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Ghost Zone

@jaewritesfic

Jaemyun on Ao3; current obsession dc x dp 27 | avatar by the fantastic dorknop here on Tumblr!

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Tiktok 1: What's the weirdest thing about you body that you haven't gotten fixed yet?

Tiktok 2: (unintelligible) I started having issues hearing out of my right ear so i go to the doctor like any normal person would, and the guy looks in my ear with that little flashlight nozzle thing and he goes, "hm." And I go, "what?" And he says, "You don't have an ear canal."

Well I DID! Haven't missed any payments, who took it?!

He sends me to the very convenient ear specialist around the corner who then looks in my ear and goes, "JESUS!"

That is not the first thing I want my doctor to say to me! You think you know where this is going and you think it's gonna be a bug- WRONG.

This man informs me that there is a small tooth-sized bone growing across my ear. So I'm sitting there trying to process this like, "So should I go to the dentist?" And he goes "Oh, no it's only covering about 60% of your ear canal so as long as it doesn't start growing more then you don't need immediate surgery." So now I can't go underwater or else it gets trapped behind my ear-tooth!

Also, to the person on twitter who said I wasn't getting enough action so my body had to start 'boning' itself?

That was mean.

Tumbleweed needs everyone to know that I am his most cruel and heartless mother for decreasing the amount of food he gets due to him gaining a third again his body weight over the last year no that is not all fur Tumbleweed you are shaped like a pregnant sheep!

He has spent much of the day stomping from room to room while yelling his immense displeasure.

Yelling

Begging

Lamentations

Tumbleweed had his annual exam and is back to a healthy 10 1/2 pounds. He is officially no longer the same shape as a pregnant sheep. He has mostly forgiven me for reducing how much food he gets.

okay but there is something disquieting about this urge to cast fan writers as altruists. they give us all this for free!! well, no.

they’re sharing

it’s a key difference in perception. fic isn’t given. it’s shared. it’s part of a fandom community— in which readers are also an integral part.

it’s probably inevitable mission creep from the increasingly transactional nature of the internet and fandom-as-consumerism, which was always gonna happen after corps worked out how much bank there is to make from those weirdo fan people

but like. fandom is sharing. i think we’ve lost that somewhere.

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

Hmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Women in Shakespeare

Also like to point out that when her mother says “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid,” (translation: I had you when I was your age) you have to remember her father’s words: “earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” (translation: all the other children died.)  The whole plot point of Juliet being an only child is explained by her mother being a Margaret Beaufort type who had her first child too young and it damaged her past the point of being able to bear more children.

Margaret Beaufort died in 1509. She was a major player in the Wars of the Roses, the swirling on-again-off-again civil wars that consumed England from 1455-1487. Romeo and Juliet was written and first performed in the early 1590s. Your average English person of Shakespeare’s day would probably have had at least a vague understanding of who she was and what happened to her, because she was a key figure in recent history and was still getting passed around as a cautionary tale.

There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.

The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.

You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.

Shakespeare is telling us “yeah, this is fucked up. but even if you’re the kind of awful person who doesn’t think girls marrying too young is morally wrong, it’s also a problem for practical and dynastic reasons, don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

It bears repeating:

don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

yes, excellent discussion!

another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)

i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?

art history matters.

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nerviovago

holy fuck man, whenever I need to bust a gut this always hits so hard. Holy shit.

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same-pic-rick-roll

This video shows that delivery of the joke is far more important than the joke itself.

“What is a skeleton’s favorite snack? RIBS!”

By itself a good joke, but the skeleton prop, the dumb voice and the acting makes this truly epic.

being 5'7" is so fucked. AND i'm a top. i suffer more than you could ever know.

doing shadow of the colossus shit to her pussy 🧝‍♀️

uhm.... girls only have cocks around these parts, friend

Doing shadow of the colossus shit to HIS pussy

sorry im a lesbian

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puppygirlisland-deactivated2024

doing shadow of the colossus shit to her penis?

well if youre unsure i can take over for you

collecting lizards to boost my stamina and climbing the tower to do shadow of the colossus shit to her 17th secret penis

i think the concept of the post is starting to escape us

nothing escapes from me

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Reblogged

You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”

Well I see that, and I raise you this:

An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.

And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.

He’s crushed by the competition every single time.

Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker. 

There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.

And he wins.

Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something

The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.

So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.

He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”

There’s an international competition, and Main Character-kun and all his candy-haired rivals/peers/nakama/friends are being housed in the same hotel.

The night before the competition, some ungodly scream sounds from the Naruto-kid’s room. The rest of the cast rush in, flick on the lights, and find Naruto-kid sitting up in bed, his hair completely flat and utterly black, a pair of DIY salon gloves discarded next to his bed. He races to the mirror across the room, hands hovering in shock around his straightened hair, as though unable to recognize the boy staring back at him.

It’s… an unsettling act of personal vandalism, but Naruto-kid seems unhurt. After verifying he’s okay and reporting it to hotel security, most of the kids are content to go back to their own rooms and just double-check their own locks.

Most seem content…. Not all…

The next day, Naruto-kid is eliminated from the competition nigh-instantly. He’s given no chance to monologue about his ambitions, his friends, his hometown.  Not even a second spared for a flashback to the bullying that became the formative motivator of his childhood.  

No. He’s summarily eliminated by another candy-haired contestant. Naruto-kid, with his suddenly unassuming black hair, is dismissed from the arena. And Main Character-kun is distressed. 

There’s a murderer on the loose. Just in no traditional sense. Another kid is shaved bald in the middle of the night, and eliminated from the competition the next day. Colored contact lenses go missing, and suddenly the red-eyed yandere girl doesn’t have a leg to stand on. She’s sent home without the slightest bit of fanfare. Someone funnels bleach into the sprinkler line, and a triggering of the fire alarm leaves a whole arena of contestants doused in the ruinous fluid. Their candy colors melt into brittle, tacky, bleachy off-orange. Not a single one survives that night’s round of eliminations.

Main Character-kun is still pink. He’s still gelled. He’s still dressed in fiery robes and platform sandals with a bandana cinched around his forehead. He hoards hair dye in his room and sleeps with one eye open. He can only watch in silence as this gruesome assassination plot unravels, without a doubt in his mind that he is the real target.

One night, there’s a knock on his door. And the twisting of a key. And the squeak of hinges swinging open. Main Character-boy’s breathing halts.  His time has come.

He looks. It’s the blue-haired girl, the quiet one with self-confidence issues. Her hair is tied into twin pigtails. She’s carrying something in her right hand.  Main Character boy braces for impact.

She flicks on the lights. He looks. They’re wigs, in her hand. Three of them. Purple Green and Orange, each primmed and poofed and curled to extravagant degrees.

“Here,” she offers, hand extended. “Take whichever you like. They’re extra.”

“Wait. Why…? What’s this–what’s happening?”

She takes a step forward, and she shuts the door behind her. With her free hand, she grips the blue hairline at her scalp, and she pulls back gently, revealing netting. She drops the blue hair to the ground, and pulls the netting free from her forehead, and a loose, unassuming bob of perfectly black, perfectly normal hair falls around her shoulders.

She’s unassuming in every possible regard, mundane in every sense, a girl to blend into the backdrop of millions.

“We’re not going home yet,” she says. “Not you, and not me.”

chrissy i want you to know im in love with this

The Comb and the Dye are in fact the real anime weapons of this series im so glad they’re wielding them as such

The Main Character girl wraps her hair back up in the netting and fixes her blue wig back in place. She takes a seat in the nearby desk chair and explains why she’s here. She’s suspected for a while that she and MC-kun are the same, both normal-looking people masquerading in this candy haired world. MC-kun had seemed just a bit too distraught during the Naruto-kid incident. That was when Main Character-chan first noticed him, and when she recognized his shade of candy pink hair by its bottle brand.

MC-chan explains that she had lived a very normal and unassuming life. She did Stage Crew in middle school for the drama club, always the unnoticed extra in the background, sweeping in silently, covertly, under darkness to handle the scene changes and wardrobe transformations.  She honed her skills making props and costumes for the drama kids, til she was a master of needle and thread, dyes and combs, and props built from paper and plastic.

She thinks it was that attention-to-detail she cultivated in prop-design that let her finally See what MC-kun had seen—the Candy Haired world around her that constantly overshadowed whatever she did.

One day, she put on the wig. And she never looked back.

But she doesn’t know who the hair assassin is either, any more than MC-kun. There’s still strength in numbers. And she figures if they work together, their odds of survival are greater.

MC-kun agrees.

The next day is a free day for the kids competing in this International Competition. The morning passes with most of the contestants montaging through a romp in the city, tasting local cuisine and window-shopping around the market area and getting into Kodak-moment worthy shenanigans.

MC-kun and MC-chan steal away to a quiet park, sitting at a picnic table, putting pink- and blue-heads together to talk through all the info they have, and what options are open to them. They don’t get very far. A glasses-wearing girl appears from behind the bushes and stops them cold.

Glasses Girl is small and wiry, mousy in her frame. She has orange hair that poofs around her head, cropped at chin level, in a way that reminds MC-kun vaguely of a roosting chicken. Her glasses are enormous on her freckled face, and they capture the light, obscuring her eyes behind their glare.

“You two… you’re fakes, aren’t you? Both of you.”

MC-kun stops cold. MC-chan spins around in her seat, wide-eyed. “I don’t… I don’t even know what that means! Go away before we—”

Glasses Girl pulls an immaculate, highly stylized laptop from her bag. She flips it open with one hand, propping it on the table and typing furiously, too fast to even see her fingers. Audio begins to play from the laptop speakers.

“We’re not going home yet. Not you, and not me.”

“I hacked into your phone last night,” GG-chan states simply, head tilted toward MC-kun. “I’ve heard the whole conversation.”

“How?!” MC-kun asks. He holds his phone at a distance, like it’s suddenly venomous.

GG-chan shifts. Suddenly the glare of her glasses is no longer obstructing her eyes. Behind the coke-bottle look is an expression of pure brow-knitted confusion. “I don’t…. I don’t actually know. I just could.”

GG-chan was an art student. A not-very-good-at-all art student. And a very-much-below-average competitor in sculpting competitions. She was plain, and unassuming, and inconspicuous, and jealous of the better-established art students around her with their own flashy styles. Her peers wore giant non-prescription glasses; they dyed their hair bright colors and cropped it short to perfect hipster chique.

GG-chan tried to imitate that. But as a truly-not-fantastic artist, she couldn’t even pull that off. She dyed her hair, picked out glasses, overshot “hipster”, and landed firmly in “geek”.

She landed so firmly in “geek” that internationally-acclaimed hacker abilities spawned with her makeover. Suddenly she could break into anything, override anything, hack or fix or erase anything over a permanent wifi connection that followed her as its hotspot.

Her laptop never loses charge. Her bash scripts never fail. Her glasses always glint in the slightest bit of light and slide down her nose so that she has to keep her middle finger pressed firmly to the bridge at all times.

She’s afraid of being sent home in ruin, sent back to her life as a mediocre art student.

GG-chan wants to join the effort to not be eliminated.

A day passes. GG-chan has hacked all the email accounts of the registered contestants and has found nothing suspicious. MC-chan has spent her time crafting shorter-cut wigs to give to MC-kun and GG-chan as backups. MC-kun has been trying his best to understand what he’s gotten into. He bought a few extra obnoxious bandanas to bolster his obnoxious outfit, as if that might help.

They’re sitting quietly at lunch, eating in silence, with no new information to share and no desire to attract unwanted attention from the contestants around them.

“Ohhhhh my what is this? Has this pathetic posse of plebeians formed a little club oh how quaint!”

MC-chan chokes on her noodles. GG-chan startles. MC-kun groans.

The voice belongs to a platinum-blond boy, dressed to the nines, who’s sidled up to the table unannounced. He reeks of ambition and money and arrogance and a very particular high-end cologne, and he laughs heartily at his own joke. He flicks a lock of blond hair from his face, which all but sparkles.

MC-kun recognizes this kid. He was one of the first Candy Haired kids to declare an eternal rivalry with him.

“What’s it to you?” MC-kun challenges, already ticked off.

And the Rich Blond Rival Boy deflates. Comically. Pale and hollow-cheeked and exhausted, suddenly leaning against their lunch table, speaking in a rasp. “Please let me join you. I’ve been wearing this Gucci suit for two weeks straight I don’t have any others.”

No one answers immediately. No one has anything resembling an answer.

“Then buy another suit!” MC-kun says.

“Do I look like I’m made of m o n e y to you?!”

“YES.”

“Ah ha! Yes that is the point, well you see–” and RBR-kun pulls out a soggy PB&J from his bag, slumps into an open seat at the table, his eyes dull and matte, solemnly chewing his lunch. “Can one of you spot me like $1.50 for the bus ride to the competition arena tomorrow? I spent the last of my money on this bread.”

MC-kun: “What?”

RBR-kun: “I don’t have money!”

MC-kun: “Why are you ACTING like a rich boy if you DONT HAVE MONEY”

RBR-kun: “LOOK IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED OKAY.”

MC-kun: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED.”

And well, it just kind of happened. Rich Blond Rival Boy is as fake as they come. He grew up in a modest household, making money over the summer by doing yard work for neighbors. He was fairly frugal and quiet and unassuming, until his grandma bought him a nice tux for the school dance, and he dyed his hair platinum blond on a dare, and suddenly the world was in his pocket.

Suddenly he had connections in high places. Suddenly he could have wait staff doting on him at a moment’s notice. Suddenly he could summon helicopters at the snap of his fingers, and have any product imaginable, legal or not, air-lifted to him on a whim. Everyone was his pawn. Everything bent to his will. Ever since then he’s been unstoppable in his ambitions.

He just doesn’t have any of the actual money to maintain this. All his cards are overdrafted. His credit is in the toilet. Several different loan sharks technically own the rights to his immortal soul.

Rich Blond Rival Boy wants in on the League Of Background Characters, because he is utterly afraid of the ruin he faces if he is exposed. If the others get assassinated, they get sent home. If RBR-kun gets assassinated, the debtors will drag him out by his toes.

A scuffle erupts over by the lunch line before anyone can give RBR-kun an answer. It’s over in an instant. A shriek, a clatter, a tray and knife hitting the ground. The biker ruffian boy with the blue mohawk lies on the floor. His shorn-off mohawk spikes lie on the platter, as if being served to the cafeteria at large.

Worried murmurs break out in the crowd.

No one had seen the knife-yielder. 

No one had seen anything.

As if the act were committed by someone impossible to even notice.

[chanting]

MORE KIDS MORE KIDS MORE KIDS

LAST PART, CONCLUSION AND ALL, AND IT’S LONG

And the one thing worth noting: MC-chan is now MG-chan, as in Main Girl-chan, to avoid mixing up her name with MC-kun. 

Enjoy.

There’s a sustained hush, like a breath held too long. It’s a blooming, crawling, clawing wave of realization that takes the cafeteria captive. Heads turn. Voices falls silent. Clueless candy-hair after clueless candy-hair takes in the murder scene, mohawk spikes presented so curiously, so esoterically plattered, as if part of the lunch selection.

The dish itself is a warning; MG-chan understands that much. She feels the bloodlust in the air. And it’s closer now. She edges her chair away from the table. Her nerves are alight.

“Run,” MG-chan says.

“Sorry?” MC-kun replies.

MG-chan kicks her chair back, lighting to her feet.

Run!”

And at that moment, a sound like a cannon ball fires, the silence breaking. People startle at the noise, but it’s the boy sitting one table over – directly across from MC-kun – who jolts entirely sideways in his seat. He’s the contestant whose hair has been quaffed perfectly into a cartoon whale, pallid blue and deep ocean undertones brimming through his hairline. He stares forward, as if stunned. The girl next to him asks if he’s okay.

He turns to her slowly, and reveals the entire right half of his face has been consumed in a wad of bubblegum. He raises one shaking hand to his whale-tail, now webbed in gum, and he collapses.

And all hell breaks loose.

MG-chan has MC-kun by the shoulder before he can process it. They’re running. Them and GG-chan and RBR-kun. Them and almost everyone else, a breathing screaming mass of panic as people shove and knee and elbow their way through the crowd.

“Where are we going?” MC-kun asks. He’s stumbling to keep pace with MG-chan, one hand pressed protectively to the bandana on his forehead in danger of slipping off.

“Away from here. Outside.”  MG-chan throws her weight against the cafeteria door. It slams open. “Wherever we’re not sitting targets.”

Their feet beat against the linoleum below, into the hotel foyer, but it’s no good. The bloodlust presence doesn’t fade. It does not grow weaker. Instead it gains on them, like heat, like a house fire that lashes out at their heels and trips them with each step. Another two kids go down with the sound of razor blades and a puff of shorn hair, like dandelion fluff blown in the wind.

MG-chan, MC-kun, GG-chan, and RBR-kun all burst out the hotel front doors – RBR-kun with a shriek and a graceful leap over a half-shaved unconscious student on the floor.

“How did he go down?! I didn’t even see him go down?!” RBR-kun shouts, pointing to the kid he vaulted. “Invisibility? Is the murderer invisible?!”

“Maybe super-speed. Really any superpower is possible among these people. We can’t rule anything out.” GG-chan has her laptop out, balanced precariously on the crook of her arm. She types one-handed while she runs. “If I can hack into the security cameras maybe I can activate the infra-red sensors and get a reading on—”

There’s a crack. A gasp. MG, MC, and RBR all look back to find GG-chan frozen in place. Her glasses are shattered, pinned to the wall beside her by a single needle-thin arrow.

“My glasses…” GG-chan blinks, and stares at her laptop like it’s something entirely foreign to her. “What is this? What was I–?”

MG-chan grabs her arm too. “Never mind. Run. Just run.”

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