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#i love science so so so much every single one is incredible to me in every way..

marknee · 1 year

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bts fanfics i personally think shakespeare would lose his job over in the 1500’s.

chapter i. ✷ chapter ii.

KEYS ON SEVERITY OF SHAKESPEARE’S STATE:

( ✮ ) — poor sod is on the floor. perhaps it’s shock?

( ♬ ) — he’s jealous he didn’t write this himself. well, it sucks to suck, mate.

( ✎ ) — currently handing him a tissue. give him a second.

( ♛ ) — both him and i lost our jobs. her majesty is ruthless.

THE SHAKESPEARE SERIES.

WARNING: keep in mind, some of these authors are very strict on the rule that no minors should read their work if they’re underage, and i will honour that. but, at the end of the day, i am not your parent. so, there’s that. but heed my warning wisely. any smut or 18+ content is highlighted in bold.

NOTE: without further ado, this are the fanfics that i think would cause shakespeare to lose his job: the first of many essays. let’s bring the guy to his knees. metaphorically.

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( ♛ ) THE BODYGUARD — by @rmnamjoons

!! bodyguard!namjoon x reader | 62.9k !!

bodyguard au, romance, smut, fake dating, slight angst if you squint, lil bit of violence.

firstly, we’re starting off strong. i present to you, the mother of all namjoon fanfics. and she’s a bad bitch. tbh, i feel like this fic needs a moment of silence just to relish in her glory. soak it all up. it’s essential.

this fic genuinely had me gobsmacked at how incredibly written it is. it delves into every detail and no aspect of the story is left dry. you can tell the author put their everything into creating this world you just submerge into. and it shows.

the world building is amazing, the characters are so thought out, and it feels like you’re just on this adventure with them and discovering their story as it plots out.

also, the build up to the smut? out of this world. that’s one thing i love about this fic: it doesn’t feel rushed. everything is very spaced out and takes it’s sweet time, so when you get to the chocolately nut of the ferrero rocher, it’s like gold and well earned. and you can enjoy it.

honestly, it’s been months since i read this and i think about it every day. i did do some research (for my own peace of mind) and this fic is longer than the perks of being a wallflower. and is it better? yes. sorry not sorry.

this work of art deserves to be read and loved. and i rest my case, your honour.

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( ✎ ) UNTIL THE LAST STAR FALLS — by @minniepetals

!! underworld lords!bts x shield!reader | 44.4k !!

reincarnation!au, poly!au, gods!au, unrequited love, minor character death, car accidents.

quick question — for science — how does one happen to lose all their memories without any sustaining any internal or external injuries? because the things i would do to read this again for the first time. and i do not use those words lightly.

this was my first ever ‘longer’ written fic. and if i’m being honest, i never really liked to read them because i have the attention span of a goat. but this fic lures you in from the very start and time slips away like smoke. to say, it definitely left its mark on me.

it’s so brilliantly written and you feel connected to the characters both mind and soul. you want the best for them, you want to save them, you actually want to crawl into the pages (or screen) and fucking help them out. and that sold it to me, i think. just the sheer love for these characters.

i balled when i read the last few sentences. i didn’t want it to end. i think i finished it at three in the morning and sent a voice note of me crying to my friend. tmi? well, now on my christmas list is 7 hot boys in the underworld who would risk their everything for me. and i, them.

worth every single second. trust.

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( ♬ ) WARM THIS WINTER — by @jamaisjoons

!! seokjin x reader ft. ex-boyfriend jungkook | 51.6k !!

christmas!au, vacation!au, angst, fluff, smut (18+).

one thing about solaris, is she never misses. if i could, i think i’d recommend every fanfic she ever put out, but that’s too much effort for me when you could simply click her masterlist. so, i’ll wait here for you to do that. make sure you come back though.

love. sure, there are hundreds- perhaps, thousands of fics on this app about it. so what makes this one different? well, that’s just it. the sorrowful honesty of love. knowing when it’s over, and when it’s blooming in the midst.

i’ve never been in love, but frankly, this fic really spelt it out for me. the pain, the joy, the lingering memories after everything is said and done. it’s all there. and it really settles in your heart as you near the end.

this work pulled on every single heartstring of mine, stamped on them, and then proceeded to sew anew for the future to bring its own miseries. and i enjoyed it more than i can say (or type).

give this a read if you need just that bit of spark in your life. and that bit of sadness, too.

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( ✮ ) STRIKE A CHORD — by @snackhobi

!! yoongi x reader | 15.8k !!

smut (18+), pianist!yoongi.

i don’t know what it is about this fic, but i come back to it whenever it pops up in my mind during my day. i’ll immediately unlock my phone and open this app, knowing i’ll feel better when the last word is read. and i feel content.

the atmosphere in this fic, if i may, feels as though you’re trapped in a warm, safe bubble with hazed music in the distance and soft light spilling through the thin layer of the bubble— not too dark, but enough to make you feel drowsy and peaceful. perhaps that’s why i return to it so often. i like how it makes me feel.

yoongi as an artist is already enough to make a person swoon, but as a pianist? i need a lie down. a cold towel to the head. just the whole characterisation of him in this fic needs a whole separate essay in itself, but you’ll understand my point when you read it.

forever a comfort fic, i think. and forever a comfort person. double whammy. case closed.

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( ✎ ) THE END — by @jimlingss

!! seokjin x reader | 31k !!

fifty percent fluff, fifty percent angst, loosely inspired by to all the boys i’ve loved before.

i say this with my whole chest: i have never underestimated the amount of emotions you can experience during a fanfic, until i read the end— both literally and metaphorically. shock horror.

this fanfic takes you through the adventure of the reader learning of what her future would commence if she were to marry either one of the six members. best part? she’s led through this rollercoaster journey by the ghost of kim seokjin.

first impression to such an offer? sign me the fuck up. i mean, what more could you ask for? however my final impression went a bit more on the lines of what the fuck just happened. very different ends of the spectrum, if you ask me.

i decided to hand both shakespeare and i a tissue after this great piece of art was finished because not only was i sobbing, he was on the floor knowing his romance play of pericles could never live up to such an incredible story.

this fic was a rollercoaster i would be delighted to get onto for another ride.

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( ✎ ) A UNIVERSE TO YOU — by @readyplayerhobi

!! soulmate!hoseok x reader | 41k !!

fluff, angst, smut (18+), soulmates!au.

shakespeare once said (according to google), “it is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves,” and if this fic wasn’t a soulmate!au, i think i would’ve agreed in some sorts. but as it is, in fact, a soulmate!au, i’m obliged to disagree. it was destiny i read this fic, hand on heart.

i was not expecting this fic to hit me in the feels as hard as it did. as you can tell by the other works listed in this essay of recommendations, soulmate!au’s come up a lot. and with a lot of the same plots flying around on this app, it’s hard to make one stand out. but this author definitely has a gift.

everything was so richly created it made you feel full. of wonder, of love, and of want. it made you crave it for yourself. and that’s what i love about this fic. it just makes you feel… good. and with the unfortunates of life currently, it’s one to get your head stuck in for some temporary relief.

dream soulmate? he’s right here, people. just enjoy the story and all the feels that float around your body. go on.

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( ✮ ) BUNNY — by @btssmutgalore

!! jungkook x fem!reader | 46.5k !!

non-idol!au, camboy!jk, friends to lovers, smut, angst.

let’s start here: never judge a book by its cover. a quote by george eliot going all the way back to the 19th century, and one i would use to describe this series as a whole, and my first impressions towards it.

this series, although unfinished (i think), has exceeded my expectations of a good smut outlined by a good plot. the best of both worlds, if you might. i came out of this series deeply in awe of the writing and the clear imagery the author manages to create within your own mind.

additionally, bunny was the beginning for me in learning about the world of camboys and camgirls(?), but i was greatly surprised. often, people are unkind to the new and stick to what they’re accustomed to, afraid of what the unknown might bring — me, included.

but, i’m glad i took the risk because i received three great things in return: a beautiful fanfic, knowledge of something that was foreign to me, and an author whose work i admire and shall be returning to in the future.

perhaps what i’m getting at is this could be a lesson to all. take a risk of something unknown because who knows? maybe something great will come out of it, and you’ll learn something. i did.

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( ♬ ) SEOUL UNDERGROUND — by @hunniejimins (ao3)

!! namjoon x jungkook x f!reader | 300k !!

mafia!au, enemies to lovers, violence, slow burn, love triangles, mob boss!namjoon, smut, heavy angst.

it’s ironic really. i found this work by someone else’s recommendation, and now i’m passing on the favour and recommending it to you, dear reader. it’s funny how the world works.

this work is the perfect balance of fantasy and reality and i love it. you’re hit with the beauty and clouded haze of love before being smacked back into the world at the realisation the very person you’re in love with, is a mafia mob boss and his killer mate. a real fun-sponge, i tell ‘ya.

nevertheless, this book kept me up early morning and late evening reading. it keeps you hooked, wanting, and hungry for more.

it’s nothing less of a masterpiece.

⠀

( ✎ ) CREAM AND SUGA — by @snackhobi

!! yoongi x barista f!reader | 14.8k !!

coffee shop!au, barista!au, fluff, nfsw (18+).

@snackhobi is mentioned twice on this list. though, can you blame me? it’s just a good thing shakespeare and this author don’t exist in the same century. it would be absolute carnage but nobody is ready for that conversation.

this author has a talent of portraying yoongi in the most irresistible way possible. i swear, i fall in love with him all over again reading. i wish you understood.

the whole misunderstanding section made me laugh because haven’t we all been there? the crushing pain and overwhelming guilt of having a crush on someone you can’t have. it’s all too real, seriously. been there, done that (unfortunately).

especially having the holidays just past, this is a perfect fic for a warm evening in, while the coldness of winter storms past outside. such a cute fic. love, love, love!

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( ♛ ) LOST AND FOUND — by @taleasnewastime

!! seokjin x reader | 21.2k !!

strangers to lovers, fluff, angst, sfw.

everyone says they have a fanfic that changed them, whether they’re being hyperbolic or brutally honest. and in my case, it’s a matter of both latter and former.

a couple months ago, i reached what i thought was rock bottom regarding my mental state and i took to my imagination to save me from the daily hell of my own mind. and this book was one i never really forgot about.

everything this author wrote within this fic was honest, heartfelt and very, very real. from the way you don’t just go up after going through something, but fall occasionally and sometimes feel as though you’re back at square one, to the way that there definitely is hope in the dark moments, and a light at the end of the tunnel. albeit a very faint one.

it comforted me in a way and reminded me of what i thought to be lost. fruitless, even. but sometimes, it’s books like these that open our eyes to things we’ve forgotten during times of turmoil: the simple goodness of life. and of people.

“if you’re going through hell, keep going.” winston churchill.

⠀

( ✮ ) CANDYLAND — by @honeymoonjin

!! seokjin x reader ft. elf!jk | 13k !!

thriller, angst, fantasy, husband!jin, some cursing.

my mother is the biggest thriller fan. not that you needed to know that, but she is. and she’s not ashamed of it either. she’ll let you know if she’s reading a really good thriller in the moment. trust me, you’ll know.

me? not so much. i’m more of a sappy, hopeless romance, happy ending kind-of-sod — if you haven’t already guessed from this list. but there’s a reason this fic is on the list, too.

this fic genuinely kept me on the edge of my seat- uh, bed. the secrets of what darkness lingered behind the happy exterior of this adventure trip gripped my eyes to the screen, and lord, was it worth it.

throw a bit of husband!seokjin in there too? what more could you want! and written by @honeymoonjin? what a win.

let’s just say after this fic i added a few other thrillers to my basket. and happily reported to my mum i was a changed woman. okay, i’m exaggerating, but you get my point. it was incredible.

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( ✎ ) LILY LUCK — by @gguksgalaxy

!! yoongi x reader | 10.7k !!

soulmates!au, angst, fluff if u squint, very slight implicit sexual content, anxiety.

although this fic may be the shortest on the list, do not underestimate its power. it is still as mighty as the others— perhaps, even more so.

i think the main emotion i want to hone into concerning this fanfic is compassion. it sinks into your bones and surrounds your entire being like a unwanted hug. and you can’t even stop it.

the author does a good job of making you feel intense compassion for the reader — who so desperately wants to meet her soulmate. which makes the ending that much more satisfying.

this is for those who’re lonely, need a pick up, or those who’re hopeless romantics and believe in love belonging to fate, such as myself.

“expectation is the root of all heartache.” william shakespeare. talking of the devil, he would definitely cry over this fic. either of bubbling emotions, or the fact he didn’t write it himself. sucks really. for him, not for me.

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carrotsofthepirabbean · 7 months

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I will say I think part of the reason OG Kirk isn't more popular on Tumblr is because he can't be crammed into the 'If one part of a ship is the unemotional logical one the other one MUST be the bouncy himbo sparkle softboy' cliche. Kirk can be goofy and has a good sense of humor, he teases and laughs, but speaking in Lord of the Rings terms, Kirk isn't Pippin, he's Aragorn.

Which is SO much tougher for the 'must distill every variety of character into the same 5 different people' crowd on Tumblr. There isn't an 'Aragorn' slot because 'incredibly complicated' isn't descriptive enough for cliche. Like yes, he's charming, but it's the quiet sort of charming. Yes, he's a strong athlete and a fighter, but he's fundamentally a shockingly huge nerd and spends his private time reading poetry and thinking about philosophy and what it means to be a leader. Yes, he's haunted, but he has a fundamental hope that keeps shining through. Kirk's got a serious job, and he's a serious person. He's an Adult kind of adult. He's one of the last survivors of a horrific genocide. He's killed people with his bare hands.

Spock wasn't bowled over by how bright and shiny and cuddly Kirk was. Because underneath everything, there's a fundamental sadness and loneliness to Kirk, and a simmering possibility of rage that most people would consider Abnormal. And Spock shares those qualities, though for different reasons. The thing that really shakes Spock (besides Kirk's iron sense of loyalty) is that there are times where KIRK is more coolheaded and professional than Spock is. In everyday terms, Kirk is easily and confidently emotional in a way Spock was always taught was a weakness, but when the shit hits the fan Kirk gets this shine of cold, calculating, James Bond-like brutality/practicality that not only meets Spock's Vulcan control, it will at times go PAST it. Surviving that genocide gave Kirk access to both a level of iron-willed 'do whatever is necessary to live no matter what' and a level of genuinely bloodcurdling rage that, when death is on the line, reads sometimes like a Vulcan on steroids. In a battle-type situation Kirk has absolutely looked at Spock and snapped like 'for god's sake, control yourself', and that is some whiplash a Vulcan doesn't just get OVER.

At the very start OG Kirk is already both wildly famous for and frighteningly good at being a commander, better than Spock is by miles, which forces Spock to confront his self-hate fueled 'Vulcans are better' prejudices over and over again until Spock has a starry-eyed admiration for Kirk that knocks him so hard into love that Spock's teeth rattle. Kirk isn't Some Soft Boy that grows on Famous Vulcan Spock against his will. Kirk is the most talented Starfleet officer in generations- He's Horatio Nelson, except not an imperialist asshole. Spock is (at first) just Some Science Guy who managed to nail one of the most coveted jobs in Starfleet.

Like, what is Tumblr going to do with a Kirk (who is supposed to be the bouncy soft boy half of Spirk) who looks coldly at an alien who is killing people and without hesitation goes 'I am a military man, we have a mission, we don't have time to understand motivations, kill that thing' and calmly walks off? And then Spock, (the unemotional logical one) is the one going after him going 'please, this is a thinking creature, it could be scared or hurt, think of its feelings, at least let me try to talk to it'. And like, the big lesson of the episode is KIRK being convinced by Spock to care more and be more empathetic?

Like, that's not some shit Tumblr can fit into its 'five acceptable personalities for every single ship ever'. There isn't a category for 'one is the logical one and the other one is the guy in charge on the battlefield that the men point their swords at while yelling "to the king!"'

But, it does make me a bit sad, because god, the relationship between Kirk and Spock is unique. Because Kirk is SUCH a freak. If there's a fictional personality grouping Kirk is a part of it's like Kirk, Chris Evans' Captain America, Aragorn, and nobody.

I super agree! AOS Kirk fits the bill more for the ship dynamics tumblr focuses on (and I do really love Chris Pine's performance, not half because it was what introduced me to Star Trek in the first place), but I do find TOS Kirk more intriguing because he has such layers. He's scarily competent, youngest captain in Starfleet and it's not like you get in that position by being a sunshine flower boy - he's got a streak of cold practicality that, yeah, is super apparent in Devil in the Dark. But he's also warm, loving, and physically affectionate with his closest friends, professional with his subordinates and his duties, calculating with his enemies, and overall an exceedingly intelligent individual who does not take his position and responsibilities lightly. And in terms of his relationship with Spock, it was all those things that drew Spock's respect and interest, and not (checks notes) his being a "bouncy himbo sparkle soft-boy". He's just a wonderful character <3

#I do however love a good 'spock blushes cause jim is physically affectionate' thing though #as is clearly apparent in the last drawing i posted. but i love jim for being a responsible and mature leader #including the kind of cold and practical decisions he makes #as well as being a warm and affectionate man #god i do fucking lvoe that man god help me #ask #star trek #jim kirk #star trek tos

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teyamsatan · 1 year

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Illicit Affairs | Chapter X: Invisible String

Pairing: Neteyam x Human/Avatar!Reader

Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX

Synopsis: Back from the dead, you have to heal in order to be able to move on and be forever part of the people. You and Neteyam finally find each other, giving in to desires you've both had for years.

Warnings: SMUT (18+ minors DNI!!!), some angst, fluff, all the feels, so many feels, the end

Word Count: 14,7k words (i need to be stopped)

A/N: The last chapter of Ilicit Affairs is finally here!! It took me a lot longer than I thought to finish this, but that's because this chapter is longer than my first like 5 chapters combined. I don't know what happened hahahah. I'm so excited to share this with you, the conclusion and culmination of this whole story. I hope you find it a satisfying pay-off, and I'd love to hear allll of your thoughts. Honestly, replies and asks make my life and I cry a little bit every time someone interacts with my content. I hope you have enjoyed this journey, and make sure you read til the end for a (hopefully pleasant) surprise ;)

As always, thank you to everyone who asked to be tagged, I love you all sm!! Ok enjoy byeee x

“Isn't it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me? A string that pulled me out of all the wrong arms right into that dive bar Something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire Chains around my demons, wool to brave the seasons One single thread of gold tied me to you”

Neteyam stood in the room that he knew so well now, he had memorised its cracks in the white walls, and he was holding your hand, slowly tracing the now-fading yellow bruises along your arm. He looked at the tube that was going into the nook of your elbow and followed his eyes along it, until it reached a little clear pouch with a liquid that was dripping slowly all the way into your body. You were talking animatedly with Kiri, Norm and Max, looking over a bunch of plants displayed on a table in front you. It was incredible to see you, you looked like a completely different person than you were a few days ago. As soon as you woke up, you asked for the treatment you worked on and got working, and your symptoms improved massively. You were still sick, and the virus was still there, not to mention the damage it had already done couldn’t be reversed, it had to be treated on day at a time. Norm said your lungs were getting better and your heart was too, but your kidneys, he thought they were called, still not cleared your blood properly, so you were still stuck in bed with a big tube coming out of your neck where it removed your blood and another tube where it returned it back to your body. Neteyam did not understand how any of this worked, but whatever science it took, he was grateful for. He did not leave your sight in this time, refusing to be parted with you for even more than a few minutes at a time. Jake helped Max and Norm bring in an extra large bed, like the ones made for Avatars and add it to the room next to your own bed, and he slept there, reaching over to hold you hand at all times.

There was so much between you that was still unsolved, still eating at his insides, but he did not want to overwhelm you or pain you in any way while in this state, so he was satisfied to just be near you and listen to your heavy breathing while you slept, and be comforted by the sound of the ECG machine letting him know you were still there, that your heart was still beating and it wasn’t stopping anytime soon.

“Ok, I think we need to start with how will we extract the proteins from these plants. I’ve not done protein extraction on plants, but I assume we can do some sort of chloroform or methanol precipitation? You and Grace used to work with plants a lot more than Max or I, so I think you would be the best at figuring it this out, no?” Neteyam looked at you with wide eyes, so perpetually impressed with your intelligence and drive, with how good you seemed to be at tackling any challenge. You were barely breathing properly, but here you were, trying to find a cure for this illness that almost took your life. The first full sentence you said after coming back to life was to Kiri, and he was a little jealous, but overall incredibly proud of you and your strength that felt like it could move mountains if you put all your might into it. Knowing you, he was sure this virus will be dead meat soon.

“Right, I can take care of the protein extraction, you can then run mass spectrometry on it and see what we’re working with. It’s going to be a lot of work, are you sure you don’t want us to take care of it? Until we figure out exactly which active ingredient in which one of these plants gets results, it’s nonstop. I don’t think you’re ready to be back to work yet.”

“I can’t sit back and do nothing. We’ll see how I feel, worst case scenario I do all the analysis from the comfort of this bed, deal?”

Norm was happy to hear that you weren’t being stubborn for once. Whatever happened to you when you died, you definitely seemed changed. As if death brought forth epiphanies that made you want to live, to heal. Neteyam was definitely not complaining.

After a while, everyone cleared, and you and Neteyam were left by yourselves. You turned around to watch him, giving him a little grin.

“You know you don’t have to stay here every minute of the day, right?”

“I disagree.”

You laughed heartily, your breath getting caught in your throat when the action made your lungs hurt, and the laughter turned to wincing, much to Neteyam’s dismay. Eventually, the wincing turned to sighing, and you didn’t look at him as you spoke again.

“Shouldn’t you be with your mate?”

It was his turn to wince, and he realised you probably couldn’t avoid talking about your issues forever.

“Do you really want to talk about this right now?”

“Neteyam… I won’t be the other woman. And I’m also not going to be the woman who steals a man from another, or who endorses whatever the hell this is. I need to make sure you are serious about this, about us. I might still not make the consciousness transfer. I need you to think about this, and if you do and you decide that it is me after all, then you need to talk to her. She deserves that, she deserves better than what she’s been getting. And I don’t want to be part of this until I know she is not being deceived or led on.”

“You are right. I will talk to her today, alright? But I’m not leaving you right now.”

“Do you want to watch a movie?”

You could feel yourself getting stronger by the day. It was a struggle still, your lungs feeling like they were going to explode any time you took a deep breath in and your heart oscillating between going a million miles a minute to barely functioning in the span of a day, but you were getting there. The combination treatment was definitely doing its job, and your body was no longer on the brink of collapse. Some colour returned to your cheeks in time, and since you have been eating about 15 meals a day because of how worried everyone was, you were gaining weight back, which was further increasing your day-to-day quality of life. You got a lot of sleep in the last few days, probably more combined than in the past few months, and you felt rested, for the first time in a really long time.

The first two days were the hardest, your body reeling from withdrawal on top of everything else you were experiencing. But you were feeling good today, and were trying to remain optimistic so as to not fall into old patterns. Having Neteyam next to you helped, your light in all the darkness, he refused to leave your sight, even in the face of more pressing matters.

The humans were closing in, you were told. The ships will be landing any day now, which only contributed to your slow recovery, as the anxiety was manifesting itself physically and hurting your progress. You felt stressed at the situation and more so at the thought that Neteyam wasn’t there, in the meetings and in practice, missing it all so he could stay with you. You hated it, worrying constantly and he wouldn’t hear it.

“It’s only a couple of days, Atan. Stop worrying.”

Today was the day they were going to remove the dialysis machine, which you were extremely excited about. You felt the need to walk, to stretch out your legs, to be back in the lab. You had a lot to do, a lot you had riding on this. You were trying not to think too hard on how you were doing everything in your power to further procrastinate healing, knowing that at some point you were going to have to deal with the trauma head on and open that damned drawer, that held all of your darkest memories, all of the things you spent your whole life pushing away. If you were going to be ready to heal, ready to move on, you had to do so with a clear conscience and a clean slate. You were adamant that you were going to find the cure for the virus and use it on yourself before you made a decision about the consciousness transfer. You had to be 100% sure of your choice, of your decision to leave this life behind forever, and you couldn’t do that if you viewed it as an escape from your current weak and disease-ridden body.

It took a while to be disconnected to the machine and get the tube out of your neck. From now on til you decide whether to go through with the transfer, you will have to do this for a few hours a day, which was a pain, but better than being bed ridden all day.

You put your feet on the ground for the first time in days, and you forced yourself to stand slowly, and quickly realised it was a bad idea, and your knees immediately buckled under you. Neteyam caught you with both his hands under your arms, and effortlessly raised you until your feet were a few inches above ground.

“Put me down! This is so embarrassing.” You groaned at your own impairment, and refused to give up, slowly starting to walk with shaky feeble steps. You felt both Norm and Neteyam hover over you, and although you were grateful for them, you wanted to scream at how upsetting it was making you having to be looked after like you were a baby taking her first steps. You guess, in some ways, you were.

You eventually got to your room, which looked untouched, if a little dusty. You were happy to see it again, happy to take it all in. It was a bit surreal, the whole experience. You didn’t realise how much it was all going to matter, all the little things, until you were dead on a hospital bed, begging Eywa for another chance. Every wall, every creak on the floor, every book, it all hit you suddenly, and you had to sit down on the ground, your back against the bed frame, so as to not collapse under the weight of this whole endeavour.

“Atan, are you alright?” Neteyam’s voice was laced with concern, and you tried to stop panting long enough to answer him.

“I’m fine, it’s just a lot.”

He slowly sat down next to you, struggling to squeeze in the tight space between the bed and the desk. His knee was brushing up against the side of the thigh, and you felt heat spread from the touch through your entire body. He gently raised one hand to the side of your face, removing strands of hair that were falling on it and tucking them behind your ear.

“Talk to me, Atan. I want to know, I want to help.”

You felt tears pool in your eyes, and you couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look anywhere but the ground as the words got lodged in your throat. This was going to be much harder than you thought.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Neteyam. I’m sorry that I almost died, that I did die, and that you had to witness it. I’m sorry for not telling you, I am sorry for not fighting harder, I am sorry for so many things.” Hot tears were falling on your arm laying in your lap and you struggled to find the words to speak. “I am still so mad at you, so mad that you left, so mad that you lied, so mad that you never told me how you felt about me, so mad about so many things, but I shouldn’t have kept this from you. We’ve been inseparable since birth, and no matter what happened, you deserved to know, you all deserved to know. You deserved to say goodbye. I am sorry I took that from you.”

You were both crying now, and he picked you up and placed in his lap with little visible effort, it was probably easier for him than carrying Tuk. You wrapped your arms around his neck and slid your legs around him to wrap around his back and you stood there, crying in the crook of his neck while he held you tightly, trying not to hurt you.

“I am sorry for leaving. Sorry for not talking to you about how I felt, sorry about giving up on you. I should have stayed and helped you heal, I should have been there for you to rely on instead of being yet another thing you had to deal with in this life. I am sorry about lying about Tiongli, I am sorry for not telling them all no from the beginning. Even without the Avatar, there was only one woman in this whole world I would ever belong to, and I would have been happy spending my whole life in this lab, if it meant doing it with you. I was scared, and I am sorry.”

He removed your head slowly from the crook of his neck, and grasped the side of you face with one of his hands, thumb trailing over your lips, tracing them from your cupid’s bow to your lower lips, and you shuddered at the touch, deep desire pooling within you.

“I love you so much. I have loved you my whole life, from the moment I was born, and I will love you until the moment I die. I am so sorry it took me so long to grow, but I am ready now. Whatever it is, I will brave it with you, and for you. You will never have to do this alone again.”

You were sobbing now, unmoored at his confession that you have waited for your entire life. You were so overwhelmed by the love and affection you felt for this man, for the appreciation of knowing he was willing to hear the deepest, darkest parts of your soul and share in that pain willingly.

“I love you too. I missed you so much.”

After crying it out on the crook of his neck, letting your human hands caress the soft blue skin of his back and chest while he held you, fingers running up and down your spine in a comforting motion, you eventually got up from his lap slowly, and crawled on all your fours to your messy old desk. You took a key that was taped to the underside of your chair, and, with a deep sigh and tired eyes, unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. You took out just one thing. A bracelet. You smiled at the sight, and tightened it around your arm multiple times so it fit on your human form. You looked at Neteyam coyly, giving him a soft smile, and you saw his hand reaching for his own bracelet, with a gummy smile and tears in his eyes.

Maybe you could do this after all.

You eventually started working in the lab again, being a lot more careful about striking a balance between work and everything else in your life. You were still struggling to sleep, especially now that Norm and Max flushed every pill you had down the toilet, but you were trying your best. The best was when Neteyam slept over, and you just fell asleep flush against his bare body, whose warmth melted away all your nightmares and replaced them with much better, much lewder ones. You weren’t getting anywhere with your research, as Kiri found a lot of plants in the forest, and to do mass spectrometry and proteomics on so many proteins, and analysing them all was an impossible task in the time you had left. So in an afternoon, as you were hanging out with her, Lo’ak, Spider and Neteyam in the hub, guitar strumming in your hands, you had a lightbulb moment.

“Kiri, if you had to save one plant, just one on this whole planet, which one would it be?” Kiri was special. Whenever the rest of the kids argued over her heritage, making crude jokes about Grace and Norm, trying to figure out who her dad is, you always had a different hypothesis, that you never said out loud. Kiri was Eywa’s child, as much as Grace’s. She was the key to everything. Eywa was flowing through her, guiding her, and you believed she had a lot more up her sleeve than any of you knew, than even she knew.

“Hmmm, that is a hard question.” She looked deep in thought for a long time, and eventually it’s like a huge epiphany was released from her mind. “Pamtseowll!!”

“The Cat Ear plant? Are you sure?”

“I think so! I don’t know why that one, but that’s the only thing that came to mind, and when I thought about it, I just knew it was the right one! Why do you ask?”

You raised from the ground, placed the guitar on a bench next to you, and ran (more like walked at slightly increased velocity than normal) to her, kissing her forehead in a loud smooch.

“I’ll let you know!! Wait here!!”

You talked to Norm, telling him your hunch and asking him to treat a vial of the infected blood with the liquid extracted from the plant in question, that you already had in stock thanks to Kiri. It would take a while, but you were buzzing in excitement, feeling extremely positively about your idea and your new odds. You made it back to the hub where they were all waiting for you, and sat back on the ground, mischievously ignoring their curious glares.

“Are you going to tell us what this was all about?” Spider said, rolling your eyes at your antics.

“Nope.”

They eventually dropped it, and you sat together, talking about everything and nothing, trying to ignore the looming doom of the ships slowly making their way to Pandora’s atmosphere, and the deadly consequences that would follow them.

You picked up the guitar again, deep in thought. Before you could help yourself, you found yourself speaking.

“I saw my mum.”

Everybody stopped and stared at you in shock. None of them said anything, and you swore you could hear a hairpin drop for sure in this big hall, or your heart pounding in your ears.

“When I died…” you started cautiously, not even knowing why you started talking in the first place, but knowing it was too late to back off now. “…I woke up in this new place I have never seen before. Eventually, I realised I was on Earth, in my mum’s childhood home. There were pictures of her on the wall, with her parents, she looked young, and happy… and alive.”

“Her house overlooked the ocean, and I went and sat on the beach and she came. Like it was nothing, she just came to me, and sat me down, and watched me cry on her shoulder until I thought I was running out of tears.”

This bit was easy enough to speak about, now came the real problem. You swallowed the big lump in your throat and continued. “She told me she did the same things I did. That she had been sad, so very sad, ever since my father died, the kind of sad that never goes away, the kind of sad I am.” You couldn’t look at them, preferring the look of your guitar that you were holding on to dear life as you spoke, and saw small tears crashing into the strings, splattering everywhere. “She said she didn’t try… to stay alive, to heal. Just like I didn’t. She said she had a choice, and she chose to die, because the hurt was too much for her to bear. She left me, orphaned me, put me through so much pain I’m still dealing with a decade later.”

You heard small gasps and sharp breath intakes and the new information, but couldn’t stop to acknowledge it, needing it out of your soul as soon as possible. “I was so hurt, so mad at her. That she left, that she didn’t fight harder to be in my life, that she left me with so many scars because of her selfishness. And then it dawned on me… that was me. I did that to you. To all of you. And I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

They all slowly sat up from where they sat and gathered around you in a circle, and hugged you.

“We forgive you. We’re just happy you’re still here. We love you, we want you to know that you’ll always be able to talk to us. You’ll always have us. We’re a family. Sullys stick together.”

You felt each of these words deep within you, the forgiveness something you craved like air, and you realised how much it must have meant to your mum. You were happy you could do that for her. You were happy something good came out of all the misery.

Later that day, all the Sully kids left, and you went to your room, carrying your guitar in your hands, and found yourself again, sitting on the ground, reaching for the bottom drawer key and unlocking it with shaky hands and muffled cries. It was time. You reached inside it for a photo album, with old school printed photos on it, and opened it. Your heart was hurting so badly you needed to place your hand on your hand to try to settle it, settle the pain and agony you felt. The first photo was a photo of you and your mum in the medical ward, holding you tightly against her chest, looking really tired with the caption “you had just been born a couple hours ago, how crazy is that?”. The second one - a photo of you, as a tiny baby, only a few days old by the scribbling on it. Countless photos of you, in various stages of growth, in various positions, all captioned by your mother, who loved you more than anything else in this world and whose love was loud and clear in every one of these images. The tears kept falling off the laminated pages and onto your legs, and your anguished cries took over the music playing in the background. An image of you and Neteyam, in a crib, his body much larger than yours even as tiny infants, but you were holding hands, sleeping peacefully next to each other. An image of your mum with Neytiri and Jake, smiling widely for the camera. A photo of your mum in her Avatar body with all the Sully kids, her holding Tuk in her arms when she was just born. An image of her in the lab, mid laugh with a pipette gun in her hand - no one would ever have been able to tell how much hurt she was hiding underneath, how close she was to death. Finally, an image of her and your dad, taken by your dad, of them looking into each other’s eyes lovingly. The caption, blurred and blotched from dried tear stains, read “the love of my life, the light in all the darkness”. You closed the album panting, and brought it close to your heart, just holding on to it while you cried.

You were spent by the end, but wanted to push through, needing to get this done all in one go. You removed another thing from the drawer, a camera, the gift Jake have you for your birthday. You eventually sat on your desk chair, and plugged it into your laptop. You clicked on the only file on it, and gasped at your mum’s face appearing on the screen, smiling while adjusting the camera to centre her face. She started speaking, and you clung to every word, making sure her voice and words will forever be imprinted on your mind.

“My child,

I know it’s been a while since you have since my face.” she says with a small laugh.

“I’m making this tape for your 18th birthday, as this should be around the time when your Avatar is ready for you to use. I gave Norm and the rest of them notes and doodles and research and I think they can do it, my love. I think they can build you the ramps new life, one amongst the Na’vi. I am so excited for you, you have no idea.

Happy birthday, bunny. You will forever be the best and brightest thing I will have ever achieved. I am more sorry than you will ever know that I don’t get to see you grow up, see the beautiful, intelligent, caring and loving person you already are blossom into so much more, but I want you to know, more than anything, that I have no regrets.

I have lived my life exactly the way I wanted to. I have explored new worlds, I have contributed something good to the world, I have lived and I have loved deeply and unconditionally. I just hope you do, too. I hope this world doesn’t break you, my love. I hope it doesn’t snuff out your light, because in that case, I will have failed you, and I am so sorry.

I know you are sad, and I know you have probably been sad for a while, and I know this life is emotionally abusive, and it takes and takes and takes until there’s nothing left. But it’s also worth living. Because you can learn to take from it, too. You can learn to heal, and love and live, and replace whatever it took in time with even better fitted pieces. But in order to do that, you have to live, my love.

Even at 10, you have a tendency to keep sadness in, and don’t let it out. That’s something you got from me, and I’m sorry for that. I love that you got my eyes, and my addiction to music and my love for science and literature, but baby, I don’t want you to be like me in every way. You also have a tendency to isolate, and that, you also got from me. I’m hoping that will change in time, I’m hoping Neteyam, and Spider, and Lo’ak and Kiri, and eventually Tuk will be able to break through and allow their light to shine on the dark walls of this lab. But if not, I’m hoping this Avatar will.

I want you to know that it’s alright to hurt, and it’s alright to be scared and wonder if the path you’ve taken is the correct one. We all wonder through this life scared and confused and a little alone. But it’s up to us to want to make a change and it’s worth it, baby. I know opening yourself up to hurt is scary and hard, but it will also allow to love, to love fully and deeply, to give yourself to others and have them give themselves to you. There’s beauty in this world and this life, but you need to be brave to experience it.

Your dad and I love you very much. Enjoy this Avatar, and enjoy all that it can bring to your life. You are the brightest light of my life, and now it’s time for you to become another’s.”

You replayed the video until you were so spent, your eyes were closing painfully from the tiredness and hurt and tears. After that, you went to your bed, still clinging to the photo album, and fell asleep, to a song you hoped one day you’ll be strong enough to play yourself, but for now had to settle for the original.

I should've asked you questions, I should've asked you how to be Asked you to write it down for me, should've kept every grocery store receipt Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me Watched as you signed your name Marjorie All your closets of backlogged dreams, and how you left them all to me...

Norm came bursting through the door of your bedroom, waking you up in a panic. “What the fuck, Norm??”

“We did it.” He came to your bedroom and took you by the shoulders, shaking you. He screamed and jumped in the air.

“WE FUCKING DID IT, ACE!”

You jumped from the bed onto your knees, so you were almost face to face.

“WHAT? ARE YOU FOR REAL?”

“YES, OH MY GOD, YES!”

You jumped on him and he caught you, and you just spun around in your tiny room, laughing and screaming at the beginning of your new life.

Thank you, mum. For looking after me even after you’ve gone. Thank you.

You had to toil a bit with details, but by midday, you were ready to get the substance, now purified and diluted in appropriate medium for being inserted in a human body. You watched as Norm prepared, and held your breath as he injected it into your now healed veins. You didn’t know whether it would work, or how many doses you would need, this was all so new, it was kind of crazy you were willing to inject it in your body with so little information, but you trusted your mum, and you trusted Kiri, and you trusted Eywa.

You felt good. So good, in fact, you knew exactly what you wanted to do.

Neteyam was in the village, in a deep strategy meeting about how they were going to approach the upcoming threat looming over everybody. His mind was only half listening, the other half too busy with musings of you. What were you doing? Have you eaten? Did you take your treatment? He was worried about you after yesterday, and felt guilty he didn’t stick around for the night in case you needed him. He is pulled out of his train of thought when he hears a loud banshee scream, and everyone’s attention turns to the entrance of the tent, to which everyone rushes. When Neteyam makes his way outside, his mouth drops at the sight of you, beautiful and wild, free on top of your golden white ikran.

You were radiant, smiling widely at him while you removed your queue and your visors and brought your hand to your forehead and greeted everyone at the meeting.

“Hey, kid.” The Sully patriarch came over and gave you a big hug, a conflicted look on his face. “Are you sure it’s ok for you to use your Avatar?”

“We did it, Jake. We found the cure.”

His mother and father both gasped loudly at the news and hugged you tightly, and you held on to them with all your might, pouring all of your love and apologies into it. Neteyam was too stunned to say anything, pure bliss escaping his body in the form of silent tears, that he wiped immediately from his face - he was in a meeting with all the warriors, there couldn’t be tears.

“I’m actually here to steal the future Olo’eyktan, if that’s ok with everyone. I will bring him back in one piece, I promise.”

“Fine, but don’t be too late. I don’t want to have to use the radio, am I making myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Neteyam saw you click your tongue towards where you were standing, and felt a ping of arousal at your sight, at your confident demeanour. You used to be such a wild girl before life got too much for you to bear. He hoped he’d get to see that in you again, just like he was now. His hands made their way to his mouth and formed a circle around it, and he screamed loudly for his ikran, which appeared quickly and landed next to yours. He connected the queue and both of you took flight at the same time.

You flew like that for a while, and he was mystified at the experience. He has spent so much of his time riding with other people, flying as much a chore as a delight, but nothing that will ever be able to top this. You were screaming, fiercely and ferociously, doing barrel rolls in midair on your beautiful banshee, laughing loudly and urging her to almost bump into him, to which he gasped in mock annoyance and returned the favour. He followed you to the Hallelujah mountains, all the way to a cave on one of the floating rocks. It was beautiful, and he thought it would probably be breathtaking at night. You both landed, panting from the adventure, and made your ways to each other after petting your ikrans affectionately.

His hands immediately found your face, holding you tightly to look deep into your eyes. Your eyes softened looking at him, and he could see himself in them, looking intense and troubled.

“Did you really do it?”

You raised you own hand and brushed an unwieldy braid from his face, gently tugging it behind his ear. He saw your tail swish enthusiastically.

“We really did it.”

Neteyam’s mouth immediately found yours, desperate for your touch, the feeling of relief washing over him and it was so intense this is the only way it could be manifested. He needed you, craved your touch, craved the closeness, craved to make up for all the time you two lost. You moaned into the kiss and deepened it, opening your mouth, inviting his tongue to meet yours and dance in the way that made you both weak in the knees. You put your hand on his chest and pushed him and it caught him off guard, because he tipped backwards and hit the ground with a painful thud. You smirked and raised an eyebrow, and he moaned at the sight. You immediately got on top of him, straddling his lap and pulling him by his chest piece until your lips met his again. Your hands went into his hair and his did the same, and you let out a wail when he pulled on it, making your head tilt backwards, giving him access to your neck that he attacked mercilessly, leaving trails of his presence all over you. You felt him, hard against your core that was dripping in arousal, and you thoughtlessly starting grinding against him, feeling your mind flooded with sensations you never wanted to let go of.

“Neteyam, we can’t.” It hurt you saying these words, it was taking every ounce of self discipline you had, which at the moment was almost none.

“Yes, we can. In fact, I think it would be irresponsible of us not to.”

You laughed, smacking his chest playfully at his words. You brought your hand to his face and caressed it softly, and he closed his eyes in bliss.

“I want to do this properly. I will be one of you soon, for the rest of my life. I want to do this your way. I want to be mated to you the Na’vi way. Then we can do whatever you want, however you want. Deal?” You raised an eyebrow at him, smiling mischievously.

“Only if you stop raising your eyebrow at me, otherwise I make no promises.”

You laughed again, and laid next to him with your head on his chest, hoping this moment could last forever.

“Hey, I have to do something, and it won’t be pleasant. I was going to go alone, but I’ve made a promise to not go about everything alone. So if your offer still stands, would you like to come with me?”

You felt Neteyam’s hand stop caressing your hair like it had been for a while. He starts getting up, pushing your head off his chest slowly in the process. He looked serious, concerned, but he had a calming smile on, and when he took your hands in his and held them tightly, you knew you were gonna be ok.

“Let’s go.”

You got on your ikrans and flew back to the forest, feeling comforted by the knowledge he was there, next to you. You didn’t have to do this alone. You landed in the clearing next to the exo suit that belonged to you dad. Your heart was picking up pace from the sight, but it was time. It was time to work through it.

You slid off Neyn’s back and made your way to the suit, running your hands over it to remove some of the vines and eventually reaching for the dash cam. It was probably long dead, but you had to try, especially after what your mum said. You fiddled with the screen for a while, and eventually, it turned on, making you jump out of your skin.

In the view of the camera stood a man, tall and bald, wearing military clothing and reloading the guns that came with the suit. You’ve seen him before, in a photo in one of the jackets you found rummaging for clothes to wear. His name was Lyle Weinfleet.

“Captain, I think if we go through this clearing, we should be closing in on the tree of souls in about 3 clicks.”

“You’re right. But I don’t think we should do it.”

Lyle looked stunned, and he stopped whatever he was doing to turn around and look and your dad. “Barlowe, what are you talking about?”

“This is wrong, Lyle. You know it, I know it, everyone here fucking knows it. And if you don’t, you’re even a bigger psychopath than I thought you were. We have to go back.”

“I’m not fucking going anywhere, Captain. These freaks are going to kill all of us if they get their way. Someone has to stop them.”

Your dad picked up his gun and pointed it at him. “Are you disobeying direct orders, lieutenant?”

“You’re not my squad leader, Captain. And I have orders from above.”

A fight ensued which eventually resulted in the destruction of both the exo suits. Your dad got out of the suit, and the last time the camera picked up was Weinfleet running at him with a knife.

You lowered the screen and sat in silence for a long time. Neteyam’s hands were rubbing up and down your arms, and you felt his chest radiating heat on your back. You were happy to have him here, as the new influx of information was overwhelming enough to make you dizzy. Your dad didn’t attack on that fateful night 19 years ago. Everything you believed your entire life was false.

“My dad was not a horrible person.” Neteyam said nothing and just stood by your side, allowing you to process everything at your own pace.

“I hated him my whole life. I felt so much guilt at his actions, the murders I thought he committed plagued my mind for years and years. I was too scared to come to the village because I thought he was responsible for the decimation of your people.”

“You came from him, you share his blood. There was no way he could have been that bad. Not with you as his daughter.”

You scoffed lightly at his comment, but were so happy he was here. You took him by the hand and walked him to the body that was now only a pile of bones. You looked further in the clearing, and realised another set of bones was settled in the ground a few meters from your dad’s. Good, you thought.

“I’d like to bury him, if that’s alright with you?”

You gathered all the bones and walked to a tree whose roots were hanging partially above the ground, creating a little cove. Rays of light were hitting it, and you knew then it would be the perfect place. You placed his remains there, and gathered flowers and ornate twigs that had fallen on the ground, and decorated the little space as well as you could.

“Thank you, dad.” You were comforted at the thought that, although he died on this foreign planet alone, he was loved, and now, he will be mourned.

You made it back to the village together, walking and holding hands, trying to get your mind off all the epiphanies you have had to undergo in the past few days. Healing was hard work, you snickered to yourself. You made it to the tent you knew Jake and the rest of the warriors would be.

“There you are. Was starting to get worried.”

“Ah, there’s nothing to be worried about, pops.” You laughed at Jake’s shocked expression and the way his eyes softened immediately as a response to your new nickname.

He had to wipe that expression off his face. He was Olo’eyktan. He was Toruk Makto, this was not inspiring leadership.

“Right. The humans will be here any day now. I think we will have to move our base of operations in the Hallelujah mountains, somewhere they can’t find us, where the flux is too strong for their equipment. It’s going to be a big ask, and a big adjustment, but it is necessary. You know the first place they will look is at the hub. And it won’t take long for them to find the village either.”

What he was saying made sense, but it filled you with a sense of grief. This forest, that hub, those labs, this village, is all you’ve ever known. To have to leave it for an undetermined amount of time, maybe forever, was hurting your heart. You knew Neteyam felt the same, you knew they all felt the same. Jake was a marine, strong and adaptable, he was an incredible person to have around in a crisis. But he didn’t quite understand what it means to belong to only one place, to only know one reality that was going to be uprooted and taken from you. That takes time, time you didn’t have.

“I think we should do the ceremony tonight. You have completed the Iknimaya, you are to be one of us now. It’s time, if you want it.”

You peered up at him, in shock, but the beating of your heart was so loud because it was excited, it was happy. It’s time. You knew it in your heart it was right, this time. You belonged here. Your mum worked so hard for you to get to do this, she foresaw this 18 years ago. Your dad gave his life for yours, even without knowing it. You owed them this, owed them your life and this new one you were about to get.

“And tomorrow, we can do the transfer, if you are ready.”

By nightfall, you were ready. Your hair was freshly braided, in a pattern different to what the Na’vi wear, but you wanted it to be a mix of Na’vi and human braiding. You had all new clothes, and Kiri was in your tent, painting your body in white lines, as was the tradition. She looked radiant, happy and beautiful, like she always was.

“How are you feeling?

“Nervous.”

“There’s nothing to be nervous about. You belong here, you always have, even when you were human. This is just formality at this point.”

“Kiri… I want to thank you. You saved my life. Your plants, your mind saved my life. I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t for you.”

“You saved your life. You asked me, you did the work, you found the cure. The Na’vi will be forever grateful to you, and Max and Norm, I hope you know that.”

“How about we say it was a team effort?” You laughed together and you kissed her forehead. You loved her so much, your sister for life.

Neteyam saw your body, adorning all new garbs, a golden frilly loincloth and green, violet and gold beaded top that hung from your neck to reveal a bare back that made Neteyam’s body beam with desire. Your left arm was decorated with a bracelet, the same bracelet he was wearing, the one that he gave to you when he was ten, that was now proudly shining on your person rather than hiding in a drawer, masking pain. You had bracelets around your ankles as well, that were softly clinking every time you took a step. Your hair was soft and braided in a pattern that was unlike the Na’vi ways, and it was fitting, Neteyam thought. You would never be only Na’vi - you were more, not quite human, not quite one of them, you were the most beautiful aspects of both and Neteyam felt his heart skip a beat at the sight, one which will never cease to take his breath away. You were his, forever. How did he get so lucky?

Almost as if you could hear him, you slowly turned around and he saw your eyes searching the crowd until they found him, and your face immediately broke out into a beaming smile, that slowly changed into a gaze filled with yearning and love….and lust. Neteyam gulped audibly at your expression, so intense it was making him crazed enough to almost consider taking you away right now, ceremony be damned, and coax screams out of you he would be sure anyone else would cower in shame at. But not you. You were his match, his twin flame, and he knew whatever he wanted to take from you, the screams, the pleasured pains, the moans and panted breaths, you would give willingly, and would take his in return, until you were both so spent you collapsed in aching bliss.

He waited though, despite his progressively harder to ignore twitch, knowing he wouldn’t, couldn’t rob you of this moment, knowing the waiting and anticipation would be worth it in the end.

The ceremony was ethereal, magical, and he couldn’t help reminisce about his own, years and years ago. The people all stood around you, waiting for the Olo’eyktan to say the words that will make it official. Neteyam saw his father approach you, wearing all the garbs worthy of a chief of the Omatikaya, and placed both his arms on your shoulders, smiling proudly. You were a Sully now, for all intents and purposes, and his father looked at you the same way he looked at all his children. Neteyam’s heart swelled at the sight, taking in the familial interaction.

“Ngenga 'ite Omatikayaä luyu set. Na'viyä luyu hapxì. (You are now a daughter of the Omaticaya. You are part of The People.)”

Neteyam made his way by your side, and he watched as the rest of his family did the same. He placed both of his hands on your body, one over your heart, and the other on your back. His family did the same, and he noticed tears in everyone’s eyes, including yours and his own. This was a moment none of them thought they’d get to see, that you never expected to experience, and Neteyam said a silent prayer to Eywa, thanking her for bringing the love of his life back to him, and into the clan.

After the celebration, you excused yourself from everyone, tired and dazed, as well as too impatient to wait for what you have wanted, needed for days, months, years. You found Neteyam casually talking to some friends, and you touched his back lightly, so lightly it was barely there. He shuddered minutely, and turned his body to face you. He took your breath away, always, but particularly today, in this light, under these circumstances, wearing his ornate clothes and that bracelet, the one that you would both wear for the rest of your lives. That one that meant forever.

“Come.” He said, and he looked at you like you were a meal that he’s been starved from, that he was going to devour. You bit your lip in excitement and followed him.

You went for a swim in a tiny lake not too far from the village. You swam together like that for hours, kissing and touching each other under the water, just feeling him. The anticipation was building strongly, and as the last of the paint on your body dissipated, you left, with hurried steps, quickly making your way towards the Tree of Souls.

Your entire body stalled at the sight. You have seen images of it, areal videos taken from drones and helicopters, you saw it all, and yet nothing could have prepared you for the beauty of this place, for its magnitude and significance. The air felt thick, charged with energy, and you could hear whispers all around you, soft, almost imperceptible, but they were there. Eywa was here, just like she was all around you, but here, you felt her stronger, almost palpably so. You made your way through the willow-like branches, seeing the purple hue illuminate your skin, and you just walked, taking it all in, touching it, experiencing it fully. You were so happy, it made you anxious. You’ve never felt happiness like this, and you were scared it wasn’t going to last, scared of knowing that the fall from such a high would break all of your bones, crush you forever. You felt Neteyam’s gaze on you, electrifying every inch of your body its gaze was touching. You could feel him, in your bones, you knew what he was feeling, what he was thinking. You shared a soul, you always have. “He is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

You looked at him and your breath hitched in your throat at the sight; he was the most gorgeous human you have ever seen. He was beautiful and angelic and looking at you like you were prey that he wanted to exert complete control over - and you didn’t mind. You wanted him so badly and you have waited for this for what feels like lifetimes. You knew looking at this man in front of you that you would allow him to ruin you, you would beg him to kill you softly, slowly drive out any ounce of sanity from your body orgasm by orgasm until there was nothing left of you but the echoes of moans you couldn’t help exhale. It was almost desperate, your need for him, and you heard your breath become laboured, panting with craving and ache. You saw him make his way towards you slowly, and stopped only when he was towering over you, and you had to bring your chin up to be able to look into his eyes. His hands immediately found your jaw, that he gripped tightly, making sure you weren’t going to look away from him, from that gaze that drove you mad and made you throb in pain, begging to be filled, craving sweet release.

“You’re mine. I can’t believe you’re mine. I have waited for so long, I have dreamt about this for years. The one thing I have wanted more than life itself and you are here. You’re mine. Forever.”

You were fully panting now, not even an ounce of shame on your features. You wanted him, you wanted him to know what he was doing to you. Wanted him to control you, to possess you, to take what was his, what has been his and will be his forever.

“Say it. I need to hear you say it, Atan.”

His grip on your jaw tightened, and you moaned, unable to stop yourself, not wanting to stop yourself.

“I am yours, Neteyam. I have always been yours. I will always be yours. It’s you and me, forever.”

It was his turn to moan, gaze turning animalistic now, in a way that you felt within you, deep within you, and you knew you were dripping wet now, knew he was going to love it, was going to revel in it, and you smirked at the thought.

You saw him stop and reach back for his queue. You gasped silently at the sight, but smiled at the thought he wanted this, that after this, you would be his for life. You reached back for yours, and you both held them close to each other, just out of reach, looking deeply in each other’s eyes.

“Do you trust me?”

“You know I do. I trust you, Neteyam, do whatever you want to me. I’m yours to take, I’m yours.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.” You joined the queues and nothing in the world could have ever prepared you for the overwhelming sensations and feelings, for the intense intimacy of feeling Neteyam’s deepest desires and emotions, for how deep his love and care for you actually ran, for how desperate he was to own you, to make you his. You felt his breathing and his heartbeat, and he felt yours and the desire you both felt exploded all around you.

He aggressively smashed his lips into yours, both of you moaning at the contact, at the need that enveloped both your beings like the rushing water of the river you loved swimming in together. Your fingers immediately made their way into his hair, his beautiful hair that seemed to sometimes have a life of its own, and thinking of how hot you found it made you only more enthusiastic, gripping at it tightly and pulling on it. He smirked in the kiss, parting your lips enough to look at you with a mischievous grin that you loved more than you could put into words. You loved this man - you loved his kindness and compassion and sacrificial streak and patience, but you loved this side of him more, the side only you ever got to experience, that no one else knew about. How passionate and adventurous he was, how masculine and possessive of what was his he was, how wild and untamed a streak he hid under the well-behaved and poised demeanour. How well he matched you. Your twin flame. He placed both of his hands on you thighs, just underneath your ass, and lifted you effortlessly, and you instantly wrapped both your legs around him, never breaking the kiss, that was now just a mess of panted moans, lips and intertwined tongues. You felt your back hit a tree bark and you gasped, breaking the kiss and watching as the action left a trail of spit in between you. His mouth moved to your neck, that he sucked and licked until it was hurting, and he pushed you into the tree, trying to remove whatever space there still was in between you two. As he did so, you felt his chest and pelvis push aggressively into you, and you whined when you felt his dick brush up against you core, hard as a rock and hitting a spot that was making you lose your ability to see around you. He started moving his hips into yours, drawing circles into your pelvis and you matched him, desperate for release, desperate to want to give him your first of many orgasms of the night. You weren’t going to be satisfied until he made you cry in pain, in pleasure, until the line between them was blurred.

Neteyam saw your breathing quickened and he smirked in a way that only made further pleasure pool in your depths. “Coming already, my love? You wanted me that badly, huh?”

“Dick.”

“You’ll get that later, too.”

You wanted to laugh, but couldn’t do anything but mewl in agonising ecstasy as he hit a spot that immediately made you see stars and you rode out your first orgasm, crying into the crook of his neck.

“Good girl.” He didn’t let you come down from you high, as he removed your body from the tree and placed you on the mossy, comfortable ground, and both his hands went on your knees, making sure you were keeping them apart, as soon as he could feel you wanting to close them to accommodate for your post-orgasm sensitivity.

“No, Atan. You wanted this, remember? You have to keep your pretty legs spread for me.”

The entire world was spinning around you, a mess of purple, pink and white, as he traced his hands slowly, too slowly, painfully slowly up your thighs, until he reached your hips, where you loincloth was tightened, and you felt him make quick work of the knot, inhaling deeply as he took it off from you and saw you for the first time.

“Fuck, Atan. I feel like I could come just from looking at you. Look at you, a fucking writhing mess and I haven’t done anything yet. Look at this,” he said as he place a hand in between your folds, removing the slick that was so abundant it was now dripping down your ass, “Look at how wet you are for me, and I haven’t even touched you yet. The shit I want to do to you, Atan, will make Eywa regret ever making this tree part of the mating ritual.”

You saw him slowly lowering his head towards you legs, kissing and biting roughly up your thigh until you were screaming in pain. “Shh, Atan.” He drew circles in your thighs as he continued his onslaught to comfort you to some extent, except it was only lighting your skin on fire, only strengthening your need for that second release.

“Fuck, Neteyam, please.”

“Begging so soon, my love? What do you need?”

“You. Your tongue, your fingers, anything. Fuck, please!”

“Well, since you said please.”

He smirked again, the asshole, and you felt him licking your pussy from your entrance to your clit, and at the moan he released as he did so, you convulsed so violently you needed a while to settle, still trying desperately to close your thighs to make the sensation more bearable.

“Stop that, or I’ll stop. Do you want me to stop, my love?” He looked at you through hooded eyes and giving you a wild look that made you clench around nothing, and your hands found his head and you pushed him back into you, annoyed that he stopped, already upset at the thought that he wasn’t going to be doing this every minute for the rest of your life. If you had your way, he would. That’s all you would do. He laughed, but obliged, and continued his attack on your lips, messily kissing and licking, pushing his tongue deep within you, like your pussy held the potion for eternal life and he wanted to live in you forever.

“Fuck, Atan, you taste so good. So good, how am I ever supposed to stop, huh?” You started grinding your hips around him, moaning loudly and you saw him dry humping the ground, trying to get some of his own release. The primal animalistic action was enough to push you over the edge again, coming all over his tongue, that was still lapping at your insides, without any intention to stop.

You tried to push him away, the feeling so overwhelming it was bordering painful, your clit so red and sensitive now it was glaring and obvious, but he didn’t relent.

“Fuck, you are intoxicating. Come on, baby, I’m not nearly done. We’re not nearly done.” He pushed two fingers in you, which was incredibly easy with the amount of slick and cum you were continuously releasing. Although so sensitive, you immediately clenched around him, taking him in, and felt the familiar ache slowly building in you again. He pushed his fingers deeper, until his knuckles made contact with your folds, and you felt his thumb slowly, gently rubbing your throbbing clit as his fingers were hitting your g spot mercilessly. The stimulation was too much, and you felt yourself seeking yet another orgasm, bucking your hips wildly against his fingers.

“That’s right, Atan. Let me see you come all over my fingers.” That’s all you needed to hear, and almost on command, you felt yourself coating his long digits with your cum. He removed his fingers from inside you and you cried out at the loss, but he didn’t care, too busy staring at his fingers, covered in the clear viscous liquid enveloping them. He brought both fingers to his mouth and he took them both in and sucked on them, and immediately kissed you, messily and forcefully, and you moaned at the vulgarity of it, and the taste of your own orgasms on his tongue, which was exploring your mouth like he had your folds earlier. You loved it, loved all of it, drunk on the feeling, on the connection you felt to this man that knew you, so well, so deeply, knew your body instinctually, like he touched you and had you all his life, and you squirmed when you realised that now you had a whole life to do this, every day, you would never have to live without this feeling again.

“Do you feel how good you taste, Atan? Fuck. I will never get enough of this.”

With one swift motion, he removed your top from around your neck and took its place, squeezing your throat until you couldn’t breathe anymore, slowly choking you. You threw your head back and arched your back, eyes fluttering shut, just taking in this feeling, of being completely owned, completely in someone else’s control. It was exhilarating.

“Look at you. Look at how you give in to me, it makes me fucking crazy.” He squeezed harder. “You drive me fucking crazy. I have dreamt about fucking you for so long. So many nights, having to stroke my cock imagining it was your mouth instead, you have no idea how badly I need you. How entirely and completely yours I am. You own me. My soul and my mind. It’s only fair I own your body.”

The hand that wasn’t around your throat went to his loincloth, that he removed skilfully, letting it drop to the ground around him. Your eyes fluttered open to take him in, his glorious body and that magnificent cock, that was even bigger that you ever dreamt, and you struggled to gulp in the position you were currently in. Your pussy clenched fully at the sight, and you were drooling now, saliva pooling around your mouth that you licked off like a kitty looking at her favourite meal. His fist wrapped around the girth of his cock and he started pumping himself, and you were close to being done again just at the sight, never in your life seeing anything more sensual, more erotic. You needed him inside of you now.

“Fuck, please, Neteyam. I need you in me.”

“I know, Atan. I need to be in you. I need to feel you milking me, like the good girl I know you are.”

With a couple more strokes, he lined himself at your entrance and slowly, deliberately, agonisingly pushing in, one inch at a time, stretching you deliciously, fully until he bottommed out, and you could feel him hitting your cervix, you could see his bulge in your lower abdomen. It drove you to the point of madness.

Your hand went to his ass, trying to push him even further in, despite not thinking it was actually possible for him to go anywhere else, but it was still not enough, never enough.

He removed your hand and gathered both of them and pushed them above your head, pining them to the ground with enough force that you couldn’t move them anymore.

“No, Atan. You don’t get to dictate this. We go at my speed.” And with those words, he started rutting into you brutally, giving you no time to adjust to him or to the pace. It was rough and wild and out of control, everything you have ever desired in your darkest, best fantasies. It was so dirty, so wrong it made your insides squirm in pleasure, in uninhibited bliss.

He maintained his pace for so long it was enough to steal two more orgasms from you. You were on the verge of tears, now, so overstimulated you didn’t know if you were feeling pleasure or pain anymore, but you didn’t care, you wanted more, always more of this, more of him.

“Fuck, Atan, I can feel you squeezing me again. You think you can give me one more?” You nodded weekly, trying to match his ruthless pace.

“I want to come in this pretty pussy. You want me to fill you up, Atan?” You could only moan at the words, unable to formulate any coherent thoughts or sentences, anymore. You were way past that. Your breath quickened rapidly and you knew you were really close, and he could feel you too.

“Yeah, that’s right baby, come all over my cock. I want to feel you come undone.” Those words were enough to rip another explosive orgasm out of you, and your clenching milked his cock dry, feeling thick spurts of cum fill you up, painting your pink walls white.

He collapsed on top of you with a thud, still buried deep in you, and you couldn’t help laugh exhilaratingly at his reaction, at what just happened, at the fact his was all real, not just an out-of-reach fantasy.

Eventually, he rolled from on top of you and stretched out an arm for you to cuddle up to him, which you did, feeling grateful for every moment, grateful for the intimacy.

You were both still panting, still recuperating and you lay in his arms in peaceful bliss, trying to catch your breath.

“Thank you.” You said playfully, drawing circles on his chest.

“What for?”

“For being an even better lay than I always imagined you to be in my dreams. Although I’ll find it hard ever being a productive member of this clan again going forward.”

He threw his head back and laughed, and the sound filled the forest and your heart, so relieved to be able to hear it again, so immensely grateful to get to experience these feelings in your life, that didn’t end prematurely no matter how many bad decisions you have made.

“You’re very welcome, Atan.”

You peered up at him bashfully, and you knew then you did at least one thing right in this life.

You fell asleep in his arms, and woke up in the link room, wide smile on your face. Max was waiting for you, and he returned your smile when he saw how happy you were.

“You look happy.”

“It’s just been a good day.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.” He looked at you playfully. “Do me and Norm have to give you the talk?”

“Shut up, Max. In a completely unrelated subject, though, can I have some birth control from the medical ward, please?”

Your body was weak, and you needed a while to adjust to being back here after a whole day in your other body, soon to be your only body. You felt weightless, despite the pain, so happy and so in love. Your knees were weak from the memories, and you felt a bit empty at the lack of touch, craving him again, even though he’s taken so many orgasms from you, you knew you were going to be sore walking back to the village.

You went looking for Norm, who was already waiting for you in the medical ward, ready to give you a new dose of the injection and take some blood to see how everything is looking.

“It was a beautiful ceremony last night. Did you enjoy yourself?”

“Yeah, definitely did. It was incredible, I have never felt anything like it before.”

“Are you ready for tonight?”

“I think I am. I opened the drawer, little by little, Norm. I think it’s time. I am ready to take my place amongst the people, I am ready for my body to belong, I am ready to not have to worry that this virus will turn around and kill me at any point. My mum and dad both sacrificed so much for me to have a chance at a better life. You guys sacrificed so much. You’re like my guardian angels. I owe you so much, and I am so sorry about how I acted. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Will you still come by and hang out once in a while when you’re not busy riding your ikrans and being an overall badass?”

“Always, Norm. I am still me, I am still a scientist at heart, and I am still human. Maybe my body won’t be, but I will also have my mum and dad, you and Max, a whole history and heritage that I don’t want to rid myself of.”

“Good. Then all’s forgiven, Ace. I am sorry too, for not telling you about Neteyam. It just didn’t feel like my secret to share.”

“I understand.” You got up after he injected you with the treatment and hugged him tightly, grateful for this man who is your family just as much as your mum and the Sullys are.

After resting, eating and taking a nap, you did your dialysis session for the day, and although loopy, you hopped in your Avatar body, still a couple of things you wanted to take care of before the transfer.

To your surprise, you woke up in your tent, a small blanket covering you. You smiled, realising Neteyam must have carried you back in the morning. He even put your clothes back on. You blushed at the need that immediately overwhelmed your body, and tried to calm yourself as there were more pressing matters at hand.

You made your way to the Sully tent, and heard Neytiri and Mo’at talking. Good, two of the people you were looking for.

“Mai’te! How are you feeling?”

“I feel great, sa’nok (mother). Thank you for last night, it was beautiful.” Neytiri brought her hand to her mouth in slight shock at your new name for her. She was so happy, it all felt complete now, after all this time.

You took her free hand in yours as well as one of Mo’at’s, and looked at them seriously, intently.

“I want to ask for your permission for the transfer. I realise a lot of talk has happened, done when I was a human, when I was sick. But I am not sick anymore. I don’t want you to do it because you are worried I will die. I want to be sure, I want you to be sure, that you want me as a Na’vi forever. That you are comfortable with me becoming my Avatar for life. I will not do it, if you aren’t. This means so much for me, and I know I have been a coward, for so long, but I am ready now. I am standing here in front of you, and I am finally ready, to be one of the people, to be in this body, to be your daughter. I just hope I’m not too late.”

They both looked at each other, and smiled, and looked back at you lovingly.

“Mai’te, we have waited for you all of our lives. You are the missing piece in this world, in our world. You brought forth a cure for an illness that has plagued the Na’vi for years and years. There is nothing we would love more than for you to be Na’vi. And there will be no better future Tsa’hik.”

Your eyes widened at Mo’at’s words, at the consent not only to join the clan, this family, but to do so as Neteyam’s mate, as the future spiritual leader of the Omaticaya.

“I won’t let you down.” You hugged both of them, tears in your eyes.

You eventually made your way out of the tent and looked for the only other person you had to talk to before this was all done. Neytiri told you where he could be, so you looked there first. Sure enough, you found Lo’ak deep in thought up a tree, above everyone else, and you climbed easily and joined him. He was startled by you, but he composed himself quickly and gave you a look that you couldn’t quite place. You could tell he had conflicting feelings, happy on one hand to not have lost you in one way, sad that he did lose you in others.

“Hey.” He was curt, and didn’t look at you, and a twinge of hurt settled in your chest. You had to make this right.

“Hey, you. Scooch.” He moved slightly so you could fit with him on the branch, which was more than wide enough to accommodate both of you.

“Lo’ak… please talk to me? I can’t stand the thought that you hate me. You’re my best friend. Please?”

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“I saw you leaving with Neteyam last night, after the ceremony.”

You cringed a little, the thought of having this particular conversation with him close to unbearable.

“Yes, it’s true.”

Pain flashed across his face and you saw a tear, just one small tear, fall down his face. You reached to wipe it off, but he beat you to it, so you awkwardly let your hand drop.

“I’m sorry, Lo’ak. I’m so so sorry. But I have loved your brother my whole life. My whole life, ever since I was born, he was there. And I love you too, I love you so so much, but we wouldn’t be right together. You are the best guy in the world, and I am not even close to being worthy of you. Neteyam gets me. He gets the darkest side of me, he knows my darkest, worst secrets, he has been with me through some of my most traumatic moments. It’s never been that it’s not you. It’s just that it can’t be anyone else. My whole life, it was always going to be just him.”

“You are my best friend, and I will always be here for you. You will never lose me. You will never get rid of me. I found a season of Friends on my mum’s directory that I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen. I can’t do that with anyone else.”

“I know you are scared, and I think that’s why you asked me. Not because you think I’m the woman you want to grow old with, but because you’re scared that no one else will see you the way I do. And you’re wrong, Lo’ak. Everyone will see in time that you are the best person in the world. You are incredible. And so many girls will be falling at your feet soon, you will be angry at yourself for ever pining over someone like me. I know you are scared, but I am not going anywhere. Can you please forgive me?”

He turned and looked at you for a long time, intensely searching your face, maybe for a sign that you were lying, or exaggerating, but he couldn’t find any, as he eventually dropped his gaze and smirked playfully.

“Do you really think girls will be falling at my feet?”

“Yes, I really really do. You are a catch, mister.”

He rolled his eyes dramatically and let out an exasperated sigh.

“Well then, I have to forgive you.” You both laughed and your back pressed against the bark of the tree and you stretched your legs to sit in his lap.

“Now, about that season of Friends…”

You returned to your human form in the afternoon, and slowly started packing your life away, ready to relinquish this room, once your mothers, with deep sadness in your heart. You will all have to relocate from tomorrow, so you will probably not be back here except to help everyone else evacuate and move all the equipment. You’ll never be back here, you realised with a deep sigh. So many memories, so many bad ones, but so many good ones too, this place was your safe place, your little piece of heaven, despite all the hell you went through in it. As you packed all of your books and trinkets you collected in time, you found yourself tracing your fingers over every surface, trying to commit it to memory. The coffee stain on your desk that was made when Neteyam spilled your mug with his tail without meaning to. The scratches on one of the drawers from all the times you pulled on it with your finger, since the latch was a little broken and hard to open. The wear and tear from your ass print on the chair that you spent inordinate amounts of hours in, be it analysing data or watching shows, or reading with your feet carelessly stretched on the desk. You moved on to your bed, that you sat on, and you sighed at the thought of never being able to sleep on a bed again. You will miss the comfort of the mattress and the sheets, and the space to really spread out however much you wanted, looking like a little starfish every time Norm woke you up in the mornings and his subsequent laughter at your ridiculous poses.

It took a while, but you were done about an hour before eclipse. Neteyam knocked on your door, with eyes slightly widened at the state of the now empty room.

“I’ve never seen this place like this. It looks so barren without your touch.”

You sighed and tugged at the insides of your mouth with your teeth. “Yeah, it does.”

“Any regrets?” You turned around to face him, giving him a small reassuring smile and taking his hand in yours, the size difference always a stark contrast compared to your Avatar body.

“Never.” You eyed the bed playfully and raised an eyebrow, feigning timidity. “We still have some time… what could we possibly do to fill it, huh?”

He looked at you, and you could tell he was turned on out of his mind, but also gave you a reserved look. “We can’t… not like this, I will hurt you.”

“I don’t think you realise you’re not making the point you think you are.”

He closed the door behind him with his tail and stalked towards you. “Fuck, you will be the death of me, Atan.”

You made your way to the village a little after eclipse, and everyone was following you. All the humans, Norm and the other Avatars and Neteyam, who was carrying you on his back like you were his little backpack. You were flushed and a little disheveled from earlier, purple marks all over your body, but it didn’t matter. Your hours in this body were limited. In your back pocket of your shorts you had a box of birth control pills that Norm gave to you as you and Neteyam made it out of the room. You laughed at his reaction and yours, both of you awkward and embarrassed to have to address it whatsoever. You placed your head on Neteyam’s shoulder, peering up at the sky, like you used to do when you were little. The village was busy and roaring, everyone packing their lives up for the move tomorrow. People looked at you as you passed by, unfamiliar with your human form clinging to the future Olo’eyktan’s back. Jake and the rest of the family met you at the big bonfire.

“Heads up, everyone. It’s time!” You smiled, and looked next to him on the ground, where your Avatar body lay motionless and you had to take a second to take this all thing in, the weight of what you were about to do hitting you full force. You started breathing in deep, shallow breaths, and you felt Neteyam’s hands running up and down your thigh in a calming motion.

“You’ve got this. We’re all here for you.” You reached over and pecked his neck, in gratitude.

Everybody in the village, all the Na’vi were making their ways through the forest towards Vitraya Ramunong - they would all partake in the ritual. Neteyam was nervous, out of his mind with worry and fear, although he didn’t want to impart that to you, so he carried you gently, trying to be strong, as he was sure your mind was also laced with concerns. What if you didn’t come back? Neteyam quickly pushed the thought out of his mind and cursed it for making him think about such things, making his heart constrict in his chest in pain at the mere thought. Of course you would make it. A part of him was also excited about the ritual. It would be the first time anyone under 19 would get to see it, to experience it, it was only the third time it would have ever been performed. It was a powerful ritual, hence why they needed everyone.

The tree was as breathtaking as it always has been, and Neteyam had to inhale deeper to accommodate for the deep charge of the atmosphere, for the thickness of the air. He heard the ancestor’s voices, buzzing quietly all around him. As soon as you reached the natural platform on which the tree resided, Neteyam put you down next to his family and tried to not think of all the images flashing across his mind’s eye of all the unholy things you two did last night right in this spot. His grandma was giving out orders about where to place your Avatar.

“Are you ready?” Said Mo’at, in her usual no-nonsense fashion.You gulped loudly, and Neteyam couldn’t help wince. Everybody was on the edge.

“Yes, I think I am.” He saw you turn around to face him and the rest of the family, as well as Spider, Norm and Max.

“This is it, I guess.” You grabbed his mother and youngest sister’s hands in yours, and squeezed, a small tear falling down your face.

“I love you, guys. Thank you for everything all of you have done for me. I am so excited to join this clan and your family, forever.”

Neteyam watched as you lay on the ground, naked except for some leaves covering you. He was going to miss you, he realises. This body is the only one he’s known you as for 18 years. He’s spent so may days and nights with you, with this small person who had so much in her, so much beauty and intelligence, so much hurt and pain, so much personality, so much fierceness and grit and so much care and empathy, he didn’t know where it could all fit in such a tiny body. You’ve grown up together, a human and a Na’vi, learning so much from each other, adapting together to the world around you and to each other’s mind and soul. He was going to miss this body, the body he fell in love with, the toothy grin and wild eyes so unlike anything he’s ever seen, your beauty marks that he used to trace with his finger and eyes.. and mouth, as of a few hours ago. You were everything, and have always been regardless of your difference in species, and colour, and height. He mourned a little, he realised, for the you you’re leaving behind, but was also incredibly thrilled to have you as one of the people, as his mate, mother of his children, Tsa’hik, for the rest of his life.

He hovered over you the whole ritual, unnerved at the way the tendrils were emerging from the ground and slowly enveloping you, until there was almost no bare skin left to see. His skin was covered in goosebumps at the experience, as the chorus of people asking Eywa to grant you life in a new body, undulating their bodies in unison, and his grandma’s words. It was unlike anything he’s every experienced.

Tìng mikyun ayoheru rutxe, ma Nawma Sa'nok. (Hear us please, Great Mother)

Pori tireati, munge mì nga (Take this spirit into you)

Srung si poeru, ma Eywa (Eywa, help her)

Ulte tìng ayoer nì'eyng hu ngeyä ya (And breathe her back to us)

Srung si poeru, ma Eywa (Eywa, help her)

Tivìran po ayoekip (Let her walk among us)

Na Na'viyä hapxì! (As one of The People!)

Srung si poeru, ma Eywa (Eywa, help her)

Eventually, the ritual came to an end when Mo’at screamed for everybody to stop. Neteyam reached over to your face, and removed your mask, kissing your cheeks and your hands, and saying a quiet “I love you” before he moved on, anxiously waiting to see if you would open your eyes. He let out a panted breath as you did, smiling tiredly at the family who was now jumping on you, making you choke slightly.

You laughed and his eyes found yours in the manic scene unfolding in front of him. You smiled lovingly and reached out a hand for him to grab.

“Hi.”

“Hi, Atan. It’s good to see you.”

You were sad as you were carrying your body, you tiny human body in your arms, and lowering it in the ground next to the Home Tree. You saw your family place a flower each in the little cove where you now lay, and you carefully redirected an Atokirina towards it, and watched as it landed on you, making its home in the little gap made by your foetal position.

You will miss this body, and all the memories you made in it. You will miss looking in the mirror and seeing your mother’s eyes and hair, you will miss being able to play her guitar. This body, however tiny and weak, was your home for 18 years, and it has stood by you no matter how many times you treated it badly or betrayed it. It kept you alive in a world that could kill you in an instant, and you were sorry to have to leave it behind.

“Thank you. Thank you, mum and dad, for giving me life and gifting me this body. Thank you for taking care of me, I know it wasn’t easy to keep up with this messy mind. Thank you.”

You turned around and fixed your gaze on your mate, the love of your life, the one that made it all bearable, and when met with his dazzling warm smile and his touch that set your soul ablaze, you couldn’t help be excited at the adventures that lay ahead of you, that you will always brave together.

-the end-

EPILOGUE

The man felt weak and dizzy, the entire room spinning and making him well nauseous. He didn’t know what was happening, what any of this was. He saw a bright light flashing across his eyes and he groaned in pain and annoyance at the way it was making his vision spotty. He grasped the hand of whoever it was that was doing this to him, and he was relieved when it stopped. It took him a long time to adjust to his surroundings, and was met with shock when realising he was in some sort of medical ward, surrounded by people in white coats. His gaze fixated on his hand, that was still wrapped around someone’s wrist, and couldn’t understand what he was seeing in front of him. Blue. A blue striped hand, that supposedly belonged to him.

“Captain, Captain Barlowe, can you hear me? You’re ok, you’re just disorientated. It’s gonna take a while to settle your mind, so take you time.”

He raised assertively from the bed he was laying on and made his way to the reflective windows all around him. He stood there, still, just taking it all in, finding it hard to understand, to process what was clearly displayed in front of the mirror. His body, in an Avatar.

“Captain Barlowe, due to your outstanding military record and previous acquiescence with this project, you have been chosen as one of the select few to carry out a special op on Pandora. You will be briefed shortly, but right now we have to make sure everything is in order.”

“I’ll be damned.”

For everyone who’s made it this far, I am so excited to announce the sequel series, The Archer, that will tackle all of the events of the Way of Water x coming to you soon 💕💕

Tag list (thank you thank you thank you x): @nuhteyam @eywas-heir @fanboyluvr @mashiromochi @puffb4ll @sassy-persona @simp4ff @mommyneytiri @inomoikawa @jackiehollanderr @jaysarchiv3 @meivap @dakotali @hlhl99 @eskamybeloved @erenjaegerwifee @winchestertitties @mommyneytiri @ultimatebluff @elizarikaallen @yeosxxx @ssc7514 @lolcaca @jackiehollanderr @bunnyrose01 @therealbloom @neteyams-queue @r1dd1kulus @whore4neteyam

@kikookii @iliyoo @velvetskies @rebeccao03 @im-in-a-pansexual-panik

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elialys · 3 months

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Channeling positive energy for 2024

I have been very listless for at least the last couple of years (if not since 2020 and the whole pandemic mess), resulting in a pretty rough depressive episode that peaked this last November. It's hard to feel motivated to do anything concrete to improve your own life when everything around you is just...bleak. And this world does suck so much, so often, in so many ways.

But then I remember how I innately believe that most people are good, and that I am good, too, and that the one thing that always makes me feel better when I'm low is to do something helpful for someone, or to just be kind if I don't have the spoons for more.

(Putting this big ramble under read more)

I think I've mentioned it here before but I've made the decision to try and get into a new field of work, which involves at least two if not three years of studying. Let me tell you, I'm about to turn 36 in a couple of weeks. It's scary as fuck to do something like this. But this job, if I get into the school I need to get into, will be perfect for me. I'll be helping people who need guidance and compassion basically every day.

The bond I got to build with my students was my absolutely favorite part of teaching, but I got overwhelmed by everything else. I burned myself out in less than four years because I became a workaholic who worked 70 hours a week, never took a breath, tried tried tried, yet never felt like I was doing enough. The pressure was incredible, the 'I have to be around hundreds of people every single day', performing in front of entire classrooms full of kids 6h a day'...it just wore me down. Loved my kiddos to death, loved my science team so much, but then the pandemic hit and I lost a few family members within a few months, and I realized it was time for me to go home after 12 years abroad.

The meanest part of my brain likes to tell me I've spent the last four years being basically a useless human blob, but realistically, I know I wasn't. I had been working my ass off since 2011, when I was in America nannying two young kids all day long then going to school full time at night/weekends, before being hired as a teacher in England for 4 years.

I needed the break, I needed time with my loved ones. I needed to help grieving family members, especially my little sister with ASD, who had to learn to navigate life without her mom, who also developed epilepsy on top of everything else while our father pretended nothing was happening. I needed to spend time with my grandmother, who did so much for me when I was young and who's all alone, now. I'll even go as far as saying I've been working on fixing things with my mother this past year living with her, which was not an easy thing. Still isn't, but it's so much better than it used to be, and she's trying, too.

But I'm ready to get my life "back on track", or at least, to get busier , more proactive, more helpful to others who aren't in my inner circle, because I know that's what I'm good at, and why I'm here.

So, yeah, channeling positive thoughts for 2024. I'm not only going to work on getting into that school in the next few weeks, I also just received an email a couple days ago from an editor I used to work with. She's a writing director somewhere else now, and they need writers for a new webcomic project; she told me she immediately thought of me because they'd always been happy with my work, so I'm going to test for that, too, because why the hell not. Actually getting paid for the stuff I was writing a couple of years ago was the most surreal, rewarding experience of my writer life, and I wouldn't mind that happening again.

I want to give the biggest shoutout to my best friend & other butt cheek, @melusine0811, for helping me navigate those last four years, for always believing in me, and for being so fucking courageous when life is just so damn hard. Lauren, you're the bravest person I know, and forever my Donna Noble.

And because I'm sappy this weekend, awards and all, I'm also sending my thanks to my Australian unicorn, just for existing somewhere out there, for being a role model to me from afar these last thirteen years, for being another perfect example of people persevering no matter what, doing the things they love, while always trying to be kind to others in the process. I don't believe in much, but I believe in karma. You do good deeds, good things will happen to you.

Be kind to each other, my lovelies. Always be kind.

#personal #about me #just putting my thoughts and feelings down #encouraging positivity for myself #and for anyone who needs it ❤️#2024 i'm coming for you

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progressive-waves-art · 3 months

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A Very, Very Unfinished Pile of Theory of Everything Headcanons (Ayreon)

Last semester, my English final was a presentation relating the overall theme of the Forever saga to that of the more popular works of H.G. Wells. Details of that argument aside, the thesis was that Ayreon’s emotional core was the presence of small-scale acts of love juxtaposed against large-scale existential tragedy, balanced in their individual power. That we are messy and self-destructive, and in the grand scheme of things we mean very little in the universe, but we are resilient and alive and human and that has to be worth something.

I really like this aspect of the main story, and it got me a perfect score on that assignment. It had a ten minute time limit and I was fighting for my life to stay under it. While I was downsizing the script, I couldn’t help but think of an earlier idea I had drafted about how The Theory of Everything on its own was a really incredible example of the mad scientist archetype turned completely on its head (it was a science-fiction analysis class). Specifically how that script was almost three times longer than the original H.G. Wells one, that took me a solid twenty minutes to read aloud.

I literally wrote an hour long lecture about The Theory of Everything. No headcanons. No extra theories. Literally just picking apart its canon plot.

I think this is why I have so little extra writing for it. The story as its given is airtight and just…fucking incredible. Arjen wrote it with a very clear theme in mind like he did with Transitus, but TToE isn’t missing half of its story because he couldn’t pull in the cash to make a movie out of it. You can feel the intention behind every single character, they feel like real people, it has so many layers to it and it is literally, objectively, the greatest prog album ever made. Fight me.

But anyways: For lack of better phrasing, there isn’t much to “fix” in that sense. Almost all the headcanons I have for The Source or Transitus boil down to a few things:

I was being self-indulgent with a favorite character and it snowballed into a genuinely informative trait/subplot that informs the main story (a certain hc I have where Henry just fucking shoots Daniel in the back by mistake sometime between Two Worlds and Talk of the Town, turning into this weirdly effective commentary of how Daniel is conditioned to his brother’s shitty behavior and Abby hauling ass to get him out of that headspace)

I am curious about aspects of an album’s worldbuilding and get a little excited while filling in the blanks that were perfectly fine being left alone (doing mental gymnastics trying to build a version of The Source where these five academics, three politicians, two religious figures, one robot and one random spaceman viably know each other)

The rarer option that I am genuinely disappointed by how a part of the story was handled and completely ignore this small part of canon to make the overall story be more effective. Or attempt it, at least (Lavinia’s entire character undermining Transitus’ themes and her contradicting her own motivations, and me, in turn, just writing her character from scratch while keeping with the basic story beats [her seeing ghosts, doing shady shit with Henry, etc.])

But with TToE I’ve felt very little need to do any of these. If I were to really dive into it with intention I think I would start building off of the whole bank robbery plot in Phase III (just a slightly weirdly framed plot point for me), but I haven’t thought about it. It’s not that glaring of an issue and there’s few other places in the story where I think adding anything would make it more effective.

This isn’t to say that Transitus and The Source are objectively worse in any sense, but they leave a lot more up to interpretation, allowing me to write so many add ons that they become structured and essential to each other’s function.

It’s fun with those two albums. With TToE I really have to look for cracks to fill and it’s kind of useless.

Not entirely, though. I’ve got a few hcs, and maybe they’ll warrant dozens of google doc pages of context one day like the other two albums:

Two central things sparked curiosity. Setting, and how the parent characters came to hate each other that much. Naturally.

This started four-ish years ago when I was pacing around my parents’ house with TToE on the mind (as it often is), and my brother put on this show called His Dark Materials. I watched the intro to it all of one time and just…knew this was the aesthetic TToE should have.🔗 At least combined with dark academia. It’s an album about physics and ghosts, that seems reasonable enough.

…funnily enough, as I later found out, His Dark Materials itself has a very dark-academia-esque vibe, and the plot is entirely based upon the intersectionality between science and mysticism and trivial human attempts to make sense of it.

So. Pretty fitting.

This really stuck with me, and a handful of the characteristics of the show and books became the basis for the way I picture The Theory of Everything. Mainly the visual aesthetic, like I said, but also the fact that the story starts at a parallel version of Oxford University. I don’t have some giant case study for this like with Transitus/New England. I just think it’d be a cool and vibey setting. Maybe it’s the American in me but there’s something about a thousand-year-old college with a campus made of literal goddamn castles that borders on the fantastic.

From there, you have a decent excuse for The Prodigy to run off to Ireland, where you can choose from one of like 200 different pretty little isolated lighthouses for him to lose his mind in, far enough away for him not to be found as long as he did. Not to mention it lowkey matches with the overt Celtic influence of the music. Or Scotland, if you want some weather symbolism from the North Sea.

Solid setting, if I say so myself, and it actually influenced the family’s whole situation. Here, The Father (Mike) is a physics professor at Oxford, and The Mother (Cristina) is the director of the Bodleian Library. It’s how and where they meet in 1991 (though the mother is in an attendant position at the time), as shown by the only part of this I have drawn out:

They hit it off, and marry in 1993. Their first and only child is born two years later and they love him half to death. Everything is more or less nice and normal.

In 1996, Mike stumbles into “proof,” more or less, of the theory of everything being a singular, solvable equation through his work, practically by accident, and begins focused work on it with enthusiastic support from his wife. Life is going great, Cristina is promoted and the two are balancing things well enough.

The boy shows little to no social development into his toddler years, but his parents don’t think much of it. His father was similar at his age; they’re not worried. They even go as far to say he’ll turn out just as ambitious and smart as his dad and relatives, coworkers and family friends go along with it, setting insanely high expectations for this literal three year old. Mike keeps working on his theory.

The boy enters preschool at age four; still no improvement. Just isolates himself and draws indiscernible patterns on everything you put in front of him. His parents finally try to intervene to some degree, hiring private instructors and talking with some other psych/child development people they know through the university, to no avail. Nothing changes. He just stares off into space, doesn’t interact with any of them and supposedly doesn’t pay attention to lessons. He still isn’t speaking. Cristina is finally concerned

Around the same time, Mike makes a significant breakthrough in his work, gaining worldwide attention. He receives massive grants from in and outside of Oxford to continue his work, and quits his teaching job to make more time for the endeavor. Cristina is left as the family’s sole provider. She understands and is in agreement on that decision, that’s not the problem yet. The problem is that Mike is becoming more or less indifferent to their son hits five, not seeing any previously projected greatness he was supposed to have in his father’s footsteps. Cristina, much more conscious of balance in her life and how having kids works, isn’t sure what to make of that. Their relationship starts to strain.

From there, as Mike keeps working, Cristina takes the kid to all sorts of specialists around England but none of them can pinpoint what’s “wrong” with him. She tries much more actively to connect with him like they’re telling her to (though she still enrolls him in the university’s affiliated primary school program, against their suggestions), bringing him everywhere. Buys him little memory games since that’s all that seems to hold his attention. She’s past any belief of him being some secret genius like his dad, not that her opinion of her husband is super positive at this point anyway. She’s just dead-set on her son having some sense of normal in his life.

By 2002, Mike has completely secluded himself and works nearly constantly. He has made no progress on his theory since 1999 and the fame garnered from his breakthrough has faded. The family is running out of money and Cristina is exhausted. The boy is ostracized at school and still (almost) totally nonverbal. Her coworkers keep suggesting these weird holistic remedies that she refuses. She knows better than to fall for all that new age, pyramid scheme bullshit.

The son’s condition, whatever it is, worsens until mom, desperate, puts her foot down in 2008 (or “gives up,” if you wanna put it like that) and drags her husband and son to this private practice in Scotland she was told about by a friend, suspicious but ready to put up with anything at this point.

😐👍

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orowyrm · 2 years

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let's talk about the way we talk about sigma

and i’m not just saying this because i’m a hater or because i find the woobification of characters annoying (although i am, and i do, but that’s neither here nor there) but i AM saying it cuz it’s no longer mildly annoying so much as it is just hurtful and exhausting due to the casual ableism it perpetuates. whether it’s consciously or not, it’s there and i’m pointing it out cuz a lot of people probably don’t even realize what they’re saying (i hope) so i wanna spell it out crystal clear.

*granted, these are sentiments i’ve seen far more often on twitter or tiktok than on here (and i know complaining about stupid takes on either site is like going to the beach and getting mad about all the sand, but bear with me) but it’s ABSOLUTELY something that i see a lot on here too and i'm starting to get incredibly fed up with it all. someone's gotta fuckin say it.

im going to put the majority of this under a readmore because i've got a lot to say on the topic but here's the long and short of it:

you guys have GOT to stop acting like sigma is a poor little helpless confused manipulated innocent little uwu baby. like, for real. stop saying that shit. stop lamenting about “waahhh poor science granpa doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening around himmm 🥺🥺🥺”. stop acting like he’s being held captive or abused by talon despite evidence to the contrary so you can make your little “uwu i can’t wait for overwatch to save him and Fix Him uwuwuw” posts. and for the love of all that’s holy, if i see one more person say or imply that he was better off when he was being forcibly institutionalized than he is now working for talon, i’m going to start fucking attacking people with my teeth like a chimpanzee.

it's incredibly fucking weird and alienating for literally anyone who experiences even a fraction of the things yall are pointing out as proof of his incompetence. and before any of you hit me with the "oh it's not that deep 🙄" im gonna tell you right now that i dont care and im going to be mad about it anyway cuz its my party and i can post whatever i want.

ANYWAY!!

to continue my point, not only is it weird and infantilizing and demeaning and belittling to those of us who deal with literally any of the myriad of things going on with him that i’ve seen people point to as proof that he ‘needs to be fixed’ — memory lapses, time loss, dissociation, auditory hallucinations, disordered thought, just straight up being autistic, hyperfocus and/or complete lack of focus, panic attacks or meltdowns, i cannot overstate how many of the ‘weird’ things he does are just autistic traits so i’m gonna say it a second time for good measure — and those are all just things that i personally have in common with him (which is part of the reason i’m as mad about this as i am to make this post, but i digress).

to single out these things, all of which are completely reasonable for someone who is autistic, who is traumatized, who suffered through a prolonged period of forced confinement, and/or who has literal brain damage, and NONE of which are nearly as tragic and doomed as people are making them out to be, that’s all bad enough on its own!

but to point out these traits and then turn around and use them to color every single interaction he has with another character, every single thing he says, and tie it back to his traaaagic broken mind and how he’s clearly losing his grip on reality just feels… insanely othering in a way that’s really exhausting.

like, for fucks sake, a solid 80% of his character interactions could be lifted near verbatim from conversations i’ve had in real life with my friends, family, coworkers, you name it, all of which were friendly and usually in jest — hell, 9/10 times when i let out a random non sequitur or lose my train of thought or forget what i’m doing, nobody even bats a fucking eye! they sure as hell don't accuse whoever i’m talking to of abusing me because they expressed mild annoyance at my bad joke.

i’ve genuinely seen someone get all worked up and construe his one interaction with sombra where he comments on her tendency to disappear and reappear in odd places as evidence that he’s got dementia and is slipping away from reality altogether… and not, yknow, a nod to her fucking cloaking ability and translocator and the fact that she uses both very frequently just for the hell of it. that one still fucking baffles me i'm sorry. if i hadn't seen it with my own eyes i'd honestly think it was a joke. like. cmon now

another thing that makes it even worse is that most of this is also just…. not even grounded in canon. if this was the way blizz was writing him, it’d be one thing. it would still be shitty and ableist, but blizzard handling their oooh spooky scary mentally ill character badly is about as surprising as the sun rising every morning. i can't say i wouldn't still be upset to see people continuing to perpetuate it, but i wouldn't be AS mad, i guess.

but SO. MANY. of the popular takes on his character are either never concretely stated or outright contradicted by his ingame dialogue and interactions and it drives me insane!!! idk WHERE y’all are getting this shit but so many people are reaching so hard to make him a tragic sad uwuwuw glass bones and paper skin pathetic little meow meow that they’re going out of their way to misinterpret source material so they can shout from the rooftops about how sad and pathetic and unaware they think people like me must be.

i keep seeing people talk about how he probably has no idea that talon is a terrorist group, that he doesn’t know what talon IS, or that he doesn’t even know that he WORKS for talon, and it’s starting to go from mildly annoying to infuriating. this shit has literally no basis in canon aside from conjecture based on the fact that he’s Known to be mentally ill!! i don't see even half as many people getting this all up in arms about widow, who we KNOW FOR A FACT was literally kidnapped and experimented on and brainwashed by talon. like. that's her WHOLE THING. meanwhile sig literally just works there and people are clamoring for ovw to come """""rescue"""""" him as if hes like, a lab animal or something instead of a grown man who happens to not be particularly bothered by the fact that he works for talon.

this is something that's addressed in game MULTIPLE TIMES - he’d far prefer to watch an ant crawl on the ceiling than listen to s76 trying to ‘talk sense into him’, not because he can’t hear him or anything either, it’s pretty clear from his tone and cadence that he’s actively choosing to ignore him. when baptiste points out the fact that he’s fully capable of leaving talon if he wanted to, he doesn’t deny it or act confused or like that’s a strange thing to say, he just seems a little bemused that someone would think he WANTS to leave. yeah, he sure could— but why would he bother?

he's not "totally unaware of what he's doing" in the fucking slightest - hell, i'd argue that his new map-exclusive lines and interactions prove that he's MORE grounded now than he was in ovw1. yes, he gets a little confused on occasion when he can't quite remember the last time he's been somewhere. (memory lapses are just kind of like that. i had several while writing this post, in fact! it just fucking happens sometimes. it's really not the end of the world. frustrating, yeah, but i promise you we can manage just fine).

i guess the question i'm asking is: is it really all that difficult for to fathom that he might just... WANT to be there? that he might just straight up not care what talon is up to, so long as he's able to keep doing his research as he sees fit??

and for the record, before anyone takes this and runs with it and we lose the plot of this post, i am NOT SAYING that the very idea of wanting him to leave talon is #problematic or anything. i dont care, really. do whatever you want. what i do care about is just like.... being mindful about what we're saying and WHY we're saying it. it's reaching a point where people are somehow managing to look at the ass backwards already ableist as hell decisions blizz has already made with him and decided "hey, i bet i can find a way to make that even worse!"

#overwatch #sigma #siebren de kuiper #overwatch 2 #ovw2 #sorry for the essay but also im not sorry. in fact i am kinda mad.

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br1ghtestlight · 7 months

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random thought but i love eugene mirman's gene sounds ESPECIALLY when gene is sleeping. they're so good & cute

louise tina bob and linda looking @ gene literally exactly like this when he forgets how his song goes at breakfast LMAOO

love that tina and louise seem to actually pay attention to what songs gene is writing and what they're about despite the fact that there are SO MANY. supportive family <3

gene's dream.... bro that was god speaking to you. like for real wtf

also im only a minute in and there are SO MANY good screenshots already he's such a cutie i love him so much!!!! <3 gene episodes my beloved

"Now I'm going to change into last night's pajamas, AKA my only pajamas, and brush my teeth with Tina's toothbrush because that's what I accidentally did last night."

"Wait, what?"

gene and tina are so silly?? 😭

me and gene share many similarities including waking up in the middle of the night every two hours for no fucking reason. like THATS relatable

MR AMBROSE APPEARANCE LETS FUCKING GOOO‼️‼️ why does his voice sound slightly sped up is he okay. does he have a new voice actor?? he sounds slightly off not like in a bad way its just strange

THERE WAS A NEW VOICE ACTOR BCUZ BILLY EICHNER WASNT CREDITED maybe bcuz its such a small appearance but thats very weird. i feel like mickey fans in season 12 episode 6 when loren did that horrible mickey impression 😭😭 also whoever did his voice in this episode wasnt credited so it was somebody from the main cast doing an impression of him. will try to figure out who. sorry episode review cancelled i need to figure out who the hell voiced mr ambrose in this episode

based on the fact that u cant obviously tell who it is i dont think its eugene mirman and probably not h jon benjiman?? dan mintz can only do one voice so its not him either. probably either john roberts larry murphy or a random crew member who they didnt bother to credit

(most likely billy eischner just wasn't avaliable to voice mr ambrose due to his movie career etc so i dont blame them but it was noticeable enough to ME that i needed to figure it out. not even a bad impression honestly the average fan wouldnt notice)

"What do you lucid dream about?"

"I do revenge stuff on people who were mean to me in high school, some fantasy and science fiction, some adult stuff I can't tell you about."

this is literally the gayest thing mr ambrose has ever said omg FHFMDDJKSKS i cant believe this drama club ass nerd was bullied in high school who could have guessed. not me thats for sure

(now somebody has to write a fanfic about mr ambrose having Adult Stuff dreams about mr frond. i want this on my desk by 3pm tomorrow)

love mr ambrose and his gay ass curly hair..... mr ambrose my beloved <33 kisses u

i dont have anything to say im just strangely invested in gene's lucid dreaming plot at this point. Love all his silly little dreams and its incredible he never seems to have any nightmares or anything!!

this is reminding me of the movie where gene had a dream and he was scared that he wasn't good at music and that people weren't going to like his performance and the aliens came down to told him to stop 😭😭💔 his insecurity that he might not be that good a musician literally makes me cry. he's so sweet and kindhearted my babyy boy

CAN I SKIP SCHOOL AND GO BACK TO SLEEP LMAO

"Even successful musicians went to sixth grade, Gene."

"That's a MYTH!!"

weirdly mr ambrose started sounding completely normal at some point like did his voice actor come back and just wasn't credited?? or whoever did this impression was REALLY good jfc

mr ambrose HATES these fuckign kids bro

HES SO UNHINGED LMAO 😭😭

NOT THE STARING AGAIN. why are they literally just this image every single time gene plays music in this episode im gonna cry

love this specific frame of gene running his hand through his hair

awww bob is such a good dad

sidenote but this subplot with tina and louise is so stupid it actually made me laugh LMAO the fucking girl cricket. thr female cricket. like what if he's gay huh what then

"or if she's not his type she also makes a great best friend. she's a good listener" THANK YOU louise for acknowledging the cricket might be gay. she's an ally 🙏

AWW GENE WRITING HIS SONG <3 eugene mirman isnt a Good singer (not hating he literally says that all the time. they have to record each line seperately bcuz he cant sing on key) so its hard to tell when they're trying to make gene's songs seem good or not but this is really sweet. u can tell he just loves music so much

why is gene's song kinda making me emotional..... like this show is usually 50/50 on if it actually wants to take gene's songwriting ability seriously but in this episode its so clear how much he LOVES music and songwriting and how talented he is at it. he has trouble with focus and commitment sometimes but thats never an issue when it comes to his music and he'd happily spend an entire afternoon writing a song from start to finish (even skipping out on dinner) because he was so hyperfocused. love how much respect they give gene in this episode tbh

deeply appreciate the "larry murphy as teddy" credit despite teddy not having one single line in this entire episode. Literally just a legacy credit at this point

I LOVED THIS EPISODE 😭😭💕 i dont think it'll be as widely popular as some other episodes this season but as a gene fan and an artist this episode really resonated with me. the ending sequence was actually really beautiful (gives me the same vibes as "your heart's not broken its only growing" tbh) and i loved gene's song and all the different costumes they put him in for his dreams!! tina and louise's subplot was really cute too. very enjoyable episode if you're a gene fan or just a casual viewer who wishes he got more focus. he's SO SWEET and so passionate <3

#txt #bob's burgers #episode review

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k-phoenix · 6 months

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hello! i would love to hear the rant about PET scans :3

Holy shit so okay I'm in the train for the next 20 minutes, and I _know_ that's not enough time to get into all of it, but I could rant about this for hours, so. Maybe we cap this at 20 minutes. [20 minutes later] Okay so I wrote a huge wall of very boring text that barely started getting into it, so let me provide way less detail, actually:

It is massively expensive. A PET scanner costs a lot. And it's not a one time purchase, and then you can do scans, no, you wish. You also need some very expensive equipment to create radioactive tracers (which are what is used to do a PET scan) on site, because that stuff needs to be created fresh (under an hour) before every scan. To create the tracers is ALSO incredibly expensive. A single PET scan costs multiple thousands.

This also means that PET research makes use of as few participants as possible. A study with 15 participants is considered big. You simply cannot infer from 15 participants to the whole population. This also means that, statistically, it is highly likely that you don't find an effect even though it exists - meaning if your PET study looks for the effect of A on B, it is highly likely that it will find that A has no effect on B even though it does - simply because you didn't have enough participants (if this explanation doesn't make sense, let me know, and I can explain in detail)

This, together means, that an absolutely absurd amount of money is used for research that, by design, will not find results, because to find results, they would need more participants and even more money.

Because scientific publishing is a shitshow at the moment, research that doesn't find results very rarely gets published, especially not if you can't even be sure whether the result is right. So absurd amounts of money put into research that doesn't even get published.

And I haven't even talked about the results they did find and issues with them. Don't ask me to explain those. Don't tempt me to put hours into writing a multiple page essay that nobody will read.

So, in conclusion: PET is an absolutely amazing feat of engineering that is magnificent in detecting cancer and with it we could learn so. Much. More about the brain and how it works. But to do that, a lot of the basic organisation of how we do science would first need to change. Many labs would have to collaborate and be okay with making the collected data openly available, so appropriate sample sizes (=numbers of participants in a study) can even be achieved (Here's a paper on that). That probably won't happen, though.

Now, obligatory note: one of the professors who taught me about PET is a man who wrote an extremely controversial paper about exactly this stuff, despite also using PET in his research. If you like niche drama in science, look into this paper and all the articles that are responding to it.

#answers #thank you so much for the question!!!#i tried to not go into too much detail and still make sense but let me know if I should explain something better!#don't get me wrong. PET is amazing. we could learn so much with it #but also. i could not do PET research with good conscience because currently it is a waste of a shitton of money #god I wish though. it is such an absolutely cool method.#like - you can look at fucking dopamine. straight up. not just at brain activity but the actual neurotransmitters!!!#that's cool as hell!!!!!#I fucking dream of that being possible and also FEASIBLE #damn reading over this after I hit post and reading 'let me provide WAY less detail actually' and then a long ass post #me @myself: damn man you gotta take your adhd medication #also if you click one of the last two links. I know my profs name is very... unfortunate.#please don't mention his full name in my notes though. i don't want him to google his name and find my tumblr or something #personal #neuroscience

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supernovaa-remnant · 8 months

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ahhh space truly is so cool!!! also i love your pictures!! :D i really get your love for it, i too have loved space since i was pretty young and i even wanted to be an astronaut at one point lol sadly, it became clear over the years that i didn't have the talent for maths and science needed to do that lol but i still love watching space documentaries and learning about it!!! which brings me to my question of if you could tell me any cool space facts :D

askxhhsgsjwvsihsjsbsjshxs sky where do I even start with cool space facts???

okay okay. So, by nature of how they’re formed, all gas giant planets (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) have rings around them. Because of the gravity of these planets, these rings are slowly being drawn into the planets and crashing into the atmospheres. however, they’re getting replenished by asteroids and comets that are drawn in by their gravitational pull. (sometimes these objects collide with debris in the ring system and make more debris).

Now, onto the interesting bit. Most people don’t know that all the gas giants have rings, but everyone knows about Saturn’s brilliant rings. The reason why Saturn’s rings are so much bigger and more prominent isn’t 100% known, but the most popular theory is that, not only were the rings recently replenished, but they were formed due to an object around the size of Saturn’s moon Titan (which is v close to the size of the earth) being destroyed and broken up. (Titan is another really really cool satellite/moon but I’ll leave that for another post askshxhsjdghsbzjshs)

Now, one more fun fact for you but this time about black holes because I’m actually incapable of talking abt space without bringing them up.

So, black holes are formed by really really really massive stars dying. Stars die in a variety of ways depending on their mass, and maybe one day I’ll make a post going more in depth, but basically what happens is most stars become red dwarfs and eject their outer layers forming planetary nebulae, and a very small amount of stars are so massive that they go supernova.

What usually happens is that, after the explosion, a supernova remnant (a nebula) and a neutron star are left behind. Neutron stars are still incredibly massive, but they’re also really really small (like, diameter the size of a city small), which means they’re really dense. Anyway, the gravity of these things is immense.

But, an even smaller amount of stars, are so massive that a really weird thing happens with the neutron stars left behind.

But let me back up a couple steps and introduce you to this idea of an escape velocity. The escape velocity is the velocity (speed) needed for something to escape and objects gravitational pull. I won’t bore you with the details of Earth’s gravitational pull (I also don’t know it off the top of my head lmao).

Another thing to know is that light is the fastest moving thing in the universe (as far as we know). You see it talked about in sci-fi all the time “faster than light travel.” It’s also the reason we use light years as our primary measurement in space.

But that small percentage of neutron stars? The ones from that very very small percentage of incredibly massive stars? The escape velocity is so high that not even light can escape. And that’s why we have black holes. They’re essentially this incredibly dense and incredibly massive object that not even light can escape.

One more fact about black holes: every single spiral galaxy has at least one supermassive black hole at its center. The fun thing? We don’t know how those black holes were formed, because they’re too massive for any singular star to have formed them. Anyway, I’ll wrap up here.

I just think space and really really cool askshsbsvzvajbskazhjs thank you so much for this ask sky <3

#also I totally get the math and science being a struggle #I’m fighting for my life everyday desperately trying to understand calc lol #if you ever wanna talk more abt space never hesitate to message me :3 #I love talking abt this subject so much #astronomy #space #stella answers #sky cdreambur

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carnellousthecat · 3 days

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Hi, so, I wanted to highlight something I learned a while back but didn't think to share here iirc

basically here in the US we have a very NASA centric view of the history of space exploration (for obvious reasons) and the accomplishments of other space programs are rarely celebrated if not downright ignored. The Soviet space program accomplished a TON of stuff that is often forgotten about around here. We love to relish the fact that NASA put the first astronauts on the moon, but the Soviets beat the US in basically every single other milestone before then. First satellite (Sputnik) first unmanned craft, first animal in space (Laika the dog) first manned craft and even first EVA (extravehicular activity) in space. Not only that, they deadass put unmanned probes with cameras ON THE SURFACE OF VENUS!

That's right, on the surface of another planet. I can't believe I was never made aware of this until so recently, it's shocking to me. There's color photographs of what the surface of Venus looks like. This is an absolutely monumental achievement and it happened so long ago and I didn't even know because the only things I've been taught about space travel are about NASA.

The images are really unbelievable, you guys should take a look at the article. Some I've seen are like, "reconstructions" that kinda put together the few existing images to form like, a proper landscape, but even just the raw images are incredible. We actually know what the surface of another planet looks like, other than Mars. That's buck wild. And you know what, while researching and writing this, I've JUST learned that the first Mars lander? That was Soviet as well!

It's insane how a country can present the world in such a narrowly nationalistic way that accomplishments like these might as well never have happened to a modern American. I wanna take a few moments to shout out nations other than America that have accomplished feats of space exploration. You can find a full list on this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_space_agencies

Judging by the table on that article, there have been 77 space agencies as of 2024, 70 of which are/were national agencies and 7 of which are international organizations. Some especially impressive ones, the agencies that have put an astronaut in space, operate satellites, build satellites and/or spacecraft parts, and are capable of retrieving scientific payloads from space, are the following:

-China National Space Administration

-European Space Agency

-Indian Space Research Organisation (I knew about this one!)

-Iranian Space Agency

-Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities (Russia)

-Soviet Space Program

-NASA :)

I find it comforting to know how much of the world has engaged in space exploration. There's this idea in Science Fiction of the Earthling as a unified identity. In optimistic fiction we see all nations coming together to push out into the stars, combining all their resources to ensure our future, and while cooperation has not always been our strong suit, (they didn't call it the Cold War for nothing) things like the International Space Station and other joint scientific programs have been a testament to that idea. Seeing so many countries on this list makes me feel like humanity does have a future in the stars after all.

#nasa #space #space program #international space station #science #sputnik #technology #soviet space program #venera 7 #venus #feel good

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lexreadsdiversely · 16 days

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Asian Readathon 2024

[ID: A black cat laying on purple patterned sheets in front of a stack of four books: Bliss Montage by Ling Ma, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, and The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin. End ID.]

Even if I wanted to be an aesthetic blogger I couldn't. Not with my baby boy, Lito, taking every opportunity to lay on me.

It's AAPI month and I'm participating in the Asian Readathon! (See withcindy on YouTube for more details). I wanted to share some of the books I'm reading and talk briefly about my thoughts so far.

Sidenote: You should be reading Asian authors year round. If you aren't already, I recommend checking out Cindy's blog, looking at the kickass spreadsheet of books, and expanding your horizons.

Bliss Montage, Ling Ma

Features eight reality-bending stories about relationships with oneself and other people. Character-driven. Less than 250 pages. Check trigger warnings.

I chose this one to fit the prompt of a book that feels timeless based on the vibes of Ling Ma's first book, Severance (a personal favorite). She goes back and forth between past and present often, at times seamlessly between mere paragraphs, and it gives the feeling of time being stretched and almost uncertain. I greatly enjoyed it in Severance and suspected similar vibes in this book, and I'm not disappointed! I'm wondering if this is autobiographical fiction (it isn't advertised as such, but I can spot some of the shared events of Ma's actual life and the MC). This book is deeply intimate and, at times, very heavy. I'm only halfway through, and I already know it's going to be another favorite.

This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Adult Sapphic science fantasy about two rival agents on opposing sides of a war. Less than 200 pages (can you tell I like novellas?)

I've started this twice now, once on audiobook and once on ebook, before realizing neither format worked for me and buying a physical copy. I'm only two chapters in, but wow, if you enjoy competitive flirting, these two are incredible at it! I'll say more when I'm further along, but this is some quality writing.

Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

Sapphic science fantasy. A woman makes a deal with a demon to sell her soul for fame in the violin world and must convince seven other violin prodigies to sell theirs in order to get hers back. She finds number seven in a trans girl who runs away from home, and unexpected love with an alien woman who comes to Earth to escape a galactic Endplague. Check the trigger warnings!

I'm 300 pages in (out of almost 400) and this book makes me fucking feral. Apart from the main three characters stories, there are so many side characters with their own stories, and every single one weaves together in some way and packs a punch. I was sold on this book the moment I heard Queen of Hell, and it's just sucked me deeper and deeper. There are so many unexpected events in this book, so many moments that make me go "holy fucking shit?" You think you know what kind of book it is, then some off the wall shit happens and you have to reassess. This is such a deeply trans narrative (written by a trans woman), and as soon as I finish it I'm never going to shut up about it. Probably one of the best books I've ever read and I'm not done yet.

Once more, check the trigger warnings! Aoki is very good at making it super clear what's happening, while also not doing too much on-page (usually by either going light with the details, or fading the scene). But of all the talk about this book I've encountered, no one ever mentioned triggers and I foolishly assumed that meant that there weren't any major ones. There very much are. I'll start you off: transphobia, internalized transphobia, racism, sexual assault, self-harm, parental abuse (the book opens with this one, so mentally prepare yourself).

The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir, Jami Nakamura Lin

A memoir that users the yōkai and various other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan folktales to talk about grief in the face of the author's father's cancer and her struggles with Bipolar Disorder. Features amazing illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin.

This sentence from the blurb took me out at the knees: "...Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?"

This is just fucking cool. It's a memoir that basically ripped up the rule book and does it so well. You're never certain if what you're reading really happened (and this is intentional). Stories that show the complexity and humanity of people with Bipolar Disorder are few and far between, so this book has a special place in my heart. It challenges the current narrative of mental health recovery in a way I've yet to see.

Other things I'll be reading:

The Garden of Delights by Amal Singh - Doesn't come out until mid-May, so I'll be waiting impatiently to enjoy it.

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. If you've read any of these books, come scream at me!

~ Lex

#AAPI month #Asian readathon #asian readathon 2024 #bliss montage #ling ma #this is how you lose the time war #amal el mohtar #light from uncommon stars #ryka aoki #the night parade a speculative memoir #jami nakamura lin #amal singh #the garden of delights #diverse bookblr #diverse booklr #book talk #bookish community #lex rambles

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bronanlynch · 6 months

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experimenting with different ways of organizing this post. shout out to bullet point lists. anyway once again I watched more television than doing anything else

listening (podcast):

new Palisade: very fun as usual! I love the Blue Channel crew so much and I am constantly so worried for them

Great Gundam Project: still very fun to hear how little they know about what is to come. also they got to the episode where Char comes back with a bunch of cool underwater robots and 1) god I miss Char I wish I too were watching an arc of Gundam that has Char in it and 2) shout out to the Gogg & Z'Gok, two of my fave suits in all of Gundam

Media Club Plus: once again they have good thoughts about Hunter x Hunter, truly cannot wait to hear Jack's reaction to the Illumi reveal

listening (music): Dance Apocalyptic by Janelle Monae because I'm stealing songs from my old Beam Saber campaign playlist to make a Partizan/Palisade playlist and that's on both

reading:

Imperial Uncle: got to a twist about halfway through that I was fully not expecting but it was very fun, and the story in now drastically different than I thought it would be when I started but I am still enjoying it a lot

The Death I Gave Him: one of the most interesting questions to me in any Hamlet adaptation/retelling is what to do with Gertrude, what her role in the murder was, etc, and I'm enjoying the way this novel handles that. shout out to unethical science milfs

watching:

TGCF: regarding last week's episode, since we watched it after last week's wednedsaypost: on one hand, beef of beefleaf fame! my beloved! they looked extremely good! ("op they were chained up & disheveled" yeah exactly) on the other, the racism and also the transmisogyny. not that any of this was surprising because it's in the novel too, but it sure sucks to have racist caricatures and also to repeatedly treat the gender shifting & crossdressing as a joke and/or with disgust. regarding this week's episode: rip to Hua Cheng :/ sorry your crush burned your house down :/ I don't remember this arc super well because it was kinda overshadowed (for me) by having Ghost City and then the start of book 2 on either side of it, and as primarily a beefleaf & Mu Qing main I have priorities

Bakeoff: so the technical was a shitshow in a way that is 100% on the judges for not giving them enough time like. sorry that's what it means when every single person underbakes it. however. I literally laughed so hard I was in physical pain when everyone was presenting their horrible liquid puddings so who could say if it was bad or not

Hunter x Hunter: I do love where Killua's arc goes but I also really enjoy this early bit where he's just incredibly competent & terrifying and kicks everyone's ass without breaking a sweat. good for him, sorry about what led you to this point tho

Legend of the Galactic Heroes: other things happened in the episodes that I watched but I will be honest, most of it is wiped away by the preview for next episode showing me an incredibly major character death. um. aside from that. I do like the battle sequences, I love when a show is a couple of guys in a room going "I think this is the enemy's plan, here's what we're going to do about it" and then you see some different guys in a different room going "this is our plan, I hope this is how they react to it" and so on. also I like the narrator as kind of like. a historical accounting of the events, both because I like stories about the narrative construction of history and also because it means everything happens on very specific dates and I love having clear ideas of timelines

ZZ Gundam: finished ZZ! in general I enjoyed it (though I still prefer Zeta) and there are some really fun moments, especially with the Gundam Team, and I like Haman a lot as an antagonist. I didn't realize how close we were to the end until we had like 4 episodes left because the pacing is. kind of interesting. lot more "going to a place and fucking around for a while" than I expected, and sometimes it works better than other times. most of my ~critiques are things I already said last week (the misogyny, the ways in which the critiques of western military intervention in Africa & southwest Asia fall flat due to the white saviorism & none of it really getting a chance to be developed properly, etc) so I'm not gonna go into all that again, but I am going to just mention one of the wildest things which is that they refer to Dublin as "a city in what used to be Britain" which is. a loaded thing to say in 2023 let alone in the 1980s. lmao

I'm in Love with the Villainess: a fun yuri isekai about someone with a shitty job who gets transported into the world of her favorite otome game except instead of giving a shit about any of the male love interests she just wants to spend all her time with the female antagonist. it's very light and silly, and we're watching it as a short break before diving into more Gundam. I do love it when there are lesbians and little hints of class conflict simmering just under the surface

playing:

Ace Attorney 5: some mixed feelings about what I've gotten through this week. I love to see Edgeworth and I'm so compelled by Aura & Simon (individually and also as siblings), but I don't like how Trucy continues to be incredibly sidelined, and whenever they talk about the "dark age of the law" I kind of feel like. ok. look. it is just factually incorrect that it's only now that people cheat in court and only care about winning, and also the idea that overturning one (1) false conviction will fix the problems of the legal system is laughable. especially considering 1) everything about Von Karma 2) Edgeworth's entire backstory and 3) the fact that Phoenix spent the 7 year gap inventing a new legal system that everyone forgot about I guess. anyway. I do love Aura a lot though

Blades in the Dark: finally was able to run another session in my Blades campaign, in which the party. checks notes. performed a reverse bank heist. and also a normal bank heist. sometimes you have to break into a bank to leave something in a specific vault and you steal some other stuff along the way

making: finished building Miorine, so she is no longer a disembodied head and can now stand on the shelf with her wife. I'm not a huge fan of some the proportions/posing of the model, she has. like. woman in a comic book proportions that she doesn't have in the actual show (Imo the worst of it is her arched spine which you can't see here but I was surprised because Suletta has just. a normal spine)

drinking: Down East's cider donut-flavored cider because, once again, I love a seasonal fun little drink. this one's not as dry as the equivalent Citizens Cider I posted about a couple of weeks ago but Down East's stuff does tend to be a little sweeter in general. extremely good though, to be clear

writing: I added a section to my wip doc for my Nirvana in Fire exchange fic and copied over my giftee's prompts but I have not started on it and other than that I've done no writing. oops.

#on one hand talking abt the things i do in a week makes me feel more like a real person who does things #on the other hand it's real depressing to have to say i didn't write at all #u win some u lose some i guess #dreaming.txt #weekly media roundup post

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witch-from-a-block-of-flats · 9 months

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Alright! I won’t write a book but I do want to seriously recommend Link Click. All three main characters are instantly loveable and you’ll enjoy their dynamic from the start. The science fiction, mystery and thriller genres of the show are VERY intriguing and you’ll realize that you will miss a ton of stuff just watching each episode once so the rewatch factor is incredibly high! There are episodes I have rewatched more than 5 times and every time I find new details informing us about the characters, the events or the worldbuilding. Once you have an answer to one mystery, 5 new questions pop up in your mind. To me it’s insanely fun to try and catch all the clues. But apart from that Link Click is ultimately very grounded in human emotions. They explore themes like love, friendship, loneliness, changing over time, being a parent, losing people, grief, trust and distrust, abuse, death, letting go and even more things through the people the main character becomes when he travels back into a moment of time. They also have to deal with the consequences of their actions and how good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes. Fate and destiny also seem to play a huge role but they are more subtle aboout it. Season 1 is a continuous build up leading to season 2 which deals with one single „murder mystery“ so to speak when before it was connected but more episodic. But the genre switch doesn’t feel jarring at all. Sorry this is so all over the place I just realized I didn’t even talk about the premise buts its basically three people working at a photo studio and two of them have supernatural abilities related to time and photography and they use this as a side business to help people (getting information from the past for example). There is more to it as well like how the photostufio belongs to the main guys parents who disappeared and never came back when he was a child and he doesn’t know why.

Basically they just pack a lot of great emotional themes into this mystery show and you just want to know what will happen to these characters and try to figure out the mysteries

Thank you for this lovely message!

I've just finished season 1 and I have to say you are 100% right. Characters and their personalities are wonderfuly written. I love contrast between Lu Guang and Xiaoshi both in their design and character. Btw maybe I'm thinking too much of it but in the first and last episode people talk about how Lu Guang is 'really mature for his age' and 'couldn't possibly be a kid'. We know that some form of time travell (and also body possession?) is possible in this world so I wonder if it has a deeper meaning.

All stories touched me on a emotional level and emotions are something I'm looking for in every media I consume. You've mentioned themes such as love, friendship, grief ect but I find the theme of city and countryside pretty interesting as it is present in most of stories our boys dive into. Emma, noodle ladies, basketball guy. I wonder if it was done on purpose or is it a cultural thing.

I know I will be rewatching the series plenty of times, I want to pick up some clues an dive deeper into the meaning of opening and ending songs (I need to know what's the deal with this photo Lu Guang is holding at the beginning of intro).

Now I'm so excited to watch season 2!

#link click #i'm going back to my ddlc era when i overthink every minor detail #get ready for some stupid theories

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gffa · 1 year

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On page 419 of Death’s End and I am going to GNAW ON THE WALLS PRETTY SOON because this series has enthralled me. I’m not sure what I expected when I picked up the book and honestly I’m not sure knowing ahead of time would have made much difference--I’m reading reviews for the early books, trying to gather my thoughts together, because they feel like they’re pinging off in a dozen different directions at once, and thinking about how I probably would have felt like this was overhyped, either before I read it or once I’d read it. Because what really gets me about this series is the absolutely relentless pacing of it and how it feels to experience that. From the outset, if you’d explained the structure of the story to me, as I’ve wanted to several times when talking about the book, because I feel I should give an accurate view of what it’s like, I think I would have been less than enthused. It’s incredibly brisk, the characters aren’t ones that really lend themselves towards fandom-type Blorbos (though, I do love several of them), and it’s about weaving together culture, science, and the fundamental questions about what drives sentient people. With each scene, the story keeps moving forward, there’s always a new puzzle to tease out, a new question about what motivates an alien race that we may or may not think similarly to, that humanity is stepping onto a galactic playing field that’s been going on for longer than they know, and the nature of the universe. I had no idea what to expect when I read the premise of the books, other than that it was reasonably hard scifi, which it is, but at a more fundamental level, I think it’s mostly about what people do when they discover new things and what that means in regards to your relationships with other peoples. The way the story is written, almost like a series of puzzles to solve, then a bombshell is dropped, and you have a new series of puzzles to figure out, is an absolute rush to read, it’s addictive and more than one night I stayed up just to read one more chapter, because the reveal moments work so damn well each time. The answers the story gives, even the way it leads to more questions, satisfied me every single time. Especially because the answers weren’t always nice ones, so I never knew whether the characters would figure their way out of this one or if they would be trapped in a corner and have to face a terrible cost. This is very much a story about humans facing what seems like an impossible mountain to climb and the messy, shell-shocked feeling of how all of that plays out. Is this a perfect series? No, I can see why some people warned me about parts of it, especially that there are some moments of side-eye-worthy sexism, but what the story delivers on is fantastic and it’s made me genuinely excited to read more genre stories again, because I fell in love with that sense of exploration, of discovery of what’s around the next corner that’s wildly imaginitive, that a story can grip me in the thrall of desperately wanting to know where all of this is going.

#lumi.txt #the three body problem #remembrance of earth's past

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