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alexandralyman · 7 months

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Neither Confirm Nor Deny (Dave York x Reader)

Dave York has taken over my life. I dived headfirst into Pedro Pascal fandom and this asshole caught me (among others, looking at you Commandante Veracruz). 7k of self-indulgence later, here's Dave x Reader as CIA agents and partners - AU, Dave went into the CIA after the military and never became a contract killer. Oh, and Carol and the kids don't exist in this.

Rated M for smut and vague mentions of bad people doing bad things

https://archiveofourown.org/works/50244982

You're a CIA agent on assignment in Europe caught up not in enemy crossfire, but in the love/hate relationship you have with your asshole of a partner, Dave York.

You hate how much you secretly love how good he is not just at his job, but between the sheets as well. He drives you up the wall most of the time (and fucks you up against them even better), but when your own agency betrays you at the end of an op, he's the only one who's still got your back.

You can never confirm what he really is to you, but you can't deny it either.

neither confirm nor deny

You practically fling the door to the safe house open, making the rusty hinges squeal loudly in protest as if to remind you about the need for stealth and discretion. Normally you’re the very model of both during a mission, but right now you don’t give a shit. Let the damn place get compromised, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Nothing fucking matters.

You’re met on the threshold by the barrel of Dave’s gun, aimed for a kill shot and immediately withdrawn when he sees it’s you. Protocol when entering the safe house was to knock first with two taps to announce your entry and that everything was fine.

Everything isn’t fucking fine.

“Jesus Christ,” he swears, because you never break protocol—except, of course, when you very much do—and he almost just shot you in the face for it. “What the actual fuck…wait. What happened? What’s wrong?”

Dave York is infuriatingly good at reading your moods. He knows when you’re happy and he knows when you’re angry, which is far more common and usually directed at him. He also almost always knows when you’re horny, which isn’t uncommon, especially around him, but is dead last right now on the list of emotions you’re currently experiencing. Murderous is first, and he’s familiar with that one too because it’s also frequently directed at him. It’s infuriating because you’re a highly trained CIA agent with a highly trained poker face you could easily clean out Vegas with, but at the moment even the most oblivious person in the world could tell that you’re on the verge of a volcanic eruption and not just your asshole of a partner who knows you all too well.

“They’re letting the bastard walk,” you practically spit.

Dave blinks, “What?”

“Yeah,” your voice is more bitter than the ridiculous amount of espresso he drinks like it’s water. “Apparently he cut a deal, and they’re letting him walk.”

Dave is many things, slow on the uptake isn’t one of them. “They flipped him,” he says, matter of fact. “He’s an asset now.”

You’d spent months trying to bring down Andrei “the Crow” Morozov, arms dealer, sex trafficker, Eurotrash asshole extraordinaire. Hours and hours of sorting through the mountains of intel for the nuggets of gold, late nights, shitty safe houses, getting two ribs cracked in Düsseldorf and not going to hospital because you would have been pulled from the mission, just dealing with the pain because you were so close, so close, to finally catching the slippery bastard and putting him away for good. It was all for nothing, Morozov shot you a shit-eating grin as the cuffs were unlocked and walked out of custody a free man.

“Give Irina’s mother my love,” he’d said with a wink, and three agents had to hustle you out of the room with his mocking laughter following you lest you go after him with your bare hands. The things he’d done to the poor girl, barely more than a child. You’d promised her mother, you swore to the woman that the monster responsible would be brought to justice. Instead, you watched him walk away free and clear with the blessing of your own damn agency.

“It makes sense,” Dave says, setting his gun back down on the battered coffee table that was scattered with nicks and cigarette burns courtesy of the many nameless, faceless agents who’d sought sanctuary for the night. “He’s connected to all the major players in Eastern Europe, with the amount of intel he could provide if they keep him in place it’s no wonder the plan was to flip him all along.”

That brings you up short as a new, hotter fury starts to burn under your skin. “It was? You…you knew?”

He gives a shrug with a broad shoulder that you may end up dislocating depending on what he says next. “Officially? No. But I suspected. Didn’t you?”

You…didn’t. Fuck, you one hundred percent didn’t expect the CIA would stab you in the back and worst of all, Dave did. He shouldn’t have put his gun down, because you have a new target now.

“And you didn’t fucking tell me? After all that fucking work to catch the son of a bitch? When I didn’t shoot him in Germany despite having a clear shot because I thought he was going to be locked up for the rest of his life, not let out to keep ruining lives because he’s a fucking ASSET to the CIA now?

When I was making promises I couldn’t keep, you think, but don’t say.

“The CIA has gotten into bed with much worse than Morozov when it serves their purpose. You know that. What makes this different?” Dave asks, the infuriatingly calm eye in your raging storm.

It was different because…because…

Because of Irina and all the others. The ones whose names you knew. The ones whose names you didn’t and would haunt you forever. Because you’d looked Andrei Morozov right in the eye in the underground club in Düsseldorf where he sold girls as easily as shots to asshole men and swore to yourself that you’d make him pay.

Because it was personal.

You couldn’t do this. Not now, running on no sleep and barely any food and the ash of your own failure in your mouth. Tears start to burn behind your eyes, but you’d walk barefoot through a minefield before letting Dave York see you cry.

“You should have told me. We’re supposed to be partners.”

You could almost handle being betrayed by the higher ups, the ones who sat in windowless rooms looking at names and numbers on reports and decided which was more valuable, some teenage girls or the man who’d sold them to the highest bidder. The CIA made deals with all sorts of devils, dictators, terrorists, lowlife arms dealers. You couldn’t handle being betrayed by Dave

, who was by your side the whole time you were on the ground putting faces to the names on those reports. Anna. Olga. Irina.

He calls your name when you leave, your real name, not the one you were given for the mission with a passport and credit cards to match. He’s been calling you by that fake name for months, or, when you push him onto his back in a safe house or a hotel or wherever you’re holed up for a few hours and take him inside, he calls you baby or sweetheart in a voice that gets increasingly more wrecked with each roll of your hips into his and you pretend to hate it.

The sound of your real name from a man who rarely uses it almost makes you stop on the narrow stairs of the ancient building before you reach the outside.

Almost.

You’re in Paris, the city of lights and romance and the final stop on this farce of a European tour now that Morozov’s been caught and released in pursuit of bigger fish. The station chief said to take a few days to decompress before heading back stateside. Do some sightseeing, or some shopping. Patronizing jackass. You almost stabbed him with a pen. As if you were in the mood for museums or boutiques after Morozov walked, like this was a vacation and not your life’s work. You find the French equivalent of a dive bar instead and speak the international language of alcohol to the bartender, drink until it’s too dark to see the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe or anything except the bottom of an empty glass before ordering another. A man sidles over at some point between drinks three and four and tries to pick you up, a local with an accent you would have swooned for once upon a time. He’s attractive enough and you’re tempted, there’s more than one way to forget your absolute shitshow of a job. You’re definitely no stranger to this one, but not with anyone else since…

Fuck.

You’re not dating Dave York. He’s your partner, because you did something terrible in a past life and this is karma biting you in the ass for it. And it’s not that he’s a bad agent, far from it. He’s one of the best in the agency. He’s also smug, and irritating, and you want to punch him in the face on a near day basis. He’s fucking good at his job, and that means he knows with pinpoint accuracy just what buttons to push to drive you up the goddamn wall. He also knows just what buttons to push when he’s fucking you against a wall, which happens on an alarmingly regular basis. He understands the adrenaline rush at the end of a successful mission and the helpless frustration when a target skips through the net instead, he’s the only one who knows why you currently have a large bruise across your ribs and the unseen marks the work leaves on your soul.

Parisian sights and a pretty Frenchman offering a turn in the sheets both hold no allure, you go back to the safe house once the bar closes, far drunker than you should be. Not drunk enough to forget the smirk on Morozov’s face, for that you need to fuck Dave until everything else fades away. Only the small garret apartment is empty, his gun isn’t on the table and the air already feels stale, like no one’s been there for hours. Maybe he went out looking for you, although if he did, he would have found you. Maybe he went to find someone to spend the night with, someone who doesn’t throw things at his head and threatens to strangle him with his own tie when he’s being a dick. He’s seen you do it too, so it’s not an idle threat. The mission in Monte Carlo. The second one. Where the two of you posed as a wealthy businessman and his mistress, and caught the target’s eye in your cut-down-to-the-navel dress with no room to hide a gun and had to improvise. Dave fucked you from behind on the balcony of your hotel room afterwards, still in your dress and heels, and he wasn’t the slightest bit turned off by the fact that you’d just killed a man with your bare hands and a length of deceptively strong silk from Hermès. If anything he was even harder than usual, quickly unzipping his suit pants with one hand as he shoved your dress up with the other and whispering all sorts of deliciously filthy things in your ear as he buried himself to the hilt over and over again with the lights of the city glittering below like a fortune in precious jewels.

The Paris safe house is a lot less lavish than a five-star hotel, the hot water in the tiny bathroom can be described as only slightly less icy than the cold tap and the floors are so uneven that if anyone did break in they’d probably trip over their own feet before getting a single shot off. It’s extra hazardous when drunk, even for a highly trained agent, but you manage to navigate your way to the sink to splash some water pulled from the frigid depths of the Seine on your face and stay upright long enough to strip off your clothes, leaving them in a heap where they fall. You grab a T-shirt from the back of a chair that you think is yours in your inebriated state, until you slip it on and realize the shoulders are far too wide and the hem is too long. It’s one of Dave’s, well worn and soft and you drank way too much alcohol tonight to bother trying to pretend that you don’t like the way it feels to wear his clothes. He’s not here anyway (where the fuck is he?) and you’ll take it off before he comes back.

You fall into the empty bed that’s not really big enough and yet it feels like it stretches on forever without someone else there to hog the blankets and tangle your feet with his. Your own gun stowed under the lump of a pillow and the taste of failure in the back of your throat more bitter than the booze, you close your eyes and drift off in a sea of regret that a monster walked free and innocents suffered, all because of you.

Your fault.

All your fault.

********

“Bonjour. Or should I say bonsoir, Mademoiselle.”

You’re awake at once, reaching for the gun under the pillow and closing your fingers around it just as the voice registers through your bitch of a hangover.

Dave.

Sitting up is made an Olympic sport both by your not full healed ribs and whoever’s playing the drums behind your eyes like a headliner at a death metal festival. Someone you manage it and crack open a lid to find your dick of a partner sitting in a chair next to the bed. It’s too small for him but somehow it doesn’t look awkward, he sits easily, comfortably, as far as you know he could have been there for hours. As you blink stupidly at him he leans forward and taps a fingertip against your lips.

“Open up, sweetheart.”

Taken completely off guard and too hungover to argue, you do as he asks without thinking. He pops two white pills on your tongue and hands you a glass of water.

“Drink,” he instructs, like he’s talking to a child. You resist the urge to scowl like one and swallow the pills down, chasing them with the water.

One secret about the CIA is that it has access to some really good drugs. Those weren’t aspirin, and it doesn’t take long for your headache to go away and the twinge in your ribs to fade so you can feel human again. Two things then happen at once, you remember why you were hungover in the first place and that you’re still wearing Dave’s T-shirt.

Three things, you clock what he just said. Bonsoir.

Not good morning. Good evening.

“What time is it?” you ask.

“Almost 1800 hours, Sleeping Beauty.”

Fuck. You slept almost the whole fucking day. You have a vague memory of stumbling to the bathroom again at some point and then falling back into bed afterwards, still alone with no sign of Dave anywhere. It’s probably not surprising that you crashed so hard, you’ve been running on nothing but coffee and sheer rage since Düsseldorf, but it feels wrong to have been sleeping when you should have been doing something, anything, to get justice for all of those girls.

Dave is watching you carefully and while his words were sarcastic, his tone wasn’t. He knows what you went through to bring Morozov in. He was right there the whole time, pouring over intel and CCTV footage with you, staking out meeting sites and infiltrating the underground clubs and back rooms where business was conducted by men who would have killed the both of you and not thought twice about it if there was the slightest hint of your cover being blown.

“They let him walk,” you say, more to yourself than him. “He fucking smiled at me, and he walked.”

Dave tosses a phone onto the faded comforter that offered no comfort the night before, without him in the bed beside you. “You have a message,” is all he says.

It’s not the burner phone you’ve been using for the mission, it’s your real phone. You pick it up and when you check the lock screen it shows a text notification. Your heart stops when you see it’s from Irina’s mother. You gave her your number, your real number, when you swore to get justice for her daughter, not the burner one that would be discarded and forgotten as soon as the job was over.

The flash of guilt that you failed them both is a gut-punch on an empty stomach that makes bile rise in your throat, acrid and sour, and then you see what she wrote.

Thank You!!!!

You look up from the message in sheer confusion and meet Dave’s eyes. He’s still watching you with what would look like nothing but cool detachment to anyone else, but you can see the laser focus of a sniper behind that dark gaze.

“Check out the BBC’s homepage,” is all he says.

That answers nothing until you go online and see the top story staring up at you from the screen.

SUSPECTED ARMS DEALER ARRESTED AT ST PANCRAS, accompanied by that same photo that’s clipped to the dossier you read over and over again every night like a fucked up bedtime story. A quick skim of the article reveals the important facts, Andrei “the Crow” Morozov, wanted by Interpol and half a dozen countries for a variety of crimes, had been found on the Eurostar when it arrived at St Pancras station in London from Paris a few hours prior, thanks to an anonymous tip received by the Metropolitan Police. He’d been discovered barely conscious and handcuffed to the pipes in a toilet that had been marked out of order. Morozov had been taken to an undisclosed hospital, where he was currently being treated for multiple broken ribs and other injuries while under reported guard by MI6. A list of his alleged offenses followed, including the trafficking of vulnerable women and girls from Eastern Europe into the sex trade.

You look up from the screen. “Multiple broken ribs?”

Dave’s face is perfectly calm, placid, his expression betraying no remorse for what he did. It was him, you know it in a heartbeat just as you know that he can put a bullet between someone’s eyes from a quarter mile away and what he looks like when he comes undone inside you.

“At least fifteen. Maybe more, it’s hard to be sure after the first dozen. One for Irina. One for Anna. One for Olga. One for all the other girls. The rest for you.”

Morozov had cracked two of your ribs, Dave had broken most of his in return and turned him over to MI6.

“They won’t let him walk too, will they?” you ask, fingers tightening around the phone. If the bastard walks again….

He lifts one shoulder in a shrug. There’s not a speck of blood on his clothes, he could have just come back from a day playing well-heeled tourist at the Louvre instead of stuffing an internationally wanted criminal into a train car bathroom after breaking over a dozen of his ribs. Hiis expression is as serene and unaffected as the Mona Lisa’s, keeping his own secrets from everyone except you.

“Unlikely. Even if they wanted to his arrest was public thanks to the cops sending out a press release, it would make them look bad to just let him go. It also makes him completely worthless now as an asset, since if he did walk everyone would suspect he worked a deal to get out of the charges.”

Dave York is very, very good at what he does.

“And if they do,” he continues, unconcerned by the prospect, “well, he won’t get far.”

You know it’s true, because you know him.

“Everyone must be pissed,” you say, imagining the utter chaos that must be going on in the upper ranks. To catch and lose Morozov in the same day, publicly, no less, and to have him end up in custody of MI6. Publicly the CIA and MI6 were allies…privately they each had their own agendas that didn’t always align.

Dave’s facade cracks at last and reveals his amusement. “Oh, they are, baby. I was there when the call came in from London. The station chief was already on thin ice, he’s going to get demoted for this and sent to a far less desirable posting where he won’t be served fresh croissants for breakfast every morning. Thought he was going to have an aneurysm when he was on the phone to D.C, serves him right too, the fucking prick. Everyone else is scrambling to avoid the fallout.”

You cross your arms over the soft cotton of Dave’s T-shirt, annoyed that you forgot (didn’t want to) take it off. “Don’t call me baby. Do they have any suspects?”

Translation: Do they suspect you?

He shrugs again, still completely unconcerned. “Sure. Do they have the right suspect? No, and they won’t. Now as good as you look in nothing but my shirt, go make yourself pretty. We're going out for dinner, I worked up an appetite today and I’m not eating alone.”

Go make yourself pretty? He’s such an ass. You ignore the burn in your cheeks at his casual acknowledgement that the only thing you’re currently wearing is his T-shirt and throw a pillow at his head with deadly accuracy.

“Clock’s ticking, partner,” he says, catching it easily in one hand.

Well…you could go for some actual food to eat after the liquid dinner you had the night before. That’s what you tell yourself, anyway. You’re a CIA agent, you’re an excellent liar. Especially to yourself.

You don’t visit the Eiffel Tower or hold hands on a famous bridge or do anything soppy and romantic. You’re not dating. You’re two CIA agents who caught a very bad man, have barely eaten in the past week, and who fight like mortal enemies and fuck like rabbits. Sometimes both at the same time.

Dallas. The conference where you were chasing down members of a suspected South American terrorist group. You had a screaming argument while you were riding him, his large hands tight on your hips guiding you up and down even as he said you wouldn’t recognize good intel if it slapped you in the face and you called him a self-important jackass who thought he was God’s gift to intelligence and he could take his intel and shove it. You only stopped yelling at him when you came.

Three times.

Dave leads you to a nondescript restaurant off the tourist path, tucked away down a narrow street. The service is French, otherwise known as indifferent, the food is excellent, and while you’d sooner stab yourself with one of the steak knives than admit you made yourself pretty for him, the dress you pulled from your cover identity’s wardrobe is pretty by any objective definition of the word. It may not be a date, but it is dinner in Paris and you’re supposed to blend in while on assignment. It’s not for him.

Another lie you tell yourself.

Dave likes the dress, you can tell. He pulls your chair back like the gentleman he most definitely isn’t and his hands brush over your bare shoulders when you sit down, lingering for a moment against your skin. When the waiter finally deigns to appear Dave orders the braised short ribs without bothering to look at the menu, saying with a wink across the table that he’s got a craving.

You order them too, because fuck men who hurt women and enjoy it.

They’re fucking delicious.

You don’t feed each other dessert or stroll along the Seine afterwards looking at the lights. You do duck into an alley, because Paris is for lovers and for two CIA agents who got paired up unwillingly and drove each other crazy fighting before falling into bed and doing the exact same thing while fucking instead. Dave doesn’t kiss you when he presses you against an ancient wall that’s probably seen its fair share of forbidden trysts over the centuries, instead he sucks a mark into your neck that’ll bruise like your ribs from pleasure instead of pain, one hand shoved under your pretty dress and the heat from his body keeping you warm in a cold, unforgiving world.

“Here, baby?” he asks in a voice that echoes right between your legs, nuzzling and nipping at your skin with one hand at his belt ready to unbuckle and unzip. You’ve fucked him in alleys before, buzzing with adrenaline from a mission and riding high on success while riding each other hard. But not tonight, as easy as it would be to wrap your legs around his narrow waist and muffle your cries in his shoulder while he fucks you against the wall.

“No, not here.”

Not the safe house either, with its shitty mismatched furniture and the ghosts of CIA agents past lurking in the shadows. You find a hotel instead on a cobblestone street, the kind of thing tourists would book for its classic Parisian charm without considering the lack of an elevator. You don’t have any suitcases to lug up the stairs to your room, where Dave presses you against the door as soon as it’s closed, caging you in with both arms. You feel anything but trapped.

“You should have told me,” you say, hands flat on his chest and looking into those dark eyes. You should have told me those girls didn’t matter, you should have told me they were going to stab me in the back and make a deal with the devil, you should have told me!

“You should have known,” he retorts. You should have known they didn’t, you should have seen the knife before it struck, you should have known.

You’ve seen Dave flatter, flirt, and charm to get what he wants, but with you he doesn’t placate or sugarcoat his words. He’s also right, which you hate, you should have known and you would have if you hadn’t let it get personal.

“But,” he continues, head tipping down with a sigh, “yeah, I should have.”

“Me too.”

His admission deserves yours. You’re still going to be salty about it for a while though. Maybe until your ribs fully heal. The bruise is a sickly yellow now, the edges starting to blend back in with the surrounding skin. It’ll disappear eventually but you’ll always remember where it was, a souvenir of your trip instead of a fridge magnet or a keychain. Dave will remember too, he’ll remember examining it in another hotel room when it was the purple of overripe fruit, before winding an ace bandage around your middle with his mouth set in a thin line. His fury had been silent, as quiet as the moment of calm before the storm, while his hands were careful, gentle even, for a man who could and did kill with them his touch had been delicate and feather-light.

Yours hadn’t been, when you jerked him off afterwards with rough strokes that made his silence turn to deep groans as his hips rolled with the movement of your hand. It wasn’t quid pro quo, you just needed to do something to deal with the frustration and that always ended with doing him. He couldn’t reciprocate, not then, not for a while, couldn’t make you come with his fingers or mouth or cock, not when it hurt just to breathe, let alone have an orgasm. Or three.

Now though, he strips the pretty dress from your body with far too much efficiency for a government employee and grazes fingers across the still-marred skin. Somewhere in London there’s a man lying in a hospital bed with his whole torso turned black and blue because he did this to you. You know the only reason Morozov isn’t dead at the bottom of the Seine is because you wanted him to rot in a cell for the rest of his life instead. Dave would have killed him otherwise. Fifteen broken ribs was him showing restraint.

You lift his hand to your mouth and suck on his finger, wrapping your lips around it. The backs of his knuckles are faintly bruised, a match to yours. He’s still fully dressed in charcoal trousers and an army green sweater. The man wears clothes beautifully, something you used to find irritating. He looks even better naked, something you also used to find irritating.

Dave replaces his finger with his lips, reaching down and hoisting your legs around his waist to carry you to bed like he carried you in Düsseldorf after Morozov caught you in the side with a tire iron. You fall back to the mattress and he stops kissing you only long enough to yank the sweater and T-shirt underneath over his head before he’s on you again, nipping the underside of your jaw while his hands roam the length of your body and push your thighs apart. You’ve been wet and ready since the alley, since dinner, since you made yourself pretty (for him) and his fingers find no resistance between your thighs despite how long and thick they are. Just the slightest touch has you trembling, clutching at his arms and legs widening in silent invitation.

“Fuck,” he mumbles, quickly shoving his pants and underwear both down with his other hand so that he’s wonderfully, gloriously naked. “What do you want? What do you need, baby? My fingers? My mouth? This?”

He’s got his cock in his fist, rubbing it up and down your slick heat without letting it slip inside. It’s difficult to breathe, but not because of your rib this time.

“Yes,” you moan, lifting your hips to try to line him up with where you need him. It doesn’t work, the bastard keeps himself just out of reach.

“Hmm,” he chides, breath hot against your skin as he trails his lips down your neck and across the tops of your breasts. “Even I’m not capable of using all of them at once on your lovely pink cunt. You have to choose. Tell me what you need and I’ll give it to you.”

You want his smart mouth to eat you out, and not just because he’ll finally stop talking. You want his long fingers pumping deep. You need his thick cock to fill you, to fuck you, to find every last sweet spot the way only he can and absolutely ruin you.

“Dave?”

He looks up and meets your gaze. “Yes, baby?”

“Fuck me with that big dick you’re so fucking proud of until I can’t fucking walk, and then do it again.”

He smiles, showing his teeth. It’s the smile of a man who just got handed exactly what he wanted on a silver platter and you’re too needy and desperate to care. He leans down and presses a kiss to the tip of your nose, a sweet gesture from a man who’s capable of such shocking violence. But then again, so are you.

“There now, was that so difficult? All you ever have to do is ask.”

It’s getting less and less difficult, with Dave. He’ll give you what you want, what you need, you know he will.

His hips thrust and his aim is as accurate as it is with his sniper rifle, precise and true. He buries himself inside of you and adjusts his trajectory as he goes to follow the arch of your back and the tilt of your hips as you take him all the way in a hot slide that pushes the air from your lungs as he fills you with him instead. Your nails dig into his shoulders to carve your name into his skin in cuneiforms of lines and half-moons, an encryption only the two of you can decipher. He rests his forehead on yours, weight braced on his arms, breathing more heavily than he ever would while sighting a target, giving you both a moment to adjust before he does what you asks and fucks you. It’s hard, it’s fast, it makes your toes curl into the hotel sheets and your pulse race under his mouth when he presses it to your neck and whispers hot against your skin.

“That’s it, baby, taking me so well. So fucking deep. How? How is it always this fucking good, drives me fucking crazy.”

You wrap your legs tight around his waist, tug on his hair, run your nails down his back and scrape your teeth against his jaw like you’re lighting a match. All the things that you know drive him fucking crazy. He lifts you with an arm under your lower back like you weigh nothing, changing the angle to that one that’s like gasoline on a flame and pulling a high-pitched cry from your throat that he echoes with his own deep groan. You hate that he’s the only one who’s ever done this, fucked you like it would be a war crime to stop. His hips move in a rapid-fire tempo, unrelenting, cock a piston, impossibly thick and hard as it drives into you again and again and again. You can’t stop any of the noises that escape you, the cries, the moans, the desperate pleas, the yes, yes, more, please, more and your only consolation is that neither can he with his grunts and growls and fuck, yes baby, yes, take it, fuck!

Dave yanks you against him with those large hands, holding you flush to his hips, and grinds instead of thrusts. The effect is immediate, your thighs tremble, your stomach tightens, your nerves sing as he hits every sweet spot inside you at once and lights them all up like Times Square. You clutch at him helplessly, jaw dropping with a silent scream that he hears nonetheless.

“Let go, baby, let go.”

It’s not an order, it’s a plea from a man who wouldn’t beg for mercy under torture and it breaks you instead. You let it all go and fall over the edge, keeping him locked tight inside and bringing him with you.

You’re partners, after all.

He groans, giving a final, dirty grind of his hips. A lock of dark hair falls on his forehead and his broad chest is covered with a faint sheen of sweat as he shudders through his own climax until he finally collapses down

Dave groans, giving a final, dirty grind of his hips, a lock of dark hair falling on his forehead and a faint sheen of sweat on his broad chest as he shudders through his climax and collapses down into your arms. You run fingers through his damp hair, his weight pinning you to the mattress and holding you fast. You’re not going anywhere, not this time.

Afterwards he lays next to you with his long limbs stretched out on the bed, naked, skin marked in places from his time in the service. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. At what cost though?

“I can hear you thinking, baby.”

You flick him on the shoulder. “Don’t call me baby,” you say, but there’s no bite to the words. He never does in front of other agents or contacts. A cocky young field agent called you “sweetheart” once in a briefing and lived to regret it. Dave had watched you sharpen your tongue on the man and run him right through with it as you tore his piss-poor interpretation of the data to shreds. Then he told the analyst to get you a coffee and to take notes silently for the rest of the briefing.

That night in bed with him you were sweetheart and baby and darling and sugar, each ridiculous endearment teased into your skin and whispered in your ear, until you finally shut him up with your mouth and ignored the point he was making. No one else gets to call you those things, only him.

In another bed you stare up at the plaster ceiling with its graceful antique fixture and feel his eyes on you. I can hear you thinking. Even the sex wasn’t enough to quiet the thoughts in your head tonight.

“How do you-“ you start, and stop, not sure if you really want to go down this particular road. Dave waits with a sniper’s patience, going even more silent and still beside you. “How do you make it not be…personal?” you ask the one man who won’t lie to you.

Irina. Anna. Olga. You would have shot Morozov through the heart despite the orders to take him alive if you’d known they were going to let him walk, and ruined your career in the process.

“Who says I do?”

Dave puts his fingers under your chin, turns you to face him and brushes a thumb over your lips. His eyes are dark and hooded, the eyes of a trained killer, a man more dangerous than any two-bit arms dealer and the one you let into your bed. He looks at you and sees what other men would miss, that even though you’re naked and flushed you’re still so, so angry.

“If you take nothing else from me ever again, take this piece of advice. Don’t work for the CIA.”

“Kinda late for that,” you interrupt with a roll of your eyes.

His thumb presses back against your lips. “Hush now and listen. Don’t work for them, make them work for you. The intel, the equipment, the slush funds, take it all and use it. Put men like Morozov in prison when they won’t. Because you’re not the kind of agent who won’t let it become personal.”

From anyone else you would have taken it as an insult, the first rule of intelligence work is compartmentalization. It can’t be personal. It’s just supposed to be names on a list and numbers on a page. Let bad men walk to catch worse ones. Collateral damage is a given, whether it’s a few cracked ribs or some broken girls.

“That sounds…” a number of different things go through your mind, starting with the fact that it sounds very much like treason, but you settle on one word, “…dangerous.”

Dave drags his thumb along your jaw. “The best things in life always are. Now, I believe you told me to fuck you with this big dick I’m so fucking proud of until you couldn’t walk, and then to do it again. And you know I always follow orders.”

You know he doesn’t, Dave York gets results like no other agent, but that’s not the same thing as following orders. He only follows the ones he wants to.

He rolls easily on top of you, making space for himself between your thighs. He’s making space for himself in others places too, something you wouldn’t acknowledge under torture. This is all you’ll allow yourself, to run your hands down his broad back to where it narrows at the waist, muscles rippling and flexing under your touch while the rapidly hardening line of his erection is hot against the crease where your thigh turns to hip.

“Is this what you want?” he asks, voice low and rough. One hand goes under your knee, pushes it back, opening you up. You’re still aching, still needing more, as wet as he is hard, and while his fingers can drive you crazy and his smart mouth never looks better than when it’s fitted snugly between your legs, what you want, what you need, is for him to break you into the mattress again until you shatter completely.

“Baby-“

You pull his head down to kiss him silent, kiss him deeply, kiss the man who’s gone to hell and back with you and would do it all again tomorrow. He pushes inside with a grunt, not making you beg any more than you’ve already done. This time he sinks down into you, warm and thick like honey, chest against your breasts, face buried in your neck, and fucks you with steady rolls golf his hips that you feel all the way down to your toes. It’s slower this time, less frantic, a more gradual build under your skin. Dave’s pace never falters, you feel that he would do this all night long if you asked. A hotel bed in Paris, an alley in Boston, in the back of a car, in a field, Dallas, Monte Carlo, Düsseldorf, Jakarta, you’ve fucked and fought your way around the world with Dave. You’re not dating, you don’t go to the movies on Saturday nights or argue over whose turn it is to do the dishes, there’s just this. Mission completed, Morozov file closed, new assignment in the morning.

What happens in the hours between stays there. It has to. You’re already compromised enough.

Dave groans, his hand finding yours and lacing your fingers together against the mattress. You keep your legs locked around him, thighs wrapped tight over his hips. Everything else fades away, there’s nothing except him on top of you, inside you, doing what you asked and fucking you until you tighten around him and cry out, shuddering through another orgasm. He doesn’t stop, the bastard just keeps going with a quick kiss to your temple as he fucks you through it and starts working you up again.

“One more,” he pants, shifting his hips. “Need you to come on my big dick one more time for me.”

You let out a huff of a laugh that turns into a bitten-off moan as he finds that blissful angle again, because his big dick is doing a hell of a job getting you there. The thick drag of it is more delicious than any fancy French dessert, sparking across over-sensitive nerves and hitting that spot buried deep in you on each stroke. You gasp and clutch at sweat-slicked skin, Dave fucks you and fucks you and fucks you, until you can’t take it anymore and fall apart in his arms. Even then he doesn’t give in immediately, drawing it out like the final note as he plays you as expertly as a concert pianist. That part of you that secretly wonders if he’s just been playing you the whole time is silent, drowned out by the hot rush as he floods you with warmth while you’re still quivering, pulsing hot to the same rhythm until you’re both fully spent.

After a few long, blissful moments where neither of you move or speak, Dave stirs first.

“Can you walk?” he asks. It’s not a rhetorical question. Fuck me with that big dick you’re so fucking proud of until I can’t fucking walk, and then do it again.

You’re tempted to lie, you’re so tempted because the absolute last thing Dave York needs is an ego boost. You’ll give him this, though, he earned it tonight.

“No,” you mumble, and wait for the inevitable smug, smart-ass remark. It doesn’t come, there’s only a quiet hum from him as you stroke fingers over his damp hair. His large hand splays over your ribs, covering what’s left of the bruising. It could have been worse, you could have run into that building and not come back out again. You got off easy with two cracked ribs, relatively speaking.

This job, this life, is dangerous. It wasn’t the first close call and it won’t be the last. You know it. Dave knows it.

Sleep is a luxury now, alongside regular meals, relationships that aren’t built on half-truths and lies, and downtime. It steals up on you, eyes closing against the anonymous room that you’ll never see again after this night, in a city that’s just another name on a map. There’s a faint rustle of sheets, and a warm body that settles next to you with a brush of lips to your cheek.

Whatever comes next, Dave York will be by your side.

Your partner.

(yours)

#dave york x reader #dave york x you #dave york smut #dave york fic #unapologetically in love with this asshole

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ponderingmoonlight · 5 months

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How to leave a request on this blog/general information

General information

I write all my fanfics by myself so please don't steal my content

The covers of my fics are NOT supposed to be artwork, but to enhance the mood of the following fic

All pictures that don't have a source reference are AI generated by me (AI Mirror) and therefore NOT MY ART

Others are screencaps of the anime itself or other anime/manga

Unfortunately I'm not a skilled artist when it comes to things outside writing, so don't come at me for using AI

If I use anything apart from what's listed here, I'll mark it as so of course

If you don't like it, I kindly advise you to leave this blog

Dividers used are by @saradika 🤍

About requests on this blog

Your requests are always welcomed, no matter what time or what day – get in that inbox!

It might take a while for me to actually publish it though, so stay patient

I won't write anon request I don't 100% feel anymore so be prepared that your anon request might not get published

I will write non-anon requests almost granted though (as long as you follow me!)

At the moment you are able to request for Attack on Titan, Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer – a detailed list can be found underneath

If I don’t write a specific request, I will answer it with saying that so you don’t wait for nothing. Exceptions: -> you want something out of my don'ts -> you are non-anon and don't follow me

Don’ts

Everything outside the universe I’m writing in

(modern au, fairy-tale au, that whole actor thing, fandom mixed up with legends or mythical creatures, just basically everything that isn’t related to the anime/manga directly)

I exclusively write fem! or gn! Reader (but mosty fem) x male!character as this is what I’m comfortable with – no male x character

Really long and detailed requests

At the moment I'm not interested in writing hcs - if I still write your request, I will do so in a "normal" way, if not at all I'll let you know!

requests that contain sensitive topics without a trigger warning

Wants

kind tone

Short and sweet requests (2-3 sentences with some details here and there; in Germany we say “in der Kürze liegt die Würze”)

Feel free to leave a wish for the cover of your fic!

You can ask for smut, however these fics take me some time to write

I'm a sucker for angst/hurt/comfort hehe

Characters I’m writing for

Jujutsu Kaisen

Satoru Gojo

Suguru Geto

Kento Nanami

Megumi Fushiguro

Toji Fushiguro

Choso Kamo

Yuji Itadori

Ryomen Sukuna

Toge Inumaki

Ino Takuma

Complilations (many characters separately in the same setting)

Attack on Titan

Levi Ackerman

Eren Jaeger

Erwin Smith

Jean Kirstein

Rainer Braun

Porco Galliard

Complilations

Demon Slayer

Kyojuro Rengoku

Tanjiro Kamado

Inosuke Hashibira

Uzui Tengen

Giyu Tomioka

Yoriichi

Akaza

Kokushibo

Complilations

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coquelicoq · 8 months

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it's interesting, a few people on my post yesterday about the dandelion dynasty told me they were taking it as a rec for the series, but i didn't actually recommend the series in that post. it's making me think about whether i would rec it to people, a question i hadn't fully considered yet (as it is a very different question from "do i like this book?"). so this is me figuring out the answer to that question. i'll keep it spoiler-free (though i make no promises on brevity).

i just finished book 3 (of 4) and each installment has left me more invested than i was before, but the series started out very slow, and i didn't really get into it until halfway through book 2. i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people bounce off the first book; i didn't, but only because 1) i almost never give up on a book that i've started (it's a character flaw of mine 😕) and 2) my trust in ken liu is ridiculously high because the other stuff i've read by him is so beloved to me. so my reaction to feeling kind of meh about book 1 was "okay, let's see where he's going with this" rather than "i guess this just isn't my cup of tea."

i should say that the problem might just be my own ignorance/lack of familiarity with the form. i don't read a lot of epic fantasy - in fact, lord of the rings is the one series that i have given up on reading a couple of times because it just left me totally indifferent. so if you like epics, you are starting out way ahead of me and can maybe just ignore the rest of this post lol, but i think i had to adjust to what the form is asking of me and what it's best suited to accomplish before i could get fully on board.

the main thing i struggled with is the writing, like the actual sentence-level mechanics of voice and style. this surprised me, because i usually find his writing very beautiful, or, when not beautiful, i can get a sense of the effect he means to achieve by employing a certain style. but in this series, the writing came across as kind of awkward and one-note to me at first, and i couldn't see a reason for it to be that way.* the dialogue especially - different characters don't really have different ways of speaking, they all feel pretty much the same. this was one of the main things i had to adjust to, but i do get it now. i don't just mean that i got used to the style and it doesn't bother me anymore, though that is true; i mean that i now understand the effect he means to achieve by employing this style, which gives it purpose and inextricably ties it to the story he's telling (this becomes especially clear in book 3, as it's directly related to a major theme of that book). if the style were different, he would be telling a different story; that's the sign of a successful execution, i think.

i said in the tags on yesterday's post that one reason the series doesn't have much of a fandom on here might be that the characters aren't natural blorbos. of course every character is probably the blorbo of somebody somewhere, but i don't know that these characters were designed to be blorbos, if that makes sense. not that they're plot devices either! every single one of them is conflicted and complicated and compelling, and most of them are followed over a period of many years, so we see them develop as people over time. but there is no protagonist, for example. you could also say that every character is a protagonist. the "list of major characters" at the beginning of book 3 is six pages long, and there are stories to be told about each of these characters, and none of them are told in isolation. but in a way, the characters themselves are not the point, or if they are, it's in aggregate - it's in the ways they're all complex, the ways they all have motivations that make sense to them (and that make sense to us, once we get to know them). and it's about power and the roles that the characters play in their society, rather than the roles the characters play in the story. or maybe those are the same thing! because ultimately, the main character of this story is the society. and the plot is the history of this society, rather than the journey or life of a single person or handful of people.**

(sidenote, there will be a period during book 1 when you will think to yourself, "wow, all the women characters are super one-dimensional and the narrative doesn't seem to respect them." this is on purpose. just keep going.)

the plotting is intricate while also feeling very organic. he's got dozens of plates in the air at once, he's maintaining them over a long period (these books are MASSIVE), and he's somehow making it seem like a real history, not like an author pulling strings. i haven't finished it yet, but my guess is that he's going to pull off a very satisfying conclusion that's at the same time very open-ended. definitely looking forward to it.

and the worldbuilding. oh, the worldbuilding. this is some of the most detailed, complex, realistic*** worldbuilding i've ever encountered, and he covers SO much ground. you want linguistic worldbuilding? you got it. philosophy? it's here. psychology of empire? coming right up. the nitty-gritty of everyday governance? buddy, pull up a chair. mechanical engineering? how much time you got?? (it better be enough time to read 3504 physical pages, because that's how long this series is.) and he's drawing on chinese history and cultural narratives rather than slapping lipstick on a tolkien clone (see his comments here, but stop reading at "In this continuation of the series" if you want to avoid spoilers). he WILL go on for a hundred pages about a single invention, but it's SO interesting that he is allowed. this is a story about how technology (including language, and schools of thought, and agriculture, and...) shapes, and is a product of, its time and place and people, so again, this is all to purpose. but it's also just. really cool.

the last thing i'll say, and this is mainly for other ken liu fans, is that one of the things i most love about his short stories is how they tap into emotions i didn't even know i had, as though they're reaching inside of me and drawing to the surface ways of experiencing consciousness and love and mortal life that i had no idea were in there. this series is not causing emotional revelation for me in the way his other stories do, which isn't a bad thing - i don't mean to say the series is not engaging or that it inspires no emotions! i just mean, iykyk. if you've read the paper menagerie and are expecting that experience, you will have a better time here if you leave those expectations at the door. i am invested in this book because it's engaging my intellect, curiosity, sense of wanting to find out what else the characters will learn and what's going to happen next...less because it's turning my heart inside out inside my chest. and like thank goodness, because i don't think i could survive four entire 900-page books' worth of that! but anyway. word to the wise.

tl;dr: yes, i recommend it, especially if you like epic fantasy. if you're a fan of ken liu's other work, this is quite different, so just know that going in!

*this opinion is of course subjective and not universally shared. for instance, see this review of book 3 (full of spoilers, so don't actually read it lol) which says "There's Liu's voice to hold onto, though — beautifully deployed here and fully in command of the language of his imaginary universe." so ymmv. maybe it's an epic fantasy thing.

**this is making me realize that the story is commenting on this very thing through a tension between bureaucracy (founded on interchangeability) and monarchy (informed by a specific personality). dude. that's so meta!

***though sometimes i'm like, "really? you scaled up that invention to use untested on the battlefield in the span of like two weeks? sure, jan." so sometimes he falls down a little on translation of ideas into logistics, but it makes for such a great story that i'll allow it.

#i kind of want to call it epic science fiction rather than epic fantasy #i know the categories are very porous. but if you think of fantasy as having 'magic' and scifi as having 'technology'#this is scifi #there's no magic. unless you count the gods creating weather patterns etc. to help or hinder their favorite mortals #but i don't count that as magic #okay i guess maybe Gitré Üthu is magic...but again that's a god thing. so there's a gray area #the aesthetics are more fantasy than scifi. these terms are meaningless though so just ignore me lol #another thought. it occurs to me that some of the style choices he's making might be related to comments of his that i've read #on translation...and how when he translates a story he tries to retain a sense of it having been written in a different idiom #he likes people reading a chinese story in english to be able to tell that it was not originally written in english #this story was originally written in english irl. but in the world of the story itself they are speaking other languages #like for instance page 1 of book 1 features the lyrics of a song. they read kinda awkwardly. but don't translated lyrics almost always #look like that? because the rhymes and cadence and number of syllables etc. are so dependent on the language of origin?#the dandelion dynasty #ken liu #the grace of kings #the wall of storms #the veiled throne #my posts #links #wow this is NOT how i planned to spend my evening. and yet here we are. time to shower and then start thinking about bedtime #why does everything take me so long???? how are people so fast. ugh. it takes me hours just to have thoughts #and then writing them down? fuhgeddaboutit.

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fayestardust · 3 months

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Miscellaneous Tag game

Tagged by bestie @almost-a-class-act

Favorite place in the world you’ve visited?

Probably California, because accessibility is so great there. I actually loved LA, but I would guess I wouldn't like it so much if I had to live there. It's the visiting that is cool.

Something you’re proud of yourself for?

Honestly, for still being here? I know that seems like a dark thing to say, and it kind of is, but I've been through a lot of shit, and life continues to be hard. So I'm proud that I'm trudging through it.

On a more recent scale, I am really proud of myself for walking through the Bois Jacques and Trou de Loup forest the other day with my BoB family. It was the most I've walked in probably the last ten years and while I was completely out of breath, it felt great to have done it.

Favorite books?

I don't know anymore. Maybe the Housekeeper and the Professor. But recently, Wool by Hugh Howey.

Something that makes your heart happy when thinking about it?

The last time @almost-a-class-act came to visit, and also any of my BoB trips. Something about found family. Squeee.

Favorite thing about your culture?

Probably that we pull no punches. And I'm not sure if it's part of our culture but growing up, everyone was always welcome in our house. To stay for dinner, to sleep over, just about anything. I love that I was taught that.

When did you join the HBO War fandom? What was the first show you watched?

Band of Brothers way back when it came out when I was in high school. Our history teacher was cool like that. Then I watched it with my dad (now 84) and I got into the Pacific slightly after it came out. Fun fact is that I initially did not like it. Too violent and a bit scattered, I thought, but now I like it about just as much as Band. Covid launched me back into the series harder than ever before, and I watched both plenty of times with @almost-a-class-act. Then the whole art thing started and the rest is history.

Have you read any of Easy Company’s books? If so, which ones were your favorite?

I've read Band of Brothers, Easy Company Soldier and Parachute Infantry. Easy Company Soldier is my favourite out of those. I've also read Bob Leckie's book Helmet for My Pillow, which might be better.

Favorite HBO War character and your favorite moment with them?

I can't pick a favourite, it changes all the time. My favourite scene is Doc and Babe in their foxhole, though.

Do you make content for any fandoms, if so; what sort of content?

I make art and, on rare occasions, write fic and sometimes poetry. Not enough, though.

Favorite actor/actress and your favorite film of theirs?

Andrew Garfield can do no wrong. Give me him in just about anything. Under the Banner of Heaven was impactful. Reminds me that I have to finish watching Silence. I started watching it over Christmas with my family, but we decided it was too heavy for Christmas. Paul Mescal has been one of my recent faves.

Favorite quote/s that you wish to share with others?

I have one but my brain is broken and I can't think of it right now.

Random fact your mutuals/followers don’t know about you?

Hm, maybe I used to sing a lot and once recorded an album. Or that I wasn't always in a wheelchair.

If you’re a writer, do you need a beta reader (say yes so I can be your beta reader 🤭)?

Yes, but I have @almost-a-class-act. She never lets me down.

Three things that make you smile?

My cats. My signed art. My camera (nerd!)

Any nicknames you like?

Faye, K-Maart (begrudgingly)

List some people you love to see around on tumblr!

@mutantmanifesto @almost-a-class-act @derry-rain @cody-helix02 And loads of you who I just don't remember because my brain is overloaded.

What would you do during a zombie apocalypse?

Die.

Favorite movie?

I don't know, don't make me pick.

Do you like horror movies?

I do not. Though I guess it kind of depends on how suspenseful they are and if they have jumpscares.

Tagging: @derry-rain @mutantmanifesto @cody-helix02 @wordsluts

#tag game #me

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olderthannetfic · 2 years

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On the subject of blocking, I think entering a new fandom and blocking a huge section of it straight away is self care at this point. If I read any post along the lines of "if you like this fictional thing then you are..." I block immediately. If a friend knows the fandom, I follow their advice and block the people they suggest too after a quick scroll (I know a lot of people do this). Fandom isn't a community anymore. It's finding a small handful of people to enjoy the thing with and hiding from everyone else.

I read a post on Twitter that talked about how old school fan culture was dying, and how preemptively blocking/antis were killing fandom because it was forcing people to engage and communicate less. I was sad to realize I was part of the problem, but I've had so many bad experiences. I preemptively block based on a particular ship and two characters in A fandom, because of how horribly disgusting the fans are (to each other, to people who like something different, and the content they create is often squicky/poorly tagged). I realize this is almost "anti" behaviour (judging people's character for their fictional tastes), but it was endemic. I don't harass, I walk away silently and filter them out. So hopefully not as bad?

The final straw for me was the "antis in disguise". People who profess to love Dead Dove content (and also write it), but then are aggressive/vile to people who like/don't like different characters, forms of canon, etc, and have extensive trigger lists in their servers, while telling people the right way to fandom (which is to only like what they do). For me, the only "right way" is to let people love their thing and don't harass, while making content for your thing. I was in one for an IP where hunting, death and murder were a huge part of the narrative... and death is on the trigger list. Any and all mentions of it. Yes. Even "that's so funny, I'm deceased".

I'm sorry for the ramble. I have a lot of feelings about being guilted for blocking and setting up boundaries. Especially one person using their RSD to claim they were being bullied! Fandom is mad these days. Mad!

—

I die laughing every time I see someone who thinks they’ve been around a long time but who is somehow still such a n00b that they could say blocking kills old fandom culture.

You know what kills oldschool fandom culture? TWITTER

It’s short form quips. Oldschool fandom was interminable tl;dr. It’s open and public. Oldschool fandom was invite-only with dense webs of social connections required to access it and a natural result of being in it. Some people took their old friendships to twitter with them, but if they want to know why things feel different now, it’s because they went to that piece of shit website. That’s not the fault of the rest of us.

Back in the day, m/m shippers often found a little group of their own people and hid from the haters. Those few tragic souls who liked whatsherface from the last season of Beauty and the Beast did the same. Anime fans weren’t always in the buddy cop fandoms and vice versa, except for FAKE. Fandom has never been just one community. That’s an illusion born of nostalgia and planting one’s head firmly in the sand.

You know what forces people to communicate and engage less? Platforms that make them feel unsafe. Randos being able to turn up in the comments to go “Well, actually!” without the poster having any ability to keep them out. And sure, antis are part of that, but we’ve always had haters of other sorts and always had to get rid of them in order to have a civil discussion.

Denying dickheads access to your time does not kill communication.

If someone on twitter actually meant what you’ve written about above, then they’re clueless. If they want oldschool fandom culture, they need look no further than their own pen. Post long-ass “thinky thoughts” (and use cringe-inducing terms like “thinky thoughts”) and oldschool culture will come to you… And maybe, while you’re at it, figure out if oldschool means LJ culture, forum culture, FFN culture, mailing list culture, Usenet culture, fanfic convention culture, AMV editor culture, 80s multifandom zine culture, 70s Star Trek zine culture…

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denim-mixtapes · 1 year

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Nice List jim hopper

Hiiii thank you for requesting Hopper!! I haven't written anything for him yet because I wasn't sure if there was a demand, but back before season 3/4 he's the only person I read fic for in the ST fandom so I'm happy to get the chance!! I don't really know where this lines up with the canon. Probably somewhere in season 2 but??? Let's just pretend that canon doesn't exist anyway.

Picking out a Christmas Tree with Jim Hopper w/c: 676

Join the Christmas Party!

“Are you gonna tell me why you dragged me all the way out here, Hop?”

You wring your cold hands together, willing away the shiver that follows as Hopper digs in the back of the pickup truck.

“You said,” he grunts, fighting with something in the bed, a fierce metallic clunk interrupts his sentence. Pulling what you now recognize as a hacksaw free from the clutter, he huffs and continues, “you said you’ve never had a real Christmas tree.”

“Oh.”

It’s all you can muster. Your heart cracks at the gesture, the fact that something small you mentioned in passing a few days ago led here, to the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Hawkins, surrounded by rows and rows of evergreen trees.

“Yeah, oh! Now come on, ’M already freezing.”

He guides you up the first row of trees with a firm hand on your lower back. Something you’ve learned in your time living with Jim Hopper is that he’s a man of few words. He never has too much to say, and even when he does he struggles to say it. But that doesn’t mean he can’t find other ways to make his feelings known. In small gestures; a fresh pot of coffee before he leaves for work, or throwing your towel in the dryer so it’s nice and warm when you get out of the shower. Or in larger, more grand ones like this, he never fails to make you feel loved.

“Do you have decorations already?” You ask, lacing your fingers with his and tugging along toward a tree that caught your eye. “I don’t remember you ever having a tree in the past, real or not.”

He huffs a single, clipped laugh and shrugs, “I think I’ve got some lights out in the shed. Maybe. It’s, ah, been a while since I put one up, you’re right.” He didn’t need to tell you that the lights were leftover from Joyce’s predicament last year, or that the few ornaments he does have aren’t meant for the tree. Not anymore, they’re too special, handmade little things from Sara’s daycare and elementary school holiday parties, a My First Christmas ceramic teddy bear that he can’t bring himself to throw away. You can see his expression go blank at the thought, his hand tightening around yours ever so slightly, but don’t dare mention it.

Humming thoughtfully, you notice that the one that caught your eye has a bald spot in the back and move on. “Well then we’ll just have to start our own collection from scratch!”

The smile that takes over his features is still a little guarded, but it’s warm despite his apprehension. “Yeah?” He asks, voice thick with emotion, and presses a kiss to your temple. His whiskers tickle against your hairline, cold nose pressing into your skin and sending another shiver down your spine. “I like the sound of that.”

As you turn the corner to the next row of trees you spot the perfect one, and without thinking you drop his hand and run for it. “This one!” You shout, turning in place and bouncing on your toes. Your excitement is contagious, only encouraging a wider, joyous smile onto his face as he jogs to catch up. “This is it!”

It’s picture perfect, almost as wide as it is tall, standing just a little taller than your head. The branches are full, evenly spread, and if you didn’t know any better you would say it was store bought. Fresh snow dusts it evenly, glittering in the winter sun.

From behind Hopper engulfs you in his embrace, thick arms wrapping around your waist, careful of the blade in his hand. He rests his chin on your shoulder, “looks like a winner to me. This the one you want?”

You don’t give a verbal response, only lean heavier back into his hold and nod.

With another quick kiss pressed high on the apple of your cheek, he releases you and twirls the saw in hand with a flourish, “then it’s yours.”

#jim hopper x reader #jim hopper/reader #hopper x reader #hopper/reader #hopper drabble #stranger things x reader #stranger things imagine #stranger things reader insert #1k celebration blurb

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stardust2003 · 9 months

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A History of Oasis Fanfiction

I'm calling this "A History" rather than "The History" because this is from my point of view. I know I could've done more research on this topic and dug way deeper into it than I have but decided not to. So, I'll be sharing a history of Oasis Fanfiction as it pertains to my history with it but hopefully others in the fandom can still relate to it.

I've been a fan of Oasis since 2005. Long story short, I fell in love with the Beatles in 1999/2000 followed by Jet in 2004 followed by Oasis in 2005. There were other bands elsewhere in that mix but Jet and Oasis have always been the most important ones to me after the Beatles. To me, they both sound like a modern day Beatles in their own unique ways.

Despite being a fan for so long, I didn't discover the Oasis Fanfiction Community until 2015 on the day after I saw Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds in concert. Still buzzing after the show, I googled Oasis fanfiction which led me to the Tumblr page of @heresthestorymorningglory. Their story, "The Girl In The Dirty Shirt" blew me away for so many reasons with the biggest one being how they included real life events into it. Up until then, the fanfiction I read in other fandoms was fluffy and maybe included some real life stuff but not in the way this author did.

In addition to Tumblr, the author also had a Wattpad account. I'd never heard of Wattpad before but decided to join it after it prompted me to do so while looking at Oasis fanfiction on there. This led me to so many other great authors (like @Katy15307) who wrote so many great stories and inspired me to write my own.

I never thought I'd write my own story because I didn't think I'd be able to write something as good as the stories I was reading. But in November of 2015, I finally mustered up the courage to write and post "To Light A Bitter Fuse" and haven't looked back since. It's been a fun journey so far and I've met a lot of wonderful people over the years because of it.

That brings me to my next topic: the Oasis Fanfiction Community. If you've read my author's notes on Wattpad (I leave them out of my posts on Archive of Our Own), you know I talk about this a lot. But it's a subject that always strikes me and makes me wonder.

The Oasis Fanfiction Era from about 2015 to 2017 at least on Wattpad seemed like a pretty active time period. I'm sure this included the couple years before it as my two favorite stories by my two favorite authors were first started in 2013 and 2014, respectively (I believe). I met a lot of great people back then who not only provided lovely support on my stories but became my friends as we gushed about our shared love of Oasis amongst other things.

Sadly, it seems like a lot of people have come and gone since then. I could make a whole list of people who I really wish I could reconnect with. It always makes me wonder what happened to them when all of a sudden they just stopped reading, writing, commenting, voting/giving kudos, etc. Did they leave the fandom and move on to another one? Did life get in the way and they just don't have time for writing and reading fanfiction anymore?

When I first discovered "The Girl In The Dirty Shirt" it was so entertaining to follow the author's Tumblr for their almost weekly updates as well as their Q and A videos and general interactions with their fans. But eventually that came to an end also which was sad to see happen.

I know we all have lives outside of writing and reading fanfiction. So, I can understand if someone gives it up because of this. It's just so sad to see people go and not get a chance to say goodbye.

This post from @coolcassie really says a lot: https://coolcassie.tumblr.com/post/188829997432

There are still Oasis fanfiction readers and writers out there though. Some old, some new which gives me hope this fandom is gonna live forever (see what I did there?). And maybe this post will bring people out of the woodwork long enough to at least say, "Hey! How's it going? I've really missed talking to you!"

To anyone reading this, thank you for being a friend. Not only if you've read and enjoyed any of my stories (and thank you so much if you have!) but also for indulging in our shared love of the Gallagher Brothers with me amongst other things!

#liam gallagher #noel gallagher #original female character #oasis band #noel gallagher's high flying birds #beady eye #fanfiction #fanfiction history #fanfiction community

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trecomics · 1 year

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Mastodon is great for a quiet fandom life

Even before the buyout, Twitter has been an anxious place for a hobbyist like me.

I want to chill in my fandom bubble and find people who like the same characters I like to connect and chat maybe! I want to shitpost in peace!

Because of how twitter’s algorithm and search function works, I don’t want to force people who don’t like that sort of thing to see what I draw, so I’m careful with how I word my post. I mark the pairing name somewhere so people can mute it. (or find it) I censor full names or series titles so it ’s not found in search. I’ve been doing this for so long it shouldn’t be stressful, but getting stray comments reminds me to stay on my toes.

Mastodon, I realized, is close to perfect place for a peaceful fandom life.

Mastodon is compared to twitter a lot. That’s the wrong way of thinking about it. It’s not about trying to be “engaged” with the site 24/7. It wants to work for everyone, while keeping its focus on safety and making it harder to dogpile on others. That’s freakin’ awesome. Once you understand how it works. So how to get started?

These were my top worries while figuring out Mastodon.

There’s so many instances! What if I join the wrong one? This had me stuck deciding whether Mastodon was even viable. But there is no “wrong one.” you can join any instance, you can even make your own as the sole member. It’s simply having an address to be found.

HOWEVER

You might want to shop around first. When you sign up for an instance, their rules and which instances they don’t interact with are listed. I draw NSFW art, so I wanted to join an instance that allows that sort of thing.

AND

There’s no advantage joining a heavily populated instance. it could lag, more difficult to get into contact with the admins/support. The local timeline is a mess. Small and cozy is best. You can follow anyone, anywhere, anyway.

I don’t know how to follow others from different instances. You don't have sign up to different instances to follow others. The easiest way to do that is to copy their profile URL and paste and search into your instance’s search bar. You can also copy and search their account name, usually displayed by their username. They look like “@[email protected]”

I tried doing a search for my favorite thing but got 0 results! I’m proud of this creation, how can others find it? Mastodon’s search will only catch hashtags and URLs from all the instances. While I avoided hashtags with every fiber of my being on twitter, it’s vital to use them if you want public posts to be found by others. So don’t be shy and tag it up, use appropriate content warnings if needed on posts you want others to see! Because of these search limitations, you don’t have to censor words without fear of being found in a random search anymore. It’s great.

Best of all, you can follow hashtags! This way, any post with that hashtag will appear in your home timeline whether you follow that person or not, even from other instances. It’s great to see new stuff without manually searching. To do this, search your favorite hashtag names. Click the hashtag in the search results and in the upper right corner there’s an icon with a plus mark to click. You can remove it anytime by doing the same method.

But I want to follow others who speak different languages, twitter at least has a translate function (for now) Mastodon does too! But it’s up to each instance’s admin to implement the feature. it doesn’t hurt to politely ask them to add it. If they don’t, some apps have it built in! I know Ice Cubes for Mastodon does at least.

Quick tips: —You can change the default visibility of your posts in preferences The default is “public” but if you’re like me, you don’t want every thought out on the public/local timeline. I have mine set for “unlisted” so only followers or profile visitors can see it. The many posting options Mastodon has are almost perfect. I hope someday they adopt Twitter’s circle function.

—You can add filters to words and hashtags you don’t want to see! It just works! This is in preferences.

—No more extra work when you have to delete and repost, the “delete and re-draft” function is the best option ever.

—For the most comprehensive FAQ that answers every little thing you want to know about how Mastodon works and why, https://fedi.tips answers and then some.

I'm still a newb to Mastodon but I love being there so much. If anyone else has tips I've missed I'd love to know!

#mastodon #fandom

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aclosetfan · 9 months

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Hellooo, here I am again, after all, you said I could bother you all I want with my random trivia that I have in the middle of the night so I will 😃 (Stop encouraging me if you don't I take it seriously and I won't stop anymore)

Just for the record, I read the fics and loved every one of them. Unfortunately I made up reading The Notion of Loss and re-read Till death do us part for the tenth time (that damn ending always kills me, you will pay for every tear shed 😡) that same night with a heart-wrenching soundtrack and it was the holy trinity that I I could sleep covered in my tears tonight. I force myself to suffer, I know, but... If I don't, who will? 😔

My question for today is something I'm pretty sure you've been asked before, but it doesn't hurt to try, does it? Could you talk about some of your favorite headcanons for a specific character or in general? (And if something has already been discussed here, could you name others, please?🥲) I know it's something that's already been used, but I really like it when the fandom comes together to believe in something collectively in a way that feels like the cartoon itself has already confirmed (CN would never give us that satisfaction, so what we have left is to hunt for our own survival)

By the way, what you said about not being able to leave the fandom is something that I think is very real to almost everyone inside. I really use the community as a place of comfort to hide from real life problems or even spend hours looking at random things like trivia or fan headcanons (Main reason for asking) and I think now I couldn't get out of something that it's already become a routine for me in some way, or even watching random videos and never remembering my comfort characters again, but anyway, just any outburst from someone who is going through a similar situation! 😊

About the new job and the delays...don't worry so much, we all take our time to adjust and for some it may take longer than for others! I think adapting is part of growing up and maturing and I know that there will come a time when you will feel stable enough to be able to focus your head on interesting new stories and plots, or writing bit by bit, I don't really know, I just know that with time everything will settle down and I'm sure that when you release a story or one-short again it will be amazing just because of your writing and plot that never disappoints. Well that was it, take your time, however long it is, and your 'comeback' in writing when you feel up to writing again and I will definitely be here to read everything from my favorite writer in the community!!!💗

Notes :

-Slightly jaded speech, I know, but I really hope that some of this text makes you feel somehow better ♡

-I know I write a lot, it's just that I get a little overexcited having someone to respond to the idiotic questions of the hysterical teenager that lives inside me 😔

- Any mistakes are just a coincidence that I know almost nothing of this language 😀 (If it's not readable I'll cry)

- The emoji thing was real.

aw thank you :))) your continued confidence in me is so kind. I hope I find time to write something soon. Anything, really! I miss writing and want to continue practicing. Also, I'm super happy that you read the fic recommendations. There are some crazy talented people in this fandom who have taken the time to write incredible stories. There are a thousand more out there, and I know some people I follow collect lists of fics, so if you want more, I'd sneak a look at some people's pinned posts. Pinned posts are sometimes the only way I find fics haha

To you're actual question, I have a lot of headcanons throughout my blog. Some are tagged, and some are not. Honestly, I couldn't remember my headcanon tags now! For the sake of not repeating myself too much, I'll give you three h/cs for the three girls :)

Bloss:

Follows rules until she no longer agrees with the rules, and then she makes new ones. Despite what people may think, Blossom isn't so caught up in the technicalities of right and wrong. She doesn't think black and white but is morally gray. She knows what right is, and she does what she needs to do to accomplish it, and sometimes that means choosing the lesser of the two evils and breaking a few rules.

Related to the top one, she has classic leader-martyr syndrome, but as she gets older, she burns out. I think it would be interesting if once she burns out, instead of quitting, she falls to second-in-command and pushes Buttercup to take over, but eventually has to take it back because of her ability to make hard sacrifices that BC lacks, and they both know it. Compared to Blossom, Buttercup is too overly-protective to make hard decisions.

Bad cheesy jokes and puns. She is not funny. No one thinks she's funny. She thinks she is, though, and believes her pep talks can move mountains (they cannot).

Butters:

Like I said, overly protective. When Blossom plays martyr, BC's there to catch her. Her over-protectiveness/toughness leads people to think she's intimidating and standoffish, but in truth, she's also the shyest sister. So, it's hard for her to make friends, but once she's your friend, you've got a ride-or-die for life. Despite how often she complains about things/people, she doesn't give up on others.

I also love her as a classic dude-bro. She loves watching sports, tracking sports statistics, and playing them. I don't think she'd be able to play on teams with normal humans, but given how many mutants pop up in Townsville, I headcanon there are superpowered teams, and she's in at least three of them. Idk which sports exactly, but 100% of the time, one of them is Roller derby.

In the show, she was prone to acts of aggression. I'd like to believe that when she grows up, she's mellowed out a great deal, but she's not at all cool like she hopes she is. If you're her friend, she's nosy, loud, and 100% in your business. If a doorknob pulls out her earbuds, she's 100% punching a hole in the door. Like, she's mellowed out, but she's "spice" for a reason.

Bubbles:

Blossom and Buttercup have 99 problems, and Bubbles is the cause of all of them :)) <3 she's a whirlwind of chaos and is always involved in some kind of shenanigans, which her sisters inevitably have to clean up. For all the problems she causes, she creates an equal amount of solutions. Things tend to work out for her. (I usually h/c Boomer as the same, but shit doesn't work out as well for him).

Her love life is dismal. There isn't much else to say. She's a girl who very much wants to fall in love, but she is not lucky with it. She doesn't understand that Blossom and Buttercup scare off 99.9% of all suitors. Down the line, this is a problem because she begins to think she's the problem, so Blossom and Buttercup have to bully people into dating her.

A nature nut, a cheerleader, a seamstress, a dog walker, a pet talker, and a lawncare enthusiast, she'd definitely be the jack of all trades in the family. She has more hobbies than she could ever keep up with, but she does just fine. Blossom might seem like the busy one, but Bubbles is more so. Unfortunately, unlike Blossom, she's horrible at keeping organized. Given all her odd skill sets, out of the three sisters, she's the most eccentric (and superstitious, but that's another h/c lol).

I hope these spark some interest!! I feel like these are pretty in line with my prior h/cs. I don't deviate from my characterizations of them often lolol

#anon asks #thank you thank you thank you 🙏#anon if you have a prompt/request for a short one shot #lemme kno #maybe that'd get me back into writing things!#who knows worth a shot tho right?#long post

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bagheerita · 1 month

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for the ask game - d, i, j, x, y!

Woohoo!

D - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t.

This is kind of hard because there's very few pairings that I straight up DON'T like and of those I feel like there are reasons I don't like them, either because they just don't make sense to me or because I don't like one of the characters, so there isn't really a WISH to like them. There are certain pairings I wish I liked *better* than I do... SGA is my main fandom at the moment, and I wish I liked Teylabeth more than I do, or really any pairings with Weir; I feel like Sparky has a lot of potential, but I haven't found any fics for it that make sense to me.

I - Has Tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

Not really a fandom, but overexposure to McShep through tumblr has made reading fics that focus on it less enjoyable, and so I don't usually read new fics anymore, though I'll occasionally reread ones I already know I like. It's fine as a pairing, but I feel like a LOT of fans consider it "canon" and... okay, do what you want, but that's not something I can agree with.

J - Name a fandom you didn’t think about until you saw it all over Tumblr. (You don’t have to care about it or follow it; it just has to be something that Tumblr made you aware of.)

The Shape of Water. And in general, other movies. I feel like single movies don't have the same fandom potential as series, but I'll see people making gif sets and realize "hmm I should check that out on AO3 and see what they've got..." I found a really great fix it/continuation for the Shape of Water that I adore.

X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

I love it when characters are convinced of their own unworthiness or unlovable-ness and are then surprised and touched when someone is loyal and loving to them. ❤

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Merlin, Clone Wars/The Bad Batch/(anything star wars that isn't the movies/OG novels/The Mandalorian/TBOBF), Sherlock Holmes, Supernatural, Black Sails, some show called 911 that is all over my dash now, Ted Lasso. Though as we go down this list I know less and less about these fandoms. (Edit: how could I forget fucking BG3??? it's everywhere and i have no idea what's going on) There's also a lot of fandoms I'm only "in" for one reason, like for She-ra I like the fanart but I don't read much fic and am not really interested in the headcanons, and for The Last Kingdom I like gifs and tumblr posts but also don't read much fic.

Thanks for the ask! 💕

Ask game!

#answers

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mwolf0epsilon · 1 year

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Hi there. I'm still new to tumblr and to the starwars animated series fandom so I'm not very good at keeping up with things or asking about stuff that's been going on. As of late I've noticed there's a lot of discourse about Tech from the bad batch show. Could you maybe explain to me why? It's ok if you don't want to answer, I just saw that sometimes you answer these kinds of questions and you never sound mean when you do it? I'm trying not to sound dumb but I don't understand what's going on.

Yesterday when I got this ask I decided I wasn't going to answer it immediately. Both because it was my birthday and I'd rather enjoy it than delve deep into fandom drama that I'm not 100% interested in following, and because I just didn't have the time to do it any sort of justice in terms of explaining what's gone down.

Newbie Anon I'll be frank with you, I am not really sure what sparked the recent mess relating to Tech (there's always hot debates sparked by TBB for obvious reasons if you ask some of the older people in the fandom, but that's something I think you'll figure out fairly quickly if you stick around tumblr for a while). But I do have a bit of a theory...

I'm gonna keep this one under a cut for the sake of my followers and pals that don't want to get slapped in the face with this topic.

---

To start this off Newbie Anon, The Bad Batch is unquestioningly a Whitewashed Mess.

It has surpassed The Clone Wars in piss poor poc design, and while this is not a new issue (the clones have always been inconsistently portrayed as white men in various forms of older media) the animated series haven't done jackshit to fix the models despite the producers going back to fix other character models in Tales of the Jedi (proving that they can do so but simply refuse to properly represent Temuera's features in the characters that should all look like him).

Temuera Morrison as Jango Fett, compared to clone trooper Dogma

The example above helps point out some of the issues with the clone models. The profile of the face, the shape of the nose, chin and ears, the bone-cheek prominence and even the brow ridge is incorrect.

The shape of the lips and eyebrows are the only parts of the model that look right. The eyes are almost correct if not for their size and coloration. This is less of a stylistic choice like many claim, and more obviously an attempt to make the clones's features resemble less of those of a Polynesian man and more of an Euro-centric man.

Cody is another excellent example of comparison because he was directly portrayed by Tem as well, and thus his model in the show is more blatantly incorrect in the way it was depicted. Down to both the features I mentioned above and also his height being needlessly exaggerated to make him look more "intimidating" (the wikia lists all standard clones as being 6 feet tall despite Tem being 5'7").

Commander Cody as he appears in ROTS compared to his TCW Model

And then we have Clone Force 99...

Clone Force 99 aka the Bad Batch

Newbie Anon, you'd need to be blind not to see the physical discrepancies between Jango Fett and the Bad Batch. The only member that looks remotely like a clone is Wrecker who unfortunately draws heavy inspiration from the Hulk...

The Hulk... Let that sink in.

Even Echo who was a standard clone prior to his capture barely looks like a clone anymore, and the insistence on keeping him looking the way he does while justifying it as medical in nature is offensive in many ways (both towards poc and the disabled) especially when Echo was most definitely treated very poorly by the writing team (dehumanized on various occasions because of his cybernetics all in the name of a "good laugh", portrayed as the broody "killjoy" that does nothing but complain and argue with Hunter, missing the point entirely on his character which we'd gotten to know long before cf99 were a thing, just to then toss him away when they no longer wanted to focus on anyone but TBB exclusive characters).

Their designs are atrocious examples of whitewashing and the fandom has been divided on this topic for a long long time now.

There's those who likely don't understand what the problem is, which doesn't make them dumb mind you. Not everyone who watches a show is super connected to a fandom or with this kind of debate. A show is a show, animated or not, and it's watched and sometimes not spared a second glance. And since TBB is mostly aimed at kids it's mostly kids who are watching it, and the issues pass over their heads because... Well they're kids and they're still learning. No harm in that at all, eventually they'll grow up and grow wiser (or not, sometimes that's just how these things happen).

There's those who have pointed this out time and time again, arguing that they should look more like clones because it makes no sense that they look so wildly different from the rest. Especially when the explanation provided is that their "desirable mutations" made them look like that (which essentially means that being white is a desirable mutation and that's a brutally racist thing to claim).

There's also those who see nothing wrong with their designs and that even consider them hot. Hunter, Tech and Crosshair especially are viewed as the Hotties of the squad and have a massive following of kinnies and girlies who would definitely not mind getting hot and bothered with them.

Which is where the recent discourse kind of starts off...

But not as unexpectedly as you'd think. More, it happened because of something I suspect is far too big of a coincidence to ignore. The overall timing matches up with the recent outcry at least.

So, there's this company called Sideshow. It's a figures/collectibles/merchandise company that has been producing high quality star wars figures for a while now. They take pride in making as accurate a facial sculpt as possible, and over the years they have improved tremendously especially when portraying characters who have Tem's features (mostly thanks to Hot Toys who've improved the original sculpts they were using).

A comparison between the original Sideshow captain Rex sculpt vs the more recent Hot Toys version

Commander Wolffe's two much older face sculpts compared to Commander Cody's more recent face sculpt

Clone trooper Domino Twins face sculpt compared to the Jango Fett face sculpt

ARC trooper Domino Twins face sculpt compared to the ARC trooper Jesse face sculpt

Sideshow and Hot Toys are undeniably good at what they do in terms of sculpting the faces of these characters. They've done a lot of improving and while some of the skin tones are still a little off off on occasion (especially in Rex who's lighter hair color automatically makes his skin tone look even more pale than it already does), you can't exactly say they don't look like the source material.

When it comes to quality figures, the fandom was of course pleased when Sideshow and Hot Toys started working on a TBB line where the figures had facial sculpts that matched Tem more closely than their show counterparts.

The first three figures of the TBB line to be unveiled

Obviously there's still issues (especially on the skin tone department) but you can see Tem's features more easily in Hunter and Echo. In Crosshair's case he seems more like he's related to the clones rather than being a clone himself (he looks like he could be the son of a clone) but at the very least the shape of the eyes, brows and ears is a more accurate match than what his model looks like in the show.

It's not perfect. But the fact Sideshow and Hot Toys tried to make them look like clones made a lot of people happy that there was someone in the companies trying. So when Wrecker and Tech's facial sculpts were announced everyone was excited to see what the end result would be like.

The Wrecker face sculpt revealed at long last

They managed quite well with Wrecker aside from how pale he looks. I'm very grateful they didn't try to make his brow and jawline thicker to make him look "meaner" or more brutish.

The Tech sculpt on the other hand...

The Tech face sculpt

They managed to get the ears and shape of the head right... But the rest is most definitely not at all what a clone should look like. I draw attention towards the shape and size of the lips, nose, brows and eyes specifically (coupled with his lighter hair colour and his hairline being quite receded and it's even worse to look at). The balance is way off to the point they manage to make him most definitely look like a basic white guy in altered clone armour.

This was a blow to people who were hopeful that the figure would make him resemble Temuera a little more like what they'd done to the others. It just didn't work for Tech and people were rightfully frustrated with it.

However, as soon as this was brought up there was a spark of "What's wrong? I thought you said Tech was hot :)" arguments with people laughing over the "Tech Girlies" getting what was coming to them for thinking their whitewashed pretty boy was suddenly less attractive than what they previously thought.

Now I could be wrong, it could have nothing to do with the figure reveals. I'm not very good at keeping up to date with fandom discourse because I mostly don't have the energy to care anymore (I'm here for a good time, I know my own convictions and where I stand morally, I don't need to constantly argue and moan about it when instead I could just pass along information and make my own stuff to share with the people who're here to have fun with me, I am not morally bound to star wars nor would I ever dare equate my enjoyment of the fandom to something like a marriage commitment because that's honestly ridiculous). But I donno Newbie Anon...

The timing seems too much of a coincidence and this fandom is notorious for starting fights very easily. Tech's figure coming out as the ugly duckling of the bunch and setting off a war between people who are genuinely disappointed the sculpt is bad, the Tech fangirls, and anyone who's just eager to pick a fight with everyone else, wouldn't really surprise me much.

I've seen shit like this happen in every fandom I've been. It's a matter of getting used to it and learning to pick your fights more wisely. Getting worked up about fandom discourse will only burn you out faster than you can say "oh bother".

#Eps Talks About:#star wars #the clone wars #the bad batch #tcw #tbb #sideshow collectibles #hot toys #I'm pretty sure this is what sparked the recent drama but -shrugs-#could just be a very weird coincidence #either way sorry if this isn't helpful Anon I am honestly not super sure on it #and also sorry if people have responded to you in a mean way over questions like these #that's not super helpful of them

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