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aftg & trc sideblog | occasionally nsfw | minors dni

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for the record always feel free to send me asks about anything ever. even if it's hate about my aftg takes. even if it's not aftg related. even if it's hate about non-aftg things. i love to talk.

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on another note i started reading dark rise. so umm marcus this james guy is simon's worm you say? his bootlicker? oh. oh i'm sure he is

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so this simon guy is branding his favorite devotee sailors with an iron brand? and then afterwards they get "special rewards" although to a lot of them simon's attention is "its own reward"? so like simon is definitely fucking some of these guys right

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strange to think "private boarding school" is real & not invented for exploring relations between the wealthiest student and the student on scholarship

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[new to degrading someone] I can tell that due to adverse childhood experience you're uncomfortable exercising autonomy so as an adult you find comfort in a consensual relationship dynamic with a power imbalance of some sort that puts you in a vulnerable position

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on another note i started reading dark rise. so umm marcus this james guy is simon's worm you say? his bootlicker? oh. oh i'm sure he is

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pervert voice i think there's a lot of unexploited potential in the whole "declan lynch was a liar" thing being used against him. oh declan you don't want this? come on you don't really believe that. you're lying to both of us declan of course you want it

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trc locked tomb au i'm not read up on all the tlt lore so if there are inaccuracies try to suspend your disbelief. henrietta is like. a recent imperial acquisition. maybe flipped within the last two generations or so. blue's whole family is crazy thanergetic except her which makes her very upset. crucially none of them are necromancers in a formal sense (ie they can do necromancy but they don't function as agents of the empire). aglionby is a necromantic school maybe connected to cohort training? unclear; gansey is a cav to ronan's necro and adam is a necro but doesn't actually have a cav (not well-connected enough for anyone to be willing). kavinsky desperately wishes he could be ronan's cav so he could sacrifice himself on the altar of ronan's lyctorhood (don't ask how he knows about the process for lyctorhood) but unforch he's a necro too. ronan wishes the same but for adam, or he would if he knew the deal with lyctorhood. also kavinsky's digs about ronan being gay for gansey are not insulting because they imply ronan is a homosexual (derogatory) but instead because they imply ronan is a necro who wants to fuck his cav (derogatory). there's a period of time where blue essentially functions as adam's cav (ie their pseudo dating period). niall and mor were both necros but they cut their cavs loose so they could run away and put all their codependency on each other, although ever since the divorce they just puppet around construct-facsimiles of each other (aurora and tnf) which are kind of the closest either of them can ever get to having "normal" necro-cav dynamics. matthew is some kind of necromantic anomaly courtesy of ronan that no one can explain so they pretend he's a real boy whose necromancy just comes out weird sometimes. i thought about making declan matthew's cav but there is a taboo on close relatives as cavs so i think declan is neither a necro nor a cav and instead just some guy but he uses proximity to ronan and matthew to distract people from his own lack of necromantic capacity a la coronabeth (people find ronan and matthew's thanergetic energies so weird they just assume declan is the one normal necro sibling and move away) the gray man is still a hitman but now there's necromancy involved. he's not a necro he just goes around shooting them. colin and piper greenmantle are both necros but not amazing ones; they own a cute place on the third house. umm who am i missing. noah is um. a revenant? somehow bound to a pseudo-body? unclear. henry is a necro. his cav is prob one of the vancrewver. the greywaren is supposed to be this object able to do all kinds of crazy necromancy stuff previously thought impossible (like make a functioning person or semi-permanently keep a revenant from passing on) but it's just ronan. niall did some crazy shit to get his kid to come out like that. maybe not kill 200 babies crazy but similar in spirit (ha, spirit).

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i'd love to hear your thoughts on the gray man as a sub owo

ah!!! okay it's taken me a while to answer this but i'm finally going to. i have a lot of thoughts on this concept and it honestly makes me a little insane to think about.

so first of all i think a lot of the appeal of sub!gray comes from his capacity for violence combined with the fact that submission or at least taking orders is a big part of his job and by extension his exercise of violence. like at the start of dream thieves he's not only a hitman but greenmantle's hitman specifically which to me is like being greenmantle's attack dog. he can even fetch on command! and it's like, you know it's one thing to have a guy who's really good at beating the shit out of people, but it's a different kind of high to have a guy who will beat the shit out of people specifically for you, whenever wherever and however you tell him to do it. it just hits different. this is also what compels me about victor and mitch villainous. as an aside, greenmantle/the gray man for some reason doesn't fully captivate me, just aesthetically i guess, but it really is the canon dynamic where gray's capacity for submission is most obvious and most obviously linked to his violent tendencies. and on that note i think what i would be really into is i guess some sort of au scenario where declan instead of greenmantle is the gray man's sort of client/owner/handler and gray is his enforcer for fairy market stuff. could even be incorporated into the au i was toying with a while ago where declan and gray both are both under contract with greenmantle.

anyway! another compelling aspect i think is that there's such a strong connection between violence and intimacy and the gray man obviously gets violent fairly frequently. this is really apparent in the infamous scene in declan's dorm room where all the descriptions of violence are also so unbearably sensual. the language that gets used to describe sex and violence and combinations of those things gets super blurry. so that blurriness combined with the link between the gray man's role as a perpetrator of violence and his role as someone who takes orders (and takes them pretty well) makes the idea of sexual submission on his part appealing - violence is just another way to use your body for someone else's end(s)!

also, there's the gray man's implicit narrative need for redemption from all the murders he did, which is of course especially interesting if the person he's fucking in this scenario has been deeply personally impacted by the murders (cough. declan. hashtag my personal bias). like on-page the gray man doesn't read as feeling super emotionally guilty about the murders but he does super want to stop thinking about the murders/stop having them be a part of his life so he can have his domestic bliss era. so that need for penance i feel like puts him at someone else's emotional mercy, since for a crime to be forgiven it has to be within someone's power to forgive you for it, reversing the usual power dynamic where the gray man tends to be in a position to give mercy to someone else. again this aspect seems like it'd be the most impactful if gray is under the power of someone he's personally wronged (cough).

and finally, while brother/brother stuff is not my main thing, i think sub!gray as a concept exists in a super interesting context wrt the gray man's past with his brother which doesn't explicitly but could definitely include sexual abuse, and if that's the interpretation you take (and honestly even if it isn't) any intimacy (sexual or otherwise) involving the gray man has a huge brother-shaped hole in it! so that's for sure there for those with eyes to see

anyway! thanks for being so patient for this ask to get answered. i would love to hear any thoughts you have on this or just any thoughts of yours in general because they're always super compellingly unhinged!!

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have we considered aurora, having survived the death of cabeswater, going out on her own for nearly the first time in her life sometime during mid to late td3, and finding hennessy, who's so extremely like the man who made her that aurora almost can't help but fall at her feet because wasn't that what she was made to do (fall at the feet of a maker) (did niall dream catholicism into her?). and then hennessey, who's enduring the collapse of everything she loves, looking at aurora's face, which is the face of the dark lady (the thing she was hoping for so long would save her from the lace) but also not, and finding her new private orbital axis of codependency in the absence of jordan and the others. and then they can, i don't know, fuck about it

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#insane mommy issues at play here as well#aurora who is hardwired to be a wife and a mother running into hennessy who desperately desperately wants to be wanted and cared for#while also both trying to run from their behaviour patterns of the past only to find each other#and it feels so familiar and nice#i think aurora/hennessy has the power to make the lynch + extended family situation somehow feel more incestuous (via @afurtivecake)

bringing this back after several months because i thought about your tags again. truly the lynch family wreath is always getting worse.

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#i keep thinking about whether or not aurora would be capable of feeling or understanding attraction to anyone other than niall.#she's clearly capable of loving and nurturing any child but is her only other mode the “wanting niall” mode?#cuz like the switch in emotions she would have to make from thinking of hennessy as a child to love and care for to#thinking of hennessy as niall

i'm personally really fascinated by the idea of aurora having wires crossed between love (maternal) and love (romantic/sexual/niall) during the process of her i guess affair with hennessey. i love the phrase "henessey as niall" because it's so like. they're each other's attempts to fill an absence. daughterhusband doesn't have the same ring to it as like sonwife but they're living their truth i guess

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have we considered aurora, having survived the death of cabeswater, going out on her own for nearly the first time in her life sometime during mid to late td3, and finding hennessy, who's so extremely like the man who made her that aurora almost can't help but fall at her feet because wasn't that what she was made to do (fall at the feet of a maker) (did niall dream catholicism into her?). and then hennessey, who's enduring the collapse of everything she loves, looking at aurora's face, which is the face of the dark lady (the thing she was hoping for so long would save her from the lace) but also not, and finding her new private orbital axis of codependency in the absence of jordan and the others. and then they can, i don't know, fuck about it

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#insane mommy issues at play here as well#aurora who is hardwired to be a wife and a mother running into hennessy who desperately desperately wants to be wanted and cared for#while also both trying to run from their behaviour patterns of the past only to find each other#and it feels so familiar and nice#i think aurora/hennessy has the power to make the lynch + extended family situation somehow feel more incestuous (via @afurtivecake)

bringing this back after several months because i thought about your tags again. truly the lynch family wreath is always getting worse.

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the way this is declan about matthew

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man who could easily overpower you but chooses to stay at your feet with his head in your lap …. bloodied and smiling at the feeling of your fingers in his hair

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scared the gray man chapters will suffer in the gn without his internal monologue. it's really the best thing about him as a character

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@theskybetween: please share Declan and Mr Gray tussling in color

silly declan in his rugby top

plus bonus declan who will never look cooler (with a filter so i don’t get caught by the tumblr police)

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shout out to ** ***** for describing two characters who have the same last name in a way that makes it ambiguous whether they're siblings or a married couple. not even the reveal that they have a kid fully convinced me they're biologically unrelated

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i swear i'm going to answer that ask as soon as god starts hating me a little less

[noxidae]

Oh you misunderstand. I don’t headcanon that character as a sub because I think they’re weak and pathetic or inherently subservient, I headcanon them as a sub because I think they have neuroses about accidentally/deliberately harming someone, particularly sexually.