#but your sparkling vampire boyfriend is undead too
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People: crying necrophilia because many want to fuck zombie!Ghost
Me: looking at all the monsterfucker stories about Liches/Vampires/Mummies/Ghosts etc. and cackling while I click 'read more' on yet another zombie!Ghost story
#the sewer croaks#like come on people#that's not something new#awww zombie ghost is too dead for you?#poor baby#I hate to break it to you#but your sparkling vampire boyfriend is undead too#zombie!ghost#zombie!ghost x reader#monsterfucker#lich#vampire#ghost#simon ghost riley#simon riley#cod
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The Secret Room
Author's note: When I was planning the fanworks I could post for @choicesnovchallenge2021, I remembered one the first scenes on book three when MC realizes she's no longer human. That’s why I decided to write this. [Original characters are creations of this author. The others are owned by Pixelberry Studios]
Book: Bloodbound III
Pairing: Jax Matsuo x Vampire!MC (Samantha)
Rating: T
Word count: 796
Reading time: ~3min
Summary: While appreciating her powers she gained when she was Turned, Samantha realizes life as a vampire means giving up thing she didn't know she would miss.
Based on the prompts: Choices November Challenge - day seven: bittersweet / sunlight
Adrenaline pulses through Samantha's veins as she jumps from one building to another. When her friends mentioned she should get trained to master her skills as a vampire, she didn't know what to expect. But if someone had told her she'd have to work on her strength and agility by running around New York in the middle and watching the beauty of the city that never sleeps without getting caught, she wouldn't believe it.
Yet, there she is in a playful race with her boyfriend, so far ahead of him. As she picks up speed and jumps again, Samantha breathes in and opens her arms. The feeling of almost flying is exhilarating. And the truth is, even being undead, she never felt more alive. She can't barely believe the irony of the situation and laughs the moment she lands on the rooftop. But to her surprise, Jax passes by, plays with a lock of her hair and takes the lead on the race.
"Wha— Hey!"
"You snooze, you lose, beautiful!" Jax yells.
Samantha does her best to keep and gets so close to him, but it seems like he was saving up energy to give himself a boost for the last minute. On the other hand, she was getting tired and her body decelerates slowly. Damn... Why didn't I think of that?
Once she finally reaches the final building, Jax is already leaning against the concrete railing of the rooftop and smirks at her as she approaches.
"Sam! I'm so glad you could make it," he jokes.
"Hey, I was winning in the beginning," she protests.
"You were so not. I was just giving you a head start to admire your ass."
She slaps his arm playfully, then rises one her toes to kiss him.
"You did great though."
"Did I?"
"For someone who was Turned days ago and is still adjusting to new powers? Yeah! You'll get faster in no time."
"Good to know. But I wouldn't mind if I had to practice for a longer period. That felt amazing."
"I knew you'd enjoy the feeling of running and jumping around the city."
"That's one word for it."
He chuckles, glances at his wrist watch and offers his hand to her. "Come on, adrenaline junkie. Let's go back inside."
She takes his hand and let her him guide her inside the building. It still bothers her that there are some things she can no longer do like staying out until the sun rises. Sometimes, she can't even believe she would miss something so small. Something she often ignored when she was human. Perhaps this is a lesson she had to learn.
After they climbed down the stairs and reached the floor of Jax's apartment, he opens the door and takes her to a room she hasn't seen before. Unlike the other rooms, there's no furniture, no drapes, no home decorations. Only a large tinted window with a breathtaking view of New York City.
"Did you forget decorating this room or were you waiting for me to wake from the dead to do it?"
He smiles ruefully. "No... It's unfurnished because we can't stay here for too long. We're in the last floor and this room gets too much sunlight exposure. It can be dangerous for us, even during cloudy days."
"Oh..." She nods. "So why are we here?"
"Because there's moment of the day the sun doesn't hurt that much."
"Sunrise..." She concludes, her voice merely a whisper as she realizes she's about to see something she missed so much.
"It's time," he nods towards the window.
Her eyes sparkle as she gazes out the window. In the horizon, shades of purple, orange, pink and yellow paint the blue sky and the sun slowly emerges. Has it always been this majestic? It's hard to say. Before she could control it, tears run down her cheeks.
"Sam?" Jax squeezes her hand gently. "You okay?"
"Yeah. I just..." She brushes away her tears as she gathers strength to speak. "I just didn't know how much I'd miss this."
"I get the feeling..." Jax nods and looks down at his hands. "I know I didn't give you much choice when I turned you and I knew the risks when I did it. But, Sam, I—"
"I know." She smiles softly. "I probably would've done the same. It's okay."
He pulls her close and wraps his arms around her as she presses her back to his chest. In silence, they watch the sun rises in the sky, its light making that cold morning a little warmer. After a few minutes, his wrist watch beeps.
"We have to go now, don't we?"
"Yeah..."
"Can we do it again some other time?"
"Sure."
As the sun begins to brighten up the room, Jax and Samantha walk away, shutting the door behind them.
#choices fanfic#bloodbound fanfic#jax matsuo#jax x mc#choicesnovember2021#lorirwritesfanfic#lorircreates
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One very important gesture - Hatcherfield favourites pt.1
This one is very specific because it’s very late when in writing this, or should I say early, and I have this scenario in mind where I take characters I like writing and have their s/o do something for then that they weren't expecting but needed; this work is unedited
Alice
“So the she (the vampire lesbian) just takes-” she passed realizing how a simple ‘how are you?’ just turned into a big monologue about her new project. Great now you’ll think she’s weird! Not giving you time to respond and just rambling like a maniac about undead murder lesbians. And if you found out she actually based the coffee shop owner’s character on you- that whole thing was am embarrassing mistake and she should have learned to shut up by now. If no one’s asking about her play then there’s literally no reason to shove it down people’s throats. That's the most pathetic thing she could do “geez, sorry for the ramble”
“No, no, please continue! I enjoy hearing you talk about things you like” smiling you look at her expectantly to continue her tale adding “i should be thankful America’s next most successful playwright is sharing her ideas with me”
Putting down her phone completely Alice looked at you wide eyed and you half expected to see those anime girl sparkle appear around her irises. She then looked away timidly smiling and putting her soft small hand atop of yours. After the pause ended she continued. Still smiling “so then she grabs the gun and[...]”
Lex
Lex cringed at her reddened face in the mirror, the aftermath of a crying session wrapped in your arm. She was scared, she felt very drained and lonely lately. But no matter what she had to keep her brave facade for Hannah.
“You alright?” you asked from your room seeing how your girlfriend only went to wash her face but was taking a very long time to come put of the bathroom.
“Why does it always go to shit like that?” sighing she fell back down of your bed “I really want her to have a better life but so far I'm doing nothing help”
“No, Lex” she expected to see pity when she turned to look you in the eyes but instead she was met with a sympathetic look “you’re doing enough and I know it's hard but I swear you are not alone in this”
As corny as it sounded it did paint a weak smile on her lips as she wrapped her hands around your torso lightly kissing your cheek
Lucy
The first date was going swell but you could tell the British woman across the table was getting distracted glancing at her phone.
“Is something wrong?” cocking your head you examined your date as her head snapped back up to look at you like a deer in headlights. She must have thought she was being sneaky with looking into her purse but she definitely was not.
“Oh! Sorry for that” avoiding the answer she sent you an apologetic smile.
“I won't press but did something happen?”
“No, not really. But if I told you, you’d just leave me here and call me crazy” she took a sip of her drink but despite her words she continued “Have you heard the ‘legend’ of the Ape Man who lives in the forests nearby?”
“So it is true that you’re looking for him” his could you not have heard the colourful stories about the creature, after all this town was where you grew up in and just like every child you too we're scared into obedience by tales of the beast that could lurk just outside your window. They didn't scare you but many of them stayed in your mind, vivid as ever.
“So you knew before you asked me out?” her eyebrows travelled almost all the way up to her hairline.
“Don’t get me wrong but those rumours were the reason I approached you in the first place...” looking away nervously you did not get the reaction you anticipated.
“Wait, really? I’m flattered, I really am” she smiled at your confusion “would you like to hear me talk about it then? I... I haven't had anyone to share my research with, in a while, and my ex-fiance wasn't very keen on the subject, you could say”
Nodding happily you took a sip of you hot chocolate listening to everything she had to say, seeing your date grow more excited as you followed along and asked questions about what she had to say
Emdroid
Walking over the bridge you stopped noticing that your partner had stopped to look over the railing. Here, some moths ago you helped her dump the bodies of her ‘human prototype’ as you called her and that man, her ex-fiance, who decided to be a bother and call off the wedding upon learning her identity.
She was the mastermind in your duo, way more confident about your crimes than you were. Yet she was still cursed with an awfully human mind and was no stranger to feeling doubt. And so as soon as you noticed her brown and blue eyes gazing into the black unforgiving mass of water underneath you knew what she was thinking.
“You know that we did the right thing, right?” approaching you put down your one hand next to hers on the railing and wrapped the other one around her, giving her sort of a light side-hug “she didn't use her life, you did a lot more than she could ever accomplish. You deserve happiness too”
Squeezing her shoulder lightly you felt her head lean on your (shoulder/head) as her small hand landed atop of yours. It was Sunday evening and it felt eru good news is t to rush and just stand there, with her, thinking.
Bonus for Starr that she gave me the idea for (I literally wrote nothing on my own here so all credit to @stopgettingonmynerves )
Ethan
After sneaking into the drive-in theatre at the outskirts of Hatchetfield, one of your personal favourite places in this small boring town, you took your favourite spot waiting for the film to start. You were really excited when you heard they would be playing “the rope” as you enjoyed revisiting it every chance you got. Sort of a weird comfort movie but your boyfriend didn't seem to mind. You felt a bit guilty actually with how much you mentioned it because ever since them Ethan went beyond himself to get some money and get you there legally. But it didn't work out and he had to resort to your usual plan. He wasn't very wealthy to say the least but it was never something that mattered to you. Yet it clearly embarrassed him, it was clear in the way his expression always changed to shameful when you two did something like that. It seemed that he (falsely of course) believed that if he didn't treat you to all those things you’d think less of him.
Finally, you couldn't bare to look at how he did all this and how he made himself feel about not doing more and when you cuddled into him, still waiting for the movie to start you leaned in and said to him quietly “You really don't gave to do this, you know? I know you don't like to sneak in every time and lie your way out of trouble. So please don't. You are worth much more than what you give and you don't have to ‘buy’ yourself space to exist in this relationship... please”
You weren't met with any verbal response but you felt him grip you tighter and rest his chin on your (head/shoulder).
Henry
“What is it?” you practically forced your way into his house frantically. When in the middle of the night your partner called you that there's been an emergency you rushed to get to him. But there he stood, fine as ever.
“I just had a revelation dear!” he said but it didn't go unnoticed that he had snuck around you and as he took your coat he was most likely trying to lock the door “come in and take a sit next to Alexa! How moronic of me not to think about this solution! So, it's about the ‘workin‘ boys’ I-”
“Henry” you stopped his rambling “is that why you called me to get here?”
To your surprise the man scoffed as if the answer was obvious.
“How else was I supposed to get you to come?” now it was your time to look at him baffled. You were extremely worried that he was hurt and for what?
“You could have just told me you wanted to talk, I would gladly listen to you” you explained making him freeze like a deer in the headlights.
“That's absurd!” the man objected “It never works! If I didn't use half truths i would never get an audience”
“Look, I'm not Emma or Ted” you responded taking a deep sigh “I'm with you now and I’ll gladly listen to what you have to say. Just... No weird lies and schemes from now on, alright?”
A genuine smile stretched his lips as he led you to his cozy kitchen “you certainly are a peculiar companion, I must say. But truly, the best one I could ask for. So! As I was saying [...]”
#starkid#tgwdlm#tgwdlm x reader#black friday x reader#tgwdlm preference#emdroid#black friday lex#ethan green#henry hidgens#lucy nightmare time#alice woodward#tgwdlm alice#x reader#preference
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to @oceanographerschoice from @rowsha
title: holidays are for making you blush
rating: teen and up audiences
summary:
the story of a vampire learning to be loved, and the two idiots who love him.
ao3 link: link
content:
Rory Keaner grew up different from his boyfriends.
Not so much different from Benny, as they both grew up with a single parent, but much more different than Ethan. He sort of (definitely) envies Ethan in a way (in many ways); he envies his nuclear family, his good grades, his smarts, his humor, and-
His flat chest.
He envied Benny's too. Both of them, unlike Rory, grew up and identified as cisgender boys. Nothing changed about their wardrobe when they got to middle school. Neither of them had to deal with a substitute teacher who didn't know the chosen names of everyone in their class. They didn't live with the shame, the tears, the want to be someone other than themselves- they've been with each other since they were both in diapers. And Rory would never have that bond with the two of them. He would never be able to relate to them the way that they related to each other.
The jokes, the references, and the longing, knowing gazes they would shoot in the direction of the other. Rory didn't know what it was like to have someone know you inside and out. He knew the concept of his body was… an enigma all on its own. He knew his own brain betrayed him when it came to understanding a word Ethan and Benny were saying to each other half the time.
So, becoming a vampire made things…
The day he got bit was easily the best and worst day of his life. It was rushed, it was peer pressure, it was the way Rory felt waking up into a body he finally felt was his. But at the same time… he felt dead. No matter how you looked at it- he was a dead person, that was a part of him now. He didn't have a beating heart, just still blood that stayed cold and dead like cement flowing throughout his veins. He had no need to eat, but he still ate (in other ways). He didn't need sleep, not because he was immortal, but because the thought of never being the person he was before… it tore him up inside.
For the way he was born and for the way he transformed, he knew he wouldn't be the same as his boyfriends ever again. After all, they were human- well, minus Ethan because he's some type of prophet for the supernatural. And Benny too, what with him being a "spellmaster" as Grandma Weir put it. So, okay, maybe they weren't fully human. But they would grow old and live life the way it was meant to be lived- with death. And Rory would have to watch them die and be alone for all of eternity. Who else (other than a seer and witch) would be able to love someone so… noticeably undead?
To Rory's surprise, Benny and Ethan didn't really care whether he was alive or "undead." they cared about keeping Rory safe from being found out. They stole bags from the blood drive, they picked up extra sunblock for him at the corner store. Sunglasses, hoodies, rats- the whole nine yards. Just to make Rory happy. Just to keep him from exposure. it made him wonder if all those intrusive thoughts of never being to love again once they were dead were valid at all. He feels like, to a certain degree, the thought of his boyfriends staying with him (even after they were long gone) would be enough for him to make it on his own.
There were still other things about being a vampire trapped in a girl's body that bothered him. On one hand, he could run away from his mom and live his life and live somewhere with Ethan and Benny in the woods. Like they did in Dusk. On the other hand, he could tell someone other than those two what was going on, and that he needed help (a cure, a surgery, something). If he stayed the way he was, trapped inside his room with the curtains drawn and sneaking vermin into his room, he would stay like that until his mom noticed he wasn't aging and find out the awkward way. But if he just told somebody maybe it would be hard and he could find a cure like Sarah did and live and die with Benny and Ethan and-
No. That's not possible.
He can't tell anyone. Not a single soul. that he's a vampire- that he's transgender. That his disgusting, embarrassing name is Tabitha Abigail Keaner and that's the name he has to hear over and over and over at home. At a place that doesn't feel like home because home was wherever Ethan and Benny were.
But he can't keep it in any longer. Surely, it's going to get blurted out eventually. Or written in a note followed by "I've decided to skip town, you'll never see me again, goodbye everyone." He wondered, sometimes, how much a bus ticket would cost.
Not a lot of it makes sense, and not a lot of it should make sense. But he knows that no matter how horrible his home life will get, and no matter how much he wants to correct teachers and substitutes, he'll always have his home. Ethan will always put on a videogame and Benny will always order a pizza for the three of them. And they will always call him Rory, whenever they kiss or hold hands or ask him to pass the remote.
Rory decided that he wouldn't let the daunting gloom of immortality shake him as much as it did when he was just a fledgling. He decided that the future was malleable and the present was cement, because of Ethan throwing his controller and Benny slamming the door on the delivery guy's face. He cherishes what he has, even if it is two dorks in Canada. For now, as the thoughts of them dying swim in his mind's kiddie pool, Rory rests on Ethan's chest while holding Benny's hand.
-
"Chag ah molad baruch, Ror." Benny says, placing a kiss on Rory's cheek as they sat under Ethan's Christmas tree.
He blushes, both because of Benny's kiss and the embarrassment of not learning Hebrew fast enough. He looks down at the wrapped gift in his lap, sitting shiny and neat underneath a large plastic ribbon. He pulls Benny in for a hug. It only lasts for a second or two, before he pulls back to ask:
"That means 'blessed Yule', right?"
Benny laughs, then nods in agreement. He gives Rory another peck on the cheek and Rory has to try his best not to squeal like a Dusk fangirl.
"Or 'merry Christmas'," Ethan interjects, face stuffed with Grandma Weir's cookies, "but if you wanna look at its root meaning, it translates to-"
"Celebrating the birth of a male. Yes, E, we know." Benny and Rory both roll their eyes, knowing that Ethan was never slow when it came to languages.
Rory feels a bit bitter that Benny taught Ethan hebrew before him- but then again, they did meet before they met Rory, so it makes sense that Ethan would be almost fluent in it by now. Still, it didn't stop Rory from being jealous of their impenetrable bond.
Ethan shrugs, turning back to the cookie platter only to notice the last of the treats had been mysteriously eaten. He gasps dramatically, spinning around to face Benny and Rory, who were gleefully eating the remaining cookies together.
"Stupid vampire speed." he grumbles, sitting down next to the two of them. Rory ruffles his hair playfully, and he smiles.
"You should know you're no match for the vampire ninja, babe." Rory says matter-of-factly, resting on his elbows now. A smug smile was plastered on his face as Ethan scowled and Benny giggled.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever." he says with his arms crossed, "open my gift first."
"No way! My gift is cooler!" Benny says, pushing Ethan's gift out of Rory's lap and snapping his fingers. Suddenly, a small, beautifully wrapped box is in the other gift's place. It sparkles with magic air, shining (quite literally) as bright as a star.
"Wh- no fair! Yours didn't glow before! Take it back!" Ethan surges towards Benny, tackling him to the ground. They both struggle for a while, Benny pulling at Ethan's hair and Ethan trying to put Benny in a chokehold while Rory falls to the floor laughing.
After enough laughing, and concern for his boyfriends' well being, Rory decides to speak up.
"Okay, how about I open the gifts with my eyes closed? That way, whichever gift I pick is a surprise."
The two boys look up from their tangled position at Rory, Ethan's fist stopping mid-air above Benny's face. They look at each other, then shrug. They untangle themselves from each other, sitting prim and proper next to the tree. It makes Rory's smile even wider.
"Seems fair to me." Benny says.
"I don't see why not." Ethan agrees.
With that, Rory closes his eyes and begins to reach underneath the tree. He feels around for a bit, hand accidentally bumping the branches of the fake plant, until he feels a gift. He can't tell whose it is, but he knows that it's medium sized and wrapped in a bow. He thinks it might be the present from earlier. He picks it up and settles it on his lap, opening his eyes.
"To Rorster, from Ethan." he reads aloud, "looks like Ethan's is up first."
Benny groans in defeat, and Ethan pumps his fist in triumph. He briefly turns to Benny and kisses him apologetically, ruffling his hair. "Better luck next time, Ben."
"Go on, open it." Ethan encourages, arm around Benny.
Rory rips through the paper excitedly, making sure to keep the bow intact as he tears off the decorative wrapping. When all the paper is gone, he sees a familiar logo across the seal. His eyes widen in realization, mouth agape in wonder. Could Ethan really have pulled this off? No way- no way he could've done this…
"Ethan, you shouldn't have…" Rory says as he peels back the seal on the package, opening it to reveal-
A chest binder.
Not just any chest binder- a GC2B binder. And not just one, but multiple; a nude one that matches his skin tone, a black one, and a navy blue one. Rory clutches his hands over his mouth. He can't believe this… he knows how expensive these were, and he just… can't imagine how Ethan got the money to buy them.
"How- how did you-" Rory picks up the binders one by one, running his hands over the smooth material. Tears began to form in his eyes.
"It was nothing, really. I just used my birthday money from the past year or so and figured it would come in handy one day." Ethan said it like it was really nothing, shrugging nonchalantly as he leaned on Benny's side.
Rory, dumbfounded, couldn't keep his eyes off the binders. They seemed to shine brighter than the magic box, to glimmer in the light of the tree. The fabric felt silky smooth on one side, and perfectly rough on the other. It made Rory's heart want to leap out of his chest and swaddle his boys in the tightest of hugs. The tears from earlier were beginning to fall as Rory couldn't keep his happiness inside of him for much longer. The two boys began to take notice of his tears, wiping their own eyes themself.
"Well, I guess you gotta open mine now." Benny smirks when he says it, a glint in his eye that Rory knew all too well.
This is either going to be a very elegant gift or a very elaborate set up to a prank.
Rory opens the gift with caution, untying the ribbon around the small box. Still glowing, Rory has to squint his eyes to lift the top of the box off. He holds his hand over his eyes as if the sun was beaming directly into them. After a while, the light begins to die down.
"Jeez, Benny," Ethan rubs his irritated eyes, "did you have to make it so… painful to look at?"
"It's for the drama, dude."
Rory chuckles at that, wiping a light-induced tear from his eye as he reaches inside the box. His hand comes in contact with something small and… textured? It feels like a chain of some sort. He picks it up, then gazes in awe at the present in his palm.
"A locket? Ben…" true to his word, it's a real locket. The chain is silver, as is the heart shaped pendant hanging from it. Rory can see his reflection in the heart, and it makes his chest flutter.
"Open it!" Benny smiles from ear to ear, along with Ethan, who is just as in awe as Rory.
Doing as he's told, he opens the pendant. Inside is a picture of the three of them. They're at the place where they got those milkshakes that made Ethan discover he was lactose intolerant. As he blinks, the image changes. The picture of Benny and Ethan dressed as Ghostbusters on Halloween makes him remember the time they got swirlies from those jocks. It changes again to a moving image of Benny tripping and falling at the roller rink.
"I have no idea how you got pictures of these, but I love them. Thank you." Rory wraps his arms around Benny briefly, kissing him on the cheek as he lets go.
"It's a spell." Benny states proudly, "it shows all of your zikheronott semekhim- or 'happy memories', with the ones you love."
Ethan slaps him playfully on the shoulder. "You made my gift look like shit!"
Benny rushes to tackle Ethan, and they return to their shenanigans. They tussle on the floor again, looking like total geeks. Rory goes into another laughing fit as Ethan sits on Benny's back, trying to force him into a grotesque, spit-soaked kiss.
-
The next day, Rory proudly walks out of his house with a flat chest. His locket tucked safely under his shirt.
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“Strawberries.” Baekhyun (m) | Vampire!bbh
*Genre: Fluff, Smut
*Warnings: fingering, cunnilingus, face sitting, forced orgasm
*Mini playlist: link
*[This fic is inspired by Baekhyuns SuperM teaser pictures.] ***This is totally not proof read sorry***
Summary: Your goth vampire boyfriend Baekhyun invites you on a picnic date in the middle of a beautiful field full of flowers.
The wind slightly blew as you both sat on the ground. The red gingham blanket protecting you from getting dirty. You smiled as the sun was shining down on you. Baekhyun...not so much.
His skin was sensitive to the sun, being a vampire made it difficult to sun bathe. Even though he knew you loved being surrounded by nature and basking in the suns warm rays he planned this adorable picnic for you both.
A thoughtful man.
The man that made you feel special.
Baekhyun packed strawberries, sandwiches, cheese cubes, sparkling lemonade, watermelon, chocolate and grapes. He really knew how to set a playful mood for the afternoon.
The sun was at its peak so it could shine down on you and he could admire your raw beauty. He thought about when the sun hit your features you were the prettiest. Baekhyun envied the sun’s touch, letting it settle into every nook and cranny of your body. Bringing warmth and it’s gentle touch.
He wanted to be your sun.
Baekhyun looks over at your figure, you’re leaned back on your arms, legs crossed to the side as you eat a strawberry. How pretty, he thought.
You look over to find Baekhyun’s eyes on you. You raise your brow at him in question, he shrugs his shoulders and grins. You look down at the basket of food and pluck a strawberry from its carton.
“Here.” You bring it to his lips and he accepts it gracefully, taking a bite from the fruit while maintaining eye contact. His dark eyes light up at the flavor of the fruit.
He’s never eaten human food, so when you first heard this, naturally you made him try everything you loved. He loved everything.
One thing he loved about you. Your eagerness to give. You always gave so much to him. Like a flower who gives oxygen to the earth and gets nothing in return. He thought of how he wanted to give back to you.
You raise your brow at him again. “Good?”
Baekhyun nods. “It tastes...” He licks his lips, thinking about it for a moment. “Just like you.”
Your cheeks redden and you push his shoulder. “Don’t say that it’s embarrassing.” You pop a cheese cube into your mouth, pouting. You suddenly get an idea and you smile again.
“Want to try some food combinations?”
Baekhyun tilts his head in question, his black hair falling over his eyes slightly. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Ok!” You grab a cheese cube and a grape and he eyes them. “Eat the grape first then the cheese.”
He opens his mouth and you feed him the grape, he chews a little before you feed him the cheese. His brows furrow at the combination of the two flavors, shaking his head.
“That was absolutely disgusting. How could you betray me like that?”
You snort and hand him a glass of sparking lemonade. “I’m sure you’ll like strawberries and chocolate, everybody does.”
You break off a piece of chocolate and you feed him the strawberry first before giving him the chocolate.
Baekhyun moans at the flavor, his tastebuds dancing on his tongue. You smile clapping your hands.
“It’s good isn’t it?”
“It’s really good.”
“I cant believe in all the years you’ve been alive you’ve never eaten human food.” You cock your head and smile funnily. “It’s just funny how you weren’t even a bit curious.”
“My mouth would water at the sight of fresh baked goods, I wasn’t completely immune to delicious food.” He chuckles, his eyes drifting from the horizon line to yours. “And after I tasted you I knew-“
“Baekhyun!” You cover your face not wanting him to repeat any of the dirty things he’s done to you. You ears turn red and you want to hide in a hole.
Baekhyun grabs your wrist, “Hey don’t hide from me.” You can hear the smile in his voice, annoyingly enough. He coos at you in a teasing way and tries to remove your hand from your face. He wrestles with you for a moment before he pins you to the ground.
“My love,” He breathes “Look at me.”
You remove your hands and let them fall by your head. Baekhyun thinks you look pretty, your lips slightly parted and a goofy grin on them. Your eyes are peering up at his and he wants to suck the life out of you. His undead heart swells with love and adoration.
“You’re the prettiest when you smile. when the sun is shining down on just you, you make the scenery worth a drive.” He tells you.
Your heart pounds away under your ribcage and you’re afraid it may break a rib. The endearing speech causes you to let out a noise of appreciation. Between a “awww” and a “mmm.”
Baekhyun looks at you as if you’re a fresh plucked flower and he’s the gardener who’s grown you into a blossoming rose. He admires your alive figure.
You look at Baekhyun and he’s breath taking. The sunlight behind his back is casting a halo around his pretty little head, his eyes are darker than usual. His little freckles scattered across his face, and his blushing cheeks tell you he’s been outside for a bit too long.
“Baekhyun your skin...” You grab his shoulder to push him slightly, but he doesn’t budge.
“I’m fine, Y/n. Let me just remember this moment forever.” He says pushing you back down.
You let him lure you back to your place on the ground and you feel little. Baekhyun glances down at your lips.
You know what he wants to do.
You carefully lean forward and place your lips on his. Baekhyun lets out a deep sigh, and holds your back to support you.
His lips are on yours and his cold body warms up to yours. Your body temperatures are drastically different though when brought together they regulate.
Baekhyun’s lips move slow, his tongue stroking the inside of your cheek. His tongue ring made the perfect sound when it clashed with your teeth. He rubs your back, his hand going up your shirt as well. He didn’t think you would notice till he undid your bra.
Sneaky bastard. Your hands support your own body weight as Baekhyun fumbles with your bra. He gets it undone and rips away from your lips momentarily to remove your shirt and bra.
He sits on top of you, admiring your beauty once more. You smile slightly at his dark eyes. What a cheeky little bat. Baekhyun gropes you with one hand and his other hand is on your jaw, directing your lips to his.
You both share a kiss infused with strawberries and sparkling lemonade. You can taste the fresh strawberries on his tongue still.
“You taste like strawberries.” You mumble. He pulls back, looking at you.
“No, you taste like strawberries. Let me prove it.” Baekhyun slide down your body. His hands warm on your waist and hips. You giggled and shook as his fingers tickled your sides.
“Be still or i’ll have to keep you still myself.” Baekhyun’s voice was threatening, his tone dark and dripping sex.
His lips were at your hips as he unzipped your skirt and slid it down your body. He placed open mouth kisses down your thighs, stopping at your inner calves. Then he worked his way back up, kissing close to your panties but decided against it.
Baekhyun swiped his finger up your slit, eliciting a squeak from you. He grinned. Another swipe and you bit your lip, not playing in to his game. Baekhyun’s eyes shot up to your closed ones and he pulled your panty waist band back and let it slap against your skin. Your eyes shot open and you let out a whine.
“Owie..Baekhyun.” You like your bottom lip out and Baekhyun almost gives in.
Baekhyun slaps your thigh before turning you over forcefully raising your ass in the air. You yelp in surprise and look back at him, his eyes peering at your clothed sex.
Baekhyun pulls down your panties reveal your flower. He licks his lips subconsciously. Dragging a finger in your dripping sex he brings it up to his mouth licking his finger clean.
You watch in amazement as he teases you. “Stop..” You whine.
Baekhyun runs his palm over your ass and lays a light smack over he flesh. “Aww, is the poor angel not enjoying sex in the sun? Would she rather be sitting on my face instead?” Baekhyun teased.
Your eyes widen, sit on his face? Your body jolted at the feel of Baekhyun’s long fingers again as he probed at your hole. You let out a quiet moan. Baekhyun heard it and his ears perked up.
He pushed his finger in, testing the waters before pulling it out, and in, and out. In and out. Until you were moaning his name into the picnic blanket. Baekhyun pulled our his finger and pulled you up roughly.
“What?” You said in a whinny voice, mad he stopped.
“Sit on my face, angel.” Baekhyun said laying on his back on the blanket. He pulled you by your thigh until your sex was hovering over his mouth.
“Baekhyun are you sure—Ah!” Baekhyun pulled you down by your hips and hindered your speech.
Baekhyun’s tongue lapped at your pussy, the sensation of his semi rough tongue and smooth tongue pericing on your most delicate part of your body felt like heaven. Your thighs shook as the feeling of his tongue fucking you made you into a whining mess. The field was filled with your cries and whines and pleas for Baekhyun to fuck you into the hills.
The miles of civilization wouldn’t be able to hear either of your as you moaned into the atmosphere. “Baekhyun—fuck, there!” You held onto his black locks as his tongue ran over your clit.
His cold chain resting on his neck met with your ass, contrasting with your warm bodies. You could hear his breathing become ragged and his hair was tangled together as you pulled and tugged.
“W-wait, I dont want to cum yet.” You stuttered, you wanted to hold it off for as long as possible. You held Baekhyun’s head down on the ground by his hair and his eyes came up to meet yours. An evil look cross his eyes, and he grinned.
Baekhyun’s cold hands came up to hold your hips down as he licked all over your pussy. Your grip on his head couldn’t compare to the cobra like grasp he had on your hips. You whimpered and felt your core burn with desire. You thighs clenched around Baekhyun’s head and you rocked your hips on his tongue, the pleasure of it sending you into an orgasm.
Baekhyun didn’t stop his attack on your clit either way and you shook violently as you felt overly sensitive and too tired to fight against him.
“Baekhyun..” You brushes the hair out of his face and he looked up at your eyes. He retreated his tongue back in his mouth and he slid you off of him, holding you close to his body.
He could admire your completely fucked out expression and you closed your eyes. Baekhyun placed a kiss on your lips, your juices running down his chin. You tasted yourself on him. And he was right, you did taste like strawberries.
“I told you so.”
#exo au#baekhyun au#au#baek au#exo baekhyun#baekhyun#byun baekhyun#exo byun#exo byun baekhyun#exo smut#exo fluff#exo fic#exo fanfic#exo fiction#exo fan fiction#exo writings#exo baek#baek#baekhyun smut#baek smut#byun baekhyun smut#exo baekhyun smut#exo baek smut#byun smut#exo byun smut#exo byun baek smut#exo baekhyun fluff#exo byun baekhyun fluff#exo byun fluff#baekhyuq
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Song List!! :D Some of these are super sad, ngl guys. I put warnings next to a couple songs just cause I know some of the lyrics or subject matter could be alarming, so watch out for that! I’ve been listening to this playlist non stop for like 2 weeks, just using it to get inspired for my daminette fic I started lol
Maybe you guys’ll like it too! <3 The genres are pretty mixed, so be ready for a bit of everything lmao
Gonna want a read more, I think lol
Stay - The Score
Natural - Imagine Dragons
Hero - Skillet
Black and Blue - Long Hawke
Monster - Starset
I Walk the Line - Halsey
Me Against The World - Superchick
Blue Eyes - Within Temptation
Centuries - Fall Out Boy
Walking on Air - Kerli
Decode - Paramore
Red Stars - The Birthday Massacre
Love Goes On and On (feat. Amy Lee) - Lindsey Stirling
Dance With the Devil - Breaking Benjamin
I Don’t Wanna Die - Hollywood Undead
Devour - Disturbed
Lips Like Morphine - Kill Hannah
Death of Me - PVRIS
Not Strong Enough (feat. Brent Smith) - Apocalyptica
Warriors - Imagine Dragons
Rise - Katy Perry
Welcome Home - Cohered and Cambria
Wicked World - Cold
You’re Mine - Disturbed
Cold (But I’m Still Here) - Evans Blue
Think Twice - Eve 6
Cirice - Ghost
Gasoline - Halsey
Angel - Theory of a Deadman
A Thousand Years - Christina Perri
Champion - Fall Out Boy
Rock What You Got (Fight Underdog Fight! Mix) - Superchick
All I Ever Wanted - Basshunter
Summertime Sadness - Within Temptation
Take a Bow - Rihanna
Undisclosed Desires - Muse
you should see me in a crown - Billie Eilish
Set Me on Fire - Flyleaf
Satisfy - Nero
Running Up That Hill - Meg Myers
Phoenix - League of Legends (Song slaps, don’t judge me)
Strange Boy - Kerli
Roar - Katy Perry
The Mystic - Adam Jensen
S.C.A.V.A. - Hollywood undead
Misery Business - Paramore
Wanna Be Missed - Hayley Kiyoko
Bound to You - Christina Aguilera
Anthem for the Broken - MISSIO
Taking Over Me - Evanescence
Memories - Within Temptation
Funhouse - P!nk
Mirror - Barlow Girl
The Last Night - Skillet
Unfamiliar - The Birthday Massacre
Hey Hey (Vampires vs. Cheerleaders Mix) - Superchick
I Bet My Life - Imagine Dragons
Your Betrayal - Bullet for My Valentine
New Day - Hollywood undead
Broken Pieces (feat. Lacey) - Apocalyptica
I Don’t Care (feat. Adam Gontier) - Apocalyptica
Already Over - Red
Together Again - Evanescence
Mad Hatter - Melanie Martinez
Shatter Me (feat Lzzy Hale) - Lindsey Stirling
Miss Murder - AFI
Forevermore (feat. Broken Iris) - Aroth
Passion - AWOLNATION
You Call Me a Bitch Like It’s a Bad Thing - Halestorm
Shapeshifter (feat. Styles of Beyond) - Celldweller
Whatever It Takes - Hollywood undead
I Will Possess Your Heart - Death Cab for Cutie
It’s the Fear - Within Temptation
Can I Exist - MISSIO
I Can’t Do This - Plumb
One Step at a Time - Jordin Sparks
Only Girl (In the World) - Rihanna
That’s What You Get - Paramore
Never Say Die - CHVRCHES
Devil’s Backbone - The Civil Wars
Kill the Lights - The Birthday Massacre
Still Here - Digital Daggers
Immortals - Fall Out Boy
No Light, No Light - Florence + The Machine
Castle - Halsey
Hearts a Mess - Gotye
Where Did the Beat Go? - P!nk
NFWMB - Hozier (it’s the pitched lesbian version though)
Next to Me - Imagine Dragons
Blood in the Cut - K.Flay
Love is Dead - Kerli
Crazy Angel - Kill Hannah
Dark Paradise - Lana Del Rey
How to be a Heartbreaker - Marina and The Diamonds
You Don’t Belong - Daughtry
What You Want - Evanescence
Tag, You’re It - Melanie Martinez (potential TW for this song)
Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea - MISSIO
Had Enough - Breaking Benjamin
Ricochet - Starset
Young - Hollywood Undead
Stockholm Syndrome - Muse
High Hopes - Panic! At the Disco
Crushcrushcrush - Paramore
What’s Wrong - PVRIS
Rock This World - Hilary Duff
In the Dark - The Birthday Massacre
My Girl’s Ex-Boyfriend - Relient k
Pretty Girl (The Way) - Sugarcult
Heathens - twenty one pilots
The Bird and The Worm - The Used
Only One - Yellowcard
Now You’re Gone - Basshunter
Bad Boy - Cascada
Something Just Like This - The Chainsmokers & Coldplay
Live For The Night - Krewella
I Am Woman - Jordin Sparks
Secret Door - Evanescence
Defeated - Breaking Benjamin
U Don’t Know (feat. Wayne Coyne) - Alison Wonderland
Black Dahlia - Hollywood Undead
Someone Who Cares - Three Days Grace
Bewitched (feat. Lady Nogrady) - Blood on the Dance Floor (don’t judge me, it’s a fun song)
Hold On (feat. Brave) - Arman Cekin
Sever The Ties (feat. Esther Sparkles) - Arman Cekin
Memories of a Girl I Haven’t Met - Celldweller
Paris - M.O.O.N.
Guilt - Nero
Love Me (feat. Jacob Banks) - Wide Awake
Daughters of Darkness - Halestorm
Never Alone - Barlow Girl
Anthem - Superchick
Burn Away - The Birthday Massacre
God is a woman - Arian Grande
I Did It for Love (feat Sean Garrett) - BoA
Beautiful Liar - Beyonce & Shakira
Angel With a Shotgun - The Cab
Anthem of the Angels - Breaking Benjamin
Everytime - Britney Spears
Haters - Hilary Duff
I Look So Good (Without You) - Jessie James
Battlefield - Jordin Sparks
Weight of the World - Evanescence
Wide Awake - Katy Perry
Cannonball - Kiesza
I Need to Know - Marc Anthony
Problem - Natalia Kills
Rude Boy - Rihanna
Counting Stars - OneRepublic
According to You - Orianthi
The Truth About Love - P!nk
I Hate This Part - The Pussycat Dolls
Eternity - Rachel Taylor
Towards the Sun - Rihanna
Ready to Fight - Roby Fayer & Tom Gefen
Brave - Sara Bareilles
Good For You (feat. A$AP Rocky) - Selena Gomez
Invisible - Skylar Grey (potential TW here)
This Love - The Veronicas
Beautiful - Akon
Too Little, Too Late - JoJo
Knock You Down - Keri Hilson
Bang - Armchair Cynics
Shut Your Mouth - Attack Attack!
Leaving Tonight - The Birthday Massacre
Breaking the Silence - Breaking Benjamin
Beautiful Girl - Broken Iris
All These Things I Hate (Revolve Around Me) - Bullet for My Valentine
Stupid Girl - Cold
Traitor - Daughtry
Love and Tragedy - Digital Summer
Haunted - Evanescence
Iris - Goo Goo Dolls
Beautiful With You - Halestorm
My Name is Human - Highly Suspect
Can’t Love Me - It’s Alive
Gone - My Darkest Days
How Did You Love - Shinedown
It’s Not Me It’s You - Skillet
Halo - Starset
Until the Day I Die - Story of the Year
Bitter Taste - Three Days Grace
Always Find Me Here - Transit
Liar Liar (Burn in Hell) - The Used
The Heart of Everything - Within Temptation
I Want Out - Young Guns
World So Cold - 12 Stones
#song list#maribat#daminette#mlb x dc#A Ladybug in Gotham#that's the name of the fic I'm gonna post#once I'm done proofreading and editing lmao
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Waking up slow
The Wayhaven Chronicles
Adam du Mortain x female Detective (in the future)
Detective Kat Kingston faces a murder, Unit Bravo and her mother.
AO3link
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I don't know where to begin
But I didn't think I cared
I could be your friend
But I'm unprepared
Kat looked at the mirror and stuck out her tongue.
Not much to see there. Especially after getting almost no sleep. Dark circles surrounded her eyes, hollowing out her face, and giving her a constant aura of exhaustion. With her pale skin, Kat wondered, if some aspiring filmmaker would hire her for an extra in their horrorfilm. Background zombie vampire number 21. Surely she could throw in some undead moans and shuffling.
She made a note to investigate, if anyone filmed in the surrounding areas.
Dressed in a pencil skirt and blouse, Kat felt a bit more like herself. It hugged her wide hips and concealed her tummy, which she hadn’t been ready to show to the world since her early teenage years. She decided to throw in some jewelry, a long necklace, earrings, nothing special.
A dash of powder and she faced her mirror again. “You can do this. Just take a deep breath and survive the day and make sure that no one else get killed.”
She’d been the logical choice for a promotion, but she started to doubt her abilities. Always the smart one in class, Kat now found herself facing obstacle after obstacle. A killer haunted her town and evidence seemed to be spare, one dead woman, strange blood samples, Verda working over hours to get some results. But nothing made sense. Wayhaven wasn’t known for it’s high crime rate. Most of the days, she investigated neighborhood disputes, lost cats (her rate of finding them was nearing 100%) and drug related incidents at times.
Lately, doubts crawled into her sleep and made her wonder, if she deserved the title of Detective. She saw herself as neither smart nor experienced enough.
Not to mention a whole squad of agents occupied her office and station. With them around her, Kat felt out of place and small. Between the four of them were years of actual agent work and whatever they’d been paid to do.
With them, her mother had also grabbed a part of her life again.
Wonderful.
“No. Not thinking of her.” Their complicated relationship offered too many raw wounds and too many missed birthdays and the vastness of a lonely childhood. At her ripe age of 31, she surely should get over it, but bitterness seemed rooted deep within in herself. All those expensive hours of therapy, just to face the same old shit.
Kat tucked her red hair behind her ears and nodded. “Off we go then.”
Half past seven and her neighbors slowly began their day. She heard laughing children and dogs barking. The pure picture of a quiet, idyllic town. Kat wrapped her scarf a bit tighter around her neck, because the air felt cold and smelled of frost. Though, she’d always liked this time of the year, before it got uncomfortable warm and before pollen attacked her nose and eyes.
She got in her car and found herself relaxing behind the wheel, with the help of Stevie Nicks and her comforting voice. Singing along Seven Wonders worked miracles on a bad mood.
Her shoulders tensed as she noticed a familiar figure in front of the station. Handsome and rugged, Bobby owned too much space in her memories and still too much space in her life.
Kat nodded. “Bobby.”
“Hey, angel. Long time no see.” He smiled and stood right in front of the entrance.
Sighing, she tried to find a way around him. “Look, Bobby, I haven’t got the time.”
“Come on, just some small answers. Wouldn’t hurt you, eh?”
“At this point, I can’t tell you anything. We’re investigating different angles.”
“Please.” Bobby’s eyes were bright and cheerful and Kat rubbed her neck, hoping that she didn’t blush. He’d been charming back when they meet at college and then dumped her, because he couldn’t bring a chubby girl home to meet his parents.
Yeah, that had happened.
Concentrating on how she felt back then surely helped with bringing more distance between the two of them. It also pushed the self-doubts to a new high. Damn. This morning totally screwed her over.
“The detective is needed inside.”
Kat spun around and almost crushed into Adam’s chest. “Detective Kingston.” He opened the door and positioned himself right between herself and Bobby. Her throat seemed suddenly very, very dry with Adam standing so close. Dressed in his usual grey shirt and cargo trousers, he cut an impressive figure.
“So, are you going to answer a few questions.”
“No.”
Kat slipped in and ignored Bobby’s protests. She already feared what he would write about her and the Wayhaven police. Probably calling them incompetent and lazy for selling a few more papers.
“Good morning, Douglas.”
His smile looked earnest and cheerful. “Morning, Kat. Everything alright?”
“Yes, thank you.” Kat nodded and followed Adam, because further stalling wouldn’t improve anyone's day.
Adam opened her office door and she walked in. “Good morning. You’re awfully early.”
“Couldn’t wait to see you, Detective.” Felix quipped and Kat felt heat rising in her neck and up to her cheeks. Being the center of attention had never been comfortable and Kat tried hide her embarrassment with focussing on anything but Felix.
A hot, steaming coffee waited on Kat’s desk and she found a note from Tina and a smiley drawn beneath it. She liked it with a dash of oat milk and cupped it in her hands as she sat down. Kat would visit her later and thank her for indulging one tired detective. The rest of the team had already made themself comfortable. Mason leaning against a filing cabinet, Felix lounging on the only other chair, Nate crunched over her desk, checking his notes and comparing them to Kat’s.
“So, another day of research?” Felix sighed loudly enough for Adam to stare him into silence again.
Nate looked up, his warm eyes on Kat. “If that is your plan of action.”
She looked down to check her mails. “Yeah, we need to find out what’s going on with the blood of the victim and how it fits into all of this.”
Back in college, she’d thought about following her passion for science and enter the pathology course, but it didn't worked out. It still lingered on her mind from time to time and she spent more time than necessary down in the lab with Verda.
Kat read through the file again.
Janet Greenland. Aspiring engineer. Far too young to face such a gruesome fate.
Kat took a sip of coffee. “I’d appreciate it, if you would tell me about your findings. You’ve been tracking him for a while and must know more than me.”
Nate and Adam exchanged a glance. Did they really believe themself to be subtle? They’d only known each other for a few days, but often enough she felt left out of the conversation and their secrets.
“You already received all our information.” Adam’s face seemed unmoved and his intense eyes woke a squeamish sensation in her stomach.
Kat stood up and tried to scrap together her last pieces of confidence. “I know that you’re not exactly excited to work with me, but I appreciate your insight into this and would be really grateful, if you wouldn’t leave me in the dark.”
"Detective Kingston…” Nate started, but Adam didn’t let him continue.
Felix and Mason stayed quiet, probably used to the other two butting their heads.
Kat waited for an answer, knowing that red spots started to bloom on her neck, betraying her confident words.
"So?"
"So." Adam's answer held a final note.
Tina knocked on the door, thankfully cutting through the awkward silence that followed their exchange.
“Excuse me.” Kat got up and straightened her skirt. “Time for break. There is a nice bakery around the corner, if you’re hungry. Makes good sandwiches and cupcakes.”
She left with a feeling that no one in Unit Bravo would follow her advice, and with her coffee secured between her fingers.
Her friend slung an arm around Kat's shoulders and whispered. “The blond one is still staring.”
“Probably thinking less and less of me and my competence. Wouldn't blame him." Adam du Mortain usually worked with skilled professionals, not some small town Detective that got a bit lucky and who had to be rescued from noisy ex-boyfriends.
"Let's check out, if anyone has repaired our vending machine.” Kat ignored the urge to look back through the glass and just held herself a bit stiffer.
“You’re still hoping to get back your money?” Tina guided her towards their break room.
“I do or at least that chocolate bar.”
“Always the optimist.”
Kat snorted. “Haven’t been called that in a while.”
As expected, the vending machine didn’t work and she positioned herself against the counter. Tina opened their mini fridge and made a face. Douglas had forgotten about his lunch for about a week now and it began to grew a soft pelt. They really should trow it away, but neither of them seemed brave enough to touch it.
Crossing her arms in front of her chest, Tina nudged Kat’s shoulder with her own. “How you’re holding up? I mean with the case and with your mother back in Wayhaven?”
“Not that well, if you want the truth. I’m afraid for the people here and I don’t know, if I’m up to the task of catching the murderer. Unit Bravo doesn’t help as much as I thought they would.”
Kat bit her lip. “And Rebecca, hm, you know … I respect her on a professional level and that is as far as I’m thinking about her now.”
“It’s a start.”
“I guess.” Kat finished her coffee. Dead father, absent mother, didn’t help much growing up.
She shook her head. “Enough of my stunted emotions. How was your date with… damn, what was her name? Anna?”
“Annabelle.” Tina smiled. “Actually, pretty bad. We didn’t click and after dinner we decided to just accept that and part ways.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Nah, I’ll find the one and at least she didn't throw her drink at the bartender.”
Tina laughed and her eyes sparkled with amusement. Kat found herself smiling too. It seemed hard to not do when her friend was around. She also remembered their horrible double date, back when her guy got so angry about something that he threw his perfectly fine vodka soda at the Bartender. They didn’t arrest him but let him go off with a warning to behave better in the future.
“Here’s to another day in Wayhaven.” Kat raised her empty mug.
“Hear, hear!”
#the wayhaven chronicles#wayhaven chronicles#Adam du Mortain#female detective#the get it out of my system fic#oh man#where to go from here#headcanons#kat kingston
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Something Wicked
A short story requested by anonymous, read beneath the cut. Involves an immortal, a zombie, a vampire, and a circus full of secrets.
The girl was filthy.
Amarante tried to keep from staring-concentrate, she told herself- but couldn't help it. The girl had greasy black hair that reached her ankles and wore a frilly black dress with a matching hat. She wandered through the crowded fairgrounds with a belt made of fireworks strung loosely about her waist. Amarante peered over a burly man's shoulder to get a better view, but quickly turned around and began rummaging around in her purse when the little girl noticed her.
Don't come over here, she thought. Please don't draw any attention to me.
Her prayers were met by a swift poke on the shoulder. She whirled around and gasped when she saw the girl grinning at her.
It was almost too much to take in at once. She noticed the smell first; the putrid scent of undead creatures that hadn't bothered to put on any perfume. The girl's eyes, which were blank and white, were rimmed by a layer of dark and messily applied eyeshadow. Hanging loosely from her mangled yellow teeth was a fat cigar. She exhaled a puff of smoke and blew it into the girl's face.
"Why, hello," the girl murmured gleefully in what Amarante thought was a French accent. "What do we have here?"
"What do you want?" Her voice was cold and sharp with fear.
The girl let out a high-pitched giggle. "What everyone here wants; to sell. We're offering a discount for circus week. Buy my explosives, and I'll light them under you."
"Why on earth would I want to do that?" she asked, horrified.
The zombie girl shrugged. "Some like the thrill. Me, I like to watch them burn. But it wouldn't harm you, anyway; you're one of us."
"One of us?"
The girl waves a hand lazily. "Oh, you know. Monsters. Beasts. Supernatural beings. Whatever you want to call us. What are you, I wonder?" she eyes Amarante gleefully. "An elf? No, you don't have the ears. Perhaps a siren? Although I don't feel any attraction."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Amarante snapped. "Who are you, anyway? And what's this about a circus?"
She blew another puff of smoke. "I didn't introduce myself? My apologies. I'm Adreanna, and I work for the Circus of Souls. We're in town this week. Hadn't you heard?"
"Circuses aren't really my thing," Amarante responded.
Adreanna shrugged and gave a short giggle. "I have a feeling you'll change your mind. When you do, meet us here at midnight. My mother will be here to greet you; I'm sure you'll find her... Charming."
The zombie girl giggled again and gave Amarante a tiny wave before using the tip of her cigar to light the end of her fireworks. Before she could respond, the girl had shot into the sky. She exploded into small pieces and disappeared with a twinkle.
This is insane, Amarante thought with a scowl as she approached the fairgrounds. And probably dangerous. Why am I here?
But she knew full well the reason she'd followed the strange undead girl's instructions; she was curious. And what harm could a little fun do once in a while? She was immortal, after all.
She frowned as she reached the fairgrounds.It didn't look like any sort of circus was there. The wide grassy field was empty and unlit. A solitary mirror stood to her right, but otherwise it was deserted.
"Perhaps the girl was lying," she muttered. I wouldn't put it past her.
The mirror sparked her attention. She strode over to inspect it, and saw a small piece of paper taped to the top. 'ENTER HERE FOR CIRCUS OF SOULS', it read in huge block letters.
She frowned. "Enter? Through a mirror?" With a shrug, she stepped forward. "I suppose I've seen stranger things."
Amarante reached her hand out tentatively. The mirror shimmered, and her hand disappeared through what felt like cool water. She took a deep breath and walked through.
When she opened her eyes, she was mesmerized. The fairgrounds, once dark and deserted, were now bright and teeming with life. Strange animals performed tricks and teenagers tried to win dragon paws in booths that smelled of popcorn and cotton candy. People in strange costumes wandered about, sampling foods and gawking at the performers. A man made of stone smiled eerily at her from the ticket booth. Across from him, a hellhound ripped a shackled prisoner in two as people cheered.
"What is this place?" she asked, horrified.
"I see you made it," called a rusty, smoke-charred voice from behind her
She whipped around to see a tall, beautiful woman with blood red lips grinning at her. She had sharp, silvery incisors different word? that poked out of her mouth slightly. In between them was a burning cigarette. Her outfit, a reflective black dress that was just a little too short, made Amarante wince and avert her eyes.
"Allow me to introduce myself," said the woman. She removed her cigarette, discarding it before extending a pale hand. "My name is Cressida. I run this show. My daughter told me you'd be coming. We're all so glad you'll be joining us."
"Your... Daughter?" Amarante asked. Her head was spinning with all that she'd seen. "The zombie?"
The woman tilted her head back and laughed, showing her sharpened teeth stained red. "Interesting, isn't she? She's actually part of the show. You'll see her at the end of our tour. I think you'll find her act quite amusing."
"Wait," she said with a frown. "What do you mean, joining you?"
Cressida cackled again and grabbed Amarante's hand. Her long, delicate fingers curled around the girl's. She shuddered at the sudden chill that passed through her.
"Come with me," the vampire hissed gleefully. "I'll show you around."
Trapped by Cressida's firm grasp and beginning to regret her actions, Amarante allowed herself to be dragged toward a large aquarium lit up with sparkling neon fish. At what must have been 50 feet above the tank, a beautiful girl with long green hair and bright scales stood atop a diving board. She held an ornate bubble pipe in her mouth, and she was grinning.
"Who is that?" Amarante asked, horrified.
Cressida waved a lazy hand and pulled them closer. At the sight of her, onlookers immediately pulled back a respectful distance. "Oh, that's just Alunna, our mermaid. She's supposed to do water tricks, but she can't seem to handle even a small jump."
They watched as she clumsily tipped herself over the edge and fell face first into the water.
"Her boyfriend-"she pointed to a man in a scuba mask waiting at the bottom of the tank- "is supposed to do the act with her, but he isn't much better at it. The only thing she's good for is that silly bubble pipe. The customers seem to love it."
She watched as Alunna swam around the aquarium, followed by the strange-looking man with pointed ears. Every so often, she would puff on her pipe, and children would squeal as it formed a bird, or a lollipop, or a cat.
"If she's so terrible, why is she performing?"
Cressida's expression turned sour. "She's one of the more... dull choices. Some people don't think before they come to visit. They call this the Circus of Souls for a reason."
Amarante frowned. Nothing here made sense, especially the woman's strange way of talking. "What do you-"
"Time to move on," the woman interrupted. She grabbed her hand in her vice like grip and pulled her along.
They wandered past booths filled with questionable-looking candy, raw meat, and strange objects that looked sort of like oysters. The stench made her gag and cover her nose.
"Many interesting creatures come from all over to see our performances," Cressida said. The odor didn't seem to affect her at all. "We're quite extraordinary. I don't mean to brag, of course. It's just that no one else does what we do."
"And what do you do?"
The woman gave her a strange look. "I thought that was clear. We cater to the interests of supernatural beings everywhere. They come to be fulfilled, and in return we take what we need from them. It could be their youth, their laughter, their wisdom, their gifts. Their energy- their life- it fuels the circus. A small price to pay, really, for such wonders."
Amarante put a hand to her mouth. Her normally rosy cheeks were pale, and her hands had the slightest tremble in them. "I think I want to leave now."
Cressida cackled. "But the tour has only just begun. You must see our other acts. I insist."
Filled with dread and the understanding that there was no good way out of this, she let herself be led toward what looked like a stadium.
As they got closer, Amarante saw two tiny creatures facing off inside. Sprites, she thought. They're fighting to the death.
"Quick little buggers, but they put up a good fight," Cressida said cheerfully. "And the crowd seems to love them."
She was right. The stadium was packed with eager onlookers who roared and pounded their fists every time one of the fighters drew blood.
"It's barbaric."
"Everything is, if you look at it the right way. It's the beautiful thing about being a monster; nothing is beneath you." The vampire's sharp fangs glittered in the moonlight. "We can do anything."
And somehow, Amarante believed it.
Their next stop was a man covered in nothing but tattoos that appeared to be twisting and writhing as he moved. He arched his neck back and opened his mouth wide to let loose a burst of flame. The crowd roared, and he did it again. More tattoos appeared.
She stared in horror at his body. Those weren't tattoos. They were burn marks. "He's burning. It's burning him alive."
"It's an interesting story," the vampire said. "He was born a mortal, and lived a long and happy life until a wizard cursed him to burn forever in hell. Unfortunately, the state of our world right now is so hellish that the curse couldn't see the difference, and he's been burning ever since. A useful addition; the crowd loves a good bonfire."
"This is awful."
"Oh, darling, this is just the beginning." Cressida cackled again, and they were moving on.
A winged man in shackles slumped against a pole. His strong legs were tied together and there were feathers strewn about on the ground. Someone had clipped his wings.
He raised his head, and Amarante saw a faint glimmer above him. "He's an angel," she whispered in awe.
As if sensing her presence, he looked directly at her and shook his head slightly, as if to say get out. His eyes conveyed a thousand miseries in the space of a second. Soon, they would be hers to endure.
I can't, she wanted to scream. She won't let me go. But Cressida was already pulling her along.
"He grants wishes," she said with a bored wave of a hand. "Heals wounds, reads futures, soothes hearts. All of that boring nonsense. Now, this is an act I think you'll enjoy."
I doubt it, she wanted to say. She opened her mouth to accuse the vampire of being a barbarian and a monster, but her words died in her mouth as she saw what lay before her.
It was a spectacular cannon. Large and painted the blackest of black, with silver streaks along the side. And inside of it was the zombie girl Amarante had met earlier. She still held a fat cigar between her yellowed teeth, but she had smoked it down to almost nothing.
"You can't shoot her out of that thing," she protested, her heart racing. "She's got explosives strapped all over her. She'll explode."
"They always manage to put her back together nearly as well as before," Cressida said with a dismissive wave. "Besides, she doesn't seem to mind."
"That's your daughter," she said. She struggled to pull her arm free, wanting to save the girl, but Cressida held firm. "That's your daughter they're shooting out of a cannon."
"It's a good marketing feature, don't you think?" the woman asked. "This is a family business, after all. Now, excuse me; I have a job to do. And don't go running off on me, either. You're still needed here."
Her heart pounded wildly as she watched Cressida take the end of her cigarette and bend over to gracefully light the match. She stepped back as the flame raced toward the cannon. Amarante covered her ears, shut her eyes, and sent out one last prayer for the girl before she was blown to pieces.
Boom.
The sound sent her stumbling backwards as it reverberated through every bone in her body. Energy crackled audibly as Adreanna shot through the sky. She soared over the trees before exploding into thousands of tiny pink dots. The fireworks strapped to her body rocketed through the air before exploding in glorious tendrils of color.
"Isn't it beautiful?" Cressida asked from Amarante's side. There were tears in the vampire's eyes, but she had a feeling they weren't from sadness. "Such a marvelous sight."
"It's sick," Amarante spat, twisting her arm out of the woman's grip. "All of this is sick and twisted. I'm leaving."
"Oh, but you can't leave yet," Cressida purred. Something dark and wild sparked in her eyes. "You haven't paid your ticket yet."
"Fine," Amarante shouted. Others turned to stare at her, but she didn't care. "Take my youth or my immortality or whatever the hell you want, just let me leave this place."
"I'm afraid that won't be necessary," said Cressida with a smirk. "You see, there's only one thing I want from you, and it's something I'd rather have you give freely. You, my dear, are very special. You're an immortal."
Amarante took a step backward.
"Don't think I don't know who you are," she cooed. "I know all about you. You're not just any immortal, either. You're one of the endesje- the ones who cannot be killed. At least by anything we have. It makes you quite an interesting spectacle, when in the right circumstances."
Amarante's eyes widened as she realized what was happening. "You want me to join the circus."
"Finally, you've stopped being so dense. There are plenty of monsters who would pay good money to see what you have to offer. Once our angel is through with you, you'll be glad to oblige them."
"You can't do this," Amarante pleaded, stumbling backwards. Strong hands gripped her forearms and she twisted around to see the angel staring at her with his dead eyes. "I have a family, I have-"
"You don't need a family," Cressida whispered, grinning. She leaned forward to trace her jawline with a cold, pale finger. "You have us now."
Her vision faded and her racing heart stilled to a slow, steady thump. Her thoughts- useless things- were scrubbed clean and replaced by a new purpose. A twisted, monstrous, glorious, purpose.
"Welcome to the circus," the vampire said.
Amarante smiled. She was home.
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God, what a blast from the past. I haven’t written Phineas and Ferb fanfiction in literally almost two years (my username has become more sentiment than anything lol)
Commission for @crazyfanatic97. Halloween-esque, because who doesn’t enjoy Halloween in July?
Consider donating to my Ko-fi if you like my writing.
~~
Vanessa was going to kill her father when he got back.
It wasn’t just that he had left her alone, at this Halloween party that he had insisted on throwing for the whole neighborhood for some reason. It was that he left her alone because he turned into a fucking were-cow, if Perry’s posts on Instagram were to be any kind of clue.
She sighed and set her phone down, checking her hair one more time before grabbing her things and exiting her room. She headed down to the lobby of the building – no evil castle this time, thank god – and observed the guests for a moment from the stairwell before showing herself.
Like before, even though her father had set it up, Vanessa had called Phineas and Ferb to double check party decorations, various lights to make sure they wouldn’t accidentally kill anyone, and the like. They were still hanging around, Phineas in a Luke Skywalker costume and Ferb in a Darth Maul one, weirdly enough. She didn’t understand the choices, but she didn’t really question it either.
They had brought along their friends, who were bounding around in themed costumes helping guests, and Vanessa shook her head and smiled. Always the helpful kids, she supposed. She’d have to thank them for it later.
Stacy and Candace were in the far corner, Stacy dressed as Jasmine from Aladdin and Candace as the human version of Ariel. Ironically, they all kind of matched. She walked over to them first.
“Hey guys,” she called out as she got closer.
When they looked over at her, their jaws fell just a little, and Vanessa couldn’t help but be smug about it. “Girl,” Stacy gasped out. “You look INCREDIBLE! How did you get your hair to look like that?”
“How did we all theme ourselves as Disney princesses without even discussing it first?” Candace wondered.
Vanessa was decked head to toe as Belle from Beauty and the Beast, right down to the golden ball gown that she had hand sewn for months. She wasn’t why she had felt so compelled to make it; someone at school had told her that she had the complexion and the hair for the Disney princess, and after a little bit of researching, she had agreed.
Something about the story of Beauty and the Beast had inspired her too. The way that it implied that anyone could find love, regardless of their background? It was kind of nice to think about, all things considered.
Speaking of...
Vanessa pulled her phone out from the pockets she had stitched into the dress at the last second on a whim. She was glad for that now.
Perry had put up another post on his private Instagram. Her father was somewhere on the south side of town, rampaging through some bushes or something. The image was a very unamused looking secret agent in the foreground, with her father passed out behind him.
Vanessa snorted, hit the like button, and clicked her phone off again, setting it away. She looked up at Stacy and Candace, who were chatting about their homework.
“So did you guys come here with your boyfriends?” Vanessa asked, simultaneously wanting to play good host but also genuinely curious.
They grinned and nodded at the stage, where a group was setting up to play. Jeremy and Coltrane, both dressed as matching princes to their girlfriend’s princess, were up on stage tuning instruments, chatting together and with their other bandmates. “Phineas and Ferb got them to bring the whole band,” Stacy informed her.
Vanessa nodded, a bit impressed. “Nice.”
“So....do you have a date?” Candace asked. Her tone held a teasing lilt to it, and her eyes sparkled in amusement as she nudged Vanessa.
Vanessa wrinkled her nose and ducked her chin. “Not...not really, no.”
“How do you mean?”
Vanessa could feel Stacy looking at her sympathetically; seeing as she knew the whole dilemma with Perry and Monty and Monogram, she wasn’t surprised. She didn’t look at her when she answered. “My...the guy I invited probably won’t be able to come. Our dads don’t like each other a whole lot.”
“Your dad isn’t even here,” Stacy pointed out.
Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Trust me, everyone is grateful for that right now.”
Her phone pinged softly, another alert from Instagram, and she hid a grin. “I’m gonna go check on the other guests for a bit, you guys have fun, okay?”
They chorused an affirmative and Vanessa moved aside, pulling her phone out and glancing at the screen. Another check in, this time from a bit closer to the center of town, in a pumpkin patch about two miles towards the suburbs. Perry didn’t look very amused anymore, just sleepy.
Jeremy and Coltrane started up their music, a quick, rolling number that had people scrambling for the dance floor in all assortment of costumes. Fairies, witches, wolves, vampires, snake people, Greek partyers – there was something for everyone.
Halloween was one of Vanessa’s favorite holidays, which always made people snort upon hearing it. Of course the goth girl would like Halloween, right?
But no, she liked it for what people could dress up as, seeing the creativity that came every year. It wasn’t like Christmas, a false sense of cheer and fake gratitude for gifts you didn’t want or need, not dealing with rude family members at dinner who ruined the festivity.
Halloween was a small enough holiday that it didn’t require family get togethers, but large enough to have a Hallmark section in the store and a massive following online. It was the one time of year where anyone could be what they wanted and no one could judge them for it, only praise them for really cool costumes.
Vanessa supposed she liked that sense of freedom. She wasn’t super girly in her day-to-day life, but on Halloween, she could be Belle, and no one would blink twice except maybe to ask why she hadn’t made her undead...which was definitely a thought for next years costume.
“Didn’t know if I would be able to find you here,” came a soft voice from behind her. “Though with that outfit, you’re pretty much wearing the most amazing costume here.”
Vanessa stiffened and turned slowly to find Monty standing there, a warm smile on his face and a hint of a blush on his cheeks. He was dressed in a modest vampire outfit, so simple that, had he not been wearing a cape and small fangs, Vanessa wouldn’t have noticed, it was more like a suit than anything.
They honestly probably couldn’t have matched better, in a weird, sort of ironic way.
“You came,” she breathed.
Monty shrugged, a boyish grin on his lips. “Of course I did. You sent me an invitation, after all.”
“I didn’t think your dad-”
Monty laced their fingers together, cutting her off, and twirled her gently, his eyes taking in her outfit. “What my dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Care to dance?”
“Absolutely.”
They had taken barely two steps when the wall behind them crashed open and her dad, still a fucking cow, bolted through, mooing at passerby. People in the immediate path dove for cover and everyone else clapped and whistled, probably thinking it a stunt.
Vanessa wasn’t about to correct them.
Perry charged through after him, wearing a fake mustache and glasses to hide his identity, and rolled his eyes at her when he saw her. Vanessa bit back a chuckle. “As much as I want to dance, I think maybe we should help Perry,” she laughed, kicking off her heels.
Monty shook his head and removed his fangs. “Couldn’t agree more.”
#phineas and ferb#my writing#writing commissions#pnf#montnessa#vanessa doofenshmirtz#monty monogram#background canderemy
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Snow White & Bambi
Pairing: Yoonji x Reader (F X F)
Rated: M / NC-17
Genre: Gender bend!AU, College!AU
Warnings: Lots of anxiety, panic attack mentions
Summary: She wasn’t even looking at you, but she might one day. In a classroom consisting of only twenty students, Min Yoonji might see you at the front of the room, skimming over words that weren’t yours, but were still riddled with meaningful similarities. An inside joke with yourself – that Yoonji was a lot like a Disney princess, visually anyway.
‘She was a princess, who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore, they named her Snow White.’
Sequel: Dragons & Bambi
A/N: I would like to say right now that I do not know shit about college or college basketball. This is a work of fiction, so just go with it. Also, some of the Brothers Grimm pieces were adjusted to befit the story more, so go with that, too.
Snow White & Bambi
Why was it that every time you saw her, your mouth went dry? Breathing was a simple task for most and yet, your lungs felt constricted, and useless. She was new three months ago, a transfer student from Daegu. You could hear it in the lazy slur of her words, whenever she’d been asked to read aloud during Literature class. Today you’d been called up and it was ironic that you found yourself reciting one of the Brothers Grimm best tales, eyes lifting from each line just to catch a glimpse of pale skin and soft black hair.
She wasn’t even looking at you, but she might one day. In a classroom consisting of only twenty students, Min Yoonji might see you at the front of the room, skimming over words that weren’t yours, but were still riddled with meaningful similarities. An inside joke with yourself – that Yoonji was a lot like a Disney princess, visually anyway.
‘She was a princess, who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore, they named her Snow White.’
Yoonji’s skin was like fallen snow, like a cloud had permanently muddled her skin with its shadow. She was an ice storm with a calm that comes after and not a second before. There was no fair amount of subtlety to her existence. Bored, catlike eyes remained focused on the rain tapping on the window, as a pink tongue slid out across her bottom lip, before she returned to doing that pout-thing that made you forget how to breathe. It caused your voice to tremble throughout the next paragraph, which was enough to raise interest when the professor lifted his head with concern.
Could you imagine? Nah, it’s all good, professor – it’s just that my gay ass is currently invested in being tongue fucked by Yoonji, is all. Please, go back to your Subway menu.
You’d decided a long time ago that something had to change. Even if you knew that you would have to be the one to make the first approach, it was still difficult to follow through with it. And you weren’t the most articulate with your words.
Yoonji was weighed the second she arrived, the popular girls trying her out, and passing her up once they realized that she was of the musically creative and athletic sort. One would think that the two would contradict itself, but it didn’t. Not when Yoonji played, whether it was in the music room on the piano, or out on the court. It made you question yourself, wondering what the hell you were good at, except pining.
The class ended with the tale going unfinished and would be saved for tomorrow. You placed the book inside your bag and stalled in leaving, wondering if Yoonji would actually eat lunch today, or if she’d skip. Skipping meals was a too common occurrence with her, which worried you. Did she not have money? Did she not like the food…?
A shoulder nudged into yours, the impact nearly sending you into the lockers with a shrill. Jimin was pleased with herself, “Allow me to help you be less obvious.”
Your only friend was pure evil and a part of you believed Jimin only befriended you, because you were woefully short. She’d once said you did ‘something’ for her legs? So, really, you were a walking favor that Jimin cashed in on every single day.
Rubbing at your sore arm, you continued down the hall, “I think being obvious would only improve my situation, really.”
“Try rolling your skirt up a few inches,” Jimin said, knocking into you out of habit. She was a clingy, hands-on friend, who was chock-full of platonic kisses, and hugs.
“She might be straight,” you reasoned. Although, doing something more with the school uniform might help you standout a bit more.
“Yeah, but my gaydar doesn’t pick up false signals, sweetie,” she grinned, before patting away at the same shoulder she’d just slammed into the locker. You winced. “Hey, Yoonji!”
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Fuck, no.
The girl paused at the end of the hallway, short black hair falling over her shoulder when she turned. Jimin gestured enthusiastically, “Come here.”
You were in your friend’s stupid mochi face, cursing low, “The fuck you doing?”
“Helping. I mean, it’s this, or nothing happens, ever.” She looked at you seriously, “Remember what happened with Jeongguk?”
“Uhm, yeah. You slut dropped on his dick and now you own it.”
“That’s right. Now slut drop.”
Yoonji approached, expression as vacant and uninterested as her voice, “You beckoned?”
“I did, yeah. Wanna join us for lunch?” It was effortless, you thought, watching Jimin in awe. Even if she was your only friend, you certainly weren’t hers, and this was probably the reason.
Yoonji was taking awhile to answer, a brief look of confusion flitting across her face, before turning glacial. You could see it so well, the storm reflecting beneath the surface of her pale skin.
You decided to save her, throwing her a lifeline, “You probably have other things…”
“You know what? Yeah,” Yoonji answered, staring directly at you – her words were tired and rough like gravel, easily droning you out. “I’ll join you.”
“What a relief! My friend here was starting to think you were a vampire,” Jimin teased, purposefully slowing in her steps, so that Yoonji could comfortably walk with you. “Talked about calling in reinforcements, like Van Helsing or something, like a big ol’ nerd…”
You shook your head, denying it, “I don’t have those connections.”
“That’s a shame,” Yoonji sighed heavily, as though the small walk to the cafeteria was enough to wind her. “…since I’m Dracula’s third cousin.”
Jimin played along well, well enough to make you feel envious all over again. “But you take sunlight like a pro.”
“The power of the right BB cream.” Unbelievably hot were Min Yoonji’s blasé responses. She’d stated it so casually that it was almost deemed feasible in your tragically gullible mind. Forget Princess Yoonji, upgrade to Vampire Princess Yoonji, please. Thank you, brain.
“This line is ridiculous. All the salad bowls are gonna be gone,” Jimin whined, stomping her foot like a child, latching onto you – swinging your linked arms around for good measure. Yoonji’s sleepy, feline eyes remained fixed on you the whole time, finally, finally watching you.
She scraped her teeth over her bottom lip, contemplative, “I’m probably not gonna eat. I’ll go find us a table?”
“Sounds good,” Jimin said, saluting Yoonji with her free hand.
This was your chance to spoil her, even if it was with food, which – what better way, really? You would just double up on everything you usually get and then offer it up like it was a mistake.
“So, like, this was all very easy, wasn’t it?” Jimin was smug and a smug Jimin was…eh, whatever, it was fine. You let her have her moment.
“It kinda was, yeah,” you said, agreeing. You grabbed a tray, grabbing two of the ham, cheese, and jelly sandwiches. A set of jjiggae of the day, bowls of rice, two cookies, and cokes. A thing you’ve yet to witness was a happily fed Yoonji. In the end, this would probably end up as being more of a treat for yourself.
“You thought she was the undead. You said that she was grumpy, unapproachable, and yet…” Jimin grabbed for her salad bowl. There were still tons of them left, thus concluding that your best friend was terminally dramatic. “And yet!”
“Yes, yes, and yet she was nice, alive, and approachable,” you said, as you finished with paying for the food and skimmed your eyes over the cafeteria, finding Yoonji at one of the far back tables. She hadn’t run away yet, how lovely, and hopeful.
Jimin already tore open her strawberry milk, humming blissfully around the straw with each sip. The girl was incapable of eating or drinking without making some type of noise. “Awe, look, she secured the table furthest from the jocks.”
“Because they suck?” you offered, unhelpfully.
“Anything else you’d like to say about my boyfriend?”
“Tell him I said, ‘Hi’, since I know you’re about to ditch me for him.”
“Wow, you know me so well. It’s seriously scary sometimes. Enjoy your lunch date,” she said, waving her carton of milk at you. “And you can thank me later, by the way, and properly. Like, with snacks and story time. Okay?”
This bitch.
“Oh, ‘kay then…”
You’d wanted to lean on Jimin as a social crutch, but that wasn’t going to happen, apparently. So, you approached Yoonji, as calmly as you could manage, which was a solid twenty percent out of a whopping one hundred. If she’d noticed, she didn’t let on.
Instead, she asked, “What happened to sparkles?”
Oh.
It was possible that Yoonji only agreed, because of Jimin was there. It was an addictive sort of energy that your friend tended to give off, a very positive and friendly vibe that everyone wanted a piece of.
“You mean mochi sparkles? She spotted her boyfriend, who just so happens to be a bunny. Mochi and bunnies go together. Who knew?” You placed the tray of food down on the table, trying not to make it obvious that half of it was intended for her. You laughed at the arrangement, as though it wasn’t purposeful. “I think I bought too much. Way too much, in fact.”
“Almost like an identical serving for two,” Yoonji said, letting you know that she knew – she knew, she wasn’t dumb, and you would never assume that she was, but there was underlying anger within the tone that she was using. It was a pleasantly sarcastic lilt that had your mind forgetting its function. “Two soups, two sandwiches, two drinks. All accidental? Do you make these mistakes often?”
“Not u-usually,” you stammered, wondering if you’d offended her. “I don’t like eating alone, s-so whatever you don’t eat, I’ll give to someone else, or it’ll get tossed. It’s really no big deal.”
“Bullshit.”
The nervous smile you’ve been giving her fell from your face, shoulders visibly slumping. Admittedly, you weren’t used to confrontation. You sure as fuck weren’t prepared for Yoonji’s wrath.
“What?”
“You eat alone all the fucking time. In the library, which isn’t even allowed, so however you manage that, probably with magic, or whatever the fuck – congratulations. The music room, you’re always off to the side, nibbling away on your gimbap. Let us not forget,” One side of her mouth was curled into a derisive smirk, going on and on like she was Sherlock fucking Holmes, about to hand your ass over to Scotland Yard, “…the gym, where you’re usually snacking on something banana flavored, pretending like you give a shit about basketball, which I’m pretty sure you don’t. Bullshit you don’t like eating alone. Just say it. This is all out of pity, isn’t it? New girl from Daegu can’t afford a meal? Let’s invite her to lunch?”
What left your mouth next was neither a word nor a syllable, but was a long shaky breath. Your fingertips were cold with anxiety, in shock that Yoonji would perceive your intentions as pity. The dark look in her eyes was like black ice, full of tempered rage that was about to unleash with one wrong move.
Meanwhile, all of those times you thought she never saw you, she did. She did. She’d listed every occasion, oblivious to the fact that it was to become closer to her.
“That’s not,” you whispered, shaking your head. You felt weakened by her accusation. “I could never do those things or think that way about you.”
“What? Did you think that by being charitable that it would make you seem like a good person? Hate to break it to you, Bambi, but the world doesn’t work that way. So, stop giving me those fucking eyes.” She settled back onto the bench, bringing a leg up so that she could rest her arm against it. Due to the cold weather, female students had the option of wearing sweatpants beneath their skirts. Yoonji did this more often than not. “We’re not going to be friends, but I am going to eat all of this food,” she said calmly, although her words were dripping with spite. “I mean, you bought half of it just for me. Out of the kindness of your heart…”
By now you’d lost the nerve to eat, let alone to continue on with a conversation where Yoonji painted you as a horrible person. You were the villain in this pseudo-fairytale you’ve thought up. You could only hope that it was not Jafar – anyone but that turd, although his beard was pretty legit, and majestic. Great. Now you were envisioning Yoonji in a hot red Arabian harem garment, chained at the wrists, feeding you fruit, and wine…
You had fucking problems.
She proceeded with what she said she was going to do, ripping the plastic off the sandwich, dipping her soup spoon into the spicy jjiggae. She shoveled food into her mouth like this was her only meal within the past week. At this rate, she’d probably end up with an upset stomach, but you couldn’t say anything. Instead, you watched the way her mouth parted for each bite, her complexion flushed due to the spices.
You could cry. You might do just that, but not in front of her.
“Thank you for eating with me,” you said, grabbing for your bag with trembling hands.
She stared at you when you got up from the bench, “You didn’t even touch your food. Sit.”
You shut your eyes for a moment, trying to cancel her out, because you wanted to obey that voice so badly.
“You know, there’s a reason why you always saw me eating alone so often. We only have one class together and lunchtime was the only time to…” You stopped yourself, because nope, you weren’t that brave yet. You repeated the statement. “It was the only time.”
She grew quiet then, too quiet for comfort. A deep pout settled against her jjiggae stained lips and you could tell that she was assessing you – all of you, your words, and actions. You could literally feel her picking you apart into pieces, searching for more faults. You shifted under her gaze, bringing your bag to your chest. A single bow, because no, you two weren’t friends, and you weren’t going to see her for the remainder of the day.
You probably wouldn’t see her at all outside of Literature class. No more being a weirdo and eating lunch in super obvious places.
It was time to put your fixation with Princess Yoonji to bed.
Time passed slowly. You noticed every cruel, drawn out moment of it. Lunch might’ve been the only time to see Yoonji, but now it wasn’t. You’d spent your lunch period at a table full of jocks, watching Jimin feed her oversized baby bunny his fries. Jung Hoseok would yet again, bark up the wrong tree, despite being shot down on numerous occasions.
“You know who I saw yesterday?” Hoseok asked and really, you hated these types of questions.
You shrugged, because seriously, “Who?”
“Yoonji. She was working the counter at the cat café.” Well, of course she was. She too was a cat and sometimes cats work with other cats. It all made sense. “But I also saw her working at olive bbq just last week. She’s a busy girl. Probably sick of seeing my face by now.”
Your crazy mind was already thinking of all the olive bbq’s in the area, as well as cat cafés, except you weren’t about that life anymore. Nope, Yoonji handling cute, cuddly, flooofy cats, and choosing the right kitty for you would have to wait, indefinitely. Yoonji handling an order of spicy chicken would have to wait, too. Knowing her though, she’d get angry over a generous tip. How dare you.
Even a week later, you still couldn’t escape from Yoonji.
You didn’t bother with responding to him, as you took your tray to the garbage, and walked out of the busy lunchroom. Even when you heard Jimin calling your name, you did not stop – couldn’t, even if you’d wanted to. Your arms felt too loose, fingertips too cold, an oncoming panic attack ready to be set off. Escape. Abort it all. Just as you’d felt the sudden urge to run, to pick up your heart rate – it had all come to a stop. Your body had collided with something firm. Not a wall, but a person. A glimpse of the beat up converse, sweatpants, and skirt combo should have been enough to properly deduce it, but it would be rather unusual to see Yoonji here.
A hand on your arm stabled you and pulled you in, bringing you out of oncoming student traffic. You almost didn’t want to look. But you did, stuck in your own version of hell, where round-the-clock torture was helplessly staring up at an unimpressed Yoonji. The panic in your bones slowly eased, having no other choice but to regain control, as though her mere presence was enough to subdue your fears.
She smirked down at you, voice somewhat smug, “You’re real short, you know that, Bambi?”
The nickname wasn’t going anywhere.
“Yeah,” You sighed, still calming down. You’ve heard that numerous times. “But why can no one get over it?”
There was cat fur clinging to the hoody that she was wearing under her school blazer, the hood thrown over her head with silky black bangs falling just beneath her brows. The halls quieted, leaving you both standing there with the muffled sounds of hip-hop music coming through her headphones. Even when you dropped your arm down, she hadn’t bothered letting you go.
“Probably because it’s really cute,” she said – Wait, what?
“Nothing I do is cute and I’m not even trying to fish, this is just fact,” you said, voice shaking with nerves, as you looked down to where her fingers were still curled in your sleeve. Silver adorned fingers, so many rings. Black matte painted nails. Yoonji’s hands were nice to look at and oh – kay, you were doing that thing again. Focus.
She shook her head, disagreeing. However, “I noticed that you’re around a lot less lately.”
Was there any reason why you should be around? You wanted to say those words, could feel them on the tip of your tongue, ready to come out. Coward. You were a damn coward.
“It made me think that maybe,” she started, licking at her too red lips, drawing your attention to them. Fuck whenever she pouted when she talked, which was always. “…you’d actually wanted to be friends? Look, my attitude is total shit, I know.”
“No, it’s uhm…” You don’t even know where to begin on the subject of Yoonji. You tried though, rolling your wrist so that you could hold onto the hand she’d snagged your sleeve with. She hadn’t even flinched at the contact, unblinking. “I like your personality. I do. I like that you’re standing here in a hallway with me, apologizing, kind of, in your own way, while rap music plays through your earbuds.”
You hesitated, because now you’re dangerously close to outing yourself.
“Tell me,” she said, firmly. The space separating you both dwindled, as she took a persistent step closer. You leaned your back against the wall behind you, not trusting your legs. “Whatever made you pause just now, forget about it, and tell me.”
“I…”
“Bambi.”
Fuck.
Your response was a classic, one that no human deserved the right to use – truly. In a world where words had failed you, but actions would not – you reached for the side of Yoonji’s face, cold fingers slipping beneath her short black hair, brushing over the silver studs along the lobe of her ear. Her skin was soft and hot, it was everything, but your mind was not able to keep up fast enough to fully appreciate it. What you hadn’t been expecting, was Yoonji to lean into your touch with her dark, catlike eyes burning into you.
And despite making the first move, Yoonji was the one who kissed first. It was all wet, firm pressure, and too short-lived. You’d smelled the strawberry gloss, before you tasted it, running your tongue over your bottom lip when she pulled back, savoring it.
Her voice was low, yet noticeably affected, “Was that okay?”
You dropped your hand from her face, not trusting yourself not to lean back in for another kiss. You nodded, shyly, “Yes.”
“Good girl,” she said, brushing her thumb over her own mouth, fixing you with a lopsided smirk. It was provocative and heated. It was the sexiest thing you’d ever seen.
Don’t judge a cat by the size of its claws.
Literature class.
The professor was still very much invested in making it through the Brothers Grimm tales. The strangest part was when Yoonji volunteered this week. Your girlfriend wanted to read aloud by her own volition. It was suspicious and intriguing. However, once she’d read the story title, it all made sense. An angry flush covered your skin, as you quietly watched Yoonji go on.
She crossed one leg over the other, a slender hand poised so that she could lean comfortably against the podium. Her dark eyes flickered to yours every so often, utterly pleased with herself, ‘Inside sat a tiny girl, no bigger than a thumb. The woman called her Thumbelina. For a bed she had a walnut shell…’
The lengths she’d go to just to make a short joke were impressive. If Jimin were here, she’d be rolling. That was alright. You had plans for Yoonji. The good, ‘fuck you’ type of revenge that would either land you deeply satisfied or devastatingly single. Tonight was a home game for the girls basketball team. It was also the last of the season. You’d get to sit on the bleachers and look pretty, rooting for moonlight aka the bringer of storms aka Min Yoonji. She was twice as foulmouthed while out on the court, aggressive in all her competitive endeavors. Okay, so maybe you enjoyed watching her play.
The only difference was that now you had access to Taehyeon’s closet – Hoseok’s new girlfriend, who somehow managed to smile in the shape of a box. It was kind of cute. Both she and Jimin were rays of sunshine in your life, blinding, yet necessary. And although you hadn’t known Taehyeon for as long as Jimin had, it took no time for you to get close to her.
Yoonji waited for you after class, not outside, but right at your desk. You stood up and slung your bag over your shoulder.
“Thumbelina,” was all you had to say.
She hummed, amusedly, “It was appropriate and worth all the social awkwardness.”
You were still trying to adjust to her newly silver dyed hair and the shorter cut that had come with it. It made her look all hot and androgynous – and you were pretty much screwed. It took effort to refrain from cooing at her for the umpteenth time, going on about how cute – how gorgeous – how perfect the color and haircut looked on her. How well it went with her soft pale skin and dark clothes. If your two friends were the sun, then Yoonji was pure moonlight, and you needed both.
“But was it worth me making this face at you?” You asked, trying your best to embody the cat from Shrek.
Yoonji deadpanned, “I think you already know the answer to that.” Then she slid her fingers between yours, going by routine, steering you into the direction of the lunchroom.
You stopped before going in, knowing that this was as far as she’d take you anyway. Yoonji was still not up for eating with jocks, despite being the female equivalent of one. “After lunch, Jimin and I are gonna go to Tae’s for a little bit. So, I won’t be able to watch you practice before the game tonight.”
She narrowed her eyes, visibly vexed by that, “That’s a lot of pretty girls in one room.”
“Pretty girls with boyfriends,” you reminded her, which was a fact she already knew, since residing within your friendship circle for almost a month now. “Besides, I can’t be stolen from you. Unless, that’s like, an easy thing that can be accomplished? Should I worry about all of the girls you rub up on during games? And my friends aren’t just girls, but they’re pretty girls?”
“I get it,” she said, waving off your point. “I just don’t like it, but I’ll get over it. You’ll be at the game though, correct?”
You shrugged, “By that time, I might find myself in a threesome I won’t be able to refuse. Pretty friends and all. We’ll have to see.”
She pulled you away from the doors, backing you up between the wall and the drink machine. It was a small space, which was something that Yoonji seemed to enjoy all too much – small spaces, with her small girlfriend. No matter where you were, it seemed. In this particular spot, she was tugging at your lips, pulling on them until they were swollen red from the abuse. A soft whimper into her mouth made her grow more impatient to have you, slender fingers at your throat keeping you still.
Your kept your eyes closed long after the heady kisses had ended, feeling a little too hot and needy for her. The familiar ache at the pit of your stomach reminded you of just how easy you were for Min Yoonji. How just a single kiss could tear you into pieces, skin flushed deeply, panting even though you’d had more than enough air, like you’d been deprived. The hands at your throat tightened a fraction and your head tipped back by its force.
Her breath reached your skin, “Look at me, Bambi.”
You did as she asked of you and felt imposed by what awaited you the moment that you did, meeting the heavy stare that you were no longer a stranger to, able to tell the difference between what was Yoonji’s usual look of iciness versus a darkening expression of lust. She wanted you. No matter what the circumstances were, you would want her, too. Her mouth twitched into a knowing smirk, aware of the effects she had on you.
“It isn’t very nice of you to try and make me jealous,” she sighed, words lightly skimming your lips. “You know I don’t like it and yet…” She dropped a hand to the hem of your skirt, dark eyes watching you intently, as she ran her fingers along the top of your thigh, bringing the material with her, “…you continue to tempt me as though I wouldn’t fuck you right here just to make myself feel a little bit better.”
You caught her wrist the moment she’d conquered a questionable length of skin. Even if her closeness hid you from view, it was still dangerous. Saying no to her was difficult, for the both of you. Yoonji’s auto-response was to draw you in closer by your neck, brushing your lips together in slow, languid drags. For a moment, you’d thought it would melt away your resolve. You might actually allow her to have her way with you right here at school.
“Take a picture, so we can use it as blackmail.” The familiar voice startled you away from your girlfriend, which proved to have failed anyway, what with being pinned between Yoonji and the wall. Jimin had her arms crossed, openly judging. Oh, damn it.
Jeongguk tilted his head, considering it, “I might.”
“Well, that killed it for me,” Yoonji said, removing her hand from your skirt. Not wanting to give any nearby jocks the satisfaction, as she placed a quick kiss against your forehead, and said her goodbyes to the rest of your friends – for your sake. One last look at your embarrassed and slightly debauched state had her simpering, “See you at the game.”
Taehyeon’s room was the size of a shoebox. Her closet, however, was big enough to make even Carrie Bradshaw jealous. It was probably the only reason why she put up with it. There was a single bookshelf dedicated to manhwa and handheld devices with the games stacked high consisting of otomes. Next to her bed was a collection of fashion magazines and an even bigger pile of sewing patterns.
“You should wear this beret,” Taehyeon said, removing it from its limited edition box. “…with the short black skirt and the thigh highs.”
Jimin was over on the bed, chipping away at last week’s nail polish. “I know it’s the last game of the season, but is this really necessary? I’ve been telling you to wear shorter skirts since the beginning of time.”
Taehyeon answered before you could even open your mouth, “One, I’m shocked that this is coming from you and two…yes, it’s necessary. You should dress up every day. It’s empowering and it feels nice.”
Jimin practically rolled her eyes in defeat, “Whatever.”
Despite being smaller, the skirt fit exactly how Taehyeon knew that it would, dangerously short, and super tight around the waist. The shirt was a simple striped, long sleeve – matching the black and red beret. Accessories were not your thing, but Taehyeon had plenty, allowing you to borrow her jewelry. The prettiest item was the black ribbon choker. You joined Jimin in retouching your makeup, using her dark red lipstick when she’d offered it. You’d never been so daring, but tonight was about driving Yoonji out of her mind, so why not?
Your friends never partook in watching Yoonji’s games, which was fine, but not really? Taehyeon dropped you off on the east end of campus, since it was the closest to the gym. Your two friends were leaving you stranded to catch a movie. It was rather sad, considering that crowds made you feel uneasy. You always made sure to sit on the bottom bleachers, so that if need be, you could easily escape.
Tonight wasn’t about your anxiety, though. It was about being supportive. The moment you caught a glimpse of silver hair, you were deeply reminded of that fact. Yoonji was in her dark red jersey, padded brace supports on both legs, which were just as distracting as your thigh highs. A Nike headband kept her bangs out of her eyes for the most part, balm making her mouth look rosy, and slick. Now this was a look, a whole meal in fact. You loved it. The only thing better was when she started searching the busy room for you, even while the coach was speaking directly to her.
Being stared at was intense enough, but one look from Yoonji was enough to set your skin ablaze. The moment she found you, she’d paused completely, and it was the same for you, too – everything seemed to stop within that moment, even your breathing. The contact from sight felt no different from touch, as she dragged her eyes across your body with slow deliberateness, taking in all the obvious changes to your outfit.
You watched the way her pouty lips fell apart, kitten tongue flashing out, before she cocked a slender brow at your newfound bravado. You felt more than vulnerable within that moment, like you were about to be devoured whole. Being in trouble with her was exhilarating. Disobeying, misbehaving, being defiant – these things made for a very impatient Min Yoonji, not that she had much of it to begin with.
The captain walked with her out onto the court, Nam Joonhee. You were introduced once before. It was obvious that Yoonji was woefully distracted and you’d almost felt bad about it – almost. She shook her head at you, casting you a long meaningful look, before the match started. You’ve had Yoonji explain her position to you plenty of times. She was a point guard, because she was the best at handling the ball. Quick – quick at passing, quick at dribbling, quick at bringing the ball to the opposing team’s basket.
Yoonji was especially good at long distance shooting. Every time she bounced up to take a jump shot, it was usually a secured point. Hell, you’d seen her shoot and then turn her back on it, because she knew that it would land. Your girlfriend was like that, insufferably smug about most things, prone to catty hair flips, full of conceit – a self-proclaimed genius.
You sat through two hours worth of Yoonji running her mouth, sending the double birds to one of the tallest members of her own team. The more physically exhausted she’d become, the more invigorated she felt by it, sweat glistening at the back of her neck, as she strained for another basket. Halftime, timeouts, the typical highs and lows of a long game, the threat of the opposite team catching up, of scoring a point, of another girl getting way too close to Yoonji – blocking her movements, crowding her in, nearly shoving her down. It had you on edge.
The match ended with a one point difference, Yoonji’s team reigning victorious. Usually the girls would head into the locker room, but it looked as though Yoonji was saying her goodbyes early, patting the back of the same girl she’d flipped off earlier. Seokgenie her name was, if you remembered correctly. A visible pause – Yoonji’s body straightened with tension when she looked over her shoulder at you, dark eyes on yours then, which had been a frequented action throughout the game. Time could not prepare you for how fast she’d closed the distance, wordlessly grabbing you by your wrist, and hauling you out the double doors.
The silence was to be expected, as she brought you further away from the crowd, away from everyone so that no one could hear you screaming bloody murder. You noticed the route she was taking. The school bathrooms were kept unlocked during the game.
Yoonji practically hurled you far ahead from where she stood, releasing your wrist with enough force to send you into the counter. You’d caught yourself with your palms against the surface. A wild angry Yoonji appears.
She gestured with a finger, pointing from the top of your beret down to your boots, “Who’s closet did you raid, because it sure as shit wasn’t yours.”
“Taehyeon’s…” you said, attempting to tug your skirt down. It kept riding up, the damn thing. “I thought you’d like it.”
Yoonji tilted her head at you, eyes narrowed like you should know better, “We can both agree that it’s not your style.”
“Maybe it is now,” you said, shrugging in nonchalance. Why did it have to be a thing? Not that it was much of a threat, but, “Be prepared for a new collection of miniskirts and thigh highs.”
She chuckled softly at that, lacking any real amusement, “Oh, my sweet Bambi. You know as well as I do that tonight was all about distracting me. You wanted my attention all to yourself, didn’t you?” Striking the figurative match, she continued, “Your behavior is coming off as rather needy as of late.”
Needy? Oh.
“I never meant to distract you, but since we’re on the topic. Let’s say that I was trying to do just that, I’d say it worked. You did miss that layup when I started fixing my stockings,” you said, voice trembling at the end of your sentence when she started coming closer. You followed her pace, carefully stepping backwards each time she advanced. “The end score was only a one point difference. You could have lost the game all because of me.”
The heavy glare she’d settled on you was enough to let you know that there was truth to your statement. “Yeah, we could have,” she agreed with you, taking a moment to pause, becoming absolutely still. Perhaps pointing out her mistakes wasn’t a good idea on your part, you could see that now – could feel it within the intensity of a single glance. “My head was elsewhere, but that was your fault. I kept thinking about what I’d do to you once I finally got you alone. Take my time bringing you back to my place, so that I could fuck you with that pretty new toy we picked out, but you know me. I’ve never been any good at being patient.”
You nodded, well aware of the fact that she liked to go fast. Dating Yoonji was something you had always envisioned as a slow affair filled with shyness, and timid firsts. When, no less than a week after she’d kissed you in the hallway, she had you screaming into her Lord Nermal bedding, making you come against the firm press of her mouth, her tongue still fucking into you after you’d been sated – wanting more from you.
“Looks like you’re out of room,” Yoonji observed with mock pity, watching as your back met the stall and you startled at the contact. She was careful not to touch you at first, even when she’d been close enough to do so, which drove you absolutely mad. Instead, she reached for the lock, and twisted it so that the door opened. You fell inside with little grace and quickly found yourself being pinned to the surface once it’d been closed and relocked.
Yoonji’s skin was still damp with sweat, the ends of her silver hair soaked. The smell was a heady mix of her perfume and two hours’ worth of exertion. At this closeness, her eyes fluttered painfully slow, thick dark lashes framing pretty kitten shaped eyes, her pupils dilated with want, staring at you with a slow curl of her red lips.
“Are you ready for my undivided attention?” she taunted, pressing the full length of her body against your own, lips falling against your temple with each word, “This is what you wanted, baby. You wanted to dress like a slut for me and now I get to treat you like one.”
You were frustrated, petulant in a way that only she seemed to bring out of you, “That’s not what I was trying–”
She touched her cool hands to your face, pulling you into a kiss that was deceptively light, and sweet. You knew that it was an apology for the wreck that was about to happen, because the next pull of your lips was with her teeth, the sharp pain causing you to whimper. She soothed you with her tongue, mouth pliant when she licked into your mouth, growing more invested with sucking, and nipping at you every time you attempted to regain any semblance of control.
Your lipstick was sure to be smeared, since Yoonji was wearing it now, the dark shade of wild berries staining her pale skin. It was hot – it shouldn’t be, but it was.
The shirt you wore was purposefully low cut, revealing a few straps of your bralette. She’d once commented on how it looked a lot like a harness on you, enjoying the thought of it. Yoonji’s breasts were small, which was probably why she played with yours so much. They were full, big enough to avoid button ups since the age of twelve, cringing at the catcalls you still managed to receive, even on days where your chest was bound, because you hated them so much. Hated, although with the way Yoonji practically worshipped them, you were starting to gain confidence.
She pulled your shirt over your head, arms already raised to assist her, when she stopped – allowing the fitted material to serve as its own restraints. You tucked your hands above your head into a more comfortable position, a breath escaping when she closed her fingers around your throat. The pressure slight, just enough to remind you that you were hers, “I’m still gonna take you home after this…” Her other hand was teasing below the many straps. “…so you can ride me on that cute little cock we bought. I wanna watch your tits bounce. Bet you’d look so pretty. Would you like that?”
Your thighs closed against the ache you felt, clenching painfully around nothing, but you needed – needed so badly to be filled by her. She tightened her fingers when your response was delayed too long for her liking, “Words.”
It was difficult, your mind becoming hazy with want. You wanted her however you could have her. You managed a small, “Yes, please.”
She released her grip on you to pull at the front of your bralette. The straps were adjusted lower, trapping your nipples between the thin lines of the material, exposing you further. Yoonji’s hands were pleasantly larger than yours, weighing your breasts within her palms, short black nails digging into your sensitive skin as she bent down to tease – encircling an erect bud with her tongue, before sucking messily – the sound of it was twice as loud given your surroundings. You were already trembling. Each time she brought your sensitive skin into the hot suction of her mouth, the pleasure shot straight to your core.
You tried moving your arms, on the brink of desperation, “I want…ahh…to touch you…” Her only response was a sharp nip of her teeth, fingers growing more possessive when she gripped and kneaded at your hips. Yoonji’s lips were the color of cherries, swollen red from working over your skin. You shrunk against the surface when she stood at full height, staring at you from behind strands of silver hair, wiping the saliva from the corners of her mouth.
“Wanna be good for me?” she asked, leaning into you so she could tug your shirt off the rest of the way. She moved back before you could reach for her, making it clear that you weren’t permitted to do so. “The point of this is that I get to do whatever I want with you, not the other way around. Now lift up your skirt.”
True to tonight’s theme, this wasn’t really your style, either, which was probably why your face was on fire. You were reduced to a shy, anxious mess. She knew it, too, eyes as black as charcoal, challenging you to dare be defiant. Your fingers uncurled from your sides to slowly pull the fabric high enough for her to see your panties – the same panties that had nothing to do with the rest of your outfit.
“Tinkerbelle,” Yoonji noted, the Disney character print of your underwear was endearing to her, heavy gaze alit with amusement. “This is more you, isn’t it? Nothing like the little slut you’d come dressed as, hm?”
The words slipped past your lips, before you could stop them, “Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? You’re really in no position to be saying that...” There was a hint of Daegu satoori in the lazy drawl of her words, the inflection doing something to you all on its own. All Yoonji had to do was whisper into your ear and you would be a mess. She laughed at your obvious struggle, the derisive sound turning you on more than it had angered you, “My sweet, sweet Bambi.”
She leaned down, immediately parting your lips with her tongue so she could fill you. You loved when Yoonji kissed you – loved how she took her time with it. She was thorough, drifting over your teeth, along the roof of your mouth. Yoonji stole whenever she kissed, consumed and tasted every bit of you, until it felt like you couldn’t breathe. You hummed, easily falling captive when her hand moved past your stomach, slipping beneath the cotton of your panties.
You were clean shaven, which wasn’t news to her, but she still groaned at how smooth you felt. It was difficult to focus on the hot tongue delving between your lips, when she slid her middle finger between your soaked folds, gathering your arousal and coating you with it, making each touch afterwards slippery, and wet. You rolled your hips against her palm, breaking the kiss with a sharp gasp – forgetting about where this was happening.
“Wanna know what gets me off?” Yoonji teased, speaking into your lips. You nodded slowly, nose to nose with her. You wanted to know. You really, really did. She leaned in so that she could say the rest against your ear, her mouth pressing firmly. It caused your shoulders to scrunch up. She murmured, thickly, “Getting you off.”
Yoonji was…impossible. You would have said so if you could, but words were too hard a task when her lips wandered down the side of your neck, expertly swirling her tongue – marking you in several spots. Marking was her new thing, although it was usually in less obvious places. You would have to hide these, but she didn’t seem to care. Not even you cared, becoming lost to the incessant strokes of her delicate fingers, the way she allowed you to grind against them, moving at whatever pace you desired.
The sharp sting of her teeth along your collarbone made your legs tremble, the molten heat at your lower stomach ready to unfurl. You were shameless when you were gone. The small moans and quickened breaths resounded harshly off the bathroom walls. You were so painfully close, teetering over the edge when she wedged a finger in deep, pulling back far enough to watch your downfall – pushing in another digit, pumping them in and out of you.
You were thrown off – orgasm delayed for only a few short seconds longer, as she rocked the heel of her palm against your clit, making you come in white pulses of intense pleasure. She waited for your muscles to relax, before slowly removing her fingers. You finally closed your eyes, expelling the air from your lungs in one shaky breath.
“Yoonji…” Fuck. That was amazing. Your head was resting against the stall door, body still thrumming with energy. The high you felt then could conquer anything, when your panties were suddenly being torn down past your thighs. You stepped out of them somewhat dazedly. Your girlfriend was kneeling on the tiles, the padding from her basketball gear supporting her knees.
The sight was enough to kill you dead.
She brought your leg up to rest atop her shoulder, nuzzling into your stocking covered thigh, her teeth catching on the fabric like needles over silk. You should have known that she wouldn’t be done with you. She never truly was, proven time and time again to be the insatiable one.
“Spread yourself for me, baby,” were the words pressed into your skin, as impatient fingers pulled at your thigh highs. She was hungry for more of you, eagerly sucking and nipping her way closer towards the mess she’d created between your thighs. You were always so easy for her, obeying despite the brief wave of apprehension, parting yourself wide for her.
The look she sent you made chills run down your spine – her eyes pools of black, peering up at you from behind her long, pretty lashes. You knew that you were well and truly fucked.
She wasted no time, covering you with the tight heat of her mouth, drinking you in – her kittenish tongue curling into the sticky arousal at your raw pink entrance, slurping lewdly, wanting it all for herself. The deep moan she elicited struck you at your very core. You were already so sensitive and you both knew that it wouldn’t take much. The sounds of her tongue darting inside you were loud in your ears and you swore you could hear shoes scuffing across the school floors nearby.
It made you all the more desperate to come.
“Yoonji, more…” you pleaded, breathlessly. She was all too willing to oblige you, replacing her tongue with two of her fingers, pressing down in a way that made you feel deliciously full, before she pushed in a third – stretching you, filling you to the brim. You stared down at her somewhat helplessly and swore that her eyes grew darker then. The moment she trapped your clit between her lips, it was over.
With her nails biting into your skin, she kept your leg still, as she started flicking her tongue back and forth in rhythm with her fingers thrusting into you. You’d spiraled so high, so fast. The second orgasm was always more intense for you, the tight pressure of your walls clenching around her as you came. You could feel her lavish around and between her digits with her soft tongue, soothing you through your orgasm, licking you clean.
What the hell just happened?
Yoonji carefully set your foot back on the ground, her slim arms catching you around the waist when you’d slumped forward. Your name was on her lips, as she murmured gentle things to you, trying to bring you back into focus. She pressed you more firmly against the door, brushing your hair away from your face, her fingers cold in contrast to your heated skin. Now she smelled like you. You made a face at that, hearing her chuckle.
“We should wash up,” she said, helping you get dressed, but refusing to return your panties? It wouldn’t be the first pair she’d kept, but now you’d have to face the public, commando. She held the cotton within her palm, before pointing at you accusingly, “Think of it as your punishment. Maybe don’t try to distract me next time. You already do a good enough job as it is. This whole thing was just overkill.”
You rolled your eyes at the weak excuse, as you picked up the beret that had been knocked off your head at some point. Taehyeon would kill you if she ever found out. You adjusted it, as you started fixing your hair in the mirror. You could feel Yoonji’s eyes watching you, practically burning into your skin.
“What?” You asked, meeting her reflection in the mirror above the sink. You rinsed your hands under the faucet.
She shook her head, knowing it was probably ridiculous, but, “I’m thinking of how I’m going to make it to the car without touching you.”
Your mouth went dry.
Oh.
Lunch at the jock table was less painful when your girlfriend decided to join one day. Jimin was pleasantly surprised when she took a seat down beside you, a tray of food in her hands. Taehyeon was practically beaming, sending you a knowing look, having sat through so many venting sessions – listening to you go on and on about how much it bothered you that Yoonji never partook.
“Why so surprised?” she asked, nudging the tray close to you. “I bought us lots of bread. For you, for me, and the cats…” You were excited to go to work with her later. Yoonji tended to smile a lot around cats. Not just any smile, but the big gummy smile – the same one that caused you to sweat and have heart palpitations.
Noticing that you were zoning out, she started kissing at your cheek, once – twice – five times, before her hand fell to your waist, pulling you as close as she could get you without having you on her lap.
Jeongguk seemed unsettled, cheeks flushed a deep pink. Jimin brushed her hand over his skin, cupping his face and whispering something into his pierced ear. You only heard the end of what she’d said, reassuring him, “I’ll ask soon, okay?”
“Nah, ask now,” Yoonji said, pinning Jeongguk beneath her eyes. “And let him say it. I really wanna hear the words from this fucker.”
You turned towards your girlfriend, sincerely confused. “What is happening?”
“I want to see you two…” Jeongguk started, words nearly dying on his tongue. The intensity of Yoonji’s glare was intimidating and maybe he liked that a little too much. He motioned towards Jimin, “I would like for us and for you…”
“The only dick my girlfriend is getting, is mine,” Yoonji said, simplifying it for him. “We’re flattered though.”
“And you?” Jimin asked, somewhat hesitantly. Yoonji was hot. The entire table would merrily agree with that notion. If Taehyeon and Hoseok weren’t so speechless, perhaps they’d inquire themselves. “Whose dick will you be receiving?”
“I’m not interested in dick,” Yoonji said, keeping her eyes on Jeongguk’s, her expression turning sinister. “So, you should be careful. Maybe not offer your girlfriends up like they’re sacrificial offerings.”
“Duly noted,” Hoseok quipped, smiling so hard that his eyes were gone. Probably vacationing at some fantasy at the back of his mind, one where Taehyeon was dancing in a martini glass.
Yoonji brought a piece of cream bread to your lips, acting casual, “You have weird friends.”
You nodded, “Yeah, I just found that out.”
“Still want me to come and sit with you at lunch?”
“Nope. Never again, in fact,” you said, prepared for things to go back to normal starting tomorrow.
She buried her face into your neck, her soft laugh tickling your skin, “I didn’t think so.”
Min Yoonji, your insufferable girlfriend.
A Disney princess from Daegu.
Dracula’s third cousin.
The storm and the moon.
Yoonji…
“Bambi.”
Fin~
#noonanet#yoonji x reader#btsxreader#bts smut#bts scenarios#bts fan fics#min yoonji#min yoongi x reader#fem!suga#fem!yoongi#snow white & bambi#f x f#genderswap#gender bend
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How about Michael Jackson's Thriller for Victor and Yuuri?
ohohooo hoohOHOhhohOHO who wants an izombie au? no one? cool, more zombies for me 👈😎👈 warning for some light gore, ofc
Yuuri isn’t exactly sure what he’d expected from his new roommate. Viktor Nikiforov is pale, a bit gaunt, with silver hair cut into a fringe across one of his eyes, both of which are very heavily shadowed as if he either had recently escaped from a dark basement with no food, or he’s just exceedingly into the goth aesthetic.
He also has a residency at the local morgue, so the goth theory is probably very likely.
Despite the fact that they’re living together in the same apartment, Viktor very rarely seems to be around, and whenever he is, Yuuri rarely ever sees the man eat. He knows Viktor eats – he can hear him rummaging through the fridge at night when he’s cooped up in his own room FaceTiming Phichit to make sure he and Seung-gil are handling his move-in well. He tells Phichit about it, and Phichit laughs, saying that sometimes people don’t like to be looked at when they eat.
Yuuri doesn’t blame his new roommate too much. Viktor seems to be having a rough time of it, considering how much he had emphasised his nonexistent social life when Yuuri had been interviewing him. Apparently he’d gone to exactly one party in this past year, and given that said party had been the Lake Paulsen Massacre, Yuuri is pretty sure the guy just has a severe case of post-traumatic stress or something.
Still, there’s something that Viktor’s hiding. Yuuri knows he shouldn’t pry, shouldn’t keep tabs on Viktor’s behaviours whenever he’s in the room, but it’s far too much of a curiosity for him to bear. Viktor seems to have a strong fondness for hot sauce, given all the new bottles of it that pop up. He also keeps a separate set of pots and pans, and sometimes the flat smells like heavily-sprayed Febreze when Yuuri returns to it. Under the Febreze there’s a distinct strong odour. Yuuri isn’t sure if he wants to know. Maybe Viktor just has a fondness for pungent food or something.
He’s determined to get to the bottom of this, though, if only for his own peace of mind. So one night, he broaches the suggestion to cook for Viktor.
“I know how to make pork cutlet bowls, if you’d like,” he says.
Viktor blinks at him from where he’s seated in front of the TV. “What’s that?”
“Breaded pork cutlet and rice?” asks Yuuri, frowning slightly. “It’s my favourite comfort food, and you look like you could do with some.”
“Oh.” Viktor nods. “I’m sorry, Yuuri, I have special dietary needs.”
“You’re a vegetarian?” asks Yuuri.
Viktor snorts at that, but then catches himself. “No,” he says. “It’s something else. Don’t worry about it, Yuuri, I can cook for myself.”
“I just wanted…” Yuuri trails off, feeling his cheeks flare. “I’m sorry if I come off as a bother. I just wanted us to get to know each other better.”
“You’re not a bother.” Viktor’s eyes are soft, gentle, slightly regretful. “I’d love to get to know you better, but maybe just not while cooking.”
Yuuri laughs at that, but he drops the subject.
The thing is, Viktor is strange sometimes, and that’s even factoring in all the strangeness from before with his special diet (apparently replete with hot sauce) and his odd hours of eating. Sometimes he’s friendlier, sometimes he’s surlier. Sometimes he’s more outgoing, sometimes he’s reserved. Yuuri can’t seem to pin him down precisely, especially when Viktor pauses, and stares off into the distance for a moment before returning to earth, as if he’d suddenly had an epiphany of some kind and won’t tell anyone about it.
Yuuri’s curiosity is rewarded, though, one night when he returns late from his shift at the Cherry Flip, his and Phichit’s small bakery. It’d been unplanned – there’d been a body discovered in the dumpster out back, and the police had closed down shop in order to take everyone in for questioning. Yuuri had stayed to make sure everything was all right and the police had all the answers (namely, that neither he nor Phichit knew how that body happened to end up in their dumpster), and so it’s past his usual dinnertime when he walks into his apartment and into the sight of Viktor Nikiforov biting into a piece of brain at the kitchen island.
“Viktor?” Yuuri asks, and Viktor looks up, face even paler than Yuuri remembers as he shifts to obscure his dinner from view. Slowly, Yuuri steps back out of the apartment, trying to blink away the image of the brain – at least, it looks very undeniably like one, albeit diced and seasoned – speared on Viktor’s fork from his mind’s eye.
And then he opens the apartment door again and steps inside once more.
The kitchen island is now clean, obviously devoid of anything vaguely brain-like or food-like. Viktor is washing his hands at the sink, and when he smiles at Yuuri, it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Yuuri focuses on the plate depicting a rooster right above Viktor’s shoulder. “So, uh, did you get that from work?” he asks.
The faucet stops abruptly. “What?” asks Viktor.
“The brain,” says Yuuri. “I saw you eating a brain, right?”
Viktor looks distinctly uncomfortable. “Maybe?” he hedges.
“Maybe I’m just hallucinating,” says Yuuri, shaking his head as he tries to piece together the new crime scene in his kitchen. Besides the bowl and fork sitting by the sink and the bottle of hot sauce on the counter, nothing in the kitchen seems to indicate that Viktor had been eating anything at all. “But I’m pretty sure I saw you eating a brain.”
“It was… it was a pig brain,” says Viktor, though something about his voice tells Yuuri that he doesn’t believe his own story at all.
“No wonder you have your own pots and pans,” says Yuuri, hesitantly crossing over to the fridge to grab a bottle of wine. “Do you usually eat at this hour?”
“You’re usually asleep by now,” says Viktor.
“And there’s something about pig brain that requires all this secrecy?” wonders Yuuri. “I’m… I’m not judging, I swear. I want to be a good roommate, even if it means putting up with my roommate’s weird dietary habits.”
Viktor opens his mouth, as if to point out that Yuuri calling his diet ‘weird’ is a judgement in and of itself, but then he clearly thinks better of it and closes his mouth. Yuuri goes to pour himself a glass of wine, offering Viktor a glass as well.
Viktor takes it with a wary expression. Yuuri sits down at the counter, noticing that it vaguely smells of bleach.
“Are you usually this meticulous about clean-up?” he asks.
“Definitely,” says Viktor quickly. “I’m not going to be a bother, I swear. If you want me to leave –”
“No,” Yuuri says, to his own surprise. “And I know you said you wanted to room with me because I keep to myself and don’t ask questions, but… I think I’d appreciate a bit of forewarning about a zombie flatmate, you know?”
“Who said anything about zombies?” asks Viktor, clearly feigning innocence. Yuuri swallows. Maybe he’d gone a bit too far. Maybe ‘zombie’ isn’t exactly the politically correct term – maybe Viktor preferred ‘undead’ or ‘person of undeath’ or something.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s just that… you’re one of the victims of the Lake Paulsen Massacre, and my friend Phichit’s mortician boyfriend was the medical examiner that day and he’d noticed that some of the bodies had significant amounts of missing brain tissue, and… well. I don’t know if that’s pig brain or not, but I can make some guesses.”
Viktor worries at his lip, before taking a swig of his wine. “You got me,” he says after a moment, hanging his head so that his sunken eyes are hidden behind his curtain of silver hair. “I’m a zombie.”
Yuuri peers at him curiously, casting his existing knowledge of Viktor Nikiforov in a new light. “I’m… honestly surprised it took me this long to figure it out,” he admits. “You kinda look the part.”
Viktor laughs a little harshly. “Thanks,” he intones drily. “I swear I was a lot hotter when I was alive.”
“I didn’t – I didn’t mean that,” blusters Yuuri, feeling his cheeks heat up. “I just meant you look gothic and you have a job at a morgue. But I probably would’ve guessed vampire before zombie, then.”
“I think I’d rather be a vampire,” laments Viktor, taking a pointed sip of wine as he does so. “Much sexier. The hottest zombies have ever gotten are, like, as backup dancers for Michael Jackson.”
Yuuri laughs at that. “So the… brains thing?”
“I have to,” says Viktor. “Otherwise I get more… well, feral. You don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see that, at least ever again.”
“Ah.” Yuuri nods. “I’ll take your word for it. And the hot sauce?”
“I can’t eat anything without at least six chili peppers next to it on the menu.” Viktor drums his fingers against the counter. “And you’re… you’re fine with all of this, Yuuri? Like I said, I could move out –”
“No!” Yuuri shakes his head. “You can’t find anything in this city on such short notice, and since you already have your own kitchenware, I really don’t mind. Just, you know. Disinfect everything.”
Viktor chuckles. “Yeah, I know,” he says.
Yuuri hums, before taking a sip of his wine. “Okay… and how did you get turned?”
“The massacre,” replies Viktor. “I got scratched.”
“Oh,” says Yuuri simply. Viktor nods, and Yuuri heads back to the fridge to grab himself a slice of quiche he’d saved from the bakery.
He turns with the box of quiche, intending to set it on the counter, but suddenly Viktor goes very still, his gaze becoming unfocused. Yuuri recognises it – sometimes Viktor had done that in the past. Slowly, he puts the box down and waves a hand in front of Viktor’s face.
“Hello?” he asks.
Viktor jerks himself out of his trance, his blue eyes wide and sparkling. “Oh my god,” he says. “I have to tell Yurio about this.”
“Yurio?” asks Yuuri.
“Detective Plisetsky,” says Viktor, already halfway across the living room in his scramble for the hall closet and the brown coat contained inside. “There was a case this morning, something about a Jane Doe found in a bakery dumpster. She was a customer at the Cherry Flip.”
“Oh my god.” Yuuri gasps. “You were eating her brain.”
“Yeah, when I eat one I get the person’s memories and stuff. It’s really weird.” Viktor’s smile is now reaching his eyes as he swings on his coat. “Yurio’s going to love this, I swear.” And then he’s gone, the door to the apartment slamming shut behind him, and Yuuri is left in a dim kitchen with one and a half glasses of wine for company.
He downs his glass, and sighs. Maybe he should get himself another one.
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Vampires: You're Doin’ It Wrong
by Melissa G.
Sunday, 20 December 2009
Melissa kindly provides Fb's obligatory Twilight article.~
So with the release of New Moon, and that fact that it has now beaten out the sales of, like, everything ever, I am reminded strongly of the intense rage I feel for anything Twilight-related. Add that to the rage-inspiring feminism kick I’ve been on lately, and it should come as no surprise that I’ve decided to have a go at Twilight. Because nothing inspires my rage-o-meter more than a woman writing a book damaging to women, especially teenage women.
I can only personally speak to the first book as that is the one I read. I decided to spare my sanity and keep the others far, far away from me lest my brain start melting out my ears. Let me give a brief disclaimer: I had negative feelings toward Twilight before I even read it, and I kind of only read it so I didn't feel hypocritical hating it so much. So, was my judgment colored? Yes, it was. But that doesn’t mean that my points aren’t valid and supported by the text.
Here's my issue with Twilight. I can accept Twilight as a guilty pleasure read. I understand why so many girls are titillated by the idea of it; every novel or TV series or movie that I’m exposed to, I, too, will inevitably fall for the vulnerable, sympathetic bad guy (Draco Malfoy, anyone?). What I object to is the people who are under the opinion that Twilight is a well-written, well-crafted, original book that realistically and believably captures a healthy and functional relationship between two people who truly love each other.
Not only is the book inherently flawed in its conception, but it isn’t even written well to make up for it. One of the biggest examples of writing-fail comes in the prologue of the book. Meyer wrote a prologue about an imminent death in first person past tense. Say that with me again. IMMINENT death. FIRST person. PAST tense. Immediately any sort of actual terror inspired by this passage is moot because it's pretty obvious that this imminent death is not happening. And it’s not even as if the prose itself manages to inspire some sense of fear or suspense. Bella tells us she’s “terrified”, but the writing here focuses on her thought process, which is quite lengthy and calm for someone who is about to die. I kind of imagine the killer looking at his watch and tapping his foot while he allows her to think all this out. Surely, the point of putting this scene at the beginning of the book is to create suspense, and it fails miserably in this.
So, as you can see, Twilight was off to a fabulous start with me. It was like going to a blind date you regretted agreeing to and seeing the complete antithesis of what is attractive and desirable to you. But I was willing to keep going and give the book a shot to impress and win me over. So I begrudgingly continued reading, and sadly it did not get any better. I will address the following things in this rant: Shiny Vampires, Bella-fail, and Abuse = Love.
Let's start right off with: Shiny Vampires
I have always liked the idea of vampires. Vampires in literature have predominately functioned as metaphors – most commonly as metaphors for sex and seduction. Dracula, arguably the most famous vampire novel, did exactly this. Dracula is about sexual repression. The vampires represent sex; the staking of Lucy in the graveyard is written very well to read disturbingly as a rape scene, and the three sisters, as well as Dracula himself, are seductive and deadly. And being turned into a vampire means to give in to your sexual desire. And let’s face it, with all the penetration (by teeth) and exchanging of bodily fluids (blood), it’s not hard to see what Stoker was going for.
All Twilight did was indulge an extremely common fantasy that has been done many times before, and honestly, it's a lot more acceptable when you don't try to defend the blood-sucking undead creature's really outrageously inappropriate behavior by equating it with love. Yes, it's fine to investigate the downside of immortality, to make your vampires angsty, but the problem I have with "Twipires" is that they really don't make any sense outside of "Vampires need to do this so my plot works." There are some lazy attempts to explain why vampires are acting so OOC or doing conveniently plot relevant things, but it comes off more as lazy writing than plausible excuse. For example, the reason they go to high school is because they need to start as young as possible in a new town so that people won’t notice right away that they’re not aging. I don’t know that being the odd home-schooled family would make them stand out any more than they already do, but if they didn’t go to high school, I guess there would be no book – you know, unless you came up with another plausible reason for two people to meet and interact.
And here’s where Edward doesn’t even try to provide any sort of reasonable explanation for the inconsistencies:
“Don’t laugh – but how can you come out during the daytime?”
He laughed anyway. “Myth.”
“Burned by the sun?”
“Myth.”
“Sleeping in coffins?”
“Myth.”
That’s it, folks. That’s all we get. Not even an attempt at why these things have gotten misconstrued over the years. No line about that damn Bram Stoker getting all these ideas in people’s heads or anything. No attempt at all.
So, let's go over what goes into making a "Twipire". They drink blood, they don't age, they have super speed and strength, they can't die easily (in fact, even conventional methods like stakes and sun don't work), and, the biggie, they don't combust in the sun - they sparkle like a magical little pony. Oh, and let's not forget that some of them develop cool powers completely arbitrarily that are convenient to the plot and only serve to make her characters more “speshul” and nifty. There are certain changes I can accept in vampire mythology, such as it being a virus ala Blade or deciding that vampires can't actually do things like turn into bats and such. But when you take away the essential things that make a vampire a vampire (not being able to go out in the day, being killed by stakes), these creatures cease to be recognizable as vampires. By denying them the core elements of their identity, the vampires are domesticated in a way. Their power, both as characters and as literary devices, is taken away. It would be like if someone wrote about vampires and decided that instead of drinking blood, they had to stand upside down on their heads for at least five hours a day to keep living. And I highly doubt that vampires are the only monster in common mythology that lives on blood. Why not find a better creature to suit your needs instead of changing an already existing mythos almost completely?
I suppose my more basic issue with them is that I don't see much real downside to being a vampire in this world. They're super-strong, super-fast, get cool powers possibly, seem to be fairly uninhibited from going outside, and are immortal and nearly unkillable. Sounds pretty good to me. From what I could see, there was no good argument against turning Bella into a vampire pretty much immediately except, of course, that maybe you're too young at seventeen to know who you want to spend the rest of your life with, but this isn't a claim the book seems interested in exploring. As far as I remember, the problem Edward has with turning Bella into a vampire has everything to do with not wanting to make her into a monster like him and nothing to do with the fact that their love might not be forever. Instead, their everlasting love is presented as a given. Now, in Bella’s teenage mind, this is acceptable; it’s very common to think your high school boyfriend is “the one”. But no one in the text – or the text itself – seems to challenge this idea. To use another vampire/human relationship most of us are probably aware of, Angel – being older and having more life-experience – believes that Buffy has a teenage crush on him and will eventually mature out of the idea that having a vampire boyfriend is cool or at all emotionally satisfying. Twilight doesn’t tackle these more covert emotional complications of a vampire/human relationship; it is satisfied to merely deal with the obvious, which makes their relationship far less interesting to the reader.
Let's move on to Bella-fail...
So, anytime I say the words "Mary Sue" and the person I'm talking to goes "huh?", I simply say, "Like Bella." And they immediately understand. Okay, I do tend to give a sort of definition as well, but as soon as I mention Bella, I need say no more. Bella is the epitome of Mary Sue. She keeps insisting over and over how she isn't pretty or popular or special, but the text pretty much contradicts her at every turn. No one liked her at her old school, she wasn't popular, she's doesn't stand-out, and yet, in her first few days of school, she has three, count 'em, three guys all clamoring immediately for her attention (Eric, Mike, and Tyler – we’ll not even count Edward and Jacob yet). So, this girl who insists how absolutely plain she is is someone still capable of arresting the attention of, like, every guy in school. I call bullshit. Now, here’s a quote from Meyer giving an answer to the question, “Why do all the guys at Forks High like Bella if she's supposed to be average-looking? Is she pretty or not?”
Some parts of Bella's experiences are modeled after real life (my life, to be exact) in order to ground the fantasy aspects of the story in solid reality. Ironically, many of the details that are one hundred percent reality are the ones that are called into question the most (as illustrated by some of my angry Amazon reviews). In this particular case, I modeled Bella's move to Forks after my real life move from high school to college. (Personal story alert!) I mentioned in my bio that I went to a high school in Scottsdale, AZ, which is Arizona's version of Beverly Hills (picture the high school in the movie Clueless). In high school, I was a mousy, A-track wall-flower. I had a lot of incredible girlfriends, but I wasn't much sought after by the Y chromosomes, if you know what I mean. Then I went to college in Provo, Utah. Let me tell you, my stock went through the roof. See, beauty is a lot more subjective than you might think. In Scottsdale, surrounded by barbies, I was about a five. In Provo, surrounded by normal people, I was more like an eight.
I can accept that going from a big city to a small town might bump her number up a little. There are definitely people who are “small-town hot” but not “NY/LA hot”. Fine. But here’s what the text had to say:
“You don’t see yourself very clearly, you know. I’ll admit you’re dead on about the bad things,” he chuckled blackly, “but you didn’t hear what every human male in this school was thinking on your first day.”
Checkmate, Meyer. Edward says “every human male in this school”. I can accept more guys in Forks liking her than in Arizona, but come on? Every male in school? Even the gay ones? I guess there also aren't any lesbians at Bella's school either.
Oh, and as with all Mary Sues, Bella has one tiny little adorable flaw. She's clumsy. Laughably clumsy. Plot-convenience driven clumsy. This is only made worse by the fact that her clumsiness often induces knight-in-shining-armor behavior from men, resulting in Bella constantly needing to be saved. Now, I understand that when she's surrounded by vampires, she is the weakest and it wouldn't make sense for her to be kick-ass, but the fact that she also needs help when she's just walking is a little much for me to take. And Edward's constantly cheesy lines about how he can’t leave her alone for a second just sound extremely patronizing. And here come a bunch of them!
“I’ve never tried to keep a specific person alive before, and it’s much more troublesome than I would have believed. But that’s probably just because it’s you.”
“Don’t be offended, but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet. So…try not to fall into the ocean or get run over or anything, all right?”
“You were right. I’m definitely fighting fate trying to keep you alive.”
“I’m surprised that you did make it through a whole weekend unscathed.”
“Are you referring to the fact that you can’t walk across a flat, stable surface without finding something to trip over?"
Bella is so utterly incompetent at walking. And it makes her absolutely incapable of taking care of herself. She constantly needs men to help her. It's infuriating. She almost gets hit by a car, but magical Edward is there to save her. She almost gets mugged/raped by some random Straw Men in Port Angeles, but luckily, Edward was stalking her so he could leap in to the rescue. This reinforces in young girls’ heads that they are helpless without a man around. And that being helpless is perfectly okay because one day, they'll find a big, strong, practically perfect in every way man so that all they need to do is sit around birthing babies.
Now I'd like to talk about the character of Bella, but she is so miraculously vague, especially given that the book is entirely in her point of view. What does come off, to me at least, is that she is horribly arrogant and ungrateful. She seems to have a bad enough relationship with her father that she calls him by his first name, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that he is anything but a genuinely nice, protective Papa. He buys her a car (more than a lot of parents would do), tries to be involved with her life (how dare he?!), and even seems rather guilty and embarrassed that he can't cook for her.
He seemed to feel awkward standing in the kitchen doing nothing; he lumbered into the living room to watch TV while I worked. We were both more comfortable that way.
This of course also reinforces such wonderful gender stereotypes. But the fact remains that Bella's treatment of her father seems rather unfair and unfounded, and pretty much just came off ungrateful and nasty. He didn't have to let her come move in with him to begin with, but he actually wanted her there, a fact she seems to take completely for granted.
Her snootiness is evident again when she meets Jessica, who as far as the book tells us, has done nothing but be nice and try to include Bella into her circle of friends. Again, this is more than a lot of teenage girls would do for the new kid in school. And yet, Bella seems extremely judgmental of Jessica simply because, I guess, she lives in Forks? I've been told by people that Jessica does actually turn out to be a bitch, but unless Bella shares Alice's “speshul” power, I don't take this as an excuse for her nastiness in the prose toward someone who is just trying to be friendly.
One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. […] I couldn’t remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled about teachers and classes. I didn’t try to keep up.
As if the use of the word “prattle” isn’t bad enough – it indicates Jessica is vapid and ditzy – Bella doesn’t even “try to keep up” with what Jessica is saying. Obviously she feels Jessica is below her. She isn’t even bothered to remember her name, nor does she seem to care that she doesn’t know it.
And then the fact that she's asked out by several guys to the dance is presented as merely annoying (which I'm sure it is), but not at all flattering. You’d think someone who’s never been noticed by guys before would find this overwhelming and exciting even if she isn’t interested in them. It’s also really hard to make anyone feel sorry for someone who has too many choices when it comes to guys.
Also, Bella likes to constantly point out to us in the prose that she has already done all the things that the kids in Forks are doing in school.
I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I’d already read everything. That was comforting…and boring.
Is this a commentary on big city schools vs. small town schools? Perhaps, but it’s a rather unfounded and unfair conclusion. I think this is put in deliberately to make us think Bella is smart.
We had a pop quiz on Wuthering Heights. It was straightforward, very easy.
Are we meant to believe that it was easy for her because she was smart? Because it’s more likely that it was easy for her because she’d covered the material before. There is nothing smarter about being in a school that has a faster moving curriculum, and hell, there's not really evidence of that, only evidence that they are different curriculums. And anyone who has switched schools knows that no two schools work exactly the same in America. My friend (at a big city private school) and I (at a small town public school) read exactly the same books in high school, but we read them in different years. Also, the fact that Bella enjoys things like Charlotte Bronte tell us she's smart. You know what? If you were really smart, you'd still pay attention and just do it all again for review purposes or look into doing more challenging projects instead of the easy assignments you already know. Also:
I wondered if my mom would send me my folder of old essays
Lazy. Not smart.
I'm sure there's much more I can say, but let's move on to: Abuse = Love.
This is, much as people like to argue with me, a HUGE problem with the Edward/Bella relationship. I have been told by people that if I just read the short story that explains it all from Edward's point of view, it will all make sense and cease to be creepy and stalkerish. I disagree. Looking into the head of the perpetrator of terrible behavior makes the behavior understandable not excused. It's like holding up Lolita and proclaiming that NAMBLA or like-minded people have totally valid arguments because if you just read this book, you'll get it.
Let's talk about Edward/Bella, shall we? Her interest in him is spurred nearly completely by what she takes as his distaste for her.
Just as I passed, he suddenly went rigid in his seat. He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face – it was hostile, furious. […] I kept my eyes down as I went to sit by him, bewildered by the antagonistic stare he’d given me. [ …] He was leaning away from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his face like he smelled something bad.
He treats her extremely rudely, acts like a total freak, and she can't stop thinking about him and starts becoming obsessed with solving the mystery that is the jerkface who sits next to her in biology. Now, I understand the curiosity, and I understand her wanting to know why some guy she's never really interacted with seems to hate her so much, but the difference to me is that most of the time, the guy who is treating you like shit rarely ends up being your "twu luv". He might be that asshole you dated for a while because he was hot or because you didn't have enough self-confidence to know you deserved better, but he should not be your true love, and the fact that Twilight represents this really bothers me. Especially given how seriously it's taken by teenage girls. As an adult reading it as a guilty pleasure, you can indulge yourself in the James Dean-esque bad boy with a heart of gold thing and then let it go and return to reality. I don’t believe that most teenage and pre-teens girls have the emotional maturity that would allow them to do this.
Twilight is reinforcing the idea that really, he just treats you that way because he loves you too much. (Sounds remarkably like classic spousal abuse defense, no?) And I'm not saying this was her intent, but unfortunately, it is what the book ends up doing. See, Edward's coldness and refusal to interact with her was really just him loving her too much. His sneaking into her room while she was sleeping every night for months was more evidence of his deep and meaningful love. And the true symbol of his affection is the fact that manages to keep from raping - er, I mean, biting - her as his nature as a man - er, uh, vampire - pressures him to do.
This is slightly off topic, but I get more than a little annoyed at how most media seems to believe that there is either making out or sex with absolutely nothing in between the two. To go past kissing immediately means having sex. Um, no. Untrue. Extremely untrue. And it bothers me that this idea is ingrained in teen's heads nowadays. To take this back to Twilight, let's look at the scene when they kiss, and this is her response:
Blood boiled under my skin, burned in my lips. My breath came in a wild gasp. My fingers knotted in his hair, clutching him to me. My lips parted as I breathed in his heady scent.
Immediately I felt him turn to unresponsive stone beneath my lips. His hands gently, but with irresistible force, pushed my face back. I opened my eyes and saw his guarded expression.
“Oops,” I breathed.
“That’s an understatement.”
[….]
“Should I…?” I tried to disengage myself, to give him some room.
His hands refused to let me move so much as an inch.
“No, it’s tolerable.”
Her sexual arousal is “tolerable”? Not to mention, she did barely anything in this scene; the behavior was extremely tame and yet is represented as too much. While I can applaud the fact that the woman in the relationship is pushing for sex/vampirism and the man is the one refusing, the execution actually does more harm than good. It makes it seem like Bella's desires are dirty and wrong, thus pigeonholing women back into their "you can't enjoy sex" boxes. To look at some other examples:
There was really no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn’t seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and my lips parted.
He staggered back, breaking my grip effortlessly.
“Damn it, Bella!” he broke off, gasping. “You’ll be the death of me, I swear you will.”
Again, very slight sexual actions – Bella pressed her body into his – are portrayed as catastrophic to Edward’s ability to control himself sexually. (Remember, I’m looking at the “urge to bite” as equivalent to “urge to sleep with. Not to mention that the phrase “safely motionless” really irks me. It makes me think that women are just meant to lie there while they allow men have sex with them. Because god-forbid we, you know, enjoy it or something.
“What am I going to do with you?” he groaned in exasperation. “Yesterday I kiss you, and you attack me! Today you pass out on me!”
That’s right, his kiss was so passionate that she passed out. All he did before this happened was “[touch] his cool lips to mine for the second time, very carefully, parting them slightly”. That’s a pretty tame kiss. The book ends up presenting any form of sexual desire – no matter how slight – as a very big deal. And let’s note that he’s “exasperated” with her behavior. And when Edward restrains himself, it's supposed to be admirable rather than expected. He's so great! He can stop himself from raping people! My hero! To see this illustrated, take a look at this passage which occurs right after the first kiss when he pushes her away after she gets too into it:
He laughed aloud. “I’m stronger than I thought. It’s nice to know.”
“I wish I could say the same. I’m sorry.”
Edward saying this is like he’s patting himself on the back for his self control. Because as a man, he can’t help but want to have sex with Bella. But apparently Bella’s desire to have sex with him is something to apologize for. Not to mention, she manages to spike his sexual desire by merely being a woman (albeit one with a super special smell, wtf?). And that is her fault.
Sex is not a decision teens should make lightly, and it's nice that Meyer wants to show them that you can be in love without having sex, but I think the harm rather outweighs the good in this case. Not to mention how the characters fit nicely into ye olde gender roles. Bella is the cook, the nurturer, the damsel in distress, and later even child-bearer while Edward is a manly man who saves and protects women when he's not making them feel like absolute shit and/or skeeving them the hell out.
Also I saw very little motivation for Edward's affections aside from "Bella's hawt". In fact, there seems to be very little motivation for any of the boys interested in her. As for Bella and Edward, they certainly don't seem to connect on an intellectual level, and why should they, given their age difference, because no matter how much the characters and first person prose try to tell us Bella is mature for her age, it just doesn't seem so. Basically their whole relationship is completely unbalanced; the two are not at all on equal footing, reinforcing the idea that men and women cannot be equal in a relationship either in power or intelligence.
This is also brings me to the idea of “love at first sight”. Edward falls in love with Bella pretty much the instant he sees her. He falls totally in love with her despite knowing absolutely nothing about her. And yet, despite her being plain and him never having spoken to her, he is protective and obsessed with her completely. I understand this is a fantasy of a relationship, but I’ve seen Harlequins try harder to create some sense of compatibility between their characters. And actually, none of the boys who vie for Bella’s affections do something as insane as getting to know her first.
Twilight is the worst of all the things it tries to be. It’s a bad vampire novel, it’s a bad romance, and it’s bad teen fiction. The vampires serve no real purpose to the book, other than to be “cool” or “hot”, and they are even stripped of their basic vampire identities. As a romance, the book fails because the relationship is abusive and the sexual aspects are seen as dirty and wrong rather than titillating. And the messages it gives to its teen audience are wholly irresponsible and set back women’s sexual freedom a few hundred years. The only thing Twilight succeeds at is being far more popular than its writing or premise should allow.
Themes:
Books
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Sci-fi / Fantasy
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Young Adult / Children
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Guy
at 01:40 on 2009-12-21
I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I’d already read everything. That was comforting…and boring.
Yes, because any halfway smart teenage girl would have read and understood the complete works of Shakespeare, and as for Chaucer! Pfft, glance over it once and you know it all, of course it's going to be boring! Where's the experimental poetry written in Esperanto that every typical teenager hungers for in their unending quest for ever-more abstruse literary forms to satisfy their perfectly natural desire to move beyond something basic like Shakespeare or, *shudder*, Faulkner!
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at 02:06 on 2009-12-21I take issue with your belief that "most teenage girls" aren't capable of dealing with this kind of in a healthy way. This kind of thing is actually a big part of why the Twilight-hate phenomenon annoys me.
I haven't read them, but I've read a lot about them and a number of passages, and I have little doubt that they're as dreadful as people say. But there are a lot of dreadful things in the world. Similarly misanthropic and stereotypical fare aimed at male audiences--think james Bond or something--is almost never singled out for this kind of, in my mind, hyperbolic criticism. We say all the time, and rightly, that James Bond, or Generic Sci-Fi/Action movie glorifies violence and sexism in an inappropriate way, but rarely do we accuse a specific author of "damaging" the nations male youth. I think there's probably a substantial pool of savvy young women who know exactly what the score is but read Twilight anyway.
On the substance of the article: Counterfactual criticism alert!
I don't actually have a problem with the idea that she has no need to work on her school's curriculum; it seems like a fairly self-conscious plot device to facilitate the demands of this genre's plots.
Basically, creating a justification for why she doesn't have to work at schools so she has more time to devote the adventures and trials of the actual plot. Especially in a fantasy story involving our heroes being initiated into a "secret world," that seems pretty much necessary unless the story is *about* the difficulty of juggling magic and high school.
It comes off badly because Bella is such an annoying character, but I suggest that if she used the time she saved to compose music, build robots in her garage, or even flirt with some dude who was vaguely interesting, you wouldn't have objected.
Re: Belledward
I've not read the books and have no desire to, but Kit Whitfield has an interesting and more sympathetic take: she considers the book a depiction of a fantastic, diealized BDSM relationship:
"for instance, dragging her to the prom, Edward finds Bella exlaiming 'in horror' and 'mortified' - which he responds to with a masterful, 'Don't be difficult, Bella.' This would sound like genuine objections on her part if her real protest was at being taken to a dance she wants to avoid. But making her dance is merely a lily-white way of pressing her limits; when they get going it's like this:
"Edward." My throat was so dry I could only manage a whisper. " I honestly can't dance!" I could feel the panic bubbling up inside my chest.
"Dont worry, silly," he whispered back. "I can." He put my arms around his neck and lifted me to slide his feet under mine.
And then we were whirling, too.
"I feel like I'm five years old," I laughed after a few minutes of effortless waltzing.
Bella is scared, but when skilfully pushed over the edge she finds herself having a wonderful time; this is an interplay of dominance and submission, Edward making Bella do things she discovers she actually wanted, rather than serious coercion. Words like 'gulped' and 'pouted' keep coming up, which is hardly the language of genuine resistance. The real reason Bella was upset is not that he's ignored her insistence that she doesn't want to go, it's that she thought tonight might be the night he vamped her and he's disappointed her 'half-fearful hopes'. She doesn't mind Edward making her do stuff; what she minds is when he won't make her do it. And in fact, as I'll mention later, when they finally do get down to business, Bella seems quite capable of erotic pain as well."
Not having read the book, I don't know whether this is a plausible construction; I suspect that it's probably partially valid, but that the quality of the writing introduces some regrettable morals anyway.
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at 02:07 on 2009-12-21Sorry for the double post, but forgot to link Whitfield:
http://www.kitwhitfield.com/2009_08_01_archive.html
The post is "Innocent Libertinism" about halfway down the page.
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Arthur B
at 02:27 on 2009-12-21I posted
this
a while ago in the Playpen, but it's buried now, and it pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject. :)
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Arthur B
at 02:35 on 2009-12-21
We say all the time, and rightly, that James Bond, or Generic Sci-Fi/Action movie glorifies violence and sexism in an inappropriate way, but rarely do we accuse a specific author of "damaging" the nations male youth.
There is a difference, though. James Bond, Rambo, Conan and their ilk go around kicking ass, laying down the law, and generally exerting authority over the situation throughout their lives. They are active, independent, and don't wait around for permission to go and get what they want.
Bella, based on Viorica's assessment here, is almost the complete reverse of that. She is passive to a fault. She wanders around getting into trouble. Then Edward shows up and helps her out. She gets into more trouble. Edward shows up and helps her out again. She basically allows Edward a control of her life which, if it's like Viorica describes, is complete to an almost frightening degree.
Now, imagine a young man who goes through life with the attitude of James Bond. Not in terms of going around shooting people, that's clearly fantasy, but in terms of taking on Bond's no-nonsense, take-charge attitude. What you would have there is a lad who takes the lead, who is proactive, who goes out and grabs life by the throat! In other words,
management material!
That boy will go far!
Now, imagine a girl who goes through life with Bella's attitude. Would you consider this to be empowering, like the scenario I outline above, or
massively disempowering
?
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Melissa G.
at 02:41 on 2009-12-21
I take issue with your belief that "most teenage girls" aren't capable of dealing with this kind of in a healthy way. This kind of thing is actually a big part of why the Twilight-hate phenomenon annoys me.
It's completely fair of you to take issue with it. And honestly, it's not just the teenage girls that do it; I've heard adult fans talk about the books without hearing any indication that they understand that Edward would be a horrible boyfriend in real life. And after hearing teenage girls in the school where I teach trying to defend the horrible behavior of their bfs to each other ("But you don't get WHY he cheated on me. Really, it's okay."), I'd rather lean on the side of caution with that one, personally.
it seems like a fairly self-conscious plot device to facilitate the demands of this genre's plots.
The problem is, I really don't read it that way at all. The book pretty much takes place exclusively in her school or around regular teenage activities. As far the first book goes, until the end, it's very much grounded in the every day. It's all focused around regular life: school and romance. So it would be completely natural to have her dealing with both homework and trying to have a social life. But, again, if she didn't come off so snotty about it, maybe I wouldn't care so much.
she considers the book a depiction of a fantastic, diealized BDSM relationship:
Oh, there's definitely some BD/fantasy rape aspects going on in there. A lot of romances fall into this trap, and this one is no different. Honestly, if this book weren't so popular, I wouldn't even give it a second glance. I'd just chalk it up to another bad romance novel with vampires. The fact that it has exploded this way makes me feel the need to point out its extreme flaws whenever I can b/c I'm confrontation that way. :-)
@Arthur
I loved that comic. It made me giggle.
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Melissa G.
at 02:42 on 2009-12-21Wrong author, Arthur, but I forgive you. :-)
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Melissa G.
at 02:48 on 2009-12-21
Edward making Bella do things she discovers she actually wanted, rather than serious coercion.
Sorry for multiple posts, but I just want to point out that the problem with this kind of thing is that it skates dangerously close to "No means yes." And while a common fantasy!rape aspect, it does not translate well into real life.
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Arthur B
at 02:59 on 2009-12-21
Wrong author, Arthur, but I forgive you. :-)
A sure sign that I've been staying up too late revising. Goodnight all!
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at 04:19 on 2009-12-21Melissa,
Re: "No means yes" -- first, let me say that I absolutely have no illusions about Stphanie Myers as a person. She publicly and repeatedly espouses destructive and horrifying values, and her own statements to the effect that Bella and Edward's is an unqualified ideal are problematic.
Setting her aside though and looking at the text--well, it depends on who you think it's talking to. Kit Whitfield's argument is that, just as erotica aimed at vanilla audiences often glosses over some or all of the anxiety, the miscommunication, the STI risk, and the need to learn what a new partner needs, letting our heroes have good sex the first time out, BDSM erotica omits the negotiation, safewords, and so on that are required for safe and healthy BDSM practice in the real world.
So then what do you make of its popularity? There's certainly an argument to be made that it's fandom is so ubiquitous it's obviously not *only* being appreciated by the kink community, or even by people with kinks they're no conscious of, but that on the contrary its phenomenal popularity is a sign that our culture, problematically, assumes female submission as a default value. It even sounds to me like because Ms. Myers didn't *intend* to write a BDSM Romance, the text itself blurs the lines between consensual BDSM and abuse in a skeevy way.
That said,I'm attracted to the BDSM interpretation because, well, I have friends who like Twilight and I'd like to think better of their taste. And while this can't be the entire explanation, I do think that these kinds of kinks are a lot more common than anybody lets on, and so I don't think the mainstreaming of kink, even femsub, is a harm *per se* and I think a careful critic can, and should, criticize the flaws in this particular book without condemning all femsub erotica.
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at 04:30 on 2009-12-21
I've not read the books and have no desire to, but Kit Whitfield has an interesting and more sympathetic take: she considers the book a depiction of a fantastic, diealized BDSM relationship:
So this is probably a bit off topic and (disclaimer) I don't speak from experience but from some research. As far as I understand what makes a healthy BDSM relationship is the knowledge and communication.
You don't just find yourself in a such a relationship (unromatic I know) you go into the relationship with the foreknowledge that you are entering a BDSM relationship with previously discussed and set up fail-safes so you and your partner don't end up crossing any lines. Which is what is missing in Twilight (and 1 million other romance novels). It's all the titillation of BDSM without any of the foundations that make it safe and fun.
So while I don't fault Twilight for it's romanticized BDSM it is part of whole genre of romantic BDSM and fantasy!rape. I don't think I could call it a good representation of a functioning BDSM relationship.
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Melissa G.
at 04:33 on 2009-12-21
So then what do you make of its popularity?
I imagine it's the same reason that we find this "BDSM/fantasy!rape" in the majority of romance novels. I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, but I can make a guess where the attraction comes from - even to someone who doesn't have that "kink".
The fantasy!rape situation allows for two things. 1) The woman doesn't have to admit to wanting sex and thus is spared the shame of having sexual desire. (She shouldn't have this shame, but because of things like Victorian age repression, a lot of women do.) and 2) It gives something of an ego boast to think that you are so sexy/amazing that he just can't control himself and must have you NOW! (Not to mention the long-standing idea that women are only worthwhile if they're attractive and what's a better gauge of your attractiveness than having a guy unable to control his sexual desires around you).
I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality. But sadly, I can totally see the attraction in these ideas, and I know I'm not alone. I mean, most romance is written by women for women and includes - what would be in the real world - very self-destructive behaviors. "No means yes" being the major one. And the thing is, I find nothing wrong with women taking private delight in this idea as long as they know full well that they are reading trashy romance novels and that this is a FANTASY.
The problem I have with Twilight falling into this category of romance is that it's marketed toward teens rather than adults, and it pretend to have wholesome, positive messages toward sex like, "Don't have sex before marriage".
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Melissa G.
at 04:58 on 2009-12-21And I want to clarify that I'm not saying that people who partake in BDSM are in some way perpetrating "negative female beahavior" or anything. What they are doing is between two consenting partners who have discussed all this beforehand. And I have no problem with BDSM and those who do it.
I'm speaking directly to why fantasy!rape is such an attractive idea to women.
**I'm going to bed so it may be a while before I'm able to respond again, fyi.
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Rami
at 05:13 on 2009-12-21The impression I'm getting from this discussion is that interpreting it as an idealized dom/sub relationship would assume a level of relative sensibility and communication between the people involved that isn't actually supported by the text. Which makes said interpretation rather problematic. Or have I missed something?
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at 05:24 on 2009-12-21
The impression I'm getting from this discussion is that interpreting it as an idealized dom/sub relationship would assume a level of relative sensibility and communication between the people involved that isn't actually supported by the text. Which makes said interpretation rather problematic. Or have I missed something?
yes or at least that is what I was awkwardly aiming at.
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at 05:25 on 2009-12-21@Ninjacatman
What you say about BDSM is also how I understand the matter to be. I tried to say as much somewhere in my wall of text. The trick is, while communication and trust are the difference between BDSM play and abuse, they're also the difference between a good vanilla relationship and a shitty one.
Erotic fiction generally doesn't bother to depict all of the set-up work required for a healthy vanilla relationship, so it seems to me that BDSM erotica should get the same fantasy-license--at least when it's clearly labeled. The trouble with Twilight is that it isn't marketed as BDSM and its author doesn't acknowledge it as a kinky relationship.
@Melissa G.
I don't think children are as in need of protection as you seem to feel. Sure, some children get bad ideas from things they read: I got plenty of bad ideas about life from my own fantasy diet, though I like to think I didn't absorb too much of the misogyny.
But teenagers can be pretty savvy readers, and especially in the age of internet fandom I think it's pretty obvious that teenagers can engage critically with their favorite texts and decide what they like and what they don't. Furthermore, setting aside the example of Twilight specifically, i'm concerned that you feel fantasy!rape is something only adult women should be permitted to read about.
Teenagers are people who are growing into their sexuality and exploring their sexual imagination, and I think consciously chose "exploring" over "forming." Most of the kinky people I know well enough to discuss this with reported basically having their kinks from a very early age, often before they had a real awareness of sexuality. Sure, the way our media sexualises violence probably shapes the way some teenagers perceive sexuality, but it's important to remember that teendom isn't any child's first exposure to the media; those ideas have been around for a while.
On the basis of the anecdotal evidence available to me, I think a substantial number of people reach the age of 13 with a pre-existing and life-long attraction to fantasy!rape. To tell those people of either gender that they, unlike their vanilla peers, don't deserve access to sexually compelling literature seems a little repressive.
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Rami
at 05:31 on 2009-12-21
To tell those people of either gender that they, unlike their vanilla peers, don't deserve access to sexually compelling literature seems a little repressive.
I don't think anyone has suggested that so far.
I think a substantial number of people reach the age of 13 with a pre-existing and life-long attraction to fantasy!rape
That seems like an odd conclusion to draw, and while I obviously don't know the anecdotal evidence available to you, I personally would find such a conclusion extremely dubious.
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at 05:33 on 2009-12-21Melissa,
Sorry for double--post, I didn't see your latest comment before posting mine, which reassures me that your heart is in the right place. I stand by the substance of the comment though: Twilight may be problematic, but to state as you seem to that fantasy!rape is not appropriate material for teenage girls is, in my opinion, too far.
@Rami,
Idealized, not ideal. It's not a depiction of a relationship that would be healthy in real life; it's a relationship that only works in a fantasy world where you and your partner magically want the same thing without discussion.
Rennaissance fair fetishists don't (usually) read stories about people dressing as kings and queens, they read stories about fantasy!kings and fantasy!queens. Similarly, people who like pretending to be abused in real life would generally prefer to read about fantasy!abuse than other people pretending to be abused.
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at 05:35 on 2009-12-21
Erotic fiction generally doesn't bother to depict all of the set-up work required for a healthy vanilla relationship, so it seems to me that BDSM erotica should get the same fantasy-license--at least when it's clearly labeled. The trouble with Twilight is that it isn't marketed as BDSM and its author doesn't acknowledge it as a kinky relationship.
Yes, sorry I hadn't realized you posted again. My point isn't that it's bad erotica but that I don't know if I would feel comfortable calling it idealized or a good BDSM relationship rather than just calling it good erotica (which often seems to be based around bad relationships).
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Melissa G.
at 05:44 on 2009-12-21
i'm concerned that you feel fantasy!rape is something only adult women should be permitted to read about.
Oh, not at all! Teens should be free to explore and develop their sexuality as they come into it. I'd rather they be informed than not. But these romanticized texts of "fantasy!rape" and "fantasy!BDSM" need to be categorized as such. Twilight is definitely not. It's packaged as a loving, ideal relationship.
As someone who had been attracted to the idea of fantasy!rape early on as well as being a feminist, I had to really work through these things in my mind to try and understand where the attraction came from. And I had to work to draw that line in my mind that this would not be acceptable in "real life" but as a "fantasy" is fine. (Like I said, BDSM in it's true form is fine in real life b/c it follows certain rules and guidelines in its community that are not present in its fantasy/romanticized incarnations.)
But I do have to admit that the idea of someone writing erotica *marketed* toward teens makes me a little squeamish. If teens find erotica themselves and buy it full well understanding what it is, I'm fine with that. What I object to the use of it in Twilight b/c of how Twilight is packaged.
**Okay, to bed for real this time. Back later.
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Rami
at 05:52 on 2009-12-21
Idealized, not ideal. It's not a depiction of a relationship that would be healthy in real life; it's a relationship that only works in a fantasy world
Ah, I think I see where you're coming from. In which case my objection becomes the same as Melissa's: everywhere I've seen it being pushed, it's being pushed as an ideal -- something to aspire to, something that could happen, something that people should actively search for. I've actually spoken to adults who lauded it as a perfect relationship that they wished they could have found. And that's absurd, and simply reinforces already-unrealistic portrayals of what relationships should be.
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at 06:55 on 2009-12-21I have to go with the person said that all the anti-Twilight feeling based on the idea that the books are so damaging to young, impressionable women is bothersome. Dare I even say that that mentality - that girls need to be shielded in a way that boys never seem to need to be - is anti-feminist? Because it implies a quality of moral/mental character exists in men that is lacking in women. To use the James Bond to Sam Whittacker examples: Both are high-fantasy male characters (starring in badly written, plot-holed filled stories) that have the potential to influence little boys as badly as Bella is supposed to influence little girls. But very few people seem to think that teenage boys need to be told that while slapping women around worked for Sean Connery, it won't work for them/land them in jail. And Sam Whittacker, probably the most repulsive male wish-fulfillment character of the decade, doesn't come with a cautionary sign either. Don't let me touch Watchmen, or Harry Potter and the bad messages Rowling sends out to both boys *and* girls e.g. You "mature" when you fool around with a girl that likes you to get the attention of the one you do. Oops, I gues I did touch it after all.
What I'm trying to say in a rather long-winded way is that it's hard for me to be suddenly upset about Twilight's negative messages when, in my opinion, more damaging media works have been existence and will no doubt, continue to be in existence, with nary a comment. Neither can I help but wonder if the pro-feminist criticism is actually walking on some anti-feminist legs: Twilight is targeted because its female author wrote a female-viewpoint story for a female audience and has had the affrontery to, against all odds, be successful.
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Melissa G.
at 07:25 on 2009-12-21
But very few people seem to think that teenage boys need to be told that while slapping women around worked for Sean Connery, it won't work for them/land them in jail.
See, in my opinion, yes. Yes, this really does need to be told to young boys. But, the other thing is, that James Bond movies are not *targeted* nor *marketed* to young boys. Neither was Watchmen, which I hated. They are marketed toward adults, and are rated as such. If kids see them and get ideas in their heads they aren't mature enough to fully understand, I really do believe that someone needs to sit down and set them straight.
And, oh, god, yes, Harry Potter bothers me IMMENSELY. But I'm not talking about JKR here. I'm talking about Twilight and Meyer.
Twilight is targeted because its female author wrote a female-viewpoint story for a female audience and has had the affrontery to, against all odds, be successful.
The reason I take issue with her being a female writer is because I do feel like she should have more sense than to write what she does. The same way I think Rowling should have more sense than to write what she does about women. And, yes, men shouldn't do it either, and that's why we're far more likely to call them out on it when they do. But we seem to like to give women a pass for writing sexist material because "women can't possibly be sexist!" Which is completely untrue. And that's the only reason I mentioned her gender at all.
Twilight has a rather irresponsible, damaging message for everyone when it tries to call Bella/Edward an ideal relationship. And putting that aside, it's badly written and poorly conceived. It's just plain not a good book. And part of that has a lot to do with it saying it's doing one thing and unintentionally doing another - the very same thing we all take issue with Harry Potter for doing. So I don't understand why it's acceptable to attack Rowling and not Meyer.
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at 07:45 on 2009-12-21Rowling is an excelletn parallel though; there's plenty of Rowling criticism on this website calling it badly written, the characters awful and unappealing, and the moral message hrrifying. But I've never seen anyone, on this site or really anywhere, call Harry Potter "damaging" and suggest that it's dangerous for kids to read it.
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Melissa G.
at 08:01 on 2009-12-21If people took the morality lessons of Harry Potter and emulated them, I would call that "damaging" personally. And to bring back something Rami said above:
I've actually spoken to adults who lauded it as a perfect relationship that they wished they could have found.
This is what is damaging. This is an actual problem. If you can read Twilight and dismiss it as trashy romantic fun, I have no problem with that. It's the above behavior - wanting to emulate the Bella/Edward relationship and have it for yourself - that I find so disturbing.
I'm not saying people
shouldn't
read Twilight. I'm saying they should fully recognize and understand it as a fantasy of a relationship. If they don't, that's when it gets damaging.
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Arthur B
at 08:11 on 2009-12-21Like I allude to above with my second comment on the article (waaaaay, long ago), I think the reason that people bring up the "damaging" tag more often with Twilight than with HP is that the damage which could come from someone taking the lessons of Twilight to heart is very, very obvious. Women already get trapped in abusive relationships with controlling men far, far too often; we really don't need more media telling us that Abuse Is Love, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength.
That said, I do think Potter has messages which are equally damaging - I'm particularly concerned by the fact that it seems to say "If the voice of authority is ugly and telling you things you don't want to hear, it's evil, if it seems like a kindly old man who occasionally keeps things secret from you for your own good, it's OK". But I would argue that you need to look at Potter far more carefully to find the dubious messages than you do Twilight, where the troubling factor is the
very premise
of the story.
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at 09:08 on 2009-12-21I'm a little bit uncomfortable continuing this discussion. I got into it for the wrong reasons (emotional annoyance at reading *yet more Twilight bashing* coupled with a joy in nitpicking--did you know, for instance, that your assertion that vampires shouldn't be able to go out in the sun is contradicted by none other than the original Dracula?). I haven't read the book in question, which puts in the position of arguing about the book Ms. Whitfield suggested exists, not a book I know was actually written.
I also have every conceivable conflict of interest: I'm a barely-ex-teenage man with minor dominant fantasies in a relationship with a woman with submissive fantasies dating from her early childhood. My objectivity on this issue is probably thoroughly compromised.
I feel the need to lay that out there because what I have to say is somewhat confrontational: Your most recent comment, that you "have no problem" with reading twilight as trashy fun, and are only criticizing those who "laud it as a perfect relationship." I don't think that's an accurate summary of what you've posted.
It's true that's how you begin the OP, with an introduction I agree with absolutely. But the post seems to me to take a turn sideways here:
As an adult reading it as a guilty pleasure, you can indulge yourself in the James Dean-esque bad boy with a heart of gold thing and then let it go and return to reality. I don’t believe that most teenage and pre-teens girls have the emotional maturity that would allow them to do this.
In later comments, you added:
Oh, there's definitely some BD/fantasy rape aspects going on in there. A lot of romances fall into this TRAP (emphasis mine)
"I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality."
I'll agree with you as long as you strictly mean fantasy RAPE, but although you've used the terms interchangably (and I've followed suit), rape-play is not the whole of BDSM. I do believe that rape fantasy would go away in an egalitarian society; ritualized submission would not.
The Ms. Whitfield quote wasn't a scene in which Edward's fangs/dick were even an issue. It was about him managing her life, making her choices for her. This is, of course, the manifestation of thousands of years of patriarchal culture filtered through Myers' Mormon upbringing, and the author seems wrongheadedly to think that this is the natural order of things. But, it's also a compelling fantasy in its own right. I've had submissive fantasies in the past as well, and as someone who agonizes over small decisions and generally frets my life away, I'm prepared to claim that surrendering control is a fantasy whose appeal is not inherently rooted in sexism.
The problem I have with Twilight falling into this category of romance is that it's marketed toward teens rather than adults, and it pretend to have wholesome, positive messages toward sex...
"I do have to admit that the idea of someone writing erotica *marketed* toward teens makes me a little squeamish"
I'll try my hardest here not to put words in your mouth. I wrote and erased a few sentences of the form "it seems you have a problem with..." and then "I think the basic issues is that we don't see eye to eye on..." Let me just say that it is these statements that comments have raised my eyebrows and leave it at that. The following also caught my attention:
"As someone who *had been* (mine) attracted to the idea of fantasy!rape early on as well as being a feminist"
Do you mean to imply that you are no longer attracted to fantasy!rape? If so, how do you feel about this? Do you consider it a point of pride, or feel more mature for having outgrown it?
Finally, I wanted to comment on this:
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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/
at 09:11 on 2009-12-21Wow, somehow the end of my comment got click-dragged into the middle. I hate my touchpad. And need sleep. The discussion of this line: "I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality."
Was supposed to be the end of the post. The post continues from:
Oh, there's definitely some BD/fantasy rape aspects going on in there. A lot of romances fall into this TRAP (emphasis mine)
directly to
"The problem I have with Twilight falling into this category of romance is that it's marketed toward teens rather than adults, and it pretend to have wholesome, positive messages toward sex..."
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http://katsullivan.insanejournal.com/
at 09:45 on 2009-12-21Transformers, Watchmen (and the whole comic-book industry) and Harry Potter (Rowling was asked to use de-gendered initials so as not to frighten away the testosterone contingent) are targeted and marketed towards young boys. As for James Bond, some of the movies have been severely edited in the past (Goldeneye, License to Kill) to ensure that they do not exceed a PG-13 rating. So young boys may not be a primary target, but they're still part of the catchment market.
I'm not sure that the "women should have more sense" argument is one that empowers women in anyway. It's basically judging women on a different standard from men which is part of the inequality that feminism fights against. My argument isn't that Meyer isn't sexist by virtue of being a woman, or writing a woman's story. My argument is that I don't see this level of outrage directed at male-created & male-targeted stories. It is harmless-enough-to-ignore fantasy when it's men who are making it, but when it's made by a woman, it's suddenly dangerous and book-burning-worthy.
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Arthur B
at 10:10 on 2009-12-21@katsullivan:
It is harmless-enough-to-ignore fantasy when it's men who are making it, but when it's made by a woman, it's suddenly dangerous and book-burning-worthy.
Last time I'm going to repeat myself on this topic, I promise: all of the examples cited of stories aimed at young boys/men involve male protagonists who are quite specifically empowered in the texts concerned. (With the arguable exception of Harry Potter, but in that case he's going about doing precisely what an older wiser man wanted him to do.) The complaints about Twilight tend to centre on how much Bella is
dis
empowered. Given that we live in a society which empowers men to the hilt but isn't very good at empowering women, I think mildly different treatment of the subject matter is warranted.
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Arthur B
at 10:12 on 2009-12-21(Which isn't, of course, to say that the fantasies promoted for young men are beyond criticism on the basis that they empower men at the expense of women. They absolutely should be criticised on that basis. But that's a different criticism from saying "this story encourages people to surrender what empowerment they have.")
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http://katsullivan.insanejournal.com/
at 12:12 on 2009-12-21I've always seen how much or how little Bella is empowered as a subjective thing because the anti-Bella arguments that populate the Net have run the spectrum of her agency in the story, from complaining about it being too much to being too little.
What I have noticed is the common denominator is the bad example Bella and Twilight gives to women. Regardless of how empowered Bond, Potter or Whittacker are, they aren't giving good examples to men, either.
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Arthur B
at 12:18 on 2009-12-21Do you have a link to any of these arguments that say Bella is overempowered? I'd be interested to see them, most of the criticism I've seen takes the opposite view.
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Wardog
at 12:25 on 2009-12-21Ye Gods, I go to bed for one night and this happens.
First of all:
@Arthur
Firstly, James Bond is fairly blatantly a sexual masochist - I don't know how that fits into the idea of empowering role models for men. Not that I'm not saying sexual masochists can't be empowering or role models, it's just a bit off the beaten path (lol) for aspirational literature.
Secondly, is there any problem, inherently, with what might be considered "non empowering fantasies "for women? I mean, there's definitely a distinction between "you should be like this" and sheer fantasy-space, which is how most people see Twilight.
@Orionsnebula
Thanks for all your coments by the way, all very interesting, especially the link to Ms Whitfield. I tend to roll my eyes at Twilight but I'm not necessarily as incensed about it as Melissa - I actually enjoyed the first book, and thought it was a fun fantasy, but then I got rather squicked by the later books when I realised the problems associated with Meyer's profound lack of self-awareness. The thing is, as you yourself, acknowledge (and I'm sorry I lost the direct quote in all the text), although Whitfield's reading is compelling, it is not actually *directly* supported by the text, it's something you can read out of it in an effort to make it more interesting / acceptable. A bit like The Taming of the Shrew - you can read that as a consensual BDSM relationship between two difficult adults who have finally met their match (and I saw a version of it that *really* played this up - lots of pretty explicit hints to show they both knew entirely what they were up to, and having lots of fun with it) OR you can read it offensive, patriarchal, misogynist propaganda.
I don't have any problems with the idea that Bella/Edward ARE in a BDSM relationship, I just think that you've got a problem if they're UNCONSCIOUSLY involved in one, and the author has no idea what she's doing.
Again, I have no problem with teenagers confronting these issues per se but I don't think via Twilight is the route.
And the fact that Bella is as wet as an October afternoon (metaphorically I mean) further compromises the BDSM reading - I don't have much insight into the submissive mindset myself but I think most people would agree that submissive women are strong, capable and independent who *choose* to submit. Bella seems genuinely incapable of staying alive most of the time - there'd be very pleasure little in the submission of someone so blatantly rubbish :) Sorry, that's a slightly frivolous point but ultimately reading Bella as a submissive does no kindness to submissives.
And finally: @Melissa et al
The romance/rape device. Come on folks, get your heads out of the 70s. This is a *MUCH LESS COMMON* device than people seem to realise. In fact, I can't remember the last time I encountered it in a modern romance (oh, wait I can, it's Claiming the Courtesan) - if there is an element of sexual submission, texts are at a much greater liberty to address it directly, rather cloaking it behind a facade of rape fantasy. Again, you can still find rape fantasies if you're looking for them (see CtC above) but, again, they tend to be served up with self-knowledge, self-awareness and in much more "healthy" fantasy contexts. The problem with the "rape" fantasy is that it often attempted to address in an underhand way a lot of seemingly less acceptable fantasies - the idea that a man was so into he couldn't stop him, sexual submission, abdication of responsibilities to pleasure etc. etc. It's not a fantasy about rape per se, it's a fantasy about other things connected to the idea of being raped. Nowadays these ideas can be directly addressed and explored so the 'need' for the hero to rape the heroine has diminished.
I most assuredly don't believe that fantasy rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views female sexuality. I don't think you give women enough credit for their fantasies, and I do, in fact, believe it can be perfectly healthy fantasy.
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Arthur B
at 12:34 on 2009-12-21
Secondly, is there any problem, inherently, with what might be considered "non empowering fantasies "for women? I mean, there's definitely a distinction between "you should be like this" and sheer fantasy-space, which is how most people see Twilight.
I think the main thrust of Melissa's argument is that there are a disturbing number of people who really do see Twilight as an ideal for living, though.
There is, of course, absolutely no problem with fantasy-space taken as fantasy space. And there will always, of course, be a certain proportion of an audience that takes a fantasy outside fantasy-space, but that's their problem, not the author's. I suppose the real question is whether the proportion of Twilight's readers to take the ideas out of fantasy-space and decide that Bella is someone they should try to be is more or less the proportion you'd expect, or whether it's disproportionately large. This is not a question which anecdotal evidence can really answer, and until we set up the Ferret Statistics Bureau is probably not something we're likely to sort out here...
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Melissa G.
at 12:39 on 2009-12-21@orions
I stated many times that I have no problem with BDSM in its true form. It follows specific rules and guidelines that make it safe and enjoyable for those involved. Do I partake in it personally? No, I don't. But I have no problem with those who do.
The issue I was addressing - and I should have made it more clear - is the romanticized versions of BDSM and rape that you see in romance novels all the time. Because I think there is a big difference between not only real BDSM and fantasy!BDSM but also between fantasy!BDSM and fantasy!rape.
And I did purposely clarify that I wasn't trying to say that those who practice BDSM in real life are somehow sexist or anti-feminist - I was referring specifically to where the attraction to fantasy!rape comes from. And also there's nothing wrong with being attracted to fantasy!rape material.
And yes, I still read manga that reeks of fantasy!rape. But the fantasy!rape phenomena to me is completely different from rape-play, etc in real life because in the story these are not people who are consciously taking part in said behavior. It's just plain "actual rape" in which the person being violated actually doesn't mind so much. Fantasy!rape is just that. A fantasy. And it should never be confused with reality or - in my opinion - rape play between two consenting partners. Because while I enjoy reading about it, I certainly have no intentions or desire to act it out in real life.
Re: Dracula, it's been a while since I read it, but I'm pretty sure the vampires could not go out during the day, which is what I specified was a criteria.
I'm honestly willing to just agree to disagree with you at this point if you'd be more comfortable putting the conversation to bed.
My argument is that I don't see this level of outrage directed at male-created & male-targeted stories.
You don't? Because I certainly have. On this very site, for example. I feel we're far more likely to call men out on sexist behavior than we are women, and that *is* holding them to a different standard. Maybe I shouldn't have specified her gender; maybe I should have just said that the book was sexist and leave it at that. Because whether or not the writer was male or female, the book has some out-dated views about sex and sexuality. I'd be just as angry about this if it had been written by a male.
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Melissa G.
at 12:46 on 2009-12-21
This is a *MUCH LESS COMMON* device than people seem to realise.
The thing, Kyra, I read a lot of Boys Love manga, and it's all over the place in that. To the point where it starts to get disturbing. But I do admit that it's more common the more old-fashioned romance novels, and I'll take your word for it as I assume you read more romance than I do.
It's not a fantasy about rape per se, it's a fantasy about other things connected to the idea of being raped.
And yes, I totally agree with this.
I most assuredly don't believe that fantasy rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views female sexuality. I don't think you give women enough credit for their fantasies, and I do, in fact, believe it can be perfectly healthy fantasy.
I think it can be a healthy fantasy too. And as I said, I was merely trying to figure out where the attraction comes from. I'm not trying to submit that idea as fact.
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Melissa G.
at 13:03 on 2009-12-21I just want to clarify that I have no problem with anyone's personal fantasies or kinks. There's nothing unhealthy about having them. And if I insinuated to anyone that they should be ashamed or embarrassed about their fantasies, I do sincerely apologize.
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Wardog
at 13:12 on 2009-12-21I'm pretty sure nobody is genuinely annoyed - and equally pretty sure you weren't disparaging anybody's sexual preferences. I read through this when I woke up this morning and it seemed like lively discussion. Honestly, after the Graceling fiasco we're all way too nervy about stepping on each other's toes :)
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Melissa G.
at 14:28 on 2009-12-21I also realize that I wasn't being entirely clear when I said:
I definitely think the attraction to the fantasy!rape is embedded in the negative ways society treats/views women's sexuality.
I don't mean that having that fantasy or enjoying that fantasy makes you inherently sexist. I was trying to come at it from an extremely analytical point of view and how it works on a subconscious level. I think the attraction arises more out of a "coping mechanism" to the Madonna/Whore complex women have to live with every day and not that women who have these fantasies are in some way sexist. That wasn't at all what I meant to imply. I hope that makes it clearer what I was going for there and that I didn't just dig myself in deeper.
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Sister Magpie
at 15:41 on 2009-12-21Regarding Bella being over-empowered, I wonder if the point isn't that she's over-special? Doesn't she gain superspecial vampire powers, and two of them instead of one, and have no trouble controlling them right off? I would assume that's what people are referring to--but within the text she presumably remains as passive as ever in terms of her life.
I have a friend who was recently questioning the hatred of Twilight in terms of asking: How come when something is known as being loved by teenaged boys it's generally considered cool, but if it's known as loved by teenaged girls it's lame lame lame? I couldn't help but think of this here with the discussion of how there's less concern that boys be sheilded from something like HP--especially since I can understand the double standard in a way.
But part of it, for me, is maybe that I do feel a little embarassed when this kind of teen girl fantasy gets so popular. At least one conservative politician jumped on it as proof that despite what those unnatural feminists say this just proves that what girls really want is a man to obsess over their beauty and protect them while they are passively loved.
Which is maybe part of the danger. Not only do embarassing male adolescent fantasies tend to tread more into the danger zone of disrespecting other people while the female version comes close to disrespecting yourself, but girl fantasies--no matter if they are just a healthy part of their exploration of their own sexuality--is more likely to be manipulated to serve men. If we imagine a man and a woman both hopelessly stuck in immature fantasies the woman tends to risk ending up in a worse position.
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Arthur B
at 15:58 on 2009-12-21
Not only do embarassing male adolescent fantasies tend to tread more into the danger zone of disrespecting other people while the female version comes close to disrespecting yourself, but girl fantasies--no matter if they are just a healthy part of their exploration of their own sexuality--is more likely to be manipulated to serve men. If we imagine a man and a woman both hopelessly stuck in immature fantasies the woman tends to risk ending up in a worse position.
Thank you! This is a much better statement of the position I was trying to put forward. The man might disrespect other people, but he won't take any shit; it might be bad, in the sense that he's being horrible to people, but it won't be personally damaging to him, just the people he hurts as he cuts a swathe through life.
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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/
at 18:56 on 2009-12-21Melissa,
I appreciate all the disclaimers, I really do; I'm not accusing you of having your heart in the wrong place or wishing ill on anyone in the kink community.
I *think* we have a basic disagreement about childhood and adolescence, and the role sex, litereature, or sex literature plays in them.
I don't understand, for instance, why you would consider teen-targeted erotica, for instance, to be a squick; I think if written by someone other than Stephanie Myers it has the possibility to do a lot of good.
I can't point to a specific proposal you make about childrearing that I would object to--talking with kids about problematic movies, saying they should be free to explore their sexuality, and so on are all things I want to hear. But, probably because this started as a critique of a book, not a manifesto for youth education, I don't feel I have a coherent picture of how you think kids should interact with books. To be honest, what you've said still seems to me to be contradictory.
For example, you've said that teenagers should be free to explore sexuality through literature, but that writing erotica specifically for teenagers squicks you; to me, those positions aren't fully compatible. I don't know how it can be wrong to sell someone something it's okay for them to buy; for every market of readers there's a genre produced to meet their expectations. And honestly, I think a conscientious YA-targeted erotica writer could produce stuff that was better for kids than adult-targeted erotica which would naturally be about a different set of concerns.
Basically there's nothing more I can say at this point; some of your comments seem to have implications that trouble me, but I can't articulate the problem without putting words in your mouth. And it's difficult to get at the distinction I'm seeing between our stances on what's appropriate for teenagers without lapsing into scoring points by calling someone a prude.
In conclusion, I think I've said all I have to say about Twilight. I think there's room for an interesting conversation to be had about children and fiction in general, but that wasn't what the article was about. If you should choose at some point to explain in detail how you think children should approach fiction and what you think is acceptable to market to them, I'd read it with great interest.
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http://baihehua.livejournal.com/
at 18:56 on 2009-12-21Wow; long and meandering discussion.
I don't see anyone stating here that Twilight is a wonderful work of literature. There seems to be a consensus that Bella and Edward's relationship is not healthy. (If you want to view it as a BDSM relationship, I think that's fine, and there is certainly nothing wrong with BDSM in real life- with safewords and such-, but Bella and Edward's relationship as presented in the book does not seem healthy.)
I think one of the main problems (if not THE main problem) is the fact that this story is targeted to children- specifically prepubescent and pubescent girls. Girls are already being bombarded with social pressures to be meek, submissive, "feminine", etc; Meyer's work is certainly far from unique in this respect*. But Twilight is new, extremely popular, and sends this type of disempowering message in a very clear way. (This message, of course, is that it is perfectly acceptable for girls to wait for a man to protect them and make decisions for them.) Girls do not need any more messages to be docile little doormats, especially not from such popular sources.
The thing that I think most separates adult audiences from teen and preteen ones is that teens and children are still developing their opinions and beliefs about the world and themselves (discussed in many developmental analysis books). Whereas an adult can look at a character like Edward and think "he's hot/cute/sexy/such a bad boy, but I wouldn't want a boyfriend like him in real life", children and even many teens have a lot more trouble with that (not necessarily that they can't, but it's certainly harder). What the adult is doing there is interjecting his/her own outside beliefs ("I don't want a boyfriend like that"/"it's not okay for someone to act like that in real life") onto their understanding of this story. And that's great. But since children and many teens are still developing their beliefs, it is incredibly difficult for them to take still-forming opinions and contradict what the text seems to be saying. Twilight (or other materials) is much more likely to help *form* teens' beliefs about the world than it is to form adults'.
And that, I think, is the real problem. No one (that I know of, anyway) wants teens or children to emulate Bella's behavior (or Edward's, for that matter). But since teens and preteens are still developing their views of the world and themselves, they are much more likely to emulate or idolize these behaviors than adult readers would be.
As a result, I think authors of materials aimed at younger audiences need to be especially careful of negative messages their works may advocate. I'm sure most of these messages are completely unintentional, but authors (as responsible people) should try to be as aware as possible of what their material may be saying.
*I realize that these social messages are not as strong as they used to be, but they (like so many negative elements of society) are far from gone.
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Melissa G.
at 19:08 on 2009-12-21
I don't understand, for instance, why you would consider teen-targeted erotica, for instance, to be a squick;
Maybe we're defining erotica differently? In my mind erotica = a book written for the specific purpose of titillating and sexually arousing it's audience with sexually provocative scenes. Such as the book in Kyra's
latest review
. I don't think there's anything wrong with having sex scenes in teen books; if well written, they could be very beneficial. What bothers me is the idea of an adult writing a book whose *sole intent* is to try and sexually arouse teenagers. To me, that's squicky. It just is; I can't help it.
I think there's room for an interesting conversation to be had about children and fiction in general, but that wasn't what the article was about.
Yes, precisely. So while I am of course happy to discuss psychological/sociological issues with anyone, this really isn't the place for it. So I'd agree it's best to put the convo to rest.
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Arthur B
at 19:17 on 2009-12-21
I don't think there's anything wrong with having sex scenes in teen books; if well written, they could be very beneficial. What bothers me is the idea of an adult writing a book whose *sole intent* is to try and sexually arouse teenagers. To me, that's squicky. It just is; I can't help it.
I can see that. Adults writing books addressed to other adults with the intent of titillating or arousing them, and teenagers happening to chance across those books and enjoying them is one thing. Adults attempting to engage with the sexuality of teenagers on the level of titillation or arousal? Uh, not keen.
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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/
at 19:32 on 2009-12-21Arthur,
I couldn't agree less. Teenage sexuality is different from adult sexuality. Many can and will get something out of adult erotica, but teenagers as a group have different concerns and will find slightly different things appealing.
The most interesting part of Ms. Whitfield's article was the idea that Twilight and Flowers in the Attic embody a specifically *virginal* sexuality and that part of the challenge of writing sex scenes for kids is that many of them aren't familiar with the sensations of genital sex. The bruises and strained muscles and so on that Bella incurs when they do get down to banging, for instance, add a sensory dimension that kids will be familiar with.
So I do think that erotica for teenagers should be different from erotica for adults; plenty of teenagers seems to agree, choosing to participate in "lemon" fanfic communities rather than read mainstream erotica. But teen-for-teen erotica writers just produce an echo chamber where sexual ignorance and prejudices are amplified. And writing well is a skill developed over *years*.
Very few teenagers, in my opinion, are capable of producing honest, readable teen-targeted erotica; that's something that has to be left to adults with the perspective of age.
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Andy G
at 19:39 on 2009-12-21@ Arthur and Orionsnebula: I kind of agree with Orionsnebula here, I think in principle it's not really that different from the way the adult writers of something like Skins are tapping into teen fantasies. Adults writing erotica for teens is not in the same category as adults making sexual advances to teens, if that was an aspect you weren't keen on (though I may be putting words into your mouth there), any more than adults writing erotica for adults are doing so to their readers.
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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/
at 19:46 on 2009-12-21My name is Orion, by the way; My (defunct) blog was a joke on my name
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Arthur B
at 19:55 on 2009-12-21
Adults writing erotica for teens is not in the same category as adults making sexual advances to teens, if that was an aspect you weren't keen on (though I may be putting words into your mouth there), any more than adults writing erotica for adults are doing so to their readers.
You see, to me there's a difference between fiction with a heavily sexualised element which may titillate but doesn't have titillation as its main purpose (such as Skins, to use your example) and erotica, wherein sexual titillation is pretty much the entire purpose of the proceedings and any additional meaning is pretty much secondary.
I have never seen an example of an adult writing the latter for teenagers; I think it's the sort of thing that teenagers are better off exploring with other teenagers (such as on the lemon fic communities Orionsnebula refers to). I am unsure whether you could successfully pull it off without coming off as deeply creepy. I would love to hear about any counter-examples.
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Arthur B
at 19:59 on 2009-12-21(Though I want to stress that I don't think that intelligent, meaningful erotica is impossible - just that I would only classify as "erotica" fiction where the main purpose is titillation. Additional meaning can, and doubtless does, arise as an adjunct to this, but if the main purpose of the story isn't the arousal of the reader, what's the difference between erotica and normal fiction which includes sex scenes?)
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Robinson L
at 20:30 on 2009-12-21All right! I've been looking forward to this. Ptolemaues has been ranting about this series for over two years, and though I've never read any of it myself, I've picked up quite a lot second-hand from her and her fellow haters; and all this matches up pretty well with what I've gathered elsewhere.
She also
made a start
on
New Moon
, but she hasn't looked at it in months. (Unfortunate, as I enjoy her rants tremendously, but on the other hand I guess exposing herself to that stuff must be toxic to her health.) She also takes issue with Bella's treatment of Jessica, among other things.
[Bella} seems to have a bad enough relationship with her father that she calls him by his first name
Not sure about this; two of ptolemaeus' best friends call their fathers by their first names, and I don't think it's indicative of a bad relationship in either case. Then again, I presume Meyer never bothers to explain why Bella calls her father by his first name.
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http://ninjacatman.livejournal.com/
at 20:36 on 2009-12-21
[Bella} seems to have a bad enough relationship with her father that she calls him by his first name
From what I remember about the book (it's been a while) the way this is introduced it is meant to imply that Bella doesn't have a close relationship with her father.
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Melissa G.
at 20:51 on 2009-12-21
Not sure about this; two of ptolemaeus' best friends call their fathers by their first names, and I don't think it's indicative of a bad relationship in either case.
I feel like there was something in the book that hinted at this, but I don't have it in front of me to find out for sure. I remember distinctly being given the impression that she didn't get along with her father, and she does state that he doesn't like her calling him "Charlie". She says she can't do it in front of him. That to me is different from a consensual attitude toward it.
You see, to me there's a difference between fiction with a heavily sexualised element which may titillate but doesn't have titillation as its main purpose (such as Skins, to use your example) and erotica, wherein sexual titillation is pretty much the entire purpose of the proceedings and any additional meaning is pretty much secondary.
This was pretty much what I was getting at. The goal of erotica is not to "inform" (for lack of a better word), it's meant to "arouse". I think a teen fiction book that deals heavily with teenage sexuality as a theme and thus has a lot of sex scenes (which teens may or may not find titillating) is one thing and writing erotica for teens is another. The former is an exploratory look at sex between teens paying careful attention to what it's doing.
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Melissa G.
at 21:03 on 2009-12-21@Robinson L.:
Thanks for the link to your sister's lj entry! I got a kick out of that!
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Andy G
at 00:41 on 2009-12-22
I have never seen an example of an adult writing the latter for teenagers; I think it's the sort of thing that teenagers are better off exploring with other teenagers (such as on the lemon fic communities Orionsnebula refers to). I am unsure whether you could successfully pull it off without coming off as deeply creepy. I would love to hear about any counter-examples.
I know nothing about erotic fiction, my response was more to try and tease out if "creepiness" was the problem you were getting at, as I think it is an interesting question whether it would necessarily be an issue. Not an interesting question to which I have an answer however.
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Arthur B
at 01:35 on 2009-12-22Yes; I'm not satisfied that the best problem I can come up with in terms of adults writing out-and-out erotica for teens is "creepiness" - it's a bit Daily Mail isn't it? - which is why I would genuinely welcome anyone pointing out genuine examples of adults trying to write fiction which is primarily intended to arouse teenagers through the portrayal of sexual situations so we can have some data points.
I mean, you could make an argument for Twilight. But there's two issues there: firstly, Twilight is terrified of sex, to the extent that it is symbolised in the stories by sacrifice, bleeding, and undeath, which is pretty fatal for erotica (which requires a certain amount of sexual hoopla to really qualify as erotica in the first plaxce), but works far better for romance (the pursuit of innocence, the deflowering a culmination of the relationship developed throughout the story, etc.), which is a pretty big indication that Twilight falls on the "romance" side of the border. And also, Twilight creeps me the hell out, so it's not likely to change my mind on the erotica-for-teens concept. ;)
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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/
at 02:16 on 2009-12-22I don't actually read much erotica, so i can't think of any targeted to teenagers. I have to admit, I just always assumed it must exist.
The closest I come is fantasy writers like Melanie Rawn and Mercedes Lackey. None of her books are *strictly* about sex, but in several of the YA books (cough*ArrowsFlight*cough) the sex gets a huge chunk of the page count and is substantially more interesting than the main plot.
But if you'll gant the following premises:
1: It's okay for teens to read erotica
2: any two demographic groups will have different tastes as a matter of statistics
and
3: good writers are generally adults
it seems to follow that among the erotic stories it is possible to write, some will appeal more to teens, other to adults, and that the best of those stories will probably be written by adults, not children.
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Robinson L
at 03:00 on 2009-12-22
Thanks for the link to your sister's lj entry! I got a kick out of that!
Glad to hear it! Thought you might!
If you really liked it, I'm sure she'd appreciate comments. (Which you should be able to do anonymously if you don't already have an account.)
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Melissa G.
at 03:18 on 2009-12-22
If you really liked it, I'm sure she'd appreciate comments.
I was going to, but when I realized how long ago the entry was from, I thought it'd be weird so I didn't. ^_^;
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http://ninjacatman.livejournal.com/
at 03:43 on 2009-12-22
The closest I come is fantasy writers like Melanie Rawn and Mercedes Lackey. None of her books are *strictly* about sex, but in several of the YA books (cough*ArrowsFlight*cough) the sex gets a huge chunk of the page count and is substantially more interesting than the main plot.
But see that means it's not erotica, even if there is a lot of sex it's not just about the sex (whether the main plot is more interesting or not). Even trashy Harlequinn romances aren't erotica, they're trashy romances which have a lot of sex in them but are technically about the relationship with sex as a bonus. Erotica is the other way around.
One of the problems I think Melissa and Arthur and even me are having is when we think of erotica we think of the erotica we have come across which is written by adults with a distinctly adult view of sex. I can't think of erotica that has been written for teens with a distinctly teenage mindset. But that I'm thinking about, it doesn't like a bad idea, to write books about having sex from an actual teenage point of view.
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http://ninjacatman.livejournal.com/
at 03:44 on 2009-12-22***But now that I'm thinking about, it doesn't seem like a bad idea, to write books about having sex from an actual teenage point of view.***
because sometimes I skip important words when i type.
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Robinson L
at 15:30 on 2009-12-22
If you really liked it, I'm sure she'd appreciate comments.
I was going to, but when I realized how long ago the entry was from, I thought it'd be weird so I didn't. ^_^;
Yeah, I know the feeling. Still, even if it is extremely belated, I think she'd appreciate feedback from someone who isn't a member of her family. Besides, she's probably either reading this already or will be soon enough, so it's not as if it would be out-of-the-blue.
Still up to you, of course. *shrugs*
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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/
at 16:04 on 2009-12-22I don't really have a lot to say here. I did read the series, and pretty much enjoyed the first three books, though they are certainly not great literature and I ended up raising my eyebrows in certain places. But I enjoyed this even more:
http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317176.html
Seriously, Sparkledammerung will tell you all you ever need to know about what "Twilight" is *really* about - and it's a hoot, besides.
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Melissa G.
at 16:32 on 2009-12-22@Mary J
Thanks for the link! I knew there was a Mormon influence in the book but I don't know enough about the religion to feel able to discuss it myself. So this was really interesting for me to read! I liked her picture inclusions too. ^^
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Arthur B
at 16:47 on 2009-12-22A note: this year we've had:
- This article.
- My review of
Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines
.
- Dan's article about
the philosophy of identity
, which included notes on the metaphysical underpinnings of vampirism in the
Buffy
setting.
- My review of
Let the Right One In
.
- And Kyra's first article of the year was another
Twilight article
.
Have we just accidentally had our very own Year of the Vampire? Is it time for a vampire theme? (Or perhaps an expansion of the zombies theme to include undeath in general?) Should we put a moratorium on further Twilight articles so that it never, ever, ever qualifies for a theme?
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Sister Magpie
at 18:52 on 2009-12-22What, no True Blood?
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Arthur B
at 19:01 on 2009-12-22The search feature's showing some mention in the PlayPen, but no articles. I don't remember wrong, but I might just be being forgetful...
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Shim
at 19:42 on 2009-12-22Wow, I'm late... I have also not read this book. Oh well... I feel like for this discussion, the "boys' trash" (basically) mentioned is a bit different from
Twilight
, whatever you think about quality or empowerment. It's about the type of characters these people are supposed to be.
James Bond, Rambo, Conan... they are basically military types with very unusual lives, and the books/films are about the way they defeat obstacles and kick ass. Boys certainly tend to think what they do is cool, but they're so far removed from typical lives that there's not much direct parallel in terms of how to behave. Of course, they all glamorise violence and relentless enmity as ways to deal with problems. One might argue that the contexts are all military ones and a bit different to everyday problems, which might reduce the effect, but I think it's there. I'd say the typical influence is to make boys want to be strong, hardy, resolute, and maybe suave. On the whole, I think there won't be many situations where boys could think "oh, this is just like what happened to Conan" and approach or interpret situations in a similar way.
Twilight
is all about vampires and magic, but the heroine is supposedly fairly ordinary, and designed for girls to empathise with. She does normal stuff. Relationships with people are the core of the book, from what I gather (like, it being a romance). That being the case, stripped-down versions of some situations in the book could happen to real girls - getting followed around, having their boundaries pushed by boys, having the pace of relationships controlled by boys, and... whatever else happens in the book I haven't read. So it's
perhaps
more likely that the portrayal of Bella and the relationship, which is supposedly ideal, will influence girls' approach to similar situations in their own lives.
To some extent I might also say that James Bond, Rambo et al. aren't really held up as role models. Few people (some, but few) would say James Bond is a model for relationships with others - he doesn't seem to have friends, is egotistical, throws himself into danger unnecessarily, is incredibly cynical... And while his string of girls might appeal at first, boys don't only want sex. But also, these heroes only show the characteristics they do because of their extraordinary lives. If Conan settled down as a shepherd somewhere and found a girlfriend, I've no idea what he'd be like, because you don't usually find out much about their real selves, only the traits relevant to adventures. Bond would probably be that self-important git in the office who seems to have a new girlfriend every week and a whole string of enemies at work and outside.
Sorry, that rambles a bit but I hope it makes sense.
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Robinson L
at 20:02 on 2009-12-22
What, no True Blood?
Not yet. Once I've read
Dead to the World
I intend to begin work on a review of the book series (which, at my speed, should be ready sometime in March), but I've yet to see even one episode of the tv show, and I haven't seen anybody else tackle it here yet.
I agree with Arthur's suggestion of including a theme handle which includes "Vampires." I'd personally favor a new handle, given the large backlog of articles in our archives, it seems to me more differentiation among them would be all to the good.
Oh, and Melissa, congratulations on getting into the top five most-discussed articles.
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Melissa G.
at 20:20 on 2009-12-22
What, no True Blood?
I've seen the show, and while I didn't *love* it, I didn't hate it either. I'm basically too indifferent to invest my time in an article personally. :-) But I'm looking forward to reading a review of the book series if it appears here on FB. I'm curious how it will compare to the show.
Oh, and Melissa, congratulations on getting into the top five most-discussed articles.
Thanks! I'm very excited about that! ^_^
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Sister Magpie
at 20:30 on 2009-12-22Heh--I'm not really missing the True Blood articles. It just seemed like it went with the theme. I've never read the books, but like the TV series. I started out thinking it was just too silly for words, but was somehow looking forward to it every week so I have to admit I'm a fan.
On the subject of vampires that aren't vampires, I really wanted to agree with this article, actually. Of course anybody can take out certain details and still have the character be a vampire (even something so big as "can go out in the sun") but the problem with so many modern vampire stories is they so often want to have the cool parts without any of the sacrifice that's supposed to make it horrible. This goes double if the person isn't even particularly doing anything wrong.
I always remember someone--I think it was Cassie Claire, actually, criticizing Moonlight for that reason and saying that if you wanted a vampire story you'd be better off watching Dexter, since he's pretty much a vampire despite not actually being a vampire. Just because he's a monster who preys on humans while looking like one of them, and he has a hunger for blood he can't deny.
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Arthur B
at 20:48 on 2009-12-22I think also there's an certain extent to which, if you want to tap into the old vampire myths, you have to include at least a tiny amount of the trappings which go with them, if only on an allegorical level (as with Dexter), otherwise you're trying to freeride on the reputation of vampires without really developing a proper connection to the myth.
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Shim
at 21:13 on 2009-12-22Well, vampires nowadays tend to ignore the inconvenient mythological basis of being, y'know,
actually, genuinely dead
. And depending on your myth of choice, repulsive. And not necessarily having human motivations any more. Obviously it all depends a bit where you decide your vampires are "rooted" - the folk versions (from my reading a long time ago) seemed a lot more monstrous undead horror, without the personality of Dracula or whoever.
I note that they don't seem to turn ordinary people into corrupted semi-human serfs any more, either. Now that might be an interesting twist for Twilight's take on relationships...
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Melissa G.
at 21:49 on 2009-12-22
I have to admit I'm a fan
I also find True Blood very addictive. ^^ Even though Bill is a bit of a "pussy-vampire", we also get Eric who is an old-school sadistic freak vampire, which makes me really happy. I loved when he got blood in his hair and had to cut it!
And depending on your myth of choice, repulsive.
I think Anne Rice had a lot to do with making vampires hot. :-)
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Andy G
at 22:04 on 2009-12-22On the year of the Vampire front, did anyone see Thirst? I thought that was great. And definitely didn't cut back on the nastier side of the vampire myth.
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Sister Magpie
at 01:17 on 2009-12-23Thirst, the Australian film from years ago?
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Andy G
at 02:08 on 2009-12-23No, the Korean film from this year by Chan-woon Park.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0762073/
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Sister Magpie
at 02:40 on 2009-12-23I haven't seen it. I must remember to check it out--if it's good. Is it good?
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Melissa G.
at 02:49 on 2009-12-23
I must remember to check it out--if it's good.
Ditto! It sounds really intriguing. And I've heard good things about Korean horror in general (assuming it falls into that category).
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Andy G
at 10:32 on 2009-12-23Personally I loved it. There are some awesome trailers for it around too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODoagpV68gA
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http://orionsnebula.blogspot.com/
at 18:04 on 2009-12-23Again, I'd blame Bram Stoker for this stuff before I'd blame Anne Rice.
We don't know the story with titular lead, but Dracula-vampires explicitly don't have to be "already dead". At least, Mina Harker gets to turn halfway and get vampire powers while she's still alive.
Furthermore, Dracula can and does go out during the day, not once but twice. First Jonathan runs into him in the streets of London, then when they attack him in his coffin during the day, he escapes and runs out into the streets. While in the sun, he can't use any of his magic powers, but suffers no harm.
Honestly, Bram Stoker decided that vampires were going to be about sex--which worked as horror in Victorian England. But as our culture gets a little more honest and open about sexuality, sex-vampires become less scary and more tittilating.
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Melissa G.
at 19:38 on 2009-12-23
Again, I'd blame Bram Stoker for this stuff before I'd blame Anne Rice.
I certainly wouldn't. Bram Stoker's Dracula (and I'm speaking specifically to the book not any of the movies based on it) is not supposed to be sexy. His physical description (what little there is of it) is not overly flattering. We're not meant to think that Mina is drawn to him because she is physically attracted to him; she isn't. She's drawn to his animal sexual magnetism, or through his powers of mind control.
In Dracula, the sun isn't fatal to the Count, but it does render him powerless. This forces him to adjust his daily life to sleeping during the day (in his coffin filled with dirt) and going out at night when he is powerful. The important thing is that "the sun is a curse to vampires". While it doesn't necessarily have to kill them (Supernatural is a good example of when it worked for me that the sun wasn't fatal), it should be detrimental to them in some way. Causing them to sparkle really isn't a detriment in any way, shape, or form. And that's the problem with the Twilight vampires.
And Mina certainly doesn't gain vampire powers in the book, nor does Lucy. They just waste away in illness as they lose more and more blood. Dracula does give Mina his blood to turn her, but she won't become a vampire until her death when she rises up out of her coffin as Lucy tried to do. Towards the end, she starts to have a sort of psychic connection to Dracula himself, but I wouldn't call that "vampire powers". Dracula has linked himself to her through his blood and she is using that link against him.
The thing to remember about the difference between Anne Rice's work and Bram Stoker's is that Stoker's was condemning sex. Don't give in to your dark sexual urges, it will make you a monster. It's true that nowadays, this message seems more titillating in nature than scary, but that's hardly Stoker's fault.
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Jamie Johnston
at 16:15 on 2009-12-29Hello folks! Been away. Interesting article & discussion. I confess I've slightly skimmed the discussion so forgive me if I say things that have already been mentioned.
The part of the discussion about sex made me think of one of the things that I've found difficult to untangle in my head about the
Twilight
books. At first I thought Meyer's approach to the 'vampirism as metaphor for sex' thing was interesting and quite clever. As Orion has pointed out a couple of comments above this one, having that metaphor made sense in Stoker's time [disclaimer: haven't actually read
Dracula
, except an abridged & simplified children's version when I was under 10] as a way of (first of all) representing sex in fiction at all and (secondly) representing sex as something both attractive and dangerous. Now that sex isn't, by and large, seen as dangerous, the modern vampire story has to find a social setting in which it still makes sense to address sex as something that's dangerous as well as appealing. One option is to use it to address rape-fantasies through 'vampirism as metaphor for non-consensual-or-is-it? sex', but another is Meyer's social setting of teenage sex, which has elements of dangerousness in that it may attract parental and social disapproval, it may be new and unknown, and it may bring the real (because of ignorance or nonchalance on the teenagers' part about safe sex) or imagined (because of ignorance about the biology of conception and transmission of disease) threat of pregnancy and / or STDs. For a lot of young teenagers, especially ones from small and conservative communities and especially for girls, sex must in some ways be quite a scary prospect. I'm sure Meyer isn't by any means the first artist to see and exploit the potential for vampire stories as metaphors for all this, but
Twilight
was the first place I'd encountered it.
What I find hard to get my head around, though, is that she also, especially after the first book, brings sex very much into the story on a non-metaphorical level. Sometimes the metaphor and the literal story are saying the same thing about sex and sometimes they say different things, so it becomes a little confusing. For example, Edward refuses to 'have sex with' (i.e. bite) Bella because it would be selfish and would deprive her of her carefree innocence and would imperil her soul; yet he refuses to (literally) have sex with her for simply because it would be physically dangerous and probably kill her. Both lines of reasoning are disempowering for Bella and both are based on the Nice Guy premise that Bella probably wouldn't really enjoy it; but the metaphorical reasons are moral ones and the literal ones are entirely practical. Is Meyer telling us that teenagers shouldn't have sex because it's metaphorically but not actually wrong and also because it's literally but not metaphorically dangerous?
And then it's further confused by an extra layer of metaphor, because having literal sex with a vampire is, like literal (and irresponsible and ill-informed) teenage human sex, dangerous, but for different reasons: vampire sex is dangerous because in the excitement the vampire is likely to lose self-control and bite you (or, as it becomes in the later books, because the vampire is so super-strong that even if he doesn't bite you the mere exertion of force that's involved in the sex itself is likely to kill you). Which appears in at least some parts of the series to operate as a metaphor for the actual dangers of teenage sex to the extent that sex with Edward is something Bella both desires and fears (thus her mental disposition parallels what many of Meyer's female readers probably feel or felt when contemplating havign sex for the first time), except that the metaphor in this case is an extremely bad and misleading one because, first of all, fear of sex with a vampire is extremely rational and appropriate because having sex with a vampire genuinely is almost certain to kill you whereas fear of sex with a teenage boy is largely irrational and socially constructed because having sex with a teenage boy is almost certain not to kill you and very likely to cause you no ill effects at all; and secondly, the danger from sex with a vampire stems from the vampire's inherent dangerousness and lack of self-control, whereas the danger from sex with a teenage boy, in as much as there is any danger at all, stems from irresponsibility and ignorance on the part of both participants. So on this level vampire sex seems to function as a metaphor for teenage human sex that tells us, quite unhelpfully, that teenage human sex is extremely dangerous because boys are violent and have little self-control. Indeed sex with a vampire here seems to be really a metaphor for sex with a date-rapist, but because it looks like a metaphor for sex in general the reader comes away with an unconscious impression that all men are rapists. Which is, to put it very mildly, not an appropriate assertion to make by sleight-of-hand in a book like this.
And not only do the metaphorical and the literal messages get into conflicts and tangles with one another, but the metaphorical and literal events themselves get caught up together in the plot. In
Breaking dawn
(
spoilers
, as if anyone cares!) Edward does eventually have sex (literally) with Bella, she having tricked / persuaded him to do this while she's still human. The metaphorical danger of the literal sex doesn't materialize: he restrains himself sufficiently that he causes no injury beyond extensive bruising. But then we find that the literal danger of literal sex does result: Bella gets pregnant. Consequently, although the literal sex didn't result in the expected metaphorical event (death), this result is ultimately caused by the literal result of the literal sex (pregnancy), because Bella dies delivering the baby, thus in turn bringing about the metaphorical sex (vampirism) because in order to save her Edward has to make her a vampire, except that this has now stopped being a metaphor for sex and has become something like a metaphor for the immortal soul (since Bella, like a good Mormon, refuses life-saving abortion and therefore dies to be reborn as a happy immortal being).
It's all rather baffling, really.
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Jamie Johnston
at 16:34 on 2009-12-29Oh, also, quick thing about empowerment. I think this is a little more complex than some commenters have thought, in as much as Bella is actually quite a powerful agent of action in the plot a lot of the time but at the same time she's very disempowered in other ways. In
Twilight
itself (
spoliers
of course) she has a lot of will but very little capacity and does indeed have to be rescued again and again. It's perhaps slightly good that the climax results from her choice to escape the protection of the Cullens in order to rescue her mother from the evil vampire, but this is undermined by the fact that it's a stupid idea and she ends up having to be rescued from the evil vampire herself.
But in the later books things improve a bit. In
New moon
a certain amount of rescuing is still required, but she does end up taking a real role in the final bit of the plot, namely 'rescuing' Edward from killing himself because he thinks she's dead. In
Eclipse
she exercises a fairly significant bit of agency in choosing between her two suitors. And of course in
Breaking dawn
she gets ridiculous super-powers and can kick everyone's collective arse. In a sense her ridiculous super-powers are quite traditionally feminine in that they're protective rather than offensive, but there's no implication that they're anything other than utterly crucial to victory.
Still, the series is really a lurve story more than a fantasy adventure, so the most important place for Bella to show agency and empowerment is in her relationship with Edward, and there isn't much of it there. She's pushy about sex and eventually gets what she wants, but one can't really say that she's in control or that she directs events in the relationship.
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http://atropaxbeladona.livejournal.com/
at 22:48 on 2011-02-10I can't comment on the original post, but I read your dumb post about Steve Vander Ark and laughed so hard your cluelessness, I thought you should know. Also, some facts about the case can be found
here
and
here
.
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http://atropaxbeladona.livejournal.com/
at 22:48 on 2011-02-10Oops, it should be AT your cluelesness but my browser eated it. :(
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Dan H
at 23:20 on 2011-02-10Hiya, sorry you can't post on the original article, really not sure what the issue is if you can post on this one (openID sometimes plays funny).
I'm more than willing to believe that the HP Lexicon did in fact contain unattributed material from the Potter books (and looking at the article which I believe I wrote in 2008 I did in fact open with the line "If the guy has genuinely reproduced text from the Potter books without attribution, then he's breaking the law and he needs to correct that") it's just that Rowling seemed to be trying to argue that (a) reference guides were inherently worthless and that (b) a guide to her books could be improved by including information that is not in the books.
I don't really give a crap about the legality of it (that's for courts to decide, although personally I come down on the side of "if it's not her words it's not her copyright" although I suspect that is an oversimplification) what bothered me was what it implied about Rowling's attitude to her texts.
But dude, it was three years ago, I'm personally kind of over it.
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Dan H
at 09:39 on 2011-02-11Further:
Having read the posts you linked in some detail, I'm pretty sure the court's analysis and understanding of copyright law was basically in line with my own as expressed in the original article.
My problem with the lawsuit wasn't that I thought that Rowling was necessarily wrong, just that I thought she was acting for the wrong reasons. Her objection to the lexicon was that it just put information from the books in alphabetical order and that's ... well ... perfectly reasonable as far as I can see.
The key to the case was (as I pointed out several times in the comments on the original article) that copyright protects not ideas but expressions, and the Lexicon used too much of Rowling's original expression (particularly from the two companion books). It had nothing to do with those complaints which I dismissed as ludicrous - that there wasn't enough new information in the book, and that all he'd done was rearrange preexisting information.
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Arthur B
at 11:00 on 2011-02-11It's often the case in law - especially poorly understood fields like IP law - that the reasons your client has to want to take action against someone have nothing to do with the actual legal arguments as to why what that person did was wrong. I imagine her lawyers spent a lot of time encouraging her to stick to the actual harm that was done - the wholesale borrowing of her text - rather than wittering on about irrelevant nonsense that undermined her case, and failing that tried to suppress the urge to roll their eyes at her testimony and did all they could to get her off the stand sharpish before she did more damage.
A lot of the skill in being an attorney, especially in emotive cases like these, is taking a client's irrational concerns, working out whether there's any legal merit to them, and failing that working out whether the opponent has screwed up in some other respect which would allow your client to get satisfaction that way. It's difficult because often the sensible and prudent thing to do is not the thing which would make the client feel happy and vindicated.
On the other side, I would
hope
Vander Ark's lawyers expended at least some effort to say "Look, we might be able to put together a case here, but let's face it - it'll be tenuous. It might be cheaper and easier in the long run to cut your losses and do a rewrite to reduce the amount of stuff you're copy-pasting directly from the books so we can settle this out of court." If a client is intent on making a stand and won't listen to advice to the contrary that's one thing, but it's not cool to let clients walk into the lion's den expecting kittens.
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Gamer_2k4 at 19:36 on 2011-05-18
Meyer wrote a prologue about an imminent death in first person past tense. Say that with me again. IMMINENT death. FIRST person. PAST tense.
So? I'm sure nearly all first-person works are written in past tense; I know for sure that most novels in general are past tense. Present tense just sounds strange in a book, regardless of the application. After all, the fact that you have a book in its entirety means it was (supposedly) compiled together from past events, rather than being something that's being written as you read it.
Now, I'm not trying to say that Meyer has any merit as a writer. That would be silly. However, past tense isn't as bad as you're making it out to be.
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Wardog
at 20:13 on 2011-05-18Meyer's prologue, and pedestrian prose style, don't bother me as much as they bother Melissa but nevertheless I do agree that trying to induce a sense of narrative tension by having the narrator fearing her imminent death in the past tense only draws attention to the artificiality of the form because it smacks you in the face with the reality that this is being narrated from *somewhere*. I don't think it's the first person past tense that's the issue: it's the death thang. Also quite a lot of YA novels, The Hunger Games and The Knife of Never Letting Go, are told in present tense first person narration for precisely this reason.
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Melissa G.
at 22:59 on 2011-05-18
nevertheless I do agree that trying to induce a sense of narrative tension by having the narrator fearing her imminent death in the past tense only draws attention to the artificiality of the form because it smacks you in the face with the reality that this is being narrated from *somewhere*.
This basically says it. I wasn't objecting to the past tense. I think past tense should be the default if you don't have a good reason to switch it up. The problem with what Meyer did was that you have a character telling you how they are about to die despite the fact that since the narration is in past tense, we already KNOW the narrator doesn't die thus killing any sense of tension or fear.
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Andy G
at 23:27 on 2011-05-18I remember writing about present tense narration in my first year at uni. There was a sentence in All Quiet on the Western Front that piqued my interest:
We trudge through mud for five days. (paraphrase)
The question is: at what point is he narrating from? If it's the middle of the period, how does he know they will marching for five days. If it's after the period, why doesn't he use past tense?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying present-tense narration is problematic or illogical or anything. I just think it's an interesting contrast to the past-tense first-person-about-to-die narration.
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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/
at 08:42 on 2011-05-19It seems that if one wants tension in a past tense, using first persion might not be the way to go. Rather it is more effective if it is some version of the apersonal narrative voice.
Though that might not be as immersive. This isn't true in my personal experience, I often get annoyed with first person present tense even if it works on occasion.
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Wardog
at 10:33 on 2011-05-19Yes, I think you're right. I think the thing is you can't have it both ways. There's nothing inherently "wrong" about first person past tense narration telling you the protagonist presently fears for her death but you can't also expect the reader to get all wound up about it.
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Andy G
at 12:25 on 2011-05-19I've just remembered something that the Kick-Ass voiceover narrator says:
"And if you're reassuring yourself that I'm going to make it through this since I'm talking to you now, quit being such a smart-ass! Hell dude, you never seen "Sin City"? "Sunset Boulevard"? "American Beauty"?
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Dan H
at 23:02 on 2011-05-19I have heard that /Sunset Boulevard/ originally opened with the narrator actually checking himself into a morgue.
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Shim
at 23:22 on 2011-05-19
"We trudge through mud for five days." (paraphrase)
The question is: at what point is he narrating from? If it's the middle of the period, how does he know they will marching for five days. If it's after the period, why doesn't he use past tense?
Well, I'd say not from any point, but the whole period. Or if you insist on a fixed point, continuously at points during the five days that are handily merged for the reader's convenience. But I prefer the first.
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Wardog
at 23:31 on 2011-05-19Also, and sorry to keep going on about this because I do absolutely see your point Andy, none of those texts are trying to make you feel anxious about whether or not the protagonist dies.
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Dan H
at 23:38 on 2011-05-19To be fair to Stephanie Meyer, you can make the case that the flash-forward in Twilight *also* isn't trying to make you feel anxious about whether or not the protagonist dies, rather it's trying to make you feel curious about how this seemingly normal girl will find herself at risk of death (spoiler: the guy she likes turns out to be a vampire).
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Wardog
at 23:44 on 2011-05-19Point taken. I am pwned.
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Melissa G.
at 00:35 on 2011-05-20
To be fair to Stephanie Meyer, you can make the case that the flash-forward in Twilight *also* isn't trying to make you feel anxious about whether or not the protagonist dies, rather it's trying to make you feel curious about how this seemingly normal girl will find herself at risk of death (spoiler: the guy she likes turns out to be a vampire).
The point remains that it didn't make me feel *anything* because the prose was flat, explanatory, bland, and horribly horribly boring. It inspired no feeling whatsoever. The first person narrator was facing her death and she was waxing boring about trivial details. The story could have just started with the first chapter, and the audience wouldn't have lost anything. It wasn't just the first person past tense fail of making the audience nervous or anxious. The passage was just poor and served no purpose and should have been cut completely. At least in Kick-Ass even though I wasn't thinking the kid would die, I was still nervous and freaked out for him because that movie inspired thoughts and feelings and connection to the main character and who he was and how he felt. Twilight does NONE of this with it's awkwardly phrased, thesaurus syndrome purple prose.
*pants* Wow, ranty. Sorry....
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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/
at 11:36 on 2011-05-20It comes to mind that in first person past tense, the result of the situation might not be death, but it could be something traumatic or bad altogether. Examples: Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy, Mika Waltari's The Egyptian.
This is not a defense of Waltari, I was just thinking how it could work as generating tension. Arguably this would apply to All Quiet on the Western Front, as even if we might not worry for the narrator, everyone knows its going to get bad. I don't recall whether the whole novel was in first person past tense though, rather than just the quote Andy G posted.
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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/
at 11:49 on 2011-05-20I mean defense of Meyer. Drat.
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Melissa G.
at 17:34 on 2011-05-20
This is not a defense of Waltari, I was just thinking how it could work as generating tension.
I think it could work. If the narrative managed to invoke anxiety or fear or nerves for the character, that would be a successful passage despite the fact that the audience knows she won't die. Also, it's hard for the prologue to inspire anything in the reader because we don't know Bella yet, and we have yet to care about her. So it'd be more difficult to pull off in the first book then it would in the second or third where the character and our feelings toward them is already established. In any case, it would take a better writer than Meyer to pull it off.
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Andy G
at 11:31 on 2011-05-23"I don't recall whether the whole novel was in first person past tense though, rather than just the quote Andy G posted."
Just FYI, it was :)
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Andy G
at 11:31 on 2011-05-23Apart from the very, very end.
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Robinson L
at 22:30 on 2011-06-06More necroing. I'm not sure if this is bringing a new perspective on the above discussion of tension in first person narration, or reiterating a point someone else has already made; in first person, past-tense narration, I think when the protagonist is in danger, the tension comes more from how they'll get out of it, rather than whether they will (similarly in a great deal of third person narratives).
Brandon Sanderson hung a pretty funny lampshade on this point in the second book of his
Alcatraz
series, where the first person narrator encourages the reader to ignore the mortal danger he was in at the end of the previous chapter for a moment because he's narrating in the past tense, so he obviously survived somehow.
But anyway, this is all just a thinly disguised excuse to provide an update on my
earlier promise
to deliver an article on the subject of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire series. I had one mostly worked out, then I read
Pyrofennec's review of All Together Dead
and I had to rethink my whole take on the series. So no articles any time soon.
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Wardog
at 16:46 on 2011-06-07Ye Gods, that's a lot of fail. I read about halfway through the first one, tbh, but the banal prose style sent me to sleep. I will confess to a secret filthy love of the TV series - even though it's, y'know, not without problems. Tara being one of them. I quite *like* Tara but I've never seen so many shitty things happen to one person in my entire life.
The line I particularly liked in there, and by 'liked' I mean made me cringe in an amusing fashion, was "racial blend." That, to me, sounds like a protein shake.
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Robinson L
at 00:00 on 2011-06-09I actually quite like the book series, for various reasons, but I obviously need to start thinking about it more critically.
I also enjoy
True Blood
, though as you say, it's got issues too. Despite the problems surrounding her character, Tara's actually my favorite in the tv show for the sheer awesomeness of her intro in episode one.
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TheMerryMustelid
at 15:41 on 2012-04-21It's probably been said before, but the only rational explanation that I can think of for the Twilight series being the success it was (even before the movies came out) was that desparate, coming-of-age Harry Potter fans needed something to replace their fantasy fix, and sadly Twilight was the wrong young adult series to come out at the right time.
Now that they're full grown adults, hopefully they're reading Game of Thrones to remind them what good fantasy writing is.
I enjoyed the Harry Potter series myself *ducks* but happily went on to Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series which saved me from Twihard Disease.
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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/
at 16:54 on 2012-04-21I can just about understand the appeal of
Twilight
to a teenager. Bella's life sucks exactly the way your life sucks. You have to do the dishes while your brothers sit on the couch watching tv and laughing at you for being a girl. You get in trouble for swearing when they don't. You're not allowed to play and have fun and have dreams and ambitions while they are. Boys at school are creepy douchebags to you, and your boyfriend is a total controlling asshole.
It might be nice to have that turned into something that's kind of not so bad, and affirms that you actually are okay, even kind of awesome, and boys treat you like crap because they can't handle your awesomeness, and anyway you wouldn't want them to be nice to you, because then they'd be spineless pussies. (How I hate that word.) Your dad makes you do the housework not because you're a girl and that's all you're good for, but because he loves you and cares about you and you have your role in life just as he has his. Your boyfriend wants to control you and protect you and make decisions for you because that's his role, just as it's your role to make him happy in exactly the way he chooses. Really, it's not so bad, and you don't have to feel so bad about it.
I think my heart just cracked a little.
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TheMerryMustelid
at 17:05 on 2012-04-22
I can just about understand the appeal of Twilight to a teenager...Boys at school are creepy douchebags to you, and your boyfriend is a total controlling asshole.
I see your point FITM, which is why I'm ever-so-glad I spent my formative years in an all-girls catholic highschool. As much as we usually make fun of such establishments, I for one felt much more prepared for the added social pressures of dating & such when I entered college. Highschool was hard enough just keeping on top of grades without worrying about what to wear every damn day.
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