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edenmemes · 3 years

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ghost of tsushima starters

❝ promise you’ll remain the good man i know. ❞ ❝ only fools have no fear of death. ❞ ❝ i am very much alive. but my patience is dying. ❞ ❝ i’ll make sure you are remembered. as a great warrior...a wise leader. ❞ ❝ the strength we need is all around us. ❞ ❝ the past cannot hurt you. ❞ ❝ this whole journey, and i never asked your name. ❞ ❝ fear drives you to be stronger. fight harder. ❞ ❝ sometimes...our only choice is to walk away from everything we know ❞ ❝ we do what we must. that is why you and i are both survivors. ❞ ❝ i can do good! i just...need practice. ❞ ❝ may your next life be more peaceful than this one. ❞ ❝ i knew it was too good to be true. ❞ ❝ i'll see what i can do. but if you’re lying to me... ❞ ❝ you’re too comfortable with that power. ❞ ❝ don’t ever try to kill me again. ❞ ❝ turn your back on a foe...and you will die with a sword stuck in it. ❞ ❝ youre not slipping away that easily. ❞ ❝ just stay closed. keep your sword sheathed. and let me do the talking. ❞ ❝ the things i saw still haunt my nightmares. ❞ ❝ i dont even know if you're real. ❞ ❝ victories don’t have to feel good. ❞ ❝ killing your own family...it’s harder than you could ever imagine. ❞ ❝ it’s safer for everyone if i just disappear. ❞ ❝ next time, leave some glory for the rest of us. ❞ ❝ peace doesn’t always come quietly. ❞ ❝ some people respond to kindness. others require a glimpse of steel. ❞ ❝ i am nothing if not honest. ❞ ❝ stop using people, and start thinking about how you can help them. ❞ ❝ you’ve had your vengeance. don’t stand in the way of mine. ❞ ❝ you don’t have to do it alone. ❞ ❝ not all words need to be spoken. ❞ ❝ there is time yet for revenge. i will savour their cries of pain when that time comes. ❞ ❝ i have learned to love the cool, damp dark. ❞ ❝ the last thing i saw was faces filled with hatred, rage... ❞ ❝ you didn’t think you'd get rid of me that easily, did you? ❞ ❝ we will celebrate when this is all over. ❞ ❝ what’s wrong with you? one moment we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, the next you’re ready to cross blades. ❞ ❝ a warrior learns from their mistakes, or they are buried by them. ❞ ❝ remember your training...and never leave my side. ❞ ❝ well...i guess this is goodbye. ❞ ❝ your visions will grow worse, driving you to madness and death. ❞ ❝ i can only pretend for so much longer. i’m not like these people and never will be. ❞ ❝ i loved you all my life, but i could never work up the courage to tell you. ❞ ❝ the proud do not last, and the mightiest of us perish like dust before the wind. ❞ ❝ you’re a vision of mercy. ❞ ❝ not bad, but only half-good. ❞ ❝ we make a good team, don’t we? ❞ ❝ an archer’s aim relies not on eyes...but on body, mind, and spirit. ❞ ❝ this is my fight. i don’t need your weapon. ❞ ❝ being right doesn’t always make things better. ❞ ❝ there is nothing easier than to prey upon the vanity of ambitious men. ❞ ❝ you weren’t looking so good. i let you rest. ❞ ❝ your intentions this time were...better than usual. ❞ ❝ what are you not telling me? ❞ ❝ trouble sticks to you like shit on rice. ❞ ❝ it’s strange being back after so many years...everywhere i look brings back memories. ❞ ❝ only a child expects perfection of their elders. ❞ ❝ when this is all over, what will you do? ❞ ❝ you are ruled by your emotion. ❞ ❝ is this how you want to be remembered? ❞ ❝ perhaps great men share all the aspects of their lessers, but more. great wisdom, but even greater cruelty. ❞ ❝ i cannot imagine the burden a leader like you must bear. ❞ ❝ our greatest enemies are the greatest teachers. ❞ ❝ death’s shadow embraces me. hand in hand we walk. ❞ ❝ breathe. you can’t fight if you hold your breath. ❞ ❝ i know you well enough by now, my friend. ❞ ❝ i can’t go back...to what i was. before this. ❞ ❝ i hope you one day forgive me for the choice i made. ❞ ❝ the wounds you dealt my spirit will never heal. ❞ ❝ why did you turn away from me? ❞ ❝ if you can keep moving forward, so can i. ❞ ❝ it’s a bad idea to sneak up on me. ❞ ❝ promise me something. don’t become like me. ❞ ❝ let me undo the damage i’ve done. ❞ ❝ ...and you want me to clean up your mess. ❞ ❝ the path ahead may take a lifetime, but i will walk it with you. always. ❞ ❝ whatever you believe i’ve become, i will always be your family. ❞ ❝ i wouldn’t be here without you. ❞ ❝ i’ll hunt you past the horizon if i must. ❞ ❝ can i count on you to do what needs to be done? ❞ ❝ that’s over now. you’re here. with me. ❞ ❝ i thought i’d lost you, i should’ve known you’d never give up. ❞ ❝ you can’t continue down this path. ❞ ❝ be careful. demons are everywhere and they fear nothing. ❞ ❝ corpses can’t answer questions. ❞ ❝ you deserve greater respect than this. ❞ ❝ it’s just like the stories my father told me. ❞ ❝ what you become tomorrow is your choice. ❞ ❝ just ask the last man who questioned my sincerity. you’ll find his head covered in flies out back. ❞ ❝ you shouldn’t have lied. i still would have helped you. ❞ ❝ we came this far. we’re not turning back now. ❞ ❝ how do we survive if we don’t trust each other? ❞ ❝ without my help, the fear and pain will overwhelm you. ❞ ❝ whatever happens, we don’t retreat. ❞ ❝ the stories are true. i’ve never seen anyone fight like you. ❞ ❝ see how the enemy fear you? you are a true warrior. ❞ ❝ you want to share a drink...with me? ❞ ❝ maybe you should’ve just ran away. like you always do. ❞ ❝ good people have nothing to fear from me. ❞ ❝ your promises are just like you. worthless. ❞ ❝ as you wish, since you asked so sweetly. ❞ ❝ i know better than to argue. ❞ ❝ i hope i can find quiet places like this one, untouched by war. ❞ ❝ we grew up together, but you threw it all away. ❞ ❝ it was so chaotic. i felt you grip my wrist and then nothing. ❞ ❝ desperation can bring out the demon in the best of men. ❞ ❝ i don’t want to leave without you, but...i can’t stay. i hope you understand. ❞ ❝ a grown man, and you still can barely sit still. ❞ ❝ and i heard you had no sense of humor! ❞ ❝ knowing and doing are different. ❞ ❝ trouble follows me everywhere. ❞ ❝ indulging violence weakens the warrior...like too much food or drink. ❞ ❝ i can always tell when you want to ask me something. out with it. ❞ ❝ i am proud to fight beside you. ❞ ❝ i didn’t nurse you back to health to watch you throw your life away. ❞ ❝ all i want...all i need is to start a new life. ❞ ❝ look twice and shoot once. ❞ ❝ i think they’re afraid of you. you can be...intimidating.. ❞ ❝ you don’t even try to hear me. it’s like talking to a stone. ❞ ❝ so you try to kill me? have you lost your mind? ❞ ❝ you’ve sacrificed everything. for revenge. ❞ ❝ we can’t let anger consume us. or blind us to our friends. ❞ ❝ there is only one way this ends. ❞ ❝ i gave you everything. and you threw it away. ❞ ❝ do not question my integrity again. ❞ ❝ your father would be proud. ❞ ❝ the worst one can do is take advantage of their own people. ❞ ❝ you follow trouble. you should ask yourself why. ❞ ❝ some of my favourite memories happened at this place. ❞ ❝ i told you this was a bad idea! ❞ ❝ keep fighting. we need people like you. ❞ ❝ are you the one who finally kills me? ❞ ❝ a warrior’s most important weapon is themself. lose control, and you risk defeat. ❞ ❝ first, get some rest. this is killing you. ❞ ❝ see that? i told you. there’s always hope. ❞ ❝ i hope the skills i gained through hardship can be of use to the people here. ❞ ❝ you have skill...but you nearly died rushing into battle. ❞ ❝ in the midst of battle, true leaders must stay rooted, stand firm. ❞ ❝ every time i get in a mess like this, i’m as scared as the time before. ❞ ❝ don’t be the next to disappoint me. ❞ ❝ save what we can, but know that everything passes away. ❞ ❝ i hope you understand, this is just a job. ❞ ❝ that’s a sad way to look at the world. ❞ ❝ seeing you like that...i’m still shaken up. ❞ ❝ sit with me a moment. ❞ ❝ doubt and indecision have destroyed armies. ❞ ❝ it’s so painful to...see you weighed down by sadness. ❞ ❝ on the slim chance some good comes of this...lead the way. ❞ ❝ you fought well, but we’re finished. ❞ ❝ the warrior’s mind is quiet but alive, like rustling bamboo. ❞ ❝ i’ve trained with a blade since i could walk. ❞ ❝ the visions...they’re still happening. ❞ ❝ in our world, being intimidating isn’t a bad thing. ❞ ❝ you have a talent. it’s time you use it, for the sake of our land. ❞ ❝ i've tried to teach you all i know...but you act more like a poet than a warrior. ❞ ❝ your path leads to madness and death. ❞ ❝ that’s twice you saved my life. ❞ ❝ these people stay because they believe in you. ❞ ❝ i didn’t choose this life. it was my only option. ❞ ❝ you came at me like i was your mortal enemy. almost broke my arm! ❞ ❝ i could use your help...in the fight ahead. ❞ ❝ you can be a little rough, but you have a good heart. ❞ ❝ i don’t want to kill you, stop! ❞ ❝ what’s wrong? afraid i’ll get more famous than you? ❞ ❝ war brings out who we truly are. ❞ ❝ take care where you place your faith. ❞ ❝ you seem lost in thought. ❞ ❝ i was getting tired of waiting for you. ❞ ❝ without my wisdom, you will lose your soul to madness. ❞ ❝ peace is an unattainable dream...but a dream worth fighting for. ❞ ❝ i’ve killed a thousand men. every death was sweet. ❞ ❝ what is the point of prayer when we are doomed? ❞ ❝ you’re like your father in more ways than you know. ❞ ❝ if you want my respect, earn it. ❞ ❝ and how many wars have you fought? ❞ ❝ you’re quite the butcher with that sword. ❞ ❝ people who sow chaos must be punished. ❞ ❝ i can’t help but wonder if you enjoy the violence. ❞ ❝ i kill only to protect our people. i think about that every time i reach for my sword. ❞ ❝ i'm sorry if my lack of skill offends. ❞ ❝ it’s the first time in days i haven’t felt like i was about to die. ❞ ❝ you fought like an animal...or a demon! ❞ ❝ there’s nothing more painful to me than a perfect bow...ineptly used. ❞ ❝ victory is won by warriors, not weapons. ❞ ❝ i couldn’t leave you to die. ❞ ❝ i made my choices. even knowing what they’ve cost me, i’d make them again. ❞ ❝ when’s the last time you slept or ate? ❞ ❝ you don’t get to give up. this land needs you. ❞ ❝ oh you pretend we are different, but we fight for the same thing. ❞ ❝ there are still places of beauty to remind us of what truly matters. ❞ ❝ true mastery begins where individual ego ends. ❞ ❝ a warrior faces danger with courage and resolve. this is how they endure. ❞ ❝ those stories...they're not entirely true. ❞ ❝ even the youngest warrior needs a full belly and a rested sword-arm. ❞ ❝ bad men are good at hiding their true natures. ❞ ❝ there is nothing left for me here. my hope is lost. ❞ ❝ i did what i had to. for you. ❞ ❝ forgive my manners. i spent all my time alone. ❞ ❝ is that any way to greet a visitor? ❞ ❝ if you continue down this path...you’ll be no better than the enemy. ❞ ❝ i am grateful for the times we share...but, i always want more. ❞ ❝ you lived your life in a castle. it made you soft. ❞ ❝ i used to know what i fought for... ❞ ❝ face them as a warrior with honour. not a monster. ❞ ❝ i don’t take lives, but i am not a coward. ❞ ❝ i wonder if i’ve crossed a line. ❞ ❝ you can’t expect everyone to understand what you’re doing, or why. ❞ ❝ your methods were brutal...impulsive...without honour. ❞ ❝ there’s plenty to fear without worrying about folktales. ❞ ❝ i hope you’ll find peace again soon. ❞ ❝ you do what you need to survive. and yet you despise others for doing the same. ❞ ❝ is that your excuse? your reason to kill? ❞ ❝ we have to keep pushing. even if it costs us our lives. ❞ ❝ cowards without honour deserve no mercy. ❞ ❝ i’ll fight beside you until the end. ❞ ❝ whatever happens, your forgiveness won’t change who i am. ❞ ❝ why should we settle for scraps when we deserve to be legends? ❞ ❝ only cowards strike from the shadows. ❞ ❝ the proud do not endure. the greatest of us fall in the end. ❞ ❝ perhaps some good will come of this. ❞ ❝ you will see nothing but death to the end of your days. ❞ ❝ legacy is more than a name. ❞ ❝ im sorry. i know what it means to lose family. ❞ ❝ one day we'll escape the endless wheel of suffering. ❞ ❝ is that a 'thank you'? ❞ ❝ i know what it means to be hunted. ❞ ❝ you personify fury and regret. ❞ ❝ that's all right. i want to hear you dig your own grave. ❞ ❝ either way, we’ve got nothing to lose. ❞ ❝ i’ve done what i can. the rest is up to you. ❞ ❝ forgive me, but you look fatigued. have you endured much hardship? ❞ ❝ i hope you find true honour in your next life. ❞ ❝ you deserve nothing less than death. ❞ ❝ this is foolish. surrender, and you can live. ❞ ❝ i too have pride in family. and i know what it’s like to live in their shadow. ❞ ❝ you were gone so long, i knew you were in trouble. ❞ ❝ so many of us here owe you our lives. ❞ ❝ what's wrong? what did they do to you? ❞ ❝ you’re lucky to be alive. ❞ ❝ i know your language. your traditions. your beliefs. which village to tame and which to burn. ❞ ❝ i cannot lose you again. ❞ ❝ i don’t seek revenge. but i will fight for peace. ❞ ❝ we will meet again soon. until then...travel safely. ❞ ❝ this is war --- not a test. ❞ ❝ we can save our home together. it doesn’t have to be like this. ❞ ❝ fear is a weapon. don’t let them use it against you. ❞

#rp meme #roleplay meme #roleplay starters #long post for ts /

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saintobio · 2 years

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I've like casted the intro thingy almosy 3 times onto my TV atp so thank god finally my finger hit the ask box- Okay, SO SAINT, IK IM TIPSY RN BUT I MY ALCO FUZZIEX BRAIN CANNOT THINK OF ANYTHING BUT SY AND SY GOJO RN. IK IBEEN SOBBINF OVER HIM FOR THE PAST HOUR BUT SAINT, I WANNA CRY AND TELL U THAT U ARE AMAZING AND ILY, I HOPE YOI KNOW UOI DESERVE THE WORLD PLS 😭😭 IM SORRY IF THIS ASK COMES ACROSS AS SLOPPY AND PLAIN ANNOYING BUT HOLY SHIT IM JUSY CRYING AT HOW TALENTRD YOU ARE FOR GIVINF US QORLDS TO ESCAPE TO LIKE SN/SY, OLAL, WASTELANDS ESCPECIALLY WHEN PEOPLE HAVE BORINGASS LIVES LIKE MINE. ITS SO SEDENTARY AND STALE THAT I HAD TO DRINJ TO NOT BE THE SOBER ME. AND THEN YOURE SO NICE AND WITTY WITH ALL YOUR FOLLOWES TOO!!! YOURW HELLA COOL I HOPE U KNOW THAT!!! I HOPE U KNOW I ADOREE YOU MORE THAN ANY AUTHOR ATP. ILYYY. TAKE CARE OR GOJO NO UNBOX! BYE-BYE!!

ty so much!!! that’s so nice of u and it’s not annoying at all :D rly glad you enjoy some of my works <33

@otivez said

saint i've been DYING to tell you this omg my law professor told us this crazy story last week and istg it's sincerely not

it's very long and wild but in a nutshell this son of a high status family in the 60s needs to marry someone and his parents don't like his girlfriend so they find him a woman. he goes to his gf and tells her that he should marry the other woman and then they should see. fast forward a couple years he gets cancer and dies. after he dies, they see that he has 14 kids with his wife AND 15 with his girlfriend 😭 they ask the wife "why" and she says "well she gave birth so i had to give birth too" 😭 they were RACING 🤧 my mind just instantly went "what if reader was like sera too" shit gets even crazier that they even made a tv show about it

WHATJDJD THATS SO MESSY 😭

Anonymous said

Hello new reader here👀 An auntie lurking around.

I’m not an anime watcher (but a kdrama one) btw so I don’t know who this characters are irl? Is that even the term?🤣 I just happen to open tumblr after 5 years, this is my 12 year old account whom I spent my teenage years (you can guess my age already 😂)and that one person I’m following reblogged your Sincerely yours series. AND GURL WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN IN MY HECTIC BORING CORPORATE LIFE?!!! It’s been too loooong since I got invested like this for real😭 I am so intrigue, this is nothing like The Princess Diaries I used to read😒😂 and now I discover this gem called smut brrrr Guess what chapter I happen to read first, it’s the bora bora damn I was like, this series is fucking interesting I’m hooked and started reading from the very beginning. To that person who reblogged that chapter, thank you! And Saint, I love you! Muah💋

P.S I’m not following you yet, I don’t want to see the juicy spoilers 😁but I will, I PROMISE once I’m done teehee. And I just google this fucker Gojo Satoru (I’m in a chapter where I really despise him and Sera right now hahaha) he’s my wallpaper now btw and now I’m introducing him to my niece as my cheating rich handsome fiance so they’d stop calling me an old maiden😩

P.P.S can I share how I imagine yn’s style and appearance? It’s Kang Sa-Ra in kdrama A beauty Inside❤️ this is before I saw your curated aesthetic images for sn and yn hehe

it’s sooo interesting when people who don’t watch jjk actually read sn/sy 😭 i hope u know that they are very ooc in this series, and gojo isn’t like this at all HAHAJAJ also i haven’t watch that drama but the inspos for her fashion usually come from typical kdrama chaebols 😹

Anonymous said

I really wanted yn and Gojo to end up together because I’m a Gojo simp lmao. But if SN and SY with OG characters? honestly I don’t want the FL to end up with the ML I want them to go on their separate ways but have a healthy or civil coparenting their child. They’re both too broken to be together again but if they happen to have the strength to patch things up, I wish they’re already both healed to be together again.

If Gojo and YN is the endgame… Saint, I wonder how… And if they’re not… waaah

Anonymous said

This is a terrible thing to say but I'm toji x yn because i think it's the less worse option of gojo x yn. Both relationships have major issues but toji by comparison has less issues and can be salvage. Despite the titanic reference gojo made in sn19 their ship sunk and is staying at the bottom.

gojoyn or tojiyn, i think we can all agree that yn x therapy should come first 😫

@bellehalla said

this is not new but i will defend those Utahime haters because...i am one of them. first of all, why would you go after your friend's ex boyfriend. that itself is already questionable. then you go after an ex that your friend has a bad and complicated history with. apparently, that's not enough to set her head straight. then, you as a friend, know that this friend of yours is losing her shit, losing her mind over this dude and you're out here uwu catching feelings. BUT GREAT CHAPTER SAINT! <33

ahahaha i just know utahime wouldn’t give this much damn abt gojo in canon 😭 but sy!hime is a cassie

Anonymous said

Oh boy, your writing is so captivating! sn6 is the first chapter I've read as it's been released and what a chapter it has been... Thank you for doing this!

A question, I've seen in your profile that your type is INFP and as an mbti nerd have been wondering if you take the personality types of the characters when writing the story?

Sorry if the question has been asked before but I've just been very curious :)

tysm <33 i’m not very knowledgeable about mbti but i remember one of my readers who did a long post abt the characters mbti and why they make sense!! sorry i couldn’t find it anymore but it was during sn era, which is several months ago T^T

#🖤: letters to saint #series: sincerely yours

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makeste · 3 years

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A theory I have seen is that Fuyumi wants the family back so desperately, because she and Toya experienced the better Endeavor, where everything was alright. My guess is that after his decent into abuse its stopped being like a normal family and Natsuo and Shoto never experienced a normal family. But that is just a therory

okay so speaking as someone who grew up with an abusive and neglectful parent (though in my case it was my mom rather than my dad)... it’s complicated. there are a lot of emotions there. I think one of the things Horikoshi has really excelled at with the whole Todoroki plot is the way that he’s used the four siblings to show the different ways that children respond to parental abuse. and I can say from personal experience that all of them are valid. not just the bitterness, anger, and resentment that Touya, Natsuo, and Shouto have all shown at times, but also that intense (but tentative, almost wishful-thinking) longing to just have a normal family that we see from Fuyumi. speaking again from experience, that last one isn’t an outlier at all. in fact, in my case, I’d say that was honestly the strongest feeling out of all of them, and it even fueled a lot of the other three emotions. btw just a heads up I’m gonna delve into some personal stuff here briefly, so yeah. I won’t put details, but if anyone wants an abuse trigger warning added to the post or anything like that, just let me know.

so the thing is, even during my angriest times, if some magic wish-granting genie had poofed in and told the child me, “’sup, I’m here to solve all of your family problems, just tell me what you want me to do,” I wouldn’t have wanted them to take my mom away and lock her up somewhere and make her suffer or anything like that. honestly, even during the worst of it, the thing I wanted more than anything else was just to have a normal family. my mom had a lot of untreated mental health issues, and it was basically a situation where you never knew which version of her you were going to get on any given day. so there were times when she was a kind and loving mother who took care of me and my siblings. and there were a great many more times when she was temperamental and erratic, and we all (my dad included) basically just walked on eggshells around her and did our best to lay low and try not to bother her because even little things might set her off, and we never knew how she was going to react. and my dad worked a lot, and my sibs and I were homeschooled for reasons which I’m not gonna get into because this post is already veering off on too many tangents, but anyway so the short of it is that my sibs and I grew up in this unstable environment and ended up more or less raising ourselves. and I resented my mom a lot for that, growing up, and I still do honestly.

now a lot’s happened since then, and she’s gotten some help, and my siblings and I are all adults now and we’re more or less good, even though we all took a certain amount of Psychic Damage along the way and we’re each still dealing with that. and we each have different relationships with our mom now, and a couple of my sibs are even fairly close to her. but for my part, I pretty much have no relationship with her at all outside of seeing her a few times a year at family get-togethers and the like. the thing is, even though my mom did eventually (after a LOT of false starts and struggles and heartache) get some help, she’s never really shown remorse for what my siblings and I went through because of her. she’s never taken responsibility for any of it. she blames a lot of other people, and will go on long rants about all of the terrible things that have happened to her and all of the horrible ways people have treated her (some of which is true, and some of which very much is not). but there’s never even the slightest acknowledgement of any of the things she herself has done to hurt others. she either passes the blame or just pretends it never happened.

and honestly, it sucks. even now, there’s little to no real desire to change on her part. she’s gotten therapy and meds now, and so emotionally she’s much more stable than when we were kids, but one of the unfortunate results is that it’s all the more clear now that a lot of her behavior never had anything to do with her mental illness at all. she just didn’t care at all about how she was hurting others; or at the very least, didn’t care to face it. and that’s just how it is.

anyway, so I’m sorry to keep breaking away and telling you guys my own life story lol. but the point I’m trying to get at here is that I actually relate to Fuyumi so much, though. what I wanted more than anything was for my mom to care, and to say she was sorry, and for me to be able to believe that and to trust her, and for her to actually change. that was it.

and so for me, here’s the biggest difference between the Endeavor situation, and my own and so many others. the difference is that unlike people in real life, we know Endeavor is actually remorseful for what he’s done. we know it for certain because we’ve seen it for ourselves, from his own point of view. the manga actually lets us get inside his head and shows us that he really is sincere, that he really is sorry, and that he really is trying to change. and that’s something that’s impossible to get in real life. that certainty that the person really means it, that they’re genuinely remorseful and committed to making amends.

and for me, that’s fucking wish fulfillment right there. for the abusive parent to finally realize the error of their ways and be sorry and try to do right by their kids. I fucking wanted that. hell, I still want it, even though I’ve made my peace with things the way that they are. that chance to somehow heal the broken relationship, and have your parent genuinely try their best to be a real parent to you, even if it’s years after the fact? shit. I’d take that in a heartbeat.

and so when it comes to Fuyumi and her attempts to get her family to reconcile and experience a few normal things, I f feel that. I really do. because when you’re growing up in that type of situation, normal is all that you want. and I don’t think it’s anything that requires an explanation on her part, because it’s not actually an unusual reaction at all. it’s natural. it’s the most natural thing in the world. honestly it’s annoying that fandom sometimes tries to shame her for having those feelings. like honestly, fuck that. because the thing is, I’d wager that almost every kid who grew up with an abusive parent has at some time or other felt the exact same way.

and that includes Touya, Natsuo, and Shouto as well. literally the only difference between them and Fuyumi is that they feel that Endeavor’s change of heart is simply coming too late. it’s not that they don’t want their family back, just like she does; it’s that from their point of view, it’s something they can’t get back. for Fuyumi, that dream of having a normal family is something she’s still seeking. for Natsuo and Touya, that dream of having a normal family is something that was destroyed. something that Endeavor killed. something they’re in mourning of. and so Touya wants revenge for it, and Natsuo is trying to pick himself up and move past it. and meanwhile Shouto is caught somewhere in the middle of all of those reactions, because he’s still trying to decide whether or not he can ever bring himself to trust his father again. he’s somewhere in between his brothers’ mourning and his sister’s hopefulness. sort of a Schrodinger type of deal lol.

but anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that all four siblings are really experiencing the same thing, just in different ways. Fuyu may be the one arranging family dinners and the like, but that same longing to be part of a normal family is at the core of Natsuo, Shouto, and even Touya’s behavior as well. Natsuo’s hurt and resentment, and Touya’s spite and bitterness, come from being denied the thing they want. and Fuyu’s shaky attempts at reconciliation come from her desire to still obtain it somehow. but at the end of the day they’re the exact same feelings. and they all come from the same place.

anyways, hopefully that makes some kind of sense. basically, everyone is valid. Fuyu is valid, Natsu and Shouto are valid, and Touya is murdery which isn’t cool, but his feelings are still valid too nonetheless. hugs and therapy for the Todoroki children in 2021, Horikoshi. please and thank you.

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tobeornottotc · 4 years

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ADACHI AND KUROSAWA- THE MEANING OF TOUCH

First thing first: Touch can be physical (come into contact with something), internal (emotional, feeling touched, concerned sympathy and gratitude) or mental/psychic (an effect on something: talent, skill or presence). In the dictionary, there are so many meanings for touch, but this show focused on this three.

Episode 7 was all about touch, touch and even more TOUCH. In a show where the premise is on the magical abilities of touch being used to help and ease the lives of people including our main character, we come to see in this episode just how much touch is needed even in his new blossoming relationship with Kurosawa. How these two discover how much they need the other's touch is so incredible, and I love it so much. So here's my breakdown for it :) Here are instances this episode where touch happened and what it meant for these two cuties.

The confession with the touch:

Kurosawa has just confessed, and he's about to lean forward and touch Adachi's cheek a sign of affection; Kurosawa feels rejected and a burden to Adachi. Adachi flinches because of anxiety in his head: The touch was to show sincerity and love, but at this time, they both are too scared.

Adachi and his anxiety

Again it wasn't that Adachi didn't want Kurosawa's touch but the opposite; he was frightened because of too many thoughts in his head, his heart was racing, and his whole mind was shutting down at that moment. Kurosawa wanted something with him. He realised what was happening and then, was shocked when Kurosawa's hand fell from his cheek. Adachi knows he has to stop him from leaving, but he's frozen, still unsure that he's right for Kurosawa, still uncertain about what to say, how to phrase how he feels, still unsure of everything in his head. So he lets him leave, Kurosawa takes that as acceptance, he thinks Adachi is straight and likes girls so of course, he's not into him, it breaks his heart immensely, but he decides to stay polite and return back to them being colleagues. Machida is such a great actor, you can physically see and feel when Kurosawa feels deflated and defeated, after seven years he must say goodbye to a love that meant everything, he took a risk, but he lost everything but most importantly Adachi's touch.

The touch at this moment was not fulfilled, it was hindered and stopped by Kurosawa because both were scared: this touch meant for both of them the truth, crossing the line and risking it all to be with each other, but because Kurosawa stopped it left both of them dissatisfied and heartbroken.

Kurosawa's reason for liking Adachi

Kurosawa felt objectified, used by people who didn't really understand or know the real him. People were only viewing him on the surface, from the outside. It should feel great, but he didn't like it, he hated being objectified and not actually being noticed. But Adachi was different. Adachi noticed him; he gave him reasons why he thought he was cool why he thought he was great because, in Adachi's mind, Kurosawa is much better and awesome than him. Adachi also felt touched by Kurosawa's gesture from their first meeting, when he took the wine glass and drank for him despite not being strong enough to do so. That's why he followed him and comforted him; it's one of the automatic things with Adachi and Kurosawa, Adachi hates seeing Kurosawa hurt, so he followed him to ensure he was okay. In doing so, he also touched his heart without knowing and changed everything for Kurosawa.

Kurosawa's touch to Adachi 7 years ago: made him feel cared for, protected and happy.

Adachi's touch to Kurosawa 7 years ago: made him feel noticed, understood and appreciated.

They did this all by being near each other, but also Kurosawa decided to repay Adachi because of this hence why he never thinks a bad thought about him, he also wants Adachi to feel noticed for his efforts (therefore his thoughts and the way he protected Adachi in episode 1/2 when it came to work) he wanted Adachi to feel understood by people. He wanted people to give Adachi proper appreciation. Adachi did the same without knowing; he wanted to ensure Kurosawa felt the same way he made him feel, hence he hates him being upset at him, he hates when he's in trouble with people/work, and he hates when he feels his feelings don't matter. They both again keep trying to repay the other for how they made each other feel at their first meeting. It was a perfect match, and it started from touch.

Adachi and Kurosawa: the need to please people

It's such a meta thing that Kurosawa and Adachi met each other because of an event where both were forced to come to be objectified by one of the heads. It's interesting because the reason that keeps preventing Adachi and Kurosawa from confessing how they feel is the perception of internalised homophobia.

Adachi is worried about how society would think; he's also concerned about not being good enough for Kurosawa in people's mind. Kurosawa is scared about the same thing; that his feelings are seen as abnormal to Adachi, that he's just burdening him with his feelings etc.

All this back and forth and running away is because of both's need to please people though they both feel uncomfortable and disappointed each time they do so. Adachi has social anxiety, so although he wants to help and be useful to people, he hates situations where there's too much pressure on him and where he has to interact with strangers; he gets anxious, worried and feels stupid each time this happens. Adachi literally can't eat because of his anxiety at the dinner it's so relatable the way he feels scared about how people perceive him.

Kurosawa tries to please people by not saying how he feels; he feels inappropriate to complain about being objectified when it's meant to be viewed as a compliment, he tries his hardest to be kind and help everyone. Still, he also feels defeated and empty by the fact that if he says no, he could ruin everyone's jobs and opinions on him. They're trying to conform to social expectations, behaviours and perceptions by not genuinely being themselves a perfect metaphor for why they both avoided confessing or ran away from admitting to the other.

They both saw through each other in that event and because of that automatically touched the other heart because of it.

Kurosawa's drunken fall

Did you notice they were two touches in this scene: One when Adachi catches Kurosawa, and the second when he puts his hand on his heart. Both can be seen literally; Adachi is saving and catching Kurosawa as he falls. Adachi is like a healing presence to him (just like the results of his magic), Adachi makes him feel safe and secure, and I find it so important to notice how Adachi does this automatically. We've watched each episode and saw Kurosawa let doubts fill his mind, about the kiss, about annoying Adachi, about being a burden but Adachi automatically runs to him and blurts out what he's thinking always erasing Kurosawa's doubt and making him feel safe to be the way he is, to like Adachi the way he has, to keep doing the things he's terrified of.

That's Adachi being his safety net without realising. Adachi wants always to make sure he's safe. It's innate in their relationship. Last Adachi is catching him when he's meant to be the one catching everyone else/ saving everyone else. Adachi is the only person who made an effort to pay attention to Kurosawa, to help Kurosawa, to also see Kurosawa just like everyone else; it was a relief to Kurosawa, it was important.

Because of this, Adachi physically, literally and metaphorically touches his heart and enters without knowing.

But the physical touch also points back to the magic that started it all for Adachi's realisation and awakening; the magic stemmed from that touch, just like in present the magic keeps helping Adachi pay attention and catch Kurosawa each time he slips, the magic was there from the start just waiting to manifest and its source was Adachi's need to show Kurosawa he was loved, listened to and looked after. That's beautiful.

Also, notice how Kurosawa and Adachi are always reading each other's minds without knowing it? We have Adachi who has the physical ability to read Kurosawa's mind, but you also have Kurosawa being able to read Adachi's mind without knowing. In this scene, Kurosawa confesses he felt useless, and he felt upset for being useless at the dinner, but Adachi was also feeling the same way, he also didn't fulfil his responsibilities at the dinner, he felt worse than Kurosawa, uncool, gloomy and a burden but hearing Kurosawa, someone he was starting to think was really impressive and cool, excellent (he showed jealousy seeing how suave Kurosawa was at the dinner), it made him feel relieved that Kurosawa was just like him, and it again increased his confidence to want to tell Kurosawa why he liked him and thought he was cool. Without knowing it, Kurosawa was metaphorically catching Adachi too and making him feel safer and less worried.

In this scene, touch meant for both of them :

A safe space to be their authentic self.

A relief that they weren't failures/useless.

Inspiration/ confidence to be even better.

They're both so great guys, so good, so pure and perfect for each other.

Adachi's memories of Kurosawa

Did you notice this too? They all had to do with Kurosawa's touch, putting a scarf around his neck, touching his cheek, carrying him, helping his wounds, helping him with his things, they all showed how Kurosawa touched Adachi emotionally: he was comfort and warmth (the scarf), he was helping hand and companion, he was healing presence, and he was understanding and protective of Adachi every single moment he was with him.

But he also made Adachi's heart race (each time he tried to touch his cheek), and that touch was excitement/nervousness. I also love how the first act of Adachi when he realised how much he needed Kurosawa's touch was to ignore and walk away from helping his colleague. He's not thinking about pleasing other people, He's thinking about Kurosawa, he's doing what he wants, and he's brave. Kurosawa did that.

That's how Kurosawa and Adachi touched each other without realising their physical touches, emotional metaphorical touches, and their mental touches in each other's life. Both of them meant so much to the other, fit each other, needed each other without understanding until they finally confessed at the end of this episode. That final hug and Adachi responding after feeling scared, that kinda touch is the most precious, most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a couple and I am obsessed with this couple's growth and relationship.

#cherry magic #cherry magic! thirty years of virginity can make you a wizard?!#cherry magic!#cherrymagic #adachi x kurosawa #reviews #analysis #japanese bl #bl series #bl drama

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vaguely-concerned · 4 years

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The Mandalorian Chapter 14 reactions: HOLY SHIT THAT WAS AWESOME BUT ALSO I’M CRYING edition

- the good good din characterization is back after all the weirdness last episode!!!! that soft way he says ‘no, no, I’m not mad at you’? THAT’S din djarin, he would not be fucking impatient with his son having just been informed and seen for himself that he is terrified, go away mr filoni I know you’ve got all of canon memorized but you don’t get this lol. this feels much more right in how din being conflicted and still thinking he should give the baby away for his own good plays out too

honestly every line of dialogue for him in this one was perfect I was just whispering ‘I love this awkward clueless wonderful man just doing his best’ to myself any time he said anything. “...does this look Jedi to you?” sir I adore you more than words can describe

- we got din chuckling. asjdklfhsdkafghsdafsadhjkfsdahjkfh. fskahfksjad. side note: I can’t believe my joke post about din desperately trying to Force home school the kid with the one (1) jedi trick he knows about and the baby being delighted by it over and over anyway -- listen to his expectant excited laugh when din takes the ball and sets up the game!!!! -- was canon all along. and then the baby & mando music kicking in when he gently put the silver ball into the baby’s hands again and tells him he’s special (because he IS special. to din)? hmng. hmmmmnnnnn

they opened on the height of softness so we would all crumple under the weight of the rest of the episode and that was very mean of them in a way I sincerely appreciate

- nothing to see here... just a dad trying to walk through the literal manifestation of the unassailable underlying forces of the universe to get to his baby again and again........ the desperation in that, the love, the foolhardy devotion................... shit

- okay so I might be a dumbass, but I’d never noticed this before -- the silver ball has a blue spot on the top, like so:

and in addition we get the room where the baby goes full darth grogu (I have to laugh so I don’t cry okay) on those storm troopers, and there’s a red light in there dominating the room (and it did even more in the concept art):

in star wars blue means light side and red means dark side (it’s very sophisticated that way), meaning the visual storytelling here is that there’s a battle for the baby’s soul and gideon and all his nonsense (and the trauma bb’s been through in the wider sense) is pulling towards the dark, while grogu and din’s connection leads him towards the light. just... the image of the baby looking at his own reflection in the symbolic representation of his relationship to din? the way children find their sense of self through being safely reflected and held by their caretakers? god help meeeeeee I will go in there and fistfight gideon myself for disrupting that in any way

the smaller light seems to be blue too, like there’s still the presence of light even if it’s dimmed and small in that shitty horrible room, which is a change from the concept art!

- FENNEC SHAND SURVIVED BITCHES!!! I even called that she’d be back with new shiny robot parts back in season 1, could not happen to a cooler lady, I hope we get more backstory and interaction from her the next episodes -- sounds like she’s basically sworn herself to boba’s service in gratitude for saving her life, I wonder if that’s a cultural thing of whereever she comes from? does she live aboard slave 1 now too?? because that would be hilarious and amazing, it must be like two strange cats trying to get used to sharing the same space

- everything I could ever hope for about boba fett in this series came true, they went down the much more interesting and nuanced route with jango and boba’s identities as mandalorians, he looked cool as fuck and made din as a character shine rather than overshadowing him... amazing beautiful yesss

(I did 100% not anticipate just how ‘cool uncle boba here to help you fuck shit up’ he was going to be but I am delighted to get it anyway. uncle points deducted for getting someone to point a gun at the baby, but the main point still stands lol)

the power and brutality of his hand to hand fighting too... a w e s o m e , I enjoyed the action scenes a lot in this one

- they even recanonized him actually wearing jango’s armour. what more could I ask for. I’ve had confused parent & child feels about these two since I was like eleven and here we fucking go again. and jango fighting in the mando civil wars too!

- so I’m grieving the razor crest (and I always will be, rip you magnificent jalopy, always in my heart) but also there’s the grim satisfaction that my reading on it was sort of true -- it is (...was. oh god it’s going to take a while to sink in huh) a symbol of din’s self and life, and at this point when they take the baby it tears everything else to pieces. the only thing that’s left in the ashes is the beskar and the thing that connects him to the baby. and there’s... a strange solace in seeing that that’s all he needs to keep going? he’s fucking obliterated from orbit but he still has his love for the baby and the beskar and that can keep him going until he finds something new, everything else can be replaced?????? weirdly healing, though he is probably going to have a solid breakdown at some point after they get the kid back (shut up they are getting the kid back) and the cold distant fog lifts

also this scene/shot feels like it carries some Meaning, doesn’t it? I’m on record several times saying I never want din to be mand’alor and that’s still true, but there’s something about the framing of this and the way boba looks at him that’s like... hm. I’m not sure I have the words for it. there’s something heightened about it, anyway, for a moment he looks like something mythic there in the wreckage

(something I would be much cooler with is our clan of two growing a little bit and those new people rallying behind him, actually, that might be neat. imagine if a force user does show up for the baby and gets adopted into the clan somehow??? so many possibilities.)

- from the way he picks up the silver ball... din djarin is on his way to straight up murder some people huh

I think part of what reassures me about this scene is the music -- this mando flute is not distant, is not beaten, is not despondent, it’s clear and determined and strong.

I love this. I love when we get explicit baby POVs, it makes it feel so real and intimate and... like home. (I especially loved baby’s point of view inside the razor crest, which just made me tear up again. baby lost the closest thing he’s had to a home in a long long time on top of it all. everything is suffering)

Emotionally Significant Thumb Grabbing tm; the show

- din djarin looking for the ‘on’ switch on a magic rock fhsdakjfhsadlfhsdjah I can’t breathe

“Well, this is the seeing stone. Are you. Seeing anything?” fsafkdsajhfsa sdhfksjalhfkjsdahfkjsdhf

- the energy around the baby as he’s, in ahsoka’s words, ‘choosing his path’ is blue, and the force sort of works across time and space, right?? so there’s definitely still hope for our lil green bean to not have to come up with a really dumb unsubtle sith name for himself, as is regrettably yet delightfully tradition. darth babbu should never come to pass (I do like how they’re interrogating the normal dark/light side dichotomy in this series, seeing as this is a literal baby who can’t really be responsible for that stuff himself yet and has such capacity for both.)

- listen. listen, the way din says ‘can you please hurry up’ with no sarcasm or real impatience whatsoever, more like a harried worry, to his force-meditating son as he jogs off to make sure no one’s trying to kill them. is hilarious and also YES this is what the character is!!! weirdly and incongruously polite under stress sometimes and with a slightly odd reaction pattern to things!!! he’s not just quiet and badass, he’s a little strange sometimes and it’s so good!

- a friendly opening volley warning shot from boba there

also din uncertainly asking BOBA FETT if he’s a jedi... now this is the dramatic irony I’ve been looking for haha

I guess neither shand nor boba actually know din’s name after this either. baby you gotta start introducing yourself at some point it gets real confusing when there are two mandos on screen

oh the long weary sigh going through din’s frame when boba says he wants ‘the armour’ and he thinks it’s just someone trying to peel the beskar off his corpse again. sorry the galaxy’s so shitty dad

- “But fate sometimes steps in to rescue the wretched” is a killer line well done mr favreau. I like that boba actually offers din a good deal as well and seems to intend to deliver on it from how things are going.

- din using his beskar-covered bod to cover someone he’s fighting alongside!!! literal moving cover haha. also I love fennec’s costume design

- I don’t know where din got more whistling birds from and I don’t care, it was really cool haha

wow haha um so anyway --

(cue all the ‘who wore it better’ with cobb vanth’s ‘spiderman’s first home made costume’ look on one side and ABSOLUTE UNIT DADDY boba fett on the other side posts lol)

- aaaghh the music almost like a stunned desperate fluttering heart beat as din watches the razor crest be destroyed

- for someone who has willingly worked for them in the past boba sure sounds less than thrilled about having the empire back in any capacity

- oof the deadness in din’s voice when he says “The child is gone”. ooooh no that got me h e l p

- guessing next episode is at least partly a ‘gathering old allies and preparing the assault’ step before the grand finale, then! they cannot go for the season ender cliffhanger with this, I will fucking riot. anything can be up in the air except baby and dad being separated, I will not allow it

it would be very funny if the force user baby called out to comes stumbling into the middle of all this like the troy entering the room with pizzas meme too

- the music in the darth grogu scene is partially a dark mirror of the baby & mando music :’( is nothing in this world sacred

also from how he reaches out for it baby might have used a light saber before in the past with the jedi? ngl the idea of baby wielding the dark saber not when he’s all grown up but in like two episodes -- with all the chaos a toddler holding a laser sword would involve -- is all that is keeping me sane here

‘liable to put an eye out with one of these’ well gideon you sure have doomed someone to lose an eye with that one, here’s to hoping it’s you, for full dramatic payoff

he is a deliciously smug awful force with great musical cues tho, you have to give it to him

- okay so this

is obviously awful and horrible and it makes me so sad... but it is undeniably also very very very funny in how it’s framed. you know what? after all this bullshit baby grogu can have a little dark side tantrum, as a treat, we’ve all been there right

(forget finding a jedi, we need to go out there and find a child psychologist who can help him deal with this without adding the fear that he’s on the path to become a two foot tall evil space sorcerer to the mix Y_________Y)

- rip the razor crest except for the second time :’’’( gone but never forgotten

- the last thing din tells the baby is “I’m gonna protect you; I’ll be back soon”. and I hope that stays with the kid somehow and that it actually comes true, that din will be back for him as soon as humanly possible and all this pain and fear can be repaired. ggggghhhhh my emotions are too big for my dumb human body

#star wars #the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #the mandalorian meta #okay I'm gonna have to. go take a calming walk or something after this haha

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acciocrzychickfics · 3 years

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2020 Remadora Fanfic Recommendations

So these are not all of my favorites because there are so many, many to choose from but these are. Also I rarely read fluff, so I struggled with that list, sorry. I have put an * next to any story that is fabulous read by has been abandoned.

MutliChapter Rec

1. If Only by LoquaciousLupin

Tonks meets a mysterious, charming and handsome man at a muggle bar, imagine her surprise when the next time she bumps into him is at her first Order meeting! Will they continue their flirtatious relationship or push aside their feelings in the name of the Order?

Rating: K Status: Complete

2. The Bureaucratic Error by Iniga

After his death, Remus finds himself 5 years in the past, having undone Voldemort's defeat and Teddy's birth. He's going to need his old friend Sirius to help him with this one.

Rating: T Status : Incomplete*

3. Chasing Grindylows by Firetoflame

She pens the note on official Ministry letterhead. Remus Lupin, it reads. You are hereby summoned to attend an Auror interview regarding case file number 713, suspect to be named, Sirius Black. You are required to attend promptly at nine o'clock on the morning of Tuesday the twenty-first. Sincerely, Nymphadora Tonks, Auror Department

Rating: M Status: Complete

4. Lycanthropy, Love and Other Curses by Thora Jane

This is the story of Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks from beginning...to end.

Rating: T Status: In-Progress (last updated on 12/13/20)

5. A Marriage of Convivence? by BDA

The Ministry of Magic is preparing to pass new and extremely restrictive laws against magical beings. The Order must scramble to protect Remus, who will be greatly affected by the restrictions on werewolves. Thankfully Dumbledore has a solution. It is decided that Remus will marry Tonks - a pretend relationship to take advantage of a loophole in the laws. Will it work? How will the pair find being married to each other?

Rating: E Status: Complete

6. A Crinkle of Fate by AFaith1192

What if you were given a second chance? An opportunity to change everything... At the last minute before dying, Nymphadora Tonks makes a desperate wish; a wish to save more than one life. But changing the future has a price, and she will have to learn how to pay it.

Rating: T Status: In-Progress (last updated on 11/15/20)

7. Flying Colours Series by TauraNorma

The ‘Flying Colours’ trilogy follows Lupin and Tonks’ romance across the canon timeline, from the beginning of the Order of the Phoenix until the end of the Deathly Hallows.

Rating: E Status: In-Progress

8. Snapshots by brainyisalwayssexy

Mini scenes and moments that could’ve, should’ve been in the films, but weren’t. Movie-canon semi-compliant. Not meant to make sense from chapter to chapter, and not in chronological order.

Rating: M Status: In-Progress (last updated on 12/21/20)

9.Muggle AU Series by AyashiTetsuko132

A school teacher with a rebellious past. A punk musician with a dynamic present. They have an interesting future together.

Rating: T Status: Complete

10. Protection Detail by LoquaciousLupin

As she can't actively be involved with the search for Black, Tonks is sent to co-ordinate the protection of Hogwarts and Harry Potter whilst Sirius is on the loose. Whilst there, she befriends a charming but secretive new professor. Set during Prisoner of Azkaban. AU in later chapters. Rated for language! Remus/Tonks centred fic.

Rating: T Status: Incomplete (last updated 06/27/20)

11. Worth the Risk by HeadintheCloudsForever

AU. Odyssey-length long fic. Tonks/Remus. Following an Order mission gone horribly wrong that results in Tonks becoming gravely wounded, she meets Remus Lupin when he and Moody rescue her, and Dumbledore assigns Lupin as her new partner for the year, and during the painful time of healing as the young witch recovers from her injuries, she slowly begins to warm up to the man and falls in love with him. Remadora.

Rating: T Status: Complete

Angst/Hurt/Comfort

1. I Can't Tell Her by accio_spaceman

He couldn't tell her- it would ruin everything. But can he stop himself? Originally written about Remadora but written in such a way that you could make it about pretty much anyone.

Rating: K Status: Complete

2. In Denial by secretfanficlover

Remus and Tonks try their best to prevent Tonks from becoming pregnant, a war wasn't the time or place for a child, but Teddy was going to become part of the family whether they liked it or not.

Rating: K Status: Complete

3. The First Goodbye by couldbemoresonic

“I’m leaving. Albus,” he nodded to the Hogwarts Headmaster, who nodded in return, “has asked me to go into the Underground to help with recruiting.” A few people gasped, Molly audibly said, “Remus no, that’s far too dangerous!” Remus didn’t look at Molly Weasley though. He found himself instead, looking directly into the pale grey eyes of Nymphadora Tonks.

Remus leaves to be a Werewolf spy for the Order, but stops in to say goodbye first.

Rating: G Status: Complete

4. Clearing the Desk by HecateA

Harry inherited a certain someone's desk in the Auror Office and finds out just how many slices of someone's life can be contained in a couple of drawers. Oneshot.

Rating: K Status: Complete

5. For the Sake of the Daughter by Gilpin

Tonks brings Remus home to see her parents and it's a meeting of mixed emotions for all. Set just after the end of HBP

Rating: T Status: Complete

Fluffy, Fluff

1. The Order’s Most Eligible Bachelors by cafei-au-lei

The Order's Most Eligible Bachelors, or: the ladies indulge in some firewhiskey and gossip. Sirius and Remus stumble upon a game they're not sure they want to be privy to (okay, maybe Sirius does.) The results lead to some necessary conversation and introspection for a few of the parties involved. Oneshot.

Rating: T Status: Complete

2. Lucky Stars by Sirussly

Series of oneshots (most are fluffly haha)

Rating: G ��Status: Incomplete*

3. Chapter by Chapter by HecateA

Due to a mix-up in the school library, McGonagall's new TA gets the book that Remus needs, which leads to some slow and painful torture. Oneshot. University/College AU.

Rating: K Status: Complete

4. Strange Magic by ItsSoRonksItsRight

Molly comes across a pair of bright purple female short-style lace briefs, what will Remus do? Ronks. Rated T to be safe. One-shot. Disclaimer: I do not own anything relatable to Harry Potter, I'm just borrowing.

Rating: T Status: Complete

5. The Love Life of Nymphadora Tonks by miniandminie

After Tonks slips to Sirius that she likes someone, the entire Order of the Phoenix is on her case to find out who that ‘someone’ is, including the ‘someone’ himself: Remus Lupin. RLNT, Remadora.

Rating: K Status: Complete

Family (Remus/Tonks/Teddy)

1. The Talk, Or The (Lighthearted) Trauma of Teddy R. Lupin by cafei-au-lei

Teddy knew when Dad brought out the firewhiskey that something was suspicious. Then again, maybe he wasn't giving Dad enough credit for being the cool parent. AU. Remus and Tonks survive to raise their son and give him The Dreaded Talk. Oneshot.

Rating: T Status: Complete

2. Grocery Shopping with the Lupins by Deletinvthissoon

What happens when Teddy Lupin gets lost in the grocery store?

Rating: K Status: Complete

3. In Case I Don’t Live Forever by ThatHCWriter

While cleaning out her attic years after the war, Andromeda discovers a strange muggle media device. She turns it on, and when it begins, Andromeda's world stops.

"Is this thing on? Teddy! It's your dad."

Or, how an accidental discovery allows Teddy Lupin to hear a message from beyond the grave.

Rating: T Status: Complete

4. Remus, Teddy! by LadyLoss15

Remadora oneshot Tonks spends an amazing day with Remus just to realize at the end of the day that, to her horror, they have forgotten about bringing Teddy home from the kindergarten. Or have they really?

Rating: NR Status: Complete

5. The Miracle of Accidental Magic by Mills87

Teddy has a bout of accidental magic when he and his Grandma are attacked by a remnant group of Voldemort supporters on his third birthday. His magic transports him and Andromeda back in time to three years before he was born. With no way back to their time will Andromeda find a way to safely alter time to save her loved ones, what consequences may lie ahead?

Rating: T Status: Incomplete*

Smut/PWP

1. Awake at Night by Skelpielimmer

Tonks muses on her newfound obsession with Remus Lupin's hands. OotP. Rated M for adult content!

Rating: M Status: Complete

2. The Perils of Patrol by Worthfull1

Things get a little heated when patrolling undercover. Rated M for swearing and smut. One-shot.

Rating: E Status: Complete

3. Under the Invisibility Cloak by AWideEyedPhoenix84

Lupin and Tonks find themselves in a precarious situation on a mission for the Order, and months of pent-up passion come out right before the full moon.

Rating: E Status: Complete

4. Under the Desk by immahorny

Tonks pays Lupin a visit at Hogwarts. What will happen. AU - Remus is still a teacher when they have an established relationship Book 6 . ***CAUTION: HEAVY SMUT. RATED M FOR A REASON. DON'T LIKE DON'T READ***

Rating: M Status: Complete

5. Phantom Touch by Fleshisonlyflesh

Dora is unable to sleep, and her fantasies of a certain werewolf cause her to find a way to relax...

Rating: E Status: Complete

General/Romance

1. First Meeting and She’s a Piece of Work by firetoflame

He doesn't even know her, not really, and somehow she's ended up with his wand. He thinks maybe next time he'll listen when Sirius tells him his cousin is a real piece of work.

Rating: G Status: Complete

2. Remus, Interrupted by Tonkswyrda

Sirius likes to interrupt people when they're in the middle of things.

Rating: K Status: Complete

3. Things Sirius Black Cannot Unsee by HecateA

In which Sirius doesn't know how to knock, sees something he shouldn't have, and can't keep it to himself—especially not during a very serious Order meeting. Oneshot.

Rating: T Status: Complete

4. Pluto by bikelock28

A series of Lupin/ Tonks one-shots. Canon universe. Ch84 now up. "Did you send him away, Professor? Or did he ask to go?".

Rating: T Status: In-Progress (last updated on 12/18/20)

5. Girlish Giggle by failuretoland

Sirius could always tell when Remus had an enjoyable evening, and he had a bad habit of announcing it to anyone who would listen.

Rating: G Status: Complete

6. The Dawn Patrol by aegle

Mundungus Fletcher resents being dragged to Yorkshire by Remus and Tonks. He laments.

Rating: T Status: Complete

7. On First Impressions by cafei-au-lei

"'You know,' Sirius said, 'it's kind of funny. For someone who thinks Remus is so annoying, you sure can't seem to stop talking about him.'" A series of moments in Remus and Tonks' developing relationship as they get to know each other and learn that maybe first impressions aren't necessarily everything. OOTP. Oneshot.

Rating: T Status: Complete

8. Tuesday by Moreofaguestage

“Sure, Okay let's go get married” Tonks replied brightly. “Where do people get married at 8pm on a Tuesday evening?”

Rating: G Status: Complete

9. Find Us in a Week by myscribblinquill

Tonks' new case is different to those she's had before. First off, there's no crime to solve, all she has to do it collect information on the mark and pass it along to her client. But the problem is there's nothing to pass along, he's so boring and yet, somehow, Tonks can't stop following him.

Rating: G Status: Complete

10. Dora by notoriously

Meetings with the Order are long and boring, and Don't-Call-Me-Nymphadora Tonks doesn't do long and boring. She takes some time out of her duties to carefully consider Remus Lupin, and he quite-significantly-less-carefully considers the name that leaves his mouth when addressing her.

Rating: G Status: Complete

#remadora fanfic recs #hp fanfic recs #remadora #its finally done #thank god this took forever for me to do haha #i will make a seperate one for the holidays

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isaksbestpillow · 2 years

Note

I finally binged bad buddy after seeing you blog about it these past weeks, it’s so good! I was wondering if you have any recommendations for other similar series to occupy myself with until the next episode is released?

Hello!! Welcome to the club!! Sorry for not replying sooner though, moving has been crazy. :( Have you already watched the directors other works? They're not necessarily similar in terms of themes or style but they all have the director's romantic signature that reveals itself in some seemingly mundane scenes. Watching his work I feel like he must be a very romantic person! I looooved A tale of thousand stars/Atots earlier this year, it's been comfort show during these complicated times. It's quite different from Bad buddy because the characters are older, the setting is rural and the storytelling more akin to a Thai soap/drama than a comedy but the good stuff is good all the same! The main character is a guy who develops survivor’s guilt after receiving a lifesaving heart transplant that drives him to trace the donor to finish the things their death left behind. Above all it’s a story about how you can’t live someone else’s life, so it’s perhaps a bit heavier from the usual bls but it’s also very soft and healing a lot of the time. The romance is a lot slower and subdued than in Bad buddy yet similar in how the characters are unapologetically queer and how they know they’re into each other but try not to act on it because their circumstances aren’t ideal (homophobia is not part of the reason). It’s not a perfect show but it is a show made with love and sincerity from everyone involved so overlooking the few hiccups along the way is easy for me!

In addition to Bad buddy I’m also watching Not me! It uploads on Sundays on gmmtv’s yt channel. Only three episodes are out so far but it’s already very different from all the other bl shows I’ve seen. I picked it up because the director is a trans woman who has made an interesting queer film Malila: the farewell flower and because the show promotes the democratic movement in Thailand. The show is plot driven and has a cool video game vibe to it. I’ve read they’ve had to work on the script a lot to even get it to air amidst the heavy censorship so I want to salute the whole team because queer motorcycle vigilantes blowing up a billionaire’s house is not the easiest way to sell those sponsored products lol. I don’t expect it to become a huge hit since there has been very little romance so far and the plot requires some awareness of the political situation in Thailand, but for me it’s a nice show to watch alone with the lights off and I look forward to a new episode!

In the past I would’ve wholeheartedly recommended Gaya sa pelikula for a nice healing experience but then I learned the creator had been sexually harassing the actor the whole time and now the show is tainted. Especially how he presented his work as the antithesis to all the other bls out there, almost positioned himself above them, as the real thing, all the while having no respect for actual queer people on his fucking set. :(

I have to sleep now!!!

Ps. I also recommend my own fansub @kinounaniresource!

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starlightsearches · 3 years

Text

His Pilot Ch. 6 (SFW)

Masterlist

Armitage Hux x Pilot! Reader (f)

NSFW Version of the chapter can be found here.

Warnings: Language, angst.

The fire paints with dim, golden streaks on the ceiling above your bed—not bright enough to keep you awake, if you could manage to close your eyes.

You should be tired, exhausted. You should have fallen into the deepest sleep of your life before you even managed to crawl between the sheets. But you can’t. And you’re not.

Rest stays elusive, no matter how hard you try. After everything that’s happened, every promise and commitment you made in the blazing heat of the moment, it would be wise to take this time alone to think about what’s been done, and what cannot be undone.

And instead you're thinking about how it would feel to have Armitage's lips against your neck.

You huff at yourself, turning once again, the sheets in a tangle around your legs from your restless movements.

The knock at the door is so quiet, you’re sure you’ve imagined it. You want him to be there, but finding the hallway empty would be unbearable. The sound comes again, slightly louder, and you close your eyes, offer your hopes to the universe, and slip from between the sheets.

It takes effort to keep from running—even on your sore and tired legs—your footsteps marking an even beat against the floor, not loud enough to drown out the rapid strike of your heartbeat as your fingers curl around the cool metal of the door handle.

It could be Day, checking to make sure that you’re alright. Or Alida with fresh clothes for tomorrow or more wood for the fireplace.

The door opens; all your fears go quiet. It’s him.

“I . . .” Armitage hesitates, eyes gone wide when he sees you, shoulders positioned away from the door, like he's ready to run, “I couldn’t sleep, and I thought . . .”

Thank gods. You manage to keep your excitement to yourself, stepping out of the way so that he can enter.

The fire burns low in the hearth, casting more shadows than light at this point, bringing the walls in closer and shrinking the room, small enough that you can’t help but stand close to him.

He’s still in his clothes from before, except for the jacket—the fabric stiff with rain. His hair has lost any of the gel he had put in it that morning, and it falls across his forehead in soft waves—longer than you expected it to be—before he brushes it back with one ungloved hand.

“I— I didn’t mean to bother you,” he says, his throat jumping slightly when he swallows, eyes on the mess of sheets and blankets on your bed. He clasps his hands tighter behind his back when you rest your hand on his arm, the skin of his knuckles turning white.

“You’re not bothering me, I couldn’t sleep either.”

His eyebrows raise, the breath he was holding brushing your skin when he finally releases it. “Really?”

“Yes." You continue to shrink the space between you, looking up at him through your lashes.

He frowns, confused. “Why not?”

“I was thinking about you.” He can't not know what you're waiting for at this point, standing so close you can feel the heat from his skin through his clothes, staring pointedly at his lips.

He holds your hand to his face, and you think you've finally gotten through to him, letting your eyes flutter closed, but he doesn't come any closer, and when you meet his eyes again, they're full of pain.

“I’m— I’ll never be able to express how sorry I am for all of this. I’ve ruined—”

You kiss him with an exasperated sigh—kiss him to shut him up, kiss him because you can’t wait any longer. It stuns him, but he kisses you back, his hand at your jaw, lips moving seamlessly against yours.

It’s exactly what you wanted—uncomplicated, pure connection. He won’t listen to you when his own insecurities are so loud, but he can feel this: the urgency of your mouth against his, the sincere desire in your sighs.

There’s no forethought, no planning, just need—every movement motivated only by desire. He stumbles back on the bed, sinking into the plush mattress, pulling you down against him with his arm at your waist until you’re a mess of shifting legs and desperate, roaming hands.

It’s need that presses your hips against his thigh, warm and solid between your legs, need that has you sliding your core against the firm press of his body, sighing into his open mouth.

You reach for his shirt collar, pulling him closer, the buttons slipping easily from their hold under the strength of your hands until you can grip at the skin beneath—his neck, his collarbone, each valley and ridge mapping itself beneath your touch, searching lower, deeper, for more.

You’re left staring at the ceiling with wide eyes and empty hands.

Armitage turns to you, half his face in shadow as he sits on the edge of the bed, running his palms over the silk covers methodically, as if he’s trying to make sure that there's something real beneath him.

“Is everything . . . alright?” you whisper, apprehensive. There’s a sinking pit in your stomach, a terrible strain between your need to touch him and your fear of pushing him away.

He waits a moment before answering with an unconvincing nod.

“Yes, of course. I’m— I apologize.”

He looks so broken, defeated, and you don’t even know what you’ve done to make him this way. With no other options, you shift closer, stroke your fingers over the back of his neck in what you hope is a soothing gesture. His shoulders relax minutely, pressing closer against your hand, and even this little sliver of contact makes your stomach soar.

“There’s nothing for you to apologize for. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

He scoffs, turning away from you, and it's only then that you realize the anger in his eyes is directed inward.

Your chest collapses, folding in on itself in shame.

“Armitage,” you hook one finger under his chin, forcing him to look you in the eyes, “it’s alright. I’m not upset, or angry. We don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do.”

His jaw tightens, eyes heavy with an unspoken pain. “Please, don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. You don’t have to worry about me, Armitage.”

He pauses, quiet, shifting in his seat, clearly still embarrassed despite your assurance, “I should return to my room.”

You stop him with a hand on his chest, “Don’t, please, stay with me.”

He flushes, red from his temples to his cheeks; his shame only just overpowered by the desire to stay with you. “I’d need a change of clothes.”

You press your lips together, biting away a smile, “I think I can help with that.”

The trip to his room and back is uneventful, thankfully. The hallways are dim and empty, and the house is large enough that you don’t have to worry about waking anyone, or having to explain your trip to Armitage's quarters in the middle of the night.

The refresher is off when you get back, the room swallowed by silence, and you knock on the door to let him know that you’ve returned from your little mission.

“Come in.”

He speaks quietly but you still manage to hear him, bracing yourself before you enter the refresher, greeted by a wall of steam that clings to your skin and collects in your lashes like tears. Armitage stands, bare from the waist up, staring at his hazy reflection in the fogged glass.

His back is to you, pale white skin pulled tight over sharp shoulder blades, dotted with freckles and occasionally marred by the white stripe of a long-healed scar. There’s another mark, an unexpected one on his left shoulder, just below the junction of his neck.

He watches your approach through the glass, no longer covered in mist now that you’ve let the cold air in, the leftover condensation dripping down its surface like rain before pooling at the edge of the counter.

It’s not a very large tattoo, about the length and width of your thumb: a small sprig of flowers, like the ones you saw on your trip to the market. You trace the lines—the dark green of the stem and where it fades into the soft, white petals—with the tip of your finger, memorizing the pattern.

“It’s Halia,” he says with a cough, “they’re the flowers that grow on the mountains along the shoreline. She was named after them. It was the first thing I did after leaving the academy, in her memory when—” he pauses, voice thick with emotion, “—when I thought she was dead.”

You nod, stroking your thumb over his shoulder, unwilling to speak just yet, in case it breaks whatever spell has overcome him.

“It scared me, for most of my childhood. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and for a few moments I’d be terrified, thinking I’d forgotten her name. My father, he told me the truth when I was very young. Maybe he thought I’d be ashamed, but I couldn’t be. She was the only thing that separated me from that man, and I worried that if I forgot her, like he had, I’d end up like him, too.”

It’s the most he’s ever said to you in a single sitting, bared to you not just physically, but emotionally as well. It's the moment you've been waiting for.

“If she knew the truth,” you whisper, kissing the bend right above the tattoo, “she would be proud of you.”

His hand covers yours, pressed tighter against his skin. “I hope you’re right.”

He glows in the darkness beside you, skin bright and reflective as a moon, and you stroke your hand over his cheek as he slumbers, brush the dark, still-damp hair from his eyes, your other hand firmly held in his own.

You rest your head against the pillow, laying on your side. He'll be the last thing you see before you drift off tonight, and the first you'll see when you wake up.

You fall asleep knowing that you made the right choice.

Hux Tag List: @theredwolfisalesbian, @aramanna, @catboykenobii

Join my tag list here!

#armitage hux x reader #armitage hux x you #general hux x reader #general hux x you #armitage hux/reader #armitage hux/you #general hux/reader #general hux/you #armitage hux fanfic #armitage hux fanfiction #general hux fanfic #general hux fanfiction #my writing #his pilot

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comfy-whumpee · 3 years

Text

Polycule 2

CN: recovering pet whumpee.

Ellis’s Taglist: @lonesome--hunter, @iaminamoodymoodtoday, @wildfaewhump, @ishouldblogmore, @lektricwhump, @that-one-thespian, @raigash, @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi, @rosesareviolentlyread, @castielamigos-whump-side-blog

Ellis wakes up on the bed between Felicity and Nic. It’s dark outside still; the nights are long right now, and even though Felicity rises early, she’s not usually up before sunrise at the moment. She stays up late to spend time with Nic, after Ellis has become tired and gone to bed.

Bed. It’s soft, so soft he worries about floating away, but he wakes up held. Felicity’s warm arm is draped over his waist, her forehead against his back. Felicity gives good hugs, though she doesn’t like it when he nuzzles. Not like Master.

Nic sleeps on the very edge of the bed, now. Ellis knows it’s because he clings to them otherwise. When he clings to them, they don’t sleep. He’s heard them talking about it.

But they never push him off or send him to the floor. They never even mentioned it. Ever since those awful weeks with the voice, Ellis hasn’t been able to sleep in the dark alone. He reaches for them, to chase away the cold and loneliness of the pitch black in his head.

Felicity is a good enough replacement. Ellis relaxes into her arms, feeling her breath through his thin T-shirt, pooling warm and then damp on his skin.

It’s someone real, who hasn’t left in the night, or in any of the nights before now. She’s something he wouldn’t see at home, where even Master sometimes had to leave him alone.

She’s good.

She’s reliable, careful, and she never pushes him. He doesn’t want to be pushed; he doesn’t want to be a person, like Nic talks about sometimes. If he could just learn some things again, that would be enough. He would be happy like this.

“You awake, pumpkin?”

She picked out a nickname for him that he’s never heard. He thinks that’s nice. He’s surprised that she’s awake, but even more that she’s still holding him.

He nods.

“Let’s get up, so Nic can sleep a little more.”

She lets him go, and cold brushes up his sides, but he rolls off the bed after she does and follows her downstairs. She’s wearing pink flannel pyjamas and she looks really cute in them. They’re not pyjamas like he wears with Master, but he still likes them.

Arriving in the living room, she rubs her arms. “Oh, it’s chilly down here.” She crosses the room and picks up her jumper from last night, taken off when she got too warm sandwiched between himself and Nic. “Here, you must be cold in just your T-shirt, right?”

He nods. He takes the jumper. It’s soft. It had been days before he’d taken off his pyjamas to shower, and weeks before he’d stopped putting them back on again as soon as they were out of the wash. Now, he wears T-shirts and sleep shorts like he used to. They’re not as soft against his skin as Master’s choices, but he endures the heat of the itch. It’s never going to go away.

The wool of the jumper is nearly unbearable. He knows as soon as he puts it on. The fibres scratch against every burn scar. The way it shifts with his movements makes it feel like he’s being burned anew. He doesn’t say a word.

Felicity, of course, can’t see that he’s in pain. She smiles, pleased that he’s not cold. And he’s not, no. He’s burning.

“I’ll make breakfast,” she says. She steps into the kitchen. Ellis stands for a minute, but the feeling on his skin is ever louder without a distraction. He follows her, and kneels in the doorway.

He hears her make a sympathetic, disappointed noise, and assumes she is looking at him.

“Let’s do eggs,” she says, presumably to herself. Nobody bothers talking to Ellis usually. “Four should do it, with enough spare to share with you, if you want some after your toast.”

Talking to him isn’t the same as talking with him. He only nods.

“Fried, scrambled…” Felicity wonders aloud. “Do you know how they like their eggs, pumpkin?”

He knows. Distantly, he knows. “S… Sunny…”

He’s not sure of the next word. Top? Side? Turn?

“Sunny side up it is,” Felicity agrees immediately, not at all bothered by his half-asleep vagueness. “And some toast, do you think?”

Unsure of what to say, whether he’s really being asked, he doesn’t answer. Master talks like this all the time, just keeping him involved without asking him to do anything. Ellis likes it that way. He leans against the doorframe and watches her move, listens to her hum, and it’s safely familiar even while being horribly alien to him.

Footsteps sound on the stairs and he turns his head to see Nic stumbling down, in the midst of a yawn with one hand scrubbing their cheek. “Morning,” they smile at him as they reach the floor. “Sleep okay?”

He nods.

“S’good. Morning ‘Lis.”

“Good morning! Sunny side up, right?”

“Huh? Yeah.”

Felicity turns and gives him a thumbs up, and he smiles at her smile, and wishes she would just pet his hair like Master does.

“Go take a nap, boo. We’re gonna play - I dunno what we’re playing.”

Nic blinks, sighs, and nods. Iz pats their back, and they head upstairs with a tired smile Ellis’s way.

He keeps his eyes on the ground, watching them only in his peripheral vision. They’re always so tired, it takes intervention from one of the other two to make them admit it. He knows why, too. They’re trying to hide it from him.

Iz sits down on the sofa, and pats it. He climbs into it, and tucks against her side. “What are we playing, then?” she asks, looking at him from the corner of her eye. “‘Cause I’m in the mood for something shooty.”

Ellis chews his lip, thinking. Hesitantly, he reaches for the computer mouse, and she nods encouragingly. He takes it, and clicks through his library until he finds a game he thinks she’ll like. He double-clicks on it, and it immediately fills the screen with its loading graphics.

“What have I got?”

Iz doesn’t know a thing about video games. She says she played Call of Duty as a teenager, but hasn’t touched one since. But she kept asking about them, asking Ellis for recommendations, and now she comes over most weekends and plays something on his computer, asking him for help pretty much non-stop. She no longer turns the controller to try and move, or looks down at it to check which buttons she’s pressing, but she still doesn’t know what she likes. They’re finding out together.

It’s like the games that Master’s guests used to play, except Ellis picks them, and nobody wins or loses.

Iz looks through the menu screens, eyes studying the screen. She pauses, eyes widening. “Wait, am I playing against people?” There’s a hint of panic in her voice.

Ellis points to an option on the screen, and she selects it. “Training. Right. Thank fuck for that. Wait, so I’m playing with people?”

She cuts a glance his way, and he nods. He smiles encouragingly.

“Okay. Shit, dude, you have a lot of faith in me.” She finds the character select and scroll through the options until she finds a muscular woman with spiky hair and a huge cannon in her arms. She reads through her character’s abilities, tries moving around the pre-match area, and then nods. “Right. Okay. Here goes.”

He snuggles down against her side as she enters the match, ignoring the way the jumper scratches over his skin. She gets lost more than once, but once she finds her way to the action, she turns out to be a pretty good shot. The character she chose happens to be a tank, sturdy and the priority for healing, so she does pretty well.

“Shit!” she exclaims, as she is assassinated at short range. “Oh man, what was that?”

“Ultimate,” Ellis mumbles without thinking. “Strong ability. You’ve got one too.”

“Ohhhh. Okay. Wait, so that’s something to use when I’m in danger?”

“Mm.”

“Got it.”

It’s not like the games with guests he’s done before. No winners or losers, not between himself and Iz. No pain, no mockery. Ellis is the expert, and he teaches her what to do, and her attention stays on her screen and not him.

“Did you have an okay day, Ellis?”

He nods against the pillow his head is resting on. His arms are around another pillow, their new attempt to stop him winding around Nic in the night.

They smile. They look less tired now, but still not their usual self. “That’s great. I’m really proud of you for sitting on the sofa today, and sleeping on the bed, too. You’re doing your best, and I see that.”

He is. The rules are different here, but he’s learning them as fast as he can, and trying to follow them. He wants to be good.

“You ready to sleep?”

He nods. He sits up, realising his opportunity: at last, he can go back to being in his pyjamas. He slips his arms into his sleeves, and finally, finally pulls off the jumper. Cool bedroom air washes over his skin, and the burning begins to slowly fade away.

“Oh, hon,” Nic says, and he tries not to flinch, “isn’t that one wool?” They reach out and rub a hand over the material. “Doesn’t that itch against your scars?”

Ellis twitches, looking down at his lap. His hands twist together.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Nic lays a hand over one of his. “Did Felicity hand it to you?”

He nods. Always nodding, useless at talking, a bad pet. Bad company.

“You couldn’t tell her no, huh?”

Nod. Cringe, waiting for the affectionate sigh, the touch and forgiveness for his stupidity.

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice earlier. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

He blinks. Sincere apology. Promise of change. He looks up at them, but they’re not smiling. They’re looking at him seriously, with compassion. “Is that okay?” they ask him softly.

He wants to hug them. He wants to throw himself into their arms and thank them with sweet, tumbling words, and stay there until he falls asleep and dreams of Master.

But he’s been given a pillow. He’s too much trouble. He curls up on his side, the cotton bedding smooth and only a little scratchy on his skin, and he tries to fall asleep.

#recovery whump #angst #comfort #aftermath #pet whumpee #ellis: polycule #iz #felicity #nic #ellis #scars #aggravating injuries #recovery #conditioning #deconditioning #past trauma

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badartfriend · 3 years

Text

There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

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Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

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maddiethebull · 4 years

Text

Satan (Obey Me!) - Prompt #9 - “I could quote a thousand poems, but none can describe what I feel.”

I’m BACK Y’ALL After some InTrOSpeCtioN and HeaLiNG and LoTS of CRyINg ;)

Sorry for my absence. I hope you like it and thank you for making a request! Requested by @l3v1sblog

Here’s a song to listen to while reading if you’d like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R0Ix90hFu8

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You were cleaning around the lounge of The House of Lamentation, it was your chore for the day to help dust and reorganize whatever silverware or centerpieces that may be out of place. You always thought it was such a bore, you never found anything cool to talk about with the brothers while you cleaned there, unlike the many times you’d found an interesting book to talk about with Satan whilst you cleaned the library. Or the times that you found household items with huge bites taken out of them and asking Beel if he did it and him so innocently denying it… You were about to put some silverware away when something caught your eye, though, it was a red, leather bound book. There wasn't any writing on the cover, piquing your interest, so you opened it and the first thing you saw was a poem titled Suns and Seraphim dedicated to…… WAIT THAT’S YOUR NAME???. It read,

“Could seraphim descend to earthly ground,

For chance to brush thine lips with hues of rose;

Discard their grace and heav’nly guise, cast down,

They would; just as the sun is always bound.

The moon will rise upon the sun’s repose

With gifts to thee inside night skies of opal tone

Of diamonds who’s shine dare not oppose

That which resides in precious eyes, thine own.

Si j'avais été dans le royaume des cieux

Pour vous donner ces soleils souriants

Et regarder votre beauté,

Mon cœur volage me tenterait d'arracher

Mes ailes angéliques et descendre;

Je quitterais ce paradis creux pour être en Eden

Avec mon amant, Mon ange de la terre, vous.

(written by Madeline Melcher (me lol) I dont know french so I used a translator btw)

Your jaw dropped, who could have written this?? It popped up in your head that it was most likely either Lucifer or Satan, it definitely wasn’t Mammon, Levi, or Beel. The maybes were Belphie and Asmo, but the chances they wrote that were rather slim.

Curiosity killed the cat and you couldn’t restrain your fingers from flipping through the many filled pages of the notebook. Another page had read,

“I could quote a thousand poems, but none can describe what I feel when I’m with you. You are a glimpse of a Heaven lost to betrayal, a sun that, for so long, I’ve been missing. I promise, someday I’ll show you these and then I’ll take you on a picnic (maybe in the human world?).”

Involuntarily, a smile made its way to your lips and a blush to your cheeks until you heard a knock on your door, it was Lucifer,

“MC, Why aren't you cleaning?”

Your heart sped up, what if it was Lucifer who wrote this? You began stuttering, you liked him, sure, but not in the way these poems talk about. Oh god… what if you had to turn down the second most powerful demon ever? Oh lawd.

“MC, we enjoy having you here but if you don’t finish your chores and put down whatever book you're reading-”

A HUGE sigh of relief escaped you,

“So you don’t know this book?” You asked, still slightly on edge.

He answered, “How could I know what you’re reading? There's not even a title on it.” He sighed and stepped closer, he eyed the book and, “Is that Satan’s Journal? Oh dear, MC, I believe you’ve made a rather stupid mistake.”

Your eyes were open wide as you sat completely still and quiet staring at the book in your hands. Lucifer spoke up, seeing that you looked quite shocked and perhaps a bit scared,

“If you would like, I can put it back where it was. Though I will be giving you extra chores because it seems that you also know what you did was an invasion of my annoying brother’s privacy.”

You thought a moment then spoke,

“No, I don’t feel good about that… I think I should give it back to him. I don’t wanna lie to him.”

“If that’s what you would like to do then I am nobody to stop you, just be careful and if something happens then don’t refrain from calling me for help.”

“Thank you Lu-”

In a seemingly dejected and scoffing tone Lucifer said, “And do your chores.”

With that he left you all alone to contemplate a plan to give Satan his journal back. Your mind was clouded with a million thoughts, the most prominent one being ‘he really thinks of me like that?’ A brush of pink crept onto your cheeks, thinking of him writing these poems. Thinking of him thinking of you. You wished so much that you could just revel in these thoughts, but the issue at hand was that, like Lucifer had said, you invaded Satan’s privacy. ‘What if he doesn’t feel that way anymore...’ Excitement and fear mixed inside your mind making you feel overwhelmed. How would you go about this?

‘Maybe I can just leave it in front of his door with a note on it. But, no, what if someone else picks it up?’

‘I could just burn it and forget about everything…….. No, MC, that’s NOT what’s gonna happen.’

You thought and thought and came to the realization that the easiest and most moral way to take care of the situation was just to knock on his door and hand it to him. You would tell him what you did and apologize and it would go very super incredibly smooth… yeah. You picked up the book ad headed towards Satan’s room with conviction, ‘you can do this MC!’ you thought. But when you got to his room, you froze like Mammon’s credit cards.

You’d never felt more anxious in your life. You liked Satan a great deal, he was handsome and charming, he had a soft side that he showed you often, he was wonderful. Even though these poems were made out to you, you felt as if it couldn't possibly be real. And moreover, this was the Avatar of Wrath’s personal journal that you had gone through... You breathed heavily to calm your nerves and gave yourself a mini pep talk. Then, finally, you meekly knocked on the door. Satan opened the door and saw you standing there, a smile crossed his face,

His blonde locks messily hung around his bright green eyes with a beautiful happy go lucky look in them,

“Hello, MC, find something interesting today? I certainly did and would very much like to give it to you.” A sweet chuckle ran off his words as he began to show you in but he froze and his expression changed drastically.

With his eyes open wide he asked while pointing to the book,

“What’s that?”

Stuttering and mumbling, fumbling your words you managed to get out a small “I’m sorry”

Silence. Silence that was louder than the rumble of a volcano.

He cleared his throat,

“Did- did you read it?” his eyes fixated on the book you held, he looked incredibly worried. You weren't looking at him so you could only assume that his visage was pure rage, something you, a mere human, were terrified of.

“I-I-I-I-”

You were cut off by a chuckle, although this time it wasn’t sweet, per say, more nervous. But through your ever amazing perception skills, you again thought he was angry with you and as he said,

“MC, I-”

You blurted out, “I’m sorry!” and ran away.

Your heart beat a million miles per hour as you hastily made your way to your room, locking the door and looking down to see that your dumbass TOOK THE BOOK. You were silent on the outside, but screaming like Hell on the inside.

Just then, a voice wriggled it’s way through the wooden door, it was Asmo.

“MC, do you think I could borrow your hair straightener? Mine broke and I can’t go anywhere looking like this!”

Shakily, you replied, “Sure, it’s just on my bathroom counter.”

He waltzed in all happy and pretty but the look on your face made him stop in his tracks,

“What’s wrong?” With those two words, you nearly burst into tears.

“Oh hun…” he said as he put a reassuring hand on your shoulder, letting you rest your head on his arm. “Why don’t we go to my room and talk about it? I’ll even give you a makeover, that’d be nice, yeah?”

You wiped the tears from your cheeks, “Yeah.”

You told him all about it as he did your makeup, making you feel slightly better, though, it wasn’t really the makeup, it was more seeing how much the brothers cared about you in times like this. He began to finish his own makeup as you sat down on the bed and your restless thoughts ran out of your mouth as if it were a marathon.

“And he got angry at me, I can’t stand seeing him angry, and and-”

“MC, honey, calm down,” he said as he finished doing his eye makeup, focusing on his reflection in the vanity mirror.

“How can I? These poems, they’re beautiful but I just read his journal without asking and I feel so horrible about it. And I’m really scared of him when he gets angry… I just don’t know if I can face him right now.” You flopped from sitting up to splaying out on the pale pink bedspread.

“You said the exact same thing just five minutes ago! You won’t get anywhere from repeating that.”

“UGH but it's all I can think about right now… What if he hates me because of this…”

Asmo let out a light chuckle, “He doesn’t hate you sweetie, I don’t think he can.”

You frowned, “You don’t know that.”

After a moment’s pause, looking at how distraught you were with the current situation, Asmo spoke again,

“MC, let me tell you a secret, I’ve been watching this whole thing unravel, I could sense rom com vibes since the day you waltzed in! You should’ve heard the way he talked about you, it was constant ‘MC this and MC that’ ‘Oh I made MC laugh today,’ ‘MC let me borrow her pen’ ‘MC asked me to get coffee,’” Asmo said while doing a ridiculous impression of Satan, “But you can’t tell him I told you this or he’ll probably string me up by the ankles.”

You chuckled and when your smile faded, Asmo looked you in the eye and said in a sincere voice,

“He likes you girlie, I would even say he loves you. I’ve never seen him care about someone so much. When I said I don’t think he can hate you, I meant it. So go back there and tell him what you feel, this is the climax of your love story! And believe me when I say a good climax can fix anything!”

“Asmo ew.”

“Hehe, too much?”

You looked at the red book cover, “He really said that?”

Asmo rolled his eyes with a smile,

“Yes! So what’re you waiting for?? I can feel the stress seeping out of you and it's not good for my skin.”

Meanwhile in his room Satan was pacing like a worried cat, mumbling to himself. ‘I knew MC didn’t feel that way…’ ‘How could I be so reckless? I left my journal in the dining room of all places!’ With a frustrated grunt, he brought his hands to his face, lowkey slapping himself in the face. He sat down on his bed and tousled with his hair, as he did so, his focus was taken by a single blooming Mirage Flower on his desk. He winced and flopped onto his bed face down. The sigh he let out after that held an almost tangible emotion of frustration. He was frustrated with himself, but also with you. He didn’t plan on you finding out like this and it made him feel, well, kind of lame. He imagined telling you many times, none were as embarrassing as you reading his journal. He wanted to sweep you off of your feet like a prince in one of Levi’s animes, with the flowers mysteriously blooming and all of that. He turned to the side, restless and angry with himself and again was there the flower he had secretly picked from Diavolo’s garden, only to give to you. His lips turned to a frown and he sat up again, taking the flower from it’s vase and like a child, he plucked each petal saying “MC loves me.” “MC loves me not.” As the flower diminished to just the stem he finished with “MC loves me.” ‘Hmph, I look like I’m losing it, don’t I?’ he thought. Still, this powerful demon’s heart felt aflutter from something as silly as the words “MC loves me” as he plucked the final petal from the pistal. Those petals that would soon dry out and crumble to dust reflected in his aquamarine eyes like lilies floating in a pond. His brow furrowed and he decided it best to lay down looking the other way.

You got off of Asmo’s bed, dropping the journal with the spine facing the ground, making it open to the last page that had only one sentence on it. Your heart beat sped up as you read the short entry and what you read was enough to make you happy for entire lifetimes.

“I've loved you every day before today and I will love you every day after.”

You didn’t know why, but it was enough to bring the hint of tears to your eyes. He really thought of you like that? Did you think of him like that? As intensely in love as these poems and pages had shown?

Now holding the book in your hands, looking at the same red leather cover but seeing something different. You smiled, and said “Yeah. I think I do.”

Asmo turned around with a confused look on his face, “You do what?”

A blush rose to your cheeks much like a rose in bloom,

“I love him.”

You left the room determined, set firmly on a path to Satan’s bedroom.

All alone in his room, Asmo chuckled,

“Have fun dearie.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------

This was a long one, I wrote this over a long period of time and I changed it up a lot. I was feeling sad when I wrote a lot of this, so it’s a bit really sad and I decided to end it like this because it kind of felt right? Like instead of explaining the whole thing from beginning to end, it would be a better read and be a better experience for the readers to be able to imagine whatever ending they would like when confronting the character Satan. I’m open to writing an ending that includes MC finally confronting him, though, just say the word and I’ll finish the story in a different way :) Thanks for reading! <3

also as a BONUS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9raS7-NisU this song is basically what Satan was thinking the entire time lmao

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dettiot · 4 years

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i saw your fake! married trope post and i’m begging you to write something where the senate makes padmé and anakin be fake married for a mission, so they have to pretend to be married while concealing the fact that they are actually married. if you don’t want to that’s cool too! i just love your writing and i’d love to see you write the prompt! 💜💜💜

Since I love the fake!married trope, I’ve already started writing a Star Wars spin on this idea! This ficlet follows love and politics.

“Bail, you can’t be serious with this,” Padme Amidala said, once she had collected her wits after her friend and colleague’s stunning idea.

“But I am,” Bail said, his voice gentle. “I speak from experience--an arranged marriage isn’t all bad. And after what Alderaan went through during Ascendancy Contention, I saw how my marriage to Breha united Alderaan behind us. Healed the wounds between my people.”

Padme sighed softly. “I know how successful your marriage has been, for Alderaan and for the galaxy, Bail. And I’m very glad you and Breha have created happiness out of politics. But . . . marrying a Jedi? Me?”

Never mind that the idea of marrying a Jedi wasn’t nearly as foreign as she was making it sound. She could not reveal that she was already married--not when it would mean losing her seat in the Senate, not when it meant Anakin being punished, even expelled from the Order . . .

“You’re young, intelligent, talented: you represent the best of the Republic, Padme,” Bail flattered her. “When I had this idea, I knew you would be the perfect candidate.”

Sighing softly, Padme rose to her feet and turned to look out the window of her office. Her reluctance was only partially feigned. Because yes, she could acknowledge the intellectual strength of Bail’s argument. A wedding between a Senator and a Jedi would be a wonderful way to draw the galaxy together, with the Clone Wars still raging and systems leaving the Republic to join the Separatists.

But she had served as Queen of Naboo for eight years. Had been a Senator for almost four years now. She was willing to sacrifice her time, her energy, even her life towards democracy and service to the galaxy.

Must she sacrifice her heart, too? A heart that wasn’t even hers to give, since someone else held it in his hands?

Admittedly, there was no legal record of her marriage to Anakin. Their ceremony on Naboo, conducted by a holy man, held no weight in galactic law. But Padme knew she was married, even without having any legal documents to prove it.

But none of that mattered. She couldn’t do this.

Bail joined her at the window, resting a hand gently on her shoulder. “I know this is a surprise. Even a shock. But I do hope you’ll consider the idea. Especially since Master Yoda has suggested a Jedi who . . . who I believe you might be amenable to forming such a bond with.”

She blinked. “You’ve already talked to Master Yoda? He agreed to this?”

With everything Anakin had told her about the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, and from her own acquaintance with the small green Jedi, she couldn’t believe he was in favor of this idea.

“I believe Master Yoda agrees with me that the galaxy is at a critical point. The people don’t realize how much we need the Jedi, and while they’re seen as heroes of the war, no one really feels like they know them,” Bail said. “The wedding would not take place immediately. You would have enough time to establish a relationship with your prospective groom, to come to an understanding.”

Padme doubted sincerely that there was much chance of any real relationship forming between herself and a Jedi. Not when he found out she was in love with another Jedi--was married to another Jedi.

But . . . but what could she do? Perhaps the best choice would be to stall. To show she was actually considering the idea, to give her time to come up with a solution that wouldn’t involve her becoming bigamy.

“Who is Master Yoda suggesting as the groom?” she asked. “From what you’ve said, I guess it’s someone I know.” She paused and felt her heart drop. “Not Master Kenobi?”

Bail looked confused for a moment, his eyebrows drawing together. “Master Kenobi? No. Master Yoda suggested Anakin Skywalker.”

XXX

After being under the thumb of the Jedi Council for more than ten years, Anakin Skywalker knew what to expect from them. Masters Yoda and Mace disliked him and wished he had never been trained. Master Koon was kind and welcoming. Master Shaak Ti had a good sense of humor, Master Mundi was a stick in the mud, and Obi-Wan . . . Obi-Wan was his greatest defender. Always.

But standing before the Council and finding out that they wanted him to marry some Senator . . .

He had never expected anything like this.

“Unusual, it is. Times like these, unusual they are,” Master Yoda said.

“I--but--how--” Anakin flailed, looking to his Master and sensing an equal amount of shock from him.

Giving his head a shake, Anakin said, “What about the Code?”

“Exceptions have been made before,” Master Mace said, sounding like he was being forced not just to suck a lemon, but to eat it. “Master Mundi, for example.”

“I know, but--but this is different,” Anakin said, still feeling shocked.

And honestly? Pretty angry. Because how was it fair to brush aside the Code for politics but not for love?

“I must agree with Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s already nearly unprecedented for exceptions to the Code. And the reason for this exception sits poorly with me.”

“Meditate, we all must. A shock it is, acknowledge I do,” Master Yoda said. “But persuaded, I am, by Senator Organa’s arguments. And hope, I see, in this plan, from my own meditation.”

Senator Organa? Padme’s friend? Anakin did his best to keep from scowling. Trust an Alderaanian to be all smooth and sneaky.

Anakin ran a hand through his hair, giving in to the urge to show his confusion and surprise and worry. Because what if this was all a way to get rid of him? Sure, they could say they would grant him an exception to the Jedi Code, but what if he actually was seen as being attached to his wife? What then?

Of course, this was all pointless. He loved Padme--was married to Padme. There was no way he would ever love anyone other than her.

And there was no way he would give her up for some stupid political arranged marriage. Even if it made the Council trust him.

Master Shaak Ti folded her hands. “I admit, spending more time away from the Temple, among the peoples of the galaxy, has made me see how little they know about us. How misunderstood we are.”

Master Luminara nodded. “This idea of Senator Organa’s might be promising. But Master Yoda is correct: much meditation is required on this idea.”

Nodding, Master Yoda looked at Anakin. “You, especially, must meditate. Much we ask of you, young Skywalker. A sign of our belief in you, it is.”

It took everything Anakin had--every scrap of training that Obi-Wan had pounded into his head--to stay calm on the surface. He bowed, and even though he didn’t really mean it, he said, “Thank you, Master Yoda.”

Master Koon leaned forward. “If you don’t mind my asking, Master Yoda, who would Anakin be marrying, if this plan goes ahead?”

“Provide a bride, the Senate would,” Master Yoda said. “Suggested by Senator Organa, Senator Amidala is.”

If Anakin had been shocked before, now he was . . . was there a word that meant knocked ass-over-head in Basic? He knew what it would be in Huttese, but definitely not Basic.

Because he could marry Padme? Officially? In front of the whole galaxy?

He opened his mouth to agree immediately, but only caught himself in time. He couldn’t do that! Not when the Council hadn’t agreed to the idea, not when he had just acted like the idea of marriage had never crossed his mind.

But for just a moment, Anakin’s mind soared on wings higher than any starfighter could carry him. Because if this actually worked . . . he would be married to Padme for real. It would be all right for him to love her. He could live with her, see her every day, cook dinner for her . . .

Have children with her.

Anakin’s throat tightened as he thought about his dreams. Of the children with his hair and Padme’s eyes. With Padme’s warm heart and his skill with machines.

Could he really have everything he had ever wanted? The respect of the Jedi Council, a family to love, a place in the galaxy? The freedom to be the man he truly was?

Clearing his throat, Anakin said, “I will go to meditate on this at once. If the Council will excuse me.”

“Yes, yes, young Skywalker, go,” Master Yoda said. “Mediate now, we all will.”

Only taking a moment to exchange a look with Obi-Wan, who looked concerned but thoughtful, Anakin slipped out of the Council room. He kept himself under tight control, maintaining his shields to hold back the wealth of emotion sweeping over him.

It wouldn’t do to lose the chance to make all his dreams come true, just because he let slip he was already in love with Padme.

End.

My Star Wars Fic Masterlist

#anidala #star wars #arranged marriage #love and politics #i-want-a-bracken-to-my-kendra

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atopearth · 4 years

Text

Higurashi When They Cry Part 8 - Ch 8 Matsuribayashi-hen

So, the reason Takano is obsessed with the Hinamizawa disease is because she wants to prove her grandpa's theory that there are parasites in our brains affecting our emotions and thoughts, and the different parasites in different areas etc are what causes cultural differences and clashes in thoughts across the world? And it's these parasites that "control" humans. It's saddening to think about the idea of orphanages that operated as a way to claim money "for the children" rather than actually taking care of the children. Like, I can understand being overworked and unappreciated considering the amount of war orphans and others like that, but the thought that people could take advantage of these children to get money and just treat them like prisoners to be beaten or punished when they don't act the way they want them to is just terrible... I guess the fact that the Takano back then who ran away from the orphanage and even bit off the finger of her pursuer to escape shows how bad the place was and how desperate she was to leave. It probably was literally a do or die situation to her.

It's kinda interesting to think that the reason why Takano's grandfather's research was ignored wasn't because it was useless, but because it might have actually been credible in a sense. Due to a war that had erupted because of the mystery behind whether a soldier from Hinamizawa shot the other side or not, this caused a neutral pact to fall through and make the two parties go to war. In the end, since Japan insisted that they weren't at fault and China insisted the same, if Takano's grandfather's research were to come to light, then the fault could be insinuated to be from the Hinamizawa soldier and therefore Japan's fault, and that's why the research was unsupported. I guess it's nice for Takano that her research is getting sponsored properly, by the SDF even since they would probably want to use it as a weapon if the research comes to fruition properly. On the other hand, child Takano got caught huh? Even though Dr Takano saved her later, I'm sure her trauma is something difficult to come to terms with. Personal note, I have to admit, I don't really care for Takano though haha, but I understand why her story is necessary to unfold now. It's saddening to watch how excited Dr Takano was over presenting his research to potential sponsors and then having it all shattered with their cruel allegations that it's all his own delusion and that he was so consumed with the research that he's just making it seem as if it's credible because he wants it to be and not because there's enough evidence or whatever. It's terrible to hear people say something like that for something you sacrificed your whole life to research..and imagine taking those doubts to the grave, like maybe he was delusional blah blah, that's crappy... Psychosurgery is something I never really thought about though! The idea of severing certain connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain sounds really interesting yet dangerous, I can see why it was ethically challenged later on and even caused Dr Irie to kinda be cast aside from the industry considering his persistence on it when they're trying to swerve away from it. At least he sticks to his beliefs I guess haha.

The connecting fragments thing is rather interesting, I like getting more information on what exactly happened behind the scenes with all the discussions they had and everything. It's quite sad and sweet to see how Rika's conviction towards saving Satoko allowed her to accept the idea of people researching her brain or whatever since she's the "parasite leader". It's also saddening to see Hanyuu heartbroken over everyone fighting because of the dam project. Seeing Tomitake smitten with Takano is rather saddening too. Anyway, for context, connecting the fragments is to make way to the ultimate "ending" where they can win against Takano (since Takano has accumulated a lot of support from organisations such as the SDF and has "won" in every world before this because of it + her indomitable will to spread her grandfather's research making way for it to be "fate" I guess). Although it should have been expected that Ooishi has a particular reason to be so adamant about finding out the mystery and murders in Hinamizawa, I don't know why but I actually found his reason to be rather contrived when it was revealed that the dismembered dam construction head guy was someone he sort of respected as a second father after he lost his real one. I guess it's kinda because at this point, I've forgotten how I felt about Ooishi haha, and also because it's just a short segment I guess so it's hard to feel much for it.

As someone whose not a big fan of Satoko (blasphemy, I know right haha), I definitely relate to Satoshi's situation much more and I always wanted more insight into his feelings. It's actually really sad to think about his situation. He loves Satoko, but he's also super tired, he'll always try to protect her whether it be from his stepfathers or his aunt and uncle, but regardless of whose fault it is, anyone will get tired of having to do this all the time. It was heartbreaking to hear that he hated himself for wanting Satoko to stay at the clinic longer just so he could have some peace away from his aunt and Satoko arguing all the time. As someone who also hates the sounds of arguing, I can understand a little bit of that and just how stressful it can be. I...wonder how Satoshi would react if he knew Satoko pushed her parents off the cliff on that trip. Like yeah, she was affected by the Hinamizawa Syndrome and that caused her to kinda go crazy from paranoia, but Satoshi was sane, he knew his parents really wanted to make amends, even the stepfather took courses to try and fix their relationship and Satoshi saw that, so I feel like if Satoshi found that out, he would break. Anyway, I'm not sure how I feel like the story is painting the Hinamizawa Syndrome. On one hand, I understand that yes, if it's caused by a medical condition exacerbating emotions that they can't control, it can't be helped that so many worlds turned out the way it did, but at the same time, it feels like a lot of it tries to apportion all the blame to the Hinamizawa Syndrome as if it never existed, then everything would be fine? Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but it makes me feel like that which I don't agree with, since I feel that even if things wouldn't have turned out so drastic with the clawing of the necks etc, I still think that with the way a lot of characters were treated and how they felt, things were inevitable whether the syndrome was there or not.

It's sweet to know that Tomitake was sincere with Takano and really tried his best to be her ally, it's just that even though he knew her, he couldn't really help her, and I guess that's something a lot of us struggle with. No matter how well we can know the people close to us, it's not necessarily true that we can "heal" them. Of course we still try, but as it was with Satoko, if they don't help themselves, then outside help can never truly help them. On the other hand, it's interesting that Keiichi's father was able to see Hanyuu and Rika play together when he first visited Hinamizawa hoping to change his life and environment for Keiichi. He's right though, as we grow older, I feel like we do slowly lose our "innocence" as we know more things and "sin", so when we look at children, we always think back and look fondly to that and to them as representative of what we lost and what we hope we still had. I guess it's kinda amusing to say that Takano had a strong will when she nearly gave up and drank her sorrows away after Koizumi (main backer who was friends with her grandpa) died and she couldn't convince the new people to believe in her research until some people under Koizumi's faction came along to "help" her. In a sense, Takano is just trying her best to make sure to tell everyone and her grandfather that he didn't waste away his whole life on useless research, but at the same time it's unsettling to watch her be so consumed by it. Anyway, as I said, it's amusing that Takano is considered to have a strong will, when in a sense I feel like Rika being able to live through all those worlds again and again should be "stronger" but at the same time more weary I assume haha. Regardless, I guess what Rika lacked was concrete support, since even if Takano is being used, she still has support, whereas Rika was always by herself with Hanyuu who doesn't really encourage her since she doesn't believe that fate will change and I guess that didn't help Rika haha.

Akasaka becoming super capable after his wife's death is interesting, like will he be able to reach the same heights in martial prowess if his wife doesn't end up dying? On the other hand, Hanyuu can transfer in as a normal kid?! Cuteee. It was so cute how Hanyuu tried so hard to tell them that she wanted to join their club, and I loved how Rika refused to say it for her, and told Hanyuu that if she wanted it, she had to say it herself. Believing in something is like a gamble huh? When you think about it like that, I guess in a sense, it is. Our beliefs are beliefs because it's not a fact or the "truth" after all, it's basically what we have chosen to think "exists" after we thought about it. The sad thing though is that what we believe in isn't always the "right" thing, but I guess that's fine since we chose to believe in it? Not gonna lie, when they were talking about how they "sacrificed" Hanyuu and her mother(?) back in the day to like cleanse their sins, all I could think about was Jesus, so now I'm just thinking about Rika's ancestor being Jesus and now she's met her in the flesh lol.

Anyway, I love how Hanyuu and Rika pitched their whole situation to Keiichi and them like it's a manga. I think it was really cool to see the whole group bounce ideas off each other with Rika piping in trying to get them to figure out what she couldn't about the whole situation. I really liked it since I feel like the biggest reason Rika is unable to find a way out of this a lot of the time is because she's the one experiencing it, and she's experienced it many times, so it's difficult for her to think outside the box when she feels like she's done that. So I think it's great to see her give the group details to try and see from their perspective what the reason could be for Takano to destroy Hinamizawa, and well as expected, she's most likely being used by the higher ups as she gets revenge by killing Rika and the village. It also feels so great to see Ooishi, Akasaka, Tomitake and Irie get to talk everything out and try to solve things, everything just feels like dang, we've really come such a long way for the final world! Btw lmao at Hanyuu teasing Rika about not trusting her friends enough, it's time for Hanyuu's revenge on Rika!! Or not, lmao at Rika making spicy food (Hanyuu hates it lol) and dumping the cream puffs lolll. On the other hand, omg I love the group's strategic meeting, Hanyuu fits in so well hahaha. I love the 48 hour strategy though, I didn't get it (just like Rena and Rika) initially, but once they explained it, I was like whoa, that is actually a great idea to blow away the presumption that everyone in the village goes crazy in 48 hours! If Rika's corpse appears and is proven that she had been dead for more than 48 hours and yet no one had gone crazy in that time, then their hypothesis about the queen carrier causing them to go crazy would be wrong and everything could sail much smoother, it's nice!

I guess it's really interesting how in the end, many people in Hinamizawa actually do understand and think that the dam construction war is over now and that things should start facing forward and moving properly again; whether this be Oryou or Mion and Shion's mother Akane, they're all tired of being stuck in the past and want to move beyond that, so it's nice to see that Akane and Shion actually visited the dam construction leader guy's grave every year (just like Ooishi) as a way to remind themselves but also tell him that the past is the past and they hope he rests in peace. I quite like Akane and Ooishi, I found it hilarious when Ohtaka was trying to get info about whether Rika was really dead and pretended he knew Sonozaki Saburou (higher up representative) right when he and Akane came in to the police station lol. On the other hand, I want to feel sorry for Takano, but whenever I think about how she was willing to sacrifice Tomitake in every world for her revenge, I don't really pity her lol. Honestly, it was only a matter of time until Tomitake would get captured since everyone knows how important he is, but I was so worried for Irie. No one needs to worry about Akasaka because he's obviously too strong haha. I didn't expect Shion to pick Irie up when he was injured, I was so relieved! But I will be so sad if she and Kasai die. It's nice to know Shion's true feelings and that even though Mion feels bad that she took Shion's place as the older sister, Shion also felt bad for taking Mion's place as the younger sister. Despite everything, they both know how hard it is to be in either place because of the burdens they have. Honestly, I nearly cried when Akasaka came to save the day, he really is Rika's hero, the one who will finally save her after regretting leaving her to die in so many worlds, it was so heartwarming to see. He's ridiculously OP but I guess that's what happens when you train for so long haha.

Satoshi being alive and in the basement if the clinic undergoing treatment is nice for Irie, Satoko and Shion. I personally think it fits the story better if he's dead, but if we want a true happy ending, then he needs to be there so that Satoko can truly apologise to him, Shion can properly tell him how much she cares and Irie can feel less guilt over having to kill or use terminal patients. The mountain fight between the kids club and the Mountain Dogs was pretty fun but expected, I still think in terms of excitement it pales in comparison to their usual games haha, but Mion as commander is always such a highlight, I love seeing how confident she is. It was nice to have the group pitted against Takano as a last battle kinda thing, but I do admit that when Takano was the "main loser" out of all this, I was like, can this really be a happy ending if they characterised her so much but gave only her a bad ending? So yeah even though Tomitake is too good for her, I was happy that he came back to save her, since he's just that kind of person. Honestly, whether Takano has the Hinamizawa Syndrome is something to think about since scratching herself could be stress too imo, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore. Anyway, I honestly wanted Takano to be a much more formidable opponent for them, but I guess not lol. What I really enjoyed though was Rika calling Akasaka "papa" at the festival and his wife was about to kill him over it🤣 and I'm glad that Hanyuu got to stay and play with them since she's part of the group after all. The possibilities of forever where Ryukishi07 talks about how we as readers could create our own abundance of fragments and stories etc was interesting I guess haha, I do wonder though, how would Takano's life have been if she went with her parents to the mall and they didn't end up dying? Wouldn't that be nice? But I wonder what would have happened with the Hinamizawa Syndrome like that.

Overall, the last chapter was as I expected? Honestly, I took a long time to read it because I knew it wouldn’t be my favourite or as enjoyable as the others so it was difficult to ��end” my journey with Higurashi but yeah I still liked it regardless I guess haha. Anyway, yeah, I knew it wouldn't be as fun and interesting to me as the other chapters, especially since Keiichi and the others aren't as prominent here due to the adults helping out to obtaining the good ending with all of them. But I did enjoy Akasaka and everyone working their hardest in their own way to save the people important to them. I kinda thought Ooishi would have a better role but I guess it's okay that he and Akane are pretty funny together lol. However, I do think that Okonogi of the Mountain Dogs was more lacklustre(?) than I thought? I think he could have been pretty cool, but I guess they spent more time humanising Takano haha. The battles weren't as exciting as Keiichi's club battles but I guess that's because Keiichi is a funny and cool guy haha. And I think I just didn't care for all the god stuff with Hanyuu and everything, so I think it would have been better for me if everything was solved by everyone uniting together without the need of supernatural stuff but that's just me. I'm just glad that we got to see the fruits of all their efforts and see everyone believe in the miracle that they could win. It was really satisfying to see everything come into place.

Overall review

Higurashi is a solid VN. Honestly, when I first read Onikakushi, I wasn't sure if I would like it or not even though I was intrigued, but it was crazy how much I loved Watanagashi and the others. The way they set out the mystery, how they had the staff room talks to discuss with you the possibilities and everything, it was just so much fun. I loved the endless possibilities of each different world and how it showed really well how living in your own bubble, not trusting your friends and not communicating with others could make things go so wrong. Of course a lot of it was attributed to the Hinamizawa Syndrome, but at the same time there were a lot of real problems that each character had to go through in order to grow, and I think I personally loved Rena's arc the most. I think her emotions were portrayed so well, and I loved how everyone in the group united with her in Meakashi. I loved how the theme of friendship felt so real, and I think going through the various chapters really helped to build that. Honestly, the slice of life parts used to be so long and annoying for me in the first two chapters, but it eventually became the highlight for me, and it was better than the mystery itself haha. Overall, I think I would give the whole story (all the chapters) an 8.5/10 and would definitely recommend it over the anime (the new one at least haha, I haven’t watched the old one), I think what makes Higurashi so good is how detailed it goes into a lot of the feelings and actions of our main characters and I feel like a lot of that is lost in the anime. Anyway people say the PS3 sprites and voice patches are needed to enjoy this, but I played it like the original sound novel it was and I still loved it. I think it's actually kinda crazy how music and character sprites can enhance the experience of reading a novel so much haha. So yeah, I don't doubt that maybe the patch could make it even better (I guess I can try it in the future haha, since I do think I would like to read it again) but I think it's fine either way. I also bought it in Japanese for the switch so maybe I'll read it in Japanese one day!😆

#higurashi #higurashi when they cry

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