#//I don't know what's so hard about the concept of if you don't like something just ignore it and move on.
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Hello! Love your work, life-long fan, etc. etc. But I am here today on a mission and wondering if you could help. My nibling (who is unsure if "niece" and other gendered concepts is right for them) is turning 7 this week and is TERRIFIED of black holes. Can't sleep, can't enjoy the night sky, is-getting-picked-on-at-school bad. I'm hoping to introduce her to Fred, but I think if I start at "so there these things called white holes which kind of are "opposite" black holes," I might have a whole new problem to explain to my sister.
So as I dream up what a "nice" black hole would be all about - How was Fred as a black hole? What would such an entropically-interesting entity like a black hole even look like as a wizard? Have people with melanoheliophobia reached out to you before/Do you have any expert advice?
Thanks for all that you do to help change the landscape for anxious, nerdy people!!
Let me go talk to Fred.
***
"It was a good while ago, you know?" he says.
("He" is an approximation of the most extreme kind, here. Most astronomical entities above the Planetary level have no idea whatsoever what gender is about, or what it's good for. And even at the Planetary level they're often none too sure what it means for biologicals.)
Anyway. When you're in Timeheart, even when only visiting, it's hard to avoid the sense of everything you're discussing being in the nature of a game you won; or a test you passed and don't have to deal with further except as an amused memory. But then, on the other side of physicality, all games are won. All tests are passed. This is where you choose the next challenge. As for past ones...?
"It seems straightforward," Fred says, "when you're a black hole. More and more stuff accretes to you. At first, it's just your job, right? But then it starts to become more, and you slowly start getting aware of it. Mass = consciousness, possibly? I don't know. But you start noticing it. More, and more, and more, till you just can't bear it! Gravity, right? What can you do about gravity? Or mass? Honestly. ...But then, finally!—all of a sudden, the pressure releases. There's room. You have somewhere for it to go."
"The Schwarzchild radius," I say.
"Is that what it's called?" Fred says. "...Was he nice?"
"I, uh... couldn't say. Didn't know him personally."
"Pity," Fred says. "It was such a relief! Please thank him for me." A pause. "...'Him?'"
"Insofar as it matters," I say, "apparently so."
"All right," he says. "But anyway, it's such a simple thing. All your life you've been gathering stuff in. More and more, all the time. And you start saying to yourself, "This can't go on, it's just wrong, what happens if I eat everything? I don't want to eat everything!' You know? It's scary."
"I hear you, cuz," I say.
"But it doesn't matter what you think or feel; it just gets worse and worse. You swell on the inside but you can't swell on the outside, and you can't stop stuff from swirling in and in and in. You think, 'This is all wrong, it's going to be the end of me! And if it is, what else is there? What was this all about? Why am I not big enough?' And 'Why can't I be the same kind of "big enough" on both sides?' And the inside and the outside start fighting over which should be bigger—"
"I think I may know where this is going," I say.
"Yes! And then, all of a sudden, when you think you can't bear it another second longer, something happens and you just... evert!"
"Go inside out, you mean."
He laughs out loud. "Yeah, well, that's maybe a little simplistic...? I mean, when you're dealing with six dimensions and above, you sort of go inside out, and upside down, and sideways, and, you know, more ways than that."
"I'm sorry to say that I don't know," I say, "but I suspect it's memorable."
"Please!" he says. "My poor gnaester! You have no idea."
"Um... perhaps that's for the best."
"But the inside gets bigger than the outside," Fred says. And then adds, a bit abashed but also amused, "I was kind of late to the party on this, apparently. I'm told it's a trope."
"So it is," I said. "...For a lot of us, though. Takes a while to realize what's happened. But you're in good company."
"Oh good. Anyway, so then after that you start emitting all the stuff you earlier absorbed," Fred says. "You're a gateway. It's like... recycling, you know? Takes a while sometimes: some people have trouble emitting, after absorbing and absorbing for so long." He laughs. "Habit, yeah?"
"Yes it is," I say. "Habit is such a problem."
"Anyway," Fred says, "tell everybody it's okay. Black holes are about taking in what's over with, what's done. But when we shift, it's about letting whatever we ingested go out to be something new. Has to go through our insides first, though! That's what we're for."
"Recycling?" I say.
"Recycling. You're starstuff, sure!" And Fred laughs. "But sometimes even starstuff needs to go through the wash."
***
HTH!
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baby, i'm here to love you
pairing: boyfriend ! jake x girlfriend ! reader genre: established relationship, angst, comfort warnings: reader calling herself stupid, crying authors note: this is for my pookie @luvj4key. i hope i did you justice love </3
jake has always been the best boyfriend - like a golden retriever to your beck and call. his smile radiates through the entire room and his laugh could heal the souls of millions. he has loved you endlessly and never once have you ever doubted it.
so how did you end up yelling at him over not washing the dishes? "jake i asked you to do one thing for me ! and you couldn't even do that," you yell out. whatever those girls said about mercury being in retrograde, were right. it felt like the earth was rotating backwards with finals week around the corner. you have summed up about an average of 3 hours of sleep a day, the rest of the hours hunched over in the library.
it was getting more frustrating with the days going on and jake has been busy with his own school work. you knew jake was busy, either studying for his own finals or gaming with his friends. jake was always a smart guy, being in honors classes and passing them with ease. you. on the other hand, struggle to grasp concepts until they are fully immersed after countless hours of practice.
you had given jake a heads up to ask him to please wash the dishes before coming home. you wanted to cook dinner but you didn't have any clean dishes to use. jake, on the hand, had just got home and decided to take a small nap before doing some cleaning around the house. he sets an alarm and it doesn't ring.
"baby i'm sorry, it was a mistake, i didn't mean to forget," he says as he tries to pull you in for a hug. you shake off his advances and you roll your eyes at him, "it wasn't that hard of a task to do but you still couldn't do it? i've been endlessly studying in the library for finals week because i'm not a genius like you and i don't understand the material ! i keep trying all these practice problems and i keep getting everything wrong and i just wanted one thing to be done. i'm starving all day and i wanted to come home and cook us dinner but none of the dishes are done and.."
your voice breaks with ease and jake's demeanor immediately softens. his tone is so soft that you would miss it, "baby..."
the emotions that you've been holding for however long comes breaking down as tears streamed down your face. jake feels like his heart is chipping away, "oh baby, come here." you take a step forward before jake fully wraps his arms around you, his cologne wafting into your senses. his arms rub soothing circles on your hip as he plants soft kisses into your hair. "hey it's okay, i got you, i got you."
your tears start to slow down as you slowly catch your breathe. jake slowly pulls you to sit on his lap while the sound of your breathing is only heard. jake whispers to you, "what happened baby? tell me."
you only let out a small exhale, "i've just been so stressed with finals and i just can't grasp the content and i feel so stupid. i just don't know how to get these formulas down and i didn't want to bother you because i know you were busy with your own finals. i just didn't want you to become annoyed at me or think i'm stupid."
jake reaches up his hand to cup your cheek and softly caress it with his thumb, "my sweet angel, i can't believe you've been holding all of this in. it's okay to not understand content after studying it, sometimes you just need a little more time for things to click. if it doesn't, you know i'm here to help you always."
he continues on, "you are not stupid because you don't understand something, okay? you are very smart and work very hard and you can never bother me. baby, i'm here to love you."
your eyes soften at his words and the only thing you can say in this moment is a 'thank you.' jake points to his watering eyes, "look baby! you even got me crying." you only softly laugh and give him a kiss which he gladly returns.
"let's order some takeout and we can work on some of your material tomorrow morning? how does that sound?" jake says and you nod. for the first time in weeks, you finally smile.
© belong to j4keluver. do not copy, translate, or repost.
#enhypen#enhypen imagines#enhypen reactions#enhypen scenarios#enhypen x reader#enhypen fluff#jake sim#kim sunoo#lee heeseung#park jay#park sunghoon#yang jungwon#nishimura riki
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heya, so i've read your fic "it's about magic eyeball biology" right when it came out on AO3 but i just saw it's not online anymore. is there a way you'd be willing to send me the file? I REALLY like it and I was reading it basically every day for a few days because it made me laugh
i pulled it because i was getting comments about it on other fics and that was super annoying. but i guess i don't have a problem reposting it to tumblr. some notes:
this is an AU based on a bunch of jokes in this tag (chronological order)
someone asked about how weird it would be to be an SI and find out about the eyeball symbionts, so i wrote about tori finding out. this fic is a joke. it is not "canon." no one in plasticity, mutagenicity, or any other fic of mine has eyeball symbionts. i do not find it interesting, amusing, or fun to explore this concept in other fics. i do not want comments or questions about it. please respect this
the word i chose to use is "symbiont," which in my experience is the more common term used by people who study symbiosis. "symbiote" is from marvel.
Tori was successful in not vomiting the first time she watched an autopsy. Her stomach churned uncomfortably, but she ignored it, watching Keizo’s hands and pointedly not looking at the face of their latest victim. If she just focused on the steady removal of organs from the abdomen and not the face, she could pretend they weren’t from a person.
Then Keizo moved on to the head, and she had to look. He pried open the eyelids, and her stomach rolled.
“The eyes aren’t so bad,” Keizo narrated, voice gruff and bored. He held the lids open with one hand while he cut away with the other. “I like to use curved scissors to-- pay attention-- cut through the fascial sheath, and then you can cut away the orbital muscles and it’ll pop right out. Orochimaru-sama isn’t going to let you touch anyone with a doujutsu, so don’t worry about damaging the…”
Tori frowned, barely listening to Keizo, as the victim’s eye did pop right out. It was smooth, almost a perfect sphere, with the dark brown iris raised ever so slightly. Pink viscera clung to it in Keizo’s hand.
“Hold on,” Tori interrupted, twisting her neck to try and look at the back of the eyeball. “Where’s the… you know, the optic nerve?”
She was pretty sure the optic nerve was, like, huge. It was a bundle of over a million nerve fibers or something insane like that, if she remembered the human anatomy unit correctly. Her teacher had called it a “bridge cable.”
Then again, that unit was from an advanced high school class, and Keizo was looking at her like she was particularly stupid. Even if he was mean, violent, and uncooperative, he definitely knew more about cutting out eyeballs than Tori.
“Is it smaller than it looks in cartoons?” she tried.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Keizo sneered. “Here, you do the second eye.”
That was the good thing about eyes, Tori supposed. You got two for the price of one.
He passed her the curved scissors, which were slick with whatever goo lined an eye socket, and Tori hesitantly put down the notebook she’d been writing in. Feeling very light-headed, she copied Keizo’s movements, gently separating the victim’s eyelids and praying something would happen to intervene in what she was about to do. A fire alarm going off, or a earthquake, or fuck-- she’d take the hideout being actively attacked over this.
No act of god stopped her. Her hands were shaking so hard that she accidentally punctured the sclera and transparent, goopy vitreous started leaking out.
The eye did pop right out, though. There was no nerve at the back, and no evidence of one in the back of the pink socket.
Looking into the face of dead, eyeless person, she could either feel the horror at what she’d done seeping into her very bones, or she could wonder: What the fuck?
xXx
She asked for an anatomy book.
“I don’t see what the point is,” Kabuto told her. “You’re getting hands-on experience.”
“I want to know how things work when they’re still alive,” Tori replied.
“Well…” Kabuto rolled his chair back from his desk towards a narrow bookstand of books and scrolls he kept in his clinic. “I suppose Orochimaru would approve. Here, you can look through this while we wait for that drug to kick in.”
He handed her what was clearly a picture book meant for children, a deeply condescending smile on his face. Tori pressed her lips together to prevent herself from saying something disrespectful, then forced her face into a polite smile.
There was a chapter on different senses, and she slowly flipped through the chapter on chakra networks in mild interest, before she found the two-page spread covering sight.
Mother of Christ, Tori thought.
She hadn’t found an optic nerve because there wasn’t one.
xXx
Part of Tori’s argument for why she shouldn’t be dissected like a frog was that there was no reason to think there was much special about her biologically, including her own anatomy. She thought it would be safer to simply not say anything.
But now she knew. She knew every person in this world was a walking sin against logic, and that knowledge, sitting in the Oto clinic with Kabuto, was a horrible, heavy burden that made it hard to breathe.
The picture book Kabuto had loaned her had explained vision to her the way Tori thought an alien who’d never even seen a human and also who didn’t have sight themselves might explain it: special cells at the back of the eye reacted to light, and then that information was transferred directly into the brain via a complex network of chakra, and this was not even the worst part.
The worst part was that eyeballs were an entirely separate organism. A mutualistic creature that colonized newborn baby eye sockets and then metamorphosed into basically a giant eyeball that fed visual information into the brain in exchange for protection and nutrients.
“During pregnancy,” the book had explained in a little Did you know? box, “a mommy’s body makes special hormones, which tell the visual symbiont to make babies too! The babies are called larvae, which have lots of little tentacles to help them move around. They like to stay with mommy, though, and so they find the baby when she holds it. Sometimes, when there’s a problem with mommy and she can’t donate larvae to her baby, a doctor can help daddy’s eyes make babies, or sometimes another mommy will donate!”
Tori was going insane. She was going to hyperventilate. What the FUCK!
“This is the worst thing I ever read,” she muttered to herself, eyes stuck on the book. Whatever drug Kabuto had given her was making her dizzy, but she felt like her vision was laser-focused and perfectly taking in the bright cartoon of two eyeball symbiont creatures. “Is this a joke? This has to be a joke.”
She was vaguely aware of Kabuto frowning at her. “A joke?”
“Visual symbionts?” Tori squeaked out, sounding and feeling hysterical.
“Yes…?” Kabuto repeated.
“No,” Tori argued. “No way.”
Bemused, Kabuto dug out more textbooks, these ones meant for actual medical professionals. He flipped through passages on syndromes related to host-symbiont genetic incompatibilities, being colonized by more than one symbiont, symbiont maldevelopment and absenteeism, chakra incompatibilities, if the symbiont spontaneously regrew its tentacles and left your head in order to start its sexual reproductive cycle.
“Is this…” Tori felt like she couldn’t breathe. She felt more apt to vomit than she did when she’d fucked up trying to cut out someone’s eye. “Is this a genjutsu…?”
“Did you really not know about them?” Kabuto asked. “I thought you had biological training.”
Tori had to work very hard not to break down into hysterics.
xXx
The good news was that “I have a special nerve that connects my eyeball to my brain and lets me see” sounded exactly as insane to both Kabuto and Orochimaru as “eyeball symbiont creature” did to Tori.
Well, no, that wasn’t really good news. But she felt vindicated at both their absolutely baffled looks.
She had to explain it three times– dropping words like “optic chiasma” and “retinal blind spot” before Kabuto believed her enough to press his fingers to her temple and send chakra into her eyes.
“There is something there,” he said, sounding deeply perplexed, and Orochimaru perked up like a child receiving a Christmas gift. “I think-- yes, it’s a nerve.”
“I think you should be able to see it,” Tori said, “if you shine a light into the pupil.”
They did. Tori did indeed have a white spot at the back of her eye, right where her optic nerve entered her eye.
“You’re like a cephalopod,” Orochimaru informed her, sounding like a dog owner telling their pet they were a very good girl. “This is how their eyes are arranged, an absolutely beautiful evolution. Oh, but the approach of the nerve is different. How fascinating.”
The examination ended with Orochimaru gleefully jabbing a needle into both Tori’s eyes. This was uncomfortable and painful, and he talked about how the presence of an optic nerve might be part of her future vision.
At least this backs up my story, Tori thought as Orochimaru’s cool hand held her face down.
xXx
Orochimaru strolled into lab the next day and pulled Tori aside to go over the results of her test with her. He took her down the hall to an office, which was surprisingly homey, all things considered. Orochimaru’s office was lined with bookshelves, and had a nice wood desk and a comfortable looking chair behind it. There was an ornamental lamp, which along with the desk chair, were the closest to “creature comforts” that Tori had seen in Oto so far.
She sat opposite to Orochimaru, in a much less comfortable chair. He spread a scroll out on the desk in front of her.
“Do you know how to read the results of a DNA test?” he asked.
“Uh,” Tori answered. “Not like whatever you’re about to show me.”
He hummed back at her, not at all bothered. “Ah, your otherworldly science. You should tell me about that later. For now…”
He explained how he’d compared the DNA extracted from her eye to DNA extracted from the hair he’d ripped off of her previously. They had matched exactly. He’d also ran her eye DNA against several visual symbionts they had on file, across many vertebrate taxa, and found no match at all.
“Your eyes are one-hundred percent Tori,” he said. “It’s amazing.”
“...thanks?” Tori tried. As a joke she added, “I grew them myself.”
“Hmm,” he answered. “I wish I had more of you, and more of other animals from your world. I’d like to study how they evolved.”
“I don’t understand how they didn’t evolve here,” Tori told him honestly. They had a special socket and everything! “I think… do other animals have eyes here? I’m pretty sure eyes evolved more than once. In my world, I mean.”
Orochimaru leaned back in his seat, eyeing her indulgently, a smile tugging at his lips. “The leading theory is that the symbiont started as a flesh-eating parasite that attacked proto-eyes in vertebrates, and then evolved with us until it simply replaced our eyes. Most babies are born with soft tissue in their sockets, to feed potential symbionts, and some think that growth is left over from millions of years ago when our ancestors had their own eyes.”
“Oh,” Tori said, unsure how to respond to that. She’d been taught parasitism and mutualism were opposite sides of the same symbiotic spectrum, so moving from one end to the other made sense. “Well, that happens sometimes.”
Orochimaru laughed.
They chatted. Orochimaru was good at answering questions thoroughly and without making Tori feel like she was stupid the way other Oto residents did, and he nodded along to her talking about whatever eyeball-related thing that came to her mind. Red-green colorblindness being a sex-linked trait, for example, was an extremely interesting topic for Orochimaru.
“So do you not have the genes for photoreceptors at all?” Tori asked curiously.
Instead of answering her immediately, Orochimaru had started writing down notes to himself. With the exception of occasionally labeling a tube or sample, Tori had never actually seen him write anything down before, and he scribbled with a sort of fervent focus.
“I’ve never looked,” he said eventually. “There’s evidence for photosensitivity in those without symbionts, but… It would be interesting to use your genome to search for any analogous loci…”
Because the conversation flowed easily, Tori eventually felt bold enough to ask:
“So is this why you can just pass sharingan around like hot potatoes?”
Orochimaru paused in the middle of writing, blinking at her.
“Hot potatoes?”
Tori blushed, and then backpedaled. “I know you… uh, Sasuke is going to get into a fight with Danzo at some point.”
She gestured at her forearm, and Orochimaru let a loud, rasping laugh.
“I don’t think Danzo can see particularly well with those,” he said, eyes mirthful. “But I suppose eye transplants would be quite difficult with a nerve to connect, wouldn’t they?”
Tori nodded. She was pretty sure they weren’t even possible. There were… a lot of problems, there. But if the eyeball was supposed to be an external creature, it had to be easier to pass them around.
“They have quite a high success rate here,” he answered, tone flippant as he played with the pen in his hand. “Unfortunately, an eye transplanted into a non-related host can rarely be coaxed into reproducing.”
“Huh,” Tori answered. “Why?”
Orochimaru’s lips quirked up into a smirk. “Perhaps that can be your next project.”
xXx
It didn’t get to be Tori’s next project, because Oto ended up going up in flames.
She didn’t even have time or energy to think about how everyone in this world was running around with symbiont eyeballs instead of regular eyes until months later, sitting in Sasori’s workshop and carefully stirring some foul-smelling concoction while he excavated someone’s insides so he could hide weapons inside or something.
“You know, you guys should really invent magnetic stir-bars,” Tori said, eyeing the beaker of slowly bubbling sludge and wondering if the fumes could hurt her.
Apparently Sasori was in a bad mood today, because he put the horrifying… scooping tool… down and turned to her fully.
Like carving a pumpkin, Tori thought against her will, eyes fixated on the… organ scooper?
“What stupid thing are you rambling about now?” Sasori asked her, voice harsh. “You’re distracting me. If you make a single mistake with that poison--”
Tori was trying very hard to pay attention to Sasori’s threats and not think about all the horrible squelching noises of the organs she’d removed herself. It was better to listen to Sasori, really. Probably increased her chance of survival, even.
There was movement behind Sasori. Tori squeaked in surprise. Sasori clicked his tongue in annoyance, picked up the organ scooper, and then used it to catch something right out of the air with the ease of a professional lacrosse player.
“Oh, disgusting,” he said, staring down at it in evident annoyance.
Something else plopped to the floor with an audible, vaguely wet thud. It rolled across the concrete floor, and Sasori trapped it against the floor with a firm sandal. Tori leaned over the bench to see what was going on, and saw the transparent ooze of viscera across the cement and gray tentacles trashing against the floor and the sides of Sasori’s sandals.
“Is that an eyeball symbiont?” Tori asked, suddenly excited. She leapt to her feet and came to stand beside him, peering into the shell of the organ scooper.
Sure enough, an eyeball with a halo of tentacles was rolling back and forth, desperately trying to escape.
Holy shit, Tori thought. That was… that was amazing, actually.
“It’s sort of cute,” she said.
Sasori looked at her like she was insane. This was, apparently, such a bizarre statement that he didn’t immediately react to the eyeball finally lurching itself forward and out of the scoop. Tori caught it easily in one hand as it fell.
“Don’t touch it,” Sasori hissed, grabbing her wrist. “Are you insane? It’ll induce your eyes too.”
“...what?” Tori asked, blinking back at him. “Oh, because the tentacles mean it’s trying to have sex?”
She stared down at the thing in her hand. The tentacles wriggled between her fingers. Kinky little bastards, weren’t they?
Sasori was looking at her with… awe wasn’t really the word. More like: What the fuck, I have never seen someone this carelessly insane before, and I am horrified that humanity could reach these depth.
Which was kind of rude, actually, because they lived with Hidan.
“What do you mean by ‘induce’?” Toi asked.
“Do you not know how eyeballs work?” Sasori asked, sounding just shy of hysterical.
Apparently, handling an eyeball symbiont in its sexual reproduction mode could induce a symbiont in a host to also leave the head and revert to its sexual cycle, so they could both run off and hopefully have an eyeball orgy with as many symbionts as possible. Tori guessed that made sense. The symbiont reproduced mainly asexually, but most things did occasionally run off to have sex. That was just life.
Sasori was absolutely disgusted by the entire process. His symbionts were the only living part of him, and he was personally horrified by the idea of them crawling out of his head to make babies.
He also seemed to be viscerally repulsed by the threat of a loose symbiont in someone’s living quarters, not because it might affect his housemates, but because he didn’t like the idea of more tentacled symbionts flopping around.
“Is this like… an ongoing societal problem?” Tori wondered. Did people kill them on sight, or was this considered a beautiful miracle of life?
She didn’t get to find out, because her question triggered a rant from Sasori about how much he hated them, and that they should just stay in people’s heads and look pretty like they were meant to.
“Is it common to leave a dead host like this?” Tori asked when he calmed down. They couldn’t really move on their own unless they went into sex mode, after all…
“Why are you still holding it?” Sasori demanded. His own disgust was the only thing keeping him from prying it out of her hand himself.
“Oh, I don’t have a visual symbiont,” Tori said, blinking at Sasori. “I just grew my own eyes. Uh. Like an octopus.”
Sasori very slowly let go of her wrist. He stared at her, perplexed.
The symbiont in her hand wriggled some more. Her own eyeballs stayed firmly in place.
“...pick up the one on the floor,” Sasori said eventually.
He wanted to keep them. He liked saving his puppet’s original eyes. Usually, when they left the host, he had to kill them and then isolate them for a week to be sure the hormones that could induce his own symbionts dissipated. That meant, once he was able to safely handle them, they were not in pristine condition. This, perhaps, contributed to why he hated them so much. They were frustrating art material.
Tori thought, based on what she’d read about things doctors did, he was being a bit paranoid, the way some people didn’t like touching raw meat.
“You’ll have to kill them and preserve them for me,” Sasori said, having fully accepted that Tori was a weird freak faster than she would have anticipated.
Tori felt bad when she killed them, slipping a scalpel into their backs where Sasori indicated.
“You’ll see more live ones,” Sasori sniffed when she complained. “This happens with about a quarter of my bodies.”
Fascinating, Tori thought. She’d never had one of her failed surgery… patients… do this. Maybe what they did in Oto also killed the symbiont?
“And you don’t use all those bodies for full puppets, right?” Tori asked. “You won’t need every symbiont.”
“You can’t keep it as a pet,” Sasori sneered.
Obviously she didn’t want a pet. She wanted to run some experiments. This was really interesting, after all!
Instead of earnestly explaining this to Sasori, who seemed a bit on edge and likely to yell at her, she went for jokes at other people’s expense. He loved those.
“I want to see if Jashin protects Hidan from them,” Tori told him, and he snorted. “Or see if we can get one to colonize Deidara’s mouth-hand.”
“He will kill you,” Sasori said, not without a hint of bemusement. “You’ll cut off all their tentacles next. I like to use curved scissors…”
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Okay Clove. I've seen a lot of little snippets from Blind Trust and I rock with your writing style a ton. But what's the book actually about?? Something with magic in a contemporary setting ? Hot dogs are somehow involved ??
Geets, it's me, the person who never learned how to properly pitch their own writing! I'll give it a shot anyway. I have a pinned post on my blog that has the fancy synopsis I'll probably put on the back of the book, but I'm fresh from a nap and on my phone and Feeling Frisky so I'll try and take it a different way.
What is Blind Trust about?
Blind Trust is book one of the Songbird Elegies, and it takes place in a contemporary world where magic exists but isn't great. It's not bad in a cool, The Witcher sort of way. Most people only know about magic through The Academy, where anyone can enlist and learn how to tap into the source of magic itself. Which sounds cool until you consider the physical strain of even a minor spell, the fact that major spells can take massive amounts for studying and practice and still aren't that powerful, and how carrying a wand on your person at all times is not easy to do without looking and feeling like a dipshit. Essentially, the average Academic Witch is like an arrogant MFA student or so someone really into craft beer.
But then there is a certain, little-studied medical anomaly that creates birthrights, which are individuals born already tapped into the source of magic by design. They each have a single ability that they can do without a wand (or wand-shaped proxy), but it's nothing innately combative and is mainly used to help interact with society at large. This is because the Birthright Gene is seen exclusively in individuals who are either born with a severe hereditary, genetic, or developmental disability, or will develop one over the course of their life but I'm not supposed to talk about that yet.
Birthrights are often found in a few scattered witch towns, where they use their abilities to focus on social work and community outreach. People also call them genetic witches, but you'd be hard-pressed to get a birthright to call themselves a witch at all. They don't value magic at all in the same way Academics do, and primarily see their "gift" as a chronic illness to manage and accommodate for.
Birthrights and Academics have varying relationships depending on where you are and who you ask but I can't really get into that because in Blind Trust no one knows anything so you don't get to either.
Well, that's not true. There's a mutual understanding of the concept of soul bonds, which are lifelong connections formed between individuals born in the source of magic - though how much people actually retained about this varies. A soul bond is not unlike a karass in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, in that the people involved are cosmically entangled with each other in a very profound way.
They might be born to be companions, family, enemies, or lovers. The last possibility, called a Lover's Knot, is the rarest and is reserved as a way to contain birthrights who would otherwise be capable of reality-shattering degrees of power. Which nobody wants. Especially not a birthright.
Meet Edgar Gallows and Scott Skylark Kaufner. Scott is a birthright from a witch town and Edgar was born into an Academy in Louisiana, despite also being birthright.
At the start of Blind Trust Edgar has escaped his Academy for the time being and has established a ramshackle and pretty lonely life for himself in New Orleans. He never wants to touch a wand for the rest of his life, and his only hope is to be boring and safe and left alone forever.
Meanwhile, Scott has been having a real rough time. He's been wandering the country nonstop for years with an unfathomable cosmic horror feeding on his sanity and gradually eroding reality around him. Birthrights don't use their abilities often, but for some reason Scott can't turn his off, and they've been warped to the degree where he's been forced to manipulate everyone around him. He can't stop, though. The only thing that can make this stop is if he finds the other half of his Lover's Knot, who he now only remembers as a ghostly vision named Eddie.
Scott and Edgar meet in a dirty walk-in of a mid-tier, overpriced bar and restaurant. Stuff changes and continues to change. Magic is involved but it's not really about the magic.
It's asexual and romantic and soft and confused and frightening and frightened and tender and in book two Edgar eats a hot dog for four pages. It's a great book about love and devotion that's sensual but not at all sexual, because the Clove Gardener Pledge is that there is no sex depicted at any point in the series. It's a great series if you're coping with parental neglect and trauma and want to read a depiction of self-love through an unconventional romantic pairing.
Blind Trust. Buy it in June in paperback or ebook, or just ask me for it and I'll probably give it to you.
#writeblr#writing community#writers on tumblr#on writing#authors of tumblr#writing#queer writers#actually writing#blind trust#songbird elegies#aspec#asexual#asexuality#asexual positivity#asexual relationship#self published#indie author#magic system#urban fantasy
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How would you have handled the other miraculous holders?
I would have massively cut them down. The season two lineup was fantastic, though you could get away with two or three more. Eight really is about the max you can hit for a team before you start bloating the characters assuming that you're only dealing with one central group. If you're dealing with lots of side teams, then things get more complex.
There's a concept in writing called "Kill your darlings," which I'm only mentioning so that you have something to Google if you want to know more than what I'm about to tell you. The basic idea is this: to tell a good story, you need to be willing to cut things you like if they're detracting from your overall story.
As a personal example, I really like Juleka and Rose. I think they're cute and I like putting them together as a couple. But narratively speaking? They don't matter. You could cut them from the story and nothing would change because they're just casual friends to Marinette and Marinette really doesn't need more close friends for the stories I want to tell. Add in the fact that Purple Tigress and Pigella have awkward power sets that aren't all that interesting and, yeah, my love for these two does not override the fact that they have no place in the stories I want to tell. So I find ways to mention Juleka and Rose from time to time and I use them in a scene when I can, but most of the time? They're not in my stories because the goal of my stories is usually love square shenanigans and not showing off a cute healthy sapphic couple.
Similarly, the goal of Miraculous is the tales of Ladynette and Chatdrien, so the focus needs to be on them and these extra characters are really not needed. A fact that's super clear because of how underdeveloped the side heroes are. Most of them get a single recruitment episode and that's it. There's no build up to establish them as solid heroes, leading to them eventually being chosen. It's all shoehorned into 20 minutes and then largely ignored after that. I mean, Nino has been Carapace since season 2 and he's in a mere handful of episodes, none of which are all important character moments outside of his initial debut. The only temp heroes with anything interesting going on are Viperion, Queen Bee, and Rena Rouge/Furtive.
If I HAD to include the other holders? Then I would have massively cut back the love square content and come up with ways to power up the butterfly so that the extra heroes felt necessary. I might have even brought in additional forces of evil to battle. I also would have given the various team member clearer roles and given them their miraculous full time because you really do need to make massive changes for the team setup to work.
Team shows are wildly different from dynamic duo setups. Compare Kim Possible to Teen Titans and think about how different the focus is. Kim Possible has two very clear main characters while the supporting cast takes back seats. Teen Titans doesn't have a clear main character. All five Titans are given a chance to shine as the main character shifts from episode to episode and even season to season with each Titan getting a chance to be the center of an ongoing plot. If you want to have a team while keeping Chat Noir and Ladybug at the center of the story, then you need to build that team around them which you really can't do if you have a massive team of 18. A smaller team, though? You can make that work. For example, I still think Chloe's recruitment should have been a chance to give Adrien a character arc around boundaries and trust because it's really hard to jump into parent/child conflicts. Starting with a best friend one with the same vibe is a much easier path.
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wip thing...
of my bg3 avatar hellebore. i also did some casual nude studies of my 3 characters which i'll put under a cut... rather unlike me after all. (so WARNING for abrupt non-sexual full Artistic nudity lol...,,,,) (< won't be making a habit of this)
they mean the world to me
#bg3 spoilers#?? idk. gith look so..Emaciated. And long. i guess we don't eat on the astral plane :) anyway..well..too much to say.....#it is very very very depressing having to live in the Real World after that final playthrough meant so very much to me.#i normally feel Hope & suchlike after finishing a highly immersive emotional game..but it's too hard this time and it hurtsssss lol yippee#i appreciate bg3 very much for being a place where i could access the concept of nudity & such like in a way that finally felt comfortable.#bodies are inherently non-sexual. they just Are a Fact of Life. this game being NORMAL about nudity from the character creation screen#makes it possible for someone like me to actually have a chance at accessing sensuality in a way that feels comfortable from there.#dont feel like putting it into words further. im ace. just very grateful to this game. even despite the horrors i will never ever forget it#augoh..gugf.. want to go back. my friends & love are in there.....i'm supposed to just move on? in the real world??? THIS place???? UHH????#my characters canonically look like that too!! i see them as intersex and not so much trans. They just look that way.#Diversity win!!! the people who enacted horrors upon you and are trying to kill you again respect your pronouns!!!! <3#I FAILED HONOUR MODE IN THE STUPIDEST WAY POSSIBLE..ACCIDENTALLY TOUCHED AN ITEM. MY LOVER TOUCHED SOME BLOOD-TOUCHED RAG ITEM @ THE CRECHE#AND MY PEOPLE MASSACRED US... YOU BELOVED PRAT. OF COURSE IT WOULD BE YOU AND IN THIS WAY#grateful for love triangle chaos...INTENSE EX DRAMA... IT HAD MAJOR REPURCUSSIONS THIS TIME...ohh so very much happened ohh my dear#truly don't know how to face the Real World now for real. I Don't Know. something has snapped. ive realised twt just makes me feel sad lol#if something in my spare time isn't at least half as fun as bg3....like.. it's not good enough. god we only have one wild and precious life#being Online makes me feel a loneliness so wretched and painful and horrible i really don't think this is the answer.#Why did you even start drawing in the first place? Why did you start this?#For real..the need to work this out and decide what on earth i'm going to do now has presented itself. Why try to get better..why be online#someone who has an imagination that can keep them so happy and fulfilled...has no business also feeling a loneliness as profound as this.#why was someone THIS introverted and withdrawn and anxious also cursed with such a restlessness?#What are you going to DO now? because hellebore and their lover are fine....... So what about you...?#hellebore..😭😭 AUUGHH!! I JUST WANT TO GO TO MY BED IN THE INN...PLAY ON MY VIOLIN THAT'S WHAT I'D DO!!!! i'd drink some ALE DAMNIT!!!!!#i was rereading My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness- the only time i've seen this level of emotional isolation depicted-and was grateful.#but then i read her latest book and now she has a debilitating substance abuse situation and it's upsetting.#I hope she finds what she was looking for. I hope we all make it. kind of wild that i dont do such major self-sabotage at this point myself#I truly think anyone who manages to find dear friends and achieve fulfillment and happiness with others outside themselves are amazing.#I see it happen from my tower. i hope we all make it. I hope we can make it through everything to come.#Why did i say all this on drawings of my characters naked. ah who even cares any more......
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kasander + 😴 please!
Thank you ❤️ Sleep questions about D&D elves always lead peculiar places, don't they?
hc + 😴 for a sleep-themed headcanon
Kasander seldom sleeps willingly. Their trance is already haunted by half-alien memories of blood and darkness, disorganized images they struggle to stitch together and match to their origins. It's upsetting even without any supernatural incursion causing more extreme visions, and it makes them fear resting. Sleeping, on the rare experiment trying to avoid the memories, is much worse. They always dream, and they always dream Bhaal's dreams. And it takes such a terribly long time to wake. So they avoid sleeping, and they're thankful not to have a reason to.
However, sleep is the most convenient way for the Emperor to contact them, and the Emperor has a way of pulling them under whenever he pleases. When they first met and the Emperor was still in the form of the Dream Visitor the Emperor offered to soothe their nights from the restless, terrible trance by quieting their dreams- if only they would sleep, of course. Disoriented, still largely amnesiac, and distressed by the visions, Kasander agreed eagerly (there was a lot of agreeing with the Emperor then) and committed themself to the psionic protection out of desperation for any relief from the growing fear there was something wrong with them. It did seem to work- mostly- but when Kas began to break with the Emperor they stopped sleeping nightly as well. By that point they were ready to grapple with the horrors of trance again, as painful and difficult as they were.
#any time something comes up around kasander and sleeping I have this moment of 'do elves sleep in pathfinder'#and you know what? I still don't know the answer. I should. but I don't.#I have become intimately acquainted with trance in D&D thanks to periodically being forced to fact check a bizarre and incorrect belief#that elves have to learn to trance properly and there was a cultural aspect of it. this isn't true and I don't know where I got it from.#anyway do you ever think about how fucking funny it is that trance is genuinely such a deeprooted and unique part of cross setting D&D lore#and so much shit pretends it doesn't exist. I'm guilty too it's the easy way out but god. it's such a simple alien touch#our conception of life is hard to separate from sleep huh#elves sleep an absolutely SILLY amount in bg3 despite there being flavor text and the guy scene acknowledging that they. y'know. don't.#the flavor text takes an especially hardline stance even. very silly. are we just supposed to pretend the sleeping is trance for elves#I'm about to sleep and not trance myself this was not a night of powerful focus for me#sorry you're getting my most scattered and incoherent one of the night :')#emi plays bg3#ask me emithing#ask game#kasander#archduke-enver-gortash#hm. that feels like I'm summoning something. ominous.#anyway if I've just missed some in game explanation for what's going on every time elves appear to be sleeping please lmk
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while like. yeah, I can understand that there are absolutely straight furries out there, het omegaverse always feels like it's like. missing the point of omegaverse to me.
omegaverse feels like it exists as a deliberately queer concept and like. exploration of fucked up mating concepts as well as gender exploration with some kinda kinky animalistic fuckery involved as well as some breeding kink and exploring what it means if gender dynamics and sexuality were like. profoundly *different* from what they are now and we weren't in a society based around "men have gonads which create sperm which are deposited into the female who have gonads which create eggs which receive sperm and are carried in the womb during pregnancy for mating."
like. Het Omegaverse is like. "That but the alphas are more aggressive and the omegas are more submissive and breedable" and it just feels like... I'm not shitting on it entirely because like, if I like the fantasy of being ravished then I'm sure there are girlies out there who want to be ravished but it's like, not subversive. it's just werewolf smut. And half the time they'll like. do *so* much to cut all the furry stuff out of it and just make it toxic psychological dramas with trad-wife fantasies. which like. sure, butter your biscuit to it I guess.
But Queer Omegaverse feels built on "what if gender and sex were independent and society was was built on a foundation of different ideas of what gender meant" and Het Omegaverse feels like "what if gender roles were so fucking traditional and men were so toxic and virile, and women were so dainty and the best ones were fertile, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?" and like. I get that it's a romantic and sexual fantasy, and like. sometimes you just want to fantasize about being wanted. and I don't want to take that away from people or say that wanting to just... daydream about some fantasy of a man being really really attracted to you is bad. because daydreaming about that stuff is fun. That's to point of smut. and like. half of gay omegaverse is literally just "I wanna daydream about being bred by my werewolf boyfriend who is feral with his lust for me, and all my lame domestic skills are actually really attractive to him. please find my submissive nature deeply appealing instead of embarrassing." so like. this *isn't* kink shaming entirely. I fully understand like. why it's attractive and why it exists and why it's written and read and indulged in.
I just think the two are fully different genres in a way that like. Is hard to explain without sounding fucking batshit??? like in general het smut can have breeding kinks and stuff really easily already. Omegaverse was created to restructure the universe around new gender dynamics and politics to create whole new systems and medicines and like sometimes even governments to structure a furry eroticism fake breeding system for queer romances and sexualities and genders. Het romance is often too scared to touch on queer subject matter to blend the gender dynamics, so I fully like. Don't know what is explored besides the main character's bodies???
And I mean I have my issues with queer omegaverse! When they make the dude's asshole a cloaca for example! I hate when that happens! like. just do some alternative genital configurations or something, I don't know. or lean into the fact you obviously made it a cloaca, since no one seems to admit that. honestly part of me just is kinda curious how the whole genital configuration makes sense for a lot of omegaverse since there's a lot of misunderstanding about how genitals work, but like. I can write my own if I'm so concerned. that's fine. I just wanna make a point that like, nobody's perfect. while I admire the concept of queer omegaverse for redefining gender roles, that's not how all queer omegaverse works and I know that. and het omegaverse could be written really really well by a talented author. just 'cause I haven't read it and... admittedly am not hugely interested, doesn't mean it's impossible.
But in general I think the only way to fully make omegaverse work is to embrace the weird shit. change the genitals, change the genders, change how society is built, change how people identify, change how relationships are made, change the power structures. Do weird fucked up shit and embrace that it's weird and fucked up. if you do then it will be more a more compelling story.
if it's just smut feel free to disregard because that's fine sometimes you just want daydream fodder and that's fair, but I think sometimes you just need to like. realize you've created a cloaca and that's weirder than just giving a man a pussy??? or a pussy and a dick? or coming up with something new and majestic? or something. I don't know. or if you're gonna have a fucking cloaca lay some eggs. fuck around with it. that's like, my really specific omegaverse pet peeve. the fucking cloaca.
#omegaverse#to be clear I don't think het omegaverse is bad#it just prompted my weird brain blast#which was like 'you can already breed what's the point???'#which was like a really weird brain blast#i don't know if that's even the point of omegaverse???#don't take any of this too seriously#I mean it's about omegaverse like I really hope you don't take it too seriously#but I also have a habit of taking concepts that are like... clearly absurd and like... trying to make them not absurd#so part of my brain has been trying to worldbuild this into something more hard fantasy#I guess????#and that is probably even more absurd#so I am the fool in this situation here
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It irks me when people shit on Goro and the argument on why they're doing so makes it feel as if we didn't play the same game at all. It's even worse when people shit on him just to start drama because they know he's a relatively popular character.
I honestly don't care if you dislike Goro. It's entirely valid to feel that way towards him. He's an antagonist and it's natural that it'll happen, and even if he wasn't sometimes people just don't vibe with a character and that's completely okay. I have characters I feel that way towards, and some of them are main characters depicted as the "good guys." You're not going to like every character you come across no matter what their status is in the plot.
But here's the thing: you don't have to be an ass about it. There's respectful ways to dislike the character even as you talk about them in public spaces. You can be critical of the character without actively hating on people that do like/enjoy them. Post a thoughtful discussion!! Or better yet if you really hate the character and have nothing to say but you just wanna piss people off? Keep your mouth shut!! Complain in private!! Just don't be an ass by targeting or attacking the people that like the character. It serves no purpose and it doesn't make you look cool.
#; OOC || Bri ♟️#//At first it was kinda funny watching people get so heated over Goro winning polls on Twitter.#//But now it's starting to feel intentional that Goro will win just so people will whine about him and his fans.#//It's fine to be sad that your favorite didn't win these ridiculous fanmade polls.#//They're supposed to be for fun! Win or lose it's still interesting to see what happens.#//I'm just tired of having no say on the fact that my brain hyperfixates on problematic characters like Goro#//only to have to wade through all the hate they get.#//It's even worse when people are using arguments for things that never happened in canon#//and when they start targeting the actual people that enjoy characters like Goro.#//I don't know what's so hard about the concept of if you don't like something just ignore it and move on.#//Let people enjoy what they like and you can go about your merry way of ignoring it so everyone's happy!#//Apologies for my rant. I do have more to say but this is probably already overload for the moment.#//I'm just really tired of people using mischaracterization and a hatred for the character being popular#//as a reason to spread hate. There's really no excuse for it.
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it was too much i had to make my own post
line cook here. ACCURATE
if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.
it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.
The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.
So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.
(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)
Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.
More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.
So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.
all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.
while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays
Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.
Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.
The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.
Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself
you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)
If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.
Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there
Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in
oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?
water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.
Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!
The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.
You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)
THE POINT IS
by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.
For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.
if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.
you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.
See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?
those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...
And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...
Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.
In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.
IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO
open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.
Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.
It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.
but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.
#long post#sorry#i just have a lot of DO PEOPLE UNDERSTAND feelings left over from all my years in restaurants#restaurants#line cook#service industry
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It's me. I'm the cis, heterosexual, aromantic man. I will never marry, I will never be married, I will grow into middle age and elder age and I will die unmarried. I will be forced to support a household of myself on only my wages alone for the rest of my life. I will be asked about women and marriage and children by my family for the rest of my life (or men, the progressive ones might say). I may not ever come out to them. I feel like I burned my coming out on something stupid. I don't want to explain it. I don't want to run them through the definitions and intricacies. I don't want the acceptance without understanding, placating me with ceased questions and poor explanations to other, drunk adults.
I like my hair to be long, I spent a year with it dyed a golden blonde with dark roots because I like the trashy party girl aesthetic. I want to dye it again with pink tips. I like painting my nails, black and blue are my favorite colors. I like wearing chokers. I also like wearing baggy jeans and ratty hoodies. I like having stubble. I like having chest hair. I like having a square jaw and broad shoulders. I wish I had a flatter stomach and a thinner profile frame. I don't know what this makes me, perhaps this is something no more GNC than Machine Gun Kelly. I think about this a lot, how queer my appearance truly is. I should think about it less. I have thought long and hard about if I could be trans or if I could be non-binary or if I could be genderqueer and the conclusion I ultimately came to is that I most enjoy being a man open to whatever self-expression I want.
I don't date, but I've thought about it. I would like to meet people, and I would like to have sex with them. But I don't want to hurt them. I fear if I explain what I am beforehand it'll scare them away. I fear if I explain after they'll feel manipulated or abused. I don't know how many people in the dating scene want what I want. I fear my own lack of experience will make me a bad lay, an embarrassing story to tell to confidants in hindsight. I fear my own virginity, a boundary to those I wish to be like. All of these fears are baseless, as I've not been able to even begin a single relationship in my life. Despite this I still heavily identify with terms like "slut" and "manwhore" and "thot" because my interests lay so deeply within casual sex, sex without great intimacy or emotion. This may be some form of stolen valor. I hope the true sluts are not too mad at me.
I made this blog several years ago because a mutual of mine reblogged memes making fun of aro and ace people, making fun of the concept of aphobia, and in addition well known aphobes. I didn't feel comfortable talking about aro stuff on my main blog, for as little as I talk about it. Living through the ace discourse of the 2016 era has largely caused me to cringe in embarrassment any time I am forced to discuss my orientation with people who aren't aro or ace themselves. I no longer follow this person. I unfollowed many people I was mutuals with from that time, most of them because they posted too often about how much they hated men and I didn't want to see that, some because our interests simply drifted too far apart, only one for explicit aphobia reasons. (Also one because they became a "both sides are bad, any vote is wasted" libertarian, but that's unrelated.)
I guess at this point I don't care deeply about what strangers on the internet think of me. If a trusted friend told me that they don't think I'm truly queer that may hurt. But I am going to continue to use the word for myself. I take up no resources. I go to events that are open to me. If an event was not open to me, I think I'd not want to go anyways. I am not a hypothetical, I am not a strawman, I am a person with lived experiences both within and exterior to the queer community. If you hate me, I will permit you to continue to do so. But ultimately, I am who I am, I cannot change these facts, and I would not choose to do so even if I could.
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a comprehensive list of everything wrong with hazbin hotel.
quick note before i lose myself in madness, my standards for helluvaboss are non existent because its a free show on youtube. also i kinda like helluvaboss and i will indulge in any bias i damn well please.
oh and spoilers. i guess.
the greater narrative of the entire season is "White lady civilize inner city hoodlum". ex: The blind side. rich girl, affluent family yadda yadda.
the story is set up to be like amphibia, owl house, svtfoe, steven universe, that being starting as something episodic then transforming into story driven narrative. why? because we know the benefits and drawbacks, episodic starts allows us to wander the world, it allows us to understand the dynamics, we are not forced to reckon with anything because there is no deadline. characters are allowed to bloom and shine and the audience can actually get attached.
the source material is Vary Clearly formed from remnants of something out of a middle school edgelord narrative. the usage of transformation, the big spooky grins, the "and then i smile as my eyes glow and-"-isms which in most cases i don't mind because in some instances but in a vary Particular case its astoundingly annoying and that annoyance is like a mold, shit spreads quick.
the color Red. as a lover of homestuck cherubs and karkat and aradia, as someone who fucking loves the color red, it is so painful to say but holy shit tone it the fuck down, i know its hell but their are so many other colors that you can use, its everywhere, the streets, the air, the windows, the screens, the characters, i know the pride ring is represented with red but change up the palates every so often for backgrounds
the rush, this ties into the second point made but i think the story itself is rushed. we know everything way to early. i know way to much and it makes it hard to care about anything because im still trying to digest the last chunk of info. "oh ok, so they clear out hell once a year. oh hell has a heaven embassy? ok. oh that adam the angel, i though he wou- oh its every 6 months now. wait the exterminators die a lot? then why is everyone sca- people in hell already have weapons that can kill angels? w- oh we are in heaven now, ok ma- no one in heaven except for the elites know the exterminations occur? how do-" and its that, just this incessant rush to explain everything to you. notably that's just the god damn spark notes, we need to know everything about the characters now, every single bit of their story, their insecurities, what charlie needs to fix, how she can fix them, the major bad guys, everything. you are never allowed to dwell on a character because we need to rush towards something else. it almost feels like this should have been like... season three, it would have been a fantastic season three if you dropped the introductions honestly.
the concept of redemption. for a story of redemption to work you need to look at three things. What is there crime, Do they want to change, What is preventing them from changeing? there is only one single character that has a notable path of redemption, angel dust, but if you look through their story it feels off. What Exactly is he guilty of? he has sex, does drugs and drinks. his apparent nymphomania is tied to his sad backstory as someone forced into the sex industry so how is that their fault? then if you think about it you start to spiral and notice "hey why are most of these people in hell?" like sure some of them may deserve punishment but then you see the fucking dichotomy and its like "I was a inventor in england and died of the fucking plague, i may have made evil little contraption hoohoohoo" vs "I was a cannibal, a full on cannibal, i fucking killed people and ate them and then someone shot me". ONE OF THESE THINGS ARE A LITTLE MORE FUCKING EXTREME. i'm going to go fucking nuts, the thing they went to heaven with when presenting a case to angels on the idea that redemption and becoming a better person is actually real was angel dust not drinking at a party and not having sex with consenting adults and i want to go fucking insane. WHAT IS THE CRIME, WHO IS THROWING THE BOOK, WHAT DOES THE BOOK INTEL, ARE WE ON GOOD PLACE RULES?! half the cast dont Need redemption they need fucking help, and the other half of the cast do need redemption but they do not seek it making the point moot. sir pentious acts like he has the brain of a hyper intelligent toddler tossing about toys, its almost like he did his one bad thing of spying and then got caught, sank his little diddy about forgiveness and second chances and become a null point through out the rest of the series, sure their was Some weight to him sacrificing himself, he was a decently funny character and he had good moments but him popping up in heaven felt like a fore gone conclusion, he didn't deserve to be in hell so why do i care that he is suddenly in heaven? because its working on the concept the good place already made. no one actually deserves eternal punishment they just need help processing what makes them a dick, but instead of looking at all the parts of the afterlife that make it bad, inefficient and then creating and trying ideas to see if it work instead over a few seasons, we crash dick first into all the major plot points in regards to that and say "tada, we fixed it.".
having a sub-plot about sexual assault and its victims then having multiple sexual assault related gag ruins your point.
don't make a bunch of stereotypically jewish characters into cannibals, that was a big thing, really shouldn't have to say it.
if you are going to make a character black, make them black, you can say alastor was black but sweet seren-fucking-dippity that's not a black man.
pot meet kettle but yeah the cursing could be a little less liberal. maybe just blue hair or the pronouns, not both.
there is a very distinctive art deco/jazz aesthetic which normally i love but i feel as though it is not used to its full extent and in some cases really hurts the character design in and of itself.
this is a vary obvious bit but the story is a million times more interested in gay men then it is of lesbians, which culminates in this insane thing where the writers clearly have more talent or perhaps it would be more abt to say practice writing male gay pining then they are with lesbian pining. which i personally think is hilarious because i did not know you could min max fujoshi-ism that hard.
this next section is more to do with each character on a fundamental level, for the sake of brevity whatever there is left, i'm just doing ones with speaking roles.
13. Charlie:
(see what i mean about that red thing?)
as originally stated charlie fits rather comfortably into every white saviour narrative, though that seems to be part of her joke. though i'm not entirely sure how much of a joke it can be when its rewarded and expected to advance the plot.
her character design says nothing, it has the motif of old puppets or dolls, she wears something vaguely similar to service suits, her demonic form is just some extra horns.not to say every character needs to have their life on a clothes rack but some more snake and goat imagery would be nice
its not the chol design of charlie with snake hair, not an actual problem but its a problem to me, damn you @cholvoq for ruining my ability to look at any of the characters without wishing i was seeing your designs instead.
character wise aside from the white savoir bit, i'm having a bit of trouble understanding what the arc of the character is. she is shown to be naive, someone who doesn't understand how the world works but everytime she says something its something astoundingly clear like "people can actually get better". and its treated like someone demanded faygo in every water fountain. is the joke that the world around her to cynical or is so to naive? please pick one or the other.
now if you know me, you know i fucking hate overpowered characters with a blinding passion, one that would set alit the god damn abyss but in this one special instance, i feel like its warranted, she's the direct descendant of fucking God, she can swing her weight around a little, i mean god damn. she in so many instances looks like shes cowering so often, why would the daughter of lucifer get backed down by some rando pimp? why wasn't she the one to fight adam? sure you can say she is young but how young? her parents were there since pre-abrahamic times, most of the characters showed up in hell in the 1900s, some of them showed up in the 1600s, how old is charlie??? how long does it take for her to learn how to be strong? The story does not suffer if charlie is strong and knows she is strong. it can easily be a case of "i don't believe in violence to a weird degree". fit it into her apparent naivety about the world to believe that violence is never the answer even when dealing with a being that is unilaterally horrible and abusive and monstrous.
she ga- no im kidding, i do think her romance was waysided a bit, it would have been fine to have more scenes of them togather and in love you know?
14. Vaggie
why did you name the lesbian vaggie...? Don't do that maybe?
I like how her design is almost moth like but again i feel as though you could have amped that up.
she feels as though someone tried to combine undyne and pearl from steven universe, same story beats and design elements. it makes it hard to really distinguish her as a character.
i honestly dont have much to say about her. she is fine.
christ kill me, lets just get the big one out of the way
15. Alastor.
God Damn
where to start.
"alastor is mixed race" mixed with fucking what? concrete? there is not a single black feature on that creature, now im not saying you have to make him a png of louie armstrong but it wouldn't hurt to add a curl to the hair maybe? make it a tiny bit more wavy? Something? a crumb i beg of thee?
his symbolism is all over the god damn place, native american monsters (you know the one), voodoo, radio, puppets, stitches, circuses??? and Tentacles i guess. two of those are from closed religions so if you dumped those you would actually get a more concise character focused on the concept of vox populi as a means of societal control and influence as we see in his first song. but again that gets drowned out repeatedly by all the other random toy box bits shoved into him.
tumblr sexy man bait
he serves no purpose in the story. he does spooky stuff, pretends to do things and then goes back to sitting around looking spooky. i understand that his motif is supposed to be aloof mastermind but maybe have him do more mastermindy things? if you remove most of alastors scenes, bar the songs, it doesn't change all to much. husk and nifity can still be at the hotel, they could be looking for outs in their contracts the same as angel dust. hell it even helps with the one scene where he dose some spooky shit, asking charlie for a favor in exchange for his help in the fight with the angels instead of asking him about angel weapons which should have remained a strictly vaggie scene.
his presence in a way delegitimize the story, as I noted in in the section regarding redemption, the three parts are "what is the crime, do they want to change, what is stopping them?" and alastor kinda just spits in the face of that. he is a serial killer cannibal that has no qualms about how evil he is and apparently must continue being evil due to being under the control under someone legitimately called the Root Of All Evil. show him take a slight interest in the idea that maybe shit for him could be better, make him Want Change at the bare fucking minimum or dont have him at the hotel.
his stupid little fucking horns, big shot the troll liker wants characters to have big fucking horns, make them noticeable or dont have them.
he looks more like a dog boy, which could have been an interesting thing with the collar motif but fuck me i guess.
personal pet peeve but i fucking hate characters that have a million plus powers, stick to a set number, be creative.
im getting more petty as i go on so last point: he could have been in less episodes, he didn't need to be in dad beat dad, that should have been just a lucifer and charlie episode. inverse the red and black and i think he would be fucking great color wise, his body type is the same as ten different characters, he isnt radio enough, aside from the voice and and staff if you told me he was the fucking Cat Demon i would have been just as convinced.
16. Angel Dust
what the fuck, gay spider? its hard to actully articulate all the thoughts i have on angel dust, not in the sense that he is a deeply thought provoking character but in the fact that there is not much meat on the bones.
all around i think angel dust is kinda middling. he has a decent enough romance with husk, he has a decent enough story line that revolves around battling addiction and removing yourself from an abuser (which the story tries to brand as "Redemption???")
I dont like that most of his jokes would qualify as sexual harassment, i don't mind him being sexual as a character but continuing on when clearly someone doesn't like the jokes hurts the character.
not a critique but he is pink, which honestly ill fucking take at point, as long as its not more fucking red.
i think his design is an improvement over some of the old vivzie designs but it feels like it could have done with going a few more rounds of design changes.
same thing with alastor, charlie and vaggie, there is not enough of the animal that they are supposed to be. You could have told me angel dust was a fucking bee or something and i would have had to believe you. nothing about angel dust initially says spider, hell he dosent even have enough limps to be a fucking spider.
17. Carmilla carmine
are... are you supposed to be a rabbit...?
Big Yoai Hands
ballet fighting style, could have been cool, wish she fought more like sanji or chun li.
A single mom that works to hard, who loves her kids and never stops-
her song was decent, not great, decent. it feels as though the actress has experience singing but not in the way they tried to make her sing during her two songs. they have a obvious mexican influence, honestly just let her sing in spanish in the english dub. go listen to the spanish dub, "out for love" sounds great in spanish.
i wish i had more thoughts on them, fucking rip.
18. cherri bomb
that's not a punk aesthetic that's 2010s alt
decent character, they showed up once or twice i guess, no real thoughts.
19. egg boiz
absolutely perfect, i have not notes on them, these are perfect creatures.
20. Emily
im so fucking happy to see a singular blue character
does the naive dreamer bit better then charlie
We really shouldnt have seen her until the end of season two or middle of three.
good contrast with the other angels on screen.
Wait she is supposed to be black??? Where???
21. Husk
keith david you absolute delight, Why on gods green earth did they only give you one singing part?
one of the few charecters where its clear husk is a cat, i do like the kinda... marquee design, he is a magic cat, thats neat. i still think you can toss the wings and eyebrows and still have just as good of a charecter.
has a deeply intresting story of someone who died as a nobody, became the fat cat of hell and then was forced back to the bottom by their own vices, not used at fucking all.
huge potential, little pay off.
22. lillith
I know nothing about her except she ditched her kid and husband to vacation in heaven and i think thats kinda funny.
alot of werid things floating around her, again she shouldnt have been shown in the show at all until next season.
23. lucifer morningstar
no notes, funniest charecter, did a song based on friend like me.
few notes: i do like the idea that the immortal symbol of pride is a constant emotional wreckage constantly seeking approval through grand showmanship and manic energy that threatens to take over anything they touch.
would have liked more snake stuff on him, maybe some more goat things like horns.
that is such a stupid fucking staff lmao.
24. Adam.
alex brightman you absolute fucking delight, you should have had more songs.
I wish his design was more focused on the idea of him being a glam rock wash up
I fucking hate his mask
We shouldn't have met him until the end of the season.
25. Niffty
again she is supposed to be a bug or cockroach but nothing about her points to that.
token straight
keeps rocketing back and fourth between sexulization and infantilization
you had kimiko glenn but didnt give her a single fucking song?
26. Sir Pentious
the secret season one redeemed.
the pilot version of him felt more like someone that could do a season one redemption arc, a megalomaniac constantly attempting territory grabs, there is something you can work with, actual character flaws to work through.
essentially a child after the first episode.
actually a snake which i appreciate.
no where near steampunky enough.
27. the villians of the show dont make much sense, each one feels like they should be season long deals on their own instead of a bunch of team rocket esque idiots that show up on occasion, do a bad thing and then leave.
28. Valentino
gOD THERE IS SO MUCH RED
only a moth some of the time.
sucks as a villain, maybe they need more screen time to show why they suck in a more substantial way aside from being told that he sucks.
it is interesting that angel dust is only under his magical control when in the studio, it shows that angel dust has to make a conscious choice to return, which in turn can be made to show how abusers can draw back their victims. I do not think it was done well in this circumstance as it shows him to be cartoonishly evil, constantly flying back and fourth between sweet and utter psycho, there is no actual reason for angel dust to ever actually go back to the studio, he just does so every so often.
29. Vox
legit who cares? the only thing about him that is in any way substantial is all the dope ass fan art we get.
propaganda machine angle that is not explored at all, just hinted at. no actual barring on the story whatsoever.
why didn't he try to do the same shit as alastor by the way? he knows its bad if alastor gets in good with charlie so shouldn't it be a ass kissing race?
same body shape as literally every other male character.
tumblr sexy man version of pyrocynicals fursona.
30. Valvette
the actual poster child of the shows huge problem of "Show me, don't tell me".
apparently the glue that holds the villains together. never shown.
apparently the one that makes the love potions that valentino is famous for. had to learn about that in the fuckin wiki trivias
we know so much about her from things outside of the show.
was there to call carmilla a coward, that's her plot contribution. she shows up every now and again but its never anything substantial and serves to more around take up run time for people We Don't Need To Know Yet.
im not trying to be mean, animation is animation, we need smaller studios to have success in the industry so that other indie studios can have that success, felling a tree makes it easier for others to follow. showing that its possible to number brain rot exacs helps all animators.
but this show has so much bullshit attached to it, it has so much fucking potential that it fries my brain with unyielding frustration.
this took a bit to write, im tired, thanks for reading.
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been seeing some stuff on blue eye samurai and big yikes to nearly everyone pushing extremely western ideals onto these characters.
this is early edo period. 1600s. the japan you know now did not exist yet.
yall. please. there was NO concept of sexuality in pre-modern japan. that came with both the influx of christianity and western influence very very late in history. like, mid-1800s. (yes, there was christianity pre-1800s but it was not a widespread idea yet and wouldn't be until about the 1800s since, y'know, missionaries were routinely murdered before then)
"so and so is either bi and hasn't figured it out yet or..." no. that isn't how it worked then. nobody gave a shit what was between your legs. anyone could be attracted to anyone else. it was a little more common for male homosexual relationships to be between an adult and younger male - like many other places around the world - but two adult men could bang and love each other just as easily. relationships between women were quite common - especially since so many men were often away at war. there's tons of pornographic prints from the time depicting all manner of fun queer relationships. sex itself had absolutely no moral assignment to it. good sex was good health. it didn't matter who with. (well, social class/caste mattered more than anything else tbh but that didn't stop upper and lower class from fucking.)
that isn't to say people didn't have preferences. of course they did. that is human nature. preferences arose more from physical appearance, caste, and circumstances with gender being about the last thing one would look for in a partner - romantic, casual, or otherwise. the only role in sex where gender actually mattered was for procreation.
there would be no queer awakening moment, no sudden switch flipped, no stigma to have internal conflicts about because it simply did not exist as a concept whatsoever. you were either attracted to a person or you weren't, it was that simple. gender played no role when it came to sex and sexual attraction. the japanese were lightyears ahead of western cultures in this particular area - like most cultures were before christianity came in and ruined everything with its backwards morals and strict good/evil dichotomy.
yall have got to realize queer rep will not and should not always adhere by modern western standards.
there was no straight, gay, bi, or anything else of the sort. the closest they ever got was referring to roles during sex - as in who is giving and who is receiving.
i know this is mostly a made up story but it is still set within a very specific time period and culture, which should be honored and respected by not making it fit into our box. tons of research went into making this show historically accurate (albeit with some discrepancies but tbh they aren't really that huge) right down to the calligraphy writing. please please please don't whitewash the culture from these characters.
i say this mainly because without this knowledge, so many of you are going to build these characters up on a foundation they aren't meant to be on and then you'll rage about queerbaiting and bad queer rep if it isn't somehow super explicitly stated, if it doesn't match your very modern, very western ideal of what queer looks like. don't try to force this plot and narrative and characters into something they canonically and historically aren't. headcanons are a thing, AUs are a thing, fanfiction is a thing - leave your western thinking for those and let these characters simply exist as they should otherwise. this is one of those times where the queerness really does not need to be examined at all beyond what we get.
i know it can be hard to wrap your head around - sexuality is such a huge part of our identity in the western world and has slowly started to spread amongst other parts of the world in importance. but just keep in mind with these particular characters, that concept would be so very alien to them.
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With moshang I think I'm equally fond of the possibilities/concepts where either Shang Qinghua is ludicrously attractive to demons in a broad sense (but doesn't realize it), or, where Shang Qinghua is just some weird little gremlin and everyone else cannot wrap their head around why THE Mobei Jun is so smug about seducing this man.
Or a combination, where no demon in their right mind would ordinarily look at Shang Qinghua and perceive a sex icon, but because such a high-ranking demon has clearly done so, they go "well there must be SOMETHING going on there" and then look closer and before they know it they're on the slippery slope to being horny about a guy who could help file their taxes or arrange to have their clan base's faulty plumbing fixed.
Basically it's all good. Demons en mass going "yeah yeah big scary dudes who punch good are a dime a fucking dozen around here, but do you know how hot someone who can skillfully use an abacus is?" vs demons going "the ice king is a respectable ruler but he has garbage taste in men, we all just smile and politely nod while he insists the weird rat guy he fixated on as a teenager is a catch" vs demons going "I really don't see the appeal -- wait he did what? he killed how many guys at once with 1 trick? he betrayed WHOMST? and lived?! and he knows how to get my door to stop making horrible squeaky noises?! okay yeah figures the king would marry him" but every option is a winner.
I'm also a big fan of both Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua being not very attractive to demons in general, but it also being really common for demons to get super weird about first crushes and fixate hard on them, so in that sense they are completely normal choices for a couple of high-level demons to marry. Like the demon populace can appreciate the emperor actually landing his hot teacher and the king successfully marrying his teenage sweetheart. It's an idealized fantasy in terms of the scenarios, even if the actual guys are just weird humans. Nearly every average demon has lifelong daydreams about successfully seducing their first crush, so regardless of who those crushes turned out to be it's still a power move for LBH and MBJ to actually succeed.
Bonus if the fact that both SQQ and SQH are peak lords from the same sect leads to a bunch of demon kids developing crushes on the other remaining, unattached peak lords, and chaos ensuing. Especially for Liu Qingge. I think it would be funny for him to gain a flock of teenage demons with crushes, whom he keeps trying to fight off, only to discover that beating them up does NOT discourage them at all (actually makes the crushes worse). Or Yue Qingyuan getting mobbed like he's a pop star any time he makes a diplomatic visit to the demon realms. Sha Hualing deciding that she's just waiting for Liu Mingyan to become a peak lord before they make things official, since That's Obviously How It's Done, or Qi Qingqi doing a head count one day and realizing she suddenly has a bunch of unfamiliar "guest" disciples who sigh at her a lot and have funny-colored eyes...
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Thinking ab Yan!Dr. Ratio in arranged marriage.. in whichever setting, I dont know
He doesn't like the idea of it at all. He opposes it until he can't. It would have to be a painstakingly limiting situation for him to even marry anyone, especially someone that's arranged.
When it comes to actually talking with him and setting out boundaries – he's not interested at all. He doesn't want to know you, he doesn't care, and he thinks it most likely won't change, and he'll remain uninterested..
If it weren't for the fact he's so damn touch starved.
He finds out by a lazy morning in the kitchen, your hands accidentally brushing each others as both of you carry on your routines in your own world. He doesn't realise ‐its just a brief feeling of nice. And his hand subconsciously tilts a bit to touch yours again, to emptiness. Your hand already moved away. And Aeons, he just can't get the feeling out of his head. He loved that brief moment where you both touched and he hates it.
And neither of you actually realises just how clingy he is, because he builds up to it so slowly. He pulls you along to some of his lectures, and sometimes you protest. He grabs your hand, and secretly relishes just how good the contact feels. He says there's something on your face with an annoyed tone, and brushes it off, his fingers lingering near your lips a little longer than they should. Whenever you walk by him, your scent practically intoxicates him, his head whips up from whichever book he fancied that day just to find the source of the scent, which he knows deep down, very well, it has always been you.
And it infuriates him. You have such a grip on him that it drives him up a wall.
And Aeons, he loves the feeling so so much.
He forces you to take a bath with him, telling you to keep the bathrobe on if you want to but it is a must that you join him. He tells you to move closer with a stern voice, impatience bubbling inside of him, all covered up with his signature scowl. The water sloshes as you move and his hand almost eagerly snakes around your waist, holding you snug against him. He fills the noise by asking you all sorts of things, calling you an idiot, and going on a ramble about some or the other complicated topic, trying so hard to not just hold you and bite into your shoulder, arm, neck, wherever his eyes can see your skin. You're practically driving him feral.
Oh dear, he swears he doesn't care about you. He cares even less about your personal life and whatever daily affairs you carry on. It's none of his business and he doesn't want it. But seeing you talk and become so chummy with another man boils a kind of anger he's never experienced before. As if to prove him wrong, Veritas tells you to sleep beside him at night, not answering your "why"s and shutting you up in an instant with something or the other. The summer heat is bad, but it's even worse with Veritas practically sticking himself to you, the direct skin-to-skin contact creating an absurd amount of sweat and humidity under the covers. His arms just tighten their grip around you if you ask him to get off. He won't. He needs to prove to himself, that bumbling buffoon won't ever get as close to you as he can. He will make sure of it.
And suddenly, he starts presenting just how possessive he is behind doors. He always keeps an eye on what you're up to from behind you, telling you to stop overthinking and to just come to him, that it'll take you months to understand this concept, and to just let him help you instead. Who else would tolerate you as well as him? Just let his hand keep it's deathly grip on your thigh, or arm, maybe even your waist. Its a fair exchange, and he's being generous, when it really comes down to it. Ugh, you're testing his patience too much. Just.. let him shut you up with a harsh kiss, don't ask, and let him continue. Keep listening, or he'll test you, and he won't go easy on you if you get those questions wrong. He has a lot of pent up frustration about you, anyway. You'll only give him a reason to take it out on you.
Don't bother going outside. Just invite your friends here, instead. You'll waste more than half your break-time just travelling alone. Maybe your idiot friends can join in on the study sessions, so Veritas knows what kind of people you enjoy surrounding yourself with. Of course, he isn't amused at all. Idiots, the lot of them. Is this who entertains you? He scoffs. Perhaps letting you talk to them in the first place was a mistake. Yes, of course.. just talk to him, instead. He's much better than them. You'll only waste your time around them.
#moonink#hsr#honkai star rail#hsr ratio#hsr veritas#honkai star rail dr ratio#hsr dr ratio#yandere hsr x reader#hsr x gender neutral reader#hsr x you#hsr x y/n#hsr x reader#yandere hsr sunday#yandere hsr x you#yandere hsr#yandere honkai star rail x reader#yandere honkai star rail#yandere dr ratio#yandere veritas ratio#honkai star rail x reader#honkai star rail x gender neutral reader#honkai star rail x you
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how to actually grow in 2024
introduction:
hey loves! to keep it short i don't like new years resolution's at all. this time each year all these adults talk about how this is the year they're going to lose weight or be more active, and it rarely ever works. most people fail their new year's resolutions because the concept in itself is flawed. but anyways, i know that a lot of people find them fun, so i'll give some tips on how to actually improve this year :)
why do resolutions fail?
theyre hard to measure. when people make their resolutions to 'eat healthier' or 'exercise more' it's not something you can really measure because it's not specific.
goals vs. habits:
how to grow:
create goals that're attainable and measureable. i like to avoid goals that're like "i want to workout everyday for 30 minutes", because that's more of a habit (working out daily) and also it's pretty hard to accomplish since there might be days when you're sick, or too busy, etc.
example:
instead of "i want to sew more in 2024" -> "i want to sew 10 projects in 2024"
instead of "i want to read more in 2024" -> "i want to read 10 books in 2024"
create a step by step plan. when you set a goal you need to think about HOW you're going to accomplish it. this is where daily habits come in.
alter your daily routine to incorporate new healthy habits. anytime i want to get a new habit i just do it little by little everyday. like read for 10 minutes or meditate for 5.
first of all: don't wait for new year's! i know it just feels good to think that the new year is when you're going to start doing all these things, but really you should be starting before then. don't wait
remember: progress ISNT linear!! you might have a month (or multiple) where you're really in a slump and not doing what you want to be doing, but that doesn't mean that you failed in any way. you don't need to wait for a new year to have a clean slate, just brush yourself off after these mistakes and keep going. progress isn't something that is constant- you have good times and bad times, you just need to keep doing your thing.
sending u all positive energy and all of my love :) -amy <3
#that girl#that girl 2024#that girl 2023#self improvement#pink pilates princess#healthy habits#queenofcoquette
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