Ohhhh this is a good one.
1. Cleveland Museum of Art
Always free, massive, gorgeous, actually a pretty damn good cafe. I will stan forever and ever.
2. Hocking Hills State Park
Getting more and more overrun with tourists in summer but with good reason! Autumn here is one of my favorite places on earth and one of the most popular sites is named for my husband's family. :)
3. Lake View Cemetery
Gargantuan cemetery in Cleveland where James Garfield and many other very interesting people are buried; lots of cool rituals at certain graves, such as people sticking pens in the ground at Harvey Pekar's grave! And, of course - Haserot Angel my beloved.
4. Columbus Zoo & Aquarium
There's a reason it's consistently ranked the best or second best zoo in the country. I could sit and watch Stubby the manatee all day.
5. West Side Market
What more do you need. Amazing architecture. Delicious food. Eastern Europeans screaming at you from every angle. Feels like home.
How does Hazel feel about the possibility of having kids?
Thank you for the ask!! ♥
That's a really interesting question, as the topic will come up in more detail later in the fic, but I'll give you Hazel's thoughts on the matter here without (hopefully?) delving too much into spoiler territory.
CWs for talk about tokophobia, fertility, childbirth and childbirth-related complications, infant mortality etc under the cut
It's kind of hinted at early on in the story, but Hazel and Rose's mum passed away shortly after giving birth to their little brother, Oscar, due to severe medical complications. In the prologue, she and Rose visit their mother and brother's grave before heading to the airport.
Hazel herself was never actually told the exact reason why her mum suddenly went from fine to being rushed into hospital at just over six months pregnant to being gone, but it certainly changed the way she viewed pregnancy, and the possibility that she might end up dying from complications herself is genuinely terrifying.
Since being infected by the Cadou, her periods dwindled down to a sporadic one or two a year, and coupled with a reluctance to seek out any kind of intimate relationship, the fear kind of took a back seat in her mind...until she gets with Karl and the tokophobia rears its head again.
However, he's more or less in the same boat in that the Cadou has made them both hypofertile, which is probably the only reason Miranda didn't bother sticking them in a room together with a bed to get her captive breeding program started from day one lmao
If they were in a normal situation, with no parasites and cults involved, she'd consider having kids with him (but only after a lot of therapy to unpack all that childhood trauma first). But as much as she'd love to just live the white picket fence dream far away from the village with Karl, given the nasty combination of their own respective unaddressed traumas, mutated genetics and the very real possibility of Miranda stealing and experimenting on any children they produce, raw-dogging is off the table.
OC ask game: Secret-What's one secret your OC never wants anyone to know about them?
Hazel is bisexual, but barely even acknowledges it herself because she's so far in the closet she might as well as be hanging out with Mr. Tumnus in Narnia due to her Irish Catholic upbringing on her mother's side and her father's Extremely Conservative attitude towards, well, everything. She's certainly attracted to other women, but is far too shy to ever do more than shoot furtive glances and blush.
Unfortunately, this is an aspect of her identity that she strongly repressed both before arriving in the village and during her life there, but who knows- maybe things can change?
(There's also the whole scene in chapter 12 where Miranda humiliates her by revealing another traumatic secret of hers in front of Heisenberg, but that's a sensitive topic that kinda deserves to be read in context)
Crow! Ask Game! L, something nice about a character you dont like!!
Thank you Kit! <3 This is a good one. I earnestly had to think about it for a while, haha.
L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you merely dislike. Characters that you absolutely loathe with the fire of ten thousand suns are exempt, as there is no point in giving yourself an aneurysm over a character that you hate.)
Okay, so. I know I've said before that I sometimes legitimately think I'm too dumb for Cyberpunk 2077, and no one should take this "analysis" too seriously, but let's talk about Johnny Silverhand.
I wouldn't say I hate him, not by a longshot. Keanu played him brilliantly, and he's well written (though that doesn't become apparent imho until like 3/4 through the main quest.) But jesus fucking Christ, I could not stand this dude up until that point and I still find myself wondering if I actually felt emotional over him at the end of the game or if it was more the overall story coming to a close that had me feeling some type of way.
Look, I know it's by design but he is SO so so terrible at first. Insists on commandeering your body/tries to kill you upon first meeting, is a legitimate POS to his girlfriends/friends in every flashback, the incessant drug and alcohol fueled rampages (addiction is not evil ofc but whatever THAT was, it wasn't good.) The thing that got me worst about him over and over was his zero nuance takes where he utterly refuses to see anyone in the corpo realm as human and insists on the fact that nuking a building full of innocent people was a good call even though it fundamentally changed nothing. I get that's "the point" or whatever, that maybe we should see him as a victim in some sense because he's trying to convince himself he isn't a murderer, that the world of Cyberpunk is so horrific/dystopian that one individuals actions no matter how drastic can't make a difference. But god did I want to punch him in the mouth for most of the game lmao.
That being said, it's for these reasons that it always gave me pause when he had very nuanced and frankly touching insights into the military, both with regard to his own service and others. He really speaks very differently most of the time when it comes up, and it's clear that he has a sensitivity there that's both weirdly admirable imho and thoughtful. There's still a touch of douchebaggery of course, but I actually wish we'd gotten more time to delve into it with him. The "giving V his dog tags" scene lives in my brain rent free still.
Fandom Ask Game
You got me lol. Was it the introversion? The weird sense of constant ennui? The social anxiety? I am like the poster child for "had no siblings and spent a lot of time alone growing up."
My parents were also older when they had me (40+) which also probably explains a lot about... everything, haha.
I love asks like this lmao thank you. <3
So, actually, my answer is gonna be a firm no! Idk but Karl strikes me as a very like... hands on dad. You are gonna get into that garage and hold the damn flashlight for him. We are bonding by changing the oil in your mom's car together. Rub some dirt in that scraped knee! (He doesn't know how to use an iPad and at this point he's too afraid to ask.)
Kris might let her play around on her phone or tablet or something for a bit but I think the second she hears some kind of incomprehensible skibidi toilet type shit it's like a kill switch and the varcolac gets activated lmfao.
If it's any consolation: I think Lottie inherits her dad's bizarre ineptitude with modern tech and I can absolutely see them exchanging videos from across the living room that they play at full blast and laugh way too hard at while Kris sits in the middle Googling how to fake her own death and start anew.
