#language is one of the most complex things humans do

[neptune-scythe]

quick thing about the nuances of desire that is often over looked, specifically in regards to touch aversion

the argument I get the most when discussing Kanej having a relationship without any physical intimacy or touch is that they both want that

but here's the thing

yes they both express desires for touch or physical intimacy, but it's not as black and white as that.

there's three points I wanna make here

the first is there's a difference between wanting something and fantasizing about it. and by that I mean you can like the idea of something, you can have a desire for that idea, but it isn't the actual thing. so for the topic of touch, you can like the idea of a hug or a kiss, you can desire to experience the same feeling from it that other people do or that you think you should, but in reality it isn't actually enjoyable to you, it doesn't give you the feeling you want it to. you want it, maybe even enough to try it again and again, but it may never give you what you want out of it.

the second point ties into the first one nicely of being that you can want the feeling that touch is supposed to give, so you think you want the touch as well. but in reality you just haven't separated the two. you want the comfort, the safety, the closeness, the protection, or whatever else that you're supposed to feel when you touch someone, you might not actually want or enjoy the touch itself or get those feelings from it. but once you separate the two you can find those feelings you're searching for in other ways that are actually comfortable and beneficial.

and the third point is that sometimes you just want to want something. you want to have the desire to touch someone, to be able to feel comfortable with it, but you don't. you might try and convince yourself that you do want it because you think you're supposed to, but the actual desire just isn't there. you want to have the desire rather than actually having the desire.

so for Kaz and Inej, yes they both expressed desires for physical intimacy, but it's not as black and white as "they said they want it so that's what they need to be happy"

desire is much deeper than that, and humans are much more nuanced and layered and unpredictable.

and yes there are also times when people just have desires without any of the extra stuff, but given their history I personally don't think Kaz or Inej are that type. There are too many conflicting feelings and experiences for it to be that simple in my opinion.

and if there's one thing Leigh Bardugo is good at it's making deep, multifaceted, and complex characters, and that's what I enjoy so much about them. they have the capacity to portray all those nuances of desire that other characters just can't, and that's a very beautiful and important thing ... especially for y/a books. to capture the human experience, to explain the aspects of humanity that are hard to discover in one's self or notice in other people. it's a bridge to deeper understanding, it's putting that ability to understand in a language that is more accessible and universal than an intellectual self help book or an essay.

so to circle back to my overarching point, desire isn't a simple thing. thinking "I want __" doesn't necessarily translate perfectly the way it presents, and there are many complexities to the human mind that are unpredictable and surprising.

#touch aversion #touch averse #touch sensitive #desire #complexity #nuance #grishaverse #six of crows #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #dirtyhands #the bastard of the barrel #the wraith #kanej #kaz x inej #kanej hc #kanej head canon #kanej headcanon #kanej hot takes #kanej supremacy #kaz x inej headcanon #kaz x inej hc #kanej rants #kaz thoughts #inej thoughts #kaz brekker and inej ghafa #kaz and inej #kaz brekker x inej ghafa #inej x kaz

[dcxdpdabbles]

DC x DP fic idea: Cave Boy

Danny Fenton is a lot of things, but good under pressure is not one of them. He didn't mean to be stranded in an unknown universe after playing around with his parents' Specter Speeder in the Ghost Zone and losing control of it. He didn't mean to find shelter in the strange cave systems under the city Danny crashlanded in. He didn't mean to step on any bat and bird costume-wearing toes.

All he was trying to do was fix the ship he arrived in with stolen and repurposed technology from all across the city. He also didn't take anything that wasn't in a garbage can so he couldn't even be acussed of thief.

Danny barely even allowed himself to be spotted, only going out at night to avoid regular citizens. Danny was a very considerate dimensional visitor compared to the Ghosts that came to Amity Park.

He spent hours exploring the caves as a human, but whenever he felt like it was time to go back, he shifted into his ghost form and floated upwards until he was above the ground. Sometimes he find himself far away from city limits othertimes he be right under a bank or a apparement complex.

It was an exciting, if a little rough, life. He occasionally found food in the garbage, and while it was disgusting, it was better than nothing. Thankfully, his halfa status allowed him to go longer without meals, sleep, and even breathing. It's just a bit hard to keep track of time since he rarely sees the sun, and he doesn't exactly have a clock nearby, but he sure it's been at least three months when he finds the bat and bird costume wearing people.

Danny is minding his own business, having just found a primarily intact toaster that would have the perfect wiring for the Speeder's temperature-controlling unit, when he mistakenly take a right on the third turn instead of a left.

It wouldn't usually be a problem, as he could just float to the topside and find his way to his little shelter/shop, but he had unknowingly tripped motion detectors. Danny had continued on his merry way, just starting to realize he was lost, when out of the shadows a man in a gaint bat costume leaped at him.

He yelp, barely dropping out of a nasty-looking jab, bending his back from the elbow aimed at his face and only through his ghost reflexes able to jump over the leg swipe.

"Who are you!?" The man growled "how did you find this place?"

"Dude, I live here!" Danny gasped, throwing himself to the ground to avoid what he knew was a jujitsu grab. "What you doing here?!"

He doesn't get a answering seeing as a bo staff of all things slams into the back of his head. He hits the ground just as his attacker says.

"Good job Red Robbin"

"Yummmmm" Danny mutters word association too strong not to.

When he wakes, he finds himself tucked in a medical cot inside a glass cell. He is still inside the caves but somewhere he's never seen. It's filled with technological advances that has his mouth watering just looking at them.

His hands twitch with the urge to break everything apart and tinker. He's a Fenton through and through.

He would have enjoyed the scenery- especially the gaint computer that was just calling his name- except various people in costumes were standing around his cell studying him like a animal in a zoo.

"Oh, ugh, hi," Danny says to the man in the giant red helmet. He gets no response so he tries to get a reaction from the others. It yields the same results. "Okay. So ugh is this a cult thing? Cause I really don't want to be part of whatever is happening here"

"What is your name?" The man dressed like a Bat demands and well crude if this is a cult thing Danny doesn't want them knowing his name. Either as human or as a ghost.

So he thinks of the most boring name he can think of, wrestling his ghost to make his body language as human as possible as he says "my name is Bruce"

There is a sharp intake of breath to his left, which causes Danny to look at a man wearing blue. That man has his face pressed against the glass, staring at Danny with a wide, manic smile. Even though the white lens of the blue man's mask hides his eyes, he knows they are drinking in Danny's features.

"look at him! He's adorable!" The blue man gushes and the other teenagers all nod in agreement.

"Super cute," the girl in purple agrees stepping closer to peer at Danny.

"A bit odd to see so much emotion on that face but he really is cute." the one holding a bo staff adds.

"He is weak." A boy sneers, "Hardly deserving of the blood in his veins."

"Lay off Demon Brat" The guy with the red helmet says, "He's just a civilian."

Now, Danny did not like those comments.

What if this is a cult thing but not a ghost cult like he orginally thought? What if it's a creepy sex thing? Or Cannibals? Or a secret fight club where they would force him to partake in death battles?

Whatever the case may be, they could not know he's from a different dimension.

"Bruce," the man dressed as a Bat cuts into the chatter. He levels a hard stare at Danny, who flinches away from it. The man's face softens just a bit. "We know that you from a different dimension"

"We tested your blood and have means to detect travelers from alternate universes" a guy in yellow helpfully says. "We also sort of figured who you were before that"

Seriously how?

"What?" Danny asks and the man in the Bat costume removes his masks. He's left staring at someone who look oddly familar but for the life of him he can't place it.

"Ughhhhh"

"Bruce, I'm also Bruce Wayne and in this universe I'm Batman" He says

Who?

"We will help you get home" Bruce tells Danny unlocking his cell. "I'm sorry about the ambush"

Now, this is where Danny should come clean and tell this man the truth, but he panics because he is not good under pressure and instead says, "Okay,"

And that's how Danny is mistaken for Bruce Wayne's civilian dimension traveling counterpart. He tries to roll with it, he does, but it's a little hard to when he's surrounded by weirdos who dress up like clowns to fight crime.

What even is his life.

#dcxdpdabbles #dc x dp crossover #Cave Boy #Danny is flying by the seat of his pants #the Bats are losing thier minds over “civilian teenage Bruce”

[togglesbloggle]

Voltaire's Prayer

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." -Volaire’s letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, 16 May 1767

I’m inordinately fond of sex, in the political sense.  It’s saved us so often from the worst parts of ourselves.

As far as anti-authoritarian elements of the human experience go, sex is right up there with curiosity and the search for truth- maybe even more so.  When a new tyrant comes to town, shutting down the universities and the libraries is only the second thing they try.  The first thing is to regulate human sexuality to within an inch of its life.  Rules for marriage, rules for courtship, rules for which genitals may touch and where they may touch and when they may touch.  Rules for who and rules for whom.  Rules for which kinds of sex must doom characters in literature, rules for which things may be described as sexy, rules for which things may be described in a sexy way.

Of course they do!  If you’re trying to bind a large polity together under a common ideological narrative, to render people predictable enough to quash dissent and legible enough to exert power through them, the last thing you need is a bunch of folks running around being horny about stuff without permission.  Nature gifted us with a great capacity for reason and community; we have the innate opportunity to learn about ourselves and our neighbors, and to form complex societies based on that understanding.  It was Aristotle who first called us the political animal, and the fruits of that extraordinary capacity will always be within our reach, if only we can come together within a shared understanding.  The invention of the city is the great triumph of our species, and with it we conquer the universe.

But also this extraordinary, reasoning mind has been sculpted from the raw clay of a biology that’s anchored in sexual reproduction, and this ends up being very, very funny.

The problem isn’t so much that the sex instinct exists, per se.  It’s how it’s implemented.  Like most biological forms, the full complement of 86 billion(!) neurons in your brain aren’t encoded in a particular configuration; the brain is much too complex to be described so precisely in the only ~725 megabytes or so of human DNA.  The particular shape of your brain is in there somewhere- the lobes and subregions responsible for vision, memory, cognition, all that- but only up to a point.  The genius and fundamental limitation of genetics is that, below a certain level, the genes instead describe a process for the production and reproduction of specialized cells, and simply constructs them in such a way that they can be relied upon to order themselves as they go.

This is all well and good when we’re talking about kidneys and livers, but the fact that you can encode any kind of specific behavioral instinct in a brain this way is nothing short of a minor miracle.  Think about it!  Spiders don’t have a ‘spider web’ gene, the gene is for ‘proteins that come together in self-assembling electrochemically sensitive gelatin tissue which, when complete, encodes patterns that operate organ systems such as legs and spinnerets in such a way as to reliably create silk webs.’  This is absurdly impressive, and also completely insane.

What I’m getting at is, powerful behavioral instincts in a complex animal aren’t precise instruction manuals by which we pursue evolutionarily advantageous behaviors.  Sex and eros are prior to logic or language, let alone strategy.  Sex is a double-thick electrical wire discharging lightning bolts right through the middle of our cognitive centers, installed in the brain by a surgeon wearing mittens.  It’s an untethered firehose whipping chaotically through the cathedral, unpredictably spraying golden reliquaries with substances unmentionable.  It’s the first and greatest anarchist.

I really can’t overstate my gratitude for this.

Obviously this results in any number of deeply goofy outcomes by way of kinks and odd sexual practices- it gets tangled with pain centers, with random bits of anatomy and proprioception, with our taboos and aversions, with our greatest terrors or our greatest yearnings or just arbitrary stimuli from adolescence, and of course it gets enmeshed so often with our notions of power and submission.  It imbues these things with a fascination and potency out of all proportion with their mundane meanings.  And ultimately, you end up with human pleasures and human values that diverge so far from banal evolutionary imperatives as to be all but unrecognizable.

Even when this process somehow manages to propagate through the brain in such a way as to drive behaviors that are legibly aligned towards some adaptive constraint- e.g. heterosexual mating practices resulting in biological reproduction and careful childrearing- it’s still madness.  Love and sex penetrate deeply across tribal and national and racial boundaries, across economic interests, across battle-lines and enmities.  We become traitors, apostates, emigrants, and artists.  Declare a law, and in short order some hot-headed young people come along to break it in the name of sexual passions you could not possibly have seen coming.  Divide your neighborhood into us and them, and by the time the ink is dry on your proclamation there will be a forbidden relationship across the fence.  There is no social order, no ethical system, no theory of human nature that can entirely withstand contact with the full spectrum of human sexuality, because sex and eros are always going to be exactly as bonkers as the complexity of the human mind and culture will allow, plus a little extra just to be sure.

This isn’t always a delight, of course.  Many prohibitions exist for a very good reason, and the chaos of human sexuality makes no exemptions for true evil.  Some of us end up really, truly victims of this process.  But for all the dangers, the chaos at the root of all this isn’t oriented towards evil.  Chaos just means chaos, essentially arbitrary and hence absurd in character.

And in the grand analysis, we are so lucky to have this thing moving through our communities, this ridiculous madness that guarantees that there will be cracks in every wall and slips exploding cigars in the pockets of the powerful few.  Not in everybody as individuals, of course, and not everybody the same amount; asexuality is certainly one of the outcomes that all this mad gallivanting through our brains can produce.  Sexuality would never be so predictable as to guarantee its own existence, after all.  That’s part of what makes the joke so funny.

But all of us, regardless of sexuality, get to live in a world where the grand anarchy of sex is constantly driving home this lesson that no category is inviolate and no law is perfect.  That we should not and cannot take ourselves too seriously, or forget that we’re animals.  That we don’t exist only for the sake of others, or within their understanding.  That cities are made of cooperation, grace, and forbearance- not conformity or mere compliance.

People sometimes worry about immortality.  In the political sense, I mean.  They worry about eternal dictatorships and unconquerable gerontocracies.  This fear isn’t entirely unjustified; death has often played a role in progress and liberation.  But as long as enough of us are still getting horny without permission, still falling in love in stupid ways, I think we’ll be okay.  Romeo and Juliet don’t have to die at the end to make a difference in the world, as long as they’re brave enough to get weird with it.

[dedalvs]

Hello there! I was wondering if you could possibly translate this quote: (I know it's a different fandom, but I was wondering if you could translate it anyways. I think it would be neat to see it in High Valyrian.)... "Not all who wander are lost."

So listen… I know this wasn't the intent, and I know that you're kind of standing in for tons of people from my past, but like… When people ask to have something translated, do they really not give any thought to the grammatical complexity of what they're asking for? And 100% this is not just you, but like… Embedded clauses, relative clauses, counterfactuals…

Something I didn't realize till I started creating languages for a living is translation is my least favorite part of language creation—and it's what I spend the most time doing.

Okay, so, "Not all who wander are lost". Good lord. First, there's "lost", which has a literal and metaphorical meaning in English. Absolutely no idea if this would translate in High Valyrian, and I'm pretty sure I don't have a word for "lost", and I don't even know how to go about creating one. Spanish perdido essentially comes from "wasted" or "squandered". We know where English "lost" came from. There actually is a word for "to lose" in HV, but it's to lose a battle. Doesn't make sense to use it here. So I'm going with something that kind of evokes that mists that surround destroyed Valyria and use the locative of "fog", so to be sambrarra "in the fog" means "to be lost".

I also don't (or didn't) have a word for "wander", but I made a derivation based on one of my favorite words, elēnagon, which means to oscillate or swerve. Jorelēnagon now means "to wander". Seems to fit.

And that was the easy part. A relative clause is something like "The dragon that I saw is big". "Whoever I saw is big" also features a kind of relative clause—an indefinite relative clause. These things are absolute murder to create. But no. It's not just that. It's a modified indefinite relative, because it's not "Whoever wanders is lost", it's "All who wander are lost". BUT IT'S NOT JUST THAT. It's negated on top of that. NE. GA. TED. And not just in the usual way: It's the Mothra fumbling quantifier that's negated. It's not whoever wanders. It's not all who wander. It's NOT ALL who wander. This is like my nightmare—being asked to translate something like this. This is giving me flashbacks to season 1 of House of the Dragon when they asked me to translated "Would that it were", as if that was some reasonable thing for a human being to say in any language ever.

Anyway, if you type "indefinite relative clause" into my High Valyrian grammar, you come up with nothing, because I always forget to write down how the hell I decided to do them. I think because I have both relative adjectives and pronouns that I can just use the damn pronouns by themselves. God. "Not all…" Are you kidding me?! You know High Valyrian has a whole collective number to handle "all", right? What, do I just negate that? Will the meaning be the same as a negated quantifier?! Like it's [[not all] who wander], right? And you can bracket like that because they're all separate words. But what if "all who" is one word? What then?! BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT IT IS!

(By the way I just added a sentence to my grammar that includes the phrase "indefinite relative clause" so I can search for it. It's not like this wasn't written up, but I honestly probably forgot what the term was when I wrote the section the first time and I never revisited it.)

Okay. I'm calm and cool. So. Returning to the translation. There are two types of relative pronouns: One that refers to people or things, and another that refers to concepts or ideas or places. We're talking about people here, so we need the first one. And we need it in the collective. That's lȳr. Leaving the negation aside, this can be translated fairly easily:

Jorelēnus lȳr sambrarra ilza.

Okay, that's "All who wander are lost". I chose the aorist subjunctive for the relative because it's like "anyone who may wander"; I think it makes sense. Lȳr is grammatically singular, so it triggers third person singular agreement in both verbs. Since we're using ilagon as a locative copula here, I think (think) the present tense makes the most sense. So that is "All who wander are lost".

Now how the flarking frump do you say "not all" when "all who" is lȳr?!

So since lȳr is a pronoun it can be modified with an adjective, which would like like this:

Jorelēnus dōre lȳr sambrarra ilza.

But the problem with that is I don't think it gives us the intended meaning. I think that means "None who wander are lost", and that's not what the intended meaning is at all. It is basically "Some people who wander are indeed lost—perhaps many of them—but some of those who are wandering are not, in fact, lost". This is also why you can't negate the matrix verb. That would mean "Anyone that might be wandering is not lost"—again, not the intended meaning. This is the crux of the whole translation: Negating the quantifier and not what the quantifier is modifying.

For that reason, the only thing I can think to do is to go to a much more prolix, and, frankly, un-Valyrian-like expression. This would mean taking the relative pronoun out of the collective, putting it back in the singular, adding in a quantifier, and negating it. That would be this:

Jorelēnus dōre tolvie lȳ sambrarra ilza.

Is that it? I honestly don't know. It is a translation; I'm not sure if it's the best translation. Another possibility is to re-translate it and say "A few who may wander are not lost". That would look like this:

Jorelēnusy lȳn sambrarra ilosy daor.

The pronoun is now in the paucal, which triggers plural agreement on both verbs. (And, by the way, thank goodness sambrarra is a noun phrase; it doesn't have to agree with anything!) And this is, basically, "A few who may wander are not lost".

I feel like the second translation is better maybe…? It feels more Valyrianesque. But I'm not 100% sure it conveys the same sense.

Anyway, I started translating this a little over two hours ago. That's what this takes. That's how long something this complex takes. Granted, it didn't have my full attention at all times, because I was watching Booksmart, but this was my second time watching it, so I didn't have to give the movie my undivided attention (though it had been a few years; there were bits I didn't remember). But yeah. Translation. My god. Like…why. Creating languages is fun. Translation is work. (And if it's not work, you're doing it wrong. Mic drop; soap box kicked.)

#conlang #language #valyrian #high valyrian #valyrian grammar #grammar #high valyrian grammar #translation #asoiaf #grrm #hbo #hotd #house of the dragon #got #game of thrones #all the flipping tags #booksmart

[ozzgin]

How would the guys react to prehistoric reader fighting pickle (and she wins if that’s akay) Since he angered her. Because he ate her food( or she really loves food or she’s on her period)

(hope it makes sense )

I can never say no to a strong female character so it’s absolutely okay! If you‘d be so kind, I have two more asks regarding the prehistoric reader that I think are somewhat similar, so I’d just combine them under your request.

The first request: prehistoric pregnant reader “adopts” Baki (our affection deprived boy could use some love); her first spoken word is “Pickle”, and finally she gives birth to twins

The second request: prehistoric reader begins understanding modern human language, surprising the fighters, and begins translating for Pickle.

Baki Characters x Prehistoric! Fem Reader (II)

Featuring Pickle and his challengers. The sequel to our prehistoric reader that just gave birth and is slowly cozying up to modern life.

Reader wins against Pickle

You don’t even remember what set you off. Maybe the pregnancy hormones had gotten out of hand, or Pickle’s successive wins had earned him too much audacity. What’s certain is that you weren’t pleased with his attitude and decided to remind him you’re not one of the humans for him to show this insolence.

Hearing the savage, vicious growls that erupted from your chest as you slammed Pickle’s unconscious body into the ground one final time, no one really dared to interrupt you. Retsu, Katsumi and Jack had already received extensive injuries from a Pickle that held back still. They didn’t wish to ponder what you could do to them in your current state. Baki glanced at his father, wondering if he’d be tempted to challenge you during this unique opportunity.

Yuujirou, however, was trying his best to hold back his laughter. He couldn’t remember the last time he was so entertained. If you were moping the floors with Pickle with a massive pregnant belly, how damn strong were you on a regular day? He nearly put his hands together in prayer, hoping you’d stick around once you were done popping kids. He wanted to fight you so badly and felt like a schoolgirl kicking her feet on the mattress the night before a class trip.

Baki finds it amusing that you’re seemingly stronger than Pickle. His only goal is defeating his father. Of course, anyone strong enough could provide him with extra training for the final battle, but at this point, with you as his opponent, he might actually be overreaching. He hopes you won’t decide to fight Yuujirou anytime soon, because he wants to be the one to defeat him first. Jack shares this sentiment but is also a bit deflated knowing how big the gap between him and the ancient humans is.

Reader’s first word

Pickle is curled up in his enclosure’s tree trunk, pouting mildly after the angry defeat he suffered. To add insult to the injury, he can hear Baki’s spoiled chuckles as you feed him some of your T-Rex meat. After his fight with Pickle, the young boy was most open to receive aftercare and attention and you found it utterly adorable that someone as strong as him enjoyed special treatment.

The other men found it rather humiliating to rely on you and would gently let you know that they can manage just fine. But Baki immediately clung onto you and in time you began to wonder about his family. You weren’t entirely sure how to express the question to him. Did he have a mother? Where was she? How would you gesture for “mother” in the first place? If only you could articulate the same noises the other humans used to communicate. It looked very efficient and also very complex.

You glance at Pickle’s hiding spot, lost in thought. You try to replay some of the dialogues you’ve witnessed. In your mind, you closely observe the men discussing things in front of your prehistoric mate. The way their jaw opens and closes at calculated intervals. Why is the tongue contracting so frequently? Is this the tool needed to turn your growls into intentional, obvious messages? You pucker your lips and allow some air to blow out, like a faint whistle. Then, you tighten your lips and release them with pressure, and a “pop” sound comes out. Baki observes your attempts, confused. You press your tongue against the roof of your mouth and exhale. Another flattened whistle is released.

Finally, you flex your vocal chords with just enough force that the growl smoothens out and is replaced by a continuous voice. You repeat the movements that you’ve practiced in your head. So many people have used this word when looking at him. It can only mean one thing, and you want to hear it roll out of your own mouth. “Pi-ku-ru~”

Pickle pokes his head out of the enclosure, perplexed. That was certainly your voice, but the contents delivered by it were nothing he would’ve expected. His eyebrows are raised and he looks at your equally shocked expression. Baki is dumbfounded. He feels like he just witnessed something forbidden, of unspeakable importance. The raw piece of meat hangs in his mouth, yet to be chewed. You turn to the small human, seeking approval. Was this the correct way to do it? Have you made your message clear?

Before a potential answer comes out, you rush to Pickle and grab his face between your hands. Such a bizarre sensation. Within this vast, intricate language that the humans used, this one sequence of contractions and movements was specially designated for him. This one prolonged sound, and his eyes will lock with yours because he knows it’s him you’re calling. You gently kiss Pickle and he clumsily returns the gesture, still unsure of what is happening.

Birth and aftermath

Professor Payne is pacing in front of the hospital room. He doesn’t know what to be more excited about. The fact that two more prehistoric humans will soon walk the modern Earth, or that their mother casually reproduced articulate language just a few days ago. He clenches his fist in his pocket, somewhat resentful of Baki for being the one to retell the story. What unbelievable potential. His nostrils can already pick up the fresh ink of the soon-to-be published newspapers: “Noam Chomsky’s works in linguistics threatened by latest breakthrough - Discovery of Dr. Payne shows that ancient, Jurassic humans posses the skill to acquire spoken language. Implications unknown.”

Meanwhile, the fighters are gathered in the cramped hospital room. As they have proven their friendship to Pickle, it’s only natural to share this intimate moment with him. Pickle is holding one baby in each arm, cooing at them excitedly. Katsumi is pretending to be focused on a sight outside the window in order to hide his glossy eyes; births are always emotional for him. Retsu is standing close to the entrance, arms folded. He, too, is distracted by the knowledge that you may understand them and reproduce their words. He absentmindedly goes back to his encounters with you, hoping he didn’t say anything out of place that you might’ve picked up.

Baki is sitting on the side of your bed, carefully kneading your hand in an attempt to relax you. “You really should try some of the hospital food, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a dish this fancy!” He smiles at you and then nods in the direction of the tray. You follow his gaze and process his words. “Want try?” You manage to croak. Everyone in the room pauses to look at you. They already knew it from Baki, but hearing it firsthand truly is an astonishing experience. There’s a silent enthusiasm shared by the men standing close and Pickle tenses up, a small frown forming on his face. They better not get any ideas.

“What do you think about your new siblings?” Jack questions Baki jokingly. “Given you’ve been adopted by (Y/N) and all.” You follow the conversation with analytical eyes and Jack wants to try his hand at explaining the words to you. Once the meanings start to connect, you laugh and begin gesturing to Pickle, aided by short growls. Everyone assumes you’re translating to him. Pickle glares at Baki and his hold on the babies tightens, perhaps too hesitant to agree to your bond with the little modern human.

Pickle sighs deeply. Not only was he thrown into this strange world, but now there’s a bunch of men that are starting to show too much interest in you. He’ll have to put them in their place very soon if this continues. He’s especially annoyed at your fast learning pace when it comes to conversing with these creatures. He needs to hurry up and catch up to you if he wants to know the intentions of his rival friends.

#baki #baki the grappler #baki x reader #pickle x reader #baki headcanons #pickle baki #baki hanma #jack hanma #katsumi orochi

[fumifooms]

Chilchuck’s wife and family - Facts, theories and headcanons

I want to keep this as a sort of masterpost on Chil’s family situation if I can, but if we get a lot of information on it (in the additional content that Kui is gonna make) that renders this more or less useless I probably won’t update this anymore. If you find other crumbs of information or I've said anything factually incorrect please do tell me! I'm planning to edit this as we go since I want to compile most if not all of the information and pages we get about this topic on here, and if I just wait to post it perfection paralysis will nip this in the bud. It focuses a lot on Chilchuck and Chilchuck's wife relationships, but the daughters and Chilchuck's own parents and siblings are talked about as well.

CW/disclaimer: This post talks about messy family dynamics and such, there’s no outright abuse I’m implying anywhere, but alcoholism and neglect are mentioned and discussed. I’m not here to demonize anyone! I love every character involved and I just want to theorize about the topic as a layered issue that involves complex characters. Also, I try to use very transparent language as to when I’m citing or analyzing canon information and when I’m giving a personal interpretation or headcanoning.

Abbreviated table of content:

Timeline and circumstances

Possible strains on the marriage

The hair question. Confirmation on what his wife looks like?

Other family dynamic & post-canon theories & headcanons

Parenting style + misc in a reblog addition (new)

Let’s start with the facts, shall we?

Timeline and circumstances

So, we see that Chilchuck and his wife are childhood friends, and they married at 13 years old and had two children in that same year. Since half-foots reach the age of maturity at 14, they seem to be what we'd call teen parents. It's a bit debatable though, since Laios says the age of maturity for tallmen (humans) is 16 instead of 18 or even 21, so what's considered to be the age of maturity is a cultural thing and isn't fully reliable when we want to compare to our irl understanding and what developmental stage it perfectly aligns with. Also, during the succubus chapter Chichuck says that his daughters were all now of age to be independent, and Chilchuck's wife leaves to live with Flertom, which would mean that Puckpatti was independent at age 10 and lived away from home as well (since she's the third/last daughter). Ah yes another interesting thing to note is that we don’t know the pregnancy periods for the races, since Meijack and Flertom were born the same year. It could be tight timing or it could be something else, but I don’t think they’re twins, they keep talking about them being the oldest and the middle child, them being twins is definitely the sort of thing that would get mentioned.

Him starting working on the island notably happens just one year before his wife leaves him. I don't remember the other instances of him mentioning it though I feel like it happened, but since he started working at the Island's dungeon, working as a dungeon diver and then forming the half-foot guild, that probably means he started being away for longer periods of time and having a less reliable schedule on when he'd be coming back home. It is said that he went back home somewhat regularly iirc, though he usually ends up sleeping at the half-foot guild quarters. I'm not sure if Kahka Brud is also where he lived with his family, or just since he rented someplace new after she left him. He and his timeline state that he was born in a small village "northeast of the island", which he left at 14 one year after being married, but it isn’t stated where they go after so it’s unsure how far his home was from the island if it wasn’t in Kahka Brud. We don’t know when his father died so if that factors in to him leaving his village we have no clue.

Chil also says that he hasn’t seen or spoken with his wife nor daughters since the incident, which would mean he's gone 4 years without contact with his family during the events of canon. I don't remember if Chilchuck is said to exchange letters with his daughters, beyond the initial one from Flertom saying her mother was with her, so I've been assuming he hasn't.

He also says "For about ten years I’ve been travelling to dungeons in various areas and doing work" which considering he’s turning 29 that year would mean he started around 19 years old? The panel also gives details what sort of work he’s been doing. Either way it’s confirmed that Chilchuck travels for his work a lot.

In addition, since Chilchuck has the seal of approval of the bicorn + says so himself, he has always stayed faithful to his wife. So that means that unless he's had previous adventures before he was 14 and got married, he's never dated anyone else in his life, nor had romantic or sexual encounters/experiences with others in his 16 years of marriage right up to canon (year 514). I feel it’s safe to say that it’s implied that during all these years starting from when they were married, Chilchuck's wife was a housewife whose main job was taking care of the kids and the house.

Marcille's take on what happened is unreliable, as Kui even takes the time to directly say so in the Adventurer's Bible, so I don't want to use it as a baseline even if it offers some insight on what could have happened (her feeling out of place, leaving to test his love, etc etc).

What Chilchuck says seems to be accurate though since it pertains to his perspective of the events! Unlike how Marcille's theory flows, Chilchuck was aware that something was off before she left since she "suddenly fell into a bad mood".

Piecing everything together, my theory: Chilchuck and his wife were childhood friends and have always always sort of danced around of each other, the classic movie love story with childhood sweethearts, until they ultimately confessed and got together. While dating, Chilchuck's wife becomes pregnant and they're both unequiped to deal with the situation but decide to marry, either a bit forced in order to cover it up or hopeful to make the best of it. They make it work as they can and Chilchuck works to provide for the family while she takes care of the home and the kids, which means that even though he's not a deadbeat father (he cares, he was at least a bit involved in their lives and raising them since for example he knows how to braid hair after all) he ends up being rather absent from home. It only gets worse over the years, especially when Chilchuck starts working further and further away from home and coming home less often, and since Puckpatti left home Chilchuck's wife is alone at home most of the time, never knowing when Chilchuck would be coming and if to prepare the table for two instead of one, or even if he'd be coming back at all since his work is dangerous. The humdrum and lifestyle would get to her, they've grown into different people in these 10 years of marriage and she doesn't feel the spark or feels valued & seen anymore, so she leaves. He feels confused and betrayed which turns into anger so he doesn’t try to reach out and mend things, and with the way he says they’re estranged and he moves away I think he’s avoiding his family somewhat.

Possible strains on the marriage

Tfw all your daughters are independent and your husband is gone to work almost all the time and he barely even tells you that he loves you, is there even a reason to stay together anymore? Every day it’s just you and an empty house and chores to do, wondering if you have to cook for one or for two today.

Alright it’s analysis and theorizing time! Although there are more facts down in this post if you care about Chilchuck's wife's appearajce, Chilchuck's parents & siblings or the kids, the essential facts so to speak were all in the first part.

We don't see Chilchuck showing any discontent with his wife through the manga so I'm assuming that he was content in his marriage, happy with his wife, and with how he stayed faithful to her even in the 4 years after she left (and never stopped calling her his wife. Which also shows a weird stubborn attitude since he wasn’t planning on reaching out to her and mend things but I’ll put aside the possible entitlement/coping mechanism for another time) I think he truly loved her and still does. Since she left him and not the reverse, I'm putting a lot of emphasis on his wife's side of things. Especially since we do see how Chilchuck is at work quite a bit but never see how he is at home. I’ll be sounding harsh towards Chil on this but he’s pretty much the only party we can criticize since we don’t know her, I still side with Chil on the leaving issue though, he’s justifiably pissed if she left without a word what the hell even.

Alcoholism and health

Chilchuck’s favorite food as listed in the Adventurer’s Bible is beer, and it’s shown that he’s prone to drinking until drunk whenever he gets the opportunity to. A cheerful drunk is still a drunk. (Extra reading: if interested here's a oneshot FMA fanfic by a friend that goes in depth about this very topic that really illustrates what sort of family dynamic that can bring about. It’s not dunmeshi but it’s a good read.) Chilchuck is also canonically underweight, starving himself for a strict weight management diet (Extra reading: you can look at a short compilation post about that here). Did you know under eating makes one irritable? And this is on top of Chilchuck sometimes/regularly coming back home with "horrible injuries", since Marcille guesses it and he acts like she’s dead right on everything that far.

It’s rough seeing someone you love mistreat themselves, not being able to shake them out of that and having to stay to see them wasting away. It’s rough seeing them put their work above their own health. Putting their work even above their family. Putting alcohol over family time. It's not that simple, but there's always that element when asking someone you love to tone it down with things like alcohol or such, that if they refuse, then it feels like they value that thing more than they value your feelings or opinions. That they love alcohol more than they love you.

You know how there’s often this thing of "Well I’m providing everything for this family, so whatever else that I do you don’t get to complain." I do think that it’s something they’d have argued over a little bit, not that he’d say it that way, but the essence of it. "Chilchuck, you’re drinking a lot of alcohol often, I’m worried maybe you should ease up on it." "This is what I want to do in my free time, give me a break.", "Dear, your mood gets worse when you’re hungry, I really think you should stop dieting-" "Would you rather I die in a trap because I was too heavy?", "Honey I don’t like when you work so far away from home for so long" "Well what else can I do, do you have any better idea?". That sort of thing. Even if not being passive agressive or snappy, or even spoken upon, these situations can cause tension, or a feeling of powerlessness or imbalance in the relationship. Although I personally feel like they were both rather passive in their relationship (thus having little arguments), which itself can be a problem since yes they let each other live but they grew more distant and less communicative as a result, more on that later. Content and tolerating, rather than happy and fulfilled.

Workaholism and long distance

Spending a lot (or even a majority?) of time away from home for years and years obviously can strain relationships in many ways. Besides becoming more distant, both with his wife and his daughters, there's just that side that maybe you grow apart or you end up not knowing them all that well. Like the fictional dialogue excerpts I wrote just above, the way Chilchuck puts work above most things can by itself be the source of a lot of unhealthy habits and strains that could not only hurt himself but his relationships too. Devoted doesn’t mean attentive, even if Chilchuck 100% devotes himself to only her romantically and works in the goal to support her that doesn’t transfer into being there for her, even when he physically is.

An absent father isn't necessarily a deadbeat father, but an absent father is absent. And alright, we don’t know what his schedule was like exactly, but he was busy and traveled around, I think it’s fair to assume that if we were to make comparisons it’d be like parents irl who are often on work trips. We don't know what Chilchuck's wife's social circle is like, but regardless of how big or small or supportive it is it would be easy to get lonely I think. Besides raising the kids undoubtedly falling more onto her shoulders as well. Managing a household can be very hard and tiring even when not alone, I can imagine she felt like she missed the support of Chilchuck either as help or comfort oftentimes. We know very little about her, but I don't get the impression that she'd build up resentment over it except maybe her ‘falling into a bad mood’, but exhaustion? Absolutely.

It’s also implied imo, even beyond Chil not often being at home, that they rarely go out together. And that could very well be part of why she was mad after the outing. In Marcille’s theory she says that her wife felt out of place amongst all the cool adventurer coworkers, and if it’s a rare time that they go out together and it was supposed to be about her meeting his coworkers… I feel like what could have happened was that she felt out of place yes, and even moreso if she ended up not participating in conversations much because of it and no one really seemed to care, and the evening was all Chilchuck and his coworkers chatting it up as always and she was an outsider, if she sort of just faded into the background, if it felt like nothing would have changed wether she was there or not... If she felt like her presence didn’t matter on this special outing that rarely happened, it could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for her to want to leave, definitely. He finally comes back after a long work travel and they finally go out and this is what their quality time is like? The outing that was supposed to be about her & them both ended up being all about him, and once more she was supposed to just orbit around him and his life without complaint or her own selfish wants like a devoted wife. With how Chil said that she got mad "all of a sudden" on the way home and he didn’t know why, plus that he was probably drunk (which may very well have made the whole thing worse), I feel like it supports that he didn’t pay her much attention during the evening, not that I’m assigning him ill intent at all, I’m sure that for him, it was a casual and fun night out and he didn’t think it'd been unpleasant or alienating for her.

That night

And all of this speculation in order to try and figure… What happened? Why did she leave? I've already gone into it a fair bit, but this is where I discuss it fully in depth.

We can’t rely on Marcille’s theory. Neither in the why she felt so out of place enough to want to leave, nor if her intention when leaving was to "test" him. I definitely agree that the reason why she left is layered and that the night/outing was the straw that broke the camel’s back more than the cause perse, but besides that it’s hard to say how much of it was impulsive and how much was because nothing else had worked to fix their relationship, or how long she'd been thinking of maybe leaving him.

Personally my favorite interpretation isn't that she found herself to be boring surrounded with Chilchuck's adventurer coworkers, or her reason for leaving is super centered around insecurity and if Chilchuck even loves her anymore, but that she sees how rich and eventful Chilchuck's life is and at the same time realizes how stagnant her own life has been. Chilchuck has adventurers for coworkers and they go out to bars and spend evenings together chatting it up, while she always does the same house chores every day and waits, and wonders, uncertain about when her huband would come back, and waits some more. She has a sort of passive role in her own life that gets pulled in one way or another by the people around her at their whims and needs, which is also a recurring theme in the manga: having a passive role in your own life, or a role that's devoted to others. Like with Falin who's always following her parents' directives or following Laios around, being the party's healer and eventually sacrificing herself for Laios and Marcille (she also doesn't seem to think much of marriage, as seen with Shuro proposing to her and her not having answered yet, which fits with how she was supposed to have an arranged marriage in her hometown too; a loveless marriage isn't something alarming to her). Izutsumi too, whose whole arc is about her gaining freedom and figuring out how to use this empowerment for herself and what she wants.

So she'd sit there, not knowing anyone except Chilchuck and not being able to follow their conversations about dungeons, and think about how this is a world she's totally apart from. How she knows so little of the world compared to him. She'd realize that while she's always waiting for Chilchuck to come home, dedicated to him and their family, Chilchuck's world doesn't stop and end at where and when he sees her, that while she's waiting he's living and experiencing things and being self-fulfilled. She's so passive and devoted and her tasks seem almost senseless now that the house is empty except for her, and in that time he's formed half-foot unions and she understands so little of what his life has become outside of her sight. This isn't a diss on Chilchuck or his attitude, I just think that it'd make her ponder about happiness and lifestyles, what's worth it and if she's content with her life. I think she'd find that her and Chilchuck aren't on the same page anymore, and probably they don't communicate much or even that they don't know how to communicate with each other anymore.

Other factors

They really do seem to be on different pages and not know how to communicate with each other well, since for example Chilchuck thinks that on the way back home she "suddenly" fell into a bad mood and seemingly left it alone, or otherwise they didn't talk until he knew what was wrong. Or like how she left and Chilchuck never reached out to her to talk or mend things, just like she never reached out either. According to Marcille it could be that she wanted to "test his love" and see if he'd even care if she was gone, but Chilchuck just got angry that she left like that and never reached out to her, so if that's true they definitely have incompatible expectations or ways to deal with things like that. Maybe she thought of leaving as something he should react to by trying to win her back, but Chilchuck did nothing and let her do her thing, and tbh if that were me I'd also have waited on her to reach out because I figure out that if someone leaves me they want space from me idk. He seems to be rather passive when it comes to interpersonal relationships and how they can mess up, made an analysis post here that talks about it, so the way he reacted by not reacting doesn't feel surprising, maybe she didn't know/remember that part of him, or wanted to shake him out of that tendency. He has no clue why she left, and there are just so many misunderstandings here that it's impossible to know what happened and how she felt and what she wanted for the future.

Also, we’re shown that younger Chilchuck, when he started dungeon crawling, is much more "innocent" and optimistic, less closed off on himself and bitter, and maybe he hasn't even developed his famous "sarcastic retorts" and "abusive remarks" yet as is plastered on all his character introductions and stats. Chilchuck has definitely changed a lot over the years, and some would argue not for the better. Staying with someone for so long has implications that they'll change and be different of course, but signing up for marriage with someone can still leave you questioning that choice decades down the line when they're so different

We get to see his freckles fade in sync with his corruption arc /j

Tfw when you can’t recognize the man you fell in love with.

The hair question

Edit 1/13/2024 leak!!!! Things aren’t officially confirmed but this is a safe bet. You can still read this section to see my reasoning to thinking she had black hair prior to this tho haha

It's not all that important rationally, but the community's been split on the topic: is Chilchuck's wife blonde or not?

Kui highlights Chilchuck being attracted to blondes a grand total of three times, and many assume that his wife is blonde due to this. However, the only vision we see of Chilchuck's wife is Marcille imagining herself as a halfling, so it's up for debate! Flertom has black hair, and that's mostly been the key clue that has people arguing.

I'm not an expert in genetics but black hair is a dominant gene, but it also doesn't mean a black haired parent can't have a brown haired kid, or that two brown haired parents can't have a kid with black hair. As long as one of the parents have it in their genetic code from somewhere in their family tree, it's possible, if not maybe unlikely.

People have been taking Flertom having black hair as evidence that Chilchuck's wife has black hair, but it could be Chilchuck that has the gene and could pass it on. Although...

That seems unlikely. We don't know what Chilchuck's elder brother's hair color was, and his elder sister does have a darker brown hair color, but in the case their parents had black hair or the gene for it, it seems highly unlikely if not impossible for the dominant black hair gene to miss this many amount of time in the gene russian roulette game.

And so I shall now call a witness to the stand, and you reader shall be the judge… Dandan.

You know, this guy? He makes appearances throughout the whole manga, but only has one spoken line in an easy to brush over flashback iirc. He's most often seen hanging out around Chilchuck and other half-foots, but it's unsure how far back he and Chilchuck go.

Now. Remember how Chilchuck and his wife are childhood friends? What if, and hear me out, what if Dandan is related to her. A cousin, or a sibling. Or maybe he's Chilchuck's cousin, even, if we go the reverse route.

The chapter cover

Look at the chapter cover below! We see each member of the main party at a table that's meaningful to them and their history, mostly showing themes of family, community and routine. Laios and Falin sharing a meal by themselves, Marcille at a meal in the cafeteria at the magic academy, Senshi by himself cooking in the dungeon, Izutsumi with Inutade at the Nakamoto household, and... Chilchuck, surrounded by much more mysterious and unknown characters and surroundings.

The only face we see besides the infant is a young one on the left which strikes me as looking a ton like Chilchuck! I doubt it's Meijack or Puckpatti, or someone else, especially since Chilchuck left his hometown pretty early which must make family gatherings harder (and routine is implied with the others’ panels). If it were Meijack I think Kui would have drawn it to more closely match her too, and have her usual freckles. I also don't think it's just Chilchuck and his own family, since if that's Chilchuck the only sibling with black hair he could have is his elder brother and the infant in the middle is clearly, well an infant.

My thoughts are that the table is shared with family friends, or at least members of the community. The elderly person implies that either there's extended family or it’s a gathering, especially if Chilchuck's grandparents don't live with them. Community is implied to be very important with half-foots imo, and if Chilchuck is from a small hometown like he says that would surprise me even less. Childhood friends are often brought together as friends because of circumstances, such as proximity or their families being friends! Doesn't that kid almost off-panel on the right, with a Flertom-like hairstyle and black hair, look to be the same age as the Chilchuck on the left? 👀

Also… Notice the dragon plush she’s holding?

Passed down from mom to daughter? The "most likely belonged to his daughters" is interesting too

If he is related, Dandan could be the infant. I suppose he doesn't end up mattering all that much in the end if you theorize that the Flertom-like kid is his wife on its own though haha. But wether or not you think that this is convincing enough, it's all we have on the topic for now.

Ah yes! Lastly, I've seen the sentiment around that his wife should be blonde, that Chilchuck's taste for blondes, if not the thing that brought them together, should be an acquired taste from loving his wife. That if that's not the case, then Chilchuck's type being blondes is either out of place or insuting or unromantic, etc etc. I can't help but disagree! I think, especially with how Chilchuck and his wife are domestic and all about knowing each from a young age, familiarity etc etc, that it would be so sweet if she wasn't his type! Loving someone so deeply, even if they aren't an idealized type... Which is a common theme/story & character beat in Dungeon Meshi.

Family dynamic theories

Meijack is the most capable, takes after her father the most, seems to have her own business as a locksmith but has a stable steady life. Flertom is the most social, she works at a tavern which seems stable and is ambitious with marriage plans, she has a caring side to her since she sent her dad a handmade gift. Puckpatti is the most upbeat, though she has the most unstable lifestyle, seemingly doing odd jobs.

His daughters do seem well adjusted, which encourages me in that their family seems amicable on the whole and (at the very least) decently functional. We don’t hear what they think of Chilchuck but presumably none of them are on bad terms with him or each other. Flertom does say that "half-foot men are stingy" which, gee, I wonder what half-foot man would have made taught her that- though it does also seem to be a racial stereotype in general, with how for example Namari also says to "steer clear from stores with half-foot clerks".

Flertom seems to be the only one who reached out after their mother left (the only one who's mentioned to have done so at least), and it's because she was the one who took in her mother. It’s not implied that they exchange letters regularly too iirc, it possibly was the only letter they've exchanged since then. I wonder if the daughters even know the full story, if their mother told them all about it or very little. Maybe some are pretty out of the loop, or more distant.

It strikes me that they don't seem to be very close. We're not shown anything that leads us to believe they don't like their father, but I think they're so used to him being absent for work that such distance is normal for them and they don't really long for a deeper relationship or to see him often. They were already out of the house and it seems like they didn't see each other much at that time either so for them it would be just a bit less than the regular amount of Dad time. It's been 4 years Chilchuck what are you doing... But yeah! From what we see they seem mostly unaffected, almost indifferent, not that we can truly tell. I imagine Flertom is the one most attached to Chilchuck with how she sent him a handmade cowl, and I think he rubbed off the most on Meijack teachings wise (besides her attitude, she’s also the one who still wears braids, and we see that Chilchuck braids hair). It makes sense, since they're oldest, and on the contrary I think Puckpatti is the one that knows her father the least. It'd fit the timeline with him working away more while she grew up imo.

Wouldn't it be interesting then that she's the one that Chilchuck says is carefree, in the official translation "doesn't treat life real seriously"? That she's the most optimistic, the most go-with-the-flow, out of the bunch? To me that sounds like a result from her being the youngest and Chil being the most often at work, thus her getting raised by her mother without as much involvement from Chil. Far be it from me to say Chilchuck would raise his daughters to be unhappy btw, not at all, we just all know what down-to-earth values he wants others to have so he doesn't have to worry about them.

Although… Puckpatti spotted?? Seems like he wants to stop her from buying something? His heart meter for her is full <3 (Note: I’ve seen it be argued that this could be his wife. I disagree, since the "stop them" and way that the long haired one is off-center compared to everyone else gives the sense that it’s many of his daughters, and the fact that it’s styled after a dating sim doesn’t mean it’s romantic love as we see with the others. Otherwise imagine being her wife and he tells you not to buy stuff when you go shopping together rip)

Headcanons time:

When naming the daughters, together they choose a pool of names they’d like but only one has the final say, and they alternate between who that is. Chilchuck sticks around more near the end of her pregnancies, and he hasn’t missed any of their births. I don’t have any opinions on who named who right now, but there could be some interesting stuff to theorize with Puckpatti, like them taking extra care picking the name together because they settled on her being their last daughter for fluff, or it was supposed to be Chilchuck but he was so busy that he ended up not picking in time and she was the one to name her for angst.

Actually scratch that I have a new theory : What if it’s actually customary for each parent to pick one half of their half-foot kid’s name? So then each would have chosen half of each girl’s name… And this could be why Chil calls Puckpatti Patti instead of Puck which is her first name, because he’s stubborn since Patti was his pick lmaoooo. Pattipuck doesn’t have the same ring to it alas, his wife was so right

Chilchuck liked to do activities with the girls when they were young. He's not opposed to relaxing at home with them perse, but he likes to do workshops with stuff like arts & crafts to develop their agility some. I don't think they'd do much outings to places like restaurants or theatres for money reason, and I don't think Chilchuck is much of an outdoors type, but he could accompany them to nice fields to play in, or in winter places to play in snow and sled, and organize some activities at home. He's not home very often so when he is he likes to take it easy as a break from work and values the time he gets with his family.

Chilchuck would sometimes work from home as a locksmith, say, unlocking a chest for a customer. In those times, Meijack would take interest and watch him work, even handing him the tools he needs as he goes. In this way, Chilchuck taught her a lot about the work of a locksmith over time. He's also the one that would oil door hinges or do renovation around the house- when he's available.

Like the plushies under his table in his home that we see in illustrations, Chilchuck has a lot of mementos from his daughter (and his wife) he keeps around. Sometimes they take a bothersome amount of place, but throwing anything out isn't something he's seriously willing to consider. Flertom's the most artistic and she used to help with sewing clothes back together, so he has a cheap ceramic mug painted by her when she was really young and small embroideries around.

Imo Meijack would be the most distant in the present. Flertom makes efforts for her parents and is pretty involved, and Puckpatti's distance is more out of being a bit airheaded and being busy + not having a great grasp on time or what's a normal amount of family contact, but Meijack's the one who knowingly and intentionally keeps some distance. I think she’d be the least optimistic about their family situation, and although she’d be hopeful when Chilchuck reached out to them again she’d be a but hesitant. I think Meijack would hold some grudges, being the one most critical of their parenting, both grateful to her dad for working so hard for them and saddened that he wasn't in their life more. Since Flertom was born in the same year I think it’s possible that Meijack was pushed aside a bit to take care of the younger baby more, out of necessity rather than lack of love. Her mom probably needed a lot of help around the house too. Flertom wasn’t blind either, and she cared about & noticed her mom’s emotional states, but she’s on the whole more hopeful and forgiving.

This is my most far fetched one but it is a hc after all, but I think it'd be interesting if one of them had food hoarding tendencies/stress. I like to think it's Flertom, because she's the middle child and would get told that her older sister and younger sister are "growing and need the food" so she wouldn't be allowed to take as much refill or such, add that to them not having much money to frivolously spend on food and that makes a kid who's worried about not eating to her hunger and tends to be possessive over food (I'm projecting). Differential treatment is inevitable in families with many siblings, and it can manifest in small or big ways, maybe they realize it maybe they don't. Working in a tavern has helped eased that tendency of her though, and while she does diet a bit she always leaves a meal feeling satisfied.

When they were younger, Flertom was a real firecracker, loud and spirited with some troublemaking tendencies! She was the daughter that got in trouble & got scolded the most. You can still see slivers of it now that she’s an adult, but she’s much more poised and diligent. She has much more acquaintances than friends, but she has a couple of best friends and usually gets along well with most people. Puckpatti was always a bit head in the cloud, very kind if not gullible, and tended to make friends somewhat easily but didn’t keep them for long, preferring to keep meeting new people and not keeping in touch well. She isn’t super talkative but tends to ramble when she does. Meijack is very introverted, she has more trouble making friends, she has a good handful though they don’t meet up often, her friendships tend to last and she’s close to them. She’s grown more confident over the years, less repressed and more quiet. Meijack as the big sister tended to be the listener for her younger sisters who had more social mishaps. Flertom has dated once before and it only cemented to her that she was going to have very high standards from then on.

Meijack wears thigh-high boots because she hates when sand, dirt or snow gets in her shoes. She wears practical clothing but avoids anything frilly or flashy. Puckpatti also dresses practically, but she does enjoy pretty clothes, it’s more out of necessity and due to not having enough money to indulge. Flertom has a social stable job and she loves prettying herself up (especially as she’s in search of a husband) so she’s the one who gets the most and nicest fashionable clothes and accessories.

Chilchuck is hinted to have had a rather dysfunctional family himself (alcoholic father, distant siblings, etc). So he doesn’t really have the best model on how to raise someone and such. I imagine it was a sort of neglectful home situation, where the kids are encouraged to be independent. If they didn’t have to work or help around much, then free range parenting sort of thing. We do see how the family has full and warm feasts, where someone cleans his mouth with a rag, so it’s not like he didn’t have a caring circle or a tragic childhood though! I don’t remember if it’s explicitely stated, but he’s heavily implied to having grown up poor, as most half-foots, and I just think it's the hardened hardworking family type of childhood where just like he does with others they instill somewhat harsh life lessons in him, which in turn encourages him to indulge in the simple pleasures of life like alcohol and sex, or at least women’s beauty and crass jokes. We do see he seems more optimistic when he's younger in flashbacks, so a bunch of his harsh view on the world is still likely learned and earned rather than taught. I still think he inherited many flawed views from how his father acted, like his attitude about excessive drinking not being a big deal and worth it. That work hard play hard, enjoy life die young mentality he has, shown mostly in the "alcohol" section of his Adventurer's Bible profile, could very well be partly a result of the general poverty half-foot communities are that he grew in as well, like how he doesn't hope for things to be as best as they could be and contends with good enough. As far as I remember, his mother is never mentioned, but I doubt it implies she was out of the picture. She was probably a regular sort of mother that took care of the home as well and was still around when his father died. It looks like there’s a good age gap between one sibling to the next, that could be interesting to dig into too.

A part of Chilchuck’s character is that he takes responsibility for safety and actions of people around him and is very often looking out for them to not do faux-pas wether socially or literally with stepping onto traps. The way he says "I’ve got three people to think of here" makes me think that’s also how he’d think about having to provide for his family, and that could be a source of stress and insecurity for him. Caring for others is a pretty integral part of his character and we see time and time again that his family is very important to him, in any case.

Post-canon

This pic has so much to say!! It’s the ‘thank you for reading’ double page spread where they’re going to a big dining table at the castle with Laios and the main gang. First family gathering in 4 years perhaps?! I’ll say, not feeling very hopeful that his wife isn’t in this, not even implied to be just off-panel with a hand or anything… I imagine before this he still talked to them at least a bit and figured their family situation out, but I think this is still in the early stages of reconnecting. Haha imagine being one of them and receiving a letter saying "Hi it’s been a while… I want to introduce you to my ex-coworker the king and his friends, you up for that?" I don’t want to reconsider all my hcs for this yet, but this pic does seemingly show an eagerness from all the daughters to reunite and reconnect! Meijack’s could be seen as more hesitant, but I think it’s just awkwardness from meeting so many new people, of high status no less. Chilchuck does seem awkward and somewhat self-conscious though, and while that could be just from say Marcille and the others meeting his daughters and him not knowing how to act, I think that also shows that Chilchuck is unsure how to act around his daughters too. Can’t blame him, I’d be stressed too. Anyways, the daughters are all dressed up! Puckpatti even brought flowers! And I doubt it’s just for Senshi, or just to be in with the king. Oh also also, Puckpatti chides Meijack here, seemingly on manners?, so that implies new/different family dynamics there~

We know with the succubus chapter that he does plan on reaching out to his wife again and shooting his shot, and when Marcille was dungeon lord he told her she could help think of a plan to make up with her together at which point Marcille showered him in gifts and flowers intended for her and his daughters. So we do know that whatever happens and however it happens, Chilchuck definitely will at least reach out to her to win her back or worse case scenario get closure on the situation.

-

These are his plans before it’s revealed that the Island is… Well, not an island but the golden kingdom, so the news that Laios is king and that might have changed them a bit, but I think he’s still gonna stick around to help with the half-foot guild for a while.

My personal ideal post-canon Chilchuck life is that after around a year or two of helping around in the golden kingdom, especially regarding half-foot working rights, he gets his shop and finally settles down. He prioritized the whole half-foot guild because there are changes to attend to and people to help, but also used that to procrastinate a bit on getting in touch with his wife again. He does send a letter though, and when she replies they then meet face to face. They explain how it was like on their end, their grievances and their feelings, and they do reconcile. But… It’s been 4 years and his wife has frankly moved on. She’d rather they stay as friends, and Chilchuck has mixed feelings on it but is ultimately fine with it. He was halfway resigned to not reconciling with his wife in canon after all. But no longer do they have cut contact! They get together with the girls for the holidays and the ambiance is nice! He starts exchanging letters more regularly. He also gets a second family of clingy asses with Izutsumi and the main gang and so though he lives alone in his shop he’s well surrounded and well loved, and his daughters visit to check up on him every so often.

I really like the… Maturity of Chilchuck’s plotline, if that makes sense? To me the ending that fits the most is him and his wife reconciling, but not getting back together. I like that they could still be adults about it and at least amicable even after divorce, and that that wouldn’t be treated as a tragic ending. In the end, they were childhood friends and teenage parents, they rushed things a bit and I genuinely think they’re just not that compatible. If not then, at least having it be a gradual process, getting back together and making it work until they’re truly comforatble with each other. Destroy the relationship to better build it again stronger!

Although, his arc in the manga is to allow himself to form connections and be optimistic, which would fit well with him and his wife getting back together. I def think Chil would get healthier post-canon which could fix the issues they had in their relationship though. Like for one he starts eating more, which improves mood & irritability & health, and also after the whole half-foot guild he plans to settle down with a shop so it wouldn’t be long distance or unstable anymore which would definitely give his wife some peace of mind. If they still do some long distance at first while he gets the half-foot guild stable, it’d be really cute if he sent pressed flowers with his letters to her… That could make a nice fic concept, like over time all the pressed flowers and exchanged letters hehe (oh shit that’s a nice title)

My post-canon timeline is Chilchuck lives a nice life living alone in his house except his friends all visit him and care and even tho he likes living alone it’s also bittersweet and every corner of his life is haunted by mementos of the ones he loves and the moments he had with them. But then it’s also like the shared duty of everyone to pass by his shop when they can and keep the old man company and sometimes that means many people come at the same time like if both Meijack and Marcille came the same day~ Cozy life, no regrets except a lil regrets still. That’s it that’s all I want.

Misc

I didn’t know where to put this, so new category time! Family truly is a central theme of Chilchuck’s character. His reaction to learning more about how life gets made is so awed by the wonder of the world. Life indeed…

The implication of this page is that Chil didn’t know about the science side of how procreation works, though of course he did know about the practical side of it. This is speculation, and we have no clue how widespread the information of how reproduction scientifically works lol, but I think it’s fair to think that half-foots’ education especially in smaller communities is handled by the parent, school of life style, or if there are schools then the education is very general and it probably ends early. I think this is supported by how for example half-foots’ jobs we’ve seen are based on experience rather than knowledge, like being a locksmith. Of course any job has its fair share of specialized knowledge to learn, but jobs you learn on the fly pretty well. This sort of dynamic contrasts a lot against elves many tallmen communities, like with the magic academy, where education and knowledge are valued almost above experience, this is what the mandrake chapter was all about after all. Poorer communities tend to have poorer education systems as well irl, it’s a whole issue.

So I already said my piece about his wife not being blonde and it being nice and romantic because literally you don’t need someone to be a beauty ideal to love them and that’s fine and normal and even more romantic imo. But!! I do have an headcanon, now that his wife’s appearance is all but explicitly confirmed. While their hair is blonde, yes their hair is wavy and the ‘main’ one has deep-set eyes, not unlike his wife! Now this is a ‘which came first the egg or the chicken’ question, but while most people seem to be assuming that he got with his wife because she was his type, since they’re childhood friends I feel like it’s his love for his wife that shaped his preferences in that deparment. Like ok he loves golden hair and hers is black, but isn’t it so much more romantic that he has so much love and devotion for his wife and has stared lovingly at it so much over the years, that it’d become his ideal? He loves her eyes <3

Conclusion

Reminder that I’ve got more stuff in a reblog addition now. What I've got left to add at some point:

Compile more info on Chilchuck's father and his other family

Reread the manga and catch details like exchanged letters & his work schedule. Reword some things to repeat myself less maybe

A buddy is planning to make a name analysis post for everyone, and I might have more to say especially about the daughters once I know what possible meaning their names have

Other stuff I may be forgetting about

And thus I leave you with a lil web weaving I made about Chil & his wife’s relationship~ And this is where I’d put panels of Chilchuck’s wife… IF THERE WERE ANY

Should we call Chilchuck's wife Mrs. Tims... We don't know dunmeshi marrital traditions though, and half-foot already have somewhat complex naming conventions... I hate that we don't really know if the daughters' last names are Chils or Chilz. Oh yeah the last names change each generation, that’s odd right? But in english it sounds like saying Chil’s, like, [father]’s, so I think this also supports how half-foots communities tend to be tightly knit and live in the present, for them to be like "Ooh so you’re [father]’s little one eh? I know who that is and this is insightful as to who your family is to me!". Iceland’s a place where last names are like this, though I don’t know about pros and cons of it in that context

Ah and I have a bittersweet spotify playlist about her and Chil too, here if ya want. That’s it the post is over

#dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi manga spoilers #spoilers #chilchuck tims #delicious in dungeon #chilchuck's wife #chilchuck’s family #Tims family #puckpatti #meijack #flertom #Analysis #Meta #Despite my best tries I am not omnipresent it's always fun when piecing together these topics is a community effort!! #please do build upon this if you have anything to add #but yeah editing is up in the air. I'll probably be adding stuff maybe even cutting stuff out #this is a giant post i am slightly overwhelmed #Kui puts so much importance in details it's incredible. It truly feels worthwhile to get into the weeds #We support chilchuck’s wife on this blog #I covered how stressful her life could have been a bit in my Grind Me Down Sweetly fic funnily enough if ya want to give it a read. It has #Daughters mentions too hehe. And my post-canon marchil take #Oh also if there’s already theory and compilation posts out there about this i’m down to link them in or smth. I haven’t seen it done but #If it’s been then i’m very interested in reading & seeing #Apparently chilchuck being an absent dad is a heated debated topic. Oops #Pls do not murder me… Peace and love in the dungeon meshi fandom? He’s my second fave have mercy on this humble stan #This is 7k words btw. Pls do pick and choose what you’re interested in or skim or take breaks or anything

[homochadensistm]

Why do you hate Arabs so much?

I dont 'hate Arabs', I hate people who actively want me dead. I hate Islamic extremists and Arab ultranationalists just as much as I hate Jewish extremists and Israeli ultranationalists like Bezalel Smotrich, or Baruch Goldstein, or Miri Regev, or the common Eliran outside screaming for actual apartheid. I hate people who would shove me in a camp for being either Jewish or gay the moment theyll legally be able to. I hate people who dont view me as human because Im Jewish or gay. I hate people who are incapable of reaching any form of middle ground and want all-or-nothing types of solutions. I hate people who want a Jewish/Islamic theocracy as a country. I hate people who think more violence is the solution to everything, be it the ones who think raping and murdering random Israelis is justified or the ones who think that holding on to the despicable current status quo in the West Bank is A NecessityTM. I hate people who formulate their opinions on the conflict based on either feelings alone or facts alone, incapable of bridging between the two in a sensible way. I hate people who are so terrified of looking at their own culture, be it Israeli or Arab, in an objective way; who are terrified of pointing the finger at the things that make said culture violent/unjust because it will break whatever narrative they set up for themselves. I hate people who take pride in ruining the lives of others, be it terrorists who upload GoPro footage of their murders or IDF soldiers who upload cute uwu videos of mindless beatings/torture of palestinian detainees or pillaging a random Gazan's house. I hate people who mindlessly and uncritically consume content online with the sole purpose of vilifying The OthersTM, and people who uncritically consume said content in a language+cultural context they dont even understand. I hate people who put videos in Arabic through an uwuification/woobification process and translate the word 'Yahoodi' to 'Israeli' to avoid admitting that antisemitism is rife within Arab society and is taught from a young age. I hate people who view the Druze as 'our brothers' because they serve in the army and dont complain but treat Israeli Arabs like shit because they dont serve in the army and do complain. I hate people who derive the value of others from their Loyalty To The StateTM whether its the Israeli state or The Palestinian StruggleTM. I hate people who view others as either 'Arab' or 'Israeli' instead of complex human beings capable of both good and horrible things. I hate people who distort history for clout and political gain. I hate people who talk shit on anon because theyre too much of a pussy to have a conversation attached to their username.

And most of all,

#israel #palestine #jokes on you I am racist against everyone equally

[t00thpasteface]

the thing about academic literature is that sometimes incredibly complex hyperspecific terminology and phrasing really is the best, clearest, most efficient way to communicate a concept while minimizing nuance and potential for misinterpretation. tbh it drives me up the wall when people take that personally and misconstrue it as elitism and deliberate obfuscation when the goal is to be as objective as possible in such an inherently subjective medium as written language. obvs some authors take it to an extreme— pretty common disclaimer for humans in general— but the rule of thumb is if you can choose between a common word or phrase that kinda matches the thing you need to say and has a variety of colloquial meanings, and a niche word that has exactly one definition, you should pick the niche one every time.

the other thing is that most academic literature is aimed at other academics, because that's who it's most vital and time-sensitive to reach with the info. entry-level science communication geared toward the layperson should not be expected from interacademic communication and scientific journals, the same way you wouldn't tell two ESL spanish-speaking people to speak english when chatting privately in their own home.

on top of all that, i think people criminally undervalue teachers and public speakers. "simple english" is deceptive; it's an entirely separate skill (and honestly an art form) to rephrase something complex into simpler terms, even if you know the actual concept front to back. asking someone who deals almost exclusively in academic vernacular to suddenly try and write in simple english for a layperson is an extremely tall order and devalues both the work they put into developing that academic-language mindset and the equally impressive work of educators who actually are able to perform that translation work and regularly do so as a career

#check out Thing Explainer by randall munroe if you want a brilliantly simple and funny feat of science communication in simple english! #shebbz shoutz

[sailoryooons]

Spider Web | JHS | (m)

☾ Pairing: Vampire!Hoseok x human!reader (afab)

☾ Summary: Playing games with vampires is a bad idea. Playing with Spiders is worse. 

☾ Word Count: 1,976

☾ Genre: Supernatural, Predator/Prey, Established Relationship, Smut

☾ Rating: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging and reading this content. It contains explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately. 

☾ Warnings:  Predator/prey dynamics, intense feelings of fear, reader is navigating a maze while unable to see at all, Hoseok taunting reader, minor injuries, explicit language, explicit sexual content including vaginal fingering, biting, dom/sub dynamics, subspace, feeling fear during sex, reader being both afraid and aroused and just going with it, implied relationship of some manner. 

☾ Published: Monday, January 15, 2024

☾ A/N: This might not be for everyone, but this is for me. This is not only self-indulgent but it was so fun to write. The third roll for the 100 Drabble Challenge was number 46 - Predator/Prey and I had the opportunity to do something that surprised me - write a piece of a universe that I’ve wanted to write since I was in middle school. You heard that right - I have an entire outline/idea of a dystopian vampire novel where vampires rule and humans live under them with a complex political structure and rebel human groups and class war etc. that I have wanted to write since middle school and when I rolled this tonight… I was like what if I just use that world. In that world there are vampire guards call The Web that are broken up into three categories: Spiders, Widows and Venoms and they all have different purposes. In this case, Hobi is a Spider :) I’ve considered turning it into a fic so… let me know if you’re interested odigjdoigjdofgij 

A/N 2: This is unedited and I wrote it in roughly an hour pls excuse the errors etc. I will look back over it in the morning and fix them okay soifjsoigj

☾ Disclaimer: All members of BTS are faces and name claims for this story. This is entirely a work of fiction and by no means is meant to be a projection, judgment or representation of real-life people. Any scenarios or representations of the people and places mentioned in works are not representative of real-life scenarios.

Main Masterlist ☾ 100 Drabble Masterlist ☾ Ask ☾ 

“The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout,” a voice echoes. Your heart slams in your chest as you press your fingers against the sides of the wall, trying to feel your way through the maze. “Down came the rain and washed the spider out.” 

You should be used to the dark. Your life has revolved around the dark from the moment you took your first breath. Born in the dead of night during the hour of the predator. As a kid, you didn’t quite understand the hour of the predator. All you knew was that it meant to stay inside and not leave the building no matter what.

When you were older, you learned that walls and locks do not keep out predators. The notion that they keep their hunt to a single hour of the night is ridiculous. Now you know that vampires only let people think that they’re safe outside of that single hour of every night.

Like everything in the city, it is an illusion.

Inhaling shakily, you try to calm your breathing. The thud of your pulse in your neck and the rattling of your heart in your ribcage is a dead giveaway to this predator. Fear puts you on a razor's edge. A tingling sensation skitters along your skin like static as you keep one hand against the wall and the other in front of you, each step careful.

You can’t see in the darkness of the maze. He can. 

The disadvantage isn’t far. He’s better than you at most things: sight, smell, speed, strength - sadism, to be sure. But still, you’ve managed to evade him for far longer than he would like, and despite his taunting, you know it’s irritating him.

You smile. For vampires, most things are prey. For Spiders, all things are. 

“Perhaps we should change the lyrics of the song,” Hoseok calls. The hair on the back of your neck stands up. He sounds only a few rows over, making you quicken your steps. You’re barefoot and the ground is cold, making you shiver as you go. “The Spider doesn’t get washed out, but the little human does.”

The hand reaching in front of you hits the wall. You inhale and turn left, letting your right hand skim the corner and press against the new wall. You’ve hit a dead end twice and lost your sense of direction, but Hoseok hasn’t caught up yet. 

The thought makes you grin. You’re better at these games than you used to be, and you’re able to make faster decisions now. You also have managed to learn a thing or two about vampires. Somewhere, your socks and shoes are sitting in other corners. You’ve also dropped a jacket, making the entire maze smell like you. 

“Ah, the mouse has left a shoe for me.” 

Your heart beats faster. You only dropped that shoe moments ago, which means Hoseok is close. Too close. You’re not even sure what will happen if he wins - it’s always different. 

“I hear your heart, Mouse.”

The momentary panic makes you walk into a wall, banging loudly. Hoseok laugh is carried down a maze hall, chilling your spine. You throat caution to the wind, breaking into a run though you cannot see anything around you. 

In the dark, colors and shapes taunt you, your imagination filling in the gaps for the things you cannot see. Running wild totally unable to see is a terrible idea, you could run into-

You slam into a wall and let out a pained sound. Pain shoots up your wrist and you whimper, cradling it to your hand. A hiss echoes behind you and you run again, bad hand tucked to your chest as Hoseok closes in. 

“Yes!” he growls, glee in his dark voice. “Run, Mouse! I love it when you run!” 

You hardly recognize his voice through the growl, bloodlust taking over. Your instincts perceive a wall and you jerk to the left, skidding as you go. A speck of light beckons you and you gasp, realizing you can see the way out of the maze. You never make it that far. 

Without hesitation, you take off at a full sprint, the soles of your feet slapping against concrete, your heart pumping in your chest. Just a little further, almost there.

Hoseok snarls behind you and you scream, a primal fear exploding inside of you as your instincts sense the danger behind you, all other thoughts and feelings blotted out by the sheer force of terror. 

A force crashes into you, taking you down. You squeeze your eyes shut, jarred and waiting for the harsh impact of the concrete. It doesn’t come, instead softened by the blow of falling into Hoseok as he twists, taking the brunt of the impact. 

You’re dizzy, world spinning as the adrenaline tingles in your veins, your entire body feeling like it’s on pins and needles. In the dim light of the concrete building, you make out the shape of Hoseok under you. It doesn’t last long, the vampire rolling and pinning you with an ironclad grip to the floor.

A cry slips out of your mouth before you can stop it. It riles him up, Hoseok pressing in on you. He smells like rosewood and lavender, making your eyes flutter as Hoseok pulls your head backward against the old concrete, your skull digging in painfully as he noses your pulse. 

“You lose, Mouse.”

Hoseok’s voice rasps against your throat. Fear-laced pleasure blooms in your stomach. Where his mouth ghosts against your sweaty skin feels good, his words buzzing through you as his lips skim your neck toward your jaw.

You don’t dare move - can’t move. This is the part that you don’t understand, but don’t have to. Your body thrums with the innate terror of death. Adrenaline pumps through your system, parts of your brain screaming and alerting your organs that you’re in danger.

But there’s another part of your brain that goes fuzzy when you feel Hoseok’s fangs drag against your jaw. You can’t make out his features in the barely-there light of the building, but you catch the silver flash of predator's eyes when he glances up at you.

Once upon a time that gaze made you nearly soil yourself in horror. Now the wetness between your legs is entirely different, caused by the hell your nervous system goes through as it straddles fear and desire. 

“I smell you,” Hoseok breathes. His tongue snakes out to taste your salty skin and you can’t help the sound that comes out of your throat. It is equal parts a whimper as it is a moan. His lips are pressed against your cheekbone as one of his hands skims down your body. “You almost made it out this time.”

The ability to verbalize anything is lost on you. You can only squirm underneath his touch, sparking to life like cut livewires. A violent shiver wracks through your body as Hoseok presses his hands between your legs, causing a pulse of want to unfurl. 

You want more. You want none of it. You want both. 

“Next time try dropping your panties,” he whispers, pressing hard, painful kisses toward your ear. He bites your earlobe sharply at the same time he presses your clothed cunt, plain and pleasure dancing together. “That would certainly do it.”

“Never thought of that.”

Hoseok’s hand ventures up and grabs the waistband of your pants, pulling on them with a loud rip. It’s almost drowned out by the sound of your heartbeat in your ears. 

Your limbs start to shake in excitement as Hoseok catches your mouth with his. The kiss is sudden and demanding, completely inescapable. You kiss him back, drowning in the flurry of sensations hammering down on you, scrambling your thoughts, destroying your feelings. 

It’s always like this. He’s always able to do this. Hoseok has made an art of building you up and cutting you open, scattering every thought to the wind as he hunts you and beds you. Here with him you might not be safe, but at least you don’t think about being out there and being unsafe. 

This spider web you weave with Hoseok is high stakes, high reward. At least here if he kills you, you’ll be smiling. Out there when you die, no one will care.

Hoseok’s fingers hook your underwear to the side and pull. Cold air hits your hot, weeping hunt and you wiggle under him, trapped under his oppressive weight. He half growls, half purs as his fingers swipe up your sticky folds, avoiding your clit where all the pressure feels trapped.

You kick your feet under him, pressing up. You want more. Need more. The more he gives you, the more you feel the high of whatever this is between you. Hoseok knows this and gives in, playing nice as his fingers dip into your clenching hole to collect wetness before drifting back up, circling your clit.

A sound that is barely human escapes you. Hoseok has you pinned firmly underneath him as he starts to play. He carefully drags his fingers up and down, tracing your tightening entrance before drifting back up to apply pressure on your bundle of nerves.

“Little mouse is desperate tonight,” Hoseok pants. When he speaks, you can feel the sharp drag of his fangs on your cheek. “I bet you wanted to be caught.”

You shake your head no and he laughs, sinking a finger into your waiting heat. A strangled moan escapes you. Everything is on fire and you feel your cunt clench around his fingers. The concrete beneath you is too hot, Hoseok is too firm, his fangs on your skin are too sharp, you’re half afraid and half aroused - it all turns you into a mess, your mind tiptoeing on the edge of a blade between two nameless abysses. 

Hoseok thrusts his fingers up into you at an angle, pushing against that spot that makes you teeter dangerously. Your nails dig into your palms, leaving bloody crescents as Hoseok fucks you expertly with his fingers, drawing you to the edge of madness as he does it. 

Just as you think you’re about to tip one way or the other and plunge into darkness, Hoseok presses his mouth against yours, words slurred as he mumbles, “Ask.”

“Please.” Your words are slurred against his mouth, your breath hot and sticky. “Please let me. I need it. I - Hoseok - please.” 

His pace quickens. His thumb presses on your clit, wiggling. You feel it coming like a spool spinning thread, going and going and going until the spindle snaps and the thread comes unwound, spilling into his hand with a scream. 

Your ears ring. Your mind blanks. Your body goes so taught that it's only option is to go limp. You are vaguely aware that you’re gasping for air - you feel it more than you see it. You melt into the ground, unaware of anything but the static in your veins and the rush of air through your lungs.

In out. In out. In out. In out. 

You drift in the abyss. You’re unsure which one you fell into. Here, you are weightless and calm. 

In out. In out. In out. 

Nothing can hurt you here. There is no such thing as pain. There is only absolutely nothing but your breath and the buzzing on your skin.

In out. In out. In out. 

Eventually it wears off. Hoseok is still a firm weight against you, an anchor pulling you back. Your thoughts are syrup-slow and dizzy when you lift your too-heavy head to look at him. You cannot make out his features, but you get the sense he’s smiling. 

“Did you think we were done?” he rasps, a laugh in his voice. “You’ve only just fallen into the spiderweb, Mouse.” 

#hobi smut #hoseok smut #j hope smut #bts smut #hobi fic #hobi fanfic #hoseok fic #hobi x reader #hoseok x reader #vampire hobi #bts fanfic #hoseok x you #100 drabble challenge #okay but like trying to do j hope hobi hoseok tags is wild please why must i name him thrice

[buckets-of-dirt]

(ID: A screenshot of tags that read "#Prev what are some alternatives to the word primitive that are less derogatory" /end ID.)

@panicdeleter I'm responding to your question on a new post so that the op of the original doesn't get this in their notes because answering in good faith is going to take a lot of explanation.

Short answer: there isn't one.

Long answer: as you say in your tags, "primitive" is a derogatory term with a very loaded meaning. Removing it from your vocabulary is less a matter of finding a more PC alternative, and more a matter of understanding why it's derogatory and changing your perception of what's being discussed. To do that, we're going to have to look at archaeological theory for a minute. Stick with me, I do have suggestions at the end.

Archaeological theory is a complicated subject and there's no way I'm going to try to summarize all of it in a Tumblr post since it's a topic arch programs devote at least a semester (if not longer) to. So we'll focus on the relevant bits.

Essentially, in the bad old days when archaeology was starting to become a discipline instead of a thing rich dudes did on the weekends, there was this idea that certain European societies were the peak of civilization and everywhere else was less evolved and therefore primitive. It was based on the misunderstanding of the theory of evolution that was common at the time. Like so:

(ID: a diagram drawn in pen. It's titled "Ye Olde Arch/Anth Theory TM". The next line says "Primitive = simple, less evolved, bad". Below it there is a vertical arrow pointing down, with the words "one way line" next to it. Under the arrow there is a line of text reading "Advanced = complex, most evolved, good". /end ID.)

These early archaeologists believed that all of humanity lived on a hierarchy with the "advanced" societies they lived in (and their ancestors like Ancient Greece) at the top and all the "primitive" past and current societies (destined to either become like them or die out eventually) at the bottom.

It's been a long road for archaeological theory. The 20th century was fraught with theoretical movements and debates that sometimes literally devolved into fistfights. But eventually we all ended up more or less here:

(ID: A hand drawn diagram in a similar format to the one above. It's titled "Arch Theory Today (Short Version). Below the title there is a single line of text centred around a horizontal line with arrows at both ends. The left side of the arrow reads "simple" while the right side reads "complex". The line itself is labeled "continuum or spectrum". /end ID.)

While you'll still find some archaeologists who disagree, the main consensus appears to at least be on the same page that instead of the old primitive vs advanced hierarchy, societies exist on a spectrum that ranges in complexity. In the most basic terms, because I'm glossing over A LOT of nuance here, hunter gatherer societies tend towards the simple end of the spectrum while big state societies are on the more complex end. This is not meant as a value judgement of these societies, but merely an attempt to classify them so other people have a frame of reference for what you're talking about. Even so, there's considerable debate about the language used for certain terms and societies, and I am not necessarily qualified to go into that in this post.

I say all that to help you understand why I can't give you a catch-all term to replace "primitive", because if one did exist it would be just as derogatory. In certain contexts there may be more appropriate words that you can use, such as simple (as in the case of the meme that inspired this post) or old. But a lot of the time an alternative just doesn't exist because we are not better or 'more evolved' than our ancestors any more than people living in big state societies are any better than people still living as hunter gatherers.

I know this has been a very long post, but I really am just scratching the surface here. For more information I suggest looking at podcasts like The Dirt or A Life In Ruins, youtube channels like The Welsh Viking or Archaeology Tube, or the blogs of any of my fellow dirt lovers here on Tumblr like @chaotic-archaeologist, @micewithknives, @art-thropologist, @archaeologistproblems, and @rhysintherain to name just a few. Archaeologists are generally a bunch of nerds who will take any opportunity they can to talk about the human past, and we rarely bite.

#thanks for the question! #I hope this long rambly response was a decent answer

[flowerandblood]

The Taste of Shame (2)

[ dom!modern • Aemond x friend sister • female ]

[ warnings: doubts related to sex work, panic attack, remorse and depression, fluff, sexual tension ]

[ description: Aemond works as a professional dom, fulfilling the various fantasies of his female clients - however, he guards his privacy and does not enter into any relationships with them, recognizing that he does not want or need it. It turns out that what he wants and what he doesn’t no longer matter when he meets his friend’s younger sister for the first time. Slow burn, sexual tension, doubts related to sex work. ]

Series & Characters Moodboard Aemond NSFW Alphabet

* English is not my first language. Please, do not repost. Enjoy! *

Next chapters: Masterlist

_____

Walking to the lecture they talked about everything and nothing; for the most part, she was the one speaking, telling stories or asking questions, guiding her bike beside her by the handlebars, while he just added his thought or simply remained silent, listening to her.

They arrived at the Community Centre true to her word very quickly and indeed he immediately saw posters announcing that there would be free lectures by philosophers in the fields of contemporary ethics.

Robert's sister padlocked her bike in the designated area and they both went inside, following the signs. They entered a large, neo-classical hall with beautiful pillars and rich ornamentation on the ceiling, reminding him of a theatre or opera house.

They sat side by side on seats in one of the first rows − she explained to him that the presenter would be asking questions and, among others, her professor would be answering.

Indeed, the discussion was remarkably interesting and he caught himself drawn in; the men were talking among themselves about capital punishment, attitudes to the treatment of other humans and animals, warfare and human-wide conflicts.

However, he felt a cold sweat on his back and a tightness in his throat, his heart starting to pound like mad when the presenter asked the next question.

"As we know, a lot of young people start, as they say in modern times, sexworking − whether they show up on webcams or have sex for money. How do you, Professor, view this, do you think it's good for the psyche of such people? Is it morally right?"

The professor grunted and corrected his glasses with a slight hand gesture; he was a grey-haired, elderly man with a kindly, calm face.

"It depends on a number of factors. Firstly − what that young person's goal is. When we choose our job, we usually want more than just to earn money, most people's dream is to do things that fascinate them, that they are fulfilled in. Of course, people are also fulfilled in the sexual sphere with their partners, however, what happens when sexuality becomes a profession?

Well, in a way, two things are then combined that can be very destructive to the psyche − materliness and one's own body. At the same time, we make the decision ourselves, so it is not morally wrong if it involves two adults who agree to it, but there is an internal objectification, a selling of some part of our intimacy.

Of course, one can feel good about it. One may even like it. One should not tell such people that they are denying something, or say that they are selling themselves, that they are pricing their value. You see, it is not for us to judge. Everyone can do what they want with their body, it is their unquestionable right.

However, the danger arises when, underneath this materialistic approach, there is a desire for self-destruction, a desire to simultaneously dominate, to be in charge − I decide what happens to my body − and, at the same time, I desire to humiliate myself in my own eyes − I sell myself and I'm nothing, I don't want affection because I don't deserve it.

This issue is very complex and delicate, judging too quickly, especially by outsiders, will be even more hurtful to such people, a confirmation that they will never be loved and accepted, so they will be afraid to make sexuality emotional, which will lead to the opposite effect that we would all like."

The presenter nodded with understanding.

"If the professor were to state what it should look like in an ideal world, what would the professor say?"

The man laughed good-naturedly, stroking his white beard.

"I don't have an answer to that. I think that in an ideal world, the person who is made for us would be highlighted to us in green and those who hurt us in red. But we don't have that option. I think the fundamental mistake of every human being is to make judgements prematurely, instead of being willing to understand, to offer conversation, to support.

Calling someone a whore or a slut has never helped anyone, what's more, it only makes such people even more likely to have suicidal thoughts and be afraid to seek help when they feel they need it, because they are scared of revealing themselves to their parents or loved ones."

The presenter moved on to the next topic, but he heard nothing more, staring blankly at the floor, leaning forward so that his elbows were on his knees − he felt himself trembling all over, his eyes burning from the moisture that had gathered under his eyelids, his throat all clenched.

He felt her hand on his back and he shuddered, glancing over his shoulder at her with wide eyes − she was leaning over him worriedly, he could smell her pleasant scent again.

"Are you all right? Do you want to go out for some fresh air?" She asked frightened, clearly seeing how pale he was, and he nodded in embarrassment.

By the time they got outside it was completely dark; he reached with his shaking hand into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, taking out a cigarette and a lighter, firing it quickly and putting it into his mouth.

He felt her looking at him − they were standing in the square in front of the main entrance where there was no one but them, all around them was the loud hum of moving cars.

For some reason he felt desperate and miserable, weak, small; he clenched his eyes shut, shaking his head, trying to pull himself together. He sat down on the cold stone steps and she immediately sat down next to him, far too close.

He sighed when he felt her hand on his shoulder, stroking him gently, her warm breath on his cheek cool from the crisp evening air. He let out a loud puff of smoke with his lips, thinking only of how he had never let any woman touch him.

He placed his hand on hers, wanting to feel her for once, her skin soft as silk, exactly as he had imagined; he looked at her in pain, her eyebrows arched in worry, in incomprehension of what had actually happened.

"I'm selling myself." He said finally, desperate, and she blinked as if she didn't understand what she had just heard.

He took a drag again, not taking his eyes off her, and let the smoke out through his nose.

"I do all sorts of fucked up things to women for money and get satisfaction out of it, you know?" He asked in a low, trembling voice, feeling devastated how tears of shame one by one began to run down his face.

He felt himself shaking all over and thought he was an idiot, wondering how he could have said that to her. For some reason, he felt something inside him break.

He wanted her to know, to tell him she was disgusted with him, to look at him with that look full of reserve, to tell him it was nothing and just go away simply to let him finally stop thinking about her.

He saw her tighten her lips, her eyes turning red, her eyebrows arching in sorrow as if she was in pain as he was. He felt a pleasant shudder when her hand stroked gently through his hair as if he were a small child, and then she hugged her face to his cheek and simply remained silent.

She didn't say anything.

She stayed.

She wanted to comfort him.

Delighted at this revelation, he burst out into a quiet, mournful sob, leaned over and snuggled his face into her neck, wanting to hide from his own shame and remorse, from what she might think of him, from what he feared and could not forgive himself for.

Why did he have to be like this?

Why exactly did this give him fulfilment?

He sighed quietly as she put her arms around him and hugged him, her soft hand stroking his cheek with gentle, slow movements, her face nestled against his hair and placing a gentle kiss on it.

"You didn't do anything wrong." She whispered finally; he swallowed hard, rubbing the tip of his nose against her neck, brushing his lips gently against her bare skin, again, and then again.

He felt her tremble and tighten her hands on his leather jacket, his manhood in his trousers completely hard.

He had no idea what had just happened between them, but he didn't want to stop.

After a moment, as his emotions left him he realised what he had done.

That he had told a complete stranger about who he was, revealed to her his darkest secret.

This thought made him panic − he got up abruptly and mumbled through his tears that he would go home already, that he apologised to her for everything, not listening to her pleas to wait for her, running quickly down the stone stairs, walking ahead.

He looked over his shoulder as he turned into the corner of the next street and noticed with some kind of disappointment that she was not following him.

He burst out into uncontrollable sobs for the second time once he had locked himself in his car having complete chaos in his head, feeling that he was going through some kind of panic attack.

He thought that until he'd met her he hadn't felt this way, that the idea that he couldn't date her because of what he'd done made him start to regret it all.

What was he supposed to do now?

He reached for his phone hearing it vibrate and unlocked it quickly seeing as many as three new messages from her.

He clenched his eyelids, dropping his phone on the other seat, hiding his face in his hands.

He needed to calm down.

He sat like that for a few minutes in silence, not thinking about anything, just breathing, and then he drove home as if nothing had happened.

He entered his flat, took a shower, ate something and then turned on the TV, all mechanical, completely empty; he shuddered when he got a new message, reaching uncertainly for his phone and felt an unpleasant twinge in his stomach when he saw it was one of his clients.

She wanted to meet the next day.

No, he thought.

I don't want to.

He wrote her back that he was taking a break from it all for a while.

He was infuriated when she started texting him to tell him not to do it, that she needed him, that meeting him made her want to go on living.

He slammed his phone furiously into the wall.

What about what he fucking needed?

When he picked it up after several minutes he found that it worked despite the cracked screen.

He accessed the last messages he'd received from Robert's sister and began typing quickly to her on his phone's keypad.

He pressed his lips together when he saw that she immediately displayed his message, a bubble popped up in his app window indicating that she had just written back to him.

He swallowed loudly, writing her back without thinking, without controlling himself, allowing himself to shamelessly write her exactly what was in his head.

He stared at the screen with a pounding heart, wondering whether to do it or not, walking restlessly around his living room with his phone in his hands − he typed out the answer slowly, feeling that he was hot.

She didn't reply for a long time even though he could see that she had displayed his message.

He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head, laughing despairingly under his breath, not believing how desperate he was.

He'd known it from the moment he'd seen her, when she'd gotten off that fucking bike and looked at him with those big, innocent eyes of hers.

He stood looking at her message as if stupefied, reading it again and again, unable to believe it, feeling like he was about to die from the arousal and heat he felt in his chest, his fingers trembling as he tapped out his reply to her.

And so she did.

He didn't dare propose to meet her alone, knowing how that would have gone down on his part.

He didn't want to scare her off.

However, they wrote with each other for days, even during his classes; Criston and Robert laughed at him for having a girlfriend and not even wanting to introduce her to them.

He didn't care.

She was the first person he told about how it all started, what he felt when he did it, what aroused him and what repulsed him about it all.

She listened to him and answered him with sincere concern and worry, without judging him, without pretending it was a simple and obvious subject, giving him a sense of comfort and understanding.

He made it clear to her that he had refrained from any contact with strange women for the time being.

He licked his lower lip as he lay back in his bed, writing her off quickly.

He swallowed hard when she wrote him back after a moment.

He felt a squeeze in his heart at her words, some kind of pain that she thought of herself that way, that she saw herself as just another person he wanted to take out on.

He chuckled involuntarily, typing back a quick response to her question.

He blinked, looking at his screen with a pounding heart, not believing what he read.

______

Aemond Taglist:

(bold means I couldn't tag you)

@its-actually-minicika @notnormalthings-blog @nikstrange @zenka69 @bellaisasleep @k-y-r-a-1 @g-cf2020 @melsunshine @opheliaas-stuff @chainsawsangel @iiamthehybrid @tinykryptonitewerewolf @namoreno @malfoytargaryen @qyburnsghost @aemondsdelight @persephonerinyes @fan-goddess @sweethoneyblossom1 @watercolorskyy @randomdragonfires @apollonshootafar @padfooteyes

#aemond fic #aemond fanfiction #aemond targaryen #hotd aemond #aemond x oc #ewan mitchell #ewan mitchell fanfic #dark aemond smut #aemond smut #aemond targaryen smut #ewan mitchell smut #modern aemond angst #dark modern aemond #modern aemond smut #modern aemond #ewan mitchell fanfiction #aemond targaryen angst #aemond angst #hotd angst #dark aemond #dark aemond targaryen #aemond kinslayer #prince aemond #aemond #aemond one eye #prince aemond targaryen #aemond fanfic #hotd fanfiction #hotd fanfic #ewan mitchell fandom

[thatdeadaquarius]

Genshin Sagau (?) Isekai Brainrot - Language

I've seen like ONE small kinda related Genshin Sagau/isekai idea for this but I wanted more of it so BAD

It’s not the most interesting thing in the world, it’s about our modern vernacular vs. Teyvat's flowery speech

Pls feel free to expand on or add to this pLEASE TAG ME IF U DO IM STARVING OUT HERE :)))

So I saw someone write like one sentence abt this (can’t remember who :( sorry I’ll update if I find them ) or like a brutally honest version??

But I also took inspo from how fucking wordy and long conversations that are in Genshin, even with ppl like Xiao (the rude boy that he is) or even Tighnari who gets to the point pretty quickly

It goes smth like:

So, all of Teyvet, (esp ppl like Zhongli 💀 u know the ones) talk,, flowery.

Like, the whole Pride and Prejudice style speaking, euphemisms, metaphors, for some characters (or Npcs) its full on POETRY. 

Lookin’ at you Kazuha.

.

And going off of any variation of you being the Creator, (or otherwise an older mythical being?), they could have this thing where the older a deity/mythical thingy is, the simpler the speech. 

Kinda makes sense to them y’know? The older beings are serious, commanding, intimidating

And nothing says "I'm ancient as fuck and powerful as fuck" like simple blunt speech.

And being closer to the literal creation of the world, language would understandably be less complex (I’m assuming it’s the same as in human cultures in our world's history)

Like literally look at our fantasy typical stories, plenty of them have a dragon or ancient god that speaks in extremes, like so flowery its a metaphor, or so bluntly its startling (ie, "Be not afraid." "I am all powerful." etc etc)

And so, ancient powerful being = direct/blunt speech

..

…

...Y'know,, almost like our modern vernacular.

Like, part of some of our modern day comedy is purely based on a sentence being delivered bluntly for impact

Hell our ads and videos and content in general we always want to get to the point, to say things simply

So with this in mind, even if you try to deny being the Creator, they might still think you are, or at least a more minor ancient deity/creature

 .

(like the Seven Sovereigns/Phanes/Shades/etc. for example would sound eerily modern or at least easy for you to understand bc of this trait lol)

(Also I'm just assuming u know Genshin lore enough to know what I meant by that ^)

____

So, I love the AU where you just,, hitch a ride with the traveler like Paimon bc u start at the "beginning of the game",

And with every person you meet, you're like, "Ok, no, I promise this is just how my country/world speaks, it's not like that, I'm not some ancient deity…" 

And They're all like 🤨🤨🤨 "Well, fine traveler and companions, why does your speech sound so simplistic and sharp? Surely, you do not expect me to truly believe you.."

You: "Please I just talk like this, I'm a regular human."

Them: "Alright, if it is as you say,, you wish to not experience being "known" yes? Fear not, I will keep your secrets close to my chest."

You: "No, for the last time, that's not-" 

.

And it just keeps happening, lol

.

(srry I tried my best at emulate Genshin language + flowery speech idk how to do it)

.

Like maybe you would just sound weird or like a foreigner speaking y’know in simpler sentences bc they don't know the language as well as native speakers, at least that could be how you sound to NPCs and ppl who don’t know abt simpler speech meaning

.

...But the Adepti? Zhongli?? Barbatos maybe??? Even the Aranara??? Those who are old enough to maybe have heard how older beings speak or at least have knowledge of how they should speak/sound??

You couldn’t have predicted how shocked their faces were the second you opened you’re mouth… 

Sumeru scholars would freak tf out i stg, as soon as you meet Haypasia, she's already losing it, first the Irminsul progress, now this ancient being/Creator?? Girlie thinks its a sign lmao

.

(I’m an Aether lover, and also bc I think Lumine looks badass as Abyss ruler, so I’m gonna go with Aether for traveler sorry Lumine mains love yall T-T)

.

You, and Aether being equally confused at first pLEASE 😭 

lets say he speaks a little more fluffy than you at least, after all I’m assuming bc of the outfit that he’s from a fantasy-like place, and his replies can be a little fluffy like Teyvat’s residents, so he kinda fits in, kinda like everybody assumes he's just from another country when he gets to a new nation (at least that’s what I think happens??)

.

Like after (maybe Diluc?) Lisa, Kaeya, Venti, and Jean (who I think would all be knowledgeable, thru diff means, about this enough to maybe recognize the simpler speech = ancient god thing)

ALL reacted shocked as hell at hearing you talk, and would probably explain (or Paimon before then?) in that infuriatingly roundabout way, that you would usually skip a couple dialogue boxes just to avoid bc yOU ALREADY GOT THE POINT or alternatively WHATS THE POINT HERE?? JUST SAY IT, WHATS THE COMMISSION/QUEST FOR/WHAT DO I DO??

(Those blue highlights be savin my impatient life, and i actually like lore stuff 💀)

.

Oh that’s also another frustration. For you.

.

It would drive me crazy if I had to wait like,, 2-3 minutes for ppl to explain what they ate for dinner or sm shit

Like, now imagine that’s everyone, about everything.

You don’t know how anything gets done in battles or wars, like you need faster communication for that right??💀

.

Anyway, you, Aether and Paimon decide you just gotta not talk when you first meet people or like,, make sure you're gonna be around that person for a while so you don’t have to possibly get someone over the shock of your speech every time you guys talk to people 😭 that'd be so miserable I can already tell,,

Like at first, every convo ya’ll have had with people who recognize that direct speech trait as a thing, would take at least 10 minutes to finish talking about it/being shocked,,

It got so old so fast.

.

(Like I already can’t communicate that good with ppl irl bc I misunderstand them, or they do me, or they just dont get what I mean, and as my friends put it, which I think would fit here for any language shenanigans we go thru in Teyvat, "A Shakespearean level of misunderstanding, hilarious but such a downward spiral to watch, it just gets more and more ridiculous as it goes on...")

.

On another note, making fun of someone would be so fucking funny,

I’d like to give myself the benefit of the doubt that many characters, after getting used to your speech, would generally understand you (even if they always notice it, like an accent) and would actually rlly love hearing insults or even just generally how you would put things

(like maybe treating this almost like those vids of ppl with non-native english speaknig relatives/parents and its the most hilarious thing to watch them, usually get pissed 😭, at their kid, if u dont know what I mean look up on tiktok or smth)

And You just come off like those insults where you dont even use cuss words, you just like, drag queen read them into never showing their face again, and you did it in so few words!! 

They're amazed and oh, 

you've become the John Mulaney of Teyvat 

(Bad examples include:

Fontaine inventor: "...And I shall call my invention, crocks!"

You: "I wouldn't even be cremated in those." ) 

*Aether crying laughing in the background bc he never knows what you’re gonna say next, and Paimon's jaw dropped so hard

JFC this post is so long sorry, I probably will spam with a Part 2 but let me know if you’re interested in hearing more anyway!!

Thanks for reading this rambling!!

Or send in asks abt this 👀

Cheers,

🌒🌊🌧Aquarius♒️🌌🌘

#genshin sagau ideas #sagau #isekai #genshin god reader #genshin impact #genshin imagines #gender neutral y/n #gender neutral reader #genshin sagau #genshin isekai #going feral #genshin brainrot #genshin au

[abductedlawnchair]

*ranting and raving and stomping on rooftops and flailing my arms about* HUMANS ARE AMIMALS!!! WE ARE ANIMALS!!! QUIT ACTING LIKE WE'RE NOT!!!

I am so goddamn tired of society acting like we're not!!! I am so goddamn tired of us as a society acting like we are above all the other animals!!! I do not care that we are the apex!!! We are fucking ANIMALS!!! Like, just take a step back and observe us like we have our own nature documentary on Nat Geo or something. Maybe with David Attenborough or whatever, idc. Just imagine it.

We are a species of apes that just so happened to gain the ability of extremely complex and abstract thought, capability of language, an almost absurd level of self-awareness, and the type of intelligence that allowed us to discover, invent, and develop tools. A species of apes that just so happen to have such a crazy level of curiosity that we have the capability to learn about the world around us, and beyond.

The way we learn and develop is fascinating. If you observe a toddler from that standpoint, watching them interact with the world around them, you'd see how natural curiosity is to us, in our human nature. Neil deGrasse Tyson has literally said that children are beings of chaos because they're curious and learning about the world around them.

We all have children in us, just like we have our ancestors in us!!! Our brains are wired like theirs. Relatively, we have been in this state of society for an extremely short amount of time!! Our brains and nervous systems are still wired to survive and keep us safe from predators and other dangers!!

We are social creatures!! We need love and connection to survive!! We can't do things on our own. The only reason we ever got to where we are is because we work together and communicate and share knowledge. The way society is right now is too isolating!! Humans aren't meant to be fighting for a place in society!! Haven't you seen zookeepers?? Or anyone who cares for nature in any capacity?? We have an incredible capacity for compassion and caretaking, because we have the capability to know and understand the inner workings of ourselves and countless other species!! Caretaking and compassion is literally an innate human trait!! We're supposed to take care of each other and the world around us!! We literally are capable of pack bonding with ROOMBAS, for fucks sake!! Little robots that our ape brains see moving around on its own, being part of our homes, and thinks "little guy is alive... I love him"!!! Isn't that beautiful???

We were an evolution of Mother Earth, Herself, to grow Her and expand Her and care for Her!!! Whether you believe in intelligent design or just the absurdity of it all, it still happened like that. We have the capacity to care for Her in an evolved level, yet we're fucking it up so badly right now.

Indigenous cultures have always been on the right track. They've always been right about this. They have always known that we are all pieces of the same organism, just like the atoms and cells and organs and electricity in your body are all part of one body!!

And btw, culture is another HUGE part of us being social creatures!! Being expressive and creative and connected!! That's part of our nature!! We're meant to sing and dance and laugh together!! That connectivity of us being a collective is So Important!!! Making fun of people for being "sheep", or having "herd mentality" every single time is so stupid because yes!!! Yes that's EXACTLY how we are supposed to be!!! We are social creatures, remember?? The whole point is that we do things together!!!

I know how society is rn isn't the end all, be all, but it just breaks my heart that this Capitalism shit goes against some of the most beautiful parts of humanity!! We are animals!!! We are cute and curious and compassionate and social and we need warmth and sunlight and sustenance from the earth and water and sleep and shelter from the elements!! We have instincts just like everything else!! We came from the dust and we will return to the dust because we will always be part of the Earth, just like all the other animals!! And somehow, despite all odds, despite how robotic Capitalism wants us to be, our human nature seeps into everything.

Take care of yourself! You are an animal, after all! <3

*climbs off rooftop... for now*

#humanity #humans as animals #human spirit #and the true nature of humanity #anthropology #nature #human nature #whimsy #childlike wonder #wholesome #ponderings #galaxy brain #ramblings #connectedness #shouting into the tumblr void #soap box

[gatheringbones]

[“The problem is that we have exiled sex in our minds. We have isolated it from the larger inclusive narrative and we have limited its definition to that which serves the most privileged class of protagonists.

I think that this is a symptom of that other habit of treating whole classes of human beings as though their stories do not have the stakes, narrative depth, and complexity typically assigned to dominant protagonists. It is a craft quandary indeed to write yet another sex scene in which a white male protagonist exercises his archetypal masculinity on a secondary, two-dimensional character functioning as a prop in his hero’s journey without any narrative awareness of this exhausted trope.

But to write a sex scene in which that marginalized character is treated with some reverence and depth? To write it from their perspective? Or to write a scene in which a white male character experiences, even in an inchoate way, the deep discomfort that occurs when we act out our erotic story on another body without recognizing its humanity? I’ll repeat the unrule: you can use any words you want.

Here is Eileen Myles, from Inferno, in case you thought comparing a pussy to soup, or using the word crotch, was out of bounds or unsexy:

But after kissing her mouth a little chapped which seemed familiar then feeling her breasts not so large, but nice round and beautiful, familiar breasts, ones I already knew in some way I tugged down her pants. She said Oh. Like a soft amount of light, a small gust of wind. And luckily she had some sweatpants on or something, a stretchy waist. Easy getting them down and there were her lemony legs. Not big not strong, but smooth soft hair like peaches everything that way. Pink rose warm. I just dived down. It couldn’t have been too fast. Time was being so slow and warm. And there it was. A pussy, the singular place on a girl, it’s where I’m going. Wiggly thing, like soup, like a bowl. Another mouth. Like lips between her legs and the taste of it. Piss and fruit. I pressed my face against its bone and it moved. She was letting me. All this was happening. I smelled the future right there, a present and a past. All that went through her, known through the soft sweet flesh of her lips and clit. It was like my face felt loved temporarily […] I felt plunged into a tropical movie in which light was bathing my head and her pussy, her cunt, her crotch was a warm smile and for a moment I lived in her sun.

The revelation here is not that these words can be used in a sex scene, but that a pussy, a cunt, a crotch can be transformed by a sex scene. “Language is never innocent,” Roland Barthes once wrote, and I agree. Here, in the sense that the words pussy, cunt, and crotch all carry the connotative luggage of all their previous contexts—the violence, disgust, and pornographic theater of all the scenes and mouths I’ve heard them in and from. Experience, however, is innocent. This narrator’s sexual reality is so powerful a phenomenon that it washes these words of their previous connotations. Now they mean not a wimp or a bitch or the place on a woman that belongs to a man, but something magnificent and weird, pure and exotic, deeply familiar and erotic—a warm smile, a cosmic body. Just as sweatpants become perfect attire for such a scene, smooth soft hair like peaches, and the actual smell of sex a good one. When they enter this revelatory scene, these degraded words are suddenly imbued with the same reverence as their speaker. To use them is an incontrovertible act of (re)creation.”]

melissa febos, from body work: the radical power of personal narrative, 2022

#melissa febos #currently reading #terra preta

[ilongfor-the-arts]

Could you do a fanfic where the marquis meets the reader in a museum and they bond over their live of art

Meet Me in the Hallway

Pairing: Vincent de Gramont x fem! Reader

Warnings: VERY mild language

Summary: *in req*

Word Count: 2.3k

The Louvre has maintained a particular place in my heart for as long as I can remember. As a child, I recall visiting during tourist season. The other children darted around, driving their guardians to the brink of insanity. However, I stood in front of the immense paintings, carefully analyzing each aspect of the art. I remember visiting The Louvre as a teenager during the winter, when the immense corridors were barren. I'd find a place to sit and ponder, observing faces and objects in the quiet halls. I recall taking advantage of any occasion to talk about art with friends and family.

My friends were perplexed by my preoccupation. When I rambled on, they would nod and appear to be attentive. But I could always tell by the look on their faces that they were eager for my rant to end.

I've always been drawn to art's beauty. One bad stroke, one outburst of rage, and the finished result may be jeopardized. Art is more than just a painting or a sculpture; it is a way of life. You must be able to look beyond what the eye can see in order to produce art. You must be able to view the world in a completely unique way. You must look for a message behind the eyes rather than simply viewing things analytically. Painters paint, artists interpret.

That is what separates the good from the iconic.

I enjoyed the near silence as I wandered through The Louvre. Because it being January, the museum was nearly totally populated with a sprinkle of wandering locals. I took a tour around my favorite section, French paintings 1780-1850. The gold frames stood out against the dark burgundy walls.

The atmosphere was serene. As night fell, the hallway was illuminated exclusively by a few fluorescent lights. The sensation that washed over me was one of sheer nostalgia and amazement.

The dimness of room 700, when combined with the massive displays showcasing the complexity of the human mind, gave off an ominous vibe. There was everything and nothing at the same time.

Nothing else on the planet can make you feel this way.

I proceeded to one of the most well-known works of art in the entire museum.

Ah, one of my favorites, Liberty Leading the People. Eugene Delacoix created this work of art in the year 1830. Delacoix depicts a scene during the July Revolution of 1830, when King Charles X-

Woah.

My gaze was drawn to a man sitting on a beautiful white couch.

I tightened my teeth to keep my jaw from dropping to the floor.

He was breathtakingly beautiful.

Was he a tourist?

No way, no how. No tourist would dress up in an expensive three-piece black suit to visit the Louvre. He's got to be a local.

He was staring at the enormous painting, his mind fixed in deep thought. Many locals stopped to look at the paintings, but he seemed to be examining every face and object.

Should I introduce myself? It would be the polite thing to do as I’ve been obviously staring at him for-

“Did no one ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”

My trance was broken by his velvety accent. I hid my gitters by slipping my hands into the pockets of my beige trenchcoat.

“I’m sorry,” I said smugly, “You caught my eye.”

He sneered, a slight smirk playing on the edges of his lips. He couldn't take his gaze away from the painting. I swallowed, unsure how to dispel the uneasiness. The man uncrossed his lanky legs and pushed himself up to his full height.

He's tall, Jesus.

He strolled over to the picture, decreasing the distance between himself and the work of art to a few feet. He cocked his head upwards, his gaze wandering over the magnificent painting's many intricacies. The man put his hand on his hip and pushed his jacket to the side, revealing an astonishing variety of golden buttons along his vest.

“What do you think of this one?”

He asked, motioning with his free hand towards the canvas. I followed his movements, taking in the painting I know and adore.

“It’s a beautiful piece of art.”

I said hesitantly. The man chuckled, turning his head to meet my gaze. Despite being only three feet away, I found myself completely engrossed in his captivating green eyes.

“That’s it? It’s beautiful?”

His smirk now more prevalent than before. I exhaled a shuddery breath.

“Well, it’s one of the most famous paintings in art history. I think it's wonderful how this artwork has become a universal emblem of liberty and freedom from oppressive dominance.”

The man raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“That’s excellent insight. It’s good to meet people with an appreciation for the finer things in life.”

He returned his gaze to the canvas, motioning with his fingers for me to come towards him.

“Come closer, look at this.”

I was hesitant to approach this intimidating man, but my curiosity was far too strong to ignore. So I narrowed the gap between us to a mere six inches. As I took up a place next to him, our sides nearly brushed against each other.

He raised his finger to the stunning representation of liberty.

Take note of her features, such as her straight nose, plump lips, and delicate chin. They all look like antique Greek and Roman statues. She pays homage to both Ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy, and Roman republican culture.”

I narrowed my eyes, mentally applying his words to the painting.

“Here, look at this,” I began, pointing to the left side of the painting.

“See that guy with the pistol? He's wearing a shirt but no jacket. He belongs to the lower class. But look at the man next to him; he's wearing a top hat, jacket, and vest. He belongs to the upper class. Delacroix aimed to include all classes of people in the fight against royalist oppression.”

The man exhaled in amazement.

“How fascinating. Delacroix’s artistic vision is truly unmatched.”

“I agree. This piece is probably my favorite in the entire museum.”

The man shrugged nonchalantly.

“It is certainly impressive. But my favorite would have to be Venus de Milo.”

He shifted his head to face me, sweeping his gaze up and down my figure. I shuddered, his heated gaze making me feel like I was under scrutiny.

“However, I suppose that opinion could simply be mine because I enjoy the presence of a beautiful woman.”

Holy shit was he flirting with me?

Heat climbed onto my cheekbones. I hoped my flush wasn't too visible, as his gaze was still fixed on me. I chuckled awkwardly.

“I suppose that could certainly contribute to your fondness of the piece.”

He motioned towards the white couch.

“Here, sit, let’s talk.”

He sat closer than I had expected. Our thighs were almost touching, and the arm slung around the back of the couch was almost brushing my shoulders. Despite the color on my cheeks and my minor intimidation of the man's large stature, I felt strangely at ease. I was intrigued rather than nervous. He exuded mystery, and I had every intention of unraveling the web of secrets.

“Do you believe talent like this is given at birth, or developed as the individual grows?”

I licked my lips, carefully contemplating my next words.

“Well, I believe we are all born blank canvases, and if we find something we are exceptionally passionate about, then we can grow those specific talents.”

I swallowed, hoping he was satisfied with that reply.

“How about you?”

“Oh, I believe people with true artistic talent are born with promise. Because if we go by your logic, anyone who loves art has the potential to become the next Delacroix.”

Wow, he was certainly quite the intellectual.

“Well, allow me to elaborate. Anyone can become a mediocre artist if they try,” I began, “but yes, I agree with you, only a few are born with the promise of artistic greatness. I mean, someone like Coco Chanel could never become the next Van Gogh or Delacroix, it just isn't meant to be. That isn’t where her talents lie.”

The man's lips curved into a smile. I locked my attention on his lovely green eyes. We were closer than I had imagined. His breath was cascading across my face. I inhaled sharply. He smelt amazing, like an expensive floral fragrance. It crept into my head, confounding my already hazy thinking.

“I like you… Miss…”

“Y/N, Y/N Y/L/N.”

His smile widened even more, splitting his face to reveal a stunning row of white teeth.

“What a gorgeous name... It’s fitting, a gorgeous name for a gorgeous woman.”

His accent was dripping with charm. There was no way in hell this man didn't have a significant other. He was far too enticing and attractive to be single.

“You know, plenty of people wander these halls, knowing every name of every piece. Yet they don’t contemplate the true meaning of the art.”

His eyes were drawn to Liberty Leading the People. The man’s tone became somewhat agitated as he ran his tongue along his smooth bottom lip, his eyes narrowing.

“They only think about the art, they don’t contemplate it.”

He inhaled deeply, his chest softly rising and sinking beneath the pricey cloth.

“Thinking is simple, thinking is the most simple thing in the entire universe for humankind. Anyone can think, but not everyone can contemplate.”

I concur. It was pleasant to meet a thinker who cared so deeply about the beauty of art.

“Who’s your favorite painter?”

My face broke into a genuine smile.

“Paul Cezanne.”

“And why is that, Miss. Y/N Y/L/N.”

I adored how he said my name. It rolled off his tongue effortlessly, like butter on a hot pan. I could spend the entire day sitting next to him on a couch at the Louvre, listening to him utter my name.

“Well, because his distinct color-building technique and his analytical approach to nature had a great impact on the art of Cubists, Fauves, and many generations of avant-garde artists.”

I've never encountered somebody who would listen to my raving with such enthusiasm. And there was no one who properly comprehended my words and had the knowledge to respond intelligently. Not only on the subject of art, but also on the issue of life.

“Ah!”

He exclaimed, shooting a finger towards me.

“There it is!”

His hand fell to his lap.

“You, Miss Y/N Y/L/N, do not just think, you were born with the gift of careful contemplation.”

I'd dated a few men previously, but none had ever made me feel as great as this mysterious man. And I'd only known him for about 30 minutes. My eyes lit up with wonder when I heard his voice, and I hung on to every word with excitement.

“You have a dizzying intellect.”

His velvety tone dropped to an endearing whisper. My stomach flipped.

“It is very rare I meet a woman with such beauty, not only in her appearance, but in her demeanor as well.”

His long fingers pushed a stray hair behind my ear. I nearly flinched before realizing the gesture was benign. I could still feel his contact on my cheek after he removed his fingertips. He set fire to every nerve he came into contact with.

“Will you grant me the opportunity to become your acquaintance?”

His eyes were filled with anticipation. There it was, the date I'd been looking forward to throughout the duration of this conversation.

“I would like that very much Mr…”

“Vincent de Gramont.”

I hummed in delight.

“That’s a handsome name. It’s fitting, a handsome name for a handsome man.”

I said, slightly mocking his previous remark.

Vincent chuckled.

“Oh, you are a comedian as well. I like you more and more as time goes on.”

Vincent waited for a beat of silence before rising to his full height. Being the one seated while he stood certainly flipped the script. I felt small under his demeanor as his presence was felt throughout the room. He was comfortable in his own skin, demanding control of the atmosphere like a conductor.

“My bodyguards will ensure that you have all the information necessary to find my estate.”

Bodyguards?!

He indicated to two men in gray suits who were standing with their backs against the nearest maroon wall.

Wow.

I surely hoped they wouldn’t be hanging around when I finally seized the opportunity to speak with Vincent in private.

“Wonderful.”

“My estate is beautiful if I do have to say so myself. You will enjoy it.”

I can only imagine how magnificent his house was if this was the suit he decided to wear for a chance visit to a museum.

“There is lots of space, plenty of rooms to explore and places to sit and talk for hours.”

I couldn't keep a smile from breaking my face. Who would have guessed that when I walked into the Louver today, I'd walk out with a lovely new date?

“That sounds like a dream come true. I can’t wait to see it.”

Vincent returned my grin.

“I can not wait for you to see it. You will melt.”

He extended his hand. I hesitated for a moment before realizing he wanted me to lay my palm in his. Vincent leaned down and kissed the top of my hand in an exceedingly trendy gesture.

Wow, very gentlemanly.

If my cheeks weren’t pink before, they surely were bright red now.

“Thank you for granting me the pleasure of becoming your acquaintance, I look forward to seeing you around my estate.”

After his departure, I remained seated on the couch. I was unable to move, wanting to preserve the moment for as long as possible

#marquis de gramont #marquis x reader #marquis de gramont x reader #marquis vincent de gramont #vincent de gramont x you #vincent de gramont x reader #vincent de gramont #john wick 4 #john wick #bill skarsgard fanfiction #bill skargard #bill skarsgård #bill skarsgard imagine #bill skarsgard x reader

[fantastic-nonsense]

I might be wrong but I figured you'd be the person to ask: Someone in a Discord server I'm in was talking about the "popular fanon idea of Cass learning ASL and sometimes preferring it to speech." And I... don't think this is fanon? Doesn't she canonically know ASL? I know she learned English and (I believe) Mandarin but I'm almost positive there are also lots of canon instances of her signing.

Okay so I'm going to split this ask into two questions:

Does Cass know American Sign Language (ASL), canonically?

Could Cass learn ASL?

The answer to #1 is no, Cass doesn't canonically know ASL to my knowledge (caveat: this does not, apparently, apply to the Young Justice cartoon universe; Cassandra Wu-San does appear to know some form of legitimate sign language). Canon!Cass, on the other hand, knows some basic signs and does use them, but it's more charades, 'loud gesturing,' and basic hand signals than it is ASL. The reasons Cass knowing ASL is such a popular fanon misperception are rather complex, but it largely comes down to two things: misunderstanding how ASL works and misunderstanding what Cass's disability actually is.

ASL isn't just some fancy hand gestures that translate one-to-one into spoken English; that would be "baby sign" or spell signing at best. ASL is a language, with all of the complex grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure that implies. It takes years of learning and immersion to understand, learn, and utilize properly, just like any other language. Treating it as anything else is a form of ableism.

Someone like Cass who has difficulty processing language is going to have just as much trouble learning ASL as she would English, Mandarin, or any other language, because her problem isn't that she just "doesn't know English." Cass's disability is not that she can't read or communicate verbally: it's that her brain is literally built different because of how Cain raised her, and that affects how she processes language (and thus how she communicates with other people):

"David Cain…had some unusal ideas about combat. He experimented with infants. Trained them in isolation and deprived them of human speech. The goal was to adapt the language center of the brain to interpret physical movement as a language. She can…read you. Your body. That's why she understands what you're saying when she doesn't know the words. It's why in combat, she knows what you're going to do before you do it." -Batgirl (2000) #1

"The language centers of your brain are all over both hemispheres. Not centralized like with most people. When you try to read or write, your brain doesn't know how to keep it cohesive. But the good news is--you can learn. It's just a matter of figuring out how." -Batgirl #67

It's actually specified somewhere (I don't have the panel on hand, unfortunately) that she doesn't know sign language; Cain wanted her to read natural body language and nuance, not artificial hand gestures. Cass's primary "language" (and thus form of communication) until her brain was semi-rewired was body language.

But body language isn't actually a language; it's a form of non-verbal communication that functions through the (largely subconscious) 'reading' of both conscious and unconscious physical movement. Cass's childhood and training simply elevated that ability to ridiculous heights:

"A special ability to predict my opponent's moves. That doesn't begin to describe it. Time...ran together. The future...blending...into the moment. A blink of an eye...the knife thrust that follows...both one. It was like...like I could predict my opponent's moves. Okay, that does describe it. But it doesn't do it justice. All this knowledge. No substitute for knowing." -Batgirl (2000) #7

We see explicitly how this ability plays out on several occasions throughout her Batgirl run and the Detective Comics Rebirth run, and it's pretty clear she's reading subconscious feelings, thoughts, and movement, not language:

Cass absolutely communicates via hand gestures before and after Batgirl #4, but it's not any form of cohesive language, much less ASL. It's effectively advanced charades mixed with some universal non-verbal gestures:

"You don't speak any language, do you? Except violence." -Detective Comics (1937) #734

"Is he giving you any trouble?" *Cass flaps her hand to indicate the guy is a blabbermouth* "Got you. He talks too much." -Batman: Family (2002) #7

*Cass gestures to Jason's heart, Tim's mind, and Dick's voice to indicate she understands how they work as a team*-Batman and Robin Eternal (2015) #3

People learning a English as a second language already have an understanding of how language works, but Cass doesn’t have that foundation. Her primary language isn't sign language, it's body reading. Thus, she struggles to speak, read, and write in English not because it's a different language than she's used to communicating with but because it's the first actual language she's ever learned. Fanon largely projects ASL fluency onto Cass because they fundamentally don't understand how her abilities work (and thus don't understand how her disability works either).

Does Cass have the ability to learn ASL? Absolutely! Would ASL be a really cool way of depicting Cass communicating with other people and an interesting way to showcase language learning difficulties and communication disabilities in the visual medium that is comics? Absolutely! I would actually be genuinely thrilled if canon and the fandom actually worked with what a physical, visual-based language like ASL might mean for Cass's ability to communicate given her childhood training. But as it stands, "Cass knowing ASL" is a well-meaning but misguided fanon attempt to showcase inclusivity while being...well, frankly kind of offensive.

(As for why she would theoretically "know" Mandarin, it's a product of the incredibly racist and ableist writing that defined the "Evil Cass Era." This culminated in DC putting her on a bus and shipping her off to Hong Kong because "Asian girl knows Asian languages, right? Brilliant! Send her off!" while ignoring literally everything about Cass ever. She's never actually shown speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other dialect of Chinese on-panel, but we can reasonably infer she probably picked up SOME level of comprehension while living there.)

#cassandra cain #cassandra cain meta #batman #batfam #batgirl #asks #ableism #fanon vs canon #disability #note: I have not read all of Reboot!Cass's appearances so she theoretically MIGHT know ASL even though it's super doubtful #but pre-reboot!Cass DEFINITELY doesn't #long post #batman meta