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max1461 · 6 months

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Ok, I have a lot of people who read my blog and are (rightly) very skeptical of generative syntax. For my linguistics mutuals this is usually for somewhat subtler reasons, but for my non-ling-readers the reasoning is generally something like "well, it seems like a bunch of bullshit".

This is a very good instinct! I personally think that most of what gets published in generative syntax is a bunch of bullshit. There are very deep problems in the field, which basically everyone who is not a Chomskyan is in agreement on. But I do think people should understand, if they want to critique generative syntax well, what motivated the whole thing, what Chomsky was trying to explain, and why it's a genuine puzzle. Without that I think you're swinging blind.

I'm assume that anyone reading this will have at least some passing familiarity with the basic concepts of linguistics, but I'll try not to assume too much.

Right, so, one of the basic goals of linguistics, the thing you have to do before positing any deeper theory of the mind or linguistic cognition, is to be able to write down descriptions of existing natural languages. This descriptive task is where modern linguistics got its start. You want to look at a language, collect a bunch of data from speakers, and answer structural questions like "how can the words in this language be ordered? How can the sounds in an individual word be ordered? How do smaller pieces of words (morphemes) combine to make bigger words? Etc.". That first question, "how can the words in this language be ordered?" is the domain of descriptive syntax. Theoretical syntax (which really starts with Chomsky) attempts to find broader principles which govern the order of words in all languages, syntactic universals. Furthermore, the hope is generally that finding such principles will tell us something about the way language is generated and processed in the brain.

The first thing I want to talk about is, basically, what was already understood when Chomsky came onto the scene. I'll use modern terminology and notion (and bring a modern, computational lens to the question), but I'll describe the basic state of understanding at the very beginning of the generative project.

Let's get back to that original question, "how can the words in this language be ordered?". For the specific language we are trying to describe, let's take English. We know that some orderings of words produce valid English sentences: "the dog went to the store and bought a meteorite". We know that other orderings of words do not produce valid English sentences: "him the went dog store meteorite have bought". We would like to write down some rules or principles that characterize which sentences will be valid and which will not.

The first thing we can do is abstract away from individual words and start thinking about syntactic categories. We notice that certain words seem to be able to be swapped out for each other without affecting the validity of a sentence: if I can say "the dog went to the store", I can also say "they man went to the store". If I can say "I saw the dog", then I can say "I saw the man". Of course these sentences don't mean the same thing, but the point is that if one of these sentences with "dog" is valid, the corresponding sentence with "man" is also valid. We say that "man" and "dog" have the same syntactic distribution in English. The set of all words with a given syntactic distribution is called a syntactic category. In this case, "man" and "dog" are both nouns.

In school grammar, you might have learned that a noun is a "person, place, or thing". But in syntax, we want to understand a noun as a class of words with a particular syntactic distribution.

In fact, simple categories like "noun" and "verb" are too broad; in order to describe English grammar we need more precise categories than this. But we will keep running with these for now. If we want to be precise, we can think of "noun" and "verb" as classes of categories having similar-but-not-identical distributions. We're already at an important empirical observation—every language appears to have noun-like categories and verb-like categories, and this is interesting. But we won't dwell on this.

So we can view a sentence as a sequence of categories. "The dog went to the store" might as well be "D N V P D N" for all the syntactician cares. Here I'm using standard abbreviations for these categories: D is "determiner", N is "noun", P is "preposition", and V is "verb". I'll also use A for "adjective" later. But at this point we can abstract again. Look, there are two pieces of the above sentence that have the same shape: "the dog" and "the store" are both D N. Hmm. Let's look at another sentence. "The red dog goes to the store". Now here, the sentence starts with something shaped D A N, in place of that first D N. What about this: "the big red dog goes to the store". Now it starts D A A N. And we could have said "the dog goes to the big red store", D N V P D A A N. So it starts to look like anywhere a D N can go, a D A N can go, or a D A A N, or D [any number of As] N. These are sequences of words that have the same syntactic distribution as each other, and thus can be freely swapped out for one another. If we can describe the internal structure they have, and the positions they're allowed to go in, we can describe the syntax of the whole language.

Thus, the idea of describing syntax with trees. Sentences consist of parts nested inside other parts. These parts are called constituents or phrases. Each phrase has a particular syntactic distribution, just like individual words do. We can test what the constituents of a sentence are by trying to swap them out for one another (and for other things, like pronouns) and seeing if it works. Then we can diagram a sentence in terms of the way the constituents bracket: [[the dog] [went [to [the store]]]]. And we can represent that as a syntax tree, like this

I won't explain the concept of "headedness" right now, but the basic idea is that in some constituents, certain words play a special role, and these words are called "heads". A constituent whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase (NP), one whose head is a verb is called a verb phrase (VP), and so on. That's what the labels in the tree mean. The labels on the leaves of the tree refer to syntactic categories of individual words, and the ones up inside the tree are phrase types. The important thing is that each phrase is a subtree, and each phrase type has a specific syntactic distribution. Additionally, any individual word can be seen as a one-word phrase.

What we are building right now is called a phrase-structure grammar. If we want to describe the sentences of a language this way, we specify some abstract symbols for phrase types (NP, VP, N, V, etc.), and some rules that say what shape these phrase types can have. We know from the examples above that a DP can have shape D N (as in "the dog"), D A N (as in "the big dog"), etc. We could write this rule as DP -> D A* N. The "*" after A means "any number of As". Actually, that notation is not quite what a linguist would use, but I'm using "*" because I think it will be familiar to a lot of people already from computer science.

A phrase-structure grammar is a list of syntactic rules like this, that describe the valid shapes of different phrases. Once you do that, you need only specify what the different vocabulary items of the language are and what syntactic categories they're part of, and you've fully described the syntax.

But, wait... does that actually work? Can this system actually describe all of natural language syntax?

No!

Enter Chomsky. The term "phrase-structure grammar" was not around at the time, but diagramming sentences as trees in roughly the way shown above was not new. Chomsky wondered "is this sufficient"? In trying to answer that question, he came up with the Chomsky hierarchy. The Chomsky hierarchy is a hierarchy of different types of "formal language" (sets of sequences of symbols, like our sequences D N V P D N etc.). The hierarchy is ordered by what kind of computation apparatus you need in order to describe the given language type. Phrase-structure grammars like we constructed above are, mathematically, only able to describe languages at the "context-free" level in the Chomsky hierarchy. Are natural languages context-free languages, under Chomsky's definition? They are not.

Consider, for instance, English question words: who, what, when, where, how. Words of this type are known as wh-words, because most of them start with "wh" in English. Yes, that is as Anglocentric as it sounds. Anyway, where can they go?

Well, they usually go at the beginning of a sentence. "What did you see?", "How are you doing". Notice that in these sentences, there is something that looks like a constituent with a gap. We know already that English transitive verb phrases (VPs) have the shape V DP, where V is a verb and DP is a determiner phrase, described above. So verb phrases will be things like "saw the man" or "ate the rice". But in "what did you see", the transitive verb see doesn't have a DP after it. In fact, if you try to put the usual DP after it, then the sentence with what becomes ungrammatical: *"what did you see the dog".

(By the way, putting a "*" before a sentence is what linguists use to indicate that speakers judge it ungrammatical. Another helpful bit of notation: "?" before a sentence means speakers aren't sure if it's grammatical or disagree, the sentence is of dubious grammaticality.)

So, ok, you can put a DP after a transitive verb, unless the sentence starts with what, then you can't. Is that it? Well, not quite, but let's run with that for now. Check this out: the above rule still works no matter how far away the wh-word is from the DP gap:

"What did you see?"

*"What did you see the dog?"

"What did you tell me the man saw?"

*"What did you tell me the man saw the dog?"

"What did you tell me the man told you he saw?"

*"What did you tell me the man told you he saw the dog?"

This situation is called a long distance dependency, and it is impossible to describe them with the kind of context-free phrase-structure grammar we came up with above. Thus, context-free phrase-structure grammars are insufficient for describing natural language syntax.

So what do we do about it? Well, it's certainly the case that phrase-structure-grammar gets close to describing what we want. Lots of sentences can be diagrammed as context-free syntax trees just fine. And thinking about language in terms of constituency is very useful in a bunch of other contexts that I haven't mentioned here; phrases are the bread-and-butter of linguistic description. Chomsky's solution was to take a good old context-free phrase-structure grammar and augment it with a mechanism called movement, turning it into a context-sensitive grammar (a higher position on the Chomsky hierarchy, capable of describing long distance dependencies like that above).

There are a lot of different forms of movement, and proposals for what its limits should be, but the basic idea is that movement allows you to take something from one node in the tree and move it to another node, under some set of conditions. Generally the node it moves to should be empty; you sort of have to imagine trees like the one I drew above as having valid nodes at every possible location specified by the phrase-structure grammar, even if most of them don't have words in them. The ones without words are the empty nodes. Every syntactic theory with movement is based on some phrase-structure grammar, which determines what trees exist in the language. Movement is then allowed to apply to this set of trees generated by the PSG, shifting constituents from one node to another. In most theories, movement is only allowed to be upward (that is, things can only move to strictly higher positions in the tree). Other limitations may be put in place as well: heads may only move to other head positions, complements may only move to spec positions, movement cannot progress across certain barriers in the tree, etc. It all gets very technical.

The ideal generative theory is a PSG and a set of conditions on movement that allow linguists to describe all and only the possible syntactic structures of natural human language. This is where the term "generative" comes from: a grammar (of a specific language, in a specific theory) generates possible sentences, and a theory generates possible grammars. A bad grammar either overgenerates (predicts ungrammatical sentences) or undergenerates (fails to predict grammatical sentences). This makes it an insufficient description of the language. On a meta-level, a bad syntactic theory either overgenerates (predicts impossible grammars) or undergenerates (fails to predict possible grammars).

Anyway, back to movement. Why is it an appealing mechanism? Well, it unites a bunch of related phenomena under one description. First of all, let's notice something else about those long distance dependencies in English. There are a bunch of them: "what did he see", "where did he go", "how does he feel", etc. In all of them, the syntactic category of the gap corresponds to the question word you use.

"What did he see?" ↔︎ "He saw the dog" (DP)

"Where did he go?" ↔︎ "He went to the park" (PP)

"How did he feel?" ↔︎ "He felt good" (AP)

We might like to say that certain types of phrase are allowed in the highlighted positions in the sentences on the right, and this includes the corresponding wh-words. Then, the wh-word moves out of that position and up to the front of the sentence. This allows us to describe what sorts of wh-words pair with what sorts of constituents without having to "say the same thing twice" in the grammar. Many natural generalizations present themselves by simply specifying what is allowed to go in the position where movement starts, and then specifying where things can move to.

Here's another compelling reason to posit movement: sometimes, things don't move. Above, I said that it was a simplification to say that wh-word always show up at the front of the sentence. For example, when multiple interrogatives are present in a single sentence, only one of them can be fronted. If I say "Stacy went to the store and bought apples", and later you forget what I told you and want to ask about the details, you might say:

"Tell me again, who went to the store and bought what?"

Here, who has is in its fronted position but what is not (linguists call this wh-in-situ). Where does the in situ wh-word appear? It appears in exactly the position of the gap that must be present when it is fronted! This makes it very tempting to say that it "started there" and moved. This even provides a natural explanation for why it fails to move in the above sentence: if we suppose that words can only move to empty positions, then the position it would like to move to is blocked by the other wh-word who, and so it must stay were it is. This is fairly parsimonious.

Positing other limits on movement explains other phenomena. There are certain syntactic positions out of which wh-words can't move. Such positions are called islands. In English, wh-words are not just used for questions but also for introducing certain subordinate clauses, for instance "I know what the man saw". What if you try to move a wh-word out of a subordinate clause itself introduced with a wh-word? For example, suppose someone says "I know what Jim saw", and you later forget they were talking about Jim. You might like to ask who they were talking about. But you cannot say:

*"Who do you know what saw?"

This is an island. The most standard analysis of such islands follows from positing that movement must be local: items must always move to the closest valid syntactic landing site before they can move anywhere else. Our wh-word who would like to make it to the very front of the sentence. But that position is structurally identical to the one in the subordinate clause in which what already sits. This follows from the basic phrase-structure grammar: subordinate clauses are merely sentences-within-sentences. So, locally, the "front of the sentence" for who is the front of that subordinate clause. But what is already there! So it can't move, it can't get out.

Locality conditions and movement blocking explain a fair number of really weird, really arcane phenomena in natural language syntax, which is enough to make movement seem to me at the very least a compelling idea.

There are a bunch of other island effects that are difficult to even really talk about without the vocabulary introduced by generative syntax, at least, like subject islands:

"That John went home is likely"

*"Who is that went home likely?"

And left-branch islands:

"Susan likes Fred's hat"

*"Whose does Susan like hat?"

Which appear to be constraints on movement out of subtrees of specific shapes.

I don't consider these to be evidence for movement, but they are easy to phrase using movement, and they are essentially impossible to phrase without reference to tree structure and long distance dependency.

So, this is what the Chomskyans are seeing. There is a lot to be understood about natural language that you cannot even start asking about without looking in a pretty fine-toothed way at trees, natural language sentences, and the kind of rulesets that can generate them. I don't think there is a way to address these concerns without at least meeting generativism where it's at on some level, unless you are entirely disinterested in describing this aspect of natural language.

Where do I think generativism has failed? Well, I said that all these phenomena make movement a compelling idea, but that's a far cry from the generativists having a good scientific theory. And, in fact, I think that they don't. I think formal syntax research is marred by a thousand problems big and small that make it difficult to progress on turning their compelling ideas into good scientific theories, and I think Chomsky's personal approach to the research program has had a large hand in making things the way they are. But that's all a topic for another time. What I wanted to convey here is just... why, why are we talking about this? Why are these ideas important to think about to begin with? And I hope, even to the generativism-skeptical, that I've demonstrated that somewhat.

#linguistics

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kagoutiss · 1 year

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what is link like in your AU?💞💞

hi anon i hope you’re ok with the fact that i ended up writing you a gargantuan wall of text in response to your very simple question 😭 so basically most of the AU takes place during the 7 year timeskip when link is asleep in the sacred realm, so that’s why i don’t talk as much about him. but i have a lot of feelings about his & sheik’s interactions after he finally wakes up, him being the same friend sheik knew for such a short time so many years ago, him probably still being the best friend she’s ever had despite that. except link hasn’t been able to adjust to the passage of time like sheik— he’s a little boy who was basically turned into a soldier in a matter of days, and has now woken up in a body that’s suddenly too big for him, and still has to keep being a soldier and fulfill a mission he never asked for, wherein he has to prepare to kill a human being who is in possession of unimaginable divine power. link in my AU is basically the same as how i think of him in canon, he’s trying to do everything that’s been asked of him while relearning how to move/fight/interact with a world that’s very different from the one he had just barely begun to familiarize himself with

not to infantilize him by talking so much about how he was just a kid, but he is metaphorically & literally a kid who was forced to grow up before he was ready— from the moment his mother gave him to the Deku Tree as a baby, he’s been saddled with immense expectations that inevitably ruin his entire life, very suddenly and very quickly. zelda, the only person who really acknowledges the burdens that have been placed on him, tries to help in the end by sending him back to his childhood in the hopes of returning what she feels she’s deprived him of, intentionally or not. but even this can’t really give him his childhood back, or give him a normal life (not to mention, the zelda he knew never gets to see him again after that, and likewise the zelda he meets again in his childhood will not ever really be the same zelda he knew. because they had completely different life experiences. adult link & adult zelda kinda both lose their closest friends in the entire world in that way)

also like in the game, ganondorf is passively interested in link’s progress & thinks he’s a really gutsy (if naive) kid with a ton of potential. but he also feels that link’s potential is squandered by serving people who are only interested in him as a means of restoring their old world, people who have instilled in link this tendency to do whatever is asked of him without questioning any of it. link is afraid of ganondorf and confused by him, he does not understand why ganon does what he does, he despises him more & more for the harm he’s caused to the people he meets on his journey, and link conquers his childhood fears in the end by facing him anyway. at the same time, on his own, link also starts to gain more awareness (especially after going thru the spirit and shadow temples) that his actions are consequential, that he is doing all this because he’s been told to, that regardless of his hatred & fear for ganondorf, there is still a bigger picture that he isn’t seeing. that there are profound evils in this world that weren’t created by ganon, that aren’t demonic or monstrous in nature. this world and its conflicts aren’t simple like they’d been made out to be, evil does not always name itself things like The King of All Evil. and an unsettled feeling comes with that. it only grows after he’s been sent back to his original time, where his actions set in motion even more far-reaching consequences in hyrule, even as he’s leaving on his own adventure for his own reasons, unaware he’ll have to contend with a lot of his newfound traumas in termina

ANYWAY i just went on a huge tangent sorry agskfhskd but to answer your question, link in my AU is pretty much the same as in canon, he does not know that sheik is also working for ganondorf, basically he’s just trying to fulfill the impossible expectations that the world has for him, becoming the prophesied hero of legend through his sheer endless grit and determination, in spite of his fear, all for the sake of others who he owes absolutely nothing to (which is what makes him the chosen bearer of courage!). he’s also mostly nonverbal, he does speak but finds it easier around people he knows well. he loves animals, he has a reserved and gentle personality, but he also becomes incredibly audacious and bullheaded when faced with potential threats, or with people belittling his friends. he recognizes bullies when he sees them, and gets better and better at standing his ground against them. he also has a difficult time comprehending his own agency, that he can do things because he wants to do them and not just because he has a responsibility to someone else. whether or not he also gets sent back in time by zelda at the end of the AU is still up in the air tho, since zelda may or may not decide on the exact same solutions in the end agdjahfksjf

#ask #link #sheik #undercover sheik au #this became more of just me dumping out my link feelings. Sorry lol #with a side of the EXTREME SADNESS i feel when thinking about OoT link & zelda’s entire situation #it’s so much. link my boy

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popculturebuffet · 1 year

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Into the Spider-Verse: Spider-Ham (Marvel Tails #1 and Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham #15) (Comissioned by WeirdKev15)

Hello all you happy webheads and welcome back to Into the Spider-Verse, my look at the origins of every webslinger from the landmark film in the build up to Across the Spider-Verse. And it's bittersweet to be this close to the end of the web here: i'm proud of myself for this project and kev for having cooked it up as it allowed me to really dig into my love of spider-man, and comics in general, with new ideas and even possible new retrospectives wholesale coming out of this.

But before we can end this ride, we still have one Spidey to cover, who after our previous spider-persons adventures with crackers and milk, their predecesors literal oppisite sex clone, mob goons without fear, rock n roll pop art halluciongens in your giant spider mecha, and giant spiders stripping you naked, one man comes along to say..

Yes it's time for the debut of Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham a

And i'm sure many of you, both those familiar with the comics and those who just watched the movie, are asking the same question: why. The answer is simple. Way way back in the 1980's, Marvel had a new animated arm, Marvel Productions, which was a massive deal, producing both GI Joe and Transformers, which both started as comics first to promote the upcoming toylines, as well as Dungeons and Dragons, My LIttle Pony Tales, Muppet Babies, Jem and the Holograms, Kid N Play and the Biker Mice From Mars. There were also of course marvel cartoons like Spider-Man(the 80s one), Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, The Incredible Hulk, the more popular Incredible Hulk and the infamous and destined to be covered Pryde of the X-Men Pilot.

So naturally Marvel wanted more ips to feed into the almighty merchandising machine, because shockingly, companies have ALWAYS wanted every dollar they can get out of making more and more adaptations as long s they can afford it. So two writers set to work to spitball this: They were Tom DeFalco, a longtime spider-man editor who would go on to write the guidebook I had as a kid that really got me into the comics and taught me a lot about his rogues gallery and more importantly would write the book himself briefly, being the one to crystalize Mary Jane's tragic Backstory and her knowing Peter Parker is spider-man all along. WIth him was the wonderful Larry Hama, at the time writing GI JOe for marvel.. and at the time of this writing STILL writing his continuation of that continuity for IDW as he should. Hama deserves all the credit for setting the foundations of the GI Joe universe most adaptations follows and for writing one hell of a comic in the process, and not one to rest on his laurels would later have the defining run on Wolverine's solo book.

So as you can imagine when these two legends get together.. they created a simple but enduringly weird joke that has lasted decades. It's a concept that just works: Spider-Man.. but he's a funny animal. Weirdly though Marvel Animation passed on it, not wanting anything to do with it despite the fact that in a time when Garfield was at the peak of his powers and they'd be making muppet babies, funny animals were a VERY easy sell. Seriously why Marvel Animation was so stupid is a riddle for the ages but Marvel liked printing money, so they put Porker in a one shot, Marvel Tails, parodying the marvel reprint mag marvel Tales. That said DeFalco didn't expect much from it and was suprised months later when the higher ups asked for another issue. He explained it was a one shot.. and then they asked when the next issue was and he got the memo. While DeFalco wrote the one shot that launched the character he freely admits he's not the one who made him a star. That honor goes to Steve Skeates. Skeates had been a mainstay in the industry, paticuarlly having a run on Aquaman i've been trying to read for some time that really launched the character to new heights before Superfriends would shove him back to the depths for a while. He was burnt out on the industry and freely admits he wouldn't of done the book for Larry Hama if it was any other book, but felt the format allowed him to do a throwback to the kinds of books he liked writing while still throwing in plenty of comedy to keep it fresh. The result was pretty great, with Skeates wisely having Porker's various foes not be the obvious joke of being the animals they resemble, for instance the Vulture being a possum in a buzzard suit instead of a vulture.

And we'll be seeing that contrast between Porker's humble one shot joke beginings and evolved more nuanced parody as unlike most of the characters featured... Porker didn't get his origin story for a while. While most of the spider-persons got there's in their very first appearance or arc, Porker's origin didn't come about till late in his solo books run. So today we'll be looking at both his first appearance in Marvel Tails, and his origin story in Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham #15 under the cut!

Spider-Ham begins his career in a typical spider-man setting: stopping a typical gang of thugs with ease and some quips. But it's not long before we get into one of the weird things about this story, something that just dosen't really work with it: Captain Americat. Cap is pictured here as Peter's steadfast partner and a reporter at his paper and none of this works. Now this is an AU, it COULD work and the idea of steve and peter being closer partners and steve mentoring him is great, just as the idea of Tony mentoring him was a brilliant one the movies captalized on. But here it's just treated as a normal thing without really being used for a joke that this is so unusual. A large part of this is something that's easy to forget as it hasn't been true about the character since the early 2000's. Spidey.. used to be a bit of a loner when it came to the rest of the Marvel Universe. Granted he was the kind of loaner who had an entire ongoing dedicated to him teaming up with other heroes and a tv show where he had two super college roomies he'd fight crime with, but when it came to consistant teamups his only real super friends were the fantastic four and in a few years Daredevil. Spider-Woman existed, but Jessica was largely her own thing by design, with only the name in common and wouldn't really become an ally or even friend of peter's till they were in the avengers together. Peter would have team ups but he really wasn't super close with the rest of the marvel universe. This changed in the early 2000's as his joining the new avengers gave him a lot of new allies in the marvel universe: He'd be on the new avengers until Brian Micheal Bendis left the book, he joined HIckman's avengers for the first arc, with Doc Ock taking his place, and joined the Mighty Avengers and Mark Waid's avengers afterwords, only in the last few years taking a break from the group entirely, ironically as his MCU counterpart became heavily associated with them himself. Not only that the dawn of the spider-verse and miles migrating to become the 616's second spider-man, meant peter soon had a spider-family.

Even now in his current tirefire of a solo i've been purposfully avoiding but suspect i'l lhave to confront some day, he has Ms Marvel, soon to be thrown in the fridge, Norman Osborn, long story, and his current girlfriend the black cat. Peter's no longer the solo operator he once was.. but back then it's very weird fo ra parody of the character to just.. casually hang out with Captain America regularly and this angle was wisely dropped.

This isn't the only weird thing in this issue either. For some reason rather than pulling from peter's many rogues, the issue has him face the Masked Marauder, some punk ripping off a super high tech arcade. It comes off more like a Scooby Doo Mystery complete with various red herings and the actual culprit showing up early on. He's not even the main threat as the everlovin hulk is also shoved into this issue. His origin is a little neat, with Bruce Bunny being an arcade game maker who gets shoved into a cabinet.

The result though just isn't that funny. Ther'es a good joke about steve stashing his shield in his coat

But otherwise i'ts just kinda.. there and didn't leave the best first impression back when I first read it. It's nicely drawn, but dosen't have much actually to say or any really satire of the character. It's clear they had the name but no idea what to do with it. THe backup is pretty funny though, the weird Goose Rider, take a while guess, who just.. spends it riding around, thinking about grabbing a burger, and dealing iwth shouty civlians and some random doofus called chainsaw. This satire.. actually works as from what I can tell Ghost Rider's early rogues gallery before his reinvention in the 90's wasn't all that impressive with few exceptions. It's more what I wanted. Thankfully when Peter got his title shot, things perked up and by the time we get to his origin... we get something delightful.

As you can tell both by the cover used for this review and from the title, this one's a parody of spider-man no more. Even if you haven't read the story (I've only read the iconic issue iwth the cover), you've doubtlessly seen it's cover, and the various homages to both that and the shot of peter throwing his costume in the trash and walking away, both by spider-heroes and the rest of the marvel. It helps that Sam Rami choose it as the backbone of Spider-Man 2 and ended up making an even BETTER version of the story in the process. Even Miles had his own version of it after his mom died and he blamed himself for it since the second ultimate venom was the reason she died. If you've read more recent comics and seen Rio alive and well that's because Miles befriended the Molocule Man, a very shy man with the power to control molocules... which shockingly for comics has been treated every bit as horrifyingly powerful as it should since his introduction, with MM's only real wekaness being his crippling neurosis. So when the universe died and was put back, Molocule brought her back as a thank you present. I had a point here.. ah yes.. I love the Molocule Man and feel he's a highly underated character. Oh that with the severe stress and sacrifice of being a spider-man, it's not a huge leap to have that moment of doubt. And it's an even shorter leap to take that moment and parody it and Peter's angst for all it's worth. We open with J Jonah Jackal hooking himself up to an idea machine while his three young wards, the junior newsboys watch. They are Jermiah Jackal, JJJ's snooty nephew, Bunson Bunny, our resident nerd who talks in big snetences and Upton Adam Stray, a combination of a black sterotype and

If your getting some deja vu from a rich magnate having three young sidekicks who both acompany him and try to steer away his worse instincts, one of whom is jonah's literal nephew.. GOOD. It means you have good taste and also get the bit. Spider-Ham has a bit of the old Scrooge McDuck stories in it's dna, simply adding spider-man and his rogues to the mix, and really JJJ is such a perfect fit for scrooge and Peter for Donald, that I can't blame both writers for dipping into this formula when it fits spider-man shockingly well now he's a pig.

This issue is written by steven Mellor, who took over the title later in his run, but like Skeates does a really fun job with it.

With Jonah having peter come to the clubhouse to view an idea he came up with that involves the kids

Peter deals with typical spider-man things. That is trying to get a date with his ex Betty Bat. It goes about usual for peter

Also as you might have noticed, hilariously, Peter Porker looks a LOT like John Mulaney, despite having been created only one year after John was born. I mean he's also a talking pig but the hair is distractingly like his future voice actors and I love it.

Baby P decides to handle this like a mature, rational young swine

Before bemoaning that he's still single.. what I like is that Mellor both really gets how Peter Parker Mopey Rants work, and milks it with everyone starring not sure what to do as peter ineternally rants and the janitor eventually asking him to leave as he's getting his tears on the floor. Peter then reflects back to his origin, the reason we're here. And even for a talking pig.. peter's origin is hilaroiusly bizzare. It's my kind of weird shenanigans. Okay so in this version Peter.. was a spider, which is clever enough.. but May was a mad scientest who befriended peter and showed him her new invention: a fission powered hairdryer. It made her radoactive, it wasn't good.. and well... I can't say what happens next and have most of you belivie it actually happened so here's photographic evdience.

This.. this is comedy gold, and clever as all hell. Just deciding to have may be radioactive nad bite peter. It's as nuts as it is brilliant and I love it. So we get the standard origin moments of Peter testing out his powers.. and we also get a nice gag out of him bending a pipe in the original amazing fantasy #15

Peter returns to find may basically the dodering old lady sterotype she was in earlier spider-man comics, and decides to look after her and not tell her the truth, as well as put his powers to use. Peter's genius in this version is also from the bite and thus Spider-Ham is born

After running into flash thompsons counterpart, who sadly isn't named flash beagle, we get jonah's meeting where he's dressed himself and the boys up in superhero outfits and ...

To become Black Beagle and his beagle brigadeers. Peter is dragged along for this and this.. is easily the weakest part of the issue. While the idea of Jonah becoming a hero himself is great and has been used well, here it's just kinda there and is mostly a setup for them to befriend "Andy Warthog" and see a bunch of celebrity pastiches. It's a boring page or two

Thankfully it picks up with a delightful parody of one of my faviorite spider-man rogue as the Hobgobbler crashes the party! God bless this pun. He kidnaps one of the celebrties and we get a ncie character moment. Despite how silly this character and his origin are... it's still neat to see the core of spider-man.. is still present.

No matter the universe, no matter who wears the mask... they can't turn down responsiblity. Try as he might.. Peter just can't let someone else get hurt if he can help it and that's what makes spider-man the hero we love so much: that drive to help people no matter what it takes. It's what makes a spider-person what they are wethere they be man, woman, ham or nb.

So Peter naturally wins, in a nicely drawn fight, cooks the turkey and drive sJonah home. He WANTS to just get some deserved sleep but Aunt May has other plans.. thankfully said plans give our hero his much deserved happy ending. Action is already his reward.

As you can probably figure, this issue is a massive improvment and it's clear even with two diffrent writers, the full ongoing got the concept better and more importantly had more fun with it. The result.. is fucking great. Also the puns. Dear lord the puns. And that's not getting into the backup which has the scavengers fight kangaroo the conquerer. Who damn well better be among the council of kangs. At any rate this issue was greatr and even with the brief slowdown, is a great issue, not only getting me reintrested in this run, but also showing off just what you can do with a parody: have it be both heartfelt and clearly get what it's making fun of while still being great.

Next Time: The web ends as we look at the movie itself. Anyone can wear the mask but is one Miles Morales up to the task? Can he fill peter's shoes? Well yeah, I mean there's even a sequel, but it's still one hell of a ride.

#spider-man #peter porker #spider-ham #mary jane waterbuffalo #john mulaney #into the spider-verse #across the spider-verse

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lutiaslayton · 4 months

Note

Hi! I really love your timeline analyses and have been thinking about them a lot as I try to write my own Layton longfic. (I hope you don't mind me referencing your timeline and puzzle research for it ^^;) It's very well done! I have a hard time figuring out so many details at once like that, so it's been a huge help.

...I don't want to be annoying or overly nitpicky when I point this out, but I just thought I'd mention something.

We know that Dropstone was founded on August 12th (by the JP version) and Layton travels there on its 50th anniversary (also August 12th). In your deduced timeline you have that arrival date down as Wednesday the 12th, 1963. The year with a Wednesday on an August 12th is actually 1964. In 1963, the 12th falls on a Monday.

I don't know if the day being a Wednesday specifically matters at all, or if Layton's days of the week aren't in sync with ours, but from what I understand, your timeline might be 1 year behind. (Or that date was meant to be Monday the 12th...?)

I figured with SLS (one of my favorite fics ever, by the way!) being in 1953, a detail like this could be important to you, but you can totally ignore this ask if I'm wrong! I just wanted to let you know just in case.

Hi! The fact that you picked up on this is a true testament to your dedication and rigorous work, congratulations!!

I haven't touched this timeline in a long while for a number of reasons (far too many other projects + "um actually I think there might be multiple timelines and you can't put every single game/novel/manga/movie/other in the same chronology but it becomes soooooo much more interesting if you start placing them in multiple ones, also puzzle theory makes that not only plausible but also quite probable"), so sadly I have forgotten most of the details of how past me from over a year ago reached the conclusions that she did. From what I remember, however, the quick answer to your question is simple: yes, the days of the week in the Laytonverse are out of sync with ours.

(I kinda like how I take it as a bigger reminder that the Laytonverse really is disconnected from our world's History in a number of ways, from the mention in the novels of kings and queens that do not exist IRL to the simple logical fact that there is no way History happened the same way when mechas are a thing, the Azran happened, Targent happened, and also puzzles break the laws of physics daily. But that's just personal preference.)

I think what started it was the fact that London Holiday takes place on a Sunday and that I could not find any way to make the whole "a few days ago" for both Curious Village and Diabolical Box work alongside the "They arrive in Dropstone on August 12th." I won't redo the math right now because schedule and to-do list and other stuff (+ I trust you more to check it since your brain cogs are already warm and revving in the middle of it, so you would be more efficient at figuring it out as well as more critical than present me), but if memory serves, this was the best I could manage at the time, and I never went back later to recheck the math. I really just stopped at "Yes, there is a desync, so what? That's not supposed to be the real world anyway. Also huge kudos to whoever notices."

---

My mind is set on the fact that the Layton timeline places the original trilogy on the year 1963 because of the promotional UF artwork implying that UF would take place during the winter between 1963 and 1964, but that part is personal preference since I know (and stated on the timeline web page iirc) that in-universe, this date does not appear in the game. I know other people use for example the "Year 1960" unused artwork which had been datamined from Curious Village. I also know that the World of PL interview just says "There is no official date, it's inspired from the 1960s but we are never going to give a date because we don't want to." I also also know that some others, who consider the PLvsAA crossover canon, take the Ace Attorney timeline and thus completely yeet the "1960s" part into oblivion.

So the choice is ultimately up to personal preference, and you're free to choose a different one! The only reason I put 1963 in the timeline instead of "Year YYYY ; Year YYYY - 50 ; Year YYYY + 1" and such is for obvious readability reasons... and because past me had not thought that perhaps there could be a Javascript way to say "hey put here the year you'd like the original trilogy to take place in," have the user click on a button, and make the whole page do the calculations and display the new dates according to the user's chosen year of reference. darn it now I'm going to be nagging myself into implementing that but it would also be so tedious.

---

Anyway TL;DR yes I was aware of this, and past me either forgot to mention it or thought "Eh it's not like anybody will notice/care" hahaha. Rather insensitive from past me admittedly, I do now wonder why I didn't add that as a small paragraph in the preliminary notes... Most likely reason is that the thought just didn't cross my mind at the time.

Good luck on your own longfic, don't hesitate to send me the link (no promises on reading it the day it comes out because there are SO many fics already on my to-read list, but nnngnfhghh I wish I could read other people's works as well as continue working on SLS), and thank you for your ask! Even though I was personally aware of it, you can absolutely feel proud of having picked up on it, and don't hesitate to come back to me (and make me sweat cold bullets) if you figure out a way to make "1963" + "London Holiday on a Sunday" + "No week day desyncs with the real world" work. Thanks to you, other people can now be made aware of this detail which I had apparently forgotten to explain explicitly!

Lastly, I don't remember whether I mentioned it here or not because it's still far from done and isn't going to be truly useful before a LONG while, but just in case what little info is on there could still be useful to you or someone else in any way: among many other things, I'm working on a Lore Map. Imagine having the ENTIRETY of EVERY SINGLE CANON FACT we have been given, in a single web page, with a whole list of tags so you can filter only the trivia that is relevant to your fanfic research <3

---

(Now this paragraph is completely unrelated to your ask, I'm going to leave this here for a different person (or not? would be good luck if you're the same anon): I am so sorry to the anon who asked me if I considered the LMJ ARG event canon or not, I uhhhhh... got carried away and I don't think the answer will be posted anytime soon, because for the sake of answering it in an exhaustive way I wanted to re-read the entirety of what has been preserved of it + add every bit of trivia I could find to the Lore Map mentioned earlier. And I'm juggling between many other projects too so progress is very slow. TL;DR version of my personal opinion so far: as for everything else it is up to personal preference, but I could theoretically see at least parts of it being canon. The trickiest part I found by reading just the introduction of the ARG is the fact that Kat would apparently make livestreams. Which implies the existence of the internet or a similar technology, the existence of streaming platforms, and the fact that she would have a decent-ish enough following for her random viewers from all around the world to want to help her. And if we go with the hypothesis that there could be multiple timelines, I could see that happen in an Ace Attorney-based timeline such as the one in which the PLvsAA crossover is canon, for example! I don't know enough about AA to be able to speak about it with confidence, but I think that 20+ years after the original AA trilogy, internet technology is indeed quite advanced enough for this to be possible? anyway. Just thought I'd give you a first short answer so you don't have to keep holding your breath and/or think I completely forgot about you. I'm sorry :'D)

#lutiasreplies #lutiasgithub #pl theory board

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silverbladexyz · 1 year

Note

i never see anybody write for the flags and u do it so well😭😭 can i request how they'd ask you out pls??

Oh anon and I would like to ask YOU out for giving me such a lovely request 💗

The image does not belong to me. It belongs to it's original owner.

TW: Mentions of death

How the Flags would ask you out

Pianoman:

-This hot-fancy-suave-smooth-whimsy-fastidious-extra-fickle mafioso is actually kind of nervous at the thought of asking you out. He is a perfectionist, and he just can't think of the perfect way to ask you out

-And what was the perfect spot for a date? He knows he can’t make it too expensive and fancy, because then you would think that he was too desperate for you. And he can’t make it too simple as well, or else you’d think he was doing this just as a fling

-Literally is in internal conflict for the longest time ever. It became so obvious that even you noticed it. You never asked though, because frankly it may be intruding into his own privacy. Not to mention you had feelings for him and you didn’t want him to think you were weird

-After the longestttt time in internal conflict, it was Lippmann in the end who made him confess. While Pianoman is his leader, Lippmann is a smoother talker, and in the end he managed to convince this perfectionistic mafioso to ask you out

-So in the end, he decides to ask you to meet him at Old World alone on one of your free days. It was his free day as well and you couldn’t help but wonder what he was planning. Although you were a bit skeptical, you still decided to go. Who wouldn’t say no to being alone with their hot crush? I wouldn’t

-When you enter the bar and slide next to him with a smile on your face, Pianoman is feeling extra nervous. What if you rejected him? But he isn’t backing out because he hates the idea of making you come all the way here only for him to just talk with you

-He engages in small talk with you at the start, and it isn’t long before he starts incorporating jokes and funny things to make you laugh. You were having a great time, but you still wondered a little why he called you here in private

-It’s when the bar is quiet and you two are in comfortable silence is when Pianoman finally decides to drop the question. He’ll start with saying your name first, and when you turn to him, it’s when he prepares the short speech that he’s been thinking about all the time

-‘Y/N... ever since I’ve met you, I was attached to you. Your loveliness, charm and intellect is what brightens my day. Now, I can’t stop thinking about you. So to relieve me of the constant tightening of my chest and the butterflies in my stomach whenever I’m around you... would you like to go out with me sometime?’

-He says this calmly and professionally, but internally he is panicking. When you open your mouth to say your answer, Pianoman is silently tensed up and is hoping that you say yes

-When you say yes, he smiles and says ‘see you on Saturday night’. It’s after he walks away that all the anxiety and stress leaves him so quickly he almost collapsed from the feeling. Lippmann asked him to spill all the tea the next time the Flags were gathered together

Albatross:

-Oh boy... this chaotic menace is just going to act like he normally does. Which means that you can’t tell whether he’s being genuine or just being playful because he just uses the same tone of voice and body language every time he talks

-But once he has feelings for you... he’s going to be way more affectionate with you. Like initiating lots more physical contact, inviting you to a lot of hangouts with him, and even offers to give you your very own custom-made and custom-tailored vehicle to use for your missions and daily life

-I feel like he’d ask you out in a kind-of-casual but also not-too-casual setting. Sort of like a place where friends hang out but where lovers also confess, y’know? My best guess is in a bar or on a secluded rooftop

-When he asks you out he does it in the most casual way. It’s like a ‘hey, I really like you! Wanna go out with me sometime?” While you just sit there being confused and flustered because... the way he said it so casually sounded like he was just asking you to a friend’s hangout with him

-Luckily for Albatross, you knew that he was asking you out on a date and not on a hangout. And when you say yes, the biggest smile appears on his face and he tackles you into the biggest hug you’ll ever receive

Doc:

-Hmmm he will give a lot of mixed signals

-When Doc had feelings for you, he was in denial for the longest time for sure. He didn’t understand why his chest was tight around you, or why his heart raced so much whenever you talked to him. This caused him to be curt when he didn’t want to be, and it was evident to the rest of the Flags that Doc felt something towards you

-It went on for a while until the others confronted him about it. And after some help from Lippmann, he found out that he apparently had feelings for you. Great.

-More denial + more confusion for several more weeks, but I feel like he’ll come to terms with his emotions after a while finally

-It will be simple when he asks you out. Probably while he’s treating you in the infirmary or when he’s all alone with you. He actually confesses pretty straightforwardly and asks you to go out with him, and you can actually see the nervousness in him

-When you say yes though... the rest of the Flags are all going to breathe a sigh of relief because they do not want to deal with a heartbroken Doc (trust me you wouldn’t want to either)

Iceman:

-Probably another clueless one, but unlike Doc, he’s quick to ask for help on why he was feeling this particular way when he’s around you

-The rest of the Flags can’t believe it. The cold-blooded and cool Iceman actually has feelings for someone?! Albatross couldn’t stop talking about it until Iceman threatened him with a pool stick if he wouldn’t shut up

-Okay but even though he’s still his own self when he likes you, if you observe him closely you’ll see that he treats you differently than anybody else. Like helping you carry all your stuff, listening to you talk for as long as you want, and just wants to help you all the time

-It’s a long time before the rest of the Flags start encouraging him to ask you out. You see, I feel like Iceman is the type to let you confess to him, because he doesn’t know if you reciprocate his feelings for you. Plus he doesn’t want to pressure you to make a decision and feel bad afterwards if you reject him

-In a last attempt to get him to ask you out, Pianoman uses his position as the leader of the Flags to order him to confess. You know things get desperate when even Pianoman has to use his rank to order the Flags to do something

-So Iceman actually does do that, but he takes so damn long to drop the actual question. He takes you out on a lovely walk, where there’s nobody and the scenery is beautiful and it’s a perfect day for lovers to spend time with each other. You enjoy this, but you wonder why he was doing this for you

-It’s after a few hours when he finally asks you out. You were a bit surprised, but you gladly accepted with a smile. The Flags took a few pictures in the distance and Pianoman was smiling in relief when he saw that Iceman finally did it

Lippmann:

-Another hot-fancy-suave-smooth-whimsy-fastidious-extra-fickle mafioso, but he’s a bit more charming and less extra okay I lied he’s as extra as Pianoman lmao sorry

-He’s actually not that dense when it comes to feelings? I mean he must’ve acted in a lot of romance movies because he’s too pretty so he should know the ‘tell-tale’ signs of a crush

-But when he falls for you though... he’s not going to be that obvious about it. Meaning that he’s just going to be his normal self around you and hide his feelings. And he’s so damn good at it because he’s a top-class actor, so nobody really suspects anything

-Expect him to flirt with you and drop some pickup lines and elegant quotes under the guise of ‘practicing his script’, but sometimes you wonder if he’s doing it because he likes you he does

-Okay but his pickup lines and elegant quotes about your attractiveness are so well done and smooth that they make you blush a bit sometimes. Your blush just fuels Lippmann’s confidence damn that pretty bastard

-When he decides to confess to you... he’s going to make it extra fancy. Take you to somewhere elegant but fun to set the mood. Like a masquerade ball! Then after dancing and socialising with everyone, he takes you to the balcony under the guise of ‘getting some fresh air’

-You were gazing at the pretty sight, smiling, and that’s when Lippmann decides to drop the question. But you bet that he’s going to add in a long, cheesy, fancy and elegant quote about how he loved you since the day you met and how you managed to capture his heart because of your attractiveness. Then he finally asks you out

-You were blushing so much by the end of it, but when you say yes, that’s when Lippmann smiles and gives you a small kiss and he’s damn good at it

I’m so so so so SO sorry that this took over a month oh my gosh 😭

@pixyys @pianotross @angolicious @chuuyas-beloved @sariel626 @nekokinax @xxelfmamaxx @yuugen-benni @lakeside-paradise @yukitomybeloved @voyagewiththesatan @arisu-chan4646 @catzlivedforbsd @irethepotato

#bsd x reader #bungou stray dogs x reader #bsd flags x reader #piano man x reader #albatross x reader #doc x reader #bsd iceman x reader #iceman x reader #lippmann x reader

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arcielee · 10 months

Text

Interview With a Writer

Thank you @humanpurposes for your time to answer my questions about your amazing story 💜 This is just a continuation of my Interview With a Writer series. You can go to masterlist and read the other amazing, talented, wonderful authors that I have spoken with, getting a BTS of their brilliant minds and their stories on Tumblr and ao3.

Dividers by @saradika 💜

Name: humanpurposes

Story: My Heart Belongs to Daddy

Paring: modern!Aemond x step-daughter

Warnings: 18+, angst, smut, daddy kink, spanking, degradation, questionable relationship dynamics, infidelity, mentions of grief/loss, no underage elements.

So, when did you start writing?

I've always had an interest in stories, whatever form they take, books, films, plays, ideas in my head. Since I was a kid I've loved exploring different creative outlets, writing being one of them.

I think I first really started to realise I was decent at it when I did creative writing at school, it was the one subject I just 'got'. As a teenager I tried writing fanfiction and originals (which were all terrible and never saw the light of day), and to be honest, my interest in writing dwindled while I was doing A Levels and uni.

Then last year, out of nowhere, I managed to finish a one-shot for The Sandman (which I never posted and lost rip). Then House of the Dragon happened, Aemond Targaryen appeared on my screen and the rest is history! So really it's only in the last year I've considered myself 'a writer'.

Where did the plot for My Heart Belongs to Daddy come from?

One thing about me is that I'm highly susceptible to peer pressure, so when people were asking for a part 2, I was like "of course!" ...cut to me sitting in front of my laptop for hours trying to conjure up a plot.

I knew I wanted it to be quite an emotional series, because while hooking up with your mum's boyfriend is a fun gimmick for a one-shot, I really wanted to get deeper into all the dynamics and relationships at play. I knew I wanted Alys to have her moment, I was really adamant that she wasn't going to be a villain, and I had the scene outside the club on New Years Eve in my head. From there, I kinda came up with Aemond's backstory, him having a crush on her when they were younger and harbouring those feelings. It all just kinda fell into place from there.

I have to say as well, it was kind of inspired by Normal People; just two people struggling to navigate their feelings. And I love it because it sounds like such a simple premise, but there are so many complexities to it.

Expand on your interpretation of Aemond. What drives him? Why is he the way he is in MHBTD?

MHBTD Aemond is very much intended to mirror the Aemond we see in the show, minus the dragon and the war crimes.

He's studious, a perfectionist, a very imposing but understated presence. The relationship with his family is very much the same too. He sees himself as more capable than his siblings, is overlooked by his father and overshadowed by Rhaenyra and the Strong boys, so he is very much driven by a want to prove himself and live up to the legacy of his family.

He also takes on the burden of being Alicent's golden child, which he kinda botches when he messes up a contract with Storm's End, and ends up feeling more alienated by the only person who really values him. That's where Alys comes in and gives him a way to escape all of that.

So I really tried to translate his character into a modern setting in a way that would be believable, but I didn't want to lose what makes Aemond Targaryen, "Aemond Targaryen."

Was there anything in specific that inspired your Reader portrayal?

Well, this was actually the first reader/nameless character fic I've written. Generally I tend to write original characters for a series. I mean real talk though, a lot of her character is inspired by me, like her interest in history and the love for Lana Del Rey and Mazzy Star, but if you can't self indulge when writing a fanfiction, when can you?

But it was interesting for me trying to write her as someone who is easy to project onto, but also, I hope, has a lot of depth. She has a lot of conflicts going on in her head, her dependence on Aemond and her guilt she feels lying to Alys, knowing pursuing a relationship is wrong, trying to break away, only to be pulled back in... so the more I wrote, the more she became her own person.

What is your take on her relationship with Aemond? Do you feel she complements Aemond?

I think they compliment each other quite well, but there are a lot of things at play here.

So on a basic level, they have similar personalities, not particularly outgoing but not exactly shy either, they both have a quiet confidence. They have similar interests, did similar subjects at uni, that kind of thing.

But I think their differences go together well too. Aemond is ambitious and eager to prove himself, whereas she can be a bit more grounded. There's also an element of codependency to their relationship. True to canon, Aemond likes to be in control and she compliments that well (better than Alys does), and they both have moments where they struggle with loneliness and latch onto each other as a result.

There are a lot of external factors that make the whole situation very very complicated. They suck at communication and obviously, he dated her mother.

But ultimately, they both want each other enough to keep going back. I think it's like that age of question of 'is love enough?'

What was your outline process for this? Did you always know how this story was going to end?

I always write with an end point in mind. For me anyway, I need to know what I'm working towards. In my head it was always going to end with her knowing that while being with Aemond probably isn't the right choice, she does it anyway because she can't say no to him.

And again talking about realism, I really didn't see it having a fairytale ending, because even though they'll be in Oldtown together, they won't be able to hide their relationship from their families forever.

Do you think there will be a sequel? Or something else you are working on next?

As much as I've loved working on this series, I am ready to work on some other stuff.

I have two series which I'm currently updating, a canon era Aemond fic called Karma is a God, and a Tom Bennett mini series called Just for a Moment.

I also have some one-shots in the works and I'm looking to get back to updating an Osferth fic which I started in May and haven't updated since!

That being said... I did have an idea for an epilogue which I'm kinda obsessed with. But we'll see how long it takes me to get round to it 🤭

Last question! Do you have any fanfic recommendations?

That's so hard to just pic one!

I have to shout out my girl Sam @randomdragonfires and her story Invisible String. I love the dynamic she created between Aemond and the reader, only to leave me utterly devastated with the ending! Sam is so talented I love her writing style and the voices she gives the characters, everything she writes is gold.

Also, I feel like I'll never shut up about it but Now I'm Covered In You by @inthedayswhenlandswerefew was just incredible. I cannot tell you how much of a chokehold that fic had on me. The tension, the politics, the drama, the yearning between Aemond and Ivy! I was on the edge of my seat for all 10 Chapters.

I'm obsessed with medieval history, it is literally my perfect fic.

#iwaw #iwaw13 #writing community #bts #of their brilliant writing

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myloveforhergoeson · 1 month

Note

wait actually thinking more about that follower gap post, what is the tasw universe btr fandom's feelings towards roxy? i guess we see a bit of it in the tour letters chapter, and hopefully more in big time contest? are they public at this point? is she, as a girl their age on the team, being shipped with any other member?

hi!! the answer to this is simultaneously simple and complicated. as usual i have a long answer for you!

in short: no, btr fandom doesn’t know more than she’s their touring guitarist and if they did some research they’d find her listed as the writer on many of their songs. james and roxy aren’t public and there’s a few reasons why! as far as the fandom is aware, she just works with the band. after carlos told her he loved her at that one show tho some people might think they’re cute together but more on that later

in long: ah! i’ve already tried to incorporate this in so many ways and i have not found a way i like quite yet. i’ve set many little things up - you are so right about the letters chapter! rox makes a comment about getting some boos when carlos kisses her because we all know what fandom typically does to women who date guys in boybands 😭 in roxy’s birthday chapter, she and james get stopped in santa monica and people start taking pictures of him and he throws his coat over her head and pulls her away from the pier because of some “media training” he said he got from gustavo. jo mentions the same thing happening to her while she was out with kendall before the pair were forcibly made public by her publicist (which is also briefly mentioned; skipped that ep bc i didn’t like the sneaker storyline sorry!) so there’s little crumbs im attempting to put in here and there i just can’t decide what to do with them. i thought about adding another section onto the minnesota chapter where roxy convinces her old boss to let her have her show again for a night where she can “interview” (read: fuck around with her boyfriend in the radio studio for four hours) james and he’d forget to turn his mic off before calling her babe or something and accidentally make their relationship public but 1) the chapter was already way too long and 2) like what do i do then. write an even longer chapter the next time around to fix what i wrote previously? i do not have the same time i used to when i started writing this to just get down like 20 pages a night LMAO. i loveeeee writing don’t get me wrong but it’s just hard for me currently and low interaction on original portions of the story are not very motivating. (but i’m not writing for the engagement don’t worry! it’s just a bonus!!!)

so yeah like it’s THERE it’s just not there.

besides. i want james and roxy to have a conversation about it too but i think he’s probably tweaking out about it bc of gustavo’s “training” and she would love to be public i just don’t think she understands what being in the spotlight really means and she doesn’t want to come off as too pushy because he hasn’t brought it up. neither of them really know what to expect from a public relationship with a public figure. but i mean. they’re out to their friends and stuff obviously! so maybe that might come back to bite them in the butt later idk. i have literally so many thoughts about this i promise itll be in there at some point i just don’t know when :)

i imagine at this point in time the band members each have like the lower end of a 60-100k follower count? i really have no basis for this though. i’ll have to give it some more thought!

tysm for your question eeee!! love seeing things tagged rames on my dash :) <3

#thats all she wrote fic #ash talks tasw #:)))!!!

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autumnslance · 8 months

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FFXIV Write 2023 Day 20: Hamper

(this one got away from me, and touches on an aspect of WoL's adventures dear to me. Also it's not a FFXIV Write anymore without nebulous future Iyna)

Outwardly, Sharlayan hadn’t changed much in the last hundred and fifty years or so. The buildings were still primarily the native white stone in rounded styles with columns, the tiles of the streets were still blue. Thaliak’s statue still watched over Scholar’s Harbor, and the Last Stand was still the best restaurant in the city, Debroye keeping it much the same as it always had been.

Thankfully for the city, other restaurants had cropped up in the intervening decades.

Iyna still preferred the original, though, and only in part because she had known the owner since the girl was a student during the harrowing Final Days. In part because of the sea breeze coming in with the view, far enough from the docks to not worry about the less pleasant underlying scents that would affect one’s appetite.

And in large part, the nostalgia; memories of old friends at the tables a pleasant one, whenever she visited. Iyna was getting sentimental as she grew older.

It was Debroye herself who served her now, setting a tantalizing lobster dish before Iyna. “I’m gaining weight just from the scents,” Iyna joked. “What have you done to improve even this classic?”

“I can’t give away all my secrets, now that I have real competition in this city,” Debroye said. “But I will say certain spices from Tural do help.”

“Gods, it’s been so long since I went West,” Iyna said idly. “Perhaps I should take a vacation, once done with this commission for the Forum.”

“I haven’t seen you take a vacation in over a century. I’d say you’re about due. Meanwhile,” Debroye looked around. “If you don’t mind, you might have company for your meal.”

“Oh?” Iyna raised a brow as she began to snap apart the crustacean.

“I’ve a history student at the counter with a few burning questions for someone who knew the Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. And being a good student, she recognized you by sight alone and is about to jitter off her seat.”

“General academia, or actual project work?”

“Project; she’s fifteen and working on her archon thesis.” At Iyna’s raised brow, Debroye nodded. “She almost beat the Leveilleur’s record for entering the Studium, only missing it due to when her nameday falls during registration—and all without the benefit of family wealth or connections as they had.”

“Not a Viera, I take it?”

“Highlander.”

“Always so impatient, Hyurs,” Iyna noted. “Needing to get so much done so soon, they miss what youth they have. By all means, send the girl over. If nothing else, we can set up a better time to meet for the in depth interview I’m sure she’ll want.”

Deboye nodded, thanking Iyna and returning to the counter. It took about two minutes for the Highlander girl to compose herself and take a seat at Iyna’s table, controlling her underlying giddiness. “Thank you for taking the time to speak to me.”

“Of course,” Iyna said. “What might I do for you, Miss…?”

“Alina Breck,” she said. She was a gangly young thing, not yet filled out to the usual height and broad build of her people. She was fair-skinned and freckled all over, with bushy red hair pulled back in a semblance of a ponytail, curly strands escaping. She had large round glasses over hazel eyes, and wore a simple gray dress, with a wide belt keeping pens, notebooks, and other needed tools on hand. “I was hoping to ask a few questions about your time with the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.”

“Very well; though I do have only so much time now. But we can get a start, and if needed, perhaps arrange a longer meeting?”

The girl beamed, the image of a serious wannabe adult scholar breaking for a moment. “Oh that would be great! Ahem. Thank you.” She comported herself again.

Iyna smiled, and let the girl ask her questions, answering in between bites of her meal, sometimes to think.

Also because one did not let a Last Stand Lobster go to waste.

As the hour drew close to when she had to leave to speak to her contacts on the Forum, Alina looked over the notes taken so far. “There are definitely things I want to ask more about, and some things I hadn’t even considered before this discussion, I’m embarrassed to say.”

Iyna shook her head. “Don’t be; there’s always more to discover, even in seemingly well-known topics. It’s why you came to me for this, isn’t it?”

Alina nodded. “I would like to meet again, for sure, and consider some of those questions, especially once I’ve had a chance to check some other sources, but…One last thing I noted…”

Iyna waited.

“It seems like, well. There were a lot of times Aeryn was on her own, with no other comrades. And sometimes it almost seems by design.” Alina flipped through her notes, a little frown creasing her forehead.

“At times it was,” Iyna said. “I wasn’t there, but when the Crystal Braves betrayed the Scions, for instance, they ensured the group was separated. Particularly Aeryn, with the Sultana. They hoped by dividing the archons and the champion from the leadership, they might have a chance.” Iyna leaned back. “It wasn’t the last time, of course; one of the best ways to try to rein in the Warrior of Light was to separate her from her support; without the other Scions’ knowledge and skills, or those of other comrades and companions she worked with, such as the Garlond Ironworks, adventures could be much harder. Aeryn noted it herself a few times—especially when young adventurers would speak to her, eager for advice, wanting to be like her.

“She often had to remind them that the times she fought alone were the worst; that she was hamstrung without her friends to back her up. There were things she couldn’t do that they could, knowledge they had that she needed. And many of her victories came with help; from her allies, from the dragons, from Hydaelyn Herself. Being cut off from such support was the way to mitigate her strength. Or so her enemies thought.”

Alina tilted her head. “Because she was powerful enough on her own anyway?”

Iyna smiled. “Oh, she was often stronger than even she thought, that stubborn gremlin of a woman. But that strength came from love for those friends, and from them, even when apart.”

“That’s one of the things I’m looking for clarification on,” Alina said. “How she actually stopped the Final Days. Some say she fought only with an enemy at her side; others that the Scions were with her through it all.”

“Both are true,” Iyna said. “Like many others, the Endsinger thought she could deprive the champions of each others’ support, break their hopes, and leave the Warrior of Light without aid. But in that place of pure concept and dynamis, merely physically separating the Scions was not enough. Their hearts were ever aligned with hers.”

Alina wrote that down in her shorthand, thinking for a moment. “I see. I think.”

“Mull it over; we can meet again,” Iyna checked the calendar on her tomephone. Alina compared her own, and they came to an agreeable time, two days from now. “I’ll do some thinking too, and dig through some old notes. I have access to the Baldesion Archives, after all…and might be able to finagle permission for you. No promises, though!” she quickly said as the girl’s eyes lit up.

“Of course, I understand. Thank you, Miss Cauld!”

“Call me Iyna. And it’s been a pleasure, Miss Alina.”

Iyna nodded, paying for her meal—and Alina’s, as one of the constants in life aside from death and taxes is the minimum stipends of graduate students, even one as gifted as this girl—and headed for her meeting with the Forum, a few minutes behind schedule, but they likely would be as well, and would understand her reasons. Losing track of time in academic discussions was another thing that hadn’t changed in Sharlayan.

She thought back on all those old adventures, tapping reminders to herself into her tomephone idly as she went, recalling the times the Scions and companions had been separated, not by choice, from one another. How they had succeeded anyway, often by trusting that the others would do what they must, what they could.

Iyna made sure to note that, too. She smiled and put the tomephone away as she climbed the steps to the Rostra. She did not often dwell on those times in such detail, and it had been some time—she really would need to hit up the archives for writings and reminders of those days—but given the girl’s questions, and the focus on the Warrior of Light’s companions and how they helped her succeed, Iyna was quite willing to delve into those memories.

There was always, after all, more than one perspective to a story, and more than the popular myth. Aeryn had never wanted to be that, and to give due credit to her beloved friends and companions was a gift Iyna was more than willing to offer to her memory.

#final fantasy xiv #ffxivwrite2023 #Lyn Writing #Endwalker #Old Sharlayan #Debroye #Iyna Cauld #Aeryn Striker

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applestorms · 8 months

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morality in the world of good omens

so i wrote another (admittedly very messy) essay on good omens not long ago right after watching season 2 but after finishing that, rewatching all of both seasons multiple times, and reading through the book, i have a couple more distinct ideas to get out...somewhere...if only for my own sanity. this is me throwing my thoughts into the internet before i pop, if you will. just 3 sections, below the cut.

1. environment, characters, & transformative fandom creations

to start this post off a bit more broadly, i've been thinking a lot recently about transformative fandom and the reasons why we write fanfiction/create semi-original works in the first place, as well as why certain aspects of fandom (writing, art, analysis, etc.) will be more appealing to me for certain shows/series than others. correct me if you have a totally different view of this, but in my experience i've found that i tend to naturally gravitate towards different parts of fandom depending on what the original medium of the story was- podcasts tend to lead to some of the most interesting art trends, for example, since there's more room for interpretation and character design tends to be more of an ongoing community project than something set in stone like for a tv show with live human actors.

in my own observation, i've noticed that a lot of the really big & excitable fandoms, the ones that generate tons & tons of fanworks more naturally (a.k.a. just because of the story itself & not other factors like a pre-existing franchise or hype about new great gay representation, etc.) tend to surround stories that fall into a kind of "sweet spot" that makes the creation of fanworks really appealing. if you've ever wondered why there are so many ravenous artists bending over backwards to draw gorgeous fanart for stuff like homestuck or south park or even minecraft youtubers, it's likely because those stories all fall into a sweet spot for drawing, with character designs that are recognizable at a glance and yet still simple enough that there is plenty of room for personal creative touches. (think also, if you're familiar with such kinds of homestuck terms: hyperflexible mythologies, A4:1524, and/or this archive link cause the official thing is down now for some reason)

the conclusion i've come to is thus that even something as basic as the original medium of a story can dictate a lot about what kinds of fan activities are more common or popular within said story's fandom.

so, back to good omens- for me, this all relates back because of a question i've been messing with in my head recently, about why i've been less interested in fanfiction for good omens than i have been for the last few fandoms i've been, almost all of which have basically broken my ao3 bookmarks.

this question has been fucking with me for a while now, largely because i'm not entirely sure what's motivating it. a lot of times i can figure out pretty easily why i might personally not be interested in some parts of fandom, but that's not really the case here. from what i've seen this fandom seems to be pretty mixed in terms of age, & the writing that i have read is certainly no worse than i've seen elsewhere, perhaps even better in some places- and yet, i can't seem to get entirely into it, even getting frustrated as i can't find something to my tastes for an ao3 bedtime story as i've grown so accustomed. what caught me off guard is that this was an issue that i ran into while watching season 1 as well, back when the series was still quite popular but not blowing up like it is right now.

a lot of this may seem like (and likely is, at least in part) basic overthinking, but i mentioned it all here because the answer i eventually came to is reminiscent of my previous reflections above on the nature of fandom & how/why fanworks are created.

a couple paragraphs above, i used the example of art as an example of how fandoms that generate a lot of original artwork will often do the most when the original story falls into a sweet spot of character design, but notably i think that this sentiment applies to a lot more than just art. if you've ever seen the copious amounts of kpop & hockey rpf fanfiction that lives on ao3, it should be clear that this applies to writing too.

i wrote this essay a while back responding to an observation about the lack of a more extensive symbolic language in fanfiction & i've toyed around with the idea more since, particularly in considering the question of why a lot of what we see as the staples of fanfiction exist in the first place. in that post, my response largely revolved around an argument of why we create fanfiction- namely, that fanfiction is created as in tandem with deeper analysis of the original story/series, as a way of trying to practically apply character analysis to a new context.

the key part of that last sentence to me is how a lot of this revolves around character analysis (and shipping, but really it's the characters that motivate the shipping in most cases so. same difference).

i tend to instinctively separate fanfiction into two separate categories: fanfiction that is based out of the original world/canon of the story (including but not limited to fix-its, deeper analysis fics that take a scene & extrapolate from it, continuations, etc.) and fanfiction that takes the characters from the original story & plops them in an alternate universe/AU. while i separate these out as two distinct categories of fanfiction, i should also clarify that i don't think these two groups are necessarily equal in terms of number of fics- rather, the vast majority of fanfiction tends to be AUs, keeping the original characters & changing any & all aspects of the world around them. again, this may vary depending on the story & Vibe of the fandom at the time, stories like game of thrones or harry potter or homestuck might have a lot more in the canon category by nature of any major dissatisfactions the fandom has with how the original story was told, but in most cases AUs are more popular. this was a lot of the basis behind my argument that fanfiction is created as character analysis in fact, since the characters are the most important part that carries over from original story to fanwork, as well as can end up being one of the most debated/scorned parts when it comes to fandom drift (i.e. "that's out of character"/"he wouldn't do that"/and all other such arguments about fanon vs. canon characterization).

basically, my conclusion in this case was that i was a lot less interested in gomens fic largely because i have a really hard time separating the characters from the world in the case of this particular story. aziraphale & crowley being an angel & a demon and dealing with all of the bullshit of their world when it comes to heaven & hell are such integral parts of their characters in my mind that i have a much harder time getting behind AU fanfiction that plops them in a totally different context. it's just a much harder sell for keeping the characters in character for me. (i also tend to not like s2 fix-its just cause, idk they're just not my style, which is where a lot of the recent blast of energy has led us.) to clarify, this is not a judgement, just a matter of personal preference and a reflection of why, even if a lot of fandoms will look the same from the outside/involve the same things like art, fic, etc., an individual's mileage can vary wildly when it comes to how they interact with different things online.

*additional note, also for clarification: i do want to acknowledge that a lot of this depends on pure popularity as well, popular fandoms will often end up with basically everything in terms of fanworks just by nature of how many people are interacting with & thinking deeply about the story. my point here is more along the lines of the fact that even within the more well-populated fandoms, certain types of fanwork will often Stick Out more to me than others, or even be visibly much more common than in other fandoms, due largely to the original medium/structure of how the story.

so, speaking of aziraphale & crowley in more depth now- why does the world of good omens feel like such an integral part of their personalities when it comes to characterization? up next, let's talk about morality within the context of good omens' perhaps surprisingly secular take on heaven & hell.

2. the amorality of heaven & hell (ft. the crowley quote apples you know the one)

(warning in advance that this section may be a bit limited since i'm not going to get super far (or very far at all, really) into the whole religious-analysis aspect of good omens.)

i've been binge-reading the original pterry & gaiman book for good omens over the last few days and it's been very fun seeing all the slight changes between the tv show & the original. you can really see the hand of the original creators in how the tv show was translated, even just by looking at which parts made it and which parts were deemed worth cutting out. i suppose having one of the original creators right there helping build everything really helps make a book -> show translation work, since the ASOUE tv series was also pretty well received- something about knowing what's the core of the series & truly important to keep in, and having more time to tell the story itself?

anyways, i have a short list of notes that i've been taking as i read, conversations that stand out to me or footnotes that particularly amused me, but i keep coming back to one line that stood out to me quite early on. in context, this line comes from crowley during the conversation where he is first attempting to fully convince aziraphale about stopping armageddon, specifically when they're talking about exerting equal forces on warlock to make him normal:

"You're saying the child isn't evil of itself?" [Aziraphale] said slowly. "Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality, waiting to be shaped," said Crowley. He shrugged. "Anyway, why're we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that."

(pg. 67)

"They're just names for sides." if i had to pick one line to sum up the view on religious morality of this series, this would likely be it.

on the one hand, i tend to interpret a lot gomens' take on heaven & hell within the context of its political stance, something that is particularly obvious through a line from gabriel in s2e2 where he tries to clarify to aziraphale that heaven isn't trying to hurt job directly, but instead is just not stopping hell from doing horrible things to him. while there may be some additional nuance to add to this take within the context of british politics that i don't really know well enough to add about, i'm inclined to see this from the side of my own familiar american politics, which might hold some weight considering how long mr. gaiman's lived around here. point is, my current interpretation of that line is that it helps in more clearly establishing the analogy of heaven & hell as the story moves forward into newer seasons and thus more contemporary politics, equating heaven with mainstream liberal politics & politicians and hell with conservatives.

this stance seems to be emphasized even more in the tv show than the book which makes sense considering its been coming out more recently, and especially in season 2 which is still quite caught up in a lot of quarantine-based reflection. (the tv show puts a lot more emphasis on heaven & hell in general, actually, perhaps initially a byproduct of actually being able to see those environments in their entirety and all the angels & demons that populate them- but we'll get to that.)

the book takes a slightly different stance that, fittingly, seems more reflective of the time it came out. in particular, i was struck a lot more when reading the book by adam's rise (fall?) to power, and how much of it was motivated by a burgeoning nervousness/pessimism about climate change and the anxieties of younger generations that comes with inheriting an earth that feels so fucked up. honestly if anything it's only gotten more relevant in that respect, what with the current vibe on the internet & the hopelessness of the doomer gen z gang, but it also has a distinctly different flavor to me from the tv show, which i think is largely because it's less connected to Formal politics since again we see a whole lot less of heaven & hell as such distinct, bureaucratic entities.

instead, there is a very distinctly amoral aspect to heaven & hell that we get through lines like the one above and especially from characters like crowley. this is why i argue that good omens, despite having so many religious elements, is such a deeply secular take, especially when it comes to its ethics & morality- Good and Evil, notably with the capital letters in this case, has very little to do with actual actions and much more to do with the name that you stamp on top of said actions. heaven & hell and the angels & demons that we see directing and watching and generally fucking with aziraphale & crowley throughout the story are distinctly separate from humanity, and as we see even more as the story progresses, distinctly unaware about what it even means to be a human, in both a deeper philosophical & very basic and literal sense. Good and Evil is simply another name for the sides- and thus the true ethics is something separate, and based in a deeply human experience.

in my opinion this is also why aziraphale & crowley, lovers of humanity and also to some degree spokespersons of it from how much they've "gone native," tend to be so deeply at odds with both heaven & hell and always end up agreeing with each other over their own supposed sides. what makes aziraphale & crowley so distinctly different is that they ascribe to the same ethics & morality that humanity does, or at the very least are trying to figure out ethics & morality & How to Be a Good Person in the same horribly messy way that humans do, separating them from the black & white "this side Good & this side Bad," logic that the rest of heaven & hell instinctively ascribe to.

there's a lot of nuance here, which is also why i think there is such an emphasis on moral ambiguity (and love, but we'll get to that) throughout season 2. the story of job, grave robbing, & questionable attempts at matchmaking- aziraphale is working through a lot of Shit right now when it comes to trying to figure out what the Good thing actually fucking is, and i think it's key that a lot of that is motivated by crowley himself. crowley might'e been cast out of heaven for asking too many questions, but aziraphale is there & listening to them & giving them the serious thought they deserve, and that can't be overlooked.

sidenote: i couldn't figure out a place to shove this in, but i also wanna point out that a lot of this is tied to the idea of growing over time too. on the same page as the quote transcribed above is another line from crowley leading up to aziraphale's question that puts a lot of emphasis on the fact that warlock is going to be a product of nurture, not nature. again, this is an argument against basic black & white assigned-at-birth morality for the ability of humans to grow & change over time and be influenced by the people around them.

it's notable that despite adam's supposed origin as a Son of Satan, what really gets him to stop the apocalypse in the end is the fact that he doesn't really give a shit about all this big plans but instead just wants to hang around his friends. there's a lot of emphasis in the book placed on how beautiful & nice tadfield is as a place for a young kid to grow up, how well loved & fiercely protected it as as something beloved to adam. while he might be overwhelmed when faced with the full picture of how horrible the world can be, ultimately what he cares about is loving & taking care of the people & places that he grew up learning were precious, and the only way to do that is to keep growing & changing yourself within that world and trying to help it also grow into something better, not throw it all away just for the slightest chance that you could restart. a message worth taking the time to think about, at the absolute very least.

3. finding morality w/in humanity: crowley & aziraphale and speculation for s3

i have complicated feelings about both aziraphale & crowley throughout a lot of the show and especially in season 2. i think a lot of people, myself included, are inclined to see crowley as the voice of reason in this season, and for good reason- as i mentioned before, a lot of aziraphale's deeper questioning of the status quo and goodness (Goodness) as a whole is motivated by questions from crowley.

i kiiind of mentioned this in my previous essay, but to state it more clearly, my take on crowley is that he's arriving at the right answer for the wrong reasons, and, conversely, aziraphale is arriving at the wrong answer for... kind of also the wrong reasons but also slightly for the right reasons. let me explain.

crowley is clearly much more aware of the flaws in both heaven & hell than aziraphale is, which seems to be the basis behind a lot of his motivation in asking aziraphale so many questions in the first place. he's also, as maggie & nina point out in s2e6, deeply lonely, often running away or getting ready to fight literally anyone that isn't aziraphale (or humans, but that's a little more complicated). from his reaction to beelz & gabriel getting together, i think it's pretty clear that he still hasn't entirely given up on the whole alpha centauri idea, and it makes sense- as i said in that last essay, crowley basically won the argument at the end of the previous season when it comes to aziraphale & crowley, "making [their] own side," so he doesn't have much reason to face any of his personal fears until maggie & nina basically point out that they exist directly to his face. once they do point it out, however, he's very motivated to act & does so almost immediately, even after hearing what aziraphale has to tell him and being pretty thoroughly devastated by it.

my point here is that crowley is correct in seeing the toxicity of both heaven & hell, he's just flawed and largely motivated by fear (up for debate if that's all it is, but i certainly think it's a big part of it) in his desire to run away from it all. it's not quite armageddon, again he's going more flight > fight here, but he's still ultimately giving up and that's not a great conclusion.

on the other hand, as some others on this site have pointed out, aziraphale is certainly showing a lot of strength in his willingness to keep fighting & try to change things for the better, but it's not hard to see how that belief has been twisted. one of aziraphale's biggest flaw in motivation at this point imo is that he doesn't just believe in goodness but Goodness, the kind that's tied to heaven always being right & all actions being morally Good so long as they're done under the name of heaven, and that clearly also isn't great.

thus what i think the both of these two really need ultimately is that deeper connection to humanity, and the ethics born from humans interacting with humans. we can already see how strong these two are when they collaborate, even when they're doing their absolute best to be as subtle as possible, but what i think they need is to once again be grounded by humanity, not to get so caught up in the bullshittery of heaven & hell and Good & Evil, but once again find a goodness defined by the world that they mutually love so much and stick with it.

i keep tossing a question around in my head about whether or not aziraphale & crowley are going to end up human by the end of this series. it feels natural that they would, they're already so at home and in love with earth & around humanity, but i'm also not entirely sure if that would be a happy ending for them considering how long they've watched & loved the world as it's changed. perhaps taking this post into account is another push towards humanity as a happy ending, not running away to a cottage to get away from the world (i just can't see running away to a cottage to be together as as happy ending, sorry- it might work for beelz & gabriel but not for aziraphale & crowley), but choosing to settle down within that world that is so dear.

#'just three sections' LAFFS. YEAH #astronaut rambles #good omens #gomens #no but i like this one a lot better than the last attempt at a gomens essay #this one feels a lot cleaner. more focused?#got a bit sappy at the end but i don't mind humanity is always worth loving #also off topic but i read this really interesting paper at work the other day #about pratchett’s writing in discworld & zizek & religion #forget what it’s called now but it was an interesting take on how fiction/fantasy can allow for deeper insights/reflection of reality #got some discworld books today so looking forward to reading those once i slurp up the last hundred or so pages of good omens #also thanks to my dad for having some interesting commentary on the job interpretation in s2e2 today #i all but literally slept through sunday school so i think a lot of the more noteworthy religion takes in this show go over my head =3=‘’#man i am so very much looking forward to how season 3 continues this story #i feel like a lot of the big conclusions there are really gonna be important for the direction of the story’s main message #season 2 is just. such a transition season it’s hard to get super distinct conclusions sometimes #like it’s still going somewhere there’s shit developing #it’s not like sherlock where it just teases deeper meaning forever but gives you nothing #but. it’s just so obviously Not Over Yet and I Need More #anyways much love i need to go to bed now arghfjdkd lots of shit to do in the future but all i wanna do is keep writing gomens essays. sigh #brainrot central #oh yay my phone’s at 69% now ☺️ wheeee #good omens meta

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fuck-customers · 2 years

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LONG POST

I just saw another post that reminded me of my short but hellish time working at a local family restaurant.

I filled out an application and handed it over in person and the owner called me the next day to start working that night. (🚩#1- no background check, no real interview, just asked if I was over 18, what my availability was and if I'd ever worked in a restaurant before and maybe for my ID, I'm not even sure if he asked for that) Whatever. I was desperate for a job and came in. I was upfront that this was my first job, I had no work experience, especially no restaurant experience but I was ready to try my best and was eager to learn. The owner also informed me to not come through the main restaurant doors where customers come through, to go through the back entrance. (This is relevant later)

I get all of 2 minutes of training (this is not really a red flag, more of a pink one) and set to work. The boss writes down on a pad of paper what time I came in and later writes down what time I left, the other employees do the same thing (🚩) No real/accurate clocking in exists, nor does any actual schedule exist, just the owner verbally saying to come in tomorrow or the next day or whenever at whatever time, but only one shift is notified at a time. (🚩) No one speaks to me, which I originally contributed to them being busy, until I noticed how dead the restaurant was. The only time anyone DOES speak to me, it is to condescendingly tell me how I'm fucking up and usually to yell at me. This not only includes the owner yelling at me, but his nephew who also works there as well as one of the waitresses, both of whom are supposed to be on my same employee level/aka not management. (🚩)

On the first day of work, I explain to the owner that I was looking around to find where dishes go because I have a bad memory due to brain damage and I WILL be able to eventually memorize where everything is supposed to go, it just might take me longer than the average person. He jokes about how he also has a bad memory and to ask anyone there for help, giving me false confidence that he may be understanding. I forgot where some dishes go on the second day and ask him where they go. Instead of helping like he claimed he would, he screams at me because I "can't even remember something so simple" (🚩)

On maybe the 3rd or 4th shift I have, I try to go in through the back as instructed, but the door is locked. I knock on the door and yell for someone to let me in for 5 or so minutes and no one comes. I obviously have no keys to this place I've worked at for 3 days, so I give up and go in through the main restaurant doors. The owner sees me and I immediately start trying to explain about the door being locked and no one answering and he either ignores me or doesn't hear me over his own yelling and is screaming at me in front of my coworkers and the customers eating their meals about how he told me not to come in through the restaurant and to only use the backdoor and refused to listen when I tried to explain that it was LOCKED. (🚩) I am obviously rattled and stressed and embarrassed so I scramble to the back to focus on work so I don't cry. After I contain myself, I get to work and I'm working for maybe 10-20 minutes when the owner stops by my station and asks if I like working there (🚩 I guess??? Wtf kind of question is that, ESPECIALLY after yelling at someone in front of employees and customers?) Of course I lie and say yes and I'm suddenly aware that I'm not currently working and I panic and start washing again. He stops me and says "Get out." "...What?" "Leave. Get out." "...the dishes..?" (in my defense I was very rattled) "I'll have [whatever his nephew's name was] do them. Leave now. You're too slow, I can do these dishes in half the time it takes you. See? *washes a dish* Leave." (side note: the dishes he "washed" and deemed acceptable to be served to customers STILL had food caked on them. 🤮 🚩)

I'm very disoriented and on the verge of tears, so I take off my apron as fast as possible and run out the door to avoid crying in front of everybody, as now the whole goddamn crew has come to watch my humiliation, and call my mom in tears in the parking lot. It's only afterwards, after I've calmed down that I realize that he never paid me (🚩) and I don't even know how much I'm supposed to be paid, since he never told me how much I was supposed to make in an hour (🚩) (yeah that one was on me, but honestly this guy scared me even during the "interview" and I was afraid to ask questions because he was very harsh) My mom (correctly) tells me to go back and demand my pay. The only silver lining in my story is that he doesn't argue against paying me and gives me cash (idk how much it was, but I do remember confirming that it was the correct amount for minimum wage for how many hours I worked)

I worked there less than a week, but it was enough to traumatize me and make me refuse to work in a restaurant setting ever again. There is an overall silver lining: as I recalled this story, I was curious if there were employee reviews and if that guy was also abusive to other employees or if he just had something against me. I didn't find any employee reviews, but I did discover that the restaurant is permanently closed as of 2020. Good fucking riddance. I hope he wasn't as horrible to his other employees as he was to me, but at least he won't be able to abuse them anymore.

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rotworld · 1 year

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i hope the new year has been kind to you !! please don’t feel pressure to write. take time to rest well. i go back and reread old pieces of yours all the time! i admire your writing a lot and wanted to ask if you had any more advice about writing .. am excited for whatever you post, whenever it is you post it ^__^ your sandman fic is so evocative and interesting.. the prose is so .. thick in a glutinous dough kind of way.. i don’t know where it’ll go.. thank you again!

thank you and happy new year! so far so good lol i’m with family and very happy. i appreciate your patience and understanding. while i am working on stuff again, i’m also sort of stranded away from home until the later part of this month lol so my schedule is a bit strange.

as for writing advice, here are some exercises to try!

->rewrite a classic: china mieville wrote four final orpheuses, a short story which explores four different reasons why orpheus failed in his quest to bring eurydice back from the underworld. these range from a moment of weakness to simple human error and tell radically different stories about their relationship and his state of mind in just a few brief snippets.

find a story like a classic myth or fairy tale and rewrite it in ways that resonate with you. change the ending, reinterpret the characters, or focus on a different perspective. if you’re not sure what to do, try coming up with questions you want answered or alternate possibilities: how did marya morevna first defeat and capture koschei the deathless? what does the sea witch get up to when mermaids aren’t pestering her to see the surface world? hope is the last thing in the box pandora opens; what does it look like, and what does she do with it?

->imitate another writer’s style: i made a post one time about voice and said you shouldn’t feel pressure to change it, but i also think going out of your way to emulate another writer for an exercise can be fun and useful. for the sandman fic, i tried to imitate the “feel” and structure of gaiman’s writing. when i first read the comic, i was really amazed by how many plot threads he would juggle each arc, and how those threads would weave together in the finale, so i wanted to use that along with the more dreamy, surreal prose and absurd humor.

find a writer or specific work that you enjoy and wouldn't mind imitating stylistically. study their voice (the aforementioned post has specific examples of what to look for) as well as how the work is structured. you could write fanfiction or something original with this exercise, but i think it’s easiest to stay in the same genre and use similar themes or aesthetics as the work you’re using for reference.

->if you get stuck, time travel: recently i read a book on revisions (unfortunately can’t remember the title/author, i skimmed it at the star but didn't buy it) that gave advice along the lines of “if you suddenly get stuck and can’t figure out why, the problem is several sentences ago.” the thinking here is that we sometimes write ourselves into a corner without realizing it, and you need to back out of the corner by retracing your steps. you might’ve gotten bored or lost focus and that made the last few sentences really rough or go in a direction that’s hard to work with. go back a paragraph or two and reexamine what you have, cutting it entirely if need be.

alternatively, i’ve found that if i get stuck at the very start of a piece, then the problem is where i’m choosing to start. i’ve been working on something about certain characters involved in certain illicit businesses and wanted to open with a party at a fancy venue. i was hellbent on opening with some scene-setting narration/exposition on the venue itself as the reader travels there, and i wasn't getting past the first sentence. so eventually i shifted forward. instead, the reader would have just arrived at the venue and the opening would introduce one of the characters at the party. this also just didn't work, so i moved forward even further. everyone's at the venue, the party has been going on for a while, and it starts with the reader considering the reasons they should not be at this party. what ended up working was cutting my initial, slow-paced plan and starting closer to the action, and i think that's a good idea in most situations.

#rotpeach answers #rot on writing #the fic i mentioned struggling with in this is getting ungodly long so not sure when it'll be done #im out of town and will soon be out of the country so please bear with me during this slow time lol

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gogofordrakgo · 4 months

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Since Tumblr chickened out on allowing people off-site to ask questions, I have to resort to barbaric measures to do so. Please forgive me for this.

What started you on D/S drabbles and what made you stick to strictly 100 words (as is the original requirement for this format)?

How do you work with them? Start big and trim down, or small and add more?

You do them in alphabetical order. Why?

- Guest

Ooh! Well, this is fun! Sorry for the delay, Tumblr decided to hide this until just now! I started the drakgo drabbles back in... I think 2021 mostly in an attempt to get back into writing in general. (Hell yeah for antidepressants lol) I thought writing a couple of quick short stories would be helpful, and ended up writing a few drabbles for the challenge of it... And then I realized it was fun and I found them “simple” to write, so I wound up sticking with it! In fact, a number of the original drabbles still haven’t been posted as they don’t fit in with any of my current sets. I’ll find homes for them eventually, I promise! I stuck with the 100 words because I can sorta be a stickler for inconsequential rules. I imagine there are very few people besides myself who’d be upset if I went over or under on a few of them but I generally think the challenge is in getting the story conveyed within the constraints of exactly 100 words. As you said, it’s the original requirement for this format and while I will never correct someone else for calling a short story a drabble (because honestly, I know it doesn’t really matter) I couldn’t imagine myself doing this any other way. Now, this question I feel like kind of a jerk answering... I sort of just... write them. I don’t know, so long as I have an idea to work with I can usually get an entire drabble written in a matter of minutes. That’s not to say I never end up going over or under the word count! Certainly, I have spent plenty of time reworking certain drabbles to reach 100 words exactly! I’ve also had a few drabbles, I admit not many, that I’ve rewritten several times just on the principle of not liking the way they turned out. “Wrestle” for example took me an entire day to write, as I couldn’t decide what route exactly I wanted to take, or how best to convey the positioning in the scene. But... Yeah, in general, most of them come pretty naturally to me. I would like to make it clear here that I have been writing for well over a decade and did in fact study writing in college. The fact that this comes easily to me now is not me trying to look down on or discourage anyone else who might struggle with short-form storytelling or writing in general. I have done a lot of work to reach a point where I can confidently believe I am a decent, if not good writer.

The alphabetical order thing actually came from the names of my one-shots! I don’t know why I decided to stick to one-word names but I did and eventually started to think it would be funny to write a one-shot covering every letter in the alphabet. Then for a variety of reasons, I wound up somewhat leaving the fandom for a while and had a lot of trouble trying to get back into writing. So that never really happened. As things started to get a bit better, as I started writing the drabbles, I realized if I was going to post them I might as well hit that alphabet goal! And what better way to do that than to do it in... reverse alphabetic older?

But that was how I ended up using obscure words as my first set of drabbles. After that, it just sort of became part of it, which I admit is a little unfortunate because while I have this current set almost completed and the next two sets named... It’s starting to get really difficult to come up with categories that I could hit all 26 letters in! I may just decide to start posting them as I write them later on, but frankly, I enjoy my personal alphabetical rule and know I’ll have difficulty breaking it when the time comes.

Wow! Seriously, thank you for the questions! I hope I was able to answer them in a decently satisfying way! I promise the drabbles will get posted soon... I’m just... working on... something... I’m hoping to be done with it in the next few days!

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ohraicodoll · 1 year

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Interwoven | Chapter 2

Chapters: 2/6 Fandom: The Sandman (Comics & TV 2022) Rating: Mature/Explicit Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Original Female Character, Dream/Reader Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Original Female Character, Hob Gadling, Original Characters, Matthew the Raven, Lucienne, Calliope, Mervyn Pumpkinhead, Calliope, The Endless, Eve, Delirium, Death, Desire Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI, Explicit Sexual Content, Past Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Possessive Behavior, Domestic Abuse, Domestic Violence, Jealousy, Trauma Responses Tags: Character Development, Established Relationships, General complicated feelings, meeting the family, meeting the friends, talk about fantasies, domestic life, fluff, past Relationships, ANGST, OFC: Dahlia, Named Reader, 1st POV

Summary: She had very few people in her life and while he denied it, Dream had so many. People that cared for him, people that warned her. Or in other terms, Dream and Dahlia’s casual relationship is turning not so casual. Chapter Summary: Birthdays, Bars, and Blushes

4th in the Fragments Series | Read on AO3 Writing Masterlist Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 Previous in Series: Possession Next in Series: The Complications of Family (Author’s Note: Sorry for the delay in getting this posted here. Still working through some grief and just feeling generally depressed after my grandma’s passing. I’m trying to shake it off and cope and writing usually does that) Chapter 2: Anissa

Dream was right. I hated when he was right, but I do get anxiety when dealing with uncertain situations and right now I was anxious. Birthdays weren’t big on my list. Mom and Dad had died when I was almost seventeen and were the main celebrator. They would wake me up and give me a present throughout the day, letting me choose what I wanted for dinner and then Mom would always make me a cake to celebrate. Sometimes we’d go to the library and pick out new books, sometimes we’d go somewhere extra special like the zoo or a show. But when they died and I started living with my abusive older partner, that had all gone out the window. I spent the first few years hopeful and then quickly learned to get used to the taste of disappointment. After that, there was simply no point in even hoping. Thomas, my most recent ex, forgot and I wasn’t inclined to remind him so we never celebrated in the one year we were together. I didn’t have any more relatives or even friends after escaping the first relationship and years later, Anissa was my only friend and we had gotten close in recent years. And I had Morpheus now even if we were/were not dating. Even then, this was more support than I’ve had in years and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t want to expect anything at all. When you hope, you set yourself up for disappointment. I wish none of them had found out what the day was. There would be no anxiety over Morpheus meeting Nissa or taking him into public or trying to figure out how to answer my coworker’s questions. And poor Hob was pulled into the mix. At some point, Matthew had flown by to drop off a small package, cawing a quick “Happy Birthday” before rushing off like he was in a hurry. Morpheus had definitely told them what day it was which made me extra suspicious as I looked at the small black box the raven had left behind. It was fancier than anything I had in my small apartment which was a giveaway in itself that it was one, from the Dream King, and two, from the Dreaming itself. Wrapped in a delicate, perfect ribbon, the box fit in the palm of my hand and had no card. Chewing on my lip, I carefully unwrapped it to preserve the ribbon and opened it up to find a necklace with earrings more beautiful than anything I owned. It was simple but immaculate featuring an onyx teardrop stone encased in ornate metal swirls on a rose gold chain, the earrings matching the design but smaller and dainty. I could almost feel the essence of Morpheus in the item, a steady hum I had become so familiar with and able to distinguish easily now in everything he made. The kernel of hope curled to life and I had to force myself not to get choked up at the idea that I’d received a birthday present. It was gorgeous, so stunning it felt unreal, and I smiled at the sparkling black stones, staring at them throughout most of the day and unable to keep from touching them. I was positively giddy over it and almost hated it. The evening was coming soon and I distracted myself more with getting dressed. Anissa had suggested a different place than before, a nicer more cocktail style bar than our usual place. I was glad considering the whole ordeal with Morpheus scaring my now former coworker, Cameron, had sullied that bar. But a nicer place meant I had to dress up so I took my time doing my makeup and choosing a decent dress and coat. I figured if I wore a heavy enough jacket it would keep me warm on the walk there even in a dress. I’d just fully clasped the halter straps of my dark green gown when I felt the tingling sensation of power coating over my skin like a gentle breeze along the open back of my dress. My eyes darted to the doorway in the bathroom mirror precisely as Morpheus walked in like he owned the place, long black wool peacoat in place with a black plain shirt, jeans, and laced up boots underneath. His sharp blue eyes met mine as he leaned against the doorway, a small smile tilting up his lips. “Hello, little dreamer,” he whispered as he took in my form, the way the emerald fabric followed my curves and the large expanse of skin it left exposed.

I dropped my arms, smirking at him in return through the mirror and feeling some of my anxiety ease at his presence, “Hello, dreamlord.”

Turning, my long hair skimming along my shoulders to fall to my back, I stepped closer and leaned against the doorway next to him so I could stare up at his amused face, “Do I clean up decent enough?�� Morpheus’ eyes darkened and he took his time to follow the line of my body, at the draped neck of my neckline, the silk of the fabric as it hugged my waist, and the fall of the skirt as it fell to my feet. I could feel the burn of his gaze the entire way and swallowed, my mouth going dry as he drank me in. This was the most dressed up I’d been since the masquerade ball dream I’d had months ago, when he had danced and touched and teased me relentlessly. It made me want to dress up more if only to see his reaction. His hand lifted, knuckles grazing my cheek and dragging down to my chin, neck, collarbones, to the dip of my necklines. My breath was coming out in shallow pants, bottom lip pulling between my teeth. I would never get used to his touch, his attention. It was like drawing the focus of the moon, overwhelming and enthralling. Morpheus leaned forward, forehead touching mine and breath ghosting along my lips, his voice a dark whisper full of promise, “You are breathtaking. You always are.” “Flatterer,” I joked though my heart was beating in my ears and all I could focus on was the heat of his skin and his breath mixing with mine. His lips grazed mine in the barest hint of a kiss as if he was restraining himself, but the simple touch was enough to undo me entirely. I pressed forward and kissed him, moaning as he let go and met me eagerly, arms wrapping around my waist and pulling me forward. His palms flattened along my exposed back and a gasp left my lips to be swallowed by him as his tongue explored my mouth. He held me tightly while kissing me deeply, causing liquid fire to spread and pool in me. My hands grasped the fabric of his shirt and fingers dug into the thin width of his waist. I wanted to touch the cool, hard skin of his stomach, feel his muscles as he moved against me. I wanted to call the whole thing tonight off.

It would be a far better night to stay in. Just say sorry and pull birthday rights so I could stay home and let the Endless completely drown me in his touch and not leave the bedroom. But even as my body screamed at me, reason began to slowly seep in as the need to tear his clothes off rose to dangerous levels. It was getting tiring having to leave the house when staying at home was so much better. I slowed, his soft black hair already between my fingers, and let out a low groan, “I don’t think we have time before Hob gets here.” The Nightmare King growled low while giving me another searing kiss, chasing me even as I attempted to lean back, “He can wait outside.” The man had zero patience for anything else in the universe when he wanted something and was being denied it, I was beginning to realize. So far, it mostly seemed to be when people or things got in the way of us having sex. But the words did their job of snapping me from the intensity of our lust as I laughed and put a hand on his chest to keep him from lifting me on the counter and having his way right then, “We have later, I promise. I’m not going to make him wait outside like a sad college roommate.” He sighed and recomposed himself, cupping my cheek in his hand with a look as if I had kicked his puppy, “Very well then.” Shaking my head, I smiled up at him, “Thank you for the present Matthew dropped off earlier. Can you help me put them on?”

He kissed my forehead softly and nodded, “Of course. I trust they were to your liking?” I nodded in reply and held his hand, leading him back to the living room where the small box resting on the coffee table held the necklace and earrings. He took the dainty chain out and moved my hair aside, the small onyx pendant resting above the top of my cleavage. With a gentle kiss to the back of my neck, the jewelry was secured and in place. The earrings followed next until all pieces were in place. It was definitely the most beautiful thing I’d ever owned and I couldn’t help touching it, feeling the small current of his power hidden inside. It made me wonder if everyone could feel it, that slight hum of something otherworldly that surrounded him and everything he created. It was almost impossible to ignore and something I had to get used to, now signifying anytime he was near me. “You will always be connected to me through this, if you should ever have need of me while separated,” Morpheus whispered into my skin, hands settling on my waist. “This isn’t like a tracking beacon or anything, is it?” I teased, but also half serious.

He frowned and I started to consider if I wasn’t actually correct, “Anything connected to the Dreaming, I can locate but the intention is more to be a way to communicate an emergency should you have one.” So yes and no. I let the answer slide though, knowing how paranoid he was about my safety, especially since Thomas had showed up and pushed his way into my apartment. Being human didn’t help his nerves about me and sometimes he acted as if I could shatter at the smallest accident.

“Well either way, it’s beautiful,” I hummed. We stood there embraced for a while and caught up, him telling me about the latest delegation to come and visit the Dreaming. Now that the realm was getting back in order finally after the past couple years of Morpheus’ return, other gods and delegations from other worlds and realms were visiting to get reacquainted. Half the time the names he told me went over my head, having no clue who he was talking about, but it was interesting to hear either way and I liked hearing him discuss his work. He took it very seriously, put it above all else, and so sharing it showed a little bit of the pride he took with it. Lucienne was taking a more active role beyond librarian and now acting more appropriately as a right hand to the Dream King, organizing his “calendar” so to speak and being a mediary when he wasn’t present. She had held the Dreaming together while he was gone and I was happy to see her having something that challenged her beyond the library. It especially helped when he wanted to visit me as she kept the place running and freed up his time to come to the Waking world.

A sharp knock interrupted us and Morpheus laid a quick kiss on my shoulder before I could fully process the interruption, moving to the door himself. Acting as if it was totally normal to open the door to my apartment, he unlocked and answered it, greeting Hob on the other side standing in the hallway. The history professor blinked, obviously caught off guard, and grinned at both of us, stepping inside, “Wasn’t quite expecting you to answer, but you always have been full of surprises.”

Morpheus didn’t say anything, only raised a brow and shut the door behind the man. I couldn’t blame him, if Dream had answered the door anywhere I was going I would have been stunned. It was weird, seeing both well dressed immortal men in my mediocre little apartment, but life had been a whole lot weirder since meeting the dreamlord and I was trying to learn to take it all in stride. After all, I was now friends with a talking bird, pumpkin headed janitor, dream librarian, and now an immortal man.

The man in question pivoted to face me and the grin grew even wider, brightening his face, “And happy birthday to you, fair lady!” He produced a sunflower from behind his back and made an overdone flourish of bowing, presenting it to me in an outstretched fist.

I smiled and laughed, slightly blushing and not used to having the attention all on me, taking the flower from him, “Thank you, Hob. I appreciate the gesture.” The man was dressed in tan slacks and a loose white button up long sleeved shirt, a brown vest over it and shiny leather shoes. He was very handsome in a more grounded way than the dreamlord was, more of a rugged good looks type of man with his stubble and earthy tones and longer hair. His charm amplified it all, half smile constantly twisting his lips and lighting up the room. It was no surprise that if anyone was going to become friends with Dream of the Endless, it would be the one man I couldn’t see anyone hating really.

I went to put the sunflower into some water, hearing from the kitchen as Hob teased Morpheus about essentially wearing the same thing constantly and him arguing that his appearance changed depending on perception so it was pointless to change outfits. It felt…nice, having the two friends in my home, as if the place had warmed up and they were just a normal group of friends. If you ignored that they were anything but. I came back to find Morpheus slightly more annoyed but in a longer, nicer coat with dark black floral embroidery along the edges and a black button up shirt underneath, the collar held together with a golden pin. It was subtly different but was nicer. I tried not to grin, knowing it would just annoy him more if I pointed out the outfit change and the fact that Hob had gotten to him. “Alright, you both ready to go?” I asked innocently. Those blue eyes of his swirled, lips pressed into a thin line, and the dreamlord only nodded while his friend winked. The air outside wasn’t too bad even with the sun fully set and the stars blazing outside. Anissa had at least considered my hatred of driving and made sure to pick a close enough place that I could walk without needing to hail a cab or drive myself. My own coat was cinched at the waist around me to protect me from the cold and Dream had taken my hand into his while Hob had jokingly offered his elbow, the three of us walking side by side down the mostly empty sidewalk.

For a second, I wondered if the Endless would be upset at how much Hob seemed to be flirty with me, knowing that much less had set him off before. But he either didn’t notice, which I doubted, or didn’t care. Maybe since it was someone he knew and trusted, it didn’t phase him or he simply knew that was how Hob was..

I hadn’t fully warned Anissa that I was bringing Dream, merely sending her a quick text saying I had invited some friends. She’d sent an eye emoji back but I didn’t respond, figuring the less information I gave the less likely I would be fielding questions and getting more nervous before the night came. I knew her well enough to think she wouldn’t start a full argument but I also knew she was hot headed sometimes and thought she knew best….same with the Dream King. They were both stubborn. He wasn’t human, didn’t have to deal directly with them often, and so I wasn’t sure how he’d react to her making digs at him. He didn’t seem to like her all that well either. The anxiety was coming back and I let the sound of the street and the intermittent chatting of the two friends on either side take over as my thoughts drowned me. This felt too big. Introducing the guy you’ve been kinda-sorta seeing for the past handful of months to your friend felt too big. Yes, he had taken the first step in this, had planned for me to meet Hob but I could reason that he was simply introducing the only two humans in his life. Anissa didn’t know about the Dreaming or Dream Walking or anything considered supernatural. What if this was a mistake? What if he realized how mundane and dumb and boring my life was and he lost interest? What if Morpheus denied any feelings or intentions towards me and then I’d feel embarrassed and stupid and- The hand in mine gave me a small squeeze and I broke out of my unblinking stare to look up at him, the knowing look in his eyes catching me. He was looking at me with an inquisitive look, a brow twitching up as if to ask if I was okay while also reassuring me that he was here with me. My breathing had started to come in quick, panicked pants without me noticing and I worked to calm down and take deep breaths. I was spiraling. It was his idea to come and meet her, I repeated to myself. And before I knew it, the bar was in front of us, nicer than any place I was used to frequenting which didn’t help my nerves at all. I was a simple type of girl. I didn’t care about anything fancy or appearances or high end things. It made me feel like a kid, trying desperately not to ruin anything expensive after being allowed to sit with the adults. Hob opened the door and Dream led me in, holding my hand securely in an effort to sooth the apprehension he could feel coursing through me. His thumb ran over the back of my hand, the chilled skin sending tingles as I felt a little more grounded. The lights were dim inside, a jazz band in the corner playing live with a few people dancing in front while a good remainder of the place was filled with circular tables couples and groups sat at, dressed up and drinking over candlelight. The place wasn’t too crowded for the evening and in the back corner I could see Anissa’s long red hair, pulled up into a high ponytail and a figure hugging white dress on. Her eyes met mine and then swiveled to the two guys at my back, eyebrows noticeably rising even at a distance. I swallowed a groan and pulled Morpheus behind me with a tight grip, headed to her direction while silently praying for a drama free night. I hated my birthday.

Reaching the table, I shot her a quick thin smile and let the dreamlord take off my coat to avoid meeting Anissa’s eyes, my own gaze latching onto the two shots of liquor already on the table. I grabbed one and didn’t even ask, feeling all their eyes on me as I shot it back and felt the sharp burn of what was very likely tequila. “Okay, yeah, that’s for you,” Nissa commented dryly with wide eyes, brows high into her browline, “I’m sorry, do you need more?”

Clearing my throat as the warm liquid lit my insides on fire, I shook my head and took a seat on the stool next to her, “No, I’m good. Hi.” “Hi, happy birthday” she incredulously, eyes flicking to the two men taking seats next to me, “Hi?” I eyed the second shot briefly, feeling anxiety tightening my throat as I tried to introduce everyone over the sound of the music, “Uh, yeah, this is Anissa, my friend and coworker. Nissa, this is Hob…and Morpheus.” No explanation, only their names because I couldn’t explain them.

I waited for her to take in the way the latter male sat close to me, hand on my waist as he watched me carefully and seemed to not be caring that he was being introduced as he was more worried about my wellbeing. She was smart, she’d connect the dots to who he was even though I had never mentioned his name before. Because if I had ever called him Dream or Morpheus in front of her, she definitely would have commented on the oddity of it. Hob, the godsend that he was, took the reins and held out a hand, smiling wide and easily, “Hello! So you work with Dahlia at the book publishers?” Anissa continued to stare, taking in Dream’s appearance and stoic demeanor, the protective way he hovered before turning to the other man, “Yeah, we’ve been in the same department for the past few years. How do you all know each other?” “Uh, Hob here is a history professor and friends with Morpheus,” I tried to nonchalantly explain, “And Morpheus-” “Dahlia and I are involved,” the Dream King cut in, eyes cool and face almost icy. The fingers at my waist clenched almost possessively and I wanted the alcohol to kick in much faster. Her dark brown eyes met mine then went back to him, taking in his demeanor and appearance as it all clicked together, “Ooh, so you’re the fun.” I wanted to die. “Pardon?” he shot back and I could see Hob out the corner of my eye rub his temple. “I mean I’ve heard…not a whole lot about you, actually, but glad to see you have a name and are willing to come in public with her,” Anissa replied with a smile that was too sharp to be genuine. Out of context, the statement would have sounded relatively normal and not at all loaded, but I knew the underlying accusation. “Fun is good but I think you deserve someone that will make you feel comfortable, love you, accept you as you are! I know you’ve had some issues in the past-” “That’s an understatement,” I muttered. “-But! I know you deserve someone that will see it and accept it and be considerate to what you need. You’re having fun for now but maybe when the fun starts to make you sad, it’s time to call it,” Anissa finished.

She’d taken me out when Dream and I had been fighting and I’d felt small and insecure and miserable. She understood that this was something I was having a hard time putting to words, trying to put what we were into clean boxes and failing. Unfortunately, while she cared, she wanted something else for me, not believing that this would end well. And so…she’d tried to set me up with Cameron…which had ended well.

“I am more than willing to be seen in public with Dahlia,” Morpheus answered back curtly, “Especially on her birthday, lest you try to pair her with another male coworker of hers.” Dear fucking god. I grabbed the second shot from the table and threw it back, letting the burn of it drown the absolute absurdity that was happening right now. Five minutes. It had only taken five minutes for the whole thing to go to absolute shit because of course. Everyone around me had the biggest heads and egos. “Can we not?” I asked, placing both hands on the table to try and cut in between them, “Maybe everyone…chill?” Anissa pressed her lips tightly together, locked in a glaring match with the Endless at my side, “Of course, Dahl. It’s your birthday, I wouldn’t want to be inconsiderate.” “Are you implying that I would?” I wanted to shove my head into my arms and disappear. Someone tugged on my arm and I turned to find Hob now behind me, gently pulling me from the table and out of Morpheus’ grasp, “How about we go to the bar and get you a big birthday drink, darling?” I stared at him with wide eyes and a look that definitely asked if he was crazy, shaking my head fervently, but he managed to pull me away. Both parties left at the table went to protest but stopped as Hob let out a quick, “We’ll be right back!” and dragged me away. “Are you out of your mind leaving them alone together?” I hissed at him, hand swallowed by his large one as he tugged me a short way away to the bar. “Listen, sometimes you have to just let people duke it out,” the immortal argued back, saddling up to the bar top, “They’ll get it out of their system and either come to an agreement or hate each other but neither are your fault and you don’t need to bare witness to it.” “That’s my friend and my…person…” the words stopped and I let myself drift off, trying to glance back at the table and two we were discussing. I could see the stiffness in Dream’s posture and the way Anissa’s lips twisted as she spoke. My mind was already conjuring the worst case scenario. Hob stared at my profile, absentmindedly waving down the bartender, “I’ve been meaning to ask about that. You and my old friend. How did that happen?” My eyes were still on the two arguing until my companion gently turned my face to look at him with a finger under my chin. I almost jumped at the contact, not expecting it and blinking large eyes owlishly at him, “You’re asking how me and Dream met?” He smirked and tapped my nose with the finger that turned my head, “Eyes here, love. Let them hash it out, no point in watching. And yes, I’m asking how you met.” The bartender came by and he ordered a whiskey while I got a cranberry vodka sour, the leftover tequila coating my throat reminding me why I hated the liquor. “I would have thought he’d tell you,” I answered and resisted trying to look at the person in question. Hob let out a bark of a laugh, one side of his lips twisting in deep amusement, “Might I remind you, he didn’t even tell me who he was until yesterday when you did. Sharing isn’t exactly a skill of his especially when it’s about himself.” He paused and a considerate look seemed to light up his warm eyes, “I think that’s why I like you. For years he’s been this big secret, this mysterious figure I couldn’t discuss with anyone. Him and the whole not dying thing. But now there’s you and it feels…relieving to have someone to talk to and share the experience with.” I smiled at that, pondering over the words. He was right. Dream of the Endless had only been in my life for a blink of an eye compared to Hob but it felt restricting sometimes that I couldn’t really discuss him. You can’t exactly go around and tell people you were seeing the anthropomorphic personification of dreams and nightmares without ending up with a wellness check. So it was nice to have someone who knew him in a human way and felt the frustration.

“Yeah, I feel the same,” I replied absentmindedly. He tapped me on the nose again and I jerked, giving him a small glare, “Now, back to how you two met.” “It’s complicated,” I sighed, “I feel like everything about us is complicated. There’s never a straight answer.” “So I take it you didn’t meet out in a bar or out in the streets?” he joked and thanked the bartender as our drinks were placed in front of us, “I mean, technically he picked me up in a pub.” I could feel the anxiety of wondering what was happening behind us and tried desperately to stay focused on the cold drink in my hands, the way the condensation slid over my skin and dripped onto the counter, “No. You do know about him being captured, right?” The other man nodded while taking a drink of his whiskey, “Well, I am apparently something called a Dream Walker. I am completely lucid when I dream and can actually go into other people’s. I didn’t even know it was something I could really do until a couple of years ago when he was freed.” I told him about how it was apparently something that was in my family, though with Morpheus’ capture the only person that had done it before was my grandmother when she was a child. Both her and my mother were dead by the time I could Dream Walk on my own, having believed it was a crazy story my grandma told, but luckily she had warned me not to interfere with other’s dreams as if it were a children’s bedtime story. And I’d followed that rule for two years…until I’d gotten drunk and destroyed my ex’s dream after finding him in bed with my neighbor.

The King of Dreams usually tampered down on any Dream Walker’s abilities when they first manifested, had never let one grow into their full power out of worry it may damage the realm, but it was too late to do that with me. And so he let me be, after very angrily arguing with me. “I thought he was going to kill me,” the words sounded a little ridiculous now, seeing how it ended up being the opposite, and Hob’s answering grin told me he thought the same.

“You did? Nah, I think he likes to be argued with sometimes. Keeps him humble…or somewhat humble,” he laughed. I laughed and drank the sour alcoholic drink, my body feeling warmer and loose as the two shots previously started to sink in a bit more, “Well, I know that now. Back then he was terrifying. He sent a nightmare after me.” Hob choked and coughed, eyes wide and red as he blinked at me. I only chuckled and grinned, “Yeah, this big tentacle monster thing. And then the next day he met me in the Waking world at that café after I ran from him and I thought he was going to murder me in front of everyone. But instead he said it wasn’t my fault I was how I was and let me be…but then he started asking questions and we started talking and I think he was flirting with me. I don’t know, there was just a shift and slowly it built up into whatever this is.”

Seeing both our drinks were empty, he waved the bartender down while I cautioned a look back at the table. The annoyance was gone from Anissa’s face, almost sad and blank, and I could see that Morpheus was talking, but I couldn’t figure out the tone of the conversation. But his posture wasn’t as rigid and neither of them were dead so that was a plus. It was killing me that I didn’t know what was being said, what was happening but Hob nudged me with another drink and I turned back to face him. “I think sometimes that his time away changed him more than he’s willing to admit,” his fingers tapped on the countertop, eyes reminiscent, “Don’t ever mention this to him because he will deny and probably flip over a table, but I feel like he’s desperate to build connections. Over a hundred years in isolation did a number and now it’s like he doesn’t want to be alone entirely.” “Touch starved,” I blurted, staring at his fingers as they tapped and tapped their own rhythm, “He’s definitely touch starved.”

He nodded, almost a little sadly, “I’ve seen him more in the two years since he’s been back than the six hundred plus that I’ve known him. Honestly it wasn’t entirely a surprise that he popped up and was suddenly dating someone-” “Oh we’re not dating,” I cut him off with a wave of my hand, “I mean, this is…casual, I guess.” Hob furrowed his brows, mouth quirked in a way that screamed bullshit, “Oh yeah, because my old friend definitely brings every person he sees casually to meet me. Darling, I don’t mean to call you delusional, but…” He gave me a pointed look and I winced, “You mean something to him and it’s definitely not casual. I’ve never met anyone in his personal life, but he wanted me to meet you.” I sighed, chewing on my bottom lip and staring at the glass in my hands, “It’s hard to put into words. What we are…we’ve never really talked about it in certain terms. He says he’s mine and I’m his, but I always figured that was like the overly romantic way of saying we were exclusive. I don’t know what we are, really, and I’m afraid to bring it up.” Hand reaching up and rubbing my back, the warmth of his hand soothing on the expanse of my exposed skin, he chuckled a bit, “In 1889, I told him that I thought he kept meeting me because we were friends and he was lonely and he was so furious that he walked out. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he hasn’t bothered to clear things up. I doubt he even fully knows, but he is very attached to you.” Blinking up at him under his lashes, I stared at his profile in the dim light and found he wasn’t looking at me but back at the table where Morpheus was talking with Anissa. There was a slight smile on his lips, a fondness when he talked about his friend and perhaps something more. His own kind of attraction to the dreamlord. Hob was old, charming, and a relentless flirt. I couldn’t help but think of all the relationships and lovers he had probably taken in the past, all the things he might have tried. And when faced with Morpheus, who had his own pull… I couldn’t help but take in the angle of his jaw and the strong line of his nose. He was handsome in an entirely different way from Dream, a more masculine way, stubble coating his jaw adding a ruggedness to him. With alcohol starting to seep in, the hand rubbing at my back shot tingles through me. Before I could properly think about the question or my line of thinking, I blurted out, “Have you and he ever…?” Brown eyes turned to meet mine, that affection still dancing in the dark irises. I took in the natural tilt of his lips, the humor and lightness that seemed a permanent fixture to him. He didn’t answer, only met my gaze and gave me a small flirtatious smile before dropping his hand from my back, “Come on, looks like those two have finally settled and we should probably save him.” With a wink, he grabbed my hand and intertwined our fingers and I realized the alcohol had seeped in a lot more than I thought as he kept me from stumbling on my dress back to the table. My mind was having a hard time focusing, distracted by what was happening, and all I could picture were those same tanned hands on pale skin and his fingers in ink black messy hair. My skin felt too hot and tight. Suddenly lifting my hand and giving me a small twirl I wasn’t expecting, Hob deposited me in a less than graceful stumble into Morpheus’ arms who wrapped them firmly around my waist and settled me half on his knee at the table. I comforted instantly at the feel of him and the smooth texture of his coat against my bare back, my body feeling warm and toasty. “Are you two done fighting?” I asked and was startled at the slightest way my words felt in slow motion. I could feel Dream stiffen and turn to his friend with a glare who shrugged with a laugh. Anissa looked resigned, taking me in next to him, “We weren’t fighting, just having a disagreement and yes, we are…. Though what kind of pretentious name is Morpheus anyways?” “Nissa!” I reprimanded sharply. She raised her hand in surrender, “Okay, okay, I’m done!”

“Did you get her inebriated?” the man in question asked while his fingers gripped the soft skin of my hip through the fabric. I mumbled my dissent at being called drunk while Hob pointed a finger at me, “Technically she did that to herself when she started the night by downing two shots and she’s fine! It’s her birthday, let her loosen up if she has to deal with both of you tonight.” My coworker scoffed and looked at him, “Excuse me, I don’t even know you.” Hob grinned, “I don’t have to know you. I could tell from how she almost had a damn panic attack getting here she was worried about both of you. That tells me all I need.” I gave him points on being observant but was mostly feeling disgruntled that I was being discussed by everyone while literally sitting between them all, “I’m right here, you know.” “Yes and you look lovely,” he winked. I rolled my eyes and settled into Dream’s arms, partially pleased that he was still holding me even though we were in public and he never seemed like a publicly affectionate being. But he held me to him while the other two bantered, Hob driving the conversation to them to give us a break. Anissa had found a worthy partner to verbally duel with and the other man definitely was taking joy in trying to charm her. Turning my head into him, I asked my partner quietly, “You alright?” The Dream King hummed in acquiescence, tracing lazy circles in my dress, “We had a discussion and came to an understanding. Apologies, I did not wish to worry you about our meeting or cause you distress. Are you well?” I nodded, wondering what kind of an “understanding” they came to and what was even discussed, “Yeah, me and Hob just talked and drank a bit.” My mind flashed to the images I had unintentionally visualized earlier as well as those hands on my back as well and I flushed, diverting my attention to the rest of the bar. I could feel Dream’s eyes on me, knew he was taking in the blush on my cheeks and hoped he chalked it up to the alcohol I had drank in quick succession that was now hitting me all at once. I was slightly tipsy and apparently horny. I needed to get myself together and stop fantasizing about them. Yes, they were two ungodly attractive men. But they were friends and I’m sure Morpheus wouldn’t appreciate me imagining another man, no matter how close they were. “… I do not share.” He had told me that forever ago, had warned me about how possessive he could be. And even if he had loosened up on it, directed it to be a less toxic form of possessiveness, I doubted he had changed that drastically.

Hob proved to, in fact, be a very good mediary. He kept the conversation going with talking about books and history and of all things, the early stages of the printing industry. To Morpheus’ annoyance, he called more drinks over with the excuse that it was my birthday and if I wanted to get hammered then I could. When Anissa would ask basic questions we couldn’t answer like what did Morpheus do for a living or how we met or how long the two men had been friends, the professor easily diverted the conversation or gave an obtuse answer. I’m sure she was noticing how the conversation kept getting steered away, how little information Dream gave or even seemed to talk now that their own argument was over, but she didn’t push it and I was grateful.

Nissa apologized for how she acted, if only after a couple more drinks, saying she only wanted me to be happy after everything with my exes and I waved her off. It didn’t stop her from making small passive aggressive comments towards Morpheus but he seemed less reactionary now and more able to ignore her. I understood it all. Both of them argued out of care for me, and also ego, but I’d rather it be shoved away and not talked about anymore. I was still uncomfortable with anger and fighting in general and it being about me made it more uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to people caring enough to argue. As the band switched up to a livelier tune, Hob managed to persuade Anissa to dance, carting her off and leaving me alone with the Endless. His tolerance was high, hers was low, and it wasn’t hard to keep her distracted so we could have alone time. My head felt slightly fuzzy and I’d switched to drinking water simply because I would still have to walk home and didn’t want a hangover in the morning, but overall I felt relaxed. Dream’s lips pressed to the dip in my shoulder and the simple touch sent a wave of electricity shooting through my already heated skin, “How are you feeling, little dreamer?” “I think Hob’s trying to get everyone drunk,” I chuckled, leaning into him and the feel of his kiss, “But I’m good. We should probably head back soon though before it gets too cold.” I’d taken up residence between his thighs, his long legs still stretched out on the ground even though he was sitting on a stool, standing but fully wrapped in his hold. His fingers drifted up and down my sides, taking satisfaction in the way I shivered at the small act. I could tell he was all for leaving, probably had been from the start. Coming out tonight was less a want and more of a need to be present, to be involved in my life and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was half to stake a claim on me. He knew Anissa had tried to set me up and wasn’t pleased, probably wanting her to know I was off limits for future matchmaking.

But he didn’t like being amongst people or playing human, I knew that much, and I’m sure he found it all very droll. His fingers went to my bare back again, tracing the skin and dip along my spine. I let my head fall back to rest on his shoulder, closing my eyes and relaxing under the haze of alcohol and the delicious feeling of him touching me. His breath brushed along the shell of my ear and I shivered as he whispered, “You were blushing rather hard earlier. What was on your mind?” I froze, my mind taking a second to process the words. So he had noticed that. Of course he had, he notices everything but I didn’t think he’d ask directly. “Uh nothing,” I answered innocently. His nail gently scraped my skin and I had to hold in a moan at how it felt, pulling my lower lip between my teeth, “You are a poor liar, little dreamer. I have seen all of you bared beneath me, seen what makes you blush so. What are you afraid to tell me?” My breath hitched and I opened my eyes, blinking at the dim lights hanging from the ceiling and feeling the thrum of music all around us. Even in a crowded room and our friends nearby, I felt like we were alone in our own bubble, the sound muffled except here with his voice so close. I turned my head, catching the dark swirl of his irises with my own and seeing the stars hidden beneath. The air left my lungs in a shallow rise and fall, heat pooling in my center as the darkness of his gaze seemed to strip me down and leave me exposed, “It was just…alcohol and my brain being overactive.” His black brow rose, hands moving lower down my body. I was keenly aware that we were mostly hidden in the corner of the room behind the table, the bar dark and most of the lights focused on the band and the dance floor. It was almost like we were wrapped in shadows and I wondered if Morpheus did something to hide us even more. “That is not a proper answer,” his voice was low and half a growl of admonishment, eyes tracing the length of my neck as I stayed fully pressed back against him, following the scoop of the fabric covering my neck and the fact I definitely hadn’t worn a bra with this dress. Dream’s lips touched my temple and he muttered, “What did that overactive mind of yours show you?” I gulped and felt his fingers on my thigh, slowly pulling the long fabric of my skirt up and up my legs, “I don’t want you to be mad.” He paused and pulled back a little to more fully see my face, “And why would I be angry with you?” My eyes instinctively flickered over to where Hob and Anissa were dancing, my friend cackling as the immortal swung her around and spun her on the dance floor. His movements were easy and fluid, practiced, while she flailed around trying to keep up but obviously having fun.

Morpheus followed my gaze and I could almost see him connect the dots as I whispered, “He’s a flirt and I had wondered if you and he…then I thought of you and me as well…” His voice was rough and deep, eyes locked on watching his friend and mine dancing as he commented darkly, “The three of us…” I swallowed and broke from looking, staring down at the table and watched the water slide down the outside of my glass. “I’m drunk and it’s dumb and it was a passing thought. It’s not anything. I’m apparently a horny drunk which is interesting,” I rambled and chuckled anxiously, my words all running together as I tried to move on from what I’d admitted and force my brain to make any sort of sense. Two shots and almost four drinks were not helping, “Like I said, my mind is overactive and should be ignored.” But he was still fixated, not looking at me, “You were afraid I would be angry.” It wasn’t a question, a flat statement as his hands stayed paused on my thighs. I wanted to groan and sink down under the table as I worried I’d ruined the peace everyone had managed to reach after the rough beginning. I shouldn’t have drank, didn’t usually and my tolerance was low and apparently made me run my mouth and do stupid things. Afterall, drinking is what had led me to destroy Thomas’ dream which then caught Morpheus’ attention. I was chewing my lip raw, nerves pushing through the alcohol as I wasn’t sure what the expression on his face was exactly, “You said you don’t share. And after last time…I thought you’d be angry at him or me or both…” Last time when Cameron had only flirted with me and Dream had terrified him enough that the man didn’t go near me and quit his job. When the mere idea of someone being interested had sent him into a jealous tantrum. Morpheus finally turned and looked down at me, straightening us both enough that he could fully see my face. One hand left my hip and went to cup my cheek, raising my face to meet his and gently moving a piece of hair behind my ear, “That was a different situation and I promised I would not be so quick to anger. But is this… scenario you imagined…something you wish for? Truly?” My heart was beating so loudly it drowned out the jazz music that was playing and all I could see was the blue of his eyes and feel the fast thrumming of nerves. I considered his words. I’d never really fantasized before, hadn’t considered my sex life in general before Morpheus came around. Sex hadn’t been something I craved, simply a way to please whatever partner I was with. Mind you, none of my previous partners were all that good at sex and there was a level of trauma attached to the act after my first abusive boyfriend but sex was decent enough and I got use to it. Now possibilities had opened up, I had a healthy and very active sex life, and I wasn’t sure, was almost scared to look beyond what was considered normal or vanilla. But the dreamlord was already more than I could have ever expected, more gorgeous and skilled than I thought possible. He was always attentive to my wants and boundaries. And Hob was handsome and attractive, physically and personality wise. What would it be like to be with both of them, to have both their attention on me and even each other? What kind of life did I have that the scenario was even a possibility? Two immortals with a mere plain mortal? But god did the image interest me, leave me pulsing with want and excitement. It was something I hadn’t ever considered but now…now maybe… Dream traced a thumb over my chewed lip and my breath hitched, eyes wide and unblinking as against his dark, curious gaze before I let out the subtlest of nods. It was small and almost imperceptible but I knew he’d caught it. He leaned in and pressed his forehead to mine, hand moving from my cheek to entwine with my long hair at the base of my neck as he asked softly, “Why him?” My voice was shaky, stuttering as I gripped the wrist of the hand in my hair, wanting to keep him close to me, “Because you trust him so I trust him. Because he cares for you.” And I’d do anything as long as Dream was involved. His skin was so hot against mine and I could feel the muscles in his arms, the humming of his power surrounding me and answering back in the small necklace and earrings hanging from me, “Perhaps… when you are of clear mind and sober …that is something we can…discuss further about making happen. When you are ready, of course.” Not a no. Most certainly interested. I nodded against him slowly, his breath mingling with mine at the proximity, unable to form words and process that not only was he not mad but potentially willing for that scenario. And as much as I wanted to say yes and let’s talk about it now and make it happen, I respected that he wanted me to sit on it a bit and not rush into something I may not be prepared for. The idea was exciting but the reality was harder to swallow. Pulling me in, he laid the barest kiss against my lips and I could feel the raw need he was holding back, the hunger he was keeping carefully tucked away. I sighed, simultaneously tight with my own lust and incredibly relieved that this hadn’t turned into a complete disaster. And that maybe I wasn’t the only one turned on by the idea. But before I could deepen the kiss he pulled back, leaving me to chase him eagerly, and laid a softer kiss to my hair. His arms were back around my waist, tucking me into him as our friends returned panting and out of breath with wide smiles. Neither of them seemed to guess that anything was off or even hinted that they knew what we were discussing, but I could feel Dream’s desire in the slight hardness against my back. He was done with being in public and wanted to go home to other things and honestly I couldn’t argue with that. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t being rude even if it was my birthday and I could feel exactly how excited he was. Unfortunately for both of us, Anissa proceeded to pull me into a dance, claiming I had gotten time with both men and it was her turn. I could feel Dream’s annoyance in his scowl and the way he watched her drag me away from him, but I could only smile as she began to swing me around. We were both pretty sauced and neither of us knew how to really dance to the music that was playing, but I laughed as we basically swayed and spun each other. Nissa smiled and hugged me as we moved back and forth in some attempt at dancing, “Happy birthday, Dahl. Sorry it started off a little rough, but I’ll say your guy isn’t so bad. Has a dumb name, but not bad.” My guy. I smiled back, feeling strangely choked up at her approval, and laughed a bit, “Thank you for looking out for me and trying.” She laughed and sent me into another spin, “I want you to be happy, that’s all. You’re a good person, Dahlia. You deserve it.” I could only nod, hearing her words and not knowing quite what to say. So I said nothing and hugged her, both of us fake dancing through the rest of the song. For what it was, even with all the anxiety and bickering, it had been a good birthday. Morpheus had made the effort to spend the evening with me in the Waking world. A weight felt like it was lifted off my shoulder now that Anissa, the only person I was close with, had met him. Plus I had gained a friend with a similar experience through Hob. Not bad at all. Hob took care of the tab while we danced and luckily, everyone seemed to be in agreement that it was a good time to head out. Anissa downed the remainder of her drink, claiming she didn’t want good alcohol to go to waste, and Morpheus helped me into my coat as we walked out. I had been right and it was much colder now, the air stinging my nose a bit as it held a slight bite. The tipsy haze had cleared up a little bit, my words coming out a little stronger, but the alcohol was still very heavily in my system and warmed me however it could. “Are you sure you can get home on your own?” Hob asked my friend, who was ever so slightly swaying while standing straight. I met his eyes and shook my head, not knowing if she had walked or driven to the bar. Either way, I wasn’t sure she should be left to go off alone and as I went to open my mouth, the immortal shrugged, “I’ll make sure she gets to her place. Last thing we need is someone trying to make a move on you.” “I’m fine, it’s not even very far,” Anissa rolled her eyes but seemed to be tilting to the side as if we were still swinging and dancing. “Mmmhmm,” he hummed skeptically, “Either way, it’ll make everyone feel better.” “Just let him, Nissa, it’ll be better than arguing,” I shot before she could let out a retort. Huffing, she relented and he grinned while offering an arm to her, “Get back safe, you two! And happy birthday again, darling!” I smiled and waved, watching them walk off down the street and trusting that he would actually get her home in one piece. Sighing, I turned and found Morpheus staring at me, the stars more pronounced in his eyes, “What?” He only smiled softly and held out a hand, long fingers so pale in the darkness of the night, “Come.” Staring at him suspiciously, I took his hand and intertwined our fingers, him tugging me not down the street but around the corner to the dark opening of an alley. My suspicion grew as I looked around, brow furrowed. “Uh, are we about to have sex in the alley cause I have to say, it’s a little too cold for that,” I commented dryly, looking at the black abyss that encompassed the small space. If I didn’t know and trust him, I would assume I was in the beginning of a true crime podcast episode. He frowned and shook his head, “That is not an idea I wish to cross off your list, unfortunately.” We stopped at the opening, not that far in but far enough that we weren’t easily noticed even if you were walking past. His eyes seemed to reflect in the darkness like a cat and it was almost as if we were back in the Dreaming, the irises so dark they seemed black and the reflection sparkling like twin stars. Morpheus continued to hold my hand and pulled me closer to him, trying to keep me warm with his body heat, “Do you wish to go to the Dreaming?” My brain, alcohol-laden and tired, stuttered and tried to comprehend what he was asking, “Um, yes though I’m confused. I thought I’d already been going to the Dreaming? Didn’t really know there was a choice since I have to sleep unless you’re implying not sleeping at all, which I may be down for?” He shook his head, half a sigh and half a chuckle leaving him, “You misunderstand. When you sleep, you are simply visiting the Dreaming but your physical body stays here. You are there but also not. I am asking if you would like to go in your entirety. Physically, go to the Dreaming with me.” “I…didn’t know I could physically go there,” I mumbled. “Of course you can. The Dreaming is as whole and solid as the world you are standing in now,” Dream reached a hand out and dragged its knuckles along the edge of my chin, “The residents have a purpose but they live there the same as you live here. Living beings simply are able to visit areas in their sleep but unlike you, they never remember upon waking.” He wanted me to come to the Dreaming. No time limit, no wondering when my body would wake up and force me to leave. I could actually go there and be there with him. I’d always had a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of the Dreaming but the way he described it made a bit more sense. It was just another world that we were allowed to briefly visit. He was asking me to be there in all ways. “Yes,” I met his gaze in the low light, the words rushed and eager and excited, “Yeah, I want to go.” His smile, the one he showed so rarely, lit up and my heart sped up at the sight, “Good. I can take us there now.” “I don’t have to bring anything?” my words were a jumble, nerves surfacing now that I had accepted. He knew I took a few extra days off from work, if only so I could laze around at home, but I didn’t know if that was something he ever even considered because why would he? He didn’t have to pay bills. “You will have everything you need there and I will bring you back when you wish,” he stepped closer, bringing my head up to look at him. Only a couple inches more and I would be able to reach his mouth, pull it against mine finally and kiss him fully and deeply. I only nodded though, entranced by his gaze and what almost seemed like his own excitement there. His hand went to his waist and to the small pouch of sand he always kept on his belt. It had to be some form of magic that hid it. When I would be held to him, I never felt it on him even though it was hard to miss. Holding me close, he whispered while taking a handful of grains out, “I should warn you, Lucienne may have discovered what day it is and was planning on having the kitchen staff make you something.” While I wanted to groan at more birthday celebrations, connecting it to Matthew’s quick visit and hasty retreat, it was heartwarming that even those in the Dreaming wanted to try and help me celebrate a bit. But at the same time, “So we should probably go straight to your quarters first then?” And as the sand swirled around our feet and all around us, his devious smile sent a shiver down my spine with a delicious promise of what was to come.

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