#also god as much as i love drawing details this piece really tested that love dhfkdmfd | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

azulas-lightning-bolt · 23 days

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I truly do not know why I am letting this see the light of day, but here.

tw: really bad art under the cut

fem mako with all my little hcs applied so she doesn't look even slightly like the original. you're welcome. I was hunched over my dad's nice drawing computer (he's an architect) for about five hours trying to figure out how to digital art on krita. this is the best I could come up with.

I kind of like this so. I'm gonna yap a bit about my 'artistic intentions'. starting off there's the qipao, which was originally going to be red/gold like the ref pic I used, but then I was like. what if I made her look even more ek. and then the qipao turned green. this was mostly just me testing out shading and stuff, and I'm honestly pretty proud of the qipao in general. it's hard to see in the finished piece, but the contrast between shaded and flat colors is actually insane. I'm not too happy with how Mako herself turned out.

however.

the hair and the makeup are my newest prized possessions. like. the eyeliner. the little hair pieces sticking up from the ears. the lipstick. the little blush. aosufhoafhosaiff. also her eyes?? I wasn't sure but I really wanted to include the central green/gold heterochromia, and this was born. and her little mole. I was giggling to myself drawing that on. I thought the purple snake tatoo on her arm would be a cool nod to some of mako's concept art w an arm tatoo and also a,, backstory,, w the triple threats,, but i didn't really like how it turned out. left it on just because.

and on the topic of her arms. I don't fucking know how to draw burn scars. help. or arms, actually, but whatever. revisiting those the arms are actually so bad but I was staring at the computer screen so long I could taste the colors. I hate anatomy and that is why I write more than I draw. and the fucking lichtenberg scars. I'm on the brink. they look so cool but my hand was cramping so goddamn bad drawing ten thousand little lines on my pixelly fucking krita canvas oh my god. though if i may i would like to direct your attention to the scars on her ear. I thought that was a neat little detail but idk.

otherwise anatomy-related I tried to give her that blocky ek build as well, although I think it came out more clunky than anything. though honestly I’m not too upset as this was a practice. I might go back another day and fix it to be slightly less terrible but. whatever.

uhhh the background was supposed to be the fire nation emblem and her name as, like, a newspaper cover or something. if my handwriting wasn't terrible, I would've written on the little boxes of subtitles like, 'captian and firebender of the up-and-coming probending team, the fire ferrets' and 'the survivors of a true rags-to-riches tale; the background of the newest probenders.' so yeah that was kind of the idea with her name in the back. also she doesn’t have her scarf because uhhh. I forgot it but we’ll just. pretend. idk. I also do not know how to draw scarves so,,, yeah.

i love her so much btw i'm really mentally ill abt her. if anyone has like art tips. please share im really new and really bad at this.

ps: she does still have the eyebrows, the pointy part is just hidden under her hair.

#mako lok #legend of korra #lok #tlok #mako tlok #fem mako #mako fanart #fem mako fanart #sigh #im genuinely so embarrassed posting this #however #it was a labor of love (an intense hyperfixation on mako)#and thus deserves to see the eyes of the public #i'm very sorry to subject you dear viewer to this #but i love her #i kinda want her in a jar on my desk tbh #<-proof of me being absolutely batshit insane #jfgahpishdfas #slug’s stuff

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fexiled · 3 years

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a gift for @pinesbrosfalls ❤️ thanks for making me fall in love with this show :’)

#star wars #the mandalorian #din djarin #grogu #baby yoda #fex draws #may the uh- *checks calendar* -8th be with you #also god as much as i love drawing details this piece really tested that love dhfkdmfd #still had fun tho i just wish i could've finished it faster lol #shading metal is Hard bruh #light sources? i don't know her

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writingwithcolor · 3 years

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Gingerbread man as golem

@yaronata asked:

I would like to write a character who is Jewish and uses a Golem. She's based on the D&D class of the artificer which looks magic but isn't, because they produce all their effects with inventions, like the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" quote. Her story is that her very Jewish town was under attack from a terrible monster when she was little. Her Rabbis made a Golem to protect the town, and it succeeded but was torn to pieces in the process. She was fascinated by the Golem and as a kid didn't see a big difference between it's sentience and person's so was really thankful for its sacrifice like you would a person's sacrificing their life for you. They thought all the pieces had been devoured by the monster before it died, but she went looking and found the piece used to animate the Golem, which she, kinda misunderstanding called its "heart". She kept the piece and grew up to be an incredibly skilled cook, specialising as a baker in the town. I imagine she would make a lot of really good food for the Jewish holidays, or to break fasts on ones like Yom Kippur or Tish'abav. But she also made a town specific holiday to honour the Golem's sacrifice and the town still being alive, because I feel "we are not dead woo" is a big theme for Jewish holidays from my research, so it could fit, for which she invented ginger bread men to be the golem, and gave them little "hearts" of fruit or honey, and you're meant to eat them limb by limb like the beast did before eating the heart. This would be the inspiration for using the "heart" piece later to make her own giant gingerbread Golem to help her save the world.

These are my questions 1) would it be considered bad or disrespectful for someone who isn't a Rabbi to make a Golem, or is this method of taking an animating piece someone else made disrespectful? 2) Her journey will take her far from her town and her Jewish family and friends and she will likely travel with gentiles. Would it be disrespectful for a Golem to be used to protect a lot of gentiles and one Jew in the course of saving the world? I don't want to fall into the stereotype of someone putting all their effort into valuing and protecting very specifically the group that in real life is oppressive to them. 3) While she is not using magic and is actually mimicking its effects with technology she invents, is this drawing too close to the line of "magical Jew"? 4) I like to "play test" my characters in ttrpgs to really get a feel for them before I write. Would it be disrespectful to play a Jewish character when I am a gentile, and would it be disrespectful to play a Jewish character in a setting where there are demonstrably real gods other than the one of Judaism?

I really like this character idea and I think it's cute and fun and rooted in Jewish culture but I really want to make sure it's respectful and as good as I, a gentile researching on the internet, thinks it is. Thanks so much! Have a nice day!

My answer to this is very complicated because there are things I both like and do not like about this premise. First of all, I love the idea of a cookie golem, and I'm even imagining the magic word that brings him to life (EMET/truth) would be written in icing. And I'm okay with the part about how she found a piece of the old golem and used it to build a new golem, because that makes sense for a golem made from a baked good when you think about how people use sourdough starter to make a new batch of sourdough.

However, here are the thing that make me cock my head to the side like my little sister's German shepherd:

1. re: "magical Jew" - that's not a trope I've ever heard of. Remember, marginalized groups don't receive identical disrespect across the board. It is indeed a trope to use Black people or disabled people as supernatural plot devices who exist only to further the stories of white main characters or able-bodied main characters. But I can't say as I've ever seen anyone using Jewishness that way. Usually if we are someone's one-dimensional plot device it's as someone's lawyer, fixer, "money guy", etc, not a supernatural force. So this isn't something you have to worry about.

2. I have a certain level of discomfort with you playing as a Jewish character just because playacting as a marginalized culture you're not part of strikes me as off, but I understand that that's how you gain insight into a character you're about to write so it's more of a writing exercise than anything else. (I wonder if D&D regulars from marginalized groups have written about this -- I've only played a few times casually with family so if I did run into this type of discussion in my social justice reading I wouldn't have absorbed it. If anyone is curious I played first as Captain Werewolf, and then switched to playing as Cinnamon Blade because lawful good was too hard. :P )

3. I would prefer you omit the detail about eating the cookies piece by piece symbolically, for two reasons: a. it unintentionally evokes Communion by having appreciative people consume a baked good symbolic of an entity who sacrificed his life for theirs, and b. focusing on the details of flesh consumption reminds me too much of Blood Libel (yes, a gingerbread man is in the shape of a person but how many of us actually think about it literally, the way this act would cause?)

As to your first question: I'm fine with her making a golem even though she's just a rando. Second question: I see what you're saying and maybe it could be more okay if it's really clear how well these gentile folks are treating her? And questions three and four are answered above.

I really do love the idea of a giant gingerbread man golem. Cookie golem T_T <3

--Shira

I would like to second Shira’s point about not ripping apart the gingerbread cookies. I honestly would prefer they were used as decoration, and other cookies eaten instead, since that part just feels so not-Jewish to me, but I don’t have golem-specific issues other than that. It seems like you have already been doing a lot of research, which is appreciated.

As far as the ttrpg/DnD aspect… I bounce back and forth on the topic of playing characters that are so very different from our experiences, other than in fantasy-related ways. However, I am aware that a lot of people will play with, and experiment with gender in game, and learn something about themselves in the process (the number of trans players of ttrpgs who tried out their gender in game before they were out is high). It’s different with Judaism, and even more significantly different when it comes to things you can’t convert into, like various actual, real-world races. But because people do sometimes experience growth from experiences like this, I’m hesitant to dissuade players completely. I do urge you to, at a minimum, bring the same care, research, and willingness to learn, that you brought to this question.

--Dierdra

This sounds like a creative storyline that you could have lots of fun with 😊

At first I was confused by this part:

She also made a town specific holiday to honour the Golem's sacrifice

But then you really got me thinking about different types of Jewish holidays and how they come about, so thank you for that!

Because it’s often the little details that either make a story super powerful or kind of nonsensical, I think it would be a good idea to decide what type of holiday is being created here:

A full-blown chag with restrictions on labour and halachic obligations? These are commanded in Torah and new ones can’t be added.

A minor yom tov with halachic obligations but no restrictions? These were instituted by the rabbis prior to the destruction of the Temple, so again new ones can’t be added.

A public holiday or equivalent? This would usually be declared by the Knesset in Israel, and filter to the rest of the Jewish world from there.

A community-based yom tov with specific customs only for people in the know, such as certain Chasidic groups celebrating the birthdays of their deceased leaders? I asked around, but no one can really tell me how these holidays get started, which is probably a good indication that they arise quite organically from a group of people who all just feel that it should be celebrated. Probably not created by a single person, as such.

Something she runs from her bakery, not religion-based, but more like a day of doing special products and deals the way many small businesses do on their anniversary?

Now, if the people of a modern-day town were actually saved by a real live Golem, that would arguably be the most overt miracle for many generations, so there would be a decent chance of options 3 and/or 4 happening. It’s entirely plausible that there could be special foods for this day that become a tradition, including Golem cookies. People who directly benefited might also return to the site where the Golem fought the monster and recite the prayer, ‘Blessed is Hashem, Master of the Universe, Who performed a miracle for me in this place.’

Alternatively, if it’s important that your MC created the holiday, something like option 5 might be the best. Hopefully this will still fulfil what you need: you describe her as incredibly skilled, so I can imagine the day when she goes all out on the Golem cookies being one of the most exciting events of the year for the townspeople, just because her baking is that good. Plus, they already have a personal stake in the Golem’s sacrifice, so I definitely think it could be a thing without being an official holiday. Also, if she is outside of an all-Jewish environment, don’t forget that she would have to decide whether to commemorate the anniversary in the Hebrew calendar or the local one.

Coming back to the cookies, sorry if we’re getting a little repetitive on this point! But I don’t see the cookies being torn limb from limb as part of a celebration. First of all, this doesn’t sound like a very celebratory thing to do, to say the least. Can you imagine explaining that to a three-year-old on their first Yom HaGolem? They would be terrified! (I don’t read this suggestion as accidental anti-Semitism so much as getting carried away with a metaphor, which I’m sure as writers we have all done!)

But also, it’s worth pointing out that our commemorative foods aren’t usually that literal. If you think about hamantaschen, maror, or apple in honey, they’re all symbols. That’s not to say that having Golem-shaped cookies is a problem, as this sounds like just a bit of fun that the MC is having and not something that is directly at odds with Judaism or Jewish culture. But it’s worth bearing in mind that the more literal you go from there in terms of tying the cookies to the event they commemorate, the less culturally aligned your holiday food becomes.

Finally, about the Golem protecting non-Jewish people: I like this idea! There’s a stereotype that we only use whatever is at our disposal to help ourselves and other Jewish people, so a Golem being created by Jews but helping others as well is a big plus for me. Of course, as has already been pointed out, this would be an odd choice if her Saving The World team were anti-Semitic or otherwise disrespectful to her/her community, but I don’t think you were headed that way!

-Shoshi

I have to come back in here just to squee over the phrase “Yom HaGolem.” Well done :D

--Shira

#asks #Jewish #dnd #golem #food #Jewish stereotypes

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ac3id · 4 years

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The Artist and His Majesty| 18+

𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓉 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓂𝒶𝒿𝑒𝓈𝓉𝓎 0 / 5 | fantasy au.

chapter i , chapter ii

pairings: yandere! emperor! shigaraki x female! reader.

warnings: [series] dubcon, exhibitionism, size difference, degradation, masturbation, bondage, reader is also kind of delusional, death, violence (not on reader). (there are more but i can’t think right now.]

↪ for chapter 0: none !!

summary: you come to the big city in hopes of starting your career as an artist but things take a shocking turn when you’re recruited as the court painter for the royal palace.

↪ for chapter 0: a strange man approaches you, offering to buy your painting to which you oblige. little do you know that it kicks of a series of unfortunate events ending with you being trapped in shigaraki tomura’s clutches forever.

wordcount.

a/n: finally !! i started this series. high-key inspired by these two dresses in my wardrobe and @ana-list‘s this drawing ! seriously it’s literally everything. also thank you once again for proof reading this @the-grimm-writer !

taglist: @shigaraki-is-my-master, @deathmemeiverse, @n4dhii, @bat-eclecticwolfbouquet-love, @mstssister, @nereida19, @prince-zukohere [dm to be added/ removed.]

“That’s a beautiful painting,” a rough, scruffy voice calls out, jerking you away from your daydreams. Your grip around the color canvas resting in your arms tightens as you glance behind your shoulder to see a well-built man standing right behind you. He’s tall and a lot older than you, he has short grey hair which falls right before his eyebrows along beautiful, matching grey eyes. A cigar hangs lazily from his lips as he occasionally huffs on it, blowing clouds of smoke out his mouth. He’s dressed in expensive robes, a choice of style only people better off could afford. You can’t help exachaning a covetous glance between his expensive suit and your sloppy, knee-length, light green dress. “Thank you.” you murmur shoving him an appreciative look, hoping he’d leave you alone. When you come to the city to complete your studies in art, you mother, father, family and friends had warned you about men like these. Rich, snobby men who liked to lure in young, naive girls. Whispering praises of how they are the most unique on the planet so they pull their guard down form them to take advantage of the helpless beings.

“Can I take a better look? It’s the Emperor, is it not? Your painting. ” You hesitate before turning back to him. Not a lot of people had seen the King to be. He lived humbly in his castle, trying his best to not indulge in the affairs of the common people. “ Yes,” you hold up the slightly small canvas (courtesy of you being broke the entire week and not being able to save up to buy a bigger canvas). To even get an idea of Shigaraki Tomura, you had to go through many people. Not a lot of people had seen his face, he had always kept it hidden under a mask. No one knew why he did so but the many conspiracy throes suggested it was something to do with his personal grief.

You had heard many stories about him. Some made him look like a spoiled brat with a demeaning, ignorant personality who didn’t care for others and as the rumors said: self destructive habits which lead him to tear the skin of his own neck down whenever he got anxious or frustrated.

Others portrayed him as a strong, confident man and a reliable leader who cared for his comrades. You did not know which one of the two personas brought him your attention but you couldn’t complain. Tomura had caught you under a spell, and despite never meeting him (and knowing full well you never would), you were still ready to sacrifice your life for him. He was your King even before he had taken his crown, to you he looked like a shining bright light ready to enlighten you. To you, he was a god. And as years passed by, he grew from a caterpillar into a cocoon which was ready to burst open as a butterfly into the beautiful, mysterious world. And it was happening today, Prince Tomura Shigaraki’s Coronation ceremony. After the passing of All For One, it was his turn to take the crown and fulfill his duty as the ruler of the nation

The entire city was busy, bustling with people. Families, friends and everyone in between gathered around the huge castle walls as they waited for the ceremony to begin. They waited patiently, filled with excitement and joy as they waited to catch a glimpse of the new great King. You were among them. You had come down to the centre of the city with your friends, waiting alongside many to catch a glimpse of the new ruler. The painting which nestled in your hand was something you were hoping to sell today, to a shop or anyone who wants to have it. It was a beautiful painting which had taken you several days to complete, and dare you say it, you were quite proud of it. From all the things you had heard about Tomura, you had managed to sketch him decently. Long white, wavy hair reaching till his shoulder, skin white as snow. He sat proudly on his throne wearing a cape with his vermillion eyes peering through your soul. His face was scarcely detailed as you did not have much idea about it but he still looked ethereal. With little scars running both his eyes and a comparatively larger one on his right. Chapped lips with even more scars running over them wildly, he was not conventionally attractive. No one would call him a pretty boy yet there was something more, something alluring which attracted you to him. His beauty was rare, not in the grasp of many but if it was grasped and held close to the heart, it was hard to let go off. And you found him attractive, very attractive.

The man took a good look at your painting, examining it carefully and for a second you really thought he had seen the mysterious Prince. “It’s quite similar to him,” he sends you a friendly grin and you notice a tooth from his front missing, leaving an uncomfortable gap. “Have you seen him before?” he asked and you shake your head, no. He gives you an amused expression, “I must say, you are very talented, miss…?” you complete your name with a nervous smile. “And you are?” you ask.

You realised that you were getting a little too comfortable with the stranger and it could be a really bad decision but you can’t help but give him the benefit of the doubt as he behaves like a gentleman you can find yourself to trust. “Kagero Okuta but I like to go by Giran,” he says with a lop-sided grin. Giran, you’ve heard the name before but cannot recall where and how. It sounds so familiar but you just can’t grasp it, he looked wealthy so you assumed he was a Noble and that made you even more curious as to why he was speaking to you.

“What are you planning to do with that painting?” he asks, diving a closer look and admiring its features. “I must say, you’ve got it quite accurate but,” you stiffen, your hands growing cold as your heartbeat picks up. You realized your painting must have some complications, drawing a man you had never seen before purely out of your interpretation was a hard and a bold task to do. But to have someone who had actually seen the King for himself pinpoint your mistakes sent a rush of anxiety through your veins.

“He’s not that bony.” He completes and you gulp nervously, looking down at your painting in disappointment. Your eyes are filled with disappointment, all of the time and effort you spent making the piece all for it go in vain just because you missed a small detail. Giran notices your remorse and speaks up, “But that’s quite alright. He looked just like that until a while ago,” he hadn’t meant to offend or hurt you. He still believed your painting was the most beautiful thing he had seen all day.

“What do you mean?” you ponder, giving him a perplexed look. He leans in closer to you as if to tell a secret, “let’s say the King has been working out behind closed doors.” you blink in confusion. It was a strange thing to say, exactly how well did this man know the Emperor? Who was it that you were talking?

“Who are you?” you can’t help but question, bewildered by such a character. Giran says nothing. He just stares at you with his lips curled into a snappy smirk, holding his cigar between his lips. He was not going to tell you anything. Without wasting time, he quickly changes the topic. “What are you going to do with that painting?” he repeats, his voice growing impatient.

“I am planning to sell it,” you feel a bit taken back. The friendly aura which had Giran had now disappeared for a reason you could not conclude. “Sell it? To whom?” the intruding nature of his tone starts to make you uncomfortable, there’s nothing more you want to do other than get far away from him. Yet you still find yourself answering him, “To anyone who wants it.” he hums at your response, his eyes holding a mocking glint. “Wouldn’t you like to give it to the Emperor himself?” you frown, was he mocking you?

“That’s well...impossible.” you reply, stretching your neck awkwardly. “To you, maybe.”

You stop yourself from rolling your eyes, this man was really testing your patience. A part of you tells you to ignore him and walk away but as he reaches into his coat and pulls out a bag of coins worth much more than you could ever earn in a month, he has you hooked yet again.

“Hey, let me buy that painting, would yer’?”

“What is the problem now?” Giran takes a seat around the round table. It was late after the Coronation ceremony and the Royal palace was already facing problems. Giran was disappointed but definitely not surprised. After all, he was their personal problem solver and broker. “It’s not that big of a deal.” A curt and hard reply cut him off.

“It actually is, Shigaraki Tomura.” a voice speaks, coming from a man dressed in a black suit with a long, flowy robe covering his entire body. He stands taller than the other two men in the as his head is replaced with a wisp of smoke. He was none other than the trusted and talented magician of the Royal family. With eccentric features and an ability to wield strange magic, nobody knew where he came from. There were many rumors about him; that he was once a normal, handsome man cursed by a witch that turned him into a hideous monster or he simply was a ghost. “What is it, Kurogiri?” Giran rephrases his question, directing it to the other man. “We need a new painter,-”

“Servant.” Shigaraki corrected. He stood in front of the giant windows glancing over his city as his men talked about hiring a new painter for the castle. He couldn’t care less about such tedious tasks, he had his focus set on greater things like expanding his territory, taking back stolen land.

“What happened to Mr. Kyo?” Giran asked, Shigaraki rolled his eyes at the mention of the name and clicked his tongue, “His Majesty eliminated him.” Giran stops himself from laughing out loud. He was certain once Shigaraki would take over the throne incidents like so would double the instant. But he was expecting it to happen so soon. “And why was that?”

“He was breathing too loud, like you are right now.”

A cold silence broke over the room as Giran counted his breath. Kurogiri looked nervously at Shigaraki who still had his back turned to them. The longer the pause grew, the dreadful the atmosphere became. Shigaraki’s threat strung the air loud and clear and Giran was afraid to speak again. “What we are asking for is that-,” Kurogiri started in a calm, slow tone easing the tension in the room. “-we need a new court painter. Do you have any names?”

The murderous sent in the air magically disappeared as a grin stretched across Giran’s face.

“Aren’t you in luck?” He says, running a hand through his hair before taking a puff out of his cigar. “Does that mean you know someone?” Kurogiri questioned. Giran hummed, “You see, I met this beautiful painter today. She’s extremely talented and I know for a fact she will love working for the castle.”

“What’s the name?” growing impatient, Shigaraki asks. “Oh, it was,” Giran pauses for a moment to recall.

“Ah yes, Y/N L/N.”

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blushing-starker · 3 years

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Insanity brings me truth and you

can you guess what Peter's doing to not be understood by the guards?

It's not easy, being crazy. There are expectations to run away from, a bar to limbo under, a specific number of people one has to betray and scar. The unknowable becomes knowable, so you have to skirt the edge of that Venn diagram very carefully. Or very recklessly. Either way, it's a complex thing except for when it's not. Jesus, how infuriating to think about. The point is, the paradox that crazies carry on their shoulders? It's a fucking hassle, a tricky one and Peter is tired of it.

He sighs, lets gravity bend him backward, legs slipping dangerously off the blanket he's hung as a hammock inside his cell. Act like a psycho and you're predictable, don't act like an ax wielding murderer and whoops! Predictable. It's the downside of being insane; you leave the weary capitalist consumer mask out in the world, probably set that shit on fire and make yourself sick with the fumes. But you just replace it with the one labelled 'danger to society' and get forced to play along with that. He did what he did to avoid the world and its predetermined fate, its standards.

Peter closes his eyes, thinks of the nauseating smell on his left. Rupert, the guard that dared graze him while he came back from the shower naked, has a broken nose thanks to Ned and his loyalty to him. The idiot barely cleans the open wound and the whole cell reeks of pus because of it. He does the math of how long it's been going on for and shudders in disgust. His bare calves slip a little more.

An inhale near the front of his cage. Slow, but controlled. Not the usual. Thank God for a circus family and heightened senses.

The doctor is paying attention to him.

"Doctor Stark. Gnittor gnihtemos llems ouy nac?" Rupert grumbles from his perch on the second floor, curses a hare brained psycho that's incomprehensible. Peter hums, pleased to know that after ten months, nine days, twelve hours, and...

Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus on sinking deeper into nothing, into a yawning void. The blanket shakes and his thighs are starting to tremble. Blood is rushing to his head, veins most likely beginning to protrude. Irrelevant.

His favorite guard Stan wears a Swiss watch his wife got for him on their fortieth anniversary. It sings to him now, smooth and cool like a river. A skipping stone is thrown, tic, a fish heads towards the sound, toc. Above all the other stimuli in the room, the watch announces itself. Ten fifteen.

Ten months, nine days, twelve hours and twenty minutes into a game, his tiny gnat still hasn't caught on. Not like the charming doctor. He sees him then, behind closed eyelids, as clearly as a sweet nightmare. Tall, taller than Peter, but less strong. Wide shoulders that morph into a slim waist and a delectable ass he aches to sink his teeth into. Shapely calves from running, curiously delicate looking ankles.

Down and back again. A full head of dark hair with a dusting of silver. Dangerously clever mouth, what his aunt would call a noble nose. Agreeable cheekbones. Piercing eyes that tear his walls down, rip apart the bricks and mortar until he's scrambling on the other side, desperately, clumsily attempting to reinforce them for the millionth time. Those eyes saw the trick, the mirror reflection on his second day here, Peter offhandedly talking in reverse with Ned when they passed the new doctor. A dark gaze had pinned him in place, a spider fixed in place with its own silk against the cold dissection table.

Ned had rambled on, Peter had met a worthy playmate and the doctor had seen all he needed in that eternally prolonged glance. That very afternoon, a psychiatrist signed on as his very own voyeur.

Doctor Stark seems to be as interested in cutting him open to peek inside as Peter is in taking a dagger and comparing their hearts. He does this a lot; wonders how fate and the absence of lucky fate led them here. On opposite sides of a prison when perhaps it should be the other way around. Or perhaps there should only be Peter and Doctor Stark.

He feels himself falling, plummeting ever downward into fantasies and hazy dreams. It's not until the good doctor sharply calls out his name that he realizes he's also plummeting towards the floor. Now, MJ had warned him; had specifically said that the hammock being ten feet off the concrete ground was a bad idea. Ned had said he'd be fine and Peter loves the guy, ok? He has to do everything he can so that his best friend wins a bet over his other best friend.

Peter slightly regrets that when he's forced to arch his body backward, flip right side up in order to hit the floor on his feet instead of his face. The impact chokes the air right out of him, shakes his bones, but he doesn't react. Cracks his neck and that's all. Most of the guards were kind, some shade of understanding. They weren't harmless, though. He knows what he looks like, knows how many hours these men are cooped up with the scum of the earth.

"To answer your question," Peter leaps onto the bars of his cell, slithers higher than any sane person would and somersaults off the vertical slits, sinks into his trustworthy hammock with its trustworthy knots (MJ and Ned had tied them, one each), "yes, I do. It's less potent this time."

He stills, frowns. "How? There haven't been any changes. External or internal." No need to act like the Mad Hatter when the conversation could be had normally. Quicker and more reliable with meanings. But the doctor pauses, enunciates his next words slowly.

"Ti koot uoy erom emit yadot." God, he loved hearing Doctor Stark talk that carefully and smoothly. It was as comforting as it was uncomfortable. (He and sex don't particularly get along. It's like a headache that comes and goes; with the right medicine it can dissipate and evolve into something soothing, pleasant. With the majority of medicine, it blossoms into pain and soreness, a dry throat clogged by a thick syrup that won't leave him be no matter how much water MJ and Ned encourage him to drink. Peter isn't yet completely certain which side of his scale the doctor falls on, but he's guessing it's likely the first.)

(The man seemed to live in the grey areas; fitting that with this, too, he'd reside in the in between.)

The reverse effect is in play and he grins, genuine and wide, when he catches it. "Monsters are visiting more frequently, taking up space in the light." His nightmares had intensified recently, and they're starting to accompany him even in moments Peter knows are real; shapes drifting by the corner of his eye. As a coping tactic, he rips parts of his nails off. Not entirely, just the corners. His mind could concoct lots of things, but in his dreams his hands are always pristine.

(He hasn't caught up with it, hasn't noticed that although his nightmares have a clearness to them, a bright intensity, Peter can't shift enough focus to realize his hands aren't his own. They never are. But he usually has more pressing bodies to deal with than the good doctor's.)

Another pause, this one being done by Tony Stark, doctor and healer of men, instead of Doctor Stark, curious keeper of deranged souls. "I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe this will help." Peter peers over the edge of the grey hammock, watches with interest as the doctor approaches his cell with a glass bottle of clear liquid sloshing inside. The other man stops an inch away from the bars, looks up at Peter.

There's a slow tension simmering between them, something as thick and addictive as honey. There's scientific curiosity, a desire to seek out and maybe comprehend the unknown lurking inside their mirror image, as other and as alike as oneself. But there is also a gleam of something he's afraid of acknowledging in Doctor Stark's eyes. A madness once tucked away steadily unraveling itself with each glance they share.

Peter returns the look, unblinking and thinking. " 'If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' " A lesson Nietzsche offered to those wise enough, sane enough to live blind.

The doctor raises an eyebrow, is otherwise still. Sometimes, if Peter considers their current predicament for too long, his grasp on his masks loosens, and the Spider begins to spin its deadly thread round and round its very own body. He sees a guard exchange money with a partner; the crazy quota has, he guesses, been filled for the week. And they had such a nice streak going on, too. Oh, well. This web is unavoidable anyways.

He pitches himself forward, is the one who controls the descent instead of gravity this time. Letting the air rush up to meet him, he inhales, tastes a distinct sharpness around him. Crouching, Peter takes it all in, every last detail. Looks, really looks, at the doctor and suspects.

As if he were none the wiser, he calmly heads to the front of the cell. Meets the doctor at the divide and wonders what it'll be. Wonders if he'll rise higher than ash and flame, an acrobat testing the fates by flying just seconds ahead of death. Doctor Stark hands him the bottle and he can see now, tiny pieces of lavender. A distraction for the guards. "That should keep the monsters in the dark. Use it before you got to sleep and tuck away your hair."

Like a schoolgirl with a crush, he self consciously brings a hand to his curls. They're getting a bit long, but the warden only allows haircuts once a month or two. "I don't have anything to use." Digging into his lab coat, the other man retrieves a single black stick.

Well, to everyone else it's a hair pin. Peter knows the truth though, can see it and smell it and very nearly touch it. As it is, he gently plucks the items out of elegant hands and refuses to look at them. Looking draws attention. Doctor Stark gazes at his face, eyes flickering in a rehearsed way around his own, but not into them. That's alright, he understands.

"The lack of movement around your face should also help." The question of why is out before he can reel it in and act as a sane, normal person. Christ, he could handle crazy, not rude. He would have to practice being in control so as not to slip up when the doctor is around. Said doctor cocks his head, doesn't have to do anything more for Peter to get the message: go on, ask the devil why he made the deal.

Peter B Parker does not back down when intrigued. "Why are you helping me sleep better?"

Why help me escape?

"It's my duty." Three words. Not the explicit declaration of affection typical, normal, dull people receive from an admirer or partner. Not a grand proclamation of wanting what the heart wants, or a sonnet regarding the connection between star crossed paramours. Simple, short, concise; enough to turn to religion, to sanctity and salvation if it means hearing it again. He'd do anything, including putting on a discarded mask from his past if it gets him what he desires. Peter would suffer through sanity for this man. He would if it means hearing what sounds silent to those around them.

You're my duty. Whatever happens tonight, Doctor Stark believes it's his duty to see it through. To see him through, in a way.

"Why would you accept?" Ah, silly doc thinking any of his principles have changed since the first time they met, since the first time he brought fire to life and gave death in return. Peter smiles, brings forth the prisoner that had not seen the light of day in almost a decade.

(His uncle often said Peter's greatest gift to the world was his smile, his true smile. His aunt said it was the final move needed to capture a king and make him his pawn.)

"Why, doc, you know I hate to be bored." Call him a psycho, a freak, a sick, pitiful creature. Call him anything and everything and maybe those words would ring true. But Peter will never allow himself to be bored, not when there's so much fun to be had. Especially with a doctor as crazy as he is. "This looks...promising."

" 'He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.' " The first part of Nietzsche's warning.

"Nietzsche didn't understand; those who fought monsters were already fated to become what they struggled to defeat. They believed salvation could be found by killing the monsters outside, but all they did was feed the ones inside."

Anthony Stark, the truest version, grins at him, all glinting eyes, sharp teeth and a crooked smile. Peter Parker, armed with a match, gasoline and soon to be glass shards, grins right back. In this instant, being crazy isn't such a hassle. After all, he has someone to share the crazy with now.

#starker #dark!starker #insane!peter #insane!tony #patient!peter #doctor!tony #peter parker x tony stark #i mean sorta dark #arsonist!peter #demisexual!peter #legit a harley/joker version where theres no manipulation #theyre insane and in love yall #sophie writes

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echodrops · 3 years

Note

I’m obviously late to the tumble party... but I stumbled across your Notagami Essays posts and they are absolutely Fabulous! Love your writing and the amount of detail you go into :)

So I figured you may be a good person to ask - if you just had to guess (bc as far as I know it’s never been officially confirmed?) but if you had to take a guess or give a rough estimate, how old do you think Yato was when he first met Sakura? We know he’s estimated to be at least a thousand years old, we know he’s - from the start of the series to present - estimated to be somewhere between 18 and his early 20s (physically)... but I can’t find a single thing/discussion/post/stickynote/whatever where it talks about how old he might have been when he first met Sakura - let alone the emotional/psychological effects of Sakura coming into his life and introducing healthy mindset/morals/maternal-influence etc. etc. (obviously no mom and Father’s neglect played a big role in him not knowing how inappropriate it was for him to ‘accidentally touch’ and yell “boobs!” but you can also just say he was so young he didn’t know how inappropriate that was?) My point is: how old do you think Yato was (physically anyway) at the time of their meeting? and Do you know of any discussions or care to share your opinion on how being the no more than the age of blank affected his mental/emotional understanding of Sakura teaching him a new narrative?

Sorry this is a random out of the blue ask 😅😓 if I rambled on and you don’t feel like answering, I get it, just figured it was worth asking :)

I fell down a serious rabbit hole trying to see if I could figure out the answer to this question about Yato’s age but unfortunately I’m mostly coming up empty-handed.

The answer to this question actually depends on two different pieces of information which--as far as I can remember--we’ve never actually been given for certain.

1) We would need to know when Yato was actually born.

The manga has kind of hinted at a total (not physical) age for Yato in the flashbacks which showed him as a young child during the Heian era (putting him somewhere in the vicinity of a little over 1000 years old) and Father not making masks before ~1100 years ago, but the problem is we still don’t know how many years might have passed between this scene (the youngest we’ve ever seen Yato):

And the next flashback scene, where Yato meets Nora:

If gods age normally when they are children, these two scenes might be only a handful of years apart. But if gods don’t age normally, then these two scenes could be decades or centuries apart, which leads to the other missing piece of information (under the read more to save people’s dashes):

2) We would need to know the aging process for gods who are just born/reincarnate.

Up to this point in the manga, we’ve only seen two gods reincarnate--Ebisu (who reincarnated too recently to really help answer this question) and Takemikazuchi. The implication of Takemikazuchi’s backstory is that his shinki forced him to reincarnate and then hid his reincarnation from all of Heaven. The only way they could have kept other gods from noticing that Takemikazuchi had reincarnated would have been by not allowing him to go out at all until he had grown enough to match his previous reincarnation in appearance. This seems to suggest that gods probably do age normally when they are children--hiding Takemikazuchi away for ~20 years seems a lot more likely than being able to hide him away for centuries, after all... (I also feel like I have very vague recollection of some scene in the manga where someone comments on Takemikazuchi not having been around for a “few years,” but it’s been so long since I reread I can’t recall if this is a real moment from the manga or just me misremembering.)

Overall, however, based on what we’ve seen in the manga, my guess would be that when they’re young, after just being born or being reincarnated, gods age pretty normally. This would suggest that, for the first few years at least, the physical and mental ages of reincarnated/newly born gods actually overlap; baby Ebisu acts like a little kid because he is, in fact, both mentally and physically a little kid.

That would mean that, for all intents and purposes, Yato’s physical and mental ages lined up when he was young and meeting Sakura, and he acted like a little kid because he really was just a little kid, god or not.

(Detour for a second though:

This line always struck me as interesting in that it might, just might, give us a more specific timeframe for Yato’s “birth”: although the constellations, of course, are visible in the sky every single year, this particular combination of concepts (kanoto-tori, yin metal rooster) is known much more commonly as one of the sixty years on the cyclical Chinese calendar, also used in Japan. Counting back on the calendar, 961 A.D. was a yin metal rooster year and would align just about right for what we know about the timeframe in which Yato later met Sakura (~970ish). Just referencing constellations doesn’t mean Adachitoka was pointing to a specific year, but it might have been another hint as to the timeframe of the flashbacks.

Okay, detour over.)

Anyway, without 100% confirmation on either of those pieces of information--when Yato was born and whether gods age at the same rate as humans after reincarnating--I don’t think it’s really possible to pin down Yato’s “real” age (physically or mentally) at the time he met Sakura. We mostly just have to estimate.

Personally, based on his size and behavior at the time, I’d put him somewhere between seven and maybe up to ten, but the way Adachitoka draws characters kind of makes it impossible to judge their ages by appearance; Yato is about the same size as Nora when he meets Sakura, implying that he and Nora were around the same physical “age” at that time; meanwhile, Nora is later portrayed as being roughly the same age as Yukine, suggesting she was maybe 12-13ish years old when she died. So, despite being drawn tiny, it’s possible Yato was meant to be anywhere from a little kiddo (6-7) to all the way up to Nora’s age by the time he met Sakura.

But all that said, I think what you were really asking about was more the mental state Yato would have been in when he met Sakura and how his young age would have impacted his ability to change his world views, right? The answer to that is... complicated and could be approached a lot of ways. Coming from a background of working with and educating social work students, there are several common psychological theories of child development that might apply here, for example.

I’d recommend checking out Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development, though.

(Pulled from here.)

I don’t have time to explain the entire theory with the complexity it might deserve, but the basic idea is that, as children develop, they experience a series of crises or challenges that they must overcome. Successfully overcoming each challenge results in successful psychological and social development; failing to overcome a challenge in childhood will result in long-term negative impacts later in the child’s life. (There are plenty critiques of this theory too, so don’t take this as gospel or anything--just a theory worth thinking about!)

Given Father’s lack of interest in teaching Yato basic concepts of humanity, I would put Yato at approximately the “Initiative vs. Guilt” stage when he met Sakura. At this level of Erikson’s theory, children struggle with asserting themselves and developing a healthy sense of how their personal desires might conflict with the expectations and rules set out by others. In this stage, giving a child positive feedback for their actions teaches the child that those actions are “right,” while giving negative feedback teaching the child that their actions are wrong. In order to overcome this particular challenge, children need to begin taking initiative and aligning their actions with social standards; the child acts, and the parental figure reacts--through this process, children learn “I can do X thing but I cannot do Y thing.”

When you hear things like “Children are cruel,” most often what people are referring to is that it takes time for children to learn empathy and to experience guilt when they cause harm to others; children do not natively understand the repercussions of their actions. It’s only through a process of testing the boundaries, of receiving praise or punishment, that children define what is “right” versus “wrong,” and begin to feel bad when they do something deemed wrong.

And this is pretty much word-for-word what we see Sakura teaching Yato.

If they have healthy role models and caretakers during this phase, children develop successfully. Successful children in this phase get their first taste of personal responsibility; unsuccessful children are (supposedly) plagued for years afterward by a sense of guilt and shame when their actions produce disapproval from everyone around them.

Yato... doesn’t exactly make it through this development stage unscathed, because he receives conflicting definitions of right and wrong from his Father an Sakura:

Which ultimately results in, years later, the Yato we know and love who still does his Father’s bidding to kill humans even though it fills him with a horrific sense of guilt:

Through his time with Sakura, I think it could also be argued that Yato moves into the next stage of Erikson’s theory as well, getting into the “Industry versus Inferiority” crises.

Meeting Sakura brings out Yato’s true, deep down desire as a god: to help people. (I think it’s important to note that this isn’t something Sakura teaches him--it’s a quality Yato already possessed; it was explicitly Yato’s desire to please people that led to him murdering in his father’s name.)

Once he learns what makes people happy, Yato immediately pursues that with intense focus:

The primary goal of this phase of psychosocial development is to experience a sense of confidence in one’s actions. When children practice their skills, pursue areas where they are praised, and gain new skills and aptitudes through mentoring from healthy role models, they gain confidence in their ability to excel, to fit in with peers their age, and to create meaningful things. By encouraging Yato to pursue positive behaviors--playing peacefully with other children, appreciating natural beauty, and creating useful things like boots for the needy--Sakura moved Yato toward successfully completing this phase and developing a sense of confidence in his actions and his ability to achieve positive things in the world.

Of course, Father cannot have that (because confident children with a sense of self-worth are much more difficult to abuse), so he puts an immediate end to Sakura’s influence over Yato in the most insidious way possible: although he clearly manipulated the situation to achieve Sakura’s death, out loud, he blames Yato, implying that Sakura’s death was all Yato’s fault, the results of Yato taking unwanted action “industry” and yet failing--creating a sense of “inferiority” instead.

This, of course, haunts Yato all the way to the present, as he--again and again and again--blames himself for things outside his control or failing to live up to expectations that no one in his situation (still being manipulated) could possibly hope to get “right.”

Finally, you could say that Sakura’s presence is Yato’s life is ultimately what sows the seeds of the manga’s main plot up to this point, with Yato’s quest to create an entirely new identity for himself as a god of fortune instead of a god of calamity. Personally, I would say that Yato is currently still in this phase of development, still working out how to define himself and who he will ultimately become once he is finally free to decide on his own path in life. It was Sakura’s gentle influence--his desire to become the kind of god who could make her smile--that eventually sparked his conflict and finally led Yato to the brink of catastrophe. If he wishes to become the god Sakura told him he could be, he can no longer suffer his father to live.

So, long story longer, I think it can be argued that Yato meeting Sakura at such a young age is EXACTLY what made it possible for him to change, and exactly what has led to his crisis in identifying himself and redefining his sense of right and wrong.

Uhhhh... I hope that answers your question!

#noragami #noragami meta #noragami spoilers #noragami manga #psychosocial development #Yato #Sakura #Father (Noragami)#speculation

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still-a-morosexual-help · 3 years

Text

OBEY ME! LESSON 46 DETAILED SUMMARY + THEORIES

This lesson’s got two locked chapters that I can’t unlock :’)

D takes them to the casino where they meet Mammon in the Lamp event outfit. When he laughs and tells them that they must have forgotten who he is if they think they can take the money MC ignores all of this to ask him wtf he’s wearing. Mammon blushes and tells them that they have no right to criticize what he’s wearing considering what they’re wearing. Then he says also Lucifer wtf happened to you!? He laughs and teases Lucifer about getting shrunk and how he could accidentally step on him and kill him rn or how Beel might eat him as a snack. I saw someone say that Mammon was a little shit who was also BabyTM and like Yess!??? I love when we get to see more of the asshole side of him specially when we already know how soft he is. Man’s an onion :’) Beel says he wouldn’t do that unless Lucifer hid inside a piece of cake and Beel swallowed him whole without realising. Lucifer, off screen: “You’d better realise I was there!” And Like??? That’s the point Lucifer wants to argue? Not the fact that he wouldn’t hide inside a cake? Mammon says whatever and that he’ll take Lucifer from them so he can have fun with his new toy anyway RIP to Mammon who dies after this lesson. “Mammon, Avatar of Greed, Appears”- gonna have Pokemon Battles from now on, I can’t believe this what this dating sim has evolved into :D Mammon uses wind to lift Lucifer up and bring him towards him. MC has a flashback to the previous night and commands Beel who transforms into a demon and whose body starts moving on its own, Beel then cancels out Mammon’s spell and uses a wind spell to send Mammon flying. Beel transforms back to his human form and is shocked by what happened. Solomon says MC did a good job commanding Beel though they weren’t able to draw out all his powers. They get the armour, which Beel thinks is too flashy but MC tells him it looks great which he is happy about. D tells them about a rumour of Satan attacking a town up north.

As they walk through the woods Lucifer talks about how much he’s gonna love beating the shit outta Mammon when he’s back to normal and waves MC off when they ask him to go easy on Mammon. Beel says that Lucifer used to be a lot nicer to Mammon in the celestial realm and how the two of them would team up to go argue with Raphael. Solomon asks if it was Diavolo who got Lucifer to change and what exactly Lucifer had to do to reach the status they now enjoy in the Devildom. Beel seems shocked at this and ask Lucifer if it’s true. He says he doesn’t remember. There’s growling & they’re suddenly surrounded by ghosts. Solomon: Oh yeah lol this is called the Black Phantom Forest. Everyone else: WHY the FUCK didn’t you say so before!? They run from the ghosts and set up camp beside a lake, MC & Beel talk. Beel says how they’ve all changed from their time in the Celestial Realm and he can’t remember when he stopped resisting the urge to constantly eat. But how somethings are still the same and how the brothers have always been together and how they always will be. He brings up the three things the butcher said to maintain a long relationship and how even though they may sometimes falter at the “respect each other” part when it comes down to it the brothers have all three things with each other (Not me sobbing like a baby. It’s the found family trope for me guys). Beel says how he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to fight Belphie if they meet him in the game and how he has so many people who he loves that he doesn’t know who to put first and that he knows many people would kill to have that kinda problem and that as both an angel and a demon he’s being lucky to have the people he loves. MC gets to hold his hand, lean on his shoulder or say nothing and guys I love Beel so much he’s just so pure god. Okay so theory part: I 100% believe (& it’s implied in canon and in the chats too) and the main reason Lucifer is so mean to Mammon now is because he’s scared if he doesn’t discipline him then Diavolo will and he’ll end up with another Lilith situation. That being said I NEED to know how Lucifer came across Mammon in the celestial realm and what he said to make Mammon so loyal to him. PLS om! Give me the boys backstory? I like to think Lucifer raised Mammon the same way Simeon is raising Luke and that’s why you can see some of Lucifer’s traits in Mammon whenever he becomes serious about something and why Mammon sometimes slips up and calls Lucifer “Dad” and why Lucifer becomes so happy about it. I also think the others would have been older than Mammon was when he first met Lucifer, when they eventually joined the family which is why they share far less traits with Lucifer and why (as far as we know) none of them have called Lucifer ‘dad”. If this is true it also brings up a real interesting dynamic between Satan and Mammon that would be useful when writing fics. You know a little deeply buried resentment and envy about Lucifer having been more of a father figure to Mammon than to the person who is technically his actual son, and since we know for a fact that right after arriving in the Devildom Lucifer starts going through an existential crisis and Mammon’s the one who steps up to look after the others I 100% believe Mammon’s the one who did most of the work in raising a newly created Satan and who taught him how to control his anger so well (cause lets be real it definitely couldn’t be any of the others) which also gives backstory to Satan’s “do you think Mammon’s actually the most decent of us” homescreen comment and more importantly adds spice to the relationship dynamic you can work with in fics.

When they wake up Beel is thankful that they didn’t get eaten. Solomon: not like you would have noticed with all the fun you had *wink wink* Lucifer: wtf Solomon:*WINK WINK* Me: bro they were just talking… they find out game time and real world time pass differently and come across a treasure chest in the middle of their path. Solomon: Lets open it! :D Lucifer: Expect that’s definitely a trap… Solomon: Exactly! Which is why we should open it! :D MC: Lets open it! :D Lucifer: Why is the entire human species so fucking stupid!? Why were you created without any self preservation!? Who approved this!? They find medicine, a warding bottle and cat ears. …They put Lucifer into the bottle and Lucifer’s really going through it in this huh. But opening the chest pulls up an inescapable battle with the final boss, and Satan pops up fully immersed in the villain role with an evil laugh and everything. Luci asks MC to use something from the chest and they use the cat ears and Lucifer’s disappointed when they actually work. But it only deals 222 damage to Satan’s 870k HP. Satan paralyses them all and steals bottled lucifer and calls Belphie to finish the others off. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before but how did the brothers know that Lucifer was gonna be mini before they even got home, it would’ve had to be quite a bit in advance for them to so perfectly set up everything… And you know Solomon was really determined to open that chest (I mean so was MC but the whole of season 1 was establishing that their curiosity was gonna get them killed) so…

MC tells Belphie they don’t want to fight him and Belphie says he doesn’t want to fight either but at the same time Satan agreed to give him mine lucifer for a whole day if he defeats them. Beel’s still reluctant and Belphie says Beel doesn’t have to worry cause Belphie isn’t the same small/weak person that Beel always had to protect (and holy shit I need more info on this too?). Beel eventually agrees and says that Belphie’s strong, he tells MC that they weren’t able to use his entire power against Mammon cause he was holding himself back unconsciously but that he was ready now. MC makes Beel do a bunch of wind attacks and they defeat Belphie who’s impressed. Beel says that the magic was actually MC doing it not him (even though he was the one that executed it). Belphie says he’ll join their party if MC promises him that he’ll be allowed to poke at mini luci. MC tells him there’s a damned line and he’ll have to wait his turn. Solomon wonders if MC should be going around giving the right to annoy lucifer to others but also he wants that right too. Even though Lucifer was kidnapped since he’s still in the bottle he’ll be protected so MC’s test is still ongoing. Odd that there was a bottle that would protect Lucifer should he get kidnapped in the chest that was a trap… look we all know Solomon is shady enough that he’s probably behind this right?

During dinner at a tavern the twins are sickeningly soft with each other and Solomon watches them with a smile. For the night the twins end up sharing a room with each other, with Mc and Solomon alone together. In the middle of the night MC wakes up to Solomon still up and looking sad. They ask him what’s up. He says despite how much they walked he still isn’t tired and that seeing the twins together made him lonely. Seeing how much they love and care and understand each other and how they were always together made him wish he had something similar but how when you didn’t age it was difficult to from lasting bonds like that in the human world. MC tells him that all of them care about him and he says he hopes so. Solomon: Lol just the two of us in a room in a game, wouldn’t it be crazy if we made out? MC can either kiss him or kinda stare awkwardly. If they choose the second he apologises for suddenly putting them on the spot and says he won’t try anything else. So this might be kinda an unpopular opinion and I’m genuinely really happy that the side characters are getting more screen time and development because I desperately needed that but I’m not really onboard the romancing option with them? I’m happy they’ve got their own cards now and I love the devilgram stories and romance options in them but I don’t think it makes sense in the context of the main storyline? Barbatos has almost no interaction with MC and though they haven’t shown it yet it’d be weird if he was suddenly into MC. Diavolo spent 2 whole seasons simping over Lucifer why is MC suddenly an option? Besides Diavolo always seems so lonely and I really want him and MC to be really good friends, I want Diavolo to have a friendship where there isn’t some condition that hangs over it like there is with his relationship with Barbatos and Lucifer. The same goes with Solomon. I just want him to have a good solid friendship where there isn’t expectations or power between them. He also initially only seems interested in MC for their power and as a way to train them and eventually genuinely softens up to them, Just the request to kiss seemed outta nowhere? I don’t know why but with Simeon he seems above crushes? I always imagine him seeing MC as another cute kid Lucifer picked up (despite MC being an adult) and having a sort of soft indulgent attitude towards them. I don’t know I think I just want MC to have some friends who aren’t trying to sleep with them.

Solomon is extremely chipper the next morning and Belphie grumpily makes a comment about him having fun and sdfjdvnsjdokd they just talked. Belphie uses his magic to teleport them to Satan’s castle and Beel asked why he couldn’t do that the previous night, Belphie says grumpily cause then Solomon would have missed out on the fun and Solomon agrees and THEY JUST TALKED!? Satan has managed to transform Lucifer into wolf Lucifer and is shaking his bottle hard enough to make Luci wanna puke while Lucifer asks him to stop. MC tells satan to stop and he tells them they won’t be able to defeat him cause they skipped right to the boss battle without taking the long route and levelling up. MC says they’re not gonna fight him cause this whole thing is fucking stupid. Satan says it’s not cause he’s having fun. MC gives him one of their free therapy sessions about how important the bonds between he and his brothers are and how they don’t care more about helping the brothers all get along than some stupid star. Beel comes out spitting facts, saying they all know that Satan actually cares about Lucifer and how that embarrasses him and how he needs to stop hiding it by lashing out. And how Lucifer needs to get his shit together and be honest with satan. That he needs to tell Satan that Lucifer knows he’s his own demon and a really good demon at that. Lucifer says FYI but I never said you weren’t your own great person and Satan blushes and says that unless he wants to look childish he has no option but to accept the olive branch. He tosses Luci to MC. Belphie complains about having stupid older brothers and Solomon says he’s disappointed in Satan and reveals himself as the true secret final boss and FUCK YEAH! I CALLED THAT SHIT! Kinda – I thought he might have just given them a heads up about Luci’s condition. On a different note, Satan needs serious therapy. They all do tbh.

Solomon congratulates MC on what they’ve done so far but says they still haven’t accessed Beel’s full potential and that he’ll give his ‘adorable apprentice’ one more shit at it. Solomon summons Asmo who complains about how long he was made to wait and how he nearly gave up and went to the spa and that no one likes a selfish man. Solomon tells Asmo that he can tell him all this after they get back to the real world and I genuinely want the backstory of how they met and just more about their relationship. At Solomon’s command Asmo uses charm and paralyses Beel and at MC’s Beel uses another wind attack. Asmo says he’s never seen beel do something of this calibre before and he seems more powerful, even more than he was in the celestial realm, Asmo yells at Solomon for just standing and seeming impressed instead of helping him. There’s a bright white light.

Back home with everything back to normal Beel, Lucifer and MC are hanging out by the pool. Lucifer is in an unexpectedly good mood and MC has earned a star, which glows slightly from its place on the symbol etched to the back of their hand. Inside Solomon is feeding the other brothers as punishment. Mammon is sobbing his heart out and Levi is out cold (possibly dead). Satan is given Levi’s remaining share of food and Asmo is in tears. Belphie had made a run for it the second they got home and is nowhere to be found. Solomon talks about how nice Lucifer actually is and how he really loves his brothers cause he just made Solomon make them dinner instead of punishing any of them…. Love that the canonical reason why none of these demons tell Solomon about his food and allow themselves to get tortured is cause they don’t wanna be rude and hurt his feelings. And he thought no one cared about him. If that isn’t love I dunno what is. Beel and MC take a walk while Lucifer sits by the pool and in his words basks in “their screams of agony” While blushing beel says he’s grateful for what happened and how that star is proof that they got closer. Mc can either thank him or say that the star belongs to him. I think they kiss after the second option? For the first Beel says MC’s the one who did the work of drawing out his power. Over the echoing screams from inside Beel asks if they feel like they forgot something and ndfjkfjkdjfefjkn THEY FORGOT DIAVOLO I’M!!!!???? poor baby

#my posts #my theories #obey me spoilers #obey me!#obey me #swd obey me #shall we date? obey me!#obey me shall we date

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the-girl-in-the-box · 3 years

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Not Today XXVIII

A/N: This is actually the first chapter I've had *true* writer's block for, interestingly enough. Hoping Wednesday's update goes better, but I'm pretty sure it will. Skål!

Summary: When Ivar takes the throne of Kattegat, Lagertha flees to Wessex along with Björn, Ubbe, Torvi, and the Bishop Heahmund. There, they seek the aid of King Alfred. This aid comes in the form of his sister, Aethelind, who agrees to travel to Kattegat and try to reason Ivar, who she spent some time with during their youth, when her grandfather King Ecbert hosted Ragnar Lothbrok in their castle. Now, she is the only hope for Lagertha and her supporters to retake Kattegat from Ivar the Boneless.

Masterlist

It was the sound of laughter and giggling which woke Asta. She had fallen asleep with Ivar, as always, but a knock at the door had woken them both. The intruder had been Ganbaatar, Oleg’s right hand, coming to tell Ivar Oleg was asking for him. Asta hated those times, when Oleg summoned only Ivar, and left her without him.

Not that Asta couldn’t stand to be away from Ivar, but what she really couldn’t stand was this feeling that Oleg wanted them separated. He was always pulling Ivar away, leaving her out of their talks, even though Ivar filled her in when he returned. And it wasn’t for lack of trying to get her included on Ivar’s part. He told Oleg that he and his ‘wife’ were a team, that they discussed everything together, but that didn’t mean Oleg budged.

The truth was, he knew Asta saw through him. He couldn’t tell to what extent, but he knew he was no true prophet, and he knew there was not enough information he had about her to say she wasn’t. There was too much mystery surrounding her, too many things he was unsure about with her, and he didn’t trust what he couldn’t know. Often, in trying to get Ivar alone, he hoped to learn more about her nature. Not that Ivar budged on information Asta herself had not given. They talked, it was obvious, and he knew what she was comfortable with him sharing.

Thus, he had attempted to loosen Ivar’s lips with alcohol, with talk of their invasion of Scandinavia, and questioning if Asta would be able to assist them through her visions. Unfortunately, Ivar was vague about that. The gods will reveal to her only what they wish to reveal, he had said. She does not ask from them, but accepts what they offer.

Well, that had been no help to Oleg in the slightest. Ivar and Asta were both- though still, her more than him- far from open books. Even as he shared with Ivar that they needed to capture Dir, even as they laughed about his brother’s cowardice, at his weakness, together, he wondered if they were playing some other game, and if he were going to be a piece in it.

Who could say?

In the end, Ivar had returned to his chambers that he shared with Asta a bit drunk, and so his drunken giggles were what woke her, echoing through the halls and coming through the door. She sat up slowly, her eyes blinking as if she were in a daze, as the door opened.

“Asta!” he greeted happily. “Asta, Asta, Asta, Asta…” He said her name again, drawing the vowel sounds out as if they amused him.

“Ivar,” she replied, smiling softly and running a hand through her hair. “Your meeting with Oleg went well?”

He giggled, and tossed his crutch somewhere once he got to the bed, letting himself flop down onto his stomach. “It went horribly,” he said, and then turned his face up toward her. “But also very well.”

“How could it have done both?” Asta asked. She reached down now to let her fingers slide through his hair. With a hum, Ivar scooted closer so he could lay his head on her lap.

“Because he continues to ask about you,” he said. “He wants you to have visions, but you don’t just have visions.” Ivar looked up at her thoughtfully, almost confusedly. “Or perhaps you have. I have often thought you only came with me because you saw you were supposed to.” His hand lifted and tapped the side of her head.

Asta chuckled softly, and took his hand between her hands. “I didn’t follow you because of any visions I may have had. I followed you because I wanted to,” she corrected him. He gave something of a cross between a scoff and a snort.

“Why would you want to do a stupid thing like that?” he questioned. “I would not have followed me.”

“Hmm, well, then it’s a good thing I’m not you,” she answered. He giggled.

“A good thing indeed, because I am happy you’re here.”

Asta smiled softly, and leaned down to kiss your head. “I’m happy I’m here, too,” she told him. “And you are very drunk, and we need to get you to bed. Hm?”

Ivar whined and tried to bury his face in her stomach. “But I enjoy speaking with you,” he said. “If I sleep now, who knows what wonderful conversations I will miss out on?”

“We’ll talk until you fall asleep, how’s that?” she offered, and he looked up at her as if he were in awe.

“You will come to bed with me?” he asked.

“I do every night,” she said, laughing softly herself. “Have since we left Kattegat, almost.”

Ivar seemed to be considering something, and then he finally said, “Then I was not lying when I told Oleg you were my wife, apparently.” He paused, now confused. “How could I have forgotten getting married?”

Asta giggled and shook her head. “You haven’t forgotten anything, sweet Ivar,” she assured him, as he had seemed to be growing a bit distressed at the thought of forgetting his wedding. “We just sleep better together.”

Ivar hummed then, and nodded, starting to slowly relax against her. “That makes sense,” he mumbled. He wasn’t going to stay awake for long, Asta could see, so she quickly moved to get his leg braces off. Once that was done, she got him to crawl up into the bed with her, and pulled him close.

“Now, talk,” she teased him. He mumbled something, and then was lost to sleep, just as she had predicted. Asta smiled, rested her head against his, and allowed herself to succumb as well.

Ivar, understandably, felt nowhere near his best the next morning. But Asta had stayed with him until the afternoon, when he was feeling better, and she’d chosen not to make him aware of the rather embarrassing details of the night before. He hadn’t needed to know exactly how he’d revealed some of his inner thoughts to her. Knowing him, he’d likely only grow irritable in his embarrassment.

That didn’t mean he didn’t recall his conversation with Oleg, however, and so in one of the more quiet moments of the afternoon, he brought it up.

“Oleg wants to capture Dir,” he told her, and she turned to look at him curiously, her hand not stilling in his hand for a moment. “He will not move forward with the invasion until he has done this.”

“No?” Asta questioned, tilting her head slightly. “Why not?”

“He does not believe Dir can be trusted,” Ivar answered.

Asta chuckled softly and said, “We’re counting on it,” which earned a chuckle from Ivar. “Still, he won’t be any good to us captured. Oleg has already killed one of his brothers. What’s to say he won’t kill another?”

Ivar swallowed, and sighed. “One might hope he regrets killing his brother, and would not wish to kill another,” he said. Asta gave a tight-lipped smile.

“I doubt he’s as good a man as you are,” she said. He let out a halfhearted, breathy chuckle.

There were a few moments of silence while Ivar tried to decide how to answer her, but eventually gave up. When it became clear he was no longer intending to answer, she continued, “If Dir’s dead, there’s nothing he can help us with. We need him alive, and preferably, free.”

“If it comes to it,” Ivar said, “we will have a plan to rescue Dir. Until then, we will try to keep Oleg from succeeding in this capture.”

Asta hummed, nodding. “He seems to trust you,” she commented. “If you continue to work with him, you may be able to convince him to leave Dir alone, convince him he isn’t worth the effort. That would leave us in a much better position.”

“It would,” Ivar agreed. “And Igor trusts you. We should work both sides with Prince Dir. We will let Dir in, and Dir will defeat Oleg. Then, we will defeat Dir, and be the heroes who saved the young Prince.”

She chuckled softly. “And Rus will be ours?”

“Mm, it will be Igor’s,” Ivar said. “But I think that is not so different from being ours.”

A small smile lit Asta’s face. After a moment, she teased, “I think you may be a bad influence on me.”

This brought a full laugh from Ivar, who recognized easily how different she was now from the Princess he first met in Wessex. That girl was still in there, he saw her in many moments when the two of them were alone, and yet he also saw a more dangerous, cunning side to her as well. As they sat and plotted against Oleg, it occurred to Ivar just how blessed he was that she was on his side.

Though, he often though about the letter she had received from Björn, the warning that Kattegat was going to be attacked. His brother had cared for her enough to warn her himself. Had Hvitserk sent the warning, he wouldn’t have questioned it, but it had been sent by Björn.

Sometimes, he questioned if she may have been on their side at once, and had turned on them in his favor. If not for whatever it was between them, the thing that existed without acknowledgement between them, he could wonder if she wasn’t still on their side, keeping him busy away from Kattegat.

In truth, there was nothing but his faith in her to say she wasn’t doing this. That, and the fact that he wasn’t sure he could take another betrayal, and not from her, not from another woman he had come to love. Surely, that just would have been cruel. The gods couldn’t have intended that for him in sending her with him. Surely, the woman he was currently watching roll her shoulder back, roll her shoulder forward, testing it after the injury she had sustained defending him, had no intentions of betraying him.

Surely he was able to trust at least one person in this world.

Perhaps, if he could know her mind and her heart, he would be able to relax fully. Because, as the truth would have it, she had never once wavered since that day she gave her loyalty to Ivar. She had given it to him freely, unsure if she had made the right decision then, but now fully certain of her choice.

The death of Freydis had truly broken her heart. But, the Queen’s betrayal had broken her heart all the same. Though she wouldn’t have had it in herself to kill her, it had still devastated her. The entirety of the situation had been tragic. Both sides of the conflict, she understood- the revenge of a broken mother, the twisted mercy of a betrayed husband. Then there was her, caught between the two, devastated by the actions of each.

How could she possibly stand to lose Ivar, after essentially losing everyone else she has ever loved? Yes, Alfred lived, but she couldn’t help but doubt if she would ever see him again. Hvitserk left Ivar, and all the other Vikings she had cared for were with Björn. Ivar was the only person she had left, the only one left that she loved. Her love for those she had lost hadn’t lessened, but how can one show love to the ones so far away, who they can’t even reach out to? How could she show those she had left in Kattegat, or in Wessex, that she still loved them, even from such a distance?

There was no way, and so she would defend Ivar with her life, or with her death. Her heart was his.

Nothing came of their concerns about Dir for many days, and when something finally did come of it, it was while they were caring for Igor. They’d been teaching him some of Ivar’s language, and in return, Igor had been teaching them some of his own. It wouldn’t be long before they were able to communicate more freely.

Asta giggled a little as she watched Igor drag himself over to one of the Rus puppets he kept, the one of a King, which he held up and called, “Oleg.”

Ivar had also been amused until that point, at which point they shared a look between themselves. They had no way of explaining to Igor just yet that Oleg was not the King, and that Igor himself would one day be. Not that they were given time, as there was a commotion outside, and Igor jumped up to run and see what it was.

They followed him out, down to the market there in Kiev, where they saw that someone had just been put in a cage. Clearly, Igor wanted to see who it was, and so the covering over the cage was pulled back, and someone turned to look at the young Prince.

Even with the bruising on his face, the ring in his lip which was chained to the cage, Asta and Ivar recognized him immediately. They were out of time to talk Oleg out of capturing Prince Dir, as he now sat before them, entirely at Oleg’s mercy.

Time was running out.

When Igor began to bark at Dir, almost mocking him, a deep concern rooted in Asta. Their purpose in coming to Kiev was becoming clear to her, especially as Ivar leaned over to whisper to her, “This is Oleg’s influence. He called him a dog.” The fact Igor was barking, after the comment Oleg had made to Ivar, couldn’t have been a coincidence.

Oleg was going to twist Igor into a cruel boy, and rule Kiev and Rus through him. This was no longer about securing her own place their, along with Ivar’s. This was about saving Rus from the rule of a man who would abuse his people.

There had been a quick decision to get Igor back to his room, to leave him to his studies, and then to return to their own room to make their own plans.

And now, Ivar sat on the bed, his braces already abandoned to the side, as he watched Asta pace back and forth. She was stressed, and rightfully so. Oleg moved far quickly than they had expected him to, they were both realizing.

“I know I said I would prefer Dir be in Kiev, but I meant free,” she said sharply. “He can’t do anything being kept in a cage like a rabid dog! We can’t do anything if he’s being held here!”

Ivar chuckled softly. Clearly, this was the first of any plan she’d been involved with to go wrong. She was going to have to learn to adapt, if she was to continue behaving as though she was a Prophet, or even if she could ever be considered to be a well-prepared Shieldmaiden.

“Asta,” he said. “Our plans from here are easy, they only need to be made. But we need to release Prince Dir. Can you not see that?”

She huffed. “Of course I can see that,” she said. “But then he is gone from Kiev, and it becomes more difficult to work with him. I wanted him here, not in Novgorod. That was the purpose of getting close to Oleg.”

“You once said if Dir was captured, then it would be better because he would be in Kiev, but you realized the problem with that, didn’t you? He cannot be useful in captivity, especially not when he could die there. But, you have overlooked a way that this will be to our benefit, my dear.”

When Asta turned to him with an exasperated, confused expression, Ivar patted the bed to his side, silently asking her to come and sit beside him. She easily did as requested of her. “We will free him, and he will see our goodwill and desire to fight for him, and for Prince Igor,” he finished explaining. “All that is left, is to figure out how to free Prince Dir. We can solidify an alliance with him once that is done.”

Asta nodded slowly, her brows drawing in as she began to think over this new plan. “He isn’t well,” she said. “We need to be sure he can be received as soon as he’s freed, especially since we can’t deliver him to Novgorod ourselves, and he’s in no condition to make the journey alone. His people need to be here to take him as soon as he’s out.”

“I agree,” Ivar said. “But in order to contact them, Oleg will need to be distracted.” She nodded as he paused, waiting for him to continue. “I will do that. I will keep him from noticing that you are corresponding with someone, and you will be in contact with Dir’s family in Novgorod. Our plan should be made with them, as they will be instrumental in its completion. Hm?”

Asta hummed her agreement.

“Good,” he said. “Then we will begin this process as quickly as possible. And with any luck, and with the favor of the gods, Dir will not die before we can release him to his family, and gain powerful allies in Novgorod.”

Not a day had passed before Asta’s first message was being carried to Novgorod, taken by a soldier who had lied, sworn to Oleg that he had given the Prince Regent his loyalty, yet still remained loyal to Prince Dir, and even more importantly, to Prince Igor.

The true heir had more friends than he knew there in Rus, more than just Asta and Ivar, and the two were more than happy to be helping him reclaim his Kingdom. He didn’t know it just yet, but if he had known all that was going on, and could speak to his new Viking companions, he would have been well grateful.

After all, it was just as Ivar and Asta had learned for themselves in Kattegat- once one had a taste of power, it was not something they wanted to give up. Igor himself hadn’t yet had this taste, but Oleg had, and if they weren’t quick, he would become drunk on it, and the Kingdom of Rus would be lost.

Taglist: @youbloodymadgenius, @wilhelmyna, @katfett, @fangirl-nonsense, @zuzus-sun, @heavenly1927, @pomegranates-and-blood, @kingniazx

If you want to be added to the taglist, feel free to reach out either by commenting, reblogging, DMing me, or sending an ask, and I’ll be more than happy to add you

#ivar the boneless #ivar #ivar ragnarsson #alex hogh andersen #ivar's heathen army #ivar x oc #ivar x original female character #ivar x ofc #ivar x christian!oc #vikings #vikings history channel #history channel vikings #not today #chapter twenty-eight

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thecrownnet · 4 years

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Peter Morgan And Cast On The Multi-Generational Appeal Of ‘The Crown’: “The Queen Is Part Of Our Lives”

By Joe Utichi Editor, AwardsLine June 30, 2020

When it first premiered in 2016, Peter Morgan’s Netflix series The Crown was an instant smash. Aiming to tell the epic story of Queen Elizabeth II’s record-breaking spell as Britain’s longest-serving monarch, starting with her marriage in 1947 and seeing her reign through to the earliest 20th Century, it caught the attention of royalists and republicans alike. Some were hooked by the history and the pageantry, painstakingly researched from detailed court records, and others by the unprecedented psychological detail that showrunner Peter Morgan brought to the saga of the famously tight-knit Windsor family, whose gilded lives have been rocked by scandal and tragedy.

Speaking to Deadline’s Joe Utichi as part of Netflix’s FYSEE TV In Conversation series, Morgan said he was delighted that, after the three successful outings, The Crown was still a ratings draw and en route to a fourth and fifth season. Asked to explain the show’s appeal, he said, “I suppose it’s really her, isn’t it? It’s our fascination with her—the Queen—and the fact that she’s been in everybody’s lives; our lives, our parent’s lives and our grandparents’ lives. She’s been on every stamp in this country [the U.K.], on every bank note, for as long as any of us can remember. So it’s something that doesn’t have a narrow constituency—it speaks to multiple generations and it brings multiple generations together in the process of uncovering it, discovering it and enjoying it. I mean, anecdotally, that’s how I gather people are watching it—they’re often not watching it in the way they would traditionally [watch it], they’re often watching it with other members of their families, or with people of different generations, and that’s lovely.”

One of the original show’s many fans was Olivia Colman, who, for Season Three, took over the role of Queen Elizabeth from Claire Foy. Despite having recently won an Oscar for portraying 18th Century Queen Anne in 2018’s The Favourite, Colman admitted to having reservations about her ability to portray one of the most famous women in the world today. “It’s definitely more daunting to play someone that everyone knows,” she said. “The beauty of Queen Anne is that no one can tell me she didn’t sound like that, but everyone can tell me what the Queen sounds like, and that’s slightly annoying… It’s much harder to play people that everyone has a vision of, a picture of, and has ideas about. I’ve never joined a show that’s already been up and running and successful. But I was such an enormous fan of the show that I didn’t really think about it.”

Joining Colman, and the cast, was Tobias Menzies, who took over from Matt Smith as Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip. Like Colman, Menzies had been a fan of the show and knew that, with Morgan at the helm, the standards would remain high. “I wasn’t surprised about the quality of the scripts,” he said, “because I had really admired what Peter had done with the previous cast for the first two seasons, and the scripts we were being sent seemed really of a piece with all of that. That’s Peter’s genius: weaving together the very public and the very private, and that’s sort of the magic of the show, really. I have to admit, I didn’t really know a great deal about the Royal Family going in to this show—they’re not a family that I particularly had paid a lot of interest to. [But] I think what the show does really well, even for people who maybe aren’t necessarily that interested in the Royal Family, is that it takes you into the decisions and the challenges of trying to live as a family in this institution. The continual frustrations, the challenges, and sometimes a privileges and joys of this very peculiar—and acutely British—institution.”

Season Three also saw the introduction of Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s older, and only, sibling. Long before the tabloid stories that defined Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992, Princess Margaret had been a one-woman scandal sheet of her own back in the day, culminating in a much-publicized marriage breakdown in 1976. Bonham Carter praises the show for portraying Princess Margaret as a woman first rather than a figurehead.

“I think the reason this show has been so successful is because we’ve all taken [the Royal Family] for granted,” Bonham Carter said. “We’ve all thought that they were just [cardboard] cut-outs, and the surprise is, ‘Oh my God—of course [they aren’t].’ What must they have felt? They had a human experience through all these different events. Princess Margaret did get divorced, but [people] didn’t really think about [her feelings]. And when you’re playing somebody from the inside, from that perspective, you realize how hard it is to go through a divorce in public, to be that vulnerable and experience all sorts of things that come with divorce when you are you are in full view of the entire world.”

The Crown, she decided, was “the story of an ordinary family in extraordinary circumstances”. “And, ultimately,” she continued, “it’s not a place to be if you are suffering, it’s not a place for any individuality. Duty and responsibility come first, and it doesn’t allow for much fallibility or humanity, or human foible.”

By Season Three, two of Queen Elizabeth’s children had become young adults, which saw the arrival of Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles and Erin Doherty as Princess Anne. O’Connor praised the show for its unpredictability, even when dealing with well-known historical events. “I didn’t know much about anything [to do with the Royal Family] to be honest,” he joked, “so everything was a surprise! But I think the surprising thing, as always in The Crown, is that the unexpected [version of the story] is what’s told. There were certain stories that you look back at and you go, ‘Well, you can’t not tell that story—but how can you tell it in a more interesting way, or from an angle that hasn’t been seen before?’”

For Doherty, the chance to play Princess Anne, arguably the saltiest of the Windsor family after her father, was a dream come true. “For me, [Anne] is the furthest person away from my natural personality that I’ve ever been given the opportunity to play,” she said. “What it is with her that I think is fascinating is that she just doesn’t really give a crap about what anyone thinks—she’s just so honest with her emotions. And it’s so rare to be able to play someone who just tells the truth, without faffing about.”

Director Jessica Hobbs, who helmed two of the Season Three’s episodes, paid testament to Donerty’s commitment to the role. “I remember seeing her test audition,” she laughed. “Peter showed it to me. I was doing some work with him and he said, ‘Come and have a look at who we’re looking at for Anne,’ and it was just this raw contemptuous fury. I was, like, ‘God, she’s perfect.’ Absolutely perfect. And Erin never faltered from that. It was pretty joyful to watch.”

To see more from Peter Morgan and The Crown’s creative crew, watch the video.

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#olivia colman #queen elizabeth ii #tobias menzies #helena bonham carter #the crown #josh o'connor #peter morgan #erin doherty #the crown netflix

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sambergscott · 4 years

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a valentine’s surprise

Summary: Cheddar had passed the gem stones, they had been sterilised (twice!) and everyone is usually too loved up, or sad, to be out committing crimes, making Valentine’s the perfect holiday for a heist. Except when you had plans that will have to be cancelled. At the end of the day, Jake makes it up to his wife.

(spoilers for season 7 episode 11)

Her Valentine’s starts pretty great, her husband treating her to coffee, heart-shaped pancakes and a card that reads I’m going to make you moan like Myrtle.

(Despite the message on the front, there is a very sweet paragraph inside about how much he loves her and how smart and pretty she is and about how she makes him feel good about the world and his place in it. When she gets to the sentence about how difficult the last few months have been, he thanks her, says that he couldn’t have gone through it with anyone else and reminds her that they are a family - no matter what).

He proudly displays his card from her (a drawing of Hans Gruber falling from Nakatomi Plaza with the words I’ve fallen for you) on his nightstand and lays out his elaborate plans for the rest of the day: quick stop at home after work to shower and change, dinner at a fancy Manhattan restaurant and then, when they’re a little wine drunk and their inhibitions are lowered, salsa dancing.

She pops a piece of pancake in her mouth, chewing slowly as she debates the pros and cons of telling him they can’t do any of that. He will be crushed. He made the reservations last year, added it to their joint calendar and sticks new post-its on the fridge daily counting down to the Valentine’s Day Of The Century. They clearly both need the distraction from eating healthily and monitoring temperature and overly scheduled sex and referring to said sex as uterine deposits and doctor’s appointments, fertility drugs, negative test after negative test and questions from everyone they know. But the heist is due to restart today - Cheddar had passed the gem stones, they had been sterilised (twice!) and everyone is usually too loved up, or sad, to be out committing crimes, making it the perfect holiday for a heist.

Except when you had plans that will have to be cancelled.

“I’m sorry, babe,” she apologises after revealing the news, kissing away his disappointed frown. “We can always reschedule. February 15th can be the most romantic day of the year if we want it to be.”

He doesn’t respond, but she recognises the look on his face from when he’s coming up with a backstory for one of his undercover characters or an explanation as to why the dishwasher is overflowing when there are still dirty dishes all over the kitchen. His expression changes, his lips twisting into a smile, his eyes sparkling - he has a solution.

“What is it, Jake?” She deadpans.

“Surprise,” is his only answer as he wolfs the rest of his pancakes and asks her to shower with him.

Thank God she washed her hair last night otherwise they would’ve most certainly been late to work.

“Morning lovebirds,” Charles says in a singsong voice as soon as the elevator doors open, firing a million questions at them about what they bought each other, how the pancakes tasted (he must’ve got lessons from Charles, which makes the gesture that much sweeter) and whether they’ve already conceived a Valentine’s baby from their love.

Rosa punches him in the arm for them as she walks past.

Of all days to be handcuffed to her husband’s best friend, it had to be Valentine’s Day.

She learns way too many disgusting details about his sex life; he lists the sexiest restaurants in New York from A-Z (his personal favourite is Dining in the Dark that just opened in Parkslope, the blindfolds enhancing all the senses, he explains with a smirk), recommends the best foods to eat off a lover’s body and reads all his texts to Genevieve OUT. LOUD.

Amy shudders at their increasingly gross pet names, trying to focus her attention on Jake from across the bullpen. He’s kept coy about what he has planned for her, her only clue that it will be “hella romantic.”

(She read his lips).

Charles puts his phone away (thank God, she was moments from pulling a Terry and crushing the thing with her bare hands) and they go over their plan once more. Jake and Holt will argue, thanks to her excellent idea to rig the teams, they will mess up and Charles will use his dainty fingers to steal the gems from Bill’s pocket.

Then there are flowers everywhere, the precinct filled with the sweet scent of a billion roses, and in the chaos Scully steals (and swallows) the damn gems.

They end up back at Cheddar’s vet because all the emergency rooms are filled with skeletons and clowns and Harley Quinns having their stomachs pumped and apparently Scully’s body resembles closer to that of a human-sized giraffe with his big ol’ heart and leathery skin than a human-human. The vet reveals the gems are indeed inside of him and the heist is postponed until Easter.

“Hey,” Jake says, grabbing her hand to hold her back as everyone else leaves the surgery. “We’re friends again, right?”

“Yes, babe,” she assures him. Kylie thinks it’s weird how they can go from trash talking back to “babe” and heart eyes with the flick of a switch, but that’s just the way they’ve always been. They’re competitive. They will do anything to win. And they love each other. “Best friends.”

“Awesome,” he grins.

“So, best friend, what do we do now?”

He feigns ignorance. “What do you mean?”

“What’s your big Valentine’s Day surprise? I know you have one.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Ames. We’ve missed our reservation. I just need to go back to work to pick up my bag.”

“Mm-hmm. Sure.” She eyes him suspiciously, following him to the parking lot and their car and laughing when he turns on a playlist of the Most Romantic Taylor Swift Songs for the drive back to the precinct.

She plays along, acts like nothing is happening, like she doesn’t see the nervous tapping of his hand against the steering wheel or the constant lighting up of his phone with new encrypted messages. He’s even changed his passcode from their wedding date so she can’t unlock it.

When they get to the Nine-Nine, all the Valentine’s decorations have gone, probably removed by the night shift detectives who cannot stand their day shift counterparts, and Jake leads her to the evidence lock-up.

Her thoughts inevitably drift to HalloVeen, to becoming a two time champ and Jake Peralta’s fiancée. To the way he told her to “read the inscription on that there belt”, the way he was already down on one knee when she realised what was happening, the way he smiled when he managed to surprise her. To his heart eyes as he listed the things he loves about her and slid on the ring and kissed her in a way he’d never kissed her before.

She doesn’t know how anyone can argue anything other than her winning that day.

He opens the door and there are hearts everywhere, all the flowers from the delivery guys, a table and two chairs constructed from evidence boxes, a bottle of pinot gris and a take-out bag from her favourite Polish place.

She’s speechless.

“I got Bill to set it up,” he explains, fiddling with his police badge. “I figured if we couldn’t make it to the fancy restaurant, I’d bring the fancy restaurant to you. Kind of. I mean, it’s still a police precinct and the floor is kind of sticky and we’re surrounded by evidence from murder cases, but-.”

She cuts him off with a kiss. “Babe, it’s perfect.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s so romantic. And this is kind of our place, right? Where we had our first for realz kiss, where we got engaged.” She pauses. “Also the flowers really mask the bad smell.”

He breaks into laughter, shaking his head. “I love you so much.”

“I love you so much, too,” she replies. “Now can we eat? I had to listen to Charles talk about food all day and I’m starving.”

“Of course, m’lady.” He pulls out a “chair”, ever the gentleman, and kisses the top of her head before sitting on his own stack of boxes. He pours the wine into their NYPD mugs and holds his up in the air. “To us, to Fake Charles, to pierogis.”

“To pierogis,” she cheers, clinking their mugs together.

(And, for the record, when they get home, he sticks to his card’s promise, a very happy ending to Valentine’s Day indeed).

#b99 fic #jake x amy #my writing #lemme know what you think!!

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ariella884 · 4 years

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Voyager Book Club - February Favorite Fics

So I put forth a challenge of sorts to our Voyager Book Club. I asked everyone to pick ONE Voyager fic that they consider to be their favorite. Now, you can imagine, this is pretty freaking hard! There are so many incredible fics out there. I didn’t say it had to be the best written, or the most in character. I gave examples such as: the one you read over and over or your go-to fic, however you want to phrase it. It was pointed out that a favorite fic can change every hour based on your frame of mind and what you are in the mood to read at any one moment. I get it. Even so....I challenged everyone to only pick ONE. And they did it! Or most of them! I got around 20 different favorites picked! So here is the list of our Favorite Voyager Fics, why they were chosen and by whom. Happy Reading!!

Note: Click on the name of the fic for a link to it! Also, this list is in no particular order.

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@curator-on-ao3: ‘Fragile Things’ by @mia-cooper

“Fanfic is about exploring possibilities. That’s what put this fic over the top to be my favorite. In Fragile Things, MiaCooper examines multiple versions of one relationship, pulling different threads to see how things unravel or knit together. It’s thoughtful, it’s meta, it’s realistic as hell, it’s damn good writing — it’s MiaCooper and it’s excellent.”

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@ariella884(yep, that’s me!): ‘2013′ by PCBW (@pcbw)

“I had a hard time choosing my favorite (like most people here), mostly because as i was gathering them all from everyone else I kept seeing ones and going, ‘Oh! I love that one!’. I also didn’t want to have any duplicates so I had to change mine a couple times, that being said, 2013 is easily one of my top three (which of themselves is almost impossible to pick just one. I’m lucky that my other two were chosen already and I didn’t have to!). I love 2013 because it is a modern AU, without being a completely modern AU. No, that doesn’t make sense. But you get our Janeway and Chakotay, Starfleet officers and all, and you get them in the modern world. It’s incredible! We see the challenges they go through of being taken from everything they know and put into a world that is pretty much unknown to them. Add to that the personal differences they have to work out together. Splash in the normal challenges that we all go through when trying to live a life in this day and age (jobs, house, money, love, family, etc). This is just an incredibly beautiful story that I have read many times and will continue to read over and over. It’s also a long fic and those are my favorite because I like to get completely involved in stories!”

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@mia-cooper: ‘Deceiving’ by QuantumSilver

“Because it starts with a canon event that is absolutely devastating and shows just how devastated Janeway and Chakotay are by it (and Tuvok and Ayala as well, though they only make a brief appearance). It shows Janeway at her absolute best - every last inch the captain, going above and beyond for her crew not just physically but emotionally in spite of the absolutely gut-wrenching cost to her - and it really kicks off with one of my absolute favourite tropes: mutual pining to the Nth Fucking Degree.

It has Chakotay being every bit the commander, backing her up even though he's dying inside, and REFUSING to let her shut herself away even though he KNOWS she's going to want to murder him for pushing and pushing and pushing at her.

And then OH MY GOD, he's deliberately getting on her every last nerve just so he can wrench honesty from her because he knows if she doesn't tell him how badly he's hurt her, how she's absolutely bottomed out because of him, she will never open up to him or anyone else again.

AND THEY DRINK WHISKEY OMG GIVE ME KJ AND C UTTERLY MISERABLE AND DRINKING WHISKEY LIKE IT'S WATER AND PINING LIKE FUCK AND NOT SAYING A WORD BUT BLEEDING TO DEATH FROM THE HEART AND I WILL DIE HAPPY FOREVERRRRRRR

I'm sorry for yelling but this fic makes me want to rip off my clothes and run up and down the street screeching how everybody should read it and they are just BRUTAL with each other and they STILL do not understand, refuse to, CANNOT understand, that the other would not just die for them but MURDER WHOLE FUCKING ARMIES FOR THEM and it's tragic and devastating but then oH MY GOoOoOODDDDD

So that is my favourite fic and the one i read approximately every two months or more if i really hate my writing that day and want to torture myself with How It Should Be Done.”

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@bizships: ‘Fealty’ by MsDisdain

“My favorite story. I honestly don’t have to think about it. It’s one I always go back to.

I love the way the crew pledges their loyalty to her and the way subtle way they tell her that it’s okay that she’s happy too in that they effectively give her Chakotay for her birthday, by way of him “fighting” Tuvok(Starfleet) for her hand.”

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@arcadia1995: ‘The Space Between’ by lauawill ( @joyful-voyager)

“The Space Between is a story I return to time and time again when I'm feeling down. I like that it realistically portrays what might have happened between Janeway and Chakotay right after the returned home in Endgame. I like that no one in the J/C/7 triangle ends up being a bad guy. I like the hopeful ending and imaging what might have happened after the fade to black (lots of sex!!!)“

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@wishful-thinker-87 : ‘if you came this way’ by tree

“It’s always a go to for me, even though I don’t usually like AUs. The sex is intense and emotional. The characterization is pot on. And we get Phoebe being an awesome sister and some Chakotay/Molly bonding too. What’s not to love?!”

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BlackVelvet: ‘Bluffing the Crowd’ by @ralkana

“Even after years since i read this, just thinking about this story brings a warm fuzzy feeling to my heart and a huge silly grin to my face. I simply love it.”

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@purpledog47: ‘The Future is Ours’ by Dawn

“My favorite is most definitely Dawn’s ‘The Future is Ours. This is my one fic. It’s super long and it tells us what happened after Endgame and it has a little bit of everything in it: angst, romance, hurt/comfort, Q, babyfic, romance.”

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@amoderngirl: ‘Time and Distance’ by northernexposure

“If I am ever loosing the thread with J/C, I can always read this and I am immediately in love again.”

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@coffeeblack75: ‘Soft Light’ by northernexposure

“There are so many reasons why I love it that I can't even, haha. I'll start with: it was the first piece of fanfic smut I read, so I love it for that reason - my first time haha. More importantly, it is just beautifully, beautifully written - it's plotted beautifully, it flows beautifully and the pacing is spot on. The author has complete control over all of that & over the language, which is just used masterfully. There's so much subtley going on in this story too - the author doesn't spell everything out for us and instead draws us to the details that reveal what is important - the beginnings of these two getting to know each other. Gosh, it's so hard to articulate haha! But lines like this just make me shiver in delight for their beauty and what they reveal: "he was kissing her, with a lot more sweetness than was wise. Ah god, I could go on and on but perhaps I'll finish with my favourite bit, which is when C feels that first stab of lust & realises she might too & tests his theory by blowing softly on the back of her neck. This moment, omg, the moment is just so beautiful, so quiet, so pointed and private and intimate. You really feel that moment as if you are there. Ahhhhh :)

Also….there are two sequels to it that are equally as wonderful ;)

Oh and one more thing I adore about this story is the way that the C thinks he is lusting after KJ but it is quite obvious he loves her - even before they come together - but he hasn’t realized it yet. The way the author does this is just incredible - so deft! Everything for C is about taking care of KJ … it’s just beautiful.”

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@caladeniablue: ‘Lifeline’ by helenagray ( @picking-daisies-in-the-outfield)

“Why do I like that fic? An unfinished WIP at that (Started in 2013; last update in Jan 2019. No indication how many chapters to go.) The perfect serial story and that's part of the attraction for me.

The first chapter sets the scene: raw Janeway, alone, without the backup of her ship, her crew or Chakotay. Bare of essentials and with only her courage and intelligence and sheer determination to help her survive, and even she wonders how long those will last her.

And while we learn about Chakotay and how he seeks her while the crew has to move on, I am drawn to Janeway most of all.

The fic jumps back and forth across locations and in time from that first chapter to catch up with it again some 20 chapters later, but there is no jarring. The reader knows immediately what KJ is experiencing , but the past events that led to that situation are as important, and that's one of the many attractions of this story. No overlong flashbacks, no tedious info dump. It's all layered, making one wait for the next chapter and the next one, while knowing all the time where KJ has ended up.

The writing is gorgeous, which is a bonus. And it is pure J/C, distilled to its purest by separation. Perfect.”

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@keiraniels: ‘Bad Ensign’ (Series) by @curator-on-ao3

“Ok so I chose Curator’s ‘Bad Ensign’ because I come back to it often - - it’s such a freaking brilliant idea that I can 100% imagine being canon, and it inspired so many Voyager Bookclubbers to write Bad Ensign stories”

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@cnrothtrek: ‘War Torn’ by @curator-on-ao3

“Why? I had the pleasure of beta reading this story, and I am so glad that I did. It has a great plot, is well-written and perfectly paced, and is hard to put down. The way it pulls together two pieces of canon backstories for Miles O’Brien and Kathryn Janeway is genius. The characters feel so real and their voices can be clearly heard in the text. And the supporting characters of Captain Benjamin Maxwell, Will “Stompie” Kayden, and Molly Walsh are incredible. The story is intense, absorbing, and emotional. I just can’t say enough good things about it.”

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@theshortywrites: ‘The Dragonfly Oath’ by Koneia

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@emmikamikatze: ‘All the Good Things We Never Did’ by northernexposure

“This story brings me to tears, makes me smile and shiver and fear and worry. It's given me phrases that won't leave me, that keep repeating itself in my head even months (years) after first reading it. There's just the right amount of show trivia to make it a fanfiction, but little enough to make it a unique and original story. ne makes me fall in love with these characters all over again as if I didn't know them beforehand.

This story is special and precious and it speaks to me on so many levels I can hardly comprehend how genius it is. It's a literary masterpiece of fanfic if there ever was one.”

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@missmil: ‘Here I Stand’ by lauawill

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@manalyzer13: ‘Gravitation’ by northernexposure

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@grace-among-the-stars: ‘Filling the Void’ by Spiletta42

“Filling the Void is the one fic I always return to. It has my fave ships, JC, PT and D7. Minor characters play major parts and it is just funny. It makes me laugh every time.

JC’s relationship is really explored from all angles, this is not just your average, ‘the crew get them together fics’, it is so much more. It has sexual tension, smut, humour, sadness and is pure JC BLISS. It always cheers me up and I was so happy when Spiletta42 added it to Ao3 because this meant so many more people would find it.”

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Anonymous: ‘Bent, Not Broken’ by @killermanatee

“This is an incredible hurt/comfort Janeway/Chakotay fic. The story is painfully written from both characters' perspectives, showing how each is suffering in a different way from the traumatic event that has occurred. In the end, their love for each other will help them come together and they will both be able to heal with time, comfort, and support from one another. This is a beautifully told, emotionally heavy story of one couple's love overcoming tragedy. It is my favorite Janeway/Chakotay fic, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read a heartbreaking yet fulfilling story.”

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@minakotenjou: ‘Mysterious and Curious’ by @h4t08

“It was so hard to choose - there are a lot of incredible fanfics out there. This was one of the first...shall we say spicier J/C fics I read and for some reason I still think of it often. It's great smut for sure, but I think it stuck with me because of how it all gets tied together at the end.”

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@leisylaura: ‘The Bitter End’ by @mia-cooper

“We have post endgame books but not one about the original timeline, I remember reading “The bitter end” and thinking “this is it, this is what happened”. I cried from beginning to end.”

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@killermanatee: ‘The Dying of the Light’ by @cnrothtrek

"This fic is such a gorgeous piece of art. I hadn't seen the TNG episode before reading it and when I did watch it I was very disappointed because this fic is just on such a completely different level. The storytelling is so delicate and intriguing, that combined with the poignant and elegant writing style, so that it was impossible to put my phone down. I can't recommend this fic highly enough."

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@cheile: ‘Marooned’ by Soliquilii9 (aka Running Horse)

“I love how she makes the story unfold in slow steady measures. Also, she filled in the gaps left by the writers in regards to his heritage by using information from her own Cherokee background and it is done naturally (not in an info dump type manner). “

__________

What do you think of our list of Voyager favorites? Do you have a favorite that isn’t on this list? Reply to this post with your favorite!! And if you haven’t read ALL of these fics yet, I strongly suggest you get started!! Have fun and enjoy!!

#voyager #star trek voyager #voyager fic #voyager book club #Voyager Favorite Fics

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druid-for-hire · 5 years

Photo

new Hadestown au, ICARUS!ORPHEUS, wherein orpheus is not the world’s greatest musician but rather the world’s greatest inventor/mechanic/tinkerer. his creations are wondrous and beautiful and a miracle. Orpheus his mission is to create something that will repair the world--take what’s broken, make it whole.

Orpheus is still very much an artist--only his art in this AU is visual instead of auditory. and he’s still poor! not everything he makes is immediately useful for survival and y’know, hardly anyone has the money to buy things, and he has a propensity to just. give things away, especially the smaller trinkets he makes. and they take a Long Time to make. so he still works at hermes’ bar

SO!!!

this orpheus is body pain solidarity KDSKFJH

he has a fucked up back from all the heavy lifting he does around the workshop, being hunched over while he works on stuff, and being stuck in weird positions for extended periods of time when he’s working on machines and whatever, especially the bigger ones

also he’s got a wrist brace

he has a set of gear he wears a lot especially when he’s in his workshop

1) his wing pack! he built it himself and he’s proud. the pack was also made to help with his back problems. he doesn’t wear his mechanic gear when he’s working at the bar, but sometimes he’ll leave the wings on because back hurty. also, following w icarus, the wings are kept smooth & together and waterproofed w wax, kinda like a gloss. he reapplies every so often

2) his goggles! every part about the design is impractical (the red lenses and the beak) but i like them. they protect his eyes from flying bits and sparks and sawdust etc. when he’s working and wind when he’s flying

3) his boots! they’re sturdy workin’ boots, and have a talon function to clasp onto and lift things up. especially useful for moving bigger things around the workshop, up to higher levels and what have you, and he gets to flit around the whole space with minimal usage of ladders. (yes, they’re inspired by Vulture’s boots from Spider-Man: Homecoming)

(ALSO. the model of his wings are white crow wings, bc of the myth of Coronis)

because in greek mythology, crows started out white and had beautiful voices and the reason they turned black and got croaky calls is because a crow had to tell Apollo that his lover, Coronis, left him to marry a mortal

and Apollo got so upset he burned the crow and then burned Coronis to death, or burned the crow and then turned Coronis into a crow, depending on the version

(thanks to @princessponies81 for helping me figure this bit out)

so there are some... parallels here

also, IIRC crow wings are elliptical-type wings, meaning they’re good for a lot of control and maneuverability in tight spaces. good for the workshop

also he makes automata too! he has this little mockingbird to help him around the workshop. lots of calls for lots of signals, like how a car will have diff beep signals for low gas or parking brake on or door left open or key left in etc... little bird can measure and alert for lots of things

he’s also less noodle-y than canon orpheus because of how much he uses his arms and legs doing lifting, work, and flying

he’s not like. Built or anything. but hes got some strength to him

he doesn’t just make really good machines either; he’s absolutely as skilled in fine, delicate things as much as the big pieces—he sees the details himself, has to make it himself, he’s as skilled in silversmithy or goldsmithy as he is in mechanics, and i imagine he has skills in metallurgy too. maybe even a bit of glassblowing? just for piece assembly. all his pieces will fit most perfectly if he makes them himself

things like the Silver Swan automaton (i’d link a video but external links are illegal on tumblr)

also... i don’t know if they manage to get married this time, but they at least get the wedding bands

lover, tell me, if you can--who’s gonna make the wedding bands?

@supercantaloupe: the river gonna give us the wedding bands -- he draws the mineral, the stones from the silt, and crafts them himself

SO, he charms eurydice with one (or many) of his dazzling creations that also have usages in practicality and survival

as is the youzhe, she leaves when he gets to obsessive with working on something, holed up in his workshop instead of like. Surviving the winter

they last longer into the winter this time though because again, he does have a couple of machines good for tiding over the winter and surviving, and eurydice can operate them. but he’s too caught up with creating something to fix the world to repair them when they break down

when he leaves, he leaves his mockingbird to take care of his workshop while he’s gone. make sure there’s not leaks or fires, etc., keep everything in working order

the trip to hadestown still takes a long time, but less time than in canon, given that orpheus gets there on a pair of wings, though he gets grounded plenty of times due to bad weather. plus, his wings aren’t really meant for long-distance

so in the end the time still matches up; the events underground still happen on the onset of proper spring

he sails over the wall of the Styx on his wings, but it’s a feat easier said than done; it really is high and wide, just... hundreds of feet tall, and i headcanon that the “wall” is in fact seven layers of fortification because some myths say the River Styx wraps around the underworld seven times

and he is not a high altitude flier

uhhhhhhhhh blah blah something something ... i’m not clear on all the details but here are a few things:

orpheus gets the shit kicked out of him in Papers as usual and the fates hold his wings over him instead of his guitar

i have no idea how If It’s True goes

SOMEWHERE there’s Hey Little Songbird II (thank you to @supercantaloupe for authoring this idea);

it's Hades to Orpheus this time. Ironic, as he sings and flies, a real songbird.

and orpheus, that inspired inventor, that mechanic, that engineer, blessed by Hephaestus himself, being tempted to stay. It's a marvel of engineering, those factories. But they're rough around the edges, dirty, inefficient, unrefined. Imagine all the work he could do. Imagine how grand it would be, with just his help. And imagine how much fun it would be to fix it all!

but since he's fallen in love - and lost her once already - he has to pause and think. it's too good to be true, isn't it? Is it true? Can he really stay here forever, with parts and tools and endless projects worthy of his skill and attention - at least, without her?

ok back to me writing stuffs

there is no Epic I / Epic II / Epic III; the titles are now Trial I / Trial II / Trial III, like trial runs of prototypes, and on the third one it has a double meaning as a trial of judgement

Trial III goes as such:

(and thank you to @ferretteeth for this)

Hades orders him to build. An impressive invention in turn for his life – a chance he gives only because his wife is smitten with interest.

Orpheus gets three days and no more, and when he is finally ordered to come before the throne of basalt and steel he brings his invention. And Hades gives a curt, mocking laugh, because all Orpheus has in his hands is a simple box of bronze, cheap and adorably human.

He almost orders for Orpheus' death the moment he sees it, but then the boy lifts the lid and reveals a mechanical flower. Petals made out of metal rusted rosy, nectar of flecks of fool's gold.

Delicate and beautiful; extremely finely spun, as if the metal were only woven fibers. It is as soft as any silk.

"Where did you get that," the king snaps in a hurry. "How did you know–"

And then, with the twist of a key, the invention reveals to be a music box and long lost chords fill the Underworld.

(i originally had the idea that he builds a planetarium that replicates the summer above, a caught snippet of the thing that hades could never make on a large scale. a beautiful thing with flowers that blossomed and played the old song as hades brushed his hands across them, sun above. but i figured it’s probably more in line with the sensibilities of Hadestown if orpheus had created something less... grand)

so eurydice and orpheus are granted their chance to leave.

i’m not sure what the test is, because he’s got to fly out with eurydice clutched in his talons, and i want him to be as much a victim of his doubt as in canon

but he has to follow this flight path with absolute perfection, down to the flap. you fly too high, the flames of hadestown will catch him. he flies too low, the flames of hadestown will catch her.

i think, in his paranoia, he flies too high, and his wings catch fire

his wings are on fire--his arms are strapped in to them. he’s burning up. he’s burning.

he’s slowing down in his ascent. in a moment, he knows that if they’re going to make it, it’ll only be one of them, and... he’s not going to drop eurydice. he can’t do that to her.

when his wings can no longer climb, he throws her the final distance to the surface. she turns around and reaches desperately for him, but he’s too far away.

he falls. a comet.

he breaks.

the fact is, he dies

but he dies in hadestown. so now he’s just... well, one, no chance of going back aboveground. two, now he’s... sitting at the bottom of that long climb, broken and in pain, surrounded by the charred skeleton of his wings, broken and burned feathers, drips of melted oil and wax, and blood

he’s... there for a long time, just suffering, before someone comes to see if they made it out, and finds him at the bottom

hades sees this as an opportunity to bring him back, let him heal, and put him onto projects, perhaps “to get your mind off of it all,” but. orpheus doesn’t want to work. he doesn’t want to do anything

thanks to supercanteloupe again for co-authoring this section:

Hades says he'll squander his god given talents to just sit around all day but Orpheus won't listen

hades has just zero fucking clue how to deal with a depressed human

"have I not given him all he could want, metal, tools, a workbench? Bed, bread, fire? Strength in his bones? And yet he refuses still? The boy must be mad," he cries, angry

@s-aint-elmo: "i got a new mechanist"

“you ruined a perfectly good talented young man is what you did. look at him, he's got depression"

persephone herself is a mess (less so after Trial III) but she has at least some sense—she is more in touch with mortals than him, spending time with them up on the surface and throwing revels, but also greeting those who lost their lovers/sisters/brothers/mothers/fathers in the winter before

persephone encouraging orpheus to build, not for her sake or for Hades', but for his own. little flowers, little birds, wind up toys and music boxes. something to keep him going

s-aint-elmo: she brings him pressed flowers from the surface, little trinkets, tokens of the green. orpheus only lets the first few wilt and rot at the corner of his table.

flowers bloom until they rot and fall apart

it's a sad, painful reminder

he eventually has the resolve to rebuild his wing pack—better this time, because really, he feels crippled without them after living w em for so long

edit: (and the feathers are black, a la the crow myth)

when hades first sees him like, passing by w wings on his back, he turns to persephone like “what have you been saying to him?” “only what he needs to hear, husband”

he has a great fear of actually getting off the ground at first, though

he’ll perch at the edge of a rooftop, but... doesn’t move. it’s a leap of faith he doesn’t feel like he can take

he always saw air as just a medium to move through, that it would support him, as easy as swimming

now he sees straight through it to the ground

he has burn scars across the entire back of his arms, hands, and fingers

it’s a reminder every time he gets to working

rough patchy skin. calloused fingers from work

big sigh

eurydice goes home.

there is the empty shell of his workshop. his many machines and trinkets and tools and his hundreds of unfinisheds and thousands of scraps of plans, and… his bird left to care for the shop after god knows how many weeks or months.

it flies down and greets her, some string of whistles and beeps she only half understands. then it asks for orpheus

she tells it that he fell; he’s not coming back, it’s too late

the bird sticks by her from there on out, the last “living” remnant of her lover, besides his shell of a workshop

ok i haven’t thought farther than this, please have fun with this au i think it’s a new favorite alongside Unswayed AU & Apartments AU

#icarus orpheus au #hadestown #hadestown au #hadestown fanart #my art

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flemnotthun · 3 years

Text

‘Who Else Would It Be’

Chapter 6 - Hard

BIG *TW* Rape (discussed, some detail). Kate’s story in this is my story, never stay with someone who hurts you x

_____________

Steve gave notice on his flat the next day, eager to get the ball rolling on his new life together with Kate as soon as possible. Thankfully, there was only one month left on the contract, so he’d only be paying rent for one more month, and being the gent that he was, he offered to pay rent for the time he’d stayed at Kate’s, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“Don’t be daft! You’ve paid your way in dressing changes and food shops” she said.

Steve’s morning began with the warm person cuddled next to him giving him a peck on the cheek, then the side of his nose, and then his lips with a whispered, “Hello mate”. He leaned in to return her touches when he found that his bed-partner had vanished into the kitchen. She returned about 10 minutes later with two plates of pancakes accompanied by a glass of water each. Kate placed Steve’s breakfast on his bedside table and walked around the foot of the bed to do the same with hers. Sitting down on the bed to look at Steve, she saw him sat up, smiling and stretching out his arms to draw her close to him from behind. He rested his hands lightly on her waist, not wanting to pull due to the still healing gash in her side. Kate read his gesture and shifted back and down towards her friend, allowing his arm to fall protectively around her middle as he curled his legs behind her knees, slotting them together like puzzle pieces.

“What’s all this then? You didn’t have to make me breakfast , you’re still meant to be resting!” Steve spoke softly into the ear resting in front of his mouth.

“Not bloody likely!” Kate replied. “I’ve always cooked you breakfast when you’ve stayed over. You can’t get rid of my cooking that easily.”

“You’re a marvel Fleming,” Steve smiled into the back of her shoulder blade. Kate started giggling as his nose tickled her, and with that he eased them both up so that they were sitting.

They ate in a companionable silence, only stopping eating to make noises like “mmm” and “...tastes so good...”

“The neighbours will think we’re getting heavy on it if we carry on like this,” Kate laughed.

“Oh that’s funny,” said Steve. “I thought you were gay, short haircut and all that...”

Kate snorted, slapping Steve playfully on the arm.

“I bet you’ve got off on that one many a time,” Kate quipped, giving as good as she got.

“Um... no, ah, I...” replied a flustered Steve, using his hands to try and make up for his lack of speech. Kate put him out of his misery with a lemon and sugar kiss on his lips that broke them into fits of laughter.

“Nah, I’m more of a 10 dates after an STI test kind of guy.” Steve joked as Kate let out a hearty laugh. She was so beautiful when she was laughing, Steve thought. He told her this, which earned him an even bigger smile from the woman opposite him.

“Actually,” Kate said, the big grin draining slowly from her face to be replaced with a sad smile.

“That’s something we ought to talk about. It’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up for a while.”

Steve panicked. Had she guessed? Had someone told her about his problems in bed? God, had Sam said something? But his thoughts were cut off abruptly when Kate uttered the unthinkable.

“About 15 years ago, I was raped. It effects me in bed.”

All feeling dropped out of Steve’s legs as he took in her words one by one.

She’d been raped. He felt sick, empty, dead, but just like at the hospital, this was about her.

“Kate...I.” He looked at the woman in front of him, eyes filling with tears which he blinked back to save her embarrassment. Just when he thought that she couldn’t be more resilient, she outdid herself.

Steve took a breath to calm himself. “Kate, I’m sorry this happened. This must have been very difficult for you to tell me, and I’m here to listen whenever you want, for however long you want. And this goes without saying but of course I believe you.” Steve said quietly, offering his hand to her, which she grasped. To hear that his partner was effected in bed, understandably, by something so awful, put his physical difficulties, while upsetting, into perspective.

Kate took a deep breath. “Thank you mate. I don’t want you to think this means that I don’t want to have sex or be intimate with you. I do, and I have done for a very long time. I also don’t want you to think that I don’t want affection from you. I do, and everything we’ve been doing has made me feel cherished and so loved. You’ve done everything you could to make me feel comfortable and you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s just... with Mark, it wasn’t him... but there were problems. He would...”

She paused as Steve twisted the rings on her fingers, listening attentively and patiently.

“He would... do things... without asking, put his hand around my neck, use belts...”

Steve tightened his grip on her hand.

“It’s okay, Kate, you can tell me as much or as little as you want to.”

Kate smiled gratefully. “It’s okay. You’re my best mate, and I want to share this with you, not because I think you’re like Mark, or... him, but because I know you’re not.”

Tears began to fall from both of their eyes, as Kate went on to describe what happened to her.

It had been her first boyfriend, he’d pressured her, and she felt like she couldn’t say no because he’d flooded her with so much affection, the opposite of Steve’s careful gestures and respect for consent. He’d put his hands around her neck, he’d beaten her, but she didn’t leave.

“I stayed with him for a year, despite the rape. I know that makes me seem desperate.”

“No, not at all Kate, those situations can be so hard to escape from. I’m so glad you got out though. I’m so glad and I’m so sorry that this happened to you.”

Kate told Steve that the abuse had started with the subtle digs, the comments about friends, her short hair, the way she dressed, progressing to screaming fits and verbal beatings.

“He used to send me photos of women being raped by animals, threatened to break my arm, told everyone I was mental. Some of my old friends still think I was making it all up...” Kate’s words choked in her mouth, unable to go on any more. Steve gathered her in his arms and held her as she cried.

“I’m sorry Kate, I just hate the thought of you going through that alone. Love shouldn’t feel like that.” Steve said quietly as he stroked her hair.

Kate surfaced and continued: “it’s only sometimes, but with Mark... in bed... I used to freeze, dissociate and go into flashbacks. He used to tell me to pull myself together, and that I needed to ‘work on myself’ to get through it.”

Steve felt anger rising up his body that someone had treated his best friend as if she were broken, a problem that it was her responsibility to fix, “Oh God Kate, that sounds absolutely awful. Those responses are totally normal.”

“I know,” Kate replied, “but when it’s the one you think you love saying it...”

“Tell me about it, Nicky used to tell me not to spend time with you. I knew it was wrong, that she was so jealous, but she kept putting pressure on me.”

“But you never spent any less time with me?” Kate questioned, blinking through tears.

“Nope. Was never gonna happen.” Steve replied defiantly.

Kate beamed and pressed a kiss to Steve’s chin.

“Well,” she said, putting her hand on her heart. “I promise I will never ask you to spend any less time with me. In fact, I’m so excited for you to move in properly. Don’t get me wrong, I love being independent, but I want you there with me. What Nicky did was abusive, and you’re remarkable for resisting it. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you at the time, I should have asked more questions.”

“Kate,” Steve pushed gently, “You’re remarkable. I know it’s a cliche but you’re so strong. Likewise, I should have checked in on you more when things were bad with mark. You’ve been so brave, and I’m so grateful that you’ve trusted me with this. Most importantly though, you’re yours, no one else’s, and I can’t wait to see what you achieve next, even if it’s nothing. I want my time with you.” Steve put his hand on her hip and kissed the top of her head.

“I really love you Steve, you know that?” Kate whispered in his ear.

“I love you too mate. So much.” Steve whispered back.

Reluctantly, they rose from the bed and took their plates out to the kitchen. He would move in that day, and not just into her home, but into her soul.

#flemnott #steve x kate #katexsteve #kate fleming #vicky mcclure #steve arnott #martin compston #line of duty #bbc #fanfic #bbc line of duty

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ayatosmlktea · 4 years

Text

Well I fucked up and deleted the first part of the ask...basically the request was an Erwin x reader. She finds out she’s pregnant but doesn’t tell him and Levi or Hange ends up finding out about it. On a mission she gets into an accident and...

A/N: You asked for one but why not both?

𝑺𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑵𝒐𝒕 𝑴𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒀𝒐𝒖

“Y/N! You in here”? Hange calls out, not bothering to knock as she invites herself into Y/N’s office. The brunette frowns upon finding the room empty. She’d been trying to find her all morning needing help finalizing an experiment that she planned to use on the expedition tomorrow.

Walking over to desk Hange sorts through the papers strewn messily everywhere, Y/N had taken Hange’s notes the last time they had been planning the experiment and she needed them in order to go over the final details. In her search for the notes a few papers had flown off the desk, bending down to pick them up one paper in particular catches Hange’s attention. Brown eyes widen with shock she quickly places the paper under a pile of others, not sure of what to do with the information. The sudden sound of loud knocking makes her jump back.

“Y/N it’s Levi.” Hange’s eyes widen rushing to the door she grabs Levi by the arm and drags him inside.

“What the hell four-eyes?” Levi asks trying to pull his arm out of her iron clad grip.

“Thank god you’re here, you need to see this” Dragging him over to Y/N’s desk she shuffles through the papers again.

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be showing me this?” He questions, nose wrinkling at the disorder Y/N kept her things in. Finding what she was looking for Hange shoves the paper in front of his face. Levi’s expression remained unimpressed, his eyes darting over to hers.

“It’s her physical. Big deal, she’s perfectly healthy.” Rolling her eyes she points to the bottom of the page waiting for the light to go off in his brain.

“Shit…do you think he knows?” They exchanged glances of unease. Levi was almost certain that if Erwin knew Y/N was pregnant he would have taken her off the expedition tomorrow, meaning that they were probably the only ones who knew her secret for the time being. Once again shoving her physical under several papers they make a silent pact not to say anything until Y/N confronted Erwin or one of them first.

At dinner her body language gave nothing away, Levi and Hange were watching her closely looking for any indication that Erwin was treating her differently. However, the day ended and they found themselves ready to leave the walls with Y/N among them. Levi wasn’t sure whether to give her credit for being able to act like she hadn’t received life changing news or knock her out himself and leave her behind.

Y/N was forcing herself to smile at her husband. She felt guilty for hiding her pregnancy from him but knew that if he found of he wouldn’t have let her come on the expedition. Hange had been working hard on the mechanics for capturing the female titan and she would be damned if he didn’t let her see their plan come to fruition. Y/N also knew that Erwin needed as much man power as he could get. This was probably one of their biggest missions in a while and would ultimately lead them to uncovering secrets of the titans. Y/N finds herself getting lost in thought, her guilt eating away at her conscience as she remembers their last conversation that morning.

“You better come back alive, I won’t accept any other outcome.” His eyes fixed on her and full of love. It was no secret that Y/N had the commander wrapped around her finger.

“I’ll always come back to you” She replied softly, her fingers ghosting over his cheeks. Erwin leans down to give her a chaste yet warm kiss.

“You should go see if Hange needs your help before we leave” Planting a firm kiss on her forehead he taps her butt playfully, nudging her out of the door.

Erwin’s concerned gaze brings her back to reality, shaking her head she gives him a reassuring smile. Unaware to both of them Hange and Levi were watching their exchange closely. Y/N was a capable soldier, she’d survived every expedition thus far, there was no reason to doubt her skills. That was what they’d both told themselves, until skills alone weren’t enough when it came to surviving the disaster that was the female titan. Levi’s entire squad had been annihilated and if that wasn’t enough they couldn’t find Y/N. They’d all been split up after the female titan had attracted other titans once being captured.

On the battlefield Erwin treated his wife as he would any other soldier so he just had to hope that she was safe and capable of taking care of her squad.

His stomach churns in terror as the only two remaining members of her squad were frantically trying to carry her body back to the wagons. A large gash bleeding freely on her abdomen staining her clothes dark red. Her head was lulled back, barely clinging onto consciousness.

“What happened?” He barked, his blood turning to ice as he takes her out of their arms. Her skin was pale, almost grey in colour, beads of sweat falling from her forehead.

“It was an accident sir, it happened so fast. She went to take out a titan and out wires got caught and I couldn’t draw back my blades in time”

The young boy started panicking, on the brink of hyperventilating. His eyes focused on Y/N’s semi conscious form.

Too many things were going on at once, too many things needed to be prioritized and Erwin was overwhelmed with having to choose between his soldiers or her.

“What are you standing around like idiots for? If you don’t stop the bleeding now she’s going to lose the baby!” Hange cries, stunned at Erwin’s lack of response at Y/N bleeding out in his arms.

“Baby? What baby?” Azure eyes widen frantically, Y/N visibly grimaces squeezing her eyes shut to avoid looking at the mixture of emotions swimming in his eyes.

“She’s fucking pregnant!” Something snaps inside of Erwin, his body going on autopilot as he hands her off to the medics. His mind goes blank the only clear thought he has is getting her back to the safety of the walls and hoping that it won’t be too late to save their baby.

Time drags on agonizingly slow, questions are racing through his mind. He hates having to leave her side but his duties as commander outweigh his duty to her. Erwin can only pray to invisible gods that they all make it back in one piece.

Y/N is immediately rushed to the infirmary her condition taking priority over everyone else. He didn’t know whether to be furious at her for keeping this from him or excited at the prospect of being a dad. Erwin paces back and forth beside her bed unable to sit still and wait for her to wake up. The doctor had told him that her condition was severe, having lost almost thirty percent of her blood but that she would eventually wake up. He was almost too scared to ask about the condition of their child unsure of whether he wanted to know the outcome.

In the week she had been unconscious Erwin had found himself staring at the results of her physical more than once. The silence was unbearable for his restless mind. He needed answers, what could have possibly prevented her from telling him something like this. He was convinced he was losing his mind, staying by her bedside long into the early hours of the morning asking her why she hadn’t told him.

The day she had woken up he’d almost cried tears of relief. Her memory was hazy. She couldn’t remember anything that had happened after her collision.

“I know this is very sudden but we needed to do some tests on you while you were unconscious to make sure the baby was safe.” Her doctor is solemn, too serious for whatever was coming next to be good news. Noting the way she pales he reaches over to affectionately stroke the back of her hand.

“And?” Y/N’s voice is strained but she can already tell that it’s too late.

“I’ve very sorry but there was too much blood loss” Her bottom lip begins to tremble, angry hot tears of grief escaping the corner of her eyes.

“It’s all my fault” she sobs helplessly. Her knuckles turning white from gripping the sheets. Erwin gently holds her face against his chest. Any hope he had let live inside his heart quickly dissipated. He felt guilty for holding a small ounce of resentment for her in his heart.

“It’s not your fault Y/N. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” He asks quietly, his hand rubs her back soothingly while the other combs through her hair keeping her close to him.

“I don’t know, I was scared!” Her words are barely comprehensible the force of her sobs mushing them all together as she hiccups.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me go but I wanted to be useful” closing his eyes he takes a deep breath. She was right, he would never have let her leave had he known from the beginning. But he also understood her desire to want to keep fighting.

“I’m so sorry” Erwin couldn’t find it in himself to stay mad at her knowing that she would never have wanted this to happen. Crawling into bed with her he holds her against his chest, his own bitter tears silently sliding down his cheeks at the loss of something he had never really gotten to enjoy to begin with.

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