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mysticdarling · 1 year

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Calling them by their real name - part 2 (spicy)

Characters: venti, xiao, scaramoche (genshin impact!)

Warnings: established relationship, NSFW, breeding., biting, n!pple stimulation, primal, exhibitionism, penetration, smut, no pronouns used for the reader, NO MINORS.

(A/n): hello again, miss me? I apologize for my absence and im happy to announce this long awaited part i turly hope you enjoy your time with my naughty boys~ hope it was worth the long wait! Ps. (I suggest you read the first part first)

Venti

The evening grew darker you didn't know if you should hide or just give up and hope he has Mercy. "Maybe he can only find me where the wind can reach…hmm where could I go without wind?" You talked your thoughts aloud as you walked around, enjoying the scenery of Monstadt. You came across a nice wooded area still feeling the soft Breeze, only getting more anxious by the moment.

You wander a while on the brink of giving up hope before coming across a cave, which seemed to be empty, only harboring a put out campfire. It was a perfect place to hide out for a while so you did. You walked in no breeze to be felt not even a draft.

The night began to brew and since you figured you would be there a while, you lit the fire and sat next to the controlled flames. So what if a Hilichurl was to wonder by, you escaped Barbados!…….so you thought at least.

In a flash of a second a cool gust of wind found its way inside extinguishing the flames.

" oh Windling~ you truly didn't think you could hide from me in my own Nation right? I had fun acting as if I couldn't find you ehe!" You jump just from the sound of his voice, it making your skin crawl.

Venti got into the cave with you without hesitation or invitation taking a bite from an apple he must have picked from a passing tree. "Me hiding?! Psshh noo i was just…Exploring! Yes that"

Venti busted out in laughter "I'm a god remember you cant lie to me windblume, more importantly I'm your boyfriend I would see before it left your tongue, speaking of your tongue I could think of a lot of places I want it to be right now" He flirted his eyes gazing you up and down.

"Venti!? Geez must you be such a pervert" You grumbled pulling his hat down over his face, soon feeling his slender hand grip your wrist. Venti pushed you down cradling the back of your head as he lays you back getting on top of you. " I've been looking forward to this my disciple, I almost immediately wanted to come running after you even before the rich wine reached to my lips" He pulled at the bow around his neck untying it letting his cape fall to the ground. He started at your face cupping it softly before his hands wandered, taking in the beauty of every inch of you. It wasn't long before he had you in nearly nothing at all, the way he looked, touched, made all your insecurities melt away. " Tell me Traveler do you think all of Monstadt could hear you if i make you loud enough?" he slipped off his shorts leaving the stockings, rubbing his rosy tip against your entrance.

You stared up at your bard, it was very clear you weren't speaking to him anymore no, you were talking to a god. "Venti maybe not here what if Adventures walk by or-" Your words were cut short, venti sinking himself inside with no remorse, an unexpected gasp escaping your lips. Your walls swallowed him whole, taking every inch of him as if your body was made for it. "Venti!" You moaned out only to be cut off once again by the bards chuckle.

" Oh windblume I don't want to hear that now call me by my name it sounds so beautiful coming from your lips" He leaned down whispering in your ear, the ends of his braids starting to glow against you. "Say it for me please my beloved" Venti begged, his breath against your neck sending chills down your spine. It was strange it was still your venti but his voice was different, serious, ethereal, too perfect for this world and the whole of tayvat. You felt your face burn with a blush as you turned your face away from the God of freedom "Barbados….my lord… BarbADOS!" It was as if something snapped inside Venti he wanted to defile his disciple. So he did, his hips struck you like lightning noises and moans filling the cave. Even as he was fucking into you Venti Whined in the orgasmic pleasure of your warmth. you couldn't tell which of you were louder.

"That's right, sing for me!" Venti relished in making such a mess out of you

"Mghh! W-Windblume… windblume.. ah! Y/N!!" With every word Venti's voice strained higher. He gripped the back of your thighs folding you to hit the most unholy spots inside you, it nearly made you melt into nothing. Your abdomen tenses reaching the highest point of climax before completely relishing in the finishing feeling. Venti wasn't close behind. He filled your every office before collapsing onto you panting with a huge grin on his face. He laid Apon your chest keeping his seed trapped inside you not daring to pull quite yet. " Now that is how you worship a God ehe"

Xiao

You ran to Liyue as you near the border from the neighboring nation, clearly excited to see your darling yaksha. Once you finally step foot you notice a dark figure, Xiao breathing heavily staring at the ground. This only causes you to hurry to worry filling your face. " Xiao? Is that you are you feeling oka-" Your words stop, in a blur Xiao tackling you in the grass. He stared down at you his fingers digging into the ground next to you. "xiao i-its okay now its me im here" you slowly removed his mask it disapping in your hands. " I'm ok...i didnt harm you did i?" Xiao put a hand against his head, making him shutter. "Y/n is it really you…. I'm not seeing things right…" He places the hand on your cheek feeling the warmth, his thumb pressing your lips, letting out a breath of full relief " i…i missed your visits and company" Before the golden eyed boy could continue you tugged him down by his necklace, pressing your lips against his, the kiss desperate, rough, feeling the shared breaths.

Xiao pulled back only when you both were breathless. " say my name" your lips parted "no my real name" His pleading eyes was enough to make you melt where you laid "Alatus" xiao couldn't hold back his blush, he trailed down your sides gripping the fabric before ripping it open finding you so beautiful exsposed under the moon. Xiao stared at you for reassurance with each touch before grabbing a hold of your wrist dragging your hand against his own chest his heart racing .

With a smile, your hands wandered down hooking a finger on his pants tugging them down honestly surprised at his mere girth, but Xiao didn't leave you much time to think before he folded you. He Threw your leg over his shoulder, dragging his tip against your awaiting hole. "Y/n Please stop me. If you don't stop me now I don't think I'll be able to"

Self-control was leaving his body as he spoke his golden eyes dilated and targeted on you. " I trust you Alatus-" As those words escaped your lips xiao rammed his cock inside. All at once you felt his teeth sinking into the of your shoulder trying to muffling himself. He was a rough lover not that he always meant to be but he couldn't control it, all he does for his life is fight for control so with you tends to accidentally let loose a little too much. His blows were merciless as he pounded into you under the night sky, grunting and panting with every move it all dissolving into pleasure.

"Alatus A..Alatus don't stop p-please don't stop" Xiao rutted inside you gritting his teeth as he came filling your needy hole.

His cock twitched from the over stimulation but not daring to stop. Whining and shuddering with every movement "wouldnt…Gh! Dream of it." He hunched over you not daring to stop his hips for a second, even with his seed pouring out of you from around him.

Xiao was so worked up he was even overstimulating himself refusing to let it end as he jerked and whined his length twitching like crazy inside of you. Beads of sweat dripped down his neck, fucking you so hard his hips slapped against your ass making the most obscene sounds even after you did finish, Xiao still couldn't persuade himself to stop. He needed it, he desperately wanted to fill every orifice of you and by the time he did stop he did fill up every bit of your sore little hole. That night he was especially attentive, carrying you to his room in the inn, wiping you down with a warm rag. He served you for the rest of the night, whatever you may ask he will provide. Xiao made sure to remind you, all you need do is say his name. Even the one that was Heaven to his ears as it escaped your lips.

Scaramoche

Scaramouche grabbed your hand leading you to an old abandoned inazuma house. The house was pretty well preserved, apart from the few leaks in the roof and the smell of dust. "we should rest here. I'll get a fire going" Scara removed his hat a little doll falling out, you stared at it then looked up him "what a cute doll! it looks like you, did you make it?" You ask curious, him clearly trying to brush it off as he picks it up. "It's just a stupid doll. Don't think much of it." He shoved it in his sleeve huffing turning away. "...hey kuni i would love to look after him for you, so he doesn't fall into the fire" He froze for a moment before grabbing the plush doll out of his sleeve placing it in your hands. "You wouldn't have liked me.." He said quietly looking at the doll in your palms.

What?"

"You wouldn't have liked kunikazushi, he was gentle, he dressed in silks and was naive to the world. Me and you both know you like when I'm rough with you" Scara looked up at you from his eyebrows, his head still tilted down.

" I think I would enjoy seeing your soft side, I would love if you showed me"you cupped his face his eyes softening.

"In your dreams." he said in a snarky tone, but with his height you picked him up with ease, setting him on the creaky but stable table. "ah! Hey what the hell do you think you're doing!?" Scaramouche struggled, clearly not used to being lifted off his feet.... by someone else "I want to see you every part of you kunikazushi please show me" you plead really making it hard for the puppet to refuse.

All at once he gripped your hair staring at you with a threatening glare. "y/n if you tell a single soul i swear no one ALIVE will believe you" He glared, you nodding in response.

Scaramouche relaxed becoming completely tender as he brought your hand to his cheek nuzzling against the palm " I love you and I never want you to abandon me even if you grow to hate me please stay by my side" Scaramouche looked away almost embarrassed of himself, all while you melt like putty in his hands. "Could i touch you more y/n? I want to ingrain every inch of you into my mind so I'll know that I met someone as perfect as you" Scara eyes trailed over every inch of you, slowly dragging his hands down to your neck and then shoulders soon replacing his soft cold hands with kisses. He admired your whole body as if it was complex art, all the way down to your toes leaving a soft kiss as a pure act of humble adoration.

He stood a hand clasping your top. " I want to explore more will you let me?" once you gave him the okay he lifted your shirt dragging his soft tongue against the bud of your nipple. He captured it in-between his lips, suckling on as he stared up at you innocently, you so focused on the stimulation you didn't notice the Wanderer seemed to have switched places with you, he sat you displayed on the table. It was clear Scaramouche was starting to get more worked up then he originally meant to. He layed you back his hips so desperate whines escaping his parted lips as he grinded himself against you, not even able to wait until he gets you fully unclothed.

Not like you were complaining, his tent causing enough friction to your sex to make you enjoy it, Hooking a leg around scara waist. Especially with the adorable noises he made causing you to unshamefully move your hips against it only getting more shutters and whines from him.

He gazed down inbeween, a blush filling his face watching you pleasure yourself on his hard on a wet spot soon growing on to his shorts.

"Aww kuni you got yourself dirty its a good thing you don't wear those silks any more" you pull his shorts down with one swift movement his length springing out still painfully hard leaking pathetic amounts of precum.

Scara's embarrassed face only worked you up by the second, you didn't know if he was suppressing it or if he's really good at acting, but his innocence unleashed something deep inside of you.

You guided his cock unable to wait a minute more, his hands covering his face peeking through his fingers as he watches his cock sink inside whining from the tightness that surrounds him making him hunch over the pleasure overwhelming the poor little puppet. "Mm oh kuni does it feel good?" You bit your lip clearly knowing the answer, watching his ears even start to turn red as he nods fast. Scara placed his hands on either side of you moving his hips at a comfortable pace. "i-is this okay y/n im not hurting you am i?" You shake your head in response to wrapped up in the feeling struggling to even keep your eyes from rolling back. Scaramouche continued both of your noises nearly drowning out by each other. He hid himself into your neck, causing him to bury himself into the silky walls with no remorse making sure you feel every inch of his member inside of your needy hole. a gasp escaped your lips unable to even scold him finding his embrace so soft and sweet, even if he's playing it off as a innocent moment with no Sinister ulterior motive.

Scaramouche's breasts were heavy against your neck he couldn't help but rut himself into you barely even letting himself pull out before pushing back, not wanting to leave your warmth for a second.

You were starting to get unbelievably close and you could tell by the way scara shuttered in your arms he wasn't too far behind. You couldn't help it you reached your Edge your abdomen tensing. " s-something's happening i don't think i can stop.. I can't hold on… please take all of it" with one loud yelp he released painting your insides with his cum so sensitive he's teary-eyed. Once you come down from the high you slowly wipe a tear that happened to make it to his cheek smiling like an idiot " you're so cute kunikazushi" As if on cue Scaramouche rolled his eyes burying his face in your chest "oh shut it." He grumbled as you tangle your hand into his hair. " welcome back scara"

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rainydayz-nstuff · 8 months

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First time posting, but I needed to write something about Finn from Adventure Time because… I just had to get obsessed again.

So here is a Finn x Librarian! Reader of how he fell for you! (And how it is with his feelings for you)

Starting off with how ya’ll met, it was… very hilarious.

You were caught by a swamp creature at the edge of the forest after walking home, and got tied up to a tree.

Finn, alone in the woods, assumed you needed to be saved, so he tried to bravely beat up the beast that held you captive. (Kind of like that one scene from Hercules)

Before he could even lay a hit, you escaped the rope and tackled the beast into a headlock right in front of him.

Your grip made the swamp guy scream uncle till you let go and he booked it out of there, calling you a maniac.

When you turned to face Finn, his eyes lit up in awe at how strong and brave you were for putting up with the guy.

Even though you glared at him, Finn’s smile never faltered. You waited for him to say a cheesy or bold line like “I could’ve done that.” Or “You could’ve waited for me to help.”

But no, his words made you flustered

“You’re so… mathmatical!”

“… what?”

You had no idea what that word was or meant, but it seemed to be a compliment so you took it.

He continued to ramble about how cool you looked and kept asking you questions about fighting and adventures.

“Ah, I’m not really an adventurer. I work at the library”

Cue his shocked expression. Especially since he had never seen you there before. He felt guilty about never noticing you, but after this night he’ll never leave you alone.

He’ll try to talk to you more and he even visits the library. (He’s forced to get a book each time since he can’t just show up almost every day trying to talk while you work)

One day, he shows up a little later than usual and catches you reading a book to a group of candy children.

You seemed so calm and happy while you told the tale. Your eyes had a glimmer that could rival any jewel he and his brother found in a dark cave.

His face heated up and his heart leapt into his throat. His mouth gaped open and shut like a fish in air. He’s felt like this before, but only around PB and Flame Princess…

… so he could possibly be in love. Or, that being too much for him to handle, he is in the current phase where he found a new crush.

After this realization, he starts asking you to hang out more outside of your job. To the point where if you step outside, there’s a chance he’ll be there asking you for advice or to hang out.

One of his favorite things to do with you is just sit or lay next to you while you read a book.

Your voice is calming to him, and the way you tell the tales makes it come alive.

He’ll get really close, basically leaning on you, while he smiles happily with his eyes closed so he can listen to you speak.

His feelings are very known, meaning everyone knows, but he thinks it’s a huge secret that no one knows about.

His feelings start off as a childish crush, but the more you are around him, the more he falls each and every time.

“Can… can you read that line again please?”

“Sure. Then, the beast rushed over to the knight and…”

Please let me know if you liked this or want anymore! And if anyone is interested, I have an Adventure Time fanfic posted on Wattpad and Quotev.

It’s called “Lost in Ice” and it’s relatively easy to find.

Thank you!!

#adventure time #finn mertens #finn the human #x reader #imagine #adventure time x reader #gn reader #cartoon #finn x reader #fluff #cartoon network

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the-final-sif · 4 months

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It’s the holidays, and having learned more about them from his friend c!Sapnap, c!Dream decides that he would like to get his guardian, XD, a gift.

Sapnap got both his dads gifts while he and Dream were out on an adventure. The two of them had ventured down into the caves until they managed to find a strange old city underground.

Sapnap had been spooked by the black, blue and glowing substance that grew over every surface, slowly consuming the city, but Dream knew exactly what it was! It was sculk, and it was harmless as long as you kept quiet. There was a warden that would show up if you got really loud and annoyed the sculk, but as long as you were very polite it wasn’t a big deal.

Despite this, Sapnap had been a scaredy cat so Dream had gone in instead, and after asking the moss to make sure it wasn’t using any of the old stuff, he’d found some cool discs and neat shards that looked like the night sky. Both had been very interesting and he’d given most of it to Sapnap, keeping only a few of the night shards for himself.

Bad apparently loved music and Skeppy ate minerals so he should love the shards. Sapnap was sure he’d never had anything like it.

Dream had been quite happy to help his friend with his gifts this year, but it had got him thinking.

XD did so much for Dream, he’d been taking care of him for years, built his mask to keep Dream safe, and taught him how to fight. Taught him how to explore.

They’d been ramping up training lately. XD had been spending more time with him. Dream was almost 13 now, he was getting taller and broader. He was feeling more and more like he was getting ready for… whatever it was XD was preparing him for.

There was a tension growing, and XD seemed… off. Nervous? Tired? Whatever it was, it wasn't happy.

Since his guarden was stressed, Dream really wanted to get him a gift. Sapnap would be spending most of the holidays with his dads on a trip to some kingdom (they had invited Dream along, but Dream had his training and also being surrounded by people constantly seemed like way too much), so Dream had plenty of free time to figure something out.

Only that left him with a seemingly impossible question. What do you get for someone who seemed to be able to get anything?

XD’s magic let him summon just about anything, so anything that Dream could get him just seemed… empty.

The question had been bothering him for nearly two weeks now, through training and-

“Hello, little one.”

Dream quickly hopped out of his bed, grinning brightly at his guardian. He hadn’t been expecting XD to show up again so soon, but here he was! It’d only been a day or so since they last spoke.

“Hi, XD! Are we training again today? I’m a bit sore from yesterday but I can still fight, I really want to fix my sword swing. I mean, axes are better, but I know my sword is still too high…” Dream trailed off, the expression on XD’s mask had changed from its usual smile to something a bit more… concerned?

“Not today, little one. Today, you need to go somewhere.”

That got Dream excited, he snagged his adventure bag, bouncing on the balls of his feet in excitement. It’d been awhile since they went on an adventure together.

“Where are we going? Should I bring anything in particular? How long will we be gone?”

XD didn’t seem quite as excited, but his mask still shifted back to a smile.

“Unfortunately, I can’t go with you this time. This is something you need to do alone. Don’t worry, it won’t be dangerous. Or not really dangerous. Not like things will be in the future. I can’t tell you how long it will take.”

Dream’s excitement fell a bit, traveling alone wasn't as fun, but it would be a good chance to find a gift for XD. Maybe inspiration would hit while he was traveling?

“Okay, so where am I going then? How will I get there?”

XD’s mask shifted to something more contemplative.

“I can’t tell you. It’s not… it’s not quite a place that you find. It’s a place that finds you. It’s almost time for it to find you. Go looking and follow your instincts. You should… if I’ve done everything right, you should get there.”

As XD spoke, he did something he rarely did. He reached out and adjusted Dream’s mask. Straightening it just a little.

In the movement, Dream felt something shift. Not a lot. Not much at all. But just a little. Just enough that he felt a bit odd. A bit taller maybe?

It was weird, Dream tried to shake the feeling off and focus on his task. The instructions didn’t quite make sense, but he trusted XD. If XD said the place would find him, then that must be what would happen.

“Okay! I’ll… try to find it I guess. How will I know when I’m there?”

As he asked, he moved to climb down from his tree house, only for XD to scoop him up instead, teleporting both of them down to the base of the tree.

XD cradled him for just a moment, squeezing him in a hug before carefully putting him down.

“When you find it, you’ll know. Be safe little one.”

“I will.” Dream promised, and then XD was gone. And Dream was on his own.

Now that he was alone, he could feel a charge to the air. There was something out in the woods. He needed to find it. And maybe he’d find a gift for XD on his way.

#dreblr #c!dream #dreamwastaken #dsmp #dream smp #c!sapnap #dreamxd #c!Sapnap #godling c!Dream au #godling dream au #sif writes #sif speaks #i lied we're two parts away from the murder #but I'm happy with the next part too

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quitealotofsodapop · 5 months

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It'd be hilarious if some of the other pilgrim's decendants did still come visit Wukong. Like, imagine Tang or Pigsy being told that if they were EVER in trouble, go to this far off mountain. Or Mei's parents going camping in the forests because it's "protected by an old friend of our decendant" and it's the only place they feel safe enough to camo in without having to act like a proper royal, not realizing it's where Wukong lives. Imagine if they came across the pregnant king jsut a few years before the Canon events of the show because Wukong never bothered to seal the entrance of the waterfall off of his brother's decendants and baby Mei was just a little too curious while exploring near a waterfall or Tang tripped and fell against the barrier

Sandy also def provides safe passage to the island no matter what, even if it's a pain to navigate the volcanos.

I love the thought of Tang just tripping and finding the Monkey King.

Tang: *sees a pregnant monkey demon hanging out in Water-Curtain Cave* Wukong: *sees his Master's soul standing right in front of him* Tang: "Hi?" Wukong: "Hi..."

After some confusion, and breathless info-dumping from Tang, Wukong calmly explains why he's disappeared from the public eye. Tang makes a promise to stay quiet... but could he hear some tales of his adventures with the Pilgrims pretty please? Wukong chuckles as Tang takes out a notebook to record every word he says. Wukong gains a frequent vistor in the scholar. Tang would spend his life on the island if he could, but the craving for Pigsy's cooking is too strong a siren's call to stay forever.

Little Mei would be so sweet. Wukong feels the littlest hands on his stomach and just knows that fang-filled smile looking back at him. he helps reunite Mei with her parents, both Long-Ao's so very grateful and embarassed by the turn of events. The dragons were too busy in the moment just glad that they hadn't completely lost their daughter to wonder who this mysterious monkey was. It's only after they arrive home that they truly realise. Mei is allowed visit the island as much as she wants growing up. Uncle Sun is like the coolest person she knows! She's super-excited for Baby to get here, babbling for hours at the round stomach about dragons and horses and a super cool stablehand who was a monkey. Wukong adores his honorary niece.

Pigsy fleeing to the island when he was in a bad spot, only to meet someone who looked at him like he was an old friend. He brings Sandy around to meet the guy. They like to hang out without much said between them. Pigsy wonders how long this monkey demon has been pregnant for, since he's looked ready to pop for months now.

by the time Xiaotian/MK is actually born, the friends Wukong has made help him to deliver.

#stone egg talk #lego monkie kid #lmk #lmk aus #sun wukong #lmk tang #lmk pigsy #lmk mei #long xiaojiao #SWK is MK's stone egg dad au

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lightwise · 2 days

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TBB S3 E11 Reaction

I’ve watched this episode multiple times already but honestly it doesn’t get any easier. Here we go I guess 😩

- This droid guy looks like the one from episode 4. They’re kinda cute

- The return of Mel! (And Phee 😁)

- Both of them are in a mood 😆. What trip did they just get back from to make them so cranky? Love the throwback to Skara Nall too.

- Noooo not CX-2 😭

- He’s a sneaky boi

- I knew that Phee would inadvertently be how the coordinates to Pabu would be found 🥺🥺

- I’m just now noticing that the back office is playing music and that’s probably why Phee can’t hear the alarm go off. That is hilarious and also very frustrating 😅

- Of course the droid thinks it caused the alarm somehow

- There’s no way downloading someone’s flight log goes that quickly but okay

- Ooooh my girl knows something is up! Her spidey pirate senses are going off. Aghhhh if only she had been a second sooner!!

- If CX-2 ISN’T Tech there is zero reason why he would have stayed behind to watch Phee leave before he snuck off. Also how is he so incredible at hacking into and decoding things 👀

- Ugh I just want a show of Phee and Mel adventures around the galaxy!

- Why is his ship so freaking cool. These maps are incredible.

- Reallyyyy wanna get CX-2’s helmet off 😭

- Aw Pabu is so beautiful in the sunset

- Ha! I knew the boys would try to leave after Ventress warned them it was too dangerous to stay on Pabu. Hunter might be slow sometimes but he’s not completely stupid guys

- Aw poor Wrecker just wants an ice cream

- Crosshair shakes his head at him 🤣

- The little clone cadets outfits are so cool!!!

- Not going to lie, the first time I watched this was the closest I had cried all season. Tech’s goggles and Lula being placed in the Archium is so heartbreakingly fitting 💔

- Wrecker and Gonky banter 🤩🤩🤩 Gonk is such a part of the family I love it soooo much

- Okay seriously how is CX-2 able to both know he’s tripped a proximity sensor AND turn it off?? Come on

- I just realized how he knows where the cave is too. If he tracked Phee’s flight log it must have shown exactly where she normally landed

- Ugh that gold and purple is just too beautiful. Can Pabu be a real place that I can go to?

- Hunter’s spidey senses are also on alert. And I love how close he and Crosshair are again, their pre-Order 66 bond has been restored and is even deeper. Crosshair is attuned to when Hunter’s senses go off. And their helmets sitting together on the cart is so cute 🥹

- No NO no NOOO Nooooo. This moment was ruined by the Star Wars marketing team so it honestly didn’t hit as hard as it would have otherwise, but 😭😭😭. RIP Marauder. You will live on in our imagination

- I still can’t believe that they somehow heard our outcry about what would happen to Gonky, Lula, and Tech’s goggles if they blew up the Marauder, and decided to save EXACTLY those three things 🤣 (and Wrecker. So glad Wrecker is “relatively” okay, poor boy)

- Hunter’s slooow helmet turn until we see the starship above the island. Phew. And the Imperial March coming in.

- Omega comforting Batcher 😭😭😭

- Having LAATs swoop down into a town like that would be terrifying

- Man, where’s Maarva when you need her. Fuck the Empire

- “Search every domicile until you find her” is going to go down in Star Wars quote history

- I was genuinely afraid they were going to burn the whole island

- I’m sorry but I just can’t take the backpack clips on CX-2 seriously

- Batcher baby no! (Also genuinely thought we were going to lose her for a second)

- Damn Hunter. Nothing makes him shine like hand to hand combat and other things 🥵

- He’s never been hotter honestly

- Alright how in the world is CX-2 so good at *everything*. I’m honestly getting a little annoyed at it.

- Crosshair’s face 😭💔😭 he’s never looked more scared and pleading than when he says his baby sister’s name

- I’m kind of surprised that they didn’t just burn down the town anyway. Either CX-2 is just trying to be super efficient/he doesn’t care past accomplishing his mission, or the Empire gets much more petty and cruel by Kenobi and Rebels

- It’s so interesting to me how touchy CX-2 is with Omega. Why all the shoulder pushes? Shoulder touches are very much a form of affection and communication among clones. Has that impulse in him just been turned to violence?

- Sooo…we basically will never get wet hair Hunter 🤣🤣🤣 I’ll take this much dripping and cute Batcher scratches compensation though

- Okay. I’m just going to say it. The way they chose to have Crosshair miss the tracking device was so disappointing to me. Not the fact that he missed, but how he missed. Having him be distracted and fend for his life and be late for the shot was great. But I wish they had brought his hand tremble into play here as the main mechanism behind why he missed. They’ve been building that up all season and it would have made perfect sense. Instead he rushes and like trips and just shoots too early? So out of character. I didn’t like it and still don’t :(

- Welp, Omega seems to be less worried than we are. We’re in the end game now folks 😳 this music is awesome too

#the bad batch #tbb #tbb spoilers #the bad batch spoilers

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chronotsr · 19 days

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Pre-G1 Modules, part 4B - The Judge's Guild Roundup Completed

Oh. Oh we're still doing this? It won't end? Gods. At least we made it to 1978. Anyway, happy eclipse to every. Reminder: the people who run Judge's Guild now are full-on nazis, do not buy their books. Go hug your loved ones instead.

The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor (1978)

Maybe I was too hard on the Prince Valiant-ass artstyle. It looks very proud for a bandit fortress, don't you think? The full color version that comes out later is even nicer -- it's the one you find on google images first. Anyway. Fort Badboybaskaur was founded by ''The Emperor of Glorious Doomfire''. It truly was the era of so-bad-its-good naming! The fort was built so that if raiding happened, the many small villages could congregate there for safety. Only, it turns out there was a red dragon underneath. And then that got resealed. And then an evil demigod took over. And then bandits took that over.

I read this section like five times and for the life of me I cannot find a prophesy here. They just kind of say it because it sounds cool. The prose in this hand out is, really really rough, it's a lot of proper nouns and moral history tropes -- empire becoming successful and spawning evil religion yada yada yada. The proper noun addiction is strong with this one, we get quite a few undefined proper nouns here. He's another classic: "Zanaaphic the All-King of the Spirit Universe". I have so many questions! None of which will be answered. "Angall of the Perpetual Void" Wow! Those are some neat nouns! The net effect, however, is there was a really skilled evil wizard who got confronted by a god, beat him, and by defeating him became a four-armed dragon-skinned bat-winged magical null. He does up to 16 pips of damage with his silly flails!

So the cover image is lying a little bit about the fortress. In both of the presented maps, there is no cool rampart that you have to slowly siege, there are mountains both in front and behind the fortress, and there are way more than three turrets. I am actually a little fond of this keep layout-wise, it's less cramped than the Keep on the Borderlands is. Naturally, it sits at the foot of Mount Deception.

It's a nice little fortress, no? I would recommend getting a modern copy of the map if it wasn't for the ownership sucking ass in an extreme way. Plus, having dungeons under your keep on the borderlands seems like a great idea, actually. Or, shit, having a rival keep on a rival borderlands sounds kinda rad. Anyway, the room by room is pretty rote. The exterior rooms are mostly just services you'd give to anyone walking in, but the real juicy stuff is all kept inside the mountain walls. We've got your usual suspects. Guard captain, bossman, bossman's terrible wife (and the wife is legally required to be evil because male writers), pawnbroker, human trafficker, tavernsssssss, gemcutter, blacksmith, et c. Some of the names are okay, "Hole in the Hill Inn" run by ogres was really funny to me, I would change them to hill giants to complete the joke.

The dungeon has an interesting conceit where there are some generic "alternate rooms" in the back of the book that come with a blank room number that you can swap if you dislike the default room contents. I'm really in favor of this mindset. I have thought for a while that it'd be kind of nice for adventure books to be shipped in some sort of editable capacity? Like if I wanna do open heart surgery on a floor of a dungeon, but I like the other 4 floors, it'd be nice to keep it in the original format instead of having the adventure book and then some loose-leaf with the changes penciled in. Tragically, the alt rooms are overwhelmingly just monsters in a room, with the outlier being a wererats with a little kidnapping scheme.

Underneath the fortress there are five levels, one is actually above ground level and in the cliff face behind the keep, and the third level leads to the surface via caves. Neat! I'm kind of imagining Gerudo Fortress here on a lot of levels. Here's a quick skim of the best contents:

There appears to be a little rat treasure hoard where the rats have to pay their dues to their little rat kings? What's going on here is kind of unclear to me, but I can't help but imagine one of the guards trained the rats to hide money in the walls for him and the ten rats with silver formation are a kind of animal-passcode.

A chest trapped with some sort of reverse truth serum -- it removes your ability to speak, see, or hear for a week if you open it without permission. Naturally, the chest is decorated with the three wise monkeys 🙈🙉🙊 (and a mysterious fourth monkey the text implies nothing about, maybe it's Sezaru? Curse of erectile dysfunction!)

The alarm system seems to be gong-based

Oh, I don't like this beholder at all. Ewwww! But also, why is this drawing here? There's no beholders in here? Is this some kind of silly trap for snooping players? In fact, most of the monster illustrations are…kind of just random monsters.

The treasury is booby-trapped to hell and back. We have a standard guillotine trap disarmed with a tile puzzle on the wall, a hell-hound guard dog, and the most prominent magical item is a necklace of strangulation. Rough break! Just go ahead and put all of the treasure on pressure plates with flame jets at that point.

A reverse gravity pit-trap -- you pull a book, you fall through a hole in the ceiling and then it traps you in the ceiling. It's just a pit trap at the end of the day, but way vivid!

A chair made of a dragon's arms and horn that will animate and attack you if you try to pry gems off it or attack anyone

Two wizards are having a battle over who gets to own a trained lizard that can sing and carry heavy loads. I understand guys. That lizard is worth it.

Under a sarcophagus is written "If you can read this, you're too close", as well as some explosive runes

The treasure hoard of a lost king, if you attempt to steal it, will turn into a treasure construct shaped like the king. Awesome!

"A similar cabinet on the north wall is labeled "For Future Imperialists". In the top drawer is a Gem of Brightness, the second is a pair of Bracers of Defenselessness, and in the bottom drawer is a pouch of Dust of Sneezing and Choking." I would fully lean in, make it a Cursed Gem of Brightness that you can't turn off, and put the Bracers in the top drawer if the goal is to prank an evil character into hurting themselves.

A reverse-vampire giant lizardfolk that consumes the unlife from undead. So, Tomb of the Lizard King got beat to the vampire-lizardfolk punch, I guess?

Large swaths of this dungeon genuinely feel randomly generated. The worst parts are about half of floor 2, 3, and about half of floors 4 and 5. It just feels like padding to me. And in true Judge's Guild fashion, there are treasure stores in the temple that are "instantly max your character" amounts of loot. Now I get that shares are a thing and you gotta pay your hirelings, but still, 1.5M gold represents like, even if you're a party of 10 you're still looking at instantly maxing a thief, shooting a fighter to level 8, and shooting a wizard to level 9. And there's no way you were at 0xp when you smuggled that statue out, that's going to be an instant max for just about anyone. The big reveal that I…guess you could conceivably puzzle out? Is that the dragons were nearby because they were minions of a dragon-king entombed under this fortress before it was built. A cool idea, that desperately needs more foreshadowing. The love clearly went into making those tombs cool, so if I was going to rip anything off from this module that'd probably be my second port of call.

Gen Con IX Dungeons (1978)

What a name, right? How come Tsojconth got a name and these dungeons didn't? Blatant favoritism. Well actually one of the two dungeons may as well be called the Halls of Grsk. And, wow, everything about the design notes are ominous. "Simplicity would be the prime requisite". So….does that mean this adventure is boring on purpose, Bob?

The adventure is split into two bits, the player-side info and the gm-side info, which…okay. Sure. The titular dungeon is set in the "Celtic mythos", whatever the fuck that means (Bob, the Celtic cultures covered almost all of Europe and parts of Asia. That phrase is meaningless!). TL;DR the old king's wizard went evil and killed the king, left no one to rule, and then went nuts and much later summoned a bunch of demons to protect his loot now that he's old and dying. The local wizard, Framschamsnaggle (seriously?) bullies you into raiding his tomb to get a staff back. There's a dragon in there and you were handed a teleportation amulet that will zip you out as soon as you get your hands on the staff.

Oh. Oh that's not good. That's a very not good dungeon layout. That's a very bad dungeon layout. And the contents are, as bad. I wonder if it was considered bad at the con itself? I couldn't find a single remarkable thing in this whole dungeon. It is neither weird, nor funny, nor clever, nor interesting. It's 30 random dungeon rooms in a row, with a rare trap that is practically randomized also.

The sole joy I can find in this module is this illustration, which looks like a shitpost.

The second round of the tournament (1st round eliminates) is set in a completely different place, which is more properly called the Halls of Grsk. Almost all of this area is also just, save or suck traps and monsters. There is one trap that's kind of classic and okay -- picking up the giant ruby locks all exits, many red herrings, room starts heating up like an oven. The solution is to smash the ruby, which instantly kills the heating element. It's not amazing (how are you supposed to guess it's a ruby? It behaves like a pressure plate trap but the ruby itself is contact-activated) but it's the least bad thing in here. The portal-that-eats-you prank in particular grinds my gears, the game communicates every possible thing to say it kills you, and by blind faith you go through and is the best solution. Picking up the fake secret item instantly kills you, because fuck you. The fakeout trap's sole hint is "why are there two normal doors on the north wall?" which, it's a points-based dungeon, they're going to assume it's for extra points. Also, the whole dungeon is a massive straight line in disguise. It's a wreck.

Actually, the whole scenario feels like a worse "Tomb of the Lizard King" in a lot of ways, down to the silly rhyme on the last page that gives you a critical clue about how to kill the undead baddie. In a sense it's also like Tomb of Horrors in that way, I guess, but the vibes are a lot more like Tomb of the Lizard King.

Damn it Bob, you made it boring on purpose.

Citadel of Fire (1978)

This is truly one of the dungeon covers of all time.

Is… is that The Golem? I hope Rabbi Loew is available. Or, maybe it's good that he's not in the module, because obviously this construct's creator is going to be evil in this module.

This is the least least imaginative of the Judge's Guild modules in this series. It is, simply a wizard's tower. If you have ever in your life read a wizard's tower module, you've read this one. The JG staples of constant slavery mentions continues with slave girls being in every single damn room of the towers. There's, not really much plot to go on either. There are wizards, the hill is good for magic, they are aligned with the goblins, go chop 'em up.

Sigh. Here's the memorable bits.

Nearly out the gate, we get one of those paragraphs that you would hope would be so obviously bad to the writers that they would second guess the decision. Why the actual hell did you stat out some 200 nearly identical goblins manually?

What is that and when do I get a bestiary entry for them? That's not a joke, the module never mentions what this is and now I want this Weresalazzle in my adventures.

The vague allusion to "Shabast", which are apparently a species of people who are intelligent clouds? But only sometimes.

A variety of pens for animals the wizards are working on, which include an Irish deer, a jackalwere, a baby lammasu, a giant slug named Skippy, some orcs, man-eating apes, an elephant, and a hydra

For…some reason there's a tavern on the 2nd floor of a dungeon. In the lightest defense of the module, at least the 2F has a surface access and no pre-programmed encounters between here and the tavern (random monsters thoooo). The owner sleeps with a new person every night, highly critical detail.

?????????????????????

OK so many rooms later there's a pyrohydra with a toothache. Mystery solved, that's why there's a magical dentist!

I hesitate to complain, but after multiple dungeons with 100k+ gold rewards, this dungeon's treasury having roughly 11,000 gold in it feels like an anticlimax. The fact that it's protected by that pyrohydra and electrified locks adds insult to injury.

This is a joke, right? That's your final floor? Anyway, this is just The Demon Floor. There is more treasure here than upstairs, which is a little strange given that the demon serves the wizard and not the other way around.

So on the whole, deeply shit. In conclusion, Early Judge's Guild leaves a lot to be desired. Next time we will -- wait, am I free? There's no more pre-G1 modules? I get to finally do TSR shit and leave this mire?

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS (edit: I was half-right -- there was one more pre-G1 module, but it was TSR!)

#0e #chronotsr #dnd #dungeons and dragons #tsr #ttrpg

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kettlemouse13 · 2 months

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In Heat

Female Dragon x Human Reader

Your beautiful draconic partner just hit her heat cycle. Despite her warning to stay away, you can’t help but return out of worry. Surprisingly, taking care of her doesn’t require as much stamina as you thought.

Sorry if this was a little short, I just wanted to get this out before I milked myself dry of any motivation.

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Irritated hissing echoed in the gaping cavern as you entered, watching every step you took, worried that if you don’t keep quiet, she might pounce. The pungent smell secreting from her attacked your nose the closer you got.

There she laid, her beautiful black scales shining in the dim lighting, her sapphire eyes glowing whenever she opened them. Her brilliant wings hugged themselves to her large yet slender body in discomfort.

The poor dragon was completely and utterly at mercy to her heat cycle, her body heat radiated off of her and warmed your body despite the distance. She rolled round in her mound, desperately trying to find a comfortable position.

She froze as a gust of wind blew into the cave, soothing her overheated scales, but you knew that said wind managed to carry your scent right to her.

Dammit.

With a sigh, you revealed yourself to her with a weak smile,

“Oryth, How are you doing—”

“What in oblivion are you thinking?” Her mighty words shook the ground as little rocks fell from the cavern ceiling, “I told you to stay away during my heat cycle.”

Her voice, still powerful as ever, calmed your racing heart, knowing that her clear words indicated that she was still in control of her thoughts and needs.

“I… I was worried about you. I wasn’t going to relax until I could be sure that you were safe from wandering villagers.”

It was true. With the decrease in disappearances, villagers have been getting curious and too sure of themselves, exploring closer and closer to Oryth’s territory. With her heat cycle upon her, you couldn’t bare the thought of them taking advantage of her weakened state.

She huffed in frustration, whether it was from your disobedience or her discomfort, you didn’t know.

Her clawed feet scratched at the earth as she stalked her way towards you, grabbing the hem of your shirt and carrying you to her mound.

From this height, you could see the mountains of books, trinkets and crystals that decorated the cavern, your draconic love always having a need for knowledge and shiny things.

The scaled beauty curled up on her mound, snapping you out of your thought process. She purred deeply, placing your figure down as delicately as possibly.

But her sharp hearing picked up on the pitter patter of adventurous villagers in the forest, prompting her body to tense up, curling around you in a possessive manner. She growled and hissed, the intrusion forcing her heat in full throttle, filling the cavern with the stench of her need to mate.

The danger was clear as day, you knew that if the villagers were close enough, they would smell her and attempt to investigate.

With that in mind, you grasped her snout and hugged it to your frame, which was still cooled from the brisk air outside, no doubt cooling her fever.

Your natural scent and the contrast in temperature on her scales proved to be grounding, her body slumped out of its protective stance as her eyes closed in a slow blink. With that, the scent began to dissipate, and so did the echo of the intruders’ steps, signifying that they had ventured elsewhere for the time being.

You pulled away, albeit slowly, after a little bit longer, giving the beautiful dragon a sharp glare, “Are you trying to get yourself caught?”

A huff a smoke smacked you in the face, prompting you to scrunch up your expression as her head moved to curl around you and rest onto your back.

“Hush now, Welp. I want some rest and I am finally comfortable.”

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Reblogs are appreciated <3

#dragon x reader #exophilia #reader insert #female dragon #gender neutral reader #dragon #sfw #fantasy #oneshot #heat cycle #x reader

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im-just-a-mississippi-girl · 1 year

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Begin Again

Pairing: Wheeler Yuta x reader

Category: Slight Angst/Fluff

Word count: 2,532

Summary: After being burned in a previous relationship, you find it hard to trust, open up, and love again. Moving to a new city with a new job, you’re ready to begin again, leaving the past where it belongs and cautiously opening up to new adventures and opportunities. What happens when you meet your neighbor across the street? Can you learn to trust and love again or will you keep your guard up and push him away?

Warnings: Swearing, female reader but no description of reader

Requested by: @rubyred1980 I hope you love it as much as I do! ❤️

You can find the original request post here!

A/N: I thought about this for a little bit and ultimately decided that precious baby Yoots was perfect for this! Also, I feel SO HORRIBLE I completely forgot about this request! So to make up for it, I tried to make this as long as I could. Also, as I was writing this Taylor Swift’s song Begin Again popped in my head, and I thought it was a perfect fit so there you go! Oh! And bonus points if you can find the title reference to a previous Wheeler Yuta fic I wrote!

Masterlist

Taglist

Gif is not mine. Credit to owner

A new job. A new city. New friends. It was time to begin again.

The job you accepted was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The neighborhood you took up residency in was calm and friendly, majority of you neighbors had stopped by to give you a warm welcome.

It wasn’t until a week later when your neighbor across the street pulled into their driveway, this was the last neighbor you had yet to meet. You stepped out onto your small front porch, casually watching while sipping on your tea, nestled in the comfiest chair you could find at the local furniture store. You almost choked on your cup of tea when you finally saw just who your final neighbor was — professional wrestler, Wheeler Yuta.

Wheeler had made a few trips to and from his car before he noticed you. He waved to you, smiling his adorable smile that made you stifle a giggle. You were a wrestling fan, having watched numerous companies and promotions over the years and still to this day. Needless to say, you were familiar with Wheeler Yuta. Never in your wildest dreams did you imagine that one day you’d be living across the street from him.

Yuta ventured over to your house, smile still on his face. You were so nervous but attempted to play it cool, even though you knew you would probably end up making a fool of yourself.

Wheeler introduced himself to you, and you did the same. He was sweet just like you thought. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell him you already knew who he was. You were surprised that the conversation flowed so smoothly. Turns out Wheeler’s easy to talk to and you shared a few things in common, like your love for professional wrestling and that’s when you finally admitted that you were a fan of his. Boy, did you blush hard when Wheeler’s face lit up, that smile and those eyes were more than enough to make you swoon.

As the months went on, Wheeler would make it a point to stop by your house and let you know he was back home from the road, leaving you a little souvenir from whatever city he wrestled in as a thank you for watching his house while he was gone. You always told him not to get you anything, but your words fell on deaf ears every single time. The little trinkets or keychains would always bring a smile to your face and brighten any bad day.

You began missing Wheeler more and more each time he left, knowing you were doing the one thing you’ve been refusing to do for months — fall in love. Your last relationship was far from a fairytale. You found out after four months that he didn’t truly care about you but more about his reputation and appearance, and unfortunately, you were included in that reputation and appearance.

Your ex-boyfriend didn’t like a lot of the clothes you would wear, making side remarks until you finally caved and changed. He was never on time to anything, always forgetting dates, anniversaries, even your own birthday. He wasn’t very gentlemanly or chivalrous like he had been in the first two months. He was always so serious, never wanting to do anything fun unless his friends were around, and then the fun was at your expense more often than not. You found out on Instagram that he had been seeing another woman at the same time. He broke your heart, your trust, and you hate to admit, but he broke you. You’re still at a loss on why you let that relationship last so long, maybe because you had gotten used to it, or maybe because you were scared — scared to leave, thinking that you deserved that type of relationship.

As time went on, you and Wheeler grew closer, hanging out when he had a little bit of free time. Each time you would hang out with him, you always try to keep the conversation from drifting to the topic of love and relationships, you didn’t want Wheeler thinking negatively of you because of your ex or past choices. Little did you know Wheeler had some bad relationship stories of his own. He wanted to talk about them, you two had discussed everything except for that topic, but he noticed you always changed the subject or steered the conversation to something else. He didn’t want to push you to open up, thinking you needed time and knowing he would be more than ready to listen when that time came.

One night, while the pair of you were hanging out, you were the one to bring up your love life — well, with the help of some random movie playing in the background. You felt ready. You felt like you could trust him enough, that he wouldn’t judge you. You remember pouring your heart out to him, Wheeler gently pulling you into a hug, telling you that you didn’t deserve that, and that you deserve so much better. You couldn’t help but break down even more at how sweet and gentle he was being with you. It made you want to fall in love with him so much more, but you still kept your walls up.

Once you were calmed down, Wheeler told you some his bad relationship stories, hearing his stories helped, knowing he had been burned too, that it wasn’t just you. Despite your dating history being similar, there were some differences — your heartbreak and mistreatment was recent, still fresh in your mind whereas his had been a few years ago.

After that night, Wheeler would go out of his way to make sure you felt appreciated and cared for. He hated that you had been through all that; he wanted you to know you were important to him. He knew you weren’t ready for a relationship yet, but his feelings for you grew from friendship to wanting more. He knew after you shared your past with him that he loved you. The way you talked about what happened, how you let him see you all vulnerable, how you clung to him when he hugged you — that’s what made him realize he was in deep. All Wheeler wanted was to show you what true, healthy love was. He wanted to put your broken heart back together if you’d let him, and you really wanted him to. The thought of loving someone again, of letting someone in on that level, of putting your trust in someone else’s hands was terrifying let alone actually doing it.

Wheeler took his time with you, going at your pace, making sure not to rush or pressure you. He would do little things like checking on you during the day regardless if he was traveling or at home, continuing to bring you souvenirs from the road, taking you out on little adventures. He was doing all the things your ex refused or just wouldn’t do. Wheeler Yuta was making you slowly believe in love again.

You missed him like crazy when he was gone, constantly checking your phone for calls or texts from him, thinking about him when certain songs came on the radio or your playlist, counting down the days until his return. That’s when you finally decided to give in to your feelings for him — you loved him, and something was telling you to risk it, despite being scared. You decided you’d tell him of your feelings when he was home again.

You spent the rest of the week going over what you would say, preparing for the worst as you did so. When the time came, you were a nervous wreck, shaking, stuttering, your throat stayed dry no matter how much water you drank.

Wheeler pulled into the driveway of his home, not bothering to retrieve his bags from his car, but rather head to your house. He was excited to be home but more excited to see you.

You met him on the porch, nervous smile on your face, happy he was back but nervous about your confession. Wheeler pulled you into a bone crushing hug to which you returned with the same intensity, at least you tried to. “Can’t…. breathe….” You managed to choke out, tapping Wheeler on the back to better grab his attention.

He immediately let you go, looking embarrassed, “Sorry. I just missed you...” He paused, inhaling to settle his nerves. Wheeler knew he was falling for you, but he didn’t realize how much, until he was on the road the next day after he left.

“I missed you too…” You whispered in reply. You took a deep breath before making your feelings known to him. You can do this! It’s now or never. Don’t chicken out. This could be a wonderful thing. You’ll be okay if he rejects you. Come on, go for it! You gave yourself an internal pep talk, now you were ready. “Wheeler, I have something I need to tell you.” You inhale once more. Wheeler’s eyes locked on yours, confusion and worry were present throughout his features. He nodded and motioned for you to continue, not wanting to interrupt your thoughts and courage. “For the longest time I believed that love was a myth. Then you came along and proved to me that myths can sometimes be real too. I care about you. I trust you. I feel safe with you. You make me happier than I thought was possible. Life feels empty when I’m not around you, and I’m so scared that you’ll never want to hold my hand again…. and your hand is the only hand I want to hold.” You confessed, blurting all your feelings and emotions out before your turned into a stuttering mess like you had been earlier when you practiced your speech.

You couldn’t bare to look Wheeler in the eyes, too nervous and a little embarrassed to be honest. You were scared of what he reaction was. Did you just ruin everything? Will he run for the hills? Were you too damaged? Would he want to continue taking things slow with you? Would he really and truly want to help you trust and love again? Was his prior actions and words meaningless? Were they just to trick you into thinking he was worth a shot? Were you going to regret this? Would he laugh in your face and say it was just a game? You hoped your nerves and anxiety was getting the better of you, but after your previous relationship you couldn’t be too sure of anything anymore.

Wheeler was speechless. He was surprised you were ready to let him in, to let him take care of you the best he could, to love him, to begin again. He thought you would need more time before this moment, but he must have underestimated how much of an impact he was having on you. He knew he had to say something or do something quick before you ran off. He knew that confession was hard for you, and he didn’t want you to feel bad or panic and regret everything you just said, everything you two worked on and built up to this point.

Wheeler gently reached out and lifted your head up, his index finger under your chin as he did so. His eyes were full of emotion: happiness, hope, excitement, admiration, and love. He kept his eyes locked on yours, looking deeply. He saw worry, fear, anxiety, a hint of hope along with sprinkles of love. You wanted to cry, eyes welling up with tears that had yet to spill over. You hands were shaking, heart racing, mouth and throat excruciatingly dry. Why hasn’t he said anything yet? It must be okay. He’s still here. He didn’t look angry. He’s not laughing at you. This has to be a good sign, right?

You felt Wheeler’s finger leave your chin, his hands calmly and firmly encased yours. “I can’t stop smiling when I look at you. Your hand feels so natural in mine. It’s like the gaps in mine were made for your hand. I’ve never felt better than I do when we’re close. I want you by my side. Wanna know why?” He paused, a blush filled smile growing on his face. “Because I love you, every part of you. Even the parts you don’t like.” At this point in his speech, you didn’t notice that Wheeler’s hands had left yours and were now resting gently on either side of your face, caressing your cheeks and searching your eyes for any type of reaction.

Tears slipped from your eyes, a small smile making its way onto your face. “Wheeler…. kiss me better….” You quietly sniffled, wanting nothing more than to keep him as close to you as possible, to never let him go.

Wheeler didn’t have to be told twice. He initiated the kiss like you implied, slow and steady, head tilting to the side, nose gently brushing your cheek as he closed the distance. You froze momentarily before letting your eyes fall closed. His lips were slightly chapped but not unpleasant, a little rough but smooth enough to create the best sensation. You could hear your heart beating loudly and rapidly, so loudly you were positive Wheeler could hear it too.

Wheeler’s heart was pounding as well. He hoped you couldn’t hear it or feel it for that matter. He wanted to be cool, calm, and steady for you, knowing that’s what you needed — stability and reassurance. He wrapped his arms around you, holding you close to his body. You melted into his embrace, hands gliding up his chest to slip into his hair, holding firmly onto the back of his head, keeping him close as well, afraid he’ll slip away and you’ll wake up from some sick, cruel dream.

You didn’t want the kiss to end and neither did Wheeler, but unfortunately, your need for oxygen became too great. Slowly, the pair of you pulled apart, foreheads resting against one another, both your eyes still closed, savoring the moment you two just shared. As your breathing slowed, you finally opened your eyes to find Wheeler looking at you with admiration filled eyes, a wide grin full of happiness present as well. His smile was contagious. You studied him just for a few moments, really taking it all in. The more your eyes ran over his frame, the more your heart swelled, your mind traveled back to the beginning and all the little things he did for you over the course of these countless months. The little souvenirs, the sweet hang outs, the patience and gentleness he showed you, the phone calls and texts to check on you while he was traveling proved to you just how much he liked you and what you meant to him. All those things were exactly what you needed after the shitty relationship you were last in. You came to the final conclusion that you were in love with Wheeler Yuta, and you wanted nothing more than to take a chance on romance with him and to officially begin again.

General taglist: @legit9thlunaticwarrior @plentyoffandoms @1dluver13xx @sunshinevirus @wwenhlimagines @crowleysqueenofhell

Wheeler Yuta taglist: @sheinthatfandom @gaysimpingmess

A/N: If you want to be added to the taglist, feel free to ask, message, or let me know in a comment!

#wheeler yuta #wheeler yuta x reader #wheeler yuta imagine #wheeler yuta imagines #wheeler yuta fanfic #wheeler yuta fanfiction #wheeler yuta fluff #wheeler yuta angst #aew #all elite wrestling #aew imagine #aew imagines #aew fluff #aew angst #aew fanfiction #aew fanfic #aew fic

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dark-angel-of-muses · 1 year

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Little Comforts for @breannasfluff

Wing Au for Linked Universe

Twilight sniffed the air again, annoyed as he trotted through the dense brush as a wolf. Wild had once again wandered off, and the magpie had a terrible habit of finding the most difficult-to-find nooks and crannies to shove himself into. Logically, he knew it was a good survival instinct honed by his adventure, but every time he had to go fish his cub out from under a bush or in a hole that was too small to count as a cave, it took hours.

It didn't help that Wild moved erratically, obviously having zig-zagged to check out every cool mushroom or insect that caught his eye. This meant, naturally, that his trail looped back over itself and was so incomprehensible that Twilight wasn't sure if he was running in circles at some points.

When he finally heard the telltale beeps of the Sheikah slate signaling Wild nearby, he internally groaned in relief, immediately shifting back to Hylian. His cub had perched himself up on a ledge right under the overhang of a cliff. Near impossible to spot if it wasn't for the unnatural noises coming from the tech in his hands.

Twilight beat his wings to help him get up to Wild. It was awkward, Four or Hyrule were much better at controlled vertical movement, but his cub had him trained on flying in tight spaces and odd directions. His wings were too big to get to Wild's little alcove while open. So he overshot to the top of the cliff so he could snap them close and climb down.

He had been mentally poring over of ways to admonish his cub, some other way to deliver the "Don't Go Hiding Without Telling Someone" Lecture that went through one ear and out the other, but on his trip to the top of the cliff, he had spotted something that paused his annoyed train of thought. Wet tracks had been clearly visible across Wild's cheeks, and his eyes were unfocused and hazy.

All thoughts of annoyance fled to be replaced by worry. Was his cub ok, did he remember something, was he hurt, was he safe? If he could reach his cub as a wolf, he would transform just to provide the comfort of a furry body laying across Wild's lap. As it stood, his Hylian form would have to do.

As he swung down from the cliff's overhang, he made sure to move as slowly as he could, as not to spook his protégé. It was clear Wild had seen him and knew he was coming, because the cub had set down the slate and was staring at the ground, looking guilty. Ah, so maybe Twilight's lectures had set in. It wasn't satisfying to see that, not when it was causing guilt to fall over his cub's face as he tried to stifle his tears.

"I'm sorry." Wild's wings were beginning to curl around him, blocking out the world on instinct. "I couldn't- Sky was talking about his Goron friend and then all of a sudden I remembered Daruk and I don't know why it hurt so much so I tried to take a walk but nothing was helping so I tried to look at Zelda's pictures to remember but it hurts-t'" Wild's feathers were poofing, raised as he started working himself into hysterics.

Twilight placed a gentle hand on the top of Wild's wing and pushed it away. With anyone else, they were liable to be punched as Wild snapped his wings open when startled and upset, but Twilight had enough practice to know to make comforting little growls and firm yet gentle pressure that slowly coaxed him out of his shell.

"It's OK to grieve, we've all lost someone." As Twilight pushed away Wild's wings, he crawled into the space next to the magpie. On instinct, Wild pushed forward to bury his face in his mentor's shoulder. Twilight wrapped his wing around Wild in a practiced way while bringing a hand up to run through Wild's distressed feathers in a soothing motion.

He spared a glance over Wild's shoulder, and tightened his hold on his cub when he saw the photo of the five champions, all startled as the goron hugged them close. Twilight knew Wild's pain intimately. When trying to find comfort in a memory suddenly leads it to hurt all the worse. He had days where memories of Midna's sass would help calm him from a storm, and others where it was the wind blowing in the hurricane.

He cooed at his cub, scooching back into the alcove to lean his back against the wall and firmly take the magpie in his arms. He'd give the others a signal that he found Wild soon, his raptor call could stretch for a mile around, but he would wait until his cub was settled.

After all, by the way his breathing was starting to even and feathers rested from their upset state, it was clear that they were going to be okay.

#linked universe #wing au #hurt/confort #this probably ends to abruptly but k wanted to get it out before totk reaches my house ok #fic

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matrioshka · 11 days

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I played through the pixel remasters! Here’s my ranking

A little prelude - while I have some interest in RPG systems and have tried to get into JRPGs many times, I’ve rarely finished these games start to finish. I get annoyed pretty easily by a lot of the things I’m sure you’ve heard brought up before and I’m easily overwhelmed by progression systems.

This list might seem a bit weird but it’s purely based on my subjective experience with the games - I probably didn’t appreciate story moments much if I was feeling generally frustrated with game, and I might feel differently if I ever go back and play them again.

2 > 1 > 6 > 5 > 3 > 4

FF1

I ended up enjoying this game a lot. You get a really good sense of progression (probably because the PR plays a lot faster than the famicom version? 30 hours of gametime cut down to 10 hours makes the game feel pretty tight!). So many different modes of transportation, and you unlock them at a pretty steady pace. I like how the world opens up, and getting a boat or creating a new canal to sail out of feels a lot cooler than finding a key or something. Some things were a bit rough starting out - I don’t really like how debuffs work in these games, and when you use them and they don’t work it’s not really clear why, whether you got unlucky or the target is immune. I don’t think the combat is ever really engaging on its own, and the dungeon crawling is this odd mix of being grueling and also kind of trivial with quick saves. It’s mostly overarching progression that’s fun.

The story was something I ended up enjoying a lot - it feels really creative and ambitious. A lot of the story beats I can imagine being little D&D adventures, you know, but there are some moments that really stood out to me. A kid in a town says they saw a meteor land in a waterfall. You go to cave behind the waterfall and find a broken down robot. Later, you go to the hidden city in the sky and realize this is where it fell from! It’s really cool foreshadowing while being evocative. This one moment and revelation has stood out to me more than any other moment in these 6 games and I’m not completely sure why. Maybe I ended up getting a lot out of the storytelling with this game because I chose to view everything through the lens of it being an NES game, but that’s me!

FF2

This game has really stuck with me. It’s been a year since I started playing these games and I still like thinking about it, and when I finished the game I wanted to talk about it with everyone I could. The story landed with me like none of the games after really did - you get this really profound sense of sacrifice and loss running through the whole game. Every tragic moment is executed really well, especially considering that this being made for the same system as 1. I think it’s partially because of the text limitation that gives the game a sense of restraint and focus, but talking to a child who was waiting for their town hero to come back and seeing them realize that he never will hit me really hard. The rotating party member mechanic ended up working great throughout the game and I like how the designers were intentional with how each party member was designed - Minwu is a great character to have at the beginning, as a powerful support character that will make fighting a lot easier without killing everything for you. Gordon, however, as a character struggling with his courage and living up to his brother, is kind of dead weight when you first get him.

Like the first game, I might have enjoyed this game’s story more because of how I engaged with it. The gameplay, battle to battle, is not any more fun than FF1, but I enjoyed the sense of customization and growth. Casting spells feels better because even when they miss you know you’re getting better with them and it doesn’t seem like a wasted turn. When I ended the game I had a lot of ideas about how I might have set up the characters differently, which is a good feeling. Also, there was a moment in the game I found really funny - you find these random, empty ‘trap’ rooms throughout a bunch of the game’s dungeons. Late into the game, you go to the dragoon castle, which has no random encounters, and it also has these random empty rooms. It feels like a gag? I don’t know.

FF3

I really enjoyed the scale of this game. The sense of progression is great, and I loved exploring all of the initial island bit by bit before revealing the wider world. This game has fun story moments, and the cutscenes are definitely more animated. The overarching adventure didn’t end up really sticking with me - maybe I would appreciate it more if I revisited the game, but not many of the emotional beats landed. (One of my favorite moments was finding the retired Dark Knight town, which is really sad and kind of sweet in concept and is a really good example of Final Fantasy’s charm).

The class system is neat, but my favorite thing about it is that the class designs are visually very cute. I don’t know if I actually enjoyed playing around with it all that much in practice - I would get used to it as the games went on but I didn’t like rearranging my characters over and over again and I didn’t feel a desire to experiment more than necessary. This is a weird case where I think I enjoyed the previous games’ gameplay more because I had to think about it less, which doesn’t seem like a good trait for a game to have!

FF4

I really don’t like the ATB system, and this kind of spoils the rest of the SNES games. My experience with it is harshest in 4 because it was my first time with it, which is probably unfair to this particular game. But it gave combat a really odd and unsatisfying feeling, where there are moments where the system rushes you and moments where you’re waiting for things to happen, and the way the system interacts with the combat animations gives everything a start-and-stop pacing. The thing I like the least about the combat in these games is the general combat speed (how long it takes to go through a turn of combat, the animation speed for each character, etc) and 4 makes it a lot worse.

This game has some great setpieces and story moments. The way characters move around gives all of the cutscenes a lot of energy, it’s very fun. The story didn’t end up resonating with me very much - the storyline you have with Cecil, as well as similar arcs in 6, feel to me like the most simple version of this kind of “morally complex” character arc. There’s a feeling I get when I play certain games or watch certain shows where I think, this would seem really deep and revelatory if I was a teenager. Sometimes that feeling is endearing, sometimes it’s not! I enjoyed the presentation a lot, there was a lot of fun spectacle, but it didn’t leave any kind of impression on me.

FF5

I liked the story in this one more. There seems to be a pretty big benefit to the restrained party size - lots of variety in gameplay, but characters get more time to develop interconnected bonds over the course of the entire game rather than have that development spread out. And each character gets a lot of their own emotional beats. (The moment where Faris’ dragon dies really hits hard. Really good presentation, it keeps getting better!) I don’t think any of the characters are all that complex but I liked spending so much time with them. None of the funny moments did anything for me but I think this game more or less strikes a pretty good tone. The overarching story gets less interesting to me as it goes along, though.

A big problem I had with these games, particular 4 onward, is that the process of trial and error is kind of broken. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad to have to try things out in order to discover what works, but these games are kind of bad at making it clear when you’ve made an error and when you’ve done something that works. Did I miss or is the boss immune to this? Does the boss just attack a lot or is it counterattacking, and if so, does that mean I’m meant to find some other way to hurt it or do I just push through the damage? The liquid flame boss was super egregious to me because I repeatedly came to the wrong conclusion about how the boss works due to the shifting mechanic. In most of these fights there is *a* logic to how the boss works, you only feel that logic in retrospect - it’s not like acting on your intuition or trying to apply real-world logic is going to work in most cases, so the moments where it’s necessary feel more like point & click puzzles than creative combat challenges.

This is really weird, right? I enjoyed the gameplay in 1 & 2 way more than this game even though they’re infinitely less complex, and in retrospect the reason why I enjoyed them more than this game is that it was much harder to get confused by bosses with no mechanics.

The class mechanics were fun. I played around with it a lot more than I did with 3.

FF6

Really good presentation! I’d played a bit of chrono trigger before starting this one and so I couldn’t help but compare, and this is not nearly as well put together visually or in terms of spectacle, but it’s still fun. The first half of the game feels almost like a (kind of random?) collection of fun scenarios and set pieces connected by cave crawls. The humor still didn’t do anything for me but the story has a nice mix of goofy stuff and serious plot - out of all of these games it feels like the first game to successfully emulate the feeling of a fun adventure comic or cartoon aimed at teens, and it reminds me a lot of the kind of games that I got really into as a teenager.

By this point I’d come to terms a bit more with ATB. After 6 games though I can’t say I’ve come to a point where I enjoy the combat - it’s mostly something I push through in stride. The progression is fun - I don’t know how I feel about espers and I’m kind of glad I only realized how the stat boosts worked until the second half of the game because I would have wasted a lot of time on it earlier if I knew I could have been optimizing it. My biggest revelation by far though was that, rather than me not understanding how the class mechanics work, most of them are actually just useless and I can just ignore them. It’s odd because there are definitely times where the game definitely, definitely does want you to use them (like with Celes’ runic ability), and it seems to make sense that if there’s a unique action to a character that must be key to how you use them, right? I don’t know.

Overall, I feel good having played these games. I’ve heard a lot about them over the years - I can’t say I’ve gone into them blind, even though I tried to take each game on their own terms. As much as I’ve complained here, I have to say that I’ve played a bit of 7, 9, 10, 13, and 15, and I even mentioned Chrono Trigger - but I haven’t beaten any of those games! There’s something about these ones that made me want to see them through. They're special!

#final fantasy

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vivi-the-goblin · 1 year

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We really did go through a lot to find pokemon in gen 3, didn't we? Especially since this was the days before consistent internet access, reliable guides, and solid coverage. You want Milotic? ok, so there are 6 random unmarked tiles in this entire river which have a 50% spawn rate, and it re-randomizes if you talk to an NPC on the other side of the map. You find it? Cool, go to the contests and raise its beauty stat to max with pokeblocks, remembering that if you don't raise it to max within a small number of pokeblocks it will just refuse to eat more. How many pokeblocks? depends. Anyway, Congrats! Oh, you want the regi's? ok, in the middle of a swirling maze of sea tiles that shove you, off in the middle of nowhere, find a small Diving spot and go to wall. There's a message in braille for you there saying to dive again, hope you know what braille is. Inside are many more braille tablets. go to the back wall, use dig, which I hope you have, and also I hope you have a waillord in the last slot of your party and relicanth (5% spawn in underwater grass on 2 routes) in the first. Do that, and 3 random rocks in the middle of nowhere all over the map will open, your hint to this is "a door opened somewhere far away." Find those obscure caves for more obscure braille hints like "wait twice" (don't move for 2 minutes). Congrats! careful not to knock them out though, only one chance. Oh, look the TV's flashing, but it's not the name rater show like it has been the whole game, it's a news report! It's somewhere, and it's red! What is it, and where? Red! Unknown to you, it's a different somewhere every time you enter a door, but good luck! Especially since it immediately runs and keeps the same HP between encounters, make sure not to knock it out :) Wynaut? Well this random tiny town has an old man saying whether he can see an island today. In the 1/10923 to 1/65536 chance that he can (depends on how many pokemon you have with you), go in the direction of that window and you'll find a new island with them. Bagon? previously unreachable section in a midgame cave, very back room, chance to spawn. Hope you aren't wearing repels! Beldam? Yeah it's in the champ's house in a corner of the map, a building and city you've otherwise looted already. Spheal, Snorunt? Yeah there's a cave whose tide changes throughout the day, go there at different times and there's different parts available. solve puzzles at both times and you can get a shell bell! And remember, this was 2003. Parents were either very controlling of your internet or outright banning it in fear of you getting kidnapped or getting their info hacked. Internet safety was taught in schools because it was a wild west where you could easily stumble onto anything, less corporate sanitization than a run down subway system. So running to it wasn't most people's first thought, and there was a good chance nobody would have what you were looking for, if you even knew how to find the right people. There's something wonderful to be said for those days. If you DID manage to get the regi's, you were likely the only kid at school to, and you felt like an ADVENTURER! You found old ruins in hidden untouched corners, with a language you may have never heard of before! You deciphered it and solved thier riddles to find something ancient and unlike anything you'd seen! And all by yourself, or the forum you stumbled on to figure it out with other explorers! It felt amazing! That said, they were right to dial it back in the future. Gen 4 probably had the best overall balance on these. Still, every time people get upset over a Malamar or Runerigus, I can't help but smile. That was part of the appeal, once upon a time. It always feels like they're saying "this one's for you, thanks for sticking around."

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lailakotori · 1 year

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Headcanon Illinois is grandchild of noir!mark | Illinois x GN!reader

It’s not a request, Just some my imagination about the theory about Illinois and Noir!mark like- Their family? I don’t know how to explain but- you will find out in this story!

btw i forgot the credit who think canon if one of yall rememeber or even saw that, pls told which thier ac i want to the credit so much.

Summary: Illinois meet the person who be mysterious.

TW : Fluff, Angst, Illinois is the grandchild of Noir!mark, Y/n in the wkm adwm ahwm and swm are the same person, mention a past life, mention first love, Some violence of misunderstanding.

As Illinois remember, His grandpa, Mark always talks about his adventure in space. He’s told how cool or beautiful is it but not as much like his first love… The only love will never forgot until he’s pass. Of course he love his grandma but she didn’t the first thing on his mind. He fall in love with his captain who brave, clever, beautiful and handsome But they never know his feeling while theirs gone. He belive that one day they will come back.

Illinois has a theory like- They ran away with another crew without telling mark before until he realize that you will never come back, and also Question why He loves them so much. Did they make a love potion? Or just because mark is a simp.

Illinois didn’t seem to be care that much, Until he meet Y/n, The person who keep thier past life.

He meet them in the cave and meet them in space ship for twice. Then he meet they again but their seem look tried, Trying sleep or live in peace like old person.

“Long time no see, gorgeous” He says with a smile, Y/n looks at him and says back “Glade to see you, Illinois” “You look tired today….Want some vacation? I will tour around with you if you want, baby” They shook their head “Thanks but no, I’m too old about this stuff”

Too old? It’s make Illinois Question, Becaues you look young and pretty. what that suppost to mean???

He know that if he try to find out your past life, It’s kinda rude. But he still trying find out.

He begs you to adventure with him, At first you denied him until he’s annoy make you accepte his request.

Both of you adventure everywhere and have some conversation but It’s didn’t helpful to mention your past.

Also, he has weird feelings for you… Heart beat fast, Want to near you, Want to see your smile and heard laugh. He trying avoid you but it’s make harder and harder, Finally he fall for it.

One day, He’s want you visit his granpa. Because he want to make you impress and boasting.

But He didn’t know who you are…Even who you were to be.

When Illinois and you visit mark, The situation change… Every thing you trying to hind open up because him.

“….Long time no see, captian” mark smile weakly “Glade to meet you, mark. How your life? This is your granson?” You sit on the chair while Ililnois shock “hmm….It’s great but it’s will much if you stay with me and yeah…That is my grandson. What about you, captian. Where are you been? Why you look so tried more than before…” You bite your bottom lip with nerves “Long story….and don’t worry about its, It’s end now. Just…some nightmare and think some past”

When you end conversation, You and Illinois are polemic about your past life or your Identity.

“Why you don’t tell me that you’re that captian???”

“It’s not that importhan beside you didn’t ask that.”

“Jeez…. You’re freaking Selfish you know that?”

“Excuse me?”

“You run away from my granpa, Not tell reason why you go even last goodbye. Just run away start new life and look at you- Still gorgeous never look old. I wonder why you act like you care-”

“You don’t know me, Ililnois”

“THEN TELL ME, why are you look like-”

“BECUASE I’M DEAD”

“….”

“I’m dead for long time ago….Before i meet you and noir mark, and the death make me immortal but this immortal HURT me Illinois. You don’t know what i saw, you don’t even know why i’m always meet all of you. I’m die and stuck in fucking mirror nobody help me or care me, Damian and celine ran away because their revenge. AND THAT ASSHOLE MARK USE ME LIKE I AM TOY”

“….y/n”

“You think that I’m live in peace and perfect? Well, you’re WRONG. I’m in fucking loop hell, see everything and remember it. I saw the bad ending and the Good ending. You don’t know that days, The days i trying to protect your grandpa with my own life, The day I sacrifice myself for all of them. When It ends…. I’m gone becuase Asshole mark, He didn’t let me say goodbye to him or even give last hug!”

Now, Illinois understand the truth. The past of pain and lose, He feel bad for them and want to say sorry and listen the real story of you.

He’s apologized, sit beside and listen to what you saw. Ask detailed who they are or how you feel.

While end from visited noir mark. Illinois leads you to a mansion, Let’s you meet other Egos. It’d make he’s smile, to see you talk all of them in a calm voice. Besiad… Darkiplier and Wilford are hug you as old friends.

He’s stick with you all the time no matter what, Wanna go toilet? I’m come with you, Wanna sleep? Sleep on my lap.

When you have nightmare, He will hug you make you breath slowly calm until you feel fine.

He’s call you ‘Old men/women/dear’ or ‘Captian’

Some time, You saw him as noir mark how such a flirt to him. You adore him as Freinds first untilhe come closer.

He’s confess his love to you by hold your hand and kiss them, Told how you look or how you’re so fine.

After that, You and him also live in peace like old couple. Some little kiss, some words of love before he adventure. If you want to with him, He prefer let’s you come with him.

#lailakotori #canon x reader #canon x y/n #markiplier egos x reader #markiplier fanfiction #markiplier fandom #illinois x reader #illinois #noir mark #self insert #illinois x y/n

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sky-squido · 2 years

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Linking Adventure!!!

OKAY SO I FINALLY CAVED

i’ve been daydreaming about link redesigns for years but always figured it was too big a project or nobody would want Yet Another Link Redesign but i actually love every link redesign i’ve seen and there have been more and more lately (props you guys they’re all awesome) so here are mine! i have no intentions to turn this into a full AU even if i do have the plot for it kicking around my brain, i just wanted to share my fun character ideas :3 obligatory disclaimer that this is not LinkedUniverse (or linkedmaze, or linkverse, or bonus links, or—) so don’t tag it as such!

it’s called “Linking Adventure” because *cough* maybe it was an adventure but also because the Point of the adventure is to link the three timelines together before the universe disintegrates. fun! this selection of links, then, is all the ones who get recruited for the quest.

here’s how that went down btw:

Hylia/Zelda (“Vega” in this AU): UGGGGH SkSw Link (“Altair” in this AU): what’s wrong? Vega: I JUST COMMUNED WITH THE GOLDEN GODDESSES Altair: oh no Vega: THEY LET THIS NINE YEAR OLD BREAK THE FABRIC OF REALITY. TWICE Altair: oh no Vega: AND NOW THEY’RE TRYING TO FIX IT Altair: yay? Vega: BY SMASHING ALL THE REALITIES TOGETHER Altair: oh dear. where is this? Vega: in like a buncha millennia Altair: oH. so wait where will you be you at the time? Vega: I doN’t KnOW! Altair: can i help? Vega: yes please Altair: cool. how do i do that. Vega: I’m gonna yell at Nayru and get her to yeet you into the future. there’s three heroes, one in each timeline, whose help you’re gonna need Altair: nice Vega: Oh also go grab the Hero of Legend, too. He’s pals with her oracle and will definitely come in handy Altair: sick Vega: cool okay so to stabilize the Convergence you’re going to need to find the full Triforce in each era and merge them together—that should hold most of reality together pretty solidly. you’ll need each timeline’s master sword to do that, though, since it’s the only artifact strong enough to withstand that kind of power. Also you can’t bring your own Master Sword because that might break reality. i’m sorry. is that too much? you’ve done so much already, you don’t have to— Altair: this isn’t like last time, though. i’ve got more experience, there’s no demon king to fight, and you’ll be safe. that’s all that matters. Vega: thank you. so much. Altair: just don’t erect any statues in my honor while i’m gone Vega: no promises!

and then he went and found everyone and they had a little adventure. here’s the gang! (transcriptions and clarifications of the handwritten text under the cut)

And here’s just some concept sketches about how they’d all fit together as a team

transcription: Favored battle positions (this is really loose) Wind— ranged support Altair— taking out main enemy’s weak point Fire— high damage output Traveler— distract enemy Night— misc.

Anyway! don’t expect more content of this! i just don’t have the patience for comics and i wouldn’t want to tell the story any other way.

cool! transcriptions below the cut:

FIRE: “The Big Guns” [LoZ 1 & 2] 19 yo (she/her) Nicknamed herself for her favorite spell - uses she/her, don’t question it - has Down Syndrome & ASD - is mostly nonverbal - can speak with a stutter but prefers to sign - if she gets emotional while signing, her hands Will catch fire - abandoned as a baby and raised by fairies - insane magical potential - near-constantly casting life to counteract various health complications - her favorite spell is fire. - she did not hide from Ganon’s cult - fiercely protective & loyal - is very no-nonsense; to the point - when she casts fire, the ends of her scarf flare out like fairy wings - her hands always glow faintly so she can be “heard” in the dark - solves problems with fire - prefers to speak with actions over voice or sign

TRAVELER: [aLttP, OoA, OoS, LA, ALBW] 17 yo (he/him) Nicknamed himself for his passion in life - LOVES adventuring & traveling - hates fighting—prefers to avoid/distract enemies - incredibly fast & agile—attacks by surprise - the lightning strike just before Koholint made him almost completely deaf - and gave him arrhythmia (tachycardia) - gets chest pains/short of breath sometimes - when he’s backed into a corner, he’ll go feral with his magic rods - kid’s a walking encyclopedia - super kindhearted—cannot refuse someone who needs help - incredibly curious & nosy (if someone needs help, he will find out about it) - prefers to sign, but can still talk, since he could hear for most his life, but sometimes he’s hard to understand b/c he’s been deaf for a year. - his eyes are really, REALLY vibrant blue ever since he used the Triforce the second time—they glow faintly in the dark - somehow more level-headed when in danger than when he’s safe - he’s like a freaking cockroach he WILL NOT die - damage reduction items have no effect on pain <3 - pretends Koholint never happened (claims to have only been on 4 adventures) - ✨avoidance coping✨ (Dialogue Sample): “hey, is this place upsetting you? If it helps, I’ve catalogued 4 separate exit routes and have strategies set up for handling all the monsters we’re likely to encounter here!” (Outfit Description): he has pegasus boots, the magic cape from aLttP (which turns him invisible and invincible), the Protection Ring from OoA/OoS (which makes him take 1 heart of damage from every attack), the red tunic from ALBW (which reduces damage taken by 75%), and the Heart Ring L-2 from OoA/OoS (which heals him over time)

WIND [WW+PH] 14 yo (he/him) Nicknamed himself for his position as Wind Waker and his love for the ocean’s breezes - ADHD (hyperactive) and misophonia - he will flip out if a noise bothers him too much - somehow, he always seems upbeat—master of mind over matter - never loses sight of the big picture - can be curled up in a ball, crying, hands over his ears, and still say with full certainty that he loves life - “I’m not okay, but I will be, and that’s enough for me.” - If he loses hope, the world is literally ending - Really Freaking Good with a bow and arrow - his ice, fire, and light arrows are so OP - uses one of Tetra’s cutlasses ever since he jammed the Master Sword into Ganondorf’s skull - he’s had a no-killing-humanoids policy since then, too (clarification: he’ll only kill things that burst into purple smoke upon death) - even though Phantom Hourglass took 10 irl minutes, he counts those months towards his age - has no items from PH except for the empty hourglass - the Pirate’s Charm around his neck glows faintly in the dark. members of the Royal Family can speak through it—everyone else can only play the messages he’s recorded on it - oh yeah, he can record and play audio messages on it (Dialogue Sample): “how dare you! that’s the same as just giving up!“ (Outfit Description): friendship bracelet Aryll made (a set of 4 for her, Tetra, Wind, and Grandma); bracelet of grass he learned how to weave in the Ocean King’s world; custom made coat a 13th b-day present from Tetra (he’ll grow into it); socks were a gift from Aryll

ALTAIR [SkSw] 22 yo (he/him) Nicknamed himself for his Loftwing, who he named after the brightest start in Aquila, the eagle constellation - ADHD (inattentive) - has prophetic dreams - Team mom energy - usually tries to avoid combat—focus on support/defense (clarification: unless he deems it appropriate to draw his sword, in which case, Oh No) - may or may not be the King of Hyrule - he is trying to be very diplomatic—likes to talk things out - loves talking about everyone’s feelings but his own - he’s the kind of person you grow really close to really fast and tell everything to and then realize several months in that you know NOTHING about him - kind of under a lot of pressure—acts like it doesn’t affect him so people still feel comfortable coming to him for help - he’s nominally in charge cuz Hylia sent him to grab the others but he honestly doesn’t care—it’s all Laissez-faire - unless you make him angry - it’s very hard to make him angry - but when he is, he’s like a completely different person—grows completely silent and becomes brutally efficient - his left eye’s been purple ever since Demise—don’t worry, it’s totally fine and normal for it to be doing that.

NIGHT [TP] 23 yo (she/her) Nicknamed herself night because night is what comes after the twilight and she felt really lost after the events of TP - just kind of a girl dw about it - what happened to her leg? well she HAD it when she fought Ganondorf... idk where it went~ she’s got her knee but nothing below that - she got that canon repair guy to make her a new leg - it has a gun in it. it shoots explosive rounds & has 10 shots - she’s ambidextrous and decided to take full advantage of that by dual wielding blades - ever since she lost her leg, she had this awesome fighting style where she switches frequently between hylian and wolf, darting around the battlefield on 3 legs before shifting into a hylian in midair, lashing out with both blades, and landing as a wolf. she’s very good at it but after a long battle she’ll be sick for a little while from the magic. - takes on the leader role determinedly. fiercely protective - she cares so, so deeply and honestly all the time. it hurts so much but she can’t help it and doesn’t want to. she’ll keep caring even if it kills her. - has, on some level, lost hope that she’ll ever be happy. Ordon feels intensely wrong, somehow, and she doesn’t know where else to go. everywhere she goes, she feels trapped. - Midna said “see you later” and then destroyed the portal. Night doesn’t take people at their word. She won’t be vocal about it, but she won’t believe them, either. - harbors distrust towards Altair but still cares so deeply for him. fully expecting to get backstabbed and that the pain of it will kill her (clarification: this killing is metaphorical)

more art of them here!

#squido's op #loz #linking adventure #this is not gonna be a thing nope nope nope #squido writes #squido draws #legend of zelda

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epicfranb · 11 months

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GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS i got an idea for a new au 😅 BUT HEY i believe it's ,y first actual Life Series AU, and i called it: nth life_

The usual team, no new characters, no lizzie and mumbo (sorry lizzie and mumbo), they get 3 lives (tho that could be changed) and their goal is... to survive in the void. (inspired by this video lololol)

Initially i wanted them to have some time on the surface, they they have to go down and survive in the void for as long as they can. i struggled to imagine how that would go, so i uh... accidentally might've made a Made in Abyss crossover 😅

So, each session, the guys go down lower and lower in the world. first it's just caves, then it's the deep dark, then they start going deeper and deeper... the nether and the end are also layers, they can't just go there whenever they want. And i want to add some cool mc mods in there to spice things up (mostly so layers are cool and different, but also mods that let them find or make food where there isn't any in vanilla)

Now, i don't want to copy Made in Abyss in that going back to the upper levels has more negative effects the lower you go, but i do want some sort of drawback to doing so. I think the lower levels could be opened up gradually, so nobody rushes, and the lower you go, the better materials and equipment you can get, so players are discouraged from staying in one place for too long, and setting up permanent bases IS NOT ALLOWED. You do need materials from every level to survive the void though.

Void really fucks with people's heads. The closer they are to it, the more paranoid and anxios they become. Some wil also become aggressive, have hallucinations or derealization, thinking they're in previous season or in a different series bringing up things that didn't happen and people that aren't there (Grian searching for Mumbo? Etho paranoid that Gem is out to get him? Pearl and Cleo feeling like Lizzie and Gem respectively possess them?)

With that, i think it could start out silly,similar to how the normal series usually goes, but, as theygo down, it gets more serious in tone and even steps into the horror category. that could be neat.

I either don't want watchers there at all, or have a non-obvious interpretation from fanon? Something like in OFF, DDLC or Undertale, where the player is a separate character in the story, but here it's the reader. Idk yet if the reader will be able to make choices or not. Could intepret watchers in some fun way, but only if it adds something to the story. They don't need to be there and they're only canon to Martyn anyway im pretty sure

I guess the reader could make a choice of whose story to follow, mirroring how you choose POV's when you're watching the actual series. Like, Martyn and Cleo are doing something, and there's Joel and Scar somewhere else at the same time, and you choose who to watch. Could also add replayability/rereadbility (is that a word??)

I imagine the whole thing as a text adventure, with cryptic vibes like "breaking the 4th wall/they know they're in a game" and "liminal space/backrooms". there could also be puzzles for the audience to solve to make it more engaging and immersive :)

Maybe i could start out by deciding who teams up with who. I don't want to pair up people who i actually want to pair up, cuz that could make me focus solely on them (looks at clethubs), but i still want the teams to go well together and have fun dynamics.

Some brainstorms from 1 am me:

For Jimmy, i want him to team with someone as stupid+silly+goofy like himself. Current options include: BigB, Martyn, Skizz (i might go w him) and Ren. Any combination of them could also work.

The team i'm 100% decided on is... Etho, Pearl and Cleo. Girlbosses + a wet rag

Joel and Bdubs would be suuuuper fun. Tango, Joel and Bdubs? Do i want a team that just gonna yell at eahc other all the time? Perhaps yes,

But Scott and Bdubs... sounds chaotic.

I want Grian with Impulse!!

Scar and Ren are left? Scar and Joel could be a good combo.

Aaaand that's everything for now. It's not an au i believe i can work on by myself though. as much as i like this concept, it feels like one of those that i will abandon very quickly, especially seeing as i have other au's i'd like to work on... but i want to at least do a lil bit on this one!! so uh... if anyone gets the vision and wants to collab... i invite u :D

#life series #traffic smp #trafficblr #nth life_

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blobracing · 4 months

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2) Splinter of the Mind's Eye, by Alan Dean Foster

Featuring classic scifi’s issues with women and racism, “He Would Not Fucking Say That”, and more . . . .

Splinter has lived in infamy with me for a while: I didn’t like it as a kid, when pretty much anything with the Star Wars label would get a mild thumbs-up at worst. The complaints I’ve repeated to myself from that time was that I didn’t like the prose, it felt like something was wrong with the characters, and every chapter– or scene change– would end with a trailing ellipsis. You can set your watch by it.

I’m not sure it would be worth it to harp on things I dislike about the prose now– even those ellipses strike me as kind of charming, in that they feel left over from conventions about serialized adventures ending in cliffhangers. Like, it’s not to my taste, but who’s it hurting?

In scrolling through the first pages of Goodreads reviews to see if I could snag more succinct blurbs and pawn off some of the work, I noticed that none of the reviewers mention any of the physical violence, condescension, or sexual threats made against Leia. I don’t mean to pearl-clutch, and I’m the last person to worry about or condemn “problematic” writing, but there’s something about the more-explicit-than-casual sexism going unaddressed in a Star Wars novel that feels… weird. There’s an argument to be made that Splinter is essentially a pulpy scifi novel, that the concept of “a Star Wars novel” with all the caveats of adhering to canon (or keeping romance very courtly and mostly chaste) didn’t exist yet. Foster was set the task to write a follow-up for Star Wars following the genre conventions of the time.

Unfortunately, those conventions suck. Leia pendulums between Annoying Princess and Active Obstacle, Luke is full of derring-do, better ideas, and in the last half of the book seems to be getting paid by the word. No aliens have speaking roles, and come in three varieties of Savage– Pathetic, Useful, and Too-Primitive-To-Be-Truly-Noble. Vader is verbose (boo), briefly sexually threatening ( 👀) and ultimately a blathering fool not that far off from the throwaway Imperial commander antagonist that wastes a lot of our time earlier in the novel.

So, let’s get into it. We’ll do the world’s fastest plot summary, get into why the characterization fails and the silliest examples of it, and maybe I’ll have finally worked this splinter out from under my skin.

PLOT SPEEDRUN:

Luke and Leia are on their way to a planet to negotiate its support for the Rebel Alliance. They crashland on a nearby planet, find a secret Imperial mining colony, and are drawn into helping a Mysterious Eccentric Old Woman find a legendary Force-enhancing crystal. They’re briefly captured by the Imperials, break free with the help of two aliens, run from a giant worm and fall into an underground labyrinth of caves that ends in a long-abandoned city. Ritual fight to establish dominance over the “primitive natives,” Vader shows up, there’s a firefight, they find the temple with the crystal, Luke fights a beast, Vader shows up again, final fight, Vader gets dropped down a hole and the crystal revives Luke from death so he can heal Leia, done.

Wookieepedia has a more in-depth summary if you’d prefer a nittier gritty.

It’s a little meandering, and has the cadence of a couple sessions of D&D where there are only two players and a DM with more setting ideas than story beats. The setting of a boggy planet full of ancient temples waiting to be explored and underground caves full of mysteries and aliens kinda fucks, and it feels like there may be some of Dagobah’s DNA in the descriptions of the swamp filled with alien birdcalls. (The Force-sensitive eccentric “oldster” [one of Al’s favorite words] Halla bears only a passing resemblance to Yoda in that Luke sort of forcibly adopts her as a mentor figure and she loves to lie.)

OKAY COOL WHATEVER GET TO THE PART WHERE YOU TALK ABOUT LEIA:

As one of three returning “"canon”” characters and one of two main protagonists, Leia gets a lot of airtime and really doesn’t do much in the first half of the book besides scold Luke for acting sensibly but against her sensibilities, worry about the wrong things and get corrected for it, and get slapped either literally or by the narrative. It’s difficult to try and remember that at the time this was written, there wasn’t a large corpus of work that helped flesh out her character and give her agency and respect– but I don’t think that’s really an excuse. In Splinter, she’s frequently shrill and stuffy, infantilized, and in turns both naive but somehow knowing more than Luke– although his instincts usually prove to be right over her experience.

Goodreads reviewers correctly note that the sexual tension between Luke and Leia is pushed hard and makes the reveal in Empire that they’re siblings… complicated. Luke/Leia has legs as a ship and I’m not about to deny it, but unfortunately the things that would make it interesting or compelling– the separation and then reuniting, both of them giving Han grief, the tension and intimacy granted by their potential bond through the Force– are best left in the hands of fic writers, since obviously it would never be even remotely embraced in canon. Foster’s take on Luke’s attraction to Leia is blithely and standardly horny in a boring way. After a day of trudging through the swamp and Leia harping at him, they huddle together for warmth at a campfire.

“Then he happened to glance down at his companion’s face. It was not the face of a Princess and a Senator or of a leader of the Rebel Alliance, but instead that of a chilled child. Moistly parted in sleep, her lips seemed to beckon to him. He leaned closer, seeking refuge from the damp green and brown of the swamp in that hypnotic redness.

He hesitated, pulled back. [...]

His assignment was to protect her. [...] He would do it out of respect and admiration and possibly out of the most powerful of emotions, unrequited love.

He would even defend her from himself, he determined tiredly. In five minutes he was fast asleep. . . .”

Damn, dude. The hypnotic redness? This part mostly stands out to me as being purple prose and a relic of “ohoho, this was back before we knew they were twins” writing– cherry on top being the idea of her as a “chilled child,” and the weird sort of babydoll innocent-sexy convention that we all know by now. It’s not worth excoriating Foster for this, we all know the real ways that it sucks and the tiredness of it as a fictional trope. It does tie into a lot of her (mis)characterization and irrationality in Splinter.

Later, the two have snuck into the Imperial mining town after stealing some mining duds to blend in (which Luke steals, because Leia refuses to. Yeah, Leia ‘famously worried about personal property’ Organa.) and are getting something to eat at a tavern. Luke’s made a point to tell Leia to walk differently, to put dirt on her face, to disguise her regal bearing, but attentions from an officer make her anxious.

“They do suspect!” she whispered tightly. She started to stand. “I’ve had enough, Luke. Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t rush off, especially if we’re being watched,” he countered. “Don’t panic, Princess.”

“I said I’m leaving, Luke.” Nervous, she started to turn and leave.

Without realizing what he was doing, he reached out, slapped her hard across the face, and as heads turned in their direction said loudly, “No favors for you until I’m finished eating!”

One hand went to her burning cheek. Wide-eyed and voiceless, the Princess slowly sat back down. Luke frantically attacked his steak as the uniformed Imperial sauntered over to them, backed by the attendant at a discreet distance.”

Luke spins them a tale of how she’s a servant he bought and is still breaking in, and they buy it and congratulate him on his taste.

“It was the first logical thing I could think of,” he insisted. “Besides, it explains you as well as anything could.” He sounded pleased. “No one will question you once the word gets around.”

Like, what happened to protecting her hypnotic redness? What makes this even more dumb and insidious bad is that occasionally, the story will cue us that Luke is being prompted by the Force to do things, even his hunches are usually correct, and none of his plans completely fail. The servant story is bought until they’re brought before the Imperial boss of the place, who proceeds to beat Leia until Luke spins him another story that’s miraculously believed.

Beyond the shittiness of Wormie Skywalker, who has now been portrayed by doe-eyed cat-cuddler Mark Hamill, slapping Leia and then propping it up with a cover story, it’s the fact that he never faces any prompting from the narrative that this was, perhaps, shitty!

When they’re outside, Leia kicks his shins to get back at him and he then instigates a mud-throwing fight– yeah– that evolves into wrestling in the mud– yeah, no, yeah– that gets to the point where local roughnecks show up to join in and try to get in on assaulting Leia once they see that she’s Beautiful Woman. That leads to their Imperial capture and drags the plot along by the barest of sinews.

Blah blah, Leia is ogled and beat by the bog-standard Imperial Badguy officer, yadda yadda, thrown in a prison cell, Luke befriends the Yuzzems while Leia does nothing. Officer Badguy returns briefly to inform them that he’s called his bosses and an Imperial Governor will be by soon– which, interestingly but unsurprisingly, sends Leia into a panic attack.

“Imperial governors don’t take an interest in common thieves, Luke,” she whispered tightly. Something was clutching at her throat. “I’ll be interrogated again… like that time… that time.” She broke away, threw herself up against the back wall of the cell.

That time back on the Death Star. Small black worms crawled through her head. [...] The remorseless black machine, illegal, concocted by twisted Imperial scientists in defiance of every code, legal and moral.

[...] Screaming, screaming, screaming never to stop she was…

Something hit her hard. She blinked, burned to see Luke looking at her, worried. She slid down to sit up against the wall.”

Nothing in the text contradicts the implication that Luke slaps her out of her panic attack.

Later, she has some kind of screaming fit in the underground caverns and berates herself for missing a shot against Darth Vader in the middle of a fight. I could keep transcribing passages but like, I’m hoping you get the idea.

Her one moment of sort-of triumph is when she takes up Luke’s lightsaber to duel Darth Vader– Luke has his leg trapped under a rock like on the cover and is momentarily out of commission. She surprises him at first but then spends the rest of the fight being wounded and toyed with until Luke is ready to get tagged back in. She dies? Or something maybe? And then gets healed– no scars, thank god, can you imagine if she wasn’t fuckable– wakes up, and has no speaking lines after wondering what happens to Threepio and Artoo. The old woman with a heart of gold gets cajoled into the Rebellion by Luke and everyone laughs.

It sucks. It sucks! It’s so clearly just Default Woman Character and not informed by Carrie Fisher’s performance or anything other than the laxest tropes in adventure novel writing. And it’s not just her. This is nowhere more evident than the fact that Leia is characterized as not knowing how to swim– but Luke does.

OH SHIT, WHAT ABOUT LUKE?

Luke who? Luke Skywalker doesn’t exist here in any recognizable form. This is distilled perfectly in the last fourth of the book after he’s won his duel against a “primitive alien warrior.” Imagine this falling out of his cute little twink mouth:

“Don’t you understand?” [Leia] asked brightly. “You won. We can all go free now. That is,” she continued in a more subdued voice, staring around at the silent crowd and trying not to show any fear, “we can if these creatures have any sense of honor.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Leia,” he advised her, wiping water from his face. “Canu has judged, remember? Besides, it takes many thousands of years of advanced technological development for a society to reduce honor to an abstract moral truism devoid of real meaning.”

AND… THE RACISM?

Right, whoops. Let’s see– our three kinds of indians– I mean, uh, natives– I mean, native aliens! I meant aliens. The three kinds: pathetic, useful, and too-primitive-to-be-truly-noble.

Pathetic: Local humanoid-but-furry aliens are seen speaking in broken English and begging Imperials for liquor. See: the firewater myth and stereotype of the Drunken Indian.

Useful: Luke and Leia meet two almost-humanoid-and-furry, ultra-strong Yuzzems, Hin and Kee, who were also imprisoned by the Imperials for accidentally signing themselves in slavery and then getting drunk and trying to wreck the mine. They don’t have any speaking lines, and are only able to communicate through Luke. They function as a kind of “shit, we need the characters to get this resources” tool and nothing is ever learned about their personal lives or personalities beyond their ability to tear Imperials limb from limb. One of them gets gonked offscreen by Vader and the other one lives long enough to die helping Luke in the final fight. No time is spent mourning them.

Too Primitive To Be Truly Noble: In the underground city, Luke and Leia meet a settlement of humanoid-but-furry aliens called the Coway, who appear to be living in the remains of a more ‘advanced’ civilization. They challenge Luke to a ritual duel to determine if he and his captured friends should be set free, which Luke wins through an instinctive use of the Force. The Coways they kill before this point aren’t mourned by their people, and for winning the fight they throw Luke and Luke’s Friends a party. The settlement is attacked soon after by Imperials, but thanks to Luke and Luke’s Friends marshalling them, they defeat the stormtroopers. After the battle is done, the Coways kill any injured Imperials, which Leia condones and Luke finds morally repugnant.

I don’t super want to quote any of the passages illustrating how the narrative feels about these characters. It shouldn’t be shocking: old scifi is frequently as racist as it is misogynist. New scifi is frequently as racist as it is misogynist. (Shoutout to Rebel Moon, woo! Time I’ll never get back!) Part of Star Wars' genetic material is that of westerns, for good and ill.

DO WE HAVE TIME FOR HORNY DARTH VADER? WOULD THAT LIGHTEN THE MOOD? :(

“Do you remember that day back on the station,” Vader mused, with deliberate patience, “when the late Governor Tarkin and I interviewed you?” He placed a peculiar stress on the word “interviewed.”

Leia had both hands on opposite shoulders and was shivering as if from intense cold.

“Yes,” Vader observed, perverse amusement in his voice, “I can see that you do. I am truly sorry I have nothing as elaborate to treat you to at this time. However,” he added, swinging his weapon lightly, “one can do some interesting things with a saber, you know. I’ll do my best to show you all of them if you’ll cooperate by not passing out.”

Incredible prediction of itsorlo’s steez.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My allotted “Um, Actually” for this post is pointing out that Luka and Leia navigate an underground lake by using rods of selenite as paddles on a giant lily pad– selenite is water-soluble.

The first use of “stang” as a curse word shows up– “What the Stang!” Probably my preferred Star Wars expletive, considering how goofy they get.

Oh– Leia does say “Well, darn” after missing Vader with a rifle shot.

Do I recommend it? It's an unimpressed and dispassionate no from me, bud. The things that made Foster’s work charming in the ANH novelization are fewer and farther between, and additionally now that we know who Luke and Leia are, their mischaracterization means the only thing left of interest is the worldbuilding. Even that’s shallow at best, and not remotely worth the weird racist mouthfeels and seeing Leia get shit on. There are better adventure novels, there are better scifi novels, and there are better Star Wars novels.

NEXT TIME:

Han Solo at Star's End, by Brian Daley.

#star wars #sweu read #star wars expanded universe #alan dean foster #splinter of the mind's eye #book post

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