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alargehunkofdebris · 9 months

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Why There’ll Never Be Another Good Omens 2 Experience

The strangest thing happened after a few days post my watching of S2. I got a wave of real, bittersweet sadness.

Not due to the obvious – I was dealing with that too, but with more excitement than anything – but because I realized something, as a writer and consumer of media. I realized that it’s unlikely I’ll ever get a media experience close to what I experienced at the end of Good Omens 2. Because really, its setup was absolutely unparalleled – in general, and for myself personally.

I am currently writing my third romance, and what I’ve learned primarily about the genre, the way for it to really work, is that there needs to be something keeping the couple apart initially. The more things keeping the couple apart, the stronger the romance hits. The more the couple clashes with each other, the better it is. Societal norms, class issues, initial dislike, literal danger—all these aspects are what make a romance a story. It’s that conflict that creates the compelling narrative. No romance was ever popular because things worked out well from the beginning – it’s that “look at what we were, and look at us now” aspect that gives readers/watchers that satisfaction. It’s the “I can’t believe this happened” effect. The “I would never have foreseen this” effect. The “they’ll never be together” effect. It’s why forbidden romances are so incredibly popular.

Another aspect that makes a romance story really work well is the amount of time it takes for the romance to develop. A couple that gets together after a few days? Eh, it’s tricky. You better make it really dramatic somehow. A great example is Titanic – class differences, betrothal, and a huge amount of danger threatens this couple, so them being in love after only a few days works. But what really sells this one is because we can see how this romance has survived beyond those few days. We see it 80 years in the future, still there, in the memory of Rose. That is why it hits so hard. Romances that span over long periods of time (especially ones that are bittersweet/tragic) hit so much more than ones spanning a short period.

But wait! There’s more!

You can up this effect by not only having the romance take time in story…but having it take time in real life, for the viewer/reader.

This is why romances in TV shows that take years to finally work out are so compelling. It’s that “Pam and Jim” effect, that will-they-won’t-they deal. We are waiting right along with them, and we’re feeling that same relief when all those things keeping them apart finally fall away. This is harder to pull off, because there’s never that guarantee that the story will make it that far. TV shows get cancelled, creators lose interest or die, etc. So it’s not just “Will They, Won’t They,” it’s “Will They, Won’t They, Can They Even Try?”

This is also compounded by that fear that it won’t happen in-story after all, and while in romances you’re pretty positive that things work out (they kinda have to, for it to be labeled a “romance”) in other media, there’s always that possibility. Look at Community – there’s a forbidden/conflict-ridden romance that didn’t end up working out, even though it was “Will They, Won’t They”d for six entire seasons. You also then have shows and ships where fans are almost sure it won’t happen, but still hold out hope. (See: Supernatural, Sherlock, etc.)

Now. Now look at Good Omens. Look at that absolutely unparalleled, unbelievable set up. It’s unbelievable because it takes almost every single thing that makes a romance compelling, and not only uses all of them, but dials them up to 11.

Why are they at odds? Why are they forbidden from being together?

Because they are literally the most opposing forces you can imagine in Western Canon. They are the Angel Guarding The Gate and The Serpent of Eden. The literal only way you could’ve made this a bigger deal would’ve been to make it God and Satan, and even that would’ve not hit as hard, because it’d be like two CEOs getting together – there’s no fear of a higher power adding that delicious conflict. And to add to all this, in real life, the couple is portrayed as two men, which adds that second meta level of conflict.

And what fear/danger is keeping this couple apart?

Not just familial disappointment—but disappointment from God and Heaven and Hell. Not just moral guilt, but the guilt of potentially dooming the entire Earth. And finally, on top of that, the very real danger of being killed. Not only that, but making it as though you never even existed.

And in real life, they face all those roadblocks that queer couples in media have been battling for years and years, but I'll talk about that more in a second.

Okay, then Time. How long have they been kept apart?

For…all of it.

All of the time that ever existed.

They, quite literally, could not have been kept apart longer.

And this leads into those final two points, the ones that actually really sell it. Because I can sit down right now and write a story about an angel and a demon falling for each other at the beginning of time against all odds…but what I can’t do is to have already written it thirty-three years ago.

That’s how long this story has existed. Thirty. Three. Years.

I’m not even counting how this is using characters that have existed as opposing forces for thousands of years. I’m not even saying that, even though that’s also a part of it. But besides that, this story, this exact story started thirty-three years ago, and is still being continued by the author to this day.

Do you know how uncommon that is?

Yes, we have canon that has lasted for many, many years. Hundreds. We get new versions of beloved older stories ever year. But it’s so very rare that they are by the same creator. We get new Sherlock Holmes content, but it is not written by Arthur Conan Doyle. This, on the other hand, is actual canon content, written by the author of the original. That is unbelievably rare.

That means we’ve got a fandom where some people have grown up with these characters. People who read it at twenty are fifty-three. People who read it at fifty are eighty-three. Kids who saw their parents reading the book now have children of their own. It is a cult classic that has been in the hearts of so many people for generations. Me, personally, I fell in love with it ten years ago, at age twenty, at the very beginning of my own writing journey. This story means so much to people, because it’s stood that test of time.

And yet, this story was never explicitly romantic. So many saw it that way, but it was never something confirmed. Because this was a book from the 90s, at a time where this kind of romance just wasn’t in popular media if it wasn’t played as a joke. It was, back then, the same kind of “forbidden” as a romance between angel and demon. So people imagined, but they never expected anything more. And they’ve continued not expecting more, because even in the 2019 first season, there was never any true confirmation of anything, and people accepted it. You have a 33-year-old story here – it’s possible that this major change/confirmation could happen, but all things considered, it was unlikely. You would never blame the creator for not making major developments to a story they wrote with their late friend a lifetime ago. And no one in production was saying a word to confirm or deny, but we’ve seen all this before. It was a Will-They-Won’t-They…Probably-Not situation.

And then you have the end of S2.

And that's where that bittersweet sadness comes in for me, personally. Not at a huge level, not to the point where I'd have it any other way, but it's there regardless. Because I realized that this was a unique situation that could never be replicated, for me, and likely for many, especially readers of the book pre-show. In all likelihood, I would never again experience a romantic payoff like this one. Because it was the most forbidden of forbidden romances, the couple of which have been kept apart by the worst of all dangers and highest level of guilt for the longest amount of time literally possible, written over a real-life span of time where this kind of romance went from “completely taboo even in real life” to “finally acceptable in popular media,” written by the same creator, and not confirmed as canon until the story reached the age of Jesus Christ himself.

And the real kicker is, even after everything these two literally star-crossed lovers have gone through…they’re still being kept apart. They’ve still not taken down those final, seemingly insurmountable barriers between them. It wasn’t a “here you go 😊” move to make long-time fans happy – it’s being used as a perfect, painful plot point. After 33 years, we’re still having to wait longer.

Chef's kiss. Couldn’t have been a better set up if it was mathematically calculated. And yet, the best part is that it happened organically.

It just works.

#good omens #good omens 2 spoilers #go2 spoilers #good omens 2 #gos2 spoilers #good omens s2 spoilers #good omens spoilers #good omens season 2 #good omens season 2 spoilers #gos2 #good omens meta #good omens 2 meta #neil gaiman

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dragonmuse · 6 months

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Keep It In The Box : An Essay on OFMD Season 2 and the Failure to Heal

(here in is my season two reaction. It contains many many spoilers. It's also about 3k words long so you know what you're getting into.)

“See, I have a system for dealing with all the terrible things I've seen. There's a box in my mind, and I put the things in the box..” -Frenchie, Season 2 of Our Flag Means Death

…..and then he never opens it. Chekov’s locked box has no key in season two.

On first watch, it seemed clear to me that Frenchie’s declaration was a narrative plant. Clearly the whole season would be about that box of pain and trauma being opened, sorted through and at least the beginning of healing. The show had developed a reputation after season one of being kind and focused on queer narratives of healing from childhood. Ed and Stede’s parallels in their childhood traumas were frequently on display through season one and were repeated in flashback throughout season two. Jim’s season one arc about becoming someone who doesn’t think just of revenge and can now forge meaningful connections was profound, beautiful and often funny. Izzy is an antagonist because he doesn’t want Ed to move on or stop acting like the trauma-response version of himself. The antagonist wants to stop healing. The point is to grow, to change, to learn how to love. It’s one of the things that made season one work for me at the time, despite reservations about pacing and tone.

So naturally season two should follow suit. It’s a kind show! About healing and falling in love!

For the first several episodes, the remaining crew on the Revenge go through a gauntlet of trauma, forced to do and receive violence at Ed’s whims as he careens from self-destructive behavior to self-destructive behavior. This is the wounding setup. It was dark, but it seemed like it would have a payoff and at first it did.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful moments of the season comes in one of the small respites in those early episodes as Jim recounts Pinnochio to Fang to soothe him through his grief. That was the show that I expected. The kindness of that moment struck me very deeply. It gave me some understanding of Archie too, who seems to fall for Jim right at that moment.

That scene is the show season one promised. Season two led with packing Frenchie’s box full to bursting. Here is the fight to the death between lovers, there is a first mate who is mutilated and rotting in the very walls (the rot of the Revenge itself), and there is the storm of Ed’s rage and pain that threatens to consume all of them.

So surely these remaining episodes would concentrate on finding the humor in healing from those moments. That is the setup. Frenchie has a box. The box must eventually open.

Except time and again, all the characters who suffered are told that the only way to deal with what they’ve been through is to stick it in the box and never open it again.

Pete tells Lucius that he’s unable to move on and needs to let it go. Izzy has a story about a shark. Ed’s apology to the crew which doesn’t even contain the words ‘I’m sorry’ is just…accepted. I kept waiting and waiting for a meaningful apology to the people Ed had hurt the worst with his actions, but it seems all we get is Fang saying ‘eh, no problem, I got to hit you back so I feel better’.

The playful theme of ‘pirates are just violent sometimes’ from season one becomes a grinding horror machine in season two when every atrocity visited on someone is forgiven because the narrative needs it to be. Ed and Stede spend more time making amends with each other over the bloodless night on the beach than either of them spend trying to repent for their actions towards anyone else.

And let’s talk about Ed. Arguably this season pivots on his narrative, on his path to healing and growth. A path that starts at a very low point. His moment in the gravy basket, deciding he wants to live because there are still things to live for is so great! So one might assume that what would follow would be him pursuing those things, making amends, making connections. He and Stede have a wonderful moment, talking about being whim prone and how they’ll work to avoid that, build a relationship by going slower.

Yet, at no point do either of them stop following whims. They never heal or learn from what’s happened to them. They both keep running from thing to thing, particularly Ed. It’s a whim to sleep with Stede, it’s a whim to run off to fish, and the finale gives us just more of their whims. Ed drops fishing as fast as he picked it up. He finds those leathers in the ocean, murdering the symbolism of leaving them behind. Even the inn is a whim, one of those things Ed decided he’d be good at without evidence. And Stede joins him in that without a single on screen conversation about it ahead of the moment.

Ed needs to heal himself and to do that he needs to confront what he’s done and do the work to heal the wound. Instead, he doesn’t meaningfully apologize to anyone, besides Stede and Fang. Despite Izzy’s dying words (we’ll get to that), not only do we never see the crew caring about Ed, working to make him family in the same way they do with Fang and even Izzy, he also doesn’t choose to stay with them. So what is the point? Where is the healing? Or does even Ed, beloved main character, have to live with it all stuffed in a box?

He ends the season in the leathers he threw away, in a relationship that’s barely stabilized, going to live in a house which we are told by the narrative (in that they are very very clearly paralleling Anne and Mary with Ed and Stede or why do we even get that whole Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? episode) will only end in them setting fire to each other to stay warm.

But Vee, I hear you cry, it’s a ROM-COM. This is all meant to be ha-ha funny and you are taking it so seriously!

Cool beans. Then why the hell isn’t it funny? Healing is often filled with comedy because people deal with pain with humor. You can heal and laugh at the same time. The finale especially is almost entirely devoid of laughs, almost entirely devoid of joy until the last minute for that matter. The episode that should show off with a flourish how far everyone’s come, mostly serves to show that no one has grown.

Okay that’s Ed. I want to talk about Lucius next. Our former audience surrogate (that’s taken away in season two when he doesn’t get enough screen time to perform that role and no one takes his place) really goes through the wringer. He experiences many many terrible things, including sexual assault (which is made into a grimace-laugh line that doesn’t take away from it’s seriousness because oh hey, that can be done as it turns out). He’s nervous, he’s smoking, it’s clear he’s suffering.

There’s a beautiful moment where Pete tells him ‘hey, I was also in pain. I grieved’ and that’s great. It’s good that Pete sets a boundary about Lucius not obsessing over the past to the point of occluding their future.

We even get our comedic moment where Lucius pushes Ed off the boat (still not apology, but I’d lost hope for that by then) and that doesn’t help enough. So Izzy comes in with a shark and the advice that you just have to move on.

Just…you know. Play pretend. Forget.

Shove it in a box. Ed didn’t take my leg, a shark did. Ed didn’t kill you, a shark did. Live with the person that tried to murder you because it’s your fault you dangled your leg over the side of a boat. That is the show’s message. I thought on first watch, that surely this would also come back up and be explained that you can’t live that way, that that is no way to heal. That it would become clear that this was no way through. You cannot make everything into sharks.

Lucius can move forward and still carry pain. He can still want a meaningful apology and still want to talk to his lover about what he’s dealing with while moving forward toward a brighter future.

And what of the flirtatious promise of relationships and connections being the way to heal? Look to Oluwande and Jim, whose heartfelt romance from season one was relegated to the bins of history in favor of a narrative that made him a brother Jim once had sex with. They could have had Archie AND Oluwande, who in turn could also have Zheng, but that never seems to be an option. With a single short conversation, they are broken up with, despite a brief tease at the birthday that they still ‘dance’ together, it never actually manifests. Jim and Archie never talk about what they went through. It’s swept under the rug as fast as knives are lowered.

Lucius also no longer flirts with other people, the solution to his pain is to propose and get married (but not too married, lest we forget that they’re two men, they don’t even get to be husbands or even the more respectful mates, no. They’re mateys.) This season proposes that the only happy endings are monogamous ones, where no one talks about anything painful that went before.

To ensure that message, beyond assuring the success of Oluwande and Zheng’s relationship, Jim and Archie almost entirely disappear from the narrative. Sorry you guys were given layers of trauma and no growth and not even much to do this season, we need to make sure that everyone remembers Oluwande is the break in Zheng’s day so when he says that to her five minutes later we know exactly what he’s referencing. No time for Archie to learn what an apology is or for Jim to get one line in with Oluwande that isn’t affirming their newfound broship. Must do more flashbacks to things we just did two episodes ago!

The show even dangles the conversation of the Revenge being a safe space. Why would any of them ever feel safe when the man who tortured them is allowed to walk among them and they are expected to forgive and forget? What’s safe about that? The ship is never made safe for any of them, but that’s never addressed.

And Zheng! Amazing, hysterically funny Zheng! She loses her ships, her entire way of life, the kingdom she built for herself and then…she doesn’t even get to captain the Revenge. We don’t know what becomes of her fleet, of her plans, her ambitions. Don’t worry about it, she has a romantic partner and isn’t that what every lady wants in the end?

(But Vee, I hear you cry again, there will be a season three! Maybe it will be All About Zheng! To which I say: then why did they present us with the most series finale feeling episode ever? If there’s more, I have no idea where it’s going. BUT VEE: BUTTONS AS SEAGULL ON THE GR- Fine. It’s time.)

Let’s talk about Izzy Hands.

Izzy manages more healing than anyone else this season. He reaches his lowest point, suicidal in the bowels of a ship that’s become a prison (very much in contrast to Ed’s suicidal low). The person he loves most in the world has shredded him physically and emotionally (and if you’re in the camp that thinks Izzy deserves the abuse that Ed gave to him, I would really like you to sit quietly with yourself and ask why you think there is ever anything anyone can do to deserve that treatment). He’s low, he shoots Ed to protect everyone, and then seems to plan to drink himself to death, mourning his losses.

And then another beautiful moment! The crew move past their own pain to help him. They work together for the first time and it’s to give Izzy mobility back. He treasures it. He cries over it. He uses that kindness extended to him to reach a new understanding of Stede and help him succeed, doing the work to make real amends. He sings in drag, he’s vulnerable and beautiful, celebrating the side of himself that he must’ve loathed in the first season. He’s an elder queer man, coming into himself.

He never gets an apology though. (‘Sorry about your leg’ without eye contact is not an apology. There is no responsibility taking, no acknowledgement of the weeks of torture that came with it.) Izzy also never really has an honest conversation with anyone about what it means that the man he loves punished him so severely for the crime of trying to protect the crew (yes, lest we forget, Izzy lost his leg because he was trying to keep Ed from re-traumatizing the crew and himself).

Izzy does all this work, but even he’s not allowed to take it out of the box. It’s a shark, not Ed. Ed is just ‘complicated’ (the language of abuse here is so upsetting and I think not even intentional).

And then he dies. His last act? To apologize to the man who tortured him and shot at him. To have done all this work, to take on all the blame. And then die.

In a rom com.

This show ends in a profoundly unfunny moment of telling the audience: this is the one character that did the work, that made amends, that tried his hardest to accept the parts of himself that he had a hard time embracing and formerly embittered him. He’s fully accepted his queerness and turned it into beautiful music. He’s disabled, and he worked hard to accept that. The man he loves will never love him back, so he worked hard to make Stede able to meet Ed on an even playing field. The Giving Tree gave up its limbs and its trunk, and it’s not even allowed to be a stump to sit on.

Kill the queer elder, who has managed to figure out how to live and in his own way how to heal. Kill him before he manages to teach anyone else how to meaningfully move forward (he almost gets it with Lucius, almost, but it’s meant to be rule of three, you know. Cigarette..shark…and then…and then fuck it, Lucius doesn’t even get to say a word at his funeral).

The message of this season again and again is that there is no healing, just moving forward. Like a shark. Like a bird that never lands.

That is not a kind show.

Season two is not a kind season.

It splinters people up and jams them back together without purpose or reason. It tells everyone who experiences pain that they should shove it in a box and not deal with it. No one who really needs one gets an apology of any sincerity. No one puts in the work to gain forgiveness. (Ed wearing a onesie is not The Work. Ed fixing a door is not The Work. Ed broke people that the show wants us to care about. Ed never does the work of making those amends. He fires off a Notes app apology at best. After all, it’s what he told himself via Hornigold in the gravy basket: you move on or you blow your brains out! Good thing he took his own advice and therefore had to change nothing to get his just rewards.

I would’ve taken just fifteen minutes of Ed trying to actually make amends. It could’ve been hilarious! Imagine awkward Ed trying to dance around what he’s doing with Jim and the two of them having a knife throwing competition about it. Or him and Frenchie attempting to make music together, writing a song about the raids they went on! It’s not just the crew robbed of their healing because of this, it’s Ed himself. He never meaningfully changes or makes amends. How is he any different at the end of the finale then he is standing on the edge of that cliff with Hornigold? He hasn’t moved on, he hasn’t healed. He tried one thing (fishing) that doesn’t fucking work and then he runs right back.

No one leaves this season better than they went into it. They’ve lost an elder queer, they’ve lost their joyous and queer polyamory, they’ve lost a chance for meaningful reconciliation with Ed and Ed lost any chance of looking like he gave shit if they did. Stede grows enough to accept the crew’s beliefs as important and then leaves them behind without a care.

Izzy gets a beautiful speech about piracy being larger than yourself. Ed and Stede, within twenty minutes of that speech, leave piracy. They are incapable of giving themselves to something bigger, apparently. They haven’t learned to be a part of a community. They haven’t healed from their childhood trauma or their fresher wounds. They are still just following their own whims.

Zheng’s life work is in tatters, but it’s fine, she has love. Oluwande and Jim aren’t together, but it's fine because they both have dedicated monogamous partners. Lucius was deeply scarred by what happened, never recovers much of his first season personality, but hey he got-well it’s not married exactly- but you know good enough!

Frenchie, who has a box forever locked in his head, is captain. Because the key to success is to lock it all in a box and never open it. What a message. What a show. Conceal, don’t feel. Smile because it’s a happy ending. Don’t mourn the dead, don’t try to tell people what happened to you (they will literally run away or cry too hard to listen and really you’re just bumming them out), and any meaningful change you make is only rewarded with death.

Frenchie is now a pirate captain with a box in his head full of trauma that’s never been opened, leading a crew with more wounds than scars. Wonder how that could turn out? Wonder how many years before he might want to retire and then happen to run across a gentleman pirate. As if no one learned anything at all.

#our flag means death #ofmd #ofmd spoilers #the strangest message sent #and no idea if it was on purpose #I kind of think it wasn't somehow #but boy howedy did it come across

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megu-meow · 7 months

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how I met your mother - Gojo Satoru

dad!Gojo x fem.reader

Summary: I recently found out that many TV series and other Manga/Anime are canon in JJK - How I Met Your Mother included - and I couldn't stop thinking about how Gojo would re-enact the thing after watching it. Moreover, all of you deserve some teeth-rotting fluff after that horrifying manga chapter. Enjoy!

"Why am I here?" Megumi asked with irritation laced through his voice as he sat down on the couch, beside the two white-haired rascals he calls his siblings.

"I'm gonna tell you guys the story of how I met your mother!" Gojo exclaims as he sits on his desk chair, in his office at Jujutsu Tech. The desk usually sits in the corner, right beside the window, but now is pushed in front of the couch, so that he can sit face to face with his children, the setup similar to the one in his recent favorite American TV show, How I Met Your Mother. The only difference is that the whole scenario is not played in his home office, but the one at his actual workplace, because you declared your home a Jujutsu-Free Zone.

"Gojo-Sensei..." Megumi sighs as he starts rubbing his forehead with annoyance "I was five when the two of you got together, I heard the story of how you two met a million times, this is not new to me." he explains as three sets of cerulean blue eyes gawk at him from all directions.

"Mama..." the two-year-old girl sitting on Megumi's left puffs with a ridiculously adorable pout on her face as soon as she hears the mention of her mother, and the five-year-old boy on the other side of the couch whiffs the air aggressively with the plush sword his father was forced to buy him on their way to the school.

"I know, Megumi, but this is a special occasion, you're gonna sit through the whole thing again so that you can experience this amazing fairytale with your beloved siblings." the tall sorcerer explains and his attention turns to his beloved daughter, Munchkin as he refers to her. The little girl slowly climbs into Megumi's lap, the boy instinctively helping her settle down as he embraces her lightly from behind, tickling her sides, and the room is filled with childish laughter. His son, or as he refers to him, Nugget, drops the toy from his tiny hands and huffs in annoyance, suddenly jealous of his sister's ability to gain the undivided attention of his favorite person, his older brother. "Now, all of you pay attention."

It was his first day at Tokyo Jujutsu High. Given his extravagant upbringing, Gojo Satoru was a self-centered douchebag with a horrible attitude. He first met Geto Suguru, the only friend he ever claimed he had, the dark-haired sorcerer with a warm smile and polite demeanor, the polar opposite of him. The two formed an unbearable duo and as soon as you walked into the classroom with the three first-year students, four months after the school year began, you knew you had to keep yourself as far away from the boys as possible. You became good friends with Shoko though, the two of you had plenty of common interests and your personalities were similar as well.

You tried avoiding Gojo at all times, you thought he was irritating based on his behavior in class and his rude comments behind your back, ones he whispered to Geto, making your dark-haired classmate laugh obnoxiously. However, Your efforts to stay as far away from him were proven to be useless when Yaga paired the two of you for a mission.

"So, why is a clan princess like you avoiding the strongest sorcerer of her time? Didn't your family tell you about the power and influence my family holds over the jujutsu society?" he asks you cockily and you chuckle dismissively at his words.

"I'm not a clan princess, Gojo! On the contrary... I come from a family of non-sorcerers and I was an outcast my whole life because I kept seeing things that others couldn't." you said as you kept hitting the curse with sharp daggers that you wielded in the air with your cursed technique "And I don't care about your power or your privilege, because I'm only here to help others." you make your point even clearer as you throw your last dagger with extra force, exorcising the curse without breaking a sweat.

"And that was the moment..." Gojo begins to explain to his overly bored children, but Megumi interrupts him.

"... when you realized you wanted to pursue the only girl that ever gave you attitude, a.k.a. Y/n. We know, it's getting boring."

"Don't roll your eyes at me, Megumi! This is an amazing story about the two people that raised you. Show some respect!" Satoru exclaims with an offended expression and Munchkin hides her face in her tiny hands, thinking that she is the one who is being scolded, trying to hide from her father's light-hearted attempt at discipline.

"Papa, can we have Splendid Sushi?" the white-haired boy asks, boredom evident from his facial expression.

"Nugget, you just ate before we came here." Satoru pouts, clearly disappointed in his kids.

"I know, I'm still hungry."

"I'm gonna wrap this story up quickly and we can go eat after." he gives in, a sad expression on his face.

After that moment you shared on your mission, Gojo changed. He was still annoying and arrogant, but he tried acting like a decent human being around you. In one instance Suguru explained that the remarks they exchanged with each other were making fun of Yaga-Sensei, not you. He felt the need to clarify that after Satoru complained to him about how much you seemed to hate his guts.

These things shed a different light on Gojo, you noticed how he was very attentive when it came to the small details you shared about yourself when the four of you first years were hanging out. He also ensured that you got home safe whenever you went out as a group and he even gave you his jacket so that you wouldn't catch a cold.

He also started complimenting you, your looks, your advancement with your technique, and he thoroughly enjoyed how you blushed every time he called you sweetheart or any other nickname he came up with on the spot. However, you were stubborn, even more challenging than some curses he fought.

"I'm gonna wife you up one day, sweet girl! Even if it's the last thing I do." he whispers into your ear as your head is resting on his shoulder while you're being driven home by an auxiliary assistant from a challenging mission. He thought you were sleeping, but you could hear his muffled words and your lips curled into a slight smile. Because Satoru was good, kind-hearted, and loving in his dorky, obnoxious way.

"Papa, where is Mama?" Munchkin asks with tears in her eyes, clearly distressed from the long period of time she had to endure without her Mama. And the only thing Satoru can do is get up from his chair, walk towards his little baby and embrace her with his strong and bulky arms, trying to comfort her, because he knows exactly how terrible it feels being away from you. He coos at her lovingly, kissing her chubby cheeks and he sits back down to continue with his story. He also puts out his hand, using blue to fetch a pink fluffy blankie he keeps in his office. Megumi rolls his eyes at this, he finds it annoying how Gojo uses his techniques so unnecessarily.

A month after Satoru's not-so-secret confession, at Nanami Kento's birthday party, it happens. Your first kiss. For the most part, the party goes terribly for both of you. He is standing in a corner, drinking seltzers orange soda furiously as he observes how a third-year is trying to hit on you with cringey pick up lines that make Gojo want to throw up. You seem uncomfortable with his advances, but Satoru doesn't intervene, because he has no right to. You two are not dating, you are just very close friends. Nothing less, certainly nothing more. However, as that idiot steps closer to you and you try to bring an end to his flirting, Satoru observes the deep discomfort in your eyes and the twirling of your hands, trying to wield some glass shards with your technique from the broken bottle spilled onto the floor. He decides to intervene, and with a single clap of his hands, he's beside you, his fingers slip into yours, stopping you from using your technique, knowing that using it without permission on school grounds could get you in trouble. The third-year leaves instantly once Gojo arrives and there you stand in front of the white-haired sorcerer with thankful eyes.

"Thank you, Satoru!" you say and from the many shots of sake cups of tea you had, you gain a newfound courage within you to get on your tiptoes and kiss his cheek. Or so you think, because in the last moment, he turns his head and your lips land on his. It's a short kiss, basically a peck, but the sobering reality of the consequences of your actions hits you like a train.

"I'm sorry, that was a mistake..." you mutter and you run out of the party, leaving him there disappointed.

After that, you don't talk to each other for two weeks. Gojo tries in the beginning, but you stop all of his attempts because you are too ashamed of your actions. After a while he becomes petty himself, claiming that it's for the better and saying the two of you wouldn't have lasted in the first place. He does it in the usual Gojo fashion, making sure that you hear every word leaving his mouth. He wants you to hurt just as much as he is, but as soon as he spots the puffy, red circles under your eyes, he regrets ever being mean towards you.

"Dada, why you make Mama cry?" the toddler in his lap looks at him curiously, her lips in a pout, clearly disappointed with her father.

"Hey! That's not true, Mama made me cry first, Munchkin."

"You never cried in your life, Gojo." Megumi intervenes and if Satoru could kill with his Six Eyes, he would annihilate the Fushiguro kid right now.

"Is the story over, Papa? You said we'd go to Splendid Sushi after." Nugget whines once again and Satoru knows he has to finish up soon, otherwise, his son is going to throw a tantrum.

Satoru rushes into the medical ward upon hearing the news. You went out on a mission alone and you were brought back by Yaga himself, on a stretcher. He doesn't know any more details than that, but he's frantic. As soon as he spots you on one of the disgustingly hard hospital beds, being treated by Shoko with blood running down your beautiful face, Satoru is standing beside you, holding your hand. You are unconscious, but it doesn't matter, his six eyes tell him that your cursed energy is stable, you have been knocked out, that's all.

"Step aside for a second, loverboy, I have to heal the cut on her arm." Shoko says with a smirk and Gojo steps away hesitantly, watching carefully as your scars slowly disappear. The healer leaves the room as soon as she finishes and Satoru is quick to return to your side, his fingers laced with yours once again.

"Gojo?"

"Am I not Satoru anymore, sweet thing?" he asks disappointedly and your mouth curls up slightly. You could have died, but he's still hung up on the way you addressed him. You look down at your hands, not able to respond. You don't quite know what you two are anymore. "I was really scared, you know? I cannot lose my favorite girl this soon, otherwise I would go insane."

"It's not a big deal, Satoru..."

"But it is...Don't you get it?! I love you." he confesses, he seems furious, but his eyes glisten with the utmost adoration "It's you, it's always been you. The one who keeps me grounded, the one that makes it worthy to be the strongest, because all this power is meant to protect you, sweetheart. So please don't ever go two weeks and four days without talking to me and for the love of god, please don't go out there on reckless missions without me because I don't want to hear about you coming back on a stretcher ever again." he brings your hands up to his lips, kissing them gently and you swear you can see tears swelling in his precious eyes.

"I love you too, Satoru." you reply, your voice barely a whisper. He's shocked, for a second, the next he's leaning closer asking for permission to kiss you properly. You grant it to him and he unites your lips in a long-awaited kiss, one that seals the fate of the rest of your lives, without even knowing it.

"That day, in the hospital ward of Jujutsu Tech, I promised my classmate, the girl I fell deeply in love with, that I would protect her no matter what. That I would love and cherish her with all of my might till the end of my life. I promised her that one day I would marry her, when I went back home with you, Megumi, and told her I was planning on raising you at eighteen, while she simply agreed to help me all the way, no questions asked. Three years later I vowed to her that I would be beside her in sickness and in health. When you rascals were born, I promised I would take care of her and you guys with all the energy I have. Deep down I knew from the moment she stepped into that classroom when I was fifteen that she would be the one for me. And that kids, is how I met your mother." he finishes with a fond smile on his face, but it quickly falters as he notices that Nugget is once again preoccupied with whacking the air with the toy from earlier, Megumi is on his phone and Munchkin is sleeping soundly in his embrace.

Suddenly, he hears your footsteps from down the hall and your sing-song voice coming through the door.

"Where's my beloved family at?" you ask playfully, opening the door to his office, and peeking in. Upon spotting the sleeping toddler in his arms you keep quiet, approaching the two of them and you take your daughter into your embrace. You look around the room, observing the changes, the very bored teenager and your rascal of a son sitting on the couch and you quickly connect the pieces of the puzzle.

"You did it, didn’t you, Satoru?"

"What, sweetheart?" he asks faking innocence.

"The How I Met Your Mother Thing? The idea you were talking to me about the other night."

"Maybe."

"Oh, my poor babies, you had to sit through that cliche story. How long did your dad keep you bored, Megumi?" you ask, your tone teasing.

"Actually it wasn't that long after Nugget started whining." the raven-haired boy explained, looking fondly at his only mother figure.

"I'm so sorry, guys, let's go to Splendid Suchi, okay? That would make you all feel better." you add, leaving a loving kiss on all the kids' heads. Your son lifts his head with incredible speed upon hearing you mention his favourite restaurant, up until now he didn't even notice your presence, too preoccupied with his new toy. Suddenly everyone is up on their feet, ready to have a scrumptious meal.

You and Satoru stay behind a bit as the two boys run out of the school and Megumi summons his demon dogs so that the two of them can play with the fluffy shikigami.

"When are you gonna tell ME that fairytale of yours, angel boy? I'm really curious how you scored a clan princess like me." you ask your husband jokingly and he chuckles, raising his sunglasses up his nose. His hands quickly snake around your waist, pulling you into a loving kiss. Your daughter finally awakens lifting her head from your shoulder, interrupting the beautiful moment between the two of you.

"Mama!" she exclaims, embracing you tightly, her tired eyes fluttering as you bring her closer to your chest.

"Not only did you steal your Mama from me you get her titties as well?! This world is truly cruel."

#jujutsu kaisen #satoru gojo #gojo satoru #jjk imagines #gojo imagine #jjk x reader #gojo fluff #jjk x you #gojou satoru x you #dad gojo #jjk imganie #satoru imagine #satoru gojo fluff #satoru gojo x reader #satoru gojo x you #gojo x reader #jujutsu kaisen x reader

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evangelical04 · 1 month

Text

A Single Daffodil || 1

Summary: Getting arranged to be married to your long-time crush wasn't exactly the fairy tale romance you were hoping for. Nor is the dynamic of the marriage, with your husband treating you like you don't exist. But you're going to make this work, whether he cares about you or not. And he definitely doesn't...right?

Pairing: Min Yoongi x Reader

Rating: 18+ minors DNI

Word Count: 2.7K

Genre: angst, romance, unrequited love, smut, enemies to lovers, arranged marriage au, businessman yoongi

Warnings: parental trauma, sibling trauma, toxic parents, unrequited love, explicit language, alcohol usage, yoongi's kind of mean, future smut

Author's Note: hello! i'm Eva and this is my first fic on tumblr ever! I've been a reader for so long and I've always wanted to write my own stories, so I figured I finally would. I know it’s kind of short but I promise the other parts will be longer. Please give me any feedback you have and let me know if you'd like there to be a tag list or anything! I hope you guys like it!! p.s. I'm totally posting this instead of doing my morphology homework that's due in 15 minutes

masterlist / next

The door to your childhood home looked artificially welcoming. There were too many flowers lining the walls encasing the looming wooden door. The grass on the lawn just was a bit too green without a blade out of place and the paved walkway was freshly powerwashed and missing even a speck of dirt. You let out the deep breath you were holding and gently took hold of the overly ornate bronze knocker adorning the painted wood of the door. Two loud thuds rang out as you knocked and the door quickly opened afterwards.

“Hello, Miss Y/N, your parents have been expecting you.”

“Yes, I know. Thank you, Mrs. Oh,” you responded quietly, nodding at the grey-haired woman. She shot you a sympathetic smile before ushering you in, taking your coat and carefully laying it over her arm. After removing your shoes, you followed her past the foyer to the living room where your parents awaited.

You knew what was coming, you knew that this had been decided long before you were born. Yet, you still felt unprepared. You had grown comfortable, living in your simple apartment in Gangnam and your quiet work routine. Biting your lip, you reprimanded yourself internally, You should’ve brought this shit up in therapy before it happened.

“Here we are, Miss Y/N,” Mrs. Oh said, snapping you out of your self-pity session. You nodded gratefully at her, sending a small smile her way. Her eyebrows wove together in her own pity-ridden expression and she quickly whispered, “Good luck,” while exiting swiftly. You steeled your nerves and forced your chin up high, knowing that you’d most likely cower inwards as soon as you faced your parents anyway.

Stepping into the room, you noted the almost intervention-like setup your parents had arranged themselves in, with your father sitting proudly in his reclining, leather armchair, clad in a dark blue quarter zip and khaki pants. Your mother stood facing the fireplace, arms crossed, in a simple and elegant turquoise dress and hair tied up in a tight and neat bun, with her baby hairs smoothed back to prevent any imperfection. You could almost imagine her pinched mouth, forever encased in a stern and unamused expression.

“Hello father, mother,” you started, trying to smooth the slight trembling in your voice. Your mother turned around, eyes narrowing at your form, “Sit down.”

You promptly obeyed.

“Your father and I have decided on your marriage. It’ll be to the Min family, to Min Yoongi.”

“What? To him? But,” you began protesting but your mother quickly cut you off with a steely glare.

“It has already been decided. Your wedding will be in eight months. I’ll forward you the invitation list and you can add three people of your choosing. You’ll be having dinner with us and the Min family on Friday at six. I’ll have Yujin send you an email with further details. Don’t be late.”

You looked to your father in a desperate plea but were only met with stony silence and a passive face. You turned back to your mother and registered the composed expression painting her face. Your fate had been decided, and it had not worked in your favor at all. Rising slowly, you set your hands by your side and bowed towards your parents, “I understand. I’ll be there.”

Your mother swiftly exited the room, evidently deciding the conversation was over. You could hear her dangling earrings tinkling against each other in what felt like a mocking melody. Your father calmly produced a cigar from the table next to him and lit up, no longer acknowledging you either. You let out another slow breath and walked out.

Collecting your coat from Mrs. Oh, who tried to give you a comforting shoulder squeeze but it felt more like condolences than anything, and made your way to your car parked in front of the gate closing off your parents’ home.

That’s it then.

You felt eerily calm yet stressed as you started up your car and carefully reversed out, making sure to avoid hitting the carved statues your parents had in front of the iron gate. As you drove home, your mind started racing with the information you had been relayed.

Min Yoongi as your soon-to-be-husband? What irony.

Does he even know you exist?

Will you be able to survive this?

Hand gripping the steering wheel hard, you quickly dialed the most recent number in your contact list. She answered after only two rings.

“Y/N! Are you still alive? How’d it go?”

“Hi Joohee, not great. I’m completely and totally fucked.”

Joohee chuckled on the other end of the line, “Want to come over?”

“Yes,” you breathed, “I was hoping you’d offer.”

“I’ll get the booze.”

“Min Yoongi? Now that’s ironic,” Joohee chuckled, seemingly at your expense. You shot a glare her way which she shrugged in response to.

“How long have you been crushing on him? This is, like, practically fate. Maybe this’ll be a good thing.”

You scoffed in response, “A good thing? Joohee, be serious. The last thing I want to do is get with my long-time infatuation, not crush, by forcing him to be my husband.” You took another swig of wine. It was a cheap pink Moscato, perfect for nights like these with Joohee.

Joohee shoved a pillow in your direction in an effort to gain more room on the couch you had stuffed yourselves onto. The trash reality dating show you had on in the background was showing a rather dramatic fight but you paid it no attention, “It’s just…I haven’t talked to him in the last, what, five years? He probably doesn’t even remember me. And you’ve heard the rumors, I don’t think he’ll be exactly thrilled at giving up his playboy lifestyle just because he has to marry me.”

“What if he doesn’t give that up?”

You stared at Joohee in slight surprise, “What do you mean?”

“Like, what if he says that he doesn’t want to stop hooking up with other people? What will you do?”

Your brows furrowed as you considered the question, “I don’t know, I guess. I mean, I can’t really stop him. I guess I’d just have to live with it.”

Joohee hummed in response before continuing on, “Well, this is happening whether you like it or not. Just try to make it amicable at the least. Maybe it’ll work out, you never know. Just look at Jin oppa.”

Kim Seokjin, Joohee’s older brother and a friend of Min Yoongi’s, was arranged by Joohee’s parents to marry Song Yeonhee, and the two had seemingly fallen in love after a rocky start to their nuptials. You had seen them recently at Yeonhee’s baby shower and she had been glowing, looking unbelievably happy. You recalled the loving gaze that Seokjin had sent her during the party and the pang of envy you felt, knowing that you would likely never get to experience that.

“Yeah, well,” you responded, “He’s an outlier. Most of these types of marriages don’t work out. I have a feeling I’m going to be a part of that group.”

“You’re too negative, you haven’t even met him for dinner yet. Maybe he’ll surprise you. You just have to give him the chance.”

You mulled over Joohee’s words and nodded, “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I guess I’ll see how Friday goes.”

You weren’t technically late.

While you still had about 5 minutes before the dinner officially started, you weren’t early, and that was unacceptable by your mother’s standards. A mini emergency at your job had left you scrambling to leave on time, only noticing the late hour when one of your coworkers asked if they should order take-out for the team. After profusely apologizing to your team, they encouraged you to go, practically shooing you out the door, claiming they could handle the situation for now.

Which left you barely on time to park in the lot outside the ridiculously fancy Japanese restaurant your mother’s assistant, Yujin, had sent to your email earlier that week. You quickly stepped out, smoothing out your dress that you had kept in the backseat of your car and had hastily changed into in the parking lot of your office. Tugging down the hem, you took a moment to look at your reflection in your car window and attempt to look more presentable. Your hair was slightly frizzy but nicely combed back, and you had extremely minimal makeup on from only remembering last minute this morning, and your eyes looked tired.

You felt tired.

Shaking off your nerves, you headed inside the restaurant giving your family name to the hostess who took you back to a private room where your mother and father were waiting. Your father spared you only a cursory glance before returning his gaze to his phone and your mother looked you up and down before uttering a curt, “Hm.” You held in an eye roll and quickly sat next to them, trying to calm your heart rate for the sure-to-be exhilarating dinner ahead. At six on the dot, you spotted the same hostess leading the Min family towards your table. Your mother stood, welcoming them and urging them to sit down. You stood as well, a little less welcoming, a lot more obligated.

Mrs. Min looked like the epitome of a rich older woman with dark black hair combed back and glittering jewels lining her ears and neck, complementing the midnight blue gown she had on. Mr. Min was dressed quite similarly to your father, in a simple suit, the only difference being his starkly greying hair providing quite the contrast to his dark blazer. Close behind them was the person you were the most anxious about meeting, Min Yoongi. His pitch-black hair complemented his slightly tanned skin nicely and his feline eyes remained straightforward and untelling. He was dressed in a simple black suit as well with an expensive-looking watch adoring his wrist. His mouth was closed tightly and he did not smile at your mother when she greeted him, not at your father when they sat down across from your family, and certainly not at you.

Your hands nervously played with each other in your lap as you took your seat again. You listened quietly as the mothers exchanged pleasantries and the fathers gruffly greeted each other. You were trying to avoid looking at Yoongi as much as possible.

“So, Y/N,” Mrs. Min started, making you startle to attention, “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-nine, ma’am.”

“Ah, so only a bit younger than Yoongi. That’s good then. How is your work?”

You felt your father stiffen next to you and prayed your discomfort didn’t show on your face, “Good. I’m in the middle of producing a new project with my team.”

“How lovely. Although I’m sure you’ll be leaving that soon after the wedding. You won’t need to work then after all,” Mrs. Min smiled at you. It was hard to read her so you couldn’t tell if she was being genuine or not, though if you had to guess, it was likely the latter. Your job was a point of contention with your family. Choosing to work in a video game production company did not go over well, and if your older brother, Kyungsoo, hadn’t been in line to inherit Seo Industries, you would’ve never been able to keep it.

You smiled awkwardly in response to Mrs. Min and returned your gaze to the empty plate in front of you.

As the conversation dragged on, you couldn’t help but steal a glance or two at Yoongi, who was periodically checking his phone and looking permanently bored of the conversation. Not that you could blame him. The dull talk of social circle gossip and work was beginning to get grating, and even the introduction of fancy entrees wasn’t enough to stop your stomach from feeling queasy.

Yoongi had yet to say one word to you. To be fair, you hadn’t said anything to him either, but he had barely looked in your direction since he entered the private dining room. How exactly were you supposed to start a conversation with that?

Soon after the desserts came out and were finished, with you politely refusing, feeling like you were going to throw up any second, Mrs. Min suddenly pushed her chair back and stood. She looked down at you and Yoongi and announced, “Well. I think we can leave them to talk on their own for a bit. Why don’t you join us for a drink at our home, Eujin-ssi?”

At the sound of her name, your mother stood, nodding, “Yes, that sounds lovely. Let’s let them get to know each other a bit more.” With that, the parents swiftly gathered their belongings and left, before you could even protest, leaving you staring open-mouthed at the exit.

Slowly, you turned to face Yoongi and were startled, seeing his eyes already boring into yours.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Yoongi stated, his deep and stable voice wrapping around you for the first time that night, “This marriage means nothing to me. It shouldn’t to you either. I’ll do my thing and you do yours. Most importantly, stay out of my life except when necessary. Just because my parents are forcing my hand doesn’t mean I have to adhere to every little thing. Nothing will be changing except for our living situation and a ring on our fingers.”

A little stunned, you could only stutter a passive agreement and watch as he rose and left without sparing you another glance.

Letting out a deep breath, you closed your eyes, trying to understand what had just transpired. Your heart raced as you quickly stacked up the dishes to be a bit easier for the busboy and quickly made your way to your car. Sitting down in the driver’s seat, you vaguely registered Min Yoongi’s cold demeanor towards you.

It seems he didn’t remember you after all.

The dress you had on was itchy, but you knew if you complained, you would only end up with a sharp stinging on your cheek and tear-filled eyes. You had escaped the boring party with grown-ups and were sitting outside on a stone bench in the garden, trying to remedy your hurt feelings at the hands of the mean, older boy, Hyunsoo.

He had confidently poked fun at your appearance, saying the dress was a bit too small on you and that your parents should’ve sprung for a size that could fit an elephant instead. He continued on, saying your parents must’ve forgotten to vaccinate you for measles considering all the red spots on your face that were actually acne. Being a tender twelve years of age and going through the worst bits of puberty, his words hit you hard and you quickly ran from the scene into the garden.

Unable to contain your tears, they slipped down your face in large droplets and soaked into the front of your dress.

“Hey, you.”

Startled, you looked up to see a boy a couple of years older than you standing in front of you, black hair shining in the light from the garden lamps. His sharp eyes trailed down your tear-stained face. You quickly turned away in shame, not wanting to undergo any more embarrassment tonight.

“Hey, snot-face.”

You shot him a glare but softened when you saw his hand extended, holding a handkerchief, his face turned slightly away, “Use this. You look ugly while you’re crying.”

You gingerly took the cloth from his hands and blew your nose, noticing him wince out of the corner of your eye.

“Thank you,” you managed and he only rolled his eyes in response.

“Yeah, whatever. I think Joohee’s looking for you,” he grumbled before turning on his heel and stalking off back towards the party.

Confused, your eyes followed after him, not knowing how he knew that Joohee would be looking for you. You unfolded the handkerchief and noticed an elegant embroidering of three letters in black near the bottom, MYG.

Oh, you realized, Min Yoongi. Joohee’s older brother was friends with him but you had never seen him before. Joohee had described him as kind of rude and quite closed off, but you disagreed. He certainly didn’t seem that bad.

masterlist / next

513 notes · View notes

crazyforhwa · 10 months

Note

hard hours ?,!

my brain is full of yunho right now. imagine the reader has a oral fixation and it calms her down when she has something in her mouth.

he’s playing valorant or something and she really needs his pretty cock asap and he lets her just warm his cock in her mouth while playing

eventually he gets a little needdddyy! include some exhibitionist themes like him praising her while on mic with mingi or smth? go crazy with it!!

Put on a show..

pairing: gamer!yunho x fem!reader ft. gamer!mingi

genre: smut with little to no plot, fluff

summary: You get a little bit too needy when your boyfriend is busy playing with his friend..

word count: 1,8k+

tags/warnings: nudity, none of them are idols, reader has an oral fixation(it's not that good, I'm sorry), video call, exhibitionism, oral (m! receiving), slight clit play, spanking (f! receiving), praise(only once), short aftercare, there's no actual intercourse, they're just playing around, vulgar words

Feedback will be highly appreciated, I'd like to know what you guys think! ♡︎

Yunho and Mingi were playing. Again. The amount of "one more round" you have heard from your boyfriend in the past two hours is funny at this point. You couldn't wait any longer, you wanted him so bad.. So you decided to gain his attention in a different way. You weren't going to play innocent, not today. Taking off everything besides your underwear, you got on all fours and quietly crawled towards his gaming setup.

After finally finding your place under the desk, you looked up to see his face fully focused on the game. Yunho knew about your oral fixation, and it wasn't a problem for him. He actually enjoyed it, the thought of your pretty face stuffed with his cock never failed to give him a boner. However, not used to initiating things, you were unsure as fuck of your actions. After a short moment of thinking, you hesitantly tugged on the seam of his sweatpants. It clearly shifted something inside of him, his adam's apple bobbing. His fierce eyes looked down on you, focusing for a second on your perky nipples. He's getting riled up, that's a good sign..

"Want you in my mouth.." you mumbled out quietly. He sent you a look of approval, a silly grin painting his face. You licked your lips hungrily and pulled down his pants completely. What a surprise, he had been going commando all this time.

Yunho's half-hard cock slapped against his abdomen, the wet sound so loud, some of it could be heard on his mic, catching the other male's attention. You gently grabbed his member, and even though it wasn't fully erected, you could feel it pulsing and twitching under your touch, the tip already leaking with precum, begging to be sucked on. Not wanting to wait any longer, you wrapped your lips around his dick, this particular action making him moan out loud. This time, much to your relief, his mic was off.

As expected of his thick girth, your jaw got sore in mere minutes. However, that didn't bother you at all, content with finally having him in your mouth after waiting for so long. His salty essence kept on dripping, this time, down your throat. He was so heavy, putting some great force on your tongue, and it felt so good, muffled whines kept on escaping your used mouth. Soon enough, he was fully hard, the vibration of your voice too pleasurable to bear with. Deep, breathy grunts could be heard around the bedroom, your boyfriend getting closer to his release.

On accident, Yunho turned on his mic, your filthy sounds loud and clear for his best friend. "Are you alright? Hello?" Mingi asked. You immediately froze, too scared to get caught. It didn't really phase Yun, and he gently nudged your chin with his finger to signal that you should relax and go back to what you were doing. "Yeah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it, bro," he confirmed and went mute. To ease your worries, his fingers ended up on your head, softly stroking your beautiful locks. It encouraged you a lot, soft whimpers leaving your lips once again.

Without your knowledge, Yun turned on his microphone again, this time on purpose, letting the other male hear all of the nasty noises you guys were creating. At first, Mingi would ignore the sounds until..

"Such a good girl. Yeah, are you pleased with having your pretty mouth stuffed with my cock? Hm?" your boyfriend said, making you moan like a bitch in heat. That's it, a tent started slowly forming in Mingi's shorts. Fuck, he didn't want to come off as a pervert, but everything that was happening right now got him stroking his sensitive length through the thin fabric, biting on his lower lip in order to reach an orgasm without your knowledge. Ah, he was so glad to have his camera turned off.

At some point, Yunho stopped thinking about the game, the thought of fucking that little throat of yours completely fogged up his brain.

He grabbed the back of your head and started moving his hips, which was not so smart as he quickly lost control of himself, and his long dick hit the back of your throat, making you gag loudly. "What was that noise, man??" Mingi finally asked, although he already knew the answer. You thought Yunho would try to save himself, but oh, you were so wrong.

He turned on his camera and rolled back his chair until you were visible. "What was that noise, you ask?" his hand grabbed a handful of your hair. "Off." you immediately let go of his cock with a pop sound. You looked at Yunho's monitor and saw Mingi in his pajamas. He looked so shocked yet so fucking hot, the sight of his long, blonde hair made your panties sticky with arousal. "Say hi to our friend, whore," your boyfriend demanded. "H-hi, Mangi," you tried your best, but it didn't sound appealing, your voice too groggy.

The man behind the screen clearly had no clue that his camera was on, as he pulled his length out of his shorts, half of it visible to both you and Yunho. "Hello.." his deep voice could be heard from the speakers, sending shivers down your spine. Before you could say anything else, Yun filled your mouth with his girth again, this time more roughly, making you scream out of surprise.

You made eye contact with him, and his eyes said one thing. Suck. So you did so, a white, creamy residue forming around your lips from how fast you bobbed your head up and down. "Let's play another match," said Yunho in a shaky tone, followed by a muffled groan when you squeezed his heavy balls.

Mingi, however, being too stunned by what was happening, didn't answer. Yunho released a deep sigh and stopped your movements. "If you want to watch so much, then watch, idiot.." he stood up and changed your position in a way so the other male could see both your mouth and cunt. He grabbed his moistened tip and directed it to your lips, forcefully prying them open. Oh, you were in for a ride.

"Come on, slut. Look at him, he's so desperate. Probably wants that precious body all to himself. Let's put on a show for him, shall we?" not expecting a response from any of you, he started thrusting into your mouth. His moves were rough and fast, tight balls slapping against your chin with every push. You choked on his member, streaks of salty tears running down your face, but you loved it. You loved every second. You wanted him to absolutely ruin you. Use you like one of his toys.

"Look at her, isn't she so pretty?" Yunho asked. Mingi just nodded his head, not knowing where to look. "Take off your soaked panties, show your stupid cunt to him," your boyfriend ordered, so you slowly pulled them off, the black piece clinging to your skin because of the wetness.

Once you were completely bare, Yunho continued on with fucking your throat. To turn on Mingi even more, you decided to pleasure yourself and started slowly rubbing your puffy clit with the black langerie piece. You moved the soaked material up and down, nudging your bundle of nerves in the best places possible. It felt so good, your tight hole kept on closing and opening, clear arousal dripping out of it, ending up on the floor.

Your boyfriend caught up pretty quickly on your shenanigans and decided to spice it up by using his free hand. He slapped your buttocks with so much force, you swear it had you seeing stars for a moment. He kept on spanking you, leaving red handprints on your ass and making it jiggle.

And oh, it definitely helped Mingi. With his lustful eyes focused on your body, he started jerking off his dick even faster. His eyebrows were furrowed, and he was biting his lower lip. Fuck, he looked so delectable.

Yunho's sounds got louder, and so did yours. Finally, his head tilted back, sweat dripping down his face, and his mouth wide open from the intense pleasure. He was letting out the beautifulest moans and groans known to mankind as his cock started throbbing, and soon enough, thick strings of cum shot from his tip right into your throat. You swallowed everything and pulled away to catch a breath.

You found a portable mirror laying on Yunho's desk, so you grabbed it to check out yourself, and to say less, you looked like a cheap whore. Ruined makeup, teary eyes, sweaty skin, dishevelled hair.. Fuck.

You tried to stand up but failed miserably, your legs too wobbly to take a step. Yunho softly grabbed your waist and sat you down on his lap in the gaming chair. "Everything okay? Want me to bring you some water, tiny?" he asked, his voice laced with worry. You giggled at him, happy to have your gentle giant back. "Yes, please. My throat hurts a little bit.." you answered. Yunho kissed your temple in response and left to get something for you.

Your thoughts went back to Mingi, and you immediately opened up discord to see if he still was on the call. He was! "Mangi..?" you asked, unsure if he would respond, as the screen was black. You heard some shuffling, it appears that he had to put his headset back on and fix the position of his camera. "Oh, yeah? I'm here," he said, his face finally visible again. A subtle blush adorned his cheeks, and his blonde strands were all over the place. Your lips widened at the cute view. You guys chatted for a while, talking about everything, waiting for Yunho to come back.

"Hey.. I wanted to ask you something.." he interrupted out of the blue, nervousness evident in his words. You replied with a simple "Hmm?", not knowing what to expect from someone so unpredictable like him. "Did you.. Cum? During our call.." His voice was so damn awkward. You couldn't see his face anymore, but you could bet he was scratching the back of his neck while asking. Not wanting to lie, though, you slipped out a quiet "No.." and cleared your throat. Gosh, what have you gotten yourself into.

Before you could change the subject, you felt a muscular arm grab your chin and tilt your head away from the computer. It was Yunho. "My lady didn't cum, hm?" he asked, that deep voice of his laced with mockery. Your eyes widened, thighs rubbing against each other. Upon seeing your weak state, he chuckled and got close to your right earlobe. He gently bit on it and let out the sexiest sigh you have ever heard.

"I guess it's your turn now, tiny."

author's note: thank you so much for this ask, I hope you will like it, anon🫢 Because it's my first ask ever, I've decided to turn it into a drabble. It's trash, I know, but it's my first time writing something in less than 12 hours. Oh and, I'm sorry, I went a little bit overboard with the exhibitionism themes💀

taglist: @ateezreader (send an ask to be added)

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galamalion · 3 months

Text

꒰১໒꒱. 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑

summary. you take zoro on a camping trip to relax; zoro finds other activities to partake in.

⤷ contents. afab!reader, fluff + smut, pet names (baby, babe, sweetheart, good girl), outdoor sex, light strength kink, light degradation, cunnilingus, hair pulling, light slapping (zoro slaps your ass/thighs) // wc. 1.5k

⤷ notes. request by @isapirata for camping and stargazing with zoro + a little bit of smut. hope you enjoy! hoping to pump out some works before my semester starts up <3

"I'm telling you right now, you're gonna enjoy it!"

"And I'm telling you, as long as I can shut my eyes without you pestering me, I'll love this trip."

"Oh, believe me, princess," you teased, hammering the stake into the ground, "you'll get all the beauty rest you need and more."

"Who you callin' princess, princess?" Zoro sneered, giving you a dirty look.

You stood, looking at the tent you single handedly pitched, "You're the one lazing about while I do all the work."

"It's called napping, sweetheart," Zoro rolled his eyes, "you want my help, just holler and your big strong boyfriend will be there."

"My hero," you scoffed, unpacking your gear in the tent.

You couldn't be too mad at Zoro for not helping. After all, he carried you up this gorgeous mountain so that you could go camping. If he wanted to sleep while you set everything up, he was more than welcome to. You would, however, be forcing him to roast marshmallows later. That was non negotiable.

“Would you mind getting some firewood at least, Zoro?” you peaked over your shoulder at the dozing swordsman. “It'd be good exercise.”

With a deep, displeased grumble, Zoro arose from beneath his shady tree, stomping away from your camping setup and into the nearby woods.

“Stay safe!” you called, giving him a small wave.

Zoro being gone allowed you to focus on other necessities, like digging out a spot for a small fire pit. You definitely weren’t as skilled as Franky, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t try your hand at crafting something. With the rudimentary skills of a novice craftsman, you laid a couple of sizable stones around your dug out hole, creating a misshapen circle that would make any child envious of your talents.

Occasional loud thumps in the distance kept you on your toes, clearly originating from Zoro taking your request a little too far. Part of you was scared to see how many tree trunks Zoro would return with, while the other part of you was excited to put him to work. Maybe you could fashion one into some kind of bench for the two of you? Of course, that was assuming that the tree trunk could withstand Zoro’s hulking frame. It’d be terribly unfortunate if it collapsed on the spot.

Moments later your boyfriend emerged from the woods with five massive trunks slung over his shoulder, balanced perfectly with the help of his huge bicep.

“Welcome back, handsome!” you cooed, skipping over to his side.

“Go back to your arts and crafts,” he grunted, continuing his stride towards your camp.

You gasped, “I came over here to help! How ungrateful!”

“What are you gonna do, help me carry these?” he gestured above his shoulder.

“I came to be a cheerleader, for your information. There’s no way in hell I can lift those over my shoulder like you can.”

“You couldn’t lift one, period.”

“I’m not fighting you on that.”

Upon your instruction, Zoro laid a single log near your amateur fire pit, setting the others aside. After removing his shirt, he began slicing them into smaller pieces, ripping the fragments in half to fit inside the pit. You thought about assisting him, but after considering the danger of splinters, decided against it.

“Hurry up, babe! It’s getting cold!” you shouted, searching for any available tinder to use in your fire.

“Quit yer’ bitchin’! I got your wood right here.” He stomped over beside you, tossing the wood into the fire pit.

“Thank you,” you emphasized, standing up to give him a hug. A grunt was all you got in response, but it was all you needed.

“C’mere, sweetheart,” Zoro whistled from his spot under the tree, arms folded behind his head.

“What? What do you mean ‘come here’?” you stared at him befuddled, “I just finished setting all this stuff up, and you just wanna sit on—”

“No complaints, ya brat,” he barked, moving a hand to pat his bare chest, signaling for you to come lay against it.

Annoyed, you stomped towards your boyfriend, sitting just a couple inches away from him in defiance.

“You really wanna play this game?” Zoro muttered, raising an eyebrow at your actions.

“What game?” you said, batting your eyelashes and flashing him a smile.

“Alright, fine,” Zoro whispered to himself, standing up from beneath the tree.

You just closed your eyes and rested your chin on your hand, quietly humming to yourself. It was somewhat of a surprise that Zoro gave up so easily, knowing that your boyfriend was stubborn to a fault. He stood up; was he really just gonna—

“Up we go,” Zoro huffed, easily slinging you over his shoulder and walking towards a clearer area.

“Hey, hold on!” you shrieked, flailing as he laid you down in the grass.

“Oh come on, baby,” he grinned, pulling your hips plush against his, “I think I’ve earned a little something for all my hard work tonight, and all you’ve done was whine.”

“Excuse me! I also worked hard tonight,” you scoffed, pushing your thighs close together, denying Zoro access to what he wanted most.

“Don’t be a tease,” he growled, sliding a calloused hand between your thighs. Zoro could effortlessly spread your legs faster than even you could open them, and both of you were aware of this. But what was the fun in just giving him what he wanted?

“Me? A tease? I think you’re just being a little unfair. You want a treat, so why can’t I also have one?”

“You’re really pushing my buttons here, babe.”

“I think you’ll get over it.”

“Fine,” he said, “you want a little reward, huh? Somethin’ sweet?”

Your legs were quickly pulled apart, Zoro’s hands quickly moving to cup your ass.

“Might as well get a little treat myself,” he hissed, yanking your panties down to your ankles.

“Wait!” you yelped, “take it slow!”

The pleas that left your lips fell on deaf ears as Zoro dove straight into his midnight snack, snaking his tongue across your folds and plunging it into your wet cunt. Your initial surprise wore off as soon as his tongue entered you, replaced with feelings of reluctant bliss and overpowering your other senses.

“So now the princess doesn’t want her reward?” he gasped, popping his mouth off your clit.

“S-Someone might hear us,” you sputtered, trying to not look at his mouth that was covered with your juices.

“Oh, come on. You’ve been a real brat today, ya know?” he groaned, giving your ass a hard slap. “Don’t go soft on me now, I know you can take it.”

He went back to his mission, between your legs in order to devour your sweet pussy. Every lick he made caused you to yank your pelvis away, but his tight hold on your hips kept you from escaping grasp, leaving you a pathetic, squirming mess.

“Right there, baby,” you moaned, gripping his hair and yanking him closer, “don’t stop!”

His hands moved in response to your request for more, sliding his rough hands up to your thighs and throwing them over his shoulders to delve deeper into your poor cunt.

It was overbearing, and you couldn’t decide which was worse—or in this case, better. The way he tongue-fucked you relentlessly, swirling around inside your walls, or the way he’d switch to sucking on your, now swollen, clit. All you could do was curl your toes and grasp at the sleeping bag beneath you, gasping for air as pleasure racked your body.

“Gonna cum, Zo!” you cried, crossing your legs tight around his head.

Zoro squeezed your thighs, lapping at your clit with his tongue as he sucked it for all it was worth, watching eagerly from below as you felt apart.

“Knew you could handle it, sweetheart,” he panted, giving your cunt one last lick before he easily escaped your weakened hold.

“W-What about yo-u!” you yelped as Zoro slapped your cunt, rising from his place beneath you.

“Believe me, I'll get my fill later," he grunted, bringing you up to lay against his chest, “we still have all of tomorrow, right?”

“I guess,” you mumbled, nuzzling into him and readjusting your clothes.

You looked up into the shimmering night sky, beholding the glittering stars above, scattered about their blackened canvas like grains of sand on a beach.

"You know anything about stars, Zo?" you asked.

"Not a damn thing."

“Well, that one,” you pointed, “is Ursa Major.”

“Hm?” Zoro questioned, looking up in the direction you pointed. “I don’t see anything.”

“Right there! Those are the feet, and that’s the tail, and that little sticky-outy-bit is the head!”

“I guess I kinda see it.”

“And that one is Ursa Minor, with the big long tail.”

“The hell? Are constellations having babies now? Didn’t know stars could fuck.”

“Be more romantic, Zoro,” you begged.

“The sky is Nami’s thing,” he frowned, “I’m not interested unless there’s one that I can fight. Or one shaped like a sword.”

You crossed your arms and pouted, leaning further into his chest.

“Well, aren’t the stars pretty, at least?”

“I guess,” he muttered, a grin rising to his face.zoro romance

“But I got the prettiest star of all, right?”

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theemporium · 8 months

Note

What about Max maxplaining Trouble? Like not to Trouble, but about Trouble to someone. He’s just gushing about her or maybe he’s telling someone that no they can’t do “x” b/c that’s not the way Trouble prefers it done. And everyone is just so confused about why Max knows something so random about Trouble.

kinda made this into a wee sick fic but enjoy! and thank you for requesting!🫶🏽

“Max, I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Sorry for taking your health seriously. Now, give Danny the phone.”

If someone told you that Max Verstappen was an overbearing mother hen before you met him, you would have laughed in their face. You had heard many things about him, and that certainly wasn’t one you would have believed. Even in the early stages of your friendship, you would have never really pegged him as the type. He was caring, yes.

But this? This was a whole new level.

You were sick. Nothing crazy or insane, just a simple flu that left you feeling a bit under the weather and longing for your bed. But apparently to Max, it was equivalent to you being on your deathbed.

Unfortunately for him, he had to fly out to England for a few meetings at the factory that required his presence. He tried arguing Christian over the phone about it, but ultimately lost that battle and was forced to take his private jet out.

You made the mistake in thinking that you would be able to get a few days of quiet rest to recover. Because only mother hen Max Verstappen would send someone to do exactly what he would do if he was able to stay by your side.

“Did you get her a blanket?”

Daniel tried to suppress his laughter and remain serious as he held your phone in his hand, watching Max on the screen scrutinising every little detail about your setup in your bed.

“Yes, I—”

“You got the wrong blanket,” Max stated bluntly.

You sighed. “Max, it’s fine—”

“Stop saying that, schatz, when it’s not,” Max retorted before his focus returned to the Aussie. “She likes the cream one in the hallway cupboard. Should be on the third shelf.”

Daniel nodded. “Right, got it.”

“Did you get her medicine?”

“Oh yeah,” Daniel said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I got her some cough syrup from the pharmacy down the—”

“Which flavour?”

“Cherry,” Daniel said.

Max scoffed. “Mate, she hates cherry. You need to get the orange flavoured one.”

“Max,” you groaned as you nuzzled yourself further into the endless amount of pillows your boyfriend had made Daniel surround you in. “Cherry is fine. I just have to take a spoonful once a day, or whatever it is.”

“Three times a day,” Max said, his brows furrowed together. “And you hate artificial cherry flavouring. You said it makes you want to throw up.”

Your cheeks flushed in embarrassment.

“I’ll get her the orange flavoured one,” Daniel said with a laugh, finding it adorable how caring Max was. “Anything else, helicopter boyfriend?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Max grumbled. “But yes. I have left menus on the kitchen counter, I’ll send you what she likes and what she wants to get but always refuses until it’s in front of her. Also, there should be a list of movies I sent you that are her comfort movies that you can—”

“This is creepy, Verstappen, it’s like you’re my stalker or something,” you muttered, even if your heart was swooning at the small details he remembered about you.

“Lil’ Maxie just loves his Trouble,” Daniel grinned wildly. “He doesn’t shut up about you. He could probably go on for hours if we let him.”

“More like days,” Max corrected before he continued to explain everything you would need to his friend, whilst you laid there with a fond smile on your face.

#max verstappen #formula one #f1 #max verstappen x reader #max verstappen x you #max verstappen x y/n #max verstappen fic #max verstappen one shot #formula one x reader #formula one x you #formula one x y/n #formula one fic #formula one one shot #f1 x reader #f1 x you #f1 x y/n #f1 fic #f1 one shot

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

Text

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

youtube

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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#pluralistic #transmediale #lectures #enshittification #big tech #berlin #mcluhan lecture #Youtube

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lymtw · 8 days

Text

You've always done your best to drill into Toji's head that if he ever needs to have a heart to heart with you, you're there. He pushes his more vulnerable emotions down for you because he fears that if you ever see him break down, you'll be scared. Scared of possibly not being able to console him, scared that he'll break things, just scared in the worst ways possible.

Toji keeping it in works out for him anyway, because the man lives to protect your feelings. Your feelings are more than enough for him, even if he teases you for how emotional you are sometimes. He knows you're delicate, and you crumble at things that would be brushed off so easily by him, but that's not to say that he is asking you to modify yourself to make things easier on him. He's a big boy, he can handle hurricanes.

Toji invited you to spend the night at his apartment, bribing you with words that jumped out at you in his messages.

Movie night? My place?

You read the message over and over again for a good minute or so. Your heart started its usual routine of overworking itself, and you cursed yourself mentally for being such a lovesick fool for Toji. You loved the feeling that came with receiving a text from him first. He was looking for you, he was thinking about you, and from what you understood, he wanted to see you.

What's in it for me?

He chuckles behind his screen. You're an unintentional flirt, and it's amusing to him because it's the recurring reason for why you often find yourself wondering how you ended up with just his sheets wrapped around your body. You lack awareness in terms of how you phrase things, and Toji eats it up like a five course meal.

Time with your man. What else could you want?

Snacks, blankets, cuddles, xyz.

You bringing all that stuff with you?

Joking babe. I'll have all that here for you. Just come already.

Fine i'll be there in 10 <3

—

Toji could hear your car as you pulled up outside. He had everything set up on his coffee table. He would never tell you that he paid attention to the minor details of this setup. Maybe it would turn you off to hear that he unwrinkled a corner on a bag of chips, or that he squished the pillows so that they had more shape to them.

You knock, not having enough time to look around the area before the door opens. You're greeted by those devestatingly green eyes, a soft grin on his face when you smile at him. You throw your arms around his neck, causing him to stumble back at the force of your body in your momentum. He chuckles, sneaking a hand behind you to shut the door as you bombard him with kisses all over his face.

"Doll... do-..." you cut him off with your intoxicatingly sweet kisses. He can't help but smile at feeling. "Doll," he calls, finally snapping you out of your romantic assault.

"Whoops." You laugh, a bright hue forming on your cheeks. "Just... happy to be here, I guess."

"I can tell. You almost ran us into the coffee table."

You take a step back to look at what he laid out for your movie night. It's precious, absolutely treasurable. He remembered your favorite chip brand and flavor, he remembered that you like juice more than soda. Up until now, you didn't know if behind those hunter eyes he actually made an effort to remember you.

"I'm choosing the movie," you say, putting your hand on his bicep.

"Ha, you thought I was gonna fight you on that?"

A smile creeps onto your lips again. "Your house, your rules, no?"

He sighs, remembering the time he said that to you when you proposed that he should get a dog. You insisted and insisted but he didn't want a dog, so as a last resort, he said it. You deflated towards him for a little, but eventually he made you laugh and the hard feelings were blown away.

"Just choose the movie, brat." He flicks your forehead before settling on the couch. Your brows furrow as you rub the stinging area, your expression quickly lifting again when you go to join him.

The snacks were opened before you even decided on a movie. They were looking irresistible, and they are your favorites for a reason.

"Mm... does this one look good?" You turn over to Toji, chewing on a mouthful of crunchy chips.

"Swallow your damn food before you speak." He cracks when you stick your tongue out, chunky and pureed chips sticking to it. "You're so gross."

"We've established that, already," you say, giggling. You turn back to the TV, leaving Toji to ponder your response.

"I'm just gonna scroll through all of these for three seconds and whatever it lands on, we watch. Cool?"

"Whatever you want, babe."

You nod, and do a countdown.

3... scroll... 2... scroll... 1... scroll

"This is it. Get comfortable," you say as if he's not in his own home. "Do you have to pee?"

"Nah, princess." He grins at your question.

"Alriiight," you say, excitedly, before playing the movie.

—

It was a pretty good movie. It was funny, there was romance, and it had a really good cast. You got to a good part in the movie, where the main characters, who are in love, reach dramatic turmoil. The conflict was a choice that the woman had to make. It was between the woman leaving the country for the next three years to make a life for herself, or staying behind with the love of her life, unable to give him everything he wants and more. She was fiercely independent, which was heavily weighing her decision.

You teared up at the dialogue. Both characters were reaching for each other, waiting for the other to say 'I can't be without you' or 'i'll follow you wherever you go'. The result was heartbreaking. The woman left the country, not even stopping by the man's house to say goodbye. She blocked his number and cut off all contact with him, leaving him a total mess.

"What the fuck..." you hear from beside you. You turn to Toji, and when you notice his sparkling eyes, you pause the movie.

"Oh, baby," you coo. His eyes mirror yours, glossy and full of emotional damage. He doesn't give you this rare sight for long. He uses his knuckles to dry his eyes before looking at you again. "You okay?" You brush his cheek.

He takes your hand and puts it to his lips, before using it to pull you closer to him. "Tell me you would never consider pulling something like that," he murmurs between you and him. His face is nose distance away from yours, so you try to pull back. He keeps a firm grip on your hand, holding you there with him.

You use your other hand to hold his face. "I'm not her. I wouldn't do that, Toji. I'm always within your reach." You give him a soft smile, pressing your forehead to his. "Just call and text me all day, or you know, when you miss me. You know, I'll be waiting for it, anyway." You chuckle, gently kissing his face all over again.

He catches your lips with his and pushes you down onto the couch. You don't mind that he's crushing you. Nothing is more important than making him believe that you're not going anywhere, and if that means he has to hold you down with his weight, so be it.

You realized that that movie scene must have resonated somewhere deep within Toji if it managed to bring tears to his eyes. And for that to be followed by a question that didn't sound like him at all... it just made your heart even softer for him.

His hands touch the warm skin beneath your shirt, while keeping the slow steady synchronization of his lips with yours. His hands don't wander to your erogenous zones. Instead, he keeps them on your stomach where he can feel the rise and fall of your breathing. He breaks the kiss, looking at you for a mere two seconds before burying his face into your chest, another area where he can feel you breathing. If he focuses hard enough, your heartbeat will reach his ears, inevitably forcing his to sync with it.

You decide not to say anything else. There's nothing else you could say to the man finding comfort in just being attached to you. You play with his hair, and focus on how fast your heart is beating in your ears, and he sighs because deep down he's hoping you'll stay true to your word. He can't see this happening with anyone else after you.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Inspo Credit: @nottorureadz 💙

Based on this ask

P.S. Hope you don't mind that I took the more emotional route with this one.

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spacebell · 2 years

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I’m debating on going to uni today even if it is just to work two hours in the library

#I thought my brother was working from home today so that sort of forced me to go #just to be able to work for a while bc he would use his desk and all the setup and I can’t really focus with someone else working in here #but I woke up and he was gone #and it’s cold outside and it’s raining #and my commute to uni is kind of annoying #and there were protests yesterday on my uni and on the route there #so I didn’t go yesterday #but today I don’t think there’s something like that #and I don’t want to have to have lunch there bc I don’t even know where to buy lunch #so I guess I could eat something before leaving my house and either skip lunch or buy something on the way back #I think that’s my best choice #bc I stayed home yesterday and I was so bored #mariana.txt

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nobodyfamousposts · 6 months

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Scarlet Lady Essay: Frightningale

Yet another essay for @zoe-oneesama. Because you deserve it.

I’m not going to bother with a compare/contrast of canon vs Scarlet Lady Frightningale because Frightningale in canon was a pretty forgettable episode. Akuma was lame. Setup was wasted. And it’s removal from the series would lose nothing of value.

So instead, I'm going to focus primarily on the Scarlet Lady version of Frightningale and what it does that makes it memorable.

I guess to start with, I should make it clear that I’m not a fan of shows being lazy, especially when they display a lack of planning or consideration of their story and characters. And perhaps one of the greater indicators of this issue is when a series suddenly realizes they they neglected multiple plot points until it’s too late to give them all the focus they warrant so they end up shoving all of those points into one episode and try to present it like it’s supposed to be an adequate resolution of all that buildup or in any way intentional.

Penalteam was that episode for Miraculous. They had the “temporary heroes” setup going for them but then wasted so much time on filler like Frightningale that it seems like they honestly forgot about it until they were reaching a designated end point and they realized they still had four more heroes they were supposed to introduce. Whoops? Ah well, just introduce them all at once. Not like anyone will care!

And when you treat most of the cast like they’re all as shallow as a puddle, I guess that’s true.

The thing is, when you have a setup where there is a running theme of every person in a specific group getting their own episode/chapter to detail their issues and how they get a power up, it’s going to stand out whenever one of them doesn’t. Especially when that one or more are forced to share their limelight episode.

That’s not to say you can’t do it, but it’s bound to get attention if you do. It reflects poorly on the writing. It shows whom the “favored” and “unfavored” characters are. And it displays the issue with pacing—namely that it’s next to nonexistent until it hits you with the force of a freight train.

But can it be done and be done well? Is it possible to pull off such a thing and have it make sense and fit in lines with the characters?

Well, yes. Off the top of my head, I can think of two different ways to do it to make it work.

And Zoe did both of them.

If you look at Scarlet Lady as a whole, you’ll see a conglomeration of characters—each with stories and arcs attached. They have personalities. They have goals and problems and their own highs and lows. One sign of good writing is that some focus is given to highlight these other characters as people. Individuals in their own right with lives outside of the main characters or situation.

Miraculous doesn't really do this.

Scarlet Lady, however, does. Because contrary to the title, Scarlet Lady isn’t just about Chloe.

It isn’t even just about the heroes.

It isn’t just about Chloe being horrible. Or Marinette being in love. Or Adrien being in desperate need of a hug and a nap. Because while the story is centered around them, it isn’t solely about them. Other characters get focus and growth and their own arcs throughout the comics.

But the big two—the BIGGEST two with arguably the most depth and most growth and quite frankly the best storylines out of everyone in the entire series?

It’s Sabrina and Lila. And their individual stories have led up to this.

As such, this episode—which was mostly filler and all around forgettable in canon, matters here.

It’s where Sabrina and Lila reach the culmination of their respective character arcs.

Yes, it’s when they both get to become Miraculous Heroes and meet their own kwamis, but it’s more than just that! They both hang out with the girls group as full members of the crew, getting to take part in a music video together. It’s also where they both get to stand up for themselves and the city at large while calling out Chloe and Scarlet Lady. This is what their storylines have been building up to and where their growth really shows.

Sabrina started out as Chloe’s minion same as canon—albeit with more attention to her feelings and her responses, no matter how seemingly small, allowing her to feel more like her own person. And through this focus, we got to see her open up more, pull and eventually break away from Chloe and her influence, and over time stand up for herself and try to establish herself both with the class and as an individual.

Lila started off as a liar and manipulator, selfish and self centered, much like canon. Unlike canon, her lies are tied to her issues, noted to be poorly thought through, and give her more introspection as a person. After the lies are revealed, she’s not “redeemed” so much as she is “accountable”, and it doesn’t change who she is. She remains selfish and certainly far from being considered “good”, but she’s letting people in past her walls and masks in a way she hadn’t been able to before.

Both of these things? Figuring out who you are and letting people know you for who you are? They’re incredibly hard. And a lot of time was devoted to both of their journeys along the course of the comic.

Sabrina’s arc was about her figuring out who she is on her own. Outside of Chloe and her previous role of being a follower and lackey. And sometimes it feels less scary to stay with someone toxic than to be alone and facing the unknown. We see it in the way she tries to put herself out there afterwards, reaching out and risking rejection and just figuring herself out. Even or perhaps especially with those she already knows and has a less than positive history with.

And we still see the struggle of her view of herself in this episode. It was in the way she was upset that she legitimately tried to help and it still resulted in bad things happening. And it was also clear when she calls herself a “sidekick” to Marigold after the day was saved, as if it’s a role she still sees herself as and one she struggles not to fall in to. Over time, we’re seeing Sabrina learning that she doesn’t have to be attached or subservient to someone else to have an identity or be accepted.

Lila’s arc involved her figuring out who she is with people. Outside of the lies and manipulations she creates, the masks she wears, and the identities she crafts to make people like her. The “real Lila” is far from the best person and arguably not even a good person, but she also doesn’t have to be for the others to accept her as the still somewhat bad influence she is. She’s still very much selfish and flawed, but she’s less inclined to hide it or treat it like something that needs to be hidden. And isn’t that a common lesson? That it’s better to be liked for who you are than to force yourself to be someone else to be liked?

And at the same time, even with being less than a fully good person, she’s showing that she can still find better ways of acting that allow her to help others rather than hurt them or serve herself. She still hates Scar, but rather than working with Hawk Moth to kill her and risk dooming Paris and the world, she’s instead working with Alya through more legitimate (and legal) means…and hitting Scar where it hurts most. She and Adrien may not be friends, but rather than try to punish him for not going along with her, she’s instead rescued him, putting herself on the line—something that the former Lila wouldn’t have considered doing and one that canon Lila wouldn’t be capable of. Even if she’s motivated by pettiness or self-interest, what would have been straight up revenge on someone who upset her has grown to be something that is working in everyone’s better interests.

Both Lila and Sabrina hid themselves in different ways and for different reasons. So having them both assert themselves and call out both Chloe and Scarlet Lady is a show of their growth and overall a huge deal. It’s not something either of them would have done at the start of the series. Sabrina, because she was a “yes man” who wouldn’t dare to argue with Chloe and Lila because she wouldn’t risk openly doing something to make herself a target.

And now boom! Look at them both! Lila stepped up to openly and publicly denounce Scarlet Lady as not being a hero for real reasons that aren’t just about herself or her feelings—complete with receipts! The girl did her research, noting incidents from before she even came into the picture. Then follow up with Sabrina standing up against Chloe’s machinations and dismantling Chloe’s main source of power: her father. Even better, she’s using logic and knowledge she would have as a former ally of Chloe’s who would know her tricks, taking her former friendship with Chloe and using it against her.

And on top of that, each of them are given the Miraculous by the person they wronged in the past. Marinette to Sabrina and Adrien to Lila. Especially in Lila’s case, it says a lot that they’re trusted. That shows narratively that even with their mistakes and bad choices and continued struggles, they still can move forward—not necessarily to find redemption, but to find themselves and be their best selves.

This is why it makes sense for them to share this episode. It’s also why both of them speaking up matters. They are both publicly confronting their greatest foe, and the fact that their foes are really two faces of the same person further highlights this.

So they both have issues with the same person, are dealing with forming their identities without catering to others, are working out how to have/be friends, were formerly not the best of people, and have a fear of rejection. As such, this isn’t just their obligatory hero episode, this is what their individual stories have been leading up to. Almost like they’re two sides of the same coin. And the comparison between the two helps them both shine.

And speaking of shining, does anyone remember how the all girls team up didn’t get a chance to shine in canon? Zoe sure did.

I have a whole list of problems I have regarding Party Crasher, but perhaps number seven on that list is that the boys got to have an all male temp hero team up episode while the girls didn’t.

In fact, by this episode in canon, only Alya, Chloe, and Kagami actually got to be temp heroes.

To be fair, only four of the guys out of seven in canon got to be part of their particular event in Party Crasher, leaving out Ivan (who often tends to get overlooked) and Nathaniel (who has had a precedent of just literally disappearing from the episode). But originally, part of the appeal of Party Crasher was that the focus was supposed to be on the male classmates and getting to see at least some of them being part of a team against the akuma.

Why then didn’t we get an episode like this with the girls? Or at least something LIKE this?

Frightningale became that episode. And if any of the episodes were to do it, it makes the most sense for Frightningale to be the one.

All of the girls were together to take part in this event. So Zag would have had the perfect excuse to include them all in the fight or just have the girls do something to help even as civilians. I mean, we’ve had episodes do this before. Max in Robustus. Nathaniel and Alix in Reverser. Luka in Captain Hardrock. Let the civilians show their heroic traits even before they become heroes. It’s not a Miraculous, but it’s still giving them focus and expanding on them as individuals.

Instead, canon Frightningale was a filler episode. And not even a good one. For an akuma who forces people to sing or dance, it’s a waste that they just had the heroes spend the whole time rhyming. A waste of writing and talent. I mean, have you heard Christina Vee sing? If there needed to be a musical episode, I would think that the akuma who forces people to sing would certainly warrant it! At least more than it’s Christmas and they sing just cuz.

So this is yet another thing that Zoe improves with the Scarlet Lady version of this episode. Giving us the all girl team up episode so many of us have long wanted and getting to see all the female heroes together at last.

And with this, we get the full roster of friends-turned heroes.

Except for Alix. Poor, poor Alix. ;_;

Your day will come.

In this way, the end where Clara goes a different direction with her music video feels less like a half-assed fix to a half-forgotten plot point and more like something that was built by everyone involved. I don’t know about the rest of you, but given Clara’s excitement over the all girl band playing and Pigella’s gift showing Clara an idea for her video, it highlights the focus on EVERYONE being part of this—both the video and the episode itself. It kind of comes off as a lesson of its own about teamwork and giving everyone a shot rather than focusing specifically only on one or two specific individuals.

And isn’t that what separates the heroes from Scarlet Lady?

But there’s a third important aspect of this episode.

This is the episode where Chloe is smacked in the face with Scarlet Lady’s falling popularity.

Let’s remember that at the start of the comic, Scarlet Lady was fully and widely considered THE Hero of Paris. She was beloved for doing nothing and it was a point of frustration for Chat, who actually was having to pick up her slack. Initially, there was nothing he could do because him being the only real hero among the duo meant he often couldn't stick around after akuma fights to prevent Scar from telling "our story". In addition, he didn’t know who she was or who chose her and why. Then even when it was clear her getting the Earrings was a mistake, for a lot of the first couple seasons, she was so popular that they couldn’t just take the Earrings away from her lest they risk backlash from the rest of the city. It’s a backlash that seems increasingly unlikely as more and more people get to see her behavior and callousness firsthand.

We’ve seen hints of it in other episodes, but none of them were so blatant to Chloe that she couldn’t ignore it or shrug it off or otherwise make excuses to protect her ego.

Prime Queen wanted to focus on Marigold and Chat Noir for their “romance” to try and boost ratings. Alya and Lila made some snarky comments, but Chloe could easily dismiss them both. Nadja also made a comment that nobody cared about Scarlet’s love life, but a lack of interest in her love life isn’t a lack of interest in herself and Chloe despises both of her “sidekicks” and wouldn’t want anyone trying to pair her with them anyway. And Nadja reassures her that they’ll focus on her after they’re done with Chat and Marigold. So yes, she can dismiss that as well.

Reverser has Chloe faced with both of her identities are made as villains in art and a story. However, she clearly looks down on Nathaniel and Marc barely registers to her. So she can dismiss them.

Look at Despair Bear, the Intermission, the interactions with the various other heroes, and the fact that only Chat Noir and Marigold are privy to the Guardian’s secret existence and allowed to pass out other Miraculous. Much has been shown of the other characters being less than impressed with her, snarky towards her, or showing the process of how they discover the truth about her and how she actually handles akuma attacks…namely in that she doesn’t. And Chloe can dismiss all of that because to her, none of them really matter to her.

But Chloe can’t dismiss the fact that a renown celebrity dedicating a music video to the “Heroes of Paris” isn’t including her. Bad enough her sidekicks are taking center stage but she’s not even in the music video at all?

And when someone she despises calls out the reasons why she’s not a hero in an openly public setting surrounded by a multitude of people who all agree with her? You could say it’s insult to injury. But some would say it was a long time coming.

Some Rando: Scarlet Lady sucks! Alya: Marigold and Chat Noir do all the work, not her! Kagami: She’s barely even necessary at this point. Clara: This video and song are to celebrate hope and love. And Scarlet Lady lacks both when push comes to shove. Chloe: ARGHHH! WHATEVER!

It further shows the turning tide of public opinion against Scar. What was once a trickle has grown into a wave, and now Chloe is forced to acknowledge her image and status aren’t as ironclad as she thought. Sure, she could denounce Lila as a liar like she’s done before, but Lila is bringing up instances that Chloe can’t deny: being late (as she’s just plain been a no show to several fights), endangering civilians, and being caught live on camera being willing to let someone die in a particularly horrible way because it’s easier.

This is the episode where it’s not just people seeing Scar is horrible, but acting on it and letting Chloe know they know she’s horrible. It’s reached the point where Chloe can’t just disregard the claims or discount and ignore her critics. And we’re seeing Chloe starting to lose control as a result. To the point she has to force her dad to ruin a previously sanctioned event in what has to be one of his most flagrant displays of abuse of power to date just to shut down her detractors.

And even that would come with more consequences for Chloe if it had been allowed to continue. Sabrina herself points it out that Clara is very popular with a lot of fans—people who would be aware she’s making a music video and whom would be very disappointed if word got out that it was cancelled due to an issue with the Mayor. And given all the very unhappy people we see in the comic in question where she points that out, it stands to reason that the word would get out. Heck, I’d be surprised if someone wasn’t recording it.

Then there’s the love square/hero shenanigans.

Remember how in canon, the whole “playing themselves/risking identities” bit kinda just dropped out halfway in? The kwamis were the only authority figures involved to call out on the risk and of the two, Plagg didn’t care and Tikki gave one knowing stare at Marinette before turning around to gush about the suit. Even though Marinette offers the alternative idea to the music video by the end, there’s no further comment or notice of how she and Adrien nearly blew their identities….or alternatively a comedic take where nobody recognizes them regardless and they worried for nothing. Honestly, I would have taken either setup.

Having Fu present to call them both out shows there is a responsible authority figure watching, makes it clear there are rules they are expected to follow, and reinforces that this was, in fact, a horrible idea. Sure, Marinette and Adrien worried enough to hide their masks, but it should have been obvious that wouldn’t work long term. They are risking their identities, not just to Paris but to each other. And he calls them out for doing it on purpose.

Then there’s the beautiful crescendo of the love square dance in that the two both pretty much have figured out the other’s identity and just want an identity reveal to make it official—which Fu won’t allow. We see it in their playful banter that gets mistaken for “getting into character” and in Adrien in particular pushing Marinette to take part.

This is a point where we are seeing them be teenagers. Foolish of them? Yes. Should they have known better and not done it? Yes. But is it in character and the sort of teenage shenanigans we would expect of teenage superheroes? Definitely. And that’s part of the point. Because they are teenagers. Teenagers in love, no less. Teenagers in love with secret identities to dance around. Which is half the fun of secret identities!

It’s just another aspect to this episode that makes it enjoyable.

So overall, the episode matters in ways that the canon version didn’t and was fun in ways that the canon version wasn’t, making it stand out not just as an episode or a remake of the canon episode, but as its own standalone episode AND a noteworthy point in the overall story.

#scarlet lady au #scarlet lady essay #scarlet lady is better than canon #for zoe

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