#and not the videos themselves not being the right learning material

[sluttyten]

You In My Arms

Chapter 1: The Tourist

full masterlist || haechan masterlist || YIMA chapter index

summary: Haechan doesn’t mind being a background character in someone else’s love story as long as he gets a front row seat to the love scenes. He’s in university, still learning about himself, still exploring his sexuality, and during his last year, he finally experiences an awakening, realizing a truth about himself: he likes to watch

length: 11,045

tags: slowburn, friends to lovers, voyeurism, exhibitionism, masturbation (public & in private), general perversion, smut

Haechan’s first real heartbreak happens when he’s at university.

The girl he has a giant crush on – she’s the most gorgeous girl he’s seen at their university, like a model with her perfect body that draws the attention of every red-blooded straight man on campus – kisses one of Haechan’s friends right in front of him. 

It’s not a peck, not a chaste kiss, not even a kiss in a game of truth or dare (though they do play that game regularly at their small parties, at the nights at Mark’s rented house, spent drinking themselves numb after a rough week). It’s a kiss, like hands on cheeks, bodies pressed together, and the moment Haechan sees a flicker of tongue, he’s done.

“Okay, gross. We get it!” He says, and he wonders if his voice is actually as loud as it sounds in his ears. His heart is pounding, stomach lurching. 

Mark, Chenle, Jungwoo, some of the others are all laughing. Haechan’s face feels slack, stomach tight, palms sweaty as he looks at the bright smile on Shotaro’s face. Haechan feels that sharp bite of jealousy in his belly as she gravitates to stay by Shotaro’s side.

He ignores it. Ignores the jealousy he feels – because he has no claim on her heart; he’s never had the guts to confess his feelings to her – as the days and weeks pass by. Haechan buries himself in other girls, fucking his way through all the girls on the dorm floor beneath his until they all know him as a manwhore and want nothing more to do with him.

Desperately looking for anything to focus on other than the moon-eyes that Shotaro keeps shooting at the girl Haechan has spent so long lusting after, Haechan turns to a little good, old-fashioned fantasy material. He uses Twitter mostly, digging up some good content to watch and jerk off to, hiding himself in his bed at the dorm, thankful that his roommate is almost never home. 

His airpods, his phone, and a bottle of lube become his near-constant companions while he’s tucked away in the dorm room. It’s not a problem because he makes sure it isn’t one. He can still have sex with real women and distinguish what’s happening from the way things play out in the videos he watches online. He’s not delusional, okay?

But he does quickly learn a few things about himself. He unburies a few kinks he didn’t realize were a thing for him.

Like, getting caught jerking off by his roommate. That’s one that he didn’t realize he liked until it happened. His roommate doesn’t seem to care too much the first time he walks in on Haechan with his hand wrapped around his own cock. Even the second time, a week or two later, it’s no big deal. It happens. But when he walks into their dorm room and finds Haechan making direct eye contact with him as he cums, then it’s a bit much.

“Dude, get the fuck out,” his roommate had said, and Haechan had obeyed. 

It’s awkward after that, every time they encounter each other, so Haechan begins to spend a lot more time at the house a few of his friends rent together. Their sofa is always open, sometimes a few of them let him sleep in their beds whether they’re in them or not. He still crashes in his dorm sometimes because all of his stuff is still there, and when he needs to focus on his coursework, it’s always a lot easier to get done there than at the house. But things between him and his roommate remain tense. There are many nights, he just hangs out at the house until everyone kinda falls asleep, or until they ask him to just stay the night.

This is particularly easy on nights when everyone is over at the house. Their whole friend group gathered around the living room on the floor and sofas, on armchairs and bean bag chairs. Once the alcohol comes out, Haechan knows he’ll be fine to stay the night tonight, even if it means snuggling up on the sofa between YangYang and Xiaojun, neither of which live in the house either, but who both are likely to pass out from overindulging in drinks.

Sometimes, if Haechan is really lucky, she stays the night too, folding her beautiful self onto the sofa or an armchair. He’s watched her curl up in one of the armchairs, still clinging to a half-empty bottle when she falls asleep. He’s been lucky enough to be on the sofa with her one night, her head resting on his shoulder, and his shirt still smelling like her perfume the next day. 

Tonight, he watches as the party dwindles around him, as his friends that don’t live here slowly leave, until only a few people are left. She’s one of them, giggling at something Renjun’s telling her. Her eyes are shiny, dancing around the room to look at the last few members of the party – Jaemin and Jeno, both of whom live here, one of the girls in their friend group who spent the first part of the night teasing Haechan about his flubbed presentation in one of their shared classes, Shotaro, Chenle, Sungchan, and Haechan. She smiles when she meets his gaze, and his heart does a foolish little flutter.

But then Shotaro passes by, and her smile grows infinitely brighter.

Haechan loses track of her when Jaemin starts squawking about whatever game he’s just lost against Chenle, and when Haechan next looks up, she’s gone. He doesn’t see her again, so he figures she’s left for the night along with everyone else after a short while longer.

He curls comfortably on one of the sofas, dozing lightly until some sound drags him out of his dreams. A creak of floorboards, the sound of rushing water tinkling against the kitchen sink. 

Haechan sits up, squinting in the dim light. It’s still the middle of the night. Who the hell is up right now?

He twists around, looking in the direction of the kitchen, and what he sees there freezes him to his core.

There she is, an absolute vision.

A vision of her in another man’s shirt.

Haechan’s fingers curl against his blanket. Jealousy turns his stomach. She’s wearing Shotaro’s shirt, the holey band t-shirt that he brought over with him from Japan, the one that Haechan and Renjun have both insisted he get rid of. She’s wearing it. And if Haechan isn’t mistaken, the shadowy mark on her neck is a hickey.

Suddenly, a lot of different things make connections in his mind.

That kiss he’d witnessed between her and Shotaro, the one that everyone had thought was just the one time kiss. The moony eyes Shotaro’s been making at her since then. And many little things from the past few weeks. Many little things from just tonight – they’d both vanished for a while earlier during the movie, but Haechan had just assumed she’d gone upstairs where some of the guys were gaming; the way they’d sat so close together for most of the rest of the evening. But mostly, the way that they’d had similar truths about sex during a game of truth or dare someone had brought up; the way she’d vanished entirely tonight, just shortly before Shotaro had turned in for the night.

He doesn’t know what he plans to do, not really. Even as he pushes the blanket off of himself, as he rises to his feet and walks towards the kitchen, Haechan doesn’t know what his next move is.

She looks up, startled. Her eyes are wide, open and innocent in the darkness, frightened even.

One of her hands drifts down to the hem of the shirt, tugging it down a little. The other holds a glass of water.

Haechan can’t help drinking the sight of her in, even if she is wearing Shotaro’s shirt. He folds his arms across his chest, leaning against the doorway to look at her. Gorgeous. And her thighs are beautiful, he just wants to feel them against his hips, he wants to bite them and kiss them, feel them squeezing against the sides of his head as he – 

No. 

He can’t do any of that. None of that will happen with her because she’s with Shotaro in whatever capacity. And Haechan isn’t going to infringe on that no matter how he feels. 

So, in the moment, Haechan puts on a brave face and decides to call her out on it. “So, you and our innocent Shotaro, huh?”

The way that she holds his gaze in challenge is truthfully very hot. He watches the way that she gulps down her water, a stray drop spilling from the corner of her mouth, trailing along her face to her jaw. Haechan struggles not to imagine catching that water droplet on his tongue, tracing it back to her lips, kissing her until she completely forgets whose bed she’s left.

And then she walks towards him, and all he can smell is her perfume or her shampoo or body wash or whatever it is, he’s just enveloped in a cloud of her. It drives him a little wild, forcing him to look away from her before he does something really stupid like kiss her. Because she’s not his to kiss; it’s Shotaro’s lips that she’s had all over her tonight because up this close, Haechan can definitely see a hickey low on her throat, almost hidden by the neck of the t-shirt. 

He makes his accusation, putting it out there into the world just to see if she’ll deny it. Her and Shotaro. It doesn’t make sense, not to him. The boy is an innocent, or at least he was up until he claimed otherwise tonight. What does she see in him? How good of a lover could inexperienced Shotaro really be?

To Haechan’s surprise, she doesn’t deny what he’s figured out. She’s got a bold, sharp look in her eye, though she’s avoiding looking directly at him. She doesn’t deny a thing about his assumptions about her and Shotaro, instead she asks, in a quiet voice that crackles with a challenge, “Are you going to tell everyone?”

No, he’s not going to tell everyone. That would be really fucking stupid of him. She’d be furious, and he’d be ruining any chance of her ever wanting to speak to him again. Ruining any tiny chance that if this thing with Shotaro goes sideways, she might someday consider Haechan, even though deep down he knows that if he ever stood a chance with her, it would’ve already happened. She’s gorgeous, she’s not been celibate in the while that he’s known her, so if she’s avoided his company and has instead found herself in Shotaro’s then that’s probably where she’d like to be. 

He doesn’t know what brings him to do it. Doesn’t know why he lets his arm brush against hers because the moment that he feels how soft her skin is, how warm she is, his brain short-circuits a little, and he blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. “I’m just glad Shotaro’s finally made his move. He’s had a crush on you since the first time he met you.” It’s the truth, but he’s not entirely sure why he’s telling her this right now. He can remember the first day that Renjun introduced Shotaro to all of them, the way that he’d fit right in, the way that she had come in at the last minute, running late because of something to do with the campus buses. She’d been windswept and a little sunburnt, wearing a sundress with one of the straps sliding over her shoulder.

She’d been enchanting.

Apparently, Haechan hadn’t been the only one caught under her spell that day. 

Hours later, after she’d left, Shotaro was sitting there, talking with Renjun, YangYang, and Haechan. He’d been pretty quiet up until someone mentioned her name, and then his eyes had lit up. It was obvious right away that Shotaro liked her, and he liked her in a different way than Haechan usually heard guys talk about her. Haechan himself was a bad example since he was lusting after her, in love with her body more than anything else. But when Shotaro talked about her he was wanting to know more about her, wanting to repeat all the things she’d said that he’d found funny; he liked her for her personality and didn’t even mention how great her tits had looked.

Haechan had assumed it was just the innocence of Shotaro, but tonight he’s seeing that Shotaro clearly harbors lusty feelings for her too. 

“I thought his heart would’ve exploded that day you kissed him in front of us,” Haechan tells her, watching the way that her gaze flicks up to meet his briefly before dancing away again. In truth, Haechan’s heart had nearly burst that day too, but surely Shotaro’s had as well. It had been Shotaro’s first kiss, with the girl of his dreams. Haechan still could only wish that he and Shotaro could have switched places that day. What he wouldn’t have given to be the one kissing her in front of all of their friends, to have them all know that he’d bagged the hottest woman on campus; he wanted to be the cause for her blush; he wanted to be the one who had walked away with her at his side.

He doesn’t know what he expects from her at this moment. What her reaction would really be to him telling her that Shotaro’s had a silly schoolboy crush on her for the past year and a half, but he doesn’t expect this.

Her shoulder knocks roughly against Haechan’s, pushing by him to escape the doorway. “You should go home, Haechan. Stop crashing on their couch,” she says. She walks away, crossing the living room towards the stairs, heading back to Shotaro instead of lingering for even a moment longer to talk to Haechan.

“Yeah, yeah.” Haechan feels a new burst of jealousy, thinking about her climbing those stairs, crawling back into Shotaro’s bed, pressing herself up against him in that t-shirt. Or, even worse, maybe without it. And again, he doesn’t know why he says it when he calls out in a voice just above a whisper, “Go crawl back in his bed!”

She’s going to do exactly that.

The sight of her extended middle finger draws a laugh from Haechan, but she doesn’t look back. She climbs the stairs and vanishes from sight. 

He collapses back down onto the sofa, trying to stop straining his ears for any sounds overhead. What is he trying to hear, anyway? The creaking of the floorboards? The squeak of the mattress springs as she rejoins Shotaro in bed? Or what, her waking Shotaro and them making sounds together.

A strange pit opens in Haechan’s belly, twisted full of complex knots that he can’t even begin to untangle the meaning of. 

Somehow, he eventually falls asleep, though his dreams are possessed with jealous scenarios. Her face, Shotaro’s, his own. Scenarios where he gets her, only to find her taken away in Shotaro’s arms. Dreams where he’s trapped outside the room while the sounds of her and Shotaro having sex echo in his ears. He wouldn’t necessarily call them nightmares. 

He doesn’t know exactly what wakes him in the morning, but something startles him awake, finding himself with a face full of bright sunlight on the sofa in the living room. His blanket is tucked up beneath his chin, and there are voices everywhere. Mainly though, he hears Shotaro’s voice, telling some story, and as the words come together in Haechan’s still half-asleep brain, he realizes that the story Shotaro is telling is a lie. An excuse for why he’s come down from his room this morning with company.

Haechan opens his eyes, catching sight of her standing on the stairs. She’s wearing her own clothes now, that hickey from the night before hidden away. He remembers one of his dreams when he’d been the one to give her that mark. 

The others seem to buy the bullshit story about her being drunk, vomiting and passing out in Shotaro’s bed. Haechan hears the quiet exchange of words between her and Shotaro in a soft, lovey-dovey tone that makes Haechan want to be sick. He sees them leave the stairs, making for the door and their smooth escape, and he can’t help it. He wants to make himself known to them before they leave.

“Such a gentleman, our Shotaro.” He says, “Letting her sleep in your bed. So sweet.”

She turns her head around so quickly, Haechan would be surprised if it didn’t hurt her neck. There’s venom in her eyes, but at the moment, Haechan can’t feel the sting of it. Especially when he’s instead blinded by the bright, bright sunlight as Shotaro throws open the front door. To combat her glare, Haechan responds with a wink and a wave, though that just makes her pretty face tighten.

“You should go home, Haechan,” she repeats her parting words from the night before. “Stop crashing on their couch.”

He laughs, because what else is there to do? 

She and Shotaro step out into the daylight, closing the door behind them. He laughs again, chuckling to himself as he remembers her words, the look on her face. 

A pillow smacks him full in the face. 

Haechan swears, bringing his hands up to ward off the possibility of a second attack as the pillow falls away. He looks up to see Renjun standing over him, glaring down at him. “She’s got a point. Either pay rent, dude, or get off our couch. Figure out the deal with your roommate.”

It’s impossible to figure things out with his roommate, but luckily, the other guy gets a girlfriend — the lucky bastard — and he starts spending all of his time at her apartment. Haechan returns to his ways of jerking off every chance he gets just so he can attempt to forget about those dreams he’s been having about Shotaro and her tangled together in bed. 

Weeks pass, and he manages to do a pretty good job of avoiding them. It helps that most of his nights are spent in his own bed at his own dorm now, but even when all of their friends are together, he always manages to miss being one-on-one with her and Shotaro. Until one weekend. 

The camping trip to the lake. 

All day long, Haechan was tortured by the sight of her bathed in sunlight, wind blowing through her hair, her face constantly lit up with smiles and laughter. All of the girls were wearing bikinis which had been a delightful sight to his eyes, and Haechan had even found his attention drifting to a few of the guys to admire the way their muscles moved and glistened with sweat in the sunlight. But his attention kept returning to her and the way she filled out her bikini. She easily could be a model, so gorgeous that he can imagine her as one of the models on the cover of a swimsuit catalogue, a Victoria Secret runway, or a Playboy magazine. 

He purposely puts himself close to her all day, though he also notices the way that she keeps gravitating toward wherever Shotaro is. 

Sometimes Haechan allows himself other distractions. He wrestles with Mark and Renjun in the shallows. He plays beach volleyball with several of them. He flirts with Karina where she floats on a pool float tied to the dock. He spends a short while sunbathing on the dock with one of the girls and Xiaojun, all three of them staring up at the clouds. 

And then comes the time in the early afternoon when a few of them start playing chicken. Shotaro is nowhere in sight, so Haechan takes the opportunity to ask the object of his lust if she would like to play. And to his luck and surprise, she agrees to partner with Haechan, letting him hold her on his shoulders. Her bare thighs rest over his shoulders, her fingers in his hair, and he knows it’s probably just his imagination, but he could swear he can smell her — sweet temptation tucked just beneath the scent of sunscreen and sweat and those fruity drinks Xiaojun and YangYang had been mixing up and passing out all day. 

They lost the game of chicken, but Haechan didn’t even care because for those few moments he’d had her. Or at least, it had felt like he did. Her fingers had tugged at his hair as she said his name with her thighs on his shoulders. And maybe his imagination got a little carried away. It was a good thing he was up to his waist in the lake so no one could see the trouble rising in his shorts thinking about all of her sun kissed skin against his. 

It wasn’t until hours and hours later, when the sun was plunging towards the horizon, when some of the other guys were busy grilling meat, that Haechan sat down beside the bright bonfire, pulling on a hoodie to ward off the chill sweeping in. Some of the others drift inside to rinse off after the day spent on the lake, the others start dinner preparations, and Haechan helps out some, mostly as a mood-maker, trying to draw laughs out of those whose faces have grown grim with hunger and irritability after being in the sun all day. 

When Haechan looks across the fire after a while, he finds her sitting there. Her hair is damp, her cheeks ruddy from the sun, but she’s freshly showered, dressed warmer now. Gone is all of that gorgeous exposed skin, the bikini that had felt like nothing when he’d held her on his shoulders earlier. He watches as Shotaro passes by her, brushing his hand over her shoulders. Haechan witnesses the little grin she throws towards Shotaro as he keeps walking into the house. She makes a move like she could just follow, and Haechan’s imagination takes that and runs with it, envisioning the two of them sneaking off and fucking in the house, imagining how he could walk in….

“This is a nice break, huh?” A girl drops down into the seat beside him. She smiles, wrapping her arms around her knees as she draws them up towards her chest. “I don’t know about you, but I feel like this semester is kicking my ass.”

Haechan welcomes the distraction. 

“Professor Kang especially,” Haechan agrees. He and this girl have several classes together since they’re in the same major, and the course that Professor Kang teaches is one required for the major, but if it wasn’t Haechan would have dropped it by now. 

She laughs. “Kang’s class is a little rough. But I’m doing pretty well in it right now if you need any help.”

Haechan isn’t even surprised by that. The girl sitting beside him is probably the smartest in their year. She does well all the time; the professors compliment her on it in class. Haechan’s definitely sought her out before for help dozens of times since they met as freshmen. 

“I might take you up on that,” he sighs, tipping his head back to look up at the sky. “But like you said, this is a nice break. I feel like this weekend we can all just relax and let loose a little.”

She’s smiling when he looks over at him. “When do you ever hold back from letting loose, Lee Donghyuck?” 

The sound of his full name from her lips makes his stomach do a flip. People so rarely use it, and when they do he’s often in trouble. But that’s not how she said it, with her voice warm and happy, full of laughter. 

She is laughing, Haechan realizes, and he laughs too. She’s not wrong. Haechan takes pretty much every opportunity he can to crack jokes, to relax, to bring a little brightness to the days of the people around him.

Xiaojun comes over to see what’s so funny, and he draws her attention away until Haechan feels like he’s been cut out of the conversation. He decides to go help finish up the last of the meal prep. 

He does his best to try to rile up some of the others as they all eat. Trying to get a round of dares going because he wants to see someone have to go skinny dipping in the lake tonight even though the night air is quite cold now. No one’s up to play his game unfortunately, but as the night sinks in around everyone at the fire, Haechan does convince YangYang to drink with him, to see which of them can drink the most. 

The more he drinks, the harder it is for Haechan to keep his eyes from drifting across the fire. The harder it is to ignore the way Shotaro and the girl are so wrapped up in each other. And Haechan Isn't blind, although all of their friends might be, so he can see that Shotaro has stolen her heart, and that unsettles Haechan. 

For as long as Haechan has known her she hasn’t been tied down in a relationship, but now he can see that if she isn’t already, then she’s about to be fully in one. 

It throws off the balance of the world he knows, shutting out any possibility of him getting to experience any fun with her. 

Unsettled, jealous, a little drunk maybe (though Haechan refuses to admit that YangYang might have beat him), that’s what drives Haechan to say what he does. 

His words leap over the fire as everyone’s making jokes about Mark and one of their other friends finally jumping over the line between just friends and fuckbuddies. 

Haechan’s eyes are fixed on her and Shotaro, his heavy tongue lifts, mouth open to draw everyone’s attention to the secret couple in their midst. 

He can tell from the look in her eyes then that he’s done for. There’s no going back from these words he’s speaking, but it’s too late. Drunken words are sober thoughts, and all that, but it just keeps spilling out of him while the others around the fire look on. 

“Shotaro has obviously been in love with you from the start,” Haechan can hear himself saying, “Literally that very first day you met each other. He wouldn’t stop talking about you that night on the way back to our dorm, and kept trying to get Renjun and Mark to invite him to places where you would be. Absolutely lovesick. And then you were his first kiss? How romantic! Did you take his virginity too?”

Jaemin spits his drink out when he laughs, and several of the others laugh as well, someone spouts out their own teasing comment aimed at Shotaro. The night crawls over Haechan’s skin, but he’s staring at her. At no one else but her and the fire reflected in her eyes. She’s beautiful. She’s pissed off, but she’s beautiful. 

It’s the sound of the others around him joining in, it’s the alcohol soaking through his veins, he doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore, just anything to embarrass Shotaro honestly, because Haechan can see their fingers knitted together now, and he knows that Shotaro is the one that she wants and Haechan hates that, he absolutely hates it. He was here first, he should’ve taken his chance while he could. 

The jealousy eats at him, so he goes on and on, attacking everything from Shotaro’s lack of experience to the high likelihood of him being bad in bed. 

Even when she rises to her feet, the fire in her eyes no longer just a reflection of the bonfire, but her own blazing anger, Haechan leans back in his seat and smirks. She uses his full name, and its the second time he’s heard it used today, but this time is certainly the more familiar usage — with the tone of anger and followed by her telling him to fuck off, an accusation of him being drunk. 

He does start to feel a little bad about it when he notices the tears swimming in her eyes as she rails at him for bullying Shotaro. Haechan’s gaze flicks over to the other man, and he finds Shotaro looking a little embarrassed, but they all tease him about this stuff all the time, and Haechan’s drunk, so he can’t really be held accountable for what he’s saying right now. He and Shotaro will still be friends in the morning. 

Haechan isn’t really listening to what she says, not until he hears her say, “We don’t all ask about your sex life, or lack thereof. It’s not like you’re getting a lot of action.” 

That starts a fire in Haechan’s belly. It’s not like he never gets laid anymore. He can if he wants to, but it seems like since he found out about her and Shotaro his fantasies have starred the two of them more often than not, and he can’t have her, so it’s just a lot easier to settle for his hand and a fantasy. 

But she’s not finished yet. 

“Maybe you should be worried about your own skills instead of Shotaro’s.” She takes a half step forward, and Haechan is once again thinking about how hot she is even while she’s angry. She’s gorgeous, and maybe if she weren’t so obsessed with Shotaro, Haechan could redirect this anger she’s feeling into something more productive. 

Or so he thinks, drunkenly, until her next words. 

“Maybe if you were a semi-decent fuck, you’d not be sleeping on the sofa at their house every night.”

Those words finally hit home. 

He’s not a bad fuck. 

He’s more than a semi-decent fuck, thank you very much. 

But hearing that insult from her is more than he can take at the moment. It’s annoying, is what it is. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. Just last week, at a party, he’d fucked a sorority girl boneless and she’d still begged him for more. He’s a good fuck. 

He sits forward in his seat, fingertips digging into the edges of the arm as he tries to haul himself forward. 

He at least has the sobriety of mind to bite his tongue from saying the first thing that springs to mind. He holds in the offer to show her firsthand his skills although the words dance right there on the tip of his tongue. 

Instead, he says something else. 

“You want to talk about what I’m up to every night?” He could tell her a thing or two — the kinks he’d awakened in his weeks of video-watching trying to get over her, the things he’s already been experimenting on with people he’s met on a hook-up app. She doesn’t need to worry about what he’s up to. “Why don’t we talk about how every night you’re there fu—“

Shotaro rocks to his feet, face twisted with anger that Haechan has never seen from him before. A shout leaves his lips, drowning out the rest of Haechan’s words, leaving them floundering in the taste of vodka on Haechan’s tongue. 

Maybe this time they won’t be friends in the morning. Haechan can see that in the way Shotaro glares at him. At the possessive way that Shotaro puts his hand on her shoulder, moving her away from the fire, away from Haechan. 

She goes. 

Shotaro follows. 

Haechan rises to his feet, wanting to follow because he’s not done. 

Renjun’s there in an instant, and although he’s smaller than Haechan, he’s easily able to manhandle him. Especially since Renjun’s relatively sober and Haechan…. He’s had more than enough. He knows that. Renjun’s telling him as much as he corrals him inside the cabin, rambling to him and lecturing him about the things he’s said. 

He doesn’t want a lecture. Doesn’t want to think about anything else. He definitely doesn’t want to sit inside this cabin and pretend like he can’t hear the muffled sounds of Mark and their other friend fucking in the back bedroom. 

Renjun forces Haechan to sit at the kitchen table. He puts a glass of water down in front of him. 

“Drink, Donghyuckie.” He collapses into the seat beside Haechan, rubbing at his forehead like he’s got a headache. “Why do you always have to stir up shit with Shotaro, huh? Just because he genuinely likes the girl you just want to fuck? Because she kissed him? Move on, buddy. She’s clearly not into you. There are plenty of other people that are.”

Haechan glares but doesn’t say a word, just downs the glass of water as quickly as he can. Renjun just picks it up and refills it for him. 

He doesn’t want to talk about this with Renjun. Doesn’t want to talk about it with anyone. So he just sits there silently and sullenly, allowing Renjun to all but waterboard him in an attempt at sobering him up. 

By the time the couple in the back room stumble out to the kitchen, looking a little bit rough and blushing, Haechan does feel a whole lot less drunk. Some of the others have started to drift inside, toting in their blankets and their drinks and snacks. Calling it a night.

Haechan can hear someone singing out by the fire though, and Renjun wanders back out there, his voice joining in. Haechan can’t just sit inside and be miserable, and he doesn’t feel tired yet, so when Mark heads back to the fire, Haechan follows. 

Wherever her and Shotaro had gone while Renjun dragged Haechan off, they’ve returned. She sits tucked into Shotaro’s side. They look happy, and Haechan feels like shit.

And his mind is a lot more clear now. The jealous haze is gone, except for a tiny wrinkle of it in the back of his mind, so he has the clarity to at least stop by where the two of them sit. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, ducking his head. “I was a dick before, and I know it. I just — I don’t really have any excuse, other than that I was just being an asshole.” He lowers his voice a little, glancing at where their hands now sit intertwined above the blanket that covers their laps. “But, hey, now it’s not a secret anymore, right?”

That thought doesn’t seem to reassure either of them too much, so Haechan walks away, snuggling into the spot between Mark and Renjun. The girl Haechan had talked with about school earlier is sitting across the fire  shooting looks at him, and he can’t help wondering if he was that much of an asshole earlier that she’s wary of him; he and her have always gotten along, but now when he looks at her, she avoids eye contact.

Haechan steers away from the bottle of whiskey that is getting passed around, and slowly the rest of the night passes. The crowd around the bonfire shrinks as his friends disappear inside, and soon there are only a core few of them left. 

The night wind whistles in off the lake, biting at his bare legs where he’s still wearing his swim trunks from earlier today. 

Jeno laughs, then he turns to look at Haechan, at the other few still left. It’s only Shotaro and his girlfriend, Jeno, Haechan, Xiaojun, Mark, and the girl from earlier left around the fire now. 

It’s grown cold out even with the bonfire. Haechan wishes he’d opted to put on warmer clothes earlier in the evening instead of just his thin swim trunks and a hoodie. Several of the others are bundled up in jackets and pants and blankets. As Haechan looks around the fire, the girl he has class with shivers, tucking her feet under the blanket covering her lap. Xiaojun is still sitting beside her and he drapes another blanket across her lap. 

Jeno smiles around the fire at all of them as he says, “Maybe before we all head in, we take a dip in the hot tub.”

“I think I’m done for the night.” Mark stands up, stretching his arms above his head. “It’s too cold.”

“It helps that you’ve got someone new to warm your bed, though, I bet,” Jeno calls at Mark’s retreating back. Mark just flips him off.

Haechan is chilled to the bone, so it sounds good to him. Xiaojun also heads in for the night, but all of the others agree, and before he knows it, he’s stripped down to his boxers, sitting in the boiling hot water of the tub up on the deck. He’d almost forgotten about it since it’s tucked off to the side of the house. 

He’s entirely sober now. He’s downed enough water over the last two hours that he’s probably fully replenished any of the dehydrating effects of what he’d drunk earlier in the night. But tragically, as he realizes after he’s been stewing in the hot tub for a little while, he needs to piss. 

He’s not so much of a dick that he’d do it in here, so he gets up. Internally he curses at how cold the air is on his bare skin, but externally he doesn’t say anything even as he can see the steam rising from his skin, even as his swim trunks cling tight to his hips and ass. He just grabs his sweatshirt from where he dumped it with everyone else’s clothes, and he heads inside. 

He just goes in to take a piss, expecting he’ll be back out there with the rest of them in a minute. There is no way Haechan’s gone for longer than five minutes, but when he steps into the kitchen on his way back outside, he finds the girl who’d been in the hot tub now sitting at the table. Jeno’s clothes are on the floor, which means he’s probably not out there either. Did they all come in?

She’s got her head pillowed on her arms, but she turns her head to the side as Haechan approaches. Her eyes look heavy, sleepy, as if she’d been about to doze off. 

“Are you just gonna sleep out here?” Haechan asks. 

There are plenty of rooms in this house to sleep in, not to mention those nice tents out there by the fire. If it’s her roommates she’s trying to avoid — which he would also avoid rooming with Karina and Winter, like she was supposed to be — his room on the second floor is still open. 

“You know the King bed upstairs is still open,” Haechan tells her without really knowing why he’s offering. He’d won that single room fair and square from the other guys. But maybe it’s because he’s slept with Karina before — actually slept with her, not just fucked her, though he has done that too — in a room shared with Winter, and he knows the sparks of jealousy that Winter can ignite when her space is infringed upon. “If it's the idea of rooming with Karina and Winter that has you scared to sleep in there, you’re welcome to the room up there.”

Her eyes go wide for a second, mouth forming a soft o, and she shakes her head a little. She looks cute like that, and Haechan feels a little smile rise to his lips. He’s not saying that he’s never really thought of her that way, but it’s never really struck him much. Not when there was someone around to overshadow her like Shotaro’s girlfriend. But right now, she looks cute, open and vulnerable in her expression. Not to mention the open and vulnerable way that she’s still barely dressed from the dip in the hot tub. Haechan can’t fight the urge to sweep his gaze over her, all the skin exposed by the little bra she’s wearing and her underwear that are still wet and a tiny bit see-through. 

He notices the way she draws her arms closer to her body, pressing the bundle of her clothes against her chest as she stands. 

“Why is no one sleeping up there?” She asks, and it takes Haechan a second too long to remember that he’d just offered up his bed to her for the night. 

Haechan explains quickly that he won the single room, and it’s still unoccupied because he’s not tired yet. And then he repeats his offer for her to take it. She just looks at him with these wide, pretty eyes, then she asks, “And what about when you do get tired? Where are you gonna sleep then?” 

He just shrugs. He’s really not tired at all right now. He could use a good long soak in the hot tub, especially if the rest of them have abandoned it. Or maybe he’ll just go sit by the fire, pick up one of the beers someone surely left out there. And he’s pretty sure that YangYang left half a bag of marshmallows out there for roasting. So right now the thought of where he’s going to sleep isn’t really something he’s too concerned about. “That’s a problem for then.”

She doesn’t say anything to that, so Haechan reaches for the door to step back outside, and the doorknob has just turned beneath his hand when he hears her quiet voice behind him.

“When you get tired Haechan….” She pauses just long enough that Haechan turns to look back at her. 

She’s twisting her shirt in her hands like she’s nervous, and Haechan can’t help smiling at that. Does he make her nervous? They’ve been friends for a while now, sharing classes, study rooms, meals and conversations. When they’d talked earlier today she hadn’t seemed nervous at all, but right now she does, and Haechan knows that when they first became friends she had a crush on him, but he thought she grew out of it. Maybe not. Her cheeks grow a little warm, her gaze dipping away from his before returning. 

“Well, it’s a big bed,” she says, “I’m happy to share.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Haechan pulls the door open, still watching her. 

He sees something there in her eyes, buried deep. Just a flicker of some deeper hunger, a small spark in the dark.

Interesting.

But it’s gone just as quickly, and Haechan looks away, murmuring a quiet “goodnight” to her, and then he’s stepping out through the doorway. 

Just as he rounds the corner of the house to return to the hot tub, Haechan freezes in place. 

The hot tub, which had held four people when he left, and which he believed would now be empty, still holds two people. 

Haechan shrinks back around the corner of the house, but he doesn’t withdraw completely. Doesn’t look away. 

How could he look away from the sight of one of his fantasies playing out right in front of his eyes? The girl he’d just finally relinquished his lustful crush on now straddling Shotaro? Her shoulders steam as she drapes her arms over Shotaro’s shoulders, as he draws a hand up out of the water to touch her back. Haechan can’t look away, transfixed by the way that she shivers into Shotaro, the way her back arches slightly against his light touch. And she’s smiling, holding Shotaro’s gaze when Haechan sees the other man’s wrist flick, and then his breath catches in his throat. 

Her bra falls away, and Haechan has dreamed of her tits. He has had very, very specific fantasies about fucking them, fondling them, resting his head on them during post-coital bliss. 

But he’s never seen them in person. Not until right now. 

Shotaro drops her bra over the edge of the hot tub, and Haechan can only stare, like a fucking pervert, at her bare tits. They’re perfect. Her nipples stand to attention in the cool air, and then Shotaro’s hands are on them, just like Haechan wishes his were. His hands flex at his sides, curling into fists, trying to rid himself of the phantom feeling of soft boobs in his hands. 

And then Shotaro’s lips are on her neck, and Haechan watches the way her eyes flutter shut, her mouth falls open. 

He should stop looking. 

Look away, he tells himself. Just go inside, and stop being a pervert.

But he likes watching. 

He likes to see the way her body reacts. The way she gasps and shifts in Shotaro’s lap as he kisses her neck, as he trails his kisses down. The soft moan she lets out when he scrapes his teeth over her collarbone. 

Fuck. 

Haechan feels his cock stirring in interest. 

He notices when she shifts higher in Shotaro’s lap, when her mouth falls open on a sigh that becomes a moan of Shotaro’s name. And then she starts moving, rolling her hips, and Haechan realizes that Shotaro must have his fingers inside her right now. She clutches at Shotaro’s shoulders, and Haechan wishes with all his being that he could be Shotaro right then. To have his fingers buried inside her soft, tight heat. To have his lips on her tits, her writhing in his lap and saying his name. 

Haechan can tell Shotaro isn’t holding back. He’s not teasing, not drawing it out. He’s just giving it to her exactly like she wants it. And Haechan drinks in the show, the way she rides Shotaro’s fingers, her face flushing and eyes aglow when she looks at Shotaro’s face. And then, Haechan gets to witness her cumming, falling apart on Shotaro’s fingers, beneath Shotaro’s lips. She pulls at his hair so tightly. 

Haechan doesn’t even notice at first that his hand has risen to his own hair. That he’s knotted his fingers through it. He tugs, and it’s only at the jolt of pleasure that goes straight to his cock that he realizes what he’s doing. 

He’s so damn hard in his pants right now. 

Even watching her kiss another man, in this context, Haechan feels nothing but arousal. He watches, knowing that it’s wrong, but also knowing that he likes it. 

He likes watching her with her guard down, uninhibited and raw with Shotaro, unaware that Haechan’s watching. The thought makes his cock throb a little, and Haechan reaches down, just offering his cock a little squeeze. 

They’re moving again in the hot tub. Her and Shotaro are making out, and Haechan, from his vantage point twenty feet away, can only barely hear Shotaro moaning into the kiss. More importantly, Haechan’s focused on the way her body moves, on how she’s clearly grinding down on Shotaro, but Haechan wonders if he missed the moment when she started riding Shotaro, or if she’s really only teasing him right now. 

Another squeeze of his hand around his cock, the glide of his palm over the tip. 

Fuck, she’s so sexy right now. On top. In charge. 

The wind whips around the corner of the house towards Haechan, carrying with it the sound of Shotaro whining. His head thumps against the side of the hot tub, just gazing up at her. Haechan wishes, again, that he was in Shotaro’s spot, looking up at her like she’s a star in the night sky, like she’s the moon, like she’s all that matters in the universe with her pussy so tight around him. 

He shivers, his foot moving. 

His toes knock into a small branch on the deck, and it makes a small scraping sound, rolling away across the boards. 

Haechan moves, drawing further back around the corner, but lingers close enough to peek around. 

For a moment he thinks he sees her look in his direction, but there’s no shout of anger, no look of surprise. 

She just dips her head to kiss Shotaro’s cheek or his neck. Her hair falls in a curtain obscuring Haechan’s view a little bit until she sits up a moment later. She shivers in Shotaro’s lap, goosebumps rising on her skin and her fucking nipples look like they would feel so good in Haechan’s mouth. 

Damn it all. 

He pushes his hand down the front of his swim trunks, fingertips moving over his abdomen, down to wrap his hand around his bare cock at last. 

Now Haechan can see that she was definitely just grinding on Shotaro before. He can see the way she rises up a little bit, the way she reaches down beneath the water, this look of mischievousness and delight in her eyes as she sinks down on Shotaro’s cock. 

And then she moans, and Haechan’s entire body goes numb. 

That sound. 

It’s unmistakable and so loud that probably half of his friends heard it in the house. Not that her or Shotaro seem to care. 

Judging by the way that she moans, Haechan feels a new brand of jealousy. Is Shotaro’s cock really that good? Haechan has never seen it, obviously he’s never heard any tales about it, but if just sinking down on him has her making a sound like that then Shotaro must have a dreamy cock. 

Haechan thumbs at his tip, smearing a bit of precum around, reminding himself that he shouldn’t be doing this. Shouldn’t be jerking off to the sight of his friends fucking unwittingly in front of him. 

But then she starts moving, starts kissing Shotaro in an absolutely filthy way with visible tongue and moaning from both of them. He can see Shotaro with his hands on her ass, her back, her tits. 

Haechan just leans against the wall of the house, hand fisting his cock as he starts jerking off, moving his hand at the same pace that she’s moving on Shotaro.

And when she starts bouncing? Tits jumping on her chest, Haechan feels a new jolt of lust and lets a fantasy overlay reality. He’s still watching her with Shotaro, but he’s also envisioning himself beneath her, her pussy hugging his cock, her ass smacking against his thighs, and his lips wrapped around her tit, his hand at her hip to keep her moving. In his fantasy, Haechan is making her moan, but in reality, he’s mostly just hearing Shotaro, which should probably be a turn-off, but something about everything combined means that Haechan’s cock is growing harder, more wet at the tip as he twists his wrist, imagining his face buried in her tits. 

He thinks about earlier today, when she’d sat on his shoulders for the game of chicken, the scenario his mind had come up with then of eating her out, her taste on his lips as he’d imagined the smell of her all around him. 

Haechan bites his bottom lip, feeling a tug in his belly, the tightness in his balls. 

And when he refocuses on the sight in front of him, he watches Shotaro standing up, lifting her out of the water with her legs twisted around his hips. She laughs a little, her voice carrying clear over to Haechan as she says, “Fuck me, Taro! It’s cold out here.”

Shotaro laughs too, turning to sit her ass down on the edge of the tub. 

Not that either of them could possibly be aware of it, but doing this has made Haechan’s view just that much better. Although now he’s getting an eye full of Shotaro’s ass, Haechan can also see where their bodies join. Can watch her thighs tighten against Shotaro’s hips as he drives into her, can catch a glimpse of his cock pushing into her and — oh, fuck, Haechan can barely hold in a moan as he sees her pussy. Pretty, perfect. Again, he imagines licking her out, his tongue swirling circles on her clit, her voice moaning his name. 

“Taro!” She cries out, shattering that little bit of Haechan’s fantasy. But still. 

Her nails rake over Shotaro’s back, and Haechan feels phantom zings of pleasure down to his lower back. 

Shotaro fucks her like he’s got experience, and fuck, Haechan supposes that he does have experience right here with her. He knows exactly where to touch, where to kiss, what angles and how deep and everything that Haechan doesn’t know in this situation. He fucks her with confidence, and with the ability to show her so much pleasure that Haechan can tell she’s on the brink of orgasm. 

He’s close too, seeing her like this. All laid out like a vision as Shotaro works her to the edge. 

And then it happens. 

There’s no denying it now, not when she glances his way, and their eyes catch. 

Haechan thinks that this is it. That he’s done for. 

But she doesn’t look away. She doesn’t yell and make Shotaro stop so they can kill Haechan for being a pervert. She locks eyes with him, and there’s something there in her gaze that makes him reevaluate everything that’s happened in the last few minutes. Earlier when he thought he’d narrowly avoided being caught, had he actually been spotted? Had they put on a show for him?

Fuck, that thought alone, that any part of what he’s witnessing had been done with him in mind, even just a little bit. 

Shotaro grabs her chin, dragging her mouth back to his. Her eyes flutter shut, Haechan forgotten. 

Haechan doubles down on his cock, and his orgasm hits right as hers rocks through her. He cums over his fist inside his swim trunks, watching her toes curl, her fingers dragging through Shotaro’s hair and down over his shoulders. 

He’s still pumping his cock, his body wracked with pleasure, when she slips off Shotaro’s cock to sink into the water, and Haechan watches her give the most intense, sloppiest head to Shotaro. Maybe Haechan cums again a bit, watching her bob her head on another man’s cock, and perhaps he feels a bit filthy for it too, but there’s a deeper satisfaction to be found there. 

Haechan doesn’t hang around to watch Shotaro cum in her mouth. He slips back around the house, down the stairs from the deck, and he walks over to the bonfire. They really should’ve put it out before they walked away, but it’s dying now anyway. The last burning embers of it flicker in the wind off the lake, and Haechan takes a seat, wipes his cum-covered hand off on a towel that someone left slung over this chair, and he stares into the embers to process what the fuck just happened. 

How is he going to be able to look either of them in the eye again after tonight? If Shotaro knew that he was watching, then their friendship is probably definitely over. 

He can’t believe he just stayed there and watched. 

Of course, he knew he was a bit of a perv, maybe an exhibitionist when his roommate walked in on him the first time and Haechan liked it. He definitely knew he was into it when he held eye contact with his roommate while cumming that other time. And, sure, his interest in watching porn definitely stemmed from him enjoying watching other people going at it. 

But this? 

“Haechan.” 

It’s the sound of his name that finally snaps him out of his stupor. 

He has to blink away the afterimage of the embers imposed on his eyes, but when it clears enough, he sees her and Shotaro both standing there staring at him. Hands clasped, still wet and flushed from the hot tub. 

He doesn’t know if they’re here to talk or if they’re claiming one of the nice tents out here to sleep in tonight. Either way, Haechan doesn’t want to be here. 

He stands up, not making eye contact, brushing right by them with nothing more than a goodnight. 

Inside the cabin, it’s very quiet. Everyone is asleep, and Haechan can feel the need to sleep finally catching up with him, the big bed upstairs calling his name. 

Shit, he remembers, the bed isn’t empty anymore. 

He does his best to open the door quietly, but even with his caution, he has barely pushed the door open before he hears the sound of a startled movement from the bed. She’s half-lifted herself up, and she’s just staring at him in the dark.

“Sorry,” he apologizes as he steps inside. “It’s just me.”

She sighs and sinks back down into the bed, and that’s when Haechan realizes she’s lying on his side of the bed. He prefers the left side, but it seems rude to ask her to move now. He closes the door again behind himself, and he does his best to keep quiet as he moves around the room towards the ensuite bathroom. He needs to rinse off – or at the very least clean up his jizz. 

Haechan pulls his hoodie off, letting it fall to the floor, and then he casts a quick glance at the girl laying in his bed. Her back is to him, so he feels fine about it as he drops his swim trunks and takes those last few steps into the bathroom fully nude.

He flicks the light on in the bathroom and takes a look down at himself. Gross. He grabs a wad of toilet paper to clean himself up, then decides the still slightly damp washcloth draped over the edge of the bathtub will be better. It takes only a moment to wipe his tacky cum off his skin, then he turns the light off again, and steps back out into the room. She’s still got her back to him, and she doesn’t move at all when he walks across the room to reach the desk where he’d sat his baggage for the weekend. 

It’s pitch black in there anyway, so even if she were to look over at him, it’s not like she would really see anything. And it’s not like Haechan isn’t confident in how he looks. He is. But… this is different.

His bag is sitting on the desk, and he quickly grabs out a pair of sweatpants, slips them on, then walks over to the wrong side of the bed.   

“You smell like lake water, bonfire smoke, and chlorine.” Her voice is half-muffled.

“I’ll shower in the morning,” Haechan says, pressing his face into the pillow. It’s not right. This pillow isn’t as comfortable, but that’s probably because he brought the pillow on his side of the bed from home. It’s perfectly formed for him, and he’s half-tempted to drag it out from beneath her head or maybe make her switch him sides of the bed. “You’re on my side of the bed, by the way.”

She snorts a tiny sound of amusement. 

Haechan moves just slightly, and he feels his foot bump against some part of her. Possibly her calf – he doesn’t know, all he knows is that whatever part of her it is is soft and warm.

“You’re the one that invited me,” she teases, “Guess you should’ve been more specific about where you wanted me.” 

She turns over to face Haechan then, and the movement sends a tiny puff of air in his direction. She smells nice, and he breathes in again, noticing that she doesn’t smell like nasty lake water or chlorine, and she only smells a tiny bit like smoke from the fire, but there’s something else sweet and aromatic about her that makes his mouth water just a tiny bit. 

And maybe his dick grows a little hard too, if he’s being honest. 

She’s already in his bed, so it doesn’t take a whole lot for his imagination to get carried away, especially not when he notices that now that his eyes have adjusted to the light level, it’s not nearly as dark in this room as he’d first thought. There are two uncovered windows, and light comes in through both of them – from the fading bonfire and from the lights over the hot tub on the deck below.

In that small amount of light, he can see her face now, and when his eyes briefly dip lower he can see that she is still only wearing that clingy thin bra that she’d worn in the hot tub. Her tits look perfect right now, like they would feel perfect in his hands or beneath his lips. He can just imagine rolling her onto her back, tugging the top edge of that material down, taking one of her nipples into his mouth….

But no. He’s not going to fuck her tonight. 

They’re just friends, and he might be a manwhore but he’s not an asshole. Making a move on her when it’s already so late and she’s clearly half-asleep, when he’s the one that told her that she could just sleep in this bed, that would obviously be a dick move. 

So no, not tonight. But he’s not saying never.

“Next time I’ll make it clear where I want you,” Haechan says, and he hopes she hears the promise that if they someday find themselves in a position at all similar to this one, he’ll be glad to position her exactly how he might want her. 

In the morning, Haechan gets rudely awoken by YangYang shoving into the room, not even bothering to knock in his rush to use this room’s bathroom. Haechan just groans and rolls over, stretching his limbs out across the bed as far as they can go, and it takes him a moment to realize why all of the space tickles some part of his brain as strange. Because then he remembers that this bed wasn’t empty when he fell asleep last night. 

Haechan lifts his head to squint at the side of the bed that prior to last night had been his. Empty. Sheets rumpled, but empty of the girl who had filled them.

He just drops his head back down, and he rolls over, sliding onto that half of the bed to get comfortable on his own pillow from home.

The only thing is that it doesn’t smell like home right now. 

It smells like her, like that pretty attractive scent he’d breathed in last night. He feels a little perverted when he buries his nose in the pillow to take a whiff. There’s one spot that stimulates something deep in his brain, and he wonders if that’s where she’d laid her head for most of the night, if that’s her shampoo that he’s smelling the most right there. He groans a little.

Yeah.

He’s definitely a perv because he’s getting hard again.

First the hot tub voyeurism and now this?

God damn, he’s a freak.

Willfully ignoring the rising problem, Haechan gets out of bed and heads down to the kitchen, determined to start the day off either with a coffee if someone’s got some brewing or a beer or maybe even something stronger if it’s available. 

Renjun squints at Haechan when he comes down, complaining about how he’d been woken up by Jeno nearly puking on him, hungover as hell. He lays all the blame on Haechan, since he’d been Jeno’s drinking buddy earlier in the night yesterday, and he’d also been one of the last ones hanging out with him last night, so he should’ve at least gotten him to trade out the alcohol for water.  But thinking of Jeno makes Haechan think of the hot tub, and thinking of the hot tub makes him think about the scene he’d witnessed, and that is something he can’t think about right now. 

He can’t risk it showing on his face somehow, and he refuses to admit to anyone else about his perverted moment last night. He can’t even face the happy couple. Not over breakfast when they appear in the kitchen hand-in-hand, blushing and bright-eyed from outside where they’d slept in one of those tents. 

He avoids them until he can’t anymore. 

For some reason, YangYang is the one allowed to steer the boat that had come with this rented property on the lake, which YangYang thinks makes him the Captain. He stands on the dock, waving everyone on board until the boat is at maximum capacity minus one. 

Haechan lingers on the dock as Shotaro and his girlfriend step onto the boat. 

YangYang stands there, watching Haechan, waiting. “Dude, are you not coming?”

To everyone’s surprise, but no one more so than Haechan, Shotaro answers. “Oh, no. Haechannie likes to just watch.”

Heat flashes through Haechan’s face. 

So they both knew about last night. 

And Shotaro is making jokes about it. 

Her face is lit up with laughter. Everyone else brushes the comment off, but Shotaro smiles, looking at Haechan with forgiveness in his eyes, even amusement. 

Haechan rocks past YangYang and onto the boat. He puts his arm around Shotaro’s shoulders, and he glances first at her where she’s watching the two of them, and then he meets Shotaro’s gaze so close to his own. 

“Consider me a tourist,” Haechan says, and the feeling of his words resound in his bones. “I just want to enjoy the view.”

That brings a laugh from both of them, Shotaro pushes him away, but Haechan moves further onto the boat. And then YangYang hops on board, unmoors it from the dock, and moments later he’s Captaining everyone across the lake. 

And Haechan looks around at his friends, his gaze lingering a little extra long on the happy couple, where Shotaro’s hand rests so low on her waist that it’s pretty much on her ass. His gaze passes momentarily over his friend who’d shared his bed last night; his attention pauses on Jeno where he’s wrestling with Jaemin, both of them shirtless and dripping with the beer that Jaemin had just dumped over Jeno. Haechan sees Karina and Winter drinking with Chenle. There’s Renjun grinning down at his phone at the far end of the boat. And Haechan again Haechan’s attention returns to the girl who had fled his bed this morning, she sits now with her head tipped back to soak in the sun while Xiaojun talks to her and flexes his muscles

Yes, Haechan thinks as he takes it all in, he’s certainly something of a tourist, enjoying the view.

YIMA chapter index || next chapter -> 

a/n: Chapter 1 done! If you’d like another perspective of this chapter, you should check out kiss kiss (fall in love) which is a 3 part Shotaro x Y/N fic, and that scene in the hot tub occurs in part 3! 

#haechan #nct haechan #haechan smut #nct smut #nct dream #nct 127 #nct dream smut #nct 127 smut #nct #lee haechan

[buckyalpine]

So for the Untouched AU have you thought about any of these scenarios? Film themselves having sex, using whipped cream or chocolate, try getting tied up (either one of them but y/n would be my choice), give y/n a nipple-only orgasm, role playing, try edging, order a sex toy online after they search the site for things they wanna try together, tease each other all week with sexting during class, sending pics/videos to each other. I know. Just a few thoughts…🙄

18+

Bucky x f reader (Steve's sister,  if you’re like me, add the caveat of being an adopted sister)

Sex tapes with our Untouched babies? The answer to this is hell yes. These babies are learning everything together. Nudes. Edging. Sex tapes included. Can be read as a standalone.  

Warnings: Smutty smut, fluffy fluff, shy reader, sending nudes, sex tapes

The first nudes 

It started off with a few sexy pics. 

He’d send you a pic of him in his grey sweats after the gym. There’s no way to hide his boner, the outline of his cock straining against the fabric. 

Shirtless pics. 

Fresh out the shower, towel hanging low pics. 

He didn't want to pressure you to send anything so he doesn’t even ask, happy to tease and tempt you instead. Quite honestly he regretted sending you anything in the first place because the second you sent him something with a little extra cleavage he had to hold his school bag against his lap to contain his boner.

The first time he sent you nudes was after he’d spent the whole day struggling to keep his hands to himself after you’d paraded around the house in a tiny sundress. He’d come over to play video games, gritting his teeth each time you came over to you brothers room to bring up their pizza and drinks, petting his hair on your way out. He couldn’t focus on a damn thing, his mind clouded with your bare thighs and the glance he got of your tiny panties from where he was sitting, only coming to his senses when Steve threw the controller at his head. 

At least keep it in your goddamn pants when I’m around punk

As soon as he was home, he pulled his pants off, grabbing his phone, showing off his leaking cock, throbbing, the tip glistening without him touching himself.

My Bucky: See what you do to me? 

Babydoll: OMG BUCKY  🙈

My Bucky: It’s fucking leaking sweets, fuck I need you

Babydoll: Serves you right, perving all day  🙄

M Bucky: You’re the one who teased me, come make it go away  🥺️

You giggled, your face heating up, feeling a little frisky, butterflies erupting around your tummy when he sent you another pic, this time with his balls, legs spread. You pulled your dress up, pulling your panties to the side, giving him the perfect view of your glistening cunt, your heart racing after you hit send. 

Babydoll: Take care of me first 

My Bucky: God Damn.

My Bucky: Fuck babydoll

My Bucky: Not fair, let me come over doll, please?

5 minutes later

My Bucky: I’m outside.

That started it. Bucky didn’t hesitate to show you exactly what you did to him and how hard he was, always ready to show you exactly how turned on he was for you. Study room. His car. Bed. It was fine until he’d nearly gotten caught twice, always scrambling to yank his pants back up, the tell tale blush on his face giving him away. 

“Bucky had his dick out again”

“For fucks sake Barnes” 

“You’re both something else, I swear” 

“This is why we call you Bucknasty” 

“You nasty hoe” 

“Shut up Sam”

Your nudes drove Bucky feral and he’d nearly came in his pants the first time you sent him something in lingerie. He whimpered as soon as he opened the message, struggling not to palm himself, his eyes nearly crossing seeing you encased beautifully in the dark lace, the sheer material hardly covering your nipples and your perfect cunt. He may or may not have left class to rub one out, but it didn’t do much, his cock continued to twitch until he had you spread out on his bed. Your nudes are precious gold to him and he treasures every single one with his life. His beautiful doll in her bare form, all just for him. 

The first time edging 

“Sweet girl, please?” 

“You’re pretty when you beg baby” 

You were on top of Bucky, winding your hips down on him, watching his beautiful fucked out face, his skin flushed, lip chewed from how hard he was focusing. He had a bruising grip on your thighs, his cock throbbing from how badly he wanted to cum. You had made him hold it, bringing him close to the edge only to stop his orgasm right at the tip, his cock swollen and desperate. 

“F-fuck, I can’t y/n” He nearly sobbed, squeezing his eyes shut. You felt your stomach clench, watching his perfect face contort, his brows furrowed, trying so hard to force himself from cumming. “Baby, s’too much, I wanna cum, let me cum, I can’t hold it” 

“Y-yes you can” You continued to bounce on his cock, your high pitched whines making it harder for him to hold off his orgasm. You’d been curious about edging for a while, wanting to give Bucky the most intense pleasure of his life, not realizing it’d be just as amazing for you. Your slick dripped all over his crotch, his balls covered in your arousal. 

“C’mon, I know you wanna cum, let’s cum together baby, please” He pleaded with you, choking at the way your pussy squeezed and fluttered around him, your own orgasm waiting to snap. You whimpered, gasping when he snaked his hand to play with your clit, a pornographic moan slipping from your lip as he rubbed perfect circles. 

“Does that feel good doll? You gonna cum with me?”  

“FUCK BUCKY” You gave into the pleasure he toyed with, your muscles tensed as he started to fuck up into you from underneath, his cock growing harder. “I-shit-

“Let go with me doll, cum with me, I got you” Bucky grabbed your hips, slamming you down onto his cock while he thrusted upwards, his back nearly arching off the bed. You moaned, your body giving way and falling limp, letting him pound from underneath you, the sounds of skin slapping growing louder. 

“I’m gonna cum Bucky!” You started to flutter around his cock, your juices soaked him again as you came on his cock. Bucky let out a strained moan feeling you squeeze him, his pace growing sloppy as he pushed in as deep as he could. 

“Fuckffuck thankyouthankyou, oh god, gonna c- AH FUCKKK” Bucky wrapped his arms around you, stilling as he cock throbbed, cum pumping into your pussy while he whined and whimpered under you. He refused to move afterwards, keeping his cock warm inside you while you both cuddled under his sheets, his face buried into the crook of your neck. 

“Bubba, you have to pull out at some point” You giggled, playing with his hair while he shook his head, keeping his flushed face hidden. 

“Sensitive” He whispered, staying inside your warmth, a new idea coming to mind, “We should try rope next time” 

The first time using rope 

“You sure you okay with this bubba?” Bucky checked the ties again, making sure they were comfortable around your wrists, his thumb stroking your cheek while you looked up at him with love and adoration. No matter what it was he wanted to do, your comfort had always come first. 

That being said, something about having you tied up had made Bucky extra feral. He loved the way you trusted him, your pretty doe eyes shying away from him while you were bare in his bed. 

“You-you look so pretty tied up like this for me baby” Bucky whispered, kissing your lips sweetly while you whimpered, squeezing your thighs together, your clit throbbing. You felt a shiver, naked on his bed while he still had his clothes on, admiring your pretty form as if you were a present just for him. 

He stripped his clothes off while keeping his eyes locked with yours, crawling onto the bed and tossing your legs apart, licking his lips before kissing your inner thigh. 

“Gonna let me play with this pretty pussy baby?” Bucky didn’t waste a second, his tongue laving and drinking every bit of your sweetness, loving the way your squirmed each time he flicked at your clit. 

“Fuck Bucky!” Your back bowed off the bed as he latched onto your clit, suckling, practically nursing off you, moaning as he kept his lips sealed around your sensitive bud. He pulled away from you, untying the rope, just to manhandle you and shove your face into the mattress with your ass in the air. You yelped, feeling his hand spank your ass, grabbing both hands and tying them again, holding onto your wrists as leverage as he brought his cock to your entrance.

“Scream for me baby” He gave you a wolfish grin, glancing at the mirror that was off to the side of the bed, the more you squirmed, the more his cock leaked. “Can’t run from my cock now so take it” He shoved his cock into you, pounding into you, letting his balls hit your clit with each thrust, grunting and groaning. 

“S’too much” Your eyes rolled back, the coil in your belly winding tighter as he pressed his hand to your shoulder blades making his cock his deeper. You cried out, your pussy squelching, your juices making a mess on his thighs. “I’m gonna cum Bucky, pleasee-” 

“Fuck, you gonna cum without me even touching you baby? Don’t even need me to rub that pretty pearl of yours, you gonna cum just from my cock fucking you? You can take it baby, you’re my good girl” Bucky’s voice was low, nearly breathless, his cock throbbing, reeling over how the rope felt as he held onto your tied hands, his perfect beautiful doll, helplessly crying over his cock. “Hold it baby, fuckin’ hold it” 

“Wanna cum James, p-please, wanna cum” You couldn’t even hold it any more, your pussy already starting to flutter. Your moans were muffled against the sheets, your trembling body a sign you were close. 

“Together, jus-jus’ fuckin hold it sweets, that’s it, my good girl, my good fuckin’ girl, m’gonna fill you up okay?” Bucky rubbed up and down your spine, his head thrown back. “Gonna make you feel so good, give you all the cum you want babydoll, cum now baby, cum right fucking now!”

“Give me your cum James” You cried out, your orgasm ripping through you right on his command. Your pussy was desperate to milk every drop of his cum, squeezing and pulsing around him making it harder for him to move. 

“Oh fuck, you have no idea, I’m gonna give it to you doll, gonna give you so much, so much, SO FUCKING MUCH FUCK-” Bucky slammed into you, grabbing your hips and holding still as his cock throbbed, desperately moaning as he filled you up. He untied your wrists, still panting and sensitive from his climax, pulling you up to cuddle up with him. 

“Did I do good Bucky” You mumbled against him, your face buried in his chest, nearly falling asleep instantly at his ministrations. 

“Did so good for me my angel, so perfect” He stroked your hair, kissing your face while you nuzzled against him, his hands gently massaging the indents of the rope of your wrists. “My perfect good girl”

The first sex tape 

Bucky can't help himself, wanting to capture some of those intimate moments with you for just his viewing pleasure. It didn’t matter if he was making soft love to you or railing the fuck out of you, he wanted to go back to every single moment and capture how perfect you were for him, how perfect you looked together. He wanted to see how gorgeous you looked when you were filled up with his cock, how your pretty face contorted with pleasure with him deep inside you. 

You knew he wanted something when he spent the whole day being needy, trailing behind you like a lost puppy. 

“Wanna make a sex tape with you” He whispered, his cheeks blushing. 

"Buckyyy" You covered your face when he brought it up, your cheeks heating up at the idea; you weren’t against it but you still felt self conscious. Bucky pulled you into his lap, cupping your cheek to make you look at him, kissing you before speaking again. 

"Promise no one else will see it sweets, we won't do it if you're no comfortable with it though" He smiled softly and you knew he meant it. Not once had he ever pressured you into doing something you didn't like.

He waited for the day where you felt comfortable. His whole body buzzed with anticipation, noting that you were much more shy, staying curled up in bed, trying to cover yourself up. Bucky propped his phone up, letting it rest on the dresser while he crawled into bed, draping his body over yours, keeping you covered. 

“You sure you okay with this pretty baby?” He whispered, his nose gently bumping against yours. You felt your face heat up, nodding and wrapping your arms around his shoulders. “I’m sure”

“Can-can I eat you out first?” 

Your eyes grew wide for a moment before you said yes, your breath hitching in your throat as he slowly trailed kisses down your body, starting at your neck, stopping to take your nipples into his mouth. He swirled his tongue around, nipping them before continuing down. His broad shoulders still kept you partially covered, his sculpted ass flexing as he grinded against the mattress, moaning as soon as his tongue tasted your slick. He came back up, crashing his lips against yours letting you taste yourself, moaning when he felt your legs come to wrap around his waist.

“How do you want it baby” His cock brushed against your pussy, the tip leaking, “You want it soft or hard?” 

“Soft please” You whispered, biting your lip as he smiled, kissing your forehead while lining his cock up, rubbing the tip, letting it catch your hole. His eyes rolled back feeling you fluttering already, his whole body keeping you covered. You relaxed under his body weight, gasping as he filled you up, your pussy fluttering over the roll of his hips. You whimpered, trying to keep your moans down, your nails scratching down his back instead, pleasure overwhelming you. 

“Let me hear you sweet girl” He whispered, trailing kisses down your neck, sucking the sensitive flesh, coaxing a whine out of you. “You sound so beautiful when you moan for my cock baby”  You couldn’t help but cry out for him as he sped his thrusts up, bringing his knee up, his cock rubbing and kissing that sensitive spot deep inside you.

“Jamesss” You were finding it harder and harder to silence yourself, soft moans starting to slip from your lips. Bucky’s hands came to lace with yours, pinning them on the bed, squeezing them as he barely pulled out, keeping you full of him. 

“You feel my cock deep inside you baby?” Bucky’s intense gaze made you feel shy again, overwhelmed with the pleasure he was giving you, how intimate the moment was, how you felt him everywhere, all over. 

“So deep B-Bucky” Your voice was shaky, struggling to keep yourself from tipping off the edge, gripping onto his hands instead. 

“I know princess, doing so good for me, you make me feel so good” Bucky kissed you until he had to come up for air, panting and resting his forehead onto yours. “Do I make you feel good babygirl? Does my cock make you feel good?”

All you could do was moan, unable to formulate words as he fucked you harder, is thrusts pushing all the way into you. Bucky groaned at the way your jaw was slack, your body trembling under him, thighs squeezing him, you were close, trying so hard not to cum. 

“You like my cock in your pussy huh angel? Look at how beautiful you are right now doll, Love making you feel good doll, wanna make you feel good every. single. day” Bucky’s pace started to grow sloppy, his breaths getting heavier. 

“Gonna watch this over and over and make myself cum every time I can’t have you pretty girl” 

The thought of Bucky watching your sex tape while touching himself was too much, heat coursing through your body, your pussy starting to suck him deeper. 

“FUCK JAMES” 

“That’s right baby, say my name, wanna hear you scream for me when I make you cum, c’mon, scream my name baby, let go” Bucky picked up his back, moaning into your neck, struggling to hold his own pleasure off until you came first. “Cum baby, m’not gonna last” 

“J-JAMESS” You sobbed, your back bowing off the bed, pressing against his chest, your eyes rolling back. Your let out a pornographic moan, cumming all over his cock, your slick gushing out of you as he continued to fuck you through your high. 

“Gonna cum for you baby, take it sweet heart, take my cum, take it, take it- oh fucckkk” All the muscles in his body were pulled taut, stilling as his cock throbbed shooting his load inside you. He cuddles with you for a bit, still staying inside you before finally pulling out, making sure he still covers up most of you before grabbing his phone to stop recording. 

After the first sex tape, you get a little more comfortable and also more frisky. Bucky records just about anything whenever he gets the chance.

His favorite tapes are the ones where he can see your face and see the way you look at him. It makes him feel butterflies, blushing as he looks back, your pretty eyes always shyly gazing at him even when he doesn’t notice. 

His absolute favorite video is the one from the shower where theres so much steam, it’s a little fuzzy but it makes the moment so much more intimate. He has your legs around his waist, water dripping off your bodies, your back against the shower wall. Your moans echo and bounce off the walls significantly louder, mixed with the sound of the shower.

He also has a few prized ones that he will guard with his life. Ones that would make him cum without touching himself. 

“Smile for the camera my little slut” Bucky’s voice all you can hear, his phone focused on you while you lay on his bed, your hair messy and tousled, a thin sheen of sweat covering your body. 

You blink up with doe eyes, your tongue darting up to lick up the cum dripping from your lips, his load covering your face. You run your finger through the mess he’s made, sucking it off, giving him an innocent giggle. Bucky groaned, panning the camera down to capture the way hes stroking his spent cock, growing hard again because you look so sexy covered in him. 

“Got my dick all sensitive baby, made me cum so hard” He smirked, bringing his semi hard cock to your lips, pushing the tip for you to suckle on. “That’s it, my good girl, my little cum princess drinking up like a good girl” 

You whined, still playing with the cum that covered you, letting him record the way you took his load, coating your fingers and fingering yourself, rubbing your clit after. Bucky spread your legs apart, capturing the way your fluttering pussy dripped onto the bed, your cream messy between your thighs. He makes you hold his phone so you can record the way he cleans the mess up, his chestnut hair between your legs, arms holding you down. 

You can hardly focus on keeping the camera steady but you get every single minute of the way he moans and greedily licks up the mixed arousal pouring out of you. You nearly loose your mind at the way he lets his eyes roll back, telling you how perfect you taste together, crawling up to kiss you, making your more messy than before. 

“Let’s make a sequel?” 

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#bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes smut #bucky barnes x f!reader #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #bucky x y/n #bucky x female reader #bucky x f!reader #college bucky #college bucky au #college bucky barnes #bucky barnes college au #marvel college au #avengers college au #bucky barnes au #bucky barnes x f reader #bucky x f reader #bucky fluff #bucky smut #bucky barnes #james bucky barnes #james buchanan bucky barnes #james buchanan barnes #james bucky buchanan barnes #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes fan fic #bucky barnes fan fiction

[creature-wizard]

Toxic Individualism In Modern Witchcraft

The modern witchcraft movement is very much a product of the 20th century, and one thing it picked up from that was a pretty individualist way of thinking. This isn't all bad, since it helped normalize people being allowed to do spirituality in a way that truly resonated with them, rather than following whatever an institution prescribed for them.

But as many of us know, western individualism comes with a lot of really toxic shit, encouraging and even enshrining apathy, cruelty, and social Darwinism. This, unfortunately, is very much an attitude you occasionally see within modern witchcraft.

This is sometimes expressed through a "let 'em sink or swim" attitude. For example, you might see people bristle at the idea of warning people about dangers such as toxic plants; "well, they should know to just research this themselves, if they get hurt, that's their own faults." Never mind that most of us live in a socioeconomic environment where "natural" tends to be equated with "safe," and few people were taught any real amount of research skills. (Most people don't know how to research beyond "type a thing into Google and click the first link" or "watch a video on YouTube and follow the algorithm.")

There's this sort of idea that witchcraft and the occult is this kind of Darwinian proving ground. You're either just born having what it takes, or you're not. Supposedly, there's no need to warn people about red flags, fascist rhetoric, pseudohistory, or anything, because supposedly, the "worthy" will just be able to find their own way on their own. Anyone who doesn't make it? Anyone who ends up poisoning themselves or falling down the alt right pipeline or abused by a predator? Couldn't be helped; they were never "meant" for this path anyway. It was simply too much for them. Why, if you really think about it, it was their own faults for daring to reach above the station they were born for, anyway.

This is a completely irrational view, because it's simply not how things work. People aren't born having research skills, critical thinking skills, or knowing the difference between real history and pseudohistory; they're taught these things. And some people are statistically much less likely to receive a good education than others. There are a few people who beat the odds and end up better educated than most people in their socioeconomic status, but this doesn't mean that they were born with inherent greatness; it just means that they were curious and lucked out in finding the right materials.

As many of us also know, Victorian-era eugenicists believed that members of the upper class were just inherently better. They had the genes for intelligence and strength of will. (Yeah, that whole modern occult fixation with willpower has some dodgy origins, too.) They just ignored that whole thing where they lived in a socioeconomic system designed to keep most people in poverty. If they ever saw someone beat the system, they attributed it to that person being born exceptional for some reason. I would highly recommend that anyone who hasn't done so already watch Shaun's video, The Bell Curve, which criticizes the book by the same title that effectively tries to argue for Victorian-age eugenics, to get a better picture of this whole thing.

Toxic individualism also encourages thinking of individuals as main characters on some kind of hero's journey, where every pain they suffer and every mistake they make is a vitally important part of their journey and growth; so much so that any effort to prevent them from making mistakes or suffering harm is hindering their personal growth.

Sure, people do often gain valuable insight from their mistakes and suffering. But it's absurd to claim that this is always the best way for people to learn and grow, especially if there's a risk of serious harm for themselves or others. Certainly it's much better to learn from a friendly Tumblr post that essential oils can give you chemical burns or harm your pets than experience it first-hand. And it's much better to learn what far right rhetoric looks like beforehand so you can recognize it when you first see it, rather than get drawn into some far right belief system and perpetuate harm on vulnerable minorities for any amount of time. (This whole thing of acting like you're life's main character and other people are basically just NPCs on some hero's journey that you imagine yourself to be on is so immensely fucked up.)

And finally, if anybody out here finds themselves thinking, "but nobody should expect help from others; after all, I didn't get any!", I'm gonna tell you: it shouldn't have been that way. You didn't not get help because that's just how the world works; you didn't get help because that's how modern western socioeconomics are created to work. Toxic individualism is a construct, and it's one that we can dismantle and replace with something better.

#witchcraft #eugenics #social darwinism #spiritual eugenics #spiritual darwinism #victim blaming #individualism #toxic individualism #anti communal behavior

[mikunology]

New Mikunology Files #1: CV Powers

omg here we go again

I've been on break a little while but I've been thinking hard recently and I want to share, so! I got an ask long ago about how Miku and friends' superpowers worked in my AU, and I answered it with what I had at the time, but after a lot of thought I straightened something more out I'm pretty satisfied with. I could add on potentially, though, because this AU is an eternal WIP. But y'know.

I'm pretty much gonna copy my notes. (Also sorry if this is formatted oddly, I'm on mobile right now.) Read below the cut! 👇

So, let's recap with the basics.

The Crypton CV androids are outfitted with special cores that function as their "hearts" - they're located in their chests. These cores are made of a special material that not only allows the CVs to learn and experience humanlike emotions, but also have the ability to change "feelings" into "energy": this is what gives them their superpowers. (They found this out by accident.) Meiko has dubbed this energy "Voltage".

The thing about Voltage, though, is that it's kind of unstable, and really powerful. Because of that, it's best for it to be used sparingly; the CVs can probably use it once or twice per fight (Module transformations excluded). Overuse of Voltage can cause the CVs to short/overload or become exhausted (which isn't great when you're trying to finish off a fight).

Voltage can get stronger with strong emotions, so the group can occasionally spark their powers by accident if they get particularly emotional. Conversely, being too stoic or repressing emotions too much can reduce Voltage power. (Hence, it takes Luka much longer to truly break her powers in.)

Voltage also gives the group the ability to use Modules, chunks of pure Voltage energy that can give them a major power boost and change their appearances, as well as grant them new powers. (For example, Miku acquiring the Raspberryism Module gives her a mega punch ability and a new appearance resembling the character Raspberry Monster.)

Each of the CVs possess a unique way to channel their Voltage (special ability):

Miku's is Voltage Resonance. It gives Miku the ability to "resonate" with someone else's feelings and thoughts. This way, she can use this temporary empathic link to induce feelings, and given it's Miku, it's usually through song (for example, if she encounters a Module monster who's fueled by sadness, she can use Voltage Resonance to see what they're feeling and counter by giving them a song of hope or happiness). She can't outright control emotions like this, mind you, they're more like a powerful emotional suggestion. The flip side to this is that it can be ignored if a character is staunch about it (and technically regardless it wears off eventually, it just gives Miku enough time to give the person a "head start", if that makes sense?) and it can also mess Miku's own feelings up a bit if she's neglects to keep herself focused. It's also best used when the target is already vulnerable.

Rin and Len's is Voltage Link. Kind of similar to Miku's, but unique in that it mainly works with each other: it gives the twins a power boost and allows them to telepathically link themselves, making them temporarily "of one mind and body". It works best with each other since they're twins/mirrors, but they can use it with others... it's just way more difficult to keep it stable unless they understand the other person really well. Which is rare.

Luka's ability is Voltage Lariat. Also kinda unique in that can be both offensive and defensive, depending on what Luka's aiming for - Luka creates a field of Voltage that can either be a sort of healing spot (giving energy to everything in it) or a blast zone (taking energy from anything in it and giving it to Luka). Luka can probably do one of these each per fight, but she's gotta choose carefully when to use it. The fields also don't last long. (Why's this sound so video gamey? But this is the best I could come up with that I think works for her.)

Lastly, all CVs get one extra ability that is usually their "finisher" when all together: Voltage Wave. Not much to this one, just all the CVs using their Voltage to create a super rainbow energy beam!! Usually does the trick. (Fun fact: I like to think that it was rare for Miku and the twins to be able to pull off this move given they were inexperienced and it took a lot of power to pull off; with Luka's inclusion, it's way easier!)

Lastly, the CVs do have a few regular old stock superpowers: super strength (Rin's specialty), flight (Miku's specialty; also Luka is the only one in the group who doesn't fly too much when not necessary), super speed (to a degree at least), super reflexes, super hearing (they're musicians, after all!), super durability, the ability to download themselves into technology (robot perk) and the ability to manipulate hologram/hard light technology.

And that's pretty much it! I hope all of that makes some amount of sense. I'm sorry if I missed some stuff, I'll try to fill it in eventually.

#text #vocal android verse #vocaloid au #vocaloid #au lore #i did my best

[makingspiritualityreal]

Taylor Swift's "Anti Hero" - A Psychological Study of Rahu Mentality

I rarely dive into pop-culture references in my Astrology writing, but I couldn't help myself after seeing this recent piece of art from Taylor Swift, who has a strong Rahu influence in her chart (Moon conjunct Jupiter in Ardra Nakshatra). This song and music video describe perfectly the state of mind of Rahu natives, together with the emotional struggles they experience at this particular planetary stage. Every word and scene in the music video reflect the emotional state a Rahu influenced native finds themselves in, to the point it speaks for itself. I feel like my own description fails to do it as well as the source material does, so I encourage you to watch the video, with lyrics, after reading my post.

This post can be personally relatable to anyone, who has a very prominent Rahu influence in their chart, especially on their Moon, with the Moon placed either in Ardra, Swati or Shatabhisha or Rahu closely conjunct any personal planet. It is also a good information resource for anyone, who would like to understand the behaviour of Rahu in general.

Side note 1, before I dive deeper into the Rahu portion of the post. In the music video, the artist is presented talking to her alter ego. The duality of the character's two personalities interacting with each other is very typical of Rahu. A mindstate of fake social politeness and repression concerning what they view as undesirable to show externally, but battle with internally.

Side note 2. Minus the psychological component reflecting the traits of Rahu, the song directly describes Rahu's archetypal nature. "I'll stare directly at the Sun, but never in the mirror." That pertains to Rahu being the "smoky mirror" and its talent in creating illusions, mixed with its unwillingness to build up accountability, but instead being obsessed with swallowing up the greatness, that it desires through admiring the traits of the Sun itself.

Rahu trait 1: Birth of self-awareness and struggle with personal accountability. "I grow older but never wiser".

Rahu is widely known in Astrology circles for its negative traits, having a bad reputation for being greedy and all consuming. However, people don't realise that Rahu doesn't have the potential to fully step into the role of taking responsibility for any of its actions at this stage in a zodiac wheel. Rahu is where we merely begin to understand ourselves as conscious creators of our reality, because right until the previous stage of Mars, we were in one way or another directed or influenced by external forces, kept in a primitive state. Because we only start developing consciousness in a Rahu stage, it can feel, as if bad things are "happening to us" as opposed to "we are doing the wrong thing". That is why "I'm the problem" is used as such a strong revelation from the Artist's perspective in the song. To Rahu, its own illusory nature is so strong, it considers even realising its basic flaws an enormous step, as the newly found feeling of guilt can be overwhelming. Since we have yet to reach the Jupiterian stage, we accumulate a lot of experiences, which make us feel like we're "growing", but don't really give us satisfaction, as it feels like writing chapters in a book, that hasn't really reached its main plot point yet. That is reflected in the scenes, where the main character physically grows to monstrous proportions in comparison to other people in the room, yet struggles to find any fulfilment, and experiences mostly negative emotions related to herself.

Rahu trait 2: Megalomania and sense of drama, polarised with intense self-hatred and self criticism. "It must be exhausting rooting for the Anti Hero".

Because Rahu has been freed from obedience to command, that it was spelled under in the previous Mars stage, it views itself as the center of everything, discovering its individuality for the first time. It hasn't yet learned the principle of Universal connectivity and how one's personal actions need to be responsible towards the collective, because it is only now learning about the concept of its own independence. Thus, for Rahu, a desire for being a "Hero", call for freedom and receiving attention, is strong, to savour the newly cut chains. However, with these actions come consequences and responsibility for every step taken. That's when the dread and self hatred set in, as in many scenes of the video we can see a Rahu person has a strong part inside that doesn't even like themselves and lives in a strong energy of self sabotage. Rahu can't free itself from its desires to be center stage, yet it also can't let go of the impending doom of its mistakes. Thus, it mixes self glorification and self hatred in the "Anti-Hero" concept...as deep down, Rahu knows how much bravery it took for it to conquer so much in uncharted territories. It's not giving up its accolades. And perhaps they are earned, as it is thanks to the Rahu stage, that we are reborn with so many blessings in the Jupiterian phase.

Rahu trait 3: A state of deep loneliness, paranoia and anxiety. "I should not be left to my own devices. They come with prices and vices."

Something that is often taken for granted in Rahu, is that it lives in a constant state of fear. It feels like a scared child, that has been let out into the street with no support and due to the mistakes it has made, it struggles to develop self-trust and self reliance. These qualities are only fully developed in the Saturn stage, later down the road. Rahu is where we first experience the dread of loss of any idea of protection, that was still lingering on in the previous Mars stage. Since we are constantly testing boundaries in what feels to be an empty space at best and a threatening environment at worst, it is impossible for us to go through that stage without making mistakes. Thus, a desire for guidance and protection, that we receive in Jupiter, is born, as the Rahu stage is emotionally extremely uncomfortable.

Rahu trait 4: Struggles in relationships due to all the above traits. "One day I'll watch as you're leaving, 'Cause you got tired of my scheming for the last time."

Since Rahu is the birth of awareness of our own actions, it is also the birth of awareness of people's reception of us. At this stage, we are however unable to liberate ourselves from our flaws, so the mind lives in a state of fear of abandonment, as it is constantly hyperaware of its imperfection and the havoc it wreaks on others. It creates a state of entrapment, that there seems to be no way to get out of, which is why Rahu tries to escape the painful cycle in relationships with others through "ghosting" people, which is also mentioned in the song. Because of this entrapment, Rahu feels like it's not only not anyone's friend, but not even their own. There is progress waiting, even for Rahu however, and it is found in Jupiterian boundless forgiveness.

Rahu's greatest desire is the bridge of Rahu to Jupiter - Salvation, self-acceptance and mercy. What Rahu ultimately craves for is the beginning of self love for the imperfect and fragile human condition. At this stage cosmically, we are sick not only of other people's negative opinions of us, but also of our own flaws. Rahu reaches for hope after an intense struggle. It has a deep desire for forgiveness and cooperation with its shadow side, for the sake of progress and liberation from pain. And at the end of a very long, tiring journey, after it has fought so hard to reach basic self acceptance, it does indeed receive that relief at the hands of Jupiter.

#astrology #north node #rahu #vedic astrology #vedic astro notes #vedic astro observations #taylor swift #anti hero

[sleepy-shutin]

here’s something interesting i feel like some more people in the community should probably think about:

something really interesting i’ve had to learn over the years is that, no, i didn’t actually have that many fictives lol. what i did have was dissociation-related identity issues and severe derealization and latched onto fictional characters because i felt like the rest of the world wasn’t real, like i was in some kind of a TV show or video game or something.

weirdly enough, it hasn’t gotten better since getting a job and getting out of the house, and in fact it kinda feels like it’s gotten worse. every day, i struggle with understanding that people other than me/my family are real and that i have to legitimately deal with them, and that my job is not some video game and is actually something that i have to take seriously.

either way i find it really interesting to consider that some people don’t have as many fictives (or non-fictives) as they think they do. it’s not a bad thing, just part of the process of getting all your shit sorted out, especially if you don’t have a therapist. but i think too many people are afraid to admit that they could be wrong about how many alters they have for some reason. if they think they have an alter of something than they must, and they can never be wrong about it because why would they? they know themselves best, right?

not necessarily true.

all the time, people mistake things for alters that were not alters. people who have been diagnosed for years can mistake something for an alter when it’s not an alter at all. it’s simply a part of the process, and people need to acknowledge that you can be wrong about having (a) certain part(s), and that’s fine.

like i said at the beginning of this post, this very thing has happened to me. i thought i had alters i didn’t, particularly fictives, and had to eventually restart my alter count a couple of years ago because i didn’t have my shit figured out, and was so sick of being unable to tell what was real and what isn’t. 

here’s some things that should’ve been my own hint that the alters i thought i had were not real:

if you have fictives that go 'dormant’ when the fixation on their source material goes away,

if they only front to interact with their source material,

if they only front because their source material triggered them out,

if you’re only ever ‘splitting’ fictive alters, especially if you’re in spaces where fictives are the majority,

or if you constantly expect to split fictives over any other kind of alter...

...then that/those fictive(s) might not actually be there.

causes could be related to being in fictive-heavy spaces causing you to feel like you’re only going to split fictives or identity issues related to severe, chronic dissociation causing you to identify with fictional characters heavily without actually introjecting them. both of these were the reasons i thought i had more fictives than i did in the beginning.

obviously, not a one-size-fits-all type deal and there are probably plenty of cases where this is flat-out wrong. i’m mostly just writing this so that someone out there like me doesn’t have to waste their time thinking they have more parts, or more of one specific kind of part, than they actually do, thus stunting their own recovery like i did for a handful of years.

it’s also not to shame anyone or fakeclaim anyone or whatever. there’s no shame in being wrong, and being wrong about having a specific alter or a handful of a certain type of alter doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re faking everything or whatever. it’s just something to consider, especially if you’re new to the system community, like a year or less into realizing you have a complex dissociative disorder.

#part zero #actuallydid #actuallymultiple #actuallytraumagenic #actuallydissociative #actuallyosdd #did system #osdd system #dissociative identity disorder #osdd-1 #osdd-1a #osdd-1b #ddnos #syscourse

[bwaveq]

I had this stuck in my head for a while but idk if it makes sense or not so bear with me.

Imagine there’s a reader with some sort of ability(?), they aren’t a plant nor anything near as an experiment but a deadly disease. HEAR ME OUT i loved history and learning about it like watching movies/clips/youtube videos in class n stuff, but what i was mostly intrigued in was the bubonic plauge/black death. You might be thinking where am i going with this? Well lets say reader is a walking disease traveling nowhere really since they really have no where to go, along with anyone to rely on since they’re known as the black death/the plauge.

People don’t know who they are at first when they come across them, the first incident broke out when they were roaming with no masking or protection leading to where everyone was catching onto this said disease and basically barricading theirselves inside homes/shelters.

It was an innocent interaction when reader’s hand came in contact with a little kid’s hand, she had the biggest smile on her face when she greeted her new friend they met during a shoot down where component’s were facing off into a gun throw down. It wasn’t long until everyone broke out into a frenzy watching as the little girl soon crumple in front of readers eyes, the disease wrapping itself around her hands causing it to go limp and decay while the rest of her body did the same. Not only did it stop there, it spread to the people around them decaying and screaming for help.

Weeks later did they only find the material to make their very own clothing that would protect people from themselves, aha you guessed it a beaked mask, gloves, and a long coat. Now imagine having to walk through a desert with that kind of clothing on the average human would’ve collapsed from heat stroke and died, but diseases can’t die could they?

I hope y’all at least understand what im going on about wouldn’t it be so cool to read about a reader being the Plauge? How would they meet with Vash and the others, do they remain a secret or do they tell them right off the bat.

Imagine having like the coolest names ever

Vash The Stampede

Undertaker/Punisher

The Black Death/Bubonic plauge/ The Plauge

Idk i thought this was a thing i needed to share😭

Love and Peace? Nah Death and Decay.

#bwaveq #bwaveq rants #bwaveq randoms #vash x you #vash the stampede #fyppage #trigun stampede x reader #trigun stampede x you #trigun x reader #trigun x gn reader #trigun x you #nicholas d. wolfwood x reader #nicolas d. wolfwood x you #Trigun #plauge doctor #bubonicplague #imagines #yeah idk

[welcome-to-green-hills]

What’s the difference between an anthropologist and an archaeologist? 😃 And what do archaeologists do when they’re not digging at excavation sites?

Oooh! Okay!❤️🤩❤️

An anthropologist is a scientist who studies human beings. The ask questions like, “what makes us human?” And “How can we define ourselves as human?”

We ask these questions through four (or five if you want to get technical) categories:

Linguistics

Cultural and Social Development

Biology

Archaeology (ME!)

and Applied Anthropology

Linguistics pretty much answers how languages not only changed through time, but how they’ve influenced culture and changes in society. It’s pretty common to have Linguistic Anthropologists work in a language lab where they play with words all day. They also make it a point to connect language with reading. If you ever talk to a linguistic anthropologist, ask them about cranial cap ripples.

Biological anthropologists help with the biological and organic portion of humans and nonhumans. You get primatologists (primates), forensic experts, retired doctors, paleontologists (human evolution), molecular scientists, and those that practice alternative methods of medicine. If you ever meet a biological anthropologist, as them how many ways to Sunday you can study teeth.

Cultural Anthropologists is very open in interpretation. I say that because it’s always advancing in its field with new discoveries every day. Cultural anthropologists study social groups. They immerse themselves in artwork, written/spoken literature, music, humanities, material goods, women’s rights, gender and sexuality. and social engagement. Kinda like how it’s a Tumblr norm to say, “I like your shoelaces. Thanks, I got them from the president.” They learn behaviors and manners, physical and non-physical telling of what makes that society function. If you ever meet a cultural anthropologist, ask them what their favorite cultural greeting.

Archaeology is a field in anthropology that’s commonly classified as a “historical science.” We use the scientific method to answer questions about the past and continuously ask “why?” We’re not Indiana Jones, many of us frown upon the comparison. We’re environmentally conscious of what we do when looking through historical records and digging at different sites. You need an understanding of history, linguistics, biology, and cultural practices for what site you work at. When archaeologists aren’t digging, they’re considered “shovel bums.” They travel around from one agency to the next (if they’re freelance) and dig year-round. We practically live out of a suitcase. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m not a shovel bum. I’ve made my archaeological work through museums and conservation labs.

Applied Anthropology is a newer branch in anthropology. They ask the question, “now what!?” They look for practical solutions. They question a bit more and ask, “now what do we do? How can we make this more efficient for humans?” If you ever meet someone in this field, ask them their stance on Cyber-Anthropology (I.E., video games, AI, robots). You’ll get a mixed bag, but you might come out wiser.

SAPIENS.ORG is an anthropological magazine that’s designed for anthropologists, as well as those who are learning/interested in the field. Free subscription. Scope them out if you’re interested! And know that I’m always up for chatting about it here. I know that I’ve gotten some DMs from y’all wanting to know more about it. Know that my inbox is open.

#I hope this helped you my dear #mystery anon #off topic #I am an anthropologist #I am an archaeologist

[thunderclaw100]

Bio: Nixy is the daughter of tallest Red and Eva and the third born of her siblings. Unlike her older brother, Jovian, she doesn’t take ring a halfbreed to heart. Nixy knows she’ll be treated differently, and is aware of the discrimination she and her siblings face. Nixy is a smart girl and has proven this in many way, including ring very calculating. When she was little, her mother found her toying with one of her inventions. As it turns out, Nixy actually improved it. Eva has her studying with her older sister, Bellatrix. Learning the culture of planet Vort. She’s very interested in learning more about her mother’s background. Once can believe it or not but Nixy is a genius in her own right. Given a tablet of her own from her mother, she was able to use it to her own advantage. Hacking, converting, designing, encoding. She’s using her vortian side they most and it’s leaving her with good results as she grows. Nixy’s interested in science and genetic research ever since she and her siblings learned that their father was made in a smeetery back on planet irk. Her mother sees this as a sign to get her involved with the nautralian’s lab training so that she can explore this passion of hers. Out of her siblings, Nixy has doesn’t have the best of eyesight.

That being part of her vortian side. Eva told her that some of her people have that same issue and there is reason why most wear goggles now. Her mother did offered her glasses but instead, Nixy made her own. Using the material sand soil for the lenses as well as adding other things to make it notes useful to her. Like night vision, zooming, sensing heat signatures, and she might add a laser beam for it. Nixy could be a pilot navigator but is still thinking about what she want to be when she grows up. Her mother gave her a few ideas to think over. Some that seems fitting for a vortian. Nixy wants to be accepted the way she is instead of being judged because of who her father is.

Likes: Her family, stargazing, snacks, studying, working on her tablet, her parents, vegetables, camping, video games, backing cupcakes, her crush.

Dislikes: filthy things, rude insults, fake people, being told she’s not good enough for anything, stupidity.

Personality:Lovable, benevolent, cheerful, talkative,diligent,devoted, generous, impatient.

*RELATIONSHIPS*

Eva: Her mother helped her out a lot when she was little. From moving Nixy past her own insecurities to improving her poor vision. Her mother walked her though the knowledge of her vortian side, and telling her all the good contribution her people made for themselves and other aliens they’ve allied themselves with. Accept for the irken race. During times when her mother was going to be exposed for harboring a fugitive, tallest Red. Nixy helped her out by messing with the wanted poster images and putting cryptic locks on their home security. Eva is the one person she would never cross.

Tallest Red: Meeting her father for the first time was a shock to her. Nixy was the first out of her siblings to make him feel welcome. Even going so far as to jump into his arms to hug him. Red was unsure about this whole family thing, and Nixy learned that her father is a clone made in a smeetery factory back on irk, so his father skills need work on. This cloud on improving his other lack of emotions that are not implanted into his pak system. Even after being told about who tallest Red really is and all the horrible things he’s done to others. Nixy still wants to bond with her father. Just like the rest of her siblings.

Bellatrix: She admires her older sister. Not because she resembles their mother a lot! One would say, Bella keeps the peace among her siblings with gentle or firm words of knowledge . A trait she’s got from Eva. During their earlier years, Nixy and her sister snuck out of their mother’s nest to explore a little. Bella found a rare neutralien crystal gem and kept it. It’s been used for her her own inventions and experiments. Nixy learns a lot when she’s with her sister. Bella can handle tough situations than she can. During a pak malfunction, Nixy was in a state of panic. It was her older sister who came and fix the problem. Adding a new function to the pak’s system that’ll prevent internal bugging. Bella takes care of her whenever she’s feeling down or upset. It’s hard not to call her mom when she does this.

jovian: It can’t be helped to say that he’s a thorn in her side sometimes. Like the rest of their siblings, Jovian’s reckless antics is an eyesore to the family.l and needs to be scolded. Nixy isn’t in favor of her older brother fighting himself to be better at everything. Jovian would often show up after a hard self disciplined training session with blood and bruises all over his body. Nixy can’t even count the times she had to restitch his outfits. She only covered for him him once when their mother demand what happened to him the first time he started this. Never again. She regrets it every time a new scratch our black eye shows up on her brother’s face. Other than this, Nixy and Jovian get along just fine. They are the dynamic duo. Teaming up to concur anything. This sort of happened when they were young little smeets, playing round in their mother’s nest with. They would team up against Bellatrix and Orieon to climb to the top of their mother’s head as a sort of “king of the mountain game.” She was also involved with him getting custom made pak from their mother. She thought of having different colors would be nice for a change. Seeing she learn that the majority of irken have everything match the same. Nixy’s most recent argument with Jovian was about him wanting to leave planet Neutra and explore the universe. What frightened her more was that he thought of visiting planet irk. It only took a few insults and a stream of tears to get him to stay.

Orieon: Her younger brother. He used to be the quiet one in their litter and was the last to leave the nest. It was Nixy and Bellatrix that got him to be more talkative and outgoing. Nixy noticed that her brother seems to be growing a lot faster than the rest of them. With their mother, began to keep tabs on his growth. Eva noticed his behavior patterns are almost at a match with tallest Red, and that was something to be concerned about later in the years. After having installed their custom paks, Nixy helped her brother get the hang of using his pak legs. She even saved him once, after one of them went haywire and was about to stab him in the chest. In fact she’s the one monitoring all of their paks with her tablet. Orieon appreciates Nixy and thanked her for tolerating him.

Dib: Nixy has grown interested in the human. Partly because she wants to examine him or ask a lot of questions about space, or his relationship with an Irken. Zim’s voot cruiser also caught her eye at the time. Nixy, like her older brother, wants to learn more about their Irken heritage, so they asked Zim. The human boy shared some info about what’s going on in space. Letting Nixy know that there is a brave vortian out there, risking his life as well as his team to make sure planets like theirs are safe from an invasion. At first Nixy thought that humans were uneducated and so far back behind from the res of the universe, that they’d wouldn’t bother to explore outside their own solar system. Or not even to make trading partner ls with other, more advanced planets. For a moment, Nixy was thinking like an Irken. Believing that other inferior races should just give in to the stronger ones. Dib made it clear to her and the other kids that being stronger doesn’t make you better than others because there will always be someone out there better than you. Before Dib and Zim depart from planet Neutra, she gave them a gem. Both something to remember her by and for great use in forging into something powerful.

Zim: When he and Dib landed on the outskirts of the neutralien’s refugee camp, they were following a distress signal which lead them to Eva and her children. Jovian found and brought them home with him. Nixy and her other siblings were amazed to see another Irken, other than the other two that are part of the camp. Zim proudfully told the kids about Irken culture, the empire, the function of the paks, and the ranked jobs of the Irken military. Nixy took notes of everything being said to her from him. Asked her own questions, including one that kinda caught him off gourd. She wanted to know if he’s a defective. This didn’t trigger much, other than a slight bias and a displeasing look from Zim. The young hybrid wonders if the reason for the defectivness is the park, she suggested that Zim just fix it himself or Chang ethe encoding while cutting off links to the possible downgrade that will automatically change his functional character. Zim never met anyone THIS young being able to speak this logical and smart. Nixy sees a friend in Zim and possibly a god father.

*EXTRA*

•She made an Irken uniform in inspiration of Zim.

•Nixy likes to analyze people and her work.

• Just like her brother, she’s a brainiac.

• Her mother surgically enhanced her poor vision.

• She likes to make silk fabrics for her family.

• She’s partially colorblind to some colors. That’s another reason why she got the surgery from Eva.

•Nixy gotten used to wearing neutralien

• Is afraid of horror movies but likes sci-fi films.

•Just like her mother, Nixy grooms her horns.

• Nixie and Bellatrix are the ones with four fingers.

•Nixy and Orieon both have a crush on an neutralien.

*DIALAUGE*

“I never liked being called a know it all. I am smarter than most kids my age but I don’t see myself as anyone too intelligent to be important.”

“I didn’t tell my littermates about this but….I have poor eyesight. Mom said that it’s normal for some vortian’s to have this problem due to having smaller eyes. I had to wear ugly glasses for a while. In secret, mom got to do surgery on my eyes to improve them.”

“The Neutraliens we’re pretty decent with me and my family. I only hope the other aliens who took residence here would be more accepting. Some of them are think that me and siblings are a curse.”

“You are so hard-headed, Jovian! You’re not going to succeed our father. Get a fucking clue!”

“These schismatics are amazing! It’s exactly what I need to improve our custom paks.”

“HEY! I may be an nuisance to you but I’m still a kid!”

“When in doubt, try a different approach!”

“Are they going to send us away? Why did that tall man get us in trouble, momma?”

“Doesn’t it shock you that our father is the leader of the most threatening race in the galaxy? The tallest of the Irken empire. Just try and Top that!”

“I want to make a difference in this place once I’m older. We’ll have to contribute to it one day. I hope that our father’s reputation doesn’t ruin it for us.”

#invader zim #Nixy #Irken/Vortian #Oc #Fanart

[artylo]

On Lecturing, Mansplaining, and The Way We Seek Information

What I find profoundly tiring about the senseless perversion of the conversational maxims nowadays is the seemingly insatiable urge for people to lecture others. Doubly so on the internet. I think this is somewhat of a new endeavour in everyone's repertoire, a honest to god brand new learned behaviour in the communal melting pot.

Of course, lecturing someone implies that there is some sense of superiority and of ego. One believes that the other could benefit with having something explained to them, so they do so with a sense of complete entitlement and with no consideration of one's receptiveness towards such an act. I see slighter examples of this online, like under interviews with rather oratorically gifted people like Orson Welles. Just here and there, someone will have isolated some pleasant and articulate phrase as one of the many comments. This in and of itself is not a bad thing - sententiae are after all fit for purpose. What is not to share? These individuals, however, cannot help themselves by just highlighting what they find pleasant to the ear, but the feel obligated to comment further on how "this is some advice a lot of young people can benefit from" or "this is a valuable lesson for everybody to learn right there". How observant. That these are words that the elusive "I" has deemed valuable - words that souls of perceived lesser taste ought to immediately apply. Of course, this seems innocent enough, but to me it speaks to a much larger shift in the way we perceive others and appreciate information.

Surely, if we are listening to or reading the same material, and we then come across the same sententia, which is evidently universally applicable to all facets of the human condition, something that everyone should and ought know, then why surmise that everyone else has somehow missed it. Why belittle the intelligence of your fellow man by acting as if your own intellectual facets are somehow better attuned to what is considered tasteful or profound. If the sententia is truly what you say it is, then shouldn't it be evident to the recipient without further elaboration on why this particular fragment is of vital importance for our species.

There is a whole industry of people who have essentially created a career putting together listicles of advice or quotes from famous people. Just the other day I came across a video, which was roughly about ten or so minutes, which essentially revolved around listing three sentences that were supposedly uttered by Ernest Hemingway, as advice to aspiring writers. This was of course padded for length and supported by several metric tons of visuals and calls to action, which as you might imagine could be a wholly different and lengthy topic of discussion. Yet, surely if I were to seek wisdom from the greats, then I would seek it out myself. That I would find meaning in their work or conversations they had had with their peers, rather than some montage bereft of all context.

The film critique industry has essentially morphed from mostly critique, analysis, and conspicuous marketing, into a factory for ready-made opinion pieces, which viewers eat up wholesale and regurgitate instead of indulging whatever thoughts they might have on the particular film. Dozens upon dozens of "Ending Explained" videos and articles, where people are given objective answers to subjective questions. Works to which many flock to immediately upon the credits rolling, just so there isn't any shred of ambiguity left. Not immediately knowing or being confused causes people to feel excluded from the group - excluded from people that can somehow explain - people who are perhaps confident enough to state their opinion at all, regardless of the consequences, in a way that to the rest of society looks like expertise and some higher sense of wisdom.

We're essentially begging each other to remove all doubt. To blindly trust in the loudest voices of our generation. Not doing so might open one up to being wrong or to being misinformed. In the court of public opinion, those are seen as grievous acts. How dare you not be aware that this is the case! Aren't you a fool!

This makes people afraid to share their thoughts and encourages a capriciously Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The environment which allowed for there to be the public's opinion and the private opinion is slowly being eroded. Conversing on a topic might seem fruitless when there is a video on the topic, which can be shared instead. The material doesn't contain the point - it is the point.

There is not innate reward in being able to synthesise your own thoughts any more. It's much easier to be indifferent after all. It's much easier to plead media illiteracy than it is to open oneself to ridicule. Expressing positivity or negativity towards a work might alienate you from the diametrically opposed group after all. Taste is prescribed, not cultivated.

Recently, I've been coming across a lot of media that mentions mansplaining - the act of a man explaining something, typically to a woman, in a manner seen as patronizing. I feel that that too is a symptom, or at least a more common example of what I'm seeing. In a sense, we want to perceive others' passions and interests as fundamentally their own and as non-transferable. There is no way of opening someone's eyes to something your hold dear without shoving it down their throat or presenting it as the rule of thumb. It creates this inane sense that the people around you are somehow less intelligent and less receptive to things, which you consider to be, of finer taste. That in and of itself motivates people to lecture and to present themselves as holier than thou. To present the information in a way that is mimetically palatable. If a lot of people believe something, then it must be correct. And if it is correct then it must be what people believe.

This kind of reasoning is indeed very democratic, but is liable to a vocal minority controlling the narrative and essentially prescribing what the majority opinion of a work will be. Worryingly so, this isn't even entirely isolated to fiction. News and information has become too plentiful and too difficult to sift through, so we flock to simple, pre-chewed, and condensed information, where some supposedly learned figure has handily decided what is important and what isn't for us. Being informed is becoming an exercise of trust in others, rather than a search for an objective truth.

Needless to say, what I am advocating for is for you to exercise self-restraint when it comes to satisfying your lust for information or the need to elucidate it in others. Form views of your own, before comparing them to those representing the zeitgeist. Do not seek to eradicate the views of others, so that you might substitute them with your own. Seek understanding in what you perceive as wrong. Question everything, including yourself, the views of those closest to you, and the views of those you deem wisest and most eloquent. Post-modernism is an exercise in individuality, and as we slowly move into an era of post-irony I feel it is going to become ever so important, if not more. In a very meta-modernist way, you might even choose to ignore my assumptions, which would also be valid. Are we there yet? You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

#conversational maxims #linguistics #sociology #philosophy #critical thinking #mansplaining #ending explained #creative nonfiction #essay #human behaviour #random observations #orwellian #post irony #metamodernism

[tickle-her-senseless]

Reblogging vs reposting - a rant…

I wonder how long it’ll be before a certain someone decides to save and re-upload my latest bunch of gifs 😒 All I seem to see around here these days are re-uploads of my old gifs by the same person, usually with hundreds of notes on them. When their blog initially appeared, the majority of the owner’s posts were just copypasta of my gifs from the previous few years - not reblogs, to be clear. Giving her the benefit of the doubt (she was new and pretty young), I sent her a friendly message:

As you can see, her response was to block me with no reply - but it hasn’t stopped her from continuing to rip my gifs off, going way back to the days when I was still learning and didn’t know how to make them without a big “makeagif.com” watermark at the bottom right 🙄 I guess she either sees them in reblogs (which is how I see her posts everywhere) and saves them, or she views my blog in a browser window without signing in. I just had a look at hers using the same trick, and there are asks saying things like “where did you find that video? I’ve been looking for that for years” and she replies along the lines of “oh, it’s not available on the site where I found it anymore”. I doubt she’s ever even seen most of the videos I used to make the gifs. They were just lifted from my blog.

“But Swift, why get so precious about it? Aren’t you stealing from the original videos when you make gifs anyway?”

One or two people have asked me similar things over the last several years. My take on gifs can be broken down into 5 parts…

1. They’re ubiquitous on the Internet and seem to get a free pass as low-quality glimpses lasting a couple of seconds with no audio. Major entertainment studios tend to enforce copyright restrictions with an iron fist, but you never see them going after gifs. Official accounts can be seen posting humorous gifs that others have made of their films, shows, music videos etc etc. They’re just part of Internet culture at this point. I’ve seen gifs others have made of me tickling my friends out there online … I’ve even seen a couple of me being tickled, God help me 😱

2. I believe that enough work goes into making a gif for it to qualify as transformative content. Most of it is actually the time spent watching a video like a hawk (usually with the sound off for context) and waiting for a brief spike of beauty or intensity or excitement. Then I’ll replay it a few times, screen record it, crop out any black bars, trim it (sometimes trying to make it loop as smoothly as possible), convert it to a gif while adjusting the size, FPS, format etc, optimise it to get the file size down and finally post it with a caption. All of this was learned through trial and error … which is plain to see in my earliest posts 😅 If reaction videos fall under transformative content from which some people make a fortune, my little non-profit tickle gifs are OK by me.

3. As a hard rule, I never make gifs from videos that aren’t already available to view somewhere online. A lot of them are actually from preview clips posted by the studios themselves, since they put all of the best moments in there anyway! I’ve been known to pay for tickle videos, but I never use them as gif material.

4. I spend a fair bit of time telling people where gifs are from when they ask eg. “Oh, it’s from a free preview of this video by this studio, full version available on Clips4Sale here.” I reckon I’ve actually directed a lot of traffic towards creators by this point.

5. I’m just continuing a convention that pre-dates my involvement on Tumblr and will probably carry on for a long time. When I arrived here, I was more interested in well-drawn art, well-written stories and community meet-up/session videos which warmed my icy heart and really made me want to be a part of things here. To my surprise, the engagement on gif posts dwarfed every other type of content, even videos. Ironically, I don’t actually get much pleasure from them myself, I find them empty without the audio. I always want to hear how much the lee is suffering, sue me 😁 Still, I figured that learning how to make gifs would be the most effective way to integrate myself here - and I was right, it was 😉 I do think it’s crazy, though, that a gif of mine could get hundreds of notes in 24 hours when I was posting regularly, but talented artists and writers struggle to get a few dozen in total. They’re the real content creators.

Anyway, yeah, there you go. It’s also true that content takes on a life of its own to some extent once you upload it. I see a bunch of my stuff on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok … people regularly upload it to Discord servers that I’m in (or even help to moderate) and I just smile to myself and don’t say anything. Posting a gif on a different platform is one thing, but I do think that posting literally dozens of them on the exact same platform is shady as hell when the reblog button exists. Especially when I reached out amicably and was blocked with no response.

It’s been one of the factors behind my activity dropping off so much in the past year - motivation to make gifs is hard to find when you know that someone’s waiting to help themselves to anything you throw out there. The only reason I haven’t named this person is that she’s on the young side, although not a minor (as you can see, my original message to her was sent over a year ago and I never said anything in public to spare her any flaming that might ensue) but I have to admit, it’s beginning to grate on me - especially when I see people tagging her blog as the source when they incorporate the gifs into their own posts…

#tickle community #tickling #tickle gifs #reblog don’t repost #losing the will

[flownintothesun]

LAYER 001 : THE OUTSIDE.

name : westley colin johannes henrik van der sterren (mccarthy / bernardi / pollard / gunderson).

eye colour : shifting like the sea between blues and greens & grays.

hair style & colour : curly & black — catches red in the light.

clothing style : think ‘bad boy’ who can clean up damn well.

best physical feature : the ones i write about most are his ever-changing eyes, the dusting of freckles across his nose, or the dimples when he smiles.

LAYER 002 : THE INSIDE.

fears : abandonment, death of a loved one, being incapable, not being strong enough, lack of control, lack of stability, not being smart enough, being the reason a loved one gets hurt, losing his sense of self, being corrupt / evil.

guilty pleasure : musicals. he enjoys both watching them and singing them and will take this fact to his grave — unless you’re muriel or james, in which case you already know.

biggest pet peeve : incompetence that causes trouble, people who don’t respect the boundaries of his loved ones.

ambitions for the future : to be happy and loved.

 LAYER 003 : THOUGHTS.  

first thoughts waking up : coffee now pls.

what they think about most : @batteredoptimist’s james and muriel, tbh. how to love them, how to keep them safe, how to do good / right by them.

what they think about before bed : honestly it’s probably very citrusy, and i blame nonny for this, too.

what they think their best quality is : well, since we got him thinking about citrus fruits, he says his ass. i think his best quality is that he pushes himself so hard to do right by the ones he loves when the world did him so utterly wrong. he’s a fighter and he is so strong and beautiful and brave and i’m so proud of him.

LAYER 004 : WHAT’S BETTER?

single or group dates : single (but also this counts for his polyam triad with muriel & james)  — he just wants to spend time with the ones he loves, tbh. he doesn’t mind company, but prefers to keep dates intimate.

to be loved or respected : both, and feared too in the right circumstances. it depends on the person. by strangers? respected. by an enemy? feared. by those he loves? loved, loved, loved.

beauty or brains : he says that muriel tells him that he has both. but ehm, in a partner? i don’t think that it’s that black and white and neither does he. beauty becomes beauty when it’s something beloved, and intelligence is such a broad spectrum of knowledge. westley says (and i agree) that there is no one person that is more or less this than anyone else in the right eyes.

dogs or cats : dogs, but he loves both and he basically is a wee feral kitten. he has a golden retriever named ‘baby’ that he adores in one of my main / closed nonny-verses though and thus...dogs, but also all creatures great and small. ♡

LAYER 005 : DO THEY ...?

lie : he values honesty in relationships but he will absolutely lie to every single other person in his life that isn’t intimately close.

believe in themselves : he has a weird relationship with this, and it kind of teeters back and forth.

believe in love : of course he does. he’s loved too deeply to doubt that love is one of the greatest forces on earth.

want someone : *waves at james and muriel* but also, he wants ‘home’ and ‘family’.

LAYER 006 : HAVE THEY EVER ...?

been on stage : verse-dependent.

changed who they were to fit in : sure. he’ll do whatever it takes in a pinch to get himself and his loved ones out of or into whatever scenario presents itself.

LAYER 007 : FAVOURITES

favourite colour : gold

favourite animal : he says don’t make him choose. he seems to have an affinity for pretty much all animals — but maybe dogs and birds?

favourite book :   he has adhd and has trouble focusing if it’s not special interest. he likes to make up / tell stories, or hear them from others. if he wants to learn something though, he will BURY himself in source material.

favourite game :  no one plays board games or video games with him, he’s absolutely relentless.

LAYER 008 : AGE

day their next birthday will be : june 26, 2023.

how old will they be : verse-dependent. infinite, or technically somewhere between 26-28.

LAYER 009 : FINISH THE SENTENCE

i love my husbands.

i feel deeply, sometimes i feel too much.

i hide from rejection. i don’t want to be a disappointment.

i miss feeling as though i belonged somewhere in the world.

i (rarely) have all the answers.

#➤ 𝟶. 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙵𝙾𝙾𝙻 ┊ westley mccarthy.

[first-only]

i'll probably regret asking since league of legends is known to be Not Good™ but now i'm curious. how is light and darkness treated in league of legends lore? (i've seen arcane but apart from that i know nothing)

(referring to this post and my tags on it)

ok so to answer this first a glimpse into what even "league of legends lore" is, as in the material principle of it. Best part of the entire ordeal is that literally nobody cares about league lore. The dudebros playing dont even know it, it has no active fandom (in the definition of tumblr/ao3 of 'fandom'), there's little cancelling, barely analysis, it's free. Which is great!! bc the authors took this to mean they can do literally whatever they want without scrutiny (or w very little of it) from either side. And they did good, oh did they do good. There's been gay characters since the beginning. There are /so many/ now. There's a trans character! She is referenced as such in-game and her bio tells her writing process and decisions! there's no drama over that! bc nobody knows despite all that lol. And im actually grateful for league's natural toxic defense systems because even the boom of arcane did not get the toxic fandom culture into scrutinizing and nitpicking. in short, there's like 5 of us who care abt this shit.

now the way league lore is conveyed is infinitely better than any other franchise with similar storytelling (looking at u overwatch). it's compact, the company actually puts it all in one official place, there's no word-of-god-ing whats canon is clear. side projects are easily referenced and accessible. did you know one of the trailers for the card game in the same universe kinda gives a hint as to the future of one of the main arcane charas? you could go look at it! (or ask for a link/explanation id be happy to). now, the way we learn about the universe beyound the explicitly shared things about regions and factions (and oh lord there's /so many/ of those - arcane was set in its specific regions because they were underdeveloped before!! imagine how the others are); is through the characters themselves and their personal lore. everyone has at least one (and usually many more + videos and stuff) short stories that explain their origin, connection to other characters, strives and moral dilemmas and relation to their faction and/or region. so we get to learn from a first-person account and. well. there's 162 characters to date. yeh that's /a lot of lore/.

And there's more!! The skins in the game, and especially the skin lines (ie skins for different champions with the same theme) are /canon/. Well, they're AU, in the sense of "what if this character was from this other faction/region/nation instead?" or "what if X had happened in this universe instead?" but the lore behind them is solid and applicable. So from all this we have learned a few things about the universe:

-The world they live in, Runeterra, is technically a "planet", but the universe itself is /definitely/ not like ours. It's not the kind of space we see in our physics and studies. It's a magical world! It's filled with beasts and mythological concepts, not hard mathematics and logic. Which is to say the 'void' of space is, in fact, a place for magical creatures to live! It's alive! it's livable, no concept of oxygen, it's travellable (with the right technology and/or magic to get there). The stars are little creatures that sometimes get lost or weak and 'fall' to Runeterra! there's a whole ass faction devoted to helping them grow and get back up. There's space dragons and 'gods' (which is a complicated concept in this universe but to abbreviate here lets call them that) that /create/ those lil guys!

Look at them!

those lil beasties ARE the stars! being shepherded! The darkness of the night sky is alive! its full of tiny creatures and scary space dragons and adventure and benevolent or mischievous celestials! (girl with the horn is one of them!)

-There /is/ a concept of the actual Void, which is a different... spacetime? Sure let's go with that. It's all consuming, the threat to all living beings, on Runeterra and beyound. It's looking to eat and consume everything, ever expanding. Some characters dont believe it even exists (its kinda on a cooldown, waking up atm); others devote their lives and turn into villains to protect the world from it. The kicker? Not only is it /alive/ itself, made of undulating flesh, but all its monsters and messengers are grabbing hands looking to grapple and drown the world as we know it inside of themselves. It's True Darkness, alive and breathing and looking to Consume.

-the concept of light is a little bit different. it's treated as good and righteous by some factions and characters, as blinding by others. the biggest fans of it, as it were, are however the nation that looks to purge everything unclean and magical, to subdue mages and any expression of things non-physical. their battlecries are 'for the light' (which is often called out by other charas as /magical itself/ ironically lol), as they slaughter and purge the lives they deem unnecessary, leaving the emptiness magic leaves behind it as a remnant. ofc this isnt as clear cut a moral lesson - the lore loves its ambiguity. an angel splits in two (simplifying lol) to 'righteous justice' (=light, punishment, purging) and 'compassionate justice' (=dark, support, helping humans with what they need so they would be kinder). the star shepherding region itself is split in sun and moon warriors. protectors of supposed invasions, shields of the light that let nothing in. and nighttime secretive warriors who do what they can to improve the lives of the little guys, who want to fill the sky and the earth with (moon)light - reflected and thus gentler, subtler, /fuller/. and the leaders of these factions are lesbian lovers who were sisters in the old lore 👀

and honestly thats not even my fav part of league lore lol. the political intrigue, characters seemingly crafted to suit me personally. there's ninja-likes who move in smoke and darkness to preserve peace, opposed by light-shining spirit walkers who seek complacency, control, subjugation! you know i never thought /too/ much abt the whole way it treats lightness vs darkness apart from the more obvious space and void faction, but damn the more i dig into it, the more obvious it is this seems like an intentional thing. there's a shining sun emperor and his servants literally made of light(ning), who created creatures called Darkin in their hubris, and who are being opposed by underground factions clad in black. damn.

(for the record league lore got a rewritten some years ago - before, the game was actually canon and the characters were competing to win the League of Legends in-lore for an ultimate price. since, the writers have decided that the characters tell stories that cannot be contained in those limits, and have turned the game into just a backdrop [it and most other games in the same universe] for the bigger story they're telling in the background. i did grumble abt the decision at the time, but now i see that it's taking a very interesting path and i love following it)

#ask #arguably league being Not Good тм is what is saving and preserving its goodness lol #sorry for the essay and thank you for giving me reason to rant about this oh my god #i love this universe so muchhh

[hardestgrove]

like not to get too deep on my stranger things shitposting blog but like, people being so rampantly anti billy but lacking and thought or nuance to that argument or trying to moralize their dislike of his character instead of just saying "i just don't like him" (which is literally a valid reason all on it's own) is in part directly because challenging material being removed from school curriculums, the increasingly poor quality of the american education system and the focus on standardized testing. Also a cause of this is places like tiktok which are finely tuned capitalist time sinks that create addicting doom scrolling echo chambers built to both make you feel bad and spoon feed you validation of a limited point of view so they can make money off of you.

In elementary school my art teacher was a ww2 survivor, sometimes he would gather us all in the projector room tell us stories from his childhood instead of showing us slides of Dali and Rembrandt. Not all of them were happy, some people would argue should not have been told to children our age even thought they happen to him in his real life when he was around 12. But these stories are foundational to me and my understanding of the world now. I loved this man deeply and he helped to inspire my love of art and creativity and helped art be the field I want to work in to this day.

I read Maus in high school which people have recently spoke of banning and watched Persepolis. I took a class about the literary use of the "Monster" and the "Other" where we read things like Frankenstein and watched Bladerunner and talked about the groups these monsters where metaphors for. We had a whole class discussing how many "monsters" are just people with conditions that were then demonized for their otherness (did you know the insult "pinhead" originated as an insult/slur against people with malformed skulls usually from microcephaly who were then exploited in freak shows?). I took a course on satire where we read A Modest Proposal (which is a slam against the English landlords who were treating the irish horrifically at the time, not a dude proposing they ate babies).

In college I took an entire mandatory course in my freshman year at art school called critical inquiry where we went through all the different kinds of theory-- Marxist, feminist, queer etc.

All media has a message, even dumb popcorn blockbuster shows. In some ways it is all propaganda. Critical thinking is important to understanding the world around you. Being able to understand multiple points of view is critical to interacting with the world. Schools are more and more less likely to teach these skills for reasons ranging from no time to actively suppressing them which leaves children open to getting a lot of info online with very little way of engaging with it in a way where they can think for themselves and pick it apart. This fandom skews young and it shows because there's very little genuine thinking, discussion and analysis of the text and a lot of frankly poorly considered takes and dickhead behavior.

I urge younger folks to engage with problematic content and listen to video essays and podcasts and whatever that explain critical thinking concepts and different kinds of theory used in analysis. If it feels like your school isn't teaching you how to be able to really seriously think for yourself please use the nightmarish hellscape that is the internet to find people who will and even when you find those sources be critical of them and never completely assume they're right, always ask "what's their angle?". Learn about dog whistles and indoctrination tactics. Learn how to protect your brains and how to engage with texts more completely for your own growth, entertainment and education and so you don't get blindsided by fucked up subtexts you didn't even realize where there and accidentally let shape your thinking.

#train.txt #once again THIS IS LONGER THAN I WANTED lol #god i got other shit to do i need to shut up but YES my final thought on this for now

[hubcapbaker6]

Gay-For-View Videos Are Increasingly Popular Among Teenagers

While there are some controversy surrounding anti-gay videos, these are becoming increasingly popular with teenagers. The popularity of gay-for-view videos has led some older gay men to express confusion over them. Some older gay men are confused about why they are so popular, but this trend is only likely to grow in popularity. For those who aren't sure, here are some things to know about this controversial genre. Also, learn more about Arif and Ricky, who are gay life coaches, and Davey Wavey, a YouTuber. Anthony Quintal's anti-gay video After a period of silence, YouTuber Anthony Quintal has returned to the spotlight as Lohanthony. His 2012 video, which called all women basic bitches, gained him widespread attention. However, his latest video reveals his history of molestation and conversion therapy. The video has drawn criticism from LGBTQ activists and Christians alike. Here are some reactions to his video. While the video has not been deleted, it has received a lot of attention on social media. Mr. Robinson's gay video Many have condemned Reverend Tommy Robinson's "hateful" remarks, calling him a homophobe and a "hateful person." He's also opposed to teaching sexually explicit material in schools and teaching LGBTQ lifestyles. Robinson's comments were posted by Right Wing Watch, a right-wing website. In one of the speeches, he compares drag queens to child molesters and perverts. Arif and Ricky are gay life coaches As homosexual couples, Arif and Ricky define themselves as gay life coaches and lifestyle mentors. They have a shared love of Disney, art, and theater. As gay life coaches, they help people learn how to live a more positive life and are also advocates of tolerance and acceptance. The couple offers tips on coming out, finding the right partner, and other topics related to being gay. For their website, Arif and Ricky define themselves as "gay lifestyle coaches." Davey Wavey is a gay YouTuber If you're interested in the world of YouTube, you've probably heard of Davey Wavey. bokep video The popular American YouTube personality is a certified professional trainer and a leading voice for the LGBT community. He has nearly 300 million YouTube video views and is known for his irreverent and authentic videos. He has also partnered with several organizations, including Visit Britain and the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Read on to learn more about this famous YouTuber. Nick Toteda's gay video If you're wondering if YouTuber Nick Toteda is gay, you're not alone. Many European men have been confused by the gay-for-view videos that have exploded across the Internet. Nick Toteda's videos have caused a stir, with some of his older gay fans expressing confusion. However, teen fans are loving it. In this article, we'll explore what gay for views videos are, and whether they're okay for mainstream viewing. Bria and Chrissy's gay YouTube channel The singer-songwriter duo known as BriaAndChrissy is making a name for themselves as YouTube stars. They met on their first night as lesbians and were later married. Besides posting cover songs, Chrissy and Kam also have their own YouTube channel, Lesbian Love. Their videos often feature drunken DMs, waxing, and DNA tests. While many people may have been unaware of these YouTubers, they are promoting equality in a way that is empowering.

#download video sex

[alex-sweetoblivion]

The Pros and Cons of Online CPA Exam Review Courses

Online CPA exam review courses offer flexibility and accessibility, making them popular among aspiring accountants. They provide a cost-effective alternative to traditional classroom courses allowing students to study at their own pace and from the comfort of their homes. These courses often include comprehensive study materials, practice exams, and access to experienced instructors, which can enhance the learning experience and increase the chances of passing the CPA exam. Additionally, online courses may offer virtual live classrooms, tutoring sessions, and final course reviews to further support students' exam preparation. However, there are drawbacks to consider. Online courses require strong self-discipline and motivation as there is less structure compared to traditional classroom settings. Students may also miss out on the interactive learning experience and immediate feedback from instructors. Technical issues or poor internet connectivity can also disrupt the learning process.

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CPA exam review course are designed to help candidates prepare for the rigorous CPA Exam. They offer comprehensive study materials, practice questions, and expert guidance to ensure candidates are fully prepared on exam day.

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Online courses are web-based courses that offer flexibility and convenience, allowing candidates to study from anywhere. In-person courses some candidates prefer traditional classroom settings for structured learning and interaction with instructors. Self-study Courses these courses provide study materials for candidates to study independently at their own pace.

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Consider Your Learning Style: Choose a course that matches your learning preferences, whether it's visual, auditory, or hands-on. Check reviews look for reviews and testimonials from other candidates to gauge the course's effectiveness. Cost vs value Compare the cost of the course with its features and benefits to ensure you're getting value for money. Free trials take advantage of free trials offered by some courses to see if it's the right fit for you.

Artificial Intelligence on CPA Exam Review Courses

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into CPA exam review courses to enhance the learning experience. These technologies offer adaptive learning, personalized study plans, and real-time feedback to improve candidates' chances of passing the exam. For example, UWorld Roger CPA Review incorporates AI to provide individualized study schedules and practice questions tailored to each student's weaknesses.

Improve Your Performance in Your CPA Exam Review Course

Choose CPA review materials that are comprehensive and aligned with the exam content. Look for courses with practice questions and simulations. Create a study schedule plan your study sessions based on your strengths and weaknesses. Allocate more time to challenging topics and practice questions.

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#CPA exam review course