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naoa-ao3 · 5 months

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Cries and Whispers

SUMMARY: There's something watching over Cheryl's little brother. It sits on his crib and waits and no one seems to notice. In the absence of a mother and in the wake of family grief, even Cheryl is starting to tell herself it isn't there.

Cheryl's life is very complicated. She had a mum and now she has a baby brother and she doesn't have a mum anymore.

She used to think people were excited about babies but no one seems excited for this one and for a little girl it's all terribly, terribly confusing.

Babies are good, people like them but dad says that this one killed mum and she doesn't know what to think or do.

Adults don't talk to her about what's going on either. Her aunt has come to stay, she looks after the baby because dad won't. Dad won't go near him. He just drinks and Cheryl misses her mum more than ever.

Baby John was sick for a while, he's only been home from the hospital a few days now and even now the grown ups shun her from his room, they whisper to themselves and to no one and the house is a confusing mixture of mourning and new life. Cries and whispers.

Cheryl had looked forward to having a brother, she still thinks babies are exciting but when mum was pregnant she never imagined the baby coming home without her. The whole situation is different now.

For a little girl there aren't a lot of answers. Maybe the adults think they're being kind by sheltering her from it but it scares her more not understanding why everything is like this.

Dad doesn't act right, mum is gone and there's a stranger crying in her house every night. A little baby she doesn't think anyone wants.

She feels sorry for him and she's young, she doesn't think the way they do yet, the way the grown ups do with their hushed voices and their secrets and her dad's liquor.

Cheryl goes from room to room in the house, confused and ignored. Her aunt takes care of the baby but she won't stay forever and even Cheryl is old enough to worry about what that means.

Dad hasn't acted right since he came back from the hospital. He sits in his chair and he drinks and he cries. He doesn't go to the baby and he's being cold to Cheryl now too.

She's heard him muttering. He blames the boy but John is just a baby and she doesn't see how a baby can murder someone.

She doesn't understand what went wrong and no one seems to want to tell her.

She always thought babies were a good thing.

There's something in John's room too. She's only seen it in glimpses, when she hangs in doorways and watches aunt Dolly change his diaper.

It hovers over the crib like a shadow and she doesn't know what it is. She thinks she might even be imagining it and when she's all grown up and most of her has forgotten she'll tell herself that that's what happened, that she did imagine it.

It'll make sense to her that a little girl would make something up to deal with her family's troubles and her family was very troubled after all, even before little John came along.

Cheryl is used to trouble but as she stands in the doorway and watches aunt Dolly fix the baby up her eyes find the hulking thing and she starts to shake.

It's some kind of evil shadow over her new baby brother, it perches and seems to shimmer like blackness. Like unwanted smoke.

Aunt Dolly doesn't notice and it's right at her elbow.

Cheryl think's she'll scream if someone doesn't make it go away. That's her brother in the crib. Her poor, little brother and all of this is going on and something is over top of him and she doesn't understand any of it.

"Look at you hanging there, run this to the bins for me." Her aunt say's, handing her a bag of dirty wipes.

Cheryl wrinkles her nose and does as she's told, looking over her shoulder at the thing hovering over her brother's crib. It's evil and it scares her.

She thinks of imps and goblins in fairy tales. It looks like something from a book, something nasty looking. She doesn't want it near her brother but of course she doesn't get a choice.

She runs to the back and throws the stinking bag into the trash there.

This is new to her but her aunt say's all babies are like this and she was like it once too. You have to look after them and she doesn't mind being a big sister in this way, it's almost normal and when she returns her aunt is leaving the room.

"Got him down for a nap." She say's, wiping her hands on her apron. "Don't go making any noise now, Cheryl. He needs his sleep."

But she doesn't make a lot of noise. The house is quiet now except when John is crying. Cheryl doesn't ever make a racket.

She nods anyway and her aunt run's a hand over her head. It's brief and it's not enough and she suddenly misses her mother painfully.

No one holds her any more.

She even misses the sound of her parents' fighting now. It echoes in her ears sometimes but it's over and done with.

It won't sound again.

Her aunt is back towards the kitchen and she's left alone in the hall. She's alone a lot now and John's door is shut.

She worries about what's behind it.

Not the baby, she knows he's there.

She worries about what else.

She stares at the door and feels panic creeping into her heart, into the souls of her feet. Through her toes. There's something there that's not supposed to be and it's so bad it makes her start to shake.

She wants to cry but that's all anyone does anymore. Dad. . . The baby. . . even aunt Dolly and she doesn't understand why they aren't scared too. Why everyone isn't losing their minds the way she feels she is.

There's something IN her brother's room. Something hovering over him and everyone is acting like. . .

She goes to her aunt in the kitchen and like a much younger girl clings to her skirts. "Aunt Dolly, there's something in John's room." She says, face pressed against her aunt's leg.

The woman allows the clinging for a moment before shaking her off. "Oh, and what's in John's room then?" She asks and Cheryl feels hopeless. Adults don't believe in these things. They think it's all made up.

"I don't know." She says softly, knowing she sounds stupid.

Her aunt gives her a strange look and puts a hand on the top of her head. "Don't you start too, Cheryl. I don't think this family can handle anyone else falling apart." She whispers.

Cheryl's heart sinks even lower, a sick, nauseous feeling settling in her stomach. It's too much to believe. Imps and goblins don't really exist outside of fairy tales and yet she knows she saw something.

"You're a good girl, Cheryl. Go and run this out back for me." Her aunt says, handing her a bucket of potato peelings.

She takes it numbly like she did the bag of wipes and soiled rags. She goes outside and wonders if she should pretend the thing doesn't exist too. Act like the grown ups act.

Outside is fine. Outside looks normal, like there isn't a new baby or a missing mum. The garden she knows well is as it always has been and yet when she looks up at little John's window she knows it's all very wrong inside.

Back inside she climbs the stairs. She's going to take a peak, just a little peak and see if the nasty thing is still there, still hovering malignantly over her baby brother.

Her hand sweats as it closes around the door knob and it rattles as it turns.

Her heart thuds painfully in her chest.

Its going to be here.

Hovering over her baby brother.

She opens the door and sees the crib.

The thing is sitting on the corner and she makes herself approach because that's her brother in there. Her brand new, little, baby brother.

He's asleep, arm thrown back.

She looks at the shadow thing and swallows. "Go away." She whispers. "Just leave him alone."

It does nothing and she grows more afraid. She's still small and this thing is next to her tiny, baby brother and babies are supposed to be good so why is this thing even here?

The door opens and her aunt Dolly walks in, face baffled. "Cheryl, what are you doing in here?" She asks.

Cheryl looks through the bars of the crib and thinks she might start crying. "I was just checking on the baby." She say's.

The thing has vanished but she's afraid it isn't gone.

Aunt Dolly smiles. "You're a good big sister already." She say's. "John's in good hands with you."

Her hands?

Her hands are still small and she see's the thing she thinks, under the dresser. Maybe she'd just imagining it though. No one else seems to see it.

"Want to help me feed him?" Aunt Dolly asks, hands on her hips. "You'll have to learn some time."

Cheryl worries that means dad won't be doing anything. That dad won't feed him.

She hasn't seen him in the baby's room once and nods, almost crying.

She doesn't feel much like a kid lately and as Aunt Dolly get's John up he starts to cry and she suddenly wants to cry again with him.

"Shh now John, there you are. There you are." Aunt Dolly whispers. "No reason for all of that. Come on."

She sits down in the rocking chair that should have been her mother's and get's him settled, get's him interested in the bottle.

"That's it."

Cheryl comes near and Aunt Dolly helps her to hold him, teaches her to mind his head.

She briefly stops thinking about the thing.

She smiles and think's it's incredible that he's actually in her arms. Her own baby brother. She's started to out grow baby dolls and she thinks he's nothing like them anyway. He's far more important, far more heavy and alive in her small arms. A baby doll never felt like this.

"You're a natural." Aunt Dolly say's. "Just like that, Cheryl. You'll be a great mother one day."

She's always thought that that was what girls did. They grew up and became mummies but now for the first time she doesn't know what that means.

She kind of knows how babies are made. . . there are always girls talking at school and the older girls seem to know the most but something had gone wrong with her mum and her mum was dead.

Maybe is was scary too, having a baby. Her friend Margaret's mum has had six kids. She wonders what the difference between Margaret's mum and her's was.

No one will tell her anything and she's starting to think they just don't know.

"Hold the bottle up a little more." Aunt Dolly say's and she obeys without thinking, she doesn't want to mess it up.

John is hungry and she feel's really thrilled to be the one feeding him. To be the one taking care of him.

She thinks she might like being a big sister. "He's got blond hair like me." She say's.

"It might get darker, boy's hair usually does." Her aunt say's dismissively.

She looks at it and John finally slows a little. She hopes it doesn't change.

"There you go, lad." Her aunt say's taking him back and carrying him around the room for a moment.

Cheryl watches and think's she'll be a mum one day. She won't marry someone like her dad though. He's her dad but she already knows that she doesn't want someone like him.

She has no idea of course yet who Tony is or about Gemma. She doesn't know how things will end. She can't even imagine it.

Cheryl doesn't even really believe in what she's seeing over the crib again.

She and Aunt Dolly lay John down and she wishes things were different in the house. That her mother was there and that her father wasn't the way he was.

"You're a good girl, Cheryl." Her aunt say's quietly. "You've gotten rotten luck with this family. I'm sorry."

She doesn't know what that means or at least pretends she doesn't. She's starting to think she might have some idea though.

She feels like her childhood is ending.

It's just her, dad and the baby and dad is drunk. Dad is angry and the baby is helpless.

Aunt Dolly can't stay forever.

She's almost panicking but she holds it in, keeping herself together.

"Come on now, we can play with the baby after supper but it's almost time to eat." Aunt Dolly say's to her, oblivious to the imp or her panic.

She follows her out, looking bleakly back at the thing sitting atop her brother's crib again.

It's silent and still there.

She shakes her head and leaves, wanting to take John with her.

She can't though. Dad doesn't like it when he's out of the room.

Doesn't like it when he's in there either.

They eat dinner quietly at the table. Dad doesn't ask about John. Won't go in and see him and Aunt Dolly isn't asking him to any more. Mostly it's just quiet.

Cheryl feels like she's going insane.

The house is going insane.

After supper she hears Aunt Dolly in the kitchen fretting on her own, sherry out in front of her. Half empty. It's a wonder dad hasn't drank it already.

She stands outside the door and thinks that she's never seen so many grown ups so upset before. They're all crying lately. Like the baby. Like it's a house full of children and everyone is miserable. Maybe that's what happens when there's no mum around.

She stops by John's door before bed and stares at it but Aunt Dolly says he's asleep again and she passes it by, knowing it's only for a little while.

She'll see if the thing is still there later.

She goes to bed and can't sleep. There's a creek through the house and and wind at her panes.

No rain.

Just wind.

She lays in bed for a long moment, heart hammering.

She feels completely useless in bed but eventually she slides her feet from under the covers and sneaks from her room.

She's just gong to check on John and maybe it will all be okay. Maybe things will be different.

Maybe the thing won't be there.

Each step down the hallway however is terrifying and Cheryl's heart in in her throat as she draws near the door.

When she opens the door the thing is on the crib again.

On her brother's crib and she steadies herself.

These things don't exist.

This thing doesn't exist.

"Go away." She say's, stepping towards it.

Towards where John is laying helpless.

It turns it's formless face towards her and seems to glare only it can't. It has no eyes, no real form.

It isn't real.

It can't be.

She walks more loudly than she'd meant towards it and is shocked by the sound of the wind from outside.

She stops and it does too.

Then it looks at her again and in the future, not even the far future Cheryl will tell herself this never happened. She'll remember being young and confused and remember that children handle things in all sorts of ways.

She'll remember that she'd just lot her mum and that everything was wrong and twisted up.

Tonight however she takes a swipe at the thing and her hand passes through it like smoke. "Get away from my little brother!" She snaps, her voice harsh in the dark.

The thing lurches back and springs onto the dresser but she's mad now.

Mad at it, mad at everything. Mad at dad and even Aunt Dolly, all of the adults with their tears and whispers. . . all of the things they won't tell her. She's mad at herself for being confused and mad at the hospital and this thing- this thing that has invaded her home and threatens her little brother. She's so angry she could burst.

She stomps towards it.

Baby John kicks in his crib.

"Get out of our house!" She snarls, all of the anger of the past month burning inside of her.

It jumps towards the window and sits on the sill but before she can get to it and swipe at it again it leaps out and she shuts the window, chest heaving.

There's no rain yet.

She turns to the crib and looks through the bars. She's not tall enough to lift John out yet and instead just looks at him.

He's asleep and she sighs.

Maybe she's imagining things but she feels better.

The room feels more normal.

John is as safe as he's going to get it seems and she watches him for a long time, finally feeling something like relief.

She could be a big sister.

The world might be a mess, a confusing mess but she can be a big sister. She knows this now and as the baby moves in his sleep she feels something normal for the first time in a very long time.

This is how a big sister is supposed to feel and she can't wait to see what kind of person her brother's going to be.

"You're alright, John." She whispers to the darkness. "Cheryl's here."

She leaves the door open just a little in case he cries in the night and heads back to bed, heart feeling years older and steps more sure this time.

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fecto-forgo · 4 months

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btw one of the funniest things that ever happened to me was the first time i watched the owl house was a compilation of clips of amitys parents being shitty n i remember reading some comments talking abt how both of them suck bc enabling/ignoring abuse is still abuse n thinking wow they arent being weirdly insistent the dad is secretly good for not being the worst one! anyways guess what was one of the first things i saw when toh went trending on here

#analiceoriginal.txt #im not gonna go on another massive rant on why i hate fictional depictions of child abuse im not gonna go on another massive rant on why i #i love!!! feel good stories where neglect isnt serious n abuse is forgiveable!!! bc everything is abt family is secretly always good/s #yes ik her mom stayed shitty that doesnt fix my issue w the depiction of neglect

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a-man-and-his-muse · 2 years

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“It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.”

- Coraline (2002) by Neil Gaiman

#quote #quotation #book quote #literature #fiction #coraline #neil gaiman #the other mother #child abuse #child neglect #parental abuse

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nikkilbook · 19 hours

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Where's the Line?

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Isabol passed him his plate from where she’d finished filling it, and he joined her at the table. Breakfast wasn’t anything too fancy, but it was nice enough. The newlywed cottages were always stocked with enough staples to get the couples started, though most would also have some extras, like a chicken or goat, covered by the dowries.

Though usually, the families of the couples had a few days beforehand to finish stocking the cottage. No one but he and Isabel had been up to theirs in the five days since the handfasting. All they had was a basic root cellar with what excess could be spared since the last young couple had been married. Some grain, since the last growing season had gone uncommonly well. Dried spices and herbs, though more of those could be found in the forest without too much trouble. Some preserves and other canned fruit. Sugar, salt, though not too much. Those were usually shipped in from towns in the mountains, and it wasn’t often that someone would just buy extras unless it was specifically meant for a young relative’s dowry.

So they’d made do with porridge’s and stews for the last few days, along with some apples they’d been able to gather from the forest on their visit to their tree. Isabel had done her best to make some biscuits the other day, and they tasted all right even if they looked a bit unappetizing. She’d talked it over a bit, and she seemed pretty sure she knew what to change for the next batch.

“What are you thinking about?”

Tristan blinked, and realized he’d been staring blankly at the cabinets for however long it took for his eyes to start feeling this itchy. He had half a biscuit in his hand, and a mouthful of food he’d stopped chewing. He jerked his head back to center, fixed his eyes on his plate, and swallowed as fast as he could around a noticeably dry throat.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, trying very hard not to end up with a fistful of crumbs. “Didn’t mean to get distracted.”

“You don’t have to—you didn’t do anything wrong? We were just eating?” Isabol’s voice which he’d always associated with a sense of firmness, of steadiness, and a kind of knowing he’d never felt anywhere else in his life, felt brittle around the edges. “You just seemed like you... went away, in your head, just a bit. Like you were thinking really hard about something, and you stopped eating. Should I not—do you not want me to do that in the future?” Her voice was smaller than he’d ever wanted to hear it. “Am I supposed to let you come back on your own time, and not interrupt?”

Tristan had never been asked that before, and both the asking and the question were entirely too much to deal with. So he decided not to.

“It’s market day,” he said.

Isabel blinked.

“I was thinking. About market day.” He hadn’t, exactly. He’d been very carefully thinking around it, but it was where his thoughts were always going to end up. “So we can get different food. And the dowries.”

“Oh, um.” Isabel looked over at the cabinets he’d been staring through, and nodded. “That’s a good idea. Since nobody’s come up yet, they probably aren’t... going to....” Her brow drew down, a single furrow forming directly in the middle of her forehead, and the line of her mouth distorted as she bit the inside of her lip. She’d just started doing that back before they’d stopped seeing each other, back when they were kids. “Do you think we’d need to talk to someone from the family directly, or do you think we could get away with going to the counting house and talking to one of the clerks? That would be faster, I think, but it would mean having someone else know our business, as well as know that our families didn’t stock things.” Her nose wrinkled. “Half the town would know by the end of the day, and the other half would learn about it over the dinner table. Which I cant say I’d enjoy, and it’d surely aggravate my uncles.”

Tristan very carefully didn’t say that he suspected most of them already knew. The town had always loved any gossip that painted his family in a bad light, for all they were still willing to do business with his father and uncles. He looked at the frustration on Isabol’s face, and the knot of very-carefully-unsaid things grew a little larger in his throat. If he said he’d prefer the counting house, would that frustration swallow him? Last night, when she’d convinced him to sleep in the bed with her, she’d been softer and kinder than anyone he’d spoken to in a long time, and she’d said they were a team. That she believed what he’d said back when they were kids, even if she’d stormed off as a child.

It was one thing to believe what he’d said; it was another to expect her to sit through it with him.

This was where he should offer to go by himself to their families and collect the dowry gifts. Let her give him a list of what to pick up as well as any personal effects to collect from her parents’ home. This was where he should be an adult and represent his new household to the community. That was how this was supposed to go.

Tristan hooked one thumb over the other and squeezed hard, twisting and pinching until the skin darkened to a dull red and he idly wondered if he’d break his own thumb. He did not want to try and walk up to her father’s door, especially not alone and especially not trying to pretend like he had a right to be there. He knew what they thought of him, he was beginning to understand why they thought it of him, and for all that the legal debs had all been squared, now he, the son of a liar and a cheat, had effectively stolen one of their best and brightest. He could see no reason why they would hate him any less than they had 5 days ago.

He didn’t want to face her father and uncles; what did it make him that he wanted her to be there to see it when he ultimately would?

She had been kind to him, and seemed not to mind living and working together. She’d invited him into the bed. She had apologized. And yet a part of him, one that had burrowed deep where grabbing hands and stomping feet couldn’t reach, one that had gnawed is way out of a trap and knew who had set it, wanted her to see. To really understand what it was to be him.

Another part, backed into the burrow of his skull and blocked from sight by the other, hoped that maybe if she were there, nothing would happen.

“If,” he whispered, his voice pitched a little higher and riding on the sigh escaping his lungs, “if we go to. The counting house. We can pick what we want instead of taking what they give us.” Could make sure things were quality, and that they got their full dowries’ worth.

Isabel nodded slowly, her eyes focused on whatever was going through her head. “I think—yeah. That’s probably best. I’d like to go by my family’s place at some point, just to pick up some of my own things, but for the dowries, the counting house is our best bet.” She got up and went over to the door to the cottage, moving things around a bit before returning with a slate and a bit of chalk. Nudging her breakfast to the side, she sat backdown and started making notes, her head resting on her off-hand. Most of her mouth was covered, but he could still hear her muttering fairly clearly.

“...enough to last the season, or...? Need tools as well, for… depends on how… subsistence or trade?”

Tristan felt kind of floaty, like the edges of himself that touched the chair, the table, the floor, were starting to dissolve, leaving him suspended. He should be participating, right? He should have answers to the questions she was asking. Or did she want to do it by herself? Did she want to take the lead when it came to interacting with the village? That would probably make things easier. Would give her a chance to keep some of her reputation intact, too.

The back of the slate scrape a bit on the tabletop as Isabol spun it around to face him. “What do you think?”

The spark that lit up the back of his neck didn’t even have time to catch before he got a good look at what she’d written. Tick marks, clusters of letters that didn’t spell anything, curved lines that crossed over one another in what seemed like nonsense, but that he knew neatly represented entire words or sentences.

He knew what merchant shorthand looked like.

He looked down at the table, closing his eyes just enough to turn the slate blurry. There was a pain in his chest, just behind his ribs, that felt like something was pulling his bones out of alignment, collapsing them inward into his lungs. “It looks good,” he whispered, hoping it wouldn’t seem like he didn’t care.

“Is there anything else you want to look for? And did I guess your dowry amount right?”

Tristan bit his lip, not able to hide it this time. “It’s probably fine. We can check it again at the counting house.”

“But if—” Isabol’s voice cut off, but Tristan still didn’t look up. It was getting difficult to concentrate, because his mind was playing back the expressions of every person who’d ever handed him something in shorthand, or who’d snatched it from his hand from across a counter. Superimposing those faces over Isabol’s felt uncomfortable and surreal, but he couldn’t make himself look up. He didn’t want to know what her face looked like when she finally got disgusted with him.

A hand slowly pushed into his vision, stopping just shy of where Tristan was white-knuckling his sleeves. It bent up at the wrist a bit, like it was getting ready to touch him, but it just stayed there.

The memory of the night before, of her hands on his face and the tight hug she’d wrapped him up in, joined the other echoes in his head, and he slumped a little, letting her hand come in contact with his.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t read what you wrote down. I never—I’m sure the list is good, I just don’t—I can’t read it.”

Her hand felt tighter where it gripped his wrist. Not uncomfortable, not tight enough to bruise, but enough to be noticeable. Her thumb moved across the heel of his palm, leaving little static-like tingles on the surface of the skin that sunk deep into the muscle.

“Did… I use the wrong script?” She asked, but her voice sounded like she didn’t believe it. “Does your family use a different version?”

Tristan shook his head. They both knew there was only one version—the whole point was to be able to communicate almost universally with other merchants, regardless of origin. None of the variations that did exist would have rendered a message incomprehensible.m”I recognize the shapes and some of the patterns, but I don’t —I can’t read. Shorthand, I mean. I can read regular books or lists, just not… not that.”

She was confuse. Or maybe frustrated? She was something, he could tell by the way her hand tightened around his, going stiff but keeping her thumb moving across his palm in an attempt to seem casual. He was just adding fuel to the fire—there was a breaking point, there had to be, but he didn’t want to find it, no matter how stressful it was to never know how close he was cutting it. He shoved the words out past his teeth and hoped they made enough sense when they landed to pull everything away from the edge.

“No one ever taught me how to read it. I tried figuring it out myself from the lists and what people gave me, but eventually I figured out that the orders didn’t always match no matter what kind of list it was, so I couldn’t find the patterns. I don’t know whose idea it was, my father or my uncles or somebody else, if they didn’t think I was fit to join the company, or if they wanted me to be a bad m-match for you, but I can’t read it, I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s a good list, I promise I tried, I just can’t read it.”

“Do you want me to show you how?”

Tristan held his breath.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to, or—or don’t want me to, I guess. I can rewrite the list in script, that’s fine, I only wrote it like this to save space and work out my thoughts. Or I could go by myself, if you want? I just thought it would make the most sense to do it together, but I didn’t know—I can tell you what’s on the list? So you’re still part of the decision. I didn’t want to leave you out—but I guess I already did, I should have talked it out while I was writing. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to cut you out or anything.”

He missed some of what she said as just noise, his brain following certain threads a few stops further before realizing she was still talking, but even if he didn’t catch every word, her voice was still… comforting. She sounded a little stressed, and her words were quicker than normal, but she kept doing this—trying so hard to reassure him even if she didn’t think she knew how. Even last night, when he’d started panicking, he’d eventually been able to see what she’d been trying to do.

She hadn’t tried to hurt him yet.

He really wanted it to stay that way.

“Maybe you could just point things out as we pick them up for now? If you still want me to come with you?”

“Okay. Okay, okay.” Isabol nodded, repeating the word under her breath and setting the flats of her hands solidly on the table in front of her. “Is there anything you want to do before we go, or should we just get this over with so we can have the rest of the day to ourselves?”

Tristan breathed in and let it out as deliberately as he could, furrowing his brow and staring down at the table as he piled his utensils onto his plate. “Let’s go.” He focused very, very hard on the image of he and Isabol under their tree spending their evening away from everyone and everything, and not the next several hours. It didn’t matter what happened in the market, because the tree was on the other side.

Isabol joined him in standing, tis late in the one hand and the remains of her breakfast in the other. She brushed past his shoulder and looked up at him as she scraped the rest of her food into the compost pail. “Let’s go. Together, okay?”

Dishes on the counter, he took the hand she’d reached out to him, and nodded. The tree’s on the other side. “Okay.”

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thenerdcantina · 7 months

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Everybody Here is Kin by Bettyjoyce Nash: Book Review

Lucille Lamb is a 13-year-old on vacation with her widowed mother, Naomi, and her younger half-siblings Mayzie and Jack. The initial goal was to travel to Key West for Lucille’s birthday, to go snorkeling in the Florida Reef. But they stop at a remote vacation property near Savannah to scatter Lucille’s father’s ashes. But Naomi is, unfortunately, an unreliable mother due to her pill addiction.…

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#alcoholism #child neglect #fiction #found family #ptsd #substance abuse #trigger warning

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olivia-soffey-author · 10 months

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Painting The San Diego Sky

The San Diego sky is beautiful tonight. Vibrant hues of tangerine melt into a deep shade of magenta over the San Diego Skyline. I peered through a crack in the door to the back porch as I intently studied my new foster mom. Her dark brown skin glowed in the rays of the sun. She carefully spread oil paint across the canvas with a pallet knife while humming a happy tune to herself.

When you're a foster teen, you cycle through a lot of moms, but I've never met anyone quite like her before. Her name is Penelope Kingston. I don't know what kind of job she has, but she wears a pink suit every single day. She owns one in every shade from blush to cerise. Some were covered in various prints and patterns while others were plain. Her closet looked more like it belonged to a Barbie doll than it did a person. Tonight, she was wearing a rose-colored sundress, and she'd woven a flower crown of fresh carnations into her boho braids. She joyously danced along to the tune in her head as she added more color. I've never met someone who is so unabashedly themselves before. I wonder how it feels not to care what anyone thinks of you.

During my deep contemplation, Penelope caught sight of me spying and beckoned me outside. I trudged outside with a guilty expression, resembling that of a puppy that had been caught chewing on its owner's shoes.

She giggled. "Don't look at me like that, Fierro. You're not in trouble."

The corners of my lips turned upward in a half smile.

She proudly showed off her painting. "What do you think?"

"It's pretty," I said honestly. The painting was a vibrant interpretation of the sun setting over the San Diego skyline.

She stroked her chin thoughtfully. "You're right. It is pretty, but it's missing something." She handed me a fine-tipped paintbrush. "Here, add something."

I shook my head and tried to give the brush back to her. "No way, I can't do that. I'll probably do it all wrong and ruin your artwork."

"There's no wrong way to express yourself creatively," She chided. "Besides I have plenty more paintings."

I hesitantly dipped the tip of my brush into brown paint and added two small birds sitting on a telephone wire.

"It's perfect!" She squealed, pulling me into a tight hug. "You've got a real artistic eye."

"I barely did anything."

"That's alright! Everyone's artistic journey starts somewhere." She reached behind her easel and pulled out a blank mixed-media sketchbook. "Here

"You can ask me anything."

"Why do you wear your hair like that? What's the point of all the flowers?"

She paused for a long moment. "Well, how did you pick your current hairstyle?”

I ran a hand over my buzz cut. "I don't know. I've never really thought about it before. I guess it's because it's easier to take care of, and I'm less likely to get lice in a group home."

"Does your appearance make you feel confident?"

I gave an indifferent shrug.

"For me, my look is about more than convenience. It's about self-expression. My hair makes me feel like me, you know?"

"I don't think I know who I am," I confessed.

Well then, we need to help you find yourself.

In the following weeks, I took Penelope's sketchbook with me to school and tried to draw some random objects I saw. So far, I had drawn a pen, a service dog, a basketball, a 3-D model of the human brain, and a bag of chips stuck in the vending machine. They all looked terrible. The lines were all wonky, the depth was all wrong. Oh well, I tried. I tucked the sketchbook in the back corner of my closet. In other news, I started growing my hair out. I couldn't stop thinking about my conversation with Penelope. Did I feel confident in my own skin? Should I? I didn't have answers to those questions, but a change of style couldn't hurt. Right now, my hair is spiked up in several different directions. It was still too short to properly style, so I was stuck looking like a chicken for the time being. Did I feel more like myself? Maybe. I don't know what myself is supposed to feel like. When you spend your entire life just trying to survive, you don't always have the time to discover yourself.

On the last Saturday in May, I came downstairs to find Penelope eagerly waiting for me. "Put your shoes on. We're going on an adventure." She threw a tote bag at me, which I caught in midair. I peeked inside to find it full of art supplies. "Your sketchbook has been collecting dust for too long. Let's fill it up today!"

"But I'm not any good at drawing. I don't think I'm meant to be making art."

"Don't be ridiculous. All expression is art and expression is for everyone," She insisted. "The most important question is, do you have fun when you're creating?"

I thought about it for a long time, then said. "I had fun painting with you on the patio."

"Perfect! Let's make something together!" She led me to her strawberry-pink Mercedes and hopped in. "Alright Fierro, if you don't like art what kind of things do you like to do?"

"Napping," I said without hesitation.

She laughed. "Okay, what else?"

"I like to go for walks."

"Great! What do you enjoy about the walks?"

"I guess I enjoy being outside in the fresh air and watching the birds."

"Buckle up, I know exactly where we're going."

We drove in silence for several minutes. I could tell the lack of conversation was killing her, but I was too shy to say anything. Eventually, she couldn't bear it any longer and spoke up, "So I've been thinking, we should decorate your room. It's so empty and depressing right now."

To her, my room probably looked like a barren wasteland. In comparison to the rest of the house, it was pretty desolate. Penelope's home was a lot like her. It was filled with color and personality, and decorated with love. Every room was themed after a different color of the rainbow and adorned with vibrant floral wallpaper and an eclectic collection of up-cycled furniture. Every surface was littered with trinkets and knick-knacks. The word Minimalism was not in her vocabulary. My room was the opposite of hers, it was completely bare apart from a twin-sized bed and an old trash bag filled with my humble belongings. "No, thank you. I want to keep it the way it is. It will be easier to pack up when I have to leave." I stared blankly out the window, so I wouldn't have to make eye contact with her as I spoke.

"Fierro," she whispered with so much sadness in her voice it broke my heart. "You know I care about you, right?"

I nodded.

"I know it will be hard for you to ever feel fully at home somewhere, but I want you to know I don't have any plans to get rid of you. So you can relax, alright?"

"Alright," I said, just to appease her. I'd heard that one before and I know how it ends. If I know one thing for sure, It's that parents never stay. Even if Penelope is telling the truth, and she won't transfer me to another home, I'm still sixteen rapidly approaching eighteen. Once I age out of the system I’ll be all on my own. If I let myself love her, I don't think I'll be able to live with the pain of letting her go.

We pulled into the parking lot and I read the large green sign. San Diego Zoo.

Woah, isn't this place crazy expensive?" I remarked. I can't afford this. My bank account has negative ten dollars in it!"

She placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. "Chillax. This is my treat. You need to learn to let lose a little bit."

We purchased our tickets and entered the park. I glanced at Penelope expectantly as she studied the map. "Where are we going first?"

"That's up to you. Where is your artist's intuition leading you?"

I pointed to the aviaries on the map.

She beamed. "Excellent choice."

We stepped into the elegant glass dome and the birds erupted into a cacophony of chirps and caws to welcome us to their habitat. First, I tried to sketch the hummingbirds, but they moved too fast for me to capture their likeness. I opted to try drawing the peacock instead. His slow strides and lack of flight made him the perfect model. I crouched down to his level while being careful not to touch the feces-covered ground. I took out my sketchbook and a pencil and Penelope did the same. I was unsure where to begin, so I glanced at her page for inspiration.

He noticed my wandering gaze and decided to assist me. "Let's start with simple shapes. What basic shapes can you identify?"

"The body kind of looks like an oval, and the neck is sort of S-shaped like a snake. The head is round, but pointy at the same time, like a teardrop," I observed.

"You have a great eye! Now, etch those shapes onto the page as lightly as you can and darken them once you're satisfied with the way it looks."

I followed her instructions, and soon I had a basic sketch of the body head, and neck that looked halfway decent.

“Let’s start working on those feathers. Start with the largest ones at the base of the tail and work your way to the smaller ones at the tip.”

I sketched the long curved shapes and tried to mimic the pattern to the best of my abilities. I also added the legs and feet along with some details on the face. I flipped the sketch around, so the peacock could view it. He pecked it and then let out a squawk of approval.

Penelope began coloring in her sketch with an indigo pencil.

I carefully mirrored her light strokes. “How do you make the colors look so vibrant?”

“Try blending different colors, start with the lightest hue, and fade into the darkest shade.”

For the next hour, my focus was zeroed in on the drawing. I seamlessly blended shades of indigo, midnight blue, cerulean, turquoise, lime, gold, and emerald until I was satisfied with the results. I wiped the sweat off my brow and rushed over to Penelope to show off my work.

She let out a delighted gasp and pulled me into a tight hug. “Fierro! It’s beautiful! You should be so proud of yourself!”

An overwhelming sense of warmth flared in my chest. Is this what little kids feel like when their parents hang their artwork on the fridge? I wouldn’t know. For the brief time, I knew my birth parents; they weren’t the type to show any approval or support for my accomplishments. They claimed they were too busy for coddling. Somehow they always found the time to tell me I was worthless and would never amount to anything. I shook my head to wake myself from the terrible memories. It didn’t matter what was said in the past. They were dead to me. I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “Thank you, Penelope. Your kindness means a lot to me.”

We spent the rest of our time at the zoo in the aviaries sketching the different birds. By the end of the day, I had drawn a toucan, a macaw, a lovebird, an African pygmy goose, and a flamingo. With every sketch, my skills improved. Every new drawing looked slightly more accurate than the last. We worked on our sketches until the zookeepers came to kick us out at closing time.

On our way back to the car I apologized for using up all of our time in the aviary.

Penelope waved her hand dismissively. “Never apologize for being in a creative state of flow.”

When we got home I taped all of my artwork to the wall above my bed in a noticeable place for everyone to admire.

In the following weeks, school let out for the summer and I spent my days sleeping in and going for long walks around the city, doodling the sights whenever I felt inspired. I got a summer job hauling bags of food at the pet store. It was grueling work, but I enjoyed visiting the animals every day. Penelope and I started hosting Mario Kart tournaments in our condo every Tuesday night. Don’t be fooled by Penelope’s kind demeanor; she is one of the fiercest competitors I’ve ever met. She doesn’t just want to win, she seeks to obliterate the competition. Lucky for me, I am also a merciless force of nature when I’m on the racetrack. In the group homes where I grew up, the Wii was my foster parents’ favorite tool for keeping the kids busy and out of trouble. I was the master of every game they had. It got to the point where none of the other children would play with me because they were too afraid of my awesomeness. Penelope was not intimidated by my skills. Our tournaments typically ended with us throwing all of our shells at each other until there was only one person left standing. She won some races, I almost won others. Someday I was finally going to win, then her reign of terror would finally be over. As time passed by I felt myself changing. After every day I spent with Penelope, I became a little less shy and I felt more secure. I found myself smiling and laughing a lot more than I ever did before. My hair now reached my eyebrow and was finally long enough to tame. It took some practice to find a style that looked good on me, but once I did I seemed to get compliments everywhere I went.

“It looks like you’re becoming a local heartthrob, Fierro,” Penelope teased.

I would act humble, but deep down I loved the rush of satisfaction that came with being noticed. That June and July had been the happiest time of my life. It was the closest I’d ever come to being a normal kid. When August rolled around things took a turn for the worst.

It started late one night as I was dragging the trash out to the dumpster. Even after dark, the California heat was brutal and unforgiving. The sweltering humidity further exacerbated the foul odors emanating from the dumpster. When I went to open the lid, I spotted a flier for a community art gallery. I knew Penelope would love that, so I reached down to pick it up. Before I had the chance to grab it, someone else picked it up.

He let out a scoff and read it aloud. “We invite all members of the community to showcase their artistic talents in our free open community art gallery. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting, we want to see your interpretation of landscapes with emotions. All types of paintings, from oils to watercolors, acrylics to pastels, are welcome. We want to celebrate the diversity of our community and the richness of its artistic expression.” He crumpled up the flier and threw it at me. “Is this the kind of garbage you’re into now? Are you the kind of guy who paints his feelings? I thought I raised you to be tougher than that.”

I looked up to see my father standing in front of me with a belittling expression on his face. My heart pounded so violently, I thought I might be having a heart attack. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be doing four more years. Please tell me you didn’t break out!”

“Don’t be absurd. They let me out early, on good behavior. I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer. You left me no choice but to track you down.”

After my mother died, my father was granted custody of me. He didn’t know the first thing about raising children, and he barely had enough money to take care of himself, much less a child. This led him to take part in a major money laundering scheme, so he could afford to send me to daycare. Everything was going fine until the FBI caught wind of what he was doing, and sent him to prison. That’s how I ended up in foster care. He was supposed to be in the middle of a fifteen-year sentence, but it appears that is no longer the case.

I crossed my arms and tried to act tough. “What do you want from me?”

He leaned against the dumpster and lit a cigar. “I want to see my son. Is that too much to ask? I haven’t seen you in ages.”

I’d done my best to stay as far away from him as I could. I hadn’t seen him since my social worker stopped forcing me to go to visitations. She noticed how miserable the visits made me and chose to spare me the pain.

My father scanned me up and down appraisingly. “You’ve gotten fat,” he remarked, his voice laced with disdain.

I had put on some weight since he’d seen me last. My ribs no longer protruded from malnourishment and neglect. My shoulders grew broader and my arms became thicker. I was no longer the fragile wisp of a child he could bully and demean however he felt like. Every pound I had gained was a blessing because it meant I was no longer starving. “My weight is none of your business. I’m not having this conversation with you.”

“It was just an observation. You need to learn how to accept criticism. You’ll never get anywhere in life if you keep being so sensitive.”

"It's better to be sensitive than a convicted felon."

“Don’t disrespect me!”

“Or what? You’ll hit me like you used to?”

He took a step forward, his cigar smoke wafting into my face. "You have no idea what you're talking about."

"I know exactly what I'm talking about. I remember every time you hit me, every time you belittled me, and made me feel worthless."

He looked away, a hint of shame flickering across his face. "I was a different person back then. I'm trying to fix things right now."

I scoffed. “Is that why you came here? To deliver a half-assed apology.”

He hesitated. “Not, entirely. I need to ask you for something.”

“What?” I said through clenched teeth, losing all patience for the good-for-nothing deadbeat I call dad.

“Listen, I need to borrow some money.”

I let out a laugh so loud I startled myself. “You’re delusional. What on earth makes you think I would ever give you a single cent?”

He took a long drag of his cigar and released it in a pungent cloud of smoke. “My girlfriend is pregnant, and we can’t afford to pay her medical bills. We have nothing, Fierro. I wouldn't be asking if it wasn’t desperate.”

“Is the baby yours?” Was my dad having another child? He couldn’t even care for the one he had! I threw my hands up in the air. “You know what? I don’t care! You abandoned me, and then you have the audacity to track me down and beg for money!”

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

“I never want to speak to you again!”

“Son.” He took a step forward toward me.

“Didn’t you hear me the first time? Get out!” I threw an empty soda can at him.

He raised his hands in surrender and began walking away. He didn’t say a word, but he turned back to look at me one last time.

“If I ever see you snooping around here again, I’ll file a restraining order! Do you hear me?” I screamed into the darkness, but it was no use. He was already gone.

I didn't tell Penelope about the confrontation with my father, but she could sense that I was quieter than usual. She didn’t force me to share, and I appreciated that. I didn’t want to talk about it. A feeling of guilt clawed at my gut. Maybe I should have given my dad some money. It’s not the baby’s fault my dad is a deadbeat and a dirtbag.

I tried my best to forget all about my father and the conversation we’d had. I was doing a decent job at ignoring his existence until I got the phone call that changed everything. It happened in the middle of the night. I was too hot to sleep, so I sat at my desk making a watercolor painting of the night sky. Then my phone rang, startling me out of my deep concentration. I picked up my phone to see who was calling me at such an ungodly hour of the night. It was my social worker, Mindy. I felt a rising wave of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. It was uncharacteristic of her to call me so late. I knew something was wrong. My entire body trembled as I pressed the answer button. “Hey, Mindy. What’s going on?”

“Hello, Fierro. I’m sorry to call you this late, but I have some upsetting news to share with you.”

My heart pounded violently in a fast rhythm. I suddenly felt like I was going to vomit. Was I going to have to move again? “What’s going on?”

“It’s about your father. He was run over by a drunk driver earlier tonight. He died on the way to the hospital. I’m so sorry.”

My entire body went numb. I had no idea how I was expected to respond to this information, so I said, “Thank you for telling me.”

“I’m going to speak with your foster mom to make sure you’re receiving proper support during this difficult time. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

“Thanks. Have a good night.”

“Fierro, wait!”

I hung up on her. I didn’t want to talk. I needed to be alone with my thoughts for a while. As terrible as it sounds, the first emotion I felt was a relief. I wasn’t being taken away from Penelope. I could stay here with her, but at what cost? My father was dead and one of the last things I ever said was, “I never want to see you again.” I sat alone in silence, waiting to feel some overwhelming sense of grief or guilt, or any emotion at all, but deep down I felt nothing. Inside I just felt hollow. I expected Mindy to call back and scold me for hanging up on her, but she never did. Once I got tired of blankly staring at my bedroom ceiling, I tiptoed downstairs for a change of scenery.

Penelope stood at the kitchen counter stirring a mug of coffee with a far-off look in her eyes. Once she heard me enter the kitchen, she rushed over and pulled me into the warmest of hugs. Tears dripped from her eyes as she held me close. “Fierro, Mindy told me the news. I’m so sorry. I know how you must be feeling right now.

She didn’t have a clue how I was feeling. I barely knew how I felt. Whatever emotion it was certainly wasn’t sorrow. She seemed more upset about the loss than I was at the moment. And yet, after about a minute of silence, something overcame me. I hugged her back and let the tears fill my eyes. I wasn’t crying for my father. I was crying for myself. I cried for my past self, the lonely child whose father was never there. I cried for my present self, who only wanted to be loved. I cried for my future self, who would never have the chance to make things right.

Penelope stroked my hair as I sobbed into her shoulder. “You’re going to be okay. I’m here. I got you.”

I stayed in my room for several days only coming out for occasional meals. I wasn’t hungry most of the time. I took the week off from work. told my boss I’d be going out of town for the funeral. That was a lie, I had no intention of going to the funeral. I’d already missed the wake. It felt disrespectful to go see him after the way I ended things. I rolled over in bed and stared at the exotic bird calendar Penelope had bought for me. Today was August 5th, the day I’d been dreading. Not only was it the day of my father’s funeral, but it was also my seventeenth birthday. Happy birthday to me, I guess. I used all my willpower to drag myself out of bed and down the stairs.

When I came downstairs I was greeted with a stack of pancakes with a birthday candle sticking out of it. The words happy birthday were spelled out in maple syrup. I guess Penelope remembered what day it was. She'd gone out with friends last night. I had hoped she would sleep in and forget all about it. I had to practically push her out the door last night, so I could cry myself to sleep in peace.

Penelope sat in the chair directly across from me and gave a comforting reassuring smile. Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

I forced a smile in return. “You remembered.”

“I would never forget it.”

Of course she wouldn’t, she was too good of a mom to ever let it slip from her memory.

She gently rubbed my wrist. “Listen, I’m not going to force you to go anywhere or do anything today, but if there is something you’d like to do, let me know, and I’ll make it happen.”

I stared down at my plate of pancakes. “I’m not really in the mood to do anything special.”

She gave an understanding nod. "Alright, how about a walk?"

"Just a walk? No surprises?"

"No surprises," She promised.

After breakfast, we slipped on our shoes and began our walk to the pier. The weather was perfect. The sky was a brilliant shade of baby blue that stretched as far as the eye could see, not a single cloud could be spotted along the horizon. Warm rays of golden sunlight illuminated the city in a warm glow. I cursed the sky for being so blue. How could everything be so beautiful on the day my father is going to be buried? Locals walked their dogs and tourists took selfies by the waterfront. Isn’t it cruel how life goes on like nothing happened after you’ve lost everything? I stood at the end of the pier and watched as a father lifted his young son onto his shoulders so he could enjoy the ocean view. I averted my gaze and stared out at the still waters instead. It felt like the universe was giving me a colossal middle finger for ever believing I could’ve had a father like that.

“Do you mind if we stop for a moment?” Penelope asked.

“That’s fine,” I said as I gazed vacantly at the tranquil turquoise waters.

She sat on a wooden bench and pulled out her sketchbook along with a set of oil pastels. She motioned for me to sit next to her as she began sketching.

She ripped out a blank page and handed it to me without saying a word.

I glanced between the empty page and the peaceful sea. I wasn’t in the mood to draw it as it was. I felt wrong to draw such a happy sight on a day like today. Instead, I chose the darkest, murkiest shades of gray, green, and navy. With harsh, powerful strokes I drew fierce powerful tidal waves crashing into sharp, jagged rocks beneath a blackened sky. Using the white pastel I added fragmented bolts of lightning tearing through the sky. I focused all the anger and heartbreak I felt toward my father and directed it into the piece. Once the drawing was completed I let out an exhausted breath. I felt like I had just fought a war.

Penelope glanced over at my work. She didn’t say anything, but she gave me an approving nod. We spent the rest of our time together enjoying each other's company in silence until we began our walk home. Penelope finally broke the silence as we walked past the cemetery. “Do you mind if we stop for a moment?”

I eyed her wearily, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t know what to expect when she led me deep into the cemetery. I feared maybe she’d force me to attend my father’s burial, but instead, she led me to a joint tombstone that read, Jeffrey and Maria Kingston. Loving Mother and Father. Penelope set down a drawing of a dark-skinned little girl being held in a loving embrace by her parents on top of the grave. She shed a single tear and then continued our walk home as if nothing had happened.

“You’re an orphan,” I said. It wasn’t a question, it was an observation.

She nodded. “I am. My father was a soldier. He gave his life in the line of duty. My mother died of cancer not long after. I grew up in foster care just like you. I never had anyone to care for me. That’s why I became a foster mom; so I could make sure another orphan could have a better life than I did.”

Hearing her story made me view Penelope in a new light. I always believed her joy and kindness came from a place of naivety. I thought she was happy because she didn’t know what it was like to suffer, but I was wrong. She understood pain more intimately than most people do and she chose to be happy despite everything she’d been through. “Thank you for giving me a chance. I can hardly remember what my mother was like, but if I did have a mom I would want her to be exactly like you.”

“You don’t need to thank me. It’s been an honor to call you my son.”

As we walked back to her house, I couldn't help but think about the drawing she had left on her parents' grave. It was a powerful reminder of the love and connection that existed between families, even when they were separated by death. And it made me realize that, in some small way, I had found a new family with Penelope.

When we got home, Peneolpe set the crumpled flyer for the community gallery on the table. Without any preamble, she said, “I think you should submit one of your pieces to the gallery.”

“Me? No. I brought that flyer home for you. I’m not any good.”

“You don’t need to be modest. I’ve seen your recent work. You’re very talented. Besides, this gallery is open for everyone, you don’t have to be a pro to submit.”

“I’ll think about it.”

She smiled. “That’s all I ask.”

For the fifth night in a row, I couldn’t sleep. So I dug through my portfolio for something worthy of being displayed in a gallery. My eyes caught on the drawing of the stormy sea I made today. Plenty of my drawings were pretty, but one was meaningful. It was infused with all of the grief, anger, and sorrow, I was experiencing, and that made it significant. At that moment, I decided this was the piece I needed to submit to the gallery.

Over the next few days, I worked on the drawing, refining and perfecting it until it felt like a true representation of everything I was feeling. Finally, I mustered up the courage to submit it to the community gallery, feeling a mix of excitement and nervousness. A few weeks went by, and I received an email that left me ecstatic - my piece had been accepted for the gallery exhibition. I couldn't believe it. On the day of the exhibition, I arrived early, dressed in my best clothes, my heart pounding with anticipation. As I walked through the gallery, I saw my drawing on display alongside other beautiful pieces of art. It was a surreal moment, one that I had never imagined possible. I looked around and saw Penelope beaming at me from across the room, her eyes full of pride. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had accomplished something truly meaningful.

I looked at the empty spot by my beside my painting where my father could have been standing in another life If things were different. If he were a better father, a better man. Now the thought of him didn’t fill me with the same level of rage and sorrow like it used to, and that was a start. I wasn’t plagued with the same sense of hopelessness I used to feel because I knew Penelope would never abandon me like he did.

A professional-looking man, wearing a sharp business suit and designer glasses stopped in front of my painting to carefully appraise it. He stared at it for a long time, not saying a word or showing any kind of emotion.

“Is it any good?” I asked nervously, unsure of how to react when someone scrutinizes your artwork.

“Did you make this?” He asked.

I nodded.

“You know, I see a dozen paintings of the pier a day. They all want to paint the pretty scenery. Yours is special, It’s not just pretty I can tell there’s a deeper meaning buried in here. I’d like to buy it.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “You really want to buy it?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t mean it. You’ve got a bright future, kid,”

I smiled at Penelope and for once I believed that was true.

#women writers #writerscommunity #short story #short stories #short fiction #creative writing #fiction #fiction writing #creative works #realistic fiction #coming of age

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worst-mother-throwdown · 2 months

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BRACKET 1

Quarterfinals

TW: child abuse, child abandonment, child neglect physical abuse, torture, waterboarding, electrocution, cult, animal cruelty, animal death

Mrs. Momose propaganda

Mrs. Doofenscmirz propaganda

#worst mother throwdown #worst fictional mother throwdown #milgram #milgram project #amane momose #phineas and ferb #heinz doofenshmirtz #tw child abuse #tw child abandonment #tw child neglect #tw physical abuse #tw electrocution #tw waterboarding #tw cult #tw animal cruelty #tw animal death

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bardic-tales · 1 year

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Dates: 12.5.22 - 12.12.22

I've been slowly getting back to posting regularly on here once more. I had a few things happen in October and November that has made it impossible for me to concentrate upon the subject matter of my writing.

Blog Pages

Cold as Ice: This page has been updated to reflect a new page theme.

Fiction

How to Save a Life - general rating

Loneliness- general rating - cw: depressive thoughts

Playtime - mature rating - cw: animal abuse. child neglect. mental illness

Tags:

#Kelendi Faroly

#Old Mum

#Titus Arturis

#writeblr #flash fiction: cai #tw: depressive thoughts #tw: animal abuse #tw: child neglect #tw: mental illness #bardic tales

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weirdfangirly · 12 days

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Little Red Light—+18

Dark Fiction

dark!Joel x reader // dark!Tommy x reader

Warnings: dub-con/non-con, sex work, sexual exploitation (reader is being filmed against her will), dark Joel & Tommy, drug abuse (cocaine), drinking, name-calling, spanking, humiliation & degradation of reader, description of injuries & blood, cum-shot, face-fucking, blowjob, kissing feet, face-slapping, dark themes…

Summery: In a rundown motel, reader finds herself in an nightmarish encounter with Joel and Tommy. Trapped in a cycle of abuse and degradation, she struggles to escape the grim reality of her life as a prostitute, haunted by the consequences of her choices

A/n: please like, share and leave a comment! It honestly is my only motivation to keep writing. This is dark, very long and very depressing. Much fun xoxo

In the eerie silence of the night, you stood hesitantly before room 23 of a shady motel, its flickering red neon sign offering you a pale glimmer of confidence in the desolate landscape.

Wearing a coat that failed to shield you from the biting cold, your wrestled with a mix of anticipation and worry.

Tonight marked the beginning of yet another miserable dance with your fate as you mentally prepared yourself to meet your first client of the night.

You hesitated for a moment before mustering the courage to knock on the door.

*knock*

“Let’s get this over with.”, you thought.

Moments later, the door cracked open, revealing a man who’s weathered face painted with lines of hardships.

The man’s rugged features softened slightly as his stern eyes landed on you, his gaze betraying a flicker of empathy.

Your soft features were the prettiest sight he’d seen all week. A pretty little thing.

“Come in.”, the man’s voice, gravelly yet strangely comforting, broke the silence of the night.

He went by the name of Joel Miller.

With a cautious nod, you stepped inside. Your footsteps echoing softly against the floorboards.

The door closed behind you with a soft *click.*

As soon as you stepped in, a wave of musty air assaulted your senses, carrying the unmistakable scent of neglect and decay of the room.

“It smells like an old ladies house.”, you thought.

Your gaze swept across the room, taking in the sight of dilapidated furniture that sagged under the weight of years of use and abuse—a sight that reminded you of yourself. Once a joyful child with a promising future, now your inner lights dimmed by the harsh realities of life.

The bed was adorned with stained sheets that bore the telltale marks of countless forgotten encounters—Before long, you would add your own imprint to the fabric.

This thought left you deeply depressed.

It was only now that the shadows of the room revealed another man seated in the corner of the room…

His presence imposing, he sat with quiet confidence. Clad in white wife-beaters & faded jeans his thick black curly hair framed a rugged face. His mustache highlighted his stern expression, adding to the mystery of his presence.

His gaze—dark and inscrutable—met yours.

Irritation swept across your face, you turned back to Joel “I don’t do threesomes, sir.”, you said firmly, but your voice betrayed a hint of worry.

Joel’s expression hardened.

You couldn’t help but noticed the stark contrast between your ages…The lines etched into Joel’s face telling a story of a life lived long and hard. In contrast your own features still bearing the softness of youth. It was your eyes though that exposed how brittle and weak you really were.

“I’ll pay you extra.”, he said.

The offer hung heavy in the air.

Joel reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. He held out the money to you.

Temptation aroused deep within you. It was more money than Dean—your boyfriend—expected you to bring back home tonight…

With trembling hands, you reached out to the money. The crisp bills feeling foreign and heavy in your grip.

As Joel’s gaze bore into yours, you felt a pang of guilt nagging on your conscience. You could feel that accepting this money came with an unknown risk.

You didn’t know those men. They could be bad.

There was a hint of danger lurking behind the shadows of this transaction—But in this moment, the promise of financial security outweighed the nagging voice of doubt that whispered in the back of your mind.

You nodded, accepting his offer. You put the money inside your handbag.

It was sealed.

Joel’s features softened. He triumphantly looked over to the other man in the room—his younger brother, Tommy.

Their silent conversation went unnoticed by you.

“Can I use the restroom, please?”, you asked, voice quivering slightly despite your attempt to sound composed. The weight of uncertainty pressing down on you.

You’d never done anything with two man before...

With a nod, Joel gestured towards the bathroom door.

You made your way to the small, cramped bathroom. In an attempt to shake off the unease you splashed some water on your face and took a deep breath to steady your nerves.

“Get it over with.”, you told yoursel.

You peeled off your coat, revealing the slutty attire your wore beneath. It was by no means modest and clung to your curves like a second skin.

Dean made you wear it, saying that men liked to see a pretty girl in a dress too small for her.

Despite the dim lights, you felt exposed and vulnerable. With trembling hands you smooth down the fabric of the dress, your fingers tracing the patterns of the dress as if seeking reassurance in their familiarity.

Taking a deep breath, you told yourself that you got this, that you would face whatever was awaiting you with courage. You’d squared your shoulders and walked out of the room.

As you emerged from the bathroom, the dim light of the room cast a subtle glow over you figure, highlighting the obvious differences between the men and you.

Joel and Tommy who’s gaze locked onto you. Their gaze lingering hungrily as their minds raced with illicit thoughts…

They didn’t saw you as a person, but as an object for their lust and greed. It was about power and control to them, about profit, and you’d just accepted their offer; cash in exchange for your bod.

Tonight you belonged to them.

Unaware of their true intentions, you offered them a shy little smile. Despite how nervous you were, you refused to let fear consume you.

But it all came crashing down on you when your eyes landed on the camcorder attached atop a tripod. Its lens pointed directly at the bed...

Panic shot through you veins as the realisation set in: they intended to film you!

A shiver ran down your spine.

“Why is there a camcorder?”, you asked after summoning the courage to confront them about it.

Jowls response was a slow, deliberate drag from his cigarette. The ember glowing brightly in the dimly lit room as smoke danced lazily around him. With a nonchalant exhale, he met your gaze. His expression unreadable as he considered his response.

“It’s just for fun.”, he finally replied, his tone casual yet laced with a hint of something darker beneath the surface.

“I-I don’t like the idea of being recorded.”, you stated your discomfort firmly.

“You already accepted our money, baby-face.”, Tommy smiled, his deep voice cutting through the air like a knife. “There is no backing out of this.”

It was only now that you recognised the undeniable resemblance between Tommy and Joel. The only difference between them was that Tommys eyes held a glimmer of youthful vitality, untouched by the weight of the world that seemed to burden Joel’s.

They were brothers, you realised.

For some reason their familial ties only scared you more…

Tommys words had landed a heavy blow on you. You realised that you were trapped Your fate sealed by the very desperation that had driven you into the men’s clutches.

“Calm down,”, Joel’s voice cuts through the tense air, his voice smooth and reassuring. “We’ll only record for private use.”

Despite the foul feeling in your gut, you forced yourself to believe him. You cling to the fragil hope that maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to his words.

“O-okay.”, you nodded.

Tommy reached inside his pocket and fished out a little bag of cocaine. He started to line up the powder onto the wooden table.

“Ya want some?”, he asked you.

His offer hung heavy in the air, loaded with the promise of escape and oblivion, but you knew too well the dangers that lurked beneath its enticing facade of the powder.

It brought back memories of Dean, who’s addiction to cocaine would only fuel his violent outbursts, oftentimes directed at you.

You hoped that Tommy would react differently to the drug.

“No thank you, mister.”, you shook your head. Despite the allure of temporary relief, you couldn’t afford to lose yourself in the haze of drugs.

Tommy shrugged, leaned forward and consumed the powder through his nose—an immediate and noticeable shift overtook his demeanour. The drug infusing him with newfound energy.

You watched with growing unease.

“Is the camera rolling?”, he asked Joel with anticipation.

You knew, once the camera was rolling there was no turning back…

Joel took a swig from the whiskey bottle.

With a steady gaze Joel addressed you, his voice laced with authority as he outlined the rules for the night:

“All you gotta do,” he begun, “is to do what we say. No questions, no objections. Understand?”

His short speech echoed in the silence, each word a chilling reminder of the power dynamics at play.

“Yes, sir.”, you replied, your words a whispered admission of defeat in the face of his overwhelming dominance.

He reminded you of your father.

Joel nodded approvingly at your submission. Joel reached for the camcorder, pressing the record button with a sense of finality.

The red light blinked to life.

Tommy made his way over to the bed. His imposing figure filing the room with an aura of dominance. He sat down right in front of the camcorder, the bed creaked.

You couldn’t help but feel a twinge of attraction towards him...

His strong physic and confident demeanour stirred something within you, despite the tension and fear that hung heavy in the air.

His gaze locked onto yours. “Come here, sweetheart.”, he gestured towards himself.

You obeyed Tommys command. You approached him slowly.

When you were close enough, he reached out for your hand. His touch sent a jolt of electricity skittering across your skin.

With a gentle yet firm guidance, he positioned you between his open legs—right in in front of the lens. As you stood there, trapped between his powerful frame you felt small and caged.

“Undress yourself.”, he said and gave your ass a playful but firm smack, sending yet another jolt of electricity through your body.

With trembling hands, you begun to undress yourself.

With Joel lingering behind the camcorder, his eyes fixed on the unfolding scene, you felt a sense of vulnerability wash all over you. You were painfully aware of the fact that you were being watched, every move captured by the unblinking lens of the recording devise.

You peeled away the layers of fabric that were shielding you from their hungry gaze.

As you stood there in front of them, clad in only your skin, Tommys hands started to roam all over your body. You felt a shiver of anticipation race down your spine.

But when his touch grew more insistent—turning from playful to possessive—you felt discomfort creeping in.

His hands wandered down between you legs, rubbing along your soft cunt, making Tommys eyes nearly roll back from anticipation. You closed your eyes and relaxed into his touch.

When Tommy felt your wetness, he smiled mischievously.

“What a good little whore you are.”, Tommy said and smacked your ass again, this time much harder.

You hissed in pain.

The harshness of his smack, coupled with the demeaning label he had assigned to you, you felt your heart grew heavy. The word “whore” echoing through your mind.

Joel seemed to notice your distress.

“I think you hurt her feelings, brother.”, Joel said, a cruel smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, a perverse satisfaction blossoming within him at the sight of your distress.

Tommys laughter filled the room.

“Aw, is that true?” his tone mocking, “You don’t like being called a whore?”

You stayed silent, looking down, mentally scolding yourself for getting emotional in front of them.

He kept groping your ass and tits. His colossal hands all over you, burning your tender flesh.

“You liked it better when I called you sweetheart?” Tommy asked, “wanna be our little sweetheart? Get treated like a good girl, a little princess?”

You let him know with a timid little nod.

Tommy made you sit on top of his thigh. You felt out of place being so close to him now. The rough material of his jeans dug into your soft skin, creating some sparkling friction.

“Good girls don’t whore themselves out though...”, he whispered, nose buried deep in the pit between your neck and shoulder, revelling in your feminine scent.

You smelled like vanilla to him.

You felt a wave of humiliation wash over you, the sting of his words cutting deep. You winced slightly as his hands pinched the flesh of your ass. You remained frozen in place.

“If you want to be treated good, then you have to beg for forgiveness.”, Tommy explained to you.

And then—without warning—Tommy tossed you away.

Pain shoot through you as you landed on the unforgiving ground next to his feet. Naked and vulnerable. You felt abandoned, like a discarded toy in the hands of a cruel child.

“Will you do that, little whore?”, Tommy asked, an eyebrow raised.

“Y-yes, sir.”, you nodded, yearning for any semblance of kindness. In your abandoned state, you failed to recognise the cruelty lurking behind his words.

“Take my shoes of and kiss my feet then, cunt.”

With trembling hands, you knelt before him, your fingers trembling as you struggled to remove his boots.

With a heavy heart and tears stinging your eyes, you pressed your plump lips to his feet. Your stomach churning with disgust at the act of submission.

“Please forgive me.” your voice barley above a whisper as you begged for absolution for the sins you were forced to commit

“Forgive what, cunt?”

“Please forgive me for being a..whore.”

As Joel watched the scene unfold in front of him, a sense of arousal stirred within him. His body responding to the display of power and control exhibited by his brother. The way you submitted to his brothers every whim, your vulnerability laid bare before them. It was thrilling.

“I’m not convinced—not at all.”, Tommy said after making a clicking sound with his tongue and shaking his head dismissively. “I’m not convinced that you’re actually sorry.”

Tommy rose to his full height, towering over you like a building, casting a shadow over you.

Tommy grabbed you by your upper arm, his grip tight. He guided you to lay down onto the bed, legs hanging off the edge. Your bare back was exposed to not only the men, but also the lens of the camcorder.

The uncertainty of what would unfold next hung heavy in your mind.

With a predatory gleam in his eyes, Tommy reached down and unfastened his leather belt. You heard the metallic clink of his belt echoing in the dimly lit room. Tears begun to flow from your eyes, as the dread of what Tommy would to do next sank in…

“No, no please!”, you cried out.

He was about to punish you, with his belt…

The humiliation of begging for forgiveness and kissing his feet was unbearable enough, but the thought of enduring further punishment filled you with a primal fear.

“Please I am sorry, don’t do that!”, your pleas landed on deaf ears.

“It’s for your own good.”, Tommy said and clenched his fists around the belt. “You’ll feel better afterwards.”

Truth was, Tommy couldn’t care less about how you felt. He was driven solely by his own twisted desires.

You shook your head in silent protest, tears streaming down your face. You knew that there was no escape. So you brace yourself—mentally and physically—for the inevitable impact that was about to come.

Tommy raised the belt high above his head before landing the first blow upon your bare ass, sending a wave of pain through your body.

“Ah!”, you cried out.

The next strike came quick after.

And again,

and again.

Each punishing blow, the sting of unforgiving leather against your skin served as a harsh reminder of the sins you were forced to commit.

Each punishing blow, a catapult that hurled you right back to your childhood… The punishments you would receive from your father were of equally painful nature…

Each punishing blow, letting you fall further down a pit of shame and humiliation.

As the hard blows from Tommy's belt continued, your delicate skin began to show signs of distress.

Red welts formed across your flesh, the skin splitting under the force of each strike, revealing raw patches that oozed a little blood.

With each blow, the pain intensified, the sting of the leather against your already irritated skin sending shockwaves of agony through your trembling frame.

Tommys dick got rock hard by your cries and begging.

The metallic tang of blood mixed with the scent of sweat and fear in the air, a visceral reminder of the brutality of Tommy's assault.

For Tommy, it smelled like heaven.

Despite the overwhelming pain, you gritted your teeth and endured, your spirit battered but unbroken. You reminded yourself that you’d endured worse. In the darkness of the room, you clung to the fragile hope of survival, knowing that this night was not different than any other; the sun would soon rise.

At this point you’d stopped screaming, entirely. Only finding the strength to cry bitterly into the stained bedsheets.

Despite the twisted satisfaction Joel got from Tommys cruel treatment, he couldn't ignore the sight of your battered and bloodied form.

Joel knew that he had to intervene.

He raised his voice just above the chaos, commanding Tommy to stop:

“Alright, that’s ‘nough, Tommy.” his voice cut through the air like a knife, his tone firm and authoritative.

Tommy hesitated, his grip on the belt loosening as he regarded his brother with a mixture of defiance and resignation.

Relief flooded through you as Joel put an end to Tommy's assault.

As Joel extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray with a flick of his wrist, he glanced at Tommy, making him understand that it was now his turn to take control of the situation.

With a predatory hunger still burning in his eyes, Tommy settled into his seat behind the camera.

Meanwhile, Joel approached the trembling, tear-streaked you.

“Can you stand up?”, curiosity lingering in his voice.

With a heavy heart you pushed yourself up on your hands and knees, sobbing quietly. Your body trembling with pain. You pushed yourself off the bed and stood on shaking legs in front of Joel Miller.

You looked a mess. Tear-streaked cheeks and a face contorted with pain.

“Thank you, sir.”, you sobbed.

Your eyes flickered over at Tommy who was sitting in the corner of the room, not letting you out of his sight. Chest rising and falling from the adrenaline and cocaine pumping through his veins.

As you trembled in the aftermath of his brutality, you couldn't help but view Tommy as a menacing figure whose mere presence filled you with a sense of dread.

To shield yourself from the menacing gaze of Tommy, you instinctively sought refuge behind the protective frame of Joel.

It was clear to Joel that Tommy's cruelty had left its mark on you psyche and that you now—in your hopeless delusion—sought protection from him.

But by him simply placing his large hand on your fragil shoulder—its weight upon you like a heavy stone, making you slowly sink down to your knees under its force—Joel made his position of power crystal clear to you.

It came crushing down on you: He wasn’t your ally, nor your saviour.

He may had stopped Tommy from assaulting you, however he’d also watched it happening in amusement. The only reason why he’d stopped his brother was because he feared Tommy would break you too quickly…

From you kneeling position, you gazed up at Joel. Your eyes filled with a flicker of hope that maybe, just maybe, Joel would treat you with more kindness and compassion than Tommy had…

Joel began to unbuckle his pants—without taking his eyes off of your pretty fear-streaked face—his movements deliberate and unhurried.

He revealed his hardened cock, it was thick and veiny and looked as powerful as his presence felt to you.

You were inches away from his manhood, the scent of his arousal filling your senses. You knew what he wanted from you next.

“Open up, girl.”, he said, a simple command.

You opened your mouth and leaned forward. Joel placed his hand on your head, before guiding his cock between your plump lips. It fit only partly. You began to move your tongue, letting it swirl around him.

As the scene unfolded before him, Tommy rose from his seat, his eyes fixed on you as you serviced Joel. With trained hands, he took the camcorder off the tripod. Now taking the role as his cameraman, Tommy moved closer to you and Joel to capture a more intimate view of what was going on.

It didn’t went unnoticed by you that Tommy was filming you from up-close now, determined to capture every little explicit detail.

You felt a surge of unease wash over you, now that Tommy was so close. The pain radiating from your ass a painful reminder of how Tommy was capable of. You grew nervous.

So you made the mistake of stopping and taking Joels cock out of your mouth to voice your discomfort.

You opened your mouth to speak, but with a sudden and forceful motion, Joel's hand connected with your cheek.

*smack*

The sharp crack of the impact echoing through the room.

As you recoiled from the strike, you felt fear and humiliation wash over you. Your spirit crushed once again by the weight of his punishment.

With tear-filled eyes, you bowed her head and cried.

“Who told you to stop?”, Joel asked, sounding annoyed with you.

You just shook your head, sobbing quietly.

“Open your mouth and don’t try that again…”

You quickly let him back inside your mouth and continued massaging his member with your tongue.

“They always get so eager after a good beating…”, Tommy smiled.

Joel felt the need to spice things up. So he grasped you by your hair—firmly—and took control over the situation by setting the rhythm and pace. Fucking your mouth, asserting his dominance in every motion. With each subtle shift of his hips and every whispered instruction, Joel made you feel smaller and smaller, whilst he grew bigger and bigger. You were completely at his mercy. Glued to his crotch.

You let him fuck your mouth, gagging and coughing under his grip.

“Good job, keep going.”, Joel hissed.

You opened tour eyes and looked up at him, your vision blurred from your tears. You liked hearing him praise you. It made you feel better. You tried your best not to puke around his cock—or pass out.

Your throat was burning and saliva was flowing out of the corners of your mouth like a waterfall. You were spasm hard, trying to keep your lunch down.

Joel was so deep inside your mouth, that Tommy—and the lens of the camcorder—could see the outline of Joel’s cock in your throat.

With merciless intensity, Joel thrust into your throat, his movements rough and unrestrained.

You started to throw your fists against his muscular thighs, hoping he would back up and let go of your head.

Each forceful thrust pushed your limits.

You couldn't help but wonder how much more you could endure before reaching your breaking point.

Right when your vision had started to get black, Joel released you from his merciless grip.

You collapsed to the ground in a heap, your body trembling with exhaustion and desperation for air. Gasping for air like a desperate goldfish out of water, you lay there, utterly spent and broken by the brutal encounter.

Next you felt was Joel fisting your hair and yanking yout face up. He came all over your face. Painting your face shiny white with bis cum.

“Fuck!”, he hissed, his appearance resembled a wild animal rather than a human.

When he was done, he let you go again.

Your throat burned with the aftermath of Joel's rough treatment. Every muscle in your body ached with fatigue, your mind reeling from the overwhelming sensations of pain and humiliation. Your face covered with sticky hot cum.

You felt utterly defeated. Once again you wondered how much you could endure tonight before reaching your breaking point.

“Good job, cunt.”, Joel halfheartedly said, still out of breath and in an undeniably good mood.

“Thank you, dad.”, you whispered in your out-of-your-mind state. A flicker of longing and desperation evident in your voice. You were close to falling unconscious.

“Aw, she thinks you are her fucking father.”, tommy laughed.

Joel remained outwardly composed, but felt a hint of satisfaction at your acknowledgment of his authority.

Tommy pressed the camcorder in Joel’s hand, “Alright I have enough of this.”, Tommys word were accompanied by lifting you up effortlessly and placing you on the bed

Panic floated your senses.

"Can I…can I have something to drink?", the request a desperate plea wanting to numb your senses so that you could endure whatever would come next.

Joel handed you the whiskey bottle, and you eagerly drowned the liquid down, hunting the numbness at the bottom of the bottle.

“Jesus Christ, that’s enough”, tommy said, reaching out to retrieve the bottle from your grasp.

You let yourself fall back on the hard mattress.

Tommy lowered himself onto you, his weight pressing down on your trembling form. "Let's find out just how much you're really worth," he murmured, his sinister words directed more to himself than at you.

He gripped his already hard member in his hand, slicking it with his saliva in preparation.

You didn’t count Tommy for someone who would take his time in preparing you for penetration, so additional help was welcomed.

You reached down and rubbed your clit, in hopes to generate some wetness…

But the only thing that was acting up was your flight or fight response.

Tommy's gaze resembled that of a starved dog, hungrily eyeing you as if you were only a piece of meat.

Tommy wasted no more time lining the tip of his cock up with your entrance between your shaking legs.

With a single forceful thrust, Tommy rammed his cock deep inside you.

“Ouh!”, you whimpered, clutching his thick muscular arms for support as a jolt of pain shot through you.

Tommy wasted no time, swiftly finding a rhythm that satisfied his desires, plunging in and out of you with relentless favour.

“Ah stop!”, you cried.

Instinctively, you resisted his brutal thrusts, attempting to push him away and free yourself from his assault.

Your attempt was met with yet another harsh slap across your face, reminding you painfully of your powerlessness against Tommy.

“Keep crying, little whore, come on.”, Tommy hissed.

You shook your head and looked away, but Tommy grasped your chin firmly, making sure you couldn't look away from him, his gaze commanding your full attention.

Your body trembled under Tommy with each forceful thrust.

It could’ve been the alcohol, but eventually, your body adapted to his thrusts, the sensation becoming dull.

“Fuck, for a rundown prostitute you are tight as fuck”, Tommy pressed out in between his thrusts.

Tommys degrading words seemed to be so far away, you almost couldn’t hear them.

Your gaze drifted over to Joel, who sat in Tommy's chair, his expression a mix of exhaustion and satisfaction.

As your eyes met, a wave of shame washed over you, his watchful gaze reminded you of how your father used to look at you: disappointed and full of judgment.

It felt as if Joel could see right through you, condemning you for the wrong decisions you had made, like running away with your boyfriend, Dean.

In that moment, you realized your father had been right all along, but it was too late to turn back. You had irreversibly altered the course of your life, and men like Tommy were the consequence of your choices.

Another blow struck your cheeks, catching you off guard. “Don’t look at him, he won’t safe you this time.”

After what felt like an eternity, you sensed that Tommy was nearing his climax.

It was only then that you realised that he hadn’t bothered with a condom—another boundary crossed in the course of this night.

“Please don’t cum in me.”, you sounded hopeless.

Tommy drew out of you, grabbed your hair and yanked your head off the edge of the bed. He then violently started to empty his balls on your face, mixing his cum with your tears and his brothers cum.

When he was done, he let go of your hair. Your skull arched. Your ass hurt. And your throat and vagina feeling rough and scratchy.

“Don’t worry, cunt”, Tommy begun “last thing I want is having another whore being the mother of my child.”

It was only then you noticed that he wore a ring on his finger. He was married.

Tommy allowed himself to collapse onto the bed, taking a moment to catch his breath.

You rolled out of the bed and dragged yourself into the bathroom, tears and cum streaming down your face.

You cleaned your face with water, your hands shaking. You put your dress on. All you wanted to get out of here. You had your money, but you lost the little bit of dignity you had left.

“Dean will be proud.”, you thought. You just wanted to go back to him.

Stepping out of the bathroom, your feet carried you straight to the front door, driven by the urgent need to flee.

However, Joel's words stopped you in your tracks. "Tell Dean, Joel said hello.”

With a silent nod, you turned and walked back out into the eerie night, the weight of the encounter hanging heavy on your shoulders…

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softlyopulent-if · 1 year

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Softly, Opulent is a dark fantasy romance, an interactive fiction not suited for those under 17.

Demo. [Prologue and Chapter One.]

The Queen dies the night you’re born. And your family locks you away.

All of King Adder’s children are a mystery to the common folk, but you—you are nothing but a ghost. A ghost, that spends eighteen years locked away in the deepest part of the palace, so that no eyes may lay upon you.

And those that do—they do not treat you kindly.

And when you are finally of age, at last, you are betrothed to the child of the King of a far away kingdom, to secure an alliance that your father has been seeking for years.

And you are swept away to a place even more foreign than your own land, to be wed to a stranger that looks at you with contempt. To live in a kingdom of citizens that despise you.

And perhaps, just perhaps, fight a war.

Content Warnings: Softly, Opulent contains many upsetting themes, such as: arranged marriage, child abuse, child neglect, assault, death, murder, suicide, sexually suggestive scenes, and more. Viewer discretion is advised, and this story is only appropriate for those 17+.

Customize your main character. (Name, Pronouns, Appearance, Personality.)

Romance one of four characters. (All of which are gender selectable.)

Overcome your past trauma.

Befriend many side characters.

Learn magic, learn how to fight.

Possibly overthrow your father, the tyrant King.

Attend balls, and witness the viper pit that is high society.

Fight an undead army.

The Betrothed, Aleksandar/Aleksandra. (Gender Selectable. She/Her. He/Him.) - They are the heir to the throne of Aslerea and your betrothed. But it’s the last thing they want to be. They seem to hold something against you. They are serious and spend hours upon hours training—they’re preparing for something. Their engagement to you is quite the hinder, but can you make them see it differently? Their duty blinds them, but you can change that.

The Pirate Captain, Rhys/Rhea. (Gender Selectable. She/Her. He/Him.) - They are a mystery. They are a pirate—the very embodiment of freedom and sea, yet they choose to remain in the kingdom of Aslerea more often than not. They stand to gain something by being there, but you don’t know what. There’s something in you that tells you that you can’t trust them, but their smile is so pretty, and their flirtation so constant that you want to. But maybe—just maybe, if you play your cards right—they will treat you as tenderly as their dearest treasure.

The Shadow, Calixta/Calix. (Gender Selectable. She/Her. He/Him.) - They are your betrothed’s younger sibling, and so no one pays quite as much attention to them. Though they seem content in their sibling’s shadow—content with their lack of responsibility—you can’t help but wonder if there’s more to it. They are as lazy as a bump on a log, and they likely sleep more than anything else—but there’s an interest in their eyes when they look at you. Is it something deep, or just a longing to claim what their sibling has? You could find out.

The Tutor, Mestra/Mestrn. (Gender Selectable. She/Her. He/Him.) - They are assigned as your tutor and tasked with the great undertaking of making you fit to lead. But they are also close with the people in the palace, and help the servants when they can. They know commoners by name and spend nights in the tavern, surrounded by free drinks. And while they are kind, there is something beneath it all that suggests a person that will go far to protect those they care about. Whether it’s because of their kind nature or something else, they have no enemies.

OTHER LINKS.

RO APPERANCES.

RO HEIGHTS.

#interactive if #romance #fantasy #twine game #twine #arranged marriage #softly opulent #SO #interactive fiction #interact if #if #romance if #fantasy if #dating sim #if story #interactive story

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stygiansun-totaleclipse · 1 month

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Stygian Sun: Total Eclipse - WIP

DEMO TBA

After the deaths of your four oldest siblings, taken from you by war, your older sibling, Nour, once fifth in line for the Solar Imperial throne, is now the heir.

This day never should have happened.

As recompense for the ravages your kingdom’s war has inflicted upon the Lunar kingdom of Celestyl, and as assurance it will not happen again, your sibling is to be sent to Celestyl to marry the Lunar King’s heir. An arranged marriage, meant to unite the kingdoms. Or, at least that’s how everyone prefers to phrase it. But you all recognize this for what it really is: a guise. Your sibling will be a political hostage.

And—Theia, grant you guidance—you have had a premonition this is not the worst to come. Should your sibling go to Celestyl, they will not survive.

So you will take their place.

Stygian Sun: Total Eclipse is a dark fantasy interactive fictional story where you play as the sixth child in the proud and grandiose Solar Imperial Dynasty and leave your homeland for a foreign country, where you will take your sibling’s place in an arranged marriage to the heir to the Lunar Kingdom. But something sinister simmers on the horizon—you have felt it in your premonitions; apprehension crawls beneath your skin, foreboding pricks at the back of your neck, dread sinks low and heavy in your stomach. Theia is warning you—of what, you know not, but you have seen the way the Lunar King looks at you. His stare, the dagger, and you, the sacrificial lamb on the altar. Beware the wolf, little lamb.

Content Warnings: "Stygian Sun: Total Eclipse" contains many upsetting themes, such as arranged marriage, child abuse, child neglect, death, murder, sexually suggestive scenes, optional sexual content, suicidal ideations, and more. "Stygian Sun: Total Eclipse" is intended for mature audiences 18+. Viewer discretion is advised.

Customize your MC's name, gender, pronouns, appearance, personality, and sexuality. Play as straight, gay, lesbian, bi, poly, or asexual.

Shape your personality through your choices and see how it affects dialogue with other characters.

Navigate through the difficulties of court life in a foreign country.

Develop your magic—powers bestowed upon you through your divine bloodline.

Romance one or more of five romantic options, including your betrothed, the Lunar heir; your charming and overly flirtatious retainer; your acolyte, a priestess in training; a kind yet darkly mysterious Celestylian noble; or a peculiar and chaotic mage.

Develop deep and lasting friendships or make enemies.

Kill some parents.

Uncover a sinister plot that threatens everything you hold dear—and decide what you will risk to protect it.

Nour al’Teia, your older sibling. (Gender dependent on MC’s. She/her. He/him. They/them.) Non-RO Once fifth in line for the Solar Imperial throne, Nour was perfectly content to play a supportive role to Parim, first in line, and the rest of their siblings. Now first in line for the throne, Nour is doing their best to step into a role they were never prepared to fill. Despite their best attempts to reassure you, you can tell this weighs more heavily on them than they let on.

Kieran Zeleskas, the Lunar Heir. (Gender Selectable. She/her. He/him.) RO The Crown Prince/ss of Celestyl. Though not of noble birth, events put into motion by their father have elevated them to this position, one they seem to have adapted to rather well by all appearances. Stoic and aloof, they seem less than pleased about this arrangement between the two of you. You’re inclined to agree.

Alektis de Celestys, the lone princess. (She/her.) Non-RO The adoptive sister to Kieran. The slaughter of her family during the coup that brought Kieran’s father to power has rendered her irascible and hostile to most everyone. Though she mostly keeps to herself, with only her retainer, Nihm, for company, you often find her tumultuous glare trained on you, a complex look on her face you can’t quite decipher. (Character portrait coming soon.)

Nihm de Circené, the guardian. (They/them.) RO Devoted retainer to Alektis and last surviving member of House Circené. Kind and sociable, Nihm is well-regarded in both noble and commoner social circles alike. However, their warm and affable disposition cannot completely hide the apprehension in their gait, nor the trembling in their hands. Still, they do their best to welcome you in a place where everyone seems dead-set on hating you. (Character portrait coming soon.)

Aurynn Anouar, the retainer (He/him.) RO Seeming to have appeared from out of nowhere, Aurynn rescued you from a dire situation during your first battle experience, and afterwards was appointed your retainer and has served you as such ever since. Charismatic, laidback, and flirtatious to a fault, Aurynn tends to either charm or annoy everyone he meets. Despite his insistence that he is an open book, sometimes you can’t help but feel the opposite; indeed, everything about him seems shrouded in secrecy.

Samira Nahdiri, the priestess (She/her.) RO Certain events left her family deeply shamed and nearly destitute until her exceptional accomplishments as a healer elevated her to the renowned position as your acolyte, drawing upon the power of your blood to learn healing magic in her pursuit to become a priestess. Strong, loyal, and compassionate, she is devoted to caring for her family above all else, and she counts you among them.

Lilith/Lucien de Arcanis, the mage. (Gender Selectable. She/they. He/they.) RO The adopted heir to House Arcanis, a line of powerful and highly skilled mages. Wild-eyed with a wolfish grin, their peculiar and eccentric mannerisms tend to unsettle their peers, leaving them rather isolated in social circles—a circumstance which doesn’t seem to bother them one way or the other. For better or worse, it appears they’ve taken a rather intense interest in you.

Poly Routes (subject to change): Kieran/Aurynn, Samira/Aurynn, Lilith/Lucien/Aurynn.

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linkspooky · 7 months

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Dr. Venture vs. Enji Todoroki: How to Write Bad Dads

This is a post comparing two shows about two abusive dads who are the main characters instead of their children. My Hero Academia is a Shonen jump manga that takes inspiration from American comics and shonen manga. Whereas The Venture Bros is an adult swim cartoon that started out as a parody of Johnny Quest, and grew into a seven season long character study of former child star Rusty Venture.

The idea for this post came from the fact that I've noticed a common hot take from MHA fans that Endeavor's redemption arc is bad because it's wrong to make an abuser the main character.

I've always disagreed, and used The Venture Bros as an example of a show where making an abuser the main character works. Rusty is actually a well-liked character in the venture bros fandom. So my question is if these characters are both abusers why is one of them generally accepted and the other one so controversial?

Before we begin I want to say this is a story with fictional characters. Don't bring real life into the equation. We are doing literary criticism here and only talking about the events that happen in the story.

Anyway, My Hero Academia and The Venture Bros seem like the weirdest shows to compare but they are actually pretty similar. They are both comic book shows that are commentating on the comics they're inspired from.

What My Hero Academia is to Spiderman and Dragonball Z, Venture Bros is to Tom Swift Novels, the Hardy Boys, and old Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. They also make the decision to focus on the characters as people rather than heroes. They are telling the stories of real people that exist in a world overflowing with both heroes and villains.

1. Meet the Venture Brothers

If you've heard of the Venture Bros then you've probably heard of the premise that it's an adult parody of Johnny Quest. Johnny Quest for those of you who have a life and therefore haven't seen every old Hanna-Barbera Cartoon like I have is a show where eleven year old Johnny Quest travels around the world with his super scientist father Dr. Benton C. Quest and their bodyguard Race Bannon, going on adventures in Jungle Ruins or fighting villains.

In the Venture Bros the main character Dr. Thaddeus Venture is an emotionally abusive and neglectful father who constantly exposes his sons to danger in his trips around the world. Their bodyguard Brock Samson is a ultra violent and is basically a thirteen year old's idea of what a cool manly man is. The titular Venture Bros, Hank and Dean Venture are sheltered children who are constantly being chased around by men in costumes trying to kill them.

So the basic premise of the show lies in it's dark deconstruction of shows like Hardy Boys, Johnny Quest, these Tom Swift-esque stories where young boys go on adventures by showing the real dangers that children would be exposed to in that kind of life.

Between Johnny Quest, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift, what is up with these pie-eyed youths chasing pirates and international diamond thieves and stuff like that? They would get their throats cut the minute that stumbled upon a hideout. And that would be the gag. - ART AND MAKING OF THE VENTURE BROS.

The show does explore Hank and Dean's trauma, but despite the title of the show they are not the main characters. The protagonist is Doctor Thaddeus Venture who himself is other victim of the Boy Adventuring Lifestyle.

Dr. Venture: "Who was, for 43 years, the only son of Dr. Jonas Venture? Who, from the ages of 3 to 17 accompanied him on hundreds of adventures the chilling memories of which rouse him from sleep in a cold sweat to this day?"

Thaddeus used to travel around the world with his father the super scientist Dr. Jonas Venture who was a far more successful super scientist and hero. He's the former star of the "Rusty Venture Show" a cartoon based off of his travels with his father.

Jonas who continually neglected and gaslit him throughout his childhood to the point of not allowing him to go to therapy. He gaslit him so hard there's a scene where he literally pretends to be Rusty's therapist to tell his son to stop complaining.

Rusty: "So I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could just be a normal kid and go out and play with kids my own age and stuff. The only people I get to hang out with are grown ups. The only time I get to leave the compound is to go someplace creepy, like the Bermuda triangle, and then I get kidnapped, by grown ups. And I'm not even sure I want to be a super scientist when I grow up anyway, but I feel all this pressure because of my fa-It feels weird telling you this stuff." Jonas: "Remember Rusty, in here I'm your doctor not your father. Now let's get back to it shall we. You were telling me how you're ungrateful for all the opportunities your father's given you and you blame me for all your problems."

Rusty is both a washed up child star, and a faiilure to his father's legacy. He never formed an identity outside of being the star of the Rusty Venture show or the son of Jonas Venture. He drags his kids all around the world on crazy super science adventures because that's what he knows.

The central premise of the Venture Bros is that Rusty is basically stuck and cannot meaningfully grow up into an adult and his own person, despite the fact he is now a single father trying to raise two sons. The central theme is about three generations of one family, and what it says about the complicated nature of family itself,

As Rusty is both the victim and the perpetrator of the abuse it makes sense he is the main character the story centers around because he's the central link between Jonas and the Twins.

The themes can be summarized in one line said towards the end of the show:

BEN "Just a watch. Tells the time in two time zones. That fourth hand there? Little date window? Those are called complications. Complications make a watch special. More complications the more value. Read the engraving Jonas put on the back there. Elige Tua. It's Latin for Choose your family. Blood doesn't make a family, love does. Choose your family and remember that complications make it special."

In other words it's a seven season long show on how family is complicated.

2. Keeping up with the Todorokis

My Hero Academia is about a lot of things, but the central premise is that in a society where he quirk you were born with can determine a lot about your life, one boy without a quirk sets out to prove that anyone can be a hero.

If Complciations make it special is the central theme of Venture Bros, then the central theme of My Hero Academia is two sentences. "All People are not created equal" and "Anyone can become someone's hero" both said at different points in the story. The story itself is about Deku's attempts to overcome the first statement, that he was not born equal but he deserves to be a hero as much as anyone else because he represents the true spirit of heroes. That heroes don't just show up to beat the big bad, a hero saves people.

The story isn't just about Deku though. We're not even going to talk about Deku in this post, but rather the Tritagonist Todoroki Shoto.

Todrooki is introduced as a foil to Deku someone who is born with an extremely powerful quirk, but who's been groomed from childhood to be a hero.

Shoto's father Enji Todoroki is All Might's ultimate rival. In the world of MHA hers are highly commercialized and ranked by popularity and achievements and Enji has been number two his entire life. He decided to conceive of an heir that could surpass All Might instead.

He purchased a wife with an ice quirk for an arranged marriage to selectively breed for a child with a fire and ice quirk. When Shoto was born he raised Shoto up as a hero, forcing him through grueling training sessions from a young age, and beating his wife when she tried to intervene for Shoto's sake.

That's a lot and I didn't even cover all of it. After this reveal of Shoto's backstory, Enji seems like he's only going to be a one note abuser to give Shoto a tragic backstory to angst over.

However, later on in the show Enji ifinally becomes the number one hero only to realize how empty his lifelong dream has been. He feels remorse for the family he destroyed in pursuit of that dream and starts wanting to make ammends. After this , Enji basically becomes the second most important character of the "Todoroki Family" arc. . A lot of focus is put on Enji's attempts at atonement to the point where some accuse him of stealing the spotlight from his victims.

These two families have a lot in common. They are basically families who are not allowed to have normal lives because the patriarch of the family is a costumed hero. The hero is also someone who is generally well-respected and is considered extremely successful in their chosen career, but are terrible to their family members. They are a hero to the world and a villain to their own family.

If there is a central premise to the Todoroki Family outside of MHA's analysis of what exactly makes a hero, it's this:

Todoroki Shoto: "As a hero this endeavor guy is pretty darn amazing. But it's just like Nasu said. I'm not ready to forgive you... for abusing mom. So, heroics aside. What sort of dad are you going to be? That's what I want to find out?"

The challenge is if Endeavor can choose his family over being a hero.

You can se the parallels in Venture Bros, as Rusty's main struggle is to try to be a father to his twin sons and help them grow up while at the same time struggling in this dangerous worlds of super science. Rusty is a super scientist constantly getting chased around by guys in costumes, but he's also a normal father trying to raise two sons into adulthood with basically no idea what he's doing because he doesn't have a frame of reference for how fathers are supposed to act or what a normal childhood would even look like.

The comic book super scientist, and the comic book hero are expected to act like real fathers to their sons.

However, as I said above in Rusty's case it's pretty uncontroversial that he is the main character of his story, whereas Enji starts fights within the fandom very time he appears onscreen.

Why is this exactly?

It's not because it's offensive to have an abuser be the main character, but rather how these characters are written and how well they fit into their stories. As I said Rusty is naturally the main character of his story because he's the central link in the chain of abuse, but should Enji be the main character of the Todorokis? Does he fit as well as Rusty?

3. Who's your Daddy?

So as stated above Enji and Rusty simultaneously exist in worlds where heroes exist and yet they are also normal people who are expected to provide for their families and raise their kids. They both exist in what is basically the marvel universe, though in the case of Venture Bros it's the Marvel Universe fused with old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Because of this world some of the things both Enji and Rusty do are things that have no real life parallels. For example Rusty once created a machine using the soul of a dead orphan as a power supply. You can't do that in real life so I'm not going to use that as an example.

Both of these stories are drawing on real life parallels of parental abuse I'm going to be talking about those to tell what kind of neglectful parent each is.

Rusty raised Hank and Dean Venture as a single parent with the assistance of their body guard Brock Samson. They live on the Venture Compound and only leave when Rusty needs to take a trip around the world. Obviously, there's not many real life examples of parents taking their kids into egypt to fight mummies.

However, Rusty's main flaw as a parent is how much he shelters his children not allowing them to make their own choices. They are homeschooled until they are eighteen and almost never allowed to leave their home unsupervised. Rusty could be compared to a helicopter parent that feels the need to micromanage every aspect of their child's lives, sheltering them so much they're unprepared for the real world.

Rusty is a weird combination of controlling and neglectful, because while he doesn't let either of his childre go to public school aor interact with kids their own age, he constantly exposes them to danger. He is often disinterested in his kid's lives and puts most of the burden of protecting them and raising them on his bodyguard Brock, while he chases after whatever super-science project is occupying him at the moment. He's neglectful to dangerous extents too considering they're always getting cahsed around by crazy men in costumes.

Also, he lets them die a lot.

Hank and Dean have died several times over, only to be replaced by clones that Rusty grew in a lab with all the same memories. Once again there's no real life parallel to this, but it's interesting in the context of the show itself.

How do these children survive being chased by villains and constantly kidnapped? The answer is, they don't.

They die, and then Rusty just clones a new pair of boys. That in itself should make Rusty irredeemable but the show presents it in a more ambiguous light.

Dean: "You're telling me I'm a clone, that I'm not even Dean, that I'm some stupid science experiment." Ben: "No, no, no. You're Dean. There's no other Dean, you're it, flesh and blood. Look I was conceived in the back seat of a packard, you were conceived in a tank. So what?" Dean: "So I have no mommy? No nothing!?" Ben: "Dean, you have it all wrong. You have a mommy, and your dad is your dad. They made you by getting drunk and forgetting to wear a condem like everybody else, and your dad loved you so much that when you got a boo-boo, he kissed it and made it all better and made it go away." Dean: "You brought me back to life." Ben: "Yeah okay, well you and your brother had some pretty big boo boos. Have a kid one day, Dean. Hold it's lifeless body in your arms, and then tell me how wrong it is. Jonas, me, and yes your dad, saw it as nothing more than a fucking band-aid for a really big boo boo."

In the story itself it brings up the argument that if any parent was holding their dying child in their arms they'd want to bring them back somehow. That in the logic of the show it's the same as using magic to revive someone from the dead. At the same time it's not because Rusty's let his sons die multiple times and never changed his lifestyle because he can just keep replacing them with clones.

Super-science aside, it is kind of a metaphor for Rusty's parenting as a whole that his sons have been cloned and replaced so many times they're perpetually sixteen and never allowed to grow up. Rusty's so neglectful he's never taken an interest in raising them and this is the result, they literally do not grow up.

It's also probably relevant to mention that Rusty himself is a clone and died and was replaced multiple times much like his sons, and the technology for cloning Hank and Dean was invented by his father Jonas.

However, after season 3 the cloning lab gets destroyed, and the body guard Brock leaves the family. With the safety net removed Rusty actually starts taking a more active role in both of his child's lives. This is basically a mirror to Endeavor's moment of realization after getting number one hero that his entire family has grown up without him and they all resent him.

Season four onwards Hank and Dean develop into their own people outside of Rusty. He responds to them in different ways but he's actually parenting them this time instead of shoving them away like annoyances. Hank becomes rebellious and fights back against Rusty for a long time after Brock leaves because he no longer has a role model and Rusty's response is to always get strict and punish him.

Whereas when Dean rebels not only does Rusty tolerate it, he also spends a lot more time in Dean's life trying to push him into the direction of being a super-scientist like him, supporting his efforts to go to college, while basically ignoring Hank. It's a running gag in the show that Dean is obviously Rusty's favorite, but even when playing favorites Rusty by this point in the show has reasons for why he's making those parenting choices.

Rusty: "Dean believes in this crap! He should have been Rusty Venture, Boy adventurer. Hank got this life thrown at him. And he fights against it. Just like I did."

Rusty playing favorites comes from an attempt to overcorrect for both children. He rejects Hank because he believes Hank doesn't want to be a boy adventure and therefore pushing Hank away from his family and the Venture lifestyle is what he needs. Whereas, he believes that Dean embraces the super scientist lifestyle and he tries to mentor Dean into another scientist like himself therefore he gives Dean most of his attention because he thinks Dean needs that guidance from him.

Of course, Rusty is totally wrong about his sons. If anything Hank is the one who wants to be an adventurer whereas Dean just wants a normal life away from his crazy family but parents often misunderstand their children. He's not actively malicious, he's just misguided in what he thinks is best for each of his sons. He's not really even playing favorites in this case he's choosing to parent his sons differently based on what he thinks is best for each of them, it's just in this case father doesn't know best.

Rusty isn't a stagnant character, but also there's no big redemption arc for him the way there is Endeavor. Rusty never narrates about how he needs to atone for his past mistakes. The result is Rusty is a far more amoral character than Endeavor because he's not trying to atone but the narrative also isn't trying to spin Rusty in any way. It's just showing you Rusty as he is, and with all the bad things he does he's still capable of loving his sons.

The question isn't really "Is Rusty redeemable?" but "When is Rusty gonna grow up?"

Then there's Endeavor (everyone starts booing) who is simultaneously a much better, and far worse person than Rusty.

Enji is honestly more comparable to Jonas, an incredibly successful hero who built a career and an empire in heroics and fame and then tried to force his son into that same lifestyle.He's the exploration of that same idea a supposedly great man with skeletons in his closet. Enji technically has saved thousands of people (such as Hawks one of the other main characters). A person who is so good at playing the role of a hero no one would ever expect there are skeletons in his closet.

"Rusty's father was more successful than you could ever imagine. Jonas Venture Sr. was a manipulative narcissist admired by the world for his scientific accomplishements and his hyper-masculine James Bond meets Doc Savage public persona. He's a geniuine villain who was able to take everything he wanted from the world by seamlessly fitting into the role of everyone's hero." [Source]

Jonas is like showing everything nasty about using someone like James Bond as a male power fantasy. He treats women like objects, he thinks he's aboe good and evil, he's effortlessly charming and suave and uses that to get what he wants out of people. Enji similiarly is everything that is wrong with the ideals of hero society. A society that glorifies flashy, strong quirks that are the best for taking down villains. The only person who even seems to care that he's number two is Enji himself, beause Enji is otherwise rich and succesful, a pillar of the hero community, and allowed to get away with a lot because of his position and influence.

Enji is at least a better hero than Rusty, because Rusty is an incompetent mad scientist who does stuff like mutate college interns into four armed freaks and build death rays.

However, as a parent strip away his status as a hero and Enji is little more than a show parent, pushing his children into a life they don't want in an attempt to live vicariously through them. Once again, resembling Jonas more than he really does Rusty. As Jonas forced Rusty to be a boy adventurer, and then made a cartoon out of it to make money like any show parent.

It's also the idea that generation put that kids into films and it was a very horrible selfish thing to do, they were doing trying to live out their own lives through their kids. That didn't exist before that was something that boomers brought to the world. "Oh I can't be these fun new things I'll make you be it." I think Jonas was a pioneer of throwing his kid at the world. I think Jonas was something of a boy adventurer himself, and made his kid be it. But also put his kid on TV to cash in the residuals. Jackson Publick, DVD Commentary

As stated above Enji gave up on his ambition to be the number one hero and so he decided to create a son with the right quirk to surpass All Might. He then pressured a woman into an arranged marriage, basically purchasing her from her parents and conceived four children until he got his designer baby.

Chapters 301-302 the wrong way to put out a fire, detail the slow descent of the Todoroki Household from Enji entering an arranged marriage with bad intention to create an ideal child to be heir to his legacy, into a full on child abuser. Enji is written like a normal person falling into a cycle of abuse, he never intended to hurt his children at first. Abusers aren't evil monsters, they're just people. Most abusers don't even think of themselves as abusers.

In fact he's shown positively bonding with his first born son who seems eager to learn to use his fire based quirk. He even mentions that he was alright at the time with the idea of Toya being the one to succeed him and letting go of his quirk experiment.

Enji only had kids to carry on his legacy, and only bonded with Toya because Toya was eager to participate in the training and become his heir. However, to give Enji some backstory it's quite clear the death of Enji's own father at a young age left him with no idea on how a father should act.

At a young age Enji witnessed his father attempt to save an innocent girl only to end up a burnt up corpse, and probably at that point conflated strength with being a good father. If his father had been strong enough he would have survived and continued to be a father to young Enji. At that point it's almost understandable that Enji thinks in his mind that earning his keep as the patriarch of the family, and being a powerful hero who will come home alive is the same thing as being a good father.

So Enji conflates masculine ideals of strength and heroism with being a good father, all the while not actually showing up to parent his kids. When Toya seemed like he could live up to Enji's expectations and be strong as a successor everything seemed fine.

However, Toya turned out to be disabled at which point everything in the household began to spiral out of control. After learning Toya could not use his quirk without burning himself, Enji tossed Toya aside and left raising him entirely up to Rei and then pressured her to have more children until one with his ideal quirk would be born.

Toya did not like his father ignoring him and began acting out for his attention. The response of everyone in the household was to politely tell Toya to shut up, because Enji while not being a parent is the money maker and authority in the household no one can stand up to him. When Toya's acting up got too out of hand, Enji would even hit Rei instead of just personally dealing with his son.

At the same time Shoto was finally born and being given his perfect heir after four attempts, Enji eagerly began training him. When Shoto resisted him, Enji stepped up to threats of physical violence and long grueling training sessions to force him to learn. All the while Toya continued to mentally spiral.

One day after his flames turned blue Toya asked his father to meet with him on Sekoto Peak. However that day Enji didn't show up, and Toya lost control of his flames starting a massive forest fire that killed him. Rather than changing anything after his firstborn's death, he doubled down and pushed Shoto even harder.

While being a far worse person, as a parent Rusty is far less malicious. He neglects his kids similarly to Enji at first, but when the safety net is removed and he can't keep cloning them anymore he actually does start taking a personal interest in their lives. Maybe it's too little too late because it's the 14th version of Hank and Dean but he does hear the wake up call and change his ways as a parent.

Enji always doubles down on ignoring his sons in favor of heroics when given the chance to be a father.

Even post redemption arc Enji behaves in the same way. There is no point in the story so far where Enji actively chooses to help or be a parent to one of his sons, when he can choose to be a part of a big important battle instead. Let me break out the list:

In the Pro Hero Arc Shoto sets the challenge for Enji to show what he can be like as a father rather than a hero.

In the internship arc Enji trains Shoto up as a hero but not a father. When he brings the family home to dinner they're attacked by a villain and Enji stands and watches as his son Natsuo gets kidnapped y a villain because he felt like it would be too awkward if he saved Natsuo because then Natsuo might feel inclined to forgive him.

In the War Arc aftewards Toya is revealed to be alive the entire time, and when given the chance to see his dead son come back to life, Enji not only does nothing but he sits and watches as his oldest son tries to kill his youngest without trying to talk to or appeal to Toya.

After the war arc, Enji doesn't bother looking for Toya and goes back to his job as a hero hunting down AFO. He also makes a promise to Shoto that they'll search for Toya together, only to break that promise multiple times.

In the second war arc, when Enji is given a chance to face Toya face to face, he instead sends his other son Shoto to fight him, while Enji fights against the big bad instead as the number one hero.

When Toya is literally dying and about to burn himself alive in front of him, Enji who has chosen to run away from Toya too many times by this point picks the murder suicide option and chooses to try dying with his son in a heroic sacrifice.

Every single chance he is given to act like a father, he acts like a hero instead. Enji Todoroki never steps out of the role of the hero Endeavor. Internally he's changed, yeah. He's remorseful now and realzies what he's done wrong. However, externally he hasn't. He doesn't do anything different. He neglected his family for his job his entire life so his way of making it up to them is... to keep going to his job.

The problem isn't whether or not he deserves to be redeemed, but rather that there's no change in his actions. Endeavor at the beginning of the story would have shown up to fight AFO in the war arc too, because being the hero is what he does. It's the only thing he does. The story never asks him to be anything other than a hero.

Which is I think a fundamental difference in Rusty and Enji in how they're written. Rusty is a flawed parent, but he's still a parent.

He does favor Dean over Hank, but that favoritism takes the form of him giving Hank more chores when Hank acts out, but when it's time for Dean to rebel giving him space and letting him have his own separate room in the attic. It's Rusty letting Dean have access to the family checkbook so he'll have spending money at college, but cutting Hank off from the checkbook because they agreed if Hank didn't want to go to college he needed to find a job to support himself.

Rusty is parenting these children. He's parenting them very badly, but he's still their parent. Enji never wanted to be a parent to begin with, he wanted to be his kid's abusive gymnastics coach. He wanted a prodigy that he could push and push until they won gold at the Olympics.

If you ignore the fantasy elements then you're left with how these men are shown interacting with their kids in their day to day lives.

Rusty has absolutely no idea what he's doing, so even when he has good intentions he screws up. However, he is making an effort to guide these kids.

Enji was an intentional manipulator more in line with Jonas. He controlled everything in the household, and was actively trying to groom Shoto into someone who would obediently carry on his legacy. He made the choice to isolate Shoto from his siblings so he'd have more control over him. Rusty keeps Dean and Hank away from kids their own age and from having a normal life because he never had a normal life. He doesn't even know what a normal life looks like.

Enji for most of his life didn't want kids, he wanted heirs. He even purchased a woman so his heirs would turn out with the right genetics, and tossed aside the ones that were disabled or born with the wrong quirk.

Rusty made the decision to become a parent on his own. In the last twist in the series it's revealed Dean and Hank had no mother. They were conceived in a test tube, raised in an artificial womb by Rusty himself. He is both their father and their mother. Kids were a deliberate decision on his part. He wanted to have a family, probably because his own childhood was so deprived of any familial love.

Dean: Okay, so who is our mom? Rusty: Seriously, Dean haven't we had enough family history for one day? I don't even know who my mom is. All you need to know is that the person who gave birth to you. I promise they do.

Remember as stated above the central thesis statement of Venture Bros is "Elige Tua - Choose your family". Rusty chose to bring those kids into the world because he wanted to be a father, it's an active choice his character makes.

Whereas the central statement of Endeavor's arc is "So, heroics aside. What sort of dad are you going to be? That's what I want to find out?" but we never witness Enji doing anything outside of being a hero.

Even post-redemption the only time he ever spends with Shoto is when they're either doing quirk training or working as heroes together. Toya as a character presents this challenge to him, because he's Enji's son, but he's also a villain who's killed innocent people. If he's acting as a hero he has to put a stop to Toya, but a father is supposed to put the safety and well-being of their children above everything else.

We never see Enji make that choice to be Toya's father over a hero. Which is why in story he comes off as a worse father than someone like Rusty, because he never makes any attempt to emotionally bond with his children.

Rusty will sit Hank and Dean down and tell them stories from his childhood. He'll find common ground with his sons to bond over because they've both been subjected to the boy adventurer lifestyle.

Rusty: Dean what are you doing? Dean: Hyperventilating into my knees. That smell a little like spit up... because I spit up a little. Rusty: Dean, you just baby burped onto a speed suit. Not a super scientist alive that hasn't coughed a little acid onto his speed suit. Dean: Really? Rusty: Why do you think these things are like 95 percent polyester? You can clean off fear-vomit with a wet nap. Dean: I thought you were used to this. Rusty: Dean I remember when the action man would wake me up with a gun pointed at my head. He'd just hold it there and pull the trigger. I'd hear the click really loud because it was right against my forehead. Dean: So it echoed. Rusty: Right, it sounded like he snapped one of my teeth out. Click! Then he'd go, "Not day Rusty. Not Today." Dean: Golly, and you took it because you had to? Rusty: No Dean, I took it because I was Rusty Venture. Boy adventurer. I didn't ask for this life, Dean, but it's mine. Sure, I fall down in the Speed Suit but I get up and Wet-Nap my puke off.

We never get any moments like this with Endeavor and his kids.

He only goes so far as apologizing for his past abuse. Yes, maybe it's cathartic hearing an abuser apologize for what they've done but that's not the question the story was asking. It wasn't asking "Can Endeavor be forgiven?" It was asking "What sort of dad are you going to be?"

The narrative challenged him to learn to act like a father to his family, and he never did. He stayed in the role of hero from beginning to end. It might be cathartic for his victims to hear him say sorry, but it's not good for Endeavor as a character because he hasn't changed and we've learned nothing about him. We already knew he was sorry at the beginning of the arc. Endeavor is sorry and knows he's done something wrong has already been established, but by Endeavor stepping out of the role of hero and acting like a father we could have learned something new about him or his character but no he stays the same from beginning to end.

They're both awful people but at the end of the day Rusty is a father, and Enji is not.

Stories are kind of like essays your English teacher used to force you to read. You need to make a thesis statement in the story itself, and then have evidence to support that thesis statement. The theme of Venture Bros is choose your family, and family is complicated, and in support of that theme we have Rusty choosing to connect with his sons. Jonas is basically nothing more than Rusty's biological father. Rusty's chosen a different way to connect with his sons, and he is their dad, and they can bond about the complicated lifestyle of being a Venture together.

The actions Enji takes in his story don't line up with his thesis statement. The Todoroki Family subplot is supposed to be about how one family was messed up because Enji only chose to have a family to further his career as a hero, and choosing his career again and again made things worse. The thesis statement was that Enji needed to choose to be a dad, but he's never shown doing that in the story.

So Enji as a character seems like he doesn't fit in with his narrative. Which is what I said at the very beginning about Rusty and why he works as a main character. Rusty is the center, because he's had this horrible life inflicted on him by his father, and he's in the process of raising his sons but he still has a chance to choose to be better.

Enji could also work as the center of his story, he has a chance to choose his family over his work as a hero, but he's ultimately not the one who does that, it's Shoto. Which yes Shoto is the main character of the Todoroki plotline, but by the end Enji's gotten as much screen time as his son. If the plot was going to focus on Shoto and his choices to begin with then he should have been the central point. You spent a lot of in story time asking this question with Enji on whether or not he's going to be able to choose to be a father over a hero, and who Enji is outside of being a hero only to not give the audience any answeres.

This again has nothing to do with Enji the person and whether I think he's likable or not, because Enji's a fictional character. He's an idea. If writing is communication, then a writer is trying to communciate some idea with every character in their novel. We're asking what is the author trying to say with Enji, and do they do a good job of getting that message across?

4. What's the Big Idea?

So the above section was mainly about the personal arcs of each characters: How do both of them fail at fatherhood and do they learn to be better fathers over the course of their narratives?

However, these characters are part of a much bigger world. How a character interacts with both the world around them, and the extended cast of characters is another way a story relates it's theme.

Venture Bros and My Hero Academia both exist in comic book worlds. There are people running around in costumes calling themselves heroes and villains and fighting each other on the streets.

In My Hero Academia heroes are basically professional athletes who sell sports drinks and pose for ads and compete for rankings on a big board, and heroics for the most part has been reduced to a day job for people with particularly powerful quirks. Heroism is an entire industry that's for profit, and run by the shadowy hero council who has far more power over their society than they let onto. You could compare Endeavor being the top hero to him is like a combination of being the best pro athlete, and also the best salaryman ever.

Ironically, the worldbuilding of Venture Bros is pretty similar. In Venture Bros. the villains are all unionized. There is a super villain trade union. It's a secret organization known as the guild of calamitous intent, which makes villainy into a bureaucracy.

All villains in the world have to register with the guild. If you're a part of the guild you receive the protection that the guild offers, as long as you follow the guilds rules and regulations. There's lots of small rules, like you can't torture someone who's having a medical issue, and if you're fighting a good guy and they have a doctor's appointment you have to let them go.

They even rank heroes and villains by their threat levels called "EMA LEVELS (equally matched aggression) and then assign you a hero who's about your equal so you won't get killed by someone way stronger than you. The guild basically decides who you're allowed to fight as a villain and picks a hero for you. The act of being someone's arch villain is called "arching" you show up to harass them once a week like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, fight them, then do it again next week. You're not allowed to kill your hero and you're supposed to follow specific rules. The tradeoff is the heroes won't kill you either, because you have guild protection.

The Monarch: I don't know, just keep it cat and mouse not cat and missile. JJ:: So it's a game? We fake fight? That's ridiculous. The Monarch: No, it's like fencing, it's about the art of the fight. JJ: Well, I'm about to deliver my killing stroke. Then what? Dr. Girlfriend: Then the guild steps up their game. You throw a rock, they throw a knife. You throw a knife, they come to your house when you're sleeping and murder your family. The Monarch: Look Dr. Venture you call the guild and you get the damn rulebook, I'll be waiting.

The justification for why the guild exists is that in world if you didn't give the villains a system with a bunch of rules, then you'd have a bunch of crazy people in costumes running around causing havoc.

Brock: You wanna what? Shoot him? And all his men and his wife? You could steal his cattle, too. Maybe burn his village down? JJ: It's an antiquated system. I mean my father did this fake arch enemy nonsense in the sxities. Maybe my brother is good with this namby pamby guy in a costume chases you around nonsense, but I'm not. Brock: Hey no disrespect Jonas, but it isn't so easy. These guys like their system. It's what they do. You take that away and you're looking at a bunch of pissed off nut bags with ray guns, and giant -- i don't know, a giant octopus / tank with laser eyes.

The villains and the OSI (who are like the GI JOE) of this world have signed a very long and detailed treaty that keeps both sides in a cold world stalemate and lets them fight every week like how the good guys and bad guys fight constantly while maintaining a status quo where neither side wins.

In MHA heroics is a commodity. It's commercialized and sold to the public. Heroes are like professional athletes selling you sports drinks, it's a spectacle to the public, and it's even intentionally made to be that way by the Hero Commission who use heroes as a bright shining light to distract the public while they do shady things like assassinate antigovernmental protestors from behind the scenes. The entire of hero society in MHA is built on the spectacle of heroes.

In Venture Bros heroes and villains are a spectacle too. It's just a job to them. Heroes and villains both show up to work, get in their costumes, fight each other and then go home. In Season 6 of Venture Bros, a parody of the Avengers is actively charging people to provide their services as heroes in the city of New York and you have to sign up for a protection plan if you want to get saved. Then the local mob boss takes a cut of the protection money they're charging.

In both settings the ideas of heroes exist, comic books exist, but the heroes themselves are incredibly mundane, they're just people showing up to jobs and making money for the most part. The only difference really is that in MHA the villains are societal rejects and trauma victims, whereas in Venture Bros they've unionized. In Venture Bros the villains and heroes basically fake fight under strict rules. Even in MHA though the villains need to exist in order to give the heroes someone to fight in front of the public. "Villain" is an actual legal term for a certain kind of quirk criminals with more than three strikes who gets sent to a super max prison if they're caught.

Both of these works are making comic book heroes and villains seem a lot more mundane by deconstructing them with this layer of realism. By making the roles of "hero" and "villain" seem much more mundane, and therefore more human, it also asks us to look at the characters who call themselves heroes and villains as human beings.

The Venture Bros like many richer takes on superhero stories really likes to play with the concept of identity. It's the idea that Good and Evil, Heroes and Villains, are just roles we play. They're not something fundamental or innate they're constructed by the world around us. In the show the main villainous organization the GCI is really just a bureaucracy of larpers sustaining their violent rolelplaying through organized crime. Rich and powerful lunatics who built the world around a game they wanted to play. There's really nothing of substance keeping Rusty on the "Good Guy" side. The good guys are also a mix and match. Shield, GI JOE, FBI. Another exmaple of people who never grew up. Only these people are running things, playing out their childhood power fantasies. They're barely less insane and blood thirsty than the bad guys. So what's even the point of being a good guy in the first place? That's the world Rusty is caught between...[x]

MHA and Venture Bros are both works that feature societies that divide people into two distinct categories "hero" and "villain" and then go on to show that these two categories are not as black and white as they would like us to believe.

Venture Bros features Brock Samson, a character who is ostensibly on the side of the good guys who also highest body count of nameless henchman who we see him gleefully kill onscreen over and over again. There are members of the OSI who are just as trigger happy as the guild so what's the difference between them besides what they've decided to personally identify as? On one side you have the Larpers who are roleplaying villainy, and on the other you have the military soliders who think they're real life GI JOES.

In My Hero Academia you have heroes who are essentially state sponsored peace keepers who suppress anyone who disrupts the status quo with violence, and villains who are rejected from that status quo who eventually turn into violent terrorists. While yes heroes have the responsibility of protecting innocent civilians, most of what heroes do is fight villains, in fact heroes with quirks suited to rescuing people aren't nearly as famous as ones with flashy violent quirks like Endeavor.

You have two sides and one calls themselves villains and the others heroes, but they both use extreme violence as a way to accomplish their goals.

Rusty and Enji are two characters who are caught between these two categories which aren't as distinct and separate as we'd like to believe they are.

Enji is basically the first deconstruction of heroes in MHA. He's a hero who's not interested in saving people, but instead wants to be the strongest and does everything in pursuit of selfish glory.

He's simultaneously the hero with the single most resolved cases in history, but at the same time he's always number two to All Might because he's not "super" enough of a super hero. In a manga where Deku's natural desire to save others make him a candidate to b ahero even without a quirk, we have a character who's a hero for purely selfish reasons. One that only cares about having the strongest quirk because being the best is all that matters to Enji.

In many ways the way Enji treats his family is more like a villain than a hero. Main villain AFO himself comments at one point he wasn't able to manipulate Toya, because his father did too good of a job manipulating him already. In fact you can draw a parallel between his actions of manipulating and grooming Shoto to be his heir, to how AFO raised orphaned child Shigaraki Tomura as his successor.

This is a good use of Enji's character, because making it hard to label him as hero and villain makes us think about who he is as a person instead.

There's an entire episode of Venture Bros dedicated to a villain Mentor named Dr. Henry Killinger, showing up and basically mentoring Rusty Venture when he's at a low point. He gives Rusty money, workers, gets his business up and running again and at the very end reveals that he's setting Rusty up to be a villain to arch his brother as a hero. Rusty is tempted with the idea that he'd make a much more successful villain than he ever would be a hero (because as a hero he's kind of just a loser) but he still chooses to be a hero at the end of the story because he doesn't want to fight his brother.

At which point his mentor, all his hired men, all just walk off and he loses all the money he would have gained and he goes back to being a mediocre super-scientist.

"Doc has the whole thing laid out for him clear as day. This role is here for you. Waiting for you to claim it. You have your nemesis. You have your means. You have the ability and the pain. You can do this and you'd be good at it. And Rusty can look at all of that, everything he's been through and say, "Yeah... but I don't wanna be evil." [x]

Rusty walks away from the chance to be a villain, but he's not exactly a hero either. He runs illegal cloning farms, he does lots of unethical scientific stuff and he's not even remotely the hero his father was considered to be.

Because he doesn't fit well into the category of hero or villain, the show instead asks you to evaluate who Rusty is as a person. He's one of the few characters in the show that's capable of stepping out of those categories.

"That's the great thing about him. Sometimes being disillusioned just means you can see through the whole thing. Sure the whole super science villain game feels stupid. It's not going anywhere. No one's accomplishing anything. It's all violence and roleplay. But at the end of the day it's still real. And it still means something to us. Choosing to be a villain means choosing to be a bad guy. It means relinquishing the premise that you could ever do better, ever actually help anyone. And that's not who Rusty is. He's a scum-bag, but he's a grown up. Even in a show with brilliant characters, old pros, and actual supermen, Rusty is the adult. And adults don't put on rubber masks and terrorize people for fun because that would be fucking silly." - [x]

Rusty spent his entire childhood being terrorized by guys in costumes, so he's now the cynical straight man pointing out how ridiculous this all is. He's the one normal person among the crazies.

Rusty is just too incompetent to ever be like his father. Jonas Venture is scum bag, but he's also a well-respected scientist and a world wide hero. Everyone in the scientific community thinks that Rusty is a joke, and his friends just barely put up with him

Jonas gets away with it because he perfectly fit what society's idea of a hyper masculine strong hero was, and no one questioned it or how he treated his son, whereas because balding, impotent, pathetic Rusty falls so short of toxic masculinity's standards he doesn't get the same respect or leeway that Jonas did. Jonas Venture continually got away with murder, and Rusty can't get away with anything.

He's a pill-popping, middle aged man who ran his father's business empire into the ground who continually gets laughed out of any scientific conference he tries to attend.

He can't be a hero. He can't be his father. He fall short of toxic masculinity's standards. He falls short of everyone's standards. The only way in which he's better than Jonas is that he's a much better father to both of his sons. His greatest triumphs as a character come from bonding with Hank and Dean. Jonas for all his accomplishments wasn't capable of bonding with Rusty because he didn't really care about anyone but himself. Jonas Venture is someone who perfectly fit society's standards of toxic masculinity, but he wasn't a person outside of that.

"Jonas Sr realized this too, but to him, it was a joke. To him it meant being above everyone. Rusty can't be above everyone so he has to meet them at eye level. Part of the bitterness of growing up is realizing that we're all just chidlren who got old. No one knows what they're doing and when you come to terms with that you can look down on people or give them the respect everyone deserves. How you treat children says a lot about how you treat people which in turn says a lot about you." [x]

Now returning to Endeavor we run into the same problem that we did earlier. This whole post is comparing Rusty and Endeavor because they are the protagonists, but Endeavor is far more like Jonas. He's someone who sees through the hero system and only cares about climbing to the top out of his own self interest. He knows it's a game, but he wants to win at the game.

Enji even sort of looks like Jonas.

They're both extremely bulky men at peak levels of physical fitness. Meanwhile Rusty is a balding, short and out of shape middle aged man.

In story Jonas is still widley beloved by the public and is constantly praised, while no one but Rusty is aware of his faults, but there's a reason for that. Jonas is someone who is basically allowed to do anything he wants, because the patriarchy means all of society is built around letting men like Jonas succeed.

Jonas is also someone who literally uses his position as a hero to manipulate people into getting what he wants and glorify himself.

Jonas can casually destroy people's lives, all while still believing he's the good guy because in his world being good guy is just a role to play and he plays it well. One of the best three episodes of the series is the Morphic Trilogy, the opening to season 7 where some of Jonas's past crimes are revealed.

In the past he tricked a married man into making a sex tape with him, and then when that man Don Carraldo aka the Blue Morpho turned out to regret that, he used the tape to constantly blackmail him into doing his dirty work. Killing people in secret while Jonas Venture remained Squeaky clean. After years of being forced to act as a mercenary for Jonas, the Blue Morpho died in a plane crash. Jonas then revived his best friend as a cyborg. He got bored of his new cyborg within a few months and reassigned him to babysit his son Rusty. The cyborg glitched and started to strangle Rusty and then he snaps his friends neck, and throws the cyborg away in the garbage.

Jonas can just completely destroy a man's life because he can. Because everyone around him enables him and no one is going to stop him. Because this is how people in power act when they're given too much power. Because might does not make right.

He's the gold standard. He's the ideal. Who would question him?

Enji occupies a similar position in the story, where he fits the role of a hero so well that even when his family abuse is revealed to the public basically every character and their mom is tripping over themselves to defend him.

Jonas is constantly praised in story years after his death and every bad thing he's done is swept under the rug, but that's because number one Jonas was a manipulative monster, and number two it shows toxic masculinity is a false ideal. This is how Jonas who everyone thinks is the ideal man's man, really acts. This is what he gets away with it, because the thing society glorifies are toxic and bad.

When people bend over backwards to defend Endeavor what does it say exactly? Because we're supposed to believe that Enji's willing to work for redemption even if people don't forgive him. We're not supposed to think Enji is a manipulative monster intentionally twisting people around his finger like Jonas was.

There are some ways Enji is like Jonas, especially in his backstory. He did use his money and influence to buy a woman. Rei was definitely not going to get the option of divorcing him if she actually wanted to leave.

However, in the present time we don't see Enji doing the kind of manipulation that Jonas does, because really he doesn't have to. Hawks does it for him. There is a character in the narrative named Takami Keigo / Hawks who is a little boy that Enji indirectly saved as a child by putting his father in prison. Because of this he is obsessed with making Endeavor live up to the hero he imagined him to be when he was young, and does everything he can to prop Enji up behind the scenes and make him look like that hero to the public.

Hawks is a whole other can of worms, but in effect what this means is there is someone manipulating public opinion in favor of Endeavor so he'll be able to shine in spite of the numerous skeletons in his closet, it's just not Endeavor himself. Hawks also takes away a lot of the active decisions on Endeavor's part. When Endeavor chooses to ignore Toya in the latter part of the story, it's not Endeavor's choice, he's just following Hawks plan to fight AFO. When Endeavor makes a public apology, Hawks is the one who wrote it for him.

The result is that Endeavor comes off as less of a Jonas, after all Hawks is the one manipulating his public image. On the other hand, he's also less good of a character because he's not making choices anymore. It'd be better If Enji was trying to manipulate the public into forgiving him in the wake of his scandal, because that'd be an active choice on his part. When a character makes a choice it tells us something about who that character is.

Horikoshi doesn't want us to think that Enji is the kind of selfish monster that Jonas is, but then who is he supposed to be?

The entire point of this post is to compare Enji to Rusty, but Enji's far too successful to be Rusty. Rusty is a failure in basically everything he set out to do in life. He's the butt of the series jokes. He's the victim in as many ways as he's the perpetrator. He had a lot of money and then wasted it all. None of his inventions are succesful. The scientific community thinks he's a joke, or they don't even know who he is. Women won't even go near him. No one ever defends him. At no point in the story does someone stop and say "Hey, Hank I know your dad's an asshole but he's really good at science so that makes it okay."

Rusty's such a failure at being a hero that he's forced to be a person. He's as equally narcissticic and toxic as his father, he treats women like objects for sex and comfort like his father does, he just doesn't get away with it. You can't point to some heroic feat of his that justifies his toxic behavior because he doesn't have any.

The story however can't stop singing Enji's praises for what a good hero he is. He's never forced to step out of the role of hero and be a person like Rusty is, and because of that the message of his character becomes confused.

Are we supposed to think he's a manipulative narcissist like Jonas is? Are we supposed to think he's an incredibly flawed individual trying to figure out how to be a father late into his kid's lives like Rusty?

Rusty has a clear role in his story, and what the author wants to say with Enji is unclear.

Everyone praises Jonas to death and no one can see him for the terrible purpose he is, because that's the point. Venture Bros is about failure. It's about the death of the space ag optimisme. It's about how much the boomer generation sucked.

From the Radiant is the Baboon Heart Commentary. Question: Did Jonas only keep Rusty around for the press and his cloning tech or did he actually care about him? Answer: . The show has a villain called the monarch, but if you watch all the show the villain is Jonas Venture Sr. He is a bad dad. What you need to realize is that in this kind of baby boomers gen x millenials kind of thing we are of the generation that had bad parents. For the good and the bad of it. The good was we were all left alone by our parents, and we had a freedom in our thought that I don't think the millennials have. Because we made the millennials, and we were like You know what Our parents suck and we're gonna be great parents." And they helicoptered them and they gave playdates. [...] I did hate the boomers, they were awful fathers they were terrible people they did horrible things to our world, and at the time they were celebrated as good people. They were a bunch of hippies and they failed and they did everything wrong that they wanted to fix [...]. You and I are lost people we observed our generation. We are fully aware of it. We observed our parents generation. My actual father was a classic distant father, very bright had a lot of work to do, but I observed that generation and the way that toxic masculinity was set in stone. Just branded onto their tombstone. Toxic masculinity. Our generation grew up wanting to be adults, childhood was something that was not examined. When people were growing up we wanted to be grown ups, we wanted to wear suits, it was something you guys don't have. It was a very different way to grow up. So we wanted to be like this generation that immediately we looked at and went oh my god they're monsters. So Jonas Venture Sr. is a monster.

Jonas is a commentary on how much the boomer generation is glorified, and how much they suck if you look at them critically at all. It's written by authors who were observing basically three different generations of parenting, the way boomers parented, the ways Gen-Xers did in response to that and now the way millennials act as they reach adulthood. Rusty can't escape Jonas' shadow because Toxic Masculinity is set in stone.

The role of Jonas in the story is to serve as an antagonist to Rusty and be the cause of Rusty's struggles, and also his impetus to change because Rusty doesn't want to be like his father. Rusty and Jonas both exist as characters to show the author's observations on parenting through the generations, and yeah it's a very american idea of parenting and family but it's you know... a cartoon made in america.

What is Endeavor's role of the story? If he's a criticism of toxic masculinity he's not criticized enough, because the story spends just as much time glorifying him his obsession with strength and power as it does criticizing him. There's no scenes like this for Rusty to show off how cool he is, or how determined. The story wants you to believe that there's something redeeming in the fact that Enji is always struggling to be the greatest, even though his obsession with being number one is what caused him to abuse his family in the first place

It's criticizing and praising Enji's obsession with power in the same breath, because My Hero Academia can't fully deconstruct toxic masculinity the way that Venture Bros can. It keeps trying to find something redeemable in Endeavor's toxic pursuit of power, but that's the whole point. Toxic masculinity isn't redeemable, because toxic masculinity is toxic. There's nothing wrong with masculinity itself, or the values people traditionally consider masculine but the kind of hyper-aggressive pursuit of physical strength Endeavor chases after is toxic masculinity. In Endeavor's mind men are warriors, protectors and providers and nothing else, and he never learns to be anything else either.

MHA would never treat Endeavor the way Vbros treats Rusty, constantly humiliating him or making him the butt of jokes. It would never make Enji out to be weak or pathetic the way Rusty is.

The central concept of Endeavor is struggle. His chosen hero nae "Endeavor" means to try hard to achieve something. His entire character is based around the concept of struggle. His central struggle is that he's a normal guy trying to compete with a superhero like all might, and everything he does he struggles with even if that struggle is pointless.

However, in the actual narrative itself he doesn't struggle. He definitely doesn't struggle the way Rusty does. Rusty's a lazy, incompetent, and entitled man sitting on a pile of money he didn't earn who thinks he's entitled to more who fails at all he sets out to achieve. Rusty never gets what he wants, and even when he does get what he wants like when his brother leaves him a billion dollar corporation in his will, he bankrupts that company in two seasons. Struggle means that the world isn't going to give you what you want and you keep trying anyway.

Endeavor's never subjected to nearly the same amount of narrative punishment that Rusty is. He's still well-respected. People defend him. He fights in all the major battles of the series and gets victories. No one's disgusted when they hear that he's a wife beater. We are told that he struggles, that the central concept of his character is struggle, but the narrative keeps handing him wins and cool moments.

As I've said above several times, Enji's never really forced to step out of the role as hero because he's not a failure the way Rusty is.

My Hero Academia hits some of the same notes as Venture Bros. It's criticizing apanese hegemonic masculinity, specifically that of salaryman masculinity and the way men in japan completely put their careers over their families. Read about it here in this convenient power point presentation. Enji is essentially an incredibly successful salaryman who has completely disappeared from his kid's lives in order to earn money and success and believes that he's still entitled to be a father because he's performed adequately in his role as earner of the household.

The story does show how giving too much power to the patriarch of a household can cause a house to fall apart. It shows that traditional family roles aren't all they're cracked up to be. Enji is assigned the role of father but he doesn't live up to it. The very rigid and traditional Todoroki Household crumbles because basically everyone fails to live up to their roles. The father isn't present. The mother isn't a good caretaker. The first born is defective. The youngest is given all the responsibility of the first born. No one is able to live up to those roles because maybe those rigid set in stone roles shouldn't exist in the first place.

Once again though, that's all in the backstory. Enji never changes from the Pro Hero Arc to his last showdown with Toya. The story never tells us anything about who Enji is as a person. Therefore, it also never comments on Enji's role as the patriarch. What is Horikoshi using Enji to say about patriarchy besides... it exists?

The story shows you how destructive the idea of patriarchy that Enji represents can be in the backstory, but because Enji doesn't do much for 90 percent of the story it never says anything about how Enji can learn to be a father or if it's even possible for him to be a father this late in the game. Because Enji's story isn't about fatherhood ultimately, it's about him becoming a less selfish hero.

Which might just be a problem with the whole of MHA. Venture Bros is about who the characters are outside of their identity as heroes and villains, but MHA is ultimately more about the optimism of heroes and what it means to be a hero than these characters personal lives.

Rusty is never going to be as sucessful as his father. He's always going to be mediocre, ad even if he's sympathetic he's still a scum bag. However, Rusty has one thing his father doesn't have which are his two sons who he made a deliberate decision to get closer to. Unlike a serial user of people Jonas, Rusty has the ability to actually love and care for people and he chooses to make those connections.

Endeavor never chooses to be a father. He didn't choose to go to Toya's side. He was too busy being a hero and fighting the big bad. As a result of that we never learn anything about Enji as a character outside of being a hero because he never chose to be anything other than a hero.

He also never failed. As I said the narrative kept handing him wins. You'd think never choosing to see Toya would mean he can't save Toya in the end, but in the end of the story Toya's just fine. There are no consequences to his choices. He's revealed to be an abuser to the public but he gets to keep being a hero. Enji never really fails in some big way that forces him to rfelect and change on his actions, so he just keeps doing the same thing from beginning to end.

Which is why Enji doesn't work as a character compared to Rusty. He doesn't fail. He's supposed to be a flawed protagonist struggling against himself, but he never really loses. He's too much like Jonas and not enough like Rusty.

"I think Jonas was something of a boy adventurer himself, and made his kid be it. But also put his kid on TV to cash in the residuals. He was just a shitty parent. When he went to bed he was just, he was moral, and he was fighting the good fight. When he woke up he ignored his son and made his son do terrible things. He voted for nixon like a good american. He was a winner and our show is not about winners. Our show is about losers and people we love." Jackson Publick. n

#venture bros #enji todoroki #mha meta #bnha meta #my hero academia #i put so much effort into this post only two people will read #rusty venture #doctor venture #doctor thaddeus venture #endeavor

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