would you consider doing a good aaron pov fic rec list?
yeah sure! these are a few that come to mind (bear in mind i'm rubbish at bookmarking or otherwise saving fics so i'll probably have missed some and i might come back and add more later):
@vagabondangel has great poetic canon fics from aaron's perspective and a genderswapped popstar au!
@angstics (blownspeakers (gasolinenights) on ao3) has several aaron pov fics (including bottom aaron!!) and their robert pov fics are also well characterised. i especially like "please, can i sleep?", which i mentioned in my last ask, where gordon's reveal comes later, in 2018.
@letnirvanarain (saintaaron on ao3) has two brilliant canon typical aaron pov fics, "the fight" and "by the lake", dealing with his internal thoughts
"and your soul has changed" by livflahertydingle is an aaron amnesia fic (unfinished, only 1 of 3 chapters so far) which has lots of manipulative john
"to see the sun paint the sky" also by livflahertydingle, an aaron pov about seb
"home, family, and all things inbetween" by ParkerLuck, which is aaron's pov of reuniting with seb
"how long?" (anonymous), is a haunting aaron pov of farm life with robert and seb. complete with dubcon and allusions to transfem seb
"in which the love still remains" by riversbluebear, a fluffy 5+1 sebron centric fic of seb calling aaron dad for the first time
"secrets unlocked" by rholou is about if aaron's abuse came out in 2009
"triple dog dare" by dahliasquints is a teenage enemies to lovers au (incomplete, 1 of 2 chapters published)
"i pay for my place" by bitemeloser is an au of the affair where chrissie got pregnant (incomplete, 7/8 chapters)
"what do i gotta do to get in your motherfuckin' heart" by thebodydies is bottom!aaron pwp of after 'upstairs now' and also "something black and blue" which is bottom!aaron affair era pwp in an au where jackson didn't die
"out with lanterns" by shanastoryteller is a post john aaron pov fic where aaron and robert share a bed because neither of them can sleep (also very sympathetic towards rob)
"stay in the game" by finkpishnets is an aaron falls first teen au with maxbert and edron
"i can't seem to let you myself leave you (but i can't breathe anymore)" by emilia_kaisa is an affair era aaron-centric hanahaki au
and some good non aaron povs:
"no escape no mercy" by dracolacerta, which is a fabulously creepy john pov cottage fic
"different but the same" by quarkstartrek is transfem seb pov coming out
"tears dry, lights off (fall asleep baby, so the hurt stops)" by RazzmatazzWillow is rob pov but aaron-centric hurt/comfort dealing with john trauma
ninth_life has a lot of great robron fics, "snow daze" is a rob pov prime minister!rob popstar!aaron au that i'm enjoying rn, and "suspended sentence" is aaron-centric hurt/comfort about the brca2 cancer gene
"even if nobody else sings along" by sunsetmog is a series of jackson pov fics about aaron, dated back to 2010
and that's just the way it is which is from an orphaned account is both in Aaron and Robert's POV. This is a Gavin and Stacey au. Very fluffy.
Dancing with a Stranger byStarWitness42 is also in both Aaron and Robert's POV. Very Aaron centered. This is a long fic about Robert pining after a struggling Aaron.
drowning in your light by softlyspoken is Aaron POV. In this fic, Aaron and Robert meet as kind of a one night stand. Aaron is younger here, pretty messed up, and Robert is infatuated with him.
Who's Got Game by sofestlad is Aaron POV. Short fic. Has some humor and jealousy on Robert's side.
i think that it's best if we stay by electrumqueen is Robert's POV. While this one is Robert's POV, it's very Aaron centered around Aaron's relationship with Jackson and Robert and Aaron learning to trust each other.
The Hardest Science by jentacular is Robert's POV but also very Aaron sympathetic. It's about Robert getting his memories wiped of Aaron right after their affair is revealed.
Mr. Wrong by ripringle is Aaron's POV, but this is Aaron/OC if you're open to that. It's a very charming story about Aaron calling a wrong number.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
idk I think there really might be a link between kev and celia tbh. him being one of her other sons. since that post yesterday pointed out to me that joe absolom was in eastenders too, and then obviously chris was too, and two very memorable characters - this is not really a clue but i just feel it lol. and also when the kev news first came out it did say it would affect many villagers, and he seems to be having scene with more villagers… and that duncan tweet about interlinking stories etc. I can see it, I feel it
I don't mean to be all discoursey here, but it's a bad take to imply that Aaron should be held accountable for the john situation. Normally, I wouldn't say anything, but I feel compelled to do so, in this case, as someone whose had experience with this personally with an emotionally abusive partner (aside from the murder/manslaughter parts).
As someone who has been in an emotionally abusive relationship, it is totally false that it's easy to recognize. Because you're being manipulated and gasliit by someone who you love and trust, it's hard to recognize the red flags. I actually feel that Emmerdale has done a pretty good job of displaying this kind of abusive relationship, down to Aaron's appeasement of John and his apathy at times to John's lies. What's disheartening is the fandom response.
This take is basically claiming that emotionally intelligent people cannot be emotionally controlled and abused. That the abuse was at least somewhat Aaron's fault since he didn't recognize the signs of being emotionally abused. It is never the other partner's fault for their partner's abusive behavior. Emotional abuse is still abuse. Aaron is not accountable for it. All the accountability lies with John. Just like it wasn't Robert's fault he was gaslit by John, it also wasn't Aaron's.
John has been controlling and abusive of Aaron since at least Anthony's death. Of course he can't see it. He's too close to it. It happened slowly and insidiously. He feels he owes John because John has manipulated him to feel this way. Yes, he's also afraid of how much he loves Robert, and that plays a part in it. But, ultimately, he's clinging to John because he believes that John is a good person. A person who loves him.
Should Aaron go to therapy? Absolutely. Should he be held accountable for John's abuse and manipulation of himself and others? No.
why would anyone want aaron to apologise to robert? crazy opinion. what does he have to apologise for??
rob hid the fact that he was still gunning after lee. hid the possibility that he was up for a life sentence. hid the fact that he was being moved to the isle of wight. hid that he was planning to send divorce papers. failed to acknowledge liv's death. hid that he was planning to appeal. hid that the appeal had succeeded.
robert completely abandoned aaron and removed all of aaron's hard won agency in the relationship and any sense them being a team.
and any idea that any of that was selfless is completely negated when he rocks up at the wedding, like i'm back to pick up where i left off and your new relationship and whatever you've built in my absence means nothing because it's not with me.
like??????????
don't get me wrong, i love that he's like this because drama and robron. but to want aaron to apologise for making the only choices robert left for him is grotesque. especially in the context where we as the audience know that he's wrong about john and is about to be betrayed again so badly.
like, what do you want him to say? i'm sorry i was upset that you abandoned me the way everyone else i've ever loved has and i'm sorry for trying to move on the way you wanted me to and i'm sorry i yelled at you in the pub because it was taking me too long to realise that i was wrong about the guy i was trying to move on with the way you told me to...
why should he apologise for being jerked around and for not knowing things he doesn't know?????
“What do you want?” Leaf asked, still backing away.
The forest person smiled, and tilted his head. “The same thing you do,” he answered.
“What do I want?” Leaf asked, confused.
“Me and mine have heard your prayers and have come to answer them,” the forest person said. He mockingly bowed to Leaf.
“You and yours?”
“Yes,” he replied. He spread his arms to either side of him, which seemed to be a signal as more Forest People came out of the woods. There was one who resembled a tree. They had skin like bark, green leaves that sprouted from their head, shoulders, and twig-like fingers. They moved stiffly, their legs not bending where their knees should be. Leaf was unable to determine a gender.
Another one was a short creature with black mushrooms that rose from his gray skin. At first glance, it looked as if he had fur on his chin as some humans did, but when Leaf looked closer he saw the fur was also mushrooms growing closely together.
He disconnected their mouths, took a breath, and asked shakily, "What do you want me to do?"
She laughed at him a bit, just a little puff of air that he could barely hear. Instead of answering, she reached back behind herself, fiddled with the back of her shirt a bit, and then withdrew her bra from her left arm hole.
She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, "Feel free to do whatever. I'll let you know if I want you to stop."
He nodded, and she leaned in to kiss him again. He put his hand under her shirt, let it rest on the underside of her breast for a moment before moving it up again. Her skin was warm and inviting. He splayed his palm across her breast, and felt her hard nipple underneath. He pressed in a bit to feel the tip against his palm, and she moaned and moved in closer. He took his palm off her breast and rubbed his thumb over her nipple. He tried to pay attention to what she liked. She would gasp into his mouth when he tugged on her nipple with a little pressure, so he tugged and played, and listened.
A block from his apartment building, his phone rang, the screen lighting up to tell him the caller was Stuart. Andrew ducked into an alleyway and answered it.
"Well?" Andrew demanded.
"It wasn't the FBI," Stuart said.
Andrew already knew that. "Tell me something useful."
"Ichirou has been informed of the situation. He's not pleased that his investment has disappeared. I'm getting on a plane now. I'll be there in six hours. Don't call the police."
The line went dead. Stuart had hung up the phone.
Andrew leaned up against the wall of the alleyway for a moment. He took a second then lit another cigarette.
"Well?" Kevin demanded impatiently from where he was hovering beside Andrew.
"Stuart will be here in six hours."
"Does he know who has him?"
"No," Andrew answered.
Andrew rubbed his cigarette out against the alleyway and tossed the stub. He started walking back to the apartment.
Kevin jogged to catch up with him. "What now?"
Yes, Andrew, what now? He sure as hell wasn't going to wait six hours for Stuart on his ass doing nothing when Neil could be dying. Could be dead. Probably already is dead, a slowly rotting corpse buried under ground that Andrew would never find, a little voice whispered.
He forcibly pushed it back. "I'm getting the car."
Neil had never given up on him. He wouldn't give up on Neil.
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