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rene-spade · 4 months

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my man isn’t creepy! i | f1 grid

growing up leclerc au !

fem! leclerc! reader x f1 grid, leclerc family

part i: carlos sainz, daniel ricciardo, oscar piastri, pierre gasly & kika gomes

synopsis. when the youngest leclerc finds her partners’ ‘shrine’ of her, but she’s a leclerc so the red flags aren’t all that red

WARNING(s); i like em crazy y’all, obsessive/possessive behavior, implied stalking/shrines, unhealthy relationship dynamics, sexual implications but no smut

carlos sainz.

“What is it?” You asked, head tilted to the side as you look up at your boyfriend. The Spaniard melted, muttering a curse to himself and running his hands through his thick hair. He felt hot, nervous for what the outcome of this discussion could be.

“Dios mío, ángel, it’s— it is not what you think— nothing bad. I am just embarrassed is all.” He reassured, big hands gripping at your shoulders. But he knew it was a bit bad, even his enabling family members were worried he’d freak you out if you saw. His movements were made to comfort you, but you could tell they were more self-soothing. Arthur had a similar habit whenever you got upset with him, too.

You only frowned, but it fueled Carlos’ panic.

“Mi amor, I will do whatever you ask-! You know this. I will let you in when it’s cleaned, I swear it.” He pulled you into his chest, arms fully embracing you. But you squirmed out of his hold, making him respond with an unhappy attempt to coo you back into comfort.

“You’re hiding something in there, Carlos. This is the first time I’m staying with you in your home since we started dating, let me see.” And at the sight of your big, beautiful, angry eyes, how could he refuse an Angel? With a twitch of his fingers, Carlos unlocked the door without any movement to push it open.

With a short huff, you pushed yourself through the door, only pausing at seeing at the sheer amount of merchandise that covered every surface. It was all you-themed, from posters and cut-outs, down to a body-pillow and even an outfit you’d only worn once for a runway show. There was a glass shelf with your old perfumes, newer ones too, and photos everywhere.

“Carlos….” You began, covering your mouth with your fingers and stepping further in.

“I know—! But I liked you so much before we started seeing each other and I- I am just a passionate man is all, my whole family says so—!” You cut off his red-faced rambling with a beaming grin.

“Ouah! I didn’t know you were a super fan before we met!” You giggled, mumbling to yourself in French about the various things he’d collected. “maybe you are a bit extreme, but it’s kind of cute, no?”

“¿En serio? Sí, mi perla!” He breathed shakily before grinning, “I should have known you’d understand! Mis hermanas se burlaron de mí, ¿sabes? But it was all silly…” (You’re serious? Yes, my pearl! My sisters teased me, you know?)

“What are you saying? Your sisters… something? I’m still learning, mon chéri.” You pout at him, in a much better mood now that you knew what your boyfriend was hiding behind the door he seemed so desperate to keep you away from.

He shook his head, hair messy after having run his fingers through it many times due to stress, “We should have dinner with them tonight while we’re still in Spain, I said. Let’s go back downstairs?”

“Why? Got anything weird?”

“Don’t say things like that, amor!”

♤ ♤ ♤

daniel ricciardo.

“Danny…?”

“Shit-!” He jumped out of surprise, dropping the box he was reaching from the top shelf of the closet.

“Oh, I’m sorry, mon soleil!” You squeaked, jumping back as well. You hadn’t meant to scare him, but it wasn’t your fault he was so focused in the dead of night. You were just curious is all. The box he dropped was was rectangular in shape, but easily bigger than a shoebox. You shot him a sleepy grin, “What do you have there?”

He sighed, shaking his head, “Why are you up, sleepy girl? Get back to bed, I’ll be right there. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“I’m up because you’re up.” You wrinkled your nose, inching closer to him with a small blanket in your arms. You tried to get a glimpse of what fell out of the box, but Daniel wrapped himself around you so you couldn’t see. He wrestled the blanket from your fingers, careful not to be rough with long nails, and threw it over your head with smile.

As you wrestled, your boyfriend only laughed and placed kisses on any part of you he could without being hit by your flying limbs, “Pretty things like you should be asleep. Your brothers would kill me if they knew I disturbed your beauty rest.”

“Are you trying to hide something from me?” You pulled the blanket off your head, hair a mess.

Daniel froze, jaw clenching as he tried to hold a toothy smile. But he didn’t have it in him to lie to you. The moment was completely still, before you finally broke eye contact and crept passed him to see the mess on the floor. You could hear Danny gulp as you plucked the first item from the ground; a pretty, navy blue set of lacy underwear. Yours, yes. But from ages ago, you swore you lost them. Then there were a few pieces of jewelry, a lipstick tube, a silk scrunchie, a press-on nail, a red heel, and two pieces of now-hardened chewing gum. All yours from various points of this past year.

“Daniel,” no, not the first name, he begged internally, squeezing his eyes shut, deciding to just wait for the inevitable disgust and rejection. You never called him by his full first name, only sweet ‘danny’s his way, sometimes ‘mon soleil’ or ‘sunshine’.

“You know you can just ask for my things, yes? You don’t have to take.” You were looking right up at him, navy colored panties still in your hand like you didn’t even mind that he took them. His reasoning couldn’t have been pure, you know that.

You hummed, pulling at his fingers so you can shove the underwear into his balled up fist, “lá.”

“Perfect girl.” He muttered, pulling you back into him and dragging you to bed, “give me the pair you have on then, yeah?”

♤ ♤ ♤

max verstappen.

It wasn’t always like this with you— you used to be just Charles “track terror” Leclerc’s pretty little sister, a little girl. But now it was years later and you’ve become something perfect and irresistible— something he can’t live without. He knows he’d resorted to some immoral, if not a little creepy, behaviors, but it’s not like he’s one of those guys that would ever hurt you. No, you’re a deity to him. He told his sister about his feelings at one point (even thought about showing her the shrine), but she told him— “This is all because you watched You!” The Netflix show that follows a stalker.

So he took down the shrine— moving most of it into his bedside drawer and the rest under his bed. But he realized he didn’t think it all the way through when he had you in his room for the first time; all pretty and perfect and curious.

“Good race, Maxie.” You hopped back onto the bed, your hair bouncing as you landed, “You’re so tense and for what, huh?”

Max had just a little bit of shame about the whole thing, but maybe not too much. I mean, his body definitely felt some kind of physical guilt or something if you’re judging him by the shaking and sweating— but his mind was happy. You were here with him in his home. In fact, the physical reaction might just be from seeing you curled up in his bed. But you’re close to finding out how… intense he was. (As his mother would say.)

“Sorry, lief, I’m just tired and you’re distracting me by being cute.” He smiled down at you as he began to change, “you need a shirt to wear?”

“Yes, s'il te plaît. Hey, can I put my bracelets in here—? oh!” He’d barely turned his back for a second, just long enough to remove his shirt, but that’s all it took for you to pull the drawer open and see the copious amount of photos of you (some edited to have him in them) and unsent love letters.

“It’s not a shrine— I’m not a creep! It’s just some things I made back before we got together—! You weren’t supposed to see them!” He was trying to shove some of the papers back in, but you were already skimming one of the letters.

“Mijn hart,” he winced at seeing the one you had— one of the more unhinged ones. The worst of it was in Dutch, so that worked out for him at least.

“Oh c’mon, Maxie! It’s kind of sweet! You had such a big crush on me! It’s a little hot, even.”

He grew even more red and fidgety at that, “Shit.”

You giggled at the words you could understand before he wrestled the page out of your grip. You grabbed him and pressed a kiss to his cheek before he could stray too far.

“From Max Verstappen-Leclerc, hm?”

♤ ♤ ♤

oscar piastri.

“Can’t I just grab a hoodie, Osc?” You questioned as he held you in place on the counter, from his spot between your legs, still in his race suit.

“You don’t need one, Lovey, it’s hot.” He pressed himself into you so he could feel you breathe better. You’d asked for a jacket the moment you’d entered his freezing trailer just after the race. He saw you go for the closet and quickly redirected you onto the counter.

“Non, you’re hot because you just raced in a little car for hours and now you’re all over me. I am normal temperature.”

“Cold?”

“Yes.”

“Then get closer, I’m hot.”

You huff obnoxiously like the pretty spoiled girl you are and Oscar can feel the rush of serotonin he got just from the sound. He knew this is the part where you’d get cute and pretend to pick a fight, his sweet thing. But bad timing— he’s desperate to hide his secret now.

“I can’t get any closer to you if I trieddd. What? You have a girl hiding in that closet? Hm?” He scoffed into your shoulder, but stiffened, knowing just what was behind that door.

You gasped dramatically, likely playing it up to get what you wanted (a tactic you used with your brothers, Oscar noticed), “You do! Irréelle!”

“I don’t!” His face shot up from your shoulder, brows furrowed, but he didn’t let you go, “You know I don’t like any other girls!”

“Then you need to show me so I can be sure! And I’m still cold.” You crossed your arms and pulled your knees together to get him to back up.

“I can’t.” He choked out. “There’s— it’s just— I have this thing—”

You hopped down and booked it across the trailer before he could reach out and stop you, yanking the door open to see what your new boyfriend was hiding.

You breathed out a dramatic sigh of relief at the sight, “Goodness, Osc.” Rather than finding a person, you instead found some sort of… collection? Collage of yourself and your things? Photos mostly, magazines, and lots of hearts drawn on articles about you.

Oscar grabbed you by the shoulders and quickly spun you around into him, slamming the door, “You saw?”

Looking up at him with big eyes, you nodded, “Yeah, why? You really like me that much?”

“What? Yes— yeah I do. You—? Okay.”

♤ ♤ ♤

pierre gasly. | kika gomes.

“I’m prepared to blame you for this if Charles finds it.” Pierre breathed, looking at the start of his girlfriend’s collection of your things. Kika scoffed, a smile playing at her lips as she re-organizes your makeup. Mostly lip balms, you’d let her borrow some of your things, not knowing she wasn’t going to give any of it back. Kika even managed to get a few skirts from you as well. The small framed photo of you sitting in her vanity was just a personal touch.

Pierre would be lying if he said he wasn’t impressed, but he could say he wasn’t surprised. He and Kika were a good couple, a good duo in general, but especially when it came to drawing you in. Because Pierre was such a good friend to Charles, it came pretty easy; Charles was easier on him around you. Unfortunately, that grace didn’t extend to Kika just because they were dating. Charles had something of a sixth sense for when pretty girls liked his pretty sister; so he was on to Kika. Where at the beginning it was nothing to get you alone with them, it was now next to impossible.

“Pierre? Kika? Are you home?” Wow it’s like they could hear your pretty voice— oh wait they gave you a key. To their apartment. In Monaco, where you live and you can really just waltz in and see all of the things they took (—yes they, Pierre is a thief too—)

Like two naughty school children, the couple shot up to cover what they’d done before you could reach their bedroom. This was their fault naturally, none of yours at all, they were the ones who encouraged you to come over whenever physically possible.

“Grab everything and I’ll distract her!” Kika whispered, rushing to slip out of the room.

Before the ‘not fair-’ could slip from his lips, his girlfriend was off to catch you, brushing passed him and leaving the door cracked. He could hear your surprised greeting, a cute squeak escaping you, before Kika saying something like ‘Oh, Pierre is busy now’, then silence. Pulling the handle back just an inch, he peaked outside to see Kika’s lips not even a centimeter from your own, her hands gripping your jacket for dear life.

“Oh, pretty girls, ce n'est tout simplement pas juste.” Slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it. Your eyes shot to his, but Kika’s remained trained on your face. After just a second, your gaze drifted to Kika’s vanity behind him.

The couple froze, you saw. Pierre pulled the door shut behind him as Kika’s mouth opened to form words.

“Oi! Get your hands off my little sister, huh? Démon impoli et pratique, seriously.” Charles slipped into the living room from the front hallway, having obviously accompanied his little sister in her visit.

“Non, Charlie, Kika helped me when I almost tripped.” You smiled at your brother, quickly covering for them, “I was just coming to see if I could get my jean skirt back?”

You looked up at her so sweet and she thinks you’re blushing—“Oh.” She squeaked, “yes, no problem. Pierre.”

“I’ll get it for her, mate.”

“surveille ta copine. je ne suis pas aveugle, mate.”

♤ ♤ ♤

Your man (s girlfriend) is definitely creepy, girl.

note; I made kika and pierres a lil longer bc they’re two ppl so yeah ft charles

thinking part ii with lando, mick (ft the schumachers), lewis, lance, alex & lily, george and carmen?

- ren

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myfairkatiecat · 2 months

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why'd you get so mad at that sophie/keefe sibling anon?

hope that doesn't seem rude

I didn’t mean to come off as mad or anything, sorry if the tone didn’t translate right! BUT! I did get a little frustrated, because this is something that people who ship non-canon ships rlly need to figure out.

And hello to you anon, and also to whatever anon send the original ask! Because considering the amount of anti-Sokeefe friends I have in this fandom, you totally might be one of my friends! Want to be clear—this isn’t because I have a problem with you not liking Sokeefe, the problem is with saying she saw him as a sibling in canon when she did NOT see him as a sibling in canon, because that has icky implications.

Since I don’t want to misrepresent anyone’s opinions, here’s the exact message:

Sophie never seemed romantically interested in Keefe, sorry

it was more like a little sister comforting her brother

That’s the part that bothered me, because that implies that in canon, the thoughts sophie has about Keefe seem more like a sister about a brother.

It’s one thing to read Percy Jackson and say, “wow, I just don’t really like a Percabeth ship :/” and that’s totally valid, like, ship whatever you want! Ship Annabeth with Piper if you’d like, or Percy with Jason or whatever!

But it’s another thing to say “Percy always saw Annabeth as a sister!!” 1) that’s a weird thing to say because they’re canonically together and so comparing them to siblings is really icky, and 2) if you actually read the books it’s very clear that he develops romantic feelings for her. Even if it’s not super prevalent in the first few books cause they start out as twelve.

So people who say Sophie never seemed to like Keefe until book 9 sound to me like if someone said Percy never liked Annabeth or considered her romantically until the kiss in battle of the labyrinth. Just because it wasn’t a focus of the narrative doesn’t mean it wasn’t there from the beginning—and it CLEARLY was!

It just sort of feels like a really icky reaction to not liking a ship to say they always acted like siblings when clearly that isn’t canon.

If you don’t like Sokeefe, maybe you can say you would have preferred it if Sophie saw Keefe as a brother. Maybe you can write fanfic where they’re just friends and have more of a sibling type relationship. But that isn’t canon and that’s FINE, you don’t have to be on board with everything in canon, but for the love of God not liking a ship doesn’t mean they were never interested in each other 😭

Especially cause the ask didn’t even say she saw him as a friend, it said she saw him as a sibling??? Hello??? That’s SUCH a weird thing to say about two people who are now canonically dating???

Like it wouldn’t really have bothered me if the anon said “I would have enjoyed kotlc more if Keefe was a brother to Sophie instead of a love interest.” Like, I definitely disagree, but I don’t care that much cause everyone can have their own opinions and enjoy whatever they like about the media or write whatever fanfic bc they don’t think canon did it right! You’re MORE than welcome to believe that Sophie and Keefe would have been a better dynamic IF they were siblings.

But don’t say that IN CANON Sophie treated Keefe like she was his sister, because considering the many specifically romantic thoughts she has regarding him, that is a really weird thing to say because it implies that people think that way about their siblings? And comment internally on how attractive they are? Like maybe even if the anon had used the word “friend” I wouldn’t have been as frustrated, though it’s definitely the case that if we’re looking at canon, Sophie has feelings for Keefe. They’ve kissed. They’re together. That’s canon. If canon isn’t your thing, read fanfic, but don’t outright deny what’s in canon in a way that has weird implications.

It’s almost like saying sophie never had a crush on fitz. It’s slightly different because she acknowledged that one more overtly beyond just commenting on how good he looked or how he made her feel, but it would still really frustrate me if someone said Sophie and Fitz had more of a sibling relationship in canon when clearly they had romantic feelings for each other. So like it has nothing to do even with the fact that I ship Sokeefe, I would get frustrated if it was about Sophitz too because you just can’t say that someone who has very clear romantic thoughts about someone always saw them as a sibling in canon

That has really weird implications??

Anyway. I know im not being super tactful but I do hope that anon sees this so they can understand what the problem was with the ask, which wasn’t that it was anti-Sokeefe. I’m super okay with someone not liking Sokeefe. Literally a bunch of my best friends in this fandom are anti-Sokeefe. One of them might even be the one who sent this ask, in which case, hey friend!! my advice to you is, if you want a sibling dynamic, go write some fanfic! But… don’t imply that “and she had to say, the beachy look really worked for him” is a normal thing to say about your brother, because it seriously is not.

Hope we can all continue to be friends! Again it’s not the anti-Sokeefe that bothers me, it’s the deliberate misrepresentation of canon in a way that has icky implications!!

Whoaaa that was long sorry

TLDR: Sophie has romantic thoughts about Keefe in canon, so saying that in canon they seemed like siblings is weird because that implies people normally have romantic thoughts about their siblings.

Have a great day :)

#I hope we can all still be friends ofc #also anon if you’re reading this don’t take this the wrong way #it was just the wording of the ask #perhaps send a clarifying ask if you understand why the wording was definitely not right?#idk if you were really thinking about it but I definitely saw the ask and was like #you have to be kidding me #kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #keefe sencen #sophie foster #Sokeefe

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lauri-rosehearts · 3 months

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Its been a while since I’ve actually sat down to discuss EAH lore or anything EAH related in general. I got a good amount of promps but right now I wanted to focus on one that was submitted to me by @birdbombs714 regarding my thoughts on Alistair and Lizzie’s relationship

Thank you so much for this idea! And happy birthday! (Edit: Where I live it’s already almost 1am so in my time zone, it’s technically the day after as I’m posting this so I’m a bit late. I’m so Sorry. I meant to post this sooner 😭) Thought I’d dedicate this one to you as a little gift if you will! Hope you enjoy :)

Something I find really interesting regarding Alistair and Lizzie in general is the fact that they’re one of very few “future villain and hero” duos that dont seem to have any sort of tense relationship. On the contrary, all the wonderlandians seem to have been good friends from a very young age. But as the characters destined to be the next Alice and the next Queen of Hearts, its very refreshing seeing these two just being friends with no real hard feelings towards each other. Like it honestly makes me wonder what kind of relationship their moms had.

You know I love going into the parents lore when it can provide an expansion on the children’s lore so lets talk about Alice and the Queen of Hearts real quick, both in the context of EAH and in the Alice in wonderland story. In the context of EAH, I don’t think they were ever super close friends like Alistair and Lizzie, but I do think they had a good deal of respect for each other even before committing to their stories. There never seems to be any implication that Lizzie’s mom hated Alistairs mom, which I actually find quite fitting given their characterization in the original story. What’s interesting about their dynamic in the original Alice in wonderland story is the fact that their dynamic isn’t really influenced by something personal like a good amount of fairytale hero and villain duos (for example: Snow White and the Evil Queen). Instead, it’s influenced by the fact that Alice finds herself in a place where all rules and logic work differently, hence why she runs into so many weird and frustrating misunderstandings with the characters. The Queen of Hearts is a temperamental tyrant whose bad side is very easy to get on given the amount of people she executes for petty reasons. Alice just so happens to especially gets on her bad side for the simple reason that Alice doesn’t know how to navigate the logic of the world shes in, and as a result she accidentally does and says things that go against the logic and customs of wonderland and as a result, especially piss off the Queen.

With that said, lets talk about how this translates over to Lizzie and Alistair. I’ve talked about this in the past, but I wholeheartedly subscribe to the theory that the reason Alistair’s last name is “Wonderland” instead of “Liddel” like Alice in the original story, is because during the Evil Queen’s takeover, Alice probably either disappeared or died (this is also potentially supported by the fact that we see all of the wonderlandians’ parents at some point with the exception of Alice), and so, Alistair was sort of co-parented and raised by all the other wonderlandians parents in Wonderland. And so, they renamed him from “Alistair Liddel” to “Alistair Wonderland” as a sort of tribute to both his mother and the world. We know Alistair canonically grew up in Wonderland unlike his mother, so he’s used to the logic and customs of the place despite the narrative of his story’s legacy saying otherwise. He quite literally grew up around Lizzie and the others and I actually attribute this to Lizzies relationship to her destiny. We know from her bio information that while she wants to follow her destiny, Lizzie wants to be a less villainous, kinder Queen of Hearts than her mom, and even then it’s implied her mom wasn’t actually that bad and became a lot more temperamental as a result of the wonderland curse (hence why I also think in the context of EAH, Alice and the Queen of Hearts didn’t dislike each other that much. ). Because Alistair and her were raised right alongside the other wonderlandians, Lizzie has no reason to dislike Alistair the way the Queen of Hearts does to Alice in the original story. On the contrary, she considers him one of her closest friends. Obviously, she probably has other reasons, but her friendship with Alistair is probably one reason she wants to be more lenient in her future reign.

That analysis aside, I definitely think they’re just friends, nothing romantic. I know some people ship them but I personally prefer Lizzie with Maddie and Kitty over anything. Also this is a 100% on the writers but when compared to Lizzie, Kitty, and Maddie, Alistair and especially Bunny’s characterization suffers pretty greatly, I feel. Mainly because most of their individual screentime is dedicated to their romantic feelings for each other, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the way their relationship is portrayed frustrates me so much so I don’t really pay much attention to it. As a result though, it makes shipping Alistair with anyone else in his friend group also really hard, because when compared to someone like Lizzie who has a lot of development, he doesn’t feel as fleshed out, yknow. This isn’t Alistair slander, its just my personal view. When thinking of the 5 wonderlandians as a group, I think of them as a sort of found family more than anything. And as far as romantic shipping goes, I mainly focus on Lizzie, Kitty, and Maddie as a sort of poly relationship. But anything is valid as long as its not illegal, obviously.

I apologize if this feels really unorganized and convoluted but I had a lot of thoughts and I was trying my best to fit them in this post in a way that felt correlated 😭. But anyway, I don’t talk about Lizzie that often even though shes my favorite wonderland and overall right up there in my top 5 favorite characters in Ever After High so this enabled me to talk about her a pretty good bunch ❤️

#ever after high #eah #lizzie hearts #alistair wonderland #eah wonderlandians #eah analysis #eah theory #eah lore

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tomwambsgans · 4 months

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i'm ngl it's because i recently read fight club, But i'm thinking a lot lately about castration and the true/deepest implications of it irt nero and sporus and tom and greg. obviously we've got tom's line about greg being "castrated on pay" and some pretty solid analysis on that being a matter of tom keeping greg dependent on him, but tbh even with said meta posts...

like, i'm sorry, but it's a weak line. it feels just as strangely on the nose as shiv falling down the stairs, and in fact like a line that exists specifically to match shiv falling. it almost even seems like a last-minute rush to complete Following Up The Nero And Sporus Thing, like they did the first part and managed to get all the way to the last episode before realizing they'd forgotten to do the second thing, so they had to reach for anything they could relate castration to without having to film a new scene. this feels especially evident/likely in the fact that there is NO way greg's salary is actually getting docked to the degree that tom implied. it's markedly disappointing, too, in the way that setting it up with shiv literally falling down stairs had the audience looking forward to how the rest of the overt symbolism would play out. castration on pay was the most mundane and least expected possible conclusion, lol. and not at all on par with the literal fall. like if that is the castration we were actually waiting for the whole time...

it's also all overkill, for that matter, considering that the s3 finale fit "pushed his wife down the stairs and married sporus" thing perfectly fine and a perfect amount of vague. like tom ALREADY betrayed shiv, symbolically "killing" her, and had an ancient-roman-wedding-handshake agreement with greg about his soul. even tom and greg's initial dynamic in the final season often feels like that of a married couple. which begs the question: why have the stuff in s4 on top of that? it may very well be simply one of the many marks of s4's drop in quality, caused by a myriad of irl factors. or it could possibly be on purpose to specifically bring home something else about the nero and sporus story. maybe it's to reinforce the tomshiv divorce and also tom and greg's marriage after all the rapid shifts in dynamic. who knows.

but what i DO know is that i wanna get to the bottom (lol) of the castration symbolism/motif. so i'm gonna go through everything that could possibly inform the audience's interpretation.

i'll start with the least significant, which i believe is the reality of castration in ancient rome and in the circumstances around the irl nero and sporus. part of why this falls on the bottom rung is the fact that historical accounts of nero especially with sporus are hotly contested. another reason is that the story tom tells is one that not only omits many details in a technically misleading/recontextualizing way, but also adds details that are present in no known accounts.

so: WHY was sporus castrated? there are 2 main possibilities/reasons.

to maintain his youthful [and therefore feminine] beauty. the real sporus was most likely around 16 when nero had him castrated. and the practice of castration to preserve youth had precedence. basically, twinks were REALLY in. it's alleged that sporus may have already been more effeminate (and sexually attractive) than average. but it's also said that sporus bore an uncanny resemblance to poppaea, which nero chose him for specifically and wanted to maintain.

in order to marry him with legal/social sanction. ancient roman society, rather than being built upon the heterosexual, was more built upon the Top/generally masculine. Eunuch was a gender class/category essentially equivalent with Woman, which allowed sporus to specifically be nero's wife. this didn't mean that his marriage to sporus was necessarily seen as good and normal, only technically acceptable.

and i have a ways more to go with the analysis but i'm gonna say right here that i do not think the first reason bears any significance to tom and greg. firstly due to that there is no textual evidence that tom wants greg to be explicitly feminine, even compared to himself, and a LOT to the contrary. tom consistently invites greg to join him in performing masculinity and gaining power through it, case in point the "let's fight like chickens" scene that directly follows the nero and sporus story. secondly, sporus's possible resemblance to poppaea does not track to greg and shiv more than incidentally; greg being shiv's cousin doesn't directly earn tom anything. but more importantly, imo, is the fact that what would have made nero want sporus to look like poppaea is in direct contrast with both the story tom tells AND the way their arc plays out.

so NOW, to demonstrate this, let's look at the irl poppaea's death/murder, which happened during her second pregnancy. different historians (even those alive at the time) have different theories for how it went down. who knows how much truth they're based in, bc there's a clear heavy bias against nero, but they're all we have anyway and therefore all tom would have had. here they are:

nero kicked her in the stomach in a fit of rage, while she was fighting with him about how much time he spent at the races (main theory/rumor)

nero kicked her in the stomach in a casual outburst

nero "leapt upon her belly" either accidentally or on purpose

nero poisoned her (uncommon rumor, most likely bs)

she died through no fault of nero's at all, simply bc of complications with her pregnancy (this has the most evidence, and is believed by many modern historians)

you'll notice a complete lack of stairs-related death theories, and in fact a near total lack of Nero Purposefully Murdered Poppaea theories. the general idea is that nero deeply mourned poppaea's death (and was remorseful, if it was his own fault), and proceeded to replace her with sporus, even calling him by her name.

which feels like a good segue into the more significant story of nero and sporus to analyze: the one that TOM told.

Sporus was a young slave boy. He was Nero's favorite. And, uh... you know what Nero did to him? Well, Nero... pushed his wife... down the stairs. And then he had Sporus castrated and he married him instead. And he gave him a ring. And he made him dress up like his dead wife. ...I'd castrate you and marry you in a heartbeat.

without looking into the actual story, this would sound like nero murdering his wife in order to marry sporus. with bringing up sporus first, it even sounds like nero met sporus and started favoring him prior to killing poppaea. which is also overtly analogous to tom and greg's relationship arc.

despite what tom must have read in his book, and what one could very easily imagine him, a Wife Guy, latching onto in that book... tom isn't telling greg about the tragedy of an emperor who accidentally killed his wife and then had to replace her with a young boy. tom literally invents a method of death that there is NO preexisting source for. furthermore he chooses one that does not sound remotely unintentional. at best he keeps in line with themes that suggest a violent miscarriage. but he removes all notions of an accident. he turns it into an unambiguous, purposeful uxorcide.

so, since all notions of trying to keep sporus looking like poppaea are not only unfitting as potential parallels, but also utterly irrelevant to the version of events that tom tells, and since we know tom twists and omits many other details (like what happens just a year into their marriage) anyway... what reasons DOES tom have for bringing up castration in this story? here's the possibilities i can come up with:

to make it sound less overtly romantic through means of the bizarre. classic diversionary tactic. literally without the castration it would sound undeniably like he's just saying "i read about this ancient roman gay marriage. an emperor murdered his wife so that he could marry a boy. i would like to do that with you also :)"

to make it sound less gay, specifically, because of nero's power in the situation. this of course calls back to that second reason for the actual sporus to be castrated. it's not gay if i've made you a eunuch, greg.

to emphasize the cruelty on nero's end. tom often puts himself in the role of a villain, especially irt his behavior with greg. considering also that this whole scene follows tom talking about how he's going to prison (AND that the next time he calls greg sporus it's in the scripts before the diner scene, where he agrees to sacrifice himself and go down for greg), it would make sense for him to buffer this confession with the caveat of what a bad person he is, like express in SOME way how insane his feelings are and how terrible he knows it is that he feels this way about greg. tom is notoriously unable to make normal apologies either, so. it tracks.

i think all of these are true, and i'm sure most would agree. i'm also sure most who've read this far are in full agreement that tom fixated on the story of nero and sporus in particular because it was a gay relationship with just enough ambiguity that he's able to relate to it without panicking. hell, the "he gave him a ring" line alone doesn't even evoke an ancient roman marriage nearly as much as a modern american one. i can't find even any sources that specifically mention a ring from nero to sporus, so i imagine tom invented that as well.

BUT while i'm here i do still want to mention a couple other queer things about nero to drive home that it's not just incidental gayness but overt homosexual desire being portrayed, as well as to emphasize that second reason that the irl nero may have had to castrate sporus:

prior to knowing sporus, nero had a mock-wedding as part of festive role-reversals during saturnalia. in this wedding he took the role of a bride, marrying a different freedman.

this is apocryphal and practically historical fiction, and may also specifically be due to perceived deviancy in nero, but it's old enough (like 13th century) that it's lowkey in the nero "canon" that he had womb envy and was obsessed with being the one to get pregnant

okay so NOW... how does all this translate into the actual events demanded/foreshadowed/symbolized by this story? if pushing shiv down the stairs is the betrayal that keeps her from being able to block the gojo deal (but also shiv is shown to fall down a couple real stairs)... and marrying sporus is making the "deal with the devil" (AND the sticker on the forehead)... then what's the castration? what was the first, less on-the-nose-and-simultaneously-meaningless castration, at least?

my best answer is that it's tom getting greg to drop his brightstar buffalo plans and follow him instead. because if death is just corporate death, then your testicles/manhood is your independence. tom says you're a joke, you can't function on your own, you need me (i need you). he's insecure that greg will leave if he has the option to do so. fair enough.

......and yet i come back to my initial disappointment, because that is barely different than the pay castration. and it's redefining greg's symbolic testes to something that tom gave him in the first place, thus practically retconning the first castration. but if that's it, does shiv's literal fall also replace her kick out of the company? that would sure be stupid! is the point of rehashing the symbolism to be stupid? to have meaningless stuff follow up the more significant events? even if that was the case, wouldn't you at least be doing it to give a visual element to the symbols? if shiv gets actual stairs, WHERE are greg's actual balls? or ANY balls!!!! greg even started wearing grey suits which he hadn't done before (but shiv had), and got a "ring" in his final scene. where's the FUCKING balls, huh?????

(anyway)

occam's razor, i think, may be that the meaninglessness of the castration specifically is the point. tom's insecurity that greg will leave if he has the option to (that greg would never actually want him but only need him), has been present for basically the duration of the show. it's just a character trait, and thus doesn't even work as foreshadowing when that just means "he's gonna keep doing what he's been doing." then, take that second reason--the purely pragmatic, not based in heterosexual-adjacent desire reason--for nero to castrate sporus. aka the only reason that makes sense for the way tom spins the story.

(it's also a motivation that leaves room for not even actually doing it. sporus wasn't going through rapid masculinization or anything. and they only lived another year. you could get away with just claiming that you did it for a while, probably.)

i should say there IS technically a third reason, postulated by modern scholars, for sporus's castration: to intentionally humiliate a potential rival for the throne. imagine if tom had told greg about nero and sporus upon first meeting. obviously things changed very quickly, but if all castration is here is tom keeping greg on a tight leash, then it works. and if the castration is nothing, then greg nearly tanking tom's plan out of naivety can be a nothing version of sporus wanting revenge. and shiv falling down real stairs can, instead of actually intending to set up a meaningful castration, be a red herring in that regard and simply foreshadow her pregnancy.

and that could be it. but... i've got One More Thing. maybe the most significant of all. lightning round:

who or what, in modern day where tom and greg live, actually IS castrated?

animals

specifically dogs

hmmmmmm

and why are DOGS castrated?

to reduce sexual and territorial aggression

reduce other unwanted behaviors

to keep them from breeding

okay. think greg's newfound sexual confidence in s4 and tom's distaste for it. tom's continued anxiety that greg's independence might lead him to leave him. think greg being tom's attack dog and how that nearly backfires at the very end. greg approaching tom at the end like a begging puppy.

think full circle: who's the rescue pup, i'll take care of you, i've got you...

i feel justified in recontextualizing all of this, and i come back to fight club:

Valley of the Dogs. Where even if they don't kill you, if someone loves you enough to take you home, they still castrate you.

#tomgreg #lion in the meadow #with open eyes #meta #mine

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cissyenthusiast010155 · 1 year

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Tattoo’s For Days ~Peggy Carter xFem Reader

I wanted to do like a tattoo admiration kinda thing so I did it with older SHIELD Peggy Carter. I added the tattoos that I had in mind. Hope you like it (:

Link to Part 2 & Part 3

Mommy…Master List

Prompt-List

Warnings: NSFW, implied sex, implied smut, body/age insecurities, age gap (all legal), tattoo kink…?, etc.

Shorter Length

Enjoy (;

You had met Peggy through S.H.I.E.L.D. You both worked there and enjoyed it. You had also been dating for a few months now.

She had been alone for a long time and was also a considerable amount older than you, so you both had decided to take it slower.

Naturally due to your work environment, you dressed professionally and conservatively. You didn’t think anything of it.

However, one Saturday morning, you and Peg had planned a breakfast at your place. Unfortunately, your alarm clock didn’t go off, so you were woken up by the doorbell ringing. You sleepily got up, not thinking that you were in a tank and sweats and went to the door.

You opened it and immediately began to apologize, “I’m so sorry Peg, my alarm just didn’t go off so I haven’t prepared anything. Maybe we could make something together?”

But Peggy didn’t respond.

She was stunned.

You looked at her puzzled.

“Peg? What’s up?”

“I didn’t know you had a tattoo, love.” Peggy said surprised.

“Oh. Ohhhh. Yea… I do. Here, come in.” You said, letting her into your apartment.

But Peggy couldn’t get over the tattoo. She had completely forgotten about breakfast.

Your tank only showed one of your tattoos; your floral on your chest. But Peg couldn’t get over it.

“How many do you have?” She asked curiously.

You chuckled, “A good amount.”

Without thinking of the implication Peggy continued, “Can I see them?”

You looked at here with love yet concern.

“Only if that’s what you want, Peg. I just want you to be sure.”

“Yes.” Peg quickly said, “please.”

You slowly took off your tank, only now realizing that you weren’t wearing a bra.

Peggy blushed at this.

But she truly blushed once she say your rose tattoo in between your breasts.

You swore you caught her lick her lips.

“Can I touch them?” She whispered.

“Sure.” You gently said, trying not to push her.

Peggy came towards you, removing her own coat, and placed a finger on your chest. She ran her finger amazed from your chest floral all the way down to your floral in your cleavage.

“Wanna see more?” You whispered.

Peggy looked up in amazement that you had more tattoos. All she could do was nod.

You turned around and she gasped. You had a large floral going along your spine, but it was partially covered by your pants.

Peg again traced the floral from top to bottom, but stopped at your pants with a whine accidentally escaping her throat.

You chuckled.

“Want me to take them off?” You asked.

“Yes, please.” Peggy choked out.

You then stripped your pants in front of Peg, and elicited another gasp from her when she spotted your thigh floral.

“Oh my…” she whimpered, covering her mouth with her hand to stop any other whimpers from escaping her throat.

You were now stripped down to nothing but your underwear in front of Peggy fucking Carter. And she was goggling at your tattoos.

You couldn’t help yourself anymore. You knew you two had said you’d go slow but what the hell.

Fuck it.

You clashed your lips into Peggy’s. Surprised, Peggy yelped, but it quickly turned into a whimper and then a moan. But she just as quickly pulled away, causing you to whimper.

“Darling… I’m so old…” she insecurely said.

You approached your next response very carefully, “Peg, I only want to do what your comfortable with, but I can tell you want more than just what we have now. Hell, the way you look at me and my tattoos. Just… Peggy, please listen; your not too old, that’s ridiculous. Your beautiful and nothing could make me change my mind.”

Peg looked at you and then to your tattoos and bit her lip.

“Ok.”

“Ok?”

Peggy nodded and came over to you, ghosting her lips over yours but moving them to your ear, “But only if you let me lick, bite, and suck every inch of your body especially your tattoos…”

You looked at her to see eyes full of lust.

You would have never had expected that over some tattoos…

Link to a pt. 2 😉

Link to Part 3 🤭

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thesmutsideblog · 11 months

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When Your Heart Feel Heavy You Drink (Eddie Munson, Ft Steve Harrington)

Content Warnings: Accidental Pregnancy, Implied Plans For Abortion, Explicit Language, Alcohol Use, Drunken Behaviour, Smutty-ish Content But Not Extensive There Would Be More Heavy Smut If I End Up Doing A Second Part. Implications Of Reputation/Bullying. Use Of Nickname "Bunny" Both Derogatorily And Affectionately. Not Beta/Proof Read. AFAB Reader Word Count: 8k+A/N: So, a few things. One, I started writing this at 1am on a random Wednesday because I had a half asleep thought and then could not let it go. Two, I have said, time and time again, there are few tropes I hate more than accidental pregnancy. Now take that as a personal preference issue, take that as an embodiment of my fear of pregnancy, the fact I do not want children and my raging asexuality. Three, I had no idea this was going to be as much as it was when I started writing it. And I had no idea where it was going to go either. I knew I wanted it to be Eddie based, but I also knew it might end up being Harrington in the end, maybe even some Steddie content, I really didn’t have a clue, so I just let it write itself. And I might continue to write it, fuck knows. Do I think this is my best work? No. Not remotely. But I wrote it, and I wrote a lot of it, and tbh I’ve written a lot worse and thought fuck it, it exists, might aswell put it out there, so both you’re welcome and I am sorry. But also I am not sorry.

Now

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

No string of curse words was going to change the two red lines on the stick you held between your hands. No amount of praying, of cursing, of wishing. No amount of screwing your eyes closed and counting to ten and opening them again was going to change the result.

The tiny little rest glares up at you, illuminated by the shitty white lighting of the convenience stores public bathroom, and it feels like the biggest taunt you’ve ever experienced. You wonder to yourself if you could drown yourself in the dripping water of the sink you are resting your head against. You doubt it and with a deep inhale you pull yourself up off the floor.

“Right,” you tell yourself. “Not ideal, but we can fix this, we can fix this and we can forget about it, and we can focus on college applications.”

You tell yourself over and over you can do that, you can focus on tomorrow like you’re not spinning. You can think about school and college and work like your heart isn’t threatening to stop in your chest.

Like you’re not pregnant.

Your watch beeps and your hairs stand on end. Four o’clock. It’s Saturday, and it’s four o’clock. Shit, you’re about to be late for your shift at Family Video. Your whole body feels cold. You cannot go to work today. You can’t. Not with everything going on. Not there. Not if there is even the smallest chance you’ll see him.

“Keith is going to kill me,” you whisper to yourself, as you make a beeline for the payphone. You twist the metal chord around and around as it rings out, praying to the wide open that anyone else picks up the phone.

“Family Video,” comes Robin’s voice and you’ve never been so glad to hear it, “what can I do for you?”

“Buckley,” you say but your voice barely makes it out.

“Bunny?” is her reply. You groan, that nickname has followed you like the plague and Robin had never used it, until now. “Shit,” she whispers, realising her slip up, “sorry.”

“It’s fine,” you tell her, it’s not, but you’d forgive her a whole manner of sins if she doesn’t make you feel even worse for what you’re about to tell her. “Robin I cannot make my shift.”

“It’s Saturday,” Robin whines.

“I know,” you tell her, “I know, and I am sorry, and you know I wouldn’t leave you hanging if I didn’t have a really good reason.”

“What is it?” she asks. Notoriously nosy and yet it never stops surprising you how shamelessly Robin will demand answers for anything. It is as if the girl has never had to keep a secret in her life, as if she has never had a single thing she wanted to keep to herself.

“I’ve been throwing up for the last three hours and I hoped it was going to pass, I thought, hey maybe if I get it all out my system I can get to work, but between heaving up my insides and trying to force water down my throat I didn’t realise how much time passed, and I know that’s a shit excuse for giving you so little warning, but as it turns out, this might be a little more than a bad reaction to my mothers quiche,” you lean into it now, knowing how Robin feels about germs, “and unless you want to share whatever it is making me want to tear my intestines from my body-,”

“You’re good, stay home,” Robin says, “can you at least call Harrington and have him cover?”

“He is your best friend, you call him,” you say, a little too harshly, so with a wince you add, “it took all the energy I have making this call.”

“Sure, sure,” she says, and you don’t have to see her to know she is waving a hand in the air to usher your words away from her. “Whatever, just… stop being sick or something.”

“I’ll try,” you say before hanging up. Every muscle in your body hurts, you want nothing more than to sink onto the floor of this dirty payphone box and let the ground swallow you. But you can’t, because that gets you nowhere, and you’ve got places to be.

You give the door of the box a small kick before pushing it open, and staring down the road, it’ll take you about twenty minutes from here to walk to where you need to go next. Your brain is screaming at you, desperate for you to think of another option, a better option, any other option. Because there is only once place you’d not rather be than where you’re headed. One person you’d not prefer to see right now, in this moment, than who you’re walking to. But you’ve got no other choice and for every reason you want to stay the fuck away from him until you figure everything out, until everything is fixed, you can think of sixteen other reasons to go to him instead. So you do, one slow, dragging step at a time, knowing that at this pace it might take more like forty minutes to get there, but before you’ve managed to talk yourself out of the idea entirely, and before you can think of any other option you can see the benches where Gareth is stood, telling a story with his arms spread wide, and Wheeler is looking at him so intently you wonder if his eyes might pop from their sockets. Dustin is pacing, trying to figure something out, and Lucas watches sat between Gavin and Jeff, no doubt wondering why he agreed to be here on this slightly too warm June Saturday. In the middle of them all, with his legs crossed, centre of the picnic table, lazy smile on his face with a cigarette stuck between his lips, still unlit, the person you really don’t want to face right now, the person you want to run from as fast as your legs might carry you. Eddie Munson, you looks up, and in seeing you, jumps to his feet, smile turning into a wicked grin as he thrusts his arms open wide and does a theatrical bow at your approach. Eddie Munson, your best friend and favourite person in the whole wide world.

“Malady,” he calls to you, “I did not believe you would be gracing us with your presence today, thought you had to earn that money, what was it you said, the honest way.”

His jovial tone, his welcoming smile, the way he lights up when he sees you is enough to make you break. You hold yourself close, arms wrapped around your torso, as if you could stop yourself bursting at the seams if you just kept holding on tight enough. You cannot cry, you tell yourself, you will not cry.

“Princess?” Eddie asks, seeing your face, searching for a smile that he cannot find. “You okay?”

“Can I borrow your van?” you ask. This gets everyone’s attention and Eddie knows without asking by the way you look at the ground, focused intently on a rock you’re pushing between your feet, that attention is the last thing you need right now.

“Scram rugrats,” Eddie says.

“But,” Dustin starts.

Eddie just holds up a hand to silence any disagreements. “Scram.” He approaches you, slower than normal as the others start to disperse. He reaches you and he moves to place a hand on your arm, and you let him, his rings cold against your skin but you barely even register the touch. You feel so unreal, the gravity of everything suspended above you, threatening to crush you at any moment. He waits until everyone is gone, and waits a little longer before trying again. “Hey, what happened?” he asks.

“Can I borrow your van?” you ask again. Not to avoid the question, but in an eagerness to get everything moving, keep everything moving, God you need everything to keep moving because if you stop, you will fall and you doubt you have the strength to get back up again.

“Sweetheart, you cannot drive my van,” he reminds you. You nod, realising you really haven’t thought any of this through.

“Okay, can I borrow you and your van?” you ask, your voice cracking now, every other syllable seeming jaded and stifled as it comes out. Eddie’s concerned look only grows.

“I am going to need you to tell me what has happened,” he says slowly.

“Eddie,” you try, “please, can you just…” you inhale, a deep shaky breath. “I need to get to Pennsylvania.”

Eddie laughs, part of him knows he shouldn’t but the ridiculousness of you stood in front of him, in the afternoon of a Saturday in blue jeans and a tee-shirt he knows you well enough to know is a pyjama top, asking him if he can take you to Pennsylvania is just too much for him not to laugh. “Got a sudden killer urge to see the Liberty Bell?” he jokes.

“Eddie I… I really can’t have you asking questions right now,” you admit, “can you take me, or am I looking at buses?”

“Wait, you’re really serious,” he says, looking you up and down, trying to decipher why in the name of all things, would you be so serious about this.

“As a heart attack,” you say. Or an accidental pregnancy, you think to yourself.

“That’s like… an eight hour drive,” he says.

“Is that a no?” you ask, and there it is again, the pain in your voice, the threat of bursting into tears right here and not knowing if you can stop. Eddie cannot bear it, the sight of you so empty, so broken.

“No,” he says, “I’ll take you-,”

“Great,” you don’t let him finish, “where did you park?”

“Right now?” he asks. You nod and gesture around as if to enforce your question. “I parked by Family Video.”

“Oh,” you say, “well I can’t go there.”

“Because you’re skipping your shift,” Eddie says, his studying you feels so invasive all of a sudden, like he can see right through you. He can’t, and he has never wanted more to be able to. Everything about you right now seems so far from normal. He wants more than anything to know what has happened, what is happening right now, why you’re suddenly a million miles from your body and you are asking the strangest things of him. He would’ve been less surprised if you had walked up to him and told him between him dropping you home last night and now, you’d gotten hitched to a member of New Kids On The Block. He just wants to know, so he knows how to fix it, how to help.

You can see that on his face. “I told Robin I was sick, and that’s not a lie,” you say, “I spent enough hours today chucking up yesterdays diner food that I don’t think I could look at a burger right now without wanting to hurl, so no, I cannot be around Family Video,” you say, but that’s not all of it. But you don’t have the energy or the ability right now to explain that to him. “So if you want to help Eddie, please go get the van and come get me.”

“So we can drive to Pennsylvania for a reason you haven’t told me?” he asks. You nod. “And we need to leave, right now?” You nod again. He nods slowly, pulling his keys from his pocket and swinging them between his fingers by the keychain. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “I’ll be fifteen minutes, tops.”

Waiting for Eddie could have been forever but it could have been a blink of your eyes, you're not sure because you're reeling. To find this out, to consider what this means and then try and get out of state the same day is what some might call impulsive choice making. But it doesn't really feel like you've got options. Not like this. Not now. There are so many conversations you'd have to have that your head starts to ache so much at the thought of it all that your vision blurs. You're not even sure what you're going to tell Eddie, and Eddie knows you better than anyone, Eddie has always known all your secrets, all except one.

You’re sat on the curb when Eddie pulls up, the van making all kinds of noises you’d usually be worried about, the type of sounds you’d start hammering into Eddie he needs to have checked out. But you don’t have it in you to be worried about that right now. That doesn’t matter right now. Just getting the fuck out of Indiana is a start.

You open the passenger side and slip in, you hadn’t noticed how long Eddie had been gone, but he must’ve been gone longer than fifteen minutes, because from the bag you can see peeping out from behind Eddie’s driving seat, he had a chance to swing home and grab a few things. You recognise your backpack you left at his for the nights you both drink far too much and cannot get home. The backpack with all the supplies you need to look like a functioning human the next day, anything emergency you might need. You give him the softest look you can muster, and he nods, the silent thank you acknowledged and immediately put aside. There were some things in your friendship with Eddie that never needed to be said, and this was one of them.

He lets you start the drive in relative silence, you reach to turn on the cassette player and before you can fill the quiet with heavy metal, Eddie’s hand rests on top of yours, pausing you, a gentle quiet gesture, trying not to push too far. But he needs something, he isn’t asking for all the answers right now, he doesn’t need them right now, a lot of it can wait, he can tell you need it to wait. But he needs something. “One thing, one answer and then you can blare Judas Priest all you want,” he says, not taking his eyes off the road, but you feel his gaze as if it were on you. “Just… why Pennsylvania, that’s all I am asking right now.”

It's a fair question, you know it is. You’re getting him to drive you eight hours across States and you’ve not given him the smallest inkling as to why. You shuffle in your seat, feeling the belt across you like a noose tightening. You wanted to run from Eddie because you’ve never been able to keep things from him, he knew all your secrets, except one. He recognises every single tell, he knows you, he has always known you and he can smell a lie from your lips before it makes it there, and you knew this would be no different. But you just need a few more hours where this is yours, and you can put things into order, find the right way to explain yourself, to explain it… to explain everything. Because you know you cannot just tell him you’re pregnant, you have to tell him… everything, and you know he will have questions and you’re not sure how to answer them yet. So you rake in a breath and bite the inside of your cheek. “Pennsylvania feels far enough away that no one will know who I am, and no one will care to remember,” you say, eyes on the road.

You know he was looking for more, but he doesn’t ask for it. You know he will, but not yet. He let’s your hand go and presses the play on the cassette tape. Breaking The Law starts up, part way through the first verse and you sink back further into your seat, hoping you might just let it swallow you, but you know it won’t. You’re stuck in the long haul now.

The Night Of The Party

You weren’t sure of the dress. You stared at it for what felt like hours in the mirror. This was a party you were going to, and you had an idea about what that means you should wear. But the dress felt too different, it was something your mother had bought you, thinking you were someone else, she had a habit of doing that.

You wanted to slip into black jeans, you wanted to back out, but you'd convinced Eddie, you'd finally, really convinced Eddie and you weren't going to ruin that for yourself. Eddie leant around the doorframe, dressed in usual attire, a band tee shirt with a few holes in it, he'd claim aesthetic choice if asked but you know he has more often than not caught that fabric jumping fences. But he looked good, he always does. He smiled at you.

"You look..."

"Different?" You offered.

"You look like her," he said. You frowned, not sure what he meant until he raised two fingers behind his head to mock up bunny ears.

"Shut up Munson," you said, flipping him off. He meant no harm by it, and you took no offence from it, because it's him.

"Nah, see, there, just like that, you're back to being my girl again," he said, opening the door for you, "no floppy ears in sight."

"And you as always look like my misfit, I am glad you're not wearing the hellfire shirt."

"Are you? I can change."

"Don't you dare."

In moments like this Eddie felt like some wonderful dream, this figment of your imagination you’d conjured up to keep you from being lonely, but you doubted your mind could ever contrive something quite as wonderful as Munson. He stuck his tongue out at you and you flipped him off in return. At times like these Eddie felt like something you could keep, something that was truly yours, and yours alone. You had to share Eddie with school and work and life and the boys, but you never felt lost to those things. Like above anything else he was your Eddie. Your best friend. Your partner in crime.

“I don’t know how you talked me into this,” he said, ruffling out some of his curls with a shake of his head. You giggled.

“You’re like a poodle,” you had teased him.

“Calling me a dog sweetheart?” he’d asked, and leant over you, tongue lolling out. You’d laughed and shoved him back, palm to his face.

“Down boy,” you’d mocked. His laughter had carried you both out to the van and all the way to the house party.

The porch felt like the final and biggest hurdle, neither of you were exactly popular at school and this was akin to walking into a shark tank. Eddie asked you again why it was you wanted to even go. You shrugged. "Feels like a necessary experience," you stated.

"I think making out under the bleachers might be a necessary experience too," he teased, "need my help with that one?"

"If I need any help making out, I will let you know," you retorted before pushing open the unlocked door.

The party was the type of loud where you had no room for thinking, the music turned up so you can barely make conversation, the real sounds that compete with the speakers are the cheers and chants of those observing and partaking in the drinking games. The occasional less than sober giggle of those heading up to empty bedrooms.

"We can head home right now," Eddie whispered, offering you the out, sensing just how overwhelmed you could become. You shook your head. "We can have some drinks at the trailer, watch a movie, we do not have to put up with this, just say the word."

"I'd like to stay," you told him, and you'd regret those words before the hour was even up.

You'd gotten lost in the people at some point, a few drinks in, talking to Robin and Eddie had disappeared into the mass. You'd gotten a reassuring squeeze on the arm as you tried to wade through the crowds to find him. You didn't like the party. It wasn't for you, you knew it, he knew it, and he had been right. Eddie often was. You were ready to find him, take his hand and pull him out of his unimaginable hell and start a sobering walk home.

But when your eyes had finally landed on Eddie, he didn't look at all like he was suffering. He was smiling, leant one hand against the wall as he talked to some girl in a tennis skirt and even over the music and the crowd and the mess of it all, you could hear her laugh from a room away. All flirty and wanting.

And just like that, your stomach was being ripped out and you forgot how to breathe. Eddie wasn’t just yours, he wasn’t this magical creature that only you could see, he wasn’t something you get to keep to yourself forever, and you knew that. You were around Hellfire enough to know that, but it was different then, with the guys, you never felt like this. Something about some pretty girl with her fingers playing with the hem of her skirt as Eddie talked made you want to drown yourself in the punch.

So you had.

You had a drink, and then another, and then another, and somewhere between your empty bottle of vodka and the pile of red cups you lost count of just how much you were drinking.

Each drink made you more drunk, and the more drunk you became the less the feeling in your stomach of seeing Eddie with that girl was noticeable, so you got drunk. You got so very drunk.

Now

You hadn’t been asleep exactly, but you’d been clocked out and you weren’t sure for how long. The sky was darker now, the sun setting and the road lights starting to turn on. Eddie had changed the cassette over and is tapping his fingers on the wheel, not impatient or anxious, just absent of mind. You sit up straighter and he throws you a glance. “Back with me sweetheart?” he asks.

“Somewhat,” you say. Your voice is grouchy, and Eddie would think you’d woken from a slumber if he hadn’t spent every passing minute with you. “I guess.”

“You ready to talk about it?” he asks.

“No,” you admit, not holding back your discomfort as you try to roll the ache from your shoulders, but it’s not the drive and long time seated that is making your body ache, it’s the gnawing dread. “But I will.”

“I don’t mean to push,” Eddie says, and you don’t recognise the tone in his voice, it’s laced with something you don’t remember ever hearing from his mouth. Which is an admittedly strange experience given how long you’ve known Eddie, all of your life that mattered. But that thought brings clarity, this is probably exactly how he feels about your behaviour, how strange and alien it is to look at someone you know better than yourself and not recognise a thing they’re doing.

You sigh. “I couldn’t be in Indiana anymore,” you say.

“I got that part,” Eddie admits, and the chuckle is almost sad.

“I… I am sorry,” you say. You are. You’re sorry you’ve had to drag him into this. You had wanted another option, you’d wanted nearly any other option. But it was always going to be Eddie. Because Eddie is who you go to when you’re stuck, when you need help, when you need someone to bail you out or offer you a hand, when you need somewhere to crash or someone to cover for you, it’s Eddie. It’s always Eddie. It was always going to be Eddie.

“Don’t apologise,” he says, trying to shrug it off, “you’ve got nothing to be sorry for, I think.”

You pull your knees up onto the seat with you, wrapping your arms around them, and resting your chin. “Remember the party?” you ask. Eddie scoffs.

“You mean Hagan’s party?” he asks. You rolls your eyes as you look at him.

“No I mean the beach party at the White House,” you mumble. He smiles, glad to recognise you again.

“There she is,” he whispers. “But yeah, I remember the party.”

“Yeah well, it starts with the party,” you explain. But memories come bubbling back.

You were leaning against a wall for support and you were looking for Eddie, even if you didn't want to see him, not if you might see him with that girl, with his hands on her waist, his tongue down his throat. The thoughts were swimming through your mind and you wanted to drink until they drowned. But you couldn't stop thinking about Eddie, the same way you can't stop thinking about him in the quiet moments, the late at night moments, the moments when thoughts of his tongue and his hands creep all too eagerly into your mind. You shook the thoughts out because now instead of hearing your name on his lips, hands tracing up the inside of your thigh, quietly whispering requests against your skin, looking for permission to have you. It was her you were picturing with him. Her skirt hiked up, her bra unfastened. His mouth leaving marks on her hips and you wanted to scream. So you downed your drink.

You shake them away, trying to start at the beginning, trying to keep it relevant, trying to not out your feelings. “I was two drinks in and we got separated, I saw Robin and she asked me if I had seen Vicky, and I thought I had by the beer pong so I tried to direct her and maybe the drinks were stronger than Craig let on, but I felt like I was spinning out,” you explain. Eddie nods.

“They were strong,” he agrees. His tapping on the wheel has gotten lighter as you start to talk, you know that means he is concentrating on what you have to say, but you know what Eddie is like, his mind runs faster than the conversation and he is jumping hurdles way ahead of the journey. You try not to let it distract you.

“I found Vicky and she was with her boyfriend and Robin said something about getting drinks, and she walked away and I was trying to find my way back to you, but I couldn’t find you anywhere and I didn’t really know anyone else and I didn’t like those I recognised and I needed air,” you pause, letting your eyes fall on the road, watching the little white dots marking the lanes disappear in flashes as the van moves forward, if you watch them long enough they become this blur of reflective light. You’re watching them, trying to find the words to explain what happened next. “And then I saw something, and I felt like I was…” you stop yourself. You can’t explain how seeing Eddie with another girl made you feel like you were dying, not now, you have too much to explain already. “I felt awful, I felt really, really awful and I wanted that feeling to go away.”

“What did you see?” Eddie asks, letting his eyes flicker over to you for a moment.

“That doesn’t really matter,” you say, trying to brush the question away.

“If it made you upset it matters,” he says.

“It’s not relevant to the story,” you say, “you just need to know I got upset, over something, something really stupid and I should’ve have gotten upset about it. I had no right to get upset about it, but I did. I got really upset. And I didn’t like feeling that way, so I made the third bad choice of the evening.”

“The third?” he asks, trying to keep a light tone despite the heaviness of the air around you both, the threat of this topic burying you alive ever prevalent.

“Well the second was leaving your side at all, and the first was convincing us to go,” you breathe out. “But anyway, I made the third mistake of the evening, I went back to the punch. And I drank.” You push your shoes against your palms, trying to ball yourself up as small as you can be, trying to hide from yourself. “I drank a lot.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything to that, and you half expect him to, but he keeps his eyes on the road, hands now on the wheel fully, no tapping, no lightness, and he waits for you to continue.

“And I kept drinking, and kept drinking, and at some point, someone, I think Tommy handed me a bottle of… cherry tequila I think, and I don’t remember how much of that I drank, but I remember a lot of chanting and encouragement and the bottle feeling much less heavy in my hands. I got dizzy after that, and I went to find some air, but I kept walking into door frames, and the ground kept getting dangerously close to me.”

“You were really drunk,” Eddie says. Had he seen you? You wondered. You had thought that after you saw him with the girl, you’d lost track of him for the rest of the night, and maybe you had, but just because you hadn’t seen him, didn’t mean he hadn’t see you. But you thought it unlikely, because if he had seen you the way you were he would’ve made you both leave there and then.

“I made it to the door, and then I nearly fell off the front step,” you say, “but luckily, he caught me.”

“Who?” Eddie asks.

“Just this guy,” you say, really not wanting him to push the matter. “And I was so glad to see him, I know him, we know him, I wouldn’t say I know him well, but it was nice to see a familiar face that didn’t make me want to crawl into a hole. And he was careful with me, and he helped me sit on the porch and get some cold air, and I thought I sobered up a little more, and maybe I did, but not enough because I went back inside and I found another drink. But I got halfway through it, and he stopped me. He seemed concerned for me, he could see how drunk I was and I couldn’t, I just wanted to keep drinking and stop feeling so bad, and jealous and petty because I had no right. But he took the drink off me and put it down, asking if maybe I wanted some water. So I let him get me water, and he was gone maybe a few minutes before some jock was hitting on me, and I wasn’t paying much attention because I was looking for someone, Robin I think, but you can only ignore someone for so long, and he tried to kiss me so I was suddenly very aware of how close he was and then the guy got back with the water and told him to stay the fuck away, and he did. I drank the water and I felt, giddy and I felt rescued.” The way you say the word makes Eddie’s fist clench around the steering wheel for a moment. You try to ignore it. “I felt rescued and I was drunk,” you say, “I was so drunk.” You suck your teeth for a moment, gathering up more of that courage to get yourself through the story. “So, I threw myself at him, repeatedly, insistently, relentlessly, it was pathetic and I wish the alcohol would’ve taken those memories away because the things I said to him, the things I suggested, it was… embarrassing. It is embarrassing,” you groan and return your face to being buried in your knees. “I hate knowing all those… filthy things I said, things you couldn’t pay me to say sober, things I never even thought would come out of my mouth, things I haven’t even thought about, but again… I was drunk. I was… so fucking drunk.” You inhale. “So I asked him to take me from the party, I hadn’t seen you in hours and I figured you’d gone home.” You can’t ignore the flicker of hurt that crossed over Eddie’s face as you say that. That you thought he would’ve left without you, without finding you. But you’d hashed that conversation out weeks ago. And you wanted to let sleeping dogs lie. So neither of you comment any more on it. “So he took me back to his place. He hadn’t drank so he could drive.”

“He what?” Eddie asks.

“Eddie I was so drunk I couldn’t remember my own address, I couldn’t tell him where to go because I didn’t know,” you say. He turns the steering wheel in a quick action, and the van jerks at the change as he pulls off to a layby. You hadn’t noticed how tightly he had started to grip the wheel the more you talked, but his knuckles are nearly white.

“I don’t… I don’t like where this is going,” he says. You see that look in his eyes, that anger, and you’ve seen it before, it’s the kind of anger that makes him slash tires and break windows.

“Eddie, no,” you say, trying to steady yourself, “it’s not. He wasn’t like that.”

“He wasn’t?” the words feel venomous as they drop from his mouth but you know the anger isn’t at you, it’s for you.

“I don’t have enough gaps in my memory for you to doubt me on this, okay,” you tell him. “He took me back to his place, and I tried to throw myself at him more, but he wouldn’t have it, he kept telling me that I was drunk and he was glad it was him that I fell into but no. He set me up in his guest room, and I threw up, a lot, and he held my hair back and made me drink ice water. I woke up in the morning and I had a bad headache, but it could’ve been so much worse. All the things I said, all the ways I acted, it could have been so much worse. I had a shower in the ensuite and when I got out, he had made me breakfast. And a hangover smoothie and I felt a lot better. And then I felt something else.” With the van in park Eddie is watching you very closely now, turned to you, eyes studying every small movement, waiting to catch you in a lie or react to whatever you might throw at him, what feelings you might have that bubble up, he needed to be ready. Because above all, he wanted to be here for you, he wanted to fix this, and he has long lost the thread on where this is going. “I felt grateful.”

Eddie wishes he could hide his response to that, and he manages to not sneer but the irritation is clear in the way he draws his breath in tight. “Grateful,” he says. You know why that bothers him, he has spent years showing you the difference between good behaviour and common decency, and you know better than to thank someone for not being the worst.

“He is a good guy,” you try but regret the words.

“Because he didn’t take advantage of someone so drunk they literally couldn’t remember the address of the house they’ve lived at their entire life?” Eddie asks. He looks sad, really sad and you want to break apart. He sees it in your face and he winces at himself. “Shit, sorry, I am not trying to make you feel bad, I just… I wish things were better for you.”

“I know,” you tell him honestly. “But I’m not done.” He had figured as much, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear where this was going now, but he knew he had to. “I felt grateful, and I felt stupid, I felt really stupid because I could remember all those things I said and I apologised over and over, and he told me not to worry about it. That people say dumb shit when they’re drunk, and I thanked him for being there, and he said he really didn’t mind. And I apologised again for putting him out and for hitting on him like we were dying tomorrow and he shrugged it off, and he said ‘I wouldn’t have minded if you were sober.’” You bite your tongue as Eddie does the same letting his hand squeeze the wheel again. “Eddie, he wasn’t… it was on me, okay. He was good and sweet and I felt safe because of him, and I got caught up in myself and… I kissed him.”

“You kissed him?” he asks. You can feel the memory of his lips on your collarbone, his hands all needy and giving. The ways he touched you, the ways he held you, the ways your back arched and your words become nothing more than whispers. But you do not want to think about that right now. Because if you think about that you'll remember how much you thought about Eddie, and then you might just sink far enough into the car seat that you don't return. Maybe that would be better.

“And then I more than kissed him,” you say. He nods, really not wanting more detail, and you not wanting to give it. “And that would’ve been fine, it would’ve been a dumb, embarrassing memory, and a decent hook up, and it would’ve all been fine.”

“But?” he asks. He is waiting for it, the penny to drop. This nice guy of yours, did he have a girlfriend he neglected to tell you about while he was kissing you? Eddie wants to say so many things, but he doesn’t he just waits.

“But, we got caught up in it, and I didn’t think, and I don’t know if he just didn’t think either, or if while I was drunk I said something that wasn’t entirely true that made him think he didn’t have to think,” your words are becoming riddled again and Eddie’s brow furrows, trying to follow.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I think I said something about the pill,” you say, “which wasn’t untrue, but I may have run out and not thought much about how long I’d not taken it, I started taking it again a few days later, and I didn’t think anything of it. Until yesterday,” you say. You watch it process behind Eddie’s eyes.

“You didn’t use…” he doesn’t finish the sentence. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” you nod, “oh.”

“Oh shit,” he says, leaning back into the seat.

“Yeah, oh shit,” you echo. “The party was like five weeks ago.”

“Shit,” Eddie says again, “your pregnant.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” you whisper. You’re not sure when you started crying but you can feel the tears spilling out from your eyes now, dripping down onto your arms and exposed skin. “Not exactly a test I wanted to pass.”

“Shit,” he pulls you in, giving you a hug and resting his head on top of yours. He brings no attention to your sobs as you finally let all the feelings you tried to bury flow out of you. He doesn’t know what to say any more than you do. But being close to him, hearing his breathing, his heartbeat as he tries to keep himself calm, it reminds you of home, not your home, but true home, the place where you feel safe and understood and always welcome. That has always been Eddie for you. Now is no different.

“So Pennsylvania,” he says after a long silence.

“Yeah,” you manage, “it felt far enough away that it couldn’t come home with me, the whispers, the judgment.” You feel Eddie’s posture change, his shoulders falling lower, his muscles relaxing, you hadn’t realised how tense he had been. So it’s not surprising when you look up at him and his expression is soft, his lips gently parted in thought.

“Why are we going to Pennsylvania?” he asks.

“To deal with this,” you say, “and then never think about it again.”

He nods, you knew he wouldn’t try and talk you out of it, you knew he wouldn’t do anything but support you in whatever it was you wanted to do. Hell, knowing Eddie he would offer to take the blame, joke about a shotgun wedding if you wanted to keep it. But in his silence you hear the quiet for the first time, and the question you didn’t want creeps in.

“I am going to ask you once, and then I will never ask you again, and you don’t have to tell me,” Eddie says, “but the guy?”

“I haven’t told him,” you say. Eddie frowns for a moment, and then gives your forehead a gentle flick. “Ouch.”

“I wasn’t asking that,” he says, “I would never ask that, it’s not his business frankly, not unless you want it to be.” You give him a small smile. “No, I just… who was he?”

“You really want to know that?” you ask. Eddie tilts his head from side to side.

“I don’t know,” he admits, “curiosity might kill me, but I don’t think I am going to like the answer anyway.”

“You don’t like any guy that’s taken an interest in me,” you point out, rubbing some of the remaining moisture from your eyes with the back of your hand.

“Well, usually they are trash,” he says, “and I don’t think defending the guy you knocked you up is going to go down well,” he jokes, or mostly jokes anyway.

“Promise me you won’t tell him if I tell you,” you say. Eddie mocks offence, it’s nothing like the hurt you saw in him earlier, when you recalled how you thought he left without you, it’s all play.

“I would never,” he says, “you question my honour so?”

“I question your ability to not want to start something with him, because I know what you’re thinking,” you say.

“Has he spoken to you since?” he asks.

“Yes,” you say, and he has. Not about it, not that you would have given him the chance to. You were so eager to forget anything happened at all, too embarrassed by the entire series of events and just wanting your life to go back to how it was. Just you and Eddie, with the rest of the world at arms length. But he has talked to you, he kind of has to, it’s hard to give silent treatment to someone you work with.

“About it?” Eddie asks. You look at your tattered converse and Eddie has his answer. “Unbelievable.”

“Did you call the girl you hooked up with at the party?” you respond. Eddie frowns again, all confusion now.

“I didn’t hook up with anyone at the party,” he says. You laugh.

“Not true,” you say. Eddie stares at you, blank. You don’t understand what reason Eddie would have to try and lie about that, especially right now. “Eddie, were you wasted?”

“I had three drinks,” Eddie says, “two of which I had with you.” He looks so clueless and you don’t understand it, the girl had been all over him, and she didn’t seem eager to leave any time soon, it had shocked you sick. It had sent you reeling, it had hurt you in ways you didn’t want to process, and he doesn’t remember it.

“Eddie, the tennis skirt,” you say, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. He still stares at you like you’re talking another language. “Eddie how many people do you have to get hot and heavy with that you don’t remember someone like that?”

“I told you, I didn’t get hot and heavy with anyone, I spent most the night looking for you,” he says.

“Eddie I saw you, with the flirty tank top and tennis skirt, she was like half a sentence away from jumping your bones,” you say.

“That’s got to be an exaggeration,” Eddie states, moving to take the van out of park and get back on the road.

“No wait, we need to finish this first,” you say, pulling the keys out the ignition. “She was drinking something really cheap with a cherry in it.” A look of realisation crosses over Eddie’s face.

“Estelle?” he asks.

“I didn’t stick around to ask her name,” you point out, “I was replacing all the water in my blood with alcohol remember?”

“Estelle, Tommy’s cousin,” he starts to describe her in vague detail and she sounds like she fits the bill so you shrug.

“I guess,” you say, “she was gorgeous, that’s all I really remember about her.”

“Was she?” Eddie asks. You laugh and it’s bitter and Eddie can’t tell why. “What?”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t notice Munson,” you say.

“I guess I didn’t,” he says, “like I didn’t notice she was all over me apparently.”

“Trust me,” you say, “she was.”

“You sound…” he stops. You’re quick to respond to that, fear flooding you. You put the keys back in and try to nudge him to move the car.

“Places to be, problems to deal with,” you tell him. He doesn’t move. He is staring into nothing, like he is playing a reel back through his mind, hitting through the rolodex of memories. You’re scared of what he might find there.

“You said,” he pauses. You can hear his heartbeat, as it starts to hammer like an all too eager drum in his chest. “You said you saw something, and you got upset, and you went to get more drinks.”

“Eddie we should move, not let the night get ahead of us, we have miles to go,” you try.

“You said, you saw something that made you feel awful and you needed to drink to make that feeling go away,” he says, he sounds scared as he speaks and that fills you with a whole other type of fear.

“Eddie, please don’t think about it too hard,” you beg him, but you know it’s too late. He is a dog with a bone, and he has found all the pieces, it’s just a matter of time now.

“You didn’t stick around to ask her name… and that’s… I lost sight of you before that, and I thought I saw you when Estelle was talking and I came to find you but you must’ve already been getting more drunk,” he says.

“Eddie,” you say, not even a whisper, not even a plea, just a need to say it.

“And you almost sounded… jealous,” Eddie says, so hesitant on the word, “and that’s what you said you felt, sad about something childish and jealous when you had no right to be.”

“Well, how can I get mad about someone noticing you Eddie?” you ask. “I notice you all the damn time, hell I don’t know how to stop noticing you. But I can’t make other people not see you because it makes me feel small, unimportant,” you sigh. “I saw Estelle in her little skirt and her chirpy demeanour and I immediately wanted to drown myself.”

“You… you got drunk because of that?” he asks. You understand now with one simple sentence. He blames himself, that is the thing he takes away from this. You got drunk. You got vulnerable and drunk and he sees it as his fault.

“Eddie, no,” you say, but the words don’t bring comfort, because they’re not really true.

“I should’ve found you sooner, I shouldn’t have let you out of my sight,” Eddie stammers.

“I shouldn’t have made you go to the party,” you say, “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve.”

“This is my fault,” he says. You punch his arm, hard and he throws you a wounded look. “Fucking, ouch.”

“You do not get to take credit for my accidental pregnancy,” you state, “did you knock me up? No. Did you drink your body weight in punch? No. All you did was let a pretty girl talk to you, you couldn’t know how that would make me feel.”

“I didn’t mean to let a pretty girl talk to me though,” Eddie says, “I only ever really want you talking to me.”

“I don’t know Eds,” you say softly, “I think there are things appealing about talking to someone who isn’t me, like a pretty girl,” you pause, “or guy.” He looks at you with those puppy dog eyes, so brown and lost. He let’s the comment pass you both by in favour of something more important.

“You’re the only pretty girl I care about talking to,” he says. “Or pretty, anyone.”

“Eddie,” you say, “you don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Eddie says firmly, “I do mean it, and I’ve been meaning it for a while, but I thought… how could you feel like that, that hurt and not tell me?”

“What did you think I was going to say Munson?” you ask. “Hey, I know you’re my best friend in the whole world, but seeing another girl flirt with you makes me feel like I’m dying, that seeing anyone noticing you in all the ways you should be noticed because you’re a fucking rarity, makes me feel like I’ve lost you. Makes me feel like you’ll wake up and find someone and forget about me, because I am in love with you Eddie and I don’t know how to process that properly so instead I got drunk and I hooked up with Steve fucking Harrington.”

Eddie wants to say a lot of things in response to that, to ask about the whole ‘you being in love with him thing,’ to tell you all the things he hasn’t said but always wanted to, to make you see that he sees you just the same. But only one word manages to form on his lips and he can’t keep it to himself try as he might it just falls out.

“Steve?”

#stranger things fanfiction #stranger things #eddie munson #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson x fem reader #eddie x you #accidental pregnancy #love triangle #steve harrington #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington smut #eddie munson smut #i will not be held accountable for this

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nekropsii · 1 year

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hello! sorry if this is a stupid question, but i recall seeing someone claim that aranea was pedophilic/predatory towards jake— is that true? if not, do you know where that idea may have come from?

Hi, Anon! Considering the question is prompted by the claims of another, and this claim has an extreme amount of gravity attached to it, this is not a stupid question whatsoever. I appreciate that you're trying to fact check this, rather than just spreading that idea with zero regard. A lot of people online tend to get really caught up in the immediate emotional response that an Accusation of Sexual Misconduct gives them, and fail to do their due diligence. I can't fault anyone for feeling distressed upon hearing that anyone is a Pedophile or a Sexual Predator, but it's irresponsible and disrespectful to not... Y'know, check the evidence, if there's even any there.

I'm going to put this all under a cut due to the subject matter. You understand, I hope!

Content Warning: Discussion of Pedophilia, Assault, and Dubious Consent.

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: No, Aranea is not a Pedophile, and I do not believe she has ever sexually or romantically predated on Jake.

I am not saying this to blame who is being understandably perceived as the victim of the situation. Jake is, by all accounts, the target of a lot of Non-Consenting and Dubiously Consenting advances… So it makes a lot of sense to immediately be on the offensive with regards to anyone's conduct towards Jake. I get it. Jake is living in the tragedy of being seen as an object by his peers- some kind of prize to be won, something that exists only to provide some kind of romantic or sexual catharsis. It's horrible, genuinely, and I totally understand the urge to instantly jump on anything that veers even slightly in that direction and take it to extremes…

…But that just… Did not happen with Aranea. Because Jake was not the target of attraction here. Aranea was. Aranea never pursued Jake, to my knowledge, save for one single scene. Put a pin in that. She was not interested in him, he was interested in her. He labelled Aranea as his Dream Girl very quickly after meeting her, and at no point does she... Reciprocate his feelings.

The immediate counterpoint to that is that Pedophiles do not love their victims. And I would typically completely agree with it!! This is true!! Bringing up anything akin to "True Love" in defense of an act of Child Predation is absolutely disgusting!!

...But Aranea is not a Pedophile. In no universe would Aranea ever be considered a Pedophile, even if she had feelings for and sexually pursued Jake. She wouldn't be a Pedophile even if she straight up assaulted him on screen. She is 19 years old, and he is 16 years old. That does not even come close to counting as Pedophilia. Their ages are way too close for that. If Jake was 13 years old or younger, and she was attracted to him, then yes, this would be an entirely valid point to make. That practically wouldn't even be an accusation, that would be an observation. It would be extremely fucked up if that was the case, as it is with Cronus and Meenah, but that's just... Not true here.

But then there's the claim of Predation left, which is an entirely ageless concept. There's no implication of an immoral age discrepancy in the label of "Predator".

...But Aranea never sexually predated on Jake. She just plain was not interested in him, not even as a friend. Jake was more or less just a tool to her, a mere cog in the machine of her plan to Fuck Shit Up. Is that fucked up? Sure!! But that's average Villain Behavior, and it's not inherently Predatory. Especially not in the way that's implied when paired with a Pedophilia Accusation.

Remember that scene I said to put a pin in, though? The one where she actually does make an unwanted advance on Jake? We're bringing it up again now. That, conceptually, sounds like a counterpoint to what I'm saying here at first, but just bear with me. There's a scene in which, just prior to her making Jake Hope-splode, Aranea tries to kiss him. This was actually how she was initially going to "heal" him. The advance was made, and right before she actually did kiss him, he started flailing and wildly professing how much he does not consent to the situation.

[Homestuck, page 6582.]

It's clear from what he's saying and how he's behaving that the severity of this reaction has been building up over the course of his story. Even if that wasn't the case, his lack of consent is fair...

...And goes completely uncontested.

[Homestuck, page 6582.]

This is the problem. This is the biggest issue I have with the claim that she was predating upon Jake. Not as a child, but as a person. I have to assume that it was about this scene- there's no other place in the story in which you could make that claim and have it be any level of grounded. But taking a moment to read the text makes the entire argument that this was an act of Sexual Predation completely fall apart, because his lack of consent to being kissed goes instantly respected and totally unchallenged.

She drops him... And says this.

[Homestuck, page 6583.]

This... Is not Pedophilia. This is not Sexual Predation. This is two teenagers experiencing a messy situation.

Aranea knew Jake was into her, and assumed that that meant he would've enjoyed her making a move on him. It is, by all means, a valid assumption to make- it's understandable. It's a completely average train of thought. Jake, however, is tired of people making moves on him, and despite being attracted to her, did not accept this advance.

...To which she immediately accepts "No" as an answer, ceases physical contact, apologizes, explains herself, and then says that her advances were inappropriate, and that she will try to be better in the future.

This is... A fantastic response to someone expressing a lack of consent. Especially considering she's Beforan! By all accounts, she's the most normal person out of that whole group because of this!!

The only thing that puts a damper on this is that she immediately turns around and heals him. But... That's not an inherently sexual act. Yes, he did not give express verbal consent to being healed, but it's also just straight up not something you can quantify as Sexual Predation. It's not even a metaphor for it!

I don't know. Calling her a Pedophile is abhorrent. It is way too far and entirely inaccurate. Calling her a Sexual Predator is less egregious, but the bar for what's okay is being used in a limbo competition in Hell.

To me, this is just an instance of messy teenage sexuality. It's just... A misunderstanding that was immediately resolved, and then followed up by some Video Game Villain behavior. If their age gap in the context of any romantic advances makes you uncomfortable, that's completely and utterly fine. More than okay. It's a perfectly respectable boundary to have. But that boundary doesn't mean that it's fine to randomly stick a label as loaded and utterly despicable as "Pedophile" onto anything. A misunderstanding left unescalated isn't a crime, and Video Game Villain Behavior isn't sexually predatory.

I hope this response finds you well. Have a lovely day.

#homestuck #homestuck meta #homestuck analysis #alpha kids #alpha trolls #beforan trolls #dancestors #aranea serket #jake english #cw abuse #cw child harm #aranea.pdf #aranea.prtsc #jake.pdf #jake.prtsc #nekro.pdf #nekro.sms

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aesterblaster · 1 year

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Ik you said to send hot takes but what about your hot takes 👀👀

NYAHAHAHA THANKS FOR ASKING

*clears throat*

IsagiRin as a ship just doesn't work for me. Odk why just. Sorry I can NOT see your vision bestie. Half of the Blue Lock ships don't work for me especially when centered around Isagi because that boy switches side characters like they're pairs of shoes. In Blue Lock one or two sus or even sweet moments doesn't really amount to much to me because everyone has them here. That doesn't automatically mean date on a riverside resturant. On the other hand I totally could see Bachira x Isagi but I just think of them as really close friends because that's what gives me the most comfort being as some of the people who really saved my life were friends. I think it would be better if Bachira had a friend first and focused on himself before getting into any big relationship. Idk I guess that's more of a personal preferance

SPEAKING OF, I hate people who write Blue Lock smut w a burning passion. I'm not even gonna hit the whole iTS IMMorAL train it just usually sucks all the fun and personality out of the chosen character and is just trying to be as gross ans shocking as possible and twist them into somehow being pervs just bc they get all hyperactive when they play soccer. Like GET THERAPY. Half the time I go to the bllk tag im just scrolling like HE WOULD NOT FUCKING SAY THAT.

The anime gets a lot of slack but like... It's very difficult to transfer things from one medium to the other especially things as philisophical as Blue Lock

Fandom interpretations of Shidou are usually weirdly ooc because they wittle him down to like how cray cray he is or whatever and completely ignore for example, his respect for people who are also creative and out of the box or his ability to deal with lonliness and being othered by everyone

Characters that shouldn't be hated nearly as much as they are: NOA NOEL. You heard it here folks. I genuinely believe he's just trying his best and honestly most coaches would've asked to drop half the player he has to deal with by now like cmon you got an emo gymrat who was forced to become like you, you got a playee whos EYESIGHT IS FAILING but will literally start falling apart if you bench him, you got..kaiser and his lapdog ass cronie who dont listen to your plans at all, you got an entire rift between new and old players. Like how do you even fix that when you can't send people home (i think)? He gives good advice sometimes ngl and they're winning games so like...

Cont. Sure he isn't as funny or amusing to read as Lavinho or Chris and he isn't as open as Snuffy but DAMN IT he's doing his job ok? And all the dad son moments between him and Isagi are to die for.

Naruhayas little miniarc is honestly has the saddest backstory implications to me. THERE I SAID IT. Rin's is indeed tragic and heartwrenching but can be fixed, he can move on and heal if he so chooses. Bachira...ok nvm bachira's ties with it. Hiori's is an absolute tear jerker but he is still in Blue Lock. He still has some time to grow. Naruhaya? There's nothing that could be done to fix his position or bring him up or cut him from the weights dragging him down. We see so many characters in the Blue Lock universe rise from their poverty through soccer but DAMN IT NARUHAYA EXISTED TO SHOW THAT THAT IS A LUCKY AND FEW 2 PERCENT. HE PROBABLY HAD TO GIVE UP ON EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS DREAMS JUST TO SUPPORT THE VERY FAMILY HE LOVES SO MUCH. HIS PARENTS LITERALLY DIED. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? BACHIRA STILL HAS HIS MOM, RIN AT LEAST HAS HOPES OF RECONCILING WITH HIS BROTHER AND HIORI MIGHT ONE DAY SAFELY CUT HIS PARENTS OFF BUT HIS ARE IMPLIED TO BE GOOD PEOPLE JUST..STRAIGHT UP DEAD. AND THE WAY HE STOLE FOOD ALL THE TIME???? IM GOING INSANE.

Ok thats all for now LMAO

#blue lock #bllk #asks #blue lock manga #yeah.

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purgemarchlockdown · 5 months

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I've been reading the t1 interrros and something about Amane's answer to the question ''Do you like yourself?'' is really contradictory with her song. She answers she never thought about it on terms of like or dislike but she thinks she is a good girl, but in her t1 song, she has lyrics like ''If only I could be a good girl'', ''even I can say ''sorry, even I can have hope'', which sounds like she hates herself or looks down on herself. Amane also doesn't seem like the type to lie, so why do you think she said that? I guessed that maybe she lied, because she was afraid of Es and when you grow up with overly controlling parents, you learn to lie on the spot from a young age. Es has physically restrained/held her in her t1 vd after all. Maybe they reminded her of her mother.

Anon this is such a Fantastic question! Though unfortunately I'm not really Sure exactly what to think of it Either...I have an interperation though...take it with a grain of salt.

First of all, I'm pretty sure Es Does remind Amane of her parents for multiple reasons. The physical restrainment for one as you pointed out but also the amount of power and control Es holds Over her. Es is a figure with power and control over her that is willing to use physical violence whenever Amane acts "unfavorably." There's a lot to it, I think it's really intriguing

Second of all: While Amane Isn't the type to lie, she isn't really Honest either.

So, the thing with Amane is that when she talks about things she tends to Around the subject then actually talking about it.

Like over here:

Amane: Okay! I’m kind, so I shall forgive you. That’s nice, isn’t it? If my parents were in my place, you would have been lectured for another hour.

Or over here:

Amane: Furthermore, isn’t it condescending of you to assume that just because I happen to be a child, I am incapable of hating someone enough to kill them?

She isn't Lying Exactly, she's just not being direct about it. You can't Prove she killed someone because she hated them, she just said she's Capable of hating someone enough to kill them. She didn't Say her Parents were unkind, she just called Herself hind.

This is probably both a defense mechanism and also a small form of "freedom" in a sense. If she speaks in Implication then she's more likely to get away with saying certain things.

Which brings us to the question in...question.

T1Q7: Do you like yourself? A: I have never considered it from the perspective of love and hate, but I do think I am a good child.

Like- we know that Amane doesn't think she's a good girl in the sense of her cult. Heck I think she knows that it's impossible for her to be. As you said "Only if I could be a good girl." that implies that she Can't.

I think her being afraid of Es is a factor but I think there's a bit more working behind the surface here.

T2 interrogations gave us these two answers from Amane:

T2Q13: If you could be reborn, would you still choose to be yourself? A: Obviously.

T2Q20: How do you feel about you not being like everyone else? A: Nevertheless I was born as myself, so I'm happy.

There's a lot to how Amane cares about herself I think, her crime is partially self-preservation. She was going to die (or at least, she felt like she was going to die) if she didn't do anything. This was as much an act of saving herself as much as it was an act of faith.

Bringing in Cat Symbolism, judging by how Amane is the Cat and Cats in Milgram seem to be representative of desire, sin, and impurity. It hammers home the idea that Amane is inherently Wrong in some way. She was impure from the start. She's not even Human.

Yet, again, this is something Amane...likes about herself. Sure she punishes herself for being impure but she also wants to stay as Her. No matter how horrible she Really Is. There's a sense of freedom and happiness in being an Animal (which ties into her Animal cover.)

But she can't...say that, can she? Saying she loves herself is wrong because she's so sinful and horrible, saying she hates herself is wrong because it's a lie and reveals how sinful she is (What if she gets punished for that?)

So, what's the next best thing?

I am a good child.

Though again- this question turns me into mush whenever I think about it so take this interpretation with a grain of salt.

#asks #sorry for not being much help here anon! Hope this helps anyway though #cw child abuse #cw cults

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tf2shipswag · 1 year

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ok so first and foremost i dont agree with ppl being mean and insulting you because thats not how you get people to listen to what you have to say so i am sorry about the prev ppl immediately going to attack you but im not going to sit here and minimize their anger because its not baseless and they are well within their right to feel that way. im coming here to try and at least offer my view as a lesbian, which i doubt will do anything but its worth a shot i guess.

i dont agree with the implication that 'bi/mspec lesbian' labels are not harmful when they are fundamentally lesbophobic, biphobic, and transphobic from the talking points ive seen, and hurt us. implying that lesbians can feel attraction to men is the same rhetoric homophobes push onto us in real life to try and imply our sexuality is a phase and can be cured. "you just need to give men a chance." yk things of that nature. im not going to dive deep into the biphohia of it because i do not live the experience of a bisexual and i dont want to talk over bisexuals but i think it speaks for itself when people are so adverse to the label. you must ask yourself why are you so afraid to identify as bisexual? lesbianism has always included nonbinary, trans, gnc, and intersex people. and if its 'too restrictive' then it does not apply to you. lesbians do not and will not ever be attracted to men, i know its hard to believe but yes! people who arent attracted to men exist! we exist! i feel people are so angry and emotionally charged is because we are tired. tired of facing lesbophobia from outside and within the community. sorry for the long ask i tried to keep it short and concise. all i can say is please listen to actual lesbians.

hi, thank you for not being an ass an providing an actual argument, i very much appreciate that /gen. there genuinely is a horrid amount of lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia within the community. i know that there are a lot of arguments that the mspec label contributes to such. i just cannot get over the fact we are having fights like this within a community that is actively being attacked so heavily as a whole, especially right now.

your argument's reminiscent of the idea that the pan label is biphobic. genuinely, some people just identify with one label more than another, and sometimes people feel best defined by a combination of labels. even if the difference between the definition of bi and pan is miniscule to you, it might be big enough of a difference to someone else for it to matter.

it's not about "fear" of identifying as a certain label, sometimes it just doesn't. feel. right. once again! i could identify with bi, pan, omni, whatever label! but it's just not me. this has been said before, but nothing about identity is simple. feeling like we need to separate each other all into our own little boxes is incredibly isolating. the point of having this community to begin with, is so we all know that we're not alone.

everyone's just trying to live their lives. you genuinely seem like you have good intentions and god, i KNOW that this argument's tiring, and i can't imagine what it's like to deal with all the other arguments targeted against lesbians in particular, and i won't act like i'll ever understand the struggle with lesbophobic arguments, since i'm not a lesbian.

but people outside of the community are taking advantage of this argument even existing in order to make life worse for us as a whole, regardless of whatever label you choose to use. whether you're bi, a lesbian, or a bi lesbian, doesn't matter to the people passing bills against our rights and healthcare and protection. any difference to them is equally wrong. i'd rather stand against that idea as a whole than go along with it to suit whatever i'm trying to convey.

i just don't want to cause people to struggle to be themselves and live their lives simultaneously. majority of us have that same goal. even if we don't agree with each other along the way, at the end of the day, we all just want to feel safe and happy.

#not a poll #discourse

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sparring-spirals · 2 years

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I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention this, so maybe I’m reading too far into this, but it’s interesting to me that pretty much all of the cruel things FCG says in their DeathBot mode could kinda also be applied to himself as well as the people he was targeting with them?(threats of beheading aside) things like “WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP? JUST SHUT YOUR F***ING MOUTH” and “YOUR PARENTS (parental figure in Grass’s case) GOT RID OF YOU BECAUSE THEY DON’T LIKE YOU AND THEY WERE F***ING RIGHT” 1/2

“YOU WERE NEVER ALIVE” in particular sounds like a much meaner version of how Letters claims that they’re not soul-touched, not a person (Not trying to make this all about FCG, that was definitely directed at Laudna and it hit her like a sack of bricks).Could totally be a coincidence/unintentional but it kinda reminds me of the interpretation of ‘FCG maybe/maybe not projecting onto Laudna about being jealous of living beings and such’. 2/2 (Chopped into two parts because long, so sorry!)

Hm. I'm of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I definitely think F.C.G projects some of their issues onto other folks, when providing therapy to them and in some of his snippier moments. Which- to be fair, everyone in the party is prone to providing advice that swings between "surprisingly good!" and "hmm pal this is DEFINITELY about you, huh". Either way. F.C.G having unresolved Thoughts about his alive-ness and humanity and being left by Dancer and other self worth, and putting elements of that onto other people is a theory I personally stand by.

On the other hand, I also don't think we should understate the extent to which each of the pointed comments were pointed. Each of them were crafted, very specifically, to hurt that person, to aim for a raw spot and hit home.

(Theres also a separate meta that can be written about how fucking terrifying F.C.G murderbot is, not for the murder but for the implied way the kindness and listening and the picking-apart and breaking down issues can be so easily repurposed into a weapon. That they were. But thats for a different day).

The implication that I got from the whole encounter- other than the attempted murder- was about how well that side of F.C.G was able to pinpoint each of their weaknesses, and hurt them with it. Was there bleedover from their own issues? Probably. But no amount of projection takes away the intent behind those words, which I think is the Juciest Bit™.

(Also! as a fun leftover thought, something to be said about how sometimes hurts and their themes are just- common. broad. shared. A big, wide world, but sometimes its very easy to know how to hurt people.) (and sometimes its even easier when you pull out your own pains to amplify it.)

#critical role #cr spoilers #c3e31 #fcg #character meta #speculation #spar speaks #ask away!#sorry this got a little meandering. im still chewing through the implications of Murderbot!F.C.G and their fine tuned emotional warfare #it absolutely TERRIFIES ME. not F.C.Gs fault though. or not directly.#fcg meta

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rogueddie · 1 year

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Y'all have gotta stop fucking strawmanning me. I never said "I can't be a transmisogynist I've faced equal amounts of blah blah blah".

I should have just answered the ask that started all of this, that's on me, but the thing you're exaggerating into something I never said was in reply to that original ask. It was the way they were attacking me, the language they used, that implied (from my pov, at least) that I had no idea or experience with misogyny. That I have never dealt with transphobia or fetishization in fandom. And I have, often, which is why I got defensive on that point especially.

You're right, little posts and hcs can't add depth or complexity. It's all in the implications and, if that's something I'm not making clear enough, I'm sorry.

If anything Stobin related has made it seem like I think robin's sexuality is "in the way" of them having feelings for each other, I'm also sorry. That's not how I feel about Robin, it's not the way that I see trans femme Steve and Robin.

If I'm not getting my intentions across, or I'm ignorant on things, then of course; I am sorry. That's on me and I should know better.

The point you then make... if Steve was a cis girl then she wouldn't date Robin? That's an opinion. The same way that you simply call my hcs 'lame'. You make it sound like there isn't a problem, rather that you personally don't like my posts.

But that's why you blocked me. Ages ago. So why are you stalking my blog? You don't want drama, but you clearly don't want to talk. So, what's your goal here? What do you want? Because some of the things you say make it sound like you don't really care if I'm ignorant, you just want someone to be mad at.

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twdmusicboxmystery · 1 year

Text

Interview From Norman About the Spinoff

@wdway:

I'm trying to get the ET interview of Norman from last night at AMC Up Front event. He talked about the spinoff a lots of things he's already said but he did say this was kind of a reset. He also said it was romantic and use words to describe it like poetic and beautiful. Norman, also Jeffrey and Lauren about their spinoff.

@galadrieljones:

Just watched the interview w Norman. I love how he keeps calling it romantic. I think he means sort of like aesthetically romantic but he says it twice.

He also posted a shot of the Eiffel Tower today on Insta, maybe he’s back in France now?

@twdmusicboxmystery:

Yeah, I noticed that, too.

@wdway:

He starts out with talking about remember the last scene Daryl gets on the bike and rides off and everything goes terrible. I know this is probably silly and maybe just me but I felt like it was a decoy. You guys know that I am hung up on the missing year and I just felt like it was a "don't look over there at that missing year look at what you last see and let me tell you what it is."

I'm just hung up with something that was said by someone high up a few months ago that we would see a surprising twist at the beginning of the spin-off and I don't think us seeing him being kidnapped is the surprise twist because they keep telling us about it.

His talk of romantic and poetic a course everyone's going to assume that it's going to be romance between him and (sorry cannot think of her name the French actress) which if anything to me that the absolute sign that it will not be between him and her. Why would you give that away.

I love absolutely love when he says it's a reset.

@galadrieljones:

I feel like he says in the interview that the series ends with him “taking off on his bike to look for someone.” Does he say that? I thought that’s what I heard but I didn’t understand like, did we already know that? I will recheck as soon as I can.

I also love the word reset because it implies a dc al coda.

I think you’re probably onto something with the missing year. It’s an arbitrary amount of time, and it’s weird that he comes back but then he is leaving AGAIN and this time to go find his happy ending, and per his goodbyes to Carol, there seems to be this implication that he might not be back for a long long time. He tells Judith if he finds Rick while he’s gone, he’ll bring him back, right? Implying he’s not looking for Rick. So why is this trip so singular? And where was he before this. Why does he keep leaving.

I had forgotten the mention of the twist. I think it’s interesting how Norman focuses on the aesthetics of the show in his interview to avoid talking about the content or the story, even as we do have a hint from gimple that foreshadowing for the spin-off lies in the WB coda.

I wanted to mention too that amc posted that same throwback with Daryl and Leah on Twitter. Most of the comments are about how they hated the arc because it went nowhere and felt unfinished.

Just reminded me of what ppl once said about Grady. I know we believe that these arcs feel u finished for a reason. But a lot of ppl do just think tptb likes to drop things for no reason.

I fully believe that if and when they pick back up those unfinished arcs all these same haters will be back in the audience in two seconds.

So it really doesn’t matter what ppl say. It’s like Lori’s actress said, if the writing is good, anything can work, and it will.

@wdway:

In answer to your questions Norman does say he's taking off to look for someone. I believe that is another decoy because most people think he's going to go look for Rick even though he tells Judith that if he finds everything about Rick/ Michonne he'll bring them back which means that isn't his main mission.

Maggie said that they should look (not sure of the wording) for other communities but the scene ends with that so are we to believe that Daryl is leaving everyone plus the kids again after just returning from the "frontier." Judith is totally OK with him leaving after we saw her in s10&11 not telling about why her mother has not returned because she was afraid that Daryl would leave her. Now she ties his leaving with Daryl finding happiness.

I'm just having a hard time with so few people not questioning Daryl gap year. That we're told repeatedly that Daryl will be kidnapped and wake up in France not knowing where he is and what happened a verrry strong recall to the title of the episode after Coda, What's Happening What's Going On.

Gimple gave us that strange coda at the end of TWB and tied it to Daryl's spin-off and yet tptb doesn't spend much time in reminding us of that fact.

@galadrieljones:

Interesting. Okay I actually took it as a weird (probably planned) slip-up. Anyone actually watching this closely will notice he said that and will also know he’s not actually going out and looking for Rick. Immediately I was confused because I don’t think anyone has ever said before that in the spin-off Daryl is going to look for someone.

To me this would support the theory that while he’s gone during the “lost year,” he discovers something and then he radios back to Judith about it. He talks to her about it and warns her he’s coming home but he’s going to have to leave again because he has to go and try and find THIS PERSON, that he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t follow up at least, and that it could be the thing that finally brings him peace. Judith would be sad but would ofc understand. She would have some time to come to terms with the fact that he’s going to leave again.

Maggie’s attitude is weird after the time jump, too. That weird line about like, discovering the outside world or whatever. Maybe Daryl lied to her about where he’s going, because it’s already happened once that somebody told Maggie Beth was alive and then she wasn’t alive. Daryl would never do that to her again. He would lie, and he would tell Judith that she can tell Maggie the truth if she wants to, like he would never ask her to lie, but not until he’s already gone. Because he knows Maggie would insist on coming, and he wants to go alone, and he also has no idea if what he heard or saw will even lead to anything.

I was thinking like maybe he’s lying to everyone. Like Connie thinks he’s just out navigating the wild frontier but in reality he just went back to Atlanta, and he ended up at Grady, and he found something.

Daryl would totally be the man to keep all that a secret, or to only tell Judith. Maybe he’d tell Carol but Carol can keep a secret. And Carol would understand if Daryl wants to go alone.

I also agree that the use of the word romantic is a decoy to make ppl think he’s going to have a love story with Isabelle. But if you’re paying attn then you know this is unlikely, not only because we know that tptb knows how much another random new love interest would irritate the fan base, but because we have seen “leaked” photos of her that imply she is a nun.

Ofc casual viewers and people who only care about ship wars and what not will get pissed at this and rage share the information just to complain, and this is free PR and exactly what tptb wants.

Because there’s a HUGE fan base that just wants Daryl to be happy. They’re not ride or die Carylers or whatever. They will tune in just to see if there’s a chance Daryl could finally bs happy.

I am suddenly remembering that Morgan will be heading back to Atlanta in the final season of Fear. I would not be surprised if they’re driving the entire narrative back in that direction, ie: going back to the beginning to unlock new information and blaze a new trail forward.

@twdmusicboxmystery:

I hope so! Love all the discussion today!

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost ehre #bethyl

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terrence-silver · 1 year

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Hi Bea! I have a scenario. What if Beloved hated Kim Da Eun? Kim’s attitude towards Terry, all this bossing him around and demanding that Terry proves he is good enough for the way of the fist is super annoying. What if Beloved gets pissed seeing this and decides no one will treat their boyfriend this way? So Beloved comes up with a plan. They try to make friends with Da Eun, offering they will show her LA (Da Eun needs somebody to show her all the cool places), asking her for Karate lessons (“just some basic moves? You know just to be able to defend myself if I need to”) and doing everything to gain her trust hoping sensei Kim will finally show some chinks in her armor. Even if Da Eun doesn’t open up about herself Beloved may try to spread rumors about her and say things that will make sensei Kim seem less competent (something like “Terry is always so serious about Karate and the whole healthy lifestyle, you know training every day, going to bed early, having good sleep and clean diet but Kim is just the coolest person, we went to a party yesterday and we came back at 4 in the morning” said at some event, meant of course as a compliment). Beloved starts coming to the dojo more frequently (to see Terry of course) and while they’re there they always say something that undermines Kim’s authority in the eyes of the students (not openly, but some innocent questions like “are you sure this will help us win? I’m sorry for asking, I just care for Cobra Kai so much I want you guys to choose the best tactics for the tournament”). Beloved may even recruit some of Terry’s staff, like Carla and Amber (I imagine sensei Kim isn’t very popular among Terry’s employees) to spy on Da Eun. Terry’s reaction when he realizes what is happening?

---

I mean, we validly don't have enough information and the show hasn't done nearly enough exploration on Kim Da Eun's personality for us to know the definitive answers to this character sadly, so way too much is left to interpretation, and that's literally the opposite of good for any quite literally character anywhere. We do know Terry would be oddly proud (and turned on), where the petty scheming on beloved's part is concerned, but more so on the fact that they're so adamant and devoted in silently defending him and his authority. He could even see it as a proof of their love for him, outright.

But Kim Da Eun? How would she react to being besmirched? Sabotaged?

Hard to tell.

I have no concrete answers, and as such, I have to go out of my way here and headcanon that a lot of her icy, steely exterior hides staggering amounts of insecurity and that continued implications that she maybe only vaguely isn't as disciplined, dedicated, strict on herself or meticulously Spartan with her lifestyle might just lead her to firmly over-justifying herself, that that in fact, isn't true. Like, the sole accusation that could ever hurt Kim Da Eun is the implication that she isn't loyal enough to her own craft and lifestyle, which digs up old fears that stem from way back in the time her despotic and doubtlessly strictly traditional grandfather maybe didn't think a girl was good enough to train The Way, or hey, maybe he had no firm gender biases, but this mentality of doing right by one's body, spirit and mind through living healthy, living right and living a life for discipline and continued training was drilled into Da Eun to the point any notion she is straying from that path even in by the slightest is enough to create...like the tiniest crack in her otherwise iron resolve. Of course, she'll merely raise a petulant eyebrow questioningly at being accused at having a little more to drink than Sensei should and she seems otherwise unfettered, cold and haughty, but inside, she's burning up, because she feels she failed herself somehow through the mere fact someone dares to imply such rubbish.

#kim da eun #terry silver #cobra kai #terry silver x reader #terry silver x beloved #cobra kai season 5 #the fist #they really should've characterized kim da eun a bit more

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skellebonez · 2 years

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I'm putting this in an ask as to not derail the post but like, while i can make JOKES about it i'm right there with you about the denial of the spiders(and I'm passionate about it) bc like, it feels needlessly CRUEL to give literally ALL of them such interesting possible continuations, Syntax's implied backstory, Huntsman's teased arc, Giving us ANYTHING with Goliath, Spider Queen's teased arc, and then just deciding that ALL of those were better off on the cutting room floor to emphasize how SCARY LBD is, and not even really giving the tragedy of a really well designed really INTERESTING band of rogues being cut at the ankles the respect it deserved because of the fast paced nature of the show, and yeah the lead up WAS to LBD because she was the final boss but it left everything with the Spiders feeling unfinished in a bad way (which is esp. frustrating because the Bull Family get FAR better treatment despite doing like, WAY worse on a 'villainous actions' scale. the spiders just took over the city once and then stole some shit they barely got started before they were ganked!) Which like, I'm crossing my fingers for Season 4 giving us at least the IMPLICATION of resurrection because that otherwise would feel like a needlessly cruel part of all of this that can't help but leave a sour taste

I'm gonna be honest, after the interview that confirmed the spiders are DEAD dead? I do think they are one very large bit of wasted potential for the show.

I know no show is going to be perfect, and LMK is still close to like... a 9/10 for me. But this is a missed opportunity that really just sucks to see. I know LBD was the main big bad and the arc was hers, but introducing new spiders in the Revenge special and giving only 2 of the 3 focus (sorry Goliath, you didn't even get a NAME) just feels short sighted. I did a bingo character opinion thing before the S3 finale and... well, I said I was hoping the Wasted Potential box could be removed. It ain't being removed now, they legitimately wasted them in my opinion. And I love what we got, so for me to think they wasted something while loving it means that this is one of the only big mistakes I think the show made (and I am not the kind of person who cannot admit the faults of something I love).

Now, considering this is related to my S4 thread? I DO have an idea for an S4 season I want to expand on later! It involves the Mayor being unable to accept that LBD's plan failed and he attempts his own plan by reviving the spiders. Regardless of whether or not they stay? This could give them a more concrete amount of closure than what they have so far. I know it is a long shot of an idea, but still! It could be fun, and it would be a really interesting way to follow up on Mayor as well.

Even if they are never brought back I will still probably love S4. But yeah... the treatment of the spiders post S2 kinda fucking sucks. BUT THEY WILL LIVE ON IN FANON IF WE HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT!

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