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segenassefa · 4 years

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2: On Consumerism, Fighting Demons, and Societies Inevitable Collapse

Quarantine has been lowkey surreal. My constant complaint of never having enough time to do all the things I want/should be doing has now left me bored in the house, bored in the house, bored with nothing but time to get said things done. However, it is a dual edged sword - with the collapse and subsequent reformation of civil society outside my doors, it leaves me wondering – as well as a lot of other people – in the words of Miss Juicy…what the hell we gone do now?

Nearing the end of the first leg of my university career, I should be thinking about getting ready to transition to the next logical stages of adulthood - saving for an apartment, applying for permanent residency, as well as graduate schools and part time jobs. Yet, I’m worried about if these things will even be a possibility within the next month, six months, or even the next year.

On top of ALL of that, the recent BLM protests and the way that people (read: white people, Latinxs, Black men, homo/transphobes, etc.) have shown their asses the past few months is beyond mortifying - especially regarding the treatment of black women and how our value as individuals as well as a collective to society is really perceived.* This is not to downplay the murder of numerous black men in society, BUT who the fuck is riding for black women aside from other black women? And not just the ones who find attractive, or are racially ambiguous, or the ones you feel as if you get “guilted” into supporting and demanding justice for, I mean each and every black woman. I’m just saying, it gets pretty disheartening to feel like the legwork of the revolution is on the back of one category of people, and that your value to society is measured by the amount of emotional labour you’re ready to do for others, or how fat your ass is (but I digress…).

I feel like most people have used material things as coping mechanisms instead of actually facing their feelings and dealing with the things that bother them. Just think of the number of packages that have arrived on your doorstep the past few months. Breaking the glossy seal of packing tape is similar to therapy, until all the boxes are open, and you start feeling like shit again. And now, more than ever, there’s a lot to be bothered about. Western society has dedicated phrases based on the phenomenon of substituting true self-work with figurative emotional bandages (Phrases like comfort eating and retail therapy come to mind).

It’s nice to think that we – the people entering their adolescent and young adult years – will be the one to change these things, but suddenly it’s 2 am, you have twenty different things in your Amazon cart, (who the fuck needs a metal straw cleaning kit?) and you’re trying to see how far you can stretch and grab your debit card before falling off of the bed.

The conflicting messages pushed by society don’t help all that much either. If you look up “Kondo method” or “decluttering my closet” on YouTube, the numbers of videos that come up is astounding. Pages and pages of sweaty-faced, smiling YouTubers monetizing from this kind of faux “minimalism” only to post haul videos a few days later because “I threw everything out and now I have to rebuild from scratch sksksk!”. Does this not just perpetuate a cycle of buying and throwing and buying? I am....confusion, to say the least. Still I watch them, because I’m a hypocrite, and am also easily amused.

I will be the first to admit I have always had a very unhealthy relationship with money, with self-image, and with measuring my self-worth in proximity with “stuff that stems from a complicated relationship with physical self. Follow along:

Growing up, I was a fat kid. We don’t even have to sugar coat it. Think Terrio, but better eyebrows and more hair. Except I was not killin’ em, just myself. I always envied my friends who were able to go shopping at regular stores – read: Hollister, Abercrombie, Urban Outfitters (yes my friends were white), meanwhile I was condemned to shopping in the women’s department.

So, to compensate, I would buy trinkets – things like nail polish, lip gloss, journals, you get the point. My proximity to worthiness was measured not by the things that I bought, but within the act of buying. Growing up with parents who were also financially frugal also altered my relationship with money and blessed me with crippling buyers’ remorse after every purchase, even on things that are important (read: groceries).

But as a kid, buying “stuff” was fun for me – it gave me some sort of purpose, and the acquisition of things (even if they weren’t the same things my peers had) made me feel like, to some extent, I could compete on the same playing field. As I got older, and I started to have real expenses, I moved towards second-hand shopping. I would religiously find myself at Goodwill on weekend, after school, or with friends. I could literally feel an endorphin rush when I would find something that I would consider a “good deal”, and it made me feel (again) purposeful, to be spending money, even if I didn’t need whatever I was buying.

I should also add that the people in my immediate family does not believe in thrift stores (“Why am I working for you to wear other people’s clothing?”, I remember my dad asking me one day), so the act of second-hand shopping was also my form of rebellion.

I began to amass a collection of clothing that would put Kylie’s closet to shame. I began buying things for events and situations that were yet to happen, for other people, for when I lose ten pounds. It was a madness.

In freshman year of university, I had an unhealthy relationship with clubbing clothes. Did I have the figure for clubbing clothes? Absolutely not. The funnier part is, I couldn’t even go clubbing because I wasn’t 19 at the time. And yet I had drawers and drawers full of the stuff. Not to mention that clubbing clothes is incredibly similar to summer clothing and living between Minnesota and Canada meant that these things were barely seeing the light of day.

The moral of this was – I could never figure out my relationship with stuff, This quarantine has forced me to try and break down the compulsion behind my behaviour. I felt like I was spiralling the six weeks that they closed thrift stores, and I knew myself well enough to not try and online shop with the same kind of frequency as that. But the crazy part was, I didn’t die. I didn’t go into withdrawal (ok, I did a little bit, but whatever), and I was able to take the time to go through the things I already owned and find some hidden gems that were routinely buried in the cracks and crevices of my closet. It was like the episode of Family Guy when Peter realizes he has a vestigial twin – alarming and cool at first, but then it’s just alarming and annoying.

Its more embarrassing to realize that some semblance of myself image is tied to the frequency with which I am able to spend money. I would never say that participating in capitalist society gives me some kind of purpose as a black woman because God forbid. Also, considering that a lot of big names companies are actually racist and fatphobic as hell creates a whole new dimension for analyzing the power of my black dollar, sometimes creating another spiral of guilt leading to you guessed it – more spending.

As much as it seems like it, however, this self-reflection was not in vain. In the past month, I’ve cut down my closet from +200 pieces of clothing and shoes to about 40. If you ever want a fun, humbling activity this quarantine, just clean out your closet and be honest with yourself about how often you wear certain things. It was revolting to see the number of shirts, dresses, pants, skirts that I had bought and convinced myself wholeheartedly I was going to wear, only to pull them out of my closet months later with the tags attached *insert Marge Simpson covering her face meme*.

But at the end of the whole ordeal, it felt really good to look at my space and not feel burden or guilt. It was somewhat philanthropic realizing that not only will these clothes make someone else happier (I donated pretty much everything because it’s not always about money), but that my quality of life was not dramatically impacted in owning (or not owning) certain things. The past few weeks, I’ve spent more money on going out and sharing experiences with friends, but still nowhere near the same amount of money I would have spent buying clothes and other material possession.

Youtuber Kelly Stamps has a video on how minimalism “cured” her depression**, and the whole thesis boils down to the idea that owning less things gives you less to compare yourself too, thus making you happier (in a sense) and allowing you to focus the energy and time that would have been centered around maintaining and building your collection of possessions other things.

This still doesn’t break down the root of the issue, but it’s a start. I think when you have traits or patterns that you’ve participated in for so long, it becomes hard to step back and be objective enough to realize that you – yes, you – are part of the problem. I can blame my habits on a lot of things but at the end of the day, it’s important to realize that certain cycles seem never-ending because I actively choose to participate in these kinds of behaviours (accountability is sexy, huh?). While I’m not ready to face all my demons quite yet, it’s easier to do it with a nice wardrobe and a streamlined sense of mind.

Notes

*When I say black women, I mean ALL black women. Not some limited, cis-gendered, heteronormative view of what a woman is. Over here we ride for all those who identify as women.

**She emphasizes that she doesn’t actually means that it cured anything, but rather helped with her anxiety, and in turn, helped with her depression.

Links

That Family Guy Episode

The Kelly Stamps video

#cms #selfhelp?#consumerism

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geminimoonbeamx · 5 years

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Oh, Baby: Chapter Two

A/N: So I was so excited about the reaction and feedback I got on the first chapter, I hope you guys enjoy this one too!

Word Count: 3.5k+

Warnings: None really- brief mentions of smut and of course cursing like a mf

Summary: After a drunken night, Y/N finds herself having to face the biggest decision of her life; is she ready for motherhood? And a better question, is Bucky Barnes, her long time friend and womanizer extraordinaire, ready for fatherhood? They’ll just have to go along for the ride and find out together. A Bucky Barnes x Plus Size Reader Story

Chapter 2/6: And a Cherry On Top

Once you decide that you want this baby- that you’re keeping, things become alot clearer in your mind.

All those lists you made? The bullet pointed steps, numbered processes that you need to accomplish zero in, your brain finally able to sort them, at least a little bit. More then you’d been able to last night, or even this morning.

You’re keeping this baby, it’s cemented in your stubborn brain now and even though that brings a whole new round of terror, it becomes a front and center though. A focal point, so to say.

And when you’re focused- you’ve been told you can be a little ruthless.

“Look, Dr. Cho, I like you so far, I really do, but I’m going to be blunt here: I’ve read some horror stories about plus size pregnancies, and how miserable it is to have a doctor who is fatphobic- so I just want to check base and make sure that you’re...okay with having me as a patient, and will treat me with the same respect that I plan to treat you with”

She doesn't look shocked and you don't know whether that's just her training or if her face always has that sage quality to it, but you can't really read it.

“I really admire you bringing up your concerns, and I can assure you that they’re very presidented, but that’s not something you’re going to have to worry about with me if you choose to continue on with me as your practitioner for this pregnancy.

I’ve been an OB for the last fifteen years and have worked with lots of very different women: big and small and everything in between and that doesn't matter to me. What matters is that we find a plan that works for you and your little one and keeps you both healthy as we get you to term. Does that sound okay to you?”

You chuckle, delightedly shocked at her words. At how straight forward and sincere she had been. At the support you could feel from her and how relieving that felt to know that your doctor was going to be on your side, for you, with you.

Being overweight, you’d had prejudice thrown at you left and right thought your life, sadly also by medical professionals, and to know she wasn't going to do that to you?

“Yeah” You nod, with a grateful smile “That sounds more than okay”

The appointment goes smoothly for the next hour and a half or so after that. You’re happy you’d Googled like crazy and had come prepared with a small list of key medical facts: any allergies, past surgeries talks of mental health and medications. She gives you a pelvic exam/Pap and its uncomfortable as they always are, even with her gentle, nimble fingers. Legs in stirrups, biting at the inside of your cheek.

The magic happens when she lays you down and slathers your tummy with a jelly like substance and your heart goes fluttery against your chest as she uses a little wand, probes and moves it gently against the jelly. Looking, searching…

Thump,

Found.

On the screen of the ultrasound machine that she’d pulled up. Dr. Cho had warned you that it was very early, and that there was a good chance that she wouldn't be able to find much of anything at this point and yet there it was.

A tiny little blur in the blob like painting of your insides that we’re up for display on the US machine. A heart beat, the sound it made would be imprinted in your mind forever.

“There’s your baby, it’s about the size of a cherry right now and I has no really defined shape, but as you can hear, it has a very strong heart beat”

Like in movies, you thought you’d cry, and yeah, maybe your close, but really it lights a fire in you. Sets your heart ablaze and makes you feel lightheaded.

There’s your baby, and it’s real. So real. With a little heart inside you, beating along with your own…

You leave the office with two copies of the ultrasound pictures, one for you to keep, and one to give to Bucky.

Now you only had to tell him.

Later that night, as you and Wanda lounge on your living room couch, you text him, clutching a furry pillow in your lap.

You need to get this done and over with, you have to tell him.

Hey, long time no talk. You think we could get together for lunch sometime this week?

----------

Bucky finds himself sitting at a corner table, it’s half past three and you’re still not there yet. You we’re supposed to be meeting him for a late lunch...ten minutes ago? Fuck, why were you always late?

It drove him crazy, was on that long list of things about you that made his eyes cross with annoyance. On that list was also the fact that he could never guess what you we’re going to do- which yeah, that one still stood, too.

When you’d texted him, asking him to meet you for lunch last Friday, Bucky had gaped at his phone for a few minutes. Hadn't you spent the last couple months avoiding him like the plague? He couldn't help himself, though, and had only given you a tiny bit of shit before agreeing to meet you that next Wednesday at you guys’ favorite spot.

And so here he sat, at HandCraft, waiting for you. Trying not too feel excited, hopeful. That usual feeling that settled in his gut whenever you we’re around(even with just the promise of your presence) had been thrown into effect.

He orders himself a Corona, extra lime, but considers something stronger to quell the weird nerves, and orders you a Long Island Peach Tea.

He knew your obsession with everything peach, so when he saw it he couldn't help but order it for you.

He’s a couple drinks into his beer when you walk in. Bucky could zero in on you in a crowd of hundreds, a skill he’d developed pretty quick after meeting you. His weird 20/20 Y/N radar doesn't fail him and his eyes snap to you as you walk in, and he waves you over. You boop through the crowd, and Bucky knows he has a stupid little smile on his face as he watches.

You’re cute, always. It’s infuriating, and intoxicating and damn, will he ever get over this shit? It’s been eight years for fucks sake.

It’d been rainy and humid in the city this May, and the beige long sleeved, off the shoulder top and high waisted ripped jeans you wear are breezy enough. You always dressed nice, most always put together and he’d always taken the time to appreciate your style, the way you hed yourself and adorned your curvy body.

The big bun that sits atop your head is messy and has started to frizz from the time you’d spent in the sprinkling rain, your loose baby hairs wispy and starting to curl as you sit down in the chair on the opposite him.

“Hi” You greet, shifting in the chair. You’re awkward around him now, and it sucks. It really does.

He thinks about that night in early March, and he cant bring himself to regret it, and he tries to ignore the twinge from how apparently you seem to.

“Hey there- I ordered some drinks so I didn’t die or dehydration while I was waiting for you”

You can’t help but giggle- you and Bucky’s dry humors had always lined up. It was a part of the reason why the two of you had always got on so well, the two of you were always throwing off hand, rude to anyone else, jokes at each other.

“It’s three, you’re going to need to check that alcoholism or yours someday” you rebuff and he shrugs, taking another swig if his beer with a cheeky smile-

“It’s five o’clock somewhere...and it’s actually 3:30, which makes you- he checks his watch playfully, asshole, fifteen minutes late”

“I had a meeting with my boss. Give me a fucking break” You snipe back, and yeah maybe you sound a little sharp.

Shit. No, that’s not how you wanted the atmosphere of this conversation to go. But this week had been...a lot.

You’d told your little sister MJ about the big B news and she had advised you to talk to your boss about bumping up your healthcare, about maternity leave and all that other jazz as early as possible- and that had lead to you having to sit for over an hour with the one-eyed owner of the radio station.

Nick Fury was cool enough, really he is, but still. Explaining an unexpected pregnancy to him was...really awkward. Especially when he had asked about the father and you had to pretty much shrug and say “Bitch, I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out later today”

But you definitely didn’t call your boss a bitch.

“A meeting? Is everything okay?” Bucky actually sounds concerned and you purse your lips and spin the straw in the dark drink you hadn’t touched yet because you were preeeeetty sure it had liquor in it and that was a no go for you now.

“Um, yeah...it is now. I just had some serious stuff to talk to him about”

“Serious? That doesn’t sound great” Bucky didn’t mean to pry, but he knows how much you loved your job. How hard you’d worked for it.

He’s always rooted for you, knowing that like many things, the radio waves were dominated by male hosts. He listened to your podcasts, and your new show, religiously.

Every Wednesday night at 7- he diligently listens to your melodic voice, actually for the last couple months it’s the only way he could feel close to you.

Sucker. He knows.

“Um, yeah. Kinda serious? More just things I needed to get sorted out with Fury. A little planning for my future, ya know?” Our future, the life inside me, you don’t say. Yet.

“Okay, well as long as everything’s still going smoothly there, that’s good, right?”

“Yeah, right. Everything’s going smoothly…” fuck.

“Just say it and get it over with. Like pulling off a band-aid” Wanda had pep talked you about this- but god, how could anybody know it was going to be this hard.

Your heartbeat had gone hummingbird and your stomach was in knots as the minutes ticked on. You order an ice water and watermelon salad and Bucky frowns.

Because that’s not your usual...you always get the Nacho Tots. He offers them as an appetizer for the two of you to share and you shake your head with a forced smile, complaining of a stomach ache.

You don’t touch the peach tea, he points that it too and you shake your head telling him you weren’t in the mood to drink which, what? You were always down to day drink. Always.

Half way through his chimichurri steak, Bucky can’t take the weird tension anymore. You’re trying...to hard. And yet he can clearly see that you’re more uncomfortable, more uneasy then he’s ever seen you.

He can only bite his tongue for so long. Months of tension were bound to come to a head eventually.

He couldn’t bare talking about the weather and other trivial bullshit subjects anymore.

“Y/N...if you didn’t want to hang out, why did you make plans with me?” Bucky questions, bluntly. Takes you off guard a bit.

“What?” Is your bright reply and he just frowns and leans back in his chair. His body language is all wrong- and it makes you even more anxious then you already were.

“I just- fuck. Fuck, it’s been so weird between us since March and I thought having lunch today was supposed to be us remedying said weirdness but it just feels worse” Bucky’s tone is slightly frustrated and dejected

You can feel your face drop. None of this was going how you’d planned- and you’d imagined this going 1,000 different ways in the last few days.

“I just want everything to go back to the way it was” Bucky speaks, interrupting your silence and it feels like there’s fucking needles in your stomach.

“It can’t go back” You utter, fidget in place, staring at the busy street outside the window for a moment. Not able to meet his eyes yet.

“Really? Cause I kinda think that’s bullshit. So we slept together? It was consensual and we’re adults, I don’t get why it has to be a friendship ending thing-“ Bucky’s feelings are hurt, and it’s apparent in his tone. Confused, slightly pleading.

Band-aid, Wanda’s words ring in your head as you muster up your courage and look back at Bucky.

Jesus, you could drown in his foggy eyes. Could be melted down to nothing by the molten silver of his gaze.

“I have something to tell you, it’s why I asked you to lunch today. I wanted to talk to you face to face because...this is pretty fucking huge and I- I” you stutter and stumble over your words and Bucky knows it’s something major because words are usually your weapon. You vernacular your sword and armor.

He doesn’t know why he knows, or why it clicked together in his head- call it some kind of weird intuition. Maybe from the fact that he grew up with all sisters and that he remembers his older sister Charlie and her face when she’d told his parents, at the age of sixteen, that she was-

And Oh, ohhhh, you hadn’t drank. Or touched your food-

“You’re pregnant” it doesn’t feel real to him as he says it, as his lips gram the words he can’t really feel himself speak them.

You gasp softly- your big eyes locked with his for a moment where everything goes still around the two of you, and then you nod.

It’s like he had peered straight into your soul anyway. Like he already knew.

“Yeah, I am. Nine weeks- well almost ten now, I guess”

“Oh...oh fuck” Bucky breathes out, a long exhale because he’d been holding his breath and oh shit- he hasn’t had a panic attack in years but this sure feels like what the start one.

“Bucky?”

“It’s mine?” He knows it’s an asshole question, but he grits it out anyway because he has to be sure of what he already knows.

“Yeah, it is. I haven’t been with anyone since we were together” It’s the truth, and he knows because you have a big fat unfiltered mouth that you hadn’t been with anyone for months before him.

“Five months?” You remember him breathing into your neck “Fuck, doll, how? No way”

“Mmhmm” you’d hummed as he’d kissed down your chest “I’m not a whore like you- I can go a few months without sex with out my genitals shriveling up and my brain short circuiting”

He’d laughed around a mouthful of breast.

And now you were pregnant. With his baby.

He gapes like a fucking fish as he tries to digest it all.

“I’m going to keep it, Bucky. And that doesn’t mean I expect you, or am going to force you to be in they’re life but I just...I don’t know I thought i should tell you? And not because I felt obligated to or anything...I mean kind of, but because you’re a good person and I wanted you to know” You’re rambling, yeah, but you’re saying your peace.

“You’re ten weeks?” Bucky questions, breaking you out of your ramblings and you nod, a little confused.

“Yeah, it’s the size of a Cherry right now...trippy, right?”

Bucky barks out a laugh, still in that headspace where he though he might wake up at any given moment.

“A cherry. Oh my god. Holy fuck- you’re pregnant” Bucky exasperates and then puts his hands on his face, trying to calm down. Trying to get a grip on himself.

He knows you. Knows that you’re not lying about it being his, why would you? And there’s a baby inside you, right this moment. One that he’d put there- that the two of you had created together.

“Yup. Super fucking pregnant- a doctor confirmed it and everything” You try to lighten the mood a little, just like you always do.

“Really?”

“Yeah...here, look” you dog through your handbag for a moment and then pull out a laminated picture and reach across the table to hand it to him.

When Bucky takes his first look at it, his heart squeezes and his breath gets stuck in his throat again.

It’s the ultrasound picture. Black and white, unidentifiable shapes- but his eyes zero in on the little blob in the darkness. The baby.

His baby.

His heart clenches again.

“There it is” you point out what he’s looking out with a manicured finger “that’s the baby. I know it all looks like an obscure Picasso painting or something but that’s it” you kind of hate calling your baby an it, but you don’t know what else to call...them, yet.

“A cherry” Bucky whispers, asks.

“Yeah, like-“ you make that annoying, internet famous, 6 shape, with your hand and put it up to your eye to look through it “this big”

Bucky chuckles. You’re so dumb. And so special, for being able to make such a tense situation feel...lighter.

“I’m going to want to be in this baby’s life, you know that, right?” Yeah, he doesn’t know how he feels about all of this yet. He still thinks this might be some kind of fever dream- that maybe he died from that flu he had last week, but he’d been raised right by his mom and pop.

Was he a bit slutty? Yeah, he guesses he’d own that(argue that he only acted on how he was pursued)

Could he be a little bit of an arrogant prick? You, and plenty of other people had told him that plenty in his life and yeah, he’d own that one too.

But he’d never, could never, leave you alone to raise this child. Not with how he felt about you- and shit, even if he wasn’t harboring these feelings could he ever just leave a woman who he’d gotten pregnant completely alone.

“Don’t make promises in the heat of the moment, I’m not expecting-“

“Me to want to be a father to my child” he doesn’t snap, per say, but he knows you can hear how offended he is. It makes you bite the inside of your lip.

“I don’t know. I just don’t...want you to feel like you have to say things you don’t mean because I’m sitting in front of you right now. Like? You might feel different later, you know?”

Bucky instantly feels bad for snapping at you. You’d been sitting on this, thinking you might have to do this alone…

Bucky looks back at the ultrasound picture and his stomach rolls at the idea of you doing this alone. Of him missing this first milestone of your pregnancy. Of his child’s life.

His child.

He’d woken up this morning, single, uncomplicated and now...he knew there was a baby that was half him inside of you.

He should have had that stronger drink.

“I’m going to be there for this baby, and for you. I don’t know what that looks like yet and I can’t promise I’ll be great at it, but I’m going to be here” his voice gets soft and passionate and fuck, the way he’s looking at you, vowing this to you…

It’s almost more than you can handle.

“Okay...I’m game” you say, and he snorts and nods.

He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, if he’ll be a good dad or not. There’s so many unknowns swirling around his head, clogging his brain-

But he knows he’s not going anywhere.

“We’re going to have a baby” He says it, and this time it feels a little more real as it comes out of his mouth. “Holy fuck I’m going to be a dad”

“Um, congratulations” The waiter chooses that time to come back to the table, and the kid who can’t be more then eighteen looks a little awkward at intruding “Do you want a celebratory piece of cake?”

“You know what? Yeah we do- and please, make sure there’s a cherry on top”

He grins too big when he asks for a cherry and you know he’s needs it as a visual comparison to the size of the baby inside you. Bucky is so obnoxious.

He’s also beautiful- in the restaurants low light. All teeth and bright blue eyes- his brows still pulled together and his expression a little overwhelmed, but not mad. Not disgusted or cold like you’d feared.

You can almost here both Wanda and MJ’s “told you so’s” now.

You can’t help but share in his contagious smile- the nerves that had players you aren’t completely gone, not by a long shot.

But...you and Bucky Barnes were going to have a baby.

You could only hope that the two of you didn’t fuck it up too bad.

@peacefulwriter88 @jaamesbbarnes @jalapenobarnes @gifsbysimplysonia @brieannakeogh @lostinthoughtsandfeelings @lostinspace33 @4theluvofall @tatathekissypotato @siren-kitten-his @skishenanigans @geekyweed @spidey-babe-parker @lastfallenstar @rachelle-on-the-run @prettybubblesintheair @dani-si @hufflepuff-always-forever @morganhoran1671 @imdiegohargreeves @nikolett3 @miss-mcbotty @nerdgirljen @readingsubtitles @sgtbookybarnes @prussiangilbert @tiredofsatansbullshit @bitchwhytho @mishameadows @heartbeats-wildly @10kindsofderp @xodearling @notyourtypcalrose @rachelle-on-the-run

The taglist for this story is still OPEN. If you would like to be tagged, please be aware that I will be expecting feedback, and will not take the time to tag you again if you don’t give any- I will update with the next chapter once this chapter reaches 100 notes.

Okayyy, so here’s part two. It might be a little cheesy, but I really want this story to be more fluff then angst, okay?! Which let me say is not easy for me because lately I’ve been one angsty bitch.

So I decided that I wanted to play with more MCU characters then I normally do, do something different- and that’s how I came up with the idea that the readers little sister is MJ(Michelle Jones) from Spider-Man. I love Zendaya- and since I’m usually writing a mixed race reader- she fits as a sibling.

Just for heads up, a little spoiler for the next chapters, I will also be having the Van Dynes be in her family tree. Hope is her cousin.

I’m really just trying to have fun writing for Marvel again. Hope you guys are having fun reading this.

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diegoh4rgreeves · 5 years

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Fitting Room

Story Summary: Diego and reader go shopping for a publicity event of The Umbrella Academy. They decide to go into one ridiculous high-end store as a joke. Reader deals with fatphobic implications from someone working floor there. Diego tries defending her, and reader ends up taking care of it herself. Diego joins reader in the fitting room to zip her gown for her, and they end up having some fun…

Pairing: Diego Hargreeves x Plus Size Female Reader

Chapter: 1/1

Word Count: 2,158 words

Warning(s): Fluff, smut, fatphobic minor character, cussing

A/N: This took me 5 days to write and rewrite, and bothering a friend about for more ideas. I came up with COMPLETELY new ideas, and I had breakdowns of wondering if I should even continue doing this or not. Finally, I kept my original idea and I wanted to make reader a happy, confident, and self-assured gal. Let me know if this is good representation! I hope you all enjoy this!

Taglist:

@reblogserpent @whistlingwindtree @lostinwonderland314

It’s nearly sunrise when you sit up in bed and notice that your boyfriend Diego is still absent. The mattress is hard, the room is hot from the lack of air conditioning in the old mansion, and the walls have a dull dark green colour. There are flashcards of action moves and posters of The Kraken posted to the walls. You wonder how your boyfriend can come back to his childhood home. Not only does the mansion look like it’s falling apart, but also Diego has told you stories of his traumatic childhood. Then again, his current place is the boiler room of the gym he works and boxes at. It was either the traumatising and somewhat clean mansion or the dusty boiler room.

You hear the bedroom door creak open. A tall and built figure appears. He has a square-shaped face with big brown eyes, plump lips, a mustache, and a goatee. He’s in full leather clad with knives strapped to the torso.

As relieved as you are that Diego’s home, you feign being asleep. Even after all these years of being with your vigilante boyfriend, you worry about him and his night missions. You just didn’t see the point of waking up and scolding him anymore.

He gets into the bed and snakes one of his arms on your waist. He nuzzles you. “Good morning, gorgeous,” he whispers as if he’s sending you a voicemail. He pecks your head and falls asleep.

The silence is worth his affections.

It’s about noon when Diego and you enter a fancy clothing store at the mall. The store is grand with its open concept and minimal amount of clothing. A store with such an elegant exterior would not typically have such comical looking clothes. This one, however, did.

Diego and you were originally going to pick up clothes for a grand event this weekend. It’s a public appearance from The Umbrella Academy after the death of Diego’s father, Reginald Hargreeves. Normally Diego would decline something like this, had it not been for Pogo insisting that his siblings and he give it a chance. Pogo is the family’s chimpanzee servant who can talk and is practically Diego’s second father.

Diego and you went inside this particular store as a joke. You see poofy gowns and 70s style tuxedos. You dare each other to try something on.

“Try this on,” Diego hands you a multicoloured gown with ruffled collars on it. It looks like a sheet of cloth with a handkerchief placed on each side.

You take the gown and you feel your lips tense up as you try to fight laughter. A tall and leggy woman working floor passes by. You turn around and see a black blazer with rhinestones on it and matching pants. You pick up this outfit and hand it to Diego. “You try this on.”

He turns to you and checks what you’re holding. He scoffs. “Really?”

You smile at him and nod.

Diego reluctantly takes the blazer from you. His face falls when he sees the dress you’re holding. “Oh shit…” He takes the dress from you and hands you one a size bigger.

You take the dress from Diego and thank him. Suddenly you hear someone clear their throat. You turn around to see the same tall and leggy woman looking at you. “Hello,” you say to the woman.

“We have a maternity section. It’s over there.” She points further down the store.

You look at her in bewilderment.

Diego looks at her with flames in his eyes. “Excuse me, miss, but she is not pregnant… Who are you to assume that?” Diego tilts his head and smirks. “Did you remember to have breakfast today?”

The woman’s jaw drops.

“Diego…” You grit your teeth and grab his arm. “I got this, babe. I got this.”

He looks at you with flared nostrils, and then he glares at the woman. He respects your wishes by keeping quiet. He stays with you and watches how you handle this.

“He’s right,” you say to the woman. “I’m not pregnant, and this has my size on it.” You lift the dress and gesture it to her. “See? Do I look like something bigger than that?”

The lady smirks. “Alright. As you were. Would you like to try this on?”

You beam up. “Why yes, I would, actually! Thank you so much.” You’ve come a long way in learning that killing people with kindness does the job. “May my boyfriend have a room too?”

The lady’s jaw drops again. “B-boyfriend?”

“Yeah, that’s right!” Diego takes a step toward her, seemingly ready to pull his knife out. You’re praying to God he didn’t actually pack any of his knives to the mall!

You block him with your arm. “Yes, going strong 2 years now.” You look at him and smile.

He wraps his arms around your neck from behind and pecks your cheek.

“Uh…” The lady clears her throat once more. “Alright… Right this way then.” She walks up ahead of you. Diego takes your hand as you both follow the lady. She takes out some tags and hands one each to you. “Feel free to call for another size.”

“I don’t think we’ll need to…” Diego retorts.

The lady widens her eyes with fear and nods. Then she walks out.

You’re ready to walk over to your stall until Diego approaches you. “How can you let anyone talk to you like that?” Diego loudly whispers.

“Diego… It’s something I’ve dealt with my whole life. I’m fine.”

“But you don’t deserve that. If only everyone else could see the strong, independent, kind, and beautiful woman you are!”

You shake your head. “I like weeding out the jerks. If I’m honest… I used to think you’d be a jerk.”

He looks at you in amazement. “What, why? How?”

You shrug. “You’re tall, you’re built, you’re a boxer, and you’re a fucking superhero! You’re a handsome and famous person, Diego.”

He blows raspberries. “I ain’t shit compared to your genuine self.”

You giggle. “You’re cute. I like you.” You kiss the tip of his nose. “Holler when you’re done trying on your dumb outfit.”

He smiles. “You do the same.”

You look back at him over your shoulders and wink. “Oh, I can do more than a holler.”

He smirks and takes in how smooth and sexy you are. Then he walks into his stall, as do you.

The fitting room is spacious and pretty with its cream coloured walls and Astoria Grand Beaston Leaner full-length mirror.

You slip off your clothes and slide on the gown. As you fiddle with the zipper at the back, you remember how the fitting room used to make you feel.

The fitting room was where you’d cry when you were younger because you were bigger than your cousins. The fitting room was where your mother told you to lose weight before the prom or no one will ask you to it. The fitting room was what made you think dates never called you back no matter how beautiful the next dress you bought would be. Now, you’ve come to terms with your size, and how it’s made you the person you are today. Getting a sexy, strong, kind, and loving boyfriend is a bonus.

As you remember him and smile, you call him over.

You attempt zipping yourself up even though it’s useless. “Yeah?” Diego appears at the door.

“Can you zip me up?” You turn away from him and hold up your hair.

He zips you up and notices the mirror in front of the both of you. He smiles and wraps his arms around your waist.

You take notice of the mirror and let out a loud laugh. “Oh my God!”

“What?” He asks.

“I look like a cupcake!” This rainbow dress is unflattering, but at least it has nothing to do with your body.

He takes a moment before he speaks again. “I think you look perfect.” He pecks your cheek.

You hold his hands and turn to face him. You give him a soft smile and blush. “Why are you so good to me?”

He doesn’t say anything. He only keeps his smile on. “Did you notice my outfit?”

You let go of his grip so that you can see the outfit. You let out a screech from your disbelieved laugh. “You look like a magician!”

He smirks. “Yeah yeah yeah… I’m better off with my knives.”

“Yes, you’re a bad boy.” You pull him in for a kiss by tugging the collar of his white dress shirt. “Let’s get out of these clothes.”

He smirks. “Haha and then what?”

You playfully punch his arm. “Diego! This is a public place.”

“Not with closed doors, is it…” He grabs your hips and leans his head on yours.

You grin and wrap your arms around his neck. “Here? Right now?”

He nods.

You giggle. “Okay! What the hell. Why no—”

He leans in and presses a hard kiss to your lips. You beam up as you drown your lips with his. He slides the gown down and it instantly falls off you. Neither of you pay any mind to accidentally stepping on it. In this passionate kiss, he slides his hands underneath both cups of your bra. You unclasp the hook of it and it dangles off your shoulders. You rush sliding your panties down and scoff as you kick the poofy and rainbow gown away from both your feet.

He tosses his blazer to the floor and releases the kiss to quickly take his pants and boxers off. You unbutton his shirt which exposes his big and hairy chest. He sits on the bench and you place your legs in between him. He keeps full concentration on you and rubs your back up and down as you hungrily kiss.

You stay on his lap and simultaneously bend down to pick up your purse. You sigh with relief when you see that you kept the pack of condoms there from the other night. “Thought I was going to actually get pregnant today.” You chuckle.

Diego rolls his eyes. “That floor bitch doesn’t know what’s coming!” He presses another hard kiss to you and whispers to you in a hot breath. “You’re perfect.”

You moan after you hear that sweet nothing. He smiles and lifts you off his lap for a dreaded minute. He takes the condom from you and slips it on. He shifts you back to him and gives you a slow and sloppy kiss as you place yourself on top of him. He moans and closes his eyes. “Yeah. Ride me, you bad girl.”

You stare at him deeply and slowly hop on him. He spanks you and looks over to watch your ass jiggle. You gasp and thrust faster. He spanks you harder this time. You feel a burn on you and thrust faster. He grabs your hips and slides you off him. “Turn around and bend over.”

You do as you’re told, and you assume getting back in charge. You go up and down him and he keeps hitting your cute bottom. He revels in the view of your ass jiggling. You go faster and harder and you moan as he manages to reach his cock to your clit. You reach two fingers to your clit and rub them as he starts taking the lead now. After a few more strokes, you moan louder and forget where you are.

He smiles and looks out to check if anyone’s coming in. “He leans in and whispers. “Come for me, babe. Come.” He grabs both your breasts and twists your nipples with his index finger and thumb. It doesn’t do much to your genitals, though it puts you back in the driver’s seat. You rise in reverse cowgirl position and he holds your hair back. “That’s it…” He encourages you. “Keep going.” He can’t help but to thrust along with you. He is also getting close.

You feel yourself clench up and roll your eyes back to what feels like your skull. You call out a long fuck and tell Diego you love him. You fall back on his lap as your knees weaken. You turn around and see him smirking at you. “Did you cum?”

He nods.

“Are you sure?”

He lifts you off him and holds up his messy condom.

You guffaw. “Holy shit…” You eye the door to see how no one walked in on you and your kinky boyfriend. You whisper to him. “How the fuck did we get away with that, Diego!?”

He shrugs. You notice that he gets quiet after sex. Little did you know, he gets into trances after making love to you.

You smirk. “Thank you.” You lean in and kiss the tip of his nose.

He smiles and whispers. “I love you too.”

The fitting room is no longer your enemy.

110 notes · View notes

professorspork · 5 years

Note

Can you talk a little more about why you found Endgame devastating in a bad way and not a good way?

I sure can! I can talk a lot more, in fact! I’m going to put this under a cut because Ihave a feeling it’s going to get Quite Long (ETA: it is, this is 6k words I amso sorry) so if anyone just wants the tl;dr version, I recommend GaviaBaker-Whitelaw’s excellent article ‘How the straight agenda ruined Avengers:Endgame.’

If you want my own personal take, well. Enter at your ownrisk, here be monsters, etc:

First of all, the very short answer to your question: Itagged this photo as emblematic of all the ways Endgame was “devastating in thebad way and not in the good way” because, if I’m being really honest, Steve and Natbeing queerplatonic life partners (who maybe occasionally fuck but mostly don’t)was my absolute favorite thing about the MCU. (Yes, despite all the words thatfollow hereon about Bucky, I stand by Steve&Nat being my Absolute Favorite,because it was entirely about what was onscreen and nothing about the fanon thatfollowed.) And now it’s Gone and not only is it Gone it was Taken From Me, andI’m salty.

The much longer answer:

What’s maddening is that I honestly loved the vast, vastmajority of Endgame. I adored, like, 92% of it!! It’s just that the remaining8% is the part that’s a) most relevant to character arcs and b) permanent,which leaves me at a bit of an impasse. It’s hard to remember my delight overthe way Natasha laid down haphazardly over old take-out containers whilebrainstorming at her peak adorableness when she’s, y’know, dead. (Which isn’teven my biggest issue!)

I’m going to break it out by character, from most toleast irksome to me so we get the heaviest stuff out of the way and then by theend I’m just shouting on my lawn going “AND ANOTHER THING.” I’m also not goingto go into The Thor Thing, because I think everyone worth talking to is inagreement about that being fatphobic and offensive.

Okay, here we go:

STEVE

I fucking hate that Steve went back in time to marryPeggy. AND I LOVE PEGGY AND I LOVE STEVE/PEGGY SO I’M SO MAD THIS IS WHERE I’VEBEEN LEFT. I have tried to make my peace with it, I have failed, and I amhonestly not used to being this mad at a fictional character. I know it’suseless to hold it against him—something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately isthat argument some fans make about like “why are you slutshaming X characterfor wearing skimpy armor, she just feels most empowered riding into battle withnothing but a strip of leather over her tits” when like, the characterdid not make this choice, the writers made it be that way—but unlike, say,the characterization of Steve in Age of Ultron, which I can happily disregard becauseJoss hates Steve, Markus, McFeely, Russo & Russo have been the architectsof everything I love about Steve. It’s straight from the source! And soI… I’m taking it personally, though I know I shouldn’t. I feel like Steve turnedhis back on me and left me behind.

Well. Me and Bucky Barnes.

It’s probably no secret if you follow this blog that I’ma big Stucky girl. I have admitted it’s one of my top three ships of all time;my steve and bucky tag is 21 damn pages long. But I promise, I PROMISE, thisisn’t even about that. Regardless of whether or not you think these two are orever were in romantic love with each other, their best friendship is one of themost important and indelible parts of the MCU.

Steve’s emotional arc over the last several movies hasrevolved around his intense obsession with all things Bucky. He bailedon his concert tour, defied orders and became Cap-in-combat to save Bucky in1944. He tore down SHIELD, HYDRA and the whole world for Bucky when he foundout he was alive. He became a war criminal on the slightest chance he couldprove Bucky’s innocence! And then, when they were finally reunited, finally foronce on the same page at the same time, Bucky was taken in the Snap. And so,like. It seems a bit WEIRD to me that Steve’s heartbreak over the Snap isframed as a Peggy thing (see: him looking at the Peggy compass before their first act attack on Thanos; his talking exclusively about Peggyin the Snap support group he runs WITH GAY MEN) when Peggy died a natural deathafter a long life in Civil War and not, y’know, Bucky, his oldest, mostintimate relationship-haver, or even Sam, his best friend. It seems a bit ODDto me that we see dozens of cute, short reunions and meetings in the finalbattle with 2014 Thanos—known Extremely Important Relationships Tony/Dr. Strangeand Peter/Carol are given significant on screen exchanges—but we don’t seeSteve and Bucky reunite with one another. It feels a bit CONSPICUOUS to me thatSteve does not tell Bucky what he plans to do when he goes to take the stonesback, full on SUSPICIOUS to me that the two don’t say boo shit to each other—can’teven stand in the same group together when Steve comes back from histime vacation—and outright UNBELIEVABLE to me that Steve Rogers would choose tolive seventy years of his life without Bucky Barnes.

I just don’t buy it.

I don’t buy that after four movies of you telling me itisn’t the case, Steve Rogers’ happy ending doesn’t include Bucky. (Andwe’ll touch on the whole idea of what it means to have a “happy ending” in abit.)

It feels like a deliberate side-step. It feels like thecreative team tried and failed to come up with anything approaching a normal,just-two-bros reunion scene for them and with the weight of their past intimacyeverything they wrote came off as a marriage proposal so they scrapped itentirely. It’s insulting. Not on a “my ship didn’t go canon” level—I never in amillion years expected Steve and Bucky to ‘get together’ in any concrete sense,I wouldn’t even have known what to do with it if I got it, I never wanted that.All I wanted was for the text to honor the affection, the bond between thesetwo just as much as it did in any of the other movies. One of the best featuresof the MCU is its consistency when it comes to character detail andrelationship nuance. So how on earth (I know how, we all know how) did theydrop the ball on what is literally their flagship friendship?

But it’s not just that Steve goes back in time withoutBucky, or without saying a word to him about it. It’s that Steve goes back intime and then, apparently, does absolutely nothing for seventy years, includingsaving Bucky.

The time travel rules in Endgame are… unique. They areunprecedented. And it’s easy to tell that’s true, because not once have thedifferent members of the creative team been able to give a consistent answer onwhy or how it works in interviews after the fact. So like. I accept that mytake on this may not be the “canon” take, and until we get a post-Endgame moviethat addresses these things there IS no canon take. Regardless of what their “thisisn’t Back to the Future” rules means about whether or not changing the pastmeans changing the future, in the future all of these characters lived Buckywas on ice/doing murders until the events of Winter Soldier, also in which theworld learned SHIELD was HYDRA. The Russos think Steve created his own branchreality when he went back in time, and the question is then how he got back toour world to hand off the shield; Markus and McFeely don’t think that’s true;they think Steve lived concurrently to his own regular timeline and was always Peggy’s husband. YOU WOULD THINK THEY’D HAVE REACHED AGREEMENT ON THIS EITHER WAY BEFORE THIS POINT, BUT I DIGRESS. This meansthat either a) M&M are right and Steve went back in time and neither toldhis new wife Peggy “hey honey, you know that startup you’ve got going withHoward, maybe don’t invite Arnim Zola unless you want your entire legacy to beNazis,” nor did he save Bucky when he knew he was somewhere in Eastern Europebeing fucking tortured and brainwashed. He didn’t stop Howard and Maria fromgetting in the car. There’s a lot of joke tweets about how Captain America just“let 9/11 happen” and like—it’s a joke but it’s also NOT A JOKE--- orrrrrr b) theRussos are right and maybe Steve did all of those things in a branch reality,which they felt no need to mention when they were wrapping up the emotionalstoryline for their marquee character, which is lazy at best and kind ofunforgivable at worst. Even in the Best Version of Events, where not only arethe Russos are right and Steve went back in a splinter timeline, but in thatsplinter timeline Steve co-founded a Nazi-less SHIELD with Peggy and theyfought crime Hart to Hart style, saved Bucky, stopped the Vietnam War fromhappening and cured AIDS, it still means Peggy no longer did everything she didon her own, fighting and clawing for it like a honey badger. And should shehave had to? No, of course not. But is it her defining trait and greatestaccomplishment that she did? YES! This matters to me! Erasing it without givingher a say matters to me!

And the fact that all of this is in doubt is BONKERS. Iwould feel less weird about if they didn’t leave all of it unsaid! If they’dincluded a scene with Bucky before Steve went back where Bucky just went “Steve,listen. I know what you’re thinking, and you can’t save me, okay? It wouldbreak the time continuum or something. Now go be a reckless idiot like I knowyou’re gonna and say hi to Carter for me” it would at least feel like theycared the slightest bit. Hell, if they gave Peggy ANY LINES AT ALL it wouldfeel a heck of a lot more like the reuniting of two characters I love and lesslike a mortifying hetcon where Steve erases all of Peggy’s professionalaccomplishments and canon husband and other family just to have hisfairytale happy ending with a voiceless woman-shaped smilebot.

Do you have any idea how much I would have cried if we’dgotten a scene were Steve showed up at the Stork Club in time for his dance?Peggy doesn’t even need to have A LOT of lines (though she should!) A tearysmirk and a “you’re late” reprise would have gone so far! (Especially if they’dhad a final, heart-wrenching goodbye for closure and then he’d returned to thefuture, giving us the best of both worlds, but what do I know.) But no, EdwinJarvis gets a line in this movie and Peggy doesn’t. She has no say in the endof her story—it’s a decision that’s made at her. She’s a bit player inher own life. Steve isn’t reunited with Peggy, he gets a dance with the idea ofPeggy. But like. The real Peggy is brash and terrible at emotional honesty! Shewould be a nightmare to be married to! So is Steve! That’s why I love them,they’re awful! And it just feels like all of that was erased in a moment infavor of a vision of unsustainable hetero bliss.

(Honestly, the way I make peace with this is by thinkingthat after maybe six months with Peggy they were both like “oh godwhat were we thinking, this is never going to work” and broke up, and thereason Steve didn’t tell Sam his wife’s name is that it wasn’t Peggy andhe’s too embarrassed to say so.)

And like. I’m trying not to feel like an awfulbitch/bitter old crone about it, because the thing I keep circling back to inconversation with others is them saying “can’t you at least be happy for himthat he’s at peace? Don’t you think he deserves to rest? After everything he’s done,shouldn’t Steve get a chance to be happy?”

Listen. Do I think Steve deserves a chance athappiness? Yes. Do I think Steve Rogers actually has the capacity forsustainable, long term happiness? … Honestly, no. That’s one of the reasons Ilove him.

Steve is miserable. His life is hard, he’s got PTSD, hehas trouble adjusting even in the best of circumstances. But he’s a fighter.And the reason I admire(d) him so much is that no matter what life threw athim, he was relentless in his forward momentum. He had to go on, he had to keepstanding up for others. He didn’t know how not to. Does this mean he needs ashit ton of therapy? Yes, it does—and the therapy is better in the future, Imight add! But like. As much as the creative team keeps going on about howtheir overall arcs were “Tony needed to learn to be more selfless, like Steve,and Steve needed to learn to be more selfish, like Tony” I think there’s adifference between learning to grasp happiness with both hands in the unlikely,miraculous event it comes your way, because it’s brief and shining and worthcelebrating, even though it comes with heartbreak, and just… noping out of yourlife and ignoring your problems for seven decades while everyone else worriesabout it. I’ve never seen Steve sit still and keep himself out of trouble forseven minutes—now I’m supposed to believe he managed it for seventy years? Hewas Peggy’s weird secret attic husband no one knew about? I respected him,loved him, and identified with him—I felt represented by him—because not onlydid he have to fight for every scrap of happiness he’s ever had, he felt likethere was honor in that fight. That’s why Mjolnir declared him Worthy!! And forhim to then lay down his responsibility and NOT FIGHT for 70 years momentsafter being given that distinction… it stings.

I appreciate my happy endings when they’re hard-won. Thatoften means they’re bittersweet. And if Steve’s ending were framed that way—yes,he got back his Era and he got the girl, but he lost his best friend, his foundfamily, and any determinedly-etched-out balance—I might be more okay with it.But it’s presented as the uncomplicated ride off into the sunset he deserved,and… I don’t want my stories uncomplicated. Steve Rogers is not anuncomplicated man. I know a lot of this is YMMV and I’m maybe a bit more darkin my tastes than others, here—hell, I think it’s cheap that the Elrics got alltheir flesh back AND Mustang got back his sight in FMA:B, that feels like toohappy an ending for me—but telling me that what Steve’s really wanted allthis time was to have a house in the ‘burbs and chill doesn’t resonate. Steve’swhole thing since Day 1 was “how can I sit idly by while other men risk theirlives? I can’t stand that.”

It feels like a How I Met Your Mother ending. If Stevehad had the option to go back at the end of Avengers 1, I’d have bought itcompletely that he’d take it (both for character arc reasons and for “he didn’tknow Bucky was alive then” reasons). But he’s not that guy anymore. Yet itseems like they decided a long, long time ago that Steve was going to go backin time and get a do-over, and years of development, growth, moving on andbonding with other people be damned. Who cares if Steve got Bucky back, whocares if Steve got Sam back, who cares that he’d lived 13 years, his entireadult life, in the future? Nat’s dead, might as well go back to the other damewho liked him!

And. And here’s the thing. If everything else were equalbut Bucky and Peggy’s roles were reversed—if Peggy fell from the train, and itwas Bucky who founded SHIELD with Howard; if Steve met Bucky again as adementia-ridden old man and Peggy were the Winter Soldier, if it were PeggySteve spent all these movies desperately trying to save and nurture—I feel likeeveryone else would find it REALLY WEIRD if Steve went back in time to do itall over again with Bucky! That’s not a question of romance, or gender. Not forme, who loves all of these characters equally. It’s a question of the emotionalarchitecture the story is built upon.

Historically, every decision Steve’s ever made in theentire time we’ve known him has been about Bucky. And for this ending to work,it requires us to either ignore that, or think this single-minded focus wasnever about Bucky at all—that it was instead a sublimated love where Buckybecame a signifier for Peggy or the past Steve lost, instead of a person in hisown right, the person Steve’s always chosen and who’s always chosen him, sincethey were kids. Til the end of the line. Asking me to believe that is a)horrible, and cruel, and frankly homophobic and b) simply untenable—I don’t thinkthat the plots of First Avenger, Winter Soldier or Civil War stand up to thatreading.

And even in the kindest reading of all of this—that Stevedeserves to return to the time he was stolen from, because it’s his TrueTime and Peggy’s his True Love—then my god, doesn’t Bucky deserve that, too?Steve was an orphan with, after Bucky’s “death,” ONLY Peggy and I guess theHowlies to tie him to the world. Bucky has a family! He’s got sisters! Theythink he’s dead! If Steve deserves this, doesn’t Bucky, after everything he’sbeen through, deserve it too? If it applies to one of them, it applies to bothof them, doesn’t it? No matter which way you slice it? (For the record, if Stevehad taken Bucky back to the past with him I'd still be scratching my head aboutthe timeline bearing out—and I think it would make the Sam!Cap offer even morekind of paltry and afterthoughtish than it already is, Sam deserves FIREWORKSand A CROWD damn it, and it also deserves to be a decision not made AT him, seeabove—but at least I could be like “yeah, that's exactly the kind ofhilariously not-thought-out decision Steve would make, have fun kiddo.”)

But I guess Steve inviting Bucky on his Happy Ending Tourof the past would be too much like a fucking proposal so, uh, no, we don’t getthat.

NATASHA

Here is a top ten list, in no particular order, called “I’dbe fine with it, but.”

1. I’d be fine with it—Natasha is a hero, and she deservesa hero’s ending, she merits going out in a big swing to save the world—but she’sstill the Smurfette, man. It means something different to kill your only original female leadthis way than it does to kill a male character. It especially means that whenyou kill her in the exact same way you killed Gamora—THE OTHER SMURFETTE—onemovie previous. It feels cheap, and it feels callous. M&M&R&R havetalked a lot about the woman/women in the office who read a draft where Clintdied instead and said “DON’T YOU TAKE THIS AWAY FROM HER” but a) tbh I feellike maybe they were reading a different draft than was ultimately shot, thismovie evolved a lot over the years and b) when you’re the Token Girl, your storyis more than just yours. In a franchise of this scale, it’s just… it’s notequal yet. If the circumstances had been utterly different, if Nat haddied wielding the Infinity Gauntlet, at least it would be novel. And like—I amnot the kind of person who thinks standing against Bury Your Gays means no gayscan ever die or else, for example; sometimes a Good Death is warranted if it’swell-written enough—but again: it’s the “she feels empowered in that skimpysuit” thing. You didn’t HAVE to create a murder cliff that only exists forfemale characters to die for the men who love them. You made that choice. It’speak “why do we even have that lever?!”

2. I’d be fine with it—Natasha loves Clint, of course shewouldn’t let him die for her, not when he’s fighting to get back his family—butit would have made more sense for Clint to die as penance for all of the ninjamurders he did after losing his kids than for Nat to die because she can’t haveany. It feels like it privileges bio family over found family in a way that’skind of dismissive and gross, and it calls back to the mortifying line in Ageof Ultron were Nat referred to herself as a monster over her infertility. And theargument that Clint couldn’t die, there’s a Hawkeye Disney+ series falls flatwhen Nat has a MOVIE coming out and Vision also has a Disney+ series and yetis, as of this moment, still dead.

3. I’d be fine with it—Natasha loves Clint, of coursethey’d bicker over who would jump—but when the “dramatic” scene that precedes amajor character’s death resembles nothing so much as this comic, you’re doingit wrong. I shouldn’t be giggling over their antics right before someone fallsto their death.

4. I’d be fine with it—Nat did it for her family, whomshe loves—but her family didn’t even honor her back, and that’s bullshit. Tonygets a massive funeral and Nat gets nothing? I admit that what I trulywant for her—a long sequence of RENT-style “what Angel meant to me”testimonials—would have been a bit weird to include pacing-wise, even if I dothink if I asked Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner nicely over twitter they’dprobably improvise one for me anyway. But it didn’t have to be that. A singleshot in a montage would be enough. A shot of Clint, Laura, Fury, Steve, Sam, Okoye and Pepper doing a shot of vodka together and pouring one out for Nat would havebeen enough. Simple, elegant, gets the point across. It’s not hard!!!

5. I’d be fine with it—they needed to get the Soul Stone,for skimpy outfit reasons someone had to die, I get it—but then Steve has toput all the stones back to reverse the heist and stop the branch timelines fromcollapsing like The Ancient One warned about. How the fuck do you return theSoul Stone? And Steve could, wouldn’t that cosmically mean we get Nat back? Asoul for a soul, isn’t that the deal?

6. I’d be fine with it—I understand that playing the longgame and forcing yourself to fall in love with Red Skull so you cansacrifice him, though hilarious, is not actually a solution—but it just seemslike there are other ways to write around this moment. Nat and Clint have bothlost so much, sacrificed so much. That doesn’t count? This isn’t like Thanos,who’s never sacrificed a thing in his life. Nat’s given up so much for thecause; Clint lost his family. The Soul Stone couldn’t just sense that?Or—what if they’d jumped together? Full Rose and Jack, “you jump, I jump,right?” Refusing to be separated. What would the Soul Stone math be then? Ifeel like it would have been a cooler story to find out.

7. I’d be fine with it—ScarJo needed a way out of hercontract, after the Black Widow movie (which: how they’re going to make thatwork is a whole other rant I do not have time for here)—but killing Natasha inthe one irreversible way in a damn comic book franchise just feels soneedlessly final. If you’d said “after everything, after holding the Avengerstogether for five years with nothing but the force of her will and some peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches, she’s tired and disillusioned with it and wants toroam the world for a while without the team, maybe fight some normal crime fora bit” and had her phased out quietly I would have understood! It would havebeen fine! Preferable, even!

8. I’d be fine with it—I don’t think it’s total bullshit whenM&M&R&R say that this was the end of her arc, she’d found herfamily and become a true hero—but the implication that death is the only way toend an arc is lazy and, in this case, hurtful. It comes off as “we couldn’tthink of anything else to do with her, so we killed her.” You can’t do betterthan that? Tony and Steve were gone. Natasha ran the Avengers, andpulled Nick Fury duty on top of it, for five years and death is the onlyend of her arc? Again, I know ScarJo’s contract is up, but that answer is justoffensive. In a perfect world, given the circumstances you’ve described the endof Nat’s arc would be continuing to lead the fucking Avengers.

9. I’d be fine with it—maybe all those office ladies wereright, maybe it would have felt pandering and sexist and deflating if Clint hadstolen Nat’s moment and died for her—but it’s kind of conspicuous that thereare only two female leads in this movie, Natasha and Nebula, and when both trulyexhibit their agency in their climactic moments, they choose to die. And Nebulakilling her past self to save Gamora is one of my favorite moments of the film!But god, there’s more to female agency than suicide, right?

10. I’d be fine with it—the way Steve cries when he findsout is gratifying and in-character—but Tony’s question of “Did she have anyfamily?” is fucking horrifying. You know she doesn’t, Tony, Jesus Christ.It was a sloppy, lazy setup just so Steve could say “Yeah. Us.” Which wasfucking unnecessary because we know that, that’s why she died for you. (Thecomedy reading, which is that Tony was implying she, like Clint, had a secretFarm Family is hilarious but, y’know. Not the right time.)

And speaking of the sir himself…

TONY

This one is a big case of “it’s not what you say, it’show you say it.” I didn’t expect Tony to get out of Endgame alive. (In fact, Ihad braced myself for a total party kill for the original six, which, if it hadbeen a TPK, I would have felt way better about it tbh. If they’d gone down one byone Rogue One style, at least the playing field would be even; that wouldremove a lot of the sting.) Tony’s the bedrock, he’s where we started, and ofcourse this would be the end of his road. He was going to go out big, he wasgoing to save the world. I knew that was the deal.

But they also gave him a little girl.

To my eyes, you can give Tony the ending he deserves—the endingwhere he and Pepper get to settle down, where he gets to be the father he neverhad, the one where he’s finally stable, finally at peace—or you can giveTony the Ending He Deserves—the one where he, the flagship, the starting pistolof the MCU, gets to vanquish Thanos saying “I am Iron Man.” Epic.

You… you lose me when you do both.

Here’s where I get my hackles up:

Were there any other outcomes you considered for Tony?

MARKUS No. Because we had the opportunity to give him theperfect retirement life, within the movie.

McFEELY He got that already.

MARKUS That’s the life he’s been striving for. Are he andPepper going to get together? Yes. They got married, they had a kid, it wasgreat. It’s a good death. It doesn’t feel like a tragedy. It feels like aheroic, finished life.

It is a fucking tragedy! Pepper is left alone with a fiveyear old girl! Pepper does not get a perfect, finished life. It’s a gross,reductive, alienating view of fatherhood, which is all the more starkly (punintended) contrasted when you compare him to Scott, a good dad whoactually gives a shit that he missed out on three years of Cassie’s lifein prison and then ANOTHER FIVE in the Quantum Realm. Honestly, this is whathappens when you don’t let women write these movies—the characterization formen suffers, too, not just women. Because it wasn’t even a factor to them.Like. They literally cut a scene from the movie where a vision of Morgan fromthe future absolved him of guilt for leaving his family behind. That’s… reallyawful, fellas. Surely you can see how awful that is?

I want to feel good about Tony’s death. I want to feelinspired. Part of me does. But god, that little girl. God, Pepper.

But then, it’s pretty much par for the course. Because it’sworth it to talk about

WOMEN

This isn’t about how the one “Girl Power” shot wasshallow fanservice instead of substantive representation, how it makes no sensein the plot of the moment, or how it’s a totally empty gesture unless they planon giving us an A-Force movie (though all of those things are true).

It’s about how this movie has a gender problem in whichthe vast, vast majority of female characters got to be “badass” by bucklingunder the will of their male counterparts—and those who didn’t mostly justweren’t in it enough for that to be true.

Peggy doesn’t get any lines; she is presented not as thestrong, capable individual we know her to be but as a storybook reward forSteve’s good behavior after all these years. She is a prop, not a person.

Pepper is, for the thousandth time, defined as strong andcapable because she’s able to withstand all of the crap Tony puts on her. Ilove Tony/Pepper, I think they’re the beating heart of the MCU, their screwballenergy left a positive and indelible mark on the MCU that redefined how loveinterests work (well, barring Betty Ross, I’m so sorry Betty your movie isawful and you deserved so much better). But like. Tony gives her a company whenhe doesn’t want it anymore, he gives her a suit even though he knows she’s notinterested, he talks her into having a child together and then he leaves herbehind. Pepper is like an amazing, super intense version of one of those cookswho up-cycles leftovers into new, amazing, even-better-than-the-originaldishes. But she shouldn’t have to be, and she deserves better.

The same goes for Valkyrie, who is literally handedthe crown of Asgard for no other reason than because she’s there. It’s notthat she’s not capable, it’s not that she doesn’t deserve it, and it’s not thatshe won’t do an amazing job, but again: it’s a decision made at her. Why isthis still happening? (See also: Sam!Cap, and another way that Sam is stillgetting the Love Interest treatment after all of these years).

Carol was underused, and utilized entirely as a Deus ExMachina instead of as a person with feelings every time she did show up. Whileshe has the raw power to back up that plot usage, aside from her little smirkand “hey, Peter Parker,” we got almost no humanity from her. It’s not like theMCU is bad at establishing loads and loads of nuance in just a few lines—the massivejuggernaut that is Clint/Coulson shipping was launched when they exchanged twosentences to each other!—so it doesn’t feel like a lot to ask that Carol bein the scenes she’s in. You know?

For the most part, I really love how they handled Gamoraand Nebula, but the fact that 2014 them were Super Team Thanos flies directlyin the face of where both of them were at the start of GotG—and for Gamora tochange her mind after learning that in the future, she and Nebula are trulysisters when it’s Nebula who always wanted that for them is… a littlereductive. This was Their Movie—five more minutes to really tease out thenuance here would have really gone a long way.

Plus there was that whole scene where Frigga was like “actuallyit’s fine if I die; I’m just glad you’re okay honey. I feel so empowered inthis skimpy outfit. It has to be this way!” If Nat didn’t die the way she did, this scene would read differently! But she did! So it doesn’t!

Okay. Okay. I’m sure I’ve forgotten things that botheredme, but I have to stop somewhere so it might as well be here. In fact, here’s alist of things I really liked, to remind us all that I did like this movie:

America’s ass! “I could do this all day”/“I know!” ThePB&J cut diagonal! Cooper’s baseball mitt! Tony and Nebula playing PaperFootball! Nebula and Rhodey being best friends / “he’s an idiot!” Clint and Natforehead touch! Nat lounging on the takeout containers! When Hope calls Steve ‘Cap’and Scott gives her a little Look about it! Instant Kill Mode! Bruce and TheAncient One talk metaphysics—and the fact that Bruce is what is astrallyprojected out of Hulk! The redo of the elevator scene being subverted with “HailHydra!” Tony and Howard! Rocket’s much-needed frank pep talk to Thor! Ding dongditching 1970 Hank because he deserves that and so much worse! Tony revisitinghis Age of Ultron mentality at his lowest—frankly, it made me buy it in a wayall of AoU didn’t! Nebula murdering who she used to be so she can becomesomething new (let the past die, kill it if you have to amirite?)! Theindulgent credits sequence with the original 6 and their autographs! Quill’sface when he saw 2014 Gamora! TIME HEIST AS A CONCEPT LBR. Everyone’s funeralfashion choices, some of which are patently Bonkers! Smart Hulk having to riphis shirt off and pretend to enjoy smashing to blend in in 2012! The whole tacosight gag outside the compound! I love you 3000! Scott reuniting with Cassieand saying “you’re so big” instead of “you’re so tall!” Steve being Worthy!Thor doing a self-Fastball Special by hitting Mjolnir with Stormbreaker! YIBAMBE!

I don’t think I have ever cried as hard as I didwhen Sam said “on your left” and all of the Snapped heroes came back in Strange’sportals. Desperate, sobbing, joyful, elated, transported, awe-filled GASPINGkind of crying. I could hardly breathe. I really freaked out the guy next tome, I’ll tell you that.

I’m upset because these movies are good. This movie isgood. It made me feel… I don’t think I can describe the acute, painful ecstasyof that moment as long as I live, when everyone I loved, everyone gone,returned and returned and returned. I’m tearing up just describing it to younow.

I say these things because I care. I say these thingsbecause I don’t want to stop caring, and when characters I love are written inways I cannot understand, that I cannot abide, I am removed from the equation.And I am the damn target audience for this fucking movie. What I think matters.And it matters that I say it.

If you actually made it this far, I am very impressedwith your fortitude, and I thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#hoo boy #i do not want this in any tracked tags #not that those even work anymore #but here's some filler #and one more #okay #avengers endgame #endgame #mcu #avengers endgame spoilers #endgame spoilers #Anonymous

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gaynoctgar · 6 years

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Thoughts about Prompto’s arc in “Brotherhood”

The real title, for now, is something like “Prompto being formerly fat was not even remotely necessary and was offensively handled” or “Haley rants about Brotherhood because it’s so fatphobic”

TW: eating disorders, fatphobia.

It’s also incredibly long, but I really want to share my thoughts.

Update: 10-4-2018: inspired by comments and tags, I added more examples of dialogue that exemplifies the problem

Update: 22-4-2018: accounting for the new “official profiles”...it got worse, everyone.

Oh Prompto. Prompto Argentum. My beloved, sweet, beautiful bi boy who could have had a much more satisfying arc. They really tried, didn’t they? They tried to give you a touching backstory and instead exposed their fatphobia. And as for the bi part, well, that’s another essay in and of itself....stay tuned everyone.

Yes, this is one of those posts. That’s why I put all of this under a “Keep reading.” It’s just something that has been subtly bothering me for a long time and I thought I’d give this short essay format a try. There will be a TL;DR at the end, I suppose, but please read through this if you are interested in this aspect that I feel is both underexplored and overexploited about my most favorite character in anything ever.

A bit about myself before we begin: I am rather chubby. I’m 5’4” (162cm) and 220 lbs (100 kg), and I have struggled off and on with eating disorders since I was in high school. I do realize this makes me “obese,” but this essay isn’t about that. Rather, it is about how fatness and obesity is often portrayed in media as a character flaw, or something to overcome, and my own feelings about why this is harmful. To be clear, I want to make two major points with this: 1) Prompto being “formerly fat” is not something that was even remotely necessary for his character arc and its inclusion and resolution are nothing short of fatphobic and; 2) the fact that Prompto receives his character development via losing weight in Brotherhood is emblematic of every problem I have with how media chooses to include fat people.

These points are incredibly intertwined, so let’s start by exploring what was intended by the episode. I want to be clear and demonstrate that I fully understand what the episode intended to show, and I will continue to acknowledge what the likely intent was. This essay/rant is critiquing the execution.

If the point of Brotherhood was to suggest that Prompto had a lonely childhood until he met Noctis, that’s great! I understand that that’s what Brotherhood was showing. HOWEVER. I have been sickened, from the moment I saw his episode, with how his journey to lose weight was correlated with his journey to “be good enough” to be Noct’s friend. Let me be clear. I understand that we are supposed to interpret this as a character flaw on Prompto’s part, and we see in the gayest scene the rooftop motel scene that losing weight did not resolve Prompto’s self-confidence. I know that. What I am saying is that him losing weight was in no was necessary to include, at least not in the way that they did. There are some ugly implicit implications here, not least of which is that eating nothing but salads is, I would argue, just as unhealthy as what he was doing before. The show treats it as a positive good that Prompto appears to be starving himself and thinking obsessively about losing weight, and that is what I am taking issue with.

I, personally, detest the “formerly fat” trope and all its incarnations. Wouldn’t it simply have been enough to say that Prompto was painfully shy (he was) and very lonely (he was)? Why do these feelings have to be justified via his body? Was there no other way you could justify Prompto simply being too shy to talk to Noct? Noct’s the prince, Prompto is a commoner who feels that he’s nothing particularly special…would this not have been enough? Doing it the way that they did implies that being fat is a moral and character flaw that needs to be corrected in order for you to be seen as a hero. That is what I am taking issue with.

And yes, I realize that the “weight loss journey” is jump-started by the fact that babby Noct says “heavy…” when trying to help Prompto to his feet. Believe me, I understand first-hand how much that hurts. I faced many similar instances in my own life. I can’t blame him for saying it, he’s a kid, but I do want to point out that Noct never apologizes for this. You could say “he didn’t realize he was wrong” but maybe you could have had a scene where Noct wonders why the cute boy with the camera is avoiding him, and Ignis can say something like “well, did you do or say anything that might have upset him?” and Noct can actually apologize for hurting Prompto’s feelings. This is not unreasonable to expect. When I was a kid and people were avoiding me, my mom always asked me to think back on why that might be. It’s part of growing up and learning that your words and actions have consequences.

TO BE FAIR: I do think the motel scene was an attempt to rectify all of this in the game. While Prompto formerly being fat is not explicitly mentioned, he is mortified that Noct remembers him back in elementary school. Now, I love Noct, but he’s stupid sometimes, and not very intuitive. This is, however, in his character, and I will allow it because the very next thing he says is “You should have said something sooner.” This shows Prompto (and the audience) that Noct doesn’t give two shits about how Prompto looks, now or ever, and I am happy that this was included. However, there is no given reason behind why Noct couldn’t simply talk to Prompto himself beforehand. Like I said, Noct is an idiot, and also a lot more shy and awkward than he lets on. But this moment was sweet between them, even if you don’t ship promptis, and I do think it is fair to mention it.

However, coupling all of this with the fact that the “character sheets” show us that Prompto does, canonically, have a fear of gaining weight, as well as these little snippets of dialogue…

Prompto: Hey, let’s hit up the Crow’s Nest!

Ignis: If you wish to put on weight? Certainly.

Prompto: *sighs* Yeah, I know…

(I swear to god every time I get this dialogue I SCREAM at Ignis, how is this even remotely okay to say to your friend who you damn well know has problems with his weight and there’s no way you don’t know this--)

EDIT: The addition of this quote is based on the tags from @gentiuna, I knew I was forgetting something!

Noct: Why is your face so fat?

Prompto: I’m NOT fat!!

(I swear to Jesus you’re on thin fucking ice with me Noct, that’s not even remotely funny and you need a time out to think about what you’ve done--)

This one I have only gotten once in my ~400 hrs of play but I swear I didn’t make it up; if anyone finds the specific words, I will correct it:

Ignis: talks about food and how it’s “anything your heart wants” or something

Prompto: Yeah, it’s the wanting that’s the problem.

I think this was intended to be a nod to Brotherhood but (and @bernielu can back me up on this) I SCREAMED when I heard it. How is that REMOTELY okay? Nobody even REACTS to this, or asks if Prompto is okay, or ask him why the FUCK he would say that.

This is when it becomes pertinent, I think, to discuss my own experience with eating disorders. I have wonderful friends and family, and I’m well on the road to recovery, but back when I was in high school, I just straight up wouldn’t bring food to lunch. Retroactively, I realize they all brought extra, hoping I would get just hungry enough to pick at the scraps (I usually did), and that was their way of helping me and showing me that they cared. It can be hard to want food sometimes. As offensive as I find its inclusion, I do think that’s an accurate way of representing how it can feel: you know that food is good, and you know that you are hungry, but it’s wanting to eat it that’s a problem. Here’s my issue: that should have raised everyone’s red flags, and the fact that nobody, NOT EVEN NOCT, WHO WE CAN EXPECT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS, says ANYTHING about this, and the game writes it off as another one of its Infamous Banters ™….it’s not looking great. It’s not looking like representation, to me. It’s looking like erasure and fatphobia.

Babby Prompto is supposed to be viewed with pity but also, I think, with disdain: by the audience and by Prompto himself. I’ve noticed in many fics that the fans like to almost romanticize this aspect of him, and explore that he has an eating disorder which is…I don’t’ like it because most of these fics come to the same conclusion: Prompto ends up skinny anyway and it’s just a quirk about him. This is what I meant when I said that I feel this is overexploited, earlier in the essay, but also underdeveloped in the sense that they basically, in my opinion, show this as something that Prompto had to “get over” to be a real protagonist. They don’t go into how fucked up Prompto’s psyche must be from this. It’s just kinda…ignored.

UPDATE 22-4-2018: I’ve got to get this off my chest, the new “Official Works Profile” for Prompto made all of this worse. It literally outright states that, after rescuing Pryna, Prompto “decided “to become the right sort of person for a Prince” and worked to change himself. It also refers to Prompto having a “pudgy youth” as if that were a bad thing. It also says “Incidentally, Prompto’s photography hobby developed when he was dieting and took photos to record his weight loss progress.” Not gonna lie, this one made me physically ill. There was literally no reason for that other than to imply that being fat is somehow immoral. Why is Prompto’s “personal resolve” equated to losing weight? Why couldn’t it simply have been to be more outgoing? I’m fucking ANGRY, I’m done being polite about this.

My solution, then? Well, one of two things: 1) don’t make Prompto fat to justify his bad childhood if you know you’re just gonna make him thin and completely ignore that he was ever different, which is my preferred solution, or 2) have at least one character be bigger and that’s just how they are and it’s not made into a plot point or anything.

A final note: I KNOW people can and do drop tremendous amounts of weight, and I want to be clear that I am not suggesting this is bad or that people shouldn’t do it. A person’s weight and their relationship to it is their own business, and as long as people have a healthy relationship with their body, I’m not one to judge. I know that we are supposed to see Prompto’s weight loss as heroic and a strong example of his dedication to Noctis. And sure, we get that. But maybe I have convinced you that the development we get comes at the cost of fatphobia, at least in terms of how it was portrayed here.

TL;DR: Prompto didn’t need to be fat to develop his character, and its inclusion and treatment in the narrative of Brotherhood suggest an uncomfortable degree of fatphobia.

If you stuck around for the whole thing, thank you so much for reading my thoughts. It’s something that has been bubbling up in me for months, and now I am finally able to put it in words. <3

#tw eating disorders #tw fatphobia #please take care of yourselves with this one #haley talks #haley has opinions #haley has a soapbox #it's just something i've been thinking about for a long time #ever since i first saw it i knew something wasn't right #brotherhood #prompto argentum #text post #long post #first try at an essay about this #let's see how it goes #i do not know how to format this on mobile so it will show up weird there #i'm sorry

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purplenickel · 6 years

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So this turned more into my queer dating history but its fun lol

So I have always been attracted to boys even before I knew that trans was a thing much less that I could transition. I also always admired girls and found ways to rationalize it until like middle school when I became aware of bisexuality where I had so many crushes usually on the mean kids at least the ones that didn’t have like weird shaped heads or watch alarms that went off at weird times during class like why do you need an alarm for 1:27? Youre supposed to be learning basic Spanish do that instead lol An I dated one guy in middle school when I knew I was bisexual and at least a tom boy. And the things I wanted to do to that boy. Like I was kinky as a small child lol like damn you could do a lot more than hold my hand and let me give you innocent little cheek kisses.

We stayed together until freshmen year of high school where I was bored with how slow things were going so I broke up with him. It probably didn’t help that I was starting to question my gender then either. I told my mom I thought I wanted to be a boy and she shot that down real quick “You’re a girl and cant be a boy” so I ended up trying to cut off all my hair until it was so fucked she had to give me a buzzcut and I ended up looking like a hard core butch lesbian for a semester)

Second boyfriend was this skinny dude like only an inch taller than me and I was 5’3 at the time. I wrote down love song lyrics and gave them to him to ask him out. Im romantic like that lol. We dated for a while and I guess we just grew apart. He wouldn’t do much more than kiss me occasionally and I was like damn yall how do I keep getting these innocent Victorian straight boys. But he was cute and I still see him around town much to my embarrassment. Idk why im embarrassed so much maybe I feel bad that he thought he was dating a girl and im not?

Next boyfriend was a bi emo guy named Justice. I dated him mainly because he was the only bi guy I knew at my school in rural redneck Virginia lol he ended up being really kinky and kinda weirdly intense. Like the fun part was he didn’t mind that I was all for sitting in the back of the anime club/computer classroom and tryina get down. The weird part was that he had the idea to write Real Person fanfiction staring ourselves as like vampires because he had a major biting kink and was really emo and thought he was goth but rural VA is a hard place to be goth when all your clothes come from walmart. But he was really intense like he had our entire lives planned out in the fanfic and actually went a bought me a ring , gold with a pearl setting, that I immediately lost because why would you give me a ring??? Nah so I got real disinterested in Justice and planned to break up with him. I actually ended up cheating on him sort of. My class went on a field trip to Jamestown famous school tour site all Virginian probably had to go to. And one of my classmates/kind of friends was this really hot guy with this shaggy blonde hair and this wiry lanky body and was this laid back hot stoner type and I really liked him so I sat next to him on the bus ride and seduced him through out the whole trip until we stopped in this little shopping mall on the way back to school. I was walking around one of the department stores and saw him trying one underwear of all things lol he invited me to help him pick out a new pair of tight good looking underwear and I agreed and slipped into the changing room while he was putting them on and ended up giving him a hand job he was grateful lol. Then we went back to the bus and pretended like nothing happened but there was already a rumor going around the buses that somebody had sex in the store. A few days later Justice actually broke up with me because he felt that I was “acting different” and I probably was simply because I wasn’t attracted to him any more.

Between dating Justice and the next guy I did have my first kiss with a girl! She was so pretty with silky black hair in a bob and dark blue eyes and the palest skin. She dressed in rave clothes all the time and sometimes wore fairy wings and cloaks to school. She was delightfully strange but moved to florida I think but we were saying goodbye by the schools front doors and when it was my turn I gave her a tight hug and she turned her face and gave me a kiss and I was just wow kissing girls is so nice. Speaking of girls, I also had a huge crush on president of the anime club. She was so tall and really thin with a few curves, but she was really confident and funny and just made you feel at ease and I could’ve seen myself dating her easily but she was dating someone else but im pretty sure she might have been bi but she graduated and moved to Washington state to be a masseuse.

Next boyfriend was extremely religious and also wanted to get married. I was against getting married so young, really against converting to southern baptism and definitely against having kids. Pregnancy has always freaked me out mostly because I don’t like pain and don’t want to be in pain and in general everything about reproduction freaks me out idk why. But I really wanted him. He had these nice big and rough hands and was so warm all the time. He was also really sweet. But I broke up with him because I couldn’t do the religious thing It was Too Much™.

After dating him though I had this huge crush on this girl a year younger than me in me creative writing class. She was gothic in a very flowery dark fairy type way and I loved it she was also had a huge gay crush on my female friend who I can confirm is very beautiful with long dyed red hair and olive skin and this soft husky voice that would be perfect for a late night radio talk show where you call in about relationship problems. But anyways the girl I had a crush on was named Sage and she was beautiful with her long blonde hair and her light green eyes and small everything she was very thin like scarily thin she actually had an eating disorder that we tried to help her with and she could reach her hand behind her ribs and grip the bottom of her ribs it was creepy to look at. She wrote beautiful and dark poems and never seemed to mind that my crush took the form of hugging her and resting against her as often as I could. She never seemed interested in me though I think she was actually fatphobic or maybe she was just femme for femme I dunno but I graduated and nev er saw her again so whatever.

After I graduated high school I decided to go to a traditionally womens college. My roommate was ace and like the first openly ace person I had ever met and she was really cool and introduced me to the idea of being ace but at the time I was decidedly bi and later pan once some more friends introduced me to tumblr and I started openly learning about gender and sexuality. All my friends were really hot that I met at college and I probably would have been down to date any of them except for the girl that I met through the anime club who also really liked the anime Hetalia. We could get together and watch episodes and read a variety of fanfictions ranging from family type things to kinky sex shit we were very close and im sure that a lot of people thought we were dating or at least fooling around together. We actually met each other at a Virginia anime convention where the anime club people went in a group and I went separately with some friends from high school (the best part of the experience was the wafflehouse in the hotel parking lot) but me and my friend got together at the con and went back to my groups hotel room to gush over the merch we had found and watch some anime together. I was in a closet cosplay that consisted of booty shorts and tied button up shirt so I had a lot of skin showing and we were sitting on the bed by ourselves until my friends came back and they all thought we had sex like no she was very attractive and had really nice curves but girl needed to shower more often because unfortunately she had a smell to her that I just didn’t like. I think she was interested in dating me but she ended up having financial problems of some sort and couldn’t come back to school the next year.

After she left school I came out as trans and got closer to the core group of the college anime club. They were all really hot except for the vegetarian one but she had a boyfriend and didn’t seem to like me much anyways so whatever. I also dated this one girl in my graduation class for like three days over the summer but she broke up with me because she was again a southern Baptist and couldn’t honestly date a trans person because it somehow went against god or some shit. That person has since come out as trans masculine. But anyways next person I dated was this smoking hot older girl who only wore skirts. She was southern Baptist and straight but I had to try even if I never got to be anything other than her creepy friend who everybody knew had a crush on her. She surprisingly was interested in dating me so we started going out. We went on dates around town to explore and see new stores and went to the park and shit was great we had kisses and cuddles and fun cute dates and sexy times but we also clashed a lot over mostly miscommunication. It didn’t help that I was on a medicine that once I started taking it regularly like I was supposed to my sex drive dropped to nonexistent. We fought over this a few times but still planned to try to get an apartment off campus the next year. I thought she was being too clingy by texting me pretty often that summer. I was in a bad mood all of that summer though. We broke up and got back together over the phone probably at least three times before deciding to break up for good. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we had stayed together because when we weren’t fighting we had a lot of fun and I told her things I hadn’t told anybody before, I felt safe.

The next person I dated didn’t go so well. This was a friend from the colleges LARP club that also had people from the community or it was a community club that extended to the college kids and just ended up being held on campus but that’s how we met. She had a very butch androgynous look but I just really liked her personality no matter how hot she looked in her leather jacket. So we started off as LARP friends and then I worked up the nerve to ask for her number and just texted her about random things and we ended up talking about how much we both like coffee so that turned into a coffee date at the local dunkin and it was a lot of fun and we had a few more dates like that and things were looking good. A few friends that knew both of us warned me that she didn’t normally go for men but I had talked to her myself and was like that a lie and you don’t know what youre talking about ok so we hung out for a few months going slow and not really relationship dating. Around the time I was thinking of asking her to be a couple my mental health deteriorated and I ended up being hospitalized. I tried calling her once to keep up the habit of talking at night through text since I couldn’t text at the time but I think me being in the “cr*zy ward” freaked her out because 1) the phone call did not go well and was never tried again and 2) once I got out of the hospital I texted her to see if she was interested in picking up where we left off and she shut me down saying she just wanted to be friends. Of course not even a month later I found out that she and the girl I had dated for over a year were now dating. This bothered me for a long time and I was constantly wondering if I was too cr*zy to date somebody or it was because I was trans a whole bunch of self hatred type thoughts. I eventually got over it (mostly)

Then I didn’t date anybody until last year. I started texting my friend Cat from high school (back then we had a very cute James Potter Severus Snape thing going on where the characters were dating but we weren’t) and I learned that they were agender and ace and I thought it over and determined that I was ridiculously attracted to them and didn’t mind being in a nonsexual relationship because at the time I was still pretty sex repulsed myself besides for reading kinky fanfiction and getting myself off every once in a while. So We went on a friends date in the spring to see Zootopia and it was so much fun and they were so cute in their leggings and hoodie with their windblown cropped hair dyed dark red. I asked them if they wanted to date and they said yes so we went on our first official date (a hike up an abandoned walking trail where we both got covered in ticks and I had to stop and stretch out a bad leg cramp, then we got lunch at a cute vegetarian café in town and went to the town park to hang out. We sat in the grass and listened to Florence and the Machine songs and smiled at each other looking cute. We then got milkshakes and learned that we still had ticks on us from the hick and they took me home and gave me a sweet kiss goodbye with the promise of more dates in the future). Over the summer we hung out a lot because they and their mom were moving from the house they had lived in for years to a house a county over and I volunteered to help with the moving of the last few belongings. Maybe 5 trips all together, but it was a good time every day we got to see each other. We would comfortable hang out in their old house packing things up and taking our time and then we would take the forty five minute drive to the new house listening to whatever queer music we could find and save to playlists. Then we would cuddle on their couch after taking the days moving things inside and find something nice to eat on the way back to my house. I visited their college a few times (another traditionally women’s college) and met their friends who were also agender and queer and very cute people indeed. I enjoyed all the time I spent with Cat. Cat also helped me realize I was leaning more towards being a demiguy than strictly binary trans and that it was okay if I was ace, that sexuality can be fluid. Our relationship was very intimate and domestic and I loved it, especially the tight hugs and long slow kisses I would get each time we met and each time we had to say goodbye. I fell in love with Cat and because we didn’t see each other all the time and there was no pressure to maintain a sexual relationship I felt I could maintain those feelings I had for cat for a long time. We dated up until August of 2017 when they texted me and let me know they felt they were not only agender and asexual but also felt aromantic and would prefer to be platonic as they couldn’t keep up with the demands of a relationship. This devastated me. I took a week off from school to lie at home and let myself deal with the depression this brought. Im over Cat now. I enjoyed what we had but Im happy being friends though our ideas of friendship are different but that’s another textpost entirely.

I recently went to Charlottesville Pride 2017 with my friends that are the couple where I dated both and now they are happily dating each other and one of their other trans friends and it was so much fun. I think the act of getting a bag of free condoms reawakened my sex drive somehow?? Because now I would totally be down to get sex from anybody I was attracted to?? And im attracted to a lot more people than I usually am?? Like it was my friend Ness’s birthday a few weeks ago and she invited the same trans friend that went to pride with us to come and she brought her cousin with her and damn. Her cousin was the cutest and got so drunk like baby no you gotta stop while its still fun. So he’s agender and gave me his Snapchat and Im just…crushing so hard…hes too cute. But also I’ve been talking to people on OKCupid and everyones just so attractive (not the cismen tho neither the hets or gays wanna hit it so fuck em I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life) and all these tumblr people are cute and I wanna date everybody but everybody live like at least three hours away and it makes me sad because nobody seems to wanna try a long distance type thing which I would be up for.

So tl;dr: if youre reading this and you think im cute, message me and ill tell you what all we could do together ;)

Im a biromantic greyace chubby transmasculine enby and i like all body types and most personality types lol

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fatphobiabusters · 6 years

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Hey guys, kinda dealing with some fatphobe shit right now? Boyfriend put a down payment on an engagement ring for me- We've been together for seven years and we have a beautiful gender fluid four year old.. Here's the shtick though, his mum caught wind and is trying to get me to "lose weight" so I look "beautiful." And man it is just such a downer on the whole thing? I /feel/ beautiful enough to be a bride already, I /want/ to have long purple hair and chubby arms because this is who I am, but I

a lot of anxiety about doing big event with them because of the shitstorm that was my kids baptism (lets just say a lot of tears on my part because they were in general pretty cruel towards me during the whole ordeal) and when we do get married I just /don’t/ want to feel like shit because of her shit on the day? I want to feel beautiful and loved and I know my boyfriend is an awesome person who will make me feel that but his family is very?? Center of attention folks. Everything has to be about them sorta people. Like when I got pregnant his mother cried for days and his father tried to tell him to “come home” the next day after I gave birth because “he done his bit.” They’ve chilled out a little but just my anxiety mixed with everything is a mess right now. Looking at stuff for wedding dresses (because I want to start looking at budgeting ideas for it) is so hard when I’m hearing snide shit about my size all the dang time. I don’t know how to tell her to back the fuck off y'know?

[ old Post. Sorry! ]

“Back the Fuck Off”. -nervous laugh- I’m sorry! But I have a REALLY hard time with people who don’t know how to stay in their lane.

It’s your life. It’s your family. Its your chance to be happy… and it sounds to me like you guys are! if she and papa-in-law are the only ones who are unhappy with the whole situation then thats nothing to do with you and your family, thats their stuff. They gotta figure it out. Obviously you can tell them in a nicer way. But, yea… if they cant truly be happy for you [ and i mean truly! none of that fake shit for the holidays ] , then its probably time for them to step back unitl they can figure out with themselves why you and your fiance being together bring them so much distress. This would be a conversation to have with your fiance, of course. its okay to speak up for your right to peace. Nothing is set in stone. If they’re able to behave or at least have a talk to you about why they act the way they do, then maybe something can be worked out. But, yea… I wouldn’t give mom-in-law that power on your big day.

Or any day after. You’ll be a lovely fat bride! And to add extra salt just jiggle your belly as you walk by mom. [ sorry, the petty came out. ] - Mod Dom

#bopeepsims #domino speaks #fatphobia #familial abuse #fatphobia in the family #gif warning #Ask #Asked and Answered

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sapphic-sex-ed · 7 years

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i dont even take in the needed calories for my age and im still fat and i dont get it youre suppose to cut food to lose weight and im sure ive gained and its all gotten worse im so fat my moms making comments about it now about how shell never find clothes in stores for me and i cant wear a shit ton of clothes because it makes me look fatter she blames the depo shot partially for me being fat and she tells everyone not to get the shot cause it made me fat i want to die skinny like she wants

Caloric restriction results in weight gain. No, really, it does. Your body has been evolved to store energy during times when food is unavailable. Your metabolism slows down and your body will burn muscle and bone tissue as well as the energy stored in fat cells. Your body does not know that there is plenty food available. For all it knows, you are in the middle of a harsh Siberian winter and it is doing everything it can to keep you alive until you can get enough food.

What your mother is doing is weight-based physical abuse (insufficient food when plenty is available is also neglect). She is so fatphobic that her own child’s physical and mental health is disregarded in order to further her thin beauty standard and hatred of fat people. Her own mother would remember a time when things were very different indeed. Women used to be encouraged to gain weight. The standard of what used to be considered ‘underweight’ was tens of pounds more than what ‘normal’ is considered today. Amazing how fast diet culture makes us forget.

Every medication has the common side effects of weight gain and weight loss. Your mother is looking for an external excuse. If she really wanted you to lose weight she would let you eat properly. It’s okay to eat! Bodies need food! There is no blame to a person gaining weight, but if you want a cause, it would be your mother (and being pressured to lose weight is very stressful and stress will only make you gain more).

With a mother like this, I honestly doubt that you are truly what would be considered very fat by an average western person. You are probably underweight or average. No matter what you weigh, it is absolutely no reason to abuse you like this.

Thinness is an impossible ideal. Most people cannot be supermodel-thin. Most people cannot be hollywood-thin. Advertisements are heavily edited to remove any trace of skin folds (even underweight people get them btw) and reduce the model’s body to be sometimes physically smaller than their bones would allow. You cannot become a stick figure. There is something called the set point theory. It states that a human body has a weight at which it becomes hard to either gain or lose weight. It’s different for everyone and it is the weight you would be at with proper nutrition. It’s the only true healthy weight because it’s what your genes code you for. It can fluctuate with hormones and time. Weight gain is normal. It is healthy. There is nothing wrong with being fat, I promise.

I recommend you follow @bigfatscience for the science of fat and weight and how to deal with fatphobia. If you are of age, I know a blog which is filled with beautiful fat women who are confident and love themselves, but it can be nsfw sometimes with artistic nudity. We do not link any content that can be nsfw by policy, however seeing positive portrayals of fat women is something you need to help you get through this abuse and this is the best blog I know of for that purpose. If you or anyone else comes off anon then I will privately give you the link.

-*Mod Star*

#mod star #fatphobia #dieting tw #weight mention #weight loss mention #mothers mention #swearing #food mention #fat resources #abuse tw #anon

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aion-rsa · 5 years

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Pumpkinheads: An Interview with Rainbow Rowell & Faith Erin Hicks

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Cozy and empowering, Pumpkinheads is a must-read fall graphic novel for anyone who wants to visit the best pumpkin patch ever.

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Author Rainbow Rowell (Eleanor & Park, Carry On) and Eisner Award–winning artist Faith Erin Hicks (The Nameless City, Avatar: The Last Airbender) have teamed up for Pumpkinheads, a new graphic novel about two high schoolers embarking on a final night of adventure in the pumpkin patch they have called work-home for the past four autumns.

Deja and Josie are seniors, which means this particular Halloween marks the last time they will have the chance to explore DeKnock’s World Famous Pumpkin Patch and Autumn Jamboree (aka the greatest pumpkin patch in the world) together before everything changes. What starts as an epic quest to find "Fudge Girl," the co-worker Josiah has been crushing on for the past four seasons but has never had the courage to start a conversation with, turns into a night to celebrate the two friends' relationship, their shared love of the pumpkin patch, and the importance of being an active player in your own life.

With plenty of autumn-themed delights—from succotash to corn mazes, pumpkin bombs to hayrack rides—Pumpkinheads is almost certainly the most delightful new story you can add to your to-read pile for the upcoming season. We had the chance to chat with Rowell and Hicks about bringing this world and story to life. Here's what they had to tell us about the process of creating Pumpkinheads...

Den of Geek: What does each of you admire about the other’s storytelling?

Rowell: Faith is a very grounded storyteller; you always know where you are in her stories. That’s something I really appreciate as a reader – the feeling that I can settle into a story and trust it. And I always want to spend time with her characters. She writes very kind and decent people.

Hicks: Rainbow’s stories make me feel things, often very deeply. I’ve cried reading two of her books (Eleanor & Park and Fangirl) and I totally teared up the first time I read the Pumpkinheads script. As someone who loves stories and storytelling, that’s exactly what I’m looking for when I pick up a book: I want to care. I want to root for the characters, I want them to fight and make up, and make out. Rainbow’s books stay with me years after I’ve read them, and that’s something really, really special.

That period right before you leave for college is such a rich storytelling setting, and one that has gotten a lot of love in lots of different mediums. What do you think is so fertile about this period, and was there something new you wanted to do with this subgenre?

Hicks: It’s a time of great change and upheaval in a person’s life, where you might be kinda sorta an adult but not really? When I went to university, it was my first time living away from home, and after a rocky high school experience, I was excited to reinvent myself, hopefully as someone much, much cooler (it didn’t happen).

read more: Rainbow Rowell to Pen Marvel's Runaways

I think that’s similar to the experience of many teens going into university or college for the first time, although for Deja and Josiah it might be slightly different. Deja’s so self-assured already, she doesn’t need to re-invent herself. For Deja and Josiah, college starting means the end of something they’ve really enjoyed: their time working at the pumpkin patch, and that’s causing lots of heartache (on Josiah’s side, that is).

Rowell: Well, it’s that bridge between your child life and your adult life, when everything is shifting and changing, and you’re trying to figure which relationships are going to cross the bridge with you. I think it’s a really dramatic time. This book focuses on a really specific friendship – a work friendship – and how hard it can be to move a relationship from one part of your world to another. (I’ve written in this space twice before, both in Fangirl and in Carry On.)

Rainbow, you didn’t start in graphic novels. What have you learned about storytelling working in the comics/graphic novel world?

The big shift for me is that, in comics, my main audience isn’t the reader – it’s the artist. I’m trying to give the artists everything they need to talk to the reader. It’s a little bit like you’re handing all these elements to the artist as they need them. Is there a joke coming in a few panels? What does the artist need to know now to make that joke work?

Who is this graphic novel for? Did you have specific kinds of readers in mind when you were writing it?

Hicks: I like to think I make comics for everyone. Of course, not everyone in the world likes my comics, but that’s usually my hope when I sit down to draw a new graphic novel. Mostly I make comics for myself. I make the kinds of comics I want to read, or wanted to read when I was a lonely, geeky 16 year old.

read more: Rainbow Rowell's Wayward Son — Release Date & News

Rowell: I never think about that when I’m writing. I’m always just trying to write the best version of whatever story is in my head. But once I’d written this script, I realized there were only one or two things keeping it from being an all-ages book. So I took those things out. And I got kind of excited about having written a story that you could hand to anyone.

I wanted this book to feel like one of those classic Disney live-action movies – like The Parent Trap or Freaky Friday. Emotional and earnest, but also a rollicking good time.

Autumn, like all seasons, is a different experience depending on where you live geographically. Was that something you talked/thought about: how this story is experienced for readers who experience fall in the stereotypical ways vs. those for whom fall looks very different?

Rowell: This book very specifically takes place in Nebraska, during a Nebraska fall. It’s our best season, I think. And I really wanted Faith to experience that. She very kindly came to Omaha during October, and we visited a pumpkin patch together. (It was a blast!)

Nebraska has a very Classic Fall Vibe – changing leaves, cool weather, bonfires. And we really leaned into that in the book. Sarah Stern, our colorist, did such a good job bringing that to life.

Hicks: The look that Rainbow wanted for Pumpkinheads was very specific, and it was based on a pumpkin patch in the state where she lives in. I visited her before I started drawing the book and took lots of reference pictures, and ate lots of snacks. That visit helped a lot when I sat down to draw Pumpkinheads; being at that particular pumpkin patch and getting to experience its whimsy was important, especially as it’s something very different from fall festivals where I live in Vancouver, Canada.

There’s a lot of nihilistic mainstream storytelling right now, but I think hopepunk might be on the upswing. I think of both of you as hopeful, kind, and empathetic storytellers. For both of you, what is the value of depicting worlds that reflect these qualities?

Rowell: Well, that’s something I really like about Faith’s books -- I find her characters very comforting. The world is hard. I want to spend time with characters who remind me what I like about people and why we need each other.

Hicks: I believe in a Star Trek future, where humanity eventually gets its shit figured out, and a better, more positive world is created. I’ve never had much taste for dystopia (although I did enjoy the Hunger Games books, back in the day) or stories that revel in misery, mostly because I find them exhausting, and as unrealistic as stories where everything goes perfectly according to plan.

I think the world and other people are worth fighting for, and I want empathy and kindness to be the backbone of the stories I create … at least at this stage in my life. Maybe I’ll develop more of a taste for darker stories when I’m older, but right now I want to offer encouragement to readers, rather than grind them down.

That being said, there is still prejudice in the delightful Pumpkinheads world (i.e. the kid who makes a fatphobic comment to Deja). How do you balance writing a kind and inclusive world with representing these difficult real-life experiences in vital ways?

Rowell: That’s a tricky question. This is probably my most joyful book. I wrote it during a hard time in my life, and I really needed it to be joyful and gentle. (This is maybe my only book written completely in a major key?) But all my stories tend to be rooted in reality. So there are still moments when Deja and Josiah hit bumps. I like to see characters navigate hard things. In this book, the way Deja and Josiah react to that comment tells us a lot about both their characters.

Hicks: I think the important thing about that scene is how Deja reacts to it. Josiah is the one responding to the kid, while Deja just happily notes that he defended her. I’d like to be like Deja someday, so secure in my own sense of self that cruel words don’t bother me. Deja knows she’s a great person, she’s not going to let some snot-nosed punk get her down. She’s my hero!

Would you like to write more stories set in this universe and what might that look like for such a setting (time AND period)-specific graphic novel?

Rowell: I think we’d like to come back to Deja and Josiah. (I have a few ideas up my sleeve!) But Faith and I both have stacks of other obligations. We were lucky that our schedules lined up for this project.

Pumpkinheads is out today, which means it isw now available to pick up at your local independent bookstore or via Macmillan.

Kayti Burt is a staff editor covering books, TV, movies, and fan culture at Den of Geek. Read more of her work here or follow her on Twitter @kaytiburt.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Interview Kayti Burt

Aug 27, 2019

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#aion-rsa #Books

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