#I have played no games like this before and the story is more important to me than the gameplay challenge | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

samarecharm · 2 months

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geniunely not trying to put words in ur mouth im geniunely asking: what do you actually like about persona 5? from all ur rants im just wondering why you didnt drop the game bc it seems (again, im not trying to put words in ur mouth) that it simply not for you? i geniunely have not felt any of the issues you bring up outside of the writing ones and i cannot tell if i'm just easily pleased and not good at discerning what a good game is or we simply have dif things we enjoy in a video game. i hate getting tone across text but im asking out of geniune curiosity im not trying to attack your opinion (;-;)

Nah, i dont feel like ur attacking me, and I hope u dont feel the same when u see my complaints! Lmao. In my defense, I am replaying the game for the first time after completing my first file back in 2020, so alot of the faults i kinda shrugged off in my first playthrough are now glaringly in my face now that I no longer have the confusion and interest in learning the main story to keep me occupied. The game is clunky all the way through, and at some times, even frustratingly so.

But despite that, i do like this game. Alot! Its probably one of my top games ever if im being honest!

This ended up way longer than I intended, so im putting it under a readmore to keep the post short on dashboards

If i had to describe what I liked about the game in the simplest way imaginable…I think I would say, I like how the game makes me feel :) I like the music. I like the vibe. I like the immersion from city to city, and I like the premise! I like the characters and I like the connections you make with these characters! As im replaying this game, i am most excited to see Akira and his comments about the world :) i like hearing everyones voices, I like their little interactions in Mementos, and I like seeing them fight!

P5 is the first game I played in the series; its the game that introduced me to SMT in the first place! And it (smt) is a series that my longtime best friend LOVES and never thought hed be able to share with me! It is a game i keep very near to my heart; it has influenced me in ways i did not think would happen in the short couple of years since i first finished it. It genuinely keeps me awake some nights thinking about the world this game has created, and I think that is a testament to the impact its had, be it good or bad.

The joke about wishing theyd make a persona game that was Good is that despite all of its numerous flaws, the games manage to snatch your attention and pull you in anyway. Imagine if they made a game that had all of those things that i mentioned I loved, but done Right and executed Properly?? Where I got to have a story that made sense and didnt need to be spoonfed to me (in like an HOUR of dialogue and scenes; an HOUR!), and characters that talked and bonded beyond the tiny snippets of interaction theyre allowed to have in mementos? Combat that let me use PERSONAS i liked instead of BUILDS that stop me from getting instakilled throughout the entirety of the endgame, and a Persona building mechanic that didnt feel like I was shooting in the dark looking for possible fusions that end up not even being useful in the endgame.

Ive mentioned it before, but I complain so much bc I have seen what a good p5 game looks like, and its Strikers almost to a T. Combat is still your typical warriors-esque style combat, but it is at least different from the turn based strategy of the main game. Characters talk to each other freely, they hang out and comfort each other in a way that feels more connected that the base game. Strikers implements the ability to see ALL possible fusions with ALL registered personas, not just the ones in your Stock, so you can fuse easily without having yo consult a guide. The story feels like it makes SENSE with antagonists that feel morally grey and sympathetic. Genuinely, alot of the complaints for p5 I had were almost immediately rectified in this game.

But please also know that the praises I sing for this game is only bc of the groundwork laid by p5 and the world it created. Thats what I like about this game, that it had such a captivating premise and cast of characters, that a DIFFERENT company was able to hit the ground running with them. P5 had alot happening in that game, but i think what it had most was potential. The effort put into this game is astronomical, and the possible connections you can outright MISS if u arent paying attention was worth the money and time to implement; even if it meant that it could be considered a waste of resources to higher ups.

Books and games and part time jobs???!! Silly little cutscenes that add nothing to the game PLOTwise, but define and flesh out the personality of your protagonist. There was alot of love put into this game, and its evident by the fact that we have NOT seen a new persona game released; they bank on existing titles bc they are unwilling to make a game like this from scratch again. They dont want to ‘waste’ resources on good voice acting and a complex, overarching story; they dont want to waste money on scenes a player may never see, on routes a player may never get to experience. Making a game that gives u even the slightest bit of freedom means more money in programming and detailing that freedom. This has been an issue for a WHILE, and its a miracle that the gaming landscape had space for a colossal title like p5!

I complain bc I want better, and I do not think that is inherently at odds with my love of this game. In b4 im told to get good; ive played on hard and tested out merciless (its NOT fun, im making godbuilds again and its boring 😞). Its not the most accessible turnbased rpg; theres no colorblind modes, and the affinity system is convoluted and overwhelming. Combo moves are hard to keep track of and it can be incredibly frustrating to see your turns being skipped or seeing characters take extreme technical damage without understanding WHY it happened. The fact that they KNEW the game was desperate for qol improvements by the time royal came out, and instead of updating the base game to have those improvements too, they just pushed the royal edition out for people to play instead. It sucks! Customers and fans deserve better than being forced to shell out money for a game they already played !

As the gaming climate gets more and more hostile and unbearable, I think it is good to look at your games critically, and understand why products come out subpar. Persona 5 is a fun game that has a nice cast and an interesting premise, but it is ultimately tied down by its refusal to build on existing building blocks regarding its combat, and it insists on having insulting and downright out of character dialogue and scenes to appease the audience its designed to be targeted to. It is easy to forget sometimes that queer ppl are infact NOT the prime target of these games, its cishet gamer bros from aged 16 to 40 who will laugh at homophobic comments, who drool over a 16 yr old girl with a 16 yr old mindset and a grown womans body, who need to be placated with constant sexual comments to deal with a convoluted story that will inevitably make zero sense until its laid out for you before the literal end of the game.

Its bad. Its good. Its so shallow and its unbelievable that they thought having the plot twist make ZERO sense until they showed CUTSCENES of YOUR character discussing Goro and his connections to the metaverse for endgame SHOCK VALUE was more important than just having your team be smart and piece it together over time. Its shit. Its literally amazing. It let you FUCK your teacher ??????????????what the FUCK. They also let me shoot a god in the face w the best looking ult persona in the world so i can ignore that shit. And ultimately that is how i got through the game. Lol.

#chattin #answered #i have mentioned it before but i did NOT romance anyone #u know why? bc i literally didnt know it existed #i maxed out ann and the game was like ‘hey. this next decision is important’#and i was like. huh. u know what. i have not looked up a guide until now. thats scary. i dont want to lose a confidant…#and learned that.#so uh. i really DID go through the game bot realizing i could date anyone. even the adults.#anyway. this was alot. and i tried to keep out alot of my other complaints #bc i have so many. but they are like. either nitpicky things or things that are issues in lots of games too #like the models suck in this game but i can look past that. graphics are always bottom on the list of complaints #and i do like the little animations!! i like akiras little tics #and i like seeing personas do their casting animations; shiki ouji and nekomata are my faves #i distinctly remember that being a thing i wished to see more of.#bc i liked thinking of what joker would look like fighting for Real #and then i remembered him being in smash so i was like COOL. ill look at those #and then i got STRIKERS and it was exactly what I wanted #i think #the game is like.#its bad. but in ways that i wouldnt call another game bad #like back 4 blood is BAD bad. its awful. the gameplay is bad. the story was shit. and the servers shut down within a year or two of launch #risk of rain 2 is bad in the way that it continuously obscures and withholds information to the player. its tedious and frustrating #but unlike b4b i LIKE ror2 and will continue to enjoy it.#bc the gameplay loop FEELS satisfying #and ultimately thats how i feel about p5 #for all of its faults; its fun. it has a gameplay loop that is consistent and fun when u get the hang of it #im playing on hard again since merciless is just me making the right instakill builds while i pick up my team over and over again #and theres still a challenge in having the endgame weapons and armor #its satisfying! and i think its satisfying bc I was given the luck of having this be my introduction into the series #maybe i would have a better opinion on the game if i came from p4. or maybe not! who knows !

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waywardsalt · 1 year

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mmmgh

#salty talks #this one is personal but not in a scary just in a i need to say this shit somewhere way #botw/totk… i do not fucking like th. like gameplay is fun puzzles are cool world is cool but like.#the lackluster story and characters honest to god drag it the fuck down for me #none of the characters are actuslly interesting and ganondorf is the only one i want to see in totk #like i got the master sword. i got it and its like whatever. i know whats up with the light dragon and i dont care #totk is making me start to dislike this version of zelda and idk how to feel abt that #no one feels like. interesting. everyone is either good or evil or a fucking side character with a paper thin life #and totk with its fucking no-nuance go kill ganondorf plot is just. stop making half of the plot take place in the fucking past #i havent really done much story stuff but like. GOD. no one in totk is meant to be morally gray its all so fucking black and white #what happened to having major characters who were morally dubious and were actually fascinating to watch #i dont like that most of the major characters in totk/botw are Good Guys and Nice To Link nobody actually interests me #i was SO excited that the lurelin pirates would be a new group of characters to contend with but no. monsters. fuck #they had a chance to maybe get into the kingdoms more dubious past concerning the sheikah and then made the sheikah barely important #and then made the yiga more of a joke instead of like. doing anything with their interesting past #no fuck you heres some all new shit that has nothing to do with what came before and the same shallow conflict and characters #theyve dipped their toes into morally dubious characters and genuinely fascinating characters and the idea that the kingdom of hyrule isnt #all that and gave more room for drawing your own conclusions and totk just hands over the most black and white experience #im playing to finish the story and finish the game i actively do not care or expect much from these characters #and it just seems like the narrative is going to bend over backwards to put hyrule as the ultimate moral good and any opposition as bad #and all but force you to accept that because it just proves that sentiment correct over and over again and its fucking bland #idk. aomething about the writing of this game fucking frustrates me esp when i think abt how past games were written #imperialist shit aside this game’s story and characters are so fucking. par for the course bland. i dont care beyond ‘oh thata charming’#i dont think about this game’s story. it doesnt make me think it just shoves events and character actions at me and moves on #fuck.#it feels like its just. telling me shit. not giving me much room to really decide for myself. zelda is good ganondorf is bad fuck nuance ig #it seems so fucking scared of being a little bit complex. this is why i say 'i miss linebeck' i miss complicated ideas and characters #just. totk seems like it REALLY wants you to have specific thoughts about these events and characters. doing everything it can to prove #the good guys right and the bad guys wrong and having pretty much no one be in between or like. anything. its all standard

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maddy-ferguson · 1 month

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fun fact about me: i'm insecure about so many random things that i've never flipped anyone off in my 22 years of life because i think my middle finger looks awkward and ugly by itself

#and like i say: brf slt #i felt like this especially when i would have been likely to do it semi-regularly like in middle school. but like i was thinking about this #the other day and i did it in front of a mirror just to check and it looked as bad as i remember like it's just not for me #i have a story abour middle fingers though or just about what one would call the finger #when i was in what an american would call the 5th grade (i can never do when i was x years old because it's not an accurate representation #of the class i was in since i skipped a grade and the grade is what matters more to me. when i was 9 and my friends were 10 i was saying)#we would always play this game called girls catch guys or guys catch girls where the girls would run after the guys and like tap them on #the shoulder and then they would go to prison and they would line up and another guy could set them free by like touching one of the #prisoners it was a very fun game except it's way more fun to be like the ones getting caught than to be the ones catching and we would #ALWAYS play girls catching guys and it was very unfair we would be like okay in the morning we do guys catching girls in the afternoon #girls catching guys so it's fair like normal system but the guys NEVER wanted to do it (and we would always give in because like we still #wanted to play ig and idk guys. female socialization) they never wanted to be the ones doing the catching it was so unfair because we also #didn't like it as much and we did it all the time?#and i remember this one morning we were fighting about this we had literally all agreed that it was fair this way but they didn't want to #do it and my second best male friend flipped me and my best (female) friend off and (very #important detail) he did it with both of his hands so like two middle fingers and i don't know why because i'm not even sure that that's a #thing but one middle finger meant fuck you and two middle fingers meant go fuck yourself and to us that was very different? and i remember #my friend and i we like knew what it meant but for some reason we were like. he did do the one finger before doing the two does this mean #he...loves us because it literally means he wants to have sex with us #but what's funny is we never talked to him again after that and i don't even know why that was our last straw because i remember i #genuinely liked him before that like i said he was my second best male friend! so like maybe sixth best friend overall that's not bad #and he's not the only guy friend who flipped us off that year like it was so random to stop talking to him after that😭#like he was an actual enemy we really did not like him we talked about him in letters we'd give each other using a nickname etc #and what's even funnier is in our last year of middle schoold FOUR YEARS AFTER THIS a friend of a friend told him he should become friends #with well my friend and he was like hm i don't think so have you seen who she hangs out with? marianne *last name* like why do YOU hate #me😭 it was so funny like wdym it was mutual this whole time. i had literally moved on by then i didn't even care about hating him #anymore like wow...i think he's the only person i hated who actually hated me back

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excusemebutiquit · 1 year

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IVE BEEN PLAYING THE LAST OF US FOR LIKE 10 MINUTES AND IM ALREADY SOBBING

#AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA #AAAAAAAAAAAAA #I knew it was coming and I still wanted so much to believe it wouldn’t #aaaaaaaaaaa #im playing on ‘very light’ btw #I have played no games like this before and the story is more important to me than the gameplay challenge #tlou #my post #very excited to experience this story!! I don’t know a ton about it!

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sneefsnorf · 19 days

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OH HEY!! do you have final thoguhts on ultrakill and gabriel and the v's and everything :333333 <- my agenda

machine. ive spent my life loved and revered by my people and my church. i trusted my institution and my Father because i never had a reason not to, machine. the council and the people had such high expectations of me and i always rose to meet them. my achievements were many. everything was perfect. and then you took it all from me, machine. i failed ONCE. i wasnt what the church wanted me to be exactly and they tore their love away from me. its not fair. not in the slightest. ive been thinking a lot. ive been reflecting on the churches and the institutions of mankind. so many of them have warped the word of the Father into whatever will give them the most power. they use his teachings to break down and bully those they hate. they grind them into the ground and humiliate them as much as they can, not just for their own self-gain, but for the sake of hatred. this is what the council has done to me, machine, and now i have joined your ranks. all their love for me revoked as soon as i couldnt be what they wanted, thrown from the gates of heaven like the queers and the freaks. i've joined your ranks, machine. i'm less than a person now. and i am filled with so much rage.

anyways thanks for driving me to the abortion clinic machine i really appreciate it

#sneefs asks #cathartidae #sorry for answering your question in writing from gabriels perspective i have issues stemming from how i was treated by a catholic institut #i have issues. im also need to do insane things to him like [EXTENDED CENSOR TONE]. sorry #ANYWAYS its a really good game and i love it lots. i really wanna play it myself but i dunno if my mum would be too pleased with me playing #an incredibly violent first person shooter. she's not too big on those games and i'd be playing it in the same room where she's doing her #phd. she would not appreciate it. which i totally get so ill probably play it once i move out in a few months #ANYWAYS i do wonder how intelligent the V models are. are they mostly just programmed to understand combat pathfinding and basic puzzles?#because if i was designing a robot that needs reaction and processing time as quick as V1 i would only give it the bare minimum for #it to function as intended. being able to understand langauge and emotion or do. idk complex maths calculations seems like extra shit i don #need my killing machine to do #but then there is the thing where V1 can scan text and understand which parts are important. and V2 bowed before their first duel. and she #had such ATTITUDE in the second one. cuz yeah they have emotions and stuff. i do wonder a lot about whether they have theory of mind #ability to recognise or even create art. all that stuf. there is that scene with mirage that is incredibly conceptually abstract and deep #but im not sure how closely that relates to the V models' own brains/GPUs/whatever they have #i think thats probably just something ive picked up from the fandom portraying V1 as not as emotionally aware or intelligent as gabriel.#(at least in a way we understand as humans) anyways id love to know more about V1's thought process independent of the player and how she #experiences emotions. anyways. awesome game. bangin graphics. bangin story. bangin soundtrack #also i would do CRAZY things to a hideous mass i mean WHO SAID THATTTTTTTTT

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that-wildwolf · 1 year

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every time i see fanart of the last of us (original) on my dash these days I let out a squee of joy! that's the Original™ ellie! the Original™ joel! omg! ohohoho! a rare sighting in the wild these days! and i think to myself that im so lucky to have seen this! and i literally only saw it bc one of my mutuals reblogged it 💀

#wild rambles #sometimes i forget how tumblr works #sometimes i also forget how much i enjoy and care for a video game until it gradually gets replaced by a type of media that is #inherently opposed to gaming itself and people who play video games #and having to stand on the side and watch the tv show-ification of yet another video game #is just heartbreaking #because the gameness of those stories is a vital important part of their very core #and taking it away is taking away the soul of that story #because it was a video game for a reason #the user input was there for a reason #the deeper immersion was there for a reason #and stripping that story of its medium and throwing it into an unrelated medium for a different audience #only because that is a bigger audience and will generate more revenue #feels like an attack not just on the video game community but on storytelling itself #we have different types of media for a reason #and just like there is a reason live action remakes of animated stories don't work #there is also a reason why live action remakes of video games don't work either #please. stop this trend before it gets out of control #this sentiment also applies to: halo tv show #resident evil movie #mass effect tv show #assassin's creed movie #the walking dead tv show (it's more complicated with twd but i stand by my opinion)#kingdom hearts tv show #fallout tv show #slenderman movie #the list goes on

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tehstripe · 3 months

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this sequence of pages in act 5 is so striking to me.

in acts 1-4, jade is a mysterious, all-knowing figure who knows about sburb and how it needs to go, and shes very systematic about logging and remembering important things through the little bands on her fingers. even though shes just some goofy little girl, shes smart!! she knows whats going on and knows what she has to do, and shes been studying the clouds to make sure that she and her friends are ready. because honestly, what else is she going to do with her time? she's alone on the island, and this is her destiny. she's going to make sure it happens.

here, we're finally seeing a bit of her friendly and put together self image start to fall apart as she just gives up on keeping track of things. she's grieving the loss of prospit, shes just had her first ever nightmare, AND she had to deal with an obnoxious teenage boy (karkat), and she's reached her breaking point. and she just. gives up. forget the reminders, forget the systems, they aren't serving her right now, so off they go.

plus, we get this tidbit a few pages later:

jade always knew she was going to die. she had seen herself, stuffed and perfectly preserved as a thirteen-year-old. she must have known that it was coming soon, but that didn't stop her from going through the plan to play the game with her friends. personally i think she thought it was worth it if she could at least see her friends, hopefully keep them safe, and have some fun times with them right before she had to die.

i wonder if theres a part of her unsettled by the fact that she's finally faced something she didn't already know was going to happen. she no longer has the comforting clouds of skaia to tell her what's going to happen - she's as clueless as everyone else. probably MORE clueless than some characters, like the trolls, who have a window into her future that she can't see.

jade's realized that she doesn't know all of the beats of this story anymore. she might just grow up now, and that means she has to go forth into the unknown.

#jade harley #homestuck #stripe hs reread 2024 #i hope this is coherent. i teach science not lit analysis.

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hazelfoureyes · 2 months

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I just need you to know this story has had me in a chokehold and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying writing it. This is gonna be a weird smutty slow burn, so still smut every post but full p in v sex will be a reward you have to work for?

⟢HumanAlastor x FemaleBurlesquerReader - A Doe in Fall

Part 1 - Pretty in Redsmut💦 Part 2 - Liar smut💦 Part 3 - A Tragedysmut💦 Part 4 - Enough Part 5 - Too Much Part 6 - Learning smut💦 Part 7 - Recognition smut💦

A burlesquer with a penchant for conning men, you find your latest game interrupted when your next mark saves you from an aggressive fan— by killing him. The chance encounter left you curious, still half convinced you could complete your normal chase. Unbeknownst to you, you were the one being tracked.

「warnings/tags: HumanAlastor x FemaleReader, implied attempt to SA, fingering, plot with porn?, Multi part work, bad kind of choking, blood kink, blood licking, just in general blood, Non-Sex repulsed Ace Spectrum Alastor, stalking, murder obvs, finger sucking, smoking kinda kills if you squint, Public sex acts, garter belt, You have a stage name but no one important uses it, Greed, Lust, Human Alastor is a little different than Demon Alastor. 」

minors dni 💅🏽

Part 1 Pretty in Red

The marriage between burlesque and jazz wasn’t unexpected. Before the Great Depression took the nation into a stranglehold, both Jazz and Burlesque were immoral wastes of time only the most barbaric sought out.

And oh, did you love it. Everyone who was made to feel like nobody flocked to your theater and the surrounding neighborhood. Men, women, the people who didn’t agree with either. The biblically inclined, those closer to sodom, the sapphic dolls. Everyone was equal in the halls of jazz rooms and theatres where burlesquers were welcome.

Because of the inclusive nature of such places, you often saw familiar faces. It wouldn’t be unusual for someone from Thursday night to be seen Saturday at a different locale.

That presented certain opportunities and challenges. When you found a good mark, it was easy to be wherever he was and play it off as fate and common interests.

And when you gained a new stalker, someone wanting a personal show, it could be hard to tell until it was too late.

Maybe it was your greed, or just your love of attention, but you found yourself focused almost entirely on a particularly well dressed man one evening. You’d seen him around before. Clean cut, sharp suit, a welcoming smile always on display. He looked like he had money, the most attractive quality of any man you could meet.

So focused on his gleaming stare from the side booths you hadn’t noticed the man at the stage front tables. You barely noticed him the night before, or the night before that, either. Because Smiles, as you took to calling the handsome stranger in the back, had been here three nights now too.

You really put on a show. Shimmying your hips, ostrich feathers following suit with every move. Your brassiere was heavy with shining rhinestones, panties of silk and lace. Your set was almost done, all that was left was to remove your top and slink away behind the curtains to hollers and whistles. Back turned, you unhooked the painful bra and let it fall to the stage with a clunk. Foot in front of foot, you stalked the stage length. With your hand hidden from view you took the feathered fan from the stagehand behind the curtain. As the music crescendoed you turned, fan unfurling just in time to hide yourself.

Groans, mass begging from the audience. Your stage name a chant now, a prayer. “Autumn! Come on!”

As the band slowed, music dying to mark the end of your number, you scanned the crowd. Eyes blinking coyly, you mouthed, “More? Did you want more?”

People were jumping to their feet, not Smiles but that was fine, you were focused now on the adoration of the crowd. The music ended, a second of silence.

You winked, the drums hitting one last beat as you let the fan close.

Fanfare! Men whistling, women clapping. Someone shouted a marriage proposal. You took a bow, twirled on the balls of your feet and slipped gracefully behind the curtains.

Your hands wound to your spine, rubbing blood flow back into your skin as the staff removed your headdress. Someone slipped your robe over you and you nodded a thanks, aching feet carrying you to the dressing room. It was chaos, as usual. Women buzzing around, tits and ass here and there. You smiled. You happened to enjoy this part of the job. Soft bodies in shiny costumes, lovely smells and sweet voices. If you could get dressed quickly enough, you could still take a tour of the room and slide into Smiles’ booth.

“Enjoy the show?” You’d ask. He’d lean in, maybe blush, “Always when you’re here.” Or something like that. You’d cozy up to him, flag down a waiter for something strong and pricey, and get him properly drunk. He’d wake up outside, fine and dandy except his missing cash.

You’ll call him a drunkard if he confronts you, accuse him of getting himself robbed after you refused his advances. You’ll say it too loudly, and he’ll run off.

You danced a little in your seat, another game of cat and mouse about to commence. But first, a smoke.

Unbeknownst to you, the well dressed man hadn’t come to see you. He preferred your singing shows at the little dive bar two blocks over. No, he had come for the man at the front table. For weeks now, he had watched him harassing the ladies of the few joints in New Orleans that weren’t regularly hounded by police. Your smiley mark even heard stories of unsavory acts, many women leaving the dance scene entirely after.

He didn’t care for it. He didn’t care for him. So he took to his hunt, following the man to come to his own conclusions. The pattern of behavior was obvious, and though he hadn’t seen what ended the last obsession, it was clear one of the performers at this club was being stalked as the next victim.

He watched your dance with half lidded eyes, just as much as he watched the man give dirty looks to the other men cheering. Heard the, “Marry me!” shouted at you.

Yes, it was obvious to him now.

So when the target of his interest got up and pushed his way into a staff only door, well, the well dressed man was sure to follow.

The great thing about confidence and a nicely tailored suit is that no one questions you about why you are where you are. So while the brute he tailed had to shove past people to get wherever he was going, people smiled and made room for the gentleman who was not far behind.

He caught the street access door before it closed, allowing it to stay open just a sliver. Enough for one golden brown eye to watch the events unfold.

“Can I have a light?” The stranger asked you. You looked at him, then to the staff only entrance he just came out of.

“I don’t think I know you….,” you handed him the lighter but he instead leaned into you, cigarette hanging from his lips. “You… new?”

You sparked the flint with a practiced thumb, taking three tries to get it lit, and put your hand out. The man didn’t budge, eyebrows rising, “You really don’t recognize me?” He asked, motioning with his hand to come closer. Your eyes glanced down the alley, cars slowly moving past the street. When you looked back, the man took your wrist in his hand. He held you so tightly that the muscles in your palm locked and you dropped the lighter.

“What the fu-,” his hand came across your face, halting your sentence.

“I’m your best customer. Every show. I’m the one who brings flowers.”

Dozens of men bring flowers, especially on the weekend shows. You held your cheek, skin burning. Your hand pulled back, the corner of your lip bleeding from his rings. Scrambling, your mind was searching for the right words.

With a forced smiled, your shaky voice finally piped up, “Oh! Yeah! Oh geez. I am so sorry, doll. I’m just so tired, and the alley is so dark. Here, let’s go inside so I can get a better look at you.” You tried to take your wrist from him but he didn’t loosen up.

“Nah, you ain’t tricking me. You owe me.” He pulled you into him, large hand gripping your face with ease, “You can’t lead on men like this and think you don’t gotta answer for it.” He kissed you, forcing your face into his. “Bitch! Did you fucking bite me?” He threw you into the tin trash cans beside the wall, knocking the wind out of you.

No purse, no sharp object, not even a heeled shoe to defend yourself with. You cursed, so preoccupied with Smiles you forgot your wits.

You spit out the copper saliva, his blood and yours. “I’ll keep biting, too.”

Why scream? The sounds of the next act were bouncing off the brick walls. Upbeat jazz and applause echoing around you. No one would hear you. Men can break your body but you never had to give them your dignity. Never give them the satisfaction of a response.

No. No screaming. You instead spent your energy trying to get to your feet. He took hold of your neck now, throttling you. It wasn’t what you had expected, but as he lifted you off the ground and your little dressing room slippers fell off, you thought this was actually better.

“Well I think that’s quite enough.”

You felt warmth, then registered wetness. Your shin scraped on the asphalt as you were dropped without warning. Trying to open your eyes, you found you couldn’t see. Wiping and blinking away the foreign liquid, you watched your attacker fall to his knees.

Blood was shooting from between his fingers around his own neck, each pulse becoming weaker and weaker, evident through the stream.

When he finally fell over, drained, you were startled to see another man with you. The light reflected off his glasses as he adjusted them, the knife still in his right hand as he did so.

“My, my. What a mess he’s made.” The man smiled down at you, offering a hand. When you didn’t immediately react, he cocked his head to the left, “Is that anyway to treat your rescuer?”

Is that was this was? A rescue? You took his hand with both of yours, pulling yourself up.

Smiles? You blinked away the shock, time to shift into your next part. Damsel. You weren’t out the woods yet.

“You saved my life!” As you pressed yourself into his chest, you tucked your head beneath his chin. You tried to make yourself small. “I owe you! Please let’s go inside, drinks on me!” You looked up, batting your lashes.

“I don’t think that’s wise, dear.” His gaze panned down your dress, soaked through. He could see the thinking behind your eyes.

“No, right….,” You gripped his vest, “We gotta get outta here, fast. There’s a hotel just behind the threatre.” You started to pull his suit jacket off, slipping it over yourself. “No cops, the theatre will get raided. Just— take me somewhere safe?”

You watched him look you over, arm finally extending to let you hook yours with his.

As soon as the hotel door closed behind you, you slipped off his jacket and ran to the dressing table mirror.

Your face was painted red, navy dress now black and sticky. It was good you stayed from view of the reception staff. “I didn’t get my rescuer’s name,” you licked your thumb and rubbed at the blood around your cheeks.

“Alastor. It’s a pleasure.”

You laughed, “Is that what you call a pleasure?” Turning, you pulled the mostly still dry handkerchief from your pocket and dabbed the corner on your tongue. You brought it up to the frame of his glasses and wiped the blood from the metal. “I’d hate to see what you call a bad time.”

Your hand slowed, noticing the way he was looking at you. Typically men’s pupils were blown when they fell on you, but his were constricted. They flitted around your face. His hand took hold of yours, fingers separating the thumb from the handkerchief. He pulled the little square of yellow fabric free with his other hand, allowing him to hold your thumb now by itself.

His lips opened, tongue licking the blood stained finger before placing it directly into his mouth.

Your stared, horrified, as he sucked the digit clean.

His eyes fluttered close, finger popping out of his mouth with a debauched sound. You made no attempt to take back your hand. The realization you may have hopped out of the frying pan and into the fire set in.

“You are a funny one, aren’t you?” You tried to sound as in control as possible. Calm. Unwavered. Offered a timid smile.

He chuckled, “You could say that. May I?” His fingers lifted your chin. You didn’t know what he was asking. His soft smile looked downright loving. He smelled so good, notes of something earthy rising above the copper.

You nodded, because part of you wanted to see where it would go. And part of you thought you didn’t have a choice.

As his face came to yours, you instinctually closed your eyes expecting a kiss. But no, instead you felt his tongue wipe across the cut at the corner of your mouth. His breath blanketed your cheek. Then his hand left your chin, the warmth of his body gone entirely.

You opened your eyes to see him at the door, slipping back into his jacket, “I’ll pay for the night.” He tipped his head to you and exited the room back first, eyes locked with yours until the door closed.

You just stood there in the silence left behind. But as if on cue, the adrenaline waned and your knees buckled under you. You were moments from death, now somehow spared. But what had he— Alastor, been doing there? Did he follow you, too? The cat and mouse had been flipped, or perhaps now this was a fox and hound?

Gripping the dressing table, you pulled yourself up and into the view of the mirror again. Face streaked in dried blood save for the one clean spot where your lips met cheek.

You felt like a ghost the next day. It would be nice to tell someone about what happened but, “Hey a man tried to kill me and then another man killed him! Then he licked blood off my face and I let him. It was the most disturbingly erotic thing to happen to me in months!” would get you tossed into a wagon.

“Are you rude or just stupid?” The theatre manager pulled you aside by the arm when you came into rehearsal. “You can’t just disappear like that, people were waiting.”

Your eyes narrowed, “Was… my absence really the most exciting part of the evening? Not the John in the gutter?”

He huffed, “So that’s it? Got a beau?”

“Wait— nothing else happened last night? After I left?”

“This show doesn’t revolve around you. Plenty happened.”

“Excuse me,” you hurried into the back, “And sorry!”

You opened the street access door and looked into the alley. Trash cans neat and tidy, no dead man, nothing strange or telltale.

You ducked back inside. Had Smiles done this? Obviously, actually. No stranger just cleaned up the dead body. If the flatfeet had found him, the club would have been under scrutiny.

Good, you thought, and went about your work.

Rehearsal dragged on. Little details summoning you back to the night before.

“You okay?” Another performer asked, grabbing your hand and inspecting the blood around your cuticles.

“Oh it’s not mine!” You laughed, she laughed, you walked off before she could clarify.

When applying your makeup, you remembered his hands on your face. They were so soft. Definitely a man of means. A brief intrusive thought, the other hands on your face last night.

You pranced on stage, going through the motions of your routine. Even in the empty hall, your eyes wandered to the booth he’d been in. And as you took the stage in earnest later that night you searched the crowd for the glint of his glasses and found nothing shiny nor promising.

Back in the dressing room you took a moment to wonder what the actual fuck you we’re doing. He murdered a man in front of you, why were you hoping to see him again? He had half a mind to kill you next.

But would that really be so bad? Your life was routine, boring even. The only thing keeping your lungs expanding was the applause. Maybe the headlines of your death would cause such an uproar, dancer struck down in her prime, that you could bask in the loving glow all the way from hell.

One way to remain famous, you considered. A dramatic death.

Not that you were famous. You weren’t part of the national circuits. Just your local theatres, a common face and body to the sinners of Louisiana’s most infamous city. But, well, fame is relative. For the scene you were in, you were your own little star.

A shining light. Shimmering. The faint light reflecting off— Blood. For a second you could only remember looking through bloodied, heavy lashes.

“You’ve been so out of it. Trouble in paradise?” Ruth, the curviest of your coworkers and arguably the favorite of the crew, rested her chin on your head. Looking at each other in the mirror, you offered a soft smile.

“I’ll letcha know when I get there.”

She pinched your cheek, “Tommy said you had a new guy. I just figured-,”

“That isn’t,” you clenched your eyes shut, “no, no guy. I just got locked out last night in the alley. The sticky-,” sticky and viscous blood, “back door wouldn’t open up. I didn’t want to come in the front in my slippers so I just hoofed it home.”

She patted your head, “if you say so! Be careful out there though. Dangerous these days.”

An understatement.

You enjoyed the spotlight, but more than that you craved the attention doted on you after. You’d walk through the hall to the bar to adoring looks and free drinks. It bothered you that Tommy was telling the girls you had a man. You didn’t want to appear too closed off, or for word to spread to the customers.

Last thing you needed was men passing you by for more available options. Not that the pay wasn’t fine. Ends were being met, but grifting added an element of thrill. You really did love the chase. Finding someone and deciding he would be yours, he would fall under your spell and be at your feminine mercy. It made you feel powerful, almost mythical. And the money was nice. Sometimes you didn’t even need to steal, the men would just lavish you in gifts and you’d let it fizzle out naturally. Normally their wives would snatch them back or they’d just get tired of waiting for you to leave the stage and dance into their domestic dreams. A housewife? An adopted mother to a grown man during the day, a hungry nymph at night? For what, an allowance and a home you didn’t own? Pass. Where’s that handsome man with his knife? That was a much better steel to fall onto than what these men offered from their laps.

From your view at the bar you knew he wasn’t there. But with a nod you decided the chase was still on. You were going to get your victory. If anything, this would be easier. You had dirt on him. Blackmail would be simple enough. Bloody clothes and the perfect alibi; being a woman. No cop would think you took down that hulking man.

Ah, right. There was no body.

That would be an issue. He had to have taken it somewhere. Just find him and follow. Worst case scenario, you play the usual game and steal whatever cash was in his wallet.

Well, worst case you die.

You slept sitting up to keep your hair set, during the day your makeup barely was there but a red lip always the star. You had three nice dresses (well, you had had four) so you figured three nights to find him before moving on.

You slinked through the crowds of the hot and sweaty dance club Moxie. Swinging music kept bodies moving, and though you kept your eyes open you didn’t catch sight of this Alastor fellow. Which was fine! You enjoyed a few dances, swing always making you feel energized. Not a waste of a Friday night.

Saturday was easy, the lounge on fifth. Smooth jazz, plush chairs, rich men. Definitely a place you could imagine Smiles to frequent. The whisky was all top shelf, and many gentlemen offered you a lap to sit. Sure, no Alastor, but you didn’t go home empty handed.

You weren’t a particularly great singer, but if the room was small enough and the piano loud enough, you could please a crowd. Your friend had you on a semi-set schedule most Sundays at her little dive too many blocks from Main Street. Her darling played piano, you sat and sang to the couple dozen patrons stuffed into the one room bar. When you finished your set, you took your bows and looked for your friend. You needed to tell her you wouldn’t be staying.

Your polite nods and gracious thank yous were abruptly ended by a tap on your shoulder, “You dropped this, miss.” You did a mental check of your purse before turning around.

“Oh, a sight for sore eyes. Mr. Alastor.” Your face lit up, you could see it in his glasses.

“You’re too kind. Here, I apologize for the delay. I wanted to return them clean.” In his hand was your yellow handkerchief, folded neatly. You took it and found it uncharacteristically heavy.

When you unfurled it, your brass lighter fell into your waiting palm. Your thumb caressed the engraving.

Alastor watched your face as the lighter tumbled out. “I figured it was important, given the condition and detailing.”

You tested the weight in your hand, “Did you fill it?” You looked to him incredulously. He nodded.

It was a surprisingly kind act, and you needed a second to regain your composure. “I don’t know how to thank you.” Your quick wit failed for a moment, but rebounded fast. “Except with a drink. My treat. To my rescuer.”

He mulled the idea, your reaction to him was interesting. Alastor had thought if he approached you first you’d show a little more fear, or shock. But you looked downright chipper to see him there.

“Unfortunately I don’t have much time tonight. I had just wanted to return your items.”

Your smile dropped. How did he know you were here? Had he been carrying— no, he said he had them cleaned. Had he seen you here before, before the incident? A chuckle, smile brought back, “My luck is terrible. You always flee me. I hope you don’t see my company as deadweight.”

Alastor’s smile twitched, eyes hidden behind the glare of his glasses, “Not at all! I think you’d find I’m quite comfortable with-.”

“Lugging people around?” You said. That constricted pupil again, eyes wild. A chill ran down your spine. Alarms were going off. Wrong answer. You straightened your back, popping the items into your purse, “Next time.”

Alastor nodded, “Yes. Next time, then.”

You fucked it up. You knew you had, but suddenly his words felt like a thinly veiled threat.

You turned to leave and hadn’t seen his smile sour.

It hadn’t been a threat. He hadn’t anticipated you to notice the implication. Most people would have been so blinded by his charm they would fail to notice the glaring red flags. He was mildly impressed. You would be more trouble than he had expected.

Alastor knew he needed to do something about the clearly clever woman who was seemingly expecting him. He had followed you for several days, surprised to find you not spreading word about the murder. You hadn’t spoken to anyone, really. Even the man you left the lounge with, you just smiled and nodded nearly all evening while the man dominated the conversation. So, your sharp wit took him off guard. Who were you pretending to be? And why?

All of your cleverness fell apart when you tried to follow him. It was almost comical. He felt bad. This was going to be embarrassing for you.

He took several right turns and stepped into the park just outside of the bar. You thought perhaps he had gotten lost and considered turning around after you realized you’d lost sight of him. As you passed a large weeping willow, you were pulled under the curtains of hanging moss by your waist.

Back against the large tree, you could only pout.

“What are you after, stalking a man in the dead of night?” Alastor had you pinned, both hands on either side of your head. His body boxed you in, not that there was much more to see than moss and darkness.

You blinked several times. What a question. You answered honestly, “You.” He cocked a brow. Then you lied, “Your affection. Your time.”

Something akin to a giggle bubbled from his chest. “I don’t have much affection, but I have even less time.” Your eyes darted around, looking for your next move. “I-,” you grabbed him by the face and kissed him. When you broke the kiss he was staring wide eyed, glasses askew. He opened his mouth to speak and you kissed him again, longer, harder.

He seemed frozen under your mouth, lips taut. Your hands roamed his face, messing up his hair and glasses. Mind reeling. Play the nymph. Be the whore the men always said they hated. Be too strong, too forward, too much and he’ll run off like men do. You could try again another day.

Your hand reached for his lap, his hips instinctively jerking away. Perfect. Men these days can’t get it up for a woman who takes the lead.

Alastor was entirely unsure what the fuck was happening. You were wildly unpredictable. When you grabbed at his dick, he thought his eyes would cross from the shock. Is this what ‘affection’ meant to you? He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t understand you. Were you really just lustful? Even after what you’d seen him—

You bit at his bottom lip, pulling slightly. Big eyes looking back at him. Your breath was already running away from you, adrenaline seemingly synonymous with Alastor. Staring up at him, you waited. His move.

It was his turn to blink. He looked off to his left, eyes swinging back to you. With a shrug, he leaned his body back towards yours. His hand slid down the front of your dress; red silk. A deer in the headlights, you tensed. The rare third option; fight, flight, freeze. Soon his fingers were tracing the lace of your stockings, climbing up the garter straps.

His eyes were studying your face. You didn’t want to give the wrong answer again, but at this point you weren’t sure any answer was right. This was taking a sudden turn and your foot was off the brake. You closed your eyes, opting out of the scrutiny of his stare. His hand met your stomach and began to slip down again. He rested it between your thighs, longer fingers and palm cupping the entirety of your sex.

Alastor struggled to decipher your expression. It was almost like a pout, but more subtle. You hadn’t said stop or pushed him away yet. Was he right? You were just… horny? As his hand slid back up and pried their way into your panties, you trembled.

It had been so long since someone else’s hand was on you. Someone whose hands you genuinely enjoyed, who you wanted to be on you.

Is that right? You wanted him to touch you?

Maybe it was the stare, or the smile. Probably just the adrenaline.

His hand found its place again, middle finger bending to part your folds and feel your wetness. You whimpered, hand coming to cover your own mouth.

“Is this what you wanted?” He said it low, a husky tone he didn’t have before.

No. Maybe. You nodded yes.

“Will you be satisfied now? No more tailing me?”

No. Probably not. Another nod.

His finger pushed in, and with a kind of greed you didn't recognize your hips ground down into his palm. He slipped in and out of you with ease. You had no idea when or why you got so wet.

“I always end up dripping around you, Alastor,” you whispered through your fingers. His ring finger joined. Why couldn’t you shut up? Why did you have to bring up, well, the murder?

“A common problem for those I take an interest in.”

Oh no. You moaned softly into your hand. Sharp mind made dull by his fingers so you didn’t, couldn’t, process his double meaning.

Oh no. The sounds of footsteps, a pair of lovers sneaking into the park for privacy. You heard their giggles, the sounds of kisses interrupting their walking.

“Shhh”, he breathed into your ear as he worked a third finger into your heat. One knuckle, two knuckles. A whimper. His hand came to press down over your own on your mouth, a second barrier for your mewling. You groaned, the sound coming from your throat.

Whispers. The silhouette of the two interlopers was visible through the willow’s curtains. You watched from over his shoulder, pussy clenching around him. Three knuckles deep, bottoming out.

Fuck it. You moaned freely into your hand, wiggling down onto his hand. Hips rolling, you let your little sounds of praise flow.

The couple laughed, “That’s the spirit!” A man said, a woman hushing him and pulling him away.

Alastor grinned into your neck, immensely amused. He would have better luck predicting a dice roll than your next move.

You hadn’t realized how hollow you’d been until now, feeling so full. When alone, you focused on just cumming, fingers on your clit and mind on memories. You never bothered much with anything else.

Your hunger intensified. You wanted more. Both hands reached for his crotch again, finding nothing there for you. You could have cried. How were you a wet mess pressed against a tree and he was soft as a newspaper in a rainstorm?

Your pride stung. Men usually stood at attention around you. A half sob into the air earned you a chuckle from Alastor. “It’s no reflection of you, darling.” His nose nudged your ear lobe, “I need a little different stimulation than most.”

“Do you play for the other team?” You considered how you could momentarily switch.

A louder laugh, “I don’t have a team.” He leaned back now to look at you. His freehand came to press on your lower stomach, gently pushing your womb down. Your brows knit, why did that feel so good? Hands going to the tree behind you for stability.

“Sure feels like you know how to play. This is-,” his hand switched from thrusting slowly in and out to moving front and back. It sent vibrations up into you. Your eyes rolled close. Shut up. Stop talking. Focus. Close.

He kissed around your open mouth, “Well, it’d be unamerican to not dabble. When necessary, or when the conditions are right.”

Double speak over, “Just tell me what to do to get you to fuck me.”

Alastor’s head fell back as he laughed earnestly, most likely alerting anyone in the immediate area. “Ha! No, this is more fun.”

“Oh fuck you,” you brought a hand around to your throbbing clit to quicken your release.

“Maybe next time, dear.” He took a second, fingers in you sliding around your walls in search of something before finding his place and continuing. Your breath noticeably changed, instead of panting you were practically holding it in. You needed the pressure, you needed something to squeeze that spring of pleasure down so it could snap back. As your face went flush, he kissed at your temple, “You look so pretty in red.”

“Oh god-,” Your head fell onto his chest, your joint effort bringing you to orgasm.

“A little late on Sunday for prayers, don't you think?”

A tiny scream into his suit pocket, his hand not stopping until your thighs finished twitching around him. Even after his hand stopped moving you gripped him by the wrist and rolled onto his fingers a few more times. The pleasure ebbing but still spiking every time he moved against you.

Ah, greed. That was it. He understood a little better. This wasn’t lust, not alone. You were definitely a mix of the two. With a sigh, you released your hold and let him slide out of you. Already you felt lonelier. Already you wished to start over.

With his dry hand he smoothed out your dress. You weren’t ashamed but you suddenly felt too embarrassed to look him the eye. But you did, hearing him hum as he sucked his fingers clean.

Why were you only ever in his mouth in the strangest ways?

“You always taste so sweet, dear. Now!” You wanted to say something clever and salacious like, ‘there’s more where that came from’ but he didn’t afford you the opportunity. He offered you his hooked arm, “It’s dangerous in the park at night. Let’s get you to a cab and on your way home.”

“Is this a hobby of yours?” Your legs were wobbly but otherwise fine. “Illegal activities in public?”

“Funny, I was just wondering the same of you. Stalking is a crime, dear.”

You bit your lip. “Touché.”

He flagged down a taxi, “Tell him where to go.” You slid into the back seat and half-whispered to the driver. Alastor leaned into the passenger side front window and after paying the man, went to close your door, “You’ve been an entertaining sparring partner. Goodbye, sweetheart.”

With a thud of the door and a growl of the engine, you were driving away from him. You could see him in the rear window. He didn’t dare to move, he didn’t need you following another step of his.

Which was unfortunate for him, as you were already scheming how to find him again.

༻Masterlist༺

∰ Summoning the Horny Little Deer Cult (general tag list):

@cxrsedwxrlds , @nonetheartist , @tsunaki , @janchei , @wettiny-in-smutland , @moonmark98 , @hoebihoeshi , @pansexual-opera-house , @polytheatrix , @lorddiabigmommymilkers , @backinthefkingbuildingagain , @harley2223-blog , @coffee-colored-hopeless-romantic , @poinappel , @midnightnoiserose , @spookieroz , @missmidorima , @ivebeenthearchersstuff , @downbadforfictionalppl , @xx-all-purpose-nerd-xx , @sleepylittledemon , @aether-th3-enby , @dontfuckbutimfab , @breathlessaura , @aperfectidiot , @certainlygay , @jth12 , @star-kujo-platinum ,

@ivebeenthearchersstuffn, @rubyninja1 , @simphornies , @alleystore , @readergirlstuff , @berry-demon , @chirimeimei , @fairyv-ice , @olive-frog , @thonethatflies620 , @tiredkiwiii , @ilikemyteawithmilk , @whateverlololo , @psipies , @howabouticallyou , @roxxie-wolf , @ive-no-idea-what-to-call-this , @fizzled-phoenix , @fjorjestertealeaf , @phobophobular , @surusurusuru , @mariaclarade-la-cruz1 , @whateverlololo , @simplyonehellofanotaku , @xixflower , @i-am-nonbinary-bean-deal-with-it , @roxxie-wolf , @a-case-of-attachment , @multifandomfanatic02 , @watereddownmilk , @raynerrold , @crazii-saber-wolf , @valkyrie-expeditions , @bontensbabygirl , @sillyb0nez , @oo0lady-mad0oo , @jazzmasternot , @pseudobun , @fraugwinska✨, @alitaar , @angelicwillows

🏹Alastor stalkers: @celestial-vomit , @amurtan ,@valkyrie-expeditions

1K notes · View notes

hyukalyptus · 8 months

Text

something nice — sub!fem!reader x dom!yeonjun x servicetop!kai

cw. reader is in an established (open) relationship with yeonjun, cucking? (kai eats reader's pussy while yj watches lol), cunnilingus ofc, nipple play, orgasm denial, edging, pet names (baby, jjun), begging, mention of "punishment" but nothing's ever done, yeonjun and kai talk about reader and what they're gonna do to her (without her understanding—everything is consensual in the beginning, but read note below), let me know if there's anything else. notes. IMPORTANT: ok so the tea with this one. the idea here is that the reader doesn't speak korean well and kai and yj are speaking korean to kinda talk about the reader and what they're gonna do to her so she doesn't understand. nothing aggressive, just describing what to do to her body so she's kinda surprised? SO!! anything in italics is in korean. thats important!! also idk how i feel about this???? smut under cut. wc. 1.5K

“Did she give you a reason or did she just break up with you?” You’re eavesdropping on Yeonjun and Kai—not that they’re being very secretive. They’re talking about a woman Kai’s been seeing while you play video games and attempt to translate in your head, but you're not being too successful, catching a few words here and there.

“She did say one thing,” Kai says hesitantly. “But it’s kinda embarrassing.”

“What is it?”

“Well,” he starts, scooting closer to Yeonjun to awkwardly whisper something to him, twiddling his thumbs, running his fingers through his hair.

“Oh,” Yeonjun chuckles. “That’s…man, if you get really good at that, you could date anyone.”

“What are you talking about?” You finally pause your game, curiosity getting the best of you. Looking up, Kai looks like you caught him stealing cookies from a cookie jar while Yeonjun tries to hold back a chuckle. The three of you exchange looks until Yeonjun rolls his eyes to bluntly say—

“Eating women out.”

“Yeonjun—!” Kai says, shoving his arm.

“What?” He chuckles, returning the shove. “I eat her out all the time. She knows what it is. She knows you eat pussy too.”

“But that’s why that woman broke up with you?” You ask. “Because you…you're bad at eating pussy?” He blushes, averting his attention to the floor while he clasps his hands together, nodding shyly.

“Be honest, babe—am I good at eating you out?”

Looking between the two of them, you sit up and say, “Yeah, you’re probably the best I’ve had, but we’re super compatible, you know? We’re, like, super in love. That makes a big difference sometimes.”

Holding back a cocky smile, he asks, “But, objectively, I’m pretty good, right?” You shrug and nod—really, he probably is the best you’ve ever had, but that’s another story.

“What makes it good?” Kai asks.

Humming, you think before saying, “First, he doesn’t go straight for it.” Turning red and ears getting warm, you gush and— “Oh god, Kai, don’t look at me when I tell you this.”

“Ah, this is ridiculous,” Yeonjun exasperates. “Do you just wanna practice on her?” You both whip your heads in his direction. “If you’re comfortable with it, of course,” he says to you. “Just thought it might be helpful.”

Oh, how did you end up here? Laying in Yeonjun's bed, clenching your thighs together out of nervousness. “Remember, this is kinda specific to her. Pay attention to what whoever you’re with wants.” Kai nods, kneeling at the foot of the bed.

“She already said this—” Yeonjun says. “I don’t go straight for it. I kiss her first, then make my way down there.”

“You want him to kiss me?”

He shrugs and says, “If you’re alright with that.”

“If you are,” you say, looking Kai in the eyes. Both of them can’t help but notice the confidence you seem to be exuding, especially compared to Kai. Trembling fingers reaching for your cheek, he looks at you for permission one final time. Finally leaning in, his lips press to yours.

You’d forgotten what it was like to have a first kiss with someone. Kai’s kisses are different from Yeonjun’s. Kai’s are much more cautious, more careful—not necessarily shy, but careful. It quickly turns hot and heavy. But you remember Yeonjun is watching you, suddenly overtaken with bashfulness, you break the kiss to glance over at him.

Him and that sinister smile.

Turning back to Kai, you crash into his lips again, humming into his mouth and smirking to rub how much you're enjoying this in Yeonjun's face.

“Touch her,” Yeonjun says. “Kinda slowly, but then a little more intense.” Kai does as he’s told, his hand dragging up your hip to squeeze your tits. “Under her shirt.”

His hand on the outside of your bra feels new and exciting. Reaching around your back to unhook it, you break the kiss to take your shirt off, pulling at the hem of his.

“Slow down for a second,” Yeonjun chuckles and Kai listens, placing gentle kisses to your collarbone. “Lick her nipples.” Swirling his tongue around your nipple, you gasp, reaching for his hair. “Pay attention to which one she likes better.”

Kai tests both, slyly licking between the two. After testing the waters, he picks correctly. You chuckle thinking about Yeonjun sitting on a chair across the room, smirking in approval. You could look for yourself, but you can’t bring yourself to open your eyes.

“Keep licking her until her hips roll.” This is a bit crazy, isn’t it? The guy you love telling another man how to fuck you the way you like. “Not yet.” Yeonjun switches to Korean, making you roll your eyes. If you didn’t have the energy to translate in your head earlier, you definitely can’t focus enough to translate now.

Lips trailing down your body, he tugs at your shorts, but keeps your cute pink panties on. Yeonjun talks him through every move—to lick his thumb and rub your nipple, to press his nose to the outside of your panties, to skate his lips across your inner thighs.

Your hips roll uncontrollably, practically begging him to taste you.

“Kai—” You whisper, your body instantly burning at the sound of the both of them chuckling. Pulling your panties down and off your legs, he throws them to Yeonjun who happily wads them up to sniff them and smell how delicious you are.

Licking his thumb again, he keeps rubbing circles over your nipple as he finally licks your clit, your back arching as soon as he touches it.

“Fuck—” You say breathlessly, looking down at him as his eyes sparkle up at you, your head dropping to your pillow with a thud. “Who the fuck is this bitch that says you’re bad at this?” He shakes his head, digging deeper into your pussy.

Smiling cockily, you look over at Yeonjun, trying to control his breathing. He can’t help it—the two of you are just too hot together. He's never been able to enjoy this kind of view before. Seeing how every part of your body reacts to being touched—it's an incredible view.

“Please tell me he’s allowed to make me cum, baby,” You beg.

“Of course,” he chuckles smugly. “If he can.” Kai’s eating you out like he’s absolutely starving. And it’s true—he can’t help it. You taste too fucking good.

Your eyes squeeze shut as you start squeaking, throwing your head back.

“Okay, that sound means she’s gonna cum soon. Try to bring her as close to the edge as possible and then stop.”

“Fuck, Kai,” you breathe. “Right there—yes.” You can’t believe how good he is at this, especially given the reason you're under his tongue right now. He’s supposed to be bad at this, right?

You’re so fucking close and he can feel it. “Don’t stop—” he brings you right there. And then he does it. He stops. “Agh, fuck you,” you groan. Looking down at him, his smirking at you, eyes flashing between you and Yeonjun.

He doesn’t waste too much time before getting back to your pussy, flicking his tongue over your clit.

“Take it away from her for a bit. Lick her nipples again.” He does just that. You’re aching, bucking your hips over and over, desperately trying to relieve some kind of tension. But his tongue does feel amazing on your tits. Threading your fingers through his hair, you tug at it hard. He groans, his mouth dropping open like you just unlocked a new kink of his.

Now he can’t take it anymore. Hips jutting forward, you feel the roughness of his sweatpants drag against your center, relieving some of that tension. You gasp, resorting to begging him to get back to licking you.

“No, don’t,” Yeonjun says sternly.

“But I want to,” Kai whines back, looking at your pussy hungrily, sticking the tip of his tongue out, giving his best begging eyes. But Yeonjun just shakes his head, satisfied with watching you uncontrollably rolling your hips up toward Kai’s mouth. Kai compromises, wrapping his hands around the backs of your thighs to yank you closer to him and presses his lips to the skin right around your clit, teasing you even more.

“Babe—” you breathe, begging Yeonjun with your eyes to let him continue licking you.

“I know, baby, I know…” he responds, his voice low and rough. He finally lets him lick you again. But he doesn’t show much mercy. He repeats the same tactic over and over—having him bring you right to the edge, even to the point of tears, then he stops right in his tracks.

"I'm gonna tell you to stop, but I want you to keep going, okay?" Kai nods, agreeing to his instructions. Bringing you to the edge again, you're begging for mercy, begging to cum. "Don't let her cum, Kai," he says, making tears form in your eyes. "Stop—"

And he does.

"I told you to let her cum that time."

"Sorry," he smiles up at him, licking his lips. "It's so fun to see her beg like that though." Tilting his head toward you, he says, "Look at her...she's got tears in her eyes. Isn't that the hottest fucking thing you've ever seen?"

"It's okay, baby," he says, fingers flowing through your hair while Kai's mouth finds your clit again. You're moaning, gasping for air, swearing, screaming, anything to try to find a release. "Not yet. Don't let her fucking cum, Kai." You don't think you can handle this much longer. Edging is nice, yes, but this? This is bordering torture.

"Please, please, please, Jjun..." you trail off. "Just please let me cum. I can't take it anymore."

"I know you can take it, baby. Fucking taking it so well..."

It's building again. That knot in your stomach that gets tighter and tighter with every second. That white hot fire in the pit of your stomach waiting to explode.

"Don't stop, Kai," you blurt. "I'm gonna cum—" Slamming your palm over your mouth—you shouldn't have said that. He's gonna make you regret saying that.

"Don't let her cum," he orders.

But his grip gets tighter. His tongue licks furiouser. His face digs deeper. You're so fucking close. Closer than you've ever been tonight.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, Kai..." your orgasms crashes over you like a bolt of lightning. "Yes, fuck yes, that feels so fucking good." You feel like you're having an out of body experience. It's one of the best fucking orgasms of your life. "Don't stop, right there." You chest heaves with heavy breaths.

Coming down from one of the best orgasms of your life, your vision clears up and all you keep thinking is how much Yeonjun's gonna make you pay for this. You came without his permission—what's he gonna do now? Everything flashes across your mind: not letting you cum for a week, spanking you until your ass had his hand print on it, tying you up for hours, you're not sure.

But he doesn't do any of that. His hand caresses your cheek as he smiles down at you, "Did that feel good, baby?"

Confused, you nod, "Mhmm." You're still nervous, looking around at everyone's reactions. Kai's smirking while he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Bad at eating pussy my ass," you say, shoving his shoulder with your foot.

"Ah, I knew you a had a little crush on him...I've seen how you look at him." Your face turns beet red. He's noticed that? Oh god... "I just wanted to do something nice for my baby."

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pyrrhiccomedy · 17 days

Text

A DM’s Fair Play Guide To Plot Twists

I love running a game with a lot of surprises. The challenge to pulling this off well is that, unless you’re playing a one on one game, your players outnumber you: and between them, they have a good chance of figuring out what’s going to happen, no matter how sneaky and clever you are.

The first way of dealing with this - which I’ll just call the bullshit way - is to not give your players the information they need to solve the mystery. Don’t let them find out about the secret society until it’s too late. Don’t give them any reason to suspect that their NPC ally is planning to kill them. Don’t let them find the murder weapon, don’t let them locate the witnesses, don’t give them the chance to skip to the end of their investigation.

This sucks, and if you run your games like this, you’re going to piss off your players. Because it isn’t fair.

In mystery literature, a “fair play mystery” is one where the reader is given all of the information they need in order to figure out the solution before the Big Reveal. It’s what makes the reveal good: that GASP, the “oh shit, the knife! the knife from the party! that was hers! I forgot!”

Pulling off a twist in a fair play game is an incredible feeling. Your players will think you’re a genius (or an absolute dick bastard, which is just as good) and they’ll respect it more when they land in hot water that they plausibly could have avoided. So how do you run a fair play game without your players figuring out the twists ahead of time, given that you’re definitely not smarter than all of your players put together?

By fucking with their expectations.

Here are some things that I keep in mind, to keep my players guessing. And it’s important, with all of this, that if your players see through something, let them have it. They should figure out a lot of things on their own! But if you’re regularly seeding your stories with all of this stuff, eventually your players will miss something. Those are somethings you can build on. The same way that a low level enemy who gets away once can keep coming back again and again until they become an important antagonist, a misapprehension your party proves to have a blindspot for can grow and develop until they get smacked with a breathtaking twist.

What’s a twist if not the sudden overturning of an assumption you never thought to question?

1: Make your powerful friendly NPCs know a lot...but not as much as the players think they do.

Player characters often end up with powerful allies. It would be very convenient for the party if those allies always had accurate information. Make sure they don’t always enjoy that convenience.

It’s a balancing act: you want your powerful NPCs to be powerful. You want this alliance to be meaningful and beneficial to your players. But give your NPC an Achilles heel of some kind, when it comes to the information at their disposal. The Noble General commands powerful forces and knows the lay of the enemy’s land well...but that doesn’t mean he knows what every squadron and scouting party is up to. The Political Mastermind may know the ins and outs of the court, and have keen insight into the motivations of others: but he has an enemy who pisses him off so much that he loses all objectivity around her. The Powerful Wizard can call upon great magic to aid the party: but his divinations aren’t as accurate as he thinks they are, and he’s prone to finding, in his signs and omens, what he wants to see, more than what’s actually there.

Most of the time, their information should be good! That will make it more likely that your players will trust them the one time when it isn’t.

2. Let (apparently) less powerful NPCs sometimes know more than the players think they do.

Most NPCs aren’t the Noble General or the Powerful Wizard. Most NPCs are Daves, designed to get the players from place to place. Most of those Daves know about as much as you’d expect them to. But some Daves have plans of their own.

You don’t always have to signpost with big blinking lights which of your NPCs are ‘important,’ and which ones are ‘unimportant.’ Sneak in a crafty Dave from time to time. That assistant they talk to, every time they go to see the prince? That bitch knows everything, and she’s almost ready to make her move.

3: There is no such thing as a completely reliable witness.

If the players only get information from one person, that information should be flawed in at least one, potentially small, but important way. Smart players will seek a second opinion, or at least allow for the possibility that their information may be incomplete. But even smart players get out over their skis sometimes.

4: Let your NPCs be aware of the power of a first impression.

If an NPC gives a strong first impression of being a particular kind of person, it’s because they’re comfortable giving that impression. That might be because it’s who they are. But maybe not.

One of the first characters the PCs met in a VtM campaign I ran was Gawaine. Gawaine was a good old pine-scented man’s man, with salt and pepper stubble and a blue Ford truck. He listened to AC/DC, and talked about the war. He was affable and honest and willing to lend a hand. You already know Gawaine. Everybody knows a Gawaine. Gawaines are trustworthy, salt of the earth types. You don’t necessarily think to question a Gawaine.

That’s exactly why Gawaine was such a useful persona for Krystiyan, the Tzimisce Voivode, a cruel and alien sculptor of flesh who “never left his haven.” There were plenty of clues that they were the same person, but that campaign was in its endgame before the players put them all together.

5: Sometimes, dangerous and villainous NPCs should be helpful and cooperative.

Not even necessarily because they’re manipulating the players, or even deceiving them about their true natures, but because their interests and the players’ interests genuinely align...for the moment.

One of the easiest levers in your players’ brains to exploit is the expectation that people who help you are your friends. Even if your players know, consciously, that they shouldn’t trust this person, most of the time they kind of can’t help it, if the NPC is genuinely helpful to them and at least a little charismatic.

6: Sometimes, good and valuable NPCs should be unhelpful and uncooperative.

No matter how mature your players are, there’s a natural tendency to react to uncooperative NPCs with a reflexive, “Hey, fuck you! We’re the protagonists! This guy is an asshole!” so from time to time have a helpful, honest, good-aligned NPC have a wholly justified but as-yet-unknown-to-the-party reason to flatly refuse to deal with them.

7: Every NPC should have a secret.

Not necessarily a bad secret. Were it to be revealed, it might even make the party like them more! But for their own reasons, the NPC does not want their secret to come out, and they will lie to the party to protect it. Players go crazy when they realize they’re being lied to, and often jump to some wild assumptions about your NPC’s motivations. I’ve had an NPC lie about the opening hours of a shop, and had the PCs assume that they were black market dealers for the villain when the dude just wanted to be able to close early so he could go smoke weed in the park.

8. As a DM, it’s polite to remind your players of the common knowledge their characters would possess...even when it doesn’t reflect the truth.

We all know it’s tedious when the DM calls for a roll when you’re just asking for common knowledge. I shouldn’t have to make a roll to know the dumb space word for plastic in a Star Wars game. I shouldn’t have to make a roll to know who the Holy Roman Emperor is in a game about medieval vampires. The DM should supply common knowledge for free, whenever it comes up.

That doesn’t mean common knowledge is true.

This is different from just lying to your players, because you don’t put the weight of DM word-of-God behind it. It’s not “You would know this guy is a Ventrue, based on XYZ.” It’s “it would be a common assumption that this guy is a Ventrue, based on XYZ.” He might not be a Ventrue. It might in fact be extremely important that he is not a Ventrue. But if it is commonly assumed that he’s a Ventrue, that is - word for word - something you can share with your players. If they don’t look any deeper than common knowledge, that’s on them.

9. Obviously untrustworthy NPCs provide great air coverage for less obviously untrustworthy NPCs.

The obviously untrustworthy NPC might or might not be planning to betray the party. But if you introduce two untrustworthy NPCs in the same storyline, and one of them seems normal and cool and has a genuine plot-related reason to be there, and the other one is Jaffar, Jaffar’s gonna get clocked, but Susan over there will probably slip under the radar, and might even get tapped to help out with the whole Jaffar situation. They might get Susan’s number, by the end of the session. Susan might become an ‘ally.’ Susan might even get romanced by a party member. Play your cards right, and Jaffar might just end up a footnote in the introduction of Susan, Scourge of Worlds and most hated NPC in the entire campaign.

10. Your villains should always have a secret plan B.

Your villain isn’t stupid, right? And your villain probably isn’t so arrogant that it is inconceivable to them that their plan might fail. They’ve been planning this ritual for ten thousand years, after all. It’s always possible that some plucky band of heroes could show up at the last minute and murder your high priest, or steal your amulet, or seduce your second in command. So what does your villain have in his back pocket to make the players go, “Oh, shit - he planned for this!”

This may mean that there is a whole separate plot happening, running alongside the main story. This is great, because when weird things happen, the players have to figure out whether this is part of Plot A or Plot B, and working out who did what and why gets a lot more interesting. If they end up foiling Plot A, great - your villain was also secretly behind Plot B the whole time, and will transfer all of his resources over to that.

Sometimes your players will figure out that Plots A and B were both the same plot the whole time, with the same villain at the head, and they’ll feel like the smartest people on the planet, and it will be their favorite moment of the entire game. That’s great! You gave them that!

Sometimes, they won’t. And when the villain of Plot A, apparently defeated, starts laughing and reveals that he was also the mastermind behind Plot B, which is now too late to be stopped, that will probably be your favorite moment of the entire game.

#dice matters

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billfarrah · 2 months

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One of my favourite things about Young Royals and its characters is how much it romanticizes being utterly ordinary.

Stories often focus on characters who are exceptionally good at something or who are more ambitious than the average person. Even in the teen shows I’ve watched, these young characters always seemed to have their dream career and dream university figured out at a young age and I could never relate to that because I had none of those things figured out as a teen. It always felt like pushing this narrative that teenagers need to have their entire lives figured out before their brains are even fully developed.

None of the characters in YR seem particularly ambitious and in fact, the main character’s journey is a story of anti-ambition. When he is introduced to Simon, it is precisely Simon’s ordinariness that draws Wille to him. Sure, Simon is a very talented singer, but it’s never indicated within the series that he has dreams of being a pop star. It’s just something he likes to do. Simon is motivated by very ordinary things - he wants to do well in school so he can have better opportunities for himself, he wants to take care of his family, he wants to hang out with his friends and play video games. He’s a dedicated student but not necessarily valedictorian. It’s not his ambition that Wille is drawn to but his integrity and kindness and warmth.

Wille had a chance to be extraordinary - to be Sweden’s first gay king - but being extraordinary has never been Wille’s ambition. Wille’s ultimate goal and dream within the series’ narrative is to be free to make his own decisions and live his life as he pleases. He just wants to kiss his boyfriend and get drunk at parties and live his life one day at a time instead of spending every moment of his life preparing for an inevitable future he doesn’t want. In the end Wille is extraordinary not for his ambition, but for his bravery to reject the expectations thrust upon him and throw himself into the unknown and see where it takes him. Wille had a whole future in front of him as crown prince and future king - he’d never have to work a day in his life and would have people advising his every move - and he rejects that. This lack of ambition is not portrayed as a moral failure, but a necessary step in Wille’s journey to personal self-discovery and fulfillment of his own desires. His desire right now is simple - be free with Simon, but that doesn’t mean his dreams end here forever. He deserves peace and tranquility after all the trauma he’s been through without having to worry about where or who he’s gonna be in a few years. He deserves time to just exist.

None of the characters know where they’re going when they drive away at the end. We as the audience don’t know what careers if any these characters will find themselves in, but that’s also not important to this story. The series is saying you don’t have to have everything figured out when you’re 17 and you don’t have to do something just because your parents think they know what’s best for you and even if you don’t know exactly what you want to do, that doesn’t mean you don’t have the agency to know what you don’t want.

It’s not a moral failing to want the simple things in life or to be ordinary, and I love that Young Royals celebrates that. It shows the beauty in simple moments that feel revolutionary to a person - touching the person you love, forgiving someone and making amends after a hardship, whooping with your friends in a car as you drive into the summer and celebrates them. Ultimately these are the moments that make life worth living.

#young royals #idk if this even makes sense but I had to get it off my chest

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rosedom · 3 months

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AHHHH HELLOOO sorry i usually dont request much, haha this is actually my second request in all of my tumblr story ever but...i saw you decided to write for gaming and i just couldnt resist, i love your writing a lot and i just think its so immaculate hahaa. Could you write an scenario where male reader is stressed from work (imagine he has an important job like a doctor or something whatever you want is fine :)) because he has been working days nonstop, so much that his boyfriend is all worked up and horny for him so when reader comes back he finds himself straddled by him while hes begging for fucking? With cockwarming, breeding kink and cowgirl position. Could that be with Gaming, Lyney and Gorou? SORRY IF IM ASKING MUCH I DONT WANT TO BE A BOTHER😭😭 i just dont know how to request but thanks for reading all of rant. And again, thank you and sorry for bothering😔 have a nice day/afternoon/night!

"an unnamed player has invited GA-MING, LYNEY, and GOROU to play . . . an apple a day

✦ㅤㅤ 【 CW 】 dom!top!male!reader, sub!bottom!ftm!characters, vaginal sex & riding, breeding kink + creampies, creaming (lyney), gratuitous praise + petnames .

A/N : aa u are never a bother !! i am SO SORRY this took so long for me to get to, omg . . . but i had sm fun with this (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

"do you want to watch, [PLAYER]? press KEEP READING to spectate the match."

Patient after patient after patient, each one with a more downright stupid trouble than the last. Your day had started with a young man, clearly fresh out of Millelith training, complaining of a tummy ache, of all things! He had clutched his stomach and moaned and groaned, and all you could prescribe him was bedrest. It’s not like you were going to waste medicine—medicine that some people needed—on someone who ached because he didn't eat fucking breakfast.

The next patient was an older woman, here only for her biannual check up. You'd greeted her, said a sweet, “Good morning, madame,” but all she did was turn her snobby nose up at you and demand you not waste her time.

“Madame, you have a serious—”

“I know, young man.” You had heaved a sigh, letting her boss you around for the length of her appointment before sending her off with the exact same specifications as last time: take vitamins, get ample rest, stop talking back to people just doing their jobs. (Though, that last one there was merely something you wished you had said.

Too bad the customer—in this case, patient—is always right, huh?)

But, by the end of the day, you wish, instead, that you had simply elderly after elderly; their disrespect pales to the absolute headache that the rest of your patients put behind your eyes, pounding at your skull—bam, bam, bam.

Wham bam-thank-you-ma'am, all throbbing incessantly behind your eyes and making you wanna hurl—except, god, you’re the fucking doctor, and who’s there to take care of him when he’s a little under the weather? You’ve got your boyfriend, of course—your perfect boyfriend, light of your life, apple of your eye, yet he’s home, and you’re here, and you’re bloody exhausted.

“I need to go home,” you murmur—quiet, lest your own voice make you lose the last of your thin-threaded sanity—, already stripping yourself of the itchy scrubs you wear during the long days.

“But sir—” the nurse asks, meak, but her voice is still too loud, too shrill for right now.

You huff. “I’ve worked for fourteen hours.” The tired gruff to your own voice makes you cringe. You can feel the way it tumbles from your chest, rattling you, your overly sensitive eyes and brain and head and fuckin’ everything, at this point. “Refer to the doc on duty, now.”

The nurse nods, once. “Have a good night, doctor.”

You bid farewell—a kind apology with a promise to make it up to them, to bring them coffee, maybe, or some cookies—, and you take the slow walk home. The sky is dark and the fireflies are out, the gentle glow illuminating the path. With nothing but your own thoughts and the night to accompany you, you feel your headache gradually ease. It throbs, still; but each bump in your skull is gentler, now: it’s easier to ignore.

Although the porch light is too strong—the lantern bright and attracting the nighttime bugs and moths—, the foyer of your home is dark. Your aching head is grateful for the reprieve—for the silence that envelops you in totality the second the door clicks quietly shut behind you—, but something other than tiredness pulls at your heartstrings: your sweet boyfriend, clad in only a shirt of yours, toeing into the entryway.

“Honey?” He wipes the sleep from his eyes, softly smiling at you. “Hi.”

“Ga-ming, honey—” honey, because Ga-ming unabashedly stole the pet name from you, first, “—you didn’t have to stay up for me.”

As if on cue, his jaw cracks open in a yawn: this, you do not need the lights on to see. Your heart aches with your head, knowing that he had stayed up just for you. “Honey,” you repeat, sliding off your jacket and stepping up to him. You take his waist in your hands, bunching up the shirt he stole from your closet.

“Quit with that,” he murmurs, tilting up his head for a soft kiss. You grant it; but when you go to pull back, to keep the kiss gentle and chaste, Ga-ming presses forward, darting that little tongue out to lick at the seam of your lips; his hips, too, come bumping against yours, pressing into your thigh, pant to skin—

“Ga-ming?” you repeat, breath leaving you in a low huff. “You’re—” bare.

Utterly, wholly bare: an expanse of warm, slick skin against your clothed leg. “‘m ready,” he mumbles while he takes to mouthing at your throat. His lips soothe you, somehow; it’s a reprieve, a stark contrast, to the pounding at your skull.

“Ready?” you whisper, tilting your head back, letting your hands guide the steady roll of his hips onto your lap.

He nods. “Ready for you,” he enunciates as he softly whines.

Ga-ming—your Ga-ming—, your boyfriend, your love and light of your life: right here in front of you, on you, all needy for you, offering himself to you, wholly ready for the taking.

“So please,” he continues, his cock dragging heavy across the seam of your pant; “fuck me.”

“Oh, honey,” you murmur; then again, an “oh, honey,” because you’re still half-dressed up in your clothes—though they’re only soft and bland, made to fit under the rough scrubs you had abandoned at the office—, and Ga-ming is naked save for the shirt draping across him, the low hemline covering the absolutely sinful way he grinds down. It’s a dirty move, a down, down, down that gives his sensitive cock friction against your pelvis.

“Please, please, ‘m ready, I said—” his words abruptly drop off, a high cry in his throat that sends him to hide his overly-warm face in your neck. His skin burns against you, a feverish-hot that makes you chuckle, makes the throb in your head go away, just-so. “I said I-I was ready, so, please!”

You coo, quiet, bumping your hips up once. The jerking motion makes him cry out, but he manages to keep himself upright, right-side up but entirely unmoored on your cock. “Go on then, little lion. Take what you need, yeah?”

Whimpering a quiet, “Y-yeah,” he begins riding you, slow, steady—but slightly off-balanced—rolls of his hips that makes him whine, makes you groan low n’ deep in your chest. You let your hands rest on his hips, the fabric of his shirt falling over your wrists, and gently guide his motions. Once you’ve helped him establish himself, he begins riding you harder, more desperate.

Silent tears—though, are they truly silent, loud as he is moaning out for you?—dribble down his cheeks, falling to his shirt and soaking the collar of it in salty evidence of his abject pleasure. His abdomen is tensing and relaxing and tensing and relaxing again, all in a rapid loop, in and out and in n’ out, and then there’s a fucking bulge right below his navel when he sinks down hard n’ deep on your cock; and you’re sent over the edge at the sight, moaning through your teeth as you fill Ga-ming up with hot, sticky cum.

“Oh, oh—” he cries, grinding down harsh to get all your cum in as deep as possible, deep ‘nuff to breed him— “bred me, bred me so well, oh—” You groan at his desperate babbling as his thighs jerk around your hips, just before they give out on him entirely. He falls bodily into your chest, heaving through his own orgasm as weak mewls tumble from his prettily parted lips. Each sound is smeared into your throat while you laugh, light and breathless, jostling his overly-sensitized body and making him flinch.

“Sorry, honey.” You kiss at his temple, and, the whole while, his small cunt is left to unconsciously milk your cock, left to assure that loud, insecure part of his brain that he’s wanted, that he’s bred all nice n’ full because he is loved. You’re long done, now, but the undulations make your body warm, soft, safe—just like Ga-ming is, comfy in your lap and wholly protected. “Thank you.”

He shakes his head against you, nuzzling into your throat with a heavy sigh. “You don’t have—hafta thank me,” he mumbles, a lick at your Adam’s apple to seal the deal. “I wanted ta.”

Tucking up the blankets around him, you grin. “Then can you warm my cock, lil’ dragon? Just for me?” You run your fingers lightly up his clothed spine, delighting in the shiver you can feel, one that runs the length of your cock as he’s snug on it. “Since earlier was all about you?” You raise the end of your sentence in a lilting tone, meant to tease, and Ga-ming huffs at you.

And, n further retaliation, he clenches around you; the soft squeeze—all wet n’ warm, smearing your own cum across the base of your cock and leaving the mess of both of yours to dribble down the minute space between your bodies—forces you to calm your breathing, to take in the delicate scent of what is undeniably Ga-ming mixed with the smell of your own shirt, your own cologne.

You laugh, then. “‘m sorry,” you say again amidst giggles, ones you’re careful you confine only to your upper chest lest the movement be too uncomfortable on both of your oversensitive groins.

He doesn't reply, snuggled up comfy on your lap and stuffed full of your cock n’ cum both. Instead, he only noses into your neck further before his breathing steadies, lulling you to sleep, too.

It’s in your final moments of consciousness that you realize your head no longer hurts.

(You suppose you now have the evidence that, yes, an orgasm is sufficient enough a cure for headaches.)

Under Lyney’s palm, a small floor lamp clicks silently on. The light is admittedly dim, but, to your sensitive eyes, the bulb is blinding. You cringe and cover your eyes; but it only serves to shield you slightly, because you’re still upright in the foyer, and your body is rather weak. “Lyney,” you tiredly murmur, lifting your palm just enough to see the ground lest you trip.

You bump into him, laughing lightly, but his worried hands jump to your arm. “Hey—”

“I’m okay.” You’re quick to calm him, placing your free hand on his in a tender gesture as you make way to the living room. “Just a headache, ‘s all. Ya shouldn't have stayed up f’r me.” Earlier, it hurt to even think; but here, with him, the pain is easy to ignore, in the face of his own self destruction.

He grumbles at you, though, says something you can’t quite catch and drops his hands, pads over to the lamp to flick it off. The return of darkness is soothing.

He smiles at you, then; or, at least, you think he does. It’s difficult to see in the dark, and you can’t strain your eyes without hurting yourself. “I wanted to!” He takes three long strides before he’s standing in front of you, draping his arms across your shoulders. The position makes his (your) shirt ride up on his belly, and— ”I missed you, y’know,” he murmurs, suddenly all soft n’ deep, looking up at you and bumping his forehead against your chin. “A lot, really.”

“Lyn—”

He quickly silences you with a kiss. Against your lips, he pulls back, murmurs, “I missed your cock, especially.”

Laughing against him, you lean up ‘til he can no longer reach you. He pouts at you when you reply, faux-snark, “only my cock, huh?” Your bottom lip juts out—a mirror of Lyney’s own, a magic trick of his you took for your own; it’s a devilish trick, one you play right alongside puppy-dog eyes you know he’s soft to. “How cruel.”

He huffs at you, pulling you down by the collar of your shirt to kiss the mirth off your lips. “I was tryin’ to be seductive,” he grumbles, knocking against your chin and beginning to push you backwards into the living room. “But nevermind!”

You want to say, “Hey, now:” disagree with him and keep on pouting and go, “hey, hey, hey,” all offended, but the backs of your knees come into contact with the edge of the sofa, and you’re well and sufficiently distracted from that idea.

“Sit,” he gently commands you—merely the illusion of choice—, giving you no choice in the matter with the way he’s pressing you down into the cushions. You go easily; you sigh in relief when the softness begins enveloping you—a pillow’s snug right in the middle of your back, and you briefly wonder if Lyney had planned this. He murmurs, “there you go,” quiet n’ soft, and you’re taken by the way this man gives to you.

He wears his heart on his sleeve, truly; except, right now, the sleeve is yours (just like his heart belongs to you and yours to him in turn), and it's bare, and so is the expanse of his long, pale thighs, the hem of his boxers peeking out beneath the shirt. He stands in front of you, between your legs, makes sure you’re down and that you’re gonna stay down, but your eyes aren’t really tired, not anymore, staring at Luney—your Lyney—before he huffs and sits bodily onto you, straddling your lap with his knees sinking into the cushions on either side of you.

“Lyney,” you murmur, reaching out to take hold of his thighs. The position makes the shirt rise up on his belly, exposing the soft, rippling muscles there; but, in the dark, all you can go by is what you feel against your own stomach, his bare skin pressed to your thin shirt. “I was kiddin’, sweetheart.”

“I know you were,” he snaps at you, mean-like, but he brings his arms around your shoulders all sweetly and nuzzles into the side of your head. “But I wasn’t. I—I really did miss you; and your cock. If you—if you wanna, of course.”

“Of course I want to, Lyn,” you mutter, tilting your head up to kiss beneath his chin. “I’m just a little tired.”

“A little?” He huffs, again, before sighing. “Just—let me do the work, alright? I’m already...” he pauses, tilts his head to the side, breathes in and out sharply.

You hum at him to go on.

“‘m already prepped.” Oh.

“Oh?” You grin, bringing your tired arm up to cup his cheek. He leans into your palm and his eyelashes flutter, brushing against your skin. “Go ahead then, sweet thing.”

And go ahead he does, smiling into you before he abruptly leans back ‘nuff to chuck off the shirt. You whine, say, “hey!” but there isn’t any bite left on your tongue when Lyney starts tugging his boxers down, too. He’s impatient, pulling at the seam and groaning curses at the fabric—as if it’s the damn boxers’ fault that he’s in a position that prevents him from taking them off.

He relents, tilting this way and that and finally—after painstaking minutes later, ones that, under no circumstance, should be arousing, but the anticipation, the wait: it all makes your dick chub up in your own pants—Lyney’s left naked in your lap. The fabric hangs off his foot, and you reach down to tug it the rest of the way off for your sweet boyfriend as he busies himself unbuckling your own belt, loosening the tough leather enough for your pants to droop and enough for him to reach a hot hand into your briefs.

“Eager, huh?” you tease, lifting your hips—and, subsequently, him—to let him get your dick out of your pants. Neither of you bother pulling down your own pants, not after Lyney spent so long on his boxers alone. He doesn’t dally. “My sweet Lyney.”

He sighs, again—he’s rather dramatic tonight; but, then again, when isn’t he? It wouldn’t quite be your Lyney without some theatrics—, spitting into his palm and lathering up your cock with it while he makes to straddle you more fully. “Thought you were tired,” he grumbles, hovering his, indeed, wet n’ slicked up and entirely prepped cunt over your thick cockhead.

“Mhm.” You set your hands on his plush thighs once he hooks the head of you into his loosened hole, groaning low and pleased in your throat while he softly whimpers at the barely-there stretch. He prepared himself well. “But when you’re lookin’ so pretty for me, I can’t help being wide awake. Wouldn’t wanna miss this sight for the world.”

With your eyes now adjusted to the light—and, oh, you consider how the throb of your head is a bygone memory now—, you can see the way his cheeks darken just-so, puffed up in exertion as his groin meets yours. You’ve got your cock stuffed up balls-deep in him, and he leans into you once he’s fully settled.

He moans, less out of outright pleasure and more out of total contentment, comfy and warm on your lap as your arms knead at his thighs. His arms squeeze around your shoulders, and he quietly asks, “Gimme a minute.”

Nodding, you simply bask in the steady heat of him, letting him adjust and recognize that, yes, you’re home, now, and you hadn’t really left him at all. “I missed you,” you murmur rather suddenly, your voice quiet but still stark in the silence of the night. “Thought about you durin’ my shift.”

“You did?” His voice is rough but wispy, a little out-there and entirely gone. He’s slipping into that mindset he always does when he’s left to warm your cock—regardless of if it were by his volition or your own—, but he begins to subtly grind his hips against you, mewling at the hot sparks of rapture from his cock rubbing just right against you.

“‘Course I did,” you continue, moving your hands to his hips instead to help move him along. His arms tighten around you and he moans directly into your ear.

From then on, it’s quiet: quiet, that is, save from the obscene slick noises of the lube Lyney used to prep himself earlier with his own slick, your pre-cum mixing up and making a mess of thick liquid between both of your thighs. His moans are barely audible, these soft, gentle lil’ uh, uh, uh’s punched out of him with each tender grind down.

You think, even, that you’ll both cum like this: quiet, nothing but the sounds of your connection and heavy breaths, moans, groans as you fall over the edge. But then Lyney starts bumping his groin against yours even harder, grinding down deep on your cock and rubbing against your full balls, and he starts babbling for you to “breed me! Please—”

“I-I’ll breed you,” you groan, leaning your head back into the sofa cushions and chasing your release, chasing the release you both want, the one he wants so desperately stuffed up deep inside him. “Gonna fill you right up, just like you want, sweetheart.”

He babbles more—a mix of syllables and words, more pleas for you to breed him—until he’s silenced by his own high-pitched whine, cumming around you and slathering you in creamy-white. The steady clench and release of his cunt forces you to your own end, thick cum slowly leaking out from the edges of his cunt and your cock. (You can hardly tell what’s your leaking cum and what is his own.)

“Thank you,” he mumbles, already beginning to doze. “Th’nk you:” quieter, more muddled against your ear.

You grab the throw you have across the sofa’s armrest, rucking it up around the two of you; you cocoon Lyney safe in your arms and on your softened cock. He’s nodded off, now, and he misses your words: “You don’t have to thank me,” you say anyway, even if he doesn’t hear you, “I love you.”

The cum’ll be sticky, later, when you wake up; but for now, it’s perfect. It’s perfectly warm and entirely cozy, wholly snuggled up with the love of your life. Your headache, the stressors of the day—they’re all forgotten in his presence.

You’re so, so glad to love him.

“Hi, puppy,” you coo. The sound of your own voice grates you, but you ignore it to sweetly smile at your beloved. He stands there, motionless for a moment right there at the threshold before the foyer, until he shakes his head with a barely-there laugh. “Gorou?”

He tilts his head to the side—this you can see, the silhouette of him in the moonlight—before he takes a tentative step forward.

Then another. And another. Another, another, another, ‘till he’s standing in front of you and leans up to kiss your jaw. “Hi,” he repeats, voice ruff (hah!) and hoarse, a little too much so. “Missed ya.”

You tilt your head back to let him mouth at you, and your hands subconsciously come to clutch at his hips, and— “Oh, Gorou,” you mumble, pleasantly aghast, because your hands come into contact with bare, slick skin. “Pent up?”

With a quiet whimper, he tilts his hips forward, into you, pressing against the contact of your fingers on him. You slowly slide your one hand around, sneaking a large handful of his ass before you dip into his cleft, shuddering when your fingertip easily glides across his slicked, open cunt.

“I-I wanted you, so bad,” he starts to mumble, shy, tucking his head into the meat where your shoulder meets your neck. Without any prompting, you adjust your stance, pressing your knee into his cock and making him jerk forward with another whimper high in his throat. “Oh!”

Slowly, his hips begin grinding—it’s a weak movement, testing, making sure you're really okay with this, right now. He moves unsure against you until you begin bumping your knee, letting his slick make a mess of your pant leg. “Go on,” you goad him on, soft, holding him snug against you. You can feel his cunt clench even through the fabric of your pants, a rapid rat-a-tat-tat against you that is oddly reminiscent of the headache you can feel begin to dissipate. “Take your pleasure, pup.”

He nods vehemently against you, beginning to hump as his tail swishes side to side, side to side, hypnotizing you just slightly. It’s hard to parse it out in the dark, but the shadow of it is undeniable behind him. Each bounce of your leg makes Gorou whimper, and he’s quick to crane his neck up for a kiss to muffle himself. You grant his request easily, but only for a minute; after, you gently part from him to murmur, so quiet that only he could possibly hear, those big, soft ears of his twitching as he strains, “What else do you want, honey?”

“Want you,” he whines, grinding harshly once, twice. “Want you inside me, want you to breed me.”

You didn’t expect that, but you’re a doctor, after all; it’s kinda in the job description to roll with the punches, so you do. “You wanna get fucked full of pups?” you ask, teasing and light, but Gorou’s mouth parts as a loud whine crawls out of his chest.

“Yes! Please.” Thick tears begin to drop from his eyes, saltwater dribbling onto the bare skin of your throat. “Now, now—breed me now,” he begs, and you coo at him, bringing your hands to curl into his hair, rubbing soothing circles into the base of one puppydog ear.

“Patience, pup.”

And, because he’s Gorou, and Gorou is nothing but a good boy, he nods, rapid-quick movements of his head, and begins to slow on your thigh. Heat shimmers low in your belly as he steps back from you on shaky legs, a wet splotch across your leg from his cunt. You bring a hand down, meaning to scoop it up off your pant, but your finger brushes two distinctly different textures: his natural slick, and fuckin’ lube. “Did you prepare yourself for me?”

“Y-yeah,” he mutters, tail tucking itself between his legs. You almost cringe at that, knowing he’s smearing himself into his own fur, but if he doesn’t mind, then you won’t either; besides, it’s hard to truly care when your boyfriend is so bashful in front of you. “I—I missed you, ‘nd wanted to be ready for you.”

The image of Gorou, ass up on the bed with four of his fingers stuffed up inside of himself flitters across your mind, makes your cock throb in your britches. Your erection was easy to ignore, earlier; but now it’s abject torture.

However, it’s not nearly as torturous as it was for your boyfriend, and you know this. You know he didn’t cum, know his fingers are far too short to truly reach in deep and press against his g-spot, know his wrist can’t comfortably bend to jerk himself off and finger himself at the same time. So you coo, soft, “Sweet boy. Where’s your toy?”

“Charging,” he mutters.

You grin at that: it’s perfect. “Can you go get it then, puppy?”

With an audible swallow, he nods, rushing for your bedroom. You follow behind him, lethargic but so, so turned on; and while he’s grabbing the vibrator from the corner, you shuck off the rest of your clothes and plop yourself down on the edge of your bed.

He must not expect you to have followed him, however, because once he turns around, he jumps, ears flattening to his head in embarrassment. You only laugh and pat your lap. “C’mere.”

Quickly—and toy in tow—, he shuffles over to you. He stands awkwardly in front of you for a moment before you murmur, “I said c’mere,” and tug him to straddle your lap. The position immediately forces his cock—slick n’ thick, out of its hood and throbbing incessantly—against yours, and he mewls helplessly for a moment, grinds once, twice again, before he grabs the lube to the side of you.

You hadn’t even noticed it there, but now that he’s grabbed it, pointed it out, you feel other wet spots beneath you. He fuckin’ masturbated here, right on the duvet you both sleep under, thinkin’ about you and only you. You’re taking out of your musings when he slathers up your cock in lube, messy and sloppy, and then he’s rising, positioning you, and sinking right on down.

“Mm!” he cries out, swiveling his hips to take you in deeper, deeper, deeper. You groan at the lube-slick combination that smothers your cock in Gorou, Gorou, Gorou. “Breed me, breed me!” Each meak plea makes your cock pulse inside him, and he mewls at each throb inside him. “Please!”

“I got you, pup,” you murmur, your edge so close you can taste it on the tip of your tongue. “Just make yourself feel good, and I’ll breed you, okay? Okay, puppy?”

“Okay, okay—”

You grin. “Good boy,” you say, and then he’s tumbling over the edge and bringing you right down with him. You groan into his throat, feeling the vibrations of his whimpers n’ whining moans as he’s getting thoroughly bred. Your hands ruck up his shirt to hold his sides and soothe him down from his high. “You did so good for me, sweetheart. Bred you just like I promised I would, hm?”

He weakly nods. “Thank you,” he mumbles, nosing at your throat.

And, well. You’re bloody exhausted, and you promised to breed him, and he can’t keep on being bred if you pull out. You tell yourself you’re only upholding your promise as Gorou falls asleep on your cock, breathing deep on your lap: tell yourself that it’s the lingering tiredness that suddenly seems to hit you in full-force that keeps him warm and snug on you.

Really, clean-up can wait.

i got a lil' carried away on lyney's part ,, o(*^＠^*)o also, none of these were really cowgirl 'cos reader was sitting up for it . . . i couldn't think of how to have him lay flat in these scenarios LOLL

13 MAR. 2024, @rosedom, rosey .

#ㅤ✦【 ASKS 】#i used to have very frequent headaches and the only way i could abate them was:#1) midol (god's gift to earth i stg)#and 2) jrking off.#so !!#sub genshin #genshin smut #genshin x reader #sub gaming #gaming x reader #sub lyney #lyney x reader #sub gorou #gorou x reader #lord .#top reader #dom reader #amab reader #male reader

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songoftrillium · 10 months

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Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition and the Anti-Indigeneity in the Gaming Industry

reosted with permission from J.F. Sambrano

Dagot’ee!

Shii J.F. Sambrano gonsēē. My nations are Chiricahua Apache (Ndeh) through my maternal grandmother and Cora Indian (Náayarite) through my maternal grandfather. I am a mixed race Indigenous person, and through my father my heritage is English and Scottish. I am currently residing and doing work in my community on the lands of Lummi Nation. I use both gender non-binary and masculine pronouns, but prefer the former. I have several published works in the TTRPG industry, and am probably most known for my contributions to Mage: the Ascension 20th Edition, Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Edition, and the Transformers Roleplaying Game, as well as being part of the Essence 20 development team. Further, I also work in higher education at an Indian college, both advising and teaching Indigenous students across the United States. My passion is education, and I believe that we all learn through play, and that TTRPGs are a valuable source of learning, especially on personal, cultural, and social levels. This has always been what has drawn me to TTRPGs since I started playing M.E.R.P. with my brother in 1996 (and before that HeroQuest), through to my “graduation” into more story-driven games such as those presented in the Storyteller System, until now, where I author and produce my own roleplaying games.

I was also part of the First Team (in-joke intentional) hired by White Wolf Studios/Paradox Interactive via Hunters Entertainment to develop and author Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition. After several months of work, Paradox Interactive chose to go in another direction in early 2021 (I believe it was either March or April) and in fall of that year, it was announced that Werewolf would instead be taken in house, with Justin Achilli as the Brand Creative Lead and primary author of the book. Going forward I will be describing my experience while I worked with Paradox Interactive, primarily through Karim Muammar, White Wolf’s Brand Editor, as well as the developmental editor for Werewolf. Although I worked in a team, both with hired authors and in-house representatives at Hunters Entertainment, I will not be speaking for the experience of others, except when specifically noting unanimous consensuses, and specific interactions (which will go unnamed) that are particularly relevant. My hope is that by highlighting some of the anti-Indigenous attitudes that are central to the foundational members and leaders of the White Wolf brand, that I can provide opportunities for growth and healing within the World of Darkness TTRPG community, but also in the broader gaming community, where these behaviors and attitudes are rampant. I also want the community to have a better understanding of what this experience is like internally, and the challenges that Indigenous creators, as well as other marginalized creators, are met with when they try to make positive change within nerd and geek communities clinging to inherited white supremacist values, even if they don’t realize they are doing so.

What I do not want to be doing in this article is creating fuel for edition wars. I believe that both legacy and Werewolf 5th are rife with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and appalling amounts of appropriation. Both versions deserve criticism, I am not defending one over the other, I am only sharing what my experience was like working on the 5th edition of the book. Further, please understand that I was originally going to wait until I had read the final copy of the book, because I wanted to know how much of my work was used (based on previews I already know some was, just not the extent) and whether or not they decided to credit me for that work, and how I was going to be credited. My belief is that I likely will not be, but I am genuinely uncertain. Knowing how they handled that would have reframed how I addressed this. But more importantly, I want it to be very clear that even before Paradox ultimately pulled the plug on the Hunters team, I was preparing to exit working on the project based on the experience I will describe below. Not only did I find it frustrating, and personally disparaging, but I ultimately decided I was uncomfortable with my name being attached to the product based on the direction they wanted to go. So while I wanted to know whether or not I would be credited, because it would teach me something about their internal practices, I do not want or need the credit.

Finally, the reason that I decided to speak about this now instead of after having a chance to inspect the final product, was because my personal experience dealing with anti-Indigeneity coming from Paradox was just that: personal. But since then I have witnessed a throughline of hateful and xenophobic attitudes wielded against Indigenous people across the globe, and we do not deserve this treatment. I was outraged over the events that led to the segregation of the Latin American fanbase, which culminated from bottom-up criticism about how poorly their people and countries were being defined through World of Darkness products, and ended up with the firing of their Latin American Brand Ambassador, Alessa Torres, because she chose to stand with her community in those criticisms. I was further appalled when the likeness of Tāme Wairere Iti was shoehorned into the Werewolf book, a blatant example of cultural theft: not only in stealing the literal physical identity of an Indigenous person, but also his sacred tā moko. When Paradox Interactive issued an apology for this, it felt incredibly hollow to me in the wake of these events, the hateful attitudes I had personally witnessed coming from the top.

Whether from North America, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, or Peru, or across the globe in New Zealand, not only do Indigenous people deserve better treatment from such a major company, but their Indigenous and Latino fanbases, who have twisted and worked themselves through difficult representation for decades at this point, deserve better. Apologies are not enough, especially when they come with next to no real change.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse in Context

At the time that White Wolf Publishing began to produce its World of Darkness line, the TTRPG industry was dominated by white men, both as producers, developers, and authors, as well as the main characters in their settings. White Wolf's World of Darkness made an impact at the time, by defying these Eurocentric, patriarchal presentations, first by defaulting to feminine pronouns throughout Vampire: the Masquerade, and then by focusing on Indigenous representation and values in Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and as a young Indigenous nerd, it had a positive impact on me, as I know it has on some other Indigenous people who became fans of the World of Darkness at the time. This was because before opening the pages of Werewolf: the Apocalypse, I had never seen heroes that I could play who looked like me and my culture. It was off, and often offensive, but it was my first experience in which I could directly play a hero who shared my heritage--and I also had more than one option through two different Tribes to do so. This might sound a little like I was cheering for table scraps, but again, at the time, table scraps was more than I had ever seen before.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse 1st Edition was originally published in 1992 via then White Wolf Publishing (not to be confused with Paradox Interactive's White Wolf). From its inception, the premise was interwoven with what its then-authors believed to be Indigenous praxis and representation. Like many pop-culture presentations of Indigeneity from this time period (see Fern Gully, Dances With Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, or in TTRPGs, the NAN from Shadowrun) it was rife with problematic and even offensive stereotyping. The most obvious examples thereof are within the two "Pure Tribes" Uktena, and W****** who I will henceforth refer to as Older and Younger Brother. However, Indigenous inspiration was at the core of the game's spiritual premise as well, where animism and "Totems" are central to the setting and gameplay. The way these concepts are presented is trivializing and dehumanizing, but it is important to acknowledge that the appropriation present in Werewolf: the Apocalypse goes a lot deeper than the two Brother Tribes (even the term "Tribe" was meant to invoke a vision of Indigeneity compared to the previous setting in the line's use of "Clan"). Additionally, there is art throughout every generation of these gaming books that represents humans, wolves, and human-wolf hybrid forms wearing Indigenous regalia, including sacred items such as headdresses, or engaged in sacred rituals such as the Sun Dance. The list of problematic representations goes deep, and my examples only scratch the surface, but it is also important for me to note the positive impact that this had, particularly in the 90's.

Even though the primary contributors to these narratives were non-Indigenous authors, or in one case, a Pretendian, and another, a culturally disconnected author, by the time the Revised (or Third Edition) era of the books came around, White Wolf Publishing was actively engaged in cultural consultation. While I do not believe cultural consultation makes a big difference on its own, it matters that the attempt was made, to a degree: while these efforts fall short of what needs to be seen in cultural representation, this was still ahead of most other gaming companies at this time.

Hired by Hunters Entertainment

In February of 2020 I was approached by one of the co-owners of Hunters Entertainment to be one of the primary authors for Werewolf: 5th Edition due to my work on other World of Darkness projects, and let's be honest, because I was capable of bringing a much needed Indigenous perspective to a gameline that was rooted in Indigeneity and rotting with appropriation and racist stereotypes. I was overall receptive to the invitation, largely because I was very passionate about the World of Darkness setting overall, and Werewolf in particular, due to the impact that 90's representation had on me when I was a younger gamer. I also felt hopeful that with a really hard rewrite of Indigenous aspects of the game that I could shift a lot of really painful aspects of the game into something that was a net positive for Indigenous representation. I will tell you now, more than anything, I was excited to rewrite the Younger Brother Tribe, because when separated from racist authors, their message is very empowering and real to my lived experience.

That said, I did not agree to join the project without first asking for reassurances. I said that I was not willing to write negative Native stereotypes. I would not use appropriative language, or generally engage in appropriative writing (which meant at minimum that the names of the Pure Tribes would need to change), and most importantly, that I would not not engage in writing that contributed to erasure. While the person who recruited me to work on the project was eager to work with me, he acknowledged that he was not sure he could get everything I wanted to see approved, but also promised to fight for everything I suggested as hard as he could. Additionally, he shared with me that the original setting pitch for W5 involved all of Younger Brother being slaughtered en masse in a massacre. I made it clear that this was exactly the kind of thing that I would not write. I cannot remember if this was something he suggested to be changed before or after I was invited onto the project, but with some pushback it was changed. However, I point this out because I want you, the reader, to understand how eager Paradox Interactive was to start with mass genocide and erasure as a foundation to the setting. All that said, I cannot stress enough that I have had nothing but positive experiences with Hunters Entertainment, and none of the following concerns fall upon them.

The Sword of Heimdall

The first encounter the Hunters Entertainment team as a whole had with problematic guidelines for the W5 draft was the direction that Paradox Interactive wanted to go with the Sword of Heimdall. At the time, the suggestions from Paradox and Karim Muammar were that the Sword of Heimdall was going to represent the new major villain of the Werewolf setting, and that they were to also represent the far-right, fascist direction that Werewolf society so often turned toward. They were meant to be representative of how far the new concept of Hauglosk could take entire communities. However, the Sword of Heimdall was discussed interchangeably with the Get of Fenris as a whole, and more than once Muammar seemed to suggest that every member of this Tribe was guilty of the same attitudes espoused in previous editions from the Sword of Heimdall. Now let's not beat around the bush: the Sword of Heimdall are literal Nazis. They believe directly in white supremacy and don't shy from it. They wanted to cleanse impure elements from the Get of Fenris, including BIPOC people, other non-white ethnicities, women, neurodivergent Garou, and other disabled Garou.

The writing team found this approach problematic for several reasons. The first, and most obvious, was that the direction seemed to want to turn one of the most popular Tribes into a horrific stereotype of its most abhorrent faction. Whether or not Muammar’s goal was to turn them into villains, we could not imagine a world where fans of previous editions would get their hands on this book, and not look for a way to play one of their previous favorite groups, thus creating the issue of making a guide to playing Nazi. Even beyond that, it’s not as if historically there were not players who used the tools of the setting to play Black Spiral Dancers, why wouldn’t this draw people who actually wanted to role-play through these toxic, harmful politics? Further, and while this is less important, it left a bad taste in my mouth, the justification for this major shift in Werewolf lore seemed to change over each pass. At first, Muammar suggested that all Fenrir were Nazis/SoH. Then, when he was provided with evidence that it was a small faction that was eliminated in the early 2000’s, he started to shift toward the idea that we should not follow the lore. Finally, when every single member of the writer’s team flatly refused to provide what would essentially be “a player’s guide to being a Nazi werewolf” the writing was on the wall about the end of our involvement with this product. More than once, he suggested that we were cowardly social justice warriors for being unwilling to work with this concept, even though there were several attempts to write a heroic version of the Fenrir that were focused on undoing these ills of the past.

Indigenous Erasure in Werewolf: 5th Edition

While the entire Hunters Entertainment writing team was handling the major, glaring issue of Paradox’s fervor to include a major Nazi element in Werewolf, I was personally dealing with the problematic approach to the Indigenous issues in the setting. The largest problem, for me, was in addressing Younger Brother’s issues, the history of non-Indigenous writers creating horrifically racist stereotypes, and what was valuable in the Tribal identity that should be saved and recentered. However, my attempts to do so were thwarted with every approach. I rewrote this Tribe four times, and offered three different versions of it to try to earn approval for a final write-up, but each time there was a lot of negativity directed towards my attempts and all them boiled down to this: Muammar felt that having two Tribes (both Younger and Older Brother) representing the “Indigenous population” was too many, and wanted them to only be focused on Older Brother, and that Younger Brother’s connection to a central, Indigenous identity, was undesirable because “other sources wrote them as having Siberian and European connections” and that future writing on this Tribe would require a lot of sensitivity…suggesting that one, Muammar wasn’t interested in doing the work to handle that level of sensitivity, and further, that he wasn’t interested in including me in future work, since I was involved with doing that at the time.

I want to take a moment to remind you that the work that was put into recovering Younger Brother started with “Let’s Kill Them Off” and at this point, through a combination of convincing and pleading, had been walked back to “They can live, but now they’re not connected to being Indigenous anymore” which is just representative genocide of a different variety. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” It was also explicitly something I said I would not write about going into this project. Ultimately, my efforts did not get much further than this, with some specific exceptions I will cite below.

Karim Muammar’s Anti-Indigenous Positions

Muammar consistently and repeatedly communicated to the team in ways that were condescending and dismissive of our collective accomplishments and capabilities, but from my perspective, no one suffered as much significant derision as I did while discussing the changes I wanted to make to Younger and Older Brother in order to make their representation empowering and exciting.

In the pulled quote from the previous paragraph, I want to point out to you that Muammar, who had the title of Lead Editor on this project, refused to capitalize Native American. Further, he would often redline my work with edits to decapitalize my own uses of Native American, as well as the word Indigenous when referring to Indigenous peoples. While there are plenty of people who might want to argue about this, I will point out that both the AP style guide as well as the Chicago style guide (the one which I am most familiar with in my academic historical work) both call for Indigenous to be capitalized when referring to a people. Further, I challenge anyone to defend the consistent decapitalization of Native American. More importantly, the reason that these are standards in respected style guides, is because the English language has been used historically to oppress and erase ethnic identities, including Indigenous identities. By transforming adjectives into proper nouns, we are declaring that Indigenous and Native aren’t descriptors that can be applied to animals, plants, and soil, but real lived identities and culture groups.

When I was explaining to the Paradox team (which was mostly just Muammar) why it was important to change the names of these two Tribes from the appropriative (and offensive) ones used in the past, Muammar pushed back by defending the previously used Younger Brother name, even after reading my extensive research and explanation about how this would harm Indigenous communities and fans.

While doing so, he also decided that it was appropriate to refer to this entirely Native American tribe by the word “savages” a slur that has been specifically used to dehumanize Native Americans, and then mocked my rewrite that focused on presenting them as stewards of the land using Indigenous methodologies and praxes, instead of the “savage” racist stereotypes they were presented as in previous editions. Further, as in the above quote, even after it was communicated that the use of this term was problematic, he kept doubling-down to use it to refer to the Tribe.

Even though I worked hard to redefine Younger Brother through Indigenous theory, such as place-based theory, relational theory, and communal theory, Muammar either refused to recognize this work, dismissing it as simple, or else simply could not understand the importance of these changes. Either way, the choice is that he didn’t want them to change, or couldn’t comprehend why the change was important because of how entrenched in white supremacist thinking he is. Further, after the massive effort that I put forward to attempt to educate him and the rest of the Paradox team on these issues, the insistence on using offensive terms and belittling my work felt intentional. So let’s talk about the work I did that was above and beyond my job description: free cultural consulting work.

“Sensitivity” and Consultation

I have seen several misunderstandings of my role working on this project going around, so I want to make something very clear. I was hired to work on this project as an author, and nothing else. I was not ever hired to be a cultural consultant. I do not do cultural consulting work. While I feel that there are many creators and companies who hire cultural consultants with the best intentions in mind, their responses often fall short of what is needed, as no one is ever obligated to actually follow the advice of cultural consultants. Further, I think there are also many companies who choose to hire cultural consultants only to say “we did this minimal step, and that is enough” in order to ward off naysayers.

However, anyone who hires me gets some level of cultural consulting for free, because it comes out in my writing–in both what I won’t write and what I choose to center my writing around. In the case of Werewolf 5th Edition, however, it was far more involved than this. I came with a plethora of “I will not write X” because I knew the setting was so problematic. A short list of my demands besides not being willing to write Indigenous erasure, was that we needed to change the names of the Pure Tribes (and the term Pure Tribe itself), we needed to change the word Totem to Patron, and also the Patrons of the Pure Tribes. We needed to move away from the term Metis for obvious reasons, and we needed to move away from the term Skin Dancers. I also specifically noted that there was a lot of cultural theft happening from the beginning of Werewolf until now that I wanted to address. The only way these issues were going to be addressed was to convince Paradox they were actual issues on the level of PR concerns, because nothing else was likely going to be considered. So in order to achieve this, I put in weeks worth of research, writing, and meetings with top level administrators with Hunters Entertainment so that they could bring this information to Paradox. I never documented my hours, but I would guess that I did approximately 80-100 hours of what I could only describe as cultural consultation work for free that was outside the contract work I was hired for. Let’s be clear: I did this willingly because I was passionate about the positive changes I wanted to see in this product, because I believed that Werewolf’s historic ills could be turned toward non-toxic representation.

Besides my actual words, such as naming the Ghost Council, and arguably the name Gale Stalkers came from a combination of names I pitched to Paradox after Winter’s Teeth was denied, and several sentences and paragraphs that I have seen so far that appear so close to what I originally wrote that you could imagine they were just edited versions, my largest contribution toward the final version of Werewolf: 5th Edition was this work. The only reason the offensive, appropriated names were changed were because of hours of my work to convince them it needed to happen. The reason that the Gale Stalkers aren’t just dead and gone: again, I pushed against this. The reason that Skin Dancers, Totem, and Metis will not appear as canonical titles? I pushed against their unwillingness to alter these things (see Karim’s defense of Wen**** Tribe name above).

Further, and this is the biggest reason I decided to write this article before seeing the final version of the book, I want to mention that I was also included in discussions with Hunters Entertainment to potentially be part of the art direction team, especially to oversee depictions of Indigenous characters, regalia, and art, to ensure that it would be represented either respectfully or not at all. I decided I needed to speak as soon as possible after the artistic portrayal of Tāme Iti appeared in the Glass Walkers preview without his permission. There are many arguments surrounding this issue and I am not going to address everything, but ultimately, I can tell you that had I remained as part of the art direction team, and saw that, I would have questioned it immediately. Even if I didn’t recognize Tāme Iti immediately, I would have asked what the source was on the depiction of moko in that piece, because I am aware that this is a sacred form of art–and I had already discussed wanting to make sure things like Crinos in headdresses didn’t appear in the book (as had often happened in previous editions, particularly on a certain white-skinned character whose name rhymes with Steals-the-Past).

As time working on this project went on, and I went through rounds and rounds of trying to convince Muammar and Paradox that it was important to not steal Indigenous identities, art, and stories, and that a greater effort needed to be put in powerful and empowering Indigenous representation, and I constantly ran into refusals and criticisms that were clearly hateful toward Indigenous identities and peoples, not to mention the push to represent Nazism as a major part of the game setting, I grew increasingly frustrated and restless with feeling like I was trying to work on a challenging project while also defending my right to exist as the person I am at every turn. Eventually I turned to another Indigenous TTRPG and game creator to ask for advice, and after a long and difficult discussion, I came to the conclusion that I was going to talk to the Hunters administration team and tell them that if Muammar kept using slurs and other anti-Indigenous language and attitudes, I was going to need to step off of this project, because it was harmful to me on a personal level. In furtherance of this point, I have been avoiding doing any contract work at all where I can tell that I am wanted for my specific cultural perspective ever since, because this situation was so harrowing for me.

Unfortunately, before I could have this conversation, after one final draft of Younger Brother and Bone Gnawers (which had its own issues, but that is not the point of this discussion), before we received any other specific feedback, the Hunters Entertainment administrators announced to the writing team that Paradox had decided to take the book in-house, and would no longer need our services.

The main point I would like to leave you with, besides these few specific quotes (out of dozens and dozens) that Muammar made that were anti-Indigenous, is that there is often a big call to have more BIPOC voices in various entertainment industries, so that both our stories, perspectives, and unique views on how the universe and life works, can be included; so that an industry that is historically, harmfully Eurocentric, might turn toward new, healthier, and inclusive directions. And I agree with this call for change, but I implore you to consider the conditions that BIPOC creators often have to work under: doing cultural/identity work and consultation for free as part of being present, being subject to vicious refusals of our experiences and perspectives, and straight-up having slurs lodged against our work. I want to see these changes in the industries we love, including the gaming industry, but currently the people who are in charge, who have the most power, are severely hostile to our work and our perspectives. This is why, for example, works like Coyote & Crow were done with an almost entirely Indigenous group of creators, and led by Indigenous creators, because trying to work for and with this ugly, hateful, and xenophobic group of people is so often exhausting, both mentally and spiritually, and because no good changes end up being made.

I am glad the harmful, appropriative terms were removed from the setting. I am glad I was part of the fight to make that real. I am not so glad that I was treated with hostility and racism by Muammar for the effort and love I put into this work, and I am not so glad that I will certainly be reviled by one of the two communities I did this work for–the gaming community, and certainly the people in power in this industry–and I am also not so glad that I didn’t have the opportunity to properly acknowledge how much of Werewolf’s base themes and setting are twisted and tied-up in Indigenous appropriation without giving the proper acknowledgments.

More than anything, I hope that this story will help you, the fans, realize that there is a lot of darkness in these communities, and they won’t change unless you hold their feet to the fire.

Ánaagodzįįhł

J.F. Sambrano

#decolonization #ttrpg #werewolves #writing #world of darkness #werewolf: the apocalypse #werewolf the apocalypse #mage: the ascension #vampire: the masquerade #changeling: the dreaming

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