#Since when does Tumblr give me questionable images?!?
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Today, I made Sonk with Perler beads!
#sonic the hedgehog#sonic fanart#sonic#art#cursed#sonk#perler beads#perler art#I am posting this on the bus#I just scrolled past 3 questionable rouge images on said bus HELP!!!#Since when does Tumblr give me questionable images?!?#this is fine#on a separate topic#this was really fun to do!#goofy#silly
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PSA - Community Predator
Over a series of months, myself and other Tumblr users -- fic writers, gif makers, fans of created content -- have been victimised by @mrkdvidal1989, who has extensively lied about who he is, preyed on multiple women and denied involvement -- therefore ruining friendships, reputations and feelings, and promised me life-saving medical treatment that he never followed through on.
More information including mine and their stories under the cut.
The reason I am going public with this is twofold:
A) To protect others from being hurt. He is known to reach out to many tumblr users, especially young women in the Cillian Murphy fandom -- but he may have a wider reach beyond this circle.
B) Since his "disappearance" three weeks ago and the unravelling of his lies, this man has ruined my life and the only hope I had of obtaining treatment for a condition that has been plaguing me for four years.
Killian Vidal is the name he has chosen to give us, and has claimed to be both a officer commander and general in the mobility troop in the SAS (the general rank does not even exist), has beaten cancer a while ago (but said to another mutual that his "time was running out" and he is currently struggling with it), and a plethora of other life experiences and general knowledge about him that varies in consistency when talking to different people and is questionable in its validity. He has also shared pictures of "himself" that when reverse image searched, belong to different people.
I got to know Kill when he reblogged one of my fanfics (as the story seems to start with a lot of his victims) and he reached out via DMs. We quickly became close friends who called nearly every day on Discord and when I told him about my health issues, he immediately offered to pay for my medical treatment wherever I could find willing doctors.
I was hesitant to believe this at first since all of this seemed too good to be true (and was). He claimed to be very wealthy, enough to afford private jets like it was nothing and to rent me an apartment in the UK in the same building as him. Over time, I grew to trust him because he felt like such a genuine person and friend, which was made all the more believable by the fact that he has such a huge following on Tumblr and was, at the time, part of a vast social network of fans and friends (one of which he even claimed to know IRL -- who will remain anonymous unless they decide to speak out). I decided to ignore the little red flags because I was so desperate to receive this treatment that for me would be life-saving.
For four years, I have been plagued by an array of (mostly) undiagnosed digestive issues that have made my life almost unbearable and have on numerous occasions nearly killed me due to malnutrition. I've spent months in hospital, endured years of malpractice and misdiagnoses, undergone heart surgery, and have tried absolutely everything I can to get better. In the winter of 2023, I was told by my doctor that I was refused in the TPN program (a treatment that may have slowed or stopped my weight loss) and that with or without it, I was looking at mortality. Refusing to stop fighting but having exhausted the public health care system in Canada, I went into 2024 not really having much hope of anything anymore.
So, when Kill came along, that changed. He promised -- and I mean, from the bottom of his heart, promised -- that he would help me get treatment, that he would get me out of my abusive home and fly me to the UK, that he would be there for me as my friend, etc. I was beyond grateful, and as my trust with him built, so did my hope.
The travel plans kept getting put off; originally, he would fly me out as soon as the apartment became available, which was the 11th of Feb, 2024. He kept finding excuses to not book the jet. Finally, it seemed as if around the 15th/16th I would be flying. My health had been declining rapidly and the situation was becoming all the more urgent, and he said he was in contact with a pilot and would send the ticket soon and call me.
That was the last I heard from him. The 16th.
Initially thinking he had ended his life (he had discussed thoughts of suicide with me prior to this), I was beside myself with worry not only thinking one of my closest friends was gone but also that my chance at life was. I reached out to his other friends, and I made several calls to the UK authorities and emergency services and ended up requesting a welfare check be made to see if he was even alive.
They reported that no one under the name Killian Vidal was in the records of the building name he gave me -- the same building that I was meant to live in within that week.
After reaching out to my now beloved friend @kittenonpluto (A.K.A., Cas) on Tumblr, I learned that Kill was in fact alive, and had told her that he was in hospital for digestive issues in Indianopolis, United States (though again, no record of his name in their medical system). He still wouldn't talk to me, but told her to tell me that he would reach out when he was out of hospital.
Cas and I compared information he'd told us (her story will be attached to this post) and looked into the mystery more. He constantly dodged confrontation and questions about the fake photos and information he'd sent her, and seemed to use his completely fabricated hospitalisation as an excuse to not fulfil his promises to myself and her, as well as a means to garner sympathy.
It was quite obvious that he didn't know how the American medical system worked, and he even incorporated elements of my actual story and used them in his. When asked about his treatments, he responded with medically false information. He reported digestive issues, reflux, and having both an NG tube and TPN -- both of which I have experience with -- and let me say, I am beyond disgusted and infuriated that my real life trauma was used as a ploy in all this.
How do we know for a fact this is false? I checked the police case for his welfare check again, and they said that they confirmed him being in the UK at the same time he had told Cas he was in hospital in the States.
After a final confrontation from both Cas and myself (and a desperate final plea for the medical aid he promised me), he was never heard from again from either of us or our friend circles.
I'm now having to pick up the pieces he's left me in and to be honest, I have little to no idea of what the hell to do or how to save myself. The fact that he strung me along for a month and built up my hope that I was going to live only to abandon me without even a word is deplorable to me.
And mine isn't the only story. I've heard from four women on Tumblr (who, again, will remain anonymous unless they choose to speak out) who he has been romantic or sexually involved with (and lied about his involvement, made them out to seem insane or toxic, created rifts in our friendships, toyed with their emotions, and made false promises to of relationships, marriage, and finances).
And that's not including the ex-wife who came back to Tumblr to claim that her and Kill had never met nor married. She was promptly silenced by a "lawyer threat" that we have strong reason to believe was a bluff.
At the end of the day, there are so many lies, half-truths, inconsistencies, etc. this man has wrapped himself in and we don't know for the life of us what his motives are, but from the information that we do know is false, he isn't genuine. He toys with people. He hurts them. Myself and the others that have been affected by this want that to stop.
And at any point, he has the ability to make a new account, and take on a new persona, pretend to be someone else. Tumblr is a wonderful place and I have met so many cool people on here, but please be careful about who you interact with and what you share, because aside from making this post, it is beyond my power to stop him from doing what he does. But after what he did to me, I could not remain silent.
Other Stories
If you have an experience or story with Killian that you would like heard, please reblog it on this thread or make a post. With your consent, I can include a link to it below.
kittenonpluto's story
aurorag98's story
everyoneisawhore's story
your-nanas-house's story
hllywdwhre's story
Final Note
Lastly, if you have read this far, thank you.
If you want to reach out to me about this issue -- whether it's to anonymously share your experience, ask questions, ask for evidence (of which I can back up these statements with), or anything at all --, please do not hesitate to do so. <3
For those who may be worried about the potential legality of this post, everything that I have stated as fact is fact and it is not my intention to slander or spread false information.
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Rebirth.
Billy’s first time with you.
※ Bottom Billy Hargrove/Top Male Reader
※ 11,270 words
※ Personal work (not request).
※ Content & warnings: First time bottoming. Crying during sex. Angst. Light D/s dynamics (Sub Billy Hargrove/Dom Male Reader). Emotional sex. Vulnerability. Praise kink. Sort of PWP. Overstimulation.
※ Both characters are 18 or older.
※ Work available only on Tumblr and under ArchiveOfOurOwn pseud of the same name (DecadentWorld). Do not repost, edit, or redistribute. Do not use for TikTok videos.
※ Warning: this gets real sad, real fast.
“Hey…”, you ask the man after you’ve paused your kissing. “…you okay?”
Currently, you have Billy pressed against the wall next to your bedroom door. Your house’s dim lighting puts this very moment into focus, as though time is concentrated into a needlepoint. There is not a single thing you’d rather be doing than this. Him. The sole fact that he’s yours is already enough to keep you up at night.
His gaze lowers and he looks elsewhere, not at you, never at you at this time. That’s one of the things that drew you in to him like a moth to a flame. That little detail, the fact that, out there, he has to be so very him: boisterous, dangerous, loud, bigger than life… but in this pocket of space you both call home, that he tentatively calls his safe space, he can finally be him: vulnerable, insecure, shy, small.
So he does not look at you, never at you, and rather lowers his head to a side as he nods as a response to your question. There’s a pinched expression in his face that does not go unnoticed by you.
“Y’sure?” Your lips find the left side of his forehead. “You still wanna…?”
Because this is a huge step, isn’t it? It’s what you’ve both been discussing for some time now. He wants to go further. And hell, it wasn’t easy for him to say it at all. Said it somewhat similarly to the way he’s looking right now. Quiet. Meek. Looking elsewhere.
But your boy is so brave. Secretly trembles in the adversity of society’s opinion on people like him and you and still pushes forward with a bold front, told you he wants you to be his first in this aspect.
“Mmm-hmm,” is his answer. He doesn’t notice, of course, but his hands, the ones holding your own arms, which at this time are around his waist, start trembling more and more, a minute thing that only you can perceive.
“Okay.” An easy answer, because you can’t make this complicated to him, not when he’s like this. “We can still stop anytime—”
“Don’t wanna fuckin’ stop.” And, oh, he’s grunting it out now. Now, he’s turned into the spitting image of a cornered animal, and you have to tread carefully. When he’s like this it’s because his emotions are getting the best of him. You know he’s nervous.
Your right hand finds its way to his chin. You lift his face up, until he’s facing you, though his eyes are not quite there yet. Still pointedly looking to his right, to the floor, even as he’s under your intense gaze and visibly getting hotter under the collar, more flustered, his breathing heavier.
“Look at me, Blue.” It’s not quite an order. It will not be unless you both discuss it in depth first.
The few inches you have on him mean he has to —slowly, painstakingly— look up at you, and isn’t that a heady feel? To have such a beautiful man look up in wonder at someone or something bigger than him? Someone who can envelop him completely and seal him away from the world’s horrors?
“This is your call, yeah? I want what you want.” The knuckles of your right hand brush against his pink cheek. He traces the movement with something akin to uncertainty. “And if you, right now, want to flee this house, I won’t stop you.”
“Then why did you stop?” There’s a croak in his voice. His eyes fight to stay on yours, and there’s a shine on them that wasn’t there before. “Why d’you think I wanna stop? Huh?”
You give him a small rueful smile he watches perplexed. “Babe… you haven’t stopped shaking like a leaf since we set foot in my room—”
“No I’m n— I’m not. Shaking.” And his head is back in that position. Not looking at you in any way.
You purse your lips. Your arms that were around his waist again untangle some, until your hands are pressed against the low of his back. His hands, that were holding onto your arms, move with the jostling. At the same time you rub against his back, feeling the littlest squirm against them, you lower your mouth to his cheek.
The gentle treatment compels him to press more of himself against you, still not looking at you properly, but wondering what got into you to hold him like this.
“It’s okay to be nervous.”
“I’m not.”
A gentle kiss on the cheek. A trembling sigh in response. “I know you are, and I’m not judging you for it.” Another kiss, this time lower, on the jaw. “I just want you to know…” A kiss on the jugular, like an animal playing with its prey, and Billy feels as if he were right into the wolf’s fauces with how fast that same vein is beating against your mouth. “…that you don’t have to pretend with me.” One on the juncture of his neck and shoulder and the trembling he’s trying to deny so indubitably only worsens. Then, a series of kisses, tracing that same path backwards, as you punctuate each with a word: “I. Will. Take. Care. Of. You.”
A last kiss on the corner of his mouth, and you have his full attention. Your faces are so close that you could just close your eyes and still feel the heat coming off his.
And his eyes. It’s almost an obsession now. You thought they were blue before, like the gentle waves he could relax on during the quietest pockets of his life before coming to this city. But now. Now they’re somehow accentuated. No longer calm, but the imposing waves during a thunderstorm in the middle of the ocean.
Because the white of his eyes has progressively turned more red and the lighter blue of his eyes could save any lost man at sea.
You don’t comment on this as of now. Just the fact that he’s already like this, and you haven’t done much yet, speaks volumes about how much trust he’s putting into you. The subtle tremble in the space between his eyebrows, the much more visible one of his chin, right under his drooping lips…
You nuzzle your noses together and that somehow seems to be his breaking point. He heaves, blinks in rapid succession, and looks like he’s having a battle with himself, head turning to the side again but coming back, always coming back to you. Then, decided, tilts his head up more, directing those stormy eyes on yours and then your lips.
“You’ll… You’ll take care of me?” His voice is no more than a croak.
In response, your hands seek his. Once they find them, you guide them towards his chest and towards themselves, something that confuses him at first. His arms are now fully folded against himself. Then, your arms encircle his body. You make sure there’s not a breath of space between you.
This is how you envelop him completely. You are his shield, and nothing can get to him.
His heavy breathing is shaky as well. You nuzzle the side of his face and that draws him in.
“Always.”
It seems the waterworks are about to start for him, so he quickly hides it by kissing you, full on the mouth this time.
This is not nervousness over the sex as a physical act, you realize. This is something bigger. You leave this thought aside for a second as you return the kiss with all the affection you can muster. Your arms that are encircling his body start lowering as you leave soft smacks of your lips on his, until they’re only around his waist. But his own arms are still where you left them; he’s afraid of breaking this bubble you created.
Finally, your hands set on his hips. They start caressing the clothed skin there, and, in this moment of catharsis you’ve bestowed upon him you can feel him writhe against your hands, a small, happy thing you notice is grounding him.
His arms are still in the same position when you withdraw. When you do, he chases after you, but quickly retracts in shame.
“Oh, sweetness, you want more?”, you mumble close to his lips, noticing how he sighs in pleasure at this.
So you give him more. One short kiss against his lips, two more, loud smacking noises in the silent room, and then a small bite on his lower lip that makes his body vibrate.
He withdraws with a loud gasp but does not stop looking at you in yearning. His hands finally lower to find yours and he guides them to his heaving chest. His chest, the most of which is uncovered, since the man can absolutely not wear a shirt without undoing at least three of its buttons.
Billy is so brave, so good to you, he made the first move to let you know it’s okay to have this, to have him. Your hands find the hairless skin and the contact is electric. He heaves heavy breath after breath and can’t seem to decide whether to look at you or at the point of contact, because your hands feel so good on him, on his chest, such an unassuming place that would bring him so much pleasure. And his chest is so warm, too. Your fingers splay over the upper part of it, and you can’t believe how much heat irradiates off him. The tips of your fingers manage to touch his clavicles while the lowest parts of your palms press softly lower down his chest. And —this is what gets you the most— Billy blushes everywhere. The center of his chest is such a beautiful shade of pink, the same or similar to the one on his freckled face, that you just can’t help but rub both hands on the expanse of his pectorals. You feverishly wonder if your hands can leave a brand on his skin, because it seems to be turning an ever darkening shade, and you realize it’s only your own effect on Billy’s sensitive skin.
His hands have been holding onto your wrists, directing only at first but now just resting there, or holding on for dear life, you can’t tell. The only thing you understand is that you have to get your hands —and your mouth, dear god. Your mouth— on those pretty pink nipples, so you start a slow, sinful massage of your fingertips over the meat of his pecs, something that seems to agitate him even more with how heavy he’s breathing now. His mouth is open, he’s fully looking at you now, like he can’t believe his life has finally lead to this point.
And then, the palms of your hands graze across his nipples, and his body seizes. He makes this small, broken noise that catches your attention, and he doesn’t want you to look at him, he seems so embarrassed, as if he doesn’t want you to see how affected he is with just this. But you’re ruthless in your mercy, and bring your face closer to his, nuzzling close to his nose again, and he’s wordless as you begin a sensual massage from the center of those two pleasure points outwards, the entirety of your hands on him.
Another broken noise, this time more choked off than the first one. Your faces are so close together that it would only take a small push to kiss again, but you don’t. Your lips are right there, barely coming in contact with his, not kissing while you continue this erotic touch, and you’re now basically breathing the same air. You have an exhilarating thought: maybe he’s more pent up about the fact that you won’t close the distance between your lips than about the fact that you’re outright feeling up his chest. Because, truly, his desire only grows bigger when it’s not acted upon.
Your hands lower to the sides of his chest, underneath his shirt. Your thumbs press against his nipples.
His body curls into you, and then his head knocks against the wall behind him, and you can perfectly see the expression he makes and hear the song he sings for you and you just…
You’re the one to cave in. This kiss is a masterpiece of a choreography: the force of it almost knocks him back against the wall. His hands hold onto your wrists for dear life as he feels his body move on its own, a writhing of his spine against those burning points of contact on his nipples. Then, for the next dance steps: your thumbs start rubbing circles on those pretty pinks. At the same, he, as if synchronized, opens his mouth just in time for you to push your tongue into it, rubbing circles against his own tongue in a similar fashion to the way you’re touching him below. And doesn’t this rush the grand finale? Small sounds start filtering off the closed space you’ve created with the cavern of your mouth. A mix of his own choked off moans, smacking noises of your lips each time they withdraw only to come back to him again, slick sounds of your tongues circling each other. The perfect musical score for your magnum opus, because you did this. You have set off these reactions and you have stored this fragile boy’s trust in you, and have seen it come to fruition like this.
It’s all carefully synchronized. You bite his lower lip and pinch the now erect peaks, gentle roughness matching both places and he gasps, pressing his chest more against you, like he craves that tender kind of pain. And, oh, he’s losing himself to you. Now he moves and is the one to initiate a rougher kiss, and you lose yourself to him as well, because you answer back in kind, the kiss now with exhilarating hints of teeth from both parts. But you have plans for him. Of course, he will get nothing but the best from this treatment, this particular type of roughness you can give him that will not have him running for the hills. So you detach your lips from his, though it’s an intermittent thing, because his lips were made to be kissed, and you can’t help yourself with a few more noisy smacks against them, but when you’re finally done, you attach these same lips to his neck, a quick, sharp point of contact when you show the slightest hint of teeth, to which in turn he exhales heavily, and your mouth just keeps going down, on his clavicle, then on a meaty part of his upper pec, and then…!
And then your mouth is on his left nipple, and he shouts, and he tries to keep it down, and then you start sucking and your left hand is fondling his right pectoral, and his hands hold onto the back of your head and you do something with your tongue that has him trembling and moaning outloud this time, and he crosses his legs and isn’t that a sight, he’s fully hard beneath his jeans, and he’s so needy and your right arm surrounds him and your right hand gropes his ass and his hips are pushed forward and he sobs as your own hips meet his and you grunt against his chest and the vibrations are too much for him and your mouth never leaves him as you lick a trail all the way to his right nipple and he blubbers and the heat of his chest feels like home to you and you bite his nipple and—
“Fuck me!”
You withdraw quickly to witness the spectacle: his hands are to the sides of his head against the wall. His almost fully open shirt, all rumpled, the crimson of its color and the pink of his chest a perfect palette. Below, the tent of his erection against the front of his jeans is enhanced by the small wet spot, right where the tip should be. Above, his face turns out to be the real zenith of the play. Mouth open as he draws in breaths, eyebrows pinched, eyes brimming with unshed tears.
‘I surrender’ would be the perfect title for this masterpiece of a performance.
You get close to him again and he rushes to hold onto your shoulders, like he cannot stand to be unmoored for one second. You encircle his waist, and your hands lay on his ass, and it’s a perfect fit. The comedown has to be gentler, this time. You give him a short, soft kiss on his lips that he chases after you’re done.
“So good for me, Bill. Telling me what you want.” The mumbled praise next to his ear has such an effect on him, you still can’t believe he could actually blush more. “Where do you want it?”
He takes a couple of deep breaths, calming himself down before he blows too soon. “Uh… the b-bed, I guess.” He tries to look to the side, embarrassed that he, he of all people could stutter at a time like this, but you don’t let him, left hand on his chin gently forcing him to keep his eyes on you.
“Yeah?” Your hands fondle that firm ass of his, still clothed, but he feels it as though he had nothing on, and he fights to keep his eyes open and on you, stubborn to give into his desire to close them and just feel.
Though it’s a reluctant move —because it is a tragedy, that you can’t multitask— your hands leave their place and set themselves on the few done buttons of his shirt.
He nods, and it almost gives you whiplash, how shy he’s looking right now, as if he didn’t shout out how he wanted you to fuck him some seconds ago.
You start unbuttoning the remaining part of his shirt before he loses his courage, and when you’re done, you hold his gaze intensely for one second as your hands find their way to his belt. He has to look down at what you’re doing because he needs to check that this is real, and because he just can’t with he way you’re looking at him. You keep looking at him even as he can’t decide between looking down or up, even as you undo his belt and his jeans, and then pull the tails of his shirt out of his jeans.
It seems like he braves through it and decides to face you in the end. Your hands stroke a sensual path up his bare chest until they’re underneath the fabric on his shoulders. You slowly push his shirt off him, not leaving his eyes for one second as the shirt falls to the floor. His body is so very perfectly sculpted, and you can’t wait to see more of him. Never leaving his skin, your hands lower down his body in a sensual caress, so low you have to bend over a bit, until your right hand is tracing his left leg, lower and lower. He looks confused for a slight moment until a gentle firmness tells him you want him to flex his leg. He does, and you use the momentum to lay his foot on your own folded leg. You start undoing his shoe.
This is the part where he looks at you like he can’t believe you exist. To be able to just stand there, against the wall, while someone else pauses their foreplay to simply take the time to undress him, or like the undressing is part of the foreplay too, maybe… he doesn’t think he can describe this moment. Not now, not ever. The only thing he knows is that he can’t think this over too much or he’ll start crying for sure this time, even before the sex begins.
Once his shoes are done, you rise and come back to his mouth, your home, and after a soft peck your hands find their way to the front of his pants. You hook two fingers of both hands beneath his underwear right away, and with a long heated look on his behalf, you slowly lower both jeans and underwear down his legs.
It’s so exhilarating when his hard cock springs free. You don’t know who’s the more excited of the two.
You use the excuse of lowering his lower garments to crouch before him, until you get to your prize, and exhale a hot breath right over his hard and leaking cock as you’re lowering them down his knees, and he almost keels over at the feel. Then, as if too stupefied from that simple action, he takes several seconds before remembering to lift his feet so that you can fully take his pants off and away. As you rise up again, you do the same thing, this time a quick brush of your lips against the head of his cock almost his ruin.
He’s on you the moment your faces are close again. You can’t tell whether it is because he truly can’t stand to be far from you for a second or because he’s feeling embarrassed again, but you return the messy kiss until he’s almost out of air. You notice this but he doesn’t stop, somehow. There’s a notable shaking of his hands on the back of your head as you lay your hands on his bare body.
You pull back because you simply have to look at him. He chases after you with a gasp but stops himself at the last moment, and you know he’s mortified, if the strong blush on his face is indicative enough. And now, he’s fully bare for you to feast on. Your eyes trace heated paths across his body, and your hands follow those same paths. He beckons you, just by being himself. He can’t seem to choose between looking at you or at what you’re doing to him, but Billy’s equally pleased with the way you’re touching him and the way you’re looking at him, like you want to commit every single detail to memory.
You can’t help yourself and grope at his pecs once more, the view so much better now that you can see his chest, unhindered. Rough, calloused fingertips play with his nipples and the sides of his torso, and he lays himself onto you, ripe for the taking.
“God, Billy. Your fucking body…” Your left hand rubs down his navel, feeling him squirm at the sensation. Your right hand goes around his body and slowly, painstakingly approaches the lower part of his back.
He almost jumps a foot in the air and moans when your hand is suddenly there, groping the swell of his ass. He can’t look at you. God, he can’t. The way you’re spreading him with one hand is too much for him and he has to hide his face in the crook of your neck as he tries to muffle his moans.
“Sensitive there?” Your right hand traces the inner part of his cheek, and one of his feet kicks against the wall as a reflex. His face is radiating so much heat right now, because you’re so close to touching his hole.
But Billy can’t handle you laying it all on him at once, so he instead withdraws —with such a red face you can’t believe it’s not feverish— and says, “You too. T-Take off your clothes.”
Sweet boy. It truly takes a lot for him to not want the attention on him anymore, and this seems to be it, the way you’re this close to consuming him entirely and the way he would terrifyingly let you. But doesn’t he know that tonight is all about him? He will receive as much attention as he needs to and he will burst at the seams with it. So, instead of taking your time, you quickly start undressing before him as he watches almost in foreboding, understanding that this is about him. But he tries to prolong this, lays his hands on the front of your pants, looking at you with shyness, then, at his own hands, trying to open your button and zipper, but his hands are trembling too much for it.
You chuckle against his lips, receiving a meek sigh in response. “My good boy. Trying to help me.”
It’s the first time you say it loud and clear. He’s your good boy. And your good boy looks faint from it. He’s trying to blubber something out but he can’t seem to form the words, so your mercy comes in the form of a slow, forceful kiss, in which he can’t keep himself quiet. It’s as if the floodgates have been opened with these two simple words. The only reason his moans aren’t that loud is because you’re not giving his mouth a second of respite. Meanwhile, your hands find his, and you finally withdraw from his lips and watch, exhilarated, as he chases after you. It’s becoming tradition now, and it’s probably one of your newest favorite things about Billy.
“It goes like this,” you say, and your fingers guide his in undoing your pants. After it’s done, you hold his gaze as you lead his hands to the sides of you, slowly beginning to push down your lower garments all at once. He bends forward some, similar to what you did with him, but doesn’t go down all the way and seems to lose his courage in the middle of it, because you’re the one who ends up taking off the rest of your own clothes as he pointedly looks at your eyes only, as if he already knew what he was going to encounter and was terrified and thrilled at the same time.
The last of your clothes is now away from you, and you both stare down at each other, with nothing blocking the way.
Your right hand finds its way under his chin. You rub your thumb across and under his lips, and feel his hot, heavy exhale against it.
He blinks quickly in succession. His eyes do this funny thing where they want to look down but end up looking at you and then elsewhere, like he’s embarrassed again and doesn’t know where to look. You think he deserves some encouragement, and lower your mouth to his for a quick peck. Then, your right hand, still holding his chin, starts tilting his head down, slowly enough that he can push you off if he wants to, but he doesn’t want that. No, he does not. As he’s being lead down, his eyes quickly find yours once more in a slight… panic? Excitement?, before he’s facing down and has nothing more to look at but you.
And you can hear and feel his reaction. Because that’s the thing. You’re big, bigger than he was possibly expecting, and a small croak of a moan confirms this same thought he’s currently having. He swallows down and looks you in the eye, from under his lashes, and does he have any idea of what that does to you?
He wants to put his hands on you this time. He doesn’t even know where to start so he settles on your navel. He briefly looks up at you again, but then down, like he’s quickly becoming obsessed with the sight of you. Your hands, in turn, find his hips and lower still. They come to rest right on the sides of his erect, flushed cock, and he does this little jump, and you’re quickly realizing that he’s a lot more sensitive that you initially thought. Hmm…
Billy can’t hide the trembling in his hands anymore, but you’re going to trust him on this, trust that he knows what he’s doing and that he wants it. His nervous hands hover around your cock and it’s like he’s having an internal battle with himself over something, or maybe he truly can’t believe he gets to look at another naked male in a sexual situation and is still getting acclimated to it, so perhaps a little incentive will work.
“Touch all you want, sweetness. It’s all yours.”
He gets this little nervous look on his eye that’s somehow eclipsed by the thrill he’s feeling and showing. So, he obeys. The first contact on your cock is warm, timid, rough from the dryness. Billy has his full attention on your member now. Now, this here is something that would make any man in the world preen: the way Billy’s looking at your cock is comparable to that of someone witnessing a wonder. He’s just holding it, feeling the heavy weight of it on his right hand as his nervous left hand can’t decide if it wants to feel out your testes. You notice this and you gently lead that hand down, showing him he can unequivocally feel to his heart’s desires. The contact on both points feels nice, though clearly insecure on his behalf. And his face. You could’ve never pictured anyone looking at someone else’s sex the way he is. His mouth opens and closes like he can’t find the words, some quiet gasps resounding in the otherwise quiet room.
This leaves you with that same question from before, when he looked ready to weep just from being treated nicely. What is it about this situation that has him so agitated?
“Okay?”, you just have to ask. “Does it feel nice?”
You expect him to snark, but you surprisingly get a somewhat enthusiastic nod in response. Only now you realize that you haven’t touched his cock still, and yet he’s been hard from your foreplay all this time. Well. You obviously have to fix that.
Only that before you can lay a hand on his cock, he shocks you by leaning into you, and then going down, down, down…
“Oh, honey…”
The vision of a bare Billy Hargrove kneeling at your feet is something that’ll haunt your dreams forever, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. Of course, you didn’t expect anything from Billy because he doesn’t owe you anything, and this is about him tonight, but if this is what he wants to do then by all means you will make it unforgettable for him, because this is probably his first time giving head to a man, isn’t it?
He’s gaping at the heavy cock in front of him, holding it in both hands, and then at you.
You run the fingers of your right hand through his soft hair. “Need me to guide you?”
He’s doing that thing again, where he’s opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, can’t decide what he wants to say, and to you this is a clear visage of a boy who needs a nurturing hand.
“S’alright, gorgeous. I’ll tell you what to do. Yeah?”
Billy heaves a heavy breath and nods. So it seems like he’s going non-verbal for the moment. It doesn’t concern you right now, but you’ll keep an eye out in case anything goes wrong. You feel the slightest hint of guilt for thinking he’s so fucking hot like this, not being able to even speak out from lust.
“Open your mouth.” He does. “Pull out your tongue for me, handsome.” He does, too, though slowly, like he’s embarrassed. “Now, just start like this,” and you run your finger across your cock in random strokes, showing him how he’s to lick you, get you wet. “You told me girls sometimes did this to you, yeah? Just do what you’d like to get done on you.”
But, there’s a problem with that. Billy has been with girls before, has had sex with them, but never out of real desire. It has always been a carefully crafted mask for him, the fact that he has to be seen with a girl just to fend off his piece of shit father’s heavy suspicions of him being queer. So, the entirety of his sexual experiences can be summarized into forced orgasm after forced orgasm, doing the most to seem interested enough. So he cannot possibly ‘do what he’d like to get done on himself’ because no situation where a girl was sucking him off could count as genuinely pleasurable for him.
The pause he makes as he’s processing these thoughts and this gentle encouragement of yours tells you all you need to know. “Just start with this pretty pink of yours, yeah?” The tip of your index finger strokes across the expanse of his tongue.
He pulls it back in to swallow, because the way you’re treating him will be his ruin someday, and pulls it back out. There’s a hot blush on his cheeks and the bridge of his nose.
And then, he begins. Nervous, but braving through it, always your boy, he starts with a small kitten lick on the underside of your head. His tongue is like velvet, so hot and alive under you. There’s no words to describe this masterpiece of a vision. He swipes his tongue a little lower, going down to the base and then returning to his first spot. The hot breath he heaves as he pulls his tongue back in to wet it gives you a little thrill. Then, his tongue sweeps all the way up and against the front of your cockhead, and you know he’s now got the taste of your pre-cum, if the short-lived pursing of his lips is any indicator. You know it can’t taste that good, but your boy is full of surprises. After a quick closing of his lips, and a muffled smacking of them, as if he’s savoring the taste and trying to get to a conclusion, he goes back for another taste. And another. He’s holding your gaze, daringly, as he keeps tasting the few drops that keep coming out of you.
Your right hand has a life of its own, finding his soft locks like they’re its home. “Such a good boy for me, Blue.”
Billy always gets a bit more flustered with each time you say that to him. Right now, he’s breathing heavily, only now remembering to use his hands as well. He starts a slow, soft stroke of his hands near the base of your cock while he keeps using his tongue under your head. It’s a nice form of gentle stimulation.
Your finger cards through his curls. “Look at yourself, Billy. Doing so good.” It’s the start of something raunchy, what you’re about to do, but your left hand finds its way to his lips. Your thumb hooks down against the inner part of his cheek and pulls outwards. It’s an obscene image, the beginning of a very obscene expression on him, him with his tongue on a man’s cock, his cheek bulging out.
And yet. The small gasp that resounds in the room does not sound as if he dislikes it.
You end it as quickly as your started it. You get your thumb out and rub it against his lower lip, effectively wetting it. He looks at you with something that looks very much like excitement.
“Try using your lips now, gorgeous.”
He puts his tongue back in his mouth and he swallows and he licks his lips. He briefly looks down in embarrassment and then back at you. He nods. He gets his lips closer to the head of your cock, but he pauses for some seconds here. He pointedly looks at your member now, like he’s gearing up for something. He bites his lower lip. Billy quickly looks up at you and then down again. Then, closes the distance and puts his closed lips to the tip of your cock. The contact is shy, clearly new to him, but what he lacks in experience he makes up for in enthusiasm. Immediately, his lips open, and he starts a gentle suckling on the tip. His eyes are glazed, continuously switching between looking at what he’s doing and looking up at you.
“That’s it…”
Encouraged, he opens his jaw, only to pause for a second and remember to cover his teeth with his lips.
He looks obscene.
“God, Bill, look at you.”
He goes down on you for the first time. The praise on your behalf is taking effect on him: his breathing goes heavier, and he seems to start drooling even though he hasn’t gone so far down yet. His mouth —it’s so open. No doubt his jaw might be sore afterwards— lowers around your cock down to the frenulum, and then lower still.
A small hum from him reverberates on your head. It feels delicious.
“Only what you can, baby. Don’t force yourself.”
His hands on your cock tremble a bit more, but it’s nothing concerning as of right now, because what’s a little bit more of it already? But, you should pay attention to him. As he’s withdrawing and going back down, just a hair’s width further each time, his breathing turns erratic. He quickly looks at you and back down just because he wants to check that’s he’s doing good, that he’s being good, your angel. Even then, that doesn’t seem to compose him at all anymore. The room is filling with the soft sounds of his suckling and his noisy breathing. There’s one or two faint moans in the mix. And that trembling… it’s the subtle shaking of his body this time that tells you something else is up.
Billy starts crying well before he chokes.
“Oh, Billy…”
It’s too late for him to cover it up, but he still tries. Tears are rolling down his cheek first, and then he lowers himself as far as he can, effectively choking this time. He starts a quicker pace, down to that same point that has him gagging every time.
Your hand is soft but firm in his hair as you stop him and pull him off. “You’re hurting yourself.”
Billy doesn’t even look at your eyes after he’s been caught. He uses the back of a hand to wipe at the tears that won’t stop spilling from his eyes, as if you can’t see his pinched eyebrows, the downturn of his lips, the shuddering of his torso drawing in trembling breaths.
The hand you have in his hair goes under his chin. You tilt his head up but he won’t look at you yet. “Talk to me, babe.” Even more tears roll down his cheeks while he shakes his head. “Please?”
This treatment he’s receiving, like he’s a fragile thing not to be messed with, is what does him in. His face turns heartbreaking to look at right now. It’s the grimace a person makes when they’re about to break down.
“It’s so f-fucking— I’m s-so fucking stupid—”
“You’re not.” It’s a commandment, a key principle, something to not be refuted, because it is true. The intensity with which you enunciate it gives him pause and has him staring up at you, vision blurry from the tears. “Tell me what’s wrong?”
The soft caressing under his jaw breaks him a little more. He has to look down for this, otherwise he’ll be a blubbering mess before he even starts speaking. “I… It’s just…” His hands leave your cock for the moment, going to rest on the front of your thighs. “I just— can’t believe I’m finally…”
Oh, baby. “With a man?”
His quick nodding is followed by more tears.
It dawns on you like the biggest epiphany. Of course. He’s never had the chance to be himself, not until he met you and until you could present him with this safe space. This is something so important to him, so much so that he’s been carrying this hurt and this burden his entire life, and now, it all comes out in a steady torrent he can’t seem to shut off.
Everything you want to convey can’t possibly be said in this position, him on his knees in front of your erect cock; this is supposed to be special for him. So, both of your hands go under his jaw and you try to pull him up, to bring him up to his feet and in front of you. But.
He whines. He presses his face to your thigh, adamant about not getting up, like the only way he’ll be able to stay calm is on his knees.
Well. You’re not going to refuse him.
“Baby, look at me.” He does. Billy’s eye peeks from beneath you, and this vision is sure to stay with you for a good while. He hasn’t stopped shedding tears, albeit silently now, and with how fragile he is right now you know it’ll only get more intense starting from now. “You are so brave by telling me this. You were so alone, and now you don’t have to be. And the fact that you chose me of all people?” Your right hand goes to his soft curls and he’s already on his way to weeping again. You lean down until your faces are in front of each other. “I feel so fucking honored.” A kiss on his lips. “I will do everything in my power to make you feel safe at all times.” Another kiss, and he’s blubbering something that vaguely sounds like ‘but you already do!’. You smile at him. “And you’ll always come back to me when anything’s wrong and I’ll make it better, because it’s my duty, because you’re mine, and I’m yours. Okay?”
And everything comes out now. He’s full-on bawling at this point. You kneel down and he throws himself around your shoulders. You’ll hold him for as long as he’ll crying, and he’ll be alright, because he is safe in your arms. Because right now he’s a broken little thing, so beautiful still, the shards from his soul scattered all around, and you are his mender. Your kisses against the side of his head are the liquid gold that will glue the pieces back together.
This is his moment of catharsis.
It’s a surprisingly short-lived affair. After some few thirty seconds, he composes himself enough to gradually stop sobbing. Only trembling breaths reverberating throughout your own body are the indicator that tears are still rolling down, but he’s miles more settled than before.
You caress thoughout the length of his hair. He finally withdraws from the spot in your neck and valiantly tries to look at you. Your hand on his hair goes under his jaw, strokes the chiseled relief. “Better?”
His expression is so soft. You barely remember the last time he looked so calm. “Yeah,” is the hoarse whisper next to your soothing hand.
You lean forward and kiss the few droplets that are still going down. He closes his eyes and sighs, conquered. Turns his head as you’re kissing him and meets your lips, one, two, three times. Gives you the smallest of smiles.
Then he surprises you. His arms untangle from around your shoulders and his hands come to rest on your navel. “C’mon,” he murmurs. “I still want you to— to fuck me.”
Your arms tighten around his waist. “Yeah? You sure?”
Billy gives you a meek little nod.
You both get up. It’s a bit tricky; both of you have been on the hard floor for a while and your legs hurt. You begin to slowly walk the very few steps leading towards the bed, and even that takes a while, since he can’t seem to help himself and stop a few times to kiss you again and again. And it’s not like you’d complain. This is heaven to you.
You reach the foot of your bed. Now, this part is very special, and you have to be able to convey it to him, because he might have settled for the moment, but you suspect that the second you lay him on your bed he might start breaking again a little. So, your arms find their way around his waist. Billy’s arms go around your shoulders once again, like he knows what’s up. And then, slowly, you start tipping him over backwards, feeling a pang of affection with how he’s trusting you with his whole weight, until his back softly hits the bed, so silently the sheets barely rustle.
You settle between his legs.
“Still okay?”
He nods. You lean down, arms still around his waist between him and the mattress, and kiss him long and languidly for good measure. After you separate, there’s a few brief seconds where you just look each other in the eye. He seems to shy away after a while. A couple of tears roll down the sides of his head, and you begin to think it’s something he can’t control, like years of repressed emotions are just leaking out of him absent-mindedly.
You mumble against his lips, quietly, so that you won’t break this bubble: “Okay, gorgeous. Gonna need some lube and a rubber.”
Billy’s gaze turns heated, even as the tears are still rolling out of him. He bites his lower lip and nods.
With the grip on his waist, you push him further up the bed until you’re both comfortably positioned. Your hands fondle the sides of him, up and down his torso, and you feel the tiniest squirm against them. Hm. He’s probably ticklish after all. You give him a small smile and close the distance between your lips. He responds in kind and deepens the kiss. A short groan comes out of his mouth, muffled by your mouth.
While you’ve got him busy, feeling his nervous hands tracing random patterns on your back, you reach out with your right hand until you can open your nightstand’s drawer. Billy hears what you’re doing, but tries not to mind you too much or he’ll lose his nerve, so he keeps on opening his mouth for you, letting you caress his tongue with yours. Without looking, you pull out the objects and close it with the same hand. You lay the tube of lube and the unopened packet on the bed, next to his left hip.
Not wanting to withdraw yet, you start a sensual stroke of your right hand across his torso. His small breakdown just moments earlier have obviously made him flag. Your fingertips press firmly against the juncture of his neck and shoulder, starting a soft massage that leaves him boneless close to you. Then, those same fingers continue their way down his chest. One thing that’ll never stop exciting you is how sensitive his pecs seem to be, so you decide to exploit this fact to the maximum. You grope and rub the meat of his left pectoral in circles. He arches up into you, looking for more of that feel. The thumb of your right hand starts stroking his nipple, and he moans into the kiss. You take advantage of this and bite his lower lip. He shakes against you.
You reluctantly remove yourself from his lips and immediatly attach them to his neck. Without the barrier of your own mouth on his now, he makes small, choked off noises. While he’s distracted, you leave the warm skin of his chest and use that hand to open the lube, pouring some in that same hand single-handedly. You leave it to the side for the moment. Your tongue comes out. It starts tracing a path from the fluttering underneath his jaw and down to the place where your thumb is, and once you’re there, simultaneously, you suck on his pink nipple and enclose his now semi-hard cock with your lubed hand.
The reaction is priceless. He shocks himself with how loud he moans, almost to the point of shouting. He can’t even get on his elbows to watch you as you stimulate him; his arms feel like jelly. Billy can only hold tight against the bedsheet next to the sides of his head. He can’t help but thrust his hips repeatedly against the tunnel of your fingers.
“Needy boy.” He whimpers at that. Your hand moves very slowly up and down his member. “I’ll give you everything you want, and more.”
You move your mouth to his other nipple and do the same, this time with the tiniest, most delicious hint of teeth. He sobs. His cock has gotten fully hard in record time, and is steadily leaking pre-cum now.
“Can you open your legs for me, gorgeous?”
Billy covers his mouth with his right hand, somehow embarrassed at the obscene moan that almost comes out of him. He nods. You remove your hand from his sex, and he whines, even as he watches you lean back to witness him.
The way he flexes his legs, until his feet are against the mattress, and begins parting them, is shy, inexperienced, nervous. It does nothing to quell the pure feel of arousal you get when you finally see the most intimate part of him.
He chews on his fingertips, like he’s so nervous he can’t control his reactions.
“Billy…” You hook your hands under the back of his knees and pull his legs up more, almost bending him in half, wanting to look at him better. He shrieks and rushes to hide his face with his hands. His face is so pink behind them, no doubt. “Fucking perfect. Like you were made for me.” A muffled whine is all you get in response. But, how is he so ashamed of this right now? You are right. He is perfect. And so pink. And tender? And… open… Wait.
Your hands automatically stroke along his thighs until you take hold of his cheeks; he gasps and looks at what you’re doing from between his fingers. Your thumbs open him up.
“Oh my God,” is all he can whimper.
Huh.
You’re positive you might start drooling any point from now. He totally opened himself up for you before coming here. You’re absolutely sure you could fit two of your fingers in him right away.
In fact. Why not?
Your middle and ring finger start rubbing circles against his asshole. He has such a visceral reaction to this that you’re worried he might break down again. Billy uncovers his face and howls; grabs at both of your wrists, the one near his knee and the one close to his entrance. You watch him just in case he wants to stop, but the way he’s holding onto you lets you know he’s doing just that: holding on for dear life, not calling everything off.
“Good?”
He nods, almost enthusiastically, and you’re again hit with a rush of affection for him.
Slowly, as to not spook him too much, the tip of your middle finger starts pushing against his entrance, not forcefully enough to breach him yet. You were right. You could totally sink two fingers in him easily.
Meanwhile, he has started breathing more frantically, expectant of your next moves.
He looks at you. His pupils are so wide that the gorgeous ocean of his irises almost can’t be seen anymore.
You push your middle and ring finger in him, easily, and it’s like sinking into hot velvet.
The look on his face. God. He exhales a moaning breath and his eyes almost cross. You’re sure he’s started tearing up again. His head leans backwards against the bed. His spine sinfully arches up.
You begin a slow, leisured massage in and out of his entrance, index and pinky fingers to the sides of it. He sounds so breathless. His moans are so obscene already, and you’ve barely even started.
“Feels better when someone else does it, hm?”
You believe he didn’t even register that you’ve said something, if the way he keeps on moaning is indicator enough. Not a problem. The answer is clearly yes. Your thick fingers feel like heaven and hell at the same time in him, stretch him so much more than what he’s worked himself with —two fingers, as well— and send currents of pleasure throughout his body.
Your fingers part, effectively stretching him open further, and he makes a noise that sounds a lot like a purr. You lean forwards to look at his face better; his head was tilted back before, too caught in the throes of pleasure to understand anything else.
Billy catches your eye. He looks like a wreck. There are tear trails going up his forehead and now down the sides of his temples.
“Hey, gorgeous. Having fun?”
Your fingers thrust in and out of him a bit faster, and he covers his mouth with his right hand before nodding.
“It’s so hot that you played with yourself before coming here.”
Billy chokes on a moan. “Wh-What?! No— I—” His face gets so pink and he covers his face with his hands.
You smile fondly at him. He still gets so embarrassed at times. Your left hand leaves his leg and pulls at one of his hands, uncovering his face with not much resistance. “Such a good boy for doing that, Bill. Getting ready for me.”
And, as you say this, your fingers press against that bundle of nerves and that has him screaming so loud he can’t stop himself. He covers his mouth with his right hand, and even then he can’t stop the obscene moans filtering through.
But you don’t stop there. Your fingers focus solely against that place, and you begin a circular massage that has him seeing stars and start sobbing against his own hand. Such a perfect picture he paints for you. His hips are shaking, his feet are kicking against the bed. Billy uses his free hand to hold onto the wrist of the hand that’s making him feel in cloud nine, and he pushes with his hips against it.
“Oh, Billy. So good for me. Let me hear you, baby.” Your left hand grabs at his right wrist and pulls his hand away from his mouth. He complies without problem because he’s so out of it. Your fingertips press hard against his prostate, stroke around it, tap against it in random patterns. He’s trembling like a leaf by this point.
His eyes are clenched. He’s biting his lip so hard you’re afraid he might draw blood. You realize he’s trying to say something.
“F— Fast-ter—”
Your fingers start a quicker rhythm. “Yeah?” They thrust in and out of his hole with force now. He wails. He sobs even harder, well on his way to fully crying, but he doesn’t tell you to stop. His left arm goes around your shoulders to hold on for dear life. “Feels good?”
“Ye— Yeah.”
Your fingers are almost vibrating against him with how fast you’re going. His breathing is mostly composed of moans rather than breaths by this point. “You look so gorgeous like this. So perfect for me.”
Billy presses his tearful, agonic face against the side of yours. “Fuck me. Please! Please.”
“In a moment, gorgeous. I have to stretch you more.” He whines so loudly and prolonged it amuses you. He sounds so pouty about it. “Trust me on this one, okay? I can kind of be… well. A lot.”
He whines a bit more but complies, because it’s true. He’s going to need at least four fingers before you can enter him without causing him pain.
You kiss him languidly, trying to calm him down some before proceeding. As he’s distracted within the kiss, you slip your index finger under —or above, more specifically, since your hand is facing up— your middle and ring finger. It’s a tighter fit now. Your fingers are thick and unforgiving inside him, and his whining turns into a more choked off whimpering.
You withdraw your mouth. “Hurts?”
He shakes his head. You don’t think he’s being untruthful, even as he grimaces, because he’s pushing his hips onto your hand. After some seconds of stillness, you move your fingers in and out of him, slowly at first, but quicken the pace right away. He moans right into your mouth. You’re not kissing him, only sharing the same breath, which to him feels somehow more intimate.
He looks at you pointedly from beneath his tears. “Put another.”
You do, and this time, it’s a bit tricky to ease him into it. The fit is too tight as of right now, and he doesn’t realize he’s clenching down on the three fingers you already have in him. You can’t possibly enter him like this.
“Can you relax for me, baby? Be good for me and unclench?”
Billy exhales so loudly it can be taken for a moan. He bites his lip and tries to do as he’s told. Your last finger slips in, only up to the first joint. But your angel is being so good for you, and he deserves a reward that’ll surely give him a bit more encouragement.
“That’s a good boy.” You lower your face down his body, and before he can ready himself for it, your tongue licks a stripe up his cock.
He yells. His legs quiver next to your head, like he wants to trap your head in them but stops himself at the last moment. You give him too little of this, of this oral stimulation, because you can tell it won’t take too much for him now. Only a few swirls of your tongue around his head have him sobbing desperately, but it lands its intended purpose. His hole is lax around your fingers, and you manage to penetrate him with the entirety of your four fingers now.
You grab the backside of his right leg. You kiss a trail from his groin to his knee. “Perfect. I knew you could do it.” Your fingers thrust in and out quickly now.
Billy’s body is shaking and he’s making the most erotic noises now. He’s so out of it that he doesn’t realize that he’s whimpering, “Thank you. Thank you.”
“Oh, Billy.” Your fingers are ruthless against his entrance. “Such a polite boy, thanking me. I should be thanking you for letting me see you like this. If only you could see yourself right now.”
He’s a blubbering mess. He grabs the wrist of the hand that’s pleasuring him. “Now. Now. Please.”
You get your fingers out of him, slowly, though he still whimpers when you’re finally out. You quickly find the package and tear it open. Billy clings onto your shoulders and presses his tearful face against the junction of your shoulder and neck.
“Baby. It’s okay be nervous,” you start, as you roll on the condom and grab the lube bottle. “I’m here. Nothing bad’s ever gonna happen to you here.” You pour lube on your sheathed cock and stroke yourself a couple of times. Your arms go around his waist, and his legs find their way around your hips, like they’re their designated place by default. “I’ll take care of you. Can I take care of you? Please?”
“Please.” His whine resounds wetly, a tremble present in his voice.
This moment is everything for him. The moment when you push forward, slowly, though even then the head of your cock slips in completely, fluidly, and he looks a little bit like he’s dying, and he’s even quieted down, almost to the point of silence, like he needs to watch this part of his life as though he were witnessing a spectacle.
Billy looks at you, and his mouth does that thing where he can’t seem to get the words out, opening and closing on its own. You push your mouth onto him but don’t kiss him, only let him breath against yours, as if you’re his lifeline, his breathing source.
Your hips push forward a bit more, and all of a sudden you’re bottoming out.
He does this noise now, like that of a dying animal. His face is undescribable. He’s in the biggest agony, and yet he looks like he’s having the silent Rapture. Both emotions are strangely accompanied by complete silence. He can’t begin to process this. One thing that’s for sure is that he needs to be treated delicately for a while now, or he’ll truly break.
You kiss the side of his face. He turns his head, not really seeking your lips but just wanting you to be in his field of vision. “Talk to me, babe? Everything okay?”
He breaths heavily. Erratically. The tears are a steady companion now, will be for a good while. Billy looks at you like he hasn’t processed what you’ve said.
“Babe. Okay?”, you repeat, just in case.
The noise starts coming back. He’s moaning lowly without noticing. He shifts his arms around your shoulders, wanting you even closer to him. God. The light blue of his irises is so intense now, made even more so with how red his eyes have gotten.
He finally nods. Slowly at first, but then turning more frantic, pawing at your back, flexing his legs around your hips, urging you to move.
You chuckle a bit and that almost makes his eyes roll back in his skull. “Tell me how it feels?”
He exhales shakily a few times, like he can’t get enough air in to tell you his answer. “G-Good. So good. So full.”
“Yeah?” You knew he would. Your big cock is stretching him so much, you’re surprised he doesn’t look like he’s in pain. “Doesn’t hurt?”
He shakes his head. That makes this easier.
“Good boy.” He whines against your lips at this. “You were made for me. Taking me in so easily. Look so good split on my cock.”
He’s weeping, but he feels so accomplished now. Fulfilled. So wanted.
Billy closes the short distance and you do, too. The kiss is long and steamy. Half of it is just you giving his lips little bites that he can’t get enough of. A quarter of it is him inviting you into his mouth, licking inside yours and you responding in kind. Through all of it, his moaning gets louder, more whiny, more needy.
You bite his lower lip and drag it backwards, ending a kiss that he chases, again, so predictable and delectable. Sufficiently stimulated, Billy caresses your hips with his legs, whining a bit more. He’s so ready.
Your arms, hooked around his waist, work as an anchor as you begin pulling out of him, almost to the tip, something that has him shaking and whimpering already. Then, you push forward in the same leisured pace until you bottom out again.
His moans get desperate, even though you haven’t done much yet. “Go faster. Faster.”
You give him a steamy kiss and do as you’re told, pulling out and then giving a forceful thrust that has him wailing into your mouth. Then, you do it again. And then you start a steady rhythm that sends a current of pure unadulterated pleasure through his body. It’s not strong enough for him to feel it through his bones, but it still has Billy grasping at your back like you’re his only anchor. The way he’s moaning now leaves you wondering what he’ll sound like when you really start pounding into him. The image concerns you and leaves you breathless at the same time.
Billy’s legs are quivering around your hips already. You’re sure his hands are leaving scratch marks down your back, and the simple thought is delicious. His moans are breathy against your mouth. And the way he clenches around your cock is undescribable. He feels so hot, so tight, even through the condom.
He paints the prettiest picture. His face reflects how much he’s feeling right now, the steady stream of tears down his temples having never stopped. You don’t think you’ll ever see anything more beautiful.
“Is this how you’d thought it would feel?”, you ask, breathless as well, because no one who looks at this masterpiece can remain unmoved.
He shakes his head and tries to quiet his moans. “N-No. This is— ah— s-so much better. Never thought I would— oh— earn this!”
You press him tighter against you within the shield of your arms while you quicken your pace. “You never had to earn this. This —I— was always yours.” You press heavy kisses on his neck while he sobs. “I want to get this through to you.” Your hips slap against his skin, turning this moment into something so sensual and intimate at the same time. “You deserve to be happy.”
Billy begins crying in earnest. It almost makes you slow down before he tightens his legs around your waist, clearly indicating that he wants you to go faster. You comply, anything for your boy, and pound into him so hard that you feel it vibrate around him.
Your arms untangle from his waist and your hands grab at the back of his knees, bending him in half while you keep a fast pace.
“Yes! Yes!”
“I need you to believe it,” you say while you piston in and out of him. “You have to understand how much you mean. Not only to me, but by yourself.”
“Thank you! Thank you s-so mu-uch!” He looks almost overwhelmed with pleasure and emotions. He can barely keep his eyes open.
“You are enough, and more. I love you, Blue. Love you so fucking much.”
That’s Billy’s breaking point. It’s the first time either of you has said it, and he can’t take it. He starts coming untouched, shocked by himself, but pushes on around his pleasure. “L-Love you. I love you. I love you!” He repeats it like a mantra, in a moan, in a sob, defeated by this feel, so intense that he truly breaks down.
This is the strongest orgasm he’s ever had, and he can’t get enough of it. Tries to prolong it, doesn’t want it to ever end, even as he feels almost faint from it, his walls clenching down on you almost painfully.
Before it starts ebbing away, he tries to clamp his legs around you, both still in your grip. “Keep going. Keep going. Please.”
You curse and keep your quick pace. You know he’s finished when he starts moving against you almost erratically, overstimulated, his moans almost screams now. But he doesn’t tell you to stop. “Yeah? You’re gonna let me in you? Let me love you?” Your thrusts turn erratic as well.
“Yes! Yes! Please!” He’s shaking his head, so overwhelmed by the onslaught of your hips, now almost painful with how stimulated he is. His legs quake in your strong grip.
“I’m going to. You’re gonna get so much love, Billy.” You feel a pull at your gut. “So much and even more.”
“Please!”
You grunt next to his ear, and his moans turn airy and high-pitched, barely holding himself together. A few frantic thrusts more, and you’re releasing into the condom, grunting out your pleasure to him. He answers with loud moans, so overwhelmed, almost to the point of blacking out when he feels the warmth of your cum within the condom in him.
He’s still sobbing loudly as you slow down, but there’s a small, dopey smile on his face now.
You pull out and lie next to him, and he immediately attaches himself to you. Billy cries so loudly. He holds you around the shoulders and you hold him close to you, letting him vent all of his remaining emotions to you. But this is the beginning of something new, something different.
Those are happy tears now.
Oops. I didn’t mean for this to get so poetic and long. Lol
Edit: Yes, I changed the header for this work. I hope I’m not being too exaggerated.
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Sharingan no Kakashi
Volumes Covered: 1-27 (first part)
Hatake Kakashi, the copycat ninja, has been a fan favorite amongst readers of the Naruto Manga since the very beginning. For as long as I have been on Tumblr, his image has been plastered everywhere to the point where his design is known even outside the manga’s universe: many people who are not usual consumers have seen at least one panel/screenshot/fanart of him.
When I first read the manga, I too became really invested in his story (he was the mysterious, possibly good-looking kind of character that as a teenager was appealing to me) but as years passed (more so now that I’m currently re-reading the manga), that appreciation shattered, or rather, dwelled.
This is not to say I hate him, nor that I’m encouraging enthusiastic readers of the manga to dislike him, my particular mention of this relies on the need to give those that choose to read this post a warning, for I will be analyzing particular aspects of his character that can (and should) be considered negative and/or controversial.
Now, I’m not going to perform a detailed list of everything his character does during the first part of the manga because not only would it be excruciatingly long (and I don’t see the point in doing so for it beats the purpose of this meta), but also, because not everything about him is to be noted. In that sense, I chose some topics that interested me the most and that I consider important (if not central) to his characterization.
Long post:
Types of relationships
How does Kakashi Hatake interact with those around him? What kind of relationships does he prefer or does he have and how does the social aspect of shinobi’s culture shape the bonds he manages to create?
Mentor-student / commander-soldiers
During the first interaction of Team 7 (meaning, the one they have on the rooftop, not the one where Naruto pranks him) Kakashi asks the newly formed group to share personal information outside the data he already was given about them, however, when is his turn to share, his responses are extremely vague and general (here), preventing the team under his command to have any sort of knowledge about him outside of his military role. Furthermore, the way he decides to reply (that is the wording of his answer to, let’s remember, his own question), is not only empty of any meaning but also seems to be on the verge of mockery. Considering the way he acts and how other sensei ask the same thing (we can see that during Guy’s flashback), we can infer that the question wasn’t of his choosing, and he’s most likely following a script.
To give some context to this introduction, Kakashi up to this point has performed the same questions for at least a few years to different groups of Gënin which failed to pass his test (we don’t know exactly how many, only that he’s being failing teams for years) - so it’s not weird for him to lack any sort of interest in this team since it might be no different from the ones he already failed.
In addition, during this exchange, there are two dynamics that he introduces:
1. The dynamic between a leader and subordinates (in the general aspect). As a commander, Kakashi is not required to share personal information with his underlings, they -however- are bound to share/do whatever he asks of them due to his superior position in the chain of power.
2. The (non-existent, yet highlighted by this particular absence) relationship between teacher and students. Kakashi seems to start their link by severing it from the very beginning: he distances himself from the team, choosing to favor the dynamic leader-subordinate over the mentor-student (this will be cemented during CH 35, where he calls them “soldiers under his command”, and reiterated on CH 43 -where he refers to them as “subordinates”). Iruka becomes, by juxtaposition, one of the only real “teachers” inside the narutoverse.
The type of relationship we see between Kakashi and Team 7 (particularly Naruto and Sakura) seems to be replicated by every other Konoha team we are introduced to, except for some dynamics that can be put, in some way, inside the latter category: Kakashi/Sasuke (this dynamic in particular is presented in quite a toxic manner, I’ll expand on this later on), Asuma/Shikamaru, Gai/Lee and (to a lesser extent, since Team 8 was never focused on), Kurenai/Hinata.
About Kakashi and Sasuke’s dynamic (the one I mentioned could be more or less put inside the mentor/student category, although that specific label isn’t as strong as I might have implied), the headcanons about their relationship overtook many aspects of their canon interactions.
It’s true that Kakashi favored Sasuke and it’s true that one of the canon reasons for him to do so was that they shared the same chakra nature (lightning), so Kakashi was more able to help Sasuke to develop some techniques. However, there’s a fandom misconception that Kakashi was planning and/or actually helping Sasuke with his Sharingan -but that’s simply not true. At no point in their training are we shown how Kakashi tries to help Sasuke once he “awakes” (rather, gets conscious access over) his doujutsu, furthermore, I don’t see an actual reason for him to do so:
First, Sasuke probably knows a lot about the Sharingan (he grew up in a clan where many members possessed it; canonically, his father and brother were users. We don’t have confirmation about Mikoto, but because of how the Sharingan might be inherited she might possess at least the genes). They had conversations about the Sharingan and Mangekyo (x, x), and Sasuke saw it while being used multiple times in its basic form (x) and even in its Mangekyou form (x), meaning, theoretically, Sasuke was more prepared and educated than Kakashi, even with no experience. Second, the Sharingan is quite literally Sasuke's nature; I don’t think he needed much help (if any at all) on how to use it.
Beyond their chakra nature training, there’s not much Kakashi does or even proposes to do. Additionally, for Kakashi, training Sasuke also meant to do the least amount of effort while also implicated to gain the most prestige: Naruto was unstable -the Seal of Minato was tampered with by Orochimaru during the chünin exams which made him fail on basic skills (even those he had already mastered); Sakura didn’t reach the final stage -and for some reason, that meant no training for her, as if she didn’t need it the most*, while Sasuke was already internationally famous for being the last Uchiha: he was the main “spectacle” during the Final Stage.
*[Sakura’s need to be trained after her tie with Ino is to be discussed in a deeper manner. The chünin exams are not real exams but displays of the military forces of each village, hence why Sakura wasn’t trained after her failure and why the focus was on both Sasuke and Naruto. The third stage of the exam is a spectacle for other Kages and Daimyos to see, hence why she -almost literally, mattered not].
To add to this discussion about Sasuke and Kakashi’s relationship, it’s important for me to touch -at least briefly (for going in-depth with this will extend this post to an unmanageable degree), Kakashi’s projection of himself onto his student. Let’s look at their similarities first in order to dispute them after:
a- They are both geniuses, which puts them in the “highest” position inside their respective teams: This particular aspect of them, in addition to receiving the constant praises of their peers during such formative moments of their life, made them particularly arrogant (this doesn't diminish the training Sasuke subjected himself to as to reach such level of skill, here).
Yet, while Kakashi refused to cooperate with his own team (Minato’s) and relied upon his newly achieved rank (Jönin) in order to tell them what to do (x, x, x) Sasuke creates a bond with his teammates to the point where Naruto -who, by all means, would refuse to obey Sasuke during their first interactions, often follows his lead or trusts his judgment. In this specific aspect: Sasuke constructed a bond with his team, while Kakashi didn’t.
[Their context while growing up is vastly different: Kakashi had to deal with something Sasuke didn’t: the dishonor that suicide brings particularly in Japanese society, x (and vice-versa, as Sasuke witnessed his brother murdering his entire family), however, both of them shared the pressure of knowing that they were the only ones capable of "bringing their families’ honor back", so it isn't weird for them to act in such manner.]
b- They share similar personalities: This is, of course, partially a consequence of the prior point (you’ll notice that Neji, also a genius, comes off as arrogant -yet I will not focus on this aspect particularly), but the main reason for this similarity is that traumatic experiences shaped their personalities and the way they approach other people.
They both are rather passive-aggressive to others (now that I think about it, Neji is also like that -and a traumatic experience was indeed the reason behind such a mindset), yet Sasuke modifies his behavior the more time he spends with his teammates (he cheers up Sakura when she’s depressed, acknowledges Naruto’s strength during the chünin exams and saves their lives multiple times even when doing so puts his own life in danger and thus, jeopardizes his ultimate goal: kill Itachi).
Kakashi, for his part, was far crueler and linear with his teammates during his youth (and I’m specifically making a comparison between kid Kakashi and kid Sasuke for that’s the parallelism Kakashi draws -which is the basis he uses to judge Sasuke’s actions later on), his response to the trauma of finding his father’s dead body was to live for and live by the rules established for Konoha’s militia to follow -to the point where emotions were aspects of himself or his teammates that he refused to acknowledge; in the same manner, he prioritized the mission’s success over his team’s safety (unlike Sakumo). Later on, with both Rin and Obito’s deaths, Kakashi modified parts of his personality in order to model himself after Obito (not the real Obito but the perception he got of specific parts he chose -or thought worthy of mimicking -more of this will be discussed in the Nationalistic Mindset part of this post).
c- They both possess guilt complexes from which derived a strong feeling of inadequacy: This particular aspect is intrinsical, I believe, to Kakashi’s approach to Obito’s dogma (I won’t be expanding much for this is tackled, again, on the Nationalistic Mindset title). And again, both of them share a similar complex, yet their reason to have them is completely different (yes, they both might have survivor’s guilt, but it’s not the one I will speak of): Kakashi’s remorse lies in the fact that he wasn’t able to protect his teammates (once he formed a bond with them), he failed Obito -who died to save him despite Kakashi’s earlier attitude (I’m not diminishing Kakashi’s life, I’m pointing out Kakashi’s possible perspective about Obito’s death), and later on he failed him again when Rin died (he also failed Rin herself for not be able to prevent her kidnap). The manga doesn’t show us much of Kakashi’s trauma, but it’s somewhat safe to assume that he models his personality after “Obito” in response to this guilt, making himself someone “worthy” of both their teammates' sacrifices: he vows not to fail at protecting his teammates again, (“I will never let my comrades die”, here) for that’s what Obito taught him (here).
Sasuke’s guilt also has to do with his own incapacities, yet his main issue is that he wasn’t able to do anything against his family’s murderer (he arrived at the compound after they were killed), and it’s this specific event that germinated and blossomed into Sasuke’s core objective: Avenge and restore his clan [honour]. He could do nothing then, but he will do so one day. None of his family members “sacrificed” themselves for him to live (Itachi might have killed them to “save” Sasuke, but they would have been murdered regardless; sacrifice implies that those who perished took a conscious decision to die in another person’s place), so their background is nothing but different.
In addition, these specific events (including Sasuke’s incapacity to fight against Gaara during the invasion or against Itachi in Shibuya), shattered both their conception as geniuses (which, in lieu of the arrogance they constructed around it, makes the fall from grace much more difficult to bear), which pushes them to extreme changes: Sasuke, to flee Konoha in order to polish his abilities and achieve his goal; Kakashi, to make his life a memoir of “Obito’s dogma.”
Personal bonds
The types of relationships Kakashi values are first shown in CH 8 when we are introduced to the Memorial Stone. He refers to those who are carved in such space as his “best friends”, a statement that is (at least) questionable once we learn Kakashi’s background and how his relationship with Obito and Rin actually was prior to their death. The only possible explanation about why they are his best friends is that he developed a deep connection with them after their death (in lieu of their sacrifices and the feeling of guilt such occurrences brought upon him), it’s possible (headcanon alert!) that he also twisted specific memories of them in order to elevate them and -later on, force himself to become someone “worthy” of their sacrifices, as he did modify the original quote from Obito.
In that sense, Kakashi’s relationship with Guy (at least during their first interactions) is particularly blown out of proportion, out of the three jönin-sensei, Guy is the only one who stands alongside Iruka (hence, against Kakashi, Asuma, and Kurenai) and asks them -but mostly Kakashi, to reconsider their decision to register their rookie teams in the exam. Kakashi replies by laughing at him, justifying his choice by stating that “what they lack in experience they make up in surprises” (I guess “surprises” encompasses the fact that one of them heals almost instantly thanks to Kurama and the other one already has the Sharingan, which replies absolutely nothing to the actual matter at hand), and finally proclaiming that team seven will make Guy’s team “eat dust”.
After that, their next interaction is during the preliminary rounds, where Kakashi ignores Guy yet when Lee is fighting Gaara, Kakashi claims to be (literally) disappointed in him for teaching his student a forbidden technique, even if later on tries to cheer him up when Lee loses. And yes, the interactions are hilarious, yet the relationship is carried solely by Guy’s character for Kakashi is particularly closed on his one-sided relationship with his deceased team. That’s my point.
Emotional Manipulation
I have established before Hiruzen’s approach to the Will of Fire (exploiting people’s bonds and emotions in order to tie them to Konoha rather than a person/clan; basically constructing Konoha as a symbol that encompasses those who are dear to the shinobi, creating a nationalistic mindset where family=village. x), now, how does that dogma interact with Kakashi, influencing his actions and interactions with other people -particularly (but not limited to) Sasuke?
Kakashi has linked Sasuke’s capacities to the Uchiha Clan’s value since the bell test (CH 7), and repeated the behavior more cruelly in CH 18, and again in CH 27 (albeit this time positively, in the face of an enemy). The technique he uses to “push Sasuke forward” (in the sense of giving him motivation, since Sasuke’s bond with his family is intrinsic to him) can be (should be) considered emotionally manipulative. Should Sasuke fail or perform at a lower level than expected, it means the Uchiha Clan’s honor downfall.
Furthermore, Sasuke is not the “finest hope” of the clan, as he called him, he is the only hope since the only other member of the clan is Itachi, who massacred them, and Kakashi is aware of such circumstances. It’s different in Naruto’s case (Kakashi also displays emotional manipulation towards him) because he’s not linking a traumatic experience to his value -furthermore, he’s not linking the honor of an entire (deceased/killed) clan to his value, which is what he’s doing to Sasuke. The caption on Sasuke’s panel is “stab”, the words of Kakashi were purposefully chosen in order to downgrade Sasuke’s ego (I’m not denying he still uses them to “motivate” Sasuke -I’m questioning his methods). If we also take into account that Sasuke, at this point, has seen Kakashi’s Sharingan (and believed him to be part of the Uchiha clan) it gives his input more weight since Sasuke’s doubt about whether or not his teacher is related to the clan hasn’t been addressed yet (Sasuke didn’t ask nor does he know where Kakashi got the eye, and since he doesn’t know doujutsu can be transplanted yet, he assumes he might be a distant relative).
In this sense, is to be added that, one, Jönin-sensei vow upon their clan’s honor that their students are ready for the Chünin Exams (CH 35), and two, Hiruzen, in CH 65, states that shinobi defend not only the balance between nations -but also, the honor of their village. It’s no surprise then that Kakashi is so insistent on tying the Uchiha’s honor to Sasuke’s name (Naruto is an orphan to whom a “generic” last name was given -even if it’s his mother’s, he represents no clan nor has any knowledge about his family, Sakura’s family name isn’t renowned nor important enough for him to even care).
However, and despite the fact that Kakashi’s abasement of Sasuke is harsher than the one he performs on Naruto, it doesn’t imply that such degradation doesn’t exist: Back in CH 10, after Team 7 is attacked (and for the first time for the three gënin, might I add), Kakashi says to him, “it never occurred to me that you would freeze up,” meaning, he elevates him first (implying that he did consider him capable enough to respond to an attack of such caliber), only to dismantle him from the previous conception he -apparently, possessed. His words leave such an impression that Naruto cuts himself with his own kunai: from a narrative perspective is a powerful moment -but hadn’t been for Kurama, Kakashi would have had an injured student (he even mentions he could bleed to death), so why apply such psychological pressure to a gënin that has already a lot of emotional stress from the earlier attack? From a teacher’s point of view, it doesn’t make sense, however, it does make sense from a commander’s point of view, something Kakashi has actually had experience on (Team 7 is literally the very first team he passed), so his methods of “teaching” are yet to be polished.
[Jönin-sensei is a title where jönins (soldiers) are told to pass on their experiences/techniques to future members of Konoha’s militia, without being given pedagogical education to interact better with their students. Being a teacher (that is, a person actually capable of educating, with everything that it entails), it’s not important -being a good soldier is. This is incredibly highlighted during this interaction back in Chapter 3, where Kakashi calls this pedagogical situation a “mission”].
But this type of approach isn’t reserved solely for those under his command, showing that Kakashi either is not using it consciously as a tool -but rather is the way he was approached and, therefore, believes to be the usual way to speak to others; or that he’s constantly on “shinobi mode”, meaning, he uses every tool at his disposal (always, ever) to achieve the result he considers is the best (I, personally, believe this option to be the most truthful to his character, for he performs emotionally charged speeches to his own peers).
An example of the point previously made: During CH 22 [Wave Arc] Inari and Naruto get into a fight, Inari screams at Naruto and the main character responds by calling him a crybaby. After the confrontation, Kakashi finds the little boy, and we have an interesting interaction where Kakashi talks to him and (without Naruto’s permission) tells him part of Naruto’s background for no real reason but to appeal to the emotions of Inari and build a case for his student (which isn’t strictly necessary, the kid doesn't have to like Naruto and -likewise-, Naruto doesn’t have to like Inari for the mission to be successful).
What we see is what follows: Kakashi applauds Naruto’s way of handling trauma (he doesn’t cry rather, he hides his feelings) and, by juxtaposition, he brings back Naruto’s claim about Inari (him being a cry-baby) in order to criticize the young boy. Inari -who is a kid younger than Naruto-, is a coward and uses his pain to justify that supposed cowardice, Naruto doesn’t, which makes him better and should be reason enough for Inari to one, get along with him; and two make him a role-model.
Now, Inari is a civilian who lives in a civilian village and his experiences have nothing to do with those of a shinobi. Kaiza (Inari’s father) was publicly killed because he tried to defend his hometown, but he lacked the tools a shinobi possesses. Naruto grew up in a hidden village and the shinobi’s approach to death is completely different from what a civilian kid might be taught or experience. Naruto doesn’t have to know this, so his hostile reactions towards Inari are understandable from a character’s point of view, but Kakashi's reaction isn’t. People can argue that Kakashi, like Naruto, was taught and lives solely under the cultural aspects of his village, which is the reason why he brings Inari’s experience to his own sphere of understanding, yet while we can see that as his reasoning, it doesn’t mean we should condone it, as he has more experience outside his cultural bubble.
His words are successful, as we see here and here. Inari internalized both Naruto's and Kakashi’s speeches and instead of running to escape and reach safety, he decides to help his captive mother (who has been taken hostage by Gato’s men). Let’s add some more context: a young, untrained boy is forced through emotional manipulation (and here I will spare Naruto due to his lack of experience, but not Kakashi, who might understand things through the veil of his own culture while lacking the knowledge of civilian rules -yet he is aware of civilians incapacities during armed conflicts and still “pushed” Inari to take action against Gato’s thugs by glorifying Naruto’s behaviors) to “stop” being a coward (meaning: to confront trauma in a particular manner: the shinobi way, that has no claim in civilian society); and his life had to be literally saved by a ninja as a consequence. Furthermore, his cowardliness wasn’t an issue he was already struggling with before the shinobi arrived to the island, it was an uncertainty introduced by the group (brought in by Naruto -who knew no better- and cemented by Kakashi).
It’s when Sasuke “dies” and Sakura recites one of the shinobi rules, that we learn that Kakashi and Naruto were judging Inari’s “cowardliness” through the perspective and internalization of the same rule Sakura is now reciting. Inari, as a civilian, can't be judged by those premises.
I have pointed this out in some other posts but there’s no harm to reiterate: the pass from childhood to adulthood -unlike in the civilian society that follows different rules, is marked by the bestowal of the headband. That is, adulthood has little to do with age and more to do with rank. With that mentality, Naruto and Kakashi’s behavior towards Inari is slightly more understandable since, to them, his age is not an excuse to behave like a “child” (furthermore, Kakashi took the Chünin Exams when he was six, meaning he was considered an adult since that age). Yet, again, where Kakashi fails is in understanding that Inari is not governed by the same principles that he is.
Nationalistic mindset
How do the Will of Fire and Obito’s apparent dogma interact? Did Kakashi’s character really have the possibility of seeing Konoha as an oppressive state that considered him nothing but a mere tool? Did he have the “potential” to rebel?
Back in Wave Arc, among many things, there’s an interaction between Tazuna and Kakashi, where Kakashi mentions that a previous Hokage (we aren’t told who) taught his people to “fight for what is right”, selling the idea to the civilian in front of him that his hidden village (specifically) is the “good” side against the “evil” side (Zabuza, Gato -even other hidden villages). However, this particular speech of Kakashi, which he gives solely to Tazuna and not to his subordinates (who, by Tazuna’s standards are children), clashes with the prior idea that “missions’ feuds are high and we do what we are paid to do” (assassinations or babysitting). Meaning: there’s a narrative to be told to civilians to shape their view of shinobi (particularly Konoha’s), and the actual reality that only Team 7 (as ninjas), gets to see.
In addition, during Kakashi’s second fight against Zabuza (CH 30), Kakashi states that Konoha (therefore, he), knows about the swordsman’s attempt to coup and kill the current Mizukage -alongside his wish to raise funds to attempt another coup after his failure. We learned previously thanks to Haku’s background that there’s a bloodline cleansing currently happening in Mist; a genocide on such a large scale can’t be kept secret that long -furthermore, there’s no indication that the murders are happening quietly either since those who possessed Kekkei Genkai were pushed to hide their bloodline; and if Konoha knows about Zabuza and his attempt to take over the government, then they surely know about the reasons behind it.
What I mean by this is what follows: Kakashi and Konoha claim that they fight for “the right thing” to those civilians they encounter, but do nothing -neither military nor diplomatically, to stop those massacres from occurring (nor do they take a stance against them either, as it reduces Mist numbers and weakens their military power). They’re still pretty much in touch with the Mizukage that carried out/ordered such killings, for his government was the one that told Konoha about Zabuza’s attempted coup when declaring him rogue.
Kakashi downgrading Zabuza for working for Gato is, in a way, absolutely comical because not only is he working for an authoritarian regime, but he also downgrades someone who (even as despicable as he might be) is actually trying to do something against those who wronged him. Kakashi (under Konoha’s mindset), can’t differentiate between a person’s ambitions and their ideals, they might seem equal on the surface, but they are intrinsically different: One goes after an individualistic goal, and the other one is founded on the possibility of a communal achievement. To Zabuza, another individual raised under shinobi culture, killing innocent civilians to gain funds in order to bring down his oppressive government is a plausible course of action (we can make a value judgment on this, but this does not dispute the idea of Zabuza taking actual actions in order to overthrow the oppressive government in his village).
As said before, Kakashi doesn’t seem able to differentiate between personal ambitions and ideals, therefore, he will never be able to take a stand against Konoha. Hence, the belief/headcanon where Kakashi rebels against Konoha or has the “potential” to do so should Kishimoto “allow him to” is contradicted by Kakashi himself, to the point where he defends Konoha even when it’s not being questioned (building it in a positive light).
Furthermore, there’s an interaction that pretty much confirms this: Here and here. Kakashi admits that the belief system under which a shinobi’s life is valued “bubbles beneath the surface of his mind, disturbing him” (he also uses the plural, referring to the ninjas -as a kind, which means that from his perspective everyone feels uncomfortable with that mindset, and yet, no one seems to question it, for those who questioned are then labeled as missing-nin). Even if Naruto later on promises that he will create his own “Nindo” (and by context, that destiny is presented as opposed to the “I’m a tool” mentality previously discussed) and Kakashi smiles, there’s no actual denial of his current belief system.
Kakashi was intended to be the representation of a nationalistic/pro-shinobi system mindset, as he follows the narrative’s stance (which, in turn, follows Naruto’s). Even after everything Kakashi said to Zabuza in order to degrade him (like, for instance, questioning his standards for affiliating with Gato and staging a coup), the moment Zabuza says “I won’t kill Tazuna because I won’t get paid, so let’s not fight”, Kakashi immediately agrees. His problem with Zabuza isn’t that his mindset is different per se, but that is opposed -at that moment- to Kakashi’s and his mission, once Zabuza is not at the other end of their fight, everything is forgotten/forgiven (he simply doesn’t care anymore).
Later on, because of this nationalistic ideology, Kakashi is willing to sacrifice his students’ well-being: Again, the Chünin Exams (analysis I made here), are nothing but staged wars in order to display each village’s military forces to draw the attention of potential customers; therefore, even tho Kakashi knows about Sasuke’s condition (Orochimaru giving him the Cursed Mark) - he stands against Anko when she asks the Hokage to pull Sasuke out of the exam. Even though he later on warns the child the fact that he allows such a dangerous situation to occur while putting the whole weight of the issue on Sasuke’s shoulders, is rather telling of his priorities.
Kakashi’s phrase (well, it isn’t Kakashi’s phrase but actually his interpretation of Obito’s) “I will never let my comrades die” (x) is solely true until Konoha’s wellbeing (in any sort of way, including prestigiously) is on the line. Dying is the only thing Kakashi protects them from, physical or psychological damage isn’t included.
The idea of him respecting and following Obito's true dogma is an absolute contradiction because Obito’s core ideology and Konoha’s are intrinsically contradictory, they can’t coexist and still be truthful to their basis. To Kakashi, Konoha is the symbol of peace -of his comrades, so the physical existence of an individual isn’t as important as the symbol’s survival, therefore, sacrificing his soldiers’ wellbeing to give the village more leverage during the chünin exams isn’t a problem -unlike them dying at the hands of Zabuza, which would mean Konoha failed on the mission and lost three gënin in the process.
And here I'll add this: Obito's actual phrase was "Sure, in a ninja’s world, those who violate the rules and fail to follow orders …. are lower than garbage. However….Those who do not care for and support their fellows…are even lower than that! If I’m scum…the rules are no good to me! And if breaking them makes me the wrong kind of shinobi…then I’ll crush all the so-called shinobi!!" here. In lesser terms, Obito's dogma is this one: If a system (shinobi's/Konoha's) prioritizes political/warfare success over the lives of those fighting for it, I will not be a part of such a system - furthermore, I'll rise against it.
My claim of Obito joining Madara in his quest as something always existing at his core sustains mostly in this. Rin is a catalyst, for I'll admit, he didn't turn completely against it until her death when the system personally affected him and those he cared for (can he be blamed when he was taught to be loyal to it? It isn’t weird for him not to see such flaws until they impact him specifically, we can’t fault him for something so humane), yet his beliefs are right there and have always been there.
The very important, very much intrinsic difference between Obito and Kakashi's approaches is that Kakashi (and later on, Naruto) puts the weight of his comrades' well-being upon his shoulders and his shoulders alone (his trauma with Obito's death, who sacrificed to save him, and Rin's who was "killed'' by his hand, are probably the main reason for Kakashi's specific approach to his former classmate's dogma), while Obito disputes the very basis of the issue. Obito isn’t blaming Kakashi per se but the rules that Kakashi, as a commander, chooses to follow indisputably (x, x). Obito will gain no awards or recognition for saving Rin while compromising the mission, on the contrary, he'll gain the same punishment Sakumo did: ostracization, now not only from the Uchiha but also from the general population.
And here's the thing: at that moment, his respect for Konoha is so little that he doesn't care - going against the rules is going against Konoha, fine "I'm scum, I'll crush the so-called shinobi!!". Here Kakashi "fails" (yet it's to be mentioned he's a child soldier in distress and in the middle of a battlefield) to externalize the critique and place it upon the rules (hence, the system) where it belongs, rather, he internalizes it and blames himself, believing that he's responsible for everything since he was "too uptight" to bend (x and x).
Obito and Kakashi’s opposition comes from the answers to these questions: "What are they fighting for?" and "Why are they fighting for it?" (the what's and why's in narrative and character-construction by Dushman-e-jaan). The first answer might be similar as they both might answer, "Konoha", particularly at that point in time; it's the why, which drives the what, that's different. For Kakashi, as established prior (although, during his childhood, that might have been the answer as that's what he was told to do and what he was taught to want, rather than a personal conviction), Konoha in and of itself is what matters, the place, the land, the symbol of peace; while Obito's core belief would push him to say "Rin", as in, an individual; hence, “the people”. Then why would he choose to sacrifice Rin (the people) in exchange for the survival of a place created to ensure their well-being? In his eyes, it makes no sense (and yes, later on, he “betrays” his own core beliefs as he carries out the UCM for a "greater good", yet he does that because he considers the real world to be hell, so he cares not for it -x,x-, as the only world that matters it’s the I.T one).
Obito was written by Kishimoto to be Naruto’s “dark” parallel, as he was a morally good child (wanted to become Hokage to stop the war, helped ladies on the street, even sought his master advice and changed his stance on Kakashi after Minato’s speech) that the environment transformed onto one of its darkest consequences (and well prior to Madara’s intervention as he claimed he would crush the “so called shinobi” shall he need to). Meanwhile, Kakashi reflects the pro-shinobi stance as he never even begun to question it when a child (the same could be said for Neji, who showed revulsion to his personal situation, and was definitely closer than Kakashi to rebel, yet he never questioned the status quo in itself).
It’s difficult to give closure to a post this charged and long (as of now, it’s fourteen pages), so I’ll finish up with this: Whether you agree or not with this post, try not to just blatantly insult me (if you end up doing it, oh well). I genuinely don’t care if you find my analysis revolting, and it’s just as easy as ignoring my blog altogether or creating your own post with your own takes and reading of the manga; I have no problem discussing these topics, but if your entire argument relies on your personal headcanons and you provide not a single panel of evidence I’m ignoring you, so don’t bother.
Here it is, spent months on this post (it depended on my re-reading of the manga, which is why it took this long), so I hope you guys enjoyed it and I want to personally thank those who read all of this, I genuinely appreciate it.
Cheers.
#naruto#naruto meta#kakashi#kakashi hatake#anti kakashi#anti kakashi hatake#anti shinobi system#anti konoha#obito#obito uchiha#sasuke uchiha#sasuke#naruto uzumaki#uzumaki naruto#uchiha sasuke#sakura#sakura haruno#haruno sakura#team 7#team minato#rin nohara#team gai#long post
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kinda random question but how do you go about researching? I’ve wanted to get deeper into fashion history than just watching youtube videos, but I don’t really know where to start.
ps. thanks for making such detailed posts. they’re really interesting to read.
Thank you! I'm really glad you've found my posts interesting!
This is great since I've kinda answered this in replies couple of times, but not properly. I very much understand the struggle. Dress history is a relatively new academic field and there's not that much reliable sources available and so so much unreliable sources everywhere. Internet of course has this problem but so does a lot of books too.
I thought this would be a short one and yet, here we are again.
Disclaimer: I'm writing this from a western fashion history perspective, since that's what I know best, but especially reading up on academic research and doing primary source research applies to non-western cultures too, though often it's harder to find sources for non-western fashion.
Getting started
Imo the best place to getting started is to read a book that gives a general timeline of fashion through history. I'm not sure if that's just how my brain works, but it helped me a lot of when going deeper into one period or another to understand the broader context and what roughly came before and what after. However these books are inherently difficult to make well, because there's so much nuance and variation in every period of dress history and if you're writing about the whole timeline through thousands of years and keeping it book length, there will need to be a lot of simplification to the point of inaccuracy. There's many popular fashion history timeline books with illustrations made for the book, but I would avoid those since non-contemporary illustrations often give a distorted image of the fashion, especially when it's about earlier periods in history. I've seen some really inaccurate illustrations depicting Middle Ages and Renaissance especially.
Costume and fashion: a concise history by James Laver - I'd recommend this as the starting point. James Laver was a art historian, an important pioneer of fashion history and curator of Victoria and Albert Museum, which has one of the most extensive costume collections now. The book is therefore based on serious academic study, but being a pioneer means you'll be outdated, when the field is more established, which is partly the case with this book. There's some outdated parts, but the images are primary sources and it does give good historical background. It should be taken as a starting point, not as the end point.
A History of Fashion by J. Anderson Black and Madge Garland - This is another similar book. It's more recent, but it also suffers from some outdated parts. The writers are not academics, but it has more primary source pictures which does help (at least me) understand visually what's being said.
Books
In a given subject I'm researching I usually start with seeing if I can find a reliable book on it or related to it, if I haven't already read much on it. Often what I want to research goes deeper into details than what a book usually does, so it will work as a starting point. As said it can be hard to find these books that are actually reliable, but here's couple of reading lists to help with it.
Here's a reading list by a retired professor of dress history from Helsinki University. It's very extensive and has a wide variety of books and papers listed. There's a bit of leaning towards Finnish sources, but most are in English and about more international western fashion.
Here's a reading list by @clove-pinks, who is excellent and writes a lot about the Romantic period, especially men's fashion here on Tumblr. These are all books that can be read free on Internet Archive, which makes the list even better.
Internet sources
There's a lot of bad sources floating around in the internet, but also some excellent gems. As dress history is such a new field, there's a lot of unexplored spots and lacking research still, but some troopers in the internet have done some great legwork in going through primary sources and gathering them together. These can be excellent especially when trying to research a specific garment, since often these blog posts are by historical costumers, who are detailing their background research in reconstructing a specific garment. It's not always easy to find them, since they might not come up in the first page of the google search, but I often find them through pinterest, where the blogs are linked into the primary source images and images of the reconstructed garments. Though be sure to look with blogs like that with critical eye. The best sign that it's reliable is when each image is given a source.
There's some more general sources too that need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Fashion History Timeline - This is a page with entries to the whole timeline of fashion as well as entries of specific garments. It's very well sourced and has usually pretty good image sources too. I will say though that it often gives a pretty limited description of the period focusing on some specifics, without giving a good overall picture, especially in the Medieval sections. The medieval sections are honestly pretty useless. It's at it's best in 19th century imo (I haven't checked out the entries to 20th century since I rarely research vintage styles, but I'd assume they are pretty good too). But since it has great sourcing it is usually informative. It just shouldn't be relied upon to give full picture of a period.
Wikipedia, History of Western fashion - In some ways this is the opposite of Fashion History Timeline. Wikipedia has articles on each period. The sourcing on these articles is often quite lacking and the information shouldn't be taken at face value. Especially the terms for the garments are often used in these articles in very questionable ways. However what these articles have is pretty good primary source image collections, and what is nice is that in Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern periods they are often divided into regions, and they often have images of working class clothing, which are for some periods really hard to find. These articles often don't either give a full picture of the period, but in someways the basic picture of the period is easier to grasp from these than from Fashion History Timeline. I use these mostly for the primary source images, and the texts of them should be taken with a bucket of salt.
Academic papers
Going deeper into something will inevitably require reading up on some academic papers. I'm lucky since I get access to a lot of academic publications through my uni, but JSTOR (my beloved) gives free access to 100 papers per month (you'll just have to make an account). Through google scholar you can search for papers on a given subject, or if you don't have access to other publications, you can just use JSTOR's search engine.
Primary sources
If some MVP hasn't already combed through primary sources to gather them on a give subject, you can do that too. It's not necessarily an easy task though. There's thankfully a perfect guide for that.
A Handbook of Costume by Janet Arnold - Janet Arnold was a legendary dress historian, who really defined the modern field. This book details the process of researching dress history and how to analyze primary sources. And it's free on Internet Archives.
I'll give some basics here though.
Extant garment
Most of us who are not academic historians don't have physical access to extant garment, but many museums have nowadays excellent digital archives of their costume collections. Here's a list of the most well known ones. MET and V&A has sometimes great descriptions of the clothing and their history, but not for every item.
MET Costume Institute
Kyoto Costume Institute
LACMA
V&A Costume Collection
Palais Galliera
Extant garments are of course the ideal sources to study, since they are the actual garments and not just representations or descriptions of them. Sometimes the collections even have pictures of the insides of the garments, giving invaluable information about their construction. However, extant garments have limitations for research, since there's a strong survivorship bias. Firstly, they heavily lean on later periods as textiles deteriorate relatively quickly. You won't find extant garments from Middle Ages, at most fragments of them. Secondly, they are mostly clothing of the upper classes. Lower classes used their clothing till they broke down, and even then often salvaged any fabric that could be salvaged for new clothing and other textiles. Upper classes didn't necessarily have to do that, so what survives is usually very expensive formal clothing that people would wear rarely and rather preserve than salvage the fabric from it.
Photography
Since camera was popularized in early Victorian era, you don't get photos before that. Photography is a great source from the times it was available, since yes it's still only representation of the clothing, but there's less artistic interpretation than in paintings and illustrations, though importantly, there still is artistic interpretation. As long as there has been photography, there has been photoediting. They of course used it for creepypasta purposes by editing them holding their own heads and editing ghosts into backgrounds, but also editing their waists smaller. Basically the exact same way photos are still edited. So no, this is not really how small the waist got in Edwardian era, since this is edited.
Another obvious limitation for early photography is that it didn't have colors, so popular colors of a given time period and given styles have to be found through other means. A great thing about photography though was that compared to painting, it was relatively cheap, and therefore a lot of lower class people were able to photograph themselves. We even get people outside in everyday situations not posing.
Photography can be found with search engines like google and pinterest, though they should be always sourced then. You sometimes come across very Victorian looking photos that are actually just modern photos that are well edited. And also it's important to date the photos, which might not be easily with photos just randomly floating in the internet. Libraries and museums sometimes have good digital collections of old photos. For example:
Digital collections of New York Public Library (NYPL) - It has a wide variety of collections including photography, fashion plates and other illustrations. I haven't found a great way to search through the collections, but the best way I've come up with is to search images within the Clothing & Dress topic, put some limiting filters, then click some right looking image and then go to the collection it was from. I bet there's an easier way but I haven't figured it out.
Paintings
A great thing about paintings and statues is that they date basically through whole history of organized civilizations. Paintings are more delicate so even with murals in antiquity, you'll get more surviving status from that time period. But because of the strong artistic interpretation inherent to these art forms, there's some tricky parts to them as sources for historical fashions.
You'll find a lot of paintings by just searching for fashion or paintings of a given period in google and pinterest, but it's sometimes tricky to source them to figure out where and when they were painted. Therefore I often check from Wikipedia a list of artists from a given time and place, and search their paintings from digital archives of museums. It also helps when you choose artists who were specialised in specific type of paintings. What kind of paintings depends on what you're researching and the time period.
Portraits are of course great sources. They depict the actual clothing an actual person wore and if the person was historically important enough you can find out who they were and gain a lot of context for the clothing. However, they are usually all rich people, though not always. Another thing to keep in mind is that sometimes portraits portray the subject in a costume. This became a pretty big trend among nobles in 18th century. They had costume parties and would have their portrait painted with their costume, but also there were trends of costume that were not even worn for parties, but only for having a portrait. Sometimes the painting would be painted like a scene and not like traditional portrait. Van Dyke costume (first picture below) in first half of 18th century paintings is one such example. It referred to mid 17th century fashion that was seen as timeless at the time. Peasant costume (second picture below) is another example of a popular costume for nobles to wear in portraits. Costume balls continued to 19th century, but after the popularization of camera they were mainly photographed. People would continue to dress up in costumes for portraits, but it wasn't as big of a trend as in 18th century.
Genre paintings were a genre of paintings that became popular first in 16th century Low Countries and then In Netherlands/Belgium area during the Dutch Golden Age (from late 16th century and thorough Baroque) and during Baroque's popularity all over Europe. Genre paintings depict normal everyday life of peasants, working class people and the bourgeois. During Baroque they often had elements of idealization, symbolism and even sexualization of the subjects, so they should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do usually depict accurately the clothes the people wore. Rococo era had a lot of these types of everyday scenes about the upper class. During the Romantic era peasants were heavily romanticized in genre paintings, but there was also a lot of genre paintings of bourgeois thorough 19th century that was wasn't as strongly romanticized. These scenes were sometimes also depicted in portrait form. Realism brought another interest into the genre and Realistic genre paintings often focused on the working class. They did the opposite of romanticism though and often exaggerated their subjects to look more wretched.
History paintings depict events and scenes that were for the time historical too. They became very popular in 19th century, when Historism was the dominant in arts, but they have existed long before. There's even some from late Medieval period, and in those earlier history paintings, the historical figures are usually depicted in contemporary clothing and there's no attempt at recreating historical styles. In later periods, especially during 19th century Historism they very much tried to recreate historical styles. This is why it's important to always source paintings. I've too often seen Victorian paintings used as images for Medieval fashions.
Religious paintings have sometimes a bit of the same issue. They were very popular during Medieval and Renaissance eras, and usually the biblical figures would be depicted in contemporary fashions, though not always, sometimes in vaguely "biblical garbs". Religious paintings also have the issue of often being highly symbolic, so sometimes the characters in them are not dressed for the situation, or a character that in the biblical canon very poor is depicted in upper class contemporary fashions.
Illuminated manuscripts
Medieval manuscripts with illustrations are invaluable sources for Medieval fashions. They are usually commissioned by royalty and detail historical narratives, so they mostly depict royalty and nobility, but some illustrated scenes depict commoners too. You often find images of the illustrations floating around in pinterest but they can be hard to source when the source is not linked (which is quite often). The illustrations can be spotted by the quite consistent style (though sometimes they are not from illuminated manuscripts but some other rarer illustrations like playing cards).
A lot of illuminated manuscripts have been digitized and British and French libraries have quite extensive online collections of them which are linked below. The manuscrips in those are mostly English and French of course but there's manuscrips from other places in Europe too, I've seen quite a lot of the German speaking area especially.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
The British Library
Fashion plates
Fashion plates became a thing in 1780s, so they are not useful for periods before that. They are basically illustrations that show the latest trends and they were published in fashion magazines. They don't reflect the way everyone dressed, since as they did show the latest high fashion and the people who would be wearing that were mostly young rich fashionable people. However, fashion at the time had a little different meaning than today as it was linked to dress code, and to be respectable you needed to follow fashion. So everyone, even working class people, would follow the new trends to an extent. This is especially true when we get to Victorian era, when mass industrial mass production and the emerging middle class made clothing cheaper and more available to more people. They wouldn't maybe follow every new trend or with every detail and with as much extravaganza or with the most expensive fashionable materials.
While the fashion plates didn't necessarily depict specific existing clothing, they were based on existing clothing and they were often used as guides for dressmakers. Kinda like you might go to a hairdresser with a picture of a famous person's hair or hairdressers sometimes use pictures of famous person's hair to show what they might do. And the people who might not afford something as extravagant as shown in a fashion plate, might still show it as a guide and get a simpler version of it made for them. People of the middle and lower classes especially would also use them as guides to sew themselves fashionable clothing.
Fashion plates are quite easily found on the internet, but as with other things, if you don't go straight to some organized archive, it might be really hard to date them accurately. Many bigger museums and libraries have fashion plates in their online archives, for example NYPL which I mentioned earlier.
MET Fashion Plate Collection - This is a pretty extensive collection.
Regional costume illustrations
When genre paintings became popular, artists didn't necessarily have the change to go and see what peasants wore in the places they were setting their genre paintings in, but because the whole point of them was to depict authentic real life, there was a need for illustrations of regional dress around Europe. And some artists would travel and create costume collections for resource to other artists. These are really invaluable to us today, though they should always be taken with a grain of salt, because sometimes the artists who created these drew dresses for places they never had even been in. For example some of these collections include non-European dress and they should all be probably disregarded as fantasy costumes basically. You can usually assume that the closer the region which dress they depict is to their own place of origin, the more accurate and based on reality it is. It's also good to try and google the artist and see if you can find information of where they actually traveled, because sometimes we know that pretty well.
These collections can also be found in the digitized archives of big museums and libraries, again there's some in NYPL collections.
British Museum's collections by Hippolyte Lacomte from 19th century
A collection from late 16th century on BnF archives
Honorable mentions
There's many other primary sources in different periods that can be helpful, but the ones I've mentioned are the major ones and easiest to access, when you're not doing academic research with institutional resources. I thought I might mention couple of other sources that have become handy to me as examples.
Magazine and news paper ads became wide spread in the Victorian era and from that onward is a great source. They advertise specifically ready-made clothing, so clothing that was much more available to a regular person and therefore can be really helpful to understand what a regular person might wear. I don't know a great source for them though. Many libraries have digitized old papers and magazines so going through fashion magazines is perhaps the best bet, but it's definitely a lot of combing though. Some people have though gathered ads in blogs.
Satiric comics can be surprisingly helpful for researching sort of alternative styles and seeing what trends garnered backlash. For example I've long been obsessed with Aestheticism and the other counter-cultural movements related to it, and there's quite a lot of women's Aesthetic extant garments, photos and paintings available, but very little of men's Aesthetic fashion. But then I found that Punch Magazine (conservative satire magazine) loved mocking the Aesthetes and therefore drew a lot of comics with men in Aesthetic fashion. Caution should be taken though since satiric illustrations do often exaggerate for comedic effect. For example the idea that 1770s ladies made ships out of their massive hair comes from a satiric illustration mocking the large and elaborate hair of the time.
Runaway ads of slaves and indentured servants are bleak, but can be helpful source for the clothing of poor people during 18th century. This is specific to US, but because of the colonialism poor people there would often wear at least similar clothing as those in Europe, especially Britain and France, which had the most colonial presence in that region. The clothes were described in great detail in these ads for identification purposes. These runaway ads can be also found in news papers of the era, many of which are digitized in archives of bigger US libraries, but it's definitely even more combing through. Though again some people have done some of that work already and documented it in blogs.
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I looked around and didn't see anything about this on your blog but I apologize if I missed it.
I was wondering, what does doing the work behind this blog...feel like? I guess what I'm asking is if it does anything to you. Like, I had a thought. For a flash, I imagined you as Butters from South Park in that episode where he is tasked with filtering out all the negative comments on Cartman's social media. It ended up really messing with Butters, what with him having to see all that negativity.
You're definitely not being affected to that extreme, I assume, but I wonder if you would have anything to say about the process of finding these negative posts and reading them several times to edit them. Has it exposed you to unpleasantness that you wouldn't have otherwise seen? Or is there perhaps a kind of catharsis in editing such filth?
I'm making a lot of assumptions here. Maybe I'm also asking about your process. I just think what you're doing is neat and would love to hear about your experience with it.
Thanks for reading and I hope you have plenty of reasons to feel joy <3
oh boy, i love talking about myself haha—so thank you for giving me an excuse to do so! i have answered similar questions in the past, though never at length. every once in a while, someone pops into the inbox to ask about my mental health (which, rest assured, is just fine—i don’t put this blog’s operation above anything; it’s honestly pretty low on my list of life-priorities), and it’s always quite sweet. having a mob of strangers following one’s sideblog has its perks: one being that sometimes parasociality results in some well wishes, kind thoughts, and general goodwill. which is very nice, and probably an unearned vanity-boost for my ego.
what does the work behind this blog feel like? in turns: mundane, challenging, vindicating, annoying, amusing… and probably other things that i’m forgetting. most of the work i do on this blog is actually me procrastinating! i am a certified adult with a job™, and i’m definitely guilty of slacking off at work sometimes to queue posts submissions from my inbox, which is more fun than like… proofreading financial documents and making spreadsheets. other times, i’m sitting in a café with my partner, and allegedly i’m “writing” fanfiction. but, uh, if you know any writers, you know that sometimes “writing” means, ‘looking at a blinking cursor’. so it’s in those moments that i open up tumblr and start writing image descriptions and adding tags to prep posts for my queue. that’s mainly when the blog feels mundane.
something that i think helps me avoid negative doomscroll-spirals is that i don’t actively seek out bad posts for this blog. being a citizen of the internet delivers fodder to me naturally. that, and running a semi-popular sideblog on tumblr. when i see a bad post in the wild, that’s when the feeling is annoying/challenging. challenging, because ever since starting this sideblog, hateful posts don’t feel as vicious to me. once i see them, they stop being posts and turn into word-puzzles. and i love word puzzles!
solving the word puzzle is amusing for me, as is getting to look at my resulting “blackout poem.” it makes me laugh, it stretches my brain. when i started, i used to have to read a post several times to find the ‘good post within the bad post’ so to speak. these days, i’m so used to it, i barely read the bad posts more than a handful of times. but as i was saying to my partner, one of the reasons i love found poetry (erasure poetry, and cut-up poetry) is that it uses the same part of my brain that loves scrabble (the board game). then, of course, it's vindicating to see my posts get so many notes, sometimes surpassing the original bad post. that's more of my own vanity, i'm sure.
as for the last part of your message: yes, i have plenty of reasons to feel joy. i work with people who respect me, i live walking distance from a bubble tea café, and have friends and family whom i love. i have the good fortune to be safely out as a queer person. i’m a fanbinder. i’m currently working on a long fanfiction which is getting some very nice comments on ao3. and i’ve recently decided to become a poet (like, for real).
i must admit, i’m fascinated by how you imagine me. i often wonder how i am perceived, especially because i keep many cards close to my chest here on my sideblog.
anyhow, thank you for this excuse to ramble about myself and the process of running this blog. i hope you also have plenty of reasons to feel joy 💛
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Hi, I just want to ask about the tags I've seen on one of the Loki posts (screen below, because I dont know what I'm doing, I rarely sand messages on tumblr). Could you explain the S-H part and how it relates to his attire when you have some time (and want to explain of course)? Thank you!
Hello! Thank you for sending me an ask!
So, to explain why I honestly think Loki does self-harm...
Look at Loki's attire in Thor 1...
And then look at The Warriors Three attire...(Images)
And Thor's...
In the scene where we see Loki confess about telling Odin, all of The Warriors Three are either wearing thin clothing or showing skin of some sort. It's also worth noting that they're sitting around a fire in the scene. So, the room that they're in is by no means cold, yet Loki is still completely covered from the neck down. All that viewers, and other supporting characters, are able to see is his head and his hands.
Now, if we compare Loki's attire to Thor's when he visits him at the S.H.I.E.L.D base, we can see that Loki is wearing several layers just like he was on Asgard when, base off of how other characters are dress, it's not necessary. While Thor is on Earth, we see him only really wear a jacket and/or flannel and short sleeve t-shirt for most if not the entire the time he's there. This causes me to speculate that Asgardians have higher body temperatures than humans since he clearly doesn't require several layers to stay warm. (Darcy is literally in the background wearing a skull cap and coat and possibly even a scarf, and Thor is out here in a t-shirt and flannel 🙄).
Keep in mind that Loki is also a Jotun, and the planet that they originate from is colder than the Antarctic. When we see him, Thor and The Warriors Three go to Jotunheim, Heimdall makes a comment that Loki isn't dress warmly enough. Clearly it isn't required for Loki wear much to stave off the cold. This detail most likely means that because of Loki's Jotun biology (and arguably his Asgardian biology), the cold doesn't bother him. Therefore, the amount of layers we see him wear in the movie, again, isn't necessary.
That begs the question...If Loki doesn't get cold, why does he dress the way that he does?
It's simple really, he's hiding something. It's not uncommon for people who self-harm to try and hide their scars from others. People also may self-harm for an assortment of reasons. Whether it be because they are depressed, anxious, seeking attention and/or possibly suicidal (and according to Thor 1, it can also be debated that Loki was/is suicidal as well). My entire blog really is just a series of repetitive in-depth analyses of the psychological problems Loki suffers from because of, really ALL of Asgard but specifically, Heimdall, The Warriors Three, Thor, Frigga and especially Odin. (My Loki Series Analysis summarizes a lot if not all of the main points I make on my blog). The Thor 1 movie just gives you a sneak peak/summary of what Loki has no doubt had to deal with for centuries. Between being talked over, ignored, underappreciated, neglected, misunderstood, isolated, outcast, gaslit and possibly physically abused (Odin's fist raise), coupled with being abducted and being raised to believe that the species he originated from are a race of horrible monsters, how much he struggles in the movie and in his overall life is understandable. Loki is painfully aware that he is different from other Asgardians and this bothers him. In reality, Loki understands that self-harming in not a normal thing for people to do and, based on the fact that he's hiding, he feels embarrassed that he does it. There could even be a fear factor included since he might not know how people would react if he were to tell them, or he may already know that the people around him won't take it very well if they care at all! As a result, Loki hides.
I hope this answered your question and makes sense! Thank you again for sending me this ask! 💌😁
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Please Read
Thanks to all of my followers and people who see and enjoy my postings. I have always tried to respond to personal messages sent to me and avoid public postings or replies like this.
Recently I got a very nice note from one of you that I was trying to reply to and was cut off by character limits. Somehow the message got lost and I cannot reply directly to you but I will address your questions and concerns and thank you so much.
Recently I have gotten several complaints/rants from anonymous about posting AI. They never give which posting they are concerned about and frankly it is starting to piss me off to the point of considering closing my inbox, through which I have developed good friendships over the 15 or so years I have been on tumblr.
AI is an interesting new form of expression and I agree completely that it should be indentified as what it is. I try and when I find out I have been faked I remove posts or amend them. So please send me any images that your are concerned about and I will respond privately.
The nice person who contacted me talked about the baby platypus which of course is a toy, I gave a similar one to my grand-daughter. I assumed it was obvious, same with technicolor birds. That said the majority of the concerns I have received to date were infact about verifiably real animals or clearly art.
Many things being called AI are digital art which of course is a different thing completely. What is art? Is a photo-montage art? Is painting art? Is leaving a small hand made structure in a gutter art. None are real life. For me art is a form of expression and interpretation of our inner and outer worlds. My own personal art consists of words, sounds, photos, hand made paints, clay, found objects, whatever. I think it is arrogant, ignorant and irrelevant to question someone's art unless they are trying to benefit from intentional misrepresentation.
Currently I am doing paintings that are my version of Australian indigenous people style dot paintings. I am constructing 3 dimensional pieces with ultaviolet light reflective materials including paints I make myself. Some hang from the ceiling. They are displayed in a room which is lined with blacklights. Unfortunately it is impossible to present them online in anything other than video format.
Since I joined tumblr I have had a completely separate blog for my personal artworks and writing, a few of which make it here. I never give out the name of that tumblr.
My first and primary tumblr is ymutate. Mutant Distractions was an early spinoff but entirely different than it is now. Other blogs under this moniker are Mutant Whatnots and RUKnowhere amongst others. In the past ymutate was primary and had other stuff that has since become the focus of other blogs. I have been redefining the focus of each tumblr to be more specific. As I have stated in a previous post my intention has always been to keep track of things that interest me and share content from other platforms that I do not find here. I make an effort to verify anything that is in my mind questionable but that is difficult. So few people identify sources and/or the specifics of their posts. I do not post anything which I dislike. I avoid violence though sometimes paintings or animal photos may contain it. I try to be thought provoking, educating and amusing. That's what art does for me.
Please personal message me with any questions you have. I am considering making my blogs private if I continued to get annymous and useless spam complaints. It is unlikely I will even read anons again but I will not exclude you from mail just yet.
ymutate has always tried to provide entertainment. Legitimately people complain of me over posting but I can do whatever I want, these are personal blogs for all of the wonderful people on tumblr. I follow 1500 people and have thousand of followers (I never cared about numbers) but if I do follow you it is because I like what you offer and do not assume that because do not reblog your postings it is because I don't like them.
Many of you have changed my life for the better and enriched the lives of countless others.
Thank you all so much. May your days be full of wonder and joy,
Sincerely, ymutate.....
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Please tell us the reason behind the pokemon choices! I get most of them, but am curious about Meowstic and Nihelego in particular. Is it for the nihilEGO pun?
OKAY i am on my iphone so i’m typing this from scratch again instead of my drafts. also it is night. tumblr decided to not give me notifs until now but it’s okay!! we ball😁
I’m unsure how much you know abt pokémon so I’m gonna do my best to explain but this is a lifelong special interest so i may miss some things^^
Quick going over the ones you didn’t ask about:
Mewtwo: clone created to replicate Mew, Went Horribly Wrong, ended up destroying the lab it was born in. It’s even a really long time since I’ve seen the movie but i believe the mewtwo there is neglected child core. This is REALLY Angela especially because in pokedex entries they often talk about the thing that makes mewtwo nothing like mew is that it’s “heartless”. poor poor angela baby…
Mega Gardevoir: This is a mostly aesthetic pick. That thing really looks like her if it’s shiny (see image) and the colors match perfect. the way gardevoir is portrayed in pmd reminds me a lot of Angela. Gardevoir is about immense loyalty to a trainer (even if it ruins your life forever and the trainer does not care, as shown in pmd) and i read it as something about the script
Porygon2: Honestly this could be any of the mons in this line but Porygon is a digital being and the first fully synthetic pokemon which begins acting in ways which were not programmed as it evolves. Kind of represents Angela acting in ways a machine should not and breaking free of her predetermined role to me :)
Now onto the pokémon you actually asked about!! :)
First up, Meowstic!
This first part is a small design thing but this thing has Angela’s face to me, especially with the yellow eyes with red pupils. Angela’s eyes are inconsistent in canon but I like to represent them with both red and yellow to represent both of her “parents” (sorry Benjamin… i love you but u aren’t included there😔)
This pokedex entry is one of the main reasons this is an angela pokémon to me, aside from vibes.
It has the same “closed eyes to repress” thing that Lobcorp angela has going on, just with repressing incredibly explosive powers instead of repressing The Horrors!
These pokedex entries are really goofy but they read very angela to me :) its unfriendliness is part of its charm!
Also i have no idea when i’ll ever get to post these so now is a good time as any to drop meowstic angela :)
Nihilego is a slightly different case because it’s tied less to dex entries and more to how it is used in the story of sun and moon. I haven’t played those games in YEARS so i might be a little bit questionable with my reasoning but this one’s really important.
Nihilego is intentionally designed to mirror one of the human characters in pokémon sun and moon.
(image i found online. i see it somewhat differently but it’s close enough for this)
Anyway this human character’s mother has neglected/abandoned her in obsessive pursuit of this pokémon and other Ultra Beasts.
The fact this pokémon not only has a similar silhouette to angela but serves as a “replacement” for a human character in a parent’s mind while also being Distinctly Nonhuman… it’s by no means a perfect comparison but there’s Something There
This dex entry always gets me too… it’s just a girlie… :(
It really makes me want to replay sun/moon because i feel like my memory of the story being really shaky has me on the edge of a breakthrough about this thing… but it looks like angela and i can draw story parallels basically:)
I have No Idea if this is coherent but I hope it cleared things up a little ^^^
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well here is sunny's scuffed gif tutorial for anyone who wants to learn how to gif 🎉🎉
so first of all you're obviously going to need a clip of whatever you want to gif. you can either download full videos or use a screen recorder (like obs for example) to record the specific scene you want to gif
once you have your clip you go into photoshop and look for "file -> import -> video frames to layers" then choose your clip and you'll get a screen like this
you can use the two small arrows to trim the clip to just what you need then click ok and it will open the clip up into frames
(btw if you don't already have it on make sure to go to "window" and turn on timeline. that's where you will see the frames)
now personally my first step is cropping and resizing. cropping is kind of self explanatory but to resize the gif make sure you go to "image -> image size" (NOT canvas size. just wanted to say that since the options are kind of similar) (although you can still use canvas size for cropping) and here is a handy little chart that is helpful if you want to know what to resize gifs to (width is what's important here height can be whatever you want it to be)
now personally my next step is sharpening although you can probably also do this at the end. i use maizekeen's gif sharpening actions (if you don't know how to use actions in photoshop there are many tutorials online but very basically you download the actions then go into the actions menu (windows -> action if you don't have it open) and click on load actions) and then from there you just choose your action and click the play button
then after that is usually when i delete any extra unwanted frames in the timeline (it's not necessary to delete the frames from the layers panel)
NOW is the fun part and also where a lot of this becomes up to taste and personal style ✨
make sure you have your adjustment panel open (window -> adjustments)
the ones underlined are the main ones i use. i recommend playing around and seeing what does what and seeing what ends up looking cool to you
oh and when you use adjustment layers make sure they are above all the layers of the gif like this
i made some different edits of the same gif to show some of the different things you can do. like i said it's up to personal taste and style
here is the original unedited for comparison
and here are some different edits i did real quick to hopefully give you some ideas for what you can do
and if you want to change the speed of a gif make sure to select all frames and then use this little arrow
i tend to use either 0.05 or 0.04 since anything faster or slower tends to start looking wonky but you can try it out yourself and see what looks good to you
btw here is the difference between 0.05 (left) and 0.04 (right)
NOW FOR SAVING
when you feel like you're done you wanna go to "export -> save for web" (it might say legacy next to yours it still works the same) and you will get a window like this
the most important things here are the two options i circled. most of the time i just leave these at adaptive and pattern. perceptual and selective can be used in place of adaptive but i've found that adaptive tends to look best. diffusion instead of pattern can help lower the size of a file in some situations but it doesn't always work but for the love of god please don't set it to "no dither". also make sure the looping option is set to forever (unless you specifically wanna make a non looping gif)
and from this menu you can preview your gif (lower left corner). slightly above the preview button is where you can see your file size (in this case this gif is 7.8mb) tumblr says their gif limit is 10mb but in reality it's slightly less than that so if your gif is 9.7~9.8mb it's probably too big
now if everything looks good then just click on save and name your gif and you're done 👍
now i'm sure there are a lot of things i didn't explain well so if there are any question feel free to send me an ask or a dm and i'll try to explain things more in depth :)
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First, I want to wish you ( a little bit late however) a happy birthday!!! 🎂 🎂🥳🥳🎉🎉
I was busy and was only reading on your ao3 account, just got here and realized!
You are one of the two accounts that made me do a profile last September or October ( I don't remember exactly which one of these two months it was). I hope you're having an amazing pregnancy ( are you having nausea, did you have it already and it passed on the next stage or did you not have this effect? 👀, if you don't feel comfortable answering, that's totally fine, I understand) and I hope your hubby gives you princess/queen treatment like you deserve! 😌✨
Could I ask you how you post on tumblr? I want to post things like pictures or blurbs, but I have no idea how.
Do you also have tips on organizing time? I have a lot on my plate between uni stuff, looking for scholarships/opportunities and trying to have a life, that I have no stability and am very stressed.
To conclude this, I wonder how would traveling abroad on another continent be with either Matt or with Frank?
I definitely imagine that with Frank it'll be really nice. He'll always have everything planned and I see him informing himself as much as he could with knowledge to the max. He'll bring reader to museums or historical places. However, he could sometimes be paranoid or really almost always on alert. He's definitely a bodyguard boyfriend!
With Matt, I think I'll be hard on the way to go there ( either by plane or boat, it will be really noisy for him) . He could also be always stressed since he won't be able to understand the language spoken and might misinterpret things as threats. :( I don't see how reader and him could have a great time together...
What do you think?
Ahh thank you, friend! 💖 My birthday was actually back in October, but this celebration is sort of like a tumblr birthday! I've been here for just over a year now and it seems like a good cause for celebration! And I'm glad to hear I could play a role in you coming over here to tumblr as well! It's definitely fun being able to interact a lot more than on AO3!
Thankfully most of this pregnancy has gone pretty well in comparison to my previous with my first son. That one took place during COVID so it was isolating and I had 24/7 nausea and sickness. This pregnancy has had its issues, but thankfully everything has been working out in the end. I've only had a bit of nausea in the first trimester and then it comes and goes lately now, but honestly I'm just forever exhausted and uncomfortable being almost 36 weeks along now. And my husband is doing his best! We've got a toddler so this time around it's not always do-able to have quite that level of treatment, but he's very helpful and attentive!
For the rest of your questions, I'll answer them below the cut! Because this is quickly becoming long 😆
It's generally pretty easy to post on tumblr, whether you use mobile or a PC. There's usually a button somewhere that says create or something along those lines. And there's options to just write text or add in images or make polls, etc. If you sort of play around you should be able to see the different things you can do! You can always test out a post and see what it does and then delete it afterwards, too! I was a bit confused when I came here at first, but just playing around with everything had me realizing that it's pretty straightforward for most things!
As for tips on organizing time, I can share what helped me during the busiest phase of my life in my late 20s. I was in grad school for a couple of years while also running a wedding photography business while also planning my own wedding and trying to maintain my own social life and sanity. So I get the stress! What I found helpful was using some sort of calendar or organizer. I wrote down deadlines for things that were non-negotiable so that I could visibly see what was going on--days I needed to go photograph a wedding, days wedding photos were due to couples, when homework was due, what days exams were, or when projects/papers were due for grad school. Things like that that cannot be changed. Then I usually plotted out time to allot to each thing throughout the week and prioritized each one depending how long it would take/how soon I needed it finished. So I made sure I had time to work on editing photos every day to keep making progress on weddings (because I usually had a new one piling up more work about every weekend), and I usually allotted so much time throughout the week to work on schoolwork (because I was reading well over a thousand pages a week every semester). I felt like having the visual of a calendar allowed me to actually see where my time was being spent and how much time I actually had to get things done. And it made things feel a little less overwhelming and like I was more in control. And any extra free time outside of getting my work done was reserved for wedding planning of my own or doing something fun with friends or my now husband.
So for you, I'd say plot out when school things/homework/exams are due, when scholarships are due, and what days you have work (if you have to go into work). Then try to allot how much time you would need to get everything done and plan that into your days every week. Some weeks you may find that you don't have a lot of social time (I know I certainly didn't and that's rough), but unfortunately that comes with going to college. Unless you're like one of my friends who somehow skipped every class, winged every assignment, went out always partying, and somehow still got her degree. Still baffles me to this day... But generally, school is going to take up a lot of your time until you finish it. It's rough and I feel for you though ❤ Just make sure to take some mental breaks and don't overwork yourself. Allow yourself to say no to things you don't actually need to do as well.
Now onto the bit about Matt and Frank abroad!! And of course, these are just my thoughts on how I picture the two of them.
I do think of the two, Frank would be easier to actually travel with just for the fact that he wouldn't need as much accommodation since he does not have Matt's heightened senses or a disability, which would obviously add a layer into planning that a Reader/significant other would have to keep in mind when planning things with Matt. But to me personally, I still think experiencing traveling abroad with either man would be a fun experience for different reasons and I don't think Matt's need for extra accommodation would ultimately have a negative effect on a vacation, especially because I imagine he'd travel with a partner who makes him feel comfortable with who he is as a blind man dealing with the extra sensory input. Personally I think experiencing anything through Matt's senses with the way he 'sees' the world would fascinate me because I don't experience the world even close to the way he does.
That being said, with Frank I could see him having some things planned out, and in my mind I picture it being from his time spent in the military. He seemed to spend quite a few years in the service, which means he's done multiple tours to many different places worldwide, even if that means just passing through a country. But I'm sure he's visited a couple of interesting places on his own when he had free moments, whether alone or with his buddies, and I could picture him having a few places in mind he'd want to show Reader. But I could also see him having places in mind that he had heard about but never had the opportunity or time to go visit while he was abroad in the past because the military tends to keep you busy. So I'm sure there's places Frank would love to really explore. I could also see him being interested in the historical places, having read up on something that really stood out to him, but I could definitely see him interested in adventuring outdoors if Reader/his significant other was open to that. He definitely seems like he'd want to get out and explore the scenery and the sights and he probably wouldn't want to sit and relax too much on a vacation. And I agree, he'd have times where he'd absolutely be on alert. I think that's just how Frank is wired at this point, especially with loved ones.
As for traveling abroad with Matt, the actual getting to a different destination would be rough on him. Though we know in the MCU he's traveled to LA now because of his appearance in She Hulk, so canonically he's managed what I think is around a six hour flight. And from a brief check, it seems New York to certain cities within Europe would be a little bit longer of a flight by an hour or so. So, I think he could manage it, but I think it would be vastly unenjoyable because of his senses. And he'd absolutely need to accommodate for those. I also imagine he'd need time to decompress and recover after a flight like that before getting out and enjoying the vacation. Though I do think he'd have fun exploring restaurants and finding really great food to try, and I think he'd enjoy experiencing museums or art galleries whether there was a guided tour set in place for someone who is blind or visually impaired, or whether he got to experience things through Reader's descriptions. I think he'd still like to explore the city and visit historical sites, but I think Matt would really enjoy experiencing places that are probably a little less overrun with tourists and people that might overwhelm his senses. But also, getting Matt to stop being Daredevil for a bit and actually leave Hell's Kitchen might be hard 😆
#bellas 2.5k follower celebration#lots of questions here!!#but thinking about matt and frank abroad was fun!
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a perspective on dea and grinpayne: part 1 (siblings)
[image id: screenshot of a tumblr reply by prettyravegirlnightcore that reads “id be interested to know more of your thoughts on their relationship.. like i agree theyre not siblings but sometimes im not really sure Why they arent siblings :o (i love your posts/analysis btw!!)” /end id.]
first off: thank you! i’m glad you enjoy them! and you are in luck because i have a lot to say on this topic. you’re also getting way more than you asked for because i love typing. :)
the post this is replying to is one where i said i thought it was funny they cut the lyrics where osric calls dea grinpayne’s girlfriend, and then in the tags i mentioned that i appreciate the complexity of their relationship but i think it’s clear they’re not meant to be read as siblings.
the other complexities will have to wait for another time (part 2 here), but today i would like to give my two cents to the point mentioned specifically in this reply: dea and grinpayne are not siblings.
i'm going to kick this one off by reminding everyone that my first experience with this musical was by reading the script and listening to the london cast recording, not by watching it onstage, filmed or otherwise. i think i've mentioned it offhand before but it bears repeating for this one because the focus of this series of posts is going to be on analyzing the script. you’re going to get my interpretation of their dynamic before i saw a performance. this is not about version differences, or the way that the actors chose to portray them onstage. i’m sure i’ll cover that eventually (i’m dying to, actually), but not here.
the issue on the table
i think these two are kind of challenging. full disclosure, the first few times i read it, dea and grinpayne made me uncomfortable. so i think that's a valid feeling. you get the two of them being raised together and then immediately a song about how they love each other. and you go woah now hang on. stop the car.
so let’s hit the brakes. there are two assumptions about their relationship present here that, as they coexist, naturally cause some discomfort:
dea and grinpayne are adopted siblings
dea and grinpayne are in romantic love with each other (and possibly have been since they were young)
so, taken together at face value: siblings in love! and to be clear i'm not cool with this personally. i'm not about to defend incest. don't even worry.
what i am about to do is tell you is that not only can you argue they are not siblings, you can also argue that they are not in love with each other, at least not until they are adults, and possibly even not until the end of the show. (and just so we are 100% in the clear the thing i am disputing here is the “in love” romantic part specifically. as the self-proclaimed “#1 beauty and the beast enthusiast” obviously i think they love each other). the latter will have to wait (or click here) so for now let’s just assume that they’re in love and focus on articulating why i think these two are not brother and sister.
argument for siblings
the biggest reason to believe that they see each other as siblings is that they were raised at the same time in the same place by the same father figure.
maybe this reason is enough for you and it trumps everything else. as a general audience member, that's completely fine. that's how you feel about it. a valid gut reaction. however, when analyzing something, "how do i feel about this?" and "how does the text want me to feel about this?" are two separate questions that may have two separate answers. and we are interested in the answer to the second, not the first.
so, how does the grinning man want us to see dea and grinpayne?
well, whether or not they ever refer to each other as brother and sister is going to be a pretty big indicator of that. and... they don't. they both call ursus father, but not once do they call each other siblings. taken in isolation, i still wouldn't give this more weight than them being raised together. i'd call it ambiguous and accept either interpretation (siblings or not) with varying degrees of personal comfort. however, we have to take the whole show into account. and there is more than one romantic couple...
josiana and dirry-moir's relationship is critical to the construction of dea and grinpayne's. they're the only two romantic couples in the show, and i believe they stand in very intentional contrast to one another. (yeah sure ursus's wife exists but. barely. not enough to count.)
josiana and dirry-moir absolutely call each other brother and sister. hell, their first on-stage interaction is this:
Dirry-Moir: Sister!
Josiana: Brother!
They immediately get intimate.
following this, angelica comes in and starts telling them to knock it off. josiana and dirry-moir's relationship is very explicitly an incestuous one. and it is played for laughs. heavily. when it finally accepts them, its with a "well, under these circumstances, i think incest is absolutely acceptable" that is honestly still too absurd to take seriously.
disclaimer: i have not fully read lhqr, nor do i plan to at this time. but i skimmed it enough to notice that josiana and dirry-moir were not originally half-siblings in the novel. this is something they changed this for the musical. and i think they made this choice specifically to make this point and to contrast them with dea and grinpayne.
it becomes incredibly relevant, then, that dea and grinpayne's relationship is treated differently from theirs. they’re never questioned or ridiculed about their relationship by other characters. even ursus, their father, doesn’t really seem put off by them being a couple. grinpayne told him when they were first found that the baby was not his sister, and ursus seems to have taken it to heart. his reluctance to tell them beauty and the beast seems comes from them relating to the eponymous characters (“a little close to the bone, girl”) and when he comes into conflict with the two of them later, it’s over dea encouraging grinpayne to seek the truth, not over them being in love with each other. barkilphedro doesn’t mention them being raised together at all when grinpayne says he wants to marry her, his preferred attack as to why she’s not suitable is that she’s “part of the old life.” now, dirry-moir describes dea and grinpayne as having “a love affair that’s beautiful and true / but more ugly and erotic than a visit to the zoo,” but it isn’t explicit in my opinion exactly which parts are “beautiful” and which are “ugly,” so it’s hard to parse this as a comment on the morality of their relationship. i’m of the opinion that this is just him saying that he thought beauty and the beast was sweet, with the “ugly and erotic” part being because of their disabilities. the rest of the song is him gleefully objectifying grinpayne for his face, so i think it’s a pretty safe reading. this is all of the times that came to mind where an outside character comments on their relationship, but if i missed one let me know.
i think that, in a nutshell, this difference in treatment is the strongest indication that we aren't meant to see dea and grinpayne as siblings. the grinning man establishes very decisively (albeit after "beauty and the beast") by way of josiana and dirry-moir that it believes in poking fun at incestuous relationships. and it just never does this with dea and grinpayne. they’re treated quite seriously, both by the other characters and the narrative itself.
as i said, i think there’s still a lot to be examined when it comes to these two and their relationship with each other. hopefully you will join me next time as i do my best to unpack more of it.
part 2
#the grinning man#burning thoughts#dea#grinpayne#duchess josiana#dirry moir#stay tuned for part 2 in a few days where i will finally talk in-depth about beauty and the beast ❤️
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what the fuck is the red jello? i'm so glad you asked (thrasir metapost womp)
as this is my longest waiting muse, i figure it's time i post baby's first meta. please bear with me on what is basically just... a ramble with images.
(tumblr deleted this in its ((very fucking long)) first pass. so i'm grumpy about having to write it all again)
before there was a feh oc with the name, i took to calling the neon jello-like stuff the hel ocs have eitr. in old norse, eitr is the word for poison, and in nordic mythology it is a liquid substance that gave life to the first jötunn. my headcanons are all derived from that concept (though whether or not i will continue to call it eitr since getting a character with the name has yet to be determined.)
for now, though, we'll be calling it such. has a better ring to it than jello or goo lmao.
so, lina, what does this stuff do? good question. think of it like a preservative. the characters who possess it are all very much dead, and so eitr takes the place of things like organs and flesh when they are no longer needed. all of the helions we have seen are missing their chests and stomachs, so by that fact (and that being where our most important organs are) i assume this is where eitr begins its progression. from there it spreads through the limbs.
and i can say in confidence that it spreads in such a way because thrasir still has hands!
this is her day of devotion alt, in which you can see that beneath her elbow is eitr, and yet her wrists are still flesh. in her default, you cannot see this, because the entirety of her forearm is covered in armor.
looking at her design and the clear lack of care taken in protecting the eitr parts of herself, i've come to the conclusion that the most heavily armored parts of her are likely still skin. this would be part of her forearms + hands and some of her calves + feet. she also is the only oc with all of her face still (and a neck!) though i couldn't tell you why exactly on that one. she's just cool or whatever.
the protection also would make sense under the logic that, because she is dead, any sort of wound will not be naturally healed. were her remaining flesh to sustain any sort of damage, there would be only eitr to replace it. clinging to her last little scraps of humanity is what this is.
now, onto the real pressing question. if i punch her, will my fist go right through? and the short answer is no. the actual texture of eitr is kind of hard to guage, but i'll break it down for you.
based on damaged art, neither thrasir nor ganglot's jello-parts have any effects added to them to display how they react. we have hel and lif to source from, in this instance, and they give... quite different answers.
hel's eitr seems to crack like glass, lending more towards a hard surface than lif, who turns to liquid...?
my takeaway from this is that it depends on the eitr's age. hel has been this way for considerably longer, and is also way less frequently in combat than lif. hel's eitr would be cured, almost, and hardened on the outside, whereas lif's is probably still a little squishy (especially if it is consistently taking damage and being renewed.)
so this would give us thrasir's answer, which is that hers is likely somewhere in the middle. punching her would probably feel about the same as punching a normal person -- kind of squishy but definitely solid.
and of course, the most important question: is she cherry flavored?
no. and if you lick her you will die, be it because eitr is poisonous in nature or thrasir would explode you. one or the other, whichever comes first.
#( HEADCANONS )#if you read all this you get an award#it's been cooking in my brain for over a year now... thank you feh for explaining nothing so that i may take the liberty of doing it myself
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Isa, we've discussed this a few times so it will come as no surprise when I ask you a question about the 10th anniversary of Peaky!! I'm wondering what you would rate the top 10 kisses?
Hi Lee 🤗 This was a surprinsingly difficult question since i've never even considered rating the show's kisses before (a mistake i now realize) and also because tumblr gif engine is absolute shit in aiding me in this task 😅 I've unfortunately came two kisses short from what you asked but i hope you enjoy it anyway 😚
8. I didn't manage to find a gif or even just a cropped image but Number #8 goes to those two fellas making out at the entrance of Eden Club. They were there just entering the roaring 20's, in a drug induced chaotic party, living their best lives so i would like to give props to them 😆
7. I love Arthur and his genuine reaction to Linda's news warms my heart despite me knowing that everything from here goes downhill. I read this kiss as a gesture full of hope, promises and even some pride showing that Arthur had some desire to be a better father than the one he had. This, unfortunately, didn't come into fruition as we know but i appreciate that the spark to be something other lived in heart.
6. Polly and Aberama were something else, weren't they? Admittedly their relationship kinda came out of nowhere but it worked even if short-lived. So their mention on the list it's also a memento of their dynamic ☺
5. And we finally arrived at my two beloveds🥰 I love May's slight desperation and Tommy's slight surprise as they kiss 🤭 It holds an adorable level of awkwardness as May states (with the kiss not with words) that she's willing to stand the public ridicule for Tommy!
4. I guess this one speaks for itself 😳 A deep passionate kiss in the midst of love making. You can't go wrong with that.
3. This is the perfect level of devotion for a wedding kiss (the exchanged gaze and the comfort between the two is *chef's kiss*) and it's enhanced by the way Tommy helds her face 🫠
2. This could be easily my favourite kiss in the entire show... I mean, look at Tommy's shoulder dip, the tenderness of his lips and how May starts to grip his coat... (and they even start to sway a little bit, i couldn't find a longer gif that showed it) 🥹 It's beautiful and it plasters all over my face the ENORMOUS chemistry potential these two had 😭
1. But number one comes and does THIS to me:
It's Derby day, May is clinging onto the hope that he will stay with her and it's heartbreaking because even despite not yet knowing about Grace's pregnancy, we as an audience now that (for plot reasons) Tommy has no interest in staying by her side. BUT Cillian and Charlotte were in another frequency over here 🤭 All the elements that made Kiss Number #2 great are here as well, dusted on this small peck on the lips 🤩 Instead of the detachment and indiference Tommy is suppose to feel, it reads more like a domestic bliss scenario where May says goodbye before he ventures to a long day of work and crime.
#this is MY list folks#so don't be mad at me for not including a kiss that you particurlaly like#it's all for shits and giggles anyways#peaky blinders#tommy shelby#may carleton#grace shelby#polly gray#aberama gold#arthur shelby#linda shelby
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New to EDblr?
Some stuff you might not understand or be familiar with when starting out on tumblr for ed content.
OBVIOUS TRIGGER WARNING::: if you’re underaged/“new” to this PLEASE seek recovery and try your best not to trigger yourself on here. You deserve recovery. This is very unsafe and you need to turn back before it’s too late. You DO NOT want this disorder i promise.
abbreviations: a lot of abbreviations are used so people don’t get their accounts deleted. this content is genuinely dangerous and you should seek recovery. however, recovery is hard and i know it doesn’t help to just say “recover”, so i will try to educate! Some common abbreviations are
Ed: eat!ng d!sorder (notice people use characters instead of letters. again so they don’t get their account deleted for the content)
Gw: goal we!ght
Ugw: ultimate goal we!ght
Hw: heaviest we!ght
Lw: lowest we!ght
CW: current we!ght
BMI: body mass index. (This really doesn’t matter because everyone is built different! But body dysmorphia makes you feel like it’s necessary to lower this. It’s not. But if you see it, that’s what it’s measuring)
Ana: an0rex!a
Mia: Bu||em!a
🌧️, 🦋: symbols to help identify others with an ed
3d: eat!ng disorder
Sh: s3lf h4rm
Ed Sheeran: a silly code for ed, or s3lf h4rm.
You may see super low numbers in each category. Some are in kg not pounds, so keep that in mind if a number seems SUPER low. Again, we’re all not doing okay here so never judge someone for the things their brain tells them they need to achieve. It’s a DISORDER.
You’ll see recipes or meal inspiration too. You don’t have to follow any of these specifically. Usually it’s to help give ideas if people need new safe foods. It can help expand your palette if you’re struggling to find something you feel okay consuming.
Th!nsp0: using images of very small build people as inspiration for staying small. Not necessary, and very tr!ggering. Be warned.
F4tsp0: using images of larger people to “inspire” being small. This one is one of the most awful categories. Fat people are valid and should NEVER “inspire” you to be thin. It’s disgusting, but it’s out there.
Sweetsp0: using sweet language and words to inspire you to keep going. I honestly prefer this.
Meansp0: using mean words to inspire you to keep going and be small. This one isn’t effective for me, but it depends on how it’s done.
Fasting: many users state that they are going on fasts. Water fasts mean you’re only consuming water for a period of time. Just fasting usually means just not consuming foods, but you’ll consume liquids like coffee, etc.
When i first joined, i wasn’t sure how people lived every day like this. Am i supposed to be eating a certain amount? What should my ca|or!es for everyday be? How does exercise add on to that??
It’s different for every person. I started with a goal of like 1000 cäls a day. I learned that for me, it takes like 700-900 a day for me to actually lose anything. Again, it is different for everyone so please don’t compare yourself to others. Usually if you exercise or walk through the day, users subtract that amount of calories from their daily intake. It’s not an exact science obviously, but that’s just what you might come across. I usually track myself like that.
You can use apps like Lifesum (my personal choice) to measure meals and calor!es. You can also track your we!ght progress and stuff. It helps me put into perspective how much progress i actually made. It’s hard to see it since you see yourself every day.
PLEASE BE SAFE. This is a mental illness, not a lifestyle. It is dangerous and deadly even if you don’t feel it. Please take care of yourself. Have something to eat daily if possible. Please make sure to drink water. You deserve to be here and be healthy.
((I’ll edit this periodically if i think of anything else. If you’re confused about something or have a question, feel free to comment!! I will answer anything!!))
#🌧.txt#🦋rant#not pr0 just for myself#anorexjk#🦋 vent#e 🌧#c 🦋 thought#🦋log#t41nsp0#anorexsick#🦋.txt#th1n$po#4n4 tips#🦋food#th1nz🎀#eating problems#🦋 tips#restrictive ed#4na tw#c 🌧
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Aaaah, I read your demo and you got me hooked immediately. I didn't read the synopsis aside the MCU part, so I knew it was about superpowers and that's it. Wanted to let myself get surprised and I was so "OMG WHAT'S GOING ON I NEED TO KNOW MORE". Loved every second of it <3
I gave my MC hemophobia and needless to say I felt sorry for that after they arrived at that floor lmfao
I immediately feel in love with Wildcat🥺
Very important questions: since their skin color is so different, what about their tongue (lol). Also do they have sharp fangs canines. Asking for science.
Also when I read "with straight black strands sticking out like thorns in a bush" my immediate right was, "ah... so like a sea urchin Fushiguro Megumi, got it" /lh
When they transform, does their suit transform with them (just imagining a tiny cute cat in a skintight suit is hilarious, sorry) or will they be naked when they transform back?👀
Oh, if it's not too much of a bother, could you either give us the color code or an image of their skin color? I just google'd purple beetles and royal purple (as described in-game) and they seem to still come in a variety of shades which doesn't help at all...
All that asking only about my husband Wildcat aside, can I also bother you with asking what sort of casual clothes all of the ROs wear?
I'm sorry for all these questions. I'm also very sorry if I bothered you with any of those. I tried Tumblr search but...Tumblr isn't the kindest with showing results--at least on mobile :'3
Talking about Tumblr being mean on mobile, I used italics and strike-through on a few words here, but somehow sometimes Tumblr loves to change the entire paragraph into what I used for a word or two so I apologize if that happens before I hit send and makes everything I wrote look weird lmao
I hope you have a wonderful day. Please don't forget to rest a lot and have fun with your IF!
Byeee! :D
Hahaah a fellow marvel fan I see 🤭🤭
Their tongue is pretty similar in tone to ours, just a teeny bit purple in the middle, and they do in fact have fangs, but not as long as vampire fangs.
Their bodysuit was especially designed by Stardom to shift alongside them, but believe me, before that they would just walk around butt naked a lot of the time—much to Zodiac's dismay.
Click HERE to see the purple beetle image I took as an inspiration, since a few of you might not like insects very much, like me haha. Wildcat's skin is a few tones lighter than this one but not by much, and the bodysuit is a iridescent dark green, the same as in the image.
The questions are not a bother at all, I love that you guys are so interested!!
And I quite understand the frustration with tumblr asks, a lot of the asks get eaten... 😭
Thank you for the question!! 🍒
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