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soulprompts · 9 months

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THE SURPRISING HERO ( A PROMPT LIST! )

hello my beloveds!!! an absolutely incredible nonnie sent in a request for prompts based on the idea of someone becoming a vital part of saving the world through unanticipated events, and i hope i managed to achieve what they wanted in this list! basically i got a tonne of inspiration from comic book movies and the more fantastical vibes of high fantasy franchises, and i was going to make these more amusing, but i think there's something so hard-hitting about the concept of being thrust into greatness and heroism when you feel you aren't ready for it! anyway! enjoy, and as always: DO NOT ADD TO OR EDIT THIS LIST, AND DO NOT CLAIM AS YOUR OWN!

FROM THE UNEXPECTED HERO:

“ i’m not supposed to be here. i’m not like the rest of you; i’m not special, or blessed, or gifted. i’m just… me. “

“ you’ve got to be joking! i can’t save the world! i’m just an ordinary person! “

“ it’s funny. all these years, i’ve wanted so badly to see the world. now… i think i’ve never wanted anything so much as to go back home. “

“ so that’s it, then? i’m just supposed to sacrifice everything to save the world, all because some ancient prophecy says so? “

“ i still can’t quite believe we were doing laundry yesterday. now our biggest chore is traveling across the world to save it. “

“ i miss home. i miss how safe and boring and fine it all was. i never would’ve wanted adventures if i thought they’d be as scary and dangerous as this. “

“ they’re right to be angry, you know. everyone has a purpose here; i’m only joining you all because of some insane twist of fate. “

“ surprised? don’t worry, so was i. i don’t think it’s a normal occurrence for people like me to be part of massive quests like this. “

“ look. i’m not the chosen one, alright? i don’t want any part in any prophecy or ancient dictation. i just want to live an ordinary, safe, boring life. “

“ you think i don’t acknowledge what’s happening?! every mistake i make has costs, and those costs are often the lives of innocent people! “

“ you know, last year my idea of a grand adventure was going up the mountains for a picnic with my friends. funny how fast things change, isn’t it? “

“ i’m not a hero! i don’t know how to fight! heroes are special and unique and trained, and i’m none of those things. “

“ everyone looks at me like i’ve got the answers, but i don’t. i was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “

“ you ever stop to question the solidity of this prophecy? because if the wording is that vague that it could name me as the savior of the world, then maybe we ought to revise it. “

“ this is stupid! putting the fate of the universe on some million-year-old prophecy! “

“ i’m not what you think i am. i’m not a hero. i’m sorry, i know you want me to be one, but… i’m just not. “

“ so you’re telling me, because i happened to overhear some weird out of context conversation, that the safety of the world relies entirely on me? “

“ don’t you see how daft this whole thing is?! i’ve got to save the world now because i happened to take a wrong turn on my way home! “

“ why can’t i just give you guys what i found, and you can go and rescue the world yourselves? “

“ i want to clarify that i’m not a coward. okay? i’m not running away from this. but i’m not exactly save-the-world material. so thank you for the opportunity, but… i think i’ll stay at home. “

TO THE UNEXPECTED HERO:

“ i get it, you know. it’s a huge responsibility for someone who’s only just realized what’s at stake. “

“ the others think i’m utterly mad for even considering you for this task. but the fact is, you’re the only person i genuinely believe to be capable of fixing this mess. “

“ would you like to know the mark of a true hero? it’s courage. not an absence of fear, not an ignorance of it, but rather, the choice to persevere in spite of it. you’re still here. that makes you one of the bravest people on the planet. “

“ don’t let anyone else tell you what you are and aren’t capable of. everything happens for a reason, and it wasn’t dumb luck that put you in our path. “

“ i don’t believe in prophecies, personally. i think the universe is far too chaotic for them to survive thousands of years. but i do believe that you being here is not a coincidence. “

“ fate only accounts for part of what happens in our lives. the rest of it is all choices. and despite how scared and inexperienced you are… you’ve chosen to stay. that tells me an awful lot about you. “

“ how selfish can you be?! running away from this destiny, this task! the world will fall into darkness if you don’t step up, and here you are, hiding from your fate like a coward! “

“ you need to learn to ignore the opinions of others if you’re going to stand a chance at doing this. this is the cost of being a hero. people will judge, not based on truth, but on a limited perspective. “

“ don’t be stupid. we’re not special or talented either; i was trained from childhood, i can fight men twice my size, but that’s not the mark of a hero. “

“ if you like, i could teach you how to fight? you may find it useful. even if it’s just to comfort yourself against these ridiculous self-doubts. “

“ heroes aren’t always massive muscle types. the inventor of new defense measures against attacks, or someone who discovered a cure for a disease, or perhaps someone clever enough to use new fuel sources in the winter… heroism isn’t always found in warzones, you know. “

“ fine. don’t do it for the fate of the world. do it for your family. your friends. do it for the ones you’ll return to once we settle this for good. save this world, not for the world itself, but for the ones you love, so that they may live on. “

“ you should know some things. most people, if you somehow perform outside of the very specific expectations they have for you, will be very quick and harsh in their judgment. it’s not something one can avoid. but you can learn to rise above those critics. remember. they don’t know the real you. “

" fear is normal. okay? we all fear things. the real killer is when you try to fight that fear. you're no lesser a hero for fearing things. expect it. accept it. embrace it. and once it's with you, work with it to fight even more. "

" you keep saying you're not a hero. tell me. what exactly is it that you believe a hero to be? "

" people make the error of assuming heroes to be golden, flawless, immaculate in both thought and strategy. it's never the case. heroes are the most flawed of all. that's what makes us admire them so. "

#rp meme #roleplay meme #sentence starters #ask meme #writing prompts #roleplay prompts #rp prompt

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nadzhosny2 · 1 year

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So you’re damaged goods? Please go to therapy

I used to hear the phrase ‘I’m damaged goods’ being thrown around a lot by men who wanted to seem mysterious, alluring and brooding to attract women and to get away with being complete douchebags, because apparently women have a tendency to like broken men because they think they can fix them (LOL), when in reality they were about as damaged as a Nokia 3310. Not a scratch on them and dull as a doorknob.

Dear men, kindly stop misusing the word damaged; its very offensive to the those who are ACTUALLY damaged goods. It doesn’t qualify as bragging rights so stop. Being damaged goods is not pleasant. Another word for damaged goods, that doesn’t sound as appealing, is emotionally damaged, which in all honestly is the more correct description.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the damaged have accepted wholeheartedly that they have issues, that they are just a ticking time bomb and everyone should stay far, far away. If you are one of these people, please, for the love of all that is good and pure in this God forsaken universe, GET SOME FUCKING HELP.

Living in a state of pain, hurt, anger, guilt and low self esteem isn’t healthy whatsoever, no matter what the books, series and the movies of our generation would have you believe. Alienating everyone around you by treating them like trash, doubting you’ll ever be happy again, having trust issues and a pessimistic outlook on life is not a way to live. That’s a way to slowly kill yourself, because you’re chipping away, little by little, at your life and the possibility that it could be better.

Yes, you were hurt, disappointed, traumatized even, had your heart and soul stomped on and put in a blender. It’s difficult and downright shattering, no doubt about it, and I’m not here to belittle it or make it seem as if it wasn’t gut wrenchingly painful and you’re not wounded and bruised but are you just going to sit there and let it run your entire life? Do you want your life to be defined by anguish and suffering without relief? To let every action and choice be dictated by it? To rip away any chance of future happiness?

That is the highest form of weakness, no offence.

Get up and do something about it! Life is too short to be living in misery when there are options to put an end to it. Therapy is there for a reason. There are actual trained professionals whose job it is to guide you to being a better person and to help you navigate the treacherous waters of your emotional damage. Seeking help isn’t a weakness, not seeking it is because it shows you’re not strong enough to face your problems head on to try and heal yourself. You want to spend money on something that will help ease the pain, put down the drugs and alcohol and spend it on a therapist; at least the effects will be longer lasting and won’t fuck up your internal organs.

The hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life is work on bettering yourself for the sake of your own wellbeing. To take the step forward and say you will no longer continue to suffer and improve your mental state. Heal yourself so you can be happy, heal yourself so you can thrive, heal yourself so you can attack life with your new found knowledge that will keep you from making the same mistakes. Everything you have gone through will serve as a lesson; a lesson on what not to do and what to do differently. Experience is the best teacher; the unfortunate fact of life is that the best lessons, the ones that serve as foundations and guiding posts, are often the ones that wound us the deepest.

You have no idea how much life you are missing by wallowing in your misery, wake the fuck up.

It will be extremely hard, you will definitely stumble. There will be days where you can’t bring yourself to continue, where it will seem so simple and safe to fall back into your old self-destructive routine because healing requires too much effort. When that little dark voice in your head starts whispering those tantalizing words, you’ll have to make the choice between what is right and what is easy (Thank you Albus Dumbledore). Doing what is easy will not benefit you in the long run, nor will giving up on self-improvement because it’s not all comforting words and hugs.

Will it be torturous to begin with? Absolutely. All therapy is. Who wants to confront their own inadequacies? Who wants to admit their failures? Who wants to admit their deepest and darkest fear?

Answer: not even fucking Batman himself.

You will have to confront some uncomfortable truths about yourself, discover things about yourself that you will not like at all but it will be worth it because you will discover who you truly are, to the depths of your soul, your inner most demons will be summoned forth to do battle with.

Working on yourself will take time, it doesn’t magically happen after one therapy session, unless your therapist is Professor Xavier and he just erases your mind. Just take it day by day, little by little. Set small goals. Subscribe to the 1% rule of self improvement; if you do 1% consistently every day, you can build to tremendous improvements, and over time can make a big difference. Your brain is used a certain routine, it will get confused and it will take a while to adjust. Beware, excuses will come up then because you’re used to doing things in a certain way, don’t give in.

Don’t let life pass you by while you’re having a solo extended pity party. You’ll end up a shriveled, twisted, regret filled shell of a human being and that is the worst possible fate a person can endure, death would be kinder. Remember, just because you’ve gone through a hard time does not give you a free pass to be a despicable person. Don’t take out your unprocessed suffering on innocents who have done nothing to deserve it. So for your own sake, start healing.

There are alot of nerdy references here but they drive the point home and you know what you signed up for.

Thanks for reading ❤️

#therapy #mental health #damaged #tough love #self improvement #personal growth #life advice #being damaged isnt cool so dont brag about it

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nomorerww · 1 year

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This is another diatribe by an egotistical, condescending male but whenever a new fantasy series is released and BREAKS RECORDS like Hogwarts legacy did It always make me wonder. Why are peoples so drawn to these stories where one person is tasked with "saving" the entire world, where the stakes are unrealistically high. The premise seems more than a little narcissistic. And of course, It is typically a boy that we are focusing on here. One of the writer's arguments is that it is ego that underpins people's eagerness to consume fantasy fiction or to become fervent supporters of a sports team or something -- almost as if they have something to do with a successes of these things, is if they're living vicariously through a random player or the main character in a game.

But is there no ego/lack of impulse control involved in lifestyle choices like constant partying and heavy drinking like one of the author's friends did, supposedly in an attempt to mimic the rock and roll musicians he idolized? It too involves self-indulgence and an immediate dopamine hit.

Those recently entering college will end up partying and drinking to an excess because they want to feel like they belong/they want to feel that high, one wonders what happens when that mindset persiats for decades...

[...]According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American spends a little more than five hours each day watching television.

Moreover, the average American will spend the equivalent of nine years of his or her life watching television. (This figure, of course, does not include the untold hours we spend watching movies -- either at the cinema or online -- or the inordinate amount of time spent surfing the Web.)

It is, thus, reasonable to assume that the public expends an enormous amount of time engaged with mass media instead of with real-life interactions and experiences.

But at what cost?

Given that the overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies, television shows (and pop songs) are basically garbage designed to appeal to the broadest swath of society in order to maximize corporate profits -- the impact of such exposure is extremely corrosive and perhaps incalculable. We are addicted to our TVs, iPads, iTunes, Blackberries, iPhones and the Internet the same way we cannot shed our embrace of drugs, tobacco, alcohol, gambling and other forms of instant gratification.

Almost 30 years ago, a brilliant educator and author named Neil Postman wrote an engrossing book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” Covering a broad array of subjects, Postman proposed the idea that addiction to mass media is essentially tantamount to oppression and slavery, as was once predicted decades before by George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World.”

Thus, mass media serves as a kind of voluntary medication for the masses -- people who are either bored or dissatisfied by their real lives seek to escape into the unreal universe of images on a screen or sounds on a music player, which, in turn, often dictate what they think, how they talk, how they dress and even what they say.

Fantasy and science fiction have become a cold, hard, stark reality.

I am reminded of two former friends of mine who epitomize how mass media has usurped our personal lives and consciousness. One fellow, whom I will call Matt, is obsessed with rock 'n' roll. Now approaching middle age, Matt still wears what’s left of his hair long and frequently dons T-shirts and blue jeans (the standard rock 'n' roll uniform).

Born to a wealthy but broken home to two unloving parents, Matt was a homely and awkward child who grew into a desperately unhappy and lonely adolescent. He sought solace in the world of rock music -- he bought hundreds of records (his collection now runs into the thousands), attended innumerable concerts, devoured all the music magazines and (like too many of his peers who sought to imitate their idols) took drugs, smoked and drank excessively.

This same depressing narrative has been replicated millions of times around the planet by similarly bored and alienated teenagers. But Matt took his obsession several steps beyond.

Despite a definite lack of musical talent, Matt dove so deep into the realm of rock 'n' roll that he has deluded himself into thinking that he, too, is part of the rock music industry. He speaks of famous musicians by the first names (Mick, Jimi, Bob, Bruce, etc.) and acts like they are personal friends of his. When he would attend a concert, he did not simply go as a fan -- rather, he pretended he was actually part of the show (as if he participated in its very production).

And these delusions have only deepened over the past 30-plus years.

Clearly, Matt desperately needed to fill the emptiness in his soul and heart with the accouterments of the pop music industry -- a universe he has no real connection to whatsoever.

For another old friend of mine, whom I will call Dan, the attachment to mass media has taken even more bizarre and pathetic turns.

Dan, who, like Matt, grew up in an affluent, suburban family and developed into a lonely, awkward, sullen teenager, dove headlong into the spheres of television and movies. Nothing unusual about that, but to Dan, the nonexistent lives and worlds of fictitious TV and film characters became real to him -- more real, in fact, than the flesh-and-blood creatures around him.

Unable to formulate his own jokes or monologs, Dan repeatedly plagiarized the words he heard uttered by people on the screen -- he even pretended that they were real people that he knew personally (much like how Matt adopted rock stars as his own friends and peers).

Thus, the plot lines of TV shows became an inseparable part of Dan’s otherwise humdrum real life.

Matt and Dan may serve as extreme cases, but I believe tens of millions of people share this same terrible affliction -- the total immersion and subjugation of one’s ego and individuality into the fantasy lives of people they do not know, have never met, are unlikely to ever meet and may not really even exist.

Ironically, Western democracies purport to celebrate individuality -- yet mass media has completely undermined that noble concept by turning the masses into a mindless herd who blindly follow the activities of an exalted few, who themselves are manufactured by a tiny elite of media lords.

Is this freedom? Is this democracy? Is this healthy?

George Orwell was indeed prescient.

Living vicariously through media-created images also expands to sports. Whenever I see men and women wearing memorabilia of their favorite sports clubs -- whether it be the New York Yankees or Dallas Cowboys or Notre Dame football or Manchester United -- I wonder: Are they honoring the team and its players? Or are they vainly glorifying themselves -- that is, deluding themselves into believing they are part of the roster? A combination of both, I suspect.

This phenomenon is particularly acute in the field of science fiction/horror/fantasy films. It seems as though every other year, a new sensation arrives (manufactured and heavily marketed by movie studios) that suddenly attracts millions of movie-goers, turning an otherwise mediocre piece of celluloid into an instant classic while concurrently creating a battalion of fans who dress up like characters in the film.

When I was a boy, a little movie by the name of “Star Wars” was released. I went to see it, liked it and thought it was a reasonably enjoyable adventure story. But I was completely taken aback by the fanaticism it inspired -- indeed, I was puzzled as to why so many fans returned to the theater repeatedly to watch it. (I knew one fellow who watched the film more than 100 times and knew the entire dialog by heart, this being years before the availability of home videos).

George Lucas not only built an enormous empire out of "Star Wars" (and several subsequent sequels and prequels of varying quality), but also a religion of sorts. The film became a kind of Bible to legions of followers -- people of all ages recited bits of dialog like scripture and dressed up like Luke Skywalker or Han Solo or Darth Vader (with, of course, light sabers that didn’t really do anything).

The obsession with "Star Wars" has only intensified after 35 years -- grown adults dress up like characters from the film at various functions. Lucas, who has made more money than he could spend in a millennium, is likely appalled by what he has inadvertently wrought.

Indeed, more than any other film, the huge success of "Star Wars" permanently damaged the integrity and artistry of filmmaking.

[...]

"Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have each become billion-dollar corporate empires that apparently will never disappear (new converts are recruited each year to keep the franchise going).

And they have a lot of company -- in recent decades, "Harry Potter," "Game of Thrones," "Batman" and various others have seized the souls of untold millions of obsessives who spend ungodly amounts of time (and money) on these pointless entertainments.

I have never read a "Harry Potter" book, nor have I ever seen any of the films, but I realize they’re massively popular, particularly with children. While I admire J.K. Rowling for inspiring millions of kids around the world to read books -- I would rather they read "Treasure Island," "Jane Eyre" or "Sherlock Holmes" (rather than a book whose popularity depends upon films, massive marketing/promotion and huge merchandising).

[...]At the root of all of this virtual reality is real greed. ‘The Hobbit’ is a great example of how Hollywood has franchised fantasy and encouraged its fans to run away from real life. ... The goal is to get the audience hooked on the studio’s product -- and some literally become addicted. ... But what is worrying is the cult-like following that the Tolkien films have encouraged. Many of the acolytes seem victims of arrested development -- detaching themselves from the real world with its real people and its real challenges. In the same way that superhero movies actually emasculate the audience by convincing them that their problems are so big that only a man in a cape can solve them, so the fantasy racket returns us to the emotional paralysis of early childhood. ... The true horror comes when someone can no longer tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not and they end up living their lives as dwarves or wizards.”

Amen, Mr. Stanley!

One must also wonder what Tolkien himself would have thought of this monstrous corporate machine he unwittingly created from beyond the grave.

Tolkien’s tales of elves and wizards were largely inspired by the ancient Celtic and Norse legends he was immersed in as a child -- he celebrated the simple, rustic values of a pastoral lifestyle. Indeed, Tolkien was appalled by the modern mechanized world of unrelenting commerce and sought to retreat from such corrosive vulgarities in his own private shire.

Yes, Tolkien sought escape as well, but he created his own dazzling, highly detailed fantasy world; he did not appropriate someone else’s dreams and move into them.

All these 24-7 diversions cannot be good for our society or our souls. To combat this paralyzing disease, we must declare: “May the force be with you.”

#long reads #harry potter #escapism #fantasy film #sociology

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swga-ficrecs · 3 years

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june 2021 recap

ahh june was a really fic-filled month!!! i used to be a silent reader but then i realized that it’s hard to go back to the fics i really liked reading since i had no way of finding them except for remembering key words and googling the shit out of it lol so!!! i thought of doing a monthly recap of all my favorites in addition to the fics i like and reblog. thank you to these wonderful authors who just write pure magic ✨

🏆 holy grail | ☀️ fluff | 🌧 angst | 💋 smut.

fave authors

🏆 @minyoongijjangjjangmanboongboong

HOLY GRAIL AUTHOR!!! Loved a lot of their series because of the tropes and the plot. I’ll definitely come back to their fics in the future for another binge reading session

@taecalikook

Really loved their fuckboy trope fics. Has a few unfinished fics I’m excited to binge read once they’re completed

🏆 @gukyi

Discovered their work back in 2017? Really loved IGYMH and reread their masterlist this month

@ve1vetyoongi

All I can remember is the ending of Mic Drop and I can’t 😭 I’m really excited for their unfinished fics!!!!

fave fics

Arranged by @.minyoongijjangjjangmanboongboong 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: chaebol MYG x student reader

Y/N is a struggling student in Seoul: working multiple jobs, living in a broom closet apartment, and often sacrificing her dignity for the sake of her livelihood. What happens when a handsome stranger presents her with an offer she cannot refuse at the moment she needs it most?

Dissonance by @.minyoongijjangjjangmanboongboong 🏆 🌧 ☀️

Pairing: bassist KTH x student / band manager reader

The Parting by @.minyoongijjangjjangmanboongboong 🏆 🌧 ☀️

Pairing: flower shop owner PJM x reaper reader

The only certainty in life is death, and it seems to follow Park Jimin. All his life, the icy shadow of death has hung closely by his side, along with the shadow of…something else. Reapers exist to guide the souls of the living to the world beyond. But what happens when a particular Reaper tampers with the natural order and saves a mortal boy’s life? What will they do once their fates become inextricably linked?

From Home by @gyukult 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: chaebol JJK x reader

jungkook is the youngest of five boys, the last in line to truly inherit any his parents’ money. but what if his mom suddenly cuts him off due to his current poor behavior and he’s forced to learn how it feels like to be part of the working class?

(Not) Just Friends by @.taecalikook 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: Bestfriend / fuckboy / fratboy JJK x reader ft. KSJ

Befriending the fuckboy with devilishly handsome face and emotional capacity of a pea is not your choice, especially when you met him when you were in fifth grade, attracted for the unhealthy vermilion shaded face of the nerd he was that fateful day. So was Jungkook, as he is already putting strictly platonic label on your forehead and calls it a day. But it is only a matter of time before everything changes, and it only takes a frat party, lots of booze and… a certain Kim Seokjin.

Partiality by @jiminimoon 🏆 🌧

Pairing: Husband PJM x reader

You and Jimin argue about your kids not loving you two equally

Brown-eyed Baby by @jeonstudios 🏆 ☀️ 🌧 💋

Pairing: Single Parent JJK x reader

a lost child at the mall. eyes from a different time.

I’ll Give You My Heart by @.gukyi 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: CEO bestfriend MYG x reader

gift exchanges are cool. gift exchanges with your ceo-slash-best friend min yoongi are less cool, because what the hell are you supposed to get the man that already has everything?

The Truth Between Us by @.gukyi and @jimlingss 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: Editor MYG x reader

a book deal should be the most exciting time of your life, but there seems to be a constant and omnipresent damper on your mood in the form of a certain min yoongi, who you would just cut out from your life, if he weren’t your editor. but then, the world shifts beneath your feet, and you begin to wonder if maybe you’ve always been looking at life from the wrong angle.

Love is Blind by @cinnaminsvga 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

[Final] Pairing: Fake boyfriend KNJ x reader

social media au where y/n posts a fake boyfriend application on twitter as a dare but ends up seeking something real in the long run (aka how to fall in love the zillennial way)

Love Grows Where You Go by @hueseok 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: Fiancé MYG x reader

determined to make you and yoongi grow closer for your upcoming wedding in two weeks, your parents plan a trip for the both of you that lasts five days long. you know you should be ecstatic about it, considering your longtime crush on your fiancé, but by how you’re positive that he secretly despises your whole being, you don’t find this mini vacation with him something to look forward to. that is until things take an unexpected turn and suddenly, he makes it apparent he doesn’t hate you at all as you reckoned.

Give Me Love by @.hueseok 🏆 ☀️ 🌧

Pairing: Lawyer boyfriend KNJ x reader

you’ve been in a relationship with your boyfriend for over five years now, yet the talk of marriage has never been initiated between the two of you. of course, you try to somehow squeeze it in from time to time, but it seems like no matter what, namjoon just won’t take the hint

Cornfields and Cosmos by @jessikahathaway ☀️ 🌧 💋

Pairing: Alien MYG x reader

Cornfields: He was an alien. You were a girl. Can I make it any more obvious? Probably. It’s the one where Yoongi’s a cold alien that needs love too.

Cosmos: Yoongi and you had been travelling together for a long time. You’d begun the terrifying journey of becoming parents. When a new person arrives in a way you didn’t expect, you and Yoongi’s relationship is sent into a tailspin.

The Art of Craving by @venusiangguk ☀️ 💋

Pairing: Single parent DILF JJK x reader

jk takes you to a bbq at his friends house. the tri-tip is good but the creampie is even better.

fics to i’m waiting to finish before binge reading

What we are not ; Soulmates by @.taecalikook

Pairing: MYG x reader x KTH

you love yoongi with all your heart throughout these five years being in a relationship with him. you always thought he is the one — your one, even when the infamous soulmate signs are still not showing. yet you always wait, because you know it’s him you are destined to be with, forever. but what would happen if then his childhood best friend comes along, with the universe-signed telltales that you have been looking for true love in all the wrong places?

When the sea sleeps by @.taecalikook

Pairing: KSJ x reader

marriage should be based on love, but it’s not really the case with you and Seokjin. what’s more beneficial than two person who sworn off romances to get married out of obligation, right? but you should have known better, that keeping your heart straight from wanting someone like Kim Seokjin is next to impossible.

After Midnight by @.gyukult

Pairing: JJK x reader

jeon jungkook only likes seeing you after midnight.

Better With You by @ve1vetyoongi

Pairing: KSJ x reader

A part time job as a chef at Paradise Resort seems like the perfect way to spend your summer and save up some spare cash to open your own restaurant back home. That is until you cross paths with the CEO’s son who threatens to fire you if you don’t help him inherit his trust-fund-baby-fortune. How? By making you his fiancé. Well, his pretend fiancé at least.

Operation: Love Letters by @.ve1vetyoongi

Pairing: OT7 x reader

When every student on campus is going crazy about a survey that claims to make true love bloom, your best friend manages to convince you to join in on the fun — except you’re disappointed to find out that your results just seem to be lost causes. That is until a love letter from a mysterious secret admirer turns up and you find yourself on a mission to find the person behind the pen — but you quickly realise it’s going to be a lot harder than you initially thought when you have 7 possible bachelors to investigate, right? Operation: Love Letters a-go!

Remember Me by @.ve1vetyoongi

Pairing: OT7 x reader

Taehyung wants to be forgotten. Overwhelmed by his life as idol persona V, he longs to just be Kim Taehyung for once. Even if that means forgetting everything he ever knew

🏆 The Prince and His Rose by @vanaera

Pairing: Football player / Childhood bestfriend JJK x reader

Drabble series of “For a While”

The Heart Holiday by @.vanaera

Pairing: MYG x reader

Valentine’s Day is declared as an official holiday. However, private companies’ standards dictate it’s only for the people who are currently in a relationship. Unluckily for Y/N, she doesn’t have this year’s PRS’ (Proof of Relationship Status) “in a relationship” box ticked – the only ticket out she can have to enjoy one paid week of holiday leave away from her hellish job. And more unfortunately for Y/N, everyone around her is oh so conveniently currently committed in a relationship. Except for one person: Min Yoongi, Y/N’s biggest critic in every pitch meeting, the picky guy who always picks on her, and the most annoying jerk of the century. Desperate for that holiday leave, Y/N strikes Yoongi up with an offer: Fake date each other two weeks before February 14, just enough time for the Department of Relationship Management (DRM) to consider processing their PRSs. After Valentine’s Day, they will go back to their own ways and never speak about whatever that may happen during the plan. Good, plain, and simple. That is until, Yoongi uncharacteristically oh so enthusiastically agrees to Y/N’s offer, leaving her thinking that she may have bitten something too much more than she can chew.

My Time by @.vanaera

Pairing: JJK x reader

A future technology allows cops to jump in the past and future to investigate crimes that have happened and prepare for those that are about to happen. A simple hit-and-run turns into something more when Captain Jeon Jungkook finds himself as the victim of a culprit who cannot be identified by the system. Especially when the culprit seems to be the same person behind the new case that’s threatening the order in the justice organization. All goes haywire when Jungkook gets involved with Y/N L/N, the clairvoyant sketch artist who may be his only help to solve the case.

Lost Stars by @.hueseok

Pairing: JJK x reader

the last person you’d expect to be there for you is your roommate, jeongguk, on the night you break up with your cheating boyfriend; because as far as you’re concerned, the both of you aren’t exactly friends, and he definitely shouldn’t be running to get you upon hearing you sob via phone call.

so when he does, you begin thinking that maybe you’ve just been hard on him over the years, or perhaps he just liked pretending to be an annoying shit most of the time. either way, it becomes the beginning of an unexpected friendship finally blossoming.

Dexterity + Stupidity by @.hueseok

Pairing: JJK x reader

a drabble series that features surgical intern!jeongguk x surgical resident!reader as they go through their odd senior-junior relationship, obviously having the hots for each other and yet, frustratingly goes into twists and turns in order to properly act on it.

Crimson Grail by @.jessikahathaway

Pairing: MYG x reader

There were tales of the famed pirate Min Yoongi, Captain of the Crimson Grail. However, one meeting with him is hardly ever enough… One taste of adventure, and you were addicted.

Baby Talk by @.jessikahathaway

Pairing: PJM x JJK x reader

Jimin and Jungkook had been trying to get a surrogate for years. Finally when you agree to help them, their dreams seem to be coming true. But, dreams change…

Vegas, Baby by @.jessikahathaway

Pairing: KTH x reader

They say what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. What happens when there’s a little more legality to it than that?

Taming the Beast by @.jessikahathaway

Pairing: KTH x reader

You were the next in line to be the head of your village, when your mother gave you to the enemy to save your people from merciless slaughter. What happens when they try to Tame a Beast?

Owner by @.jessikahathaway

Pairing: JJK x reader

With your mother hounding on you (no pun intended), you decided to get a little help from a hybrid, who was also in need of assistance.

If Only You Knew by @agustdakasuga

Pairing: BTS x reader

From the start, you knew you wanted to be a hybrid rehabilitator. You needed to help these hybrids heal, learn to live with one another and lead normal lives. Even if they are all different, you hoped that they could give each other a new reason to live.

#monthly recap #bts fics #bts jungkook #bts jin #bts seokjin #bts yoongi #bts suga #bts rm #bts namjoon #bts jimin #bts v #bts taehyung #bts fic recs #bts fanfic

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writings-of-a-hufflepuff · 4 years

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Prompt List #8 - Lines from love letters

All Prompt Lists

All these lines come from a book called ‘The Love of an Unknown Soldier’ which is an antique book that’s essentially a series of love letters from the Great War that were found in a dugout and published. All unsent from a British Officer to an American Nurse he met in Paris. He never told her that he loved her and presumably died before he had the chance.

I was so many times on the point of telling you - every evening after I had left you I accused myself and spent half the night awake planning the words in which I would confess when next we met.

I wonder if you have guessed. Surely I could not have loved you so much without your knowing.

What right have I, who may be dead within a month, to speak to you of love? To have done so would have been the act of a coward.

You, all the time you would have been lonely. All the time you would have been worrying about my safety.

And yet there is still time to tell you. I have only to unhook the receiver and to telephone to you.

Perhaps it was fate; I prefer to think that it was something else.

You’d never guess how long I spent in polishing my belt and buttons. Yes, men are like that.

And my emotions! Shall I be frank? They were awfully muddled. They were made up of longing, hope, doubt and the terror that I might appear absurd.

The longing was all for you.

The hope was that you might share my longing.

The doubt was lest I might have idealised a memory which, when I saw you, would fade into reality. Oh, the heresy of me!

I have spoken of the touch of your hand, but I think it was the sympathy in your eyes that touched me.

I suppose you’ll never know how proud I was to be seen beside you.

I felt so keenly aware of you; your beauty was almost painful.

The paths were slippery; I took your arm at times to help you over places and laughed within myself at its reluctance.

She does care for me a little, I told myself - that thought kept my heart singing after we had parted.

One never hears you coming; you are absent - one looks again and you are there.

You trusted me so much from the very first; is that a good sign from a lover?

Strange, that I should have conquered fear in the front-line, should have lived for days quite calmly with sudden death, and yet should tremble before a girl.

The letter I shall send you will be strictly conventional and not too lengthy - it will be the kind that I might write to any acquaintance of either sex. And yet - yes, that is the thought that troubles me - we may have met and parted for the very last time.

Since you will never read this, I will play a game; I will not send you what I write, but I will speak the truth to you on paper.

I can at least carry the memory of these things back; they are unspoilt by any sadder knowledge.

We stopped so long talking over dinner that by the time we reached the opera the first scene was ended.

I am glad I met you. I am glad of the pain I shall carry back with me.

Your face will be with me, the sound of your voice and the memory of your gentleness.

I shall be a better soldier because we have met.

If I die, I shall die satisfied.

I didn’t have much time to catch my train, but managed to stop long enough to order you some flowers. They were roses, deep red, the colours of the ones you wore at the opera on our last night. I bought far too many for good taste - I bought the way I felt.

How far away you seem - how far everything seems that I have loved.

You’re a captain in rank, aren’t you? Then you’re my superior, for I’m only a subaltern.

There must be more in you than I have guessed; to have left luxury and come into danger just to look after other people’s babies, that took courage.

There’s a sacredness of devotion, which goes deeper than mere beauty.

Do you begin to understand why it is that you seem so far away?

You can weave all kinds of fancies out of our nights if you’re in love and have an imagination. Those white flares, appearing, racing, vanishing, seem to me a phantom-city and make me think of Paris.

The boys came in intending to buy something; they hardly noticed you at first. Then they saw you, stared and tried to spin out an awkward conversation...they’d returned to buy something else. They really returned to get another sight of you.

You fascinated me as well.

What are you? You are drifting away from me, becoming unreal already.

Did you care for me at all, even for a moment?

Did you ever picture the life to which I was going?

Was I only an incident - some one transiently amusing, and perhaps a little pleasant?

For me there was always poignancy in our happiness. The thought was constantly with me of our parting. Something within me kept warning, ‘it is the end - the end - the end.’/

If I had only met you earlier, in the days before war started, I could have made love to you honourably. But not now.

And yet - “I wish I had married my man,” your friend said. It’s a problem. Self-interest dictates that I should tell you. That choice might be more righteous than silence; it depends on you. But because the choice would be selfish I distrust it.

Had you stayed a moment longer I might have spoken the words which were better left unsaid. I think you knew that.

At the cry ‘mail up’ I forsook my dignity and went out on the pretence of seeing that the teams were clear of the position.

For a little while memories travelled back to affections and quiet.

You mean more to me than anyone in the world, yet I have never seen your handwriting. That brings home to me vividly how much we are strangers.

I never knew a man more in love with anybody.

Why didn’t you write to me? I had counted the days and made allowances for delays. A letter might have come yesterday; to-night it seemed certain.

I form so many conjectures...you were busy. You did write, but forgot to post it. You posted it, and it’s held up in transit. Then there are other conjectures of another kind: that you do not care; that the knowledge that I care would come to you as a surprise; that it is the knowledge that I care that keeps you from writing.

When I remember you like that I feel your kindness. You may not care, but you are not careless.

To have known you as I have is more than I had counted on - more than I deserved.

To have had love come to one in the midst of a war, was more than could have been expected.

All my life I had waited for that; then, when one had sacrificed so many human affections, it happened. It was a gift from the gods. Though you may never know, I ought to be contented.

I must not entertain hopes about you. To do so would be weakening.

You have happened in my life - that should be sufficient. To have snatched one last glimpse of loyalty should make me braver; it should be like the sacrament pressed against the lips of those about to die.

I don’t think I will write to you any more, my dear. These unposted letters, written out of loneliness are becoming a luxury which is dangerous. They make the future seem too valuable.

I begin to realise how sweet life is - how glorious we could make it.

A letter from you! Such a jolly letter, so full of yourself! It’s just as though you were at my elbow and I could hear your voice.

I’ve read it how many times? I can’t count. I think I know it all by heart, and yet keep on turning back to my favourite passages.

To save France, Joan of Arc charged on horseback into battle. You go with less drama, but with an equal heroism.

You would laugh quietly and say that I make too much of what you are doing - that it’s really very ordinary.

You can’t love a woman and not gaze into the future. You can’t feel the need of her and be resigned to die.

I wish I knew that you felt the need of me. In the loneliness of this existence the knowledge that there is one woman who cares supremely helps.

I mustn’t think of you too often.

But this is foolishness - one can’t get rid of memory. Since I can’t forget you, I must make your memory a help.

I write you letters which you will never receive, recording the fact that I love you; but I fail to tell you.

I persuade myself, as Benham would have persuaded himself, that it is honest and fine not to confess.

I don’t do the passionately human thing - the thing that Jack Holt did when he won his wife. I act idealistically but, God knows, i’m by no means certain of my motives.

It’s easy to be brave for one’s self, but to have known that you were in danger would have been intolerable.

Could I see you I should find you changed, you say; the sleepless nights have done their work. I expect I should find you changed - as metal is tried in the furnace.

Like every man who loves a woman, the desire of my heart was to shut you up in a cage of unreality.

I beg you to take especial care of yourself. Don’t run more risks than you can help.

My mind is full of you to-day. I have been trying to remember your face, the tones of your voice - all the things that make you you so essentially.

At first, when I feel in love with you, I almost resented your intrusion

I used to mistrust love as a kind of sickness, and yet all the while - I must tell the truth - I longed for it desperately. Love always avoided me.

I wanted to have something so worth giving to a woman: perhaps that was why I was willing to delay.

Then a quaint little picture forms in my brain of you and me alone in a darkened room. There’s a fire burning. You’re sitting in a great armchair; i’m crouched on the floor beside you, my head against your knees.

But one grows weary of being strong; one wants to be loved so badly, just once while there is time.

It’s the feel of you I need, the protection, the security - the sure knowledge that I am yours, whatever happens.

It’s you that I want - the feel of your hands touching mine in the darkness and your arms about me.

I’m afraid i’ve been acting like the traditional Englishman; you’re the greatest pleasure I have and i’ve been taking you sadly. It isn’t much of a compliment to you and I must stop it. Unhappiness is a form of disloyalty.

You came upon me so suddenly; you awakened such longings; your very presence spoke so loudly of a future which, perhaps, I may not share; you offered all that I had once hoped for before I put hope behind me.

Your presence to me was like St. Peter’s shadow to those sick men; it healed me, but it made me long for more than the shadow. The thought that you would walk through other cities where i could not follow, filled me with emptiness.

I realised then what a gaiety would fill my world if I had the assurance that you loved me.

In a vain attempt to make you a part of my world I lie awake imagining half the night. What a foolish heart I have!

How sick I am of my own pose of spurious manliness! What I want is to feel your arms about me and your lips against my eyes, whispering, ‘Mon petit.’

I know at last for certain that I am nothing and you have forgotten me. And yet there was a time when - or do I deceive myself? You could not help writing to me if you have ever cared. You are breaking the news to me slowly by your silence. Perhaps that is the kinder way to do it.

I know that love in one who is not loved, must always seem absurd. I know that I ought to smile and bow in a gallant sort of fashion, excusing myself for having been so mistaken as to have troubled you with my affections. But the men who used to love like that loved lightly; they had scores of years before them to seek their love elsewhere.

I love you as a man loves only once, and I may have but a few hours.

If I come through to-morrow safely, I’ve almost a mind to write you a real love letter. I can picture you reading it, if I were to send it. Those straight brows of yours would draw together. The more impassioned I was, the more puzzled you’d become, It would all be so sudden after my carefully proper letters.

I think of you, as I shall think of you to the end, if the end comes. I do not want you less. I want you more perhaps, only not so selfishly.

And yet there is always you, you, you, to lure me back from death. You with your grey eyes and your intense atmosphere of rest - you with your unconscious womanliness.

Aft4er such a long wait, two nights ago I received your last letter. You hadn’t quite forgotten me. You hadn’t forgotten me at all. You have been ill, but you’re better now.

I dreamt of you last night. It was the first time that this has happened. We were in a garden full of sunshine and roses. You were learning on my arm. We must have been married for some time, for there was no strangeness in our being together. We cam to an old stone summer-house and sat down. You sank your head against my shoulder, gazing up into my eyes, and brushing my lips with your hair.

My heart cries out for you and hears only the silence.

If I come through this, I have made a pledge that I will tell you. The last few months have educated me in taking chances.

I shall never know now whether you would have loved me, or could have been made to care for me. Perhaps you did care, and were waiting for me to give the sign.

It’s the touch of live hands, of lips pressed to lips that counts.

I want to hold you and to say nothing. I want-

#a bit of tragic history that pulls at the heart strings #prompt list #writing prompt list #prompt lists #history #ww1 #world war 1 #wwi #world war i #the great war

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mage-and-the-tantrums · 3 years

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Excerpts from a book I will probably *try* to write

333 Days home.

333 days ago exactly. August the 5th, 2020, I took my final return flight, from Istanbul to Tunisia, after 5 years of expatriation. After graduating quietly, on my bed while wearing shorts, I found no reasons to stay in Turkey, and no reasons to not come back home, in a world torched by a global pandemic.

Upon returning home, and within a month, I discovered how badly my family failed and grew apart. I never thought it could happen to us. My sister helped wake me from my stun. "They just behave for a couple of months, when you were here for vacations, and also whenever we called you on messenger. It's broken", she said, with an acceptance that should be forbidden to her age.

I was led, mystically, to discover some dark secrets. I refuse to talk or write about them here. Only one person besides me knows the whole truth.

The bitch and a half about knowing something that you cannot divulge to anyone, and I mean absolutely not a living soul, is that it detaches you from the world. It leaves you questioning your two best friends with whom you thought you would discuss anything. You charge and trial "in absentia" them, and you find them guilty without them actually doing anything. It has been an education, to discover what loneliness truly meant. I felt corrected, back to school, as harshly as possible, just because I thought I was alone when in Istanbul. Life showed me, in the span of 30 days, how much I could be alone, while within my family, my friends, and the country that I love and missed beyond words.

I would sit next to my friends, in the backseat of a car, listening to autotuned american rap (which I disdain), while they converse about girls, cars, and the eventuality of marriage with the inexplicable costs that it imposes in our country, and how one should escape this sorry corner of the world to Europe. I would hear scribbles and syllables, as if I shrank and sank 6 feet deeper into myself. The only thought swimming in the pool of my brain is "how little do they know about the dilemma tearing me apart. They are here, they have known me for years, they are practically the family I chose for myself. And yet, and yet, we're oceans apart. Nothing would be the same ever again. How many secrets could a person hold while sitting next to you ? We're all strangers to one another.

I truly discovered how loneliness could snatch someone from their settings, to dictate its own terms and draw an existence, in pale shades of grey for that someone to dwell in. At some point, I realised that, no matter how shockingly and frighteningly true my thoughts were, there were equally dangerous and self-destructive. Looking into what felt like a void is fun and instructive and intellectually probably sexy, until it begins leaking into your life, which it does pretty often. I was as alone as I permitted myself to be. I figured that I needed to create a breathing gap between me and some shit in my life, that, in the end, is none of my business. Some persons decided and acted, while apparently thinking so little to none about the consequences. It is not, nor it will ever be, under any pretext, my problem. I kept repeating it, slowly, breathing it into my lungs, and holding to that breath, in the corner of my room, during some long ass nights, and I realised that I really needed to believe that. I needed to find a formula to market that idea to my brain which kept feeding on the void. Truth can be a very subjective and useless concept. So I turned to another, more pragmatic concept; priorities. I asked the primordial, narcissistic question: "What about me ?". No one was asking that question, so I did.

From there, I cruised my way to restore some inner peace after a chaos that was served to me, and before I could speak, crammed down my throat. If I could reduce it down to a words, it would be this: "Everyone thought of themselves. Nobody thought about me, so why the fuck should I lose sleep over it ? I'll think of myself as well, because if I don't, no one will".

Friendships are another big, juicy topic. Tough love all the way, and if you don't like it, then you're overly sensitive. Tough love wrapped by layers and layers of selfishness and a critical lack of any notion of emotional intelligence. But at the end of the day, I think that I am privileged to have a circle of people with whom I can ride and spend time. It could have been a lot worse.

The food is awesome. I genuinely think that Tunisian cuisine is criminally underrated. It never got properly marketed on a global level (nor it ever will). It is very hard to not gain weight here, and I am regularly (although with a shy frequency) I go out to run.

Financially, I am leeching off my Mom, since I am still working on establishing an eCommerce platform with a friend. She gladly helps, and I feel so grateful for her support. She has been my guardian in these difficult times.

Do I think about expatriation again ? I honestly do not know. Tunisia has been sinking for quite some time, and everyone is looking for a way out. I am convinced that we should stay here and fight. No matter how little the effort, we should grab the situation by the reigns and ride our way, no matter where. But I understand those who believe in the "personal salvation". Everyone should aspire for a financial and a moral dignified life, which is becoming harder by the day here. The social tissue is more like a bikini now, with the bra being the wealthy who got wealthier (upper), and all of the rest including the middle class who are sinking deeper into the pit of bank credits. Want to get married ? that would be this huge amount that would never be able to pay for with 2 salaries and a 10 years saving account. Want to purchase a house ? how cute. Mathematically and financially impossible, even with the most elaborate and strict saving measures. But hey, all is possible with a huge, fat, juicy credit bank that would suck nearly half of your salary (if not exactly half) for 1 to 2 decades.

Being back home is re-calibrating your tongue, your digestive system and your daily habits. It is a constant rewiring, and an eternal effort to make things better, because we know better now. Being back home is struggling to find your place again, because everyone is so used to your absence they often need to be reminded you're here now. Being back home is the choice to actually stress-test your relationships, and see if people would bother to grant you once again, access to their lives. Being back home is the shocking resolution that most won't bother to call, and that most relationships are as random as the circumstances. In a parallel reality, you wouldn't even be friends. Being back home is very far from being the solution to anything. But being back home feels like recharging. It feels once again that I am alive.

#excerpt from a book i will probably write #writers thoughts #thoughts of a writer #writers on tumblr #writeblr #poets and writers #home #thoughts of a mage #mage #spilled thoughts #spilled inks #spilled words

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clonewarslover55 · 3 years

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Walon Vau’s story

I decided to write out Walon Vau’s story, especially his home life and childhood. Why is Walon Vau the way he is? Read this and find out why.

Notes: I used my own headcanons mixed with the small details Karen Traviss gave us in the Republic Commando books. Please don’t steal this because you think it’s all hers!

Warnings: Bad childhood, abuse, child abuse, wounds, whipping, exile, royal drama, evil in the form of a man, thoughts of suicide, angst,

Let’s start this off with a little bit of planet information and backstory!

The planet Irmenu is a small ocean world, the only land masses being large rocky islands. Most seem like mountains, with dangerous cliffs leading into the cold unforgiving sea. The ocean is riddled with beasts and monsters, but the only way of life is to sail. There are some valleys for livestock or farming, but not many. The valleys usually flood anyways, the storms always ruthless. So the Irmenu people fish and sail, searching for months on end just to survive and feed their family.

Sailing is easy enough. The winds are strong and the seas rough. It’s cold year around, but the people have learned to adapt and survive. Wearing the fur of the air breathing sea beasts, making larger boats, etc.

The kingdoms are clusters of islands, not one large land mass. Many islands are in large clusters, huge oceans between each cluster. The islands are all under the rule of the religious leaders, but sometimes there is still conflict. Conflict never lasts long on Irmenu though.

This oceanic planet is in the Outer Rim, in the Belsmuth sector. Their planet is in the middle of the Crombach Nebula, which is extremely hazardous. This gives Irmenu a very good excuse to be so isolated. The leaders of the world use this to their advantage.

This planet is a Feudal world, which means it’s controlled by a strict religion that also runs the powerful military. This means his world is very close minded and far behind on certain technologies and such. They still have spaceships and holopads, yes, but they’re out of date and ancient.

The Imperius Priesthood runs the planet under very strict rules. They control what leaves and goes, along with who. They control the nobles and their money, using the Count’s as their marionettes. If you didn’t follow their rules/beliefs, you were either publicly executed, exiled, or sent to a nunnery. All depends on the situation.

They’re everywhere, spying on their people and arresting whoever they please. Being so strict and ruling by fear affected the Irmenu people terribly. Most were religious fanatics, which means religion dictates every single part of their lives. They read the Irmenu Bible over and over instead of other books, and they follow the rules like good puppets.

This planet is clearly terrible on it’s own, which only made Walon Vau’s childhood even worse.

Walon Vau was born around 79 BBY on the planet Irmenu. He was the first and only son of the Count of Gesl, who was also an admiral in the very large Irmenu navy. Walon was raised like any royal, so he didn’t have much of a childhood.

Every second of every day was planned out by his father. He was highly educated, classes every day of the week and all day long. He rarely saw his parents, and when he did it was never under good circumstances.

Walon learned proper etiquette, dancing, poetry, politics, and many other things he’d need to know for his future as a ruler. He was taught by a number of tutors, each brutal and cruel. He either learned, or was beaten.

Once he reached the age of ten he began to work harder, practicing and studying for the navy. He didn’t want to follow in his fathers footsteps, but Walon had no choice. Plus he loved sailing, the ocean was calming and vast. The navy was his only hope for a better life.

Pa Vau, Walon’s father was a harsh man. He was described as domineering, cold hearted, and unpleasable. He beat Walon when he didn’t do perfect on his lessons or training. He wanted Walon to be like him, so he tried to beat all emotion and feeling from his son. He almost succeeded.

A good ruler in Irmenu has no heart or soul in Pa’s eyes.

He would never hit Walon on the face or anywhere visible, he had to have a good face as a royal. As Walon got older the beatings became more often and more brutal, because he wasn’t doing good enough in Pa’s eyes.

When Walon was fourteen and tried out for the navy his own father rejected him, saying he was not good enough. Walon continued to train, the beatings even worse. The training didn’t help, Walon never made it into the navy. Pa was so unpleasable his only child was never good enough for him. This caused Walon to quickly lose hope, the thought of suicide seeming more appealing by the day.

Walon only ever got to see his mother at nights, when she would come clean up his bloody lashing marks and other wounds. She was a soft gentle woman, but timid. Pa beat her as well, making sure she didn’t see her son for too long. She was never allowed to see Walon alone, because Pa didn’t want Vau to go soft by a mothers love.

She was a religious fanatic just like his father, so she would lecture him as well. He had to be better, he had to. He was royalty, he was better than how he acted. Her words were often more cruel than intended.

When she finished cleaning his wounds she’d read him a chapter of the Irmenu Bible, a book Walon was forced to know every last word to. He never listened though, he would always zone out and dream of a better life…….Or even of ending his life.

His parents were never in love, their marriage arranged. His father married his mother because of her wealth and bloodline. His mother had rare golden eyes, a symbol of high status to his people. He got her eyes, but his father said that the color of his eyes meant nothing compared to how much of a failure he is.

When Walon turned sixteen he was at a ball for some religious holiday, where we meant a beautiful princess of a neighboring province. After a few dances they quickly hit it off, and grew close rather fast. She basically saved his life, keeping him from ending it once and for all. She also changed his future for the better.

He would sneak out as often as he could to meet her under the stars, but more often than not they wrote love letters on flimsy back and forth. Each letter, written with the finest penmanship and finest poetic words was kept by the princess. Walon kept hers as well, in a box under his bed.

When Walon was eighteen, he asked his father if he could marry the princess. His father and her father both rejected the marriage, along with the Priesthood. Not because of politics or religion, but because Walon was not good enough or worthy to marry such a beautiful woman.

His father was enraged that he had dared to ask such a question, so he was beaten worse than ever and nearly died. All because his father was embarrassed. When Walon healed a little he learned his love had been shipped away across the planet, to a nunnery. She would learn her lesson for sneaking out and falling in love with someone who was not of an arranged marriage.

He knew he’d never see her again.

Walon was exiled temporarily aftwards, being sent to some neighboring shit hole of a planet. He was eighteen and alone, with no idea of the outside world. His mother sobbed for days, her only child and her last hope gone. She prayed every night that he would be allowed back soon.

Luckily for Walon Vau, he used to sneak out to the large library every night to read books. They had no fiction books, so he just learned about other societies and their ways. Most books pointed out how “bad” they were, but Walon always thought they were so much better than his planet's society.

Thanks to reading, he knew a bit about the real galaxy.

Walon had nothing but the clothes on his back. He had no money or possessions. No title, no name. So he wandered.

Soon he ran into a group of Mandalorians, one by the name of Jaster Mereel. They quickly took in a teenage Walon, teaching him a new way. The way of the Mandalorian warriors. He never believed his home world's ludicrous ideas, so switching religions and cultures was very easy for Walon.

His family found out and disowned Walon for giving up his culture and religion. He lost his title and broke his mothers heart. His mother apparently died of a broken heart, after she heard the news that he would never return. But he knows deep down that his father finally snapped and killed her.

Walon became a perfect warrior, his body and mind already scarred from years and years of abuse. He was cold, calm, and calculated. Walon was also highly educated and very intelligent. So much so that some other Mandalorians taught him how to torture and dismember. He learned about the medical field and could have even been a doctor, but he preferred dead bodies and torturing.

Jedi could hardly sense him in the force, his soul too broken. He was a perfect Mandalorian Warrior, fighting along with his friend Jango Fett and many others for years. He fought in the Mandalorian Civil Wars, killing Jedi with no issue.

Early in his time with the Mandalorians, Walon met a Strill. The Strill could sense Walon’s shattered soul and broken mind, so it adopted him. The Strill was named Lord Mirdalan, jokingly after his favorite uncle. The uncle that had beaten him the less, and had been executed when Walon was ten. Walon did not miss him, or anyone from his home world.

That’s Walon Vau’s childhood story. He’s ice cold, calm, and utterly detached for a reason. His body is scarred, as is his shattered soul. He was so traumatized and beaten down into the way of the soulless that he had a hard time trying to escape that pit.

He was cruel to his Clone Commandos, but every day he would be up all night thinking. He wanted them to survive the war, that's all he wanted. He didn’t want them to be failures like him, he couldn’t allow it. Failures never survived.

Walon Vau hardly ever sleeps at night, his mind plagued by nightmares. Not of the wars, but of his home life.

Mird held Vau together a little better, but his soul never healed. He could never escape the hole of his traumatic past, and it ruined his life forever.

They call him a psychopath but he really isn’t. Walon Vau can still feel, he just doesn’t know how to. Walon Vau is just a shattered and traumatized man, one who never got proper help. One who never had a childhood.

(Please reblog this if you like it! I worked very hard on it!)

Tags: @leias-left-hair-bun @iamassbuttkingofhell @catsnkooks @mxndalorians @colorfulloverbatturkey @ahsokatano-thetogruta @jedi-mando @peacefulwizardfox @hounding-around @julyzaa @feathersforclones @chr0nicbackpain @strangebroadwaykinks @jedi-nila-rhyn @crimson-dxwn @detroitbydark @passionofthesith

#walon vau #Walon Vau's story #Republic Commando #Planet Irmenu #Pa Vau #Ma Vau #republic commando novels #republic commando game #republic commandos #delta squad #walon vau’s boys #repcomm novels #repcomm game #repcom #repcomm

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jubilantscribbler · 3 years

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you ever look at a character and go, “hey buddy, why are you here?” and then try and justify it?

Yeah, Adam MadOnes, I’m looking at you. But after some deep, deep, DEEP thought, I realized that Adam’s role in the story is easily overlooked and overshadowed in the musical compared to Kelly’s and even Sam’s mom’s relationships with Sam. At face value, Adam is just the boyfriend who adds very little to the plot, save for the very end when he’s the reason Sam breaks out of that stupor long enough to realize that he’s not what she wants either.

But then you listen to his lines in “Drive”, and you realize, hey, wait a minute, maybe he was supposed to be kinda forgettable but always present. Because, when you listen to his lines and what he has to offer to Sam, it’s safety. Or rather, he’s the safety net that Sam could rely on, except that she doesn’t want to.

Lemme explain.

Compared to Kelly and Beverly’s songs, Adam’s tend to be more... chill. “Simple as That” really shows it off, with the song having a playful but easy beat that drives home how low maintenance their relationship seems to be. They tend to get each other... most of the time. Their relationship is described as “perfect”, but the simple tune and beats also makes their relationship just a little bit childish, in that bright-eyed, “Santa Claus is Real” sort of way that’s endearing. That sets up their relationship easily enough to overlook it - it’s a naive, sweet kind of love that goes with the usual High School Sweethearts narrative, where the two of them are a perfect pair and they’re TOTALLY going to get married after they graduate-

And then you get into “The Proposal” and the opening line, “Have sex with me” is backed up with an intense strum that immediately levels out into a song that gets surprisingly soft. It sounds like a love song, but the lines are more of a plea to please have sex with Adam, he’ll make breakfast and dinner and he has candles he’ll be so romantic, and it’s like haha the usual boyfriend shenanigans until he starts backtrack and go, you know, they can always bone down tomorrow, or even next week which is surprising given how insistent Adam was for like, 90% of the song (Genius has a comment that this song is actually what Sam assumes Adam wants from her - sex, but even then, Adam still makes the effort to not completely push her to commit to the act and even suggests putting it off). Adam appears in the background of other songs too, like “Top Ten” and “I Know My Girl”, making him an ever present, lingering background figure in Sam’s life. He doesn’t push to make himself more prominent, and he also doesn’t push Sam to go with what he wants too. And that’s important to keep in mind.

Adam as a character is all about being there for Sam. He’s literally described as having “great emotional intelligence and the loyalty of a Saint Bernard”. The first part is why he doesn’t push so hard with Sam. He can read her cues. He can tell when she’s uncomfortable or doesn’t want to do something, and he doesn’t push. This is actually important to his character, and it’s how it all culminates into “Run Away with Me”. It’s this emotional awareness that has him recognizing the importance of “On the Road” and trying to connect and reconnect with Sam after Kelly’s death, how he recognizes in that very last line that Sam... doesn’t want what he’s throwing down. But instead of getting upset with Sam, he keeps it to himself and instead wishes her good luck in a goofy way for her driving test.

But this emotional awareness is also what makes Adam so important to Sam. He’s different from Kelly and her mom - he doesn’t actively push her to make decisions or go along with what he wants. Kelly forces her forward, to make decisions for herself - impulsive, wild, self-serving, but also freeing choices that are meant to lead Sam to her happiness. Meanwhile, Beverly, Sam’s mom, pushes her towards success, to make the right decisions, to be calculating and careful but ambitious, and to understand the reality of the world they live in, specifically as women. Adam doesn’t do any of that. It’s why his music is less intense compared to the Kelly and Beverly’s songs, more slow and oddly calm. Adam backtracks, tries to give Sam space for her decisions, (”maybe not today, maybe tomorrow, maybe-”), but more importantly, he wants to stick by Sam in however way she needs him to be.

It’s that dedication and love for Sam that has her singing “Say the Word” to him, that sweet, soft love song where she says that if he asks, she’ll stay for him even though she wants to go. In that moment, she’s giving him the chance to lead her life in a direction that he wants which, when you look at how Sam takes to people trying to dictate what she should do with her life, is oddly sweet of her to offer to him. He doesn’t act on it immediately, probably doesn’t have the time to given the song that follows up, but when he does sing to Sam his response, it’s after Kelly’s death with the attempt to try and get her to run away with him.

This is the one time Adam actually tries to push her into making a decision. He tells her that she’s ready, that she can make a new life with him, that they can be happy together on the road, just like her favorite book, and, interestingly, he repeats back to her the words she sang to him. For Sam, if he said the word, she’d stay for him. But for Adam, if she says the word, they can leave together. Sam tells him to tell her that she’s ready in “Say the Word”, and he does in “Run Away With Me”. Over and over, he tells her that “she’s ready now”, and it almost sounds too good to be true. Sam can finally hit the road, something she wanted so desperately before with Kelly, something that she was so frightened of before that had her saying no. Now she has the chance with Adam, offering her almost the same thing - a life on the road with someone she deeply cares about.

Except.

His offer comes with that little catch. That little dream of his of settling down in a house somewhere with Sam, words that remind Sam of what Kelly warned her about before. His offer is to save her, have a simple life with her, one that’s easy and calming and full of safety.

He’s offering her a safe way out to getting what she wants... temporarily. What he actually wants from her is a life where they’re always together, where they can maybe get married, maybe settle down, maybe have a family if she wants or not, maybe live somewhere by the coast, and it’s not what Kelly would have wanted, or what her ambitious mom would have wanted, and it’s not what Sam wants at all.

And Adam realizes that all too late, just right at the very last line of his song, where he loses all his enthusiasm and quiets his voice just enough. And, in the live version, you can hear his heartbreak loud and clear.

“Drive” is where Sam’s impression of Adam really shines through as he blatantly states that he can keep Sam safe, his pleas for her to run away with him more pleading even when he says that it doesn’t have to be right away, it can be later, because Adam is always willing to wait for Sam, he’s in love with her. To Sam, he becomes that idealized lover, that perfect high school sweetheart that follows the trope of getting married after high school, of settling down and leading a life that doesn’t have a lot of strife because they’re always so agreeable with each other. Sure, he doesn’t maybe understand her at the same level as Kelly, nor does he push her to be her very absolute best, but he offers something simple. Something safe. Something that she can take her time deciding on.

Adam, compared to the rest of the cast, doesn’t really have those strong, identifiable traits other than his devotion to Sam. He really is just that boyfriend character, but despite how his relationship with Sam practically pales in comparison to Sam’s relationship with Kelly, he’s still that important person to Sam. He’s the safety net in her relationships, the one that’s always there to catch her, the one she ran to after her fight with Kelly and her mom, the one who inadvertently broke her out of her stupor. He doesn’t outright add to the plot because he doesn’t push Sam to make her choices like Kelly or Beverly. And the story is all about Sam trying to make her own choices. Each of them have their way of going about it - Kelly by sheer force, Beverly with caution and fear, and Adam with time. And once he finally tries to push Sam towards a decision?

That’s the tipping point that leads into “Drive”.

Like Beverly, he’s important in making Sam realize what she wants. He’s important in making her realize what she doesn’t want, despite being that perfect, devoted boyfriend who just wants to be by her side. He’s the rejection of that concept, similar to how Sam rejects Beverly’s idea of striving to be the best despite the hand that was given to her, of being as successful as she can be allowed and maybe even a little more, of having to live and cope with reality. He represents the safe path, the simple path, the path a lot of people would take and have taken. And he matters more not in what he can add to Sam’s life and story, because Sam doesn’t actually want that, but what it takes for Sam to realize, or remembers really, what she actually wants for once in her life. Because the entire musical is about Sam searching for what she wants, and what Adam has to offer isn’t it.

It’s easy to overlook Adam really. He doesn’t show up often in the clips floating around Youtube, he’s got like, One Really Popular Song and the other two are pretty skippable, and comparing his relationship with Sam to Kelly’s really makes you wonder why she chose to date Adam instead of Kelly, asides from the compulsory heteronormativity. But when you actually take a step back and put together what Adam has to offer in conjunction to how the others normally act around Sam, and why he matters so much to Sam, he can be a pretty important character. Because in the end, he’s the one who manages to push her out of her funk, and no one else.

#the mad ones #that's a lot of #WORD VOMIT #but i think a lot about adam and what he represents #they all represent something to sam #im getting a copy of the uh #the book itself to try and get a grip of adams character #he doesn't actually have much going for him #either in the clips or in the album #i never saw the whole thing live #but even if he doesnt add specifically to the plot #he adds a little something else instead #poor guy is just a normal dude trying to make his gf happy #he's really not a bad guy #i will stand by that til the day i die

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antoine-roquentin · 3 years

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The clear subtext of the last half-decade of political upheaval has been rising impatience with how difficult it has become to enjoy things once considered the basics of life. Young people leave school saddled in debt, consider themselves lucky if they get health insurance, and are usually so far from being able to imagine owning their own homes or having real professional security that marriage or children seem like absurd, unattainable luxuries.

For older people further along in life, the logistical challenges of mere living have become so outrageous that many have committed to Dickensian work regimes, only to discover that in America, even working overtime costs money. You take a second job to pay for the child care necessitated by the first, and the little ancillary costs that seemed not so serious once — from DMV fees to getting a stove repaired to parking — now trigger a pucker factor just to consider. That’s without even taking into account all the various near-automatically bankrupting endgames built into the American experience that most people try as much as possible not to think about: serious illness, an elderly relative forced into care, divorce, surprise legal problems, etc.

The fact that a year ago, anyone thought it made sense to tell the millions of people forced daily to navigate all this stupidity that they needed to focus on a labyrinthine political controversy in Ukraine — and to blast them for deficits of “sobriety and clarity” when they didn’t — told you everything you needed to know about the cluelessness of the people who run this country.

Then the pandemic happened.

No conspiracy theories are necessary to point out that all of the institutions Americans were in the process of rejecting just a year ago have since increased their power and influence. Be it opportunism or coincidence, the international emergency has written a dramatic heel turn into our history.

A sweeping Fed-based rescue program resulted in enormous booms in asset values, allowing America’s wealthiest to increase their net worth by nearly a trillion dollars since the start of the pandemic (in mid-summer, American billionaires were collectively earning $42 billion per week). The disease pummeled people who actually had to travel to work, while empowering conglomerates like Amazon, which tripled its profits in the third quarter alone. Most of our lives are online now, an ironic reward to intelligence services that went unpunished after illegal surveillance programs were disclosed in the Obama years.

After all that upheaval, the White House is about to be re-occupied by a political fossil from the eighties, surrounded by a zombie cabinet of Iraq War supporters, drone assassination proponents, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and neoliberal economists, coming from places like Amazon, DuPont, and Raytheon (the Pentagon appointment of the current Henry Kissinger Chair from the Center from Strategic and International Studies was a nice homage to the unchangingly vile character of America’s royal court). How bad any of this is in comparison with the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump is arguable, but it surely represents the triumph of Sameness, a powerful reminder that in America, you ultimately can’t beat City Hall. Or can you?

The news in recent years often reads like accounts of America before the Sixties upheavals. That was also a time when long-held myths were rapidly losing force and people were beginning to question the palette of life choices celebrated in places like the Book of the Month Club and Life magazine. Men wondered why they were being sent around the world to kill poor people, only to come home to what Paul Goodman described as a “style of life dictated by Personnel… to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator.”

Women had it worse, consigned to tend house and give themselves nightly as a reward for men who’d completed their “covenant of murder” in places like Vietnam. Spirituality in much of Jim Crow America was a superficial weekly injunction to conformity at archaic churches and temples, while our real religion, consumerism, became a constant devotional exercise, bolstered by a thousand dazzling commercials for products that people began to realize fulfilled every conceivable need, but the most important.

We’re in such a similar place, and though America’s political leaders learned a great deal from those times — the list of absurd Woke Headlines run here a few days ago chronicles the extremely clever effort to commoditize and sell the desire for political action that had no permissible outlet in the sixties — the reality is, if you keep giving people nothing but crappy choices, they’ll eventually write their own story, even if they can’t do it through voting.

Americans are tired. The rancorous politics they’ve been sold as bread-and-circus diversions are tiring, not laughing is tiring, having too much work and too little money is tiring, being stuck inside now is tiring, even being sexually frustrated is tiring (look at the stats on that one sometime, if you want insight into why so many Americans seemed a tad touchy in recent years). The most exhausting part is the mandate to take it all seriously. Unfortunately for America’s leaders, that’s the easiest part to change, which is why 2021 feels like such a good candidate to be the year things finally begin turning in a happier direction.

Distortions on CNN or in the New York Times drive people crazy, but that’s only because they remember trusting those sources. They’ll forget soon and learn to walk right past mass media blather as if it were just amusingly terrible wallpaper, the way Soviets eventually did with Pravda and Izvestia. Student debt is crushing and college is an overpriced scam, but a reckoning of sorts is coming when people stop being ashamed of vocational school. Facebook and Instagram turbocharged the impact of fear-based “ring around the collar”-style marketing, but what happens when the pandemic recedes and going offline is possible again? Throwing off worries about likes and rediscovering real-life interaction feels destined to become a fashionable dissident statement, in the same way tuning in, turning on, and “dropping out” was an obvious response to the stultifying conformity of the fifties.

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hiccanna-tidbits · 3 years

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5, 6, 7 & 8 for OTP asks with Hiccanna!!

HELL YEAH BRO

Soulmate AU: Who is eager to meet their soulmate? Who absolutely does not want to meet their soulmate?

Anna, hopeless romantic and “true love” fanatic that she is, is incredibly down to meet her soulmate. One of her biggest fears is being inherently unlovable and that no one will ever love her for who she is (parents dying and sister shunning you has to leave some abandonment issues babyyyy), so she takes a lot of comfort in the idea of a soulmate--at least one person is basically certain to love her, right?

Hiccup, meanwhile, is apathetic at best and annoyed by the idea of a higher power dictating who his girlfriend is at worst. Unlike Anna, he doesn’t really fear no one will ever really love him for who he is--rather, he just accepts it as fact. Growing up with no friends and an emotionally-distant father, Hiccup came to believe that he was never going to feel the kind of deep, boundless love he’d seen between other people--and he made his peace with it. Being a more introverted scientist and inventor-type, Hiccup tends to spend a lot of time alone anyways and believes (maybe not fully accurately) that he prefers it that way. Besides, the logician in him thinks the whole “magic cosmic soulmate” thing is probably bullshit, and he just can’t figure out how something like soulmates could ever be backed or supported by modern science. Ultimately, Hiccup figures he’s going to date who he’s going to date (if he can even find any girls who are interested, that is), and he really couldn’t care less what the stars have to say about it.

When Hiccup and Anna do finally meet, and eventually start dating (knowing how shy and awkward they’d both be about confessing, it would take months to years after them meeting to actually get together, even in a goddamn soulmate AU), it isn’t revealed that they’re soulmates right away. Maybe it’s revealed by their hearts glowing a certain color when they first realize they’re in love with the other person? Idk.

When Anna finds out they’re soulmates, she’s absolutely stoked. Like the girl probably runs around their home for a solid 15 minutes planning a soulmate reveal party or something. Hiccup, meanwhile, is just kind of like “Oh! Neat!” and then immediately goes back to whatever he was doing XD

Anna is a bit hurt that Hiccup is so, ah...unconcerned about them being literally destined to be together. She’s mainly worried that it means that he doesn’t like...cherish their connection enough and whatnot. After he picks up on the fact that she’s kind of upset about his definitive lack of a strong reaction to the whole thing, he explains to her that he didn’t really care because he’d 100% date Anna whether or not she was his soulmate. Saying their souls were deeply connected was basically just putting a formal title on what he already knew.

And Anna has to take a minute, because honestly? Hiccup confidently saying he’d be with her in any reality, even one where he risks angering cosmic forces to do so, is actually much more romantic than them being supposedly “fated for each other” since the beginning.

Single parent AU: Which one is the single parent? (Alt. if they’re both single parents: Which one is open to starting a new relationship from the start? Which one is never planning on finding love again… Until they meet the other and are instantly smitten?)

I think I’ll have Zephyr and Nuffink be the single parent kids because I Just Think They’re Neat! That, and I honestly can’t bear to make lovechildren for Anna with anyone but Hiccup XD (those of you who know me will know making Krist/anna lovechildren in any context is RIGHT OUT).

So in this AU things didn’t work out with Astrid and Hiccup is pretty heartbroken over it :( I imagine she ultimately left him because she wasn’t really feeling the spark anymore, and they have joint custody of the kids. Meanwhile, Hiccup and Anna were neighbors growing up, and were pretty close friends as kids until Anna moved away and they lost touch. She eventually comes back to their hometown as an adult, and she and Hiccup reconnect. They’re also both like “ah shit, my old buddy got HOT” XD

I actually think Anna and Zephyr would really hit it off, mainly because Anna sees a lot of what she loves the most about Hiccup in Zephyr. Zephyr has Hiccup’s anxiety, cynicism, inventive streak, overall social awkwardness--and because Anna knows Hiccup so well and knows how to best accommodate all of his quirks and oddities, it’s not hard for her to extrapolate how best to befriend a younger version of him XD Zephyr, meanwhile, has had trouble befriending kids her age due to her bluntness and general “nerdiness,” so she’s always happy to find someone who accepts her unconditionally and takes a genuine interest in her wacky inventions--even if it’s her dad’s new girlfriend, who by all accounts should be a weird person for her to get close to XD Zephyr also devours science books like they’re going out of style, and is very pleased that Anna is more than happy to listen to her ramble on and on about random science trivia. Zeph still loves her biological mom, for sure, but she starts thinking of Anna as a second mom. She brags to all the kids at school that she has two moms, which leaves them very confused and wondering if Astrid ended up marrying another woman after she divorced Hiccup (which, to be fair, wouldn’t be entirely out of character).

Nuffink, meanwhile, is a little more unsure about the whole situation, if mainly because I headcanon him as a bit of a mama’s boy. He doesn’t dislike Anna so much as he’s just...wary of her, and doesn’t know how to feel about his dad falling in love with someone who isn’t his mom. He also can’t help but feel out-of-place when he, Zephyr, Hiccup, and Anna go out on “family outings” because he kind of looks like he doesn’t belong. With her reddish-brown hair, her blue eyes, her aundance of freckles, and her fondness for wearing twin braids, Zephyr could definitely pass as Anna’s daughter (I’ve even seen Anna used as an older version of Zephyr in video edits, which is hilariously ironic). Although Nuffink has his dad’s eyes, he very much has his biological mom’s hair and doesn’t look like he’s related to Anna at all.

I think what helps them finally bond is that they both have a love of combat! Nuffink definitely does some kind of martial arts or fencing training if he can access it, and Anna is more than happy to teach him some swordplay and spar with him if he wants! Because Sword Anna is best Anna, fight me. Nuffink is also open-minded enough that hey, if his cool big sister likes someone that much, she can’t be that bad. Hiccup is just...continually super impressed with how much Anna knows about fighting--and it makes him fall all the more in love with her, because he loves that in a woman XD Once Nuffink warms up to Anna, he’s constantly trying to impress her ith how tough he is--mostly shown by him ramming his head into walls. Poor Anna worries about Nuffink a lot XD

I imagine there’s a little bit of tension between Anna and Astrid in this AU. Not really because Astrid resents Hiccup moving on--she’s actually pretty happy for Hiccup that he found someone better suited for him than her--but more because she worries Anna is trying to replace her as the kids’ “true mom” XD Anna, meanwhile, can’t help but resent Astrid a little for breaking Hiccup’s heart and doesn’t get why they kids can’t just have two moms! The more people who love them, the better, right???

I don’t imagine Anna and Hiccup having any biological kids in this AU, because I think two stepkids would be plenty for Anna! Of course, since Zephyr and Nuffink are Hiccup’s, she loves them with all her being and tries to be the best stepmom she can be. But I think having more than two kids would stress Anna’s ADHD ass the fuck out, and she doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who would feel a need to have biological kids with Hiccup if she already had Nuffink and Zephyr to parent. Our girl is perfectly happy adopting!

Doctor AU: Which one is the longsuffering doctor? Which one is the patient?

Hiccup is the long-suffering doctor, although not entirely by choice. Often he wonders if being a doctor is actually what he wanted, but his dad was like “WELL SON! YOU’RE SMART, SO YOU GOTTA BE A DOCTOR SO YOU MAKE BIG BUCKS!” (I’m headcanoning in this AU Stoick is a professional athlete of some kind, and has made BANK since he was young. He can’t really conceive of his son NOT pursuing a well-paid profession). Hiccup doesn’t really want to disappoint his rather intimidating dad, so he goes along with it.

It’s not that he dislikes it, when all is said and done. He does care about people and wants to help them, although he hides it underneath about 10 layers of snark. Still, it’s stressful and thankless work, and often he worries about whether he took the right path. Too late to pursue something else now, he supposes.

Then he meets Anna, rushed to the ICU with a collection of third-degree electrical burns. She tried to plug all of her Christmas light strings into the same power strip, and uh...it did not go well. Hiccup is there monitoring her vitals when she wakes up, and she just kind of wearily sighs and admits to him that living on her own wasn’t nearly as fun or exciting as she thought it would be. As it turned out, Anna had insisted she could be trusted with putting up her apartment’s holiday decorations, and she very much should not have been.

Anna ends up having to stay a couple weeks. She needs a small skin graft (yeah, she fucked herself up THAT bad), and then needs a bit of time for the surgery wounds to heal. Hiccup is assigned to do checkups on her regularly, and starts to look forward to it. Her perky disposition (despite being stuck in the hospital with burn wounds) is contagious, and she never fails to make him laugh after a long, draining shift. As stressful as his job is, Anna becomes his one respite.

He has to admit, it’s nice to have at least one thing to look forward to.

Hiccup is a little sad to see Anna go. Of course, bumbling, socially awkward foot-in-mouth fool that he is, he doesn’t have the courage to ask for her number so they can keep in touch. That would, uh...probably be unprofessional or something. Besides, it would probably crush his heart and soul if she was weirded out by his soft spot for her so like...maybe best not to even open himself up to the possibility.

Then, not two weeks later, Anna shows up at the hospital again--this time having broken three bones in a hiking accident. Apparently she got too excited about a particularly nice view, and toppled right off the top of a very steep bluff. He, once again, takes on her care, and is delighted (albeit guiltily) to have her back. He, once again, has something to make work not suck as much!

Oddly enough, this turns out to be the first of many hiking accidents. Anna comes in next month claiming to have nearly burned her arm off in a rogue campfire, and then again the next month claiming to have been mauled by a bear (although Hiccup is pretty sure those bleeding gashes were just left by a very big dog, and Anna is too embarrassed to admit it). Odder still, Hiccup distinctly remembers talking to Anna during her first hospital stay about how much he loved hiking and the outdoors, and now all of her new string of injuries just happen to be hiking-related. He can’t help but be baffled about how her insurance even covers all of this, but apparently having a family lineage distantly related to Norwegian royalty has its perks.

On roughly her 7th hospital stay, Hiccup finally gathers up the courage to ask Anna for her number, if only because he figures it would be nice for them to see each other without Anna having to nearly get herself killed first every time XD

Bodyguard AU: Who is the bodyguard? Who are they protecting? Which one is secretly pining for the other?

OMIGOD SO

I HAD AN IDEA FOR THIS

What if Anna was sent to bodyguard Hiccup in an AU where Arendelle is a lot more militaristic???

Basically what I'm thinking is that this is in an alternate timeline, Hiccup didn't injure Toothless's tail when he shot him down. The beginning of HTTYD plays out the same, but Toothless can still fly and just yeets off after Hiccup frees him, supposedly never to be seen again. However, this still leads Hiccup to believe he may not be dragon-fighting material after all. The poor boy still yearns to find a way to prove his worth to Berk, though.

As Hiccup gets older, his strength doesn't really improve, and it becomes clear to Stoick that he's always going to be pretty scrawny. Because of this, he's hesitant to put Hiccup in dragon training for the sake of his son's own safety--and hey, Hiccup seems to have lost interest in dragon-fighting anyhow, so it's not like Hiccup will fight him on it. Nonetheless, the dragon raids are getting worse, and Stoick worries about Hiccup being able to protect himself at all. Knowing most of the older villagers are busy with dragon-fighting and other jobs, and honestly doubting any of the village's teenagers would protect Hiccup if push came to shove, Stoick sends out an appeal of sorts to neighboring villages and kingdoms requesting a bodyguard for his skinny disaster of a son.

Back in Arendelle, shut-in princess Anna is surprised yet intrigued when a messenger from the Viking village of Berk shows up at Elsa's coronation. In a timeline where Hans and Anna don’t have their chance encounter, Hans sets his wooing sights on the newly-crowned Queen Elsa (and fails), and no push ends up being strong enough to make Elsa lose control of her powers at the ceremony. Anna, however, still feels hurt by her sister’s seemingly reasonless rebuke earlier in the evening and finds herself aching to explore the world outside her castle and be close with someone--anyone--again.

When the Viking messenger requests a bodyguard for the Chief of Berk’s son, Anna is quick to volunteer. The messenger scoffs at first, but to his surprise, the soft-looking princess isn’t entirely unqualified. She filled many of her long, empty childhood hours training with the Arendelle guard, and her swordplay is admirable. To prove her worth, Anna faces off with one of the Berkian warriors in a duel--and holds her own shockingly well. While Queen Elsa is hesitant to let her sister run off to a faraway nation, Anna vehemently insists that Arendelle doesn’t need two monarchs, and this will be great for diplomatic relations in the long run. Of course, she also longs to explore and get away from the place she’s been trapped her entire life, but Elsa doesn’t need to know that part.

When Anna arrives in Arendelle, Hiccup has absolutely no idea what to make of his new bodyguard. On the one hand, a girl who’s good with a sword is hot, and he’s long since given up on Astrid anyways. On the other hand, Hiccup is definitely irked that his dad sees him as so weak and incapable that he’s the only Viking in the village who needs a full-on bodyguard, and he hates feeling like he’s being babied and coddled (not that this is Anna’s fault). Still, his bodyguard is essentially the only person who’s ever seemed to actually want to be friends with him in...well, his whole life, and honestly? He’ll take it.

Anna, meanwhile, still aching for love and connections of really any kind, is nigh-instantly smitten. His brains, his creativity, his constant snide jokes, his snark-coated good heart, his weird, messy hairdo--all of it has an 18-year-old Anna completely over the moon. Hiccup, feeling hopeless in the world of romance after being rejected by Astrid, is honestly just relieved to finally have a friend--to the point that it doesn’t even occur to him that Anna’s a girlfriend option.

Not long after she arrives in Berk, Anna is put into dragon training to prepare for raids. She does a bit of training of her own with Hiccup, teaching him some swordplay to try and boost his confidence. It’s not hard to tell that he has mixed feelings about having to have a protector, and Anna hopes that by teaching him some basic fighting skills he can at least feel a little better if he’s ever in a situation where she isn’t there to defend him.

As she gets deeper into her dragon training, Anna asks Hiccup why he never gave dragon training a go. Granted, him being as physically small as he is would be a disadvantage, but he could still learn to hold his own decently well using speed and stealth. It would help him be able to protect himself, if nothing else. Hiccup seems very reluctant to talk about the whole subject, but he says Anna needs to trust that he knows he can’t kill dragons. He tends to give the shortest answers possible to her questions, and nigh-instantly changes the subject. When Anna presses too much, he gets snippy.

As they get closer, Hiccup finally opens up to Anna about the time he shot down a Night Fury and couldn’t bring himself to make the final kill. He admits to cutting the creature free, and how the dragon nearly killed him--only to spare Hiccup just as Hiccup had spared him. “I saw more than just a ruthless killer when I looked into that dragon’s eye,” Hiccup tells her. “I saw myself. I think there’s so much more to them than anyone knows, but...you’re the only person I feel like would actually give me the benefit of the doubt on that.”

During the next raid, Anna pays closer attention to the dragons than before. She watches how they interact with the villagers, and notice that they never seem to go out of their way to go after people. They only fight Vikings when Vikings initiate, and the dragons’ main concern always seems to be taking sheep and fish. Left to their own devices, they don’t seem to want to hurt anyone.

Unfortunately, Anna standing off to the side and trying to watch what all the dragons are doing leaves her distracted--and vulnerable. She’s not prepared for a camouflaged changewing to melt out of the wall behind her, whipping around and backing her into a corner. Anna grabs for her sword but can hardly move, frozen in terror as the massive dragon stares her down.

She holds up an arm, bracing herself for a wall of fire, but none comes. There’s a swish of wings and a gust of wind blows her back. When she looks up, the dragon is gone.

It would’ve been beyond easy for the dragon to kill her. The creature clearly saw her--could have taken advantage in her moment of frozen stupor and burned her to a crisp. And yet...the dragon spared her. Just like the Night Fury had spared Hiccup.

Anna realizes Hiccup might be onto something.

Together, Hiccup and Anna decide they’re going to get to the bottom of what dragons are really like--and why they’re stealing the village’s food. While claiming to go out for “battle practice,” Hiccup and Anna track down dragons and study them in secret--observing them, writing about them, seeing how they behave and how they interact with one another. They’re surprised by what they see: left to their own devices, dragons are good-natured and compassionate, and they take care of their own. Strangely, they never seem to feed the stolen food to their young. Hiccup predicts they’re not actually keeping it for themselves, and taking it somewhere nigh unreachable for humans. For what actual purpose is anyone’s guess.

Anna starts using the info she gathers observing dragons with Hiccup in dragon-training. She finds ways to sooth them and calm them down in the ring by using things they seem to enjoy in the wild. Scented grass, bits of fish, soft touches, slow, gentle movements. The village marvels at her newfound skills, and can’t help but wonder where she developed such a knack for controlling dragons despite spending basically all her time around “Stoick’s little runt.” She couldn’t be training with him, of all people...could she? Astrid, for one, is definitely none too pleased about her spot at the top of the class being threatened.

Meanwhile, Anna and Hiccup can’t help but grow fond of the dragons they watch. They start becoming more bold, and leaving snacks of trout and mutton for the scaled creatures. Anna is delighted when the food ends up attracting none other than what she’s pretty sure is the same changewing who spared her, as well as a curious snaptrapper. She’s never gotten to see a snaptrapper up close before, and is completely undeterred by the triple-jawed four heads. Rather, she is far more preoccupied with coming up with the perfect name for each head.

“Omigod, he’s so PRETTY! And he smells like CHOCOLATE!”

“...you know they probably emit that scent to lure in prey so they can slice it in three, right?”

“CHOCOLATE, HICCUP!!!”

With each new meal, the local dragons grow more and more comfortable with Hiccup and Anna. After a while, the changewing and the snaptrapper even let Anna touch their noses. Anna falls in love with watching the changewing seem to melt around the forest as she camouflages, and rolling in the mud with the snaptrapper after a summer storm. Hiccup starts catching what seems to be glimpses of the Night Fury he freed, and it appears that the curious creature has come back to investigate him.

The Night Fury appears more and more, drawn in by Hiccup’s trout feast. Hiccup notices the dragon’s wing is injured, likely shot by someone from the village. Although he’s not completely helpless, he’s having trouble. Hiccup sets to work on his most daring project yet--making a “brace” of sorts that can mend the ripped wing.

When Hiccup and Anna attempt to distract the Night Fury long enough to climb up and put the wing brace on, something unexpected happens. The dragon shoots up to the sky, both unwitting passengers clinging onto his tail for dear life.

Once they get their bearings and clamber up to his back, the Night Fury (who Hiccup has nicknamed “Toothless” for his retractable teeth) takes them on a flight through the clouds. Unable to help herself, Anna laces her arms around Hiccup’s waist--if only so she can supposedly “hold on better.”

Hiccup, of course, still doesn’t get it.

The flight takes a sinister turn when Toothless takes them to the dragon nest, and Hiccup finally gets his answer about where all of the villages food has been going--to their queen. Unsure what to do or how to free their new friends from the Red Death, Hiccup and Anna promise each other one thing or sure--none of the rest of Berk can know about the dragon nest. If they attack it, it spells disaster for both dragons and Vikings--not to mention the question of how they got there is sure to dig up their secret dragon-related activities as of late.

With each dragon raid, Anna finds herself more and more reluctant to fight dragons--especially now that she knows what’s actually going on. She only does the bare minimum to protect the food and the village, never going out of her way to attack a dragon or landing a killing blow (although by this point, she’d definitely be skilled enough to). During one particularly intense raid, Anna is finding it harder and harder to fend dragons off without doing lethal damage. While driving out a particularly tenacious monstrous nightmare, Anna happens upon the same changewing she’s befriended in the forest, limping to safety.

It would be incredibly easy to finish the dragon off, but Anna refuses. The dragon knows she’s beat, and so Anna lets her leave without so much as a swing of the princess’s sword.

Unfortunately, Astrid sees.

After the raid, Astrid storms up to Anna and chews her out in front of the whole village, yelling about how weak she was to not go for a dragon kill when she had the chance. It turns out Astrid’s also been noticing Anna going intentionally easy on the dragons, and how much the Arendelle princess seems to hold back when fighting him. Astrid knows it’s not physical incompetence, or a lack of skill--she’s seen Anna subdue plenty of dragons in training.

No, it seems to be the princess’s heart that’s weak. Her kingdom must be nothing but a bunch of bleeding-hearted morons, and she’ll never be tough enough to really belong in Berk.

As he watches Astrid yell and the Berkians all turn to sneer at the scene, Hiccup feels a sudden rush of protectiveness for his friend. Tears are starting to form in the corners of her eyes, and something gives in him seeing her subjected to the very ostracization that left him completely alone for so many years.

He walks up beside Anna, and suddenly he’s shouting like he’s never quite had the courage to before.

“You’re wrong, Astrid! You’re all wrong!”

Before long, he’s spilling everything--how dragons are intelligent and caring creatures, how they’re only stealing food to feed a ruthless queen, how he’s sure humans have killed far more dragons than vice versa. The village stares, horrified. When Stoick storms forward, Hiccup and Anna know it’s nothing good.

Stoick is disgusted. The very bodyguard he had brought all the way out to Berk to give his son strength did nothing but fill Hiccup’s head with softness and dangerous lies. He banishes Anna, warning her never to set foot in Berk or speak to his son again.

Hiccup will not have it. He says if Anna’s leaving, he’s coming with her. He’s made his choice, and he’s standing by the only person who ever really treated him with unconditional love and kindness.

“Fine,” Stoick says simply. “We’ll be rid of two traitors, then.”

Cast out from Berk, Hiccup and Anna find themselves with a new mission: Find the nest before the rest of Berk does, and take out the Red Death once and for all.

With the help of Toothless, the Changewing (who Anna has nicknamed “Flicker”), and the Snaptrapper (whose heads Anna have very creatively named Leafy, Greeny, Spiky, and Badbreath. It’s beyond Hiccup how she tells all of them apart, but she’s very adamant about which is which.), they find the dragon hive again, and attempt the impossible--attacking the queen. It seems hopeless at first, but once more and more malcontented dragons see what they’re doing, they join in and rebel.

It’s a tough fight, but the two humans and the revolting dragons come out on top. Not before the Red Death has one last hurrah, though--letting out a final, massive blast of fire that knocks Hiccup askew and sends him tumbling down into the flames. Toothless, Flicker, Anna, and the Snaptrapper dive after, and are quickly engulfed in red and orange.

Meanwhile, the Berkians have sent out ships following Hiccup, Anna, and their dragons, guessing the nest is where they were headed. By the time they get there, the fight is over--and Stoick and Gobber just manage to catch a glimpse of Hiccup plummeting into the flames.

Anna screams Hiccup’s name until the smoke burns her throat so much she can’t anymore. She remembers swooping underneath him and just managing to grab hold of his limp body before everything goes dark.

When she comes to later, it’s still dark--but she feels something soft and warm in her arms, and feels scales pressed against her back. Her arm is searing with pain, but she barely notices it as her eyes adjust to the darkness. Hiccup is curled up against her--groaning, but alive.

Not sure she’ll ever get another chance, she puts a hand on his cheek and finally tells him the truth. “I love you.”

He opens his eyes and looks, gaze shocked until a slow realization washes over him. He smiles. “I love you, too.”

They both pass out, still wrapped up in each other.

When the flames clear, Stoick sees what looks like a pile of dragons, all pressed together with their wings folded in. Slowly, they lift their wings to reveal two humans--charred in places, but alive.

Wracked with guilt, Stoick realizes he was wrong. Hiccup’s new bodyguard helped his son become stronger and braver than the chief of Berk ever imagined.

It turns out taking down the queen saved the dragons and the humans, and thanks to Hiccup, Anna, and their dragon friends, Berk will never have to worry about dragon raids again.

It turns out Hiccup’s leg and Anna’s arm didn’t quite make it out of the fire. Luckily, Gobber has always been handy at prosthetics--and Hiccup manages to make a fairly dextrous and functional metal hand for Anna. Anna is utterly delighted with how cool it looks.

After the whole Red Death incident, it’s decided that Hiccup is probably competent enough that he doesn’t need his own bodyguard anymore. Nonetheless, Anna is welcome to stay in Berk as long as she likes. And with new dragon friends and an incredibly cute new boyfriend, she’s not going anywhere anytime soon!

***

This is in reference to this post! I’ve already done these questions for Moanida. Theoretically still willing to do any questions I haven’t yet for Hiccanna and Moanida, although these were exhausting to write out so I might not give as long of answers XD

#hiccanna #hiccup x anna #anna x hiccup #hiccup #anna #otp questions #hiccup haddock #princess anna #hiccupxanna #annaxhiccup #rotbtd #rotbtfd #httyd #frozen #crossover

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thelittleredheadedmusician · 4 years

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I’ve been thinking a lot about political structures in children’s fantasy. I’m positive this ramble is just going to end in more questions than answers but I need to organize my thoughts.

So Oz has an obvious, if confusing, political structure. (I’ve only ever read The Wizard of Oz though I know Baum went into a lot more of Oz’s history in his others, that’s what I’m sticking with rn cause that’s also the base of the media most are familiar with.) So, when Dorothy lands in Oz she kills the Wicked Witch of the East and frees the Munchkins from her tyrannical(? We’re lead to believe) rule leaving the Munchkins free(? Or maybe under Glinda’s rule?). Regardless, Oz has a political structure & Dorothy’s actions directly upset it — as she goes on to kill the Wicked Witch of the West who was ruling over the Winkies — but we never see her involved in politics. If anything she’s a tool of Glinda and the Wizard, upsetting the current balance of power before heading back to Kansas and not getting involved in the political restructuring. (Look I know there’s other media that might include this & I know I’ve read some but I’m thinking of strictly L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Which is political to begin with since it’s an allegory for a silver backed dollar but I’m not talking American politics here.)

Then there’s Alice. Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass involve Alice directly dealing with, and often arguing, contradicting, and outright defying, royalty of both of the lands she finds herself in. While in Looking Glass Alice manages to become a queen she is still shown to not have any real political power or even anything to be queen over before waking up. Like Dorothy, Alice upsets the political landscape of the world she finds herself in without being able to restructure it. (Again, I’m not taking into consideration all the various adaptations and retellings.)

There’s probably something to be said about them both being girls and the eras in which the books were written or just the more overtly nonsensical or fantastical facets of both but still. Alice and Dorothy were both, undeniably, used as political pawns and then sent home.

The Chronicles of Narnia get to more of what I’m actually interested in. The Pevensie children show up, literally wage a war, and rid the country of a tyrannical dictator. Then by divine right of Aslan they’re made kings and queens. While it’s shown that there are other humans in the world, at this point the Telemarians don’t have any contact with the Narnians. So like, these kids first had to learn how to wage war (which I think might be the bigger takeaway here? That there’s a whole lot of child soldiers and political pawns going around.) and then they suddenly have to run a country? Granted it’s a magical one that seems to pretty much govern itself but like, these are kids! They don’t know what they’re doing! They got guidance in the war because they joined up with the resistance movement! Now suddenly the country’s at peace and very few people in it remember peacetime at this point so you’ve got a population that has to readjust to peace (and seasons) as well as four kids who are expected to run a country. I think the books said Mr. Tumnus and the Beavers ended up being advisors for them but like what do they know? What’re their qualifications? And I’m almost certain they got in contact with Telemar before they left the first time. So like how were they handling international relations in a world that wasn’t their own with people who knew this and while children? I just. I want to know how that worked, how it happened, how did these four kids — specifically SIBLINGS — actually manage to work out how to govern.

In Harry Potter there’s a mix between what happens with Dorothy, Harry is used as a pawn in a preexisting political structure with very little knowledge of his own, and the Pevensies, he and his family are thrust into the midst of a war and suddenly become child soldiers. But there’s less responsibility because at the end of the day the structure itself is largely unchanged, the Ministry being relinquished by the Death Eaters & Kingsley being elected Minister, and there are adults to pick up the pieces around them. Harry & co went through terrible, traumatic events and were forced to grow up too quickly, but they are given a reprieve and allowed to be kids again. Hermione goes back to Hogwarts even and completes school with Ginny and Luna. But we know that she also then goes on to work for the Ministry, and Harry becomes an Auror presumably right away and Neville eventually a professor at Hogwarts. You can’t say that these children, who by virtue of being war heroes, now have power and influence but don’t wield it. That they’re not included as members of the Order of the Phoenix or that Dumbledore’s Army doesn’t carry weight akin to a political party. Are we just expected to believe that the boy who felt played, betrayed, and controlled his whole life suddenly steps back and continues to allow someone else to make decisions now that he’s undoubtedly free to act on his own accord? Why would Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, or Luna give up their newfound power either? It doesn’t make sense for any of these characters who have felt as though they have no control over their lives or the world around them to suddenly gain the ability to and yet not use it. I’m not saying they staged a coup or anything but they must have been included on discussions of what to do with the remaining Death Eaters and how to rebuild. They must have wanted to be included. So, what happened?

Now this one I’m less familiar with and there’s already been a lot of meta done but it’s the most similar to Narnia and definitely needs to be included. So, Avatar: The Last Airbender is very much along the same lines as Narnia and Harry Potter, child soldiers & taking over running a country that’s suddenly finds itself at peace. Though the Gaang has a whole lot more awareness of the broader ramifications of their actions. Kinda. Vaguely. Zuko is well aware that he’s a prince and that one day he’s expected to run a country and Aang knows he’s the avatar and the weight that carries. Sokka and Katara also have a sense of weight and Toph knows the weight her family name carries. But like, they don’t really expect that this is going to translate into politics. But by the end Zuko does have to run a country, granted with the help of ministers and advisors and we all know Iroh, but with Korra we know that the Gaang goes on to found a whole knew country. Just like the Pevensies you have these people who are literally or nearly siblings who suddenly find themselves world leaders and dealing with other political leaders. And how did that go over? How do you go from being best friends one minute to hashing out tarriffs the next? And while all under the age of 30?

Now Percy Jackson and the Olympians is the only one I can think of (without venturing too far into YA lit) that actually sees the main character wielding hard won power. (And I do mean only the first five books.) Percy is definitively a pawn and when the war is over he actively asks the gods to restructure power by claiming their kids. It’s nowhere near the extremes that Luke wanted or control that Kronos did but Percy sees the validity that Luke had and uses the fact that the gods owe him big time to have some sort of change enacted.

I don’t know what exactly but there’s something here about children, power, politics, war, and how children who go through war together and form bonds and are in each other’s pockets by choice, necessity, and blood go about being allowed to stop growing up so fast while also being expected to govern to actually governing and shaping politics. And if children as political pawns and soldiers and “saviors” is such a reoccurring theme, why isn’t them wielding their newfound power and influence to govern? To restructure the worlds they saved?

#meta #harry potter #atla #percy jackson #chronicles of narnia #wizard of oz #alice in wonderland #to narnia!#wonderland #look i've been thinking A Lot about this the past couple days #idk what this is but it's something

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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WORK ETHIC AND RETROSPECT

There are two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders. The sharpest criticism of YC came from a founder who said we didn't focus enough on customer acquisition: YC preaches make something people want is the destination, but Be relentlessly resourceful is the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. It's not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Customers loved us. And so it proved this summer. Especially the type, all too common then, that was an anomaly—a unique combination of circumstances that compressed American society not just economically but culturally too.1 And I don't think there's any limit to the number who could be employed by small, fast-moving, lightweight VC fund.2 One of the best places to do this was at trade shows.3 That's made harder by the fact that the founders of Google knew, brand is worth next to nothing in the search business. In software, it means you should give users a few basic elements that they can combine as they wish, like Lego. The reason VCs seem formidable is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else.

They're in a different world. But you can't have action without an equal and opposite reaction. A sinecure is, in the spam I got from botnets.4 I felt that sheepish feeling you get when you offer someone something worthless. We felt like our role was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive. It may be that a significant number who get rich tend to be owned by one of them. This proves something a lot of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. People just don't seem to be very good at business or have any kind of special training.

In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry.5 Because investors are so bad at judging you, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. But when I finally tried living there for a bit, but you had no choice in the matter, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of. Us build this thing to make money from one of these centers. That yields all sorts of plausible justifications. I'm not writing here about Java which I have never used but about hacker's radar which I have never had to use CLOS. And it must have powerful libraries for server-based applications. Because so little money is involved.

Stephen Hawking's editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. What makes the answer appear is letting your thoughts drift.6 Microsoft's death: everyone can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. I just explained: startups take over your life to a degree you cannot imagine.7 There is a kind of business plan for a new Lisp.8 In retrospect, it would seem crazy to most people outside the US. But negative lessons are just as backward as search was before Google. It's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common is that they can't force anyone to do deals with them. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.9

The bad news is that I don't think fast code comes primarily from things you do.10 And they are a classic example of the dangers of deciding what programmers are allowed to want. Does anyone who wants to use your system in their whole company won't. The third reason you need them, and I got in reply what was then the party line about it: that Yahoo was no longer a mere search engine. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem.11 Your tastes will change. I had bought the hype of the startup world want to believe this comes from the city's prudent Yankee character. And in startup hubs they understand it.12

Notes

Treating high school kids arrive at college with a woman who, because what they're capable of.

7% of American kids attend private, non-broken form, that it even seemed a plausible excuse.

What drives the most important information about competitors is what the editors will have a lot easier now for a startup is a case of the world barely affects me. And you should be clear.

The dictator in the mid 1980s. Back when students focused mainly on getting a job where you have no idea how much they lied to them unfair that things don't work the upper middle class first appeared in northern Italy and the super-angels tend not to. Google's revenues are about two billion a year for a long time by sufficiently large numbers of users to observe—e. Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2005.

I'm claiming with the amount—maybe not linearly, but all they could attribute to the year x in a spiral.

5% of Apple now January 2016 would be taught that masturbation was perfectly normal and not others, no one is going to call the years after 1914 a nightmare than to call all our lies lies. 94 says a 1952 study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome. And no, unfortunately, I can imagine what it can buy. And if you did so, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and no doubt partly because it was so widespread and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality, and how good you are not in 1950 something one could reasonably be with children, with number replaced by gender.

Anyone can broadcast a high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods.

54 million, and FreeBSD 1.

I wouldn't say that it offers a vivid illustration of that. Or lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as a high product of number of big companies, but the nature of the big winners if they do the opposite: when we created pets. Odds are people in the top and get pushed down by new arrivals.

In some cases the writing teachers were transformed in situ into English professors. Google and Facebook are driven by money—for example, being a doctor. Indifference, mainly. Because they want to get great people.

You leave it to get kids into better colleges, I mean no more than most people will pay for health insurance derives from efforts by businesses to use those solutions. I was not in the old version, I didn't need to run on the group's accumulated knowledge.

And while they think the main effect of low salaries as the web was going to eat a sheep in the time it would have turned out to coincide with other investors doing so because otherwise you'd be surprised how often have valuation caps, a proper open-source projects now that VCs may begin to conserve board seats by switching to what you learn via users anyway.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Alex Lewin, Peter Norvig, Geoff Ralston, Jackie McDonough, Aaron Iba, and Cameron Robertson for inviting me to speak.

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jerseydeanne · 3 years

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Nothing was ever good enough...Meghan left staff shaking with fear

The Times article.

https://archive.vn/2e8QQ

Tuesday March 02 2021, 10.00pm GMT, The Times The Duchess of Sussex has always prided herself on being a good boss. When she was in the American TV series

Suits

, she would sometimes buy the crew pizza. At Kensington Palace there was the occasion, recounted in the pages of

People

magazine in February 2019, when she paid for an ice-cream stand for staff. “They were remarking how it was the ‘best day of work ever’,” a friend said. Some of those who worked for Meghan after she joined the royal family have less fond memories. Staff were bullied, according to sources, and some reduced to tears. One said they were humiliated by her on a number of occasions. According to the complaint revealed by

The Times

today, two PAs were driven from the household. The duchess denies any allegations of bullying.

My source said it was like walking on eggshells to be around Meghan.

The first sign that anything might be amiss came when a story appeared in a diary column in a national newspaper saying that Meghan’s personal assistant had left six months after the royal wedding.

A week later the assistant was named in another paper as Melissa Touabti. “Meghan put a lot of demands on her and it ended up with her in tears,” a source was reported as saying.Touabti was not the first member of staff to leave.

Before her there was another PA, a young woman already employed by the palace. She did not stay long after Meghan arrived.

Both PAs signed non-disclosure agreements. There is no suggestion that Meghan tried to prevent them from speaking. Lawyers for the duke and duchess stated that she had no knowledge of the agreements and that they believed staff to be comfortable and happy.

That's a lie, MM is crazy about NDAs and made Harry sign one after she dictated the statement over the phone in 2016. Everyone signs one who works for the firm. Harry is well aware of this.

Record Scratch... Meghan Markle threw a cup of hot tea at an assistant in Aus.

In late 2017, after Harry and Meghan’s engagement was announced, a senior aide spoke to the couple about the difficulties caused by their treatment of staff. People needed to be treated well and with some understanding, even when they were not performing to their standards, they were told. Meghan is said to have replied: “It’s not my job to coddle people.”

Meghan is so fake and phony, if those people can't help her get to be an A-lister, they are toast.

There is no doubt that Meghan could be a demanding boss. There were a number of people, allegedly including Harry himself, who suggested that those early problems were partly to do with cultural differences in management style. As Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand put it in their book about the couple,

Finding Freedom

: “Americans can be much more direct, and that often doesn’t sit well in the much more refined institution of the monarchy.”

It's a turn-on to a narc to watch people squirm.

However,

The Times

has spoken to insiders who have argued that it was about more than just American straight-talking. The duchess could be sharp with those she felt were letting her down, sources claim. One former staff member said: “I had unpleasant experiences with her. I would definitely say humiliated.” Meghan is sadistic! After Jason Knauf, the couple’s communications secretary, made his bullying complaint, another member of staff was worried about spending time with her the next day because she feared that Meghan was about to find out. “This is why I feel sick,” they said.

Another time there was a row about whether Meghan had been told that the media would be present at an event. When she rang the aide, they rang back but she did not pick up. “I feel terrified,” the source said. “I can’t stop shaking.” Meghan loves to play games. Another source said: “There were a lot of broken people. Young women were broken by their behaviour.” The source described one member of staff as “completely destroyed”. Even before the wedding, staff were feeling the strain. One told a colleague the couple were “outrageous bullies” and said they were considering resigning. The colleague replied: “That’s so dreadful. And they are bullies.”

The harsh treatment was not confined to junior staff. One source claimed that Samantha Cohen, the couple’s private secretary, had been bullied. Another said: “They treated her terribly. Nothing was ever good enough. It was, ‘She doesn’t understand, she’s failing.’” In fact, the source said, Cohen was “a saint” and the best organiser of royal tours they had known. Lawyers for the duke and duchess said they remained close to Cohen and grateful for her support and dedication, acknowledging that she had come out of retirement to work closely with them at a busy time. They deny bullying her.

The Sussexes’ autumn tour

in 2018, when they visited Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga, was stressful for staff, sources say. A senior adviser did his best to reassure them, saying: “You are dealing with a very difficult lady.”The issue boils down to whether Meghan was a demanding boss with high standards, or a bully. Did her team fail her or did she ask the impossible? Bully!

In court papers for her successful privacy action against TheMail on Sunday

, her lawyers said that when she was distressed by the negative stories in the media about her, her friends felt frustrated by the instruction from the palace communications team that they should respond “no comment” to allegations. That left her friends “rightly concerned for her welfare, specifically as she was pregnant, unprotected by the institution and prohibited from defending herself”, they said.

It was a setup from the beginning.

An alternative view, sources say, is that Meghan craved rejection from the moment she walked into Kensington Palace, and that nothing that anyone did would ever be good enough.

True, she is mentally ill

The palace knew that when Harry married a woman who was biracial, American and divorced, they had to go out of their way to make sure the marriage was a success: if it was not, the royal household and their supposedly hidebound ways would be blamed.

“Everyone knew that the institution would be judged by her happiness,” a source said. “The mistake they made was thinking she wanted to be happy. She wanted to be rejected because she was obsessed with that narrative from day one.”

TRUE!

Lawyers for the duchess said this was entirely wrong. The duchess wished to fit in and be accepted and had left her life in North America to commit herself to her new role.

Liar, it was always going to be this way, she was never a sticker. It's all about the money.

More than one source has expressed their view about her wanting to be a victim. One claimed: “She wanted to be the victim because then she could convince Harry that it was an unbearable experience and they had no choice but to move to America.”

Lawyers for the duke and duchess denied this was true. Supporters of the couple have argued that Harry and Meghan were frustrated in their attempts to live their life in a different way.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Meghan worked on Harry that the same thing was going to happen to her as his mother. They are after me Harry even though her PR is the one who set up the articles.

Finding Freedom

quoted a source close to the prince saying that “nothing could convince Harry that some of the old guard at the palace simply didn’t like Meghan and would stop at nothing to make her life difficult”. In her legal case against

The Mail on Sunday

, the duchess’s lawyers denied that the couple collaborated with the book. One source claimed that most of the tensions in the household at the time concerned the Sussexes’ relations with the media. “The way I see it, their view of not getting institutional support was that they were not getting permission to blow up the institution’s relationships with the media.” Again, lawyers for the duke and duchess deny this. Their lawyers are denying a lot! One conversation confirmed to

The Times

seems to reveal how much the palace was prepared to go out of its way to help Meghan. Before the wedding, the couple had a meeting with a senior aide who told them that the palace was doing everything it could to help and there was no need to think she had to take on her role in a particular way, a source said. If she was passionate about the acting world, they could help her to think about finding a role within the film industry.

They made sure Meghan had anything she wanted. They rolled out the red carpet. I told them she is going to screw you!

The source said: “The entire place, because of everything about her, and because of what Harry’s previous girlfriends had been through, was bending over backwards to make sure that every option was open.” They said Meghan thanked them, but said she had no wish to carry on acting. Instead she wanted to concentrate on her humanitarian and philanthropic work, and to support Harry as a member of the royal family.That might have been that, except of course it wasn’t. Part of the problem, according to the source, was that everyone in the palace was so genteel and civil; too genteel and civil: “When someone decides not to be civil, they have no idea what to do. They were run over by her, and then run over by Harry. They had no idea what to do.” The duchess issued a detailed statement last night stating that the allegations were a smear campaign and an attack on her character.

#The Times #Meghan Markle #JD opinions #charlatan #grifter

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like-i-need-a-hole-in-my-head · 3 years

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100 good questions to ask your friends at 4:02 am when you can’t sleep (can also function as an asks list)

Are you bothered by your cosmic insignificance? no

Do you mourn for a place or person you’ve never known? yes

Do you really think there is somebody for everybody? no

Do you place any value in gender roles? I don’t place any value in gender.

Do you have to be related to be family? Definitions in advance, please.

Are your platonic relationships just as valuable as romantic or family ones? Me personally? No.

Are you in love? Do you want to be? Yes. Yes.

Do you think you can put love into categories (family, platonic, romantic, etc.) or is it just one general sensation? Categories.

Would you be happy with a life without romance? No

Are you always going to be a little in love with somebody? Yes

Would you change your appearance if you could? No except to be invisible to enhance my already considerable spying powers

Do you have the feeling you’ve lost something you might have had in another life - whether it be a person, a place, a world, a language, etc.? Yes

Do you believe in reincarnation? Yes

Would you want to be reincarnated? It’s a bit late to ask now

Do you think you’re special, or just another person amongst billions? Can you be both? Yes and yes

Do theoretical ethical debates have any value? Is it important people discuss ethical dilemmas, e.g. the trolley problem? Yes and yes, but understand the value of considering your own values and don’t take it too seriously.

Did you have imaginary friends? Do you still have them? No and n/a

Are you religious? Do you think your religion is ‘correct’? No and no

If you aren’t religious, do you wish you were? Why? No and why would I want to be?

Do you want a grand adventure? Another? Depends on if I get free ibuprofen

Do you have somebody, whether it be a friend or stranger, who you think you could have loved if the circumstances were different? No. I love you for what you are, not what you could be.

How long does it take you to fall in love with somebody? Is the sensation of ‘falling in love’ or ‘being in love’ better? How long is a piece of string?

Is love about convenience or something more? Can it be about both? Wha? Love is anything BUT convenient

Do you think you really understand your gender and sexuality? yes

How fluid is your concept of gender and sexuality? I don’t care so I guess that’s fluid?

What’s the most life-changing choice you’ve made so far? To continue living

Are you afraid of growing old? Older? No.

Would you want to live forever? How about for a billion years, a million, a millennium, a century? No.

Do you believe in some form of god/s? Some form? yes.

Are your choices fated or of your own free will? We make our choices in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Do you have a hunch about how you’re going to die? I hope not.

Do you believe in star signs? For entertainment

How old do you have to be to be considered an adult? I was an adult when I was 6

Was your childhood happy? Yes

What are you missing from your life? Discipline

Have you ever met someone who had a very similar personality to your own? Did you get along? No, people like me are too sensible to hang out with people like me

Do opposites attract? Depends on if you’re a person or a magnet

Is your life what you expected it would be five years ago? Holy shit no

Do you know what you want out of life? No

What makes a person ‘good’? Are you a ‘good person’? Actions (vs intentions). I’m pretty good.

What fundamentally matters to you? Whether you leave me alone when I need to be left alone and whether you can tell whether I just want to be alone vs need to be alone.

Is freewill an illusion? Depends on the scale.

Do you create art? How do you define art? Do something that makes someone feel something.

How often do you lie? Is all lying inherently bad? Are you generally truthful? I’m pretty honest but I lie by omission and can get very technical when I need to be. Lying by itself, like any aspect of language, is neither good nor bad.

Do you want to be remembered after your death? What for? No.

Is true world peace ever possible? Sure. We just need a dictator strong enough to subdue everyone. No more fighting. Peace does not mean people won’t suffer.

Do you have to suffer to truly understand the human condition? What is the human condition? How can you really experience it? ffs just be human

Are you free? Will you ever be? Can anyone be truly free? Freedom is overrated and misunderstood.

Do you hold yourself to higher standards than you hold others? I hope so

What do you expect from a friend or partner? Just understand me

What question could you ask to find out the most about a person? Are you willing to complete this questionnaire?

Do you justify all your beliefs or have you just inherited/absorbed some? Inherited but contemplated

Which beliefs do you have that is most likely to be wrong? That any of this matters in any significant way

Can humans really understand the complete nature of the universe, space and time? We don’t know the complete nature of the universe space and time so how can we understand it?

Is a conscious what makes someone a person? A conscience? No.

What do you think about artificial intelligence? I think it’s often conflated with machine learning

Do you thinks humans are obsessed with escapism (books, video games, movies, etc.)? Are you looking for an escape? Do you think that’s a bad thing? Yes. Yes. No.

Are we eventually going to ‘run out’ of new combinations for music, art, language, etc.? Is there a limit to human creativity? No. No.

What do you think the next era of music will be like? No idea and don’t want to predict it.

What do you think the next era of fashion will be like? No idea and don’t want to predict it.

Do we live in tumultuous times, or do they just seem so strange because we’re living in them? These are objectively tumultuous times, IMO. Other times have been more tumultuous.

Would you want to meet a clone of yourself? Would you like them? No and no.

How confident are you, really? Confidence is A+, self esteem is C-

How consistent is your perception of time? Depends on how cold it is

What age should people be allowed to vote? Should children and teenagers be allowed to vote? Vote on what?

How do you feel about the idea ‘an eye for an eye’? It’s lazy justice

What’s the worse thing a person can be? Hopeless

How do you feel about monogamy? I approve

Can you be in love with someone and still fall in love with someone else? Yes

What’s the tragedy of your life? Bias towards inaction

Would your life make a good play? Definitely

Should people be prosecuted for crimes that weren’t considered crimes at the time? Generally no, but technicalities should not impede justice

Would you fight for your country? Do you feel a sense of loyalty to your nation? I do in my own way. Yes but I wonder why sometimes

Do you believe in gender equality in every aspect? Yes, unless equal means the same.

Do we have a moral obligation to care for others? To what extent? Yes. As much as is needed.

Do you crave approval and/or praise? Waaaaaay too much

Is there comedy in all tragedy and tragedy in all comedy? Yes.

Are you ever going to be satisfied? I hope not

When you are sad, do you listen to music that conveys your emotions or music that makes you happy? I live for sad music and fucking wallow in it

Is your music organised by mood or sensation or do you just listen to everything at any time? My music is organised by geography and time and whether I’m on a motorcycle or boat

Would you marry a friend if they needed you to (e.g. for citizenship)? Unlikely

Are you a deep person? I’ve been told so, but <shrug>

Given the chance to live your life on Mars, with no hope of returning to Earth but with the promise of scientific discovery and glory, would you take it? Don’t care about glory, but if the scientific discovery were useful and I were the only one who could do it, yeah.

Are you who people think you are? I can’t read minds.

Do you think you would be happier if you had been born a different gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality or religion? You will kill yourself if you go down rabbit holes like this.

What’s your toxic trait? Are you trying to improve yourself and fix it? I disengage. Nope.

Do you anger easily? Yep.

Are you a jealous person? Yep.

If you lost all your memories, would you have the same personality? No.

Given the chance to reset your life (with none of the knowledge you currently have), would you take it? Probably not

Is hate as strong as love? Who do you hate? Hate is as strong as loyalty. I don’t hate any person, I hate what certain people do.

Do you speak multiple languages? Which do you dream in? What language would you want to learn? Yes. I mostly dream in English but also some of the others. Arabic.

Do you draw meaning from your dreams, or do you disregard them? Consider and then disregard

How would you describe yourself when you love? Do you love forcefully, unconditionally, gently, quietly, desperately? Fiercely, loyally, unconventionally

Is unrequited love real love? Yes unless you think love has to be reciprocated, which is incorrect

Is your perception of yourself similar or the same to how others perceive you? I can’t read minds.

Are you overly analytical? hahahahahahaha “overly” does not come close

Do you ever feel that you are really a terrible person, and only act good out of societal or some other obligation? I think everyone feels this way unless you’re not human

Do you believe in magic? Are you superstitious? Yes and yes

What belief do you have that isn’t logically grounded, but you still firmly believe in? People are inherently good.

source

I hate long posts / I know this isn’t how it’s supposed to be done / I’m on vacation folks / saving you time

#personal

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theredscreech · 4 years

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Grammar Tips That Are Actually Useful #2

So I honestly didn’t expect to do another one of these, but ever since my first GTTAAU post got a whole bunch of hits over the last few days, I decided to do another one about a popular piece of grammar that I notice is often misused.

Writers, gather ‘round as we explore the dreadful and terrible aspect of writing that is the...

Epithet.

Dun, dun, duuuuuuuun!

I first want to preface this by saying that I was notorious for this. I am so sorry to everyone who read my TMNT fics from 2016; I didn’t know better and I apologise profusely!! I went entire pages without naming a character in the narrative and I have no one to blame but my own ignorance, which has now been remedied - Hallelujah!

To explain: An epithet has a few definitions, so let’s take a look at them. (Definitions courtesy of dictionary.com.)

1. Any word or phrase applied to a person or thing to describe an actual or attributed quality: “Richard the Lion-Hearted” is an epithet of Richard I.

2. A characterizing word or phrase firmly associated with a person or thing and often used in place of an actual name, title, or the like, as “man's best friend” for “dog.”

3. A word, phrase, or expression used invectively as a term of abuse or contempt, to express hostility, etc.

In other words, an epithet is an adjective or noun to describe or name someone without using their proper name.

(There’s a ton more under the Keep Reading, so buckle up.)

Epithets are used in a variety of ways to describe a variety of any character’s characteristics (haha). Most common examples for this are:

hair - the blond, the blonde, the black-haired person, etc.

eye-colour - the green-eyed person, the brown-eyed person, etc.

skin-colour - the pale-skinned person, the dark-skinned person, etc. (Side note: NEVER use food to describe skin colour/tone (eg. olive-skinned). It is offensive and wrong, so just don’t. If you have any questions, I’d encourage you to follow @writingwithcolor (which I do). They have excellent commentary for writers who write characters of varying ethnicities, religions, etc. Check out their FAQ before asking anything, though, because they’ve answered a ton of different questions already.)

status - the child, the teen, my boyfriend, his husband, etc.

profession - the engineer, the doctor, the ninja, etc.

species - the dwarf, the human, the dragon, etc.

or any combination - the green-haired teen (I saw this one in a fic from Izuku’s own POV), the orange-masked turtle (this one is mine and also from Mikey’s POV, and I am sooooo sorry.), etc.

There are, of course, dozens more of examples, but these are the most common ones, especially in fanfiction, so let’s leave it at that.

So why do writers use epithets so often?

Honestly, it becomes tedious and repetitive to write out the characters’ names all the time. It looks odd, too, all those ‘Mikeys’ and ‘Izukus’ and ‘Natasha Romanovas’ and what-nots. They’re just prancy-dancing all over your page and it looks. so. off. There’s just something about seeing characters’ names that, for whatever reason, some writers don’t like. And I kid you not, I had to train myself out of this way of thinking.

I had to train myself because as soon as I learned about epithets, I saw that I was using them absolutely everywhere. I would write literal pages without using anyone’s name, and four years later, I look back at those stories I wrote and posted publicly, and I cringe. But it’s the good kind of cringing because it lets me know how far I’ve come in my writing craft, that even though I’ve been writing for years and years, there’s always something new to learn. There’s always something to improve upon.

“Good for you, Red, but why are epithets so bad?”

Well, technically they’re not bad. They’re just used poorly or overused or both (as was my case).

We’ve already talked a bit about over usage (unless you missed the parts where I confessed to writing pages without using names), so let’s talk about poor usage.

Poor usage of epithets is when epithets are used incorrectly.

Here’s an example: Mikey looked at his red-masked brother.

Gah, that physically pained me to write! Okay, so what’s wrong with this sentence? Well, unless we’re writing for Mirage Studios’ comic (1984) where all four turtles of the TMNT wore red masks, then we’ve got a pretty good idea that ‘red-masked brother’ actually means ‘Raphael’.

Okay, great, so we know ‘red-masked brother’ is Raph, so why is this an example of poor epithet usage?

Answer: Because we already know Raph has a red mask. It is set. It is eternal. It’s a part of who he is, just like his skin or his shell. If you are at all familiar with this character, you will know that Raph is the ‘red-masked turtle’.

Here’s the thing epithets do. Epithets estrange characters from each other. This is why they’re most commonly and properly used for characters whom either we as the audience/narrator or the characters themselves do not know.

This is why phrases like ‘the dark-clad figure’ or ‘the blonde cashier’ are so popular - because we do not know who the people are! Sure, we can always go up to the dark-clad figure and introduce ourselves, or we can look at the blonde cashier’s name tag, and that’s sort of the point because we do not know who these people are yet. Epithets are used, more often than not, for unknowns until they are made known.

There are exceptions to this, of course, of course, most commonly of which are status ones: my husband, his son, their niece, etc.

These are fine, but use them wisely and sparingly (tying into the over usage part again).

Here’s a better example: I walked into the kitchen and found my husband already there and making breakfast for all three children.

‘My husband’ and ‘all three children’ are epithets, but they don’t estrange the characters, per se, because they’re letting us know who’s who and their importance to the narrator/character. That being said, you should still use ‘my husband’ sparingly because if you’re ‘my husband’-ing your husband, whose name is Henry, all over kingdom come, it begins to sound...not good. Like, why would you need to remind yourself Henry is your husband all the time? Do you have amnesia? Are you just forgetful? Are you insecure? Maybe he was unfaithful at some point and he’s doing better, but you’re internalising that and reinforcing the fact that he’s yours? Maybe you just don’t like his name? Or don’t know his name?

Hard to say.

The fact of the matter is this: the closer the characters are in terms of their relationship (platonic, romantic, as friends, as siblings, whatever), the less they will use epithets for each other.

For example: I, personally, have never thought of my mother as ‘the brown-haired woman’. She has always been mom or mum or other such derivatives. It never crosses my mind.

Contrarily, when I’m working at the book store and I’ve taken a few things up to the cash desk for a customer, I’ll let the cashier know that the items are for ‘the curly-haired woman with sunglasses’. Because she is a stranger to me.

Consider Disney’s film Lady and the Tramp (1955). I haven’t seen the live action, so I can’t make a comparison, but the 1955 version fits for what I want to talk about here.

Please name Lady’s owners.

If you said, ‘Jim Dear’ and ‘Darling’, you would be absolutely correct! While we can safely assume that ‘Jim Dear’ is actually ‘Jim’ or even ‘James’, we have no idea of Darling’s real name. Some pet names and nicknames are technically epithets if we’re being especially pedantic today (please see Disney’s Tangled’s character Flynn Ryder’s nickname for Rapunzel), but let’s say for the sake of argument that all pet names fall into the category of proper names, particularly since we’re talking about Lady and the Tramp (1955).

If you listen closely, you will notice that not once - not a single time, ever - do any of the characters that know Jim Dear and Darling call them by anything else (except for Jim Dear’s men friends at the baby shower; they all call him ‘Jim’). Even Darling’s friends call her ‘Darling’. Jock and Trusty both call Lady’s owners/masters ‘Jim Dear’ and ‘Darling’. Never ‘Lady’s owners’ or whatever else.

This is a perfect example of using names instead of epithets. It helps immensely that they aren’t main characters - secondary characters, certainly, but not main - but the point remains.

“But, Red, the Tramp never calls Lady by her name!”

And you’re right! But there’s a reason for that: Lady never formally introduced herself. The story begins in December of 1909 (thank you, Wikipedia). So by the time Lady is six months old, we’re well into 1910. Conventions in this era, as far as I know, not that I am an expert, dictate that ladies/women introduce themselves so that men could then address them (or something like that? Someone please correct me if I’m wrong). Since Lady never does that, Tramp is reduced to giving her the pet name ‘Pigeon’ or ‘Pige (Pidge?)’. Also, Lady doesn’t find out Tramp’s name until the dogs at the pound tell her.

Either way, Tramp is forced to use a pet name, but it is not an epithet simply because ‘Pigeon’ isn’t describing Lady’s characteristics.

Now, Tramp on the other hand...is a characteristic, and someone can definitely win the argument of whether this is an epithet or not. Hint: it is because it’s preceded by ‘the’. He is literally introduced as ‘the Tramp’ (Bull, the bulldog, says it first in a scene with him, Peg and the Tramp, and then Toughy drops it at the pound in front of Lady). This is his epithet, his defining characteristic, because he is introduced as it: The Tramp.

But this is not his only characteristic. He’s helpful and compassionate (the entire scene when he fights off three alley dogs chasing Lady and then proceeds to help her get the muzzle off), he’s also playful (shows Lady there’s more to life than “life on a leash”), courageous (he fights a rat), and respectful of Lady’s choices (tries to persuade her to run away with him but pursues the matter no further when she tells him ‘no’, and he also backs off when she’s mad at him).

This is what epithets do. Not only do they estrange the characters, but they also reduce the characters to a base level. Those well-rounded, complex babies you so carefully crafted become one-dimensional and flat in the span of a single phrase. They become ‘black-haired men’ and ‘green-eyed teens’ and ‘red-masked brothers’ and in that moment, that is all they are and when you continue to reinforce that, that is all the readers will see them as. Besides the fact that readers might very well forget their names entirely, especially if it’s an original work where the audience is not as familiar with the characters as they would be with fanfiction.

This is why Lady never addresses Tramp directly in the film. If she’s speaking to him, she’s looking at him so he knows she’s addressing him. It’s a subtle nuance in the film because Lady refuses to reduce Tramp to his epithet (once she learns it) because he isn’t that basic. (Another reason why Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure bugs me because I swear she actually calls him ‘Tramp’ and it feels so wrong for her to address him like that.) But Tramp gives Lady a nickname. See the difference?

So, yes. While epithets are not strictly bad, they are best when used properly and sparingly. Like, yes, please, feel free to remind us that Mikey loves his brothers and that Katsuki calls his friends ‘Spiky-hair’ or whatever. These are descriptive and good and should be used, just be aware of when and how often you use them, not to mention why. If you’re simply using an epithet for the sake of avoiding saying someone’s name, then it’s poor usage.

And holy freaking wow, this thing is ginormous! I’m going to stop here because I don’t think I can write another word about epithets and how important they are.

Thank you for reading! I hope this helps. And a reminder: check out RavenshellRorschach on DeviantArt for comprehensive how-to’s on some of English’s toughest homophones and grammar points.

Cheers, y’all!

~ Red

#writing advice #grammar #gttaau #this might become a series #epithets

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