I dont like the young justice TV show

OK OK before you say anything hears my opinion on this TV show

the one on HBO max I mean

I hate it, it makes me want to rip my hair out

and here are some of the reasons why

First off, they put the whole ass wrong Robin in there

They put Dick in there?? No?? The Robin that was in the Young Justice was Tim Drake not Dick. He was never a member of the Young justice

Time, Conner and Bart where the three IfirstI members of the Young justice, they made the team, and by the time that Tim is Robin Dicks a full grown adult so why would he be in there??

Dick was a Teen Titan sure but a young justice member?? Hello?

I mean like a quick google serch can tell you what Robin it was and like i guess benifit of the doubt the robins are a bit confusing but they have Tim come into the show later on like he was the Robin after Dick? No? Where did Jason go? After Dick Jason was Robin, not Tim.

Like for what reason (also why did they flatten his hair like that)

Like thats Tim in the first Young justice comics

You can litrally just Google it and get the right one

Okay i could talk about just the robins for hours but moving on to my second point

CONNER WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU

Why did they compleatly change him?? Why??

Not only did they give him worlds most boreing design but they also compleatly changed his backstory to??

Starting with the disign thing because thats my bigest ick this is what hes suposed to look like (what he looked like in his protraal in the comic books)

Like look how cool that is with the Leather jacket and the belts all the color design, like you can get a pretty good grasp of his personality just based on his design, but what they did with him in the show...

CONNER WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU

They just took out everything that made him a unique character, like everything

His entire personality was also changed witch i absolutly cannot stand. He almost acts like a wild animal in the show like for what reson did they need to make him the worst character ever in the show I hate it so much

Why did they change his whole backstory to?? Like he was made from super man and Lex Luthors DNA right?? Not in this show! He was made by like a cult in the tv show for whatever reson

They compleatly changed his character like compleatly and its probally one of the biggest resons why i dont like this show

but i guess ill give them points on actually putting in the right super boy because its the only charachter who was actually a member of the young justece

Third off, they goofed up Bart big time

Another backstory they almost compleatly changed.

They kept in him coming from the 31st century but he comes from like a post apocoliptic world?? Hello??

The TLDR on Barts actually backstory: He couldnt turn off his super speed abilities so his grandmother (iris) took him back in time to wally so wally could help him, since he grew up so fast he was hooked into VR so that he could mentally age at the same rate goofing up his fear responce and makeing him very impulsive.

The thing is the time that Bart goes back to is the time that wallys the flash, In the show Wally is still the kid flash

Witch is another point in of itself Wally was never a member of the young justice and the flash (barry allen) isnt suosed to be around

Why they changed what Robin and 'Kid flash' where in this tv show only to later introduce the correct ones is unknown to me i have no idea why they would do that.

long story short they put the wrong speedster in there but later put the right one in there only to goof it up

Fourth off

why did they change arrowett like that?

They not only changed her name and the color of her costume (why??) but they had a weird side romance with Wally and her wich why AND they changed her whole ass name??? Her name is Cissy? Why did they flipin change that??

Last but not least

Where are wonder girl and seccret??

Wonder girl is important?? literally what?? Not only that but they took out secret to? Shes kinda important?

Someone please inform me if im wrong on them both not being there I didn't watch the whole show its mind melting

That' s her and she made like three of four big plot lines in the comic series.

Small things i wont elaborate on for the sake of lenght,

Why was speedy there?

I hate what they did to Miss Martian

Why did they need to change the whole timeline for this show?

I could go off on this show for literal hours and how bad it is but thats just the top five reasons i might make another post like this

TLDR: I hate the young Justice TV show :)

Kick Some Ghost Ass

”Until Dawn Gang x Reader (Gender Neutral)

Warnings: Swearing, Sex jokes (excuse my bad humor)

Genre: CRACK, Humor

Summary: It’s one thing when trouble finds this gang, but why don’t we take a look at what happens when they go actively looking for trouble. Needless to say, chaos ensues and no one is spared. Some are more affected than others, and some are dead-ass traumatized, but isn’t that just how life is in general?

Requested by my dearest ever - Until Dawn Anon. Hi lovely! I’ve missed writing your requests and I’m really happy to be back, creating another chaotic fic! I’m sorry it has taken me so long to post it but here it finally is - crazy as ever! I hope you enjoy it! Love you to Blackwood Pines and back baby ❤❤❤

I don’t know how I’ve found myself in this situation but I’m not complaining. If I get to do dumb crazy shenanigans with my crew, I’m ready for just about anything. Not to mention I’m no stranger to ghost hunting. I’m that kid that made DIY Ouija boards and took them to cemeteries with their terrified friends. You should’ve seen us leaving after capturing no ghostly activity - my friends relieved as fuck, and me pissed as fuck.

But today, I’m not expecting nor will I be accepting any disappointment. Especially not with Jess swearing on her Chanel purse that she wasn’t making things up when she said she had a haunted house she wanted us to visit. I must say, I appreciate this group’s enthusiasm when it comes to the paranormal. Never have I had someone who catches my vibe on the subject so well, let alone an entire gang all sharing the same opinion as me - that ghosts, demons and poltergeists are so fucking cool. Sure, Emily took a bit of convincing and Jess is not one to give a shit about the other world creatures invisible to the human eye, but something allegedly happened that changed her mind.

Her a-hundred-and-something-year-old great-grandmother passed away recently and though the death itself didn’t shake Jess up as much as it probably should’ve, the events that followed led to this moment right now - the eleven of us pooling out of two minivans that have pulled up to a terrifying looking house in a wooded are of the suburbs. Jess literally gathered us all on an ‘emergency meeting’ in the courtyard of our college just so she could explain the situation in detail - she doesn’t do well with explaining things in general, let alone when she’s hysterical - so we only understood what she was trying to say when she mentioned the word ‘ghost’. That’s when we all started listening more closely, with the exception of Emily, Beth and Sam but the latter two were intrigued despite trying yo hide it. You can only imagine how excited Josh, Chris and I were, Mike and Matt following a close second behind. Ash was a tiny bit more hesitant but Chris convinced her to give in. And just like that, a week later, here we are.

“I gotta ask, did your great-gran own a VHS player? Or a chest in the attic? Bonus points if there’s a creepy, child-sized doll in there.“ Josh asks as he yanks all the equipment he insisted we bring out of the trunk of the minivan.

“Quit fucking around, Josh! This is serious!“ Jess complains from the spot she’s standing in, shivering in the cold autumn breeze.

“Yeah, Josh! VHS players, creepy dolls, that’s all child’s play.“ I scold him as I pull on my jacket, wrapping it around me more tightly, “Shit gets serious when there’s a secret basement.“

“Y/N!“ Jess shrieks in exasperation. Honesty, how am I supposed to NOT bother her when doing the opposite is so much easier and brings more amusement? “You’re not helping!“

“Wasn’t trying to.“ I wink at her, driving her into a new level of fury that almost leads her to chuck her phone at me. If it weren’t such a prized possession of hers, I’m pretty sure she would’ve chucked it with the intention of knocking me dead. I’m lucky she has the aim of a drunk toddler that spun around fifteen times.

“Hey, quit pissing my girlfriend off, will ya?!“ Mike, who is basically halfway inside the trunk of the other van calls out to us.

I roll my eyes but choose to let it slide. However, someone else doesn’t. Emily does a dramatic turn on her heel, turning to face Mike, or at least the only part of him which is visible. You can imagine how hard it is arguing with an ass like THAT. I don’t know how Emily does it but oh well, I guess I do it too, in a way.

“So it’s girlfriend now, huh? No space between the words?“ Oh that smile she’s flashing him, it could make the Devil himself shiver. I find it kinda hot though - it means shit’s about to go down or hit the fan, either way, the rest of us will be entertained.

Mikey boy straightens up, gracing the rest of us by-standers with his dazzling features. Nah, I’m capping. I honestly think Mike is as attractive as I am patient - very little, almost not at all. It’s surprising how him and Jess are now apparently together since I always pegged her to be the superficial type.

“Got a problem with that, Em?“ He asks, eyebrow raising, head tilting to the side. Oh yeah, it’s on now. But, as someone who’s been quite excited to do some ghost hunting, and also as a representative of the peanut gallery formed of the rest of us who find it amusing and annoying, I feel the need to cut it short before it goes where it shouldn’t. I came to see some exorcist shit, not Keeping Up With The Bitter Exs.

“Jess, I sure hope your grandma is a blood-thirsty ghost cause I can think of at least two people I’d serve to her on a silver platter.“ I snatch the keys the blond has been jingling nervously between her fingers and jog up the stairs to the front door.

Ok I maybe overexaggerated the eeriness of the house. It sure wouldn’t sit right with you if you saw it around sunset or at night, especially not if it’s foggy, but a horror movie house it is most certainly isn’t. It’s pristine and well kept, not a single crack in the walls, the only reason it’s unsettling is because: 1) We’ve all seen a few too many horror movies; 2) There’s been reports of ‘ghostly activity’ - as far as Jess is to be trusted.

While I’m surfing through all the keys, checking each and every single one of them on the door because the real key is unmarked, I can’t help but overhear the conversation going on behind me on the porch.

“Can you believe we got all this in a single day and for a discount on top of all?! Whoever says Craigslist sucks isn’t doing it right.“ Chris’ enthusiasm over the deal him and Josh got on the ghost hunting equipment has been what’s keeping a wide grin on his face this whole time. Though I’m proud of my boys for not getting murdered by the Craigslist seller, I must say I hate that I lost the bet we had - I had to pay them each ten bucks if they didn’t get scammed/kidnapped/murdered and I’m now twenty bucks poorer. I’m not saying I value those twenty bucks more than my friends, though my broke ass needs all the bucks it has and all the dollar bills it could get, but Lord knows I hate losing.

“Yeah, and the guy was only mildly sketchy.“ Josh adds just as excitedly and proudly, “To be honest, Cochise and I were probably the scary looking ones in that parking lot.“

A look over my shoulder shows the twins, Sam, Matt and Ash giving the duo skeptical and somewhat disappointing looks and shakes of their heads. I’ll admit, the equipment is in very good condition and it’s the complete set for ghost-hunting, according to BuzzFeed at least. I’m impressed with the purchase - probably had something to do with how scary Chris and Josh actually look. The all-nighters we’ve all been pulling lately have taken a toll on them worst with the dark circles and bags under their hollow eyes, pale faces and brains turned to mush. I know I’d give them a discount to avoid them pulling out meat cleavers on me.

“That’s all fine and dandy guys, but do you know how to work any of this?“ Sam asks, hesitantly lifting the EMF reader and turning it in her hand, analyzing it with a curious gaze. 

Josh and Chris exchange a look before the former replies, “Just the cameras and voice recorder, the rest falls on them.” He points a finger at me and laughs, “Though they aren’t able to work something as simple as keys, they are more than qualified to be a ghostbuster.”

“You know, Josh, jokes on you, I can work keys! Jess, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be able to work well with organizing things, hence my problem with these keys.“ I hurl the bunch of keys connected my a scarlet keychain at Josh, “Lemme demonstrate my true skills.“ I hop down the flight of stone stairs and approach the pile of equipment the guys have created smack-dab in the middle of the house’s driveway. 

“Oh, I gotta see this!” Mr. Ex-Class-President all but runs over, frowning when we all turn to look at him just as I pick up the spirit box to show off how it works, “Oh that’s what you meant. So you aren’t taking your clothes off?“

Jess and I are alike in one thing - the need we feel to chuck objects at people who piss us off. “You’re girlfriend is, like, right behind you, Munroe. Have some decency!”

“I was gonna enjoy a show as well, but I’m guessing we won’t be getting one.“ The girlfriend in question replies, looking at me quizzically as though that’s gonna convince me into discarding my outfit.

“No, unless you’re a ghost.“ I point the device I’m holding at Mike, “But if your boyfriend here keeps acting up I might turn him into one.“

“That sounds kinda kinky.“ Beth’s comment surprises me. The wink she sends me even more so. “And I kinda like it.“

Ok, ok, ok, hold on. 

Flirting with Munroe is one thing, but Beth is a completely different story. I can be threatening Mike with a knife one moment and cracking sex jokes with him over cold beer the next. While Beth actually has the ability to get me flustered and blushing, and my close relationship with her brother doesn’t help. Mother fucker can just whack me upside the head every time he catches me fussing over my silly crush on his sister.

“Ew, you too! Keep it in your pants or at least get a room.“ Emily doesn’t miss a beat when it comes to being herself. She’s truly a garbage bin full of treasure.

“We’d do the latter if SOMEONE could get the door open.” I glare daggers at Josh who is making hopeless attempts at what I was doing earlier - unlocking that damn door.

“I’d be more than happy to come through for you ladies.“ Mike says, getting in a stance of a runner before a race, his body directly opposite the door.

Oh I can’t wait to see where this is going. I SHOULD RECORD IT.

“Mike, it’s still breaking and entering and it’s still against the law even if the person’s dead.“ Sam points out, entering her mother-like mode, ruining the fun and causing me to pout at her. She gives me a look of disappointment - one worse than I’ve ever seen on my parents - so I just shut my trap before she can also express said disappointment through words and have me feeling guilty for the rest of the day.

A loud crash suddenly echoes causing us to turn our heads to look for the source of the terrifyingly startling sound. One glance is all it takes to put our minds at ease and a second one is enough to provoke different reactions in all of us - the broken window telling the story of where Josh has disappeared.

“What did I just say about breaking and entering?!“ Sam shouts after him while the vast majority of us are cracking up like hyaenas. Jess is just gaping at the broken window next to the front door in disbelief. She obviously can’t decide whether to join in on the fun or serve as back-up to Sam. Josh did technically damage private property that’s partially hers, but if you ask me it serves her right for not marking her keys.

“Sorry, I was too busy breaking the window to hear that part of the conversation!“ Josh’s apologetic smile appears on the other side of glassless frame. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely sorry or holding back laughter but either way, he looks innocent enough for Sam to let him off the hook as long as he doesn’t cause any more trouble - in which case: tough luck. Chris, Josh and I are nothing if not troublemakers, especially when we’re together. Chris tones it down when Ash’s around, and the same goes for Josh with Sam while I’m simply problematic regardless of who’s watching. My chaos is untamable, it’s a blessing and a curse and I love it, even though it’s landed me in hot water more than once. It’s nice to be around people on the same wavelength - chaos resides within this group and not a single one of us can hide it.

“At least we have a way in now.“ Ash offers Josh a helping hand in this argument after she recovers from the overwhelming fit of laughter. “I hope the broken window doesn’t anger your gran, Jess.“

The blond snaps out of her trance briefly, “No, she was a very sweet lady, but damn is Josh creative!” She hurries to correct herself, “Destructively creative.”

I hurry to correct her once again, “Chaotically creative.”

“Guys, do you mind coming in? It’s very creepy standing here alone!“ Josh calls out to us, looking over his shoulder at the interior of the house, “I’m expecting to be snatched and dragged to that secret basement we mentioned.“

“Mention it one more time and I swear to God-!“ Jess screams, fists tightened.

Before her angry wrath could crash atop us, we all make our way into the house through the broken window, carefully avoiding the shards of glass strewn about. One step inside and we’re met with the upmost of horror clichés - a drop in temperature. We’re all wearing thick hoodies because the weather outside is chilly in and of itself, but said hoodies aren’t as efficient at holding the house’s cold at bay and away from out skin.

Chris and Matt make their way in last, carrying the equipment consisting of three cameras, flashlights for everyone, an EMF reader, a spirit voice box, a voice recorder and a motion detector. I help them hand a light to each group member as well as a ghost-hunting device before we venture onward.

“If I were your grandma’s ghost, I’d be ten times more pissed about that window. It looks to me like that lady payed a lot of attention to keeping things in order.“ Matt comments while he examines the expensive looking painting hanging in the hallway.

I hear Emily scoff, “Unlike some.” but the remark is said so quickly and quietly I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who heard it.

Jess laughs, “She did like things in order, but she was never as strict as you might think. As I said, she was very sweet.“

“So do you just not take after her at all or were you adopted?“ Emily’s remarks are no longer a mumbled jumble of words, “No, nevermind, of course you’re not adopted. Your parents are smart people, they wouldn’t have chosen you if they had the chance.“

Jess laughs again, much more menacingly this time, causing me to exchange a look with Hannah who’s walking beside me. “Twenty bucks says one of them isn’t making it out of here.” It’s just a matter of time, to be honest. If not the lodge, or any party we’ve ever attended as a group, this haunted house is the perfect opportunity for a murder. We could even argue it was a ghost.

Luckily, the two cats clawing at each other’s throats don’t overhear, “No, my parents aren’t stupid, but your boyfriend clearly is. He chooses to date you! Or are you holding him captive or something.“

Ok that’s enough. I can tolerate a lot of things, but people calling one of my best friends stupid is not something I’m about to put up with, “How dare you call one of my hoes stupid?” I sneer at Jess, eyes narrowing.

“I thought I was your hoe too!“ She fights back, looking almost offended.

“Even more reason you shouldn’t have called him that! I don’t tolerate my hoes not respecting each other.“ 

I don’t get to see where this argument goes because Ashley’s shriek echoes throughout the hallway, stealing mine as well as the attention of everyone else. 

“There’s a ghost in here!“ Making it to the doorway of the room she’s in first, I peak my head inside and see the EMF reader she’s holding going nuts as if it’s detected something.

“Don’t worry, Ash, there’s a dead cactus here. That’s not the ghost we’re looking for, is it?“ Chris, my amazingly bright friend says, quirking an eyebrow suggesting that remark was nothing short of dead-ass serious.

“Chris, darling, that’s not how it works. Cactuses are plants.“ I point out as sweetly as I can as to mask my laughter.

“Don’t the same ghostly rules apply?“ The genuine look of confusion he gives me almost makes me lose it.

“Ok children, leave the room, we need to set up a motion detector to be sure.“ Beth says with a tone that suggests she’s more than over our insanity. Jeez, count on her and Sam to start parenting us through our chaos. They are of high authority, must admit - one genuinely feels bad if they don’t comply to whatever these two girls demand.

We all pile out in the hallway while the twins set up this interesting motion detector with green dots. I don’t know what Jess’ granny looked like, but I bet that even the most unattractive of people would look hella good with this lighting. Thankfully the room is dark enough with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn, allowing the dots to be perfectly visible.

We stare at the minimalistic room littered with fluorescent green dots on every surface for maybe a minute or two but not much happens to the disappointment to some and relief to others. However, as if not wanting to let us down, the ghost makes a shy appearance if the shift of the green dots is anything to go by.

“Oh shit, is that a ghost?“ Chris whispers, sounding as amazed as I feel in this moment.

“It better be.“ I mutter in response, refusing to blink and risk missing anything important.

The sudden presence of the obnoxious noise of the spirit voice box makes us all jump. As I turn my head to glare at whoever’s using it, Josh speaks up. “Are you an attractive ghost?”

“Josh, that’s my great-grandmother, you ass!“ Jess barks with disgust in her voice.

In the meantime, I catch glimpse of Mike rolling up his sleeves. Oh shit, this ain’t good.

“I’ve been waiting for this!“ He shouts victoriously, cracking his knuckles.

Knowing this won’t end well, the first thing I do is snatch the camera from Chris’ hands and turn it on.

“Um, Mike, what do you mean?“ Sam’s back to being concerned, turning to the rest of us when Mike doesn’t give her a response, “What’s he gonna do?“

“Fight it.“ I answer as though it’s the most normal thing to ever have been done, “Or, ash he calls it - kick some ghost ass.“

“A freaking ghost?! He’s gonna try to tussle with something he can’t see?“ I can’t tell if Matt’s tone is disbelief, amusement or disappointment, but I believe he isn’t about to try and stop or dear ex-president in his pursuit and that’s all that matters. I ain’t about to let someone stop whatever’s about to go down from going down.

“That’s still my great-grandmother, you dumbass!“ Jess shrieks with something alike terror.

“Don’t worry Jess, I’m sure she’ll go easy on him.“ I say in an attempt to reassure her but I can’t even be bothered really, I’m too laser-focused on the circus that’s about to take place in front of me.

Mike, as if encouraged by my words, charges into the room. Much to his dismay, before he could even reach the ghost, he’s met with a much more vigorous enemy - the carpet. The rascal trips him up and Mr. Munroe falls flat on his face.

The group stays silent, looking at the glorious aftermath of the glorious fall. Told ya these lights could make everything fabulous. Must say, it’s truly an honor for me to have been able to catch all that on tape.

“10/10, would ghost-hunt with Mikey Munroe again.“

Witches Mates-Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Witches Mates is here! I hope you guys like it!

Warnings: None

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6

After meditating for about a hour, I went to my room. Snow was perched on the chest at the foot of my bed, staring at me with her big green eyes. 

 "What?" I asked her. Because she's a familiar, she can talk. I can chose who can hear her, though, so mundanes don't randomly hear a cat talking. 

 "Those were vampires," she said. "It tried to pet me." 

 "That was Ashton," I told her. "And you need to be nice to the vampires and the hybrid. They aren't going to hurt me or you." I patted the top of her head.

 "Why are they here?" she asked.

 "They're Liam's friends and we trust him. Plus, they're my mates." 

 "All four of them?" 

 "Yes, I know. Snow, I can't help it and they can't either." I sat down on my bed and she turned to look at me from her spot on the chest. 

 "How long will they be here?" 

 "Liam and his pack are here for two more days. I don't know about the others but they're welcome to stay as long as they'd like." She glared at me but said nothing. "Hey, did you see who blew out my candles?"

"I did but I don't know who he was," she told me. She paused for a minute. "Jonathan left that." She lifted her paw and pointed in the direction of my desk. I stood up and walked over my desk, picking up the book that had a red ribbon tied around it with a note. After lighting the candle on my desk with my magic, I read the note that was written in his hand writing:

For my daughter, 

Though I can't support your path, I know every new witch needs her own grimoire. You're as powerful as you are smart so I know you'll find a way to fix the unbalance of our world. Happy 21st birthday, Mystia Firelight. 

All my love, Dad

"How did he know the name I chose?" I mumbled to myself as I pulled the ribbon off and looked at the black, worn-leather bound book. On the front cover, engraved in gold, was the Firelight family crest and, under it, my witch name. I opened it to find the pages were made of old parchment paper with ragged edges. I sat down at my desk and picked up my pen. On the first page, I wrote this:

Mystia Firelight 

Daughter of Constance Firelight, the head of the New Orleans coven and Witches Council, and Jonathan Moore, a rouge vampire 

Born on All Hallow's Eve in 1998 at exactly 5 P.M. 

Familiar: White cat with green eyes; Snow 

Mastery of the elements: 

Fire- Age 7 

Water- Age 8 

Air- Age 8 

Earth- Age 8 

Spirit- Age 9

On the back of that page and the front and back of the next two pages, I wrote down descriptions of the 5 elements and drew pictures. On the next ten or so pages front and back, I wrote down the uses of different herbs with the proper ways to use them and drew pictures of them. On the next 35 pages front and back, I wrote the 70 spells and potions I had created over the years with their ingredients, uses, and side effects. 

When I looked at the clock, it was almost 5:30 A.M. I looked back at the grimoire to see I had no pages left to write on.

 "Been a full witch for twelve hours and I have a full grimoire," I said, looking at Snow, who had jumped on the desk and was watching me closely. 

 "That's great but you should sleep," she told me. 

 "You're right," I nodded. I blew out the candle and stood up. I grabbed my grimoire and walked over to my chest, unlocking it and putting the grimoire in before locking it back. I yawned, climbing into my bed and falling asleep quickly. 

**** 

I rolled over in my bed and felt air blow on me. I opened my eyes to be met by a huge wolf. It took me a minute to register that it wasn't Liam or his pack. I squealed like a little girl as I fought to get out of bed of the other side. The wolf ran to the other side of my room as I raised my hands, about to light it's furry ass on fire. Just as I opened my mouth to start a spell, Ashton ran into my room. I locked my eyes on him, lowering my hands. 

 "J, it's okay. It's just Luke," Ashton told me. 

 "He about gave me a heart attack," I said, pulling my eyes from Ashton to look at the wolf with sandy blonde fur. "Give me a heads up next time you want to cuddle." Ashton smiled and the wolf squinted his bright blue eyes. I heard a cat meow and turned to see Snow perched on my desk behind me. "It's fine, Snow. Some dogs just need to learn manners." Ashton laughed as the wolf let out what sounded like a sigh before trotting out of my room. 

"Is that who you were talking to last night?" Ashton asked, looking at Snow. 

"I talk to Snow all the time," I nodded, walking to her and picking her up. 

"Sounded like the two of you were having a conversation," he said. 

"We were," Snow said, though Ashton only heard a meow. 

 "We were," I told him. "Snow understands me and I understand her." 

"Like Damien and Annette with their Pitbulls?" Ashton asked. 

 "You met Joker and Harleen?" I smiled. He nodded. 

"How long have Damien and Annette been together?" he quizzed as Snow jumped out of my arms. 

 "Forever." Literally, they're mates. Yes, witches can have mates that are other witches, it's just really rare. "Our parents are all really good friends. Damien and Annette have been a thing since before they were a thing." 

"Must be nice to have met their person so early in life," Ashton said. 

"How old are you?" I asked, tilting my head slightly. 

"If I told you, you'd freak out," he told me. 

"Try me," I smiled. 

"One hundred and fifty-two," he admitted. 

"How old were you when you were turned?" 

"Twenty-two." 

"You didn't even get to live," I mumbled. 

"Michael lived as a human the longest. Luke, the shortest." 

"How old?" 

"Michael was twenty-three, Calum was twenty-two, and Luke was twenty." I felt a white hot rage shoot through my body. None of them had experienced life a mundane, not that I had but at least I could enjoy walks in the park without wanting to drain every human of blood. "We've accepted it, J. Michael's one hundred and thirty-six and Calum's one hundred and eighteen." 

"And Luke?" I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. 

"He's twenty-three," he told me. "And he had it the worst. His first time feeding, he triggered the werewolf curse by killing a mundane." 

"Liam and his pack voluntarily triggered theirs. Why didn't Luke?" 

"Liam and his pack help with the Witches Council. As soon as they turn thirteen, they have to kill a rouge. It's not voluntary, they're forced. If they don't, they're killed." Okay, that's news to me. Liam had said they chose to and my mom had never said anything about forcing wolves to trigger their curse. 

"Why?" 

"Not sure," he shrugged. "It's just how it is. It would've been better for Luke if he was forced." 

"Why do you say that?" 

"He had to learn to control his thirst and his shifting at the same time. He was in hell when we found him a year ago and he still isn't completely in control of either. Now, he's freaking out about this whole mate thing, which is what triggered the change earlier." 

"Stress?" He nodded. "Is there anyway I can help?" Ashton smiled a sad smile. 

"No one can. We don't know what to do." 

"Oh." I paused, trying to think. "Hey, I'm gonna change and I'll meet you downstairs, okay?" 

"Yeah," he nodded before walking out and closing the door behind him. I quickly unlocked my chest and dug through my families old grimoires. I finally found the one of my grandmother's she had dedicated completely to werewolves. I flipped through the pages until I found what I was looking for. I quickly wrote down the ingredients and spell before putting them all back in the chest. I left mine sitting on my bed, thinking it would be okay there. 

I pulled on black high waisted jean shorts, a red cropped tank top, and a pair of red sneakers. I brushed my hair into a neat ponytail and shoved the list I had made in my back pocket before running downstairs. I found Calum, Michael, Ashton, and Luke sitting in the kitchen. 

"Where is everyone?" I asked, grabbing an ice cream sandwich from the freezer and turning to face them. Snow was standing on the island in front of Luke, staring at him. 

"Just left for food," Michael told me as I unwrapped my ice cream sandwich and took a bite. 

"Where are you going?" "I left something at the shop last night so I'm gonna run and get it. Shouldn't be long," I told him. "Snow, stop staring." Snow turned to look at me and meowed loudly. Well, they heard a meow. I heard: 

"That is the dog." 

"Are you eating an ice cream sandwich for lunch?" Calum asked. 

"High metobolism. I could eat an entire pizza and wouldn't gain a pound," I grinned. "Joker, Harleen, I'm leaving!" The blue nose and red nose Pitbulls came running into the kitchen and Snow jumped on my shoulder. 

"We're coming," Harleen told me but I knew the others only heard a bark. 

"Are you taking all the animals?" Michael asked. 

"No. I don't take, they just come," I told him. "They like being at the shop. Snow was there yesterday but you never saw her. Joker and Harleen are there whenever Damien and Annette are there." 

"They live here, don't they?" Ashton asked. 

"Hell no!" I exclaimed. "They're place is being remodeled and should actually be done tomorrow. I live here alone and living with Damien and Annette the past few weeks has been awful. Trust me, you don't need supernatural hearing to know what they're doing." I shuttered and they all laughed. Well, Luke didn't laugh but he did smile slightly. 

"How do you afford this place?" Calum asked. "I mean, it's a mansion." 

"It was my great great grandmother's. It's been passed down and my mom didn't want it so I got it. The shop pays well enough that I can afford it easy." Calum nodded. "Alright, we'll be back."

‘Round the World

Post time skip Nishinoya X y/n

[I used 1st person POV from the perspective of Y/N]

Chapter 1

"I'm telling you Y/N; this is unacceptable!" Ma shouts at me.

"I know that already, Ma!" I shout in response.

Lately, we've been on the wrong foot, constantly fighting over trivial matters sprinkled among significant ones. Every day is comparable to a chicken fight, and even the neighbors have had enough of us. In short, we're at each other's throats.

"You're already 20 years old, and you still don't have your own house," She starts, but I'm tired enough of this same conversation. I stomp towards my room and slam the door when Ma chases after me and catches it before it could shut in place. She stands angrily in my doorframe as I bury my face in the cold pillow, messily resting on my bed.

"You know I've been saving up money to get out of here, and you're still in my ear every waking moment," I retort. Ma's face scrunches up. I've been saving up all of my checks from various jobs for the past few months. Recently, I dropped out of college after realizing it was taking too much of a toll on my wallet. I need as much money as possible to get out of this hellhole of a town. There's nothing to do here but lounge in diners and go to a busted, half-abandoned roller-skate rink. I would love to move somewhere out of the country and exotic, quite literally anywhere but here.

"I refuse to have a lazy, no-good freeloader raising my light bill and eating my food," Ma snarks from afar. Trust me: I'm undoubtedly grateful to her for raising me for 18 years and allowing me to stay in the house during college to dodge lodging costs. And I don't think I'll ever be able to repay her, but I won't act like she isn't the most bewildering person I've ever met.

I burst out in rage.

"Well, if you don't want me here, then I'll just leave!"

The room goes silent. My expression is in a scowl, and my face feels hot. The shock on Ma's face says it all. "Fine," she says after what feels like a lifetime, "then get out."

I suddenly feel regret flush into my body, seemingly flowing faster than my blood. But I won't let Ma get the best of me. I speed past her silhouette in the doorway and navigate through the halls to find the storage closet. I noisily grab a duffle bag and go back to my room. In the background, I hear Ma talking on the phone, spilling my business.

"Yup! I know, right! She should've been out of here ages ago!" she stage whispers. (*whispers loudly for my non-theater kids*)

"Have fun rotting in the retirement home, you old hag!" I yell on the way out, quickly breaking into a sprint before she can make me pay for that remark. I run as far as my legs and lungs will take me. Past my favorite diner, the one that puts extra love into their fries. Past the creepy cemetery that kids dare each other to trek across for Halloween. Even past Nana Goldy's house--she's not my Nana, everyone calls her that.

I come to a stop at the outskirts of downtown. It's less busy over here, and it's quiet enough for me to clear my head.

Two things were clear right now: One, I have nowhere to go. And two, I'm hungry as hell.

What was I thinking? Sure, Ma is annoying as fuck, and I lived in a dull, endless cycle of capitalism and labor. But at least I was safe--not sitting on a damp park bench at 7 pm. I must be the smooth-brain of the goddamn century. I need to figure out a plan and fast. Someone could snatch my ass at any given moment, and I wouldn't know a thing!

I think Satan accidentally received my fears instead because a man suddenly pops up behind me.

"Um,"

Shit.

"Excuse-"

A let out the loudest yell I've ever released in my entire life. By instinct, I whip my body around, and my fist collides with his jaw instantly. He flies back in pain, and I collect my belongings and get ready to speed off.

"Wait! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you!" the strange man winces. He has a slight accent that I don't recognize. "I was gonna ask you for directions, but I guess I startled you. My bad," he grins sincerely. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to get the hell out of here, but something about his expression made me let my guard down, just a little.

"I'm sorry for slugging you," I start, still keeping a good 3 meters between us, "but I kinda hafta go."

He sits up energetically. His left hand is still cradling his cheek. "Before you go, would you mind telling me how to get downtown?" he says. Never in my whole life have I ever met a man who asks for directions from his assaulter. Oh yeah, he could be trying to turn me over to the cops! I don't wanna go to jail! Well, at least I'd have a roof over my head. Wait, what's wrong with me? I socked him in the jaw; the least I could do was tell him how to get help.

"You won't call the cops on me, right?" I question.

"Nah, it was my fault after all," he reassures me. He picks himself off of the ground, revealing his structure in the dimming sunlight. He has a sturdy but slim build, like an athlete. Dressed in black cargo shorts, a cheap, loose-fitting v-neck, and a run-down pair of sneakers, he was beaming. He looks like someone's father--what the hell am I doing?

I give him the directions to downtown, along with the nearest emergency room. He smiled brightly and thanked me countless amounts of times. What a character.

I wait until he's out of sight in the direction I pointed to and make my way downtown as well. I need to find somewhere to sleep; and something to eat. I don't have any friends to call on. Most of them are either across the country from moving away for college or living in the dorms here. The one friend I have to call, Sid, is living with their grandmother and five brothers, so I'd have to be out of my mind to move in there if they would even allow me. Today has to be one of the worst days of my life. Drowning in self-pity, I stumble through the noisy streets of downtown. Vibrant neon signs line the walkway, inviting pedestrians into various restaurants, stores, and clubs. I've never been to some of these stores; their price tags are too demanding for my just-over-minimum wage jobs. Finally, a little tucked-away bar squished between two multimillion companies catches my eye. It looks like the perfect place to collect my thoughts--for real this time--and fill my stomach.

The moment I enter the bar, instant warmth surrounds me. No more than a dozen workers weave through the tables accompanied by a comfortable amount of people. I'm sure I stick out like a sore thumb with my bags and tired expression, but I'm too hungry to care right now.

I walk up to the reception counter, where a pretty lady was standing behind the small counter. She gives me a big smile before asking me how many people. "One," I say, but then I hear a more or less familiar voice from the furthest corner to the right of the building.

"Over here!" shouts the man who I decked in the park, wearing an even bigger smile than the reception lady. What even is my luck at this point. Miss Reception Lady spoke before me.

"Your friend?"

"Not in the slightest."

Reluctantly, I walk over to the man's booth and plop down. "We're not friends. I'll pay for myself," I mumble. He wipes buffalo sauce from the corner of his mouth with a napkin, then takes a swig of his drink.

"I'll pay. it's the least I can do in return for you helping me find this awesome restaurant. Man, the food in America is top tier."

"All I did was tell you how to get to downtown," I reply.

"But it's because of you that I was even able to get here!" He lets out a hearty laugh that seems to melt away my stress.

"So you're a foreigner? I don't recognize your accent," I figure it wouldn't be too bad to start up a conversation.

He tells me that he's originally from Japan but had been traveling the world for some time now. From Japan to Spain to Portugal, Brazil, and Egypt, he plans to visit every country--at least once. He shows me pictures of his travels; the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Tokyo Skytree, even Christ the Redeemer. He talked about the time he participated in a bullfight with a 96 year-old-man. Fascinating. This man with a permanent smile and a bruised cheek was living my dream life. I asked him to tell me more. But he insisted I talked more about myself and why I was sitting on a park bench at 7 pm.

We talked for a good two hours. By then, I've ordered a burger and fries with a Sprite and chips. A different lady, this one with a more solemn expression, approaches our booth. "Are you ready to pay?" she asks the man. He glances at our empty plates and cups, then nods. I begin to retrieve my wallet when he pulls out his own.

"It's on me," he assures with a smile.

"But we've eaten so much, I can pay for my part," I object.

He looks me in the eyes as if he were deciding something important. After a minute of awkward eye contact, he rested his elbows on the table. "Okay," he grins widely, "in return for paying for your meal, be my escort."

Escort? Escort? I mean, he's a foreigner--he must be mistranslating. But what if he isn't? What if it's all an act and those pictures were just deep fakes? What if he's trying to lure me into a trap like he's done to many other young women, and I'm his next victim?

"Oh, I don't think that's the word. Guide? Is it?"

My anxiety levels go down. "A guide? Guide you where?"

"Around your city, of course."

"I don't even know your name."

He extends his hand. "Yu Nishinoya. You can call me Nishinoya."

You shake his hand in return. "Y/N, pleased to meet you." [yall I just realized Y/N has the same initials and Yu Nishinoya I'm ecstatic and an idiot]

CHAPTER 1 END

give me criticism 

[AO3] [WATTPAD]

NOTE:  The beginning of this chapter hits a little harder than it did when I wrote it, because my own grandparent is in ill health of late. That's partially what's been complicating my life. I promise I will post fanfics other than this one very soon - including a certain one a certain fandom has been clamoring for.

------

"Grandma? What do you do when you feel like life is over?"

The elderly proprietor of Marukyu smiled, even if she didn't turn away from the stove. Rise tried not to think too hard about all the new wrinkles that were forming around the corners of her eyes, how much slower she walked than she did before Rise took off for fame and fortune. Those thoughts didn't bring any joy to anyone. Might as well focus on the positives.

"What on Earth are you talking about, Ri-chan? You are still so young. You have many years ahead of you, you should not be thinking about such things yet."

"I… can't help it." She tried to turn her thoughts aside from actual mortality and toward her situation with her classmate. "A friend I really like is fighting with me, and I don't know what to do. I think- no, I know I hurt her feelings on accident. But she's really hurt and she thinks I did it on purpose."

"Hm? What could you have done, dear mago? You are so young, I'm sure it was nothing."

What could she say? How was she supposed to tell her kindly old grandmother that she might not be entirely straight, her friend might not be entirely female, and their relationship might not be entirely platonic? The woman was very traditional, even if she very rarely had an unkind word to say about anyone.

"I told a secret to a friend. Another friend, I mean. And I thought I could trust her with it, but I know now I shouldn't have told her at all… because the whole school found out, and the first friend is embarrassed."

Her grandmother laughed as she lifted a block of silken tofu from the box in which it had been setting, placing it on the counter to be cut into smaller pieces. Rise fell to work right away, since this was her job at the moment as sous-chef. "Ri-chan, it is not something to worry about, I can assure you. These things happen. But if you don't talk to your friend, don't try to work things out, you will regret it later in life. I promise you that, as well."

That, she could absolutely believe. "Yeah. She's just so angry, I don't know what to say to her. Is there anything I can say? Or should I just keep letting her know I want to talk and let her be the one to come to me? I don't know what to do!"

"Ahhhhh, yes, I can understand your concern there. It is like… playing go." They both chuckled, because the raw soybean liquid she was now straining to make the milk base for tofu was also pronounced "go", even though she was referring to the board game. "You are worried what every move you make will be the wrong one. To give up too much territory would be a costly mistake. But to do nothing is the worst move of them all. Then you will have not played, and you have already lost."

"But I…" That was hard to argue with. If she didn't lift a finger at all, she would lose Ai. Sure, if she risked it all she could still lose her, but they were better odds than giving up now. "Y-yeah. Thanks, Grandma."

"Of course. And I know, it must sound silly from an old lady like me, saying your troubles are so small. I know to you, they seem like mountains. But looking back from the mountain I stand on now, they were the foothills. You'll see someday."

Slumping, she set the knife down now that the tofu had been sliced into portions. "If I live that long…"

"RISE!" Suddenly she was being whacked with a spoon, and she ducked and covered her head. "Don't talk like that! You will have a long and healthy life, or I will send you right back to this world to try again! Do you understand?"

"Yes, Grandma," she said with a little bow. Even though she was smiling. So what if her parents were idiots? She had family; she wasn't alone. Sometimes life gives you exactly what you need — no more, no less.

                                            ~ o ~

However, what Rise had not been given was a plan of attack. And the longer she tried to think about it, tried to come up with something to put into play the next day, the more she continued to come up blank. So she decided to focus on practicing her vocals. The exercises were second nature by now, but she was still so rusty after only occasionally singing over the past year. Getting back into the game meant all parts of it, not just the "fun" ones.

Nothing happened the next day at school. Literally nothing. She did try to seek out Ai a few times, just in case they could smooth over the unpleasantness after she had her single petty act of revenge. Maybe that was it. Maybe they could be friends again, if she apologised… but Ai was either skipping, or very artfully avoiding her at all turns. She never saw her once, and she wasn't even responding to her texts or voicemails. Ghosted.

That evening, after dinnertime, she came calling around the Ebihara residence. But the woman who answered told her they weren't receiving guests. Probably a maid, but it also could have been a secretary of some sort. It definitely wasn't Ai's mother…

Thursday seemed like it would be much the same as the last. Unfortunately, an incident toward the end of the day interrupted an otherwise dull existence. Rise had been hoping for something like that — until it happened, and made her eat her wish.

"Attention, please!" called Noriko Kashiwagi in her throaty purr, crossing her arms to prop up her breasts and put them even more on display. Rise had long ago become desensitised to her teacher's little inappropriate displays, but that didn't mean she wasn't far more comfortable in Ms. Sofue's classroom, despite her Egyptian headdress. At least she didn't behave as if she were auditioning for a porno. "Mmm, yes, all eyes on me, class! All eyes on me!"

"Ugh," Kanji muttered from behind her. "No thanks, old bag." Rise tried not to snort.

"That's better. Now… would anyone care to explain this?"

She held up a manilla folder. An empty manilla folder. One of the girls in the front row raised her hand, and the teacher pointed to her. "Is… it's a folder, right?"

"It is. And there was supposed to be something in there. Would anyone care to guess what?" Dead silence. "The answers to yesterday's quiz. But it seems they walked off. Now, if some young, strapping boy would like to come forward and… reveal himself, maybe a little detention with me can straighten him right up."

While she was chuckling in way too flirtatious a tone than was appropriate, making most of the class wonder if they should be reporting her, Rise was glancing around the room, trying to see if she could spot the perpetrator. Not that she knew what to look for exactly; Naoto would have been the one with that skill set, and she wasn't in that class. But she couldn't help idly speculating anyway.

"No one? Very well. I will give you until the end of this class, or you will all be serving detention if the culprit doesn't come forward." When the predictable grumbling broke out, she raised her voice a little to say, "But! Confess your sins, and I may be more lenient! Now take out your books, we must get started."

"Shit," Kanji grumbled under his breath as the students rushed to obey. None of them were coming forward, but none of them wanted to get in trouble for something else either. "That gross old lady is gonna find some way to pin this on one of us. I just know it."

"Would you relax?" Rise hissed under her breath, glancing back at him as she opened her book. "She probably just misplaced it while she was too busy thinking about new ways to make the boys in her class feel uncomfor-huh?"

She cut off when she felt a page slide over her fingers in a way that wasn't natural. Looking down, she saw a piece of paper fluttering to the floor. Did somebody toss it onto her desk? No, it was much more likely it had been tucked in the pages of her book and fallen out when she opened it. Brow furrowing, she stooped to pick it up.

And her heart stopped. It didn't take her more than a couple of seconds to figure out what she was looking at.

"What's that?" asked one of the boys. She had barely looked up at him when everybody else was craning their neck, trying to see. Instinctively, she drew away, even though she would later regret doing so.

"Miss Kujikawa, do you have something you care to share with the class?"

"Oh. Well… yes, Miss Kashiwagi, this fell out of my textbook."

The woman slunk through the classroom toward her. Really, she started to think she ought to get a phone set up somewhere to grab video of the audacity of this cougar! She snatched the page out of her hand, stared at it… and her eyebrows shot up.

"This is it. The answer key." A ripple of gasps spread throughout the room, followed by hushed whispering. "Oh… but why would you need this, Kujikawa? Your grades have been consistently splendid."

"I… I didn't take it, I promise! It was just there already — I've never seen that before in my life!"

Noriko shook her head and tsked. "My, my, such acting skills. Not that I'm surprised, Risette. I would say that you must have been stealing the answers all along and that's why your grades are so high, but… this is the first time an answer key has gone missing."

"Miss Kashiwagi," Kanji put in suddenly, "come on, that's crap." Rise saw the teacher flinch at his disrespectful coarseness, and was thankful he pushed ahead immediately afterward. "Why the hell would she put that somewhere as stupid as her book if she was trying to cheat? Nobody's that dumb."

"Or careless," the teacher agreed with a long sigh, staring down at the page thoughtfully. For a long few seconds that had Rise's stomach twisting into knots. "Kujikawa, I'll supervise while you retake the test after school. If you score an above average grade on it, no cheating, I will choose to believe this somehow found its way into your book by mistake and we will forget the whole thing. But I had better not see you pull anything like this again, understand?"

The pop idol deflated somewhat. She had really been hoping the teacher would just believe her outright, and she wasn't thrilled at the idea of having to retake a test for no good reason. But all she said aloud was, "Yes, sensei."

"Mm. Now, if any of you choose to admit to a little prank on Kujikawa, you can raise your hand now, or see me after class. Where I can punish you suitably."

If only she didn't add that sinister chuckle as she walked back to her desk, hips swaying too much to be accidental…

"What the hell?" Kanji hissed to her as the teacher began to give their lesson for the day in earnest. "You didn't do it, right?"

"No, I didn't."

"Then how'd that thing get into your book? It was in your bag before you even walked into class."

Jaw setting as she stared through the blackboard, Rise growled, "Oh… I have a pretty good idea."

                                            ~ o ~

This time, Ai was lying in wait like a supervillain in her lair — even if it was just on the roof. Rise was already shaking her head and clapping as she walked up to her.

"Thank you, thank you." She even took a little bow before raising up to smirk devilishly at her. "And I'm sure you're pissed but trying to put on that brave face."

"You think this is tatemae? No, no. You're getting the real Rise, live and in colour."

"Sure, okay, whatever. But you must be here because of my little gift."

Rise leaned her elbows against the ledge, staring out over Inaba through the fence. Just sighing and thinking. Ai regarded her warily; she could see as much out of the corner of her eye. But she didn't say anything further as she waited for the response.

"It didn't feel good."

"That's it?" she snorted. "Wow."

"It didn't. Because you were my friend, and I miss you, and… I don't want to fight. Doesn't matter, though; I know I really messed up, and you're mad. And I can't change that; maybe… I can't ever change it. But does it have to go down like this? Really?"

Ai's tone wasn't as jovial now. She was still ice cold, not betraying any pain or rage. "Yes."

"Fine. But now it's my turn to let you know something."

"And what might that be? Please, Risette, bless me with your tiny little thoughts."

Rise spun to glare at her. "Oh, there it is. You think I'm small-minded, huh? Because I didn't know how to handle this from the beginning. Well I guess I was. But don't you think this is a pretty childish way to react? Trying to embarrass me, get me kicked out of school?"

"You mean the way you almost got me kicked out of school? Which could still happen, you know; I fooled them once, but what if I slip up? Or you slip up again? Could still come crashing down around me. I'm used to shitty rumours circulating about me, y'know; these rumours are just new and unwelcome because they could mean the end of life as I know it. Hell, you could still just out me again more publicly, and then I'd be royally fucked. But I'm going to force your hand." She took a step closer, glowering down into her eyes. "I am going to push, and prod, and ruin, and unravel, until you either have to kick my ass, leave in defeat, or out me on purpose. You could do that, you know; it's always been on the table. But you really think you're a good person under all that fame and stardom and self-involvement."

Rise burst out laughing, biting as the sound was. "Whoa, whoa, amazing! You're sitting there, calling me vain again! YOU! I thought we already did this one."

Ai rolled her eyes. They were both drawn tight as bowstrings as they tried to navigate this situation, being so close to a person that had been everything in their eyes once. Rise knew she still felt that way. She only could guess whether or not her feelings remained requited, despite this feud.

"Fine. Then your days are numbered. I promise I'm going to be so happy when you're dragged off your pedestal, cutie."

"Sure," she snorted. "Because we both know that's not true."

"Oh, it's not?"

"No. You still love me." Even while Ai let out a blast of harsh laughter, Rise pushed ahead. "And I still love you. So you doing this to me? It's only going to be a bad look for one of us."

Ai's dark smile finally faded into a blank look. "I didn't think you would admit it. Wow, I really wrapped you around my finger, didn't I?"

Rise felt that. She saw the glimmer of hope, she knew she had to grasp it. But with Ai dead set on her current path, she didn't know how. So she simply whispered, "I will do whatever you want. Okay? Anything to make it up to you. I already would. But you have to act like I'm not a monster first, just… give me something to grab onto. Tell me how to be better."

Ai frowned, brow creasing the tiniest bit. She leaned closer, and Rise felt her heart leap into her throat — amazed this was going to happen, here, on the school roof where anyone could see them! Her eyes began to slide closed…

But before they were shut, she saw the smirk and her heart was already sinking. The writing was on the wall. Words weren't necessary; all they did was pour salt in the wound Ai had already ripped freshly open.

"You can't be better, because you can't be me."

Then she strutted confidently off toward the stairwell, leaving a bruised and battered survivor on the battlefield. Even if Rise wasn't the victor, nor had she died; it was something of an emotional break-even. But she would need a while to recover from the skirmish regardless. Anyone would have.

                                            ~ o ~

It took Rise until she was already walking home from school, a successful retake of a test she hadn't cheated on already under her belt, to realise the silver lining of all these events. The temptation to be so unbelievably furious with Ai was strong, as was the painful longing for release — to give up, to either forget about Ai forever or just retaliate to give her what she seemed to want. The idol didn't know what to do but she felt like doing nothing wasn't acceptable.

But eventually, as she was staring into the rippling water of the Fuefuki, it came to her. Clarity. The realisation that there was a flipside to just how ardently her former friend was pursuing this line of vengeance.

"Ohhh," she breathed softly with a slowly widening smile. Bittersweet though it was. "I get it. That's really sad… but I get it now."

Unfortunately, nobody was around to hear this revelation, so she didn't tell anyone. Not yet. That was something she could keep in her back pocket for a little while longer.

                                            To Be Continued…

I went to sleep before I finished this post yesterday. In retrospect, it was the correct move, as now I can finish this post with a clearer head and from a much better disposition.

So, in response to a few comments that were made yesterday:

‘Serie A Femminile is ‘less fun’ than other leagues because the players aren’t openly gay’.

'Why don’t the players [in Italy] just come out?’

There’s a specific reason for that. Several of them in fact.

Here are a few:

One

Two

Three

Four

If you don’t want to bother to click on the links, then let me sum up some of it up for you:

Italy is the worst country in Western Europe, in terms of LGBTQ+ rights. 92% of the LGBTQ community there have faced some form of discrimination, and some have been assaulted as well.

There have also been a few high profile homophobic incidents in Italian football. Most notably, there was the time Maurizio Sarri insulted Roberto Mancini by calling him two anti-gay slurs (’frocio’ and ‘finocchio’) and Antonio Cassano hoped that there would be ‘no gays’ in Italy’s locker room.

It’s also not uncommon to hear that kind of language in the stands every weekend.

With this in mind, it’s understandable why a lot of players keep quiet about their personal lives.

There are a few exceptions, of course. The most notable of them is Elena Linari. Though after she came out, Linari’s grandmother actually feared for her personal safety. Her fear was based on the belief that if Elena came back to Italy, that she would be attacked for being openly gay.

Thankfully, she hasn’t been hurt so far. But this should tell you about the type of environment that exists in Italy, and why one must be careful while living in these conditions.

They have to learn to maneuver carefully under such circumstances, for any wrong move could set off an explosion.

(Also note that Elena only felt comfortable enough to come out while she was living in Spain. And that she hasn’t publicly named her girlfriend yet.)

Martina Rosucci herself said that the ‘foreign players’ feel free to openly kiss their partners without fear of repercussion. The same can’t be said of Italy, where an ‘absurd mess’ would happen if one of the players were to do that there. 

This interview with her happened five years ago. Everything Rosucci said in it is still quite relevant to this very day.

So in conclusion: There are very real, and very legitimate reasons why the players of Serie A Femminile keep quiet about their personal lives. And rather than holding that against them, understand why they’re doing so. 

It is literally a matter of protecting their own personal safety. It is also a matter of protecting their loved ones as well. Holding the fact that they’re not out against them is just plain tacky. It also makes you look pretty bad too.

As I’ve said before, one of the most vivid memories of my whole entire life was watching people cheer when Abby Wambach kissed her wife after the US won the 2015 World Cup. 

This was in a sports bar in Northern California. This was at a bar that is normally frequented by fans of baseball, (American) football, and basketball, the three sports that are the pillars of virile American masculinity. And yet it was those same masculine men, who were among those who were cheering for Abby when she kissed her wife.

I hope we get to the point where the players in Italy are comfortable enough to do the same thing. Until then, stop holding it against them for being smart enough to keep their personal lives private.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHDBpb/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHCTwq/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHUxHb/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHDxww/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHCtVm/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHCvo3/

She's hilarious but there's two videos where she starts to speak more mumblingly

ok first of all these are brilliant and i'm losing my mind and i love you, thank you for curating these to me.

i will transcribe them in a bit but i just felt the need to leave this "little" (it's long sorry) note:

as someone who's been raised catholic i just want to say that she is pretty wrong about almost everything she said about catholics, and i say that as someone who hates catholicism with my whole mind body and soul and who's been traumatized by this stupid fucking faith to the point where i can't get into a church without breaking into sobs dauihdasiuh. the catholic guilt is real but catholics are absolutely allowed to divorce and use contraceptives, and also have sex before marriage. the first one is met with some guilt esp from women altho honestly i think it's more due to mysoginist reasons than religious reasons, and the second and third ones are commonpractice and if you say that it's wrong and bad everyone will think you're a fucking weirdo

and even with the divorce thing, while the guilt is there (im pretty sure half the reason my mom doesn't divorce is because she would feel guilty about it, although again, i feel like that's got very little to do with religion and way more with internalized mysoginy), i cannot stress enough that divorce is allowed, almost everyone i know has divorced parents and they're all catholics. the church's official position is kinda weird (as of now pope francis basically said that it's "morally necessary" in some cases but he also referred to ppl who divorced and remarried as "imperfect", but like, it hasn't been forbidden for years, so much so that people get second marriages at catholic churches literally all the time, and i kinda feel like ppl overestimate how much ppl care about what the pope says. at least here in latam, cuz we've always kind of freestyled religion since it was imposed on us anyway, but like... in my experience the average catholic practitioner is INCREDIBLY less conservative than the vatican and i feel like most people don't even know what the pope says or doesn't say. and i'm saying that as someone whose grandfather almost became a priest and only gave that up because he fell in love with my grandmother, and he's been a ferverent catholic his entire life. also two of his kids divorced, one married a divorced woman, one is gay and living together without marriage with his divorced boyfriend, one never married, and one had two kids before marriage which necessarily means that they fucked, and none of that was ever a problem to him. oh, also, my dad had divorced AND he was a buddhist when him and my mom married. currently he is a spiritist)

i think it might be possible that u technically have to ask for "permission" to the church to remarry in church, but in practice i think it's more of a ritualistic thing than actually asking for permission, cuz i've never met a single person who had them say no. it was pretty much "hey local bishop guy so my husband sucked and we divorced can i marry again" "sure lol". obviously it sucks that you even have to ask, but it's nowhere near as strict as people seem to think

the contraceptive thing is also absurd. like i cannot stress enough that my family would absolutely flip if they found out i DIDN'T use contraception. that was always something that my family reinforced very strongly, ESPECIALLY my grandpa. i've never met a single catholic who does not teach their kids to use contraceptives. my high school was catholic (literally named the Holy Cross, fun times, although they didn't impose the faith or anything. in fact almost half of the students in that school are jewish, but like, still, there was a priest in the school board) and we were taught to use contraceptives, put the condom in a banana and the whole pizzazz during biology class

like yeah the bible says not to but it also says not to mix different fabrics and that doesn't mean it's actually a thing that's reinforced in most catholic communities doaihdaj at least not here in latam. in here non-catholic christians are actually way more hardcore about the puritanism rules than catholics are, particularly evangelicals, which are kind of overtaken the catholics' traditional role of being colonialist fuckers as they are mostly from the US so they come to further US imperialism through religion here. watch out catholic church they're coming for ur crown

and even outside of puritanism, "non practicing catholics" are absolutely a thing like ppl who are catholic but don't even pray or go to church, much less care about that shit douahdsaohj so like the stereotype that all catholics are like the very small minority of hardcore catholics is like the stereotype that every muslim lives by the ultra-conservative muslim rules. it's not true and it's stereotypical and taking the minority ultra conservatives to be the rule when they are not

there's also the fact that there are many different currents of thought inside the catholic church (a little bit like with judaism although way less flexible than judaism is), some of which are very conservative, some of which are progressive. here in latam in particular the teology of liberation is extremely popular (it's the one my family subscribes to, and i'm pretty sure it was actually born here in latam) and it's pretty progressive. for catholics, that is

and like mandatory disclaimer that i am coming from my own experiences with latam catholicism, which i feel is different from other catholic countries - my polish friends for example have experiences with catholicism that are a lot closer to those stereotypes than mine ever were - but since most of the catholic population in the world is brazilian (like me), and second place goes to mexicans, i feel pretty comfortable taking it as a ruler to measure general catholic practices

with that being said, however, the catholic church can choke and die in a fire as it is a symbol of colonialism first and foremost, its proselitism is one of the worst things ever, and even the progressive currents are still way too damn conservative for my tastes. i just don't feel comfortable transcribing something that i know is incorrect and stereotypical (and that in some cases is used to further oppression like with the Irish in the UK or armenian catholics, and i've even had some US-diaspora latinos hear some incredible things from gringos who assumed they were catholic, or, in their beautiful words, "had latino religion". but obviously in most cases catholics are the oppressors, especially here in the third world)

also, her assessment in the third video is absolutely correct. A/B/O IS just conservative gender roles born of christian and catholic imposition transposed to a fictional world where the genders have slightly different names, which is why i, as a rule, hate it dauhdsaiuhdauhda and even though the assessment that catholicism is thaaat much more conservative than other christian religions (it's absolutely not, it's Exactly As Conservative) isn't true, catholicism is still where most if not all of western conservative rethoric is born of, and ugh, it's so refreshing to see someone understand this and put it into words so well

so yeah keep that note in mind but anyway, transcriptions:

[Video transcription #1: in reply to a tiktok question, which says, "now i'm thinking about the catholic guilt that would come with it oh my god". user @Omarsbigsister is saying, "good morning", she then covers her mouth as she starts to laugh, before continuing, "I guess I'm the religious omegaverse tiktoker now. I did not know catholic guilt was more than just sex, I thought it was just about sex, but nO. people who are catholic, if you don't know, they get guilt over every little thing, they get guilty when they eat, they have guilt when, like... [dismissive gesture] they have fun... it's messed up *cut* [mumbling i don't understand, sorry] in which you HAVE to be bonded before... *sticks tongue out* *cut* and catholics, from what i know, uhm, cannot get divorced, so you can't be unbonded, you're stuck for life with that alpha or omega, and then you can't use contraceptives so if you have a heat or rut, good luck, you cannot escape it, and on top of that, they preach abstinence, right, so if you're having a heat or rut in your teen years you just gotta deal with it alone like you are not allowed to be bonded, so, that would be really intense."

#2: in response to a question, which said, "follow up question: if in the real world hijabis are women, in ABO universe would hijabis be omegas of all genders?". the user is shown stroking her chin in contemplative silence for a long time, before she says, "actually, both men and women have to wear a hijab, it's just more visible on women, but men also have to cover from like, the neck all the way down... so like when you see them [mumbling i don't understand, sorry] that's their hijab. *cut* Islam is actually treating men and women, like, fairly somewhat equally, so, I feel like in omegaverse alphas, betas, and omegas would all be held to the same standards, and alphas and omegas would also be held by the same standards but then culture would ruin it, just like western culture has ruined it. for your other question. 'would muslim families prefer betas more, and would betas be spiritual leaders', i feel like everyone prefers betas more, but then also Islam came to like, uplift women [a written note then shows up, which says, "like girls are seen as a blessing to have as kids"], so like omegas would be seen as like, a blessing to have as a child.

#3: in response to another tiktok question, which says, "fun fact bestie you cannot get divorced in the catholic religion even if your spouse is abusive and horrible to you so in omegaverse how would that work?". she replies, "the reason that Abrahamic religions seemingly fit so well into the omegaverse universe is because catholicism specifically and christianity, uhm, all the gender norms and all the cultural norms especially in the west came from catholicism and christianity, they were forced on people, and then you know, people might not be religious, but the norms stay. but now you have omegaverse which is basically just a bunch of like youth exploring the youth through this, like, werewolf fanfiction trope, using all these gender roles that you have in society on their head, so, really, what i'm saying, is that... omegaverse is just catholicism fanfiction"

#4: she looks at the camera and says, "getting islamophobic comments is one thing, but getting islamophobic comments that say that muslims cannot be in the omegaverse".... she then breaks into laughter for a solid 30 seconds

#5: she is shown reading out loud, in a mock-outraged face, a tweet that says, "about to murder tiktok they try to make Ramadan a 'quirky' trend. it's a religious holiday. stop it, get some help. /srsly /g.", then a follow-up tweet, which says, "saw a tweet saying on tiktok they are asking questions about how ramadan would work in omegaverse. i'm done with y'all, just say you disrespect muslims and go". then another tweet by a different user, which says, "i tried to read, i got secondhand embarrassment-" they then break out of character and say, "oh, that's fair," before going back, "if it wasn't ramadan i'd be boxing those people right now. those people should be ashamed to even think that way wtf". then another, which replies, "well i'm not celebrating it, so as a non-muslim, i'll happily box them". then, back to her normal voice, she says, "i really was just making a silly little tiktok and seeing that stuff really hurts... i'm just kidding, i can't keep a straight face. you like minecraft youtubers, what are you gonna do to me? what are you gonna do to me?"

#6: in reply to a tiktok ask, which said, "prince philip was an omega". she slowly films herself as she takes a walk, finds the nearest trash bin, and tosses the phone there, before putting the lid over the box. end ID]

THE YEAR IS 2020 AND I WATCHED NEON GENESIS EVANGELION FOR THE FIRST TIME, PART 12

Episode 24.

It seems very unfair of us to watch Dorohedoro after Evangelion, because each episode of the former concludes by telling us things we've learned. I feel like all I've learned from Evangelion is "fuck the colour orange".

This is also the episode where I cursed that the episode length of Devilman Crybaby and Madoka didn't sync up with Evangelion so we never got the power trifecta of 'my first homoerotic teenage nihilist crush'.

The actual episode report under the cut.

So, so, so after last week's upsetting underground tang aquarium of Reis adventure the series remembers to check in on the super-traumatized Asuka (which is more than the adults within the series do). We get a greyscale small child Asuka running down an orange (bad) corridor. She's excitedly telling her mother about how she's been chosen to pilot a giant robot and protect humanity and it'll be with other kids and she won't be alone and won't need to depend on her father or anyone else and the excited child shots keep cutting to an ominous door. Eventually the door opens enough to show the red behind it and, knowing what we know from the Asuka episode a few weeks back, you can interpolate pretty easily and upsettingly what opening door onto solid red means.

There's a fight between Shinji and Asuka that we're catching the climax of, with thrown and shattered mugs, and Asuka calling Shinji a liar and Shinji apparently reiterating that fuckin' Kaji is gone (I can't tell if he's trying to tell her Kaji is dead or just that he’s bailed on them).

Misato's gotten notice from Seele, the obelisk council, that the Fifth Child is being sent to replace Asuka and Misato recognizes something hinky is going on and senses conspiracy which is ... pretty reasonable at this point. I'd also be seeing conspiracies everywhere. I wouldn't know what they meant or even whose conspiracies they were, but I'd definitely suspect multiple conspiracies going on if literally anything new happened.

Asuka, naked, maybe bloody? in a bathtub in a destroyed apartment with the ceiling crumbling down. Her eyes are vacant and her cheeks are hollow and she's mumbling about her sync rates falling. It's weird and haunting and the building is as destroyed and non-functional as Asuka. Someone from NERV finds her and it turns out Asuka's been missing for a fucking /week/ in this destroyed city and they've only just found her since I guess she ran away after her fight with Shinji and you know it's at least partially because they don't care about finding her. NERV barely cared about Asuka back when she could get in the robot, they absolutely don't care about her now and it's unclear who, if anyone, is responsible for her since fuckin' Kaji's death. Is there even law in Tokyo 3?

My point is, everything is falling apart in the structure of the show and the world within it and the first ball to truly get dropped and broken is the used up and now valueless teenage girl and it's heartbreaking.

Things are getting so real that Misato is /sending Penpen away/ for his own safety and I'm glad Misato cares about Penpen but I wish Misato could find it in her to care about, say, Asuka (Misato is a fuck up and trying her best, but at the end of the day she's still a fuck up). Is Misato the best adult in the series or is she actually the worst adult in the series because she recognizes how she is failing but fails to take action to correct her failures? As a viewer I can't be disappointed in Gendo because he's shit and I have no expectations of him. But I love Misato and so it hurts more when she lets me down and by this point she is letting me down HARD (but I suppose Misato disappoints herself).

Shinji is also in a bad place and he's contemplating the orange tang wreckage of the city and how the small thread of normalcy has gone now that everyone's evacuated. Shinji misses his friends who ... hoo boy.

The one Shinji last saw in the hospital after nearly killing him via giant robot and the other he last heard calling him to tell him how much he sucked for not wanting to pilot a giant robot. It's sad that those two are as close to friends as Shinji has had.

Shinji desperately wants to talk to someone right now about, you know, the /underground tang aquarium full of Reis/ which it seems to be implied is a result of forbidden science experiments combining Adam Trevor flesh with the remains of Shinji's mother? No one SAYS it but yes?

So Shinji can't talk to Rei about this because he feels weird about the whole thing. Asuka's missing. His friends, such as they were, are gone. The poor kid just needs someone to talk to, to confide in, and he asks Asuka, Misato, and his mother, in that order, for help. Are all women ultimately mother for him? Rei, Misato, and Asuka all got conflated when he was absorbed into the EVA which were all part of an ur-mother thing so ... maybe? I don't know. Probably nobody knows. Shinji certainly doesn't know.

Then Shinji's thoughts are interrupted by Akira Ishida humming "Ode to Joy" (gorgeous piece of music, loved it since I was a little girl) and Akira Ishida is here! Things are not going to get more sensical when Akira Ishida just appears in your anime.

So this is Kaworu, who is sitting on some picturesque rubble jutting out from the orange tang, and he's the replacement EVA pilot. His hobbies are having mysteriously deleted records, perching on things, knowing about Shinji, and talking deep and cryptic, but in a friendly way.

AT SOME POINT IN THIS EPISODE Gendo talks to Shinji's EVA and refers to it by his dead wife's name and is glad the spear of Longinus is on the moon, actually, because with it on the moon it can't stand in the way of their plans and Gendo has an eyeball in his palm.

The obelisk council have a meeting where they are once again berating and complaining about Gendo and it is unclear if they realize that Gendo's not there.

Misato is pretty sure Kaworu is a spy or agent of some sort sent by the obelisk council and she and the dude NERV subordinate who's always around are trying to do some side snooping to figure out what his deal is.

Hey where's Ritsuko? Sitting on a chair in a black void telling Gendo about how her cat died and she didn't think about it at all for years until her grandmother called to tell her it was dead and now she's having feelings about it and Gendo doesn't care about symbolism. Gendo wants to know why Ritsuko destroyed the dummy plugs and Ritsuko is like, I didn't destroy the dummy plugs, I destroyed Rei which ... I don't know, I don't know, are we all operating at cross-purposes here Ritsuko? Are you and Gendo even having the same conversation?

Gendo's like ... is this because I stopped having sex with you? And ... maybe that conversation went further but I think my brain strangled itself rather than contemplate Gendo viewing sex with anyone as a favour he's doing them and one Gendo finds inconvenient (and gross at that).

Rei's having a time and as is often the case with Rei it's unclear what she thinks about what she's thinking? Rei seems like she's a cypher to herself more than she is to anyone else. Rei's maybe trying to figure out what her purpose in life is or who she's alive for? She thinks about Gendo's glasses and something's different with this Rei, I guess, compared to the other Reis. I think something's breaking down, like maybe each new Rei is less and less connected to Gendo? I don't know.

At some point, Rei encounters Kaworu and he's like oh hey, you're like me, I thought so! Maybe they're at NERV or on their way to NERV? Look, the budget ball got dropped with Asuka, this shit is getting impressionistic. So maybe Kaworu doesn't have any background for Misato to dig up because, like Rei, he's a construct from some weird genetic fuckery (I think Misato even compares his lack of background to Rei at one point) anyway he's like it's episode 24 time to drop Lilith references!

Why are you doing this to me, Akira Ishida? If I had one of those murder evidence string boards it would be such a mess right now as I tried to find room for /Lilith/.

Misato's reached the point of fuck it, let's just throw all the kids into the robots for tests and Kaworu is /suspiciously good at robot numbers/.

After robots, Shinji is just sort of hanging around when Kaworu exits ... something NERV-y and Shinji is awkward and shy and doesn't want to go home and needs to take a shower and Kaworu is ... intense and suggestive and friendly. So they shower together and then bathe together and there's, like, an entire wall in the baths that's dedicated to a screensaver slideshow of NERV propaganda and Kaworu just wants to talk to Shinji and get to know him and hold hands in the bath and it's obviously weird.

Shinji is so desperate for friendship and someone to talk to and you don't want to see conspiracy or shady shit here because at this point I just want something /good/ to happen to Shinji for once in this constant tragedy train of a show. Just let him have this weird friend who wants to talk to Shinji about his intimacy issues and how his fear of being alone makes him keep to himself and causes the aloneness because chosen aloneness is better than risking connection and getting rejection. So probably the biggest red flag about Kaworu is that he's talking to Shinji about the things Shinji is concerned about without any overt robot-centric motives.

Then Kaworu invites himself over for a sleepover. Shinji takes the floor because of course he does and they talk more philosophy and fate and destiny and depression and Kaworu is intense and tells Shinji he likes him and no one has given Shinji even this crumb before.

The obelisk council has a meeting that isn't in the void but is over the tang craters of the ruined city and they're meeting with Kaworu because of course Kaworu is their construct of some sort being sent to ... something ... Gendo ... moons ... Lilith ... Adam ...

Misato is watching all of this from the highway through highspec binoculars and cursing that she can't read Kaworu's lips. She's looking at the back of his head, mind you. But I heard what Kaworu said and I don't fucking know, Misato, so don't feel bad.

Misato meets Ritsuko in the black void at some point and if I knew why in the moment I have since forgotten. I don't take notes. I just watch. Misato's angry, though and Ritsuko is just ... overcome with a sense of her own failure or maybe grief or anger at her inability to not repeat her mother's mistakes? There's definitely mom-stuff involved.

I'm aware that these reports are becoming longer and less coherent and also probably less interesting for people to read but once I decide to do a thing I do it. There's definitely a loss of narrative cohesion as the series nears its end, probably due to budget stuff.

It's an episode for people to talk to the EVAs in their giant hangers and Kaworu goes to have a chat with Asuka's robot where chat means 'starts floating and establishes some kind of mental link with the EVA and turns it on'.

In the NERV control centre everyone starts freaking out at the sudden activation of the EVA. IS IT ASUKA? they ask (no, she's shown to be barely conscious in a hospital bed, so someone's caring for her to some degree). NO PLUG, NO PILOT, JUST KAWORU'S PSYCHIC MANIPULATION.

Oh, and Kaworu's an Angel which means an Angel is now using an EVA to punch through ... NERV ... ground ... basement ... heading to where Adam Trevor is, the orange tang ocean, and that's really bad. If he/they succeed ... Third Impact?

Shinji's called in (and Misato hasn't talked to Shinji once about Kaworu even though the last time there was a new surprise EVA pilot it went ... poorly and, well, here we are now) and he's angry and sad and disbelieving (echoing Asuka's disbelief at the beginning). Shinji feels so /betrayed/ and he compares what Kaworu has done to his relationship with his father which is ... a lot to unpack. I suppose the friendship Kaworu offered is the most obvious affection Shinji has been offered by anyone. He wants affection and recognition from Gendo. But any affection, any seeing and noticing of him, must be like water in the desert to Shinji at this point, and if Gendo's greatest betrayal of Shinji's hopes was overriding his will to make Shinji nearly kill Tohji I guess Kaworu, the only character who's shown any interest in being Shinji's friend, being revealed to be an Angel, something Shinji /has/ to kill, is comparable. I'm sorry, Shinji.

Shinji fights Asuka's EVA, controlled by Kaworu, as they descend deeper and deeper into the bowels under NERV, the two EVAs locked into a very cool looking combat that Shinji doesn't want to be involved in, and Misato and her underling confirm plan SELF-DESTRUCT NERV.

"Ode to Joy" is playing throughout this. It feels very natural.

Kaworu gets to where Adam Trevor is, weird and white and bulgy, looking very pregnant and Adam Trevor is also Lilith and they are the parent of humanity while the Angels are maybe less tainted children of god and are siblings to the EVAs?

Shinji throws Asuka's destroyed EVA through the ... wall? into the orange tang ocean zone with Kaworu and Adam Trevor Lilith and since Shinji's the victor of that fight, he seizes Kaworu, who he still does not want to fight, let alone kill. Kaworu's calm about all of this, though. He's ready to die. He expects to die. He also is ready to live but he recognizes this is a situation where for one of them to survive, the other one can't, and he smiles and tells Shinji he wants Shinji to live.

There's once again a really excellent use of the budget and animation limitations the show was hitting at this point, as there's a long, still shot of Shinji's EVA holding Kaworu as "Ode to Joy" soars, the music the only sound for the static shot.

Then the screen flashes and a small shadowy shape sinks into the orange.

Gendo and Rei wear raincoats as blood is hosed off Shinji's EVA.

Shinji sits by Misato, devastated, and tries to express his feelings to her, express his grief and regret. Kaworu was a good person. Kaworu was his friend. Kaworu told Shinji he liked him and Shinji confirms that /no one has ever told him that before/. Shinji feels like he should have died instead of Kaworu. He felt awful about Tohji's near-death at his unwilling hands. Tohji wasn't even really his friend. His grief and culpability in his own loss here is ... huge. And all Misato can say is that Shinji did the right thing in killing his friend. She's the only adult who's been sometimes sympathetic to Shinji, who he's been forging a real connection with, but by this point she's had to deal with so much shit of her own that the fragile pseudo-parent-child relationship between them has shattered. Misato is just another adult who isn't hearing Shinji. He doesn't know why it's changed, he just knows she's telling him killing his friend was right. This concludes my report on Episode 24 of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Edit: I know there was a lot of discussion and criticism when Netflix released their new dub and sub, particularly with respect to the line "worthy of his grace" and we can all agree, I think, that Netflix's subtitles are sloppy, their localization flawed. But regardless of the words used, it's clear that Kaworu offers Shinji everything he isn't getting from the rest of the world: affection, understanding, intimacy, a sense of being valued, a sense of safety. Love in whatever form, every form Shinji needs and wants.

I guess I wonder how genuine this offer of love is although I suppose it doesn't matter to Shinji because the betrayal happens, the universe punishes him for risking emotional intimacy, and Kaworu's sincerity doesn't change how awful Shinji is left feeling.

Trading in Dignity

It was shocking how quickly it all came to an end. It started in the 2020s and within a decade, after the third global pandemic, they were faced with the worst yet. All the science deniers, those who refused to distance, wear masks and all of that ... well, most of them caught it. Some of them caught it without showing a single symptom. That didn’t matter because approximately eight months after you were infected, after you thought you were all well again, your lungs started to bleed. Nothing could make it stop. You drowned in your own bed, at night, sometimes in mere minutes. Most of the time, you just went to sleep and never woke again. It was grim.

The survivors were rare and the disease progressed so quickly, institutions fell almost overnight. Whole cities became ghost towns. Survivor teams started sweeping, looking for children, infants, pets trapped in houses and then supplies. Survivors came first. There were a lot of supplies. Not that many people.

She was rare and she knew it. Immune. How? No idea. Luck? Genetics? It didn’t matter at the end of the day. The world grieved and cities were abandoned for smaller communities. It wasn’t like in the horror movies or post-apocalypse fiction. No one ate people, bought and sold people, or any of that ridiculousness. For the most part people tried to help one another. Older people banded together to raise the children who survived. With the population reduced in the span of a decade to less than a third, it became very clear that every single human was a necessary addition. Funny how prejudice and differences in sexuality mattered a whole lot less when the end of the human race was at stake. All that shit became real irrelevant real fast.

In a spate of particularly weird coincidence, some communities lost more of a certain type of people. The east coast of North America for example had nearly no men left. It was startling, You could travel for days, scout many towns and communities and find less than a dozen males. West of the Rocky mountains however, the opposite was true. The average was 1 self-identified female to 20 self-identified males (like people were checking - get real). Some communities the ratio was more like 100 to 1. In the mid-west, prairie region, well there was almost no people left there at all. No one knew why they were so hard hit but the coasts survived. Perhaps it was just population distribution. Scientists would be studying it long after she was dead.

So, in a world where you lived with almost 100 men in your community and the number of single women could be counted on one hand, and you wouldn’t need every finger? Yeah. This was fantastic. 

Again, it wasn’t like the books though. She wasn’t chained, or bound or really mistreated in any way. Nope. None of that.

She was a strong survivor. She had a thriving garden and a number of animals of her own. Her house was cute as hell and in really good shape. Her grandmother had taught her to sew and the rest she learned from books. The little town was powered by a local dam that kept the predatory animals such as the dog packs, at bay with electrified fencing in key areas, including around her goats whom the wolves thought looked super yum yum.

But even she needed supplies. I mean, was she going with a raiding party into a city to get tampons and advil? Ummm ... no obviously. That was terrible. That’s how people died! Those places were not safe. It took rigging and expertise she did not have to be on a scavenger team. Plus do you think they would be cool having one of the few women in town go out with them? You’re dreaming if you think that’s gonna happen buddy and no one went without a team. That was a fucking death wish.

So, she had to shop. She had to trade. Fact of life. They didn’t want her tasty preserves or baking. Nope. That they could do for themselves. She traded the one thing that few had around her - her pussy. Fucked up right? 

Prostitution was the oldest game in the book for a reason it turned out. So she went into the store and put in her order for supplies that she needed. Flour, tampons, books for example. There was a tally and a calculation conducted. She was a modest girl. It rarely went above two visits. Then there was a jar. Yup. A fucking jar, with names on it. Men who had paid into the credit system. 

“One” The merchant stated bluntly marking it in his book. 

“One?” She repeated, a little surprised by how light the requirement was. Her list had been pretty long.  

“Yeah, Bernice fell pregnant, she’s off the list until after and maybe permanently since the Bennett brothers are putting serious court to her. All remaining traders just had their value go up.” 

That’s what they called them - traders. Like she was wheeling a cart through town with little jars or something instead of letting men cum in a minimum of two holes per trade. It was awesome. By the way, that was sarcasm in case you can’t tell.

“Nice.” She replied with a nod, “I hope the baby is healthy.” That was the customary statement these days when anyone fell pregnant. You see, the virus didn’t exactly go away and infant mortality was high as fuck. It was depressing as hell. She didn’t know a single woman who didn’t half dread getting knocked up, even if they really wanted to be a mother. It was a huge risk and all too likely to end in just more painful loss. Yay for survival.

“We all do.” the merchant stated sincerely as he pushed the jar toward her. Sliding her hand in, she let slips of paper, card stock that was refreshed so often you couldn’t get a feel for any one particular person, just dance through her fingertips. You just had to stick your hand in and pray to whatever god you might actually believe in that you didn’t get one of the gross old coots who thought bathing was fucking optional. Last time she had one of those she had about forty baths and still felt disgusting.

She pulled out the card and took a deep breath before flipping it over. Both her and the merchant looked surprised. “Well good luck there. Didn’t even know he paid in.” The merchant marked his book and then nodded. “I’ll get your order in as soon as ... you have about four days before you’ll have had to pay up.” 

That was another thing, the man had to confirm you had ‘paid’. However, if that man lied, he was off the books permanently. Not only that but the other men in town usually paid you a visit and beat the holy hell out of you. It was an honour system true but most followed the rules, out of honour or out of necessity, it didn’t matter at the end of the day. Men who might only get one fuck a year with a ‘willing’ woman weren’t about to lose the privilege because you decided to get fucking cute about it.

“Thanks ... Have a good day now.” She replied with a sincere smile. The merchant was a good man after all. He never put his name in and if he found out one of the men was cruel or unkind even, he’d return their credits and tell them to start getting real used to the sweet feel of their left hand because that was about all they were getting from now on. 

She walked through town, that name flipping through her mind. It was just so unexpected. 

Well no time like the present she supposed. She had had a bath last night, given the old cunt a tidy and all that. She had a debt to pay and she just knew she wouldn’t sleep right until it was paid off good and proper. Yes, it was a little fucked up but that was the system and she had lived with it for a while now. Strangely you kinda got used to it. Most men were pretty appreciative about it. 

Walking down the main street, she noted the weird combination of old and new that had blended together in this world. Cars jerry-rigged with solar panels to charge the batteries travelled on the same road as horse-drawn carriages. Kids wore sneakers cause there were still plenty of those left in old stores but paired them with clearly homemade clothes and then spiked them with leather jackets kitted out with studs and chunks of cell phones used as artistic decoration.

She walked until she hit the slight outskirts of the main town area. She could see him now, his arm lifting as he pounded the steel into shape with a large hammer. Farriers, blacksmiths, knife-makers, welders and so on made a nice living in this new world. You could always tell who they were because they smelled like fire and had arms the size of her entire body it seemed. She licked her lips and straightened her back. For the first time in well over a year, she had to admit that she might just be looking forward to this one.

“Hey ...” She greeted. He put down the hammer and shifted up his eye protection, squinting at her in the bright light of day. “Hey.” He replied back, his voice a little gruff. “You looking for something?” He asked.

“Ummm ... pulled your name.” Turns out all the cool things she was saying in her head since pulling his name had just fallen right on out of her brain. Well I wasn’t cool before, she thought bleakly with a tinge of amusement, Guess I’m not now either. Maybe the next apocalypse.

He stopped, frowning lightly as if he wasn’t sure what she was talking about and then his expression cleared and his eyes grew wide. “Oh.” he said. It was actually more of a sound. He cleared his throat. “I ... I  ... yeah. Now?” he queried.

When she nodded, “If you have the time. Otherwise ... I can come back.” I can come back. What the hell, was she Uber Eats? What the fuck is wrong with her?

He shook his head, “Now is good.” He tipped his head toward the interior. “Let me shut this down a bit and then I’ll wash up and be in.” 

He seemed nervous. Why did she like that so much? Maybe she was bored of the older guys who just had you bend over or would just unzip when they saw you coming. No effort man. No fucking effort. Literally. Wham bam, you’ve paid for your groceries Ma’am.

Mr. Muscles here better put in some damn effort at least.

Montana Academy testimony

This testimony was found on Reddit. All rights go to the author.

I’m not going to go into the hell that was SUWS Carolina [wilderness], as that is a whole different can of worms, and the boarding school was far more sinister. I arrived at Montana Academy a few weeks after turning 17. I was absolutely terrified after what I had been through spending 9 weeks living in the woods, but I was at least happy that I could use a toilet and sleep in a bed. [To get rid of any confusion later on, I was born male. At this point in my life I was still living as a boy, and trying very hard to convince myself I wanted to stay that way.] When I got to campus I was greeted by my team leaders and paraded through the lunch room as the entire student body looked at me [as all new students are]. I’m still convinced this is a power play devised by the creators of the school to subtly break your guard down. I said goodbye to my mom, grandmother, and my uncle, and began the worst period of my life.

So the Staff of our team was our team leader Dave, and boy, Dave was a piece of shit. He was the type of guy who would get a shit eating grin whenever he could punish you. You could fucking tell he got a semi off of it, and we would all talk about how much we hated him behind his back. I remember the ear to ear smile he got on his face as my eyes welled up with tears when he told me I couldn’t spend Christmas away from the ranch with my mom, because I was short by one signature on my checklist. That’s Dave in a nutshell. The weekend team leader was Sam and I think he was even worse, because he had the amazing ability to make you feel safe and loved one week, and then emotionally beat you to a pulp the next. For instance... There was one weekend where Sam and I had a long emotional talk where I opened up to him about how much my dad meant to me and how I would give anything to have him back. He gave me the biggest hug and told me he was here for me. The week after was rough and I was so excited to talk to him again, but when his shift started, he sat down and immediately screamed at me in front of everybody for not sitting down fast enough at the table, and put me on privilege freeze for a week. This would happen all the time. It was like he got off on building up our trust and hopes and then he would have a bad week at home and treat us like absolute shit.

I started with every intention of bettering myself. I had fully subscribed to the belief that I was broken as a result of “immaturity”, and the Founder of M.A.'s book was so fond of claiming. Despite coming from a broken home, childhood neglect, death of a parent, sexual abuse, trauma etc, it was MY fault that I ended up at M.A. I was ready to do my part. Unfortunately I wasn’t perfect as the staff expected me to be. I tried my ass off to do chores to the militaristic standards that they upheld, but I often fell short. Perhaps I missed a nearly microscopic hair in a bathtub. Sometimes, my sheets were a little crooked. And for each little transgression there was a severe consequence. If you made more than one mistake on your chores within a week, you could kiss all of your privileges goodbye. No phone call to your mom. No movie night. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you’re locked in an environment where you have maybe one tiny thing to look forward to a week, losing it because of something that is often not your fault is the most heart wrenching feeling in the world. Sometimes the punishments would go beyond cruel and just become abusive. About 5 weeks into my stay, I made the grave mistake of telling my team leader Dave that I had finished my assignment because I was having a really horrible day and just wanted to continue reading my book. Unfortunately he decided to double check. When he found out I wasn’t being honest, he assigned me to my first drudgery. That weekend I spent 6 hours outside in 20 degree weather scraping ice off of every single pathway on the entire ranch campus. I asked once if I could stop because my hands were rubbed raw and starting to bleed, and my weekend team leader Sam refused. I shouldn’t have lied, he insisted. By the end of the night, my hands were covered in blisters and I had learned my place. At this point I was broken, or so I thought. I didn’t know it could get worse.

As for therapy… My 1st therapist was useless. She was liable to cry about tragedies that had occurred during her own life. Ironically she was as cold as ice when it came to my issues. When it came to the issue of me being sexually assaulted in the 1st grade, she breezed right past it, and moved on to other issues. When I told her that I had always wished I had been been born a girl, she didn’t seem to give the slightest semblance of a fuck. When I would bring up the death of my father, or my mother’s alcoholism, she would go into how her brother died and start crying, and the next thing I knew I would be awkwardly wondering if I should console her. The biggest breakthrough in our therapy was when she came to the confident conclusion that the root of all my issues was that I was… wait for it… ADDICTED TO VIDEO GAMES… Every therapy session turned into her trying to convince me that I never wanted to play video games again, despite the fact I was drinking heavily and using substances before entering wilderness. After I finally promised her I would never touch another game again, we finally moved on to trying to process the loss of my father, and even that was a useless endeavor.

Group therapy was a clusterfuck. I don’t exactly know a better way to describe it than to call it “conflict therapy”. Seeing as how the entire M.A. operation was based around punishing students for their mistakes it was only natural to pit them against each other. The students of M.A. were each separated into 7 teams of roughly 10 students each. I spent 90% of my time with my team. They were your my friends, but I can guarantee they knew me fucking biblically. During group, it was common for one student on the team to be singled out and for every other student on the team to just fucking lay into them. It happened to everybody. We were all encouraged to tell on each other if we witnessed any rules being broken. I couldn’t trust my best friends with a secret at M.A. because the consequences were so dire. One tiny mistake could land me there for an extra year. Imagine the fucking paranoia that this causes. I was ALWAYS being watched. I began to question every single thing that I did. I began to believe the punishments I was being given were because I was useless, and because I couldn’t do anything right. After about a year I was 100% fucking brainwashed. I because some kind of M.A. Drone and I genuinely believed that I needed them to survive. It was like I was in a fucking cult, and if they had fucking cyanide in the punch I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

I think this next part was the most fucked up. This was the point where my red-pollyped festering cunt of a therapist decided to use me as an example, to teach a fucking seminar. My team was planning a father-son weekend trip. Doesn’t that sound lovely? Well, problem is, my dad’s fucking brain drowned in its own blood and so he’s in a box in my mom’s closet, so I can’t exactly take that out to Bowman lake with the boys. Luckily for me my therapist called me in and informed me that I was allowed to spend a weekend with my Uncle [who I love very much]. I was so happy, I was jumping for joy! A few weeks pass, and the father-son weekend is getting closer. My therapist calls me back in and tells me to sit down, and then informs me that she actually thinks it would be great for my “therapy” if I went with my team on the trip... I begged her to let me spend the weekend with my uncle, but she said it would also be good for the team’s therapy. So that weekend we all went to the lake. It was a really wonderful experience for everybody except for me. For the entire weekend I was alone. Some of my friends and their dads spent some time with me but I honestly wanted to be alone. Being the only kid without a fucking dad on a father-son trip is fucking humiliating beyond words. The worst part was on the last night of the weekend where the therapist held a group therapy session and the whole fucking thing was centered around me and my fucking dead dad, and all the issues that come with having a dead dad. My therapist had some really great and sensitive questions prepared... “Do you miss your dad?” “Do you feel guilty about anything?” “Why do you feel like it was your fault?” “Do you think your dad would be proud of you?” “Do you wish your dad was here?” “How did you deal with your mom falling apart?” “How do you feel that your mom is drinking again?” and the therapist just keeps pushing me and pushing me and pushing me until I’m inconsolable, and having a panic attack, and I just want her to shut the fuck up. I felt so broken, humiliated, and violated. How fucking dare this bitch of a therapist come at me with all of this heavy shit in front of people I've never met, when all she ever wants to talk about in our sessions is how much I like video games. They don’t care in these fucking places. They wanted to give these stupid fucking dads something powerful to witness so they could write a fucking Facebook post about the amazing work that's being done at MA. May they rot in hell.

Medical malpractice was also Rampant. While at M.A. I was struggling with weight and eating issues. My team “suggested” that I run a half marathon because our new team leader liked to run and they love to fucking push even the smallest beliefs and hobbies on their students. The shoes I was training in had literally no insoles. I asked for new shoes and was told to write a proposal. I wrote one and was never responded to by the treatment team [big fucking surprise]. After weeks of training we finally ran the half marathon. Halfway through, I felt a shooting pain in my foot. I told my team leader as he was not too far ahead. He didn’t give me much of a choice but to finish. For the next 6-8 weeks I asked the nurse every day if I could please go to the doctor as my foot was killing me, and nobody ever did anything about it. Finally after asking over what must have been 50 times, they agreed to let me go into town to get an x-ray. The x-ray found that I had snapped the middle metatarsal bone in my foot clean in half. So not only did M.A. make me run 6 miles with a broken foot, they made me do hard fucking labor on it for 6-8 weeks before allowing medical treatment. Care for Transgender students was disgustingly ignorant and based on lies and misinformation. Despite trying to come out as trans to my 1st M.A. therapist, it was just ignored. I tried multiple times to bring it up, but I’m now certain that my therapist didn’t know what a trans person was, and so she just thought it would be easier to switch the subject. When I moved on to the Sky House [the halfway house portion of the program] I said fuck it and just fully came out. This was met with backlash from the therapy team. Since I was at the Sky house now I had a new therapist and he had a lot of info about transitioning. Unfortunately, all of the info was fucking wrong, and he filled my head with misinformation, lies, and half-truths, in an attempt to make it sound like starting hormones was harder than getting a fucking doctorate from Harvard.

After Finally graduating M.A. I had been brainwashed into believing that getting a script for hormones was like a quest for the holy grail. I had no idea how fucking easy it actually was. I tried to live a normal life. I moved in with my aunt and uncle for a little while until I went off to college. I stayed sober for a few months, but as soon as I got to the university, things started fucking unraveling fast. I realized that I had been horribly abused and that the “therapy” I had been undergoing was nothing more than expensive babysitting. I fucking lost it I started drinking and taking any substance I could. I failed out of my school and moved back home. I drifted around for 3 years drinking, and being a disgusting and terrible person. I had to figure it all out on my own. I fucked with drugs I never should have and fell in with people I had no business being with. I drank too much, and made many regrettable decisions. But I still figured my fucking life out. I figured out that I needed to fucking get it together. I made a goal. I needed to transition. That was problem A. I got sober, went to my Nana [my hero] and found a therapist and within 2 weeks I was on hormones and began my transition, and by pure luck, I found love. It’s been a little over 4 years since I’ve gotten sober and things are far from perfect. I have severe PTSD from going to that hell of a school. I still dream about it multiple nights a week, and wake up in a fucking panic. I never leave the goddamn house because I start to panic, and I have serious trouble holding a job, so instead I work from home as a camgirl, inserting large objects into me for money. I’m lucky though that I now have my girlfriend to help me through it. Without her, I don’t know what I would do most days. Also, its really fucking great to not have to be a goddamn boy anymore. If anyone else had a similar experience [and I know others have] you’re not alone, and good luck.

Basketcase- Part 1

(Idk if basketcase is offense to use... but this is a story I’m working on that’s HEAVILY inspired by real life stuff. It’s kinda dark and sad, but also super hopeful) 

So I’m laying next to her, my hands itch to touch her, to stroke the soft skin and silky hair the colour of sun-kissed wheat. Her eyes and closed, and her breathing is deep and relaxed. My hands clench into fists to keep from touching her, but it is a fight within myself. I stare at her sleeping form and my breath is taken from my lungs. How the hell can one person be this beautiful? It’s so unfair I could cry. I am, of course, acutely aware of the fact that my affections are not and will never be returned. But that does not keep my mind from wandering to thoughts, soft and gentle thoughts that quiet the usual turmoil inside me. //”Hi honey, I’m home from work.” She looks exhausted and I limp over to her to place a kiss on her cheek. “How was it?” I ask, brushing her long golden hair from her face and staring lovingly into those pools of deep grey-blue, “Did anything interesting happen?” She smiles at me and kisses me on the lips, “No, not a thing. But work was good.” She holds my hands in hers and all is right with the world. “I love you.” // I am snapped back to reality as she shifts in her sleep and makes a soft sound, her body touches mine and I feel a jolt of electricity course through my veins, my heart races and I feel a flutter in my stomach. Is this what love feels like? I am inclined to say yes, I have never felt like this before. From the moment I saw her my life was never the same, being with her brings colour into my drab, grey world. Gives me a type of warmth I’ve never felt before. If I focus on her, I feel whole… When she wakes up I have to pretend I didn’t spend the whole night watching her, I don’t want her to think I’m a creep or anything. I curl into myself next to her and say, “Good morning.” She replies, “Good morning.” She’s so beautiful when she speaks, it takes my breath away and I could cry I’m so happy to just hear her voice. So then I ask her, “How did you sleep?” And she looks at me, I wonder what she’s thinking, “Good.” She says after a beat. I want to kiss her lips. “Should I go head and turn off the alarm?” I ask, grabbing my phone and logging in. God my password is embarrassing, what am I five? I check my Facebook messages while I wait for her to answer. If I look at her too long my brain turns into soup, and my palms get sweaty, so I focus on the tiny screen and turn off the alarm. I look up and she’s staring at the ceiling, I watch her for a moment, tracing the lines of her face, memorizing every tiny detail I can in the dim light of the early morning. “Sooo,” I say, unsure how to talk suddenly. She smiles at me, and I feel like my heart is being strangled. “So.” She responds. “What do you want for breakfast?” We’re at my house after all, we’re usually at her house, so this is awkward. “I don’t have time for breakfast.” She answers, “I have to drive back to my house, and then drive to work.” “Oh.” I reply, I’m sure the disappointment is evident on my face and in my voice. I tentatively reach out and touch her hair, brushing it from her face. She doesn’t stop me, just leans into my touch. We’re close, incredibly close. We’ve fooled around a few times, nothing major, nothing that would change our relationship, much to my dismay. I want to be more than just best friends. I want to be girlfriends, I want to wake up to her every day. Well I wouldn’t wake up to her, since I don’t really sleep. I’d just spend every night staring at her, but that’s the way I wanna spend my nights. Forever. She could teach me to cook and force me to try more food. I could learn to cook her favorite meals and have them waiting for her when she got home. Or we could cook together every night, side by side. Smiling and giggling. I chase away the thoughts before I can break my own heart. “Can we just lay here for a minute then?” I ask her, it isn’t weird when there’s a long pause between us. She gets that it takes me a long time to reply, there’s so many gears that shift and pause and break in my head. And I don’t mind when she takes a while to answer either, because I love almost everything about her. “Yea sure.” She smiles at me. There’s an error message in my brain, and I think I’m going to blue screen. How does she always know what to say or do that will make me fall in love all the more. We chat about random things for a while, but my thoughts keep drifting back to the previous night. Oh yea, I forget to mention, our other friend was over at my apartment too. Her name is Amber and she’s like, really frigging awesome and a total badass. She’s taking like a million college classes, taking care of her grandmother and is basically the glue that holds her family together. I wanna be her when I grow up to be honest. She’s actually a week younger than me, but she’s my role model. Oh, I also never mentioned my best friend’s name. God, I’m dumb, her name is Taylor. I’m the worst narrator in the world just so you know Anyways, what I’m thinking about is when we played truth or dare and the dare where Taylor had to lick something edible off my neck. It was like, so hot and like, talk about arousal. Taylor is basically everything I’ve ever been attracted to in a person. Fun, motherly, sassy, playful, erotic (She has an OnlyFans). I just can’t see a world in which I wouldn’t have fallen madly in love with her. After a while she gets up, and I know it’s almost time for her to go. And I’m reeling, struggling to find an excuse for her to stay longer. If I feign an injury will she stay? If I say I’m sick will she baby me and kiss my forehead, tuck me in, making me soup. Scratch that, I fucking hate soup. She hugs me before she leaves and gives me a kiss on the forehead. I’m too short to kiss her back. I’m like shorter than most people. Amber and I are almost the same height though, which is nice. It means we actually walk near the same pace. Ok, that’s a lie, she walks faster than me, every walks faster than me. I have a limp, I don’t know why, but my hip always aches and I refuse to go to the doctor about it. Actually if I’m honest most of my body hurts constantly unless I’m asleep. Also my mind is constantly screaming at me, I have very dark thoughts sometimes. Thoughts that I should kill myself and stuff, thoughts that everyone hates me. When I was younger these thoughts would get to be so much that I would hurt myself in ways that caused people to look at me like I was crazy. And like, yeah, I probably am crazy, but… Ok I have nothing to add. I am crazy, most days I cry for hours and have to fight off the urge to just you know, end it all. Oof, that sounds depressing, but don’t worry about me, things will turn out the way they’re meant to. So if I die, then I die I suppose. She’s gone now and I don’t know what to do with myself. Taylor is my sun and I am the sunflower that follows her light. Is that super gay to say? Probably. But I am like, super gay. Like really gay. I like guys, but I LOVE girls. There’s just something about girls that draws me in. I’m a fly drawn to their sweet nectar. I stare up at the ceiling. I think back to the first time we kissed. It was at her house. We were cuddled up together, we we’re touching each other and stuff and then I just kissed her, and it was like kissing for the first time. It was like I had been drowning my entire life and I was suddenly given air for the first time. Ok, if you’re getting sick of hearing me blabber on and on about my best friend, fret not because the whole story wont be about my big unrequited crush. (But she will definitely be a huge main feature) So I’ve been watching Euphoria and I mean, the show is fantastic. Who the hell told Hunter Schafer she could be that fucking fantastic, how is this her first time acting? I’m jealous, I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid. I was good too. But my grandmother wouldn’t allow me to pursue my dreams, I would tell her about all these acting opportunities and she would just shoot me down. Acting was the one thing I was the most passionate about. I would read script after script and act out the characters, and I could have been someone. But then everything fell apart. And I crumbled into a shadow of my former self. I gave up on everything, I stopped living. I simply survived, but I was still a good actor, so at school no one ever suspected anything was wrong. No one would have thought that I was slicing my arms and legs to ribbons, that I was starving myself, that I was slamming my head against the walls at home. That my grandma was verbally abusing me daily… that I was being put down at every turn and growing increasingly desperate to find a reason to live for. At least no one suspected, until I couldn’t pretend anymore... Ok wow, that got dark, but you are the one who picked up a story literally titled Basketcase. What did you expect? Sunshine and roses? I wish that’s what my life had been. Ok, buckle up, this story gets dark, but there’s levity in the darkness.

equal, hermano

The second Rafael and Max were through the front door of the loft Max ducked, practically running, into their shared room the slam of the door reverberating across the whole apartment. Rafe let out a deep sigh, he knew his little brother would have locked the door by now so he dropped his bag by the door and shuffled towards the kitchen. Defeat was not a feeling Rafe enjoyed, neither was helplessness. Especially when it concerned his little brother.

He was born lucky, he knew it-he'd been raised to know and appreciate that fact. As a shadowhunter birthright is often the first thing you're taught at the institute. But his parents had also taught him the privilege it bought him in their world, the struggles he would never have to face all because he got lucky in the lottery of existence. Many in their world would tell him his brother was born unlucky, pulled the short straw. The same was often said about his Papa. Rafe never really understood it all, all he saw of them was the fact Max healed every injured creature he came across since the age of three, and the fact his Papa conjured waffles when he was sad, Max made runes dance on the ceiling in shimmering purple when studying was melting his brain, his Papa helped save the world. He didn't understand the people who hated them. He doubted he ever would. He also would never understand the people making his little brother want to lock himself away in their room. Rafe knew he needed to think of something. To him, Max had always been equal sometimes he even considered the fact Max was superior to him in plenty of ways. He and his family saw Max like that, but he wanted everyone to.

That's when the idea hit him. Rounding the corner into the kitchen, he heard the soft hum of classical music-his Dads favourite- and saw his fathers gently swaying along together as they prepared dinner. Perfectly in-sync with each other. He almost didn't want to interrupt. Almost.

'Uh. Dad, Papa, can I ask you about something?'

They both jumped a little at the presence of their son bursting the little bubble they'd created but composed themselves quickly.

Magnus spoke first.

'Of course sweet pee, always. What's up?' Both Magnus and Alec had lent against the breakfast bar, opposite their eldest son sitting on the bar stool.

'How does the alliance rune work?'

Neither of them was prepared for that question-it was written all over their faces. They shared a glance. With that glance they shared a whole a conversation, Alec placed his hand gently on the back of Magnus' arm just above his elbow-their secret sign of support.

'Well, your Aunt Clary saw it just before the war with Valentine.' Magnus always said his name like that, as if it left a bitter taste in his mouth. His whole family did. Rafe hadn't heard it all, but he was sure it did.

Alec continued, they always spoke like this. Flowing perfectly one after the other-together.

'It binds the two who share it, I and your father share it with each other. I can use your Papas abilities, as he can use mine. I could use it to conjure a portal, and he could light up a seraph blade.'

They both got a faraway look in their eyes as Magnus finished.

'I'm almost certain that rune saved at least a thousand lives. Certainly mine and your Dads. But it was also a changing moment in the relationship between Shadowhunters and Downworlders. We fought side by side. It was truly incredible.'

Alec's arm had slid entirely around Magnus' waist as he'd been talking. Rafe's perfect example of the two worlds unity. They'd always taught him unity was strength. Love was power, and alliance was always the answer.

He knew exactly what needed to be done. He smiled broadly, a determined glint in his eye.

'Are they busy tonight?' They know who he meant. 'Can you get them over in the next half hour? Uncle Simon, Aunt Clary, and Papa are especially important. Uhh, don't tell Jace and Izzy I said that. Or Grandma.'

Alec chuckled. 'Sure buddy, your secrets safe with us, I wouldn't wanna inflict that on anybody. We'll give them all a call now. But, uh, why?'

'I'll explain when they get here, just get calling it needs to happen soon-its important.'

And with that he was gone, flying off the bar stool into the office leaving his parents to share a confused look before dialing the phone.

Exactly thirty minutes later his whole family was assembled in the living room, Rafe sat crossed legged on the coffee table in the center. Magnus and Alec, Alec with a leg slung lazily across his husbands lap, next to each other on the sofa. Jace next to Alec, with his Aunt Clary on the arm of the chair one foot in Jace's lap, the other on Simon's shoulder. Who'd been forced to sit on the floor for arriving last. Aunt Izzy and his grandma sat on the armchairs either ends of the coffee table. The only one missing was Max. Everyone noticed. Rafe began.

'Okay, so you've all noticed our little buddy blueberry isn't here. In fact, he hasn't left our room since we got back from training today.'

Concern spread across each of their faces. Magnus took Alec's hand.

'That's because today someone hurt him, pretty badly. And I don't mean just physically, although that too.'

The concern melted into horror, and cold rage in all of them. Even Rafe felt the buds of it rising again in his stomach. It was Simon who spoke. Always his Uncle Simon to hold some composure. He was good like that.

'What exactly, did they do to him, Rafael?' His voice quiet, as if he didn't really want to hear. He imagined they probably didn't. They'd known Max since he was a baby, tiny and defenseless. That image still hadn't really gone away. Even now he was ten, and able to do magic it took Warlocks hundreds of years to master, he was the family baby.

'Well first of all Max beat this kid in a race, totally fair and square. We got told to use any ability we had, and well Max just happens to be able to teleport. Really they should have been more specific. But anyways. This kid was not happy about that, jealous if you ask me. His pride was hurt, badly. He storms over to Max and calls him a cheater. Then punches him.'

The atmosphere in the room said it all. Fury filled every member of his family, he felt bad telling them about it but they needed to know for this to make sense. He ignored the nauseating feeling rising in his throat as he remembered the rest. He continued.

'This kid is big, I'm talking my age, a head taller than Max and five years of ShadowHunter training literally written all over him. He's towering over Max and I can feel it, you feel his magic you know? That shit is strong-'

'Language Rafael. Just because you're fifteen doesn't mean the rules are off the table.' Cut in his Grandmother.

'Right, sorry. I go jogging over ready to fight this kid for squaring up my baby brother when he swings for him. Now we all know, me from experience, you don't swing at Max. In seconds he's across the room right into a wall.'

They share a glance between them all. The kind only a group of concerned adults can understand. Jace nods at Rafe, silently telling him to go on. Jace is never good at speaking when he's angry.

'Obviously, I'm turning to Max to calm him down when someones shoving me aside and catches Max off guard. He was looking at me, not focussing you know? He gets him. Right in the stomach.' Rafe's voice shakes a little as he continues.

'I'm seeing red. Max is barely recovering when I'm up.I-I broke his nose. You guys can punish me for that later, I don't care about a consequence. But now this kid is humiliated and in pain. A bad combination in a jackass.'

'I can't believe the trainers just let this happen.' Interrupts Maryse. Her voice stern, but the edges laced with anger.

'They weren't there, the kid picked the exact time an important Clave message came through so the trainer had to leave or something. But that isn't the actual bad part, not really anyways. He's yelling at me. A lot of swearing and cursing my family name which I was about to punch him again for-when he notices Max healing a little graze on my elbow from where he pushed me earlier. By the angel, Max is so soft. This kid says stuff that has totally destroyed Max okay. It's bad. I dunno if Papa is even gonna wanna hear it. That kinda stuff.'

Alec squeezes his hand Clary subconsciously looks down at Simon. So does his Aunt Izzy. They aren't stupid, they know the kind of stuff he means. Blue sparks are rising from his Papas other hand, a small burn mark forming in the arm of the chair. His Dads other hand is tapping hard against his thigh. He can see the anger in his Uncle's shoulders, both of them rigid all over. His Aunt Clarys eyebrows were knotted so tightly together it must have been hurting. His Aunt Izzy had an expression that could have killed, he imagined she was wishing it could.

'Its okay sweet pea. I've lived enough years to hear this.' Despite the usually soothing nickname, his Papas tone was ice cold.

Rafes own voice shook, a lump had risen in his throat. He was going to cry.

'He said 'I don't even know why this dirty warlock is even allowed in. He's half demon. Look at what he just did to me, he's dangerous. I guess you really can't tame half breed.' At this point, I'm screaming at him. Ready to rip into him, because Max apologises to plants he steps on and heals injured birds and sleeps in Batman pajamas.' At this point the tears are streaming down Rafes face, his hands shaking.

'He's not dangerous. He's so little he was just scared. Then he turns to me and says the worst part. 'I don't get why you're defending him. You're worse than that dad of yours. A few years ago you'd be hanging his horns on your mantlepiece as a prize. Why is he even part of your twisted little family? He can't even use a seraph blade. You've been tainted by the dirty demons in your house and your faggot of a dad. He then threw a blade at Max and taunted him because he cant use it and told him we'd never be really equal, no matter how brainwashed I was.' Rafe has said it all so fast he was out of breath, the front of his shirt wet with tears.

'Max broke one of his arms and both parts of his left leg. Blew up a light bulb then ran out the room. It took me twenty minutes to catch up with him. He was practically glowing purple he wouldn't let me touch him.'

Everyone in the room was stunned into silence. They'd all surpassed anger into full-blown rage.

'That's why I needed you all to come over. I'm gonna show him we've been equal since his tiny toddler hands made me a flower out of thin air. Aunt Clary, you can still draw that alliance rune right?'

Clary took a moment to compose herself, wiping a tear and sitting up a little straighter and pulling her mouth into a smile.

'Yeah Rafe, I can.'

'Perfect. I'll go get him.'

Outside their bedroom door, Rafe could feel the ice cold sadness of Max's magic. He loved his brother more than anyone, feeling his sadness broke his heart.

'Blueberry,hermano. I've got something to give you. Everyone's here, well because they all care Maxy. You've just gotta come into the living room.' He whispered through the gap under the door.

After a moment the door opened, revealing a tear stain Max. His blue cheeks burning a bright red, Rafe only ever saw them do that when he laughed too hard. He swore they never be red from tears as long as he lived. His blue eyes puffy, curly hair scruffy and disheveled from having a pillow over his head. He hadn't even gotten changed out of his clothes, one trouser leg bunched up around his knee.

'Okay.' Was all he said, barely a whisper. He trailed behind Rafe into the living room.

Concerned eyes follow them both as Rafe goes back to the coffee table. He moves over and gestures for Max to sit next to him. He refuses. Max won't meet any of there eyes. Not even Simons. Max always favoured Simon a little, he could see the heartbreak on his uncles face.

Suddenly Rafe was angry. Angry someone had made his brother feel he didn't deserve to be with his own family Anger Max had believed him.

'Maxy, sit next to me.' He patted the spot next to him again and smiled up at him. 'Come on buddy.'

Max sat on the edge of the table looking down at his Star Wars socks. A gift from Simon the birthday after they'd watched them all together. Max looked like he was about to start burning them off. His parents were holding each others hands so tight their knuckles were white. His Papa looked close to tears but he was wearing his unglamoured eyes- a statement.

'Okay, Aunt Clary lets go.' Rafe stated a cold determination in his tone.

She drew the rune on a piece of paper, it flowing perfectly from her hand.

Rafe took the piece of paper and began copying the rune onto the palm of his hand.

'Turn and face me.' Max did, still not looking up keeping a distance between their knees. Rafe moved forward so they were touching and placed his palm over Max's heart.

'Now you listen to me, Maxwell. You're sat in the middle of a group of people who found a baby, who was bright blue and didn't even consider you being anywhere but with them. They gave you the name Max as a gift. You have a better heart and soul then many a shadowhunter, you can do way more than any of us ever could. So quit crying. And give me your hand.' Rafe smiled as his brother finally met his gaze and placed his hand palm up in his hand.

Rafe traced the rune.

A surge of magic flooded through his system and he almost fell off the table. But something had caught him. His own palm was holding him up, three inches off the ground.

'Now that. Is awesome' Rafe laughed, sat up and looked at his brother.

He handed him a witchlight.

Max hesitated for a moment, he closed his hand around the stone. He'd try this a few times before, the stone always remained cold and blank in his hand. When he opened his palm the stone was alight with a bright light, tinted slightly purple. His face lit up almost as bright as the stone in his hand, and suddenly the tension in the room snapped and everyone jumped and cheered.

'Equal, hermano.' Whispered Rafe, so only his brother could hear.

'Equal, brother.' Max beamed back, the light behind his eyes was enough thanks for Rafe.

The next day when the boys were training together, testing their new found skills Max noticed him coming. Rafe felt the spike in magic as he entered the training room-coming straight for Max.

'Haven't learned your lesson yet warlock?' He sneered.

'Let me make it clear. You can't use our weapons or our runes. So why are you even here?' He dangled a seraph blade in front of Max's face and laughed.

Max took it from him, smiled and lit it up.

Rafe had never been prouder, and when they walked home Max was practically dancing down the street in joy.

That night all the family were over for dinner, Max smiled the entire time.

Sunni's thoughts on the Tryforce album!

I do this everytime GG puts out a new album (i THINK I did one for Cool Patrol also but i gotta check- ANYWAY)

Here's my post of what I thought of the album and, this is my opinions so not everyone will agree. Take it with a grain of salt, I'm just sayin how I feel:)

RATING SYSTEM IS 10/10 process. 10 being best, 5 being average, 1 being buttfucking bad.

Intro:

It was cute, a nice way to start the album off with a bang. I will say tho, I noticed the theme of "its our last album" really hangs over the whole tracklist from this and that kinda throws off the good vibes. Like, yeah its the last one, but maybe not make it a huge deal that it is.

8/10

Hardest Game in the Fucking World:

I'm in the middle with this one. On the one hand, it's Dan and Arin lamenting on how hard Dark Souls is (and tbh same), but on the other hand...it's literally them lamenting about how hard the game is. Also it's from their perspective and not a game character which is weird but a cool change of pace. The lady in the intro got me confused tho, like WHO ARE YOU???

6/10

A Boy and his Boat:

My favorite of the songs of the ones they did as an MV. I love the beat so much, it has that smooth feel to it like I wanna just chill out by a pool. Dan sounds sooooo good in the bg vocals, and tbh the Zelda raps are always the best so- I'm glad this lived up to the hype. Side note the Disneyland line got me all happy inside XP

10/10

Filling in the Name Of:

So I guess this is a Tetris one? It was a little hard to figure out what it was till I listened a bit longer- and I guess Arin is the long piece that gets used all the time. A pretty funny concept xp I got all happy when Brian showed up- boy needs to be in more songs like when he was in Release the Kraken👍👍 the guitar and Arin excitement is damn good too omg

9/10

Welcome to the Mario Party

Okay this is the one I got all butthurt about before when the video came out- it's supposed to be a smooth jam and Arin is imitating Snoop Dogg, but ehhhh it's kinda just meh for me. The bridge is okay, the beat is nice, I kinda love/hate the inclusion of TWRP, like them being in it makes it sound like a real party slow jam, but also kinda cramps the style of the whole album since this is the only song that has this style to it. Also Dan does fuck all in this one and sounds super monotoned- I liked the line about him losing his invite in the mail tho- but overall, meh

5/10

Dream Daddy- A Dad Dating Skit

....the fuck was this crap?

@ GG, please don't make it like you're money hungry, because that whole skit, makes Arin and Dan seem like they're doing this for quick cash and that's REALLY not good. Couldn't we have gotten a dream daddy rap? No? ....k then. Still sucks tho.

3/10

Donkey Kong Joonyer:

It wasn't good. Like...at all. Its honestly the worst rap of the whole album. It's a one note joke, repeated for the whole run time. And it's not funny. Kinda offensive, and also really fucking dumb.

1/10

A Wild Guitar Solo Appears!:

HELL YEAH A POKEMON RAP!

Honestly this one brought back memories of me trying to learn the last pokemon rap and then listening to the first one at my grandmother's house YEARS ago. A lotta nostalgia in this one, plus the guitar solo was pretty sweet. I will say tho, I don't know if imma remember this one as much as the others. Still really liked it but I feel the other two were better? Also loved the interaction with Ash and Pikachu, it was honestly hella cute. But overall, a very good song!

7/10

The Simple Plot of Kingdom Hearts

...alright so....

This was the song I was dreading because, you guys know I'm a big kh fan and I was thinking I was gonna love it or hate it. Honestly, this one is pretty cute, and I really liked how much the announcer was actually trying to make sense of the plot this time instead of getting butthurt that it's going on for too long xp I did notice tho, they only cover the first game and not the entire storyplot which Id say is a missed opportunity but also a good choice since you don't wanna confuse everyone like crazy, even tho the firsy game KINDA does that anyway. They also made it a big deal that hey, it's the last album this is the last song last last LASTONE, and I'm not a fan of that but fine -_- it was still cute tho- gotta listen to it again to catch the points of the game they made.

8/10

Arin Checks the Mic:

ARIN WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO BE SO GOOD AT RAPPING?? LIKE, I WAS IN SHOCK THE WHOLE TIME, HE SOUNDS SO GOOD, HE WAS GOLDEN

10/10

Blowing the Payload:

Eh. It's the overwatch rap and I'm not 100% into the game anyway from the one time I played and failed miserably, but I mean- it's an okay concept. Reminds me a lot of Robots in Need of Disguise, with it being super mundane but shit happens that completely ridiculous. I did make a point before tho, Dan sounds completely unenthusiastic the whole time and yeah he's playing a guy who's playing other people so the voice shouldn't technically change, but I feel like it should have just to make it funnier (like the guy is trying so hard to get into a character to come off convincing) but then again, him not giving a shit is also kinda funny? So meh, in the middle with that. Not a fan of Arin yelling the whole time tho- it's just got KINDA annoying. Just a smidge.

6/10

Vegeta's Serenade:

Im confused as to why there's a Dragonball rpa in a video game album but sure- OKAY ARIN I STG YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME CRY, YOU SOUND SO BEAUTIFUL ACTUALLY SINGING THIS TIME AND IT'S SO NICE- WHY DIDN'T YOU AND DAN SING TOGETHER THO- MISSED OPPORTUNITY GODDAMMIT BUT IT WAS STILL SUPER GOOD

10/10

This Song Sucks:

Not gonna say this song sucks but- it's not....good either? Lol

It's also in the middle for me- its them poking fun at themselves for the album layout where again, they say it's the last one yada yada, guys don't hammer it in- we get it.

That aside, they were kinda just throwing out what I assume is scrapped ideas for songs they never did- sad but tbh I can see how this would be a good idea and I like it. The Sonic Boom slam tho, BEST PART AND I WAS SHOOKETH.

7/10

Outro:

A perfect sendoff to the whole album. Not my favorite outro but then again, the outtros and intros were never my favorite anyway? But it got me all sentimental- this is probably their last album (if jamming it down our throats that it was the last wasn't already obvious). But still, it's cute xp

9/10

FINAL THOUGHTS

The whole album itself, has this kinda unfocused feeling, like they don't exactly have a consistent flow of songs that go with the mood- its just a "throw to the wall and see what sticks" kinda feel, for me anyway.

I think in the long run, Player Select will still be my favorite along the albums, and Tryforce might be...number 2? Yeah the first Starbomb Album is not my favorite I'm sorry xp

Then again, Starbomb 1 had more songs I hated than actually liked, so this is an improvement.

As the last album goes, it could have been a lot better but for what we got? Pretty good! Had some stinkers tho, not gonna deny that.

Damn guys, this has been a long ass journey, and Starbomb-thought not as special to me as NSP, still holds a lot of nostalgia and sentimental value to me. Tryforce isn't the best of the albums, but its a really nice sendoff to all these years of Starbomb. Hope it isn't the LAST time tho...

𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊 𝐍𝐔𝐌𝐁𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐍𝐄   ——   𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒅𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒍𝒐𝒑𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 !

❛❛ Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. ❜❜ — Iain Thomas

001. 𝒆𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒐𝒓…

sun or moon? stars or clouds? sea or sky? sunrise or sunset? early morning or late night? snow or rain? pastel or primary colours? hot chocolate or coffee? dusk or dawn? baths or showers? swimming or running? singing or dancing? paperback or hardcover? misty mornings or rainy mornings? soft pillows or hard pillows? pop or punk?

002. 𝒊𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆…

… forced to choose between saving your best friend or yourself, what would your choice be?

❛ My best friend. ❜ It seems as though there’s a lump in her throat as she speaks, her voice sure and strong. ❛ Far more readily than I would save myself. It’s --- It’s not right. It wouldn’t be right for me to --- for me to not save her, save them. ❜ She goes silent for a few more seconds, her eyebrows raising as she asks a simple question. ❛ Why, what did the others say? ❜

If ever you’ve already asked a question but already know the answer, it’s this one: Dorcas suffers from chronic heroism, and would save her best friend far more readily than she would ever consider herself worth saving. There’s no ‘forcing’ about it - Dorcas would choose others over herself in a heartbeat. 

… trapped on a deserted island, who would you want to have with you?

❛ Probably Calliope or Emmeline. Maybe, maybe Lily. Or Alice. I mean, it’s kind of impossible to choose, right? You can have someone you get along with, or someone who you know is better at magic than you, or someone who knows stuff about surviving on a deserted island, or literally anyone famous. ❜ Dorcas shrugs. The question is more casual than the others, and her shoulders droop as she breathes in and out deeply.

… able to turn back time and given the chance to change one thing, would you?

❛ My - my brother. I’d go back, for my brother. So I could save him. Or die in his place. Anything. Just - my brother. He should be here. ❜ Her voice is panicked, now. It’s a question she hadn’t been expecting, and she knows traveling through time is possible - time turners - but she doesn’t trust herself to use them. She doesn’t trust herself to save him without breaking everything. She didn’t save him the first time. What’s to say fear won’t paralyze her again?

… able to see the future, would you try to change it, or let it happen as it should?

❛  I mean, if things are happy in the end, I’d probably let it happen as it should. But i’s not about me or my happiness. If the people that I love are happy, then I’d keep it the same. But I’d change it in a heartbeat if I knew the end of all this was anything but simple, pure happiness for any of them. ❜

If Dorcas knew what would happen to her, to her friends, her life wouldn’t be the thing that she’d want saved. No. Marlene dies soon after she does - they think it’s by Travers and his crowd, but nobody ever finds out. He gets her entire family. There are no more McKinnons that will ever grace the grounds of Hogwarts. Gideon and Fabian Prewett - brave, strong, good - are killed by five Death Eaters that same August. The ground becomes hallowed, sacred, and nobody can speak their names without thinking of Molly - poor, dearest Molly. Lily and James have a son, they get to be happy, but they’re locked away in Godric’s Hollow, and it’s there that they die, only months after Dorcas had. Their son lives, but his life is scarred, and set out for him, already. The life of a martyr. Sirius wastes away in Azkaban, and when he gets his only taste of freedom, it’s tinged by imprisonment in a house he never wanted to call home again in his life, and then he dies, and there’s no body to bury. Peter’s a traitor, until he has one moment - one shining moment of humanity - and then he is dead by his own hand. Remus lives an entire life without his best friends, goes near mad with the grief of that loss, and after finding Sirius again, he loses him so soon, and then dies himself, too. 

Emmeline lives. She gets to live, for a shining, glorious number of years, but they’re numbered. They’ve always been numbered. He comes for her, as he came for Dorcas, and she dies in the street. Alice is tortured into insanity like Frank is - they become Aurors and are successful pillars of the community and then it happens. They get their happiness, their son, but it is ripped away. He’s raised by his grandmother - formidable and strict, always criticizing him for not being the father he’d never known. Nobody ever knows what becomes of Regulus Black. Nobody ever talks about his story, or how he’s a good person, in his own way. Andromeda and Ted get married. They have a daughter, with a name as long and complex as Andromeda’s own, but then Ted goes away. He goes into hiding, and he doesn’t come home. His name is on the list of deaths announced on the radio, and Andromeda’s world stops, too, when she loses her daughter as well. Emma Vanity has a career in Quidditch - she lives through both wars, and is happy. She’s not untouched by the ravages of war, on either front, but it doesn’t hurl her into the waves like it had with the others. Lucius and Narcissa live. Lucius, imprisoned for far less years than he deserves, gets a pardon at the very end of things - they both see their son grow up, see the son they had raised to be a snake marry, and have children of his own. Mary survived, but, God, at what cost? At what cost? She loses her best friends, her family. 

Severus dies as he had lived - hopelessly in love with Lily Evans, staring into the last piece of her has left - her son’s eyes, but he has become someone not even Dorcas would recognize - a man of casual cruelty, who bullies young Neville Longbottom until he’s his worst fear. But there are no more McKinnon’s. No more Meadowes. No more Prewett’s. No more Black’s. No more Tonks’. The war that they had thought would be final isn’t. They are raised to become soldiers, some less touched by this reality than others, but it comes to them in the end, and one by one, their lives are torn apart. But, in the end, they get to be happy. There’s happiness even in their failure to surely end things. They don’t get to live until their eighties, sit back on their rocking chairs and reminisce about the old days. They die young, but some of their children live. They fight like hell to live, but they do. It’s the question of whether or not it’s worth it. They are children born to be soldiers, who bring soldiers of their own into the world without knowing it. Harry Potter is saddled with a fate worse than death - he’s raised like a pig for slaughter, and people don’t talk about that enough. He survives, he wins, but at what cost? Nightmares, pain, horror? For the rest of his life? His scar may not hurt anymore, but his limbs ache, and he remembers the feeling of someone in his mind more vividly than he ever wanted to. His friends, his friends, die. Fred and George Weasley? Dead. Remus? Dead. Tonks? Dead. Colin Creevey? Dead. Happiness isn’t something easily measured - they are happy, but it’s always tinged by the fact that a lot of their problems haven’t gone away. Psychologically, the harm of war stays with you forever. 

Dorcas would want everyone else to live. She’d throw herself in front of that Killing Curse for anyone, for anything. If she knew, she’d want everything rewritten. It would begin and end with her, nobody else, and she’s so foolishly optimistic that it might actually work. But the thing is she doesn’t know, and if she did, she’d surely go mad with the weight of it, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t change it - just that she wouldn’t be the same. And in the end, when she dies, she isn’t the same as we know her now. She still doesn’t kill, but she’s raised her wand far more times than she ever thought she’d have to, and she still holds out hope for everyone, but it’s not rose tinted anymore. The sad truth of the matter is that right now, she’d die for any of the people I mentioned above. Any of them. 

003. 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒔…

what’s your character’s myers-briggs personality type?

INFP — The Mediator

Mediator personalities are true idealists, always looking for the hint of good in even the worst of people and events, searching for ways to make things better. While they may be perceived as calm, reserved, or even shy, Mediators have an inner flame and passion that can truly shine. Comprising just 4% of the population, the risk of feeling misunderstood is unfortunately high for the Mediator personality type – but when they find like-minded people to spend their time with, the harmony they feel will be a fountain of joy and inspiration.

what’s your character’s alignment?

Neutral Good

Creatures of neutral good alignment believe that there must be some regulation in combination with freedoms if the best is to be brought to the world--the most beneficial conditions for living things in general and intelligent creatures in particular. Creatures of this alignments see the cosmos as a place where law and chaos are merely tools to use in bringing life, happiness, and prosperity to all deserving creatures. Order is not good unless it brings this to all; neither is randomness and total freedom desirable if it does not bring such good. Neutral goods value both personal freedom and adherence to laws. They feel that too many laws may unnecessarily restrict the freedom of good beings. They also believe that too much freedom may not protect society as a whole and encourage counterproductive divisions and in-fighting. They promote governments which hold broad powers, but do not interfere in the day-to-day lives of their citizens.

if you had to use one tv trope to describe your character, what would it be?

Skilled, but Naive or Wide-Eyed Idealist

(Okay, trying to gather all my thoughts together into one post. I remember doing this years ago but looking back at it, I feel like I can do better. Not as if it was terrible, but I feel like I need to revisit it because again, it involves Hibiki’s character even still. 

So! Here I go again, haha. Might be kind of long since it includes a recap and my thoughts/headcanons in general.

Starting off, here’s a warning: These are just my feelings/thoughts on the whole thing and also a warning for abuse mention.

Okay, so a recap first---

Hibiki has always just been an ordinary child. It was really the concert where her life ended up taking a turn for the worst. So of course, everyone knows about the whole thing of that; Hibiki ends up being injured and nearly dies thanks to the shards that shot off Kanade’s Gear. So from there, Hibiki’s life begins to spiral. 

After her surgery, she endured rehab. Throughout this, she made sure to push herself through it all, mainly for the sake of her family so they wouldn’t have to worry about her. And like it says in the keywords, her father was actually super thrilled about her being alive.

I think Akira loves Hibiki; that’s his daughter so he loves her. Hibiki remembers him fondly for being a great dad and it was only recently after the accident that he actually began to change. The thing with this is that after the concert, as stated prior, he was thrilled Hibiki was one of the survivors. However, because the company he works for found this out (the boss actually lost his own child in the tragedy), Akira lost his job and was basically humiliated, all because his daughter survived but his boss didn’t.

Surely he had no other way to cope with such a loss (not being able to provide for his family etc.) so he ended up turning to drinking. While this was happening, Hibiki was receiving harassment from her fellow students in school. This sort of information can vary but in my head, I’d imagine it goes beyond just making marks on her desk and calling her names. It can very well end up leading to physical violence (things like pushing/shoving/throwing rocks etc.) So not only was she tormented emotionally, she was tormented physically.

I don’t think the adults were particularly useful either. If there was, they couldn’t do much since I’d imagine that sort of stuff would get out of control. I truthfully could see them turning a blind eye to it but again, this is more of a personal thing I can imagine and not anything officially stated. Regardless, it wasn’t easy for her whenever she went to school.

On the other hand, whenever she would make her way home, she’d be faced with the turmoil there. Ever since Akira turned to alcohol, he had become increasingly violent. The keywords officially state that he became violent to those in the household, which would be Hibiki, her mother and grandmother. They don’t specifically state what it was that he did, but saying that he became violent to them specifically hints to a lot of things. He very well could have put his hands on them or if not, then it could be something like throwing things at them in their general direction, etc. This is a serious topic that I would never want to take lightly or mess up, so I’m sure everyone knows that this can be taken numerous different ways.

There’s no specified amount of time of how long this lasted, but he eventually left the household and never came back. Personally (in my opinion), all of this made Hibiki push him further in the back of her mind. For her to straight up say she doesn’t have a dad in GX just spoke volumes to me. And she repeats it numerous times within the season too, even saying to his face that he “wasn’t her dad anymore”. Hibiki has a habit of ignoring her issues, ESPECIALLY in the beginning of the series.

Of course the hurt she faced was actually really painful so in a way, a person can see it as her having a coping mechanism of merely ignoring them to make it seem like they’d go away or be solved on their own without her involvement. Her father is actually like that as well (though they clearly handled it in two different ways and it doesn’t excuse his actions but I’ll get to that later). Aoi (Hibiki’s VA) has actually stated this in the Symphogear LIVE 2016. She says that Hibiki was a lot like her father in terms of running away from responsibility but she’s had the time to learn and grow to become better while her father didn’t. (he of course learns in GX when he meets back up with Hibiki again).

Due to Hibiki learning over the years/seasons, I believe that she sees he’s actually trying to change and become better and so she takes that first step with him to attempt that change. But again, this doesn’t mean that everything is all fine and dandy super quickly. I truly don’t believe that Akira would go and live with them right after this; it would take some time for them to work things out before he can be trusted back in the same house with them. For all they know, he could fall right back into the same habits but again, that doesn’t mean they still can’t help him. I’d say this is what Hibiki is dealing with behind the scenes and such. The show may not do this, and may say that everything is fine now, but in my brain that’s not how it works so if roleplays, I’m treating it as an issue that still needs resolving and a lot of work.

Because...as much as she said she didn’t have a father, I don’t believe Hibiki hates him at all. Did she feel betrayed and highly upset due to his behavior? Yes, I’m certain and she deserves to feel that way after everything that happened to her in the past. I think she’s stuck; like she loves her dad and would love for him to come back but after everything he’s done, she felt betrayed and didn’t want to see him anymore so she “erased” him from her life. It’s a very complicated feeling I’m sure, at least that’s how I write her. You don’t want to hate them because they weren’t 100% a bad person, but you can’t forgive them so easily after what they did because it just felt like HE didn’t love her as much as she thought he did. But because she’s done some growing of her own, she knows about second chances. This whole entire thing with her father was one issue that she could never get resolved unless he came back because she found her family to be broken the entire time. 

Hibiki, who’s normally known to be optimistic and see the bright side of things, believed her family was so broken that it would never be fixed. That it would never be the same ever again. And technically, their family won’t be the same but she has a bit more hope now.

Hibiki’s reactions in GX, in my opinion, were great to showcase her bouncing emotions due to all of this. Her newfound responsibility for having an actual complete Gungnir made her scared/nervous to a point that it sounded like she got jealous of Maria using it again in episode 4 (I think this can stem from her past as well possibly; as a girl who’s been constantly told that she didn’t matter or haven’t had anything noteworthy to contribute compared to people who died or people around her, she could have felt the pressure of attempting to fill Maria’s shoes or just in general of being the only Gear user available at the time. This can also fit into how she gets into trying to help people in the first place which originally could have been her just trying to find her place in the world until it ends up becoming more of a thing she loves to do and not out of guilt or anything like that. Or I’m looking too deep into this lol). And then right after that, she came face to face with her dad in episode 7 and immediately she runs away (understandably so). I can’t imagine all the emotions she was going through in the span of those few seconds after seeing him again.

But then the next episode, episode 8, she tells Miku that she was grateful that her friend was making her face it rather than run away (and ironically that episode is named something similar to that). But of course, that meet up with him didn’t go so well and Hibiki ended up getting mad once again. Now an issue I’ve had shows up in this episode because they made it seem like Akira didn’t care whatsoever about how Hibiki was feeling. The girl was literally shaking the entire time (not to mention her expression in almost a constant scowl) and got up from the table to leave. And yet, despite asking what’s wrong or why she’s leaving, he just gives her the check to pay for the food.

The check really isn’t what bothers me, it’s just his whole demeanor of that scene. Even after she snatches it out of his hand and runs out, he just looks baffled as to why she acted like that and went back to eating. Now, he very well could have had some sort of epiphany after all that because he began to constantly call Hibiki but she ignored him the entire time.

I can understand why Hibiki would feel afraid of reaching back out to him. As she states in episode 9, she’s afraid of it not working out but it didn’t mean she wasn’t hoping for a good outcome. She took what Miku said to heart and decided to brave another encounter with her father. And from there, in episode 11, he seemed to actually showcase how he was trying to change, trying to be a better man (but once again, even in that very episode, Hibiki said that he wasn’t her dad anymore). 

Now in this episode, we find out where she got her catchphrase (”It’s okay, everything’s fine!”; various different translations but basically all the same) and see Akira stand up for Hibiki instead of running away, which Hibiki believed he was going to do again. Now I kinda get this action, yet not at the same time.

I say not because it felt so rushed, like his character immediately changed out of nowhere. But at the same time, Hibiki has had since episode 7 for all this to fester and be worked on in the background (her being angry and not agreeing to talk to her dad for multiple episodes and he could very well have gone through something himself in the midst of it. Perhaps I should say the presentation of it wasn’t to my liking but what can you do about that? Haha). So I was glad that those feelings had a chance to fester and for Hibiki to personally deal with these emotions that we don’t see from her very often.

But at the end of the day, I really do hope for them to have a happy conclusion, I just don’t believe that it will be that easy/simple. It will take time for them to get on the same page again and that’s something I try my best to implement in writing, if it ever comes to such a topic like that anyway.

In terms of the abuse though, there’s literally no way that I excuse that. No matter what type it is (physically and/or emotional) it has taken a toll on Hibiki in certain ways, I’m sure. I attempt to leave slight hints here and there about what it may have done even if she may not realize it but I’m also attempting to be SUPER careful with it.

Again, for people who don’t know, I write Hibiki having issues with alcohol, mainly because her father used it as a way to cope. She doesn’t drink it herself and normally feels uneasy being around it or people drinking it around her. Hibiki is smart enough to know that not everyone handles alcohol the same way and not everyone becomes violent because of it. But it doesn’t erase her unease.

It’s simply a very easy reminder of those times her father was violent because he was mainly drunk (which is the main reason, once again, why I don’t think they’d be living in the same house. I refuse to believe that, I’m sorry. Lol. That man will just have to live in a damn apartment somewhere else and they make contact like that or something I don’t know).

There’s a lot more other things that can reflect in her actions today due to what she went through back then but I’m also very bad at explaining that and hopefully it kind of just shows through my writing/portrayal. Things like this is what makes me nervous about writing Hibiki because I don’t want to write her as simply being optimistic; I want to write and explore the struggles she has with her emotions/thoughts; those darker parts of her that she keeps hidden. But when I say it like that, it makes it sound like I’d be making her angsty but that’s not my intention at all. 

My intention is to write her realistically as best as I can. Hibiki means a lot to me, so I don’t want to mess this up. This is also why it means a lot to me that people enjoy my portrayal of her. There’s a lot more to her than being goofy; she’s awkward, she gets sad, she thinks a lot about things when it really boils down to it (especially now) and I want to convey that in my writing.

This whole thing is really a mess still and I’m not sure if anything I said makes any sense. If not, I’m sorry. I wanted to try and get things straight in my head again after seeing how people react whenever GX is brought up, especially when it comes to her dad. And with the official Symphogear twitter having a rewatch of all the seasons, it’s bound to come back up. (They’re currently on G so not on GX just yet).

But yeah, sorry. I probably make no sense. The bottom line is; I totally get the issues of GX when it comes to this topic. It’s not easy, it’s VERY tricky and controversial territory because it deals with something very serious, which is abuse. But looking on the other side, the man did at least attempt to be better in the end, even if I don’t like how it was handled. My main goal is for Hibiki to be happy.

Once again, I repeat; this isn’t me saying his actions are excused.  I keep thinking people will believe, with me not hating GX or Akira with every fiber of my being like everyone else, means that I excuse his actions.

I don’t, nor do I encourage them. If he falls right back into that lifestyle and puts his hands on them, then that’s it. He’s done. Technically, he should have been done right after putting his hands on them in the first place but Symphogear wouldn’t do that. It was a hole in Hibiki’s heart so they brought him in so she can finally have that hole repaired...at least somewhat. 

And he’s not living with them (in my mind). That’s the important thing. Lol. But that’s canon stuff; in RP, I’ve done various different things as to where he never actually came back or she found another parental figure to fill that void (someone other than Genjurou because seriously, Genjurou is like the best adoptive dad in this show). So thanks to RP, there’s a lot more room to work with. But I just thought I’d state my opinion for canon things. Might as well say I’m 50/50.

ALRIGHT, I’m done. Again, this probably makes no sense, so I’m sorry. I’ll go now. Lmao.)

Yugioh S2 Ep 33:  ᵇˡᶦᵐᵖ ʙʟɪᴍᴘ  BLIMP ԀꟽI⅂ꓭ

I usually don’t really do these during weekdays but lets just say today was a day where I felt the need for a healthy distraction.

Ah, it is episode 33. There are...so many episodes in a Yugioh season, guys. I was just not aware. But, here we are at episode 33 and we are finally going to start the finals.

For reals this time, no one’s going to get engaged, no one’s going to randomly murder a bunch of people. We are officially starting the finals this episode.

Sort of.

Man, Kaiba and his butterfly-wing shoulderpads. Sometimes it just looks like he’s just going to gently flutter away.

Also in this stadium with Kaiba and Mokuba is Marik and Odion, who is just as confused as to where the hell everyone went and why the hell Mai just flew by being carried off by a ninja in a jet pack. The hours it must have taken to wait for Yugi’s crew to walk 2 single blocks was enough time for Marik to formulate yet another back-up plan. I want to say this is plan #9.

It’s a good thing Pharaoh can’t read anymore, considering that Marik’s just walking around in a crop hoodie with a tattoo that just reads “SEASON 2 SPOILERS, PHARAOH, DO NOT READ” in hieroglyphs.

But if you wait long enough, even Yugi and his friends will accidentally wander the correct direction and actually show up.

(read more under the cut)

Not a joke, this is actually an unfinished public works project, congratulations, Kaiba Corps, there is nothing that Kaiba won’t try and then fail at, at least once.

Anyways, this shady-as-hell unfinished stadium seems kind of like a good place to get murdered and then tossed into a cement slab. Which honestly, would have been a very likely end to this season, considering what we have been through so far.

Marik decides to sneak around the bleachers, probably on all fours so no one would spot him, jump out a window, and then come in through the front door like he’s not been here this entire time. As he did, apparently he made everything very, very windy. In fact, everyone with a millennium item brought with them a spooooooky gust of wind except I think Yugi, who is probably too short to pull that one off.

Yugi did manage to get the vibe of “something bad is coming” before Marik entered the field, but like...there’s so many bad things at this point, Yugi. So many people that could be. It feels like that might be half the cast. You could say that at any given moment in this season and be absolutely right.

So, after possessing Tea for a second, for...some reason? Did she need threatening? Anyway, after doing that, Namu is in with the gang because literally nothing will prevent Yugi from becoming a friend with you, especially if you are trying to hide the fact that you just tried to kill him by drowning him in the ocean.

Funny how instead of them asking how the hell Namu got away from cultists, they have to fixate on the mystery of “is Bakura good at cards!?” because, and I kinda forgot about this, I guess they don’t remember the last time they saw Bakura play. How far up their own ass is Yugi and Joey to assume that just because Bakura doesn’t brag about cards all day, that Bakura hasn’t been equally good at cards? They kind of deserve this.

Yeah and PS Kaiba absolutely did not check the satellite to get the DL on why the hell Bakura got so many cards. Dayjob Saruman I guess went home for the evening so...although that shadow game was definitely being recorded on a computer, we’ll never know what that mess looked like on Kaiba’s end. Like there’s just three duel disks covered in ectoplasm hanging out in the cemetery and no one seems to have noticed?

Like for a competition that was huge about security and tech, they only seemed to watch the God Cards players and then Mokuba randomly monitored Joey Wheeler for some reason. That was it. That was all the people the Kaiba’s cared about.

So although Marik and Odion and Bakura could probably take on everyone right now. Like riiiight now. They decide not to because, well, I nearly forgot about someone that I was really looking forward to seeing again, that’s right, my favorite boy!

AW THERE HE IS!

to quote one of my actual favorite earworms,

Where has this big boy been hiding!? He’s freakin ginormous, but apparently he was just hiding behind a soft cloud or something, in anticipation of this grand reveal in a very sketch unfinished stadium that’s probably being used to bet on bum fights.

Mokuba gets excited for the first time since...I don’t remember if Mokuba’s ever actually been excited before. Like I’m digging through my memories here and no, Mokuba’s been mostly abducted, angry, bored, or scared, this is the first time he’s exuded that pure pre-teen energy.

PS a blimp’s max flying height is 1500 ft, and what surprised me the most about this was realizing that this entire time we’ve been watching this show, we’ve been getting measurements in US metrics. Didn’t realize that before today.

Also, on my wikipedia deep dive into blimps, I found out that like...this is probably not a “blimp,” but actually a semi-rigid airship but...I’m gonna keep calling it a blimp. Don’t @ me, blimp fandom on tumblr.

It’s so good to see more Blimp. Even though...probably the worst place to throw a tourney? Like...how many people are you even gonna fit in there? Like...is this televised? I mean I don’t know how Kaiba’s marketing works for this, honestly, he took over every TV in the city to get people to join this tourney, and now that it’s in full swing no one can watch it?

Whatever, it’s a blimp.

Duke Devlin is still here, despite the fact that I don’t think he’s going to do anything for the rest of this season. I guess they had to promote that gameboy game so his face will just be in the background always although as a dice player he um...he has no purpose here.

In fact it makes no sense, he works with Pegasus who straight up killed Mokuba and Kaiba like a month ago, why are they just letting him on their airship? Whatever.

I dunno, maybe there’s more that Duke will do eventually, but he just seemed like a replacement for Bakura at first--and Bakura’s back now, so why’s he still here?

Ishizu is here, and while every other time we’ve seen Ishizu, she’s been talking our ears off, the one time she should probably say something, she instead decides to lock herself inside her bedroom and avoid everyone.

I guess she was mostly avoiding Marik so they don’t have a sibling laser fight in the hull of a Blimp. That would have made things so awkward for Yugi and Bakura. Especially Yugi, who still doesn’t know that thing around his neck shoots freakin lasers.

Props the background artists who had to draw billions of small little buildings AKA the worst background in the world to draw. I will go through hoops to avoid drawing even a single building, but to have to sit down and paint just a whole page of buildings that someone’s going to smack a foreground on anyway? Mad respect. If you look closely you’ll see that this artist had to use a ruler and perspective and other annoying tools that take up time and energy. Even using editing tools like using blocks of black color to imitate the look of rooftops and crowded structures, it probably took them a few hours to make the background that went in a .2 second scene.

They’ll probably reuse these buildings later, don’t get me wrong, but oi, I feel for them in my carpel tunnel bones.

Seto keeps telling Yugi that they’re rivals but I don’t think anyone on this show other than Joey thinks of Seto as much of a rival at all. You almost feel a little bad for him, like he’s in a weird...hate triangle, but very much on the loosing end of it.

Next we get a good look at Kaiba’s interior design decisions, and much like his mansions, it’s a lot of very unexpected soothing pastels. Like this is a lot of seafoam blue. How can someone so angry make something so grandma-zen? Is it actually Kaiba’s grandmother who is just slapping down all these paint chips when he’s not looking? I mean it’s got muted pink stools even, with a makeup station.

Tea, Tristan, and Duke have no rooms to go to because they aren’t actually part of this competition, so they’re just squatting around until they’ll probably all end up crashing with Mokuba, the only other person who is not dueling in this competition. Reminds me a lot of the first week of college, where everyone is just coasting dorm room to dorm room and there’s like 10 people there who actually don’t actually go there but want to hang out with their high school friends and they just end up sleeping in your room for 7 days until they read your other friend’s diary, get hella indignant, and then storm off back to California. My apologies to my Freshman year roommate who had to put up with all that girl drama.

And because it’s this show, the men and their bottomless stomachs decide to raid the smallest little mini fridge and you wouldn’t believe what takes up about 1/4 of it

There is so many cheese wheels in this Japanese show, guys. So, I felt like doing a quick google search of Japan and Cheese and it’s just a bunch of ex-pats talking about how the European cheeses most of us are familiar with is harder to find in Japan. So, maybe that’s why? It's a status symbol that he can find round cheeses?

But even if you can only get your hands on a 30$ Swiss wheel every so often (because that really is just Swiss cheese, like lets be real.) how much Swiss cheese can one man eat??? Especially since, looking closely, there is not a single baguette here. No man can eat that much cheese without a bread!

Sorry, stuffing your face full of free cheese you pulled out of your friend’s mini-fridge is also giving me vivid flashbacks to my Freshman year of college.

Also little edit--just realized that flag is flipped 90 degrees from French so that’s probably a Holland flag? Although I looked up European flags and there is...none that have that color order so I don’t know which country they were originally going for.

YO I just realized there’s no curtains on any of these pelvis-height level windows. So, you can’t sleep because of the lights, and you can’t change into pajamas because like--the whole city will see.

Kaiba does seem like the type that would on purpose not install any curtains on any of the windows he’s ever owned, though.

Keto is gone, and now we just have Roland, who is probably too terrified to ever abduct the Kaibas by picking them up by the neck with one arm.

Anyway, in case you were wondering--since the show has decided to make a huge fuss over card prep time--how can they prep for a card game if they only have the cards they brought with them and they don’t know what the other people are even playing or which person they’re playing first?

Kaiba did nothing. He sat there and thought “If Yugi doesn’t even put that God Card in his deck this entire tourney will be absolutely pointless.”

Mai took little sips of milk. Probably paired it with Swiss cheese. Just a huge bite out of a wheel of Swiss cheese.

Odion never found the refrigerator.

Marik took a nap on this bed that looks like it’s just made of foam. Why is this the only one on the show who’s like “Youknow, I should sleep at some point.”

And Yugi’s prep involved talking to himself a whole lot, which explains why none of his friends wanted to stay here for that. I doubt very much Yugi kicked him out of the room. He was probably like “no, stay, stay” in that high pitched-low pitched voice combo until they were like “nooooo I don’t want to be present for your daily seance checkup byeeee.” while slowly backing out of the room.

Yo remember that time we were worried about Bandit Keith stealing the puzzle?

Apparently...Pharaoh could have just sort of done that dizzolving thingy and appeared right back on Yugi’s neck.

And remember that time Yugi handed that puzzle to Joey?

Apparently...Pharaoh could have just sneezed and then bam--right back around Yugi’s neck.

Like remember any time this season that we’ve been like “Oh no, the puzzle! We’re gonna lose it!” no that...that was never a problem.

I mean to be fair when it’s dismantled it might not work but um--apparently you can’t lose an item after it’s decided it likes you. At all. Which is kind of weird because Pegasus totally lost that eyeball, and aren’t all these items property of Pharaoh anyway?

I’ll try not to think about it as this rule seems to only really apply to Bakura. 

Anyway, next week--I’m pretty sure the finals are indeed actually starting next week. I could be wrong as I have been every single episode but maybe--probably--the finals are actually going to start. We shall see.