In response to your post about Childe requests! Fluff? Maybe nightmare comfort? Thanks!

Awake from the nightmare

Summary: Childe wakes up from a nightmare confused.

Pairing: Childe/Tartaglia x reader

Genre: Hurt/comfort, fluff.

A/n: Sorry this took so long dear anon! I was struggling to figure out how exactly I wanted to write this haha! I had quite a bit of fun with it however, and despite my (maybe) lackluster characterisation of Childe I do very enjoy writing for him. Thank you for being so patient and enjoy! Ao3

The sudden feeling of someone sitting up disturbs your slumber, though only enough to momentarily rouse you to consciousness. It brings you no worry, for you know Ajax has never been particularly subtle when getting up in the night and so you cuddle back up under the covers, hoping for a few more hours of rest. It only takes a moment however, before you realise just how heavily he’s breathing and concerned you crack an eye open, worry seeping into your heart. You can make him out faintly in the dim light of the room, hunched over with his hands gripping the sheets. You could swear that he’s shaking and even in your half conscious state you’re certain the cold is not the why of it. 

It’s almost unnerving, seeing Ajax like this, and so tentatively you reach a hand out and place it on his trembling one in an attempt to provide some form of comfort. He recoils at the feeling, obviously startled and looks at you now wide eyed. Several beats of silence pass and you can see the gears turning in his head. You watch as his gaze turns into something more peculiar. 

“You’re okay.” He sounds small, and you wonder if he was merely thinking aloud.

You nod, unsure of what exactly to say. You opt to remain quiet, taking it upon yourself to sit up. After a moment of hesitance you reach out once more, placing your hand on his arm. His skin is warm to the touch though in no way unpleasant, and you can practically feel the tension seep out of him. You lean forward, placing a soft kiss to his shoulder and he lets out a shaky sigh, running a hand through his hair before leaning against you.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” the smile he gives you is tired, “don’t worry, I’m alright.”

He leans forward, pressing his lips against your softly. He’s still shaking, you notice, and when he pulls away you make a comment about it, teasing that it must really be due to the cold after all. Your attempt of lightening the mood works, for he laughs in response. A soft kiss is placed on your forehead before he tells you to lay back down, reaching over to grab the blanket before following you. He’s quick to wrap his arms and the covers around you, softly but urgently pulling you into his chest.

Silence fills the space once more, save for the breathing of the man before you, and it grows increasingly hard to stay awake. You think to yourself that you should try, that you should only sleep when you can ensure that Ajax is resting peacefully. But between the warmth and comfort you can barely will yourself to keep your eyes open, so with some fading reluctance you allow yourself to drift back to sleep. 

The last thing you hear is a faint “thank you solnyshko.”

do you happen to take requests? if so, may i- hcs abt playing and simping on genshin impact with kenma, kuroo, oikawa and bokuto-? you can lessen the cast if you want^^ thank you for the time! i love your blog 💖

GENSHIN IMPACT HERE I COME

genshin impact frenzy!

— kenma, kuroo, oikawa, and bokuto play genshin impact with you!

gen masterlist

taglist ( open! ) —

a/n — this game has taken literally so much of my time, it was only meant to be that i fulfill this request—also bokuto’s has minor spoilers to venti’s story quest! it’s pretty vague but it’s still there

kenma kozume.

✧｡ this guy can take on literally everyone with just the standard team

✧｡ and he does—he sees no point in wishing for people when he’s already got a decent team given to him for free

✧｡ you’ve literally fought with him so many times because he forgets that wishing is a thing and finds it strange that you are willing to spend your life savings on a single five star character

✧｡ he will only wish on the standard banner, since that’s where you can get constellations for the standard team

✧｡ somehow he’s collected so many constellations for kaeya and amber, it’s unreal

✧｡ you’ve debated on sending a complaint to mihoyo because kenma can’t send any of his primogems to you

✧｡ he’s currently AR 50 and still has the beginner’s banner untouched aside from noelle

✧｡ “kenma, would it kill you to wish on a banner once? just one ten wish summon. one time.”

✧｡ “but i already have my team up to level 90, why should i put in the effort to grind for anything else?”

✧｡ “because the other characters look nice?”

✧｡ “okay, and?”

✧｡ there’s no winning against him

✧｡ you ain’t ever catching him simp

✧｡ you almost caught him eyeing kaeya’s new idle animation but to no avail </3

✧｡ timeskip kenma streams on twitch, where even some of his viewers are completely distraught that he never wishes on the banners

✧｡ on multiple occasions he’s held events where he gives you money for primogems, and just streams you wishing for the characters instead of him

✧｡ he’d never admit it out loud, but his heart flutters when he sees the excited look on your face as you pull a five star character

tetsurou kuroo.

✧｡ for shits and giggles he probably decided to choose lumine instead of aether

✧｡ when he realized that he liked aether’s design more than hers, he just stopped using her entirely

✧｡ if he hadn’t gotten all the way to AR 30 before this realization, he probably would’ve started over with a new account just to choose aether instead

✧｡ he doesn’t play this game religiously, but he is far from a f2p guy

✧｡ will shamelessly simp with you if he deems the character simp worthy—if not he’ll just watch you simp and then simp over his own characters

✧｡ he almost lost his mind over albedo and had a heart attack when he ended up pulling a weapon instead

✧｡ don’t even get me started when he laid eyes on ganyu

✧｡ if you can’t get a five star character you want, he’ll purposely spend money so that he gets them before you and rub it in your face

✧｡ that’s what he did for zhongli

✧｡ “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU GOT ZHONGLI?”

✧｡ “i mean, he’s right here. look! isn’t he so sexy? he would be a great addition to my team. you enjoy having jean though! i’ve heard she’s a great healer.”

✧｡ “tetsurou, i am going to murder you.”

✧｡ “no you won’t.”

✧｡ “i won’t. i just won’t help you with domains anymore.”

✧｡ “okay okay wait this can be discussed—”

✧｡ he hates grinding and will continuously hold if off until he physically can’t defeat any of the ascension material bosses

✧｡ however, he completes ascension quests the moment he can—it’s just his luck that he has to deal with the consequences when he has to deal with mobs with his severely under leveled team

✧｡ both of you raced to get to AR 40 first, and you won since you were actually smart enough to level up your characters long before he did

✧｡ you two like completing domains together rather than doing it online or alone

✧｡ genshin is more of a leisure pastime for kuroo, but he finds himself playing it more and more with each passing day

tooru oikawa.

✧｡ surprisingly? he’s much better at genshin than what you were originally expecting

✧｡ it’s probably because he has enough patience to grind for all of the materials SDJKFJKSDF

✧｡ but because he prioritizes volleyball a lot more, he’s only at AR 36 while you’re on your way to AR 47

✧｡ he takes it upon himself to compare himself to childe, and you just have to go with it because tooru will not take no for an answer

✧｡ just to spite you he goes around saying “hey girlie” every now and then

✧｡ he’ll come up behind you quietly and whisper in your ear, causing you to jump at the sound of his voice

✧｡ “hey girlie, hold still.”

✧｡ “TOORU COULD YOU NOT—”

✧｡ “c’mon, you know you you like it.”

✧｡ “maybe if you dressed up into childe’s foul legacy transformation, i would be persuaded.”

✧｡ “SAY NO MORE”

✧｡ simps for both mona and diluc lowk

✧｡ i just know he purposely chooses the suggestive and flirty choices every chance he gets

✧｡ he had a field day with ying’er (that perfume lady idk)

✧｡ he hates spiral abyss with every fiber of his being and refuses to do anything more after he got xiangling

✧｡ he likes flaunting his five stars to random people he plays with in domains just for the fun of it

✧｡ his favorites to flaunt are childe and xiao (he was originally wanting ganyu but her banner expired before he could pull her so he just wasted the rest of his pity and got xiao instead)

✧｡ idk why but i get the sense that he’s eagerly waiting for an announcement that scaramouche will be a playable character

✧｡ he will give you money for genshin if you ask nicely

✧｡ if you ask nicely and you give him something in return

✧｡ but all in all, he does genuinely enjoy the game

koutarou bokuto.

✧｡ kou will either forget to play it for months or you’ll have to pry it from his hands after being locked away in his room for at least a week

✧｡ his favorite five star to use would probably be klee, just because of all the explosions she sets off

✧｡ definitely simps for ningguang and albedo, but will see to it that he proves himself better than any of the guys you simp for

✧｡ he loves using fischl so that he can use oz

✧｡ he doesn’t take the game very seriously but still manages to reach AR 40, even though he has no idea how builds work

✧｡ he has no desire to learn either, he’s just enjoying himself and exploring the world

✧｡ he gets carried away with exploring the world that he found both all of the anemoculus and the geoculus before AR 40

✧｡ goes into emo mode when he doesn’t pull the character he wants

✧｡ the story quests make him sad when he does them, especially venti’s

✧｡ he regretted not having venti after he finished that story quest and just watched the story with venti and his old friend over and over again to mourn

✧｡ and he checks up on stanley every time he sees him anywhere, usually in front of mondstadt at night

✧｡ “i promise you that i will never leave you or let any harm come to you, y/n”

✧｡ “kou, that’s sweet of you—”

✧｡ ��i mean it! i would rather die than put you in harm’s way”

✧｡ you have to comfort him repeatedly and eventually gets over it

✧｡ but now he’s saving up for venti’s rerun and has not been deterred or tempted for anyone else, mans is almost at 10k primogems for this guy

✧｡ mihoyo pls give bokuto a venti rerun

✧｡ it’s safe to say that venti slowly becomes bokuto’s favorite character

✧｡ you should watch out before kou becomes too emotionally attached to every character

haikyuu fic recs — the most beautiful, lovely, breathtaking masterlist (vol. I)

so i’ve been binging fics to cure my sadness, and i thought that these select masterpieces were too magnificent to not be plastered on every billboard ever. some tore my soul into shreds, while others melted said shreds back whole, but all of them made me feel some form of sheer, unadulterated love, so. please enjoy! 🥰⛅️✨

note: all of these fics are exquisite and you should read all of them, but if you’re short of time, those with ☆ are my all-time favourites!

daisuga

butterfly in the subway by bigspoonnoya ☆ | T

Sugawara Koushi has no idea he's already in love with the man he's supposed to hate.

i lovelovelove how all the concepts tied in together like a perfectly wrapped gift

also very wholesome, made me feel so inexplicably warm. like, love can exist everywhere!!! despite everything!!! that’s just so inspiring

i revisited this many times, i think it was (one of) my first haikyuu fics and honestly. it set the bar so high and i have no regrets

you’d fit my lonely arms so perfectly by boxofwonder ☆ | G

“Oh. You're. Not Asahi.”

Calmed down enough that he can speak again, Daichi takes a deep breath, his smile settling on his face easily and wide.

“Not as far as I know, no.”

-

Suga accidentally calls a stranger instead of his best friend, tells him all about his burned batch of cookies before realising, and that particular mistake might turn out the best one he ever made.

major, major fluff

the buildup!!!

god this made my yearning for love so much worse

the perfect stranger by downmoon | T

There’s a man standing outside Suga's door.

Scratch that. Start over.

There’s a man he doesn’t know standing outside his door, holding his sleeping nephew in one arm, with another kid clinging tightly to his free hand.

so domestic please read the entire series from start to finish it has my whole heart

shoyou and tobio as their actual kids 🥺

these two parents are so in love it makes me wanna cry

asanoya

silica sand by lilien passe ☆ | G

Overworked, over-stressed programmer Azumane Asahi works on the top floor of a Shinjuku skyscraper. Nervous around his coworkers and terrified of the long drop on the other side of the window, Asahi falls into a miserable routine, only to have it broken one day by a simple message on the outside of the glass.

PLEASE. so well-written it makes my heart glow and ache simultaneously

made me ascend into asanoya heaven

such a brilliantly unique concept i love it A+

qué syrah syrah by loudlucy | M

Asahi wants to be a Master Sommelier. It's the highest honor in wine service, and the certification would allow him to live the life he's always envisioned for himself. Too bad the certification test is notorious for being the world's most difficult.

Most people fail their first time taking the exam, and Asahi is no exception, but he has more difficulty than most dusting himself off and getting back on his feet. Enter Nishinoya, a young man who shares his same dream, and who believes in their goals so fiercely it forces Asahi to embark on a delicious and sensuous journey of viticulture and validation.

AKA The Wine Tasting AU that literally no one even knew to ask for.

NOTE: You Do Not Need to Know About Wine to Understand This Fic!

another super unique concept!!! (´∀｀=)

my god their chemistry is amazing

the writing made me feel things ngl

stop my bones from wondering by cerasi ☆ | T

After graduation, Asahi hides from the world and needs help from a few sources to find his way back.

i want to write sonnets and sing ballads for this fic, it’s that beautiful

as always, Top Notch Writing *chef’s kiss*

no but i seriously... can i kiss the author? asking for a friend 😳👉🏼👈🏼

iwaoi

star-crossed by starlitcities | T

“I never thought I’d see the day that I’d envy a human,” Oikawa admits, showering himself in tiny suns, because he can actually feels those, like a fusillade of warm kisses on luminous skin that leave marks. To humans, they’d be freckles. Skin stars, Oikawa calls them. He didn’t make that up, a human did.

“Who created the rule that we can’t touch, I wonder,” Iwaizumi ponders, floating heedlessly through space.

“Maybe it’s because we can fly. Humans dream of flying, right?”

“I don’t think so.”

gsjsgsjshsjshsjsj star!iwaoi

they’re LITERALLY STARS

beautifulbeautifulbeautiful i love how the author conveyed the beauty of touch and humanity 🥺🥺

please bless yourself further with the sequel sun-kissed

conquering the great king by suggestivescribe ☆| E

Iwaizumi blinked his gaze over to Oikawa, "Last time was supposed to be a one time thing," he said, voice low, lacking some conviction.

Oikawa's lips twitched into a smirk and he brought them hovering just over Iwaizumi's, "One time thing, Two time thing, what's it matter as long as it's not a Relationship thing?"

yes.

in fact, this entire series (breaking the rules) features daisuga, kuroken, asanoya and it’s SO GOOD. every single one.

but anyway, character development!!!!! plot!!!!!!!!! writing!!!!!!!! i’m here for it all

tsukkiyama

campfire in your chest by deanpendragon ☆ | M

Kei realizes in their second year of high school that he’s probably been in love with Yamaguchi since they were ten. However hopeless he might be in handling that situation, Kei prays he’s at least not as hopeless as Hinata and Kageyama. But he just might be.

SO BEAUTIFUL

i am also a sucker for anything with stars, moons and all the love in between

no words to describe this work of art please just go read it and be blessed

under the lilac tree by raewrites | G

there’s a lilac tree in Kei’s backyard.

gorgeous in its simplicity

softtsukkisofttsukkisofttsukki

not as grandiose as the rest but the love written into every word, action and character is absolutely show-stopping

kagehina

saffron and cayenne pepper by dontsaycrazy ☆ | T

Cooking is hard. Even if you have your very attractive, very grumpy neighbor there to help you.

-

In which Hinata's lack of cooking skills are a danger to him and others. Luckily (or not), Kageyama is willing to teach him, if only for the sake of avoiding any burned down apartments.

the essence of their characters were captured so well and yet it’s like they’re completely new characters too? author, whoever you are, you totally owned this

this made me ship kagehina so hard

fluff! cuteness! lots and lots of cooing!

kuroken

the galaxy is endless (i thought we were, too) by cosmogony ☆ | T

soulmate

/ˈsəʊlmeɪt/ • noun

A person who was made from the same star as you.

-

// Kuroken AU where the last words your soulmate will say to you appear on your skin when you turn 16, and how Kenma and Kuroo learn what this means over the course of their lives.

ahhh here it is. beautiful, heartbreaking, soul-emptying agony. you want angst? choke on this, and your tears later on.

no but seriously please read this if you haven’t you won’t regret it at all i promise

written from kenma’s perspective so you experience every depth and multitude of emotion he does and it’s so raw and- brb imma go cry for a sec

knot in my heart by hearthope | T

There’s a picture. Kenma blinks, looking at the little calico cat, being held up next to the face of a guy with stupidly messy hair and a crooked grin.

Cute.

The— the cat. The cat is cute.

Just the cat.

-

Kuroo starts spending a lot of time at the flower shop Kenma works at. Kenma definitely isn't into him.

okay so i like it when authors unravel a normally stoic character’s full scope of emotion and give them depth, sue me.

anyway, back on the fluff train!

i absolutely f*ck with flower symbolisms, cats and bitchy best friends who have dirt on each other. the layers of romance, friendship and everything in between is so prettily developed 10/10

bokuaka

the jacket you never returned by daisuga ☆☆ | G

He leaned over, kissed Bokuto on the cheek, and smiled bitterly, eyes watery.

He will never remember. Not now, not ever.

What they were will now forever be forgotten.

-

"You used to call me Keiji, Koutarou."

YOU USED TO CALL ME KEIJI, KOUTAROU!!!!!!!!!!

i beg you to listen to Spiegel im Spiegel when it’s first mentioned in the story please

i read this and screamed through my tears for a solid 1.5 hours. i rarely cry.

no f*ckin regrets though i read this thrice already and it hurts so good every time

rules by conesofdunshire ☆☆ | E

In which Akaashi Keiji is an overworked accountant who stumbles upon Bokuto one night playing the piano in the lobby of his work. Bokuto is different, that much is obvious. But with such supreme musical talent and a smile so dazzling it rivals the sun, there's just something about him that brings Akaashi back every night.

this fic. this fic has my whole, broken, sobbing heart and laughing soul

gorgeous. breathtaking. magnificent.

bokuto is so WARM and akaashi is so STRONG and they both find the solace they need in each other and it’s all i want for me 😭😭😭

in another life by littleluxray | T

Sleeping didn't come as easy as it used to. Bokuto knew this, and now Akaashi did, too.

The hospital AU that no body asked for, but that I took upon myself to write.

this is a famous fic that i doubt any seasoned haikyuu reader wouldn’t know, and RIGHTLY SO BECAUSE, the PAIN. the pain. the pain.

i could feel my lungs shrivel up and my chest cave in on itself. fatigue and rest are things i struggle with too so this whole story resonated with me from start to finish, and it broke me. in like, the best, most revitalising way

i would read this again but it still haunts me at night. i need to heal from the first time before i have the guts to try one more time HAHAHA 😆💔😭

tea-stained polaroids by dalyeau | G

“I'm gonna date that,” Bokuto declares solemnly, and Kuroo throws a plastic spoon at his head.

mmmmmmm pretty photographer + personalised coffee cups + cute baristas = diabetic fluff fic

i smiled so much throughout this you have no idea. cheeks achey but so good

i may have squealed a little at the ending

kurotsukki

moonfall by batman | T

There is no unlearning Tetsurou, after all. There is only leaving him.

-

(Five things of Tetsurou's that ended up in Kei's home, and one that never left.)

the writing!!!!!! is pure beauty!!!! sheer grace!!!!!!! the construction of the AU and the romanticism and hsjsgsjshsj

didn’t cry but. heart ache and bittersweet smiles are another level of misery that is just as fulfilling

yea just pleasepleasepleaseplease go read it thank you and have a good day

hidden gem by realmSpinner | E

Things get complicated when everything you thought you knew about a guy changes, and they get even more complicated when you actually start liking those changes.

That guy working with you AND becoming your neighbor? That's just a cherry on top of the cake of confusion.

this AU was refreshingly different, and amazingly so

top!tsukki??? sign me the f*ck up

the whole plot, man. perfection.

pings by barfs ☆☆ | T

[5/02/16, 3:50:17 AM] Tsukishima Kei: Please wake up.

[5/02/16, 3:50:23 AM] Tsukishima Kei: I hate begging. You know I hate it.

[5/02/16, 3:50:34 AM] Tsukishima Kei: I bet you’re snickering at that, wherever you are.

[5/02/16, 3:50:53 AM] Tsukishima Kei: But, it keeps hurting and I don’t know why and it feels like shit and I know you could tell me why, but you’re not here and I would really appreciate it if you’d just wake up.

[5/02/16, 3:51:02 AM] Tsukishima Kei: You’re laughing at that too, aren’t you.

[5/02/16, 3:51:10 AM] Tsukishima Kei: Dying is probably up there in the list of top ten shitty things you’ve ever done, and you’ve done a lot of shitty things.

god.

you already know what’s coming, and yet. when it comes.

how the f*ck did the author make grief beautiful????????? (at the expense of me dying along with kei and everyone else i guess)

this fic will ruin you and bury you under all your pain (i hope you’re ready)

but also put you back together with the “sequel”

kyouhaba

close to the chest by darkmagicalgirl | T

It takes Yahaba thirteen years to realize he's different from the other kids, one to figure out how to hide it, and two more to learn to be happy just the way he is. Yahaba's journey ft. an extremely annoyed Kyoutani, best friend in the world Watari, and loads and loads of good senpai Oikawa.

cause i’m (not) alright with the slow, burn~

no fr, take slow and burn very seriously

overthinking yahaba? i understand. i do.

again, such an amazing fic; 10/10 recommend

safe here by crossbelladonna ☆ | M

“Raids are routine work,” Kyoutani tells to Yahaba before he can air the question. “Sometimes there is no sleep done until we accomplish something, say kill a certain ghoul. I guess they’re still going through the possibility that people in the accident are still alive huh?”

Yahaba quirks a smile, pushing his mask up his head.

“You’re alive.”

Kyoutani looks at him intently and all of the things that they’ve gone through for the past month seems to flash in his mind.

“Yes I am.”

i haven’t watched tokyo ghoul but i understood everything perfectly. such is the power of f*cking kickass writing

*cue ugly crying and a lot of unresolved angst*

like the grief??????? ruin me please thank you 🙏 (i think i’m a little masochistic)

rare pairs

mannequin men by surveycorpsjean ☆ | M

[bokuto/akaashi/kuroo/tuskishima]

The modelling world is full of hungry wolves, constantly clambering over the other, snarling and desperate. They fight, and they kill, trampling over anything in their path.

In this case, Akaashi fell in love with the wolves.

i did not expect this to be good, and it wasn’t. it was SPLENDID.

akaashi is so enamoured with them from the get go i love it

a tiny bit of angst that stabbed me in the heart, but the happy ending soothed it (thankfully, because if there wasn’t one i will sue)

characterisation, writing, plot development; everything is great. can you tell i’m running out of synonyms for ‘beautiful’

feel like gold by heronfem ☆☆ | T

[bokuto/akaashi/kuroo/kenma]

In which Kenma is unapologetic and comfortable with who he is, Akaashi learns a lot about himself in a short period of time, Kuroo is wildly in love and an eternal survivor, and Bokuto remembers that love doesn't cure mental illness, but having a support system sure helps a lot.

Or, the one where 4 young men get together, and are helplessly, hopelessly, utterly in love despite everything.

e.e. cummings?? poetry??? f*ck yes

so beautiful. i’m so star-struck by this fic it’s simply stunning

there are no words to fully capture how worth your time and heart and mind reading this fic is so please. do yourself a favour, and fall in love with this fic with me

the sky and guilt are the only feelings i have left by oopsthisisqueertoo ☆☆ | not rated

[bokuto/akaashi/kuroo]

Akaashi is at his wits end. He feels nothing. He's quickly crumbling as a human being. He wants nothing but sweet release of death. In his fourth year of college he drafts a plan for his suicide. He is to graduate, publish writing for others to be inspired by, and slip quietly away. Shortly after, he meets a dog walker named Bokuto who asks him out and Akaashi reluctantly agrees. Nothing matters anymore and he treats Bokuto like an obligation. Until he's not anymore.

TW: SUICIDE ATTEMPTS & DEPRESSION

this was... this gutted me entirely and filled my body with too many shades of agony

arguably one of the best haikyuu fics i’ve ever read

so beautiful in the most painful way fathomable; strongly recommend

april to may by surveycorpsjean | T

[bokuto/akaashi/kuroo/tsukishima]

They're an odd family.

The four of them? Parents?

But still, they're a family.

So they'll support each other until the end.

aaahhhhh third gym as parents 🥺

so much fluff. i also love april and may

they’re still so in love there’s love in every millimetre of this fic :”)

that’s it for now! i’ll add more if i come across anymore good fics. i hope you enjoyed this list! if you have any requests/fic recs, or if u just wanna chat, feel free to just ask! hehe 🥰 k aight bye~

(1) home - enhypen

(listening to the song while reading the chapter is recommended~)

rolling green hills stood before me. i closed my eyes as i laid on the wet grass that dampened my hair, while cool breeze flew around my figure. i should appreciate this type of weather since winter is starting to approach, i thought to myself. i want to laze in autumn forever.

"byeooolll!!! byeol byeol byeol byeol byeol!!!!" a nasally voice exclaimed. i internally sighed at the call of my name. there goes my relaxation time.

i stood up from my position, whilst the setting sun gazed at me, and began to search for a hiding spot. i need to at least give him a hard time looking for me, as compensation for ruining my moments of being alone. i barely get the chance to be by myself in nature.

as i looked around, i finally found a shrub to conceal myself in. so, as quietly as i could, i made my way to the bush.

i attempted to place myself inside it, forgetting the fact that i was a complete eighteen year old.

"owww!" i quietly screamed to myself. even though i wore a lengthy brown skirt, i somehow managed to get pricked by a thorn on my right knee. i guess my kilt moved around a lot while i was trying to adjust my stance.

unanticipatedly, the same voice that yelled my name just a short time ago appeared behind me.

"wh-what are you trying to do? imagine being so stupi-"

"shut up, jungwon!" i turned around to see the boy staring at my situation. his two hands covered his mouth, as if he was struggling to hold in his laughter.

"i hope you know that you look like a cat stuck in a tree. except you're a really big cat and that's a very small tree." he giggled.

"oh, be quiet! if anything, you're the cat. now, get me out of here!"

to be honest, i did not need much assistance. i was just in the mood to bother the boy who kept snickering at my condition.

he sighed at my request. nonetheless, he continued to move towards me. his hands found his way to my waist, while i placed my own hands onto his shoulders to steady myself as he lifted me off the hedge. he then placed me back onto the moist grass that i was previously laying on.

once he let go of my frame, i started to dust off my skirt and shake off the coarse leaves on it. i suppose jungwon took that as a cue, because he began to brush the strands of grass out of my braided hair.

with a hue of pink spread on his cheeks, jungwon complained, "and you wonder why others assume that i am older than you! i really do need to stop babying you.."

i crossed my arms and stuck my tongue at him. in return, he mirrored my actions and ruffled my hair.

"it's already sunset, byeol. we should go back home before it gets dark." jungwon said as he forcibly took my hand and led me out of the plain.

i rolled my eyes, "i thought you said that you needed to stop babying me? come on wonnie, please let me stay here a little longer! you can go back home by yourself so heeseung doesn't get worried."

"i'm not leaving you alone in this area. why were you not at your house in the first place? everyone's noticed that lately, after school, you always seem to be out. these days, i constantly look out my window and expect you to be in your usual spot in the living room, but you're never there."

i tugged at the long sleeve of his button shirt, "i don't wanna talk about it, how'd you know i was in the pasture anyways?"

"jake told me he saw you coming here after he finished his classes, he sounded concerned so i came to look for you. and talking about it helps, you know that. i've never allowed you to bottle up your emotions, i've listened to every single word you've uttered since we were kids." jungwon glanced at me with hope written in his luminous eyes.

"i hate how persistent you are. are you like this around other people too? you should take care of yourself too, wonnie."

"don't change the subject. let it out, byeol."

when it comes to yang jungwon, i can never resist.

i huffed into the air, "my dad... he... he  told me he'd return to lutton last saturday, and now it's thursday a week later yet he's not back. he sent me a letter saying that he's still in the city, his boss asked him to work for an extra amount of days there."

"mr. sun's gone again?" jungwon questioned. he moved closer to me in order to put his left arm around my shoulders. i realized that he does this a lot, especially when he notices that someone is under stress.

"mhm," i replied dismally, "i don't blame you for not noticing though, whether he's in lutton or not, he's barely at home. i think we all know that ever since my mom died 6 years ago, my dad avoids staying at the house for too long because our place is filled with memories of her."

"he's been coping like that for too long, when will he come to his senses? does he ever consider the fact that his daughter has been going through a hard time too?" he commented as they reached a district near their neighborhood.

"wonnie, you know his excuse. he always pulls the 'i work hard because of you' card. i can't even argue with him about the issue because, like i said, he's never home. i just want to distract myself from him because this matter has been getting to me a lot. so, recently i've been wandering outside our community. i don't want to disturb you guys with my troubles as well. i don't like seeing you lot get constantly frustrated over my issues."

jungwon grumbled, "byeol, suddenly dissappearing makes us fuss more. we share our problems, remember? whether they're big or small - when niki's bike got stolen it wasn't only him who went looking for it. all of us put effort into finding out who robbed it. we all know that your father's always been... something else, which is why we're here for you. anyways, forget him, have you been sleeping alone? what have you been eating for dinner? most importantly, are you doing your homew-"

the moment those questions left his mouth, i immediately put my hands over his lips. "everytime i mention my dad being gone in a conversation, you start nagging! sometimes i wish you would stop talking."

jungwon let out a muffled,"im gonna lick you." accordingly, i placed my hands back to my side again.

the boy annoyingly flashed his middle finger towards my direction. however, he quickly stopped due to an old lady passing by who gave him a judgemental glare.

it was hard to hold in a sneer.

he hurriedly picked up the discussion again while he scratched the back of his neck, "you still didn't answer my questions."

"i've been surviving on instant noodles and spam."

"heeseung would approve, but i don't. so, you're gonna eat with us at sunghoon's tonight."

"i'm not gonna oppose that, sunghoon's mom makes the best carbona." my stomach rumbled at the thought of pasta.

jungwon screeched as a response, "i know right! and the garlic bread she makes too? she's a five star michelin in my eyes."

i nodded my head in agreement. we were nearing our vicinity already.

"moving on, what about sleep and homework, byeol?"

"i sleep just fine. i'll probably ask sunoo to stay over tonight though to help me with homework. thank god we're both in the same class this year."

i glimpsed at jungwon to see his reaction, but instead of wearing an accepting look, his brows were furrowed and he looked... displeased?

"i bet sunoo hasn't even done the homework, after school today he went to niki's house straight away. all they do is just watch recorded shows - i can help you instead." he suggested.

"trust me, sunoo did the work."

at this sentence, jungwon's tone became a bit more aggrivated, "how would you know?"

"he did the assignment in our study period while i was sleeping. i saw him finish it when i woke up. he sits directly in front of me, conveniant, isn't it?" i grinned.

jungwon answered with a disheartened mumble, "fine, byeol, you do you."

why's he so irritated about sunoo doing homework for once? i wondered, isn't it a good thing that he's finally starting to put effort in school?

due to me spacing out, i did not register that jungwon and i already arrived at our neighborhood.

after bidding goodbyes (the goodbyes being another lecture of how to take care of myself from jungwon because i am already a legal adult), jungwon reminded me to go to sunghoon's house for dinner. he was about to unlock his front door until i ran up to him and pulled his form into my arms.

his arms went stiff for a while, but they ended up finding a way around my lower back - like they always do. he placed his chin above my head, this way i was in the perfect position to nestle in his chest.

"in all seriousness though, thank you wonnie. for always taking care of me." i whispered.

he clicked his tongue, "there's no need to thank me, byeol. i know by now that my prescence is a blessing."

i chuckled while he played with my  tangled hair underneath the nightfall. his fingers intertwined between the locks, then he released me.

he gently pushed me using his shoulder and said, "now go change for dinner."

taglist: @wonwobbles 

a/n: hiii first chap!!! i kinda hate how i wrote this so i'll probably redo it when im free again djdjdj. anyways the rest of the characters will be introduced in the next chap <3

Let’s see, salut comrades! Needless to say I am quite new to tumblr as a whole, and thought I might as well ramble on about my new favorite game I’ve been in love with; Genshin Impact.

I adore the Honkai-Verse and have been blown away by their games thus far, but miHoYo has absolutely knocked it out of the park with Genshin. I probably spend far too much time playing, but alas, I want to explain my ultimate Genshin dream team!

So I have this obsessive format I created in my mind when it comes down to a dream team and how to set up my party, so for reference I always go in the order from top to bottom, Mc, an archer, optional, and then a claymore user. Pretty simple, and my dream team is pretty run of the mill but I can’t think of anything else so why not!

First Off: MC; Aether!

So I chose Aether out of the two twins, (the male player as opposed to the female player), for no other reason than I thought he looked cool and was presented as the main character in the Genshin promotional trailers, so I clicked away!

In my opinion I think him and Lumine are easily the most powerful fighters in the game because of their ability, (depending on who you chose as your protagonist), to resonate with any one of the seven elemental abilities. That said, there’s obviously some leanway with this because you have to unlock those regions to gain access to those abilities, and it’s just my opinion!

I just tend to keep any MC in my fighting team on impulse, so there’s not much else I can comment on, other than I think Aether is a tad underrated compared to Lumine but ability wise they’re exactly the same and play the exact same role, so the only argument there is to make is just simply who you prefer!

Archer Spot: Childe! (Tartaglia)

I was ecstatic when Childe was released as a playable character, and even more pumped when I played his test run. I think he’s the most useful archer, in terms of strength. (Though when it comes to completing quests, amber takes the cake because of how much she’s required!)

I like that you can switch from duel blades to a bow so you don’t become immediately screwed over when you get charged at. Also, in other words I, like most people, just think he’s dope as hell!

[Spoiler] I’m already heart broken over his betrayal that I haven’t even gotten to yet lmfao. BuT aRen’t wE all, aTleast we get to use his Mora!

Optional: (Probably) Kaeya!

So Kaeya is great from becoming a mini Jesus and walking on water, but besides that he came in extremely handy when facing off against the Electro Hypostasis during the Adventure Rank 25 Ascension Quest, when at the time I didn’t have any other frost flavored fighters.

I have a mega bias for this guy because let’s be real, I think he’s hot like the gay weeb I am, but I’ll be classy and explain! With the combination of Childe’s water element, Kaeya becomes far more useful because of course you can freeze your enemie after they’ve been affected by Hydro. A good and convenient combination, though of course this spot is optional.

Some of my other favorite fighters that I currently own include Sucrose, Beidou, and Razor! Of course I adore them all though, except Lisa. Her character? Great! Her fighting ability? Oh my god stab my eyes out. That’s probably putting it a little harsh but you get what I mean. Anyways, moving onto the last but DEFINITELY not least;

Claymore User: Diluc!

Let’s be real, who doesn’t want Diluc? He’s strong as all hell and will set your ass ablaze in .5 seconds, literally. (Even more reason to have Childe, he sets everyone on fire.)

I unfortunately was unable to pull him in the time he was available, which granted would have been impressive given the .6% chance drop rate for all five star characters, but hey a guy never stops dreaming. But anyways, besides me gushing over all the characters, Diluc is an extremely powerful character and I desperately want to make use of his Pyro, which pairs very well with Anemo abilities when doing attack combinations.

I also love any character that uses a claymore type weapon not only for mining but because they are really damn good at demolishing anything in their path. Pair that with a flaming blaze and you got a damn good fighter!

Conclusion!

Well, if you actually read all my spewing, thank you! Basically in summary I love genshin, and all of its characters, and I also have WAYYY too much time in my hands!

I’m glad my first post (or blog I think it’s called), could be something I’m passionate about, even if it is just ritirations of what every Genshin player already probably wishes for. Still, I think my friends got tired of my rambling so why not!

Anyways, have a wonderful night, Traveler!

Love Fast Los Angeles Read-Through: Preface

This book has 42 chapters + a preface, so I've decided to make each post 6 chapters and then do the preface separately. I want to start with just the preface because it is eight pages long but so much happens, it's like getting whiplash every five seconds. Let's do it.

First of all, it's a prologue, Davey, not a preface, a preface is more of an introduction while this is like, things that happen before the real story starts, or really just an explanation for why Star isn't around and why Alvin goes to LA.

Anyway, we open with Alvin doing a photoshoot on the beach and if I could summarize the first page of this book in a single image it would be this:

We've got narration like "Whatevs. It's cool. I've already got a memory stick full of sick shit" and nobody talks like that!

I'm not 100% clear at this point how much time has passed between Pop Kids and this book (iirc it might be more specific later but I don't remember right now) but Alvin and Star, the grown-ass woman who straight up groomed him when he was 15 and nobody cared, are still together and living in San Francisco in an old Victorian, aka my dream life. But then, in the second paragraph of this entire book, he comes home to find her cheating on him, he hits the guy with his motorcycle helmet knocking out a tooth (which he takes???) and she kicks him out.

There's some nice references in this bit, like that Star is a masseuse and the room in the house where she works is known as the Zen Room (ayyyyy!), and as he's packing his clothes to leave he sprays them with her Rose 31 perfume. This book, having come out in 2017, makes sense to have been written during the writing of the Dreamcar record and I appreciate that little nod.

So Al leaves, and we're still only 4 pages into this book and we've changed location again, going to the "Tranny Shack" where he also works shooting the drag shows. And I am truly, wildly uncomfortable with this paragraph:

"A Nubian goddess enters her spotlight. Draped in the pelts of plush animals, Lucky Day caresses her luminous microphone. The audience hushes. She begins to sing "Circle of Life" and I lose it. Spotting me weeping behind my lens, the queen of the jungle steps from the stage through the crowd and in her soothing Song of The South voice, says, "This is your favorite number. Why ya cryin' sugar?" (11)

Look I'm willing to give Davey the benefit of the doubt and suggest that Lucky Day may be based on an actual drag queen he knows and this is all harmless, but is it weird! The use of "Nubian," while a valid name of an indigenous group in Africa, is also used by weird fetishists who think black women are ~exotic. Having your black drag queen character sing a song from the Lion King dressed in fake fur? And probably worst of all, the deeply stereotypical speech pattern and comparing her voice to Song of the South. Couldn't just say she had a southern accent, you had to go with probably the most obscure Disney movie, which is obscure because it's so racist even Disney won't re-release it. Song of the South has a weird cult following of racists who praise it and claim to love it as pushback against what they feel is Disney being too woke by like... having a single black princess or acknowledging that maybe a gay person might have existed in the periphery of one of their main characters. That's not Davey's fault of course, but the association is there and also it is really super weird to use that movie as a comparison! Hardly anyone has seen it! I'm uncomfy.

So anyway, Al ends up staying with Lucky Day for literal weeks. We're five pages in and there's a time jump. In the space of a paragraph on page 12 (the preface started on page 8) Al moves in, becomes depressed enough that he sleeps all day, doesn't shower and loses his job, and starts chain-smoking until Lucky can't take it anymore, Febrezes him while he's asleep, makes him shower and eat breakfast.

She makes him grits for breakfast and I don't think Davey knows what grits are, except that people from the South like them because he describes them being cooked in an iron pan which I'm like 90% sure is not how you make grits? Idk I'm not southern and also I find grits disgusting. But you don't make them in a frying pan!

In the space of another paragraph starting on page 13, Al gets a tattoo, starts working out, feels better about himself and gets a new job, so... a second time jump in two pages and we're not even 10 pages into the book. The pacing here is insane.

Lucky flies down to SoCal to hook up with an online fling and then comes back, having been assaulted. It turns out her online fling is a famous pop star, Jamie Shannon (let's take bets who he's based on!), and Al vows to wreck him. So he's off to LA, and this absolutely batshit insane preface comes to an end.

As I was writing this recap my cat came and closed the book on me and then stood on it so I think that's a good place to stop this first entry. I expect the pace to chill the fuck out when we get into the actual story so maybe I won't be writing so much about eight pages. EIGHT.

Aren't we glad we're all on this journey together.

A Universe Full of Mystery and Intrigue | A Continuation of the Genshin Impact Review (Blog #4)

Introduction

This blog is a continuation of my previous blog about Genshin Impact, except this time I will be talking about the more artistically-oriented parts of the game, which includes, the story, characters, art design, and music. However, the bulk of it will be about the story.

Part 1: Progress (1/2)

As of right now, I have reached Adventure Rank 45, as well World Level 5. I have completed all of the main-line story quests, as well as some of the side story quests that were also available. As of right now I have three five star characters and one five star weapon.

I had read over my previous blogs and found that my Genshin gameplay review had a larger amount of information than my Hades gameplay review. I take this as a sign of improvement in my skills as a writer as well as the ability to organize ideas coherently.

Part 2: Review (2/2)

*Disclaimer: keep in mind that these are just my takeaways from the game, and that many may not share the same opinions as me. I emphasize this on part 2 in particular because of how it deals with more artistic/storytelling aspects.

As prefaced in the introduction of the previous blog, the game follows the story of a young traveler. The female avatar is named Lumine while the male avatar is named Aether. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the protagonist sibling as Aether and the lost sibling as Lumine, as this is how they are depicted in official promotional material

The two siblings are traveling across different worlds when they are stopped by a strange god, who’s identity is unknown. During their battle, the god takes Lumine, encasing her in a strange, cube vortex, while they themselves are cast into the world of Teyvat, a new place they have not yet explored. The circumstances of their arrival itself are mysterious as well, as they are unsure of how they got there or what point in time they had been flung into.

And that’s really what Genshin is abundant in: mysteries.

Whether it is about the world or the backgrounds of particular characters, there is almost always a point of intrigue that can one can ponder for quite a long while.

It is the job of the traveler to uncover more of these mysteries through various story quests. Some of them are self-contained stories, while others focus on the plot as a whole (these are called the Archon quests).

Teyvat is split into seven nations: Monstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, Sumeru, Fontaine, Natlan, and Snezhnaya. Each of them are attributed to one of the elements shown in the previous blog, and they all worship a god of that same element (referred to collectively as “The Seven”). Currently, only Mondstadt and Liyue are available, as Mihoyo is still developing the rest.

Each nation is based off of a real-world culture, which I find extremely engaging. Monstadt seems to be a mix of both Switzerland and Germany, while Liyue takes inspiration from China. From what I’ve gathered, I do believe that each culture is well-represented. This reflects in each of the characters that hail from these regions. It is easy to distinguish who comes from where.

For example, look at:

Diluc, a pyro user who is the owner of a winery in Monstadt,

vs.

Xiangling, a pyro user who is a world-renowned chef from Liyue.

Although these two characters have the same Vision (elemental power), the clothing that Mihoyo designs them with are very clearly from two different cultures, and they also embody each character’s personality. Xiangling is much more bubbly and outgoing, which show in the trinkets hanging at her side and the bright colors of her outfit. Diluc is much more aloof and quiet, and his darker attire and the simpler handling of his hair convey that to the viewer.

Though, some of the designs don’t blow me away like others do (some can be rather boring in my eyes), the characters are unique, and most are definitely not as generic as I was led to believe.

The soundtrack of this game didn’t stand out to me all that much, however. Perhaps this is simply because I wasn’t listening closely enough or because the music blended a lot with the environment of the game. Upon realizing this, I listened to a few soundtracks on their own without opening the game, and came to find that I particularly like the Liyue tracks, which I will leave a playlist of here.

Feel free to skip around to whichever tracks interest you the most! My personal favorites are Moon in One’s Cup and Flows of Jade-Like Water.

Anyhow, back to the story aspect.

Aether first goes to Monstadt, as it was close to where they had woken up. Along with their floating travel companion Paimon (the generally annoying mascot for the game) who he had saved from drowning, they quickly found themselves entangled in Monstadt’s “Stormterror” crisis. Stormterror is the name of an ancient dragon that was originally a guardian of the city, but was corrupted by the Abyss Order. The Abyss Order is a sinister league of monsters bent on destroying all of civilization and the reign of the gods. It sounds cartoonishly evil at first glance, and doesn’t seem worth giving a second look. However, at the end of the Stormterror Crisis, it is revealed to the player that Lumine is the one leading the Abyss Order. Aether himself does not know, as he never actually saw Lumine. This was revealed to the player alone (though this changes in the latest story arc). It leaves them to ponder the possible motivation for Lumine to take a darker path.

Aether is looking for each of the Archons (gods) in order to get answers about the world and information about the unknown god and his sister. He met Barbatos, the anemo archon, who took the form of a bard named Venti. With his aid, Aether helped him resolve the Stormterror crisis.

After that, he travels Liyue in search of Rex Lapis, the geo archon. Unlike Barbatos, who does not often visit his people in Mondstadt, Rex Lapis shows himself to his people once every year in the Rite of Descension. However, things go awry when it appears that god is assassinated at the rite, and Aether is the prime suspect of the Millileth (Liyue’s military). After an elaborate search for the corpse in order to find the real killer, it turns out that Rex Lapis faked his own death in favor of turning over the rule of Liyue to the Qixing, the business leaders that oversee the country (which noone knew about).

Over the course of these events, Aether was able to glean very little information. It is arguably not until the most recent quest that he really made a breakthrough. When he returns to Mondstadt, he meets a mysterious man named Dainsleif, who is dedicated to finding intel about the Abyss Order and to stopping them from achieving their goal. From this man, they learned about an ancient civilization that was destroyed by the gods. This nation was called Khaenri'ah, and existed 500 years before the current events of the game. After following clues about the Abyss Order’s new plans, they find an underground lair with a strange warped statue. This is where Aether fights a general of the Abyss (named the Abyss Herald), and his sister finally reveals herself when he is about to kill him.

From their first interaction since her disappearance, he found out that the Abyss is from Khaenri'ah, and that they took monstrous forms after it was destroyed. Lumine reveals that Dainsleif is also from Khaenri'ah, and that he was cursed with immortality. She then escapes with the Abyss Herald, leaving Aether in shock.

This raises many questions. How did citizens of Khaenri'ah change their forms so drastically? How did Dainsleif gain his immortality? How is Kaeya (a captain in the Monstadt cavalry) from Khaenri'ah if it was never clarified that he is immortal or not? There are always some unanswered questions with each new story update.

This ambiguity keeps players, including myself, interested in the game and motivates them to keep up with their announcements for content.

Conclusion/Reflection

I really did not have any expectations coming into this game. I legitimately thought that this was a game I would easily forget after a while, but I was proved wrong. Though I purely started to play out of the game’s aesthetics, Mihoyo hooked me on this game’s interesting plot and characters. I also enjoyed all the cultural representation that they are planning for the new areas, as well as the culture in the existing ones. This shows constantly, and is even incorporated into various aspects of the lore. If Mihoyo keeps this up, I’m sure I’ll be playing Genshin Impact for a long while.

Final Score: 4/5

One of the best things about STAR WARS fic is that there’s almost always something for someone, whether you want something plotty or more time travel, whether you want to cry about how sad Leia Organa’s life is or revel in how strong she is despite it all, whether you want to dive all the way back to the prequels or if you’re here for the sequels, whether you’re here for the big name characters or the more minor characters that fandom will try to flesh out, there’s going to be something that appeals. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed as long as I have, because something will appeal, no matter my mood! Sometimes I want something more hopeful, sometimes I want something that will break my heart, sometimes I’m tired of one era or just more hyped for another. I appreciate that fic helps further the world of the Saga, beyond just the story of Anakin Skywalker! I appreciate that sometimes it still really, really is about him! I appreciate that there’s fic that appeals to my shipping heart, I appreciate that there’s fic that appeals to my gen-loving heart, I appreciate that there’s so much variety that it seems next to impossible to get bored with Star Wars, not when I have so many new branches that fandom will help me explore! STAR WARS FIC RECS: TIME TRAVEL RECS: ✦ Let’s Try This Again by Nny11, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka, time travel, 11.7k wip    Anakin’s life is shaken up when he finds a small togrutan toddler hiding in a dingy alleyway, after all, she did create a Force bond with him and is apparently his future Padawan. Wizard! ✦ In Time by Ripki, obi-wan & anakin & cast, time travel, 27.1k    As the Clone Wars drags on and the secrets between them grow, Anakin and Obi-Wan have begun to drift apart. When a mysterious holocron sends them through time, they don’t only have to confront their past and future – but the present as well. ✦ A Future in Crisis by WolfMarauder, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & & padme & cast, 7.6k wip    Ahsoka has a vision that may change the course of the future. She just needs to keep her master from falling, keep his wife from dying, and the Jedi Order from dying out… That’s all. The first step is returning the the Jedi Order and she finds she has more friends than she thought. ✦ Palimpsest by PorgParty, ben & obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 21.5k wip    Kylo Ren, newly-crowned Supreme Leader of the First Order, finds himself flung back through time to the era of the Clone Wars. He decides to capitalise on this opportunity and insert himself into the life of his beloved grandfather Anakin Skywalker. Together they will rule the galaxy with an iron fist. Unfortunately, Kylo has never been very good at being evil. ✦ Old Man Luke by scarletjedi, obi-wan & anakin & luke & leia & ahsoka & asajj & cast, time travel, 41k wip    Obi-Wan narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?” He asked, hoping a direct question would yield answers. The old man seemed adept at side-stepping information when asked a bit more deftly. “I’ve never heard of a Master with your level of talent.” ✦ Unexpected Awakening (The Rewrite) by Rhiw, obi-wan & cast, time travel, 6.4k wip    The life of General Kenobi is cut short at the hands of his Padawan, but the sight that greets his eyes upon awakening is not that of blinding light of the Force, but the Jedi Temple he knew when he was still a youth. As he struggles to understand the path laid out before him, Obi-Wan unwittingly captures the attention of a singularly unusual Temple Guard, and that of a reluctant Qui-Gon Jinn. ✦ Rewind, Repeat by tulomne, obi-wan/satine & qui-gon & cast, time travel, 23k    And just like that, Obi-Wan Kenobi dies. But death is just the beginning, he realizes as he wakes as he once was, Padawan braid and all, alongside Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and Satine Kryze. Visions of the future, just out of his grasp, plague the young Jedi as the three traverse the galaxy, avoiding the dangers that follow the Duchess of Mandalore. PREQUELS RECS: ✦ Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto by amarielah, anakin & sam & dean & cast, crossover, 13.7k    When Sam and Dean investigate a spate of Vader sightings in a remote Wyoming town, they discover that – this time – they’re hunting the real deal. Vader, meanwhile, has to adjust to a world that seems designed to piss him off. All while trying his best not to strangle the Winchesters. ✦ The Living Force; Parables for Padawans by glorious_clio, obi-wan & cast, 6.1k    Since infancy, younglings are taught the Jedi Code, “Emotion, yet peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity. Chaos, yet harmony. Death, yet the Force.” Obi-Wan Kenobi learns these tenets backwards and forwards again. But even as a child, he is interested in nuance. And so his teachers tell him parables. ✦ The Great Galactic Politics Mess-Up by iomccoy, obi-wan & anakin/padme & dooku & mace & cast, 6.8k wip    Obi-Wan Kenobi asks Count Dooku if he actually has any evidence. He does. It gets messier from there. ✦ A Future Unlived by AlexTirZeng, obi-wan & katooni & cast, 1.8k    Just because a war was on didn’t mean people didn’t dream of a future; if anything, it made them long for what would come after. Obi-Wan was no exception. He’d hoped to see Anakin raise Ahsoka to knighthood. He’d hoped to take another padawan of his own. ✦ Remedial Jedi Theology by MarbleGlove, obi-wan & anakin & mace & cast, 31.2k wip    Let us consider the fact that the Jedi Order is a monastic religious organization based out of a temple, with five basic tenets of faith. ✦ Lessons Learnt by Sweven, ahsoka & kit & cast, 2.4k    As a kid, Ahsoka struggled with many things. Sometimes you just need someone to lift you up and give a word of encouragement. ✦ The Ryloth Excursion by Icarus_is_flying, obi-wan & ahsoka & cast, 2.9k    After a surprise Separatist attack, Ahsoka and Obi-wan find themselves stranded on Ryloth’s plains. Now master and padawan must work together to make it back in one piece. ✦ Duet by Silver Sky 1138, oc & cin, 2.3k    Asha Scarsi, the Jedi Padawan who feels the Force through music, isn’t half as good at lightsaber combat as she is at singing and mindtricks. So she’s a little nervous when Battlemaster Cin Drallig calls her to the training room after class. ✦ Luminous Spirits by Pandora151, obi-wan & ahsoka & cast, 5k    Ahsoka and Obi-Wan, before and after everything changes. ✦ a choice made and made again by Sweven, obi-wan/satine & qui-gon & cast, 4.1k    A glimpse into the year on the run ✦ We Have Lost by ReneeoftheStars, barriss & luminara, 1.9k    It has been a long time since Barriss Offee was imprisoned for bombing the Jedi Temple. Not one to break, she has survived it. One day, she receives an unexpected visit from one she thought long gone from her life. ✦ The Sisters of the Little Kindness by ambiguously, ahsoka/asajj, NSFW, 4.4k    Ahsoka isn’t alone as she goes into hiding. ✦ The Talk by B_Radley, shaak & ahsoka ( & background barriss/ahsoka), 1.9k    A Jedi Master gives someone else’s Padawan The Talk ✦ The Only Home We Know by ReneeoftheStars, katooni & petro & ganodi & byph & gungi & zaft & cast, character death, child death, 2.4k    The Jedi Temple is under attack. Determined to fight for their home, younglings Katooni, Petro, Zatt, Ganodi, Byph, and Gungi make their way to aid the Jedi Masters in defense of the Temple. But the situation is far graver than they expected. ✦ Darkest before Dawn by AceQueenKing, padme/mon mothma, 2.3k    “I want my babies,” Padmé whispered, leaning into Mon’s shoulder. Mon tightened her grip on the younger woman, trying to reassure them both. Padmé, glorious flower of the Senate, was wilting fast in her arms, and it scared her, scared her more than she’d like to admit. ✦ Departed by Pandora151, obi-wan & anakin & vokara & bant & dooku, character death, 3.1k    One was too late; the other was taken too soon. ✦ Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Lady Friend by Sulis57, obi-wan & anakin & rex & cody & boil & waxer & cast, 3.2k    Anakin Skywalker just wants a quiet night at home by himself. Unfortunately, a group of unexpected visitors arrive bringing a potentially destructive acquaintance into Skywalker’s home. ✦ The Probability of Failure: The Mother by B_Radley, shaak & obi-wan & cast, 1.8k    A huntress and Knight struggles to find peace in the wake of devastating loss. Several beings attempt to help her. ✦ Or has time rewritten every line by ambiguously, anakin & ahsoka & kaeden, 4.1k    Ahsoka gets a message from an old friend that leads her to an older friend. ✦ Flickering Sunlight by Pandora151, obi-wan & anakin/padme & cast, 1.5k    In the aftermath of Order 66, Anakin comes to a decision. OBI-WAN/ANAKIN RECS: ✦ Equinox by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, sith!obi-wan (sort of), d/s, 95.9k    During the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan and Anakin crash on a remote planet and take shelter in the ruins of a grand estate only to find they are not alone. ✦ Little Moments by darlingamidala, obi-wan/anakin/padme, 2.8k    This is a series of obianidala-focused drabbles, prompts, and shortfics. ✦ WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE by anecdotalist, obi-wan/anakin & bail & ahsoka & cast, 30.1k wip    War has broken out between the Republic and the Separatists. But that is of no concern to Ben, one of the best bounty hunters in the galaxy. All he’s focused on is his next target…until he’s invited to a tournament of hunters on Serenno. There, he meets a young Jedi Knight—the Hero With No Fear, Anakin Skywalker—who’s disguised as bounty hunter Rako Hardeen. ✦ Unmoored by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin, ~1k    In every world Anakin and Obi-Wan will find their way to each other, but this time it just might be too late for both of them. ✦ within us, through us by allourheroes, obi-wan/anakin, nsfw, ~1k    The Force is everywhere. Obi-wan helps Anakin understand. ✦ a spring haze by bell, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 3.2k    Obi-Wan kisses Anakin back because he believes in him. ✦ Three Bodies In Orbit by rainglazed, obi-wan/anakin/padme, 4k    A collection of ficlets and drabbles I’ve written for the obianidala suggestion blog, now posted to AO3 for easier viewing. ✦ These Three Remain by shadowsong26, obi-wan/anakin/padme, 27.5k    Immediately after the Festival of Light (and Obi-Wan’s stint undercover as bounty hunter Rako Hardeen), Anakin and Padme leave Coruscant on impulse, in response to an anonymous tip sent to Padme’s office about vital intelligence hidden in a cache of stolen goods. But things go terribly wrong, and they find themselves stranded and injured, with limited resources and no one knowing exactly where they are. ✦ Intently by zarabithia, obi-wan/anakin & cast, 2.2k    Five times Anakin thought about kissing Obi-Wan in order to distract him. ✦ Tumblr Prompts by Darlings (FromDreamstoEmpires), obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, human au, 1.4k (for this chapter)    A collection of prompts that I’ve filled on Tumblr. ✦ Satisfying Victory by zarabithia, obi-wan/anakin/ahsoka, nsfw, time travel, 3.4k    The Force gives and Ahsoka takes. (Or, Ahsoka goes back in time and is totally going to fix everything. But there’s another order of business to attend to first.) ✦ untitled by themoosejthm, obi-wan/anakin/padme, NSFW, toys, 2.3k    Anakin whimpered as he lowered himself onto the toy, his eyelashes fluttering and his toes curling. ✦ Soft now by Gondolin, obi-wan/anakin/padme (pre-ship?) & cast, 3k    Luke and Leia saved the galaxy before they were even born, Obi-Wan saved them and got aggressively adopted by the Naberrie-Skywalker family. Bonding with dads (plural, yes, Obi-Wan) is important and Padmé needs a nap. ✦ Addictions by lilyconrad, obi-wan/anakin, human au, mafia au, 3.4k    A Sith AU with three-piece suits: Ben is a “negotiator” for the mafia and Anakin his faithful, frightening enforcer. ORIGINAL TRILOGY RECS: ✦ In Which Vader Discovers He is a Father by glompcat, anakin & luke & leia & cast, 27.7k    A collection of (mostly self-contained) AUs where Vader learns about his kids earlier than he did in the canon timeline. Exploring both that moment of initial discovery, and the way the story unfolds after Vader finds Leia and/or Luke. ✦ The Princess Who Remembered Her Name: An Alderaani Faerie Tale by glorious_clio, leia & cast, 6.3k    “Once upon a time, there was a kind and clever and courageous Princess,” Bail begins his favorite story, and Leia is excited to share this with him. She goes through her life with the story in her mind, and tries not to read too much into it. ✦ The Hermit’s Son by landsail0r, obi-wan & luke, 1.2k    AU where Obi-Wan raises Luke. ✦ Hope is a Four Letter Word by laniew1, obi-wan & luke, 3.2k wip    Obi-Wan’s life is simple; he wakes, he eats, he meditates and on some mornings he watches Luke (or the Obi-Wan raises Luke instead AU). ✦ may you inherit his light by notbecauseofvictories, anakin & leia & bail, 2.5k    In this, as in many things, Leia is her fathers’ daughter. ✦ for the hint of a spark by egelantier, luke & leia, 5.1k    This is the gift she wants - her brother, her valiant brother, and the word is sweet on her tongue - and the price she doesn’t want to pay, the legacy she doesn’t want to accept. Her father’s body is burning, and she’s glad. ✦ How to Be Dead by victoria_p (musesfool), obi-wan & anakin & padme & luke & leia & han & rey & cast, 2.7k    You lose everything. You give up. REBELS RECS: ✦ Untitled Rebels Fic by Mirror and Image, zeb/kallus & cast, 11.6k    Kallus, on Yavin IV, sees a Lasat that isn’t Zeb. Things go as expected. ✦ Eidolon by Mira_Jade, han & hera & cast, 4k    Captain Solo and General Syndulla, on the subject of shipcraft, idealism, and love. In no particular order. SEQUELS RECS: ✦ Of Worth by celeste9, rose & poe & bb8, 1.4k    After Rose assists BB-8 with repairs to Poe’s ship, she gets an unexpected thank you. ✦ What They Grow Beyond by rain_sleet_snow, rey & anakin & cast, 7.1k    The war is spluttering to a halt, and Rey goes to Tatooine to build a lightsaber. FULL DETAILS + RECS HERE!

Five Feet Apart

Have you the seen the movie about dying teens in love? No, not that one. This one, Five Feet Apart, about Stella (Hayley Lu Richardson) and Will (Cole Sprouse), two star-crossed 17-year-olds who both have cystic fibrosis and a burning desire to touch each other but they can’t due to the risk of contracting each other’s deadly germs. It’s like Romeo and Juliet but with phlegm. The title refers to the minimum safe distance they have to stay apart from each other (minus 1 ft for love). So will this doomed love story ensure this new genre of sick-lit is here to stay or is it destined to die just like these teens? Well...

If this is the standard, I think this microgenre is on life support already. I’d say this is simply a rip-off of The Fault in Our Stars, but that feels unfair. This almost feels like a rip-off of a rip-off, a dollar store version of the US version of an internationally renowned Italian art film, and as such I will be spoiling some plot points in this review so back out now if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing. Though there are a few strong performances from Richardson and her best friend Poe (Moises Arias), the world the film builds just feels too contrived to be convincing.

Some thoughts:

One of the only upsides I can see from this #chronicillness life is the overabundance of the comfiest looking sweaters I’ve ever seen. I’m obsessed with every sweater in this film. People shouldn’t have to be sick to be this comfortable in public.

The first time we meet Will, my notes just say “Wow this guy sucks” and “I have never been less impressed by a teenage boy.” I’m not 100% sure my opinion on him turned around that much by the end of the film. He never feels anything beyond a poorly sketched bad boy, revealed to have a soft gooey marshmallow interior when he falls in love. I am at least happy that their relationship grows and develops over weeks (and with nothing much to do in a hospital they spend a lot of time together), but he never feels that fleshed-out or real to me.

One thing I really appreciate in movies is when the filmmakers figure out nifty ways to drop a ton of exposition on the audience without it feeling like clunky exposition. Will checking out Stella’s YouTube page was a pretty clever way to do a huge info dump in an elegant way.

Parminder Nagra, aka my teen crush from Bend It Like Beckham, is playing a doctor now? Be still my heart!

I do love that Stella developed an app. Fuck yeah, women in STEM. 

Am I the only one who has a problem with how many HIPAA violations there are in movies now? Like, we are playing SUPER fast and loose with informed consent, no regard for patient privacy, disclosing information to other patients...is this hospital being run by animals? Is a horse loose in the hospital?

Barb (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) is an underserved character and her perspective is a valuable one. I appreciate that she speaks up and showcases her sense of responsibility and advocacy for her patients. It’s not just patients who experience terminal illness, and Barb is right to not let them forget that - until she is just completely fine with helping in grand romantic gestures for the ‘gram. Kind of disappointed with the evolution of Barb from “the voice of reason” to “the power of love conquers all” but maybe that’s just because I’m old and bitter and on the side of the parents in teen movies now. 

For being about teens in love, they’re not very funny. Love is funny and silly, even when it’s life or death stakes! Stella’s message high on painkillers post-surgery is by far the funniest part of the movie.

My biggest complaint by far is that Hayley Lu Richardson is luminous and full of dazzling energy on her own and Cole Sprouse has the screen presence of a limp piece of asparagus with an emo dye job. I just feel no connection between them at all, honestly, and I am on board with the story! I am bought in! And just...nothin’.

Oh and huge fucking shocker the gay best friend (Arias) is the one who dies and gets to be the poster child of tragedy porn so we can not only enjoy a Bury Your Gays moment but also not interfere with the heterosexual romance!

For example, this sexy poolside romp late at night in the hospital for their first date should feel like the swooniest most romantic thing and all I can think is “hospitals have cameras. Security guards are watching you awkwardly caress her body with a pool cue right now, or they will later.” And this slow undress doesn’t feel seductive or alluring, it feels so uncomfortable to me. Related: I am 100% sure you can’t go around hospitals popping balloons willy nilly. You guys, I don’t know how this entire romance inspires such cynicism in me when I am, by nature, the sappiest of saps! 

That being said, in this week’s Did I Cry? The answer is yes, yes I did, when she was in surgeery and when he made his dumb speech at the end which I actually fucking hated? Like all of the words were so stupid? But the feeling was right, so that was a very confusing and disconcerting way to feel. 

I will say - I appreciate a mainstream film like this presenting bodies that are sick, scarred, and chronically ill as desirable and sexy. Even if those bodies belong to conventionally attractive cis het white people, it feels like a step towards some more inclusive representation that I know is much needed. 

Also, I get the whole “taking a stand regarding my life and my health care decisions” thing regarding the lung transplant or whatever but I don’t care what your circumstances are or how invincible you feel DON’T FUCK AROUND ON ICE. 

It’s possible the root of the issues I had stem simply from a stumbling, bumbling transition from book to film. Like, from a narrative standpoint, I appreciate the symmetry - the drowning, the mouth-to-mouth, the tangled relationship between life and death - but I think it’s one of those things that works much better in book form rather than in a film. It all just feels so fake, so contrived, so OBVIOUS. When I think of some of the truly charming teen romances that have come out in the last few years, like Love, Simon or To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, I just know that there is still magic left in the genre, and it doesn’t have to feel this forced. If you’re already a fan of this story, I’m sure the film version will deliver what you want but if not...you’re probably ok staying five feet away from this one.

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

Ereri Creator Interview: The-Silver-Field

Hello friends! Thank you all for your support with this project. If you’d like to complete the interview, you can do so here: https://goo.gl/forms/lUpTjm0NFeYYzXGy1. The form will remain open indefinitely.

The response to this was more than I could have hoped for, so please be patient as I get to your interview! I aim to post 2-3 per week.

You can enjoy past creator interviews here. (Since I post these over time,  sometimes projects are complete by the time I post the interview.)

Silver ( @the-silver-field ) is a writer who has been in the fandom for 4-5 years. On what inspires her to create, Silver writes, “Most of the time, it's music. I'll be listening to the radio, or character playlists on Spotify, and little snippets of something will pop into mind. On more rare occasions, I'll be watching a movie and I'll find myself wondering how certain pairings or characters would react to the situations portrayed by the film. After joining Tumblr, I also find that fan art seems to get my own creative juices pumping, especially when I'm feeling particularly low, or hit a road block in my writing. Seeing other artists create does my heart well.” 

Read on for more!

Please link us to your content so we can send you some love!

http://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSilverField/works

How long have you been in the fandom for?

Around four or five years! It was around the time that the anime made it to the US. My cousins introduced me to anime, which led me right to our dearest Attack on Titan!

Why did you start shipping Ereri? 

It didn't take long for me to start shipping the pair. I love that they put this blind faith and trust in each other, holding each other's lives in their hands. I love how Eren seems to pine after Levi, wanting to impress him and make him proud. I like to think that Levi, though he hides it behind this emotionless facade, is rather fond of the boy, and that he gets little flutters in his chest every time he and Eren interact in any way. Oh and the way Eren looks at his Captain? The way Levi takes care of his brat? It gives me heart palpitations. Not to mention the age gap and height difference is absolutely adorable. 

Thematically speaking, what kind of content do you most enjoy making?

I really enjoy any theme to write, though I am a sucker for hurt/comfort. Whether it's canonverse, or an AU, I like how tragedies can bring people together.

What is the work you're proudest of and why?

I am most proud of my work Every Last One. I started writing it just after the finale of season one, and only finished the first chapter late last year. (I was a bit scared to post it.) It's canonverse, but doesn't follow along with the manga since it's...well, a little outdated.

What inspires you to create?

Most of the time, it's music. I'll be listening to the radio, or character playlists on Spotify, and little snippets of something will pop into mind. On more rare occasions, I'll be watching a movie and I'll find myself wondering how certain pairings or characters would react to the situations portrayed by the film. After joining Tumblr, I also find that fan art seems to get my own creative juices pumping, especially when I'm feeling particularly low, or hit a road block in my writing. Seeing other artists create does my heart well.

Is there any work you'd like to share that inspires you?

There are simply too many to name! I feel bad if I mention a few, because I know I've forgotten other's! I really should go through and make a detailed list...

What projects are you currently working on?

I'm currently working on a few WIPs, (Timeless (Ereri), Punk'd (JeanMarco), and the Ghostly series (Ereri)), while continuing to accept prompt requests, participating in monthly fandom prompt blogs, and opening commissions!

What is an area in your work which you're trying to improve on?

Every area. I'm still an amateur. I still have many things to learn as a writer. I never want to see myself as perfect in my art. As soon as I do that, I'll be closing myself off to constructive criticism, shutting out people who may try to me. There's always room for improvement!

What advice do you have for other creators?

Don't let your comment count tell you how good your works are. Just keep going. 

Do you have any pets?

I have one dog, a german shepherd mix named Lucy, and a black cat named Kiki!

How do you relax?

I like to go outside for a walk and listen to music, or stay curled up in bed and watch youtube/hulu with some tea.

Tell us about your dream day

To just have one day where I'm off of work, and don't have to do anything. There are no errands to run, no coworkers calling in, just me and AO3.

What music are you into?

Pretty much anything, but right now I'm really into things like The Lumineers, Lord Huron, and Blind Pilot!

What are some of your favorite tv shows?

Oh gee. Well, obviously I'd have to say that Attack on Titan is by far my favorite, but close seconds would have to be My Hero Academia, Noragami, Doctor Who, Sherlock, What on Earth?, and Lost. There are A LOT more, but those are the only ones currently coming to mind!

What are some of your favorite films?

Pirates of the Carribean series, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Napoleon Dynamite, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series, Star Wars series, Phantom of the Opera, etc., etc.. There are really just too many to name! 

What are some of your favorite books?

Too many to think of! But to name a few, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, the Great Gatsby, Percy Jackson, and Jane Eyre!

An American in London: Betsy Blair first met Gene Kelly at an audition. She didn't just get the part - she got the man.

https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,480424,00.html

Betsy Blair recalls the moment Gene Kelly proposed to her. "It was in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York. We were sitting by the fountain and he said he couldn't leave me to the mercy of New York when he went to Hollywood. I said yes immediately. I didn't have any reservations at all. You don't when you're in love."

Blair had met Kelly two years earlier at an audition when she was 15. She had inadvertently turned up a day early and had spoken to a man moving tables and chairs. "I thought he was a busboy. I said, 'I'm here to see Mr Rose' and he asked me if I was a dancer. I said I was and he told me the audition was the following day. I fished the card out of my bag and sure enough it was, so I thanked this busboy and started to leave. Then he said, 'Are you a good dancer?' I turned round and said, 'Very.' The next day, I went to the audition and it was Gene moving the tables and chairs around. He was the choreographer."

Blair got the job and fell in love, spending the next two years working in nightclubs and on Broadway in musical comedies and in theatre. It was a big change for someone who had grown up in smalltown New Jersey. "I used to enter amateur shows, and being from the neighbourhood and being only nine, I won one. The prize was $20, which was a lot of money in the 30s. The man who ran the show spoke to my mother and it turned out it wasn't such an amateur show so I joined his troupe and I got paid $5 every Thursday. That was my first professional engagement. Then it all sort of happened."

Her second job was as a child photographic model. Then, with a schoolteacher mother and a father who sold insurance, Blair was set for university, winning a scholarship. But on the way back from a college interview - where she was told to come back the next year because she was too young - she saw an advertisement for dancers in a nightclub show. "I got off the train and said to my mother that I was going and I didn't care what Daddy said. So we convinced my father that because I was going to make $35 a week - more money than my brothers, who had been to university, were making - I would save and go to university the next year."

It was when that nightclub closed that Blair auditioned for another and met Kelly. "When I think about it now, that year and a half [in New York] was incredible but when you're young, nothing is surprising. You don't judge it, you don't think about it, it's just so much fun and so beautiful. I wasn't blasé about it - it was just what was happening."

After their honeymoon, Blair and Kelly arrived in Hollywood on December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Contracted to David Selznick and unlikely to be drafted early, Kelly (who was 29) was yet to make a movie, so he sold war bonds while Blair volunteered in a hospital. However, it wasn't long before MGM asked him to be in For Me and My Gal and made a deal with Selznick to take over half of his contract. It was the birth of not just one of Hollywood's most talented stars, but of an icon too.

For Blair, however, Kelly was simply her husband. "I loved his work and he was a great dancer and he was also a really interesting, educated fellow. The fact that he was a star didn't matter to me. I was a snippy kid, I never thought of him as an icon."

Kelly made three movies before he went into the US Navy's photographic unit, a posting that frustrated him since, Blair says, he wanted to fight. Blair herself had moved from Hollywood back to New Jersey with their baby daughter, Kerry, understudying for the part of Laura in the first production of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Kelly was on the verge of being shipped to the Pacific when the atom bomb was dropped on Japan.

When the war finished, the family returned to the west coast. It was then that Kelly's career went meteoric, the high points of which included: Anchors Aweigh, for which he earned a best actor Oscar nomination; Ziegfeld Follies with Fred Astaire; The Pirate, in which he reprised his For Me and My Gal partnership with Judy Garland; On the Town; An American in Paris, for which he won a special Academy award; and Singin' in the Rain, which he acted in, co-directed and choreographed.

Throughout this was Blair. Didn't she feel that she was in his shadow? "Not at all. I did mean, sometime in the future, to be a serious actress but I had so much time. It didn't occur to me that this life would interfere, that I should be in New York if I wanted to be a serious actress." (This life included hosting legendary parties attended by the likes of Noel Coward, Garland and Frank Sinatra.)

Blair's life, which she calls "almost boring because it was so wonderful", changed when the Senate investigations subcommittee under the leadership of Joseph McCarthy started its witchhunts into "un-American activities". She and Kelly were both left-wing and even though she didn't suffer as much as others, she finds it hard to talk about now. "To be very left-wing in Hollywood was to work for the unions, to work for the blacks, the ordinary things that are social democratic principles. It was, if you were a writer, to try and write a film in which black people had a dignified position rather than just servants. At the time, you weren't to say you were a communist or you weren't a communist - they had no right to ask. I think now that the committee knew from the FBI who was a communist and who wasn't and they didn't call anyone who wasn't. I wasn't that important that I would have been called but it was an incomprehensible time."

In 1957, the year after she was nominated for a best actress Oscar for her role in Marty, Blair's marriage to Kelly ended, after which she moved to Paris. She will say nothing about their divorce other than, "I have nothing bad to say about Gene in any way. I can't, in a little interview, explain the complications of what I needed and what he needed. We were married 16 years and it just came to an end."

In Gene Kelly: Hollywood Greats - the accomplished and delightful biography of the star - Blair says she didn't want to be "an idolised little girl any more". Aside from that, she keeps her counsel.

In the five years she spent in France, Blair worked more than she had before or since, including appearing in Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (The Cry). It was while filming at Pinewood that she met her second husband, Karel Reisz, who directed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. They married in 1963.

Now in her late 70s and living in north London, Blair is still luminous. In a long velvet dress and drinking Diet Coke out of a silver tankard, she still has a sparkle in her eyes, at once dignified and mischievous. It may have been this that Stephen Daldry saw when he cast her in his new film, The Hours. "He called me up and asked me to have lunch. So I went thinking it must be Meryl Streep's mother and I can do that - we both come from New Jersey - but it wasn't. I play Julianne Moore's character in 50 years' time.

"You never stop wanting to act but I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. I've often thought I was very lucky. To grow up in a small town is very lucky, to get all those real life values. Then I was in New York when you could still go walking in Central Park. And then to be in Hollywood and then Paris. Then to come and live here for the rest of my life. The timing of things has been very fortunate."

A Court of Ice and Stars: Chapter 1

Fandom: ACOTAR (Post ACOWAR!)

Setting: Winter Court/Night Court

Pairing: Kallias/Vivianne’s daughter & Rhys/Feyre’s son (OCs: Calla x Cian)

Rating: T

Word Count: 1,553

Disclaimer: I do not own any of Sarah J. Maas’s characters. This is a fun multi-chapter fic I’m writing based on a head canon someone had about what it would be like if Kallias’s/Vivianne’s daughter and Rhys’s/Feyre’s son fell for each other. I couldn’t resist. :) Enjoy!

Chapter 1:

Calla lay in the snowdrift and let the winter flurry settle in a thin coat on her back, tickling her long ears and eyelashes as she trained her ice bow on the snow leopard.  The fae beast was nearly invisible, a ghost amongst the foothills and evergreens of the mountainous border separating the Winter and Autumn Courts.  It made no sound as it slinked along the massive tree limb yards away, eyes locked on its prey: an elk out on the endless frozen lake.

The elk wouldn’t run, of course; it wasn’t real.  She’d spun it from ice and snow, light and illusion.  She hoped the distraction would be enough to land her shot. Once the leopard realized her trick, it would be hard to pin.

Squinting against the biting cold, Calla searched that feline face again, marking the scar that bisected its eye and curved along its cheek, courtesy of one of the Winter fairies.  This snow leopard was a child killer, stalking her court’s young despite the abundance of prey along the border lands.  It had failed the first time it had attacked, but the last time… the last time it had been too late and the child had been lost.

The grief had been terrible. The loss of any fae child was terrible, but even more so when the slaughter of Winter’s children under Amarantha’s reign was only a few decades ago. Still fresh, still painful in the minds of the immortal fae.

The snow leopard was marked for death, and she would end it.

The beast’s haunches bunched, ready for the spring.  Calla let out a frigid breath in response, freezing her strung ice arrow the palest of blues—almost clear. It would be nearly invisible in the low light: a ghost to kill a ghost.

The leopard pounced, and she released the shot.

Too wide. It had struck its back thigh—a wound, but not a killing shot. She cursed, leaping up as the snow leopard regained its footing, snarling as it stood within the shattered remains of her elk illusion.  

Calla strung another arrow, pacing a circle around it. Cauldron, it was huge. Easily 160 pounds and five feet in length—the largest snow leopard she’d ever seen.

It bared its fangs, watching her with those luminous eyes. The light was fading fast now, the sun cresting the mountain peaks. Soon the only light would be from the distant stars above. There would be no moon tonight.

Calla shifted her weight as she came to a stop, her back to the ice. She gripped her magic, the deathly cold, the wind and snow.  Her inheritance.  She would not falter; she would not flinch. She would be as the snow: silent, unseen. Deadly.

The leopard leaped for her.

She couldn’t help but gasp as she shot for its chest, even as she stepped back onto that dark ice, its power resonating up her legs to her very core. The ice bolt hit the leopard’s chest with a thump, but still the beast did not stop. It was going to hit her, sink its claws into her, but then—she vanished, winnowing several yards away, farther out on the ice.

Ice shards sticking out from its leg and chest, the snow leopard barely stopped, barely faltered as it changed its direction and charged her.

She hadn’t accounted for that speed, that grace.

Before she could breathe, before she could call upon the ice beneath her feet, it landed on top of her, snapping her bow and pushing her down, down, its claws tearing the light armor at her shoulders and sinking in.  She screamed.

There was red—blood, so much of it, but she couldn’t know whose it was anymore, and she couldn’t bring herself to care.

The snow leopard was going for her throat.

Ice, snow, crack and flow, her mind chanted, sang out to the lake.

Please, please.

Spinning an ice shard out of air, she swung for the leopard’s throat as it came down—

And landed her mark as the ice gave out beneath them and the world turned cold and wet and black.

-------

The world beneath the ice was silent, dark and deep.

And so unbearably cold, even for her.

Across from her in that dark womb, the snow leopard slowed and stilled, its mouth still opened in that final snarl of defeat. Dead.

And if she didn’t move, didn’t reach that surface, she would be too. She let her magic flow out of her as her fingers skimmed the underside of the ice. It was rough and pitted, so different than that deceptive smoothness above. Except for the spot she’d broken through, the ice was easily a foot thick, and even her entry point had frozen over again.

She sent that magic pulsing out of her, asking the ice, begging it, to weave to her will, to spin apart and together in a different way. A pocket, a gap, something to get her out, out, out.  Her chest felt like it was caving in, her sight was darkening, and she wanted desperately to gasp for air that wasn’t there.  She would die here, beneath the ice, and no one would ever know what had happened to her.

The ice was giving, thinning beneath her hand. Too slow.

Spin, weave, set me free. Ice and… ice…

Her mouth opened. The water came in, icy death come to claim.

Her hand broke through the ice.

She clung to the thin layer of snow above. She was choking, drowning, oh Cauldron. Calla blindly shot out her other hand, pushing the ice back, willing it to part like a blanket, like a caul, like a shroud, and somehow—somehow she was able to pull herself up enough to breathe.

She threw up water. She couldn’t remember how to pull in air. Everything was numb and dark and she had to get out, had to pull herself out before her muscles locked up completely, ice magic be damned.

Nails scrabbling against the ice, she used the last of her power to create chinks in the ice, hand holds for her to grip as she slowly pulled herself from that small hole in the unforgiving ice.

Heaving herself onto her back, she looked up at those cold, bright stars far above, the only witnesses at the edge of that watery grave. She let their familiar light caress her frigid skin as she remembered how to breathe. In and out, in…

She had begun to fall into a dangerous sleep when she heard a clatter and a startled gasp somewhere behind her, and then—

“Calla!” a familiar female voice broke the night.  “Cauldron, you idiot, what did you do?  I’ve been winnowing looking everywhere for you! Everyone’s been frantic…”

Hands were heaving her into an upright position, and she was looking at gray eyes in a heart-shaped face dusted with freckles like freshly fallen snow—the face of her best friend in the entire world. Oh thank the gods…

“Hi, Varya,” she whispered, and grinned like an idiot.

“What were you doing?” Varya hissed, patting at Calla’s clothes.  “Are you hurt? There’s so much blood…”

“That would mostly be from the dead snow leopard,” Calla muttered. “I think it got my shoulders, but it’s hard to tell how ba—“

“What snow leopard? Where is it?”

Calla looked down at the ice beneath them, and Varya muttered a stream of curses that would make even the Winter guard raise their brows. For all her pretty face, Calla could curse with the best of them.

“Let me get this right,” Varya said, shaking her head, even as she tentatively touched Calla’s shoulders with her healer’s hands, sending blessed relief into the gashes Calla hadn’t realized she’d still felt. “You fought a snow leopard and trapped it beneath the ice? Wait, you didn’t—of course you did, you’re soaked. Gods, Kallias is going to kill me, and your mother—“

Calla placed a calming hand on Varya’s shoulder. “And why would they blame you? It’s not your fault what I do on border patrol.”

Varya raised a pale blond brow. “No, but I am the one that told them to let you go tonight of all nights.”

Calla stared at her blankly. “What do you mean—“

“Don’t tell me you forgot it was tonight. Calla, you had one job.”

Oh gods, no. No, no, no, that couldn’t be tonight. They couldn’t be coming tonight—in the thrill of the chase she had completely forgotten, and it had to be closing in on midnight…

“Please,” she whispered, “no—“

“The High Lord and High Lady of the Night Court—“

“Are waiting at the Winter Palace,” a new voice cut in. Deep, smooth, and utterly male, that voice was one she hadn’t heard in years, but it was impossible to forget.  It set her blood boiling just hearing it. Why him? Anyone but him.

If Rhysand and Feyre had arrived, then that meant that the male standing behind Varya could only be—

“Hello, Calla,” he crooned.

And indeed, looking beyond Varya’s shoulder, she met the crushing blue eyes and the sardonic smirk of the male who had come to retrieve them: none other than the heir of the Night Court himself.

 “Cian.”

We Wayward Stars ch. 2

Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender

Summary: Altea burns, and in the way of burning things, not all of its ashes scatter in the same place. Centuries and galaxies later, the Garrison unearths a massive, unknown machine- and its frozen pilot.

This chapter: Lance makes friends and disregards boundaries. 

           Quintants pass. It’s hard to keep track of time because he doesn’t have a window, and humans keep time in unfamiliar units.

           Mostly, he sleeps. A lot of people want to talk to him, ask questions. After a while he can talk about Altea without losing his voice. Some of them leave disappointed- he’s able to recount, well enough, how a teludav works, or barrier crystals, but he couldn’t tell someone how to build one, or where to look for parts. He isn’t an engineer.

           Samuel Holt is easily the most persistent. The makeshift Fyllrue board gets a lot of use- other times, he brings paper and a pencil and asks about Altea’s culture. Takes notes. It leads to talking about writing- their spoken languages match up almost perfectly, which is one thing, but the writing is completely different. Picking up the letters isn’t that hard- their alphabet is only twenty-six characters- but the phonetic attachments stump him for a while. It’s some time before he can figure out how to spell his name in their letters.

           And they tell him about themselves, as well.

           Sam has two kids- he brings a picture of them, grinning, holding a creature he calls a “dog” between them. The dog looks less pleased with the arrangement. Lance tells him about Allura- recounts the time he went missing for a week trying to find flowers for her birthday that time he was eight.

           Sam is an all right guy, it turns out- he doesn’t mind, when Lance can’t finish that story.

           (Every time, he keeps thinking he’s done crying about it. Every time, he’s surprised)

           He sleeps less. Restlessness starts to set in, and he paces the length of the small apartment more than a few times. Gets in the habit of returning to his bed when he hears someone coming- the first time he’s caught, a nurse tuts at him disapprovingly.

           They still won’t let him see Blue. At this point, he’s more or less identified the one-eyed man who seems to be in charge- Iverson- and he’s skeptical when Lance points out that he’s feeling better.

           Fortunately, it would appear they’ve been seriously underestimating him.

           And he’s been paying attention.

           His quarters include a bathroom, and, after the last time he’d asked, a variety of hairties and clips. Braiding his hair again feels good, for reasons entirely outside of getting it out of his face. It’s a reminder that he’s finally getting down to business.  

           Eyeing his reflection, he contemplates. The silver hair is going to have to go. It’s showy, obvious- and looks great, but that’s entirely beyond the point right now. It’s one of the more coveted points of Altean beauty, and, as best as he’s been able to tell, has no earthly equivalent. His luminous patches, he can cover, they’re simple enough, and the bigger ones are already accounted for with the simple shirt and pants he’s wearing. Other than that, it’s mostly just the ears.

           Shifting is always an interesting feeling, of things settling in on themselves, cartilage and sinew reconfiguring. Relatively little of that, this time.

           He surveys his results- brown hair, shorter ears- he can’t completely get rid of the way the tips come to points, but he can get away with it. One pair of bandaids later, and he makes a decent looking human, if he says so himself.

           The door is locked- against outside intrusion. Tsk tsk, humans, they have been underestimating him. Or overestimating his injury.

           One flight of stairs later, he relents that he may have underestimated his injury just a little. But personal freedom is a surprisingly effective painkiller, and he’s back on his feet rapidly.

           The first thing that hits him stepping outside is the heat. A yellow sun presiding over a world mostly red and orange, sand and scrubland stretching as far as the eye can see out to canyons. Sam told him that most of this planet was water- but it’s a little hard to believe that, looking outward.

           The structure itself is bigger than he’d assumed. It looks like there’s several other wings, branching off an imposingly-sized central building.

           Is that where they’re keeping the Blue Lion? It’d certainly be big enough. And either way, he wants to find out what’s in there.

           Up hallways, down yet more stairs (his ribs don’t like that) he can tell he’s heading in the right direction because the place is definitely livelier than the halls he’s gotten behind. At first, it’s just guards, or people in the gray uniforms that he’s used to. But then he starts to see others- people in orange, people more his age, if he’s reading humans correctly at this point. The former, he hides from- but the latter, he musters the particular princely decorum that’s gotten him out of scrapes before- the walk of ‘yes sir I have every right to be here, nothing suspicious whatsoever, really you’d just look silly asking me for my qualifications’.

           It goes spectacularly, right up until he walks directly into someone. “Someone” who does an excellent impression of a roughly meaty wall in a uniform. Gray uniform.

           Lance’s heart skips a beat.

           “New?” The man asks, amiably. His dark hair is trimmed very close to his head, except for a single tuft overlooking his forehead. Even dark-eyed and strange-eared as humans are, he’s rather handsome. Which really just makes the situation worse.

           “Huh? Oh- yeah, absolutely. Brand new. How’d you tell?”

           “…Well, you’re walking around in your PJs.”

           A small nervous twitch installs itself under Lance’s eye. “…Casual fifth quintant?”

           (he doesn’t even know if it’s fifth quintant. He guesses. Assumes. Hopes.)

           The uniformed man’s other eyebrow raises to join the first.

           After a moment, he pats Lance on the shoulder lightly. “A lot of people forget their uniform first day. Don’t worry about it too much.”

           It’s a while after he’s gone that Lance allows himself to breathe. And considerably longer before he attempts a much more forced-casual saunter down a side hallway.

           All right, Lance. Think about this. He’s not going to find Blue just running into people. There’s something. Something…

           The quintessence of the Lion resonates with its paladin.

           He’s no paladin, obviously, but he connected with Blue once, right? That has to count for something. Maybe he can find her again.

           Meditation breathing had been drilled in him since he was practically old enough to sit up in the proper position. He could do it in his sleep at this point- eyes sliding closed, counting by fives, moving away from the crowded hallways let him focus just on the footsteps; just him and the person following him. And there was something… ahead. Below.

           Wait.

           He comes to a stop. Hands in his pockets. Trying to downplay his jangling nerves. “You know, normally when people are trying to shadow somebody, they’re actually stealthy about it?”

           “…Huh?”

           “Don’t huh me, you’ve been following me for the last three doboshes!”

           The stranger blinked. He was a full head taller than Lance, powerfully built, but his wide hands are gathered almost timidly in front of his chest. He’s another one of the orange uniform guys. “What? No, I was trying to… Okay, yeah, I was following you. I’m lost, okay? This campus is huge, and you looked like you knew where you were going.”

           Well, that was… an improvement over whipping out a luxite blade and trying to take his head off in Zarkon’s name. Not that that was… real likely. Right. This guy’s human, as far as he knows Lance is another ordinary human. They’re having a nice normal human conversation.

           …A conversation where Lance isn’t a scientific oddity.

           “…All right.” He scuffs his bare toes on the floor. “Sorry. I’m Lance.”

           “It’s… It’s Hunk, all right?”

           Lance smothers a chuckle, feeling bad for the look the other boy sends him.

           “Yeah, blame middle school. Shouldn’t we get going? I don’t wanna be late.”

           And he’s got a narrow window to operate on before they realize he’s missing, but that’s not something you can drop in casual conversation without raising a lot of awkward questions. He slides back into the breathing pattern.

           It’s tricky to hear with shortened ears- but something’s there. Faintly, he can hear Blue humming.

           “So… why are you here?”

           “I told you, I got lost. Or- oh, you mean that as more generally kind of ‘here’.”

           “Yeah, you don’t exactly look like most of the guys I’ve run into.”

           Hunk levels a vaguely affronted look at him. “Look, if you start playing with rocket fuel outside of a space exploration program, you get a lot of awkward calls from the government. This stuff is the literal cutting edge. You don’t get much newer than other planets.”

           That actually brings Lance to a stop, eyeing Hunk with newfound interest. “Other planets, huh?”

           Whatever he sees in that look seems to worry him. “…That’s… what I said, yeah.”

           “You’re gonna like this, then.” He hears something- down the hallway.

           “Oh, man, you can’t just say something like that. Is this hazing? Is that where this is going? Because-”

           “Shh!”

           Two guards pass by, walking abreast. Fortunately, they don’t turn down the hallway- the narrow alcove Lance shooed Hunk into has nothing to cover it from the front. No sooner have the footsteps faded that he’s on the move again- going down the hallway the direction the guards came from.

           “We’re really not supposed to be here, are we?” Credit to Hunk, he keeps his voice down, though he voices his concerns as soon as Lance stops to catch his breath. “Are- are you okay?”

           “Doing great-!” He straightens up, a little forcefully, and regrets that too.

           “You look like you’re gonna pass out.”

           “Probably because he has a broken rib and shouldn’t be out of bed at this point.”

           Iverson folds his arms.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

           “I don’t think you realize the gravity of your current situation.”

           “I think I get the gravity just fine. I’m not just going to sit around here like a pet Juillrat.”

           “And the cadet that saw you?”

           “Correction, saw a perfectly normal human.” He’s still wearing the bandaids- but everything else is back to normal.

           Iverson sighs, deeply. “Right. That. When were you going to tell us you can do that?”

           He leans on his hand, a trace of smugness slipping through the irritation. “You didn’t ask.”

           “Don’t play games with me, boy.”

           There’s a smart remark on his lips, but something about Iverson’s tone quashes it. He works his jaw, wordlessly.

           “You recovered a lot faster than we’d estimated. Regardless of how you’ve set yourself back a week with this little escapade. That’s… on us. But if you want our help- and you need it at this point- you need to listen.”

           “…Sir,” it feels like a good place to start. “I know how to respect foreign dignitaries. And respectfully- if I’m staying here, we’re in danger. If Altea can’t stop Zarkon’s army, Earth doesn’t have a chance.” Altea might’ve won. They might’ve fought back. He wants to say that- but with the Blue Lion here? Without Voltron? When his father decided to abandon the planet and send the castle and Lions away?

           He doesn’t want to think about it- has been trying not to this entire time- but not thinking about it won’t fix anything. “I can’t just stay here and rest my feet up without knowing if they’re coming for me, or the Blue Lion.” Not knowing if anyone survived.

           Something softens in Iverson’s face. He rubs his temples, breathes into his hands for a moment.

           Silence between them. A clock in the hallway is ticking softly to itself. One of the guards standing outside of the door is fidgeting.

           “Can I trust that you’ll stay put for the rest of today? If-” he raises a hand as soon as Lance draws breath to protest- “what you say is true, there are people that need to hear this. And… we might be able to work something out. But that will take time. And I expect you to be able to follow instructions.”

           More waiting. He hates the sound of that.

           At the same time… He has a leg in the door here. More than just sitting in a room. And Iverson is right. He doesn’t have a lot of other options- and failing all else, those other options hinge on him being healthier than he is now. Which will take time anyway.

           “Do we have a deal?”

           Two-toned eyes meet a single dark one.

           “We have a deal.”

I was a morose child, but I’ve always been determined to capture light. Summers growing up in Alabama, I’d demand to chase fireflies. Granny Mil would look after me in the yard until after dark. She’d help me put the ones I caught into a mason jar. She’d cut holes in the lid so they could breathe. I’d put them by my bedside so they could help me dream.

Now that I’m grieving her as an adult, I’m stitching together our little ritual of making firefly nightlights. I’m trying to remember her alive. Granny Mil had a way of suspending time, of holding magic up to the light. 

I’m looking for flashes that could bring her back. I don’t need signs and wonders, just subtle sparks to soothe my heart’s desire to see her again. 

But you can’t hold light in a jar. You can’t find the seam between living and dying. And so you stitch and try to remember.

*

The last time I saw Granny Mil alive, she was in the ICU, with fluid in her lungs. She’d developed pneumonia in the hospital, after a fall that caused a hematoma in her leg. She was drifting in and out of a tenuous lucidity.

She was 96 years old. She was ready to go. “I never thought I would live this long,” she kept saying. The oxygen tube kept falling out of her nostrils when she would sigh. She didn’t pity herself. She was just tired.

She’d already marked in her Bible the verses she wanted to be read at her memorial service: Let not your heart be troubled… I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (John 14:1-3)

She’d marked those verses years ago, when she was still mobile enough to go to the little Baptist church where her son-in-law was the head pastor. The day he preached on the way Jesus said goodbye to his disciples, she wrote funeralin blue pen next to the verses, in that looping cursive Palmer method of penmanship she’d learned in school. 

During her last stretch in the hospital, she was spry enough to joke sometimes. When her great grandson talked about drinking hot toddies to treat a cold, she looked over at him, all but winking, and said, “Slip me one.”

If she was awake when the breakfast tray came, she’d drink the coffee, after it cooled, through a bendy straw. She’d flash me a mischievous look, like she was getting away with something.

One time, a nurse came in and said, “Can you tell me your name and birth date?”

“428-8506,” Granny Mil said, as if that set of numbers were a reflex for her to say. 

“Mother, that’s your phone number,” her seventy-five-year-old daughter Ceil said, almost in a scolding tone. Ceil had been taking care of Granny Mil at her house for over a year. Every day was a battle of wills: Mostly over the compression hose Granny Mil was supposed to wear to prevent blood clots. And coffee: Ceil wouldn’t let her have caffeine at home anymore—said it made her rowdy, with the Gabapentin she had to take for her neuropathy. That’s why the coffee that came on the ICU breakfast tray was such a treat. “Mother, say your birthday, like we practiced for going to the doctor.”

“9/13/21.” Certain numbers were easier for her to retrieve than precise words sometimes.

“Yes, Ma’am,” the nurse said, lifting Granny Mil’s bruise-blue wrist. That’s what it says on your hospital bracelet,” “Now, how about your first and last name?”

“Granny Mil,” she said.

“What do people call you who don’t know you well?” Ceil chimed in, “like at the bank.”

“Granny Mil,” she said, quick on the uptake, and a bit more emphatically this time. 

Everybody did call her Granny Mil. In the forty years since her first grandchild started talking, Granny Mil had pretty much become her name: to her daughters, to her sons-in-law, to the younger ladies at the beauty parlor, where they would sit and reminisce under those helmet-shaped hair dryers. Even the postal worker who’d been delivering her mail since 1982 had taken to calling her Granny Mil. I wouldn’t put it past a familiar bank teller to do the same.

She’d always been Granny Mil to me, even though I’m not one of her biological grandchildren. She came, when I was just under two years old, after my parents’ disastrous divorce. She’d answered an ad in The Birmingham Newsfor a live-in babysitter for a 22-month-old girl. (Granny Mil had retired from her job selling curtains, and she wasn’t necessarily looking for work, but she read every inch of the paper every morning, even the classifieds, even when she wasn’t seeking anything in particular.)

Some of my earliest memories are of Granny Mil’s voice singing me to sleep: “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, how I wonder what you are…” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…” And whatever scared or hurt me would drift off into “life is but a dream…”

Granny Mil’s life was far from a dream. When she was nine years old, she witnessed her mother die suddenly. One of her adult brothers took her in, and her sister-in-law basically treated her like a servant to take care of their young kids. By the time she came into my life, she’d buried two alcoholic husbands. But Granny Mil had a way of mending history, of stitching up and moving through. She had an ease in believing that everything would turn out alright: Like Jesus, we walk with our wounds. When we die, it’s time to go home to the Lord, who has prepared a room for us in heaven. And so she sang the hardest parts of life into a dream for me, when I was too young to know how to grieve. She wasn’t lying. She was giving me a lullaby to heal by.

“The Lord is lookin’ after you,” she would say, and that became a refrain of my childhood. When I was nine, she gave me my first Bible, an illustrated King James, with a picture of Jesus on the front surrounded by children. The cover zips up, as if to provide extra protection for the pages that are so thin you have to lick your finger to turn them one at a time. Jesus’ lines are in red, just so you know what’s most important. The front cover has pictures of the flora and fauna of Galilee inside: myrrh trees, locusts, antelopes. And the back pages have “Spiritual Memory Gems,” the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, with decorative crests and big calligraphic first letters whose looping shapes thrilled me.

I loved that Bible as a treasured object, as a gift from Granny Mil, and as my very own illuminated manuscript of the book everybody I knew in Alabama believed you were supposed to live by. I didn’t question it, but I didn’t read it, either. I was fine with sound bites I’d hear in church and in the grocery store check-out line and the variations on “Jesus Saves” I would see on giant signs on the side of the highway. I didn’t feel compelled to study the scriptures. I had the vernacular Bible in my child psyche. And I was more into sci-fi: The Neverending Storyand A Wrinkle in Time, my first favorite chapter book. I realize now as an adult that Granny Mil was like Madeleine L’Engle’s Mrs. Whatsit character for me: a disheveled old lady who seemed to have come from a starlit sky, to help the family through a hard time. 

In the mix of swiftly tilting planets and neverending stories, I had some darker obsessions as a child. The Old Yellermovie that depicts the shattering story of a family and their beloved dog who gets rabies. I would watch it over and over and cry every time at the end, when the boy has to shoot Old Yeller.

During one of Granny Mil’s especially lucid spells in the ICU, I asked her a question my dad would ask every once in awhile before he died. He would reminisce about my habit of watching Old Yeller over and over, as if reliving his fascination with the little girl he didn’t understand, as if I might have an answer as an adult. He’d say to me and my brother, laughing and somewhat rhetorically, “You knew he was going to die. Why did you cry every time?”

When I asked Granny Mil why I cried every time I watched Old Yelleras a child, she said, “Reckon you wanted to cry.” 

I spent the last night before I had to fly back to Connecticut with Granny Mil in her hospital room. We made a little slumber party of our last time together: I fed her the chocolate cake from her dinner tray, and she asked them to bring another piece for me. “Let’s look at TV,” she said. I turned on the wall-mounted monitor and flipped channels until I found The Golden Girls. When we decided it was time to go to sleep, I muted the television, but left the screen on in case she woke up during the night and wanted something besides the IV bags and the heart monitor and the hazard-orange “Fall Risk” sign look at. She kept asking if I had enough pillows in the recliner chair beside her bed. And we laughed about how awful the hospital blankets are. She kept saying, “Now just get as comfortable as you can, and let’s doze on off to sleep.” Even when she was dying, she was taking care of me.

After awhile she said, “I cain’t hardly keep my eyes open.” And as she drifted off to sleep, I sang back: “Life is but a dream…”

*

Since I lost Granny Mil, I’ve been looking hard at the stars. I’m looking for the ones that died, whose light is still traveling here.

I felt a sacred freight when I realized Granny Mil’s death day, one year since she passed, falls on Ash Wednesday. It’s my favorite holy day: The only day you are marked by dying. You get an outward sign of the loss you carry inside. And from the time you receive the ashes, two black smears in the shape of the cross, until they wear off, you walk around with a stun of loss on your face. 

I love crying like I love Ash Wednesday. Tears and ashes on your skin, a sensation you can barely perceive, the luminous presence they leave. The Orthodox conceive of Lent as a “Bright Sadness.” That’s how grief happens for me: as an alchemy of mourning and remembering and celebrating. A hollowing out of the heart that makes way for light. 

On her death day, I’m glad to have ashes on my face. I’m reading a poem I love, “Blessing the Dust,” over and over. I’m celebrating Ash Wednesday with these lines:

This is the day we freely say we are scorched.

This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning. …

So let us be marked…

for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made

and the stars that blaze in our bones

            —Jan Richardson

            from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

            janrichardson.com

Grieving is not dark to me. It’s a bright sadness. It’s a lit cave in my heart. 

Post Arcade’s top 10 games of 2018

Quick warning to those in search of a little confirmation bias: Some of the year’s most popular plays — including Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Fortnite, and FIFA 19 — just aren’t my bag. Power to anyone who enjoys these games, but I’m more interested in single-player games focused on storytelling. It’s just how I’m built.

With that in mind, 2018 was a bit of a mixed bag for me. There was a handful of truly standout games that satisfied my personal proclivities, but the overall depth of offering felt a little shallow. A sign, I suspect, of current gaming trends and appetites.

He said, she said: Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!

Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aimé on Labo's educational potential

Red Dead Redemption 2 review: An immersive and sympathetic tale of American outlaw life

And so my top 10 games of 2018 isn’t in fact a top 10 list at all, but rather a top five list, with an additional five titles I enjoyed added as honourable mentions in no particular order simply because I feel an illogical need to adhere to the tradition of a list comprised of 10 items.

Red Dead Redemption 2.

1. Red Dead Redemption 2 (Xbox One, PS3, PC)

Rockstar’s simulation of the Old West (or a couple thousand miles east of the Old West, if we’re being geographically technical about it) gives players a deeply authentic taste of what outlaw life was like a little over a hundred years ago. More than that, it delivers a profoundly tragic tale about a man who knows right from wrong and too often chooses the latter. Laugh all you like at the admittedly riotous horse fail videos that have been popping up on YouTube since its release; the moving story at the heart of this classic oater is going to be studied and dissected by critics and game design students for years to come.

God of War.

2. God of War (PS4)

Mockingly referred to as “Dad of War” prior to release due to its focus on the relationship between series protagonist Kratos and his son, this renewal of one of Sony’s most beloved franchises is daring, beautiful, and emotionally poignant. It picks up with everyone’s favourite musclebound demigod trying to create a new life in a land far away from the chaos he authored in Greece, only to come face to face with a fresh pantheon of angry deities. The real emphasis, though, is on Kratos’s interactions with his son, a constant companion for whom he feels an almost paranoid responsibility after the death of his mother. This more insular narrative tack results in the franchise’s best storytelling, by an Olympic mile.

Detroit: Become Human.

3. Detroit Become Human (PS4)

An absolutely enthralling depiction of a world in which believably humanoid androids exist and are at the cusp of joining us on equal terms as sentient intelligences — assuming they can mount a successful revolution. Its narrative is spread across a cast of multiple protagonists, each of whom can die permanently based on the player’s irrevocable decisions. Like most works from designer David Cage, its status as game is debatable. It’s not about winning or mastering play mechanics so much as it is about making decisions based on your sense of mortality and morality. Add in some of the year’s best production values and a sci-fi subject that has always fascinated me, and this one was bound to be one of my favourites.

Below.

4. Below (Xbox One, Windows PC)

The latest from Toronto-based indie darling Capybera Games, Below is a deliciously mysterious little role-playing game set on an island in the middle of the ocean. Travelers come, one by one, to discover the secrets lying at the atoll’s core. Nothing is explained; you’ll need to riddle out the purpose of everything you find. And when you die, you die forever. You’ll begin again as a new adventurer on the beach, all of your gear lost, forced to retrace the path of the previous hero. But not to worry; the cave dungeons are different for each traveler, and if you’ve done a thorough job of exploring you’ll have found shortcuts that will quickly lead you back to where the last hero perished. It’s atmospheric, splendidly scored, deeply challenging, and full of discovery.

5. Tetris Effect (PS4)

It seems odd that a Tetris game released in 2018 would compete for a spot on a list of the year’s best, but Tetris Effect is that game. Chalk it up to Zen. Tetris Effect is the most chill game I’ve played in years, with absolutely mesmerizing visual effects and a terrific soundtrack. It knowingly borrows from another great puzzler called Lumines by mixing a variety of block themes and aural soundscapes into its classic puzzle play, but it kicks it up a notch by adding virtual reality to the experience. Play with a PSVR headset and headphones on and you’ll be transported to another world, utterly immersed in orgasmic block-stacking pleasure. Well, perhaps that’s a tiny overstatement, but I doubt you’ll find a more pleasing puzzle game released in 2018.

And now the runners up…

Octopath Traveler.

Octopath Traveler (Switch)

This Japanese role-playing game from the folks behind the Bravely Default series has a terrific aesthetic that combines old-school graphics with modern filtering for a delicious diorama-like visual effect. It also tells a set of surprisingly grown-up fantasy tales centred on a group of memorable heroes, each of whom has unique talents and abilities that help them not only in the game’s tough turn-based battles, but also in bypassing more creative narrative obstacles while exploring.

Forza Horizon 4.

Forza Horizon 4 (Xbox One)

This open world racer is stuffed with enough activities to keep players busy for an hour or more every night for months on end. You’ll race on road and off, collect hundreds of real rides, take on rivals, shoot professional looking photos, go in search of well-hidden collectibles, and earn an almost endless procession of little rewards that will keep luring you into just one more race well into the wee hours. That it might also be the prettiest car game around at the moment is just gravy.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (PS4, Xbox One, Windows PC)

Huge and beautiful, this ambitious adventure set in Ancient Greece combines satisfying exploration of land and sea, delivers an impressive roster of historical locations and characters, and serves up some surprisingly challenging action. The sense of discovery is terrific, especially when exploring ruins that were considered old even in the time of Socrates. It eventually begins to grow a bit repetitive — you can only invade and conquer so many fortresses before it starts to feel more task than treat — but the elements focusing on characters and plot never grow old.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4, Xbox One, Windows PC)

The third chapter in Square Enix’s Lara Croft reboot doesn’t reinvent the wheel — we still spend our time hunting, crafting, exploring tombs and solving puzzles — but it does refine it. Using Lara’s bow, for example, now feels so intuitive and empowering that it makes other weapons feel passé by comparison. The real star, though, continues to be our heroine. Thoughtful, sympathetic, and compelling, she’s one of the most well rounded and fully developed protagonists appearing in games today, female or male. At this point seeing her in a new game almost feels like going to visit a very good friend.

Ashen.

Ashen (Xbox One, Windows PC)

This one’s like a Dark Souls game with, for lack of a better term, a soul. And a surprisingly gentle one at that. It’s got the core ingredients of one of From Software’s punishing role-playing games — including challenging block, dodge, and strike combat; severe consequences for dying; and a cleverly designed open world that rewards careful exploration — but it replaces darkness with light, and a sense of negativity with cautious optimism. You’ll be challenged throughout and recompensed for your determination and grit, but more than that you’ll feel as though you’re working toward a better world. It’s not what you’d expect from this sort of game, but it is oddly pleasing.

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New Post has been published on Alienation

New Post has been published on https://alienation.biz/maatr-bollywood-most-secular-industry-says-raveena-tandon/

Maatr: Bollywood most secular industry, says Raveena Tandon

Raveena Tandon says that with regards to faith, the Hindi movie enterprise is the most secular one in comparison to others.

Raveena, who turned into within the capital on Thursday to sell her new film Mar, changed into asked approximately singer Sonu Nigam’s remarks annoying a ban on loudspeakers throughout again. After his remarks, Sonu shaved his head and apologized in advance this week.

If we look at the contemporary scenario of our us of a — whether or not you take a look at humans of any faith — fanaticism is incorrect. We’ve always lived as mundane and strong united states and we should be allowed to accomplish that,” said Raveena.

“If Diwali firecrackers are being controlled, I promote that.

However, it doesn’t mean I am becoming communal. It depends on every body’s character thinking what they think and what they locate. In a way, I do consider that we want to move closer to a current, extra secular and liberal India. Fanaticism is incorrect,” she delivered.

While speaking approximately Bollywood, Raveena said, “I’ve been born and taken up in the leisure industry. My father (Ravi Tandon) become a film director. I was given food from my father, then my husband (Anil Thadani) and myself. I respect my enterprise plenty. I’m no longer saying this due to the fact I’m linked to it. I don’t think any other industry in India is secular as much as the leisure industry. We don’t see who comes from wherein and which caste. Skills and hard work are recognized.”Bollywood stars

Directed by using Ashtar Sayed, the story of Master offers with rape and violence against girls in Indian society.

Lavish Bedroom Ideas Inspired From Bollywood Movies

Are you a fan of Bollywood films? You need to be familiar with the famous stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra. They are very popular some of the Bollywood enthusiasts. The time period Bollywood is used to outline films produced in India. The features of Bollywood movies are seen from the surprising gown, traditional dancing, and tremendous song. Use the Bollywood characters into the bedroom for deciding on the fixtures, color schemes, bedding, add-ons and artistic endeavors. Space will seem dramatic, welcoming and exotic. Don’t be afraid to dominate it with bold styles, splendid prints, and wealthy colors.

Jewel And Metal Tones

One easiest way to infuse the Bollywood spirit is the usage of the perfect color palette. The Steel colors like silver and gold evoke the grandeur and glowing impact. Each boom the luxurious of Bollywood bedroom design. The silver framed replicate is high-quality to match with a luminous white crystal chandelier on the decorative gypsum ceiling. The number one color within the room may be inspired from jewel tones like emerald green, ruby purple, sapphire blue, fuchsia, jade green, and teal. Add a hint of white tone to lower the overpowering effect of bold tones.Bollywood actors

Tricky Timber fixtures

Pair the formidable shade schemes with a dark stained Wood bed body. The traditional look is perceived if a wealthy Wooden bed body functions an ornate floral published headboard. Different furnishings thoughts like chairs, benches, nightstands, and dressers should be vintage too. The hardware like pulls and knobs is ideal in silver or gold end.

Remarkable Bedding

The bedding set for Bollywood bedroom decor ought to be lavish and secure. Satin and silk are the common materials for the linens. Purchase an Indian garment or sari to create a unique handmade patchwork comforter. Stimulate the costly feeling via having the pillow shams ornamented with gold embroidery and beads. The violet, teal, warm pink or magenta colored bedding is charming. If you want fashionable style, opt for paisley batik or floral printed bedding.

Bollywood Art and accessories

Banish the uninteresting wall through placing a Bollywood movie poster. Get an image of your favorite Bollywood film on the internet and print it. Then use the multicolored mosaic body to show the image on the wall. The ceiling is best to enhance with a mosaic tiled lantern. The aspect table is shining with a reflected candle holder. Placed an excessive gold vase full of quite plants and greenery at the nook. The bedroom may be fresh and splendid.

Auto Transport & Car Shipping Industry Exposed

Car shipping industry is run by ninety% by means of the brokers! The majority of vehicle transport corporations do not own vehicle trailers. They don’t have the body of workers or finances to marketplace themselves to the public or the customer service team to offer help to their customers. They commonly rely upon a phrase of mouth or nearby marketing to get the enterprise. Vendors deeply rely on the agents to replenish their vans and maintain them moving.

Auto delivery agents have access to loads of transporters and might generally accommodate you on any place you can need to get your vehicle picked up or delivered to. Operating with a good broker may additionally assist you to get a better price or find a company you wouldn’t in any other case locate for your own. The booking may provide you with an extra aggressive rate quote and provide you better assist. A number of the drivers are one man operations or are beneath-staffed to provide you with fine customer service.

How the automobile transport enterprise works?

While you get a quote from extraordinary agencies/brokers – they all compete to your enterprise. However, the truth is you are in reality bidding for the drivers to transport your car. In case your quote is simply too low, your vehicle will not be picked or it could take few weeks for the shipping.

Here is an instance on how this works: let’s consider the route is (NJ to FL). There’s normally 20-40 automobiles waiting to be picked up on the dispatch board which is used by all truckers inside the industry. They may be all priced from excessive to low. The drivers will be extra drawn to hundreds which are paying more. So in case, you picked the bottom quote and there are 10 automobiles all quoted better on the list, your automobile might be sitting in your driveway for awhile. Your load will be the ultimate to get picked up, or you definitely can also in no way get a driving force assigned whilst a dishonest booking guarantees you the arena and takes your money.

The way to get the right Automobile delivery quote?

Inside the enterprise where cash talks – your price range will determine the price to get your vehicle picked up and added. Choosing the lowest car transport charges isn’t always usually recommended. We continuously pay attention complaints from purchasers who first dealt with low balled fees and then went with a higher quote – got their cars picked up with 2-4 business days.

Seek Google for “Auto delivery rates

Car delivery costs”, or “vehicle delivery rates” and check out diverse Car delivery enterprise websites. Get fees from man or woman agencies, or assessment sites and evaluate charges. You could take a look at the organization’s track report on websites like shipping Evaluations.

Deliver Any vehicle, LLC has been supporting clients delivery automobiles for over 6 years. They’re rated five stars via transport Reviews.

Faith Without Secular Evidence

Faith is the flagship of the Christian movement. Religion is believing and seeing the reality of God’s State without the advantage of any “outside stimuli.” Religion left to itself is absolutely a phrase inside the dictionary. The Religion this is exhibited via Believers today is extra like desire, which Webster defines as “A sense that what is wanted will take place.” This secular definition of desire is what has been substituted by Believers for Faith. Many agree with that feelings will no longer only jump start their Faith, but will also supply them the help they need in satisfying their hopeful desires. emotions have a tendency to dilute Religion. Each person was propelled and decelerated via emotions. feelings generally tend to determine how we respond to lifestyles. “I do not feel like going to church today

I don’t experience like studying my Bible

“I don’t feel like praying,” and so forth… The feeling is the antidote to Faith. When Believers use feelings to nudge along their Faith, they will revel in confined nonsecular accomplishments. Such a lot of Christians restrict their Faith with the aid of their feelings. they’ll take a Scripture and to start with being given its purpose, but as time passes and the phrase does now not seem to work with their lives, they start to query whether they correctly understood the verses. The “can of emotions” opens and the whole lot of disappointment, sadness, despair, anger, and confusion push against the honest reality of God’s word.

Faith rests in the integrity of the Scriptures. God method what He says and says what He manner. There’s no need for secular proof or prompting by emotions to result in the truth of God’s phrase. What is wanted is Faith upon Faith, Religion to accept as true within Religion. We have to believe that the Bible is the word of God, and Religion to trust the achievement of the phrase. A Syrophenician female got here to Jesus to are looking for healing for her daughter.