I'm honestly picking and choosing what angst I wanna share because my mind thrives on it and the hurt/comfort follow up of all of it which means I just live in my own little angst haven but not everyone loves it like me.
The best thing to knock a scandal out of the headlines is a worse one. A bigger story.
Mi-Yeong's pregnancy out of Wedlock story was sort of overwhelmed by her death after all. And no one could pick at the bastard child left behind when there was such a tragedy to talk about.
Any whispers over the circumstances of Mi-Yeong's death were hushed with a very public breakup of the Sunlight Sisters.
So when news breaks everywhere of Rumi's 'tattoos' that are so widespread, the fight at the Idol awards and how even her own bandmates must despise what she's done given they forcibly revealed her body art on stage Rumi's well aware she just has to ride it out until something bigger comes along.
What's bigger than secretly covered in 'tattoos' and publicly shamed by her best friends over it she's not sure but there must be something.
Rumi checking social media almost constantly, to the point Mira threatens to take her damn phone, laptop, tablet everything away until this shitstorm has passed them by.
A few weeks in though and suddenly HUNTR/X isn't trending, nor is Ryu Rumi, or any of the lame hashtags applied to their supposed breakup, her lapse in morals.
Sunlight Sisters is trending suddenly, as is Kang Celine, and every nickname that her adoptive mother has ever gone by. Rumi who panics at first because suddenly trending like that is normally a horrible thing, death or worse and she doesn't have any missed calls from anyone to alert her to the world ending to something happening so what the fuck is going on.
Going out to the main room in a daze trying to get Twitter to load only to have Mira steal her phone away from her and tell her in the most serious tone "You cannot listen to a single thing Zoey says for like the next three hours. Just let her get it out of her system and then we can pay attention to her again."
Rumi having no idea what the fuck Zoey's babbling has to do with whatever has Celine trending until she finally snags her phone back.
It's not death, it's not injury or an accident, it's worse.
Leaked private photos worse.
Leaked private photos from a hotel room decades ago worse.
A handful of photos that she finds across a few accounts. Tabloids, news outlets, fan accounts, places no private photos should ever be.
There's not technically any nudity to it showing that Celine hasn't ever showed off on stage, in magazines but there's implications to every photo.
Several obvious getting ready or getting undressed photos.
Celine in sheet barely covering her, touching up her makeup in the mirror with lipstick stains on her neck and shoulders.
The worst, blurred on some pages, edited with filters on others, is a photo from someone else's point of view, looking down their own body as they lay on a bed.
Whoever the unknown woman is, she's laying with one knee up, Celine's arm wrapped around it, hand sprawled possessively on her thigh, Celine's head on her hip as she looks up at the camera.
It's not explicit, it's intimate which is worse, and it's extremely obvious what was going on before the photo was taken.
It makes Rumi's stomach hurt worse than any of the posts about her 'tattoos', the 'breakup' on stage.
The fact it hasn't been taken down yet makes her heart race and there are panicked calls to Bobby as Celine isn't answering.
Bobby sharing the same almost panicked tone as he replies that it's not his circus, not his monkeys, he can't really do much in this.
"Not your--- that's my mother!"
Bobby who swears he'll do what he can, but when he gets back to them it's a text - the coward - saying he's reached out to Celine's people, the ones who've been managing her for decades at this point, and received a reply that they have everything under control and do not require assistance
Rumi can't get Celine on the phone and deciding just to show up at her house unannounced because this is a huge betrayal of Celine's trust from whoever the fuck decided to do that shit. It's career homicide, it's horrible, it's something so personal no one should ever have stolen that away. Of course she can't go alone, what kind of girlfriends friends would they be if they let her which means Mira's calming presence and Zoey's rapid fire texting and scrolling through far too many of the pages while clearly trying very hard to hold her tongue.
She's halfway to her childhood home when there's a tweet from Celine that Zoey shows her 'addressing' the situation that simply says 'Don't expect a #throwbackThursday'.
It takes about five minutes of being in Celine's home, being in Celine's presence for Rumi to realize that it wasn't some betrayal of trust, some leak or stolen photos sold for someone's gain.
It was a deliberate leak of something so scandalous it would knock anything else out of the headlines, kill any other current rumors or problems.
Celine's 'old' so she always jokes, she's made her career, she's retired - bored with it or not - and at her age who gives a fuck if the world knows her sexuality, the people who matter already do, the industry already does.
But Rumi's young, and she's always had so much pushed upon her from the moment she was born that she deserves peace now, calm, to live how she wants.
Celine promised her things would get better after the Golden Honmoon after all.
"What kind of guardian would I be if I wasn't willing to do whatever I could to take your pain away?"
"It's going to wreck your life."
"It won't do too much to me. The worst that could happen is I get canceled and continue to be a menace on social media and at the office."
"The worst that happens is people could-- they could hate you for it."
"The people who matter won't care at all, and the people who care can fuck off. I've seen the hashtags, I'll still have very dedicated fans. More importantly, hopefully I'll still have you."
I find jealous/possessive Rumi in polytrix deeply funny bc she's an only child who only learned to share when she had 2 soulmates foisted upon her so she'll share with THEM bc that was required criteria to pass soulmate 101 but she sure as fuck ain't sharing them with anyone else
I don't think we give ToG enough credit for showing us that deep connections don't have to be romantic
Yes, the series technically classifies as romantasy, and yes, there is a lot of romance in there, but not only.
There is Manon and the Thirteen, who teach us that the family we build for ourselves is so much more important than the one we're born into.
Aelin, Dorian, and Chaol, who show us that sometimes you just need a hand to pull you out of the dark hell you wound up in.
Aelin and Ansel who teach us that sometimes we make mistakes, and those mistakes hurt the people around us, but that doesn't make them unforgivable.
My personal favorite, Fenrys and Aelin, who had a bond so deep they were the only things that kept each other sane through months of torture, so deep Fenrys broke the unbreakable blood oath and SURVIVED for Aelin's sake.
There is so much love in ToG. Platonic, romantic, between all genders.
I see your "Rumi accidentally walking in on Mira and Zoey having sex because she doesn't know they're together" and raise you "Rumi intentionally teleporting in on Mira and Zoey having sex because they've been ignoring her calls for the past thirty minutes and she's really fucking annoyed."
Like, she appears in their room and they're super embarrassed meanwhile she's just like "yo dipshits, when I call you twenty times in a row it's becuase I need your help with something important" while completely ignoring both of them being butt ass naked.
stormborns
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
izzy806
germansingergirl
