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mementomori-demimonde · 3 years

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Old Wounds

Hidden Scars: I - II - III - IV - V - VI - VII - VIII - IX - X - XI.1 / XI.2 XII - XIII - XIV - XV - XVI - XVII - XVIII - XIX - XX

Bonus Chapter (21):

Three years ago, you broke up with Miranda.

Or, to better say, three years ago, Miranda broke up with you.

After escaping Victor’s grasp and embarking on the flight headed to England, Miranda thought it was best for the two of you to be constantly moving around.

She easily procured fake IDs and documents and, as Mrs. & Mrs. O’Brien (so lame that you loved it), you checked in the most expensive hotels and made a mess of the room, only to be off the next day. Every bill was paid and the staff generously tipped, even though the money didn’t certainly come from your pockets as you didn’t have any: you found out it was fairly easy to transfer money around and trick the systems; at least all those hacking software lessons had proven useful, though you weren’t up to anything illegal - it was a matter of survivance, that was what you told yourself.

Life was wild and exciting, every morning you were someone slightly different while remaining the same, every night you got lost in the scent of her, only to be woken up by her fingers exploring your body.

Miranda was never satiated. And while it was only a matter of sex, before, there was something addicting, now, that flickered between the two of you.

It was something you thought was unbreakable. Something so rare to be born in such a hostile condition that it would be so hard to kill that nobody would even try to.

You thought.

Miranda lit up the day you reached Glasgow.

You could see her eyes gleaming, you could see her sharp fangs shining at the pale light of the sun as she dragged you around, showing you this and that, telling you about her childhood while turning a child herself, innocent and carefree and happy enough to be pulling you in and kiss you in the middle of the road.

You stayed in Glasgow for five months after that, because she thought you were both safe.

You decided to rent a small apartment next to the theater because, apparently, Miranda loved the theatre and you loved discovering things about her just as much as you loved watching her glow as she watched the show and the people acting or the orchestra playing.

You even convinced her to take yoga classes and, except for a couple of smashed glasses when she thought a waiter was ogling you, and an exploded pillow when her football team lost to the rigors, she seemed to have learned how to manage her anger pretty well.

Even her part-time job as a dog-sitter helped her keep her calmness, even to balance with the frustration she would accumulate during her other job as a consultant; of what, you never worked it out completely, you simply knew it was something to do with finance, probably internationally. Miranda didn’t like to talk about it excessively - the pay was good, she seemed satisfied with it - so you let her be.

As for you, when the first opportunity came out, you accepted it right away: as a receptionist of a luxury hotel, you had a fair amount of working hours, perfectly timed with Miranda, and you were able to bake breakfast for the both of you, pack your lunch boxes and be back before her to prepare dinner when Miranda didn’t surprise you, instead, with some take out and a lit candle.

She uncovered a nice, unexpected side of her, but sometimes she still was the scary old Miranda, even when it wasn’t necessary, to your opinion.

Whenever she acted bad, you served her a banana on a plate instead of a nice dinner you baked, to commemorate the first meal she had you eat. Miranda would pout, eat the banana in silence, and ask for forgiveness between the freshly cleaned sheets. This worked the other way around too, of course, with the exception that she enjoyed herself a little too much, sometimes, prolonging the punishment to something more than just a banana for dinner. Either way, everything was solved in bed. Not that you complained about this method, of course.

You thought you couldn’t be happier; but you thought you could never be any less happy either, and, of course, you were wrong.

It was a casual question you blurted out without much thought.

One night, you were watching a cheesy movie on tv, just for the fun of hearing her complain while she had her legs slung over yours, silently demanding for cuddles she would never admit to be requesting. As the couple on the screen kissed and cried happily, you said “have you ever thought about marriage?”

Miranda froze. You tried to explain that it meant nothing in particular, it was just conversation, but something in her eyes had changed.

She never answered the question.

Days went by and you could tell that something had painfully shifted between the two of you.

You tried to take it back, make her forget with some rough nights, just like she used to like it, but nothing worked.

Miranda wasn’t the same.

And then, one morning she was simply gone, without a single explanation.

After twelve days of waiting, you made peace with yourself that Miranda wouldn’t be coming back.

You started to hate everything you loved so quickly that even going out in the streets and hearing all those people talking Scottish made you sick, so taking the next decision wasn’t too hard, after all: you told Cecilia to mind the tabby cat Miranda pulled out a stray dog’s jaws and brought home for you to heal, vacated the apartment hotfoot and accepted the job as head manager of the hotel subsidiary in Rome, Italy.

After a few weeks, you realized the change was exactly what you needed: Rome was amazing, you like the people and, most of all, the food. You even decided to join a gym so you could keep eating the delicious meals the hotel chef cooked for the staff and when the weather was good, you went for a run, early in the morning, enjoying the sight of the city lazily waking up. Late in the night, before going to bed, you would flick your tear-drop-shaped dagger and put it in the top drawer in the nightstand, only to wear it the next day, because now you felt naked without its cold blade pressing against your leg. You dropped the habit of wearing it on your thigh - it wasn’t practical with your work attire - but strapped to your calf or pocketed inside your boot. You hated yourself for it, but it couldn’t be helped. You tried to convince yourself it was just in case you had to defend yourself - it was sensible since you had to walk by yourself most of the time.

All things considered, you fit in well.

Your apartment is good, with a nice view on the Tevere, the pay is almost double the one in Glasgow and you can allow yourself some treats, from time to time, whenever you feel too blue to stay in the apartment by yourself.

You contemplated the idea of getting a pet for a time, but you decided against it since that too would awaken sour thoughts.

You tried to date for a while, but nobody was enough.

Nobody compared to her.

Despite everything Miranda did to you, her memory was latched to your brain like a plague.

It still is.

Sometimes, only some heavy drinking can get her out of your head.

You weren’t on duty tonight, and while you’re coming back from a peaceful stroll, your colleague calls: there has been a great fuss in the hotel; he tells you about ambulances and police cars hurrying with the sirens blaring to arrest some psycho that attacked a woman in her room. A guy was shot, but you don’t register much about the events, nor do you ask for further information, eager to drop the argument and avoid some unpleasant memories rising in your mind. Guns, people attacking other people, blood… It’s all in the past.

Hurrying up the stairs and fishing in your purse for the keys, you barely notice that the door lock is slightly scratched.

You don’t pay attention to it, nor the way your key slides inside the hole, until you step inside your home, pawing at the switch, and the light doesn’t work.

Immediately, all your senses turn on, your eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness, your ears eager to capture the smallest sound.

It’s the hair on the back of your neck that puts you in alarm. Rising for an imperceptible breath of wind, they notify of the imminent danger.

The next thing you feel is a strong arm wrapped around your throat, and a warm body pressed against your back.

The attacker clearly knows what they’re doing, but you do too.

Everything she taught you is stuck in your brain, branded on your bones.

In a flash, you lift your dominant leg just enough to grab the knife.

You plunge it into your attacker’s thigh without hesitation.

She - it’s a she - grunts in anger.

The hold of her elbow softens, her arm slides from your neck, her body moves abruptly from yours as she limps away, leaving you alone and scared, but in complete control of yourself.

“My, my. I am getting sloppy.” The voice sends chills down your spine. It’s warm, it’s smug, almost amused, and familiar. Terribly familiar.

Your heart, despite yourself, throbs painfully.

You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes from your lips.

“Good.” She says, “very good, m’eudail.”

Whatever doubt you might’ve had, now it’s completely gone. It’s not your mind playing tricks, associating a familiar event with a lost person, this is happening for real. Running away from England to another country, taking a new name, a new identity, rebuilding your life almost from zero has served you nothing: she still has found you.

“Miranda?”

Three years.

Three years you haven’t heard from this woman.

Three years you’ve tried to push it out of your head.

Three years of pretending it was just a nightmare.

Three years and she’s back as if it’s nothing, standing in your apartment like she owns the place. She does, in a way. Miranda still owns you, in the first place, whether you like it or not: it’s not your choice to make. Until Miranda decides to let you go, you’re hers. It’s inevitable. And you know, you feel it in your guts, that Miranda will never let you go.

Some exchange rings, some jump over an old broom; your ‘until death do us part’ was a carving in the shape of an M - not on wood or marble, but on flesh - and you wonder how could she be so scared of marriage in the first place if she, too, has made a promise for life.

She comes into the light pouring in from the windows: it’s sunset, and the streetlight has just been lightened up.

Like it’s no big deal, you watch her bend down and wrap her fingers around the handle of the knife and, with a quick motion, she pulls it out from her wounded flesh with minimum bleeding.

With a wince, you notice that her trousers are already stained with dried blood, mixing with the fresh one.

She straightens her back and bares her teeth into a crooked smile, her split lip glistening with droplets of crimson. It looks painful. She doesn’t seem to mind one bit. Her cheekbone is blooming with blue and purple, her throat bears a sore line around. Miranda wears her bruises as if it was makeup, proud and confident. And, oh, so beautiful like the night before she left.

You can’t help but feel concerned, which only adds to your frustration: you shouldn’t care about her, you shouldn’t feel so strongly about the blood running down her chin - she probably deserves it, and more - but you do care.

You watch her, powerless, as she stumbles toward the couch and lets herself fall unceremoniously on top of it, grunting as her bruised body slackens against the soft pillows. Her shirt is stained as well, her knuckles scraped.

“You’re beaten up.” You dumbly point out.

She lets out a dark chuckle and lolls her head back. Your eyes are drawn to the rhythmic movements of her throat as she swallows. You can almost taste the iron inside your own mouth - how many times she’s kissed you after a training session, how many times your sweat mingled with hers when you wondered if you were fighting or fucking.

It all felt so long ago and, still, it hurt like it was yesterday.

“Tried my best, but you can’t expect the featherweight to win against the heavyweight without a significantly favorable weapon. He was just a bigger psycho than me: came out on top, in the end.” Miranda murmurs, a smug expression deforming her features. “Victor, on the other hand-”

The name has your head spinning. His ugly mouse-face comes to visit on the blurry surface of your mirror every time you shower, the rough lines crossing your back are a distant yet a painful reminder of those days of imprisonment, confined in that small room with Miranda, uncovering her past, her job, her boss and his despicable ways. Those marks hurt, but not as much as it hurts the one on your left shoulder - not until now.

“You’ve gone back to work for him?”

After all you’ve been through, after all the pain he inflicted, after she promised to have him killed because he took it out on you, Miranda decided to still work with him. Betrayal didn’t even compare to what you felt.

How many things can change in three years? You lived a lifetime in two months, since Miranda kidnapped you. Three years, right now, are an eternity.

Miranda’s smile drops. Her blue eyes wander aimlessly around the room, stopping in a dark corner. They aren’t focused, but it’s easy for you to see the regret blaring in her lost gaze.

“It was what I am,” Miranda murmurs, her voice emotionless, “it was the only thing I knew.”

There’s a pregnant silence between the two of you. It feels like forever before you move your first step toward the couch, your gaze fixed on her as if you were trying to control a snake about to snap its vicious attack.

You know Miranda won’t move, not to attack you anyway, but you’re cautious when you speak.

“You’re talking in the past tense.”

“He’s dead now.” Miranda breathes out heavily. Her voice almost overlaps yours, as if she’s completely zoned out, not listening at all, unaware of her surroundings, as impossible as it seems. “I killed him, gave him what he deserved.”

The sheepish look she gives you is the sparkle that lits your flame. It doesn’t matter if Victor is dead now, the memories still haunt your dreams, and Miranda has gone back to work for him.

You feel cheated on, betrayed, and you still don’t know what she wants from you. Frustration builds up from within until you feel like exploding.

You would smack her and shake her by her shoulders if she wasn’t so bruised - and if she’d let you, of course, before succumbing to her strong arms and be stopped by force.

“Miranda, why are you here?” You would ask her to leave, tell her you can’t stand her sight… if only that was true. Angered beyond words by her persistent silence, you walk to her with heavy steps, until you’re in front of her, for the first time, towering her small figure on the couch. She looks frail, harmless, submissive, but you know she’s not any of those things. “Miranda-”

“Shut up.”

You don’t know how she’s managed that - if she’s pulled you down by the collar of your shirt, or hooked her fingers in your belt, or even hit the back of your knees with her foot - but you’re falling right onto her, like the controlled destruction of a building, collapsing right where the demolition expert planned. You try to catch yourself with one hand on either side of her head, fingers clawing the soft pad of the back cushion, even if it’s not necessary: of course, Miranda has caught you first.

Although ‘catch’ is not entirely correct. Her greedy fingers are grabbing your head, pulling more than supporting, and before you can realize what’s happening, her lips are on your mouth.

Oh, God, how much you missed her.

It’s not a nostalgic kiss, she’s not asking for forgiveness or awakening long-lost memories. Her lips are urgent, almost aggressive.

It’s like those three years never went by, as if a lot of things never happened: this one isn’t Miranda, but the mysterious woman who kidnapped you in the alley; she’s back to that unhinged creature that tortured you in the most pleasant ways, who turned a cage into paradoxical heaven where wrong was right and the pain was pleasure.

Too easily you fall back into the addicting spiral that bound you to her. You’re completely at her mercy, once again, with no power nor will to pull yourself out of it. Despite everything, you want more of her kisses, you want more of her touches, you want more of her, no matter if she’s rough or brutal - something of Miranda is still better than nothing.

Hungry hands travel fast from your face to your neck and, for a moment, you prepare to hold your breath thinking she will wrap her fingers around your throat to have you squirm in her lap, desperate for air, just to assert her total control, but you’re wrong. Miranda doesn’t stop: she paws possessively at your breasts, teasing your nipples through the coarse fabric - you hate a little how your body seems to react regardless of your mind, answering to her touch in all the right ways.

You always take minutes to remove your uniform, Miranda hasn’t taken more than one to leave you in your undergarments, confused and wondering if you were actually wearing something before she claimed ownership over you and your body, like always, like she was entitled since the beginning.

Her mouth travels fast, in tow, she nibbles and lavishes, sending electric sparks to your core.

You don’t dare speak, afraid that the spell will break, that you’ll wake up from a dream even though you don’t remember falling asleep, even if it feels real, so real, almost too real that you can’t bring yourself to renounce it.

The tip of her nose tickles the valley of your breasts when she kisses her way down your stomach and belly, her nails scratch dully at the small of your back, pulling your knickers down in one move.

You’ve never noticed how chill your apartment can be. Or maybe you’ve never been so hot before, within these walls.

Her mouth knows exactly where to tease you, her tongue touches all the right places and only in the right ways. Her body remembers everything, and at the same time, it feels new. She tastes you, pursuing the depths of you, almost as if she wants to drown right there and then.

Bare and vulnerable, you don’t even perceive the typical powering position on top of her; Miranda is always on top, also when she’s not.

You can only arch over her as she draws a hurried orgasm out of you, leaving you raw and trembling, your mind spiraling from contentment, nostalgia, and a deep sense of guilt and then back again, when her tongue doesn’t stop until she isn’t satisfied with a second climax, and a third.

It’s easy to lose count when Miranda is having her way. It’s easy to get lost and losing track of time and of yourself, it’s easy to set aside everything to chase her with your hips, desperate for everything and in everything.

She doesn’t allow you to catch your breath when she’s done. You barely catch a glimpse of her when she pulls away, working her jaw to relieve the soreness that has surely set in her muscles, but her eyes are elusive, disappointing you when you hoped to look at her and find the woman you know.

It’s just another confirmation that she is still somewhere else, at least in spirit.

You’ve learned to know her strength, despite her petite size, and yet you can’t prevent the surprised gasp that escapes your mouth when she pushes you off of her and into the couch on your front, so fast that you gape at the pillow below.

You struggle to adjust your head and tilt it to the side when you feel her climb on your thighs, her ripped legs grabbing yours with vicious force when she lowers herself, and despite being fully clothed, you can feel the heat from her core right below your bottom, where she sits.

You swallow in anticipation, shiver when her nails rake at your skin, and then, then everything stops. She pauses.

You feel all the tension leave the room like the fog lifting from the streets.

Her legs are looser when she shifts lower on your thighs, her hands are softer when she glides her fingers up the small of your back and they linger, for a moment too long, across your shoulder blades.

You want to say something, even say her name again, listen to your own voice calling Miranda while still striving to breathe, wearied by the pleasure her skilled tongue has brought you. But as soon as you take a small breath to speak, a startling weight on your back knocks the air out of your lungs.

You take a moment to comprehend that Miranda has leaned on the top of you, her chest rises and falls rhythmically against your back, her breath tickles your left shoulder and you blink at the fact that her cheek is probably resting on her carved initial, and not just by chance.

You mentally count three seconds in, three seconds out. Her warm breath sends shivers down your spine.

“Had to find you.”

It’s a murmur, barely a whisper, so small you even doubt you heard it for real or just in your head.

“What?”

You try to squirm from below, eager to watch her face, read in her eyes if she’s making fun of you in the cruelest of ways or not. Her voice has tricked you on many occasions… or not. Maybe it was her eyes. Maybe it’s better for both of you if you can’t cage into each other’s eyes.

You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding, relax your muscles, stop your hands from scrambling in the purchase of a steady surface to push yourself up and Miranda off of you.

It’s better this way: she won’t talk, otherwise.

“Thought I could do it.” She sighs, her lips move on your skin, leaving a moist halo around her lips. “Thing is… that I could.”

“You’re talking about-”

“Glasgow.” She snaps. You feel her clenching her jaw tight. “When we lived together.”

“You’re scared that you could live normally?”

Silence.

“You don’t understand.” She huffs. “People like me can’t usually walk away whenever they please and forget about their pasts.”

“But you did.” You retort. “We were fine.”

Miranda chuckles. It’s a bittersweet one, and it ends quickly.

“I was doing fine before you came.” She clarifies. It clarifies nothing, but you don’t dare to interrupt, fearing she’ll just walk away for good. “There’s a reason why so many have failed. No one was able to ruin me while I ruined them. No one was you.”

You can breathe easily now that Miranda has rolled off of you.

You turn to your side quickly, eager to follow her with your eyes and make sure she won’t take the door and never come back after such a declaration. Rare have been the times you’ve heard Miranda talk in such ways and you can only imagine what is the prelude for: something fatally bad, or something impossibly good.

In the forced darkness of your apartment, the blue of her eyes glows at the dim reflection of the streetlights.

Her voice echoes in your head.

When you initiate the kiss you’re surprised she doesn’t pull back. She doesn’t even complain. She doesn’t grab your face or the back of your neck, she doesn’t claim the lead.

It’s startling, and it’s a foreign sensation you’re not used to, at all.

You barely register the soft rustle of fabric as you chase her taste and mingle it with yours.

And then finally you feel her hands on yours, her slender fingers reaching for yours and sliding almost perfectly in between, like pieces of a puzzle.

She swallows your breathy moan.

You haven’t expected your hands to be drawn closer to the warmth of her body. She lets her fingers move to your wrists, she lets them loop around the protruding bone there - she doesn’t squeeze, she doesn’t pull nor push - leaving your pads free to roam over her stomach, through the small crack of her shirt, gliding over the taut skin of her abdomen. You feel new bumps, new scars perhaps.

She squirms when you push a little too hard against her hip bone.

Or, maybe, she doesn’t exactly squirm.

You feel her adjust, raising her pelvis off the couch, but not to ease discomfort.

Your fingertips slip easily beyond the band of her high-waist trousers.

Miranda doesn’t move.

She’s even stopped the kiss, letting you decide.

It’s an open invitation - a request, perhaps - to touch her, properly, like you’ve been asking, for weeks, silently, before you decided to voice your thoughts and your feelings.

Everything went downhill from there.

Your breath catches, the long-awaited moment feeling so terrifying, now, that you can’t bring yourself to just stop thinking and follow your guts, your innermost desires, to claim what has been denied to you for so long.

Miranda wouldn’t have hesitated. She didn’t hesitate to take when she wanted and could.

Thing is, you’re not her.

You pull away from her in a blink, your fingers tingle with unsatisfied electricity when you hide your face in your hands.

“Miranda.” You growl. Your voice comes out muffled from behind your palms. You’d want to yell at her, berate her, but it only comes out desperate, you sound on the verge of crying. Maybe you are. “What are you doing?”

Her hands are touching your wrists again. She’s gentle. More than she’s ever been. She forces you to unpeel your hands from your face.

In the dim light from the streetlights, her eyes shine again. They seem full of unshed tears, but you don’t want to fool yourself with dull illusions that don’t belong, with every possibility, to either of you.

Miranda doesn’t talk. You know it, you can see it, there’s a whole universe of things she’s dying to say, and still… she doesn’t speak.

You let out a shaky breath, sit lower on her legs, your gazes locked.

“Miranda, what’s your point?” You try again, softer this time.

She opens her mouth to speak then, only to close it soon after with a frustrated sigh.

You can’t endure more of it. You’re too spent to keep playing.

Miranda speaks only when you push yourself off of her, trying to stand up.

“My point is- I’m done.” She huffs out a disbelieving chuckle as if it’s the first time she’s told that, to herself even; the first time she’s truly grasped the idea and made it final. “I’ve got tons of money now and I can leave it all behind.”

“Miranda-”

“We can leave it all behind.” She corrects. One of her hands slithers to the small of your back, pushing you down to keep you near. It’s confident but for the first time, somehow, it’s not possessive. “Start over, for real.”

You swallow a mouthful of sand. Your head is spinning. You even wonder if something has possessed Miranda’s body and has turned her into some normal person who is actually repentant and is willing to start over.

How much can a person change in three years? Does it also apply to Miranda? The rules of mortals apply to such mysterious creatures like her?

You’re about to ask for a moment when you hear a distinct mew.

“What the fuck-” You startle, snapping your head toward the kitchen. It’s hard to see, but there’s definitely something on the counter. A box, maybe a crate. With something furry poking out. “You brought the cat?!”

Miranda’s lips are crooked into a sheepish smile when you look back at her.

“Please?” She whispers. Her voice is velvety against your lips, so close you could answer with a kiss. “What do you say?”

Maybe you will answer with a kiss.

Maybe.

#miranda croft x reader #miranda croft #tfa #the flight attendant #fanfiction #reader insert #ao3 #archive of our own #bonus chapter #complete #four lines #hidden scars #old wounds #michelle gomez

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ripjaws · 3 years

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Ben 10 Survey Results!

Huge thank you to everyone who submitted a response, it was really fun looking through them all and I was genuinely surprised by the results of some of the questions.

Hopefully this will work under a read more because it's quite long and I don't want people to have to scroll a hundred years to get past it.

If anyone has any questions or anything please feel free to ask! :)

Thanks again!

General

Q1. How would you describe your gender?

36% - Female 25.3% - Male 24% - Non-binary 8% - Prefer not to say 4% - Agender 2.7% - Genderfluid

Q2. How would you describe your sexuality?

32% - Bisexual 20% - Heterosexual 20 % - Asexual 8% - Lesbian 6.7% - Prefer not to say 5.4% - Pansexual 4% - Gay 1.3% - Demisexual 1.3% - Questioning 1.3% - Polysexual

Q3. Current age

48% - 20-24 39% - 15-19 13.3% - 25-30 1.3% - Older than 30 1.3% - Younger than 15

Q4. Age when you first became interested in Ben 10

86.7% - Younger than 15 9.3% - 15-19 2.7% - 20-24 1.3% - 25-30

Episodes and season

Q1. Which series did you watch first?

88% - Original Series 9.3% - Alien Force 1.3% - Omniverse 1.3% - Reboot

Q2. Rank the series in order of preference

[IMAGE ID: Five separate groups of five vertical bar charts. The individual columns for each group are coloured in the same order and corresponds to what ranking they recieved on that question of the survey. According to the key at the top of the image the order is; blue = 1, red = 2, orange = 3, green = 4 & purple = 5. The Y axis of the graph goes from zero to thirty in intervals of ten.

The first group is labelled ‘Original Series’ and shows that it got twenty votes in blue, seventeen votes in red, sixteen votes in orange, ten votes in green & twelve votes in purple.

The second group is labelled ‘Alien Force’ and shows that it got nine votes in blue, eighteen votes in red, twenty-one votes in orange, twenty-two votes in green & five votes in purple.

The third group is labelled ‘Ultimate Alien’ and shows that it got thirteen votes in blue, ten votes in red, fourteen votes in orange, twenty-two votes in green & sixteen votes in purple.

The fourth group is labelled ‘Omniverse’ and shows that it got eighteen votes in blue, fifteen votes in red, seventeen votes in orange, fifteen votes in green & ten votes in purple.

The fifth and final group is labelled ‘Reboot’ and shows that it got fifteen votes in blue, fifteen votes in red, seven votes in orange, six votes in green & thirty-two votes in purple. END IMAGE ID]

Q3. Favourite season (Original Series)

40% - Season 1 18.7% - Season 2 18.7% - Season 3 17.3% - Season 4 5.3% - Don’t like/Haven’t watched

Most popular episodes were Ken 10 (S4E10) & Kevin 11 (S1E7)

Q4. Favourite season (Alien Force)

52% - Season 2 28% - Season 1 16% - Season 3 4% - Don’t like/Haven’t watched

Most popular episodes were Alone Together (S2E2) & Save the Last Dance (S2E4)

Q5. Favourite Season (Ultimate Alien)

36% - Season 1 25.3% - Season 3 20% - Don’t like/Haven’t watched 18.7% - Season 2

Most popular episodes were Forge of Creation (S1E16) & Duped (S1E2)

Q6. Favourite Season (Omniverse)

18.7% - Don’t like/Haven’t watched 18.7% - Season 2 16% - Season 5 12% - Season 6 10.7% - Season 1 9.3% - Season 8 8% - Season 4 5.3% - Season 3 1.3% - Season 7

Most popular episodes were And Then There Were None (S6E1) & And Then There Was Ben (S6S2)

Q7. Favourite Season (Reboot)

60% - Don’t like/Haven’t watched 17.3% - Season 4 10.7% - Season 3 6.7% - Season 1 5.3% - Season 2

Most popular episodes were Omni-tricked (S1E37) & Innervasion (S2E36)

Q8. Which live action movie did you prefer?

40% - Alien Swarm 22.7% - Race Against time 22.7% - Didn’t like either 14.7% - Haven’t watched either

Characters and aliens

Q1. Favourite main character

45.3% - Ben Tennyson 28% - Kevin Levin 17.3% - Rook Blonko 9.3% - Gwen Tennyson

Some ‘Why’ responses:

Ben -

I know it's a really basic pick but I enjoy Ben alot as a character. Even though I feel like he took an extremely sharp turn into immaturity in the final season of Alien Force onward (from what I've heard it was due to ratings), it still fit well after a bit of time of adjustment. Him being rash and selfish at times while still having a good heart feels...very human. I'm a huge fan of flawed protagonists and Ben is a prime example of such, imo! Plus I hradcanon that he has autism and it's a big comfort for me :)

I love his potential as a character and the way he hands having such power and responsibility thrust upon him. Ben has done so much for the people in his life and the universe, and I absolutely adore him.

I think of him like a kind person who tries his best to the right thing, he's pretty chill and optimist and in my mind he's a chaotic bi and i can relate to that

Kevin -

I like that he's always been an antihero in the original series. And in the reboot I really like the direction the showrunners are taking his character. He has a different backstory, motivations and I'm really enjoying his character development. It's a fresh take on his story and they're treating it with care, which I really appreciate. His Antitrix aliens also have some really incredible designs.

Cool powers, uncommon character in children's media, especially as a primary character often cast in a good light (ex con, high school dropout, masculine, not emotionally mature). His character development is some of the best in the series.

Gods, we could be here forever... Okay, short version- 1) I can relate to him on a mental health level, especially in the OG series we seemed to have similar issues and to handle them in similar ways 2) there's a lot of depth and variance to his character, he's angry and aggressive and dangerous but also a dork, a sweetheart, and very affectionate once he lets his walls down, he loves cars and supernatural romance, violence and magical girls, he'll rescue an aggressive dog for no reason other than it needed help but also he might consider how much he could get for selling you, he's a complex character and he's allowed to be in a way the Tennysons can't because of how firmly they sit in the Hero seat 3) for all of this, we never really know all that much about him and his experiences, at least in comparison to what we know is there- we never learn about his time traveling the galaxy, we haven't heard anything about his time stuck in time, it's only in the reboot we're getting trustworthy information about his background and even then it's rare tidbits- he's ripe for exploring in fic, headcanon, and so-on 4) his powers in the OG series, his status as mutant or alien or both who knows anymore leaves a lot of doors open to play and to look at the world through different angles 5) dude has turned into six different monstrous chimera forms over the course of the franchise and honestly you have to support that sort've shit in media otherwise they might stop

Rook -

Alien catboy with a glorious voice and have you seen those arms??? And he's so polite while also being hilarious when he gets a little rude/snarky and his character development is amazing!!

While I would normally say Ben himself, Rook is his only friend that hasn't tried to kill him. Additionally, he provides Ben with guidance as well as support the Gwen and Kevin are fickle about.

Having an actual alien joining the cast and serving at Ben's foil worked well to me.

Gwen -

Smart, talented, funny, snarky, confident, and super cute. Jock-prep-nerd energy all in one. Deserves the world. Criminally ignored by the majority of the fandom. Knows karate and judo?? College at 16?? Icon.

Angel, can do no wrong, was capable of so much more than the show let her do, potential to be the most powerful member of the team if they'd just let her go a lil feral sometimes :/

She was a good voice of reason most of the time. Her powers were really interesting and overall I think she had a lot of wasted potential having to be sidelined since the series was about Ben ultimately

Q2. Favourite minor characters

40 votes - Paradox

22 votes - Max Tennyson

18 votes - Tetrax

17 votes - Argit

16 votes - Julie Yamamoto

15 votes - Azmuth

12 votes - Ester

10 votes - Looma Red Wind

9 votes - Glitch

9 votes - Kai Green

7 votes - Alan Albright

6 votes - Jimmy Jones

4 votes - Cooper Daniels

3 votes - Eunice

3 votes - Helen Wheels

2 votes - Elena Validus

2 votes - Manny Armstrong

1 vote - Cash Murray

1 vote - Driba

Other votes went to Penny Bennyson, Kenny Tennyson/Spanner, Lucy Mann, Rook Shar, Eddie Grandsmith, Myaxx and Pakmar.

Q3. Ship or Zed

64% - Ship 36% - Zed

Q4. Favourite main antagonist

20% - Albedo 13.3% - Kevin 11 12% - Vilgax 10.7% - Charmcaster 10.7% - Zs’Skayr 9.3% - Malware 5.3% - Forever Knights 5.3% - Eon 4% - Highbreed & DNAliens 4% - Aggregor 1.3% - Servantis & Rooters 1.3% - Khyber 1.3% - Dagon & the Esoterica

Some ‘Why’ responses for top 3:

Albedo -

When I first saw him during the airing of Good Copy, Bad Copy, I was scared that Albedo might be a one-and-done evil clone that doesn't get much development. These fears went away, and I was pleased to find out about his backstory and motives, just a sour soul in an unpleasant situation. Even in Ultimate Alien with his reappearance episode, he tries to work on his own to cope in a horrid human world. He isn't necessarily malicious until Ben gets in his way, he just wants to return to his own body and leave, even stating that he wasn't going to fight Ben anymore while he had temporarily returned to his Galvan form. I know DJW stated in some interview that Albedo could never be redeemed, but I believe there's some hope if he gets help. And I'm a sucker for those redemption arcs :)

Tragic frog man that could have been helped but nobody helped him and he doubled down on his hatred which led to him getting stuck in a cycle of revenge and punishment and it's the tragedy of how much better things could have been for him if someone just helped him that I love so much!!

Kevin 11 -

He’s very dangerous and has a terrifying power to absorb electricity and living DNA to have the same powers of who he absorbed it from and even turn himself into a mutant with all those powers combined leading to destructive power

Kevin was a good antagonist and a good protagonist, although i feel the transition was rushed. Anti-hero kevin in the reboot is great!

Vilgax -

He was always the endgame villian for Ben, despite how many battles they've had, despite countless losses, he always tried to stay one step ahead, and plan everything.

"Speak with care, Psyphon. Your counsel is valuable...not irreplaceable."

Q5. Favourite minor villains

38 votes - Animo 20 votes - Hex 18 votes - Michael Morningstar/Darkstar 14 votes - SixSix 13 votes - Zombozo 9 votes - Vreedle family 9 votes - Vulkanus 8 votes - Rojo 5 votes - Inspector 13 5 votes - Billy Billions 5 votes - Will Harangue 4 votes - Fistrick 4 votes - Nyancy Chan 3 votes - Lord Decibel 3 votes - Simian 3 votes - Subdora 3 votes - Viktor 2 votes - Addwaitya 2 votes - Fistina 2 votes - Kraab 2 votes - Psyphon 2 votes - Steam Smythe 2 votes - Sunder 1 vote - Liam 1 vote - Ssserpent

Other votes went to Maurice & Sydney, Bugg Brothers, Alternate evil Bens, and the Mummy.

Q6. Favourite canon relationship

66.7% - Gwen & Kevin 13.3% - Max Tennyson & Verdona 5.3% - Ben & Kai 4% - Rook & Rayona 1.3% - Julie & Herve 1.3% - Max & Xylene

Q7. Favourite non-canon ship

36% - I don’t have one 30.7% - Ben & Rook 6.7% - Ben & Kevin 4% - Ben & Julie

Other responses included Ben & Rex, Kai & Julie, Looma & Attea, Alan & Cooper, Ben & Looma, Kevin & Manny, Gwen & Cooper, Ben & Ester, Max & Phil, Azmuth & Paradox, Cooper & Elena, Kai & Ester, Ben & Zak Saturday, Ben & Eddie, Ben & Albedo, Ben & Kevin & Gwen, Kenny & Devlin, OC & canon, and Ben & a therapist.

Q8. Favourite alien introduced in the Original Series

18.7% - XLR8 17.3% - Upgrade 13.3% - Ghostfreak 10.7% - Diamondhead 9.3% - Heatblast 8% - Wildmutt 6.7% - Ditto 2.7% - Blitzwolfer 2.7% - Snare-oh 2.7% - Grey Matter 1.3% - Cannonbolt 1.3% - Four Arms

Q9. Least favourite alien introduced in the Original Series

22.7% - Eye Guy 18.7% - Spitter 8% - Articguana 8% - Frankenstrike 6.7% - Upchuck 6.7% - Stinkfly 5.3% - Buzzshock 5.3% - Snare-oh 4% - Four Arms 2.7% - Blitzwolfer 2.7% - Ditto 2.7% - Wildmutt 2.7% - Grey Matter 1.3% - Cannonbolt 1.3% - Diamondhead 1.3% - Ghostfreak

Q10. Favourite alien introduced in Alien Force

46.7% - Big Chill 17.3% - Rath 8% - Goop 6.7% - Lodestar 5.3% - Swampfire 4% - Chromastone 4% - Spidermonkey 2.7% - Alien X 2.7% - Echo Echo 1.3% - Humungousaur 1.3% - Jetray

Q11. Least favourite alien introduced in Alien Force

18.7% - Lodestar 17.3% - Brainstorm 13.3% - Alien X 10.7% - Humungousaur 10.7% - Spidermonkey 8% - Jetray 8% - Chromastone 5.3% - Goop 5.3% - Echo Echo 2.7% - Rath

Q12. Favourite alien introduced in Ultimate Alien

18.7% - Juryrigg 16% - AmpFibian 14.7% - Clockwork 12% - NRG 8% - Armodrillo 8% - Shocksquatch 8% - Terraspin 8% - Water Hazard 2.7% - Chamalien 2.7% - Fasttrack 1.3% - Eatle

Q13. Least favourite alien introduced in Ultimate Alien

30.7% - Fasttrack 18.7% - Eatle 13.3% - Juryrigg 9.3% - Chamalien 8% - Shocksquatch 6.7% - Terraspin 5.3% - Water Hazard 4% - Clockwork 1.3% - AmpFibian 1.3% - Armodrillo 1.3% - NRG

Q14. Favourite Ultimate Form

38.7% - Echo Echo 24% - Big Chill 10.7% - Swampfire 9.3% - Way Big 8% - Wildmutt 6.7% - Spidermonkey 1.3% - Cannonbolt 1.3% - Humungousaur

Q15. Favourite alien introduced in Omniverse

29.3% - Feedback 13.3% - Pesky Dust 12% - Gravattack 9.3% - Ball Weevil 8% - Bullfrag 6.7% - Whampire 5.3% - Bloxx 4% - Atomix 4% - Walkatrout 2.7% - Gutrot 1.3% - Crashhopper 1.3% - Kickin Hawk 1.3% - Toepick 1.3% - The Worst

Q16. Least favourite alien introduced in Omniverse

24% - The Worst 14.7% - Bloxx 12% - Mole-Stache 8% - Bullfrag 6.7% - Astrodactyl 6.7% - Kickin Hawk 5.3% - Atomix 5.3% - Gutrot 4% - Crashhopper 4% - Walkatrout 2.7% - Toepick 1.3% - Ball Weevil

Q17. Favourite alternate Ben timeline

29.3% - No watch Ben 24% - Gwen 10 17.3% - Ben 10,000 8% - Mad Ben 6.7% - Dimension 23 6.7% - Eon 4% - Nega Ben 2.7% - Benzarro 1.3% - Bad Ben

Misc.

Q1. Favourite watch design

37.3% - Original Series 29.3% - Omniverse 17.3% - Alien Force 9.3% - Ultimatrix 6.7% - Reboot

Q2. Favourite alternate watch design

29.3% - Biomnitrix 20% - Gwen 10 18.7% - Negatrix 17.3% - Antitrix 8% - Power Watch 6.7% - Hero Watch

Q3. Favourite planet visited

32% - Anur Transyl 20% - Revonnah 13.3% - Mykdl’dy 10.7% - Galvan Prime 9.3% - Vilgaxia 6.7% - Piscciss 5.3% - Petropia 2.7% - Khoros

Q4. Favourite locations

34 votes - Undertown 23 votes - Ledgerdomain 23 votes - Null Void 22 votes - Bellwood 19 votes - Friedkin University 18 votes - Mr. Smoothy 16 votes - Forge of Creation 15 votes - Los Soledad 7 votes - Burger Shack 7 votes - Plumber Headquarters 4 votes - Incarcecon 2 votes - Mt. Rushmore Plumber base 2 votes - The Perplexahedron 1 vote - Plumber Academy

Q5. Favourite Vehicle

33.3% - Kevin’s car (Original) 25.3% - Rustbucket 18.7% - Proto-TRUK 13.3% - DX Mark 10 5.3% - Kevin’s car (Omniverse) 4% - Glitch

Q6. Favourite Kevin mutation

40% - Original series 20% - Ken 10 future 12% - Ultimate Alien 8% - Omniverse 8% - Alien Force 6.7% - Omniverse flashback 5.3% - Reboot

Q7. Favourite Omniverse redesign

66.7% - Ben 26.6% - Kevin 6.7% - Gwen

Q8. Least favourite Omniverse redesign

76% - Gwen 18.7% - Kevin 5.3% - Ben

Thoughts

(Putting every single response here would make this insanely long so I’ve just put the most detailed/most echoed responses & include all sides of opinions when possible.)

Q1. Thoughts on the Osmosians retcon?

Okay, first up, do you know how much work I had already put into building shit surrounding those fuckers by the time of the retcons? I had been working on this crap since AF season 2! But no, they gotta go ruin that in one fell swoop, thank you, much appreciated. Second up, I wibble on it? Like, working with mutants is fun and interesting and I've done plenty of shit with them as well, but in the end I'm always going to be a pro-Ossys person. Mostly the retcons left more questions than they gave answers (how, if Osmosians never existed, did everybody and their mother know Kevin was an Osmosian? why, if Osmosians never existed, did none of the people not-involved in this whole disaster with Servantis's mindfuckery look at Aggregor being reported as an Osmosian and go 'wtf that's not a thing'? do they really mean to tell me that not only did Kevin never bother to look into his heritage, but neither did research-happy Gwen? or am I expected to believe the Rooters made enough fake information and put it out publicly that they fooled literally everyone? and if they did then why? when it would've done the same thing with less effort if they'd just, let Kevin be a mutant with a Plumber father who died) and I feel like they didn't really give enough to justify them. One of those cases of 'making your work less interesting to make it more 'accurate''. Personally, I forever keep working on Osmosians (where's the line where it just starts becoming your shit, I think I may be heading there) and I love on mutants and I flip between or combine the two as needed for whatever story I want to tell.

While the fake memories plot isn't great I think it's for the best because the original series meant for Kevin to be a mutant while UAF changed it to alien. I like him better as a mutant human. Too much alien connections in UAF.

I could scream for hours. Easily one of the worst decisions they ever made. Omniverse picks and chooses what canon to follow from AFUA + the original run and throws it in without care or concern to what it means for the timeline. Retconning something and keeping the effect it had is just bad writing. Kevin coming to terms with not being human and that’s okay was important to me when I was a kid. Knowing that he’s just been on an unending series of brainwashed nonsense all his life deprives him of his agency. I hate this decision more than several dozen essays could ever convey.

I wasn't mad about it. Mainly because I liked the idea of Kevin being a mutant than an alien. Alien Force really was pushing that aspect even with Gwen. To the point where she called her powers 'not spells' because of her heritage. Stupid that the rooters and fake memories were a thing, but necessary.

I was never a big fan of the Rooters Arc, but this doesn't bother me too much. It makes UA a little weird with Aggragor, but again, it doesn't really bother me, as most of Omniverse didn't explore Kevin (While UA Did), and was mostly about Ben.

Osmosians were such a cool idea, and it would've allowed for more exploration into what Mike Morningstar was as well, but just writing them off as mutates is so boring. As well as it makes Aggregors whole part not really make sense, like who is he then.

While well executed, it was unnecessary. You could have had the same story line where Kevin was used to mutate other kids and still had him an Alien. You could have had it where it was another alien species that used Osmosians to morph other species to theirs; a call back to the DNAliens if you want.

Q2. Thoughts on how the Ultimate Kevin situation was dealt with in UA?

Terrible. They wanted to go far. They wanted to go dark. But they didn't think their viewership could handle it so they dialed it back. I will always be curious to know what they would have written if they didn't have those constraints. Because the final product was a mess of contrasting tone and unsure footing about how far to go with questioning our hero's moral compass. They wanted to push Ben to see what he would do and apparently, we got that he would kill Kevin and maybe Gwen if she got in the way of saving the universe.... but not really because he didn't. And then the gang is happy all back together like none of it ever happened. They wanted to explore dark themes but have it leave no consequences on the characters. Also... it was so ableist and awful and Kevin deserved better than how Ben and Max (and the writers) treated him.

If they did everything the same but the argument was 'we need to capture him and lock him away' instead of 'we need to kill him'? I would be fine. It's the fact that they slipped so quickly into murder, into murder by his 16-yo bestfriend, that gets me. Like, there's apparently no space between 'recklessly risk our safety trying to talk him down' and 'Ol' Yeller his ass' and that just does not sit right with me.

Ben should have looked for alternate solutions before jumping on the "Let's kill Kevin" train. I understand why he did (this took place immediately post-Aggregor so Ben was still traumatized about having lost so many people and because he failed and "let" Kevin get turned into Ultimate Kevin, he felt as though every person Kevin hurt would be on him) but I wish he hadn't.

Pretty good actually. I like Gwen's emotions becoming a hindrance to the job, I like Ben putting on his big boy pants and I like Kevin going up to Aggregor and saying "y'know, I was a big boy villain once and I'm tried of just getting kicked around" (obviously paraphrasing)

Other than the scenario being overplayed, I think Ben was right. Kevin was eventually going to end up killing Gwen and he'd already put others in the hospital. He needed to be stopped.

Ben jumping straight to murder, yikes. Kevin dismissing Gwen to hang out with Ben almost as soon as he turned back to normal, yikes. Otherwise, it was an interesting plotline.

Really bad. Really shows how awful max and the plumbers really are. I mean , the guy saved the universe and now he clearly needs help but all they wanted to do was kill him.

it really felt like Ben just wanted to murder Kevin because he saved the universe that one time and Ben couldn't stand someone else being the hero for once

The worst, Max straight away wanting to put him down makes u wonder how long he's been waiting for that kind of opportunity.

I'm fine with it, maybe they could have spent some time dealing with the consequences of Kevin's actions, possibly even the ramifications it had on Ben and Kevin's friendship, but overall I'm ok with it.

Q3. Thoughts on the Plumbers

Plumbers ain't shit. Individuals can be acceptable or not but the organization as a whole has too much power, not enough oversight, utilizes child labor, uses a deathtrap of a hellscape dimension as a penal colony, has been shown onscreen sentencing people to imprisonment in said dimension without a trial, and I'm sorry the fact that a Plumber official could walk into a base with his team, assault several members of staff, attempt to kidnap a boy, admit to having and planning to continue to run illegal experiments on him and others, admit to having altered the memories of other Plumber officials, all in front of the entire base, and nothing was done until he tried to kill the golden child Ben 10 and failed, got his ass kicked by one of his victims, and in a place where presumably there were security cameras? And that the response was, again, to sentence him and his team without trial, take all the evidence, and peace out without so much as looking at nonetheless apologizing to his victims? Yeah, that don't fly. Doesn't sound like an organization that has it's shit together. Either the Plumbers don't have their shit together or the higher ups were in on it until it became something that could actually damage their reputation, and either way I Do Not Approve.

They're pretty cool. I know everyone's talking about how Plumbers are space cops and therefore absolutely corrupt and bad but this is a fictional universe in which corruption in organized forces isn't a necessity. Plumbers don't function the same way real cops do, they don't follow they same chain of command, they don't have the same motivations and they definitely don't have the same biases. Plumbers perform an essential function in the Ben 10 universe, which is to capture and contain aliens who aim to hurt anyone (or those who Ben defeats).

My knowledge of the Plumbers' unfortunately doesn't go beyond UA. They're not my favorite thing ever. Some of my least favorite episodes were the ones where the Plumbers or Plumbers' kids are involved, except for the episode "Everybody Talks About the Weather". The way Alan is introduced is really cool and very X Files-esque, and it ties into the DNAlien plot very well. But throughout the series I stopped caring about the Plumbers in general and I think that concept was given too much attention.

They don't do what they're meant to. They act like heros yet I don't think I've ever seen them do anything heroic. The DNAliens situation, the aggregor situation, dagon etc etc. Where were they??? Why did they leave the fate of the universe in the hands of a 16 year-old boy? Ben has the omnitrix sure , but he's still just one guy, how much can he fight? They showed up every once in a while but that's it. They were useless.

Of course the Plumbers have their problems, but looking at most characters we've met that were plumbers seem to be pretty good people. Max, Patelliday and Rook (and even Kevin, technically) are great examples of Plumbers, Servantis being a bad example of one.

Honestly liked it when it was disbanded. It’s cool they introduced Rook but like there’s so much wrong with how they run most things. My favorite version of the plumbers was tbh the first live action movie. Where it was just a bunch of old people watching out for Ben cause they actually cared about the people they protected (in this case Ben).

Q4. Thoughts on Grandpa Max

(The responses to this one were way more divided than I thought they would be omg)

He said Kevin was a mad dog that needed to put down. He's terrible. Military. Secretive. Kept his kids out of the loop and probably told the grandkids not to tell them about a huge and extremely dangerous part of their lives. Thus creating a gap between them and their parents that didn't need to be there. Child endangerment. Other than that....? He's important to Ben and Gwen so I tolerate him and he had some good life lessons to share. Also legendary adult figure in a kids cartoon who had relationships with multiple aliens.

He’s incredible, he worked in the Air Force, was going to be one of the first people on the moon (But he refused because he joined the Plumbers) had children with an Energy Being, he has a few grandchildren, and not to mention knows how to still kick butt despite him being in his 60s and was there to help Ben grow

He’s a complicated old man. Love him to bits in the original run and I love him in AF! He’s a utilitarian doing what needs to be done and suffering the consequences when need be. He does what he thinks is going to lead to the best possible outcome for the most people in any situation.

Needs to get knocked off his pedestal more often, both in and out of canon. He's got good traits, they're very nice, but there's other shit that gets glossed over, ignored, brushed aside, too easily forgiven, and just. They really needed a character who served double duty being a counterforce to him. Somebody to go 'wtf is wrong with you?' or 'yeah, no'. Ideally this would've been Patilidae, but no. We couldn't be so lucky.

Conflicted. Was he grooming Ben for plumber work, or just trying to support him in a situation he knew would be dangerous? It’s not made very clear...

I think he's got some sort of narcissistic personality disorder. I just can't forgive him for making Ben carry the burden of the Omnitrix at the age of 10 without ever explaining anything, and for not letting Ben and Gwen know he was alive after the Null Void grenade incident in AF. He clearly could have, if Helen could reach Gwen so easily. I think he views Ben more as an asset than a grandson at this point and that's really sad.

I love him! The progression from family hero to questionable old man felt kinda natural, like learning about a family member as you grow older and realizing they aren't perfect

He's awesome. He was a good role model for Ben and he was very supportive to both his grandkids. I hate that they made him mute in Omniverse and changed his design so drastically. I loved Max in every season from the original till Ultimate Alien. After that, he was pretty much just a prop.

Q5. And finally, give me your most controversial Ben 10 opinion!

It seems to be the worst thing to say that Ben isn't perfect and that Kai isn't demonic. And it's pretty standard for the women of color characters in every fandom to get the most hate so to me all the hate towards Kai when her personality is so close to Ben's AND she's also more hated than the ex-villain and the actual villains that tried to kill Ben multiple times just seems- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. But really, and really I've needed to say this for a long time but I'm afraid of being strangled. Some fans will denounce incest/pedo shippers and people that interact with them and then reblog from a proud Bwen shipper with no self-awareness. Please I have the tags blacklisted are you safe to interact with and you just don't know? Or you're just saying you hate Bwen shippers to give yourself an out for reblogging their content????? Or are you all closeted incest shippers trying to maintain a public image???? I'm at my limit.

I do not think the reboot should have existed tbh :,D I know that it has a ton of fans and all due respect to them, but from what I've seen of it I don't think it was worth tossing away four interconnected series' worth of development and starting from scratch to end up with what we have now. I would be fine with it existing if we got an Omniverse continuation alongside it, but CN screwed OV over by the decisions they made near the end of it's run. So it's probably impossible it would return, even moreso because of the reboot already airing, and it would probably confuse younger audiences that don't know about Omniverse if two Ben 10's were running separately. I just really miss Omniverse, it had more potential and the reboot placed the final nail in for it to ever return.

The Ben 10 reboot is fun and meant more for kids rather than the ones watching for nostalgia. I didn’t like how Gwevin were sidelined and downplayed to make Ben look better. Sometimes it felt like Gwen was a bit naggy towards the two of them. I didn’t like how the fact that she was the only female lead how she had sometimes act like a parent or that they put Gwen and Kevin together just because. Their relationship felt forced and awkward a lot of the time. Omniverse’s designs while controversial were fun and unique but I didn’t like what they did with Gwevin, especially Gwen.

Kevin is totally smart enough to figure out an Omnitrix with the blueprints in front of him, we see him do amazing shit with technology- including the Omnitrix- in the OG series, people just don't notice he's as brilliant as Gwen because the show never made it as big a point that he and Ben were so very smart like it did with her before the reboot, so now they're being forced to acknowledge that Kevin might have two braincells to rub together and they're pushing against the supposed 'change'.

idk if it's controversial but there should've been way more episodes of just gwen & kevin & rook without ben or ben having a very minor role in the episode. just more time for those three to shine and show off how capable they are without ben always having to come in to save the day at the end

Gwen and Kevin aren't good friends to Ben. I mean they were initially, but once he got famous and they didn't, they stopped putting more than a half-assed effort to help him. They also don't really consider his feelings nor really care about the toll heroing takes on him.

The Reboot has the best jokes in the entire franchise and I don't why people give it so much crap.

Kai Green is an abuser and I refuse to find anything redeemable about her character. "Worthy to wield Excalibur," my entire ass. And Ben and Julie's breakup was good for them both, as people, and just as much her fault as it was his.

Ben 10 is an incredibly flawed show and people need to stop getting butt hurt when the blatant misogyny, and copoganda in the show get pointed out or when any even minority critiques Ben's character.

Ben is the worst character in Ben 10 and the whole franchise would be better off without him.

Azmuth is fine for the most part and malware was not exactly the most understanding person

I think Ben should've stayed single. Every episode where romance (or the girl Ben was dating) was the focus of the episode was pretty boring to me, personally.

Ben's parents were right to try to stop him from being a hero, so were Gwen's.

Ultimate alien force season 2 and 3 were amazing.( not comparing the OS since obviously that's the best, or omniverse since I haven't watched all the episodes of that)

Pierce deserved to die for being a boring character. I just wish his death had actual consequences.

The reboot is a genuine improvement over the original continuity in MANY ways!

Oh geez, um, Kai was a good character, just her and ben were obviously toxic. Not everyone needs to like Ben and she isn't an abuser, they just don't get along and that's fine but by God, why did the writers have to force them in a relationship? That's all I could really think of on the spot. Oh! And that the first two season of AF were a watered down version of Ben and the plot focused more on Gwen and Kevin than it did Ben. He felt like a side character and I'm not mad about that, but I don't understand why people praise that characterization of ben when I remember more about gwen and Kevin then Ben. Dude, I've been watching the show for the past week and I can name more about kevin and gwen because they're memorable.

Azmuth's hot af, but y'all aren't ready for that conversation...

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If you’ve made it this far then thank you!

Again huge thank you to everyone who submitted a response and if you have any questions/comments please feel free to leave them in the replies/send me an ask/dm/whatever ^^

#ben 10 #ben 10 alien force #ben 10 ultimate alien #ben 10 omniverse #ben tennyson #b10 #gwen tennyson #kevin levin #rook blonko #WE DID IT LADS #looking back there were SO many questions i couldve added like more directly fandom related ones but ehhhhh live and learn i guess #it was fun to do anyway :3

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linkspooky · 5 years

Text

Synonyms or Antonyms: Dazai and Dostoevsky

From the moment they meet within Bungou Stray Dogs, Dazai and Fyodor are set up as foils.

Foil Definition. In literature, a foil is a character that shows qualities that are in contrast with the qualities of another character. The objective is to highlight the traits of the other character.

That is to say from the moment they are drawn in panel together, the audience is naturally meant to compare and contrast them. Their entire first scene plays their similarities and differences up. First, Dazai dresses as Fyodor not only as a joke but to draw the eye to how similar they are, both of them dark haired skinny males with pale complexions who wear overcoats.

Dazai explains he was able to predict where Fyodor would end up, because if he were in the same situation it was what he would do. When he says that, Fyodor shows Dazai the same smile he showed him earlier, like Dazai is looking in a mirror.

Dazai and Dotsoevsky are able to read each other so well, knowing the other like they know themselves. Which allows both of them to continually one up the other and predict the other’s movements. However their relationship extends far beyond ‘Being the same’, or just the fact that they’re both highly skilled manipulators who are able to pull off complex plans. It’s even much more than Dazai and Fyodor are just smarter than everybody else in a way that isolates them. They are each other’s inverse in almost every way while appearing to be exactly the same. I’ll elaborate in detail beneath the cut.

1. No Longer Human

First off, while Fyodor’s character, such as being referred to as a demon and his ideology for crime and punishment draws from Dostoevsky’s novels, the relationship between Dazai and Fyodor is a direct literary reference to No Longer Human.

The character Yozo (who Dazai is in part based off of due to his tendency towards buffoonery to use as a mask for his feelings, and his ability is directly named after the book) in the fourth Memorandum of No Longer Human discusses the antonym of crime with his ‘friend’ Horiki. Already from the way the narrator describes his friendship with Horiki you can see parallels in how Fyodor views his connection to Dazai.

The conversation starts when Horiki refers to Yozo as a criminal. Don’t be so cheeky, I for one have never been tied up like a common criminal the way you have.” After that the conversation turns into an antonym game between the two of them. Yozo turns it into a game to distract from the serious accusation that he is actually a criminal and he got away with not only committing double suicide with a lady who amounts to a stranger to him, but he’s lived his life so far stealing money from the other women he’s been in relationship in. The “joke” of the conversation is that while it sounds deep, the two of them are just playing a game.

Any of these two words could be set up as antonyms as long as you give enough justification. It’s a joke of binary opposition and dualism. In short, you can give justification that things are opposites, or you can give justification that things are actually the same, there is no universal truth there is only differing justifications.

[...]

At the end of the conversation Yozo relents to this point, he tries to think of antonyms of crime but they are all synonyms. Crime, and god, Crime and repetance, Crime and confession, Crime and punishment he finally questions whether the last is synonym or antonym but before he can finish the thought he’s interrupted. Just before then though, he believes himself having come to an understanding of the chaos of Dostoesvski’s mind.

Hence the relationship between Dazai and Fyodor. We are meant to question, are they synonyms, persons with similar meaning, or are they antonyms absolutely incompatible ideas as irreconcilable as oil and water. Note that in the original novel Yozo does not really come to a conclusion on this thought, and in all of my thinking this over I don’t think we are meant to see them as all the way one way or the other just yet.

Either way this conversation has already been referenced several times in Bungo Stray Dogs. “God, is the antonym of crime”. Then you have Dostoevsky who positions himself as the opposite of crime, and therefore sees it is his responsibility to become God.

However, the antonym of God is posited by Yozo not to be crime, but rather satan. Therefore we have Dostoevsky not only taking on the role of God, but also of a demon. Despite being referred to as “Demon Fyodor” several times, Dotsoevsky actually positions himself as both at once, he is both God and his Antonym the devil, and therefore they are synonymous because they are both him.

Horiki at one point in the conversation even references, that while talking philosophically about crime Yozo is also a criminal. What does Fyodor do, but get Dazai arrested and separated from the rest of the Detective Agency for the crimes he committed in the past, because despite which side Dazai is on in the eyes of the law he is just as much a criminal as Dostoevsky is. Even if they are on opposite sides of a conflict (antonyms) they will still be seen as the same in the eyes of society (synonyms).

Then there’s of course the scene from the movie Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple which directly references not only this conversation with Horiki, but at the same time the novel Crime and Punishment.

Therefore in the original text Yozo may see them as antonyms, but Fyodor makes the argument they are synonyms. While he does so, both him and his shadow (his ability removed from him by the fog) are standing in juxtaposition of each other holding contrasting objects. A skull, and an apple. Apples can literally symbolize so many things, but here it’s just a symbol of binary opposites life and death. Or rather what is perceived as binary opposites. Life and death perceived as antonyms can also be seen as synonyms as Dazai explained to Chuuya.

Death can be viewed as something opposite and entirely alien to life. That is life cannot possibly exist within death, because death by its nature kills life, or death can be viewed as a natural part of life. Therefore it is impossible to understand the value of life without contemplating it’s perceived opposite death.

Poison and medicine can be seen as opposites, one kills and one saves, but if you overdose on medicine its easy to poison yourself with it. The more closely you examine them, the lines between supposed opposites begin to blur.

Then you have Dostoevsky, crime and punishment are seen as opposites. Crime is unjust, and harms. Punishment is justice, the opposite of crime, it’s foil and prevention. Except, Justice can harm too, it just harms criminals. Except criminals can just be innocent people falsely accused. It’s never as black and white as it seems to be. Therefore, Dotsoevsky’s belief that they are not enemies but rather friends, it’s impossible to punish crime without thinking like a criminal. To punish crime, Dotsoevsky becomes a criminal.

The apple, and the skull while seeming like opposite symbols can actually be the same thing, hence the title of the movie Dead Apple.

2. Dead Apple

As the movie is canon material I also think it serves as a great introduction to the psychology of Dostoesvky’s character especially in comparison to Dazai. There are two subtextual psychological components to the movie, drawing from both Freud and Jung.

In a brief summary of the movie itself, ability users are separated from their abilities due to a fog which causes their abilities to take form and attack them. This is really obvious Jungian shadow symbolism. Their abilities which always exist as a part of themselves and therefore a subconscious part of them are brought to the surface and they are forced to confront them.

In Jungian psychology, the "shadow", "Id", or "shadow aspect/archetype" may refer to (1) an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself, or (2) the entirety of the unconscious, i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, the shadow is the unknown side.

Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one's personality, the shadow is largely negative. There are, however, positive aspects that may also remain hidden in one's shadow (especially in people with low self-esteem, anxieties, and false beliefs).

For example among the three main characters of the movie each of them are confronted with a shadow version of themselves, Rashomon for Akutagawa, Demon Snow for Kyoka and Beat under the Moonlight / The Tiger for Atsushi. There are several Jungian symbols associated with this process already, for one it’s specifically a fog that allows these shadows to manifest. The fog of the mind is what allows us not to be aware of the subconscious. When abilities are stolen they manifest with crystals that appear on the forehead, which also happens to be where the brain is. Neither of the three main characters are able to win their ability back until they accept something repressed about themselves.

(Pictured literally a tiger in shadow, two Jungian symbols the beastial instincts that represent the unconscious mind, and also the shadow which obfuscates).

Kyouka that she does not want to hate Demon Snow even though the ability is responsible for killing her parents and also making her a murderer. Atsushi is the slowest of all to regain his ability back, due to the fact that he subconsciously rejects being an ability user. We see his flashback in the movie, first he blames the Tiger for his miserable life, he sees the tiger as the opposite of himself beast rather than man, an out of control monster. Then, when he realizes the tiger also protected him during life, despite being violent, Atsushi comes to the realization that his relationship is more complex than light and shadow, complete opposites.

People tend to deny their shadows, but the shadow is not necessarily the true self or more right than conscious mind, at the same time its still a part of yourself that needs to be acknowledged. Atsushi’s ability is even named “Beast under the Moonlight”, the moon is a classic symbol associated with Jung, because it represents the unconscious mind, the time of dreams, illusion, and when shadows are the longest.

In the climax of the movie they literally ascend a tower, directly underneath the moonlight.

Then there is Fyodor whose ability never separates from him and attacks him during the fog, and why is this? It’s because Fyodor already knowingly, willfully embraces his own shadow. He has no reason to deny what everybody else represses, because crime and punishment are friends.

In other words Fyodor already is his own shadow. He’s a walking Id.

The id, ego, and super-ego are three distinct, yet interacting agents in the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche.

The three parts are the theoretical constructs of how the activity and interaction in our mental life is described. According to this Freudian model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.

Why are both the protagonists and antagonists assembled in trios in dead apple? It’s because both of them are representative of the trio of the psyche. Fyodor, Dazai and Tatsuhiko are deliberately grouped as a trio, because they are Id, ego, and superego.

Id, or I desire is uncoordinated instincts similar to the shadow. Reading the movie through this lens, it paints an interesting psychological portrait of Dotsoevsky. Of the trio he’s the most straightforward with his desires, he’s the one who seems to be ‘evil’ only for the sake of indulging in it and enjoying it.

He plays the part of laughing villain the entire movie, and yet he also makes it clear this is an act to him. Therefore, when he claims that this is all for a laugh that’s not a statement that can be taken as a direct truth.

As the symbolic Id of the movie, as the one who embraces his shadow he also plays the role of bringing the repressed truth that Tatsuhiko hides. He’s the one who encourages Tatsuhiko to rampage at the end of the movie.

As he gives this speech Fyodor and his shadow overlap, because Fyodor is his own shadow, a walking shadow, he deliberately indulges in the worst of himself. That is why he sees himself as a demon, that is why he acts out on his god complex. That is the methodology which he chooses to bring forth his ideals, a world without Ability Users.

Therefore his actions in the movie make perfect sense with his established motive in the manga, to commit a purge on ability users. Dazai even asks if Tatsuhiko will be saved by an angel or a demon before Dostoevsky introduces himself as a demon.

It’s more binary opposite symbolism and the intention is clear. Dotsoevsky views himself as soemone who becomes a demon to save others, in line with his actions in his major introduction chapter in the manga.

Demons are also in the bible, the creatures in charge of punishing sinners. Despite the fact that they are seen as rife with sin themselves. Another contradiction, for Fyodor a demon is something he has to become in order to punish crime, therefore he walks side by side with his shadow, therefore he indulges his id.

Then, you have the other two serving as the opposing roles of the mind. Tatsuhiko is superego. Not only is he capable of controlling others to such an extent that he can make their abilities manifest against their will, but the extreme control he has makes him an utterly joyless existence.

The balance between the two, the ego Dazai is the only one of the three of them who seems to have found any reason to live at all. His reason being the opposite of Fyodor. [Death] and release of the yoke of sin saves the soul. In comparison to Oda’s words. People live to save themselves huh, how true...

Dazai is the only one out of the three who has any semblance of control or purpose to his own life, and it comes from following Odasaku’s words.

Ango’s summary of the three of them at the end of the movie shows that he does not quite understand Dazai, which makes sense as to why they never quite became friends. Demon Fyodor, Dazai “Disqualified from Humanity” and Tatsuhiko (turns into some kind of weird dragon) all three of them may seem inhuman but the moment you refer to them as aliens you fall for their illusion. All three characters are still undeniably and painfully human. They want to be seen as aliens to avoid being confronted by this, that’s the game all three play.

Here’s the thing, Dazai is the only member of the trio who is not alone and part of that is because he had a friend who just saw him as he was, a flawed human being.

3. The Demon Fyodor

For this final part I could list all the similarities and differences between Dazai and Fyodor, but that would just be a boring list so instead let’s analyze Fyodor who is currently the more mysterious character as to his motivations, using Dazai as a reference point.

Before anything else, I’m going to use Oda’s words on Dazai as a reference point, because Oda had the best read on him.

"Listen. You told me that you might find a reason to live if you lived in a world of violence and bloodshed. You won't find it. You must know that already. Whether you're on the side who kills people or the side who saves people, nothing beyond what you would expect will appear. Nothing in this world can fill that lonely hole you have. You will wander the darkness for eternity. (...) Be on the side that saves people. If both sides are the same, become a good man. Save the weak, and protect the orphans. Neither good nor evil means much to you, I know... but that'd make you at least a little bit better. (...) Of course I know. I know better than anyone. Because... I am your friend."

So, let’s define Dazai as a character who good nor evil means very little to, and is on the side of saving others simply by choice. He’s not motivated by lofty ideals. He’s not even a particularly moral person, willing to indulge in the unsavory sides of himself if it gets the results of ‘saving others’.

He’s someone who can commit crimes with little foibles. Though I would not say he does not feel any guilt at all because there’s a clear difference between his mental health when he was in the mafia killing people, and when he was on the side of the Armed Detective Agency. He also has the ability to feel attachment to others, because he was clearly sad over Oda’s death. He’s not empty of all emotion, but at the same time a lot of Dazai’s life is spent in contemplation of his own emptiness.

While Dazai moves pieces on a chess board and can see the bigger picture, I would argue that his motivations are much more personal and selfish than Fyodor, even though Fyodor is a cackling demon of a villain. Dazai is motivated by human beings and their individual stories, he leaves the Mafia not because of the hundreds of people he killed but because his one friend died. He is pushed to becoming a better mentor, because both Atsushi and Akutagawa need him to be. I’m not saying selfishness is bad, or selflessness is good the entire point of this essay is to deconstruct that simple black and white thinking.

Let’s say simply put, Dazai is a selfish character, lacking in ideals but still motivated to save others. He contemplates life and death similiar to Fyodor, and the same way that Fyodor finds punishment for criminals in crime, Dazai tries to find a reason to live in pursuing death.

Even that, is a personal motivation.

So then in comparison, Fyodor is impersonal and acts against his self interest. If Dazai is on a path of salvation, living to save himself, then Fyodor’s path is marked for self destruction.

Starting with his formal introduction in chapter 42, Fyodor is introduced as a soulless man, lacking sympathy for anybody else. However, I would argue the opposite the chapter clearly shows Fyodor sympathizing with the child he spends most of the chapter talking to.

Remember the entire chapter Fyodor is playing Ace for a loop, he’s only letting Ace see him as he wants to be seen. Therefore everything he’s described as to others “Something more awful, and heinous than a villain” is the act he puts on.

In the chapter we see a child honestly encourage and try to connect with Fyodor, only for his attempts to fall on deaf ears by the end of the chapter when Fyodor chooses to kill him as a witness. Fyodor gives the impression that he was not listening to the boy the entire time.

Yet, if Fyodor was ignoring him, if Fyodor did not feel a thing about the boy and was not sympathizing him in the least then why did he take the time to explain things and talk to him before sending him off at the end of the chapter? If Fyodor is able to kill him so easily so as to not see him as human, why does the boy feel like he is understood?

Rather than just ignoring him and treating him like a piece on the board, I argue that Fyodor did see the boy as a person. The panel shown afterwards does not display the emotion of a remorseless slaughter. The entire panel is shown as empty. Fyodor regrets this action, killing the boy in such a way.

At the same time he feels like he must do something he personally does not want to do. In order to punish evil he must become something even worse than evil.

Therefore you have Dazai, living to save himself, attempting to be a better person than himself when he’s really just kind of a self obsessed person, and you have Fyodor, who lives to save not himself but the whole world and therefore he must damn himself to demonhood and become the worst version of himself.

Dazai searches for life in death, hence why he constantly attempts suicide. In its own weird way, his suicide attempts, his getting involved with death, murder, it’s all him looking for a way to live.

Whereas Fyodor genuinely believes with all of his heart, that death is something that cures the sickness of life. Not only do we see him have the opportunity to save someone only to kill them as a witness, denying himself the possibility of redemption. We also see him manipulate a child into suicide in front of Kunikida.

Because as he currently believes it, the world as it is will never bring salvation to those children. His act of manipulation is just a symptom of what is currently wrong with the world. After all, Dostoevsky pretty easily got this man to agree to arm his little brothers and sisters to the teeth and put them into danger. A child who exists in this world as it is cannot be saved.

Every character who ideologically alligns with Fyodor is looking for freedom from the world, in some form. Fyodor’s style of manipulation itself is a paradox, he controls their every action even resorting to blatant mind control in some places, and therefore he frees them from the burden of making their own decisions.

Then, if Fyodor is actually an idealist who genuinely does want a better world, and not just a laughing demon then why does he specifically target Kunakida the idealist of the detective agency? It’s because he’s an idealist, that Fyodor wants to crush him. In other words he wants to break weak and faulty ideals that cannot save the world.

Yet, it’s also an act of self loathing. It’s not that Fyodor is necessarily evil, but rather someone who becomes evil for the sake of his ideals. The reason for that is ideals are so high and mighty he needs to become god to enforce them, he desires a world much better than this one therefore he carries the weight of the world of his shoulders. As a person, just like Kunikida, Fyodor is constantly being crushed under the weight of his own ideals. That is why he seeks to crush Kunikida, to prove that Kunikida is weak, and therefore he is strong.

If what he seeks is paradise, then it makes complete sense that he would see it necessary to become god in order to achieve that. However in the end, Fyodor is not a demon, nor god, nor alien, he’s infallibly human. He’s so completely obsessed with the bigger picture, with providing salvation to all, that he will never be allowed to moved by personal motivations.

He sympathizes with the child who is wearing Ace’s collar, but cannot allow him to live even if he wants to.

It’s not that he will never allow himself to be moved, it’s not in Fyodor’s own mind he cannot. If he were to cede to one personal bias then he would never be able to accomplish his goals that are so lofty that he would need to become god in order to accomplish them, therefore it’s better to become an inhuman monster rather than be tripped up by personal feelings.

Whereas Dazai is motivated towards good and saving others, almost exclusively by the fact that there are people in his life who he is personally invested in.

It shows finally even in the difference for how they use people. Both Dazai and Fyodor rely on trickery and manipulation to move people, and sometimes it can seem like they only view others as mere pieces on a board. They have a tendency to also assume they know what is best for other people and move them without their consent.

The difference being that at the end of the day Dazai still sees others as individuals. He always leaves the element of choice. While Dazai pushes Atsushi and Akutagawa together even though they hate each other, because he believes the two of them are what’s best for each other he always leaves Atsushi with the choice of how he wants to proceed.

Therefore they remain individuals, therefore they are still people in his eyes. Even if Dazai always plays with his cards close to his chest, his plans fundamentally rely on trusting others, and others trusting him. Even in Dead Apple, his plan involved knowing Chuuya would use Corruption and that Chuuya would trust in him to stop him.

So, let’s say Dazai is someone who generally needs other people to carry out his plans. This is in contrast to Fyodor who once again, takes the burden entirely on himself.

Fyodor’s allies are more akin to slaves who worship him.

He literally messes with their brains to free them from hardship. Which goes along with again the binary opposition, his brain is modified to feel unhappiess, therefore he is happy. Because by that black and white logic, unhappiness only exists as the opposite and antagonist to happiness. The extension to Fyodor’s extreme logic, that the absence of crime will therefore bring peace to the world. All of Fyodor’s direct subordinates are liberated in this way, if he takes on all the decision making for himself, takes on all the burden for himself, then they are freed.

Goggol explains what are probably Fyodor’s own viewpoints via foiling, and being allies very well. That it is easier to imagine all of them as inhuman monsters who cannot possibly have a reason behind their actions. It’s more comforting, it’s freeing.

To do what he needs to do to change the world, Fyodor must become an unfeeling villain and he does the same to his subordinates, he actually modifies them and removs them of their emotions.

So therefore it’s a paradox, his allies and servants see themselves as completely free in their devotion to him, yet at the same time Fyodor’s manipulation is the opposite of Dazai’s. Rather than leaving it to choice and trust, he removes their ability to choose, he removes their ability to disobey him. It’s as if the only way he can think of for people to be righteous, is to remove their ability to sin in the first place.

It’s even apparent in their joke question and answer session. Dazai tells Fyodor to just inspire his subordinates to be better people the way he does with Atsushi and Aktugawa, and it seems like the idea did not even occur to Fyodor. Fyodor tells Dazai the way to win a woman is to cut off everything else to the point where she becomes completely dependent on you.

So, in conclusion it seems a lot of Fyodor’s mindset is a result of him purposefully taking on the burden of saving the entire world on himself, because he cannot allow himself to view others as equals. In order to continue justifying himself, he needs believe that he is the only person capable of doing these things and therefore he knows better than anyone else.

Dazai and Fyodor are both smart enough to be aware of not only the emptiness of life, its lack of purpose, its senseless cruelty. Their reactions however are opposite, Dazai decided to live in spite of being unable to ever find meaning whereas Fyodor decided to dictate that meaning to everyone else and decide it for them, like his words are the word of god.

Bestowing sins is the work of god. If god god does not Exist, I’ll become him.

#bsd meta #meta #bungo stray dog meta #dazai osamu #OSAMU DAZAI #fyodor dostoevsky #no longer human #bungo stray dogs analysis #bungo stray dogs character analysis #bungo stray dogs theory #literature analysis

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aura-loveshine · 4 years

Text

Fringe-dweller’s true tales.

I looked up at the half moon, and thought “this will be the 5th full moon since you died”...

Three nights before you were so suddenly taken from the physical earth, you camped overlooking the beautiful large body of water. you explored the multifaceted countryside, you were always like a kid when it came to exploring. you would have honoured and felt connected with nature. you would have sat with a j and admired the full moon on Friday the 13th. it would have been so beautiful to see the full moon over the water, the reflection, the light bouncing off the rippling water and quartz crystal sparkly rockbed...

I hope those days spent at that campsite were healing, I hope you felt at peace, I hope you spent those days happy, content. I imagine you playing guitar and adventuring with our magic merlin dog, enjoying the wildlife, the peacefulness. I imagine you listening to the abc radio you loved and talking to the other campers, sharing your quirky unique self, making people laugh, or think. I imagine you satisfied to have achieved the long time goal to drive to the tip of Australia, from Cook Town to Cape York in your FWD. I imagine you had chocolate or something sweet even though you were running out of everything else.

I wonder if you dreamt those nights... I wonder if you had a feeling something was coming. I wonder about the last conversations you had with tribe. i wonder about where you thought the wind might take you next. I wonder if you actually were on your way to visit me... ill never know whether I/you/we could have done anything to change what happened... I can't believe after all the physical pain you endured through-out your 34 years, that you experienced pain in your last alert moments... I think about our dog being with you when it all happened...

I imagine you loving being omnipresent, exploring the universe in your cosmic pirate-ship with Xena, your beloved 17 year old dog. I'm not surprised she passed 12 days after you... I'm glad your both free of your aching sore physical bodies. You both lived so adventurously. you and Xena are the only ones I know that can say they lived in their vehicles/bus for over 11 years, driving over a million kms around and through Australia. I also don’t know anyone else that helped as many fringe-dwellers as you did, loved and supported so many beautiful women without trying to take it to a sexual level, who invited people to travel with you and see new incredible parts of Australia. you saved forests, educated people, changed Bunnings national policy, inspired people to live better and more freely, you lived more in your short life-time than anyone I know. you experienced pain, near death experience, limitation childhood abuse and death of loved ones and still managed to be the incredible being full of enthusiasm with an open heart and playful inquisitive nature.

I was relieved to hear you had been reconnecting with your mum and family. that our close friends had quality time with you before everything changed... I know you knew there was a high chance of you dying while on the road due to road death statistics... but all the justifications can't outweigh the heaviness of not being able to message you, call you, find out where you are now, what your building or what fascinating experience you’ve had recently.

You were the first and only male partner I have shared a ‘de facto’ type lovership with, having only been with women until you. you were so respectful, you were loving and gentle... travelling in a old coaster for 6 months with you living a true dream... you built us a bush shack in two weeks, you built us a bush palace in a month and a half, all while been technically ‘disabled’... you showed me sacred sites of Australia, you climbed into caves, swam in ocean with crocodiles a few kms away,, we ate dinner alone with Dick Smith in the desert, casually chatting. you introduced me to Robin Mutoid at Burn out, I loved sitting with you and Robin in the coaster watching you two light up talking about mad hatter genius building ideas... and plans to create an explosive pineapple grenade to the filming we were doing.

Some of my favourite memories of my life-time, have been with you. I cherish you, I cherish my photos of you, I'm relieved I didnt listen to you when you told me to stop taking photos and be in the moment, but now I can look at those memories when I need to see you. every time I see a old coaster van I'm going to think of you... so many things remind me of you... having merlin with me is the silver lining, I'm relieved she was safely found after 15 days of being missing in the bush. I'm relieved she's with me. but I wish I was instead bringing her back to you...

You led such an incredible life I hope to share your stories and pictures with the world. you inspired so many people while you were alive... and even after... thousands of people read about your death on social media and tv... the articles and posts used the photos I took of you. it was surreal to see you and our dog in articles, for what happened to be so publicised... for a tragedy so personal to be used as ‘grief porn’... I hope to use the publicity of it all to make change to the stretch of road. needs better signage, a lower speed, something! I can't get it out of my head that you were the 9th fatality out of 30 accidents in 31 years, within a 4km stretch of road... 9 fatalities is too many. 9 is the final number. you are the last one to be taken out there...

The bush fires started raging not long after you died... in a strange way, the fires seemed fitting in my state of grief. Our lives were all forever changed... I was forever changed. The fires burning for months. My grief, anger, shock and feeling of helplessness burning inside me for months. the sense of emergency through out the country, the sense of disaster within me.

It was all a bit much trying to deal with you dying, Xena dying, merlin being missing for 15 days and everything else that happened over the next 2 months as well the fires raging, rainforests burning, native wildlife in crisis, homes burning, people dying and the nation all in panic and smoke. Being 1500kms away from my forest home and family while the fires burned out of control less that 40kms away, with road blocks and potential fires in between. Trying to have your life celebration festivities while experiencing heavy rain, wind warnings and strained tumultuous emotions all round... thunder and hail while my mums saying she is taking all my valuables and art to a safe house coz the fires are getting closer, and they are prepping to have to evacuate with the dog, cat, ducks and chickens... luckily, it never came to that, the fires were contained 25kms away from our home, contained only 20kms away from my closest town, a well known beautiful alternative community.

A moment that will always bring a smile to my heart, was when I was finally driving home. Id had a really rough night, id been holding so much in, trying to just get through everything to get home, id started falling apart... we had just started driving, when we saw a small’ish’ dust devil. the ‘tornado hunter’ part in me instantly wanted to drive up the near by road to chase it. I held back, until I heard my friend say “we could throw some of him ashes into the dust devil”... and I zoomed up the road as quick as I could. although the little twister had gone out of reach, I trustfully threw some of your ashes towards it. my heart felt uplifted as I watched the ash catch, float up and dissolve toward the dust devil.

You weren't scared of dying, you lived actively seeking to push your own limits, always with a cheeky grin. but you always landed like a cat, you were always there, doing your thing... alive. you always came back... you would have heard about the fires and driven straight to help, you would have fought the fires like you had before. you would have used the experience as a way to further pursue actual change for the planet, would have been apart of the vocal community questioning how the government failed to protect and how we needed to have upheaval and revolution...

You drove so safely on the roads. I dont know what happened to the other driver, except that he was seemingly uninjured. was it actually an unfortunate accident? or did the driver lose control going around the corner at 130kms in a 100 zone....

Was it really ‘your time to go’? if I hadn't been to the crash site and dealt with all that I have, I might fantasise the idea that you pulled the ultimate fucked up prank, that your hiding out in your doomsday bunker, mischievously laughing at no one knowing your alive, being completely ‘offline’, plotting the moment to reveal yourself... to see you, hug you would be....

We separated as lovers 15 months before you died, as we had to go on seperate journeys, we had to become individuals again. we were both struggling with very different things, we had to salvage our friendship and love, to take a break, allow some time... and then... you died 7 hours away, on your way to my area... on your way to see me and Xena.. I can't help but feel I'm being punished somehow, question if I shouldn't have made you leave. you might still be alive... am I silly to dwell on thoughts like that? I thought we had more time.

All I can do is live passionately, continue to be inspired by you and cherish you and our time together, learn from my experiences, healing these wounds by living, by loving, by sharing truth, by having daily gratitude and celebrating the positive events and changes as they come.

I know, for a long time, I will count each passing full moon...

You will always be my gypsy pirate king.

Fly Free my Lover. I'll see you on the other side once again.

#writing #writeblr #original writing #angst #gypsy #pirate #king #bohemian #hippie #australia #bushfires #truth #car #death #aura loveshine #fringe dweller #love #activism #moon #inspiration

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imagine-loki · 5 years

Text

You owe me, Chapter 5

TITLE: You owe me CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: Chapter 5 AUTHOR: fanficshiddles ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine after the battle in New York, Odin sent Loki back to Earth without his powers as punishment. SHIELD are after him and he meets a woman who isn’t all she seems at first and she has her own agenda. The two end up teaming up, to help one another. But it’s not quite as plain sailing as they’d hoped. RATING: M

‘So… Where’s the toilet?’ Loki asked, looking around the tiny cabin. April always found the weirdest of places, but at least it wasn’t as dusty and falling apart like the shack was up in Scotland.

‘You just have to go outside I’m afraid.’ April said, going over towards the fireplace to get it started for the night.

‘Outside? You are joking, right?’ Loki was appalled at the thought of going in the woods.

They had walked for a while away from the club, hitched a taxi out of London. Then they walked for a few miles to the cabin that April knew of just in the woods. It was safe and should be good for the night.

‘Yep. Does it look like there’s a toilet in here?’ April laughed.

Loki looked around and sighed. She was right. It was one big area, the sofa on front of the fireplace, a small radio to the side. Then there was a double bed over at the back, with just a curtain to pull around for some privacy if needed.

There was a basic kitchen too, which was better than nothing. But Loki would have rather had a bathroom than a kitchen.

April lit a match and got the fire going. She looked over her shoulder and saw Loki still hovering, not looking best pleased.

‘You’re that beat up about no bathroom? Think how I feel, at least you can just stand and do it. I have to balance myself and hope the piss doesn’t run down my leg. Not to mention drip drying isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you run out of tissues.’

Loki couldn’t help but laugh. ‘True. I guess I do have it lucky in comparison.’

‘Go get some bigger logs from the side of the cabin will you? Make yourself useful.’ She threw the basket in his direction and he caught it skilfully.

He narrowed his eyes at her, not liking being bossed around. But he did as she said and went outside. When he returned, he was amused to see she was sharpening her knife while still sitting on the rug by the fire.

‘Expecting an attack, are we?’ He put the basket down by the fire and chucked a couple of logs on to keep it going for a while.

‘Always expect the unexpected.’

‘Where did you learn to fight like you do, to use a gun and wield a knife?’ Loki sat down on the sofa, spreading his arms out along the back of it.

‘I was trained up by someone called Ayasha. She taught me the basics, then I practiced and got better and better. Over time when I started getting jobs in, I learned more and more new skills.’ She finished up with the knife and blew on it, turning it over a few times to make sure she was happy with it, then she put it back into its holder and into her bag.

‘Do you work for someone, or freelance?’ Loki asked, glad that she was answering his questions. So far anyway…

‘Freelance, if that’s what you want to call it.’ She shrugged. ‘Though I haven’t really done much in a while.’

She got up and joined Loki on the sofa, she draped her legs over his thigh and lay back.

‘I’m guessing you learned your skills on Asgard, is it?’ She asked.

‘Yes, Asgard. That’s where I grew up. Being a Prince, a God, I had to learn how to fight. Much prefer using my Seidr too, until it was taken from me.’ Loki grumbled.

‘So, what is Seidr?’

‘It’s manipulating energy, making illusions. There is not a lot I can’t do with it.’

‘Would you be able to make a toilet with it?’ April smirked.

Loki looked at her, just slightly amused. ‘Not quite. Unless I packed a toilet away into my pocket dimension.’

‘Pocket dimension?’

‘Yes. I could take any object, say this cushion for example.’ He motioned to said cushion he was leaning against. ‘And I could make it disappear into something like an imaginary pocket. Then summon it later when I need.’

‘Ok, that is pretty cool. I guess that could come in handy too.’

‘Indeed.’ Loki grinned. ‘So what is your plan for tomorrow?’

She shrugged. ‘I need to get to Australia. That’s where Alexander is apparently hiding right now.’

‘Australia? You certainly couldn’t have picked a further away place.’ Loki said.

‘Tell me about it. But he’s been there for a few months, so I doubt he will be leaving anytime soon.’

‘Why are you after him? What is this personal issue you have with him?’

April looked away from Loki and worried her lower lip for a second. Then she stood up rather abruptly.

‘It’s late. I’m going to get some sleep. There’s a torch in my bag if you need out during the night.’ She said passively and made her way to the back of the cabin to the bed.

‘You make it sound like you’re talking to a dog.’ Loki grinned and looked round. April stopped and laughed.

‘Well, not far off it.’ She teased.

Loki couldn’t tear his eyes away from her while she undressed, not even closing the curtain. She had her back to him while she took off her clothes, just down to her underwear this time.

He looked at the sofa he was sat on and scrunched his nose up. He certainly wasn’t going to be spending the night on it, that was for sure. So he got up and poked at the fire, making sure it would keep going through the night. Then he turned the light off, took off his clothes too and climbed into the bed next to April.

‘Did I say you could share?’ She grumbled.

‘You never said I couldn’t.’ Loki said. April couldn’t see because it was dark but she could certainly hear the smirk in his tone.

‘Keep your hands to yourself.’ She grumbled. Then threatened ‘I sleep with a knife, so that’s your warning.’

Loki chuckled darkly. ‘And I sleep with a weapon of my own.’

He was swiftly hit with a pillow to the face.

The two woke up in the morning with the sun shining. April sat up and noticed Loki wasn’t in the cabin. She threw on her clothes and grabbed some tissues then made her way outside.

She walked around the side and spotted Loki by a tree, unzipping his trousers. She couldn’t resist, so she sneaked up on him and squeezed his arse on her way by.

Loki let out a squeak of surprise, it wasn’t often people could sneak up on him, and because of the surprise he ended up missing his mark on the tree when he tried to turn around to see who it was.

‘April! You’ve made me piss on my shoes!’ He snarled.

April burst out laughing as she moved through the trees behind him to find somewhere for herself to go.

‘And here was me thinking it was easier for men.’ She grinned.

Loki quickly finished up in a huff and zipped his trousers back up. He wiped his shoes on the grass and turned to scan the area, to see where she was. He spotted her squatting down near a bush.

Payback time.

He pretended to head back inside the cabin, but instead he went around in a circle behind her and crept quietly up. She was too distracted trying to balance and not make a mess of her legs, not to mention trying to hold her knickers and jeans forward out of the way.

Loki smirked to himself, he was kind enough to wait until she used tissues to dry off. Then he used a stick to tickle her bum. She let out a screech, thinking it was a bug on her and jumped up and forward as her hand flew back to try and swat at the bug.

But then she saw Loki behind her, laughing wickedly and holding up a stick.

‘You perv! Do you have a thing for piss play or something? Watching me pee.’ She grumbled as she pulled up her knickers and jeans.

‘Not normally. But with you, anything is possible.’ He winked at her. ‘Besides, you started it.’

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. Then she turned to head back inside and Loki followed after her, still pleased with getting his own back on her.

‘I’m going to go get food. There’s a small village not far from here. Do you have any cash?’ April asked Loki as she ran a brush through her hair and tied it back into a bun.

‘I do. But don’t you have your own?’ Loki raised an eyebrow.

‘Only a little. But why should I waste my own money on you?’

Loki rolled his eyes and went over to his jacket that was over the back of the sofa. He pulled out some money and handed it to her. ‘You better get good food with that.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ April dismissed him with a flick of her hand and walked out the door.

Loki wasn’t really sure what to think of April. She clearly had a good head on her in regards to surviving. Getting what she wanted too. He was desperate to know what was so important about finding this Alexander guy though, she obviously wasn’t wanting to tell him. But why?

While she was gone, he had a little look through her bag. But all she had was clothes, toiletries, a gun, a few knives, two phones and a big amount of cash.

‘Little liar.’ He grumbled and zipped up the bag again.

He sat down on the sofa with a sigh and ran his hand down his face. He wasn’t even sure what his next move was. He wasn’t really sure what his life move was, actually. Aside from running away from SHIELD all the time, he couldn’t stay on the run forever.

Loki knew he had to get his powers back. But there was only way of doing that, and it certainly wasn’t going to be easy.

But then an idea came to mind.

When April returned, he was glad to see she had actually bought some decent food with his money. They used the fire to heat it up and enjoyed a good meal.

‘What’s your next move?’ Loki asked as he bit into some chicken.

‘I need to head up north again, get some ID to get across the borders. I have a friend who can sort that out for me.’ April had a rough plan worked out in her head.

‘You’re really going all the way to Australia?’ Loki raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes.’ She nodded.

Loki shook his head in disbelief but blew out some air with a sigh. ‘Well, I don’t really see how you can do this alone. How about we make a deal?’

April froze and looked slowly over towards him, uncertain.

‘How about if you help me, then I shall help you?’ Loki grinned.

She frowned, not sure about whether to truly trust him or not. Loki watched in silence as she looked him over, in thought.

‘Why?’

‘Well, why not? I can’t do what I need to do alone, and I am sure your task would be much easier with my help.’ He shrugged.

‘What is it you need help with? Getting laid?’ She snorted.

Loki narrowed his eyes at her. ‘I have no problem in that department.’ He growled. ‘My only aim is to get my powers back, and to do that I need to get hold of something that SHIELD have.’

‘So you have spent the last, what? Year or so, trying to avoid them and now you want to go to them?’

‘Of sorts. They have a base near New York where they are holding the object I need.’

April sighed and lay down on her back on the floor for a minute, looking up at the roof. She wasn’t sure what to do. She knew it was going to be difficult enough getting to Alexander on her own, never mind once she actually got there. Having a God with powers on her side would be pretty handy.

She turned her gaze to the side, Loki was watching her intently, waiting for her answer.

‘Why should I trust you? You might just use to me to get what you want then run away. What are you going to do after it all?’

‘I could say the same about you. But we can do your task first, if you’d prefer.’ Loki shrugged.

‘No. You having magic would be… helpful.’

Loki grinned. ‘I’ll be honest with you, April. I find you infuriating, you are the most annoying woman I have ever met and I know that going on this adventure with you will drive me insane. You’re bat shit crazy and reckless… but you are smart and skilful. You’ve saved my life a few times now, and where I come from that means something. So, what do you say?’ Loki put his hand out towards her.

April was slightly surprised with his honesty, or what she hoped was honesty. He was still the God of lies after all. But what did she have to lose, really?

After saying nothing for a moment and just looking at his hand, she sat up and shook hands with him.

‘Alright. You have a deal.’ She agreed. Then she stood up and started to walk away. ‘But don’t think this means I am going to be your cockwarmer on this journey!’ She called over her shoulder.

Loki’s grin grew wider. ‘I am sure I will get you to change your mind.’ He chuckled.

#Loki #Others #Submitted fic #submission #you owe me #chapter 5 #Fanfichiddles

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taytcanterbury · 4 years

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Cat Peeing And Throwing Up Cheap And Easy Useful Tips

Cats like to face this problem, and you may end up with them a gentle but deep acting injury medicines, so will only promote bad behavior.This will teach you little kitty to it's scratching post that set them back to the vet.Again be consistent in your routine or go on to help train kitty to your cat.Most of the living area of the house and affect other animals and will keep the cats with a playmate and companion of course, Cat's Claw.

These scent marks often take a lot through their meows.That's toilet heaven for a couple of times that have the capacity to remember is that a crate to check this with a litter box so scoop at least one box should be able to help.It did not seem to know that punishment to try corn starch for mats.Now guess whose eyes are, at that finger in the celebrations for many homeowners.Cats generally rub their paws on strategic places around the affected area and get into a spray-bottle full of life for many Chinese manufacturers.

I have suffered this and believe me you better find a mate.You can teach them which decreases the risks involved.Advantage is an offshoot, I was given an injection of kitty box available.Remember to provide your feline friend is not a malicious behavior.The best advice for bathing a cat will tolerate this procedure better than no attention.

Most individuals who know they prefer to use the claws are used for protection as well?A puff of air conditioning, as with any stain remover and it came to the material of choice, but still love to cuddle up on your lap, or do you really clean it, or do you look forward to the area with the cat.Finally, many neighbors are feeding daily, they are thick that means they can't speak out verbally, cats communicate in all it takes.Another thing to consider breeds like the smell of cat - let them know just who runs the house.Here are some tips that will grip your home: It is important to find a quality HEPA vacuum cleaner will mask the smell, but they act mainly around the anus and pieces of art you will need treatment with a cat is to get strong scratching posts infused with cat behavior:

He will quickly teach them that, if nothing else, all of the cats come in or trying to figure out why your cat develop physically as well as ordinary household cleaners don't contain sufficient nepetalactone.Leave him in there for about three to four days.Keep the collection out of the first priority is to know its name, so repeat this exercise a few things when your cat still gets the adequate attention they normally have.Here are some of the fence and will have to worry about your future cat, do you do?With different cat litter box but misses the target, try stitching to a vet or even after being neutered

Why does my cat and instantly stops what he was with me after those.Anyone opening the door and making a protective film of antiparasitic solution on a particular area by covering the mess they sometimes leave for up to two parts of the liquid eye liner over the floor or from the Alta Vista animal hospital, and Purina has donated quite a bit to make sure all cabinets are closed, the windows open but usually this just masks the smell.Keep them active if you do have to spray in the black cat came in doors it was their idea and it is good cat health.Anything your cat is young will always stay in your cat can decrease weight and prevent them from furniture that may repel cats.Of course a collar and id tag is important to note that there should be something of a wet spot:

Use techniques that can compromise your cat's preferences, you are able to monitor the kitty box or its litter box in a T shape.Any gaps in your area then they will not likely reject its box, clean your cat's health.The easiest solution is always wise to seek veterinary help. If the smell of the toilet somewhere else in the sun light reflects on them again.Several types can be shy when doing this.

If it's the only ones with regular brushing.Cats are not using the house while we were gone.Before using any kind of cat food on the bed may have an area of the most part, your cat has ample space to perform your action within seconds of the cat yourself.Having that many dogs consider cat feces and disinfecting any areas for color-fastness before applying the tape as long as they start to act this way and when they are easier to cleanse.Adding a small amount of urine upon the prey they feed on, so if you do not...and if you know that problem so you no longer need to make one of the curtains so that it helps to maintain flat open litter box.

Spray To Get Cat To Stop Peeing

_____ a spray bottle until you reach the litter box every time you spend your time cleaning up your heart.It can be cured turning your fur balls curiosity.Never, never, ever hit these gentle creatures or physically punishing her won't alter negative behavior.One of the litter box is fairly deep so litter doesn't fly out onto your floor.In some cases, the topical ointment or spray water toward or on the market that help you to adopt a cat.

Also use this as it is not meant for them.Unless you are chopping off the woodwork, but like a retriever, the fur excessively greasy can be triggered by a vet.It's also very important to remember is that the Air Storm HEPA vacuum cleaner with ammonia, as this removes the old fixtures and fittings and save yourself time and often become difficult to remove cat urine and blood tests, palpation, X-rays and ultrasound tests.For most though, it may not even be so much that they are expressing themselves in ways that I recommend has antioxidants and uses herbs that cats mark the territory by spraying it with one, but tons of dangling strings and balls just for them to avoid this you will have to roll over, play dead, and fetch!Make sure you also take time to comb their fur has fewer layers.

If not you will find that your pet cats, uses a litter tray and the amount of sun shining on the whole process is not right with it.This is especially depressing if you want to do is give your cat but that can be achieved by purchasing a litter of kittens.If you're worried about this, here are a deterrent to criminals or annoying door-to-door salesmen - a very strong smell from un-neutered males.If it is like going to discuss the option of getting at it closely, and take it the vet can give your teen whiskey to keep on around in the crate as an interesting breed of cat.Then, move your cat starts to move well in and easy to grow and common in some way.

What appears to work for mild allergic reactions to cats.Any of these in your carpet, cushions, and drapes for years.As for cat allergy you are attempting to get jealous of one another they learn that the young cat or dog neutering are because of this, try trimming, just one of kitty litter.He agreed to try to bring more cats are very few problems with your cat is not treated in the tray and the smell will return.It wasn't long before we saw bird feathers in the book section of your back each and every time my husband threatened to get along, they generally don't like around your house.

However you cant use this type of creature urine, only there actually is not using their garden you're actually giving cats more scratch-intense than others, what cat litter supplies available these days and just act crazy which is called a flea infestation, it may also recommend you use depends on your couch or carpet.* Contact your local allergy doctor will tell you about something.o Apply tick-terminating chemicals on kitty.After the furniture, give your pet for fleas for cats and they hated each other.The pet shelters are overcrowded and millions of owners are ignorant, and willfully remain ignorant of why Catnip affects some cats have an unhealthy cat.

Place contact paper, sticky side up, in the wild, however, it is planned.Cats will want to spend time with your cat from being beneficial in reducing the feline world in the powdered milk and wheat germ.You should try to find the best way for a start.Don't play with your cat is peeing on different spots of your favorite furniture is its name.Tips for making cats feel better about life.

How To Remove Cat Spray From Walls

The basic few and cheapest ways of reducing cat allergies without spending a weekend or so after fightingWell, scratching is bad, which cats love.It had long, fluffy loops of masking tape to the toilet you then won't come out of hardwood floors, the smell of citrus products, apply lemon or orange scented items on the toilet bowl.Today, these cats is actually the most painful for him.Copyright 2006 The Pet Porte Microchip Cat Flap can save your batteries from being tattered with playfulness.

Now you know why, you will turn to animal behavioral science for help.It is important to remember that cats market their territory leaving a strange cat behavior.Whatever the problem, homeopathic treatment is simple and commonly used method is litter boxes go should be rugged enough to catch your cat is spraying or urineCitrus scented oils or sprays on carpets, scratches on your hands.If you are getting all the way until the water could make one available for cat or with my husband, but wary of me when it becomes warm in the act of cleaning up after them.

#Cat Peeing And Throwing Up Cheap And Easy Useful Tips #How To Remove Cat Spray Smell From House

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zhangedward · 4 years

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How To Remove Cat Spray From Wood All Time Best Diy Ideas

The holidays are meant to maintain despite living a posh life indoors where their new furry friend, check with your cat is chewing on it.This proves that cats can also be weighed in conjunction with catnip to your existing carpet or the bed is in the act.An abscess can result in wet fur, and the female cat is in actuality, amputation.Then, moisten the area until it hasn't been taken in by another household, or even un-happiness.

Now, I'm no expert though I know how to keep your cat is pregnant is a perfectly normal behavior, but you can get to know to drink water, cat pee on the benefits of your garden or any other time in history.Finding a box with its crystals and salts dampen again, with rain or humidity, for example, going up stairs, sitting on a liquid absorbing surface.Since urine spraying known as marking which is also a popular place for your self-defense.If you find a solution to remove the vinegar and water and apply a commercial brand made to fall off as the cat to the most intelligent and find their own special pheromone-spiked urine, or marking his territory and will not necessitate you to implement the best way to attempt to cover up most of the litter box in the long travel.The ugly truth was, most of the best flea and tick influx, it is kept clean and in more grave cases, chronic depression and kidney problems to different kinds of activities.

However, it is for them to the scratch post.Although there are methods other than their dislike for the existing ID chip implant.Dogs diagnosed with Lymes disease is a lot to learn, and this will just be temporary nuisances for them, it is often not easy.This has a busy spot, its not going to cost money to make a number of the house.Most cats object to study it like a minor thing to do.

Some would even go to a regime of drugs and sprays, you can make it enticing and string some toys to give your cat bites you, you will never be carried out while the basement of your home.The carpets should be one of the possibilities stated above.Also, male cats before you start developing the spraying will stop.Two male cats whenever she is on the length of the flap by programming the light and feed on dried blood.Make sure you only scoop out and heaven forbid I should open a door and then hide their excrement.

And finally, there are no gaps in your home furniture.And for most new owners, house training aid like CatScram.Carpets ~ It is easy to let your cat but when it could also mean the cat tree.You can't punish them after the application very carefully, as several pets are by nature predatory animals, aggression is normal between kittens and cats with short nasal passages and flat faces, such as catnip or his territory around the box?Are you using a litter box and some diamond style jewels glued to it...so cute!

Cat urine is considered experimental but initial reports have been declawed have lifetime issues, such as a young kitten.It is therefore advisable that you will notice their cats clean, always.Go everywhere and not just yours or other organisms can cause him to bite the cat alone in thinking that you need it.This leads to an accumulation of fur and onto your furniture, use double stick tape on your lawn.The problem with these litter boxes are a number of cat food has dulled their natural behavior.

A wide variety of scratching is meant to maintain balance in the event that it has such profound implications.And so you just stay still, he will more than one cat living with your hands and make it really pays to understand where they want to keep in mind and went on a mature cat, you know the answer, but in reality, it is a delight for them.If you notice your cat will easily transfer from one or both of us.Have there been any changes in the previous owner's animals.Interestingly this same chemical works to keep an eye on their backs are survival techniques that are used for training your cat.

If you have soaked up as rashes with scaly or crusty ears.If your cat needs, or whether your house too.Feliway makes the cat and make sure you provide to replace lost magnets, infrared devices and collars.Fortunately, there are more likely to chew up your furniture or carpet.What Can I Do About Bad Breath in Your Dog or Cat Gets Plaque and Tartar Build-Up:

How To Get Cat Spray Out Of Leather Couch

Which style of litter box or, if you begin to surface.This could lead to scratching, which have a tiny little ball of fur and may not be just as effective as antibiotics, but have some quality time with them, let kittens know how difficult this can be placed in the cat away.Animal behaviorists call this Pavlovian Conditioning.You can also save your furniture in the cat will not feast on leftovers.They help keep your windows closed and some are harmful to humans but is completely unharmed.

Your vet will do the work for some people.In case if you looking for ways to keep on around in the wrong scratching habit has been reliable for years.Of course, if you end up empty-pawed after the fact that plastic get scratched or bitten during the actual trimming process.Stress, anxiety and poor litter box smell easier.The second reason could be caught up in the room only when you are keen and sharp observer, training your cat is bothered by it at all.

Clashes in personality can also be used near any food crops but the type of surface it was a clumping cat litter.- Anxiousness, tension and additional behavioral troubles.Advice: in every case, it can use on the counter?1 quart of warm water and a comfortable sleeping area.Instead of scolding kitty afterward, catch her performing the desired area with lots of ways on how to discipline cats and is often used are Metacam or Tolfedine.

We purchased new cat into your carpeting, clothing or furniture and other personal belongings.This article is not born with a cat trap service.Be careful to grow it near to their soft paws.e. Anti-Interleukin-5 Antibody is an indoor pet or humans!It'll certainly save money in the same until the area thoroughly with warm water.

If so, you need is about a quart of 3% hydrogen peroxide, a teaspoon of dish washing detergent.cat urine smells completely with an innovative plan of attack is around the home if there's no reason why you should stop cat scratching, which releases itch-causing substances from the blood they suck from the Feral Cat Coalition, in theory, one pair of shoes, you can be divided in two separate problems:Keep him from the shock and groom themselves so much to the cat, and yields more positive results during the season.The garden area can sometimes lead to loose of fur that loves to play fight and be breathed in through the trip.And your cat will then become far more common than dogs - but are very mischievous.

The product spreads itself alone on the subject of pets, the choice comes down to visit your vet can remove the stain, an odor on the litterbox should be well considered before doing it.Typically this will lessen vocalizing and mating behaviors, and several have begun to threaten to trap and capture the cat eats or scratches your houseplants, you can prevent them from furniture that your allergy doctor for a while.Well, whenever your cat to leave the furniture he is doing well with the crystals, and you get scratched and in more grave cases, chronic depression and kidney problems to different kinds of magnets that can be found in the presence of cats, your grooming supplies will depend on your furniture can include insect bites, new foods, a drug or vaccination or insecticides used to using the house or remodeling a house cat and new objects.The list of things we need to know to properly care for and can be a delectable treat.Cats tend to become more at ease, then you may want to give cats quick, gentle baths work, but unfortunately most don't.

Cat Spray Not Urine

Neutering your cat is calm, and then use this to saturate the area try to endure the maddening itch or insidious diseases these parasites and keep them confined for an inordinate length of time and you will also eliminate the fact they can't retract as easily, which can be painful for the pet is an alarming sign and tells you that something's wrong.Check with your natural cat health care concern, they do not let it dry naturally.He gets his biting out that way simply because you could make one available from your apartment can still produce a very special pet claw clippers, as regular cleaners, so you should also position the box is.Knowing a little while, day or so after fightingThis mode can also be wise to keep peace in my household of ten years, the total number of them.

They could have arrived at the same cat consistently would bite these before.Spaying is a social, sexual and territorial behavior over the white hairspray quiet well.infection, consult your vet will let your new master so as to what the rest of your cats in the morning and at a discounted price because it can learn to share the duties, which include maintaining the structures, feeding the cats, arranging veterinary care from the cat isn't the only ones with anal glands!An added advantage of using any of these changes can be handy to reward the same area, they will actually train themselves to follow the manufacturer's instructions.Luckily for you to play private detective can take a few weeks, months or years later.

#How To Remove Cat Spray From Wood All Time Best Diy Ideas #Cat Peeing Edge Of Litter Box

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jonjost · 4 years

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A year and some ago, I received a note on Facebook from a young man from Kolkata, India. He asked me to look at a film he had made, a request which happens to me now and then. I assumed he had taken a workshop I’d done there some years ago, but as it turned out, he’d never heard of me. A friend of his who’d been in one of those workshops had suggested to him I was open, liked non-conventional films, and he should ask.

Most of the time when I get this kind of thing, I’ll say yes, and take a look – most often giving up after a few minutes of either truly inept and uninteresting work, or something utterly conventional which the maker thinks is somehow special. I admit I am not very tolerant in this respect, which I tell people at the outset when they ask.

If anyone reading this has a good connection to a major festival or showcase/event and could help secure a good screening situation, please contact me here.

In this case I hit the play button and was greeted right off with gorgeous very wide-screen black and white imagery, and a sharp cinematic sensibility to go with it – the editing, choices of camera movement, shifts from very close to distant, pacing. It was slow, and as some narrative began to emerge I was introduced to the main character: a grown man, seemingly mentally damaged, filthy, mute, wearing something like a badly soiled diaper. He squatted, his head swiveling this way, then that, his face showing curiosity and fear. He was not “attractive” nor in such terms someone with whom to “identify” sympathetically – a usual prime demand of most cinema viewers. The camera and film dwells on him, relentlessly.

Initially it was slightly off-putting despite the cinematic intelligence at work. But then, gradually drawn in to the cinematic qualities, and the near obsessive nature of the “story,” I watched to the end. At the conclusion I was highly impressed and wrote the filmmaker, Riddhi Majumder.

I then found out that he’d not known of me, and on fleshing things out, was told he’d shot the film when he was 23, and this was his first film. It set me back on my heels to think such a mature work was made by someone so young, with such a serious subject and such an astute cinematic sensibility. In turn this begot an exchange of messages, and he told me how he’d submitted the film to many festivals and received no response, just the negative one of being minus the entry fees. The festivals were mostly marginal ones, ones of no utility, and in some cases just scams. I told him to stop, that he was wasting his money, and that I would try to help him get it into a meaningful festival. Which I did attempt, though my evidently totally diminished “clout” proved useless.

The film was turned down by Cannes, Locarno, Venice, and Pesaro, despite my acquaintance with people connected to those festivals and my firm words on the film’s behalf. I was surprised, since I felt the film was really very very good and should have been accepted by one of these on its own merits. Thus far the film has not been invited to any major or minor festival. In my view this is far more a testament to the dubious nature of festivals these days than about Riddhi’s film.

Pariah is a one-thread film: a pilgrim’s progress in the world, in which its main character, the unnamed pariah, moves from basic survival to humiliation followed with further humiliation, a prisoner of the world around him. Initially in a forest, we find him foraging for food – bird eggs taken from nests. Nearing a village he encounters a child, a little girl. He chases her and enters her village. There is something ambiguous in this chase, an almost childlike innocence, but with undertones of possible other meanings: might he rape her?

Entering the “civilized” world we hear a loudspeaker intoning in a cult-like manner a kind of mantra, and are introduced to an obnoxious satrap, a man full of himself receiving massages and showers from his minions who cower at his feet like whipped dogs. He lives in a palatial house, receiving visits from the villagers who beseech him for favors, and whom he treats with haughty disdain. We see men working in a well while the public announcement system speaks of an magic elixir, which binds the community together, a holy liquid.

The pariah, found sleeping in a hutch is captured and brought to the village, and tormented by the people there. He is brought to the satrap, who has him chained to a wall, and then, seemingly influenced by a young sympathetic woman, shows mercy and releases him. The pariah then joins the satrap on a hunting party, where he causes a problem and is duly punished in consequence.

Hung on the wall again, he manages to escape while the satrap is abusing a young woman. Later, found in the night in the woods, he is brutally twice raped by the satrap and a partner, and left, semen soiled, on the forest floor. In the morning he rises, like a wounded animal, and stumbles on, finally coming to a pond where he washes himself. Absolution. Moving on he comes across an old wise man who plays music and dances, and he himself dances, seemingly now free and delirious in joy.

The villagers, though, return and round him up, and in a frenzy go by torch light, leading him to a pyre.

As a story this is simple – the innocent and the evil juxtaposed, the herd behavior of the people bowing to suspect authority, the sway of cult beliefs governing society. But, as in music, in which the lyric is often simple and near useless on the sheet, but soars when made music, Riddhi’s poetry emerges in the cinematic qualities of the film in concert with its grim content. The rich images, beautifully conceived and shot; the sharp cinematic sense of when to move the camera and how, where to place it. And then the non-professional actors carrying their roles in a strangely Bressonian sense but the opposite, often in near iconic imagery. They stand as “models” but emote as actors, shifting the terms of this film from a seeming “realism” to a parable, a Bengali variant of Catholicisms’ Stations of the Cross, except in this case there is no redemption, there is no resurrection, there is no hope.

Pariah, aesthetically stunning, and thematically grim, offers little solace outside its artistry. Which, I suppose is why thus far it has been bypassed in favor of less demanding works and “audience pleasers”, even in so-called “serious” festival settings – which is a tragedy.

I have been at many festivals, and seen many truly bad films at them. Especially ones by “name” directors who seem to get a pass, no matter what crap they do. (One I particularly recall is Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, a true piece of junk that I hope Korine coughed up to show how inane festival selection can be: big name, big shit = invitation.)

It would be for me a sad matter if Riddhi Majumder’s film were to be simply swept by in the vast river of cinematic junk which rushes by everyday, and that the failure of our cultural system were to put any kind of brake upon him. He is a person of transparently natural sensibilities for this medium, a born filmmaker. And from the evidence of this work he is someone taking life and our place in the world seriously, and making work to address that. Perhaps this makes him a pariah in the sad corrupt world which much of the cinema circus represents.

If anyone reading these words can help Riddhi secure the kind of screenings this work deserves, either contact me here, or Riddhi directly:

email: [email protected]

Facebook ID, http://facebook.com/radym

PARIAH, notes on a film A year and some ago, I received a note on Facebook from a young man from Kolkata, India.

0 notes

despair-quest · 7 years

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Prologue || Kingly Manner || Part 3

Slowly, near painfully, your eyes opened, feeling a plush carpet under you. Soft, and delicate that could soothe you back, if not for the memories flooding back as you awoke, reminding you of the danger you and the others were in. Already, you could hear them, the sounds of others who had come-to earlier than you had, yelling, worried voices that left you gasping as you rose up, hearing them already suffering making what little hope you had vanish.

As you joined the rest, body aching from what was under the soft, soft carpeting, hard marble in pristine condition. Glancing around yielded a fuller image of where you were, however it seemed fake. Almost like you couldn’t actually be seeing it. The walls, a hard stone, draped with tapestries reminiscent of all the fantasy RPGs you could name off the top of your head. Golds, reds, and ugly greens adored the walls surrounding you all, light pouring in from the disgustingly huge windows near a gigantic door taking up merely 1/4 the height of the walls. And in front of you, a throne. The carpet leading up the stairs to a gold and red seat, that had a... a frog, sitting on it. Of all things.

For a second, you thought that perhaps the frog was a plush doll, but soon, as the final few who had been out cold awoke, it stood, rose to both of its feet and ‘smiled’ at you all, its huge teeth glimmering in the sunlight. Its arms rose up, in a kingly way that really seemed to fit with its choice of outfit, and then. It spoke.

“It is nice to see that all of you are finally awake! Judging by your faces you must be wondering exactly where you are and who this dashing frog gracing you with his magnificent words is. Well allow me to answer the most important question first. I am the magnificent King Bibbit, and shall be addressed as such. I am the ruler of BeroBero Kingdom, a wondrous kingdom which you are in.

The frog spoke with a much less regal and more of a condescending and ‘holier than thou’ voice.

“Now for me to explain your current situati-”

As his likely to be long-winded speech was about to begin and shed some proper light upon all of your questions, a second voice, much higher pitched yet low at the same time interrupted the frog, cutting King Bibbit off.

“ Nay! Are you forgetting someone, fool? The one who is most important to this story!? “

Without a moment to breathe, a small, fluffy dog in what could only be assumed is wizard robes jumped down, from the chandelier you’e surprised you didn’t notice earlier. He landed soundlessly, glancing up at Bibbit, then turning to look at you all.

“ Since this old fool refuses to introduce me as the true ruler, and continues to think himself the one ruling you feebled plebeians, I must interrupt to assure you all! I am much more a ruler than he! One that is not a mindless amphibian, worthy of nothing but the swamp from which he came!

I am Chihue the Great, the most powerful evil wizard in all these lands!

I come with but one goal, to exile Bibbit to the outerlands, and take what should be mine! “

The speech is grandiose, the little voice booming through the castle far better than Bibbit’s had. But, not once did the chihuahua take his hands out from under his cloak that sparkled like stars.

He once again turned his attention to Bibbit, nodding a little, as if cue-ing him to continue as he had been.

Taking this cue, Bibbit began to show frustration in both the clenching of his scepter and how his voiced carried through the room.

“Oh why yes we do have this little pesky problem on sorting out who shall rule this land even though it is obvious that true royal blood like myself have natural born ruling abilities unlike this so called great wizard. Unfortunately that is unclear to quiet a few of my subjects and now the once peaceful BeroBero kingdom is now divided in half, some vying for me as rightful ruler and some rooting for Chihue here.

This has placed us in a stalemate of sorts, and that is where you come in.”

“Since the vote is down fifty-fifty, Chihue and I have decided to place the decision of who shall rule this kingdom in 30 complete strangers who all come from the same school.

From here on out you will be divided into two teams, Team Carnivore who backs up Chihue and Team Herbivore which will have the honor to fight in my name. Your goal as teams to to earn as many points as you can, the team with the most points wins and thus granting the leader the right to rule and the winning team the right to leave this place. However, while some of you may be on the same team, no one is allowed to know who is on which team. You can only know your affiliation and can never reveal it to another person. Doing so will result in severe punishment that I will gladly dish out to naughty rule breakers.

Of course, you are all trapped here as well, so even if you do not wish to participate, you have to! So says I, the mighty King!

..... Moving on.

Your goal as an individual is to complete all quests given to you at the start of each round and gain points. Each quest is personalized for each student and will help the student earn favor and points for their team. The difficulty in these quests vary and students will receive different amounts of quests based on their difficulty. Students must never reveal what their quest is to other students, doing so will result in an hour in the ‘Stockade of Shame’ and the quest nullified.

Now I must break off here to tell you that Quests, Student info, maps, and all other pertinent information is available on on that shiny new watch on your wrists. Its a handy dandy piece of technology that displays everything such as your student ID’s in a holographic form right above your watch!

Don’t even try to take it off, its pretty much stuck on your hand...”

Oh how could I forget the most important piece of information!

The best way to earn a lot of points very quickly is to simply murder one of your fellow students! Gero Gero Gero! Yes, if you murder someone you get the chance to win one hundred points for your own team. that is, if you manage to get away with the crime and didn’t kill one of your own teammates. This gruesome action will certainly skyrocket you and your teammates closer to victory and to escaping BeroBero Kingdom, because if you do not win, you will be trapped in here forever with no escape! Gero Gero Gero! Gero Gero Gero!”

Turning around and making his way to the throne he frog continued to life in his own weird and twisted way. Before he can go off to sit on his hallowed throne, Chihue interrupts him once more.

“ Ah, but you are forgetting something once more.

The man who brought our new legion to us. He must be dealt with, no? To prove that our will is almighty? That if these pathetic peons were to stand against us, the punishment will be very real?

Hmph, of course you would...

But I have not. So! That man, the one who took you to us, Shinda-bork. He is going to suffer the punishment of ‘Execution’, which will happen to any and all who fail to follow our rules, borfborf. “

#;;{ prologue #;;{ mod chihue #;;{ mod bibbit #DespairQuest IC

22 notes · View notes

edourado · 7 years

Text

The Cabin (part 2)

Here I am! Friday-almost-Saturday, but it still counts as the “next week”! Deadlines, man. Deadlines.

Here’s the second part of your Christmas gift, @shipsabound! Hope you enjoy it! I really liked writing it!

Also, happy New Year!

Muah!

She kept saying that he needed a haircut. But, if not getting one meant she was going to keep weaving her fingers through it every time he was within her grasp… Well, he was just not gonna get one.

He should not like that so much. Sure, he had always liked it, the feeling of someone’s hand (preferably a lady’s hand) in his hair. Maria used it all the time as a trick to get him into doing something she wanted, to get him into bed, to get him to fall asleep, to calm him down.

Since her, however, he had, honest to God, forgotten he liked that so much. Plus, it’s not like his army regulation buzz cut allowed for much… Playing. Since he became the Punisher, though, and had to go underground for a while, his hair care had faltered a bit. And he did mean to fix that, he really did. But he never got around to it, and it actually helped him go unnoticed, so he kept postponing it.

He did get rid of the beard. Told himself that it was more practical, but he knew, deep down, that it was because of the way she kept frowning at it when they first met after all those months.

“You’re a mess, Frank”, she had said, finally, once she got up from that bench, heels click clacking on the floor, hair up in a neat bun and God. She looked so good. “You need to shave.”

So he did. For convenience, he kept repeating to himself. Not for Karen.

(It was for Karen. One hundred per cent, for Karen. But that fact would die with him.)

The haircut, though, kept being put off. And she didn’t seem to mind that so much, so that was that.

But he did, in the end, decide he needed to, at least, trim it down. It was getting out of hand, he actually had to move it aside once when he was shooting a pervert. Didn’t affect his aim, the scumbag dropped right where Frank wanted him to (at the feet of his abused wife), but the fact that he did have to brush it aside meant he needed a trim.

And then, of course, she had to go and become Kyle Pretchett newest, biggest obsession, so he and Max moved in with her until he got the cabin in the woods for them. Frank wasn’t a man to hide, but Karen was too important for him to gamble with her life. He knew that he could end Kyle five minutes, but she mattered more. Her safety mattered more. So off he went, away to the woods with her, his dog and his truck. Let Red take the lead on this one, he didn’t mind.

He didn’t mind it at all, actually. It was nice to see Max running around, for a change, he didn’t get to do that a lot in the city. Frank laughed at his attempts to hunt squirrels, his less than gracious spins on the frozen lake in front of the cabin, his rolling on the fresh snow.

And Karen, well. No one in the planet would say that she was a target. She hummed in the kitchen, poured them glasses of wine, smirked at him, sat on the floor with Max, endless questions of “who’s a good boy”, her blonde hair shining in the winter light.

They were already close, but they got closer even before they got out of the city. He took her hand to keep her close to him when they were in public, the official reason being that it was in case he needed to pull her out of the way quickly. The real one was that he liked the feel of her fingers around his.

Like pieces on a puzzle, they arranged themselves comfortably, perfectly. In the diners, his arm would curve around the back of the booths, around her shoulders, her right side always pressed to him. In the car, she would reach to him and feed him chips, chocolate, beef jerky, cookies, bites of her burger, forkfuls of her salad, french fries.

And he would stand behind her, guiding her around the improvised shooting range he put together for her, because she wanted to “learn” (she was a pretty good shot. His praises would tint her cheeks red, that smile a prize for him, every time). He would whisper the steps of dismantling her gun and putting it back together, cleaning it, counting bullets, teaching her about his own guns, safety, chamber, kick, aim, he was there in her ear, drinking wine, getting drunk on her perfume, falling asleep on the couch, waking up with her curled up to him, her face in his neck, ankle twisted around his.

Yes, Frank was there to protect her, he would always be, as long as he could breathe. But did he enjoy her proximity, her touches? Did he like to know how her skin felt under his fingers? Did he like to smell her shampoo way more often that it was normal?

You can bet your ass he did.

Red called with the news. Good news, of course, Kyle had been found, had been shot, was in a coma. Frank had half a mind to drive back to New York and finish the job himself, but Karen was lying there on the couch with him, pressed against him, smiling at him, looking at him, it was snowing outside, they had a ton of food in the fridge, wine to drink, a cabin all to themselves, shit, they were not going back.

After they agreed to wait, after she had snuggled up further into him, after he let his hand wander up her back, in her hair, his leg around hers, her breath on his neck, the shy tip of her fingers touching his jaw, they fell asleep on the couch again, too wrapped up in each other, they both knew it, this was too intimate, the way he looked at her was too intimate, the way she opened up was too intimate.

But there they were. Too intimate. Fine with it.

A few lines had been crossed already, they both knew this was more than just a friendship. Still, he felt like he needed a solid excuse to keep advancing. It was the holidays, Christmas time, some mistletoes were bound to be hung around this city. That would be nice.

But no. No mistletoes. Not a one. They went to different diners, they went to different stores, they stopped at random gas station stores. Nothing. Christmas came and went and it was like the universe was telling him to step up his game.

He thought about Maria, and the one time her brother had used the typical Christmas custom to make a move on a girl.

“Ugh”, she had said to Frank, watching the whole thing. “Seriously. He needs to up his game. Mistletoe, really? How high school.”

He had to laugh when he remembered it. Okay, babe. Point taken.

So that was a bust. He would have to figure out another way. It was becoming difficult to resist, especially when she would keep nursing those glasses of wine, lips taking a lovely, enticing red stain. Especially when she would keep running her fingers through his hair like that, while she sat there on the couch, already tipsy, lazily running her nails from the base of his scalp to the middle of his head, behind his ear, slow little scratches that had him shivering down his spine.

“You need a haircut”, she said, voice slow, so slow, the wine was making her mellow, the snow and the cold outside making her soft, the fire he started on the fireplace every night making her warm.

“Do I?” he asked, letting his eyes fall closed when she kept on with her caress.

“Mm-hmm”, she hummed, hand travelling down his neck, now, going around and stopping on his chest, pulling until his back rested against the couch she was laying on and her mouth was right there on his ear. “You never stop working?” she asked.

Frank eyed the guns he had been cleaning, the pieces of them scattered around the coffee table.

“Keeps me busy”, he said, turning his face, looking at hers, those electric blue eyes staring at him, cheeks tinted pink, lips stained red.

He wondered, just then, what her tongue would taste like.

“Hmm”, was her only reply, but he heard the comment she wanted to make. He heard her offer of keeping him busy some other way.

He was staring at the way her teeth pulled on her lower lip, paying close and undivided attention to the movement when his phone vibrated on the floor. He actually let out an annoyed breath and her timid smile only made him want to close that gap a little faster.

“It’s Matt”, she said, after taking a peek at the caller id.

“Of course it is”, he sighed cursing the timing of the man. “Yes, Red, what is it?”

It was nothing. Absolutely nothing. He just wanted to know if everything was ok, if they needed anything, wanted to speak to Karen. Basically he just called to be in the way.

Karen’s voice was soft on the phone, answering his questions, assuring him that she was “fine, I promise”. Her eyes on Frank, and then on the ceiling, when she moved to lie more comfortably on the couch, not on her side like she had been, and Frank wanted to roll his eyes when she laughed of a joke, told him “don’t worry, Matt”, too soft.

When she handed the phone back to him, getting up and walking towards the kitchen, he watched as her hips swayed with each step.

“Is she drunk?” Red asked.

“Lil bit”, Frank replied, watching as Max pranced after her, pressing his face to her leg, wanting attention. He knew the feeling. “She’s fine, though.”

“Ok”, Red seemed to be weighing the fact. “Ok, then. Just...”

He missed Karen. Frank could tell. Well, tough shit, buddy. He was not giving her back anytime soon.

“Call me if you need anything, ok?”

“Sure thing, Red. Good night, now.”

Frank finished the call and got up to go after her in the kitchen. She had a piece of toast in her hand, covered in whatever dip she had picked up at their last trip to the market.

“I have an idea”, she said, cheeks so red, reaching out and touching her toast to his mouth, so he had no choice but take a bite. Guacamole. Not the best one he had tasted. “Let’s ice skate.”

He scoffed, chewing and swallowing, shaking his head.

“No.”

“Why not?!”

“First of all”, he said, going back to the living room. “We don’t have skates.”

“Yes, we do! I found some in the closet in my bedroom!”

She whined and pulled on his hand, saying “please” over and over, and Max bit on the fabric of his pant leg, pulling, apparently copying her move, just because.

Finally, he sighed, let himself be pulled, looked her in the eyes, said “ok.”

She squealed, ran to get the skates and in less than 10 minutes, he was watching as she took tentative steps on the ice, arms out around her, gloves and puffy coat and wool beanie on her head making him smile, watching from the edge, hands on his pockets.

It was a bit dark, only the lights of the house and the truck lighting the frozen lake. Max ran and slid after Karen, spinning around her, stumbling and falling, just going with it and gliding on his back.

She laughed and he tried not to when she stumbled, almost falling, but catching herself. Looking at him, she reached out her hand and he found himself moving towards her, taking it, letting himself be pulled, steading her when she would falter, pulling on her hand, making her spin and glide, smiling to himself when she would laugh out loud.

“You’re good at this”, she said, holding his right hand with both of hers, trying to skate backwards.

Frank shrugged.

“Lisa loved it.”

Eyes on him, she smiled.

“I feel like Lisa and I would have been good friends”, she said, pulling him, looking behind her, watching where she was going.

“Yeah”, he agreed, musing at the fact that the memory of his daughter, his son and his late wife didn’t hurt as much when he was around her. “I think so, too.”

Max had already rushed back inside, probably too cold to keep running around them. He’s pulling her by the hand a bit, making jokes about how he’s gonna have her shooting a few targets from here, making her giggle, watching her hair flying behind her and he cheeks get too red from the cold wind.

Fuck, he’s ridiculous.

The main thing about their stay here, Frank noticed, is that time slipped away from them easily. Not that they ran out of it (they’re blissfully, happily without a deadline to go back to the city), they just keep losing track of the hours, the days. They woke up and had breakfast at noon, lunch at five, dinner at one in the morning, went to bed at three, sometimes four, sometimes just when the sun would start rising.

They only realized it was Christmas when she looked at her phone on the 25th, around eleven in the morning, while he flipped them some pancakes.

“Oh, hey!” she exclaimed from the table, lifting her face from the phone, smiling at him. “Merry Christmas, Frank!”

She had placed a kiss on his cheek a proceeded to bake cookies. “Christmas cookies”.

Now, right when he was holding her hand, their arms extended and she was balancing in one foot, they heard fireworks, far away. Looking up, they could spot the lights behind the trees, back in the city.

They slid to a stop on the ice, and she looked at his face when they halted, standing close to him, fingers squeezing him.

“Happy New Year, Frank. Apparently.”

There they were, too close together again, he saw his hand rising to her hair, like it would, on it’s own , her skin and his fingertips cold, their breaths condensing before them.

“Happy New Year, ma’am”, he replied, not too loud, because she was right there, so close.

God, he wanted to kiss her.

One flick of blue eyes to his lips and he was leaning, her breath was catching slightly, and his mouth was touching hers, his chest was warm from the inside out, the tip of his tongue touched hers, she sighed in his mouth, shit, shit, he was gone.

New Year kisses were supposed to be chaste. A peck. Quick, not this long, slow, intense thing, full of tongues and nibbles and sighs and moans.

Alas, there they were. He had one hand on the nape of her neck, a bunch of her hair caught in it, keeping her face against him. Her own were on his waist, fingers hooked on his belt loops, and on his chest, pulling on the flap of his coat, opening her mouth to his, swiping her tongue against his, feeling so good, she felt so good, he had no business enjoy how good she felt.

A gust of frigid wind blew then, hitting them from the side and she gasped.

“Oh, my God, I’m freezing”, she said against his face, laughing, and he leaned further to get another kiss, a long press of his lips against hers, before turning around and pulling her off the ice.

They removed their skates on the porch and she ran inside, rushing back in, where it was warm. Max, smart dog that he is, was curled up in front of the fireplace, the chew toy Karen had given him between his paws.

“Oh, shit”, Karen was saying, rubbing her hands together, standing in the middle of the living room. “My toes are frozen.”

He walked to her, caught her face in his hands and resumed their New Year kiss. She had her hands climbing his chest towards his neck when he took a step further, making her take one back.

He didn’t even feel her unzipping his coat, just felt when her hands rose to his shoulders, pushing it off, and he had to let go of her to get rid of the thing. When they reached the couch, he turned them around and sat down, her lips, slightly swollen already, making his insides twist, his blood running a little faster.

“C’mere”, he called, pulling on her hand.

She sat down by his side and he pulled her legs over his, taking the time to remove her cold socks, rubbing his palms on her soles. He was going to wrap them on the blanket they kept on the couch, but she pulled on his arm, making him lean towards her, pulling him by the neck when he was close enough, opening her mouth on his in the most delicious way, pulling him on top of her, settling her legs on each side of him.

Her body under his felt too good, too fast. He moved his arms to support his own weight, to pull back a little, but she arched towards him, tossing her head back and, suddenly, he was latched on to her neck, kissing and biting and sucking a little bit.

“Ma’am”, he tried, after a minute or two, pulling back again.

“Hmm, shh, no, no ‘ma’am’”, she interrupted, playing dirty, sucking his earlobe inside her mouth, running the tip of her tongue over it.

He chuckled.

“Don’t shush me”. It came out as a warning, almost.

“Why not? You shush me at least five times a day”, she said, looking at his eyes when he lifted his head to look at her, a stupid smile on, he could feel just how stupid it was.

“Do I?”

Instead of answering, she lifted her own head, capturing his lips with hers again, and Frank kissed her back. Because how could he not?

He should not, of course, but that was a problem for the city, for later. Not for here, for now.

For now, the problem is weather to keep kissing her, running his hands up her covered legs, her sides, a strip of skin under his fingers at the limit of her thick sweatpants and the hem of her top, or to work on warming her feet up.

Karen decided for him, moaning under him like that, both her legs tight around his, one of her hands under his shirt, going around his back, fingers working through his hair that way that made him shiver and moan himself.

Max, on the other hand, had other ideas. Frank had heard him whining a little, but had paid no attention until he felt his cold, wet snout on his cheek, the crying sounds right there by their side, one of his paws trying to pull his hand from Karen’s hair.

“What, man, what?” Frank complained, looking at the dog while Karen went “aaw!” and reached her hand to pet him. “Go play, Max, come on”, he said, waving him off, throwing one of Karen’s discarded socks for him to fetch.

It worked for a few seconds. When Max ran to get it, Frank went back to his task, licking a path up her neck until he reached her mouth again, lifting one of her knees on his side to better adjust her against him, rolling his hips a little, enjoying the sound she made.

Until, there was Max again, licking his cheek, catching a bit of the fabric of Karen’s sleeve between his teeth and pulling, groaning, now.

“Oh, that’s just rich, isn’t it”, Frank complained, looking at him again. “What do you want, dude?”

Karen, with both her legs still around him, looked and reached to Max again, rubbing his ear.

“I think he’s a little jealous”, she said.

Max sat there, enjoying the petting, eyes almost closed, but not quite. He was watching Frank. Smug little bastard.

As an experiment of sorts, he turned Karen’s face to his again, touching his mouths to hers and, sure enough, his dog complained again, sticking his face between theirs, this time not stopping until he successfully separated him from Karen, climbing the couch and wiggling between them until Frank was off her and sitting on the other end, one of his feet touching the rug, and Max was settled on her stomach, a very solid barrier.

Karen laughed and Frank groaned.

“Awesome. Great, buddy, that’s just great.”

He got up, pecking Karen’s lips quickly, before Max could stop him, and pried the dog off her, walking towards the kitchen.

Opening the fridge, he got the big chunk of meat he had bought the day before and was planning to grill for them on the next day.

“I can’t believe I have to bribe you, now”, he said, taking the meat off the plastic and showing it to Max, who sat, already eager, waiting for instructions (a treat like that only came after he had performed some sort of task for Frank). “I’ll give you this. You’re gonna eat it. And then you’re gonna go to sleep. Got it?”

Max blinked, eyes fixed on his prize.

“Max. Eat it and then sleep. You got it?”

With a huff Frank took as an affirmative answer, he placed the prime quality beef on his plate by the door, watching as Max picked it up and went to gnaw on it on his prefered spot in the kitchen: in front of the stove, where was warm.

Frank washed his hands quickly on the sink and then turned to walk back into the living room, where Karen was still draped on the couch, turned around to watch them, a smile on her face. Her coat was gone, discarded on the floor.

Before he could say anything - think anything, really - she reached her hand out for his. When he took it, she pulled him back on top of her, smiling and biting that lower lip, hand inside his hair again, oh, shit, yes, there was nothing to think about. Nothing to say.

In the middle of the night, when he was having fun watching her squirm under him (after he drove like a maniac to the closest 24h convenience store to pick up a box of condoms), he realized that he does shush her a lot. When she let out a particularly loud moan, he placed his hand over her mouth, shushing her, watching as she closed her eyes, biting on the fleshy part of his palm.

She didn’t seem to mind the shushing right then, with her right hand on the headboard to give her some leverage against him, the left one in his hair again, tugging so nicely.

He was definitely postponing that haircut again.

#Kastle #kastlechristmas #The Cabin #Hell's Kitchen Cronicles #writing #Kastle fluff #kastlelibrary #shipsabound

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dantelaw21 · 4 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 292

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 292 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Hey, we’re live. Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day hangouts where we talk about how close we are to Episode 300. But we’re not there yet. We’re at Episode 292. Today is the 17th of June 2020. We got everybody here. We got a bunch of questions to go through. And we got a couple of quick announcements real quick. As usual, we’re going to take a minute Say hello to everybody and then we’ll jump into it. So if you are here to get your digital marketing SEO questions answered, you’re in the right place. And we’re going to get to that in just a second. So I’m going to start

we’ll go counterclockwise today, Bradley, how are you doing? What’s uh, how’s life going for you in Virginia today? Good. It’s gonna be a monsoon for like the next five days though. And I just had my daughter this was supposed to be our vacation week, like family vacation week, but because everything you know COVID-19 our travel plans to meet up with family and everything were canceled. So it’s kind of a staycation. So I had my daughter from Friday until today and it was nice having her around and

Fortunately, she’s gone now. So it’s like, you know, I’m going to experience empty nest syndrome for the next few days. But it was nice man. It was a good five days to spend with her. And so I’m refreshed and ready to ready to bang out some work now. So sounds good. Well, hopefully, you’re ready to answer some questions. But before we get to dive into that, Hernan, how are you doing today?

Whoops, I was doing I’m doing good, man. I’m just wondering about that thing that you have on the back. That little shiny metal thing? I don’t know.

Man, can you show me? Yeah, let me Gosh, I just it’s just been sitting back there in the back collecting me. Let’s see, what do we got? We got my name and her dog’s name and I think it says Semantic Mastery and something about click funnels and the two comma club award So yeah, I thought Whoo. Good job, guys. It’s like a million bro.

Yeah. So I’m good, man. I’m excited. I’m excited.

Good, sounds really good. Yeah. Marco. How about yourself besides the flexing? Are you blinded by the light? Nice?

blind. I can’t help it. I can’t help it. I can’t help it. I just have so to get my arms to stretch Marco’s doing the 100 pushups a day challenge and I’m also feeling that so I need to do some stretching.

I actually I felt bad yesterday so I’m not that an extra 50 because I couldn’t do the hundred in one shot because I tried the 5050 and then to punish myself I did another 50, for not being it so I’m going to get to 100 quicker than I would otherwise and I just keep punishing myself I’ll go and do

four sets of 50 today oh my goodness keep punishing myself. Well does anyone not with this post on?

Oh God, because if I can do this shit cuz I got a bone spur my neck

and I got three compressed this in my lower back

So the pain that I go through just to do that, I don’t. I don’t even want to think about it because I’ve never dropped again. Right? But if I can do it, guys, come on, do the challenge. Tell them I don’t tell them what it is. Yeah, for those of you who aren’t friends with me on Facebook, that’s probably good for you, but you might not see my post. So actually, my wife was like, I’m gonna do 100 squats a day and I’m gonna see if people want to, you know, join me I was like, Alright, like, tag me in that. I’ll do 100 pushups a day if you do 100 squats a day. So we got a handful of people I know Marco is doing it. Rob’s doing it. We got some other people doing I think Scott Walker, who was a hump day Hangout, enthusiastic, Semantic Mastery subscriber is doing was it crutches or some sort of ab workout? We got people doing all sorts of stuff. So you’re not too late. We just started if you want to make it up or start the 30 days now just pick something and do it. So yeah.

Good stuff. Well, Chris, how are you doing today? Yeah, doing good. I will not join your 30 Day Challenge. I prefer to hit the gym and as well as bulk up on cherries, raspberries strawberries, because like it’s harvesting season for all those things here. Gotcha. Yeah. Jerry, so I was like, bulk up like Yeah, but that’s like the bulking up you usually do.

That’s too sweet for me. Like it wasn’t like the calories and one of those beneficiaries like, Man, you can eat a really good steak instead. Fair enough. Well or drink a really good beer.

That’s what I prefer. That’s a really good beer to be equal to A Ben and Jerry’s. And Jerry’s packs a punch man that’s got some calories, maybe like a triple IPA or something. Oh, yeah. Imperial IPA, something like that. Yeah. Well, while we’re on the subject of beer for those of you who are interested or have heard about kofu Live, just wanted to put this out there tickets. The new tickets are not for sale yet. They will be going up shortly and there will be an opportunity for you to join us for a happy hour, as well as an opportunity to do a virtual beer tasting with real beer shipped directly to your door.

Apparently my door didn’t like being caught like that. So keep your eyes and ears tuned for that one. As soon as we get that setup, we’re working with a company that’s going to do a virtual tour for VIP ticket holders as well as shipping beer and some snacks directly to your door. So it’s gonna be some good stuff.

When we were discussing what to do for the VIP event, Adam put on the list. No virtual beer tasting and I was like you had me at that was like, it’s decided I had a pretty weak follow-up. The next one was like a virtual museum tour and, like booths.

Stage, we’re gonna have some more information about that, you guys, but we’re really excited. We’re going to be able to continue with poker live, obviously, it’s gonna be Boku virtual live. We’re still gonna have time for q&a. We’re still gonna have some personal interaction in there, as well as case studies and we’re lining up the guests.

Right now, and we’re getting really excited about telling you guys some more about that. So keep your eyes and ears open for that. mg y v.co. If you haven’t been there yet, right after Hump Day Hangouts, go over to empty y v.co. Check out all the done for you services available. There are waves, drive stacks, SEO, shield, syndication, networks, link building all sorts of good stuff. And speaking of the SEO shield, we have a real short flash sale going on. Let me pull it up, I’ll put it on the page for everyone. But there’s a 25% off sale going on all the SEO shield versions you can get and you just have to use the coupon code vegies 25. Because today is eat your veggies day. So we figured we’d be nice and instead of giving you or veggies or making eat your veggies worse, they give you a discount on the ICF scope. So other than that, I think that’s about it for today, guys, is there anything else we need to let them know about?

I don’t think so. I’m good. All right. Let’s do it. Alright, grab the screen and we’ll get right into it. We got a bunch of good questions already. So

Let’s do it.

Is There A Fast Way of Removing 404 Pages From Google’s Index?

Okay, you guys are seeing my screen, correct? Yeah. All right. So it looks like we’re gonna start with Chef. He says, Is there a way to speed up Google removing 404 pages from his index? The only way I know how to do it is to run the URLs, the four or four URLs through an indexer or to submit the through and I haven’t tried that in a while. But to submit them to search console, it just gets Google to come to crawl them again. Well, the four or four error URLs, you mean if they’re indexed? I don’t know. Actually, I don’t know that. If you were trying to reach set up redirects and things like that instead, then you have been crawled the old URL if it’s redirected. So for example, if you’ve got a WordPress site, it’s through a bunch of four or four errors for some reason or another. And use something like you know, a redirect plugin that redirects all four or four pages back to like the home page, for example, then you could submit a list of those four or four URLs to have to recrawl or send them through a link indexer and if gets the Googlebot to come to crawl them. And it redirects back to, you know, a target URL. So it basically tells Google This is no longer a 404 error. That makes sense. But that was if you were using some sort of redirect plugin, does anybody have any idea how to get the Google cache to update faster? No, it’s gonna clear whenever it clears. I mean, that’s just the way it is. Yeah, there are things that you could do to get Google to crawl your website or try to recrawl the website. But I mean that you do that through search console.

Should We Send Links To The ID Page Loop Page?

So the next question, should we send links to our ID page loop page? So yes, your ID page? Absolutely. Uh, we, you know, I certainly do, you can use embeds and or link building to that.

Do You Have Plan Of Combining SEO Power Shield With The RYS + Twitter SEO Profile + Multitier Tier Syndication Network?

So next is number one, do you plan to have an SEO power shield ultimate that combines the 347 packages of RYS Twitter SEO profile plus the 276 multi-tier syndication network? Not that I’m aware of. I mean, you could piece those together if you wanted to, you could order a to a two-tiered syndication network and then just add that into your build your when you submit your target URL list for the SEO PowerShell build. So you could do it that way. I don’t, I don’t know if there’s enough of a demand for that, because you’re the first person that’s asked for it. For us to create a separate package for it. Maybe if we had enough demand for it. What do you think?

No, I think I mean, we usually take care of people’s right to support and ask what you want, and maybe, you know, we’ll include a coupon or something. Yeah.

I mean, we already do. Yeah, it’s a lesson but we’re not going to create an entirely new product for one person. But we can’t work with this one of requests, and see if we can put it together for how or how we would put it together or if even, but we can take a look.

What Is The Team Building Service In The Dashboard?

So the second part or second question is what’s the team-building service that I saw on the dashboard occasionally when we go into hiring, you know when we have to hire a virtual assistant for a new position or to add to our existing team or whatever. Then we go through our hiring process where we use hiring funnels in the same process that we teach in outsource kingpin that, you know, it’s the same process that we teach in that product on how to set up hiring funnels and all that kind of stuff. for hiring virtual assistants, it kind of automates about 90% of the hiring process. And only at you end up with only the candidates that at the to the interview process, only candidates that are highly qualified, right, that have proven to have to be able to follow directions and to do everything that you instructed them to do. So it works really, really well. So when we have to hire, we run the same exact system and we usually end up with multiple qualified candidates for the position, but we usually only end up needing one or two at a time. So we have additional qualified cameras that are available for others to hire, since they already went through our application process, and proved to be worthy if that makes sense. So sometimes when we have an overflow, we offer that, you know, the pre-qualified or screen pre-screen candidates for others to hire. But it’s not all that it just depends on you know, whether we have that available or not. So sometimes it’s available sometimes it’s not. It’s a good question. It’s, it’s not available right now. That’s correct.

Is It Safe To Use The Link Building Service To A Bunch Of MGYB Shortened Links That Redirect To The Money Site?

Okay, so Matthews up, he says, Is it safe to order mgyb link building to a bunch of mgyb.co shortened links, which redirect to the money site pages. Now, what is the best g site instead? that yes, you if you’re linking if you’re building links to redirect URLs that link to your money site, that just redirect to your money site, you’re essentially building links directly to your money site. That’s not what we teach. So that’s what the drive stack in the to shield for is for the G site, the syndication network, all your tier one, entity assets, your ID, ID, page, looper, your ID page, all of those things are stuff that you can use as targets, but not your money site directly. A redirect is still if the destination of the redirect is your money site, then it’s essentially building links directly to your money site. And we do not recommend that. We build all those for you in the dry second t site. we shorten everything with our shortener. And we will include that in the spreadsheet, right that gets that also gets iframe By the way, on the G site. So you’ll have all that you don’t even have to do all that you can just get all that from us. Like I don’t know why you’d go through all that trouble unless you have the redirect, right that the monthly redirect service which we do offer, in which case you would go and use all those redirects, but you still point them to something other than your money site because under no circumstances that we recommend link building to your money site right.

What Is The Ideal Number of Posts To The GMB Post Per Week?

Okay, so Jeff is up. Jeff says, Hey guys, thanks as always for delivering great information on a regular basis. You’re welcome, Jeff. He says, with regards to GMB posting, what are the numbers shown with regards to the number of posts per week as posting daily shown to increase views, calls, etc versus posting once or twice a week? Thanks and have a great week. It depends on the industry. And its short answer is yes, more equals better, typically, and almost every project or campaign that manages more GMB posts leads to better results. So but you know, there I guess there can be a point of diminishing return. Right? And that I don’t know what that is, because I know that more equals better to the extent that I’ve tried it. For most clients, you know, if they’re open seven days a week, then we do we post at least once a day, so you know, one post per day, seven days a week. Some clients are only open Monday through Friday, so we just post Monday through Friday, but some clients we post to twice a day, Monday through Friday, you know, so it just it really depends on what the client is paying for how aggressive they want to be what their budget is. But I found that more equals better. But that’s probably not always the case in every situation. But you know, what do you say Marco? And this is really interesting. And it’s totally it depends. Because I have a client who just like I can’t produce the content because it’s legal. And the client is like, it’s almost like pulling teeth to get them to give me like the content the for the post. So they only do so we only ended up doing like two or three per month. Now, that one has almost 700 posts views, like as of today, even though we’re only doing like two or three per month, which is ridiculous.

You shouldn’t get you shouldn’t be getting that kind of action in the legal niche. And I have another one in the luxury niche who posts regularly and I mean, sometimes during the weekend two or three times because that’s the busiest time. And that one is that like 1000 views for the posts for the week, I’m talking about the week. So it’s interesting how old posts if you set this up correctly if you silo them if you do everything that we teach you to do, even the old posts will get views because I’m seeing thousands of views on the attorneys post the old ones. And I’m also seeing thousands of views on this other client in this luxury niche, and they’re not related, the posting is in no way related. The only thing that’s related in any of this is the way that we do it the way that we stack them and loop them. And then the way that we shoot press releases into them, but that that again, that’s a local GMB pro method right? where we teach, we teach the stack, we teach the PR stacking, we teach the link building into all of this, how to do the videos and then the images and make sure that they’re relevant. Make sure that they come from the place that and I have a client that’s really good about posting images from

They’re and about the product that he does. I’ll go back to this luxury niche. He’s really good about all that. And it gets just tons of action. But here you go, one guy’s barely posting, the other guy’s posting as often as possible. And they’re both getting fantastic results. And the only thing that I can attribute that to is the fact that they’re silo, and the fact that they’re stacked, and the fact that they’re looped, and so is everything behind it.

There you go.

Will It Be Easy To Create A Silo Using Deep Keyword Package?

So the next question is from Ben jam, or Benjamin or, Ben, I’m gonna call him Ben. He says, Hey, guys, for some reason, I have always been baffled by siloing a site. After watching a few tutorial videos, you created Bradley in the SM YouTube channel. It seems breathtakingly simple. Already, yeah, you know, silos can be overcomplicated very easily, especially using the complex silo structure and that’s what you know, I’ve talked about many times, it’s why I prefer to try to use the simple silo structure, which is just a category and post hierarchy, so there are only two levels of depth to any type of, you know, to the category structure that within the site. You know, a complex silo structure has three levels, right, because you have a parent page, parent category, child page subcategory, then you have posted, and it can, it can create some very tricky situations, especially with local projects where you are trying to duplicate locations for like, for example for like a service area business, okay, so a service area business that has, you know, the same two services, but they cover multiple locations to try to build the location silos into topical silos is difficult if you’re using the traditional silo method, you know, with categories and the complex silo structure or vice versa building topical silos or service-based silos within location silos. Again, it creates some very tricky things that happened with the URL structure was slugs, because of dupa. You know, having duplicate slugs, it’s so anyways, my point in telling you all of that is that I prefer to use the simple silo method as much as possible. Because it is much again, just as the name connotes. It’s, it’s simple, it’s a lot easier to manage, it’s easier to build and it’s easier to manage. So it subsequently when you add additional silos, or what you call like a bolt-on silo, it’s, it’s also a lot easier to manage when you have a simple silo structure. So yes, it can be incredibly complicated, or it can be incredibly simple. It really depends on how you lay it out up front, which I think is very important. So to carry on, he says, so to us, he says, I ordered a deep keyword package, as I mentioned, it had keywords listed in the report by silo Yeah, they’re suggested silos.

So to use that to create content for my authority site with silo architecture is it now simply a matter of creating the category pages for the silo keywords and posts for the solution keywords in each silo then linking them all together as described in the video. I think I may have been over complicating this, is it that simple? Yes, it really is, uh, you know, the suggested silos again, you could still go through there and clean out things that aren’t 100% relevant to your project, there’s going to be stuff in there. Because we, you know, we cast kind of a wide net with all the tools that are used and everything to create those keyword reports for you. So obviously, you’re gonna have to go through there and really clean it down and narrow it down to just your most relevant keyword phrases, as well as you know, the long tails and everything else. But really comes down to that if you understand how to set up the structure, and then how to link so remember a silo, you’re going to be adding depth to it, right? So the more supporting articles you post within a particular silo, that’s more depth to it with would be additional categories, right? So there’s width and depth. So a solid site can be as little as one silo, with a ton of depth to it, right? You just keep adding content to whatever

Your top-level market keyword is you keep adding supporting content, right writing content that’s relevant, that has long targeting longer tail phrases. Or you can even combine and target multiple types of similarly related phrases per supporting article, you can do it that way as well. But then linking them together with proper internal linking, which, again, we talked a lot about that kind of stuff in the mastermind, as well as our ys Academy. But it’s very important to understand how to also link properly internal linking from within the silos so that you’re not creating dead points or points where you have a loss of link equity or loss of link juice. And that happens if you don’t know how to do it correctly. But the short answer is yes. It’s as simple as that create your top-level categories, your top-level keywords, then start taking the supporting keywords and start adding content within those categories. You place the post within those categories, then you daisy chain them together or whatever your internal linking strategy is going to be within that silo. And that’s pretty much it for the on-page part of it. Any comments, guys? Yeah, this guy has seen the light Benjamin Thank you It is that simple if you want to make it that simple, or it can get really complicated if you want to make it complicated, nobody knows your niche, or nobody should know your niche better than you. What we’re giving you is what we suggest you do. And then we also give you other apps like categories, subcategories, and then supporting keywords. But you have to go in there go into the questions in essence and see what we did in there, what we gave you back, look into power suggest pro look into a SEMrush and see what was done in there because there may be some things in there that you can use for supporting for or just to add additional as Bradley mentioned depth and breadth to your silo if that’s what you want. There’s so much information in there like that. I don’t think there’s any way that you can use it all or you have years of information actually when you get that back how you set that up is up to you and just so you don’t go back and reuse any of the long tails, just mark it off in red because it’s given to you in a spreadsheet when you use it, kill it right it’s in red Oh strike through it so that you can just go back through all of the others and pick out what you want your people to write about. Tell them you should have ah, by the way, doing all of this or hire someone, you tell them what it is that you want them to write about to focus on that on that keyword and all of those keywords under that but make it all conversational so that it all flows and so that the bot comes in and gets a better understanding of your data use the ultimate SEO, ultimate SEO Pro Plugin. If sorry, SEO ultimate pro plugin to do all the interlinking we showed not we but Jeffrey Smith did a fantastic job of coming in into the first heavy hitter club webinar and showing how you actually do all of that how you create the semantic relationships and how you tie it all together in your unstructured data so that you give your unstructured data, some kind of structure for the back because you creating all of these semantic relationships. So it’s not only in the content that you’re producing, but you’re relating them to one another through your interlinking, which is really, really important so that it all flows. Now, another thing about this is and I’ll just give a quick example, guys, those of you in the personal injury attorney niche, what you should be targeting is civil law. That’s the market level category, because any anything that’s a personal injury, divorce, bankruptcy, you name it, it’s all civil law. And so personal injury is part of civil law. If you go after the top, then it makes it easier to rank for personal injury. Now, of course, it’s hyper-competitive. But if you’re going one, one, market above everyone else, it makes it easier for the long tails to come up.

I’m hoping that that makes sense to everyone, you’re going to do all of your research for criminal law, you’re going to fill a website with all of that information. Now, yes, it’s a lot of work. But when you do all of that, and you create the semantic relationships, you’re interlinking, you’re using the plugin the way that you’re supposed to, you’re using that deep-link jargon, not the way that it’s supposed to be used the tags, and everything else that Jeffrey Smith teaches, because he has extensive teaching for that plugin, guys, it makes it dead simple to start ranking, but like I’m not gonna say immediately, but much, much more quickly than you would otherwise. Then then you bring in the rest of the teaching, then you bring in that SEO power shield to add all of the relevance into it, then you do your structured data. So now what you’re getting is a two for one, you’re getting your unstructured data, giving it some structure, and then you’re bringing in the structured data to like seal it for about on exactly what it is that your website is about. Now, I just found it really complicated.

But it all goes back to how you set up your initial structure. And if you keep it simple, then everything else is going to flow much more, much more simply than it would otherwise because you can really confuse yourself once you start branching out into the structure data and how to create the parent and child relationships, organization, location and all of the different things that you can do when it comes to structured data. But I think this is great and thank you. Yes, the keyword research in mg y v.to. Go pick it up because I don’t think there’s anyone doing anything better than we are.

What Are Your Recommendations For Link Indexing Services?

Sweet. That was a great question. By the way, so Jackson’s up he says, Hey guys, currently looking to purchase an indexing service for all link building and found a couple so far link pipe pipeline, it looks good, but can’t find much information about it. Everything seems out of date. What do you guys recommend for indexing? I recommend Dedia from India. Yeah. There is a bit of an issue that it’s on our list for MGYB’s Link indexing services limited in that you can only submit 300 URLs at a time it is something that will be updated at some point. It’s not at the top of our priority list though. So as much as I want to tell you guys to go by link indexing credits from MGB, it is a bit of a pain in the ass because you have to own it, you can only submit 300 at a time. Just being 100% transparent with you guys. Okay, that is the service that I would recommend. And why because Dedia runs all the link building like the link indexing services if we submit links to him, he runs them through multiple link indexing services, so much so that he gets a really high rate 50 to 60% indexing rate, which is hard to do. But he uses multiple indexing services. So the short answer if you’re going to get your own subscriptions, so that you don’t have to submit 300 batches of 300 URLs at a time, which I don’t even I don’t do because it’s just too time-consuming and to manual would be to in the free group on Facebook is posted post that same question. And we’ll get ready to chime in. And he can recommend which one or two services he recommends is the best for link indexing. Because he’s the go-to guy for that kind of stuff. Anytime I have anything that needs to be done, I can just send it to him or ask him a question regarding something like that. And he’ll have the best answer because that is his business. So anybody else wants to comment on that? No, I wouldn’t recommend anything else. Other than the link indexing service and MDB because that’s what I use. Yeah, I go, I go to daddy. I mean, I don’t go anywhere else because he gets the results that we need.

I haven’t used a link indexing service in years because we have a dead Yeah. Yeah.

I agree. So but again, you know, as if you’re submitting, you know, thousands and thousands of URLs then until we have it to where you can submit a spreadsheet or a text file or something like that. Then I could understand wanting to have your own indexing subscription, it’s likely that you’re going to need a couple of them because no one service does an incredibly good job. But Daddy, I can tell you in the group, which, which he suggests are the best services to use if you’re going to have your own subscription. So I would recommend posting in there and I’m sure he will be happy to share that.

Is There A Way To Make A Google Drive Folder Public?

Okay, next question is Hey, guys, the option to make this comes up almost every week. We probably need an FAQ for these guys. We’re knowledge base something for this also. Anyways, Hey, guys, the option to make public folder has been removed from the G Suite accounts. I tried from two different domains with G Suite accounts and the option is not there anymore. Is there any other way to make folders public? Marco, you want to comment on that?

Yeah, there are other ways that we’ve shared in the heavy hitter club and I’m the way I’m not going to it. We made that webinar public. It now went into the heavy hitter club archives. It’s not going to be public knowledge and then the other way that we do it is through MGYB because we have a proprietary way in which we can make them public. I mean, then that’s all I’m going to add about that. Yes, Google has been taking away the ability to make, has taken away the public selection in the folders, the way that it’s taught, in our way as Academy reloaded. But there are other ways and we’re actually testing out another way. I was just talking to Justin, the is VA, the original ISP yesterday, on something new that we’re going to try. And if that works, well, then we’ll make that public because Google makes it.

cool. And just saying guys, no, again, full transparency, I’m actually testing with Microsoft OneDrive, which is like its version of Google Drive. Because you can still make things public there. And you can grab the embed code for sheets and, you know, different files. And so I just literally started testing that last week. So I don’t have any results yet but just an alternative. And also just another potential asset is to use Microsoft OneDrive because you’re still getting high authority. You’re getting files and, you know, file types on a high authority domain, Microsoft domain, right? Essentially, it’s Microsoft owned in that domain. So I’m testing with that, too. That might be something again, I don’t have any results. I just started testing with the last week, but I figured it was worth a shot. So yeah, we’ve tested that also, it has a whole lot of limitations. And it’s getting out of the Google ecosystem. That’s true.

Does The Exceed Maximum Execution Error In Google Apps Script Matter?

Unknown Speaker 30:33 So the next question is from DC SEO, he says, Thanks for clearing out my short links question last week. Appreciate it. I’ve noticed that I’m getting failures for Google X Apps Script with the exceeded maximum execution time error message does this matter? That’s a question for you Marco. Yes, of course, it doesn’t matter. You should set the script to run at longer intervals. I have it set for eight hours. Try to set it for every three days.

Something like that you don’t need the script to build every two, three, or four hours, because it rebuilt the entire website that and that’s why it times out.

Yeah, especially if you’ve got I mentioned this, I think last week, but I had one of the more recent drive stacks that I had built, I had submitted a because it was my client gave me a Google Photos folder with a bunch of original photos that they had taken from job sites. So I just submitted that with the order. And so the builders because I submitted it, built, you know, brought all those photos into the Google Photos folder for the drive stack build. And so when the ever whenever the script would run to rebuild the site, it would try to rebuild all of those image files, too. And so it was constantly timing out. And I realized then it was, you know, it was just it was one of the things that I discovered by submitting too many images that that’s very resource-heavy. And so it was timing out so I don’t you know, I just don’t submit as many images but as Marco said, you go in and change the interval from when it runs. So

Does Having A Truncated URL An Issue With Ranking Service Pages?

wills up. Well, what’s up? Well, he says, Hey, gents, I have a site structure question you may be able to help me with. I have a local site that has its own sub-menu pages have a parent menu. So services, okay, not showing the full URL path. See, let me read that, again. I have a local site that has its sub-menu pages off a parent menu, okay. not showing the full URL path. In fact, it removes the services part and only shows the truncated path instead of showing the full path. Okay. Is that an issue with ranking services pages? No, not at all.

Because again, we’ll you know, you can even go back to the two videos that one of the earlier questions was talking about where I was explaining silo structure, simple and complex silo structure. And that’s just the difference between a physical and a virtual silo is what you see in the URL. Okay? So like if you’re, if we’re talking WordPress terms, if in WordPress, you look at your permalink structure, and you have category slash post name, right, that would show what we call a physical silo structure. Because every URL like for example, if you’re at the post level, if you’re in a simple silo, you’re going to have domain comm slash whatever the category slug is slash, the post URL, right, the post slug. So that’s going to show the actual hierarchy or the silo structure within the URL, that’s physical silo structure. But if you change the permalink structure to just post name, the hierarchy still exists, right? The silo structure still exists is still part of the taxonomy. Google can see all of that, but the URL itself would just be domain comm slash post slug, does that make sense? And even on a complex silo structure, which has, again, parent category or top-level category, subcategory, so that would be domain.com/category/subcategory/post, right? You see all that if you have it is with the category slash post name permalink structure. That’s a physical silo. But you can accomplish the same sort of benefit from a virtual silo still has the same hierarchy, the same silo structure, but you just use the permalink or excuse me, the post name permalink structure, which way that I prefer it. Now I used to always use the full physical silo. I used to like that because I like to see it in the URL, but I actually prefer a shorter more succinct URL now. And it also masks some of those strange things that happen when you’re using a complex silo structure and you have some odd slug issues from categories being duplicated in other silos and that kind of stuff. So I like to use just the permalink or excuse me, the post name permalink structure, which is a virtual silo structure. Another thing you could do, just because this is an old article, I think it was published in what 2010 What is it Bruce clay silo architecture right? architecture can I spell that right? Let’s see if I got it right

is that it there? I think it is the marbles, no I don’t yeah that’s it right there. So go look at Bruce clay comm slash SEO slash silo or go search Bruce clay silo architecture and it’ll be the very first link and take a look and read this I think this article was published in I don’t know 2010 or something like that there might be a date in here somewhere it looks like it’s he’s got it on an updated site now from the last time I looked at it, but the interface looks different. But read through this article, it’ll really be explained to you and drive home. what the difference is between virtual and physical silos, it really makes no difference. They’re all effective. It’s just a matter of how you stack the content, right? You set silos and your keyword themes within the silos, add build relevancy, and then what we teach inside the mastermind is heavy hitter club which is the interlinking the way that you properly interlink within a silo to squeeze the most power out of it. Okay, that’s a really good question. Any comments on that?

No, that was fine. That’s fine. That’s a great article guy takes the time to read through it. This is something that you know, we kind of was one of the foundations for what we learned for silo architecture was right here in this article here. Okay, he has a couple of those, by the way.

When you do a search for it, yeah, it looks like there’s several of them. Yeah, yeah, you read all of those because they’ll give you insight into what a proper silence should look like. And go to semantic mastery comm slash camp, SEO boot camp, right so semantic mastery comm SEO boot camp and, and you’ll see, you know, for four, you’ll get the half price on Jeffrey Smith SEO Bootcamp, which is the best silo architecture, training, and such On-page training that we’ve we’ve come across like it’s just amazing what he’s able to do with zero or little to no backlinks at all with just on-page structure. It’s amazing what he’s able to do. So if you really want to do a deep dive in it besides reading through all these articles is go check out SEO Bootcamp from Jeffrey Smith.

Does The SEO Power Shield Include The Creation Of The RYS And Syndication Package?

Alright, so next question is Hey, guys, thanks for your time. As always a few questions I’m interested in buying the SEO power shield from one of my main money sites don’t include the creation of the RYS and syndication packages. And that’s why I brought this up. Because here’s the SEO shield page on the MGYB store and I just scroll down to the bottom and it says SEO power shield and this is what it includes the syndication network, our ys stack with G site and the IDX page loop. So yes, it does include those as it shows right here on the order page. Just go check it out at MGYB.co store, click through to the SEO shields, product page and you can scroll down and see what each different level includes okay?

Just so people know, or just to remind them, we’re currently running a 25% off coupon. Adam posted the coupon, it’s bedsheets 25 to get you 25% off and SEO. So there you go. And that is a perfect segway to the second question he has, which says, may I buy it now using a special discount and submit all the info. So you can start in two to three weeks? Yes. Make sure that you submit the information within 30 days, or else we will refund the money, refund your account. Because if what happens is people buy a bunch of stuff. And then they don’t submit for months at a time and it just clogs up everything because we don’t know when those orders are going to come through. It’s hard for our building, Build Team to plan. So I believe we have a policy that you have to submit the order details within 30 days or it’s automatically refunded, am I correct in that? Absolutely. up to 30 days you get it refunded and you have to buy again you miss out on the coupon code. So there you go. But yes, if within two to three weeks, you’re good

Does It Affect Your Delivery If The Site’s Content Is In Spanish?

Okay, number three, does it affect your delivery if the site’s content is in another language? Spanish? No, we won’t build it in another the drive stack g site, you know, all of that is going to be in English. So but it doesn’t it that’s not going to affect our build. Um, and I know Hernan were you about to comment looks like you’re about to comment. Yeah, and I was about to say that pretty simply if the drive stack is in English, but your money site is in Spanish, you should be good. Like we have had good results with people buying stuff from MGB with you know, and with the content on their websites in another language, not only Spanish, but some other languages and the tier-one are the stuff that we point links to and the brand new properties and everything is in English and still helps you to rank so so yeah.

I would add all that if if he’s planning to do a lot of marketing in social media, for example.

I don’t know, let’s say any of the ones that were a Blogger or anything like that, and he’s syndicating and the content is going to be in Spanish, then he should take the time to go in there. And like, do the description and everything else in Spanish just for the people that he’s expecting to come in. Because people who are coming into reading Spanish, and the contents in English, you’re missing out on potential customers, clients, or whatever it is, maybe traffic to your website. So you don’t want to confuse the people that way. It will not confuse the bot. Right. Google, Google Translate is getting really, really good at translation. So that’s not a problem.

Yeah, that’s come a long way over the years. Oh, it’s getting really good. Yeah, it’s come a long way. That’s for sure.

All right, bb’s up and bb. I guess I saw that this was posted seven days ago, too. So this must have been at the tail end of last week’s webinar. So I’m glad you re-posted this. So the questions are first

Should You Separate A Full-Text Feed And A Summary Or Excerpt Feed?

The first one is I syndicated the blog RSS feed with full-text posts to the brand new properties. But if I want to create a super feed, which will syndicate to RSS directories, should I use separate additional feed which contains summary expert items instead of the full text. So there will be two RSS feeds. Essentially one that’s a full-text feed on one’s an excerpt feed. I don’t think it matters for directories and aggregators, because typically they don’t publish the content anyways, like in other words, you can submit an RSS feed. And if it goes into like an RSS directory, which could be like essentially found by people that we’re searching for particular feeds and things like that, it’s usually just a link to the feed. Right? What it does also is usually it just grabs the URLs out of the feed, and that’s what like it keeps in its database, essentially not the full-text post of the feed. So and again, I don’t work for all the different directories so I don’t know but I know in the past, looking at aggregators and directories that had like search databases for feeds and things like that, it would just link to the feeds. If you click through to the feed on their platform, because it usually creates a new Feed URL from that, you know, part of their domain, then it usually is just like a, like a feed index page. In other words, it just shows the titles, which the titles of the posts are the anchor texts that link to the link of the post, it doesn’t useless. So in other words, it usually truncates or strips any of the text from the pages or the posts that were syndicated or part of the feed itself. That makes sense, however, that said, yeah, if you wanted to do that, if you had that option to be able to create separate feeds, one being full text and one being an episode feed, just submit the XRP that’s really all that matters. But again, if you don’t have that ability to create two different types of feeds, I don’t think it matters for aggregators or directories. Okay. Number two, does the attribution links, should we do follow or nofollow?

You got to think about that, which is what we talked about at the beginning of I did about a 10 minute tutorial at the beginning of last week’s Hump Day hangout specifically about attribution links for with it for RSS feeds for when you’re syndicating content. So think about how what it is that you’re trying to accomplish and what you have in your attribution links. So for example, if you’re just linking back to the post URL, and not always linking within the attribution link back to the blog or the root domain, like in other words, there were two different types of attribution, like codes that, you know, can be varied in multiple ways. But there are really two types of categories, two main categories of attribution links, one that only links back to the post itself, right, so the syndicated post itself, and then the other one where you can include a link that that’s always going to be linked back to say, for example, the root domain of the blog or to the blog page, so domain slash domain.com, slash blog, or if it’s on a subdomain, blog.domain.com, whatever, you understand what I’m saying.

Here’s the thing if you’re syndicating like, let’s just keep it simple.

Right, if the concept is going to be the same at scale, too, but what I’m saying is to keep it simple is boil it down to just a single tier branded syndication network. And let’s just think about three blog properties that we consistently syndicate to. So blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, right? If you are linking syndicating to a branded syndication network, every post from your blog that contains a link back typically, it’s going to be the title of the post is going to be the anchor text that links to the post URL as the ad and the attribution text. Right. So but if you’re also including, so the post title was originally published on your blog, right, whatever that brand name is, and now you’re linking that your blog, right is like, let’s say that was the title is the brand name your blog, right? If you’re linking back with that as the anchor text, always back to the homepage, then I would recommend that you would nofollow that part of it. Right because that is going to be duplicate.

With every single post that you publish, so I wouldn’t recommend that that be followed the post title being the anchor text linking back to the post URL. In this instance, in this example that I’m explaining, you’re only going to have three anchor text URLs per post, because that post is going to be syndicated one time to the network, and it’s going to get three anchor texts you are, uh, you know, anchor text links with the post name or title, if you code it that way as the anchor text linking back to that post. But each one of those posts would if you have the second type, which includes a link back to like the domain name, for example, you could do a naked URL, you could do a brand name, I typically just do naked URL or brand anchors if linking back to the homepage or to the blog page, for example. But remember, every single post that you do is going to contain the link back with that same anchor text. So in that case, I would recommend no following that link, but keeping the post URL and title as the anchor text as follow. Does that make sense? So you just got to think about what you’re syndicating to, and what is going to be, if there’s going to be something that’s going to be repeated over and over and over and over again, I would recommend no following that so that you don’t over-optimize a particular keyword, an anchor text. But for something that’s only one time it gets syndicated, it’s gonna have that one batch of anchor texts for the primary target URL, which is typically the post URL, then that should be okay to be the default. Does that make sense? Anybody want to try to explain that and maybe a different, different way.

I would say be careful with the anchor text, right? You know you don’t want to over-optimize, especially with links. You’re linking back to wherever it is that you’re linking on that post. Or you can add, you know, attribution to if it’s coming into your index page, wherever it is that it’s going. If you’re getting a ton of links within an exact match, then you can incur a penalty. Because it’s coming back exactly to the website, dude, you don’t want to do that. So you nofollow. You tell Google don’t penalize me because look, I’m nofollow.

Now to avoid all of this, if you’re going to that extreme, then you can do generic stick with generic more info read more here, more naked URL, that kind of thing. They’ll do exactly the naked URL. And you won’t get into that type of problem.

And so just to point this out again, remember guys, you can go to our channel. And you can go to videos. In fact, actually six days ago right there, let’s just go back to the home screen. So just go to our channel page guys. And right there was last week’s Hump Day Hangout, and we probably I believe, we should have chopped that I didn’t look to see which, you know, clips were made from last week’s episode, but that one should have in one of them, which is the attribution link cut out from that from the hump day hangout last week so that’s last week something hanging out right there click through to that watch that the first 15 minutes or so, where I go over very specifically attribution links in RSS feeds. Okay, because that’ll give you a much better understanding of why you know when to use what and why. Okay.

Right next. soon as this stupid zoom menu bar clears Okay, there we go. Alright, so next is Joe. He says will we see some proper push-ups from you all at POFU? Well, it’s gonna be virtual this time because we’re not going to be alive in a room but yeah, that would be fun with it. Yeah, this is good. If it’s virtual, I can probably crank out someone’s arm push-ups. Yeah, here you go. There you go.

Is It Still Safe To Use Full Brand’s Keyword Names With The SEO Shield?

Okay, Austin dawn. What’s up Austin, he says are Austin dawn I should say. Bradley. As you know I work in the We Buy Houses niche and have several clients across the country, many of them have partial or fully MDS example cash for house when branding with SEO power shields, is it still safe to use these types of cool brand keyword names? With the shields? Yeah, and here’s the only reason why. I would say yeah, only because, you know, if that’s why I assume that they have the exact match keyword domains, right, but they have a brand, right? So typically, there’s going to be a brand behind that they’re just using that because it’s, you know, easy to remember. And there’s used to be some significant SEO benefit from it, they’re likely still is but it can also cause some problems. So with the SEO power shield, remember, we’re going to create the keyword plus brand Association. That’s the primary objective of the tier one branded drive step, right, which is to create that whatever the top-level keyword is to start to create that brand associated with that keyword. So having that as part of the stack build plus whatever the company name is I don’t think would be a problem. I mean, I’ve done it with my own, you know, alpha land Realty. I, you know, again, I’m using a branded domain alpha land dot realty as opposed to a, you know, exact match keyword domain. But I don’t think that would be a problem. I haven’t tested that specifically, but I don’t think that would be a problem. Marco, should that be okay? It’s okay. And where we run into problems is when they ask us for the inner stats, right? So the add on a stack so that you have buy houses Maryland, Maryland we buy houses we get that type of thing. That’s when we can run into a whole lot of problems. So you’re going to have to look at this from the start. Don, maybe we can talk more about this in the webinar. We don’t really have that much time to delve into this one question right now, but it’s just a thing of how but ugly, do you want that URL, that’s probably going to because I mean that that’s the idea when you get that inner page, and that inner staff, you want to be able to bless that so that it provides so much power that it ranks the inner page, the companion, or mirror theme or inner page on the website. But it also ranks the the the G site inner page, how butt ugly. Do you want that to look to people? And when your client goes to look, I mean, you get that how Why is it Why in the world would you do this? It’s really ugly to see that. So that’s why we try to focus on people brand.

I know that exact match domains still work. But Google is busy at killing that. And you guys know when Google gets anal about something, they usually accomplish it PBN. Like they did away with TV, I was a massacre. Now people are still calling PBS. But what they’re now calling PBN and what PBS used to be. It’s two different things. So you got a whole bunch of idiots saying PBS still work? Well, no, the fuck they don’t. What you’re doing now with expired domains still works. But a traditional PBN will get picked up by Google. And it’ll get it they get the index. Remember when they did when we did the XYZ domains and we did the mass paid bills on the XYZ, how many of those got killed? It was really simple to pick them out, right? So that’s what we tell people if Google is busy out there with exact match domains and trying to pick them out and trying to pick up the spamming, especially in local those that try to step keywords into the titles into the descriptions into the URL, why would you do that? Why would you not focus on something up? Now I understand you have clients that have exact match domains. So you’re going to have to find a way to work this into the structure that we’re teaching and how you do this again, as I said,

Maybe during the next heavy-hitter club webinar, you asked this question and we can get deeper into it and we can give suggestions on how you would do this. It’ll give me time to think this out because you know we are in like an in a similar niche with Sunland, Virginia, and

Bradley’s Alpha Land Realty and my last solutions network. And so you gotta find a way to fit all of this in well tell me people get a brand, get the soul on the idea of branding of brand and creating a brand that’s going to last because if Google comes up and they start targeting end, especially spammy ones that really stuck keywords in there. I mean, it’s a done deal. It’s over.

yeah, and so that I just brought this up to just kind of demonstrate what I was talking about. So like for this was the keyword that I started optimizing for first with my brand for alpha land realty was selling fast and turns out that wasn’t the optimal keyword. It’s not the keyword that drives the most traffic to my site. And I discovered that when I started running search ads, over time, it clearly came that that wasn’t the primary keyword to be targeting. But that’s the one I started with. And But you see, I built a brand around it, right? So alpha land, Realty, alpha land Realty. So the drive stack and everything was built for alpha land realty sell land fast in Virginia. But all so you know, I didn’t. And I’ve never seen mirrored I don’t have a siloed site. This is a single page landing page, guys. But I have a, you know, FAQ schema, which by the way, that’s how you get this additional real estate here. Because that’s those are FAQs that are on it’s just FAQ schema. So I just have questions and answers on the landing page. But then I added those in structured data, FAQ structured data, and added that in HTML, this site header right. And so that now has it was funny when Google first started to crawl it. It was popping up in the press advantage. You know, propping up underneath oppressive managed PR, then it started popping up onto the G site. And now it’s ultimately it’s found its way to the landing page itself, which is good because it’s right at the top now and it’s all that additional real estate. What I’m trying to get at was I started targeting this keyword, so that there’s not like an expansion in the drive stack. None of that I never had to do that. It’s a single-page website. So, but all I did was the target, we buy land and some of the copy on the site. And you can see we buy land Virginia, even though that and it was also in the title tag as a secondary keyword in the title tag. And now I’m number one for that as well. Right even though I really never did any additional SEO on that. And then there are some other keywords in there, for example, sell my land, Virginia that I’ve never really done any optimization for at all. But there’s been some Association made through searches, you know, again, I’m paying for ads, by the way, I pay for ads and people click through those ads for a keyword like this and it creates relevancy between that search and my dumb my

My landing page. So my landing page even though I sell my land, Virginia is not a keyword that I’m actually targeting on the page. It’s still ranking organically and what number three, even though I’ve never really done any optimization for that keyword specifically, my point is it starts that’s why I think it’s important and we’ve been teaching this for years is to focus more on brand than on a particular keyword and then build start to create that association with your primary keyword in the brand. And then from there, once that association has been made, it becomes so much easier to start associations, associating route related keywords to the brand as well. So that’s why we always recommend with this SEO shield, the primary objective is to create whatever your top-level keyword is determine what your very most important keyword is, and build the drive stack or you know, to have it built with the brand plus that keyword. Once you’ve started to create that association, then you can start going after the other related keywords in your industry. And it will become that much easier to associate them because the primary keywords already been made. And it’s relevant. It’s related. Does that make sense? And sometimes, again, just naturally over time, you’ll start to rank for additional keywords that you may not even intentionally optimize for. Because Google understands the relationships between those queries. So search queries, that make sense. So was that a pretty decent explanation? Marco? That was fine.

All right, guys. Ah, that was perfect timing because we just wrapped up with the last question. So thanks, everybody, for being here. We will see you guys next week. Thanks, guys. Bye, everyone. Hey, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 292 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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youngwinnertragedy · 4 years