i dont know if this something you put a lot of thought into but it seems like you might and im curious so, what are some of your favorite themes to write about/the themes that interest you in writing or media?
Oh wow, good question. I put both a lot of thought and very little into the themes of my work. I always sit down and decide what I'm saying, and the meaning of the story, but some things always emerge in the writing. I usually discover what a story is actually about as I'm writing it. It's usually only after I finish the work that I realize what themes I had put in there, which seems like it should be bad. I think this means that a lot of my themes come through subconsciously. They're typically just...things I think about a lot.
I think the one thing I keep on coming back to is *tumblr voice* the mortifying ordeal of being known. That entire article, including the image of walking down a hundred stories of hell before reaching heaven, reconfigured my brain. It's just so damn hard to exist in a world with other people in it. There's an inevitability to hurting each other, but the love's worth it. Playing The World Ends With You at a vulnerable age primed me for obsession with this. That one quote from The Little Prince, ya know.
Generational trauma, cycles of trauma and abuse, and the long-term impact of trauma comes up a lot for me too. How being fucked up makes you fuck up others, the long-term consequences of being fucked up, the coping mechanisms we develop as a result. The ugly side of trauma and mental illness, the way we lash out and hurt people. I talk about escapism a lot, and the impact that has on you and the people around you long-term. This is usually exemplified through amnesia plotlines. This is a deep cut, but the Warchild series by Karin Lowachee had the best take on this I've read in a book.
Non-traditional love. I end up writing a lot of sibling dynamics, but I like creating unnamable and undefinable relationships. A lot of things I write just become very aro and asexual narratives. Love that saves. Love that isn't enough, but it still matters. The other side of love, which is grief.
I could go on. Forgiving yourself. Struggling to determine how to be a good person. How your identity & the intersections of your identity affect who you are. Power and power dynamics. A LOT of man vs self stories, like a lot a lot (I'm not overly interested by villains). The experience of being mentally ill and navigating the world as a mentally ill and/or disabled person. The differences between navigating the world as a man or a woman. I write a lot, so a lot of stuff tends to come up, lol. Roleswaps - fucking, somehow, for some reason, WHY, WHY DO I WRITE SO MUCH OF THEM -
Thanks for the ask, I had to do some self-reflection to answer it! I never really realize I'm writing about these things until I am, again. They're just all part of my framework of how I understand the world. Everybody has those, but when you're a writer it's easier to pull them out and microscope them.
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there’s something about the events leading up to billy being flayed that i can’t stop thinking about
like you’ve got this 17 year old who gets sent out to look for his little sister and he winds up at a much older woman’s house where he essentially has to flirt with her to get the information he needs and she reciprocates, all while knowing he’s underage
then the whole situation at the byers happens and no one sees it the way billy does, no one except for him seems to realise that it’s fucking weird for steve to be in the middle of nowhere with a group of kids while lying about it, no one believes billy and he still comes out worse in the end with him being even more isolated than he already was
and then you move onto season 3 and you have the first episode where a newly 18 year old billy is introduced by being sexualised and objectified by a group of women way older than him, karen included, and it’s made obvious that they had to have learnt his work schedule by the way they talk and that they do this often which.. yeah
then billy goes up to karen and she reciprocates his flirting once again and agrees to meet up with him later with the full intention of having sex with him out at some motel somewhere, despite knowing his age
and it’s so wild to me that all of this predatory behaviour is what actually lead to billy crashing his car - he was literally on his way to see karen when it happened, that’s the only reason he was ever there - and that all of this grooming is essentially what lead to billy being attacked in such a brutal way that is so reminiscent of sa
then there’s the scene after he gets dragged to the basement where he manages to call 911 and he doesn’t answer when asked what his emergency is because he doesn’t know what to say/doesn’t think he’ll even be believed which is all too common among victims
and then you circle back to the night at the byers, the night where billy’s seen as irrational for thinking anything’s off, where he ends up being the person ‘in the wrong’ and where all of that happened right after karen started being predatory towards him and the first time he was (unknowingly) in a situation relating to the upside down
i have a lot of thoughts
something about the chain of events leading up to billy being flayed, about how everything is so interconnected and how that works when you’re looking at it in this specific way
something about grooming, something about victims not being believed, something about billy in particular never being believed and people blaming things on how he acts rather than seeing that the way he acts is a direct result of things that have happened to him
something about how he’s immediately isolated after the fight at the byers, something about how isolated he is after he’s attacked, the way his demeanour changes when he leaves karen’s house, how his behaviour seems to change after the byers, and how his behaviour changes completely once he’s attacked
how all of it fits this allegory, right from the start
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I'm being a rebel and requesting Ikesen Masamune and barefoot 💜
send me one and a character u__u
hurricane (prompt: barefoot)
masamune; 1,813; fluff and... that's it; @violettduchess is quite possibly one of the only ppl who can get me to write for a fandom that i had no plans in joining BUT HERE I AM FOLKS. here the fuCK i am.
he has always been a hurricane.
there are moments in a person’s life big enough for a single choice to put them on a completely different path, and then — there are those moments, much smaller moments, adding up to that one, bigger, monumental, life-changing moment. this is one of the latter.
the moon is heaven bright, swinging low in a full-bellied sky, and insomnia had plagued you till you’d come into the inner gardens for refuge. at least here, it felt like you were stuck between the pages of a waking dream. so… sleep-adjacent, right? right.
you swing your feet off the edge of the pristinely mopped wooden walkways, your sketchbook propped in your lap, a charcoal pencil gliding over the smooth, moon-bleached pages. you let your hand take the drawing where it wants, and these days, there’s only one place that your hand (and, subsequently the rest of your mind and body) seems to want to go.
masamune.
he appears as fish-tail flicks of your wrist bring him to life on the pages, each sketch fluid and overlapping with the next, almost like the depiction of dance — the crinkle at the edge of his eye, the curve of his hand as he rests it on the hilt of one of his blades, the strong, graceful slope of his shoulders and back, the crescent moon curve of his lips as he smiles, ever light, ever teasing, in your direction.
“ah… is that what i look like?”
his voice makes you jump, and even now after all this time, it sets your heart racing in your chest as you whirl around to find his nose inches from yours, that self-same smile hinged across his damnably gorgeous lips.
“w-wh — why aren’t you sleeping?” is your stumbling, cobbled together response to being jump-scared in the middle of his castle pagoda, but it’s the best you could come up with. he only leans back, chuckling, his arms tucked into the long thin sleeves of his kosode as he casts his eye up towards the full moon, his expression for once devoid if mischief or calculation. it’s strange, seeing him like this, so still and so quiet, and something about it makes you go still too, wondering if this is what its like to be caught in the eye of the storm, where the quiet is only ever momentary and destruction dances just beyond where your mind can reach.
“i could ask the same of you, kitten. so tell me… why aren’t you sleeping?” he grins as he joins you, propping one arm on a bent knee, watching as you gather yourself, palms pressing to the pages of your sketchbook.
“i… i couldn’t sleep.” you look down at your own knees, and it strikes you then that your feet are still bare. you can’t help glancing at masamune, and sure enough, his feet are bare too. no wonder i hadn’t heard him coming.
but something about this sets you off, the sight of his bare feet next to yours, and even though it shouldn’t be so tantalizing a thing — the flicker of bare flesh, the hint of skin unseen— you feel like one of those ancient victorian maidens, blushing at the sight of bare ankles.
you can’t help it; you start to laugh.
and masamune, sitting beside you, finds himself transfixed, held still by the sound of your laughter, pouring from you like rainwater from a stream. so clear and beautiful it sets his body arrack with shivers.
“what?” he asks, quirking an eyebrow, “is there something on my face?”
at this, you pause, stifling your giggles with a hand pressed to your lips, and you look at him. your eyes meet, and not for the first time, you feel yourself falling into them — into him. even like this, his one blue eye is something of a miracle, a thing of celestial majesty. it wasn’t until you’d met him that you’d realized what blue eyes look like up close — up close, they are the shattered light of a millions stars, fractured and reformed and singing through a universe of endless dark to end up here, shining out from him and landing on you, and god — he’s looking at you like all those million, billion years of starlight had traveled the expanse of every galaxy just to look at you.
just to see you like he does now.
“no… there isn’t,” you say, whisper, more like, reaching out a hand to trace your thumb over the lid of his closed eye. he doesn’t push you away. instead, he leans in closer.
“then, what’s so funny, kitten?”
you simply shake your head, trying to swallow down your belly-full of laughter, your mind showing you a strobe-quick flash-forward of you trying to explain the concept of foot kinks and websites that cater to such 500 years in the future before deciding — no. alas, tonight is not the night you try to educate one date masamune on the intricacies of body part kinks. though no doubt he’d take it in stride. no — that thought too, you tamp down before you’ve the mind to follow it down into a deep, dark rabbit hole from whence you might never recover or be recovered.
“tell me, please…” he grins, a grin that is simultaneously plea and pleasure, and in it, you can hear the knife-sharp promise of desire, “i’d like to know if something other than me has the power to make you laugh so much.”
“it’s just —” you bite your lips, fighting for the words, “we’re both barefoot.”
he blinks. and you can tell that whatever he was expecting the answer to be, this is clearly not it.
you track the flitter of emotions as they dance in quicksilver steps across the planes of his face — surprise, confusion, amusement, all painted porcelain perfect on the dark of his brows, the faint twitch of his lips. finally, he settles on a sorted of muted bemusement as he cocks his head at you.
“and… do people of your time tend to sleep with socks on?”
“no, it’s just…” you blush again, unable to help yourself.
“just what?” his voice is light, and he is still.
you swallow, hard,
“just… it’s weird — i mean — it’s not like i haven’t seen anyone else barefoot before just… this was — you’re just — and i —” you trip over your words in a hurry and end up tumbling through into incoherence so fast all you can do to styme the flood is to clamp your mouth shut and pray.
oh god please… tell me this is a bad dream.
but when you open your eyes, masamune is still there, watching you with that singular eye of his, expression inscrutable. and still, he doesn’t move.
“so…” and finally, finally, the stillness breaks — he cracks it open like an eggshell, stretching himself out as he leans back, propping himself up on his elbows, lengthening till he’s splayed out over the gleaming wooden boards of the walkway, his face bathed in ghostly moonlight.
“i’m not the first man you’ve seen barefoot, hm? that is a problem.”
your mouth drops open and for a moment, you gape at him wordless and fish-like, and he laughs as he turns to look at you.
“tell me his name — i’ll have his head in the morning,” he says, in a voice so casually serious that for a moment you think he might actually mean it.
“masamune!”
and then, he’s laughing too, a big, bright, uproarious thing that shakes his entire body like the foundations of the earth. it is deep and rich and lovely, warm and sweet as sun-kissed honey. you let yourself be swept up in his laughter, dropping into silent giggles, and then something louder, letting your shoulder bump into his, your bodies finally touching and then —
there’s a flurry of clothing, a shifting of weights. you find yourself pulled into him, tipping towards him like inevitability.
your sketchbook lays forgotten on the walkway next to you as masamune holds you close against his chest.
“ah… i really don’t like that…”
an entourage of tingles frissons through your body at his words.
“don’t like what?”
“the fact that you’ve seen someone else barefoot before. it bugs me.”
you peer up at him, lifting your head ever so slightly from his chest. he’s looking at you, and the sunrise-blue of his eyes are shadowed with something darker now, something decidedly less innocent than just the thought of bare feet.
“then… what will you do about it?” you ask, feeling the heat of his body, the solidness of him, the rightness of you between his arms.
“hm… are you teasing me, kitten?” his voice is gravel and earthquake and you’re emboldened by the sound, by the way his pupil dilates, the black hole at the center of every galaxy — gravity made solid, made real.
“yes,” you breathe, leaning up like a dare and he meets you gloriously, his lips hard and pressing and soft and pulling. there’s a fire unspooling at the base of your spine, stoked by the heat and truth of him, so close, too close — you break apart gasping. he grins, lynx-like and wolfish as he grazes his teeth along the column of your throat.
“good,” he says, sighing into your flesh as you arch up into him, your fingers curling into his hair as he flips the pair of you over. he pulls you beneath him and he is storm and thunder, he is rain and wonder — he is water to your desert skies, the sunlit days to all your moonless nights.
and as he makes to rend you into pleasure, into nothing more than ache and belonging, he pulls back with a bone-deep growl, a sliver of hesitation, of self-preservation.
“are… are you sure you want this?” that you want me? the echo is not lost on you.
and it’s not the first time he’s asked you the question, and you have a feeling that it wouldn’t be the last. but you reply as you had, once upon a time, in a distant, sun-drenched afternoon, when you’d been telling him about one of your favorite poems from your time.
you smile, tug him down for a kiss.
“yes,” you say, like you’d done on that long-ago afternoon, “i want you — i want this, masamune. because… I love you.”
“i will love you when you are a still day… i will love you when you are a hurricane.”
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