#god every time i have to use the word blorbo i remember that time on twitter when no one knew what this word means fsghfsd

[katyspersonal]

It doesn't even make any sense to say ppl justify the Do/ll so they can simp for Ge/hr/man because simps here are always okay with their blorbo being a little or much morally depraved. It is Tumblr, what do those edgelords expect?

jhfgfgdsgds Well, yeah

If you really analyze WHAT fictional male characters tend to attract a lot of stans and people thirsting for them, it is almost always unconditional? Like... People do not need to apologize anyone in BLORBOrne to like them. I mean LOOK at the guys BB fandom thirsts for the most - they are not even TRYING to pretend their favs are not what first meets the eye!

So why would that change for like, a single old man? In fact, on tungle dot hell the more unapologetically and obviously twisted the character is - the BETTER, somehow...?

I will be real, when I was digging lore and themes rather than characters interpreting, I was completely content with 'Maria is a badass masculine woman and G3hrman is a creepy old man' interpretation and worked my ideas from that field. I just... had no problem with the character being messed up and still hated OR enjoyed for who he is? It was when I got a glimpse of big misinterpretation going thanks to retranslation document when I grabbed my pretentious magnifying glass and made my own research.

Feels like eternity now, but to confess the truth, I kinda... liked it how it used to be? The type of 'a person I'd hate to deal with in real life but can explore from every angle in fiction'. Just ask @val-of-the-north how hard I simped for him back then *sobs* (Don't actually ask him oh my god sdfhfdhs I am joking) But yeah that's in the past and I don't even NEED it anymore, whatever I was able to obtain from the concept I now got in spades

But yeah, again, I agree - not even ONCE a Tumblr simp needed to deny the reality; there is just... well, when the blorbo is not ACTUALLY that bad, there is no fun in liking him with this 'badness', and Gehrm4n is... well, not that bad. But fictional men lovers here will pick the worst war criminal who is evil just to be sexy and portray HIM and not some 'morally grey character' as the dream husbando, THIS is what Tumblr stands on and WILL stand on forever sdfjhhds

#fandomry rambles #shitposting #ask replies #filtering the name because these memes are too fucking stupid to leave my target audience sdfhfhfhgsd #sorry </3 #i still stand by the remark that if g3hrman was straight up bitch without any 'up to interpretation' controvercy- #-he'd actually have MORE fans #it is just that everyone with at least 1 Insight point just FEELS that something is not right here #blorborne should be new name for a section of fandom that is mostly or entirely devoted to liking bb blorbos tho dfskjhfd #especially 4 sexymen of the apocalypse (m1colash alfr3d v4ltr and brad0r) #god every time i have to use the word blorbo i remember that time on twitter when no one knew what this word means fsghfsd #it was so funny dfshfdhgs #but.... yeah.. to be honest i would not mind g3hrman being creepy old man in the slightest :') #i'd just object that he simps for maria and want to be his little doll MYSELF :(((((( #but yeah as someone who loves m1colash and aldr1ch a lot i am defo not the type to wash blorbo's depravity away #if anything i am all for making character even WORSE! just check some of my takes on mico dshfdh

[majorproblems77]

Another day another LU analysis with me!

Dawn 9 is here and with it the end of the next arc of the LU comic is done!

This update did a lot and is also a full 10 pages long! So there's a bunch to unpack!

As always linked universe belongs to @linkeduniverse and Jojo, I own none of the pictures I'm using and please give the original post some love. It's very well done and I love this comic so much.

You can find the comic here!

Oh, and obviously spoilers for the most recent LU update if you've not looked at it!

Now, checklist. Popcorn, water and time to read half an hour worth of rambling.

Without further ado!

The letters!

So, Twilight, four and Time all appeared to get letters, with Time getting multiple (More on that later)

Twilights reaction to the super sale was my reaction while playing TP (I recently finished it for the first time! :D) when they opend the store in castle town. Every time i couldnt get there to get potions i was low key gutted.

And Four. Four's grandpa is a mood and i hope we get to meet him.

HE

blorbo blorbo blorbo

The master of standing 🧍

Beloved blorbo i love him

Okay im done

(Im not done)

Poor Sky He's so sad about it D:

But... I, as a part of the The team is heading to Skyloft next, team. Believe that Sun has done this on purpose. (Or that the Skyloftians dont have the mail system for him to retrieve anything) but i like to think its the first one.

Hmmm.... Time got multiple letters. (That takes care of the letter discrepancy)

Twi asking about the ranch, Time looking to one of the letters. This tells me one of two things.

The letter he's looking to could be from Malon, and he's genuenly not concerned.

or The letter he's looking at isnt from malon. Infact, by the way he's looking at it i think its from his Zelda. Possibly a report about black bloods in his time period. (As last time we see them in Time's era. They dont actually fight anything)

Twilight being cheeky and Time's dad face are giving me life.

But... as we know, Time is Twilights direct decendant only by a few generations at most. With the infomation we have from Twilight princess with Shade. And from jojo with Time and Twilight. I'm seeing this conversation as more of a father and son conversation over brothers.

And the rest of this conversation follows this same pattern. Twilight is very much being scolded. He's biting back with what he see's as Time's own words. (not that time know's as such)

Twilight looks genuenly shocked to hear this.

From the hero's shade (Time) in twilight princess.

"You may be destined to become the hero of legend...but your current power would disgrace the proud green of the hero's tunic you wear. "

I am screaming

And now im screaming more. Twilight nooooooooooooo

The we care about Twilight's well being gang. Spoiling us with the full body shots againnnnnnn.

Give me more of these three i love them all together.

And I'm convinced that theres going to be something bad happens to time directly after the end of the LU timeline.

Time is missing an eye. So we know that Shade and Time are closer together than the hero of time (In game). SO.... If time dosent Die on the adventure with the chain. I'm almost convinced he does almost right after he returns back to his time.

The armour is almost identical. He has most of the scaring which lines up....

If the helmet turns up, then i think Time dies during this adventure. It's the only thing i can see as missing.

Twilight.... Now i think Twilight thinks that the gods are giving him an opportunity to save the hero of time from dying to become the heros shade. but thats the funky thing about timetravel.

(Depending on how Jojo and LU time travels works.)

I believe that the timetravel in LU solidifies the adventures of the other links. And that nothign that occours in this adventure impacts their adventures. Even if something was changed it wouldnt change the past.

IE - Twilight breaking his shadow crystal wouldnt mean that wild didnt remember having the wolf on his adventure - as its already happened.

(I hope that makes sense. - time travel is confusing i see it as an alternative timeline type thing)

Moving on!

Wild is best brother 101

Also twilight getting flustered about a girl oh bless this man i low key love him okay

Her!

Also

Smiley man

Epona is a wonderful girl and i love her so much okay

Also Warriors!

HE LOOKS SO HAPPY AGAIN

Man got his emotional support scarf and is no longer stressed (Atleast not visably)

HE!

BELOVED AGAIN HE IS SO HAPPY I AM NORMAL ABOUT THIS MAN

okay

Please understand how much i am cackling at the shenanigans of these three.

Wind rolling around because it is clearly faster mode of travel

Go zoomies wind go zoomies!

Wind rolled down the stairs you cant convince me otherwise. Look at his little superhero pose as hes moving around the corner.

Older brother alert, dont ruin the kids fun warriors they are just getting excited about being on the road again.

Also Warriors, This is normal link behaviour. Just ask Time. He would eailsy tell you that he rolled around hyrule field.

I LOVE HIS LITTLE FACE OKAY

MY BELOVED BLORBO 🧍

(if i run out of pictures i swear to hylia)

There's so much brotherly energy in these panels i love them all so much okay.

Also Sky offering to Pay Time back for the Inn Fee this is why i love the wonderful blorbo okay

Guys im sorry, he's their dad. You cant change my mind.

Thats a dad walk, with a dad sentence.

'Okay guys i need to make sure you are not gonna get killed please have swords.'

The blacksmithing gang getting the love they deserve.

Sky leading the charge! (I know its cause he knows the way and stuff But...)

It also makes a lot of sense. If Sky is the slowest of the group(Again not confirmed but we have had jokes about his stamina), it makes sense to put him at the front to maintain pace of the group. Stops people going too fast and prevents people from being left behind.

Which i might add has already happened. (Warriors and Hyrule im looking at you.)

We just need to read the boss partterns for a bit so we can then decide how to fight it. You know, like we did when we were in our adventures and had to figure out boss mechanics.

Important that hyrule is saying this as his game is arguably one of the hardest. He probably spent a long time on each boss learning attack patterns.

Oh this arc was fun! So much fun i love it so much okay

Thank you so much again for hanging out with me while i write these. I love making them and i really appreciate all the support on them. (If you could share it around i'd really appreciate it :) )

Have a wonderful day! :D

#linked universe #linkeduniverse #lu update time #comic analysis with major #lu update spoilers #corner of lu updates #lu spoilers #dawn 9 #ramble corner with major #lu sky #lu four #lu twilight #lu time #lu legend #lu chain #lu hyrule #lu warriors #lu wind #lu wild #i love making these sm #major once again pusher her Sky blorbo propoganda #you are all welcome #:) #4 hour deep dive once again

[chronic-ghost]

Chapter 9 of Recovery Road

chapter rating: E (18+)

pairing: dieter bravo x f!reader

word count: 11845

chapter summary: if you thought you knew the full story of natalie lorraine, you were myth-taken

chapter warnings/tags: non-consensual touching, implied sexual assault, emotionally abusive parents, drug/alcohol use, underaged drug/alcohol use, women existing in the male gaze, putting too much of myself into characters as per yooshg

a/n: Header comes from the “Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses” by John William Waterhouse. Song for this chapter is Gold Dust Woman by Fleetwood Mac – watch me make a fic playlist after the fact lmao. Bear with me while I wax embarrassingly poetic about my favorite oc blorbo. Remember this does end well!!!

▲ Series Masterlist | Previous | Next (last chapter!)

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There are many different types of myth but, essentially, they can be grouped into three: etiological myths, historical myths, psychological myths. Etiological myths can offer explanations for why the world is the way it is. Historical myths retell an event from the past but elevate it with greater meaning than the actual event (if it even happened). [Lastly] psychological myths present one with a journey from the known to the unknown which, according to both Jung and Campbell, represents a psychological need to balance the external world with one's internal consciousness of it. – Mythology, Joshua Mark

“in front of my mother and my sisters, 

i pretend love is cheap and vulgar.

 i act like it’s a sin– 

i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. 

but at night i dream of a love so heavy 

it makes my spine throb–

i dream up a lover who makes love like he is 

separating salt from water.”

— Salma Deera, “salt” 

Natalie Lorraine is a myth.

And like in all the great myths, birth is a painful, violent emergence. 

Slowly, labored across years and many heartbeats, what remains is the inevitable conclusion of being fucked over, of being lazy and careless, of innocence taken too soon. Careless children grow up to be careless mothers, careless fathers. 

The titans of the world leave to make their mark on history and, in doing so, mark their children in a way more powerful, more regretful than any legend could possibly make them out to be. 

Medea is brutalized in legends and in verse for the most heinous a mother can commit.

Odysseys forgets what being a father means.

Oedipus Rex curses his children with an unforgivable sin by way of their mother, their grandmother, and that staggering failure is felt through to Antigone, a generation removed. Antigone dies. Haemon and Eurydice die too. Pain and grief are family heirlooms passed through pale fingers at the stroke of midnight. 

But despite all that. Before all that. 

Myths begin when the heroes are forced to make a choice, choose a direction in the way their lives end up. It might not always be obvious, and the gods might have things in store for them. But there is a choice and the fallen hero always chooses.

But they were all children once. You have to remember that. You have to believe that.

(Aetiologic)

I hate these socks, you think to yourself, they’re itchy and they hurt my toes. Every time you swing your legs over the edge of that leather couch, your legs too short to touch the ground, the toe of your shoe pinches you. You really, really want to take off your shoes, but Mom said you had to keep them on all day, especially in the office. In his office. You think your dress looks like one of your baby dolls and you don’t like it.

So you stop kicking, even though the sound of your heel against the leather made a funny noise. You can move too, and make the leather squeak, and that is pretty fun too. Grinning, you bounce like you aren’t supposed to on your bed back home, the cushions chirping – it sounds like they’re farting – you giggle, rocking back on your hands from left to right, squealing along with the leather as you made it –

“Enough!”

You freeze, tears immediately welling in your eyes, fear almost painful in your chest. 

But he’s not talking to you. Your father is still in his office, with the door barely shut, and he’s talking to someone on the phone. Yelling, actually. He’s been in there since the little hand was on the fifteen and now it’s on the thirty. He told you to wait there while he called your mom. You tried to sit still, but it was boring and all the toys were back in the other room. 

He never yelled at you, your dad, but he did yell at your mom. 

When you talked to the other kids in your preschool class, their mommies and daddies lived in the same house together, slept in the same bed, talked nicely to each other. Yours didn’t. 

“Well, what am I supposed to do with her, LeAnne? I told you I have a meeting at four today and she could be here for three hours. I told you! I can’t have her here! You need to come pick up your daughter!”

Your foot kicks up and down. You didn’t like it when they talked about you like you weren’t there. 

“Hey there.” A woman with blonde hair and big eyes sits down next to you. She was always around your dad, and always handled his papers and briefcase and sometimes his coffee. She is younger than your mom but way older than you are. You think she’s really, really pretty. None of her dresses look like baby doll dresses. “I’m sorry your dad is taking so long. Do you want something to eat, or drink?”

You shake your head. Your mom said not to talk to strangers, so you didn’t open your mouth. 

“Are you bored? Do you wanna watch some TV?”

TVs were everywhere in your dad’s office building. Down near the elevators, and then more when you got out. It always seemed like people were watching a tv and the actors on the tv. Actors were people whose job it was to be on the tv or in the movies, your dad told you. He told you he knew a lot of famous actors, but when you told the kids in your class about it, they said they didn’t know any of those people. 

“You’re just making things up!”

“You’re a liar!”

You really wanted your dad to introduce you to an actor, just to prove them wrong. You thought it was pretty cool how everyone was always watching them. Like they couldn’t look away. 

You nod at the pretty lady. She smiles and picks up the skinny black tv remote on the table in front of the couch. 

The tv in the corner of the room pops on. The size of it doesn’t take up the wall like some of the tvs in the office do, but it’s still bigger than the one you have at home. 

The nice lady taps the button a few times, the channels changing, until she comes to the kids channel. It’s a little old for you – all of the shows at preschool are cartoons and this one has real people in it – but you want this woman to like you. 

“Do you like this one? Friends in the Family? It’s so funny!” 

She turns and leans back against the couch with you. You hear people laughing on the screen, even though you don’t see anyone. There’s a young girl, older than you but younger than this nice lady, and she has a boy with her on her parents’ couch. The boy leans in and kisses her cheek and the invisible people go ‘oooooh’. 

“Ooooh!” You mimic and the nice woman laughs, grinning at you. Something warm and tight goes up your chest, and you pinch your lip with your teeth, toes curling in your stupid shoes. You liked making her laugh.

On the screen, a little girl – maybe the other girl’s sister – pushes through the kitchen door. You gasp in surprise. She looks like she could be in your preschool class. She’s all mad and she crosses her arms, pouting.

“Someone’s gonna get it!” 

The invisible people laugh and the nice lady giggles so hard she leans forward and you’re giggling too, even though you don’t quite get it. That warm feeling reminds you of when you drink soda too fast, but it’s good. 

You frown too, put your hands on your hips, parroting the little girl on tv, “someone’s gonna get it!”

Her pretty mouth opens in surprise, her eyes sparkling.

“Oh my God, that was so good! You sound just like her!” You giggle, your face hot. “Have you ever asked your dad about acting?”

You shake your head. You, an actor? On tv? No way!

“Well, you should! You could be really good!”

You don’t know what to say, you want to keep making the same faces that little girl is, when your dad’s door opens. The young woman next to you lurches forward and shuts off the tv. He comes out and you can’t tell if he’s angry or upset or if that’s just how he looks. You’re not around him enough to know. But he stands in front of you, thinking something.

“Judy, would you get us two juice boxes from the fridge downstairs?”

“Of course, Mr. Milken.”

The young woman leaves and you’re a little afraid. You don’t want him to yell at you for watching that show for older kids. You twist your little fingers. 

“That was your mom on the phone. She’s going to be a little late.” 

You nod. “Okay.” 

“Did you have fun today at my office? Did you like meeting all my friends?”

You nod, this time quicker. “Yes! I would like to meet an actor one day!”

At that, he smiles and you relax. People who are angry don’t smile. 

“While we wait for your mom, do you wanna play paper football?”

“What’s that?”

“C’mon. I’ll show you.”

So the myth begins. All it takes is a single idea. A single want. A single desire. An innately human desire. We build myths and we tell stories and we fill them with the things we want to hear.

You’re turning fourteen next month. It’s circled on your calendar in your bedroom. It’s not like it’s that big of a deal, but at least now you could start the emancipation process. If you wanted to. You laid awake at night, thinking about what you’d call yourself if you ever changed your name. Something vaguely French-sounding. European for sure. But they were just fantasies to get you through the day. 

It’s early in the morning. You haven’t heard anything from Mom’s room in a while so you figure it’s just the two of you in the house again. You totter out of your room, blinking sleep from your eyes – it was a very late night on set last night and probably would be again, given how the production of this made-for-tv movie was going and especially with the extra homework you’ve been doing to make up for the time off you’ve taken – as you wander across the small, sun-streaked living room, and around the corner to the kitchen. You hear something from the fridge and just as you are about to ask your mom if she’s cooking (which is never a good idea), a man stands up. He’s older than you but younger than your mom and he has the last piece of your sourdough bread in his mouth. He smirks and you unconsciously tug down the hem of your sleep shorts.

This has been happening more and more lately. The way men, older men, look at you, it’s different now. Has been for a while, but now there’s more of them, their gazes sit on your bare skin longer, the light in their eyes changing, the lines around their mouths tightening. You don’t really know what it is they want, but it’s baffling to you that they think looking at you like that will convince you to give anything to them. 

It's the way your mom’s new boyfriend is looking at you. Your cheeks heat up without your consent and you hate it. 

He’s hungry and he’s scrounging around in the fridge and now he’s looking at you. Still hungry.

“Hey, you must be LeAnne’s daughter,” he says, taking the bread slice out of his mouth and propping his hairy arm on the top of the refrigerator door, his gaze sweeping you from head to toe as if deciding whether or not to make a sandwich out of you. Who likes this kind of shit? Oh, that’s right. Your mom. 

You narrow your eyes at him. “Yeah. That’s me. Is she here?”

His eyes follow the backs of your thighs as you walk over to the coffee pot and take out week-old coffee grounds. They’ve turned blue, started to mold, but you dump them out into the trash with three good smacks.

“Uh, she’s still in bed. She said you could get to school on your own.” 

Behind you, the fridge door slams shut and you curl your toes, begging yourself not to flinch. There’s something inside of you demanding you to not show weakness. Steadying your own hand, you dig into the jar holding the coffee grounds. It’s halfway empty, you make a note to pick up some later, the thought pressed up against the swell of panic that’s growing at the edge of your awareness. 

“I’m Alan.” He leans up against the counter out of the corner of your eye. “I know we just met, but I could take you, to school . . . if you want.” 

His thick middle has nothing to do with age, only poor health. Evident further by his off-yellow teeth and bad breath. 

“I’m o-okay. Thank you.” 

There’s three minutes left on the coffee timer. His gaze is like open palms on your skin. You hate it. He sidles up closer and your nails dig half-moon crescents into your skin. The lovely smell of coffee brewing is overwhelmed by his cheap cologne. He’s big. Bigger than you. Bigger than any of the boys in your class, or any of the men on set. You’ve never really noticed the men on set, they’ve never been this close before, but you’re sure he’s bigger than all of them.

You’ve never felt quite so small. 

“You were in that movie, right? ‘Those ain’t your average space-invaders’, that was you right?” You nod, the back of your throat drying out. He chuckles. “You were good. Really good. You were so pretty.” 

“I was ten.” 

He shrugs. “Yeah. Ten outta ten.”

Your stomach clenches and it’s like he can tell. Alan reaches the two inches across the linoleum and gently strokes your forearm. A light, smelly panic sweat breaks out over your forehead, under your armpits. 

You want him away from you, want him gone, to run back to your room, but where would that get you? 

Roll over, play dead, show your under belly. You don’t know what else to do to make him go away.

“Well, if you see my mom,” you ease around him, your forearm sliding from his grasp just as his fingers tighten, making sure you don’t seem offended, “tell her I’ve got a ride to–,”

“Hey, wait, where ya going?” 

You all but run back to your room, the coffee pot beeping behind you. You throw open your bedroom door and leap inside, locking it behind you. You don’t realize you’re panting until you feel light-headed, dizzy – you feel sticky all of a sudden and rush into your bathroom. Steam pours from the scalding hot water, the red handle all the way to the right, as you stand over it, watching it rush down the drain. With your lips pinched between your teeth, you run your hands under it and muffle a scream. It hurts. It burns but it’s like his touch is evaporating off your skin and there’s relief in that. It’s the first time you realize that the pain you give yourself is different from the pain that they give you. 

Not all of them are like that. 

Some of them are actually kind of okay. 

You’re fifteen and dressed as a pumpkin for the Halloween party hosted by the studio, the suit baggy and oversized, and for once, your mom’s friends don’t stare at you. No one really has all night and it’s nice. You feel like you can ease into the wall and no one would notice. There’s a long black couch on the other side of a plant with glowing lights in the shape of ghosts wrapped around its trunk. You stepside around a few directors, one of your other actors, and head straight for the couch. 

You don’t realize Jim, your mom’s current boyfriend is already there until you sit down and groan. He laughs from the opposite end and you jump. 

He’s more her age, thankfully, and doesn’t really seem to notice if you’re at home or not. In fact, you can’t really remember another conversation with him that lasted longer than a few minutes.

“You liking the party?” He asks.

You shrug – never show your actual feelings. “It’s kinda late. I’ve got classes on Monday, so I’m hoping to make it an early night.”

He nods, slowly, distracted. There’s something about his eyes that isn’t right. Not in the way that he looks at you, but at everything, like he’s trying to look through a dense fog.

Your mother is nowhere to be found, which isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for this sort of thing. She’d either show up and be the life of the party or show up so trashed she had to be escorted out of the building. 

But it is odd for her to just leave one of her toys lying around. 

“Do you know where my mom is?” You ask Jim and he shakes his head, as though it takes a considerable amount of effort just to hold himself upright. There’s definitely something wrong with him.

And then you see the smoke coming from his fingers and you finally realize that skunky smell is coming from him. 

He sees your gaze fall. “You want a hit?” He asks, either not remembering your question or not wanting to answer.

You’d never tried it before, not really having time between shooting schedules and school and your mom wanting to take you out to meet new casting directors and writers. You sit there, staring and realize Jim is probably one of the only consistent people you see in your life, everyone else a revolving door of names and faces and elbows to rub. A tiredness breaks over you like the push of a wave and you sway, wanting nothing more than to be at home under the covers. You wish you’d brought your walkman, so you could have hid out on the soundstage until the party was over.

You’d grown skinny over the past year. Rewarded and praised for it by producers and studio execs, you saw that people listened to you more, looked you in the eye when you were beautiful, made more beautiful by the thinness of your cheeks, your narrow thighs. Your mother was convinced you were taking pills, but couldn’t find anything in the house. And yet, the real reason behind it all was sometimes you were just too tired to eat. Too tired to move. Happy to curl up wherever you found yourself and sleep until the next person needed something from you.

But this is what you wanted, after all. You asked for a life of movies and revolving doors and fake people and men staring at your ass. You are reminded of this all the time. 

You nod at Jim, curiosity getting the better of you and wondering if other girls did this sort of thing in basements or with their friends or boyfriends. You portray a teenage girl on television, but sometimes you don’t feel like one at all. 

He reaches out to you and you take it. You’d smoke a cigarette once, with a few of the kids from that one time you guest-starred on that sitcom, so you think this’ll be the same.

“What’s it going to feel like?” You ask, the white paper inches from your lips. Jim looked at you and his eyes sort of crinkled. 

“It’s good. Real good. Like there’s a cloud between you and the rest of the world.”

That did sound nice.

You put your lips and inhale – it burns in a way you weren’t expecting – and you cough. Jim laughs in a way that makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong, that you’re silly.

“You’ll get it,” he says, “you’ll get it.”

You try again and remember that he held his breath before exhaling. You do the same, but the scratch makes your eyes water, your chest tighten, but you hold on, until you feel smoke cauterizing the back of your throat close and you cough again, less this time.

Jim laughs again and takes back the skunky cigarette. “Hey, look at that, your first joint and you handled it like a champ.” 

He smokes more, losing interest in you, so he turns and watches the party. Your heart beats roughly in your chest, but that might be more of the nerves than anything else. You fidget on the couch, waiting for something to happen, but it never does.

“I think I need another h-hit. I don’t feel anything.”

Jim frowns at you, shaking his head. “Hell no. You took two giant puffs on your first go. I’m not babysitting you when you’re puking in the toilet with the spins.”

“The spins?”

“When you drink while you’re high. Can be a real bad mix.” 

You blush, wondering if he saw you take sips from the flask in your purse or he just assumes you’re always drinking because you’re LeAnne’s daughter. 

“Just sit back, relax, you’ll feel it. In a bit.”

So you try his approach, nonchalantly watching people dressed in devil costumes, in white vampire fangs and cloaks, little skimpy bunny outfits, as the party rages on. You watch, and slowly, the whole thing feels distant. Like you’re in the far back of a theater and everything in front of you is some sort of stage.

You find you like it in the back row, in the quiet and the darkness. It’s warm, sort of like you’re dizzy but you sway with the movement and you don’t get sick. You find that you are rolling your head back and forth and you giggle.

Jim smirks at you, that joint almost gone. “Yeah, there it is.”

You’d never been high like this before. Buzzed a little bit from the beer in your flask, but this was new. This was . . .

“It’s nice,” you smile widely to the ceiling. “Does it always feel this way?”

“Like I said, you can mix with alcohol and get really fucked up.” Jim shrugs. “And different strains do different things. This is gonna relax your brain, but there’s others that’ll give you a body high.”

Body, this thing you’re in that doesn’t feel like it belongs to you.

“But a mental high from weed and a mental high from glue are like two totally different things.”

Your bones feel like they weigh a thousand pounds and you could just melt into the leather. But you turn your head, dropping it against the back of the couch.

“You can get high from glue?”

“You can get high from just about anything.”

“Oh.”

The needle-like feeling that pricks your heart every time you come to one of these parties is gone. The sloshy oozy feeling in your stomach when you go into public with your mother is gone. There is nothing left inside of you except weight and heat and air that comes in through your nose and out through your mouth. 

You giggle again. What if this is how a pumpkin feels all the time?

“Will it always feel like this?”

He doesn’t understand your question, doesn’t care enough to think about it, so he answers the only way he can. “Nah, should only last for a few hours. Then you’re good. No hangover, which is a plus.” 

“But I always want it to feel this way.”

He grins again and pulls out a small plastic baggy with some fuzzy brussel-sprout-looking vegetable inside. 

“Got twenty bucks on you?” 

You’re sixteen and you’ve just started in your first major motion picture. Offers are rolling in, you no longer have to seek them out. The brand new telephone for your brand new house is constantly ringing. You have to unplug it to sleep at night. But that usually makes your mother yell at you. 

She wants to answer every call that comes through. As if this house was hers.

You sit cross-legged on your bed, grinding up the weed you bought off a sound-stage guy earlier today in your silver grinder, your headphones in to drown out the noises coming from the other side of the house as well as the ones in your head.

This boyfriend was not so nice and in a drunken stupor grabbed your ass in front of LeAnne. She raged and yelled and blamed you. 

Get out, she told you. Leave. Get out. We don’t want you here. Leave. 

This is my house, you old bitch.

Licking the paper gently, you finish rolling the joint and press pause on your walkman. Stevie Nicks pauses in her crooning, and is it over now, do you know how? pick up the pieces and go home, and you remind yourself to find a purply drape at the next flee market. Reaching to the end of the bed, you plug in your headphones to the hot pink tv and flip to the right station.

Henry had sent in a new tv for your birthday, and you had that promptly thrown out. You bought this with your first check from residuals. 

It’s almost eleven. It’s about to start. 

You light the joint, inhaling smoothly, as the credits for Twenty-Three and Fun start up. 

The joint quivers at the end of your knee, your toes curling. It wasn’t produced by your father’s company, but it was all anyone talked about at school, in the gossip mags. You thought about buying Tiger Beat just for the pictures . . . of one specific cast member.

You bite your nail as the theme song plays and the credits roll through all the gorgeous, young actors smiling as they go about their perfectly average lives in the big city. 

And then his name shows up and you inhale smoke quickly to stifle the thing expanding in your chest.

Dieter Bravo. 

His smooth soft hair, dark sweet eyes. God, he is so cute. 

Your hand clenches the sheets. You’ve never had a boyfriend, only been kissed once while at dance in between shooting schedules that you’d begged your mom to let you attend. It was bad, it tasted bad, his lips were rubbery and wet, and you didn’t feel anything. 

Not like when you imagine what it would be like to be kissed by him.

Twenty-Three and Fun is out of your demographic, but maybe you could convince someone to let you try out for the part of someone’s little sister who comes in for the weekend. You’d just love the chance to meet him. He makes you feel like nothing you’ve ever felt before, nothing you know what to do with, but you tingle all over with it.

You’re at the tail end of sixteen when the spiral starts. 

When you don’t know where to put this loneliness that’s been dragging you down. 

Men stare at you but not in the way you want. Girls your own age won’t look at you, and women glare at you while their husbands stare. And boys, God, boys your own age –

You wipe the tears from your eyes, the wind snarling through your hair, the heat of the summer night sinking into your skin like wet clay. You know you’re driving too fast, but you don’t care.

Every day you go to work and put on someone else’s skin. Their clothes. Their face. For a while, it’s been freeing, to pretend to have normal problems, a normal family, a normal life. Because you knew even if you had never chosen to go into your father’s industry – which was now just as much yours – you knew your life wasn’t ever going to be normal. Not in the way it mattered anyway. 

But there is something there when you step in front of a camera. A feeling that doesn’t come from a dark place, from feelings of abandonment and loneliness – it comes from a place inside of you that still feels like you own, still is yours to hold and keep safe, despite everyone taking things from you without asking. Instead of taking, it gives. It builds. It grows, despite the salted earth of your soul. 

You like becoming someone else for a while, thinking as they do. Dancing, laughing, eating, playing as someone other than yourself. You like to create. You crave it. You create life for someone else that doesn’t exist and you love it. It feels right, imagining something if not for you, for someone else. Someone who looks like you but isn’t you. It feels good to dream. 

But lately. 

Lately, this job is no longer an act of creation. It’s fake smiles and ad campaigns and commercials and it feels rotten. Hollow. Like you’re under the eyes of a thousand leering men instead of just one. It feels cheap. You feel cheap, for wanting it to be something more. This desire for life itself dies in your hands, choked out, aborted before it had the chance to breathe.

Your body, yourself, is being twisted, molded into something you don’t want it to become and the only time, the only time you feel as though you have even some slight control is when you have none at all. When you detach from your corporeal form, so high or drunk you can’t feel your fingers. 

It began with the beer your mom’s boyfriends left in the fridge, then the pills in her medicine cabinet. Then the mini bottles of Crown Royal and Jim Beam in the mini-fridges at your dad’s office. No one ever seemed to care when you swiped the whole row into your backpack. Maybe others had done the exact same thing. 

You didn’t know how or why these things made you feel better but they did. You didn’t care about the tears on your face, the hot flood of anger beating in your chest, and you didn’t care about the speed limit, not even when you saw the flashing red and blue lights.

But you started to care when they put you in lock up and then you definitely did when your father’s lawyer bailed you out. 

You went home and threw up for six hours. No one came to check on you, no one came to find you when you yanked the phone cord out of the wall. You clutched the porcelain basin of the toilet for what felt like days. Years. You aged decades that night.

When you woke up, you showered, ate, and called back your father’s lawyer.

You had decided on a name, a new name to put on the emancipation papers. 

You told the lawyer very clearly and seriously over the phone: “I want my name to be Natalie Lorraine.”

It was the emancipation that finally did it. The final chop from the parental vine. The day she kicked you out, you came home from school, in between shoots for a new film with Gerard Butler and in talks for something with Helen Miram, and you find your mother curled up on the kitchen table. At first, you legitimately thought she was dead; the top half of her body was crumpled against the wood, her feet tangled with the rungs of the chair. She faced away from you, her right hand curled around an empty crystal tumbler and a three-fourths empty bottle of Belvedere inches from her fingertips. 

You stare, dumb-founded, your heart so slow you could hear it pound like a drum in your ears. And then she twitches. 

And then she wails.

“How could you? How could you do this to me? I’m your mother. You owe me. You owe me you owe me you owe me.”

She heaves boneless to the floor, the glass and bottle slipping out of her hand and shattering like droplets of rain. You can’t move, transfixed, as your mother, hands split open, knees carving bloody trails across the tile, drags herself towards your feet, like a freshly dug-up corpse. 

She’s muttering, spitting, snarling – she’s a starved, beaten beast, ready to make its last stand. 

You were a mistake

You ruined me

You ruined your father for me

Her sentences are blurred, notched together, overlapping, and intertwining. The only thing you remember is the vitriol and hatred more palpable than her own breath. 

Someone older, someone more separated from their pink, flushed girlhood would have the callouses to ease the burn, dull the cut. But at sixteen, you didn’t. At sixteen, with a burgeoning substance abuse problem and at the mercy of the first of many instances where adulthood begins to rob you of the small pleasures of life, you watch your mother crumble and it scares you.

In that moment you want nothing more than to be taken care of, in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s asking too much but it clearly is. You want to be safe in a way that is primal, the animal fear of the dark and unknown. You’ve seen your mother drunk before but not this drunk, never heard the sounds she’s making — the wailing, the disappointment, the sorrow and rage. It scares you so badly you want to cry.

The gap between girlhood and womanhood is closed when you understand your mother is only human. Nothing less. And nothing more. 

She’s still muttering hateful, horrible things as you take her to her feet and ease her onto the couch. 

She’s silent when you throw a blanket over her. 

She’s pale, shaking, green. 

Go away. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you around me. Leave me alone.

Leave me.

Leave me.

Leave me. 

Go away. 

You leave her, not knowing if it's serious enough to call 911, if you can actually die from drinking too much, but that fear, that vice-grip around your chest, it’s squeezing your lungs so tightly, tears leak out of the corner of your eyes. But then it sinks. Sinks into your bones, your blood, your muscles. Watching your mother folded up like a broken doll, you experience fear like you’ve never felt before. 

Blink and you’re in your room.

Blink and you’re under your bed, curled up, knees to your chin, and you’re crying. You can’t stop crying. It’s the only thing that seems to appease the fear, the sense that nothing is real and everything is going to turn out badly and it makes your stomach twist. You gag on your own spit and you shake and you tremble and you experience your first panic attack without anyone to tell you what’s going on. How to survive something like that. You grow up thinking this is how everyone lives and you’re just too pathetic to take it. You let that shame and embarrassment fester and grow because it has no way of stopping. 

Your father is also served with the papers. 

Two weeks later, the production for your upcoming movie was suddenly put on hold. The role with Helen Miriam went to someone else.

He never helped you get ahead in the industry, but he absolutely blocked you from it. He never called you again.

Someone, someone else, might have been hurt by the fact that your father cut you off without so much as a goodbye. But it’s not like you could miss what you never had.

You take the hint and enroll in UC Santa Barbara under your new name.

The myth of your maidenhood ended in much of the same way it began: at the behest of someone else and exiled as an afterthought.

You tried the whole sleep-around-to-fill-a-need thing for the freshmen year of college. It didn’t take. You liked sex but you liked the chase more. You liked the hunt, the thrill, the unconscious desire to touch, when the desire to do something first emerges in their heads. You like to watch the basic urge emerge in their darkened eyes before the other shoe drops. Drops and splatters coherent and rational thought like a bug on a windshield. 

You liked sex, even if more often you had to get yourself off while your partner had fallen asleep, their needs met. But you liked being wanted more. The drugs helped bridge the gap and given that you had no idea how to make friends because you'd never had one your own age before, the puddles of bodies that dripped onto couches and floors at parties seemed to be as good a social circle as any. They all started to recognize you at parties, in lecture halls, at bars. They nodded, you nodded back, and you sat down. 

No longer alone.

But not entirely wanted either. 

It was enough though. 

By your third year, you were known more for your party provisions (with your old contacts from the industry) than your ex-boyfriends. 

You meet Heidi Morgan through one of your production management professors. 

You’d gone in to speak with your professor, a man notorious for sleeping with his students, and believed you to be next in line (men were so much better at doing what you asked when they thought you’d sleep with them), so you were hoping that you could convince him that it was actually your lab partner who stole the paper from you, not the other way around, when you see him with someone else. 

Blonde, small, feisty. 

Heidi Morgan takes one look at the grotesque ogling in his eyes and promptly introduces herself. 

In her own fire and take-no-shit attitude, you find kindred spirits. 

She later asks you out for drinks, you think it’s been too long since you went down on a girl, and you completely misread the situation. 

She clears things up and then asks you to read for a part. The whiplash makes your head spin, but given that she’s not calling you a giant slut, it’s probably good news.

She knows who you are. Suspected because you looked familiar and because she has friends in some truly weird places, she confirms her suspicions by the end of the day. So she gives you a call, you show up, flirt too much, and maybe end up with a job. 

She gives you the script. It’s good.

Really good.

Why me? You ask her. You graduate in two weeks. You’re turning twenty-two in a few days. There’s nothing you’ve done in recent years to make her have this kind of faith in you. All digital memories of you reflect a knobby-kneed, round-cheeked little girl then that same little girl with tits and a smirk well beyond her years. 

She didn’t think she might find her lead in a dingy auditorium, she says, but crazier things have happened. It’s not a guarantee, or a promise, just an offer. Try out, see what happens. 

Crazier things have happened.

The rest is less myth and more old history.

(Historic)

The day you meet him is not unlike any other. Except in the little things. Your bra strap breaks when you go to put it on. Your belt loop gets caught in a door handle and nearly shucks your pants to the floor. You somehow get lost on the way to the studio even though you have your phone mapping the route. It takes you around and around and around until you get out and ask a very confused gas station attendant where the fuck the sound stage is. 

It’s not momentous. Annoying, perhaps, so annoying that all these little things pester your brain like flies gorging on rotten fruit. You’re distracted, one eye always glancing over your shoulder. Trouble, trouble, trouble, your problems seem to whisper, you’re in trouble.

A PA comes to find you, saying Heidi specifically asked for your presence but she’s gone missing. He thinks he knows where to find her, if you’d come with him. You eye him up from the black leather couch you’re draped across, irritated at the day and at him for his shameless staring. You nod, and immediately he starts running his mouth about his own Hollywood dreams. He’s a writer, you know, maybe you’ve heard of some of his smaller indie work, it’s not very much, but folks who know say it's good so maybe he’ll be able to sell it if –

The door to the back of the lot opens and it’s like god snapped his fingers in your ear. It’s not momentous, or earth-shattering, but holy shit does it fuck you up.

He’s broad. Tall. Forearms, thick and veiny, stocky thumbs and tense fingers. His hair is just on the edge of being long, but combed back in some attempt to tame it, to fold it into submission. His right earlobe is puckered, pierced, but no earring. His beard and mustache are trimmed, clean shaven elsewhere. Despite how he’s built out adult male muscle from his days on Twenty-Three and Fun, he still has those boyish eyes, a dimple that would drive anyone up a wall, and eyelashes you’d pay a thousand dollars for. You knew this was coming but it still feels like a kick in the chest. 

That kick burns when you realize something.

He’s fucking pissed. He’s beautiful, carved from your very dreams of what the most gorgeous man on earth would look like, but he’s fucking pissed.

Surprisingly, at you. 

Well, that’s disappointing. 

He comes at you with his claws drawn and you’ve never, ever been one to back down. You swipe back and hope you draw blood.

You discover other things about Dieter Bravo, the boy who you used to have a heart-stopping crush on when you didn’t know anything better. Fantasy will always be better than reality, and this isn’t exactly how you’d thought your first meeting would go.

And yet, you discover something else, something very, very curious. Something soft and impressionable, bruised purple and green. Something you want to lean on with your entire weight until he chokes. It’s ugly, but it’s amusing. Maybe this is how you hoped your first meeting would go, albeit with some tricky obstacles and a ticking clock. 

You want to press and see what spills out. 

Dieter Bravo cannot and does not look away from you. 

The day you meet Dieter Bravo is also the day you meet The Sixers, the day you meet Marie. She’s small, mousy, but apparently a fucking rock star on the drums. You like the irony; quiet and unassuming until she bangs through your head with percussion. Where the rest of her bandmates are wide-eyed and eager and come with more drugs than a pharmacy, there’s something about Marie that you find so tenderly earnest you kind of wish you didn’t come dressed like you were going out to eat the fleshly hearts of men everywhere. You want to approach her on her level. You don’t want to scare her away. There’s something redemptive about a kind, sweet girl like Marie striking up a friendship with you. 

If you could ever figure out how to start one. 

“Excited for the filming to start?” You ask her after nearly everyone’s picked up their things and left after the reading. She glances at you, then over her shoulder, as if you were talking to someone else. You instantly feel insanely protective of her. 

She blinks a few times before distractedly shaking her head. “No. I’m actually terrified.” 

“About being in a movie?”

She cringes, as if it’s the most shameful thing in the world. 

“Yeah. I love playing in front of crowds, but something about being on camera scares me.” 

You make a note to find out the next time they’re playing live.

“It’s honestly not that bad. It feels a little weird, like some unblinking eye staring at you, but then it just kind of fades away.” 

She bites her lip, tucking that short brown hair over her ear. “Have you done this before?”

You’re not exactly hiding your childhood movie star past, but you don’t really want it broadcasted.

“Here and there.” 

The rest of her bandmates are chatting amongst themselves, perhaps not yet aware you’re trying to befriend one of them. You’re not quite sure how it’s going.

“If you ever want, we could talk and I could give you some pointers.”

Fuck, why did that sound like a line? It shouldn’t. You didn’t want it to. Where was the line between asking someone to be your friend and asking someone for a fuck?

If she notices your embarrassment, she doesn't show it. She grins brightly, unashamed. “Yes! Oh my god, yes, please. I’d love that!”

Normally, when giving someone your number, you’d grab their hand and write it in Sharpie, giving them a good wink. Now you tear off a corner of the call sheet and write down your number in shaking hands. It’s a small piece of paper, easily lost. That’s okay, if she does lose it. No need to freak out.

She’s grinning, smile expanding across that round face of hers as she takes your number when someone calls her name.

Roxie, the one with bright-red flaming hair and gorgeously thick eyebrows, takes a glance at the piece of paper in Marie’s fingers. One eyebrow arches, and she says nothing.

Roxie looks at you like she wants to devour you whole. You think you’ll let her. 

You decide to ignore him.

Whatever his problem with you is, it doesn’t have to be dealt with immediately. Maybe he’ll come around and if not, no skin off your nose. It’s none of your business what happens off camera, what he thinks about you as a person. All that matters is giving a good performance and you know you can do that. 

You just sort of wish you had known more about the role before Heidi offered it. You really sort of wish you had known Dieter was going to be your co-star. That night, after approaching him in the parking lot, you had two glasses of wine to settle your trembling nerves, and you flipped through the script.

He was so calm and collected at the table read today. Cool, relaxed, at ease with himself and the world. Everyone knew him, everyone talked about him, either directly to you or in snatches of conversation.

Dieter Bravo – you could not ask for a better scene partner!

Dieter Bravo – he’s so, so nice. He always stops for fans!

Dieter Bravo – this shoot is going to be so much fun with him!

You’d never been particularly star-struck, but for the first time in your life, the idea of working with your co-star was daunting. When you were up against Gerard Butler, you’d been in the game for a while, knew the industry, showed up in the trades. Now, you felt like any other Santa Barbara graduate stumbling out in front of the camera for the first time. Where was that all-knowing smirk you had perfected at fifteen? God, had you always been so transparent?

You felt like you had to prove yourself at that table read. You know you were going a bit overboard, but they watched you, transfixed, and it empowered you. Mark Bronson, Marie, the rest of The Sixers, they watched you like Taylor had possessed your body and you instantly became a rockstar. 

Only, he didn’t. He watched you and didn’t look away, but he looked so uninterested in your performance, the tears that filled your eyes were partially real.

And then he touched you and in that moment, you knew he was mocking you. Laughing at you, you fucking child. He was the legendary star here, not you, and to think you ever had a chance was laughable. The heat of disgust in his eyes hurt, more than you wanted to admit. 

It was day one and he hated you.

Things escalate. 

He caught you high on set and it felt like you were being scolded by your older brother. He didn’t get it. He never did. All that shit about how he knows what it’s like – bullshit. All fucking bullshit. He was somehow always in the corner of your eye, watching you, begging you to fuck up so he could expose you like the fraud you are. 

And a pathetic fraud you are at that. He touches you and it’s like algae, hot and dense, spreading across your skin. You fight the feeling that strokes your cunt and you grit your teeth. Stop touching me, go away, stay back – please. 

You’re twenty-two and still harboring that fucking crush you had when you were sixteen. It’s embarrassing. It’s pathetic. It’s so, so, so wrong.

You try to ignore him. Try to exorcize him from your every waking thought. It doesn’t take. You get drunk at the pool party and you want his eyes, anyone’s eyes, on you. 

Marie is shy, you try to sober up around her, but you’re too far gone and you don’t want her to see you like this.

So you find Roxie. And Samuel. They give you something that makes your pupils dilate to the size of quarters and you feel like you’re made of cosmic dust. When they touch you, beauty and awe and the atoms of the universe bloom across your skin. You like kissing them, you decide. The water dripping off you from the pool feels like bad lovers and broken kingdoms up for sale.

You end up at his door. You don’t mean to. You genuinely forgot what room you were in. 

Consciously, you know he’s married. Consciously, you know he hates you. But that doesn’t stop you from asking anyway. 

“You could join us, you know.” 

You want so badly to be his theatrical equal that it hurts, it burns hotter for a moment than your desire for him, and he just stares at you. Consciousness somewhere in a nearby galaxy, you can’t read the look on his face. And then it blurs, he closes the door, and the entire hallway grows thick, heavy leaves.

Disappointment is a physical object and it burrows into your chest. You think you can feel your ribs moving to make room.

Sam and Roxie fuck on your bed while you’re curled up on the futon. You don’t even change out of your suit. You kick them out as soon as they are done, not wanting their hungry gazes to turn to you. 

This is always the worst part. When the emotions and memories that you’ve managed to pry off you as you coat yourself in a protective layer of LSD, finally come back. They wrap around you like a vice and you can feel the beginnings of a panic attack start in the tremble of your fingers. You stay there in the armchair, damp and cold and shivering and trying not to choke on your own throat, until the early hours of the morning. You think you could die like this but you don’t. You never actually do.

He doesn’t bring it up and neither do you. You sort of wish he would, just for a chance to . . . no, that’s fucked up and, if not legally, morally wrong. You can’t wish for anything when it comes to him.

It’s easier to hate him. To pretend like he was some over-involved, self-obsessed diva who stepped on your lines on purpose and flat-out refused to run scenes with you. It was easier as a whole for a while.

Marie started talking to you on her own now and that made you forget Dieter for a bit. The rest of the group was hesitant in their welcome, despite what had almost happened between you, Sam, and Roxie. But they all came around when you gave them the cleanest Molly they’d had in years.

It was like college all over again, but the faces were consistent this time. Five of them. You smoked in their van, fuzzy orange carpet fibers tickling your ear as you looked up at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the roof. 

“Why are you called The Sixers if there are five of you?” You ask suddenly. 

There’s a pause and then a collective chuckle. You watch it like lightning spark between them.

Nick finally speaks up: “Because it sounds like the sex-ers.”

“Sixty-nine n’ feeling fine.”

You laugh with them this time and you feel your breath mix with theirs. 

While meeting him wasn’t a particularly momentous occasion, the drive up to his AirBnB was. Maybe it was the lack of air this high up, but around every turn, your chest got a little tighter. The Sixers had shown you The Labyrinth with David Bowie last weekend (“how have you never seen that movie? Did you grow up under a rock?”) and you can’t help but think of the Goblin King coming to whisk you away. At the very least, the amount of rings they wore were the same. 

You try desperately to not look at his white-knuckles around the steering wheel and fail tremendously.

The thing is, you don’t really want to fight with him. You don’t want to have to interact with him through this hazy, distant, drugged out wall, but that seems like the only way he’ll talk to you. He’s always scowling at you, like you’d done something wrong, and you hadn’t. Sure, you thought about it and fucked yourself on the biggest dildo you had about it, but you hadn’t actually done anything. You hadn’t even made a move on him, not even bat an eyelash. But it seems like you just breathe in his direction and that sets him off. 

You still don’t understand why his past drug problem is now your problem too. In your absence from Hollywood, you’d somehow missed his ups-and-downs as he transitioned out of a teenage heartthrob into a fully adult hot mess. You’d certainly missed his marriage announcement until you googled it in the bathroom after lunch one day to see if what you’d heard the two techs talk about was true.

She’s so fucking hot.

Yeah, she was a model, right? Dude fucking scored big.

Fuck, she was a model. Even if she wasn’t, she certainly looked it, from all the red-carpet photos of the two of them. He looked at her with complete and total adoration.

Hollywood party boy settles down with recent marriage to cubist painter’s daughter

The headline was wordy but got the point across. He was off-limits. 

You didn’t know how to make someone like you if you couldn’t offer them sex or drugs. What the fuck were you supposed to do with the sober and married Dieter Bravo?

And yet, there were times. Moments. Fragments. Bursts of light in a mirror, where you thought he looked too long. How his eyes flickered black when you talked about your bra, or your tits, or your ass. But that’s all they were – fleeting instances of your own insanity bleeding into reality. He would never look at you like that. He hated you. 

It scared you, the way he expected you to act when you couldn’t hide behind being high, when you couldn’t flirt your way out of a particularly tense situation. He wanted you raw, exposed, your face revealed to the light you had spent years hiding from.

And then he did the darndest thing.

He was nice about it. In the kitchen, and then on the patio, he asked you questions about your start in the industry, what you’d like to do with your life, how you saw your career going. He cooked for you and made you laugh. He invoked the holy saint Sister Heidi as a bargaining chip and it was all the excuse you needed to drop the boxing gloves. You didn’t want to fight with him. You wanted to be his friend. You wanted him to like you.

Scratch that.

You wanted him to fuck you within an inch of your life and, sure, it was stupid to finger-fuck yourself to him, on the same couch as him, but maybe you wanted to get a little caught. Okay, a lot caught because then he’d tell you to fuck off and he’d draw the line in the goddamn sand and, sure, it’d be embarrassing and, sure, it’d hurt like hell but you’d get over it. You’d nurse your heart but you’d get back on that fucking bike because you really, really wanted this movie to work – but –

He fucking doesn’t. 

He doesn’t kiss you but he wants to. He looks at you like he wants to suck the marrow from your bones, drink the blood from your heart through your cunt.

Dieter Bravo wants to kiss you desperately, but because he is a good man, he doesn’t. And because you’re a shit person, you make it hard on him. You make it hurt because it hurts you and just for once, for a second, you want someone to understand how you feel. How you hurt. How you ache. 

That house in New Mexico changed everything. For you. For him.

Friends didn’t make time with each other because they were trying to plug up the moans in their head. Friends didn’t keep busy to keep their hands off each other. You weren’t friends with him, but you did get along. You learned a lot about him. You’d never had a real friend before but you sure this isn’t how it’s supposed to feel. 

Instead of a myth, your relationship is built in handprints. Red blotches on cave walls, their original meaning lost to time, a dead language no one speaks any more. Sometimes the prints overlap, sometimes they don’t. There are no words spoken, but the feeling is there all the same.

You think, if you could just take your aching heart out of your body, you could actually be Dieter Bravo’s friend. He fills in holes you didn’t realize were empty. Chasms for art, for acting, for food that didn’t come in a can or delivered on your front door. He knows about wine, and whiskey, and needs help dressing himself. He never made you feel like your asks were too much, your need to connect too great. He took your hand and told you what you wanted was normal. He’s funny, patient, and loves Shirley MaClaine movies. He did her entire monologue from The Apartment one night after hours of begging and it brought you to tears. You had a scene partner in Dieter Bravo, you had someone to challenge you, to rethink scenes and pull back deeper and deeper character layers. He’d taken a course online about psychology to have a new perspective on analyzing characters and you thought it was fucking genius. 

Marie filled certain relationship needs – a girl to talk about drama with, a fellow fan of live music, someone to make you look up to – but Dieter fulfilled more, if not all of them. Despite working in an artistic industry for years, you’d never once talked trade with someone and certainly not someone who knew it so well. You were awestruck by him. 

Call it infatuation, call it being horny, but there is a connection, a red through line that connects you both. And for a while, that’s enough. 

Until it isn’t. 

The mark of his blotchy handprints on your heart stop when you fuck some guy you barely know because Dieter hurt you. 

When he won’t look at you while he’s pretending to fuck you, you feel self-conscious again, like he’s going to think you’re some inexperienced little nepo baby. But he does his duty and you do yours and you’ve never felt so empty. 

Your handprint stays, while his blurs away. 

(Psychologic)

After production ends, you exist in the margins. No more mythologizing. No more cave drawings. 

And then Marie shows up.

She takes you to get your nails done like it's the most normal thing in the world. What is wrong with her? Doesn’t she know what you are?

You get smoothies and see some live music and she keeps you from spiraling. There is no possible way she knew about the lines of coke upstairs in your bedroom, but she takes you out into the light all the same. 

You go out to shows with The Sixers. They love having a groupie who’s a Hollywood star. Marie seems embarrassed when they show-case you, but you find you don’t mind waving a bit on stage and introducing the band. You think you see a pair of deep brown eyes in the crowd occasionally but you know it’s not. You have to accept your fate. He might not like you and he doesn’t hate you, but he certainly doesn’t want anything to do with you.

Not friends, not lovers, but something else. Something almost.

You and the Sixers swim in the ocean off the Santa Barbara coast. You go to parties and you play the bongo drums in a treehouse in South Los Angeles. You bring the good drugs and everyone loves you. 

You don’t want to go to the wrap party, but Marie insists. You think she likes being famous just for all the opportunities to get dressed up and do your make up. She told you once that you are the prettiest girl she’d ever seen without any motive behind it. She wasn’t trying to fuck you or fuck with your head. It was just the truth in her eyes and it made you nauseous.

You go to the wrap party because it’s something better to do than get high on shrooms for the fourth time this week and as a reward, Cooper shares his blunt with you in the car. You laugh easily and often and loudly and Cooper keeps you steady with a hand on your waist. You’re nervous, you want to drink more, but you already feel like you’re carrying too many cups and plates and the noise it’s going to make when you drop them all is going to be deafening. 

He’s here. He’s here with his fucking gorgeous wife and you stand behind Cooper so you have something blocking your line of sight.

Just as you are about to order your first vodka soda of the night, Dieter rushes back into the house. The weed and coke in you switch the plugs in your brain and suddenly you are very, very angry. 

But the Dieter you find is fragile, beaten down, vulnerable. He talks to you like he did in New Mexico and it dulls the edges around the hole in your chest. He looks at you like you’re his saving grace, his last hope. 

Myths lie. They blur the truth to make a better story. They build up a man larger than life, they make goddesses out of women, and they sanctify, canonize love. They make you ache with the wanting of the fantasy of it, and that’s on purpose. Myths are the human experience on fire.

Kissing him, you feel on fucking fire.

Meeting him didn’t feel momentous. But fucking him certainly was. 

The settlement of your mythology burns to the ground, flames licking the sky. He has crystalized in your veins and, in an instant, you’re hopelessly addicted.

With Dieter Bravo, you come to like sex. You come to love it actually. It’s an itch, a fluttering, warm feeling that makes you twitch and tense when his hands aren’t on you. There’s some part of you that knows the inherent danger of giving one man, much less this man, that much power over you, but fuck, you can’t help it. 

You’re too young, too inexperienced in the world to know the difference between when a man wants you for sex and when a man loves you. In your mind, the two are the same and cannot be separated. You know what it feels like to be wanted to be fucked, but in your nativity you assume that’s how a man looks at you when he wants to love you — and this time you’d welcome it. 

There isn’t much to say about New Orleans, except for three things:

One, you’ve successfully confused yourself into thinking this is what being in a relationship with him would be like.

Two, you’ve never felt safer and more wanted and more complete than you ever have when you take drugs with Dieter. (that primal animal fear is gone for the first time in what feels like years)

And three, you’re so fucking in love with him you’re sick with it.

In the sickness, you grow weak. You burn with fever. Your bones ache and your mind races. His touch is simultaneously a balm and a contagion. 

You love him. You love him. You love him.

You love him unlike anything or anyone. 

Marie is actually the only one who ventures a guess. Who catches you, wings pinned to the corkboard, and asks you point-blank, “are you fucking Dieter Bravo?” 

Maybe she’s braver because it’s over text, permanent traces of your infidelity, but you stare at her message for hours. You think about it in the hotel shower after the plane lands in Los Angeles. You haven’t seen her in weeks and you’ve stopped returning her phone calls. 

Your high falters at the idea that you might have (and probably did) lose a friend over him. But what did that matter, in the grand scheme of things, your sickness asks you, now that you have him?

Now that he’s the only thing that matters. Now that he is everything. 

He goes back to his wife. 

After everything. After what you did for him. After what you gave up. How you prostrated yourself for his love, for a moment of his time. He can’t see it, it’s eating you up. You think cancer has kinder teeth than his. 

The foundations of the core of your being are rocked. It doesn’t feel real because he’s still in this hotel with you, the same hotel where you fucked in the bathroom, where you flirted with him for the cameras to sell the movie, where he begged you to stay with him, you’re gonna stay, right? you’re gonna be with me, after this? And maybe it isn’t real because he only lasts being apart from you for twelve, maybe fourteen hours. Maybe he’s sick too. Maybe he’s fucked just as much as you are. 

In your dark, deep wretched heart, you hope he is. You hope he’d die without you. But you don’t know. You don’t know because he never says it. 

This time, it’s real, he promises. This time, he’s never going back. This time he’s going to say he loves you, his kisses pledge to you. 

This time he’s not going to leave you.

In the mornings after Chloe leaves and you kiss him E-tablets with your tongue and he fucks you in every way he knows how, he curls up next to you and you tell him. It doesn’t matter he doesn’t seem to hear you.

You tell him you love him, have always loved him. Dieter Bravo turned from an imaginary companion, to a friend you didn’t want, and now to a lover who makes you think you’re special. Something valuable, precious. Something that is worth keeping. 

Until you’re not.

Myths serve to answer questions about our place in the natural order of things. To ease tension. To provide guidance. 

Why does it rain?

Where do the seasons come from?

What is the sun, and why does it leave and return?

What is heartbreak?

What is grief? What is sorrow? How do we carry them with us?

How do we go on when the world is determined to break us?

When you’ve always had nothing, and now you still have nothing and no one – he doesn’t love you and he’s going back to his pregnant wife – you ask, what’s the fucking point?

Not even the myths can answer that one.

Later, when you wake up under the bright lights of a hospital room, your memory is cracked, broken into terracotta pieces on the ground. There are things missing from you.

You don’t remember calling Oliver, only that he was there and he was high out of his mind and he gave you whatever he had in his pockets. You don’t remember what you took, or if Oliver was kind to you when he watched you swallow pill after pill.

You don’t remember the shower, the ambulance ride, or being admitted.

You aren’t sure exactly what you’ve lost. But you feel the missing edges.

Dieter is missing from you.

If you close your eyes, still the movement of your body, block out the noises of the machines and the hospital around you, you think you remember hearing him say it.

You think he might have said it when he kissed your forehead, but it feels older than that. Like his words and his actions stem from two different memories but you’re so fucked up they blur together. You want to hold onto that new memory, as fabricated as it might be, for as long as you can.

But then sleep over takes you again and it flushes everything out. The next time you wake up, you don’t remember that he ever said, I love you. 

When you wake up, you know he’s gone. You don’t know how you know, or why, but it feels like a piece of you has been torn away in a bloody chunk. Like someone had taken pliers to your fingernails and tore them off until blood splattered onto the floor.

Like someone put a knee to your shoulder and wrenched white teeth out of your mouth. 

Until you are gummy and dripping.

You open your eyes not to Dieter, not Heidi, but Marie. Mousy, intelligent, thoughtful Marie curled up asleep in the chair next to you. 

The sound of your crying wakes her up. Wordless, judgement-less, she crawls into bed with you, takes you into her arms, and lets you sob like the heart-broken mess you’ve become. 

God, can you die from pain like this?

She strokes your forehead and tells you, no, you can’t. You might want to, but you can’t. 

For the first time in your life, you’re not a myth. 

You’re not a story of a little girl whose parents didn’t love her enough. 

You are not the story of an actress whose star burned too bright and hot and the cosmos punished her for her hubris. 

You’re not the story of a woman who fell in love too hard and too fast with drugs and a man much older than her and got shattered on the rocks. 

The book has closed, the final chapter has come. There are no more stories to tell, nothing left to make fantastic. 

You are a broken human body. 

Natalie Lorraine is a myth.

You were a child once. You have to remember that. 

#dieter bravo #dieter bravo x f!reader #dieter bravo x you #dieter bravo fanfiction #dieter bravo x reader #the bubble fanfic #the bubble fic #the bubble fanfiction #the bubble 2016 #dieter bravo/f!reader #dieter bravo/you #dieter bravo/reader #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal characters

[thewholedamnboulangerie]

I was tagged by @bisexualbard-writes my beloved to post 5 things I like about myself!!! Thank youuuuuu ☀️🦦💖🪐🥰

I have a pretty good sense of direction, and oh my god when I was younger I did NOT appreciate this enough. I don't have the innate sense of where north is that some people do, but (particularly if I'm travelling in right angles, not in curved lines) I can usually keep track of the general direction I'm going in with a lot of accuracy, and I can read maps super easily and remember the exact routes I've taken before, provided they aren't too complicated!! It is a vvv useful skill and I LOVE it.

I am very good at picking up foreign languages! Comparatively speaking I haven't made much progress with Thai, given that I've been semi-immersed in it for close to a year and a half by now, but that's mainly because I've just been learning via osmosis rather than putting any actual effort in whatsoever. Still, I can usually understand any really simple sentences without much trouble and pick out at least a few words of the more complex ones when I'm watching something in Thai now, so that's something!! (Also, my duolingo streak is currently at 951 days!)

I am quite judicious, just as a general rule (...with the notable exception of What Time To Go To Bed). As in: I don't tend to act rashly, or speak tactlessly, but for the most part I'm also fairly good at steering clear of the level of caution that just saps joy and stirs up anxiety rather than actually being beneficial. This is not to say that I always make sensible decisions - far from it! I am always making objectively silly decisions! But since my objectively silly decisions tend to be for the purposes of indulging in the delights, as long as they fulfil that goal and don't cause any collateral damage that's too insane, I'm usually happy to consider them subjectively Correct decisions (with - and I really and truly CANNOT stress this enough - the exception of absolutely any decision related to sleeping habits 💀).

I am SO good at platonically matchmaking my friends!! I love to introduce my friends to each other, or throw them into groupchats together, or (on one memorable occasion) drag the blorbos from my tumblr dashboard AND the blorbos from my workplace to the theatre together! And then watch as they all instantly imprint on each other like lil ducklings!!! This has happened so many times and it is my favourite thing every single time! (And of course, the fact that my own taste in friends is so elite is almost certainly a contributory factor to how well they always get along. All of you are so so good and lovely! ❤️)

I am very good at directing my gaze. By which I mean several things!! First of all: I AM ALWAYS PERCEIVING. When it comes to things I care about and enjoy, I am noticing details! I am connecting dots! I am picking up on hidden meanings! I am spotting clues and interpreting them! I am reading your tags with fluency and delight even though you censored them and miscounted the asterisks! I am remembering that thing you said five months ago and bringing it up again at the funniest possible moment!!! My brain is Kim Theerapanyakul's murderboard and it is covered EXCLUSIVELY in all the things that are shiniest and most precious To Me and I am solving their mysteries!!! Secondly: when it comes to the worst parts of fandom culture, I am never perceiving. If there is a bad take, I will simply not see it. If I do see it, I will simply forget about it in 3 minutes flat. No cursed opinion has any power over me because I shall simply magnetically repel it thank you goodbye xoxo Most importantly: I am a very firm believer that life is always terrible and also that life is simultaneously always wonderful. Both are true at all times; it just depends where you're looking. And sometimes life inevitably forces your gaze towards the most terrible things the world has to offer, and there's no choice but to engage with them. But when given the choice, I like to think that I'm pretty good at directing my gaze towards the wonderful end of the scale. The everyday delights are my best friends and hopefully they always will be!

Tagging a few blorbos from my dashboard who I don't thiiiiiiink have been tagged in this yet: @divorcedmalewife, @fallen-robin, @youneedtolightenup, @yourrescuemission, @diamondcrystals, @thevorelock, @guntapon, @nangong-shunu

#tag meme #listen it took me a while to get around to actually doing this but do NOT mistake me!!! #i fucking love saying nice things about myself #hehe #it mostly took a while a) bc im BUSY; b) bc of the 'tact' bit specifically from number 3 #there were SO many other options that i ALMOST put in but then was like 'girl. on THIS website?? you can't say that it's GAUCHE' #talking in public about my god-tier self-esteem and body confidence???? on the low self esteem website???? im too tactful for that #i will simply wait 48h and THEN edit it into these tags so i can say it without anyone seeing it. yes perfect!!!

[transmasc-wizard]

Ok so if you want to continue, next question would be like what are the characters? Like their personalities and aspects to them. I know the basics but not clearly

hmmmmmmmmmmm that sure is a Question. *shakes the blorbos around in my head* what are you like again-- (/hj)

u know the drill. cut time

Angel (she/they) is like the pathetic men tumblr wants to put in a washing machine. she is not strong, as smart as some of the others, good at socializing, or a leader, but she is very good at looking sad, getting out of Situations (they're not super smart but they're clever), and making questionable choices. They don't trust anyone and mostly look out for themself (minus their sister, who is more important to them). Their motivation is literally just survival.

Their arc is mostly around learning to trust. Trusting others is learned via being made to cooperate with the rest of the cast, and trusting herself comes from learning to use the magic they're good at--necromancy. They are very against the idea of ever killing someone, so their natural affinity for death magic is scary.

Bea (she/her) is a prophet who wishes she wasn't. Prophecy in this world is based on what's likely, not certain, and it's really hard having that constant "i think but i don't know" feeling--especially when they're things like "I will fail this test" or "my grandpa will get sick". Bea is extremely energetic, genuinely likes people, and is often seen as someone with her head in the clouds. Her motivation is the possibility of making things better.

Her arc is about letting go of the idea that everything is her fault & responsibility. She blames herself when she prophesizes bad things but can't change them/can't change them without help. Throughout the story she learns that it is not up to her to try and avert every possible bad thing just because she has a rough knowledge that it may happen. (She also gets to be like 40% more unhinged, and. good for her.)

Corey (he/him)!! Corbin,,, insomniac paranoid obsessive-compulsive autism dude. He's a scientist with a fondness for creating things & is just Trying To Hold On. Frenemies with Oliver. (Homoerotically.) Quiet, observant, mistrusting, reclusive, ZERO self-preservation instincts. He's such a perfectionist it's not even funny. His motivation is escape, from... everything? basically.

Corey's arc is about the idea that escape isn't inherently tied to being as successful and envied as possible--escape can be "have a house in the forest with lots of books" or "work in a chemistry lab with your friends". Escape can involve things he actually likes, instead of a tiring CEO job as far from home as possible.

Oliver (he/they) is like if you took a theatre major and an english major and they had a child with a lot of depression. (& bisexuality.) He's comedic, to compensate for the fact that he feels like he makes things worse. They're also trying to figure out what they want to do with their life; they don't know who they are. (Scared. Lonely. Passionate. Determined.) He really likes books, and is quite fond of coffee. His motivation is protecting the things he cares about.

His arc is mostly... admitting he does care about things? He's scared that caring = weakness, and weakness gets things killed. They need to learn to stop running and put himself out there if they ever want to actually experience friendship & love.

Hope (they/them) is a fallen god who wants to feel powerful again. They have a sort of stubborn optimism--everything sucks, but they think it can and will get better. They really like birds. They want to be helpful/useful. They communicate with echolalia (repeating other people's words back) quite a bit. They have a cane. Their motivation is doing something that will make them remembered, in a good way.

Their arc is about learning they have value outside of what other people see. That's short, but it's the core of their whole arc, so. yeah.

that was!!! so long!! I have Feelings about my little OCs lol

#asks #will/lee #wip gfw1 #angel #bea #corey #oliver #hope

[skitter-kitter]

Hi!!! 2, 4, 10, 13, 15 (His Living Legacy), 20, 30, and 44 for the ask game if you wanna??

Hi!!!! Hell yeah I’ll do it I love this ask game

Fic writer ask game

How do you spend your time when it comes to fanfiction? Are you primarily a fic reader, writer, or a perfect 50/50 split of both?

I’m usually 80% writer, 20% reader because writing takes so much attention and time so I don’t really have time to read too many fics. I usually read outside of whatever fandom I’m in though. I read a LOT of BNHA fics

Link your three favorite fics right now.

Okay I just convinced my best friend to read this fic and now I’m gonna try my best to do the same to you. It’s called Runner and it’s a canon divergence AU of The Lego Movie where instead of Good Cop getting erased by Lord Business it was Bad Cop. THEN, after Good Cop has lived years without Bad Cop, he’s sent back a year before Taco Tuesday and has to try and fix EVERYTHING. The fic is all about trust and sacrifices and mistakes and I love it SO much. (There is one chapter where it’s heavily about self-sacrifice/suicide he doesn’t actually die but it’s very much about it)

OUGH I was scrolling through my bookmarks and I just remembered my favorite Teen Titans fic of all time: Deathstroke’s Apprentices. It’s a canon divergence au of the show where instead of being saved, Robin stays as Deathstroke’s apprentice. The fic starts like MONTHS into this situation and we watch as Robin changes slowly to cope with it all. Terra is also there and her being there is what makes it very hard for Robin to escape because he refuses to leave her alone. GOD. I love this fic so so much

I’m also gonna rec Welcome To The New Age because every single time I think about the line I go insane:

“In this moment I think I almost wish I were human again,” he mused, “So that I could experience a friendship with you.”

What’s your favorite fandom, pairing, or character to read fic for?

I really like reading BNHA fics because there’s SO MANY of them and because I haven’t watched the show I have no scale of what’s in character or not and just enjoy the fics. However, there are a few characters/pairings I would KILL to have more people posting in

Do you outline your fics? How much of a headache would someone get if they just looked at an outline of yours without reading the fic?

Okay it really depends. If it’s a long fic I’ll leave MANY notes. It’s usually scenes or moments that are important to me that I don’t want to forget. But if it’s a shorter fic…

[my notes for His Living Legacy]

Robotnik dies at the end of sonic 2. Stone holds a funeral for him with the badniks. “Those who shine the brightest often burn the fastest”. He considers giving the same speech he did a few months earlier. He makes a coffee exactly how Robotnik likes it and leaves it on his grave. Engraved it says, Ivo Robotnik. He was loved. He was the brightest of us all. He will be remembered.

Tell the author your favorite fic of theirs. What’s your (the author’s) favorite fic you’ve written?

I have… a hundred and fifty one posted fics… why would you do this to me

I’m glad you like His Living Legacy! I was annoyed by how few actually sad fics there were about the open ending and I love emotionally destroying my blorbos so I did lmao

But. God. What’s my favorite fic I’ve ever written…

I’ve only ever reread and edited one of my fics and that was the most honorable thing. I love that fic and especially the title since it’s a cut off quote: the most honorable thing is to keep living. It’s a fic where Maul actually gets to be happy for once in his life and I love it

What’s your favorite part about the fanfiction writing process?

I love daydreaming about fics. I love it so much.

Post a snippet from your current WIP without context - no more than 300 words.

Haha alright

Lear crossed his arms, fuming with a soul-deep anger even Red couldn’t evoke in him. This was a special sort of anger reserved only for his father.

It was made up of quiet, cutting words. Knives smaller than the eye could see. Guilt and remorse warped into weapons.

Every time he and his father met, they fought.

This was the way of the world.

Rant about something writing related.

I hate how complicated writing numbers is. Like there’s no clear indicator for when you should switch from spelling it out to just having the numbers and like. It’s so painful for me. Usually if I encounter this issue in a fic it leads to me abandoning it halfway through and it’s so annoying

#skitty asks #7 birds in a trenchcoat #I’m very tempted to go into the stobotnik tag again just to see if any new angst has been written

[beileil]

🌈 and 👖 for the ask game? ^_^

Tysm for the ask! 💜 (The post is here for anyone who wants to ask or be asked.)

🌈 What inspired you to write [Hero Detective Agency]?

I saw you messaged to specify HDA for the first question, which is unfortunate, because it's the hardest one to answer for. :P (Answers for my other fics boil down to: I'm creating content for my rarepairs because no one else is, it was part of a challenge, or in the case of Demon Cyborg Picture Show, because I thought it would be funny.)

Caveat: It's been 3 years since I started writing Hero Detective Agency, so I honestly don't remember if this was the true inspiration for it or not.

Okay, so, I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this, but I'm not sure what it's called so I'm going to dub this phenomenon "fandom creep". Basically, whatever my main fandom is (which has been One Punch Man for the last few years) starts to "creep" into my unrelated interests, experiences, and lesser-fandoms. I have a new favorite song? Coincidentally, my Blorbo also loves the song. I'm at an amusement park? I'm imagining how my OTP would behave at the amusement park.

(Detour here. Stay with me.) One of my other interests is video games. And one of my favorite game series is Fallout. If you've never played a Fallout game, the vibes of it are retrofuturistic. The games take place in the 2200s, and the world of Fallout follows the exact same history of ours up until the early 1960s, and then they branch out into their own timeline, leading to a nuclear apocalypse in 2077. BUT! Even though it's hundreds of years into the future, the music, fashion, and general culture vibes remain from the 1940s/1950s. The Fallout soundtracks include a lot of like...Ella Fitzgerald, Rat Pack, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, and so on. One of my favorite memories from playing is headshotting a raider to Billie Holiday.

I guess I sort of clung onto that whole aesthetic a little hard for a while. Listening to WWII era music, watching noir movies... And then the obsession with One Punch Man happened. And the SaiGenos shipping happened. And reading through nearly every OPM fic on Ao3 happened. And I realized that for the first time in 15 years, I actually wanted to post my own fanfiction. And no one seemed to have dibs on a 40s detective noir fic yet...so I created my own, along with a Fallout-esque soundtrack. (I promised I'd bring us back on track!)

I sometimes think I bit off far more than I can chew with Hero Detective Agency, because good god is it challenging coming up with mysteries, clues, solutions, and really just overall general plot, all while working in a setting 40+ years before I was even born. I think about it a lot when things happen like year-long breaks between updates, or when chapters end up 11,000 words longer than anticipated because there's so much world-building and exposition I have to do. And I would be lying if I said I won't be thrilled to be done with it. But it's my first baby that I'm really proud of, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

👖 Are you a planner, plantser, or pantser? Is it consistent?

All three, and not consistent at all. It depends on how plot-heavy the story is, how much of the idea is already in my head, whether I'm at work or home, how much I've had to drink, if I have detailed prompts to go off of or not...

On the "seat of my pants" side of the scale, you've got: Gray, a short, fluffy one-shot; and The Divorce, which was basically fully fleshed out as a headcanon and just needed to be put on paper. These were straight brain-to-keyboard, no notes.

On the other extreme, you've got Hero Detective Agency, where by nature of what the story is (each chapter being nearly its own contained mystery), I have to plan everything out in excruciating detail. Every single action is written, by hand, in bullet point. I list out what the case is, the clues, the solution, the settings, the characters, each suspect's motivations, and if they're a red herring why they DIDN'T do it. This is my only fic I have a beta reader for, because I'm paranoid something will not make sense logistically.

But mostly I fall somewhere around a plantser, where I write out basic plot points that need to happen and then let the scenes write themselves, leaving placeholders if there's something I need to come back to later.

#fanfic ask game #thank you for asking!

[jonathanslms]

Here's what I missed on ! Tumblr !

It's pretty weird to return to this site after so long. (I'm not exactly a "Twitter refugee" as they seem to be called lmao, more like someone who, because of the whole Twitter stuff, realised that there are still people on Tumblr? And apparently the site stopped their weird filtering/post banning system bc they now allow porn again? Anyway,) I don't remember when I was last active on Tumblr because I deleted my old blog some years ago, but if I had to guess I was probably active from around 2013 to 2015/16 at the latest? And boy, there's so much new stuff...

Firstly, the quality and functionality of themes seems much higher? Maybe that's just because I'm older now, but there are just so many original and innovative themes and pages that, like, are so interactive?? And such a broad variety as well!!!

Adding on to that: Javascript is sort of forbidden?? The work-around is pretty fast and easy (just ask support for permission basically), but still, that sucks lol.

Then there's the whole "you can have an account but no actual blog"-thing?? Idk if I really like that. A lot of people seem to use the site like that, so it's apparently at least somewhat popular. But as a Tumblr-conservative (as in conservative about Tumblr, not a conservative on Tumblr) I must say that having a blog and customizing it was sort of the whole Unique Selling Point of the site, so... interesting choice. (As long as that's still possible I'm still happy either way, I think)

The whole Dashboard experience in general is just so different now. For one, there are ads? I'm not a fan of ads (shocking opinion, I know) and I'm sure had they done it right Tumblr could have become like Ao3 and not even needed them. Still, I don't mind them too much (haha certainly not bc I use adblock :) idk what that is, sounds very morally wrong to me) and I read somewhere that the premium version is only 40€/year, which isn't a lot a lot, but still unfortunate.

I can't even tell which features are new and which aren't most of the time (except for the replying to posts? and THE CHAT?? now that there is one I can't help but wonder why there wasn't one from the start?). I think there's a lot of stuff Tumblr implemented that used to only be possible through xkit before.

Speaking of which: xkit! There's a new version - xkit rewritten - and it's incredible. I didn't even think about re-installing xkit until I stumbled upon a post that mentioned it. Now that I am aware of its existence again, god have I missed it. Being properly on Tumblr without it just isn't the same, man...

Pretty sure the search and follow tags/trending/etcetc stuff is completely revamped as well, but I don't think I used that very often back then anyway. Once I followed a big chunk of blogs I just found new ones through snowballing.

The last thing I can think of that noticably threw me off was the slang? Like wtf is a blorbo? (I actually think I get that one now) What are those other scrinkly, scrumblo, beedy weeby words? Why do I feel several generations older all of a sudden? I can feel the immediate and visceral impulse of disgruntled rejection welling up inside me everytime I see people use any new slang word (or meme, looking at you old scorsese movie that doesn't exist) whose invention I wasn't there for. (please if you've been (back) here for a while, feel free to educate me on the new tumblr etiquette, memes and slang words, I'm curious, I wanna know)

Though that being said, the overall vibes have not changed much. It is still a site that embraces its nerdy lameness and unnecessarily deep deep-dives into ANYTHING. And after the last few months to years of seeing people attacking anyone and anything, and feeling angry/depressed every time I spent some time on my social media site of choice, I think this is a very nice change of pace.

#a bit of a rambly list on my thoughts of the changes on here over the years #god i remember when i first made an account here #my english was terrible #i did not have the first clue on how to change my theme or what that was even called #AND i was a full on larry shipper directioner (my first url was sth along the lines of “larrystylinsonmonstaaa” #i say along the lines... #i think that was it exactly #making myself a tumblr account in 2022 just so i can go on an internet powered nostalgia trip #this time i'm going to fully (and self-aware..ly?) embrace the cringe though #off into the void you go

[maldito-arbol]

Here we gooo

Loreeee yum, HEART LORE YUMMM

Andy is here now /neg

Heart <3<3<3

“It is a question Heart is unsure how to tackle. Their own origins are fuzzy even to them, but they remember a familiar face, a soft voice, the sharp curve of a long stick. They also remember large hands. A sense that they have missed something. A dark void that seems inhabited by more than just them. Green. Pink. And they are blue, they think, as they gaze out to the ocean around them. They are water too, perhaps, but they have never known until now. They had not seen snow melt so much until it happened. “ The first couple of parts make me think of valeriana tbh, also , more?

Barrelllll grrrrrrrr I do not like you grrrrr

Intresting stuffffff mmmmmmmmm yes

👀👀👀 heart being in a body for the first time is so Intresting

Froog and strength are the best chaotic duo I’m calling it

WITNEY!!

 Eating all of this

Heandrias (?) shit yum this is gonna go baddd

Yeah strength and froog <3333

Heartttt moo

Gay ppl wow

Heandrias shit oh fuck no

What are the heart and wit doing? We shall seee

“They do hear them question Barrel, however, to which Wit responds, blissfully unaware, “Don’t worry, I am crawling.”” Hahsjsjsjsha witneyyy

Froog!! My Scrunkly scrimblo blorbo <3

Strength is here!!!

No no not the basement fuck

Andrias noo

“The letters were angry, exclamation points and scattershot curse words peppered into what was perhaps the most egregious use of incorrect grammar he had ever laid eyes on. And the pictures? The pictures showed her, another frog, presumably a romantic partner, and his heart stopped when he saw a tadpole in her arms. “ !!!!!!!! 👀👀👀👀 the tadpole is a plantar ancestor aren’t they Mal

“

“It was easy to leave,” she admits, and she grabs the collar of her hooded cloak, tugs down and down to expose the bare of her chest, a huge angrily red scar painted wildly across it. “My mother used to hit me too, but not so much with household items. This was a coffee pot.” “ nooo froog :((((( my girl :( 

““Sometimes…” is a mutter she says mostly to herself, but with their close proximity Andrias has no trouble hearing it. “I lay awake at night hoping when I close my eyes they’ll never open again.” Malll whyy, my girl has ✨issues ✨

Barrel boooooo, I’m gonna spray bottle him for calling wit and dimwit >:(

“Before they depart, however, Wit pauses one last time to speak to them. “Thank you for bringing me out, Heart,” she tells them, warm and happy and truly grateful. “I had a lot of fun.” “ Heartney so true <3<3

“That is not how one makes friends. You are not my friend and I am not yours. I belong solely to my Andrias. “ Hearttttt noooo nooo my Scrunkly noooo

The Scrunkles are bondinggg

I don’t remember the ship name for wit and strength but, so true <333 gay ppl

Heart holy shit 😭pleaseee mal why are you doing this

Godddd ““It was the right thing to do, coming to me with this,” he tells them, unreadable and yet electrifying. “You understand I still have to punish you though, right?” And it is whispered so dangerously it reverberates through Heart’s entire being. “ fucking hell o god mallll why, they are so unhealthy godd

Idk what to say just god holy fuck

“They count every crack, every break, every little line of imperfection that crosses their once perfect form. 

Because every single one means I love you. “

Heart holy shit….  just, Jesus

Wit and strength being gay and happy while heart is going through it

Froog <\3 

Nooo wit my girlll nooo

Godd Mal why why

“That’s not what I’m doing!!” She raises her voice now. “Why do you always assume the worst?! I liketalking to the gems—they don’t berate me constantly like you and Barrel do! And if I had to guess, you’ve been doing it to them too!! Treating them like shit just because you know you’ll get away with it! Heart flinched just a minute ago—don’t even try to tell me you haven’t hit them!”

Heart is not sure who makes the move—whether it is their own instinct, or Andrias’s, or maybe a little bit of both of them, but that giant hand that makes them so, so angry shoots out, those fingers that have cracked and broken them so many times close around a tiny pink form, and her words are choked into nothingness . Little legs squirm and strain against their palm, but neither of them let go. They cannot. They do not want to. “

FROOG FROOG FROGG NOO

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Barrel boooo

Oh fuck noo why andriasss whyy

Boooo andrias dad booo

Andrias nooo let go of froogggg

WOOO YEAH WARHAMMER YEAHHH

Goddd

Booo andrias bitch motherfucker I hate him so much

OOOOOOOOO WIT AND STRENGTH HAVE BEEN IN A BODY TOGETHER BEFORE MARCY

The core holy fuck holy fuck

“He is smiling at Andrias, a smile that he simultaneously wants to beat into a pulp and kiss into oblivion, that perfectly awful juxtaposition between the two intense emotions for his dear friend. He growls. “ gay ppl /neg

“Barrel’s hands are trembling, but he nods. “My destiny awaits.” He cracks a smile of his own. “And so does yours.”

When he flips the switch, the world fills with sound. Screams, cries, the grating and terrifying scrapes of metal coming alive before them both. 

Oh, he hates being crossed, but watching his oldest friend reach something he has worked for with all his blood, sweat, and tears is something he just cannot bring himself to prevent. 

And the hope in Heart dies with Barrel. 

The Core was supposed to be ours. 

A single, orange eye opens from the top to the bottom, and it snaps to them both, utterly silent in the dead of night. “ GRGHRHSHSHSHSHAJJAIEE MAL IM GONNA DIE

That fucking crown grrrr

“They grow numb to the suffering by the time they return to the box for the long haul. By the time the three of them drift through the passage of time for centuries and centuries until one girl finds them one day, a dusty old box on a shelf in a thrift store, when she takes what does not belong to her, when she and her friends open the box and three gems are released all over again, but they are so, so different this time. 

They had held out hope that they would see Andrias again, but when they finally did, the finality of change that had desecrated their once fiercely and deathly loyal self so too had severed their tie to him. They could not go back. As much as they craved to, as much as they desperately missed him, they cannot lose another. They cannot lose Anne Boonchuy. 

They will never lose another. “  MALLLL GRRR,

Godddd this whole thing

““You deserved so much better, Heart,” she says instead, and the entire world flips on its head. “Maybe if you’d gotten someone who wasn’t Andrias, maybe if you’d gotten someone even just a little bit nicer, maybe you wouldn’t feel like you need to do bad things all the time.” Her gaze is downcast, reflective. “What you had with him was not healthy . It was… abusive. Nobody should ever treat you like that.”” Yess anneee say itt

“It strikes them like a stab through the chest. Proud. She’s proud of me. 

“ Mal Mal Mal Mal Mal 

““…Anne.” They try it. It feels strange, but in a good way. Saying everyone’s full names gets tiring after a while. “Does this mean we’re friends?”

“Geez, you’re persistent,” she tells them, but it doesn’t sound like an insult. “Like I said, I can’t say we’re friends, but I also can’t say we’ll never be. There’s still a lot you have to apologize for, still a lot you’ve gotta work on, but now that I understand where a lot of it comes from, I could help you?”

“Are you okay with that?”

She nods. “Yeah! I like helping people. Doing it too much is my problem, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop completely. And maybe we can help each other. I still have a ways to go myself.”

Helping each other. That sounds… beautiful. 

“I would like that.”” 🥺🥺I’m gonna die

I am gonna sue you now Mal >:(( why would you do this to all of them, just let them be gay and happy.

HEART TIME LORE TIME ITS EXCITEMENT HOURS

FUCK Andy all my homies hate Andy

Heheeehehehehehehe

Yes. Yes I AM dropping hints about the gems’ origins, but we’ll get into it more during Witney’s chapter!

Ah, Barrel. I both love and hate this man so much (affectionate)

GOOD

YES!! I LOVE THE GEMS LEARNING TO NAVIGATE BODIES

THEY ARE AND YOU SHOULD SAY IT

WITNEYYYY

Heandrias is the worst thing I ever did and I’m so proud of it

What :) are :)) Heart :))) and :)))) Wit :))))) doing :))))))

THE “DONT WORRY I AM CRAWLING” LINE WAS MY FUCKING FAVORITE AND I HAVE WANTED TO MAKE A COMIC ABOUT IT SINCE THE DAY I STARTED THE HEART CHAPTER ITS SO FUNNY, ESPECIALLY SINCE HEART TAKES IT 100% SERIOUSLY

Welcome to the Basement again :)

Oh Yes this is my explanation for where the Plantars came from!! Terrible isn’t it

Froog has…been through it. This poor baby

We’re all gonna spray bottle Barrel for being a dick to Witney

HEARTNEY SO FUCKING TRUE

They’re bonding we love to see it <3

WENGTH. WENGTH MY BELOVED.

Because I Can :^)

Heandrias is by far the Worst Relationship I have ever created, I should give myself a fucking medal

Yeah. It’s a lot isn’t it.

Fucking rip my girl Froog, she deserved so much better 💔

Andrias’s dad we Hate to see him

YES WENGTH HAVE BEEN CONVERGED BEFORE ISNT THAT FUN (TERRIBLE)

Gay ppl/neg (HEY YOU FOUND A WAY TO USE /NEG)

*pats u*

The Crown :^)

Heart and Anne my beloveds 💜 let them have healthy character interaction for the love of god

Thank u for the ask and haha just try to take me to court you’ll never take me aliiiiiiiive

#ask mal #CMTO #i didnt proofread my own response this time I’m rushing today andkdkksksksksk

[xxsdelphia]

transformers or critical role (or both)

from this post. transformers first, critical role under the cut, which will be super fun because i don’t remember much from the 20 episodes of campaign 2 i watched a year ago

transformers

blorbo: this one changes often since there’s so many. all-time favorite bot is jazz, he’s so likeable! tfa jazz is my favorite jazz since like other tfa bots his archetype’s traits are turned up to 11, so it makes him a really enjoyable guy to watch even if he doesn’t say a word. mtmte brainstorm might be my favorite tf ever, though, he’s so entertaining but there’s a lot of thought into him. he can truly do it all. i’d love to get inspiration for a brainstorm angst train one day, just as much as i want to write him getting overly excited about studying some geek organic shit

scrunkly: tfa optimus tfa optimus tfa optimus. holy SHIT tfa optimus. he is my son and my boyfriend and my beloved husband of millions of stellarcycles and my best friend and every day i wake up and think god fucking bless this timeline for giving us david kaye tfa oppy. i want to build him a giant basketball court

scrimblo bimblo: only the real ones know my girl quickshadow. honestly? probably? second favorite female transformer. quickshadow is soooo clean. she wasn’t my gay awakening, but she was damn close to it, i think the second moment of gay for me ever? the point is she is THE girlboss and i’d die for her any day of the week

glup shitto: oh you guys are gonna love the knights of unicron

poor little meow meow: TFA SENTINEL PRIME. he’s one of my favorite transformers characters and it’s exactly why everyone else hates him. did you know? i am one of the few people that follows #tfa sentinel prime. people tag him in content where they just need someone to be a dick, but it’s ooc and that makes me sad. i love him. if you would have him be a dick as he is in canon why not in an in-character way? i love him. he’s insufferable and horrible and, quite frankly, has no redeeming qualities, and isn’t that why he’s so perfect? i love him. he was the first canon tf i learned how to draw because i loved him, and if i made a mistake, then it wouldn’t even be an issue because he sucks so bad. when #revivetfa was a thing i remember people saying he would be a great trump allegory. he is actually the worst. i want nothing more than to sling him into the atmosphere and ride on his shoulder and teach him how to use a gps and learn about his trauma and fix him and make him worse and do nothing as i watch him go about his life taking notes the entire time, like a bug to study, like an alien to my planet, a speedrunner at AGDQ for thousands of people to watch live.

horse plinko: i had this fanfic that i never published nor finished about redeeming tfp starscream and i want to see him wrenched. i want to see him eviscerated. the fic had a bunch of It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better moments in it where i just kept letting him get injured, have trust issues, a memory of some of megatron’s abuse, i want to keep bending his little evil arm backwards against the joint until it dislodges and becomes good

eeby deeby: hm. strongarm and sideswipe. finally, a straight tf ship i could get behind and the writers did nothing. i love the rid2015 team but hate how little development they got, the writing was shit bro. i think it’d be especially fun to send sideswipe in alone in the elevator

critical role

blorbo: you guys ever watch brian david gilbert? the live brian david gilbert? when he was doing unraveled? the live unraveled show? the one where he went “TERRY! OH TEEERRR-RRRRERERERE, EE-EE-EE-EEEEEEE-EEEEYYYY” at the end? imagine that but instead of terry it’s caleb. that’s what my mind looks like whenever someone says campaign 2

scrunkly: kirkirikirkirkirkirkir kri!!! kiri baby! kiri so little and very sweet. the part when she (matt) perfectly imitated fjord (travis) fucking SENT me, i had to rewind so many times.

scrimblo bimblo: the weird sad albino looking carriage kid from the legend of vox machina. the one that drove the briarwoods around? it might just be because he reminds me of grave keeper identityfive but he had such a cool, distinct design, even if that mf got yeeted and skeeted so fast. i want good things for him! for him though. not society. whatever he decides to do with the good fortune in his life, that’s up to him. i will watch him fail and succeed and cause pain and heal.

glup shitto: pumat sol? pumat sol! he’s one of the few npcs i remember from the time i tried to eat through the actual podcast. comedy gold, funny guys pumal sol. hey, if anyone out there is writing a modern au crit role fanfic? pumat and the sols better be working at five guys together

poor little meow meow: the briarwoods did nothing wrong actually and i am also biromantic

horse plinko: ohhh percy. percy percy percy percy percy. percival. ohh i do not remember the last time i’ve wanted to see a character go so deep off the end. i want percy to snap. i want him deranged. i want him in a dragula cold open. i want him imprisoned. i want him to kill for the sake of blood, become a serial killer, and run from the fbi with the red still on his hands and against the gun. i want him to play town of salem. i want him to play among us. i want him broken and battered and shattered into a million little pieces of a man and with something very very very important missing from his brain. i would like to perform open heart surgery on him. i would like him to drop his ice cream. oh how deeply i want to break him, private tucker

eeby deeby: see above

#i am going to tag #critical role #just to deal damage to anyone unfortunate enough to see this post #we get requests by the oscar peterson trio #franken-x #blorbo asks