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monkberries · 3 years

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They dealt with all of the above. Ringo was treated as a joke for pretty much everything, especially since this was the era of prog rock. His personal life was also tabloid fodder. George was derided as being a dour spiritual nut who was out of touch. He along w/ Ringo didn't get the respect he deserved as a guitarist bc his style wasn't in at the time & people knew little about his role in The Beatles. All credit went to Lennon/McCartney. 1/2

John had the benefit of having the rebel genius image, but even he became a source of ridicule with all the stunts he pulled with Yoko and the way his career declined after Imagine. He wasn't deified to the degree he was in the 80s. I'm not trying to say Paul never had a hard time, but the way this fandom talks as if he is the only one who faced extreme criticism or disrespect just tells me they haven't looked much into the other Beatles' lives. The man is more admired than most musicians. 2/2

(IDK if this screenshotted anons were from the same person or not, but I’ll just answer them in this one since it’s all the same subject.)

Here’s what I think is valid, as I see it: Paul fans are upset by the way his music was treated by the music press, especially in the first few years of the 70s, while the music of the other three were generally given at least the benefit of the doubt. They’re not upset about the tabloid gossip, the purely personal stuff – they are upset, specifically and with good reason, at the way Paul’s music was treated and the way the music world’s personal dislike of him seeped into their music reviews. I’m gonna focus in on 1970 through the end of 1974, since this is where a lot of the complaints spawn from, and things start to shift in a big way in 74. You didn’t ask but contemporary writings about their early solo music is something I’m fascinated by anyway and you turned the wind-up toy key in my back, so. Off I go. This is gonna be so, so long.

At different points in the decade, all of them were subject to a sullying of their personal reputations. That is where I do agree with you: all of them were subjected to that by the press, to varying degrees, at varying times, and for various reasons for each of them. That is just what happens to public figures the longer they are public figures. Tabloids mess with everyone no matter how beloved they are.

However, that’s not what I generally see Paul fans getting upset about. What I see is that they’re upset at the way the much more legitimate and widely respected music press approached Paul’s music and talent in general. It is widely received knowledge now that the critics treated Paul’s music differently than they did John’s and George’s and even Ringo’s; the trashing was not “equal.” They came at John and George with the assumption that their talent was real and ongoing outside of the Beatles, their genius unquestionable, their motives pure and well-intentioned and honest. Paul was not afforded these assumptions. Some examples to show what I mean, most of them found through wikipedia, rocksbackpages, or rollingstone.com.

John

Plastic Ono Band was Robert Christgau’s number one album of 1970 in The Village Voice. from Creem’s review: “John's record, of course, has been righteously raved over ever since its release, justifiably. It's interesting and even enlightening to see a man working out his trauma on black plastic but more than that, it's totally enthralling to see that Lennon has once again unified, to some degree, his life and his music into a truly whole statement.” From High Fidelity’s review: "a tremendously exciting listening experience, perhaps the best any Beatle has ever offered." In their Imagine review, Rolling Stone called POB “perfect.” A couple reviews in the mainstream were more mixed, put off a little by the rawness of it, but overall the rock world quickly grew to see this album as a work of genius.

Imagine was even more widely well-reviewed, despite a mixed review from Rolling Stone (John fell out with Jann Wenner around this time, curiously). Here’s a passage from rateyourmusic.com: “Imagine was actually one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year, aside from this tepid review in Rolling Stone. Indeed, much of the rock press seemed palpably relieved that the former Beatle hadn't gone completely off the deep end. ‘It's the best album of the year, and for me it's the best album he's done, with anything, or with anyone, at any time,’ Roy Hollingworth wrote in the 10/9/71 issue of Melody Maker. ‘The album is superb,’ Alan Smith agreed in the 9/11/71 issue of NME. ‘Beautiful. One step away from the chill of his recent total self-revelation, and yet a giant leap towards commerciality without compromise...I have no criticism at all.’”

Some Time in New York City was admittedly John’s nadir, and the press was vicious about it, both personally and musically, deeming the album egotistical, lacking in energy, and devoid of sincerity. However, many maintained a reverence for the genius that came before it and hopeful encouragement for the future. Rolling Stone said that “The Lennons should be commended for their daring;” Creem said it wasn’t half bad; and even though NME’s article was scathing, it ended with a plea for John to return to form, saying, “Don't rely on cant and rigidity. Don't alienate. Stimulate. You know, like you used to.”

Mind Games, though reviews were mixed, fared far better in comparison. Again, there is a hopeful tone to the reviews, a sureness that John can do better. From Rolling Stone talks about the music being a return to POB form, but the writing is his worst yet; however, Landau qualifies this by saying the lyrics aren’t “offensive, per se, just misguided... [John Lennon’s admirers] might even be able to withstand something more challenging” and then praises John’s voice, his production, and a few individual songs. In Melody Maker, Ray Coleman says, “if you warm to the rasping voice of Lennon and, like me, regard him as the true fulcrum of much of what came from his old group, then like any new Lennon album, it will be enjoyable and even important.” Christgau is more middling but also says, “Still, the single works, and let's hope he keeps right on stepping.”

Walls and Bridges seems confusing to reviewers in retrospect. They couldn’t seem to come to a consensus on it. The musicianship was widely praised, for the most part, though Rolling Stone criticized the first side on this front; reviewers alternately said it was “the latest chapter in John Lennon’s Identity Crisis” (Creem) and “truly a superb album by any standards” (Melody Maker). Throughout the Rolling Stone review, the author is able to thoroughly critique the songs, for better or worse, with a neutral affect and without resorting to insulting John personally. He ends the review on a positive note: “When one accepts one’s childhood, one’s parenthood and the impermanence which lies between, one can begin to slog along. When John slogs, he makes progress.” Again, even though the reviews aren’t all positive, we can see, especially and most importantly in the most influential rock magazine of the time, the acknowledgment of his talent, a sense of excitement for what John will do next, and a belief that his work is authentic and honest.

George

All Things Must Pass, I mean. Apart from a couple of outliers like Christgau in The Village Voice (he called it “overblown fatuity”), it was incredibly, almost universally beloved by the music press when it came out. There was quite a bit of surprise that such a talent had been under everyone’s noses all this time, but I don’t think anon is quite correct that all the credit for the Beatles went to Lennon/McCartney. For example, Ben Gerson in Rolling Stone recognized George’s talent within the Beatles like this: “Up until now, George has been perhaps the premier studio musician among rock band guitarists. From the electronic whine which began “I Feel Fine” to the break in “Hard Day’s Night” to the crazed, sitar-influenced burst on “Taxman,” George exhibited an avant-garde imagination and a technical flawlessness, as well as the ability to stay within the bounds of a song, which has remained unparalleled.” In Melody Maker, the feeling of journalists was summed up thusly: hearing the album was “the rock equivalent of the shock felt by pre-war moviegoers when Garbo first opened her mouth in a talkie: Garbo talks! – Harrison is free!" The personal nature and honesty of the lyrics were praised as well; Time described it as an “expressive, classically executed personal statement.” Ben Gerson did call his proselytizing offensive, but in the next sentence says that George redeems himself from that with the personal plea in Hear Me Lord.

Concert for Bangla Desh - again, some cynicism from Christgau in The Village Voice (must have woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day) and of course tax issues dogged it later, but overall, for the rock press at the time, this was a crowning achievement that George pulled off. He was praised all over the press, countercultural and mainstream, for his live musical talent, the group of musicians that joined him, the lack of political motivation, the sincerity and goodwill, and George’s ability to bring back "a brief incandescent revival of all that was best about the Sixties" (Rolling Stone). To this day he is credited with creating the model for future charity concerts.

Living in the Material World - Nothing could have topped the one-two punch of ATMP and the Concert for Bangla Desh, but honestly, LITMW came pretty close for some journalists. Rolling Stone again praised George’s honesty and authenticity: “ Despite the occasional use of “psychedelic puns,” Harrison’s lyrics are so guileless they convey an extraordinary sincerity that transcends questions of craftsmanship. Similarly, the devotions we are called upon to share with Harrison, though they communicate no specific, private torment, do have the authenticity of overheard prayers and are therefore sacred.” Melody Maker said, "Harrison has always struck me before as simply a writer of very classy pop songs; now he stands as something more than an entertainer. Now he's being honest." The pushback against his pious attitude and lyrics picked up some steam with this album, particularly with Christgau (again) and Tony Tyler of NME, who called it “so damn holy I could scream.” However, it was far from the consensus opinion at the time, and with the biggest rock magazine in the world at your back, you can withstand quite a bit.

Dark Horse, oof. That poor man. It did get some positivity in Billboard and Melody Maker, but my god, the reviews for this album and its subsequent tour were so cruel. I suspect when these anon(s) talk about the others being treated terribly by the press as well, this, along with John’s STINYC, is one of the examples they would give, and they’re not wrong about that. This was the point where George’s piety and what they perceived as a sanctimonious attitude finally started really getting to everyone, and the album plus the tour was the perfect opportunity to dogpile on him. I guess it was to be expected; no one can ride that high forever, and the press loves to knock people over and kick them while they’re down. Rolling Stone called it “disastrous,” “shoddy,” and called his guitar work “rudimentary,” eventually declaring that George had “never been a great artist.” This from the same magazine that was practically worshipping at his feet the year before. Yowch.

Ringo

Sentimental Journey - The less that’s said about this album, the better.

Beaucoups of Blues was actually quite well-received. No one called him a genius for it, and it wasn’t a serious personal record and therefore wasn’t treated that way, but journalists seemed uniquely able to let themselves enjoy this record despite the serious/political/personal tone of most musicians at the time. Melody Maker believed Ringo had "conviction and charm" and that because of that, the album stripped away the serious “hip posturing” and let you just enjoy the music on its own terms. The Village Voice said that Ringo was “good at making himself felt.” Although Rolling Stone’s tone was a bit more cruel than other magazines (there was a crack somewhere in there that Ringo wasn’t as smart as John), it also called him lovable and the record “a real winner” where the songs “sound terrific.”

Ringo was a total smash and I think people forget this. It’s remembered only because it’s an album that was worked on by all four Beatles, but actually, the critics fuckin loved it. Ringo was praised in Rolling Stone for his unpretentiousness, sensibility, and essentially collaborative nature: “Ringo was always the figure of conciliation within the Beatles, undoubtedly the most genial, conceivably the most sensible, and the one with the smallest musical axe to grind. His very lapses bespoke the esteem in which the others held him; had they not liked him so much, those perfectionists would never have allowed him to sing. Perhaps because as the drummer he stood outside the process of creation, he had the best perspective from which to see the Beatles as a unity. Ringo has never had any pretense of self-sufficiency. Once he had gotten his special projects out of the way (projects for which John, Paul and George's talents would have been unsuited anyway) Ringo was ready to call upon the three most obvious people to assist him with writing, singing and playing. As Starr's first "pop album," Ringo signifies a homecoming, not just of family, but in musical style as well.”

Goodnight Vienna was kind of a minor album for Ringo, but still, reviews were pretty good. Rolling Stone praised his “unalloyed sincerity which is his trademark and trump card.” Yet again, we see the theme of authenticity popping up in these reviews - if you are perceived as authentic, honest, and sincere, that takes you a long way with music reviewers in this time period, and Ringo was nothing if not wholly, completely himself.

Paul

McCartney - One of the main complaints of Paul fans is that Jann Wenner forced Langdon Winner, the author of the review for this album in Rolling Stone, to rewrite his article and put a more negative spin on it. The result is that Winner praised most of the music but totally undermined his own praise by questioning the authenticity of the tone and deriding the press release that came with the album as much as he praised the music. He ends the article like this: “I like McCartney very much. But I remember that the people of Troy also liked that wooden horse they wheeled through their gates until they discovered that it was hollow inside and full of hostile warriors.” This was a huge blow at a time when personal authenticity and substance were considered paramount. Melody Maker also questioned the legitimacy of his genius, saying “With this record, [McCartney's] debt to George Martin becomes increasingly clear.” Most other reviews weren’t any better.

Ram, I mean, Jesus Christ the reviews for this. It’s a widely respected album now, even made the RS top 500 albums of all time list last year, but at the time people were still so angry with Paul for supposedly breaking up the Beatles that they were still taking it out on his music a year later (imo). Landau in Rolling Stone called it “emotionally vacuous” and said it lacked conviction, saying also that it was “so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can’t even [hate it]; it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate.” NME called it “the worst thing Paul McCartney has ever done.” Threaded through these reviews is a belief that the songs are devoid of meaning and that Paul’s happy domestic front is just a frustrating lie; Christgau in The Village Voice said he was “infuriated by the McCartneys' modern young-marrieds image” - infuriated because he clearly doesn’t believe it, rendering Paul dishonest and his music inauthentic. Once again journalists are unable to review Paul’s music without sniping about him as a person.

Wild Life - Though the situation remains largely the same - reviewers refuse to take him seriously, believe anything he says, or treat his musical talent as anything but vacuous fluff - the reviews aren’t quite as bad as they were for Ram and a bit of positivity begins to stir. It’s evident especially in the Rolling Stone review, where Mendelsohn wonders if Paul is making crappy fluff on purpose to piss John off because it will sell just as well anyway. It’s not much, and on top of the fairly strong criticism there is almost no hope for future Paul releases: “My own conviction is that we'd be foolish to expect anything much more earth-shaking than Wild Life out of McCartney for a good long while... In the meantime the reader is advised to either develop a fondness for vacuous but unpretentious pop music or look elsewhere for musical pleasure.” But it’s something.

Red Rose Speedway Paul continues to be lambasted by a lot of the press on this album for being lightweight and having no meaning behind his songs (at this point it’s just repetitive to quote the articles, just trust me that they say basically the same thing they were saying for the past three albums too), BUT I think a nuance that gets forgotten in all of this is that Rolling Stone gave it kind of a decent review. It seems like they finally quit gatekeeping and realized that songs don’t need to have some deep personal meaning to be good. Kaye is still not very nice about Paul’s lyrics but he recognizes that he doesn’t have to take Paul’s music on the same terms as he takes John and George. Paul’s music is less personal, but that doesn’t make it unworthy. He calls it “pleasant, accessible without concentration” and praises Paul’s voice and arranging skills. It feels like for this album, Rolling Stone took the stick out of its own ass when it came to Paul and finally relaxed enough to receive Paul’s music on his terms rather than theirs. Which, imo, primed the rock world for...

Band on the Run, Paul’s comeback. Even though Christgau in The Village Voice remained unconvinced (he called it “a pleasant piece of hackwork”), almost everyone else adored it. It seems weird to us now, but the general sentiment seemed to be that people were surprised by how good this album was. NME said, “The ex-Beatle least likely to re-establish his credibility and lead the field has pulled it off with a positive master-stroke”; and although Landau’s review in Rolling Stone overflowed with praise, he also said, “I'm surprised I like Band on the Run so much more than McCartney's other solo albums because, superficially, it doesn't seem so different from them.”

I hope I’ve been able to demonstrate a general trajectory with the musical reputation of each Beatle here. John starts off on two incredible high points, crashes and burns, and then works his way back up. He DEFINITELY missed with STINYC, but even when he followed it up with Mind Games, there was still a hopeful tone to the reviews, sort of like, “Ah, well, the last two weren’t great but we’re still looking forward to what John will give us next.” Until the Dark Horse tour/album, which did sour the press on poor George, the music press adored him. It was hit after hit with him. He could not miss. Three high points, one after the other, then a monumental crash. Ringo seems to stay fairly high, even if the records aren’t serious records. All three of them start out incredibly well, and the music press was able and willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Paul was given none of that. Perhaps because he was out of step with the attitudes about music at the time, perhaps because journalists hated him for breaking up the Beatles, perhaps because they believed John when he painted Paul as “establishment,” perhaps a combination - whatever their issue was, Paul was given no benefit of the doubt to start with, no faith in his genius, and no belief in his authenticity. He was just a hack to the music press for the first few years of the 70s; he started at the bottom and was forced to work his way up, unlike the other three. It started, imo, when Wenner forced the journalist who wrote the McCartney review in RS to rewrite the article, and it spiraled from there. He was seen as hollow and uncool, as one of the anons said, “straight” in the parlance of the time - straight meaning “establishment.” This is kind of where I do start to roll my eyes a little bit at stans, when they get upset at people calling him “establishment” and trying to prove that actually he was so anti-establishment that people couldn’t handle it or whatever, without trying to understand what the word “anti-establishment” meant at the time. But there are also really substantive arguments you can make that say Paul’s music was not taken seriously because of a personal grudge against him.

I’m not saying that all of them didn’t have run-ins with the music press. I’m saying there is nuance here that I don’t think these anons are allowing for in the first few years of that decade. They came at George and John and Ringo with a positive, or at least neutral, slant most of the time. They came at Paul with a negative one. Case in point are the reviews of Band on the Run that were surprised at how good it was. That stuff gets people’s hackles up. The others didn’t have positive reviews rewritten to be more negative. The others didn’t have albums savaged that are now on the Rolling Stone top 500 albums of all time list. I do agree that John, at least, and George post Dark Horse, had a harder time with the music press than people generally remember or care to think about – deification is retroactive, I guess, and as Paul fans we should definitely recognize that Paul wasn’t the only one who went through a rough time with the press. But I do think Paul’s situation was made uniquely and unjustifiably difficult for those first few years.

I mean, at the same time, I cannot stress enough how much this did not affect his bottom line. Despite the horrible reviews, Ram still made a ton of money, McCartney made a ton of money, Band on the Run and Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway all made a ton of money. He had a fanbase, a huge one, that followed him loyally and faithfully through the early 70s as he was getting savaged by the press, and through the middle and late 70s when he was touring. At some point, you have to step back and go, wait. Why does any of this matter? This was 50 years ago. He was a multi-millionaire then and is a billionaire now. And you are right; whenever people over-generalize and try to make the case that Paul was always badly reviewed and the others were press darlings, I tend to get annoyed because they’re totally missing the actually interesting nuances of the situation (that can be easily found online! I found most of the music reviews through snippets on Wikipedia!) In conclusion, I guess my point is that both “Paul was vilified while everyone else wasn’t” and “everyone was equally vilified” paint the events of the early 70s with brushes that are too broad and miss the nuance that was evident in the way the press interacted with their music.

#Anonymous #macca #johnny #geo #ritchie #fab four #sorry this isn't so much a response to anon's points as it is me going off on research tangents and accidentally writing a masters thesis #reading old rolling stone album reviews is such an unexpected pleasure i recommend it

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littlepanduh-writes-365 · 4 years

Text

Day 43

Title: “Nothing”

Description: A study session turns out to be something more.

Features: Michaeng (Twice)

Word Count: 1,159

Tags: Fluff | College AU

It started off as a study session. Chaeyoung and Mina are taking a music history class. They usually sit next to each other, except recently when Mina had been oversleeping the class. She asked to just borrow her notes, but Chaeyoung said she needed to explain some background things considering how many classes Mina missed. Now, they were sitting together in Mina’s apartment. Mina copied notes while Chaeyoung gave an abridged synopsis of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Mina thought the class was boring and thought only the reading was necessary (which is why she thought it was okay to skip lecture), but she really appreciated Chaeyoung’s eccentric storytelling.

“You should consider trying out for theatre. Your delivery is very intriguing.” She smiles and then looks back down to her notebook to copy the notes.

Chaeyoung was taken slightly aback. Was it the compliment or Mina’s smile?

“Thanks,” she simply says. She debates whether she should continue telling the story about Don Juan and Leprello comparing their body counts. Mina seems to still be writing things down and she didn’t want to awkwardly watch her, so she decided to open up a little bit. “I used to do ballet. I didn’t stay long enough to be good at it, but I liked the theatrical aspect to it.”

Mina looks up for a quick second to show her attentiveness. “That’s cool. I used to do ballet for like 10 years before I moved here.” She looks back down to write down more notes. Chaeyoung doesn’t know this, but Mina writes “ballet” in the margin next to “Don Juan was about to cancel Leprello until the Lep. exposed him with receipts.”

It seemed that Mina was still catching up on taking notes, so Chaeyoung carried the conversation. “Ten years? How do you not get sick of it?”

This time, Mina didn’t look up. She chuckled as she continued writing down things. “When you like something that much, it just sticks with you.”

Chaeyoung crosses her arms and slouches into the chair. “I wonder what that feels like. I used to take art classes and I joined a basketball team, but there was always something that made me dislike it enough to quit.”

Mina was finally done catching up; her pencil was sitting on her notebook, instead of her hand. Chaeyoung should’ve continued Don Juans’ story, but was more interested in getting to know about the girl in front of her. Why did she like ballet so much? Does she still dance? Why is she studying in Korea? Why is she taking this class?

What was supposed to be a one-hour, study session evolved into a 3.5-hour long study date. Chaeyoung managed to catch Mina up from the 3 lectures she missed, but she also learned about Mina’s pet dog and her favorite ride at amusement parks and what she does in her spare time. They made plans to eat Thai food some time while Chaeyoung tells her story about being a k-pop trainee before giving that up and going back to school.

In the beginning, conversation was just a time-killer, something to fill in the gaps. Now, there weren’t enough gaps. Even though Chaeyoung made Mozart and Don Giovanni’s life sound interesting, Mina wanted to know more about Chaeyoung herself.

Chaeyoung didn’t expect this. If she were being completely honest, the reason why Chaeyoung agreed to meet with Mina was because her roommate kicked her out for whatever reason. At this point, her roommate was probably done with whatever (or whoever) she was doing. Chaeyoung could probably go back home now. She could be writing that paper that’s due tomorrow night. She could be studying for another class.

That didn’t stop Chaeyoung when Mina asked if she wanted to play some Mario Kart, one of Mina’s pastimes. Chaeyoung doesn’t really play video games, but there was a sparkle in Mina’s eyes that convinced her to pick up the Switch controller and just go with it.

Mina was surprisingly very competitive. She was very verbal, shocking Chaeyoung with expletives in Japanese and English. Chaeyoung doesn’t know if it was beginner’s luck or if Mina is going easy on her, but they were neck and neck the entire time.

This is definitely spontaneous and unconventional. Chaeyoung could tell she was falling. She wants to hear Mina’s excited screams when she wins first place. She wants to hear Mina’s laugh as she gets Chaeyoung with a red shell, bringing her back to first place. She wants to keep seeing that smile on her face.

Chaeyoung was definitely greedy with time. The one-hour study session had now turned into a 5-hour long date. She should really go home. She has things to do. Mina probably has things to do, too.

“Hey,” Chaeyoung turns to the older woman. They lock eyes and as corny as it sounds, it really does feel like the world around them stopped. “This was really fun.” In retrospect, they lost a rather generous amount of time and both of them were definitely going to make up for it with a lack of sleep.

It's a nice feeling, how they don’t regret it.

Mina tries to pretend something in her stomach isn’t bubbling up. She can’t hide the blush on her cheek, though. She smiles and let’s out an accidental giggle. “Yeah, it was.”

Chaeyoung doesn’t understand this feeling of how their bodies seem magnetized to each other, but she knows she really shouldn’t stay any longer. Another round of Mario Kart would result in more screaming and Mina’s neighbors are probably already very upset considering it’s past midnight.

She doesn’t want to leave, but she knows she has to. It’s okay. There’s always a next time.

Next time.

The idea makes her smile.

Not being able to read her mind yet, Mina takes attention to the spontaneous grin. It makes her heart flutter. Was it because the mystery behind it excited her or because she realizes she likes the younger woman’s smile?

The girl in front of her doesn’t say anything, so she asks, “What?”

Mina catches Chaeyoung’s eyes drop down and her breath hitches. The tension was getting to her.

“What are you doing tomorrow,” Chaeyoung asks?

The older one tries to think of her schedule. It was a Friday. She can’t really remember if she was going to attend Momo’s dance class or grab lunch with Sana.

She can’t really remember. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

“Nothing,” she simply replies. (She doesn’t notice this, but she says this in a rather sing-songy tone.)

Chaeyoung chuckles, wondering if Mina forgot they had their music history class and planned on skipping again. Chaeyoung doesn’t mind though. Maybe they’d have another one of these “study sessions” again. Mina feels silly, but she can’t feel embarrassed when Chaeyoung looks at her like that: scrunched eyes, crooked smile, and twinkling eyes.

“Well,” Chaeyoung looks down and grabs her hand. “Can I do ‘nothing’ with you tomorrow?”

Socials: Twitter | Curious Cat

#it was so weird #i kinda just woke up and thought about this #3 hours later this came out #i feel like im in a flirty mood lol #this is such a specific mood but i really want to be at a party rn LOL #but yeah stay inside #we need to get over this stupid virus before we can do house parties again #or dating #365 Challenge #littlepanduh #michaeng #twice #mina #chaeyoung #twice fanfiction #michaeng fanfiction

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justathrowaway2021 · 3 years

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Life is crazy.

It is either the dullest of dulls, with it’s days toned in monochrome, or it is a series of ups and downs so crazy that people rightly call it a rollercoaster. What I, and I assume most people as well, would like is to live a balance of the two; however, living that carefree American dream feels to be a thing of the past. This place (technically a blog I guess?) is a place for me to get stuff out into writing. To shout into a void that is completely unattached to my real life and no one knows exists. No one will probably read this and that’s fine. This is for me. As the name implies this is just a throwaway account, so who knows how long it will last? Hopefully awhile.

I was born in 1990, not a particularly remarkable year from my understanding, so I guess that classifies me a millenial? I never kept up with the whole generation thing. Looking back now I feel I was kind of lucky. I debuted in this act called life before there were a hundred different devices vying for the right to entertain me. I wouldn’t have a cellphone until I started working as a teenager and it would be years after that till the first iPhone came out. So the majority of my younger life was relatively calm and I spent it like I guess most kids at that time did. G.I. Joes, Hot Wheels and Legos. My parents were conservative religious folk and so, even from my earliest recallings, Sunday and Wednesday services were a habitual, weekly occurrence. It was at this church (and I’ve only ever been to the one at the time of this writing) that I met the people I would call friends and family for the majority of my life. Things were quite normal and good I guess, to be honest I don’t really remember much from before I was 11. I’m guessing it was all perfectly mundane occurrences from my point of view, dotted with the relatively normal ups and downs of a kids life. I was homeschooled so I was never introduced to the craziness that I’ve always assumed public schools is. We lived in a farmhouse out in the country for the beginning of my childhood and I have vague memories of life there. Memories of a small crick on the border of out property; an old, dilapidated house next door and the bitter cold the house couldn’t seem to keep out in the winter. The one thing I very clearly remember is perhaps the most terrifying memory. Being an old farmhouse it was the perfect place for critters and bugs to nest, with a plethora of chinks and cracks in it to suit just such nesting. I remember my room, a blue room I recall, was chosen by bees to be a suitable habitat for a nest. Specifically, I think there were yellow jackets or maybe bumblebees living in the windowsill. Needless to say, my days were rarely spent in my room for fear of them and my nights tormented by nightmares of humming and buzzing. I still have an extreme disliking for any kind of humming or buzzing insect to this day, but at least I’ve managed to tone down the knee jerk reactions when I hear them. There are a few other vague memories at that farmhouse floating around the edges of my memories. A garden snake that used to live under the porch. Racing an aunt back down the long driveway to see who’d get to play the Nintendo (spoilers I lost). Most others are hazy, more like feelings than actual memories in retrospect. Anyways, most of it I don’t remember so I assume it was fairly normal. We lived at the bottom of a long hill, surrounded by my mom’s family who lined the road in both directions, until the fall of 1997. Then we moved several hours north to a house that I remember much better and the years that I lived in it are more clearly distinct. That, unfortunately, will have to wait till next week though. I hadn’t planned on reminiscing on this post, nor on going through my life story but here we are so we’ll go with it. There will be plenty of time for the shouting into the void I originally created this for. Until next time, farewell.

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yaboylevi · 4 years

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What about this chapter did you not like? love your art btw ❤️

Thanks!

Sorry for the wait, I wanted to read the official chapter and wait for a bit to see if my feelings changed (spoiler: they didn't).

It would be way faster to list the few things I enjoyed but alas.

VERY negative opinions under the cut. Seriously, if you liked the chapter, don't read this, I don't want to spoil your fun or upset you. I didn't bother to write this in a respectful tone, it's not an analysis, it's just me venting. That being said, if you guys read this ignoring my warning and get upset, it'll be your fault and responsibility, yeah.

The Annie's father stuff was okay, though I hope it's gonna be explained why he was the only one in Liberio running against the flow of the screaming crowd.

Then we get Reiner being pathetic once again, I am so tired of this. What's his purpose in the story aside from killing people, being a nuisance and or dead weight to others and feeling sorry for himself? I would've appreciated if he had had some introspection on how his rushed plan was partially the cause for Porco's death and Falco's transformation (and all the other deaths bc Zeke would've never screamed in Shiganshina if Reiner hadn't pushed for another attack there). But anyway if he'd had introspection, it would've been about self-pity and NEVER growth because he seems unable to have that, so I would've disliked it anyway.

If I wasn't already rolling my eyes this hard at Reiner, then I would've started at Gabi. She's all over the place and I guess it's understandable since she is a kid and also deeply shocked and in pain. I understand it. But I don't like how Isayama made her go from despair, to murder instinct, to calm and collected in 2 pages. It's just ???? Then we have the Eren parallel and I groaned out loud. Whatever its meaning is. It's just forced.

One of the things I hated this chapter for and that I'm becoming so annoyed at in general lately, is that EVERYTHING parallels something that has already happened, and I don't understand if Isayama thinks he's being smart or if it has some deeper meaning like "oh see, history repeats itself!! wow!! a concept that is not being repeated ad nauseam in the series, not at all!! /s". I don't need it to be shoved into my face.

Idk. Also Reiner, of course, being safe in a house amongst titan territory...of...course...

Then the 104th scene. Ugh. Jean's delusion is so annoying. One moment he's rational, the other is like "muuuuu ereh is doing this for us!!! we couldn't do anything!!!", then he's rational again. Maybe if they had paid attention to Eren, and didn't only take into consideration stupid ideas that would've never worked for 4 years, maaaybe yeah, this wouldn't be happening. Who knows. I'm just tired of the 104th whining about their situation. I understand where they're coming from, their feelings, etc, I understand it's a crazy and emotional situation and all, but we already have SO MANY CHAPTERS about it, it's time to move on at least with the plot. It's just so pathetic and annoying. It makes me angry how he's basically trying to avoid responsibility or rationalize genocide like all the Eren goat stans in the fandom. I hate this mentality so much. "if they disappear, so will all the hatred! Do we really have to stop him?" JESUS CHRIST JEAN..............yikes

And then of course they (and Isayama) had to ruin chapter 108.

Then Jean also had the guts to say they should kill a kid so they can revive a commander, just bc he's too scared to take the reins of the situation. Again, I understand the struggle, it's the same as Hange afterall, it's just very, very ugly how he didn't even waver. Connie's been acting irrational, and he's been swept up by his anger for a while now, so I understand his development. Plus I find it more relatable to wanting to make a big sacrifice for someone you love, rather than someone you (think you) need. But Jean???? wtf. He doesn't even think back on the sin he was willing to commit, he isn't ashamed.

Armin as well doesn't even care that it's a kid they're talking about, he's only strategizing. And here's another annoying point: he's able to make these calculations now but when it comes to Eren his brain freezes and he becomes a delusional kid. Where were his brains when he had to think up of ways to negotiate with the world? Anyway, I get it, it's because Eren's his childhood friend and family. I am just so tired of seeing this again and again, and again. We've been stuck on this for over a year... Nothing has changed, they're just dejectedly going back and forth on their opinions and feelings. Really goes to show that Eren was the real heart of their group...

Connie flying away from the battlefield, effectively splitting again the povs we need to follow is...big yikes.

Parallel to Trost, parallel to Serumbowl. Yeah wow so interesting.

Nile dying so quick like that was also underwhelming. And it was unnecessarily cruel, imo, that as a titan he tried to kill children when as a person he was so sweet with kids (except with Eren, of course...).

The Gabi-Sasha parallel left me a bit confused. On the one hand, I don't like the killer being paralleled to the murdered. But on the other hand, I understand why that is [/inserts meta that i don't care about writing]. The Kaya-Gabi moments were also cute + Nicolo's little speech was nice, though a bit awkward, imo. I bitterly laughed at Gabi finally admitting that she mindlessly killed people just to be praised. At least she can better herself from now on! If only her cousin could take his self-pity and do something to change himself with it, but no, he just wants to change others or run away (and this is why i don't like reiner anymore).

Shadis saving these ungrateful kids was pretty cool.

I felt bad for Yelena, I want to see more of her (and maybe Mikasa+Louise), but instead, we have Jean vs Floch angst and I'm already sleeping, because I care so little about both of them.

Isayama painting Jean as a cool leader is just embarrassing when moments before he was pathetically whining and trying to kill a child (to which there was no setup, especially comparing it to the setup for Connie's plot thread. The last we saw of Jean with a kid was him wondering if he hesitated in killing the Cart because of Falco 15 chapters ago...and that was a compelling doubt but I guess he hadn't hesitated at the time, after all lol). The pages dedicated to the killing of the titans were boring, occupying space for nothing imo. Glossing over them would've sufficed, there could've just been the Pixis stuff, and it would've been fine. Which, btw, made me laugh a little in retrospect, because Armin is once again involved in the death of a Commander. Oh well.

I also didn't like that mini-flashback with Eren&Pixis. I guess Isayama wants to ruin every single nice moment Eren had with other people, because Eren is soooo so so bad now uwu, for no good reason, and it's only his fault right? people were nice to him and look at how he repaid them uwu. Big yikes for me.

I expected more from that Louise panel because it made me go [EYES EMOJI], but I guess I'll have to wait.

It's also unbelievable that NO ONE IN THE WHOLE STORY has thought of stopping Floch, when last time they arrested him, so technically why would they even leave him running around NOW? It's beyond me. Do they have a brain?

As for the basement conversation with Gabi, I hope that "I won't give up on Falco" panel + Armin looking at Gabi thoughtfully will start a "We can't give up on Eren" mindset for the 104th, but I doubt it's gonna be handled in a non-pathetic way, considering how's been done as of late.

Gabi screaming to talk to Eren was also very embarrassing from a reader pov (well, my pov). Because she was RIGHT THERE when EMA talked last time, and she should know that would most likely not work (I guess she's talking out of desperation but still...ppl be like "yeah!! they should talk to ErEn!1 why didn't they think of it!?!?!" and I mean it's probably gonna come down to that if the final audio is of any indication...I just find the presentation of this concept awkward and forced).

I really disliked most of Gabi's part, even though she's a character I have learned to enjoy. I guess what shined through in this chapter is exactly what I don't like about how Isayama uses Gabi's character: it seems like she's just there as a fast-paced mini representation of the story themes, so she's just an instrument to the story. Sometimes I feel like she's a real character, sometimes I feel she's just a tool for the story and the themes.

Armin's reaction to hearing about Annie is...I don't know. aruani has been one of my first ships and I used to be obsessed, but this is just awkward and forced, just like the previous aruani scene that made me angry at Armin. I don't even understand if Armin's shocked, scared or happy. All of these don't make sense to me, because I have no clue what he even expects from her.

Annie's release from the crystal happened in an unexpected way which i appreciated, though I would've liked it more if she had decided to get out on her own. But it depends on if she was stuck in there or if she was still willingly escaping from reality. If she was stuck, I will love this a lot more, because basically Eren set her free.

Also, Eren's radio podcast was longer I guess ("Eren said he would undo all the hardening"), and I wonder why we couldn't hear it all. Sigh.

In general, the "theme thread" of the chapter (adults & kids) felt really pushed in our face. I appreciate when things are a bit more subtle, this just came off as...boring, because every scene made me go "well, of fucking course this scene would end like this...". The only tense moment was the Connie part, let's be real.

And yeah, my perception may be also partially because I am so tired of no Eren pov and "eren is the evil, evil villain" rhetoric, so maybe I will appreciate this chapter more once we get his pov at the end of the story (bc i have no illusions left that this won't happen anytime before the finishing line). For now, I'm just frustrated because I didn't care about ANY of the things that went down in this chapter. Like, okay, let's move on, ffs.

Everything felt forced and contrived, like, Isayama must know that nobody cares about this stuff that much and everyone would prefer to see literally anything else amongst Eren, Historia, Levi&Hange, the Colossals. Hell, imagine if this chapter didn't have Annie at the end. That was the only thing that made this chapter barely worth the read for me. I hope the next one will at least follow Connie and Annie, if I can't get any of the other things that interest me.

#salt and character hate I'm so sorry hhhh #don't read if you get v upset @ ppl's opinions #and if you enjoyed the chapter #really #if you liked the chapter don't read this #if you read this and come cry in my ask box or replies I'll block you #if you read this and feel the need to rant on your blog (or your discord chat lol) about me you're just a loser bc I warned you #dl #shingeki asks #Anonymous

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bookandcover · 4 years

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[Another late-breaking update...] What a fun read! If you’re looking for a light-hearted and angsty romance, this novel has it all! I loved the pairing of a modern college kid with a stiff-upper-lipped British monarch. It feels like a lot of wish fulfillment is happening in this book, as these two young men navigate their steamy, secretive relationship with (unrealistic?) emotional maturity. But, if you’re allowing wish fulfillment, you’ve got to GO for it (and this novel certainly does!)

Both Alex and Henry are designed to be romantic figures. Alex, as our protagonist, is grittier, easier to identify with. While smart and determined, he’s also unsure of his next steps (law school? a career in politics?) and waffles in the way someone who has often put others first does when they have to strike out on their own. He’s silly and loves to have fun, in the over-the-top way that only a self-indulgent young adult can, but his partying and his spitfire attitude is paired with the social awareness that seems to pervasively mark Gen Z teens who grew up on the internet. Alex faces a real identity crisis--figuring out that he’s bisexual, falling in love with someone he shouldn’t desire (not because he’s a man, but because he’s a closeted royal)--with a lot of grace and humor. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and yet he has the kind of unflappable confidence I associate with American boys who go to good colleges, study while avoiding the typecasting of “nerd,” and wear polo shirts. I liked Alex’s freshness as a protagonist in the romance genre. In many ways, he resembles the self-sufficient, bombshell (but business woman) heroines of heterosexual chick flicks, but his insecurities run deeper, his complex relationships with his parents and his strange dependency on Senator Rafael Luna, establish him as both more vulnerable and more genuinely rowdy than I’d expected. Alex’s sister June seems perhaps better suited to this archetypal “confident woman who just hasn’t met the perfect man for her” role. June was a character who I just never got onboard with in this book...Alex is surrounded by no-nonsense, powerful women, yet a lot of them remain two-dimensional (in my opinion, and really my only complaint), defined by their roles/surface-perceptions and not a lot of depth. Nora was definitely my favorite female character--with her critical role in revealing that hackers were hired by Richards to expose Alex and Henry’s relationship, and her willingness to retreat into full “nerd-dom” to do so.

Henry--in contrast to Alex’s at times annoying, but very realistic, college kid with a chip-on-his-shoulder characterization--is the kind of romantic figure you’d expect to encounter in a heterosexual rom com. He’s the mysterious British Royal, formal and superior, that fangirls long to see break out of his shell. Alex’s masculine characterization--his initial competitiveness with Henry, his brusqueness against Henry’s unfailingly polite demeanor--makes the archetypal sophisticated, elitist hero work here. Because it made sense. I related to Alex more and more deeply as he fell further and further for Henry, when he reacted to that allure, but also to the true Henry underneath his polite mask--caring, warm, intelligent, and deeply romantic. Henry’s secret date for Alex--sneaking him into the Victoria and Albert Museum, for which he has his own key--is exactly the kind of classy, grand gesture date that earns him a place alongside quintessential leading men. Yes, Henry didn’t feel as fresh as Alex; he felt like an archetype (even further from reality than the smart and doesn’t-know-she’s-hot typical rom com leading lady), but it’s an archetype that’s used over and over again for good reason. So many of us love to love a man like Henry. And I’m glad that includes fiery, self-aware bisexuals like Alex.

Against this backdrop of livery rom com energy that reads like a full-blown fan fiction at times, a more serious tone is struck through the politics and presidential campaigns that form the context of protagonist Alex’s life in the novel. Reading this novel during the Trump presidency, the alternate universe presented here is all the more alarmingly idealized. In this alternate universe, a woman--divorced, with a mixed race family--was elected to the U.S. presidency after Barack Obama. The stark contrast this First Family poses with Trump and his cohort makes this literary world even more obviously one that is hoped for, and longed for, but not the one in which we live. I was swept up in the romance--Alex and Henry’s certainly--but also the romantic vision of an America that chooses and supports this family in the White House. While being saddened by the vast difference between this alternate universe and our own, I liked both the author’s political idealism and the background that the world of political campaigning (a space inherently filled with secrets, alliances, and backstabbing) provides for the storyline.

While politics doesn’t offer, necessarily, shades of realism, it does offer shades of seriousness. At times, the political situation of Alex’s family (can Alex’s mom be re-elected to a second term when her son has been exposed and dragged by the press for his illicit, international relationship?) poses real hurdles in Alex and Henry’s relationship, adding to the drama of the plot line and triggering the challenges that the characters have to face together. In general, I dislike the romantic comedy plot convention of characters creating unnecessary drama and misunderstanding through their inability to communicate or demonstrate emotional maturity. Jealousy, misunderstandings, and silly assumptions drive wedges between happily matched couples partway through far too many romantic comedies. When Alex and Henry settled their differences and fell into each others arms only halfway through this novel, I worried we’d be facing these kinds of trivial tropes that trip-up and delay the happily ever after. Instead, the challenges Henry and Alex face are external to their relationship. These challenges don’t divide Alex and Henry, although other characters, primarily Henry’s homophobic family, struggle to physically keep them apart. This was part of their surprising emotional maturity to me, but--in retrospect--this may not surprising at all. Instead, I’ve been conditioned by legions of romance novels and fan fictions to expect emotional crisis, flailing, and BAD AT FEELINGS the moment any opportunity for miscommunication presents itself. Alex and Henry do seem grown-up, though, for their young age, facing a lot of real challenges, and not just self-made drama, with grace and self-aware. Their maturity steers the novel into thornier (and therefore more realistic) territory.

When Kim Namjoon got a mention partway through this novel, I felt even more certain that our author was an ARMY! The fan fiction overtones of this novel made it familiar, modern, and lively. My friend who recommended the book (also a BTS fan) explored Casey McQuiston’s twitter when I pointed out the Kim Namjoon reference, and found her posts from Metlife last year. We both got a kick out of confirming that she’s an Army and immediately wanted, even more so, to be her real-life friend. This was a very enjoyable book in part because of its wish fulfillment approach--drawing on the conventions and archetypes known and loved by rom com and fan fiction readers. Yet, at the same time, it had enough backbone and social/political commentary (I read an article just this week about whether Texas could “go blue” in the next election) to expand its impact beyond “light-hearted” and “fun” (although there’s nothing wrong with pure, sugary fluff and enjoyment, of course!)

#red white and royal blue #casey mcquiston #good reads #fanfiction #bts army

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nvzblgrrl · 4 years

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On the subject of old fics 1

Allegedly, A Gentleman’s Tale (published 1-6-2012) was my first fanfic ever (again, allegedly - will explain after a bit). It only exists now as a private copy at least one person has saved and a capture on the WayBackMachine (which thankfully covered the whole ten chapters of it), because I have a habit of... deleting stories that embarrass me after the fact. It’s something I’m trying to break myself of, mostly because there are a number of people who do enjoy my work even if most of what I see in it are the flaws and I would feel bad about taking away something they enjoyed.

The ‘allegedly’ part comes in in that, based on my memories of my One Piece OCs and stories (along with more concrete evidence from my tumblr), I had a few OCs with snippets of story (with one who had at least a few chapters worth of story that I have memorized in broad strokes) attached that preceded that by at least one or two years, even though the description of ‘my first fic’ was in the synopsis of the fic as it was posted. Unfortunately, it’s hard to trace that information thanks to the ‘destroy all the evidence of me embarrassing myself’ habit (I completely deactivated my deviantart account on account of ‘cringe’, that’s how bad it got) and the passage of time making it unclear which mutuals might have been around at that time or if they even remember those things.

Now, I still have the computers that I typed up those stories on (they’re hanging out in my basement), but - they haven’t worked in quite a while. I’m not sure if they’re completely bricked or not, but I haven’t had anything to do with them for a while and I know that at least one of them was replaced because it refused to turn on anymore. Someday, I might get the chance to pull out their hard-drives and get a look at the data there, but that’s not a ‘now’ solution so...

Anyway - got a bit distracted there -, thanks to the power of the WayBackMachine, I was able to reread this specific fic in its entirety.

‘A Gentleman’s Tale’ was a little thing that was pretty much Brook backstory wrapped up in the framing device of Luffy wanting a story to help him get to sleep. I was 18, had maybe a year or two of creative writing experience/interest under my belt, and a whole lot of Soul King Stan energy to spend on my favorite character despite being at the tail end of my high school career.

Surprisingly, it was not entirely awful for an alleged ‘first attempt’. The formatting was a little eh, the pacing was borked, and a lot of characters were fairly flat (and a few leaned too hard on certain stereotypes while a lot had Western order names for some reason), but other than that, it was actually palatable. Ten chapters, about 8000 words, not a whole lot to write home about or find objectionable outside of the odd grammatical error and the fact that alcohol is mentioned in almost. every. single. chapter.

Seriously, I have no idea why that was a thing for me 2012-2013ish (it ended up in Witt and Witticism a little bit - more heavily on the rewrites that never took off back in the day but a little present in the original too). I was 18-19. I’d never had alcohol. I still haven’t had alcohol. I’d never really been around drinking at that age, socially or not, beyond like, enjoying brew fries and eating chicken tenders at a bar one time because my shit father wanted to have lunch there for some reason. I just guess that I woke up at the start of 2012 and thought Drink Mixing and Booze were interesting things.

The story wasn’t much to write home about, but the characters are the real area of interest here, so let’s cover them and a few of my plans for handling them in the rewrite.

Brook - Starts out his backstory being seasick, gets to have five decent minutes when he meets Yorki, and then is immediately shoved into the wall-to-wall shitshow that’s his life as the battle convoy captain and resident responsible adult, despite 70% of the convoy being at least ten to fifteen years older than him. Somehow that makes his interest in getting black out drunk almost every single night sound reasonable. Seriously, that’s what he was doing in that story, according to what happened almost every other chapter of the fic (because pacing is for writers on their third or fourth story). That’s one reason why the timeline is being stretched out in the rewrite plans - so we don’t kill the main character through alcohol poisoning (though with the kind of stress he was under in that original cut, I can’t blame him for trying - he got saddled with three weird + constantly fighting teenagers and a dying military organization, snubbed by the king, publicly embarrassed in front of 90% of the kingdom’s nobility, and so on in the course of two to three days max). Honestly, in retrospect, I’m not sure how well this plays with the framing device of Brook relating his backstory 62 years later, because he should have lost so many brain cells to this nonsense.

Yorki - Starts his introduction by saying ‘hey, my name’s Yorki, i’m close, bi, and willing to take you on a whirlwind adventure literally two seconds after meeting you’ which Brook immediately responds to as the best thing that’s happened to him in the last (and probably next) month. Probably the only person in Brook’s life as of the fic not stressing him out or enabling his self-destructive coping habits, though that doesn’t stop him from being one of the better things Brook woke up to after one of his blackout drinking nights. Also got an incredibly shitty nickname thanks to me not knowing how that sort of thing works from his mom. In the rewrite, he’s from Ohio (because I and my Middle-Ground lingering Self-Insert are from Michigan and the opportunity for a struggle between ‘hey we’ve both being isekai’d into this weird place and have similar backgrounds/music tastes so we’re going to hang together based on that’ and ‘200 year old inter-state hatred turned into over the top sports rivalry and disliking the other state on principle’ was too good to pass up).

Luchere Gregg (Gregg being her surname) - junior member of the battle convoy. Incredibly thorny and violent personality, with very little respect for authority (outside of her father, probably) and a generally superior attitude towards literally everyone except her father, especially when she perceived someone as being weak and ‘uppity’ at the same time - Maysure was the main target of this (as was intended at the time of the writing), but considering that Luchere was taking a similar tone with Brook (which was probably intended to be for different reasons, but honestly reads very similarly almost ten years on, given that Brook’s everything is very much not in line with her ideal anything) but not Hana (who was ‘weak’ but definitely not trying to mess with Luchere’s preferred social order), I think I can get more development out of her in that dimension. Her everything was probably was cool and badass back when I was 18, but now she just strikes me as petulant and unpleasant brat.

Minalee Hana - Generic smart guy of the junior team, complete with ‘shy’ personality and ‘harmless cute’ look... which, in retrospect, makes it really confusing why she’d join a military force in the first place and just raises suspicions on the fact that she did. Honestly she could be a Government plant and I wouldn’t be surprised. Another ‘problem’ with Hana is that she was based on someone I was friends with at the time I wrote the fic, which kinda ended up helping me dislike her a lot on more recent rereads, just because of the nature of that real world ‘friendship’ and the way it blew up in the end (with a whole lot of ugly reveals along the way that went back to pretty much when I first met that person).

Maysure Semenov Tara Su-all Evony Taebory Celeste - was originally a parody of the Mary Sue archetype, as you may have guessed from the name. Flashy, overeager, desperate for acknowledgement, and not quite managing to act in ways appropriate to her age (15, directly stated in text), either being too cutesy with her speech pattern and body language or dressing in ways that would be suited for a very different profession than soldier. I ended up liking her the most out of the junior trio out on my most recent rereads, just because she’s the only member of the group that’s actually making an effort at anything (well, beyond Luchere being hostile + trying to make Brook leave), doesn’t go out of her way to be hostile or destructive, and isn’t vaguely there in a way that makes me suspicious. Apparently was the only one of the junior trio ever stated to have weapons training (with Luchere being an unarmed fighter and Hana... just being there) and was apparently dedicated enough to it to have the schedule for the different training drills memorized.

Captain Gregg - the former captain of the battle convoy. He was never seen, only ever referenced in the fic. Based on the content, he was pretty much Luchere 1.0 - crass, unpleasant, violent, and without a lot of tolerance for those that couldn’t deal with or keep up with the unfortunate matter of his everything. The notes on rewrite so far have him becoming a lot more pleasant and lot less generally awful person, though still a bit of a roughneck and unpleasant to be around if you aren’t cut from the same cloth or a similar weave. Was not inspired by Captain Clegg until I started imbibing pop culture in preparation for the various parts of the project.

Jeevenine - quartermaster of the battle convoy, bartender, and carrier of heavy butler vibes, which feels like it might have been intentional. Said to be a master of ‘improvisation combat’ but honestly seems to be the person most likely to have taught Brook his style of fencing (based on his speed and precision being noted as something Brook had difficulty keeping up with in text) and his gentlemanly ways, considering every other character I wrote into the convoy is some flavor of hot mess and either a bruiser or a gunman. Still loses points for enabling Brook’s blackout drinking habits and being passive-aggressive instead of properly helpful.

Jack Rackum and John Delacroix - sniper-spotter pair, as indicated by their nicknames of ‘Windward’ and ‘Leeward’ respectively. Highly implied to be in a long-standing romantic relationship with each other or at least in a long-term holding pattern of pining. Delacroix’s tendency to sleep in the nude is used as half of a ‘my eyes’ joke that Brook is the victim of (the other half is Maysure’s chosen nightclothes being both stereotypical of a ‘Mary Sue’ and vastly age inappropriate, which is a running gag with her). Rackum gets the most description out of the set, with his brown leather hat and green-grey hair being mentioned, along with his taste for fruity cocktails (he might also be an alcoholic, which isn’t really all that remarkable in this fic).

Kurotora Ren - Big Guy McHugeBeef. Also the guy responsible for keeping the battle convoy awash in homebrew booze. Almost kills Brook by accident during his introduction by clapping him on the back at the exact wrong moment. Doesn’t have a lot more detail than that, mostly because he slides into the background after that brief focus moment, but I like him for being genuinely sorry about the near-death thing on top of being friendly for real and not being duplicitous about his wants + thoughts.

Zest - noble. Stupid. Probably the closest thing that Brook has to a friend in his actual age range at the start of the story, which is really fucking sad considering Zest’s everything and the fact that Brook doesn’t enjoy his company at all. Somehow when I was 18, the idea of a guy who spent most of his time in some state of wasted and trying to get his ‘friend’ (who doesn’t even like him that much but seems to tolerate him more than literally everyone else Zest ever interacted with who wasn’t being paid) into a similar condition because of unrequited love or something was tragi-cute-slash-funny instead of pathetic and faintly disturbing (though I guess I might end up writing him as tragic again anyway just because it probably takes Some Shit to make a person like that). Spent 90% of his screen time in the old story making Brook’s life inconvenient and the remaining 10% fully aware that his own life is going nowhere. His personality is oddly similar to Maysure’s, which is... interesting, implications-wise. Holy Shit, is this guy going to be a trip to work with as an adult.

#the big fat one piece fic project #talking about old fic #a gentleman's tale #my writing #if you have any questions about this or other fic i've done feel free to fire away

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ccyans · 6 years

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The one where Todoroki Rei gets out of dodge with children in Tow Part 3

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Rei makes arrangements with Inko-san over the course of a lunch break and a few text messages. Shouto’s play-date ends up less solely Shouto’s and more akin to a family picnic outing however, which is just… what happens when there are four children in the house. The morning of is a scramble of bento-making, sandwich making, and checking for sunscreen and bug-spray. Fuyumi and Dabi pack their gaming consoles; Rei fixes a hat on Natsuo’s head. Then they’re out the door.

The park Rei agreed to is a good mid-way point between her home and Inko-san’s, bordered by a gently curving river. Sunlight hits the water and makes it glimmer. It is an excellent day, hot, but the humidity hasn’t quite set in yet, this early.

Rei finds Inko at a picnic bench by the river, hand-in hand with her little boy, who looks tentative but elated. A glance down at Shouto reveals him to be now hidden behind her skirt. Her eldest rolls his eyes lifts him up and up, into full view and to a yelp of displeasure.

Thankfully though, Shouto is not the one making introductions.

Midoriya Izuku is exactly as the photos described him: six years old with stars in his eyes; gap teethed, curly haired, wearing what looks like half of an All-Might merchandise store: from his water bottle to his T-shirt to the backpack with All-Might’s grinning face. He clambers towards Shouto naturally, gravitating to the only boy in his age group, smiling wide wide wide, unlike any of Rei’s quiet, guarded children but perhaps Natsuo, and it is a little like being punted gently by a sun.

Meanwhile, Rei’s elder three take over the picnic table and another round of introductions are held.

It is a nice day. Clear, bright. The children eat the pre-made bentos and perfect little sandwiches in messy bites. Inko-san talks with her hands, gestures drawing life into the air. Rei likes her voice, the way it rushes, and hesitates. It’s been so long since she made a new friend. She’s quite content to listen. It’s difficult to talk, these days, anyway. The silence is something sunk into her, under her skin, her bones, a shroud; it is not easy to unravel a muteness hammered in from a decade of harshness.

Today her silence is by choice however. Inko-san talks with her hands, the crinkle of her eyes and mouth, a soothing flood of sound. Under that comes the familiar video game noises of Pokémon and Mario-art. Natsuo laughing, the cicadas singing, the wind in the trees, the gurgle of the river. For a moment if Rei closes her eyes it almost feels as if she were back in her father’s house, a flashback to the summers of her girlhood; cicadas singing, children laughing, the wind in the trees and grass.

“Mama,” says Shouto, when they are walking back home in the afternoon heat, a new All-might pin on his t-shirt and a borrowed All Might figurine clutched in one small hand. “Mama, can we—can Izuku and me—again?“

His ice cream is puddling over his hands. Rei freezes it, gently. “Of course, sweetheart.”

She sees Yamada-kun and Aizawa-kun again, frequently.

Mainly it’s Yamada-kun. He comes with cookies, and pie, and one time an entire cake, frosted in chocolate and ripe strawberries. Rei’s sweet tooth is non-existent but each of the children can finish an entire cake a day by themselves. Yamada-kun is an excellent baker. She thinks that he’s managing to win the children over by sweets alone, actually, even her eldest, who shies away from such things like a feral cat. It helps that he’s just good with children in a general sense: loud, ready for adventure, but not without thought.

Sightings of Aizawa-kun are much less frequent, probably due to—as Yamada-kun has informed her—his nocturnal work hours. Sometimes he shows up on the balconies though. Sometimes her balcony. Sometimes with the cat. The children still call him “the dead guy,” which is a nickname that’s sticking despite admonishments.

The third time he appears on Rei’s balcony with the cat in tow he graduates to: “dead guy with the cat.”

“Huh,” laughs Yamada-kun,“Well that’s – kinda accurate. Hey what do you call me?”

“Weirdo, says Rei’s eldest.

“Blondie!” says Natsuo.

“Yamada-san,” says Fuyumi, who has made it a study to braid his hair into a hundred teeny, tiny braids. Yamada-kun has excellent hair, Rei must admit. She’s just wondering how he exactly he is over for lunch—not that she’s complaining, he’s an excellent influence—but she’s not quite sure whether she invited him or he invited himself.

Either way she puts him in charge of supervision duty a week later, via process of elimination and practicality sake, when Dabi nearly burns down the kitchen for the third time while Rei’s on shift and Fuyumi’s holed up in the library. Growing up in a house of servants and housekeepers does not give much way for cooking prowess. There is exactly one meal Rei’s eldest knows how to cook with any certainty, and that is instant oatmeal.

This is Todoroki Fuyumi, age twelve: jean skirts, neat, methodical handwriting, and a tendency for motion sickness in anything that goes over thirty miles an hour. She is perpetually nervous (this is a matter born of circumstance), speaks either in one great tripping rush or after a long pause of contemplation, likes fall days and shortbread cookies, dislikes loud noises and sudden movements, which is on par, really with the rest of the family. At this age she wants to be a doctor, or maybe a veterinarian: some kind of helping work. She is an excellent secret keeper. And despite what Dabi likes to say, Fuyumi does not nag, thank you very much.

A week before school starts they go shopping for supplies. This is an endeavour that involves a full day outing and three different uniform stores. By afternoon though, they’re at the the big mall in central plaza, and mother is worrying the shopping list between her fingers.

Fuyumi notices. Fuyumi is very adept at noticing these things.

“Not that one,” says Dabi, and plucks the backpack from Natsuo’s hands. Fuyumi catches sight of the price tag on the upswing— and well, Dabi notices these things too.

He leads Natsuo away to get another backpack, a cheaper one. Mother is still frowning at her shopping list.

Fuyumi hands Shouto a pack of on-sale multicolour pens where he’s sitting in the cart. He arranges it, neatly, beside the binders and notebooks. What do they already have: new binders, notebooks, three pairs each of the (very expensive) uniforms. Pencils and rulers. Lunchboxes. Fuyumi flips over the All-Might themed one and blinks at the price-tag.

“That’s highway robbery,” she mutters, and makes to go put it away. She gets maybe half a step before Shouto swivels, suddenly, to trail a wide eyed look following the box.

“Fuyumi?”

For a second Fuyumi pauses, and then — oh. Of course. She’d thought it was Natsuo’s, with the All-Might theme and all, but Shouto’s new friend, the green haired one —

“Sweetheart?” asks mother, looking over.

It’s still highway robbery.

But it’s Shouto, and he deserves nice things. Father probably never let him touch anything All-Might related. It was yet another unspoken household rule, one that Dabi and Natsuo liked to break. But not Shouto. He had too much of Father’s attention on him to be able to break the rules.

And now mother is looking worried again. Mouth down, brows creased. “It’s nothing,” says Fuyumi. She dislikes it when mother looks like that, tired and frowning and worried all the time. Or on the other side of the spectrum — blank and locked down, which is something all four Fuyumi’s siblings seem have gotten from mother, in retrospect. At least in regards to Father. It’s… gotten better. She hands the box back to Shouto. “Do you think I should have the thirty gel pen pack or just the twenty?”

She presents both. “The thirty?” says mother.

“We’re back!” announces Natsuo as he skids in front of the cart, Dabi at his heels.

It’s strange. Money’s never been a problem, before. It’s the sort of luxury Fuyumi didn’t know she had until the security blanket was swept from under her. She cuts coupons with mother these days, at the kitchen table. Dabi had held out on the latest Pokemon game just last week. The tallying of the groceries carefully in mother’s small, slanted handwriting.

Honestly from what Fuyumi can see the groceries make up a good chunk of the household expenses, mainly because there are five of them and they eat — expensive. Fuyumi likes her sushi and fancy restaurant takeout; the teachers in careers class would call it a lifestyle. And they would put it on Father, before, which is now Not A Thing, and even beyond that mother never, ever ever scrimps on groceries. Fuyumi still doesn’t know the difference between regular and organic, apart from the fact the latter costs double the former, but between a choice mother always buys the organic. There’s not even a difference in taste.

“It’s better for you,” says mother, which Fuyumi is dubious about, but that’s yet another topic she’s not to be budged on.

They head home with approximately half a ton in shopping bags and two paper bags full of groceries. Dabi, bearing the title of oldest, naturally carries the most.

He starts to lag two blocks away from home, when they get off the train. Fuyumi, barely seeing over an armful of bread and jam jars and some puffy chip packets herself, pointedly elbows him in the ribs. He makes a strangled noise. She gives him a look over her glasses, jerks her shoulder towards mother.

“I know,” he mutters, tone annoyed, but he straightens up anyways. Mother makes a point of checking periodically, and then doing things like scooping up their groceries if she thinks they’re too heavy.

“Your old person bones will survive,” Fuyumi tells him.

Dabi rolls his eyes.

They pass by Shouto and Natsuo’s new elementary just before turning onto their street, where mother lets them rest for bit on a park bench. It looks like any other elementary, really. Grey walls. Lots of windows. A basketball court out front. Natsuo goes flying off to the playground immediately, energetic even after a full day of running around. Ah, to be eight again. Well, honestly, Fuyumi doesn’t remember being so active even at eight, and Dabi, well — what recollections Fuyumi has pin Dabi at eight as perpetually angry.

She tells Dabi this, and he throws his arm over his eyes. “You’re twelve. Stop sounding like you’re thirty.”

“You’re the one that’s actually approaching thirty.”

“To you maybe. You’re twelve.”

“And you’re old.”

He rolls his eyes so hard Fuyumi is surprised they don’t pop out of his head. “You know,” he sighs “you are really really annoying sometimes. Why do I have three annoying little siblings?”

“Shouto’s not annoying.”

“He’s following Natsuo. He’ll learn.”

She considers this. Shouto is, indeed, waddling after Natsuo. Right now even. “Ah.”

“I’m glad you see my wisdom. Pass me the canned coffee?”

“You’re too young to be drinking that much caffeine,” says mother, and hands Dabi an orange juice.

Fuyumi laughs at his face.

They make the rest of the leg home after Natuso tumbles from the monkey bars and scrapes his knees and mother fusses. He shrugs it off in half a minute though, which is Natsuo. The sunset makes the world soft and sharp at the same time; a heady lavender routed with stripes of vibrant pink, the sun on fire at the horizon line. By now the heat of the summer day has vanished. The cold is soothing over Fuyumi’s shoulders.

This is familiar, in a way.

When she was smaller, when Shouto was nothing but a pink and tiny baby and Natsuo was still attached to mother like a limpet, they used to go to the market, on Sundays. It wasn’t something mother needed to do. That was the housekeeper’s job. But she liked it, Fuyumi thought. The fresh air and the bustle. Looked less tired doing it. It’s hard to remember a time when mother didn’t look tired. Back then she would tot around Shouto in a sling on her front, Natsuo at her hip, balancing hand bag and shopping bag and two children. Dabi, no older than ten, would hold Fuyumi’s hand through the crowds.

And those had been happy memories. Fade washed in sunlight and gold. Drowned out by the bad, afterwards, when mother had progressively not been able to look Dabi in the eye. When Shouto’s quirk had appeared.

It’s been a while.

“Are you trying to hold my hand?” Dabi drawls, squinting incredulously, and Fuyumi kicks him in the shin for ruining her moment.

On Thursday, after dropping Shouto off at Inko-san’s for a second playdate, Rei goes to lunch with two of her college friends.

“Rei-chan!”

Oguro Takeshi is tall and broad, with dark hair and a belly laugh and a scar bisecting his face from an early childhood accident. He’s thirty-three, younger than Rei by a year, with a wife and a little girl at home. These days, he works consulting with a side gig in environmental and community revitalization. Clever but straightforward and boisterous. It’d… taken a bit to convince him not to punch Enji in the face, during the court trials.

(He might’ve succeeded, quirkless or no. Takeshi used to box, professionally, in his younger days.)

“Are you well, Rei?”

Next to him, Kiyoshi Himari waves one blue-tinged hand, smiling with pointed teeth.

She looks like a mermaid with legs — hardly the most striking in today’s society — but striking still, with her bluish skin and tangled blue hair and the scales glittering at the corners of her eyes; the double eyelids, a mouth full of razor teeth, filed to points, which make her smiles look like that of a shark sensing prey. She works in biochemistry and is married to a very lovely lawyer woman, who is a friend to Rei’s current lawyer, actually.

(Seven months ago she’d found Rei having a minor panic attack in the street. After that it’d just been a whirlwind of her sticking with Rei all through the long, long divorce settlement, icy and furious and possibly plotting ways to ruin Todoroki Enji’s life.)

“I’m well,” says Rei. She puts her purse down, tucks her skirt underneath her as she sits.

“Your little hellions?”

Rei cracks a smile. “I have my neighbours babysitting.”

“They should meet my Tamao,” says Takeshi, and oh, Rei should arrange a meeting between their children. Takeshi’s daughter would be Natsuo’s age. But. Busy.

“This week?” she presses a hand to her cheek. “No, school’s starting soon. Later? One of these days, though.”

Himari doesn’t have any children. She does, however, have two dogs and an aquarium, which she likes to extrapolate on at length, and it reminds Rei as well — Enji had never allowed pets but the children have always wanted one, and a dog would be good for Shouto.

Lunch comes in a spread of sushi and cool summer soups. They talk about the children, and Takeshi about the current economic dive, and Himari about her lab work, and a little on the hero industry, although that’s not a topic they go in depth on. Himari offers Rei tickets to concert coming into town— an instant flashback to being twenty and debating a goth phase — which Rei declines, and Takeshi hmms and invites Rei to see how his newest remodelling of an old motel into a community center is doing.

“That sounds nice,” says Rei.

“You can help out with the design,” says Takeshi thoughtfully. “You’ve always had a good eye for colour.”

Himari kisses both her cheeks when lunch ends and each of them need to return to their own errands; Takeshi pulls Rei into a bone crushing hug. “Next week?” Himari asks, pulling out her phone, and Rei wants to demur — Himari is so busy. She shouldn’t have to spend this much time checking up on Rei, which is what these luncheons are, partially — but Takeshi is already laughing and flipping open his planner, nudging Rei with one shoulder.

Rei folds. “Wednesday?”

Rei makes it to Inko-san’s at four o’clock, as agreed, to find Shouto bedecked in cookie batter and All-Might pajamas, squished together on the couch with Izuku-kun. On the TV a movie is playing out.

The movie isn’t done and Inko-san has tea out so Rei stays a while, in the little kitchen in Inko-san’s quaint dining room while the boys have their eyes glued to the screen, sneaking the occasional, still gooey cookie. She helps Inko-san clean up the mess of the kitchen (inevitable when baking with five year olds) and then they sit down for angel cake and sakura tea, the sounds of All-Might’s voice booming in the background.

She thinks Shouto’s enamoured.

She thinks Shouto is definitely enamoured.

She’s never seen him like this: head over heels in a new friendship— his first friendship, which is wrong, but Izuku-kun is a right. Here Shouto is bright eyed and smiling shyly and hanging onto Izuku-kun’s every word, chocolate smears on his mouth, dressed in the All-Might pajamas Enji would have never allowed him to wear. And this — this is a right.

Rei had been so worried for him. This is the first time Shouto would go into any kind of school, and he’s always been so painfully shy. The other children too — pulled away from old friends and classmates and during the middle of a school year no less, even with the buffer of summer vacation. But Shouto, oh Shouto. She’d been so worried that he would have a hard time making friends. That he would have a hard time a school.

“Mama is very very glad you met Izuku-kun,” she tells him, when they finally leave the Midoriyas, at six o’clock and one frantic text from Fuyumi later.

“Me too,” decides Shouto, carefully skirting a sidewalk crack.

“Are you excited for school?” Rei asks. “There’s three days left until the big day.”

“Mmm.”

“I bet Izuku-kun can show you lots of new fun things.”

“Mmm!”

All it takes it a little push before Shouto’s off, shyness forgotten for this new and shiny adventure and Izuku. He’s so enthusiastic, tripping a bit over his own words, about his new friend and his future new school and this Kaachan he’s never met, and there’s no need for Rei to worry, not about this, not at all.

It’s barely even lunch time on the children’s first school day when Rei gets a call from Shouto’s elementary, from the principal’s office.

AN:

1. Oguro Takeshi you may recognize as Knuckleduster from Illegals. Himari is a made up OC, because Rei needs a support group and there aren’t that many canon characters her age.

2. The Japanese school year runs april - july for the first term, then a 40 day summer vacation, and then september - march for the second term. Rei moved to the other side of the city shortly before summer vacation started and her kids are thus transferring into new schools for their respective second term. This is slightly more problematic organization wise for Dabi and Fuyumi than Natsuo and Shouto.

3. Next time: the Shouto and Katsuki disaster show.

Part 4

#bnha #todofam au #mha #boku no hero academia #cyan ficstuff #todoroki shouto #todoroki rei #dabi #todoroki fuyumi #midoriya inko #midoriya izuku #yamada hizashi #aizawa shouta #erasermic

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blueeyeswhitegarden · 6 years

Note

Yuya and Reiji for the meme!

This is going to be pretty long, so I’ll put my answers under the cut.

Yuya:

Why I like them/why I don’t like them: Of course, I love Yuya. There are so many reasons why I like him. He’s just so likable, relatable and sympathetic. He genuinely wants to make everyone around him happy even when he’s dealing with so much sadness and pain himself. I love that he wears his heart on his sleeve, which makes it easier to emphasize with him. Even though he deals with emotional issues like self-doubt and self-confidence throughout the series, I love that being emotional himself was never treated as a flaw exactly. Even near the end of the series, Yuya would still break out into tears, but he wasn’t looked down for it. That is so refreshing, especially for a lead male character.

He struggles through his emotional problems throughout the series, but he doesn’t give up on his goals in spite of those issues. That makes him inspiring in a way. Wanting to end the Dimensional War works so well with his goal of becoming a great Entertainment Duelist like his father, as well as the tone of the series in general. I love that he is able to reach out to people more with his dueling once he develops his own kind of dueling. Instead of trying to be someone he isn’t, being himself made Yuya closer to his goal, which was a nice touch considering his self-confidence issues. His development is fantastic and he is still my favorite character in the franchise.

What I like about their appearance: I think that the red, green and orange color scheme works really well for his design. Plus, I still love how fans see his hair as a tomato and a Christmas tree. It’s a cute fun little joke.

Do I prefer their dub names or their original name?: Yuya has the same name in both versions, but I do prefer how the Japanese version pronounces his last name. Maybe I was just too used it after watching the Japanese version for nearly two years before the dub even came out, but Sa-ka-KEY sounds like a much more natural way to say Sakaki to me than Sa-KA-key does.

OTP: I love his relationship with Yuzu. They’re such good and caring friends, which makes it easier to believe that they’d develop romantic feelings for each other. I especially appreciate that you can read their relationship as platonic or romantic, but either way, they clearly love each other.

NOTP: I’m not really a fan of any of the pairings between the Yuya counterparts, mainly because the idea of being romantically interested in someone who has the same face always sounded weird to me. I probably dislike his pairing with Yuri the most given how he treated Yuya in the series.

OT3: While I don’t like the pairings romantically, I think that the relationships between Yuya, Yuzu, Sora, as well as with Gongenzaka, are really good. They all have good friendships with each other.

Favorite card they use: I love so many of Yuya’s Performapals, but Discover Hippo and Silver Claw would be some of my favorites. They’re cute and perfect sized monsters for Yuya to ride on. Odd Eyes Pendulum Dragon is also great and is a pretty cool ace monster. Smile World is really good too. It represents Yuya’s ideals on dueling, as well as perfectly captures his goals. He wants to make everyone, including his enemies, smile with his dueling.

Favorite moment they were in: There are a lot of great moments for Yuya, but one of my favorite ones were his last turn against Jack. Seeing Yuya being able to reach out to the whole City with his dueling was so heartwarming and wonderful. Whenever I think back to that moment, to that duel and to Jack holding Yuya’s arm up to celebrate his victory, I still get immensely happy. It’s one of those moments that remind me just how much I love both Yuya and Arc V itself.

Least favorite moment: I’m not sure if this counts, but it was probably when it was revealed that Zarc had taken over Yuya completely after Yuri was defeated. It was a good shocking twist for the match and it made sense, but I was also really sad that Yuya wasn’t able to fight off Zarc’s influence even after struggling so much.

Would I fuck, marry or kill them?: I love Yuya, but I’m also over twice his age, so I wouldn’t be into those first two options and I obviously wouldn’t want to kill him. I would want to give him a big hug and have a duel with him instead.

Reiji:

Why I like them/why I don’t like him?: I like Reiji. I still remember thinking he was going to be another Kaiba clone based on his character information, but he turned out to be a much different and refreshing take on a main rival. He was still Yuya’s main rival, but they were more polar opposites. Yuya is more emotional and prone to act out of anger, while Reiji is more calm, collected and calculated. He rarely acts without having a plan in motion and only takes action himself when he deems necessary. That made their rivalry pretty different and refreshing, especially when Yuya wasn’t focused on defeating Reiji. Plus, I like how Yuya and Reiji slowly develop a nice friendship over the course of the series.

Being more morally gray also helped to make him more interesting. In retrospect, I do think I was a bit hard on him, mainly during season two. I never hated him or thought he was evil like a lot of fans did, but a combination of misreading his behavior/actions and being surrounded by a lot of negativity towards him made me upset at him for awhile. After getting away from that negative environment and looking back at what he did, I think too many people, myself included, read his calm demeanor as being too cold or a sign that he didn’t care about people around him. Even now when rewatching the series, I’ll often think to myself that Reiji didn’t deserve the hate he got and feel kind of bad about how his character was received.

What I like about their appearance: Reiji’s scarf is still so ridiculous that it turns around to become awesome again. I love it and the jokes about it make it even better. His plain blue shirt really works for his design too.

Do I prefer their dub names or original names?: I prefer Reiji over Delcan. I’m just more used to Reiji and I think it fits him more than Delcan does. It isn’t one of the worst dub names, but it is pretty strange. It is a shame that they didn’t choose Reggie instead. Maybe they didn’t want to do that because of Shark’s dub name, but Reggie would have been a much more fitting choice than Delcan.

OTP: I don’t have too many pairings for Reiji, but I kind of liked the pairing between him and Serena. I thought that meeting three years prior to the start of the series gave them some potential for an interesting relationship. I kind of like his relationship with Yuya. I don’t see it as romantic, mainly due to how I can’t see Yuya developing romantic feelings for anyone besides Yuzu, but I like it as a platonic pairing if that makes any sense.

NOTP: I’m not sure if there is a Reiji pairing that bothers me that much. Maybe the closest would be his pairing with Shun, but even then, I’m more indifferent towards it than anything else.

OT3: I think I have a three character pairing involving Reiji that I like either.

Favorite card they use: Unlike most rivals, Reiji usually use different monsters as opposed to having a more traditional ace monster. I thought that the three new D/D/D monsters he used during his third duel with Yuya were pretty cool and intimidating. I also liked his use of Contract cards in general. He always had a plan in mind when using them, which fits with his personality quite nicely.

Favorite moment they were in: One of my favorite moments for Reiji was when he was struggling against Leo during his tag duel with Yuya. Reiji had spent years preparing to stop his father and the show had shown just how powerful he is multiple times. But he still couldn’t defeat his father, even with Yuya’s help. Leo even called him out on his poor strategy and Reiji was clearly shaken up over being put into a tight spot. Since Reiji is so calm and collected most of the time, seeing him actually struggling against another opponent and being more clearly emotional made the moment stand out.

It’s also why I was glad that they didn’t have Reiji lose to hype up another secondary villain before this point. If he had lost to Roger or Yuri before, it would have weakened the emotional impact of this moment since we would have already seen Reiji lose before. It helped to make Leo more threatening and the fact that Reiji couldn’t defeat him even after planning for this confrontation for years gave the moment some good emotional weight behind it. Plus, the tag duel had some nice moments for Yuya and Reiji’s friendship so that was nice.

Least favorite moment: I’d probably go with Reiji making sure that the LDS trio’s memories were altered. It did show Reiji’s morally gray mindset, which does help to make him more interesting, but I also think that was the starting point of people thinking that Reiji was secretly evil. Plus, it wasn’t the best way to effectively write the LDS trio out of the plot. People might have thought Reiji was really evil regardless of how they handled the LDS trio, but handling that in a different manner that still showed that Reiji is morally gray might have helped.

Would I fuck, marry or kill them?: Reiji is cool, but I’m still over ten years older than him, so I wouldn’t be interested in the first two options. I certainly wouldn’t want to kill Reiji. I like the idea of telling him to relax and have some fun after the events of the series since he would definitely need that.

Thank you for asking. ^_^

#Asks #Arc V #Arc V Spoilers #Yuya #Reiji

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

I'VE BEEN PONDERING MARKETS

For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They win by transcending. We take these for granted now, but was among the poorest, or in a novel? And the Japanese don't like immigration. This should not really be surprising. But to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it. Your job description as technical founder/CEO is completely rewritten every 6-12 months. I don't know about startups in general, and that's why so many startups that we're getting better at predicting them.

It certainly is possible for individual programs to be written too densely. It's isomorphic to the very successful technique of letting people pay in installments: instead of frightening them with a high probability of being moderately successful. Pride, mostly. Thump, thump, thump. I am interested in the question of what sort of entertainment gets distributed on the Internet, you don't really understand them. The reason is that software plays an increasingly important role in companies, and the granary the wealth that each family created. There's a hack for being decisive when you're inexperienced: ratchet down the size of your investment till it's an amount you wouldn't care too much about losing. Nearly everything we have was created by electric sockets. This probably makes them less productive, because they don't have to find startups. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? If you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground.

Once you start considering this question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as the root cause of variation in every other human skill. Obviously one case where it would really be an uphill battle. So if you have the discipline to keep your expenses low; but above all, it could save you to be able to refuse such an offer if they had to rewrite their software from scratch. Tax laws that encourage growth? But the real costs are the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be on a larger scale than Youtube clips. I was at knowing if they were expressed that way. Kids didn't, but they are not the root cause of variation in income.

That might sound easy, but it's not much use in practice because the search space is too big. You couldn't just do what you would like to do, there's a strong inverse correlation between performance and job security. I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I'd predict three or four of the eight groups had a prototype ready by that time were brown with dirt. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. You don't have to prove you're going to have to go back almost a thousand years. In reality, bugs like ours get through all the initial steps, but when people go to the theater and look at the spams you miss, and figure out what. Oh my God, they know. Or the company that would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone, the control they place on the App Store feels old and crappy. The valuation reflects nothing more than a pretty good bet a few months in. They want to get rich.

Why would you want to notice things that seem wrong in a way that would seem crazy in everyday life. I learnt never to bet on any one feature or deal or anything to bring you success. Things that lure you into wasting your time although they probably won't say this directly. Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe a painting intended for this purpose. If this were true, he would be right on target. But the fact is, if you admire two kinds of spams I have trouble filtering are those from companies in e. Spreading your corpus out over more tokens has the same effect as making it smaller.

So it must be very hard—that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. She was horrified when the doctors running the study discovered what appeared to be a police state, and although present rulers seem enlightened compared to the last, even enlightened despotism can probably only get you part way toward being a great economic power. There are already a bunch of guesses, and guesses about stuff that's probably not your area of expertise. You can only work so much before you get a silicon valley? One reason, obviously, is the same as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of contemporary authors. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their tone was just captivating—alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. Editorialists ask. There are few Jews left in Germany and most Jews I know would not want to move there. Don't get hung up on deal terms, especially when they're projected onto a screen. Actually, startup ideas are. You can shift into a different mode of working.

Markets are less forgiving. The reason they like it or dislike it. Jobs and Wozniak didn't have to make a conscious effort to seek out the smartest people and get immediate feedback. I knew practically nothing about the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor, just as dynamic typing turns out to work better than static for ill-defined problems. It is, in some ways. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not, probably, to music. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree to which persistence alone was able to dissolve obstacles: If you spend all your time working on new stuff. You might have to shut the company down, but because they have no redundancy. Know everything about your market. Metrics Small in what sense though? And the use of these special, reserved field names, especially __call__, seems a bit of a hack.

As an angel, you have to join a syndicate, though. But the aim is never to be convincing per se. The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even better. Whereas a two year old company raising a series A round needs to be a large tumor. If you put $50,000 into a company at a pre-money valuation of $1 million, then the total addressable market, or TAM, of your company is just a starting point—not a blueprint, but a sort of time capsule, here's why I don't find that I'm eager to learn it. Anyone who has worked on filters at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it. Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the municipal authorities. 06%?

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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years

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May 6: Too Many Circle Thoughts

So I think the reason The Circle (s1) got into my head and is now going to be living there for a bit is that it’s just so damn wholesome, and I didn’t watch it for its assumed wholesomeness (I watched it because I thought it would be dumb and mindless) but that’s where we are. It was cheesy and it often tried too hard, and it talked up a big game of ~strategy and ~drama and judging books by covers blah blah blah but what it really proved to me was that people on average actually do want to like each other and be liked on a genuine level and will form friendships over rivalries whenever possible. It’s an encouraging lesson.

I have a variety of theories as to why it turned out like that, one of which is that the game is not really a social media competition and it doesn’t actually mirror real social media at all. Thus the lessons/assumptions of social media are not relevant to it. People aren’t becoming popular by appealing to the largest mass audience possible, as irl influencers do; they’re forming alliances, friendships, and partnerships in a supremely limited environment: only 7 other people at a time. Very little of importance happens, especially after the first day, in the realm of status updates, photos, new posts, likes, etc. It’s all about group and private chats. In other words, social media really may reward shallowness and superficiality, but on the show, people are rewarded for how they talk to other human beings. I do think there was an emphasis on the overly happy, overly positive genre of writing that social media has definitely spawned, and some of that was a little fake--as you can tell from also seeing people talk just to themselves alone--but tbh I actually think more of it was genuine than not. The language, or the code they were using, was that cheery, upbeat, bright, optimistic, over the top, emoji and hashtag strewn dialect of online speak, but the sentiments were real underneath a lot of the time, and that was rather heartwarming to me.

My other and more specific theory, though, was that it was Shubham. He might not have been the winner, but he was the center of the show; he made the season what it was and defined the tone and the unspoken set of rules that essentially governed who was eliminated and when. By which I mean, despite all the big talk about strategy and gameplay, on average, the players rewarded people who were genuine, and penalized those who were too blatantly playing the game. I think the reason they did this was Shubham.

This is obviously a generalization and not every blocking precisely fit the pattern. But I think it’s broadly true, especially if you differentiate ‘blatantly playing the game’ from ‘is a catfish.’ You can use your real photos and still have everything out of your mouth be, if not a lie, a calculated statement to get you to a certain place. And you can be using someone else’s photos and acting just as if they were your own--like Sean, for example, for the 12 hours she decided to catfish.

Antonio was one of the Players I thought was most blatantly playing the game; I can’t remember him saying anything that wasn’t for the purpose of gaining something. Yes, everyone thought to some extent about what their statements or interactions meant, but he seemed to have no other motives. Similarly, Karyn/Mercedeze was a catfish, but she was also a strategy player. She lasted a little longer than Antonio because she was a little bit more real, and she had a real friendship with Chris, but you could tell from her monologue outside of the chat that she was in strategy mode all the time. It didn’t serve her well. Adam was a catfish who only lasted as long as he did because he spoke as some kinda version of himself with the guys--even having only watched the season once, I suspect that he was saved by his male friendships, not his creepy flirting. Four of the five finalists were not only not catfish, but they were people who had pretty consistently just said whatever they thought was right, not what they thought would be the most effective strategy-move at all times.

So obviously there are some exceptions to the pattern, but imo, not strong enough to break the theory. Alana hardly counts as anything because she was eliminated based on almost nothing. They all barely knew each other at this point. If anything, I think what doomed her was Sammie being an influencer, and her ill-conceived “skinny bitches chat.” Sammie didn’t like that, and with so little other evidence to go on... there she went. Miranda I think was just a casualty of bad luck and, to some extent, the handicap of all later additions: that everyone else knew each other better than they knew her. Similarly, Bill was 100% a casualty of his timing. Coming in with another player, and leaving with another player, while having almost no time to distinguish himself from the superficially extremely similar Bro, Adam, was his undoing.

Rebecca to me is apparently the biggest wrench in the theory but actually, I think she proves it. She is a catfish who made it to final five. BUT.

First, I could argue she was more genuine than she seemed but tbh I have no idea; I still can’t figure out if Seaburn is an amazing liar or if he really is that shy/sweet and just only felt comfortable behaving that way in the game if he wore a female face. Or something in between. Like Karyn, he made some contradictory statements about his persona, strategy, and rationale.

So I won’t argue that.

I do think that Seaburn had two big things going for him as Rebecca; first, that her sweet/shy/nice persona was exactly the sort of thing that most of the players, coming in good faith, wanted to believe in and were drawn to; and second, her incredibly strategic alliance with Shubham, which came to her rescue especially when the first advantage broke down. Rebecca was a pretty consistent third ranking and I think that general popularity was a product of the shy persona. She wasn’t most people’s favorite-favorite, but they did like her. BUT, when people started doubting it--when her odd statements started adding up, and people like Ed, with no loyalty, voiced doubts that let other people feel safe at the very least talking amongst themselves--it all would have broken down but for that Shubham alliance. It was too well known that Rebecca was his girl (”sister” lmao ok; funny how that word didn’t come up until she started flirting with actually-kind-of-grew-on-me-in-retrospect catfish-Adam). And in fact when Joey had the decision to make between her and Sean, he chose Sean to get rid of specifically, actively, and admittedly, because his bro Shubham would be upset if he blocked Rebecca. And like, part of that was strategic because he didn��t want to break an alliance with a betrayal (not know that at that point it barely mattered anymore) but I think a lot of it was straight up friendship too. He didn’t want to hurt someone he cared about. I felt bad for Sean and I could understand her deep betrayal, but if it had somehow weirdly worked out that it was her or Shubham, I don’t think she would have thought twice about the deeper meaning of Joey’s decision, because it would be so clearly straightforward, and this was essentially the same, just in equation form. Ultimately, she was blocked because she came onto the game way too late to form any alliance that could compete with the relationships among the OGs and that’s that. I’m sure she couldn’t see it at the time, but it’s really to her credit that she would have probably made top 5 but for that Rebecca/Shubham/Joey triangle, because Joey speaking for himself, would not have picked Rebecca over her.

Anyway, so you see Shubham directly influencing the makeup of the top 5 and, somewhat ironically given his own value system and dislike of catfsh, directly facilitating the the original catfish’s entrance into the finale, but imo he was also behind the whole general ambience of the group, the greatest influencer, pun intended, on the value system that everyone roughly adhered to throughout the show. I’m not saying that Joey, Sammie, Chris, and the rest were complete blank slates, and maybe it would have turned out the same otherwise just based on general casting. But my theory is that some people were coming in with no other thought than strategy, and Shubham was coming in with an express mission to Be Himself with as little artifice as possible, but most people were somewhere in the middle: playing as themselves, trying to be likable, trying to make good decisions for themselves as Players, but also wanting to make friends, to be nice, to be personable because people like pleasant interactions with other people, not just because Nice People Win Popularity Contests. I mean the reason being nice is a good strategy move in a popularity contest is that people don’t want to be around others who are mean!! It’s not arbitrary!

I think Chris would have been the absolute same no matter what--frankly, even more than Shubham (who did have a strategic mind himself, and not only in that he had something to prove or a thesis to test), I think he was playing as his genuine, real self, without recourse to strategy, 98% of the time. But Sammie, Joey? I don’t know. I think they, and some of the later players too, would have behaved differently if the overall mood of the game were different.

I think what happened is that Shubham being ranked eighth was the real turning point in the game. Because he was so sure that meant he was going home--that his hypothesis was just wrong at its core--so he said things honestly and sadly simply because he had nothing to lose. That triggered honest, genuine, good hearted sympathy from these, I really believe, basically good hearted people, and the ones who reached out to him then both earned his loyalty, and came to genuinely like him. Thus, a cycle: the good feelings he engendered put him at the top again and again, and his loyalty to his core people redounded to their benefit again and again. People were not ranking him high to be strategic, though. Toward the end, they actively admitted that they were ranking him too high for their own good! They were ranking him high because they honestly thought he deserved it.

There are a variety of values the group collectively could have chosen in making their rankings: pure selfishness (penalizing anyone they thought could hurt them, or sabotaging people they thought others would like--though if everyone takes this strategy, it would soon devolve to chaos); attractiveness; personal connection; personal favor. But they seemed to pick being genuine, not necessarily in a (non) catfish sense, but in an interpersonal sense. Genuine friend versus strategic player. I think that’s because being genuine was Shubham’s most cherished value, and he made this very and explicitly clear, and everyone, or nearly everyone, aligned themselves to that both because he was (/they’d made him) so popular, and because they genuinely liked him and were won over by him and agreed with him.

Not that this kid invented thinking honesty was a virtue lol. I just really felt like it was a revelation of over-thinking that he defined the whole game.

But he didn’t win lol. Of all the players, I think Joey probably did deserve the title most. I think Chris deserved the money most, though, which was my only thing.

Well, that and.. Joey is my favorite himbo and I think he was for real. But every now and then he had moments that made me almost go galaxy-brain in wondering if this was the biggest con: not just axing Miranda and Sean directly after flirting with them, or thinking Antonio was fake, but piling on with accusations against Mercedeze and Rebecca, things like that.

That said, he was one of the premiere narrating-to-my-room contestants, and that monologue, which had no strategic value, was... 100% certified himbo. So, good for him.

#the year 2021 #2021: fandom thoughts

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prixmiumarchive · 6 years

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For the tv series ask- Arrow

send me a tv series and I’ll tell you:

my all-time ultimate fave character: Like, honestly, Oliver Queen. Sometimes I’ve really disliked him, and of course I hate f*ckboy college dropout Oliver, but his character development is just so good?

a character I didn’t used to like but now do: Slade Wilson. To say I didn’t like him ever would be incorrect, but I basically went from finding pre-mirakuru Slade kind of interesting but gruff and his dynamic with Oliver and Shado interesting to I love this man and I will defend his honor and die on this hill pretty hard and fast circa S5 finale which is what dragged me back into this show in the first place.

a character I used to like but now don’t: Unfortunately, I have a hard time liking Roy Harper in Arrow as much as I once did due to the actor being kind of incorrigible in his stupid and sometimes racist behavior. A lot of the time I am pretty ignorant of what goes on with the performers behind the scenes, but his multiple instances of blackface were pretty egregious and hard to miss knowing about. With an in-universe-only perspective, I like Roy Harper, but he’s the only one I kind of like but also have this major cringe factor about liking due to outside-canon reasons.

a character I’m indifferent about: Like, half the male villains on this show. Male heroes? I’m down. Ladies? Very down. But... like... no. Another random dude in a suit out to make some money or whatever else. Fuck off, arrow through chest, goodbye. I think that’s the point, though. I also... don’t... care about Helena Bertinelli very much, but I blame it a lot on the tone of the acting she got. I feel like she’s a neat concept but executed badly.

a character who deserved better: LAUREL LANCE

a ship I’ve never been able to get into: Hmmm. I don’t really know of canon ones that we were narratively supposed to like that I didn’t like other than, maybe, from a certain angle Laurel/Oliver in the way they tried to execute it sometimes, but like, that’s complicated. My first time watching, I wasn’t a big fan of S2!Sara/Oliver, but in retrospect as a character development thing I like it just fine.

a ship I’ve never been able to get over: Island OT3 (Oliver/Slade/Shado) and Merlance!!!!!!!

a cute, low-key ship: Olicity, from my point of view.

an unpopular ship but I still enjoyed it: I enjoy my very specific self-concept of Laurel/Oliver but it does not involve them being together on Earth 1 ultimately. I think I remember thinking Felicity/Ray was cute and fine? But it has been so long since I saw that bit that I can’t speak with authority about it. I assume that was unpopular, given the popularity of Olicity.

a ship that was totally wrong and never should have happened: I don’t have a specific answer for this except that Laurel’s last words being presented the way they were is COMPLETE BULLSHIT AND I’M MAD. I’m not here for THAT Laurel-->Oliver meta-vomit nonsense.

my favourite storyline/moment: The S5 finale is one of the best things I’ve ever seen. Also I love the latter half of S1 / early S2 island storyline the mostest and bestest. I just generally like this show, though, except, of course, for parts that suck.

a storyline that never should have been written: The aspect of Olicity where it almost cannibalized itself and its own show. I REALLY LIKE Olicity, like, a lot. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them now, ever, but it seems like late S3 and S4 (which I haven’t seen partly because of what I was hearing at the time) were a nightmare in terms of the Romance nearly smothering everything that was good about Arrow to death. I still have a chip on my shoulder and always will about how Laurel’s last words seem designed to prop up Olicity as much as they do anything else when Olicity was destined for failure at least at that point in time and the way things were being written/going. They had to kill Olicity for a while to save the show, and that’s a problem. Learn to write, writers. People liked Olicity because it was organically a part of the show, not because it was one of those Katamari Damacy balls that consumed everything in its path.

my first thoughts on the show: This is really good, and I’m gonna have that title card little bar of music in my head for the rest of my life.

my thoughts now: I’m really glad I came back to this show, and I wish that it didn’t seem like that people who initially liked Arrow have largely jumped ship for all the other or some other of the CW DCTV properties while acting like Arrow is show-non-grata in the “Arrowverse” it started. Personally, I hate it being called the “Arrowverse” which is why I pretty much always say DCTV, but the fact is that none of these big, amazing things would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for Arrow, and yes, there have been times when Arrow has gone pretty far afield, but it is still a really nice show. I’m even more determined to like it now than I was back when I first got into it. I’m working on rewatching it and closing my gaps of knowledge. And you know what? If I don’t like it, that’s what fanfiction is for. I like the core of what’s there, and I’m going to enjoy it, damn it. (Thank you @trufflemores for the encouragement in your meta work on this topic.)

#arrow #dctv #answered #tumblr games #pleasantfanandstudent

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suga-angel · 7 years

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A Crossroad Deal (1)

Summary: After getting out of a long term relationship, you try to move on with your life. However, having spent the last three years unavailable, you are not sure you know how to get back out there again, let alone if you even want to. That is, until you meet Jeon Jungkook, the barista at your college coffee shop. He is more than happy to help you wet your toes in the dating scene again, but at what cost?

Next Chapter

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader

Genre: A little of everything

Word Count: 7k

College!Jungkook, somewhat FuckBoy!Jungkook

Warning: language

A/N: The genre is for the whole story over all and not just this chapter. There will be fluff scenes scattered within chapters though. The story starts off slow but picks up with the more chapters added! I hope you enjoy =)

It is the small things that matter; at least, that is what your mother always told you. A warm smile, a hot cup of coffee, the sun breaking through the clouds after a storm. They are the minuscule parts of a person’s day that often go by without much notice. Yet, you’re told that they are the key to brightening up even the most mundane days. “People just had to keep an eye out for them”, she’d say. As you sat in your small cubicle though, you thought of your mother’s words of wisdom; and how completely full of shit they were.

In your defense, you gave it your best shot. You strained your eyes in search of the hidden jewels that life had to offer. But no amount of scenery or human pleasantries could make up for the horrendous day that you were having. Coincidentally, the beginning of your unfortunate events started off with the small things; your alarm never went off that morning. You could have normally lived with this minor inconvenience, to be honest. Your first class of the day was boring as hell, and all of the points gathered in the class were from two in class tests and random assignments that needed to be turned in online. On a regular day, attendance was totally optional and only used to enrich one’s knowledge on the subject. Today, however, was not an optional day. Today was test day, which means if you were more than ten minutes late to class, you got a zero. You could not afford a zero. It was already 7:36 a.m., you had four minutes to get ready if you even hoped to make it to campus on time.

Miraculously, you made it with only two minute to spare. While your mother’s voice whispered in your ear that you should just be appreciative of the fact that you made it to class at all, the lack of caffeine running through your bloodstream shut the idea down immediately. You had barely gotten four hours of sleep due to last minute cramming the night before and you were banking on the opportunity to eat a healthy breakfast with a strong cup of Joe this morning to get you through your day. Now, your only hope is that you could weasel out a granola bar from Jihyun in your next class.

Unfortunately, your day did not get much better from there. Skip ahead two uneaten meals, an annoying campus rally, a painful run in with a moving bicycle, and a shattered phone later, and you found yourself staring at your computer screen at work wondering if being able to pay your bills was worth elongating this day any further. With a sigh, you resigned yourself to getting back to work. There will be time to mope in front of the TV later.

The universe did not seem to be done with you yet, though. Soon after you started brainstorming your next article for the paper, the elevator dinged the newest arrival to your floor. It only took a glance up from your note pad to tell you that you should just give up any hopes of today getting any better. Instantly, you felt your heart sink as your eyes took in the scene before you. A man walked out of the elevator and navigated himself through the maze of cubicles with confident steps leading the way. He had been to this office so many times in the past that he had developed muscle memory to his location, making it so that he didn’t even have to think of his destination to arrive there. Behind his back were the obvious signs of a bouquet of roses that would have any woman’s heart melt. To top of the scene was a radiant smile painted on his face as the person he was looking for came into his line of sight. Mere weeks ago, you would have been overjoyed to see such a familiar scene play out in front of you. Then again, mere weeks ago it would have been you he was smiling at. Now that smile belong to another: Seona.

Its not that I don’t want a relationship anymore, its just that I no longer want it with you.

Even though you’ve had weeks to come to terms with it, the words still rung in your ears painfully. Truthfully, you should’ve seen it coming. The lipstick on his neck in a shade that you did not own, the mysterious marks that littered his skin every now and again, the long nights you laid in an empty bed waiting for your boyfriend of three years to return to you. Jaesung had always shrugged off your inquiry and came up with an excuse of some sort. “You just don’t remember leaving them, honey”, “I had to work overtime tonight baby” or his favorite, “Do you honestly think I could do such a thing to you?” always slipped past his lips, succeeding in silencing your doubts. It was not until you took it upon yourself to search his phone did you find the last piece of evidence you needed to confirm your insecurities.

“You’re staring. Again,” Jihyun’s voice dragged you out of your thoughts. Tearing your eyes away from the happy couple, you turned to your coworker and pestering friend. Her lips were pursed, a clear sign of her disapproval. “Honestly, I don’t see why you are still hung up on him. My dog has a better ass than that piece of walking card board over there.”

A smile cracked onto your face. “You know, I’m still waiting for the I told you so’s”, you replied, half jokingly. You had not known Jihyun for very long now. You two first met a couple of years ago in a general educations course. You both bonded over your shared sarcastic early morning attitude and your shared failing grade in that course. Your friendship only grew when you found out you both were journalists for the school newspaper. Everything was down hill from there. Early morning complaining turned into mid-afternoon trips to the campus coffee house, which then turned into late night outs on the town with the sole mission of getting the most amount of food for the cheapest amount of money. It was a beautiful friendship. However, no matter how close the two of you grew, there was always one thing she could not stand about you; Jaesung. You could never understand her strong dislike towards the person you had presumed to be the love of your life. Countless of times you had tried to get all of you to hang out together, hoping that the more exposure she had to him the more he would grow on her. However, the more she got to know about him, the more she had to dislike. So when you turned up on her doorstep looking like a sobbing mess on the night you confronted Jaesung, you were fully expecting a full-blown speech on how much of a dirt bag he was and how she knew it all along. To your surprise, it has yet to come.

She waved your comment off. “I see no need in stating the obvious. What I do see a need for though is you getting your life back. And no, re-watching your favorite dramas does not mean you have a life.”

Your cheeks puffed out indignantly at her last remark. Sure, since the break up you had been spending a little more time indoors than you usually would. However, that doesn’t mean you no longer had a life. You were still very much a functioning human being living a perfectly acceptable life. Your life now just consisted of cheese covered fingers and watching Song Joong Ki’s beautiful face play out on your TV. And that was perfectly normal.

“Come out with me tonight. It’ll be fun! We could go down town, shop for a ton of shit that we don’t need, get flirted on by a few cute guys, maybe even collect a couple of phone number…?” her voice lowered suggestively as a smirk formed on her face. As you open your mouth to protest she quickly adds on, in a whinier tone this time, “You know it would be fun, don’t lie.”

In all honesty, you knew she was right. Jaesung was not worth your time of day. That is not what any of this was about though. You were not mourning the loss of him per say, but instead the loss of the relationship you thought you had. Deep down you have known that you and Jaesung were not working the way you once did, but you still clung on because you wanted to believe that your relationship was more than it was. The realization that your doubts had been true was a hard blow to take.

“Not tonight, Jihyun. Maybe next week,” you offered with a small smile. Even though you knew you were being irrational, you just wanted to lick your wounds a little longer.

The sound of your apartment door’s lock coming undone was the most beautiful sound you had heard all day. It meant that all of the horrible luck that had happened earlier in the day could soon be drowned out by the beautiful sound of cheesy dramas and delicious potato chip crunches. Maybe you’d even allow yourself the luxury of eating ice cream right out of the container tonight. It would mean you’d have to add an extra half hour to your work out tomorrow, but it all would be worth it tonight. In retrospect, you should have foreseen the events that followed. After all, you did live with two other roommates, and you could not hog the living room forever.

Upon walking in to your quaint living quarters, your senses were instantly sent into a state of alarm. There was an awful mixture of smells lingering in the air that if you had to guess were a combination of sweaty socks, greasy pizza, and… was that fish? The thought of all of these ingredients combined left your stomach feeling nauseated at once. It also clued you in on the fact that you had company over tonight. There were only one people who could possibly sweat so much to cause your apartment to smell this horrendously.

Your suspicions were confirmed as you rounded the corner. Your eyes first took in the old gym bag tossed carelessly near the shoe rack with used gym wear peaking out of the sides. As you eyes traveled further into the room you were pleasantly surprised to notice that despite the odor, the room was not a complete mess. For the most part, everything looked in place other than the odd piece of laundry hanging over the back of the arm chair. On the coffee table laid a delicious variety of different take out containers, far more than would reasonably be needed to fill the two boys sitting on the couch at the moment, who were too engaged in the newest episode of Show Me the Money to even notice your presence.

“I’m telling you Hobi, there is no way that he will win. He might be the better rapper, but he’s not as flashy as the rest of them. The audience won’t go for him,” your roommate of the last three years remarked, eyeing the screen with a mix of what looked to between pity and acceptance on his face.

The other boy did not seem too thrilled by Namjoon’s comment. “Aish, you’re not giving the audience enough credit. They won’t be swayed by such superficial things.” Even though his voice was confident the look he shot the TV was anything but.

“Why does my living room smell like boy?” you whined with a pout forming on your lips. Instantly both of the boys on the couch turned to look in your direction, startled.

“Y/N, I missed you!” Hoseok shouted happily once his surprise wore off. A million watt smile was aimed in your direction instantly, causing your tense shoulders to start relaxing involuntarily. It was hard to even pretend to be upset when in the presence of such positive energy. He patted the spot on the couch between him and Namjoon, beckoning you towards him. “Come on, come on, we ordered your favorite pizza.”

“What does that even mean, it smells like boy? Are you saying boys naturally smell? Sexist.” Your roommate grumbled as you all but collapsed on the spot between him and Hoseok.

“What I am saying is that Hobi should start a load of laundry if he’s going to be crashing here after dance practices” you corrected. From your other side you heard the dance major let out a scoff, clearly not pleased by your comment. “Hobi, I love you, but your practice clothes smell after you’re done.”

“Yah, what disrespect. After I bought you a whole feast for dinner this is how you repay me?” The volume of his voice slowly rose as he talked. It caused a grin to break out on your face, especially when you spotted the playful look he shot you. Even Namjoon chuckled from your other side.

“So how was work? Did you come up with your next article yet?” he questioned, reaching over you to grab his bottle of beer from the coffee table. His eyes looked at you with honest curiosity. It was reasons like this that you took so easily to Namjoon when you first met him. He was genuine. He did not merely talk to you for the sake of making small talk, but because he honestly cared about what was going on in your life. To be honest, if it weren’t for the discussions you had with him over possible article subjects you don’t think your work would be as well rounded at it was.

Unfortunately, not even your cultured roommate could get you out of your dry spell. With a defeated sigh, you slouched back onto the couch, accepting the plate of pizza Hobi handed to you with a grateful nod. “Not even close. I know that there has to be a story out there on campus, I just can’t find it.”

“Maybe that has something to do with the fact you haven’t left the apartment in weeks” Hobi observed, his voice taking on an innocent tone. At the sight of your eyes narrowing he instantly added, “I’m just saying, how will you know what is going on on campus if you are never actually on campus?”

To your horror, Namjoon nodded his head in agreement. “Face it Y/N, you’ve been sitting on this couch for far too long. You need to get out there again. Maybe head over to that one café you like and eavesdrop on what people are saying.”

The other boy made a noise of doubt at that. “I don’t know. She used to like that place because the guy that worked there was cute, but he quit so…”

Your body instantly reacted to those words by sitting up straighter. “What?? Jackson quit? Why? He was literally the sweetest man on the face of this earth! He always remembered my name - he even spelt it correctly!” This day just seemed to be getting worse and worse by the minute.

“From what I heard, he got a job down at the campus gym as a personal trainer. He’s actually pretty good. He has a line of people waiting to be trained by him. He’s very popular with female clients.” Silently, you thought that that had more to do with his physique rather than his actual skill. The boy had the body of a Greek god. You kept your opinion to yourself though.

“Oh, that is an idea” the purple haired boy said, staring at you encouragingly. “You could start hitting the gym again. People love to gossip at the gym. Plus, you’ve been getting a little flabby.” To emphasize his point he poked your thigh with a playful expression, letting you know that he was just messing with you.

Nonetheless you still swatted his hand away indignantly. “I appreciate both your concern, but I am perfectly fine, thanks” you stated, a bit sarcastically, to your roommate, before turning to his friend to add, “And I’ll have you know, Jackson was just one of the reasons I like that café. They also have delicious pastries. Maybe Minjin would like to come with me tomorrow…” you wondered the last bit out loud. Truthfully, it had been a while since you hung out with your female roommate, even though you lived together. It would be nice to spend some time with her again.

“She’d like that. She’s been complaining lately that you don’t have time for her anymore since you’ve fallen in love with your dramas” Namjoon commented, looking at you with an amused smirk. Instantly, Hobi let out a giggle, turning in his seat to face his friends with a new burst of excitement.

“Oh oh, remember when we came here a couple of days ago and she was talking to his character on the screen? ‘Yoo Shi Jin, forget about the brat, I’m here for you!’” A blush creped onto your face as you remembered your slip up in front of the guys. Maybe you had been watching dramas a little too long after all.

“Yah, I can’t hear the show over you two. Tsk…” you grumbled, stuffing your face with a big bite of pizza as you sulked. They only responded with their chuckles.

“No” you instantly said, stepping closer in line. It was a Saturday morning, so the café was not as crowded as it usually was during the weekday morning rush, but the loyal weekend customers still filled up the place for a small line to have formed. Glancing around you noticed with a pang of disappointment that Jackson was in fact gone. You let out a disappointed sigh. Hopefully the muffins were still good.

Minjin didn’t seem to like your response. “You don’t know, it could be fun! I hear he’s an artist! That’s hot right? Sexy, brooding artist?” You rolled your eyes at that, continuing to glance around the café. Not much had changed other than Jackson’s departure since you had last been there a few weeks ago. The place was still as cozy and comfortable as you remembered it. The only noticeable change is that there was a new barista behind the counter. Despite the fact that he was new, he didn’t seem to be under the pressure that came with starting a new job. He even felt confident enough to socialize with the customers as he created each individualized creation with a speedy accuracy. Interesting.

“Let me be clearer. Hell no.” you replied to your roommate as you stepped closer in line, starting to regret asking her to come out with you. Everything had been going normally until she had you trapped in the coffee shop. That is when she revealed her true interest in wanting to hang out with you.

Minjin let out a small, cute whine beside you. “Oh come on Y/N! Do it for me! Do you know how long it is been since I’ve had sex with my boyfriend? Weeks. Weeks!” True to Minjin’s fashion, her voice was much louder than socially accepted to be saying such things in public. Unsurprisingly, her statement did not settle well with some of the other customers: specifically, the elderly couple standing in front of you who turned around to face you both just long enough to convey their disapproval. From the corner of your eye you saw the barista give a little smirk, but did not avert his attention away from his current task.

“Then have sex, I honestly do not see why I have to be involved with this” you replied, unphased. You had been living with your roommate for far too long for her openness about such things in public to bother you anymore. Your mood was slightly elevated when you noticed you were next to be served after the couple in front of you, though.

“Because his roommate won’t leave the damn apartment! I’m just asking for an hour, maybe two tops. Just take him out somewhere, hell, come here! Please, just do it for me” she pleaded, giving you her best puppy dog eyes. “Plus, who knows, you might hit it off! It could put an end to your dry spell!”

Warmth started to creep up your neck at her last comment. Sadly, her words were not wrong. Even though you and Jaesung only broke up a few weeks ago, your lack of sexual activities extended far before that. At the time he always claimed it was because he was too worn out from work, but in light of recent events you suspected he was just getting action from someone else.

“Leave my dry spell out of your horniness. I’ll have you know I am perfectly fine with my sex life.”

It was at that very moment that it became your turn to order. From the amused look the barista gave you both, he had not been spared from hearing the conversation between the two of you. The knowledge only made your face head up further.

“How may I help you today?” His voice was deeper than you were expecting. It had a certain warmth to it that momentarily left you forgetting your persistent roommate all together.

Quickly snapping out of your small daze, you politely ordered: A medium caramel ice blended coffee with two shots of espresso, hold the whipped cream. Was the drink enough to give you a burst of energy? Not really, but you wanted to splurge a bit today. Your usual Americano could wait for Monday morning. Once your companion gave her order as well, the barista got to work on your drinks.

“You’re new here, right?” Minjin inquired, looking at the boy behind the counter. Her mission at the time to set you up on a blind date seemed to be momentarily set aside. “Are you Jackson’s replacement?”

A deep chuckled rumbled out of the boys chest, causing his shoulders to shake slightly. The sound alone sent a shiver down your spine. “So it seems. He was pretty popular among here with the ladies, wasn’t he?” A smirk tugged on his lips as he spoke, continuing to mix up your drinks.

“Jackson is popular wherever he goes, he makes sure of it.” Minjin stated playfully. While they spoke, you took the time to let your eyes wander over the new barista. It would be an injustice to merely call him good looking. It was almost annoying how you couldn’t find a single flaw about him. Even the way that his bangs fell in front of his eyes drew you in. You suddenly had an urge to reach over and move his hair away, if only just to feel if his locks were truly as soft as they seemed. Not to mention the way that his black uniform top clung to his biceps, causing the material to stretch each time he flexed his muscles as he continued to mix the drinks. While the company apron covered his chest and torso, you still got a glimpse of his firm pecks straining against the fabric. But above all else, what really caught your attention were his wide brown eyes that beckoned you in. The very eyes that were staring into your own at that very moment.

You did not think it was possible for your face to get any warmer as a small, knowing smirk spread onto the boy’s lips. He gave a small, cocky tilt of the head, but there was no other sign that gave away the fact that he had indeed caught you giving him a thorough look over as he continued his discussion with an oblivious Minjin, the smirk never leaving his face.

“That’ll be eight fifty nine” he said, finally looking back at you. You did not miss the way that his eyes scanned over your body for a moment before returning to meet your own with cock of his head, almost challengingly. It took a moment of just standing there to realize that he was waiting for your response. With a quick, stuttered apology you reach into your purse and hand him ten-dollar bill. You did not wait for a reaction, merely nodding your head with a mumbled thank you before tugging your roommate out of the store with your drinks in hand. Behind you, the distinct sound of his deep chuckle could be heard but you paid it no mind as you made your way towards the exit, desperately wanting to put your embarrassment in the past.

Usually, you could handle situations like these with far more grace and overall smoothness. However, for the past three years you never noticed another man the way that you just noticed this new barista. Your commitment to your relationship left you blinded to other people’s advances. It also left you with an annoying lack of experience in how to deal with them, especially from impossibly attractive men. Maybe you did need to get out more, at least for the sake of not making such a fool of yourself again.

With a grudging sigh, you hunched your shoulders. “Fine, give me this artist’s number.”

“This is a horrible idea,” you stated as you looked at your reflection in the mirror with great skepticism. It has been a week since you had agreed to go on the blind date and the closer the date approached the more trepidation you felt. Nonetheless, you tried remaining positive about it. It was a chance to get out of this rut you put yourself in. You were not letting yourself back out of it. Yet, as you looked over your chosen outfit, you felt the anxiety bubbling up again. “This is a horrible idea, isn’t it? Why did I agree to this? Why did you let me agree to this? Damn it, Namjoon, I need to change again.”

Your roommate watched you stomp back into your closet with a look of amusement. You had pulled him away from reading to help you pick out an outfit to wear. That was nearly thirty minutes ago, and so far he has watched you try on nearly half of your closet. Some part of him knew that there was a billion of better ways to spend his day, but watching your meltdown was too good to pass up. “Why are you even freaking out anyways? You didn’t want to go on the date to begin with.”

You merely rolled your eyes. “I haven’t gone out on a date with anyone but Jaesung in years. I don’t even know proper first date etiquette anymore. What if he tries to like, make a move or something? No, my outfit must portray a friendly and approachable yet clearly emphasize the strictness of my personal bubble.”

Namjoon just stared in your direction. “Clothes can’t talk for you, Y/N. Plus, as I remember, you can dish out a rather affective slap. If he gets too handsy just lay one on him.”

Even with you in the closet, he could still hear you sigh. “You are useless. Hobi would have been more help than you, and he’s married to his own dance moves.”

The purple hair man let out a long breath, counting to ten in his head before getting up from his place on your bed. While this had been fun, it was starting to get old. It was time he took things into his own hands.

“Move” he demanded, walking into the close and towards your wall of clothes. He didn’t even glance in your direction, even though the only forms of clothing you had on were an undershirt and a pair of panties. In his first year of living with you girls, he had to quickly grow accustom to both yours and Minjin’s habit of walking around in various levels of undressed in the apartment. It started off with minor things, such as going braless around the apartment or leaving your underwear in the shared bathroom without worrying that he would see it. However, when you both deemed him to not be a threat to either of you, you both got a little more daring by walking around the apartment in nothing but a large shirt to eventually feeling comfortable enough to change right in front of him without much of a care. At first he had to admit that his manhood had taken a hit, but he soon got used to it. None of you guys saw each other as anything other than friends, possibly even a sort of family. Plus, it came with its perks; he no longer had to worry about walking in nothing but his boxers to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

After studying the wardrobe for a few minutes he reached into it and pulled out a loose fitted blouse that hung off your shoulders along with a pair of ripped skinny jeans before tossing them into your arms. “There, wear that. It still makes you look cute and feminine but makes it seem casual without trying too much.”

You eyed the clothing for a brief moment before shrugging and putting them on. Despite your roommates questionable fashion at time, he never led you astray when it came to what you should wear. He knew what trends you liked or disliked and based his opinions off that, not what he liked personally. It was another aspects that you loved about him; he never pushed his own opinions onto other people.

“Thanks Joonie. I owe you” you grinned, going to go slip on a pair of converse.

“Mhm. Just have fun, okay? You’re stressing yourself out for nothing. You could actually maybe hit it off with him.” With a shrug, he made his way out of the room, not even looking over his shoulder when he shouted back at you, “Oh! And bring me back a muffin as compensation for this!”

Despite the fact that your eyes rolled back into your head, you couldn’t stop the soft chuckle that passed your lips. Namjoon was right. You were overthinking this. It was one blind date, barely better than two people hanging out. There definitely would be no hand holding or kissing or anything of the sort. This is just one friend helping another friend get laid by taking their boyfriend’s roommate out of the house for a bit. It was nothing really. Plus, what did you have to lose?

A lot. It turns out you had a lot to lose, most important of which being your sanity. However, you had started to worry that your freedom was at risk as well because if he said one more thing out of place you feared that you would be thrown in jail for assault. You prided yourself in not being a physically aggressive person, but this asshole seemed to know each of your buttons to press.

The date hadn’t started off all that badly. In fact, when you first saw him walk up to you outside of the café, you actually thought he was kind of cute. He somehow made long, shaggy hair work with his features, and while he wore rather casual clothes they were all in pristine condition and fit his shape very well, which had let you know he cared about how he looked. You could admire that about a person. Mostly because half of the time you couldn’t find a single ounce of effort to care about how you looked.

Still, you were starting to have high hopes for this blind date. When he introduced himself as Jinho he seemed soft spoken as he offered to shake your hand. Your first impression of him was that he was polite and rather shy. He kept a healthy distance between you two and kind of shied into himself a bit. In all honesty, you thought it was somewhat cute. However, all of your optimism was wiped away when you both walked inside.

The first thing that had clued you in that things would probably not go as well as you had hoped was the familiar looking barista cleaning up the space behind the counter. He wore the same black shirt that you saw him in last, with the green strings of his apron wrapping around his waist rather snuggly. Luckily his back was turned towards you so he could not spot you. However, this left you with a perfect view of his back muscles stretching out the fabric of the shirt to the point you weren’t sure the shirt would hold. You also weren’t sure if the sight was a blessing or a curse.

Oblivious to your sudden nervousness, your date ushered you to stand at the counter. You were half tempted to turn around and find another café to have this date at but you figured you were being irrational. This was your favorite place to hang out at, after all. You were not going to give up your precious muffins just because of one embarrassing encounter with McDreamy from behind the counter. Besides, he most likely didn’t even recognize you. He sees hundreds of people daily; it was unlikely that you were the only one who obviously checked him out. Especially considering how good-looking he was, it must happen all the time for him.

Your hopes were instantly torn apart the moment he turned around. His eyes found yours within seconds, and from the small smirk that appeared at the corner of his mouth, you could tell that he recognized you. You silently had to remind yourself that the muffins at this place were worth it.

For his part though, he didn’t vocalize his recognition. “How may I help you both today?” he said with a pleasant smile, drying off his hands on a towel from his vest.

“Um… I’ll have a kale smoothie. Along with a fruit bowl.” To be honest, that should have been your second clue that something was not right with this guy. But nonetheless, you weren’t about to judge him off of his palate taste. You still held onto your hope for this to turn out well.

The barista merely nodded, writing up the order before turning to you next curiously.

“I’ll have a caramel ice blended coffee with two shots. Hold the whip please. Oh, and a blue berry muffin.” In your haste to get ready this morning, you forgot to grab a bite to eat. Part of you might have done it on purpose just to get the chance to eat a muffin. You’d never admit it though.

“Are you sure you want to order that?” Jinho remarked beside you, his voice changing from the soft-spoken boy you’d met outside to one of pure judgment. “Do you know how many calories are in just your drink alone? Don’t even get me started on that muffin. No one needs that much sugar in one sitting.”

There it is. The point of no return. The climax of this date, as you would later put it. It is the very moment that your day dream of slapping the sneer off of his face was born. Any hope you had left for this day was instantly thrown out the window.

Even the barista looked taken back by his remark. He stared between the two of you somewhat startled. You, on the other hand, did not even glance towards your date. You merely continued to stare at the café employee in your state of shock. You’d never had someone so rudely comment on your choice of food, let alone someone you had not even known for five minutes. You could feel your eyes narrowing as your jaw set itself into place. In that moment you knew the next hour of your life would be a slow and painful one.

Somehow, you managed to put a smile back on your face, no matter how tight it might of felt. Turning to your date, you said, “You are completely right. The blueberry muffin won’t do.” You then turned you the man behind the counter. “Could I have your double chocolate muffin instead?”

On your part, you could not tell whose reaction you enjoyed more: the disgusted scoff that made its way out of Jinho or the momentary laugh that escaped the barista’s mouth, for which he quickly tried passing off as a cough as he hastily wrote down your orders in his notepad.

Unfortunately, everything just went down hill from there. No matter how hard you tried to make the next hour somewhat pleasant, you found yourself disliking the man the more he talked. From the corner of your eye you swore you say the barista glance towards your table with an amused smirk on his face. At least someone is getting some type of enjoyment out of this, you thought.

“So yeah. Like I love art and all, but I just hate most art, you know? Like, the art is so corrupt now a day. That’s why I can’t stand it” he continued, as he had done for the past fifty minutes. You glanced up at the clock as you hummed a response, not even really listening at this point. It is not like he even let you get a sentence in if you wanted to. Ten more minutes. You could last ten more minutes with this guy, right? Minjin better be getting the best fucking of her life right now.

“Like, portraits are so last century. Do people really not know how to create anything else? Where is the creativity in just copying something you can see every day? They’re almost as bad as photographers. Am I right?”

That is it. You could not take it any longer. “I’m sorry, what kind of artist did you say you were?” you asked, keeping your voice so sweet it bordered on sickly.

Your question seemed to excite him though. He sat up straight in his chair, pulling out his phone. “I’ll show you. I think you’ll be very impressed actually.” He then thrusted his phone in your face.

At first, you could do nothing but blink. Try as you might, you could not understand what exactly you were seeing. “I’m sorry, but this canvas is blank.”

His face instantly scrunched up into a sneer, snapping his phone away to cradle it to his chest protectively as if you had just injured it somehow. “It is not blank. Its painted with different shades of white and glossed over so there are no brush strokes. It is my proudest piece.” He then proceeded to look at his phone fondly before adding, “I guess a commoner like you wouldn’t be able to understand its beauty. It’s okay, you can’t be helped.”

Once again you were left speechless. You didn’t know if you should laugh at his audacity or smack him, so instead you settled on just staring at him, baffled. Some part of your brain registered a somewhat familiar laughter coming from behind the counter that is not far from the table you are sitting at but you were in too much of a state shock to acknowledge it.

When your amazement started to fade away all that was left was anger. You had made a silent promise to yourself that you would make it to the hour mark so that Minjin could have as much time with her boyfriend as your sanity could take, but you knew that if you spent another minute with this prick you would be dumping the remainder of your drink on his head. “You know, I think it is time that I head home” you stated, collecting your stuff.

“Oh,” Jinho replied, somewhat shocked. “Well… maybe I could take you home, and we could pick things up from there,” his voice suddenly turned what you were guessing was meant to be seductive as he leaned closer to you.

The laugh that erupted from your throat shocked both of you. “I’m sorry, but what part of this date could have possibly made you think any of this had gone well?” you asked, your disbelief clear in your voice as you stared at him as if he had grown another head.

“Honestly? This was awful. You’re kind of rude. And stuck up. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still have some fun. One that doesn’t involve you to talk.”

You chose to ignore the laugh from a certain barista that followed that comment. Instead, you just gave Jinho a look of only dimly hidden disgust. Unfortunately, it didn’t phase him as much as you had hoped. Instead he just shrugged as he stood up, adding, “Fine, your loss. You can cover all this right? I’m living off of an artist salary and all. It’s a hard life, but its better than being one of those mindless people that just go to college, right?”

You leaned your head against your hands and rubbed your temples, hoping that if you closed your eyes and prayed hard enough you would wake up from this nightmare. “Please… just leave,” you half whined, not even opening your eyes when you heard the sound of his feet walking away. It was not until you heard the door shut after him that you opened your eyes again, if only to make sure that he truly was gone.

With a somewhat obnoxious groan, you threw your head back and rubbed your face. You somehow felt at least ten years older. Minjin owed you so much after doing this for her.

“He’s right you know,” a deep voice said. Sitting up straight again, your eyes fell upon the barista, who was standing by your table, cleaning up after the trash Jinho left behind. The bastard even left trash for you to clean up after, you thought bitterly.

“Huh?” you said, once again cursing yourself for your lack of elegance in front of this man.

“About the muffin. It goes straight to your ass” he replied, his tone being completely serious. You would’ve taken offense to it if it weren’t for the playful smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

“Haha, very funny, pour salt on the open wound. To think I was gonna leave you a good tip…” you grumbled lightly, before shaking your head. “God, I will kill Minjin.”

“Why? I thought the date went very well. I haven’t laughed that hard in a while,” he teased, his smirk growing to a full-blown smile. You took note to the fact that he was taking a particularly long time to pick up two pieces of trash.

“You’re begging not to get tipped aren’t you?” Your voice rose in volume a bit, but a smile started to form on your lips.

“Please, from the way you eyed me up when you walked in I deserve a good tip. The show isn’t for nothing you know.” His grin grew wider as he took in the faint blush forming on your cheeks. “You’re not sly in the least bit. You should probably work on that before you go on any other date.”

You busied yourself with getting out your wallet in hope that if you don’t look directly at him he would not notice the way your face heated up further. “I cannot say I know what you are talking about,” you played ignorant, placing the money down on the table. He only grinned at that.

“I’m sure you don’t.” With that he reached into his apron pocket and pulled out his receipt forms, writing something on it before placing it on the table in front of you. “I’ll see you around then, Y/N.” With a smirk he collected your money and headed back towards the counter.

You blinked in shock for a few moments, before quickly gathered your things to make your exit. You would not allow him the satisfaction of witnessing further evidence of the affect he had on you. It was not until you were sitting within the protection of your car that you allowed yourself the opportunity to process todays events. Was he flirting with you? No, he couldn’t be. But was he? When had you become so awful at figuring these things out? And how did he know your name?

With a small sigh, you glanced down at your receipt, making sure you had left enough money to cover everything. That is when you noticed it. For some unknown reason, a slow grin formed on your face before you could fight it off. That cocky bastard, you thought. With a shake of your head, you tossed the receipt back into your purse before starting up the car. Maybe Jackson leaving the café wasn’t the worst thing that could’ve happened after all.

It’s Jungkook, by the way. Incase you needed a name for when you bragged about me to your friend ;)

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mageinabarrel · 7 years

Text

[SPOILERS] NieR: Automata Thoughts

SPOILERS AFTER THE READ MORE LINK - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

So, I think the best way to tackle this game is just to go by ending/route. So I’ll talk about those, in order as I experienced them.

Route A:

Highlight: This cannot continue. I tweeted about this at the time, but wow, this moment was absolutely visceral for me when I first experienced it. I was still getting used to the game’s controls (having never owned a console in my life until now and generally only playing turn-based combat JRPGs, this game was a stretch for me, especially early on), tense because I’d already been surprised by things chasing the machine, and completely enveloped in the atmosphere of the collected android corpses, the tunnel, and everything else. Then it was an insane rush of creepy repeated words, a cascade of enemies I wasn’t sure I’d be able to defeat, and then the incredibly disturbing conclusion to it all with the birth of Adam and Eve (right, that was them right?). I was shaking by the time it was done.

Ending: Again to repeat my Twitter thoughts, I was left a slight bit unsatisfied by this ending. With the C/D reveal that 2B was an execution type all along, I like it a little better, and I think the overall idea of it (especially the strange beauty of the blinking green machine eyes as 9S revived) was neat—but I still thought it was less moving than it could of been. That being said, I guess in the end it’s possibly my favorite ending?

Other thoughts on A: I probably had the most fun exploring the world this route! Although I got frustrated with the lack of a log that showed where you could obtain crafting materials, overall it was a pleasure exploring the beautiful world Platinum Games created. 2B was my favorite character to actually play as, as well, and some retrospect invested stuff like the YoRHa Betrayers quest with extra meaning, which was cool.

Route B:

Highlight: Adam’s taunting of 9S. The accusatory tone and the use of “you” (you the player or 9S, eh?) makes it more intense. That being said, having it delivered by text is... well. Not necessarily ideal!

Ending: When you gain control over 2B in the middle of the credits rolling was possibly the most exhilarating moment of the entire game for me. I was super excited, and felt like, “Oh, shit, here we go—for real now.” It was good.

Other thoughts on B: Probably my least favorite route to play through. I didn’t care much for 9S’s mechanics (that freaking hacking minigame, although I didn’t know about the lock-on function until almost the end of my full playthrough lol) & if I’m being honest I didn’t feel like going through all the same events as the A route really added all that much in the way of new perspectives on it all. At some points I really resented it, actually. Which... is honestly probably more of a reflection of my natural dislike of the “route” system than anything else—I greatly wished that my actions in A had had a concrete impact on the way B played out, but, well, that’s not the game this was. Oh, also I think I basically know the whole plot of NieR now?

Route C:

Highlight: Walking out the door, refusing to cut off Pascal’s memory or kill him. His final, “How could you do this to me,” coupled with the immediate fade to black and switch to controlling 9S again gave the whole moment a feeling of, “I’ve done something I cannot undo.” And I felt pretty terrible! Even though I personally didn’t want to do either option and didn’t think A2 would be up for them either. But still, actually having to walk yourself out that door and listening to Pascal’s agony behind you... much more powerful than just selecting a “Refuse to help Pascal” choice out of three options.

Ending: Maybe I missed something along the way, but ??? A2′s final words about the world being beautiful came out of nowhere?? She sacrifices herself to save 9S because?? Surely I understand not killing him, as she obvious doesn’t care to kill her fellow androids, but as far as satisfying resolutions to her purposeless wanderings on Earth go, this was far from it. I felt like she was owed more than she got.

Other thoughts on C: I felt like A2 killing 2B should have been more moving that it was, but honestly I was more upset at the game for removing the option to play as her. And, you know, I was most invested in 2B as a character, so having to readjust my levels of caring for the characters was not a super fun experience. Otherwise, as you might expect, I enjoyed C (considering the A2 bits C and the 9S bits D) more than D because I liked playing as A2 – although her material felt somewhat directionless? Like the story didn’t know exactly what it was doing with her—something I suppose is borne out in the ending.

Route D:

Highlight: Devola/Popola’s backstory. As with the 9S/Adam conversation, displaying it in text was a bit eh of a choice for me, but I liked the material quite a lot.

Ending: So the choice you make whether to go with the ark or not doesn’t matter, huh? Anyways, can’t say I’m a huge fan of ‘everyone dies’ endings! It’s good A2 gets resolution in C, cause she gets jack squat in this one! 9S falls to nihilism and insanity... well... that’s fine I guess, but I guess I feel like there needed to be more for me to really be moved by it, my basic unfondness for the ending type aside.

Other thoughts on D: What was up with the Soul Box giving all the items (plus that weapon, Faith), though? An earlier Nier reference that I didn’t get? Lots of other questions, too? Devola and Popola made the Tower? It didn’t come from 9S after all? Or it did, as implied by the C ending? Idk...

Ending E:

Well, all games have to end, I suppose, and as far as “true endings” go this was a nice one. I suppose overall a 2-minute or whatever cut scene isn’t everything I wanted, but leave life after memory restoration up to the fan fiction, I guess! Yes I’m disgruntled. I’m sorry. It’s not enough for me! Although asking me questions like “is it all meaningless” in between deaths on the credits bullet hell is definitely enough to get me to stubbornly move through. Sorry to all the people who lost their data on my behalf.

—Overall Thoughts—

Needed more 2B, and if you think about this all from certain angles you might be a bit miffed that 2B got offed to let 9S’s story continue. Being less than happy with that decision from certain personal places, I’m certainly more sympathetic to that angle that, admittedly, I might be otherwise.

The hacking minigame was more frustrating than it should have been. It almost killed my Route D run for a week (thanks Twitter for getting me through that).

On the whole I felt like the game’s story delivery pacing was... hmm... not quite right? Like if I went off and did a bunch of sidequests and then came back to the story, it seemed really odd to just have it pick up again. But by the same token, just going from story point to story point felt like rushing through. The balance there could have been better. I like it best when quests just seemed to pop up in the middle of the main story and I could go off and do them, then resume what I was doing before.

2B’s swords were basically the only weapons I used for her and A2 all game lol.

I reconfigured my buttons after about the first 5 hours at it was sooo helpful. Quick summary:

X=light attack

Square=heavy attack/hack

Triangle=jump (duhhhh)

L1=lock-on

L2=pod function

R1=dodge

R2=pod fire

I think this is a good way to do things. Good set-up for me.

Overall, I was less enamoured by the game that I expected to be. I see the seeds of why people loved it, but to me it was not all delivered as effectively as it could have been. I might even say that the fact it was a game hampered my enjoyment of the story aspects (the final save delete option aside). I would watch an anime of this game and possibly enjoy it/find it more compelling than I did of it in game form. Anime is better than video games after all. It’s by no means a bad game and overall I enjoyed it (particularly the combat, especially during the mid-portion of the game when I’d just sort of got the hang of it but wasn’t perfect), but, I mean, if you don’t stun me into silence like Shining Force: Resurrection of Dark Dragon did, what’s even the point? (that’s a joke, although that game’s big reveal really did have a huge impact on me as a kid lol)

I suppose my thoughts on the game might evolve over time and as I read people’s essays/thoughts on it. But that’s my initial impression/experience of it.

Another thought that occurs to me just now is that some of the game’s questions about meaning and existence perhaps struck me as shallow and/or juvenile because they are such fixed, obvious quantities to me. Being a religious person I specially am, I don’t much struggle with such questions on a macro level. So interrogating them in this fictional context seemed a bit silly to me perhaps? Like the game was asking the wrong questions.

#spoilers #nier automata

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