#General Robert Smalls

[itsmythang]

Robert Smalls, (born April 5, 1839, Beaufort, South Carolina, U.S.—died February 23, 1915, Beaufort), American war hero and politician who, during the American Civil War, commandeered a Confederate ship to escape from the South and later became the first Black captain of a vessel in U.S. service. He served multiple terms (1875–79, 1882–83, and 1884–87) as a congressman from South Carolina during Reconstruction.

Smalls’s mother was enslaved, and his father was an unknown white man. In 1851 Smalls was taken by his enslaver to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was hired out to work as a hotel waiter, hack driver, and rigger. In 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, he was forced to work aboard the steamship CSS Planter, which operated as an armed transport and dispatch vessel, carrying guns and ammunition for the Confederate army.

On May 13, 1862, Smalls and other enslaved people on board took control of the ship in Charleston Harbor; he picked up his wife and children and others, succeeded in passing through Confederate checkpoints, and turned the ship, its cargo of weapons, and several important documents over to a Union naval squadron blockading the city. Smalls and the others on the Planter gained their freedom, and Smalls became famous as a war hero throughout the North.

In 1863, when he was piloting the ironclad USS Keokuk during the Union’s bombardment of Fort Sumter, the vessel took many hits and was eventually sunk. Smalls’s bravery was rewarded with command of the USS Planter later that year, making him the first African American captain in the U.S. Navy. He fought in numerous battles during the remainder of the Civil War. In addition, after he was removed from a streetcar in 1864 in Philadelphia because he was Black, Smalls led a boycott that led to the desegregation of the city’s transit system.

After the war, Smalls became a businessman, and he rose rapidly in politics. From 1868 to 1870 he served in the South Carolina House of Representatives and from 1870 to 1874 in the state Senate. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served from 1875 to 1879, from 1882 to 1883, and from 1884 to 1887; among his notable actions in the House were his efforts to integrate U.S. Army regiments and his support of a bill that would have required equal accommodations for Black and white people on interstate conveyances. In 1877 Smalls was convicted of having taken a $5,000 bribe while in the state Senate, and he was sentenced to three years in prison, but the case against him was clearly politically motivated. He was pardoned by South Carolina’s governor in 1879.

Smalls spent his last years in Beaufort, where he served as port collector (1889–93 and 1897–1913). In 1895 he delivered an impassioned speech before the South Carolina constitutional convention in an attempt to prevent the disfranchisement of Black voters.

In 1997 the University of South Carolina founded an annual lecture series named for Smalls. The USAV Major General Robert Smalls was commissioned in 2007; according to the U.S. Army, it is the first Army ship named for an African American.

#Black History #General Robert Smalls

[cassius-the-kitten]

General Headcanons (DDADDS x Reader)

warnings: just a lot of x reader fluff, also swearing in some sections, also some alcohol mentions

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Pairings: Brian Harding x Reader, Hugo Vega x Reader, Robert Small x Reader, Mat Sella x Reader

Brian Harding

Brian loves to cook, even if he’s better at grilling. he will cook you bacon, eggs, sausage, and pancakes every morning. it’s honestly a miracle that nothing ends up burnt, because he does it all at once like some sort of multitasking magician.

he may be a general contractor, but he’s got Very clumsy hands. nothing in his house is glass or ceramic because he WILL drop it. it’s all plastic cups from here on out.

thankfully he is very, very careful and extra mindful when he cooks. to the point where you shouldn’t have a conversation with him during his cooking because he will have a hard time keeping up with you due to the 5 million other things he is doing.

his dadbook profile isn’t wrong. he thinks a lot about how much smarter Daisy is than him.

but in Daisy’s defense, Brian is a himbo, through and through.

he cannot get any social cues ever and is absolutely clueless when someone obviously has a crush on him. he’s the type of guy to think you’re just being nice to him when you’re flirting.

he genuinely just likes having friendly competition, he has no clue why the dadsona seems to hate him and is getting so frustrated with losing.

and Brian’s autistic, which actually makes a lot of sense because of him missing every social cue ever.

over half of his wardrobe is button-up shirts and cargo shorts of various colors. he actually wearing socks and sandals… and even crocs. thankfully he sometimes has the decency to wear normal sneakers or even boots outside.

if you get him a button-up shirt, he will love you forever. he basically collects them.

believe it or not, but Brian was born in Florida. his parents just decided to move up to Massachusetts when he was little. his parents have since then moved back down to Florida for retirement. he and Daisy visit them sometimes for the winter holidays. one time they made the mistake of visiting during summer, and have never visited Florida in summertime since then due to the heat.

he is a very warm man. not just when he’s sleeping. he is a furnace. if you hug him for long enough, you will be sweaty by the time you come out of it.

his love language is physical affection. he just loves to pick up people and hug them and cuddle them whenever it’s socially acceptable to do so.

he’s like a dog sometimes. if you have a job and you get home after he does, he will be ECSTATIC and like Maxwell, will immediately come up to the door to greet you with kisses and hugs.

and like a grizzly bear, he’s pretty fond of fish. Brian just prefers whitefish like cod or haddock to salmon, but he’ll eat pretty much anything you put in front of him.

unless it’s spicy. Brian cannot handle any spice hotter than black pepper. on good days he can eat some semi-spicy chicken wings and enjoy himself, but only if he has a lot of water and coleslaw on hand to eat with it.

Brian actually likes piña coladas. it’s his favorite alcoholic drink besides beer, and it’s usually his second choice if he’s got a sweet tooth that day. but he doesn’t drink that often, actually.

honestly, he’s probably gone to Margaritaville with Joseph at one point. Joseph kinda meant it as a date but Brian had no clue and was so oblivious that Joseph thought that it was on-purpose in a passive-aggressive manner.

Hugo Vega

Hugo is autistic and his special interests are wrestling and literature. Ernest is also autistic. i will die on this hill

sometimes he writes a bit of poetry in his spare time, though he’s quite insecure about it so he has never shown it to anyone. a lot of them have allusions to other pieces of literature or wrestling.

the poetry writing is funny because i imagine that when he was first put into a poetry course in highschool he probably Hated it because he just couldn’t pick up much on the metaphors and the tone of the piece (just like me fr). but later in his life Hugo definitely gained an appreciation for poetry and started to write a bit of it after the divorce just to deal with his feelings.

he’s always willing to give constructive criticism. to anyone. sometimes he comes off as judgemental when he does that and he doesn’t realize it

Hugo speaks Spanish fluently, and knows a little bit of French. he actually grew up speaking Spanish and English in a bilingual household because his parents immigrated from Mexico.

he also celebrates Día de los Muertos and has since he was a child. it is his favorite holiday due to the symbolism, even if he ends up just celebrating it from home with Ernest. it’s actually one of the few things they still bond over — just decorating, making food, and Hugo going over some family history with Ernest.

this man works hard to keep his house as clean as possible. and he works hard to try and get Ernest to clean his room, which works maybe half the time. sometimes Hugo caves in and can’t help but to go in there and clean it himself if it gets bad and Ernest is out. he makes sure to try and put everything back where he found it, unless it was on the floor. then he puts it on Ernest’s bed.

Hugo isn’t much of a movie or TV show type of guy, unless they are an adaptation of a book. then he reads the book and then watches the movie\TV show. then he writes a review of it to get his thoughts and feelings out, and he Will send it to you if he trusts you enough. but only if you’ve watched it. Hugo believes heavily in the sanctity of not giving out unwanted spoilers.

he’s got a guilty pleasure of watching bad horror movies. this is canon. go replay Hugo’s second date and you will find this piece of dialogue which i hold near to my heart.

he can’t really handle good horror movies. horror movies that are good at scaring people, anyway.

he could probably crush a watermelon between his thighs. or his arms. if you ask him if he could crush a watermelon, he would be Very confused because he doesn’t know the trend(? was it a trend or did i imagine that???)

“…what? Why would I want to crush a watermelon between my thighs? I don’t like watermelon. Neither does Ernest. Honestly, I don’t know the last time he’s ever willingly eaten a vegetable or fruit.”

but then he’d be very surprised if you showed him videos of people doing it. he’d just stare with interest, impressed by the muscles.

if you manage to do it, he’ll actually start blushing so hard that he has to try and hide his face.

speaking of, he actually does try to hide his face a lot when he realizes he’s blushing. it’s very cute because he also can’t hold back a very embarrassed smile when he does so.

Mat Sella

Mat’s kind of a punk, alternative, and rock music guy, but he also really likes R&B, indie, and even some of those catchy pop songs.

his handwriting is very, very neat and pretty. he writes in cursive a lot, but only because he thinks it’s pretty and he’s just used to writing in it a lot.

he takes very, very good care of his hair. he also is the one mainly taking care of Carmensita’s hair, since she has a general disregard for taking the leaves and twigs out of it after she plays outside. so Mat is the one doing hair clean-up duty all the time.

he also cleans Carmensita’s glasses after she comes inside after playing. because she refuses to clean her glasses.

thankfully, Mat is good at cleaning and likes to clean. obviously he bakes almost every other day for both the Coffee Spoon and himself. music is playing on the record player while he’s baking or cleaning, unless he’s doing some late-night cleaning when Carmensita is asleep; that’s one of the few times he wears headphones in the house

he takes headphones with him everywhere he goes, though. he has a little bowl next to the front door with his keys and headphones in it so he doesn’t forget them

he loves coffee, to say the least. he brews a cup every morning, it’s almost like a ritual to him at this point. he just enjoys the process and relishes in it every day. it’s almost like it’s own type of therapy for him.

if it turns out that you don’t like coffee, however — he will act like a normal person and say “oh, okay” and just not make you drink coffee. he’s a little disappointed that he won’t be able to share his morning coffee time with both of you having a cup.

but if you at all try to join him on his coffee time with your own drink, just sitting in the morning and soaking up the sunlight and happy silence, he’ll be over the moon sharing that time.

we all know that he has the tendency to talk too much when he’s anxious, so moments like these where you’re just sitting together, mostly silent, is his favorite.

Mat just isn’t much of a talker when he’s super comfortable. so cuddling will be pretty quiet, too.

Mat grew up with cats, and absolutely adores them to the point where he is so tempted to turn the Coffee Spoon into a cat cafe. the only reason he hasn’t adopted any cats is because each time he is confronted with the idea he is incapable of making any decision and gets anxious.

but if you like cats, you’re totally getting a cat together. especially if you give him any kind of confidence when you’re around, like Rosa used to.

Mat isn’t an alcohol kind of guy. not since Carmensita was born, anyway. he also just doesn’t really like the taste of beer and other alcoholic drinks. he prefers the bitter coffee taste (couldn’t be me).

Mat does drink tea sometimes, but not often. maybe once a month he treats himself to a cup of tea.

Rosa actually really liked tea, so part of the reason Mat doesn’t drink it that often is because it reminds him of Rosa.

Robert Small

the man is Big. 6’3” and pretty chunky, so yeah. he’s pretty intimidating, and not just because of his RBF (resting bitch face).

speaking of RBF, he looks constantly mildly ticked off when in reality he is thinking about what he’s having for dinner. sure, he has plenty of other expressions, but they’re not quite as common as his “looks like he’s thinking of committing multiple crimes” look.

this man wakes up with some serious bedhead — hair sticking up in all sorts of directions, not because of the way he sleeps but because of Betsy. sometimes she gets up and sleeps right next to his head. and sometimes she gives Robert’s hair a bit of a nibble.

he really gives the whole “raccoon at the dumpster” type of look.

sometimes he volunteers at the animal shelter but only really late in the day when nobody except Mary is there. he usually brings a flask of whiskey with him to share with her, but Mary isn’t super keen on drinking around the animals.

he’s more like a cat than he is a dog. he likes to just sit in the general vicinity those he likes without saying anything while they talk for hours on end and he gives acknowledging feedback. usually just a blink and a nod.

but sometimes, very rarely, if he loves likes you enough, he’ll smile as he stares right at you, saying nothing.

if you end up dating him and move in with him, you could be doing literally anything and then turn around to find him staring at you with a smile that he tries to hide. sometimes he can’t believe that he’s in a healthy relationship after all the heartache he’s suffered.

but it’s also unnerving when you do something kinda embarrassing, like struggling to find a midnight snack, and then you just turn around and this big old man is just staring at you like my a cat waiting for you to go back to your bedroom.

remember how i said he’s more cat than dog? scratch that. if you have a job or god forbid, leave home without him, he will wait for you to come home. he will check the front door any time he hears even a little noise, very excited to see you, until he realizes you’re not home yet.

he counts down the hours and minutes until you get home from work. if it was socially acceptable for him to drive you to work and sit in your work’s parking lot the entire time and spend it waiting for you, he would do it.

if he can go with you somewhere, he will. even if it’s a 5 minute trip to the grocery store and it will take him longer to get dressed than to go with you, you better wait because he is coming with.

the second you come through that door? he is getting up off the couch that he moved to purely so he would be closer to the door and he, like Betsy, is coming directly towards you to ask you how your day was and if you brought anything back for him.

if you critique any of his whiskey then he will break out into a very passionate rant about the best kind of whiskey is the kind that makes you almost die a little bit on the inside when you take a shot.

idk why, but i feel like if he and Saul Goodman met, they’d be best friends. they’d pull off the best grifts together.

also Robert fucking loves Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. he just rewatches it over and over again as a comfort show even though it doesn’t provide any comfort whatsoever. his faves are Saul and Nacho

he will force you to watch Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. or at the very least, he explain the plotline.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is the Only reason that he has a Netflix subscription. there is no other reason he’d ever need one.

also Robert fucking hates Margaritaville. Joseph took him there once — Robert got sick from the Cheeseburger in Paradise, and now Robert vows to never step foot in one of those damn restaurants ever again.

Robert doesn’t like margaritas, so maybe it was doomed from the start.

#ddadds #dream daddy a dad dating simulator #dream daddy #hugo vega #robert small #mat sella #brain harding #headcanons #x reader #general headcanons #game grumps #ddadds headcanons #ddadds imagines #dream daddy headcanons #dream daddy imagines

[zombified-queer]

Being an SCP fan for the Sarkicism canons is just this image.

#sarkicism #alternate captions include but are not limited to: #when that one scientist starts huffing dmt in the middle of your small massachusettes coastal town #when the scientist does shrooms from the cave and proceeds to understand the nature of reality before his liver shuts down #when chief foreman robert bumaro shows up (just like in general)

[random-meme-bot]

Dawings of the "Hexes on the Shelves" trio based on this "Draw the squad" bases by @snuffysbox

#Hexes on the Shelves #HotS #elly #elly HotS #Elizabeth Roberts #Dan #Dan HotS #Trucy #Trucy Hots #The Trucy & Elly one is my favorite of the two It was really fun to do #Also decided to give Elly another set of clothes for variety shake #I was originally goin to give her broken jeans but I was unable to find any reference images of a pair that actually looked good #Also had a lot of fun coming up with a way to implement Elly's purple into the T-shirt #Yes is a flaming Max from Sam & Max #Artist tip never let anybody tell you what your OCs can't wear #Also Trucy's hair has parts drawn in 2 diferent layers wich did create a bit of a problem when it came to adding the transparency #I have less things to say about the first one #Dan's hat took me a while to get right but it was worth it #even if it looks kinda small... #Dan in general I think I might have made him too small #The cup Elly is drinking from is bue because a blue cup is the logo of adventure game studio #Where I first started to work with this characters #Also she's drinking coffee #It's bascally a head cannon of mine that Elly drinks a lot of coffee due to her staying way after dark on ghost hunting #Even if I don't think I have any scenarios in the story that woud show her drinking coffee #Oc #Ocs #Original characters #original character #Digital art

[marrissacooper]

#the oc #i kinda want to know what the general opinion is outside of my small circle of marissa stans #probably seth but i've seen a lot of people say he aged badly as a character so #marissa cooper #seth cohen #ryan atwood #summer roberts #polls #tumblr polls

[werewolf-t-party]

tried to fish out some shrapnel and ended up just jabbing my thumb into an old wound

#better to be generally right than exactly wrong #robert small irl

[bradshawssugarbaby]

Hurricane - Bradley Bradshaw x Reader

summary: Bradley's regretted breaking off his relationship with you for months, but when he sees you walking into the country club after his round of golf, he knows he has to fix things.

a/n: I haven't written much angst before but I'm really trying to branch out a little bit. Inspired by Hurricane by Luke Combs, and also this weird recurring dream I keep having.

pairing: Bradley Bradshaw x reader

warnings/content: buckle up bc there's a lot? angst (happy ending), parental death, depression, hurt, cancer, goose's accident + carole's reaction, carole literally never getting over losing goose, bradley being a commitmentphobe, pregnancy (i think that's it?), also entirely unrealistic bc you know what? I can't keep roo sad for long.

word count: 3.6k

taglist: @avengersfan25, @nouis-bum, @floydsmuse, @mamachasesmayhem, @jessicab1991, @atarmychick007, @b-bradshaw, @djs8891

Then you rolled in with your hair in the wind Baby, without warning I was doin' alright but just your sight Had my heart stormin'

Bradley narrowed his eyes beneath his sunglasses, the glare of the hot mid-morning sun harsh on his chocolate brown eyes. He grabbed his nine-iron from his golf bag, taking a practice swing before teeing up for his next shot. Bob, Jake, Reuben and Javy stood to the side behind him, watching as he lined up to take his shot. He hadn’t golfed in years, in fact, he’d only ever golfed a handful of times in his life, all of them back when he lived in Virginia. His uncle had taught him when he was 15, a welcome distraction when his mom became sick, and he’d gone out a few times when he was in college after a roommate of his on the school’s golf team had invited him out. He held his breath as he heard the club make contact with the small, white orb, watching as it soared through the air, disappearing somewhere onto the course. Jake let out an impressive whistle as he looked on, placing his hands on his hips as he shook his head in disbelief.

“You’ve never golfed before, Bradshaw? You sure?” He drawled, raising one of his manicured (though he’d deny it if asked) blonde eyebrows suspiciously.

“I told you, a handful of times. Not never.”

“You did say less than five,” Bob shrugged as he cleaned his glasses before replacing them on his nose. “Less than five suggests you haven’t really hit a course.”

“Not to mention you said in years. That was the swing of a man who’s at least hit a driving range a few times,” Reuben pointed out to the course in the general direction of where Bradley’s ball had landed as Javy, Bob and Jake nodded in agreement. 

“I wish Nat had tagged along, she wouldn’t ride my ass this hard,” Bradley huffed, shaking his head. 

“Nat doesn’t golf. You know that. She acted disgusted that I even asked,” Jake shrugged.

“Maybe it was how you asked,” Bob suggested as he disguised his jab at Jake as a helpful criticism.

 “Just take your turn, Robert,” Jake hissed, rolling his eyes dramatically as Bob smirked.

Bradley normally would have joined in with a quip of his own directed at Jake, but his heart just wasn’t in it. His heart wasn’t even in the game. The only reason why he’d agreed to go golfing with the guys for their usual monthly game was because you left him. He needed to get over you and move on - it’d been six months and with no deployments coming up, he had nothing to focus 100% of his attention onto. Reuben had noticed it first - Bradley was withdrawn on nights out, his usually chatterbox self now quiet, calm and keeping to himself, barely breaking eye contact with his beer bottle. Then came Natasha’s barrage of questions - he knew she meant well, but God, it was hard to listen to. 

He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he knew why you left. And it was entirely his fault. You’d gotten upset because he’d stopped spending as much time with you, kept getting cold feet about committing to your relationship. He’d never tell you why he couldn’t commit - it was too hard for him to explain to anyone, really. In fact, he was fairly confident that Reuben was the only other person aware of it. 

Bradley wanted to be the partner you needed - he really did. He wanted to be the doting, affectionate boyfriend who’d whisk you off somewhere beautiful, propose to you, start a family with 2.2 kids and a dog, cart the kids around to sports practices on weekends - the American dream. He knew you deserved that much. And yet, no matter how badly he wanted to give that to you - he couldn’t. He’d told you he didn’t want it - he didn’t want to get married, he didn’t want to have kids, he never wanted it. He watched you fall apart the minute the words left his mouth, and it killed him inside. He wanted to hold you close and tell you he was making a mistake, tell you it wasn’t true and he didn’t mean it, but he couldn’t. 

He couldn’t, because he was terrified. 

Growing up without his dad was one of the hardest things he could have experienced, he was sure of it. He was too young to truly remember how his mom reacted when she learned her husband had been killed in a training exercise, but he remembered her crying a lot, feeling paralyzed by loss and guilt, angry with the world for taking the man she loved away from her. He remembered as he grew up, she never remarried, never went on a date, never even as much as looked at another man. His dad was her everything, and losing him crushed her. 

When she got sick, Bradley was a teenager - old enough to understand what it meant for her, what her odds of recovery were, and old enough to be realistic about the future. When they found out she wasn’t going to get better, he’d half expected her to react the way she did when his dad died, but instead, she seemed almost at peace with the idea. She’d spent 14 years of her life missing his dad, and she knew that, even though she was horrified by the thought of leaving Bradley on his own, she wouldn’t have to spend another minute missing her husband.

Bradley decided then that he’d never want to put someone through that. He’d never be able to hurt someone he loved like this - leave them widowed before they turned 30, alone with a toddler at home to raise on the opposite side of the country from their family and friends, with nothing but a military pension and an apology over his death. 

It was at 16 years old that Bradley decided, if he wanted to become a pilot, he was going to have to spend life alone, and for the most part, he was ok with that. 

That was, until he met you.

He tried to deny his feelings, pretending you were just a casual fling, some fun sex here and there between deployments and missions and nothing more. That was, until three months in, he accidentally told you he loved you. It wasn’t a lie, he did love you, but it caught him off guard when he said it - he didn’t mean to blow his cover and let his guard down like that. And when you said it back? He knew it was game over. 

He tried his hardest to push his fears aside, he tried SO hard. He was getting older and beginning to realize he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life alone, especially as he neared the mandatory 20 years of service cutoff for aviators. He’d grown almost fond of the idea of settling down with you, seeing you with a ring on your finger, picturing you with a baby in you, his baby. He wanted it. He wanted all of it. But, the fears and anxiety he had reared its ugly head, and he couldn’t bring himself to get past it. 

It was on their last mission, when he had to eject and landed in the middle of a snowy mountain, unsure if he’d make it back home to you. His mind raced with thoughts of how you’d react if he didn’t make it home - how you’d crumple to the floor when you saw the two uniformed officers on your doorstep, the blood-curdling scream you’d let out in pain when you heard them say it, tears staining your pretty little face as you were handed that folded American flag - he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t stand the idea of putting you through everything his mom had gone through. Not when you were so young and had everything ahead of you. When you could find a man who wasn’t putting his life in danger nearly every damn day, risking himself and risking a chance he might not come home to you. 

This golf trip was meant to take his mind off you. Reuben had mentioned it in passing to Jake and Bob, who exchanged worried looks with one another. Javy had overheard Nat’s line of questioning when he and Mickey returned to the table with a fresh round of beers, both of them offering Bradley silent looks of sympathy as they nodded in agreement to Nat’s advice. Bradley was struggling, in over his head with emotions and regret and sadness, but he knew he’d fucked it all up. And he knew that even if he tried, you wouldn’t want him back, and who could blame you? 

Bob had suggested he reach out to you and apologize, and for a while, Bradley considered it. He strongly considered calling you, going to your house, begging for forgiveness and begging you to take him back, but after how you reacted when he broke things off with you, he wouldn’t even take him back. He’d been a dick in every sense of the word, and now, he had to try and move on, adjusting to life without you in it. 

The next nine holes passed by with little conversation from Bradley and worried glances exchanged between his friends. He wasn’t in the mood for talking, he’d explain, shrugging the concern off before focusing back on the game. Bradley was thankful for his friends’ efforts, but it was beginning to feel like nothing would help him move on. 

He slumped down into a chair at a table in the country club after their round of golf, sipping back the beer Jake bought him. He caught himself downing the liquid quicker than he should have, but at this point, being drunk would at least provide him with that much needed numbness he craved. He could hear Bob bickering with Jake over golf scores and who truly won, prompting an eye roll from Javy as he pulled the crumpled scoresheets from his pocket and placed them on the table. Reuben noticed the glazed over look in Bradley’s eye and clapped a sympathetic hand down on his shoulder. 

Bradley was about to thank Reuben for being there for him when he saw your face. You were walking into the country club with a couple of your friends, laughing and smiling as you spoke. 

God, he loved that smile. 

He gulped back the rest of his drink before placing the glass back down on the table, the sound of Bradley slamming the glass down a little harder than he intended prompting Jake to spin his head around as he saw you.

“Oh..shit,” he murmured as Bob and Javy both turned to look discreetly towards you.

Bradley’s eyes widened as you walked past the bar, revealing a very unexpected new figure. He blinked his eyes a few times to ensure they weren’t playing tricks on him - positive that this had to be some kind of optical illusion or something. It was impossible. You couldn’t be.

“Pregnant.” Jake whispered as he leaned into the table, “She’s pregnant,”

“Did you know, Bradley?” Bob inquired as he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“N-no.” Bradley choked out, feeling the walls closing in around him as the room started to spin.

Without hesitation, Bradley rose from his seat and made his way over to you, despite the protests from Bob and Reuben, the two voices of reason to Javy and Jake’s voices of impulse. Bradley approached you cautiously, clearing his throat for a moment to garner your attention. You spun your head around, your cheeks rosy and your skin glowing with that pregnancy glow everyone always talked about. Bradley had never really believed in that kind of stuff, but you were proving him wrong. 

“Bradley?” you asked, your face paleing to a shade of ghostly white. 

“Can…can we talk, please? I need to talk to you,” Bradley rambled with desperation written on his face.

You huffed a sigh, nodding your head slowly as you excused yourself from your friends, who were now whispering and exchanging uncomfortable glances with one another. Bradley followed closely behind you as you stepped out into the fresh air, finding a discreet corner of the parking lot to discuss everything from the last six months. 

“I…Is it mine?” Bradley whispered, almost afraid to hear the answer as his eyes wandered to the bump that was evident under your sundress.

You sighed again, following Bradley’s gaze down to your abdomen, a protective hand resting on your bump as you nodded slowly, humming in confirmation.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He frowned, shaking his head quickly, “I-I, I would have helped you.”

“Bradley,” you said, narrowing your eyes and shaking your head quickly, “You told me you didn’t want this. You dumped me and told me you never wanted to settle down or have a family, you didn’t want to be with me anymore, and being in a long-term relationship wasn’t what you ever wanted. You told me you didn’t love me. So please, tell me why I should have told you?”

“Because,” he said softly, his heart aching as he heard your side of things, “I didn’t mean any of that. I was wrong.”

“Oh, you were wrong? Tell me, were you always wrong, or are you only wrong now that you’ve seen me six months later, heavily pregnant?” 

Bradley was speechless. He gazed down at his feet, kicking at the pavement in his golf cleats. He sighed as he thought for a moment, taking a second of quiet reflection to compose his thoughts before speaking. He wanted to get this right. He couldn’t afford to fuck it up again.

“I was always wrong. I was wrong when I said it, and I knew I was wrong,” he shook his head vigorously before looking up to meet your gaze, “Did I ever tell you about my mom?”

“You told me she died when you were a teenager, and you didn’t really mention anything else about her. Or anyone in your family, for that matter.”

“Right,” he nodded his head slowly, taking a deep breath before beginning to explain. “My dad died when I was 2. He was an RIO, a Radar Intercept Officer. You know Maverick, right?”

“Mhmm,” you nodded slowly, a look of annoyance flashing across your face as you listened to Bradley, you were used to his excuses, and you were really hoping this wasn’t another one. 

“So, Maverick was my dad’s pilot. Best friends. Did everything together. He was flying when my dad died, their plane lost control, had to eject, my dad hit the canopy. Died instantly.” Bradley paused, taking another deep breath as he felt himself getting choked up, “My mom, she, uh, she was really young. My dad was 25, my mom was 23. He was her high school sweetheart. She was devastated. I was too young to remember a lot, but I remember her hurting, and being sad all the time, unable to function some days because she just missed him so much,” he explained as tears began to roll down his cheeks.

“Bradley, I’m sorry,” you sighed, shaking your head as you sympathetically rubbed his bicep to comfort him.

“I just…when she died, she was…peaceful, I guess, because she knew she wouldn’t have to miss him anymore. She wouldn’t be lonely. She never remarried or dated after him, she couldn’t bring herself to. She’s buried with her wedding ring still on her finger. I couldn’t bring myself to take it off her,” he took another deep breath, exhaling sharply before looking up at you. 

“I couldn’t do that to you,” he finally said, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill over again, “I couldn’t leave you like my mom. Heartbroken and alone your whole life. She never moved on, and I didn’t want that for you if we got married. God, I would have given anything to marry you. I would have taken you to the courthouse and married you on the spot if you would have agreed to it. But, I couldn’t risk breaking your heart. Not like that.”

“Bradley, you’ve always come home in one piece,” you said softly, fingers still stroking his upper arm soothingly.

“But I almost didn’t. I had to eject and all I could think about was you getting that knock at the door and going through what she went through, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do that to you, or…or to a baby.”

You shook your head, processing everything that Bradley had just said as he poured his heart out to you. He’d never opened up like this to you before, but you could tell each and every word was genuine. As much as you hated him for leaving you, you couldn’t deny that you still loved him with all of your heart. 

You missed him. 

You missed waking up to him after the two of you had fallen asleep watching a movie together. You missed the way he yelled at the tv when watching baseball, how passionate he got over football games, how he’d pick the olives out of his nachos like a toddler and put them on your plate. You missed how he couldn’t eat apples unless they were baked in a pie, how he’d scarf down an entire red velvet cake if you didn’t gently stop him, then regret it hours later. You missed the way his big brown eyes would stare at you, a look of pure adoration on his face like a lovesick puppy whenever you spoke to someone else, as if he was hanging on every single word that fell from your lips.

You burst into tears, throwing your arms tightly around Bradley as you shook your head. “God, you’re an idiot, you know that?” you murmured, laughing softly as you hugged him.

“I know, I’m the biggest idiot. I still would marry you if you let me. I wanted to have kids with you, I want to be around for this one,” he nodded, gesturing his hands at your bump. 

“Really?”

“Cross my heart,” Bradley said with an expression of complete seriousness on his face, “I wanna know everything about them. Everything. I wanna know what you’re having, what name you’ve picked out, what your cravings are, how you’ve been feeling, when they move, what does it feel like? I want to know how far along you are, and how they’re doing, if they have my nose or your nose, or if they’re gonna be tall like I am, I want to know what helps you sleep at night when you’re pregnant, and what their favourite song is. I want all of it, honey.”

“Ok, ok, slow down, breathe, Bradley,” you chuckled, shaking your head. “Take a walk with me?”

As you and Bradley walked around the pedestrian pathway on the golf course, smiling as you spoke fondly about the baby, answering all of Bradley’s questions. 

“Well, baby’s a girl, I don’t have a name in mind for her yet, I’ve been craving oranges and Sprite, anything sweet and citrusy. I’ve been ok, better now the morning sickness finally dissipated. It feels like bubbles or something when she kicks, it’s like a fluttering, almost? I’m 28 weeks along, so I have about three months left. She looked like she has your nose on the ultrasound, there’s a 50/50 chance on her height, I sleep pretty much sitting upright because I get bad heartburn otherwise, and I play her music all the time. She likes Elvis and The Beach Boys, just like her dad.” 

Bradley’s smile spread wide across his face, a small laugh of disbelief escaping his mouth as he nodded along with your words.

“That’s great. A girl? Really? You’re gonna have a daughter running around,” he said softly, almost as if he was daydreaming about what the little girl would look like.

“We are going to have a daughter.”

“You’re gonna let me be there? After everything?”

“Bradley, as much as I hated you for what you did and how you ended things - I never truly hated you. I loved you, more than anything. I still do.”

He held you tightly, burying his face into your hair as he kissed the top of your head, murmuring softly against your hair. 

“God, I love you so much, honey. I promise, I’m never going to do something stupid like that again.”

“I know you won’t,” you laughed, shaking your head as he looked down at you, “I know you’d never leave Carly and I again.”

Bradley froze in place for a moment as he stared at you, his voice barely above a whisper as he spoke. 

“What did you call her?”

“Carly. I thought, I don’t know, after you told me about your mom just now, I thought maybe you’d like to name the baby after her? Carole’s nice too, I just figured Carly gives her a name that’s her own too, they share the same root.”

“Carly,” he nodded slowly as he repeated it, “I love it.”

Bradley took your hand in his, his large fingers enveloping your hand as he held it tightly, as if he was terrified of letting go. He made that mistake once before, he wasn’t about to do it again. 

#bradley bradshaw #bradley rooster bradshaw #bradley bradshaw fic #rooster bradshaw #rooster bradshaw fic #bradley rooster bradshaw fic #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster x reader #rooster fic #rooster #rooster top gun #rooster top gun x reader #rooster top gun fic #top gun maverick fic #bradley bradshaw fanfiction #bradley bradshaw imagine #bradley rooster bradshaw imagine #bradley rooster bradshaw fanfiction #rooster fanfic #rooster fanfiction #rooster x you #bradley bradshaw x you #rooster bradshaw x you #bradley rooster bradshaw x you #bradley bradshaw x y/n #rooster x y/n #rooster bradshaw x y/n #bradley rooster bradshaw x y/n

[vintagegeekculture]

The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction

From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.

Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.

In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.

The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.

In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.

H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."

Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.

It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.

Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).

With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.

Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.

It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.

Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.

The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.

A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:

Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.

#pulp fiction #horror #pulp novels #stone age #picts

[fandom]

Queer TV

This is a strange time to be writing an editorial on queer representation. While the past year has seen an incredible uptick in queer stories being told with humor and heart on the small screen, 2022 has seen a record high of 238 proposed anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in the US—nearly half of them targeting trans folks. Representation is important, though, and demand for more queer stories is growing (and, to some degree, being met), with a lot of good books and comics making it to our screens. With that in mind, think of this as your selective chronological tour of all the times we won in the TV landscape of the last year (October 2021–October 2022).

Our dataset year started off with the much-awaited adaptation of Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic, Wheel of Time. With such extensive source material (15 books if you count the prequel, which is where the seeds of the sapphic storyline in Rafe Judkins’ adaptation are to be found), the viewership, generally speaking, was divided into book fans and show-only fans, and both camps shitposted and meme’d and reviewed with abandon. 

The biggest queer-centric show we saw in the last year was the adaptation of @aliceoseman’s comic Heartstopper (@heartstoppercomic). Co-created by Alice Oseman themself, this adaptation was very sensitive to the much-loved source material. And, being native to Tumblr, these characters were bound to be welcomed with open arms when they hit the screen in an ebullient explosion of queer joy. 

A run-down of the past year would be incomplete without the incredible queerdos of the Revenge who swashbuckled their way into our hearts. We’re referring, of course, to Our Flag Means Death’s Gentleman Pirate and his merry band of (living-wage-paid, no less!) shipmates. Your favorites included genderqueer Jim ‘not-a-fucking-mermaid’ Jimenez and Oluwande, Lucius Sprigg and Black Peter, Frenchie who just hates cats, and The Swede, who keeps his heart but loses his teeth. Then, of course, we have Blackbeard himself, or simply Ed, who is struggling with his identity (villain or softboi).

Based on the story by @veschwab and produced by @belletristbooks, First Kill was another adaptation that fans of vampire stories got very excited about. Add to that the fact that this was very much a sapphic enemies-to-lovers scenario between hunter Calliope and young vampire Juliette, and the pre-show excitement was palpable. The post-season disappointment even more so as fans turned to their dashes to vent about the lack of good lesbian and wlw representation in 2022’s TV landscape.

Where the cancelation of First Kill left us reeling, the Rockford Peaches from A League of Our Own came in clutch and soothed our sapphic souls. You love the show which you affectionately shortened, in good old Tumblr fashion, to a silly little acronym: aloto. Whether you’re in it for the gal pal aesthetics, the butch energy, or Uncle Bert, or some good old fashioned baller drama, there truly was something for all of your wlw whimsies here. Let’s go, Peaches!

@neilgaiman’s The Sandman series finally came out to much acclaim, and came out so gay that armchair reviewers of the homophobic sort really struggled to wrap their minds around quite how gay it is. We got pansexual serial killing Corinthian! Pansexual, demon-hunting, women-kissing Johanna Constantine! Some very loaded moments between Morpheus and Hob Gadlin! This is what dreams are made of (sort of)!

This whole list would be nothing, nada, a crumb of zilch whizzing around a black hole, if it weren’t for the writers who created many of these stories in the first place. So thank you to them. And to you, Tumblr, for celebrating the good and standing up for each other through another year. Here’s to a kinder 2023. 

#year in review #queer tv #tumblr2022

[faggy--butch]

I saw you mention Jammidoger and I'm a little ? about the context, can you elaborate? Have a great day no matter what tho

Sure! Last year, Jamie did a video with OBGYN Mama Doctor Jones, who is a wonderful person to watch, she uses gender neutral language to talk about reproductive care, talks about trans care, all that good stuff. The video in question is an interview with Jamie, in which he does talk about how trans men deal with a lot of medical transphobia in general but especially in reproductive care, but then be says something along the lines of "But this is a small violin in comparison to what trans women go through" This didn't sit right with me whatsoever.

He minimized everything that he said just seconds before.

We know for a fact that cis women are marginalized in the medical system, that cis women die from lack of care when it comes to all sorts of things but especially reproductive health.

Trans men and mascs deal with that but WORSE. Just an example is that when you are on testosterone, it can be harder to know when you are ovulating or pregnant, and if doctors are already unwilling to listen to AFAB people ( and I say AFAB in this very specific medical context) think of how much harder it is for trans men to navigate.

It can and Has killed us. Robert Eads was denied medical care over and over because he was legally male, and he died of Ovarian cancer. That's serious! that's no small violin. It was kind of crushing tbh to hear him say this. Jamie obviously comes from a place of privilege, he was able to fully transition and I'm happy for him but that's no excuse to be reductive and ignorant.

#asks #transandrophobia #jammidodger

[bobgasm]

awards season | b.f

pairing: robert “bob” floyd x f!reader [admiral!bob] word count: 6129 warnings: smut, nsfw [18+ only], dom/sub elements, praise kink, superior/insubordinate, power play dynamics, panty stuffing, buttplugs, reader gets tied up, lush vibrating egg, slight voyeurism/exhibitionism, spanking as a punishment, choking, breeding kink, inaccurate naval knowledge, unprotected p in v sex, strip tease,

summary: in which you and bob have a private arrangement going on, but you can’t resist him at the navy’s awards and promotion ceremonies

author’s note: basically a follow up part of the snappening but is also a standalone. @attapullman don’t kill me for this. happy IBFF month everyone 🥳

oneshot | masterlist 

You were dressed to the nines. A gorgeous, expensive dress had been delivered to your apartment, courtesy of Natasha. She’d asked you to be her plus one to the Navy Honour’s ceremony, and who were you to say no? Javy and Bob were going to be there, obviously, but given the nature of your professional relationships to them, you all decided it was best if you went separately.

Tonight was technically your first public outing with Bob. You’d been on a couple of small dates, usually dinner at his place that wound up with you spending the night. But tonight you’d be seeing him outside of the small bubble the two of you had been living in. You wanted to look your best, and make it a night he’d never forget.

And you knew just the way to do that.

Natasha had done your makeup and the two of you had done a few shots while getting ready. She was dressed in her Navy blues, just like you knew Javy and Bob would be. 

Your dress was a red backless number and you had tape pretty much covering your chest to provide an easy no-bra look. Natasha had wolf-whistled when she’d seen you and you’d tried to adjust the neckline of the dress so it wasn’t sitting so low. You felt self-conscious.

Now you were arriving, walking arm in arm with Natasha as she spoke to various Captains and Admirals. You were polite, greeting them warmly.

“And who’s your date tonight?” Natasha was asked.

“This is my friend, Y/N,” she explained. 

You were sat at a table with Cyclone who continued to eye you throughout the night. Also at the table were a couple WSO’s who were prominent in their field, but you were more concerned with the fact that Bob and Javy sat at the next table over. 

“You look so fucking good tonight,” Bob told you later in the evening. 

He’d slipped into the empty seat beside you while Natasha was in the bathroom and the rest of your table had dispersed to speak with other people in attendance.

“Good,” you said smugly. “I wore it with the intent you’d have more fun removing it.” He chuckled and shot a look over his shoulder. “Where’s Coyote gone?”

“Probably to say the same corny shit to Phoenix.”

You laughed and reached for your glass of wine, taking a sip. “Your place or mine tonight?”

“Yours is closer,” he mused, leaning back in his seat. The length of his thigh pressed up against yours. It was as much physical contact as he was going to show in public, and you understood why. “Don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“Just tonight or in general?”

“Tonight,” he clarified. “You look so fucking good.”

You laughed again. “You’ve already said that.”

“I’m a little drunk, whatever,” he dismissed, shifting in his seat.

“How much longer do you want to stay?” You asked him, hooking your ankle behind his leg running the top of your foot up and down his calf.

He reached for your glass of wine and finished it. “I’m good to leave when you are.”

“I’ll just send Natasha a text,” you replied, grabbing your phone from your clutch to send them a text. The chances that she’d already left with Javy were slim, but never zero.

Bob and I are leaving. Recommend going to Javy’s tonight x

You tucked your phone away and gave him a look. “I’ll meet you at my place?”

He nodded and watched you quickly leave. You assumed he ordered himself an Uber, you just weren’t expecting it to be a ride-share and have him slide in the back of the car beside you.

“Same place?” The driver noted.

“Yeah,” Bob agreed, hand resting on your thigh just above your knee. The driver looked back at the two of you in the mirror before pulling into traffic, not saying another word. You were grateful for it.

Bob’s hand slowly inched higher the longer the drive took. You placed your hand on top of his to stop it from going any higher. He was who he was, and the driver kept looking in the rearview mirror. If anything was going to happen, it was once you were in the privacy of your apartment.

That you now shared with Natasha.

The two of you had decided to upgrade from your small, Navy issued apartments a few years ago. It meant you could have Bob and Javy over without any issues popping up, but the building you’d moved to was less Naval Officers and more public friendly. That had been deliberate. 

Bob had been over a handful of times, though you usually went to his place. He liked to take his time, make you scream, and though Natasha wouldn’t give you too much shit for it, he didn’t like an audience. You understood perfectly, because you weren’t really a fan of an audience either. So anytime he came over, it was usually for cuddles and sleep. 

By the time you got home, Bob was pulling you in for a searing kiss. He was aching to touch you, be near you. You hadn’t even managed to unlock the door before he backed you into it. Hands gripping your waist and his mouth on yours.

“Bob,” you whined, tugging at his hair. 

He groaned, reaching for the keys in your hand and making quick work of unlocking the door. You grinned as you pulled him inside. He kicked the door shut and then his hands were on you again. Hiking up the dress, hands gripping your thighs as he lifted you up and wrapped your legs around his waist. 

You gasped, feeling his erection pressed against your core.

“See what you do to me?” He asked, roughly groping your ass as he carried you into the bedroom. “Drives me so fucking crazy not being able to touch you. Kiss you. Having to watch men flirt with you all night and not be able to make a scene.”

“They’re not you,” you reminded him. “They don’t get to see me the way you do. Who cares if they flirt? You’re the one who has me in his bed nearly every night.”

He hummed as you kissed him, savouring the feeling of his mouth on yours. The taste of liquor that lingered on his lips. The texture of his hair between your fingers.

“Help me out of this dress,” you told him, finding your feet and turning around so he could unzip the dress. Kisses pressed to your bare shoulder, fingers slowly tugging down the zipper. Too slow. 

His hands skimmed your sides as the material fell to the floor. You reached up to tug at the corner of a piece of tape. You were relieved to find that it was easy to remove.

“That’s hot,” Bob teased, picking at the tape covering your other breast. “Like I’m unwrapping a present.”

You laughed and balled up the piece of tape in your hand, dropping it onto the bedside table while he continued to remove the rest of the tape. Grinning when he was done, finally able to admire you properly.

“You’re overdressed, Admiral Floyd.” Officially, he wasn’t an Admiral yet, but it was coming. 

He groaned at your words, your hands sliding up his chest. Tugging the tie loose from around his neck. 

“Fuck you for calling me Admiral Floyd,” he said, taking the tie from your hands and shrugging out of his jacket. “Lie down, hands above your head.”

You did as he said, resting back against the pillows and crossing your wrists above your head. You watched him move. Biting down on his bottom lip as he stepped beside the bed, looping your wrists together with his tie and knotting it to the headboard.

His hair was messy from your hands. Eyes dancing across your body with admiration and lust. He liked how easily you obeyed, that you really were his good girl. His. 

Your chest heaved in anticipation, legs pressed tightly together. Seeking any kind of relief.

He hadn’t even seen your surprise yet, a pink jewelled plug seated nicely between the cheeks of your ass. It’d been driving you wild all night. A reminder of the fun you’d be having later.

“Have you been a good girl tonight?” He asked, voice thick with lust. Desire. All for you.

“No, Admiral Floyd,” you replied as innocently as you could manage.

“No?” He taunted. “Tell me, baby.”

“‘m wearing a plug,” you whispered. “Wanted to surprise you.”

He groaned in appreciation, rolling the sleeves of his shirt up his forearms. “Where’s your toys?”

You whimpered. He hadn’t even touched you yet.

“Bottom drawer,” you confessed. Of course he knew you had toys. You’d sent him a video on Snapchat of you using your dildo on yourself. He crouched down, grabbing the bag of toys from the drawer.

“What other surprises do you have here?”

“Bob,” you pleaded, tugging against your restraints.

He tutted. “That’s not my name, kitten.”

“Admiral Floyd,” you mewled, bringing a smile to his face.

“That’s better, baby,” he praised, opening the drawstring bag to reveal your two dildos – one bright pink, the other flesh coloured – some nipple clamps, a couple of vibrators and a…cock ring? He pulled it out curiously, holding it up for you to see. “Have you used this with anyone?”

“No,” you confessed. “Bought it because I wanted you to wear it. Just didn’t know how to ask.”

His eyes softened as he looked at you. Spread out on the bed, tugging at your restraints and desperately seeking some kind of relief between your legs.

“I should’ve known,” he said, reaching down to cup your cheek. “The second you said you wanted two of my fingers in your cunt and five around your neck.”

You gasped as his fingers trailed down your neck, ever so lightly applying pressure.

“Fuck,” you whimpered, eyes fluttering closed. It wasn’t enough, but it was him. The simple act of him lightly gripping your throat turned you on so much more than you thought it would.

“Spread your legs,” he told you softly. 

You did as he asked, missing his light touch around your neck. You opened your eyes to watch him settle between your legs, grinning wickedly. 

“Naughty girl,” he tsked. “Wearing that plug made you so fucking wet.”

“Wore it for you.”

He pulled the saturated material of your panties to the side, running his finger up the length of your slit and applied pressure to your swollen clit. Stroking it slightly, watching you squirm under his touch.

“Admiral Floyd, please.”

“Fucking hell,” he cursed, taking the time to properly remove your underwear. Stuffing the material in your mouth and pressing a kiss to your cheek. “Good girls get to talk. You haven’t been a good girl tonight, have you?”

You shook your head, watching him dip his head to suck your breasts. Nipples taut with desire to be touched, played with. Your moan muffled by the material stuffed in your mouth, back arching towards his mouth. Needing so much more than he was giving you.

“Was gonna take my time with you tonight,” he mumbled, his breath hot against your skin. Suckling bruises into the swell of your chest. “Don’t think you deserve it, hm?”

Your arms strained as you tugged them, begging them to be freed. Needing to touch him. Tell him he could have his way with you, whatever he wanted. You just wanted to be used. 

You watched him free his cock from his pants, kneeling between your open legs as he stroked his length. His tip was positioned at your entrance, roughly thrusting inside your sopping heat. Palming your breasts or gripping your hips as he set an unrelenting pace.

God, this was exactly what you needed. His grunts and groans filled the air. Fingers gripping your hips so tightly you knew they’d leave bruises. The sound of wet skin slapping and the tightening in your core only spurring him on.

“Cum with me, kitten,” he goaded. “Fuck, I’m almost there. Need you to milk the cum from my cock. There’s my good girl, fucking hell.”

Your body spasmed as he talked you through your orgasm. Feeling like it was so much more intense than it had ever been before. Your eyes squeezing shut, your moans muffled and legs locked around his waist.

Bob loosened your restraints and you took your panties from your mouth. Throwing them across the room while he started taking your heels off. 

“Don’t give me that look,” you whined, watching a smirk form on his face as he dropped the first heel to the ground and started on the next. 

“What look?” He asked innocently.

You grabbed a pillow and used it to cover your face, groaning into it. He laughed softly, only removing the pillow once your other shoe was off.

“What look?”

“That ‘you’ve got a kinky secret you’ve been hiding from me’ look,” you replied.

“I mean, you do,” he pointed out. “I won’t push it if you’re not comfortable…”

“I can’t have this conversation with a plug in my ass,” you confessed, only making him laugh. You gasped as he flipped you onto your stomach, hands grabbing your ass. Revealing that pretty plug nestled inside. “Fucking hell.”

He hummed as he toyed with the gem, spanking your ass just because he could.

“So fucking gorgeous,” he praised. Your hands gripped the bedsheets, a moan falling past your lips as he gently tugged the plug. “Relax, baby.”

“This is just turning me on more,” you admitted. “Let me do it.”

“No,” his voice was firm, gently tugging the plug again.

The moan that fell past your lips as the plug breached the tight muscle had you hiding your face in shame. Whimpering at the loss of the intrusion while he slapped your ass again.

“Get that pretty little ass in the shower,” he told you. You wasted no time in heading to the bathroom and starting the shower. You heard the plug clink as he washed it in the sink before stripping and joining you a moment later. “You’re so fucking sexy.”

You grinned as he snaked his arms around your waist, your own draping around his neck. 

“You’re not too bad yourself, Admiral Floyd.”

“I’m so glad you’ve never called me that at work,” he confessed. “Would’ve been awkward as fuck trying to hide my boner.”

You laughed and he silenced you with a kiss. Sweet and searing. 

“Maybe this would’ve happened a lot sooner,” you mused.

“I love that it’s happening now, though.”

“So do I.”

The next awards show was the one you’d been hanging out for. The Promotion Ceremony was almost a week after the Navy’s annual awards ceremony. You’d been working your butt off during the week, and spending the evenings with Bob. 

It was a comfortable little routine you found yourselves in, but you hadn’t come close to having a conversation about your kinks and boundaries. You were hoping to broach the subject with a new little stint at the next ceremony.

Once again, your dress matched Natasha’s dress for the evening. 

You walked inside the building arm in arm with Natasha yet again. You smiled warmly at Natasha’s bosses and politely excused yourself to use the bathroom. Putting your little plan into action. 

The pink device slipped easily inside you, and the control was an app on your phone. You checked it to see that it was working, leaving it on a low buzz that tickled you just right. Washing your hands before joining Natasha and trying to find your table.

You were led to the right table, glad to see that it was empty for now. Allowing the two of you to settle and chat amongst yourselves for the time being. 

You perked up when Bob and Javy joined you both at the table. They were mingling, as usual, but both dressed nicely in their blues. You let your eyes wander over Bob, whose jaw ticked as he took in your outfit. Eyes lingering on the deep plunge of your neckline. 

So that’s how you were playing it tonight, you thought. A smirk tugging at the corner of your mouth as you met his heavenly gaze.

“Fancy seeing you two here,” Natasha teased. 

The low hum between your legs was comfortable, and as Javy dragged Natasha away to get some water, you made your move. Slipping into the seat beside Bob and placing your phone on the table, the app open for anyone to see.

“What’s this?”

You leaned in a little closer and lowered your voice. “The controls for the vibrator in my pussy.”

“Oh, kitten.”

You let out a flirty giggle. “Give it a try.”

You demonstrated how to alter the speed, biting down on your inner cheeks as he cranked the speed high. Too high.

“You’re in for a long night,” he warned you.

You gave him a sweet smile as you moved back to your seat, shuffling to get comfortable despite the intense vibrations from the toy. Yeah, it was going to be a long night.

“What’s the passcode?”

“7-4-4-8,” you replied through gritted teeth, watching him lock the phone and tuck it into his pocket. It spelled out shit, which was exactly what you thought at that moment. 

He grinned wickedly, resting his arms on the table as he looked at you. “You’ll be rewarded if you don’t cum.”

You nodded, legs crossed beneath the table and hands in your lap. He watched you intently as you shuffled in your seat, breaths coming short and quick. Your eyes dart around the room, trying to figure out if anyone has any clue about what’s going on.

“Y/N,” Bob said softly. “Breathe slowly.”

“Shut up,” you hissed, blowing out a breath. Eyes finding his shining with mischief. You try to slow your breathing, in through your nose, out through your mouth.

But you’re acutely aware of how good it feels between your legs. The tiniest moan slipped past your lips and he’s quick to turn the device down. Your jaw ticked as you clenched your teeth and glowered in his direction.

He did it for a reason, Javy and Natasha were back. He didn’t want it to be so obvious. He didn’t want you to get caught. 

One look at Natasha told you she’d got more than a bottle of water. You busied yourself with fixing her hair while she wore a guilty look and finished reapplying her lipstick. 

Bob gave Javy shit, but it was all in good humour. Considering the control he had over you tucked in his pocket…you bit your tongue. Not wanting to say anything to incriminate the two of you when Natasha and Javy had clearly just fucked in a bathroom somewhere. 

“Thanks,” she mumbled to you.

You hummed in acknowledgement as you sat back in your seat, trying not to fidget or shuffle too much. Every time you moved you felt the device hit your g-spot and you almost gave yourself away.

“You okay?”

You hummed again. “Yeah, when’s this thing supposed to start?”

“Soon,” Bob answered coolly. Bastard. He was having too much fun with his hand in his pocket and thumb moving the speed of the device inside you. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” you snipped. Both Natasha and Javy cast a look between the both of you before sharing a look of their own. “Stop asking me if I’m okay.”

“You seem tense,” Natasha commented. “I know a good bathroom to get your back blown out in…”

Javy nudged her with a playful look in his eyes. You were glad you were seated so far away from Bob right now, you knew you’d cross a line if he was within touching distance. 

“That’s not her problem,” Bob replied.

Natasha eyed you a little more carefully, her hand covering their mouth as she started giggling. God fucking damn it. 

“Shut up,” you hissed.

“I haven’t said anything,” she replied, still laughing her ass off. 

You slapped her arm, but the movement made the device brush your g-spot and you clamped your hand over your mouth to stop you from moaning.

Bob turned the device up ever so slightly. You glared at him, arms folded over your chest as you sank down in your seat. Trying to block out the tightness in your core and focus on your breathing again. 

“What the fuck is happening?” Javy whispered to Natasha.

“I’ll tell you later,” she replied, rubbing her arm from where you slapped her. “I kinda wanna see how this plays out.”

“I’ll slap you again,” you threatened Natasha. She simply gave you a shit-eating grin in response.

It was going to be a long night. 

Throughout the opening ceremony, Bob turned the vibrations down to a more bearable setting. You appreciated it, but didn’t let on that you were happy or annoyed. You focused on the host, while keeping an eye on Bob in your peripheral, whose gaze never once waived from you.

You enjoyed your drink and spoke with Natasha. As the ceremony progressed, you’d look at Bob occasionally, and only then would the setting get turned up slightly.

Your seating configuration changed so you were sitting beside Bob near the halfway point of the evening. At least, you thought it was about halfway through. They hadn’t quite finished all the mumbo jumbo from the retiring staff yet. 

You drank to try and calm down as the vibrations were gradually increased to a point where you were constantly being edged. Brought closer to your orgasm, but then Bob would turn it back down. Resting a hand on your knee for a brief moment, a silent reminder of what he said earlier. 

It only made you antsier. You shuffled your chair a little closer until his leg was pressed against the length of yours. You needed his touch, his comfort. Whatever kind that you could get, given your current surroundings.

When they announced the newest Admirals, Javy and Bob rose to their feet. But not before Bob set the device at an uncomfortably high speed. 

“Breathe,” you reminded yourself, though it was a struggle. 

Damn Bob. Damn you for having this idea in the first place.

They made short speeches as they accepted their medals that now adorned their breastplates and you shifted in your seat. Trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t have the egg pressing nauseatingly against your g-spot. 

When the men rejoined the table, Bob’s hand lingered on your thigh. Your breathing quickened, heart racing as you squeezed your legs together and gripped his hand tightly.

“You’re okay,” he told you softly, turning his hand over to properly hold yours.

“I’m okay,” you breathed, swallowing hard.

“Good girl.”

You squeezed his hand as a warning, your other hand pressed to your chest. You barely paid any attention as Natasha took to the stage. She was accepting her second star on her Admiral badge. 

Your attention was pulled back to Bob as he turned the setting up again. You squeezed his hand tight, your breath catching in your throat. Bottom lip taken harshly between your teeth.

He cleared his throat, making you look at him. Your eyes watered as you met his steely gaze. 

 “Not yet,” he told you.

“Please,” you whimpered softly. “Please.”

“I’ll take you home soon,” he replied. “Just a bit longer.”

“Turn it down,” you pleaded quietly. “I’m going to cry. It’s too much. Please, sir.”

He took you in. Your flushed, heaving chest. Your watering hooded eyes. Your swollen bottom lip. He shifted uncomfortably, unlocking your phone and turning the device down to a more bearable setting.

He leaned closer, lips brushing your ear. “You’re getting punished for that.”

“Thank you, sir. I deserve it.”

He surprised you by kissing your cheek. You gave him a smile and rested your hand on his thigh, his wrapping around your shoulders and pulling you into his side. 

You enjoyed the comfort as another couple of promotions were announced, and relaxed into him. 

When it came time for you to leave, Bob happily took your hand in his. 

Bob stood beside you as you watched Javy and Natasha both disappear down the street, shivering in the brisk air. He shrugged his jacket off and draped it around you without you needing to ask, smiling at you as you thanked him. 

“You did good tonight,” he told you.

“You mean the vibrator?”

He chuckled, sliding an arm around your back and pulling you a little closer. “I do.”

He helped you into the car, lacing his hand with yours. You sat in silence on the ride back to his place, his thumb drawing circles on the back of your hand. His other thumb altered the speed of the vibrator still inside you. Watching your reactions throughout the drive, and kissing you whenever he turned it up so you didn’t moan. 

You were delirious when you arrived at his place. Feeling like you were floating on another planet as he led you up the steps and through the threshold. 

“How many times did you almost come?” He asked you. You stood in front of him, feeling small under his gaze.

“Five times,” you told him truthfully.

He reached out to cup your face, lightly gripping your jane between his thumb and the length of his forefinger. “Five spanks on each cheek should be punishment enough, hm?”

Your cunt tightened in excitement. “Yes, sir.”

“Wait for me in the bedroom,” he instructed, pressing a kiss to your forehead and smiling sweetly at you.

You did as he asked, walking down to the master bedroom and hanging his suit jacket up in his closet before standing at the end of the bed, waiting anxiously. You felt the vibrations in the device get dialled up, squeezing your thighs together as you tried not to enjoy it too much. Your eyebrows pulled together, bottom lip taken harshly between your teeth. Hissing at the pain that shot through your swollen and bruised lip, a reminder of how many times you’d bitten it through the night.

Your eyes fluttered open as you heard the bedroom door click shut. 

“Strip for me, baby,” Bob said, taking a seat on the end of the bed. “Keep the heels on.”

You had no music playing, but you pretended there was. A song played in your head as you moved your body under his watchful gaze. His eyes raking over you, taking in every sway of your hips, the way your hands caressed your chest and stomach. Flipping your hair over your shoulder as you turned your back to him and reached for the zipper on your dress.

The material fell to the floor but you kept dancing. The way you moved was hypnotising and you felt Bob’s burning gaze. The air electric between you as your hair covered your chest and you sat yourself down in his lap. Running your hands up his chest and toying with his tie, loosening it and undoing a couple of the buttons. Only moving away when he hand caressed your lower back.

“Touching costs extra, Admiral Floyd,” you chastised playfully, lips brushing the shell of his ear as you twirled around. 

Putting on a show as you bent over and slowly removed your underwear. The material soaked with your arousal. 

He chuckled lowly as you threw them at him, watching his fingers rub over the wet spot and his eyes darken as you sank to your knees. Stroking his thighs, lightly skimming over his crotch and hearing him hiss at the contact.

Eyes lock on his as you pressed a feathersoft kiss to his clothed cock. His nostrils flaring at the small gesture, jaw ticking.

“Lie across my lap, kitten,” he told you, voice leaving no room for argument. Not that you would, anyway. You were enjoying this too much. This shift in dynamic, the power you’d given him. The trust you had in him not to take it any further than you were comfortable with.

You folded yourself over his lap, glad you had the bed to rest on, too.

His hand rested on the back of your thigh, fingers toying with the pink rubber from the vibrator still inside you. He tugged it lightly, making your moan.

“You want me to take it out, or leave it in?”

“Out please, sir,” you replied meekly. He turned the device off before you felt a stronger tug. Willing your body to relax enough to let the device slip out, and whimpering at the loss as it breached the muscle. “I’ll take my punishment now, sir.”

“Five strikes on each cheek,” he reminded you. You didn’t know what he did with the toy, but his hand softly squeezed your left cheek. Playful, almost. “Count them.”

The first slap came as a surprise. Not too hard, but not too soft. Just enough to give you a taste, knowing he was likely to strike harder.

“One,” you counted as his hand caressed the tender skin. His hand came down harder this time, and you whimpered as he caressed the skin once again. “Two.”

Each strike got a little bit harder, and you grew a little bit wetter. Whimpering as his fingernails dragged over the sensitive skin, likely leaving a temporary mark in their wake.

You counted, “five,” and then came the assault to your other cheek. He started harder, but still took the time to smooth his hand over the freshly struck area. Caressing and squeezing.

“One,” you counted, hands fisting the bedding beneath you. Thighs squeezed together, desperately trying to stave off your orgasm. His hand came down hard once again, causing you to whimper under his touch. “Two.”

“Three more,” he told you, reaching out to brush some hair behind your ear. “Keep counting.”

You gasped as his hand stung your ass once more. “Three,” you said, eyes squeezed shut. You counted out the last two painfully, tears stinging your eyes. Not because of the pain, but because of the pleasure.

He pulled you into his lap, cradling you into his chest. Brushing your hair back from your face and swiping at a tear that escaped before it ran down your cheek.

“Was that too much?” He asked softly, pressing a kiss to your forehead.

“No,” you assured him. “It was good, I just need to come. Please, Admiral Floyd. Please let me come.”

He hummed, cupping your cheek and drawing you in for a kiss. 

His mouth was dominating. Tongue working its way into your mouth, a firm hand on your hip, the other cupping the base of your skull. Fingers wound into your hair and tipping your head back, exposing your neck to him. His hot mouth latching onto your soft skin, sucking, pecking, biting.

You released a shaky breath as he nipped at your collarbones, hand gripping the back of his neck, the other tugging his tie. 

You gasped as his hand skimmed up your side, cupping your breast. Thumb brushing over your pebbled nipple before pinching it roughly and dipping his head to take the other one in his mouth. Teeth grazing the swollen nub, tongue soothing, fingers teasing. 

He moved you so you were lying on your back, completely at his mercy. His mouth and hands continued to pinch and nip at your chest, your back arching into his touch. Legs spread wide, accommodating his body. Hands wound in his short hair and tugging as he sucked a bruise into the top of your breast.

Your hips arch off the bed, desperate for some friction between your legs. His teeth grazed your nipple as he chuckled, biting down enough to make you hiss.

“So needy,” he taunted, rolling his tongue over the hardened bud. “Use your words, babygirl.”

“Need your mouth, Admiral Floyd,” you pleaded. “Your tongue, your fingers. Anything. Please make me come.”

His hands grip your thighs, spreading your legs as he kisses your navel and pushes you further up the bed. Ankles resting over his shoulders, the heel of your stilettos no doubt digging into his back, but if it bothers him he doesn’t let on. Eyes level with your pretty, glistening cunt. 

He used his thumbs to spread you open, groaning as your hands comb through his hair.

“Such a pretty pussy,” he compliments, laying his tongue flat against your cunt and tasting your arousal. Humming in appreciation as you gasp and shudder, nose pressed snug against your clit.

He hooked his arms under your thighs, splaying his hands out over your chest and stomach. One hand applying pressure to your abdomen, the other playing with your breasts.

When your thighs clamped around his head, he knew you were a goner. Tongue licking, mouth sucking, nose firm. The perfect combination, and his favourite way to make you come undone.

He groaned in appreciation as your hips bucked against his face, riding out your orgasm. Your juices coating his tongue and dribbling down his chin. 

You saw stars as he pressed two fingers inside your sopping cunt, curling them back towards himself as he sucked on your clit. Teeth grazing the sensitive bundle of nerves, hips rolling against his mouth.

Then he sucks. Hard. And you almost pass out, gasping and bucking your hips wildly. Fingers brushing against your g-spot, working together with his mouth to make you cum again.

Your head lolled to the side, body satiated and pliant. Eyes frantically trying to blink away the spots from your vision until Bob’s face was all you could focus on. His hand cupping your cheek, eyes full of worry. 

Chin glistening.

“I’ve never cum that hard in my life,” you confessed breathily, eyes coming back into focus.

“Think you can cum again for me?” He asked. 

“Yes, sir,” you confirmed, pulling off his tie with a grin.

He chuckled as he finished unbuttoning his shirt and quickly removed his trousers. Cock springing free and slapping his stomach, the tip angry and red and glistening with precum.

He groaned as you reached for his cock, stroking his length. His hand replaced yours and you gasped as he slapped his cock against your clit. Grinning wickedly as he ran the tip of his cock up your slit and pushed just the tip inside your cunt.

“Admiral Floyd,” you pleaded. “Please. I need your cock, sir. Need you to fill me with your cum.”

Bob groaned deeply as he folded himself on top of you, hips rocking into you. Refusing to give you more than just the tip.

“Such a filthy little slut, hm?” He asked, fingers closing around your throat. Squeezing your pressure point. Your mouth falling open at the sudden act.

“Yes, sir,” you agreed, swallowing thickly. “Only a slut for you.”

He hummed, lips brushing the shell of your ear. “You’re mine.”

You whimpered, fingernails digging into the fresh over his shoulder blades. Your brain covered in fog, too overwhelmed by him. 

“Say it,” he growled. “I need to hear you say it.”

“I’m yours, Admiral Floyd. Your filthy little slut.”

You gripped his wrist as he thrust inside you, bottoming out. Your eyes rolling back in your head, his name falling past your lips in a delirious chant. 

“Mine,” he repeated, sealing his mouth over yours as his thrusts made you moan. So fucking close. So fucking good.

You groaned as you tasted yourself on his tongue, gripping the back of his neck as he rested his forehead against yours. Your eyes locked on his, noses nudging together as his thrusts grew faster. Harder. More unrelenting. 

Taking and taking and taking until you were coming undone around him. Beneath him. Consumed by all things Bob. 

“Bob,” you whined, legs wrapping around his waist as he came. Grunting and bottoming out as his cock twitched and spilled inside you. 

He looked so fucking pretty when he came. Eyes screwed shut, body shuddering. A thin sheen of sweat making his skin glisten in the low light. Lips parted as he cursed and panted your name.

He collapsed beside you, stroking your hair with a blissful look on his face. Holding you close, your lips pressing soft kisses to his cheeks, his chin, his lips. 

“That was…holy fuck,” he said with a breathy chuckle. 

You hummed, smiling as he nudged your nose with his. “You’re so good to me, Admiral Floyd.”

He groaned lowly, still trying to catch his breath. “You’re good to me, kitten. So fucking good.”

He kissed you slowly, sweetly. A stark contrast to the frenzied kisses you’d shared previously. Taking his time to make you feel comfortable, cherished. So fucking loved.

#robert bob floyd #bob floyd x reader #bob floyd #bob floyd x you #robert bob floyd x reader #bob floyd smut #robert bob floyd smut #bob floyd fanfic #bob floyd fanfiction #robert bob floyd fanfic #robert bob floyd fanfiction #robert bob floyd x you #international bob floyd fucks month

[cassius-the-kitten]

DDADDS as Content Creators (headcanons)

I don't know why I had this idea, but here you go!

have some content-creating DDADDS :3

Brian Harding

technically Brian doesn’t have a channel. Daisy just records him and posts it to TikTok.

it is all camping, fishing, and general outdoors videos. except the lawncare videos, which are actual tutorials.

Daisy actually makes these tiktoks look really nice and high-quality, even if Brian is not that good of an actor. he’s trying his best, but it actually works. surprisingly, she never really shows up on camera. it’s all Brian here

has a lot of fans of his fishing for… aesthetic reasons. yeah, aesthetic reasons. the aesthetic reason being that he is shirtless in almost all of them. and that he is obviously very confident in his body.

his lawncare videos get the same amount of views, but for vastly different reasons. all of the lawn-caring dads enter his TikTok comment section whenever he posts and they either compliment him or start discourse on which weedwhacker is the best.

surprisingly, Brian has some of the most followers out of all of the dads. he even ends up doing some lawn equipment giveaways.

Craig Cahn

it’s all fitness all day with Craig. he has a TikTok and an Instagram.

he posts a lot about his business, softball coaching, healthy recipes, and once again fitness.

he has fallen for the “can you fitness dick in your mouth” joke at least 12 times by now. he keeps falling for it. help him please

completely avoids drama not only to keep away extra stress, but also because there’s literally nothing you can really yell at him for. unless you hate his recipes

probably has a series where he tries out a bunch of popular healthy recipes and rates them on a 5-star scale.

he has a LOT of followers for a LOT of reasons. good video quality, good recipes, he’s entertaining, a good father, and all of the softball moms\dads love him.

Damien Bloodmarch

plenty of Victorian recipes, fashion, and general taxidermy. he’s got a Youtube channel and a Tiktok, but he’s more comfortable with the YouTube format.

he edits all of his videos and he’s Really, Really good at it to the point where he offers to edit videos for other dads. so he’s both a YouTuber and a freelance editor.

probably gets the most sponsorships out of all the dads

has a very welcoming and kind community that he interacts with over Tumblr and Reddit. he has a Twitter but he just doesn’t use it

his space is 100% drama-free. unless you are arguing about historical accuracy.

he has an entire series rating the historical accuracy of anything Victorian; from clothes to books to recipes and more. it doesn’t stop. he will post these forever.

he manages to make a LOT of money off of this, to the point where he gets to quit his IT job altogether and gets to have more fun.

Damien really loves getting recognized by fans and always expresses his appreciation in his videos whenever he can.

Lucien shows up in his food videos sometimes, but only to eat the food and to mildly bully him on-camera. the comments call him low-rent Gerard Way and he does Not appreciate it.

Hugo Vega

he has a small YouTube channel that consists of book reviews and nothing else. until he eventually gains more popularity, that is.

there is very, very little editing on the earlier videos and it shows. Ernest refuses to help him. all of his students refuse to help him. dadsona cannot help him. please help him. he cannot edit

he uploads very rarely (once a month, maybe twice during summer months), but his videos are actually very well-scripted and well-performed. sometimes Ernest comes in to purposefully ruin his recording session, and it works every time.

eventually he somehow manages to bag Damien as his editor, and the video quality goes up significantly from there. Damien even buys Hugo better equipment and gives him advice.

he started out covering just older lesser-known works from the 18th century. somewhere along the way, he made a single video on poorly written YouTuber books and it Exploded in popularity. that’s when he started shifting towards being a bit more of a commentary channel, with Damien’s technological help of course.

some people have called him “the old librarian version of Kurtis Conner” and he doesn’t know what it means until he looks up Kurtis Conner. then he understands.

somehow he becomes well-versed in internet discourse and makes videos about it, with full-length video essays of a pretty high quality.

he doesn’t forget his literature roots, though — he still makes plenty of content on literature and art history, even if they make less views. he enjoys doing it and that’s what matters.

he always blushes when he gets recognized in public and he is way too polite to turn down a signature or photo. one time a wrestler he likes recognized him and he almost fainted from pure joy.

Joseph Christiansen

by far the most controversial of all. (\j its Robert)

just kidding it’s all baking. his TikTok is just a gay tradwife’s dream.

the man is just trying to be hip with the kids. he even dresses up as Ken after the Barbie movie premiere and makes a cake about it. this is actually his most popular video and it gets millions of views & likes

his community is Christian. mainly because he’s Christian. just that sometimes he attracts the mean Christians. he gets a lot of hate comments from them but he just deletes them and moves on with minimal worry or stress

besides that, his community is pretty supportive and full of a combo Christian mothers and Christian queers. most of his audience are 25+ but there is a sizeable portion that is under the age of 25, so technically he got what he wanted

the videos are of a fine quality, even though he’s not really an editor. like everyone else who can’t edit themselves, he just asks Damien very nicely to edit for him

he shows his kids in videos semi-often, but it’s really just because they either mess with him while he’s recording and he doesn’t know how to edit it out, or he has them try the food afterwards. it’s a win-win scenario for the kids

Mary refuses to show her face in any of the videos whatsoever and steers clear of the kitchen whenever Joseph is recording in there.

the kids at church all know him from his TikTok but either say nothing about it or actively make fun of him for it.

Mat Sella

posts baking and recipes to TikTok, along with promotion stuff for The Coffee Spoon. it was Carmensita’s idea and he just ran with it because it’s fun for both of them

Carmensita is the one behind the camera (or tripod) while Mat bakes, and sometimes she appears on camera when she wants to try the food. Pablo helps him edit and do other promotional videos. sometimes Pablo is seen helping in the videos too.

he always gets really anxious after posting it but the second that the positive comments and likes roll in, he’s completely relaxed.

any food he bakes on TikTok he sells at the Coffee Spoon, so it’s actually extremely useful at getting people to come and buy stuff. eventually people are mostly coming over for the food but also order a coffee because “may as well”

has a very positive comments section that consists mostly of people really wanting to go to Massachusetts just to order the food and give him a kiss on the forehead.

he has been called a babygirl at least twice and he has no clue what it means. Pablo and Carmensita refuse to tell him.

has done multiple collabs with Joseph and Damien, along with sharing tips with them. they’re all internet besties.

is recognized pretty often, and he’s always in-between being an anxious mess and being a really cool chill guy about it.

Robert Small

by far the least consistent and most unhinged out of all of them, for obvious reasons. he’s a TikToker solely because the format is easy for him, but he also just uploads all of his content straight to YouTube

he either posts 5 times a day or twice a month. there’s no in between.

it will be of the most random shit. one day you get him rating brands of whiskey, and next week there’s a 12 part series of him going cryptid hunting. all of it is unedited and of very poor audio quality if he’s outside

he probably visited the Goatman’s Bridge after the Buzzfeed Unsolved and also bullied the Goatman and took the bridge for himself. the only difference is that he’s drunkenly yelling at the Goatman and calling him a bitch.

he’s always at least a little intoxicated in all of his videos, and some cases he is fully drunk. he doesn’t really put an act on for the camera, he’s really just himself, completely unfiltered.

90% of his YouTube videos are either age-restricted, demonetized, or both. some of his TikToks get taken down but he always reuploads them because he is a very stubborn old man and he refuses to stop.

Robert probably has a maximum of 200 followers. he does not respond to his comments unless someone insults his whiskey or pineapple on pizza. he also responds to weird internet slang.

he doesn’t get any sponsorships. and he never will. and he doesn’t want them. the sponsorships also don’t want him. he has made multiple videos where he goes on rants about ads and how much he hates capitalism.

whenever someone in his TikTok comments calls him a blorbo he responds with a video of his honest reaction. he is confused. they also call him a poor little meow meow. he is confused. they also call him babygirl. he is still confused.

when he gets recognized in public he has no clue how to act. mainly because he very, very rarely gets recognized. his own neighbors are surprised when they find out he is a content creator.

eventually he will get recognized more, because his content is a comedy goldmine, albeit very unintentional. most of his fans are actually Gen Z, because his humor fits in pretty damn well. he is always slightly unsettled when teenagers recognize him because sometimes he forgets that young people do in fact watch his content. even though most of his viewers are half his age or less.

eventually Val finds his channel and dies laughing and confronts him about it (post reconnecting), because she never knew about it and she wants to be in those videos too because it’s fun. just some father & daughter fun: getting drunk and taking a walk in the forest being silly.

--

I actually really love doing these headcanons and i hope you do too :3

#ddadds #dream daddy a dad dating simulator #dream daddy #game grumps #ddadds headcanons #dream daddy headcanons #headcanons #general headcanons #ddadds fanart #hugo vega #robert small #brian harding #craig cahn #joseph christiansen #damien bloodmarch #mat sella

[the-daily-dreamer]

The targaryen ruled 130 years without dragons. And the most capable kings were all targaryen. After them it was a decline for the throne. Robert, joffrey, tommen, cercei were all sith ruler .

I see targ stans are investing in high quality air to fill their heads lol

But anyways. “The most capable kings were all targaryens”. You know who else were targaryens? The worst rulers of Westeros. Robert, Cersei, Joffrey, and Tommen aren’t even close to the worst kings and queen to rule. And bringing them up as evidence to show that the targaryens are good is so disingenuous.

Maegor the Cruel, Aegon the Unworthy, The Mad King Aerys, Rhaenyra (yes, I know that’s controversial), and Daenerys (yes, I know that’s even more controversial) are all far FAR worse than anyone you mentioned.

Maegor killed his wife and her entire family. He was a usurper (apparently it’s good when the targs you like do it lol), a kinslayer (also a thing only good when it’s targs you like doing it), raped and tortured many people, wiped out entire houses, killed any and everyone that he saw in any way as deserving, and created a huge war with the faith of the seven.

Aegon the unworthy was corrupt and lazy and legitimized his bastards leading to the blackfyre rebellions that led to endless bloodshed for 5 generations.

Aerys was so bad he had a rebellion staged against him that ended his family dynasty. He burned fathers and sons together. He tortured people and burned them alive. He abused and raped his wife when he would burn people alive. He wanted to kill the entire city of kings landing.

Rhaenyra (who like it or not went down in history as one of the worst rulers) known as maegor with teats taxed her people to starvation. She had daily executions. She had knights inquisitors hunt down and punish people.

Daenerys burnt down kings landing, was complicit in the rape and enslavement of hundreds, ruined city economies so badly slavery was a better option, then profited from said slavery, abandoned the people she conquered (no doubt ensuring they will be enslaved much more harshly after supporting her), raped a “free” slave that she admits still acted like a slave because that’s all she knew, oh yeah and again, SHE BURNT DOWN KINGS LANDING. And this is after the people you listed.

And this isn’t including non Targaryen rulers that ruined lives like the blackfyres. Or rulers that are bad but weirdly beloved like Aegon I who basically conquered people by threatening to kill them and everyone they loved, subjugating a country for hundreds of years.

The best rulers I admit were Targaryens. But that’s because they were the only rulers save for 4 people. Of those four, two were bad and two were incompetent. Not nearly the sadistic “mad” people I described above. And funnily enough, as soon as a Targaryen came back to power…things got worse again. Funny how that is.

Oh and by the way. Going with the histories of Westeros. Guess who is among the best rulers according to small folk Aegon II and Alicent. Seethe :)

#game of thrones #house of the dragon #team green #anti targaryen #anti targ stans #anti team black #anti rhaenyra #anti rhaenyra targaryen #anti Aegon IV #anti Aegon IV Targaryen #anti Aerys II Targaryen #Anti Aerys II #anti daenerys targaryen #anti daenerys #anti maegor I #anti maegor I Targaryen #alicent hightower #anti aegon ii targaryen #anti Aegon I Targaryen #anti Aegon i

[soracities]

what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds

I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.

I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)

The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)

The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)

A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )

Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)

The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)

Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems

The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.

But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:

anything by Sara Teasdale

Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver

Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti

Collected Poems by Langston Hughes

Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima

Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr

Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee

A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)

Crush by Richard Siken

Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail

Selected Poems by Walt Whitman

View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska

Collected Poems by Vasko Popa

Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)

Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,

Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef

As for individual poems:

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"

"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith

"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib

"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise

"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth

"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros

"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky

“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda

"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost

"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail

"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider

“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes

“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin

“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón

“The Flea” by John Donne

"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore

"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland

“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker

"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside

“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio

“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver

"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin

“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott

“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney

“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen

“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska

"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy

“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris

"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass

"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer

"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings

"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski

"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje

"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis

"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)

"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz

"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye

"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman

"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel

"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah

"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller

"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May

"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong

"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou

I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:

Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver

"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca

"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger

In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky

"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan

#ask #anonymous #beginner guides

[attapullman]

So Hold Me Close and Say Three Words | bungalow!Robert "Bob" Floyd

PART OF THE BIG WINDOWS, SMALL KITCHEN UNIVERSE

Summary: There's only one thing that can get your boyfriend's mind off the horrible popcorn ceiling.

Word Count: 2k

Warnings: f!reader, smut, 18+ as always, cockwarming, pet name Honey, title is from McFly's "All About You"

A Note From Mo: Welcome to bungalow!Bob! A dash of acts of service, a sprinkle of a condescension kink, and a whole lot of extremely loving boyfriend. Live-in boyfriend Bob is my biggest indulgence so no one look at me, I'm fragile.

He’s been planted in the big easy chair all morning, staring up at the last project on his list before the kitchen, and sighing. Dragging long fingers through wild hair as his eyes take in the wide expanse of the living room. 

His arch nemesis: the popcorn ceiling.

The little dipples and spikes of joint compound taunt him daily. A major contrast to the rest of the bungalow, all smooth ceilings with stunning walnut beams - one major selling point of the property. And while the previous owner did a great job with the addition bringing in natural light with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the backyard, he was off his rocker for choosing popcorn ceilings. 

Bob hasn’t hate anyone more than the previous owner. Well, maybe the neighbor across the street who stops by a little too much.

Before he moved in, Bob barely noticed any features of the sweet green bungalow you owned. The majority of his time here was spent in the bedroom between your thighs. But the switch flipped that first weekend after he moved his shoebox apartment in. Lounging on the sectional, girl on his chest, book in hand, and one look up at the world’s ugliest ceiling. 

He had to fix it. You deserve your dream house and it was his mission to give it to you. 

The line between his brows is adorable as he mutters something rude at the drywall.

“Bobby, babe, it’s just a ceiling.”

Those wide cornflower blue eyes blink at you, as if noticing for the first time you’re also sitting in the sun-drenched living room enjoying your coffee.

“It’s an ugly ceiling.”

You can’t help but giggle at the disgust in his tone. “It’s not that bad, I don’t notice.”

Your sweet boyfriend just rolls his eyes and leans back, side-eyeing the offending design choice. 

Peering over the edge of your mug, you admire the way the mid-morning sunlight streams through his hair, highlighting it copper. His sweats hang low on his hips, underwear forgotten, black shirt slightly too small with how much he’s filled out with all the manual labor fixing up the house. 

While not the main reason you asked him to move in, pajama Robert Floyd is a high perk of the situation.

The scowl on his face isn’t quite as endearing. Your heart hurts knowing how frustrated he is by the ceiling. He loves you. He loves this house. It’s too much pressure on him wanting to make it perfect.

Ever since he permanently parked his truck in the driveway, Bobby’s been nothing but generous. He sees the charm and coziness of the bungalow, but also the repairs and fixes you’re too busy for. His entire leave was spent weeding the backyard, and your skin still heats remembering his muscles bulging after carrying the pile of boxes from the garage to the attic. 

While you won’t satiate your boyfriend by allowing him to drop cloth the living room and scrape every dimple of drywall off the ceiling today, you do have a better idea for getting Bob’s mind off his dreaded enemy.

His eyes widen as you stand up, admiring the way your body stretches in your cozy waffle knit robe before heading through to the kitchen. Listens to you fiddle with dishes before passing him again to the bedroom. Too far away to hear, he sinks back into the leather armchair, allowing his body to meld to the material while frustration sits low in his gut. 

The birds at the feeder chirp away before you return. Toes against hardwood catch his attention, and Bob’s head turns toward the hallway, mouth dropping open. 

You’re walking toward him in just his threadbare Naval academy shirt. The shirt you put on the first time you stayed the night. The shirt you were wearing when he last came home from deployment and you shyly asked him to move in. His favorite shirt.

“H-honey…” It’s an unfinished sentence as he takes in how the sunlight illuminates you from behind, baring the silhouette of your figure inside his shirt. 

A smile dances on your lips as you come closer, dropping something on the end table with a soft tink. A noise lost as you straddle Bobby’s thighs, his fingers racing to touch as much of you as quickly as possible. Groaning when he realizes that the shirt is all you have on, the soft flesh of your ass swallowed by his big hands. 

Your fingers smooth their way up his torso, gliding over the dark fabric until the long expanse of his neck pulses beneath your ministrations. Eventually curling into his hair, combing it back into place as he gazes at you earnestly. Within moments the two of you so deeply tangled it would take twice as long to separate.

Eyes filled with nothing but love, your lips quirk sweetly before pressing a kiss to his. Allowing it to linger before pulling away to explain. “I appreciate how much work you’re putting into the house, but I don’t want you to stress. Can I help you relax?”

In place of a response, he groans and pulls you tighter to him, relishing the feel of your skin. 

“Is that a yes?” Your laugh fades as he captures your mouth in a soft kiss. The sunlight highlighting him as you gaze lovingly into his oceanic eyes. The same color as the La Jolla print you bought last summer that he just hung up.

Bob is more than happy to spend the rest of the morning making out. Enjoying the soft warmth of you beneath his hands and the taste of your tongue. The morning sun setting the mood while the birds on the porch sing the soundtrack. It was perfect for him.

Well…perfect until you ran your thumb down the outline of his cock and breathed the most sinful words against his jaw.

“Actually, I was thinking I could keep your cock warm?”

His moan is more of a whine as he immediately swallows your tongue, so grateful for this Saturday morning surprise. Raises his hips as you drag his sweats down, releasing his slowly hardening cock into the space between you, already wet at the tip.

“Honey - ah, that feels s’good,” he interrupts himself as your hand wraps around him,”-but we should prep you. Don’t want to hurt you, honey bear.”

Your face splits into a gentle grin, so enamored by the way he takes care of you even when he’s hotly thrusting his hips into your fist. A grin that pops in surprise when his fingers trace along your folds, appreciating the arousal dripping over your thighs. 

It’s so hot that you only wear his shirt without panties.

His rough thumb slips along your clit, working its way in soft circles. It’s a treat the way your nipples harden against his shirt, level with his eyes as your mouth falls open with sounds only for him. He can’t wait to watch you fall apart stretched out on his cock.

A hand on his wrist makes him pause, your half-lidded eyes finding his. You give him a sly smile as you lean forward to the end table. “Don’t need to, you got me nice and open last night, remember?”

As visions of pounding you face down in the bed only hours before run before his eyes, his mouth opens to protest. He’s fully aware of how big he is and how tight you are.

You press your finger to his lips as you raise what you’d grabbed in the bedroom. “A little of this and we’re good, promise.”

The lube bottle slips between your fingers, applying the slick substance along his shaft as you press soothing pecks along his temple.

“Can’t wait to be full of you, Bobby.” His fingers dig into your skin. Your dirty mouth will be the end of him. Especially with how your eyes burn into his while you raise up on your knees, lining up his obscenely shiny cock with your dripping slit.

“You sure you can take all of me, Honey?”

His gaze meets yours with that steely hint of condescension right as his tip breeches your folds, your pathetic nod spurring the beginning of your descent. 

The popcorn ceiling is the last thing on his mind as your velvet insides take him in. The snug fit of you mixed with the heady scent of your sweat has him dizzy, wrapping his strong arms around you to maintain control. It’s hard to think straight when you take every inch of him so beautifully, the lube assisting your efforts.

“Almost there, so close,” Bob breathes against your lips, the hair of his pelvis beginning to brush against your clit. You’re at capacity and there’s still more. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been together, every time you think you’ve taken all of him, there’s always more.

Breath caught in your chest, his lips swallow your moan as you finally take him to the hilt, hips pressed fully together in their loving embrace. You’re so full, too full, deliciously full. His warm hand along your back soothes you, massaging while gritting himself against how good it feels.

You laugh through the consuming fullness. “This is supposed to be relaxing you, sorry.”

“Hon, never apologize for making me feel this good. This is exactly what I needed.”

Despite the tense way he’s holding his jaw, he looks content. Soft sapphire eyes shining with admiration, sandy hair swept off his forehead, a soft bead of perspiration trailing down his neck as he fights off the need to thrust. You cradle his jaw between your fingers, loving the way he keens beneath your touch. He’s out of a fairytale.

“I love you.”

“Love you more.”

Time stands still - the melody of the birds fading into the sun-drenched morning - as you bask in the feel of each other. Connected as one in the soft leather of his favorite chair. Soothing fingers trail up your back beneath his shirt, skimming the edges of your breasts, as your own trace the defined planes of his features. 

“I just want your house to be perfect. You deserve perfect things.” He burrows his face in the crook of your neck, placing a delicate kiss as he feels your satin walls contract around him.

You whisper against his hair. “It’s our house.”

Actions replace words as his hands travel up your shirt, crossing over your back as he holds you to him, dragging his lips over each spot of skin available. Skin warmed by sun is covered in adoration.

You shift, the pulsing of his shaft dizzying, as the acts of his love pepper your cheeks, your jaw, your sensitive neck. You love him more than words could ever express.

Love you. Love you so, so much.

When your foreheads finally rest against each other, antsy with arousal and admiration, Bob finally can’t help himself. A soft thrust up into your dripping center, the most delicious treat. The desperate whimper you release against his cheek only spurs him on, shifting his hips back once more only to sink fully into the home of your body.

“I think I’m done with cockwarming,” you admit with a breathless smirk as his hips buck into yours once again.

Your horny boyfriend has never heard more beautiful words. 

Strong hands grip your thighs as he pushes himself up to stand, your legs clenching around his lithe waist as your sense of gravity disappears. The shock instantly replaced by the growing hunger consuming you as he walks to the bedroom, still buried deep in you.

“Ugh, stop showing off. You know I think it’s so hot you can carry me mid-sex.”

Bob pauses in the hallway, leaning back to hold your gaze. “Maybe that’s why I keep doing it.”That cobalt steel back in place. “Now be a good girl and let me take you to bed.”

taglist: @bella-maria2018 @berryvanille @bobfloydsbabe @bobgasm @bradshawsbaby @cosmoeticss @creatchie8 @desert-fern @drxgxnslxyer @hangmanapologist @hiireadstuff @himbos-on-ice @jessicab1991 @just-in-case-iloveyou @kmc1989 @mariaenchanted @maryelizabeth13 @midnightmagpiemama @nerdgirljen @nouis-bum @petersunderoos96 @roosterforme @seitmai @senawashere @sometimesanalice @sorchathered @sweetwhispersofchaos @sydsommersss @topherwrites @xoxabs88xox @yuckosworld @primroseluna @hauntedduckdefendor @unpretty-reader @erospecies @pinkdaisies9285 @spinning-away @livingoutsidethetardis

join the taglist for any fic

#bungalow!bob #robert bob floyd #bob floyd #robert bob floyd x reader #robert bob floyd x you #bob floyd x reader #bob floyd x you #robert bob floyd smut #bob floyd smut #robert bob floyd fan fiction #bob floyd fan fiction #top gun: maverick fan fiction #top gun: maverick smut

[asha-mage]

WoT Meta: Feudalism, Class, And The Politics of The Wheel of Time

One of my long standing personal annoyances with the fantasy genre is that it often falls into the trap of simplifying feudal class systems, stripping out the interesting parts and the nuance to make something that’s either a lot more cardboard cut-out, or has our modern ideas about class imposed onto it.

Ironically the principal exception is also the series that set the bar for me. As is so often the case, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is unique in how much it works to understand and convey a realistic approach to power, politics, government, rulership, and the world in general–colored neither by cynicism or idealism. How Jordan works the feudal system into his world building is no exception–weaving in the weaknesses, the strengths, and the banal realities of what it means to have a Lord or Lady, a sovereign Queen or King, and to exist in a state held together by interpersonal relationships between them–while still conveying themes and ideas that are, at their heart, relevant to our modern world.

So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how he does that.

Defining the Structure

First, since we’re talking about feudal class systems, let's define what that means– what classes actually existed, how they related to each other, and how that is represented in Jordan’s world. 

But before that, a quick disclaimer. To avoid getting too deep into the historical weeds, I am going to be making some pretty wide generalizations. The phrases ‘most often’, ‘usually’, and ‘in general’ are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. While the strata I’m describing is broadly true across the majority medieval and early Renaissance feudal states these things were obviously heavily influenced by the culture, religion, geography, and economics of their country–all of which varied widely and could shift dramatically over a surprisingly small amount of time (sometimes less than a single generation). Almost nothing I am going to say is universally applicable to all feudal states, but all states will have large swathes of it true for them, and it will be widely applicable. The other thing I would ask you to keep in mind is that a lot of our conceptions of class have been heavily changed by industrialization. It’s impossible to overstate how completely the steam engine altered the landscape of socio-politics the world over, in ways both good and bad. This is already one of those things that Jordan is incredibly good at remembering, and that most fantasy authors are very good at forgetting. 

The disparity between your average medieval monarch’s standard of living and their peasants was pretty wide, but it was nothing compared to the distance between your average minimum wage worker and any billionaire; the monarch and the peasant had far more in common with each other than you or I do with Jeff Bezos or Mike Zuckerberg. The disparity between most people’s local country lord and their peasants was even smaller. It was only when the steam engine made the mass production of consumer goods possible that the wealth gap started to become a chasm–and that was in fact one of the forces that lead to the end of the feudal system and the collapse of many (though by no means all) of the ruling monarchies in Europe. I bring this up because the idea of a class system not predicated on the accumulation of capital seems pretty alien to our modern sensibilities, but it was the norm for most of history. Descent and birth mattered far more than the riches you could acquire–and the act of accumulating wealth was itself often seen as something vulgar and in many countries actively sinful. So with that in mind, what exactly were the classes of feudalism, and how do they connect to the Wheel of Time?

The Monarch and their immediate family unsurprisingly occupied the top of the societal pyramid (at least, in feudal states that had a monarch and royal family- which wasn’t all of them). The Monarch was head of the government and was responsible for administering the nation: collecting taxes, seeing them spent, enforcing law, defending the country’s borders and vassals in the event of war, etc. Contrary to popular belief, relatively few monarchs had absolute power during the medieval period. But how much power the monarch did have varied widely- some monarchs were little more than figureheads, others were able to centralize enough power on themselves to dictate the majority of state business- and that balance could shift back and forth over a single generation, or even a single reign depending on the competence of the monarch. 

The royal family usually held power in relation to their monarch, but also at the monarch’s discretion. The more power a monarch had, the more likely they were to delegate it to trusted family members in order to aid with the administration of the realm. This was in both official and unofficial capacities: princes were often required to do military service as a right of passage, and to act as diplomats or officials, and princesses (especially those married into foreign powers) were often used as spies for their home state, or played roles in managing court affairs and business on behalf of the ruler.

Beneath the monarch and their family you get the noble aristocracy, and I could write a whole separate essay just on the delineations and strata within this group, but suffice to say the aristocracy covers individuals and families with a wide range of power and wealth. Again, starting from that country lord whose power and wealth in the grand scheme of things is not much bigger than his peasants, all the way to people as powerful, or sometimes more powerful, than the monarch. 

Nobles in a feudal system ruled over sections of land (the size and quality usually related sharply to their power) setting taxes, enforcing laws, providing protection to the peasants, hearing petitions, etc. within their domains. These nobles were sometimes independent, but more often would swear fealty to more powerful nobles (or monarchs) in exchange for greater protection and membership in a nation state. Doing so meant agreeing to pay taxes, obey (and enforce) the laws of the kingdom, and to provide soldiers to their liege in the event of war. The amount of actual power and autonomy nobles had varied pretty widely, and the general rule of thumb is that the more powerful the monarch is, the less power and autonomy the nobles have, and vice versa. Nobles generally were expected to be well educated (or at least to be able to pretend they were) and usually provided the pool from which important government officials were drawn–generals, council members, envoys, etc–with some kingdoms having laws that prevented anyone not of noble descent from occupying these positions.

Beneath the nobles you get the wealthy financial class–major merchants, bankers, and the heads of large trade guilds. Those Marx referred to generally as the bourgeoisie because they either own means of production or manage capital. In a feudal system this class tended to have a good bit of soft power, since their fortunes could buy them access to circles of the powerful, but very little institutional power, since the accumulation and pursuit of riches, if anything, was seen to have negative moral worth. An underlying presumption of greediness was attached to this class, and with it the sense that they should be kept out of direct power.

That was possible, in part, because there weren't that many means of production to actually own, or that much capital to manage, in a pre-industrial society. Most goods were produced without the aid of equipment that required significant capital investment (a weaver owned their own loom, a blacksmith owned their own tools, etc), and most citizens did not have enough wealth to make use of banking services. This is the class of merchants who owned, but generally didn’t directly operate, multiple trading ships or caravans, guild leaders for craftsfolk who required large scale equipment to do their work (copper and iron foundries for the making of bells, for example), and bankers who mainly served the nobility and other wealthy individuals through the loaning and borrowing of money. This usually (but not always) represented the ceiling of what those not born aristocrats could achieve in society.

After that you get middling merchants, master craftsfolk and specialty artisans, in particular of luxury goods. Merchants in this class usually still directly manage their expeditions and operations, while the craftsfolk and artisans are those with specialty skill sets that can not be easily replicated without a lifetime of training. Master silversmiths, dressmakers, lacquer workers, hairdressers, and clockmakers are all found in this class. How much social clout individuals in this class have usually relates strongly to how much value is placed on their skill or product by their society (think how the Seanchan have an insatiable appetite for lacquer work and how Seanchan nobles make several Ebou Dari lacquer workers very rich) as well as the actual quality of the product. But even an unskilled artisan is still probably comfortable (as Thom says, even a bad clockmaker is still a wealthy man). Apprenticeships, where children are taught these crafts, are thus highly desired by those in lower classes,as it guaranteed at least some level of financial security in life.

Bellow that class you find minor merchants (single ship or wagon types), the owners of small businesses (inns, taverns, millers etc), some educated posts (clerks, scribes, accountants, tutors) and most craftsfolk (blacksmiths, carpenters, bootmakers, etc). These are people who can usually support themselves and their families through their own labor, or who, in the words of Jin Di, ‘work with their hands’. Most of those who occupy this class are found in cities and larger towns, where the flow of trade allows so many non-food producers to congregate and still (mostly) make ends meet. This is why there is only one inn, one miller, one blacksmith (with a single apprentice) in places like Emond’s Field: most smaller villages can not sustain more than a handful of non-food producers. This is also where you start to get the possibility of serious financial instability; in times of chaos it is people at this tier (and below) that are the first to be forced into poverty, flight, or other desperate actions to survive.

Finally, there is the group often collectively called ‘peasants’ (though that term is also sometimes used to mean anyone not noble born). Farmers, manual laborers, peddlers, fishers- anyone who is unlikely to be able to support more than themselves with their labor, and often had to depend on the combined labor of their spouse and families to get by. Servants also generally fit into this tier socially, but it’s important to understand that a servant in say, a palace, is going to be significantly better paid and respected than a maid in a merchant's house. This class is the largest, making up the majority of the population in a given country, and with a majority of its own number being food-producers specifically. Without the aid of the steam engine, most of a country’s populace needs to be producing food, and a great deal of it, in order to remain a functional nation. Most of the population as a result live in smaller spread out agrarian communities, loosely organized around single towns and villages. Since these communities will almost always lack access to certain goods or amenities (Emond’s Field has a bootmaker, but no candlemaker, for example) they depend on smalltime traders, called peddlers, to provide them with everyday things, who might travel from town to town with no more than a single wagon, or even just a large pack.

The only groups lower than peasants on the social hierarchy are beggars, the destitute, and (in societies that practice slavery) slaves. People who can not (or are not allowed to) support themselves, and instead must either eke out a day to day existence from scraps, or must be supported by others. Slaves can perform labor of any kind, but they are regarded legally as a means of production rather than a laborer, and the value is awarded to their owner instead. 

It’s also worth noting that slavery has varied wildly across history in how exactly it was carried out and ran the gamut from the trans-Atlantic chattel slavery to more caste or punitive-based slavery systems where slaves could achieve freedom, social mobility, or even some degree of power within their societies. But those realities (as with servants) had more to do with who their owners were than the slave’s own merit, and the majority of slaves (who are almost always seen as less than a freedman even when they are doing the same work) were performing the same common labor as the ‘peasant’ class, and so viewed as inferior.

Viewing The Wheel of Time Through This Lens

So what does all this have to do with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time? A lot actually, especially compared to his contemporaries in fantasy writing. Whereas most fantasy taking place in feudal systems succumbs to the urge to simplify matters (sometimes as far down to their only being two classes, ‘peasant’ and ‘royalty’) Jordan much more closely models real feudalism in his world. 

The majority of the nations we encounter are feudal monarchies, and a majority of each of their populations are agrarian farming communities overseen by a local lord or other official. How large a nation’s other classes are is directly tied to how prosperous the kingdom is, which is strongly connected to how much food and how many goods the kingdom can produce on the available land within it. This in turn, is tightly interdependent on how stable the kingdom is and how effective its government is.

Andor is the prime example: a very large, very prosperous kingdom, which is both self-sufficient in feeding itself via its large swathes of farmland (so much so that they can afford to feed Cairhien through selling their surplus almost certainly at next to no profit) and rich in mineral wealth from mines in the west. It is capable of supporting several fairly large cities even on its outskirts, as well as the very well-developed and cosmopolitan Caemlyn as its capital. This allows Andor to maintain a pretty robust class of educated workers, craftsfolk, artisans, etc, which in turn furthers the realm’s prosperity. At the top of things, the Queen presides over the entire realm with largely centralized power to set laws and taxes. Beneath her are the ‘great houses’–the only Houses in Andor besides the royal house who are strong enough that other nobles ‘follow where they lead’ making them the equivalent of Duchesses and Dukes, with any minor nobles not sworn directly to the Queen being sworn to these ten.

And that ties into something very important about the feudal system and the impact it had on our world and the impact it has on Jordan's. To quote Youtuber Jack Rackham, feudalism is what those in the science biz would call an unstable equilibrium. The monarch and their vassals are constantly in conflict with each other; the vassals desiring more power and autonomy, as the monarch works to centralize power on themselves. In feudalism there isn’t really a state army. Instead the monarch and the nobles all have personal armies, and while the monarch’s might be stronger than anyone else’s army, it’s never going to be stronger than everybody else’s. 

To maintain peace and stability in this situation everyone has to essentially play Game of Thrones (or as Jordan called it years before Martin wrote GoT, Daes Dae’mar) using political maneuvering, alliances, and scheming in order to pursue their goals without the swords coming out, and depending on the relative skill of those involved, this can go on for centuries at a time….or break apart completely over the course of a single bad summer, and plunge the country into civil war.

Cairhien is a great example of this problem. After losing the Aiel War and being left in ruins, the monarch who ultimately secured the throne of Cairhien, Galldrian Riatin, started from a place of profound weakness. He inherited a bankrupt, war torn and starving country, parts of which were still actively on fire at the time. As Thom discusses in the Great Hunt, Galddrian's failure to resettle the farmers displaced by the war left Cairhien dependent on foreign powers to feed the populace (the grain exports from Tear and Andor) and in order to prevent riots in his own capital, Galldrian choose bread and circuses to keep the people pacified rather then trying to substantially improve their situation. Meanwhile, the nobles, with no effective check on them, began to flex their power, seeing how much strength they could take away from each other and the King, further limiting the throne’s options in how to deal with the crisis, and forcing the King to compete with his most powerful vassals in order to just stay on the throne. This state of affairs ultimately resulted, unsurprisingly, in one of Galladrin’s schemes backfiring, him ending up dead, and the country plunging into civil war, every aristocrat fighting to replace him and more concerned with securing their own power then with restoring the country that was now fully plunged into ruin.

When Dyelin is supporting Elayne in the Andoran Succession, it is this outcome (or one very much like it) that she is attempting to prevent. She says as much outright to Elayne in Knife of Dreams–a direct succession is more stable, and should only be prevented in a situation where the Daughter Heir is unfit–through either incompetence or malice–to become Queen. On the flip side, Arymilla and her lot are trying to push their own agendas, using the war as an excuse to further enrich their Houses or empower themselves and their allies. Rhavin’s machinations had very neatly destabilized Andor, emboldening nobles such as Arymilla (who normally would never dream of putting forward a serious claim for the throne) by making them believe Morgase and Trakand were weak and thus easy to take advantage of. 

We also see this conflict crop up as a central reason Murandy and Altara are in their current state as well. Both are countries where their noble classes have almost complete autonomy, and the monarch is a figurehead without significantly more power than their vassals (Tylin can only keep order in Ebou Dar and its immediate surrounding area, and from what she says her father started with an even worse deal,with parts of the capital more under the control of his vassals than him). Their main unifying force is that they wish to avoid invasion and domination by another larger power (Andor for Murandy, Illian and Amadica for Altara) and the threat of that is the only thing capable of bringing either country into anything close to unity.

Meanwhile a lack of centralization has its trade offs; people enjoy more relative freedoms and social mobility (both depend heavily on trade, which means more wealth flowing into their countries but not necessarily accumulating at the top, due to the lack of stability), and Altara specifically has a very robust ‘middle class’ (or as near as you can get pre-industrialization) of middling to minor merchants, business and craftsfolk, etc. Mat’s time in Ebou Dar (and his friendship with Satelle Anan) gets into a lot of this. Think of the many many guilds that call Altara home, and how the husband of an inn owner can do a successful enough business fishing that he comes to own several crafts by his own merit. 

On the flip side both countries have problems with violence and lawlessness due to the lack of any enforced uniformity in terms of justice. You might ride a day and end up in land ruled by a Lord or Lady with a completely different idea of what constitutes, say, a capital offense, than the Lord or Lady you were under yesterday. This is also probably why Altara has such an ingrained culture of duels to resolve disputes, among both nobles and common folk. Why appeal to a higher authority when that authority can barely keep the streets clean? Instead you and the person you are in conflict with, on anything from the last cup of wine to who cheated who in a business deal, can just settle it with your knives and not have to bother with a hearing or a petition. It’s not like you could trust it anyways; as Mat informs us, most of the magistrates in Altara do the bidding of whoever is paying their bribes.

But neither Altara nor Murandy represents the extreme of how much power and autonomy nobles can manage to wrangle for themselves. That honor goes to Tear, where the nobles have done away with the monarch entirely to instead establish what amounts to an aristocratic confederacy. Their ruling council (The High Lords of Tear) share power roughly equally among themselves, and rule via compromise and consensus. This approach also has its tradeoffs: unlike Murandy and Altara, Tear is still able to effectively administer the realm and create uniformity even without a monarch, and they are able to be remarkably flexible in terms of their politics and foreign policy, maintaining trade relationships even with bitter enemies like Tar Valon or Illian.  On the flipside, the interests of individual nobles are able to shape policy and law to a much greater extent, with no monarch to play arbiter or hold them accountable. This is the source of many of the social problems in Tear: a higher sense of justice, good, or even just plain fairness all take a back seat to the whims and interest of nobles. Tear is the only country where Jordan goes out of his way, repeatedly, to point out wealth inequality and injustice. They are present in other countries, but Jordan drives home that it is much worse in Tear, and much more obscene. 

This is at least in part because there is no one to serve as a check to the nobles, not even each other. A monarch is (at least in theory) beholden to the country as a whole, but each High Lord is beholden only to their specific people, house and interests, and there is no force present that can even attempt to keep the ambitions and desires of the High Lords from dictating everything. So while Satelle Anan's husband can work his way up from a single fishing boat to the owner of multiple vessels, most fisherman and farmers in Tear scrape by on subsistence, as taxes are used to siphon off their wealth and enrich the High Lords. While in Andor ‘even the Queen most obey the law she makes or there is no law’ (to quote Morgase), Tairen Lords can commit murder, rape, or theft without any expectation of consequences, because the law dosen’t treat those acts as crimes when done to their ‘lessers’, and any chance someone might get their own justice back (as they would in Altara) is quashed, since the common folk are not even allowed to own weapons in Tear. As we’re told in the Dragon Reborn, when an innkeeper is troubled by a Lord cheating at dice in the common room, the Civil Watch will do nothing about it and citizens in Tear are banned from owning weapons so there is nothing he can do about it. The best that can be hoped for is that he will ‘get bored and go away’.

On the opposite end, you have the very very centralized Seanchan Empire as a counter example to Tear, so centralized it’s almost (though not quite) managed to transcend feudalism. In Seanchan the aristocratic class has largely been neutered by the monarchy, their ambitions and plots kept in check by a secret police (the Seekers of Truth) and their private armies dwarfed by a state army that is rigorously kept and maintained. It’s likely that the levies of the noble houses, if they all united together, would still be enough to topple the Empress, but the Crystal Throne expends a great deal of effort to ensure that doesn't happen,playing the nobles against each other and taking advantage of natural divisions in order to keep them from uniting.

Again, this has pros and cons. The Seanchan Empire is unquestionably prosperous; able to support a ridiculous food surplus and the accompanying flow of wealth throughout its society, and it has a level of equity in its legal administration that we don’t see anywhere else in Randland. Mat spots the heads of at least two Seanchan nobles decorating the gates over Ebou Dar when he enters, their crimes being rape and theft, which is a far cry from the consequence-free lives of the Tairen nobles. Meanwhile a vast state-sponsored bureaucracy works to oversee the distribution of resources and effective governance in the Empress’s name. No one, Tuon tells us proudly, has to beg or go hungry in the Empire. But that is not without cost. 

Because for all its prosperity, Seanchan society is also incredibly rigid and controlling. One of the guiding philosophies of the Seanchan is ‘the pattern has a place for everything and everything’s place should be obvious on sight’. The classes are more distinct and more regimented than anywhere else we see in Randland. The freedoms and rights of everyone from High Lords to common folk are curtailed–and what you can say or do is sharply limited by both social convention and law. The Throne (and its proxies) are also permitted to deprive you of those rights on nothing more than suspicion. To paraphrase Egeanin from TSR: Disobeying a Seeker (and presumably any other proxy of the Empress) is a crime. Flight from a Seeker is a crime. Failure to cooperate fully with a Seeker is a crime. A Seeker could order a suspected criminal to go fetch the rope for their own binding, and the suspected criminal would be expected to do it–and likely would because failure to do anything else would make them a criminal anyway, whatever their guilt or innocence in any other matter.

Meanwhile that food surplus and the resulting wealth of the Empire is built on its imperialism and its caste-based slavery system, and both of those are inherently unsustainable engines. What social mobility there is, is tied to the Empire’s constant cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat–Egeanin raises that very point early on, that the Corenne would mean ‘new names given and the chance to rise high’. But that cycle also creates an endless slew of problems and burning resentments, as conquered populations resist assimilation, the resistance explodes into violence that the Seanchan must constantly deal with–the ‘near constant rebellions since the Conquest finished’ that Mat mentions when musing on how the Seanchan army has stayed sharp.

The Seanchan also practice a form of punitive and caste-based slavery for non-channelers, and chattel slavery for channelers. As with the real-life Ottoman Empire, some da’covale enjoy incredible power and privilege in their society, but they (the Deathwatch Guard, the so’jhin, the Seekers) are the exception, not the rule. The majority of the slaves we encounter are nameless servants, laborers, or damane. While non-channelers have some enshrined legal protections in how they can be treated by their masters and society as a whole, we are told that emancipation is incredibly rare, and the slave status is inherited from parent to child as well as used as a legal punishment–which of course would have the natural effect of discouraging most da’covale from reproducing by choice until after (or if) they are emancipated–so the primary source for most of the laborers and servants in Seanchan society is going to be either people who are being punished or who choose to sell themselves into slavery rather then beg or face other desperate circumstances. 

This keeps the enslaved population in proportion with the rest of society only because of the Empire’s imperialism- that same cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat, has the side effect of breeding instability, which breeds desperation and thus provides a wide pool to draw on of both those willing to go into slavery to avoid starvation, and those who are being punished with slavery for wronging the state in some manner. It’s likely the only reason the Empire’s production can keep pace with its constant war efforts: conquered nations (and subdued rebellions) eventually yield up not just the necessary resources, but also the necessary laborers to cultivate them in the name of the state, and if that engine stalls for any sustained length of time (like say a three hundred year peace enforced by a treaty), it would mean a labor collapse the likes of which the Empire has never seen before.

A note on damane here: the damane system is undoubtedly one of chattel slavery, where human beings are deprived of basic rights and person hood under the law for the enrichment of those that claim ownership over them. Like in real life this state of affairs is maintained by a set of ingrained cultural prejudices, carefully constructed lies, and simple ignorance of the truly horrific state of affairs that the masses enjoy. The longevity of channelers insulates the damane from some of the problems of how slavery can be unsustainable, but in the long run it also suffers from the same structural problem: when the endless expansion stops, so too will the flow of new damane, and the resulting cratering of power the Empire will face will put it in jeopardy like nothing has before. There is also the problem that, as with real life chattel slavery, if any one piece of the combination of ignorance, lies, and prejudice starts to fall apart, an abolition movement becomes inevitable–and several characters are setting the stage for just that via the careful spreading of the truth about the sul’dam. Even if the Seanchan successfully put down an abolition movement, doing so will profoundly weaken them in a way that will necessitate fundamental transformation, or ensure collapse.

How Jordan Depicts The Relationships Between Classes

As someone who is very conscious in how he depicts class in his works, it makes sense that Jordan frequently focuses on characters interacting through the barriers of their various classes in different ways. New Spring in particular is a gold mine for this kind of insight.

Take, for example, Moiraine and Siuan’s visit to the master seamstress. A lesser writer would not think more deeply on the matter than ‘Moiraine is nobly born so obviously she’s going to be snobby and demanding, while down-to-earth Siuan is likely to be build a natural rapport and have better relationship her fellow commoner, the seamstress Tamore Alkohima’. But Jordan correctly writes it as the reverse: Tamore Alkohima might not be nobly born, but she is not really a peasant either–rather she belongs to that class of speciality artisans, who via the value placed on her labor and skill, is able to live quite comfortably. Moiraine is much more adept at maneuvering this kind of possibly fraught relationship than Siuan is. Yes, she is at the top of the social structure (all the more so since becoming Aes Sedai) but that does not release her from a need to observe formalities and courtesies with someone who, afterall, is doing something for Moiraine that she can not do for herself, even with the Power. If Moiraine wants the services of a master dressmaker, the finest in Tar Valon, she must show respect for both Tamore Alkohima and her craft, which means submitting to her artistic decisions, as well as paying whatever price, without complaint.

Siuan, who comes from the poor Maule district in Tear, is not used to navigating this kind of situation. Most of those she has dealt with before coming to the Tower were either her equals or only slightly above her in terms of class. She tries to treat Tamore Alkohima initially like she most likely treated vendors in the Maule where everyone is concerned with price, since so many are constantly on the edge of poverty, and she wants to know exactly what she is buying and have complete say over the final product, which is the practical mentality of someone to whom those factors had a huge impact on her survival. Coin wasted on fish a day from going bad, or netting that isn’t the right kind, might have meant the difference between eating that week or not, for a young Siuan and her father. 

Yet this this reads as an insult to Tamore Alkohima, who takes it as being treated with mockery, and leads to Moiraine needing to step in to try and smooth things over, and explain to Siuan-

“Listen to me, Siuan and do not argue.” she whispered in a rush. “We must not keep Tamore waiting long. Do not ask after prices: she will tell us after we make our selections. Nothing you buy here will be cheap, but the dresses Tamore sews for you will make you look Aes Sedai as much as the shawl does. And it is Tamore, not Mistress Alkohima. You must observe the properties or she will believe you are mocking her. But try thinking of her as a sister who stands just a little above you. A touch of deference is necessary. Just a touch, but she will tell you what to wear as much as she asks.” “And will the bloody shoe maker tell us what kind of slippers to buy and charge us enough to buy fifty new sets of nets?” “No.” Moiraine said impatiently. Tamore was only arching one eyebrow but her face may as well have been a thunderhead. The meaning of that eyebrow was clear as the finest crystal. They had already made the seamstress wait too long, and there was going to be a price for it. And that scowl! She hurried on, whispering as fast as she could. “The shoemaker will make us what we want and we will bargain the price with him, but not too hard if we want his best work. The same with the glovemaker, the stockingmaker, the shiftmaker, and all the rest. Just be glad neither of us needs a hairdresser. The best hairdressers are true tyrants, and nearly as bad as perfumers.”

-New Spring, Chapter 13: Business in the City.

Navigating the relationship between characters of a different class is something a of a running theme throughout New Spring–from Moiraine’s dealing with the discretion of her banker (‘Another woman who knew well her place in the world’ as Moiraine puts it), to having to meet with peasants during her search for the Dragon Reborn (and bungling several of those interactions), to wading through the roughest criminal parts of Chachin in search of an inn, and frequently needing to resort to the Power to avoid or resolve conflict. Moiraine’s ability to handle these situations is tightly tied to her experience with the people involved prior to her time as a Novice, but all hold up and give color to the class system Jordan presents. It also serves as set up so that when Moraine breaks the properties with a different seamstress near the end of the book, it can be a sign of the rising tension and the complex machinations she and Siuan find themselves in.

Notably, Moiraine and Siuan’s relative skill with working with people is strongly related to their backgrounds: the more Moiraine encounters people outside her lived experience as a noble daughter in Cairhien, the more she struggles to navigate those situations while Siuan is much more effective at dealing with the soldiers during the name-taking sequence (who are drawn mostly from the same class as her–common laborers, farmers, etc), and the people in Chachin, where she secures an lodging and local contacts to help in the search with relative ease.

Trying to navigate these waters is also something that frequently trips up characters in the main series as well, especially with the Two Rivers folk who are, ultimately, from a relatively classless society that does not subscribe to feudal norms (more on that below). All of them react to both moving through a society that does follow those norms, and later, being incorporated into its power structures in different, frequently disastrous ways.

Rand, who is not used to the complicated balance between vassal and monarch (which is all the more complicated as he is constantly adding more and more realms under his banner) finds imposing his will and leading the aristocrats who swear fealty to him incredibly difficult. While his reforms are undoubtedly good for the common folk and the general welfare of the nations he takes over, he is most often left to enforce them with threats and violence, which ultimately fuel resistance, rebellion, and more opposition to him throughout the nations he rules, and has down-the-line bad ripple effects on how he treats others, both noble and not, who disagree with him. 

Rand also struggles even with those who sincerely wish to serve and aid him in this context: he is awkward with servants, distant with the soldiers and warriors who swear their lives to him, and even struggles with many of his advisors and allies. Part of that is distrust that plagues him in general, but a big element to it is also his own outsider perspective. The Aiel frequently complain that Rand tries to lead them like a King, but that’s because they assume a wetlander King always leads by edict and command. Yet Rand’s efforts to do that with the Westland nations he takes over almost always backfire or have lasting consequences. Rand is frequently trying to frequently play act at what he thinks a King is and does–and when he succeeds it’s almost always a result of Moiraine or Elayne’s advice on the subject, not his own instincts or preconceptions.

Perrin, meanwhile, is unable to hide his contempt for aristocracy and those that willingly follow them, which leads to him both being frequently derelict in his duties as a Lord, and not treating his followers with a great deal of respect. Nynaeve has a similar problem, where she often tries to ‘instill backbone’ into those lower in the class system then her, then comes to regret it when that backbone ends up turned on her, and her leadership rejected or her position disrespected by those she had encouraged to reject leadership or not show respect to people in higher positions.

Interestingly, it’s Mat that most effectively manages to navigate various inter-class relationships, and who via the Band of the Red Hand builds a pretty equitable, merit-based army. He does this by following a simple rule: treating people how they wish to be treated. He accepts deference when it’s offered, but never demands it. He pushes back on the notion he’s a Lord often, but only makes it a serious bone with people who hold the aristocracy in contempt. He’s earnest in his dealings, fair minded, and good at reading social situations to adapt to how folks expect him to act, and when he breaches those expectations it’s usually a deliberate tactical choice. 

This lets him maintain strong friendships with people of all backgrounds and classes– from Princes like Beslan to horse thieves like Chel Vanin. More importantly, it makes everyone under his command feel included, respected, and valued for what they are. Mat has Strong Ideas About Class (and about most things really), but he’s the only Two Rivers character who doesn't seem to be working from an assumption that everyone else ought to live by his ideals. He thinks anyone that buys into the feudal system is mad, but he doesn't actually let that impact how he treats anyone–probably from the knowledge that they think he’s just as mad.

Getting Creative With the Structure

The other thing I want to dig into is the ways in which Jordan, via his understanding of the feudal system, is able to play with it in creative and interesting ways that match his world. Succession is the big one; who rules after the current monarch dies is a massively important matter since it determines the flow of power in a country from one leader to the next. The reason so many European monarchies had primogeniture (eldest child inherits all titles) succession is not because everyone just hated second children, it’s because primogeniture is remarkably stable. Being able to point to the eldest child of the monarch and say them, that one, and their younger sibling if they're not around, and so on is very good for the transition of power, since it establishes a framework that is both easy to understand and very very hard to subvert. Pretty much the only way, historically, to subvert a primogeniture succession is for either the heir’s blood relationship to the monarch or the legitimacy of their parent’s marriage to be called into question.

And yet despite that, few of the countries in Jordan's world actually use primogeniture succession. Andor does, as do some of the Borderlands, but the majority of  monarchies in Randland use elective succession, where the monarch is elected from among the aristocratic class by some kind of deliberative body. This is the way things are in Tarabon, Arad Doman,Ghealdan, Illian, and Malkier, who all elect the monarchs (or diarchs in the case of Tarabon- where two rulers, the Panarch and the King, share power) via either special council or some other assembly of aristocrats. 

There are three countries where we don’t know the succession type (Arafel, Murandy, and Amadicia) but also one we know for sure doesn't use primogeniture succession: Cairhien. We know this because Moiraine’s claim to the Sun Throne as a member of House Damodred is seen as as legitimate enough for the White Tower to view putting her on the Sun Throne as a viable possibility, despite the fact that she has two older sisters whose claims would be considered superior to her own under primogeniture succession. We never find out for sure in the books what the succession law actually is (the country never stabilizes for a long enough period that it becomes important), but if I had to guess I would guess that it’s designated,where the monarch chooses their successor prior to their death, and that the civil war that followed the Aiel War was the result of both Laman and his designated heir(s) dying at the Bloodsnows (we are told by Moiraine that Laman and both his brothers are killed; likely one of them was the next in line).

One country that we know for sure uses designated succession is Seanchan, where the prospective heir is still chosen from among the children of the Empress, but they are made to compete with each other (usually via murder and plotting) for the monarch’s favor, the ‘best’ being then chosen to become the heir. This very closely models how the Ottoman Empire did succession (state sanctioned fratricide) and while it has the potential to ensure competence (by certain metrics, anyways) it also sows the seeds of potential instability by ensuring that the monarch is surrounded by a whole lot of people with bad will to them and feelings of being cheated or snubbed in the succession, or else out for vengeance for their favored and felled candidate. Of course, from the Seanchan’s point of view this is a feature not a bug: if you can’t win a civil war or prevent yourself from being assassinated, then you shouldn’t have the throne anyways.

Succession is far from the only way that Jordan plays with the feudal structure either. Population is something else that is very present in the world building, even though it’s only drawn attention to a handful of times. In our world, the global population steadily and consistently rose throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance (with only small dips for things like the plague and the Mongol Invasion), then exploded with the Industrial Revolution and has seen been on a meteoric climb year over year (something that may just now be stabilizing into an equilibrium again, only time will tell). This is one of the pressures that led to the collapse of feudalism in the real world, as a growing aristocratic class was confronted with finite land and titles, while at the same time the growing (and increasingly powerful) wealthy financial class of various countries were beginning to challenge the traditions and laws that kept them out of direct power. If you’ve ever read a Jane Austen novel (or really anything from the Georgian/Regency/Victorian eras) this tension is on display. The aristocratic class had never been as secure as people think, but the potential to fall into poverty and ruin had never been a greater threat, which had ripple effects for the stability of a nation, and in particular a monarch who derived much of their power from the fealty of their now-destabilized vassals.

In Jordan’s world however, we are told as early as The Great Hunt that the global population is steadily falling, and has been since the Hundred Years’ War (at least). No kingdom is able to actually control all the territory it has on a map, the size of armies have in particular shrunk consistently (to the point where it’s repeatedly commented on that the armies Rand puts together, some of no more than a few thousand, are larger than any ‘since Artur Hawkwing's day’), large swathes of land lay ungoverned and even more uninhabited or settled. Entire kingdoms have collapsed due to the inability of their increasingly small populations to hold together. This is the fate of many of the kingdoms Ingtar talks about in the Great Hunt: Almoth, Gabon, Hardan, Moredo, Caralain, to name just a few. They came apart due to a combination of ineffective leadership, low population, and a lack of strong neighbors willing or able to extend their power and stability over the area.

All of this means that there is actually more land than there are aristocrats to govern it; so much so that in places like Baerlon power is held by a crown-appointed governor because no noble house has been able to effectively entrench in the area. This has several interesting effects on the society and politics of Randland: people in general are far more aware of the fragility of the nation state as a idea then they would be otherwise, and institutions (even the intractable and mysterious White Tower) are not viewed by even their biggest partisans as invulnerable or perpetual. Even the most powerful leaders are aware, gazing out constantly, as they do, at the ruins of the hundreds of kingdoms that have risen and fallen since the Breaking of the World (itself nothing more, to their understanding, then the death of the ultimate kingdom) that there are no guarantees, no promises that it all won’t fall apart. 

This conflict reflects on different characters in different ways, drawing out selfishness and cowardice from some, courage and strength from others. This is a factor in Andor’s surprisingly egalitarian social climate: Elayne and Morgase both boast that Andorans are able to speak their minds freely to their leaders about the state of things, and be listened to, and even the most selfish of leaders like Elenia Sarand are painfully aware that they stand on a tower built from ‘the bricks of the common folk’, and make a concentrated effort to ensure their followers feel included and heard. Conversely it also reflects on the extremely regimented culture of the Borderlands, were dereliction of duty can mean not just the loss of your life, but the loss of a village, a town, a city, to Trolloc raids (another pressure likely responsible for slow and steady decline of the global population). 

The Borderlanders value duty, honor, and responsibility above all else, because those are the cornerstones holding their various nations together against both the march of time and the Blight. All classes place a high value on the social contract; the idea that everyone must fulfill their duty to keep society safe is a lot less abstract when the stakes are made obvious every winter through monsters raiding your towns. This is most obvious in both Hurin and Ingtar’s behavior throughout The Great Hunt: Hurin (and the rest of the non-noble class) lean on the assurance that the noble class will be responsible for the greater scale problems and issues in order to endure otherwise unendurable realities, and that Rand, Ingtar, Aglemar, Lan (all of whom he believes to be nobly born) have been raised with the necessary training and tools to take charge and lead others through impossible situations and are giving over their entire lives in service to the people. In exchange Hurin pays in respect, obedience, and (presumably) taxes. This frees Hurin up to focus on the things that are decidedly within his ken: tracking, thief taking, sword breaking, etc, trusting that Ingtar, and later Rand, will take care of everything else.

When Hurin comes up against the feudal system in Cairhien, where the failures of everyone involved have lead to a culture of endless backstabbing and scheming, forced deference, entitlement, and mutual contempt between the parties, he at first attempts to show the Cairhienin ‘proper’ behavior through example, in the hopes of drawing out some shame in them. But upon realizing that no one in Cairhien truly believes in the system any longer after it has failed the country so thoroughly (hence the willingness of vassals to betray their masters, and nobles to abandon their oaths–something unthinkable in the Borderlands) he reverts to his more normal shows of deference to Rand and Ingtar, abandoning excessive courtesy in favor of true fealty.

Ingtar (and later Rand) feel the reverse side of this: the pressure to be the one with the answers, to hold it all together, to be as much icon and object as living person, a figure who people can believe in and draw strength from when they have none of their own remaining, and knowing at the same time that their choices will decide the fates and lives of others. It’s no mistake that Rand first meets Hurin and begins this arc in the remains of Hardan, one of those swept-away nations that Ingtar talks about having been left nothing more than ‘the greatest stone quarry for a hundred miles’. The stakes of what can happen if they fail in this duty are made painfully clear from the start, and for Rand the stakes will only grow ever higher throughout the course of the series, as number of those ‘under his charge’ slides to become ‘a nation’ then ‘several nations’ and finally ‘all the world’. And that leads into one of the problems at the heart of Rand’s character arc.

This emphasis on the feudal contract and duty helps the Borderlands survive the impossible, but almost all of them (with the exception of Saldaea) practice cultures of emotional repression and control,spurning displays of emotion as a lack of self-control, and viewing it as weakness to address the pains and psychological traumas of their day to day lives. ‘Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather’, ‘There will be time to sleep when you’re dead’, ‘You can care for the living or mourn the dead, you cannot do both’: all common sayings in the Borderlands. On the one hand, all of these emphasize the importance of fulfilling your duty and obligations…but on the other, all also  implicitly imply the only true release from the sorrows and wounds taken in the course of that duty is death. It is this, in part, that breaks Ingtar: the belief that only the Borderlands truly understand the existential threat, and that he and those like him are suffering and dying for ‘soft southlanders’ whose kingdoms are destined to go to ruin anyways. It’s also why he reveals his suffering to Rand only after he has decided to die in a last stand–he is putting down the mountain of his trauma at last. This is also one of those moments in the books that is a particular building block on the road to Rand’s own problems with not expressing his feelings or being willing to work through his trauma, that will swing back around to endanger the same world he is duty-bound to protect.

I also suspect strongly that this is the source of the otherwise baffling Saldean practice of….what we will call dedicated emotional release. One of the core cultural Saldean traits (and something that is constantly tripping up Perrin in his interactions with Faile) is that Saldeans are the only Borderlanders to reject the notion that showing emotion is weakness. In fact, Saldeans in general believe that shows of anger, passion, sorrow, ardor–you name it–are a sign of both strength and respect. Your feelings are strong and they matter, and being willing to inflict them on another person is not a burden or a betrayal of duty, it’s knowing that they will be strong enough to bear whatever you are feeling. I would hesitate to call even the Saldaens well-adjusted (I don’t know that there is a way to be well-adjusted in a society at constant war), but I do think there is merit to their apparent belief in catharsis, and their resistance to emotional repression as a sign of strength. Of course, that doesn't make their culture naturally better at communication (as Faile and Perrin’s relationship problems prove) but I do think it plays a part in why Bashere is such a good influence on Rand, helping push him away from a lot of the stoic restraint Rand has internalized from Lan, Ingtar, Moiraine, et al.

It also demonstrates that a functioning feudal society is not dependent on absolute emotional repression, or perfect obedience.  Only mutual respect and trust between the parties are necessary–trust that the noble (or monarch) will do their best in the execution of their duties, and trust that the common folk in society will in turn fulfill their roles to the best of their ability. Faile’s effectiveness as Perrin’s co-leader/second in command is never hindered or even implied to be hindered by her temperament or her refusal to hide/repress her emotions. She is arguably the one who is doing most of the actual work of governing the Two Rivers after she and Perrin are acclaimed their lord and lady: seeing to public works projects, settling disputes, maintaining relationships with various official groups of their subjects.

The prologue from Lord of Chaos (a favorite scene of mine of the books) where Faile is holding public audience while Perrin is off sulking ‘again’ is a great great example of this; Faile is the quintessential Borderland noble heir, raised all her life in the skills necessary to run a feudal domain, and those skills are on prime display as she holds court. But that is not hindered by her willingness to show her true feelings, from contempt of those she thinks are wasting her time, to compassion and empathy to the Wisdoms who come to her for reassurance about the weather. This is one of those things that Perrin has to learn from her over the course of the series–that simply burying his emotions for fear they might hurt others is not a healthy way to go about life, and it isn’t necessary to rule or lead either. His prejudices about what constitutes a ‘good’ Lord (Lan, Agelmar, Ingtar) and a ‘bad’ one (literally everyone else) are blinding him, showing his lack of understanding of the system that his people are adopting, and his role in it.

Which is a nice dovetail with my next bit–

Outsiders And the Non-Feudal State

Another way Jordan effectively depicts the Feudal system is by having groups who decidedly do not practice it be prominent throughout the series–which is again accurate to real life history, where feudalism was the mode of government for much of (but by no means all) of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, but even in Europe their were always societies doing their own thing, and outside of it, different systems of government flourished in response to their environments and cultures; some with parallels to Feudalism, many completely distinct.

The obvious here are the Aiel who draw on several different non-feudal societies (the Scottish Highland Clans, the Iroquois Confederation, the Mongols, and the Zulu to name just a few) and the Seafolk (whose are a combination of the Maori and the Republic of Piracy of all things), but also firmly in these categories are groups like the communities in the Black Hills, Almoth Plain, and the Two Rivers.

Even though it’s an agrarian farming community made up primarily of small villages, the Two Rivers is not a feudal state or system. We tend to forget this because it looks a lot like our notion of a classic medieval European village, which our biases inherently equate to feudal, but Jordan is very good at remembering this is not the case, and that the Two Rivers folk are just as much outsiders to these systems as the Aiel, or the Seafolk. 

Consider how often the refrain of ‘don’t even know they’re part of the Kingdom of Andor’ is repeated in regards to the Two Rivers, and how much the knowledge of Our Heroes about how things like Kingdoms, courts, war, etc, are little more than fairy tales to the likes of those Two Rivers, while even places unaffected directly by things like the Trakand Succession or the Aiel War are still strongly culturally, economically, and politically impacted. 

Instead of deriving power and justice from a noble or even a code of law, power is maintained by two distinct groups of village elders (The Village Council and the Women’s Circle) who are awarded seats based on their standing within the community. These groups provide the day-to-day ordering of business and resolving of conflicts, aiding those in need and doing what they can for problems that impact the entire community. The Wisdom serves as the community physician, spiritual advisor, and judge (in a role that resembles what we know of pre-Christian celtic druids), and the Women’s Circle manages most social ceremonies from marriages to betrothals to funerals, as well as presiding over criminal trials (insofar as they even have them). The Mayor manages the village economics, maintaining relationships and arbitrating deals with outsider merchants and peddlers, collecting and spending public funds (through a volunteer collection when necessary, which is how we’re told the new sick house was built and presumably was how the village paid for things like fireworks and gleeman for public festivals), while the Council oversees civil matters like property disputes. 

On the surface this seems like an ideal community: idyllic, agrarian, decentralized, where everyone cares more about good food and good company and good harvests than matters of power, politics, or wealth, and without the need for any broader power-structure beyond the local town leaders. It’s the kind of place that luddites Tolkien and Thomas Jefferson envisioned as a utopia (and indeed the Two Rivers it the most Tolkien-y place in Randland after the Ogier stedding, of which we see relatively little), but I think Jordan does an excellent job of not romanticizing this way of life the way Tolkien often did. Because while the Two Rivers has many virtues and a great deal to recommend it, it also has many flaws.

The people in the Two Rivers are largely narrow minded and bigoted, especially to outsiders; The day after Moiraine saves the lives of the entire village from a Trolloc attack, a mob turns up to try and burn her out, driven by their own xenophobia and fear of that which they don’t understand. Their society is also heavily repressed and regressive in its sex norms and gender relations: the personal lives of everyone are considered public business, and anyone living in a fashion the Women’s Circle deems unsuitable (such as widower and single father Tam al’Thor) is subject to intense pressure to ‘correct’ their ways (remarry and find a mother for Rand). There is also no uniformity in terms of law or government, no codified legal code, and no real public infrastructure (largely the result of the region’s lack of taxes). This is made possible by the geographic isolation and food stability–two factors that insulate the Two Rivers from many of the problems that cause the formation or joining of a nation state. It’s only after the repeated emergence of problems that their existing systems can not handle (Trolloc raids, martial law under the White Cloaks, the Endless Summer, etc) that the Two Rivers folk begin adopting feudalism, and even then it’s not an instantaneous process, as everyone involved must navigate not just how they are going to adopt this alien form of government, but how they are going to make it match to their culture and history as well.

This plays neatly with the societies that, very pointedly, do not adopt feudalism over the course of the series. The Aiel reject the notion entirely, thinking it as barbaric and backward as the Westerlanders think their culture is–and Jordan is very good at showing neither as really right. The Aiel as a society have many strengths the fandom likes to focus on (a commitment to community care, a strong sense of collective responsibility, a flexible social order that is more capable of accounting for non-traditional platonic and romantic relationships, as well as a general lack of repressive sex norms) but this comes at a serious cost as well. The Aiel broadly share the Borderlander’s response of emotional suppression as a way of dealing with the violence of their daily life, as well as serious problems with institutionalized violence, xenophobia, and a lack of respect for individual rights and agency. Of these, the xenophobia is probably the most outright destructive, and is one of the major factors Rand has to account for when leading the Aiel into Cairhien, as well a huge motivating factor in the Shaido going renegade, and many Aiel breaking clan to join them–and even before Rand’s arrival it manifested as killing all outsiders who entered their land, except for Cairhienin, whom they sold as slaves in Shara.

And yet, despite these problems Jordan never really suggests that the Aiel would be better off as town-or-castle dwelling society, and several characters (most notably the Maidens) explicitly reject the idea that they should abandon their culture, values, and history as a response to the revelations at Rhuidean. Charting a unique course forward for the Aiel is one of the most persistent problems that weighs on the Wise Ones throughout the second half of the series, and Aviendha in particular. Unlike many of the feudal states faced with Tarmon Gai’don, the Aiel when confronted with the end of days and the sure knowledge of the destruction of their way of life are mostly disinterested in ignoring, running from, or rejecting that revelation (those that do, defect to the Shaido). Their unique government and cultural structure gives them the necessary flexibility to pivot quickly to facing the reality of the Last Battle, and to focus on both helping the world defeat the Shadow, and what will become of them afterwards. This ironically, leaves them in one of the best positions post-series, as the keepers of the Dragon’s Peace, which will allow them to hold on to many of their core cultural values even as they make the transition to a new way of life, without having to succumb to the pressures to either assimilate into Westlands, or return to their xenophobic isolationism.

The Seafolk provide the other contrast, being a maritime society where the majority of the people spend their time shipboard. Their culture is one of strong self-discipline and control, where rank, experience, and rules are valued heavily, agreements are considered the next thing to sacred, and material prosperity is valued. Though we don’t spend quite as much time with them as the Aiel, we get a good sense of their culture throughout the mid-series. They share the Aiel’s contempt for the feudal ‘shorebound’, but don’t share their xenophobia, instead maintaining strong trade relationships with every nation on navigable water, though outside of the context of those trade relationships, they are at best frosty to non-Seafolk. 

They are not society without problems–the implication of their strong anti-corruption and anti-nepotism policies is that it’s a serious issue in their culture, and their lack of a centralized power structure outside of their handful of island homes means that they suffer a similar problem to the likes of Murandy and Altara, where life on one ship might be radically different then life on another, in terms of the justice or treatment you might face, especially as an outsider. But the trade off is that they have more social mobility then basically any other society we see in Randland. Even the Aiel tend to have strongly entrenched and managed circles of power, with little mobility not managed by the Wise Ones or the chiefs. But anyone can rise high in Sea Folk society, to become a leader in their clan, or even Mistress of the Ships or Master of the Blades– and they can fall just as easily, for shows of incompetence, or failures to execute their duties. 

They are also another society who is able to adapt to circumstances of Tamon Gai’don relatively painlessly, having a very effective plan in place to deal with the fallout and realities of the Last Battle. The execution gets tripped up frequently by various factors, but again, I don’t think it’s a mistake that they are one of the groups that comes out the other side of the Last Battle in a strong position, especially given the need that will now exist to move supplies and personnel for rebuilding post-Last Battle. The Seafolk have already begun working out embassies in every nation on navigable water, an important step to modernizing national relationships.

How does all this relate to feudalism and class? It’s Jordan digging into a fundamental truth about the world and people–at no point in our own history have we ever found a truly ‘perfect’ model for society. That’s something he’s constantly trying to show with feudalism–it is neither an ideal nor an abomination, it just is. Conversely, the Two Rivers, Aiel, Seafolk, and Ogier (who I don’t get into to much here for space, but who also have their own big problems with suffrage and independence, and their virtues in terms of environmental stability and social harmony) all exist in largely classes societies, but that doesn't exempt them from having problems or make them a utopia, and it certainly doesn't make them lesser or backwards either–Jordan expends a lot of energy to show them as complex, nuanced and flawed, in the same way he does for his pseudo-Europe.

Conclusion

To restate my premise: one of Jordan’s profound gifts as a writer is his capacity to set aside his own biases and write anything from his villains to his world with an honest, empathetic cast that defies simplification. Feudalism and monarchy more generally have a bad rep in our society, for good reasons. But I think either whitewashing or vilifying the feudal system is a mistake, which Jordan’s writing naturally reflects. Jordan is good at asking complicating questions of simple premises. He presents you with the Kingdom of Andor, prosperous and vast and under the rule of a regal much loved Queen and he asks ‘where does its wealth come from? How does it maintain law and order? How does the Queen exert influence and maintain her rule even in far-flung corners of the realm? How did she come to power in the first place and does that have an impact on the politics surrounding her current reign?’. And he does this with every country, every corner of his world–shining interesting lights on familiar tropes, and exploring the humanity of these grand ideas in a way that feels very real as a result.

The question of, is this an inherently just system is never really raised because it’s a simplifying question, not a complicating one. Whatever you answer–yes or no–does not add to the depiction of these systems or the people within them, it takes away. You make someone flat–be it a glorious just revolutionary opposing a cackling wicked King, or a virtuous and dutiful King suppressing dangerous radical dissidents, and you make the world flatter as a result. 

I often think about how, when I began studying European history, I was shocked to learn that the majority of the royalists who rose up against the Jacobins were provincial peasants, marching against what they perceived to be disgruntled, greedy academic and financial elites. These were, after all, the same people that the Jacobins’ revolution claimed to serve and be doing the will of. Many of the French aristocrats were undeniably corrupt, indolent, and detached from their subjects, but when you look closer at the motives of many of the Jacobins you discover that motives were frequently more complex then history tends to remember or their propaganda tried to claim, and many were bitterly divided against each other on matters of tactics, or ideals, or simple personality difference. The simple version of the French Revolution assigns all the blame to the likes of Robespierre going mad with power, and losing sight of the revolutions’ higher ideals, but the truth was the Jacobins could never properly agree on many of their supposed core ideals, and Robespierre, while powerful, was still one voice in a Republic–and every person executed by guillotine was decreed guilty by a majority vote.

This is the sort of nuance lost so often in fantasy stories, but not in Jordan’s books. The story could be simpler–Morgase could just be a just and good high Queen archetype who is driven by love of her people, but Jordan depicts her from the beginning as human–with virtues and flaws, doing the best she can in the word she has found herself. Trying to be a just and good Queen and often succeeding, and sometimes falling short of the mark. The Tairen and Cairhienin nobility could just all be greedy, corrupt, out-of-touch monsters who cannot care for anything beyond their own pleasures–but for every Laman, Weairamon, or Colavaere, you have Dobraine, Moiraine, or Darlin. And that is one of the core tenets of Jordan’s storytelling: that there is no system wholly without merit or completely without flaw, and no group of people is ever wholly good or evil.

By taking this approach, Jordan’s story feels real. None of his characters or world come across like caricature or parody. The heinous acts are sharper and more distinct, the heroic choices more earned and powerful. Nothing is assumed–not the divine right of kings, or the glorious virtue of the common man. This, combined with a willingness to draw on the real complex histories of our own world, and work through how the unique quirks of fantasy impact them, is what renders The Wheel Of Time such a standout as a fantasy series, past even more classic seminal examples of the genre, and why its themes of class, duty, power, and politics resonate with its modern audiences.

#Wheel of Time #WoT #WoT Meta #Wheel of time Meta #Feudalism #Class Politics #Worldbuilding #Wot Book Spoilers #AMOL Spoilers #No one has ever done it like Robert Jordan and no one may ever do it like him again #Their is no earthly way I can tag all the characters refrenced in this #so I'll hit those I talk about more then three times #Rand al'Thor #Moiraine Damodred #Elayne Trakand #Mat Cauthon #Perrin Aybara #faile bashere #Morgase Trakand #ingtar shinowa #Hurin #tuon athaem kore paendrag #I invite pepole to discuss/respond if they want #but a reminder that I assume good faith whenever possible #and ignore bad faith when apparent