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prettyfastcars · 4 months

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He has me by my heart | Mob!Lando x Reader

Summary: Lando is bad for you. You know that, countless people have told you this. But no matter how corrupted, dark, and wicked he was. No matter how possessive, jealous, and insane he could be, almost childishly so. Despite it all, he had you by your heart, and there was no getting away from him.

Themes: mob!lando, daddy kink, smut, explicit language, possessive!lando,

a/n: you know those videos of Lando being escorted by police in italy yeahhhh

You saw it on the news.

Then again, everyone did. Ever since he was arrested a few weeks ago, people tuned in any moment they could to follow his story. He was well-known, filthy rich, and dangerous. He went against the law a lot. But somehow there was never enough evidence against him that incriminated him.

Lando had too many loyal servants who were willing to lay down their lives in order to keep him away from being locked up in prison. But a few weeks ago, a couple days after you both broke up after a huge fight, he was arrested.

Apparently he got into a rather violent fight at some exclusive club. Videos of it circulated around everywhere. And it was the most convicting evidence that had ever surfaced regarding him so the authorities used that to at least lock him up for a little time while they tried to dig up more stuff about him.

However, that ended up not happening. Lando’s people kept everything clean. Every dirty work happened in the dark with no witnesses. Every skeleton was carefully placed in impregnable closets. So the authorities had no choice but to release him.

The day of his release, you watched him on TV. How he gloated as the authorities let him go. How he enjoyed the many cameras filming him, taking pictures of him which would later surely spark many conversations in the media. He had always liked the attention.

Even through the screen you could see it on his face. The arrogance, the smirks, the determined, proud look in his eyes like he was an unchallengeable monarch. He walked to his car, grinning like a king. He was, in many ways. A king in the darker side of life.

Just then, your phone rang. It was an unknown number. You answered it with your heart racing, part of you already knew who was calling.

“Hello?” You tried your hardest to sound as unbothered as possible.

He chuckled from the other side of the call. “Hey princess, missed me?”

You exhaled shakily, “Lando.”

He scoffed, “You sound a little out of breath there, baby. Have you been watching me on TV?” He laughed. “You knew they could never keep me locked up for long, didn’t you princess? We talked about this, remember?”

Oh. So he was doing the thing where he pretended that you two hadn’t had a big fight, said cruel things to each other and decided to go your separate ways. Yet again.

“Why are you calling me?” You said, “We broke up, remember?”

He sighed like he was annoyed, “Come on, princess. You know that wasn’t real, right?” He argued. “We were both tired and angry, and we didn’t mean it.” He didn’t even wait for you to respond as he said, “I’m coming over later, and then we’ll talk. Alright, princess? I can’t wait to see you.”

With that he ended the call. And you were standing there in the middle of your apartment feeling confused. As always.

When he comes over later, you thought, you’d set everything straight and break up with him for good this time.

—

Hours passed.

You realised you shouldn’t just sit and wait for him. But you were anxious so you couldn’t do anything else other than wait.

Later in the evening, three knocks at your door signalled that he was here. You stood there for a short while, fresh out of the shower and still in your fluffy robe as you stared at the door. You decided you were going to keep this short.

He’d walk in, you’d talk, and then you’d ask him to leave. Right? Right.

But then you opened the door. And there he was, in a fresh suit. His hair was a fluffy, curly mess. He smelt amazing. And that soft, puppy dog look in his blue-green eyes.

“Hi princess,” He said, already walking in and shutting the door behind him, “I’ve missed you.”

Your walls came crashing down instantly. You had your arms around him before you even realised it. Your face pushed into the crook of his neck as you shed a few tears and inhaled his familiar scent. Body wash and cologne.

“I was so scared I would never see you again.” You found yourself mumbling against his skin as he backed you into the closest wall.

He laughed as you pulled away to wipe your tears, “Babygirl,” He cooed, “You know that would never happen.” He cupped your teary face in his large hands and smiled at you. “Were you worried for me? Hmm?”

You nodded. He chuckled, leaning in to kiss you. Soft lips against yours, you melted into him. Your back against the wall, your fingers tangled in his hair while he moaned shamelessly into the kiss… playfully biting your lips.

“I’ve missed you so much, princess.” His hands wandered, undoing the knot at the front of your robe. He let out a strained groan when he finally felt your warm skin. He whispered between messy, hungry kisses, “Daddy missed you so much.”

He pulled away to look at you. You couldn’t help but notice the way his lips were now fuller. Fuck, he was your weakness.

“Missed this mouth,” He whispered while tracing your lips with the tip of his finger. His mere touch was driving you insane. So much so that you dropped down to your knees even before he asked you to.

Lando looked down at you with pride in his eyes and a devilishly handsome smirk on his face. “That’s my good girl,” He said breathlessly, caressing your cheek gently as he watched you undo his zipper and pull down his briefs.

His cock stood proud and tall in front of you. Your mouth watered shamelessly at the sight of it. Thick and big, you realised you’d missed him just as much. Your hands instinctively wrapped around his length and you placed the tip against your lips, kissing it and feeling the pre cum coating your lips.

Lando hissed in pleasure as you pushed him into your mouth, taking in the tip and swirling your tongue around him.

“I missed your fucking mouth, babygirl…”

He whispered your name under his breath, his hand holding your head and guiding you up and down his cock. His taste drove you crazy. As did the sounds which left his mouth.

You intended on making him come hard and fast.

“Fuck…,” He moaned again, right before coming undone all over your tongue. “You did so good, princess.”

You looked up at him, still kneeling on the cold floor. You’d missed this too.

“Stand up,” He ordered. And when you did, he leaned in to kiss you again. Rougher this time, more demanding as he pulled you away from the wall and guided you over to your living room. He grabbed your face gently by the chin and said, “Can you go make daddy a drink, princess?”

You nodded immediately. Lando smiled, kissing you briefly on the lips before smacking you gently on the butt as you walked over to the mini bar to make him a drink. You watched him the whole time you poured his whiskey in a glass.

You watched how he got rid of his suit jacket, unbuttoned his white shirt and plopped down on the couch. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a moment. He looked like he was at peace. So much so that you almost hesitated before you gently touched his face to get his attention.

Lando smiled at you as he took the glass from you first, then pulled you onto his lap. Palms gently caressing his smooth chest, you admired your man. His beard seemed coarse you realised as you stroked his cheek. You wondered whether it would feel rougher in between your thighs.

Judging by the smirk on his face, Lando thought of the same thing as he sipped on his drink. And his hooded eyes silently promised you ‘later’. His free hand rubbed up and down your exposed thigh, until he reached in between your legs.

He shamelessly watched how his fingers softly rubbed your throbbing clit. You whimpered softly, grinding against his hand on his lap.

“Who took care of you while I was away?” He asked.

You knew what he meant. Jealous, territorial, over protective man that he was.

“No one,” You answered, whining as he slid a finger inside you.

He swallowed all of the whiskey and leaned in to kiss you again. He kissed down your neck, and all while slowly fingerfucking you he whispered along your collar bones, “If I find out someone touched you while I was gone I’m gonna do terrible,” He licked and bit your skin mid-sentence, “horrible things to them.” He left marks on your skin, marking his territory. “And I’ll make you watch.”

You couldn’t help the unexpected giggle that escaped your lips. “No one touched me,” You assured him. “I took care of myself.” You added.

Lando pulled away from your skin smirking like the handsome devil he was. “Yeah?” He insisted, “Show me how.”

You gave him a shy smile.

“Come on,” He said. “Show me how you touched yourself while I was away.”

So you gave him a little show. Still on his lap as you touched yourself, like you did almost every night when he was gone. Even when you were angry at him, nothing else got you off like the memories of the moments you both spent under the covers.

Lando leaned back for a minute, his hands lazily rubbing up and down your thighs while he carefully followed your finger as it dipped in and out of your wet hole. His eyebrows furrowed everytime you moaned or let out a wanton gasp.

He grabbed your thighs tightly each time he had to hold back from shoving your hands away to touch you. His shameless stare urged you to keep going. Lando was almost just as breathless as you were when you brought yourself to the edge, slowing down and not wanting to come just yet.

“Please…” You murmured, removing your hand away and looking into his dangerously pretty eyes. “Please,” You begged again

He looked up at you and smirked. He knew what you wanted. You wanted him to make you come. His smug grin widened before he taunted, “Aww what is it, princess? Your fingers don’t feel as good as daddy’s?” He cooed, “Hmm? You want daddy to make you come, don’t you?”

You nodded quickly. Lando just smirked and shook his head. Then before you knew it, you were being pushed down onto the couch. You laid on your back while he hovered above you. You could feel the metal chain around his neck just barely brushing against your chest.

“It’s okay, babygirl.” He whispered, his face inches above yours. “Daddy’s here now.” He said before leaning in to kiss your lips. His tongue gently stroking your lower lip, then his mouth trailed downwards, kissing your neck, your collar bones down to your breasts, licking and kissing and leaving behind his marks on your skin.

Your body felt hot. Burning under him as he took his time and kissed every inch of your skin. “Missed you,” he whispered as he pressed kisses down your chest.

Within seconds his fingers found their way in between your legs again, carefully parting your wet folds before slipping inside you.

He asked, “Do your fingers feel this good, princess?” Lando leaned in again, and kissed along your jaw while his fingers stroked you gently. “I bet they don’t.”

You whined and squirmed and you wanted more. You threw your head back and whined loudly, you felt your walls clench around his fingers.

He smirked, feeling it too. “Oh? You wanna cum, is that it?” he leaned in closer, whispering against your mouth, “You want it so bad, don’t you princess?” he teased, chuckling darkly.

You moaned, and whined and tried your hardest to keep quiet but you ended up being loud anyways. His touch, his stare, his words… “Look at you,” he whispered, kissing and biting down on your skin occasionally as his fingers took you higher. “So perfect for daddy.”

He bit down on your neck as you squirmed, moaning shamelessly.

“Come for me, babygirl.”

You did. Welcoming the sweet pressure in between your legs and you came with a loud cry all over his fingers, coating them with your arousal and making him hiss and swear at the sight of you so beautifully dishevelled.

He had missed this indeed.

“You’re all mine,” Lando said.

You were still recovering from your previous orgasm that you didn’t realise his mouth was on you again, the lower half of his face completely submerged in between your legs, which were on each of his shoulders as his tongue tasting you shamelessly, eagerly.

“Fuck,” He moaned against your wetness. The sound of it making you shiver.

His tongue slipped past your folds and teased your entrance, occasionally flicking your sensitive clit mercilessly. Your hands immediately gripped his messy, curly hair and tugged gently at his roots.

“You taste so good, princess.”

You whimpered under his touch, feeling his faintly rough stubble rubbing against your soft skin. It burned a little, but you enjoyed each and every second of it and craved for more. His mouth felt good.

“Fuck… Lando,” You moaned out loud as your back arched off the couch for just a moment, your eyes closing and your head leaning back as you felt a wave of intense pleasure wash over you.

“You’re gonna cum for me, is that it, hmm?” He whispered and got back to teasing your clit with his warm and wet tongue, relishing your taste.

“Please, please….” You murmured. He chuckled, his warm breath fanning your wet folds.

“Come on, ask nicely.” He whispered, biting down on your hip bone before kissing his way back to your clit.

“Please daddy,” You whined, looking at him with pleading eyes. “Please, can I come?”

His smirk meant that he was satisfied. “Of course you can, princess.” He murmured. “Come all over daddy’s tongue.”

Lando got back to eating you out like it was the only thing he ever wanted to do. The pressure in between your legs was building up nicely. So with a few more strokes of his tongue, you let go and came all over his face.

The waves of pleasure which washed over you were so intense that you teared up as you came, grinding your hips against his waiting mouth. And Lando lapped up whatever you gave him. He couldn’t get enough.

When he finally pulled away to let you breath for a moment, he kissed your thighs, admiring the pretty mess that you were.

“You’re so fucking beautiful, princess,” he whispered, looking down at you. “All mine.” He had that feral look in his eyes. Shameless, and raw. Passionate, and unrestrained. He wanted you and he wasn’t hiding it. “Get on your hands and knees.” He ordered.

You did as he asked. You knelt on the couch, holding onto the back while he stood behind you surely admiring your ass as your back faced him.

Lando trailed a finger lazily up your spine before sliding his fingers around your neck. He gripped your throat gently, and tightened his grip just enough so he got your full attention. His lips hovered over the side of your throat and his other hand reached around and toyed with your clit, his fingers making you tremble.

You could feel his erection pressing against your butt. And your heart raced in anticipation.

“Daddy missed this pussy, princess.” He whispered into your ear, his fingers teasing your clit until you were embarrassingly wet for him. “I know you missed daddy’s cock, didn’t you? Hmm?”

You whined in response as his tongue licked along your neck.

His hand gripped your throat, eliciting a loud moan out of you. “Answer me, babygirl.” He said. “Use your words and tell daddy you want his cock.”

His fingers left your clit as he undid his trousers again, grabbed you by the hips and aligned his cock to your entrance. Pushing against it just enough to make you lose your mind but not enough.

Damn him. He knew just what to do. How to play you to get you to do exactly what he wanted. You pushed back against him, desperately craving friction, as you whimpered, “Please daddy, I want your cock. Please…”

He chuckled. “There’s my good girl.” He praised and gripped the sides of your hips tighter. He pushed into you with ease, earning a sinful moan out of you.

Lando groaned as he filled you up entirely, your ass cheek pressing into his pelvic bone as he buried his cock into you. Your knuckles gripped the back of the couch tightly as you felt the familiar pressure forming again in no time, given you were already so sensitive and sore from before.

You were barely able to think straight. You’d missed him. You’d missed this way too much. Having him right now gave you a high you did not quite comprehend but you were grateful for it.

“So fucking good… princess…” Lando spoke in a haze, and you barely heard him as the only thing you focused on was how good he felt, sliding in and out of you. His cock stretching you out each time he fit it snugly inside you.

He felt it too. He relished the sounds your bodies made together. The careless moans he earned out of you, how wet and ready you were for him. How perfectly you clenched around his cock. Your soft, often loud, whimpers and his groans of pleasure.

“I dreamt of this perfect, warm pussy the whole time I was locked up in there, you know that, princess?” Lando pounded into you like his life depended on it. Stretching you out and filling you up each time he rammed his cock into your entrance.

You could feel the soreness his touch would leave behind, and you didn’t care. But fuck… his dirty mouth only made him hotter.

“The only that kept me going was knowing that I’d come home to you and fuck you like this,” He whispered, and you felt his cock throb against your walls. You tightened around him, feeling your orgasm so close that you almost shed tears again.

Lando kept mumbling in the throes of pleasure, “Like you were made for me, for this cock…” He trailed off, moaning in that boyish way that only made you want to come harder. “It’s all you’re good for, isn’t it, babygirl? Hmm?”

Right there… you were tight on the edge, ready to let go…

But just as you were, he pulled out and flipped you around. You were on your back again, looking up at him. His roughness only turning you on even more.

He smirked when he saw that look of uncontained desire on your face. “Not so easily, princess.” He chuckled. “Daddy spent all this time away from you. So it’s only fair that now you beg for my cock.” He parted your legs, and settled in between them again, his cock slipping inside you once again. “Beg for me.”

When he saw that you didn’t, his fingers wrapped around your throat once more. “I said,” he growled, “beg.”

Your lips parted as you gasped, giving in. You’d do anything for him you realised.

“Daddy please… please make me cum…” you whined, “I missed you so much, I need you-,” you cut yourself off, moaning wantonly as he began fucking you hard and fast again.

He grunted and moaned shamelessly right in your ear and the sound sent shivers down your back. Your legs started to shake as he quickened his pace. He pounded into you incessantly.

You stared into his eyes, tears escaping your eyes, lips swollen and bruised, neck littered with his bite marks, and your eyes just as wild and passionate as his. His messy hair, that dangerous way of his, his reckless nature, that annoying arrogance, his pride was his fatal flaw and yet… Oh fuck you loved him.

Lando smirked, leaning in to whisper against your mouth, “Daddy loves you more, princess.”

Well, guess you said it out loud then.

“You belong to me, don’t you? Hmm?”

“Yes.” You gasped. “Please, daddy can I-”

The pleasure was too much and you couldn’t hold back anymore. So, you came all around his cock, moaning and squirming. Your fingers scratching his neck, your arms holding him tight like he was your lifeline. He was, in more ways than one.

Lando moaned out loud when he felt your walls pulsating violently around him. His thrusts became irregular as he came right after you, filling you up again. “Fuck,” He groaned, his voice a little hoarser. “Fuck, princess.” He sighed, putting his whole body weight onto you for a moment. He nuzzled your neck and left soft kisses along your skin.

You let him rest for a moment, mindlessly playing with his hair. You almost laughed thinking about how your initial plan was to kick him out of your life, forever. But deep down you knew, you could never get rid of Lando.

No matter how corrupted, dark, and wicked he was. No matter how possessive, jealous, and insane he could be, almost childishly so. Despite it all, he had you by your heart, and there was no getting away from him.

#lando norris x reader #lando norris smut #lando norris #lando norris x you #mob!lando #f1 imagine #f1 #f1 fanfic #f1 au

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arealphrooblem · 10 months

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Hi!! First off I just want to say that this is my new favorite writing blog on tumblr!! I'm so grateful for whatever strings the universe pulled that led me here. I'm literally addicted to every single thing you've written here. I swear I've read Mutually Assured Destruction like ten times within the past 24 hours.

I was wondering, if you find the free time and the inspiration, if you could write a villain x medic/civilian snippet? Maybe Medic accidentally witnessed villain's crime so villain can't let them just wander around freely since medic works for the hero agency, but also doesn't want to kill medic since medic is useful?

Thank you so much! I've always loved the idea of Villain x Medic so here you go!

CW: Kidnapping

“You know my face.”

The medic knew this day would come. Still, they froze in the doorway of the living room, keys dangling in their hands, blood frosting over in sheer dread. The villain sat with their legs crossed in the medic’s favorite armchair, the fire place unlit. The room in semi-darkness, the only light a glow from a street-lamp.

They didn’t ask how the villain knew their address. They should have taken Hero’s offer to leave under witness protection, but their whole life was built here. They couldn’t just leave and start over.

“I haven’t revealed it,” the medic said.

“Yet,” the villain amended. “I’m sure you would for the right price. Or under the right pressure.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t. But I am not going to risk it.”

The lamp beside the couch switched on. The medic flinched away from the sight, eyes trained on the coat rack by the door. As if mattered anymore if they saw the villain’s face again. As if they hadn’t doomed themselves the first time.

Footsteps creaked over the old wood floors. The medic took slow deep breaths, holding it for four counts and releasing it. A trick they had taught people afraid of IV needles to calm their racing heart.

The time to run had long since passed. And even if it hadn’t, the villain most definitely had people outside lying in wait for such an escape.

Hands that tipped the medic’s chin to meet that dangerous gaze.

“You’re going to kill me,” the medic said. It was not a question.

An eyebrow raised. “You sound very calm about that.”

“My career has taught me how to recognize and accept things that aren’t in my control. Right now there is nothing I can do to stop you.”

“This is true.”

The villain studied them, thumb brushing absently against the curve of their bottom lip. The darkness of their eyes felt unfathomable, like the Marianas Trench. Like the deepest part of the ocean, full of wonder and terror.

“I am not going to kill you,” the villain said finally. “I owe you my life. And I always repay my debts. But you know my face.”

The medic swallowed thickly against the barrage of options that opened up. The villain could blind them, torture them into insanity, cut out their tongue. All of the above. The villain’s hand slips across their cheek to cup the back of the medic’s head. A possessive gesture, they noted with a shiver.

“You are coming with me. Whether it be conscious or unconscious, I leave up to your . . . control.”

Relief warred with new fear. “Where are you taking me?” they asked. “What happens to me when we get there?”

“Questions I will happily answer in the car,” said the villain, their hand sliding down the medic’s

neck before retreating. “Hand me your phone and your keys and then go pack your things. You have ten minutes.”

The medic stood rooted to the spot. This was real, this was happening. And it yet it still felt like a bad dream. Ten minutes to pack their life up? Ten minutes?

“Tick tock, darling,” crooned the villain, holding their hand out.

Numbly, the medic dropped their phone and keys into the villain's hand and took robotic steps towards their bedroom. Clothes were easy to grab and stuff into the suitcase. As were their birth certificate and other identity papers. Personal items, less so. Medic spent precious minutes at their bookshelf, picking a well thumbed classic from their childhood, their most referenced medical texts, and a novel they hadn’t started yet.

The pressure of time throbbed in the back of their head, making it difficult to think rationally about what they needed. They ducked into the bathroom, grabbing their contact case and solution, their toothbrush. Then they stood in the middle of their bedroom, frantically trying to think of what they couldn’t live without.

“Times up.”

The villain’s voice came from behind, causing the medic to jump out of their skin.

“Zip it up and let’s go.”

The villain’s car lay hidden in the shadows of the back alley. A dangerous looking driver waiting for them, their cigarette glow the only light. The villain opened the backseat of the car for Medic with a mocking flourish.

It was their last opportunity to run, but the medic knew a shot in the back waited for them if they tried it. So, dread sitting heavy in their stomach, they climbed in. The villain took the seat next to them, giving out curt orders to the driver in a language the medic didn’t recognize.

The nagging horror that the medic forgot something important haunted them. They leaned their head against the window, mentally walking through their house, trying to remember. But the fear churning in their blood made it so difficult.

“I’m taking you to my compound,” said the villain, almost conversationally. As if detailing the itinerary for a date. “I have a room set up for you, as well as a med bay. You can resume your work taking care of my mercenaries.”

The medic listened with half an ear, watching the wave of street lamps pass them by. What were they missing?

“No objections to that?” the villain asked, bemused.

They passed a park, one the medic had many birthday parties in as a child, and the sudden zing of memory made them gasp.

“Stop! We have to go back!” they cried.

The driver didn’t so much as flinch.

“Go back?" The villain laughed. "Too late for that, doctor. You should have protested before you climbed into this car."

"I forgot something!"

"Whatever it is can be replaced," the villain said with a dismissive wave of their hand.

"It's not replaceable. Please."

Desperation clawed at their throat but the villain remained unmoved.

"If it were so important, one would think it would be the first thing you packed, not the first thing you forgot. You will have to learn to live without it."

The medic closed their eyes the rest of the journey. They couldn't bear to look at Villain's face.

"Do you regret it?"

The villain sat upon the examination bed, looking almost innocent.

It had been a week since the medic was taken. Their life had changed so drastically that the normality of the med bay, of the tools they had spent years around, clanged like a discordant note. They threw themselves into their work, demanding physicals for the Villain's mercenaries to establish a baseline of health. These people, so used to sewing their own wounds, grew awkward around the medic’s soft and attentive care. Some refused to come.

The villain showed up last, a new laceration on their ribs. They sat, spine straight and unflinching as medic carefully cleaned the wound and bandaged it.

"Regret what?" the medic asked.

" . . .Saving my life."

Their hands stilled for a moment, hovering over the wound. It was a tricky question and the medic wasn't sure how to answer it honestly.

"I would have regretted the person that I'd become if I had let you die," they said finally.

"Oh? Most people would consider it a net positive, preventing all my future damage."

"It's not up to me to decide who deserves to live and who doesn't."

"I beg to differ. You hold people's lives in your hands every day. Who else, if not you?"

The medic glanced up at the villain, who stared at them with open-faced fascination, rather than the usual dispassion.

"I don't think any one person should have that power," they said pointedly.

The villain smiled, a slow curving movement. "A pity. You could be terrifying indeed."

The medic swallowed something strange dancing in their gut. "You're lucky I'm not."

"Indeed I am."

They finished the examination without further conversation. The villain watched with quiet fascination as the medic sterilized their tools, folded unused bandages away, updated the Villain's medical records.

"What did you leave behind?" they asked softly.

"My life," the medic said, tersely, as they tapped on the keyboard.

The villain was undeterred. "What did you remember in the car?"

The medic paused at that, unsure if they should answer. They didn't want the villain's mockery over it. But lies rarely went over well with the villain -- the medic had cleaned up the wounds left behind from that.

"A box under my bed," they replied, keeping their eyes locked on the computer. "It had my keepsakes in it. Family photos, birthday cards, that sort of thing."

"Sentiment," the villain said skeptically. "That's what got you so worked up?"

"I wouldn't expect someone like you to understand," they snapped, standing up.

The villain watched them leave and the medic felt their gaze like a laser all the way down the hall.

Two days later a painfully familiar box sat on the examination table. Scribbled in sharpie on the cardboard was a message:

I do understand.

#hero x villain #villain x civilian #villain x medic #my writing #asks #writeblr

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bolshefem · 1 year

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if you think people are more empathetic to women than men you are straight up fucking delusional. men have proved themself almost INCAPABLE of empathy for women, and this is statistically and empirically supported. they are incapable of understanding that women have an internal life, do not see us as humans with emotions who exist external to them. look at the comments on a post of a man talking about self harm vs a woman. "men's mental health matters too🥺" "I'm proud of you" vs "attention whore" "sideways for attention downwards for results" "ugly bitch trying to get sympathy"

this is what happens for ANYTHING regarding sexual assault, mental health, suffering, trauma.

or an overweight man vs woman "keep your head up king👑" "you got this bro, I believe in you" "these women don't deserve you." (like totally unprompted not discussing relationships) Or often no comments on his weight at all if he's not talking about it. For a woman, no matter WHAT she is posting about "landwhale" "starve yourself" "put down the burger" "kys fat b*tch" and the most vile and insanely cruel comments The amount of threads and forums dedicated to eviscerating degrading and insulting overweight women on places like lolcow and kiwi farms and just social media in general and I genuinely have never seen one for a man. Same thing with things like facial deformities, the comments are unbelievably cruel to these women.

the level of vitriol is not even remotely comparable, and I don't even think it's mostly a double standard. I think they just lack the capacity to feel empathy towards women and perceive them as human and capable of feeling pain. Things are solely perceived in how they relate to them and thought to be performances for men. Women exist to serve them and if they don't give them a boner they don't deserve to be alive. If something, no matter how innocuous, pisses them off in the slightest they don't have a single qualm because they just don't view them as real people and full human beings with internal lives. women having emotions is inherently manipulative, anything they say or do is a performance for men. And like look at things such as the gender credibility gap https://www.tedxmilehigh.com/gender-credibility-gap/ Women are systematically less believed as witnesses in a courtroom, reporters, academic authorities, in claims of sexual assault, discrimination, or harassment.*

Women's reports of pain symptoms are less likely to be believed by doctors, and they are staggering more likely to not receive proper medication, go undiagnosed and untreated. Women are 32% more likely to die post-op if their surgeon is a man. "Womens' pain not taken as seriously as mens' pain. Researchers found that when male and female patients expressed the same amount of pain, observers viewed female patients' pain as less intense "(sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210406164124.htm) "Nearly three-quarters of cases where a disease primarily affects one gender, the so-called “men's diseases” are overfunded, while the “women's diseases” are dramatically underfunded."

https://www.concernusa.org/story/gender-bias-in-healthcare/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2022/women-pain-gender-bias-doctors/ https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/gender-bias-in-medical-diagnosis#how-does-it-affect-diagnosis https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/women-and-pain-disparities-in-experience-and-treatment-2017100912562 I could literally go on on this topic forever. The gender empathy gap is a form of epistemic violence against women.

* "Suicidal behaviour and self-harm in women can be viewed by family, health professionals and the community as attention-seeking, manipulative and non-serious, which can negatively influence how young women are treated." (Curtis, 2016) *Men with overweight tend to be perceived as wise or experienced, while women's credibility tends to decrease with excess weight... women seem to experience higher levels of weight stigmatization than men, even at lower levels of excess weight (Flint et al., 2016)

*Women are at greater risk for weight/height discrimination than men (Puhl et al, 2008)

*so many papers on this but "Across the board, women are perceived to be less credible than men. Especially women’s testimonies of rape and sexual harassment are widely trivialized and disregarded, even though reports of sexual abuse are not more likely to be false than reports of other crimes" (Schreurs, 2020) more like Mack, 1993

#RAMBLE #this was supposed to be like two paragraphs #sorry for the mess but worth a read

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junesprince · 4 months

Text

im sorry if someone has pointed these out already but i replayed p5t again and i am in absolute SHAMBLES with these new observations. i never actually post my thoughts here but i kinda need people to talk to about p5t IM AUTISTIC AND HYPERFIXATED. anyway onto the real post, sorry if this is unorganized and messy. im just really excited

i really wanna talk about the whole event that happens in the 3rd kingdom, on the rooftop.

soo.. when the school crashes and transforms.. it resembles a clock. a train station??? and. said clock is unmoving. what struck me is the time it was stuck on. 6:00pm, or 18:00, the exact time The Train Incident (tm) takes place, and the exact time eri was pushed onto the train tracks at the station.

i guess you could say, toshiro is stuck in the past, unable to move on and process his trauma. it's the extreme guilt of him losing his closest friend and how standing up and rebelling... just ended up in so many people hurt. he can't possibly live bearing the sin of that.

but here's when it gets more interesting... when shadow toshiro was threatening to kill erina, and when erina/eri inspired toshiro to take a stand, he throws joker's knife through the shadows hand, but more specifically, through the gloved hand, the one damaged from the train.

then with a really good sequence, toshiro runs as fast as he possibly can (i wonder how he did that actually) and with flashing memories of him failing to save eri in between, he manages to catch erina before she falls. and... he catches her with his damaged hand. the same hand that failed to save eri, saved erina.

remember the clock from the beginning? it STARTS MOVING AGAIN right after this.

this whole scene is genuinely such a beautiful and symbolistic way to show that toshiro finally found his resolve, and that despite all that trauma in the past, he's ready to change for the better and move again.

oh, and one more thing. toshiros mask only has one eye shown. the left one... the one that eri lost. they have ONE EYE EACH AAAAGHHH!! their souls really are connected.

what gets me more is that one of toshiros catchphrases in combat iirc is "witness OUR power as ONE" and it makes me go insane because he basically sees eri as his hero (here ill quote a futaba dialogue that hit me hard: "natsuhara's like the undefeated heroine in toshiro's life story, huh?") and she made him feel like he's more than just a puppet of his father. she inspired him to take a stand, and while this resulted badly, it led to his LITERAL SOUL subconsciously manifesting into a being heavily based on her (erina)

he just believes that eri/erina is a huge part of who he is. so "witness our power as one"

the fact he doesn't have a real PT outfit disappoints me a bit, but id like to think it's because eri taught him that he doesn't need to become all cool and change himself to rebel. he just needs to be himself. that's really it.

some extra things i have noticed:

-shadow toshiros 'weapon' is basically just bandages. i first thought this was a twisted more distorted version of the bandages eri gave toshiro when they first met (since shadow toshiro claims to despise eri)?? but someone in yt comments pointed out its probably made from eri's bandages after the incident. and i think that makes much more sense

-toshiro is the only persona user that has a persona opposite of his gender... that's kinda... 🏳️‍⚧️ if you ask me...heh (im trans)

-i know many know already but erinas character design is GENIUS . like ... the covered eye and the prosthetic leg?? referencing eri?? SO FUCKING WELL DONE. genuinely one of my fav character designs in persona

-not really an observation but remember the 'thank you instead of sorry' hideout talk where toshiro tells the gang about eri more?? when it was finished and toshiro said "natsuhara-senpai...um, thank you." IT TORE MY HEART STRINGS STOOOPPP

-idk im kinda unnormal about eritoshi. that's all

#persona 5 tactica #persona 5 tactica spoilers #p5t #p5t spoilers #toshiro kasukabe #p5t erina #eri natsuhara #thanks for reading all of this if u did :)#i love this game so much. seriously amazing #i migjt post more of things like this. maybe #eritoshi

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thetomorrowshow · 11 months

Text

Joel thinks it’s stupid, really.

Once they figure it out.

Soulmates, Grian messages them all. I think it’s soulmates.

Which makes sense, with the random pains shooting through his legs that he feels on occasion. He’s sharing a life with someone—or, three lives—and they feel each others’ pain.

Which is dumb. Because Joel doesn’t need or want a soulmate, and he doesn’t care much for the idea of having to share his life with someone and make sure they’re safe. He’s not here to be babysitting another player.

That’s what he would be doing, he’s sure. Babysitting someone. Not that everyone would be, of course—there are some players that he knows instantly will be paired up, because if such a thing as real soulmates exist, they would be them. Grian and Scar. Scott and Jimmy. Bdubs and Etho.

No one for him.

No one for Joel because he’s always been a loner. For as long as he can remember he’s been on his own in these games—in the first one he had his cottage on the hill (so long ago that he can barely remember what it looked like, he can only remember it burning and the flames licking up at him and melting his skin and the smell of his hair and he has to put it out—), and in the games since, he’s been alone. Alliances that last little more than a week, here and there, and somehow he always ends up at Grian’s side at the end of things, but he’s never actually teamed up with anyone else.

He doesn’t want a soulmate. He doesn’t want another player going through his things, walking through his space, just being near him when he’s angry and needs time alone to cool off.

But there’s a morbid curiosity, he supposes. Because he can’t help but wonder who on earth the universe would think to pair him with.

So every person he sees, he socks in the arm (and if he hits a little harder than is considered friendly, he can blame it on adrenaline).

He actually witnesses a soulmate pair find each other before he finds his own.

And, strangely, it’s Bdubs and Impulse.

For a moment, he thinks that can’t be right—he can envision Bdubs with Etho, or Cleo, but not Impulse. And while Impulse is easygoing enough, Bdubs is a wildcard. Impulse’s sense of order is going to be completely upturned by Bdubs and his harebrained ideals.

Maybe. It’s not like Joel actually knows either of them very well.

And then they’re all mining together, and Etho trips.

And Joel feels his knees sting.

Joel doesn’t want to settle down anywhere, at all ever, but after a bunch of fooling around with Grian and Scar (soulmates, just as he’d predicted, of course), he starts. . . .

Not laying down roots. He really ought to get something started, just like everyone else, but that’s just it: everyone else has something started. Everyone else has planted crops and fenced in some animals and set out to get building blocks.

Prime opportunity for raiding some new farms, and to his surprise, Etho absolutely agrees.

For a moment, Joel can forget that they’re linked—he’s just hanging out with a group of friends, laughing at Jimmy, stealing a bit of wheat when nobody’s looking, the norm. Then Etho takes an absurd amount of damage—Joel definitely doesn’t fall back against the crafting table they’ve set up for making armor, definitely doesn’t gasp and clutch at his chest, like he can stop his heart from leaping out of it—and he’s rather rudely reminded that his life isn’t solely his own.

Oh, he hates this already.

Etho calls an apology, but Joel can’t see him through the woods—if they die here and it’s Etho’s fault, he’s never going to forgive him, soulbond or no—so he heads forward, only to find Etho panting beside an enderman in a boat.

“Tricky getting him to walk into it,” Etho says offhandedly, and this could be ender pearls for them if they play their cards right.

Ender pearls are perfect for quick escapes, and if they decide to go with Scar’s absolutely insane plan of trying to take over that outpost, he and Etho are going to need an escape.

He swings with his axe at the angry creature. Easy. Easy pearls, the thing stuck in the boat like a sitting duck.

And then he swings again.

And he hits the boat.

Within seconds, he’s dead.

It’s dark at spawn, and Joel can barely keep from crying in frustration. The enderman had been in the blummin’ boat! All he had to do was hit it a couple of times and they were set!

“I’m so sorry, Etho,” he says, and he hates it. He hates that he has to say that.

He’d been worried about having to babysit another player, keep his lives safe in their hands, but here he is, having stolen a person’s life from them.

He lost Etho their first life, smart Etho who would never mess up killing an enderman in a boat, and now he has to own up to it and live with it.

“I know I messed up first,” Etho says, his eyes crinkling a bit in a way that, combined with the flat tone of his voice, tells Joel he’s definitely frowning. “But I think you messed up way worse there.”

Joel’s familiar with anger—very familiar—but it feels foreign coming from Etho. He ducks his head, runs back through the darkness to wherever it was that they’d died. Something akin to shame is curdling in his stomach, and it’s his fault that they died and Etho’s being weird about it and not yelling, meaning he’s the type to go all cold and calm with anger.

They gather their things from Impulse and Bdubs, then mess around a bit with boats—and maybe he’s just hiding it really well, but Etho doesn’t seem angry, it’s the strangest thing and Joel almost dreads the moment they’re alone together—before joining Grian and Scar on that horribly stupid plan to take over the outpost. It fails, of course, but no one gets seriously hurt and they get to lure a bunch of Pillagers into Bdubs’s stupid little house that he’s building for Impulse.

They hop around for probably a week, never alone, just watching everyone else start on their bases, before they finally set down a couple of chests and furnaces and get to work.

And Etho . . . isn’t mad.

In fact, as Joel starts laying out the foundation for his—their base, Etho comes up beside him, silently surveying, hands in his pockets.

“I don’t blame you for us being Yellow, by the way,” he says casually, and Joel almost chokes on his own spit.

“Sorry, what?”

Etho shrugs. “It was going to happen to one of us at some point,” he says. “And in my eyes? Better you than me, ‘cuz now I get to tease you for it.”

Is that. . . .

Was that a joke?

Etho leaves, and Joel’s left alone with his thoughts and a bunch of wood planks.

He’d thought Etho was boring. He’s always been the quiet, redstone-y kind of guy that Joel can’t stand—not that there’s anything wrong with that! Joel just needs somebody fast-moving, on his level, ready to burn down a building without questions or hesitation.

It’s just one joke. Anyone can make a joke, that doesn’t mean anything about their personality or character. For instance, Joel makes jokes all the time, and he’s a total jerk.

Etho can’t be likable. Sure, he was fine to wander around with for the past couple of days, causing general chaos, but he’s a bore and likes redstone. He won’t be able to keep up with Joel.

But Etho hovers there while he works, occasionally giving little suggestions to the build, and after he wanders off for the afternoon, he comes back with his eyes crinkled over his mask and bragging about some wool farm he’d built.

He doesn’t need help to build this ship. He doesn’t need to depend on anyone to get wool. He especially doesn’t need to depend on Etho, all dry looks and gloating and frowns.

Joel works alone. He always has.

But his indifference to Etho isn’t making him leave, so Joel decides to do what he does best.

Be annoying.

“I’m his biggest fan,” Joel boasts to anyone who’ll listen. “You guys know I looove redstone. Just like Etho. He’s perfect.”

Grian gives Scar a look. Scar doesn’t notice.

“We’re very happy—we have a lovely ‘Relation’ship, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re the best pair on the server, actually.”

Scott gives Cleo a look. Cleo does notice.

“Etho’s probably the best at everything in the world. He’s so good at . . . redstone. And . . . all the stuff you do with it. That’s why we’re practically made for each other.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you, you sound kind of. . . .” Jimmy trails off, glancing over at Tango for support.

“Like you’re compensating for something? Unhappy? Inadequate?” Tango suggests helpfully.

“A-absolutely untrue!” Joel sputters, then clears his throat and turns away, nose high. “I’m going to get back to working on me and Etho’s perfect ‘Relation’ship, thank you very much.”

“You’re short!” Jimmy calls as parting words. Joel ignores him.

In total opposition to what he’s been spending the past couple of days declaring, once he finishes the bedroom space of the ship, he places his bed and Etho’s bed on opposite sides of the room.

“You stay over there, and I stay over here, all right?” Joel says that night, pointing to their respective beds. “I’m not a cuddler. I don’t like people in my space.”

“But Joel, I thought you were my biggest fan!” Etho wheedles. There’s a glint in those crinkled eyes that tells Joel he’s heard the stuff Joel’s been saying.

Which is frustrating, and immediately takes all the fun out of it. He’d wanted Etho to be mad about his obnoxiousness, to refuse to speak to him, to mock him in return until their partnership inevitably dissolved.

But Etho—his eyes are crinkling, the way they did back when they first died and when he finished the wool farm and then later, when Joel showed him around the ship’s process and he silently nodded before walking off.

“It’s okay, Joel, I know you love me even if you need space,” Etho tells him now, mirth clear in his voice, and Joel realizes that maybe that look isn’t one of anger or disapproval, as he’d first thought. Maybe Etho is . . . smiling.

That’s not good.

It’s not good at all, because if Etho likes him, then Joel. . . .

Joel has to at least try to like him back, doesn’t he? It’s not like he’s the worst guy to be around, after all. He was actually a lot of fun in that first week, running around and stealing and bothering people together.

Maybe he was wrong.

As it turns out, when Joel decides he can like Etho, Etho becomes a whole lot more likable.

Etho’s brave—he goes out and enchants his stuff, and Impulse tells the story of them being chased by no less than three Wardens and Etho somehow surviving (Joel’s heart skips a beat in his chest at the most tense moments of the story, and Etho casually slugs his shoulder when he looks up to check his soulmate’s okay). He’s strong—not everyone can just run around the Deep Dark all day in full armor and live to tell the tale.

And he totally gets Joel’s sense of humor. He snorts at Joel’s contrived puns, mocks Martyn’s house relentlessly, finds Jimmy’s failures just as hilarious as they actually are.

Joel can’t remember, in recent memory, ever having someone like this. Someone he actually enjoys the company of, someone whom he appreciates and who appreciates him in turn. Someone to talk to, to listen to—and while Etho is a bit quiet, it’s not because he’s boring and isn’t thinking about anything. Joel thinks he just forgets to speak sometimes, and will gladly talk about anything if Joel asks him to.

Sure, he’s had friends. He’s always gotten along with Grian and Jimmy and, really, everyone on the server, when pressed. But none of them are Etho, exactly.

Which is bad. It’s bad because Joel is getting attached, he’s getting complacent, he’s getting happy—

That’s dangerous. This is a death game.

And maybe all that emotional-friend-love stuff works for the likes of Scott, but that’s just not Joel’s modus operandi. He can’t—he can’t be like that. He can’t get close.

“Redstoners and builders don’t work out together, you know,” he says to Etho early one morning. They’d both risen before the sun, for some reason (anxiety, perhaps, as more players become Yellow and fire proves to be a very useful tool) and had decided, without discussion, to sit in the crow’s nest, legs swinging in the air.

Etho hums quietly in that way that means he’s listening, the way he always does when Joel comes over to bother him. Patient, mellow, waiting to see where he’s going with it.

“Seriously, it never works,” Joel continues. “Their brains are too different. You’d think they’d work well, ‘cuz they cover different bases and all that, but it’s the opposite. They just butt heads all the time. It never works.”

“What about Bdubs and Impulse?”

Joel shrugs. “I mean, they both know a good amount of both, right? That’s different.”

There’s a smile to Etho’s voice when he speaks. “Tango and Jimmy?”

“Only if you’re calling Jimmy a builder,” Joel snorts. “In which case, you’re dead wrong.”

Etho makes a show of thinking—he props his chin up on his hand, taps his finger against his cheek. “Hm. You must be right. I can’t think of any other redstone-builder pairs.”

For some reason, something painful sinks through Joel’s stomach. He swallows it back, lets triumph color his tone. “Exactly. They’re too different.”

Etho drops his hand, lightly elbows Joel in the ribs. “Except for you and me, of course. We’re the exception.”

Joel’s mouth goes dry. He clears his throat. The pain vanishes, healed over with hope, surprise, a desperate need for attention filled—and he can’t even make himself disagree and argue, like he’d intended. Instead, all he can do is repeat it.

“We’re the exception.”

As he goes about his day, he barely even processes his actions—Etho thinks they work well together. Etho thinks they’re a match. Etho likes him, and his company, and his building skills, and his humor, and his bluntness, and everything about him.

And Joel’s really starting to think that he likes everything about Etho as well, as hard as he’d tried not to at the beginning.

They go down to the Deep Dark together the next day, and Joel’s trying very hard to ignore whatever his feelings may be on Etho. They can just—they can just be friends, right?

Friends who install proper stairs, of course. The way down takes forever.

“Creeper, behind you!”

Joel spins around, axe up, ready to defend—nothing. Etho huffs a little (again something now familiar that Joel had once taken to be a sign of disapproval), eyes crinkled almost all the way shut when Joel whips back around to him.

“Just kidding.”

“Oh, you cheeky devil—we need to trust each other,” Joel says, no real anger behind the way he shoves Etho lightly.

His palms seem to burn at the contact.

“I just need to make sure you’ll pay attention to me,” Etho says, and Joel has to wonder for a moment if he’ll ever have the problem of not paying attention to Etho again.

He doesn’t think he’s properly ignored his soulmate once all game, and in recent days, he can’t seem to pay attention to anything but Etho. He feels like he’s constantly thinking of him, wondering whether or not he’ll like the touches on the ship, wondering if he’s safe and who he’s with and if he’ll come home all right.

He hopes, a little enviously, perhaps, that Etho has similar worries.

“I am paying attention,” Joel says, and it’s perhaps the most honest thing he’s ever said, in all the games. “I always pay attention.”

When Etho responds, the mirth feels forced, and for a moment Joel feels almost as if he’s seeing Etho without his mask on. “You won’t ignore me in our ‘Relation’ship?”

“No, no, no. I never do.”

It’s true.

It’s so true, it hurts.

Joel—he doesn’t trust people. He can’t. And he’s sick of having to tell himself it again and again, but this just isn’t meant for him.

And then he forgets about it all, because they go into the Deep Dark and it’s bloody terrifying.

(Well, mostly forgets. Because he does walk behind Etho most of the way through the city and Etho—well. It’s a good angle for him, is all.)

That night, Joel lies in his bed on his side of the ship, and stares at the other side of the room. Etho’s sleeping—he hopes, at least—curled up on his side, a blanket pulled up over his head despite the summer heat.

Etho’s always cold, it’s practically his trademark. He’s always got that coat of his on, and gloves, and a mask.

He doesn’t wear the mask to sleep—Joel’s caught glimpses of his face while getting into bed, but he always looks away quickly—, but Joel has no clue if he wears the rest of his ensemble. Just the covers alone ought to be sweltering. Imagine a coat on top of all of that.

If they shared a bed, Etho would have to do away with that extra blanket. Joel could maybe tolerate a bedsheet, that’s it.

If they shared a—where did that thought come from?

But . . . well, Etho’s asleep. And thought isn’t a crime.

So Joel lies there, staring across the room at his soulmate, and wonders. Wonders about what it feels like to hold Etho in his arms, whether his elbows and knees are as bony as they look. Wonders if his hair is quite long enough to grasp between his fingers. Wonders if he’d still be all smooth words after Joel pulled down his mask, grabbed his jaw, and kissed him on the mouth.

Joel falls asleep a little red in the face, and the next morning when Etho does that silent crinkly-eyed laugh, he can’t help but stare and turn red all over again.

He pushes it out of his mind, and it’s through a feverish haze that he even gets through the week, even as they sneak around looking for sugarcane and messing with Scar and running from a Warden on the surface, of all places. He’s really quite occupied, but none of it quite computes when Etho’s right there, being devilishly handsome with that quirked eyebrow and white hair ruffled by the wind.

And the night after they’ve run from the Warden, Joel comes in a bit later than Etho—he’d been out gathering wheat a bit longer—to find that his soulmate has pushed their beds together.

His brain short-circuits as he blinks at the sight: Etho, one hand on the back of his neck sheepishly; the other still holding the blanket he’d been throwing across both beds.

“Is this all right?” Etho asks. Joel turns his blinking gaze toward him. “I just. I wouldn’t mind a bit of cuddling.”

There’s something in the way his eyebrows raise that tells Joel Etho knows exactly what he’s saying, exactly how Joel feels. The part of him that realizes that, that knows that Etho knows, wants to clap and holler and kiss that sexy man.

The rest of Joel, the main part of him, is trained to survive.

“Sure, whatever,” Joel shrugs, trying to affect an air of nonchalance. Etho can’t know. Etho can never know—and not that Etho can’t know just because he has a crush and it’s awkward, but because liking Etho is a weakness and Joel doesn’t have weaknesses, thank you very much.

And if Etho’s shoulders slump a bit at the response, Joel pretends he doesn’t notice.

And then the problem is, Etho doesn’t stop.

Joel makes it clear that he wants his space in bed, and Etho doesn’t encroach on that. But he does steal bites of Joel’s food, and sling an arm around his shoulder when they’re visiting the others, and boop his nose playfully when Joel starts to get angry at Grian for hoarding the sugarcane, and slowly look him up and down with a wink whenever he gets up for breakfast—

It’s maddening. It’s maddening, and every single night Joel lies there stiff as a board, inches away from Etho, trying to not let his thoughts wander to where they have so many times before.

He’s right there.

Every time Joel gets away on his own, he lets out a short, frustrated scream. And then he jumps off a hill that’s maybe a bit too high, if only to try and get Etho back for his teasing.

The fishing rods are possibly the stupidest thing they’ve ever done.

Not surprising, seeing as Grian’s at the head of this whole thing.

But Joel’s never been one for playing things safe, so he stabs the hook through the back of his shirt (he tugs on the line a few times, just to make sure it’s secure), then waits for Grian’s signal.

The first time is thrilling. The first time he flies up into the air, lands hard and laughs from the sheer adrenaline. Then he hooks Pearl, and Pearl hooks Etho, and they go up—

And Joel knows he’s in trouble for a split second before he’s dead on the ground.

He wakes up gasping, and there’s fire in his veins, there’s fire spreading all across his body and he wants—he needs to kill Pearl, needs her blood—

He rolls out of bed, scrambling for his chest and spare stuff, and then he hears someone else roll out of bed with a groan.

Joel turns, and Etho’s there, hungry fire in his eyes, and Joel needs him.

He practically tackles Etho, yanking down his mask—his lips are pink and soft and hot against Joel’s mouth, molten and perfect and everything he needs to stoke the burning inside—

Etho pushes him off (gently, somehow), and holds up a hand. Joel, somehow, manages to hold himself back. Etho’s—Etho’s right there—

Etho takes in a deep breath, and when he looks up, his eyes are crinkled in that perfect way and he’s smiling.

“Took you long enough,” he teases, and Joel lunges for him again.

Their next kiss is slower than that.

After they kill Pearl, and the pounding bloodlust in his head has quelled a bit, Joel leads the way back to the ship. He leans against the railing—and Etho leans next to him—and they kiss.

It’s lazy, Joel thinks he would say. But not lazy in the way he might be with a build—skipping details and panning over mistakes—, lazy in a comfortable, staying-in-bed-late kind of way.

He kisses Etho, lazy and lovely, warm in the evening sun. And he really, really doesn’t care if anyone’s watching.

Let them watch, he thinks, with an almost vicious pleasure. Etho’s mine.

That makes something deep in his chest silently purr, almost, and when he pulls away to breathe, he clears his throat in a contented kind of way (not a growl, not a purr, but the closest he can get without outright embarrassing himself). Etho perks up at the sound.

“I forgot to tell you, I figured out what that sound you make reminds me of,” he says, and even the excited way he speaks sounds lazy and perfect.

Joel clears his throat again—and yeah, he does do it a lot, come to think of it. “Yeah? What’s that?”

Etho sighs a little bit, tips his head onto Joel’s shoulder. “A tiger. Have you ever heard a tiger chuff?”

Joel laughs at that—his soulmate thinks he sounds like a tiger chuffing, and it’s the most stupidly adorable thing ever.

“Why are you laughing?” Etho asks playfully, nudging Joel. Joel doesn’t answer, just chuckles and clears his throat—or, chuffs like a tiger—and plants a kiss on Etho’s head.

“We could go threaten Scar,” Joel offers after a moment. His blood is starting to boil again, and he knows from lonely experience that only violence can scratch the itch.

Well. Probably only violence. He does notice that it’s a decent bit quieter when he’s aggressively kissing Etho.

Etho stands up straight—taller than Joel when he does that, which is blummin’ obnoxious of him—and slowly, gently, lazily kisses Joel. It’s warm and measured, his tongue teasing at Joel’s slightly parted lips, and it seems to Joel that he only pulls away when he’s memorized the feel of Joel’s lips.

“That sounds like a good date,” he murmurs.

Joel grins, and Etho grins back, his eyes all crinkled, and Joel takes off at a run to swing himself over the opposite railing and climb down the ladder.

Etho catches up moments later, mask fixed back on his face, and Joel pulls out his spyglass to check out where the residents of that giant cake-thing are.

They’re right beside it, as it turns out.

“Scar’s holding a flint n’ steel,” Joel warns, shoving his spyglass in his pocket. “He already took down the Ranch, we might want to be careful of that.”

Etho only scoffs. “If the ship burns, everything burns.”

Unsurprisingly, Joel finds he agrees with that—not that he can ever imagine disagreeing with Etho. He nods.

“If the ship burns, everything burns.”

And after everything burns, they burn too.

They’re dying, Joel had come through the portal to find lava and pain, and he screams for Etho to turn back but even if he had they’d still be dead—

He doesn’t even have the chance to glance back at his lover before he burns.

He drifts for a little while, the bitter disappointment of his loss somehow distant when compared to the loss of Etho. The next game will start eventually, and when it does, there’s no way of knowing that Etho will even be there. After all, it’s picked up new players and dropped others as time passed. Joel can’t even remember the original line-up, it’s shifted so much and so many times.

When he lands in the next game, he doesn’t even check his comm before punching apart a tree.

The gimmick isn’t soulmates again, he knows instantly. He’d grown so accustomed to the pull in his chest of Etho that it aches now to not feel him.

(Or maybe that’s just his heart. Same difference, really.)

So Joel tries to put Etho out of his mind and move on with his life. They were never meant to last, anyway. That’s the thing about redstoners and builders—they never work out.

He knew that. He knew they never work out, and he tried to do something with Etho, anyway.

It had been fun while it lasted, of course. It had been . . . perfect, even.

But Joel’s always been a loner, and now that he’s got that Green-life clarity, he can go back to it.

He takes down another tree and has a crafting table and some basic tools put together when someone clears their throat behind him.

Joel jumps, spins around—

Etho’s there, leaning lazily against a tree, and—his eyes are crinkled in that way—

“Miss me?” he teases, and Joel barely has time to drop his wooden pick before he’s storming over, pushing Etho against the tree, tearing his mask down—

The kiss is hard and messy, teeth clicking together and lips sliding apart, and when Joel pulls away to gasp in some air, Etho’s cheeks are flushed and lips bruised and he’s still got that blummin’ smile.

“Right,” Joel breathes.

“Wanna build us a house while I go mining?” Etho offers, and forget whatever loser thoughts Joel had been moping about with! He’s got Etho, there’s no need to be on his own anymore.

Maybe they can even win it, this time. After all, they’re together from the start here. No more acting like an idiot about wanting to be alone or whatever.

Joel watches Etho head off into a cave, stone pick hefted over his shoulder, and can’t help the way his heart skips a beat.

Etho’s his, and when everything burns, they burn together.

#double life smp #traffic smp #trafficblr #smalletho #THE SMALLETHO IS ROMANTIC!!#BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING THEY MAKE OUT A LOT!#double life fanfic #mas writes #061323 #this will be uploaded to ao3 under the title 'when everything burns'#idk why but after a dlsmp rewatch i had a bad smalletho itch #dlsmp #again this was queued in december #so while i very much appreciate comments and will love you forever #i won't see em immediately #and also i'm not back yet from my break #but lmk what you think!#love you guys

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stellaralignment · 3 months

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After reading @kira-serialfaggot 's post about inaccessible menus and @butterfly-sapphire post about non-customizable menus figured I now had sufficient excuse to rant about how I hate how every big restaurant's ""solution"" to these two problems is somehow always the worst fucking app I've ever had to use in my life.

So, to clarify real quick. I agree with both previous posts. Places that serve food should have their menu easily accessible somewhere if they have an online presence, and places that let you customize your order need to have that as a feature of any digital ordering solution they implement. Good? Good.

So, a lot of places I've seen (Wendys, Taco Bell, and McDonald to name a few) Have tried to get around how fucking horrible the DD app itself is by making their own apps with DD integration for the actual ordering/serving of delivery orders. Great, this lets them provide their own menu customization options, serve discounts/coupons, and generally have more control over the user experience. Fantastic. As a bonus, this usually also allows you to just look at the menu whenever you want.

Small issue. All of these apps were written by the worst fucking programmers I have ever witnessed in my life. I havn't gotten angry enough to de-compile or try to reverse engineer one yet, but my user experience has been so consistently bad and I've encountered issues that, as a software engineer, I honestly could not tell you how fucked their system has to be in order to allow that to happen.

Allow me to tell you the worst of these. I'm trying to order delivery from a store. It's late, like 7pm, but I know the place is open till 10. I can confirm this on their website (I do later for reasons that will become apparent) and google maps. So I punch in my address, make my order, and go to checkout. Unfortunately, the app tells me "Your payment method failed. Please select a new method and try again". Which was odd, but not unimaginable. I've had issues with my bank in the past. So I swap cards and try again, thinking nothing of it.

Except, my other card doesn't work either. Nor does using PayPal, or Google Pay, or any of the other payment options I tried. I'm getting desperate. I buy some games on steam just to make sure some of these are working, which they are. I was worried, but now that I've confirmed all my money hasn't been siphoned away somehow, I'm just confused and getting annoyed.

So I start going insane. I buy digital gift cards from several different sites and try using them. No dice, payment failed. I try using the website instead of the app, on my phone and PC. Payment failed. I boot up an android studio instance with a brand new virtual phone, install the app on it, and try to order. Again. Payment failed.

I'm starting to wonder if their servers are just completely down. A friend in a different state can order with no problems. A friend in the same town can order with no fanfare.

But my roommates can't. They have the same issue

Payment failed.

So. I'm going insane. I've now spent almost 3 hours attempting to order food, and I'm starving. It is at this point that my anger finally overcomes my social anxiety, and I do the one thing I never thought I'd do.

I call the store in question.

Now, in all of this there was one crucial mistake I made. See, that friend in the same town? Lived on the other side of town. And there's 2 different stores of this franchise in town. We didn't control for this, because the app doesn't let you pick a store anyways when doing delivery. It's hard locked to whatever one is closest, which isn't a terrible thing to do. You need to get the delivery address anyways, and you know where all your store are, so it cuts out a step for me. But having to choose a store might've clued us in to what was going wrong.

Because the store? Was closed. Not just closed, like mega closed. It was being shut down. It hadn't been open for two weeks, and would never be open again. The order was failing because they'd already taken all the computer systems out, and it couldn't confirm to have received the order.

So there was nothing wrong with the payment. Literally nothing I could have done about this. I am just barred completely from ordering because the app defaults to the nearest location for orders, and my nearest location didn't exist anymore.

And you'd think that there would be some way to communicate this to the user when making the app. But for reasons I can only assume are profit motivated (Though I have no idea how the fuck this is more efficient/profitable), the app just defaults to saying the payment failed.

Now, I wouldn't be this mad if this was just "oops edge case lol" where I suffered the unfortunate consequences of some procrastinator forgetting to do the thing that removes stores from the database. Unfortunate but not really anyone I can blame for it. But no. This is just the most extreme example, and it's not even confined to the one app.

Almost every single app like this I've used defaults to saying the payment failed and to try a new payment method when anything goes wrong. No drivers out on DoorDash to actually move the order? Payment failed. You're trying to order a seasonal item that got dropped today? Payment failed. The companies servers actually are down? Payment failed. You're not connected to wi-fi like an idiot and there's actually something you can do to fix the issue that's not related to payment whatsoever? Payment failed.

What the fuck is up with this lazy ass programming? I seriously doubt there's enough technical debt from these apps to justify not having a robust error catching system that communicates with the user what the issue is. By the fucking stars these people love collecting intrusive data, I'm surprised they havn't used this as an excuse to harvest everyone's fucking location at all times and send "error data" back to central.

But just don't tell me my debit card was declined when I'm trying to order a burger and you closed that store two weeks ago.

#journal #rant #i fucking hate food delivery apps #but i'm a poor bitch with no car #and I lived for 3 months off of a BOGO burger coupon once that just never fucking removed itself from my cart even after I ordered #so I continued to cash in on that one coupon for an entire semester #so like don't fix your apps #but don't tell me my fucking bank is broken when you just can't be bothered to update your fuckin store database

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1800-page-not-found · 6 months

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Another Lifetime | Gojo Satoru x Fem! Reader

I caught up with the manga and I think I'm going insane.

I was gonna make him a yandere but i switched up in the middle lol

ig i write for jujutsu kaisen now to yippie

Yall ever have those fucked up dreams of having a child or taking care of them only to wake up and realize your child doesn't exist, and will never exist?

If you do, then you can understand how Gojo acts in this story.

If you don't...just imagine how it feels to lose the closest person or animal to you, and for the entire world ignore the fact that you lost them and expects you to pretend they never existed in the first place. Something like that.

Something is wrong. Very wrong. You can feel it in your bones. Everything's the same, but different.

This... Gojo Satoru is not your Satoru.

What had happened that day? If only you were there to witness it. It was the first time you heard that the Gojo Satoru had fainted.

When he wakes up, he smiles, like his usual cheery self. But something's different. There's a hint of grief.

Everyone else seems to think he's fine. But perhaps its because they don't know him how you know him.

But now, do you even know him?

Day by day, he starts to stick less and less to his morals. He feels empty, a terrifying attribute for a man deemed the strongest. You just hope this Gojo Satoru will stay on the 'good' side.

Or maybe you never knew him at all.

Maybe, he held a facade, even in front of you. Maybe he was that broken this whole time. You wonder what happened that day.

But that's the past. Now...You wondered if you would survive today. It was no longer comforting, being alone with...Gojo was now a frightening experience.

"[name]." He smiled at you, yet it felt cold. Cruel. Evil.

"Yes, Gojo?" You answer back. He pauses.

"...You no longer call me Satoru." He is very close to you. It's suffocating.

"I thought you'd like to be called more formally." His smile drops. It's eerily silent, his eye pierce into you, seemingly tearing you apart until nothing is left.

"I see. Well! That's not what I really wanted to tell you!" And just like that, Gojo is happy. You can no longer tell if he means it or not.

"I escaped! That day-I was set free." He's spouting nonsense again. What does that mean?

"[name]." He grabs your wrist tightly. "are you afraid? Do you not like...the real me?"

The real him?

"Gojo, what nonsense are you spouting. Of course I like you." He smiles again.

"Just wanted to make sure. ⁱ ᵗʰⁱⁿᵏ ⁱ'ᵐ ᵍᵒⁱⁿᵍ ᶜʳᵃᶻʸ."

You exchange a few more sentences, and part ways. As you walk away, you can feel his eyes boring into your back, looking into your soul.

It's chilling. Gojo isn't smiling. Blood...Blood everywhere. Is this the day humanity ends?

"Gojo! What are you doing!?" You shout at him.

He turns around to face you. "Ah! [name]!" A smile that could only be perceived in nightmares appears on his face. "I got rid of them. They were going to hurt our family!"

You freeze.

He sees your reaction, and only grins in response.

"That day, I died. I really died. I couldn't use reversed curse technique. It was scary. 'How am I here then?' you might wonder."

He looks deranged, hysterical.

"It wasn't Jujutsu. A whole entire third world opened up." His face contorts to agony. "I lived a whole entire new life [name]! Free from curses, free from Jujutsu! We got married! We had a child, [name], a child! I was so happy-and, and-" He sounds crazy. He grips his hair, almost to the verge of pulling it out. "in a single moment-it all disappeared when I somehow came back to life."

--------

I...had a child? No, no, this is just him trying to get into your head!

--------

"It's not real."

"BUT IT IS, [NAME]. OUR DAUGHTER-SHE WAS REAL. ⁱ⁻ⁱ ʲᵘˢᵗ ʷᵃⁿᵗ ᵐʸ ᵇᵃᵇʸ ᵇᵃᶜᵏ…" He mumbles the last part. He crumbles to the ground, a sobbing mess.

This man...he is your Satoru. Just...broken.

But...if it's your Satoru, then you can accept it.

"Satoru..." You bend down. You're... crying.

He looks up at you, eyes red. "ʸᵒᵘ⁻ʸᵒᵘ ᶜᵃˡˡᵉᵈ ᵐᵉ ᵇʸ ᵐʸ ᶠⁱʳˢᵗ ⁿᵃᵐᵉ…" His voice is weak.

"I'm sorry." You pull him into a tight hug. "I'm sorry I couldn't accept you and comfort being at your lowest point."

The two of you hug for a long time, until Satoru pulls out a glass orb of sorts which glows a faint gold color. "Satoru?...What...What is this?"

"My baby...Our baby. I can bring her back, [name]."

But nothing's ever free in this cursed world.

"What price...must be paid?..."

He starts to sniffle, and breaks out into tears again. "I have to kill people [name]. I hate this. I hate this so much."

You pause. "How many?..."

"A thousand lives."

It honestly wasn't a hard decision. You hold your daughter's soul securely, then standing up.

"[n-name]?" Satoru looks up at you, wiping his tears away, just as yours start to pour.

"Satoru. From this day on, I will become a curse user. I'll take the blame. You have never hurt an innocent person, and I will have claimed a thousand lives. One day we'll meet again. Let me do this for you, please."

--------

It was terrible. Satoru knew that one day, your fate's would intertwine again. And on that day, you'd take your last breath.

"Under Jujutsu Regulations, t-the curse user known as [n-name]-he choked out a sob-[l. name] must be executed."

It was the first time after the day you left him, that he had cried again.

You didn't put up a fight. You smiled as blood poured out of your mouth. You held a piece of paper in your hand when you died.

It read:

I ᴅɪᴅ ɪᴛ, Sᴀᴛᴏʀᴜ. Fʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀʏ ᴏᴜʀ ᴅᴀᴜɢʜᴛᴇʀ ᴡᴀs ʀᴇʙᴏʀɴ, I ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɢɪᴠᴇɴ ʜᴇʀ ᴜɴᴄᴏɴᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ʟᴏᴠᴇ. [ᴅ. ɴᴀᴍᴇ] ɪs ᴀ ʟᴏᴠᴇʟʏ ɢɪʀʟ. I ᴋɴᴏᴡ ʏᴏᴜ'ʟʟ ᴛʀᴇᴀᴛ ʜᴇʀ ᴊᴜsᴛ ᴀs ᴡᴇʟʟ ᴀs ʏᴏᴜ ᴅɪᴅ ɪɴ ᴏᴜʀ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ʟɪꜰᴇᴛɪᴍᴇ.

I ᴏɴʟʏ ᴡɪsʜ I ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʙᴇ ʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴇxᴘᴇʀɪᴇɴᴄᴇ ɪᴛ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʏᴏᴜ.

Sᴛᴀʏ sᴛʀᴏɴɢ ꜰᴏʀ ᴏᴜʀ ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ɢɪʀʟ. I ʟᴏᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ʟᴏᴛs.

⁻Yᴏᴜʀ ᴏɴᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴏɴʟʏ [ɴᴀᴍᴇ].

He cried for hours, holding your dead body. You named her the same name you had given her in his other lifetime. He...never told you what you named her.

--------

"Daddy!" A girl shouts gleefully as she gets pushed forward on a swing.

"Wheeee! Isn't this fun, darling?" Satoru pushes his daughter carefully.

"Very! Hehe!" The little girl giggles.

--------

Satoru opened his eyes as he awakened on a grassy field. 'I fell asleep...where am I?' He looks around to see a faint figure on a hill, painting.

Walking closer, he sees, it's you. It's...you?... "[n-name]?"

He runs and hugs you so tight, you think you'd have died again from his hug.

"I can't stay long Satoru but... I wanted to check up on you. How is [d. name]?"

He smiled. "She's turning seven next month! She's also inherited your cursed technique."

"That's lovely. I'm so proud of you Satoru."

"Of course! I'm not the strongest sorcerer for nothing! It makes me the best father!"

You two talked for what seemed to be like an eternity.

"I have to go now, Satoru." You smiled softly.

"I know name. I love you. [l. name] [d. name.] loves you a lot too. She's never forgotten about you or what you look like, and I intend to keep it that way."

Your eyes widen in surprise. He gave her your last name.

"Goodbye. I love you, Satoru." You whispered as you faded away.

#angst #angst to comfort #jjk #jjk x reader #gojo x reader #satoru x reader #gojo satoru #gojo satoru x reader #satoru gojo x reader #jujutsu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jujutsu kaisen x reader angst #satoru gojo

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prof-ramses · 29 days

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This is a very real SM theory

What I've stumbled across this time is, I'll admit, completely batshit on the face of it. BUT, if you follow my flow of logic, I think you'll actually be more convinced than you'd expect

So, what is it that set my theorist mind off? Well, the character we knew we were meeting this episode, Aaron (which is apparently the name of Ross's dad in that model sheet)

We only see him twice (and no, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you, his tattoo changes what arm it's on between scenes) and in those scenes, he's mostly silent and is notably not paying attention to Jaune, despite her talking with their obviously distressed shared friend in the first scene and is separated from Jaune by the cinematography in the second scene.

From what we've seen of Aaron, both in this episode and the TT photos, he isn't very expressive, but he still shows his feelings through movement, or rather, a position in the photos, something absent in his present self.

So, what, if anything, lead to this seeming slight rift between Aaron and Jaune?

Well, we could assume it was something after Ross's birth, but could we narrow it down further? Yes, yes we can, mainly due to the first bomb I'm about to drop on you.

Jaune is a cult spy

Yes, I'm dead fucking serious. Let's look over the way the cult operates, shall we? They carefully monitor anything related to their plans while other members are on stand by, should something go wrong. How does this tie to Jaune?

Simple, she's the one keeping tabs on Lila, Ignacio does live closer, but is so abrasive, he could never get close enough to someone for intimate spying. Jaune on the other hand, as Lila's best friend, could theoretically keep tabs on certain aspects of Lila's life.

The next obvious question is why. Why would Jaune spy on Lila for a cult? Well, she wouldn't. She would, however, keep a close eye on her friend if someone else close to said friend, like say, said friend's husband, expressed concern for her emotional well being.

I know I'm probably losing some of you now, but this is where we get to another insanely counter intuitive yet convincing claim.

Jaune isn't spying on Lila because Lila's husband asked her, she's spying on Lila because she doesn't want Lila to know that-

Jaune had an affair with Lila's husband

I KNOW, I KNOW, I sound like Dale from King of the Hill right now, but I swear to you, this will all click together by the end.

Picture this, Jaune, a heavy drinker, is over at her friend's house one night when Lila's husband starts coming onto her and you know what happens, this goes from a one off event, to a semi-regular ritual for the pair. Some time later, he tells Jaune that he's worried Lila might catch on, and encourages her to carefully pay attention to any sudden mood shifts and.... share them wit ha trusted associate of his.

So, now that I've established the logic of this happening and that it will likely come into focus at some point, but what does this have to do with Aaron's detachment and how could it come into play?

It's not just that Aaron knows Jaune cheated and will reveal it to Lila, no, it's so much worse.

But first, I have to dispel some fanon for a moment, despite how popular the concept is, we have no in or out of series proof that Ross dyes his hair, the only photo of him we see is him and Aaron with Ross looking just as he does at present.

Why do I bring this up, oh my poor unsuspecting friends, it should be clear. If Ross has naturally black hair, that would mean-

Ross matches the genetic profile of Jaune and Skidad's biological child

And there you have it, the dark underbelly at back of the newest instalment in our beloved Halloween series.

And, if by some chance, you still don't believe this theory of Ross and Skid being half-brothers to be at the very least valid, well then, I have something that will blow your fucking mind.......

.........

And I'm not telling you cause it's 'Pril Fools Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#spooky month #sm Jaune #sm Aaron #sm Ross #sm Lila #sm Skid's dad #sm Skidad #sm Ignacio #sm Skid #sm theory #spooky month theory #sm prediction #spooky month prediction

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eruscreaminginthedistance · 2 months

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Ugh it's taken me like a week to post this because reformatting PF posts on my phone is a bitch so I'm gonna throw this out here so that i don't put it off any longer; my Dune Part 2 review.

Basically, I feel like I'm living through a Category 5 LOTR event in real time. I was worried going into the second film that I was overhyped and that I should temper my expectations; speculative fiction adaptations 9 times out of 10 are usually dead on arrival and Dune Part 1 already defied the odds for being as good as it was for an almost 1-to-1 recreation.

I feel like after this I could confidently trust Denis Villeneuve with my life. The man's not really making a product. He clearly LOVES sci fi. Respect for the source material oozes out of every scene of Dune, and his little tweaks and changes are done with care and with a sense of critically engaging with the story that shows real thought.

Praying to the gods that once Denis finishes the trilogy he brings out a boxset DVDs with at least three behind the scenes DVDs MINIMUM. I need to see every single aspect of production on this leviathan of a project and then ritualistically watch all three movies back to back as I would with LOTR.

Spoilers under the cut

In terms of what I liked:

I've only read the first two books in full - Children and God Emperor are next on my list to finish this year - so I can't speak as an uber knowledgeable Dune nerd who knows the books back to front, but I'm very confident when I say that Denis's changes to the source material didn't take away from the experience of the story at all.

- Chani's probably the biggest change of all in the sequel and oh my god does it revitalise her character. I was quite shocked scrolling through tags to see book readers complain about how much the movie changed her and her arc. What are they mad about? That they gave Chani something to do other than sucking Paul's dick? In the book, literally everyone is 100% behind Paul uncritically accepting every single thing he does and Chani is just one of a swarm of characters that do that. I say this with much love because I like her book counterpart but I struggle to understand the people who claim to be so invested in book Paul and Chani's dynamic as opposed to the film's when book Chani's whole character is "Wife", until Dune Messiah when she gets the "Nagging Wife" upgrade. Denis's version effectively makes her co-protagonist with Paul and it was so exciting to see that play out on screen. She became the moral litmus test and the last vestige of uncorrupted ideals in the movie; Paul's descent into fascism and betrayal of the Fremen would not have hit nearly as hard if everyone went along with it like in the book.. I really felt for Chani having to watch everyone she knows get swept up in this insane fervour. She's too dedicated to the concept of freedom to fall for the bullshit and that was such a relief ti witness. Film Chani is her own character, not just another limb of Paul's, so her story is going in a slightly different direction and I'm really excited to see that. Would not have been nearly as hyped if her whole arc was just going to be "be pregnant. die" again.

- Jessica being an absolute FREAK. She was probably my favourite character from the book and I was so pissed she wasn't in Dune Messiah. I needed to get inside her head and wiggle around in there while I was reading, and Denis fed me. In the book, I got the impression she was quite a passive participant in the prophecy, so getting to see her go full wicked witch in the film was a massive highlight. Speaking to Alia in the womb, her sinister use of The Voice (such a horrific departure from her only using it for self defence in Part 1), her FASHION. Denis needs to adapt her into Dune Messiah I refuse to watch a version of Messiah without Jessica in it.

- Stilgar came out of nowhere with the steel chair for me. The first book is filled back to back with noble fatherly leader figures so he got very lost in the shuffle and I didn't really pay attention to him that much beyond being one of Paul's many mentors. I read a tiny bit of Children before watching Part 2 and Stilgar seriously considering murdering Paul's children made me do a double take. Then seeing him in this movie blew me away. Guys I think I've slept on Stilgar all this time xD. Not gonna lie though, the film beefs up his character quite a lot from the books. I think it was a good decision to make him comedic relief, because it offsets that "religious fundamentalist" element that could put people off. It makes him much softer and more likeable. He's just a guy with big hopes and big dreams and a big heart who's a bit silly sometimes, and that makes him the ultimate prey for Paul and Jessica. It's absolutely sickening to see them exploit his sincere faith and beliefs and I'm getting upset now just thinking about all the horrific things he'll be lead to do. Denis did a fantastic job of making him a more sympathetic and softer character for people to compare with his post-timeskip Space Hitler's Right Hand Man role.

- Introducing Princess Irulan early hell yeah!! Huge improvement on the book imo; she was very much a dark horse character for this film and Florence Pugh nailed it. I loved her being the narrator much like in the book, and it was interesting to see her contribute to putting the pieces in place for the endgame, rather than just turn up at the end. More of her please, Denis!

- One of my complaints about the first film was that there wasn't enough Harkonnen action, specifically the Harkonnen-Atreides rivalry, which was talked about a bit but not really shown. Denis made all those Harkonnen scenes specifically for me. I adored the balls to the wall aesthetics and the incredibly villainous acting. This film isn't afraid of moustache twirls and villainous laughter and I LOVE that. It felt fresh. Villains who just love doing bad shit and aren't even trying to justify themselves they just LOVE being horrible creatures in their black stone murder palaces.

- What can I say about the look of the film. You've all seen it. If you haven't then go fix that. It's one of the most visually cohesive and stunning films I've seen in a long time. I don't know how a world can feel so real and yet unreal (/pos) at the same time.

- Hans Zimmer showed the fuck UP for this score. I've been listening to it nonstop all weekend. I kinda miss the Atreides bagpipes but the new horns drive me insane so it's a good tradeoff.

Things I'm on the fence about:

- I think it was a good call to remove the whole thing with Paul uh, inheriting Harah from Jamis. It gave more screentime to Chani and I think would have really put viewers off Paul when really you wanna keep people going in blind rooting for him until the third act. BUT I was surprised she wasn't in the film at all? I was convinced that the lady we see Chani talking with was supposed to be an adapted Harah, but I'm seeing everywhere online that that's not supposed to be her and Harah wasn't in the film? Why not? It just felt a bit weird that she's just some nameless Fremen.

- I'm not gonna lie I forgot Thufir existed on my first watch. I think me not missing him overall is a good sign. I didn't rewatch part 1 so I guess I assumed they'd killed him off in the Arrakeen attack, and didn't realise his part had been cut until I saw an article about it later. That was kind of disappointing. While I think the film is perfectly fine without him, I think the inclusion of his plot as kind-of prisoner kind-of strategist for the Harkonnens would have really solidified the Harkonnen-Atreides rivalry. Again because we almost never see an Atreides and Harkonnen onscreen together, so having him there to exemplify it in practice I think could have just polished things up for me personally. But also I want all films to be 5 hours long so what do I know.

- Jessica and Chani didn't interact nearly as much as I wanted them to tbh. I'm hoping that Dune Messiah beefs up their relationship.

- Timothee Chalamet

Things I didn't like:

- Not Paul btw, just Timothee

- Been saying this since the first movie but him and Zendaya were really only cast cos they're hot ticket items right now, not because they have the look and feel of the characters or the world; they just wanted to cast some hot supermodels in the roles

- Zendaya justifies her casting though by being the better actor though; I was sceptical but I came to buy her as Chani and she did a good job resonating with me

- Timothee's just a guy though, wasn't impressed

- Which is a huge problem because the emotional throughline of the movie is their romance and I just. Did not buy it. Timothee could not have paid me to believe that he was in love with Chani. They were like the definition of everybody's beautiful but nobody's horny. Just saying words with their blank hot faces. At least Zendaya put some effort in.

Anyway 10/10. This is going in my top 5 movies of all time and is one of the best book to screen adaptations I have ever seen.

#dune #dune part 2 #crossposting #pillowfort

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punkpandapatrixk · 8 months

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The Kind of Sad You Can’t Understand

Certain days I feel very deeply that I want to cry but I don’t know why.

For such a long time I lived with this kind of mood without being able to express it anywhere, not to anyone. I was struggling for my sanity; I was constantly thinking of destroying myself; and I was hoping someone would see me, and rush to save me. But nobody ever saw that of me.

I was a badass. I was a cool girl. I seemed to everybody else a smart, talented, expensive girl who's got all her shit together. Even on days she wasn't all that together, she had an enviable life anyway. I appeared on the outside too glamorous for anybody to even imagine that on the inside I was rotting. I was this close to being dead, all the time.

Who in their simple-mindedness would've thought a girl like that could be so macabre all the time? And that’s how I experienced an entire life witnessing people’s lack of empathy. I guess my point of view was fragmented but that was how life was for me anyway. Ironically, some intuitive peeps who were able to see the macabre in me thought I was frightening more than anything HAHAHAH That was all the same in the end. Enough with the gossips. I don’t know what normal people expect from everybody else they meet, to be honest. I don’t know what I’d expected from them either.

I guess it’s because the society I grew up in was like that that I couldn’t bring myself to show anybody my distress. Trauma. Mental illness. Disordered personality. All of that was nothing but insanity. And insane people don’t belong in society.

So simple. Yet so cruel.

Thank you, Jesus. Mother Mary. Catholic Church. Thanks for all the rejection. I’m SO happy now!

That’s fucking twisted.

In a society brimming with nothing but pretenders, we meet and chit and chat and act like all of our troubles are manageable to say the least. ‘Yeah, it’s not that bad, to be honest.' But it was; you've just got to pose real strong otherwise people think you're a loser. 'I guess I’m OK.’ But you weren't; you've just got to really make it sound like you're still keeping it together. 'I'll be just fine.' But you wouldn't know; you didn't even know if you'd still wanna be alive tomorrow.

In the midst of all those meaningless exchanges, I hated quite nothing more than to hear, especially from men, how strong I was as a woman. I hated it like I'd never hated anything in my life.

It was suffocating to be seen as holding it together when you were literally breaking at the seams...

I wanted someone to be able to notice I was screaming on the inside. That I was gasping for air every second I was sitting there listening to their trivial chitter chatter. Who cares about your silly drama? Would you care for mine if you knew my life was on the line? And I hated those expectant eyes. All of them. Were they expecting me to share in their self-made woes and console them in the end? HAH. Go to hell, losers.

I always thought, none of MY problems were created by my own reckless behaviours that would've obviously hurt myself or others. Not in the beginning, at least. Unlike some idiots, I was never into drugs, one night stands, or even smoking; I never caused anybody any trouble. So why did everybody cause me trouble when all I wanted was just a peaceful, normal life? Shit, what even was my IDEA of a normal life? I can't remember now.

Certain days I feel very deeply that I want to cry but I don’t know why. There's always not enough reason to do so now. Haah... If it weren't for my abundance of Aquarius, which makes me incredibly lazy and antisocial, I'd have paraded around town and rallied to become a Neo Hitler and kill everybody in this rotten world. I hated this world so much.

The first ever PAC I put out here was ‘What’s Your Crazy?’ What ever was my reason for writing that? I was crazy and I needed some explanation.

I used to look like the girl in the third pic before I chopped all of my hair off everyone began to suspect I was gay. I wasn’t gay; I was depressed. Those unassuming idiots.

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raytorosaurus · 2 years

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Hello! You said in one of your tags about how Ray had to talk Gerard out of leaving the band, do you have any videos or interviews about that? Because I'm going insane over that knowledge

ok take my hand and follow me further down the path of insanity because it's not just once he's done it multiple times. i've always thought it's kinda fitting that back when they had a drummer who couldn't keep time live that job fell to ray even though it's normally down to the rhythm section bc well. ray literally keeps my chemical romance together. just off the top of my head:

early days, post-bullets. annoyingly i can't find the video source right now but it's been transcribed + giffed a bunch, e.g. here. gerard said: "We had a real talk in my kitchen one day and I'm pretty sure I was close to not wanting to do the band anymore. Just because we made a record, right? And I was like, 'Yeah that's it, I'm done now. I made a record, I'm cool.' I kind of tended to just make little goals for myself and then once accomplishing them kind of being over it and moving onto something else. And Ray never let me do that. Now I'll never let it go, you know, once I learned that. He helped me learn that." and then they hugged like this <3

then when they were writing/recording revenge they stayed in an apartment complex in la for a couple of months - mikey and frank were roommates, gerard and ray were roommates, and otter was on his own lol. gerard flipped out and panicked that nobody would understand what they were trying to do or say with revenge and ray talked him through it. it's mentioned on p99 of not the life it seems:

then i'm sure most of you know about the madison square garden show that capped out the pretty harrowing black parade tour. frank was highly medicated and zoned out, they played desert song by ray's request, and gerard said the (in)famous, "If we never play another show ever again, keep yourself alive," line. apparently the vibes backstage were Not Good and gerard was going around telling everyone that they'd just played their last show and ray was on damage control. then ray talked to gerard and convinced him to take a break from the band for a while, because if they didn't it would be the end forever. then allegedly on the ride home with a couple of his old buddies like jon rivera, gerard started writing what would later become boy division. yeah i know right. there's a long section of ntlis dedicated to that but the most relevant part is here on p230:

anyway. love how with this band it always comes back down to the love and loyalty they all have for each other, because my chemical romance would truly be nowhere without it. so grateful that we get to witness a little bit of that and see them all back together visibly having so much fun and spreading joy even now in their forties. they always knew my chemical romance was important but i don't think they ever could have known it would end up like this <3

#know your HERSTORY #literally if in life i can be at least half as supportive a friend as ray toro seems to be...#mcr history #sorry this took a while to answer anon i like to source things lol and i had shit to do in my real life 🙄#hope you see this!#the transcripts for those quotes are in the image descriptions btw #sl #answered #*

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dayscapism · 1 year

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K-Dramas recommendations & short reviews

Because I've watched way too many to not make a list. Warning: I like romance and fantasy a bit too much.

These shows made me cry. 10/10. Five stars. Recommend to anyone. They live in my mind rent-free:

Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022) - Attorney Woo is such a wonderful person, I love her character. I can't say much about the representation, but I like that it opens up the conversation around autism & neurodivergence, discrimination and prejudice, particularly in work environments. I rarely like shows about law or lawyers but I was surprisingly engaged with the cases and the story. It deserves a second season. (The only thing I don't like about this show is they're pushing for a MinWoo and Choi Su-Yeon ship. Which huh--disrespectful.)

Hotel Del Luna (2019) - A great place to start with k-dramas if you like paranormal fantasy. This show has such a special place in my heart. I wanted a different ending but I am okay with it because it was a tight narrative. The main character is iconic (Man-Wol please step on me). The show has amazing sets, AMAZING costumes, an amazing OST, amazing and heartbreaking performance by Yeo Jin Goo. The main couple is so soft; like they're such good friends and coworkers and gentle with each other (eventually). It's enemies to reluctant friends to lovers. It's perfect for asexual viewers who want more than physicality in their romance shows. Cons: the secondary characters' goodbyes and backstories left a little to be desired. A few other nitpicks like Chang-Seong is the one to suggest the main character a new hobby instead of her just discovering it by herself.

It's Okay to Not Be Okay (2020) - Also a good place to start with k-dramas. This show is a lesson in good narrative; this has perfect writing & storytelling. The cast is so good. The female lead is an icon. The character work I excellent. The mental health issues are so well addressed and it taught me a lot about mental health I wasn't aware of. Each small minor character plays a very important thematic role. (The villain isn't the best thing ever but she serves her role in the themes and plot.) The production and the storytelling with the children's book animations are just *heart eyes*. The OST is so good too. You need to watch this to understand how good a k-dramas can be. A must-watch.

Goblin: The Lonely and Great God (2016) - This is the most iconic fantasy/paranormal k-drama ever. A lot of current tropes were started here I think (including the weird k drama last-episode time jump separation of the main couple). This show broke me. You will cry. The bromance and comedy are amazing here too. Gong Yoo and Dong Wook Lee have great chemistry. Main female lead is so cute and her character is so heartwarming. The ending felt a bit rushed. The death, existential related stuff with the grim reapers and such is so good tho.

Business Proposal (2022) - Best rom-com ever! (Well, it could be gayer tbh.) It's my new comfort show. I already watched it twice. It's campy, hilarious, chaotic, iconic and messy in a way that feels like real life (but obviously played up for drama and comedy). Excellent character work. The love interest is definitely written by a woman. Gorgeous cast (Sejeon omg I have a crush, but also the others). It was too short! I would have loved another episode, and more of Grandpa and Ha-Ri. Warning: this has the weird kdrama last-episode time jump couple separation.

W: Two Worlds (2016) - A young resident medic accidentally finds her way inside the webcomic her father created. Like, that premise is killer. We have Lee Jong Suk at his finest here; the character fits him so well. He was born to play a lead. This show has amazing meta-commentary on writing, authorship, and existential crisis. The confrontation between the webcomic character Kang Cheol and the author is insane! The main couple is an epic pair. Would rewatch. High wump value. Cons: The second part could have been more swoony with the romance, Kang Cheol kind of became a bit cold. (A warning: this show also has the k drama weird last-episode time jump couple separation.)

Would recommend with popcorn, I rate them 8/10:

Crash Landing on You (2019) - Really good. The main couple has the best chemistry I've ever seen. It's not that much of a personal fave show, but still pretty awesome and will tug at your heart. It got a bit overly dramatic in the last episodes and again, has that k-drama last episode weird time jump couple separation, but here it actually makes sense. And sort of mirrors the separation and eventual unification of the Korean Peninsula. It was very interesting to see the contrast between North and South Korea.

Shooting Stars (2022) - Aside from the terrible, horrible, insulting Africa storyline (where the male lead goes to 'help' African kids with water scarcity, not even a country name is called, he just goes to *gestures vaguely* Africa to help goddammit he's such a beautiful soul! /s) There's a weird creepy sugar mommy wannabe side storyline and it's weird and out of nowhere. But the rest of it is good and campy and the main characters are so cute. All the couples are cute. The male lead is a cute disaster. Female lead is also a capable cutey but a disaster when it comes to romance. It's hilarious. I love all characters. It's fun. It's great. It shows a very interesting side of the entertainment industry.

While You Were Sleeping (2017) - A man and a woman who don't know each other have precognition powers and after they meet, they use them to take down a corrupt lawyer. The show isn't very heavy on the romance, tough the pair work pretty well together. I liked the main actress. Lee Jong Suk has chemistry with anyone. The male role was not exactly a good fit for Jong Suk. He's so much more naturally charming than the character. It's a fun show to pass the time. The found family is nice and all the characters work great together. The mom is great.

The King's Affection (2021) - I'm going to be honest, I didn't finish watching this. Ups. I got bored after episode 15. It's a very slow show but what I watched was quite good. It was just not a show for me. Having a bisexual male lead was awesome, I appreciate that he falls for the main character while he thinks she's a man. (Could be gayer tho, just saying.) Pretty good discussions and reversals of gender cliches. It has complicated parent-child relationships that are very well written which gives a lot of heart and heartbreak to this story. The political stuff gets very convoluted. I really wish the queer part was bigger though, and not limited to the main couple. We could even have poly representation! I still have half a mind to finish this but I don't know There are so many other shows I'd rather watch instead. (Boy, I really need to get into the actually queer side of k-dramas because the side I'm currently on is giving me crumbs.)

Lovers of the Red Sky (2021) - The premise was so cool. This has so much lore I like and the setting is beautiful and rich, but it also has so much lost potential. The plot is very weak in the second half and could be restructured. I loved the atmosphere, costumes and the actors and their characters: the blind cursed scholar nobleman, the female genius cheeky painter and her friend trio and the prince are all great characters. Ahn Hyo Seop is pretty good in it and looks very pretty indeed in historical costume (but the design of the villain creature he's possessed/cursed with is so, so bad omg). Great premise failed execution. Good first half but it went over the rails quickly. Still entertaining if you like historical fantasy.

Romance is a Bonus Book (2019) - It's a bit slow and could have done so much more with the female lead and her child. She's a bit underwhelming and her daughter is barely in the story. The second female character played by Jeong Eu-Gene was awesome, I love this actress now. Lee Jung Suk is always looking hot and being an excellent actor with what he's given; he's very charming here. He could have chemistry with a piece of wood and yet I wasn't that fan of the romance. Maybe it's just because friends to lovers isn't my cup of tea. There's a weird out-of-nowhere backstory between the male leads. The commentary of ageism in the workplace is a bit surface level (it's not that big of a deal for the company if you're overqualified for a job, the point should be that is an issue for you and your career, who is too good for the company). You can tell the writers really care about books; it's definitely a love letter to editors and an interesting window into the world of book publishing; you can feel the love editors put into making books. Bonus: the founding members of the publishing company have very funny moments.

Do no recommend:

King: Eternal Monarch - Couldn't even finish this. I was so, so confused. The dialogue, narrative and backstory make no sense! Everything is so unnecessarily confusing. There's no chemistry between the main couple. The king and the bodyguard had more chemistry. Lee Jung-Jin (playing the villain Lee Lim) & Woo Do-Hwan (the bodyguard) carried this show and are pretty much the only thing good about it. The female lead is sidelined. It had an intriguing premise but failed execution.

What's Wrong With Secretary Kim - Skimmed most of the second half. It's a mess. The love interest CEO is such a narcissist and asshole he wouldn't be able to keep a working, healthy relationship with his partner without some serious therapy first. The female lead seems to be repulsed by him most of the time even when together and even looks scared when they get intimate. There's an unnecessarily convoluted plotline about the main lead's brother and a kidnapping in their past. It has tonal issues and it's cringy rather than funny. The secondary characters are just a lot of useless filler. The female lead sacrifices her independence and dreams to be with the main guy. Just go watch Business Proposal instead.

Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo - The only pro of this show is IU. The romance went the undeveloped route. Cheap-looking production, with too many episodes, melodramatic, characters pivot in place instead of naturally developing; it's definitely a telenovela. The point that the female lead is from the future doesn't even matter for the story (should have made her a Goryeo historian instead of a random cosmetologist). Pass!

Tomorrow - Could not finish watching. Please, please don't watch it if you're dealing with depression, bullying or suicidal thoughts. Please don't. By episode 2 I was just screaming at the screen. Problematic? This show invented the word problematic. The supernatural task force that's supposed to save people with suicide risk is terrible at therapy and suicide prevention. They tell the person trying to commit suicide, literally on the edge of a building about to jump, that they should do it, that they're weak, they should just jump, go ahead! Like ... what????

Mystic Pop Up Bar - Didn't capture me by episode 2. Got bored. Some say this is better than Hotel Del Luna but I don't agree.

Abyss - It's a weird tonal mix. Would have preferred if it leaned further into the absurd (go all in with the humour or don't at all), the sci-fi or the murder mystery. Instead of just revealing by episode 3 who the murderer is, quickly changing the plot into a chase after the villain, even though he's so lame. But also he is keeps killing people and it gets dark. And then we cut to the main couple being silly and cute. It's so jarring. The leads have a great dynamic and Ahn Hyo Seop knows how to differentiate his characters really well, give them their own flavour., but in the end it's just a cool premise, failed execution. Very average.

Currently watching:

The Crowned Clown - Very interesting concept and gorgeous, gorgeous visuals. Plot drags a little. Has some tonal problems and oversimplification of politics. The best part is when Yeo Jin-Goo acts with himself haha. He's such a talented actor.

The Uncanny Counter - Get's a bit melodramatic sometimes but all four main actors are insanely good.

Tale of the Nine-Tailed - The main romantic relationship needs a lot more development, but the entire show is worth watching just for Dong Wook Lee and Kim Bum as brothers.

Alchemy of Souls - 6/10 so far. Currently watching season 2/part 2. Aside from the prince, I don't particularly care for any of the characters. Unpopular opinion but the main romantic pair have no chemistry. Mu-Deok has more chemistry with Yul and the prince, and the prince has more chemistry with Jang-Uk. The lore is confusing and inconsistent: it breaks its own rules. (Two souls in one body what?? when was this established as a thing?) There's not enough foreshadowing and setting up the rules of magic in this world (the Ice Stone comes up as a deux ex mahcina big plot point in the last second). It also drags; the episodes are too long. There's a lot of saying and ultimately the show doesn't deliver. The narrative structure is straight out of a fantasy Wattpad. The set and costumes are fun and cool for a fantasy world, and the first episode was great.

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vidalinav · 1 year

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So I’ve been thinking more about my fic idea where Nesta and Cassian are forced to literally sleep together because Nesta makes things go boom in her sleep because of her nightmares. An acosf re-write.

Of course it would start off with Nesta only letting Cassian into her bubble of pure death or whatever like acosf when she has a nightmare and her power is about to explode, except Nesta this time would cling to him without waking up and Cassian would stay with her. As they all do really, because they’re like what is happening?

In the morning, Nesta’s like hell no is Cassian touching me, but Feyre and Rhys summon her to the estate and in a very similar fashion to the intervention scene, everyone is there and they recount what’s happened. Rhys asks Nesta if this has happened more than once, and Nesta’s like usually I’m too drunk for any sort of magic to occur. This makes them all (sad face), so they’re like well we can’t risk you blowing up the city, so what can we do? Nesta’s like it’s fine, I’ll monitor it. All the rest of them are like hell to the no, you almost blew us all up, and they suggest that since only Cassian could calm her, Cassian should stay with her while she sleeps.

Nesta is like hell no.

She refuses. But she does feel guilty and worried that she’s going to lose control of her power and kill people, so she says she’ll just not sleep. To which they’re all like HA! Impossible! But Nesta tries her darndest to not sleep. Like days go by and she gets crabby, but she keeps moving and drinking caffeine, and she is nearly delirious but she lasts longer than a human would bc fae stamina and whatnot. Until, she nearly has a breakdown from not sleeping, and she’s like the cauldron should have killed me... and Cassian who witnesses this breakdown, does what Cassian does and he’s like is being with me worse than death??? And Nesta admits that no it’s not. But still she persists in staying awake, until Cassian in a ploy to get her to fall asleep without just passing out, tells her that he needs to take her the House because Feyre insists she tries something, like a task, and on the way to the House, Nesta falls asleep in Cassian’s arms.

So that’s one step, except Nesta still is upset that she wakes up in Cassian’s arms so she’s like no, and leaves and the next idea is that she’s going to sleep with someone else, because why does it have to be Cassian? She’s trying to push Cassian away again, so she is going to find someone to sleep sleep with and just have them stay the whole night.

BUT for some reason she just can’t do it. Cassian leaves for Windhaven because he doesn’t want to watch Nesta avidly searching for someone to sleep with, but Nesta never even makes it out of the estate (because she’s staying with Feyre while all this happens as a safety precaution). She just sits on the couch, crossing her arms, very angry that she can’t make it out the door and now she’s tired. Mind you everyone is watching her (the IC I mean) because this whole situation is something they think they have to deal with and it’s not resolving itself. Nesta cannot be handled by one person, they think.

So they’re like ehh well Cassian will be back in the morning, let’s watch this play out. Nesta doesn’t go to sleep, she literally sits in the living room all night and she supposes that this is going to be her life. Driven insane by lack of sleep or risk blowing up the entire land of Prythrian.

But in the morning, Cassian is so sorry for sleep deprived Nesta who has bags under her eyes and is nearly falling asleep eating breakfast so that’s when he says let’s go to the house and Nesta’s like I’m not falling for that again. But Cassian’s like for real this time and up at the House he shows her the massive bed that could fit three Illyrians and he’s like see, if we use this bed, then you won’t even have to be really near me.

So finally, Nesta agrees. Even though she recognizes that it’s only a matter of time before she can’t escape him any longer. They’re all just waiting for them to be happily ensconced in a relationship where she’s no longer any one’s problem.

Except of course, Nesta always ends up climbing over Cassian to cover his body with hers while they sleep. Cassian is so fond of her, he can barely restrain himself from touching her (affectionately) when she does.

A few other details though, Cassian wakes up early as shit so Nesta has to wake up when he wakes up so she wakes up at 5 am and she hates him for this. Literally plans gutting him with his own knives. She also has to go where he goes or Cassian has to go where she goes, because she needs sleep and because of this whole situation Cassian feels very responsible for making sure she’s well taken care of and healthy. Also eventually she starts wearing different nightgowns to torture him but that’s a tale for another time.

#acosf rewrite #nessian #nesta archeron #cassian #vidalinav writes fic ideas #what should this be called?

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thefirstknife · 1 year

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Cloud Striders and the Veil

I've been musing about some lore that we got from the exotic quest for the glaive, Winterbite. I think that quest is more important than people realise in general, outside of the bombastic message at the end of it. There are some insanely interesting and potentially wholly revealing things, and I want to talk about it here at length because it's hard to parse through.

Long post ahead, with contents (highly recommended to open in a new tab or separately on mobile or you will be scrolling for a while):

The Strider and the creation of the Sidereal

Bluejay and the creation of the CloudArk as we know it

Stargazer and discovery of Earth

Maelstrom and the doubt in Cloud Striders

Imagery and symbology of the Cloud Striders

First and foremost, what happens to initiate the quest? Well, Quinn tells us that when the Witness used the Veil to make the link, that event briefly rebooted the CloudArk. As soon as it rebooted, the Vex noticed something, broke into the Hall of Heroes and destroyed five Cloud Strider memorials. They are irreplaceable, made from each Cloud Strider's core. When interacting with them, our Strand connected with one of the Cloud Striders and rebuilt the memorial. Quinn realised that if we connect with others, we will be able to restore all of them and figure out why the Vex wanted to destroy them.

We are able to restore them all and learn about them, how they connect to each other and what they occupied themselves with.

The Strider

The Strider, real name Mikaela Julaha, was the first Cloud Strider. In her lore, which is a version told in some sort of show for kids, we're told:

Before the Strider, we did not have a special protector for the city, and that meant we all had to fight every day. We had many weapons and implants to make ourselves strong, but not the special synthesis that makes the Cloud Striders special. And many more Neomuni had to be soldiers and transform their bodies to protect the city and get hurt.

Makes sense! Before Cloud Striders, everyone had to fight, which meant more people suffering and more victims, as well as more people having to use augmentations. However, there's a difference between regular implants and what the Cloud Striders have. Cloud Striders get a "special synthesis." How? Strider made the Sidereal.

What is the Sidereal? Fret not! We know! The Sidereal was created by the first Cloud Strider:

The Strider saw us suffering. She worried that fighting so much would hurt our hearts, and she knew that one person can make all the difference. So, she took her courage and her wits and her strength and created the Sidereal.

Do you know what the Sidereal is, niños?

That's right! The Sidereal is a special place where one person gives up their normal life to become a Cloud Strider and live for us all!

The Strider gave us the Sidereal. The Cloud Strider fights so we can have peace so we could be more than just soldiers.

It's some sort of a machine that does the process of becoming a Cloud Strider. It is somewhat described in the lore tab where Nimbus becomes a Cloud Strider, Foremost Vimana:

There are no smiles to go around when drills bore into bone until they taste marrow, and metal latticework replaces the dermis of their flayed-open throat. As the cradle lowers them into the Sidereal, the droning hum of a nonillion nanites fills their ears and drowns their fear.

The Sidereal is a special machine able to integrate the nanites into Cloud Striders so fully that they merge in a way that makes Cloud Striders what they ar; big, strong and also with their lifespans cut short. Intriguing process, possibly discovered by Mikaela through her own situation; Mikaela had an unspecified accident which led to her body being heavily augmented, but then those augmentations started aggressively deteriorating her body. It's implied that the lifespan part was unknown when this was first done, though the full timeline of these events is unclear.

Needless to say, Strider also found the whole topic of the exotic quest, the friendly Vex Mind called the Occlusion. Strider was the first to find it and she protected it and kept it safe, leaving it alone in the CloudArk. It is apparently integral to the function of the CloudArk; Quinn describes it as "loadbearing." I can't help but wonder if those two things are connected; if the creation of the Sidereal is directly related to Strider's discovery of the Occlusion or the other way around.

The Bluejay

Bluejay, real name Conrad Jain, is a really interesting Cloud Strider because he became one in order to have legal access to simulation tech. He was a tech genius and a game designer. He basically turned CloudArk into what it is today; at first it was just used for storage, but his simulation research and insight into the Vex allowed him to turn it into a real virtual space where people could go, live and play. Basically without him, CloudArk would still just be storage. And he researched the Vex as well:

So Bluejay helped us expand how we use the CloudArk—he made it a place we could play or even live, if we needed to. And when he made his game in there, he also learned that the Vex used the CloudArk, too. ... Bluejay learned he could jump from the CloudArk to the Vex network, and he sabotaged their machines from the inside. The Vex were very confident and did not think he could find them, so they were careless. And so Bluejay scared them, and they ran away!

Naturally, he found the Occlusion, from Strider's files and information. He left the Occlusion alone, clearly, which means that he knew its importance. Given his drive to stop the Vex, if the Occlusion was a threat or unimportant, he could've pushed it out.

In his other lore tab, the one that features a record of a hearing of him in court (he was arrested for illegal simulation research), he is arguing with the judges about his deeds, insisting that he is helping everyone. He is not remorseful at all and mentions how important his work is. Some relevant excerpts:

JAIN: We're the last of humanity, trapped in a bubble. Simulation is an entire frontier we can explore to re-define what it means to be human. And you outlaw it just because we fear others' bad experiences from hundreds of years ago!

It's unclear which experiences he's referencing. Possibly something from before Neomuna. Ishtar Collective was aware of Vex simulations and are possibly the ones who banned research of it. Only Cloud Striders, who answer to the council, are allowed to research it, and Conrad calls them "council's lapdogs."

JAIN: The CloudArk is an nth dimensional paracausal fold, and we use it to store library books.

C. BOUDAN: We use it to support the public need. Not as some playground.

JAIN: Play?! You bastard, I lost friends shutting down the Vex Isometry! You wouldn't be sitting there i—

Conrad knew a lot about the CloudArk and its abilities and possibilities. He was also aware of how it ties into the Vex Network and how important it is to expand the knowledge of it. And, unsurprisingly, he knew something about the Veil. In his own words:

It's... it's the shadow of every story and memory and hope we brought with us. The stars are off limits, but the Veil knits an entire universe for us. We just had to embrace it!

It's unclear, again, but we do know that CloudArk is powered by the Veil. Conrad, aka Bluejay, was pivotal in turning the CloudArk into what it is today, which means he must've known more about the Veil as well. This directly ties the Veil's power with the CloudArk; it's the Veil that "knits an entire universe" for them via the CloudArk where they can upload their consciousness and live inside unimpeded. These are all breadcrumbs for us to follow.

The Stargazer

I did a write-up on Stargazer as they relate to the question of why Neomuna never helped Earth during the Dark Age. In short, Stargazer (real name Laminak Li) was a mathematician before becoming a Cloud Strider and they were able to use math to re-discover the location of Earth and scan it for signs of life. Upon finding them, they went to Earth, learned of the Lightbearers, killed one, made contact with the Warmind in the bunker and deleted all records of the exodus ship and Neomuna to protect it from violent warlords of Earth.

Stargazer was aware of the Occlusion and named it:

Yes, hmm. How to describe... "Algorithm" is inaccurate but acceptable shorthand. It's... an occlusion. In the way? Perhaps. But if we ride along the edge... hm. Accelerated processing, gravitational lensing as applied to data.

Highly unclear what it means, but their story is tied to the math and science of rediscovering Earth. It appears they may have used this "algorithm" to do it. I'll briefly mention another Cloud Strider (Siegebreaker aka Telluride Magsi), the one whose memorial we first rebuilt and who first mentioned the algorithm:

Built a data crawler app to scour Siegebreaker's database for mentions of the other four Cloud Striders targeted in that Vex attack. He references Stargazer! And some kind of secret "number-crunching algorithm".

He thought it was a "number-crunching algorithm" and Stargazer claims that "algorithm" is not accurate enough. Is Occlusion responsible for this math and "number-crunching" to pinpoint where Earth is? Here, I also want to point out that "sidereal" is not a made-up word, it's a real concept:

Sidereal time is a timekeeping system that astronomers use to locate celestial objects.

That... can't be a coincidence given that the machine that makes Cloud Striders is called the Sidereal. Like, it's too much for the Sidereal to be called that for no reason. Perhaps this machine can be used for things other than making Cloud Striders or maybe the technology it's based on is also applicable elsewhere. This also relates to Bluejay who explicitly talked about the stars being "off limit" but that the power of the Veil and CloudArk can allow them to access the world otherwise. How do the Occlusion and the Sidereal tie into this? Are all of these things connected somehow?

The Maelstrom

Maelstrom was a military leader before becoming a Cloud Strider. Her real name was Sedderik Assur. In the kid's version of her story it's explained that she was a great warrior who fought off not just the Vex, but also other people causing problems. She founded the Assur Academy which trains people into leadership and they also train Cloud Striders.

It's also explained that she ended something called the "Uplift Coven" who were a group of bad people that wanted to be Cloud Striders. They hurt people and stole from people and Maelstrom stopped their attack.

What else do we know? "She was one of the city's greatest military leaders. Ended the Cobalt Occupation before she even became a Cloud Strider." (1) She knew about the Occlusion hiding in the CloudArk and she called it a "simulation echo" (2). This is interesting in relation to Bluejay, who was doing simulation research and knew of the Occlusion as well. Maelstrom's Occlusion data comes from Bluejay and Stargazer. She also said the following herself:

This little electronic oracle may be useful, but I don't like anyone standing behind me, whether they've got a knife or not. So the question is, tear it out and let the whole network fall apart? Or leave it in... and maybe things get a whole lot worse?

The "electronic oracle" she speaks about is most likely the Occlusion. Oracle is an interesting word to use; the Occlusion is somehow tied to Soteria, the Augurmind who was half-Warmind, half-Vex and had predictive technology. Like an oracle. Another interesting connection with Soteria is that Soteria's predictive technology was used to locate other habitable systems outside the solar system and predict the best ways to map them, reach them and colonise them. Aka we're talking about math and simulations to find planets again.

Maelstrom's other lore entry, the one that's a record of a log she made herself and isn't a watered down story made for kids, is her message to her rookie Cloud Strider partner called Geist. Maelstrom explains that she's sorry for shooting Geist, but that she had to and that she hopes this apology would be enough. It's safe to assume Geist survived.

Maelstrom focuses a lot more on what she finds to be her biggest mistake; creating the whole Cloud Strider training. She thinks it's her "stupidest idea ever" to pick twenty two kids and train them all to be Cloud Striders and then only pick one. She also thinks she didn't fully explain to them just how much the process of turning into and being a Cloud Strider takes from people.

She says she's right for picking Geist because:

All of you were driven, talented. But, Geist, you were the only one who didn't need it. You were the one who'd help this city as a civvie or a Strider.

The "it" Geist didn't need is presumably the augmentations and the full power of a Cloud Strider (aka the "special synthesis" through the Sidereal) since Maelstrom explains that Geist would've helped either way, with or without becoming one. At least ten of the group she trained turned out to be "terrorists with Cloud Strider training." Aka the Uplift Coven. Possibly Cloud Strider candidates who weren't too happy about not being given the luxury to become one.

And Maelstrom names some of them. Two to be exact:

And looks like I was right to not pick Ahpoor and Laghari and their little coven.

Laghari? Hm. I noticed this back then but there were a lot of names happening so I didn't want to jump to conclusions, but we still only have one Laghari character in the game: Quinn Laghari. The Hall of Heroes archivist who gave us the quest. Was she a Cloud Strider candidate who has a problematic past? Or was this an ancestor of hers? How old is she? Did she know Maelstrom personally? It seems like we have a lot more to find out about the history of characters we interact with. Even if this is Quinn's ancestor, it would still be interesting to find out what happened here.

Maelstrom ends her account with one more peculiar piece of information:

But I'm leaving you a present. Something my mentor left me: the kill codes for the Sidereal.

Interesting. Maelstrom's mentor (unknown right now) gave her the "kill switch" for this machine. And she passed it onto Geist, saying that once the Sidereal is destroyed and there are no more Cloud Striders, things would be better and "the rest of the city would have to step up" instead of "dooming another soul to this life."

Very strong words from Maelstrom. This obviously didn't happen for whatever reason. The Sidereal is fine, though we obviously don't know where it is or how it works. Given that it was created by the first Cloud Strider who was also the first person to find the Occlusion and this whole storyline hinges on the Occlusion since it connects all the Cloud Striders mentioned, I have a feeling the Occlusion has something to do with the Sidereal.

And given everything from Bluejay, as well as the fact that the Occlusion resides within CloudArk, both CloudArk and the Veil must be involved as well. Quinn even makes a comment about it at the start of the quest, something people may have forgotten by now, when our Strand recreates a destroyed memorial. Quinn is surprised and interested and then says:

I've read some academic studies on Veil transcription of the collective unconscious. I bet if I put you in cryo, I could—

The Veil, its ties to the "collective unconscious" and its ability to power the CloudArk are clearly relevant here when it comes to Strand, the memorials and this whole story. Quinn also thinks that we would be able to find out more if we were to be placed into cryo and linked to the CloudArk. Maybe one day!

Another thing that makes the connection is the imagery and motifs of the Neomuna symbols, especially as they relate to the symbol of the Veil:

This is from the in-game badge, but it appears everywhere. You can see it on Neomuna on the panels and everywhere in the menus for Neomuna collections and lore books.

The full part, the lattice? That's on the Cloud Strider Legacies lore book art, which is where all this lore is from:

This lattice can also be seen on Cloud Striders themselves, most notably on Nimbus' neck (also referenced in the lore I copied where Nimbus is lowered into the Sidereal where it's idenfitied as "lattice"), but also as a smaller motif on all Cloud Strider memorials and, I believe, as a motif on the Cloud Strider core which can be seen in Nimbus' hand in the training montage cutscene:

It also reminds me of the view of the Veil from below, as it's shown in this concept art:

Is there a connection relevant for any future reveals or is most of this just flavour and some background on past Cloud Striders, politics of Neomuna and its history? I feel like there has to be something more going on with CloudArk and the Occlusion, which naturally involves the Veil but also possibly the Sidereal and Cloud Striders themselves. And how does it tie into the Vex, their network and Soteria, whose arrival to Neptune was the catalyst for everything to follow?

This quest was A LOT and I think it was meant to be and that it was meant to give us leads and things to think about. It took me a while and a lot of re-reading and re-organising things to figure out the whole relatively chronological order of things, as well as possible connections between them and why this quest links these specific Cloud Striders and their experiences with the Occlusion, the Sidereal, the CloudArk and indirectly with the Veil. I'm still not sure where all of this leads, but these are starting points that were made to get us to talk.

If you've read through all and maybe it juggled your ideas and brain worms, feel free to share your thoughts on anything I said, any details I might've missed or things I might've gotten wrong!

#destiny 2 #destiny 2 spoilers #lightfall #lightfall spoilers #cloud strider #neomuna #the veil #sidereal #occlusion #cloudark #lore vibing #long post #i've been losing my mind over this whole quest for three weeks now #there's so much stuff here and so much that might be hinting at future reveals #i would love if cloud striders were innately tied to the veil and this whole thing #especially looking forward to learn more about the occlusion #we have to... obsessed

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 6 months

Text

Psycho Analysis: Yanni Yogi

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Case 1-4, “Turnabout Goodbyes,” is sort of the grand finale of the original Ace Attorney, and it ends the overarching story in a very satisfying way. We have the culmination of Phoenix and Edgeworth’s character arcs as well as elaboration on their shared history, we get some interesting developments about the past, and it features some of the most iconic moments in the entire series, from pointing out that it almost being Christmas means it wasn’t actually Christmas yet to cross-examining an actual parrot on the witness stand. Throw in the debut of charming hick photographer Lotta Hart and Larry Butz proving himself to be a bumbling asset, and you have one of the best and strongest cases the game has to offer (though in contrast with a lot of the rest of the series, it feels a bit easy).

Of course, a good case would be absolutely nothing without a good mystery leading into an impressive villain, and this case manages to have two! The first of them is without a doubt one of the single most sympathetic killers in the series, if not the most sympathetic: Yanni Yogi. Formerly a courtroom bailiff, being implicated in the DL-6 incident led to his entire life being ruined even if he was able to walk free. And in 1-4, he decides that enough is enough and he wants to get even. How exactly is this sympathetic? Well, that’s what this analysis is for.

Motivation/Goals: To put things extremely simply, Yogi’s goal is revenge. But nothing about 1-4 is simple, so let’s take the opportunity to do something that will be unique to some of these Ace Attorney analyses: Discuss the victim, Robert Hammond.

Hammond would likely have been worthy of a Psycho Analysis on his own if he wasn’t already dead; the man was a defense attorney who only cared about winning his cases, a very dark reminder that it isn’t just the prosecutors who are amoral in this series. Hammond took on Yogi after DL-6 and forced the poor guy to play the part of an insane man so that he could get out of the murder charges levied against him by Gregory Edgeworth’s ghost. And it worked! Yogi went free! There was just one teeny tiny little issue:

Yogi’s life was fucking destroyed.

Socially he ended up as an outcast, and things got to the point where his fiancee Polly committed suicide after dealing with the backlash. What’s more, Yogi was forced to continue living out his life as a deranged man, unable to really go back to normal. And keep in mind: All of this was done to free him from the consequences of a crime he didn’t commit, a crime he was only accused of because the victim’s spirit couldn’t possibly have known the real murderer was lurking outside the elevator.

It’s genuinely hard to blame Yogi for capping Hammond, because the dude was an utter asshole who demonstrably ruined Yogi’s life. Hammond absolutely deserved what was coming to him. Now, framing Miles Edgeworth, on the other hand… That’s a lot less forgivable. Edgeworth certainly never meant Yogi any harm, and he had just as poor an understanding of the situation as both his dead father and Yogi himself. No one involved here was on the same page, and all of them were being manipulated by the real murderer as part of his master plan to get his ultimate revenge.

Performance: In the live action movie, Yogi is portrayed by Fumiyo Kohinata, and to say he kills it in the role is an understatement. I think a lot of it comes from the movie showing rather than simply telling when it comes to Yogi’s horribly tragic backstory, with him getting to act out his reactions to Hammond’s cruelty towards him as well as stumbling across his wife’s body post-suicide, but he definitely ends up as one of the strongest aspects of an already stellar adaptation.

Breakdown: Yogi actually has one of the more lowkey breakdowns in the series when it comes to sympathetic killers, almost to the point that he doesn’t really have a breakdown. One minute he’s the teetering, goofy old man:

And then one avian cross-examination later, he gives up the goat and reveals his true self:

I actually think the lack of an extreme reaction gives Yogi a unique level of dignity and really highlights how utterly tragic his circumstances were, even if he really didn’t go about things in the best way.

Best Scene: The movie actually shows Yogi finding his wife’s body, and if it didn’t hit home how absolutely miserable and tragic this poor man’s life was before, well, here you go.

Final Thoughts & Score: More than any other sympathetic killer in the series, Yogi is the one who my heart goes out to most.

Yes, he’s not as friendly and charming as Acro, and he’s definitely not anywhere near as sexy as Geiru Toneido, but if you look at the facts this guy genuinely just didn’t deserve anything that happened to him. He didn’t kill Gregory Edgeworth, but no one believed him, not even his own lawyer; said lawyer forced him to pretend to be insane, which even if it got him free ruined his reputation and caused his beloved fiancee to kill herself; he ended up being stuck pretending to be a lunatic for years to keep suspicion off of himself even though, again, he was innocent; and then he ends up being used as a pawn in a convoluted revenge scheme. His only real crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time on that fateful day.

All of this really helps make Yogi the most pitiable villain out there. He is just a sad old man forced to live as something he’s not, and who lost literally everything. And after all that, the sole victory he managed to achieve was rendered completely hollow by the fact he ended up caught, being exposed in court, and then having the truth of DL-6 brought into the light, something that would have acted as his complete vindication had he not decided to kill. In the end, all he did was ensure his parrot was going to have to be taken in by someone else and perhaps even get himself the death penalty.

Yogi gets a 9/10 from me. A lot of this really comes from the movie more than anything, not because it’s better than the game version but because it expands upon and shows what the game already told us to great effect. He’s a fantastic sympathetic killer and one of the best tragic villains of the series, and the one all others should be measured against.

#Psycho Analysis #Yanni Yogi #Ace Attorney #Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

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