#when I want to engage in conversation about characters/story first I watch/read/play that story

[silver-horse]

fascinating that the biphobes, who say that BG3 companions are not accurate as bisexuals/pansexuals, literally haven’t played the game!! they don’t know the characters or who they flirt with and choose to sleep with.

a textpost said that everyone is allowed to play the game as they want and romance characters with a character of any gender and one person commented that OP is a homophobe and Astarion “would be the biggest gay if not for making everyone playersexual.” I clicked on the username and they have a post stating “will buy that game just to play as the furry albino elf and have homophobes watch him get fucked by every dude” ok. sounds fun, I will do the same, I’ll simply also fuck every women. but no.when not everyone is playersexual, 80% of them just end up straight. the remainder mostly still bi and they would deny the bisexuality of those few as well. why do they feel so comfortable attacking bisexuality that they will even comment on bi characters when they are unfamiliar with a given piece of fiction

#if I never watched a tv show/read a book/played a game I sure don’t go on people’s posts #and make accusing statements towards fans how they are wrong to interpret characters AS THEY ARE IN CANON #also this is typical rhetoric that bi men are actually just gay (and bi women are just straight because everyone only wants men) #biphobia #anyway they don’t care what it’s like for bi people to hear this #that a person got called a homophobe for pointing out that bi/pan character IS bi/pan and bi people do sleep with women #they literally say they haven't bought the game yet #wtf #why have an opinion? #when I want to engage in conversation about characters/story first I watch/read/play that story #my post #my posts #tumblr bullshit #bisexual #characters #text post #Baldur's Gate 3 #BG3 #textposts #also there is definitely an element of misogyny in this... #after all I haven't seen anyone demanding that the bi female companions should only be paired with women #no it's the typical fandom thing where only male/male pairings are allowed and female charactes are treated like shit and pushed to the side #female characters not allowed in male/female pairings not even when both are bi/pan and potentially poly #and female/female pairings are just so rare they almost never show up... #and like I always say bi people get shit from both sides #the conservative side of this DOES exist... people who are annoyed that larian showed him making out with a man #it's just that they are an extreme minority on this website #but just because those conservatives and homophobes exist doesn't mean it makes it ok to deny a bi character's attraction to women #both are wrong and both are biphobic #both are a form of erasure

[coffeeandjournaling]

Mini Reviews II

I don’t know what it is about space, but it makes me feel things. Have a handful of small and short games in space with a dash of emotional investment.

Low Battery by Batts

emotionally devastating :)

who doesn’t wanna be a little robot

play if you admire the attempt to create even under dire circumstances

One thing I love about solo experiences is that they really manage to get you into the head of other characters without any meddling from outside. This is especially true when mechanics and story/premise work together to get you there. Low Battery balances your character’s energy (Battery) and feelings (Melancholy, both signified by a D20 respectively) against the time that passes. With what little time you have left, can you find inspiration to create something? I was struggling with the D20s and watching the time and trying to decide on a move and – well, the robot is struggling, isn’t it? Struggling to stay conscious, to take in as much as it can for the time it has left in this universe and maybe, just maybe leaving something behind, something that proves it was here and tried to make a connection to the world around it. For me, time ran out too soon – but I still wrote a little poem about it:

Every time We create something It’s as if we chip off a tiny piece Of the universe As we see it To carry around in our pocket.

You, an Astronaut by Hannah Shaffer and Evan Rowland

short, no prep required

an interactive narrative

more reflective than focused on a goal

This is a very short, narrative experience that I recommend reading with some suitable background music. Personally, this is right up my alley: you get a few choices to “sway” the narrative to your liking, which usually tells you something about yourself in the end. You are put into the shoes of an astronaut waking from their cryo-stasis due to their ship having veered off course and sending out a distress call. While you wait for an answer, you ruminate on your dreams and the memories connected to them. Similar to Low Battery, it sports a gorgeous layout that combines NASA images with the narrative, all put into a simple, retro-style mock-up of a spaceship UI. I don’t want to give away too much – it really is short. But I do feel that the themes of queerness and belonging come through strongly. Games like these either fit you like a glove or fall flat for you. For some reason, I was reminded of the Lifeline games, which I love dearly.

Letters to Europa by Lola Johnson

an exercise in self-reflection

a hopeful look into the future

relaxing and motivating

Epistolary games have their own special charm, perhaps because keeping in contact even when we’re far apart is something we’ve done forever as humans – this need to stay connected to someone we care about, no matter the odds.  In the case of Letters to Europa, you write a message to a loved one on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Messages take about a year to arrive, and thus are sent in packages all at once. After you’ve finished your package, you switch over to the other character, writing back to the person on Earth. This, to me, felt like a conversation with myself, first putting down my thoughts about the given prompt, then trying to get some distance and reflect on it through a positive lens. I took the prompts quite literally and went with how my last year has gone – kind of a mixed bag. The prompts for the Earthling seem a little more sombre, more morose. Just as the other character has left Earth, though, embodying them makes you leave that behind (and that’s what the game says, too, ‘give yourself permission to let […] go’). It settles you in a more optimistic mood, no matter how depressing your Earthling’s messages might have been. This is a tiny game that relies heavily on how willing you are to engage with it – but if you can, in whatever medium you choose, I think it’s quite effective.

#indie ttrpg #solo rpg #review #one page #short #sci-fi #beginner friendly #epistolary #dice

[burr-ell]

To your Laudna post from earlier- I started having doubts about this character concept when Marisha said on 4SD that she wanted Laudna to be a character who was legitimately over their trauma. Just because…ok, if that’s the case, where is the character going?? What’s the growth, or the arc? (Which, to bring a bit of my bias into it, is why I think her most interesting interactions are with Ashton, who continues to poke that trauma and insist that she is not, in fact, past it.)

And to your point, if the idea is to have the character be over this trauma and for it to not play a large part in their life, why exhume Delilah for it?? Why dig up an old villain for a part that could easily be played by any random necromancer in Exandria?

It’s just such a bizarre series of choices, especially contrasted with Beau and Keyleth, who had such great character growth over their campaigns.

Yeah, that worried me too. I think the character has inched a little closer to full acknowledgment that she is not, in fact, over it (the Hound of Ill Omen rp, her killing of Bor'dor being explicitly because of her trauma around betrayal), but the fact that this was even the initial concept is very troubling.

I had some of the same reticence with Orym, since Liam was pretty upfront that he was meant to be Just A Guy who'd already been through the grieving process—but not only did Liam really put a lot more thought into what that would actually look like, the grief and recovery are not actually the point of Orym's story. Instead it's about the experience of what it means to be a foot soldier in a world full of legends, and that's a potentially engaging arc in its own right. He's not in my top ten or anything, but I generally enjoy what he's bringing to the table.

Laudna's just...a mess, and as you said, it really stands out when you compare her to Beau and Keyleth. I recently watched 2x30 for the first time, and the conversation between Beau and Caleb in the carriage on the way out of Shadycreek Run about what Beau's really doing and why she's with them was such a great scene. Her moment in 2x27 after Molly's death is good, but that more quiet conversation was so simple and yet established her so well. Keyleth, for her part, doesn't do a whole lot for me, but she doesn't really have to for me to recognize that she's a solid, well-developed character. Even Patia, who was around for a fraction of the time, was an absolute tour de force—and Patia makes the comparison even starker because she was created and developed at the same time as Laudna.

Like, there may be a turnaround here, but my charitable readings have worn thin, and even if this character does turn a corner, you still have to deal with the fact that she spent what will probably be at least half the campaign faffing around. Stories aren't made on potential; they're made on using it.

#critical role #cr meta #asks

[blogger360ncislarules]

Throughout its four-season run on The CW, Nancy Drew has consistently done several things very well, including but not limited to ghost stories, gripping mysteries and stunning heads of hair.

The show’s Aug. 9 epiode, which also marked co-showrunner Melinda Hsu Taylor’s directorial debut, zeroed in on two more things the show has always done well, with Ace’s family hosting a beautiful, authentic (and occasionally chaotic) seder dinner at The Claw, with much of the meaning and tradition being conveyed through American Sign Language (ASL).

“I was very excited to do this episode, partly because [co-showrunner Noga Landau] has always wanted to do a seder on TV, and it was really important to her to portray it in a really wonderful, affirming and inclusive light,” Taylor tells TVLine.

Part of that inclusivity meant putting ASL interpreter Susi Bolender in front of the camera as a guest of the family. As Taylor points out, “the family would be engaged in the seder and wouldn’t be translating for the guests. It was a really cool thing to put Susi on screen,” an idea she credits to the show’s ASL consultant Sharon Dror, President of the Jewish Deaf Community Center. “We wanted to get the nuances of what that would look like for this family.”

“The book that everybody’s reading from was made by the props department,” Taylor notes. “It was so detailed, down to all of the food elements, the lighting of the candles and the prayers. The cast and crew learned all sorts of things, and they learned it in ASL. It was a great way to have all the characters at the same table literally playing out their various storylines. You want to find ways for all the different emotional currants, like ocean currants, to come together at this one same spot on the rocks — and they crashed in a big wave, because the ghost throws a tantrum and everybody’s having confrontations. It was a wonderful venue for all of that.”

The episode also found Nancy and Ace at odds, as they have been for much of the season. But as Taylor points out, the same chemistry between Kennedy McMann and Alex Saxon that makes fans want their characters together also serves in their favor during those confrontational scenes. (“There’s always a different energy in the room when you have feelings for someone, or you had feelings for someone.”)

Then again, they weren’t totally alone. Ace’s ghostly girlfriend (now known as Alice) was anxiously watching from her own in-between place, and Taylor made sure the viewers experienced what it felt like to be on the other side, if even just for a moment.

“It was fun to use the camera as a supernatural force to bring the audience with you on this mystical energy that was invading Nancy’s space,” Taylor says. “That’s why the camera interrupts their argument mid-sentence and you’re on the side of Ace’s face, because that’s what the ghost is looking at. She’s trying to find him, and she feels him coming to her defense and saying he doesn’t want her to leave.”

Speaking of Alice, this episode featured her first official moment of contact with Ace, a key moment in their relationship that was both pivotal and extremely technical. Following many conversations between Taylor and Landau “about how the ghost mythology works and how [Alice] would be perceived by the human eye,” it was decided that a split diopter filter would be used to keep Alice out of focus, while Ace remained in focus due to his proximity to the regular part of the lens.

“Then our wonderful people at CoSa Visual Effects married the two things together in post-production so that we could see her kind of glitching and it would never seem like there was a halfway split down the middle of the screen. They smoothed it all out, and it was amazing.”

One scene that actually turned out even more emotional than Taylor anticipated was Ryan’s father-daughter chat with Nancy, which she credits to the chemistry that McMann and Riley Smith have developed over the years.

“Riley got very emotional in his first take, which was wonderful,” she says. “And Kennedy responded to that, of course. So the two of them were teary eyed through the whole scene, and we just embraced it. I love that about directing — hanging back and just fostering this atmosphere of possibility where the actor can bring what they’ve been working on, what happens for them in the moment, and then you just run with that and get out of their way. It’s so satisfying.”

#nancy drew #nace

[lincolnlogger]

Lincoln Logger's MazM Phantom Review

(Because apparently this game makes everyone who plays it want to say something...)

I finished this game at 3AM this morning after several weeks of free-play and grinding through with ad-watching. This will be short because I don't write reviews, and most of what I feel about the game has probably already been said by someone else. That being said, I want to address some popular points of contention.

Spoilers beyond this point! And trigger warning in advance for talks of character suicide, as there were a couple instances in this game.

1. Melek

Oh, Melek. For those who don't know or who have forgotten, Melek is Erik's blind servant from Turkey and also his first (failed) attempt at a wife. She serves basically zero plot function... except that she does. I noticed very early on that her character seemed to only exist to give Christine a reason to return to Erik over and over, since the story had changed to make Christine far less... enchanted, shall we say, by Erik. This is explicitly not a Christine/Erik story, unlike Leroux's book, and so this Christine does not feel the same complex emotions towards Erik that Leroux Christine felt towards Lerik. This Christine will never love Erik.... whereas Leroux Christine spells it out pretty unambiguously to Raoul that she's kind of got the hots for her music teacher even though she knows she shouldn't (because he's a murderer who repeatedly kidnaps her, etc, etc, etc).

In this way, Melek was a character contrived to smooth over that issue. Now we have Christine returning to Erik not out of obligation and pity for him, but out of obligation and pity for Melek. It became pretty distracting, especially in the final lair sequence, where Erik and Christine are having these intense intimate conversations and Melek's just kind of.... right there. This isn't the first time I've seen something like this before, though. I've read a fair amount of Sherlock Holmes crossovers with Phantom, and almost all of them place Sherlock in the final lair with everyone else. Suddenly Erik's house seems really crowded, especially because the new character keeps trying to butt into the conversation to make themself seem relevant. It's just a natural consequence, I think, of an adaptation trying to insert a new character into a story that's pretty complete on its own.

Melek serves a second purpose beyond being just a person for Christine to save from Erik. Melek acts as a person for Christine to visually interact with in Erik's house. This is a visual/interactive novel, and so probably the game developers decided they needed to make Christine's time in Erik's house a little more engaging. Without Melek, it'd probably be pretty boring, seeing as the only thing for Christine to do would have been walk around looking at portraits on the walls. An internal dialogue would have been boring to read for twenty minutes; with Melek, Christine's ideas were challenged and the player got a sense of her internal struggle. I read a lot of their conversations in this way, with Melek acting as an extension of Christine's own mind for the purpose of showing her internal conflict. But all in all, there were better ways to show this.

Why is it so terrible that Melek exists? Everyone who's played the game already knows this, but the problem is that it makes Erik just that much less pitiable. He's kept a woman in his house for ten years... I don't even want to know the logistics of that. And so when he kidnaps Christine, it doesn't read as "he's just that desperate for love, this is his last-ditch effort for happiness" it reads as "oh he's back on his kidnapping bullshit again." There is no pretense here; if Erik has his way, Christine will eventually hurt him enough that she will be discarded just as Melek was, and the cycle will start again with perhaps another woman. MazM Erik doesn't seem to want to be happy; in fact, he says repeatedly that he would actually rather have Christine be unhappy instead of him being happy. Leroux Erik on the other hand just wanted some shred of happiness, irregardless of Christine's state of being; his love for Christine was not some twisted form of revenge on humanity and so he didn't desire her to be miserable in the way MazM Erik did. Lerik just wanted to be loved for himself, which is exactly what made so many readers love him in the end.

2. Hatim

This is the other character a lot of people had issues with. Hatim is debatably a bad person. I personally don't see him that way. I think he did a fair amount to hurt Erik, but ultimately he thought he was helping him. I do think this game reads mainly as Pharoga more than any other pairing, just in a really, really unhealthy way - on the part of Hatim.

Hatim does a lot of questionable things to Erik. He literally purchases Erik from the traveling fair, and brings him to Persia where he gets him situated as a weapons manufacturer. Then he saves Erik's life by securing him a position as court jester/assassin, and basically isolates Erik so he only experiences humanity when he is around Hatim. Then Hatim frames Erik for treason and is ordered to execute him, but Hatim is just such a good guy that he decides to just send Erik off into the wild by himself (after which he wanders to Turkey and is accused of treason once again because Hatim's lie followed him to Turkey as well). Then, once Hatim reunites with Erik in Paris, Hatim repeatedly uses Erik's PTSD against him to trigger panic attacks "for his own good". He attempts to stop Erik from hurting Christine and Raoul, but he also doesn't do much to help them against Erik, either.

I usually get upset when adaptations villainize the Persian, because they don't do it well. Here I think it was sort of executed in an okay way. We all love Nadir Khan of Kay fame, but the problem with him in a Leroux-style book is that he's too nice to Kerik. The Persian needs to be a friendlier type of acquaintance with Erik, but cannot be counted as an individual who loved Erik or otherwise was a good influence on him, since Erik's entire point is that he had nothing of that sort for his whole life. Many adaptations/fics go the route of making the Persian an old begrudging coworker of Erik's that doesn't particularly hate or like him, but just knows enough about him to know he's not a true monster. That's a far cry from the old pals that Nadir and Kerik were to each other. This adaptation went more the route of Kay's novel, I guess, but spun the situation around so Hatim's pal relationship with Erik was ultimately harmful and negative when looked at in retrospect.

Raoul calls Hatim out on all of his shitty behavior when they're in the torture chamber together. And like, yes, it's a wonderful moment where it seems like Raoul's IQ has increased tenfold, but we need to stop and think about it a bit. Raoul has not been a logical dude for the entirety of this story. Now, in the midst of being tortured, he is irate and cantankerous. He accuses Hatim as being the reason why Erik is the way he is, but how much weight does that accusation hold? Erik is his own person and was pretty old by the time Hatim came into his life (not a full adult, but certainly old enough to learn the concept of right and wrong). Hatim led him down a bad path, but I think it's supremely unfair for Raoul to say that everything is Hatim's fault and for the reader to just blindly agree with Raoul on this.

Hatim worked for the Shah. The Shah ordered Hatim to purchase Erik, so he did, and once Erik arrived in Persia, he was put to work doing horrible things. Hatim, though, saw Erik as the human he was, and attempted to breathe some humanity into him. But there was only so much he could do - if he rebelled against the Shah, they would both be killed. Hatim's plan, therefore, was to try to protect Erik from himself, by keeping him safely in denial from the horrors he was engaging in. Erik, we later find, did not agree with Hatim's decision to do this, as it hurt him terribly when the guilt and weight of his actions finally caught up to him when he realized what exactly he was doing. Thus, we can see Hatim did some pretty terrible things, but it was mostly with good intentions... and that is probably the saddest part of their relationship.

Hatim and Erik have a very complex relationship. Hatim is only about six years older than Erik, but seems to see himself as a sort of father to Erik (there is also the interpretation that they had a more romantic relationship, and so I forget who but someone has already made the joke about how Erik must have called Hatim 'Daddy' at some point). Hatim cares about Erik, to the point of still wanting to protect him from the people of the Opera house even when everything starts going to shit - but his idea of protection is honestly abuse (re: triggering panic attacks for Erik's 'own good'). It is Hatim who ultimately hurts Erik irreparably, not Christine, and so it is Hatim who Erik pens his suicide note to.

(The next two paragraphs describe Erik's suicide, so trigger warning for that...)

Erik's suicide was very hard for me to play through. It was an ending I foresaw very early on, when I realized how self destructive this version of Erik was, but there was a shred of hope in me that was hoping somehow he wouldn't go through with it. I thought perhaps he would still be alive at the end, and they wouldn't find the body, and the game would end with Erik's sinister laughter or something... but no. They went there. It was sad. I didn't enjoy it. I'm just glad they didn't say it outright, and I could pretend that the Punjab lasso just happened to be next to his body when he collapsed or something.

But anyway. In his suicide note, Erik requests Hatim to 'please come,' and then kills himself by the time Christine and Raoul arrive. I didn't quite catch the exact amount of time that elapsed between all these events, but there is a very tragic implication in this sequence. Christine has to wait until Raoul arrives from Perros-Guirec in order to venture down; this takes at least a couple days. A body begins to decompose very soon after death. They made no comment about Erik's corpse being decayed much, just that he was cold and dead. Well... Erik's body was naturally cold. And we know he asked Hatim to please come. Personally I read this as Erik having waited for Hatim to just come and talk him out of suicide, but upon Christine and Raoul's arrival he realized Hatim really wouldn't be coming at all. So Hatim let him down that one last time, and Erik just couldn't take it anymore. He hid himself away as Christine and Raoul searched for his body, and killed himself before they could find him.

(That is all just an interpretation of how it went down, I guess, but I don't think anything else really makes sense.)

Anyway. As for just general comments about the game? It was fine. I thought it was engaging. I wasn't expecting a direct copy of the book, though it would've been nice if it was. I appreciated the attempt to expand some of the characters' personalities, but some of them fell flat with me (Sorelli being one of them... the only thing she did was slash her dagger around and pine after Philippe). I thought the workers' strike sequence was boring but I know other people liked it; I guess I just don't like history and so I thought it was an unnecessary addition.

There were some minor grammatical/spelling/etc typos, probably from translation and localization. They didn't make the game unplayable, but I will be that asshole and say I noticed each and every one of them. There also seemed to be some lazy coding, where certain elements would be revealed before a certain point of the game was reached. This happened most frequently with random people I talked to saying things that would only be relevant after I completed whatever task I was supposed to be doing, but the most annoying example was that Erik's face was revealed in the popup character bio screen before Christine took his mask off, which absolutely ruined the reveal. As someone who dropped out of the computer programming track in college - I completely understand how difficult it is to make a game and how hard it is to playtest for every little thing, and kudos to anyone whoever does game development because the amount of patience that takes is mind-numbing. I'm just stating these things because I noticed them, and I think an update could probably fix them... and ultimately, they didn't make the game unplayable. Although it was a real bummer to have Erik's face revealed like that :(

The music, I will say, was phenomenal. I've never played an interactive novel like this, and was tempted to play with the sound off because I don't like sound in my games... but oh boy. The music was amazing! Every track gave just the right atmosphere for the situation at hand. The "Lonesome Road" track was my favorite, especially when it played in the torture chamber during Nadir's account of his history with Erik. It gave the same dismal feeling that hearing the "Jailor's Elegy" track in Ace Attorney's Turnabout Goodbyes gave. On second thought... perhaps it might have been "Way Back" that played then, but both tracks are very nice regardless! "Clear Day" was also a nice track, since it was so light and cute that it perfectly distracted me from the horrors of the game when it played... just in the same way that in the ALW musical, All I Ask Of You serves to distract Christine from the sinister presence of the Phantom who we all know is lurking right around the corner. "Somewhere in Dream" did the same, though it was tinged with the sadness of needing to leave something behind, or perhaps the fear of not being able to leave something behind. "Worktime" I appreciated for its unabashed silliness.

I'm sure I'll have other thoughts later but I'll just leave this here. Feel free to tell me your thoughts on it and if you agree/disagree with any of the things I've said!

(And now, a picture of Erik and Hatim, because for all the horrible things Erik did in this game... this was the picture that broke my heart and made me see that even this Erik was not fully wicked. Yes, this Erik was a lot harder to feel bad for, but my heart did go out to him...)

#phantom of the opera #poto #mazm erik #mazm the phantom of the opera #review

[amazing-spiderling]

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

🤍what's one fic of yours you think people didn't "get"?

🍭why did you start writing?

💞

I played a little process of elimination here. Could I read (and even enjoy?) a story with less than ideal plot, worldbuilding, grammar, and language? Yes, I think so- even though those all enhance the experience for me. I can think of specific times I've had to stop reading and just *sit* with a perfect and unique metaphor- when an author described something and I realize that if I had a hundred years to come up with a million different ways to describe the same thing, I never would have imagined it the same way they did. And there are times I've read fanfic and thought the plot was so engaging, the worldbuilding so rich that even if it wasn't about a fandom I was in, I would still enjoy it. (Sometimes I throw those recommendations to my friends, just as a sample of excellent writing.)

But the characters. Oh. I am very sensitive to what the kids call, "he would not fucking say that" syndrome. Even in actual mainstream media- I will suffer through absolute *dreck* if there is even one character I really like, who is written very well. I need those characters that ping for me to become invested in a story. After that- everything else is just fruit, frosting and sprinkles. Welcome, for sure. But I'm here for the cake.

🤍

hrghhhh ummmm... I'm not even particularly proud of it, but I'm also not really one to delete fics, but after Infinity War came out, I (along with most MCU fans at the time) was sitting there going, "wait, now what?" I remember watching (and rewatching) that movie and trying to piece together where the story might go from there- and all the fan theories flying around, some of which were much more interesting (and grounded in the established universe?) than what we got. At the time there was a lot of talk about all the "snapped" people possibly ending up in a pocket universe (which were the fashion at the time lol) perhaps in the soul stone or similar. I didn't want to delve into that too deeply, but I took a little bit of that idea along with the (eventually walked back) reveal that May Parker didn't get snapped and tried to write a little fic about Tony and May having a conversation as the, ah... "dust settled", so to speak.

I picked apart Peter's famous parting words, the "I don't want to go" part specifically, and had Tony realize that the "going" was more literal than he realized, with all the vanished going to the soul gem realm etc. He then realized that was the problem he needed to tackle, with May's stone faced encouragement.

It's not the most compelling thing I ever wrote, and obviously it's not canon-adherent, but I think it just kinda flailed around and flopped (as I imagined) because it was short, gen, and maybe a little too vague in the language. But, meh. I got it out there and out of my system.

🍭

I'm trying to think back to my first (non-schoolwork) attempts at writing. There were silly little comics, of course, and these sort of... hybrid story/art/joke notebooks. I think high school is the first time I really remember sitting down and writing actual fanfiction of any kind. The thing that all of those experiences (and much of my writing these days) have in common is a communal aspect. I drew comics on notecards to share back and forth with my friends. We swapped the notebooks, each contributing to different pages as we tried to make each other laugh. In high school, we wrote about series and movies we'd seen, working in inside jokes and discussing what people now call "headcanons" before putting them in a story.

"Back in my day" fandom specific forums were still a thing, so when I tried my hand at writing X-Men and Sailor Moon fanfic, there were forums to share things on, and even if there wasn't a built in comment system, there was still the feeling of community and sharing.

This is all to say that for me, writing (and all forms of creating) have always been about sharing and connecting with other people. Whether they were my classmates, best frieends, or people I happened to meet online- writing is another way to express myself, share my thoughts and develop ideas in the hopes of building something, whether it's giggles at the lunch table or an online community. It's not just why i started writing, but the reason I still do. :)

#thanks for the ask!

[maya-matlin]

Hi Ashton! I'm committed to writing Zig/Maya fanfic this holiday season but need your expert analysis :) What do you think are Zig and Maya's major similarities? Their major differences? How do you see them spending their free time? What do you see them connecting most about and clashing most about? What professions do you see them pursuing --she'll be a cellist or music teacher maybe but what about him?! Do you see them as parents? Having pets? No pressure to answer but I live for your responses :)

Hi!! And ooh, that's cool that you want to write a Zaya holiday fic. I'd love to read it.

Hmm. You'd think this would be easy for me to answer, but I had to think about this. Honestly, I'm not sure Zig and Maya are all that similar. The main similarities that jump out to me is that both seem to value a relationship based on an emotional connection and friendship rather than a mostly physical one. Both are extremely loyal people and will do whatever they can for their friends and loved ones as well as each other. Neither is afraid to get involved, often being the one to step in to defend someone else.

As for their differences, Maya's more ambitious than Zig. By the time we meet Maya, her heart is already set on having a future in music. While her passion eventually shifted from being a cellist to wanting to be something akin to Taylor Swift, Maya always tried to put her dreams first. It's not that Zig is lacking in passion, but he doesn't have the confidence in himself to be successful. There are hints that he'd make a good chef and it's implied Zig continued to cook off screen during Next Class, but we never see any story line or moment that suggests he's all that passionate about cooking. It's just something he does and seems to enjoy, but it's never presented as his "thing" the way Maya has her music, Tiny has marine biology or Grace has technology (?). What's funny is that compared to a lot of characters, Zig has a decent variety of talents. It's just that they were eventually dropped or in the case of music, Zig was retconned into being a bad guitar player to make him look like an obsessive, pathetic boyfriend for wanting to join his girlfriend's band when he'd literally been the lead singer/bassist of Maya's last band. Zig is much more open about his feelings than Maya. Throughout their relationship (even before they were officially dating), Zig was the one voicing his wants while Maya was more hesitant and introspective. Maya had a tendency to go into denial if it meant her feelings would cause friction within her friend group. So in that way, you could say Maya is more selfless while Zig is a bit more self involved? He's more impulsive than Maya, not always seeing the bigger picture, while she seems to consider everything first. When Maya is hurt and upset, she shuts down, removing herself from the situation and refusing to engage unless provoked. Zig feels the need to overcompensate, sometimes acting like an asshole to convince the person hurting him that he doesn't care. In spite of all this, I actually think Zig is the more sensitive of the two and the more observant one. Maya's also sensitive and pays attention, but she sometimes misses the mark.

I honestly see Zig and Maya spending a lot of nights in their apartment considering Zig is such a good cook. They're not homebodies by any means, but they're happy to spend intimate nights alone together. They'd probably catch up on shows and movies they've been meaning to watch, listen to or play music, have a good conversation, or just end up having sex. When they go out, they enjoy live music and doing something more physical like going to the beach. According to the writers' Twitter, Zig and Maya learned how to surf, so maybe they're the surfing type of couple. They wouldn't be afraid to try new things or basically just eat their way through LA.

Mostly little things, honestly. There would be miscommunications from time to time or moments where they would get under each other's skin, but overall their relationship is pretty harmonious. Both seem pretty open to compromise and at their best, have a strong communication. However, Zig has some jealousy and insecurity issues that he needs to work through in order to be the best partner he can be for Maya. And considering the incident with Zoe in high school, Maya's going to have moments where she needs extra reassurance history won't be repeating itself. Really, I see both trying too hard to make sure everything is normal and they don't have their respective issues, resulting in things blowing up when they fail to be honest about their insecurities. Ultimately, I think they'll have a moment where they lay it all on the table and basically agree to voice these thoughts to each other, no matter how irrational. After that, I imagine things would improve.

In my mind, Zig eventually attends culinary school and becomes a chef. While cooking wasn't presented as Zig's passion the way music was Maya's, I think going into the restaurant industry makes a lot of sense for Zig. He'd really like the idea of people enjoying something he made.

Yes, they definitely become parents. Zig might have some fears over becoming a father due to his own parents basically abandoning him before his sixteenth birthday, not even coming back into his life during a literal life or death moment (I'm never forgiving his shitty parents for not coming to see their son after he almost died in the bus crash. No wonder he spent most of his senior year with Esme). But I also think Zig likes kids and would love the idea of starting a family with Maya. When it comes to Maya, kids were probably always going to be part of her future. She's a natural caretaker and comes from a very family oriented background. While I don't see her wanting to seriously think about becoming a mom until her career is more stable, she'd also love the idea of having a family with Zig. I feel like they'd be married for a few years before having their first kid, possibly at some point in their early 30's.

Yes, they'd have pets! Zig strikes me as a dog person, but I could see Maya loving cats and dogs pretty equally. Maybe they'd have one of each. Maya occasionally has to talk Zig out of adopting more pets.

#Zaya #otp: It felt like the world was gonna end #Anonymous #I tried LOL #Someone definitely could have answered these questions better than me

[vryyn]

The Emancipation of Performative Apathy

A personal essay about growing up

When I was younger, I always thought I was way too cool to ever express myself, especially to my peers. At the risk of sounding insane, I didn’t really like anyone- most things that I did feel were things that I could only describe as reactionary. I didn’t enjoy the people that I called friends, and, in that time, I lost a lot of interest for the sake of trying to be cool in front of them. Which means that after a certain age, I was that annoying, goofy ass, punk that just didn’t let myself or anyone else enjoy things. And through it all, through the eons that have passed, the thing that got me out of that funk was Kingdom Hearts. (That's right, this is a love letter to kingdom hearts, eat my ass. I’m pushing 30, let me have this.)

(Kingdom Hearts box art via CNET)

For the allistics reading this, Kingdom Hearts is a video game franchise that, as of writing, has 3 main numbered entries and 10 side games. All of these games are integral to the overall story that has spanned over the course of twenty-one years. It’s a game that tries the ludicrous idea of attempting a giant crossover between two IP’s- Final Fantasy and Disney. In all of these games, you play as spikey-haired anime protagonist OC known as Sora who goes on adventures with Disney’s Donald and Goofy. They explore Disney’s catalog of animated films and engage in anime fights with the villains of said movie.  If I had to sum up the experience of what it’s like playing it would be something like Goofy and Squall from Final Fantasy 8, meeting up and having a melodramatic conversation about light and darkness. Nothing about this game should have worked, but my 4-year-old ass sat on the floor and loved every second of it. I was hooked from the first game despite that game being very hard and even harder to understand at that age. 

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My brother and I would play that game together and by play, I mean I just watched while he played. The problem was that we were both young children, so we barely knew how to play the game. We got stuck a lot. The first game in this franchise is very hard- the hardest one, if you ask me. Replaying it now is still a struggle in some parts. Things don’t work the way they’re intended to, and characters move like they’re knee deep in mud. Keep in mind this was the early 2000’s, like prehistoric, ancient Mesopotamia era- there was no internet especially in the border town we lived in. The only consistent resource we had were our parents and, of course, a book. 

This, however, wasn’t just any old book, this was the holy grail of all knowledge, a heavenly divine scripture written by the gods who wished to bless us mere mortals with a tome filled with their wisdom. Our journey to acquire such knowledge was not going to be easy and we were prepared to face those challenges. We begged, cried, and, most importantly, asked our parents to take us to our conveniently located Barnes and Noble. And after searching for what felt like eons, there it was- The Official Kingdom Hearts Strategy Guide. 

(from ‘Kingdom Hearts: The Official Strategy Guide’ (pages 62, 63) via piggyback)

The guide contained everything we ever needed from maps and battle strategies, stickers, art, important item locations, secrets, stickers and, most importantly, enemy stats. We never bought it. But God I wanted those stickers. Anyway, Barnes and Noble had a copy opened so we may have skimmed it. The most important piece of information the guide ever gave us was to use defensive magic. Like that was it. And that has been the most game changing advice I have ever gotten for a game. And with that, we beat the first game, under leveled and slightly better gamers. After the first game, I was sort of left to play these games by myself. 

 Up until 2013, I had played every entry that came out, including the one where the real- time combat is done with one time use cards that have to be reloaded upon use. The series had a game come out on every piece of hardware you can imagine, so even if I wasn't home to play one of the titles, there was always something in my pocket to give me access to this world. I didn’t understand a damn thing that was being said in the game, but I loved it anyway. It was just nice to see Goofy do the most broken, most insane juggle in the game to go on and get a wombo combo by Donald casting a string of spells that barely work while you were fighting a different enemy using a spinning twits kick. It was nothing short of brilliance.

After 2013, once I was in middle school, I stopped caring. The first trailer for the 3rd installment in the game was shown off way back then and it looked interesting but by all means I just didn’t want to care about a silly game. Instead, I decided to focus my efforts into becoming the worst possible person that a teenager could be- a centralist. I thought I was hot shit, I thought I was being super cool by adapting the language and attitudes of contemporary think tanks. At the time, that meant the rhetoric of atheists on the internet which in itself evolved into the anti-woke, anti-sjw and, eventually, gamer gate spaces. The people I had surrounded myself with just made it easier for me to become so embedded into the idea that I didn’t need to be an active member in my communities or my life. I didn’t let myself be bogged down by anything that could possibly make me feel bad. And because of all that, between the ages of 10-16, my memory is pretty blurry. 

When I came to, I found myself over encumbered by the burdening realization- a passionate 3-word sentence, searing onto the tip of my tongue: I hate this. I didn’t dig my heels into the lamest world of politics- which by then shape shifted into the likes of Ben Shapario, Rubin Report, and Project Veritas. They were all things that I used to watch or was aware of who they were. I was too cool to ever be lame enough to fall into that conservative pipeline. I was just becoming an extremely apathetic man. Instead of radicalizing myself to that kind of thing, I just sat there with that nothing for a long time. I didn’t know what to talk about now. I just started listening to other people around me. I saw people who loved things and each other, who were hurt by things outside of their control. And I didn’t know what was going on. In 2016, I miraculously graduated high school even though I kind of just sort of did nothing and still came out at like 18th in my class. In that haze I somehow then performed an any% speed run through college in what was supposed to be a 2018 graduation turned into a 2019 graduation. In that time, I eventually started leaning more towards where I stand now with my political affiliations, and that meant where I was as a kid. I was super based as a kid way more than I was in my adolescence, it’s comedy really.

My brother reminded me sometime in late 2018, early 2019, that after 6+ years Kingdom Hearts 3 was finally releasing. That month I made an unprecedented amount of money in tips, and it was coming out around my birthday, so I bought it. I hadn’t played the previous games in so long and when I went back to see all these games and the plot threads that were going to be wrapped up in this 3rd main- line entry, I was surprised to see how much I remember it and, what was the most shocking to me, was how much I cared about it. Remembering all those characters, people that I hadn’t seen in at least 6+ years was a sobering reminder of my own frail creation of a personality I created and what little it had made me. 

I couldn’t help but think about Sora and the quest that he’d been through in these games. Sora is nothing like me. He unabashedly and unconditionally loves, he is quick to extend a hand of friendship, he constantly wears his heart on his sleeve and, most importantly, learns what growing up means in a world that wants to grow cold. He started off as a happy kid who goes on this long adventure because he didn’t want to lose his friends. Throughout the course of the series, in what I’m guessing was the writers trying to write themselves out of a corner, decided to inject fear and doubt into him. He loses his memory and never gets it back after a yearlong sleep. When he comes to, he finds that he’s not the same person anymore and that the friend that he spent so long looking for, doesn't even look like himself. In both writing and performance, it feels like he’s in this sort of catatonic state, a stupor that t. In that time, Sora finds that he’s literally been split in two- a side portrayed by a totally different character, one that was mean, sad, and edgy, one that represented his hurt. It takes Sora a long time to sound and act like his old self, in both writing and performance. The plot device that cements this, funnily enough, is the one that introduces time travel and has Sora look like his old self from the first game. He literally goes back into his old self and the writing is better and it’s filled with so much glee that it genuinely made me laugh. It was the corniest and lamest joke ever and it made me laugh. And I will always remember that. 

(Kingdom Hearts 3 title screen from ‘Kingdom Hearts 3 Title Screen Opening & Menu Selection (1080p 60fps)’via YouTube) 

When Kingdom Hearts 3 came to my door, I put the disc into my system, sat on the floor, and began what turned out to be one of the most heart wrenching experiences of my life. From a fucking game that featured Donald Duck casting a spell known as Zettaflare which is a spell so powerful that only two other mages in Final Fantasy can use. From the game that features an AMV that feels like it was ripped from an early 2000’s YouTube video. The main menu alone had me in tears. That’s how it went from that point forward, just little parts in its stilted weirdly written dialogue that would just remind me of me. It all just collectively came forward at the very end. Sora rescues everyone. The evil bad man (who is the only person in the franchise to have any melanin in his skin and I think I should be a little offended by that) stops being evil and realizes that maybe leading the world into fascism isn’t the move. The worlds that had fallen into darkness have been saved. That even the other half of Sora found happiness in his friend’s and stopped being so angsty. All is okay in the universe. The final image of the game, of this main line series so far, is that of Sora staring into the eyes of his love interest, both of their silhouettes outlined by the setting sun beside them. I’m shouting for my boy Sora, that son of a bitch did it. Right after they both lean in, there's a kiss coming, the music starts swelling, and as a beautiful bloom radiating from the sun, the colors turn vibrant as their outlines become consumed, he fades away into that light. He’s gone. Then it cuts to credits. That’s it. That's the ending. It made me cry so fucking hard. 

I have never let myself be part of a world that experienced anything. I purposely closed myself off to maintain a level of vague coolness because I was ashamed to ever be seen as liking something let alone ever approaching a personality that is authentically me. I think I was just scared as being seen as childish or lesser for liking silly things like a game or show. All I got from the people around me, including adults, were positive responses for being an emotionally constipated teenager. I held myself back and I lost a lot of myself because of my shame.

Shame as I now understand it, isn’t something that comes from within, it’s a feeling that comes because of one’s relation to others. It’s a feeling that comes when there’s an innate desire of needing the validation of others to accept you and all that you encompass. And when you start thinking about it like that, then there IS a lot of pressure to be someone that others will like. That ideological framework is what hurts the most. It's the thing that makes cliques and ends up becoming a sort of internalized stigmatization. In the article Shame in Self and Society, Thomas J. Sheff would argue that in all of our understanding of lived- in experiences of expressions, shame, compared to feelings like love that have had such a much broader and wider understanding, has been so uniquely defined in our society. It’s in that we can see why there is such a shocking lack of empathy in our world. And I think I can agree with it, to a certain extent.

The word that we use now, well from what I see, is cringe. Cringe in every way shape and form is about shaming people for having any sort of noticeable attachment to something. I would argue that cringe takes it a step further by directly comparing it to standards of neurotypicality of expression which can be further expressed into conservative white thought. Like all things, cringe and shame are political and hurting someone for not being what you wanted them to be is pretty lame if you ask me. I was that person and I bullied myself for it. I hid in corners of my own life watching someone that I didn’t recognize. In my head, that’s what growing up looked like.

Three months after the release of KH3, and to the surprise of everyone, I came out as trans. I know it’s pretty stereotypical of me to be a fan of Kingdom Hearts and be trans but I think it’s funny. It’s like right there with being trans and a Sonic fan. It was a (Donkey Kong Barrel) blast coming out. And I’m happy that I did. I have found happiness in allowing myself to change, to let other people see me change.  I have learned to just love things and others and myself. And that’s a weird sentence to say. It seems like just a basic human understanding, like something that would just be fundamental to just being, I don’t know, decent. And I had spent so much of my time never knowing. That pretentious kid thought they knew everything, what a punk.

Being well into my 20’s now, all I know is that I don’t want to be that person again. I don’t want to be known as someone who is there for my friends because of the simple fact that I enjoy being their friend. To let myself be completely infatuated with the small things that exist in this world. I want to be able to see others as themselves and not as what I want them to be, to see the parts of them that don’t shine anymore and still enjoy their company. I know that’s not a revolutionary take, in fact I think it makes people wince their eyes out of concern especially since the thing that made me realize it was a spikey haired anime protagonist and his closest friends Donald and Goofy. But I don’t know how else to tell you how happy that has made me. That learning from a goofball like Sora was kind of sort of freeing. And I think that I can best explain this with a simple meme, don't kill the part of you that is cringe, kill the part that cringes. I guess it was ok to just want to be a little my bestie like Sora. 

(Image of Kingdom Hearts gang and their first appearance outfits from ‘Kingdom Hearts: Visual Art Collection: CG & Illustration Works’ via Internet Archive)

#kingdom hearts #writing #short essay #funny #creative writing #games #video games #what a time to be alive #what is a tag #but #a #speck #of #pain

[purposelynana]

What Did I Watch: #35

This week, I thought a lot about the word 'forever' and it did sound scary. Infinite. No stopping. Just go on and on.

I think I'm going to stop watching Hidden Agenda. Because I never convinced there was a hidden agenda. I genuinely think it's going to pull up a plot twist a la David Fincher. But nope. No surprises either.

Am I hoping too much?

Perhaps.

Besides the missing hidden agenda (for now, who knows for the next 2-3 episodes), I have a tiny bit problem with how Dunk recited his dialogue. It wasn't bad acting per se, but it sounded to me like he read a script. The way he uttered words by words, especially during banter with Joong, or when their characters having overlapping sentences, it just didn't come out natural. Dunk particularly slow down his words so that Joong can caught up to him and making it as it seemed that he was interrupting him. And that happened so many times. I was like, in real world, no one ease off their chatter unless they were finishing their speaking or they predicted their listener about to interfere. I mean if you're engaging a very hefty conversation, would you care about your listener that much so that you could predicted that they were about to against you? I don't buy it.

It's like you have a script and yet you chose to let out words as if you read it and not trying to make it as sound as you in your normal fucking life. It was weird. I got agitated just by watching people speaking like they were in first grade's play.

(the gif was there when i was searching by 'hidden agenda thai'. might as well use it.)

I'm angry for the little things, in particular towards Thai BL. The lack of continuity between the scenes. The illogical choices in set designs (remember there were so many candles during the sex scene in La Pluie? yeah, what's the point?). Plenty of unnecessary characters to make up the episode. The shortage of adult stories where adult themes presented such as paying mortgage, or maybe sucked at your job, instead of having everyone just to making out in order to push the agenda of being adult. It's not adult. Having sex is basic necessities, even in high school they can do that. You know there is a life outside love. Show me.

So when Laws of Attraction came to my life, I was like, finally. Goodness gracious. Yassssss. I want to see people going to work and kick some asses and love is just a bonus. Arggggghhhhh.

It was on the same path as Modu which is great. It wasn't mind blowing-ly fantastic. But it was crazy and full of imperfect characters and not trying to be some pick-me girls. Like it's not "well I'm hot, I do smoke, I'm bad and I'm proud of it" kind of attitude. Charn is questionable and bad in a very messed up way, which is awesome. He doesn't want to be fix even in the name of love. Because if he wanted to be fix I hope he's going to psychiatrist.

My only beef is that it was very lakorn-y. It was so damn lakorn to point I laughed pretty hard at some scenes while watching it. The singing at the market? The cringiest thing I've ever watched. Crap, why did they have to do this?

At last, I'm about to share you a song and feasibly one of the main reasons I'm looking forward to Friday.

Please DeeHup for the love of god, you cannot mess this up. YOU CANNOT FUCKING THIS UP. Because you already have the base, which is an extraordinary story. The color palette and cinematography are top notch. The music is freaking wonderful. For the first time in my life of watching Thai BL, finally a good sound mixing. One of the fundamentals of visual media is a fucking sensible sound mixing. It is essential thing and can be very annoying if production just set aside that in favor of what, handsome people who cannot act. The hell.

I Feel You Linger in the Air is wet dream for technical maniac like me. Audiophile in me pleased. Cinephile in me satisfied. Acting? Come on, it's starring the great Nonkul.

Furthermore, the first 5 minutes of this show, is a cinema. The sound that comes out of it. The creeks on the stairs. The muffled bedroom voices. The eerily atmosphere created by a haunting score. Darling, sound can do wonder.

Sometimes I never cared on how story unravel before our eyes. And it's kinda sad for me because everyone having their own interpretation about stories, compositions, and frames. But rarely talking about sound and how critical it is to storytelling. Sound can tell you so many different things before characters uttered their words. Sound is the door between realism and fallacy. Good sound is able to make a visual presentation become such an immersive experience. Bad sound is a joke, a laughable attempt to making me trust to everything you presented.

Bold statements for bold times.

#hidden agenda #laws of attraction #i feel you linger in the air #what did i watch

[free-for-all-fics]

Prompts for Manuel “Manu”, Tenoch’s character cameo from Mozart in the Jungle Part 2. But could also just be Tenoch AUs since Manu gets so little screen time lol. Pls tag me if you’re inspired by any of these and write something, I’d love to read it! 💜 Thanks to @okay-hotshot for helping me with these!

16. Your friends said jokingly "You'll never play the violin again". You find a violin at a flea market being sold for $40 by a sad-looking Mexican man. Some years later here you are, playing the violin for a fundraiser campaign. The man who sold you the violin is in attendance, and a smile is brought to his face when he watches you perform.

17. Manu/Tenoch walks down the street with a violin case in his right hand and a small bouquet in his left.

18. You just bought a new car. You're really proud of it because you worked your ass off to save enough money to be able to buy it. One night, it drives off as if it had been stolen. But as you look, you see no visible driver. But something is left behind that points you towards who the culprit might be. (A ring, a bracelet, a wallet, anything.)

19. “Wait ma’am, nothing was stolen?”

“Nothing, yes.”

“And there was no obvious point of entry?”

“Not that I could find.”

“So how do you know there was a break in?”

“My place was a mess yesterday, then I wake up this morning and it’s the cleanest I’ve ever seen it!”

20. Manu/Tenoch, driving a stolen car, crashes into you, a woman driving another stolen car.

21. One day, your car is stolen. When you get it back weeks later, there are some unexpected modifications.

22. In the morning, you notice your car was broken into. To your relief, nothing was stolen. However, something was left behind.

23. You haven't actually been getting drinks from the guy across the bar from you, the bartender just fancies himself a master matchmaker. What's worse? He seems to be very good at it. What a strange way to meet Manu/Tenoch. But what’s even stranger is that you ended up falling in love and marrying him. Guess you’ll have to thank that bartender.

24. You wake up in some random bed - dazed and in a haze. Your friends are sleeping on the floor, and there's a stripper passed out, partially laying in a giant cake that they must have jumped out of. You went a little too hard during your bachelorette party in your excitement to marry Manu/Tenoch.

25. Short on money you decide on becoming a stripper. You excel at it, and Manu/Tenoch becomes a regular just to see you. He pays for private sessions, but he wants to engage in conversation with you and get to know you even while you’re giving him a lap dance or full body massage.

26. Your date is getting increasingly nervous as you throw back your third drink of the night. Their nerves might be due to them having roofied each of your drinks more heavily than the last. You smile glowingly and say, "I think the bar is watering down their drinks tonight, what do you think?" Unbeknownst to your shitty date, Manu/Tenoch is the owner of the bar/nightclub, but has taken over as the bartender for the night to protect you. When your date’s not looking, Manu/Tenoch has been swapping your drinks out, so you get normal drinks and the drugged drinks get tossed out. You and Manu/Tenoch just sit back and watch the show as your shitty date gets more and more confused. He’ll get thrown out eventually, but you and Manu/Tenoch are having fun first.

27. You are a bartender and it's a boring night. Manu/Tenoch comes over to you and says, "Buy me a drink and I'll tell you a hell of a story". Eh, why not? You have nothing else better to do.

28. You run a pawn shop and an older gentleman just came in to sell a Bergozi violin. A few hours later, you get a phone call from a man who asks about it. You haven’t even finished the paperwork to put the violin up for sale yet, so you wonder how he knows. He introduces himself as Manuel and claims he’s a sort of free range detective who’s been tasked with tracking down the violin. He later shows up in person and explains the situation. He promises to reimburse you for the money you gave the seller, but he also flirts with you and kisses your hand. He tells you that you can call him Manu and uses all sorts of moves to get you to melt and hand over the violin. He’s not blind and neither are you. The mutual attraction is palpable. But you’re still a businesswoman and instead of just taking his word for it, you want him to take you to this orchestra symphony concert that he’ll be attending. He smirks and agrees to your terms, telling you he’ll drop off a dress for you at 7 and pick you up at 9. If the dress and/or car is stolen? Shh, no they're not. But if they are? Don’t worry about it. Just enjoy your date night.

29. You and Manu go on a cute date which includes going for night drives in a stolen vehicle, catching a movie at a drive-in theater, making a quick getaway and evading arrest when the cops try to pull you over, then ditching the stolen car. You run away through the streets and alleys while holding hands. You top the night off by getting mystery tacos off the street and sharing your food. Both of you enjoy the local specialties and are able to hold your stomachs incredibly well, unlike Rodrigo. Manu then uses a Slim Jim to break into another car and you do the wires. He drives you home and kisses you goodnight, or you’re already living with him. Either you’re actually dating, or you’re already married and this is just how you do “date nights” as husband and wife. Up to you.

#tenoch x reader #tenoch fic #tenoch huerta x reader #tenoch huerta mejia x reader #tenoch huerta fanfic #Manuel x reader #Manu x reader #Mozart in the jungle x reader #random fic ideas #fic prompts #random prompts #pls tag me if you write any of these #i’d love to read it

[sarkywoman]

Responses to @merrilark for the ask game

1. Do you prefer writing one-shots or multi-chaptered fics?

I think both are good for different reasons. I like the way multi-chaptered fic gets engagement throughout and it tends to reach more people as it pops up again whenever you update. But I am a very busy bee so one-shots at least get finished, plus some people won’t read WIPs so you won’t get their feedback until it’s all posted, which can take a very long time for multi-chaptered fic.

7. How do you choose which POV to write from?

Funny you asked this one as I current have to write about this process for my Masters course. In theory I should have something to say. I guess it’s basically just whoever’s emotional perspective I want to examine, though sometimes I want to look at them from the outside so I’ll grab one of the other characters. I really like characters watching one another so Umbrella Academy’s pretty handy with its ensemble cast. It can sometimes frame a story I’ve told before differently if I change POV. Like I write a lot of Five/Klaus, but in ‘Playing Easy to Get’, I use Allison’s POV which provides a little amusement because she’s exasperated with them and it also means the reader has less clues as to how it’s going to go, because she’s not seeing everything. (And it stops it being angsty when Klaus is pining because we’re not in his head to deal with it.)

46. How would you describe your style? (Character/emotion/action-driven, etc)

Absolutely character-driven. It’s one of the harder things about translating fanfiction skills to original writing skills - I have to come up with plots for novels/screenplays, I can’t just be like “okay, we all know and love these guys, let’s watch one suffer while the other murders about it.”

56. What’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?

Dialogue, baby! Let’s get those bastards talking. Three pages in you suddenly think to yourself, wait, where even are they? In a library? At a cafe? In a bedroom? Nobody knows! It’s not important! They are conversing. XD (reasons I lean towards script over novel in original work.)

72. What order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

I have to go chronological or I have a nervous breakdown. Chronological in the order I write, but the story doesn’t always go chronological, if you know what I mean. Like, I’ll mix past events with present within the story, but the first part I wrote is unlikely to be relocated to somewhere else in the story. It’s not impossible, but generally I prefer my stories to build up as they go, so even in something like Passion Over Consequence with its mix of past and present (and future? Time travel’s messy), I am writing it in the order that I want the information to be revealed, not writing a scene I’m looking forward to and working my way there. (Though it’s damn tempting for that one, as I know the end scene.)

[dimonds456]

Totally random question, but I need to ask this to people and you seem very smart when it comes to these things and I want to ask: do you think people should consume media critically? Like, be aware of all its flaws?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think you should definitely be aware of a story's flaws- both plotwise and thematically- so you can better enjoy the story and engage with it, but that's not to say that media should be only consumed critically. It's entertainment, and if it's bad, then there is still value in it from a purely escapist perspective. But, you should be aware of flaws to learn from and understand in order to really engage with it.

Let me explain. Spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club and Bendy and the Ink Machine / Dark Revival. Also mentioned is HTTYD: RTTE, Twilight, HP, and Little Nightmares.

I believe that your first watch / playthrough / read of a story should 100% be to enjoy the story and characters, engaging with the worldbuilding and just letting it take you for a ride. Now, some stories will have foreshadowing you pick up on and can figure out, but some stories will be pretty unpredictable going into them, but either way, you're letting a story tell itself.

For example, Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) is a dating sim horror game. For the first hour or so, you might forget the "disturbing imagery" warning at the front of the game, but the further you go on Sayori's path, the more you realize she's been struggling. Depression hits her hard, and she's barely holding on. As the Player, most felt bad for her and wanted to help her in some way, but it was already too late.

By the time you find out what happened, Sayori is dead. For both spoiler purposes and to make sure people who don't know this game and don't want to know what happened to her, I'm not going to say how she dies.

But, the game resets, this time without her in it. She's the heart of the group, and without her, things go to shit, even if the other Club members don't realize something is missing. There's an argument in both timelines, an argument Sayori is able to resolve peacefully in her timeline, but one that tears a deep gash in Yuri and Natsuki's relationship without her. This moment really hits if you engage with the story.

At the end of the game, which I won't say here (again, go play it and engage with the story yourself), you're left to make a pretty massive decision, which you could only figure out that that's what you need to do because of the game's meta look at itself by this point.

When I was first watching a playthrough of the game (I think through Jacksepticeye) I remember it helped me a lot since I was struggling just like Sayori was, and it turned me off from doing harm to myself for a long time. And understanding why goes into thinking about it critically.

Sayori's depression was almost word for word what mine was back when I first heard her talk about it. So, when she [REDACTED], it genuinely scared me. That could be me, I thought. It made me sure that I didn't want to go down the same path, and even helped me talk about my depression a bit more than I had been up to that point.

Does the game have flaws? Hell yes. A lot of the conversations go on a little long (but it's a dating sim, you signed up for dialogue lol), sometimes the scary bits can feel a bit out of place, there's a couple lines of dialogue that feel a bit off, ect.

However, I love DDLC despite its flaws simply because I love the story, it helped me, and it's just a good story with a powerful message. Critically, there are a few flaws, which I take in stride when I replay the game, but it doesn't hurt my experience.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have Bendy and the Ink Machine (2017). I remember being absolutely obsessed with Bendy, but looking back, the game is (subjectively) Not Good. So, why did I love it so much?

Well, for starters, the game released in 5 chapters from early 2017 to late 2018. This gave the fandom huge lengths of time to theorize, to fall in love with the characters, and engage with each other. By the time Chapter 2 came out, people already had an idea of what the story was going to be in its entirety because they filled in the blanks. And, we were half right, half wrong throughout the game, because the creators started centering plot points around things the fandom came up with rather than what they themselves came up with.

The primary example is Alice Angel from Chapter 3. In Chapter 2, all there was was one voice log explaining that there was a voice actress who liked playing the role, and a singular poster in which she starred in a short called "Sent from Above." That was it. But, the fans had her design, and without any knowledge of the character herself, suddenly there was fanart, shipping, character dynamics, and emotional attachment. So, the devs behind the game went and made her the focus of Chapter 3 simply because they thought that that's what the fandom wanted.

That was why I loved the game so much. It wasn't the game I loved, but the fandom and the fan stories created about the game.

However, I still have a soft spot for BATIM. I was hyperfixated on it for two whole years, and even had a fan story of my own called Demons Inside, which is still one of my better stories even if there are a lot of major flaws. And, despite how all over the place the game turned out, I still love it.

That's why, back in February, I got the idea to make a BATIM Rewritten video. I'd do something similar to what The Closer Look did for the Star Wars sequels and make a video explaining what went wrong, only to propose my own story and how they should have handled it.

However, that never came to pass. Bendy and the Dark Revival (2022) dropped not too long ago, and because the devs decided to release all the chapters at once instead of separately, there were no fandom points to go off of for this game. They had complete creative control, and used it well. When not doing what the fandom wants, these guys can create a genuinely good game. BATDR did a lot of what I wanted to do with the original, so making that Rewritten video is kinda a moot point now.

Back to BATIM, though, that game has a lot of flaws. Pacing, character inconsistency, introductions, set up, payoff, the whole thing. The voice acting, music, artwork, designs and stuff were all on-point, it was just mostly the story that was a mess lol. But despite that, BATIM and its fandom are like comfort food to me. I still go back and listen to BATIM fan songs constantly, and rewatching old comic dubs is like stepping into an old house. I still like BATIM, even if I constantly joke with my friends about how bad it is.

No piece of media will be perfect. You're allowed to like the Star Wars prequels and sequels, even if I cannot join you on that opinion (I think, it's been a literal decade since I've seen the prequels). You're allowed to like Twilight so long as you recognize that every single relationship in that series is toxic and you should not idolize any of them.

H*rry P*tter is nostalgic to a lot of us and I know I still love it, even if I cannot enjoy it because of what the creator is doing. HP is an exception because J. K. R*wling is an awful human being.

Even my favorite video game ever, Undertale, has its flaws. Quite a few of them, actually. People have complained that the battles get repetitive and it's annoying that they appear suddenly, and you can't choose whether you want to engage with them or not. People have complained about some of the characters, that there's individual character arcs that are bad (most commonly criticized is Alphys' and I strongly disagree, and I will defend her place in this story with my entire online existence), and stuff along those lines.

But, when Undertale made me cry that hard, when it said so many things I needed to hear, when it made me fall in love with so many of its characters, when it made me completely change my ENTIRE worldview... what else was I supposed to do but enjoy it?

Not to say that to enjoy a story, it must impact you, no. You can enjoy any piece of media without it impacting you. But, you should be able to connect with the characters, world, and story no matter what, despite its flaws. The mark of an enjoyable story is one that does that with you specifically. Now whether that's because you're crying or laughing at it is still up to you, but entertainment value ≠ objectively good.

You should be aware of flaws. You should be able to say "yeah they should have introduced Viggo Grimborne much earlier in Race to the Edge than they did, since he would be a much more looming threat" while still being able to enjoy Dragons: Race to the Edge. Recognizing flaws in a piece of media is pretty key to really connecting with it from an analytic standpoint, which I recommend doing with any story to really see how it works as a story.

But you don't have to.

Entertainment is escapism. You should watch or engage with it to let go of reality for a little while. I recommend being aware of flaws so you can learn from them and talk about the story to other people, but you don't have to do that. I've played Little Nightmares... never, but I've watched a bunch of playthroughs and it's a great game. I'm sure it has flaws, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. It's a great game with a lot of atmosphere, and it's told pretty much exclusively through worldbuilding, which is awesome, but I don't know everything there is to know and that's okay.

Enjoy a story however you want to. Everything has flaws, and although they should be taken into account, that doesn't define the experience.

#dimond speaks #sorry this was so long

[letarasstuff]

Introvert meets Extrovert

(A/N): This was requested by an anon. I hope you enjoy it, Sweetheart :)

Summary: How does life for Spencer look like with an extremely extroverted baby?

Warnings: mentions of drinking alcohol

✨Masterlist✨ ____________________________________

To Spencer, it was always clear as day that a child doesn’t inherit all, or even specific, character traits of their parents. After all it’s a complete new human being, not a shift+c shift+v programme line. Still, some things come out as a shock to him, now being the father to a one year old baby.

“Baby, are you excited to go to Auntie JJ’s for Henry’s birthday party? She told me at work that Micheal is thrilled to play with you again!” Spencer talks to his daughter and kicks her legs in the air to get a laugh out of her while changing her diaper. Even though they are in the middle of potty training and he already packed an extra set of clothes for her in case (Y/N) throws an (admittedly understandable) fit about wearing a diaper in the day, he wants to prevent any incidents and meltdowns because of wet clothes. After all, he still has to get her to go to the toilet and sit her down, because she may feel the need, but postpone it when she is busy playing.

“Yes”, she giggles and puts her balled fists into her mouth. Spencer smiles, adoration written all over his face. The bliss of moments like these remind him that the struggles he went through and will go through are all worth it. Worth to see her smile, hear her laugh, listen to her proclamation of love between baby gibberish.

The father puts a pair of her playpants on, which is essentially a pair of leggings that already has a few holes and various stains on them. It won’t be a problem if they get dirtier, he will just throw them out after this day. It’s not like his baby girl doesn’t have enough clothes, especially with Penelope Garcia as an aunt and Emily Prentiss as a godmother. You may not believe this, but going shopping for baby/toddler articles brings the agent more fun than she dares to admit.

Not long after putting (Y/N)’s last sock on, the small family is on their way to the party. Spencer tries to manage his way through the subway station with his little one in one arm and pushing a stroller at the same time. Somehow he gets onto a train without causing any altercations and sits down on a bank with a sigh. He puts (Y/N) back into her stroller and straps her in. Despite her age she can be a wiggly monster and when her father isn’t paying attention for a few seconds she may sit right next to him. It has to be some kind of magic.

“Ok Sweetheart. We are riding this train for five stations. Do you want your book for entertainment?” Excitedly the baby claps and makes happy noises. Smiling at her antics, Spencer fishes a child book from his satchel and puts it on the table attached to the stroller before cracking his own open.

While getting lost in it, little (Y/N) takes a look around and sees a few people throwing her smiley faces. Audience, that’s good. In a semi dramatic fashion she tries to clear her throat, just like the people who held these big speeches her father took her with him. Then she opens the book and begins to “read” it. In reality it’s just a bit of baby gibberish with a few short sentences the girl memorized from Spencer reading it over and over again to her. What can she say, it’s her favorite book.

“Excuse me”, a nice looking lady interrupts Spencer’s continuous page turning, “This little one of yours really is such a sweetheart. I’m sure she got that outgoing personality from her momma.” The father throws a glance towards his daughter, spotting her being the entertainer she is since day one.

He smiles at the mention of her mother. “Not really, nobody knows where she got that. Nonetheless, it brightens my day.” After a look at the sign that shows the next stops, he gives the woman an apologetic look. “I’m really sorry to cut this short, but we have to get off now.” She assures him that it’s fine and compliments his parenting before the train stops and Spencer maneuvers the stroller off.

On their way to the Jareau-LaMontagne house (Y/N) keeps herself entertained by singing rather loudly songs her babysitter taught her. Her father kind of ducks away under all of the “aaaws” and loving glances he gets. Getting this kind of attention is not something he enjoys, but endures because his daughter loves it.

Finally they arrive and the birthday party is in full swing. Spencer gets her out of the stroller and puts (Y/N) down at the first patch of grass. Immediately she crawls up to Micheal, while her father greets JJ, Will and the rest of his colleagues.

“Hello (Y/N)”, Emily gushes, kneeling down to be more on the same eye level with her goddaughter. “You got sooo big, can you please stop growing,” She throws the baby a dirty look, who squeals and goes up to her aunt. Of course the agent picks the child up and the little one strikes up a conversation out of baby gibberish and a few actual words while playing with her raven black hair.

Against everyone’s beliefs, Emily really is interested in what (Y/N) has to say, even though she doesn’t understand half the things. Still, she tries to engage in the conversation (Spencer also appreciates it, because it’s improving her speaking skills).

While all the kids, Henry and his friends as well as the two babies/toddlers, play, the adults prepare dinner and talk about the things that happened recently. Especially their children’s (or godchildren’s) milestones are swept between them and gushed at.

“I don’t know where she got it,” Spencer starts and tells the story of his daughter being an entertainer for everyone on the train. It’s always a good laugh around them hearing about the youngest Reid and her extrovertness.

“Maybe she was swapped at the hospital?” Derek muses before taking a sip from his beer. Another laugh. “That’s not possible”, Rossi counters, “Boy Genius over there watched her the whole time like a hawk. There is no chance she was mistaken. He was there every step the doctors took with that girl in their arms outside the room.”

“Also, she has so many of his character traits, there is no use in denying her, Reid”, Hotch says with his signature Small-Smile. Spencer laughs, knowing that his friends are right. “You know, something like that doesn’t have to be passed down genetically. It’s just how some kids are and I think it suits her. It makes (Y/N) (Y/N).”

Just as he ends his sentence, he spots his child playing with some of Henry’s friends, despite their age difference. This makes the father smile.

They may be two ends of the same stick, but that’s ok. Not everybody is the same and it makes them love each other even more.

Taglist:

All works:

@dindjarinsspouse @big-galaxy-chaos @jswessie187

Criminal Minds:

@averyhotchner @mggsprettygirl @herecomesthewriterwitch @ash19871962 @ellyhotchner

Spencer Reid x child!reader:

@ilovetaquitosmmmm

#spencer reid x baby!reader #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid x child!reader #spencer reid x daughter!reader #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fluff #x reader #x child!reader #x daughter!reader #Emily prentiss x child!reader #spencer reid #criminal minds fanfiction

[ja-stuff]

just the boys being clingy

note: this was the title before 's/o unintentionally ignoring the, but I changed it to to 'just the boys being clingy'. Hope you like this!

Word count: 861 words

Character: Matsuno Chifuyu

Tw: none

Genre: Fluff^^

-how dare you ignore the best boy :<

-You were playing an online game with friends, technically speaking Chifuyu’s (Baji Takemichi, and the twins), at Chifuyu’s crib. This is supposed to be your house date but you got excited when Chifuyu got an invite from Baji. Your boyfriend wanted to turn it down, but you insisted you wanna learn to play.

-Sooooooooo~ Matsuno Chifuyu being the best boyfriend to exist happily taught you about the mechanics, controls, and tips on playing the game, and with the help of the other four, you went from noob to pro real quick.

-You were having so much fun, that Chifuyu started to get jealous. Yes, Chifuyu is clingy with you, but it multiplies to two when he’s jealous.

-” Babe, as much as I want you to enjoy playing the game, I’d love some attention please…” he silently complained beside you, which you failed to hear because of the loud screaming from Takemichi on the other line.

-” Takemichi for fucks sake, stop screaming!” Chifuyu heard Baji shout from the headset. This made Chifuyu frown when you laughed at how goofy the team is.

-Chifuyu tried to gain your attention for a few more minutes before he decided it was enough.

“Babe, stop~ *giggling* I’m tryna play!” you said quickly looking at your boyfriend who kept on poking your side cheek, “and then what happened to Smiley then?” you laughed as the other line tells funny stories randomly as you set forth on another mission from the game.

“Heyyyy~” this time Chifuyu did not just poke your cheeks but buried his face on your neck, inhaling your scent. This made you gasp and move away from Chifuyu a little, before continuing playing and engaging with the conversation on the line.

You’re well aware that this is supposed to be a house date, where the two of you would just bond, tell each other how their week goes, eating deliveries, reading manga, or just cuddling on the couch while watching movies, but the game made it hard for you to stand up. This is the first time you have ever played, and you didn’t wanna miss the fun moments while playing with the most chaotic party team in gaming. While you’re playing your conscience started to tell you that you’re doing something wrong, which is true because you really haven’t spent time with Chifuyu the whole week because of your exams, and when you saw him stand from your side, you know it's time to tell the others you’re bouncing off the game. “I don’t wanna ruin your fun with my friends, just continue.” he said with a hint of jealousy in his tone, “Hey, Chifuyu~” you looked at him but was surprised by how he cradled his way on your lap trying to fit himself with you and the gaming chair just like how you usually do when he’s dealing with business matters or when he’s also playing games.

“Am I heavy?” he asked softly, burying his face again in your neck, his arms wrapping around your shoulders, as he adjusts himself to feel comfortable.

“You’re ignoring me, love. We should’ve just walked at the park with Peke J, or gone to my store for a date,” he said, his voice so soft and a little breathy.

You looked at him, his eyes narrowing in frustration and a pout plastered on his lips. You find it cute whenever Chifuyu expresses his jealousy, sure he is clingy but it doubles whenever he feels like you’re enjoying others' company aside from him.

“Come on, dear~ play with meeee~” Chifuyu whined, not minding the mic on. You heard Baji laughing and teasing the both of you, “shut it Baji, my baby needs attention, enjoy the rest of the g–”

As Chifuyu finds it comfortable sitting in that position, he started to feel satisfied with the skinship you both are having, and despite his weight crushing you a little and making it a little hard to breathe, you couldn’t get yourself to push him away as you find this scene too cute, having a reverse in a role for this ‘date’, well not really date ‘cause there’s a company in the game.

“No, you’re playing. Don’t mind me. I find this place comfortable.” Chifuyu interrupted you and kissed your cheek. “So this is why you always sit on my lap when I’m also playing, it’s comfortable. I like it.” he added, purposely making the other guys jealous.

“This couple doing sweet things on the other line makes gaming, I don’t know– uhm, unholy for some reason…” you heard Smiley teased,

“Too sweet might get diabetes here.” Takemichi joins the teasing,

“Fine, we’re gonna die, single guys. Fuck this~” Baji shouts from the other line.

“If I ever get to have a s/o, you’ll regret disrespecting me dude,” Baji said, making you laugh.

“And that’s only an ‘if’, Baji.” your boyfriend teased back, as he continued to snuggle on your neck, and inhale your scent. “I love you~ Don’t mind me here, win the mission bubs,” he said, and peeked over his shoulder to watch the screen.

“I love you too, babe~”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for reading! Hoped you liked it! Oh! Here is my masterlist ^^ stay hydrated and keep safe loves!

Please support or donate for me on Patreon and Ko-fi as well! (I'll be posting the commissions and other requests! I'll give my best with all of your support! )

#tokyo revengers #tokyo manji gang #tokyo rev #tokrev imagines #tokrev x reader #tokrev x you #tokyorev x reader #tokyo rev x you #tokyo rev fluff #tokrev scenarios #tokyorev headcanons #tokrev #tokrev fluff #tokrev x y/n #tokyo rev x y/n #tokyo rev x reader #chifuyu matsuno #matsuno chifuyu #chifuyu x you #toman #toman chifuyu #chifuyu imagines #chifuyu best boy #chifuyu scenarios #toman x reader #toman x you

[army-of-mai-lovers]

in which I get progressively angrier at the various tropes of atla fandom misogyny

tbh I think it would serve all of us to have a larger conversation about the specific ways misogyny manifests in this fandom, because I’ve seen a lot of people who characterize themselves as feminists, many of whom are women themselves, discuss the female characters of atla/lok in misogynistic ways, and people don’t talk about it enough. 

disclaimer before I start: I’m not a woman, I’m an afab nonbinary person who is semi-closeted and thus often read as a woman. I’m speaking to things that I’ve seen that have made me uncomfy, but if any women (esp women existing along other axes of oppression, e.g. trans women, women of color, disabled women, etc) want to add onto this post, please do!

“This female character is a total badass but I’m not even a little bit interested in exploring her as a human being.” 

I’ve seen a lot of people say of various female characters in atla/lok, “I love her! She’s such a badass!” now, this statement on its own isn’t misogynistic, but it represents a pretty pervasive form of misogyny that I’ve seen leveled in large part toward the canon female love interests of one or both of the members of a popular gay ship (*cough* zukka *cough*) I’m going to use Suki as an example of this because I see it with her most often, but it can honestly be applied to nearly every female character in atla/lok. Basically, people will say that they stan Suki, but when it comes time to engage with her as an actual character, they refuse to do it. I’ve seen meta after meta about Zuko’s redemption arc, but I so rarely see people engage with Suki on any level beyond “look at this cool fight scene!” and yeah, I love a cool Suki fight scene as much as anybody else, but I’m also interested in meta and headcanons and fics about who she is as a person, when she isn’t an accessory to Sokka’s development or doing something cool. of course, the material for this kind of engagement with Suki is scant considering she doesn’t have a canon backstory (yet) (don’t let me down Faith Erin Hicks counting on you girl) but with the way I’ve seen people in this fandom expand upon canon to flesh out male characters, I know y’all have it in you to do more with Suki, and with all the female characters, than you currently do. frankly, the most engagement I’ve seen with Suki in mainstream fandom is justifying either zukki (which again, is characterizing her in relation to male characters, one of whom she barely interacts with in canon) or one of the Suki wlw pairings. which brings me to--

“I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!” 

now, I will admit, two of my favorite atla ships are yueki and mailee, and so I totally understand being interested in these characters’ dynamics, even if, as is the case with yueki, they’ve never interacted canonically. however, it becomes a problem for me when these ships are always in the background of a zukka fic. at some point, it becomes obvious that you like this ship because it gets either Zuko or Sokka’s female love interests out of the way, not because you actually think the characters would mesh well together. It’s bad form to dislike a female character because she gets in the way of your gay ship, so instead, you find another girl to pair her off with and call it a day. to be clear, I’m not saying that everybody who ships either mailee or yueki (or tysuki or maisuki or yumai or whatever other wlw rarepair involving Zuko or Sokka’s canon love interests) is nefariously trying to sideline a female character while acting publicly as if she’s is one of their faves--far from it--but it is noteworthy to me how difficult it is to find content that centers wlw ships, while it’s incredibly easy to find content that centers zukka in which mailee and/or yueki plays a background role. 

also, notice how little traction wlw Katara ships gain in this fandom. when’s the last time you saw yuetara on your dash? there’s no reason for wlw Katara ships to gain traction in a fandom that is so focused on Zuko and Sokka getting together, bc she doesn’t present an immediate obstacle to that goal (at least, not an obstacle that can be overcome by pairing her up with a woman). if you are primarily interested in Zuko and Sokka’s relationship, and your queer readings of other female characters are motivated by a desire to get them out of the way for zukka, then Katara’s canon m/f relationship isn’t a threat to you, and thus, there’s no reason to read her as potentially queer. Or even, really, to think about her at all. 

“Katara’s here but she’s not actually going to do anything, because deep down, I’m not interested in her as a person.” 

the show has an enormous amount of textual evidence to support the claim that Sokka and Katara are integral parts of each other’s lives. so, she typically makes some kind of appearance in zukka content. sometimes, her presence in the story is as an actual character with layers and nuance, someone whom Sokka cares about and who cares about Sokka in return, but also has her own life and goals outside of her brother (or other male characters, for that matter.) sometimes, however, she’s just there because halfway through writing the author remembered that Sokka actually has a sister who’s a huge part of the show they’re writing fanfiction for, and then they proceed to show her having a meetcute with Aang or helping Sokka through an emotional problem, without expressing wants or desires outside of those characters. I’m honestly really surprised that I haven’t seen more people calling out the fact that so much of Katara’s personality in fanon revolves around her connections to men? she’s Aang’s girlfriend, she’s Sokka’s sister, she’s Zuko’s bestie. never mind that in canon she spends an enormous amount of time fighting against (anachronistic, Westernized) sexism to establish herself as a person in her own right, outside of these connections. and that in canon she has such interesting complex relationships with other female characters (e.g. Toph, Kanna, Hama, Korra if you want to write lok content) or that there are a plethora of characters with whom she could have interesting relationships with in fanon (Mai, Suki, Ty Lee, Yue, Smellerbee, and if you want to write lok content, Kya II, Lin, Asami, Senna, etc). to me, the lack of fandom material exploring Katara’s relationships with other women or with herself speak to a profound indifference to Katara as a character. I’m not saying you have to like Katara or include her in everything you write, but I am asking you to consider why you don’t find her interesting outside of her relationships with men.

“I hate Katara because she talks about her mother dying too often.” 

this is something I’ve seen addressed by people far more qualified than I to address it, but I want to mention it here in part because when I asked people which fandom tropes they wanted me to talk about, this came up often, but also because I find it really disgusting that this is a thing that needs to be addressed at all. Y’all see a little girl who watched her mother be killed by the forces of an imperialist nation and say that she talks about it too much??? That is a formational, foundational event in a child’s life. Of course she’s going to talk about it. I’ve seen people say that she doesn’t talk about it that often, or that she only talks about it to connect with other victims of fn imperialism e.g. Jet and Haru, but frankly, she could speak about it every episode for no plot-significant reason whatsoever and I would still be angry to see people say she talks about it too much. And before you even bring up the Sokka comparison, people deal with grief in different ways. Sokka  repressed a lot of his grief/channeled it into being the “man” of his village because he knew that they would come for Katara next if he gave them the opportunity. he probably would talk about his mother more if a) he didn’t feel massive guilt at not being able to remember what she looked like, and b) he was allowed to be a child processing the loss of his mother instead of having to become a tiny adult when Hakoda had to leave to help fight the fn. And this gets into an intersection with fandom racism, in that white fans (esp white American fans) are incapable of relating to the structural trauma that both Sokka and Katara experience and thus can’t see the ways in which structural trauma colors every single aspect of both of their characters, leading them to flatten nuance and to have some really bad takes. And you know what, speaking of bad fandom takes--   

“Shitting on Mai because she gets in the way of my favorite Zuko ship is actually totally okay because she’s ~abusive~” 

y’all WHAT. 

ok listen, I get not liking maiko. I didn’t like it when I first got into fandom, and later I realized that while bryke cannot write romance to save their lives, fans who like maiko sure can, so I changed my tune. but if you still don’t like it, that’s fine. no skin off my back. 

what IS skin off my back is taking instances in which Mai had justified anger toward Zuko, and turning it into “Mai abused Zuko.” do you not realize how ridiculous you sound? this is another thing where I get so angry about it that I don’t know how useful my analysis is actually going to be, but I’ll do my best. numerous people have noted how analysis of Mai and Zuko’s breakup in “The Beach” or Mai being justifiably angry with him at Boiling Rock or her asking for FUCKING FRUIT in “Nightmares and Daydreams” that says that all of these events were her trying to gain control over him is....ahhh...lacking in reading comprehension, but I’d like to go a step further and talk about why y’all are so intent on taking down a girl who doesn’t show emotion in normative ways. obviously, there’s a “Zuko can do no wrong” aspect to Mai criticism (which is super weird considering how his whole arc is about how he can do lots of wrong and he has to atone for the wrong that he’s done--but that’s a separate post.) But I also see slandering Mai for not expressing her emotions normatively and not putting up with Zuko’s shit and slandering Katara for “talking about her mother too often” as two sides of the same coin. In both cases, a female character expresses emotions that make you, the viewer, uncomfortable, and so instead of attempting to understand where those emotions may have come from and why they might be manifesting the way they are, y’all just throw the whole character away. this is another instance of people in the fandom being fundamentally disinterested in engaging with the female characters of atla in a real way, except instead of shallowly “stanning” Mai, y’all hate her. so we get to this point where female characters are flattened into one of two things: perfect queens who can do no wrong, or bitches. and that’s not who they are. that’s not who anyone is. but while we as a fandom are pretty good at understanding b1 Zuko’s actions as layered and multifaceted even though he’s essentially an asshole then, few are willing to lend the same grace to any female character, least of all Mai. 

and what’s funny is sometimes this trope will intersect with “I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!”, so you’ll have someone actively calling Mai toxic/problematic/abusive, and at the same time ship her with Ty Lee? make it make sense! but then again, maybe that’s happening because y’all are fundamentally disinterested in Ty Lee as a character too. 

“I love Ty Lee so much that I’m going to treat her like an infantilized hypersexual airhead!” 

there are so many things happening in y’alls characterization of Ty Lee that I struggled to synthesize it into one quippy section header. on one hand, you have the hypersexualization, and on the other hand, you have the infantilization, which just makes the hypersexualization that much worse. 

(of course, sexualizing or hypersexualizing ANY atla character is really not the move, considering that these are child characters in a children’s show, but then again, that’s a separate post.) 

now, I understand how, from a very, very surface reading of the text, you could come to the conclusion that Ty Lee is an uncomplicated bimbo. if you grew up on Western media the way I did, you’ll know that Ty Lee has a lot of the character traits we associate with bimbos: the form-fitting pink crop top, the general conventional attractiveness, the ditzy dialogue. but if you think about it for more than three seconds, you’ll understand that Ty Lee has spent her whole life walking a tightrope, trying to please Azula and the rest of the royal family while also staying true to herself. Ty Lee and Azula’s relationship is a really complex and interesting topic that I don’t really have time to explore at the moment given how long this post is, but I’d argue that Ty Lee’s constant, vocal  adulation is at least partially a product of learning to survive at court at an early age. Like Mai, she has been forced to regulate her emotions as a member of fn nobility, but unlike Mai, she also has six sisters who look exactly like her, so she has a motivation to be more peppy and more affectionate to stand out. 

fandom does not do the work to understand Ty Lee. as is a theme with this post, fandom is actively disinterested in investigating female characters beyond a very surface level reading of them. Thus, fandom takes Ty Lee’s surface level qualities--her love of the color pink, her revealing standard outfit, and the fact that once she found a boy attractive and also once a lot of boys found her attractive--and they stretch this into “Ty Lee is basically Karen Smith from Mean Girls.” thus, Ty Lee is painted as a bimbo, or more specifically, as not smart, uncritically adoring of Azula (did y’all forget all the non-zukka bits of Boiling Rock?), and attractive to the point of hypersexualization. I saw somebody make a post that was like “I wish mailee was more popular but I’m also glad it isn’t because otherwise people would write it as Mai having to put up with her dumb gf” and honestly I have to agree!! this is one instance in which I’m glad that fandom doesn’t discuss one of my favorite characters that often because I hate the fanon interpretation of Ty Lee, I think it’s rooted in misogyny (particularly misogyny against East Asian women, which often takes the form of fetishizing them and viewing them only through a Western white male gaze)  

(side note: here at army-of-mai-lovers, we stan bimbos. bimbos are fucking awesome. I personally don’t read Ty Lee as a bimbo, but if that’s you, that’s fucking awesome. keep doing what you’re doing, queen <3 or king or monarch, it’s 2021, anyone can be a bimbo, bitches <3)

“Toph can and will destroy everyone here with her bare hands because she’s a meathead who likes to murder people and that’s it!”  

Toph is, and always has been, one of my favorite ATLA characters. My very first fic in fandom was about her, and she appears prominently in a lot of my other work as well. One thing that I am always struck by with Toph is how big a heart she has. She’s independent, yes, snarky, yes, but she cares about people--even the family that forced her to make herself smaller because they didn’t believe that their blind daughter could be powerful and strong. Her storyline is powerful and emotionally resonant, her bending is cool precisely because it’s based in a “wait and listen” approach instead of just smashing things indiscriminately, she’s great disabled rep, and overall one of the best characters in the show. 

And in fandom, she gets flattened into “snarky murder child.” 

So where does this come from? Well, as we all know, Toph was originally conceived of as a male character, and retained a lot of androgyny (or as the kids call it, Gender) when she was rewritten as a female character. There are a lot of cultural ideas about androgynous/butch women being violent, and people in fandom seem to connect that larger cultural narrative with some of Toph’s more violent moments in the show to create the meathead murder child trope, erasing her canon emotionality, softness, heart, and femininity in the process. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t write or characterize Toph as being violent or snarky at all ever, because yeah, Toph definitely did do Earth Rumbles a lot before joining the gaang, and yeah, Toph is definitely a sarcastic person who makes fun of her friends a lot. What I am saying is that people take these traits, sans the emotional logic, marry them to their conception of androgynous/butch women as violent/unemotional/uncaring, and thus create a caricature of Toph that is not at all up to snuff. When I see Toph as a side character in a fic (because yeah, Toph never gets to be a main character, because why would a fandom obsessed with one male character in particular ever make Toph a protagonist in her own right?) she’s making fun of people, killing people, pranking people, etc, etc. She’s never talking to people about her emotions, or palling around with her found family, or showing that she cares about her friends. Everything about her relationship with her parents, her disability, her relationship to Gender, and her love of her friends is shoved aside to focus on a version of Toph that is mean and uncaring because people have gotten it into their heads that androgynous/butch women are mean and uncaring. 

again, we see a female character who does not emote normatively or in a way that makes you, the viewer, comfortable, and so you warp her character until she’s completely unrecognizable and flat. and for what? 

Azula

no, I didn’t come up with a snappy name for this section, mainly because fanon interpretations of Azula and my own feelings toward the character are...complicated. I know there were some people who wanted me to write about Azula and the intersection of misogyny and ableism in fanon interpretations of her character, but I don’t think I can deliver on that because I personally am in a period of transition with how I see Azula. that is to say, while I still like her and believe that she can be redeemed, there is a lot of merit to disliking her. the whole point of this post is that the female characters of ATLA are complex people whom the fandom flattens into stereotypes that don’t hold up to scrutiny, or dislike for reasons that don’t make sense. Azula, however, is a different case. the rise of Azula defenders and Azula stans has led to this sentiment that Azula is a 14 y/o abuse victim who shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions. it seems to me that people are reacting to a long, horrible legacy of male ATLA fans armchair diagnosing Azula with various personality disorders (and suggesting that people with those personality disorders are inherently monstrous and unlovable which ahhhh....yikes) and then saying that those personality disorders make her unlovable, which is quite obviously bad. and hey, I get loving a character that everyone else hates and maybe getting so swept up in that love that you forget that your fave is complicated and has made some unsavory choices. it sucks that fanon takes these well-written, complex villains/antiheroes and turns them into monsters with no critical thought whatsoever. but the attitude among Azula stans that her redemption shouldn’t be hard, that her being a child excuses all of the bad things that she’s done, that she is owed redemption....all of that rubs me the wrong way. I might make another post about this in the future that discusses this in more depth, but as it stands now: while I understand that there is a legacy of misogynistic, ableist, unnuanced takes on Azula, the backlash to that does not take into account the people she hurt or the fact that in ATLA she does not make the choice to pursue redemption. and yes, Zuko had help in making that choice that Azula didn’t, and yes, Azula is a victim of abuse, but in a show about children who have gone through untold horrors and still work to better the lives of the people around them, that is not enough for me to uncritically stan her. 

Conclusion    

misogyny in this fandom runs rampant. while there are some tropes of fandom misogyny that are well-documented and have been debunked numerous times, there are other, subtler forms of misogyny that as far as I know have gone completely unchecked. 

what I find so interesting about misogyny in atla fandom is that it’s clear that it’s perpetrated by people who are aware of fandom misogyny who are actively trying not to be misogynistic. when I first joined atla fandom last summer, memes about how zukka fandom was better than every other fandom because they didn’t hate the female characters who got in the way of their gay ship were extremely prevalent, and there was this sense that *this* fandom was going to model respectful, fun, feminist online fandom. not all of the topes I’ve outlined are exclusive to or even largely utilized in zukka fandom, but a lot of them are. I’ve been in and out of fandom since I was eleven years old, and most of the fandom spaces I’ve been in have been majority-female, and all of them have been incredibly misogynistic. and I always want to know why. why, in these communities created in large part by women, in large part for women, does misogyny run wild? what I realize now is that there’s never going to be a one-size fits all answer to that question. what’s true for 1D fandom on Wattpad in 2012 is absolutely not true for atla fandom on tumblr in 2021. the answers that I’ve cobbled together for previous fandoms don’t work here. 

so, why is atla fandom like this? why did the dream of a feminist fandom almost entirely focused on the romantic relationship between two male characters fall apart? honestly, I think the notion that zukka fandom ever was this way was horrifically ignorant to begin with. from my very first moment in the fandom, I was seeing racism, widespread sexualization of minors, and yes, misogyny. these aspects of the fandom weren’t talked about as much as the crocverse or other, much more fun aspects. further, atla (specifically zukka) fandom misogyny often doesn’t look like the fandom misogyny we’ve become familiar with from like, Sherlock fandom or what have you. for the most part, people don’t actively hate Suki, they just “stan” without actually caring about her. they hate Mai because they believe in treating male victims of abuse equally. they’re not characterizing Toph poorly, they’re writing her as a “strong woman.” in short, people are misogynistic, and then invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of feminist theory to shield themselves from accusations of misogyny. it’s not unlike the way some people will invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of critical race theory to shield themselves from accusations of racism, or how they’ll talk about “freedom of speech” and “the suppression of women’s sexuality” to justify sexualizing minors. the performance of feminism and antiracism is what’s important, not the actual practice. 

if you’ve made it this far, first off, hi, thanks so much for reading, I know this was a lot. second, I would seriously encourage you to be aware of these fandom tropes and to call them out when you see them. elevate the voices of fans who do the work of bringing the female characters of atla to life. invest in the wlw ships in this fandom. drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic (please, drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic). read some yuetara. let’s all be honest about where we are now, and try to do better in the future. I believe in us. 

#fandom crit #longpost #like seriously long post strap in #misogyny #death tw #murder tw #abuse cw #sexualization of minors #ableism #racism #fandom racism #zukka crit #swearing tw #suki #yue #katara #ty lee #mai #toph #azula

[myelocin]

Postcards From: Kanazawa | Tsukishima Kei

Synopsis: The fear that comes with love is the realization that it isn't always just light. Love, rediscovered as both the fear and the drive that depicts the push and pull of whether it's worth it to say "I do," if the unknown is what's to come beyond the vow. In which it's a week until the wedding, and the both of you return to Kanazawa--to day one--as strangers.

Characters: Tsukishima Kei

Genre/Tags: Engagement!AU, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with Happy Ending | WC: 10,200+

A/N: this is a piece commed by @tsukishumai​ ;w; tq for trusting me w u and ur bb boi ily to the moon n back

playlist

commissions | ko-fi

The illusion of the soul is the false belief that love must always—always—be just light.

The truth is, it’s not. Love is many things. Primarily, love begins from desire. Then, that desire seeps into a drive that pushes you to keep wanting. Then finally, when it’s seeped in through the skin deep enough, love pools in the soul.

Love is bound to be raw at the very core. A desire. To say, “I want you,” and think it holds as much credibility as “I love you.”  To look at what you know is only the tendrils of something at the very most, and trick yourself into thinking that it’s enough. A beating heart—bloody red. The line just barely hanging in-between what’s selfish and selfless, before it ultimately sways and becomes selfish sometimes.

Sometimes, being right now, Tsukishima thinks.  

Sandwiched in-between you to the left, and Yamaguchi to his right, he finds his eyes flickering towards the clock a lot more often than he would have liked. Akaashi, who sat across from his seat on the table, was the first to catch on.  

He quirked a brow, presumably in question earlier, and mouthed the question if he was in a rush. Tsukishima’s never been known for having too many words, but because Akaashi pauses and insists to relieve his question with an answer, he shrugs, waving him off and mouthing back that he’s alright.  

“So,” Bokuto starts, his voice already slipping into somewhat of a slur. “How’s it feel to be the first to pop the question?”

You laugh, finding amusement in the man’s enthusiasm. Turning to Tsukishima, you sit and wait, expectant of a reaction.  

In response, he just shrugs, but a smile breaks through and redefines the nonchalance of his expression anyway. Raising the glass to his lips, he takes a quick sip before answering smugly, “It’s nice to finally settle down. You should try it sometimes.”

Bokuto waves him off, cheeks flushed and eyes already drooping from the inebriation. “Nah,” he slurs, shaking his head. The exaggeration warrants a quick laugh from Sugawara, who sits on the other side, nursing his own drink. Continuing, Bokuto huffs and takes a slight pause before he connects the last of what he says with, “—getting married is nice and all, but I don’t know, man,” he laughs. “Just feels like I’ll end up hitting a fucking blank space after I do or whatever. Not my vibe.”

Visibly, Tsukishima shifts a little, the smile on his face maintained but the lighthearted energy that earlier fueled it just slightly more drained now.  

From the corner of your eye, you notice it. Though, Akaashi’s the one who gives him a pointed stare, to which the former simply ignores.  

“But—“ Bokuto continues, as if trying to remedy the cracked part of the atmosphere that isn’t even visible in the first place—“If that’s your thing, then I’m obviously not going to judge you for that.”

Tsukishima responds by his silence. Bokuto, with his head still warped around the heavy state of his inebriation, doesn’t do so much other than sip a little more of his barely filled glass of beer, Tsukishima’s apathetic expression just a blur in his eyes now.  

“You seem happy, though,” Bokuto notes, then raises his glass towards you.

Blinking at being the sudden subject of his interest, you raise your own glass of water. The ice inside shifts, clinking against the sides of the glass, and slowly, Tsukishima watches. There’s familiarity in the way it moves down: trickling slow like the patience inside him that’s suddenly running by the clock. His palms just barely gripping the utensils, clammy. While his head, still whirs at Bokuto’s halfhearted words.  

It’s halfhearted, he reminds himself.

The thought of hitting a plateau after “I do,” in a way is terrifying.  

But he is happy, right?

The way his palms respond solely through tensing suddenly spikes the fear that maybe his ring will slip. So he looks at you, trying to find an anchor to keep the love he pushes to stay intertwined with his truth afloat as he responds, “Of course I am. I’m happy.”

You look back at him, eye to eye, though you find something waver just for a split second— wondering if there’s credibility in the saying that gold will always deliver truth.

-

The rest of the night flows easy.  

Almost naturally, he’s quick to wave off Bokuto’s invite for more drinks at the bar just down the street, tugging your interlaced hands towards the parking lot as soon as the group found its way to the exit.  

“You know he probably just wanted more company,” you laugh. Thirty minutes after making it back home, instead of jumping straight into the shower and getting ready for the night routine, you instead take out the suitcase and take your place, seated on the floor in the living room.  

“We needed to pack,” you hear him respond, his voice a little distant from the bedroom down the hall.  

You shrug. “Yeah, but we could have made time.”

“Sometimes we can’t just make things, if we don’t have any to make it with in the first place,” he sighs.

You chuckle. Perhaps it’s just one of those nights again. In the ten years you’ve known Tsukishima Kei, you found that he had a tendency to become a multitude of things.  

A stranger, at the start, because that’s where every connection begins. The neighbor who lived with his grandfather across the street from your childhood home. Kanazawa was a long way from Sendai, but before his parents had whisked him off to Miyagi some years later, he had been the friend that oftentimes spent his afternoons with you.  

Strawberry cake and tiny sips of boxed juice from the convenient store down the street, and not much conversation exchanged between the both of you. He’d tell you about the things on his grandfather’s old encyclopedia, and you’d listen with rapt attention, finding it nice how he seemed to carry a little bit of the stars the more his eyes gleamed. He just talked about dinosaurs, you remember. At ten, Tsukishima had always been a wonderer.  

Then he moved.  

From the friend who told you stories and shared his juice boxes with you under that tree, to the occasional email that would pop up on your phone, when you were in highschool and weaving your way in and out of pathways and dead-ends. Miyagi was a little like Kanazawa, he said. There was a lot of quiet in the two cities. His email would come once a week, then twice when you reckon he felt a little lonely.  

You’d reply with the same kind of enthusiasm as he had established, though you still couldn’t deny the fact that the notification with his name on it never failed to have you smiling—at least just a little bit. At fifteen, Tsukishima was far from a stranger, but he was also falling just a little short in making it to the halfway mark of being a friend too.  

The once-a-week emails were welcome, none the less. It stayed like that, until once a week turned into twice. Though most were just the customary how-are-yous and obligatory holiday greetings once the seasons came and went, one year it turned into emails about the little nothings.  

‘I had strawberry cake today,’ it once read. ‘The one we used to share tasted sweeter.’

‘I joined the volleyball team.’

‘Winter here is a little colder. I remember your puffy green jacket.’

‘I don’t know if you want to know…or if I should tell you...but our team won, and we’re going to nationals.’

Somehow, you were managed to be convinced by one of your friends that same week to travel with your own highschool’s volleyball team to assist in the preparation for nationals in Tokyo. It was just a coincidence, you used to reason. You were there, and so was he. There was a hundred other courts his team could have played at, and your priority was assisting your own team in what they needed.  

But still, you couldn’t help but wave back and cheer the loudest from your stands when he perfected the block and scored the winning point for the first set.

It was then, where you realized that perhaps Tsukishima Kei wouldn’t just be a stranger.  

Kanazawa to Miyagi, but somehow Tokyo became the in-between. Childhood friends to the sort-of friends from the other ends of the country sharing a few scattered memories in slices of strawberry shortcake and random dinosaur trivia from an old man’s outdated encyclopedia.  

He was the first to approach you after that match. A hand held out to shake, perhaps to commemorate the evident shift between strangers to friends—but it was nice.  

Because after that, friends turned into something more.  

Maybe Tokyo really was the middle ground. After you graduated and moved out of your respective cities, Tokyo became the third place of hello.  

Then things just slipped into place. He was here, and so were you. He had plans to stay, and you just signed the contract that bound you to the city for the next two and a half years. The apartment right down the hall from yours was recently vacated, and he was looking for a place to stay.  

His new work place, coincidentally enough, was just a stop away from the train station closest to your place.  

You had always doubted the presence of serendipity and everything that had to dictate with the celestial control of fate, but the ease that came with the relief of him signing the lease the very next week almost seemed to validate what had been just a farfetched something.  

From strangers, to friends, to lovers, then to this:

Ten years later, a ring on your finger, and an I do, bound to be said just a little over seven days from now.  

Tokyo was kind to the both of you. His mother’s close enough to visit on the weekends, while Kanazawa was just a shinkansen away from Tokyo station. A new apartment with enough space for two, plus maybe an extra, and a bakery right down the street with the best strawberry shortcake made fresh every day.  

The wedding’s just a week away. His grandfather, still living in Kanazawa was meant to travel with Akiteru to Tokyo last week, but because plans changed, the both of you were instead tasked with going there yourselves to travel with him. While Tsukishima hesitated, you didn’t. Yes was easy to say in a situation like this. Though your parents had moved to Tokyo some years ago, you were aware that his grandfather didn’t.  

The house across the street was still his, while the one you grew up in just now became a summer home your family would frequent to when Tokyo became too swarmed with tourists.  

You look at the half-filled contents of the suit case on the floor in front of you. The right side’s meant to hold your clothes, while the left was left bare for Tsukishima’s. You turn and look at him.  

“You can just grab the stuff you need me to bring for you and I’ll fold it in. We should probably catch the first train tomorrow if we wanna get there before sundown.”

What comes as a reply is only prolonged silence.  

You let what he started stay for a little, but because you had never been the type to be fond in gouging out answers from the blank spaces, you sigh, and break the impending silence before it could get a chance to even settle. “You’re quiet again, Kei.”

When he makes it to the living room, instead of coming back out with a stack of clothes, he stands by the wall with his hands in his pocket. His eyes shift from wall to wall, but skip over you.  

Knowing that you’ll just prompt another conversation again the more he keeps his silence, he sighs, swallowing the hesitation and clinging onto the bits of courage that floats by him in the moment. Grasping at the very tips of it, he forces the words out of his mouth. “Are you really coming with me?”

You raise a brow. “Back to Kanazawa? Of course. I’m from there too, you know. Plus I haven’t seen Grandpa in a while.”

He shifts his gaze to the side, thankful for the blur that came with forgetting to slip on his glasses. He’s always had a tendency to give in the moment he looks at you, so the vagueness in the blur was a welcome change. “It’s just for a week,” he mutters. “I think I’ll handle the trip just fine.”

“Plus,” he adds, the hike in the tone of his voice giving away his panic. “—I heard there was a problem with the florists? Maybe one of us needs to go in and fix it ourselves just in case.”  

In the ten years you’ve known him, you’ve always considered it a given that you’ve well perceived him by now. In front of you, he’s stammering. While Tsukishima has never been the face to poise and perfection—because at the end of the day he still is just a boy—you knew he only stammered when he was nervous.  

Perhaps trying to manipulate the situation through a wordless exchange was his way of doing so. In your head, you chuckle. Tsukishima Kei is many things, and is witty when it counts—but he could never be blunt when it came to the things he was unsure of.  

You try to gouge out his truth. Speaking straight to the point, you let him know that there’s no purpose in trying to skirt around. You turn to him, his sweater half folded on your lap. “You know I could have believed what you just said, but,” you pause, giving him a pointed look, “—you’re not even looking at me.”

“Is this about what Bokuto said earlier?”

The way he shifts his weight from one foot to the other awkwardly, confirms your suspicions that that it is about that, before he can muster up the courage to even say it. “Tell me,” you initiate. You’ve never been afraid to speak what needs to be said. “What’s got you so afraid?”

Once more, he hopes for the silence to speak for him. And like before—it doesn’t. Silence was never meant to fill in the blanks. What it did, rather, is add three seconds more on the clock that’s ticking regardless. Tsukishima bets on a timed clock to speak for him, and because you’ve never been the type to shrink at the presence of raw truth, you huff and poke into what obviously hits for him just a little deeper.  

“You’re afraid we’ll hit a blank space after we get married, aren’t you?”

He doesn’t look away, but little by little, his body language starts slipping bits and pieces of the truth you’ve already long sensed. “I think I just need to think this through.”

“What?” you scoff. “You planned to go to Kanazawa by yourself for a week to what? Soul search? To decide if you even wanna marry me?”

“I’m sor—“

“That’s what you’re not supposed to say,” you interrupt him. “You don’t say you’re sorry for how you’re feeling, because you’re allowed to feel it how it is, but shit, Kei,” you exhale, pausing to suck in a quick breath. “You couldn’t have just said this earlier?”

He looks away again, the guilt evident on his features. “You’re mad.”

“Do you blame me?”

This time, he turns to you. “No,” he murmurs. “I don’t, but I’m gonna be blunt here—“

“—first time—“

He gives you a pointed look, but in the moment, you don’t really have much in you to care too much.  

“I think I need space to clear my head.”

“Sounds like you’re contemplating on whether you wanna stay with me or not,” you respond. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about that.”

Tsukishima’s steady, this time. “Of course I wanna stay with you.”

“But,” you counter. “You aren’t sure if you want to marry me.”

He looks away. “What if—we hit a plateau after.”

“That’s still not an excuse to back out before we even try, Kei,” comes your reasoning.  

“You’re right,” he sighs. “It’s not.”

Then it’s you, who shrugs this time, giving in a little and throwing him what you hope he doesn’t see as a lifeline. There’s no comfort found in knowing that an out is a means of mercy when it comes to love. Why should there even be an out?

You settle for just cracking the door open instead. Though it was never locked, the fact that it remained close must have been understood differently by him.

“Let’s go back to Kanazawa separately, then,” you propose. The open suitcase in front of you still has the right half filled with his half folded clothes, so you reach in, taking it out one by one. “You stay with your grandfather and I’ll stay at my parent’s house.”

Tsukishima raises a concern. “He’ll wonder why we aren’t staying together.”

In response, you shrug. “Just make something up then.”

“Is this just a passive aggressive way to say you’re mad at me?”

You scoff. “When have I ever been passive aggressive, Kei? I’ve said shit as it is since day one.”  

He flinches, maybe because of what you said or the tone of the deliverance, but either way, you decide you can’t give much of a shit. It’s a given that you’re angry, but because being hurt just paves the path to silence more than lashing out, it’s not much of a surprise that you probably look deflated in front of him.  

“What I’m saying is,” you explain. “Let’s go back to Kanazawa as strangers. Do what you gotta do, however you’ve gotta do it to get your head sorted out, and then we’ll talk. I’m not dancing around in circles with you on this. Either we get married next week, or we don’t.”

He panics. “I don’t want to lose you—“

“You’re already talking like you’ve decided that you won’t be at the other end of that aisle, Kei.”

Words feel lacking all of a sudden, so you pause. The absence of the split second brevity has Tsukishima standing still, his breath held, throat dry.

But like always, clarity seems to weave its way through the cracks in the room and find you first. “Yes or no isn’t easy to decide between,” you finally mutter. Eyes to the half folded sweaters you meant to tuck into the other half of the suitcase, you realize that you’ll need to switch to a smaller trolley now because you won’t be needing this much space anyway. “I don’t know what I should tell you, because I don’t know that we’d be having a possible fallout a week before the wedding. But at the same time—I don’t want to say you’re despicable for feeling like that, Kei. It just—“

“—fucking sucks,” you sigh.  

“If you feel like you need a week to figure whatever this shit is, then okay,” you nod. “Okay. Let’s be strangers for a week and by the time we’re back in Tokyo, you give me a yes or no and be fucking blunt with it.”

-

Later that night when you turn your back against him and face the wall, his whisper breaks through the quiet. “Why are you still patient with me about this? You could have just left me.”

You shift, laying on your back and sighing to the makeshift glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceiling of your room. “Because I love you,” you sigh. “Loving someone just means you have to exhaust every other option before even thinking of throwing in the towel.”

He sleeps that night, feeling heavy.

-

He woke up later that morning, feeling the same too.  

In a sense, things admittedly started weird. You woke up before he did this time, when he usually would be the one trying to be quiet when he slipped out of bed. Even though early mornings had never been a thing for the both of you, there was still something unpleasant in waking up to an empty bed.

The sheets on your side were done, and your phone that usually would be pinging with email notifications by now wasn’t there.  

It’s odd, he thinks. While he agreed to be strangers for a week, the walk to the train station was the same. Silence was normal, but the five extra inches that added to the distance between the both of you wasn’t. You nodded his way when he pointed at the shinkansen’s direction, and wordlessly would hand him his usual brew when you stopped at the coffee shop just before going in.  

Seated beside you in the train, he tries to ignore the urge to poke you on the side and make conversation. Words have always come easy when it came to moments with you, he noticed.

Tsukishima’s aware that he’s always been dubbed as the kind of person who never preferred to say too much, and while that was true—to an extent—he realizes that there is some truth to the saying that silence kills.  

You’re seated beside him on the train, eyes to your phone, and earbuds in place. He resorts to just staring at you through his peripherals, caught in between wanting to satiate the want to talk to you by breaking the silence, or keeping it as is.  

This is where fear grips him a little tighter. The deal was, as you had pointed out just last night, that the both of you would move through the week pretending to be strangers again. You’d stay on your side of the street, while he stayed in his.  

It’s a given that his grandfather’s bound to ask about you, and so in the event that it does happen, you would just spend a few hours with them and pretend like everything was fine.  

You made it clear that you’d try to exhaust all the options before resorting to that, though. And it’s easy, he thinks, doing so. It doesn’t take much to fake a phone call from work or a last minute meeting with an old friend that wouldn’t be able to make it to the city for the supposed wedding.  

The lines were drawn, and the outline of what was to be expected in the next week was made clear.  

He thinks of what you said before you slept. Love, as that one drive that has you exhausting all your options before even thinking of quitting. It’s fair, he thinks. You’ve always been the rational thinker in the relationship.  

But then again, he doesn’t doubt your hurt either. A week was lengthy, he realizes, and to act as strangers again just a week before the wedding was a different kind of test when it came to your patience.  

Still, he owes you truth.

You’ve always told him to lay things bare, and even though what’s bare is ugly, because love always pushes to try—he stays, doing just that.  

Undoubtedly, this is a jump. There’s no question in the fact that the possibility of reaching the peak and coming face to face with a plateau scares him. But still, his thoughts counter, to face a drop that doesn’t guarantee a landing somehow terrifies him even more.

The sound of your phone vibrating snaps him out of his thoughts. Before you answer it, he snags a look of the name written on the screen—Akiteru’s.  

Tsukishima sighs, shooting you a cautious stare as you pick up the phone and turn to him.  

The tone of your voice is easy, though you look at him, unbothered. “Hey,” you answer. “Just got in the train, so Kei should be calling you in about three hours when we’re there.”

In comes a pause, before you chuckle a little. Unconsciously, Tsukishima scooches in, curious. But before he could get a chance to lean in too close, you pull away a little, looking at him curiously, an eyebrow raised. “I meant to tell you,” he hears you say, and as you look at him, he chooses to hold your stare.

“Kei and I will be staying separately for the week.”

Beside you, he shifts, fighting the urge to turn away and face forward.  

Assuming that your flinch afterwards was only a response to what he’s only certain is Akiteru’s sudden outburst, the prior nervousness of his stare shifts into concern. Understanding the are-you-okay that he mouths, you wave him off. “We’re fine,” you laugh. “I just miss staying at the house that’s all, and I’m pretty sure Kei wants to spend quality time with his grandfather.”

You stay silent after that, which truth be told, doesn’t exactly help with his nerves.  

“He’s right next to me,” you add. “We’re fine, I swear. Just wanna enjoy Kanazawa in different ways that’s all.”

-

To put it bluntly, the first day is awkward.  

His grandfather’s waiting from outside the gate the second you make it to that familiar street. Nothing much has changed, the two of you notice. The gate’s rusted a little by the edges, and the door’s still got the same chip on the left side he always said he’d take a look at.  

“Heard they were cutting down that tree,” his grandfather says, when it’s a little over three hours later and you’re all seated at a local restaurant for dinner. His old friend owned the place, he explained. Low lights, home cooked meals, and a family run business you vaguely remember your father talking about when you were young.  

Tsukishima pauses, eyebrows rising in question. “What do you mean that tree?”

“The one you used to run off to,” he laughs.  

Elbowing him, you nod towards his grandfather before pointing out, “We met by that tree, you know.”

His grandfather’s quick to responding, laughing at Tsukishima’s perplexed expression. “Seems like your grandfather’s memory is doing better these days than you, boy.”

You suppose that at the end of the day, it shouldn’t have been a big deal that he forgot. You’ve never been one to dwell too deep within the symbolic little nothings that’s bound to come with life. Rationally speaking, maybe you’re just a little miffed because of what he said the night before. And maybe that’s the reason why you’re taking this a little harsher than you would have on a normal day.  

But strangers, you remember. Strangers wouldn’t care if the other forgot.  

So with that, you shrug. You take another spoonful of the food in front of you and shift your body just slightly to the left—to which Tsukishima took noticed—and leaned forward. Without even saying much, his grandfather already has his attention on you, the smile on his face kind.

He’s always been kind, you remember. With a smile, you choose to keep the peace in the room at bay, willing yourself to ignore Tsukishima’s stare boring holes into the side of your head from beside you.  

“Now that I think about it, I don’t remember a lot of people stop by that tree,” you comment, as you take a step into nostalgia.  

His grandfather shrugs, absentmindedly nodding his head as he mulls over your word through a spoonful of broth. “It was in the middle of a residential area. Bound to get taken down if you ask me. People nowadays need a place to park.”

This time, you really feel his stare beside you almost intensify. Truth is, you can make sense of what you know he only fears. The point in life was to brave through the unfamiliar to establish a consistency in familiar grounds. To continuously rise from day one, only to hit the peak and possibly come face to face with a plateau instead of something greater than even the height of all highs—you admit that it’s terrifying.  

The plateau, that perhaps works sort of like that tree.  

It’s been there, so here it still is.  

You’ve both been at that tree—at the start—so here you both still are. Side by side back in Kanazawa, sharing a meal like I do, isn’t hanging on the line.

His grandfather’s voice snaps you out of your thoughts. “You’re not wearing your ring.”

Tsukishima’s voice is quick to cut into the conversation, his voice smooth. “She just doesn’t wanna lose it.”  

You nod along to his lie, undecided with how to feel in regards to how smooth he seemed to have delivered his lie.  

“You know, now that I think about it, it’s good that they’re cutting down that tree.”

Tsukishima speaks his mind this time. “Last week, you said you were looking forward to coming back home so you could visit that tree again.”

You don’t look at him when you answer. “I know, but your grandfather has a point. When things change, what else can you do but get rid of it?”  

“Oh nothing’s changed,” he laughs across you. “Even before the two of you were born, people would always talk about how it’s just there when the space could have been used for parking.”

“Then why put off cutting it down this long?”

“Who knows,” he laughs. There’s an unfound wisdom in his eyes that read through your soul when he looks at you. “Maybe cutting down what people already see as a permanent fixture will do more harm than good in the long run.”

“Even if it doesn’t contribute anything?”

Tsukishima thinks of his fear, then of the plateau.  

Through the rim of the glass, he keeps a steady eye on his grandfather, breath held as the anticipation for his words begin to really settle.  

“People these days just see what’s the most obvious from the surface and consider it as the only fault then run with it. Maybe it’s not the tree,” he laughs. “Maybe it’s just the people. They want convenience so they cut off everything around them instead of adjusting to it.”

The food tastes bland in his mouth, suddenly.

“Goes to show how selfish people can get sometimes,” his grandfather finishes, as an afterthought. “A shame, really. That old tree’s done nothing but give people shade.”

-

At the end of the day, you really had to give his grandfather a lot more credit than what was due.  

The second and third day was awkward. Even though you tried to stay inside for most of your day, venturing outside and meeting up with old friends was inevitable. And really, you should have remembered that he often started his day with a couple laps walked around the block.  

On day two, he hinted that he could sense something was off. Tsukishima had been a lot more silent lately, he pointed out. First, as just a passing comment, then by the third time he’d bring it up and wouldn’t get too much of a response out of you, there came more emphasis to what he says.  

He passed by the tree every time you’d round the street too. It occurs to you that passing through it was a shortcut, and contradicted his prior statements to having a route that catered towards the long way home, but you chose to not comment much about it.  

The second day was curiosity, and you figured that you could live at least just a week with it.  

The third day, on the other hand, gave you a little more trouble than you had bargained for.  

You’re on your way home from an old friend’s house, and ironically enough, both Tsukishima and his grandfather are out by their front door, tending to the weeds of a garden that doesn’t even look remotely grown.  

Tsukishima’s the first to look at you.  

Stubborn, and frankly intent on upholding your end of the deal in staying strangers, you attempt to wave them off with a passing greeting as you look through your bag, feeling around for the keys to the gate.  

“You don’t have to think of an excuse,” you hear him say. “He’s back inside now. It’s just you and me here.”

It’s funny how ever since you’ve made it back to Kanazawa, he’s been the one to break the silence a lot more lately.  

You don’t turn. Strangers, you think. The deal was to pretend the other was a stranger.  

“Cam,” he calls out again, the desperation in his voice inching more and more out of its shell. “I’m really sorry.”

You turn around, the buried anger getting the best of you in the moment. “You know the more you say that, the more convinced I am that I should just give you back your ring right now and go back to Tokyo alone. You talk like the only thing you’re sure of is the fact that you won’t be marrying me next week, Kei.”

The moment you shift your gaze from the ground to his eyes, a part of you aches at the idea that you may have to bid farewell to gold. Swallowing down the mass of emotions you hope isn’t entirely just made of anger, you steady yourself and sigh.  

It hits you that it’s been a long day.  

“It’s just you and me here,” you repeat, slowly. There’s a flutter in your heart that tells you it’s still love that stares back when you look at him. “Then why do you feel so far away, Kei?”

-

He doesn’t sleep that night.  

Day three of being strangers, but he hasn’t had anything figured out. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but what only grew was the silence. The distance is really just a few feet away—across the street and through the leaves of that tree that your father would always say he’d get to.  

The light from your room is still turned on, though the curtains are drawn.

8PM and it’s early. 8PM, and on a usual day, you’d usually be seated beside him in your Tokyo apartment’s living room, mulling over the nothings that went on in your day.  

It’s nice to talk about the rest of the world as if all they’re meant to be is just a passing blur in the background, he thinks. He’s never been much for words, but you were.  

Then again, you had always been one for truth.  

Reality is, he knows he could always swallow his doubts, walk across the street, cover the distance, and apologize to you with an I’m sorry, that covers all that needs to be addressed in a standard apology. Life can be lived as easy as that. You swallow your own thoughts, adhere to what they say needs to be done in the way they tell you how to do so, and be done with it.  

But he knows you just as well as he knows himself.  

You’d call him a coward—and truth be told, he’ll think the same.  

Present wise—he does think he is a coward.

Tsukishima sighs, knowing that blinking at your closed curtain visible from his window won’t do much of a difference. Begrudgingly, he sits up, grabbing his glasses from the bedside table.  

The streets around the neighborhood are quiet this time of night. The perks about living away from the city was the silence, he thinks. As soon as he tugs on a sweater, he makes his way downstairs, carefully, so he doesn’t stir his grandfather he presumes is sleeping on the room across the hall.  

He exhales, relieved at the barely audible creak the door clicks to as soon as he shuts it and turns the lock from the outside. The keys, jingling in his pockets, is the only sound that rings in the quiet.  

It isn’t lonely, but it isn’t comfortable either.  

Kanazawa has always been a town he’s considered as a piece of constant that’s meant to drift inbetween.  

Neither like Tokyo or the towns by the outskirts of Okinawa, it stays as is. Twenty years ago, the crack on the sidewalk was there, and now, twenty years later, it remains.  

There’s comfort in recognizing constants, Tsukishima admits. The tree just down this road, the crack on the asphalt, and the fact that your room is still the second window to the left visible from his on the second floor.  

When he was younger, he remembers he often would stand under your window, caught in between wanting to knock on your door and ask permission from your parents if you could accompany him for the afternoon, or just wait around until you’d come down yourself.  

While he left a lot of things on chance, the conscious choice to stay rooted in the spot by your window remained constant.  

The gravel under his feet crackle everytime he’d take a step. The moon’s hazy behind the clouds tonight, he muses. While you’d wish for the stars, he found a temporary safety in the midnight clouds. A timelessness felt when it’s midnight, stays.  

Before he turns to the corner that would lead home, he stops midway—recognizing the tree from a good few meters away.  

There’s a sense of feeling an urgency to let something go, the more he stares at it. Nearing autumn, the colors start to change, and just like that, he’s reminded of the impermanence in life.  

As the earth eventually changes throughout the years, he fears that perhaps in love—it would too.

-

“You’re out late,” is the first thing Tsukishima hears as soon as he enters the room.  

From the genkan, he peers over the shelf, noticing the lights from the kitchen is what floods into the dim living room. Slipping on his house slippers and making his way around the corner, Tsukishima gets a feel of the warmth that’s radiating from the familiarity of the space.  

After his grandmother had passed, his grandfather stayed in Kanazawa. Though his mother often expressed her desire for him to move with the rest of the family in Tokyo, every time, he’d only wave them off and say that there’s too much rooted here for him to just up and leave.  

Walking into the kitchen, his grandfather’s the first to raise a mug his way and offer a smile. “I’d ask you if everything’s fine, but I think I’ll just wait around and see if you’re even willing to tell me.”

Tsukishima chuckles airily. “Sounds like you wanna ask anyway.”

He takes a slow sip. “Okay then,” he nods, smiling like he’s just struck a deal. “First question is—are you okay?”

In response, Tsukishima smiles, pulling the chair and taking the seat across his. He nods. “’Course I am.”

His grandfather’s eyes don’t leave him. “You’re not wearing the ring, and neither is Cam.”

Suddenly feeling like he’s caught in between a blocked exit and the spotlight, Tsukishima freezes, but wills himself not to look away. “Just needed some space, that’s all.”

“To think?”

He sighs. “To reconsider.”

“Ahh,” the older man sighs. “Cold feet. Pretty normal, if you ask me.”

He raises a brow in question. “It’s normal?”

“To be nervous, yeah,” his grandfather laughs. “But looks like it’s a different case for you.”

Tsukishima doesn’t respond, his eyes fixated towards a spot on the wall that feeds more into the blank space of his thoughts than anything more.  

“You’re afraid,” Tsukishima hears, and as soon as the retaliation he tries to string together at the very last minute don’t come—he realizes the core of all the chaos in his head is meant to be just like that—

Blank.

“What are you so afraid of, boy?”

In the silence, he lets the rawness of his truth slowly spill. “What if I hit a plateau after this?”  

His grandfather wastes no second in countering.  “How is it life if we just keep climbing? What’s the point in doing all that work if we never get rest?”

Tsukishima laughs. “You know, by that logic it can just go the other way around too.”

He settles in his seat, trying to appreciate the silence instead of looking for company in the noise, before he adds, “What if we decide we don’t love each other anymore?”  

“That’s not all there is to a plateau,” he laughs. “It’s a valid fear, but being afraid isn’t all there is after you marry someone.”

“Then what’s there?”

With a smile, his grandfather leans back, raises the mug to his lips, and relaxes—his eyes looking fondly at a faded photograph hung beside the wall clock. “Everyday,” he answers. “What’s there after I do is just everyday.”

Sensing that his grandfather means to say more, he chooses to retain his silence. Sighing softly, his grandfather keeps his smile steady as he continues to speak. “Everyday you wake up. You roll over in bed, you think about the checklist you do to consider a day done, then you come home, eat a meal, rest a little and start the whole day over the next day. Everyday’s like that.”

He shifts, leaning forward with his arms crossed supporting his weight on the table as he eyes his grandson with a smile. “Best part is, you can do all that with someone you love. Makes the boring part of the plateau a lot more bearable.”

“You wake up with them and complain about how boring the rest of your day will be, then come home and eat a meal with them. Wash the dishes, share the silence, and just go to bed knowing you’ll wake up with somebody.”

The smile on his face is honest, then he shrugs. “It’s nice, though. The plateau after you hit a certain point in life is just inevitable, Kei. You can either complain about life alone or complain about it with somebody. At least there will be two pairs of slippers by the genkan waiting for you everytime you come home. You’ll say you’ve made it home and someone will greet you. You’ll roll over in bed at 2am and someone will be there with you. The point of climbing in life is to get somewhere, not ascend past the norm.”

Tsukishima stays quiet, pondering over the truth in his grandfather’s words. “So life’s just meant to stay in the middle?” he asks, slowly coming into terms with his grandfather’s redefinition of the plateau.  “Life’s meant to find a consistency in everyday,” he corrects.

A few moments pass before he stands back up, pointing to the counter with a thermos. He knows it’s yours. The old one that your mother refused to throw away, because there’s a crack by the lid and a couple faded sailor moon stickers stuck by the side.  

“Look at that,” Tsukishima hears. He turns his head just in time to see the old man offer him a patient smile, the message in his eyes delivered without a hitch. “That old thing’s seen a couple of decades, but it still gets to you when you need it, right?”

It’s not so bad to have an old thing be your constant, right?

-

Twenty minutes after his grandfather climbs back to his room upstairs, Tsukishima’s seated on the side of the table beside the window. Peeking through the half-opened blinds, he can still see that the light from your room is still flicked on.  

Without mulling over the decision, he takes his phone out, scrolling through the contacts until he taps your name. A swipe without too much pressure, because even his thumb’s memorized where your name is by now. Kind of like muscle memory, he supposes.  

Bypassing the unannounced rules about what to do as the strangers you had claimed from the start of this week, it results to the lack of hesitation as he types a quick text and presses send without a thought that would counter it.  

I love you, it reads.  

From his spot in the kitchen, he leans back and smiles, pouring himself a cup of the tea he knows you brewed yourself on the nights where he can’t sleep.

The lights from your room stay on for a few more moments before it dims, but before the metaphoric silence could take root, the screen of his phone lights up.

Stop walking around at night. Drink the tea and try to get some sleep.

Exhaling almost in relief, it’s the slow beating of his heart that resettles him back into the love he’s known everyday.  

It’s not quite the end, but it isn’t exactly somewhere unpleasant either.

-

Two days before you’re meant to return to the city, instead of spending the day in your room—like you had initially planned—you somehow found yourself in the passenger seat of his grandfather’s old car, with a grocery list in hand.  

You sigh, understanding what his grandfather’s trying to do.  

As you look down, there’s nothing much written in the grocery list. He had complained about some back pain earlier, followed up by his insistent request of desperately needing his groceries done so when Akiteru was to arrive later on, dinner would be taken care of.

Beside you, with his hands on the wheel, Tsukishima sighs. “We could have just ordered in food for dinner. It’s just Akiteru coming,” he mumbles.  

Keeping your eyes to the window to your left, you shrug. “He likes making the ordinary special, I guess.”

Tsukishima stays silent after that, mentally thankful for the green light and the empty roads. The more stops, the longer silence would stay. And even after the sort of middle ground from the night before, he doesn’t know what to say to you.  

After making a quick turn, he pulls up into the parking lot and kills the engine. Unbuckling his seatbelt, he turns to you, with an expectant look. “You can just stay here if you don’t wanna go in with me,” he offers. “It’s a short list, I can be in and out in a bit.”

You wave him off, already slinging on your bag and opening the car door—the list on your hand. “It’s alright. I think I’m more familiar with this area than you are, so we can just meet back in the car in thirty minutes if that’s okay with you.”

“You don’t need me to come with you?” he raises a brow.

You shake your head no, but upkeep the smile on your face anyway as you exit the car and close the door.  

-

Something about what you say sticks with him, the more he thinks about it.

He can distinguish the hesitation laced each of your decisions. You look past him, but not exactly at him. You speak to him, but keep the conversations short. Though conversation was rare between the both of you this past week, the times that you did speak to him, your words often were clipped short.  

It’s your means of upkeeping your end of the deal, he realizes.  

You’ve always been one for communication, but then again, patience can only stretch so much.  

He respects your wish for distance and walks the opposite way from the grocery store, towards a building he doesn’t really known. It’s a gallery, he realizes. Three steps past the entrance, he notices that he’s one of the few that’s in the room.  

Traditional artwork line the wall, hung in frames that have rusted throughout time.  

Tsukishima stares, eyes drawn to the pieces of art he recognizes from the few scattered memories in his childhood that relate to his time in the city.

A fieldtrip, when he was seven. He remembers leaving the house upset over the yellow hat he had to wear, and the rain boots his teacher wouldn’t let him change out of. Unlike the present, rain was present that day. He stood beside you in line, and had to tilt his head up at the piece of art he always thought was the prettiest out of the bunch.  

And now, almost two decades later, he still thinks the same.  

He smiles at the memory, finding the comfort of returning to what’s familiar, pleasant.  

As if caught by an epiphany, and suddenly enveloped in a sense of a rediscovered home, here, within a room that’s familiar, he finds purpose in the permanence of love.

Love, that’s never meant to be stretched into the likeness of what the poets declare as the absolute form of love after “I do.”

Staring at the piece of art with the rusting frames, the strokes within the canvas still depict the same story. It still is beautiful.  

It’s doesn’t become more—but it stays as is.

And maybe that’s what his grandfather was trying to convey.

To fear a certain phase in love is something that comes and goes, but it often never stays. It can linger, but eventually, it too, fades.  

What stays is what’s rooted.  

Primarily, just you. Truly, just love.

That tree in that old street, these paintings on the walls, and the kind of serenity that washes over him at the thought of you.  

The fear in life comes in the form of thinking that beyond the peak lays a plateau. Beyond “I do,” what’s next to come is love, dwindling until “I don’t love you anymore,” is the only thing left to be said.  

It’s fear, that spoke to him the past few weeks, so this time, as he gives in, he listens to love.  

It’s quiet.

But through the smoke in the room, the message that’s meant to deliver truth comes in full clarity. Illuminated, it appears before him as it is. A painting that’s struck him as beautiful then and now, and the thought of you as the face that’s always been the first to greet him every morning for more than just a few years now.  

An old man stands not too far from him, hands clasped behind his back as he stares—with a smile on his face—at a similar painting on the wall. Sensing Tsukishima’s presence, he looks over and redirects the smile his way. “Been coming here for years, and looking at this still feels the same.”

Poking at the doubts, Tsukishima responds, “Are you afraid that it won’t get old?”

The gentleman laughs, though soft enough so it doesn’t echo too much in the halls. The joy lingers around Tsukishima, on the other hand. “To have something grow old with you isn’t a bad thing. Day one, this piece was beautiful, and now, almost forty years later, I look at it and think the same too.”

A beat of silence passes, but the man speaks once more.  

“My wife, when she was alive, showed me this piece. Maybe I look at this and still find it beautiful after all these years because I think of her, but I don’t think trying to focus on that matters much. The feeling’s the same, even if it grew old.”

Reciprocating the older man’s goodbye with a nod to the head, it’s then where he laughs, a little bit more of the truth unraveling as each moment comes and goes. Thinking of his words, he dwells on its meaning.  

Standing there, alone in the museum hall, the smoke clears, and he presents himself his words of blended truth and patience.  

Love is timeless, his thoughts say. The plateau after the peak is as possible as the drop, but life’s meant to be lived in the lows and in betweens as much as the highs. Time moves in waves, and perhaps love doesn’t always grow stagnant. It can be timeless, even though the frames rust. His hair will grey, and maybe you’ll stop linking your pinky with him beneath the sheets during the rainy season’s thunderstorms, but the root of love stays.  

Within the plateau, time will move, and you’ll both grow old, but the taste of the tea you’ll brew for him will remain the same.  

And thirty minutes later, when he makes it back to the parking lot with you waiting by the door, the love that steadies his beating heart will be the same too.  

Steady, present, and timeless.  

-

Eyeing the dashboard, you’re the first to break the silence. “Why’d you buy a postcard?”

Rolling into a stoplight, he eases on the brakes and shrugs. “Lived here for so long, and I don’t even own a postcard from here.”

“Me neither,” you blink.

A couple minutes pass, and the car’s rolling again, but he misses a turn. Assuming that he’s just not used to the usual route, you stay quiet—until about he pulls up to a familiar street.  

Parked to the side, through the windshield, you find yourself face to face with a familiar tree. “Kei.” He hums.  

The coming autumn has a few leaves beginning to change its colors, you notice. The summer hues, unbalanced, as bits of red begins to bleed through the green. “You were supposed to turn there, not here.”

He shifts the gear into park, then takes his hands off the wheel, leaning back. “I know.”

It’s quiet after that, but it isn’t all that unpleasant either.  

This is the part where the questions begin to poke at you, the what-ifs in love let out in the open as you voice a little bit of your vulnerability. And because the truth is daunting, you hope he understands you through the metaphors. “Do you really think they’ll cut it down?”

He doesn’t allow the silence to take more than a moment. “I think so,” he nods his head.

“It’ll be good though, I think,” you add, nodding your head.  

It’s quiet in the room even though the words of your truth coaxes the unhealed wound to resurface. As it comes into light, it doesn’t sting.  

Sitting shoulder to shoulder beside him in the car, the tree that witnessed the first hello stays rooted, and watches.  

He doesn’t turn to you as he speaks, but in a way, you feel as if a farewell was the finale that was meant to be delivered somehow. “It’s good,” he starts. “Letting go of something that needs to be let go of.”

-

Tokyo

-

Tsukishima’s the first to speak.  

“I’m not good with words,” he starts.  

There’s a hush in the crowd, so you stay with it, knowing you’ll only add to the silence should you choose to respond. It wasn’t your turn anyway, so you will yourself to be still and listen.  

“Hey Cam,” Tsukishima continues, choosing to begin his vow with a hello. “I think a lot about what love’s supposed to have meant, mean, or eventually mean in the long run. I thought too much about it to the point where it…” he trails off, blinking at the piece of paper before flicking his eyes up to you with a slight shrug. “—to the point where love began to scare me.”

For a brief moment, he closes his eyes, confident in the fact that when he opens them, he knows he’ll see the world in clarity this time. With the smoke cleared and the scattered pieces of all his doubts set in order, the words of his truth may not speak of the most tender poem of love—but within the lines lies his truth.

As he lays his truth on you, he holds a breath and lets it all go. “I wanna wash the dishes with you for the rest of my life,” he laughs, exhaling softly, his shoulders shaking a little. “Never occurred to me how much of a liar the downside of your thoughts are when you listen to everything that isn’t love,” he continues.  

Your shoulders relax, and even through the blur of the veil, you can tell his eyes are steadily watering.  

“I’m sorry,” he says, the microphone just barely picking up what he says. You nod your head anyway, wishing you were holding his hands instead of the bouquet. Reassurance comes in many forms, but you know he’s always been the type to receive it well through physical touch.  

A kiss on the cheek, your head on his shoulder, or your hands squeezing his. But the smile you give him suffices for now, you think.  

“I wanna wash the dishes with you for the rest of my life. I’ll wash, and you dry. Nothing much happens in our day usually, but nothing has to. I’ll listen to you talk about how shit the traffic is in the city, because I know you’ll listen to me talk about the same complaints I have from Monday to Friday anyway.”

You realize he’s written his vows in the back of a postcard—the one you saw on his dashboard a few days ago, from Kanazawa.  

He sniffles a little then looks up, laughing to himself at how emotional he’s getting. Allowing more than just truth to trickle out slow is a part of love too, he realizes, so with a soft laugh, he lets the tears be and speaks again. “What needed to be let go of was let go of,” he exhales, like he’s been holding his breath for this long.  

In a sense, maybe he has. Sometimes fear grips you tightly enough that it shifts your point of view from one thing to another. What’s love, becomes fear. Then what’s fear, becomes the smoke that buries the core of truth too deep within the haze.  

“I let go of the thought the thought that after marriage, if nothing great would come then that would be the end of love,” he breathes. “I stared at that tree and thought of Grandpa’s words again and again then wrote my apology and I love you on the back of a postcard that only had one a couple of blank lines at most.”

He waves it for you, then to the crowd, to see. The words, jumbled up together look almost incomprehensible written so closely together, but in a way, you have a feeling that he’s just speaking the rest of his truth as it comes in the moment.  

The truth in love, you realize, is that its truth comes, fully unraveled the moment the initial plan falls apart.  

He puts down the postcard, and just looks at you.  

“There’s a lot I don’t think I will ever understand when it comes to love, but maybe I’m here to just feel it and not try to decipher it.” He pauses, ignores the few tears that roll down, and shrugs his shoulders, admitting to himself that the truth in his love is the first thought that comes.

“Love doesn’t have to the greatest,” he tells you. “I just wanna wash dishes with you for the rest of my life and hear about how traffic was unbearable.”

You smile, and your assurance reaches him.  

“I think that counts as love too,” he finishes, the smile on his face tender.

-

As he leans in after I do, he murmurs a question in your ear that you’ve been expecting since the start.

You could have just left, he said. How did you deal with me and still choose to stay?

Your answer was said without a hint of hesitation. With a shrug, and an honest smile, you told him, “Because I love you.”

“I think we both had to let go of the thought that to love always means to have the biggest reasoning behind it. We do things for love, and because of love. That’s just how it is,” you shrugged.

Oddly enough, it’s in that same exact moment where he remembers Bokuto’s question from that dinner a week and some days ago.  

How does it feel? he recalls, and even though words have never found him first nor met him in the middle easy, he gathers what he can and just settles on the conclusion that it just feels like love.

Wherein love, is this.

An identical band on his and your finger, and the taste of I do pleasant on the tongue. I love you, as a truth that’s easy to fathom and healing to hold, and the fear of what comes next just a passing thought that goes as soon as it comes.  

Later that evening his grandfather sits him down and asks him what he really thinks about why people have been putting off cutting down that tree for a few decades now.  

With a laugh, the hesitation that often turns decisions is made clear to him. “You know I think that people would decide things and think they’re so solid on it before even being face to face with it. The second they get to that tree with a chainsaw, I promise you they changed their minds. You think you go there and cut off or let go of one thing, then realize you’re cutting off something else in the end. They go back to what’s been there and realize that it’s not the problem at all.”

Tsukishima sighs, and his grandfather watches, the smile on his face easy. It’s like watching some emerge from a smoked out room, he thinks. Clarity’s always been a blessing, and he’s glad his grandson’s finally found it.  

“Sometimes going back to the start is the one thing you need to be reminded that it’s worth it to keep going.”

“Sounds like you’re not talking about the tree,” his grandfather comments.  Looking at you, Tsukishima smiles. “You could say that too.”

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