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chattegeorgiana · 3 months

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Hello Chatte, it’s me again! Just read chapter 13 and it was great! The chapter really sets up what you wanted to do story wise. Each characters pov drives the plot and their motivations makes sense from the OG canon. I love Sakura and Naruto drives and motivation. Naruto acknowledges the challenges of his philosophy such as his feelings on Pein and the Raikage, his personal feelings and how he’ll have to adjust if he wants to be Hokage. Sakura driving the plot forward with her plans to deal with the aftermath with war and her own personal project and the potential consequences of that is great. I’m assuming that’s why Sakura is wearing black? To symbolize her maturity and death of innocence due to the war and the potential consequences of what she wants with bringing back the dead. Also Tsunade taking care of business is great, shows how her character coming full circle from her walking away from Konoha to coming back and to making sure the next generation doesn’t have to deal with it. I read it on AOE, and I think you dealt with dark subject matter well. People often justify horrific actions behind “good” intentions. Both in literature and in real life

Anyway I’m glad that you’re taking a break to plot out the rest story I’m sure that will be easier going forward!

Hiii dear!

First of all welcome to my inbox again. My heart skips a beat whenever I see a message from you because you're one of the few people that truly does go such in depth with the way I create this story from so various angles. You and another great person I talk to about Kaika have a way to see right through my writing like no other!

Not to take from the others who enjoy Kaika, far from me, I appreciate each and every person who does it, but it's something about you two that tickles my writing senses, so to speak, haha.

It like y'all see right through me, and not in a bad way, but a great one. To be honest, I have to admit that ever since I started writing Kaika, it gave me perhaps another angle to look at Kishimoto and understand his predicament - especially in terms of Sakura's character.

It's so nice when one (or multiple) of your readers understand these layers of your writing and what you're trying to do with a character, because it creates a bond between the two of you, an understanding in an off itself, a knowing, a belonging; like a (not so) secret/coded language where you as the writer leave the coded messages, and the reader interprets and deciphers the message.

And when someone deciphers and understands the message it's absolutely incredible. It's like a feedback loop where both parts are in absolute sync feeding each other information and keeping the "motor running", if I may say like that.

Such an incredible feeling! Which is why, like I said, offered me another opportunity to understand Kishi's predicament with Sakura - for example. He did say he was trying to do things with her, but sadly the message wasn't getting across to so many.

But for me, back then, it did. It's just that I didn't have any means to reach out to him and tell him all those things. Sometimes I wish I could have been able to, to make him understand that hey, look, there's someone out there who sees it, keep pushing it, keep doing it, I SEE YOU!

But alas, it didn't happen.

Which is why I'm writing Kaika today to be honest. Well, not the sole reason but one of them.

It's my way of saying back after all these years to Kishi (methaphorically speaking of course, cuz it's not like I could reach him or anything lol) - I see you. I always did. And for as much as I didn't agree with many parts of his story, especially the ending, and how mad I was with him back in the day, I still appreciate him for giving me Naruto and especially Sakura Haruno, a character that I'll greatly cherish.

Anyway, I went so much on a tangeeeent! Let me get back to the actual subject of your message here, haha.

So, for the story and the plot... I'm finally so happy I'm slowly getting to these parts of it and I am slowly but surely starting to move the plot forward, you have no idea. I've been meaning to do this for such a long time, and while I planted the seeds in the initial chapters, with all the things that were going in my personal life that prevented me from attending to the story as I wished, it's such a big relief to be able to finally get here.

And not only that, but do it in a natural and organic way, that stays true to its canon counterpart. Because one of my worries was, I have to admit, that after being gone for so long, I would loose that touch, if I may say so, when it came to my writing. That flavor I try to bring it.

I have to admit, it's still kind of on and off, because I've been away from it for a long time. Took me almost an year from chapter 11 to 12, for example. I felt terrible and I worried that it was going to affect my writing, as well as that natural and organic feeling I tried to give to the story when mirrored to OG material. Partially my writing was affected as I do see things I would've written differently every time I reread the chapters after publishing myself.

But at the same time if I would edit over and over and over again, I would've never publish them, so for now it's like move forward, and you'll get back to your groove as you get to writing it.

That's why I've written this chapter only and then I want to take a break to plan story arcs. Because I want to be done with that side so that then, I can go full steam ahead and only focus on improving my writing.

As for Naruto and Sakura, what I'm trying to do with them is actually have them move the plot forward, not just be pawns that witness how everything moves around them, but have them be the agents of change. And to do that, I wanted to delve deep into their psychological and emotional attributes - like you said, for Naruto being the Pein and Raikage storylines, which are one of the biggest antithesis to Naruto's idealistic self, and with Sakura I went from two angles - from a relationship with self POV and with others. With self it's the greatly missed opportunity with inner Sakura, and with others is through how she connects with the others and brings about real change, rather than staying back and feeling sorry for herself that she cannot do more than that.

I love exploring these aspects to be honest, because that's one of Kishi's trademark signature when it comes to his writing style - the way he delves into the deep pits of the human psyche and manages to engage both the heart and the minds of his readers.

Like I said in one many of my other posts and talks with people - the reason Naruto is successful as a story and so popular is because of emotional manipulation, actually. I know it may sound like a negative thing I'm saying, but it doesn't have to be.

I mean, it is and it isn't at the same time. Depends from what angle you decide to look at it. From one angle can be good, from another can be bad.

But as a standalone fact, that's the truth. Kishimoto was remarkably crafty at manipulating his reader's emotions and getting them attached to the story to this degree. For that, I applaud him, even if I don't agree with him on everything he did, I can still recognize this remarkable skill of his.

And for better or for worse, I learned a lot from him, storytelling-wise. So for that, I'll always be grateful. And so I found my way to do that - through Kaika.

As for Sakura wearing black - YAS! That's exactly why it is, haha. That's exactly why both of them are having more black than other colors in their designs. Because it's meant to represent the depths of their psyche, going into the deep end face whatever they find there on that path.

I know Kishi already did it with Naruto in OG, but that was more on a personal level. It was from a standalone POV. So I thought, ok, how can I put a spin to this, add my own touch while still being faithful to OG? So then, that's when the opportunity presented itself - in his vastly unexplored Hokage dream that neither the franchise didn't go too much in depth.

Or at least, not in the way I've seen it, because from what I saw, they did something, but too surface level if you ask me.

Personally, I like to go deep and drill in the darkest depths of the being, if I may say so, haha.

Which is precisely what I'm doing with Sakura on the other hand. Sakura is a goldmine! An unexplored, uncharted territory with whom you can do so much with. It's incredible, really. Like I said on my Twitter on a post, it baffles me that Kishi didn't do so much with her because the potential. Dear God, the potential!

But oh well, I guess that leaves me more room to play with, haha.

As for my dear Tsunade, when I started Kaika I have to admit I didn’t exactly knew what to do with her other than tying her with some plots regarding the whole medical advancements. But those are built to bring forth Sakura's development, so I can't have Tsunade outshine Sakura. In this case Tsunade's function as a character in the story is very limited. This would prevent properly portraying the exposition with the new generation surpassing the old one.

And as we know, due to the way Kishi developed Sakura, it's rarely truly noticeable who's the better medic and he often put Tsunade in even scenes that impact-wise imo, would've fit Sakura better from a writing pov.

But then I ADORE Tsunade, so then the issue rose - what do I do with her character, in such a way that while yes, in Sakura's story she doesn't outshine her and provides support, but still leaves a great impact and mark on the plot as a standalone character, outside of Sakura's influence? Because as I said, this story will be mainly Sakura Haruno centric. Buuuut, I want it to be a balanced story, still.

And upon analyzing the character better - that's when the opportunity presented itself that fit all that criteria - is a supporting character in terms of Sakura's medical ninja development, however, she's also standing her her own as a standalone character by being a cog in one of the wheels of the old system that I work on reforming to bring the new one, and all done nicely wrapped in the the theme of the old generation vs the new one.

And given that this story is going to be mostly a story that focuses on the female counterparts - Sakura, Tsunade, Hinata, Karin, Ino (it's like I literally did a flip of the OG story that focused on the male cast lol, now I realized it), and females being the nurturers and live givers, I found it perfectly to have Tsunade the one that takes matter into her own hands in the problem of the Uchiha genocide. Because at her core she's a nurturer, a life giver. Despite being so incredibly strong, she represents perfectly the very principle of the traditional woman.

Because you see, I believe there's nothing wrong in portraying women in their traditional views of nurturers, life givers and all those other attributes that are associated with the female gender.

It's a matter of how you do it. You can have a character that's both a girl boss and a tender nurturing lover, for example. Like Tsunade is.

After all, the symbol that is associated with the divine feminine principle is the circle (which also happens to be the Haruno symbol *winkwink*). A circle has 360 degrees which encompasses 360 angles from which you can view a particular subject.

A woman encompasses all those 360 ways you can look at her in ONE. One circle.

It's just a matter of male authors rarely being able to portray that.

But since I'm a woman, I guess it's easier for me to do it.

And I will. Through Kaika.

Thank you once again for your incredibly insightful message.

Like you see, I love talking about these things, since this message turned out to be incredibly long.

It's been quite a while since I've written such a long response to an ask I receive, haha. But you surely know how to pull out those things in me haha.

Thank you, once again, as I said.

Wish you nothing but the best.

Chatte

#kaika saisei #kaika au #naruto #naruto fanfiction #narusaku #naruto au #tsunade #sakura haruno #naruto uzumaki #uchiha massacre

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christiansorrell · 6 months

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Play-By-Blog #12: The Isle by Luke Gearing

Welcome to my ongoing play-by-blog of The Isle by Luke Gearing! We are playing this adventure with its original system, The Vanilla Game (adjusted somewhat to fit the format). You can check out the Play-By-Blog Repository to get all caught up if you wish.

How Play-By-Blog works:

I write up the situation, NPCs, and more, just like a DM.

You vote in the poll to help decide the character's course of action.

I roll the dice, resolve actions, and write them up next week.

So on and so forth for the rest of the adventure!

Notation:

[Text in brackets is out-of-character/GM text!] "Non-italicized quotes denote text from the original adventure!" "Italicized quotations denotes NPC dialogue."

Our character: Medon Girou - Magic Cutpurse

Our maps: The Isle, The Dungeon (so far)

[You can use the links above to find Medon's Character Sheet and map of the Isle and the so far uncovered portions below the surface. On the Dungeon map, you are currently in Floor 2, Room 20.]

Now, back to the adventure!

[Another landslide poll! Y'all are focused in your desire to help this horrific, lich-like royal (and I'm excited about it too).]

You look through the dark doorways across the room. You'll need every advantage you can get if you are going to get anything out of this place and leave to tell the tale. It never hurts to have an ally, even if just for now. Who knows if you'll even find his brother down here? You just need to get out of this room.

You agree. If you discover Dainéal during your time here, you will work to kill him.

Fionn's chorus of leeches squeal-speak pleasantly.

"Aw, excellent. I knew there was ambition in your heart. I am a good judge of these things, you see.

"Go then. Find him and end him. When you are done, return to me. I shall have a gift for you, knighthood of a sort. For now, I shall remain here and you are free to rest here." You know you'll need a light down here to do anything safely, especially with the walking dead patrolling the halls. You ask him for aid, just one thing: a way to light the path.

"Well, well" He laughs, squirming squeals from a hundred leeches. "So soon and already you are asking for aid. I will admit you do not look prepared fully for a place like this."

His skeletal hand reaches over into the chest cavity of a nearby bone warrior and pulls a small necklace from out of the center of the writhing mass of leeches. As his fingers unfold, soft beams of light pour out to partially illuminate. The necklace is a fine silver chain holding a small, glowing moonstone amulet. [Mechanically, this amulet grants low light near the wearer (typically, room-wide). You guess it is likely worth around 1,500 hacksilver.] "Take this, but know that in doing so, you are barred from returning to the surface until your quest is complete. That way," he gestures towards the chimney, "is barred to you know, until Dainéal is dead. All who have stolen from me have died. Do not test me."

You take up the necklace and drape it over your neck, now seeing more clearly the disgusting mass of leeches and bones surrounding Fionn. The undead warriors stare blankly in your direction.

It is late in the day, you think. It is hard to tell underground but the light from the fireplace is darkening. Best to rest here as well as you can before heading off.

You start a small fire, sparking the kindling of old papers you dug up from the far corners of the room with the rough blade of the old sword you found in that woman's grave, and cook the dead monk's fish. The entire time, Fionn sits still, sometimes humming a tune you don't recognize. Occasionally, a shutter runs through all of the skeletons, like a shiver down your spine.

You sleep very little, but still, the rest does you well.

In the morning (you think), you gather your belongings and head off into the dark, nodding at Fionn as you go.

To the east, you hear shuffling.

To the south, you hear a strange grinding.

[An unlikely alliance and a light in the darkness. From here, the dungeoncrawl properly begins! Tread carefully, my friends - Christian]

PBB #13 is live now!

#meatcastle pbb #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #ttrpgs #rpg #fantasy #luke gearing #play by blog #play by post #the isle #polls #choose your own adventure

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musical-chick-13 · 1 year

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I understand the need to complain, so 7 and 12 for that violence ask game!

Thank you for your solidarity, I appreciate it. :)

7. What character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

I answered this here. But I'll talk about another one. Ava from LoT. Like the previous answer, she was originally just kind of there to me. But I felt like she kind of took over the show, and I wasn't really happy with the development regarding her relationship with Sara (and apparently they decided they had to destroy Sara's friendship with Rip to make this ship happen? or something?), but I liked the other characters enough to just go, "Eh, not for me" and move on.

And then there were just...too many things I saw that bothered me. People tended to act like anyone calling Ava out was inherently...bad? I never really even saw a specific reason for this, it just seemed like people didn't want to admit a character in their preferred ship could make mistakes or be wrong. There was such a horrific level of biphobia I saw regarding Sara, too (which, big surprise, eventually spread to other characters who people wanted to be confirmed as not being straight onscreen). And like I mentioned before, Sara and Rip's working relationship got caught in the crossfire, and the things I saw from too many stans of this character about how horrible Rip was for basically...daring to ever be traumatized? Or how little sympathy they had for the show killing off a grieving, deeply hurting man with a thinly-veiled death wish/suicidal ideation just...really created some not-great associations regarding this character in my brain.

12. The unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them?

Lmao.

So Idk if y'all know this but I REALLY love Cersei Lannister, yeah, shocking, I know. I've talked about her at length, but she's my Ultimate Fave so I can't NOT mention her here. Her interior emotional world is so rich and layered that I learn new things about her (and, very frequently, about my own relationship to my mental illness) every time I think about her. All of her choices make sense narratively in accordance to what we know about her, even if they aren't good ones. Her mental illness and trauma seen as a tragedy worthy of sympathy, and it is her refusal to constructively deal with them and her insistence of externalizing her pain that leads to her horrible behavior toward others, not the presence of the mental illness or trauma itself. And like...yeah, we weren't supposed to root for her (even though I did because I'm me, lol), but we were supposed to feel for her. And she was allowed to continue to exist in the narrative. For better or worse, her story still mattered and was still worth telling, and, Idk, it was the first time I'd ever seen that being afforded to a mentally ill character. She processes everything in a very ugly way, that's not societally-palatable, and I cannot begin to tell you how utterly refreshing that was. She's capable of great love, but that love is tinged with all the negative and deeply unhealthy things she's held onto. She's a villain, but she is so clearly still a hurting person under there, grieving for all the things that were denied to her. Everything she does can be tied back to an overwhelming, all-consuming desire to Avoid Being Hurt Again. She keeps going out of spite. Her paranoia is understandable, but she deal with it in increasingly unhelpfully hostile ways. She flips between being cold and angry and sad and impulsive and even, occasionally, soft, and unlike usual ""evil queen"" archetype characters, she feels so much. She thinks love is literally being as close to same person as someone else as humanly possible. SHE KILLED A WHOLE MASS OF PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO RUIN HER, GOOD FOR HER. She's fascinating.

In the interest of saying something that's NOT repeating myself for the billionth time: Martha Jones from Doctor Who. Truly the most competent companion The Doctor ever had. She didn't suffer nonsense, she was INCREDIBLY resourceful and intelligent, she extended compassion to everyone she met, even those who could (or did) easily pose a hostile threat. She was the only companion in all of RTD or Moffat-era DW to leave completely on her own terms and break away from a lifestyle that was hurting her. The characters I love don't generally tend to be people I'd want to be like irl, but as a teenager, I wanted to be her when I grew up, and I still do. (Sadly, people are racist. And they couldn't get over the fact that she wasn't her predecessor, who was half of a fan-favorite ship involving the conventionally attractive white man. I'm still mad, I'll always be mad.)

I Choose Violence asks

#tw: suicidal ideation #multi t(ASK)ing #salty mc13 is salty #light of the west and my life #the brightest star in the universe <3

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bambirex · 1 year

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Jaskier and Jesse Pinkman are kind of the same person: Part 3

The last part of my nonsense comparison post, I promise!

Spoilers for both shows, and tw for mention of drug and alcohol abuse!

Part 1 Part 2

They're often blamed for things going to shit: see the infamous mountain scene between Jaskier and Geralt where Geralt brutally sends Jaskier away, and quite many scenes of Walt going off on Jesse and calling him stupid over the smallest of things.

Both are pretty ADHD-coded, hyperactive, fidgety; a big chunk of their fandoms headcanon them as ADHD- havers. (couldn't find a pic to prove this one, you just have to trust my own ADHD brain)

The writers love to torture them both, physically and emotionally alike; they both go through some extreme, bloody and horrific situations, which they miraculously leave in one piece but the shitloads of trauma remains. Since the writers love to whump the shit out of them, the fandoms usually follow the same pattern. Let's just hope Jaskier's trauma will be addressed in the upcoming seasons, the way Jesse's was!

The substance abuse. Obviously very explicit in Jesse's case, as his drug addiction is a very prominent plot point.

With Jaskier, it's mostly theorizing and a bit more subtle (and I guess this can be a controversial take), but i couldn't help but notice (and I've seen other people point it out before), that he might have a problem with drinking, especially in season 2 where he appears to be drinking heavily to soothe his heartache, presumably - the scene where he's cuddling a literal wine botttle, anyone? The show probably won't adress it, but i wish it did.

They're both kind of smart and dumb at the same time ; Jaskier is master of the seven liberal arts and an academic, and is obviously very intelligent, but he does say and do the weirdest, dumbest things (trying to befriend a monster in the bushes, for example); Jesse is beloved for his often very simple way of thinking. But the boy has street smarts, and by the end, he cooks up some incredible plans to bring down Walt and save himself. Kind of related to this, both of them often get used as comic relief. Jaskier more so, obviously, often providing the light- hearted fun when things get very heavy (he also definitely uses his humor as a coping mechanism, right??), and Jesse, while not being a comic relief character at all, often says and does the funniest lines on the show, and the most hilarious scenes are usually tied to him.

Jaskier befriending the mice in the prison cell, and Jesse befriending bugs give me lots of feelings for some reason, and it's also just such a lovely little parallel.

Poor meow meow and cringefail vibes in all the best ways. No picture needed, I think y'all get the point. I wanna put them both in my pocket.

Lots of people headcanon them trans/queer in some way. I don't know what to do with this, but I love it and find it interesting enough to point out, so here.

Alright, that's it, this is what happens when I have the thought process of "wouldn't it be fucked up if I spent an hour making a useless list" 😂

#jaskier #jesse pinkman #the witcher #breaking bad #meta post #blorbo showdown #bambi says some bullshit

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letitrainathousandflames · 2 years

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okay i just got two more asks about Nope (2022) and I know the reading comprehension in this website is piss poor, but y'all really did skip my tags on that last ask huh? the one that said

"Don't send me anymore asks about this film, please, I'm trying to forget it"

[ID: a print of tags reading "animal cruelty m/", "animal death m/", "nope (2022) critical" and "dont send me anymore asks about this film pls im trying to forget it"]

The fact that you guys are insisting on bringing up a topic which i specifically mentioned to have caused me a panic attack is beyond me. That said, I'll answer those under the cut for politeness' sake, any following message on this subject will be deleted, as I do not owe anyone to interact with content that is triggering.

Same goes to anyone else btw, no amount of guilt-tripping should force you to talk/see/interact with topics that make you uncomfortable, especially if the other people are damn aware of your discomfort.

Prints of the asks and my responses under the cut, with plenty of spoilers to the movie and mentions of the triggers above, so reader discretion is advised.

Also, before you decide to call me a "racist white woman" for disliking a black-led movie (like someone whose ask i'm not replying did), remember that a) people are allowed not to like things and b) i'm a brown latina of Black and Native descent so maybe stop assuming everyone is white for two minutes bc thats, honestly, is racist.

oh, and just one more thing:

DON'T SEND ME MORE ASKS ABOUT THIS MOVIE

The animal abuse is in the fact that the horses were consistently used as bait by Jupe. Also, OJ dismounts in order to survive by sacrificing his horse to the creature. Furthermore, and this is only my interpretation at this point, OJ states that any creature with a spirit can be broken, which left me wondering whether he and his father were cruel to their horses while taming them.

I've read a lot on the traditional and horrific way people beat horses to tame them, and while I do hope the character took a humane, kind approach, we can't be sure, and that line didn't sit well with me. The animals also get injured and eaten, which i consider also animal cruelty, with the plot to blame for it, but still.

To give a different example, in Secret Window [spoiler], a dog is cruelly killed off-camera before the owner finds it stabbed and dead. I list that as animal cruelty, even if it's off screen, because an animal is harmed and suffers in the story.

that distinction is important though: i'm not at ALL accusing Peele or the crew of abusing the animals. I'm saying that it is a story full of animal abuse. And for me, an animal lover, to sit through a movie like that and enjoy it, the story would have to be damn goo - which, unfortunately, it wasn't.

the amount of bad movies that got explained away by a scoff and a "oh, you don't get it" is staggering. I'm giving my personal view based on my lifetime of personal experiences and media consumption, and my personal opinion is - it's a bad movie.

It's too long, it's pace is clunky, the characters lack personality (not the actors' fault), the chimp subplot being practically a copy-paste of a real life incident from which the victim is still traumatized and disfigured, the use of animals as disposable tools, the plot holes, the lack of sibling dynamic between the characters, the completely open end, it all lead to me wishing i had stayed home painting my toenails.

Films can be deep. They can be layered. They can have hidden meanings, connections left for the viewer to make, etc. But if they intend to be like that, they have to be a puzzle of which some corners and a few pieces are already in place so that you can think and fit the others in place your own way.

They can't just dump the pieces all over you and say "now, make some sense out of this."

And, again, I am so appalled over the disrespect of using a story as recent as 2009 as a scary plot point for an extremely gorey scene. Peele could've come up with an animal-related tragedy of his own, but instead he chose to copy a horrifying true story, without even disguising it with the constant nods at Oprah's name.

Like, at the end of the day, this is my opinion. I found it bad. Poorly written and lazy. I have the right to this opinion as much as you have a right to yours. But you don't get to call me ignorant or anything just because i didn't enjoy a movie you think is deep.

Because honestly, to me, it's shallow and dull, and a waste of all the effort I made not to leave the theater for those two hours and sixteen minutes that i'm never getting back.

#nope (2022) critical #animal cruelty m/#animal death m/#STOP. TALKING TO ME. ABOUT THIS SHITSHOW.#you can block anonymous askers' IPs on tumblr and by god i'm gonna start blocking y'alls asses #long post/

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geminigirl0298 · 2 years

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The Course Of True Love

Relationship: Loki Odinson x Original Female Character

Summary: Loki Odinson never expected to see his mother hurrying down a hall with a smart-mouthed, soot-covered figure who was supposedly the princess of Vanaheim. He never expected her to stay more than a week, much less an entire century, and he surely did not expect their initial animosity to morph into the fluttering, tickling feeling he got in his stomach every time she was near.

Word Count: 6 k

A/N: Threw y'all a bone in this chapter XD

Warnings: Smut later on (will be marked), 18+, loss of virginity, fingering (female receiving), oral (female receiving), unprotected sex, cursing, inappropriate language

Previous Chapter Masterlist

CHAPTER 9

Falling from the Bifrost was a disorienting affair. Landing on Jotunheim was even worse what with the hoard of frost giants attacking him and his brother from all sides.

At first, they fought them well. Thor used Mjolnir to reduce the Jotuns to piles of rock and ice whilst Loki got them with his illusions. He got a few good hits in with his daggers, too, felling some of the most ruthless enemies he had faced to date. He would have preferred to have not been attacked at all, but he had to admit it was fun to be fighting side by side with his brother again.

That all changed when one of the frozen beasts grabbed ahold of Thor’s head and slammed it into the side of a glacier. The scream his brother let out was full of such agony that it stopped Loki in his tracks. He ran to his brother, sliding to his knees near Thor’s large form. A hit like that should not have taken him out. He was a God, immortal to a point. There was no way one slam of his head would be so detrimental.

“Brother?” His whisper was a visible puff in the cold air. “Thor!” Loki shook him, and his head lolled to the side to reveal an icy burn wrapped around the back of his neck. The skin looked necrotic, shaped like a huge handprint. Loki could hear a sizzle coming from the blackness.

It was then that the Jotun grabbed him.

He— or she, for Loki could not decipher—came out from nowhere. A thick, icy hand latched on his own with a death grip. The hand squeezed, and Loki braced himself for the sting of the burn. Except it never came. A coolness overtook his skin instead, and blue blossomed along the length of his hand.

Blue, like the colour of the light within the ancient casket. Blue, like the colour that was now on every inch of his skin. The colour that he suspected indicated his true heritage and was now making his favorite person in the whole universe regard him as though he were a horrific monster.

“Loki, put down the casket,” said his mother. Tears cut fat streaks down her face. “Please.”

He obliged, if only to get Sigrid to stop looking at him like she was. As soon as the casket left his hands, a warmth spread throughout his body. He felt the blue skin and red eyes sinking into him to reveal his Aesir form, and he fixed his father with a hateful glare. “I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s a curse.”

Loki wished it was a curse. That was curable. That was manageable. The alternative, he feared, might be too much for him to bear.

“No,” said his father. “It is not a curse.”

“Then what is it?”

“Loki, there must be an explanation,” Sigrid said, speaking for the first time. She looked from his mother, to Odin, then back. “Right?”

“I think the explanation is quite clear,” he hissed. “That war with the Jotuns all those years ago. Your greatest souvenir was the casket, but it was not the only thing that you returned with, was it?” No one gave an answer. “WAS IT?”

Sigrid flinched at his sudden yell. His mother, more used to his tantrums, attempted to placate him. “Loki, we were going to—” Loki held up a hand.

“No. No. You’re not going to swoop in and fix everything, not this time.” He swung a shaking, pointed finger towards his father. “I want to hear it from him.”

The world seemed to still. There Loki was, locked in a stare with his father and finally about to get some answers to questions that had plagued him his whole life. Why Thor had been the unannounced favourite of his father. Why he always felt so out of place—so different— from everyone else on Asgard. No. He was not backing down. Not today.

“The war was over,” Odin began, weariness creeping into his face. It was strange, Loki thought, how he knew that his father was past his prime, yet he had never looked as old or as tired as he did now. “Their king had fallen; the casket was captured and Jotunheim was at our mercy. It’s a horrid place, that Jotunheim. Hardly space for anything to grow and I’ve often wondered how any sort of life could survive there.” Odin gave a mighty sigh. “You can imagine my surprise when I came across, of all things, a baby in the temple.”

Loki looked down at his hands. “A baby? Do you mean…”

“You. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.” The side of his father’s mouth twisted up at the side as though remembering a fond memory. “Too small, it seems, for the son of a king.”

“Laufey.” The revelation came from Sigrid. “But that makes no sense. Sons are pivotal to the continuation of royal lines. Why would a king cast out his own son?”

“Because Jotuns don’t take well to weakness,” Loki grit out. “And that’s exactly what I was. The runt of the litter. An embarrassment. Surely not fit for a throne.”

“No one here thinks of you in that way,” his mother said. “Odin brought you back because you had no fault in the part the giants played in their demise. He was not about to leave you there in the hands of the same people who left you suffering and near death. Your father—”

“But he is NOT. MY. FATHER!” Loki yelled. “Not really! I want to know why. Why did you take me? There is another reason, I know it!”

“Can you not just accept that I wanted to save your life?” Odin asked. “That you were innocent and did not deserve to die for being born smaller than usual?”

“I do not! I do not accept that because I know it is a lie!” Loki began advancing on his father. He saw Sigrid start towards him, only for his mother to hold her in place. “If it were only that then you would have told me since I was a child. You would not have let me think I was out of my mind for feeling like a stranger in my own home. So, what was it?”

Odin reached out a hand. “Loki—”

“TELL ME RIGHT NOW!” His screams echoed throughout the vault. Never in his life had he raised his voice at his father—his king. A snark remark here or there, maybe a needling comment or two, but never like this. Never with such insolence.

Odin measured him with a long look. It was unnerving how a man with only one eye could muster such authority that he made one forget this little flaw. “A truce. I was hoping that when the time was right, you would help bring about a peace between Jotunheim and Agard.”

Loki gaped in disbelief. “Is that what I am to you? Just a device to be used. Ignored until you deem fit?”

“That is not at all what I said. Why must you always see things from the least desirable perspective?”

“There is no other perspective!” he cried. “There is only the perspective of the little boy who could not understand why he felt so unlike everyone else. The one who saw his brother being favoured and tried his hardest to do better, be better—except little did he know the odds were already stacked against him.”

Loki stopped to shake his head. “All this bluster about Thor and I both being born for the throne. You never intended to give me the throne. You would never let a frost giant rule Asgard. It was always going to Thor, wasn’t it?” His father’s silence was answer enough. “I thought so.”

“Loki,” Frigga began, crossing the distance to him. She reached out to him. “We are so sorry—”

“No,” he pulled out of her grasp. “I expected more from you. Even if he couldn’t, you could have told me the truth. I thought you would at least have the decency.”

Frigga recoiled as though she had been slapped. “I—”

“Save it.” Loki waved his hand, and a portal appeared. There was no destination in mind. He just wanted to be anywhere that was not here. “Go check on Thor. Your actual son. I do hope the terrible frost giants did not leave any permanent damage.”

Loki could not even look at Sigrid before he stepped into the portal and let the green shadows transport him away.

ooOOoo

“This feels wrong,” muttered Thor. He reached a hand up to stop the serving girl that was pouring his ale. “We should be looking for Loki, not hosting a party.”

Sigrid massaged the centre of her forehead in soothing circles. A sharp pain had blossomed there the night that Loki disappeared through the portal. That was four days ago. Now the dulled ache served as a constant reminder that she did not know where Loki was or if he was even okay.

“I agree,” she whispered, not wanting Odin to hear. It had been a strained few days since the revelation of Loki’s true heritage. The entire palace had sensed that something was amiss within the royal family, and the sudden departure of the younger prince did nothing to quell the rumors. Of them all, the most ridiculous had to be that the prince had left in a jealous rage due to the arrival of a suitor for Sigrid.

Thor leaned down to her ear. “Then let’s get out of here. Father won’t even notice with all these nobles around. He’s too busy putting on a show.” He was halfway out of his seat when the king’s voice cut through the air.

“Sit down.” Thor did not.

“I tire of these festivities, father.” The rage in his voice was not concealed well. Unlike Loki, Thor wore his heart on his sleeve. He did not see the need for false pretenses when it came to his mood.

“You never seemed to mind them before,” his father replied. He lifted his grey brow. “Had it been any other day, you’d be the centre of attention. We would have to send half the army to pry the women off you.”

“Do you at all care that Loki has not been seen nor heard of in days?” His voice dipped to a hiss, but he did return to his seat. “He was injured in the battle. We don’t even know if his wounds have been treated.” The only indication of Odin’s mounting annoyance was the whitening of his knuckles on his golden chalice.

“Heimdall is keeping an eye on him. You know as well as I do that when your brother does not want to be found, he simply will not be.”

“Son,” Frigga cut in, attempting to ease some of the tension. “I know this is hard, and I commend you for thinking of your brother so. Valhalla knows his whereabouts plague my sleep as well. I’m sorry—”

“You should be sorry,” Thor snapped. “You should both be very sorry. How could you keep something like this from him—from us? Did you think I would love him any less? Loki is my brother.” Words could not express how grateful Sigrid was to hear Thor say that. For all his taunting and teasing of Loki’s penchant for magic, it was nice to know Thor was on his side.

“Not at all,” Frigga hurried to assure him. “We just never wanted him to feel any different.”

“Good lot that did,” muttered Sigrid. The queen met her words with a stupefied expression. Sigrid cursed in her mind. She had not at all meant to speak so loudly. Now that she had, she decided she might as well say what was on her mind. “It was wrong to keep the truth from Loki. Had it only affected the both of you that would have been different, but we’re talking about his entire being here.”

Sigrid turned her eyes on the king. Her boldness when addressing the monarchs astounded even her. “And it still did not prevent him from feeling different. If anything, knowing he was a frost giant could have helped him. At least then he would know the reason was nature and not some fault he committed that he could not recall.”

Odin gazed back at her without falter. In his eye lay an expression akin to admiration, which puzzled Sigrid even more. She had thought his reaction would be more along the lines of distaste.

“You are as fierce as the day you arrived, Sigrid. I am glad to see it.” Odin took a sip from his goblet. “When you ascend to queendom, as I have no doubt you will, you will need that same fire in you to properly rule the nation. Many a hard decision will be made by you, some that may make you compromise your morals in ways you never thought you would. Maybe then you will understand what I did.”

Thor, at her side, came to her defense without a second thought. “Sigrid would never do what you did. Neither would I, when I ascend to king. There will be no secrets from my loved ones when I rule.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re not yet king.”

Sigrid felt her jaw drop. Even Frigga threw a dismayed glance in her husband’s direction. It was no big secret that Thor was next in line for the throne. He was the elder son, and as recent events revealed, the only blood heir. Yet she could not deny that he was reckless, and his arrogance was in no short supply. She knew it was the main reason Odin had been holding off on his coronation, but to hear him voice it must have been a blow to the younger god.

The wares and cutlery on the table gave a sudden lurch. It was, she realized, a result of Thor fisting the tablecloth with such fervor that it pulled the entire thing in his direction. Around them, the other occupants of the table noticed that a tiff was in session. Noble eyes focused on him and his father to discover what was going on.

“Thor, I want to dance.” She placed a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. He was still holding the eye of his father, a storm brewing in his baby blues. Sparks of electricity danced around Thor’s fingertips. “Thor.” She shook him now, feeling the tiny hairs stand up on the back of her neck. The last thing this party needed was for Thor to slice the table in half with lighting and electrocute most of Asgard’s finest.

He pushed his chair back, letting the legs scrape against the floor. The resounding screech curdled Sigrid’s blood in the most unpleasant way. She took his outstretched hand, skin still tingling with unease, and let him lead her onto the dance floor. It only took a minute for him to start speaking again. “Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome.”

The live band was playing a well-known song. Thor was too distracted by his father’s words to lead, so she took the initiative to do so herself. She had performed this same dance with Loki hundreds of times before. He was by far the best dance partner she had ever had. Skillful, full of grace and not once did he step on her toes. Sometimes he would even put her on his feet and dance her around when hers began hurting.

“—grid. Sigrid!”

She blinked at Thor’s raised tone. It was clear he had called her name more than once. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked if you had been sleeping well. You look awfully tired.” His expression dared her to lie, so she decided against sugarcoating and answered his question with a shake of her head. “You are worried about Loki. So am I. I only wish that frost giant had not grabbed me and put me out for days. There was no way I was letting Loki leave here so upset.”

He must have seen the guilt on her face, for his eyes widened in alarm. “I meant no blame towards you, sister. It is not your fault that Loki left. Please do not fret too much.”

“I know what you meant,” she murmured. “I just…Thor you should have seen his face. He looked so broken. I fear he may not come back from this.”

“He will.” Thor’s hand tightened on her dress near her waist. “He must. Loki is strong. This will not break him.”

“Do you want me to go talk to Heimdall?” she asked quietly. “I can slip out and—Thor, are you listening?”

Something had caught Thor’s attention while she had been speaking. His eyes, which were on hers seconds before, had now strayed over her head. Miffed, she turned to see what had distracted him. Her stomach dropped when she took in the sight.

Loki was sitting on his father’s throne. He was in the same clothes he had worn the night he returned from Jotunheim, although they were much more torn and stained than before.

“Thor—”

“I know.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her with him towards Loki. His father had already spotted him and was on his way there too, Frigga hot at his heels. Even before she got to the throne Sigrid knew this was not going to end well.

She and Thor reached him first. Her heart stuttered upon seeing him, and she was overcome with the urge to throw herself onto his lap and hug him until he could not breathe. The hug would be followed soon after by a good tongue lashing, because how dare he disappear and make her sick with worry? Did he not know that she could not function unless she knew he was safe?

“Loki, what are you doing?” It was Frigga’s voice, careful and tender as always. “You know you cannot sit there.”

Loki lifted his head to look at his mother. From this angle, Sigrid could see the beginnings of a beard on his face. He abhorred stubble, meaning he must have been very out of it to not even use his magic to keep his face clean-shaven. “Why not? Thor and I used to sit here all the time as children.” A whiff of his breath told of days of mead-drinking.

“You are no longer a child so stop behaving like one.” Odin commanded. “Remove yourself from my throne and go to your rooms at once. I’ll have no further embarrassment from you tonight.”

Loki’s nostrils flared. “You mean I am not your child. Does it bother you, Odin Allfather, to have a frost giant sit on your throne? To have the quiet relic you stole besmirch your very symbol of authority?” The trickster leaned back, propping his muddy boots up on the seat. It left dirt and grass on the polished gold.

“Loki, stop this,” Sigrid begged. Red-rimmed eyes flickered to hers. The action seemed to pain him, and it hurt her too to see him so broken down. “Let’s get you to your rooms. We can talk there.” She held out a hand for him to take. In her periphery, she saw Frigga gave her a nod of encouragement. “Please come with me. I’ll stay with you, I promise.”

Loki’s eyes travelled down to her hand. He seemed to be deep in thought contemplating his next actions. To help him along, Sigrid kept a small smile on her face and ignored the pressure weighing on her shoulders. If not her, Loki would listen to no one.

Just when she thought he would not give in, his smooth hand enveloped hers. She gave him a relieved smile as he got to his feet, intertwining his fingers with hers. “Okay,” he muttered, grip on her hand tightening. “You’ll stay?”

“I’ll stay.” She held his bicep with her other hand and walked them out of the hall. Thor took up his other side, helping her support the drunken prince. There was no way she would have been able to carry him to his rooms all on her own.

They were only a few steps away from the main hall when a voice called out. “Loki!” Sigrid let out a groan. Trust Odin to make matters worse.

“Not now, father,” Thor grit out. “You can yell at Loki tomorrow. He is not in his right mind.”

“Thor is right,” Frigga agreed. She was trying, and failing, to keep her tone even. Like Sigrid, she sensed that the night had a terrible end in store. “He’s inebriated and doesn’t know what he’s doing. Just let him be.”

“Let him be?” Odin repeated. “Let him be? He just disrespected my throne in front of the entire court. I refuse to believe there was no sober intent in that!”

“Odin—”

“Everyone in this hallway will stop now. It is the command of your king.”

Sigrid came to a halt. She and Thor shared a look, and she knew he was hoping that they were far enough from the hall that no one could hear the shouting that was about to ensue. “Look at me, boy.”

“Father—”

“I said look at me!” Thor blanched, and the three of them turned to face their king. Sigrid could feel the agitation coming off Loki in waves. It only worsened when Odin marched right up to his face. “Tell me what that idiotic stunt was about.”

Loki gave a shrug. “I wanted to sit, and the throne was there.”

“Do not get smart with me,” Odin warned. “You wanted to make a statement, and you’ve made it. Loki does not have to listen to anyone. Loki can do what he wants. Tell me; do you feel any better having done it? Is your need for revenge satisfied?”

“You know nothing of my needs!” Loki growled. “Nor of my satisfaction.” Sigrid tightened her grip on Loki’s arm. Thor took a step towards his father, ready to throw himself between the two of them if need be.

“Odin, this is not—”

“Silence!” Frigga snapped her mouth shut. A twang of pity rose in Sigrid’s stomach for the queen. She hated it when Odin directed his anger towards her.

“You could show a little gratitude, you know,” Odin continued. “I saved your life.”

Loki gave a bitter laugh. “Does it make you feel better, that lie you tell yourself? Does it help you sleep at night to think yourself a saviour?”

Odin’s eye hardened. “For all intents and purposes, I am your saviour. Your parents didn’t want you. They left you there to die.” Had she not known death would be her fate, Sigrid would have kneed the king in his most precious place for throwing such harsh truths at his son. “Don’t act like your life here has been a hardship—”

“My entire life has been a lie!” Loki exclaimed.

“You are a prince! Your entire life has been wealth and privilege! I have made it so you want for nothing!”

Loki scoffed. “Oh please! You have always favoured Thor over me! At least now I know why.”

“What you see as favour, I see as a smart decision. I could never have nurtured your seidrin the way Frigga did, and she could not have trained Thor in the way I did.” Odin’s tone was matter of fact, which added to Loki’s fuming.

“Do not attempt to explain away your blatant favouritism as a stoke of genius—”

“I suggest you watch your tone, son. I may be your father, but I am also your king!”

“I am not your son!” Loki yelled. “And you are not my father. You are just the selfish king who took me from my home until you were ready to use me for your own gain!” Sigrid saw the king’s temper crack.

“I did not take you, you foolish boy! I saved you! Had I not, you would not be here to hate me now,” Odin shook his head.

“You talk of my death as though I asked you to save me from it. Guess what?” Loki threw his hands up. “I never did!”

“Then perhaps I should have left you there!”

“FUCK YOU!”

A loud crack sounded through the air. Loki stumbled backwards, taking Sigrid to the floor with him as the force unsteadied him. He choked out a sob, a hand pressed to his reddened cheek, and all Sigrid could do was stare. Her brain could not quite process what she had just seen. One minute Loki was yelling at his father and the next he was on the floor.

“Why did you hit him? What did you do?” she heard Thor yelling. She knew he was close to her, yet he sounded so far. It was as though he was calling out to her from across the courtyard.

“Sigrid. SIGRID!” Her mind took a while to catch up to the person calling her name. She was too focused on the fresh blood dripping from Loki’s lip. “Sigrid!” Frigga shook her hard. “Pay attention, child!”

“You’re crying, your majesty.” Sigrid reached up to touch one of the tears on the queen’s face. “What is the matter?” She was still so, so confused.

“I said pay attention,” Frigga snapped. Her hands came up to wipe Sigrid’s face, which had become wet for some reason. “Take Loki to his rooms, now! Please look after him.”

There was still yelling in the background—Thor, and now Odin. She wanted to ask what was going on, but her queen had given a directive and she had to obey. “Yes, of course.” She helped the queen get Loki to his feet. “Of course. Of… Sorry, what should I do?”

Frigga stared at Sigrid as though she had lost her mind. Sigrid could not blame her. It seemed as though her mind had gone for a walk and forgotten to tell her in advance. “Loki,” Frigga stressed. “Look after him, please.”

“Right,” Sigrid nodded. “Loki. My Loki.”

Frigga made a noise of impatience. It was only then that Sigrid realized she had not moved. Funny. Her body felt like it was going a mile a minute.

“Here.” She blinked again. A portal appeared in front of her, swirling and purple. It was much neater than Loki’s. “This should help.”

Frigga pushed the two of them through without another word.

ooOOoo

By the time Sigrid figured out what had happened, there was a naked prince in her bathtub.

Frigga’s portal had led her to Loki’s room, which made no sense since all her clothes were in her room. She marched out of his forest hued chambers and into her own, slipping behind her screen to change into her nightgown. When she came out, the sight of Loki sitting on her bed gave her a fright.

He looked like he had not bathed in days, so she went about drawing him a bath. She left the water cool like he preferred and instructed him to get into tub. Loki did so without question. Sigrid left to get some towels while he undressed. When she returned, he was seated below the bubbles in her built-in bathtub.

The sight of his face was what made the most recent events come rushing back to her. Purple and red mottled his left cheek, and a streak of dried blood dribbled from the side of his lip. A gasp of air escaped as she remembered the sound of Odin’s back hand hitting Loki’s face. It drew a look from the victim himself, to whom she gave a weary smile.

“I was getting some towels.” She spoke low so as not to startle him. “Would you like me to help you wash your hair?” He gave a nod. “Alright.” Sigrid settled behind him on the steps leading up to bathtub. She reached for her shampoo and poured a generous amount into her hands. “I’m afraid your hair will smell like berries for the next few days. Unless you want me to pop into your room for yours?”

“No.” It was the first time he had spoken since the incident. “I quite like the way your hair smells.”

Sigrid began massaging the shampoo into his hair with soothing motions. He made a noise of content, even closing his eyes in rapture, and she decided to continue her actions for as long as possible. It was the least she could do after what he had been through. “Do you want conditioner?”

“Yes.” She rinsed the shampoo from his hair using the glass bowl she kept with her. Next, she reached for the tub of the thick, pink conditioner formulated just for her.

“I’m not going to ask if you’re okay.” Her fingers spread the substance through the ends of his hair like her mother had taught her. “I just want you to tell me what you need.”

A beat passed. “What I need?” The question sounded self-directed. She left him to his thoughts while she finished conditioning his hair. It needed to stay in for a few minutes, she knew. “What do I need?” Loki mused.

Again, she said nothing. She just leaned down to rinse her hands clean of the hair product. They were almost rid of the remnant sliminess when Loki turned his body to grab her. “Lo— Ah!”

Water splashed out of the tub as she was pulled in. He seized her by the waist, pulling her body so close to him that she could feel his breath with every exhale. “What are you doing?”

“Let’s run away.”

“What?” Bathwater had soaked through the thin material of her nightgown. It now clung to her body in the most wanton way, allowing an eyeful of her nude form beneath. Loki took immediate notice. His green eyes roamed over the upper half of her body, pausing at the peaks caused by her hardened nipples courtesy the coolness of the water.

“Run away with me,” he murmured. He leaned his head forward until his forehead touched hers. “Please?”

“Loki…” His body tensed beneath hers. She knew he had anticipated what her answer would be. Not wanting to pile anymore stress on him—for that would be cruel considering what he was going through— she decided humoring him would be the better option. “Okay. Tell me where we would go.”

A dark brow quirked in delight. “Anywhere. There is nothing holding me here besides you, and I no longer wish to remain here. Let’s go somewhere else, just the two of us.”

Her hands rested on his toned chest. Loki may not have looked it, especially underneath all that armour and long-sleeves, but his body was muscled as any other warrior’s would be. On a regular day, Thor’s hulking form tended to garner more of the attention. Yet, Sigrid had always thought that Loki possessed a superior beauty to his brother.

“And what would we do?” She asked, knowing she was teetering on the edge of a dangerous cliff. “Just the two of us?”

The look Loki gave her was full of innuendo. He was thinking, she knew, of some more carnal activities they could engage in. A blush rose to her cheeks. She would be lying if she said she was not attracted to Loki. Many a night, when she found herself overcome with desire she had not yet let any man fill, her hands would slip beneath her nightgown and Loki would appear in her mind’s eye.

Despite him being her best friend, she never felt bizarre thinking of him in that way. Desires were fine once they were confined to the mind, especially when they were tied in with safety. Loki was the one man she trusted over all else. She was comfortable with him in a way she had never been with past suitors.

It also helped that she knew he was attracted to her too. Sigrid was too much of a lady to call him out, and she would deny it if anyone else did, but she noticed little changes in his behaviour within a few years of knowing him. His touches had evolved from a hand on her arm to strokes of the cheek and circles on her lower back. His stares became longer and more lingering, particularly when she wore that lilac dress that hugged her torso and hips.

She could not count number of times she had caught him staring at the curves of her body. And if none of that was any indication, the way he was adjusting her on his lap would have erased any doubt.

Sigrid bit her lip when Loki took her legs and made her straddle his waist. His pelvis pressed flushed against hers, and she could feel all of him through her thin clothing. Slender hands held carefully— one at her waist and another between her shoulder blades. An aquiline nose skimmed up the side of her face to position his lips near her ear. “Why don’t I show you?”

For just a moment, Sigrid forgot why giving in would be a bad idea. She forgot that he was her closest friend. It did not matter that adding a sexual encounter to their relationship may complicate things. All her mind could focus on was Loki’s hot breath at her ear and the resultant shiver that went down her spine.

Her reaction egged him on. He let his tongue flick out over the tip of her ear before grazing his teeth over the skin.

“Oh!” Trust Loki to find one of her weak spots on the first go. It was just like him to know something like that. However, it could have been worse. He could have— “Norns!” Of course, he had found it; that sweet spot at the base of her neck that never failed to get a response from her. She had never let anyone else get much further than that, but Sigrid had a feeling Loki may be the first man to make her throw all caution to the wind.

And that was precisely why she stopped him. “Loki, we have to stop.”

“Do we?” His lips were still at her neck. The dry skin brushing against her as he spoke made her shiver.

“Yes, yes we do. This is a very bad idea.” He released her immediately and leaned back against the tub. His eyes took in her flushed face, then her heaving chest, and the side of his mouth turned down in a frown.

“My apologies. I thought…” He shook his head to clear it of whatever invasive thoughts had settled. “I was mistaken. I’m sorry.”

His jaw tensed. The light in his eyes went out again. She could see disgust settling in the luminous orbs as he came to terms with what he had just tried to do. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” His voice sounded empty.

“Blaming yourself for everything. Your actions did not offend me.”

Loki’s forehead creased in puzzlement. “But you just—”

“My reasons for stopping you are not for a lack of want, rather that you are not in the right frame of mind to understand the impact were we to continue.” The widening of his eyes only served to increase the palpitations of her heart. Looking back, Sigrid would describe this as a pivotal moment in her life. She felt as though she was in confession, but of what, she could not say.

“I must go now,” she told him. “These clothes have grown comfortless.”

Loki moved his hands off her and held them up in surrender. “Yes, of course.”

She could not look at him as she left the bathroom. Not with her heart pounding against her ribcage and the more primal part of her mind yelling at her to get back in the tub. This, Sigrid ignored with every fiber of her being. She let her feet carry her to her desk, still dripping wet, and reached for the parchment she kept in her top drawer. Her hand trembled as she addressed the letter and wrote a simple declaration.

Dear Papa,

I am coming home.

Chapter 10

Taglist: @sharris8 @howdidurhammergrowchris @delightfulheartdream @queen-of-mischief @mischiefsarawr @thelittlepoetprincess @cosplayingwitch @itsmeempar @theiamischief @marygoddessofmischief @huntress-artemis @janetsnakehole02 @slickdickwitchbitch

#lokifanfic #lokismut #loki #jotun!loki #sad loki #loki odinson #lokilaufeyson #loki x original female character #loki x ofc #best friends to lovers #lokiau

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kylorengarbagedump · 3 years

Text

Defy Your Authority: Chapter 4

Read on AO3. Part 3 here. Part 5 here.

Summary: David Rose voice: Oh, my god!

Words: 3200

Warnings: dude

Characters: Kylo Ren x Reader

A/N: First: Thank you to @bastila-ren and @elmidol for their beta-kindness.

I'M ALIVE. I got super burned out at my job, took 5 weeks of FMLA, got incredibly depressed, but now I'm back! Very thankfully, my COVID symptoms were extremely mild. Thank you very very much for your well-wishes and your concerns.

I wish I could express enough apology for my lack of activity, but hopefully uploading a chapter is thanks enough. You all have been so supportive and kind to me. I am SO thankful and appreciative of everything y'all offer me!

(as a side note: I know some people do not like dude, that it throws them out. I am very sorry, but in the politest way possible: I am not going to stop using it. I like it too much.)

I also hope you enjoyed the chapter! God I wonder what's going to happen next chapter. I just don't know.

Love you all so much <3

“Piece of shit.”

Growling, you tugged out another panel from the silencer’s dash. At this point, about a dozen slats of buttons boxed you into the pilot’s seat, crowding you in the cockpit. All of them looked flawless upon inspection, and this new one was no exception. Wires were attached and the circuits were complete, every switch was grounded. You’d gone over a handful of systems already, trapped in this cockpit for hours. The silencer’s refusal to function made no sense. There had to be something you were missing.

The memory of smoke and flames licked at the perimeter of your mind. Yeah, there was a lot you were missing.

Pain burrowed, opened a well in your chest, and you shook your head, rubbing your tired face. There wasn’t time to think about anything else. Sitting forward, you started reattaching the panels to the console. You needed to focus on this. Even though the answer to where you’d go and what you would do once you were finished remained nebulous. Even though you were now apparently unknown and unloved by almost everyone in the universe, including the one man you’d waited on for months.

You caught a sigh in your chest, exhaling into your palms, shutting out the urge to cry. Crying right now was a waste of time. You still had about fifty systems to check, and you’d only read through about half of Kylo’s post-flight novella. Swallowing, you grabbed your datapad from the seat and flipped to the report, forcing yourself through the urge to skim.

It wasn’t like you weren’t interested. Normally this sort of thing was like a buffet for your freakish little brain. But you kept tasting embers on your tongue. Kept seeing your crew--completely unarmed, helpless fuel outpost workers--drowning in destruction. Kept hearing Hux’s voice: Multiple Resistance fighters… Heat gripped your neck, clogged your throat. Multiple fighters for a tiny station. Multiple fighters against three soft, fleshy bodies.

The First Order was not your creed; just your employer. The machine of war had always been an inconvenience to the prestige of working on elite starfighters. You knew that the loss of three cogs was nothing to that machine. In the past, it’d been nothing to you too. But you’d never eaten meals or laughed with or supported those lost cogs when they’d cried. This loss wasn’t just to war. This loss was horrifically and uniquely yours.

“Stop.” You shook your head, tossing your datapad back on the seat. You’d finish putting the console back together, then you’d figure out what to do next.

Jaw tight, you grabbed another panel, and your grip slipped. The sharp edge sliced your palm where the wood had lanced you earlier.

“Fuck!” You dropped it and clutched your hand, seething while you tried to squeeze away the agony. Everything from your fingers to your wrist throbbed, and your chin quaked, tears burning your sight. “Fuck! Fuck!” Snarling, you kicked the panels at your feet. “Fuck!”

The thin cut felt like a sobbing gash. You tore off your jacket and wrapped the sleeve around your palm, wincing when you tightened it to the wound.

“Stupid fucking panels!” you growled, kicking the panels again. “Stupid fucking ship, stupid fucking Kylo, stupid fucking Resistance!” The final kick dented a panel, popped off a shiny button. “Gods!”

You covered your face in your jacket and screamed until your throat crackled, until your lungs were dry. Head spinning, you drew in a breath and screamed again, stomping the floor until dizziness dropped you into the pilot’s chair. Warmth glowed at your cheeks, leaked down your back. Tremors rippled to your toes as you took in a long, steadying breath, exhaling in reluctant relief.

You considered sitting there forever. But it only took two seconds for you to remember how Kylo also sat in this chair thinking of and dealing with everything that wasn’t you before you grunted and climbed out of the cockpit.

The rest of the hangar seemed wholly unconcerned or otherwise ignorant to your tantrum. Wiping your eyes, you hopped to the ground, wagging off the lingering fury in your limbs. Maybe you just needed a walk. You cleared your throat and kept your hand clutched to your chest, the whispering ache pulsing in rhythm with your heart.

In all the hours you’d been in the cockpit, the Steadfast had continued to orbit Orinda. Xi-class shuttles whirled beyond the hangar entrance--probably staffed with crew collecting reconnaissance from whatever the Resistance left behind from the attack. Your feet carried you to the fuzzy blue edge of the magnetic shield’s barrier, meters from vacant space. A quiet hum resonated from its perimeter through your soles.

You gazed into the galaxy. Orinda was a glimmering grain of sand, adrift in the celestial trenches. A fuel outpost turned graveyard. An acceptable casualty of the Resistance. Another home where you couldn’t return. That whispering ache rumbled to a hiss and cast itself over your skin, raking it over with misery, with exhaustion. Your chin quivered. The only place you could think to sleep was the silencer. Eyes falling to the floor, you turned back to the hangar.

“My quarters.”

You squealed and jumped, clapping your hands to your chest. Feet away stood Kylo Ren.

“Shit!” you said, exhaling in relief. “How the hell do you do that?” When he said nothing, you continued, “Like, sneak up on me like that.”

“You’re not perceptive.”

You frowned. “Okay, well…” He wasn’t wrong. You sighed, shrugged. “Anyway.”

Kylo stepped forward, assessing you in your tank top, scrutinizing the tourniquet you’d made of your jacket. “Your hand.”

“It’s fine,” you said, holding it behind your back. “Your quarters?”

His stare lingered on your exposed shoulders, on your neck. “Stay,” he said. “Until the silencer is repaired.”

“That could be as early as next cycle.”

“Given your skill, yes.”

It was difficult to look in his direction. Every worn nerve screamed for his touch. “And then what?”

“You’ll depart to another station.”

You tried to flush the pain from your voice. “So,” you said, “you want me to stay with you through, like, one cycle, and then leave.” You looked to the ceiling in faux-consideration. “Cool. I think I’ll pass.”

Kylo’s eye twitched. He moved closer, tone icy. “You have nowhere to sleep,” he said. “I…” He paused. His tongue rolled in his mouth. “You mean to tell me you prefer the silencer.”

“Well,” you replied, “I’ve never fucked the silencer. I never told the silencer how I felt about it. The silencer has never treated me like a stranger who just walked off the plains of Lothal.” You tapped your chin. “So, yeah, I prefer the silencer.”

He grit his teeth. “You’re no stranger.”

“Sure could’ve fooled me!” A couple of heads turned in your direction.

“Quiet,” he hissed. “It apparently takes very little for you to be fooled.”

“Excuse me?” you replied. “Run that by me again, Supreme Leader?”

“Now your hearing fails you.”

“This is great.” You offered a false smile. “This conversation is going really well.”

Kylo snarled, shoulders bunching with restraint. “You speak this way and then question why you’re unwelcome,” he replied. “Deaf and foolish.”

“Oh!” A frustrated laugh escaped. “Okay, then. Talk to you later, Your Excellency. I need a nap before I keep trying to fix your dumbass ship.”

Shaking your head, you folded your arms over your chest and stormed past him, anger blurring your vision. Stupid fucking asshole--

You made it three steps before a warm leather glove grabbed your shoulder, and you stalled, goosebumps shooting to your hands. Kylo spun you, your face inches from his, your breath fleeing and forgetting to return. His lips trembled, his jaw tightened, his gaze boring into you before it met the floor, seeking to stare anywhere else. The pressure of his fingers was firm, then floating. And then he swallowed, grip crushing your shoulder, his eyes finding you again.

No one else in the hangar would’ve known, looking at him. But this Kylo Ren was familiar to you.

This Kylo Ren was terrified.

“I don’t…” His voice was a feather in the air. “You are…” He averted his attention, stiffening. “You have a home.”

Your chest swelled. Water stung your eyes. “I do?”

“Yes,” he replied, utterly sincere. “But not here. Not now.”

Hairline fractures crept into your heart.

“Kylo.” Your composure cracked. All of you wanted to melt, to disintegrate into his being and know each word trapped on his tongue. There was a reason you could not find him, that he would not unfold himself to you. “Please. Why do you want me gone so badly?”

His lips parted, as if he were about to speak--and he paused. He drew in a breath through his nose. “Complications,” he replied. “Factors you do not understand.”

You stepped closer, throat tight. His breath brushed your nose. “Tell me, then.”

Kylo huffed, shifting on his feet--and his face froze. His limbs locked, muscles taut. His gaze widened, fixated on something over your shoulder. Air leaked from him, like time was slowing to a close. You blinked, looked behind you. But nothing was there.

Frowning, you cleared your throat. “Kylo?” He didn’t even acknowledge you. “You’re really just going to leave it like that?”

His pupils were pinpricks.

It wasn’t like you were heartless. You knew that he was attempting wasn’t easy. But what you were feeling wasn’t a sail on a skiff either. You didn’t just deserve more. You needed it.

“Okay,” you said, backing out of his hold. “This was nice. But I have a TIE fighter to repair. So.” He didn’t respond. Didn’t even move. “Whatever.”

You turned--Kylo’s focus flicked to you. His mouth dropped, like there were words he wanted to and couldn’t speak. Instead, he remained silent, fury simmering in his gaze while you pivoted away. You didn’t say anything either. You didn’t think you had to.

When you arrived at the silencer, you clambered into the cockpit, like it was a hole you could hide in until he disappeared. Shame, stubbornness, or surrender--you imagined one of these was responsible for why he didn’t pursue you, but you didn’t care. This ship repair would be your parting gift to him, and you could take off, probably spending the rest of your life wondering how you’d managed to fuck up your affair with the galaxy’s most ineligible bachelor.

Loose panels still swarmed the pilot’s chair. You sighed and put on your jacket, settling in and throwing your feet on the dash. Your hand thumped with irritation as you closed your eyes.

Just a couple of hours. That’s all you needed. Then you’d keep working like the foolish little--

Clank.

You yelped, flinching in your seat.

Clank.

Heart fluttering, you scanned the cockpit before realizing the noise came from outside the ship.

Clank.

It was behind you. Someone was messing with the refuel port. Or the solar lines. You couldn’t tell. Grumbling, you scrambled out of the chair and hoisted yourself up the escape. If they were fucking up this stupid ship even further--

Clankclankclank.

“Hey!” You popped your head free. “Will you...”

For a split second, you’d thought Kylo had decided to rip the solar line access open and tear into his own power supply. But then your vision focused. The man crouched over the ship was a different intimidating masked man dressed only in black. Your stomach twisted. It was the one from the Buzzard. The one who’d shoulder-checked you.

“Kuruk.”

His head whipped in your direction, the talons of his predator’s gaze gouging your chest. He pulled his hands free of the solar lines, his gloves greasy with reactant.

“Lieutenant.”

Previously you’d thought absolutely no one but Hux could spit that word with that degree of acidity. But if Hux spat it like acid, then Kuruk hocked it--dragged it up through his throat and sputtered it like necrotic phlegm.

You crawled onto the dorsal plane with the coordinated majesty of a blurrg, trying not to heave and ruin any level of authority you might have tricked him into thinking you maintained. When you’d made it to both feet, you straightened, as if you did this all the time, and moved toward him.

“What are you doing?”

“Repairing a starfighter.”

You snorted. “Really,” you replied. “Tearing out a power supply is repairing?”

Kuruk jerked his arm, wrenching free another line, spewing collector dust into the air. “Closer to repairing than sleeping in the cockpit.”

Heat rushed your spine, swathed your neck. “Yeah, well…” You examined him, watching as he cocked his head to avoid the blinders attached to his helmet. “At least I can see properly when I work on a ship.”

“Magnification’s built into the visor.”

More heat, this time crackling in your cheeks, drying your tongue. “Look,” you said, “this is my job. I don’t need amateurs screwing it up for me.”

He paused, turned his gaze on you again. “Amateurs?”

You shrugged. “In comparison, yeah, probably.”

Kuruk leaned on his heels, wiping his gloves on his jacket. “I don’t think so.”

“Uh, I do.” This man looked like a weapon. Not an engineer. “What experience do you have?”

“It’s called the Night Buzzard,” he replied. “You might be familiar with it.”

You paused, brow raising. “You…” It was impossible to restrain your laughter. But he didn’t move. “You’re kidding. Right? That’s a joke.”

Kuruk’s hands tensed.

“Dude, that ship’s the ugliest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” you replied. “Did you modify it with a boiled chokeroot?”

His head tilted. He rose to stand, so controlled he looked to be fighting gravity. “I can do more work with a boiled chokeroot than you can do with an entire Star Destroyer’s worth of resources,” he drawled. “Lieu. Tenant.”

The hair on your nape stuck straight, your pulse leapt to the ceiling. But the knowledge that Kylo was within thinking distance abated your fear.

“Might wanna get one then.” You grinned. “You’re not making much progress here without it.”

He stared, filthy fingers furling into fists--and then relaxed, the tension sloughing like reactor slime from his frame. Silent, he returned to a squat, rending more lines from their channels. For some reason, a tiny, irreverent part of you was disappointed.

No, that was a lie. You knew why you were disappointed. But this man wasn’t the one you wanted to be taunting into a wild sexual rage. Exhaling, you crossed your arms.

“It’s still my job,” you said.

“And I’ve been told that once it’s done, you’ll be gone.”

“What?” You gawked. “What the fuck? You, too? I didn’t even do anything to you!”

“Debatable.”

You rolled your eyes. “You’re mad because your Master didn’t want you to disrespect an officer.”

“No.” Kuruk’s attention snapped to you. “You’re loud.”

Blood drained from your face. “I’m…”

Moments blinked in your memory like a holodrama. Like how you’d spent the entire time aboard the Buzzard thinking about Kylo slamming you against the dashboard and breaking your pussy open. How you’d mentally undressed him, verbally taunted him, physically ached for him. How you’d blazed with hatred for him and stoked it with longing. And how you’d just noted that you were desperate to wind him into a state of frenzied lust so he’d wreck you entirely.

“Oh, fuck.” You glanced at the hangar’s entrance and wondered how quickly you could hurl yourself into the vacuum of space. Speaking of hurling… “Oh, fuck.”

You couldn’t spare Kuruk another glance. With shaking hands, you fumbled your way to the ground, steadying yourself on your weakening knees. There was no way you were going to spend another minute on this ship trying to fix a starfighter while getting thought-eavesdropped by multiple men, one of whom seemed hell-bent on doing your job for you anyway.

All you needed to do was find General Hux and get him to reassign you to another station. You’d figure the rest out later when you had time to process your myriad of losses and crippling rejection. You held your breath the entire trek to the command center, only releasing when the doors opened and you spied Hux at the head of the room, briefing someone on something you didn’t care about.

Wiping your forehead, you trudged over to him. Hux’s gaze darted between you and the other officer, his brow furrowing as you approached.

“A moment,” he said to the man. “Can I help you, Lieutenant?”

Yeah, it definitely sounded worse out of Kuruk’s mouth. “Can I get a new station? I, uh, I need a new station.” The officer peered at you in horror. You coughed, standing at attention. “General. Requesting a new assignment, sir.”

Hux’s lips pursed, his eyes narrowed. “The silencer is already repaired?”

“Uh, no. No, sir, it’s not.” You stared at your shoes. “Still requesting a new assignment. I believe my work here is complete.”

A pause hung in the air. Hux observed you like you were a recently apprehended criminal. He sighed.

“Dismissed, Captain.” He waited for the man to depart before turning to you. “What do you mean, your work here is complete?”

It was hard to find the appropriate words. “I mean. Uh. Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“No.”

You groaned. “Okay.” A long breath, flooding your lungs with air. “Well. My services are no longer required. My presence is redundant. I cannot return to Orinda. I’m requesting another station.” You exhaled. “Sir.”

Hux’s pink face pinched together. “Something happened with Ren.”

Warmth flushed your neck. “Uh, no--”

“Lieutenant,” he said, like the words were thorns on his tongue, “I unfortunately believe your insight and skill may still be of use to the First Order.”

“Sir?”

“The TIE project has been approved. You may be just the person to manage it.”

You balked. “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea--”

“No?” Sharp green eyes pierced you into silence. “I thought you might leap at the opportunity, considering how cruelly the Resistance slaughtered your staff.”

Your heart clenched, your chest speared with pain. Better TIE units wouldn’t save them. But you could at least ensure their loss wouldn’t be in vain. Though you’d never supervised an undertaking of that scale before, the excitement of a challenge glittered in the distance. Glittered, then dimmed under a brooding, Kylo Ren-shaped shadow.

“Well…”

Hux glanced away, gazing through the thick panes of transparisteel, as if offering you any more praise would blind him. “Go to the Supreme Leader. Inform him of my plans.” He offered a slight shrug. “If he disagrees, then so be it. We’ll find you a new station.” The thought was left unfinished--he seemed very confident Kylo would not disagree.

Too bad you disagreed with him. “Yes, sir,” you replied. “I understand. Where might I find the Supreme Leader?”

Hux frowned. “Am I his keeper, Lieutenant?”

A brief, blissful image of your fist connecting with his chin flashed through your mind. You shook it away.

“No,” you said. “No, sir. I’ll find him. Thank you.”

He nodded. “Dismissed.”

Shooting him a glare, you pivoted on your heel, marching out of the command center. All you needed to do was find where Kylo Ren might be by searching the entirety of this huge Star Destroyer. That would be easy.

#kylo ren smut #kylo ren x reader #kylo x reader #kylo ren fanfiction #kylo ren #defy your authority #fya2 #fanfiction problems #GOLLY-GEE WILLIKERS

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recipe-for-thomathy · 4 years

Text

Across The Border

Characters: All the Sides + mentioned Character!Thomas

Pairings: Logicality, Prinxiety, Dukeceit

Summary:

Light and Dark. Good and Bad.

In the early days of the mind of Thomas Sanders, Light Sides and Dark Sides were separated by a border.

No one dared to venture into the other's domain, in fear of disrupting the Mindscape's 'balance' and the consequences it may cause to a Side if they were to leave their primary realm.

Roman knew the risk.

But it was a risk he was willing to take, if it meant being able to reunite with his brother again.

------

FamILY picnics became a weekly thing from then on.

And Prinxiety finally became a thing, too.

How did that happen, you ask?

Well let's have a little flashback, shall we?

~Flashback~

"Everything the light touches is yours, sun."

"...was that another Lion King reference and a pun?"

"Sure is, kiddo!" Patton giggles, then looks at the young Dark Side with a loving expression, "But I'm also saying that us in the Light Side of the border-"

"Another pun."

"-are your family now, too."

Anxiety flashes the fatherly figure a smile, "I know, Dad. You've made that very clear when you adopted me in the first 15 seconds of meeting me."

"Oh hush. At least now you have parents!"

"What about Roman?"

"He's your boyfriend."

"Uh, no he's not."

"Then I guess I'll have to make it official, then." Roman speaks up as he joins the moral and anxious Side and proceeds to say the speech he had practiced with Patton the day before, "Anxiety, like Padre said, everything the light touches is yours. I am a Light Side, therefore, I am yours. So, will you do me the honor of becoming my boyfriend, so you can be mine, as well?"

"...You're serious?"

"Yes."

"No take backs?"

"Not even returns."

"Then..." Anxiety quickly pulls the Prince forward so they met at the center of the border as their lips briefly touch in a chaste kiss.

"Yes!"

~End of Flashback~

So yeah, all ships are sailing now. Toot toot.

But now they had another problem.

"GUUUUUYSSSS!" Roman hollers.

"YAH LOUD NOISES!" The moral Side joins in.

"I am DEAFinitely going to lose my hearing soon." Anxiety states, making Patton squeal at his pun.

"Alright, that's enough screaming." Logan shoots a pointed look at Remus, who was about ready to make horrific whale noises, "Roman, what is it?"

"Thomas is running out of content for his YouTube channel!"

"Well, weren't you in charge of thinking up new content for him?" The logical Side reminds.

"I mean yeah, but obviously I got distracted, didn't I?" Princey gestures to Anxiety, then to all of them together on the bridge.

"I have a suggestion." Ethan suddenly speaks up. When all eyes turn to him, he continues, "Imagine this: a video where Thomas learns about himself and his different personality facets, namely; Logic, Creativity, and Morality."

"Ethan... That's brilliant!" Roman praises, his eyes filling with excitement, "That would actually make a really good series! Oh my gosh peck, I can see it happening!"

Patton gasps, "It can be called the Sanders Sides!"

"And the content shall focus on Thomas finding solutions to his everyday problems by having internal debates with himself." Logan jumps on the brainstorming train.

"Ooh, we should have Anxiety, Ethan, and Remus join in, too!"

"Of course! But we'll have them appear in later episodes to thicken the plot. If the series does become successful– which I have no doubt it will –we can have Joan help Thomas with scripts and storylines."

~3 years later~

Roman wasn't wrong.

The fans practically fell in love with the series!

At first, it was weird seeing their idol talk to himself, but as the series progressed with Thomas working alongside his friends, the Fanders had created a whole new fan base that was solely for the series itself.

The characters Thomas portrays in the series are almost similar to how the Sides actually act, excluding little details like the fact they were all dating one another.

But of course, that didn't stop the Fanders from shipping them.

Prinxiety became quite a popular ship in the community.

When Vine died, Thomas continued making short silly videos on Instagram. His YouTube channel now becoming his main medium for sharing content. And as his fan base grew, Thomas himself did, too.

His views and beliefs changed in a way that made him understand that nothing can truly be purely bad, nor purely good.

And on that day of realization, something unexpected happened.

The border.

The very border that almost cost a Side's life to fade away- Dissappeared.

And the realms were no longer separated, just like the brothers who were once kept apart, but now were together side-by-side with their little famILY.

They even created a castle in the Imagination where they all could reside in, naming it The Mind Palace, where every Side is welcome, no matter what they represent.

May they be Light or Dark, Good or Bad–

In the mind of Thomas Sanders now, Sides did not need to be separated into their primary categories anymore.

They are Sides of Thomas, that is that.

No Side had to risk their lives to be with their loved ones, because there was nothing that could ever come between them anymore.

No danger to fear.

No border to cross.

"I'm glad to be by your side again, brother."

"I'm just as glad as you are, brother."

The End.

______

Author's Note:

Yes, it is done.

Yes, this is the last official part.

But!

I am absolutely willing to write filler parts about certain events I didn't fully feature in this part. Want to know how Anxiety got to pick his name? How everyone reacted to the border dissappearing?

COMMENT AND I'LL GRANT YOUR WISH!

Once again, I must thank you guys for the endless support you have all given me and this story. It's been a blast writing Across The Border and seeing all your lovely reactions to each part I create.

Zenpai loves y'all so much!💕

Taglist:

@picklesandbeyond @mycatshuman @icequeenoriginal @nafsbluebery @its-high-time-that-i-dropped-in @ghostlygalactics @artissijam @the-pixie-with-seven-faces @nyafangirlingnya @fatesail @emo-does-things @the-aroace-queen-in-the-quiver @magimerlyn @chronophobica @4ngstyc00kie @agnes-is-ari @sashootkahoot @nothinglikehotchocolate @freyalis @lovingiseasy-434 @snek-snacc @ashtonbby2 @tiredfangirl04 @supersoftsupersleep @anassholewithawifi @not-a-clever-username @pixelatedrose @emsiemae @lunasfriendgabby @surohsopsisofclouds

#sanders sides #sanders sides au #sanders sides across the border au #roman sanders #virgil sanders #logan sanders #patton sanders #deceit sanders #remus sanders #ts deceit #ts remus #prinxiety #logicality #demus #dukeceit #creativitwins

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undert33th · 5 years

Note

I really like your Chara design can you talk about your interpretation of them?

First off tysm !!!!!!! I’m so glad u like them ;0

Second off yes of course ! Here’s a few things about them :

-they r mongolian-american

-they lived in northern Oregon/southern Washington for most of their life on the surface, both in civilization and out on the woods (I’ve always had this idea of Chara being a forager, super self sufficient, it’s one of the first things I developed abt my interpretation of them)

-lived in a group home as a child (along with that they love kids !)

-Chara has inattentive ADHD as well as bipolar disorder

-SpIn’s include: fungi, knives, sewing and geometry (which they suck at but it’s challenging and stimulating and fun work)

-they were 9 when they ‘fell’ underground and 12 when The Plan was enacted

And now for more game related stuff:

-i whole-heartedly support NarraChara

-I know everyone likes to think that Chara has a special connection with Frisk but I like to think that they could interact the same way with every fallen (that includes influencing their choices)

-going with influencing the choices of the fallen they initially did their best to cause the children to fail in hopes of saving their family after death

-they talk Like That at the end of NM to appear more intimidating (by Like That I mean like a walking dictionary)

-the no mercy route was NOT their doing (I like to think of the player as an entity, while Chara is more of just an outside force if that makes any sense? Chara can certainly control Frisk as a vessel, but only of A) frisk has given them that option, B) they’re anxious/angry/emotional enough that their power amps up and allows them to overtake frisks living soul, or C) the player is controlling Frisk through Chara) (I can post more of my ghost stuff if y'all want it just shoot me an ask) back on track for this one the no mercy route was not their doing, but they do give you, the player, not frisk, an ultimatum at the end of the no mercy route because they’re fucking pissed at you

-Goopy Chara? Cool! It’s congealed blood

-Chara only finds out that Flowey is Asriel in true lab which is why its so weird (i cannot for the life of me find the post but its super popular, probably a birdsareblooming or undertale-in-2k19 post)

Personality wise:

-theyre super skittish and jumpy. Startle at everything and wear headphones Everywhere

-theyre semi-verbal and have selective mutism (won’t speak in public at all, rarely in front of Toriel and Asgore, and frequently to Asriel and Frisk)

-with that, they’re super light on their feet and hardly make any noise when moving

-also; very quick and hard to catch

-they tend to fall apart under pressure . In a situation where something is expected of them they’ll either overwork themselves into a burnout or stop functioning all together .

-very logical and has a hard time processing strong emotions (mostly anger)

-does a lot of mimicking and can take a while to trust

-hyper empathetic

-they can be very charming and good at manipulation; take that how you will

Extra HC’s:

-Chara knows magic! It’s not much, and it really drains them, but Asgore taught them (it’s mostly enacted through hand signs and they know healing and self defense)

-they stim a ton! Cracking their knuckles and chewing are the big ones

-Worn Dagger is a survival knife gifted by an older human brother from before falling who I’m referring to currently as Anthony . It’s got a wood and resin handle and a seven inch blade with gold embossing of flowers (specifically daisies). The sheath is hand made and embroidered by them !

-they know sign language and are constantly making new slang terms . Their signing is so modified and personalized that a lot of people have a hard time understanding what theyre saying

-arthritis in their hands and wrists from a couple injuries that never healed right and constant use of their knife only made it worse (they have these splints designed to look like gloves that hold their wrist in place)

-listen to me . Listen to me. They get their hands on Tetris and never let go . Tetris is the coolest game to them . Have y'all seen Tetris tournaments ? If not watch one they’re addictive . Chara gets in . Chara rocks it . They don’t win but they get up there . They fucking rock at Tetris guys

-also after frisk shows them minecraft they fucking lose it okay . ‘Frisk’ starts making houses or rooms fully furnished for seemingly no-one and Tori only . raises an eyebrow

-they listen to lots of rock and early 2000′s alternative/techno once they can get their hands on it. Frisk hates it so they’ll debate about it a lot

-super sensitive to smell and textures

(ps: its worth mentioning that a lot of my chara is based around myself! chara is one of my comfort characters and so a lot of them is just kinda … me, or who i wish i was on some level owo)

and might as well throw in some thoughts on canon compliant chara:

-we dont really know much about canon chara, but theyve shown to be somewhat manipulative and have a really strong case of suicidal idealization . this sort of ties into the idea of them being a martyr, the future of humans and monsters; thats like a huge fucking load for a kid to carry that i definitely feel could have some effect on mental health. like, telling a kid that they’re the future of two separate races, while theyre also learning about 1) how horrifically humans acted towards monsters and 2) how the barrier can be broken, especially while already having a tendency towards self harmful actions (i.e: jumping off a fucking mountain), and given how presumably awfully humans treated them in comparison to all the kindness theyve been shown by monsters, I think I’d get some ideas too.

- I’ve already said that i don’t think they’re evil, and I’ll stand by that opinion until the day of my death

-that said, their plan was flawed. I mean, obvi. the things they did, such as attempt suicide on 2 occasions, and succeed on one with the help of Asriel (as well as taking him down with them !) were wrong for quite a few reasons. I think ultimately they were blinded by the pressure placed on them, whether it was intentional or not, and not having a place to diffuse that anxiety, they sort of absorbed it and honed it into a plan to save everyone important (monsters, who showed some bare minimum decency and kindness) and kill everyone who wasn’t (that being themself.) And, once the first part of that plan succeeded, they sort of exploded; being on the surface, with humans, the people who hurt them, the people they hated, was a good enough motive to release all that built up tension .

-also, i might as well go into no mercy- I think Chara winds up with a lot of power, a lot of anxiety, and anger built up, so when every monster in the underground is killed theyre sort of gaining power bit by bit- until the end, after you kill flowey, and we get to meet them for real . I think they’re pissed off, and they try to convince you that you’re in the right, they thank you, etc; they try to appeal to the player, who throughout the run weve only seen as a mindless killing machine, in an attempt to get you to erase the world and go back on your decisions . When you don’t, they get frustrated, explode, using all the power they’ve gained through the run to erase the file themself.

I just . I dunno . i could talk about chara for hours please ask me more questions about them

#man oh man !#long post #txt #chara #blease ask me about bitch of living and K9 #also would yall be interested in fic ?#i have an ask !!!!!!!!!

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ravencromwell · 4 years

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On Rage and Complexity interwoven with disability and queerness as filtered through Sarah Gailey's "maybe novel"

I've drifted into posting much of my more personal/metaish content on my dreamwidth In an effort to try and be better about cross-posting, thought I'd put a bit of meta up here first for a change.

We lament, often and at great length, about the kind of tales we'd like to see: with more diverse characters, yes, but also well-rounded diverse characters. As Liz Bourke concisely opined recently :

It’s troubling, sometimes, how much the issue of “good representation”—and the arguments around it—slides towards a pervasive sense that creators must depict people who are good and right and do right. It’s not necessarily an explicit dictate, but there’s an unspoken undercurrent, a sense that to portray ugliness, unlikeability, fury—to portray people who have responded to suffering with cruelty and bitterness and rage—is to be complicit in one’s own vilification. And to be vulnerable. Justify your existence is the sea we swim in, always against the current.

To be unmarked by compromise, to be without sharp edges that sometimes cut even when you don’t want them to—because the world is what it is, and sometimes what it is teaches you that the best defence against being hurt by cruelty is a really quick offense—is to either be very young or hardly human. But when we come to fictional portrayals, well… As you know, Bob, Bob gets to be seen as a difficult genius, where Alice is seen as a bitch or a Mary Sue.

And as insightful as that essay is, I'd argue that a central factor it overlooks, or doesn't articulate as well as I would like, is that the more intersections of marginalization your identity rests upon, the more that unspoken pressure kicks in. I certainly feel and see it, as both a queer and disabled person, and I have friends who feel that weight even more heavily--that internal voice policing their own writing even stronger when they're brown and/or queer and/or coming from decolonized places; even heavier if/when they and their compatriots are still untangling the effects of colonialism and modern neoimperalism. And so it becomes vitally imperative for all of us, using whatever privilege we have to work in concert to expand what characters can be portrayed in mainstream fiction. And oh, aint that an easy proclamation to make; doing the work, though, is far harder.

So y'all can imagine my overwelming delight when the Bourke essay and twitter convo that sparked it--linked to in essay and so very much worth a scan--dropped on the same week as my introduction to Sarah Gailey's maybe book Every bit of what I read of Gailey's makes my love of her work slowly, steadily increase, but to be perfectly honest, this's probably my favorite thing of hers so far. It's the thing that tugs sharpest at my heart, that I see so much of my own experience reflected in, and it's only two fuckin chapters in But even if Gailey never writes another word of this--for which a large chunk of me will mourn--, it'll still be one of the most special things I've encountered for being, in western lit terms, a masterclass in putting the characters we wanna see in the world. (I insert that caveat because I know well that folks like Viet Thanh Nguyen are doing astonishing, under-appreciated work in nonwestern litfic. But the genres I'm most familiar with, western scifi and fantasy, have a long way to go to catch up.)

There are, so far, four--maybe five? I can't quite tell--characters in this novel. Three of 'em have serious, life-changing disabilities, and one of them is delightfully, tragically queer. And they're all allowed to be wonderfully vicious and complicated. Just look at something like:

Cory Jefferson is a hunched-over curled-up boy with bones too long for his body and a jaw you could use to shovel the ashes out of a fireplace. His chest has the caved-in look that comes with growing tall before you can grow wide, and his hair is long enough to want cutting but not long enough to look like it’s long on purpose. His hoodie sleeves have holes in them, and the bottoms of his jeans are frayed from walking, and all his fingers are missing, cut off at the bottom knuckle a year ago on a night he can’t remember no matter how many Thursdays he spends looking back and forth between Piper and Ethan.

"I think we should go back," Piper says. She’s chewing on her thumb, and Cory is staring at her thumb while she chews on it, probably because that used to be his nervous tic. Piper used to nag him about it.

Piper Durham has a spine as straight as a plumb-line dropped down a well. Her dark hair falls past her shoulders, less straight than it used to be, and with a few strands of white that weren’t there before. She’s thin enough to look hollow, and pale enough to look scared. She wears large black sunglasses with scratched-up lenses. She wears them because they cover up the holes where her eyes used to be, back before the night a year ago that she can’t remember no matter how many Thursdays she spends chewing on her thumb.

"That’s a bad idea,” Cory snaps. “That’s the worst bad idea I’ve ever heard, and every time you bring it up you sound stupider."

"I don’t hear either of you coming up with something smarter,"Piper snaps back, and then she immediately closes her mouth. She’s biting her tongue, literally biting it, you can see her doing it, and then she flinches again and stops doing that, because biting her tongue is even worse than what she said.

Ethan’s hands rise from his lap. After a silent moment, Cory translates for him, so Piper can hear. "Ethan says it’s okay. He says not to worry about it. He says he’s used to people saying stuff like that."

"Sorry," Piper whispers.

Across from her, in his own folding chair, Ethan signs it’s okay again. Cory doesn’t translate this time, and the decision not to translate is a hateful one. He watches with narrowed eyes as Piper, who can’t see Ethan’s hands and will never see them again, returns to chewing on her thumb.

Ethan rests his square-fingered hands on his crossed legs and sits back in his chair, his every movement controlled. Some would call him poised. Some would call him that. He wears dark jeans, like always, and a button-down shirt, like always. His fingernails are short and clean, and his sandy-blonde hair is short and clean, and his shoes are polished and his clothes are pressed. He wears a clear plastic face mask to help heal the skin grafts on his face — his face, which was cut away from his skull in one tidy sheet. He does not speak because he has not had a tongue for a year, not since the night he lost his face, which is a night he can not remember no matter how many Thursdays he spends watching Cory and Piper hate each other.

These are people not made saintly by their experiences, who fuck up and apologize, and honestly still fuck up. But who're trying, in their deeply jaded fashion, to show solidarity after this horrific experience they've all been through. They have so many rough edges between them that it'd be impossible to navigate a room between them without cutting yourself to ribbons. Three disabled characters, never put on pedestals, allowed to be as complex as any able-bodied person. It's something still so astonishingly rare that it brought me to weeping this afternoon and meant more than I can say.

And to have these three disabled characters get language this evocative and gorgeous--to have Ethan dress so sharply! when to so many people disability translates to a disconnect from cultural touchstones like fashion. As someone who loves and wants to adopt men's fashion, that, too, meant so much. Every word of this is just so lush! I can't decide whether it's the description of Piper's spine or Cory's caved-in look that comes from growing tall before you can grow wide I love most as a descriptive passage, but to see disabled characters get this kind of attention is breathtaking.

And then there's this description of queerness, from our resident ghost:

The girls fascinated me in death the same way they had in life. For all my sixteen years alive, I was hypnotized by the way a girl can move through a room fast and subtle, like a secret moving through a church during service. The way girls laughed, the way they wrapped their hands around things they wanted to own, they way their eyes got sharp when they were angry. The way they smelled. Boys always seemed the same to me, all of them echoes of each other, all of them saying the same three sentences over and over again, all of them looking at each other with the same eyes. I could never tell the difference between them, not really. But girls. Girls.

It mattered to me while I was alive, but it didn’t make a difference in the way I lived my life, which was a regret I chewed on when I’d worn my other regrets into pulp. The town was small, and everyone knew everyone, and by the time I knew I wasn’t the only girl who watched girls the way I did, I’d been dead for too long to do anything about it. If I knew then what I know now, maybe I would have said something to Molly Two-tone, whose real name was Molly Tutonne and who had straight black hair that fell between her shoulderblades as black as roofing tar, who had bright green eyes and a laugh that you could hear from a block away. Molly Two-tone, who came to my house after I died and stood in the kitchen and whispered that if I was there and if I could hear her, she wanted me to know that she wished she’d kissed me when she had the chance.

There wasn’t a thing I could do to let her know I’d heard her. All I could do was watch her cry, and then watch her leave, closing the door quiet as she could when she went. She didn’t ever come back again.

God, that description guts me every damn time. There're so many of us for whom that metaphor applies: death can be substituted for disapproval or fear or a million other things that separate us from our queerness. I don't know if there's any way for our ghost to have a happy ending, or even something close to catharsis, but Gailey confronts the mess and complication of queerness in ways I've rarely seen.

And getting back to the original point of marginalized characters not being allowed to be cruel, look at this fucking gem on Piper:

Maybe I knew, when Piper walked in with Cory and Ethan. Maybe I knew she was Piper’s granddaughter. Or maybe I saw Piper and thought, for a breath-held instant, that Molly had come back to see me again. I lost track of time more and more often as the years went on, forgetting sometimes how far I was from my life. Forgetting that it had happened one hundred years before, and not just that instant.

When Piper eased the front door open and stepped inside, waving her hand in front of her face to ward off cobwebs, she looked just like Molly — that long black hair and those jewel-bright eyes, and a mouth with a smile hidden at the corners of it. But once the moment of hope melted away, I could see the differences between Piper and her grandmother, and there were plenty of them. And then two boys walked in behind her, and they shut the door.

Piper turned to face them, and she let that hidden smile loose, and it was a different kind of smile than I’d ever seen on Molly’s face — bright and sharp and cruel, ready to have that cruelty dialed up as far as it needed to go. When I saw that smile on Piper’s face, I knew.

I knew that she was nothing like Molly at all.

This's a character who is gonna shortly be disabled, and she's allowed all her sharp edges and I will never fucking be over it. This's a novel of sharp edges, not pulling a punch in deference to its subject matter, not doing a thing to make its readers comfortable or reassured. It's all the ferocity horror should be, with probably my favorite insight being:

When there is a house that no one will ever live in again, people bring their secrets to it. They hide things there — treasures and secrets and sins and violence and love. They turn it into a place to be cruel to each other, because they’re afraid, and fear slaps a dial onto cruelty and turns it up as high as it can go. They turn it into a place to want each other, because fear puts a dial onto want, too. They turn it into what it is, and without them, a house is just a house, no matter what happened there. It’s just empty.

a two-chapter masterclass in writing representation we wanna see.

I was a disabled child told to be kind, not to make folk nervous or bristle at their pity. To know my limitations and stay quiet, not rock the boat and I wouldn't be hurt or scorned more than was expected for my disability. They're lessons I'm spending much of my twenties unknotting, and this vicious, many-toothed novel has wrapped itself round my heart even in its infancy.

#book babbling #disability stuff #queer stuff #my meta #sarah gailey

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firjii · 5 years

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Okay I know it's an old game so I'll stfu about it after this, but even about a week after finishing it, honestly I'm?? so conflicted?? about Rise of the Tomb Raider in general.

Under a cut because I got random and rambly and a bit long and I know not everyone cares about this game/series.

Disclaimer: this was my first Tomb Raider game, I played it on easy, I didn’t do optional tombs, and I mostly played it for the story.

I still really don't know how to sum this game up. I wanted a shorter outing to make up for the enormously enjoyable but enormously long AC Odyssey that I finished a few weeks ago. I wasn't quite counting on such a steep learning curve for gameplay mechanics, but I also didn't expect to like the plot as much as I did.

The more I raged, the more intrigued I was to push on through for the story. The more I hated the survivalist aspects, the more I was motivated to finish up a mission with sheer luck in the hope of another character conversation. I can't say it's become a favorite game, but I also won't forget it. I didn't come away from this one impulsively wanting to play others in the series or even wanting to immediately replay this one, and yet despite a fairly conventional plot, it still hit me with the Ow My Feels(tm) factor.

I suspect that the jarring or weak points I found in it (gameplay and plot, respectively) were both due to the game being on the short side. Did it need to be a 50-hour game? Of course not, but the 20ish hours we got wasn't enough IMO. I've seen complaints about both characters and plot, but the writer in me says that almost all of the problems I found simply needed more time for explanation. I enjoyed what I saw - I just wished there was a lot more of it.

The environments are rad a.f. but it's not always that easy to stop and enjoy them because of combat, plot progression etc. The camera style adds to the suspenseful survivalist vibes but that's not a good thing if you're a nervous bean like me (also tbqf it set off my motion sickness more than a few times so the fact that I pushed through and finished shows just how curious I was about the characters/plot).

Since most of the story is set in Siberia, a lot of the settings deal with crumbing old Soviet facilities. Some of these are super grim, but I'm impressed that they included them because that's part of modern(ish) history and I would've been upset if they'd tried to portray them as anything else.

Most of the documents and codices are well worth the effort to find because they add some welcome texture and scope (plus they got dramatized VA treatment and that just felt really special to me). A few also add pretty important details to the plot, so they tread a weird line between "technically totally optional but you'll probably enjoy some of the game infinitely more if you bother with finding the damn things." And again, the amount of times I had to leave them behind during practical game progression because "fricking frick I barely have ammo left because I'm a crap shot and I just need to finish this fucking mission alive" was frustrating.

For me, the gameplay pacing was a bit repetitive just because there weren't really any "lite combat" moments - yes, there were calmer parts mixed in with the panicky ones, but if you're shooting at people, you're shooting at a LOT of them. Add to that the timed events like making it to the end of an actively collapsing bridge and I - go ahead and laugh - was actually physically fatigued at times.

I guessed a few big plot points long before they were revealed, but I didn't really mind, and maybe that was my writer tentacles feeling around and anticipating. The only real problem I saw was the sheer number of questions not only unanswered but unasked in the process. The writer in me wants to criticize it, but the gamer in me fully acknowledges that a) there are different kinds of games and stories in the world, and b) most games are ultimately rushed at some stage of production so tbh it's amazing that we EVER get coherent ones.

Some people have complained that the characters are underdeveloped. I do think that there was some missed potential, but that doesn't mean that what you DO see is a lack of development or bad writing (again, you can only do so much in a shortish game).

Sofia is among the rarest of breeds in media, a strong and self-sufficient woman who hasn’t paid for her competence through a huge onslaught of horrific trauma or by being cold. More depth would have been welcome, but to me, she felt like a complete thought as-is. Constantin starts out looking flat but develops into something reasonably intriguing by the end if you pay attention to the documents - but yet again, this was a case where he might have been far more in a longer game. Ditto his dynamic with Ana, who is ultimately driven by something easy to relate to but admittedly would need a lot more rounding out before I actually sympathized with her.

And then there’s Jacob - FREAKING JACOB. I don’t know about the rest of y'all, but he very much falls into one of my favorite fic archetypes: people who never stopped trying their best but are so haunted by tough choices in their past that they’re terrified of allowing themselves a moment of happiness. Between the VA and the animations, I was - to put it quite simply - mesmerized. I can’t say I was surprised about what happens to him, but it still felt like some pretty cheap pantsing to me, like the devs had said “ok we made this neat char with possibly a lot of potential if we continue to treat him sensitively, but this has to be a self-contained story so uhhh lol bye.” Weirdly, the fact that it’s easy to predict what will happen to him wasn’t a total writeoff for me because the slow-building dread felt like a vague glimpse into Jacob’s mind.

And just ugh. Ugh. Everything that might have been, u feel?

#rise of the tomb raider #spoilers #(i guess?? i mean the game's oldish now but i'll do the courteous thing anyway)

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stormbornbastard · 5 years

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Daenerys Targaryen Rant

Look, I'm new to the GOT fandom and being on Tumblr overloads with you a lot of information at once. This fandom, is like the definition of toxic and for what? Ships? I have to laugh.

I'm only gonna address one thing but believe me, I've got a list so let's do this shit.

One thing I've noticed is the overwhelming hate against Daenerys Targaryen, for her cruelty and impulsiveness in some of her actions. In no way do I agree with all of them but I refuse to reduce her complex character and story buildup to that of a villain or a mad queen.

Daenerys has simultaneously figured out to be loved and feared all at once by her people which is fucking amazing. She was not born with the same training to rule as other highborns. She was not given some handbook on how to be the perfect fucking queen for the people and herself. She makes mistakes and acts impulsively but not at all times and the times she has, she's paid for them greatly and if she hasn't learned from them now, she will. Its trial and error with her, it's the only path of ruling and conqueror she has.

By no means do her mistakes outweigh her good deeds. Daenerys has done questionable things for her claim to the throne but honestly at this point, who hasn't? (Jon isn't aware of his claim so just don't)

She's not just some benevolent and perfect ruler who shows mercy to all and does nothing wrong. You wanna know why? Because that ruler doesn't exist. No real person is capable enough to do that because real people are flawed and since GOT tries to reflect real people in their characters, Daenerys is flawed too.

Those flaws do not make her incompetent enough to rule nor do they take away all that she fought to overcome and gain (screw anyone who thinks that shit was just handed to her, her name didn't mean shit. The Targaryens had been discarded before her and the name and entitlement can only get one so far, look at Viserys for example if you need to)

A lot of people want her to be more compassionate and empathetic with her enemies and people who pose a threat but why should she? Her enemies have never been compassionate and empathetic with her. Daenerys was raised with cruelty, she was only shown cruelty by all those who were supposed to love her which is why I believe she has no problem being cruel to those who pose a threat. It's all she's knew, the cruelty others for a very long time. As much as you wanna discard her backstory, its integral to shaping the person she is.

We have seen her ability to grow as a character and show more than the death and destruction that Targaryens have left behind. She cannot learn all the capabilities of a kind and good queen when she has rarely known kindness and goodness herself. But she is growing, her sacrificing a dragon who she considered a child of her own in an effort to help defend the north against the white walkers (without Jon bending the knee first) shows her ability to put people before her own political even fucking personal interest. (Another impulsive action that she paid/ will pay for and fucking learned/will learn from. Also can we acknowledge the fact that instead of holding animosity towards Jon for the death of her dragon like she could've, she empathizes with him and instead wants to help him destroy the night king BEFORE he bends the knee all while grieving her fucking child! Dany had no indication that he would bend the knee if she helped him, none. Yet she still wanted to help him destroy the night king and protect the north and it's people regardless!)

A lot of people have ridiculously high expectations of her even though when she started the show, she had no political experience, no good social experience, no military experience, no experiences one needs to rule. Yet she gained them (she wasn't given some wise person along her entire path to help her do it either) and she gained a council of people to advise her and that she trusts with her life to become a better fucking queen and to give her knowledge when she lacks it because she knows she doesn't know everything about ruling. She's aware of almost all of her flaws and she's worked to improve on them. She's not the second coming of Robb Stark (we all wish he was still here) but she is Daenerys motherfucking Targaryen and that means something and not because of her ancestry.

Do I want her to receive the iron throne? Fuck no. I hope its destroyed along with the wheel.

Do I think she doesn't deserve to be a queen? Fuck no, she's earned it.

So stop discrediting her and fixating on her bad qualities when there is so much more of her to see.

And for fucks sakes, stop pitting her and Sansa Stark against one another. They both are remarkable fucking women who have coped with terrible shit to become who they are and they're situations as rulers are rarely the same. Most of y'all are hating on one of them because she gets in the way of a ship and its pathetic.

Sansa helps protect and maintain the north as ruler and was born a Stark which means something there and gives her some kind of respect. Dany is a fucking ruler and conqueror and the Targaryen name held nothing but negative connotations of destruction, failure and death in GOT society before her, she is consistently judged by the sins of her family. She's not familiar with every land she plans to control but she wants to be, wants to be a voice for the people and those who are oppressed just as she was. Conquering and ruling a new kingdom and ruling a well established one that you grew up in (therefore she's familiar with customs, the people and ways of life in the north) is nowhere near the same thing.

I'm not discrediting Sansa, I love her and she's an amazing ruler but she had some aspects afforded to her that Daenerys doesn't.

I know she's got an ego but shit, if I had done the things she did and overcome the things she has, my head would either be too fucking big to fit through my front door or I would've offed myself before Dany gained her first dragons (I honestly don't know if I would've had the strength to get past that point).There is no question about her strength and resilience because she's got a fuck ton of it.

One more thing, after Jon bends the knee and she says "I hope I deserve it!" THAT SHIT! THAT NEEDS TO BE FUCKING TALKED ABOUT! Dany isn't as collected as she paints herself to be, she doubts her actions just as everyone does theirs but she does it in secret. She's just not in a position to be open about her insecurities and doubts which is why she doesn't show them to anyone. She's never really been. Dany has never had family who genuinely and unconditionally loved her like the Starks have their entire lives. She has never had the comfort of confiding in someone like they have or trusting someone the way they do. Even now, the people who love her mostly love her for what she can offer them and what she represents, not who she is. She's always relied on herself for that which is probably why she's not as open and vulnerable as people would like her to be. It could even be said without all she represents or her dragons or her power, no one would love her.

She's grown up without it. Abuse taking its place, she would have no one without her claim. The starks would have each others which is why I think she holds onto it and enforces so much. Her claim has given her people who love her, the things she can offer have given her the people that love her. That sucks but it what it is.

Her questioning her ability to rule, her insecurity shows that she will not let her pride and ego get in the way of being a good queen if she gains the seven kingdom. Just because she exerts confidence does not mean she is overconfident or stuck in the belief of her entitlement to the throne. She worries she will not be the queen the seven kingdoms need which is exactly why she could be. Because those thoughts will keep her vigilant and attentive to all the shit she's needs to get done once she's no longer prioritized with conquering.

And to address her motives, or what I believe are her motives, Dany likes power. Why is that a bad thing? For a long period in life, she was considered weak and powerless, a pawn for those with power. She knows what it means to suffer (the death of her family, her husband [Stockholm syndrome but let me not start because she did love him], her only child Rhaego, and her dragon who she loves like a child, being raped, etc.) She knows it and she will never allow herself to be powerless again, she will never allow herself to be weak (I'm pretty sure she associates vulnerability with weakness at this point) in the face of threats, potential allies and the suffering of her, her people or both.

Why is that a bad thing? For her to be powerful, because that's what she equates it with strength. Power keeps her from weakness and I think it's why she strives for as much as possible so that she will never know that feeling of powerlessness again and so that her people who depend on her will never know suffering at the hands of the powerful again. It's not because of her "selfish belief that she deserves it." She wants it and forced herself to belief she's entitled and deserves it because while on the throne, she can secure protection from those who would do the horrific things she's endured and seen with that power to those without it.

She may result to cruelty when needed but that does not make her an evil person/ruler (yes I know about the Tarlys who refused to bend the knee for her. She made a power move, seeing as there were witnesses and the men who witnessed could see her not delivering on her threat of death as a weakness and eventually try and move against her, and she killed them. Now they all know she means fucking business. Also the Tarlys betrayed House Targaryen and Tyrell and were responsible for the death of thousands of Tyrell men. This is all Daenerys know of them, why do ya'll just ignore that. You act like Dany killed an innocent or someone she had a strong emotional attachment to but that's not the case. Her action was a strategic, political move and they chose to defy her when she gave them a choice) It wasn't right but it instilled fear, she cannot rule with just love. You can love someone and still plot against them, if people fear the consequences of what could happen if they fail, it'll hold them back. She needs both fear and love to rule. Loved enough to fight for her, feared enough to not move against her.

It's one a.m. but I had to get this off my chest, so yeah, I'm done.

#daenerys targaryen #jonerys #game of thrones #got #got7 #got8 #got8 spoilers #daenerys targaryen rant #dany defense squad #jon snow #khaleesi #dragons #pro daenerys #sansa stark

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atamascolily · 7 years

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Book Review: “Rider at the Gate,” by C.J. Cherryh

So I would like to give a shout-out to one of my favorite books, Rider at the Gate by C.J. Cherryh, and its sequel, Cloud’s Rider. I’ve never met anyone else who has read this series, which is a shame because it is awesome.

Okay. So lots of books have telepathic animals that can communicate with humans, right? Friendly, happy, affectionate animals. Rider at the Gate takes the idea of telepathy and imagines an entire planetary ecosystem based around it. So different animal species use telepathy for various things, with varying degrees of sophistication: to attract mates, to make themselves look bigger than they really are, or to make you think they’re not there so you won’t eat them or so they can eat you. This is brilliant, and I’ve never seen any other books with this premise - and if there are, I need to read them ASAP.

Needless to say, when human colonists show up on this planet full of telepathic animals projecting images into their minds so they can scare/confuse/eat them, they are toast.

Happily for humanity, though, one of the apex predator species - nighthorses - are curious enough to investigate, and decide they like how human minds “feel” enough to bond with individual humans and keep the other telepathic animals away. So humanity can actually colonize the planet, as long as they have “riders” ringing their towns, protecting their poor defenseless livestock, and guarding their convoys between towns. Most unbonded humans are really freaked out by telepathy, and their attitudes towards riders range from grudging respect to the more fundamentalist “riders are devilspawn, stay away” (which amounts to an entire religion, actually).

Add this to the fact that the planet is basically Alaska - short but intense growing season; long severe winters; lots of forests and mining resources - and electricity and tech are either unreliable or summon giant telepathic man-eating bears, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a setting. Basically, everything on this planet is trying to kill humanity, life is a grim frontier setting, and despite some good people trying to do the right things (particularly in book two) it’s hella dark. Frankly, I read this book as a masterpiece of world building, because most of the details are subtle and in the background rather than explained all at once in a big prologue.

The nighthorses have their own personalities and agendas, that don’t always coincide with the human ones. You can ride them, but they get tired easily, so mostly you walk, and they don’t plan/think in the future super-well without a human mind to steady them. Also, they look kinda like horses, but they’re predators - they kill fish and small mammals easily, and they love bacon. We all love the idea of bonding with an intelligent nonhuman animal, but we always expect it to be like the Companions in the Valdemar books (who are actually reincarnated people in horse bodies, not actual horses). This is what it actually would be like: occasionally awesome and convenient, but sometimes so damn frustrating.

Also, Cherryh writes telepathy really well. It’s confusing until you get used to it - it took me several read-throughs to really process how everything fits together, like an intricate puzzle-box. Part of the problem is that telepathy lends itself to rumor-mongering like you wouldn’t believe, and so it’s challening at first to figure out what’s actually happening versus what characters are imagining or are afraid of happening. I’ve never seen any other writer use that mix of images and words for telepathy, or set up her sentences so that she can write a descriptive sentence and the reader knows exactly what’s meant to be telepathic images and what’s not.

Another thing I love about this book is that there are no real villains. I can’t really say much more without HUGE SPOILERS and y'all should just go and read these books for yourselves, but there’s no one in these books who I would consider to be evil in the usual literary dualistic sense. Stupid, selfish, short-sighted, confused, lying to save their skins, deluded, worried about what other people think, etc, etc, but never evil in the sense of Voldemort or Sauron. It’s a very realistic-feeling human kind of evil, the sort you can identify with on some level.

Terrible things happen, but even the primary antagonist (who is probably an undiagnosed sociopath and/or affected by their parents’ abuse, and definitely kills a lot of people in horrific ways because they’re mad about petty things) believes themselves to be a good person and that life just isn’t treating them fairly. For them, it’s an opportunity to enact their childish fantasies of power and privilege, and it’s a game without real consequences. What they really want is so relatable on some level that it’s hard (for me, anyway) to unequivocally hate them, even though the means they choose to enact those desires are awful. Ironically, this very refusal to believe that this person is problematic - because they look so harmless and they don’t match the other characters’ idea of evil - ends up causing the bulk of the problems in the two books, even after they should know better.

It’s rare for me to find any genre fiction that is this psychologically, physically and ecologically real, or any “realistic” fiction with such an interesting premise and characters. I wish Cherryh had written more books in this universe, but I’m happy that this pair exists.

#book reviews #cj cherryh #rider at the gate #cloud's rider

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thewillowbends · 6 years

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Thoughts on TLJ - SPOILERS

Now for some spoilery content! Now that I've had a sleepless night going over some of my feelings about it, I can shuffle through what I did and didn't like.

- - - - -

TLJ Positivity:

-I liked the trajectory of Rey's whole storyline. I had hedged my bets between two concepts - Rey as Anakin reborn (which, admittedly, I preferred because I'm an indulgent prequel junkie) or that she was a nobody, representing an entirely new generation to whom the Skywalker legacy was being handed to. The wound up being the latter, but I'm not as disappointed as I expected. While I have...many, many issues with some of the characterization in this film, hers felt like it progressed the most naturally. This idea of legacies and prophecies going the way of the past, of letting a new generation start fresh but not at the expense of destroying it, of letting the PEOPLE take ahold of their destiny instead of the burden falling on a few "chosen ones" is not something I feel is necessarily a bad moral lesson for the audience nor fundamentally detrimental to the movies' previous material.

Note: I'm still writing that Rey-as-Anakin fic. YOU CAN'T STOP ME DISNEY.

-Adam Driver has a really nice gym routine. So does John Boyega.

-Kelly Marie Tran is adorable, guys. She is literally the cutest.

-A film could never hurt for more POC and they could definitely use in the main cast, but I will say that the newer movies definitely feel more "casually diverse." There are POC in the Rebellion, POC in villains, POC in the civilian culture, POC in the main cast. It doesn't feel forced. They're just THERE, which is how it should be.

-Adam Driver is also really good in this movie. Considering we're not getting as extensive a backstory as most of us wished for Ben, he still does a remarkable job making the character engaging through his performance. They essentially give him Vader's original plotline in ESB/ROTJ before the "Vader as Anakin" storyline came into fruition. So he's sort of Vader's heir in a new and more devastating way. Kylo isn't emotionally stable or enough of a visionary to really be the driving force of an empire, so it'll be interesting to see how that tension between Hux and Kylo works itself out in the last film.

- @ahollowyear - I got a real kick out of how much of the actual storyline you accurately predicted vis a vis Kylo and Rey. You wrote that fanfic, what, a year before the details of TLJ even started coming out?

-I am deeply relieved that we avoided the reductive light/dark balance the trailers teased at. The dark side is still what imbalances the Force - it inevitably exists but is not necessary for balance. Also, that the main cast's discussion of ~character complexity~ was not that open ended, since the film's protagonists actively reject more of the nihilistic viewpoints being thrown by side characters.

-Carrie Fisher is always and forever the queen. <3

-I liked the final scenes with Luke. I really liked the choice of a binary sunset to bookend Luke's story. Genreally, I'm not a huge fan of ALL POWERFUL JEDI, but I can deal with astral projected battles from a Skywalker because Skywalkers are special. But he went out in a way that I found meaningful and touching.

TLJ Negativity:

WHERE THE HELL ARE RIAN JOHNSON'S EDITORS IN THIS MOVIE.

Seriously, what was going on with the writing process here? Why is the plot all over the damn place? (Answer: Because they didn't plot out this arcs in advance and it shows.) Why do we spend 30-40 mintues on a casino sidequest that literally has NO ACTUAL EFFECT ON THE GODDAMN PLOT. What are characters like Benicio del Toro's and Laura Dern even doing in this film? We literally are trying to balance nearly two casts (OT/ST) worth of character development, the last thing you want or need is unnecessary characters distracting from the main development or wasted scenery. And that's what literally the entire middle chunk of Rose and Finn's plotline - wasted action.

There are so many good ideas struggling to be communicated in the absolute muddled mess that is the middle of the movie. We have a storyline about light and dark being natural opposite but neither being an inevitability outside of our personal choices. We have the theme of the natural order of things, life begetting death begetting life, and the idea of legacies carrying us through strife so that we can become the heroes of our own making instead of relying on others to save us. There's commentary about the significance of failures, how sometimes they're more important than victories because of what they reveal to us about ourselves and each other, and how we come to terms with them when they can't be easily remedied. The casino is clearly meant to be a commentary about exploitative capitalism and the way the evil of fascism destroys culture and people from the top down. All of these are great ideas, but you need to have that effectively communicated to your audience, and you need to communicate it meaningfully.

And the characters. THE CHARACTERS. The chaaaaaaaaaaaaraaaaacters.

Rey and Kylo I'm fine with. Their development doesn't bother me. I can even deal with Rose, though I wish her purpose in the plot wasn't so hamfisted.

But Finn and Poe? Why did it feel like their character arcs literally rebooted for this film? Poe is clearly inteded to be a kind of surrogate son to Leia ("mother of the rebellion"), serving as a foil to Ben, so I get why there's a general parallel there in the two progressing toward leadership roles - one who violently grasps at power, while the other faces some hard lessons about the reality and sacrifice of command as opposed to heroics. I feel like that's a natural progression of what we saw in their relationship in TFA, but it still feels like a step back because the level of experience and confidence we saw in him in TFA doesn't mirror how Leia views him in TLJ. If anything, he should have been growing into the position of command so that Leia can effectively and believably pass that legacy on to him. Instead, what we get is a plotline that suggests to us that Poe isn't really ready for him, which is...regressive? Like, all of these character should have been going through these changes at the start of the film, not ending on them.

(This being said, what the hell is wrong with Admiral Holdo that she can't understand the value of basic communication? Like, she's meant as a lesson to the audience about mistaking reckless action for heroism, but it's hard not to agree with Poe when she's literally telling NOBODY UNDER HER NOTHING. How easily could all of that drama been avoided if she's just said what the actual plan was instead of creating so much fear and uncertainty on the bridge?)

(I totally ship Leia/Holdo though.)

And Finn. Oh my God, I feel so bad for John Boyega. What a waste of his charisma and talent. Most of TFA is Finn going from a deserter seeking *individual* salvation from the First Order and recognizing by the end the responsibility one has in the stand against evil. So he basically...rehashes that entire character development here? Wouldn't it have made more sense to see him struggling with his reputation as a hero in the Rebellion and then coming to terms with his new role? Let him wrestle with the existentialist uncertainty of being able to make his own choices! Explore the trauma of his experiences in the army by having him struggle with his fear and uncertainty while infiltrating the First Order - use it to emphasize the contradictions of his experiences with the freedom of his new life.

If you wanted to interject some moral ambiguity, why not have him address the issue that the New Order's army is essentially a SLAVE army? Wouldn't that scene with Phasma held much greater power if he'd tried to appeal to his fellow soldiers about the destruction the New Order has wrought on their lives, about the potential they could have if they rose up against them? If you're going to have Benicio del Toro nihilistically declaring that the war is endless and therefore moral standpoints are meaningless, why not have Finn reject that meaningfully to both the audience outside the movie and within it? Legit y'all, my ideal ending for this man is to take his place in helping rebuild a newer, better system for all of them - and what better way than by helping to rehabilitate his fellow child soldiers?

Just ugh, out of everything that bothers me in the movie, Finn is the character that leaves the worst taste in my mouth. He was my favorite in TFA, and his character development should be progressing beyond this point by now.

Also: GOD HELP ME if they kill off Leia in episode III. It would be beyond heartless and irresponsible given the overall thematic trend of the movies. The character who tells us dejectedly that she "went out fighting" is arguably the one who should live to pass the legacy on and die peacefully.

TLJ neutrality:

-I am on the fence regarding Luke's characterization, leaning towards finding it less problematic than others might. He's pretty clearly suffering from severe depression, which can take a person to some pretty dark places. Most of my struggles with his characterization center around his confrontation of Ben. Do I feel that Luke is somebody who would pull the blade on his nephew? Part of me violently rejects that, but there's another part that considers it from the perspective of somebody dealing with the horror of thinking he created another Vader, of knowing what Ben could become, of the Force showing him a horrific future...and giving into that temptation the dark side presents in thinking our choices are already made. I can dig the idea that part of nefariousness of the dark is in undermining our belief in full agency. Could I believeably see him, in a moment of weakness, pulling his lightsaber? I'm vacillating on the issue. Ben Solo isn't all that particularly different from Jason in the old EU, and Luke toed the line of darkness dealing with his fall, too.

-I'd really like more EU exposition as to what exactly what down with Snoke and Ben when he was a child. How was he already THAT damaged by the time of Luke's confrontation with him? What was going on that Luke was either blind to or struggling to care for him without Leia and Han's help?

-I go between feeling like Leia was well used here to feeling like she could have done so much more, that we could have seen more emotional strife with her where Ben and Luke are concerned. Instead, we knock her out partway through the movie, which is such a shame because we no longer have the option of the third movie to be her swan song. Carrie Fisher was wonderful here, but I struggle with whether I feel like this story gave her the send off she deserved.

-The twins reunion. It was touching and memorable, don't get me wrong, but it's sad to think that's the end of it. I figured something like that was coming, but STILL. God, Skywalker/Organa life depresses me.

-Speaking of, I'm a total idiot because it took me entirely too long to catch on to what was going on the astral projection scene. Hurr hurr, I said, when did Luke build a new lightsaber? And get sweet clothes? And did he lift the X-wing out of the water to get there? omfg, all of the hints were there, I'm just ridiculous.

-Yes, the scene with Leia saving herself with the Force is pretty cool. Not sure if I feel it toes into ridiculous territory, though.

-SWEAR TO GOD DISNEY, if you give me a love triangle in the third film with girl fighting over Finn, I will flip my shit.

TLJ LOLs:

This movie practically made Rey and Ben canon, and I had a tremendously unkind moment of smug amusement at how the more obnoxious antis were going to react to this film. The histrionic discourse is the thing of legends, let me tell you.

#star wars #the last jedi spoilers #tlj spoilers #the last jedi #spoilers #this is more positive twelve hours later because i was really pissed about that casino scene #this is nothing more infuriating than writing that serves no purpose to the plot #I just started an English degree #and I know this #i don't actually care if people dislike rey and kylo together #i just find anti-shipping to be one of the most worthwhile and ridiculous endeavors ever

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evenstevensranked · 7 years

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#27: Season 2, Episode 1 - “Starstruck”

Ruby desperately wants to win a radio contest to sit in on boyband BBMak’s recording session. Meanwhile, Louis finds an incredibly lucky penny and milks it for all it’s worth.

Wow, guys! Season 2 opens with the BBMak/Lucky Penny/Louis gets a makeover and looks smokin’ hot and Ruby develops a crush on him and I'm like "girl, same" episode!!! Let’s do this.

Alright, so within the first minute of this episode we learn that Ruby is absolutely obsessed with BBMak (a boyband that actually existed and is now unfortunately so irrelevant that some younger viewers of today assume they're a fictional band) and she’s trying to win a contest to go to their recording session when they come to Sacramento. She’s been listening to the radio on her pink, cheetah print walkman for hours on end trying to make sure she’s the lucky caller. Ren is concerned that her intense devotion may not be healthy.. but, Ruby insists she’s not obsessed with them. Her bedroom and behavior says otherwise:

At school the next day, Louis ends up finding a lucky penny which leads him to experience the best few days in a row ever. It kicks off with him narrowly escaping death and his big history test being canceled due to their teacher’s monkey having babies. The usual. If you binge watch the show, like I’ve done more times than I care to admit, the first few seconds of this scene are shocking because Louis' voice is obviously deeper and he looks obviously older. Yet according to Disney logic we're supposed to believe he's still in 7th grade, lol nah. Maybe at least the second half of 7th grade... We've gone over this before.

Louis seconds away from potentially dying over a penny.

Like I've mentioned, Disney is notoriously bad at airing episodes out of order. So here, we get an episode featuring Ren’s old friend Nelson. The only issue is that this aired 6 episodes before Thin Ice, which is Nelson’s formal introduction. The only explanation I can think of for this is that the Disney execs thought the BBMak thing would make a stronger season opener and switched up the airing order after they were already shot sequentially. I guess they assumed, or hoped, no one would notice or care that there's a new character we've never seen before just chilling with the gang like BFFs lol. According to Wiki at least, Season 2 was aired horrifically out of order when you compare the production code to the number it aired in the season. Like, WOW. For example, this episode was shot as Episode 13. I think that says it all.

No wonder Louis seems so jarringly older in this episode. He’s totally younger in the episodes that were supposed to air during the front half of S2.

Anyway, both Ren and Nelson are concerned about Ruby’s wellbeing now. She has practically turned into a fanatic zombie. They approach her and she says “I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. Do you really think I wanna chat?” completely zoned out of her mind. Yeah, I’d be worried too. We also see that she’s not doing her schoolwork either. Her entire binder is full of BBMak, including this rather disturbing pop-up:

Continuing his string of good luck, Louis gets to eat Principal Wexler’s extravagant birthday lunch for whatever reason and ends up winning a free fashion makeover courtesy of "Fruity Fruit Cocktail." ....ok. Tawny starts to get freaked out and Twitty simply says "I'm starting not to like you" which is understandable, because Louis is quickly slipping into another arrogant phase due to all of the luck he's been having.

Ren and Nelson give Ruby an intervention to stop her ridiculous obsession with BBMak and wanting to marry one of them. Why is this something that never goes out of relevancy? This is still happening today. It’s perhaps more relevant than ever with the rise of internet fandoms and socials like Tumblr. Teens are literally spiraling into genuine insanity over bands like never before. As long as there are teen idols, there will be teen idol fanatics. Can’t really go wrong with a plot-line like this. Ren tells her "You deserve a real life person who's gonna be perfect for you" - Ruby agrees and decides to turn over a new leaf.

The new and improved made-over Louis comes waltzing in, and just like that Ruby replaces her BBMak obsession with a Louis obsession. She’s just blown away by his beauty. Same, tbh. Y’all already know that I HAD THE BIGGEST CRUSH AND THIS EPISODE KILLED ME!!!! Now that I think about it, this very well might've been the episode that solidified my everlasting fondness for Shia LaBeouf.

This isn’t even overdramatic. Ruby is so me.

Even Ren and Nelson tell Louis that he looks stunning! Well, “stunning” was Louis’ word, not theirs. They just agreed with his conceitedness, lol. Suddenly a bird comes flying into the house and lands on Louis’ shoulder. Of course, it happens to be Pecky -- a missing bird with a $50 reward. OF COURSE!

The next day, Ruby happily tells Ren that she has officially moved on from BBMak. There’s a new guy in her life! Ren is so excited until Ruby reveals the new object of her affection to her:

Um, is this my room circa 2001 or Ruby’s? I honestly can’t tell. Also I would so buy that big’ol poster of Shia on her closet door. That thing has made a few appearances throughout the series. It’s kind of iconic looking, don’t you think? Maybe that’s just me...

Just thought I’d mention: Ren asks her “How did you get these pictures?!” and Ruby explains “I downloaded them from the internet. Louis has a very interesting website.” Do I even want to know? Aside from the implied potentially disturbing content, part of me wishes Disney had some sort of interactive fake louisstevens.com website or something like Nickelodeon did with amandaplease.com!

Tawny insists that Louis' lucky streak is nothing but “admittedly weird coincidences,” until Louis calls in to win the huge BBMak contest and......... wins. I love how he acts so blasé about it. The DJ is so excited and Louis is all "Eh.. What can I say? This whole charmed life thing is getting kinda old." Also, the DJ in this scene, who appears two more times in the series, was one of the many actors recycled for That’s So Raven. He played a news reporter on that show. Similar field. Huh.

Ren believes that Ruby is simply rebounding with Louis and decides to show her his nasty bedroom to make her realize she doesn't actually like him. Ren also tells Ruby that he’s rotten and selfish, which... Is kinda true sometimes, oops. But at the same time, that scene always makes me a little sad inside. Louis is a good guy at heart, Ren!!

Just then, Louis appears in the doorway asking "What are you doing in my room?" and we get this incredible exchange:

(credit)

Louis then proceeds to very unselfishly invite Ruby to the BBMak recording session which only reinforces her crush on him.

Okay. We finally make it to this darn recording session! Thank god. Louis might as well’ve brought his entire extended family because he brought four freaking people along with him like it’s some free for all. You usually don’t push your luck when you’re gifted something like that... but, oh yeah. Lucky penny. I freaking love this bit where Ren whispers to Ruby “Woo! He’s gorgeous...” referring to Christian from BBMak, and Ruby says “I know.......” in reference to Louis! LOL.

Ren is so disgusted and once again Ruby is me.

Shia has been gorgeous in my eyes for nearly my entire life!!!!!!!!! Apparently I'm weird because I've seen so many memes about him that say things like "He was that ugly, weird kid on Even Stevens and then he magically became good looking" I'm just sitting here like??? Y'all are about 14 years late to the party.

Louis and Twitty get distracted by a table with free cheese on it, which honestly is the best part of any and every function or gathering. Not even gonna lie. While hanging around the cheese table, Twitty decides to seize the opportunity and give BBMak an Alan Twitty Project demo tape of “Sacramento Girl.” (YESSSSS!) They lie and say they’ll check it out — but immediately stuff it under a block of cheese. As a musician, I can confirm that this is too real. It’s impossible to get successful/established artists to take you seriously. I met Fall Out Boy at a local radio junket once and slipped Pete Wentz a demo. I never heard anything, sooo... It stings to know that he most likely hid it under some cheese the second I left.

BBMak are looking for a ‘Sacramento sound’ (whatever that is) and encourage Louis to play some tambourine on their track! They tell him “If this works out, you could come on tour with us!” If only it was that easy to land a national gig in real life. Ruby mentions in passing that she needs to tell Louis how she feels, and TAWNY IS NOT HAVIN’ IT! Omg. She kinda gets jealous of Ruby’s crush and they start a small argument over him. Ren cannot believe what she's witnessing and I love it. Also, Christy looks fantastic here? Whoever did her hair and makeup: Good job!! wow!

Unfortunately, Ruby’s attraction to him is short-lived and comes to a screeching halt the second Louis loses his penny during his tambo solo, jumping around like a lunatic with no rhythm. (Again, HOW does he become a drummer later on? It’s a mystery.) It’s very subtle, but you can tell once Ruby starts finding Louis "odd and annoying," that Tawny is secretly happy about it and still obviously likes him unconditionally even though he's literally insane. Same, Tawny.

So, yeah. Louis loses his penny and his luck runs out. BBMak basically kick him out of the studio. I love how Louis asks them “What about the record and the touring?! What about BBMak-Stevens?!” as if the conversation ever went that far. It’s great. I might’ve spoke too soon about Shia being gorgeous because the faces he makes when he realizes the penny is missing from his pocket are the furthest thing from the adjective:

It is hysterical, however. And that outweighs everything else here, so.

This episode ends on an AMAZING note: A super cringy music video for “Sacramento Girl”! What more could you ask for?!?! We get some Twitty-Stevens Connection action here and it’s something to behold. 😂 Be on the lookout for Shia doing his classic “shirt-over-the-head” thing he does, HAHA. You can tell some of the vocals were done by middle-aged men (probably Jim Wise) which makes it even more hilarious. My favorite lyric has got to be the Grammy award worthy: “Before I met the girl I had it made... Now she scores higher than the whole arcade. YEAH!” And of course, the episodes’ immortal last words "TAKE THAT, BBMAK!!!!" will go down in history.

youtube

That’s it! I honestly don’t even know why I’m ranking this one “lower.” It’s probably one of my personal favorites but.. Idk man. There are simply other episodes that I like more, lol. This is a totally solid episode though! Super memorable, pretty strong humor (including music-related humor... which you know I love!), and two awesome plot-lines that blend really well! But, even with all of that.. something felt slightly flat about it when re-watching. It could possibly just be from me watching these episodes waaay too much, tbh. It also probably has something to do with it being a “special” episode with guest stars and whatnot. Episodes like that tend to feel like totally separate things to me.

At this point, we’ve officially reached the REALLY REALLY GOOD part of the list, though. So I don’t feel too bad about placing it here. There are no “bad” episodes from here on out. Well, there are no bad episodes of Even Stevens in general really. But.. you guys know what I mean.

I’m probably gonna regret and rethink this entire list once I finish it anyway so, lol.

Thanks for reading!

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#rank #even stevens #season 2 #disney channel #shia labeouf #bbmak #louis stevens #ruby mendel #ren stevens #christy carlson romano #the twitty stevens connection #alan twitty #old school #old disney #throwback #aj trauth #the alan twitty project

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