#most of my problems with him stem from the fact that he rarely ever takes blame

[forzasedici]

Sainz was better than him most of the weekend. I'm charles fan but even I can't admit. He seemed to have more control overall while charles was clearly struggling

while i do agree there were instances where sainz was better than him. i did say that he wouldn't have gotten a top 3 finish had charles actually finished his lap because charles is way better at extracting a little more from the car in those finish moments of a session. it's just that they are different types of drivers and sainz doesn't take as many risks as charles does nor does he tend to overdrive his cars. that's just my impression i could be wrong but they are just very different drivers.

#.ask #anonymous #most of my problems with him stem from the fact that he rarely ever takes blame #he's not really a driver fit for ferrari #and i wish he could be a bit closer to charles #i'm also just a hater in general and he's particularly not one of my favorites #and probably will never be

[kyuuppi]

vegetable stew

Pairing: Kenma x Reader (f)

Contents: hurt/comfort; angst and fluff; body dysmorphia; eating disorder (negative thoughts, fat shaming, insecurity, mentions of starvation)

Word Count: 2.1k

Kenma has always been observant.

It was a large part of his success as a setter and even now his keen observational skills contribute to his career as a professional gamer. He tends to notice things others don’t and lately that means noticing how you’ve changed.

The more he thinks about it the more difficult it is to pinpoint the exact starting point of your behavior. Haven’t you always preferred baggy clothing?

He remembers the pretty blue sweater you used to treasure back in high school, wearing it every chance you got as soon as the weather report hinted at anything lower than 10°C. He loved that sweater too—not just because of the cute sweater paws it gave you or how it almost completely covered the shorts you wore beneath, offering an unobstructed view of your shapely thighs—but instead he relished in the way it seemed to make you feel. The confidence and joy in your expression was clear as day when you wore your favorite outfits and early on in your relationship he had quickly learned that somehow your happiness was synonymous to his own.

Hence Kenma’s current frustrations in seeing that spark of joy and self-confidence gradually diminishing in the past several weeks.

Although that particular sweater had long since left your wardrobe within the first few years of university, as well-loved and worn out as it was, the more recent favorites of yours have also seemed to have gone lately. It had been a while since you had worn the short yellow polka dot dress you had been so eager to show Kenma the first day you got back from the mall with your roommates. Every pair of shorts and colorful tennis skirts had also left your weekly rotation, leaving behind only dull sweatshirts with childhood cartoon characters and baggy joggers.

Objectively, Kenma hardly cared about what you wore. If fastening a potato sack around your form made you happy, Kenma wouldn’t bat an eye—the problem stemmed from the fact these clothes didn’t make you happy. Moreover, the bland clothing brought with them their own slew of behavioral changes.

You no longer wished to go out and you avoided taking pictures of yourself, your social media suffering from an obvious lack of cheeky selfies or “outfit of the day” posts as of late. However, the most concerning change of all was your refusal to eat.

Kenma had a habit of forgetting to eat himself. He rarely felt the mild twinges of hunger, his attention generally hyper-focused on something else whether it was a game, a video needing editing, or a class project he had pushed off for far too long. It was only when his own stomach growling would startle him or the hunger pains got unbearable that he would acknowledge the human requirement of sustenance (not that the instant ramen in his cabinets provided much nutrients anyhow).

You were much more in tune with your body and, unlike him, you looked forward to eating; scheduled your days around it, even.

Your mornings began with a balanced breakfast—a meal Kenma was rarely even awake in time for—followed by a generous lunch break in which you would intentionally put everything on pause. Regardless of how much work you had to do you always made time to put everything down and have a decent lunch. It was good for your soul, you would say. A time to live in the moment and relieve yourself of stress.

For dinner you often made it a point to eat with others, whether it was going to a rowdy Korean BBQ with some friends or a dinner date at home with just him, you enjoyed sharing a meal surrounded by the people you love. On top of it all, you frequently had snacks: small bags of crackers, slices of fruit, or a few cookies you made yourself.

You loved cooking almost as much as you loved eating; most of the times he invited you over you brought a large bag with you filled to the brim with ingredients he wouldn’t have a clue what to do with. You would chastise him about his awful eating habits, grimacing at the ramen and chip wrappers overflowing in the kitchen trash can before you diligently prepare a meal for you both, healthy and flavorful, full of the vegetables he hadn’t had since the last time he went home to visit his mom.

You made him look forward to meal times too, if only to see the way you light up when he compliments your cooking or the pure bliss when you take the first bite of your favorite side dish. Eating with you became one of his favorite parts of the day.

And so that last time you made him dinner—a steaming plate of curry with shrimp tempura—the normally delicious food suddenly turned sour on his tongue when he realized you had only made him dinner.

“I’m just not very hungry today,” you had assured him with a smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes.

Foolishly, he hadn’t said anything at the time.

Maybe you had a large lunch, maybe you had a stomach ache, maybe you just didn’t want curry today—at that point in time he had no reason to think there was something seriously wrong. He had no reason to think you were starving yourself.

It wasn’t until weeks later when all the evidence stacked up, the many different signs piecing themselves together like a puzzle until it was impossible not to see the picture, even if a few were still missing.

Your baggy clothing, your refusal to eat anything, your off-handed comments about how the female characters in whatever fighting game he was playing had such nice figures—it became crystal clear what you were doing and it made him feel sick.

Kenma doesn’t generally care about others’ looks; he tends to worry more on how he is perceived than how he perceives others but he is confident that he rather likes your body as it is. He would rather die than admit how often he finds his gaze wandering when your legs are bare or how his eyes naturally trace the curve of your waist down to the width of your hips his fingers twitch to touch—he has had many thoughts about your body, none of which have ever been negative.

Even so, he doesn’t mind if you want to change yourself. He isn’t foolish enough to think he has the right to dictate how you decide to present yourself to this world, but he refuses to allow the reason for your change to be one that stems from low self-esteem or insecurity.

When you step into Kenma’s apartment, weary from a long day of classes and the extra hours spent at the gym, the last thing you expect is to be greeted by the scent of some type of stew, warm and hearty. Your stomach clenches longingly but you quickly reprimand yourself—you already reached your tiny caloric limit for the day.

You have hardly made it into the living room when Kenma comes out from the kitchen, dyed hair tied in a low bun but messy, several strands poking out and sticking across his sweaty forehead. A dark blue apron is tied around his waist and his right hand holds a ladle, the perfect image of a frazzled housewife. If you weren’t so shocked by the scene you would have laughed.

“Welcome back,” he greets softly.

“Are you...cooking something?”

Kenma looks slightly embarrassed by your incredulous tone but not offended. In all the years you have known Kenma you have never seen him in the kitchen for longer than the three minutes required to heat up a bowl of noodles. Him slaving away in front of the stove for a bowl of homemade soup is nearly unfathomable to you.

“Vegetable stew...it’s my mom’s recipe,” your boyfriend explains sheepishly.

The mental image of Kenma shyly FaceTiming his mother as she patiently walks him through chopping up carrots and mixing spices makes your lips twitch upwards and you make your way past him to curiously survey his work.

“You didn’t have to go through the effort, I could have cooked you something, y’know,” you comment as you lean over the large pot on the stove.

The contents are a rich brown color with hints of potatoes, carrots, and onions peaking out. You’re gifted another pang of hunger and you quickly step back as if it would prevent you from falling into temptation.

Kenma quietly slips into the kitchen directly behind you, his chest nearly brushing your arm as he speaks.

“It's okay, I wanted to cook for us this time.”

You freeze.

Immediately, you break into a cold sweat, the prospect of eating sending you into a state of anxiety. You can’t eat—you don’t deserve to eat. Not when your arms are so flabby, your waist so undefined, your inner thighs so close to each other—

“I appreciate it,” you start.

Your voice sounds unnaturally high even to your own ears.

“But I’m not hungry—I had a really big lunch.”

Turning, you try to offer him an apologetic smile but his face looks off. His lips are pulled into a slight frown and his eyes seem to be looking through you, as if he knows you’re lying.

“Y/n...I don’t like what you’re doing.”

You attempt to laugh but it comes out hollow.

“I’m not doing anything bad, just dieting a bit.”

“I think you’re being a little extreme.”

You huff, starting to feel defensive. You don’t want to have this conversation, not now, not ever.

“Kenma, I’m totally fine, I promise.”

“I’m worried about you,” he insists.

“I’m telling you there’s nothing to worry about, I’m being safe.”

“Skipping meals isn’t healthy.”

“Kenma, being this fat isn’t healthy!”

The words escape before you can think to stop them and you can already feel the shame pricking at your eyes as you turn away. You don’t want to see your boyfriend’s look of disgust once he realizes you’re right, once he realizes how fat and unattractive his girlfriend is. Kenma is skinny, he deserves a petite girlfriend who is just as tiny, a girl with slender legs that look cute in shorts and a stomach that lays flat regardless of the time of day. He deserves the sexy girls in his video games, in shape from years of training and perfected suited for tight leather bikini tops.

You don’t realize you’re shaking until Kenma wraps his arms around your shoulders, burying his face into the side of your neck. He lets out a shuttered sigh and if you didn’t know any better you’d think he’s crying as well.

“I love you,” he murmurs against your skin, “and I don’t like seeing you hurting yourself. If you want to lose weight, I’ll help you. We can make healthy foods together and eat them together and exercise together—just please stop skipping meals.”

Your throat feels like it's stuffed with cotton so you can only nod in agreement, raising one hand to weakly wipe at the hot tears staining your cheeks.

The two of you stand like that, huddled in the middle of the kitchen, for several long minutes until the last of your tears have gone before Kenma gently pushes you to sit down at the coffee table. He prepares two steaming bowls full of vegetable stew for you both and you silently eat as Kenma tells you how low calorie the broth is and how many nutrients his mom said were in the vegetables he used. He tells you about a new fitness game on the Nintendo Switch that you two can play together. By the time you finish your meals, Kenma has already promised to wake up early to go jogging around the neighborhood together even though you know he absolutely hates waking up early and exercising when he doesn’t have to.

Your chest aches with how much he loves you, how far he’s willing to go just if he thinks it will help you and make you happy.

A small part of your mind begs you not to listen. It insists you’ll be fat forever if you don’t starve yourself; no pain, no gain. But the more rational part of you gazes into those soft golden eyes, filled with concern and love as he rambles on about the best sources of protein—all stuff he had learned from his professional volleyball player friend Hinata—and you know your answer.

Kenma loves you, he would do anything to see you happy and healthy and you would do anything to please him.

You love him more than you hate yourself.

#kozume kenma #haikyuu #haikyuu x reader #kenma x reader #haikyuu scenarios #haikyuu imagines #kenma imagine #kenma scenario #kenma x chubby reader #haikyuu x chubby reader

[the-chick-of-the-air]

Hello my lovelies!

Wow ok I’m sorry I know it’s been a while- I kinda got into a writing slump that wouldn’t let me out, however I’m feeling like I’m getting back into things! Yay!

I want to thank all of you for your continued support in my writing adventures, I seriously can’t describe how much it means to me when I get feedback and love on my work, one of my favorite things to do is make people happy- or really just feel anything- with my writing and I love hearing about it so thank you thank you THANK YOU!!! 🥰❤️

So, now I’m back with a gift! A very long fic that took me way to long to get around to finishing but I wanna share! So here, have this!!

Sorry if the length is too, well, lengthy 😅 I do so hope you enjoy it!

Edit: have added a cut due to length, read below!🥰❤️

Some Wicked Type of Love

Cardan stared down at the vial he held carefully, the greenish liquid sparkled as it sloshed around with the subtle shakes he gave it. This. This would fix everything.

“So, he just has to drink that? Nothing else?” Rhyia asked, unnerved. That unnerved Cardan, his elder sister was hardly ever shaken, so seeing her nervous about something didn’t sit well.

The imp with golden skin smiled thinly. Despite her obvious skepticism, he was the one Rhyia had told Cardan about, the one that could fix his problem, rid him of his ailment.

“That is all.”

Rhyia’s eyes narrowed into slits, “And it won’t hurt him?” Despite how she, along with the rest of his siblings, chose to brush him off more often than not, she did care for him on a certain level. It was why Cardan had approached her in the first place. He trusted her alone to follow through with this task.

“The young Prince shall remain whole and hale. It is to my understanding that he is now indebted to me?”

Cardan was about to protest when Rhyia spoke first, “I will take on his debt to you. When you need a favor, come to me.”

The imp’s smile widened, “Oh it is not a favor I seek in return. Simply bring him back to me once the… effects of the cure have taken hold.”

Cardan didn’t like how ominous that sounded. Nonetheless he nodded to his sister and they moved to leave.

Once they had turned away, they missed how the Imp’s smile grew impossibly wider and a silent laugh fell from his lips.

~.~

“Are you sure about this?”

Her constant questioning was beginning to grate on Cardan’s nerves as they trekked back to Hallow Hall. “For the last time, yes. I am profoundly certain in my decision. Will you let it alone now?”

Rhyia hummed and stopped walking. When Cardan realized she was no longer beside him, he stopped as well and turned to face her. She was staring at him with an expression he couldn’t puzzle out.

“Having the love of a mortal is-”

Cardan turned away sharply and began walking again, “I do not have the love of a mortal! One simply plagues my thoughts, and this is the only way to cure it.”

Rhyia jogged to catch up with him. She linked her arm through his, “All I was going to say was that…being in love with, or having the love of a mortal, is no reason to feel shame. Many of us have loved them, dearly so. The General, our father. Even I have known the affections of one.”

Cardan stopped short. That couldn’t be right. Yes, there were some Folk who took mortals as consorts and lovers- they were good for cultivating many children. The General’s love, he knew, had ended in tragedy. One that produced the very person he so sorely wished to be rid of. His father had an affinity for many a thing unusual, and having Val Moren at his side was just that. Cardan had just always assumed it was out of need for a seneschal who had an undying loyalty to him. But Rhyia?

He glanced at her sideways and she held her chin up higher, “As I said. I am not ashamed of who I have come to adore. Many think them beneath us, I find that to be wholly untrue. They are born, they live vibrant, beautiful lives, and they die, just as we do.”

Cardan shook his head, “They are dirt. A fleeting thing made of dust and water, gone before they can live fully if they do not stay here. They are beneath us.” A practiced excuse, and his sister knew it.

“You feel the need to run from what you do not understand. Do not want to feel. The choice is yours but know this: You are a prince. You may love whoever you see fit to love. Mortals may be weaker than we are, but their ability to love is stronger even than our own. When they find someone fit to adore, they put their entire existence into loving them. They feel it deeply and should you find yourself the object of their affection, there will be nothing they will not do for you,” She looked at him pointedly, “It is an honor to be loved by a mortal.”

Cardan was silent for a moment as her words sank in. The vial in his pocket felt heavier, somehow.

An honor. Cardan had never been granted anything akin to honor before. And as thoughts of auburn hair and rounded ears flashed through his mind, he realized he never would be granted such a thing. He shook his head,

“Even if that were true, my issue does not stem from running from the affections of a mortal.”

Rhyia smiled carefully at her brother, “Of course not. Simply from the possibility that she will not love you as you love her.”

He balked and tugged his arm from her hold, stalking the rest of the way home on his own. He did not love a mortal. He just couldn’t get thoughts of her out of his mind. Her name played on an indestructible loop in his brain, carefully preserved memories of her every sneer and glare followed him into his dreams and emerged with him in his waking hours. She wouldn’t leave him alone.

The liquid in that vial would fix it. It would erase her very essence from each corner of his brain, every fold she inhabited, like a sprite infestation of the mind. He would be rid of every thought, every memory, every feeling he had ever had for her.

Without any further pondering, he lifted the vial from his pocket and uncorked it.

Before he even got inside Hallow Hall, he brought it to his lips.

He threw back the potion and blessedly forgot Jude Duarte.

~.~

Lessons had never been a source of joy for Cardan. In fact, he would go as far to say they were a bane of his existence. Knowledge and learning, taking precious time to become scholarly when he could have been lounging about instead.

An odd absence in his chest pulled at him. He felt as if there was something about lessons that should have- usually would have- brought him some level of entertainment, of satisfaction. Looking around, his comrades by his side as they set up their blankets and baskets on the great lawn for the day, there was nothing amiss.

And yet there was something…

“Here they come.” Locke muttered conspiratorially, looking at someone approaching over Cardan’s shoulder. Valerian leered and Nicasia glanced in that direction before scoffing and looking elsewhere.

Had they all met someone at a revel recently? Someone worthy of their torment? Surely, they would have told him had that been the case.

Either way, he wanted to be included, so he turned as well.

When he caught sight of her, he lost his right to breathe.

There were two mortal girls, they were linked at the arm and looked exactly alike. Twins, highly uncommon amongst the Folk, though it happened often enough for the term to be familiar.

Despite there being two of them, his eyes immediately caught on the one to the right.

She was gorgeous.

Her auburn hair was twisted into a knot at the top of her head, a golden net holding it in place along with a few decorative pins. She was wearing a simple tunic with a crest across her chest that he instantly recognized. The family crest of General Madoc. He had mortal charges?

She clutched her basket in one hand and clutched her sister’s arm even closer. She was whispering something to the other girl and when she glanced up, she locked gazes with him.

It felt as if time had frozen.

She stared at him for a moment, brown eyes boring into his. It was the most beautiful color he had ever had the privilege of seeing. What a shame she shared a face with the girl next to her, her beauty was so striking that it deserved to be all her own. Even so, she was- as far as he was concerned- far more breathtaking than her twin.

She was alarmingly attractive. Distressingly beautiful. The product of tortuous, glorifying nightmares. He needed to know her, needed to speak to her. What did her voice sound like? Was she bold or soft spoken? How long had she been in Elfahme and why had he never encountered her before?

This ethereal creature… he could feel his heart beating so quickly it was growing painful, he had to force himself to take a breath least he pass out from lack of oxygen.

“Who is that?” He knew his voice was little more than a strained whisper as he continued to stare at her.

As soon as his mouth moved, it seemed to shatter some hold that had settled over her. Her eyes narrowed and she gave him a glare so delightfully heated that he could feel it burning his very blood. She was a fiery one.

Her lips pulled into a sneer and he immediately wanted to know what she would taste like. Some strange, horrid concoction of bitter and sweet, no doubt. He had to know.

He could see Nicasia looking at him strangely from the corner of his eye. He couldn’t bring himself to tear his gaze from the mortal as she moved to an empty area on the grass with her twin in tow. He watched as they spread out their blankets and settled down.

“The Duarte twins? Madoc’s filthy mortal brats? Cardan, are you feeling well?” She asked, rare concern lacing her voice.

He would wager he’d never felt better in his life. He felt something in his chest- the previously empty and wounded area- light up as though something finally came to life in him, as though he were finally whole.

“What’s her name, the one on the right?” He ignored the strange looks his friends gave him, never looking away from the Duarte twin that had enraptured his attention, though she kept throwing disgusted sneers his way every time she looked up to find him still staring.

“Jude?” Locke inquired, glancing gleefully between the twins and the prince.

Something in his mind snapped into place, and he finally understood what had been missing, Jude.

Her name looped around his thoughts, over and over.

Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude…

He needed her. He felt it, he…

Cardan Greenbriar was in love.

~.~

Waiting for lessons to end was nearly unbearable, the only consolation Cardan got was from staring at the object of his affections throughout the day.

Each time she caught him staring, she would glare and turn away sharply, as though his gaze had branded her. Each time it sent a thrill through him, something he had never felt before, even with previous lovers. Even with Nicasia, who was sitting right next to him through the whole day.

It was perhaps hasty on his part, this whole bodied acceptance of his feelings, but Cardan was never one to curb his indulgences. After all, when the Folk fell in love, it was often that it happened deeply and all at once. This was nothing out of the ordinary, and the prince looked forward to trying to shower this lovely fiend in affections as soon as he could speak with her.

As soon as they were released for the day, he issued Locke to distract her twin, having seen how they stole glances at one another during their lessons. The fox like faerie was all too happy to oblige and Cardan found himself trailing his new love off the palace grounds and into the forest, glad she hadn’t bothered to wait for her twin.

It took about two minutes for her to stop, once they were out of sight of the palace behind them. She turned and her gaze locked onto him.

He continued forward until he was a mere foot away from her. He said nothing and simply stood there, watching, waiting for her to speak first.

“What do you want?” Oh, how delightfully sharp her voice was! Even drenched in irritation, it was soothing as a balm to his aching head after listening to Nicasia’s grating prattle all day. She looked momentarily surprised at herself, as though she were normally much milder. Though she quickly shook it off and continued to glare at him.

He decided to forego beating around the bush, she seemed like the type of person who enjoyed being direct, getting straight to the point. That spot in his chest she now occupied throbbed a bit, “You’ve captured my attention. You’re quite alluring, Jude. That is your name, correct?”

A completely logical question, but she looked at him as though he had two heads. Actually no- there was at least one two headed faerie out there- she looked at him as though he had just asked her to shoot him through with an arrow, like he was an idiot in need of mental help.

“Is this some kind of trick?” Her voice was dripping disgust and her hand twitched as though she wanted to reach for something but thought better of it at the last moment. Her eyes narrowed further and he found himself wishing she would look at him normally so he could see her eyes fully. They must be exquisite this close up.

He shook his head, shifting towards her, she took a step back, “No trick. I know I’m being forward, but I find you most enchanting, perhaps we can walk together?” he smirked at her. He knew how to be charming, had won a few hearts that way. However, she sneered at him as though she were completely immune to it- even better!

“’Perhaps we’… What are you doing, Cardan?” she nearly growled his name and he found he quite liked the way it sounded coming out of her mouth.

“Expressing my interest in you,” he stepped closer and grabbed one of her hands gently, tried not to laugh when she casually pulled it away and unsheathed a small dagger at her hip, “As I said, you have my attention.”

She looked confused a moment, even slightly concerned. It vanished quickly and she held the dagger a little higher. Outright threatening him. Yes, he was definitely in love!

“What has gotten into you? Some sort of sickness the Folk get? Have you been drinking already?”

Already. For some reason that stuck in his head. ‘Have you been..’ it sounded as though she knew of his habits. Granted it was no secret that he preferred various wines over most other beverages any day, but only those who paid attention to him knew that. He was under the distinct impression they had never met before.

That spot in his heart throbbed again, painfully.

“You…” He took a step towards her and she backed up several paces, her blade gleaming between them.

“If this is some new way of trying to get me to back down, you can drop it. It’s not going to work. You’ve managed to pit Taryn against me already, and as long as you leave her alone, we have an understanding but that’s it. I won’t hesitate to hurt you if you touch either one of us. Now leave me alone.”

Cardan didn’t understand half of what she was talking about. Who was Taryn? Her twin perhaps? He hadn’t bothered with her name. How did Jude figure he had pit them against one another? And how had he and Jude come to an agreement of sorts if he had never met her before?

As she backed away, dagger still held offensively as though she expected him to lunge for her, he realized he was going to need answers to his growing list of questions before he tried to pursue her further.

He held up his hands in what he hoped was a placating gesture, watching as she continued to move away before she was far enough to turn and hastily make her way from him. He gazed after her a moment, wishing that had gone differently, then turned and started to trek his way home, suddenly in a somber mood.

~.~

Jude huffed out a breath of frustration as she re-sheathed her dagger, trying to figure out what on earth had just passed between her and Cardan.

You have my attention. That was normally a bad thing, but the way he had been gazing at her…she could feel her blood heating and it wasn’t all due to hate.

So wrapped up in trying to figure out what had just happened with Cardan, Jude didn’t realize someone else was following her until it was too late.

She jumped an embarrassingly high distance into the air when Princess Rhyia appeared beside her.

“Oh! Uh, your highness.” Jude muttered, dropping into a low curtsy.

She tried to keep her wits about her when the princess gripped her arm and looped her own through it. She smiled warmly at Jude, something she found slightly disconcerting, and said, “Walk with me.”

Her tone was gentle, but Jude understood a command when she heard one, and Rhyia was all but physically dragging her by the arm, so she really had little choice in the matter.

“Tell me, young Jude. What do you think of my brother?”

Jude didn’t bother asking for clarification. If Rhyia had followed her all this way, it was likely she had just seen whatever it was that had transpired between Cardan and herself. She was about to blurt out “I hate him, as he does me” when she stopped herself. It probably wasn’t wise to badmouth him to his sibling. Not to mention it felt…odd, to say that all of a sudden.

The princess caught her hesitation and squeezed her arm gently, “Please, speak freely.”

Well then, “Um…we don’t…we don’t see eye to eye.” A huge understatement, though Rhyia simply nodded, keeping quiet as she waited for Jude to go on. “I take it you know why he was acting so strangely back there?”

For a startling moment, the princess looked upset. She schooled her features quickly, though. “Usually, I would feel it is not my place to meddle. But Cardan… it is no excuse, I know, but… he doesn’t always understand his own feelings.”

Jude bit the inside of her own cheek. She had quite a bit to say when it came to Cardan and feelings. She kept quiet as his sister went on.

“I shouldn’t be the one to reveal all the details, but I can tell you that he feels very strongly for you. So strongly in fact, that he went to extremes to stop feeling for you. It would appear his plan backfired.”

Strong feelings? Backfired? What? “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Cardan approached me yesterday, asking if I knew of a way to rid him of feelings he couldn’t stand to feel. I took him to an imp I know of, who gave him a potion, a…cure, he called it. It would erase the thing that ails one from their memory.”

Jude was putting the pieces together now. For an inexplicable reason, something tugged at her chest, dark and ugly. “He…wanted to forget me?” She asked carefully.

Rhyia smiled, obviously happy Jude was understanding, “You were haunting him. He couldn’t cease thinking of you and it was driving him quite mad. So, he sought a solution.”

“A solution?” Jude scoffed, the hurt in her chest growing, “So rather than…than talk to me, he decided to erase me from his memory?!” She couldn’t fathom why this truth hurt, why she even cared-

“Well, he tried. I’ve been watching him today. It seems that, if anything, his feelings for you are much clearer now.” She nodded to herself, as if this was a completely logical situation.

Jude felt like she couldn’t breathe. Cardan, he felt something for her? Something other than hate?

She thought back to a piece of paper, her name dashed out over and over and over, like he was trying to immortalize her, pen her down on paper so she should never be forgotten.

Suddenly, she was recounting every interaction they had ever had, every weighted look and spiteful word. Each trick and torment and barb thrown at one another. The way they relentlessly targeted one another, trading blows in every form one could think of. She recalled the way Taryn begged her to let it go, to quit this twisted game but she couldn’t. She would not forfeit. She didn’t want to stop.

And he was just as guilty. Each time they went toe to toe, he wouldn’t back down, wouldn’t leave her alone, almost as if he needed this game they played just as much as she did, just to feel... and each time, there was an air of something heavier behind it all, something unspoken and deadly and mutual.

Something like obsession. A twisted kind of heart-breaking. A tragic back and forth dance. Evil, heated, something intense, some…

Some wicked type of love.

She didn’t realize she had stopped moving until Rhyia pulled her arm from Jude’s. They were nearing Madoc’s estate, but Jude found she didn’t want to go home just yet.

“He…We, uh…” Great, at a loss for words in front of royalty. But Rhyia just smiled wider.

“I heard there is a way to bring back memory stolen by a potion, a kiss of true love or something of that nature. But you didn’t hear it from me.” The princess leaned in and placed a sisterly kiss on Jude’s cheek before she winked and walked away.

Jude stood there, stupidly staring at nothing just off the edge of Madoc’s estate for far longer than she would have liked to admit.

She… she loved him? She wanted to be wrong, but it felt like she had just discovered the answer to everything she never realized she was questioning. Her chest ached, she had to get to him. What had Rhyia said? ‘kiss of true love’? Like from a story book? Ridiculous. And exactly the kind of thing that would happen to her.

Jude squared her shoulders, resigning herself to her decision.

Without giving herself a chance to reconsider, she turned on her heel and started to backtrack to Hallow Hall.

~.~

Cardan was only slightly surprised when Jude traipsed through his open balcony doors an hour later. He wasn’t sure what she had against using the front door like a normal person but epic declarations of love were often much more, well, epic when preceded by dramatic entrances.

He liked her flair.

“Somehow I knew you would show up.” He was genuinely glad to see her, though if she was here to tell him off again, he wasn’t sure how he would manage. He would find a way, though, for her.

“Shame on me for being predictable.” She muttered, moving further into the room. She regarded him coolly, “You really don’t remember me?”

Cardan held up a finger and moved to his desk. He picked up an empty vial that was sitting atop. He held it out to her.

“I assumed I was at a revel last night and that was why I couldn’t recall anything, however today’s events are making that hard to believe.”

Jude took the vial from him, careful not to touch him as she did so. She examined the glass, rolled it over in her hands a few times. She glanced back up at him and he was happy to find her eyes open wide. He was right, a gorgeous color.

“I assume you don’t know what this is.” She shook the vial.

He shook his head, “I figure it’s the cause of my lapse in memory. Now I wonder what was in it and why I needed it,” He looked her over carefully, head to toe and back up again, “And why it seems tied to you.”

She pocketed the vial, though he wasn’t sure why she would want it, “Have you spoken with Rhyia today?”

Rhyia? “What does my sister have to do with this?”

“She accompanied me home, don’t give me that look- she snuck up on me. She told me that yesterday you asked for her assistance in acquiring something. A cure, of sorts.”

Cardan ignored the jealousy he felt against his sister-how unfair that she got to walk Jude home- and mused over Jude’s words. A cure… “I don’t recall being ill before last night.” He crossed his arms, watching her. Even the way she just stood there was astounding. He could look at her forever and it still wouldn’t be long enough to give her the attention she deserved.

“Well, you weren’t sick, exactly. You…wanted someone erased from your memory.” Her voice went quiet. Odd, from what he knew of her thus far, that seemed extremely out of character for her.

“That would explain the memory loss.” Horrible attempt at a quip, though her mouth quirked up at the corner, he got her to smile! Despite her obvious upset, his chest warmed. He wanted to see her grinning, to hear her laugh. Perhaps he would, one day.

“Yeah, well, it definitely did its job.”

It hit him, then. He had wanted to forget someone, his comrades had displayed obvious distaste for the Duarte twins even though Cardan could not recall ever meeting them. Rhyia had gone to Jude after their…talk in the woods, and Cardan hardly believed it had been Jude’s twin he had wanted to forget.

“You.” He said quietly, watching her shift her weight from one foot to the other, “I wanted to forget you?” He hardly thought it possible, she was a delight! He had never known what the missing piece of his entire existence had been until he laid eyes on her for the first time- ok, not first time, rather the first time he remembers. All the same, looking upon her beautiful countenance now, he could quite confidently declare his past self absolutely mad for attempting to purge her from his thoughts.

Jude shrugged and stepped closer, “I guess I was haunting you. And you don’t like knowing there is something out there that you can’t have.”

His heart plummeted. He wished it to soar at the obvious fact that she seemed to know him so well, however her words crushed the fragile hope that had been budding within him since he left her alone in the woods, “And I can’t? Have you?”

Her gaze was intense and piercing when it landed on his own. Again, he marveled at the color. The rich hues of brown one found upon the forest floor, the cracked deck of a mighty ship, all the copper and wood and soil of the earth blending together to solidify themselves in the alluring shade of her eyes. He couldn’t breathe.

She forewent answering his question, “Your sister told me there is a way to restore your memory, if you would have it.”

“Yes.” He found himself breathing, already enticed at the prospect of remembering this wicked girl before him. Obviously, his past self had been an idiot for trying to forget her. He cleared his throat, “What is it?”

She took another step, then another, stopping only when they were so close he had to tilt his head down to meet her eyes.

“I’m not sure it will work, but I know you’ll find it entertaining.”

Gently, he reached up to wrap a lock of her hair around his finger. She didn’t seem to mind as he asked again, “Is there a chance? That I could have you?” He’d never had anything solely his, never won affections simply because someone had cared for him. He knew if she could be that for him, he’d want for nothing more in his life ever again.

Slowly, she lifted a hand to his cheek. He found himself leaning into it readily as she pulled his face closer to hers.

She seemed to hesitate, considering something before she answered, “So long as I could have you.”

He would have answered, ‘Anything, you can have anything you want’ had she not closed the distance and pressed her lips to his.

~.~

The memories came rushing back all at once and they nearly knocked his breath out of his chest. But he only gave his history with his gorgeous villain a passing thought as more pressing matters settled themselves in the forefront of his mind.

Namely, the fact that Jude was kissing him. Jude. As everything he knew about her, about them fell into place he had to wonder if he was dreaming. But no. He’d imagined this very moment before and… It had all his hopes, his expectations paling in comparison to the actual sensation. She was warm and her mouth was soft even as she roughly slanted it against his own. Even when showing affection, she felt the need to be in control and he lent it to her willingly.

In the back of his mind, he recalled having always assumed that their first kiss would be intoxicating and drenched in delirium- why else would either of them fall into the other without a fight, if not for the moment being brought about by emotions stronger than they could contend with? And while it definitely lived up to that expectation, he had also always assumed it would be over rather quickly. That she would pull away abruptly, muttering about mistakes and small, ironic acts of vengeance.

That is where the likeness between imagination and reality broke away.

In reality, as soon as her mouth met his and she gave him a moment to feel the onslaught of memories, she stepped closer, forcing him to bend slightly to accommodate their height difference. The hand that had been resting on his face slid up, over the pointed tip of his ear and into his hair while her other arm fastened tightly around his shoulders, pulling him flush against her.

He fumbled for a moment- which was really something wasn’t it? Wasn’t he the more experienced of the two? How thoroughly she had undone him already!

Once his bearings were back intact, he slipped his arms around her waist, molding himself to her. He marveled at how seamlessly they seemed to fit together. A lock and- wait, no. No Locke. Two pieces of the same puzzle finally snapping into place.

His mind gave over to a blank sort of haze, melting along to the backdrop of her name looping around his thoughts, Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude and for a bare moment he understood again why he had forced her out of his mind, for she was the only thing in the universe that had the power to drive him into pure madness.

He would happily crash into insanity now, with her wrapped around him, teeth tugging at his bottom lip demandingly. He obliged to her wishes, would cater to her every twisted whim if she would have it. One of his hands snaked into her hair as he deepened their kiss, he felt her fingers dig into his back harshly in response. He felt that should he die now, he would leave this existence fulfilled and whole.

Once the need for oxygen became unrelenting, he pressed his mouth firmly against hers, once more, and pulled away.

Again, his imaginings of this moment ended here or before, with her pulling away, that beautiful scowl etched across her perfect face, muttering foul and soul wrenching words like mistake and useless.

And again, reality outshone even the darkest parts of his mind. As soon as he pulled back, she stayed near a moment, waiting to see if he would come back. When he didn’t, she sighed through her nose, the sound almost content and she peered up at him.

His eyes locked on hers as she let her hands explore the breadth of his shoulders, the column of his neck which she glanced at briefly before her gaze snapped back to his own, full of something like longing.

When he didn’t move, said nothing, she tilted her head to the side as she tugged at the hair at the nape of his neck. “Well?” was all she said.

It took him a moment to register what her meaning was. She wanted to know if he remembered her, their history. He blinked, “I…remember.” He stated cautiously. He couldn’t lie of course, but he almost wanted to. So terrified was he of what that knowledge would mean for them, for what had just transpired between them. His imaginings never prepared him for this.

Or for what she did next.

A smirk, more of a small smile, really, bloomed across her features. That in itself was jarring but since this was Jude and ambition was what drove her out of bed in the morning, of course she took it further than simply jarring. She leaned in again, placing a kiss to his cheek, along his jaw, his nose even, before she finally claimed his lips again. It was past shocking. Had he known memory loss would lead to this he would have sought out his sister for help much sooner.

Though really, why was she even doing this? Just yesterday she had been scowling at him every time they glanced at each other, just an hour ago she had been threating his life, warning him to back off. What had changed?

This, while thrilling, wasn’t ideal. Insecurity was not something Cardan was overly familiar with these days, not when it came to her. This information is what had him puling away gently, looking at her in earnest.

“Why the sudden interest?” He debated throwing a quip or scathing remark of some sort her way, a sudden and desperate need to get back to their malicious bantering washing over him, though he shoved the thought away. He was genuinely curious as to what changed her mind.

She shook her head as she finally left his embrace, “I had just been thinking and realized that somewhere along the way, strong feelings of hate had shifted into strong feelings of…something else.”

She looked put out at the thought that she had developed any sort of emotion for him other than contempt, but he had to agree with her sentiment. He bristled to think that that potion hadn’t done its job right, but it had done something. Before, he had been content to half-lie to himself, to convince himself so profoundly that he was not enchanted, mind and body and soul by this girl before him.

What was it Rhyia had said? It is an honor to be loved by a mortal.

Cardan felt that maybe there was honor in loving one, too.

He bit the inside of his cheek before asking, “And you meant what you said, before?”

So long as I could have you.

“Yes.” She sounded so sure. He liked to believe she wasn’t lying. She rubbed at the missing tip of her finger as she watched him, “So, where does that leave us?”

Bring him back to me when the effects of the… cure have taken hold. He’d gotten more than he had bargained for. He held out his hand to Jude.

She reached for it instantly and he tried not to let it show how deeply that affected him, his head already wanting to go fuzzy with nothing but the thought of her.

“I owe a visit to a certain imp.”

Fin

And that is that! Please let me know your thoughts! And I am so excited to be sharing again and looking forward to what I plan to write in the future☺️ (jeez it is so long I’m so sorry for everyone who has to scroll all this way😬😅)

Here is my tag list, as always please let me know if you would like to be added, I’m always excited when people ask me tag them and it is my greatest pleasure to oblige!❤️ (also- over 500 followers now? What!? You guys are amazing and I honestly don’t think I would have come this far without you guys! Sending all my love!🥰)

@maleckanejnessianjurdansolangelo @woodsbeyond1 @cardan-greenbriar-tcp @thewickedkings @aneurwin @snusbandxknifewife @jurdanhell @andromeddea @dressedindustandshadows @thesirenwashere @b00kworm @hizqueen4life @unidentifiedblackthorn @iminsanenotobsessed @df3ndyr @brittneyal @aelin-queen-of-terrasen @thefolkofthefic @yafandomsdotnet @fuzzypineapples @nahthanks @charrise @thefolkofthefic @theviolettulip @embersfromink @kittkatandbooboo

#cardan greenbriar #jude duarte #jurdan #the cruel prince #tcp #fic #long fic #a test in which I see how many times I can write Jude’s name without going insane myself

[bigskydreaming]

I honestly can’t tell if this is a purely petty want or its a rare non-petty want and I’ve simply lost the ability to distinguish between the two.....

But man would I kill for some fics from Jason or Tim’s POV post Forever Evil, while still believing Dick’s dead, where they like, think about all the things they’d held against Dick in the years before that while he’d kept trying to reach out to them, and just....regret all the time wasted, y’know? Like....there are SO MANY stories that spare no detail in showcasing how guilty Dick felt for Jason’s death and wishing he’d been around more often in hindsight......but what, Tim never thought about how often Dick tried to apologize or explain his reasoning with the Robin mantle or get him to keep in touch during the early Red Robin era and thinks....was it worth it? Keeping him at a distance as long as he had? Etc, etc.

I mean, if we can have decades worth of fic burdening Dick with more of a guilt complex about Jason’s death than we even typically see from Bruce, like, feeling guilty about how he handled the Garzonas case and giving Jason reason to doubt his place in the manor and as Robin and go seeking more family elsewhere......then surely brothers regretting the time they wasted fighting with a now deceased sibling is a pretty reasonable area of exploration, y’know?

And honestly, that’s a huge part of what made Jason and Tim’s reactions so hard to stomach when Dick came back. There was so much focus and emphasis given to their feelings of betrayal BECAUSE of how much time and emotion was spent grieving for him, now seemingly for nothing.....

But problem was....

WE NEVER REALLY SAW ANY OF THAT!

Like where was it? It was very much a case of tell and not show. We barely ever got any MENTION of Dick’s death from the others during that in between time, it was more just awkward references and pained silences, but that’s not.....the same thing, y’know? We never really got any actual EXPLORATION of how they actually FELT about Dick being gone, other than a vague ‘oh we’re sad now’.....like I mean....when Bruce was lost in time, we actually SAW the grief play out in different ways amongst the different characters. With Dick’s though, we basically were just TOLD upon his return that they’d been SO heartbroken that now all they could feel was betrayed and angry when they looked at him, but where was all that heartbreak? Shouldn’t there have been some actual....displays of it then, if its gonna be strong enough to justify punching your returned from the dead brother and then pretty much declaring him persona non grata for the next year?

Course, as an extension of all that, I also can’t help but feel that if there HAD been more of an examination on the impact Dick’s loss had on the others, what it brought up for them, what it made them think about and reprioritize and regret or wish they could have done differently or had another chance to do differently....whether in canon or just in terms of fic trends.....

Then I do honestly think that actual FOCUS there on those kinds of things would have paved the way for the others still to have been more....gracious about Dick’s return, or like....made it easier for them to have more nuanced perspectives there. Because if you’ve ACTUALLY just spent the past year or so regretting having wasted so much time being angry at the brother you now miss so much, with this actually being reflected in various narratives.....then suddenly it becomes a lot easier and more obvious upon discovering he’s alive, to like....not literally repeat the same thing all over again and just go back to being mad at him rather than taking advantage of this second chance at having him back in your lives.

And I mean, if the problem all along was people not wanting to acknowledge Bruce’s specific role and actions in getting Dick to go undercover at Spyral, which I mean, I actually do get......there’s still no real need to throw Dick under the bus to give the others someone to blame there, if like.....you just make their priority not needing to BLAME someone at all, but just being fucking GLAD to have him back, the very thing most of them probably wished for multiple times over the prior year.

But that particular prioritization - joy that he’s alive, period, versus resentment for time ‘wasted’ grieving - basically first requires a reversal in what focus is given most priority. To get THAT outcome, you basically need Dick’s ABSENCE and his loss from their lives over the past year, how this affects them, how they feel about THAT, to be given the actual focus....rather than what we actually got, which was the focus just on their feelings of hurt and betrayal UPON Dick’s return.

(With this of course also stemming from and playing into my biggest issues with Forever Evil and Grayson, which is that everyone else was cast as being more victimized by the storylines that Dick was literally the ACTUAL victim of, buuuuuuut I’ve ranted on that many a time before so I mean. Whatever).

But yeah, just.....there’s a real dearth of actual REACTIONS to Dick’s death and reflections on his LOSS and what that means to the others, during that year he’s gone (with honestly the same being true of the entire year he spent as Ric Grayson, like I mean it was literally just the same thing, redux.....everyone was so busy resenting Ric for not being Dick, there was barely ever any focus actually given to the fact that this was because they MISSED Dick.....and since Ric still was Dick, after all, this basically just meant that for all that time, the focus was just on everyone being mad at him....for them....missing him. I just. Ugh. DC. Why are you such a fucking mess on repeat with Dick’s storylines I mean no but seriously WHY. GET SOME NEW MATERIAL).

Anyway. So that’s what I was thinking about while reading the umpteenth million fic where Dick waxes on, all penitent like, for not being around more before Jason died......umm okay then, so what if fic where Jason and Tim spend a paragraph or two thinking ‘oh man, wish I wasn’t always just such an asshole to my now dead brother every time he wanted to just hang out for literally no other reason than because he was my brother and he loved me’ hmmmm?

[fightabear]

so, i just need to shout for a second.

you are allowed to be critical of the media you consume. you should ask how it impacts you.

howver, you aren’t making the internet safer by pushing purity culture. if you care about the safety of minors online, you need to push education about internet safety.  predators lay in wait in general spaces and don’t need problematic content to groom them. in fact, actively pushing the idea that determining whether or not someone is a predator based on whether or not they engage in adult content determines whether or not they’re safe to interact with sets minors up to be uncritical of interactions with people that meet arbitrary safe criteria.

online predators will actively work to blend in to their victims peer group. 

you also need to be critical about where you’re getting your ideas, where they stem from, and who is pushing this agenda. 

please look at what just happened to onlyfans. i saw so many people toting it as a victory for children’s rights, without realizing that the organization behind the campaign against it is one whose primary focus is actually just criminalizing and stamping out all forms sex work. 

your desire to protect children and make the internet a safer space was being used as a weapon against sex workers by an anti-lgbt fundamentalist Christian organization that believes in abstinence only education.  

sorry.

if this had come from a genuine place, it would have sparked a larger conversation that explained to minors the very real danger put themselves in when they bypass the restrictions in place for these sites, the types of predators that could be watching them. not to mention the legal liabilities they open themselves up to as the child is technically committing a crime by producing and sharing this content.  there also would have been time for onlyfans to rework its verification system to make it harder for minors to get into.

instead, sex workers have been thrown out of the platform they built and are being shamed for being upset about it because they aren’t “thinking of the children”.

there is such a stunning lack of education being pushed as to why these things are bad and dangerous  and much more focus about destroying it. children will see this cool forbidden thing and run straight towards it because they don’t know any better, no one has told them not to touch the hot stove. yes, their brains aren’t done developing yet. they are not emotionally or mentally mature yet, they are going to make stupid mistakes - but they make more mistakes and open themselves up to more harm when they don’t understand that they’re in danger or where the danger is coming from.

and this isn’t victim blaming. i was a child online who had to deal with predators. i was the kid who would circumvent neopet’s ‘no offline site contact’ rule to rp with people over AIM. i thought it was stupid! i was grown up and mature, i could handle it, right? i had sooooo many online friends and nothing bad ever happened. i wasn’t even old enough to be on the forum!

then i was thirteen. i had naively added a person on msn thinking they were a fun new friend who was going to give me a rare item on gaia online, only for them to switch on a time when we were in private. they threatened to hack and delete my account unless i got on webcam and got shirtless. i was a lonely child and the internet friends i had were my only friends. i remember crying and my mom walking in the room, not knowing what was happening, and then i used that as a chance to wrest my account back and block and report the guy.

i never told my mom. i thought she’d take away the computer forever and i’d lose my only connection. i just dealt with the shame that this man had seen me shaking and afraid in only my bra. i had nightmares about him telling me to take it off or he’d send the picture to my school friends, since he now had access to my im list. i thought he was my friend. he said he liked my writing. he changed on a dime when we were alone.

when it happened again later, i knew that there was a reason why this 27 year old man kept dming me to tell me i was pretty when i shared pictures in our group chat.  now my school was giving internet stranger danger education, i knew some of what to watch out for and to trust my gut. it made me feel cool for all of ten seconds that this COOL older person praised my writing and thought i was attractive, but it also made me feel uneasy.  the fact that he wouldn’t do this where anyone else could see it bothered me. so, without a trusted adult, i went to the mods of the server and his girlfriend and expressed my discomfort about the conversations that were happening in private. more details came out and he was thrown out from the group chat.

i never see education being brought up in these conversations. never. from either side. the other day i went looking for evidence or studies of some of the arguments i see bandied around the most and found nothing. even in psas for legitimate predators, i never see people passing out education as to how kids can spot the danger signs or take the steps necessary to protect themselves. 

please ask yourself why when we talk about protecting minors online from predators, the normalization of carrds containing every single detail about their personal life when that is essentially a guide for a predator to use to get close to and abuse that child with is not the first thing brought up as a problem that needs to go.

#purity culture #tw child abuse #tw csa #tw child trafficking #tw homophobia #tw grooming

[makeste]

just another long rambling post trying to explain why I, a Bakugou fan, would treasonously want him to lose his quirk

this is something I had originally intended to post about later down the line, after we actually know for sure whether or not Bakugou is going to lose his quirk. but seeing as parts of this post (see: point #5) also indirectly address some issues that people had with the latest chapter (283) as well, I decided I might as well jump the gun.

this is a topic I’ve gotten a lot of asks about, and so I’ve tried to gather all of those various arguments into one single post with my own comments and rebuttals. however, the purpose of this post isn’t really to convince anyone or change anyone’s mind. it’s pretty much just an explanation of why I am so sold on the idea. I think it’s a little defensive at times, and I definitely feel like one of the side effects of getting asks like this...

...is that I feel compelled to explain that yes, as the veritable mountain of Bakuessays on this blog can attest to, I am in fact a Bakugou fan, and have not been standing here this whole time just waiting for the perfect moment to rip off my disguise revealing my secret “#1 Deku Stan!! BAKUGOU CAN SUCK IT” shirt underneath while cackling nefariously. like. just so we’re clear on that here.

I know I’ve said this repeatedly, but it’s precisely because I’m such an adamant fan of Bakugou that I’m excited over the story potential of him possibly becoming quirkless. as for why I keep bringing it up, honestly it’s mostly just because I keep getting the asks, lol. and so my options are basically to either say “ah you know what, you’ve convinced me,” or to keep trying to explain my reasoning at the risk of making everyone increasingly mad and/or bored.

anyway, so there are five arguments which I want to address, and they are as follows:

it’s repetitive/boring/we’ve already had the plotline of a prodigy student losing their quirk.

it cheapens Bakugou’s character development by directly “forcing” him to learn something, instead of him arriving at the conclusion on his own.

losing his quirk would put him on the back-burner, story-wise, and exclude him from further fights and story development.

Bakugou doesn’t need to learn anything more/there isn’t anything important Bakugou could learn by losing his quirk that he couldn’t learn in some other manner.

losing his quirk would mean him falling hopelessly behind Deku, and playing second fiddle to him when he should be Deku’s equal. it would render his whole story and all of his development meaningless.

before I get started, please be advised that this is a very long post. like, tragically long. idk I did my best to rein it in but it just got ramblier and ramblier sob anyways so here’s a cut.

okay!

1. it’s repetitive/boring/we’ve already had the plotline of a prodigy student losing their quirk.

have you ever heard people pose the argument that all of the good stories have already been told? the idea is basically that there’s no such thing as a truly original story anymore, because humankind has been telling stories for thousands of years and we’ve exhausted any and all original ideas by this point. the problem with this, though, is that it assumes that (1) stories must always be 100% completely original in order to be good, and (2) if the basic building blocks of two stories are the same, then those stories must basically be identical. which is very much not the case. classic story structures are classic for a reason. the best stories are based around themes and conflicts and story beats which have been reimagined in a million different ways, and which work precisely because they’re familiar, and because they still resonate with people each and every time. and each and every time, it’s still a different story, because even if the ideas and themes and even some of the emotions are the same, the people are different, and no two people’s stories will ever be exactly the same.

all of which is to say that firstly, just because someone has already lost their quirk doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting enough concept to explore again. but more importantly, Bakugou and Mirio are not the same person. Bakugou is a completely different character than Mirio, with a completely different personality and history, and completely different relationships with the other principal characters. in other words it is absolutely not the same story at all. Bakugou won’t react the same way as Mirio. he’s not a character who can be faded into the background like Mirio unfortunately was. and most importantly, he’s a character whose own personal history with the formerly quirkless main character makes this an extremely personal and compelling character arc which would hit in a vastly different way than Mirio’s. I don’t think it’s repetitive at all, any more than “the heroes fight the villains” is a repetitive plotline. basically this argument, which is subjective to begin with, just doesn’t hold any water to me, I’m sorry.

2. it cheapens Bakugou’s character development by directly “forcing” him to learn something instead of him arriving at the conclusion on his own.

okay there are two counterarguments that I want to make here. the first is that this has always been Bakugou’s character development process since day one. he has never simply just arrived at a zenlike conclusion on his own through stern self-reflection or anything like that. his entire story has been him learning and growing from one humbling experience after another. examples:

he stops bullying Deku after Deku saves his life.

he undergoes a huge shift in attitude after Deku beats him in their training fight on the second day of school. he eats a healthy serving of humble pie and listens to the constructive criticisms that Momo, Aizawa and the rest pile onto him afterwards, and the result is that he becomes less cocky and starts taking his training much more seriously.

he wins-but-loses to Todoroki in the school festival and it serves as a reminder that simply winning isn’t everything. being the best is meaningless if it’s handed to you. as a result his determination is fueled even more.

he is LITERALLY FORCED POINT-BLANK to work together with Deku in order to pass his final exam. he is dragged kicking and screaming. I can’t stress enough how completely unwilling he was to learn this lesson otherwise lmao. it’s abundantly clear that he would never have done this on his own had the lesson not been almost literally beaten into his own head.

his experience at Kamino -- being targeted because he was perceived as villainous, and feeling responsible for All Might’s retirement afterwards -- is perhaps the best example of how Katsuki takes a terrible experience and uses it to grow leaps and bounds as a person. he develops a new awareness of how his actions can potentially be perceived by others (a vital lesson if he ever hopes to make it to the top). and he’s profoundly humbled (I keep using that word, so I just want to pause a sec to clarify that I mean it not in a “humiliated and crushed” way, but in a “freedom from pride and arrogance” way; in other words this is ultimately a positive thing, even if it comes about in an unpleasant way) by the experience, enough so that he finally lets his walls of pride crumble enough to have his weirdly violent heart-to-heart with Deku. and as a result the two of them grow closer, and All Might sets him down the path of Win To Save and Save To Win. something which I feel compelled to note that he still had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE ABOUT beforehand. this is another thing that literally had to be spelled out for him before he could grasp it. it’s very hard for me to conceive a way of somehow spinning this particular development, which is by far the most important in his arc to date, as being something he just “learned on his own.”

and I forgot to mention it, but him failing the provisional license exam also directly contributed to the character development mentioned above! that was what finally tipped him over the edge. even though he was reeling from everything that had happened at Kamino, he still had too much pride to actually open up to anyone about it until this second “loss” of sorts finally convinced him that he really was doing something terribly wrong, and pushed him to talk to Deku about it.

and that brings us to where we’re at currently! there are a few other things I didn’t mention, like Jeanist lecturing him on the meaning behind choosing a hero name, and his internship with Endeavor teaching him... something. tbd lol. but anyways my point here is that Bakugou has always been a character who learns chiefly through his mistakes and painful experiences. it’s extremely rare for him to just arrive at some new tidbit of enlightenment all on his own, and if it does, it often still originally stems from a past -- often painful -- experience. that’s just how he is. his stubbornness is one of my favorite things about him, but it’s also always hindered his growth to some extent, and has made it harder for him to change his viewpoint all on his own, even though he is to his credit very open to change once something finally does sink in. he’s someone who’s always trying to be better. it’s just that a lot of times he needs to be nudged and pushed in the right direction, particularly on those few occasions where the thing he has to learn is something that runs counter to his current viewpoint to such a degree that he’s resistant to learning it (see, again, working together with Deku in the final exam).

and that finally brings me to my second counterargument to this point, which is that I very strongly feel that having to learn something “directly” in this very blunt manner does not make it cheap. that actually comes off as a bit insulting to all of Bakugou’s previous character development if I’m being honest. his development isn’t cheapened just because something was harder for him to learn. he’s not less of a good person just because he had a harder struggle to learn those things, and needed help and guidance, and made mistakes along the way. I feel very strongly that people shouldn’t be judged on how they grow, or their reasons for that growth. that to me feels like gatekeeping the concept of being a good person. “Bakugou isn’t as good of a character because he only started saving others and caring about people after he got kidnapped.” like, come on. people grow through their experiences! that’s literally where all growth stems from, even growth that on the surface appears to be self-fueled and motivated. every single action, every single motivation, happens because at some point or other, that person experienced something that led to them thinking and feeling that way, and deciding to do that thing. we are the sum total of our experiences, I believe is how the saying goes. and that goes double for characters in a story, because watching them go through those experiences is how we the audience discover who these characters are.

anyway so this argument is also a miss from where I stand. if it takes losing his quirk for Bakugou to have an epiphany about true strength, and what truly makes a hero on the inside, then goddammit, good for him. that’s nothing to be ashamed of. in the end that’s still his hard-earned growth, and he’s not any lesser for having learned it through adversity instead of just stumbling upon the answer somewhere along the way.

3. losing his quirk would put him on the back-burner, story-wise, and exclude him from further fights and story development.

hard disagree here as well. losing his quirk would be the single biggest thing that ever happened to Bakugou. a development like that would almost demand we focus on it. perhaps not right away (just like we didn’t immediately focus on him right after Kamino), but it would be inevitable. in fact, I’d argue that Bakugou losing his quirk is one of the only ways to guarantee that the story puts his character development back at the forefront again at some point, and doesn’t just drop the plotline entirely in an “eh, good enough” manner. it’s a development that basically makes his character development the focus of the plot, instead of us only ever getting little side anecdote scenes of “slowly becoming less of an asshole” for the rest of the series. it’s character development on hard mode, to be sure, but the fact of the matter is that Bakugou is not the main character, and so his personal character journey is only going to make it back to the forefront of the story if and when something significant enough occurs so as to make it worthy of being a focus.

as for the other half of this argument, the thing to understand here is that “Kacchan loses his quirk” is NOT the beginning, middle, and end of that storyline all in one. it absolutely won’t be “welp too bad, guess you can’t be a hero after all” and that’s that. “Kacchan loses his quirk” is only the first act of a story arc that continues with “Kacchan struggles with the aftermath of losing his quirk”, and concludes with “Kacchan regains his quirk and reemerges stronger than ever.” how that will ultimately play out, I don’t know! Vestiges; Eri; OFA; the quirk-restoring bullets which the villains also had at some point unless I’m misremembering things; whatever! the key thing here is that I have faith that it will play out. every single argument you see here is in the context of me believing that the endgame here is not a loss for him, but a win. it’s actually the win, because if all goes well, he comes back stronger than ever because he’s finally done away with the one remaining thing that was holding him back -- that lingering unnecessary fear, insecurity, and pride that’s still at the root of so many of his actions even now.

which brings me to my next point.

4. Bakugou doesn’t need to learn anything more/there isn’t anything important Bakugou could learn by losing his quirk that he couldn’t learn in some other manner.

you’ve no doubt guessed it, but I once again disagree here lol. he definitely still has more to learn. Bakugou’s character development thus far has been extraordinary, but all the same, I still want more for him. I don’t think this is the best he’s capable of. his ceiling is much, much higher, and to say that this is as good as he gets is to underestimate him imo.

here’s an incomplete list of things that Bakugou, at present, is still clearly struggling with, numbered alphabetically so that I can explain afterwards how losing his quirk would address each one.

a.) he still obsessively compares his progress to Deku’s at every turn. we got a little bit of insight into his thought processes just recently in chapter 275, and it was extremely revealing. his rivalry with Deku has been a good thing thus far, but this is primarily because up until this point he has been able to keep pace with Deku. so much of his confidence and self-worth seems to hinge on this one specific thing which is notably outside his control, and that’s troubling to me. but more on that further down in a bit.

b.) he’s still incapable of admitting that he cares about people (which is endearing to be fair, but nonetheless indicates that he still views caring as a weakness, and is uncomfortable acknowledging or expressing it).

c.) he has not yet sorted out the problem of coming off as hostile, vulgar, and aggressive even when a situation necessitates him to be more cooperative. to put it plainly, he’s incapable of dialing back his personality even the slightest degree and as a result gets edited out of interviews and has his friends constantly scrambling to apologize and/or interpret for him. I know that a lot of people -- myself included -- actually adore this feral side of him and even consider it one of his most endearing traits, but still, the fact of the matter is that it’s not a good thing that he’s entirely incapable of even the slightest bit of emotional regulation. at some point he’s going to have to sort his shit out at least a little bit; even Endeavor and Mirko are capable of reining it in when it comes to dealing with the public at large and with the press. if he wants to reach the top ranks he still has a lot of growing to do here.

d.) he still thinks of his own worth purely in terms of physical strength. this is a big one. Katsuki has always defined his own world in terms of strength and weakness. “strong” is good; “weak” is bad. people who win are strong. people with quirks are strong. he has a good quirk so he’s strong. Deku doesn’t have a quirk so he shouldn’t be strong (which becomes a paradox and a source of great fear and confusion to him when he realizes on a deep subconscious level that Deku somehow is strong in spite of lacking a quirk). All Might is the best hero because he’s strong and never loses. he’s going to be even better than All Might, and he’ll do it by being strong and never losing.

except that these ideas are all limited, and limiting. physical strength is not the only kind of strength. All Might wasn’t the number one hero and the Symbol of Peace only because he was strong. Katsuki isn’t strong only because he has a good quirk. but he’s still stuck on this idea regardless, and everything he does, everything he is is defined by this idea. even now, with everything he’s learned, he’s still stuck in this limited perspective. and the very obvious problem with that is that it places him in a precarious emotional position where if he ever actually loses, or something happens to strip that physical strength of his away, his entire core of self-worth stands to fall apart as a result. he’s put all his eggs in that basket. and it’s the source of all of his insecurity, and it’s a weakness that’s just waiting to be exploited, and which is holding him back from discovering and acknowledging so many other good things about himself.

e.) and last but not least we’ve got what is by far his biggest current failing (and I say not to put him down, but rather in that same spirit of “learning to acknowledge your own weaknesses” which he himself has so readily embraced), which is that he is still only focused on himself. mind you, I’m not saying that he’s a bad person, or that he doesn’t care about other people! but I am saying that he is self-centered, and that’s just a fact, and I would defy anyone to try and argue otherwise tbh. he is constantly and completely focused only on his own goals. and on top of that he also has great difficulty seeing things from any perspective other than his own, which has been the cause of numerous clashes and misunderstandings with other people, some more disastrous than others (see: that one time he thought Deku must be looking down on him because he couldn’t conceive of a situation where anyone would actually want to accept help from someone else, rather than being self-sufficient, and thus assumed that Deku’s attempt to help him was in fact an insult). he casts himself in the role of the main character, and dismisses most everyone else as “extras.” and it took him an extraordinarily long time to learn the importance of learning from and helping other people (and again, this was something which had to be explicitly spelled out for him. I’ll say it again and again if I have to, because it’s so important in understanding where Bakugou is coming from and what his mindset is in all of this. he had to have it spelled out, because it was genuinely something which wouldn’t have occurred to him otherwise, because it’s so alien to everything he grew up believing up till that point, and because he has so much difficulty seeing other perspectives).

and again, I’m not saying this to dump on him or imply that he doesn’t care! because he does; we’ve seen that demonstrated on multiple occasions. he has compassion for others. he wants to do the right thing and he wants to be a good person, and he tries very hard in his own way. but he is nonetheless still stuck in his own perspective. he struggles with empathy and being able to see from other people’s points of view. and that is a huge barrier to his becoming the greatest hero of all time, and it’s probably the most difficult barrier to overcome. the behavior is something he can and has been chipping away at little by little, but the root causes of the behavior are still there.

anyway. so now that I’ve said all of that, which probably could have been its own essay in and of itself, how would losing his quirk do anything to address these issues? so let’s now break that down point by point as well, using the same alphabetical numbering system as before. I’m skipping the first one because I’ll address it further down, so we’ll start with b.

b.) it makes him more vulnerable in that it’s a huge blow to his pride. how is that a good thing you ask? because pride is always a double-edged sword. the downside is that losing it hurts his self-esteem (but more on that in a sec), but the upside is it opens him up more to accepting kindness from other people, and allowing himself to express kindness and caring himself in return. pride is almost always the biggest obstacle in doing that. so the short of this is that it could lead to us seeing a more open, willingly vulnerable side to him that would strengthen his relationships and serve him well in the long run.

c.) in a similar vein, the ego check would probably help to address some of his emotional instability as well. a not-insignificant chunk of his tactless exterior is basically just a projection; a tough guy persona he’s constructed over the years as part of his neverending quest to be strong. there’s also a fair amount of insecurity (interpreting everything other people say in the worst way possible and reacting with defensive hostility), arrogance/boastfulness, and fear of vulnerability (aka weakness) mixed in as well. so I could see the whole experience leading to a softening of his personality. in my ideal world this would mostly be just temporary, with his usual Bakuattitude gradually being restored piece by piece as his soul searching adventures wear on and he starts acting like his old self more and more. but I do think that in the end, the loss of that insecurity in particular would go a long way towards helping him gain the ability to chill out just a little bit more when the situation calls for it.

d.) it strips him of that physical strength he’s depended on and defined himself by his whole life. sometimes we need to lose something in order to see and appreciate the other things we take for granted or don’t even realize that we have. Katsuki has so many other qualities that make him a good person and a great hero. he’s intelligent, perceptive, brave, resourceful, and extraordinarily determined. he’s strategic and analytical and quick-thinking. he inspires devotion in others and is a natural leader. and he is honest and sticks to his principles and stands up for his beliefs. there is so much more to admire about him than just strength. so many other kinds of strength that he has. and stripping his quirk away would force him to see that at long last. he’s not just a nobody without his power. the things that make him a worthy hero at his core have very little to do with his quirk.

e.) and then the big one -- learning to see past himself. the truth is that Bakugou has always led a relatively privileged life. he was good at everything, the things he wanted came very easily to him, and he’s basically been at the top of the food chain since he was very young. but the downside of this is that it led to a deep-seeded fear of losing all of that, or failing to live up to it. and because he feared weakness so much, he’s spent his entire life looking down on weaker people. his fear of weakness led to him despising anyone with those “weak” qualities that he secretly feared, rather than having compassion for them. add to that the fact that he just has a hard time seeing outside of his own perspective, and we’ve got a situation in which perhaps the only way for him to really gain that kind of compassion and empathy is to experience some of these things for himself.

becoming quirkless is a way of presenting new challenges to him that he would have never faced otherwise. it forces him to answer questions he’s always been too afraid to ask. it forces him to look at himself in a way he never has before, to take a good long look at his own fears and desires. what if you can’t become the number one hero? do you just give up? do you stop trying? do you stubbornly push back against the inevitable? what happens if you do become weak? do you just accept that for the rest of your life? just sit back and watch as everyone else moves on without you? how can you fight without a quirk? what can you do without a quirk? why did you want to become a hero in the first place? why did you seek out strength? what was it for? why do you struggle with everything you have to reach the very top??

and I’d like to think that some of the answers to those questions are, yes, I am still strong. and, no, I can’t give up. and, no, I won’t accept defeat, no matter what. and, I’m not sure, but no matter what happens I’ll keep on fighting. and, because the person I admired taught me to never, ever give up. and, because I wanted to surpass my limits. and, because I want to be the best version of myself.

and that is growth. and it’s precisely the kind of growth you can’t achieve until you’ve searched deep within yourself and laid your soul out bare. and it will make him a better character, and a better hero in the end. and that’s what we’re all here for isn’t it? that’s literally what this story is about. the journey of these kids growing up to become spectacular heroes. so, just, I don’t know. is it really such a great surprise that I want to see it?

anyways, this was by far the longest of these answers and this post is really starting to wear on, so let’s just get to the last one and wrap this up.

5. losing his quirk would mean him falling hopelessly behind Deku, and playing second fiddle to him when he should be Deku’s equal. it would render his whole story and all of his development meaningless.

okay, listen. first of all, this argument often comes bundled with a whole host of other arguments about Bakugou’s relationship with Deku, and how the narrative has already given him numerous other “losses” to Deku, and how this would just be the latest and greatest loss of all. and I’m just going to say it straight up: this argument is ridiculous to me. actually, what it reminds me of is the very same flawed mindset that Bakugou himself has which I mentioned earlier (the forgotten point 4.a), where he is obsessed with comparing his progress to Deku’s at all times, and only considers himself a success if he beats out Deku. the idea here is basically that Bakugou and Deku are running along parallel tracks with the same end goal/finish line of becoming a hero. and so if Deku gets too far ahead and starts lapping Bakugou or something, then it’s like a slap in the face with regard to all of Bakugou’s hard work, and it makes Bakugou’s whole journey pointless because no matter what, he’ll never be able to catch up, especially if he loses his quirk, which is like the metaphorical equivalent of him spraining his ankle.

the thing is, this entire analogy is flawed. first of all, if Bakugou doesn’t sprain his ankle at some point, he'll miss out on discovering and healing a separate underlying injury that’s been unknowingly hampering his progress this entire time. and second, the race isn’t timed. it’s more like an infinite series of races where the finish line is never actually set in stone, because the finish line isn’t actually “beat the other person”; the finish line is “run as fast and as far as you possibly can, and do it in a better way than anyone has ever done before, and while you’re at it maybe stop and save a few million people, because being the best runner isn’t actually about being faster than each other, even though that admittedly makes this a pretty crappy analogy.” anyways though, so what this means is that the sheer magnitude and scale of this race is such that little victories and losses here and there are ultimately meaningless in the big picture. maybe Bakugou sprains his ankle. maybe Deku breaks an arm or two or three or four. maybe someone shows up at some point and starts uprooting the entire track all around them and they have to put the whole race aside for the time being, because what the fuck. and maybe after spraining his ankle, Bakugou eventually comes zooming back ahead on a segway. and maybe Deku stops running for a while without Bakugou there, because he loses sight of his goal without his rival there to keep him on pace.

but anyway! the point is that declaring a winner and loser in this race before we reach the end is kind of absurd in that it ignores the whole nature of the race and how long-term it is. you see the beauty of the race is that it’s actually the opposite of footraces in real life. in this race, the longer the two of them run, the faster and stronger they become. and this same logic applies to any hurdles which are placed in their lanes along the way. the goal of these hurdles isn’t to trick or punish or humiliate them; it’s to help them get even faster and stronger and ultimately closer to their goal. and also, tbh? it’s a long, long race you guys. and so sometimes, as a fan, you almost start to want to see those hurdles. because otherwise it’s just a lot of endless running and running and running. so yeah, go ahead and throw in a damn hurdle or two and some traffic cones and maybe even a long jump here and there. because that’s part of what makes the thing great to watch in the first place.

and I don’t care whether or not Deku is ahead right now, because I also love Deku too by the way, and because I’m not invested in prematurely declaring a winner. and if Bakugou himself gets upset that Deku is ahead? if Deku pulling ahead of him is enough to send him spiraling into despair, and questioning everything about his life, and losing hope and purpose? well then honestly I would say that’s all the more reason for him to go on and get that new character development, because I don’t want him to always be hindered by those kind of toxic thoughts his entire life. their rivalry should serve to make each other better, not bring each other down. so if Bakugou’s ego is still so fragile that he can’t handle a loss to Deku -- a loss, mind you, not the loss, because ultimately these are all just little battles, and not the actual war -- then I want him to grow the fuck up and get the fuck over that, goddammit. he’s a bigger person than that. I want him to grow beyond that. I want him to develop the real, actual confidence that allows him to bounce back from something like that, and to move on better and wiser and stronger, instead of getting dragged down by the pettiness of it all.

in short, if losing to Deku would really be enough to render his story meaningless, then maybe it’s time for Bakugou to find some meaning in his story that’s not dependent on him winning or losing to Deku. because I for one am not actually in this thing just to see which character “wins.” I couldn’t care less who actually wins. I just want to see my boy grow up big and strong and self-actualized, the better to kick ass without anything holding him back. that’s it.

so this brings me at last to the end of this seemingly neverending post. I have no doubt this won’t be the last of my quirkless!Bakugou debate posts in spite of me trying to comprehensively address every single point I could think of lol. but for now it’s my best attempt. and by the way, if it doesn’t actually happen, that’s fine! I love the idea, but I’m not gonna go full on “oh happy dagger” with it if it doesn’t actually pan out lol. the downside is it will mean that I’ve posted this entire 5600-word dissertation for nothing, but you know what, sometimes that’s just how fandom goes.

#bnha #boku no hero academia #bakugou katsuki #quirkless!bakugou #bakugou meta #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #asks #anon asks

[kingreywrites]

your opinion on moongene?

Your opinion on _____?

Sorry I got really rambly but I have like. A lot of contradicting thoughts about this ghdjkdjd

My favourite character getting to have fun magical powers with a side of angst is obviously a concept that really drew me in at first gshjddj Truly, i was really interested in Eugene's link to the moonstone as in, this is the thing that is more or less responsible for a lot of what he went through in life? His abandonment directly stems from his family's obsession with protecting the stone, his mom probably died because of it too, and the idea of him getting stuck with it was genuinely a concept i couldn't get out of my mind for a while. I was also fascinated by the relationship the Dark Kingdom had with the moonstone, and the paradox between how they wanted it gone and how they couldn't actually destroy it so they started protecting it, and the idea of Eugene being in the middle of all that + knowing Rapunzel thought it was her destiny + knowing the black rocks had been destroying corona (his new home) and could still do that if he kept it + A WHOLE LOT OF OTHER ISSUES ON HIS SHOULDERS was just..... very fun to think about lmao I literally could not start s3 right away despite it being available because I just kept thinking about Destinies Collide and how I wanted it to influence Eugene's arc and its possibilities etc and I didn't want to go too fast because I wanted to form actual theories before seeing if anything would be confirmed (and well uh I shouldn't have worried about that gdhjdjd but basically a lot of my moongene thinking was done pre knowing what mooncass was gonna do exactly)

And that leads me to my problem with moongene as it exists in the fandom because... I Do Not Like moongene as in "Eugene does what Cass did in s3 with some tweaks", and I quickly discovered that a lot of the content and discussions about this AU were... that. There's a lot of fics i just had to close because they were not really about Eugene, in a way 😭 Starting with the reason why he would take it because I have yet to find a fic that could convince me Eugene could / would ever 1. betray Rapunzel, 2. make it a long-term betrayal and 3. refuse when she asks for the moonstone back directly. And since most of the moongene content starts with these three points, I fundamentally disagree with Eugene's characterisation most of the time gshjdkd

(I also have trouble with the idea of a selfless betrayal very quickly because the rhetoric "I have to hurt those I love to save them" gets annoying for me if it goes on too long gdhkdkd for all that Cassandra's motivations can be nebulous in s3, at least it's not stupid as in "I'm protecting Rapunzel by taking the moonstone away and there's absolutely no easier way to do that than to run off in the woods with a demon while she's miserable")

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I think a lot of the moongene content doesn't feel like it's about Eugene as much as it is about putting him in a dramatized mooncass arc and it's a shame imo. There's a lot of eugene specific questions I feel we're missing out on by simply trying to recreate Cass' arc with him!! And like, a very stupid one I rarely see raised but I feel would be interesting is how much Eugene would hate having blue hair asgjdjdg the fact that his ego and love for his own appearance is practically never questionned in a scenario where that same appearance is drastically changed is a big missed opportunity! I also do love emotional vulnerability and all but, you know, Eugene is the guy who made a room tour of the place he died, humor and practical thinking are big part of his character, and a lot of the moongene melodrama misses this part of him

And this is... only concerning my issues with how he's himself treated in a moongene au, but then there's. how the other characters are written around that too. And again it gets tricky for me because like, new dream as soulmates linked by Destiny™ is something that instantly loses my interest if it's given too much weight which is not questionned at all, Rapunzel being an eplored maiden waiting for him to come back can quickly feel wrong in the sense that i don't enjoy any fic where Eugene needlessly hurts her and she ~doesn't mind it~ because she loves him and he's sad, and as you put it in this post (which was really interesting btw!) Cassandra gets the very shortest end of the stick most of the time and Zhan Tiri is just uhh floating around being mean. Also if we're lucky Lance gets mentioned (when like, I think Lance being his best friend since childhood should be a good reason to make him and his reaction important in any moongene story)

I'm not particularly picky and I have read stuff I did not necessarily agree with but in general there are no developed moongene fic out there which ever became a favourite of mine which is crazy considering how much i loved this concept. I really think that as long as this AU mostly stays stuck in the "I want what Cass had" stage, I'll have trouble finding something that speaks to me because I personally don't ghdhfgd And though I get that fan content is not obligated to touch on every issue in the show, I think that erasing Cass, her issues, the fact that she wanted the stone too and still has Zhan Tiri in her corner takes away a lot of possible conflict that would be interesting to explore in a long fic. Idk, it just feels like a lot of the content is "restricted" by the canon moonstone arc, even when people say they write about this AU to break away from what went down in the show :/

#tldr i like the moongene concept but i just don't really find what draws me to it in fanon and now i'm not as interested as i was at first #speaking of your post again i LOVE your theory about demanitus planning for eugene to take the moonstone #the drama from zhan tiri realising that demanitus managed to foil her plans even from his monkey grave.... i want it #and like this wouldn't feel like s3 rehashed but like a true au tailored to what eugene taking the moonstone entails #so like... yeah moongene is a big case of 'i think it's cool. wait no not like that' ghfhfhf #ask game

[talkingbl]

The Good and Bad of My Gear And Your Gown (MGAYG)

SPOILER WARNING. TW: Child Abuse.

The Good:

An actual, real life, non wishy-washy bisexual character who, despite not actually ever saying he is bi, is not shy about what he likes/is attracted to (Pure)

A platonic male/male relationship that is just as soft, loving, and warm as platonic female/female relationships usually are in media (PureWaan). This is extremely important as it helps to normalize men being actual human beings instead of hyper-masculine hotheads in their platonic relationships

Realistic settings and characters. In most shows, either everyone is gay/gay-coded (as seen in a ton of BLs) or everyone is straight/straight-coded. In MGAYG, you have 2 bisexual-coded characters (Itt & Pure), 2 straight-coded characters (Waan & Beau), and 2 gay-coded characters (Pai & Folk) as leads & main supporting cast. This type of diversity is rare in Thai BLs

Main characters have a number of problems unrelated to their romance. In Itt's case, he's dealing with his mother having cancer, his father is cheating on his mother with his mother's childhood friend, his academic struggles, and his impending financial problems stemming from his academic struggles and lack of parental support. In Pai's case, he's dealing with his straight up neglectful parents, social anxiety, intense pressure to succeed, struggles fitting in at school, and insecurity. In fact, most of our story is spent resolving these character issues, thus helping our main characters grow into their best selves

Fiat's acting as Pure in MGAYG is hands-down some of the best acting I've seen in Thai BL. While I have to see him in more roles to adequately rank his skill against other BL actors, he's easily the best actor in this show. His range, ability to make you feel emotions, and ability to create chemistry seems criminally underrated to me. His talent carried a lot of the show

With that in mind, I have to say PureWaan is the best relationship in the whole show and makes up a large part of the 'good' in this show. The way Pure and Waan support each other is beautiful to watch on screen. The chemistry between Fiat and JJ is so undeniable that it actually makes PureWaan into a glaring flaw that I will discuss later in "The Bad" section

IttPai's kisses. While I do think they came a too late into the show, I have to say that Marc and Pawin created some of the most realistic kiss scenes I've seen in a while in Thai BL... Maybe only second behind the couples in Why R U? Even though they didn't kiss a lot or for long periods of time, their movements seemed natural and completely wanted. Unrealistic physical intimacy can really take you out of a story so it was nice to see that Marc and Pawin actually know how to portray this type of intimacy

The fact that this show went there and touched on subjects as sensitive as STDs, self love, terminal illness, parental neglect, seeking love in all the wrong places, and sexual promiscuity (and the list goes on), in itself makes it one of the most honest attempts at crafting a real and interesting story in all of BL

The overall representation in this show was decent, especially as compared with other BLs where every casting is a light-skinned, able-bodied, korean beauty standard-having character. This also applies to representation in terms of unconventional backstories (unmarried/divorced parents, "bottom"-coded characters coming from wealthy backgrounds, etc.)

Stemming from the idea of representation is the fact that we get a short (height-wise), fun-loving, top-coded character in Pure and a more stern, confident, and tall (height-wise) bottom-coded character in Folk. That was actually very cool to see. Seeing Folk carry Pure bridal-style at the end of the final episode defies so many of the expectations set in BL. And the fact that it was never a talking point (to my memory) makes it even more cool to see on screen

The Bad:

This story was so incredibly slow, it makes UWMA look like a an action-packed summer blockbuster. There are so many scenes where a character starts a sentence at minute mark 1:01 and doesn't complete the sentence until minute mark 3:05. There are scenes made longer by the fact that characters are just staring into dead space or at each other while the camera flips POVs 20 times. There are scenes that only exist to reinforce points that have already been made (such as all of the scenes showing us how smart Pai is). There are even scenes where our main four (Pure, Waan, Itt, & Pai) are just shooting the shit and it seems like they're literally just improv'ing the whole thing...

Pacing. Branching off the aforementioned scenes where the characters are just goofing off the whole time, this show goes from zero-to-sixty real quick and it makes no logical sense. The parts that are sped up are usually things that are super important for our characters to grow (such as Waan taking Pure to get tested). The parts that are slowed down have 0 bearing on the story/our characters. What's more is that one day in this show could take 2 episodes but 3-4 months flashes by in 10 minutes (as seen with the transition back into the university setting mid-series)

Incomplete, unclear and underemphasized moments/plotlines. One moment in particular that fits into this is when Pure takes Waan clubbing and while partying, a guy attacks Pure, claiming that Pure gave his girlfriend HIV. This happens at the end of an episode and the very next episode we start on Itt & Pai's storyline and do not get to see why that happened to Pure or any backstory at all until well into this next episode. In fact, the story never picks up where Pure's attack leaves off and instead just flashes forward to Waan going over to Pure's house to check on him. And when they discuss Pure's situation they never explicitly say whether Pure likely does have HIV, so the audience is left confused until the very end of the episode when Waan takes Pure to get tested. Because the show waited so long to confirm Pure's status (even though Pure was in multiple scenes, before he actually got tested, discussing his sexual behavior), it made for a very confusing watch. What's more is that after Pure's results come back negative, the subject isn't really broached again (and this happens like 4-5 episodes into the 12-episode season lmao)

Tone issues. To cap off the whiplash the show gives with story pacing, there's the issue of tone. Because the pacing is so atrocious, you wind up with situations where serious issues seem like a joke. Bringing back the plot where Waan takes Pure to get tested after Pure is attacked by a guy accusing Pure of infecting his girlfriend with HIV, the plot starts out very serious. It's a huge deal for Pure of course and Waan treats it with equal importance. However, the moment his results come back negative, we're hit with a comedic segment of Pure & Waan playfully arguing with the Doctor that they are not dating and have, in fact, friendzoned each other. It was a very weird transition from a heavy moment to a lighthearted one and it happens a lot in this show

Ultimately because of the tone issues, pacing, and slow story progression, the show felt like 2 seasons of one show crammed into one

Outside of plots that further the main romance, nothing in this show seems to have consequences. When Itt's mom passes away, he broods for an episode, then it's never talked about again despite her being his sole motivation for going to university and studying engineering. Pure's mother is coded as physically abusive and somewhat neglectful but it is only ever addressed a couple of times and carries absolutely no weight for the rest of the series. These are fatal mistakes IMO. MGAYG has some of the most interesting characters on paper but they fall completely apart when those interesting traits don't aid the barely-there character development

The acting. While he was better during the university arc, Marc's Itt was embarrassingly stiff. And what's worse, he didn't have the chemistry with Pawin to make up for the amateurish acting. I know he doesn't have a ton of experience so I won't completely leave the onus on him because the casting director should've known that he wasn't ready to carry a Leading Man role. Likewise, Pawin was nothing special. Most of the side characters (outside of JJ and Fiat) were so incredibly flat I had trouble even caring about them really

The lack of chemistry between the leads. A lot of the problem here is that Marc and Pawin are newer actors. But I really can't give them that benefit of the doubt when guys like Mix of ATOTS/1000 Stars and Win from 2gether were also inexperienced in their first lead roles but still managed to at least fake chemistry with their co-stars. I can tell Marc and Pawin tried in some scenes but for most of their screen-time they looked more focused on the act of acting itself than falling naturally into their characters

The budget. Ohhhh the budget. The audio quality, the settings, the poor editing, etc. all of these are signs of a low budget production. Especially at the beginning, these elements were so noticeably poor it took me out of the show

The slutty bisexual trope. For all the progress this show makes with representation it sure fell hard into the 'bisexual people sleep around' stereotype...sigh...

Pure and Waan not being endgame. Sorry to all the PureFolk shippers but IMO, Fiat and JJ had better romantic chemistry than Fiat and Aun. Don't get me wrong, I love PureFolk and thought Aun did a decent job matching Fiat's energy. However, Fiat and JJ just had *it*. And I think the *it* they had that made their relationship more interesting/dynamic, was the sexual tension between them at all times. Even when they were with their respective endgame boos, Pure and Waan effortlessly created a deep, magnetic field between them that just didn't exist with Aun and Beau. I think the story would've been more interesting with Waan as Pure's endgame and Aun as the best friend, but nonetheless, we get what we get

Anyway, that's it for now for MGAYG. I'm sure I'll have more to add on later though lol

#my gear and your gown mgayg #thai bl boys love #purewaan purefolk fiatjj fiataun #a tale of 1000 stars 2gether earthmix brightwin #ittpai marcpawin marcwin #whyru

[bartramcat]

CSI/GSR: A Long Strange Analysis From San Francisco to Grave Danger

(This is way too long and all over the map. Nor do I think it’s necessarily coherent, but it’s kind of my stream of consciousness overview of the first 5 seasons of GSR, mainly first impressions, slightly refined. Well, as Alex Trebek always said: go with your first instinct.)

So when I decided to rewatch Sex, Lies and Larvae recently, I found myself having a rather surprising reaction to the GSR dynamic therein. Sara came across to me as incredibly young in that episode, so much so that I decided that was one reason, of many, why I was glad they didn't get them together from the get-go. Well, actually, for most of the first 2 seasons, she seems too young to be an equal partner in a relationship with Grissom. That doesn't mean I think they weren't in love at that point, only that perhaps she had some growing up to do first. Actually, they both did.

Grissom and Sara are an interesting case in that they both suffer from a similar affliction common in the exceptionally bright: their intellects are so far ahead of their peers that they rarely have any way to relate to them. Certainly not emotionally. The first thing to be sacrificed on the altar of intellectuality is emotional development and well-being. Toss in the horrific childhood Sara had and the silent one for Grissom, and you have a cocktail for arrested development. As long as they are operating on an intellectual plane, they are in their element. Put them in an interpersonal one, and they flounder like fish out of water. 

By the time Grissom meets Sara, it is fairly clear he has found one way to relate to others: as teacher and/or mentor. It is in fact his most common relationship with all of those in his circle. It is also his initial dynamic with Sara, elements of which remain for the duration of their love story. It is for him a perfect construct: he can take personal pride and pleasure in their development as CSIs, but, at the same time, maintain that professorial distance, dissuading them from even attempting to fathom the man behind the intellectual mask. He is an enigma, an eccentric, whose mind works in mysterious ways. They admire him, respect him, possibly even love him, but they do not know him.

(I've always thought a good deal of their shock at learning he was in love with Sara stemmed not only from the fact that he was in love with Sara but from the fact that he was in love. With anyone.)

In Pledging Mr. Johnson, Catherine gives us insight into how Grissom lives his life and how they view him:

CATHERINE: You're right, you know. I should be just like you. Alone in my hermetically sealed condo, watching Discovery on the big screen, working genius-level crossword puzzles. But no relationships, no chance any will slop over into a case. Yeah, right. I want to be just like you.

GRISSOM: Technically it's a townhouse. And the crosswords are advanced, not genius. But you're right, I'm deficient in a lot of ways. But I never screw up one of my cases with personal stuff.

CATHERINE: Grissom... WHAT personal stuff?

But Sara sees beneath the mask. It’s as if she knows intuitively there’s more to him than meets the eye. In San Francisco, did he show her a side to himself that no one else ever saw? Outside of Vegas, was he able to be a little more open with this inquisitive and very bright young woman? Was he instinctively more comfortable and trusting with her? Did they have a quasi-romantic relationship? We know they fell in love, but as to how far they took things, we'll never know. 

Grissom had several qualms regarding a romantic relationship with Sara, not the least of which is the age difference. He genuinely believed that if he gave himself over to her completely that she would throw him over someday. That she would come to see him as old and unworthy and “deficient,” and he would be lost. I'm not entirely sure his fear of ultimate rejection began when she came to Vegas, even if they had previously consummated their relationship in SF. Of course, once she did come to Vegas, they both had a problem. She obviously thought their relationship was going to go forward, whereas he became aware that it couldn't without putting his job in jeopardy. Whether he brought her to Vegas thinking they could be/become lovers is again purely speculative. With Grissom however there is always the dichotomy between what he thinks and what he feels, especially where Sara is concerned. What we do know is that once he had her there he didn't want her to leave.

We know from his own words that she was the only woman he ever loved and that he found sex without love pointless. So, of course, the one person who becomes the one and only object of both his love and his desire is Forbidden Fruit. On all sorts of levels, objective and subjective.

While there is always an element of mentor/mentee in GSR, even including their very last "date" together, playing with the colored bees, I think the fundamental difference between the way he relates to Sara and everyone else is that he is more sharing his world with her than simply teaching her about it. That we learn that he gave her an entomology textbook for Christmas says...so much. Yet in episodes like SLAL, she comes across as a little too much the eager student, the subordinate, and not the perfect life partner for him she grew into. Perhaps he saw it too, reinforcing his fear that he had no business loving this young woman who would one day only see him as a pathetic old man. (Or worse: what she felt for him was no more than a temporary crush of a student on her teacher.)

One of the things the great love stories tend to have in common is that the 2 lovers usually have to go through life experiences, or "tests," in order to "earn" the other person. Since I see GSR as a Salvation rather than a Redemption love story, it's not a matter of them somehow becoming more moral people in order to be together. Rather, I think it's more a matter of their both growing and growing up. 

There are several instances of gender reversal in their relationship, and I'm referring to traditional sexual behavior in fiction. Usually, it is the female in the relationship who turns the male down sexually. Seeing the relationship going nowhere, he is the one who is more likely to get involved in a casual relationship to meet his sexual needs. In GSR, it is Sara who goes outside the relationship. She gets involved with Hank, the guy who is like watching paint dry. We know Sara has serious self-esteem issues; being rejected by Grissom after she was so sure he wanted her as much as she wanted him didn't help. So, at his suggestion, she gets a life, unaware that fucking another guy was not exactly what he meant. It damn near kills him; he can't even look at her. At the same time, his life is on a downward spiral: he is going deaf. He thinks he has nothing to offer her, but he uses the job to try to come between them. To keep her away from Hank, unaware that all he ever had to do was say the word, and she would have dropped Hank faster than yesterday's crossword.

Of course, in Grissom's mind, he was no competition for Hank, when, in reality, Hank was never real competition for him, if he had been able to come to terms with his feelings for Sara and act on them. I do think the Hank episode was important for both of them. For the first time Grissom had to confront the possibility he really could lose her forever by keeping their relationship purely on his terms, and Sara learned that no matter how much she tried to get a life that Grissom would always be number one in her heart.

The end of season 3 is the beginning of the first dark period for Sara. She learns that her attempt to get a life outside of her love for Grissom is an abysmal failure. While dating Hank never comes close to changing her love for Grissom, at least it was a way to keep her from moping around her apartment waiting for the man who was never going to show up. Then she discovers she's the other woman, Hank's side girl. Not that I think she was ever broken-hearted over ending it with him in any life-changing way, but she was humiliated. It sort of reinforced her idea that she was never good enough, even for a non-entity like Hank. So how could she ever be good enough for the man who was her ideal, her one and only, whom she had loved instantly and always? And, again, he turns her down.

Season 4 is what lays the groundwork for both of them to grow up. The first half of the season is the fallout from her offering and his rejecting her. The second half is her discovering he did, in fact, have feelings for her, had considered her as a potential second chance, only to place his job above any chance of happiness with her. That she was not worth taking a risk. It really is fairly amazing she didn't just say I'm outta here and go back to SF at that point.

While the two of them continue to dance around the central issue between them, in season 4 it seems that Sara is taking Grissom's own approach to things: she wants to advance in her profession. I've always been of the opinion that the reason Grissom chose Nick over Sara for the promotion was that he thought choosing Sara would be an act of favoritism on his part. He knew deep down inside he was in love with her, but he had to prove to himself that he could be objective where she was concerned. (His reasons for choosing Nick smack of rationalization.) Sara reads it as his way of continuing to punish her, as well as making it seem that she isn't good enough on any level, personal or professional, for Grissom. By the end of Season 4, she hits rock bottom. She came to Vegas for a man she can't have and for a job she can't advance in, ironically, because of that same man.

While Nesting Dolls is the episode that most directly makes the GSR love affair possible, I actually think the last scene of Bloodlines is what makes that episode possible. I have always felt that when he saw her sitting there humiliated that he realized 2 things: one was that no matter how much he denied it, he loved her, and the other was that by pushing her away that he was hurting both of them. 

In order for Grissom to grow up, that is what he had to learn: that a love relationship has to work for both parties. While he could derive a certain amount of contentment simply by being in her orbit, his self-denial of a more complete (both physical and emotional) relationship was also a refusal to give Sara what she needed. The entire 4th season is quite convoluted in terms of Grissom's psyche where Sara is concerned. On the one hand, we are finally given verbal entree into the fact that he is indeed in love with Sara in Butterflied. At the same time, he truly believes he has blown his chance with her, and he distances himself from her. Yet somewhere between the end of Season 4 and the beginning of Season 5 he seems to have come to a decision that she is worth the risk.

And even though we are not given privy to his epiphany in any concrete "aha" moment, his behavior towards Sara changes. It is almost as if he has finally realized that love is always a risk, and that to truly love someone is not some idealized romantic concept but a give and take between two people. While he may still believe that he is "too late" for them to have a "beautiful life" together, that doesn't mean he can't be there for her. To become emotionally available. To show her that he cares about her. To love her without reservation, and let the chips fall where they may.

There are several moments in season 5 pre ND when it seems to me that Grissom is actively wooing Sara--in his fashion. Let's face it, he really is 50 going on 15 when it comes to romance. I more than suspect that he was not the pursuer in his few sexual relationships. (Another reason the whole Teri Miller thing doesn't quite fit.) Even if you are in the camp of their having had a fully consummated relationship in SF, A La Cart tells us that, initially, it was Sara who pursued him. The difference, apparently, is that he didn't offer up much resistance. What we don't know is how far it went. Was it immediate impetuous sex and figure out the rest later, or a long slow romantic dance stopping just short of intercourse? Or some combination of both? What we do know is that the attraction was intellectual, emotional and physical. It was love at first sight.

As for Sara, she is somewhat the phoenix from the ashes in this part of the story. It's clear she came to Vegas under the assumption things would move forward with them. She has two responses when they don't, the first was to become an obsessive workaholic. Then, in an effort to get a life, she begins seeing another guy. Other than giving her a modicum of companionship and recreational sex, making her feel wanted on a superficial level, I highly doubt she got much out of dating Hank. She is absolutely obviously still in love with Grissom for the duration of that relationship. Once her distraction from her one true love ends, she decides to give it another shot with Grissom, but her timing couldn't be worse. While there is some indication she realized something was wrong with his hearing, it's clear that she is unaware of the seriousness of the situation. The irony of the scene in Play With Fire is that the 2 threats Grissom perceived to his career are intermingled within seconds: his potential loss of hearing and the girl he loves. 

I've mentioned before that watching Sara spiral downward in season 4 is hard to watch. It must have seemed to her that she was thwarted at every turn...by Gil Grissom. The very bright are at an emotional disadvantage when it comes to interpersonal relationships. So much comes so easily to them that when relationships can't be intellectually analyzed into working out they feel as if they are utter failures. Clearly, Sara is fighting feelings of worthlessness throughout the season. Okay, the guy rejected me. I'll put my head down and concentrate on my work. Omigod the guy does have feelings for me, but they weren't strong enough for him to take a chance with me. Omigod, now I'm not even good enough for a promotion, despite my exemplary record and workaholic work ethic. It's more nuanced than that, especially in Jorja's portrayal.

Hitting rock bottom with the DUI was a wake up call for Sara. Ironically, it seems that while seeing Sara broken and humiliated was a strong impetus for Grissom to revisit his interactions with her, it also seems that it caused Sara to reevaluate her relationship with Grissom vis-a-vis what she was hoping to get out of her job. On some level, her entire time in Vegas has been an attempt to use her working for him as a way to woo him: Seeking "validation in inappropriate places." It is her most mature recognition. She is no longer angling to be his “star pupil” in an effort to win his love. Yes, she came to Vegas for Grissom. Yes, she's still in love with him, but she can't make him love her on her terms; still, she can't let all of that infuse their working relationship. It is almost as if she has accepted the same terms for their relationship as the one he has been living: to be completely in love with someone, knowing it will never be more than it is, and enjoying what there is instead of longing for what can’t be.

Ironically, it is perhaps in the very moment that she tells him that she recognizes that which ultimately gets her her man. I think she stuns him twice in Snakes, first by more or less telling him she was still in love with him, and then by walking away before he can respond to her. In many ways, it's an incredibly frustrating scene. Once again she puts herself out there, and, again, he blows it. He can't say what he wants to say, and, once more, it seems as if they are destined to dance around their love for one another. But there is a difference. This time he doesn't reject her. While he clearly cannot find the words, the scene reopens up all sorts of possibilities.

While I am not in the camp of their having had sex in the time gap in ND, I do believe a lot happened, quietly. I do think he stayed with her, possibly even took her to bed, chastely, holding her until she fell asleep. In other words, whatever happened between them in that interim was incredibly intimate from an emotional standpoint. She bared her soul to him, and he stayed. It's always been my gut feeling that her making herself so vulnerable to him is what enabled him, finally, to make himself vulnerable to her.

The thing these two characters have in common is that they really don't want people to know them. They both have secrets, and they develop parallel but different modes of self-protection, although both use intellectually as a prop in their methodology. Grissom tells Cassie James in The Hunger Artist that "Looking for things, analyzing them... trying to figure out the world--that's a life." He shields himself with the "shell around his heart." When, suddenly, he has this cornucopia of feelings, which include sexual desire, for this young woman, he doesn't know how to deal with it. She makes him vulnerable because she makes him feel. His only self-protection is self-denial: he cannot let himself love this girl because he could lose himself in the love of her. As long as he keeps her at arm's length, she cannot reject him: if he never has her, he can never lose her. 

When Grissom tells Heather he learned to love someone, I think he was speaking specifically to the moment he decided that loving Sara was not just about recognizing that he loved her but the realization that love was about taking risks, not in terms of his job but in terms of making himself vulnerable to her. Showing her he cared about her, wanting to be with her in an all-encompassing romantic relationship. By choosing to get involved with her, even if he never said it directly, he was telling her she was worth the risk, not only to his career but to everything he had carefully crafted in his psyche to keep himself safe from emotion, from the potential heartbreak of love.

My read on when and how they got together is pretty eccentric in the head canon world. For one, I think it happened much more quickly after ND than most folks, at least the sexual part of it, nor do I think it just happened. I think Grissom decided it was "now or never." That  he found himself at her door on some Sunday morning or afternoon to see what would happen, because, finally, he was ready to throw caution to the wind, to take a chance. To allow himself to love.

I confess that the first time I saw ND I was convinced they made love in the time gap, especially given the double entendre in Grissom's defiant speech to Ecklie. Not to mention his flushed appearance. The problem is that I think Grissom would have seen it as taking advantage of her vulnerability. On the other hand, it makes no sense to me that after she returned from her suspension that he would wait until after the terror of either Committed or Grave Danger. I think the cumulative effect of Snakes and ND was more than enough to make him seize the day.

I realize the most popular reads are that either almost losing Sara in Committed or Nick in GD is what made him realize life is short, so he shouldn't waste any more time. I prefer internally vs externally driven epiphanies. IOW I prefer believing that whenever they got together that it had more to do with Grissom's emotional evolution than by some external traumatic event. It also seems to be a little too cliched a plot device, as well as somehow selling the character short. Maybe I’ve seen too many soaps where the big sweeps tragedy is what causes people to “find” each other. ND is sort of a traumatic event, but it is more of a recounting of one, and it represents an incredible turning point between them. Short version is that it is all about trust and emotional intimacy.

I suppose the other thing is that after ND if he were to go back into romantic Hamlet mode that he may actually have made the same mistake all over again. That, no matter how comforting he may have seemed during her confession, he might have given her the impression that he was again pulling back from her: that nothing had changed. And I just cannot believe at that moment in time he was going to let that happen. Lest we forget, he had already thought he'd lost her twice: when he found out about Hank and when he had rejected her in PWF. 

I suspect ND made him know that he wanted to take care of her, but I don't mean in the traditional man taking care of woman way, but more in terms of meeting her emotional needs. Showing her that he loved her, by wanting to be with her, no matter the risks to career, to self. By trusting her as she trusted him. Sex can have all sorts of metaphoric implications, but, as Grissom himself says, it is an opportunity for human connection. For a man as verbally inept as Grissom (when it comes to feelings), as well as one who believes in the inexorable link between love and sex, entering into a sexual relationship with Sara was doubtless to him his way to tell her he loved her. 

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't think these two ever discussed their past relationships with each other. For both of them, none of them mattered, certainly not in comparison to what they felt for each other. Sara seemed to be under the impression that, like every other man, Grissom had sexual "needs," not necessarily relationships, but sex. Hence her surprise that he'd never paid for sex, despite living in Vegas for so long. Ironically, the fact that she seems to have had no idea before Ending Happy that his sexual selectivity was so narrow also may have contributed to her insecurities in their affair. While we are never given a time frame for when he decided that sex without love was pointless, there is strong evidence, even in parts of Season 1, that it was well before he ever met Sara.

I do think Grissom's atypical sexuality is tough for people to wrap their heads around, especially as a lead male character in a TV show. A lot of folks seem to think of course he would have sex with Catherine or Heather or Sofia if the opportunity presented itself. The way I see Grissom is that of course he wouldn't. With the exception of Sara, whom he loves romantically, when Grissom loves a woman (Heather, Catherine), he values the relationship as is, and it's all that he needs from it. For him, I think, to have sex with a woman he loves Platonically would in fact ruin that relationship. It would add an element he neither needed nor wanted, and he would feel that the particular bond would be altered, even destroyed.

The problem for Grissom is that what he felt for Sara terrified him. He had such a well-ordered life before the girl with the ponytail walked into his lecture. He didn't need close personal relationships; he didn't need sex. He had work and science and problem solving. He had his "students." And, boom, at 41, he's suddenly like a teenager in love. He thinks about her, he dreams about her, he feels love, experiences desire. He is out of his element. The sum total of his confusion is succinctly summed up when he tells her he doesn't know what to do about "this." And that "this" is the whole ball of everything Sara Sidle makes him feel. The stuff poets wrote about. The stuff he thought he'd never have, the stuff he couldn't even conceive he could ever even want. He wants it so much it paralyzes him. He cannot step over the line. And in that moment he is sure he has lost her forever.

And then he is given another chance, not because he has gotten down on his knees and begged her for one but because, after everything, after every attempt to distance himself from her so they could both move on, she is still there. After all the years of permutations and rejection and hurt, they are still in love. For not one moment since the day she walked into his lecture have they not been in love. 

In Leave Out all the Rest, Sara says she “thought we could survive anything.” By the time they get together in Vegas, they have already survived a lot. They have intentionally and unintentionally hurt and rejected each other. She has tried to get a “life” completely devoid of him, and he has done his best to distance himself from her, despite his being drawn to her “like a moth to a flame.” Yet, despite all of this, the love they feel for one another has only deepened. They are, emotionally, already a couple, and they probably always have been, even if they didn’t know it.

All of which brings me back to the evolution of Gil and Sara as an actual couple. While I think they consummated their relationship within a short period after ND, (or reconsummated it if they had sex in SF), it's not that I think they fell into some sort of fully formed relationship. Hell, these two are babes in the woods when it comes to love and romance. I suspect they began a sexual relationship without taking the time to define what exactly it was, other than the fact that they both realized nobody could know about it. I doubt, initially, they discussed much having to do either with the depth of their feelings or where they hoped the relationship would go. Instead, it was probably primarily physical, although they may have begun to spend more and more time together, one or the other occasionally "sleeping over," or even sharing a meal or watching a movie together. (Ironically, if they did have a sexual encounter(s) in SF, I think a large part of the confusion in Vegas was probably because they never discussed feelings, fidelity, or a future. Despite the depth of what each felt, they probably both would have played it as casual.)

My read is that there was a significant turning point due to the events in Committed. There is no doubt Grissom was shaken when Adam Trent held the shard to her neck. He must have meditated on the potential cruel irony that almost was: after years of denying himself being with Sara that in an instant he almost lost her, irrevocably. While I doubt he dashed to her place and declared his overwhelming love to her, I certainly think it possible he said something along the lines of not being able to bear losing her, or, perhaps, if something had happened to her, he would miss her for the rest of his life. It was perhaps at that point they moved to the next level, with at least a tacit acknowledgement that they were, in fact, a couple and wanted more out of the relationship than sex. (It might be too neat of a play on words if the events of this episode caused them to admit they were in a "committed" relationship.)

To me the silly scene in Grave Danger between them is so telling. They are so open, relaxed with each other. They are intimate. The entire scene comes across as if they are in their own private bubble in the middle of the lab. One of the more fascinating and consistent narrative techniques employed by CSI with GSR is oppositional analogy. (An example is in Swap Meet, wherein we are told both Sara and Grissom are naturally monogamous within the context of wife swapping.) In Grave Danger, we see Grissom acting completely and unabashedly like an excited little kid with Sara. The sweet irony to me is that he has grown up. He has taken down the walls between them. He has let her in. And, suddenly, she seems not his eager student but more akin to a patient, adoring wife.

The beauty of GSR is that these are two convoluted, emotionally damaged people who get each other, the good and the bad, and love each other anyway. It is unconditional love. And it is selfless, often too much so. They want each other to be happy. The sad undercurrent is that, at times, each loses sight of the fact that each is the other's key to happiness. When rifts develop, it is not because of the faults they see in each other but because of those each sees in themselves. 

#csi #csi: las vegas #gil grissom #sara sidle #sara x grissom #gsr #long post #mytext

[downwiththeficness]

In the Bond-Chapter 2

Summary: Lilah often wished she’d never said yes to working with the Gecko brothers—usually while dodging gunfire. At no time was she regretting that decision more than when she’s hanging upside down from the ceiling, staring down a group of hungry culebras and one (1) extremely powerful sun god.

Word Count: ~2,300

Warnings: None

A/N: This is an AU of my Story In the Blood, which can be read here. Basically, this fic explores what would have happened if Lilah had met up with Geckos before she met Brasa.

Taglist: @symbiont13

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Lilah slid into a chair and regarded the lovers. Kate was sitting in Richie’s lap, rolling her eyes as he pressed intermittent kisses on her cheeks and neck. She’d grown used to their easy affection since the brothers had saved Kate from Amaru. For the first few days, Richie had hardly let go of Kate’s hand, would go where she went, snarling at anyone who came a little too close. Even now, he didn’t go very long without touching her, no matter the situation—a hand on her thigh, a the small of her back, toying with her hair. Kate seemed to take it all in stride, a soft smile that somehow made her look impossibly young.

It was Kate’s eyes that Lilah noticed first when she’d stepped through the doors of Jackknife Jed’s.  They flashed with gloom, aging her in a way that in no way reflected in her actual face. Looking at her made Lilah feel so disjointed that she still struggled to hold the younger woman’s gaze. Still, despite the unease, Lilah liked Kate. She certainly made dealing with the ever-arguing brothers just a little bit easier. Lilah couldn’t so easily be out-voted any more, and that was worth the disquiet she sometimes felt in Kate’s presence.

The door to the office flung open, Seth barreling through with no regard for how it hit the shelf behind it, a few of Richie’s knickknacks shaking in their stands. He was wiping sweat from his brow, his ever present frown just a little deeper than normal. Lilah’s eyes narrowed as she watched him come closer.

“Hey, watch the merchandise,” Richie called out, one hand lifting from around Kate’s middle to gesture broadly at the memorabilia.

Fandom was the one thing that Lilah and Richie really agreed on. They’d spent a lot of time on stake outs talking Star Trek, and then Firefly, followed by a whole host of niche geeky topics. He was surprisingly insightful about the little details that made each show unique. And, Lilah had spent a lot of time in hotels watching old B horror movies to be able to hold her own when he went down a rabbit hole.  It made the fact that she disagreed with him about the tenants of Jedi life acceptable, in his mind.

“We’ve got bigger problems than Obi Wan’s lightsaber, Richie.”

Seth was definitely in a mood. He might not understand Richie’s interests, and he might roll his eyes when his brother went on a tangent about canon timelines, but he at least respected Richie’s belongings enough that he didn’t intentionally screw around with them. This, whatever it was, was serious. Lilah eyed him narrowly, waiting.

Eyes vaguely betrayed, Richie muttered, “Its Mace Windu.”

Kate patted Richie’s arm lightly, saying, “What’s the problem?”

Rounding his desk, Seth sat heavily. After a deep sigh, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, tossing it on the desk in front of him. It bounced, making a soft ‘shhh’ sound as it slid across the pressed wood of the tabletop.

“We got a message today,” he explained, “And I don’t know what to make of it.”

Lilah leaned forward and plucked it up with two fingers. The paper was a heavy vellum, thick woven. She unfolded it, curious. The ink was a deep red, the lettering thick. As she brought it closer to read, Lilah caught a fragrance that had followed her in the weeks since their last failed mission.

Oh, no.

The letter was meticulously worded. The writing thick and bold, swirling softly around the crosses. Formal. Elegant. Commanding. Brasa.

Lilah read and re-read it, “He’s asking for peace.”

She looked at Seth, brows lifted in surprise. Then, she stood, stepped to Richie’s desk, and handed it to the younger brother. All the while, she tried to keep her face as neutral as possible. Lilah was grateful that Seth never bothered with the overhead lights, that only the lamps on either desk illuminated the room.  Her face was hot, her hands shaking. She didn’t know how to stand so as to draw no attention to herself while she internally panicked.

“He’s playing a game,” Seth said as he opened a drawer in his desk, pulling out a bottle, yanking out the stopper, and drinking straight from it. “Its a trap.”

Richie took a few moments to read the letter before Kate took it from him. She stood and read it, as well. Lilah watched her face, trying to discern her reaction. Kate chewed her thumbnail as her eyes flicked over the page, her brows together. A shadow passed over her expression.

“No,” Kate uttered so low that Lilah almost didn’t hear it, “He’s really asking for peace.”

Lilah didn’t have the time to think about how she might know that, or the implications. Or, how she might feel about those implications.

Seth scoffed, “How the fuck do you know that?”

Setting the letter down on Richie’s desk, Kate shrugged, “I spent a lot of time with him when I was...when she was inside me.” She sniffed, “Even though Amaru thought they were bullshit, he obeys the old laws. This is a formal call for peace talks. He’s written it in his own blood.”

Lilah felt her eyes widen, shocked that Kate could tell whose blood was on the paper. Shocked even further that someone would write a letter in their literal blood. Shocked still further that she cared how he might have procured his own blood in enough supply to write such a letter.

There were a few side effects from Kate’s possession, little quirks that Kate would sometimes display without really thinking. She’d stand up way too fast, know who might walk through the door next, hear conversations from the next room. Lilah did her best to just roll with it, but this was a little bit too freaky for Lilah’s normal ‘roll with it’ sensibilities. She deliberately set it aside, hoping that she wouldn’t need to examine the thought later.

Richie lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke through his nose, “Why now? We’ve spent the last six months fighting and killing each other, and now he wants to talk peace.”

Lilah sat down, folding her hands in her lap as she tried very hard not to think this was about her. She could not be so self-centered as to think that Brasa would give up a war just because she happened to be on the other side. A war he was, by all accounts, winning as the Gecko’s ceded more and more territory to the culebras he seemed to govern.  There had to be another explanation. A trap, maybe, a false sense of security.

“Alright,” Seth drawled, “We get him in a room and gank him.”

Kate gasped, looking horrified, “We have a chance to get real progress, here. Do you want to fight forever?”

Lilah definitely knew the answer to that question. Seth’s entire life was a fight—physical or otherwise. He wasn’t comfortable if there wasn’t some sort of conflict to battle through, his brother at his side. Even if they achieved peace, he’d be at someone’s throat within twenty four hours. It was both endearing and utterly frustrating to watch him cycle through the same motions over and over.

Seth rose, leaning his hands on the desk, “You, more than anyone, have a reason to want every one of those snakes dead.”

Sneering, Kate crossed her arms, “I, more than anyone, have a reason to want all of this to stop. I don’t want to see any more death.”

Behind her, Richie shifted uneasily in his chair. Lilah took each of them in, knowing there was far more history than she was privy to playing out right in front of her. It left her feeling like she couldn’t make a good decision, didn’t have enough data to create a strategy. This was not her preferred method of moving through life. She remained still, waiting.

“We should meet with him,” Kate asserted, hip cocking to the side.

It was not a rare occasion that Kate would insist that they act in a certain way. She had a strong moral compass that clashed with the brothers’ more criminal predilections. More often than not, Kate centered them, kept them from going too far. Lilah was grateful. She had never been successful in stemming off their momentum, once they got started.

“Absolutely not,” Seth shot back, his mouth a firm line.

Lilah surprised herself by adding, “I agree with Seth.”

Richie stubbed out his cigarette, “I’m with Kate.”

This was not surprising. Richie tended to side with Kate on most things. Lilah caught the look he sent Kate, though Kate was still looking at Seth. His eyes were following the line of her petite body, admiring in a way that made Lilah look away, embarrassed.

Seth circled his desk, leaning his hip against it, “Two against two. How’re we going to break the tie?”

There was a beat of silence, then Richie stood and offered up his fist, “Best out of three?”

When Richie beat Seth two to one, Seth gave him a hardy ‘fuck you’ and strode from the room. Richie heaved a beleaguered sigh and followed him. Lilah dropped her head in her hands, boggled by the decision making skills of her partners. Rock, paper scissors...honestly.

“Why don’t you want to meet with them?”

Lilah lifted her eyes at the question, feeling her chest constrict, “I won’t have to do the actual meeting, Kate.” Lie, lie, lie, Lilah, “I just don’t think we’ll be successful.”

Kate tilted her head to the side, “You think its a trap?”

Lilah grabbed onto that line of thinking. It was logical, far more logical than ‘No, Kate. I just don’t want to meet up with someone who claims I am his bondmate and with whom I have exchanged blood’. Even in her head, it sounded so incredibly stupid. Not to mention the fact that she’d been hiding it long enough that admitting it would only lead to suspicion.

“I think Seth is too hot headed,” Lilah clarified quickly, “I think that it’ll fall apart before it even gets started.”

There, that was a convincing lie that was pretty grounded in enough truth that even Lilah half believed it. She very carefully did not study Kate’s face to see if the lie had landed.

Kate moved closer, her ancient gaze peering at Lilah carefully, “You’re right.”

Oh. Okay.

“Thank you.”

“You need to go with them.”

Ah, fuck.

“What?”

Kate nodded, her expression hardening, “You go with them, keep things level, make this work.”

“Me?” Lilah didn’t like how high her voice came out. She cleared her throat, “No, you know them better than I do. You go. Bring me whatever contract they draw up, I’ll red line it, make sure its fair.”

That was her role. Look over the game plan, find the flaws, work out the kinks. In that, Lilah was comfortable and safe. No need to put herself back in a room with Brasa. No need to let this get even more out of hand. No need for the messiness that would come from that.

Shaking her head, Kate took a step back, “I can’t. I can’t face him. What I did to him was,” she searched for words, “terrible.”

The sudden turn of Kate’s tone, the way her face screwed up in real disgust, made Lilah sit up and stake notice. Where had this come from?

She inhaled, trying to parse the words, “What does that mean?”

Kate’s eyes were focused on the middle distance, her mouth quivering, “Amaru loved torture, all kinds of torture. She didn’t care who it was that she hurt. I—she liked,” Another breath, “Brasa was blood bound to her, she could make him do things, do anything. She never got her hands dirty, but him…”

Lilah waited for more, but Kate simply stopped speaking. She looked shell shocked, tears welling up. God, but Lilah had been completely fooled by Kate’s frequent smiles and clear headedness. She hadn’t known how much trauma the hell queen had put Kate through, hadn’t even thought that Kate was conscious of the things that she’d done while trapped inside her own body. Moved to action, she stood and embraced Kate, saying to her the only comfort she could think to give.

“Its the past. And, it wasn’t you.” Then, “Are you still blood bound?”

She felt like real shit for asking, but she needed to know what Brasa’s relationship was with Kate, and if it would make their own relationship (did they even have a relationship?) more complicated. Kate made a soft sound in the negative and Lilah let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. That was one complication she had, thankfully, avoided.

Kate’s body was taut, “When she first brought me back, when I met him, I felt the power I had over him. And, she abused it. I drained him dry that first night, to regain her strength. After three days, when he managed to stand up off the ground, she did it again. Because she could.” Kate pulled back and looked at Lilah, “That wasn’t even the worst of it. How can I look him in the eye after all that?”

Lilah shook her head, “Like I said, it wasn’t you. And, if he really wants to talk peace, he’ll set it aside. If not, fuck ‘im.”

That, at least, was the truth. Lilah had been fighting his kind of less than a year and she was tired of it. She wanted peace. She wanted to go on nice, normal jobs—jewel theft, a bank heist, possibly even some fine art that they could sell on the black market. Stuff that was in her wheelhouse, in her comfort zone. If he was going to hold Kate responsible for the actions of Amaru, then he wasn’t worth negotiating with. Full stop.

Kate loosed a soundless laugh, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

#from dusk til dawn #from dusk til dawn: the series #brasa #In the Bond

[radramblog]

Halo Through its Guns: Halo 3

This and the last one were actually the articles I was least sure about when thinking this whole series up. A bit awkward, considering it makes it look a bit one-hit-wondery. Unlike the franchise it describes.

Halo 3 was another big step up in complexity from its predecessors. Everything gets to look and sound bigger and better, what with the shift in console generation increasing audiovisual fidelity and how much shit the game could be running at once. Processing power, that’s the term I was looking for.

This coupled with the grand finale to the Halo Trilogy, something that is kinda funny to think about this many games later. But because of that, Bungie wanted to make sure this game was more bombastic than ever, with so much more stuff going on, and much of this effort paid off.

However, Halo 3 also hits a bit of a stumbling block on account of all that new Stuff. It’s one that would be corrected, then perfected, and then doubled down on as the series progressed.

But that’s well and truly ahead of ourselves. This is Halo 3 through it’s gun: The Spike Rifle.

Brutal.

If you’re somehow reading this and don’t know Halo 2/3’s plot, hello and also, what? But Halo 3 takes place after the Schism, a civil war within the Covenant in which the Jiralhanae (Brutes) replace the Sangheili (Elites) within the hierarchy and the latter start getting massacred. This means two things: one, you’re going to be fighting a lot of Brutes in this game. And two, you aren’t going to be fighting a lot of Elites in this game. Excluding Flood-infected ones, in fact, you don’t fight any.

Halo 2 gave the Brutes somewhat of a distinct flavour, seeing as they had to be distinguished from the Elites who were also enemies you were fighting, sometimes in the same level. They soaked up automatic fire like a sponge, were vulnerable to headshotting once you popped off their helmet, and would occasionally get pissed off and barrel towards you, furry fists at the ready.

Their weapons carried this further, but in 2 there really weren’t very many of them. I’d argue the Brute Plasma Rifle doesn’t really count, though the parallel is fun (higher fire rate but it overheats quicker- it’s an “angrier” gun), and Tartarus’s own Fist of Rukt isn’t exactly something you get to play around with. There was, however, the Brute Shot, a huge grenade launcher with a wicked bayonet built into the stock, a relatively powerful weapon befitting the stature of the big monkes. It was the Brute Shot whose aesthetic carried over to the following game.

The Spike Rifle (or just Spiker) is one of the new Brute-held weapons included with Halo 3. It’s an automatic, dual-wieldable projectile weapon whose spikes embed themselves in object and foe alike. Unlike the alien purple and pink of the Needler, the Spiker is a dull gunmetal and brown that feels akin to a human weapon, were it not for the twin bayonets and the, well, shooting fucking spikes at people.

The aesthetic of the Spiker and its companions in the Brute arsenal, the Brute Shot, Mauler, Gravity Hammer, and Spike Grenade (we’re just going to ignore the Firebomb) as well as the new vehicles they bring to Halo 3 perfectly suit the feel of the Brutes. These weapons are pragmatic and classless, with literally all of the guns having bayonets (including the Gravity Hammer!) and having magazine-based reloads. They’re simple, from both a design and gameplay perspective, but they server to seriously distinguish the Brutes from both the Elite enemies in previous games as well as the Grunt, Jackal, and Drone underlings they command over.

The Spiker is a standby of the lower-ranked Brutes, much like the Plasma Rifle was of the Elites previous. From this, however, stems part of the first issue with their handling in Halo 3. As much as they were unique in 2, Halo 3 doesn’t have Elites to balance them off of, and it seems the development team wanted to maintain that core enemy deployment structure that worked so well in the previous games. What this means is that the Brutes in this game are kind of just Elites most of the time, seeing as they play very similarly and have been given energy shields. There are subtle differences- Brutes can’t regenerate their shields, and they’re much more likely to rush you and attack in melee. Higher-ranking members, such as Chieftains, can actually shrug off a headshot after their shields break as their helmets stay on, and the new Equipment system (we’ll get there) means they can pull some really interesting tricks.

But like. A Chieftain with a Gravity Hammer isn’t far off a Zealot with an Energy Sword, and a Spec Ops Brute with a Mauler (only one for some reason) isn’t that different to a Spec Ops Elite with…an Energy Sword. Both wield Carbines in H2 and H3, and the Spike Grenade and Plasma Grenade are pretty similar as well. The Brutes are effectively the parallelization of an entire enemy class to fit a mould that doesn’t even exist in the game they’re in.

And as thematically appropriate as the Brute weapons are, the simplicity is kind of their downfall. The Spike Grenade is just a Plasma, stickiness and all, but trading the sheer lethality for a bit of extra range that you aren’t going to notice when you’re attaching it to someone. The Mauler is basically only useful when dual wielding, since if you aren’t then you might as well just melee someone- it’s not like the gun has any more range than the average arm. The Spiker is basically just another Plasma Rifle/SMG, though with a slightly higher DPS. Did you know that? It actually hits harder.

Arguably one of Halo 3’s biggest problems is weapon bloat. There’s simply too many guns and not enough room to let them all shine, such that a lot of them are confined to a single enemy subtype or a handful of multiplayer maps. The aforementioned Mauler only appears on the stealthy brutes that appear in maybe two levels, the returning Flamethrower and new Spartan Laser only show up in one each. And this is bad enough with the weapons that are actually cool and good, but when we get down to the Spiker? It just doesn’t matter.

The dual-wieldable weapons are pretty much universally bad in Halo 3, save maybe the Plasma Pistol. At this point, the drawbacks- not being able to conveniently melee, throw a grenade, switch weapons, or use equipment- just make them much too inconvenient to bother with. On top of that, for whatever reason, the game actually nerfs the damage of many of the weapons while they’re being dual wielded, so while you do technically get more bang for your tick, you certainly don’t get more bang for your buck, and the inaccuracy of a lot of these weapons means every miss hurts more. I think some amount of this is a result of the dominance of the Battle Rifle in just about every form of multiplayer, but very rarely will you see anyone deign to pick up anything short of an actual “power weapon”. Hell, most people never bother using the Assault Rifle they spawn in with, unless things get very desparate. The result of this is that weapons like the SMG, Spiker, and Magnum just get left on the dirt where they spawned in most of the time, unable to shine or make the game as interesting as they potentially could.

Of course, the dual-wieldable Spikers and the like were not the only thing clogging up Halo 3’s sandbox. There was also the Heavy Weapons, four very large guns that had the same restrictions as dual wielding and also slow your character down in exchange for being able to hold 3 guns at once as well as raw power. These were honestly pretty okay, adding an extra dimension to the turrets that littered Halo 2’s maps, as well as the Missile Pod replacing the homing function of 2’s Rocket Launcher. But because of that speed drop, as well as other issues (not being able to zoom in, the third-person perspective being awkward, lack of range), they just didn’t end up being worthwhile either except as defensive tools in objective modes. As insanely powerful as the Flamethrower is (seriously, fire damage is absurd in this game, if you shoot it on the ground and walk on the flames you will die very quick) it doesn’t matter if you can’t reach the guy you want to use it on while he peppers you with bullets.

The other axis on this equation is equipment. Equipment are a fun and interesting addition to the gameplay! But a lot of them are niche, terrible, or both. I can’t say I’ve seen many people effectively use the Deployable Cover, and I don’t know if there are any maps where the Trip Mine is both available and relevant. It’s not surprising that this is literally the only game with them, frankly, though a few would be adapted into future games in the form of Armour Abilities.

There is a lot going on in Halo 3’s gameplay. The game was ambitious with its additions to the franchise seeing as it was both the last of a trilogy and the first of a console generation. And while I don’t think any individual piece is bad per se, they frustratingly form less than the sum of their parts. It’s still a frankly excellent game, well-deserving of its long-time heritage and praise, but things like the awkwardness of some mechanics and the arguable needlessness of weapons like the Spiker somewhat weigh it down, much like the 12 grenades 2 guns many spare magazines and giant flamethrower Chief can carry should probably be doing to him.

The trilogy might have been over after 3, but the franchise certainly was not. Before we return to the Master Chief’s (hopefully) comfortable shoes, though, we’ve got a couple side trips to make. I hope to see you, reader, here for the next two entries of this article series, where we cover my favourite two Halo games.

#ramble #halo #halo 3 #spiker #video games

[border-spam]

Leech Lord AU - Char Breakdown

Seifa A’rosk / Seifa Ur-Machina / Saint of the God King’s Mechanica

Bless u @nikyri-art​ and @lazulizard​ for the art! List of character traits and world-building facets for this character within my story. The Leech Lord Au is the one all other twins content I’ve written is set in.

Troy’s is HERE Tyreen’s is HERE

Note, ye asked and ye received. Literally my first OC ever, no clue what I’m doing, constructive feedback is 100% welcome.

Physical Details:

Right handed.

Very short, 4′11″, and rarely seen out of heeled boots.

5 years older than the twins, in her mid twenties when she came across the scabby looking rat who introduced herself as Tyreen.

Long auburn hair she usually wears in waves.

Right side shave, warm blue eyes, septum/eyebrow/labret facial piercings

Average bodyweight, hourglass shape.

Saint sigil tattoo between her shoulderblades.

Couple of small scars across torso, stab wound near navel, nicks across left ribs. 

Visible facial scar is paper thin and streaks across her right brow into her hairline. Tells everyone this was from a knife fight, but was actually from an echodevice she was trying to scavenge components from blowing in her face a decade ago. Figures she might as well try and get some intimidation points out of it.

Relaxed punk aesthetic she carries into her engineering uniform.

Usually covered in homemade jewelry.

Backstory:

Sei is a migrant junker/mechanic, and has been running a solo career as one since her late teens.

She has no memory of family, and doesn't care in the slightest. Figures she was probably sold into child labor before she was old enough to remember who they were. Loses no sleep over this and rarely gives it any thought.

Grew up traveling with her "Boss" (head of the scavenging ring who managed herself and the other skinny little kids she was raised with) between different rim planets including Pandora, scrapping and repairing tech while scavenging the thousands of ship husks dumped during the corporate wars.

Spent her formative years constantly surrounded by other children and teens who helped each other get each other through what should have been a relatively lonely existence, and developed a close family bond with many.

Retained contact with a lot of them in adulthood. They operate a network of mechanics and engineers across the system, a few of which come to work within the COV Mechanica when they realise she can offer safety.

Spent her childhood and teens learning the art of the deal from her boss, accompanying him on trade runs, market dealings, debt collections, anything and everything he figured would help her in the long term. Learned everything she could while accompanying him as a kid, like a filthy little sponge in too-big overalls and a runny nose.

Engineering and mech skills have been honed from years of pulling apart and crawling into junked ships, repairing and reselling on components for profit.

At 19, she had saved enough to purchase a shitty little rehashed transport ship from her Boss, and set out to start her own trade. They've kept in touch and are on friendly grounds. Still calls him Boss. Never actually learned his name, it didn’t matter.

Seifa spends years migrating between outer planets, building a reputation with her bartering and trade skills. Playing idiot traders like instruments, flirting her way into high profit deals, and starting bar fights. She doesn’t take part in them mind you, she’s a lady. She just starts them. 

It’s an easy way to get a group of “eager investors” to weed out the lesser competition, and leave you able to playfully manipulate yourself into the good graces of someone who’s too horny and pumped up on the hormonal rush of the fight to realise that they are the mark.

Moves to the next planet once she's outstayed her welcome, but always makes more friends than enemies.

At 25, finds a terrified and not remotely intimidating girl in a Pandoran junkyard, who pulls a gun on her. Tyreen tries to mug her with a shitty SMG that's clearly out of ammo, has a jammed trigger, and gets laughed at in response. Gets called a weird, stupid kid. Gets interrogated about how she is too old to be on Pandora and still alive if this is how clueless she is, so what’s going on? 

Ty breaks down into tears and begs to please, please get her some medicine. Her "Brother is so sick” and he's “all she has now”, and they've “no money, no supplies. It wasn’t meant to go like this, it shouldn’t have gone like this but they didn’t know what it would be like.." and in a rare moment of empathy likely routed in years of being around kids this stupid, and clueless, and dumb ... Seifa helps.

Traits: ✓ Positive x Negative:

✓ Confident, both in her appearance and knowledge.

Sei is a jack of all trades, master of none. Her range of knowledge is broad and useful, and her confidence stems both from her well maintained physical appearance, and general competency in most situations where she needs to be.

✓  Socially skilled, fast learner, adaptable. 

She’s been learning on her feet as long as she can remember, and is highly socially skilled, though a lot of her “nice” interactions can be a veneer. She holds people at arms length without them realising she’s not being as open and friendly as she appears.

✓  Self sufficient, reliable, trustworthy.

An adult lifetime of needing to rely solely on herself has left her highly sufficient, and very dependable. Seifa is the kind of person you call when you need something done, and don’t need to ask questions about how she gets you your results. You’ll get what you need.. just don’t hassle her about how she achieved it. You’ll be told to piss off, very clearly.

✓  Excellent negotiator, skilled in controlling conversations and manipulating others from years of trading for a living.

Seifa has been learning how to argue, shift conversations towards her own goals, and turn competitors on each other since she was barely able to carry a wrench. She’s an excellent dealer, and can drop into one of her many characters instantly when they’d help shift a contract towards her gain. Floozy giggling newcomer? Got it. Clueless naive big spender? No problem. Trade baroness about to crush your knuckles? Game on.

It’s something the twin strays she rescues are very interested in learning from her.

✓  Naturally friendly, and deeply caring for those she bonds with.

Sei is generally easy to get on with, between her decent set of social skills and ability to quickly read people, she comes across as quite friendly and overall pleasant to most people. She’s very slow to become genuine around others or show her caring side, an understandable side effect of the kind of life she’s lived, but her close friends are very close, and see her as one for life.

✓  Lawful Neutral.

 Morals are decent ( for a Pandoran) , and is always willing to help someone if it's not too much hassle or won’t put her out. Like the majority of people living on this rock however, she won’t put strangers before her own safety or wellbeing.

x  Very vain.

Sei will sacrifice functionality for style in the Mechanicum without a second thought, and will become frustrated and snappy if unhappy with her appearance and forced into social situations. She’s had a lifetime of curating her looks and using them as a tool, and hates being seen “out of character”.

x Self focused. 

She won’t risk harm physically or to her reputation for someone she has no stake in. Fact of life on Pandora is that people who do that don't tend to live very long, and she’s highly aware of that. Close friends and children are about it when it comes to who she’d take a risk for, and bandits slaughtering each other or ransacking towns is unlikely to be something she’d be very phased by. It’s not that she doesn’t care, she just doesn’t allow herself to.

x Irritable, easily brought to frustration or insulted. Holds grudges badly.

Seifa manages her collected and cool outer demeanor by pushing it over her emotional state. It’s a defense mechanism she’s learned from a lifetime of being in situations where emotion = weakness. Her high personal opinion of herself and pride in her skill means she takes to being insulted very easily. A subordinate who doesn’t show her respect won’t stay in her department long, and an equal who treats her like an underling? She will Never. Let. It. Go.

x Snappy and unpleasant when stressed or overworked, unable to handle emotion based arguments.

Seifa’s response to stress or frustration is to become overwhelmingly in control of the situation, and fiercely logical. Her social niceness evaporates and she defaults to the simple level of “Get this shit done NOW, and don’t question me” when it comes to dolling out required tasks. This is a bad thing to couple with arrogance. She is also completely incapable of arguing with someone who uses emotion instead of logic as their drive, and so while she is able to communicate with Troy very well even in heated times as they both default to logic, arguments between herself and Tyreen can become vicious, as neither is capable of expressing themselves in the other’s language when frustrated.

x Loyalty to close friends can overpower her better judgement in situations.

She’s completely aware of the hypocrisy of this weakness considering the front she likes to portray, being cold and unaffected by problems, but has never been able to stop herself from making this same mistake. Over and over.

x Noticeably arrogant, no respect for the chain of command.

Relying on her gut for survival through her life left her with an inflated sense of worth for her own opinion, and she finds it very hard to really convince herself that others may be the better option, or have more value than her own. This means she can also easily forget her place if she thinks a superior is in the wrong. Has earned her a stab to the abdomen and a broken wrist in the past. Both healed, both scarred. Her arrogance towards the twins, being that they are younger and far less experienced than her in general life, has caused multiple confrontation. She know’s it’s a problem, and she’s trying to get better. She really is.

Likes:

Money.

Personal freedoms.

Self reliance.

Feeling admired and appreciated.

Close companionships with friends who see her as an equal.

Her advice being heeded.

Growing plants.

Tinkering with smalltime tech and gadgets.

The safety of the COV meaning she can finally settle in one place.

Respect.

Being wanted, physically and emotionally.

Tenderness.

Gaming, watching movies, appreciating art. 

Crafting jewelry from scrap

Having her gentle, caring nature be valued.

Men.

Dislikes:

Bullshit. Can't stand people who don't communicate logically.

Being spoken down to.

Her appearance being mocked or intelligence belittled.

Social sycophancy.

Being lied to, having her trust broken when she so rarely gives it.

Unfairness, aimed at her or those she feels protective over ( friends, underlings )

Pointless violence.

Risk taking.

Most things considered *edible* on Pandora.

Men. -

Asks are Open!

#borderlands 3 #bl3 #borderlands #troy calypso #tyreen calypso #calypso twins #my writing #my hcs #seifa #leech lord

[bigskydreaming]

there are a lot of good points here and yes bruce probably should make more of an effort especially with dick and jason BUT it feels like it's slightly overlooking that some people go to Bruce spyijg so much as indicative of HIS trauma and highlighting how and where he is broken and not quite able to fix that also i honestly think a lot of it is just a running joke now and not serious meta via @fuyunoakegata

Thing is, I don’t think you’re wrong at all about how much it has to do with people going to it as indicative of HIS trauma and highlighting how and where he is broken and not quite able to fix that.......but its that latter part that’s still a sticking point for me, as the one thing that I still see as missing from a ton of places where this crops up.....is where Bruce is ever shown TRYING to fix that.

Y’know?

That’s honestly one of my biggest gripes with a lot of takes on Bruce and his dynamics with his family, as it feels like often people start from a point of “well this is just how he is and there’s no changing that so no point in trying and instead let’s just make the most of it, with this almost always requiring more effort on everyone else’s part TOWARDS him”.....

But like.....very rarely IMO, do we see a lot of EFFORT on Bruce’s part, in which he’s shown even acknowledging where this stuff is an issue and trying to go about changing or doing things differently.

And that’s the part that doesn’t work for me....because similar to what I was saying in that post, its people kinda just jumping straight to the endpoint of seeing Bruce as unchangeable, and broken....when at no point in between was there ever really any attempt at writing things towards a different end result, y’know?

And a conclusion isn’t a foregone conclusion if the only reason for it being that way is people just....not considering that there might be any alternative to it.

As to it being a running joke a lot of the time, you’re not wrong there either I don’t think, and that’s part of why I separated those thoughts into a separate post as I don’t think the original one it spawned from was honestly trying to be taken all that seriously.....but usually the difference is just a matter of tone. And so, like, it all still applies if its taken at all seriously, but yeah I mean, obviously sometimes its not meant to be taken all that seriously, in which case like....no real point in applying it to those specific instances. 

Still, its something I think doesn’t get talked about enough over all. There’s a whole lot of “Bruce is just like that” in various ways and places in fandom, while at the same time its equally accepted at face value that when his kids are just like that or at all similar, that’s NOT something that can be allowed to stand and is grounds for pointing out where they’re doing something wrong. So my personal wish is for more people to evaluate just why it is in a family where every single member of it has massive childhood trauma.....its the parent whose childhood trauma is most allowed to just Exist as a definitive reason for all kinds of behavioral or interpersonal flaws to trace back to and just receive a “yeah, that makes sense” kinda view of things......while all his kids who could just as easily trace so many of their behavioral or interpersonal flaws back to the deaths of their parents or other childhood traumas.....like....do not get quite the same understanding, y’know?

Like, the deaths of their parents is so often regarded as a point of commonality that Bruce and Dick both share, but I think most people would agree that Dick’s own flaws when interacting with others aren’t usually argued as being a result of his parents’ death SPECIFICALLY, the way that a lot of Bruce’s very similar flaws are related back to that specific thing for him. And the follow-up there, is I would say we often hear or see it stated that one of the key reasons Bruce took in Dick and then later the others, was so that he/they wouldn’t grow up the same as Bruce himself, and so that he could steer them in a better direction.

Except....the problem I have with that reasoning, lies in looking at how many of the conflicts between say, Bruce and Dick once Dick is an ADULT, both stem from the same kinds of issues and behaviors that aren’t likely to just pop out of nowhere on either of their side of things, the second Dick reaches a certain age.....AND also tend to be the very issues and behaviors that people look back to Bruce’s own traumas as the explanation for him exhibiting.

So, the reason that line of thought doesn’t work for me is because the way I see it, we’re left with only two possible takes:

1) These issues that arise between Bruce and Dick later in life, that do still stem from Bruce’s instigation and are as such a result of Bruce’s own traumas and inability to process them or move past their hindering his current relationships....either the reason they didn’t become an issue earlier was because they simply weren’t on display on Bruce’s side of things earlier.....in which case my question is well then why now, and why are Bruce’s earlier traumas reasonable to fall back upon now when the very fact of their non-existience in conflicts between Bruce and Dick earlier in their relationship means they AREN’T actually a given....

or

2) The reason they didn’t become an issue earlier was because Bruce was able to look or work past them FOR Dick’s sake and in order to be the parent Dick needed in order for Bruce to successfully steer him down a path where he can process things more healthily/adeptly than Bruce manages....in which case the question becomes....why then is it treated as though there was an expiration date for how long or how often Bruce was able to work past/work through his own issues for Dick’s sake, and thus he no longer is able to do so despite this take basically being an argument for his ability to do precisely that while raising Dick in years past?

See what I mean?

*Shrugs* Anyway, there’s no hard and fast resolution to any of this and I don’t mean to suggest there is, more just raising the issue of how often its framed as though a Bruce Is Just Like That Though instead of a Does He Have To Be Though.

[kaaras-adaar]

Kaaras and Alcohol

// Kaaras is a recovering alcoholic.

While it’s not something a lot of people know about him (because it’s not something one brings up at a dinner table really), there may be some telltale signs for those observant enough. Both Leliana and Bull are aware of his previous addiction, and not entirely because he disclosed it. He turns down alcohol whenever he can, and simply says he and alcohol don’t agree (which is enough for some people to understand he’s had an abusive relationship with it before).

I’ve mentioned it before, he often drank to drown out the self loathing he suffered and the guilt of what had happened to his father. He was in a bad state mentally when he was a young teenager, but because he wasn’t coping with it healthily, once he began working as a mercenary, he often drank himself to sleep, and sometimes into the beds of other people (more metas are on Kaaras and his sexual history in my tags).

His go to drinks were ales and hard liquors. Kaaras knew he had a problem, he just didn’t know how to properly cope with it until his sister had had enough of it and he was approached by his lover at the time, Stenn. There relationship bloomed because of the help Kaaras gained from him, but Kaaras also went cold turkey and it was a NIGHTMARE for him when he got off the alcohol and suffered withdrawals. He had the shakes, he was physically in pain, he was sweating, couldn’t sleep, let alone perform his job. He was bedridden for at least three days because of it. It was ROUGH for him, but it was made all the better by the support that he had, both Aith and Stenn at his side.

Kaaras wasn’t perfect. He fell back on the wagon once, after he and Stenn broke up and he left to work in Starkhaven. Thankfully, he only drank a partial bottle before he threw it down the sink. He was emotionally in a tough place because he missed his lover, but the both of them were too stubborn and Kaaras couldn’t go back to that mercenary company. He just couldn’t. Because of their bad orders, his mentor had died, and he wasn’t going to tarnish himself with their reputation, plus, Kaaras’ moral compass just wouldn’t allow him.

To this day, Kaaras still suffers from time to time. Only does he drink when he feels he HAS to, which is risky considering his addiction, and he knows that, but it’s only ever during noble parties where he feels he would offend if he declined. Even then, he will ONLY drink red wine–not the kind of alcohol he had gone to in the past, and something that he does not entirely have a craving for. It’s still a risk (any alcohol is a risk when you’re an addict), but for Kaaras, it’s a safer option than anything else.

On bad days, he can still suffer shakes every now and again, or a headache, but that’s only if he’s had a glass of wine prior or he’s having a bad day emotionally which makes the craving set back in. Outside of that, however, he’s been very sober and good about it. He doesn’t mind if he has a partner that drinks, and he doesn’t crave it as much as he used to.

Because of the alcohol abuse, it has caused Kaaras to look older than he is. He’s only 29 when he’s titled Inquisitor, but he looks in his mid 30′s. It’s because of a hard life and alcohol abuse.

I wouldn’t consider Kaaras out of control when it comes to his cravings anymore, he’s learned a lot over the years and has matured greatly. He also understands the weight of drinking if he does. He was never a violent drunk, not even remotely rowdy, he merely used it as a way to feel numb from his negative feelings and a way to get courage to perform sexual acts with others.

Because he still drinks once in a blue moon (at social gatherings), he’s not the perfect example of someone being sober, but he’s also a lot more in control of himself than he used to be, because of that personal growth and maturity. It’s not a good thing, and no excuse really, considering he IS an alcoholic, but he is recovering still. It is RARE anyway, when he does not decline a drink that is offered, and most times, when he does take it, he holds it or sets it aside, not actually drinking it. He just doesn’t want to offend his host. 

Kaaras isn’t exactly secretive about his past, it’s just not something he talks about if not prodded. If someone asked him why he doesn’t drink, he would be honest with them. Kaaras isn’t ashamed of his past, he believes everyone has the right to learn, grow and change. In fact, he is very proud of how far he’s come as an individual and the hurdles he’s overcome.

If anyone were to attack him on his past, he would not be upset. He knows his past was not great, but if he didn’t have that past, then he wouldn’t be the person he was today, and he is happy with his growth, he really is proud of how far he’s come and grown. No one can take that from him. No one. And if anyone did wish to ask him about it, he really doesn’t have anything to hide.

Kaaras’ addiction stemmed from a mental place which he is no longer in. Having that control makes him more confident even if he DOES have that little glass of wine, but he always tells himself just the one, and most times he doesn’t even drink the entire glass, he just takes a sip and sends it off if he can.

Either way, Kaaras is still a recovering alcoholic. 

#Kaaras Adaar #ooc #Meta #Headcanons #cw: alcohol #Kaaras and alcohol #Stenn

[x0401x]

Hi there! Just want to thank you so much for translating for the VE fandom! I've been looking through your VE posts and noticed you mentioned how anime!Gil is completely different from LN!Gil. I agree with you and was wholeheartedly disappointed in the anime. I was hoping you could elaborate more on your thoughts, where you thought anime!Gil and anime!Violet went wrong and how they were different from the anime. Sorry if you've already made a post on this previously. Thanks again!

Hi! You’re welcome!

This reply took me long enough, lol. I haven’t gone too much into detail, or else I’d just end up writing a bible. It still turned out long as hell, though, so I’ve put it under a cut.

I really didn’t know how to begin with this. “Where they went wrong” kinda implies that those two were going right until some point, and that’s just… not the case. They were a trainwreck from start to finish. And it’s kind of impossible to really discuss this without touching upon the massive fails in the writing of the entire show. It does try to convey important messages to the viewers, but mostly with visuals and repetitive lines, never with the actual plot or the characters. You get an inkling of what the story was attempting to do with them, and that initial idea is what seems to stay with most people, because there’s nearly nothing beyond it.

As director Ishidate has stated more than once before, he made changes to the story because he thought the novel was, in his words, “too orthodox”. But watering it down meant watering the characters down too, Gil and Violet more than anyone else. And this results in a show that ironically fails to grasp its own themes and cast — the personalities and conflicts get lost in the details and have to be patched up with excuses that end up displaying how little the show trusts its own audience. It keeps spelling out plot devices and character traits in an almost robotic manner, with very scarce effort put into actually showcasing them in the situations and dialogues. Everyone is too one-dimensional and the main plot line is repeated over and over instead of being alluded in parallels or even just slightly more intelligent exchanges. Animators like Ishidate have grown dangerously used to committing a grave narrative suicide: to give vague and unconvincing reasons for things to be the way they are and expect the audience to take it all as is simply because it was stated there. Everything is oversimplified because they clearly want the viewers to get invested in the emotional baggage of the show, and only the emotional baggage, because they think that’s all we get invested on. They forget that details are necessary for the whole experience.

These problems are recurrent in Violet and Gil, and they never stop. I’ll start with Gil, since he was mentioned first.

Gilbert Bougainvillea is a very complex, humane and multi-faceted character in the novel. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t look like it at first, so he surprised many readers in volume 1 with how caring and endearing he can be. And I mean caring for real. Anime!Gil seemed like a poor excuse for what he was supposed to represent, which in turn made him into a walking contradiction. In the novel, Gil is by far the person that emphasizes the most with Violet, because the two of them are two sides of the same coin. This is where the anime falls short most frequently. They at first look like polar-opposites, but are absolutely not, yet the show portrays them as such. Novel!Gil is gratuitously kind and righteous, and he’s brave and pure-hearted enough to stand by his values no matter what. He’s used to giving up everything for the sake of other people, but he has morals that he holds to the roots of his very being, so he always chooses to donate himself to what he deems as good causes. And once he has his mind set on an objective, he doesn’t mind playing dirty to achieve it, as long as he’s not hurting anyone. That’s exactly the same as Violet, and Gil isn’t the only one who sees himself in her — Hodgins and Dietfried also notice how alike the two are. Novel!Gil relates to Violet on a spiritual level, and he knows first-hand how she must feel. He’s been there and done that. And that’s why she’s his number one priority. His purpose in life is to protect her and keep her in a healthy lifestyle within a blessed working environment and a loving family. Quite literally, all he wants is to make sure that she’s happy, and he’s active and vocal about it. He’s also an unapologetic and unabashed feminist, so he completely approves of her doing anything for a living — she doesn’t need to live her life like an ordinary woman and whatever she wants for herself is fine, as long as it’s not too dangerous.

Apparently, his personality is one of the book aspects that Ishidate believed to be “too orthodox”. He depicts Gil the way you’d expect any male creator to depict a man — a brooding martyr figure who only has a heart of gold in fleeting moments that get replayed again and again in flashbacks to serve as justification for Violet’s undying love. He makes very little strides and there’s a lot of flawed reasoning behind his affection that makes it oddly disconnected, which is the fact that said affection is barely ever there. Gil hardly treats Violet like a person, let alone an equal. Violet is ready to give her life for him anytime, and as we see in the last battle at Intense, he’s ready to cling onto that to save his own life. Ishidate doesn’t shy away from making very evident that he thinks it’s okay for Gil to do only the minimum to earn Violet’s respect and trust, like it’s a given and all he’s required in order to earn her love is to exist. This is very visible in scenes like the one where they first met. Gil seems to shield Violet from the abuse of his brother, but shows next to no distress or even interest over it as he doesn’t even question where she came from or why Dietfried was treating her that way. There’s also the scene where he takes her to one of his family’s residences, and she has his jacket on, just like in the novel… yet he’s letting her walk barefoot in the snow without giving a single flying fuck. He then leaves her side as soon as he instructs the maid what to do with her, not looking back. I also hate that scene where he gets back home and she bumps into him and falls on her butt. He just stares at her and makes no effort to help her back up. But the one I hate the most is that festival scene where he nearly thanks Violet for fighting so well in battle. I mean, she’s killing people for him. She, a literal child, is in the frontlines of a long-lasting war, risking her life and committing mass murder for his sake. That’s literally nothing to be grateful for. Especially not when he’s supposed to love her. And I despise that he only stopped himself from finishing the phrase because he noticed the bruises on her.

Another major defect of the anime was changing Gil’s backstory. Anime!Gil was, by the looks of it, just a rich kid who enlisted simply because that’s the family tradition. And if you take away Gil’s backstory, you take away the viewers’ reason to empathize with him. Why? Because that means he’s morphed into someone who can make choices. Erase any factor that binds Gil to doing what his family and his superiors make him do, and what you have is a grown man with his free will intact. And he uses none of it to help Violet. Anime!Gil was always given the opportunity to say no. He could’ve said no to Dietfried and sent Violet straight to the Evergardens, he could’ve said no to his superior officer and not taken her into the military, or he could’ve at least said no to assigning her to the men’s troops. He didn’t because there would be no story otherwise. Novel!Gil is always attempting to save Violet from the war and from herself, while anime!Gil’s actions beg to differ. And so, anime!Violet’s obsession with Gil stems from the fact that he was the first to treat her remotely like a human being and that, for a long time, he was all she had. None of that fate thing, because it’s also “too orthodox”. But without the fate element and without Gil having no control whatsoever over how he feels about Violet, he’s straight-up a pedophile. If he feels regular romantic love for Violet, who is in her mid-teens, that’s pedophilia right there. This one is my biggest beef with anime!Gil, and I don’t take criticism for it.

Now Violet. Not to be rude, but I see so many people talk about how interesting her anime counterpart is, yet I rarely ever see anyone going in-depth on it. It’s like the way the fans talks about the show. Literally every single person who comments that they liked it always says the exact same thing: “I cried during every episode”. I sort of feel like most of them are just reproducing what they see other people say out there, which is probably what got them interested in watching it in the first place. I don’t mean this with ill-intent; it’s just seriously the impression I get from looking at the tag. I’ve accompanied it since the novel came out all the way back in 2015, and when the show was running, believe it or not, I didn’t really see much of those comments. It started becoming a habit to say it after episode 10, which seems to be the highest-rating episode (the irony being that it was the closest the anime ever got to the novels). Hence why it feels to me like some people just say it on automatic, and I get the same vibe from the fans of anime!Violet.

I’ll just be blunt here: the main difference between anime!Violet and canon!Violet is that canon!Violet was made to be liked by girls and women, and anime!Violet was made to be liked by men. I have already said this before, but Violet is the very definition of independent professional woman in the novel. She’s educated, confident, strong, reliable, altruistic and overall well-versed in at least a little bit of everything. Half of it is due to luck and half of it is her own merits, but all in all, she was created not just to be relatable but also a character that people could look up to. Meanwhile, anime!Violet was clearly made to be waifubait.

I can’t really stress how little thought was actually put into her portrayal and development. We never truly see her internalizing the lessons that she supposedly learns in each of the self-contained episodes. We only ever witness her displaying sudden significant hints of emotion at convenient times, paired to her either repeating what she was told earlier by one of the characters or taking an extremely obvious conclusion to a question that was already half-answered by someone else. Because of this, Violet’s growth process has an unsteady pacing in the anime and mostly feels disjointed. In comparison, novel!Violet is usually not the point of view — she’s often in the role of observer, and we notice through the solutions she comes up with for her clients’ issues that she does have a very humane connection with them. We also notice through the clients’ opinions on Violet that she shows subtle changes at certain specific points, such as smiling just a little when she manages to not only accomplish her duties but also help solve their problems. This makes her more real and believable because, unlike the anime, it presents no abrupt alteration to the essence of her person. She’s growing in her own way, but it’s still easy to tell. It’s also very clever to have Violet be disliked or misunderstood by her clients at first because she’s so aloof and apathetic-looking, but then she grows on them after they actually understand her, and the readers can absorb that from them. I’ve seen many people complain that they can’t really empathize with anime!Violet, but in the novel, the author takes care not to let this happen, and it really doesn’t.

What upsets me the most is that anime!Violet is overly infantilized. We all know that director Ishidate loves her like a father loves a daughter; it’s been said by himself and his colleagues quite a lot. That’s cute and all, but it made her depiction extremely shallow. The biggest problem was making her 14 in the anime. I still struggle to understand what would’ve been so bad with keeping her as a 17-year-old. Sum that up with removing many of her merits and adding forceful childish traits, such as being okay with changing clothes anywhere in front of anyone or pouting when she’s frustrated, and you have the perfect recipe of what waifu junkies like to be spoon-fed with. In my opinion, anime!Violet was a downgraded tragic heroine played in a cheap and boring way to attract tearjerker lovers.

I hope this has covered enough of my take on the matter. ✌️

#violet evergarden #gilbert bougainvillea

[falseh0od]

All They Really Need

It’s finally here.

Note: A reminder that this is being written Right Now in honor of a strike that is happening on TikTok! There's been an influx of toxic Fanders on TikTok who seem to think that Logicality, Prinxiety, Dukeceit, and Remile are the only valid Sanders Sides ships which is nowhere near the truth! So, a lot of Sanders Sides cosplayers (myself included) are going on a two-week Sanders Sides cosplay strike to stand up to the bullies, and I'm also writing this finally as well! Because I will *always* prefer Analogical and Royality above any other ship, especially Logicality and Prinxiety! So enjoy my boys being gay disasters and finally deciding to make a lifelong promise to each other!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22446493

Summary: Virgil decides it's time for the next big step in his relationship with Logan... no matter how irrelevant it may seem.

TWs: a couple swear words, some anxiety, but nothing horrible!

It was a quiet day in the Mindscape.

Virgil was quietly lounging on the couch in the living room, scrolling through Tumblr and generally minding his own business. On the surface level, it might’ve looked like Virgil was just indulging in his typical emo content on Tumblr.

However, the side was actually desperately attempting (with attempting being the keyword here) to pull together a date plan for the evening.

Today was his and Logan’s two year dating anniversary, and although Virgil had come up with his overall plan for the evening a month ago, he had been so anxious about pulling it off that he had been procrastinating it ever since.

This had all stemmed after Roman had suddenly actually proposed to Patton nearly six months ago. It had been a shock to everyone- Patton included! But the two were determined to take that next step in their relationship despite the fact that it wasn’t possible for Sides to legally be married.

Considering that they had basically everything they could possibly want at their disposal, the wedding planning had gone smoothly and had taken much less time than it normally would. As a result, the wedding had happened about two months ago. Virgil and Logan had been the ‘best men’, and Thomas had done his best to officiate.

And in all honesty, Virgil had never seen either side as happy as they had been for the past two months.

Did Virgil originally think that the concept of them, as sides, getting ‘married’ was unimportant because they would never be truly married anyway? Yeah. Logan had clearly felt the same right after the announcement had been made, too. But Virgil couldn’t deny the rising feeling of longing. He didn’t want anything big or over-the-top, but goddamnit, he wanted to make that lifelong promise to the one person he loved most.

He didn’t know how Logan would feel, but he was hoping Logan would agree.

So here he was, ring in his pocket, scrolling through Tumblr trying desperately to come up with a good way to propose.

That was until his peaceful mid-morning was suddenly interrupted by a very loud Prince.

“Yes, the wind blows a little bit colder!” Roman burst into the room, singing what had quickly become one of his favorite songs from Frozen II to sing (especially when he was doing a duet with Patton). “And we’re all getting older! Aaand the clouds are moving on with every autumn breeeeze!”

Roman continued to sing through the first verse of the song, giving both Anna and Olaf’s lines his all. Virgil just rolled his eyes, trying to put his focus back on Tumblr.

That is until he had an idea.

Besides, maybe Roman could help him, anyway.

As soon as Roman got to the start of the second verse, before Roman could continue, Virgil butted in.

“The leaves are already falling,” he sang (a rare occurrence indeed, but he could make an exception). “Sven, it feels like the future is calling.”

Roman paused for half a second, almost instantly catching Virgil’s drift. A wide grin almost instantly formed on his face. “Are you telling me tonight you’re going to get down on one knee???”

Virgil sat up and gave Roman a quick nod, continuing on. “Yeah, but I’m really bad at planning these things out- like candlelight and pulling of rings out.”

Roman plopped down next to him. “Maybe you should leave all the romantic stuff to me…”

Virgil just rolled his eyes. “Some things never change… like the love that I feel for him.” (yes, purposely changing the pronoun.) “Some things never change… like how reindeers are easier. But if I commit and I go for it, I’ll know what to say and do… right?”

Roman gave him a Look. “Some things never change…” He then smirked and stole Virgil’s last line. “Virge, the pressure is all on you.”

Virgil shoved him gently in response. Roman just laughed, deciding not to continue with the song. “So, I thought you two thought getting married was irrelevant?”

“I mean, I did,” Virgil muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “But… I’ve realized that I wanna make that promise to him.”

Roman nodded. “You know, Virgil, that was actually exactly my reasoning behind proposing to Patton, and sometimes that’s the only reasoning you need. I think, even if he still thinks it’s irrelevant, he’ll do it for you if you truly want it.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right. The only problem I’m having is figuring out just how the hell to do it.”

“Mm, I see. Well, I have a few ideas, if you’d like to hear them.”

“As long as they’re not too extra, I’m all ears.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Virgil stood outside of Logan’s room, hand in his pocket, clutching the ring box.

It had turned out that Roman could actually have some down-to-earth ideas if he really wanted to, and had helped Virgil come up with a solid plan for the evening that could be easily amended if needed. It was simple and quaint, and Virgil was feeling pretty good about it.

Save for the butterflies in his stomach about the proposal, but that was normal, right?

Virgil took a deep breath and knocked on Logan’s door.

He had taken it upon himself to actually look somewhat decent for the evening. He was wearing the only tie he owned, which resembled his hoodie to a point, along with a purple button-down. It was similar to what he had worn in the courtroom, though Virgil had made a point to wear a black vest, too, to put some distance between the two events.

He was still wearing his hoodie, though. No amount of persuasion from Roman could keep him from wearing it. He was also wearing his signature ripped black skinny jeans as well because they looked good with formal outfits and Virgil would die on that hill.

The door opened, and Virgil’s breath suddenly disappeared.

Logan was looking even more dapper than ever and holy fuck was Virgil gay.

He was wearing a black button-down in replacement of his usual polo, along with his signature tie- but adding on a snazzy blazer that had a gorgeous galaxy print. Adding in the dress pants and shoes Virgil was starting to feel slightly underdressed but he knew Logan wouldn’t care.

“You good there, starlight?” Logan asked, almost teasing in a way.

Virgil finally found his voice. “Oh, uh, yeah, I’m ga- good. I’m good.

Logan just laughed softly and the two leaned in for a quick kiss.

Virgil spoke up after they broke apart. “So, I have a couple of things planned for the evening, actually. For after dinner.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I managed to convince Roman to let me borrow the imagination for the night.”

“That actually sounds wonderful, Virgil. I think that’ll be a nice change of pace for a date night.”

“Well, it is our anniversary. I thought it would be appropriate.”

“Indeed.” Logan put his hand around Virgil’s waist, and Virgil put his own hand around Logan’s as they walked down to the kitchen.

Where they were treated to a sight that Virgil was not expecting.

Patton was dressed up in a chef outfit, humming ‘Into the Unknown’ as he stirred a pot on the stove.

“Patton!” Virgil exclaimed. “I thought we had kitchen rights for the night?”

Patton turned to them and grinned. “Aww, you two look so dapper! Oh, yes, Virgil, you guys do have kitchen rights for tonight! I just thought I would do something nice for you two for your anniversary and cook dinner!”

Virgil went red. “Oh- uhh. Well, I guess that works. Thanks, Pat.”

“No problem!” Patton then winked at him and Virgil resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands and groan.

Of course Roman had gotten Patton into this.

He couldn’t complain though, because Patton was the best cook out of all of them, and he had just been planning to stick a frozen pizza in the oven. Roman had probably taken personal offense at that crime against romance at its very core and enlisted Patton for help.

“That indeed sounds wonderful, Patton. What are you making?” Logan asked.

“My secret spaghetti recipe!”

That recipe was not secret, but it was one of Patton’s best recipes, so Virgil couldn’t complain.

“Oh, cool,” Virgil nodded, walking over to the table and pulling a chair out for Logan (like a gentleman, of course). Logan sat down, saying a quick thank you to Virgil as Virgil went to sit down himself.

As they waited for Patton to finish, the two of them chatted quietly, talking about the day they each had, holding hands across the table and just generally being sappy.

After a while, Patton finally came over with two plates of spaghetti in his hands.

“There’s more on the stove if you want seconds!” he said cheerfully. “Don’t worry ‘bout the dishes when you finish, I’ll take care of them later!”

“Are you certain, Patton?” Logan asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You two deserve to enjoy your evening, I can do the dishes for ya!”

Virgil gave in with a shrug. “If you’re positive.”

“I very much am! Now, enjoy your dinner, and if you need Ro or I for any reason whatsoever, we’ll be in the living room watching Mulan!”

Suddenly, in the distance, both left-brained sides heard Roman start booming out the lyrics to ‘Let’s Get Down to Business’.

Virgil rolled his eyes. “Sounds good, Pat. Have fun.”

“I’ll do my best,” he grinned with a wink, walking off.

Logan and Virgil then dug into their dinner, which tasted even better than it ever had before. Patton had obviously made certain everything was perfect. It was mostly silent as they ate, both trying to be polite so as to not make the other have to talk with their mouth full or to have to wait awkwardly to finish chewing before they responded

Then, as they finished, Logan finally spoke up. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Well, Roman conjured a movie theatre in the imagination for me, and I picked out an astronomy documentary I’m 90% certain you haven’t seen.”

“An astronomy documentary I haven’t seen? What a concept.”

Virgil laughed. “Nerd.” Virgil then grabbed Logan’s plate and stacked it on top of his own, putting their utensils on top. He stood up, then held out his arm. “Shall we head out?”

Logan took his arm. “Indeed.”

The two stopped momentarily to share another kiss, which lingered longer than the one before.

“God I love you,” Virgil murmured.

“I love you as well.”

Virgil led them to the door to the imagination and opened it.

Logan gasped.

Virgil had spent a good two hours in the imagination with Roman making sure it looked absolutely perfect. They had studied star charts and replicated the night sky to the best of their ability with the time they had and made sure the setting was in the middle of nowhere. Virgil would’ve liked if they’d managed to figure out the whole ‘movie theatre in the middle of nowhere’ concept, but he digressed. He was still happy with how it turned out, and this was the Imagination anyway- things almost never made sense.

“Virgil, this is beautiful,” Logan whispered, almost even choked up a little bit.

“Roman and I spent all afternoon on this,” Virgil nodded. “I owe him one.”

“Yet Roman would never have been able to replicate the night sky to this degree of accuracy if you hadn’t helped him,” Logan added. “Don’t tell him I said that, though. I can clearly see the personal touches you added to this. I absolutely adore it.”

Virgil hardcore blushed. “Thanks, Lo. Shall we head to the theatre?”

“After you.”

The walk to the theatre was only a few minutes long, but it was a few minutes of blissful silence as he appreciated the company of his boyfriend… hopefully soon-to-be fiance.

As they got to the theatre, Logan took the opportunity to be the gentleman and opened the door for him. Virgil walked through and held out his own arm again in an attempt at the domination of the gentleman role again. Logan relented and let his boyfriend take the lead.

They entered the screening room, which was completely empty save for them.

“Any preference on where we sit?” Virgil asked.

“Might we sit right in the middle? I think that’s a prime spot for optimal view.”

“I agree, middle it is.”

They quickly took their seats and Virgil conjured drinks- iced coffee for Logan in his favorite mug, and hot black coffee for himself. Logan settled into his chair, putting his arm around Virgil. Virgil slid closer to Logan and put his head on the other’s shoulder.

The opening of the documentary came on, and Logan immediately reacted with “I can confirm that I have not seen this documentary!”

Virgil laughed. “Thank god.”

As the film progressed, both sides settled in even closer to learn about the stars some more together. As time went on, the two continued to move closer and closer together, until Virgil turned their two chairs and the one on the other side of Logan into a couch so they could cuddle.

Virgil could tell that not only was this a documentary that the logical side hadn’t ever seen before, there was also content discussed that Logan had not known before. Looking up every so often, Virgil could see metaphorical stars (pun) in Logan’s eyes as he listened intently to every word spoken.

Everything had turned out perfect.

And as the credits rolled, Virgil knew it was time.

Logan sighed as he sat up from where he had been sitting, leaning against Virgil. “That was thoroughly fascinating, Virgil. I can’t believe you managed to find a new documentary!”

“Well, sometimes it just takes a little deeper searching to find what you need. The internet is a wonderful place sometimes.” Virgil sat up as well and stretched as his heart began to race.

“Thank you so much for this, Virgil. Oh, did you have anything else planned, or are we returning to the mindscape?” Virgil’s heart melted at the pure hope in Logan’s eyes, knowing the side wanted to stargaze more than anything. Thankfully, Virgil knew the other side very well.

“You really think I would create a nearly-perfect night sky and not give you the opportunity to stare at it for hours on end?” Virgil teased. “Don’t worry, love, that was the plan all along. Right after one other thing.”

“Oh?”

As his heart pounded relentlessly, Virgil almost chickened out, losing a good portion of the confidence he had built up over the course of the evening in a matter of milliseconds.

But pushing past the thoughts in his mind telling him not to do it, this is a horrible idea, he’s going to hate you- Virgil cleared his throat and began to talk.

“I know we talked a lot about this when the topic first came up, and we both agreed at the time that it was kinda unnecessary, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the last few months, about all sorts of things. About how much better my life has been since I left the dark sides. Since I joined this family. Since… I first went out with you.”

Virgil swallowed. “And I’ve realized that my life would be nowhere near as incredible as it is now if you hadn’t asked me to be with you. You have made my life, which was pretty shitty beforehand, actually mean something, when four years ago, I would’ve said to anyone who asked that I wished I didn’t exist. Thomas himself said that ‘it’s a pretty big deal when someone makes you enjoy something you’d normally dread’… especially if that something is life itself.

“I know you might still see this as an ‘unnecessary formality that we don’t need to pursue in order for our relationship to be whole’, but even then… I want this, even if it’s only to make you a promise of forever. I love you with all my being, Logan Sanders.”

The butterflies were gone.

Virgil pulled out the ring box and got down on one knee on the floor in front of Logan. “Will you marry me?”

He opened the box to reveal the ring he had put so much time and effort into summoning. It was a simple black band, with purple highlights, decorated with small white diamonds resembling stars, forming some of Logan’s favorite constellations.

Logan was stunned speechless for a few moments, and Virgil suddenly had an influx of overwhelming anxiety.

He’sgonnasaynohe’sgonnasaynohe’sgonna-

Then Logan went red and buried his face in his hands. “I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve known this was going to happen.”

“What?” Virgil was very confused.

Logan lifted his head up and Virgil was greeted with one of the most genuinely amused smiles he’d ever seen on the other’s face. Logan then reached into his pocket and pulled something of his own out.

Another ring box.

Virgil’s mouth fell open. “Oh my god.”

“Only we could pull this off.”

Virgil then buried his face in his hands. “We’re so useless.”

They then looked at each other in the eye and broke out into hysterical laughter. Logan fell onto the floor beside Virgil as they leaned against each other, laughing harder than either of them could ever remember.

As Virgil started to attempt to compose himself, wiping a stray tear from his eye, he asked, “So is that a yes?”

Logan nearly started laughing again. “Yes, Virgil. That’s a yes.”

Composure regained, the two of them then launched into a hug, holding on as tight as possible.

Virgil only pulled away for a kiss, and then to slide the ring onto Logan’s ring finger. Logan then finally opened the ring box he had brought, showing Virgil the solid black ring band with a sparkling purple amethyst donning the middle he had chosen for him. Virgil nearly burst into tears at the sight. It was absolutely perfect.

Rings exchanged, they leaned in for another long, perfect kiss. Virgil wrapped his arms around Logan’s neck, and Logan wrapped his arms around Virgil’s waist.

When they broke apart, Virgil was the one who spoke first. “Ready for that stargazing I promised?”

“More than anything.”

Hand in hand, the two newly engaged sides walked out of the theatre and over to the field Virgil had chosen as the perfect stargazing spot.

The rest of the evening would be perfect as they talked about the events that lead up to this. Logan would even share that it was, in fact, he who got Patton to cook dinner, having informed the moral side of his plans that afternoon just as Virgil had with Roman. Patton had no idea Virgil was also planning to propose (and Virgil realized the winks were probably aimed at Logan, not him).

Which also likely meant that Roman hadn’t known that Logan was planning to propose. The other two sides were in for quite a tale when they returned.

But for now, Logan and Virgil just laid down in the middle of the field, the perfect spot for optimal view of the stars, cuddling close together as they enjoyed each other's company.

Yeah, maybe the concept of the Sides getting married was pretty preposterous.

But when it comes down to the bare essentials, marriage was just a lifelong promise to be together for each other, no matter what.

And that was all they really needed.

----

AAAAH IT’S DONE

I HOPE YOU ALL LIKED THIS

I LOVE MY CHAOTIC GAY BOYS

Taglist (of one person):

@cefinitely-rolo bless your soul

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