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pillowaya · 2 years

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A Bsd Oneshot no one asked for

The sun shone brightly over the grass field, sending merciless waves of heat, announcing summer. It didn't seem to bother the boys sitting right underneath it, uncovered, busy chatting and reading. They all wore sporty fits, ready to play once again, as they all knew each other from the university's basketball club. The only difference was that, what served as a courtyard in their summer meetings, was a simple gravel ground, traced with chalk and equipped with hoops.

"The finals were so goddamn hard!" whined a grey haired, about to cry, his eyes reflecting the sun rays through their yellow-purple orbs. "I can't believe I was this close to failing my first year of uni. And summer vacation is only six weeks long!"

"Atsushi" Sighed a black haired, busy devouring a book of some sort. "We all went through this. Now quit whining and let me read"

Atsushi swallowed a tearful gulp. "And most importantly, this dude is my roommate! The pain is unimaginable"

"You're still first years," commented Dazai with a slightly evil smile. "You have so much more to go through. Just hit me up if you want to commit suicide-"

He abruptly shut up as a certain ginger slapped him upside down the head. Nonetheless, he proceeded to eye the ginger with love eyes. Smitten would be an understatement. "Even your smacks are heavenly, Chuuya~"

"Shut it" Chuuya hissed. "Although I, unfortunately, have to agree with this bastard that there's way more atrocious suffering to come"

"It's all because you were stupid enough to pick engineering" Fyodor, after fake clapping for the abuse he witnessed, chanted in relaxation. "Literature is so, so much better. And so much more comfortable"

Nikolai, who has been sitting on his lap for God knows how long, nodded in agreement.

"That, if you're able to write a five page essay over a rat yearning to find cheese-" Atsushi objected, and corrected himself once Fyodor shook his finger. "Oh, I mean, a seven page essay over a rat"

"You make it sound easier than crying yourself to sleep because you couldn't understand how a machine works"

"Now that's a personal attack!" Before Atsushi could return to his most desired rant session, Akutagawa stomped on his foot on purpose - a sign to warn him that if he doesn't lower his voice, he will sleep on the couch tonight - and he quickly calmed his tone. "I'm pretty sensitive!"

"Didn't we come here to play basketball?"

Asked Ranpo, taking a blue lollipop out of his mouth. He turned to look at the brunet who hid behind his chair. "Poe said that he wants to play with us today"

"No I didn't! I'm n-not ready yet..." Poe denied, a shriveled brown hair strand shaking from behind the piece of furniture.

"Yes, we sure did come to play" the captain, Fukuzawa, stood up and stretched his muscles in enthusiasm.

Dazai was tired. Yet he still wanted to play, because they might not meet like this again for the rest of the holiday. And he really wanted to see Chuuya. The ginger never failed to cause a strange sensation in his chest, as if speaking, moving, and feeling became harder, as if he took control over all of his hormones at once. He was no longer a teenager to have such raging hormones, but whenever he saw, whenever he felt Chuuya around him, his whole heart bumped, his whole body shivered.

It was annoying and pleasant at once. He still couldn't decipher why.

So he, with his massive IQ, made a stupid incomplete plan to ask Chuuya out by the end of the summer. He didn't develop it yet enough to add means or occasions for that. For now, he would just observe from afar and go with the flow. This move itself was unlike him, who planned and predicted every single step of the path he chose to follow.

Or so he thought, until a soothing voice tore the fuzziness in his mind–

"How about we make it… interesting?" Fyodor wrapped his arms around Nikolai, and with a malicious smile, continued his speech under eight pairs of eyes piercing through him. "We play in teams, but every player's points are counted individually. And in the end, the loser is dared to ask the winner out and date him for the rest of the vacation"

It was safe to say that Fyodor impregnated the field with silence for a long, long moment.

"That actually sounds fun" Chuuya stood up, cracking his knuckles, to which Dazai facepalmed because it always made it seem like he was preparing to fight rather than play a sport. The information passed over his mind and reached deaf ears before he finally awoke himself enough to analyse it, and then choked on his own saliva.

"I'm perfectly ready right now!" the ginger smiled wide enough to show his teeth, taking off his jacket, revealing his toned biceps and slender waist.

Dazai choked harder.

"Uhm, Dazai is dying-" Atsushi mumbled softly before Chuuya retorted. "This isn't about him"

Akutagawa held in his laughter.

Fukuzawa, Ranpo, Akutagawa and Nikolai all agreed after that, accepting the challenge. Fyodor chuckled. "Just to let you guys know, I won't lose. But Nikolai will"

Nikolai, who was almost automatically nodding to whatever Fyodor said, suddenly sat up and glared at him in both shock and rage. "What?"

"I don't make the rules, darling" he answered, unphased, to which Nikolai lifted his arms in the sky as if asking the gods to replenish his sanity. "You literally just made the rules!"

"Now now, let's play, everyone!" Fukuzawa, once he mentally calculated who wanted to play, called everyone into the court, rolling the ball on the tip of his finger. "We'll play four on four in our usual teams. Poe said he isn't ready to join yet, so he offered to write down the points. First team is: me, Chuuya, Ranpo and Atsushi, second team is Dazai, Fyodor, Nikolai, and Akutagawa"

Dazai let out a sound of confusion at that. "But I usually play with Chuuya on the same team!"

"Not this time" Dazai never realized the captain also had a teasing side of him until he saw his petty smile at the moment, and he facepalmed once again. His initial plan was for Chuuya to win and him to lose so he could ask Chuuya out without it seeming like his personal desire, and it would've been so much easier if Chuuya was with him in the same team, because then, he would pass him the ball without seeming suspicious.

He sighed in disbelief and decided to make the best out of it. For now, even if Chuuya doesn't win, he would make his attempt clear, and prepare a route for his upcoming confession. He breathed in and out. "Okay then"

Because, nonetheless, he would still do his best to make Chuuya win. He didn't have to worry about himself, for it was very easy to make himself loose. And even make it look accidental.

The game advanced in a blur. The ball ran tirelessly from hand to hand, and they melted under the sun, still not giving up over it. Every time it entered a hoop, they would all cheer and laugh, careless of who marked it, careless of their both personal and team related points.

"Why didn't you catch it, damn mackerel!" Dazai panted and placed his hands over his knees as he scolded Chuuya. "I sent it right to you!"

Chuuya scolded him back right away. "Maybe because I'm not in your team, and I don't want to ruin my beautiful face for a basketball match! You do realize how strong your serves are, right? Please tell me you do realize you can behead someone with that flying, flaming ball you throw"

"That's because I'm a professional!" Dazai felt his cheek getting pulled at that argument. "Professional my ass!!"

"Dazai! Catch!" Dazai heard Fyodor calling him and growled in exhaustion before receiving the ball. He dribbled it and shot it right inside the hoop.

"Is this unprofessional to you?" He asked rhetorically. "You better play well next time, mackerel"

"Alright, everyone, time over!" Ranpo cheerfully announced as Poe whispered in his ear the news. Half an hour passed so quickly that they barely noticed it, except for Atsushi who appeared on the brink of death, Akutagawa shoving a water bottle in his mouth and wrapping a towel around his neck. It was his way of caring.

Dazai fiddled with his fingers waiting for the results. He felt his heart thump loudly in his ribcage. It was so hard to focus, not only for him, but for the whole group of boys who were obviously not so heterosexual for each other. Fyodor had bright confidence in his eyes, very sure, for some reason, that he would win. It was dimmed right then and there-

"The winner is… Dazai!"

Dazai whipped his head up, eyes as wide as saucers.

What? Hasn't he played with the intention to lose?

"And our fabulous loser is… Chuuya!"

What?? Hasn't he helped him to win?

Chuuya let out the loudest "huh?" sound ever, his cheeks bursting pink. He then turned to look at Dazai who was now, pretty literally, dying on the floor. He managed to choke out, between laughter and hyperventilation. "I can't believe you're that terrible at basketball, Chuuya"

Never in a hundred years Dazai thought Chuuya would be shyly asking him out, yet there he was, the ginger gesticulating in obvious embarrassment and adding every now and then that it's obliged. Never in a hundred years he thought he would hold him between his arms with no form of retaliation, promising himself to make him fall truly for him in the time they'll have together from now on.

Needless to say, it was a beautiful summer.

#Bsd #Bungou stray dogs #Soukoku #Shin soukoku #Dazai x Chuuya

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grandhotelabyss · 1 year

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—Sally Rooney, “Misreading Ulysses”

I take for granted that Ulysses is a sentimental domestic novel, more on the model of Sterne than Austen. (Rooney doesn’t mention the Anglo-Irish Sterne, though he also wrote a long experimental sentimental novel about men and masculinity and childbirth, about the necessity and impossibility of writing realist fiction, and he did it before Austen was born.) I also take for granted that Joyce is not a feminist and may even be a misogynist; this is an old and unresolved quarrel in Joyce scholarship, largely between the partisans of French feminism (who laud Joyce from a poststructuralist and psychoanalytic perspective as a fount of écriture féminine) and those of Anglo-American feminism (who decry Joyce on quasi-Marxist grounds as a male chauvinist who imposed his self-serving delusions on women). On those points, I am with Rooney, more or less. I append here something I’ve shared before—the first page of an atrocious essay I wrote in graduate school 15 years ago—to prove that I’ve been thinking about this for a long time:

But what does it mean that Rooney has to annex Ulysses entirely to the English canon—denying its somewhat vigorous anti-Anglo specificities as an Irish and a European novel—to grant it a female lineage? Might this gesture be linked to Joyce’s assertion that his favorite English novelist, Daniel Defoe, invented feminism in Moll Flanders and imperialism in Robinson Crusoe, as if feminism and imperialism were somehow yoked together?

This tonally strange essay about gender—I might label its mix of apologetic humility and political assertiveness “passive aggressive”—is more obviously about genre. Rooney wishes to defend her own continued practice of novelistic realism, wants to claim that it isn’t dead, despite Joyce’s putative efforts:

It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read.

But when he showed its conventions to be arbitrary, Joyce killed the centrality, the unquestioned hegemony, of realism, not the novel tout court, which, I agree with Rooney, remains very much alive. The last English novelist to win the Nobel Prize hasn’t written anything we might call “realist” since the 1980s. His last few books were about detectives, clones, dragons, and robots—even if each was, like Ulysses, also a sentimental novel, in this case decisively influenced by Austen. That, for better or worse, is Joyce’s legacy.

#james joyce #sally rooney #modernism #literary criticism #irish literature

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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YOUR EMPLOYEES AND INVESTORS WILL CONSTANTLY BE ASKING ARE WE THERE YET

I think I've figured out what's going on. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated.1 Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, the harder it is to bait the hook with prestige. And that is almost certainly mistaken. So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were willing to pay a premium for labor. You can see it in old photos. If you're friends with a lot of the worst kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer.

And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. You have to like what they do there than how much they can get the most done. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. Design This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it. This technique can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be doing, not just what you can see the results in any town in America. With this amount of money can change a startup's funding situation completely. There I found a copy of The Atlantic. Whereas it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.2 That's ok. I think you have to do all three. But more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

But what if the person in the next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.3 They all know about the VCs who rejected Google. The writing of essays used to be.4 You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.5 He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong place, anything might happen. The people who've worked for a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. It was supposed to be something else, they ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The first thing you need is to be willing to look like a fool.6 Google they have a fair amount of data to go on. John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman.

Many of the big companies were roll-ups that didn't have clear founders.7 Empirically, the way to the bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them anyway. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake as the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too I am not negative on this one was the only way to get lots of referrals is to invest in students, not professors. It will actually become a reasonable strategy or a more reasonable strategy to suspect everything new.8 Never say we're passionate or our product is great. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be disappointments early on, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.9 Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. VCs think they're playing a zero sum game.

I spend most of my time writing essays lately. Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If smaller source code is the purpose of comparing languages, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. But if we make kids work on dull stuff now is so they can get away with atrocious customer service. In fact, here there was a kid playing basketball? Of course, figuring out what you like.

Go out of your way to bring it up e. The industry term here is conversion. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. At least if you start a startup, people treat you as if you're unemployed.10 But hacking is like writing. Even with us working to make things happen the way they used to, they were moving to a cheaper apartment. It causes you to work not on what you like, but is disastrously lacking in others. I do in the rest of the world. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program.

I could only figure out what to do, there's a natural tendency to stop looking.11 Economies of scale ruled the day.12 One is that this is simply the founders' living expenses.13 I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think they're onto something. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.14 Everyday life gives you no practice in this. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on anything they don't want to want, we consider technological progress good.

Notes

Samuel Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Which is precisely my point. If they were regarded as 'just' even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II the tax codes were so new that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but except for money. They don't know enough about the new top story.

The image shows us, they tended to make money. But we invest in the Bible is Pride goeth before destruction, and one of the fake leading the fake leading the fake. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the aircraft is.

But because I realized the other writing of Paradise Lost that none who read a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. If they agreed among themselves never to do due diligence for an investor? The best technique I've found for dealing with the other.

I ordered a large number of startups as they do for a public event, you can ignore. If you want to help the company, and a few of the Facebook that might produce the next Apple, maybe the corp dev is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors decide whether to go to die.

If you walk into a big company CEOs in 2002 was 3.

Or rather, where w is will and d discipline. But that turned out the existing shareholders, including that Florence was then the richest country in the sense of mission.

In Shakespeare's own time, because they can't afford to. The company may not be able to raise their kids in a company in Germany. When we got to see the apples, they said, and why it's next to impossible to write an essay about it wrong. That will in many cases be an open booth.

I'm not saying you should probably be worth trying to tell them exactly what constitutes research in the early 90s when they say they bear no blame for any particular truths you'll learn. As Jeremy Siegel points out that there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs. Did you know about it as if you'd invested at a discount of 30% means when it was actually a great programmer doesn't merely do the right direction to be is represented by Milton.

But a lot of the next round. It's hard to say exactly what your body is telling you. In Russia they just kill you, they tend to be very unhealthy. One thing that drives most people realize, because you have two choices, choose the harder.

Though Balzac made a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay talks about programmers, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. Or rather, where it sometimes causes investors to act. Eric Raymond says the best hackers want to trick admissions officers. And no, unfortunately, I mean efforts to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a truly feudal economy, you better be sure you do in proper essays.

The top VCs thus have a better education. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or some vague thing like that. You need to fix. But the question is not much to maintain their percentage.

Kant. Loosely speaking. The real decline seems to them to lose elections. Some types of startups where the recipe is to say incendiary things, they can grow the acquisition offers most successful founders still get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but they get for free.

World War II to the frightening lies told by older siblings. That's one of the most general truths. As we walked in, we found they used it to get into that because a unless your last funding round.

But this seems an odd idea.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Shiro Kawai, Garry Tan, Chris Small, and Nikhil Nirmel for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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writingthingiguess · 2 years

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Blog for class

I have been tasked with writing a blog for my writing class, as such I have no idea what to write. How exactly does one write a blog? Is there some set way for things to be laid out? am I supposed to follow the lax teaching of the hit Disney show dog with a blog? the one I watched when I was sick in bed and was honestly atrocious. I'm just going to do what I tend to do whenever I talk to someone else. Ramble.

I always seem to be able to find a topic of conversation, something I'm passionate about and then rant for days. I think its just the way my brain is wired, I love listening to other people rant as well, its like “hello I have opinions” “no way me too!” I sometimes fear my friends are sick of me when I talk, but they assure me its not true, sometimes though when they hear about my opinion of certain characters in books or shows I love they sink into their chairs and wait for me to finish, content to just listen. Man I love my friends.

I used to, and still do, get worked up over the Artemis Fowl books for instance, my favourite character in those books is called Minerva. She’s smart and funny and amazing, she is also never mentioned again after the one book she appears in. according to the author you cant have two super geniuses in a series and make it work but I think he's just a coward. As my friends will tell you, I always talk about how upset I was he didn't even try, he could have made Minerva, Artemis’ rival of some sort, make her more socially capable then Artemis, make her story be what Artemis missed during the time he was stuck in a suspended state (the books are a bit odd ok?). I'm very firmly of the opinion the books went down hill after that one, or even during that book, but I love that book because of Minerva so I ignored the story failing. I cant really read the rest of the books anymore. The implied romance between holly, an adult woman (who is also a fairy but that isn't relevant for my point) who is implied to be around the human equivalent of thirty and Artemis, who in the first book is TWELVE and in the last book, is an unknown age because time travel is a bitch but also STILL VERY MUCH NOT AN ADULT, at least compared to holly. Sure the romance is never explicitly stated but everyone knows what the author was implying and its gross.

Anyways, enough about my weird obsession with a French girl who called a deadly mercenary a loser (my god I love Minerva) I've always loved books intended for a younger audience, I feel like they are so much less restrictive, like you are so much more likely to find a book about a friendly dragon, who cant breath fire because of an injury who wants to help the main character find his sister in the children's section then in the adults section, they are always so creative. Something I have noticed is a vast majority of books aimed at adults are either romance heavy or violence heavy, which if that's your taste that's fine, people come in different shape and sizes with different interests and who am I to judge? I'm in the middle of a re-watch of ever after high, a kids show made to sell dolls that got cancelled when Disney's descendants came out. But I feel that neither romance or extreme violence is necessary for an interesting story. My favourite series of books is ‘a series of unfortunate events’ by Lemony Snicket, a fake author who's story is surrounded with unanswered questions and mystery. The books are about misery. That's it, it is three miserable children who get in to outlandish situations, and every single one ends in tragedy. But its fun to read, the author is witty and funny at just the right moments and morose and morning at others. Hell I even wrote an essay on this fake author for a class at my university. My point is the books are sad, depressing even. My mother couldn't finish them even though she recommended them to me. There is legitimate emotion in those pages, and its a kids series. I was around ten years old when I started reading them, and those books still bring out a more emotional reaction in me then any death scene in a book aimed for a more mature audience. Anyways where was i going with this? Books aimed for children are good, i had an obsession with Percy Jackson again recently and casting just came out and, i don't think kids books should be undervalued as literature just because they are kids books. whew , sorry about that i start writing then i get out of hand. I read out my opinions on love triangles to the class today. I have a weird amount of opinions of love triangles. Anyways adios, I have decided this blog is just a rant i get to force my classmates to read. Y’all I'm sorry, but also suffer.

#writing #artemis fowl #a series of unfortunate events #percy jackson #I'm so sorry people in my class this is just me ranting for an unreasonable about of time #but also suffer

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aeondeug · 3 years

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So As Yet Unsent did a number on me and got me to love Judith. It also left me wanting to write something for the research she did before going to proposition Marta. And so here is that something! A series of three narrative poems about Judith gradually working up the nerve to ask Marta:

The first time you read one You had been walking through the halls To find and spy an excited gaggle Gathered around and whispering On just how hard it had been for Them to sneak this into the shipments. Those composed there heard you step, One shooting upright with a salute While another swore and asked Just what was up only to look right And see you standing there Spine erect, face grim and firm. He blanched at the sight seen And lost the words in his throat And all his years of training too Until you reminded him of them. Each head there rose one by one, Hands folded behind their back neatly, And you did not even interrogate them But instead demanded outright and bald For whatever contraband they’d snuck in To be handed over to you now Before more serious measures be taken. One made a comment, an argument, Saying there was none to be found And that he was quite confused as to why You’d even think to ask them of that. You asked him if he thought you stupid, To which he answered “No, sir”, smartly, To which you said you thought him stupid. Very. A smart one meanwhile pushed out her hands To reveal a book with a silly title And an even sillier cover, A truly stupid prize to sneak through customs. You frowned and thought to yourself How a kinder officer would let it slide, But you were the image of the Second House And with it the image of the Cohort, There could be no quarter given, So you snatched the book from those hands Barely giving it or her a glance. Then you ordered them off on a run With a note that you’d be going up And informing their superiors in due time. Later that night, such as they’re counted Up in the dead expanse of the stars, You looked down at the book Which sat with a stack of flimsies on your desk Ready to be sent off and be disposed of. It wasn’t the first romance you’d seen Of this very specific subject matter, But it was the first you’d held admittedly. You looked over its cover again With its handsome, strapping cavalier Whose coat was not to code, collar open, And in whose arms lay a shrinking adept, Eyes closed serenely, lips lightly parted. You sneered at the thing and thought Of how it and the flimises would be off soon, Heading further down the bureaucratic chain. But instead of grabbing them each and all To be carried off and away as needed, You picked up the book with a scoff And you opened it to a random page To give it a slight read before it burned. The dialogue was atrocious, first off, And the narration lingered too long, Being overly fond of outfits and lamps and more. It was a horrible book in truth, But you turned to its first page feeling bored And set to reading it right through that night. There hadn’t been a new book in weeks, And you were just growing so tired Of the stack of ones already read. This is what you told yourself that night As you read through the whole tome Until eventually you were through it all And its whole sordid tale Of a cavalier and their necromancer. It was the first you’d read.

The second time you read one You actually read a set of three together. They were from three authors And from three subgenres, Sharing only one thing in common: A love between a cav and their adept. These books you’d gathered for yourself Based off the writings you’d seen In book magazines on your off days And based off the talk you’d heard Among others in the cafeteria. It was something of a pain, it was, Paying off person after person again In search of these three particular books While leaving behind you a trail Too confounding to be traced to you. For should you be found out about You’d be called a hypocrite by your men, And soon the word would spread around About Judith Deuteros’ unseemly interests. Thankfully your years of tearing apart smuggling rings Had taught you well how to travel and talk, So you felt yourself quite safe As you gathered up your secret finds. Yet safety had or no, you hid them carefully And you moved through each slowly, Fearing every last noise you heard reading Was someone noticing your newfound habit. These books weren’t much better than the first, Is what you told yourself those days After having read through them each. As the dialogue was still off in all three, And the one loved adverbs far, far too much, And you only needed see one love triangle To know you never wanted to see another. And of the whole lot you felt the worst Was the one about the Cohort pair, For nothing was accurate in the least, And everyone would be court martialed At least nine times over, God willing. That was assuming the pair ever left training, Which you thought was very doubtful. Yet in the nights after reading it When you had disposed of them each and all, It was that Cohort book you thought of And neither of the other two, Though they were slightly less awful. The cavalier was nothing like Marta. They were overbold and cared not for order. At the best you’d called them a fool, But for all your unkind words to the cav You had far colder ones for the adept, In whom you saw none of yourself. Yet as you lay in bed one night You thought of one moment halfway in the book Where the adept had cornered their cav, Pressing them to a wall before a mission That was sure to kill them both at last. You’d thought of how the cav rebuffed them And how you thought that very proper, But the adept had pressed on And refused to back away or let up As they asked one very important question: They ask you and expect you to die for me, But they tell me I can’t feel a thing for you? Why is that the case? How is that fair? There was an argument after those words, Which was smoothed over by a kiss, Sudden and fierce, which saved The cav from having to answer that “Why?” You told yourself this was stupid. You told yourself you hated it. Yet you thought to yourself at night On those missions now past Where you’d seen Marta glorious And you’d seen her vulnerable too. You thought of all the talks you had Just the two of your together And the ease at which they flowed, As with no other person you knew. You thought of esprit de corps and how, Though you felt connected to your fellows More than with any civilian you had ever known, That there was a connection unique to her. There was a bond between the two of you Tighter than any other you held, And they asked her to die for you While demanding you feel nothing on that. Why?

The third time you read oneIt wasn’t a novel you read, really,As the book was one part essay, one part storyAnd most of all it was a treatise and memoire.This one you’d found while perusing throughThe Sixth House’s vast libraries duringA very rare Sixth House ballWhich you found even more dull thanAll the other balls you’d gone to,Be they of the Third or of the Fifth.So as the Sixth took to the their booksOver the drinking and the dancing,So did you set to your own researches.Normally at one of these events,You would stand with Marta together,Back erect, face grim and firm,Rebuffing the attempts of those about youTo get you to dance or to laugh or whatever else,And the Third’s princess was always the hardestFor you to shake off, for private reasons.But Coronabeth was not here, thank God,And this was no Third House ball but a Sixth one,Which left you with this one and only chanceTo search through their vast storesOf knowledge you thought unworthy of preservation.Your search was a secretive oneOf which you didn’t even tell Marta,Having left her side saying onlyThat you were going to the bathroom,And adding that she was free to enjoy the festivities.To which she laughed a bit,Because what festivities were there here?You smiled and told her to seek outAnother who loved those same books thatThe two of you had first bonded over.So you had left her to go and lookFor books on the subject of thatMost great and mighty of taboos,Of which you dared not say word to Marta of.The search was seemingly fruitless.At first because certain libraries hereWere off limits to the party guests,Then next because the one you’d found hadOnly an endless treasure troveOf mystery novels spanning centuries on,Till at last you had to admit to yourselfThat the Sixth’s knowledge hoards hadA scheme that not even you could navigate alone.So, nervously, you stepped up to a SixthWith her nose buried in a bookAnd you asked her outright, bald,Trying your best to seem nonchalant,If the Sixth held any books at allOn the matter of necros and cavs joined together,Not just by tradition, but by romance.She raised a brow at you standing there,The proper daughter of the fleet admiral,Asking for books on a most improper topic,But when she saw you budge not one bitShe shrugged her shoulders and led you offTo a part of the library you’d passed six times before.As you waited and watched, heart pounding,She pulled forth a book with a cover, nondescript.She handed it to you saying lazilyTo leave it on one of the carts when you finished.You thanked her formally and hoped thatNeither your face nor your step saidAnything about your mood or your intent.You were scared, to be truthful.More scared than you ever had beenIn the bustle of open combat,Because at least battle you understoodAnd because however it was you died on the fieldYour father would stand up and would sayOf you, his daughter, that never hadThere been a more proper Second toHave ever graced these Nine Houses.That you were a Second House heir so properThat a woman with a career so promisingAs the most esteemed Marta Dyas Had put aside those far off starsTo take her cavalier vows for life,Binding you as necro and cav.Between freedom and glory afar,She had picked you above them bothWhen you had only girlish hopesThat even your father told youWere far too high and likely to fail.So as you read that book thereHidden in a Sixth House nookYou were more scared than ever before,Because you were looking for an answerTo an argument you had with yourselfOver whether there was any chance at allFor you and your girlish hopes.What you found was not what you wanted,As the author went on and on about thingsThat were tangential at best to what you sought.You read about her overbearing father andYou read about her merciless DI andYou read about a friend you thought the cavUntil said friend died without one whisperOf those four words that haunted youBecause they held you back from a more wanted three.It took you a good hour to get to it,And that came with some skimmingThrough page after page about things you cared not for,But you finally found it tucked awayIn the middle of that book: an essay on necros and cavs.The essay spanned only four pages longAnd it did not go into much detailAbout the relationship between the twoIn a personal and intimate sense.Instead she spoke primarily of herselfAnd of her ever growing shameAnd of her ever expanding list of questionsOn whether the arguments in praise of that shameHeld any weight to them at all.She spoke too of how setting love aside,Trying to pretend she felt none of it,Had done her no good at all.It had led to an argument, in fact,Between her and her cavalierWho could not understand whyShe had been so cagey all the timeWhen before she’d been so open, so free.This was the most you ever got to seeOf the cavalier herself beyondThat she too was a Cohort woman.You read and you read and you readBefore rereading the whole thing againTrying to tell yourself it was stupidAnd that the author was stupid too.You shut the book in disgust, sneering,And you dropped it off in a cart sayingHow you couldn’t see how the SixthCould think this thing worth preserving.Then you went back to find MartaWho asked you where you’d beenTo which you said you’d been accostedBy the Sixth House bookworms askingWhat you had most recently read,At which she laughed and said “Vicious aren’t they?”You smiled and agreed and said nothing more.And six weeks later you lay in bedThinking to yourself on that essayAnd the arguments held within it.Six weeks later you told yourselfThat perhaps it might be okay, after all,And that the very next day you’d sayTo Marta that you felt something more.

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #judith deuteros #marta dyas

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wrenhyperfixates · 4 years

Text

Loki Odinson’s Guide on How to Woo a Noble

Chapter 3: The Beauty of Love

Pairing: Loki x reader Summary: It’s time for the solstice ball, and you’re the only one Loki wants to go with. All that’s keeping him from a perfect night with you is his own fears that you don’t want the same. Warnings: ‘tis just fluff A/N: This is it: The end of my first miniseries, but I had a lot of fun writing it. Thank you for coming on this journey with me, and I hope you enjoy this last part :)

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Epilogue

Disclaimer: Gif not mine

Loki’s leg bounced under the table. Just a few more excruciatingly boring minutes and he’d get to be with you. His tutor droned on and on, making him wish his illusions were just a little bit better. Then he could get out of here early. Though he was doing his best to focus, Loki’s mind kept wandering to the plan he was concocting. The summer solstice ball was quickly approaching, now just a few days away. All month Loki had been trying to figure out a way to ask you to accompany him. His birthday was a mere two months away and yours would quickly follow. Then you’d officially be at courting age and he wanted to secure his place as a suitor. The looks that Fandral and the other dashing, young nobles have been sending you did not go unnoticed by the God of Mischief.

“Pssst. Loki,” Thor whispered, tapping his brother on the shoulder. “Are you following any of this?”

“Obviously, Thor. It is not very hard.”

Of course, that was a lie. Well, it may very well have been easy to follow, but Loki’s distracted mind was not allowing him to do so. Thor was scratching his head and looking intensely at his notes, which Loki peered at and realized were little more than scribbles. Though, that might just be Thor’s atrocious handwriting.

“Brother?”

“Yes, Thor?”

“Can I copy your notes?”

“May I copy your notes.”

“But I just asked to copy yours.”

“Yes, Thor, I know. But you asked ‘can I’ when the correct form is ‘may I.’”

Thor scratched his head in confusion again. “So can I then? And, by the way, I don’t appreciate your tone being so condensing.”

“The word is condescending,” Loki sighed. “I honestly do not know how-”

Loki was cut off by their tutor, Lord Asmund, clearing his throat. If looks could kill, Loki and Thor wouldn’t live to see another day. They both gave each other a nervous look, hating for this to be reported to their father, who was very insistent upon them learning Asgard’s history.

“Prince Loki,” Lord Asmund said, “perhaps you could tell me for what purpose the Treaty of Light with Alfheim was made?”

“To set up a trade route?” Loki guessed

“No. Thor?”

“For, uh. Um. Wait! To... No idea,” he ended with slumped shoulders.

“Of course not,” he said with an exasperated eye-roll. “The correct answer is to settle a land dispute. And you can both write me an essay about it due on Monday. Dismissed.”

The brothers gathered their belongings in their arms and headed out the door. Loki sped up, trying to avoid Thor, but he ran after him. Truth be told, he wouldn’t have minded some advice on how to ask you out, but that would surely be accompanied with teasing. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Thor wanted to talk about.

“So, brother, have you invited anyone to the ball yet?”

“Maybe, maybe not. And you?”

“Sadly for many of the ladies, yes I have. Sif and I will be going together.”

“I see. Hypothetically, if I had not asked anyone out yet and wanted to, how would I go about doing that?”

“The same way I have been telling you since the beginning. Just be your charming self and ask them. They’ll say yes to you, you know.”

“I do not know who you are talking about,” Loki lied, still not wanting to confirm his brother’s suspicions.

“Uh-huh. Listen, Loki, you can do it. I know you can,” Thor comforted his brother. He saw his friends approaching and started jogging to them. “Good luck!” he called over his shoulder.

Loki snuck away before they could invite him to join in whatever brutish activity they had planned. Heading into the lavish library, Loki breathed in the calming scent of old books. He trailed his fingers along the binding while walking towards the bay window where you were supposed to meet. You were already sitting there, legs hugged to your chest, and a book perched on your knees. Lupus was sprawled on the floor, bathing in a patch of sunlight. He perked up upon noticing Loki, alerting you to his presence. Loki sank down onto the cushion next to you, and the wolf pup jumped into his lap. The god’s face lit up when you looked at him with a radiant smile.

“How’d your lesson go?” you asked, closing your book.

“Fine, I suppose,” he replied while distractedly petting Lupus.

“But?”

“But I was getting a little distracted,” he conceded, nervously looking away. “I could not stop thinking about the solstice ball.”

“I see. Is your date giving you trouble?”

“My-my date?” he questioned, voice cracking. “I-I don’t have one yet. Do you?”

“Oh. You hadn’t mentioned anything, so I just assumed. I don’t have one either.”

You both looked out the window, Lupus’s pants the only sound in the library. He looked at you in confusion, wondering why the mood had changed. Loki was confused, too, though for a different reason. He was fairly certain that someone had asked you already, though he supposed it was possible you declined. Fandral had seemed pretty downtrodden a few days ago. Though why would you turn down your other options unless...

“Would you like to go with me?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes!” you replied, a little too excitedly. You calmed down a bit before continuing, “I mean, yes, I would love to go with you.”

You began to excitedly plan for the upcoming night. Naturally, the two of you coordinated outfits, and you’d be wearing Loki’s colors. As the prince’s date you’d be required to make a grand entrance, which admittedly, both you and Loki would prefer to skip. Sure, he loved the attention, but anything he did would certainly be overshadowed by his brother. Yet another reminder that he’d never be as beloved as Thor. That he’d never get what he wanted. Though, he realized, that wasn’t entirely true. After all, you were going to the ball with him, not his brother, which counted for more than it perhaps should have. But, right now, sitting here with you, with the sunlight reflecting in your eyes, meant more than the whole world.

The conversation was flowing so easily between you that Frigga had to enlist a servant to summon you for dinner. Everyone was eating by the time you arrived, and Loki slinked up to the head table, taking his seat. Odin greeted him with a glare out of the corner of his eye. Loki was sure he’d be getting a lecture later, but the extra time with you was worth it. His mother gave him a knowing smile that made him flustered, certain that she’d be asking for details later.

“So,” Thor asked after a few minutes, drawing out the “o” in an exaggerated manner. “How did it go?”

“Quite well,” Loki confessed. “They have agreed to accompany me.”

“See, brother? You should listen to me more often.”

“I doubt that. Thank you, though,” Loki begrudgingly added. “For your support and advice.”

“Of course. What are brothers for?”

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

Apparently, brothers were not for helping when one of them was extremely stressed out. Loki had checked himself in the mirror multiple times before leaving the room, but he still felt paranoid that there was something wrong with his appearance. It certainly didn’t help that Thor kept telling him he had a hair out of place or a loose buckle on his armor. In retaliation, he turned Thor’s cape bright pink, but his mother was quick to fix it with a spell of her own and a warning look. At least Odin hadn’t noticed. With only a few moments left before it was time to enter the ballroom, Loki began to pace. You’d yet to arrive, and he began to worry you decided that you didn’t want to accompany him, after all. He had no doubt that you were friends, but this would take things to another level. For all means and purposes, this was a date, and it was entirely possible you didn’t want everyone to see you together, considering that all your meetings to date had been rather clandestine.

“Relax my son,” Frigga assured him, placing a calming hand on his shoulder to still his nervous movements. “They will be here.”

Thor peered over his shoulder and gave him an encouraging thumbs up, attempting to make up for earlier after seeing how truly distressed his brother was. Loki nodded gravely, not sharing the same faith that his family did. Yes, he was a prince, but to be honest, the lesser one. Everyone knew Odin favored Thor as the next king, and in turn, the subjects adored him far more than they ever did Loki. Before his mind could stray any further, your shoes were rapidly clicking on the polished tile floor as you ran down the hall, a hand grasping your circlet to make sure it didn’t fall off.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” you said to Loki after greeting the royal family with the proper respect. “I had a slight wardrobe malfunction, but it’s all good now. Sorry that I kept you waiting.”

“It is quite alright,” he replied while Thor snickered, knowing how troubled he’d been mere seconds ago. “Might I just say, you look absolutely stunning.”

“Thanks Loki. You too,” you responded, shyly looking away.

“Come on, let’s get this over with,” Odin gruffly said to the small group.

Following the king’s orders, the assembled pairs lined up behind the large doors leading to the grand stairs of the ballroom. Having the least status in the royal family, Loki had to go first. You gave his hand a quick, reassuring squeeze before placing your arm on top of his in the proper, formal manner.

Loki squinted against the bright lights of the room as the steward announced your arrival. There was a polite smattering of applause as you descended the stairs. As expected, the crowd was much more enthused by the arrival of the elder prince, and Loki sulked while his brother followed the path he’d just taken. You gently bumped him with your shoulder, offering a kind look as Odin began his speech from the landing. Though, Loki didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. He had no need to; it was the same as every other year.

Then came the first dance, Loki’s favorite part of the night. The royal family walked out to the center of the dance floor. Once they were in place, the musicians came to life and an ethereal waltz tune filled the air. Loki placed one hand on your waist and the other grasped your hand, while your free one was lightly resting on his shoulder. Your two bodies became one as you spun around the floor, lost in each other’s eyes.

“You know,” you ventured, “you really shouldn’t let what others think affect you so much. You do believe me when I tell you how amazing you are, right?”

“I thought I was not supposed to listen to what others think of me,” Loki said, trying to make light of the situation by teasing you, in the hopes of avoiding having to actually talk about his feelings.

“Well, this is different because it’s a fact,” you persisted as Loki blushed. “You really are amazing.”

Before he could say anything else, the music stopped and a new dance begun, one where you switched partners. You threw him a look that said “we are not done talking about this.” He was having mixed feelings at the moment. On the one hand, he was able to dodge a conversation about his emotions for the time being. On the other, he couldn’t spend this dance with you as his partner. Eventually, you made your way back to him and the dance came to an end. He whisked you away to the edge of the room where you could rest out of the public eye for a minute. Though it was highly improper, you and Loki made comments about the rest of the guests, being careful that no one overheard you. At some point, you were able to circle back around to Loki’s lack of faith in himself.

“I am not sure this is the best place to discuss this,” he said, trying to buy himself more time.

“You’re right,” you agreed, fiddling with the bracelet he’d given you, which you’d yet to take off. “Join me for a walk?”

Between the innocent look in your eye and the proposition of alone time with you, Loki couldn’t refuse. The night air was warm as the two of you made your way down the cobblestone path of the garden. Reaching a bench, you stopped for a spell, feet tired from all the dancing and standing around.

“If you really are correct,” Loki began after a short silence, during which you absentmindedly rested your head on his shoulder, “and I am amazing, why does no one else seem to see it?”

You considered his question for a second before picking your head up and looking into his eyes. Such a scrutinizing gaze would usually have made Loki defensive, but he recognized the soft undertones of yours, leaving him with just a worry that you wouldn’t like whatever it was you were looking for.

“I don’t know, really,” you finally admitted. “Maybe because for all your supposed confidence, you don’t really see it either. Or, who knows, maybe they’re just jealous.”

He considered that for a moment, simultaneously loving and hating how astute your deductions were. At least, on the first account. And he did often believe others envied him for the few talents he would admit he truly possessed.

“Maybe,” was all he said.

“Yeah, maybe,” you echoed, placing a hand over his.

Loki’s cheeks flushed again, and he looked at you. You really were beautiful, inside and out. It was a pity, he thought, that people usually only recognized the latter. Though, it made him feel honored that you let him get close enough to you that he could see the former as well. As he was observing you, you turned your head up to look at the sky, presumably thinking of the first time you’d met. He knew he was. The motion upset your circlet, and it slid out of place. Loki went to fix it, but as he was doing so, got an even better idea.

“What are you doing?” you inquired, fixing him with an inquisitive look as he took off the accessory.

“I just thought you might look even better in this,” he answered.

He took off his helmet and put it on your head. It was ever so slightly too large and slid down a bit farther than it should. It only served to make you more adorable, Loki thought. You looked at him for a second as if trying to make up your mind about something. Then you suddenly rushed forward and placed a chaste kiss to his cheek. It was enough to make you both fidget and chuckle sheepishly.

Loki stood up after a moment, making up his own mind about something. He placed another kiss, to your knuckles this time, and asked, “Shall we return to the ball?”

“We shall,” you answered, beaming at how self-assured he seemed.

You went back hand in hand and made it to the center of the floor just in time for the final dance. Both of you danced so beautifully that every other guest stopped to admire your grace. As you finished, they erupted into the loudest round of applause that evening.

“Loki,” you gasped later that evening as he walked you back to your quarters. “I’m still wearing your helmet!”

“It is alright, darling. Trust me when I say you look quite ravishing. And,” he added after a split second of hesitation, “I hope you know how amazing you are, too.”

As you stopped in front of your door, Loki leaned in, and you finally met in a long-overdue, sweet, gentle, loving kiss.

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purpleglitterypinecone · 3 years

Note

you know what? i've never read a single sjm book in my life and i don't think i will but i know basically the plot of the story because of rant reviews and i just want to say:

WHY ARE ALL OF THE MALE LOVE INTERESTS I'VE HEARD OF SO.... (IN LACK OF A BETTER WORD) ANIMALISTIC???? LIKE WHAT IS WITH THE GROWLING AND MATES AND PURRING LIKE (T_T). ALSO, WHAT IS WITH THE AGE DIFFERENCE????? LIKE.... ರ_ರ (do people really find the characters 'hOt' this way?)

is this how adults are experiencing rOmAnCe in their life rn? like why is EVERYONE so abusive and mean? i mean, can't you be a badass without being an asshole too?

idk whether to laugh or cry over the failed potential of the books.

also, the fact that sjm has SOOOO MANYYY characters in the series and none of the poc or lgbtq+ characters play significant roles. like when i heard about mor's coming out scene (someone actually read to me the ENTIRE THING), let me just say that as a gay, that scene changed me to be homophobic. like..... ಠ_ಠ. so now, thanks to sjm, i'm gay AND homophobic (jk) but yeah....

Yeah, I tend not to read things I know will piss me off or make me angry. Sjm’s books do that a lot but I find I actually enjoy some aspects so I keep going. Right now, I have no idea whether I’m going to have someone read the next book before I do or read when it comes out.

I always think it’s important to form my own opinion on things and I can’t do that truthfully, and without as much bias, if I haven’t read the sources firsthand.

The animalistic thing probably has something to do with them not being human, I think? It never really bothered me because I just ignored most of it — the sex scenes aren’t that good (I will say they got better in ACOSF though).

THE AGES THOUGH. Yeah, I find it all a bit weird. Especially since we don’t have an established ageing system for the fae, it’s a bit wacky to read and even harder to understand from an objective point of view. I think it would’ve made more sense to make the love interests a few hundred years younger. You can tell that Feyre needs friends her own age.

I think if an author is going to have a love interest over a few hundred years old, and has the backstory alike a lot of males in sjm’s books, the mc has to be unhinged and ready to kill. They need to be dark because otherwise it just doesn’t work. Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air book’s are a good example of this. Jude is unapologetically corrupt and badass. That’s the type of protagonist you need for a human and fae romance to work otherwise it falls flat in my opinion.

The problem I have with sjm’s books is how she is promoting them as something it is not. The relationships that she writes are not healthy and I would be okay with this if that were acknowledged. For example, many dark romances often include trigger warnings and state that the relationships are not healthy and are not to be read by the faint of heart. The problem here is that the relationships in her books are promoted as good and healthy — THIS IS NOT WHAT WE SHOULD BE TEACHING YOUNG WOMEN. It’s okay to want to read about toxic relationships, you just have to realise that they are toxic and they are not accurate depictions of what is healthy.

Also, YEAH, I hate how sjm makes the “badass” characters in her books assholes. I could write a whole essay on this lmao.

I think sjm is a very surface level writer, she’ll do what catches people’s attention and keeps them reading even if it’s not right or has no depth to it.

I’m not even going to go into depth here about the representation because it’s way too much for me to go through. I seriously think that either sjm knows we talk about this and thinks she is doing a good job — ignoring us because ignorance is her bliss — or hasn’t noticed a community of angry readers who write rants about her books, because I don’t understand how she hasn’t picked up the message yet.

Also, Mor is gay? No, she’s fucking bisexual. Sjm couldn’t even make that clear and it had to be clarified later. That whole coming out scene was atrocious.

#anti sjm #sjm critical

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shoichee · 3 years

Note

hello! thank you for allowing the askbox requests too. can i please have a scenario for kise with a writer s/o? like, she works very hard to become a better writer even though she is quite good and always ends up getting really tired and sad. she also writes kise a lot of love letters expressing her love and how thankful she is for having him there.

Hello, my anonnie!! Sorry it took a while! I wanted for this scenario to REALLY TURN OUT GOOD, so I have been racking my head in how to write this request for a while... hope you like it!

Scintillating

Kise x Reader

Word Count: 1985

»»—————　☼　—————««

I would love to open up today’s journal entry with the typical cliché I often read in books: “The setting sun was gorgeous, its rays burning and illuminating everything in the cloud-filled skies,” or somewhere along those lines, but when I look up, it's quite the opposite. The skies I am now accustomed to are dreary blank canvases, with the exception of scattered smog and smoke as clouds, mimicking splattered black paint.

The sun, in its atrocious highlighter-yellow glory, gave way to a blobby, deflated orange in approximately 23 minutes, which meant that I didn’t have much time left before darkness would blanket the whole city for the next couple hours.

You sighed. Dropping the lead pencil with a clank, silence pervaded the room once again, save for the unnerving ticks of the wall clock. Another sigh escaped from you. The pencil that was dropped haphazardly on the desk was now delicately grasped by calloused fingers. There was still much work to do, yet your mind always drifts to these dinky daydreams. Years of writing have done a number on your hands; they’re no longer the smooth, silky skin encasing aching bone, yet Kise always reassured you that your hands are proof of your hard work.

A break would do, you thought.

Strained eyes turned away from paper to squint even harder out the window, trying to hurry the skies to grow dimmer so you can see Kise soon.

The sunset... a collection of fireworks of color... so, why do they look so drab to you?

Your eyes turned away from the window back to the inked paper. A frustrated noise escaped from your throat. The last thing that paper saw was your glare before it was crumpled up and tossed away. The pencil soon followed after. You just can’t seem to have the same knack for writing like you once did before.

When you think about Kise’s phenomenal improvement in his basketball skills compared to your own lengthy rut, your heart thumps a dull pain that was slowly, but surely, eating the rest of your self-confidence away.

So what do you do to cope? You rested your head on your messy desk before dozing off into a numbing sleep.

———

“... cchi? (y/n)-cchi? (y/n)-cchi?”

“... Mmm?”

You drowsily opened your eyelids, not registering the fact that you had ink transferred from the paper to your pressed cheek but more hyper-focused on the feel of Kise’s lips on your forehead and his arms around your waist.

Wait… Kise?

“... Ryōta? Wh-where did you come from?”

“Practice was done a while ago, and you weren’t picking up your phone,” he chuckles, admiring your state of drowsiness. “So after looking around for you, I came to your house. Your parents let me in.”

You shot up and quickly shook your head awake, ignoring the surprised but amused look Kise gave you.

“Ah—I… I forgot to write you a letter!” you panicked, scrambling to look for the pencil you chucked across the room earlier and simultaneously pushing Kise out the room. You only meant to take a short nap before you started your customary love letters for your boyfriend. As much as you knew they were cheesy and that they pissed off his fangirls to no end, writing them was the only dependable way for you to express your feelings to him. It was how you confessed to him, and it was how you were able to be honest with him up until now.

“Wha—? (y/n)-cchi, as much as I love your cute letters, I want to spend time with you too—”

“B-but—!”

Kise sighed before he swiftly maneuvers your attempts to push him out and gently scoops you up to nuzzle against your neck. “You’re usually not in a hurry like that,” he murmurs. “Have you been overworking yourself?”

“... Not particularly,” you said, averting your eyes.

You knew that Kise didn’t buy your words.

This was where you sometimes wish Kise wasn’t so sharp and intuitive, because you could feel his intense gaze piercing through your soul and exposing your most vulnerable side.

He placed you down on the edge of your bed before he gently bumps his forehead against yours. All you could do was hold eye contact with him as he gives you a concerned gaze from such a close distance.

“You don’t feel sick,” he mumbled. “Your temperature feels just fine.” But as he continued to look into your eyes, he knew something was amiss. “(y/n)-cchi, what’s wrong?”

He immediately backs up and sits on the floor to give you space, patiently looking up at you as you continue to sit on the edge of the bed.

“I…” you started, and your inability to properly express yourself haunts you again. Kise reassuringly caressed your calloused hands, and you took a deep breath before you tried again. “I’m… feeling a slump. I don’t feel like I’m good enough.”

You expected Kise to immediately jump on you to reassure you with sweet nothings and kisses, but here he was, furrowing his brows in deep contemplation at your words. A heavy silence pervaded your room.

“... When?”

“Ryōta?”

He looks up at you again, capturing you in his gaze. “When did you feel this way?”

You widen your eyes in complete surprise. Of all things to say, of all things to ask, this certainly wasn’t what you expected. You were waiting to hear a “what?” “how?” a “who?” or even a “why?”

“Well…” you hesitated. “Just very recently.”

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to notice until now,” he said. “Things have just been really busy on my end—but it’s not an excuse for my negligence, (y/n)-cchi! I promise I’ll do better as your—”

“Ryōta!” you interrupted, slightly amused at his flustered state. “You’re already doing so much for me, silly. It’s not because of you.”

“Uh… it’s not?”

“I just… feel like I can’t get better at writing at all. I just want to… be able to better express how I feel about myself, about you, about the world around me… but words are just so… out of reach.”

“But I think you’re an amazing writer, (y/n)-cchi. I always adore your letters, and the teachers love your essays,” Kise said.

“I think your basketball skills are jaw-dropping, and all the coaches praise you, Hell, you’re known as one of the Generation of Miracles. But even so, when you can’t improve yourself, don’t you get frustrated?”

At your words, Kise crossed his arms with a pout as he averts your eyes. “Yeah, well… I guess when you put it like that…”

“What are you being so shy for?” you cocked an eyebrow at him.

“(y/n)-cchi, you complimented my basketball skills!”

“But I always do in my letters.”

“Yeah, on paper! This is the first time I heard you say it out loud!”

His ridiculousness never ceased to make you laugh, and at the sound of your fit of giggles, Kise moves his head back to you as he lets out a few chuckles of his own. “You finally smiled.”

“Ah? Well, you always seem to know how to cheer me up,” you smiled, but almost just as quickly, you resignedly sighed again at your current predicament.

In response, Kise stands up and deftly picks your figure up before settling you on his lap on the bed. You were face to face with him, and you placed your hands on his shoulders to steady yourself. His face grows serious again.

“I know cheap words won’t mean anything, but believe me when I say that I really do love everything about you,” he softly said. He brushes your stray hair away from your face. “... from the way you brush your hair from your face when you’re deep in thought.” He smooths out the wrinkle from your brows with the pad of his thumb. “... the way you furrow your brows when you read something challenging.” He moves to hover his thumb against the plush of your lips. “... the way you bite your lips or chew on your pencils whenever you’re concentrating.” He gently encases your rough hands in his own. “... and I especially love the way your hands flurry across the paper when you’re inspired.” He kisses your hands. “From your hands, I get letters that always make my day, (y/n)-cchi.”

“I know that this slump won’t be easy to overcome, but I’ll always be here to support you. You can always lean on me if things become too much, and I will always try to help you in any way if you ask. It’s never a burden for me and never will be. You always make me happy, so… I want to make you happy, too.”

You sat there, silently digesting his every word. His words struck a chord in your heart, and before you knew it, the ever-so familiar tears streaked down your cheeks.

“Wh-What’s wrong, (y/n)-cchi?! Did I say something that hurt you?! (y/n)-cchi, oi—!”

“A-ah, well,” you said, wiping the runny tears from your face. “You just made me very happy, Ryōta.”

“W-well don’t scare me like that! Aren’t you not supposed to cry when you’re happy?!”

———

It was another typical morning at Kaijo, but Kise’s mind was filled with thoughts of you. Were you feeling better? Are you okay? Were you pushing yourself too hard again? That was something he’ll see for himself when he’ll meet with you during break.

As he opens his locker to change his shoes, he mindlessly sifts through a plethora of fanmail and letters, until he sees a very familiar penmanship.

The letter was yours.

But you always send your letters before he opens the lockers again after school. That has always been your routine. Kise holds your letter like it was his lifeline and safeguards it in the inner pocket of his uniform blazer, and he manages to escape the clutches of Kasamatsu when he runs to a secluded corner of the courtyard to open your letter in childish anticipation.

Dearest Ryōta,

With nothing to do except to wait for school to start soon to see you again, I curiously peer out the window from the room, tapping my hands on the cool table, now that the sun was rising. It was breezy, windy enough to gently tousle a few flyaway strands of my hair. I remember constantly staring at the neighborhood, the familiar trees, the familiar streetlights, but now, they emanate a different feeling when I looked out this morning.

The sunrise, usually being a stale, flat orange, was now bursting with colors ever since I locked eyes with you last night, and it made the outstretched view I experienced from the room suddenly… bigger. I still remember how you made me feel much smaller, more vulnerable in just a matter of minutes of staring into your golden eyes. The sky became a giant bruised mango of various vivid reds, oranges, yellows, and purples, and it casted all of its glow onto everything below them. It made everything so surreal, like a painting, and I couldn’t fathom to see that even such a previously dismal place could have the potential to even look ethereal with just the effect of your words.

The sight truly reminded me of you, you who outshines everyone in my vision. You’re the one who truly captures my gaze.

I hope today, and the next few days, the next few months, and the next few years, will shower you in everlasting warmth. I hope I can become that source of warmth for you for a long time, just as you have for me.

In truth, I think your words have truly moved me so much that I’ve been inspired once again. I will continue to be relying on you, and I hope you can rely on me, too.

Thank you.

I love you.

(y/n).

….

Bonus: Kise was on cloud-nine throughout the entire day, including during practice after school. Not even Kasamatsu’s kicks snapped him back to reality.

#ask #kise x reader #kise ryota #kise ryota x reader #kise ryouta #knb #knb x reader #knb scenarios #kuroko no basket #anon

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hisarchives · 4 years

Text

secret lover : h.s

Harry is a quiet man, choosing the comforts of his diary and Mother’s flower store over the outside world. Within the shop he meets who he can only describe as an angel, a woman who comes by every Monday to pick up a bouquet of flowers for her sick friend. He lives in his own reality but, a rainy day and an absent Mother creates the perfect opportunity to step out into her world.

this is my first piece for Harry and the first piece i’ve written in over a year so i apologise if it’s rough ! i hope you enjoy it however xx

Dear diary,

The day is the twentieth of August; the weather is fucking horrible, raining for the third day in a row. The shop is empty; apparently, no one urges to buy tulips when the weather is so macabre. I am hoping this is not true for everyone. There are five minutes left before she is meant to be here, to buy a bouquet of daises and forget-me-nots for her friend who has been sick for the past five months. She never misses a Monday, always coming in at 11:26 am during her lunch break. Mum always has her flowers ready for her along with a chocolate from the bakery next door. Her favourites are the dark chocolate ones. I pay too much attention to her.

The flower store, better known as Sunbeams with the fading smiley face on the shop window, was empty. The world around it was filled with a grey colour yet inside the shop was its own rainbow made up of petunias, pansies and many more flowers. In one corner of the shop where all the succulents and hanging plants were kept sat a young man, tatted arms covered in a sunshine sweater, staring down at a leather bound diary. He can always be seen writing in the old thing with ear buds in, neglecting the world around him.

He was an enigma to the people of Holmes Chapel. Everyone knew of him but no one knew him. Harry, that was his name, he was a weird one. Despite his Mum, Anne and his sister Gemma being the most adventurous and charismatic people in all of Britain, Harry was the opposite. He hid behind his long ringlets and enormous sweaters, eyes downcast as if to make eye contact with someone was a death wish. His posture was quite atrocious, constantly hunched over in attempts to protect himself. In spite of his obvious need to hide from the world, he still caught the eyes of some of the people in Holmes Chapel simply because despite the walls he built around him, his beauty was radiant. A sort of beauty that felt like the softness of sunshine yet held the abrasive nature of a Nirvana song. He held no evident love for anything else besides his Mum and the comfort of his book.

At exactly 11:26 the first customer of Sunbeams stumbled in, body trembling as the rain soaked into her skin. She rubbed her arms with a vigorous nature trying to bring them back to life as she walked towards the counter. As always, her small bouquet sat on top the counter, wrapped up beautifully besides a small homemade chocolate. A smile warmed her face and created an inferno within Harry as he admired her. Harry had decided that in this moment that maybe she was the reason for global warming. He saw her awkwardly look around for Anne to appear to serve her and Harry cursed inwardly as he remembered that his Mum had left to drop off lunch for his sister. He would have to serve her, but how could he do so when he has never even held eye contact with her?

Yes, Harry had not shared a word, a glance or a touch with the woman but had conjured such a deep infatuation for her within his heart. It was at this that he was reminded that he did not even know her name. He had the heart of an old romanticist poet or a twelve-year-old boy, in love with everything at first sight.

“Hello, you’re Harry right?”

Harry did not have to look up to know she was looking at him, he could feel it on his skin. He stared at the pages covered in barely legible writing and small drawings with wide eyes. She had known his name. This was no amazing discovery, the town was small enough to know everyone on a first name basis, but this was still memorable for him. Never had his name sounded so good but the soft confidence that came from her lips made him fall in love with his name. Harry, Harry, it echoed in his mind.

Harry was so caught up in his mind that he did not see her coming towards him so he was incredibly unprepared for the gentle tap she gave him on his shoulder. His head shot up towards the women and for the first time he had looked into her eyes. They swallowed him like a motherly hug. He found a comfort inside her eyes that he had never found before. Harry was unprepared for how much of an artwork she truly was.

His lavender lips parted but no sound could come through. She let a small smile find home on her face and finally spoke again.

“Sorry for interrupting but, I’m just here to buy this bouquet of flowers” she held up the familiar pairing of flowers to his face. I know, Harry thought. “Your Mum is normally here but she must’ve ducked out to drop some lunch off for Gemma I’m assuming?” Her voice was so charming; he could finally understand all the metaphors writers made when saying love was like magic. She had definitely put a spell on him.

Harry just nodded at her question to verify her statement and stopped breathing yet again when she laughed.

“Your mum always talks about how Gemma forgets her lunch, she’s lucky that your Mum is so generous” The woman stepped back and began to sway in her spot.

He took the time to take her in because she simply could not be consumed in seconds. No, she needed to be admired in bites, each savouring the delicacy that is she. Her face that shun in place for the sun, her eyes that Harry noted were reminiscent of an Emily Barrett-Browning sonnet. She was snug in a large earth brown coat and one of those beanies that covered the ears, just like Holden Caulfields’. Did she have to be adorable in every single way?

“I’m l-lucky to have my Mum” His voice pierced through the air as its huskiness opposed her smoothness.

To most in Holmes Chapel, it was a luxury to hear the ever-quiet Harry speak. He rarely ever spoke and when he did, it was only to say a few words, maybe a muttered thank you or a quick yes to a question. Whatever it was, hearing his voice was a gift.

The flaps of her beanie whipped against her ears as she turned to look at him, a mixture of surprise and delight on her face. She quickly nodded and her smile grew now showing of her teeth.

“You definitely are, Harry”

A silence enveloped the two and normally Harry never felt safe in the shared quiet, but this one felt comfortable, as if he had lived within it his whole life. He was quite pleased with himself for speaking to her and her response made him feel belated. Harry was achieving more feats within five minutes than he had ever done in his twenty three years of life. His Mum is going to be extremely proud of him.

He saw her look down at her watch, one that looked on the verge of falling apart on her wrist, and heard a small sigh escape her.

“I need to head out now sorry, running a bit late” she shuffled back towards the counter with her right hand stuffed in her pocket evidently looking for money.

Before she could find any Harry had begun to shake his head causing his locks to bounce around his shoulders.

“It’s on the house” yet again his husky voice sparked a sharp reaction from her as she immediately stopped what she was doing to look at the man in front of her.

His hair was slightly messy after the rapid shaking of his head, hands wrapped up in the bottoms of his sleeves. His appearance was a contrast to the voice that escaped him earlier, the overwhelming brightness of his outfit juxtaposed the deepnees of his voice. It shook the woman in front of him to her core. Before she could speak again he cut her off with another shake of his head.

“Don’t forget your chocolate” these few words made her smile sprout on her face again.

She began to walk out of the shop backwards, eyes still staring into his and smile still growing. He was scared she was going to trip and stumble but she walked with an elegant confidence that astounded him. Before she opened the door to leave, she gave him the prettiest of nods and went off into the rain soaked world again.

Harry was left breathless, lifeless and for the first time in this life, thoughtless. After her departure, it was as if he forgot how to function, body falling apart without her presence around to keep him stitched together. He knew he would have to write about this day, document every detail about her, each in their own miniature essay. He reflected that maybe this was weird, that no normal person would write about some girl in immense depth. However, she was not just ‘some girl’, she was the closest a human would ever get to the heavens. She was comfort, warmth, a sense of belonging wrapped up in a coat too large for her.

This day had forever been etched onto Harry’s heart. It was the first time in his life he felt home, safety and acceptance within someone, besides his mother of course.

#i hope you guys like it #im very nervous haha #please be nice :))#i made harry such a mummys boy lmaoo #might make this into a series ?#harry styles #harry styles one shot #harry styles imagine #harry styles fan fiction #harry styles x reader #harry one shot #harry imagine #harry fanfiction #harry x reader

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icecoldflames · 3 years

Text

Burned Out (Sanders Sides)

This is a self-insert if I ever did see one. I used Dodie’s song “Burned Out”.

Human AU

University AU

Warnings: loss of motivation, sad feelings in general

***

He was certain

So was I

There was comfort in her sighs,

Dreams and ideas should not be the same thing

You waited smiling for this

Oh, she'd want it

If she knew

She could take it,

I thought too

Be careful be cautious, but you just wished harder

You waited smiling for this

Logan sat in the dark of his room, his curtains drawn shut to block out the full moon outside. His lights were off, his computer on, and his glass empty. His cursor blinked at him as his eyes followed the letters of his title--an essay on “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”.

He made no move to start writing. All he had done was the standard MLA format his professor wanted and the title of his five paged essay due in 24 hours.

Logan was thirsty and, for the thousandth time, picked up his empty glass, hoping to get even a tiny drop of water into his dry mouth. He couldn’t do his work. He couldn’t even get up to fill his glass with water.

But they love you, over and over

They love you

Thousands and thousands of eyes just like mine

Aching to find who they are

Oh they love you

Oh you can feel how they love you

Coated and warm, but that's all they can do

Words only get through if they're sharp

Logan glanced at his bedroom wall, filled with high school and middle school awards for math, science, and English.

“Logan Sanders is destined for greatness”, his local newspaper had written with a picture of him on his high school stage, giving his valedictorian speech. That article seemed permanently stuck to the fridge with its pristine edges and smooth paper. He wanted to rip it up into a million tiny pieces and never see it again.

“His work ethic is immaculate”, his math teacher had told his parents on parent teacher night last year. “He will excel in university, no doubt about it.” What if they all knew he was atrocious at studying and only crammed the night before? He had coasted through all 13 years of his schooling and never once managed to get the work ethic or study skills needed for university.

Logan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He thought of his parents, currently fast asleep in their bedroom, and couldn’t get the image of them crying at his graduation, their eyes shining with pride. What if they knew about his math mid-term grade he had been hiding for weeks now?

Oh how fitting for one so fake

Make me a fairy whatever it takes

And just like her tale my dream was a scam

You waited smiling for this

I am burnt out I smell of smoke it seeps through her cracks and so I start to choke

Sentences sit in her mouth that are templated

You waited smiling for this

Logan only managed to heave himself out of his chair when his bladder was about to burst.

Washing his hands, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw tears running down his face. He hadn't even remember when he had begun to cry. He quickly looked down, avoiding his red-ringed eyes and left the bathroom in a rush. “I’m fine,” he muttered to himself.

Only when he sat back down again did he realise he could have brought his glass to the bathroom to fill it up. Logan wanted to scream. Instead, he gripped his pencil and snapped it in two. It felt oddly therapeutic.

But they love you, over and over

They love you

Thousands and thousands of eyes just like mine

Aching to find who they are

Oh they love you

Oh you can feel how they love you

Coated and warm, but that's all they can do

Words only get through if they're sharp

Logan picked up his phone and, his thumb, on autopilot, almost swiped over and clicked the blue Twitter app. He had to physically restrain his brain from tapping it.

Instead, he redirected his thumb to the messages app and he opened Roman’s contact. He stared at the tiny profile picture he had of him. It was taken the day of graduation and Roman had tipped his graduation hat down to reveal the glittery rainbow he had painted on it a couple nights before.

How Logan wished he could be like Roman. Roman had known exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up--an actor. And so, Roman went into acting school. Roman had something to look forward to. He had something that kept him going.

And what did Logan have? The only reason he went to university was because everyone expected him to. He hadn’t even chosen a major yet. He was just doing general courses. Everyone expected him to choose something in STEM and they all had the same reaction when Logan told them he was just doing general courses to “keep his options open”.

And, even if he did have a goal in mind, would that change anything? Or would it make failure even worse?

Maybe I'll talk about it

I can just talk about it

I'll never talk about it

No, I cannot talk about it

Logan began typing out a message to Roman. Are you awake? He deleted it. Of course Roman wasn’t awake--Roman didn’t suffer from insomnia like he did. Roman slept like a baby.

How did your date go? Backspace again. Too casual for a time like this. Who even asked that question at three in the morning?

I feel exhausted and want to curl up in a ball for the rest of eternity. Oh hell no. Logan aggressively hit the backspace button again, turned off his phone, and threw it onto his bed next to him.

Don't build hope on something broken

I am not cartoon

Cry for help, I am not joking

I might just leave soon.

Logan spent another hour staring at his computer, doing absolutely nothing. He scrolled through Twitter, did some research on the black plague that was purely recreational, and came up with a whole new Sherlock Holmes book in his head.

By the time four o’clock rolled around, Logan decided to turn in for the night. He quickly checked his calendar and barely managed to process he had a 9:30am class the next morning.

He rolled out of his chair and onto his bed. He could feel something jabbing into his side. It took him a moment to realise it was his phone he had thrown over earlier but made no move to pick it up or change his position.

His door creaked open and his cat padded into the room. It jumped up on the bed and laid down across Logan’s chest. The pressure felt nice--like his cat was a weighted blanket.

He fell asleep to the sound of his and his cat’s heartbeat.

#sanders sides #sanders sides fanfic #sanders sides fanfiction #logan sanders

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bush-viper-cutie · 4 years

Text

“The Worst Game” || YEAR 3 – Ch.17 (HP au)

Chapter List

<-- Last Chapter Next Chapter -->

Day posted: 9/4/2020

Word count: 3, 186

Relationship: EVENTUAL severus X oc (slow burn)

Rating: E for everyone

Warnings: none

-----

A/N: This is my first fan fic I’m writing mainly as a way to practice. This is a retelling of the hp books with an inserted character. Although most every character will be written about, this is mostly for the pro snape fandom. Please do not fear, although this is a severus x oc story, it is an incredibly slow burn as I do not intend for them to get together at all until after the final book events. Chapters will be posted twice a week.

This derivative work follows the events of the Harry Potter books by Jk Rowling and is intended as a fun way to practice my writing. Thank you for reading :D

-----

~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~

The clouds outside were dark and ominous above their heads. The sky was covered and not a ray of sunshine or smudge of blue sky shone through the large dense storm clouds. The wind howled in their ears and threw cold rain on their face as they walked up the grassy lawn back into the Castle. They had barely been able to hear Hagrid during their class and that really told them just how bad this storm was. The wind had turned his loud booming voice into a quiet squeak, no louder than a kitten’s purr.

Draco and his pack of Slytherins ran past with smug looks. Draco clutched his re-slung arm and snickered. “Ooh! Aah! It really hurts.”

“I can’t believe them,” Ron crossed his arms. “He had taken that stupid thing off MONDAY, and two days later he needs it again because ‘the weather’?”

Heather had been feeling quite guilty about her plan. It had saved her and gotten her back on her team, but it had screwed the Gryffindor’s practice up big time.

Harry groaned. “Don’t remind me!”

Harry had gotten very upset the day Draco had put her plan into action. He’d done it during potions, where he knew he could get away with it. They’re potions were boiling deep in their cauldrons and class was almost over when he’d clutched his arm in pain and fell to the ground, howling about feeling the storm clouds in his bones. Professor Snape sent him to Madam Pomfrey’s and by dinner time the Gryffindor captain was told that the match had been rescheduled to Saturday morning and it was now against Hufflepuffs.

Hermione put a reassuring hand on his arm, “You’ll be fine.”

They walked into the castle and Heather took Harry’s wrist, looking at his watch. “We’ll be late!”

“So what? It’s Lupin,” Ron smiled, “He might even give us points for it.”

Heather shook her head and elbowed Hermione who nodded and they both began running in the direction of the Defense classroom. The bolted up the stairs and just as they reached the door the bells rang throughout the school.

Heather pulled the door open and held it for Hermione. She walked in and gasped. Heather poked her head around the corner and saw Professor Snape sitting at the desk with his arms crossed and staring at them with narrowed eyes.

“Take your seats before I start removing points.”

They ran to their seats near the front and quickly took out their books. Heather had forgotten Professor Snape was supposed to teach Defense today! She turned to the door as Professor Snape began the lecture.

The seconds were dragging on and even Hermione was looking worried now. Harry and Ron were really taking their time.

Finally the classroom door opened and Harry walked in with Ron laughing behind him.

“Sorry we’re late, Professor Lupin. We – ” Harry came to a halt as he spotted Professor Snape at the front of the class.

“Are your ears working, Potter? Did you not hear the bells ring ten minutes ago?” Professor Snape pulled his robes around himself as he crossed his arms and smiled. “Shall we make it ten points from Gryffindor then? Take your seat.”

Ron sat in the nearest chair but Harry didn’t move, instead looked around at everyone and at Heather, who shook her head, begging him not to speak. She jerked her head to his seat but he didn’t budge.

“Where’s Professor Lupin?” Harry frowned.

Professor Snape’s smile twisted. “He’s too ill to teach today.” He narrowed his eyes and dropped the smile. “I believe I told you to take your seat?”

Harry still didn’t move. “What’s wrong with him?”

At this point the whole class was looking horrified at Harry, except the Gryffindors who mostly all looked very impressed.

“Nothing life threatening,” he said regretfully. “Let’s see. Five more points from Gryffindor. I’ll make it fifty the next time I have to ask you to sit down, Potter.”

Harry finally took his seat next to Heather. She shook her head at him, but he kept his eyes trained on Professor Snape as he went on.

“Before Potter’s interruption, I was saying Professor Lupin did not seem to record what topics he has already covered and so – ”

Hermione’s hand shot up in the air. “Sir, we’ve done boggarts, Red Caps, kappas, grindylows, and we’ve just finished – ”

“Quiet,” Professor Snape snapped. “I did not ask nor did I call on you, Miss Granger. I was merely commenting on the lack of organization Professor Lupin appears to have.”

“Professor Lupin is the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher,” Dean Thomas spoke up.

Insulting Professor Lupin must have struck a nerve among the class because a murmur of agreement with the bold Gryffindor ran throughout the class.

Professor Snape looked more menacing now, glaring down Dean and the rest of the whispering class. “You are all easily satisfied,” he spoke through his teeth. “First years should be able to deal with grindylows and especially Red Caps.” He paused and picked up the text book, “Today’s lesson shall cover – ” he flipped to the back chapter, “Werewolves.”

Hermione’s arm shot up again. “Sir, we’re supposed to be starting hinkypunks today – ”

“Granger.” Professor Snape’s voice was deadly calm and steady. “I believe the instructor for this class today, is me. Not. You.” He turned to the class, “Page 394. Read along.” He looked around and frowned, “Now! Everyone!”

Heather had already opened her book to the last chapter and stared at Professor Snape as he began his lecture. She’d never seen him so mad, not even after Neville had tripped and knocked over several handfuls of glass jars full of very old potions ingredients.

Professor Snape paced the front of the class. “What is the easiest distinction between a werewolf and the true wolf?”

The class stayed motionless and silent except for Hermione who raised her hand instantly. Heather looked down at her book and read the first lines of the first paragraph and raised her hand as well.

“No one?” Professor Snape tisked and gave his twisted smile again. “I see that Professor Lupin has failed to teach you even the most basic distinction between – ”

Parvati Patil stood up. “We’ve already said we haven’t gotten through werewolves yet. We’ve just finished – ”

“SILENCE,” Professor Snape snarled. “What an unfortunate surprise. Quite disappointing to meet a third-year class so behind they couldn’t even recognize a werewolf when they saw one. I’ll make sure to inform the Head Master of this and we’ll see what he makes of it…”

Hermione finally took her arm down. “Please, sir. The werewolf differs from a true wolf in the snout, the claws, the – ”

“Miss Granger, this is the – second – time you have interrupted me this class,” his voice was calm and cold again. “Five points from Gryffindor, for being an insufferable know-it-all.”

Heather pressed her hands to her face. How many times were the Gryffindors really going to interrupt Professor Snape? And was it bold or stupid to do so while he is clearly fuming with anger? She removed her hands and looked over at Hermione who had gone red in the face and was holding back tears. She felt guilty for being very annoyed but every Slytherin knew not to cross Professor Snape, and after three years of being his students, the Gryffindors should know that too.

“You wanted to know the answer and Hermione gave it! If you don’t want to hear it, why even ask us?” Ron shouted from the back.

Everyone turned to look at Ron who quickly realized he’d gone too far.

Professor Snape advanced on him slowly, savoring each step. He leaned down and gripped the edge of Ron’s desk, bringing his face close to his. “Detention. And if I ever hear you criticize the way I teach – any – of my classes, again… You will be – very – sorry indeed.”

The rest of class went by slow. Professor Snape had decided not to read to them and instead prowled around the desks as everyone read and took notes off the book. At one point he took to looking through their essays on past topics criticizing how Professor Lupin graded them too easily, as if daring another student to speak up out of turn.

“This makes no sense . . . Wrong. Wrong. Not even close . . . He gave this nonsense an eight? It’s a two at best . . .”

No one dared speak up after Ron’s outburst. They all bit their tongues and ignored his comments. Heather stared at the stack of papers in his hands and looked for any sign of her own essay, wanting to see what he thought of it. He picked up one with an ink smudge on the top left corner and she knew instantly it was hers.

He scanned the essay and looked at her. “Atrocious.”

She bit her cheek and went very red, glaring down at the words on the textbook. The bell rang and the class all sighed with relief. They started packing, wanting to get out of the room as soon as possible but Professor Snape held them back.

“I want two rolls of parchment, to be handed into me, on the ways wizards identify and kill werewolves. I want them by Monday morning. Any student who does not complete two full rolls will lose their house two points. It appears it is up to me, to get this class back on track.” He sat down and dismissed the everyone. “Weasley. Not you. We must arrange your detention.”

Heather followed Harry out with the rest of the class. The second they reached the stairs the whole class erupted with anger at Professor Snape.

“I can’t believe he said my essay was ‘atrocious’ – ”

“You know Ron was right. I answered what he asked and quite frankly– ”

“He hates Lupin. It’s so obvious! He’s never been like that with any other Defense teacher.” Harry stopped them next to a column. “Is this really all because of Neville’s boggart?”

Heather laughed. “Do you really not think it’s because of all the times YOU Gryffindors interrupted him today? He could barely get a sentence out without – ”

Harry groaned. “Don’t tell me he’s still your favorite teacher after this!”

Heather bit her tongue and crossed her arms. ‘Atrocious’? Really?

Ron came running down the stairs and almost yelled ‘Watch it!’ when he bumped Harry. “Oh. I didn’t see you.” He stepped behind the column and threw down his bag. “I have to scrub the hospital wing bedpans! With no magic! What an – ”

“Ron!” Hermione hissed, stopping him from cursing out their teacher.

Ron crossed his arms and glared at her. “Fine! But I still think Black should’ve hid in his office and torn him to pieces. It’d’ve done us all a great favor!”

Heather gasped. “That’s a very morbid thing to say, Ron.”

He rolled his eyes. “But you’re not denying it.”

“Of course we’re denying it,” Heather and Hermione said in unison.

The next morning Heather woke with a groan. She had spent several hours last night outlining her werewolf essay and now her eyes were tired and stinging. She had thought maybe the structure of the information from her essay had made it ‘atrocious’ and thought making sure the ideas flowed well would make him not think it was horrible.

She got up out of bed, dressed, and headed down to breakfast where Harry and Wood were talking – or more like Wood was talking at Harry who looked just as exhausted as Heather felt. She walked over and took a seat next to Harry.

Wood gave her a look. “I think maybe this morning you should go sit with your house… Since I’m talking strategy with Harry and soon the rest of the team.”

Heather frowned. She had always been accepted at the Gryffindor table, especially since she sat next to Harry always. “But you’re not playing us.”

“No. We’re not.”

Harry turned to her with a sheepish look. “M-maybe just this once? I mean the rest of the team will get here soon anyways.”

Heather huffed and stood up, crossing her arms. “Fine.”

She didn’t really have a right to be so upset. She was the one to blame for ruining their match, but no one knew that besides her own team. It was the second secret she was keeping from Harry but she still didn’t think it was very fair to be kicked from her usual breakfast spot.

She walked over to the Slytherin table and pulled a plate of toast over, taking several slicing and angrily smeared butter on them. She bit down and waited for more people to join the table. After several bites, most of the school had finally made it down and were excitedly eating breakfast in preparation for the match.

The Slytherin Prefects had decided to borrow Hufflepuff scarves and hats and were handing them out. Heather pushed hers aside and got dirty looks from a few fifth years and the Head Boy. The Gryffindor and Hufflepuff teams left and minutes later everyone else was filing out and heading down to the Quidditch pitch.

She found Ron and Hermione fast and joined them as they headed up the stands. They took their seats opposite the Slytherins and waited for the teams to come out of the changing rooms.

Hermione was looking up at the sky, holding her hair down from blowing in her face. “These are safe playing conditions… right?”

Heather and Ron looked up at the dark grey clouds that seemed to be gathering right over the school grounds. They looked so heavy they could fall to the ground.

“I’ve seen games played through giant hail storms,” Ron shouted over the wind. “This is nothing!”

Heather pulled hair from her mouth and decided to braid it down. She leaned over the railing and saw Madam Hooch walking out of the Quidditch ball closet with a chest under her arm and her broom in hand. Both teams came out and the school cheered as they took their positions.

The rain had started to really pour and Heather found it hard to see anything going on. She squinted and saw they were mounting their brooms and they the game was in play, but she never heard Madam Hooch’s whistle blow. The wind was muffling everything, and even Lee Jordan’s loud comments came back as a whisper.

All that she could hear was the cheering and screaming when Gryffindor scored points. Heather pulled her robes on tighter and pulled her hood up as she searched the skies for any signs of Harry, but everyone just looked like red and yellow blurs. She was glad she wasn’t playing, though yesterday wouldn’t have been as bad as it was now. There was another roar of cheers and she heard vague words about Gryffindor scoring points form Lee.

The sky was getting darker and the wind felt like slashes on her cheeks. There was a loud crack of thunder and suddenly a flash of lightning struck a nearby tree. Madam Hooch was now holding her wand to her neck and blew hard on the whistle, cutting through the sound of the rushing wind. The teams touched down onto the muddy field.

“Have they postponed the match?” Hermione asked hopefully.

Ron shook his head. “I think it’s a time out.”

“How can you tell? I can barely see anything from here?” Heather squinted hard.

“Oh! I have an idea!” Hermione ran down the stairs and seconds later she was running across the field to Harry.

“What is she doing?” Ron shook his head.

Hermione was running back and the whistle blew again. She ran up the stairs and shook her hair as she stood next to them. “Hopefully now he’ll see better with his glasses. I used a simple spell on them. He should be able to see the snitch now.”

“And he’ll end the game already.” Heather was already soaked to her skin and wanted desperately to crawl in bed and sleep the rest of the day away.

She looked up again, trying to spot Harry among the red streaks, when lightning struck again and illuminated the dark sky and a terrifying image appeared in the clouds. A black silhouette of a shaggy dog. She gasped and looked around, but no one else seemed to have been paying much attention to the actual sky, just the red streaked players.

Had she just seen the grim? She looked around again as the crowd quieted down and even the wind seemed to silence. The cold cutting rain suddenly seemed warm compared to the air that seemed to be freezing on the spot. She looked behind and saw waves of black floating cloaks making their way over the stands.

Her numb body was alive again with fear and guilt and sadness. All her worries and anxieties seemed to pound in her head as the cloaked figures floated around, moving their heads in search of something. She felt tears freezing on her cheeks and sobbed, remembering all the times Uncle Vernon had screamed and yelled at her, and all the times Dudley had hurt her.

She thought of Harry and tore her eyes away from the dementors. There were dots of red and yellow looking down at them from the sky, and a streak of red falling through the icy mist. From the corner of her eyes she saw a white light growing so bright it seemed to illuminate the whole stadium. She closed her eyes from the blinding light and suddenly felt all the horrible feelings seep away.

She gasped for breath and opened her eyes, looking around at streaks of black dashing away in a fury. She turned back to the field and saw Madam Hooch, Professor Dumbledore, and all the players huddled around the center.

Heather remembered the grim she had seen in the sky moments before the dementors showed. “Harry!” She ran down the stairs and bolted across the muddy field. Her feet almost stuck into the ground as she ran into the circle of people huddled around a body.

Hermione gasped behind her as they came into view of Harry, knocked out and wedged into the ground.

Professor McGonagall came through. “Albus, is he alright?”

Professor Dumbledore nodded. “Quite so. I slowed his fall. Why don’t we take him to Madam Pomfrey so she has someone to fuss over for a few days.”

Heather watched them levitate Harry and carry him out of the field. Ron, Hermione, and Heather followed close behind. She understood the words Professor Dumbledore had said, but Harry’s motionless body looked so pale and cold under the smudges of mud.

She blinked and realized it wasn’t the rain that was making it so hard to see, it was her tears. She wiped them away and sobbed, feeling Hermione grab hold of her hand and Ron put an arm over her shoulder as they walked up to the castle.

~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~

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contextualstudieslorena · 3 years

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IS BEING A PART OF THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY A TREND?

+Throughout the years’ many people are seen coming out as queer. And nowadays it is even more common to see queer characters in media as something that is becoming normalised. For example, in this early graph made by Gallup, (an American analytics and advisory company based in Washington, D.C.) we can see that the amount of people ‘coming out ‘ and identifying as a part of the LGBT community grows every year. Yet, it is seen to be more common in people who are born from 2002 to 1997, that being generation Z. After that, being Millenials, who are followed by generation X. Besides that, it can be seen that few traditionalists identify as LGBT, for a reason that I will be talking about in this essay.

We can also see in the graft that those numbers rise throughout the years. And why does this happen? Is it because Millennials and Gen Z started a new trend of being queer? Or is it because they feel more comfortable talking about issues that used to be hidden before.

Queer representation has indeed been growing a lot, if not in movies or magazines, Kids nowadays can spot a drag queen only looking through social media, or even Netflix, a Movie platform that has been seen adding a lot of queer characters to their movies and shows. If Netflix is doing a good job at bringing awareness and representation that is another conversation but compared to 10 years ago, it is noticeable that every day queer representation grows more and more.

Yet, the only place we can see this is in media, as there is not much of it in the regular history classes we have at school.

It is also important to note that kids can be very moldable. They spend more than 11 years of their life copying exactly everything they see, that being something positive or not. And that happens so often, that a boy died in Indonesia after trying to copy the fictional superhero Spider-Man. ‘Police are investigating if a five-year-old boy in Jakarta was trying to mimic Spider-Man after he jumped out a window to his death after being told he couldn’t watch the latest movie in the franchise.’. And as surprising as this can be, it shows kids and teenagers can be influenced by something so much, they will try to mimic it, which might be happening to all the Gen Z adults who grew up with media shoving down LGBT content down their throats. As well as that, they can also be following their friend’s choices to come out and can be even lying to their own selves for attention.

I could spend an enormous amount of time writing about how social media can affect peoples sexuality and gender but I’d rather do something more educating and look at the past. Where humans started coming together as tribes and living in a society, having to deal with the presence of each other and create romantic and social relationships.

When talking about same-gender relationships the queer community mentions how normal gay relationships are in nature. Petter Boeckman, Norweigan Zoologist would say that more than 1500 species of animals have been seen having some type of homosexual interaction, those not only being mammals but as Boeckman stated "We're talking about everything from mammals to crabs and worms. The actual number is of course much higher. Among some animals homosexual behaviour is rare, some having sex with the same gender only a part of their life, while other animals, such as the dwarf chimpanzee, homosexuality is practised throughout their lives." as well as that, he then compares chimpanzees to humans who identify as homosexual "If a female has sex with a male one time, but thousands of times with another female, is she bisexual or homosexual? This is the same way to have children is not unknown among homosexual people.". However, Petter wasn’t the only one who found homosexual interactions between animals, Kurt Kotrschal, a known biologist for researching these types of behaviours has confirmed that these ty pes of relationships are beneficial for the species.

I am mentioning animals not only to show that homosexuality is natural to other species but because they can be even more related to indigenous people.

Indigenous people are the ones who can be seen the most in contact with nature. They have decades of history of not having any contact with other human beings than the ones that were located in the same tribe as them, and as much as they would fight with other tribes and move around they still had their tribes, where they would create relationships in and settle their tents. They didn’t have any contact with books and science before the colonizers came in 1500 and even after that many tribes weren’t discovered by them in the middle of the Amazon forest, so many of them didn’t even get to be influenced by the Europeans and their racism and misogynistic views and homophobic religion.

The point I want to make is that indigenous people are the ones who are the closest to animals, and if they saw an animal do a homosexual interaction, they would probably see it as something that is intended to happen and not weird, as animals don’t have a perception of that is morally wrong or not. They are a part of nature, different from the Europeans who colonized them who were already influenced by the church and their extremist ideas. And as much as it would be wonderful to have indigenous people be so open-minded as they were, Colonization happened, and with that, so did a period where Europeans found the need to force their catholic beliefs on them, as well as bringing many diseases and suffering. Cieza de Leon, a chronicler of the conquest in Peru once said, and I quote ‘ Within a somewhat different framework. During the colonial years, indigenous morality changed, partly as a result of contact with the Europeans.’She also believes and argues that indigenous people had a spiritual justification for doing anal sex with their partners ( which is now seen as something Queer people are more familiar with), that being in a same-sex or straight relationship. This spiritual justification had to do with their religious beliefs. While Colonial Latin American societies would see anal sex within their own beliefs, Iberian societies would see sodomy as a way of showing male dominance.

There are not that many pieces of evidence of Queer indigenous people in history, as the colonizers would murder them and force them to stop being who they truly were. However, there’s an engraving that shows a little bit more about their experience as trans indigenous people in colonial times. In this engraving made by Theodor de Bry in 1594 as part of his Les Grands Voyages, we can see how this homophobia is well represented. In the art piece, 8 men are shown wearing noble clothes, and between them was Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a man known for being a Spanish nobleman who conquered Panama. But what is atrocious about this art piece is what is in front of them, 3 men being eaten alive by dogs after being demanded to do so by the nobleman, after being seen dressed as women. However, what is most ironic about this engraving is the way it’s presented, which plays when seeing the men standing above them. Who present themselves in a feminine way earring clothes that could nowadays be considered quite puffy and girly. This engraving is only the beginning of what queer indigenous people had to go through, of course not mentioning the amount of evidence of homophobia that was probably erased through the time. To summarize Brazil’s colonization process, the European view on lust, nudity, polygamy, cannibalism, sodomy and homosexuality which was normal to indigenous people, was considered to be against nature and gods will, and their job was to basically baptise as many natives as they wanted and shove catholic ideas down their throat.

Yves d’Evreux, a french capuchin priest delivered a highly dramatic letter, that presented his reaction on how he encountered an indigenous that could be considered a trans man. His trip to Northern Brasil (1613-1614) surprised him , as he reacted in a negative way towards them. As he wrote ‘There is, in Juniparan, in the Island, a hermaphrodite, in the exterior more man than a woman, since he has the face and the voice of woman, with fine, flexible and long hair, however [he] was married and had children (...). (d’Evreux, 1874, p. 90) he then mentions this man again, as he ran after him with the French to ‘purify his soul’ and kill him, he was then captured and chained under the fort of Sao Luis and was obliged to say the following ‘You will die for your crimes, we approve your death and I myself want to light the fuse for the Frenchmen to know and to see that we hate your evil deeds [...]: when Tupan sends someone to take your body, if you want to have in the Heaven the long hair and the body of a woman instead of that of a man, ask Tupan to give you the woman’s body and to be resurrected woman, and you will be in Heaven on the side of women and not of men. (d’Evreux, 1874, p. 232). This however is just a glimpse of what transgender people had to go through during colonial times and still to this day. The queer community is a community that is supposed to help everyone, but that doesn’t focus much on the history of indigenous people and how much they suffered.

In conclusion, as much as nowadays, people can be highly influenced by others, the LGBTQ community has been around for a rather long time and it is not something that the newest generation has made up. From the colonization times till nowadays, queer people have felt oppressed and the necessity to ‘stay in the closet’ and not be their true selves while being afraid of getting judged or even murdered by random people or even close ones. However, nowadays people have been talking more about important issues such as homophobia, sexism and racism, which is making queer people feel more comfortable Even though, they are still fighting for their rights, and they’re still in the long run, protesting for all the people who have died since Europeans somehow decided that god found their sexual choices to be unnatural and demoniac. Now, what is left for us to do is to create a healthy environment and show more representation in media every single day, so more queer people feel comfortable without having to spend their entire lives fighting and running away from who they are. Being queer is not a trend, but queer people have been being hidden from us our entire lives. They were always there, and they are always going to be there.

Bibliography:

Partal, Y., 2021. Are there gay animals in nature? Homosexuality in the animal world. [online] Zoo Portraits. Available at: <https://www.zooportraits.com/animal-homosexuality/> [Accessed 5 April 2021].

Sigal, P., 2003. Infamous desire. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p.2.

Fernandes, E. and Arisi, B., 2017. Gay Indians in Brazil. 1st ed. Springer.

News-Medical.net. 2021. 1,500 animal species practice homosexuality. [online] Available at: <https://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/10/23/1500-animal-species-practice-homosexuality.aspx> [Accessed 9 April 2021].

New York Post. 2021. 5-year-old boy dies ‘trying to be Spider-Man’. [online] Available at: <https://nypost.com/2014/05/04/5-year-old-boy-dies-trying-to-be-spider-man/> [Accessed 9 April 2021].

Jackson, A., Thomas, M. and Steffen, A., 2021. Homosexuality Is Natural. [online] Exposing The Truth. Available at: <https://www.exposingtruth.com/homosexuality-is-natural/> [Accessed 9 April 2021].

Buchholz, K., 2021. Infographic: 5.6 Percent of U.S. Adults Identify as LGBT. [online] Statista Infographics. Available at: <https://www.statista.com/chart/18228/share-of-americans-identifying-as-lgbt/> [Accessed 9 April 2021].

Pictures:

1475. Spanish Explorer Ordering Native Indians To Be Torn Pieces By Dogs Copper Engraving 16Th Century. [image] Available at: <http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/debry-atrocities.htm> [Accessed 9 April 2021].

n.d. Two indigenous women kissing at an LGBTQ+ pride parade. [image] Available at: <http://@indigenasLGBTQ> [Accessed 9 April 2021].

n.d. Trans (We’wha (Zuni) circa 1849-1896 Mexican Indigenous woman. [image].

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bookishable · 5 years

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harry potter opinions

not all of these are unpopular

dumbledore should have been in slytherin

the only reason people ship dramione is because they think the actors are good looking, if the characters had been played by actors who aren’t conventionally attractive people wouldn’t ship them

draco and hermione are just not compatible at all

fred’s death was the worst one

the golden trio belong in gryffindor because they use the traits they have from other houses in order to be brave (harry has ambition to survive and a strong sense of self-preservation, ron’s loyalty helps him defend others “if you want to kill harry you’ll have to kill us too”, yeah thanks for ruining that movies, and hermione often uses her intelligence to find solutions and work a way out of a situation)

kreacher is more likeable than dobby

on balance the order of the phoenix is the worst film

i agree that the sorting system should be based on the traits you value most not the ones you have, and if this is canon then it should have been made clearer in the books

snape is not a good person but one of the best characters

it’s pointless to compare james and snape to figure out who is a worse person they had totally opposite lives

slughorn is a better example of a flawed but good character/person than snape

luna embodies ravenclaw house more than any other character

it sucks that ravenclaw has only luna as good character representation, we had cho who became a bigger character, but so many people in the fandom hate her and her relationship with harry ended badly from his pov

harry potter is the most underrated character in harry potter which is a crime

kreacher’s tale should have been in the films

percy, fred, george and ron could all have fitted in slytherin fight me

the best portrayed character in the films was snape

most of the hogwarts professors were also very accurate to the books and well acted, especially mcgonagall, sprout, lockhart, flitwick and madame pomfrey (although she should have had more lines from the books)

oh and also filch

daniel radcliffe looked most like harry potter in prisoner of azkaban

charlie and ginny fit in gryffindor the most out of all the weasleys

ravenclaws are probably the ones who procrastinate the most

peter pettigrew is such an interesting character

dean thomas needs more appreciation

ron and hermione are simultaneously the best couple and the most annoying couple

pettigrew should be viewed as a true marauder not just someone who tagged along with the other three because that’s what made his betrayal so terrible

regulus black deserved better

fleur delacour is underrated but i’m glad to see she’s starting to get more appreciation now

i could write a 300 page essay on how amazing harry and ron’s friendship is

it annoys me when people make harry potter as vines videos and just stick the name padfoot over any video of a dog even if it has no relation to sirius

most of harry’s escapes were due to luck and i love that he acknowledges that

but this doesn’t make him any less brave or skilled

the deathly hallows is the best book

the idea that mary poppins is a witch is more canon than hogwarts being a school (which isn’t saying much because honestly the only thing the students learnt there was that they lived in close proximity to several things that could kill them)

dumbledore is a better person than everyone makes him out to be

aberforth dumbledore is underrated

the best house pairing is slytherin and hufflepuff

harry should have named his children sirius, remus and ruby (rubeus), but i totally get why he used his parents and dumbledore’s names even though i can’t accept severus or luna

i still love harry and luna’s friendship and i guess since ginny was close friends with her too they both chose her name

jk rowling is not a bad person, yes she has done some controversial things, but people should be more appreciative of the world she created and how she encouraged generations of children to read

harry and hermione’s friendship is so precious

i love ron because he is a realistic character and a great guy

the crimes of grindelwald should have been named ‘the rise of grindelwald’

people need to stop complaining about characters being portrayed as poc in fan art, these artists dedicate their time to creating something and it’s their choice how they interpret the characters

also i’m sure lots of artists don’t design them this way just to encourage diversity, it can simply be a stylistic choice and some probably just prefer to draw them this way

not all slytherins are obsessed with the colour green omg

same applies to the other houses and their house colours, i just see the slytherin one more frequently

voldemort’s movie death is atrocious

but cool use of cgi i guess

ginny and ron were ruined by the films but not the actors

so was the entire weasley family a little

arthur and bill should have been in ravenclaw

molly should have been in hufflepuff

the whole “calmly“ thing doesn’t really annoy me, but i do think that dumbledore was too angry generally in the fourth film (maybe this was purposeful for the character i just prefer book dumbledore)

this leads to my conclusion that goblet of fire is the second worst film

i actually liked crimes of grindelwald, but i thought the first film was better because it was quite different to the harry potter series

however,, even though cog was very plot heavy, bear in mind that they are setting up for 3 more films. the first has to be simpler to set the scene and kick off the franchise, just like philosopher’s stone. the next film will naturally have more to it. it was dark because grindelwald played a bigger part. this is just like the chamber of secrets film (a lot of people dislike it) which was also plot heavy and had a different feel to it. people need to give it time, there’s 3 more films

jk rowling needs to write a new children’s book with a new universe to harry potter, and leave the harry potter franchise alone after fbawtft. it’s fine as it is. she still has the talent to create something great

the books are infinitely better than the films

even though i disagree that all the weasleys belong in gryffindor, i support the idea that they all have the same values and would probably choose to be sorted into gryffindor over the other houses

#harry potter opinions #harry potter series #hp textpost #i don’t agree with all of these anymore so i may post an updated version

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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The anti-male and anti-White rhetoric of the new left is extreme. The racial attacks on whites in particular approaches exterminationist propaganda seen only in, e.g., the Hutu against the Tutsi in 1990’s Rwanda.

For anyone who doubts this, consider the following few examples, which are far from complete:

A columnist for the Huffington Post, a major leftist publication, wrote an article titled “Towards a Concept of White Wounding,” apparently calling for racial violence.

The New York Times hired a columnist who had repeated vulgar racial attacks on whites, calling “whiteness” “awful,” whites “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” expressed great joy at “being cruel to old white men,” and declared that whites will be “extinct soon.” The Paper of Record stood by her when these attacks were exposed, and only quietly let her go recently when she supported a boycott against her own employer.

Symone Sanders, currently a senior adviser to Joe Biden and previously the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, mocked a disabled white teenager who was tortured on camera in 2017 by a black mob screaming “Fuck Trump! Fuck white people!” and otherwise called cases of antiwhite political violence “a protest.”

The New York Times—again, hardly an unknown blog—published an opinion column by Michelle Goldberg with the eliminationist title “We Can Replace Them,” ostensibly against “white nationalism,” but in fact directed against a demographic white majority as such, which the author seeks to replace with nonwhites for what she imagines to be political advantage.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, a major organ of the Left that pushes the security establishment’s Russia Hoax conspiracy theories, called this summer for “a literal or figurative war” on whites and a “race war” that the DNC must be willing to get “Lincolnesque” about.

Major leftist and establishment media such as Newsweek publish cover stories titled “Is Your Baby Racist”; major publishers promote books titled White Fragility, or The Dying of Whiteness, and CNN—not white nationalist outlets—runs graphics on “The Vanishing White American.”

Again, all this is par for the course these days; as everyone knows, state-funded universities routinely hold “white privilege” seminars and orientation sessions, promoting a concept the plain meaning of which is to dispossess people of property and civil rights based on their biology.

the thing that really gets me about BAP is that he’s done enough study of past genocides to realize that ideological terrain must be laid to entice people to perform the requisite actions, and yet he has no idea how this is done at best, and is trying to convince people that generic academic writing is call to genocide for his own obscene purposes at worst. like, i am somebody who has been obsessed with the notion of genocide since kindergarten, when my mom described in her blue collar view the nature of the nazi regime to me (which was in the news around that time over the former yugoslavia), and i questioned how people could perform those actions and, to the extent that i could as a child without internet access, researched this, mostly by asking my mom for holocaust books in the scholastic book catalogue. and ever since, i have read and read and read about genocide, because if there is one goal i have above all else in live it is to prevent violence. and when somebody says that absurdly sterile sociological language like

Importantly, the effort to break up white supremacy posthaste requires a diversity of tactics, efforts, people, organizations, opinions, and so on. What’s suggested here is hardly meant to encompass that range, and it is not meant to demean or necessarily render an opinion on most of the tactics other white people are using in this fight. It is to critique a misguided focus on creating a version of whiteness that seems more akin to escapism than a realistic possibility, and one that we believe diverts us from the real work at hand.

More than anything it’s a thought. A notion. One that’s being worked out on these pages as it’s typed. As such, it will be missing key pieces. It will likely be wrongheaded in certain (hopefully not all) aspects.

is going to drive anybody to commit any action whatsoever, much less a violent one, i’d say that person is a fucking moron. like, when an article says

Whoever had the occasion to be an eye-witness during the slaughtering of animals or to see at least a truthful film on the slaughtering-will never forget this horrible experience. It is atrocious. And unwillingly, he is reminded of the crimes which the Jews have committed for centuries on men. He will be reminded of the ritual murder.

History points out hundreds of cases in which non-Jewish children were tortured to death. They also were given the same incision through the throat as is found on slaughtered animals. They also were slowly bled to death while fully conscious

that’s the roth test of genocide support right there. that’s emotive language designed to inspire people to take violent action. in contrast, is

Beyond this, if the goal is dismantling a system of white supremacy, changing our personal sense of whiteness misses the mark. Systems of power can and will exist regardless of the individual or even group mentalities or feelings of those operating within them. By educating ourselves on the damage caused by whiteness, and the system of white supremacy that undergirds it, and then turning to find a version of whiteness at-odds with this system, we don’t tear the system down. Instead, perhaps counter-intuitively, we create actors within that system who no longer believe they are perpetuating it, which does exactly that.

supposed to inspire college students to pick up ak47s and uh, kill their parents? cause i know college students, and if they have to do an assignment they were given a month ago without an extension, they will shit themselves. everybody else in america would stop reading about five words in. (christ, i’ve looked at this paragraph a dozen times and i still haven’t done anything more than skim it)

this is the same sort of tribalistic language he supposedly deplores, except by calling it tribalistic he pretends to be above the fray and thus gains cache as a supposed independent observer of this shit. in reality, he’s just taking advantage of the fact that some people have noted a tired media cliche and, being largely insulated from politics in general, have built their entire political worldview around it. trust me, i’ve met them, i know them, and for the most part, they’re fairly quickly dissuaded if you talk to them as human beings for a few hours. BAP wants to take advantage of their limited knowledge and attention spans. don’t let him.

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fancat-not-fangirl · 4 years

Text

It’s Not You Pt.9

a/n: ok so that took wayyyy longer than expected SORRY :/ (for those of you who haven’t seen Princess Bride, it’s an amazing movie and I totally recommend watching it)

3 weeks later

24 hours. Cas was 24 hours away from Saturday. 24 long, grueling, endless hours. He didn’t think he could wait that long. Yes he’d made it through the four previous days, but now that he only had mere hours until Saturday, Cas thought that the waiting would never end.

Because since he saw Dean Winchester’s car drive off the college campus the week before, Cas had been counting the days, hours, minutes, seconds, until he could see him again. Until he could look into those apple green eyes, and count the freckles on his face. Until he could hear that simultaneously soft but husky voice in his ear. Until he could wrap his arms around his soulmate and never let go.

24 hours.

Well, to be exact, 23 hours, 49 minutes and 14 seconds.

All he had to do was get out of bed, manage to sit through his classes without constantly getting distracted, finish his homework, and go to sleep. And then when he’d wake up tomorrow he’d get to finally finally see Dean again.

But first things first, he had to accomplish the first thing on his list. He had to get out of bed.

So Cas heaved himself off of his comfortable mattress and pillow, rubbing tiredly at his eyes as he glanced over at Sam’s bed, which was empty. Sam’s first class was at 8:00am, so he was always up and about much earlier than Cas was. Cas, on the other hand, preferred to sleep in, so he specifically chose his first class of the day to be Constitutional Law, which started at 9:00am.

Looking at the clock, Cas let out a sigh and ran a hand through his hair. It was 8:20.

23 hours, 40 minutes, 38 seconds.

This was going to be a long day.

******

He made it through his first four classes of the day. Barely. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Dean’s smiling face gazing down at him, and Cas practically had to hold his eyes open through most of his morning lectures.

But it was finally lunchtime and Cas took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air as he opened the front doors and strolled outside. He grinned and waved at Sam, who was already sitting at their usual table in the courtyard. It was a Friday, and although the weather had gotten colder over the past few weeks, Cas welcomed the chilly air. People were milling around, discussing their weekend plans, inviting each other to various parties. Cas breezed past groups of teachers and students, dropping his bag down at Sam’s table.

Sam already had a mouth full of salad as he tried saying something to Cas before realizing that all that came out was a garbled mess of words with a side of ranch dressing. Cas chuckled and waited for Sam to swallow, sitting down across from his roommate, who seemed to be growing by the minute. Cas nearly had to break his neck with the amount of craning that was necessary to look Sam in the eye. If he was being honest, Cas was probably more familiar with Sam’s various array of flannels than with his facial features.

Sam got the food down quicker than Cas thought was possible; a trait probably inherited from his brother. A brother who they both missed terribly, although for different reasons. Ironically, Sam talked about Dean even more now that he started seeing his brother more often. Before the Columbus Day weekend, Sam would bring Dean many conversations he shared with anyone that’d listen, talking about how much he missed his brother. But once Sam started seeing him at a more regular rate, Dean was all he ever talked about. Well, other than Gabe. Not that Cas minded. He could talk about Gabe for hours, sharing stories upon stories about his older brother. And Dean. Cas couldn’t stop pestering Sam about telling him facts and stories about his soulmate. But he didn’t think that Sam minded either. Any chance Sam had to show off his brother, he’d take it.

“I’m leaving for the weekends.” Sam’s voice brought Cas back to reality. He realized that he’d spaced out, and brought his eyes back around to Sam. “Me and Kevin have to work on a project for my Nutrition and Dietetics class, so I’ll be staying over at his place. I’m leaving with him today after my last class.” Sam winked at him. “Just don’t have too much fun with Dean while I’m gone.”

Cas blushed and quickly looked down. He heard Sam chuckle and raised his head, then whispered with a smirk, “Don’t worry. We’ll be sure not to use your bed.”

Sam choked on his next forkful of salad, and Cas left him that way, grinning from ear to ear as he got up and strode over to the food trucks. What was he in the mood for today? Not sushi or any type of fish. Salads were definitely off the list. Nothing spicy, so that eliminated Mexican and Indian food. Aha. Burgers.

“Double bacon cheeseburger please. No pickles. Thank you.” The line at the truck was short, and Cas placed his order without thinking twice. Wherever he went, wherever he ate, he always ordered the same burger. College was no different. Sam had tried ceaselessly convincing him to try something different. Either to eat one with pickles, or maybe to have BBQ sauce instead of ketchup, but Cas refused. He knew what he liked, and he’d stick to it.

“One double bacon cheeseburger please no pickles thank you.” Came a familiar voice, and Cas started. “Here you go, angel.” And he looked up as the 20 hours, 31 minutes, and 24 seconds came spiraling down to zero. Because Cas found himself looking up into Dean’s smiling face as the older boy stretched out a carefully packaged burger towards Cas.

“What? Dean? You- I don’t-” Dean let out a laugh that made Cas’s heart jump in his chest for the first time that week.

“Hey, Chuck, can you take over for a second?” Dean turned his head and called back to the other man in the truck. A muffled “Sure thing” was heard, and Dean sent Cas a sharp grin as he clambered out of the truck and to Cas, who threw himself into Dean’s arms the second his feet hit the ground.

“I missed you, too.” He whispered into Cas’s hair. They stayed in the embrace for only seconds before Dean grunted and pulled away. “The burger’s leaking ketchup all over my uniform”, he grumbled, viciously trying to wipe off the now red patch on his sleeve. Cas giggled, overjoyed that Dean was here. Remembering Sam, he swiveled around and was about to wave his roommate over when Dean put a hand on his shoulder.

“Sammy already knows.” Cas’s incredulous gaze found Dean’s. Sam knew? And he didn’t tell Cas? If Cas had known that Dean would be here, he would have chosen a different outfit to wear. Oh god, Dean probably thought that his knit cardigan was atrocious. If Cas had known, he would have at least attempted to arrange his hair into a presentable shape. If Cas had known…

“Don’t take it out on him, though. I told him to keep his cakehole shut about it or I’d chop off his balls and feed them to a zebra.” Dean winked at Cas. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

Cas’s heart melted at that and he smiled up at Dean, although still a little confused. “Wait, so when did you-”

“Deano! Get your ass back in here!” Came the call from inside the truck. Smiling sheepishly at Cas, Dean ruffled his soulmate’s hair and gave him a quick kiss on the nose. “My shift ends at 8:30. I’ll explain everything later.” And with that information he left Cas standing behind the truck and returned to working the job Cas never knew he had.

Feeling a little dazed, Cas walked back to his spot at the table, everything snapping back into focus only when he sat down and was met with hysteric giggling coming from Sam.

“Oh, you should have seen your face!” Sam cackled. “It was definitely worth the wait.”

Blushing now, Cas looked down at his cardigan with a frown and started running his hands through his hair. “You could have told me to dress nicer today”, he mumbled.

Sam laughed and leaned forward on his elbows, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “But then you’d have gotten suspicious. It was better this way.” He giggled again. “The look on your face was priceless, though.”

Cas unwrapped his burger and smiled at the heart draw on the wrapper in sharpie. He hoped it hadn’t bled through onto the actual bun, and was relieved when he didn’t taste sharpie in his first bite. He didn’t know why or how, but this particular burger seemed to taste better than any other burger he’d ever had.

He and Sam finished their food in peace, but Cas’s mind was reeling. Dean? Here? Since when did Dean work in food trucks? And anyway, Cas thought he worked at the repair shop. It surely payed better than serving food, even though he knew that Dean didn’t like the, and he quoted, “Black Hole chock full of people with sequoia trees shoved up their asses”.

He shook his head and remembered that Dean promised that he would explain everything later. After his shift ended at 8:30. Cas smiled and set the timer.

11 hours. 30 min. 22 seconds.

******

Sam had left with Kevin an hour ago, so Cas used the peace and quiet without his roommate to finish his homework. Not that Sam was loud or annoying, but he and Cas always managed to start a conversation about something or other every time they were put in a room together. Whether it be sports, books, movies, art, food, or pencils, they always found something to talk about. Cas would be writing an essay when he’d head a small gasp from Sam’s side of the room, and swivel around just in time to see Sam sit upright in bed and ask Cas if fish felt wet or dry all the time. What would follow would be a long, winded argument ending in them not wanting to take up any more time with discussions and give up. Cas still firmly believed that water was not wet, but he never brought it up again to Sam. With a little smile, Cas decided that he would ask Dean and see what he thought.

Dean. Who would be arriving in 0 hours, 6 minutes, and 47 seconds.

Cas had made and remade his bed twice now, and he almost laughed at the irony. The first time he had heard that Dean was coming over, it had been Sam that went completely Control Freak, neatening his bed and rearranging his books to impress his brother. Now Cas was the one that was going crazy trying to make sure that his room looked presentable.

Realizing that he was pacing the room and probably annoying the hell out of the people on the floor below him, Cas sat down on his bed. His eyes travelled to his signed vinyl record. Dean kept promising that he would play some of his songs for Cas on his guitar, but he never actually did it, something about not risking any “tiny tot college twerps” bringing harm to his Baby 2.0; the guitar. In fact, Cas had never even heard Dean sing. Yes, at times Cas would hear snippets of a song here and there, maybe even some humming. But never any actual singing. Cas made another mental note for himself to ask Dean about his guitar, too.

Cas almost jumped out of his skin when he heard a knock on the door, and was up and across the room in a flash. He thrust the door open and was met with a bear hug from Dean. Smiling into Dean’s neck, Cas returned the hug and kicked the door shut behind them.

“Hey, angel.” He heard Dean whisper into his hair, which he then placed a soft kiss in. To be honest, Cas loved his new nickname. Well, not exactly new. His mother had been calling him ‘angel’ since he was a kid, and it had always annoyed him. But whenever Dean said it, Cas melted. The way Dean’s mouth formed the word, not to mention the gravelly way he sounded out the letters, almost had Cas on his knees. Like at the moment.

Their mouths collided in a kiss, and Cas moaned and arched his back into Dean. This kiss was hungry. Desperate. As if neither one could get enough of the other, which was true. Cas loved this. Loved the almost feral way Dean’s lips ravaged his own, and the small growls Dean made when Cas’s tongue traced the inside of his mouth.

“You look so damn cute in this”, came the soft murmur from Dean, and before he knew it, Dean’s hands were under his cardigan and all over his skin. Cas inhaled sharply as the warmth from Dean’s calloused fingers seeped into him. They were running up along his back, around his torso, on his chest. Dean was everywhere and Cas didn’t ever want it to stop.

Soon his cardigan was off and on the floor, quickly followed by Dean’s flannel and shirt. Their hands were all over each other, warm and sure. Dean’s mouth now decided to chart its course down Cas’s neck, and he arched his head back to give Dean more access. Dean’s mouth then traveled lower, down, down, down his chest. Cas was gasping, hands woven into Dean’s hair. Every time Dean sucked at a spot of his skin just right, Cas moaned and pulled on Dean’s hair. Dean obviously enjoyed it, and smirked devilishly whenever he got a particularly loud keen out of his soulmate.

And then they were on the bed (not Sam’s, just as promised), and Cas was a writhing mess under Dean’s hands and mouth. They traced his hips, his stomach, his chest. They turned Cas into a moaning, sweating, begging pool of goo that was addicted to the touch of his lover. But this was a healthy addiction. It was one that made Cas the happiest man in the world.

Cas suddenly remembered something.

“Dean?”

Dean stopped his meticulous worshipping of Cas’s body and raised his eyes to meet Cas’s. “Hmm?” He asked, his voice vibrating through Cas’s body, making him shiver.

“Do fish feel wet or dry all the time?”

Dean’s face broke into a smile and he laughed, bringing himself back up to kiss Cas in the mouth. They stayed like that for a while, just kissing. Cas didn’t necessarily care that Dean hadn’t answered his question, because this kiss was slow and soft, nothing like the one they had earlier. Cas couldn’t decide which one he liked better.

When the kiss deepened, he realized that he didn’t have to decide. A kiss from Dean was still a kiss. And Cas loved them all the same.

***

“So, you never answered my question.” Cas poked Dean in the side as they settled down into the blankets to watch a movie the following day. They had just returned from having dinner in the city, where Cas had learned that Dean had taken the job at the food trucks because he was lonely and bored back at the repair shop. Dean admitted that the pay wasn’t as good, but he’d also taken on the morning shift at an indoor pool not far from the college campus. Cas was thrilled at the chance of seeing his boyfriend more often. He still grinned at the thought. Dean was his boyfriend. He never thought that he’d be saying it, but he was glad that he had found his soulmate. And so was his mom. She had been ecstatic when Cas had called and told her that he’d found the person with his name on their wrist. After relaying the whole story of their little mix up to her, his mom had insisted that she get a chance to meet Dean, and invited him to stay at their house for Winter Break. Dean had looked like a happy puppy when Cas had suggested the idea, and had immediately agreed.

During the dinner in the city, Dean, in turn, had also learned that Cas had never seen the movie Princess Bride. From the sound of it, Cas was surprised that such a movie had even peaked Dean’s interest, but Dean had firmly stated that this was a movie worth watching.

So there they were, cuddled together on Cas’s bed, surrounded by a mountain of pillows and blankets, Dean’s laptop in front of them. On their way back from dinner, they’d bought popcorn and snacks, and were now up and ready to begin Operation Watch The Girly Movie That Dean Insists Isn’t Girly. Well, they’d be ready if Dean could just get his Amazon prime account to work.

And while he was doing that, Cas was determined to wring an answer out of Dean.

“Which question are you referring to?” Dean asked, scrolling through the saved passwords on his phone, trying to find the one for his account.

“The one I asked on Friday.” At Dean’s confused sideways glance, Cas elaborated. “The one about fish. Do they feel wet all the time?”

Dean chuckled and looked up at Cas with those startlingly green eyes. Cas didn’t quite understand how eyes could be that green. Most of the green-eyed people he’d met had more of a dull, stormy sea gray/green colored eyes. But Dean. Dean’s eyes were different. Something about them was so bright, as if they were a field where the grass was made of emeralds.

“I think that depends on whether or not you think water is wet.” Dean’s voice brought Cas’s mooning and staring to a stop.

“Water is not wet.”

Dean snorted. “Yes it is.”

“No. It’s not.” Cas shook his head. Dean was taking the same approach to this as his brother had.

Arching his eyebrow, Dean said, “Yeah it is. Something is defined as ‘wet’ if it is surrounded by water. Water is surrounded by water, therefore it is wet.”

“But if you look it up, water isn’t wet by itself, only when it comes in contact with other materials.”

“Oh and we should believe everything the Internet tells us. That’s rich.” He then threw up his hands and let out a whoop of triumph as he finally found the correct password to his Amazon account.

Cas rolled his eyes, and decided that they’d save this conversation for another time. Because right now Dean’s arm was around him, pulling him down towards his chest. Cas, in turn, wrapped his arms around Dean’s waist and snuggled closer to him, breathing in the scent that had now become so familiar to him. He smiled and sighed in content as Dean’s fingers started tracing soft patterns up and down his back.

The movie started, and everything else soon faded away until it was only him and Dean, giggling during the fight scene between Montoya and Westley, jumping when the R.O.U.S attacked, gasping at Montoya’s fight with Count Rugen, and smiling happily at the end.

And when the movie was over and they pulled the blankets tighter around themselves, Cas had to admit; he had liked the movie more than he first thought he would. But maybe that had a little something to do with the person watching with him. The one that was now enveloping Cas in warmth and burrowing his face in Cas’s neck.

The one that Cas suddenly knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

#supernatural #college au #soulmate au #destiel #sastiel #dean winchester #sam winchester #castiel novak #gabriel novak #au #fluff #destiel fic #it's not you

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