#since this is getting traction for anyone seeing this later this was posted like an hour before the stream. like Hold hands while waiting
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hold hands, everyone. one last time.
#wilbur soot#tommyinnit#dream smp#mcyt#crimeboys#wilbur soot fanart#tommyinnit fanart#dream smp fanart#mcyt fanart#crimeboys fanart#c!wilbur#c!tommy#c!crimeboys#alex.arts.jpg#god. im not ready#i SPEEDRAN this while looping eight by sleeping at last. this gives you an idea of where my emotional state is at#GOD please click on it tumblr killed the quality#but yea.#god i love those stupid guys <33 not ready for it to end#since this is getting traction for anyone seeing this later this was posted like an hour before the stream. like Hold hands while waiting
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Okay, I obviously made the above post as a leetle joke, but since it's getting not insignificant traction, I do want to offer a more serious note.
I love this about Arthur. It's probably my favorite thing about him, but let me use this fresh new RDR2 meta post to clarify exactly what I mean. Despite the aspects of his personality & appearance that are traditionally hypermasculine, and despite how often he is annoyed with people (especially incompetents or people who meddle with his plans), Arthur is decidedly NOT annoyed by the social performance of femininity or by traits that are/were frequently stereotyped as feminine. Ever. Regardless of subject. I might go so far as to say he seems to canonically prefer hanging out with women and with "feminine" men.
Your long-winded, bullet-pointed analysis is below!
The Girls. Most noticeably, Arthur actually sits down to talk with and actively confides in the camp Girls (Tilly, Mary-Beth, Karen) more than anyone else around. These three are the most traditionally "girly" (single, 20s, active, pretty, unattached, highly social, feminine, chatty) members of the gang, though of course they are still criminals and don't perfectly adhere to all period-typical standards of feminine comportment.
He doesn't mock the girls** like he sometimes does with other auxiliary members of the gang (like Uncle and Pearson, playful or not). Notably, he doesn't even gently tease Mary-Beth for writing her "silly" romance novels, a highly feminized hobby which she speaks about in a self-depreciating manner, much like Arthur speaks about his own artistic hobbies. Rather, he talks to her about writing like a peer and encourages her to write more by going out of his way to get her a nice pen.
Crucially, there is no canon romantic or sexual interest in any of the girls on Arthur's behalf. He just feels the most comfortable in their company and seems to value their advice/opinions on life the most. To me, this is much stronger proof than his forever-burning torch for the cultured & ladylike Mary, which is (or was once) rooted in romantic desire.
** Unless the player persists in Antagonizing them, and these lines (while sometimes shockingly cruel and offhandedly sexual in nature; see Arthur teasing Tilly about pursuing Javier) are largely about goading them for laziness or, in Karen's case, her alcoholism. That said, many of the Antagonize lines strike me as clumsily tacked-on & poorly rooted in canon, which could indicate: (1) an Arthur who is deliberately trying to be disruptive (a generous interpretation), or (2) writers instructed to add throwaway content that will make a certain type of childishly misanthropic gamer (think 13 y.o. boys) squeal in glee with relatively low impact on the overall story.
Campmates. Following the above point... who doesn't Arthur hang out with much? The manly men of the gang; the very people social mores suggest he ought to be hanging out with. Bill, Micah, Joe, Cleet, and even Dutch. (To some extent, this includes John and Sean, but I'd say John sort of lives at the edges of gang life anyway, and Sean is, well, Sean.)
Conversely, which male gang members does Arthur hang out with a lot? Sweet little bookish Lenny, a wordy, positive-energy, breezy intellectual who has just barely become an adult. Introspective, soft-voiced, long-haired Charles, who is traditionally masculine by some standards (strong, usually calm, can be standoffish) but decidedly NOT so when his appearance/demeanor is judged by the white Christian American male standards that began to dominate masculinity concepts in the later decades of the 1800s.
Algernon. Oh, my, Algernon. Arthur clearly dislikes Algernon's fancy, loud, outrageous clothing. But weirdly, he seems to like Algernon, not just tolerate him. Arthur in fact goes through significant personal discomfort to avoid hurting Algernon's feelings (the awful hat, the POST.MAN. sobbing), and he immediately says yes to having tea with him without any awareness of a coming business proposition, though half the time Arthur clearly has no fucking clue what Algernon is talking about. I am left to conclude that on some level, he just enjoys hearing Algernon talk, which is word-for-word what he says while listening to the Girls argue about romance novels ("I just like listening to you [all] talk." Hello????).
I mean, for God's sake, he meets the man while he's choking to death on a nut at a fancy party, and the second thing Algernon does is tell him he looks like a guy who wears a corset. If anything was going to set off the boiling defensiveness of a dude who worships masculinity, thirty seconds with Algie would have done it.
Margaret, Mistress of Fucking Danger. It's pretty clear Arthur doesn't like Margaret. But that has little to do with Margaret's femininity & cross-dressing (this doesn't faze him at all when Charles Châtenay does it; more on that below) and everything to do with Margaret's deceptiveness and highly selective memory. It's not until the bullshittery unveils itself that Arthur starts getting visibly pissed off at Margaret. Conversely, Arthur does seem more positively disposed toward Sally Nash. (That said, this quest has a lot of problems and poorly aged lines that are depressingly easy for a politically motivated jerkoff to soundbite and miscast as Rockstar being pro-bigot. Cue 800 heterobnoxious gamerbro ARTHUR MORGAN ULTIMATE ANTI SNOWFLAKE SIGMA MALE OF THE WEST YouTube videos.)
Albert, my beloved. Rather than goading him to man up, Arthur tries to persuade Albert (whom he very obviously likes) to pick safer animal photography subjects, e.g. horses, and doesn't insult him for his lack of wilderness knowledge (an aspect of traditional manliness that is highly relevant to Arthur's lifestyle). You'd think he would tear into him for this shortcoming, given that they share so many of the same interests and passions, and IMO his genuine eagerness to serve as Albert's protector and facilitate his art is highly convincing evidence that Arthur does not necessarily view masculinity as a net positive.
Arthur is a basic goddamn boyfriend-hater. He pretty much harshly disapproves of every husband, boyfriend, male partner, etc. in the game and is very, very vocal about it... except one extremely unlikely candidate: Beau Gray. Weak, dandy artist Beau Gray, whom Arthur takes one look at and promptly hands the only gun to Penelope. Arthur is curt and impish to Beau at times, but helps him in his relationship troubles willingly (without collecting repayment), and seemingly for no other reason than the fact he can see that soft, fearful Beau is genuinely head-over-heels in love with Penelope.
Is he projecting his own young love for Mary onto them? Maybe/probably, but Beau could not possibly be more different from young Arthur, and Arthur seems to believe this difference will make him a good husband for Penelope. A good husband, in Arthur's view, seems to simply be a man who ardently loves his beloved, regardless of his ability to provide for/protect her, and whose only goal in life is to live that life at her side. This is completely antithetical to mainstream late-1800s views on what constitutes a good husband and what it means to be a man.
Châtenay. Arthur shows us some of the most obvious delight and mirth he experiences in the game when he's hanging out with Charles "Allo Boys" Châtenay, who is straight up in drag a third of that time. This baffles Arthur a little, but doesn't disgust or repel him. I've written about this mission elsewhere at greater length because it is one of my favorite disasters, but it's worth mentioning here too.
Trelawny. Arthur clearly enjoys Trelawny despite his grumbly claims to the contrary. Most of these "claims" are just Arthur's established way of affectionate teasing (he does much the same with Uncle and Pearson, both of whom he genuinely likes). His authentic gripes about Trelawny are all about a perceived flightiness/lack of loyalty to the gang, not about his flamboyance. And even these gripes are half-assed, in Arthur's usual way.
Bluegills & Daisy Chains. One of the most genuine moments of softness we have with Arthur in RDR2 is when he takes Little Jack out of the camp to go fishing. Arthur's usually a much truer version of himself when he doesn't have to play the Big Bad Gang Lieutenant role, but this moment of escape is especially important, and not just because Arthur reveals his fondness for children and his natural understanding of how to talk to them.
I notice this: Arthur tries to gently teach Jack about fishing, and Jack is completely fucking uninterested. Jack prefers to make flower chains for his mommy. Arthur doesn't scold him for his drifting attention or his lack of attraction to masculine past-times; on the contrary, Arthur goes out of his way to encourage and protect Jack's natural sweetness and innocence. That's a wild stance for a murdering outlaw to have re: the "next generation" of his family. Hell, I've encountered far too many 21st century dads in my own family who flip their shit when their tiny sons prefer hanging out with women & partaking in "womanly" hobbies like art, cooking, and flowers rather than hunting and fishing.
"...and be a god damn man." This seems like classic masculine bluster on the surface, but what does this keynote line mean in the context in which Arthur says it? Well, it's complicated. This statement serves as (a) Arthur's goodbye to John, (b) Arthur's final call to action for John, and (c) Arthur's last wish for his brother's life. But it certainly does not mean standing and fighting or being tough; i.e., "dying like a man." In that moment, it means abandoning all masculine bluster and revenge fantasy, and running away: leaving violence and fighting and brotherhood and all that crap behind to simply be there (alive, present) for your wife and son.
The Best Women People. Who are the best people Arthur knows, by his own crystal-clear declaration? Abigail and Sadie. Sadie's a rough-and-tumble, super-violent gunslinger and Abigail's a stubborn thief & a former sex worker (in the time Arthur has known her), but they are also, critically, two wives: the most traditional feminine role for a woman of the time period (and indeed perhaps most of human history once the concept of "wife" subsumed that of "mother").
It's also important to note that Arthur doesn't truly give up on Dutch until Dutch abandons Abigail, which serves as Arthur's point of no return. The other men left in the gang at this point specifically note that she's "just a woman" and not worth going back for. Arthur is straight-up shocked by all of this; he obviously considers her among the most worthwhile and value-having members of the gang, and certainly one of the most core members of the gang. Without any hesitation or doubt, the instant it's clear Dutch is cutting Abigail loose, Arthur declares: "That's that, then."
tl;dr: Arthur unironically prefers hanging out with women and queens and I love that for them.
#rdr2#arthur morgan#red dead redemption#i promise to wait an appropriate amount of time before hurling another one of these massive essays at you tumblr#redmeta
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IMPORTANT (PLEASE READ)!!!
Hello everyone! I hope all of you are having a good day so far, first off. I know the booping around here has been fun! Normally I would do some silly little roleplay event around this time, but…
I’m afraid that I have to shut this blog down, likely for good. I’m very sorry to all of you who enjoy it and read it, and I am sorry that you’ll never see it’s conclusion. But this blog has been going on for about two years now? And only recently got traction last December, with the event. As much as I love the event, it was a spur of the moment thing. I didn’t have a set storyline for it, and that was my fault. Now, months later, the storyline is stuck.
When something like losing motivation for a project happens, I tend to simply…never touch it again. I don’t want that to be the case for this blog. In the beginning it was very infrequent posting, and I had been debating on deleting the blog back then.
I know most people and interactions are only because of the event, and that’s great! I’m OK with that. But my ideas are running short and I can’t think of a way to continue it. And I can’t just pretend that the event never happened and go back to how the blog was beforehand.
I know I can’t keep going with this blog as a whole if I can’t continue the Citizens event, so I decided to either scrap the blog or turn it into something else entirely. Since no one I know is in the Hatchetfield fandom, the idea of passing this blog on is impossible. If anyone wants to take this event and make it their own on their blogs, I’m giving you permission. I know how many people want to see it continue.
The point of the event was for them to make it to high school, and they haven’t even done that. I’m sure someone out there can write it better than I can.
This blog has been a big part of my life these past four months, and I am eternally grateful for all the amazing people I met along the way. Maybe I’ll make another Lords in Black blog down the line if I get my motivation back. It’s been fun interacting and reblogging with all of you either way. I’m hoping I can do so again in a different context.
I’m either deleting it or changing it come tomorrow. Either way, all the posts on here will be gone. Please do save any that you particularly liked.
I’m hoping that I’ll see you all again. I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you enough for this.
-Sweetie Mod
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Hi, I have a question, point me elsewhere if you’ve answered it :) but how do people like Steve and hiloy get access to these songs, and how are they legally allowed to have them? How was anyone able to sell Taylor’s unreleased music? I would guess they have no legal right to that and that Taylor would be able to use her resources to stop it (again in a legal sense). How does that work?
Oof, this is gonna be another long answer, just as fair warning:
So the way that I know Steve got a hold of songs was a little different than everyone else these days, because he was sort of the "founder," if you will, of the Swift unreleased world. He had connections to a lot of people in the industry, and started collecting back in either '07 or '08, right when she was really gaining traction, before the release of Fearless. He was able to get his hands on several old demo CDs, and then started a resource site known as Dark Blue Tennessee, or DBT.
This was before my time, so the info I have is a little shaky at best, but apparently that site started a bunch of drama because he started giving songs away to his trusted companions, and then made a big stink when the songs started leaking and took down DBT. A couple years later, he came back with a new site, Taylor's Inner Circle, or The IC. This one hosted descriptions of all his collection, as well as songs that were registered under Swift's name but hadn't fallen into his possession yet. The IC was up when I first got into the trading world, so I have vivid recollection of checking it almost weekly to see if there were new updates. It was also kind of a sore spot in the fandom, because despite its being a useful resource, a lot of people felt that it was more of a "bragging rights" situation, as anyone involved in the site would hype up a song to the nth degree and then chastise you for even ASKING about the POSSIBILITY of buying/trading for it.
I'm skipping a lot to try to keep this short (and also because it's been over a decade of nonsense so it's kind of hard to keep track of it all), but The IC was up and running until 2020, when Steve leaked info that hinted at Swift making new music, specifically, giving the description of a cardigan as a nod to the song with the same name. Shortly thereafter, we all kind of assume he got caught by Swift's team, because The IC was taken down, and no one has seen hide nor hair of him since.
On the subject of legality--none of this is legal. Unless you have a physical copy of the demo CD, you should not be in possession of any unreleased songs. Period. And even then, you're not supposed to share them. Any sale or distribution is actually incredibly risky. It's just that at this point in time, it's been going on for so long, it's really hard for companies to mitigate or shut down the activity, especially when a lot of it happens in places that aren't necessarily publicly accessible (like through email or physical hard drive sharing). It does happen though, as you can see if you take the time to read through the group buy drama I posted about.
Basically, you get unreleased songs either from an old demo CD, through hacking, or through knowing someone, and it's quite illegal, but there's not much that can be done once it hits the public domain. All they can do afterward is play clean-up.
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If I was given the option to time travel, I would go back to around 2016/2017 and make a spn fan blog on tumblr. Maybe one on Instagram too. After spending a few months making mutuals and getting followers I'd make a post with my predictions about the spn finale and just give a complete rundown of the actual finale. I'd probably make a separate post predicting Nov 5. I'd make sure to repost them to the Instagram account and like save the page in the wayback machine and everything to make sure that there's proof the posts weren't edited later on. The posts probably wouldn't gain much traction cause the idea is so outlandish and not what anyone would want to see but that's OK. I'd then time travel to like December 2020 and on my actual tumblr, search up the spn blog, find my predictions, and reblog them like "hey guys what the fuck." And then when people search into it, they'll find all this proof that these were real posts from like 2017 with no changes since. And I'll be specific enough in the original posts that the idea of it being mere luck that I guessed it all is completely ruled out and everyone is then forced to believe that time travel exists and the only known use of it was to predict the ending of a CW show.
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Continuation of the idol au. 🐝 anon… get ready babe
(Posted under this since it’s long ☺️) part 1 of 2
⚪️Gen 1⚪️ 90s- early 2000s
⚪️ICEE was an OG idol group made up of the Tsaritsa and 6 others who are now pretty much nameless. She outshined her fellow group mates to the point where she left her group and company to be a soloist in another company (the same that owns HARBING3R). She is more business oriented now and doesn’t really sing much anymore but does plenty of public appearances. She’s fantastic at marketing bro damn!! An amazing asset to have on your side. She worked her way up enough that she had/has a LOT of control over marketing for HARBING3R and FAiRLADiES. She is stil engaged in marketing (and even recruiting!) for new groups under her company’s name
⚪️M4GIC was a group of four. The group gained pretty much no traction but that’s where Alice debuted! She later did a lot of solo work and had 3 hit singles in her 5 years of being an active idol. She’s more family oriented now and spends most of her time with her daughter Klee. She sponsors her step son, Albedo, who is currently an idol. She is often pictured taking Klee to his group’s concerts! She also posts on her twitter about him whoever she sees him on TV or on posters
🔴Gen 2🔴 2000s
🔴HellBringerz was one of the first big groups in Teyvat. Made up of Pantalone(vis, dance), Capitano(lead, rap) and Dottore(vocal/dance). At the time, they were fresh out of college and scouted by a brand new company that literally needed anyone. The trio wrote and produced a big hit seemingly out of nowhere. Once their popularity surged, their manager, Pulcinella, quickly changed their name to a more appropriate ‘Harbingerz’ (which was again later changed to ‘HARBING3R’ after the trio claimed to fucking hate the Z at the end). Think of HARBING3R as a SHINee/Super Junior sound-alike, their signature sound is that classic early 2000s bass and extreme auto tune. HARBING3R has gone on many hiatuses but have pumped out 17 albums in their 16 years of activity. Pulcinella wanted the group to try to appeal to a wider audience so, he threw 2 new trainees in there without announcing it to the public, thats where Kuni and Ajax got their start. They only remained in the group for 6 months before leaving the company to join other, newer groups. Outside of HARBING3R comebacks, Dottore owns a private practice, Capitano is casted in action movies and Pantalone does his own solo music that has a… more mature theme…(he also does audio porn under an alias shhh) They’re all older now but are dug up when The company needs money or there’s music award shows to attend. Even though we got bitches in their late 30s, you know their company is about to make them sing for a check babe lmao. They’ll squeeze dottores arthritic knees into leather pants and shove him out onto the stage they don’t care
🔴FAiRLADiES is a group put together by the Tsaritsa herself. Since she is so influential, she is pretty much a trainer. Arlecchino, Signora, Sandrone and Columbina were scouted and trained under Tsaritsa. They debuted a year after HARBING3R as their female counterpart. They share a company so, with Tsaritsa’s encouragement, they often but the two groups together for collaborative albums. While thinking about FAiRLADiES, I listened to AOA’s ‘Miniskirt’, which inspired the ‘mature woman’ visuals in the group. They almost exclusively wear black or silver along with high heels. They carry a serious air about them but fans get to see their goofier side when their company films their dance practices. Those dance practices are what really attracted fans. While their music is fantastic, getting to see these usually serious girls giggle and dance around made fans like them even more. The group has not officially disbanded but much like HARBING3R, they don’t do much together anymore. Signora and Columbina have moved onto a lot of solo jobs, Arlecchino has made her debut in a few romance movies and Sandrone has worked diligently on a fashion line, all pieces created by her alone. But of course, when they’re called back to perform together they do so happily, they’ve publicly stated over and over that they’re a very tight knit group
🔴☆YATO was a soloist with a sexy, mature theme. Bold leather outfits, smoky eye makeup, crazy hairdos (Taemin’s Lucifer hairstyle oh my god), platform shoes… he embodied the whole gen 2 aesthetic. Kamisato Ayato is a nepotism baby by definition, his parents were/are crazy rich with connections throughout the business and entertainment industry. When Ayato showed interest in being an idol, he was picked up by a company within a week with a contract, a big budget and lots of creative freedom. He didn’t write his own songs, in fact he later admitted to being unable to read music at all but he could sing, he could dance, he had the energy and he had his good looks lmao. His parents, the ones who encouraged him to pursue being and idol quickly came to regret it as Ayato sang about seducing women and thrusted his hips on stage in front of thousands of people. They believed he was tarnishing their family name by acting this way. They gave him an ultimatum: he either got to continue being an idol with no shot at taking over the family business OR he could retire and have a guaranteed 25% of the company when he turned 22. He performed for the last time on his 3rd anniversary of debuting, apologizing to his fans and crying on stage in front of them. After his parents unfortunate passing, he took over the company when he turned 28 and now manages his sister, ☆YAKA(we’ll discuss her shortly). A second gen idol and a fourth gen idol in the same house? Oh god….
🔴Dr. BAi, Baizhu, debuted shortly after Ayato. He catered to a similar audience since his long hair, pretty face and strong vocals drew people in. He even collaborated with Ayato more than once. Baizhu was well known for his ‘Love Doctor’ album which was raunchy, dark and seductive. (Think ‘Sorry, sorry’ and ‘Bonamana’ from Super Junior cause those songs have a fuckin beat dude) He got some backlash for it, saying he was overly sexualizing doctors but he didn’t care cause he was going to be a doctor before he debuted, he was in medical school!! Dr. BAi had a sizable, dedicated fanbase. They were very invested in his personal life which got to be a bit overwhelming for him. He has an issue with his lungs which gets in the way of dancing for long periods of time. After facing criticism for being a ‘lazy dancer’ and having people trying to visit him at the hospital during his treatments, he sadly left the idol spotlight. He took some time off but later returned to appear on talent shows as a judge. People praise him for his kind and constructive criticism instead of bashing contestants on the show. Baizhu adopted Qiqi and provides a comfortable, loving life for her and his beloved pet snake Changsheng (Changsheng has her own instagram she’s kinda a celebrity herself)
🔴elec2ro is a still active duo comprised of Ei and Yae. They’ve steadily released music since they’ve debuted and while their release schedule makes it so the wait is LONG between albums/singles, their music is worth the wait. Think of how IU’s ‘Lilac’ makes you feel like that song is fresh and feminine, it’s just nice to listen to. That’s what elec2ro is. Their music is just nice to listen to and lacks the insane usage of auto tune like the other groups from this era. Ei and Yae were college roommates and they wrote music together just for fun. They submitted auditions to a few companies just for the hell of it, they were bored and had nothing else to do. Little did they know, they’d have 3 companies trying to grab them up at once! Crazy how things like that work. They refuse to do any jobs without each other, no solo work and no ‘one of you sing with this group’. They’re a package deal!! Always have been and always will be. They’re very active with their fans, they’re always retweeting fan art and setting up meet and greets with their own money cause they just love to travel and meet fans. Yae is the more social one between the two and Ei is a bit more reserved. Fans always try to get Ei to laugh and when they succeed, the whole place will erupt with cheers as they see her smile and laugh!!! so sweet. They’re not making new albums currently but they still release a solo song now an then, make plenty of appearances and interact frequently with fans online and in person
#idol au 💕#not tagging everyone but#genshin impact#genshin impact writing#genshin impact ayato#genshin impact baizhu#genshin impact dottore#genshin impact yae miko#can y’all tell I like super junior 👀#🐝. anon
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Senseless, Pt. 2
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Finally, three years later, I tested positive for COVID-19. Of course, I couldn't suffer alone, so @oftachancer humored me in inflicting the disease on Dorian so we could write Anders taking care of him (and falling in love). This is a 4-part fic which will post daily! You can follow the #senseless da fic to get updates. Written for @30daysofdorian!
I entered three separate rooms before I found the blasted kitchen. The man had two stoves. Two. Each one probably cost more than my car. And an entire walk-in refrigerator that was nearly empty. I could have fit my entire apartment in that kitchen, not even counting the fridge or the pantries. My little tub of Neapolitan seemed so lonely, sitting on its otherwise empty wide shelf. I stocked the groceries away, placing the various medicines I’d picked up in a line on the counter.
Something for the fever, the cough, the congestion. A veritable panoply of pharmaceuticals. I brought them back up with a large glass of water and a tablespoon, dragging a chair to Dorian’s bedside.
“How’s the patient?” I asked, as cheerfully as I could manage for two in the morning.
Dorian stared at me, bedraggled and somehow glamorous despite his red nose and the dark circles under his eyes. “My throat is staging a rebellion and the reading lamp is now officially too bright. How are you?”
“Tired,” I admitted, offering him pills and measuring out liquids. “But I’ll sleep after you do.”
“You’re welcome to the coffee. There’s a sealed container of a pleasant Antivan roast and a press.”
“Is this your way of asking for some?” I asked, tilting my head.
“It’s my way,” he paused to cough into a washcloth I’d given him earlier, “of offering you coffee.” He closed his eyes. “I’m quite capable of asking for what I want.”
“Good. Yes. Alright.” I glanced down at my hands. “I might make myself some, then.” I glanced down at the test waiting on the nightstand. Well. There was an answer, at least. “You tested positive, I’m afraid. But that means we know what we’re dealing with.”
“I followed all the protocols,” he sniffed, accepting the spoonful of cough medicine with barely a grimace. “I haven’t seen anyone but delivery drivers since the start of this bloody thing. Delivery drivers and one student, but we masked- Damn it, Colette.” He took the pills I handed him and the cup of water. “I should call and see how she’s getting on.” He peered at the pills. “None of these are the drowsy-making ones, are they?”
“The cough syrup is,” I admitted, “but you need the rest. If you try and work through this, it’ll take you three times as long to get over it.”
“…not work?” Dorian looked up at me perplexed. “What, at all? The virus knows if I’m thinking?”
“You need sleep,” I insisted, lifting my brows. “Much of the body’s repair mechanisms are most active during sleep. You should try to keep from doing anything strenuous, mentally or physically, for at least a week.”
Dorian continued staring at me, as though the sheer force of his personality might change the facts or at least my opinion of them. “…surely some activity is healthy. What am I meant to do? Stare at my ceiling?”
“Watch movies. Do a puzzle. Read something light, if it doesn’t make your head hurt.” I frowned. “It will probably only last a week, Dorian. What’s a week to a lifetime of working?”
It was as though I’d told him he would be in traction for months: the sheer horror in his expression. “I can’t be alone doing nothing for days.”
“…you need to rest. Really. It’s crucial.” I lifted my brows, then sighed. “…I don’t have another shift until Tuesday. I’ll need to leave to feed my cats but- I can stay with you if you-“
“Excellent, yes, thank you.” Dorian swallowed the pills and handed the empty glass back to me. “That would be best.”
“You really don’t like being alone, do you?”
Dorian shuddered. “I can’t imagine anyone does. This whole experience has been abhorrent.”
It had been for me, too, but for entirely different reasons. I felt like I’d barely been alone for weeks. I’d been looking forward to my three days off. Maybe I could rescue my poor, neglected herb garden. I simply patted the man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. It’s been hard on everyone.”
“Yes, of course it has. People put on brave faces; I don’t see why. It’s miserable being chopped off from the world without so much as a by your leave. I had appointments and events planned. There was a lovely little cruise to the Rivaini islands I’d been planning for months. Then some little beastie comes along and there's panic in the streets and silence. Silence, even when you play as much music as you can muster-” He broke off in a coughing fit.
I rushed to the bathroom to fill his glass with water again. A pitcher. I should find a pitcher next time I ventured off into the maze. I placed the cool glass into his palm, handing him a tissue to dab at his lips.
“You’re alright,” I murmured. “Maybe we should save the speeches for another time.”
Dorian nodded, grimacing, and cleared his throat into his fist. “I appreciate your presence,” his usually velvety voice scratched as he spoke. “…if you let me know what you need, I will… place the appropriate orders. Which- ah.” He rolled to the side, opening the drawer of the side table and returned with a crisp stack of cash. “There you are.”
“…should I ask why you have a bundle of money in your nightstand?” I stared at the bills, blinking. Maybe I should make more extracurricular house calls.
“One keeps these things around in case the need arises,” Dorian waved a hand wearily. “Was it more? I can forage.”
“…Dorian, I wasn’t planning on asking you for anything. The groceries were only about forty bucks.” This had to be at least five hundred dollars. “I really don’t need you to pay me for my time; I’m happy to play nurse for a little while-“
“Medicines and the like are quite expensive and I’ve been given to understand people are spending thousands for toilet paper. Take it. I’ll only use it as tissues.” He sighed, cuddling under his blanket. “Could you put another cloth on my head? That was nice.”
“Yeah. I can do that.” I sighed, shaking my head with a chuckle. Sweet, the way he hugged the pillows, his usually immaculate mustache grown in and smushed against the covers. I always tried to keep from having crushes on my patients, but I was only human. Mostly. In this way, at least. “I can even do a step better, if you’d like.”
“Oh yes?”
I nodded, wetting the wash cloth again. “Just scoot down a little bit so I can sit against the headboard. You can rest your head in my lap. Keep your tissues handy.”
Dorian opened his mouth and closed it, hummed slightly, and studied me. “That’s very generous. Although, I should warn you, if you don’t think that counts as a strenuous activity, I’m afraid you’ve been doing it wrong.”
I laughed, surprised, then rolled my eyes. “I was going to massage your sinuses.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard that euphemism. I did have a lovely tutor teach me to ‘play the flute’ when I was in secondary school.”
I coughed. That seemed like something to unpack when Dorian wasn’t on six different medications. Or to never mention again. “Oh, yes. Snot. The sexiest of bodily fluids.”
Dorian sniffled, blinking blearily. “It was your suggestion.”
“I meant it in earnest.” I laughed again, unable to help myself. “To help with the congestion. The massage,” I added quickly, “not the euphemism.”
“Ah, well. One easily trips into hope. A massage is also appreciated.” He shifted down the bed and looked up expectantly. “I was wondering what the tissues were for.”
“Dorian?” I asked softly, placing a pillow on my lap and running my fingers through his hair. I knew enough not to expect he’d feel the same after his fever subsided. Sickness could make a three look like a ten. “Ask me again in a week, if you’re still interested?”
He sighed under my hands, his silver eyes peering up at me. “Ask you… what, precisely?”
“On a date. Or a different type of massage altogether.” I smiled slightly, rubbing circles against his temples. “I’ve got a policy against seeing my patients, but since you’re not technically that- When you’re feeling better, if you still want to see me, I’m not saying no forever, just for now.”
Dorian’s brow lifted, his lips curling. “You can’t say no; I haven’t asked you anything.” He dabbed his tongue to his lower lip. “You can ask me, if you like. You’ve already turned me down twice. A third would be too much for my fragile sensibilities.”
“…twice?”
“Hmm. Yes. At Hawke’s Disco Ball and Varric’s reading. I’m not surprised you don’t remember. Insulted, but not surprised.”
“What, I-“ I stared at him, bewildered. Then frowned. “You were being- Oh.” Had what he’d taken for drunken jokes been- “You were talking about me?”
He chuckled, closing his eyes. “When I asked if you’d like to get a drink later? Did you imagine I was having a conversation with your shadow?”
“Excuse me, you didn’t use those exact words.” I lifted my brows. Something about how I’d intended to spend my evening? To which, like an idiot, I’d answered honestly: falling asleep to a tacky Wintersend movie with a bowl of ice cream. I had no idea he was even remotely interested in me. Why should he be? All he’d have to do is crook his finger and get anyone he wanted. “…I’m sorry,” I murmured, massaging the sides of his beautiful, beautiful face, feeling the heat rise in my own. “I didn’t realize.”
“Didn’t you?” He opened his eyes just enough that they were like mercurial crescents beneath dark thick lashes. “I’m rarely accused of being subtle.”
“Ah, well,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “I’ve always been a bit of a slow learner.”
“Unlikely.” Dorian watched me drowsily. “If you had realized… would it have changed your answer?”
“If I’d realized you honestly wanted to take me out-“ I met his gaze, as solemn as he’d been when he’d announced his impending doom. “I’d have said yes. I will tell you, though: I don’t really drink alcohol anymore. There are better ways to my heart.”
“Are there?” he asked, yawning into the pillow. “Like what?”
“The fact that I was the person you called when you thought you were on your deathbed.” I hummed, massaging the bridge of his nose, handing him a tissue. “Blow.”
He did, sighing pitifully. “The only other doctor I know is miserable and went into hiding a few years ago.”
“I suppose you’ll need to make do with me, then.” I squeezed his shoulder gently. “How’s your breathing, now?”
“I feel like I swallowed very sour brandy. Very strong, sour brandy. Is that breathing?” Dorian grimaced. “I do dislike medicated drowsiness.”
“It’ll help you sleep through the coughing,” I said, by way of apology.
“You know best.”
“I do.” I watched the furrow in his brow ease over long minutes. “Sleep well, Dorian.”
#senseless da fic#dorian pavus#anders#dorianders#dragon age fanfiction#midnight writes#oftachancer writes#30daysofdorian
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August 4th
This day was... unexpected in a lot of senses, but I did what I wanted (as my goal), so everything is okay anyway.
I'm noticing I'm not only talking about my writing in those posts and don't know how to feel about that, maybe I should restrain myself and keep on topic or something... I will see.
I... canceled my stream this morning, just two minutes after I started it. The day was... not being kind to me, a lot of weird things happening at the same time, so I also... didn't write early. Mostly because of that.
I decided I wasn't in the mood.
So I passed the morning trying to rewatch Hamilton (trying because the internet was being a devil and the movie stopped every thirty seconds or something like that... for three hours, bless me for continuing trying for that long), Dear Theodosia was suddenly stuck in my head and hearing the song on Youtube wasn't enough.
And after that, how I was set on watching another musical I haven't been able to and wanted since a while ago, I continued with Tick, tick... BOOM!
It was good... I have to watch Rent now.
I have to see all the musicals I ever wanted now, before my hearing gets worse and they became too loud and painful to watch. (I put them on hold because I bought an accessory that let me hear the sounds directly in the hearing aids, but one of my hearing aids started faulting, and I wasn't going to hear anything that way while only wearing one.)
SO! I decided it was time to get to work. My goal of the outline in a month won't go anywhere if I don't sit to make it happen, right?
So I sat to make it happen.
I finished eight of these to reach ten
and also got some essences that let me finish some quests.
But I had a few more words to chime in, so I decided to go against three of these
because I need lots of wood for another quest.
In word count language (?)
Worked in: Microstory.
Words written: 23.
I surprised myself adding a new microstory to my second collection (you can find the link to the first collection here), after transcribing a nine-word microstory I wrote before going to sleep.
I also wrote
Worked in: This post.
Words written: 161.
which I feel a bit ashamed to be sharing this way. It has no hashtags because I kinda don't want anyone finding it just because and because I don't feel like airing it around (looking for ways to get traction) on the posts with my raw feelings. Yeah, I felt a lot better after feeling validated, and I would love to connect with other people feeling like me, but I found it... wrong to voice it out in the first place to also... format it in a way that makes my voice be spread. I don't know if I am making myself understood.
Sigh.
Anyway, I also
Worked in: AngelDemon.
Words written: 1.259.
The outline of the fourth chapter is ready and things are already getting heated there. I'm writing down everything that occurs to me and trying to find answers to the questions even if it's not there where they will be answered. I can't rely on myself to remember it later. So better safe than sorry.
I just remembered I wanted to share a snippet of that old work, I think from the second chapter, but I will do it later when I start rewriting. I think it's still good and still holds a lot of meaning, but it won't be kept, at least not phrased that way, so if I'm going to change it, I can as well share it.
What I will share about it right now is that the demon fell first, but the angel fell harder.
Okay, nothing more to see here except the summary:
Total words: 1.443.
Lower daily goal: 100 ✅
Higher daily goal: 300 ✅
4thewords goal: 444 ✅
And there were days when I wasn't even able to write 100 words... they feel so far away...
Should I be saying that? Not going to be that I'm jinxing myself here...
Tagging: @aziz-reads
#writing log#writers#writers on tumblr#writeblr#writing community#writing#writers of tumblr#writerscommunity#writer#writerblr#4thewords#accountability#someone hold me accountable#hold people accountable#keep me accountable#writing buddies#writing buddy
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ff.net has been in complete shambles for the past several years and is a notorious hive for plagiarism. The mods also nuked thousands of fics from the platform for reasons ranging from justified to incredibly questionable, and the site has had two of these mass purges in its lifetime. It's also been on the decline for years with constant outages, unresponsive mods, and a piss-poor tagging and search function. The owners of the site do not seem keen on even really giving the base code a spit shine, and I'd really question the security of it overall. I would not be surprised if they have a major data breach in the years to come. Don't get me wrong, I love it to death in a nostalgic way, but I can see why it's not exactly a great place to post fic these days.
Wattpad, usually the second site mentioned in these discussions, hosts tagged erotica alongside the rest of its content with no filter by default. This means you can find erotica in any search query you use unless you specifically exclude the tag. It's also a notorious hive for rpf, and allows rpf erotica. It also allows sexual content of 16 year olds, as it states in its code of conduct that, quote, "the age of consent is 16+ on Wattpad".
And really, those are the only notable contenders against ao3. Any other website you could list would fall into "niche" territory, and most writers do want their work to be seen so they can gain traction and potentially a clientele later on if they want to enter writing professionally. Plus, blogging sites like Tumblr tend to not be very conducive to posting fic as they aren't designed with a book format in mind, so word limits are tighter, you have to manually stitch a sort of chapter browser together by yourself as you post the fic, readers will encounter your fic in reverse chronological order, and honestly I could go on. Plus, Tumblr's tagging system is also complete garb, and if people don't reblog your fic, you're SOL. So, while I've heard of Fanfiction Online and have seen some promise in Quotev (I've made an account there recently, so consider that a "to be continued"), sadly, in terms of usability and popularity, all alternatives are overshadowed to the point of complete obscurity by the behemoth that is ao3.
Trust me, I hate that website and the cesspool it plays host to. Ever since I learned just how bad it was over there, I haven't spent a single second of my time on it. However, I can't blame aspiring writers for using it in the same way I can't blame other content creators for using YouTube rather than Dailymotion or Vimeo, despite YouTube's openly predatory practices towards their artists and child audiences (the Elsagate stuff never stopped, they're just using Mickey and Sonic now). The site holds a soft monopoly over the realm of fanfiction publication, and it's going to take a website that directly outclasses it in terms of user-friendliness to even really start giving it trouble and to convince the majority of the audience to switch over.
I'm all for taking as much of an audience away from that hellhole as possible though, so I'll gladly vouch for any alternative website that directly outclasses ao3 purely by design. Hell, ao3's code is completely open-source. If anyone manages to literally make a better ao3 (maybe even implementing those lofty promises of multimedia support that they've been harping on for years, hm?), I'll make an account on there the moment I hear of it and spread the word of it as far as I can manage.
Honestly, I think it really speaks to the state of fan culture overall that the best place to view and post fanfiction online is a csem hive, and I really want to change that message if I can. Unfortunately though, as much as I want a viable alternative, we're stuck between YouTube and Dailymotion, and I cannot blame anyone for wanting to stay away from Dailymotion.
Also @proship-blocklist since it was your post that was involved in this, feel free to add your input as an author/reader if you feel so inclined.
#error code: asks#error code: anon#error code: discourse#?#i guess it's discourse I'm too tired to think of another tag#cw csa mention#for those in the audience wondering where the hell this came from I poke my head into replies a lot#anyways complex topics requiring complex explanations y'know#I can feel a cluster headache coming on so I'll just leave this open to discussion
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Train Talk Tuesday
Train Talk Tuesday: If you haven't noticed by now, I have a little bit of a knack for liking trains. Hell, I began doing this weekly post to express my love for them. But today, I figured, why not take a little step back in time, and look at how the mode of transportation that is literally a big box on wheels that moves on two steel rods came to be. How did the train go from a spunky little cylinder on two wheels to being a mass carrier of people at speeds and frequencies so good they can put airlines out of business?
Before the days of high speed, 220mph (354kph) rail, we existed in a much more...archaic time period. A period where *gasp* people didn't have a phone! Oh, and mass electricity wasn't a thing yet.
The idea of moving boxes on rails can be traced as far back as the 1500s, where people used wooden rails and horses to pull things from Point A to Point B. And for a good chunk of time, this was how railways were run. But 300 years later, oh man it's time for the Industrial Revolution! We can now harness the power of STEAM! And with the power of steam, came a few ideas of using it for hauling stuff from Point A to Point B...
The first stab that anyone would take at making a locomotive would be Richard Trevithick, who would take a few shots at creating a few using high-pressure steam boilers, which was a revolutionary concept for the 1800s. The design wouldn't catch on though, and Trevithick eventually stopped making locomotives. But where Trevithick got the ball rolling, another man would take that ball and get it puffing...
Steam traction wouldn't see it's spot in the limelight until two men named George and Robert Stephenson invented the Rocket, the very first successful steam locomotive in the world. Now, while it's considered the grandaddy of steam traction today, back then, people thought it was just another "experiment". Things had changed quite a bit since 1803. Other designs had come out before the Rocket. If the Rocket was to succeed, it needed to prove itself. And an opportunity to prove itself was approaching. Starting on October 6th and ending on October 14th, 1829, the Rainhill Trials would be taking place. This was the opportunity for the Rocket to prove itself capable to the nearly completed Liverpool and Manchester Railway. So, how did it do?
Well, it proved itself. Proved itself in the fact that it was the only engine to actually complete the entire trials. And with that, history was made, as the Rocket had proven that steam traction was indeed the future of rail transportation. Successive generations of locomotives would take notes from the Rocket, as the train finally got off it's legs and could begin transporting people and goods over heather and yonder.
So now that we know how the train first got started through steam, how does a steam locomotive actually work?
It first starts in the firebox. To make steam, you have to boil water. And to boil water, you need heat. And to get heat, you burn stuff. Pretty simple, right?
Most locomotives used coal, as it was a fairly abundant resource, and it burned for a long time, though there are exceptions. Locomotives in the United States, for example, used wood instead.
Once you have a nice fire going in the firebox, the hot air travels through tubes through the boiler. The boiler is filled with water, which then boils up to make steam.
Steam then makes it way through pipes into the cyliners, which is where a piston is located. The high-pressure steam forces the piston back, which then causes the wheels connected to the piston to rotate, which moves the locomotive forward. As it does, the piston will then move back, which forces the steam out of the cylinders and into the chimney, where it and the exhaust from the coal is expelled into the air.
The design shown here has a tender, which is where water and coal is stored for the locomotive. For tank engines, the tanks are integrated on the side of the boilers, and it will have a small bunker in the back for holding coal.
Steam would largely remain king of train traction until the period following World War II. By this time, the next evolution of locomotion was taking center stage, and steam engines were being phased out. The era of the diesels had begun.
Diesels are by far the most common type of locomotive you will see today, as nearly every city and country uses them in some capacity. A decent upgrade from steam engines, without needing too much investment from the railroads vs. electrics. A nice and solid middle ground for something dependable and cheap.
Diesels can be traced back as far back as 1898, when Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine. Over time, successive improvements to diesel technology shrunk them to where it was completely feasible to make a locomotive from one. So, it was that easy, right?
Ah, if only things were that simple.
See, there was a major hard limit as to how small you could stuff the guts required to make a diesel powered machine in a locomotive chassis. A major issue faced with early designs was where while the engine itself would fit, the other parts that were needed in conjunction with the engine, for example, the clutch, wouldn't fit at all. It was possible to make smaller versions of clutches, but they would wear out too quickly to be reliable.
The solution?
Just get rid of those parts and use an alternator to drive electric motors that power the wheels directly instead!
That's right, diesel locomotives aren't actually diesel locomotives in the traditional sense, most are considered "diesel-electrics" due to them using electric motors to move the wheels instead of the engine itself.
Mind blowing, I know.
Diesel locomotives would make some steady progress throughout the early 1900s, but they wouldn't get their time in the spotlight until after World War II. Following the war, diesels began phasing out steam locomotives, until the era of steam had ended, and the era of diesel had begun.
Compared to their steam brethren, diesels are much simpler to understand.
At the heart of the engine is the engine itself, which supplies an electric generator with rotational force, making the generator produce electricity. This electricity will then go to the wheels, and can even go to the train cars it is pulling, but not always.
Now, what does the diesel do that made the steam engine obsolete?
Well for one thing, diesels were a lot less maintenance intensive.
Steam locomotives were big, complex, behemoths of machines, and while this meant they were mesmerizing to look at, it made them very maintenance-intensive, and this was something that railroads didn't like one bit. One extremely funny way they tried to fight this was by pushing the size of their locomotives to their literal breaking points in order to create a locomotive that was able to do the job of two smaller locomotives, like this beautiful specimen from the New York Central Railroad.
But with diesels, the large increase in power was already there, along with something that was mechanically much simpler.
Another reason was that since diesels could generate electricity, they could easily provide that electricity to the other cars on the train, known as Head-End Power, or HEP. Steam locos just couldn't compete here.
Diesels would continue to serve from the end of World War II to even in the 21st century, but as the times shifted, people went to cars but then realized that cars wouldn't be the way of the future, a new generation of trains would have to take up the mantle and move us into a greener future. A very powerful future...
Just like diesels, the idea of electric traction isn't a new concept. We would see what electric traction could offer in 1881, when an electric tram line opened near Berlin, Germany. But back then, electrification wasn't a mainstream thing, only as a workaround for a certain problem railroads were facing.
One big problem with steam locomotives was how much exhaust they put out. Specifically when it came to tunnels. When in the open air, the exhaust would just dissipate in the ambient air, and wouldn't really be much of a problem to anyone. But in tunnels, the mixture of hot steam and coal smoke would concentrate, and this would be a nasty combination for the crew running the locomotive. At best, it would blind the crew. At worst, they would inhale the smoke and develop respiratory illnesses from it.
So the solution?
Use electric trains to shuttle things through the tunnel, and then have another locomotive continue hauling the goods/passengers onwards.
Yeah, that was basically the solution.
Over time, electrification would gradually evolve, as better supplies of electricity meant locomotives could become faster and stronger, and electrification became more and more widespread. But, following World War II, the train became old news. Why bother with such an antiquated mode of transportation when the freedom of the automobile and the speed and glamour of aircraft were here?
Things would rapidly change in 1964, when the Japanese Shinkansen would hit the scene. It proved to the world that the train was not dead, only hibernating. And it had just woken up, stronger than ever. Over time, other countries began pursuing high-speed rail just like the Shinkansen, and electric trains became the forefront of high-speed rail. The next era of trains had begun, and electric traction would be the glamorous new way to the future.
Electric traction is pretty simple to understand, the locomotive receives some kind of electric power that can drive electric motors on the locomotive, allowing it to move. However, not all electrification is the same. There are two main ways to get electric trains to move: Overhead wires, and 3rd rail.
Overhead wire (pic of the SEPTA ACS-64) is where an overhead wire runs above the train, and the train or locomotive uses a special arm known as a pantograph to touch the wire, allowing it to tap into the power above.
Third Rail (LIRR M9) is different, in where electricity is run through a third rail next to tracks. The train will then tap into the power by contacting the third rail with a contact shoe/brush.
In both instances, the trains use the rails as a way to complete the electric circuit and allow electricity to flow through, powering the train.
In terms of what they do better vs their diesel and even steam predecessors, one big advantage is that the train no longer has any need for refueling. Steam and diesels have to refuel to continue running, while electrics do not need to refuel anything since they are connected to a constant supply of power. The exception to this would be battery-electrics, but I don't count those.
Another advantage is the lower maintenance costs. While diesels are less complex than steam engines, their diesel engines are still complex machines that can wear out with time. Electrics don't have many parts that can wear out easily, beyond their electric motors. And finally, electrics are cleaner compared to either of their predecessors. In a world where we must move to a greener society, electrics are the future.
As a little bonus, I'll mention multiple unit trains.
Throughout the long journey of the train, one thing had remained consistent: The train itself was moved through one source, being the locomotive. The other parts of the train didn't do anything to move the train. But what if they did? What if they could also move the train as well?
Introduced in the 1890s, the multiple unit train was a train which had it's traction distributed through the train itself, as opposed to locomotives either pushing or pulling it. Commonly seen as electric models and occasionally diesel models, multiple units have been a popular alternative for metros, regional rail, commuter rail, and light rail in the 21st century.
So what makes a multiple unit train so special?
A big advantage of multiple units is that with all the cars on the train moving it, a multiple unit has much greater acceleration compared to a traditional locomotive headed train. Another advantage was since the traction was distributed throughout the train, multiple units were much friendlier to tracks compared to cars that were hauled by big, heavy locomotives.
Wow, what an adventure. From the origins at the Rainhill Trials, to High-Speed Rail and beyond, the train has changed quite a lot over time. What may the future hold? I can't say for certain, but I forsee a future in which electric traction can connect people from heather and yonder in a more sustainable future.
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Chapter Eight: A Map?
Summary: Iris’ first year at Hogwarts has finally come to an end. After the chaos that ensued during her fifth year, she’s ready to graduate in two years. As her relationship with Sirius picks up traction and she makes new friends, Iris wants to enjoy her time before she’s forced into adulthood.
Word Count: 2051
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A/N: Omg, I posted a chapter for this. Time to celebrate! Taking a short break from writing anime and decided to try getting back into Harry Potter. I finished the outline for this story and the next one so I can say I have a concrete idea on how things are gonna go. I never realized how ambitious I was with this little series that I wanted to make. These original stories plus the HP movies, what was I thinking?! Though I am determined to get them done now! Let's see how consistent I can be lmao
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“AH, FEEL THAT COOL FALL BREEZE. IT feels so nice to be bundled up in our scarves and jackets.” Iris cooed as she walked down the paths of Hogsmeade. The leaves that fell to the ground now sport a nice fall color of red, orange, or yellow. It wasn't too cold, not too hot, it was amazing. It is October now, really only a month into the school year. Everything is perfect and blissful for Iris and her friends.
School work is obviously a pain, in Iris’ opinion. Though that’s a given, it’s school work! She’s having all sorts of fun getting back into the swing of things. Mainly just getting to pull pranks on anyone and everyone that she wants. Also having the Marauders to hang around with and help her with all of her hijinks.
Not only that, but with it being Fall now, Halloween was right around the corner. The spooky season is one of Iris’s favorites. While she enjoys Christmas for the presents and food, Halloween is all about sweet treats and tricks. What better chance did she get to dress up in a costume, get a boatload of tooth rotting sweets, and pull as many pranks as she wanted? Not only that but it’s always better to be in the wizarding world for Halloween! What better way to spend All Hallows Eve in a world completely surrounded by supernatural things?
Currently the group of Gryffindors were all in Hogsmeade on their usual trip on the weekend. The girls wanted to go shopping a bit and then maybe get a butterbeer later. Meanwhile, the boys wanted to head off on their own, though not before stopping at the candy shop with the girls of course.
“Yeah, it’s pretty nice out right now.” Marlene commented as the group entered the bustling shop. The sweet aroma that bombarded the group made quite a few of them lick their lips happily.
Iris quickly picked up a large lollipop from a shelf, “Mhm, not too cold, not too hot, just a perfect day. Don’t you just love fall?”
“I’m surprised you like it so much considering it’s the season right before winter.” Wendy commented while grabbing a bag of sweets.
“Eh,” She just shrugged, taking a lick of her lollipop, “it’s my moment of bliss before the hellscape of snow and such.”
“Fall is really great!” Marlene exclaimed, grabbing quite a few different types of sweets as she started to drool, “Just think of it, pumpkin pie, pudding, pumpkin juice.”
“Is all you think about food? Especially pumpkin?” Lily asked with a giggle in her voice.
Marlene asked, “What’s wrong with pumpkin? It’s quite delicious.”
“Don’t judge her!” Iris exclaimed, also grabbing some of her favorite sweets to restock her private stash in her room. A stash that Lily would most certainly have a fit over since Iris may or may not eat a worryingly large amount of sweets every once in a while.
“Oh, you’re the same way, Iris.” Wendy laughed heartily, knowing that Iris would stick up for her comrade in food.
As the girls continued to grab a couple of treats to bring back with them to school, and also bet on how much food/sweets Marlene and Iris could consume, Iris noticed something a bit peculiar. In a far corner of the shop, the Marauders were muttering to each other about something. Iris was able to notice them quite easily, since she usually kept an eye out for them. She would be able to notice her boyfriend's luscious hair from a mile away, honestly. If they hadn’t been here, she knew that they would have been checking out some quidditch equipment. Though to see them being somewhat secretive got her curious. When they get like that, it just meant that they were planning something, and she definitely wanted to know what.
She slid over to them and caught a few words of their conversation, “you sure it’ll work?” It was James who had asked Remus, desperately curious.
“What’ll work?”
The four boys jumped at Iris’ question, suddenly doing their best to act as though they weren’t just whispering some sort of secret to each other.
“Iris!” They all exclaimed.
Sirius made sure to put his arm around her waist and give her a peck on the cheek, “Hello, love.”
Iris smiled lovingly at her boyfriend, “So? What are you four up to? No good if I had to guess.” She flashed them a devilish smile, “I want in.”
“It’s not anything like that,” James said, “Just going over some potions work, you know.”
She just rolled her eyes at the excuse, “You have attempted to use that excuse on me before, I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. Now, what is it?”
“James had this idea some time ago, the castle is full of secret passages and hidden rooms. Now have you ever wondered,” Sirius started to explain excitedly and paused for dramatic effect, “what if we mapped it out?”
Iris pursed her lips and thought it over. It certainly was an interesting idea, one that she knew she would love to have a hand in. She smirked at them, “Mapping out a magical school? That’s got to be difficult.”
James just smiled wider and clapped Remus on the shoulders, “Well, our resident genius thinks he’s got a good idea on what to do.”
“Not really,” Remus rolled his eyes, “It’s just a theory at this point.”
Sirius jumped in, “Not only that, but what if we knew everyone’s locations!”
“So that way we know when the coast is clear from Filch or any other professor.”
Iris’ eyes were wide with wonder, the devious thoughts running through her mind at the prospect. She chuckled, “Sounds like a brilliant idea. How are you going about it then?”
“Well…” Peter’s mousey voice spoke up for the first time, sharing a look with his friends, “we aren’t sure.”
Iris tapped her chin as the smile on her face never left her face, “I’d be happy to help you lot!”
James whooped, “Great! The more the merrier!”
“We’ll definitely need all the help we can get.” Remus sighed out, seemingly relieved that there was someone else who would be able to help them.
Iris smirked, “Good thing you’ve got a genius like me to help, eh?”
Remus just scoffed and grumbled under his breath, “Obviously, these numpies will rely on me to do most of the work.”
That seemed to offend all the others, “OI!”
“We’re smart enough to help with this!” James exclaimed, Sirius nodding his head enthusiastically next to him.
Remus smiled sarcastically, “I totally believe you.”
“Now, remember, we have to keep this between us.” James said, his voice taking on an urgent and commanding tone. “If anyone else catches wind of the map, we’re done for!” Though it’s not like he doubted any one in this group would go blabbering about it. They all do well to keep secrets within this group, so he didn’t have all that much to worry about. Still, he figured it had to be said, just in case.
Sirius nodded his head, “The teachers would be on us so fast.”
“They’d be the least of our worries. If Lily found out, she’d scold us just for thinking about it.” Iris said, scaring herself just thinking about it. They all shuttered, knowing that Lily would be quite scary if she did find out. Lily wasn’t necessarily a stickler for the rules, but with something like a magical map of their school, she would have to scold them for that.
They then heard Lily, Wendy and Marlene heading over to them, after having finished picking out what they wanted. The boys plus Iris all scrambled, making sure that they kept themselves quite about the map for now. They tried to act natural… but it wasn’t that convincing. Iris and Sirius hung onto each other pretending to have a conversation, Remus busied himself with staring at a shelf of some random candy, James was already eyeing Lily, and Peter was just standing there.
“You guys okay?” Wendy asked with a manicured eyebrow raised. All the girls were suspicious from the way that they were acting. Then again, when were they not suspicious of the Marauders doing some devious prank?
“Perfectly fine, especially now with Lily here.” James suavely said with his most charming smile.
Lily just rolled her eyes, though there was a small up turn to her lips. “Oh, hush. Come on, we’re heading to the Three Broomsticks.”
So the group all headed for some drinks and idle conversation as they enjoyed the rest of their time at Hogsmeade. It was always moments like this that Iris loved. Simple moments that didn’t really seem like much but was just a brief time of bliss with her favorite people. Slurping on a butterbeer and sharing laughter with her friends really brought her joy.
After some hearty drinks and laughter, the group headed back to the carriages to go back to Hogwarts. Once they got back to the Gryffindor common room, The Marauders made a beeline for the boys dorm so that they could get right to work. They had to show Iris what they had already done so far, after all.
They got into the room and closed the door to keep any prying eyes away from seeing their work. The last thing they need is someone to over hear their top secret map! Remus rummaged through his trunk, digging to the very bottom to pull out a worn looking parchment from it. Iris tilted her head, seeing that it was completely blank. Remus placed it on his bed as they all surrounded it to get a look at it.
Well, she thought, they have to start somewhere.
“Now this, is what we have so far.” Remus said, presenting it to the newest addition to their secret.
Iris nodded her head, “a blank paper… I can see it working.”
Sirius shook his own head, “this is just what we’re using, look,” he pulled out his wand and placed it on the blank parchment. “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
Just as he said those words, maroon lines started to move across the pages. It amazed Iris as she watched those lines start to turn into the words ‘Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs Purveyors of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers are proud to present THE MARAUDER'S MAP’. Iris marveled at it as an impressed smile crawled onto her lips.
James opened up the parchment to show a crude map, only about one-third of the school finished. “This is really all we have at the moment,” he explained, “we have to finish mapping out the school, secret passageways and all.”
“Then we have to find the right charms and spells to show who is where,” Sirius sighed. He may not exactly know the correct spells and such for it, but he knows that they can get it to work. Especially now with his lovely girlfriend helping out with their little project. He knew that she was smart and thought that this was such an amazing idea. She was definitely going to put her all into getting this to work, just like them.
Iris’ eyes raked over the crude work that was already finished as he mind ran with how they were going to get this done. She certainly didn’t know how they were doing to get the charms done, but she’ll do her best to help them find the right ones. She’s pretty decent at drawing, so she’ll ask if she could redo some of the drawing since they seemed a bit jagged.
She picked up the map to get a closer look at it, “this is a bit small, definitely going to need a bigger paper.”
“We just figured we can add onto the parchment,” James explained.
She hummed, “that could work, I suppose.” There was a lot of work that would have to be done to get to where they wanted with this map. A lot of work that she was more than enthusiastic to put into this. She then put it down and flashed them all a devious smirk, “so where do we go from here?”
---
Blog Masterlist | Series Masterlist | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
A/N: A bit shorter than what I'd normally do, but I wrote half of this like a year ago and had to rewrite some of this. I don't think my style of writing has changed too much. However, I like to believe that my grammar and spelling has improved, even slightly. So I went back and fixed anything I thought was a mistake. Are there still mistakes in this? Most definitely, but I did what I could lmao
Sorry I took a long while for this story to be updated. I sort of fell in love with a few other writing projects and going through my school work and now a full-time job. So I really just worked on writing stuff like Red Herring and Living Shadow. Though thankfully, I have more time to write and figured I'd touch on most of the fics that I haven't written in a while. Then again, I have so many fics and such that I have planned and never touched, some uploaded, others sitting in my google drive for forever lmao Let's see where I'll take all this now! Anyway, until the next chapter, my friends~!
#ocs#fanfiction#multiple ocs#fanfic#oc#female oc#female!oc#male oc#male!oc#harry potter oc#harry potter fanfiction#harry potter#marauders fanfiction#marauders fanfic#marauders era#the marauders#marauders#sirius black x oc#sirius x oc#sirius black
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Let’s Be Real
It is easy to think that we have all the social media apps we could ever handle. After all, we have our hands full trying to keep up with Facebook, Insta, TikTok, Twitter, SnapChat, and LinkedIn. But that hasn’t stopped Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger from launching Artifact (more on that in a future blog), or a former President from creating TruthSocial, and an even wider array of Alt-Right sites like Parler.
And then there’s Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, who founded the French social media app BeReal in 2020. It didn’t gain much traction during COVID, but has now exploded in growth. It is billed as the most real of social apps, in that it focuses on authenticity. Or so they say. I’ve been watching this one closely since early last Fall, when it first popped on my radar.
Here’s how it works. Users get a push notification at random times each day, and they have two minutes to shoot and post a photo of them doing whatever it is they are doing right then. The app activates both forward and rear cameras so you get a shot of the person as well as what they are seeing. No filters. No Photoshop or Lightroom. No makeup or fancy clothes. No influencers.
Just you in the raw.
Of course, we may not always be able to do this within two minutes (I’m looking at all y’all stuck in Dallas traffic right now), so the app allows for late posts, but it duly notes your tardiness. Oh, the shame and indignity.
At a time when all of our other socials are highly curated and feature tweaked images and reels, BeReal is the opposite. It wants to allow our friends and followers to see us living life, not posturing for a paid sponsor.
It’s an interesting idea to say the least, especially given that at least Facebook and Insta indeed had far humbler beginnings free of influencers. I confess that I too have taken to polishing my media before posting. A little Photoshop or Lightroom never did any harm, right? Think digital cosmetics. I can fix any blemish.
Alas, I am not pandering to corporations, as I am not on any payrolls other than the State of Texas. But then again, we do have our personal brands to worry about, too. And given that I am working on some fun travel-related books right now, it can’t hurt. Besides, I really don’t want people to see what I look like before the first two or three cups of coffee.
I
I’m not addicted. I swear.
But while BeReal has enjoyed popularity in the various app stores, I see this as a novelty, much like a Fourth of July bottle rocket. It makes a pretty splash in the sky, and then the embers fall to the ground. I can see people growing weary of being pestered at random times for another $%^&* picture. It’s almost like the app developers assume we are all sitting around doing nothing. Have they never heard of classes? Meetings? Dinner? Airplanes? Anyone?
Then there’s the very real possibility of people’s so-called authenticity being a parade for the very people and products we already see on social media. You’re in Playa del Carmen on the beach, and you get buzzed. Or at a posh movie debut. Driving a Mercedes S-Class. In the fanciest suite at the Barfield in Downtown Amarillo.
Yeah, that all looks pretty real, doesn’t it? Actually, it looks pretty damn ostentatious to me. No, I am not envious, but in a rush to focus on least common denominators, we must recognize that some people have a much larger denominator to begin with. Those brands would love to be in a big hurry to hop on this bandwagon. Even pedestrian companies like Chipotle have hacked the system by posting promos to their BeReal.
And even though the firm has received a $30 million cash infusion, there is still the most critical of flaws: They have no revenue model. This is Rule #1 for any app or social. You must have a way of making money sooner or later, just like Google and Meta discovered.
If companies are already subverting the game plan, just watch out. It is only going to look more and more like what we have been using all along. Well, that’s as long as BeReal actually bothers to figure out how to sustain itself. All the authenticity in the world won’t pay the bills, and as I have said many times before, you don’t just launch an app out of the goodness of your heart.
Nice try, BeReal. My gut tells me that people don’t want to be real. We buy in to the Looking Glass Self concept, in which our perceptions of ourselves are informed by what we think others think of us.
And…here’s the important part—we try to influence what others think of us. It’s an affirmation feedback loop.
God knows we love those Likes and Hearts a lot more than any feedback we get for posting our bed head hair.
Dr “Let’s Be Really Real“ Gerlich
Audio Blog
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HQ Boys Waking Up With You
Category: Fluff, Sweetness
Pairing: timeskip!characters x gn!reader
Characters: Suna Rintarō, Oikawa Tōru, Miya Atsumu, Miya Osamu, Bokuto Kotaro, Kuroo Tetsurō, Iwazumi Hajime, Kageyama Tobio
Content Warning: A little bit of strong wording, just a cuss word here and there. This isn’t edited, like at all. In fact, it’s not edited and mostly sweet word vomit. The relations are a mix of pre-relationship, dating, and married.
Word Count: about 100-250 words per character
REQUESTS ARE OPEN!
Edit: I really didn’t expect this to get the traction it did especially since I came from one really small post but honestly thank you so much <3
Suna Rintarō had grown infamous for taking days off after he started dating you and today was definitely one of those days. Sunarin had only just cracked his eyes open when he felt blood rush to his cheeks. He had opened his eyes to your sleeping form, a strip of sunlight perfectly illuminating your face. You truly looked etherial to him. He reached his hand out to your face as he moved his body into cuddle you once more, planting a sweet kiss on your forehead. His arms stretched around you in a loose hug while he placed your head on his chest, hoping you couldn’t hear the racing of his heart in your sleep. In short, the man was whipped for you. You may have been dating for over a year, but every time he realized you were his and only his, he couldn’t help but lose his cool. He stayed like this with you for a little longer until he decided to get up. Gently, he placed you back on the bed as he walked off to brush his teeth and start breakfast. However, before he could even leave your side to get ready, your hand wrapping around his was all he needed to melt back to your side. Breakfast could wait till later.
Oikawa Tōru never expected to fall in love with anything or anyone other than volleyball, so, you could imagine his surprise when your three year anniversary was coming up this week. Thus, when his alarm went off way too early, just as it did every time for volleyball practice, he was already up and slamming it silent. He could not let it wake you up today, not that it usually did, as you had grown accustomed its buzz, but he absolutely would not let it wake you this time. You were his sleeping beauty and there was no changing that today. So, with the sun still not in the sky, he held you close for a second more, kissing your head and rolling out of bed. He needed absolutely all the time he could get today. Ring shopping wasn’t going to do itself.
Miya Atsumu was woken up to two excited kids bouncing by his head and you wrapped around his shoulders pressing kisses to his face. Your sweet pleads to get him out of bed so the kids could open the presents had him weak in the knees from the start, but the way your eyes glimmered almost as much as the kids had him realize, once again, why he had married you. Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, his kids took his hands and rushed him downstairs to play Santa. Their faces glowed brighter as they eagerly unwrapped their gifts, whining when they saw Miya Atsumu’s hand on your lower back, kissing you deeply, and still fumbling with the gift marked for you. Let’s just say, that despite the kids whining, it was a pretty good morning.
Miya Osamu’s shop was open for lunch and dinner, which meant he had plenty of time to sleep-in and prepare for the opening time. However, he didn’t account for the fact he had to take you to the market with him, to get food for HIS opening. You really only agreed after he asked to go with you for the fourth time the day before, but now he was in bed and certainly not store ready. Damn you for having keys to his apartment. You were trying to get him up and at it for a solid twenty minutes now, and let’s say you were more than pleased to see that one smack to the back of his head finally did the trick. The string of choice words spilling from his mouth had come to an end when he realized it was you standing in-front of him. God, you looked amazing to him. “You wanna make the store trip a date,” his sleepy voice mumbled out to you, trying to save the seemingly broken pieces of this morning. He took your chuckle as a yes. Damn him for not asking you to be his lover yet.
Contrary to popular belief, Bokuto Kotaro wasn’t the biggest fan of waking up early. He also wasn’t the biggest fan of waking up in bed without you. So when he had woken up without you in bed and before 8 in the morning, his emo mode was going hard. However, it wasn’t as if you were far, no, you were brushing your teeth in the bathroom, quietly laughing at your oblivious boyfriend. He isn’t a child, he could handle himself, which made his sad walk to the bathroom all the better. A little pout on his face, dragging his feet, arms to his sides, eyes still clearly coated in the need for sleep. However, when he saw you in the bathroom, spiting the toothpaste from your mouth, his face lit up. Immediately, he walked behind you, wrapping you in his arms, kissing your neck, and practically falling asleep on top of you. He was so sweet. Only you could get that boy off you from there, and let’s be fair, you didn’t want to. You were happy to have him around you just as much as he was too.
Kuroo Testurō was a royal pain in the ass in the morning. Didn’t matter what time he woke up or where he was, man was a pain to get up. So when your husband was up and okay before you were that morning, you drew suspicions. Who knows what he had in store. However, when he wrapped you in his arms and whispered sweet nothings into your ear you could let those suspicions slide. He was a pain but he was perfect, guiding you to dance with him, humming your favorite song comically out of toon. You thought you knew the man you married well enough but I suppose volleyball trained him to keep everyone on their toes. Your studio apartment could not have felt more like a home than right now. Dancing with the man you married, forgetting the world and melting into each other. Today was just perfect. Little did you know though, he would fall asleep on you half an hour later. I told you he was a pain to get up. You didn’t mind.
Iwazumi Hajime just picked up a morning client. Of course you were proud of him, but you weren’t a fan of having to listen to his alarm. You were newly moved in with your boyfriend and was looking forward to sleeping in with him all cuddled up. However, that was not right now. Right now was way to early to have his phone going off and for him to need to get ready. So you got what you wanted, kind of. You got to cuddle your boyfriend all night, but 5 in the morning was not time to get up. Luckily for you though, he did your job for you. Outreaching his hand to his phone clicking snooze on the screen, he wrapped you closer into his chest. “10 more minutes. 10 more minutes is good. Sorry, for waking you my love.” God his voice was so nice in the morning. He brought your face up and kissed your lips softly. It didn’t matter how amazing you thought he was, he thought you were better. Absolutely perfect on both ends, the kind of relationship you only see in books. He thought you were beautiful while sleepy. You were gonna marry this man one day, both of you already knew it.
Kageyama Tobio had always been a hard head, so he was surprised to find himself being as quiet as he could around the club room for you to sleep. Don’t get me wrong, being a pro-volleyball player had its perks, but the fact people were still sleeping in the club room was not one of them. It wasn’t like you were anything more than friends, he didn’t owe you the sleep. But he also didn’t want you tired. However, his heart stoped when he knocked his water bottle to the floor right by your head. And you woke up. You woke up quite startled. “What the- oh hey Kags, was I’m sorry, I was tired.” He loved the way you said his name. “It’s okay.” But he sounded so annoying to himself. “I can get you another drink if practice doesn’t start too soon.” This was his shot. All the crushing he had done on you for Hinata to tease him about. “It was my fault actually, I can get us both drinks next door.” And that was seriously all he could add. “Really? Huh, that’s the date then.” You agreed!? “What?” Shit. “Yeah, actually, I’d like that.” You made the move. “Great. Let’s go then.” Yep, this was the first date of many. Just no one tell him you were freaking out just as hard as him. You two are oblivious when it comes to each other’s feelings.
A/N: I’m sorry this isn’t that good cuz I was very distracted but yk Haikyuu brainrot was eating away at me. Also, sorry if you don’t celebrate Christmas for Atsumu but it’s around the corner so I figured I might! <3 And this is y’all’s Christmas gift now
Reposts and notes are greatly appreciated. Plagiarism, copying, or creating videos of this work is prohibited. This work belongs to @ashlynxswhore on Tumblr.
#haikyuu!!#haikyuu fluff#haikyuu x you#haikyu#haikyuu x reader#haikyuu hcs#haikyuu headcanons#suna x y/n#suna rintaro x reader#suna x reader#oikawa x y/n#oikawa toru x y/n#oikawa x reader#oikawa toru x reader#atsumu x y/n#miya atsumu x y/n#atsumu x reader#miya atsumu x reader#osamu x y/n#miya osamu x y/n#osamu x reader#bokuto x reader#bokuto x y/n#kuroo x reader#kuroo x y/n#iwazumi x y/n#iwazumi x reader#kageyama x y/n#kageyama x reader
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youtube
I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.
I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.
This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.
Transcript below the cut.
FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??
Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.
I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.
Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.
Brace yourselves.
Some quick prehistory:
In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.
And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.
(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)
Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.
Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.
We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.
Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.
The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.
Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.
This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.
Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.
In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.
In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.
Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.
Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.
In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.
After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.
In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.
Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.
Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.
[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]
In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.
It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.
To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.
They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.
A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.
But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.
Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.
(sigh) Let’s take a breath.
Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.
In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.
Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”
Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.
The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.
What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.
This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.
The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.
Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.
In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.
Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?
And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.
So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?
The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!
Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,
How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.
What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:
you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.
MEMEIFICATION
So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.
Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.
A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.
You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -
ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.
If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!
If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times
that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?
So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,
this is a rape joke.
I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.
Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.
If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.
Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.
In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”
What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.
Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.
And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.
The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.
In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.
You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.
It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.
ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL
A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.
It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.
The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.
They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.
I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.
LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP
One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”
Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.
A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.
Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.
This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”
But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.
AD CAMPAIGN
George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.
GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.
Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.
PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING
One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.
Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”
People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.
This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.
This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.
This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.
THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END
Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”
The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.
This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.
This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.
The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”
And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.
But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.
WHY GAMES?
Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:
why not games?
Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.
This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.
And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.
The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.
And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.
Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.
Sorry this was such a bummer.
Thank you for your time.
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Broken Strings~
ꕥPosted: 7/20/21
ꕥGenre: Fluff, Angst, Smut, College!au, Rockstar!au
ꕥPairing: Fem!Reader x Rockstar!Yunho
ꕥWord Count: 10k+
ꕥWarnings (please read all!!): Yunho’s ex is an absolute asshat, death threats towards both Yunho and reader, mention of knives used as weapons, San is a bisexual king (happy late pride month), unprotected pool sex/public sex (no one is around but I guess it still counts), masturbation (f), foul language, mentions of alcohol intake, reader is mentioned to have dark brown eyes several times which you can just ignore if you have different colored eyes ofc, mentions of a restraining order against an ex, please let me know if I missed something!!
ꕥTag List: @cappujinho @bobateastay @nevieatiny
ꕥA/N: The song lyrics are ones that I wrote myself specifically for this au and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t nervous about posting it. I know there isn’t any tune or anything, but hopefully it sounds like a real song someone might sing. Also I’m not writing angst for a while after this holy shit I’ve been crying too much over this I’m emotional okay
“Date night! Date night! Date night!” I grabbed my boyfriend’s arm, bouncing on my toes.
Yunho raised a hand to cover his ear, scrunching his face, “Babe, I love you, but I think you’ve deafened me.”
I pouted at his tone and crossed my arms, “You’re such a grump.”
“Oh whatever.” He smiled, “You ready?”
I smiled at him and nodded.
Ever since his band, Sidekick Heart, began to pick up traction, he had less free time and our full-day dates once a week soon became date nights every few weeks. Most of his time was spent writing songs, producing them, and practicing endlessly. The fact that he had a tour coming up soon just meant he had even less spare time. I was happy for him, of course, but I couldn’t hide my disappointment that he was leaving.
In middle school, he and three of his friends formed a band for fun, which they kept with all throughout high school. They got good, really good and almost right after they graduated they were signed by a label. Now, three years later, they’d already released two albums and one EP and earned enough money to make a living, which was why Yunho dropped out of college a month ago. Since he had steady career path, he saw no reason to continue and decided to focus on music. He still visited me at college whenever he got the chance, but his visits were becoming more and more sporadic.
We started dating freshman year of college. We had our difficulties as most couples do, but everyday I thanked the stars for pairing us together. I met him on the first day of French class, a day I know I could never forget, no matter how how our future played out.
I sat my backpack on the table in front of me, looking around the empty classroom. I was ten minutes early, so I wasn’t surprised about the lack of students. It was a bit unlikely for me to be so early, but I wasn’t able to sleep the night before and so I had extra time to get ready. With nothing else to do, I took out my phone, reading some missed text messages.
I heard the door open and my head tilted upwards, meeting eyes with a fluffy-haired brunet. He shyly smiled at me and I returned the gesture. The man took a seat in the front row across from me, only a few chairs in between us. I found it cute that he liked to sit in the front of the classroom, too. Very few people did. He turned away from me to place his backpack on the floor and take out a few books. I took the opportunity to look at him. He was attractive, for sure. His short sleeved solid black shirt followed his movements, tattoos peaking through his top. The shirt itself tucked was into ripped jeans, his black shoes matching the outfit, along with various accoutrements. His look was uncommon for college students, most just wore sweatpants with with a casual shirt. I thanked myself for dressing nice that day.
I tilted my head to get a better look at his side profile. He was so handsome that I seemed to forget I was staring. I couldn’t help but get caught up in him, not realizing that I was no longer being subtle.
He spoke without moving to face me, “You’re pretty cute, too.”
“I-I what?” My eyes widened, realizing I’d been caught.
He turned, a charming smile on his face, “You aren’t exactly discreet.”
I took a breath, trying to form a coherent sentence, “Well...can you blame me?”
He pursed his lips, trying to hide a smile, “I appreciate the compliment. What’s your name?”
I hesitated before answering him, which brought a full smile to his face. He moved closer to me before holding out his hand for me to shake. I grabbed his hand and shook it, trying to keep my hands steady. His hand was soft, clearly he took care of himself.
“I’m Yunho.”
I smiled, observing the way he lit up as he turned my hand, placing a delicate kiss on my skin. I felt my face heat up and averted my eyes. Yunho chuckled as he released my hand. Both of us looked up at the sound of the door opening, a group of students entered, followed by a lady who I presumed to be the teacher.
Yunho looked at me, “Meet me after class?”
I nodded, biting my lip as I felt excitement build in my stomach, wanting nothing more than for class to end as soon as possible.
The instant the teacher ended her lecture she left with the rest of the students, who were talking among themselves. My eyes flickered to Yunho to find him looking back at me, his backpack now thrown over his shoulders.
“You have any classes after this?” He asked in a nonchalant manner. Later he confessed to me that he was far more nervous than he appeared, claiming that he fell in love with me at first sight.
I finished placing my notebook in my bag, zipping it up and putting the straps over my arms, “Yeah, unfortunately. I’ve got World Politics in ten minutes.”
“Aww damn. I was hoping we could grab some food.” He reached into his pants’ pocket, pulling out his phone, “Maybe I could get your number instead and we could meet up later?” He wasn’t pushy or demanding, simply asking.
I nodded quickly, “I’d like that, Yunho.”
He suddenly became more shy, the tips of his ears dusting a beautiful shade of pink, “I like the way you say my name.”
I giggled, trying to hide my own shyness. I took his phone and entered my number, really hoping that he would text me. As if he read my mind, he confirmed what I was thinking.
“I’ll text you,” He looked at me with sparkling eyes before shaking his head, like he was pulled back to reality, “Oh uh...you should probably get to class.“ He raised a hand, somewhat awkwardly scratching the back of his head.
“Yeah I probably should. I’ll see you around?”
He smiled, “I’ll see ya.”
-
It wasn’t long before he texted me, and it made my heart flutter that he kept his word. A day later we met up, grabbing ice cream and getting to know each other. He was a dance major and had to practically beg his parents to let him pursue dance. In return they said he had to repay them with getting straight A’s. He had one younger brother who was possibly the biggest baseball fan to ever exist, he roomed with three men he’d been friends with since kindergarten, and he absolutely adored my brown eyes.
“They’re just beautiful.” Yunho gushed, “Both times I’ve seen you they just sparkle and shine like they’ve got their own little galaxies in them. I’ve never seen anyone with such genuine, kind eyes.”
I let out a girly laugh at the compliment and covered my mouth with a hand, “You’re really trying to flatter me, aren’t you?”
“Depends. Is it working?” He laughed as he propped his head on one of his hands, leaning closer to me in the booth we were sitting in. We’d finished our ice cream long ago, now shamelessly flirting and getting lost in each other.
“It might be.”
“Well I do mean it. I’m not only trying to flatter you.”
The ringing of his phone caught our attention. He smiled apologetically and reached for the device. He sighed, reading the contact name and looking back up at me.
“I’m sorry I’ve gotta take this. It’s one of my roommates and it’s entirely possible they’ve set the house on fire.”
I laughed, “It’s okay, go ahead.”
Yunho excused himself as he answered the call, walking outside. I took a look around the shop we were in, smiling at all the decorations when I noticed a woman sitting alone, eating ice cream and staring at me. Her eyes were such an ice blue that they made her intimidating, to say the least. I wasn’t too surprised, I’d dressed nice and all throughout the day I’d been getting looks. Taking it as a compliment I smiled at her and waited for Yunho to return.
“So good news,” He started as he sat back down in the booth, running a hand through his hair, which was way more attractive than it should’ve been, “They haven’t burnt down the apartment, but San—he’s one of my roommates—his car ran out of gas a few miles away from here so I’ve gotta go help him. Can I drive you back to your own apartment first?”
“Oh no, I don’t want to worry you.” I waved a hand, “I can have a friend pick me up.”
He nodded, “If you’re more comfortable with that, sure, but I’d rather drive you home, if that’s okay.”
I nodded, walking with him as he guided me out to his car. We had our first kiss when he dropped me off, leaving me with the promise of another date, and he delivered. Time and time again he proved he truly cared about me, which inevitably led to a relationship.
We heard a loud crashing in the basement of the house and Yunho let out a frustrated groan, “Oh god it’s happening again.”
He walked over to the basement door, opening it and sighing at the loud yells emitting from below.
“What is it this time?” Yunho shouted.
Wooyoung’s voice rung out, “San won’t let me use the controller!”
The man in front of me placed a hand over his eyes, over the situation entirely, “You’re still fighting over that game?”
“Crash Bandicoot waits for no man!”
“San let him have the controller or I’ll come down there and I’ll beat both of your asses!” Yunho shut the door, giving me a tired smile and walking back to me, “You’d think we would’ve outgrown this stage by now. I’d fire them both and hire a new bassist and drummer if I could.”
“Okay that’s an absolute lie, and you say that like you’re any better. I saw you arguing with Seonghwa over the last bag of chips yesterday.”
He pointed a finger at me, not trying to hide the smile on his face, “Okay that was absolutely valid. I bought those and they were mine.”
I smirked. “My point still stands.”
He rolled his eyes playfully, changing the subject, “How about after our date I sing you a couple of our new songs?” He leaned closer, his lips barely grazing my ear, “I wrote a few about you.”
I pulled back from him, feeling warmth spread in my chest. “Really? You did?”
Yunho wrapped an arm around my waist, “How could I not? You’re always my inspiration.”
I let out a string of incoherent gibberish which prompted the most adorable eye smiles from my boyfriend. I felt too honored to put my emotions into words.
“Go on.” Yunho motioned to the front door, “Grab your purse and head out to my car. I’ll let the guys know we’re going and I’ll meet you outside.”
I gave him a salute, “You got it cap’n!”
His eyes warmed, “God, I love you.”
“I know!” I teased before I grabbed my purse and skipped out of the house. The sun would be setting soon and I admired the several hues that were painted within the sky. I sat on the hood of his car, swinging my feet as I saw him walk out of the house.
“So where exactly are we going?” I tilted my head, looking forward to his response.
“Well I’ve got a couple ideas.” He held up his long fingers and counted off on them, “We could go bowling, or we could have a late night picnic, or maybe...” He moved closer, placing his hands on either side of me with a mischievous grin, “We could go swimming.”
My face lit up, “I haven’t been swimming in forever!”
“I know, that’s why I recommended it.” He laughed, “Let’s break into the swimming pool downtown. It’s definitely closed by now so we can be alone.”
I raised my brows at his words, a smile widening on my face, “Don’t we need to bring swimsuits, though?”
Yunho grinned at me and moved a hand to ruffle my hair, “Nope. We’re going without ‘em.” He lifted me off his car, “Hop in, babe.”
-
We approached the fence with our hands interlocked, a new message greeting us. A red and black sign with the words ‘No Trespassing’ was attached haphazardly to one of the metal wires looped through the fence surrounding the pool.
Yunho tsked, “Aw that’s cute. Like that’s gonna keep us out. This is basically our pool anyways.”
I laughed, both of us knowing full well there was no method of security beyond the sign and fence. The pool had never installed security cameras and after word spread that the owner had a fear of advancing technology, we had no worry of being caught.
He cupped his hands, holding them out for me to step on. I placed my foot on his hands as he lifted me up, helping me scale the fence. I stepped back, feeling a thrill as Yunho jumped over. It was probably the fourth or fifth time we’d done this, but each time was just as exciting. We walked over to the edge of the pool, its light blue water and the dark blue of the sunset opposing one another but making a beautiful visual.
“Alright, off we go.” Yunho’s fingers danced to the hem of my shirt, then pulling it off and ridding me of the layer of clothing. He pressed several kisses to the exposed skin, making me shiver.
Yunho then pulled back from me, slowly removing his shirt and giving me a teasing look when he caught me staring at his abs, “I look good, don’t I?”
“Shut up,” I laughed, lightly slapping his strong, tattooed arm before removing my skirt, enjoying the way my boyfriend’s eyes devoured me. I returned the action when I saw him remove his jeans, something he was clearly enjoying as well.
I turned back to the pool only to be thrown over Yunho’s shoulders. He let out a string of laughs as I struggled to get down, fearing that he would throw me into the water.
“If you throw me into the pool I’ll kill you!” I laughed, squirming on his shoulders.
“No...I would never do something like that.” I wasn’t even facing him, but I could hear the smile in his voice, which was my only indication that he was about to throw me into pool.
Before I could try to make any sort of escape, he tossed me into the water. It was cold, but less cold than I expected it to be. I coughed up a bit of water as I resurfaced and when I opened my eyes I squinted at Yunho, annoyed at how attractive he looked with the evil smirk on his face.
“You’re a jerk.” I said with no venom behind my words.
“Yeah, yeah. Brace yourself I’m coming in.”
I barely had time to move before he jumped in, his legs tucked to his chest. “Cannonball!”
I moved my hands in front of my face to block the wave of water coming my way, not feeling any surprise about my boyfriend’s childish behavior. When he resurfaced he faced me with a smile, wading towards me, embracing me in his arms, and wrapping my legs around his waist. He was so tall that he could reach the bottom of the pool without having to swim, unlike me, where I was no near reaching the bottom and needed to swim in place. With a satisfied hum he pressed several wet kisses to my neck.
“I love you,” he mumbled, his voice muffled by my skin.
“I love you too, babe.” I hesitated before I said my next words, still overwhelmed at how strong my feelings were for him, “You’re the love of my life.”
He pulled back with a bright smile on his face, his eyes shining almost as if he was tearing up, “I knew you were the love of my life the moment I saw you. And you’re all mine.” Yunho said before he placed a delicate kiss to my lips.
“All yours, babe.”
His long fingers danced along my sides, grabbing at my hips as he began to attack my chest with kisses. I giggled as the feeling of his stubble tickled my skin.
“You know, you really ‘oughta shave before you get a full beard.”
“Why? Are you saying I wouldn’t look good with one?”
I cupped his face, “You’d look amazing with one, but I thought you didn’t like beards, babe?”
“Hate ‘em.” Yunho’s laugh echoed around us, “Really weird that men can grow them in the first place. But anyways...”
His hands made quick work of my bra, letting it sink to the bottom of the pool. I opened my mouth to scold him but before I could his mouth latched to my right nipple, sucking and nipping on it in a way that made my hands seek out his hair and tug harshly at his locks. Letting out a growl, Yunho placed one hand on the the pool wall for balance and the other on my back, drawing abstract shapes there.
Yunho moved to my other nipple, giving it the same treatment and smiling when he heard my moans. In a flash he removed his hand from my back and pressed me against the pool wall, his hand now traveling to my panties.
As he removed the final item of clothing he ran a finger over my clit, giggling to himself. I gave him a look and he clarified, “Babe, you’re wet enough to fill an entire swimming pool.”
I groaned, pressing my head into his chest, “You make that same god awful joke every time we come here.”
“And as such I couldn’t let tradition die.”
“Shut up and fuck me.” I laughed, promptly helping him out of his boxers.
He continued to tease me after, switching between playing with my clit and stretching me out with his long fingers. By the time he finally gave in, I was a whimpering, pathetic mess, begging for more.
As he aligned with my walls he looked at me with delicate eyes, “Ready, little flower?”
I nodded quickly, chanting ‘yes’ over and over. Yunho once again placed a hand on the wall and hooked one of my legs over his waist, allowing him to thrust deeper inside me. He held my hand with his free one, a simple action that always melted my heart. Despite how long we’d been together, I would always get overwhelmed by him so easily. Everything about him exuded such a strong aura that sometimes just the smallest kiss would leave me breathless. The first time we were intimate he took his hand in mine and assured me he would be gentle, and every time since he’s held my hand. It wouldn’t feel right without our hands together.
“Shit—it’s been way too long since we’ve done this.” I said as he snapped his hips into mine, quickly repeating the action.
“God I know.” He let out a pained groan at the thought of it, “Four months is gonna be fucking awful without you.”
“Guess we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got now.”
“Guess we will.”
The sounds of water splashing and the echos of our moans, a symphony I had become so familiar with, was gradually reaching its crescendo. It was getting harder to keep my eyes open but I forced them to be, needed to memorize everything about this moment. The sweat dripping down Yunho’s forehead, the tattooed muscles he was flexing, the sounds and praise he was emitting, and pleasure we were both feeling--I wouldn’t see nor feel this for the next four months.
A particular snap of his hips had me seeing stars and I called out to him, letting him know I was close. Within minutes, both of us were panting and reeling from our highs. Yunho pressed his nose against mine and both of us closed our eyes, enjoying each other’s presence.
“How come every time we come here it ends in sex?” I giggled.
He blinked and moved a strand of wet hair out of my face, “Because you’re hot and barely wearing any clothes and no one’s around.”
I blushed at his compliment, “I mean like I’m not complaining or anything.”
A cocky smile formed on Yunho’s face, “Well it certainly didn’t sound like you were a moment ago.”
“Yunho!”
The man laughed, lifting me up and spinning me around in the pool before cradling me in his arms.
“I hate to say it, but we do need to head back. The world awaits for us, I’m afraid.”
I sighed, pressing into his chest, “I’m gonna miss you.”
He stilled as he pulled me closer, “I’m gonna miss you, too. You don’t have to miss me yet, though.”
“I know.” I swallowed, wishing I had something more to say.
“Come on, then.” Yunho gave me a quick kiss, “Let’s head back.”
-
Yunho held the front door open for me, giving me a gentle slap on my ass when I walked through. I turned around and gave him a playfully annoyed look, which he only laughed at.
As we walked towards the living room, the sound of a random sitcom filled our ears. Six heads turned our way after hearing our footsteps. Seonghwa was resting his head against his long-time girlfriend. She was a sweet girl and complimented him more than any woman I’d seen him with. They really were soulmates, if they ever existed.
San was sitting holding hands with a man he’d been interested in for awhile. I’d often see him flirting with various men and women, but he never went any further than that, too afraid of commitment. This man; however, seemed to breaking through San’s walls. I really hoped they would work out, San deserved someone as kind as him.
Wooyoung sat across from the them, who acknowledged us first.
“Hey guys. Have fun?” Wooyoung asked, smiling at my soaked hair. He had his arm around a woman I’d never seen before and I was certain that none of us would ever see her again. He had the reputation of a playboy, and every poor woman thought they’d be the one exception, the one to make him stay. I’m sure the allure of being a drummer in a band was part of his appeal, too. Maybe one day, like San, he’d settle down.
The woman became visibly upset when Wooyoung looked me with a teasing glance. Feeling sympathy for her, I decided to do my best to calm her nerves.
I spoke for us, linking hands with my boyfriend. “Yeah, we did. I think we’re gonna go clean up though.” I looked at the woman, “I’m y/n, by the way. I’m Yunho’s girlfriend.”
She didn’t even try to hide the relief on her face. “Oh! I’m Solar. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” Wooyoung started, “Best girlfriend he’s ever had. Much better for him than Lucy.”
Yunho glared at the man, “Thought we agreed not to bring her up?”
Lucy, the woman Yunho dated before me, was arguably the scariest person I’d ever heard about. They dated for roughly three months before she became obsessive, to the point where Yunho had to get a restraining order against her. She threatened to hurt all of Yunho’s friends and family, all because she wanted Yunho all to herself. That was about all Yunho ever told me about her. Not that I complained. I didn’t exactly want to discuss his exes, even more so when they were that crazy.
I never told him, but I knew I saw her the first date we went on. I could see the way her piercing, ice eyes saw through me. I had no doubt it was her. I just hope I’d never see her again. Maybe now that she saw he was taken she’d leave us alone. There was an uncomfortable silence following, none of us knowing what to say until San spoke.
“You look like a wet dog, Yunho.” San joked, prompting laughter from a few of us, which seemed like more of a noise of relief rather than one of actual humor.
“Yeah, yeah.” My boyfriend relaxed his shoulders, “I think we’re gonna head in for the night so don’t make too much noise.” Waving them goodbye he caught up with me, placing a hand around my waist.
“Shower with me, doll.”
I placed a hand on his chest, “I would love to.”
-
I came out of the shower wearing my favorite large shirt of Yunho’s, drying my wet hair with a towel. The smell of chlorine had gone away for the most part; whatever chemicals the owner put in that pool always made the smell harder to get rid of. Only a small price to pay, I figured.
My boyfriend, who was much quicker than I was, looked up from his phone as he was splayed out across his bed. His tired eyes smiled at me while motioning me over. Yunho’s own hair was still drying and with his bare face and crooked smile, he was as handsome as he could ever be.
“Hey there.”
“Hey, sweetheart.” He reached an arm out to me, pulling me against him when I took his hand, “How ya feeling?”
“Tired.” I hummed, sleepily smiling against his neck.
“Too tired to listen to the song I wrote for you?”
“No! Not at all.”
Yunho chuckled, slowly brushing my hair aside and turning his head to look at me. As he had countless times, he took a breath before he turned to me, beginning to sing.
“You give me fireworks
I’ll give you the kindest words, my dear
Your love caught me
The moment I met your eyes
And how could I not fall?
Your heart bared, no disguise”
I fought to stay awake although his melodic voice seemed to be lulling me to sleep. I felt myself losing consciousness, but managed to catch the last few lyrics he sang to me.
“Now I sunbathe in the daybreak
Half asleep, half awake
Writing this song
As I hope I’ll dream of you”
Yunho brushed his fingertips brush against my face before he spoke, “Goodnight, flower.”
I muttered some form of a “goodnight” before I felt sleep take over me, nuzzling happily against my boyfriend.
-
I woke up in a panic, unsure why my heart was beating so fast until I looked at the clock. Eleven in the morning. I was an hour later than I should’ve been at my job. It seemed that even unconscious my body knew I was late.
“Oh shit I’m gonna be late for work!” I spoke with wide eyes.
Jumping from Yunho’s bed I stripped myself of his shirt and quickly threw my clothes on. The body that laid beside me stirred, moving the covers aside.
“Are you leaving?” He asked sleepily, his face puffy from sleep and an adorable pout on his lips.
I frowned, “Yeah. I’m sorry we didn’t get to spend more time together, babe.”
He shook his head, “Don’t worry about it. Both of us slept in.”
I tied my hair back, sighing. I was so caught up in my thoughts I almost missed Yunho’s question.
“Sorry what was that?”
He smiled, “You’re coming to our going away party tomorrow, right?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I moved back to the bed and hugged him, feeling my heart sink. I was proud of him, I really was, yet couldn’t help but feel sad that I wouldn’t see him for so long.
This was the longest tour they’d ever gone on and we’d never been apart from each other that long before. I trusted him and I was confident in our relationship, but realistically, all members of Sidekick Heart were attractive young men and a good portion of their fans were female. I was far more concerned about the female audience doing something than I was about Yunho making a move on another woman.
With one last squeeze of his shoulders I pulled back, goodbyes beginning to fall from my lips before Yunho pulled me back.
“I need a goodbye kiss.”
I pressed my lips together with a smile, gladly indulging him. Giving him one last kiss against the lips, I bid him farewell until the following day.
-
“So how was work?” My roommate asked as I walked in the house, propping her feet up on our couch and tossing a kernel of corn into her mouth, the lighting of the TV illuminating her blanket-covered body.
I sighed, sitting down on the floor next to her, “Other than being an hour and a half late and missing an important meeting I think it went okay. I’m just glad the day’s over.” Rubbing a hand over my face I turned to her, “What about you? How was your day?”
“Pretty damn good actually.” She smiled, removing the blanket and showing me the new ink on her upper arm. It was an assortment of flowers and matched her bubbly personality perfectly. They were now the fifth adornment on her beautiful dark skin, each one of them tempting me more and more to get a few of my own.
“Another one already, Tiff?”
“Listen, you’ll know how addicting they get as soon as you get your first.”
“You sound so confident that I will.”
“Oh I know you will. You’re dating a rockstar, after all. Not to mention he’s the goddamn lead singer and has tattoos of his own.”
“Shut up.” I giggled, “Speaking of, are you coming to the farewell party tomorrow?”
“I plan on it, but I’ll probably be there a couple hours late. My dad’s flying into town for the weekend so I plan on visiting first. I’m definitely coming though.”
I hummed, “Yeah, don’t worry too much about it. We all know it’ll go till sunrise anyway.”
She let out a loud laugh, likely remembering the last party of theirs we went to where she ended up more drunk than I’d ever seen her. She claims she remembers flashes of the night; playing strip beer pong and being dared to steal one of the neighbor’s bushes—which, after much convincing from those who were sober, she decided against it—but didn’t recall half of the hilarious memories of her the rest of us did. Personally, my favorite was watching her hold a tomato soup can and cry over the fact that it could never have children.
Tiff let out a yawn as she stretched her arms above her head, turning in my direction. Her words were muffled by her yawn as she spoke, “Imma go to bed now. You good before I go?”
I smiled at her, “Yeah I’m good. I won’t stay up too much longer, just need to go through my nightly routine of looking at the stars, ya know, the usual.”
She nodded, wrapping the blanket around her and heading to her bedroom, “Sleep well, babe. I’ll see ya tomorrow.”
“Back at ya.”
It was a habit of mine, gazing at the night sky before sleeping. It gave me comfort knowing that out there, somewhere, there was something else out there with me. Almost like I wasn’t going through everything alone.
I set my purse down when I reached our kitchen, reaching for a tea pot and tea bags, brainlessly brewing my favorite tea as I thought of what Yunho might be doing right now. It was probably most likely that he was practicing for their tours, but I could only hope he was getting a little bit of rest.
I stepped out onto our porch to look at the stars with a cup of tea in my hands, the night sky twinkling with all the stars it could offer. A slight breeze rustled my hair and I closed my eyes, thankful for the pleasant weather. I heard a sudden snap of a branch and my eyes quickly opened as I searched out property for any sign of an aggressive animal. My eyes finally landed on a human-like figure. Feeling adrenaline run though me, I decided to confront whoever or whatever it was.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I spoke, my voice loud but not quite a yell.
The figure took off it’s hood to show their face, and I saw a familiar pair of ice blue eyes, though I hadn’t seen them in years, “I’m here to see you, of course.”
My brain quickly connected her to the woman I hoped I’d never see again.
Lucy.
“Well I don’t want to see you. Leave.”
She pressed a hand to her chest, feigning offense, “But I came all this way! Just to...say hello.”
I took a step towards her, hoping that if I appeared confrontational she would leave me alone. “I don’t know who you are, now please leave. I’m not going to say it again.”
“Oh, you poor girl. You really think you have the upper hand?” She pulled out a knife, and walked towards me at impressive speed, pointing the weapon at my throat. “I know you’ve been seeing Yunho. I. Don’t. Like. That.” She emphasized every word of the last sentence, anger woven within her voice.
I wanted to fight back. Everything in me was screaming to fight back, but I knew I had no chance. I had no idea what she was capable of, and I didn’t dare to find out.
“I dated him first and he’s still mine. You’re going to break up with him, you hear me?” She screamed in my ear, the sound shaking me to my core, “I never want to see you near him again.” She grabbed my jaw harshly, forcing my eyes to lock with hers. “I bet he doesn’t even love you.”
My eyes watered. I knew she was wrong, but with the adrenaline coursing through my veins and the harshness of her words I began to doubt myself.
Her grip tightened and I let out a yelp, “He loves me and I love him. He’s always loved me, not you. Why would he ever love a thing like you?”
She then threw me to the ground, towering over me, “Break up with him. Make him hate you. If you don’t,” She squatted down next to me, once more pointing the knife at my throat, “I’ll kill him myself and make you watch. Then,” She cocked her head, a crazed smile plastered on her face, “I’ll kill you. If I can’t have him, no one can.” She stood, smirking at me, “And you know I will.”
She kicked me in the stomach, watching as I crawled into myself, groaning from the pain. I closed my eyes, hoping she wouldn’t hurt me any more than she already had.
“I’ll be watching you at the party tomorrow. Do it then. Break his heart. I’ll kill him then and there if you don’t.” She looked down at me and scoffed, “And I’ll be bringing friends to make sure the job gets done.”
I carefully opened my eyes to see her stepping over me, walking back into the darkness from which she came. I scrambled back into my house, hyperventilating from the interaction I just had.
I spent the night crying, not able to sleep even for a minute. I tried to think rationally, but there were just too many variables. How many ‘friends’ was she bringing? Would she really kill Yunho in front of everyone? Where would she be watching me from? Is she watching me now?
I could text or call Yunho to let him know, but where would we go from there? He’d want to meet me and she’d kill him instantly. Right?
“Maybe I could pull him aside at the party and warn him?” I murmured to myself, “No, she could probably see that. Maybe there’s people actually at the party who are looking out for us, too.” I covered my face with my hands and fell back into my pillows, weeping as I knew I had to break up with the love of my life.
-
Choosing to wear a yellow dress honestly couldn’t have been more ironic. Yellow was supposed to be a happy color. A color of hope and yearning, innocence and warm days full of laughter. It was the complete antithesis of how I felt and what I knew I had to do. Even worse, the weather was perfect. It was sunny, but not so much to make it unbearable outside. Everything about today made my insides twist.
I took a breath at the door of Yunho’s house, bracing myself for what I had to do. Knocking a few times I heard a commotion inside before the man I came to see opened the door. His smile had never been bigger.
“Baby!” He cheered, pulling me into a bear hug and ruffling my styled hair, “I’m so excited you’re here!”
He looks so ecstatic. And I have to break him.
The thought crushed me and brought tears to my eyes, but I couldn’t let him die. I knew she was serious, I didn’t doubt that for a moment. I grabbed Yunho’s arm, pulling him outside and away from everyone in the house.
I looked at the ground as I felt my lips begin to quiver, “I’m sorry. I just need to get this over with.”
Yunho bent down to meet my eyes, “Hey, hey. What’s going on sweetheart?” His voice was gentle, one of his hands coming to rub the tears from my face, “I’m here for you, whatever it is.”
I looked down, unable to look him in the eyes. I hated myself more than I’d ever hated anyone. “I don’t love you, Yunho.” My hands began to shake beyond my control, my own body knowing I was making a mistake.
“W-what?” Yunho’s voice cracked. A moment of silence passed before he let out a hollow laugh, “Baby, you don’t mean that-”
I looked up at him and immediately wished I hadn’t. Tears were welling in his eyes, his own hands beginning to shake.
“I said I don’t love you Yunho!” I said louder than I intended, “Not anymore. I don’t want to be with you. I’m sorry.”
He took a step back and I noticed his hands clenching, something he always did to keep himself from crying.
“If that’s what you want,” Tears fell from his eyes before he finished his sentence, “Then I’ll support your decision.” He looked to the side, not knowing what else to say.
I wanted nothing more than to throw myself in his arms and explain everything, tell him that I’ve never stopped loving him, not even for a second, but I couldn’t. Instead, I wiped away my tears with the back of my hand and looked at him one last time. He was so fucking handsome, so goddamn kind, and here I was doing this to him. Maybe he did deserve someone better.
“Good luck with your tour, Yunho. I know you’ll be fantastic.”
I turned and walked away from him quickly, leaving the house and ignoring the stare I could feel on me. I ran across the yard to my car, starting the engine and leaning my head against the steering wheel. I felt myself lose all oxygen in my body, the only option left to take large gasps of air. My vision was so clouded by tears I couldn’t even see anymore. I’d just lost myself along with my other half. I’d never felt as empty as I did in that moment.
Just then I heard a knocking on my window. I half-hardheartedly lifted my head and felt my heart lurch. Yunho was standing outside my car, eyes red and puffy, looking at me like I was the last person he’d ever see. I opened my car without thinking, my breathing still as uneven as before.
Yunho spoke, his voice coarse and distant, “I’m not asking you to change your mind, but I need you to know that I have always loved you and I always will. That will never change.”
I wiped the snot from my nose but didn’t bother to try and fix the mascara I knew was streaming down my face. I knew I had to look horrible, but he still held so much love for me that it was easy to see in his eyes. I fought myself to not reply, knowing that if I’d open my mouth all I’d say was ‘I love you’ over and over again.
“Is it too out of line to ask for a last hug?” He smiled sadly as more tears poured from his eyes.
I shook my head, running into his arms and embracing him. I felt like I made a mistake the moment I did because I could smell him. He was wearing the cologne I bought him for his birthday. His warm, sturdy chest...everything about him felt like home.
“Goodbye, Yunho.”
-
I arrived at home alone, tears still stinging my eyes. Tiff was nowhere to be found and I couldn’t decide if I was thankful or sad for the fact that she wasn’t there. I barely made it out to our porch before collapsing once again, finding it harder and harder to breathe. I didn’t know how long I was sitting there, it could’ve been one hour or three, but given the setting sun it looked like it was the latter. Once more I heard a noise outside our home, and once more the female figure appeared before me.
“You did good,” Lucy said, twirling her knife in her hands, “Dare I say I’m proud of you.”
“I don’t ever want to see you here again.” I cried, “I did what you want now get the fuck away from me.”
“My, my. You have quite the mouth on you, don’t you?” She tsked, “But you did as I asked, so I might as well comply. Don’t; however, think that you can go crawling back to Yunho and tell him about this. I’ll keep watching you and if you decide to do just that...I’ll follow through with my promise.”
I kept my eyes on the ground, convinced that if I looked up at her I’d attempt to rip the hair out of her head. No anger I had ever felt before could surmount to the rage I was feeling.
“Nonetheless, it was a pleasure doing business with you, miss.”
As soon as she came, she was gone. When I finally let myself look up, I could no longer see her, only darkness. Once again, I was alone.
-
Six months had passed since I broke up with Yunho and today officially made the third new date I’d went on. All of them were absolutely horrible. It wasn’t even that the guys were mean or rude or weren’t attractive, they just weren’t him.
Why am I even trying to move on?
I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes looked heavy, the bags under my eyes ever prominent. I couldn’t fool myself. I’d never be able to be with another man again. I forced myself to hold back tears and reached back to untie my hair, preparing to take a bath in hopes that it would take my mind off of things.
I began to run the warm water as I reached for several candles, lighting them and placing them around the room, trying to forget the entire day altogether. As I waited for the tub to fill I grabbed my phone, opening Instagram for no other reason than to have something to do. Although Yunho and I broke up, I still followed their band account, as well as their individual accounts. Seonghwa, San, and Wooyoung were still my friends, after all. Yunho was the only exception. Both of us unfollowed each other early on just because it was too painful. I didn’t hold it against him and hoped he didn’t hold it against me either.
Regardless, my eyes found the most recent post on Sidekick Heart’s account. All four members were shirtless, their hair dripping wet with goofy smiles plastered on their faces. They were standing by a pool, the same one Yunho and I would often break into. I noticed Yunho first, how could I not? His smile wasn’t as wide as the other’s, his eyes a bit colder, but he looked happy all the same. He looked good. Really, really good. He was always fit while we were dating, but he gained more muscle since I last saw him and it didn’t go unnoticed by their fans, either. I clicked the comment section against my better judgement, knowing what I was going to see before I even did so.
“Yunho looks like a fucking goddd”
“So Yunho’s still single right??”
“Yunhooo hmu I beg you”
“Jesus Christ Yunho break me please”
A surge of jealousy rushed through me. I hated when girls said those things when we were together, but now that we were apart it made it even worse. I had no right to be jealous, and that was the worst part.
The water reached my leg that was resting on the side of the tub and I scrambled to turn off the faucet. Doing my best to push the images from my mind I placed my phone aside and stripped from my clothes, settling in the water. I sighed as some water fell out of the side of the tub. It wasn’t a terrible thing to happen, but it seemed to just be another thing to go wrong.
My eyes wandered back to my phone, Instagram still open and the picture I was looking at earlier still on display. He was so fucking hot and seeing that he was standing next to that pool—our pool—made my brain short circuit. I couldn’t stop my thoughts from taking me back to the last night we broke in, the way we teased each other and how it inevitably led to sex. It seemed I had no control over my body as my dominant hand slipped between my legs.
But as much as I wanted it to be, it wasn’t the same. My fingers weren’t as long or slender as his and just nothing about our touches were the same, but the image of him just made my hormones rage. Every ounce of me craved him.
My fingers swirled around my clit, a bundle of pleasure shooting through me at the action. I closed my eyes, letting my body take over and repeat the motions and much as I fought not to, my brain kept replaying scenes of two of us again, and again, and again.
“Such a good girl, aren’t you?” Yunho spoke as I sunk down on his dick, barely finding the energy to lift myself up again even though the noises he made were like shots of espresso.
“Aww, is my baby getting tired?” He cooed, jerking his hips into mine.
“It’s not fair!” I whined, “I’m not good at this and you know it.”
“But we wouldn’t be a good couple if we didn’t encourage each other to work hard, right? Up you go, flower.”
I whimpered and pouted, but still obeyed him. Taking pity on me, Yunho grabbed my waist and lifted me, relaxing his grip as I moved downward. I made a noise that wasn’t understood by Yunho, but it didn’t go unnoticed.
“What was that?”
“Please. More. I need you so bad.” I begged.
Yunho laughed, “I really do have you wrapped around my finger, don’t I?”
I nodded before remembering that he’d probably prefer a verbal answer, “Yes. I’m w-wrapped around your finger.”
He let out a noise of satisfaction before flipping us over into a position so that he would have full control. I grabbed the bedsheets roughly, so much in my own world that I didn’t hear Yunho’s words.
“What was that?” I let out with a series of mewls.
“You’ve got me wrapped around your finger, too, you know? I don’t go an hour without thinking about you anymore. I can’t even have a single conversation without bringing you up. Anytime someone says your name my heart beats out of my damn chest. You’re the only woman for me.”
My legs shook as my high approached, barely able to breathe at it’s intensity. It took me a minute before I could even remember where I was. As I came to my senses, I felt tears biting at my eyes and this time I didn’t bother to hold them back. I watched as they streamed down my face and joined the now-cold water surrounding me. I brought my hands up to cover my eyes, glad Tiff wasn’t home to hear my wailing. She’d been good about staying with me since the breakup, but tonight she just wasn’t here. The hole in my heart felt even deeper now. I wondered if he found someone, if he was happy now. Hell, maybe it was his ex. The thought tore my heart out and ripped it in two. I wanted to be happy for him if it was true, but I just couldn’t be. I was still too selfish. I still wanted him to love only me.
-
New friends, new beginnings or whatever.
That’s apparently what I thought when I began attending more clubs at college after the breakup, meeting new people and eventually finding a really solid friend group. All who happened to really like punk-rock music.
“You should really go with us,” Shang directed his words at me, “There’s a new band popping up that’s playing this weekend. It’s three hours away but they have great music.”
I sighed, not fully convinced although it did sound fun. The last concert I’d been to was one of Yunho’s and though I hadn’t even seen him in what felt like forever, I still couldn’t help myself from thinking of him anytime someone talked about concerts. Sensing my apprehension, the woman beside me spoke up.
“Road trip! Road trip! Road trip!” Tyra chanted in my ear, her black curls bouncing with her as she clapped her hands between the words. “Come on, it would be so much fun and you know it.”
I bit my lip, deep in thought. I knew I would have fun but I just didn’t know if that would outweigh the pain I would feel.
“What’s the band name?” I asked, looking at Shang.
“Honestly?” He scratched the back of his head, “I was a little drunk when I told one of my friends I’d be there so I don’t even remember what they’re called.”
“How do you know they have great music, then?” I laughed, Tyra agreeing with me, apparently not knowing who was playing when she agreed either.
“I mean, my brother listens to their music and he’s got good music taste so they’ve gotta be good.”
I closed my eyes as I felt an oncoming headache, knowing they wouldn’t accept no as an answer. “Fuck it.” I stated, “I’ll go.”
The two cheered, Shang promising that I’d enjoy myself. I doubted it, truthfully, but really it was decided that I’d go the moment the pair brought the idea up to me.
-
Our trio waded through the giant crowd as the doors opened to let us into the venue. It was big, one of the larger concerts I’ve been to. Whoever we were seeing was successful, for sure. The volume at which everyone was speaking was essentially a yell, so I had to do just that to get my messages through.
“I still can’t believe we have no fucking idea who’s playing!” I yelled at Shang.
He laughed, “I got seats towards the front row, though! I didn’t even have to pay for them!”
“That’s not gonna matter if we don’t know any of the lyrics, you dipshit!” Tyra barked.
“Okay okay I should’ve asked, I get that now.”
As we found our way towards the seats, there was a big projector with the words ‘Sidekick Heart’ displayed across it. My heart dropped and I suddenly felt it become hard to breathe.
“You got us tickets to a Sidekick Heart concert?” Tyra beamed, “I love their music and I’m practically in love with San! His vocals are insane! Holy shit, Shang!”
“Ohhhh yeah I remember now.” He chuckled.
I seemed to fade into the background as the two of them discussed their love for the band and the members. All I could think about was seeing Yunho again.
Would he see me? How would he react if he does?...Does he hate me?
I only came back to reality when the audience began to cheer and I saw all the members step onto stage. Seonghwa cradled his electric guitar, in one arm, waving at the audience with the other. Wooyoung plopped down behind the drum set, smiling at the audience while twirling a drumstick. With his bass guitar, San, ever the king of expressions, gave his best smoulder to the audience and it seemed like the audience collectively screamed over him. Then came Yunho out to center stage, his electric guitar in his hands and a smirk on his face as if he knew everyone in the damn building wanted to fuck him. And he’d be right. The spotlights on each of them made them look like actual gods. If I didn’t know them personally I would have thought they were.
Yunho leaned into the mic, his gruff voice taking me by surprise, “Hello everyone! Great to see you all! If you haven’t been to one of our concerts before this is how it’s gonna work: You’re gonna dance, we’re gonna sing, we’re all gonna have a fucking great time tonight!”
The crowd erupted as the first song began to play. It was one of their more popular songs and for good reason. All over it was a really well put together song and I couldn’t help as I began to mouth along to the words. Song after song played, some I knew some I didn’t, and the entire time I couldn’t look away from the man singing. He radiated confidence and looked relaxed as if he’d been performing for decades. I knew he wasn’t as cool as he seemed, I’d given him so many pep talks before performances I couldn’t count them, but as an outsider you’d never know.
I wonder who talked him up this time?
“Alright everyone. This is the last song of the night and-”
The audience booed, everyone upset at the night coming to a close.
Yunho laughed. The sound was rich and beautiful. He was truly enjoying himself. This is what he was meant to do, with or without me. I closed my eyes, willing myself not to cry.
Yunho’s voice filled my ears. “I know, I know. I’d love to stay a bit longer, too. Here’s the thing though...” He paused and I opened my eyes only to see him looking back at me. His eyes automatically softened as they always did when he saw me, but as if he remembered how we ended his gaze hardened slightly, like he was trying to distance himself. It felt like we’d been looking at each other for hours before he opened his mouth to speak again, but I knew very well that my perception of time had been off for a while.
“Even if we only have this little time left, I’ve truly enjoyed the time we’ve spent together. The fact that it’s coming to an end soon is what makes it so special, I think.” Yunho broke eye contact with me, smiling slightly and glancing back out at the sea of people. “Seeing your smiling faces, your energetic cheers—all of it—is a reminder to me that we’re so lucky to be doing this as a job. Really...I love you all.”
The audience let out a chorus of ‘awws’ which was followed by several rather aggressive ‘I love you too’s.
The lead singer once more smiled, “Now, without further adieu, this is one of our newest songs and it’s called Brown Eyes, here it is.”
The music began to play, all instruments coming together to make a somber tune. Somehow they were always able to write music that perfectly encapsulated emotions or ideas. This one? Loss.
“Since you left you’re still so infused
In how I think and what I do
Can’t seem to get you to leave me alone
Your ghost stayed here and she watches my tears
That run down our picture frames”
Then he found me again in the crowd, no doubt able to see the tears staining my makeup, no doubt able to see how broken I was. And still, he sang.
“I’ve tried hard to fight it
Yet I keep givin’ in
There’s been no one but you
I’m trapped, confined
And your platinum smile still knocks me out
Every single time”
He kept eye contact with me, not once breaking his gaze. It was almost as if he wanted me to break first, as if he wanted me to look away before him. As if he was daring me to leave him again.
San stepped closer to his mic and took his eyes away from his bass guitar, Yunho’s voice being replaced by the purple-haired man. As his voice rang out I only could’ve hoped the next lyrics were about one of San ex’s, not me. Even if they weren’t, Yunho still looked at me.
“It’s not aimed at me
Maybe it never was
But oh darling, you could’ve fooled me”
My eyes flickered down, unable to look at Yunho any longer. His gaze only broke my heart further and in turn I felt my eyes water. After a moment or two, I worked up the courage to look back at him. He was still looking at me like he never moved his eyes. I couldn’t seem to register the lyrics until Yunho began to sing again, his voice drawing me in as it always did.
“You've disappeared without a trace
Left an unsuspecting guise
Love, I need you to know
I’ve been losing far more than sleep
Over those deep chocolate eyes.”
As the song and the show ended and everyone in the crowd cheered, I felt a rush of emotions run through me. Thrilled that they’d become so successful, proud of them for putting on such an amazing show, and hurt because I could still see a sliver of sadness in Yunho’s eyes.
I hurt him.
Yunho then reluctantly said his goodbyes to the audience along with the rest of the members. His jaw tightened as he walked over to Wooyoung, whispering something in his ear before walking off stage. Feeling like I was set in a trance, I grabbed my Tyra’s arm and mumbled something about going to the bathroom before following him. I completely ignored her questions and concerns about where I was going, dead set on talking to him again even though I didn’t have a damn idea what I was going to say.
Somehow, through the giant maze of people, I was able to spot Yunho leaving through the backstage. Instinctively I ran towards him, still having no plan in mind. I only stopped when a purple-headed man appeared before me.
“Y/n!” He smiled, bringing me into a hug, “I missed you so much!” He pulled back from me, “We all did.”
Seonghwa and Wooyoung came from behind me, both wearing sad, kind smiles. They looked healthy and happy, which was all I could’ve asked for them.
“How’ve you been, girl?” Seonghwa cocked his head, genuinely curious.
I hesitated, not sure if I should tell them the truth. But at the end of the day, they were still my friends. “Not...great. If I’m being honest. I was kinda hoping I could talk to Yunho...if I could.”
They all shared a look I couldn’t understand.
Wooyoung spoke up, “We’re having a party at a friend’s house after this, you should come.”
I was surprised, still not fully understanding the situation.
San frowned, “I think it would be good for you two to talk. He didn’t tell us too much about what happened, but I’m sure you had a good reason. You were always so good to all of us.”
“I can text you the address if you’d like,” Wooyoung added, “You still have the same number?”
I nodded.
“Okay, good. We need to get back but we’ll see you there. Take care, okay?”
“I will. Thanks guys.”
San pulled me in for another hug, “Of course.”
They waved as we parted ways and for the first time that night, I felt hopeful. I spotted Shang and Tyra and ran up to them, no doubt a smile on my face as I asked, “Soo...you guys up for a party?”
-
I ditched my friends the moment we arrived, barely even sparing a word with Seonghwa, San, and Wooyoung once they nudged me in the direction of Yunho. I didn’t try to think too much about it, knowing I’d explain it all to them later.
He was standing in an empty bedroom, looking at the floor and sipping out of a red cup which likely contained liquor. When his eyes met mine a rush of memories flooded back to me. The first time we kissed, the first time he confessed he loved me, the first time he saw me cry.
The first time I broke his heart.
His eyes raised to mine, his face stoic, “Enjoy the show?”
My mouth opened and closed, not having any clue what to say to him, “Yunho I-”
“I know why you did it.” He said suddenly, “A week after you left me Lucy showed up to one of our shows and tried to convince me it was all a coincidence. Said that I could finally be with her. When I didn’t buy it she finally gave in and told me she convinced you we were better apart. So naturally I called the cops and they arrested her for breaking the restraining order, thank god.” He shook his head, looking disgusted, “You know I never wanted us to be apart. My question to you,” he took a step further towards me, “is why did you do it? Why did you end us?”
When I couldn’t seem to respond he talked once more, “You could’ve told me what she was trying to do. We could’ve worked it out together.” He looked more disappointed and heartbroken rather than angry.
He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve any of this.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Yunho.” I bit my tongue as I fought back tears, “I’m not asking for you to forgive me. I-I’m just-” I sobbed, “Lucy told me she would kill you if I kept dating you.”
Yunho’s mouth shut and eyes widened, clearly missing that bit of information. I took it as my cue to continue “I don’t know why she did it, but it’s probably because we were happy.”
More tears fell down my face and it became harder for me to talk, but I owed him the truth. I had to tell him the truth. I looked up at him but because of my tears my vision was blurred. Yunho’s hands were tightening into fists as he looked away from me.
“I couldn’t tell you because I had to protect you so I had to make you hate me and I’m just so sorry.” I fell to the ground, my body feeling as heavy as my heart.
I felt a warm hand on my shoulder and I brought my eyes to meet his own, “I’m sorry.” A tear streamed down his cheek, heavy remorse in his eyes, “God she’s fucking awful.”
A laugh got caught in my throat, “Yeah she is.”
He set his cup down somewhere along the way a his hands cupped my face, finally whispering the words I’d only heard in dreams, “I still love you so fucking much. I never stopped loving you. I never even tried to stop because I know I couldn’t.”
I jumped into his arms and kissed him hard, unintentionally knocking him to the floor. He met my lips with just as much fire, groaning when I unconsciously bucked my hips into his, all my sexual frustration still pent up.
“I missed you so fucking much.” Yunho growled, obviously feeling needy too but deciding against it as he wrapped his arms around my waist, speaking in between kisses, “I missed your cute laugh. I missed your lips. I missed your fucking awful jokes. I missed the way you’d look at me whenever you told me you loved me. I missed your gorgeous body and your smile. I missed your moans and the way you arched your back when we’d have sex. I missed how alive you made me feel.” He pulled back to look at me, “My life had no purpose without you.”
I took a breath, tears once more falling, “Mine didn’t either.” It wasn’t anything profound or emotional, but it was the truth. It didn’t.
Gently picking me up, he placed me on the bed. His eyes were raw, as emotional as they could ever be. Taking my hands in his, he looked at me as if I would disappear at any minute.
“Stay with me. Come with us on the rest of the tour. If you can’t take a vacation we’ll hire you as an assistant. If you can’t do that we’ll make some other kind of accommodation. Just stay, please. Please be mine again.”
I looked at the man in front of me. The tough-looking, six-foot tall, tattooed, strong man that could probably scare the shit out of anyone. Yet here he was, bearing his heart to me and being as vulnerable as a person could be.
I smiled, feeling my heart swell. “I’ve only ever been yours.”
-
The morning was bright, lighting directly hitting my eyes. I cursed myself for not closing the blinds the night before and blinked off my sleep when I heard a familiar pleasant sound.
Jumping down from the bed I put on the new fluffy bathrobe my lover bought me. I followed Yunho’s voice out to my porch, realizing I was listening to a new song of his. The man was strumming a guitar, a beautiful melody falling from his lips. When he noticed me, he smiled and continued to sing.
“I’m in a vivid yellow mood
You’re my muse, my home and room
And now that I have you again
What could I ever fear?
Oh do me a favor, dear
And inscribe your name on my sleeve
Let me keep it there forever
Because you’re better than any daydream.”
#ateez#kpop#imagines#ateez au#ateez fluff#ateez imagines#ateez smut#atzinc#fluff#ateez yunho#rockstar au#yunho au
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I was curious what advice would you give to someone new to writing fics? I've been wanting to get back into it but haven't seriously written something since high school. I hope this isn't an annoying question or anything!
Not an annoying question at all! I'm just a little worried that I won't have terribly good or useful advice. To be honest, I also sort of stopped writing in earnest right as I finished high school, and didn't pick it back up until my late 20s. It's certainly an adjustment! But I think the few things that really helped me get back into writing fic as a hobby and something I spend quite a bit of time on would be:
Write for yourself first, then find your other motivations. My original inspiration in getting back into fic writing was that there just were not that many fics I liked for my favorite pairing, and I wanted more of them, and I especially wanted more with the tropes and characterizations I wanted to see. I think at the very core of anything you need that internal spark that drives you. At the same time, for me at least, if I just relied on my own drive, I would not get much done; I need some external guardrails. So having people send prompts, or writing for particular events, or writing stuff for friends really helps me to get my ass in gear and finish stuff. That may not be the perfect motivator for you, and that's fine! You just gotta figure out what is.
Be open to inspiration. Anything and everything can be spun out into a story with the right tweaking. Obviously stuff like music is a classic inspiration source, but I've also pulled ideas from poetry, from memes, from Reddit threads, from YouTube videos, from rambling conversations on Discord and from real life to make fics out of. So many times, someone will post a silly Twitter screencap, and I'll think, There's a fic in this. And a lot of the time, there is! Research is a wonderful thing, but so is serendipity. If you're out there actively looking for ideas, eventually one that you like will stumble past you.
Find your community. I can genuinely say I never would have finished more than one fic if I didn't have fandom friends to talk to about even stupid headcanons, to bounce ideas off of, and to encourage me (and to encourage them in turn!). Discord has been a godsend, and some of my closest online friends are people I met in the GaaLee discord server. As I've gotten more comfortable as a writer, I've also joined general writing servers and Reddit communities and have found them immensely helpful on both a motivational level (bingos, sprints, owe-me challenges) and on a craft level (plot workshopping and writing ethics and live grammar help). It's a lot easier to think about fic ideas and hash through problem moments when I have a constant stream of fandom-related chatter coming from the little people who live in my phone! Ao3 is an amazing website, and it's great as, well, an archive, but it isn't social media by design. If you want conversation and human connection and cheerleading, you've gotta forge out and find it.
Make it a habit ... If you want to produce anything longer than a couple hundred words, you really have to set aside time for it. And writing is just like knitting or dirt biking or painting little model figurines: the more you do it, the more easily it comes. When I was first getting back into the proper swing of things, I committed myself to 30 minutes of writing per week. Just 30 minutes. I didn't even hit that goal every week, but there were tons of weeks I got on a roll and went over that amount, and by the end of the year I'd written over 200,000 words. I used to spend an hour laboriously tip-tapping out 200 words, but now I can easily blow through 1k in a 50 minute sprint. It's all about training that muscle.
... But don't make it a chore. With fanfic, you aren't doing this as a job, and you aren't ultimately doing it for anyone other than you. That means you can take breaks when you need them, you can set deadlines and then fail to meet them, you can write stuff and then decide to never post it. When you start getting burnt out, when the practice loses the joy and energy, stop. There's no 'hustle' here. In our capitalist society we're so trained to push past our limits and keep going even when it hurts us, but the hobby you do for connection and relaxation and whatever else shouldn't be like that.
Ignore metrics. Sometimes stuff isn't gonna get hits, or kudos, or comments. There are some basic 'rules' as to the stuff that does and doesn't get traction, but every time you post something it's a roll of the dice. If you're focused on watching that kudos counter tick up, you will get bummed out fast. And any writer will tell you that the stuff you think is your best work will never be the stuff that gets the most accolades. So you have to find something else to give you a sense of success. For me, it's watching my wordcount go up in my stats and those occasional comments where someone has a lot to say and that one person who always leaves me a <3 emoji (and, shout out to @egregiousderp, having someone to have long one-on-one conversations with about the stuff that never made it to page).
Don't strive for perfection. It's really easy to want your first ever fic to be a complete showstopper, the best fic fandom has ever seen, hitting all the tropes and the ideas and the characterization that you just know fandom is missing and would be everyone's top favorite if only it was written. This is a trap. No one fic can be all things. Most people who want to write an epic as their very first venture will not see the end of that epic, because they haven't put in the practice hours to make something on that scale work. That's not to say you can't start out with a big, sprawling multichap, just don't expect it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread if you're just starting out, and be okay with abandoning it for greener pastures if you get to that point. Think of the first time someone makes a vase out of clay or bakes a loaf of bread. That's never their best vase or their best bread. If they keep up with it, they'll make more and better vases and loaves. Likewise, your first fic is probably not gonna be your best fic. See it for what it is: your launchpad.
You can't edit an empty page, but you can over-edit a full one. This kind of spins off of #7, but if the words aren't there, you can't fix them. Daydreams and headcanons are fantastic (and god, how many times have I wished for a speech-to-text engine that projected my falling asleep thoughts onto a Google doc for later perusal), but they aren't fic. If you want to write fic, you've gotta get comfortable with the idea of sloppy outlines and rough first drafts. You can't build a house without a frame and you can't build a man without a skeleton (I mean, you can, I guess, but he'd be one floppy man). The nice thing about fic is that it doesn't matter if that frame is structurally unsound or the skeleton has 18 too many bones, you can clean that up in the editing process. But you can't start hanging curtains and arranging furniture in something that doesn't even have walls. That's the process. But! Also know when to set down the editor's pen and say, "Okay, this is good enough for government work", and call it done. ("Done" doesn't have to mean "posted", but it does mean, "I'm done picking at this for now, and I'm gonna go write some more stuff".) Over-editing can make stuff seem laborious and forced, and it prevents you from actually improving. To continue belaboring the house metaphor, you can spend your whole life rearranging furniture in just one room, but the end result of that is a pretty narrow existence and a room with a lot of footprints and tracks in the carpet.
Write shit down. When you have ideas, jot them down--in a notebook, in a Google Doc, in the Notes app of your phone, in pen on the back of your hand. You think you will remember that brilliant line of dialogue or sparkling snippet of narration or genius plot that came to you in a dream, but you Will Not. Write it down. Write it down. Write it down! There have been so many times when a fic was completely saved by past!me having written down my shower thoughts about what happens next in the fic, that present!me had completely forgotten about and was floundering over.
Have fun with it! Try different stuff. Try stupid stuff. Try experimental stuff. Do stuff you've never done before that you aren't sure will work. It's important to get comfortable with your niche (for example, I know I'm never going to be the sort of person who writes intricate plots of intrigue or super long 100k epics or detailed battles), but you can't find that niche unless you explore lots of different niches! Figure out what you love and what you absolutely hate, and then keep doing the stuff you love.
Okay, so that was actually TEN things, but ... I hope you still found this helpful. Feel free to send another ask if any of this was confusing or unclear. Good luck with your fic writing and, if you want, send me a link to what you've written once you've written it! I'd love to read it.
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