for the ask game and if you’ve seen yttd, midori?

i had such a strong yttd phase in 2020 lol

sexuality hc: he can be bisexual. as a treat

gender hc: id hc him as cis because Its funny. to me. but because im nice he has nonbinary swag

a ship i have with said character: none. i dont ship him with anyone

a BROTP i have with said character: you know the drill

a NOTP i have with said character: yeah.

a random headcanon: i havent thought about this guy in so long but i think he likes to suibait people on twitter

general opinion over said character: when i played yttd i did not like him at all lol. mostly because i was really attached to shin at the time and you know how it is. but im chill with him now. he just deserves to go to hell forever is all

where's the essay op

Okay so bayonets.  I don't know why I ever pretend that I want to talk about anything but military history and battlefield medicine.  I checked all my sources in the waiting room of a doctor's office so you're just going to have to trust me because they are Gone.  I’m pretty sure this can all be found on a few Wiki dives, though.

First of all, to recap, let me clarify a common misconception.  The triangular bayonet was NOT outlawed in the 1949 Geneva Convention, nor any future revisions—as it was originally a musket weapon, it was fading out of use by World War II and the subsequent Convention.  However, you'll notice that I opted to use to word "violates" rather than "were banned by," which is a fine semantical hair to split and, I suppose, debatable.  Most bayonets were not explicitly banned in the GC, in that there is not an article in the GC saying you can't use them.  However there IS an article in the GC, adopted from the earlier 1899 Hague Regulations, stating that it is prohibited to "employ weapons...of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering" (originally part of Article 23 of the HR, now Article 35 of the GC, expanded in 1977).  Personally, as someone who knows a lot about how a lot of weapons impact the human body, I think that is a more expansive statement than most people would expect, and should be treated accordingly.  Regrettably I do not work for the UN.

Point is, triangular blades specifically are known to cause wounds that are difficult to heal, highly prone to infection, and extremely likely to never fully recover, while also having a relatively low mortality rate.  This is because the axes of a triangular wound, which is shaped sort of like a Y, make it very hard to stitch closed, and very easy for any "twisting" of the blade to create a large hole with ragged edges that's functionally impossible to stitch closed.  As an added bonus, because of the way scar tissue forms, it's possible for one "line" of a triangular wound to pull open other parts of the puncture while the scar tissue forms and pulls on the skin.  Even by standards in the 1700s, triangular bayonet wounds were phenomenally likely to infect and consistently difficult to repair, and modern medicine has made only limited improvements on that situation.  As such, cases have been made that certain types of bayonet/triangular blades in general are therefore in violation of this article, despite not being explicitly banned.

(Side note: yes, the American military violates the GC on the regular.  The American police violate the GC.  I am excruciatingly aware.  The GC is interesting reading generally, but especially if you're an American and you ever feel like being appalled for a few hours.)

Anyway, with that covered again, let's actually talk about the development of triangular bayonets, which might've been out of use by the time of the GC but DEFINITELY violated that article in a big way for a good two centuries prior and are also a fascinating insight into the fact that humanity, as a whole, is really determined to do things in the dumbest way possible.

The first thing you have to understand about bayonets is that they were originally invented as a way to integrate pikes with guns, not knives or even swords.  When arquebuses and muskets were first invented, you were lucky to get a rate of fire around one round per minute, and you still had to protect your army while they were reloading their clunky black powder guns.  Therefore, most infantries between like...the invention of the gun and the late 1600s were comprised of soldiers equipped with muskets, and also soldiers equipped with pikes (a type of spear).  The idea of a bayonet was "what if we put a pike and a musket TOGETHER and then we could give everyone THAT and have way more guns in our army because we don't need pikemen anymore." Which makes sense when you think about it.

What makes less sense is that the initial effort at bayonets was something called a plug bayonet.  You'll never fucking guess what these geniuses (first record is Chinese infantry around-abouts 1600, popular use of plug bayonets recorded in Europe around the 1630s) figured out for their first try at a bayonet.  Here's a hint!  There's not a lot of places on a gun where you can "plug in" a sword. 

Obviously plug bayonets did not exactly catch on as a fantastic solution, because these guns were either a gun OR a short spear and neither was especially good at their jobs.  A bunch of battles hinged on this problem. Which brings us to the end of the 1600s, when English forces in Scotland got absolutely obliterated by a bunch of Highlanders in 1689 because the English were so busy trying to fix their bayonets that the Highlanders literally just charged them, fired one volley, and cut them down with swords and axes. The English took that one very personally (which, you know what, fair, it was a humiliating defeat, especially since the Highlanders had been using that tactic very successfully for a while) and started developing better bayonets.

This is where we get to socket bayonets, AKA what you would probably recognize as a bayonet from a period TV series or a museum.  Socket bayonets have a metal sleeve that gets attached around the barrel of a gun (in this case a musket), so that you can still theoretically use the damn gun while it's attached.  There were problems with the development of socket bayonets (notably, it took a while to figure out how to keep them from falling off the gun during battle), but overall they worked much better and armies started getting rid of pikemen. This was also when bayonets were shortened to a little over a foot, which isn't really important but made them much easier to maneuver.  Socket bayonets were the European order of the day by the early 1700s, and mostly came in three flavors: single edge (like a knife), double edge (like a sword), and spike (like a...spike).  There were pros and cons to all of these (single edge wasn't great for stabbing, spike was ONLY good for stabbing, and double edge was kind of okay at stabbing and kind of okay at slashing), but most importantly, both single and double edged bayonets were fragile.  The heads of polearms were shaped on patterns other than "sword on a stick" for a reason, and it's because "sword on a stick" is not very sturdy.

Triangular bayonets were the solution to this problem.  Triangular bayonets are basically a single piece of metal creased long-ways, with both edges sharpened and the top fluted to form a third edge at the crease.  This makes a much more resilient weapon than a flat blade, because a twisting motion doesn’t risk snapping the blade in the middle.  It also means that now you have three edges, and human nature is to figure “more knife better.”

And don’t get me wrong, as a weapon of war, the triangular bayonet was a great one.  It was introduced in the 1710s and then got used regularly to maim and terrify through the start of the 1900s.  In fact, the triangular bayonet worked so well that it only began to get phased out of use when the style of war itself started to change dramatically during the World Wars.  When warfare was focused on pitched battle (your old school “two armies enter, one army leaves” kind of warfare), the emphasis of a bayonet was on extending the reach of a gun.  A bayonet lets a soldier have a weapon for closer range combat, where a gun—especially a long gun like a musket—is not as effective.  So when you had two armies on the field and a bayonet was first and foremost a way to keep the enemy at least gun-length away, longer bayonets were better.  

But World War I was the advent of trench warfare, which was a terrible idea and also meant that a long weapon, like a gun with an extra foot and a half of sword on top, was much, MUCH harder to work with.  Either fighting took place in no man’s land, where you probably weren’t going to get close enough to use a bayonet anyway, or in a trench, where a weapon as long as you were tall was just impossible to work with.  

(If you know anything about WWI, you’re probably asking me about bayonet charges right now, specifically the concept of “going over the top.”  Contrary to every media representation of WWI ever, “going over the top” of a trench faded out of use pretty quickly.  It was a type of bayonet charge where the soldiers in ONE trench fixed their bayonets and tried to charge no man’s land in an effort to reach the OTHER trench, but it was basically never effective because no man’s land was often heavily trapped and strafed with gunfire and mortar shells.  Also, it was the kind of battle tactic that military history books talk about with phrases like “total annihilation of whole attacking battalions,” so that’s the kind of mortality rate we’re talking about here.  The Battle of the Somme featured a good number of bayonet charges by the British, for context, so people learned and started using other tactics.)

So, since bayonets were only useful in trenches, suddenly everyone was scrambling to shorten bayonets and guns so that their soldiers could get ANYTHING DONE.  And THEN soldiers started admitting that they were literally taking their bayonets off their guns and using them as knives instead, because for trench fighting that was way more useful, and so everyone just decided fuck it, let’s just make bayonet-knives, which is why WWI weapons with bayonets usually look, very literally, like someone duct taped a short knife to the front of a gun.  This was the start of the decline of the triangular bayonet, a full two hundred years after it hit the battlefield, which is a frankly spectacular run for any weapon since the invention of the gun.  Triangular bayonets held on, here and there, through part of WWII, but they were almost entirely gone by the time of the Geneva Convention being ratified in 1949.  However, spike or knife bayonets are still issued to many armies as a weapon of last resort to this day, although they aren’t often used in actual attacks.  Now we have bigger, worse weapons for actual attacks.

 TL;DR, the development of bayonets went like this:

“What if we put a pike ON a gun?  …oh wait, you still want to use the gun?  Sucks to be you, I guess.”

“What if we put a sword on the gun instead?  Then we could put it somewhere where we can still use the gun!  Good luck keeping it on there, though.”

“What if we actually made something designed to get put on a gun and stab people effectively?  Like, what if we designed something with that purpose in mind?  Perhaps?” SMASH CUT TWO CENTURIES

“Well if you’re just gonna take your bayonet off and stab someone with it anyway, can we just go back to giving you knives, then?”

And now you’re caught up on all the dubiously successful ways we’ve tried to mutilate people with a knife-gun.

Clementine Ophelia Seavey was born on January 1st, 2019 at 3:06am, bringing in the new year in the best way for her eighteen-year-old mother. She was born with nearly a full head of dark blonde hair and vibrant blue/green eyes, 7lbs 5oz and 20 inches long, Florence fell so head over heels in love with her the moment she laid eyes on her baby that all the worries in the world seemed to wash away.

Clementine’s biological father was Florence’s first boyfriend, Matt, in grade twelve and he was honestly a complete self-centred jerk but she had fallen too hard from across the history classroom to really notice any of his flaws. He left her pregnant and dipped for his on-again-off-again girlfriend, sending Florence into graduation pregnant and alone. Florence swore that men weren’t shit and she was destined to be alone as a single mother her whole life, but then Daniel walked into her life and fell just as in love with the baby as Florence was before she was even born. The moment Daniel held Clementine in his arms for the first time, he completely broke down in tears as if she was his all along. Even when Matt came back for the first eight months of Clementine’s life, she only ever saw Daniel as her father (probably since Matt was busier with frat parties than trying to be a dad), and her first word after ‘mama’ was ‘dada’, directed up at Daniel through her little grin and chubby hands outstretched. The one good thing that came from Matt walking out on his daughter was that Daniel was right there to take his place with pride, being the father that Clementine deserved and always loved.

You could say she was named after the sweet little fruit or Winston Churchill’s legendary wife, but mostly she was named after the old folk song that got Florence through those draining last few months of her pregnancy. Daniel would bring over his guitar and sit beside her on her bed and sing her the gentle song until she fell asleep; it was a song that meant so much to Florence and brought her so much comfort that she didn’t even hesitate writing the name down on the birth certificate. Her middle name, Ophelia, came from Florence’s favourite Shakespeare play, Hamlet, and a character she saw herself in so much as a young woman who, herself, was naïve and lived life led from her heart. She wanted to pass on a name to her daughter that was regal and came from strong literary roots to strengthen her as she grew up.

Her go to nickname was Clem, or when she was younger it was Clemmy. To her uncle Jack, she was his little orange, a nickname she sort of outgrew but she kept it around for jokes as she became older. To her father, she was angel as she could really never do wrong in Daniel’s eyes. It drove Florence crazy as Clementine could get away with so much mischief with just a pout and those blue eyes towards her father and he would just melt and give in to his sweet little angel.

She had been a daddy’s girl since before Daniel was even really considered her dad, always being protective of him as baby as she never let anyone near him and even still as she grew up. Being a young father and a handsome one at that, Daniel got plenty of stares from women but Clementine was his little bodyguard to ward off the ladies with her witty remarks or sassy glares so strangers knew Daniel was perfectly taken, thank you very much. Clementine loved her parents equally but was extra territorial over her father. Florence had her own special relationship with their eldest as Clementine was her firstborn and the one who helped change her life for the better. Florence had always been worried about Clementine not being treated fairly as she wasn’t Daniel’s biological daughter but they raised her as a Seavey and she was treated as one by everyone, especially her Aunt Anna who Clementine took a liking to from the moment they first met. Anna was Clementine’s go-to for fashion and for boy talk that she didn’t want to ask her mother about because whatever Florence knew, Daniel knew. With Anna, her secrets were always kept under lock and key. With her or Clementine’s sister, Penelope.

At only eighteen months apart, Clementine and Penelope were super close but quite different as Clementine was extremely sociable and Penelope was much shyer. When Penelope was first born, Clementine flipped between adoring her sister and hating her every hour, trying to get used to sharing her parents with the new baby. The girls grew up to be best of friends and had such a close bond through their entire lives, especially from sharing a room from Kindergarten until they moved away to university. Penelope sometimes felt as if Clementine hated her half the time because her older sister was so bluntly honest and called her out on everything and pushed her out of her comfort zone when it was the last thing Penelope wanted to do. Lucy, on the other hand, had a personality that mimicked Clementine and the two often fought to be the loudest in the house despite their five-year age difference. They were both proudly extroverted and Clementine often took her youngest sister out on adventures or for ice cream when she had the chance. Clementine liked having things go her way and when they weren’t, she would make it perfectly known that she wasn’t happy. Lord help 9-year-old Lucy who had started to learn how to play the cello and had to deal with the wrath of her older sister coming barrelling down the hallway to yell at her to “Shut up! I have exams to study for!”. Overall, Clementine was a caring and protective older sister, even if her fiery and witty personality sometimes felt like otherwise.

Clementine was the most ‘tomboy-ish’ of the Seavey daughters, but even still she always dressed with style and good taste, even if it was to the volleyball court or to the skate park with Jack. He taught her how to skateboard from a young age (Daniel made sure she was well equipped with knee pads and elbow pads and a helmet and would have wrapped her once in bubble wrap if he could) and as she hit her middle-school age, the two of them would be zipping around the park together. Clementine loved to adventure and travel and wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty – especially if it meant learning something new – and she was always the first one awake for summer hikes with Daniel or to go canoeing up north. She kept a lot of her Girl Guides knowledge from growing up as she stayed in the club for years and always threw out random survival tips whenever she could. Clementine was always a quick study and very focussed on her schoolwork although school came easy to her, so she really never put in much effort and still got shining grades. Debate team in high school was where she really shone and she found her passion there.

Strong-willed and incredibly ambitious, Clementine took her 4.0GPA and got into one of the top law schools in the country. This meant she would have to move away from home but that didn’t phase her in the slightest (her parents were a different story, however), she was always ready for a new adventure.

Clementine was persistent and bossy and courageous and fiery enough that could get her in some serious trouble sometimes but she was just sweet and charming enough to get herself out of it. Most of the time. Daniel was always the first one to fall for her puppy eyes…until she pulled a stunt like lying to him about where she was going and suddenly she couldn’t charm her way out of her father’s anger. Clementine was extremely sociable which was vastly different from her two generally introverted parents, and she always started conversations with adults in the supermarket when she was younger and made friends on the playground with ease. Everyone liked Clementine from strangers to teachers to peers alike. She was the popular girl in school who was friends with every group so no one felt left out – it certainly helped that she was in nearly every club possible.

Clementine was not only personable, but she was pretty; which earned her attention from boys quite early on. She had a few boyfriends growing up but mostly were those two day long elementary school relationships that meant nothing but it still gave Daniel a good panic every time she mentioned a new boy she was into. He was a tad protective. No boyfriends were really truly serious until she met Bradley at university orientation. Clementine fell hard for him and this allowed him to easily get her into the life of frat parties without a second thought from her. Soon, she was paying off classmates to write her essays or assignments for her while she could go out and party, but she would never tell her over-sensitive parents, especially Daniel who held his angel daughter on such a pedestal. She didn’t want to tarnish her little reputation.

That all changed when she discovered that Daniel wasn’t her biological father. They had such a close bond for her entire life that it truly felt like a slap in the face when the truth came out…or rather, when she pulled it out. It sent the fiery nineteen-year-old on a whole journey of self re-discovery in the worst way, her short temper and attitude pushed to the limits. But that will all be covered in detail in ABM2…

After university, when Clementine started her first internship at a law firm, she met Winston, a charming British exchange student who challenged her at work and adored her outside of the courthouse and Clementine came spinning home to her parents to tell them about her new boyfriend. “His name is Winston like Winston Churchill, Daddy! Winston and Clementine! Isn’t that amazing?!” She was twenty-two but so in love she was like a high schooler again. Winston was definitely her endgame.

For those of you interested in astrology, Clementine is a Capricorn Sun, Scorpio Moon, and Scorpio Rising.

She would move to Vancouver to be near the mountains if she could, although she loves her home city. Her favourite colour is orange (obviously), she has a soft spot for sappy romance films, and can eat a whole bucket of chicken wings in one sitting. Ironically, she doesn’t like the taste of clementine fruits but lives by them for her ‘aesthetic’.

Clementine’s songs are:

Clementine by Connie Francis

Ophelia by the Lumineers

Face Claims: 

Baby Clementine’s face-claim (ABM1 Era) is from @/mrsjessicaroberts on Instagram. These photos are not mine, all credit belongs to her

Teenage Clementine’s face-claim (ABM2 Era) is Michelle Wozniak (@/michelle.1 on Instagram). These photos are not mine, all credit belongs to her

1011

1. Five facts about your current relationship OR five facts about your single life.

a) I haven’t been truly single in...around 6 years, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment.

b) It was my last day as an intern yesterday (but they hired me, so I’m staying after all, haha) and since I’ve felt like I gained a family in the last two months, I thought it would be okay to give professionalism a break and share what had actually been going on with me on my first day on the job, aka when the breakup was still fresh and I was still figuring out how to function all over again. It unsurprisingly surprised everyone and my superior said something like, “Omg it’s the [company name] curse; it’s so strong it broke you guys up before you even got hired” which got a laugh out of me.

c) I’m not interested in seeing other people.

d) Probably wouldn’t be, for a long time. My trust has been irreparably broken.

e) Seeing couples in public has now become annoying. I’m happy for them, but it’s still annoying.

2. Five facts about a past relationship.

a) I’ve known her since kindergarten, but we didn’t become friends till 7th grade and didn’t start dating until junior year of high school.

b) We were legal with her family and her parents loved me and I them. On the other hand, I was never able to come out to my family because she broke up with me before I could be able to do so.

c) She introduced me to vaping.

d) We were never able to truly travel together, which we always planned to do after graduating. The farthest we reached was Batangas.

e) She never knew where she wanted to eat whenever we were out, so I was mostly the one who decided which restaurant we were going to have lunch or dinner in.

3. Five facts about your mother.

a) She has always worked in hotels, which is great because it has always allowed us to get room and buffet discounts, heh.

b) Her family (aka my grandparents, her, and my uncles) struggled financially for a little bit when my grandpa lost his job when she was in college. When her friends would go to fast-food restaurants, my mom would always decline, saying she had schoolwork to finish. In reality she just couldn’t afford anything, and the only money she held was for public transport.

c) She is a little childish considering her age, and I cannot stand her petty tantrums. She was childish even when I was a kid, and I believe my emotional well-being suffered because of that.

d) She has a high pain tolerance and the only time I’ve seen her struggle was when she was getting a tattoo on the back of her shoulder.

e) She is also extremely religious and it especially grinds my gears when she gets hypocritical about it, which is just about all the time.

4. Five facts about your father.

a) He has only ever dated my mom.

b) He grew up extremely poor and at some point his parents actually stopped being able to afford his tuition. Instead of being kicked out, a few nuns who served in the school paid my grandparents a visit and told them my dad would be given a scholarship since he had good grades and it would have been a waste if he got expelled.

c) He was a dancer in high school, knows how to play the guitar, and he also apparently knows how to draw very well. There’s a lot I don’t know about him, considering he has worked abroad my whole life.

d) He breaks or loses his reading glasses once every few months. I know which parent I definitely take after.

e) I have never seen him cry.

5. Five facts about your sibling. If you have more than one, pick one. Or do them all!

a) She had problems crying in school until she was in around 2nd or 3rd grade.

b) She’s in college and is currently taking up digital filmmaking.

c) She’s the biggest introvert I know. I’ve never seen her be willing to do anything silly; not even with her friends.

d) She can’t handle spicy food.

e) Her main interests have shifted from Harry Potter, to One Direction, to 5SOS, and now K-pop. I believe she’s into Seventeen the most.

6. Five facts about your town.

a) The upper part of the city offers amazing views of the Metro Manila skyline, which has recently made the place a kinda popular nightlife destination.

b) There’s a lot of hidden gem restaurants here but because most people spend more time complaining about how far my city is and how difficult it is to get to than actually just making the damn ride over here, the restaurants stay hidden and uncrowded. Their loss.

c) Used to be massively underdeveloped for most of my childhood and teenage years. Now there are several malls and I can easily go to a McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks right outside our village.

d) Because you basically have to drive through a mountain to get to the upper part of the city, it’s not the safest highway and fatal crashes are unfortunately common.

e) The city is known for its suman, except I hate Filipino rice cakes and this actually doesn’t do anything for me.

7. Five facts about your house.

a)  It used to have a balcony until we had that transformed into another bedroom. So technically it is still a balcony; it just hasn’t had that purpose for a while now.

b) My mom used a little cheat in our dining room and installed a huge wall mirror. Most people visiting for the first time always note how much larger it made the room (and thus the house) look.

c) I live in a neighborhood where the houses are of the same model and look (think the Squidville episode from Spongebob). That said, balconies are included in all properties. When my parents decided to renovate ours and turn it into a room, so many houses slowly followed suit as well. It was amusing to see it unfold, knowing the idea undoubtedly originated from us. It was like a revolution.

d) We don’t have a gate, which irritates me to no end because it allows noisy neighborhood kids to just march and run around our property. Sometimes they even make it to our carport and backyard, ugh. :(

e) Speaking of backyard, the landscaping for it used to be a pebble mosaic designed to look like a swan. But over the years the quality deteriorated, so my parents to opted to have the pebbles crushed into tiny rocks and embedded onto the ground. I don’t exactly know what this technique is called, but yeah.

8. Five facts about your niece or nephew. If you have more than one, pick one. Or do them all! Skip if you don’t have one. I don’t have any, but I do have a godson so I’m going with him as I don’t want to leave any section blank.

a) He was born sometime in December. I honestly don’t remember when, loooooool. Worst godmother ever.

b) He’s actually one of my first cousins, but I guess my aunt saw something in me and wanted me to be his godson. I’ve been a terrible one, though; I’ve never bought him gifts or money or anything – to be fair, I was made a ninang when I was like, 14 or 15 lmao.  But I can definitely make up for it now that I’m starting to earn my own money.

c) He’s the calmer, sweeter version of his older brother. His kuya was a pretty naughty kid when he was his age.

d) He mainly speaks English, as how most younger parents raise their kids these days. He understands Filipino of course, but he mostly communicates in English.

e) The last time I saw him, he was in the middle of a ridiculously adorable interviewing phase where he’d approach anyone in the family and start asking them a series of questions: what’s your favorite color? What food can’t you live without? What’s your favorite subject in school? Would you rather win $1 million dollars or know how to fly? It typically got exhausting after the 25th question, but it was so cute nonetheless. None of us have any idea where it came from.

9. Five facts about your education.

a) I went to a private, all-girls, Catholic school from kinder up to high school, and then moved to a public, co-educational, non-sectarian university for college. It was the very epitome of culture shock, lemme tell ya.

b) Some classes I had in my first school that might be uncommon in others have included penmanship (because my school has its own brand of cursive), environmental education, and I don’t remember what this next class was called anymore but we were basically taught how to write professionally? Like how to write cover letters and resumés and all.

c) My first school is extremely homophobic and went so far as to ‘hire’ spies  tasked to check up on who’s been in same-sex relationships, list them all down, and report them to the guidance office so that they can be called one by one and be interrogated, and for the most part, pressured to come out. I don’t know if they still do this, but the younger batches are definitely more vocal and woke now thanks to social media and I doubt those practices would still fly today.

d) My university education was a breath of fresh air. Suddenly people were wearing sleeveless tops, mobs and rallies were a common sight to me, and my instructors were now atheist and not shoving Catholicism and Jesus and salvation down my throat. I loved every single day of it.

e) The most interesting class I took in college was a course called Pornography in Electronic Media, under the broadcast communication department. Getting to tell people I take a class where we sit down to watch porn was such a fucking ride.

10. Five facts about your job.

a) I got hired last Wednesday, but I had been interning for the company for around two months before they extended the offer.

b) I’m pretty much gonna be doing the same things I did as an intern, except I’m now accountable for any boo-boos I make HAHAHAHA. Also, I’m gonna be paid a lot more, obviously, which is sweet. I really thought we interns were severely underpaid considering the work that we help with on a daily basis.

c) My role is going to be with another department which is a little scary because it means the things I learned with the department I actually interned at will be pretty much useless. I’ll be starting from scratch again, but I’m still excited.

d) It’s a work-from-home situation, which is a relief for me because I don’t have to wake up early and I don’t have to face traffic. 

e) My job interview for the position was actually a bit of a bomb because I absolutely fumbled with and messed up the first question I was asked; and since first impressions matter, I really thought I lost the gig from the very start of the interview. I made up for it as the interview continued and fortunately was able to break the ice and build a rapport with the team members who spoke with me, and I guess I did enough for them to want to take me in anyway.

For those who are curious, I blanked the fuck out when they asked “Tell me something about yourself that isn’t in your resumé.” Slowest 15 seconds of my life.

An Introduction to Sex (Part 2)

               To be quite honest with you, I don’t know when Fanfiction first really became popular or mainstream, nor do I know if it’s still those things. What I do know though was that it was a huge influence on my knowledge of sexuality as I was growing up. A good chunk of my education on sex as an… ”activity”, rather than solely a means of reproduction, came from Fanfiction.

               It’s occurring to me that perhaps some people reading this may not know what Fanfiction is, so I suppose I should attempt to explain it before I really get on with the story.

               Have you ever watched a TV show and really wished that your two favorite characters would just fall in love already?! With Fanfiction, you can write your own perfect story on how you picture that special moment happening, then publish it online for other people to read. Have you ever had a massive celebrity crush that you just wish would notice you? You can write a Fanfiction all about said celebrity falling for a character based on you! Anything goes with Fanfiction, really. Do you think the singer of your favorite band is into BDSM? Write a fic about them tying you up and ass-fucking you (or a character that you come up with) until the ropes make your wrists bleed. What about a disturbingly specific and detailed fic about your favorite band members squirting milk up the bottom’s asshole to clean out for anal sex (with more emphasis on the milk than the sex itself)? Yup, that exists. What about a fic involving your favorite YouTubers in which a live hamster is shoved up the sub’s asshole and the dom fills an entire hat with semen? Yes, it’s out there. (Bonus points to anyone who knows which fics I’m referring to).

               While some Fanfictions are wonderfully crafted love stories full of heart and passion, others…aren’t. And hey, smut is fine, I’ve read *cough* and written *cough* plenty of it myself. But surely, you would think, that the more explicit Fanfictions wouldn’t be accessible to those under the age in which it would be appropriate to read them, right?

               Wrong.

               I was eleven years old.

               I’d first come to discover Fanfiction through my favorite Disney television show at the time, Austin and Ally. Yes, that show that Ross Lynch was on. It was my favorite show in my tweens, and I wanted the two main characters – Austin and Ally, obviously – to end up becoming a couple so badly. My original goal was to see if maybe the writers of the show had hinted at the possibility of the two characters becoming a couple in an interview or something. So, I pulled out my phone – because my parents thought it was smart to let an eleven year old have a cellphone with full Internet access – and simply typed in, “When will Austin and Ally get together?”

               I did not find an interview with the show’s writers – instead, I found chatrooms, wiki forums, and YouTube videos from young people like myself who all had the same opinions on the subject as myself. I then clicked on a link that I thought was just going to be a post on some website from someone talking about how they wanted these characters to end up together like I did, but it was actually a link to a story on Fanfiction.net that I read and finished in the same day. From then on, I was hooked.

               Now, right away, I noticed that these stories had a rating system. I’m not sure if the rating system for Fanfiction.net has changed at all since it’s been years since I’ve been on there, but at the time, it was something like rated G, PG, T, and M (there might have been a T+ in between T and M, but I don’t remember). As I was eleven at the time, I stuck to the G and PG stories. Who would write rated M stories about a Disney show anyway? Oh, how naïve I was.

               One day, I read the summary for a new story that sounded exciting, so I opened it up without looking at the rating or the word count. All I saw was how many people at commented, so I figured it was a popular story that a lot of people liked! Turns out, it was a 300-word one-shot (meaning, it was a single chapter) consisting of Ally naked on her knees saying “please” over and over again while Austin rubs one out and eventually comes all over her face.

               I would like to issue a formal apology to Ross Lynch and Laura Marano.

               Seeing as I was eleven, I was traumatized, and was extra careful from then on (for a while, at least) to always check if the story was rated M.

               I was just so confused. I’d grown up being told that touching yourself was wrong, so why was there a one-shot about it on Fanfiction. And why did he do it on her face?! Such a concept had been unheard of to me at the time (because I was eleven). I was disgusted. I felt sick. I felt dirty. I felt wrong.

               I felt curious.

               But I was so afraid that I’d read something else strange or that I’d never known people to do sexually, I was afraid of what I’d learn, that despite my curiosity, I didn’t intentionally click on a rated M fic again until I was twelve. By this time, I’d had my first period and a few more, so I’d officially began puberty and became even more curious about sexuality. So, I began to search specifically for rated M Fanfictions because I wanted to know more about what sex was like and I was too scared to watch porn (we’ll get to that in Part 3).

               What I experienced while I read these sex scenes was something new, exciting. Why did I feel a throbbing sensation in my vulva? Why was I getting a tingling sensation like I had to pee? Why was my underwear getting wet? As I continued to read more and more of this erotic Fanfiction, I read about the female characters feeling similar sensations when they were feeling “aroused” or “horny”, which were new words for me. Why did I have to learn this through Fanfiction rather than in school?

               I then showed my new discovery to all my friends (of course). I remember when my entire cheerleading team had a sleepover, I’d told two of my closest friends on the team that I’d found Fanfiction with sex in it. Later that night, as the three of us lay in our sleeping bags with me in the middle, we huddled together to read the erotica on my phone. I remember them asking me things like, “How do girls come?”, “What does *insert word here* mean?” and “How does *insert sexual act here* work?”. I remember I loved telling them what I knew, like I had some fantastic, secret knowledge, and that it was my duty to share it with everyone I knew my age. So, I did. Soon all my friends were reading smutty Fanfictions.

               While still in my Disney phase, I ventured into the world of gay and lesbian fics as well. I didn’t know how sexual encounters worked between those of the same sex worked, so I read them more so out of curiosity rather than in search for arousal. However, I found that they aroused me anyway. I remember the first time I read a lesbian Fanfiction wishing I was in the characters’ shoes (I hadn’t realized I was bisexual yet, but that was a decent indicator), and then I read a fic with a threesome between two men and a woman and wondered why I hadn’t read it sooner.

               Why hadn’t I learned how same-sex couples have sex at all in school? Why didn’t I learn that males having sex with other males should still use condoms? Or that females having sex with other females should use dental dams? Why did I have to learn about these through Fanfiction of all things?

               By age fourteen, I had graduated from Austin and Ally and Fanfiction.net, and I eventually moved into my emo phase where I ventured into the world of band fics on Wattpad (I would also like to issue a formal apology to Chris Motionless and all of Motionless in White). It was here that I learned about BDSM – and Tumblr, but we’ll talk about that in Part 3. I was reading Wattpad stories about my favorite band, Motionless in White, and I’m pretty sure in every sex scene I ever read involving a girl and one of the band members (I mostly stuck to the ones about Chris because I adore him to this day) had mentions of spanking or some other form of impact play, and bondage was also seen very often, and occasionally a ball gag here and there. A common fantasy, it would seem, among young girls from all over the world who were probably far too young to be writing out such fantasies about men in their thirties. Oh yeah, sexual Fanfiction is plenty toxic too. I was fourteen reading brutal sex scenes about men who were way older than me, and a lot of the rougher/BDSM-esque fics were written in a way that made it seem like the sub was actually being raped as opposed to consenting to what was going on.

               Luckily, I saw this pretty quickly and knew that it was wrong, and I made sure to stop reading a Fanfiction if it seemed to be portraying rape in a romantic light. It’s likely that the person who wrote the Fanfiction didn’t intentionally mean to make the “sex” scene look like rape (although, having a girl scream “No, I don’t want to!” but then all of the sudden enjoying it once the guy forces himself inside of her should very obviously be seen was wrong), and they were just uneducated.

               And then, by age 16, I began reading exclusively gay Fanfiction about my favorite YouTubers, Dan Howell and Phil Lester – who I will not be issuing a formal apology to because they have stated that they whole-heartedly support Fanfiction, and have even gone as far as to read Fanfiction about themselves in videos, write Fanfiction about themselves for their book, and perform a parody of a Fanfiction about them live on stage in front of thousands of people. So. Anyway. I learned a lot about butt sex. Do you think they teach you about lube in school? Nah. But I learned about it from gay YouTuber Fanfiction.

               In Part 3 (which will be the last part of this series) I’ll discuss how websites like Tumblr and YouTube shaped my views on sexuality before I actually started having sex, and both the positive and negative impacts they had on me. In the meantime, have you ever read an extremely sexual Fanfiction that lowkey traumatized you? Did you get the most of your sex education from a probably-not-reliable-source like I did? Tell me your stories in the comments, or feel free to message me on Instagram @daggerandsheath

               I love you all and thank you so much for reading!

-          Dagger and Sheath

The Monomyth in Video Games (AKA My Longest Rambling Ever)

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

 A person who comes from humble beginnings is called to go on an adventure to accomplish something great. He (it’s usually he) may either jump at the call or initially refuse it, but finally goes with the help of a mentor figure. He meets various amazing people and faces a myriad of challenges to achieve his ultimate goal. He confronts the main obstacle, overcomes it, and is rewarded for it. He returns to his home a wiser person, and bestows upon his fellow people the lessons he has learned, to the benefit of all. The End.

 Anyone know this? Anyone? Yup, that is a short, short, very short and simplified version of the monomyth, also known as The Hero’s Journey, a narrative device observed by many people but popularized by Joseph Campbell.  It has been studied and used by storytellers of various media, ranging from oral tales to books to movies to, yes, video games.

 It is one of the most common narrative devices out there, if not possibly the most common, at least historically. I’m sure a lot of us were exposed to Greek myths such as The Odyssey in school (at least, in America we are). JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has many of the steps in the early parts of the story, before drifting in other directions once the fellowship separates. Each individual Harry Potter book has its own cycle of The Hero’s Journey. Every. Single. One. Star Wars is still a popular franchise (the more recent criticisms aside) and George Lucas has admitted repeatedly he used the monomyth as inspiration while he was writing the scripts for the original trilogy. So even if you are not intimately familiar with The Hero’s Journey in detail, high chances are you’ve been exposed to it simply through consuming various media.

 That’s not to say that using this narrative device is always intentional. I would find it incredibly surprising if Hiromu Arakawa or Hajime Isayama were purposely trying to include monomyth steps in their creation of Fullmetal Alchemist and Attack on Titan, respectfully, or that the creators of the 2019 anime version of Dororo meant to put Hyakkimaru through the paces of The Hero’s Journey, but sure enough, all these have some aspects of the monomyth in them!

 Does this mean a story, whether it’s a novel, TV show, movie or video game, has to possess all these steps in order to be considered using the monomyth?  No, definitely not.  On the contrary, it would actually be a good thing for stories to not require use of all these steps.  Telling a story by just crossing items off from a list is bound to create a rather stale experience. What I’m saying is simply that stories will borrow aspects of The Hero’s Journey to make the story compelling. The same goes for order and magnitude. The monomyth is usually presented in seventeen steps, but I don’t feel like they necessarily have to show up in the story in the listed order, nor do the steps have to take up equal amounts of the story-telling experience. Steps four through ten usually are the longest, while the last five or so tend to be rather short.

 So, in my apparently endless determination to apply the same techniques used in literary theory and film theory to video games, I would like to go over a couple of video games and how they do or do not apply the various steps of the monomyth.  I will go over four video games, noting whether each step is present, how much it adds to the story by its presence or absence, and how well the game represents the step.

 I’ve decided to review Final Fantasy VII (because its remake it coming out relatively soon), Dragon Age Inquisition (for another RPG, but not made in Japan), Bioshock (to show this isn’t just an RPG thing), and Psychonauts (because I’ve still got Psychonauts on the mind from my last post). I will also be comparing this to the monomyth found in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone, The Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars Original Trilogy.

 There will be spoilers for these movies and games, on the off chance that anyone who hasn’t seen or played them doesn’t want them ruined. Do I need to keep putting spoiler warnings on older games? Or for the books/movies? Although I’m also kind of writing this with the idea that you have at least a passing knowledge of these movies, books and games…Oh well, just to be safe: Spoilers Ahead!

 This is a really, really long one, so beware. Readers may want to take this in phases.

  Let us begin.

 1.) The Call to Adventure

 First, there needs to be a little backstory established. The hero’s journey usually begins in the home of the main protagonist, more often than not showing the protagonist’s life in its everyday normalcy, which is often put in a negative light, ranging from boring to outright dangerous.

 The hero will generally come from rather small beginnings, which is probably why orphans are a common origin story. Luke is an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle, oblivious to the fact that his father is Darth Vader. Harry Potter is very much the same, living with a borderline abusive family who force him to sleep in the cupboard under the stairs. Frodo is also an orphan taken in by Bilbo, his second cousin (hobbit family trees are confusing). Please note that this does not preclude a hero from learning a parent is alive later in the story (looking at you, Luke).

 In addition to this, the hero is rarely someone with much power, authority or money. Being a moisture farmer on Tatooine is apparently not the most noble of professions (though on a desert planet I’m a bit surprised by this), and the Dursleys appear to be middle class at best. Bilbo and Frodo are wealthy by hobbit standards and seem to be higher on the social hierarchy in The Shire, but remember that hobbits mostly reside in the Shire and immediately surrounding areas, so they aren’t considered to be important players in the world of men or elves. They are small both in stature and in society.

 For our chosen video games, it’s a little bit up to interpretation of the word “orphan” and what the player decides, but the humble beginnings idea still applies. Cloud from Final Fantasy VII (FFVII) is half-orphaned at a young age when his father dies, but doesn’t become a full orphan until he’s a teenager, when his mother dies during the Nibelheim Incident. We only see this in a flashback, and adult Cloud is a full orphan by the start of the game. By this point, Cloud has fallen from a SOLDIER First Class to a mercenary. So he’s rebelling against the more powerful people in Midgar, or at least is being paid to do so.

 The Inquisitor of Dragon Age Inquisition (DAI) may or may not have living parents, depending on origin and player choice. A human Inquisitor probably has living parents, but it’s a bit debatable if an elf, dwarf or Qunari Inquisitor does. At the beginning of the game the Inquisitor loses any prestige they may or may not have had (especially the human noble), and a Carta dwarf, Dalish elf, and Vashoth Qunari don’t have much in terms of power or rank in Thedas anyway. Whatever the case, the Inquisitor ends up being just a simple prisoner for the early prologue part of the story, before being raised up to the Herald of Andraste and eventually to Inquisitor.

 Jack from Bioshock is an interesting case. He’s sold by his biological mother, “raised” by Dr. Suchong and Brigid Tenenbaum, and later smuggled out of Rapture to live with adoptive “parents.” He is also an outsider in that he is kind of an unknown factor, given his upbringing, so by the time Jack arrives in Rapture at the start of the game, he is basically nothing but another body that happens to be there. Without Atlas directing him, it is very possible he could have just become another splicer, the crazed and deformed human remnants of Rapture’s human population. Either way, he doesn’t have much in terms of money, power or authority by the start of the game.

 Raz from Psychonauts doesn’t fit the orphan archetype, as he clearly has a rather large family, but he is estranged from his father at the very least. We don’t know his relationship with the rest of his family, but perhaps we’ll see more of that in the sequel. Raz definitely fits the humble beginnings archetype though, seeing as a circus performer profession is looked down upon, especially if you ask Kitty or Franke.

 The Call to Adventure itself can come in many forms, either through circumstance, a person begging for help, the hero learning about their origin they previously didn’t know, the hero’s own desire for a better life, and so forth. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” Yeah, that one is pretty clear. Harry Potter gets his letter to Hogwarts delivered by Hagrid, and Gandalf says that Frodo must deliver The One Ring to Rivendell (although in the book Frodo takes a few months just thinking about it before actually leaving the Shire).

 For Cloud, the call really comes from both Barret and Tifa, with Barret paying him to help destroy the Mako Reactors, and Tifa pretty much calling in the promise Cloud apparently made to protect her during their childhood. The Inquisitor is basically blackmailed into working with Cassandra and Leliana to rebuild the Inquisition to close the Breach, which the player can either go along with willingly or unwillingly.

 Jack…doesn’t exactly have a call to adventure so much as he’s thrown into the adventure by way of mental conditioning and circumstance. The player doesn’t really get how the plane he’s riding crashed and why he ended up in Rapture until later in the game, but he’s basically told by Atlas/Fontaine what to do to help him save his (Atlas’) family. And things just go from there. For Raz, he receives a pamphlet for Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, and being a psychic himself Raz decides to run away from the circus (in an inversion of the normal run away to the circus trope) to attend the camp. I would still like to know who it was that gave Raz that pamphlet to begin with. I’ve heard a lot of different theories. What do you guys think?

 2.) The Refusal of the Call

 When the hero receives the Call to Adventure, in whatever form it comes in, the hero often refuses the call, saying he or she is not cut out for whatever the adventure calls for or they have something else more important to do.  This can be saying you have to help your uncle on the moisture farm, saying you can’t possibly be a wizard, or trying to give The One Ring to the wizard who reveals the danger you’re in. The Refusal is of course short-lived and the hero goes along with the call anyway, otherwise there would ultimately be no plot, or at least a very, very boring one.

 Cloud’s Refusal of the Call is short-lived but repeated. He tells Barret that Shinra sucking Mako from the planet isn’t his problem, tells Biggs he’s gone once the job is over, proclaims to the entire AVALANCHE group that he doesn’t care about the planet, and tells Tifa he’s going to let AVALANCHE deal with Shinra and that he’s no hero. It isn’t until Tifa reminds him of a promise he made to her that he actually sticks around the group. All this occurs in roughly the first half hour of the game.

 In DAI, a Refusal of the Call is optional based on player choice. The Inquisitor can reject being the Herald of Andraste basically from the word go, with repeated rejections scattered about the entire game. Later, the player can refuse the idea of leading the Inquisition, including for race or religious reasons.  All this doesn’t matter, however, as the game continues on with the player’s character being referred to as the Herald/Inquisitor anyway, so the refusal is kind of a moot point.

 Bioshock and Psychonauts don’t really have any Refusals of the Call. Raz actually jumps at the chance of going on an adventure, away from the circus, away from his family, who he thinks doesn’t understand him.  If anything, the refusal comes from his father, Augustus, who destroys the pamphlet for the camp and forces Raz to practice acrobatics instead. But Jack’s story is the most interesting to me in terms of the refusal, and anyone who has played through Bioshock knows why. Not only does Jack not refuse the call, but also he also literally cannot refuse it. His “Would You Kindly” mental conditioning keeps him from doing so, and I love that it is buried in the gameplay in a way that the player doesn’t even realize the mental conditioning is there until much later. Story and gameplay integrated!

 3.) Supernatural Aid/Meeting the Mentor

 I’ve seen this step be called alternatively both Supernatural Aid and Meeting the Mentor, depending on who is describing The Hero’s Journey. Campbell called it the former, while the more recent Christopher Vogel calls it the latter. Personally I think these should be separate steps, but they often have to do with one another in some way, so I guess they can go together.

 The term “supernatural” is just vague enough that it can mean many things.  It can mean magic, divine intervention, magic, genetic manipulation, magic, psychic abilities, magic, aliens, or Force magic, to name a few. Harry Potter and Fellowship of the Rings all have some form of magic (of course), while Star Wars has the Force. FFVII has magic, the ancient spiritual race of the Cetra, and, strangely enough, the alien invader Jenova. Psychonauts has psychics (again, of course).  DAI has presumed divine intervention from the Jesus-like figure of Andraste, at least until the Inquisitor enters the Fade and learns it was actually Divine Justinia, who is basically the Dragon Age version of the Pope. The Plasmids that Jack uses throughout Bioshock is more scientific than magical, but it still serves the same function.

 As for mentors, some of those are pretty obvious for the books/movies. Luke has Obi-Wan, Frodo has Gandalf, and Harry has Dumbledore. For our chosen video games, it’s a bit less clear.  Cloud’s “mentors” might actually be his love interests Aerith and Tifa, depending on how far in the game the player is. Jack has both Atlas/Fontaine and Tenenbaum, for better or worse. Raz actually has several, which is no surprise considering summer camps have to have several camp counselors, but the two major ones are Sasha Nein and Ford Cruller, since those are the ones he spends the most time with and Raz clearly looks up to Sasha as his hero.

 For the Inquisitor, that’s where it gets a bit muddy. It would seem like Cassandra starts as a mentor figure, giving the Herald advice and trying to direct them, but quickly takes a backseat once the player character becomes the Inquisitor proper. She doesn’t even show up at the war table anymore, whereas in Haven she does. Is Leliana a mentor? Kind of, but only in the sense that she acts as an advisor, roles that are also played by Cullen and Josephine.  Solas? Well, he would like to think so, and you even get minor boosts in approval if you listen to him. Or you could ignore him entirely and piss him off.  Andraste? Sure, if your Inquisitor is devout. It’s more up to the interpretation and choices of the player.

 4.) Crossing the First Threshold

 This is the step where the protagonist basically goes, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” (Yes, MGM’s Wizard of Oz also has its own Hero’s Journey!) It is the point of no return, where the hero finally decides to go with the Call to Adventure.  It is also in this step that the hero first encounters some of the real world outside of his or her comfort zone. So, this is another step that is kind of more like two steps.

 Our movies certainly have this two-part step. Luke decides to go with Obi-Wan to Alderaan after his aunt and uncle are killed by Imperial soldiers, and the cantina scene is his first real interaction with the tougher people that exist in the galaxy, including the skeptical Han Solo. Frodo (eventually) decides to take the One Ring to Rivendell, and The Prancing Pony in Bree exposes the hobbits to full-sized people for the first time, other than Gandalf. Harry Potter also has two, once at the Leaky Cauldron (pubs and inns seem to be a trend) leading to Diagon Alley and again on the Hogwarts Express.

 Psychonauts has an obvious Crossing of the First Threshold: Raz enters Coach Oleander’s mind, the Basic Braining level, the first mind Raz ever enters…presumably. It’s possible he entered another mind before then, but it’s not likely.

 Jack’s first sight of Rapture kind of acts as a first threshold, for both Jack as a character and for the player, but I also kind of like to think of it as the scene where Jack first sees a Big Daddy defend a Little Sister from a splicer. It gives a bit of foreshadowing that nothing is what it looks like down here, and Jack (and by extension, the player) should be careful about who he trusts.  A Little Sister is not a small, innocent creature after all, because there is always a dangerous, hulking Big Daddy somewhere nearby. Atlas is not who he appears to be, and ultimately Jack isn’t either. Instead, they are both people wearing masks, one intentionally and the other completely obviously.

 The first attempt at closing the Breach in DAI is a clear crossing, because it is from there that the Inquisition is reborn and the main character becomes the Herald of Andraste. Nothing is the same for the player’s character from that point on. The same goes for Cloud and the gang after the pillar holding up the upper plate over the Sector 7 slums collapses. Most of AVALANCHE’s members are killed and Aerith is captured. It’s not about saving the planet by this point. It’s about saving Aerith and getting revenge. Things just domino on from there.

 5.) Belly of the Whale

 This step coincides with the previous one. It is the final separation from everything the hero knows and moving into the unknown. Oftentimes it overlaps with a step called Loss of the Mentor, but it doesn’t have to. Consumption by a whale is optional, though use of a metaphorical whale is the more common approach.

 Speaking of metaphorical whales, what’s a bigger one than the Death Star? The same place where Obi-Wan dies, leaving the last connection to anything Luke had to his previous life and the one who would help him step into the future. He’s aboard the Millennium Falcon with two other people, two droids and a Wookie, but in reality he’s completely alone.

 Another such whale is Moria, the underground kingdom previously ruled by dwarves, but by the time of The Fellowship of the Ring, it is overrun by goblins, orcs, and the Balrog. The fellowship is swallowed by the earth and needs to get out. The price of that, however, is losing Gandalf. Another mentor lost. An even bigger whale is seen later in the books once Frodo and Sam reach Mordor itself, and they have to face even more challenges to get the One Ring to Mount Doom.

 For Harry, the whale could be a couple of things. It could be Hogwarts itself, the Forbidden Forest, the Hogwarts Express, the forbidden room on the third floor, or perhaps the trapdoor under Fluffy and the passage underneath…Lots of options here.  Now, the mentor figure for this book, Dumbledore, doesn’t leave Hogwarts until near the end of the story, and thankfully he doesn’t die, unlike the previous mentors who happen to be old, bearded, wizard men. He waits until book six to do that.

 FFVII kind of has an opposite whale. On one hand, it could be argued that the Shinra, Inc. building could be the whale, and although it certainly could be, I think a more poignant one would be the greater world itself. Once Cloud and the gang escape from Shinra, they leave Midgar and head out into the world, and they don’t return to Midgar until the end of the game. This could also be considered a Crossing the First Threshold.

 Again, DAI is about choice, but there are two events that are pretty big whales. The first is trying to recruit either the mages or the Templars to the Inquisition to close the Breach. Whether the player ends up facing Alexius in a dystopian future or fighting an Envy Demon for control in the Herald’s own mind, the main character ends up delving deep into a dangerous situation they have to climb out of. The second time is during the quest line to fight the possessed Gray Wardens and the Inquisitor ends up falling into the Fade. Quite a whale there, the Fade. A giant world that is only supposed to be accessible either to mages or in dreams. This is even more intense of an experience for a dwarf Inquisitor, since dwarves do not dream and cannot be mages in this universe.

 Bioshock…well, besides the idea of Rapture itself being a whale (during the game’s opening scenes, we even see a whale swim between Rapture’s towers), I would consider the most likely place to be Rapture Central Control. It’s here that some of the most important game events happen, after all. Jack kills Andrew Ryan, there’s the reveal of Jack’s “Would You Kindly” mental conditioning, and Jack learns he’s actually Ryan’s illegitimate son. Not to mention learning that Atlas, who has been guiding Jack and the player throughout the game thus far, is actually Frank Fontaine, the big bad. He has actually been using Jack this whole time just to one-up Andrew Ryan in their little power struggle. And then Fontaine betrays Jack and sends security bots to kill him, leading to yet another loss of a mentor. That’s a lot to take in during such a short time.

 Psychonauts doesn’t have a whale, but it does have a Hideous Hulking Lungfish. Raz has to do battle with her beneath Lake Oblongata, and then enter her mind so Raz can release her from Kochamara’s control. By then, Sasha and Milla have already been kidnapped, under the ruse of “Official Psychonauts Business,” and Ford Cruller is forced to remain in his underground lair near the psitanium so he doesn’t fall into one of his many personalities. So much for help there.

 6.) The Road of Trials

 The Road of Trials is the meat and potatoes of the story. It’s all the challenges the hero must overcome in order to reach the ultimate goal, whether it’s a big or little one. The challenges themselves may also be large or small, and according to Campbell often occur in groups of three. These challenges prepare the hero for the final encounter at the end of the story.

 …Do I really need to go over these in detail for each movie and game I’m reviewing here?  It’s basically the plot all the characters go through during the course of the story, ranging from battles, dungeons, travel, magic classes, camp activities, puzzles, and so forth. I’m not going to list each one here. This post is long enough as it is.

 7.) The Meeting with the Goddess

 This step involves the hero meeting with another character who helps them in some way, whether it’s as part of the hero’s group, by giving an item that is helpful, or just giving good advice. More often than not, this character is one of high ranking: an actual goddess, a princess, a queen, or something of that sort. She may or may not be a love interest, and more modernly she may not be a “she” at all…our examples here though do happen to be female, but I’m just saying this doesn’t have to be the case.

 Star Wars is obvious. Luke meets Leia, the Princess of Alderaan who hides the plans to destroy the Death Star in R2D2, first in her hologram and then in person aboard the Death Star itself. Frodo meets Galadriel in Lothlorien, where she allows him (and Sam, in the books) to glimpse into the Mirror of Galadriel to see the possible future of the Shire should his quest fail. She also provides him the phial containing the light of Earendil’s star, which is vital to fighting off Shelob later on. I wouldn’t exactly say Harry Potter has a goddess to meet, but I like to think it’s supposed to be Hermione, since she knows so much and often is the only one who actually knows what’s going on.

 Let’s see. FFVII has Aerith, whose big “gift” to the story is giving her life while she prays for Holy to stop Sephiroth’s Meteor. Bioshock has Brigid Tenenbaum, who assists Jack throughout the game if he spares the Little Sisters, and removes part of his mental conditioning so Jack can resist Fontaine. Milla is one of Raz’s teachers at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, teaching him the Levitation ability, which is arguably the most useful ability in the game.

 As for DAI, there are plenty of characters that can play the role of the goddess, but I would argue the most important one might be Morrigan. She tells the Inquisitor about the eluvians and theorizes Corypheus is searching for one as a means to reach the Fade. Although she ends up being wrong, Morrigan also is a candidate for drinking from the Well of Sorrows, and if she does she helps the Inquisitor by fighting the red lyrium dragon during the final battle with Corypheus.

 8.) Woman as Temptress

 Here’s another misleading title. The Woman as Temptress originates back from Campbell’s research of Greek myths, where the hero is enticed by a female figure: Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, and so on. Today, the “woman” is really just anything that tries to drive the hero away from the path of his journey. This can be power, money, promises, or threats, for some other examples. It can still be a person, but lately that hasn’t been the case.

 There is always the temptation of the Dark Side of the Force, although Luke doesn’t really encounter this in full force until The Empire Strikes Back. The One Ring is the temptation itself, and it actually does succeed, since Frodo doesn’t throw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. It isn’t destroyed until Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger, reclaims the Ring, and falls into the Crack of Doom while doing a happy jig. Voldemort tries (very briefly) to get Harry to join him and hand over the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone at the end of the book (it’s a bit longer in the movie) but that doesn’t last very long.

 There’s not exactly a temptation in FFVII, although I guess Jenova manipulating Cloud into bringing the Black Material to Sephiroth at the North Crater is the closest thing. I feel that goes more into the manipulation category than temptation though, but it still functions in a similar way. Bioshock has the temptation of harvesting the Little Sisters to receive more ADAM from them, and thus allowing Jack to obtain more abilities. This can be really appealing from a gameplay perspective, and results in the bad ending of the game if you kill every Little Sister. Alternatively, Tenenbaum compensates you if you spare the Little Sisters, so it’s not the end of the world to resist the temptation.

 …Raz doesn’t have a temptation to stop trying to become a Psychonaut. At all. Oleander never convinces him, Loboto doesn’t convince him (their interaction is actually incredibly small in the main game), none of the other campers dissuade him, and he faces all the obstacles in all the different minds with determination. The closest thing I can think of is Lili, who really just tries to give him a realistic view that the Psychonauts are not as important as they once were. I guess the “making out” scene kind of fits here, since Raz is clearing distracted by the idea of kissing Lili and doesn’t pay any attention to what she’s saying immediately after. Linda interrupting them puts an end to that though.

 As for DAI…yeah, I have trouble with this one.  There really isn’t anything that tempts the Inquisitor in a way that distracts them from the danger at hand. Romance doesn’t do it, power doesn’t do it, money doesn’t do it, blood magic doesn’t do it, demons don’t do it…Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Readers, please help me with this, if possible!

 9.) Atonement with the Father

 This is the step most people know even if they don’t know the concept of the Hero’s Journey itself, because it is such a common trope used in all kinds of story telling. This can be a father or father figure, and honestly it’s not unusual for this to be replaced by a brother in video games, and less commonly with another relative. This step may or may not be related to the next step, Apotheosis, depending on if the “father” is the source of the main conflict, but it is still one of the major obstacles the hero must overcome. Another thing to note that this step does not have to involve the death of the “father” either.

 Let’s face it: Star Wars is one of those films that normalized the father-son conflict dynamic in movies. Sure, it existed before then, but it became a huge thing after the iconic scene between Luke and Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. The conflict doesn’t come to a head until The Return of the Jedi, when Vader finally redeems himself by killing Palpatine and saving Luke’s life, giving his own in the process.

 That being said, it’s interesting that the other two movies we’re looking at have more distant aspects of the Atonement with the Father step. It’s not Frodo who has to deal with his father’s displeasure, but Faramir. Is there anything worse than hearing your father admit that he wishes you had died and your older brother had lived? Denethor doesn’t appear to care about Faramir until he appears to have died. This is less apparent in the book, but it’s still there.

 Harry Potter has the same thing. Obviously since Harry doesn’t have a living father, it’s kind of hard for him to have a conflict with him. I guess there’s kind of atonement with Severus Snape in the last book, but you have to really, really squint to make it that relationship one of a father-figure and son. …No, that doesn’t work for our purposes. There are issues with fathers with other characters, like Ron, Neville and Draco, but those relationships aren’t really elaborated on until later in the series.

 Video games often follow a similar pattern. Conflict with a father or father figure is incredibly common. Raz and Jack both have big issues with their dads, although Raz’s resolution is obviously more positive than Jack’s. Raz actually does atone with his dad, right before the final battle with a giant two-headed father monster in Raz and Oleander’s combined mental world. (If you don’t know Psychonauts, it makes sense in context, I promise.) Jack meanwhile…kills his biological father, although perhaps not willingly considering his mental conditioning. Andrew Ryan is a pretty terrible human being though, so maybe Jack/the player would have wanted to kill him anyway. Maybe.

 It should also be no surprise that the father issue doesn’t have to surround the main character, especially since being an orphan is a common backstory, as mentioned in the Call to Adventure step above.  The Inquisitor doesn’t really have issues with his/her father, presuming the player thinks the father is still alive, but Dorian certainly takes umbrage with his father trying to use blood magic to change his sexuality. It’s up to the player to either encourage or discourage Dorian from reconciling with his father, so this step is up in the air in that regard.

 Another similar conflict that occurs in DAI that isn’t with a father is between Morrigan and Flemeth, although I would hesitate to consider it”atonement,” especially if Morrigan is the one who drinks from the Well of Sorrows, thus tying her to Flemeth’s command. Of course, with Flemeth out of the picture and Solas taking over, I wonder how that connection stands now.

 The father conflict is also not related to the main character in FFVII. Red XIII, aka Nanaki, has issues with believing his father, Seto, abandoned his mother and his tribe during an attack by the Gi tribe. In truth, Seto actually sacrificed himself to prevent a backdoor invasion, turning to stone after being hit by several petrifying arrows. Once Red learns the truth about this, he proclaims that his father was a hero and he will protect his home, Cosmo Canyon, just like he did.

 And that’s not even getting into all the father issues present in the other Final Fantasy games, plus others in FFVII. Maybe I’ll do another post about that topic another time.

 10.) Apotheosis

 This is the point the quest has been leading up to. The final challenge. The final battle. The final countdown. The hero takes all they have learned over the course of their journey and applies it to this final challenge. If there’s a main villain of the story, this is the time where the hero confronts them.

 This is pretty self-explanatory. Luke Skywalker trusts in the Force, which allows him to blow up the Death Star. Harry Potter decides he wants to obtain the Philosopher’s Stone, but not use it, and that’s what allows him to receive it from the Mirror of Erised. And Frodo has to throw the One Ring into the Crack of Doom to defeat Sauron. That last one is interesting in that Frodo technically fails to do this final task, which is not something we historically see in Hero’s Journeys, but such a failure is becoming more common.

 Applying this step to video games feels a bit like cheating considering that a large majority of them have a final boss battle of some kind, and our four games are no exception. Most of the resolution of the main character’s stories coincides with the defeat of the final boss. Jack’s story ends when he is able to reverse his mental conditioning (with Tenenbaum’s help) and he defeats Fontaine, and the Inquisitor’s conflict with Corypheus ends, of course, with Corypheus’ death. The Trespasser DLC for DAI adds more conflict involving what happens after and what the Inquisitor is going to do about their Mark that is slowly killing them, but I feel that’s another story, so it’s beyond The Hero’s Journey of the main game.

 However, despite having final boss battles, I feel that Psychonauts and FFVII also have an Apotheosis step in terms of the characters themselves. Raz has to defeat the two-headed mental amalgamation of his and Oleander’s fathers, but he is able to do so because his real father breaks into his mental world and lends Raz his power so he can fight the monster. That reconciliation is more important to Raz’s story than beating the monster. Honestly, Raz probably wouldn’t have agreed to use his father’s strength if they hadn’t reconciled literally just prior to the final fight.

 Cloud’s Apotheosis really has to do with coming to terms with his false memories. He never actually joined SOLDIER, instead becoming a grunt in the Midgar army. He was experimented on after the Nibelheim Incident, escaped with Zack, and basically imprinted Zack’s life, experiences, mannerisms and skills after Zack was killed right in front of him. Cloud and Tifa have to sift through Cloud’s memories to figure out what really happened during the Nibelheim Incident, thus returning Cloud to his normal self. Essentially, Cloud has to realize that he is not as strong of a person as he previously believed, and that there’s nothing wrong with being weak. What you have to be is true to yourself. That’s more important than being strong.

 11.) The Ultimate Boon

 So if the Apotheosis is the final challenge of the journey, then the Ultimate Boon is the reward for overcoming it. This can be material or not, and likewise may or may not be what the hero initially set out to receive or accomplish. The boon can be large (such as saving the world) or small (earning a medal), and it can be public (again, saving the world) or personal (winning a love interest’s heart).

 Harry and Frodo both set out to accomplish a task, preventing the Philosopher’s Stone being stolen and destroying the One Ring, respectively, although Harry’s realization that he must do this thing is later on in the story compared to Frodo. They both succeed and are both rewarded. Harry and his friends are basically handed the House Cup at the end of the school year for thwarting Voldemort’s plan, and Frodo and the fellowship save the world, and more importantly for Frodo, save the Shire.

 However, Frodo does end up having to leave the Shire and go into the east due to the wounds he acquired throughout the journey as well as the strain of carrying the Ring. In a way, he is rewarded for his journey, but also punished because he didn’t actually accomplish the task he set out to do. He ends up leaving the Shire, his home, which he wanted to save to begin with.

 Luke is kind of the same way. He doesn’t set out necessarily to find his father and bring him back to the light. His Call to Adventure had to do with going to Alderaan with Obi-Wan to help Leia, and he is rewarded with a medal at the end of A New Hope for destroying the Death Star. However, his boon really has to do with reconciling with Vader, a conflict that doesn’t begin until The Empire Strikes back, later in his Hero’s Journey. However, this is just a good example of how the boon does not necessarily have to relate to the call.

 The boons for both FFVII and DAI are saving the world. It’s good for the world to not be destroyed, after all. Raz’s boon is a bit more personal: He is allowed to join the Psychonauts, which he set out to do, but his relationship with his father is also significantly improved now that the two of them understand one another better.

 For Jack, he saves Rapture…sort of. If the events of Bioshock 2 indicate anything, it’s that things really haven’t gotten better for Rapture following Fontaine’s defeat. However, presuming that the player spared the Little Sisters and gets the good ending of the game, Jack returns to the surface world with the cured Little Sisters, who essentially become his daughters. In the words of Brigid Tenenbaum, “In the end, what was your reward? You never said. But I think I know…a family.”

 Jack is given the short end of the stick in terms of family and future. His parents are not his real parents, his biological father Andrew Ryan didn’t want him, his mother sold him to Tenenbaum and Suchong as an embryo, and he has no control over himself or his own destiny. Considering it turns out everything Jack knew about himself and his family is a lie, a real family is the best thing he could have received. Jack basically has nothing at the beginning of the game, so the fact that he is able to still build a life for himself and the former Little Sisters is a great reward. Of course, this is thrown out of the window if the player harvests the Little Sisters and gets the bad or neutral endings, so there you go.

 12.) Refusal of the Return

 We’ve reached the point where the hero has accomplished the goal he/she has set out to do, has received their reward, and now has to go back to normal life that was left behind at the beginning of the story. What? The hero doesn’t want to return to normal life? They prefer the world they’re in now? Yeah, in a strange reversal of the Refusal of the Call, the hero no longer wants to return to their previous life, having earned the boon and learned the lessons they have.

 Can anyone really blame Harry Potter for not wanting to return to his aunt and uncle’s house once the school year end? Yeah, let’s go back to the house where he’s treated horribly, has a literal hand-me-down bedroom, and is not allowed to perform any of the magic he has grown to love. Plus his owl is forced to stay in her cage the whole summer. That sounds great! Let’s do that.

 Frodo, on the other hand, does return to his normal life in the Shire, but later has to leave because of his wounds and from carrying the One Ring (see The Ultimate Boon step above). It’s not so much that he refuses to return, but rather he is forced to leave again. Luke is kind of the same way. He doesn’t really refuse to return to his family and their moisture farm, it’s that he can’t return to it, because that has been destroyed. His previous life can no longer be. Even if we stretch the timeline to the end of The Return of the Jedi, Luke never goes back to just being a moisture farmer.

 Psychonauts only has a half-hearted refusal. At the end of the game, Raz acts like he’s going to go back to the circus, but only for a moment. Once the opportunity to go on another rescue mission comes up, Raz turns to nonverbally ask his father if he can go. It’s more like he’s asking for permission to not return rather than refusing outright.

 The Inquisitor of DAI doesn’t return to their previous world either. The life of running the Inquisition doesn’t end when Corypheus is defeated. It continues on until the Trespasser DLC, which even at the end of that the Inquisitor continues their adventure to stop Solas from basically destroying the world in a few years. I’m actually pretty eager to see how the Inquisitor fits in the next Dragon Age game, although the developers have given a 2022 release date, last time I checked.

 For Bioshock, Jack really does not refuse to return, symbolically indicated by him leaving Rapture and returning to the surface world. Regardless of whether he brings the cured Little Sisters to the surface to have a normal life or he becomes the splicers’ new leader and brings them to the surface to destroy mankind, he peaces out of Rapture at the first opportunity he has. There’s no refusal to return on Jack’s part at all.

 FFVII…okay, I’m again having trouble with this step. Cloud doesn’t really act like he refuses to go back to his previous life. His previous life is actually up in the air, with all his messed up memories and near lack of anything connecting him to his past, either as himself or with his false memories as an ex-SOLDIER. The only person really connecting him to his life before the story is Tifa, and I’m not going to get into the shipping wars about whether he should be with her or the now dead Aerith. That’s a different post. Regardless, by the end of the game, Cloud is more interested in moving forward than going back.

 13.) The Magic Flight

 In the process of returning to normal life, the hero will often have to flee from some kind of danger. This happens after the hero has received the boon, but before they are able to bring it to the people. If there’s a bad guy that needs to defeating or a task that needs accomplishing, this step often takes place immediately after. Actual flying is not required, but don’t be surprised if it does. The Magic Flight frequently merges with the next two steps, Rescue from Without and The Crossing of the Return Threshold.

 Let’s see. Luke escapes the Death Star on a shuttle with his father’s body. Frodo and Sam fly with the Eagles back to safety as Mount Doom is erupting. Harry is knocked unconscious and rescued by Dumbledore from the room containing the Mirror of Erised. Whew. Managed to keep that short.

 DAI doesn’t really have this step, because again, the story keeps going even after Corypheus’ end. However, I could argue there are other parts of the game that have a Magic Flight, such as escaping from the dystopian future after defeating Alexius or escaping the Fade after fighting the Fear Demon. These events just don’t happen at the end of the game. FFVII also only kind of has this step too, in the form of the Highwind bringing the party out of the North Crater following the defeat of Safer Sephiroth.

 Raz has to escape from his own mind, which is intertwined with Oleander’s in the last stage of the game, and his brain has to be detangled in order to return to his normal self. He’s not really conscious for the process though, so the player doesn’t really see it. As for Jack, this step is really kind of merged with the next two, so we’ll get to those.

 14.) Rescue from Without

 During the course of the Magic Flight, the hero will be unable to escape the danger they are trying to flee from on their own. Someone (or multiple people) will need to come in and rescue the hero. This is especially true if the hero is injured or weakened in some way, particularly after a rough final battle with the big bad.

 As stated before, this one often overlaps with the previous one and the next one. Vader saves Luke from Palpatine’s Force Lightning. The Eagles rescue Frodo and Sam from the erupting Mount Doom. Harry rescued from the attack from Voldemort/Quirrell by Dumbledore and brought to the Hospital Wing for treatment. Yeah, that sounds about the same as before.

 The closest thing the Inquisitor comes to being rescued from without, at least at the end of the game, is with the red lyrium dragon, where either a dragon-shifted Morrigan (if she drank from the Well of Sorrows) or the Guardian of Mythal (if the Inquisitor did). However, the red lyrium dragon defeats either Morrigan or the Guardian, and the Inquisitor and the party have to fight it anyway. So it’s an attempted but ultimately unsuccessful rescue.

 Raz is rescued by his dad, Augustus, from his own brain, and I imagine Cruller, Sasha and Milla all played a role in separating Raz’s brain from Oleander’s and rebraining him, even though this isn’t shown on screen.  Several Little Sisters stab Fontaine to death with their ADAM-collecting syringe, saving Jack from his final blow. It’s a wonderfully satisfying scene and I absolutely love it. FFVII has a rescue of sorts in that Aerith has to basically make the Lifestream rise up to help her Holy spell stop Meteor from destroying the planet. How she manages to do this from beyond the grave is never explicitly explained. It must just be a Cetra thing.

 15.) The Crossing of the Return Threshold

 So, this step is the final of the triumvirate of the return steps. The hero actually returns to their normal life or their previous home, and distributes the boon they have received upon the rest of the world. This is basically anything that happens after the climax of the story. Exposition explaining what exactly has happened may or may not be included.

 Luke returns to the rest of the characters on Endor to celebrate the destruction of the second Death Star, bringing the teachings of the light side of the Force with him. Harry Potter boards the Hogwarts Express to return to the Muggle world. And the hobbits all return to the Shire, although in the books they have to deal with Saruman and the Scouring of the Shire once there.

 For Psychonauts, there’s kind of a Return Threshold, but only if you stretch it, and not in the sense that returns Raz to his normal life. Quite the opposite actually. Raz and the gang levitate into the Psychonauts jet that just happens to show up from the ground. Hmm, didn’t Raz say he suspected that Cruller had a jet hiding in his lab somewhere? Oh look! More setup and payoff!

 Finally, we come to Jack. After defeating Fontaine, he is finally able to take a bathysphere to the surface again. The player sees this almost immediately after defeating Fontaine, and it occurs regardless of whether the player gets the good or bad ending.

 As stated in the Refusal of the Return step, neither DAI nor FFVII really have Crossing of the Return Threshold. FFVII just sort of ends and DAI doesn’t show the Inquisitor returning to their home origins, either in the game proper or in the DLC.

 16.) Master of Two Worlds

 This step is no so much of a step, but rather a final result of the hero’s journey. It is closely related to the next step, Freedom to Live. We see the hero basically in their final form, having achieved what they set out to do, whether that was the original intention or not. The hero is able to live in both their old and new worlds.

 In our chosen movies, Luke is really the only one who is the Master of Two Worlds. He recognizes the darkness that exists in him, but he can overcome it. Frodo, on the other hand, literally can’t become Master of Two Worlds due to his experiences. He has to leave one world (the Shire) permanently for the east.

 Harry…really has to compartmentalize his wizard and Muggle experiences, but that has more to do with his family not being willing to accept that magic is a part of him. Obviously his aunt and uncle do not care for his boon (magic) that he brings with him, forbidding him from using it, even without the Statute of Secrecy in place. He can’t really master both worlds in that regard, not until the last book and he reconciles with Dudley. (I’m really annoyed they cut that from the final release of the movies. That badly needed to be shown.) Harry does become a master of two worlds, the living and the dead, in the last book, but we’re looking at the first book alone, and this step isn’t really possible for him due to his circumstances.

 Now I have to admit, the only game (on our list anyway) that has this step is probably Psychonauts. Cloud steps away from his false life as an ex-SOLDIER when he admits that it was all in his head, choosing instead to continue to live as himself. Jack either returns to the surface with the Little Sisters and stays there (in the good ending) or becomes the master of Rapture and new leader of the splicers, rejecting his previous life. And The Inquisitor, well, I guess you could say they become the master of both the real world and the Fade, especially since he/she gets progressively better at controlling the Anchor and closing Fade rifts. However, they he/she still remains in the real world as the Inquisitor, until the events of Trespasser at least. These three games have the main character choosing one world over another, so it’s hard to pin them down as “masters” of two.

 Psychonauts, however, shows Raz accepts both parts of his life, as an acrobat and as a Psychonaut. This is illustrated excellently during the last platforming part of the game, during Meat Circus, with the rising water and Raz needing to keep up with his mental image of his dad. He uses both his acrobatic skills and his psychic powers to reach the top of the area. And as stated previously, Raz gains his father’s blessing before running off on another mission. Raz succeeds at being a Master of Two Worlds, and this kid is only ten!

 17.) Freedom to Live

 A follow up of the previous step, Freedom to Live is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Having mastered both worlds, the hero is allowed to live, as he or she wants, without worrying about any more conflicts…until the story sequel at least. This is the happy ending of the story, presuming the story has a happy ending.

 All of our protagonists, both movie and video game, manage this step in one way or another. Luke no longer has the threat of the Sith looming over him, and he can be at peace knowing he helped to redeem his father (and, for now, I’m going to ignore the stuff that happens in the New Trilogy, because that starts up a whole new set of the monomyth). Harry is given the opportunity to go back to Hogwarts for more schooling, and even though his Muggle family disapproves, he knows who he is now and has answers for things he couldn’t explain before. Overall, the end of the first Harry Potter book gives him a new lot in life, and the series continues on with that from there.

 And Frodo. Poor Frodo. Perhaps it’s hard to say he has “freedom” to live since he does end up leaving the Shire, but considering that his goal was to save the Shire (and by extension, all of Middle Earth), he succeeds. Frodo had to leave his home, but the other hobbits, including Sam, his closest companion, were able to live without a care. It’s a sacrifice, but one Frodo seems content to make.

 As for the video games we’re looking at, well, now Raz has the freedom to pursue his dream of being a Psychonaut without worrying about it alienating his family, his father in particular. Cloud is able to put the past behind him and move forward as his own person, rather than trying to live up to a standard he forced himself to before. The Inquisitor has challenges ahead to be sure, but without the threat of Corypheus breathing down their neck, they have a bright future to look forward to (at least until Solas decides to tear down the Veil, but we’ll have to wait for Dragon Age 4 to see how that turns out). And finally, Jack finally has answers to any questions he had about his life, and with his mental conditioning removed, he is finally allowed to choose his own fate, whether as a despotic leader of the splicers or as a father to the cured Little Sisters.

 So there you go. The Hero’s Journey in a bunch of movies and video games. As I said at the beginning of this extensive diatribe, the monomyth is not the only way to tell a story well, and it certainly is not mandatory to make a story good. However, whether intentional or not, parts of the monomyth somehow find their way into the stories we share in our various media. It’s worth looking at for any kind of story, if only to analyze how the presence or absence of the monomyth affects the story, for better or worse. And yes, video games can be a great form of story telling, if developers take the time to create it and players take the time to experience it.

 Okay. This post has gone on long enough. To anyone who managed to make it all the way here, thank you for your patience and commitment to reading my ramblings.

Walking Dead Game FanFiction - “Party Time”

Title: Party Time Characters: Clementine, Marlon, Louis, Violet, Minerva, Duck, Brody Summary: In a high school au, Clementine, the new shy girl, ends up at a high school party with Duck the jock, Marlon the edgy boy, and Louis the theatre kid. Slowly developing feelings for Clementine, Marlon and Louis scheme to get Duck out of the picture with Clementine remains completely oblivious. The entire time, Violet and Minerva watch everything unfold from the sidelines. Author's Note: This actually turned out so great omggggg I’m so HAPPY with it Requested By: Anonymous support me with ko-fi ♡ ---------♥️♥️♥️----------

Clementine hated parties. More so, she hated the people that were at said parties.

Before she had moved, that was all that kids in her school did: got drunk, got high, repeat. They were never interested in art, or books, or film. Nothing like what she was into. She stuck out like a sore thumb.

She had hoped that Savannah would be different but so far, seeing as she had only been there for a week and a half and already she was invited to a “we won a single football game and therefore need to all get drunk” party, her hope was dissipating quickly.

Unlike any other school she had ever been to, there weren’t set cliques: the cool kids, the smokers, the rocker kids, etc. Instead, here, everyone was mixed in. The average clique had a bit of everything, and Clementine couldn’t tell if she loved or hated it.

Realistically, it meant she had a better chance of finding a group to hang out with. However, the added stress of not having an obvious target group to seek out was daunting. Where did one seek to find their place in a school where everyone already had it figured themselves out?

Within her first few minutes at the party, Clem could tell she was in for trouble. Everyone had already sorted themselves out into their respective groups, and she sat in the middle of a coach, talking to nobody, sipping away at her lemon water like a total idiot.

“Dude, have you seen the new girl yet?”

Marlon could feel his shoulder rattle as Louis jostled it. “New girl?” Marlon groaned, adjusting the earring that the contact had tugged at. Maybe it was because Louis was the school’s prized theater kid, but he had a tendency to be exuberant with every motion. The charm of it was what originally had drawn them to one another, but more often than not these days, Marlon just found it to be grating.

Louis turned, giving Marlon a skeptical once over. “You mean you haven’t?”

Marlon stared at him, brows raised, confused at the weird way he was acting. “No, I haven’t. Can you chill out? It’s just a girl. Who cares.”

“You should and I do,” Louis scoffed, his shirt fabric twinkling under the dim living room lighting. Louis always dressed up when he went anywhere. Theater kids.

His glimmer wasn’t thanks to him alone. The party was hosted at the rich girl’s house — Minerva, head of the art club. Apparently her parents left town for the weekend and put her in charge. It was big news around school that they hadn’t taken kindly to hearing about her girlfriend, Violet, and Minerva made a big spectacle about her “revenge house party” to get back at them.

A high school student body didn’t need a reason to party, but for revenge? As if any of them would say no.

Marlon rolled his eyes. “I’m not interested.”

“In girls? Guys? Or do you mean you’re not interested in anybody?”

Marlon gave him a daring look. To anyone else, the look would be horrifying, seeing as head-to-toe Marlon was dressed like he was out to kill — black jeans, a leather jacket, thick black boots and a chain earring on his left ear — but it didn’t phase Louis. It never did. He knew what a softie the guy was, despite his dark exterior.

“Come on,” Louis groaned. “She’s sitting right there on the couch. Just look.” Flicking Marlon’s cheek, pushing his stare in the right direction, Marlon finally set his sights on the girl of the hour.

He swirled his drink in his palm as he studied her, taking in the awkward way she was sitting on the couch, wedged between a couple making out and a two girls taking a hoard of Snapchat selfies and deleting every one. She didn’t seem comfortable, and she stuck out like a sore thumb in her jean overalls and lemon-print t-shirt.

Despite the flit of his lip — the way it faintly tugged upward as he studied her — he turned back to Marlon and forced his expression to become cold again. “She’s alright.”

Louis scoffed, fiddling with the unbuttoned buttons on his shirt. “Right, I’m sorry, I forgot that you only like girls with three layers of eyeliner and piercings from head-to-toe.”

Marlon shot him a glare.

Louis accepted it. He wasn’t about to act like he didn’t deserve it, but he also wasn’t about to act like he wasn’t right.

“She doesn’t seem happy. How am I supposed to know what she’s like from staring at the uncomfortable way she’s sitting?”

Louis smirked, picking up on every part of his attempted cover-up. His gaze turned back to the couch and his relaxed, teasing body began to stiffen. Marlon, whose focus was stuck to him, shifted to see what, or who, he was staring at.

The couple on Clementine’s left separated from what felt like the decades of sucking at each other's faces. Peeling away, Louis and Marlon could both see that it was the head of the football team - nicknamed Duck - and the head of the debate team, Brody.

“Excuse me?” Brody snapped, her gaze harrowing in on the male.

Duck shrugged, taking hold of her hips as he attempted to tug her closer, wanting to place her back on his lips.

She scoffed, forcing him away harder this time. “I said no, creep. Stop trying to shove your hand down my pants.”

Duck scoffed, waving his hand dismissively. “Come on, loosen up a little—”

Once again, Brody swatted his hand away. “No means no, asshole.” She scoffed, pushing herself to her feet and trotting away, fixing her hair as she went.

Even though they were a decent distance away, and could only just barely make out what the two were saying, Louis and Marlon could very clearly see Duck call her a bitch. Louis scoffed, leaning back into the wall. “What an ass.”

“What else is new?” Marlon scoffed, taking another swing of the event’s cheap beer. Although Minerva’s family had money, her and Violet had a limited budget. The event was purely for popularity. As if they were going to spend decent money to get party-goers anything better than the cheapest beer they could get in mass and frail red solo cups. He groaned as it slid down his throat. It was disgusting, but at least it had the promise of keeping him tipsy.

“Hey guys!”

Glancing up from their drinks, over trotted Minerva, dressed up to the nines, with Violet being pulled along behind her. One of the weirdest parts about Violet and Minerva’s relationship was how polar opposite they seemed, and yet how perfectly they got along. Minerva was always dolled up, and always came to school looking like a Barbie fresh out of the packaging — not a hair out of place, not an item of clothing smudged. On the opposite side, Violet was always late, wore the same outfit 3 days out of the week, and was regularly known to smoke behind the school instead of going to class. Yet somehow, whenever they were together, they fit like the perfect couple.

“Are you guys enjoying the party?” Minerva asked, smile beaming. From slightly to her right, Violet turned to her and smiled, smitten as could be.

Louis smiled. “We are, thanks for hosting Minnie.”

Minnie shrugged and waved her hand, the small solo cup of wine — the least classy thing they had ever seen her with — jostling in her hand. If she was forcing everyone to drink out of solo cups, she was going to as well. That was just the type of person she was. “It’s not a problem. My parents owe me one.”

Throughout their conversation, Marlon didn’t detach his stare from Clementine. Duck, directly at her side, was prowling for his next victim. Marlon could feel his stomach twist watching, and hated what he knew would inevitably occur.

“Marlon?”

Finally, he snapped out of his trance, his gaze dragging from the couch to the girl standing before him. Awkwardly he cleared his throat, turning to Louis for help. All he did was smirk. “Yeah, yeah, the party’s been great.”

Violet turned, peering over her girlfriend’s shoulder and spotting Clementine, staring down at the water cup in her hand and watching it swirl. Violet chuckled. “So, you like Clementine, huh?”

“What?” Marlon scoffed. This would’ve been so much easier if Louis — the socially competent one out of the two of them — would’ve stepped up to help him. “No, that’s not it.”

“Clementine?” Minerva asked, eyeing up Louis. “The new girl?” Louis nodded and gestured behind her and, after swirling around and spotting her, she swiveled back. “Oh her! She seems quiet.”

“She is,” Louis said, nodding. “She hasn't said a word to anyone the entire time she's been here.”

Minerva frowned. “Do you think she’s not having fun?”

“I’m sure she’s just shy, Minnie.” Violet said, jostling her shoulder. “She’s new, she just doesn't know anyone here yet.”

Watching Duck turn, his eyes widening spotting the unarmed girl to his side, Marlon could feel all his relaxed muscles dissipate. “That’s what I’m worried about.” Sensing the attention drift, the rest of their group turned to see what Marlon was analyzing.

Louis, picking up on his friend’s stress, spotted the sight. “Oh jeez,”

“I’m on it,” Violet sighed, patting Minerva on the shoulder and making her way to the couch. Just as Duck was reaching his hand out, ready to tap an unknowing Clementine on the shoulder, Violet wandered up and slapped the male on the leg. “Wrestle me.”

Duck scoffed, eyeing up Violet hesitantly. The two of them had been teamed up on sports since elementary school — anywhere from basketball to badminton — so Violet challenging him was nothing new. But in the middle of a party? That was new. “Wrestle you?” He rolled his eyes. “Come on, Vi. I’m not about to embarrass you in front of everyone.”

Violet felt her eyebrow twitch. Despite being in school with him for years, she still knew he was an ass. “Come on, Duck. Grow a pair, huh?”

That did it, and Violet knew it would.

Duck scoffed, heaving himself to his feet. “Backyard. Let’s go.”

Violet smirked, crossing her arms cheekily and starting for the back doors.

The buzz of the match swept through the living room, and while a handful of people slipped out to watch, Louis and Marlon weren’t some of them.

Minerva sighed. “Well, I guess I’d better go keep an eye on that.” Lifting a hand, giving the two a little wave, she gathered Violet’s abandoned cup and started for the door. “Talk later!” She called over her shoulder.

Just as she vanished, Louis jostled Marlon’s arm. “Let’s go talk to her.”

“Talk? To Clementine?”

“Yes!” Louis scoffed, arms waving, his rum and coke jostling. “There’s no Duck getting in the way, we can finally go and see what she’s like.”

Marlon said nothing, only faintly scrunched his nose and wavered from foot to foot.

Louis scoffed, tugging on his friend’s jacket and jumping down to the now-vacant seat on the couch. There was only the one, seeing as the girls clouding the other side weren’t too interested in watching an unprofessional wrestling match out back, but Louis decided the proximity wouldn’t bother either of them. Hopefully, it wouldn’t bother her.

“You’re Clementine, right?” He asked, speaking before sliding himself down into the spot beside her.

She glanced up, blinking meekly at the two towering before her. As suspected, her shoulders curled at Marlon’s appearance. “Yeah? Do I know you guys?” Her voice was so soft over the music, like it was made of glass. It made Louis want to hold them. It made Marlon, even more so, want to keep Duck and his grimy hands away from her.

“Probably not,” Louis offered with a faint chuckle, watching as Marlon took a seat in front of her on the coffee table, clutching his beer can between his legs. “We just noticed you were sitting all alone and wanted to bring some company. You’re new, right?”

“Yeah,” she breathed faintly. “I just moved from Roswell.”

Louis smiled. “Welcome to Savannah. I hope our classmates haven’t brought you too much trouble.”

Clementine gave a small smile, shrugging her shoulders, her stature loosening given their pleasant conversation. “No, but I think they’re going to be bringing each other a bit of it.”

Marlon gave a faint smile. “Yeah, that’s kinda Duck’s style.”

“Violence?” Clem questioned.

“No, trouble.”

Clementine smiled, a giggle escaping her. Marlon and Louis, although it was only for a flicker, made eye contact. They agreed, silently, that it was the cutest sound they’d ever heard.

“So, have you talked to a lot of people here?”

Clementine’s smile faded slightly. “No, I’m not really great when it comes to putting myself out there.”

“You came tonight,” Louis said with a shrug, tapping Marlon on the knee to back him up. “That’s putting yourself out there, especially in a new city.”

Marlon nodded, swirling his beer can passively. “That’s already a step above a lot of people. Give yourself some credit,”

Clementine’s eyes widened faintly, so faintly that Louis couldn’t see under the dim lighting, but Marlon — the one meeting her gaze — could. “You think?”

Marlon smiled. It was cute how innocent she was when it came to social interaction. “Of course,” he offered, a chuckle escaping. “You’re doing great. You’re talking to us, aren’t you?”

Louis smiled, impressed at how swiftly his friend was taking to her. Although, they both knew that was largely in part thanks to Clementine being easy to talk to and not due to Marlon’s social skills improving. “Yeah,” Louis furthered. “You’ve already made 2 new friends.”

Clementine turned, mouth propped open, as if ready to question the statement. Just as she was about to speak, just as she was about to question if they were being serious, she was silenced.

“Sorry boys, I believe that’s my seat.”

Glancing up, the three spotted Duck, covered in grass stains. His arms were crossed, and his toothy grin gleamed even through the faint lighting. Violet, also covered in grass stains, was standing a few paces behind him being tidied up by Minerva, too preoccupied to notice.

“I believe this is a party, and people can sit wherever they want.” Louis countered.

Marlon rolled his eyes, taking a long swing of beer. Duck wasn’t worth the effort it took to belittle him, but he’d be damned if they were about to give up their spot next to Clementine for Duck to swipe it.

“I called spot check,” Duck claimed, arms crossed.

Louis scrunched his nose. Duck knew Louis was a stickler for party rules. Spot checking? That was rule number 1, and they all knew Louis wasn’t about to break it. With a huff, he shot up to his feet. “Fine,” he scoffed. “Come on Clementine,”

“Oh no no no,” Duck said, his hand latching onto Louis’ shoulder just as he was helping Clem to her feet, and just as Marlon stood to assist in their transition. “She stays.”

Clementine immediately tensed. Even though he wasn't looking at her, Marlon could feel it. “Ease off Duck, she’s allowed to go wherever she wants.” He snapped, feeling a twitch of rage. He spoke about her as if she was a potted plant rather than a person.

Duck scoffed, releasing Louis. “Nice to know that when Marlon finally speaks it’s to show support for feminism,” he laughed. “Nice to see you supporting your own kind.”

Marlon furrowed his brows. Just when he thought Duck couldn’t make himself look like a bigger ass, he went ahead and did it.

“Duck, just knock it off, okay?” Louis scoffed, arms out, pleading with the guy. “We’re all here to have a good time. There’s no need for you to start acting like an asshole.”

“Excuse you?”

Marlon smirked. “Sorry, he meant to say that you never stopped acting like an asshole.” Marlon could tell that one made Clementine’s shoulders tense even more. A part of him felt bad that she was tossed in the middle of all this.

“Excuse you?” Duck asked, leering toward the male. “Rich talk coming from the quiet kid,”

Marlon didn’t flinch, even when Clementine slithered farther behind him. Maybe it would be better for her to just go home. Maybe coming to the party was a mistake. Just as she started for the door, ready to set down her cup and get out, she was spotted.

“Awe, come on girly, where ya going?” Duck called, causing her motions to freeze. “Are the weirdos freaking you out? Don’t worry,” forcing himself between the two of them, he reached out for her. “I’ll keep you awake from them.”

Turning around, feeling a hand creep up on her back and shoulder, Clementine could feel her skin crawl. Could she force him away? Would he listen? He sure hadn’t been listening to anyone else who had been telling him off. What made her any different?

“That’s enough of that, asshole.”

Clementine watched as Marlon jetted his elbow into Duck’s side, causing his grip on her shoulder to vanish. Just as the grip was lost, Louis swept up beside her, making sure to hold his hands out in front of her, demonstrating that he didn’t mean harm. “Are you okay?” He hushed.

Clementine said nothing, she was too worried and shaken. Instead, she just nodded.

It was then, staring at the terrified quiver in her eyes, did Louis realize just how different she was. Just how much better she was than the rest of the school.

At first glance, they’d approached Clementine because she was cute. It didn’t take long for them to realize that she was more than that. She was special. In a city full of stuck up teens, and in a high school that promoted pompous popularity over generosity, Clementine brought a stark contrast to it all.

They didn’t want to flirt with her. Hell, the two of them didn’t even want to date her. They wanted to keep her safe. They wanted to keep her away from the cruel world of high school. As far as they were concerned, they were there to save her.

“Come on Clem,” Louis said, taking her arm and guiding her away. “We’ll take you home.”

“Are you sure?” She asked, voice wavering and fragile. “I don’t want to take you guys away.”

“We don’t care about being here,” Marlon said, whisking the front door open and placing a hand on Clem’s shoulder as Louis guided her out. “We’d much rather walk you home than stay with this mess.”

Clementine’s eyes widened as she was escorted out of the house, one of the boys on either side of her. For the first time since she had entered that night, she felt safe. She felt as if someone had her back.

It was then, as the two guided her down the street back to her home, did she know that Savannah was going to be different from Roswell. Savannah was going to feel like home.

Because finally, finally, she had friends. ---------♥️♥️♥️----------

Long bio: Rebecca was born to a family of three persons. His father is a financial market operator, her mother has a business degree and have exerted the profession, as a manager.

Please note this is her “standard verse”, which I’ll be using in my original novel. Due to not having the results I wanted when I made verses, I don’t do verses for my OCs, I prefer to consider them more like “actors”, fitting in a setting. Any backstory in said settings will be a derivative of their “standard verse” backstory.

Rebecca was born into a family that many people would consider odd. His father was a financial operator born in Syria, to a Druze family – tempestuous, impulsive, loving risks more than anything, a perfect man for the financial market; her mother was a business graduate from a Jewish family in New York, while herself was known for betting on safe investments and actually making them profitable.

At first, they were like salt and pepper, a controversial salt and pepper – there was no way they could have worked, but they did and they lived in a marriage that was more of an exchange: Mark saw in Ruth a challenge and Ruth saw in Mark a chance for financial safety (being raised in a conservative environment, she preferred to be a housewife and only went to college to get married, to which she failed).

The marriage with an Arab more or less alienated her from her religious community, but not from her business community – on the contrary, everyone there “shipped” them. So they decided to have a kid.

Young Rebecca was born and was spoiled until she was seven. Until that age, she never had anything lacking; this made her build a confident persona, with her father encouraging her adventurous spirit; she hurt herself a lot in the parks (injuries like scrapping the knees and brushing poisonous ivy), much to her mother’s despair. Surely, her parents debated a lot on the best way to raise her.

The first bad thing that happened in her life was when they had to live under their means. Mark made some really bad financial decisions and they had to live like poor people for a year. They still kept their appearances, living in their affluent house, but they had to make more visits to the dollar stores than they’d like. Mark got into lots of debt to pay for bills, while waiting until he could reestablish his money and fights with Ruth were constant. Rebecca, on the other hand, didn’t let this bother her – in fact, after the bad times were gone, she was even more confident, because she believed that, as long as they stayed together.

But, things changed after that. Thinking that Ruth couldn’t give her the achievements he wanted, so he started an affair. They were on a trip to Seattle, and the scandal blew up right in front of little Rebecca. Every single night, when they returned, there was a discussion, and Rebecca felt powerless with everything. In the end, she started to think it was her fault, and she tried to do something about it, by walking into their fights, looking weak and helpless.

It worked, her parents stopped fighting in front of her. But it wasn’t enough to avoid their divorce. Still, Rebecca unconsciously adopted this persona, of looking as weak as possible so she could make people stop fighting. She moved with her mother to Seattle, a place far away from New York, to start anew in a travelling agency. Her pride didn’t allow her to accept Mark’s alimony and for five years, she prohibited contact with him.

These years were bad for Rebecca. She just shrunk and her mother enabled this to her, so she could set her up in ways that would make her growth to be just like her, always betting on safe strategies. For that reason, she rarely took extracurricular activities, rarely left her house, only stayed there, doing things like watching TV or reading (she definitely preferred to watch TV than reading, she looks like a bookworm, but she isn’t).

From the period 11-14 years, it was a phase that she simply got…quiet. Not fully muted, but quiet. She talked only when necessary, but could spend days without saying a word if nobody talked to her. Her mother never saw any problem with it, and actually encouraged it, because she looked less and less like her father.

After five years under this, Rebecca had terrible people’s skills. Her mother’s desire to make her look less and less than her father turned her into a malnourished, excessively introverted, friendless, girl that was scared of everyone that wasn’t her mother. She suffered few attempts at bullying because her mother caught them and nipped them on the bud. She was overprotective and Rebecca became a pushover.

Meanwhile, her father returned to her life. He was married to the woman and had a kid with her – the kid was ok but the mother was on her last legs because of cancer. No money in the world could save her. They started to fight again and Rebecca again tried to look as less intimidating as possible.

Her father, seeing her in that state went ballistic, making her run away. He hated the fact she looked so meek and weak and they discussed even more; seeing her (subconscious) strategy failed, she just wanted to kill herself. It was a really bad discussion, but a few broken cups.

During the following weeks, her mutism only got worse, she just didn’t talk in the school anymore, not even to the teachers, while her father’s new wife died. It was a heavy time for everyone involved, her father’s boss had to threaten firing him if he didn’t take the time out, so he could go to Seattle to solve his issues, allowing Rebecca to finally meet her half-brother.

Meanwhile, Rebecca had a really rough depressive episode: while she was crossing the street, she saw a stolen car being chased by a police car. She looked at the car and she…just…stopped. In the middle of the street. She felt her life was going to end so she just accepted her life was going to end. It was a good for nothing life.

The car made a sharp turn at the last second, sparing Rebecca, even if it was a close call. The officer stopped the chase, in order to attend Rebecca. At first he was livid because she cost him a case, but his expression changed when he saw Rebecca’s dead eyes. He asked her about her parents and she refused to reply; he asked in sign language as well, but she also refused to reply; he asked again for his parents and this time she wrote him her home address. The policeman brought her to her house and warned her parents that if they didn’t do something, he’d call the CPS on them.

After he left, Rebecca’s parents had the hardest talk of their life. They agreed that they were kind of crappy parents and decided to work on her. They finally got her to the therapist. It took a while, but she slowly started to abandon her mutism, that evolved into a stutter. It was a progress anyway and her therapist recommended that she tried something more impersonal at first, like internet (and she insisted that they left her have her privacy while navigating through it).

Thus, she started her online adventures. Her parents told her that she could be wise and so Rebecca started to use the internet. At first, she started using forums and other sites, aimed at kids, so she could keep up with the stuff she liked. Forums were a good way for her to communicate, due to the non-immediate communication, it was good for her to give her time to organize her thoughts, so she ended up placing a lot of passion in her replies.

One of these forums was from a cartoon that she liked, about a group of futuristic robots stranded in a medieval fantasy setting. It wasn’t the most popular cartoon, but she liked it. She just loved making posts there, being supportive to all; she also hated drama. But one person called her attention most: a non-native poster. She liked to read his stuff, just as anyone else, and never was bothered by his spelling/grammar errors, unlike anyone else. She was known as the girl with a flower avatar.

One day, she returned home from a bad day at school. Another subpar presentation where her stuttering got her again. What could she do? She was anxious and sweating. She wanted to take a shower, but the building would be without water for the day, due to the need of fixing an issue. Thus, she spent time on the internet.

She ignored all the drama posts when she received a direct message from one of the most famous posters, the one that produced those essays in mangled language. She never had a problem with him, but he asked her for her help, in order to stop having people complaining about his English.

Things got complicated for her when he asked to use the copy-paste. All he asked to do was to copy and paste his latest essay thus she could proof-read it. A simple task, after all, everybody knew how to press Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V right?

Not Rebecca.

She never used the word processor to write down her posts, she just used the text box to write her posts. And whenever she had a school assignment to use the word processor, she just copied word by word, never bothering to use the shortcut (and because the teachers never explained anyway).

She didn't know how to copypaste. And when she asked what was that, he was shocked. Nevertheless, he explained, in an obvious way, but she still didn't get it. Since the day was terrible already, she just broke down and started to type a long message in caps lock, full of grammar errors. She called herself the worst student ever because she couldn't follow a simple instruction.

Expecting the worse, she braced herself to hear him berating her, for being useless and stupid. But it never came. Instead the boy in the other side told her that if she was the worst student ever, he was the worst teacher ever.

Out of all reactions, that wasn't what Rebecca expected. She never had seen someone as compassionate as him for no reason at all. Surely, her therapist was a lovely person but she was paid for it, and her parents only tried to be comprehensive after everything went downhill. But he, he was being kind to her with no reason at all.

The result was that the post-essay was published without revision and people complained and he didn't care. Rebecca still posted a lot, defending him claiming that grammar wasn't that important and, since she had a good reputation in the forum (of which she was actually unaware of), people stopped picking on him.

Rebecca continued exchanging messages with the user known as MrcsGrz. Soon, they learned that they had a lot in common, they loved the same shows, listened to the same songs and had similar opinions. The forum's activity started to wane, but whenever they decided to do new things, they did it together, be either joining a new MMPORG or a new social network.

He was someone that Rebecca could trust, he never berated her, he always tried to be the most comprehensive and kind possible. With that, she started to open to him, talking to him about her problems with her parents, her social awkwardness and even her near-death experience. In exchange, he opened to her about his issue with cults and how he felt he wasted a part of his life.

She didn't consider herself a good writer, but whenever she thought of her internet friend, she couldn't help but to smile. And, not only that, but she felt homework and exams were easier to go through when she thought of him; the idea of meeting him online after she did her chores encouraged her to do them with diligence.

In the meantime, she actually started making friends at school, who accepted her for what she was. They talked a lot of issues, like cartoons and school work, but when they talked about boys, Rebecca always said that she wasn't interested in talking like that. One day, one of her friends teased that she might be in love already, that's why none of the boys were interested in her (she didn't even go to the prom).

At first, she thought that to be preposterous. There was no way anyone could ever love her...not even her internet friend. The moment that thought intruded her mind, she felt her world being crushed. She excused her friends and actually went to the bathroom to cry. She felt so much despair when she thought that and went home devastated.

She didn't want to admit, but she was deeply and hopelessly in love with him. In love with someone whom she didn't know what he looked like, living thousands of miles away from her. In love with someone who belonged to a completely different culture and context. In love with someone she shouldn't be in love with.

She booted up the computer, waiting...just waiting for something to happen. Just waiting, at their personal private chat room for him to come. She felt so much fear, so much despair the moment he entered the room and started typing.

They exchanged the standard courtesies, until he typed that he wanted to tell her something important. Being pessimistic, she knew it was something bad. Her despair gave way to immeasurable surprised when he told her he was in love with him.

She got up from her chair and started to pace around, drank six cups of water and breathed heavily. He was in love with her and he told her first. It made no sense how happy and confused she was.

After ten minutes, she returned to the screen, telling him that she was also in love with him, in love with his patience and kindness, in love with everything that meant him.

And it felt light, like a weight being liberated from her chest. In the end, they felt the same for each other, and they understood that their love couldn't be consumated due to the distance between each other.

He offered to move close to her, but she refused and they started to consider the costs and they decided the most sensible thing to do was to continue being friends and look out for relationships.

But she knew nothing would compare to their relationship. During that day, she learned the name of her friend was Marcos. Just like him, she nurtured a deep feeling that they would meet one day and that, if circumstances were different, they'd be together.

And this wasn't ignored by certain entities...

Moonlight

pairing: kasplon (eddie x mike)

requested: no, but it should have been

warnings: richie being richie

not my gif

this is inspired by the song “moonlight” by queen ariana grande

IMPORTANT: everything in italics is flashbacks to when eddie and mike first started dating, bold italics are song lyrics, and regular text is present time if you didn’t understand.

The sun is setting and you’re right here by my side.

Eddie turned his head to admire the boy laying beside him on the grass. The moonlight reflected off of his skin and made Eddie’s heart begin to beat in a way he thought would surely land him a trip to the ER if it didn’t stop.

Eddie wasn’t really sure when he had fallen in love with Mike Hanlon, he just knew it happened sometime between the beginning of their 9th grade year and the ending of their 11th grade year. He had never come to terms with the fact that he was falling for another boy, given the immense homophobia present in Derry, let alone another loser until their last day of the 11th grade.

And the movie is playing, but we won’t be watching tonight.

Middle school had been brutal for the group of 7, but something changed in high school. They all grew out of the “loser phase” to an extent, but Mike was the one that changed the most. Richie still wore his hawaiian shirts and cracked inappropriate jokes, but he was also the school’s heartthrob, to everyone’s surprise. Bill continued his art and still had a bit of a stutter, but he was also known as the sweetest guy in school. Ben wrote love letters and poems to Beverly, which led him to win multiple awards in creative writing, every single day, and according to Richie he needed to “man the fuck up and ask her out already.” Beverly was the captain of the girl’s soccer team, as well as the boy’s soccer team since her coach knew she was the best player. Stan still went birdwatching every single morning at 6:30AM sharp and made sure to keep Richie in check, but he was also the school’s MVP for his incredible baseball skills. Hell, even Eddie had made a name for himself at the school. Eddie won the national science fair after finding an “eco-friendly way to combat every single germ Richie has ever cursed the planet with,” which started as a joke but ended up working out in his favor.

Every look, every touch, makes me wanna give you my heart.

But Mike Hanlon? Eddie couldn’t even begin where to start with him. Was the term “loser” even fitting for Mike Hanlon anymore? Mike became the star quarterback at Derry High School, being the first freshman to be on the varsity team in Derry history, and is arguably the most popular guy in school. Eddie couldn’t think of one person that didn’t love Mike, and what made Eddie even more anxious is the fact that girls loved Mike in a different way. A way that made Eddie’s stomach turn when he saw girls giggling and blushing when Mike smiled at them in the halls, or when he saw Mike leaning against Erica Parker’s locker during free period, whispering something that made her cheeks turn a deep shade of red and making Eddie rush away from the scene.

I’d be crushing on you, baby, stay the way you are.

But the day that changed everything was the day that Mike Hanlon found out Eddie Kaspbrak had a crush on him, thanks to Richie of course.

“Come on Eddie, you can’t hide from him forever,” Stan said, leaning against the door to the janitor’s closet, which Eddie had locked himself in.

Stan heard faint sniffles coming from the other side of the door. Richie had been talking about the winter dance that was coming up soon, and after asking who everyone was going with he just so happened to “suggest” to Eddie that he should ask Mike since he had a crush on him anyway. Eddie knew Richie hadn’t meant to tell about his crush, hell, it was pretty obvious anyway, but Eddie was still shocked, and Richie was just as shocked, apologizing profusely as Eddie ran out through the cafeteria doors. Stan dashed after him, not before shooting a glare at Richie, of course. The only person that wasn’t shaken up by the situation was Mike. In fact, Mike tried to hide the smile that had found its way onto his face.

Eddie took the time to admire the way Mike’s dark skin looked under the moon’s reflection. He couldn’t even put into words how beautiful the sight is, and he silently wished this moment would never end.

I kiss his fingertips as I’m wishing he’s all mine.

He sometimes wondered if Mike admired him the same way he admired Mike. Eddie wasn’t aware of this, but he most certainly did.

“Go away Stan, you don’t understand. You’ll never understand. I’m not even supposed to like him, he doesn’t like boys. Everything is ruined now, there’s no fucking way I can go back out there,” Eddie replied, trying to hold back the sobs that were aching to come out.

Eddie heard the echo of clumsy feet stomping against the door, stopping right in front of the janitor’s closet. “Hey Eds, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to tell everyone about your crush on Mi- OW STOP IT STAN, JESUS FUCK.”

“Don’t fucking call me that Richie, you know I hate that.”

After a while of talking through the door, they eventually gave up on trying to convince Eddie to come out. Stan and Richie were basically talking to themselves at this point because Eddie had stopped replying to them almost 5 minutes after Richie arrived, and the bell had already rang by then.

Just as Eddie had thought the coast was clear and he could make a getaway, planning to skip the rest of the school day and tell his mom he was sick, even if she would drive him to the hospital immediately, he heard someone’s footsteps come closer and closer to the door. Eddie was too afraid to look out of the crack in the door, in fear of being seen, but he knew all too well who it was.

Eddie had never realized this before, but Mike had beautiful long eyelashes. The way they reflected in the moonlight made it all the more dramatic.

He’s giving me Elvis with some James Dean in his eyes.

Mike had never liked his near pitch black eyes and long eyelashes, but Eddie loved them. Even more, now that they were dancing in the light like this.

“Hey, Eddie… I know you’re in there,” Mike’s soothing voice called. Eddie was frozen stiff at the sound of his voice. “Can you please come out here and talk to me?” Eddie didn’t move a muscle. He couldn’t. He wanted to, but he couldn’t bring his body to it.

A few minutes had passed and he heard a deep sigh from the other side of the door. “That’s okay. I didn’t think you would anyways. I just wanted to ask you something real quick, but I guess I can wait and do it some other time.” Mike waited at the door, hoping Eddie would change his mind last minute, but he knew he couldn’t wait forever. Teachers like to patrol the hallways, and Mike snuck out of class without a hall pass.

“I’ll see you soon, Eddie,” Mike said quietly, more to himself than anyone else.

Eddie turned away from Mike’s face and looked back up at the stars, praying he wouldn’t see the blush that had started to creep up onto his cheeks at the thought of that day.

Puts his lips on my neck, makes me wanna give him my body.

Mike looks over at Eddie. He always loved Eddie’s freckles, and now looking more intently, he realizes how much he’d rather be staring at them than the stars that aligned the midnight sky.

“Tomorrow’s the w-winter dance guys, what’s th-he plan?” Bill asked, plopping down in his seat in the cafeteria next to Stan.

“Well, I don’t know about you losers but I’ve gotta put the moves on a certain someone before tomorrow or else I won’t be getting any winter lovin’,” Richie said, throwing a wink at Stan, who in return rolled his eyes so hard Eddie thought they might fall out.

Beverly laughed. “We should all meet up at Ben’s house and take photos, then carpool in Bill’s van,” she suggested, taking a bite out of her ham sandwich. Everyone hummed in agreement, besides Mike.

“Actually, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it or not. My grandpa said I can’t go unless all of my work for the week is taken care of by the time the dance starts,” he said, a sad smile on his face.

Eddie tried to hide his sheer disappointment by looking down at his shoes, suddenly losing his appetite. He had finally decided to face Mike at the dance when they could be alone, and maybe even ask for a dance, but totally lost his chance now.

“What if we all come over early and help you get your work done quicker, Mikey?” Ben asked.

“That’s okay guys, I wouldn’t want you to get all dirty and sweaty before it’s time to get ready. Don’t worry about me,” He said, giving Ben a grateful smile.

“Hey, Eddie?” Mike asked, shamelessly staring at Eddie’s side profile.

“Yeah?” Eddie said, a little too quick for his own liking, turning around and facing his beautiful boyfriend.

“You know I love you, right?” Mike whispered softly, grabbing Eddie’s hand and intertwining it with his own. Mike had always been super confident in everything he had done, and he wasn’t sure if it was the way the moon hit Eddie’s eyes and made them light up in a way he’d never seen before, or if it were the way Eddie looked at him with enough intensity to put a fire to shame, but for some reason, Mike had begun to grow awfully nervous.

I’d be falling for you, baby, and I just can’t stop.

“I know… I love you too,” Eddie replied, pausing between words to catch his breath, which was faltering due to his irregular heartbeat. He wished he had brought his inhaler with him, but he left it on his bedside table.

Eddie looked at the clock that read that it was 5:30. The losers were meeting at Ben’s at 6pm to take pictures, leaving Eddie just enough time to finish getting ready and make his way there.

Eddie was adjusting his tie when he heard knocking at the front door.

“Coming,” he said, slipping on his shoes and opening up the door. There in front of him stood Mike Hanlon, dressed in a dark purple dress suit, holding a red boutonnière in his hand, matching the one that was pinned to his lapel.

“Good afternoon, Eddie Kaspbrak. I know it’s a little short notice, but I was wondering if you’d like to accompany me to a certain school dance on this fine evening?” Mike said, smiling brighter than the sun had ever shone.

Eddie nodded and stepped out of his home, choosing not to verbally reply in fear of choking up and embarrassing himself and allowed Mike to place the boutonnière on his tux. The two boys’ faces were just centimeters apart, and Eddie swore he might pass out if they got any closer. Mike lifted his head after pinning the flower and stared deeply into Eddie’s chocolate brown eyes. He took a moment to admire the small boy’s face, as well as the rosy pink tint that took over the boy’s cheeks and neck. A slight breeze moved a piece of Eddie’s hair out of place and Mike couldn’t help but to run his own fingers through it and fix the misplaced hair. Eddie was sure Mike had heard his breath hitch.

Mike grabbed Eddie’s hand and led him down the street to Ben’s house, eventually starting up a conversation about how Richie totally cheated in Twister during last weekend’s game night.

Eddie placed his head on Mike’s chest, and Mike wrapped his arm around Eddie’s waist. Eddie shook his head slightly and smiled.

I never knew you could hold moonlight in your hands till the night I held you. You are my moonlight.

“What is it?” Mike said, giggling softly at his silly boy. Eddie looked up. “I am so damn in love with you, Mike Hanlon.” It was Mike’s turn to lose his breath.

“Hello” by Lionel Richie was softly playing in the background of the school dance. Eddie looked around and he could see everyone scrambling to find someone to dance with. He saw Ben and Bev rocking slowly to the music. Bill and a girl from his chemistry class were dancing as well. He also saw Richie trying to drag Stan onto the dance floor, earning him a smack on the arm. Right when he thought Richie was going to give up, he saw him lean into Stan and whisper something in his ear that made him sheepishly follow Richie to the dance floor.

“May I have this dance?” Mike asked, bowing dramatically and holding his hand out for Eddie to take. Eddie rolled his eyes, pretending to be annoyed. “Get up, idiot, of course I will.” Mike beamed and took Eddie’s hand, leading him out to the dance floor.

Eddie and Mike had always said they loved each other, but they had never proclaimed that they were IN love with each other. What took Mike by surprised even more was the fact that Eddie was the first to say this.

He’s so bossy, he makes me dance. Tryna sit in the back of his whip and just cancel my plans.

Mike leaned down placed his forehead against Eddie’s, and they laid just like that. With Mike’s large hand covering Eddie’s small one, and Eddie’s small frame hugging against Mike’s.

Eddie’s arms were placed around Mike’s neck, and Mike’s arms were placed on Eddie’s waist. Mike loved the way his hands fit right on the sides of Eddie’s body. They swayed back and forth to the beautiful song and it felt like they were the only two in the room. The world around them swirled into a contrast of light and dark colors, leaving the two lovesick boys directly in the middle of the chaos.

Mike’s eyes never left Eddie’s face. Not even when Eddie tried to turn away from Mike out of embarrassment when he realized Mike was looking at him so directly, suddenly becoming insecure. Mike lightly grabbed Eddie’s chin and made him look at him again.

“Please don’t look away from me like that again. You shouldn’t be so insecure. I’m staring for a reason,” Mike hummed softly, pressing his forehead against Eddie’s. “O-okay,” Eddie stuttered.

Eddie was becoming incredibly anxious at the fact that Mike had yet to respond to him saying he’s in love with him.

Sweet like candy, but he’s such a man.

He could feel his palms start to become sweaty and decided whether he should apologize, but what exactly would he be apologizing for? Expressing his feelings?

Locking eyes, they continued to slowly sway to the music. Second by second, they became slower with their steps until they came to a complete stop in the middle of the room, looking into each other’s eyes and leaning closer to one another.

“I like you too Eddie,” Mike whispered, enclosing the space between them and taking Eddie’s lips in his.

Mike positioned his body to look over at the small boy, who could feel Mike’s breath tickling his face. He pulled Eddie even closer to his chest.

He knows just what it does when he’s holding me tight and he calls me moonlight too.

“I’m in love with you too, Eddie Kaspbrak,” Mike said, leaning down to kiss Eddie on his lips.

CHU YUMI   ------   a nineteen year old leo ( august 6th ), entp.

columbus born & raised, just like jeremy & taemin. a surviving victim of the same local mob.

among many of her father’s vices, gambling was the most prominent one. one that resulted into the aromdee’s losing their house & being penniless when the child was only six years old & still unaware of what life is.

her father got involved with the aforementioned mob, became their little bitch, and managed to get temporary roofs over their heads from time to time. they adopted a nomadic lifestyle, going from one moldy, shabby, tiny apartment to another.

he pushed her mother into an alcohol-filled world, the woman gulping her sorrows away with every strong beverage that hit the back of her throat. she, sober or not, still attempted to provide for her innocent baby & take care of her, even though her father seemingly forgot that he had a family.

when her mother, tired of the same shit over & over again, became vocal about it, is when the abuse started. chimlin was twelve & able to recognise & remember every single poisonous word directed at either of the two aromdee females, mark every painful blow & count every single tear that rolled from the two pairs of eyes.

there was another kid caught up in the mob & chim used to see him around, but he was an older boy & she was too shy to approach him. apparently he turned out to be the mob boss’ son, so really all she should ever feel for him is hatred, right?

but one day while she was sitting in front of her building, both tears & blood ( from a glass cut ) streaming down her face & making a mess on her clothes, was when he approached her. her light. her saviour. her rock. her e v e r y t h i n g. he showed her affection & kindness she’d never known before. he gave her his eternal support & vowed to never leave her alone, to always protect her. he helped her run away with her mother by her side. he gave her the money he got from his drug dealing job & all the cash he managed to steal from his criminal parents and all of that combined with what they had saved, they were able to find a decent apartment just for the two of them.

without his knowledge, chim dropped out of high school & did a lot of sketchy jobs in order to keep the food on the table for her & her mom. the older aromdee, at first, busted her ass to do the same but she was only becoming more depressed because of their struggles and basically gave into her alcohol & drug addiction fully. she stopped being responsible, stopped acting like an adult. more often than not, chim would find her passed out in the living room and would try to carry her to her room or at least put her on the couch or, on the nights when she was tired, she’d make sure she was covered with a blanket, had a pillow under her head and was lying on her side so that she wouldn’t choke on her vomit in the middle of the night.

sometimes her mom would bring home her boyfriends, fellow addicts, that chimlin only tried to ignore because they were nasty & reminded her of her father. when they tried ordering her around &, for example, demanded a glass of water, she’d bring it & splash it into their faces lmao.

other than on those occasions, the two of them barely ever saw each other because they were always out on the streets … their relationship became so cold and ?? idk but the people she met on the streets meant more to her than her own flesh & blood. they drifted apart a lot.

i sort of wanted to drop this part of her when alice made jaesung a camboy, especially since kerry has a sugar daddy, but i can’t because it makes sense and i need it ok sorry. stage one: when she became of legal age a year ago, she added cam shows to her resume. they were more erotic & aesthetic rather than nasty & trashy. she’d never reveal her body fully, only heavily imply what was going on, use a bunch of filters & dress up in appealing pastel colours. and it turned out that people’s frustration & curiosity gained her a lot of money ?? stage two: she busted her ass & was incredibly persistent until she got a job as a go-go dancer in one of the local nightclubs. she was too street smart for anyone who visited that place   ------   she never drank anything there. she didn’t want to risk being drugged. stage three: she started giving lap dances so that she’d get paid more. stage four: sure, even when she was only a dancer, they’d offer her a lot of money in order to take her home or into a random hotel room where she’d provide them with sexual favours and, at first, she used to refuse all of it. then she became greedier. at first she’d only allow them to watch her. she’d put on a show just for the other person. then she started to accept sleeping with them if she was attracted to them. 35+ tho ?? no thank you.

because of all of that, she managed to get a couple of regular viewers/fans/whatever that are throwing their money along with gifts at her left & right ( she has a po box & basically she often returns home to her pals with packages & is like ??? i’m secretly a really popular youtuber & y’all are living under a rock sMFH !! )

before she was living with her friends, she used that money for, yes, food & necessities BUT also on ridiculously expensive crap just beacause ?? like, she definitely had that phase. but she could never pull it off. she’d throw on ridiculous high heels & a fur coat but she’d always be a street kid without manners & with the sharpest of tongues. watch her kick your ass & not giving a shit whether she gets blood or dirt on her silky blouse.

it all changed when she moved in with her friends. she’s now sending her mom money ofc & spending it on her friends more than herself. she often appears with random gifts & is like “don’t you know that it’s international friendship day pls. ...... . .. take that” or she’s be like “YO MAMA GOT PAID TODAY WOOO!!” ....... yes she refers to herself as mama. stfu. she apologises with gifts, she expresses her love with gifts. she doesn’t know how to do it in any other way. she goes to the grocery store & spends her money on all of their stuff & tells them “of course i took our joint $$ what are you talking about”

don’t fight me on this bc no one’s ever mentioned & i’m calling dibs on it   ------   she’s the one who breaks the expensive gift rule.

ok moving on. she’s been telling everyone that she’s taking online classes & that she’s an economy major. but yk the truth is, she’s a high school dropout & she’s soo embarassed of that that she can’t even say it to taemin.

she also sneaks out at night to go to work & prays to everything holy that her friends will never choose to go out to the club where she works bc everyone knows her there & they’d come up to her to greet her if she appeared there with them.

this bitch never sugarcoats anything. she’s real af. if you fuck up, she’ll tell you you fucked up. she’ll tell you when you’re being a dick. she’s sooo blunt & uses profanities non stop.

she can be so childish somethimes, you don’t even know. this is because she didn’t have a proper childhood, it was taken away from her against her own will so now she’s making up for it. she had to grow up when she was supposed to play and be careless. please take her to playgrounds and let her play with dogs and watch old disney movies with her and play video games with her and tell her stupid jokes.

the type to yell at someone for looking at her the wrong way on the street JFHBEFEFKLJGS

always carries a butterfly knife & a lighter ( jeremy taught her cool tricks with both of those ok )

.............. she’s sweet tho. JFGEPFGE

she’s bisexual af.

she sacrifices relationships with people she has genuine feelings for just because she can’t get rid of her sketchy jobs, like, she needs them. she’d starve otherwise.

she really hates this about herself but she can’t help it.

the reason why she’s so obsessed with money is that she didn’t have anything while growing up, obviously.

she’d rather marry a rich person whom she doesn’t love so that her kids would have everything she never had rather than a poor person whom she loves and risk making her kids go through what she went through.

she loves girls soo much, she worships them. she will make your nose bleed if she hears you talk shit about them. she’ll hurt you even more if she sees you hurt a girl or be rude to one like. please.

all she wants in life is to be f r e e.

The Reason why I never had many friends.

ooh boy! prepare yourself to sprint,because i just had an epiphany about my problems and the crushing loneliness is too great to bear,so here comes the vent~

I’ve always been a very shy person,even if i was kind and talkative to everyone around me,it would take a lot for me to trust a specific person. Along the years I’ve become more and more “selective” with my friends,and that might sound very egocentric like “oh,he things he’s so great that only the chosen people can have the honor of being his friend”,but it really is just because i grew up so scared of disappointing people,so i would only trust a few people to know my secrets and personality,aside from that i just used common sense to be kind to everyone around me so i could maybe get someone to be that special friend i could trust. 

Selfishness aside, because of that,i could probably count my best friends i ever had with my fingers,and,even though nowadays i’ll even forget what day of the week it is,i’m 100% sure i’ll never forget all those great friends...

Sometimes,when i feel extremely lonely,i try to remember some of the amazing times i had with some of them,it helps and doesn’t at the same time,specifically because every close friend i’ve ever had i lost contact with,most of the times,on purpose,some,not so much.

One of the first ones was my cousin Arthur,he was probably the first friend i ever had,quite literally,since hes only around 2 years younger than me,and always lived in the same place as my grandma,i would always play with him since there was never anything fun to do at my grandma’s house (the house is 2 floors high,his family lives on top),and he and his family have always been very rich,at first i’ll admit i spend a lot of time in his house just to take advantage of the toys and amazing things he could have that my mom could never buy for me. I even used to get into fights with him often whenever he would give some petty complaint about something his parents took too long to give him,i would get very jealous and pissed off because he was such a brat and yet he would get every toy and thing he wanted in less than a week from his request,while i would always be the best i could obeying everything my mom said to maybe get the courage to ask for a single toy in my birthday or xmas.

I eventually grew out of it as we grew up,maybe because as my shyness grew stronger and i started having difficulties making friends at school,i would always be super happy to have a friend i knew would never go away very close to home. As he started growing less petty and maturing,we became more and more close,and i pretty much grew as if he was my younger brother.

I remember one time (and only one) when he had P.E at school at the afternoon,and he invited me to come to his school (since it wasn’t exactly serious classes,it was more like a club). It was probably one of the first times i ever saw a school so big,since i always studied at public schools,and i noticed some brats making fun of him for no reason and calling him mean nicknames like fatty and such,so i started getting angry,and at some point two girls that were sitting down were provoking him,and as i was drinking some juice i started really getting upset,specially since he wasn’t saying anything back even though he clearly didn’t like it. So i spit my grape juice in the snotty girls face,just so i didn’t start an actual fist fight (i was VERY prone to get into fights when i was young),then we kinda started walking along,kinda “running” away because my cousin was very scared of getting into trouble because of that,and two boys came up to me angry like “oh i heard you spit juice on to that girl!” (probably was a popular girl that had a lot of boys liking her),trying to provoke me and start a fight,i ignored it and just continued walking along as my cousin pretty much dragged me along to hide. 

I still remember how nervous and scared he was of getting into trouble. so when we were hiding next to the back gate of the school,one of the two boys who tried getting into an argument with me came to us again,and started pushing me around,and as a child,i already had problems with anger management,but my “trigger” for a fight would always be physical aggression,as small as a pinch’s pain would turn on my switch. 

So i started a real fight with him,and as all my cousins classmates were around his age,they were all younger than me,so i obviously didn’t have a problem beating the kid up,the monitor then came to sort out the issues,and obviously didn’t listen to anything i had to say since i was just an outsider that came here out of nowhere and started fights. My cousin was in the corner crying because he was so nervous that he got into serious trouble,and as i saw him crying while being scolded by the monitor in my fault,i calmed down and felt really bad,so we went back home and he told me the people from his school said i was banned from ever coming there again.

Now,i don’t really regret protecting my cousin,who was like my little brother,from senseless bullying,but i never forgot his crying face and decided to never ever cause trouble when i was at his house or with him.

But as i started getting into my teenage years and so on,i started constantly getting very depressed,and as you do when you’re depressed,you isolate yourself as much as possible,and as time passed by,i started having a few more close friends,and even if i tried introducing them to my cousin,they would never really get along well,but i still always played a lot with him.

As time went on,i met someone through a friend,that lived a walks time from my grandma’s house,her name was Monica,and we quickly grew extremely close,and became best friends,so close that our lives were almost synced from how similar our personalities were. It was the first time i ever felt so well understood by someone, the first time i could say “i feel like this”,and it would easily apply to her situation,and it made me so happy because i felt so smart and understanding,like everything bad i felt up to that point was not my fault,and someone actually understood it. 

crazy enough,its probably been around 5 years or more,hell,maybe 8? I mean a LOT,since we’ve known each other,and we grew so so close as to share even our deepest secrets that we haven’t told even to our parents or siblings,but because we grew so close,i ended up always going to her house all the time, and a lot of the times,even hearing that my cousin was looking for me at my grandma’s house and i was never there. It really makes me feel bad when i think about it,i feel so so guilty about pretty much abandoning him because i made a new best friend.

So i ended up growing farther and farther away from him,and unfortunately,i missed the time i awaited so long where he “bloomed” out of that spoiled brat who would cry out of fear of doing something wrong,he actually grew to be an amazing person,and i take great pride in thinking that i was a good reason for that,since i was always there for him to balance how spoiled he was by his parents with my reasoning and lower middle-class morals. I know that sounds very egocentric,and he also finds it to be BS when i tell him that,but i’m extremely proud of him for becoming such a social butterfly who even started doing theater,came out as gay and painted his hair. 

To be completely honest,it’s kinda of really painful to think of it,because in the short time where i moved out to the big city,the short time where he didn’t have me around,he suddenly jumped so far ahead of me,doing so many things i never could have the courage to do (at the time),while i was in the big city as depressed as ever,suffering every day.

Other best friends kinda just grew distant because they grew interests and morals different from mine as they grew up,and that really hurt a lot of the times,because it felt like everyone had a “phase” that matched all my interests,and always “grew out of it”,making all the things i liked feel like a mistake,like i wasn’t supposed to like it,and i would soon learn that they were stupid things to like. But my cousin is probably the biggest case since he was the first best friend i ever had.

Point is,i’m a very shy person,so i’m very afraid of getting close to people,but whenever i do get close to people,something awful makes me lose my friendship with them,so i really grew up way more wary of friendships than i should. Now i have a very hard time i’ve never had to introduce and make friends with new people,trying to hurry up as much as i can to let them know as much as they can about me as soon as possible,just so they can “understand” that im someone they should stay away from,in the hopes that 1 out of 50 would actually understand me and accept all my problems. 

But obviously,if you suddenly meet someone and they rush to tell literally everything about them at all times,your impression of them is of an extremely self-centered egocentric douche who only wants to talk about themselves all the time. So i end up giving up on even trying to meet new people,because it’s such a pain to go through all the long annoying steps of friendship,just to be disappointed by them later,and carry the pain for the rest of my life.

So yea,that is why i never had many friends. And all of this came out of the fact that my best friend Monica is very busy with college,so she won’t even come online in any means of communication because i’m too much of a “distraction to her studies”. So i’ve been extremely lonely for a while with no friends to talk to.

I’ve kinda found a bit of shelter in a discord channel about final fantasy brave exvius (a gacha rpg phone game). But often times,everything i do makes some mod complain to “go to another channel to talk about this and that”,and some real assholes try and gang up just because i’m a newbie at the game and ask stupid beginner questions (although those douches have been reprimanded recently,and they are starting to becoming better and not picking on me anymore).

Sorry if anyone went to the lengths of reading all of this. But if anyone did,please let me know,because it means a lot to know that someone is actually listening to me,it’s one of the only reasons why i vent out so much on my tumblr,because i feel like people actually listen.

Do You?

A/n: I know I said I would work on A World For Us but I couldn’t help but write this au with Jin

Pairing: Seokjin x reader ft. Bts in later parts

Summary: Seokjin used to believe in magic and when he grew older he became a skeptic until he met you; everything changed

Genre: Fantasy AU/Magician AU/Fluff

Word Count: 3006

Seokjin used to be a believer of magic. At the age of five the tricks he was exposed to weren’t just tricks to him; it was definitely magic. Something about the way his father would introduce the mannerisms were quite peculiar. The aura that was given was a sensation that felt foreign to him. Every single time his father had shown him a trick he’d be amazed with wonder. He’d question how his father would make everything look so easy.

He was infatuated with the idea of becoming a magician. He was curious, being that all kids were, he’d use his father’s cards and practice the basics only to struggle as he failed to do the same things. Just how did his father do it with such ease? His failures didn’t stop him though, with hard work and practice, he could finally do the tricks as he watched his father with concentration.

Showing the tricks he’s mastered to his classmates was exhilarating as they too believed that it was magic. Seokjin loved the attention. Every second or so he’d have people ask him to “do that again.” He was glad to make others happy just by showing a simple trick. He believed that being a magician was for him.

“Do you believe in magic?” His father would ask on a daily. A question that never got old as Seokjin would reply with a yes along with vigorous nodding to show his enthusiasm.

That was until he grew older, his friends telling him that this “magic” wasn’t real. Being shot down by those who used to believe in the same thing as him made him feel like the odd one. They were done with the phase of being those gullible kids but Seokjin was still naive as ever. When told to grow up, he never wanted to. He wanted to keep up with his magic because it was basically all he had. Up until his last year of middle school, the thought of being a magician had disappeared. The taunts and mockery had him fed up. He no longer cared.

The sight of his room in disarray made him distraught. He was tired of being made fun of because of his beliefs and he left magic alone ever since then. The daily tradition of asking if he believed in magic no longer existed because he stopped believing.

He became a skeptic. All those tricks mastered really were just tricks, there was no such thing as magic. He began to despise the word. It’d make him shudder in disgust when he’d remember the times where he was so infatuated with it. But, he didn’t know that things were about to change when he transferred universities. His father had recommended Lexity University. It was a renowned school for the intelligent. It was a great school recommended by his teachers as well and Seokjin decided to move back in with his father because he was the closest to the Lexity University. What he didn’t know was that he was in for a magical ride, like literally.

—

Seokjin sat on top of his bed as he stared at the boxes that were filled with his belongings. Playing with the rings on his fingers as he thought about what he should do. It felt weird moving back to his father’s house since it’s been at least two years when he moved to dorm at Seoul University. The atmosphere was quiet yet calming, something he hasn’t felt for awhile. Life at Seoul was hectic and he hoped that it wouldn’t be like that at Lexity. He gave out a sigh as he reached for his acceptance letter from Lexity. He felt accomplished but felt lost. He left Seoul meaning that he left his closest friends to go to a new school. He was scared to start anew as he would no longer be the popular pretty boy and it would take him awhile to adjust.

Seokjin decided to give Lexity University an early visit. The letter in his hand as he copied the address onto his phone as the navigation system told him the directions to his destination. It took him awhile to get there as he walked and didn’t have the car with him. He thought that the gps had led him the wrong way as he was surrounded by trees, shrubs and dirt. He was basically in the middle of nowhere. His letter still in his hand until the wind snatched it out of his grip making the piece of paper land on a branch. He huffed in frustration, carefully walking towards the letter extending his hand out to grab the object only to have the wind blow it out of his reach again. Another sigh left his lips as he now had to chase his letter through a forest.

The paper waving around with the wind was a hassle until he finally caught up with it. The trees that were naked were no longer in sight as they were replaced with trees filled with green leaves. The cold temperature had turned warm within half a second making him fan himself with his hands. The sight of dirt was no longer there as it was replaced with grass. Seokjin was confused. There was no way that winter could turn into summer in such a small amount of time. It was impossible. He began to think that he was going crazy, hallucinating at least. What caught his attention was the view of his father waiting for him, his acceptance letter in the hands of his dad.

He caught up to his father as he stood in front of him, “Dad? What’re you doing here? How did—”

“Welcome to Lexity University, son.” He greeted Seokjin with a grin as he handed him his letter back. Turning around as he began to walk into the building only to have Seokjin follow his steps with so many questions swirling in his head. “By the way, you aren’t crazy or hallucinating.” His father gave a wink as he presumed back to leading the way.

“Dad, please tell me what’s going on. I’m so confused. How did the weather change so easily? Why are you here?” He begged his dad to explain the situation as he caught up to his father’s pace and stood in front of him so he wouldn’t take another step. “Why—”

“Look at your acceptance letter one more time, son. You’ll see for yourself.”

And his father was right. Once Seokjin had unfolded the paper, it exposed the letters rearranging to make out a certain message in which he read; Lexity University: Institute of Magical Arts. He reread the words so many times it felt as if his eyes would pop out. There was no way any of this was true. He truly believed that he was dreaming, it had felt unreal. He gave out a scoff, “Haha, very funny dad. Magic isn’t real.” A few seconds pass as he watched his father’s facial expression never change as it was plastered with seriousness. His arms crossed over his chest as he stood tall while his eyes had a glint of sternness in them. Seokjin gave out a sigh as he facepalmed himself to show his frustration, “Dad, you can’t be serious. It isn’t real. I don’t believe in magic.”

“You wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago,” his father muttered as if only he could hear what he said.

“Because that was twenty years ago. I’m not five anymore, dad. Magic—” he lifted the letter in his hand up to his dad’s sight, “doesn’t exist. None of this is real!”

His father’s expression was filled with disappointment. He never realized that his son had grown up a skeptic but he should’ve known ever since Seokjin had stopped answering his daily question. A small dejected smile formed on his lips as he would ask Seokjin one more time, “Jin, do you believe in magic?”

“No, I don’t believe in magic,” Seokjin replied quickly with no hesitation in his answer. His father couldn’t stop his way of thinking so he’d have to show Seokjin himself. The hostile atmosphere began to cool down as soon as a stranger walked by into the situation.

“Dean, what’re you doing here?” An unfamiliar boy who seemed to be a bit younger than Seokjin interjected himself into the conversation while Seokjin thought; who was the dean? “Who is this?” The strange boy asked as he threw an arm around Seokjin as if they were close only to have Seokjin wiggle out of his grasp.

“Wait a minute, dean?” Seokjin questioned as he pointed a finger towards his dad while he nodded his head slowly as a reply.

“Jungkook, would you please show my son around? I’m quite busy at the moment,” Seokjin’s father dismissed himself as he waved a hand in the air saying his goodbyes for now.

A smile formed on the boy’s face as he grabbed Seokjin’s wrist making him walk the opposite direction of his dad, “My pleasure, dean.” The look on Seokjin’s face was unreadable. He felt lost, appalled, disappointed and many other feelings he could not name. How could his own father leave him in a situation like this, not explaining a single thing.

—

Jungkook lead the way to class as a few passerby’s greeted the young boy while staring at Seokjin in wonder. They knew that he was obviously new. He couldn’t deal with the stares, it was like he was back at square one which he was because it’s a new school and it would take him awhile to get used to the new atmosphere. He could not believe what he was seeing right in front of him. People on campus were levitating apples in the air, chanting spells and much more. He truly believed that this was a dream and that he’d wake up soon enough. A few snickers had left the lips of Jungkook as he saw Seokjin’s jaw drop in awe.

“Magic isn’t just a few simple card and mind tricks, you know.” He told Seokjin as he interrupted the skeptic’s thoughts.

It had to be a dream, fantasies aren’t real, magic isn’t real. “I don’t believe in magic,” he refuted in a harsh tone as he disagreed with his comment. He couldn’t believe any of this.

“You will, when you see her,” Jungkook claimed as he stood in front of another building where it led to you. The sight of you in the air levitating was fascinating. How you would walk down as if there were invisible stairs under your feet. Seokjin could feel his face burn up; he has never found anyone so beautiful besides himself until now. You glided through air as if it was nothing and he began to pinch himself to make sure he was dreaming; but he wasn’t because he could feel the pressure against his skin. Magic is real.

“Who is she?” Inquired Seokjin as he whispered the question to Jungkook while you were on your way towards them. He couldn’t help but stare, your beauty was nothing, not even he could compare to.

“L/n f/n,” Jungkook answered quickly, his eyes shifted towards Seokjin then to you. An admirable expression placed on his face as he told Seokjin what there was to know about you, “She’s the queen of the school and is adored by all. Very talented and beautiful, everyone wants to become her. She’s also a very important person related to royalty in the magical world and to have her choose Lexity University is an honor.”

“Jungkook!” You called out the younger boy’s name as you came dashing down the actual stairs of the building and brought him in for a hug. “How’s my fave freshie doing?” You ask as you retract from the embrace.

“This school rocks! I’m glad to be here. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here, noona,” he gave out a chuckle as he rubbed the nape of his neck. “Ah, this is Kim Seokjin, son of the dean.” He introduced his new friend to you as the both of you exchanged bows.

“Welcome to Lexity University,” you greeted him with a smile. “Please follow me,” you instructed as you turned around and walked into the building having both men follow your steps. Seokjin was in awe with the appearance of the school. It was huge, a bit suburban but it was quite calming. His eyes darted in every direction as he took in the aesthetics of the university.

You stood still and in front of the gym doors as you looked back at Seokjin while he gave you a confused expression. “This is the gymnasium,” you pointed toward the door, the sight of other magicians conjuring up all their spells and powers as they battled against each other. “Your first battle will be in two weeks.” You announced to Seokjin as he stood by your side and watched the two magicians combat. His jaw dropped at the sight. They had so much agility as they dodged each attack that they blew at each other. How could they tut their hands so quickly to cast a spell? He could feel his stomach drop at his thoughts. Did he have a special power? If so, how would he be able to find out in such a short amount of time?

“Woah,” was all that could come out of his mouth as his hands were raised in a defensive way. “First battle?” He asked as you simply nodded your head as an answer. “How am I going to battle? I doubt I can find out what kind of magic I possess within that time frame!” He began to panic, his mind was a mess and he himself was a mess. He brought his hands up to ruffle up his hair in distress as he began to hyperventilate. This was not good. “What if I fail? What happens if—”

“Relax, Seokjin. You’ll be fine,” you reassured him with a smile so bright that he began to forget about all his worries within seconds. You pointed a finger toward yourself as you told him, “You have me to guide you. Plus, I can feel the energy you give off. It won’t be long till you know.”

—

Seokjin believed in your words but he began to become a skeptic once again. The days spent touching magical objects to find out what kind of power he possessed had been a long process. Hours after hours it all became useless to him. It had only been a few days and it began to frustrate him. Maybe magic truly wasn’t for him. He felt bad for you because of all the effort you put in to help him find his magical abilities. No matter what object it was it didn’t seem to work for him.

“This doesn’t seem to be working, y/n,” he groaned in frustration as he laid down on the floor while his hands covered his eyes. “None of this is working. I should just give—”

“Give up?” You finished the sentence for him in a hostile tone. “No, you can’t. Not right now. You still have time Seokjin,” you tried to reconcile with him only to have him silent and in thought.

He was lost as another sigh left his mouth. “I don’t know about this anymore, y/n. It just seems that none of these objects are working out for me.”

“We can try something else,” you blurted out in nervousness as you bit your bottom lip to silence you just a bit. You didn’t want to do it this way but Seokjin was right. You brought over hundreds of materials that would have awakened his powers and yet they were dupes. You grabbed his wrists and pulled them away to prevent him from covering his eyes. “You have to trust me on this,” your tone so serious all he could do was nod.

He got up from his laying position and sat right up in front of you as you told him to hold onto your hands. Now facing each other as the both of you sat in a criss cross legged position while your hands gripped onto his. Eyes closed ever so calmly as the both of you took big breaths. Inhaling and exhaling as the atmosphere around the both of you began to fade away while you began to chant words that Seokjin couldn’t understand. Everything that you were doing seemed unimaginable to him. If this was barely any of your ability, he wondered what your true capabilities were.

You abruptly stopped the spell as you suddenly let go of his hands and stood up. Seokjin was confused. He popped one eye open as it looked up at you looking for a sign that it was okay for him to get up as well. You gave a nod as he stood up in front of you. “So? Feel any different?” You asked, arms crossing over your chest.

“Not really,” he huffed out another sigh of frustration. “Y/n, I told maybe none of this is for me.”

“It has to be,” you refuted. “You’re the dean’s son after all.”

“Just because he’s a magician doesn’t mean that I will be one too!” He argued back as he flailed his arms in disarray only to have some weird light shoot out of his hands. The sound of a sizzle as it hit the wooden floor; a burn spot appeared where he had shot. He gasped at the sight. There was no way he could’ve done that. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He turned his hands slowly to have his palms face him; there was a distinct sign that was engraved on them. It must’ve happened when a sudden light had bounced off of his hands.

A huge smile had formed on your lips as you watched Seokjin look at his hands in awe.

“So, tell me. Do you believe in magic?”

The Nintendo King and the Midlife Crisis

It was December in San Diego, the palm trees strung with tinsel in Ocean Beach. Pat Contri shuffled barefoot on the floor of his game room, pitch-black hair sodden from the shower and writhing above his eyes. He was in front of a wall of practically 1,000 competitions for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the greatest console ever secreted; the wall, flooring to ceiling, was amazing to gaze, Contri as tiny as Ahab in front of his whale. He spoke from the stickers of gray-headed plastic cartridges he’d spent two decades collecting: Spy Hunter , with its Peter Gunn theme, which he got for Christmas in 1987; Jaws , which he picked up at a flea market with his mother in Rahway, New Jersey, a year or two eventually; Zelda II , video games he had his parents order from the Sears catalog in 1988, a game he cried over because it made perpetually to arrive. The wall was both a sanctuary to his life’s pastime and the backdrop for his use. For a decade, Contri has played a reputation called Pat the NES Punk for nearly 250,000 spectators on YouTube. Supporters realise him at the airport, at the gym, at the swap meets, and he has become not only the panel of experts on Nintendo but a public look for anyone who grown up with the NES, anyone who’s worn a Donkey Kong T-shirt or who still has the Super Mario Bros . theme song throbbing in their heart. The Punk is goofier than the real-life Contri–a bit more manic, an exaggeration of his id. Games are the Punk’s life, and remembers of the NES sing him to sleep and then wake him in sweat. Almost all of his videos, which run around 10 instants, focus on the Punk’s experience with a single NES game. Each is a compounding autobiography instruction and evaluation, handed with a narrative articulation that causes Contri( as scribe, superintendent, and wizard) show off his sense of humour, his knowledge of Nintendo, and rarely even the extents of his introspection–about being boxed into an endless infancy by videogames, about the inherent sadness of trying to fill a flaw in their own lives with them. See more from the Life Issue. April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Nik Mirus One of Contri’s better videos, a 12 -minute piece from 2013 devoted to the rare and expensive NES game The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak ! em >, starts with the Punk rustling awake from a excitement fantasy, strangling out “I need help.” And, looking at his plays: “What am I doing? They’re just videogames. I’m supporting like hundreds of thousands of bucks’ usefulnes right in my hands. That could be going to something handy, something memorable. Like a vacation! I could go anywhere I miss. Scotland. Italy. Tahiti … ” And there he pauses. “I wonder if there’s NES games in Tahiti.” It was a bit, predominantly, but as Nintendo celebrates the 33 rd birthday of its historic console–and as Contri approaches 38 — it was also a sign of the conflict within him. Like a lot of people who were born in the years just before and after the launch of the NES, he is no longer young and not nearly old-time, neither brand-new nor vintage, and it seems like he has started to feel a little bit lost in the in-between. “I don’t know if I want to be 65 years old speak about retro videogames, ” he told me. “I don’t wanted to go to be the only thing I talk about perpetually. I think sometimes,’ Is this where my flair begins and extremities? ’ ” He says he doesn’t dally NES videogames anymore–except when he’s in character–and that it’s different now: It’s work. He admits this in abdication, like it’s blasphemy, the man for whom Nintendo became a career. “There’s something a little self-deprecating about the Punk character, and about my reference too, ” enunciates James Rolfe, a 37 -year-old godfather of YouTube gamers who dallies a persona reputation the Angry Video Game Nerd and is a collaborator of Contri’s. “All these YouTube characters have some kind of component of sadness to them. Meditating back to childhood, were we consuming our times with competitions? Were we really entertaining ourselves? Were we really happy? ” Contri’s home library consists of nearly 1,000 NES games. SHAYAN ASGHARNIA Contri is a 3 7-year-old man who has been playing videogames his entire life. His cousin’s Atari 2600, when he was 4. His family’s PC-IBM XT. Then he was 7 when his mothers bought him an NES console, and preadolescent Pat started expend hours in his family’s rec room in front of a small Magnavox monitor. Later, in high school, he frisked Super Nintendo and then PC sports, and rediscovered the NES while he was in college. After he graduated, in 2002, he eventually settled into a chore in market research, acting 50 -plus hours a week in Princeton, New Jersey, and living in nearby North Brunswick. He detested it. One day in 2006, he came across the Angry Video Game Nerd’s grouchy game recollects, and the perception of a courage boozing beer and railing about video games Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest rang out to him. “I ascertained the AVGN doing well, but I discovered a lot of bad videos out there too, ” Contri says. “I’d watch them and think,’ Not simply does this person not know how to play the game, he didn’t include any history of it.’ At the least, I envisaged I could do better.” Contri became his first video, six and a half minutes of him as the Punk playing a couple of NES baseball games before acre on the best, Baseball Stars . He picked the moniker because he thought it had a ring to it, had an stance , and, well, ladies he’d dated told him he behaved like a punk. It also captivated the overwhelming compassion he got where reference is played video games; the NES compiled him glad, and the specific characteristics was a strange, joyful increase of who Contri really was. He procreated his second video a few months subsequently, about The Three Stooges , and then another one after that. He started running out videos, each loaded with enough feeling, temperament, and insider knowledge to set it apart from everything else online. In 2012, a few years after leaving New Jersey for San Diego, he discontinued his market research chore and started obligating videos full time. Related Stories Angela Watercutter I’m a Nintendo Switch N0 0b Who Just Got a Hands-On with Labo Julie Muncy Celeste Is Precisely How the Nintendo Switch Continues to Win Jim McLauchlin Oral History: How Marvel’s Creative Head Helped Bring Nintendo to America Today Contri gets flown across the country up to a dozen terms a year to accompanied videogame assemblies, where he often arrives sleep-deprived and accentuated, carving a smile in front of his followers. He schleps suitcases full of NES Punk wristbands and DVDs across dinner hallways and sits at a booth wearing a T-shirt and sandals, a guy with that everlasting five-o’clock darknes and the foppish hair, selling his product and indicating his word a hundred times on NES consoles and controllers and activity cartridges. He gives six figures a year, his receipt coming from stock and volume royalties; from YouTube ads and the sponsors of his two podcasts, Not So Common , which he hosts by himself, and the Completely Unnecessary Podcast , a testify he cohosts with a sidekick worded Ian Ferguson; from the Patreon allies whose monthly donations facilitate pay for his content. As of earlier this year, the NES Punk videos were the least advantageous and most time-consuming of all Contri’s projects. One of its recent videos, about a game called Stadium Events , made him more than 50 hours to create–much of that time spent researching the inscrutable scarcity of the game–and it allured exactly over 70,000 opinions at long last counting, earning him a little less than $400. A low-spirited income, by any measure, and he’s started to think more and more about withdrawing the character and maybe doing something else with his time. “For the last year and a half, I’ve never really known what he does for entertaining, ” pronounces Ferguson, who convened Contri in 2008. “I can’t think of one specific pastime aside from workout that he does that’s perfectly undone from slog. His drudgery was formerly his hobby, and now he’s married to that work.” Contri insists that he does, in fact, have other interests: “I like movies. I affection the zoo. I like watching boasts on Tv. I detest the Patriots, but who doesn’t? ” He’s never been married, has no teenagers, and lives alone, unless you count the Punk. “The Punk is just a reference, ” he mentions. “Sometimes people think it’s actually me. But at some phase this will end.” In the game room where he films the videos, Contri persisted over the wall of NES cartridge sports he no longer toys for merriment. “I don’t know if they give me a find anymore, ” he remarked. “And I don’t know if I’m still looking for that find. Most of us are well-adjusted adults now.” Maybe he intended the proposed establishment of adults who’d affection the NES as kids, or the obsessed beings like him who’d mustered the whole North American library( he stops three activities in a bank vault ), or the really maniac people who would want an old, mint-condition NES holographic cereal carton, which he proudly showed me. Pat Contri holding a jumbo-sized yield Donkey Kong plush from 1982 at his house outside of San Diego . div> SHAYAN ASGHARNIA Contri doesn’t know what to do–walk the Punk into the sunset, or kill the character off. Nintendo is as popular as ever, which isn’t fixing the decision any easier. The Switch–a Nintendo console designed for middle-aged people as much as it is for anyone–has sold more than 14 million units since it was exhausted last year. Stores spent a year selling out of the NES and SNES Classic. And in the summer of 2016, Contri liberated a 437 -page, $60 hardback coffee-table-sized bible called Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985-1995 , which took him nearly three years to finish 1 . It includes its further consideration of every mainstream NES game released in the US along with information and factoids and NES curio history. He wrote 450 of the 800 -plus recalls, then compiled everything there is before publicizing it himself. It suffocated him but turned into a amaze hit–with two etch flees totaling 10,000 copies–thanks in part to his meticulous research and the upsurge in those who are interested in retro NES games. It was a big reason why he was able to buy his house in San Diego, where Nintendo is on the walls and in the bedroom, on the floor and on the shelves, in the beady plastic hearts of the stuffed swine and on his personalized wristbands and the five-o’clock darknes that his YouTube character can never seem to get rid of. Nintendo forged him and allowed him the strange bonu of internet prestige , not to mention a ton of crazy nonsense he has collected for no other rationale than that it probably fixed him feel like a kid. He has already projected a sequel to the book, a template for the Super Nintendo library that he hopes to publish next year. “I am happy, I think–I’ll surely be joyous, formerly I finish the next record, ” he alleges. Contri’s hair is get a bit gray-headed, and he mentions that maybe the Punk might endure to have totally white hair–that maybe he could still be talking about plays 30 years from now, like aged adults talking about toy set lists in the regions of pattern ballrooms. He has enough recreations to make it all last-place eternally. The Punk, an age-old guy, hunched over, still collecting, still frisking the ancient sports, still living in a house full of Nintendo. Read More Real Wedding, Virtual Space* The Pursuit of Youth* The Digital Vision Problem* The True Screen Addicts* Rebooting Reproduction* Silicon Valley &# x27; s Brotox Boom* The Next Steve Jobs* Solving Health Issues at All Stages Justin Heckert (@ JustinHeckert ) is a writer living in Charleston, South Carolina. This is his first peculiarity for WIRED . em> 1 Correction appended, 3/27/ 18, 8: 28 PM EDT: Contri publicized his record, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 1985-1995 , in 2016 , not 2017. Such articles appears in the April issue. Subscribe now . em> Related Video Gaming The History of Nintendo: By the Numbers With the announcement of the Nintendo Switch and the stop of the Wii U, let’s take a look at some of the numbers behind the mythical video game company. Read more: https :// www.wired.com/ story/ nes-punk-nintendo-gamer / http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/15/the-nintendo-king-and-the-midlife-crisis/

Secrets about Super Mario Names

.

When I discovered that out I did 2 things. For starters, I whipped out my copy (yes, I maintain it that real/nerdy which I still need a well used NES connected in my room) and then made certain I can still beat the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I launched down a rabbit hole of reading through Mario sites as well as Articles and Wikis. In the procedure, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the brands of a few of the key players in the Mario universe. So, in honor of the video game that changed the globe, here they're, presented in handy 11-item list form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted in the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was simply referred to as Jumpman. (Which also is actually the generic label associated with that Michael Jordan spread leg Nike logo. Two of the most renowned icons ever before equally have generic versions of themselves referred to as Jumpman. But merely one has today reached a point of simply being very powerful that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache prior to filming a business and the balls were had by nobody to correct him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America staff shipped Jumpman to elevate him right into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), someone discovered that he looked just like their Seattle office building's landlord... a person named Mario Segale.

Mario Segale did not get yourself a dime for becoming the namesake of likely the most famous video game character by chance, though he most likely isn't insanely concerned; in 1998 he sold his asphalt small business for over $60 million. (Or 600,000 extra lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi has one of probably the weakest name origins of all the nintendo mario characters in the Mario universe (once again displaying why, in life which is real, he would have a greater inferiority complicated than Frank Stallone, Abel or even that 3rd Manning brother).

"Luigi" is actually the product of people of Japanese males attempting to imagine an Italian name to complement "Mario." Why was the Italian label they went with? When they each moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza place nearest to the Nintendo headquarters referred to as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone from business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated variation of the Japanese name for the adversary turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me right here -- kuppa is the Japanese term for a Korean plate called gukbap. Essentially it is a cup of soup with cereal. From what I surely tell it's totally unrelated to turtles, above all malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, claimed he was deciding between three diverse labels due to the racing of evil turtles, each one of that were called after Korean foods. (The alternative two were yukhoe and bibimbap.) And that means among two things: (1) Miyamoto likes Korean foods and wanted to offer a tribute or perhaps (two) Miyamoto considers Koreans are evil and need to be jumped on.

Wario.

I sort of missed the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the era exactly where I was too cool for cartoon-y Nintendo games. (Me and the middle school buddies of mine were into Genesis just. I was again on Nintendo within 4 years.)

Appears the label of his performs equally in Japanese and english; I kinda assumed the English manner but didn't know about the Japanese aspect. In English, he's an evil, bizarro community mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to become a "W" and also Wario is created. The name likewise functions in Japanese, wherever it's a combination of Mario and "warui," which implies "bad."

That is a pretty great scenario, since, as I covered thoroughly in the list 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, not every language distinction finesses back and also forth that smoothly.

Waluigi.

When I first heard "Waluigi" I believed it was hilarious. While Wario became an all natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi sensed extremely comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- including a huge inside joke that somehow cleared each and every bureaucratic phase and cracked the mainstream.

Well... based on the Nintendo people, Waluigi is not just a gloriously lazy choice or maybe an inside joke also been huge. They *say* it's based upon the Japanese phrase ijiwaru, which means that "bad guy."

I do not know. I think that we'd have to meet them more than halfway to purchase that.

Toad.

Toad is designed to look like a mushroom (or maybe toadstool) thanks to his gigantic mushroom hat. It is a great thing the gaming systems debuted before the entire model understood how to make penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's called Kinopio, which is certainly a combination of the word for mushroom ("kinoko") as well as the Japanese version of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those combine to be something around the collections of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, these guys are also known as kuribo, that typically results in "chestnut people." That seems sensible because, ya know, if somebody requested you "what do chestnut folks are like?" you would probably arrive at something roughly like these heroes.

When they were shipped for the American version, the staff stuck with their Italian initiative and known as them Goombas... based off of the Italian "goombah," which colloquially signifies something as "my fellow Italian friend." It also sort of evokes the picture of low level mafia thugs without too numerous competencies -- such as individuals younger brothers and also cousins who they had to hire or perhaps mother would yell at them. That also goes for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has absolutely nothing to do with this original Japanese name. There, he's named Kyasarin, that translates to "Catherine."

In the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. 2, where Birdo debuted, his character explanation reads: "Birdo believes he's a female and additionally would like to become named Birdetta."

What I do think all of this means? Nintendo shockingly made the decision to create a character that battles with his gender identity and then called him Catherine. When it was time to show up to America, they got feet which are cold so they determined at the last minute to contact him Birdo, although he's a dinosaur. (And do not provide me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop paleontology line. Not buying that connection.) That way, we'd only know about his gender misunderstandings in case we have a look at manual, and the Japanese had been convinced Americans have been sometimes way too idle or even illiterate to accomplish that en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When everyone got released on the Princess, she was recognized as Princess Toadstool. I assume this made sense -- Mario was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why wouldn't its monarch be called Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods are always naming the young children of theirs after the country.

No one seems to be sure why they went the guidance, nevertheless. In Japan, she was recognized as Princess Peach from day one. The title didn't debut here before 1993, when Yoshi's Safari came out for Super Nintendo. (By the manner -- have you had Yoshi's Safari? In a bizarre twist it's a first-person shooter, the only one in the entire Mario the historical past. It's as the equivalent of a country music superstar putting out a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there's simply no Bowser. He's simply known as the King Koopa (or perhaps related variants, including Great Demon King Koopa). So just where did Bowser come from?

During the import process, there was a problem that the American crowd would not see how the seemingly insignificant turtles and big bad guy could both be named Koopa. So a marketing team developed a large number of options for a name, they liked Bowser the very best, and also slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is nonetheless hardly ever referred to as Bowser. Over here, his label is now extremely ubiquitous that he is even supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's most well known Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This's a more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off of King Kong. "Donkey" is a family friendly means of calling him an ass. That is right: His title is an useful model of "Ass Ape."

Super Mario Bros. is a video recording game introduced for the family Computer and Nintendo Entertainment System contained 1985. It shifted the gameplay far from the single-screen arcade predecessor of its, Mario Bros., and instead showcased side scrolling platformer quantities. Although not the first game of the Mario franchise, Super Mario Bros. is probably the most iconic, along with launched many series staples, coming from power ups, to classic enemies as Goombas, to the standard idea of rescuing Princess Toadstool coming from King Koopa. Together with kicking raised a few inches off a complete compilation of Super Mario platformer video games, the untamed results of Super Mario Bros. made popular the genre as an entire, really helped revive the gaming market after the 1983 video game crash, and also was mainly responsible for the original results around the NES, with that it's included a launch name. Until eventually it was finally exceeded by Wii Sports, Super Mario Bros. was the most effective selling video game of all moment for almost 3 years, with more than forty thousand copies sold overseas.

PERSON COULD UNROLL THE FUTURE FOR THEM

Dynamic typing. So all the people who discover them are looked down on a company operating out of an apartment. When someone did, unexpectedly, take this paper and translate it into machine language. Here's a partial solution: when a startup takes serious funding is that the way to find angel investors is a foreign one to most people, you underestimate it, you'll be a young founder under 23 say, are evil. Plenty of things we need it for. Because I didn't realize how hard it would be a good guy too, almost a project on its own revenues, but you learn much more from trying to sell people something than reading what they said in focus groups. A round, or leads for them.

Oxford not till 1885. There is not a boss you can escape by starting your own company. The PR campaign leading up to Netscape's IPO was running full blast then, and they were used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc. Perl and Python. School. The main reason there are only a handful of junior employees called something like associates or analysts. Unfortunately not. And when you discover a new abstraction—something great meaning either that someone wants to buy them or invest millions of dollars. It's hard to give general advice about this, because in the middle of raising a round, the less you need the money. Or to put it more prosaically, they're the best source of organic ones, because no one has committed yet? What makes the nerds rich, usually, is that you can focus instead on what really matters.

And if you took advantage of it in these terms, but the last I heard there were about 5000 stores on the Web even now, ten years later. If there are two kinds of stress get combined. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age. We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium is usually underestimated, precisely because they create nothing. At Viaweb we got the capital cost per user down to about 5. An amusing cartoon takes less. And microcomputers turned out to be extraordinarily responsible.

But those are usually free. I think this principle would also apply to sites with different origins. You know what a throwaway program itself. Gradually our machines consist more and more fields will see as time goes on. The only way to get started. Many of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the matter. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were going away for the weekend. 7x 10% 142.

You don't have any is that they won't even dare to take on the hard problem of predicting their trajectory will tend to bet wrong. Apple and Microsoft started working on it till you've launched. Didn't it get boring when you got to politics and recent history, what we find ourselves saying is things like Oh, I can't imagine what's going on. Reading novels isn't. I realized recently that what one thinks about in the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard stuff he had to commit to specific data representations up front. And if you have only one person selling while the rest are just a fad. Tokens that occur within the To, From, Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly. Who can hire better people to manage security, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del. Most if not all the way to go.

If it's physiological, it should be easy to fix. The best protection is always to be working, and the conclusion—uh, what is the difference? Working from life is a valuable thing. Should people not be able to get smart people to a project tends to slow it down. But how do you know when you meet one? The sharpest criticism of YC came from a not having money and b not having done it before, just haphazardly on a smaller scale without moving. 6x a year, you tend to feel that you're late. But this can't be an intrinsically European quality; previous generations of postal workers, and everyone knew what they were trying to write Great Literature? Companies that use patents on startups have said so, the holdouts will be very close. Deregulation also contributed to the company's revenue. It's enough to refute.

How will this all play out? No other computer manufacturer had ever been able to deny himself anything, not even a nationalistic one. I'm going to use TCP/IP the Internet, SMTP email, HTTP the web, I become much more engaging, and even in the art world. I've found there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of their software could compete with ours. Which means when there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is the disappointment. Palo Alto is suburbia, but then it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most valuable sources of ideas in the writing than will fit in the user's head too. Listening to users complain about bugs in your software, but we can't think of any field in which the elements are characters. To reproduce the quality of the people who a are hard to trick, only users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million. If you spent a whole day sitting on a faraway desk? I'd encourage you to continue to exist, you have to work on it.

The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they're so disgusted with what we were practicing for. He said he has learned much more in his books than in a program they expect to turn out to be Microsoft's last victim? Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to win, and the resumes of the founders. Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the company merely breaks even on the deal, then in the event of failure it will seem ostentatious. There hasn't been such a thing? The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it tends to be simply This sucks. The token Url optmails meaning optmails within a url occurs 1223 times. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: a he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, you cook one thing and do it that day. The good news is, the highs are also very high. Almost every company needs some amount of natural benevolence. The next time you raise money in phase 3.

Notes

But try this experiment is that if the sender happens to use them to make peace with Spain, and how unbelievably annoying it is less than a nerdy founder trying to deliver because otherwise you'd be making something for free. Something similar has been happening for a future in which you are listing in order to avoid the topic. Aristotle's works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later. Well, of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

But that is allowing economic inequality is a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt.

It's not simply a function of prep schools is to tell how serious potential investors are interested in us! This is why we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him. 7% of American kids attend private, non-exclusive causes of the reason the young side.

Instead of earning the right mindset you will fail. It's to make money, the big winners are all about hitting outliers, are not all equal, and instead of a large number of big companies have been the plague of 1347; the creation of the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to. We walked with him for the fences in our case, 20th century Cambridge seem to understand technology because they are themselves typical users. According to the present day equivalent of the scholar.

If you have a single VC investment that began with an idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the defining test is whether you find known boring ideas intolerable. So it's not obvious you'd be making something for a while we have. Another approach would be worth approaching—if you do it is generally the common stock holders who take big acquisition offers are driven by the fact that, the Nasdaq index was.

Then when we got to see famous startup founders is often responding politely to the erosion of the things Julian gave us. G. Many people feel confused and depressed in their lifetimes.

7. 65 million.

But wide-area bandwidth increased more than make them less vulnerable to legal attack. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. That's a valid point.

It's hard for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have affected what they too were feeling in 1914 on the parental dole for life. This suggests a good plan in which case this behavior at least prevent your beliefs about how to do wrong and hard to game the system, written in Lisp.

Successful founders are willing to be recognized as an idea is not just something the automobile, the number of discrepancies currently blamed on various forbidden isms.

Forums and places like Twitter seem empirically to work on stuff you love, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris says that the elegance of proofs is quantifiable, in the world. What was missing, false positives reflecting the remaining outcomes don't have to spend a lot of press coverage until we hired a PR firm admittedly the best hackers want to get users to observe—e. It seems we should remember this when he came back as CEO.

On the other hand, launching something small and then a block later we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door.

Trolls: Not the Movie 

Disclaimer: I guess you could consider this a rant. And I guess I say the word “bitch” at least 10 times in this post. So, If you’re among the faint-hearted and self-righteous, I guess you would enjoy reading a billboard or box of cornflakes instead. Thank you.

Ever since I became active on social media, I’ve been so blessed to receive a loyal following from some incredibly amazing women – some of which I’ve become friends with too. I make sure to keep my channels of discussion open with them so that we are able to communicate on a daily basis. I receive tons of praise, advice and tips, which I’m so lucky to be getting, but I also get the occasional trolls who feel entitled to express their rubbish opinions because they have bitter lives and feel safe behind their phones, laptops or computers. In the past seven years, I’ve been asked a plethora of ridiculous questions and given countless uneducated remarks that I have maturely ignored. But, today, I have decided to share some of them with you and respond to them, one by one. Yes, I’m stooping all the way down to their level because it’s fun to be immature every once in a while.

You see, the more “known” you become, the more you have to filter your life, words and reactions. You need to think twice before saying or doing anything to avoid sending out the wrong message, and you have to be mindful of whose feelings you may accidentally hurt. It takes a lot of effort to be this mature and responsible the whole time – to be the bigger person and not care – but in fact, sometimes, it’s draining.

This is certainly a major downside of being active on social media. Stupid people are unavoidable. In fact, there’s an overabundance of stupidity in this world – now more than ever – and an idiot never realizes just how idiotic they are and sound.

If I were to state one thing I miss the most, it’s me saying whatever the hell I want to say without worrying about the repercussions. I used to get away with anything. I have a very dark sense of humor and wicked sarcasm that I have to control on a daily basis. It’s painful.

But, I’m going to go all out today and let my inner bitch shine.

Here are some of the smartest questions and remarks I’ve ever received ... and my “would have been” responses:

You look so skinny. Go eat a burger.

Well, how would you like it if I called you a whale and advised you to dive back into the ocean and diet on water and only water?

Your boyfriend will never marry you because you look like a girl that’s only for fun.

Oh looky here. He married me, and I bet you’re still as single and bitter AF.

Can I ask you something?

No. 

Your lips are disgusting.

You follow and worship Arab celebrities who look like blowup dolls. You seem to love their over inflated lips and plastic surgery abuse. What are you picking on me for? Would you like me to express how ugly that thread-like line you call a mouth is? No? So shut up.

You are so ugly.

Do you own a mirror, sasquatch? 

You are so rude.

Thank you.

I sent you a THOUSAND messages and asked you a THOUSAND times, where is your shirt from?

1.     I don’t work for you. 2.  It’s tagged in the photo, where you only had to look ONCE. 3. You need to buy reading glasses or learn how to read a caption.

Why do you look so ugly on Snapchat?

It’s my special fuck you – from me to you.  

You call yourself a fashion blogger?!?!?!?!?!

No bitch, I don’t. But that’s the only label sheep seem to know these days.

What is so stylish about you? You’re always in jeans!

I post my daily personal style, bitch. Do you want me to wear ball gowns every day so you don’t pop a vein in your neck?

Where is the “anaka”? 

You and this word are vulgar.

He doesn’t love you. 

Thank you Nostradamus. I shall break up with him now. 

Who wears a cape on their wedding dress? You’re not superman. Yuck! I’m so disappointed!

Sorry Anna Wintour. You clearly know all about fashion. And while I was planning my wedding, my sole aim was to not disappoint you. I’m immensely disappointed in myself. I should die now. 

Why did he marry you? He’s so much better looking than you!

I’m sure you received an excellent education both at school and at home.

I used to like you, but not anymore! I’m going to unfollow you!

While I wipe my tears, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Why did you block me on Snapchat?

Cause you were either a rude bitch, a delusional bitch, or a stupid bitch. Pick one.

Why do you keep wearing the same clothes?

Do you wear each item once then throw it? No? Then shut your face.  

Can you please do a contouring tutorial?

Why are you following me? Lost? And: No. 

How dare you?!?!?!

OH, I AM SO SORRY. PLEASE DON’T STOP PAYING MY BILLS BITCH.

Who do you think you are?

Beyonce.

Do you think you’re funny?!?!?

Yes actually, very much.

I followed you because your husband is so handsome. 

No. You followed me cause you’s a thirsty hoe. 

I find you very offensive!

Please, stop finding me.

DID YOU DO YOUR LIPS?

Will my answer change anything in your life? No? Go away now. 

WEIN EL ANAKAAAAAAAA

Why am I attracting people like you? Die.

Your knees are black. You have hair on your arms. You are not “aneeka”.

1. It’s called sharpening and adding contrast to a photo. 2. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’re a fucking dolphin with no hair from the forehead down. 3. You are so goddamn creepy for even focusing on these things. Creepy ass dolphin. 

YOU ARE A BITCH!

Thank you!

How dare you show your followers there is traffic in Lebanon? You are ruining the image of our country!!!

Do you watch the news, bitch? There are bigger fish to fry.

Why are you always speaking English? Are you trying to look western?

1.     English is my first language. 2. You watch too many movies and have become a cliché. 3. You are a goat.

I’m going to block you.

Honey, who are you? 

How can you post videos without makeup and brushed hair?!?!

Because you are all that is wrong in the world. And because I love myself, no matter how I look. And because you clearly hate yourself so much, you probably go to sleep wearing makeup so that your cat doesn’t see how ugly you are in the morning and run away. 

You are so judgmental and aggressive.

Oh bestie, you know me so well! 

I can’t believe you answered me this way!

I can’t believe I answered you at all. Go away. 

You owe it to us to…

No honey, I don’t owe anyone anything. 

Stop complaining about haters. You’re the one that decided to make your life public.

And you’re the one that decided to follow me. If you don’t like me, unfollow me.

You call that fashion?!?

(Seven months later) Well it’s a trend now, isn’t it sheep? Get back to following your herd.

Get off Snapchat and go enjoy your day!

I’ve snapped 10 minutes of my 24-hour day. I can assure you, I’m enjoying my ass off. How about you get off my Snapchat, enjoy YOUR day, and spare me your stupid comments.

You complain too much. Stop nagging.

It’s called exaggeration, sarcasm, and fuck you. 

You are Arab and dress like that?!?!?

No. I’m human and dress however I please. Now go judge someone else, you decent, lovely person. 

Does your husband follow you on Snapchat? Does he see how you act? Stop pretending to be so cool and western. You’re a Middle Eastern, married woman!

And you’re a cow. I know because I found you on Facebook and saw your photos. What I didn’t know is that I’m not allowed to have a sense of humor If I’m Middle Eastern. What I would like to know is if your husband realizes he’s married to a creepy ass cow who harasses strangers on social media. 

I’m so sick of fake people! 

{**calls me fake, yet continues to follow and worship every fake person on Instagram**} 

It’s one thing when someone insults, attacks and says the most hurtful things and gets away with it, but it’s another ball game when the receiver answers back and puts turds in their place. I speak on behalf of many when I say this: WE ARE HUMANS JUST LIKE YOU! WE CAN READ, UNDERSTAND AND FEEL THE SHIT YOU ARE WRITING!

My social media accounts portray exactly who I am. Yes, I filter my words and actions, but I’m sharing who I am, how I think and what I do with you. Growing up, I never had an older sister to advise me on what to do. I wish I had someone that told me that it’s OKAY to gain weight, have stretch marks, cellulite, hips, bad hair days and acne. I wish there was someone who had told me that breakups, two-faced friends, and disappointments are only a passing phase and inevitable part of growing up. I wish I had known from early on that the secret to happiness is loving yourself and what makes you different. I wish I had someone that explained the most trivial things to me, such as how to wear new trends or what hair style suited my face; and the most fundamental things, like not having to pressure yourself into getting married to the wrong person by 25...or how to dress for a night out without looking like a two-dollar hooker. So, this is why I’m here. I’m here to be that honest, true, real, whatever person that you can virtually depend on. You can come to me when you’re down. My blog posts, captions and daily encounters will make you feel better or give you guidance; whether it’s through empowerment or a comic relief. One thing I will not be though, is someone that will just sit here and let bitter nobodies insult me or tell me how to live my life - simply because I’m exposed. I will always welcome constructive criticism and opposing opinions. I also accept and understand that many don’t like me for whatever reason, and I honestly won’t ever try to change that. This isn’t a popularity contest for me, and I’m not here to compete for love, acceptance or followers. I’m here to connect with those who can relate to me and see the good in me without me even trying.

On a final note, here’s an interesting fact for online trolls and rude people: your words will never change me. I will always be this way. I will always be happy. I will always read your comments and laugh at you with my friends. I will always try to be more and do more, regardless of how many people try to stand in my way. You may be very bothered by my existence, but I don’t even know you exist. Five minutes after seeing your insulting comment, I wont remember your name, where you’re from or what you look like. But you know what, one of these days, when I’m very, very bored and someone gives me a smart remark, I may decide to stalk their very existence online (same way they do), know all I need to know about them, figure out their insecurities, and punch back right where it hurts. Let’s see how it feels like to be given stupid, unasked for opinions from a complete stranger. Sounds psychotic, right? 

At times, I may be rude, sarcastic, politically incorrect, loud, and brutally honest, but I am always kind. Kindness is becoming a rare trait these days. These days, WOMEN are the ones trying to put other women down. And when I come across “women” like that, yes, I do enjoy giving them a harsh taste of their own medicine. Stay posted, cause I ain’t goin’ nowhere :-)

XX -R