30+. writer (ao3). exuberant human being, hi! staff @ A Strange Server š Good Omens š Marvel, Doctor Who and David Tennant enthusiast. Mental health, writing, med & crime shows, cats, and baking are my jam.
Do threats and punishments make people change their behaviour to the desired? Or does it make them prepare for the punishment? The answer will shock you.
[Image ID: Tweet from verified user (@/ ok6ixx) reading: My mother once "threatened" to make my brother (6) and I (4) sleep outside if we didn't get our room cleaned up. So we decided that we should probably spend the rest of the day preparing to sleep outside because that would be Way easier than cleaning our room. Our bright idea was to dig holes for us to sleep in so we could cover ourselves in leaves and sticks to act as blankets. So instead of my mom finding her sons cleaning their room, she found them digging their own graves in the back yard. /End ID]
Plain text: Do threats and punishments make people change their behaviour to the desired? Or does it make them prepare for the punishment? The answer will shock you.
first thing you might want to consider: is the pain mental or physical?
if itās physical, what type of pain is it causing? ā sharp pain, white-hot pain, acute pain, dull ache, throbbing pain, chronic pain, neuropathic pain (typically caused by nerve damage), etc
if itās mental, what is the reason your character is in pain? ā grief, heartbreak, betrayal, anger, hopelessness, fear and anxiety, etc
because your character will react differently to different types of pain
PHYSICAL PAIN
sharp and white-hot pain may cause a character to grit their teeth, scream, moan, twist their body. their skin may appear pale, eyes red-rimmed and sunken with layers of sweat covering their forehead. they may have tears in their eyes (and the tears may feel hot), but they donāt necessarily have to always be crying.
acute pain may be similar to sharp and white-hot pain; acute pain is sudden and urgent and often comes without a warning, so your character may experience a hitched breathing where they suddenly stop what theyāre doing and clench their hand at the spot where it hurts with widened eyes and open mouth (like theyāre gasping for air).
dull ache and throbbing pain can result in your character wanting to lay down and close their eyes. if itās a headache, they may ask for the lights to be turned off and they may be less responsive, in the sense that theyād rather not engage in any activity or conversation and theyād rather be left alone. they may make a soft whimper from their throat from time to time, depends on their personality (if they donāt mind others seeing their discomfort, they may whimper. but if your character doesnāt like anyone seeing them in a not-so-strong state, chances are they wonāt make any sound, they might even pretend like theyāre fine by continuing with their normal routine, and they may or may not end up throwing up or fainting).
if your character experience chronic pain, their pain will not go away (unlike any other illnesses or injuries where the pain stops after the person is healed) so they can feel all these types of sharp pain shooting through their body. there can also be soreness and stiffness around some specific spots, and it will affect their life. so your character will be lucky if they have caretakers in their life. but are they stubborn? do they accept help from others or do they like to pretend like theyāre fine in front of everybody until their body canāt take it anymore and so they can no longer pretend?
neuropathic pain or nerve pain will have your character feeling these senses of burning, shooting and stabbing sensation, and the pain can come very suddenly and without any warning ā think of it as an electric shock that causes through your characterās body all of a sudden. your character may yelp or gasp in shock, how they react may vary depends on the severity of the pain and how long it lasts.
EMOTIONAL PAIN
grief can make your character shut themself off from their friends and the world in general. or they can also lash out at anyone who tries to comfort them. (five states of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and eventual acceptance.)
heartbreak ā your character might want to lock themself in a room, anywhere where they are unseen. or they may want to pretend that everythingās fine, that theyāre not hurt. until they break down.
betrayal can leave a character with confusion, the feelings of āwhat went wrong?ā, so itās understandable if your character blames themself at first, that maybe itās their fault because theyāve somehow done something wrong somewhere that caused the other character to betray them. what comes after confusion may be anger. your character can be angry at the person who betrayed them and at themself, after they think theyāve done something wrong that resulted in them being betrayed, they may also be angry at themself next for āfallingā for the lies and for ābeing fooledā. so yes, betrayal can leave your character with the hatred thatās directed towards the character who betrayed them and themself. whether or not your character can āmove on and forgiveā is up to you.
there are several ways a character can react to anger; they can simply lash out, break things, scream and yell, or they can also go complete silent. no shouting, no thrashing the place. they can sit alone in silence and they may cry. anger does make people cry. it mostly wonāt be anything like āugly sobbingā but your characterās eyes can be bloodshot, red-rimmed and there will be tears, only that there wonāt be any sobbing in most cases.
hopelessness can be a very valid reason for it, if you want your character to do something reckless or stupid. most people will do anything if theyāre desperate enough. so if you want your character to run into a burning building, jump in front of a bullet, or confess their love to their archenemy in front of all their friends, hopelessness is always a valid reason. thereās no āout of characterā if they are hopeless and are desperate enough.
fear and anxiety. your character may be trembling, their hands may be shaky. they may lose their appetite. they may be sweaty and/or bouncing their feet. they may have a panic attack if itās severe enough.
and I think thatās it for now! feel free to add anything I may have forgotten to mention here!
I wanted to elaborate on the one about hopelessness as someone who has been clinically depressed.
The idea of a fictional character doing something completely reckless and heroic because theyāre utterly hopeless is such a fun nuance. Donāt get me wrong, I love your classic heroic type who does things out a sense of justice even if Iām a selfish piece of crap who would be caught dead doing those things, but something about being so hopeless you donāt care about your own life so you spend it helping others is beautifully tragic.
Anyway, as someone whoās been clinically depressed, this is 100% accurate. if youāre desperate enough and hopeless enough whatās running into a burning building gonna do to you? When youāre that utterly hopeless, itās almost like mania (w/ bipolar disorder) but reversed. Same concept of having no sense of time or consequence of your action, except you donāt give a crap about what happens or doesnāt happen. Youāre just so focused on the present moment and how youāre gonna survive or stop your survival that you donāt think things throughānot really.
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it youāre literally gonna be using that almost every day
The epilogue is now posted and this quiet little story has reached the end of its journey.
Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, left kudos, and shared such kind words along the way. It has been a joy spending time at Northwoods with Crowley and Aziraphale, and I'm so grateful for all of you who came along for the ride.
A final thank you to @becky-7750 for the gorgeous lake art that captured the feeling of this story so beautifully.
Read the completed fic here: Summers at Northwoods
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
When I worked for the government a few years ago, one of the offices I was in charge of managing for their network, security, and IT systems was the nuclear task response office, this is the office that is in charge of toxic cleanups, nuclear fallout (if such a thing ever happened), and more.
They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)
One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.
I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.
Abandonware, the source code, the documentation, the IP, all of it, should be legally required to be disclosed, released, and submitted to public and government archives after either 12 years after first release, and/or upon dissolution. Until that happens, this entire era is likely going to be referred to as the digital dark age. Where everything was once online and available, but where nearly all of it will be knowingly lost.
My first job contracting was for DuPont when I was still in highschool. They showed me a piece of software they needed a special disk inserted to use. The disk had been damaged in some subtle way. You couldn't just copy it, you had to buy them from the vendor and insert it or the software wouldn't run.
They were down to a few of these disks and the company no longer existed.
Well, I ran a hacker BBS and using MASM to Crack games was a hobby of mine, so I told them I'd give it a shot.
2 hours on the job and DuPont had me cracking abandonware.
some of you are painfully unaware that part of the whole reason many kinksters are like "what happens in my or someone else's bedroom is no one else's business"
is because people have been arrested and put in fucking PRISON just for having gay sex in the privacy of their own homes. in the United States. this millennia.
if you think i'm joking, look up Lawrence v. Texas (2003). 14 out of the 50 US States STILL had laws on the books criminalizing sodomy--and yes, you could be imprisoned for multiple years and sometimes even life for repeat offenses.
in the years directly leading up to the landmark case, enforcement even in those 14 states varied, but it was absolutely weaponized against queer people, especially when stacked on top of other offenses to make up a longer sentence.
um so anyway, what happens between two or more consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes is none of my OR YOUR business, and i'm not fucking kidding!
"Sodomy" does not, in a legal context, mean "anal sex."
It means "any sexual act the court has decided is deviant."
BDSM? Sodomy.
Crossdressing for sexual pleasure? Sodomy.
Jacking off to nude photos or video your consenting adult lover sent you of themselves? Sodomy.
Het oral sex? SODOMY!!!
If you're starting to think "but how could anyone prove that happened without breaking down the door?"
Ha. Haha. Ahaha.
First, I'll give you one guess how they did prove it.
Two, these were often scapegoat charges--basically they couldn't actually nail you on anything because you hadn't done anything actually illegal, only things they didn't like, and they relied on public disgust against your "degenerate character" (yeah there's a very big reason we keep saying not to use that word and it's not to be killjoys) to make sure you knew your place.
Which means that in practice:
Went to a socialist meeting? Sodomy.
Male kindergarten teacher? Sodomy.
Mixing races? Sodomy.
Not Christian (or the right kind of Christian)? Sodomy.
Kink is only the beginning. They'll come after the kinksters because they're low-hanging fruit, and you'll gleefully help them dig a hole, laughing all the way and never consider that it's way too big for the number of bodies you need to bury.
I see someone in the tags saying "except pedophiles, they don't count, hang them."
YES THEY FUCKING DO COUNT.
Wanna know why?
Take a look at how many politicians have labeled trans people and their allies as pedophiles.
Take a look at how many politicians used to label gay people as pedophiles.
Take a look at how much suspicion falls on innocent men who just think working with kids is fun and want the chance to help, grow, nurture, and teach.
Take a look at yourself.
What about you could someone twist into "that person is a pedophile" if they wanted rid of you?
I can tell you exactly how they'd do it with me. I'm queer. I have a niece who came out as lesbian in her teens. I supported her.
Clearly I groomed her into that lifestyle, right?
Child sex abusers should be proven in a court of law to be guilty, and penalized to the fullest extent of the law. Pedophiles who have not abused children and seek to avoid doing so should not be hanged for something going wild in their brains.
Yes! That's super uncomfortable to say! I'm a CSA survivor! It's awkward and it means I have to defend people I really wish were not the way they are!
But the rope you use to lynch another will yank you into the tree to die.
TW for talk on CSA and child marriage, this topic tends to get me fired up
Its also a fucking useless example for sodomy law especially because of how wildly age of consent can vary even in the united states. Which I hate that people get so weird about when you try to discuss it. No, knowing this stuff isnt a "red flag" you have to know something before you can speak on it or try and change it!
Child marriage is legal in 34 states with 4 of them technically not even having an age minimum outside of common law that could theoretically set it at 12. If we go back a few years the state of it would be even MORE dire as many of these laws putting age minimums only were put into place in the past eight years! So if one defines sodomy as "any sexual act done premarital that isnt missionary" then these wouldn't be covered.
Sodomy laws are USELESS for protecting children, because laws about CSA are better off being their OWN thing with strictly defined terms. Sodomy is so nebulous and hand wavy it does nothing but punish people who have done nothing wrong, strict terms with clear meanings is what creates protections. "You can't just make "if we think its gross" the law and expect that to actually work on deterring people who are doing the actual crimes. Which are ALREADY illegal.
Plus this isn't even getting into the psychology part of it that most people who commit CSA aren't even attracted to minors, they just like power over their victims and its easy to hold power over a child. its about control. Not 100% of the time, but very very often its about dominance rather then attraction. Plus there's the fact of sexual intrusive thoughts being a common form of OCD that causes a lot of distress in those that have those thoughts. This is a whole rabbit hole but just... You dont need to be attracted to a victims to traffic them, you might just want control, or authority, or just money!
I think it is really, really worth focusing on that āalready illegalā part, because this is the foot in the door for a million and a half fascist proposed laws, not just sodomy.
āWe need a law that makes it illegal to go into a bathroom that doesnāt align with your birth sex! Otherwise, people might go into the wrong bathroom to sexually assault someone!ā Huh, interesting, but isnāt it already illegal to sexually assault someone, including in a bathroom??? Because if so, then you can just completely discard that explanation for the entire law. It is already illegal to go into the wrong bathroom and sexually assault a person; ergo, the law is not about sexual assault at all, itās just about bathrooms.
āWe need to arrest undocumented immigrants in order to crack down on gang activity!ā Huh, interesting, but isnāt that gang activity already illegal??? So, if you wanted to crack down on gang activity, you could simply arrest people who are associated with gangs, and in fact, we do already do that. Ergo, this rhetoric isnāt actually about gang activity at all; itās just about undocumented immigrants.
āWe need to diminish free speech and freedom of movement rights for suspected terrorists, because otherwise they could commit mass murder!ā Well, interestingly, mass murder is already illegal, and if you have probable cause that indicates that someone is planning to commit mass murder, you can simply arrest them for that. Since the law is already fully equipped to go after people who are genuinely suspected of gearing up to commit a violent terroristic act, this clearly isnāt really about terrorism at all; itās just about diminishing free speech and freedom of movement rights.
āWe need tort reform that caps the monetary damages that large corporations can be forced to pay, in order to keep people from bringing frivolous and fraudulent lawsuits!ā Hmm, but see the thing with that is fraud is already a crime, and frivolous lawsuits can already be thrown out. If a law caps the amount of damages corporations need to pay in lawsuits which were not found to be frivolous or fraudulent, then almost by definition, it has nothing to do with frivolous lawsuits or fraud ā itās just about limiting corporate liability.
I could go on.
Always ask yourself what the actual function of a proposed law is ā not just the stated goal, but what it actually does that is not already covered by an equally restrictive law.
And remember, a good general rule is:
If something is already illegal, then the people who are trying to pass a new law to ban it are probably trying to ban something else.
I dunno, I liked the addition of the āletās run away to Alpha Centauri!ā stuff and also the little added backstory of Crowley helping to design nebulas in GO1. I thought they were good additions to the story this version of GO was telling and I could also imagine maybe applying it to Book Canon in a way. But, well, it's justā¦ for a character originally defined by his Iove for Earthā¦
It just started feeling kinda weird to me that the longer TV Omens kept going, it felt like the whole Starmaker and Alpha Centauri gradually got more and more focus and by some point it started feeling like it was subsuming other important aspects of his personality?
Especially in GO3, which seemed to conclude that all of his positive traits were a result of him being āan artistā as a Starmaker, and then the one personality trait Professor Anthony shares with Crowley, the one thing thatās supposed to immediately tell us he's a reincarnation or some sort of Cosmic Echo, is the fact that they both love Star stuff. Nothing else was needed apparently.
It's just... as a huge fan of Book Crowley, it just feels pretty disappointing how little of the original character I could see there by the end.
Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
(If you arenāt in a place to read some GO3-critical analysis, this isnāt the post for you. No criticism intended! I have friends I like and respect very much who disagree with me on this subject. Curate your experience! Mute these tags, block me, whatever you need to do. I wonāt take it personally.)
Because of who I am as a person, I canāt stop noodling about what the Good Omens Finale was actually trying to do. Temporarily setting aside whether I liked it (I did not) ā what was it trying to do? What was the writersā logic and thought process in the decisions they made?
Okay, letās work backwards from the dramatic climax, and see if we can follow the critical plot path. What had to happen so that the climax could happen?ā¦
Aziraphale and Crowley sacrifice their existence, because apparently thatās a necessary condition to create a world without God judging people for their choices, which seems to be Crowleyās definition of āreal free will.ā (This condition has never been so much as hinted at before, but okay, sure. For the sake of argument, letās accept it.)
Aziraphale and Crowley have to be able to summon God using the Book of Life so that they can negotiate their sacrifice.
Michaelās Book of Life rampage has to happen, so that Aziraphale and Crowley have a reason to summon God.
Aziraphale and Crowley have to be together when Michaelās Book of Life rampage happens, so that they can negotiate the sacrifice together.
Aziraphale has to come back to Earth so he and Crowley can be together when the Book of Life rampage happens.
Heaven has to lose Jesus so that Aziraphale can have a reason to come back to Earth.
The Second Coming has to be planned so that Heaven can lose Jesus.
Aziraphale has to go back to Heaven to plan the Second Coming because ???
This is where working backwards falls apart for me. If the ultimate goal was to get A & C together in the same place for the climactic Book of Life destructionā¦ they were already in the same place at the end of S1. Why did they need to be separated and then brought back together?
Ordinarily, Iād think it was done to ramp up the emotional stakes for the poignant climax. You know, give them a happy reunion, really give them hope, so that the sacrifice hits that much harder.
But the reunion isnāt written as happy at all ā itās bitter and angry and cold. If anything, it lowers the emotional stakes for the sacrifice, because their getting back together already feels hopeless.
So, narratively, what was the breakup and reunion for?
Maybe thereās an argument that Michael losing out on the Supreme Archangel promotion is what set off the Book of Life rampage? So Aziraphale had to get the promotion? And the breakup was just a side effect of that?
This gets hazy. Was that actually what set Michael off? And why was Aziraphaleās promotion needed for that to happen, as opposed to someone elseās?
All I can come up with is that the entire F15 breakup existed so that the ultimate sacrifice scene ā where Crowley sacrifices their chance at happiness for the greater good of humanity ā could be a callback to an earlier scene where Aziraphale had been the one wanting to make that sacrifice.
Something something, Aziraphale is foolishly willing to sacrifice their happiness for a pointless reason, all in the name of being āgoodā and āangelic,ā but in the end we get the āØ ironic twist āØ: Crowley the demon is the truly good and truly angelic one, because heās the one willing to sacrifice their happiness when it really helps humanity.
I donāt like it. But setting that aside, itās all I can come up with for what the thought process might have been.
Temporarily accepting for the sake of argument that Aziraphale had to go back to Heaven, we can start working backwards through S2:
Gabriel has to run away with Beelzebub so that Aziraphale can get promoted so that Aziraphale can go back to Heaven
Gabriel has to lose and regain his memory before running away with Beelzebub so that ???
Itās unclear what any of that Gabriel amnesia plot was needed to set up.
Why not replace the whole āhiding amnesiac Gabriel from Heaven and Hellā plot in S2 with a āhiding Jesus from Heaven and Hellā plot? Then A & C are together when they need to be. It also gives them the realization that their happiness can never really be safe while Heaven and Hell still exist, because theyāll always be dragged back into the power struggle. They realize that all of humanity is in the same boat. That no one can ever truly be free. That sets up a motivation for their sacrifice.
I still donāt like this storyline. I would still argue that Aziraphale and Crowley would never give up on their universe. That thematically, the whole idea of āsacrifice themselves to create a new universeā contradicts the book/S1.
To me, the ultimate thesis of the book and of S1 is that humanity has the power to save itself. That humanityās real power lies in imagination, empathy, self-determination, love and friendship and family, and making our own meaning out of everyday joys. That this power is stronger than any god, if we only choose to claim it.
Aziraphale and Crowley sacrificing themselves, erasing their whole universe to get God to start over with a new one, making that decision for humanityā¦ because humanity is helpless and hopeless in the face of Godās ineffable game, so helpless that humanity has already been destroyed ā¦ it contradicts everything I understood and loved about Good Omens.
But if S3 insisted upon a ānoble sacrifice to erase everything and start overā storyline, at the very least it could have been coherent about it.
As expressed in this post, Iāve been feeling increasingly nostalgic for the characters of my reverse omens, double enemies to lovers, fake relationship Fae AU as of late, and I just checked the calendar and, lo and behold, today marks six months since I finished posting it!
So, happy six-month ficaversary to the story that started with a Greasy Johnson POV of all things and morphed into a fairy tale love story about breaking free from the shackles of prejudice and expectation to build a better, freer world that allows everyone to be true to themselves and their morals. It taught me so much about slowing down and writing stories with more heart than plot, writing dialogue scenes that didnāt feel like a game of ping pong, and that characters really do shine when you let them lead you (albeit maybe a little too meanderingly) though their story.
This one was such hard work, but itās truly become one Iām most proud of.
I do think that Shane gets a Russian language tutor. He sees that Ilya is always having to think, speak, and translate in his second language. And he knows that Ilya is fluent by this point, but if he's serious about forever with Ilya (which he is) he wants Ilya to be able to communicate with his boyfriend in his native language. He also saw how much his grandparents struggled with learning English as adults and how much more expressive and talkative they were when they spoke Japanese at home together.
So he gets a tutor. He meticulously researches her (she's from Moscow, so he'll learn from someone with Ilya's same accent). She's signed to more NDAs than he can count. She has 10 years of experience, she's certified to teach English and Russian, and she has 4.8 stars on MyTutor.
Shane pays her a frankly concerning amount of money to make house calls. Twice weekly, unless he's on the road, she arrives at his apartment to teach him foundational Russian. She gives him workbooks, Russia cartoon recommendation, podcasts for beginners, etc. He tells her he's learning because his boyfriend is Russian and she outlines a course that focuses on domestic language first (as opposed to travel or business). She even teaches him what she calls a 'culture course' with lessons on Russian music, food, and various traditions.
She's only a few years older than Shane and he actually finds himself looking forward to her visits. At this point, she's the only person other than his parents that knows he has a boyfriend.
About 4 months in, Shane finally feels comfortable enough to ask about what he'd been very excited about learning.
"You want me to teach you how to talk dirty to your boyfriend?" Ekaterina raised an eyebrow.
"Um," Shane blushed. Was this a little too far? Was this inappropriate to ask of a tutor? "Yes? If - If that's okay, I mean."
A slow smirk spread over her face. "This will be fun. Fun for me, now. Fun for you, later."
"I made a list," Shane admitted. He wasn't going to back out now, he put a lot of thought into his list. He turned to it in his Russian notebook and handed it to her.
She scanned over it indifferently. "You will use all this in one night?"
"Yeah, probably. Is it too much?"
"It is good you have a Russian man," Ekaterina said. "They have good stamina. Mostly, anyway."
And while it was a little embarrassing for Ekaterina to correct his pronunciation of please let me suck your cock, it helped that she seemed just as comfortable with that as there is tea on the stove.
Though, maybe he shouldn't have learned those phrases at the same time, because Ilya will never, for as long as they live, allow him to forget asking, while down on his knees and with excellent pronunciation, please let me suck your tea.
Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to knowā¦
What is your AO3 user ID?
Iām an OG user 5 digits or less
Six figures baby!
Iām in the millionsā¦
Remaining time: 11 hours 23 minutes
Iām so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!
I just know, after raising Shane all these years, Yuna is very in tune with the likes and dislikes of her family and always likes to pick things up when sheās out.
A blanket on sale that she knows is a texture Shane will like, sesame mochi ā the only dessert Shane will eat ā Davidās favourite brand of chocolate covered almonds (Meiji, obviously).
And when Ilya joins their family it takes a while, but Yuna notices that he always reaches for the dried mangoes when thereās a bag open, and he eats the Miss Vickies sweet and spicy ketchup chips by the handful.
So it makes sense to her that she would pick these things up when she sees them at the store and make sure her pantry is stocked for all her boys.
Ilya only finds out when theyāre over at his parents on a movie night, and Shane, rummaging around the pantry for snacks groans āat this point, you have more of Ilyaās stuff than you do mine,ā
āMy stuff?ā He asks, completely befuddled.
āYeah, like the ketchup chips and the dried mangoes. Your snacks take up the whole pantry.ā
āMy snacks,ā Ilya says again flatly, still not understanding. āBut you all eat these.ā
āI mean sure,ā Shane agrees, ābut my mom buys them for you. Because you like them.ā
āThis is true?ā Ilya turns to Yuna with wide eyes.
And Yuna smiles softly at him, maybe a little sheepishly at being called out so blatantly, and shrugs.
āI mean, yes, honey. I thought you liked those snacks?ā
And Ilya gets all teary and reassures her that he loves these snacks. Heās obsessed with these snacks. They are his favourite snacks.
And he starts noticing how anytime he shows interest in something, it will start showing up regularly at the Hollander householdāsnacks, candy, that specific Japanese soda Ilya likes with the marble.
It becomes a running joke between them that Yuna pays more attention to what Ilya likes than what Shane does (not true but the joke makes them both pleased and sappy).
One thing psychology made obvious to me is that people protect their self-image harder than they protect the truth. A character can do something selfish and still need to believe theyāre kind. So they rename it. They say they were āsetting boundariesā when they were punishing someone. They say they were ābeing honestā when they were being cruel. The lie is not always for other people. Sometimes the lie is the little bridge that lets them keep living with themselves.
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