I (F) love my current boyfriend, we have been dating for about 6-7 months. Earlier in our relationship we made plans for our future, but over time, I don't think we'll be able to meet those plans. And I've seen some guys that I think would be a better "fit" for me. I’m gonna do a "Reasons" list, Imk what you think. • Also he's not funny, and humor is a #1 priority for me 1. He doesn't speak English as a first language: It can be quite difficult for me to communicate with him due to his kind of poor English, and his family doesn't speak English at all. I don't think our families would communicate well. He also has trouble understanding my point in things 2. He's made the same mistakes over and over again: If he knows I won't like something, he does it, then tells me LATER, either if I found out or he accidentally tells me. An example is when I first met him he said that I was the first girl he's ever truly loved, and that he didn't LOVE anyone before me. Then 6 months later, recently, I saw his old messages with a friend from a few months before we started dating and basically, he said that he was in love with a girl, wanted her "so bad", wanted her to "be his so bad" and said he got teary eyed when his friend gave him advice for her. This REALLY hurt my feelings, as he lied to me and hid that from me for however long. So yeah there's that. And there's also other things. He just apologizes, says he'll fix it, but then doesn't. 3. I honestly don't find him that attractive: I know this sounds mean, but honestly... I've lost my attraction for him. He's just not my type 4. We have an age gap: It's not big, but at our ages it IS a big deal. I really don't think it would work out 5. I have my eyes on another guy. I've been considering breaking up with him for a while. And for the past week l've talked to this guy (in class only), he's funny, cute, smart, tall, and we have a similar childhood & background & our families speak the same language so there's no language barrier. I have imagined being with him instead and it makes me feel so guilty. 6. I really don't think it would work out. Not in really any aspect. Our families don't speak the same language, we come from different backgrounds (saying it may be harder for our families to bond and "understand" each other), I'm not that attracted to him, our age gap, and everything else mentioned above including other unmentioned things. Why I don't wanna break up with him: He is really sweet. I can see he WANTS to be the best boyfriend for me, but he just can't. He loves me a lot and cries a lot abt me when we argue or etc. I care abt him and don't wanna hurt him. He does try his best, and he still does make me happy sometimes, but he makes me sad too. Sorry for talking so much, it's just a big topic for me. I really do want to break up. I just don't wanna hurt him or regret it. Please Imk your thoughts asap.

I (F) love my current boyfriend, we have been dating for about 6-7 months. Earlier in our relationship we made plans for our future, but over time, I don't think we'll be able to meet those plans. And I've seen some guys that I think would be a better "fit" for me. I’m gonna do a "Reasons" list, Imk what you think. • Also he's not funny, and humor is a #1 priority for me 1. He doesn't speak English as a first language: It can be quite difficult for me to communicate with him due to his kind of poor English, and his family doesn't speak English at all. I don't think our families would communicate well. He also has trouble understanding my point in things 2. He's made the same mistakes over and over again: If he knows I won't like something, he does it, then tells me LATER, either if I found out or he accidentally tells me. An example is when I first met him he said that I was the first girl he's ever truly loved, and that he didn't LOVE anyone before me. Then 6 months later, recently, I saw his old messages with a friend from a few months before we started dating and basically, he said that he was in love with a girl, wanted her "so bad", wanted her to "be his so bad" and said he got teary eyed when his friend gave him advice for her. This REALLY hurt my feelings, as he lied to me and hid that from me for however long. So yeah there's that. And there's also other things. He just apologizes, says he'll fix it, but then doesn't. 3. I honestly don't find him that attractive: I know this sounds mean, but honestly... I've lost my attraction for him. He's just not my type 4. We have an age gap: It's not big, but at our ages it IS a big deal. I really don't think it would work out 5. I have my eyes on another guy. I've been considering breaking up with him for a while. And for the past week l've talked to this guy (in class only), he's funny, cute, smart, tall, and we have a similar childhood & background & our families speak the same language so there's no language barrier. I have imagined being with him instead and it makes me feel so guilty. 6. I really don't think it would work out. Not in really any aspect. Our families don't speak the same language, we come from different backgrounds (saying it may be harder for our families to bond and "understand" each other), I'm not that attracted to him, our age gap, and everything else mentioned above including other unmentioned things. Why I don't wanna break up with him: He is really sweet. I can see he WANTS to be the best boyfriend for me, but he just can't. He loves me a lot and cries a lot abt me when we argue or etc. I care abt him and don't wanna hurt him. He does try his best, and he still does make me happy sometimes, but he makes me sad too. Sorry for talking so much, it's just a big topic for me. I really do want to break up. I just don't wanna hurt him or regret it. Please Imk your thoughts asap.

Okay, so, first, my side. On Jan 28th of this year(2024), I was walking with my wife. We enjoy going for 2-3 hour walks every day, m(well we did, lol) and the last thing I remember was that I said to her “I feel dizzy”, then about 30 minutes or so later, I came to screaming in pain, as i was being put in a stretcher thingy for an Ambulance. For me, I have no memory of those 30ish minutes, according to my wife, I was trying to stand up and do other dumb shit.
Apparently, I had a stroke, seizure, or something, fell, most likely backwards, and severely broke my L7. I have a photo of the CT they did of my spine in Emerg. It’s pretty fucked.
So, that’s how my life has been for almost the last 4 months. It’s not healing and I won’t go into why i haven’t had surgery or something yet.
Well, because of this, I’ve had a great excuse to not see or deal with my mother. It’s been great(aside from the horrible physical pain and nerve pain).
Apparently 4 days ago. My mother messages me that her mother is in the hospital, I hate my Grandma so i didn’t really care.
Then 2 days later, she calls me, telling me that she’s the one actually in the hospital, basically dying. She’s saying she can’t breathe, they think she has cancer(with no symptoms or even what kind. Just “cancer”), that she’s getting a MRI of her brain because she’s been getting headaches, so she said the doctors think she some brain disease, I forget which, she was also getting a random ultrasound of her intestines, and she had a blood clot in her lungs, and because of that, she’s being put on blood thinners for the next year or longer, oh, and she’s on the verge of a heart attack because she claims her heart rate is “too high” but isn’t getting an EKG, or anything. There are a few other things I’m forgetting, aswell. But when you’re told such blatant lies, your mind can only register so much.
My wife and I guess is that she wasn’t happy that my back was giving me a valid reason to not deal with her bullshit, and this all happened on Mother’s Day, and since I didn’t go visit her in the hospital(BECAUSE I CANT), she starts to scream at me at how much I’m a piece of shit, how I don’t love her, how much my wife has turned me into a heartless monster, and when she dies from this(not even a “if”), I’ll be kicked out of her Will, and even though she supposedly paid 15,000 dollars for a spot in a mausoleum(or whatever those are called. Where your corpse is in a stone drawer, instead of the ground) and made a huge deal about how her body HAS to be placed in one, that I will not be getting any of her ashes when she’s cremated.
At this point. While I’ve started to find it funny. In the moment, I was absolutely furious. She knows full well of my horrible medical issues. Ive had a double lung transplant, I’ve been through stage 4 lymphoma, the transplant meds and chemo have really caused me alot of issues with my brain, I’ve broken my spine twice, for the last 2 years I’ve had a BP of like 180/140(roughly, and it actually caused worry in some of my doctors) and just recently got put on meds to bring that down, and so much more.
It’s so fucked that a parent who’s seen her own son struggle to survive, time and time again, to be told countless times “he’s not going to make it” to pull this shit.
I’m so done with her bullshit that if she were to die, I don’t think I would even shed a tear. After 36 years of narcissistic abuse, actually abuse, financial abuse, and more, there just isn’t any emotions for her anymore.

My mom went to get gallstone operation, which they didn't end up doing coz they found something that was not supposed to be there. They ended up taking tissue samples and now we have 2 more weeks to wait for the results. I'm 99,9% sure it's cancer. The doc said that my mom has a very bad and dangerous disease that does not yet have an accurate diagnosis. In my eyes it only waiting game to find out what stage and how wide it has spread.
And I say this because in the last three months her healt has significantly deteriorated. In february she was walking and talking like normal person. Now, she can hardly find the strength to stand let alone walk more than 10 feet. She uses a walking stick. Is always tired, dizzy, loat her appetite and what not.
So, no questions, she has cancer. My stepmom had it too and we lost her within two years from the diagnosis. Stepmoms last chemo was what took her.
Me and my brothers have stepped up and we'll be there for mom, with home improvements, doctors appointments, bill, anything she need. We don't like her but she is our mom.
So I told my husband and my best friend that my mom having cancer is karma. And I didn't say it lightly. She has destroyed so many relationships for her gain and amusement. My firs marriage was one of them. Mom hated my stepmom and dad, even though I don't think she ever loved him in the first place.
Me, my brothers, sister (all older than me) have so many mental scars because of mom, it's not even funny. So do my two older kids and one of my nieces. My sister is the only one NC with mom but my sister has a victim complex so it's not all mom's doing. She's NC with me too, coz I stopped taking her b-crap.
My best friend knows all the story's about my mom but still told me I should not have said it was karma. But I can't help it, I think it is. And the way she looks right now, it would be a miracle if she can hold on for the next two years.

The EXTREMELY detailed, mega-anxiety edition!!! Major events like consult and surgery day are labeled like this:
——— EVENT TITLE ———
Surgeon was Dr. David Whitehead and I saw him on Long Island (New Hyde)
Summarized list of major dates:
Consult: July 19 2023 Mental health letter acquired: August 9 Dates discussed: September 12 Pre-op appointment: December 18 Surgery day: January 8 2024 Post-op: January 17
November 11th 2022: Emailed northwell health for the first time, they emailed back saying to call. I was too anxious so I avoided it for a few months.
Called northwell a few months later but got too anxious talking to the person who picked up. They were being normal and talking normally, it was just personal anxiety on my part.
October 2022 - Early March 2023: Spent time talking to trans friends and family members about their timelines and processes for top surgery.
Looked into Penn medicine for a bit but wasn’t happy with the surgeons there, specifically as a nonbinary person. The patient navigational team however is lovely.
March 2: emailed Penn health patient navigation
March 3-10: correspondence and phone calls w patient navigation (absolutely wonderful people, some of the easiest phone calls I’ve ever had) Got lots of into on surgeons, things I’d need, processes etc.
Date unknown: phone call to Penn medicine asking about surgeons and possibly setting up as a patient (v long wait time on phone) Surgeon I had heard good things about only works w CHOP program and I’m was too old for that program. Other surgeons I was v iffy on.
March 23rd: Back to square 1. Called northwell again to set up an appointment. Everyone I spoke to was really nice. Could have set up an appointment within the week but decided to wait till the end of the semester. Scheduled a trans care and primary care appointment for May
Couple of calls In between for confirmations. Trans care appointment got moved around a bit and ended up being moved to a phone call.
May 8th: Trans care call: Basic preliminary questions like: Emergency contact, what you’re looking for, are you thinking of looking into hormones, experience w dysphoria or dysmorphia, mental health, and eating/nutritional concerns, things you might want doc to know, piercings or tattoos, do you do any drugs or drink often, etc. total call time was about 20 minutes. Doctor was incredibly kind, I still experienced a good deal of anxiety but the call was super easy, welcoming, and friendly. Got sent contact referrals for the surgeons, as well as trans-friendly therapists under my insurance.
May 9th: started looking at list of therapists and making respective emails and calls. Checking per session costs and double checking insurance. Most charge 100-150 per session. Got in contact w one.
May 10th: Called w first therapist talking about what I’m looking for, where I am in this process, if parents are supportive, and talking about costs. She was very friendly and affirming, wants to have a few sessions to get to know me and my situation before writing a letter. Understandable and expected, but frustrating.
May 15th: Primary care appointment: Went to northwell health primary care, parkinglot was a little scary (just a large lot with a lot of cars) but everyone working there’s is super kind. Office is incredibly affirming, pride flags and lgbtq+ art everywhere. Gave my insurance card, filled out some paper work, got called in pretty quickly. I have a needle phobia and medical trauma so I was panicking a bit in the office, nurse was good w me about it and doctor was very kind, I just requested to not have any blood work done that day and that was totally fine, so I could schedule that at a later date and go w a friend. Recommended to get blood work done before scheduling a consult w a surgeon. Also prescribed me a single dose anxiety med for the bloodwork which I was very happy about. I found over time that the anxiety meds unfortunately do little to nothing for my panic attacks personally when it comes to needles but regardless having a doctor acknowledge and respect that fear and listen to me was incredibly helpful and reassuring.
May 30th: Got blood work done in a different lab, went w a friend. Scheduling for that is super easy, I think I did it online actually I don’t entirely recall. they do take walk ins but I made an appointment to minimize complications and make sure I could prepare properly. Front desk/lobby area was a little spooky, but I think that is mainly just bc of my social anxiety. They take a urine sample, you give them your prescription, eventually they call you over for blood work. Quick and easy, tech was v nice and having a friend with me was incredibly helpful. Probably the best I’ve ever done with a needle despite the fact that I did still panic and get very lightheaded lol.
Got blood work results back within the next couple days, all looks a-okay! Neat :)
June 15th This day was incredibly difficult. I had my first session with a therapist to establish some ground knowledge around my dysphoria and the way that I view myself. Top surgery is something that I know from research and related experience Can be difficult and expensive to get and can take time, so much of my prep work has been on the understanding of taking things a step at a time and just knowing that the current way things are doesn’t have to be forever. It allowed me to be able to live with myself while prioritizing my health better. This read to the therapist as “not having the level of dysphoria [she’s] come to expect and look for in someone who is trans” and was largely based off the fact that I don’t want to go on hrt. Past that point I started to break down because now my method of learning to live with myself felt like it was actively going to work against me and prevent me from getting top surgery. I’m not good at talking about my dysphoria, I can’t imagine it’s easy for anyone, especially to a stranger I just met. It was rough, and I felt incredibly mentally drained after ending the session.
June 19th Called it quits with the first therapist, I felt incredibly disrespected and the one session we had put me in a mental spiral for days. It can feel some times in this process like the people you have to get permission from need you to be severely depressed and unable to wait another second for this procedure just in order to take you seriously.
After I left that therapist, I immediately got back to the list to find someone new. Spoke to a new therapist via email, but my insurance is kinda weird (Blue Cross Blue Shield out of state) so its off putting to some people. This therapist recommended I go through the office she started out at (Heart and Soul Counseling)
————- Time Skip ——————
IM BACK its time for some record keeping. Got super overwhelmed and lost the energy to document my process for some time so here goes.
HEART AND SOUL COUNSELING: My experience w/ this therapy office was mostly good. The person in charge, Jesse, was absolutely lovely and responsive. Never spoke in person, but any text/email interaction was prompt, respectful, and kind. The office is stellar with email/text communication, so I only ever had to call them once when I was initially inquiring about the office. This is something I wish all therapy/counseling centers did better, eliminated a ton of my anxiety and hesitation to speak to therapists.
I got set up w someone as quickly as possible and established what my goal was (to acquire letter document for my surgery team). I attended multiple session w the therapist, she was a kind lady but the sessions were unfortunately p miserable for me. We didn’t fit well, but I was willing to stick it out rather than backtrack on my process. She also did not invalidate me or accuse me of not being trans which was a major step up from my first therapy experience. Once I acquired my letter I did stop therapy there, I kindly explained to the therapist that it wasn’t a good match, but I may honestly explore my options at the office in the future. Receptionist there was also lovely and they had a cool fish tank.
———- CONSULT STARTS HERE —————
July 19th: CONSULT!!! My mama and I went to Dr. David Whiteheads office for a consult. Parking was a nightmare so I’m super glad I didn’t have to drive for this one (ty mama). Consult went really well, and the staff were all super friendly. Dr. Whitehead is cool, very chill energy and a bit intimidating, but I’m scared of everyone so that’s nothing new. First question he asked me is what I wanted/what he could do for me which caught me more off guard than it should have? I didn’t realize going into this process how many times people ask you what you’re having done even if it’s already written down, because there’s so much variety in what you can look for in the results.
We talked about the procedure, went through a slideshow n stuff, and discussed how I wanted a flat chest w/ no nipple preservation. They made sure to specify that my mental health professional letter had to include that I did not want nipple preservation because thats technically a “non-standard” appearance. Also had the first breast exam I’ve ever had in my life. Can’t say i’m a fan (not that I need to worry about that anymore!) Took pictures n measurements n such, and also discussed recovery supplies and care w me and my mom.
August 9th: After a plethora of painfully awkward therapy sessions, a decent amount of crying, and a couple breakdowns in friends cars/backyards, I got my therapist letter and sent it to the surgeons office. It ended up needing minor revisions to which I contacted Jesse from Heart and Soul and he got me the revised letter immediately. Unfortunately the surgical coordinator was out of office for the rest of the month the next day ;w;. Is how it be.
September 12th: Got a call from Surgical coordinator mid-painting class that I stepped out to take. Started discussing surgical dates!! She was kind enough to email the dates to me which was lovely because I was absolutely shaking/mind blank haha. There was an option for January 8th which felt like an absolute miracle the way it would work with my school schedule. It would give me a solid two weeks recovery time before spring semester began. Because it would be a couple months out, I was asked to contact her in the second week of October to submit documents to insurance.
(Timeline note: earliest date offered was in early December)
October 10th: Documents sent to insurance, predetermination started
October 30th: Received mail from my insurance approving my procedure as medically necessary (YAY) But! This is also where things get,,, fun! Dr Whitehead’s surgical coordinator, Alyssa, is a blessing and was very helpful and prompt with me despite the fact that I had to email her pretty constantly during this general time which I still feel bad about.
Around this time, my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer, which I reported to the surgical coordinator because it influences my family history (grandmother also had breast cancer). It was asked that I get genetic testing done because this could impact my surgical procedure. Now I’m handling the setup on this between helping my mom in her process setting up consults and considering her options because there of course is a lot of crossover to the steps I’ve already completed and am familiar with.
November 1st: Very kind person at cancer genetics calls me, sends me a family history questionnaire to fill out before I can be scheduled to see a genetic counselor. Filled out the questionnaire the same day.
November 8th: Called cancer genetics to check about scheduling, office was not open so left a message. Got a call back later in the day. I have a virtual appointment with a Genetic counselor Tuesday the 14th. Current plan is a mailed saliva genetic test but I’m going to ask if theres anything I can do to get results/materials quicker. If I can’t get results/feedback by December 8th my surgery date may get deferred.
Trying not to stress too much because there is little to nothing I can do about this, and I just don’t want to be sad. I’ve kept telling myself throughout this process to not get excited and not let myself believe anything is solid because something could happen at any time that might mess up my schedule or plan, and If I convince myself I’m in the clear, those changes will hurt a lot more. So far I think thats been a good move, because this really sucks.
My surgery date is still officially scheduled as of now as well as my first post-op. I will also ideally have pre-surgical testing done December 18th should I be cleared by genetics in time (Fingers crossed!)
ALSO! Def lean on friends if/when you can during this process. It can absolutely be challenging, and having a support system is incredibly important and helpful. I’m super lucky to have really lovely and supportive friends that are around to listen to me and send me pictures of stupid little animals.
November 9th: My mama is scheduled for her double mastectomy on December 4th
November 10th: Did some shopping with my mama for recovery supplies for double mastectomy/top surgery. Having watched a million and a half transition/top surgery videos and tiktoks and having read all the blogs and posts and tweets makes you a great support for someone suddenly faced with an upcoming double mastectomy! We might go shopping this weekend for some button ups and zip ups for her, clothes shopping is better done when you can try stuff on
November 14th: Meeting w genetic counselor: Victoria Webb, one of the loveliest medical care workers I’ve ever met. Had a virtual appointment with her to discuss and set up genetic testing. I explained to her about my situation w the proximity of my surgery and tight deadline as well as my willingness to do a blood test instead of a saliva kit to get results quicker. She was so incredibly kind and good with me, ended up being able to do a saliva kit and get results in time she deserves every good thing in life.
December 18th: pre-surgical testing: This was at the main hospital, everyone was really nice but I had a really bad panic attack despite being on Xanax.
The process is sort of like getting a physical. Measurements like weight and blood pressure get taken, lots of preliminary health questions. The people working with me were really kind and I was very open with them about my anxiety, it was visually apparent though anyway because I started crying the second we even started talking about the blood draw.
Once the equipment was actually brought into the room I started to panic. Both of the women working with me were really kind and helpful and tried to distract me and keep me talking the entire time, but I did still have a really horrible panic attack. Every muscle in my body locked up and I lost all my color, took a bit to get back to a spot where I could move and talk properly because my speech was affected too. It was a bit scary but funny to think about in post. Thanked the medical staff for being patient w me as always, a good portion of the anxiety is also guilt about making things harder for them. Got through it tho. Def eat before presurgical if allowed, I didn’t and that probably didn’t help!!
———- SURGERY DAY ————-
January 8th:
Ok so surgery day:
This day was very scary. Got my phone call the Friday prior for my surgery time which ended up being 1pm and I was asked to arrive around 11. Got there at 10 and went in at 10:30.
Called up to check in then in waiting room till someone brought me back to change. I told her right away about my anxiety with the iv bc that’s legit all I could think about. Got changed right after. I was generally shaky and a little disoriented the entire time because I was panicking but everyone was very patient with me. Clothes and belongings go in a bag in a locker and you get two gowns one that faces back and one that faces front. I was given underwear and a pad as well because lucky me I got my period a couple days before my surgery.
The pre-op area is a lot of little cubicles with curtain divider things, blue soft chairs, and medical equipment. Everyone I met and spoke to was very kind, but any time someone even suggested starting my iv I would panic. I was informed it would have to be placed in my hand and that terrified me, I’m especially anxious and sensitive about my hands and fingers. I think doctors and nurses tend to misunderstand exactly where my fear is with needles and ivs. It isn’t the pain that scares me, but the concept of veins and and anything being in them. Even writing this right now is horrible so I’m going to stop w any further detail. I spent the entire two-ish hours of pre-op absolutely terrified about this iv.
I wasn’t really keeping track of time but dr whitehead came in to do markings for surgery. They had cool rainbow socks on,big fan. Having your chest drawn on and just like, moved around n shit is such an experience. Felt bad because I kept losing my balance but doctor Whitehead is cool and I am 98% less scared about them now.
Probably my most favorite person I met during my entire hospital experience was the anesthesiologist. I know he told me what his name was but I couldn’t focus on or retain information at the time. He told me we could essentially put me to sleep with gas before putting the iv in and for the first time in probably a solid week I felt like I could calm down a little. He took a look at my hand and arm to check my veins which always does freak me out a bit but I’m more used to that kind of thing at this point and I know nothing bad is going to happen. One of the nurses came in with the iv equipment and he let her know that were going to wait till in the or which was also incredibly helpful because I absolutely panicked when I saw that little supply kit again.
V nice lady brought me into the or, I’d never been in one before it was cool. They had a little music speaker which was really cool. Took off blue jacket gown and they helped me onto the table. They put a warm blanket over my legs and my chest to help me calm down. Before long they gave me a mask w fun happy sleepy time gas, they let me keep my arms on my chest for a while which was really nice because I was still scared. I started getting loopy pretty fast but I still heard when someone mentioned where the iv equipment was and panicked a little because of that. I remember feeling them take my hand for that but never actually felt anything happen. Just some fear but the gas was v helpful obvi. Someone said they would see me in a little bit, and then I was groggily waking up in recovery.
Recovery was a little rough bc the iv was still there (fully wrapped up so I couldn’t see it though which was rad) but I was still really anxious about it until it was taken out and when it was taken out. For anyone that struggles w this i did not feel them remove it, just the tape. Everything was mentally much easier after that. After a while, going over instructions w parents, a cracker , some ginger ale and some juice, my dad helped me Get dressed and I was helped out to the car in a wheel chair. Ride was smooth bc of remaining numbness and meds except a few Bumps in the road
TOP SURGERY GOTTEN
My post op date was scheduled for Jan 17th and that’s the day I got my drains out followed by several post op check-ins. First week of recovery was miserable but things exponentially approved each day past that, and I went back to school in person two weeks post-op with driving and item-carrying assistance from friends!
Will upload recovery notes at a later date! Feel free to message me with any questions, more than happy to answer and give info! I’m a bit over four months out from surgery now and thriving 🥳

Kinda funny the amount of "woke" j cole fans who were coping by saying this whole beef was manufactured to cover up the diddy allegations (like okay buddy, go do sum bout diddy now that everything calmed down), but now the industry wants the beef squashed. Specially, Universal is trying to get on a zoom with both and get Dot to clarify that Drake is not a pedophile. I imagine staying in beef limbo isnt dot's plan, but do yall think he's gonna have to fold to universal or is he gonna drop the receipts?

I’ve said this in the past and it’s almost as if they took my thoughts - that people largely agreed with - and went even further.
A trip every bloody 5 episodes, splits the group, doesn’t allow for continuity and just shows how shite this current crop is that they need a trip every 10 minutes to get any real action/storylines.
This show has well and truly lost its authentic feel and really is just a come up for the majority of them. I miss the days when trips were after a long hard season full of action, that was subsequently followed up with more action in a different country. Now z listers like Freddy can ‘invite’ people on a trip (he’s not personally paying, though they like to make it look like that) and they’re off to Mauritius to continue the same shite storylines from London.
Really really boring.
Spoiler Alert - A bit of a random pivot, but wasn’t it funny how the producers got Rez to go to the same bench he dumped Bella at to dump Tina..lool
As for that Ruby and Rez crap, just bin them both. I think I speak for us all when I say we are bored of Rez having no self respect and being constantly manipulated. Let them rot somewhere away from our screens. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Hello everyone!
I think it would be funny to do a ranking of decades of Spiderman comics, from the 60's to the present.
For my part, I can only give an opinion up until 90's since I'm not interested in Spiderman post-2000's, but you can include it.

1. 80's: Roger Stern modernized the character and that would work a basis for the following years. He introduced a great villain like the Hobgoblin whose story would continue to be developed by other authors later. Also the black suit was introduced and the subsequent arrival of Venom, which they managed to turn into one of Spidey's most important foes despite having passed 2 decades since its launch, which is not easy. In addition, one of the character's key arcs was launched, Kraven Last Hunt. For all this and more, I would say that it is the best decade of the wall-crawler.
2. 60's: The origin of Spiderman, this age is iconic since all the characters and bases that would define the character to this day emerged. Yes, it is true that Lee and Ditko's first comics can get a little boring nowadays, but even so, seeing the first appearance of so many characters makes it worth reading. Later, the era of Lee and Romita Sr, keeping in mind that they are stories from the 60's, they manteined a high level and have not aged that much, in addition to that they also presented new iconic characters such as Rhino, Shocker or Kingpin, and great arcs such as the revelation of Norman being the Green Goblin or Peter ceasing to be Spiderman. Without a doubt, if this decade had not had this great level, Spiderman would not have become Marvel's flagship.
3. 70's: This decade during the first years has a good level until approximately number #150, although then the level of the stories begins to decline a little until the arrival of Stern in the 80's. Even so, in these early years we have memorable moments such as the death of Captain Stacy, the drug trilogy, the introduction of Morbius, the first Clone saga or the first time Harry becomes the Green Goblin, stories that continue to be remembered nowadays. And how can we not talk about the death of Gwen Stacy, probably the key moment in Spidey's entire history, which was a paradigm in the world of comics and which is still remembered 50 years later.
4. 90's: The decade most criticized in general by Spiderman fans, where it is said that the level of the stories dropped a lot to focus on action and spectacular drawings. I have not yet had the opportunity to read the Clone Saga since it will not be republished in my country until a few years, so although I know what happens during it, I cannot say if it is as bad as people say until reading it. Although personally the first years of the 90's do not seem so bad to me, Carnage is in charge of leading the gallery of rogues those years until reaching Maximum Carnage, which I enjoyed a lot, it is true that it is not a story that marked an era for its plot but even so the drawing and the battles seem very fun to me. Also during this time, we probably had the best stage of the Spectacular Spiderman title thanks to DeMatteis and Buscema with the whole story of Harry Osborn's return as the Green Goblin and his subsequent death, which is curious that they wrote in Spectacular and not in Amazing due to his importance in Peter's life. In conclusion, the absence of reading the Clone saga and although objectively it is probably the worst of these 4 initial decades of Spidey, it doesn't seem as bad to me as people try to make it out to be.

And now after having given my ranking, it is your turn to give your opinions.
Thanks for participating!

im thinking also deleting instagram. ive tried to focus more on actual life rather than instagrams feed, other peoples lifes.. you know the thing.
but theres one problem. i keep many connections, my friends, by sending funny or wholesome reels. we do that to each other. im really not a much talkative person, or rather i'd say im not the one who starts conversation. but could that change ? what if i start feeling lonely and disconnected? what helps to that?

In this post I want to break down how I think about and how I build custom B2B lead gen eco-systems that are designed to engage a cold prospect, educate and help them to then turn into $XX,XXX deals.
I'll share the metrics and best practices from my own experiences from working with around 20 b2b companies with varying deal sizes, starting from $5k marketing packages, to $90k/yr fintech solutions and $200k software dev & IT deals. If you don't agree with my approach, that's fine, there's multiple ways to skin a cat.
Fundamentals are mostly the same and we can split it in 3 main parts.

1. Traffic acquisition
2. Nurture & education mechanism
3. Conversion mechanism.

Where most businesses go wrong is that they try to sell their expensive service to a cold prospect.
That might look like cold emailing and cold "linkedining" (new term) prospects an offer or asking if they're interested in this and that, on the spot.
This is not a good approach for one simple reason - no one want's to be sold to. Not to say that this direct approach doesn't work, for some it works good enough to stay afloat, but it's not something you can use to drive real, inbound interest in your services. Selling to prospects that you get on a sales call from 1 email or DM is extremely hard since you have to do the heavy lifting to educate them on the call and then you also have to sell them.
My goal is to turn this dynamic on it's head. Yes, we want to reach out to cold prospects. Yes, we want to run ads. But not to sell immediately. Rather, we're inviting and getting those prospects into our ecosystem where if they go through your educational materials like reports, case studies, how-to's AND have a real pain, they will come to you to solve it.
Let's break it down.
Traffic acquisition.
There's 2 channels I use to acquire traffic. Sometimes I use both, sometimes one or the other. For the most part that depends on the TAM and what we're selling.
1 - Paid ads (LI and META) are great if you need volume and your deal size varies between $5k - $20k. If you get it right, it's a system that scales easily so you can control demand and growth fairly easily too. It's also very quick and easy to troubleshoot since you can change a variable and see the result in next 3 days.
The ultimate goal of paid ads is to get as many people in your funnel as possible. The only logical way to do it is using lead magnets. Industry specific reports with unique insights that only your ICP would care about, easy-to-code tools that only your ICP would find useful (calculators work great for me), guides and courses made to solve a very specific problem, you get the picture.
We're giving away this free value in exchange for their email address. I can already hear people yelling "But giving away stuff for free only attracts freebie seekers" That's because you don't have a mechanism in place to convert that opt-in into a deal. (I'll go into in the next sections)
To make a great lead magnet I follow this mantra:

1. Has to be industry and role specific
2. Has to solve 1 painful problem for the lead
3. No surface-level, bait-and-switch teasing BS. (using lead magnet as a sales page is a big no-no)

Lead magnet is your chance to build rapport, show your competence and build good will by actually helping your prospects before you ever speak with them. USE IT WISELY. I see many businesses only tease the solution. My advice - give away all your secrets. If you're vague, your leads will think that your approach is basic and you won't capture the interest.
For us, around 20% of lead magnet leads opt-in into the next step of the funnel where we ask much more details. Company name, website, name, phone, etc, etc.
Do this step right and you'll get leads from your ICP opting into your funnel in droves, for cheap.
One little hack I do whenever I launch lead magnet campaigns is create 5-10 lead magnet ideas, create the ads and the landing pages, but don't create the lead magnet itself. Then run ads to those 5-10 lead magnets and see what your cost per lead is AND see what quality leads you attract. My baseline KPI's are sub $15 CPL on the initial launch and 3 out of 10 leads be real, actual companies that fit the ICP.
If you hit that initially, you can reiterate on the ads and the LP and get your CPL way lower.
2 - Cold outreach (LI and email) is great if you're after high ticket or enterprise level deals.
Cold outreach is great for huge target markets and/or very high value accounts. You won't reach Elon Mush through ads, but you could through cold outreach.
Instead of blanket-spamming 10k leads that might or might not need our service we do this.

1. Score companies based on fit (we use AI for this on scale by giving it bad fit examples, medium fit examples and great fit examples while also describing why each is bad, medium or great. Then we ask to output a score from 1-10)
2. For companies that score 7 or higher, look at buying signals. Recent hires, open positions, growth or decline, recent funding, featured in news (why featured in news?) and, of course, technographics.
3. Companies that display positive signals AND are a fit based on scoring, we send a personalized message automatically.

90% of this happens automatically at this point, but don't get confused - it's not AI copy that gets sent out. We have a general template and framework that we base our messages upon and AI fills in the blanks. All that is based on what information we find on the companies and what state they're currently in.
"Hey Adam, saw that Houberz is looking for an engineer with deep understanding of X. I know first hand how hard it is to fill such roles.
I have a case study on how we did Y using X technology, thought you might be interested in giving it a quick read before you pull someone onboard."
This is the general gist of it. Combine it with reaching out to leads that are likely in-market and you'll average 15% reply rates. Blast 10k emails to random list and you'll get 0.5% - 1% reply rates.
That is how we get qualified traffic on the front end.
This is how we convert it into deals.
1.1 - Paid
Once you have people claiming your lead magnet, the magic happens on the thank you page. I've seen many people just have a generic thank you page that does not prompt the next action.
Wasted digital real estate.
Instead of leaving it blank, we either have a call booking page where we pitch a non-sales call that would help fix the lead a specific problem or a signup page for a live workshop.
2nd has higher opt-in rate, but has longer time-to-deal, 1st gives you 1-1 time with high value prospects, but is more expensive..
Ideally, run both. Best of both worlds.
On top of that, when someone opts in and claims your lead magnets, you can then email them on a regular basis as part of your newsletter which gives you another channel to nurture leads and throw offers their way.
2.1 - Cold outreach
As soon as you receive a positive response to your lead magnet offer, you send it over, find that person on LI and connect (so you have another channel and they see that you're a real human) then ask if they're struggling with a specific problem that your service can fix.
If they do, great, share more case studies, share how they could solve the problem themselves and then soft-pitch a meeting in which you propose to "continue the conversation"
For cold, each convo will be different so you will have to come up with helpful and relevant email responses on the fly.
Remember speed-to-lead. The faster you answer, the higher the chance of you pushing the lead to the next step of your funnel.
So do you need both of these acquisition channels? Do you also need to post on Linkedin and dance on Tiktok?
Depends on your business. Generally, the more eyes you have on you, the more deals you'll close. These two channels are foundation for myself and any business I consult, but to supplement that and build credibility, we're also heavily investing in LI organic.
Why? People who watch your ads and engage with your emails will check out your LI eventually. If it's barren, you won't leave an impression. If it's packed with valuable, funny, insightful and humanizing posts, not only your leads will connect with you, but they'll feel compelled to engage.
So it's not one system or another - it's all of them working in cohesion.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Hi Strangers or let’s say my future SO, this is kinda funny kasi I’m posting this over the internet to look for my SO. Anyway, are you tired of being in relationship with an energy vampire (emotionally immature, toxic)? Are u also tired na ba sa temporary people lang? Then let’s end that era na and tara na sa walang hanggan.
About Me: - Emotionally Matured they say I’m too grounded, and serious - Loves adventure, movies, and heart2heart talks - Looks? 7/10 pero idk why may rating here Lol - Good conversationalist - Working - QC
About you: - Emotionally Matured - Good conversationalist - Looks? Idc about it coz I value your attitude/behavior - Working
Ps. Make reading a habit kasi I don’t like answering question na already mentioned here. Pps. Don’t msg me if trippings lang or Hi and Hello, instant decline
~Sleep na ako haha. See u later coz iffilter ko if nonsense

Novel - PEACE IS WHAT I WANT
Author note:-
How should i start. Lets say. I am just a student[19 M] And today i am going to start a writing a novel. Well... ...its always good to start a new work.
Enthusiasm...
thats what i am now feeling. I can't describe it in words. I can say that my grammar is bad. Umm so bad.
English is my second language. But i am going to try. I am going to persevere.
I am starting a novel on indian mythology. Well like indian sects.
Months ago.
I am just scrolling reddit. Seeing the memes on fy. And laughing my ass off.
unknowingly i stumbled on a comment and the comment is-
just think how if a cultivation novel based on indian mythology. Like There are 28 states in india. So.
We can make 28 sects and like this. And india is also a sacred country.
Just think there are so many mystery like kailash parvat( Kangrinboqe Peak).
So many mystries...
I was just staring at the comment something was rising in me.
Like this is my destiny. I am going to be a great writer. I will make millions of money. So i procrastinated this idea. Well i am a good procrastinater..
Months later today at 1 am on night while wasting my time on scrolling reddit.
I am suddenly feeling something. I am feeling like i have to do something productive. i have to make money So i thought to write a novel. Well its not going to the level of RI or Lotm. But i can try to make it good. I will daily use my 4 hours in this work.
I know i am not going to make any money on this.
But i am atleast trying to make something new. I am not good in studies.
No no no...
Its like i had never focus on studies.
From 2 years daily minimum 5 hours... I am reading novels.
Just novels. To cultivation to progression fantasy. Just novel.
But the idea of writing novel I always procrastinated that.
But today i am feeling so much enthusiasm i am going to start it now.
Special note-
If anyone wants to be a part of this journey. join me in this wonderful journey.
Well its going to be not paid. Its like internship. You will learn something. Like i need a editor. If any of you who is interested in this journey. You can dm me. Lets start.
I am clarify now this first chapter is something i am just writing it to describe. What is my potential. Like it will be my first novel and there are so many challenges i am going to face it. I am human afterall... I will going to make mistakes obviously. Day by day my writing will just going to improve.
Just adjust a bit.
You will definitely going to enjoy.
Chapter 1 - ITS STARTING
Hahahahah.
This is hilarious I have just wrote that I am going to make a wonderful novel and see I can't even type anything on my keyboard.
As i am seeing on my laptop. My frustration is increasing. How should i start. My patience is dropping. What should i do.
Lets make a boy first
Indeed hes going to be a poor and orphan.
Wait.
Its going to same cliche novel. I have to make something new. Something like Fang yuan.
First chapter of REVEREND INSANITY is goated Hes just standing hes hair floating and his clothes are in blood. He is smiling.
A cold smile. And then sac and boom
Explosion
....
Wait wait wait... This is going to be edgy. I have not any experience i have not any talent. How can i make a sacred novel like RI This is my first novel. I have to start with good mc.
.. My mood is swinging. I am feeling frustrated. How can anyone will going to read this garbage. I had not even make a world building. I had not even decide the name of the novel. Stupid so stupid. As i am staring on the screen. My patience paid off.
I turned off my laptop I stand up from my chair. And saw the time.
Its 1 am.
If my father found about that i am wasting my time in these things instead of studying. Than raj you just say goodbye to your writing passion.
I am just a average person.
Your average who got always average marks . Average look
Average talking skill.
Average money.
Well i am going to make it. But HOW.
...as i am thinking what to do How to write something great
. Suddenly my electricity gone.
Its rare. Well where i am living i had never seen electricity gone. Because i am living in a hostel. College hostel. And it is very expensive one. So when electricity goes out generator works.
Glad part about its. All of my study expenses is on loan. I am belonging from a middle class family.
But my father agreed for my private college as i convinced him that i will pay. I will pay everything believe in me last time. ...
I opened my room gate and went to the main hall while adjusting my torch light.
I can hear students are shouting. Well it is because human always find fun in everything
so many of students always wait when will the electricity goes and they will shout loudly. Its a fun thing. Really. its first time that electricity gone. So students are shouting too loudly. Make it more fun. Well i also join them. And also start shouting at high pitch.
Suddenly i stopped. Staring at the wall.
No no.
I am staring at the void.
In front of my eyes.
There was a blue screen.

 『Welcome to the gods heir』 

It was so unrealistic. I thought that this is my dream. I touched the screen with my limb. But the funny part is. My limb goes through it. Like it is a hologram.
My thoughts are spinning.
How can this happen. Its utterly impossible.
I had read so many webnovel i had already assumed so many scenarios like this. That there will be screen come from nowhere in front of you and you will say status and-
Wait status How can i forget this.
In my rough voice i said - "status" And i am believing that there will be a status screen will come.
And my life will take a 180. Degree turn But to my surprise there is no screen came.
1 sec...
2 sec...
Sudden a somber expression appeared on my face. A kid who always growed up while reading novel. A system is always his dream.
3 sec... 3.4 sec- And than
A voice heared in my mind.

 『 STATUS Name- Raj aggarwal Level- 1 Class- homo sapiens Sub class- None Stats/skills/shop/?¿? 』 

As i stared at the screen. My lips raised upwardly. This is what i want This is like my dream I always wanted a magical world.
A rpg type world where gods and demons are fighting. I will increase my level while fighting monsters. What..What is there any chance of my being alive in this scenario. This world is going to change. I have to change. I have to protect my family. Family...
**Shit.. shit..
My family lives 100 miles from here.. If this system is real and everyone can see it. Then soon chaos is going to erupting. What should i do now.. Take a bus or metro. No no .. Think think.. Well lets call them first..**
.
I opened my phone screen and saw the battery.
Shit..
8 percent. It can work for few minutes or one hour max I called on my moms number.
**Ring...
Ring...**
My heartbeat is increasing
*Ring... *
A women voice heared in my ear
-"Hlo, raj are you fine. What.. what is this screen. Everyone can see it. Everyone is panicking. You have to hurry.... come home as soon as possible".
I am glad that my mom answered my phone. While I staring at my screen i answered-"
don't worry mom.
There is nothing as panicking. Calm down. Just prepare some weapons like your knife, baseball. And locked the house. Do not open the door.
And tell my little brother that i am coming. Theres nothing to worry. Everything is fine."
I convinced my mom that there is nothing. But a gloomy senstation was felting in my body. I has to hurry.
As i glanced to the main hostel reception. A men with black beared.
Brown skin. Black eyes and in red shirt and black pant is standing there My warden was also in the state of shock. I went to him. Seeing me his eyes became focus. He called my name.
" RAJ CAN YOU SEE THE SCREEN ALSO"
He remembered my name indeed worthy of warden position I nodded. "Well its strange-he said to me while looking at the main gate. The gate was big and transparent Made of glass. I also see outside. Utter Darkness
Worrying if any type of dragon come here and just make this college campus in ashes. I glanced to other direction.
More and more students came from there room. Many were studying in their room. Many were gaming in their room. But i don't care because i don't have any friends. ..
But what i am doing here... When a sytem comes to the world You will granted with many powers. But what i have to do. As i thinking.
I stepped out on a ant.
Well its there problem being a short and came under my limb.
...The words on my screen crazily gone and swapped by a another words

 『 You are 137th one to killed a living being. 』 『 you got 5 true points』 

A crazy expression came on my face.
Here is the link of webnovel site - https://m.webnovel.com/book/peace-is-what-i-want_29563366708313205

I (23M) have been dating my boyfriend Jake (22M) for a good 6 years now, so I'm well acquaintanced with his family. The girl woman I said this to was his sister, Amelia.
I was raised by a single mum who worked 2 jobs to support us. So I grew up doing a lot of housework and in her free-time, my mum taught me to cook. I like to think I'm pretty damn good at cooking, I cook for myself, for my boyfriend and sometimes his family. I have sensory issues and my boyfriend is allergic to a few things so I'm pretty good at finding work-arounds to accommodate people, including Amelia, so she's well aware that I can cook.
Anyway, she came over yesterday and sat down at the island(?) in the kitchen, I don't quite quite know how to describe it but basically she was on the other side, and I was in at the counter, back turned to her, making some lasagna. My specialty, so I turned around to ask if she would like something and she promptly burst out laughing. I was confused and she just kinda pointed at my apron. I was more confused, my apron was pretty normal, plain blue.
She then told me she'd never have thought I was the girl of the relationship. I assume this was a reference to my physicality, I'm pretty tall and do a lot of sports. I dithered, confused, and she 'explained' that I was cooking. I just continue staring, not quite sure what she meant. She then explained, as though I was a toddler, that cooking is for girls and the apron made me look like a 90s housewife.
The funny part about all of this is that Amelia CANNOT cook. I told her if cooking is for girls maybe she should go back to the kitchen so she could learn. I would be more than willing to teach her. She went red in the face and stormed off, calling me an asshole for saying that.
I went back to my cooking.
This morning quite a few of my friends have contacted me telling me I, of all people, should know better than to perpetuate gender stereotypes, and that Amelia was hurt by what I had said. Some of them agreed with me after hearing the context (which amelia did not tell them) but others said I did not need to sink to her level.
IMO, I thought that would show her how weird it was to perpetuate gender roles when she herself doesn't fit within them. But maybe I could have tried explaining first, AITA?
(Reposted from AmItheAsshole bc it got take down and a few people wanted updates)

Intro

It’s not much of a stretch to say that violence is the primary form of interaction in video games. With a handful of exceptions, most video games involve guys whacking other guys, with varying degrees of brutality. Even chill games fall into this - Stardew Valley has sections with combat in them! Considering the pervasiveness of violence in video games, there has been a ton of amateur and academic commentary on the topic. However, while this is a well-established school of thought, I haven’t seen people try to apply this to Fire Emblem specifically.
So, let’s do that now! In this post, I’ll be exploring how violence in Fire Emblem is implemented - what limitations are placed on violence, how it warps wider game and narrative design, and what it implicitly says and does not say. I hope this post doesn’t come off as too early-2010s “makes you think”-y, but I do think there are multiple interesting things worth talking about here!
Despite the length of this post, "a brief discussion" is an appropriate title, as we won't be able to go into depth on everything. After all, video games are holistic works, so the attitude towards violence is relevant to every aspect of their design. However, I have managed to wrangle some of these threads into the following structure: first a discussion on the fundamental mode of interaction in Fire Emblem, then how stories are constructed with regards to violence, and ending with the aesthetics of violence and how they relate to characters. Also, as FE is a huge series, be aware that I am gonna be making some broad statements which may not apply to each individual plot point of every game. I actually planned to write 3 case studies around Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses (which have the most interesting attitudes to violence in the series IMO) which point out these deviations, but this post is way too long and full of tangents already. If people are interested, I’ll make a followup to this post which goes into them in more detail. Also also, because of the nature of this post, I’ll actually give a useful TL;DR for once:
TL;DR: Nintendo games must be fun mechanically, and they can’t be too uncomfortable narratively. If you try to provide a counterpoint by saying “oh this Kirby final boss is super dark it eats 100 morbillion galaxies”, you do not deserve rights. IntSys has to keep to this as a 2nd party publisher, but they also have to deal with the fact that their games are at least nominally about ‘war’ (or at least they put their toes into that particular thematic pool). This conflict between making a fun video game for children/teens and the wider framing of the narrative leads to interesting narrative and aesthetic tensions. also fun is cringe, misery is based

“Do you like hurting other people?” (or The Fundamental Mode of Interaction)

OK LISTEN I KNOW I LITERALLY JUST SAID THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO COME ACROSS AS A EARLY 2010s “VIOLENCE IN VIDYA BAD :O????” PERSON BUT I SWEAR I’M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS
The best place to start when talking about violence in video games is to think about the primary form of interaction in said game. In the case of Fire Emblem, this is in the in-chapter gameplay. Sure, in objective terms the player moves arbitrary objects across a 2D grid which perform subtraction on arbitrary objects controlled by the computer, but this is always framed as controlling a squad of soldiers to engage in (typically lethal) combat with enemies (who are normally also soldiers). When you’re not doing this in-chapter gameplay, you are preparing for the next chapter of combat. This involves surveying the area of combat, preparing weapon loadouts, etc, however more recent entries also include light life-sim-esque elements. To summarize, Fire Emblem’s interactivity involves ordering violence as well as the preparations to order said violence.
For players, this strategic thinking is extremely fun and is the primary draw of the series! You have all these tier lists of who’s better at killing, discussion of the maps where you do the killing, complaints about the length of gameplay sections where you don’t do killing, etc. This is by design, as while I don’t know the core brand tenets of Nintendo, I imagine the Reggie quote “If it isn’t fun, why bother?” is carved into a solid gold statue of Mario in the office lobby. This then is enforced on all associated studios, including IntSys and so Fire Emblem. While I would disagree with that Reggie quote (especially the bit where he says “If it’s not a battle, where’s the fun?” which is a wild statement to make about an entire medium), this approach to making games is ultimately fine, and so IntSys tailored the strategic gameplay to be satisfying to your dopamine receptors. You could analyse what the normalisation of violence even in ‘just for fun’ games says about wider gaming culture, but I won’t get into that here. In any case, let’s dig into a few specifics of FE’s interactivity.
One thing that’s interesting with regard to strategy games is the detached perspective of the player. You order units and observe the resulting violence, but it’s not tactile, you don’t directly swing the sword or shoot the bow or cast the spell like with action games. This adds a layer of separation between the player and what fundamentally happens, at least within the framing that the game provides. It’s not like Call of Duty, where your relationship to the violence is very visceral, where you view everything down the barrel of a gun. OK, I probably shouldn’t use a series that I have very little personal experience with (I only listen to the supplementary lore material, so let’s talk about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. While you’re not directly in the driver’s seat, John Sekiro reacts to your every input with extreme responsiveness, so overcoming the game’s challenges i.e. stabbing people is incredibly visceral and satisfying. While this violence is fantastical in nature, there is sufficient blood and explicit sword-action to clearly say “oh yeah you are violently killing all of those bozos with a katana”. Coming back to FE, not only are you far more detached from the violence, it is presented in an extremely cartoony manner… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, we’ll get to the aesthetics later. Point is, Fire Emblem gives the viewpoint of a stoic commander, who Does What Needs To Be Done™, and not the viewpoint of an actual soldier who has to do the actual killing.
Now let’s view the player’s perspective on violence from a different angle. Fire Emblem intends for its combat to be relatively relaxed on the player side of things - the turn-based nature allows the player to calmly think through all of their moves, and you typically have perfect information on the enemies. The only exceptions to this are Fog of WaSame Turn Reinforcements, which are rare and typically unpopular amongst the fanbase. This leans into ‘combat as sport’, where (going back to the Reggie quote) you have a fun time picking apart a puzzle with the tools you have, and we all collectively enjoy this! This is a valid way of designing strategy games, and I like what IntSys has done. However, it’s not the only way of making these games - for example, in Total War you have to juggle all your battalions in real time whilst the enemy is bearing down on you, and the XCOM games always have Fog of War and limited information on the enemies, with you never knowing what kind of awful new monster is going to suddenly charge at you. Don’t get me wrong, neither of these follow ‘combat as war’, the principle that violence should properly mimic the stress, tension and unfairness of actual conflict. Hell, neither of them are particularly mature either - Total War is the strategy game equivalent of smashing action figures together, and XCOM emulates a pulp sci-fi alien invasion story. However, the additional pressures these games have make them hew slightly closer to actual conflict, putting you more in that mindset in a way that the clean fun Fire Emblem doesn’t really do. Again, I want to say FE’s approach to violence in in-map gameplay is fine, but when all three of these franchises have an explicit narrative framing of ‘warfare’, it does make Fire Emblem’s narrative a little more… stretched.
Finally, I want to briefly mention the maps. To steal from a brilliant Jacob Geller video, these are Worlds Designed For Violence. At least outside of the Kaga games, the maps you fight on are primarily designed around how the player interacts with them, i.e. fights on them. While I imagine the narrative designers and artists at IntSys are involved throughout the map design process, the gameplay flow probably takes precedence most of the time. Maps are not designed to resemble realistic places that you have to fight through, they are instead designed primarily to provide fun gameplay experiences before being dressed up by the artists to look realistic/fit the specific story beat. This is a more consistently entertaining approach to map design - heaven knows we have a lot of Kaga castle assault maps which are as fun as actually assaulting an entrenched position IRL - but this lack of friction could potentially take the bite out of the intended vibe, neuter any commentary on violence throughout the story.
You may have noticed that we’ve only talked about the “in-map” gameplay for now, when there’s an entire second half of these games, i.e. all the gameplay between the maps. Don’t worry, we’ll get to all of that, but this may fit better in:

Something something “ludonarrative” something something (or Narrative Implications)

(To clarify, here I’m going to talk about the wider plots and narrative structure as opposed to characterisation, as that fits more into the aesthetics of the series)
It’s not bold to say that the narratives of games have to warp around the core gameplay structure. Especially in AAA video game production, the narrative designers usually have to take a back seat to the systems and level designers, at least outside of the initial rough outline they provide in the original game pitch. In this case, the job of the writer is to form vaguely coherent connective tissue between individual levels, setpieces and expensive pre-rendered cutscenes. This must be a very difficult job, and is probably the reason why most video game stories are the way they are. I am not privy to IntSys internal meetings, but I imagine they abide by this paradigm, trying to give a reason for why you fight 20 battles which roughly align with plot beats that were decided years ago.
Put another way, the writers of Fire Emblem must contrive a reason why the characters fight a vast number of violent battles in a strategic manner. This has a pretty easy solution - war! We have found something it’s good for, as whenever the gameplay designers decide that an extra map is required, the writers can just insert “oh no there’s a blockade of enemy soldiers in the way, guess you gotta kill them all”. This is the case for almost all the games and is a fair enough narrative choice, as it’s frankly one of the few scenarios where you could reasonably contrive so many battles, but it’s worth examining this in a bit more detail.
Even in the framing of warfare, there are still a lot of skirmishes, which sometimes the narrative or tone fails to support - or at least, their presence means that violence isn’t taken that seriously. Let’s take an example from early in Awakening: Emmeryn sends the Shepherds to negotiate an alliance with Regna Ferox. On the way, they are ambushed by Risen on the Northroad (1), have to fight the border guards who think Chrom is a bandit I think??? (2), and then after arriving they need to take part in Regna Ferox’s ritual combat to secure their alliance (3). These beats aren’t necessarily bad, and I actually think Awakening uses these opportunities quite well: the Risen are established as a constant threat to the world (except not really in the main story but that’s a whole other thing), “Marth'' gets more development, we set up Regna Ferox as fighty people who like to fight, and while the middle encounter is very tenuous it does set up a funny joke in Cynthia’s paralogue. However, I want to communicate that if the map/encounter designers need X maps between plot points A and B - in this case, needing low-stakes trials in the tutorial period - then there’s gonna be a fair bit of narrative filler. That is to say, there must be multiple combat encounters that kinda just happen, which makes violence a lot more casual in the narrative. See also the myriad examples of “oh shit random bandits attack!”, used to have a lower stakes map, with bandits appearing and vanishing as needed. This works fine enough in the context of ‘combat as sport’, allowing your favourite scrunglo to build up a triple-digit body count, but this casual attitude circumvents potentially interesting ideas with regards violence. Taking the example further, banditry and its causes are never seriously explored, as bandits are just treated as a filler enemy (except in Based As Hell Thracia 776).
Another narrative consequence of needing so many fights is that… you need to fight. That is to say, any anti-war sentiment or appeal to diplomacy in the series is fundamentally undercut by a) strategic combat being a core appeal of the series and b) narrative beats needing to be structured around fighting enemies. It’s a struggle to have moments of diplomacy and reconciliation when you had a fight within 3 minutes of said moment, lest some people start screaming that things are getting boring. This also makes any appeals to pacifism kinda moot. Xander’s quote about “war bad” in Conquest is utter bullshit, as a huge part of the marketing around that route focuses on the coolness of the tactical combat and its challenge. Eirika and Ephraim can never be equal, because Ephraim’s “fighting is fucken awesome” is encouraged by the gameplay, and Eirika can NEVER save 11037 because we need a final boss and no-one else fits the bill.
Speaking of, in video games it’s best practice to have a big bad guy you fight at the end of the story, the toughest mechanical challenge coinciding with the narrative climax. In Fire Emblem, you have one grand final battle which decides the fate of the war and/or world, before cutting to a brief wrap-up and then credits. This is an attempt to make these games satisfying, which is fine, but this is at odds with an anti-war message (which FE often gestures towards) - that is, actual wars tend to be deeply unsatisfying in a narrative sense! Oftentimes, after a decisive battle, things just kinda keep going for a little while afterwards with casualties continuing to pile up until peace terms are agreed. In the few cases where there is a final battle, it’s more of a formality as the decisive moment occurred months ago. See World War 1 and… World War 2 for examples of each, not to mention a whole host of war-related books and films. The problem with doing this in a video game is that it would require having multiple one-sided fights past the most climatic fight, which would be unfun, and we return to that fucking Reggie quote again. While video games can effectively explore this anti-war narrative space - This War of Mine is a fantastic example - it just doesn’t gel with the fun games that IntSys wants to make. I bring this up in the context of FE because Fire Emblem has such an aesthetic focus on warfare compared to other video games, so it sticks out even further. Even in FE6/FE9 where the war is effectively over in the final few maps, the enemies still remain extremely challenging, because if they didn’t things would be boring.
A few minor things that didn’t fit in above before we wrap up this section. First of all, in making an action packed story, Fire Emblem neglects an important aspect of army life in warfare - the “hurrying up and waiting”. In the majority of cases, the breaks between fights is under 10 minutes, it’s just glossed over. Fire Emblem Three Houses is the exception to this, but there it’s more framed as school life. Some people may say “what’s the point in having large amounts of timewasting where nothing happens in my game about war” and to that I would say fuck you, I want to play Jarhead Emblem. Next, Fire Emblem involves fighting people AND monsters, but these targets are typically given equal narrative weight, outside of maybe a funny line of dialogue about someone being afraid of monsters. In 99% of cases, enemy soldiers you fight have no more humanity than literal monsters. The death of any of your beloved soldiers is a tragedy with big sad death quotes, the death of those poor fuckers is quite literally a statistic which is proudly used to rank how well your guys have done at the end of the game. Finally, the limited scope of the violence the series can show limits the potential impact of scenes. In some cases, this is good as the implication is enough, e.g. the ‘Monica’ scene in Sacred Stones is wonderfully grim and would be weakened by anything explicit. However, a number of other scenes are neutered by the limitations on violence. This fundamentally relates to the aesthetics of the series:

insert prozd tweet/skit here (or Aesthetics, Tone, and Characters)

I’ve been talking a lot about ‘the violence committed’, and this might have seemed a bit weird to you. It’s a true statement, but because the violence is mostly cartoony and abstracted - bad guys disappear into nothingness, there’s no blood, etc - it’s hard to think of it in that way. It’s basically impossible to place Fire Emblem in the same artistic sphere as, say, All Quiet on the Western Front. This aesthetic sense was partially tech-limited in the early NES and SNES games, which was grandfathered into the more graphically complex titles, but it’s also related to how the aesthetics unavoidably warp the tone of the work. IntSys needs their games to be relatively lighthearted and unconcerned with the consequences of its violence, as one of the core appeals of these games is the charming cast of characters. As you would expect, it would be a lot harder to appreciate your goofy blorbos and their lighthearted chats about nothing if you could see the brutal consequences of their triple digit body counts. If violence was more realistic, there would be a lot less “ooh I like training and/or this one hyperspecific food” or “I like peace, but I guess violence may be possibly needed sometimes” and there would have to be a lot more trauma and dourness. There are also age rating concerns, as you can’t exactly sell Come And See Emblem to pre-teens. And once more, to clarify: Fire Emblem as it exists now is fine! I like the lighthearted tone of this series, and I like the characters that reside within it. However, a few problems do arise from IntSys’s approach to violence, as occasionally they brush up against darker ideas but (due to similar reasons to the above) they can never commit to them, which neuters their potential impact. This is especially troublesome with regards to characterisation, as the little dudes are a core appeal, so if something is off that could cause problems. In a sense, at points we have severe aesthetic tension.
A fairly useful case study to see how this affects characterisation is with Mozu in Fire Emblem Fates. Mozu is a charming character, a genial country bumpkin with a bit of an edge at times, who has fond memories of her hometown. This lines up with the lighthearted tone of her recruitment paralogue, where (checks notes) her entire village gets massacred by inhuman monsters, with her mother literally being murdered right in front of her, and she joins up with Corrin’s party because there is literally nothing left of her old life. I understand that people who experience extreme trauma do still manage to live meaningful lives, and that IntSys wouldn’t want to have a character who is a barely functional traumatised mess for 90% of the campaign. However, this doesn’t explain the sheer dissonance between the relatively normal and well-adjusted Mozu who quietly remembers her lost loved ones, and the fact that her village got My Lai’d a handful of weeks ago in the game’s timeline. IMO this would work a lot better if there were a few survivors (instead of literally everyone else dying), with Mozu actively choosing to leave her old life to help others instead of being forced to leave by circumstance. This reduction in scope would mitigate the dissonance between the character and what actually happens to her. This is by far the most extreme example in the series, however I’m sure you can think of others. My issue here is not with having ‘normal’ characters, or with them suffering tragedies, my issue is the dissonance between the two when viewing the scope of said tragedies. This is just one way the series wants to get into darker territory, then swiftly backing off instead of delving into the consequences.
This aesthetic restriction also affects the potential impact of dramatic scenes in the main story, limiting what the focus of these scenes can actually be. This little bit will involve heavy spoilers for Genealogy of the Holy War and Spec Ops: The Line (I KNOW THESE GAMES ARE VERY DIFFERENT WITH VERY DIFFERENT INTENDED DEMOGRAPHICS IN VERY DIFFERENT CULTURAL CONTEXTS, SHUT UP). Both have a very important narrative moment around their midpoints, involving fire magic/white phosphorus respectively. In each game, the deaths that occur are utterly horrific when you think about them. In FE4 the focus is on the drama of the plot twist and effects on the characters, with the actual effects of the violence being left to implication. We don’t know if this was the original intent of Kaga and the team, or if this was enforced by various tech- and publisher-related restrictions, but in either case we do not see anything explicit. In any case, in Spec Ops: The Line, the horror and graphic nature of the violence is completely inescapable, and therefore forms the core of the turning point of the story. The specifics of the violence itself are crucial - the game does not work if you don’t see the consequences of the white phosphorus - and it leads beautifully to the complete descent of its endgame. You may be saying “of course you couldn’t show that violence in FE, it’s a kids game” which is true, and in any case the scene in Genealogy is very good, even without showing the violence. I imagine if we get a remake in the year 202X we wouldn’t see anything explicit anyway, partially due to the publisher but also because the scene doesn’t necessarily need it. The point I am trying to make is that the aesthetics form a limitation on what Fire Emblem can explore, narrative space that the series fundamentally cannot reach.
One more thing, and this isn’t really about the games themselves but the impressions leading into them, and how the aesthetics can affect that. Do you guys remember when the intro cutscene of Three Houses was released a few weeks before release? I do, and I also remember the collective shock of the community when seeing the early previews. It was so drastically different to everything that had come before, and consequently was really intriguing - you can see a lot of speculation in the above comments. To clarify, I don’t want to pretend that 3H is some kind of super mature ultra gritty war story, or that blood = good game, but that beginning cutscene gave one hell of a first impression. Even though the game isn’t that much darker than any other FE game, the sheer unexpectedness put people off-kilter in a kinda awesome way. Does the game actually deliver? YMMV, but I think this (and some of the later cutscenes, such as the mid-game Dimitri one) work quite well. Sometimes, a little injection of harsher violence can go a long way.

Conclusion

Frankly I don’t really have a conclusion, sorry. As you can see, there are so many disparate strands, I can’t possibly make one grand thesis statement. Maybe the inherent contradictions of having warfare in a family friendly video game weakens the potential end result? I guess, but I don’t want to imply that what we have now is bad, as it is pretty good tbh. So, uhh…
…
OK, if I had to say something, it’s more about the process of making this. Having to try and think about how violence intersects with a video game you like takes you in a number of different directions. Ultimately, this process was really fulfilling for me, and I would recommend that you do the same (for FE or anything else)! Trying to analyse something you enjoy from a perspective not usually applied is pretty neat. If you guys have any thoughts (on the points above or your own), I’d be very interested to hear them!
Also, if people are interested, I’ll try to make a few case studies. I would focus on Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses, as (when thinking on this topic) I found that these games were consistently the most intriguing, with the most interesting relationships to violence. This would probably take a while though, as I am gonna be very busy in June, and I probably won’t have time this month either.

I have asked this before in the past over the last four years and only now I have learned enough about this to where it is no longer a complete mystery to me, and now that I partially know what it is, I am hoping to figure out a plan and a path to help me with my healing journey and learn how to uplift the veil/buffer that prevents me from feeling anything with my gifts, and to an extent, feeling normal in my heart chakra center.
Long story short, this is what happened that led to this veil be upon me. I had long awaited for my psychic abilities, and in turn my chakras, to fully awaken and begin to experience what life is like as a psychic and feel the world around me. I was unsure of when it would happen until I was told by a guide that they would awaken after I had turned 22 in 2020. After a lot of patience, that came true, and was unexpected to attract an unwarranted amount of spirits around me. They made me confused and anxious while I was just beginning to detect sounds and auras with my abilities coming out. And somehow, after all of this, I had only known a brief glimpse of a white, wispy silhouette of a male spirit walking away from my direction past what looked like a drawer, and then suddenly saw nothing. In short, that time in 2020 was the only time I could decently experience my abilities like I had hoped and could not find an explanation to why I couldn't have my gifts awaken without and interruptions or strange paranormal occurrences. In that year, I had felt rips and tears in my aura that felt a little draining, and as I can surmise, that contributed to my journey to recovery.
What had first started my healing and recovery journey was not only the strange attacks on my aura and the austere confusion that sullied my foretold, patient awakening, yet also a shut-off in my mind that I had later discovered from a reiki healer was in fact an energy blockage in my Third Eye, which he healed and helped me walk the first steps to growth and transformation. I have no certainty of when the veil was first put on me, but throughout the entire time afterwards, I was saddened and disappointed that I could no longer feel the healing energy of my crystals, the auras of spirit being or physical people, hear the voices and thoughts of the spirit beings, and the fact that I could no longer feel like I could daydream, know my dreams, know when I'm in a Zen state when meditating or even get a sense on how to astral project correctly. Every day since the closing of my Third Eye and the end of 2020, I felt soft, faint, numb, unfeeling and unaware of anything that used to make me feel the highs and lows of life and went about my days thinking that I had lost my sense of wonder and excitement in my heart. Scary videos and movies no longer shake or startle me, love feels/felt distant and unstirring, I could not experience bliss and excitement shared with a lover or on my own, and my artistic hobbies lost their spark. All of this simply made me feel more alien to my family and people around me while I was having reiki sessions and looking for ways to feel centered, balanced, grounded, and normal again. Although, this was considering after the fact that I had a spiritual awakening once my DNA activated my dormant psychic abilities.
All throughout this time, sometimes various spirit beings popped up and I could hardly even tell who they were or if they were even of divine love and light at all, so while this was happening, those very beings just made things more difficult to comprehend and allow myself to understand the reasoning of my family's help. Fast forward to this year after a long, austere, and oddly eventful four years since my 22nd birthday, I had in total 6 hospital visits, 2 stays at recovery centers for behavioral rehab, an absurd amount of medical debt, and an embarrassing amount of times I had argued with my family over a simple fantasy game that was a part of this four year-long story that I will not mention the name of; all of which for the same reasons that first manifested from my psychic awakening and circumstances that absolutely no nurse or doctor could even help or pinpoint. The only help I had ever received that gave me any progress was the reiki healings, medium sessions with my guardian angels and spirit guides, the crystals I owned to help with my chakras, and the cathartic realization that I was actually a starseed going through a really odd awakening.
I was sad, I was upset, I was overwhelmed, and I was simply itching for a logical, metaphysical answer that could help me further understand my internal circumstances and walk away from the chaos of trying to figure out how to even re-learn how to meditate, daydream, visualize anything, and even have a substantial certainty that I could have a trustworthy conversation with my true spirit team without any false beings intruding and confusing me. Since this journey started, I have grown a lot and had some progress in this, and in summary, I have finally found a happier ending. Yet was has perplexed me and eluded me was that I could not tell was was still keeping me from re-sensitizing myself to my abilities and feel more aware and connected throughout my body, just so that I could feel more normal within my new sense of self. What helped the most was not any doctor giving me a nasty pill for BPD or Schizophrenia, but talking with my guardian angels and them telling me that they put a veil/buffer on me to keep me safe from overstimulation and unnecessary encounters from low-vibrational beings (although from my personal perspective, it would have been helpful to not have this psychic problem with not even telling the difference between my spirit team and anyone else- thus, the great itch to remove it), and that it is very much possible to fully remove it since that it's temporary. I had even learned the real names of my angels and starseed family, and that I had a large team of angels watching over me. This helped me find progress and some peace in my heart.
And so, in the epilogue era of my life, I am still in search of the same, tangible connection with that spark of wonder and feeling comfortable and grounded within my body, as I have learned from attempting to meditate again is that there is something with my heart and mind that makes me feel so unaware, soft, and faint to the energies around me and feeling anything at all with my own body, most likely in my heart and crown chakras that could hold more answers to fulfilling my wishes. I have completely foregone the need to use a pendulum at all for spiritual communication and is not solely used for crystal energy repair and spell-work, so now I have to really use my senses to channel any information from my spirit team and feel confident enough that I can still try to get the same, transformative results that the more emotionally aware people know when they feel their breath and prana while meditating, getting a healing, and having spiritual journeys like other psychics and starseeds do. I have been feeling quite unconfident and doubtful of myself with reattuning to my senses, body, and emotions again, as now I am having encouragement from my spirit medium and my spirit team that I should endeavor into reiki practice, automatic writing, and do spirit channeling myself. Whatever is going on with my heart and how the veil/buffer affects me, its quite discouraging to even try when I couldn't even tell what's happening in my dreams at night. I do not even write down my dreams anymore ever since the end of 2020 when I had first noticed that they all felt blurry, faint, fuzzy, and distant from my usual experiences, and now, I don't even bother to try to see if I can recall any visitations or conversations with my guides and angels at night.
I am in a better position now than I was back then, yet my journey is not over. I do not know anyone that has felt like this or had known their abilities better than I did, and I would like to ask if there is anyone who knows what a veil/buffer like this is for and how I can prepare myself to be ready enough to fully remove it myself, and my angels said that I could indeed do that, although I could guess that it would have to be through some kind of spiritual journey into the self/subconscious self that I could uplift it from the inside. You can try to imagine what that would be like, with meditation, in turn, feeling as soft, faint, dark, and distant like I said.
I have noticed lately, that I can still feel sadness and joy enough to substantially make me cry a little, and I enjoy that actually, it feels more close to home of how it used to feel before I had the odd spiritual attacks and all of the other said factors of my recovery; yet nowadays, I still do not jump at a thing that would usually scare or startle me (like horror game playthroughs) or even feel a natural laugh coming on when I hear or see something that previously makes me giggle and laugh. So, I try to coax myself to smile and nod at the funny things or even fake at laughing to appear more normal in front of my family or friends. Bliss and pleasure definitely feel soft and faint as well, so I know that intimacy or romantic affection does not rouse me enough anymore. I pretty much have to encourage acting out my emotions and pretend a little, which I would rather restore the excitement and tangibility of instead of feeling low and calm all of the time.
I have no spirit beings affecting me anymore, and my life is now more steady and stable now. Yet, I know that I would still have to find a way to establish a safe and effective method to spiritually visit and talk with my spirit team so that they can help me understand my life, sense of self, and what I can do to learn more about my starseed mission and why I reincarnated into this world.
What else can I do to help further the progress I have made? What kind of modalities should I try out and help heal my heart, mind and body, to heal myself like my spirit team wanted? What kinds of advice and tips can help with a soul like me who feels somewhat "aphantasic" to formerly strong and tangible senses and feelings? What exercises and practices should I take up to help balance myself and feel and know the peace between thoughts during meditation? Perhaps more reiki is needed? Could learning reiki and other types of energy healing help me with healing and opening up my heart (where I think that most of the problem is)?
What can I do to bring more empathic awareness and start to feel normal again?
Happen to know anyone who knows what it's like to have a special veil on one's spiritual senses or had something similar to having a healing journey like this? Maybe a DNA activation or healing may help with this? Whatever it is, I would love what any of you in the spiritual community have to say, as this whole journey and how it started came as one heck of a shock and surprise to me. I never had this happen to me before. I have tried to find out if Qigong or regression hypnosis therapy would help, but if you can figure this, it was definitely not easy to even tell what kind of energy shifts were going on within me or around me, so that couldn't have helped me at the time. Neurotherapy brain scans did nothing for me, in case anyone wonders that. Any feedback on this would be great, as I don't think that it is just this veil/buffer that is the sole cause of my issue. Who else can explain this besides me? Atheist scientists cannot, priests cannot, so who else would know? Please do message me, I yearn to get closer to feeling the love and light of the universe again.
Who knows? Maybe it has something to do with a subconscious thing with my Inner Child that triggered this feeling? My former Reiki healer, Chris, did say that I had "shut off" my powers and that I had regressed inwards, so, let's see if that still holds true?

Hi there everyone, I kind of curious, I have been writing a crossover fanfic in the style of Super Robot Wars storylines. One of the Franchises I want to add is RWBY, however, I never really got into the series until playing Blazblue Cross Tag Battle and during his time I started read up on the series on various wiki pages.
So, if I'm wrong on any details or something does seem to match the character's personalities, please tell me!
In this point of the fanfic, it took place after my idea of an ending to the series, so here goes nothing!
The white haired huntress explained why she feels this is the case, telling them the story of her younger brother and his road for redemption.
For the longest of times, Whitley had nothing but hatred for his older sisters and saw the hunters and huntresses as below him, mocking Weiss every moment he had while she was under house arrest. Escaping from this sham of a home, she swore the boy and their father were nothing but monsters and for their actions were things that she never could forgive. That is until it was after the arrest of their father and their manor being invaded by Grimms that cracks were showing in his facade of pettiness.
"During that fight, Whitley wanted nothing but to run off, until he saw our mother fighting against the Grimm before falling from the underuse of her Semblance when he knew he needed to help."
After saving Willow and learning from their mother that Whitley was as much of a victim as anyone else that the middle child chose to mend their damaged relationship. During the fall of their home Kingdom of Atlas, he continued to help by having all the SDC Saircrafts to save anyone and everyone to relocate the people to Vacuo. When the Team RWBY and Jaune return from Ever After, he became part of the attacking forces as a commander to help defeat Salem's forces.
In the final battle, He was present to witness Ruby Rose and Kairi sparing the now depowered and mortal Salem, who was told to simply live with reminders of her sins haunting her until the day she died, as this was her last life. "While we watch Salem leaving to parts unknown, I thought Whitley was going to say something foolish, but to my surprise, he only watched.
In the four weeks after Salem's defeat, Whitley began his new life but it was something to adjusted to as he worked a part time job and began to start classes in that first week The heir of whatever remained of the SDC let his hair grow out slightly, he may have been inspired by a picture of Jaune's appearance during his time in Mistral but still kept a very clean appearance.
It wasn't until a week ago that there were some Jacques' old associates from Vacuo wanted to give Whitley the position of CEO of a new company, one named Phoenix Ash.
"At first, I thought he just wanted to go back to his old ways of life when he agreed to the deal, Asked from me was to trust him about this..."
Out of the blue, The new CEO of the Phoenix Ash Group called for a Public Announcement. Weiss and Winter were watching on a monitor in an aircraft outside of the city. Fearing for the worst, that he would be making empty promises to make a postive public image, the boy spoke of ending the practices of abusing Fanuas workers. This was a lie that their father made to the press when he was alive, before the young CEO spoke of his new idea.
When questioned by the Press, Whitley told the world that he his idea was to start finding better sources than just Dust to rely on, so he would put his own Lien that he held on since childhood to fund this research. If this research was successful, then he would personally see to the closure of all Dust Mines under the Pheonix Ash banter but threaten that if any of the Fanuas workers were harmed during his time as CEO, that under his leadership that he personally see it that the abusers' paychecks would go to their victims and repeated offenders would be fired as quickly as possible. The two sisters begin to noticed that four of The Board Members who hired him were in shaking in their boots.
"Young Sir, please think of the words you speak..." one of Jacques' remaining associates on the board begged to hopefully conviced the boy to reconsider these ideas
"I am fully aware of the words coming from my mouth as much as you were aware of letting my father's actions slide so you can make more Lien. So, to be quite blunt, SHUT IT OR FIND NEW JOBS!" This wasn't like the boy they once knew while Jacques was thriving, he was a new Whitley Schnee that wouldn't be swayed by the idea of making Lien in dishonest ways and wouldn't allow anyone under his leadership to harm the Faunus workers.
"DAMNED BLEEDING HEART BRAT, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE JACQUES, THE REAL HEIR OF THE NAME OF SCHNEE!"
The oldest board member, a muscular bald man of over fourty who was still extremely loyal to the deceased CEO of SDC, charged at the youth with a knife! The youngest of the Schnee clan knew there would be risks, but didn't have any fighting experience to counter this attack.
"WHITLEY!" Weiss cried out as she knew she wouldn't be able to stop the would be killer's attempt of assassination, however, a certain green eyed Faunus, who's loyalites to Robyn Hill last to this day, arrived in enough time to stopped the youth's would be killer.
"You really think that Fiona Thyme would let you kill your new boss? As IF!"
Within a mere set of seconds, the man of three hundred and something pounds was on the ground, each insult that was aimed at the girl was countered with his former boss nodding for the girl to wack the creep across his bald head. This last for a couple of minutes until the police to take his sorry ass to jail as well as charging the Faunus with a minor crime. The girl knew that there would no way to escape but chose not to surrender as she put her hands behind her head much to the cheers of some in the crowd.
However, In those five seconds before the cuffs closed on her hands, The CEO jumped off of the platform and stood in between the messy haired Faunus girl and the arresting officer, slapping the cuff out of the man's hands to the shock of the world. When asked to step aside, the boy's answer to this was something everyone in Remnant, who were either in the crowd or watched from afar from their scrolls, never expected.
"You're really asking me to step aside, so you could take away a war hero's future? I choose to refuse for we all know these charges against her are nothing but baseless. She fought on the side of various heroes! Heroes ] from the Battle of Beacon, like the Teams: RWBY, JNPR, SSSN, FNKI, ABRN and CFVY, the heroes without teams like Lady Kairi, Qrow Branwen, and Taiyang Xiao Long, Heroes like Ilia Amitola and the Belladonna clan who were once White Fang members but left before the assassination of Sienna Khan and return to fight to stop the once peaceful group when they saw what it became under the command of Adam Taurus, heroes like the remaining members of the Ace Operatives, who fought their own feelings of sadness when they lost Clover Ebi and came together after they realized James Ironwood was in the wrong, after the man fell into despair because of how the upper class saw the innocent victims in Remnant and used Atlas as a ram to prevent the Grimm from gaining another advantage point. These groups of heroic and wonderful people came together to save the world from the forces of Salem, so why can't we, the civilains they protected, do the same?!"
There were some mutters from the civilians that watch on the ground level before one of the rich members of the crowd, a man named Harry Marigold, brought up that Weiss may have saved the world but of her crime of summoning the Grimm at the charity event at Schnee Manor should be held accountable before the youth counter with.
"The crime that night was one in justified anger when you, Harry Marigold, who ignored her sadness and only wanted my sister's attention for bragging rights, that damnable trophy wife, her weak minded shell of a husband, the former CEO of the SDC, myself and many others of the Upper Class chose to cruely mocked the recently deceased of Vale and proudly laughing about the deaths of the many innocents of the fallen Kingdom who had nothing to do with the fighting. fates we claimed that civilains deserved!? If anything, she didn't summoned the Grimm to harm anyone but wanted us demons to understand that life is not to be taken as a joke or anything to not to be take lightly. The real crime that night was that the Grimm didn't caused more damages to Schnee manor and not having the monster hurt any of us because of our cruelity to the dead! But because the CEO of SDC cared for nothing but his public image, when she confronted that scumbag for our actions and for using her as a prize toy for everyone to see, his only reaction was to slapped my sister across her face and denied her Birthright!
This made the rich members of the crowd uneasy, as they knew that they were being put in their places. They wanted the youth to be silenced but he continued, angry and filled with something that he should've had a long time ago, a frightful sense of Justice.
"For too damn long, I was blinded by my family's name, not knowing it was nothing but an evil curse and if it wasn't for my sister's actions that night and the night her team and the remaining members of team JNPR saved the lives of my poor mother and the sorry shell of a person. I, too, would've remained under the very same spell of ignorance that the old fool relished in to keep us in line. So, for you to order me around, to use my sister justified attempt on the upper class to see her honorable view on life so who could silence my words, and to force this maiden, who has fought harder than anyone here because fearful paranoia bigots using unjust hatred of every Faunus to make her life a living torture device, for her to rot in a prison cell without a fair trial, just for saving my life? That command is UNFORGIVABLE!" The boy screamed loudly and in pure rage so everyone could hear his plea.
Fiona was in shock, she heard from various communities of the Faunus that the SDC and clan of Schnee were nothing but monsters, worse than any of Salem's Grimms. Even after meeting the huntresses of Team RWBY, she believed Weiss was the only one of the family who wanted to set things right in the world.
Even through she hated the idea to keep an eye on the Schnee heir, even if it was a jobn from her trusted leader. His father and the fellow members of the Board in the SDC saw the Faunus and wanted nothing but for them to be trapped in cages without futures, But to see with her eyes, the very son made to follow in these footsteps of selfish desires, meaning every single word that left his mouth, these words that were filled with a justified desire to save the young girl from an unfair fate, was so unreal.
"If anything, it was the wicked ideas of greed that the deceased CEO held dear tt were one of the many factors that broke our world, Jacques Sc..." The boy stopped for less than a second before continuing in anger.
"....Actually no, I refuse to allow that bastard to my family's name any longer, even in death! Jacques Gélé was never a father, he was nothing but an unredeemable thief without a sense honor, who used dirty lies to trick my dying grandfather into his once humble life, the honorable man that should've had the right to lived long enough to prevent the future Gélé wanted, Nicholas Schnee!"
"Who used my recently deceased mother's, Willow Schnee, love and trust to steal a company he was never worthy to rule over from underneath her. When she learned of his deception and his lies in their sham of a relationship, the once loving and carring mother only means to escape from his wicked virus was to drink her sorrows away and seclude herself from the world!
"His sickness was something that their three children were not immuned to as he saw nothing from us but to be used as pawns so he could gain more power! It wasn't until we learned better ways to live by others, others who actually cared, that we actually became good people!"
"The first of us was to learn this lesson was The Soldier who proven herself time and time again, who enlisted in the Atlas military to get away from the sickness that Gélé took pleasure in, who leaders knocked the views of hatred for the Faunus and the usage of cheap tricks out of her, my oldest sister, Commander Winter Schnee!
"My second oldest sister, Huntress Weiss Schnee, who learn of the shame that her family name carried at her time in Beacon, who was forced to leave after the battle by Gélé for supposed safety only to be paraded around as a prize trophy daughter for his friends in the upper class, who felt the sting of venom when that man refused to accept her heroic heart, forcing her to escape his maddess so she could continued helping those who were suffering!"
"And then there's myself, Whitley Schnee, the boy who was so scared with the various changes to his home life that he chose to follow in that thief's footsteps, who once mocked the dead of Beacon along with the others in the Upper Class, who has never fought for anything and even in that last battle, was so powerless to prevent more tragedies for befall those he commanded to fight on his behalf! The boy who's heart is filled with so much regret because of his idiotic choices in life but is now filled a newly found sense of Justice, who only goal now is to find a cure for the poison, so he could, no! will make our world a better place than it was in the past!"
The crowd was stunned thar they couldn't help but to stay silent.
"Gélé has cause so much suffering to the Faunus and to many other communities. That suffering spread in the Kingdoms like wildfire. When my grandfather died, so did the fairness and honor that the Schnee name held on to....but not anymore! MY DREAM is to stop the suffering that Gélé relished in so he could live like a damn lazy king!
Whitley then put his hands behind his head and told the world.
"So if this girl goes to prison, so will I! All I asked of those listening is not to cheer no matter what the outcome is, not to cry for this foolish boy who has fought for nothing, but to simply think about his words and the weight they pull!" Whitley's blood was boiling as The puppet CEO's bight blue eyes widden to show everyone that his dream was one that the boy will work for through his pain.
After this decree was finished, everything was slient before the officer asked. "Would you die for that dream..?"
Whitley, answered with all seriousness. "If I die, then I would gladly die with a hundred stabs to my heart and soul to make damn sure that my dream becomes reality." The officer waved to another cop to bring in a second set of handcuffs, much to both cops dismay.
"Alright, I'm sorry. Whitley Schnee for disobeying a officer of the law, you have to come with us."
Whitley said not a word as the cuffs latched onto his hands. As if to respect the boy's wishes, There were no one in the crowd, maybe even in Remnant, cheering about the arrest of these two, even though the boy said he had nothing but hatred of those that surround Gélé mocking those that died in Beacon, none of the them wanted nor could cheer, for to celebrate this would be nothing but hallowed.
On route to the department to put the two in the holding cells until they could make bond, the two talked, mostly it was Whitley asking the girl a thousands questions of the culture of the Faunus, the life she lived before becoming a war hero and so on. The poor girl was shaking with overwhelmingness but snapped out of it when Whitley explained something to her.
"This is the second time you saved me from the door of death, thank you, Lady Thyme."
Fiona was slightly confused before slowly piecing together that in the final battle she rushed to the location of downed aircraft, where a gravely injured woman layed under some debris being protected by her white haired son with a mere wooded stick he found on the ground screaming. "GET AWAY! YOU GRIMMS!" before being knocked backwards and then being held by his throat.
"HEY FANG FACES, I'M MORE OF A CHALLENGE THAN THOSE TWO!" The Fanaus screamed while the Grimm let the boy go to blocked her attack.
"KID! TAKE YOUR MOM AND GET OUTTA HERE, I CAN'T HOLD THIS GUY OFF FOREVER!"The boy nodded as he grabbed his mother and ran off, not knowing that he would plan to thank the maiden the next time they meet.
"No freaking way, you're that boy?"
"Yeah...but I'm not proud to admit that I'm not one for fighting." Whitley smiled as this surprised the girl.
To think, the meek boy she saved that one time and the guy who wanted to help others despite his family's reputation were the same person? How would this day become more of a weird fever dream?
"Hey you two, I hate to burst this bubble but ready for a fight, there was another vehicle besides ours that was on their way to the department." A male's voice explained when they noticed a man in a grey cloak sitting in the darkest corner of the vehicle.
"Before you asked, I've been here for the entire trip."
"Why is that important?" The only woman of the three thought while the Schnee youth figured it out.
"That ghoul of a Board Member?"
"'Faid so, he was taken in sometime before your speech and there are only two holding cells in the department, one for men and the other for women." The man explained.
"I could use my semblance to hold him in a..." Fiona was stopped when the mystery man continued.
"...And to prevent any escapes, the cells and those cuffs on your hands are laced with anti-semblance tech."
Fiona screamed. "OH CRAP!"
Whitley was shaken but kept cool as he thought. "I guess as this is a smaller scale city, I should've figured as much."
"Are you actually prepared to die for your ideas?" The man asked the boy, but his answer was simple.
"I'm not planning to back down now, to betray those words I spoke earlier, would be a wicked sin."
Meanwhile in an aircraft a little ways off. Both Weiss and Winter were dumbfounded by their brother's speech and actions. "He has changed so much since weeks ago." The middle child thought before Winter demanded the pilot to land that at the port nearest to the city.
Yang, Kairi, Jaune, Ruby, and Blake were on the aircraft but was confused by the sudden change of directions, before the commander explained. "The Board member that tried to killed our brother was sent to the holding cell in the department before Whitley's speech."
"OH CRAP!" Ruby and Weiss screamed as they thought in dismay that the boy was going to be in an one sided fight against a heavier opponent.
"Please hold on for a bit longer, Younger Brother..." Winter quietly whispered as the Aircraft was going as fast as possible to their destination.
Upon arriving and being settle in the two holding cells, it was when the guards left the redeemer was being used as a punching bag for the man's humiliation.
"DAMN BRATTY ASSED PUNK!"
"UGHHH!" Whitley groaned, being punched for a hour, his clothing became ragged and bloody.
"LEAVE WHITLEY ALONE!" Fiona cried out at the tallest in the men's holding cell, she was in the womens' holding cell that was across the room, luckly for her, she was alone in the women's side but not for Whitley, making things worse is that the guards were sent out on an emergency call, as their thinning numbers were sent out because of a few bomb threats elsewhere in the city.
"SHUT IT, SHEEPIE! I GOING KEEP BEATING THIS BRAT UNTIL HE UNDERSTANDS HIS PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE!"
"..." The man in the hood remained quiet as he watched this uneven fight. "You should stay down..."
"...As if I would..." The Schnee boy rose back to his feet through he knew nothing of throwing punches he refused to surrender just to spite the former Board Member of Phoenix Ash.
"HEH, for a skinny brat, you're stubborn, be a good little boy and admit that you're nothing but a puppet then I'll quit your rightly deserved beatings!"
Whitley regained his balance before flipping a bird claiming. "You...really...think this..puppet would let some smug ass with no respect for anyone but those in the Upper Class to order me around? SCREW....YOU!" The boy yelled spiting blood onto the man's ghoulish face to annoy the monster in human flesh.
"...WHY YOU LITTLE MAGGOT!" The man was even more enraged now, as he punched the stomach of the younger male causing the boy fall onto the cold floor.
Fiona was horrified as she witness the former spoiled prince rose back to his feet.
"Still standing boy?"
The youth was still standing to a point, until the man pulled a dirty shiv he found in the holding cell while waiting for this very moment. The two youths' eyes widden when they saw the makeshift weapon of sharpen hard plastic.
"...A weapon!?" Fiona cried out in dismay.
"Some poor sap must have made this sometime ago, makes me wonder where he could be now, anywho while I am slicing into your flesh, Whitley, I'm going tell what I thought of those pretty little ideas of yours."
The Faunus was in a state of fear for the young puppet CEO as the shiv user quickly sliced into the white haired youth's shoulder, with this the first time being cut, Whitley scream in pain.
"AHHHHGNN!"
"FIRST, YOU WANT TO FREE THE ANIMALS FROM OUR CAGES, THEY HAVE NO RIGHTS TO A FUTURE IN OUR SOCIETY!
The next was a stab on his left upper leg, luckly not hitting anything vitals as makeshift blade of sharp hard plastic was pulled out and blood dripped onto the flooring The boy's screams of pain echoing through the empty department.
"NEXT, WE CAN'T MAKE ANY LIEN IF BLEEDING HEARTS, LIKE WHAT YOU'VE BECOME, ARE IN CHARGE OF THINGS!"
The attacker then sliced the right side of Whitley's face leaving a scar under his eye.
"THE FACE OF THE BOY WITH A NAME THAT NOWS MEANS NOTHING TOTHE WORLD, USING TRUTHS TO PISS ON THE LEGACY THAT JACQUES BUILT, JUST SO HIS SON COULD REBUILD THE HONOR THAT IT HELD WHEN THAT WINDBAG WAS STILL KICKING! WHAT FREAKIN DRIVEL!"
then a slash across his chest.
"THAT BLEEDING HEART OF YOURS WANTING REDEMPTION SO HE COULD HAVE SOME ATTENTION BUT GUESS WHAT THERE'S NO SUCH THING IN THE BUSINESS WORLD OR IN THE REMAINING KINGDOMS OF REMNANT AS REDEMPTION!"
Then the right hand of the boy, the one Whitley pull in front of his body in an poor attempt to grabbed the makeshift Shiv.
"THESE HANDS OF A SOFT SPOILED LITTLE BOY WHO, EVEN IN THE LAST BATTLE AGAINST THE GRIMM FORCES, NEVER THREW A PUNCH OR SLAP ANYONE, ARE SUPPOSED TO CHANGE THE WORLD, ALL YOU HAVE DONE IN THAT BATTLE WERE ORDERING SOLDIERS TO FIGHT FOR YOU, SOLDIERS WHO SHOULD HAVE SEEN WHAT YOU'VE BECOME!"
Finishing this rant with a punch to the gut, and mocking his braverly. "TELL ME THIS, BOY? WHEN THIS SPINE OF YOURS GREW, DID YOUR STUPIDITY DOUBLED, BECAUSE COMPARED TO YOUR DAD, YOU'RE SUCH AN DOLT TO BELIEVE YOUR OWN CRAP!"
"WHITLEY! STOP, YOU'RE KILLING HIM!" Fiona screamed as the man got on top of the boy's body and punch the white haired youth's face twice before the monster yelled at the girl.
"I SAID SHUT IT SHEEP! YOU MAYBE A WAR HERO THAT I CAN'T PUT MY HANDS ON BUT YOU'RE GOING TO WATCH AS THE HOPES OF THIS BOY DIES ALONG WITH HIS BODY!"
Getting off of the beaten body of the Schnee, the man let Whitley try to get up before the boy fell on his stomach and the man grabbed the white hairs of his his head and pulled his face up, so the redeemer would look into Fiona's green eyes for a last time, one filled with tears.
"ACTUALLY, IT'S FUNNY, BECAUSE OF HER STATUS AS A WAR HERO, THE SHEEP WILL GET OUT IN THE END OF THE DAY AND BE ON HER WAY HOME, BUT YOU JUST HAD TO PLAY HERO AND FOR WHAT, WHITLEY SCHNEE?! FOR YOUR REMAINS TO BE MY PUNCHING BAG UNTIL I TRANSFER TO PRISON?....IT'S SO FREAKING SAD THAT I'M LAUGHING MY ASS OFF!"
The redeemer, who's face full of buises, forgotten that this is the case for minor first time offenders but didn't care at all. Ever since Fiona saved his and his mother's lives that day, he would've happily be arrested and be beaten, time after time, so he could thank her. He wanted to smile, to show his savior that he was happy with this outcome, even this meant that his life ended today, but could barely move his face but the only could wheezingly chuckled as tears as swell from his eyes
Before the man could finished Whitley off, a small blackout happened as the doors of the cells opened, Fiona ran to the boy who risked his life just so he could to talk to her. "WHY?!" Fiona cried she held the youth in her arms. "WHY CAN'T MONSTERS LIKE YOU SEE THAT THIS A NEW WORLD, THAT WE CAN BECOME BETTER THAN WE ONCE WERE." The green eyed girl demanded anwers but the man just mocked to anwered the Fuanus.
"Do you think animals like you could understand that only the strong and the Upper Cass are the only ones who have the right to control Remnant. He could have been one of those in control and still have enough Lien to be someone important but he chose to ally with the lower class, and for little lamb he paying for it, dearly."
Putting the boy's head gently on the floor wiping the tears on her sleeve, to hopefully keep friend she made safe for a bit longer, she attempted to use Pocket Demisions to rid the world of this demon, only to realize in the middle of her attack, the power returned and because she ran to help the youth, that she was in the men's holding cell with the real beast.
"....No!" She wimpered.
"Looks like there's some of my fellow board members of Phoenix Ash are still on my side." He smiled wickening as he began to explain their plans. "You see, little Sheep, we figured the boy has a bleeding heart, so to get rid of those childish wishes to loosen our hold, we decided yesterday to make up a plan, the one that you had to prevent. So during that little speech of his, we made a second one on the fly." He continued as he put his hand on an earpiece. "...That one being the threats to distract the guards and that little blackout. Plus thanks to this little device, my semblance to increase my strength with every attack I give, still remains."
"This can't be...." She was scared, as this man that she could taken down a few mere hours ago, was telling the truth when every step he made while approaching Fiona made small cracks in the flooring.
"Damn it, We going need to cause another..." A voice explained though the earpiece before he turned off the equipment's sound option.
"Now, since you annoyed me so much, you're going be my replacement, lamb chops!" The upsuper yelled in bliss as he pulled his fist to punch her small body. She dodged the attack but his second punch connected and sent her flying into the force field door.
"AUHHGGG!" She cried out, recoiling in the pain from her back before noticing the man was coming for her, managing to get up but unable to dodge it completely in this cramped arena. She felt the punch connected with her left arm, braking the bones in the limb, Then a kick to her gut. Knocking her a few inches near Whitley's body.
"....No...."
The youngest of the Schnee clan could only watch in despair through one eye, the two were being broken by a scummy excuse of a human, and the young redeemer of his name could do nothing but watched as his attempt to prove to the world his words were real go down in flames.
"...Leave...her...alone..." These words spit out ignoring the pain as much as he could while rising back to his feet and limping to get in between the Faunus woman and her attacker.
"So, the boy still has some fighting spirit...The boy that has never fought for anything in his life, I am certain that you're doing this for everyone's attention."
The man was right on a few things, Whitley was never a fighter or some ground troop, and it may have been that he wanted attention when he first started to go down this road but Winter quickly knocked that idea out of his head, but the man is wrong on others, for Whitley realize that all he wanted to do in life is to help in anyway, even he'll be happy as a sideliner act to the main heroes.
But one can't always stay in that role and hoped to change the world, for a long time he stood by as a witness to to his father's crimes, for longer his thoughts of heroism being dismissed by that bogus excuse of a father and as far as he remembered, Whitley had others fight for him. But no more!
"In this world, money and power pull the strings, and yet you choose death for a flithy animal? How more times are you going to PISS M-!" The man was interrupted while talking by, to the surprise of all, the white haired boy headbutting his taller foe, knocking the man onto his ass!
"...WHAT!?" The man screamed in horror as he started to bleed from his now broken nose, this was the first time the business man has ever seen his own blood.
"...I've...told...the world...I...would die for my dream....even if I die today....I'll be happy to die...hundred times over again..." The boy's body was mostly broken, each word he spoke caused more pain than his body could stand but the young man still had one part of his body to fight with, his hard head!
The next thing they all knew, Whitley continued headbutting his enemy, causing the man to gain a reality check, his ability were increasing his attacks but at a certain cost, The sole major weak point on his body, the one that held the brain to think of ways to screwed others over, the one with the eyes that saw everyone else as beneath him and the one with the mouth with a booming voice he used to make threats and promises to ruin his foes, his face weaken over time with every punch or kick he gave to the two.
"NONONONONO!" The man screamed with a bloodied and bruised face, before feeling the same despair he installed into his two victims just mere minutes ago. In a desperate attempt to stop these attacks, he grabbed the man in the cloak as a hostage, with the shiv he used on the boy still in his possession.
"You-ou wouldn't w-wan...me to stab some r-random person that had nuthing to do with this, uh?!" These ragged words were like the man himself, desperate and scummy, but was enough to stop the boy from getting closer.
The foe laughed thinking he has the upper hand. "I admired your old man's talent in making a profit, but he was just like you to a certain point, he was no killer, so now I advise we wait until they let us out or I'll be plunging..."
"Tsk...This old fart really been pissing me off since we got here!"
The cloaked man yelled as he stepped on the foot of his captor along with a gunshot ringing though the air. "W-WHAT!?" The man screamed in pain as he released his hold to grabbed his now bleeding foot. "DAMMIT, DAMMIT, DAMMIT!" The larger man screamed before realizing why his leg strength wasn't up to snuff. While being headbutted by his Whitley, the earpiece fell out and was behind his two victims!
"No way this is happening...." He groaned in pain before the cloaked male took off his hood, just to make things worse for the would be assassin.
"...and here I thought I would have a peaceful life in prison..." The man sighed as he revealed himself to be a fomer ally of Salem, one who wanted nothing more but to rot in prisons for the remaining of his life.
"M-Mercury B-B-Black, why is a war criminal here?!" The man screamed, fearing for his life even more than before.
"I was supposed to transfer into the next city, mostly for some good behavior BS..." Mercury turned his attention to the white haired boy.
"Hey kid, you're the brother to that girl Weiss, right?"
"....." Whitley wanted to say something but really couldn't, with those last few headbutts, if he tried to speak now, he will surely faint.
"Man, the geezer really did a number on you, huh?" Mercury asked before = one of the guards and Whitley's sisters ran in.
"Holy...CRAP! WHITLEY!!"
"Why is our brother and Miss Thyme in the same cell as these two?!" Winter demanded answers before Mercury explained for panicing guard while pulling the earpiece from the ground.
"Whitley was being used by lord lard ass as a punching bag until few people from Pheonix Ash caused a short blackout, the girl ran in to stopped the beatings but was attacked as well until your little bro figuring out the buzzard's weakness by headbutting the man in his freakin' face. After that, The creep tried to use me as levelage but yeah, you can see how that worked out."
"DAMNED BRATS...." The man groaned as the two Schnee women got Whitley and Fiona out of this cell but froze in fear when he saw Winter staring down at the man.
"I figured that your group would pulled something like this when Whitley told me of the CEO position, so I looked into yours and the rest of the board's backgrounds...It was just as Black said, You and your three friends in the board of eight have more than just attempted assassination to worry about now."
This decree was worrying enough before Mercury Black turned his attention back to the older man."I guess I'm going to have a kicking dummy for a roommate now!"
"Please have mercy!" The man turned deathly pale before Fiona yelled.
"Like the mercy you shown to me and Whitley because he called out your sorry butt, I would think not!"
Weiss was next to insult the man for his behavior. "...If anything you deserve nothing but a fate in a cage, like the various futures you took away!"
"Looks like you're going to rot in a cell for the rest of your sad existence." Winter finished before the guards were told by the military commander to take her younger brother out of the room and to take his would be assassin to the other cell.
Before leaving, Winter asked the former ally of Salem.
"Mercury Black...Your sentence for your war crimes have been over with for a couple of months now, yet, you still choose to remain in prison, may I ask why?"
"Since Cinder died in the fight against our former partner and Salem's redemption attempt, I really don't have much else left. Besides it's like I've said during that battle with the hammerhead and her pretty boy lover, I have been forced to fight since I was born by a drunk abusive excuse of a dad, so even if I could be let back into society, I don't think I could be happy."
"You could've joined the military..." The eldest member of the Schnee replied before the younger male countered
"Yeah, but I hate following and giving orders, besides you've seen what this old bastard done to your brother, creeps like him and worse are everywhere in prison. So as long as I can beat them senseless, I'm freaking happy to serve more time for each brawl I get my ass into."
This silenced Winter for a couple of seconds before asking for two simple demands. "Just tell Em that I'm okay with how things ended between us, and tell her just to be happy with her new life, if she can do that, then that would give me some sort of peace."
A couple of hours later at the medical bay on the airship.
Kairi used the healing spell Curaga on both the boy and Fiona. "Thank you, Lady Kairi." Fiona bowed while still having her arm in a cast after Whitley opened his eyes, being healed.
"Hey, it's not a problem, but please, just call me Kairi for now on, okay, Fiona?"
"Ughh, what...Fiona..are you alright?" The redeemer asked his friend.
"Yes, but you took the blunt of the beating, please relax, Whitley." The Fanuas explained before the boy asked.
"Who payed for our bails? I doubt it was my sisters, our situation isn't as it once was."
At that moment, Weiss and Blake came in, the disowned heiress of the destroyed SDC was proud at the fact that her former enemy of a brother fought for what's right, explaining. "It those three you poined out from that charity that payed for your and Fiona's bonds."
"Huh?!" Fiona was taken back in surprise by this before the middle child of the Schnee family theorized
"My guess is, either your speech or being outed as horrible people that made those three pay with their own Lien to post bond. I only wished we got there quicker but the airport was on the other side of the city."
"That's good but I can only hope that the others in the crowd took my words to heart and none of the people recording that day alter the video."
...We can check for video or audio interferances later on today but something tells me those who heard your speech that they're going be thinking about it for a long time." Blake's words made the youngest member of the Schnee children a little more eased.
"If only mother lived to see her son became someone to be proud of." Weiss thought to herself that day before their last mission in Remnant before her universe was wiped from existence.
In the Hangar of the doomed Wunder, Weiss had a thought of what could've been the futures of the new CEO of Pheonix Ash and his loyal bodyguard could have been if their universe just lasted a little bit longer.
"Hey, Bozos I'm about to take the Eva-unit 02 F off of the ship, before figuring out a plan to stop Misato."
"Alright.." Aqua answered as the red-head walked towards the console before seeing something strange.
"You guys were here for the last hour right?"
"Yeah?" Duo answered before Asuka added.
"And no one else came in or tried anything funny right?"
"We've been here the entire time, what's with the questions, Langley?" Viral countered.
"...There's two signals of heat in the cockpit...."
"Umm what?" Jaune exclaimed as the console showing the statistics of the bulky armored version of Unit 02, showing two bodies of heat in the entry plug.
Before anything else was said in the group. A young male's voice came through the console. "Umm Hello? Can someone get us out of this thing?"
No one but the Schnee huntress recognize the youth's voice. "Whitley!?"
"Sis, can you hear me?"
Asuka spoke next, "How long were you two in the Evangelion for?"
"I think for three hours, oh right, Fi wanted to asked if there's any males in the area."
"Fiona's in there too?!" Wiess inner thoughts were of panic that were made worse after Jaune's answer.
"Yeah, there's four guys here, why?" Jaunne asked before Fiona screamed in embrassament.
"PLEASE GO TO THE OTHER ROOM OR SOMETHING, I CAN'T GO OUT LIKE THIS!"
"Fi, please relax..."
"RELAX!? YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE IN THIS THING WITH CLOTHES ON!" The girl whined while crying from embarrassment.
"Umm, could anyone bring clothing for Miss Thyme."
Duo began to smirked before being dragged by Viral into the next room. "Keep your dirty thoughts to yourself, Duo Maxwell..."
"Killjoy!" Duo screamed as Jonathan conviced Jaune to followed.
"Sir Arc, we should leave as well, as it is knights' honor to..."
"Already way ahead of you, Mr. Joestar. We'll see you all later when we come up with that plan!"
As this was all happening, an snore echoed out from behind the crates. "Is someone sleeping over there?" Aqua asked while checking to see who it might be.
There, Chibodee Crocket, of all people was in deep slumber, much to everyone's surprise.
"...We should wake him up..." Asuka sighed while Weiss went looking for any of the female members of the crew for some clothing.
But to the surprise of the two, he just walked into the next room while sleeping the entire time. "That...worked out way to well..."

Is there anything better than watching the most recent Korean series during a lazy summer afternoon, as you prepare for another busy Monday? Sure thing! That is why we have compiled a list of all the new anticipated Korean TV shows that will be hitting our screens this month. For those who love them, some of your favorite actors may even feature in these dramas (additional points). As Queen of Tears, one of the hottest ever show, is closing down; it’s about time you picked up a new one too. Well then, here are some of the finest Korean dramas that will be released in May.
1. The Atypical Family 04 May 2024 Netflix
The Atypical Family is a fantasy romance show which is always an exciting genre for fans of Kdrama. This show tells the story of a man who comes from a long line of people who have the ability to travel through time but loses it when he becomes depressed until he meets a young, lively girl named Do Da Hee and everything falls back into shape.
2. The Midnight Romance In Hagwon 06 May 2024 Netflix, TVING
A romantic drama series trying to talk about age difference among couples! The story happens when a young man falls in love with his college language instructor. Therefore, how will they deal with such a taboo that even up to date most people in South Korea cannot tolerate? Additionally, if the woman is older than the man, society instantly rejects them. Nevertheless, this particular man has remained faithful to his college love even after ten years of separation. Check out this slow burning romantic drama.
3. The 8 Show 17 May 2024 Netflix
It is not an easy task for anyone to be on this new Korean reality show! It is just like those locked house reality TV shows in which players are subjected under pressure and their every move captured on camera. There are eight participants who are confined inside a room with concrete walls- hundred days’ worth. If they can last that long then they win the show money will be shared equally between them and the winner takes all prize money divided among them, only if…. though each little thing you need costs 1 thousand times more than its initial price and your share will decrease by that amount.
4. Frankly Speaking 04 May 2024 Netflix
A funny rom-com K-drama that the fans wait eagerly- it’s finally here! The funny part about this program is that it runs for only twelve episodes- one revolves around an anchor person who suddenly can’t control his tongue while still at work; hence he says whatever comes into his mind! Now, everybody knows him as a scandalous topic throughout their nation so much so that one female talk-show host has shown interest in inviting him as her guest-it’s all TRP oriented! However, what happens when these two eccentric, cutthroat media people come together? Watch the show and tell us.
Explore More: Frankly Speaking
If you have already circled the dates of release for these four Korean dramas coming out in May then, well, your binge-watching has begun. Happy Watching!

Oh how sad I am. I've been planning this escape for years. And now that I'm finally here, with one more night on my... not-really-a-bed, just a... mat-on-the-floor with blanket and pillows...
I sob. Sob and cry and wonder why I feel all this pain. I'm the one who wanted to escape. To live my life to the fullest. To do all the things I love. To draw and sing, to wear my hair down and bake, to make friends and wear cute dresses, to have cats and be with the man I love and oh gosh how lucky I am that he loves me dearly and wants the best for me. He and his mum supported me so so much. My friend too. They are my chosen family.
But... why am I feeling so horribly sad...? Its because I'll never see my parents or siblings again. I feel so bad for my mum because she allows people to use her and by that I mean she does everything for my grown ass siblings. And my extended family all use her a lot too.
About my mum.
Sadly, shes religious. Prays constantly. Always telling us to pray. Donates money to needy. Forced me to pay zakkah. Buys counters to constantly recite, it's like digital tasbeehs and stuff to use wherever without looking or counting. You just press and then you get your number on a screen. She takes care of her mum sometimes. Often cooks for her. She often watches her sisters kids because her sister, my aunt... is ever so social and kinda just expects my mum to baby sit them. My mum cooks almost every day. Usually every other day because my dad refuses to eat old food. And when I say cook I dont mean something easy like whip up a pasta. I mean dishes that take at least more than 2 hours to cook. Mind you though, hes a chef and does cook sometimes in the house. But since he works he expects mum to cook and honestly if I were a man, I'd want that too. To come home from work to good food. Anyway...
I have siblings. One of which is a piece of good for nothing shit. Uses and abuses mum psychologically. For real. It's so sad. And mum enables this shit because she believes it's not actually my siblings behaviour. It's apparently a ghost. My other siblings are not of legal age yet. I will miss them terribly. They... will have to grow up a lot. Mum does a lot for them. Cooking. Cleaning. Honestly, I dont cook because mum does it. Nor clean. I avoided being with mum and basically without realising it, did that rock technique with her. Where I basically diffuse the conversation and stuff because I hate talking about Islam and just avoid being around her and stuff. I forgot what the technique is actually called.
I love her. Even if I'm sure her love for me is conditional. I wish to keep contact with her. But I worry about her health. Diabetes and general pressure issues. If she dies, my dad wont be able to take care of my siblings. My dad will cook for them and teach them how to travel to school and stuff. But besides that, he wont know about their medical conditions or history, he cant speak much English just some. He is smart but also not really? It's weird.
Mg siblings and mum is who I worry for most. The two siblings who arent over 18 yet. I dont care for the other one because they ruined my life and became such a horrible person. I get some of it is mental health issues so they need help but I'm speaking very specifically of their character before all this began.
Anyway. I escape tomorrow. Today is technically my last day ever with my family. I do love them. I wish to text or call them from time to time but I do think a period of no contact may be necessary for both them and myself to kind of... let this choice I made sink in. I've bought games for my younger siblings where we can chat and hopefully they keep this private. I do believe that they may understand me when they reach a certain age and be more accepting than my parents.
In my letter, I'm not sure if I should say I left because I wanted to live my life or because "God guided me" and play that card. I'm semi atheist. Sometimes I believe in God and other times I dont. Right now km not really sure what I am so I say semi atheist. I will cry and cry and cry after I've made it to my partner. He and his mum will hold me close and tell me I'm safe and loved and deserve to choose the life I want. I have support. We are gonna do so many things together that we couldn't before!
I'm an artist. In so many ways. I had to hide my art with my family. With my partner, he wanted them all displayed. For Christmas, I drew portraits, more like fantasy portraits of him and his mum and his cat. They still have it displayed in their house. It warms my heart. I draw, sew, sculpt with clay, paint sometimes, do traditional pencils drawings with colour and without, digital art, pixel art for working on my game, make plushies and I plan to sew my own dresses, I like styling my hair although my hair is pretty damaged sadly, no not with heat products, more of just unhealthy hair. What else...? I just love making things with paper like water fall cards and spinning cards and pop up books. When I confessed to my partner, at the time he couldn't be with me because he wanted to make sure he was ready, I made him a well designed pop up book. It had stuff we liked, camping, gaming, sleeping, loads of pop up and sliding elements. Then on our 1st anniversary, I made him an explosion box. He was absolutely in shock as he opened it over Skype. I plan to make an even better gift for next time. For Christmas he attempted something similar, he is very creative too. He made me a book of himself. Like a little toy for my to hold around with funny comments and his cat kinda touring me through his weak knee joints Haha and his heart which loves me 100% and his little nose which if I boop, doesnt do anything, nor the the little mole he has on his face. All these drawings and details, I love it so much.
Why did I write all that... I'm trying to cope right now. I want encouragement. I'm scared. But I know I have to do this. I dont want to cry or be sad. I wanna be happy because I have this opportunity to run away move out and be free. I've saved and saved enough for at least a few years. But I'll be getting a job in the new country after I learn the language officially. By going to school to learn the language I'll keep myself occupied and busy. At my partners house we will be playing games ans cuddling and making Lego stuff and drawing and going for walks and watching films so I know I'll be happy.
I just also know I'll wonder how my family are and worry those thoughts will eat into my happy time. I dont know how to go about this.
Please... I wanna move out on happy terms. I deserve to live. To think 7 years ago I was going to take my life because I prayed constantly to God and he didnt seem to reply to it... and then I became an ex Muslim and found a new friend and then a another one of which who became my partner... I never would have believed if someone told me, hey in some years you'll move away from your family have a loving boyfriend and be free from religion. I'd have slapped them maybe and said shut up you liar. Get lost.
But here I am. I didnt take my life. I won. And I'm gonna win again tomorrow when I take that plane. I'm just sad about missing my family. Even if they were unpleasant at times. I still love them.
But I deserve to live my own life. I can do this. One more night on my not so very comfy floor bed.
Paper Blackstar
I will never post from this account again. For updates on my situation, possibly a tutorial of how I escape, please see my other account, The Paper Blackstar. It has one post saying that it's me, and in the comments a mod confirmed.

I'm a 6ft 1, 271lb woman. I'm currently 21 and I want to finally start my weight loss journey. The funny thing is I don't look overweight but my BMI says I'm obese. I want to be healthier and more fit I'm also currently not happy about my body weight and I'd like to drop more than a 100lbs. I don't know much about a calorie deficit and workout( not really keen on going to the gym but I will if it's absolutely necessary) I'm planning on being more active like walking more and skipping for my work outs but I don't know how to reduce my calories I used a calculator and it said I need to be eating around 1,350kcals a day I just don't know how to do that ,literally I'm quite new to this. I'm looking to lose belly fat and back fat mostly I'm pretty okay with the rest of me and I just want to be healthy(which I'm currently not because my family has a history of diabetes and back pain ) and more fit(I get tired easily) I don't want to start with anything too vigorous because I have sciatic pain.any help please?

Y'all must have seen some manga panel memes, with the speech bubble changed with some funny text
I found a meme a few times where it was a girl who head big breasts and was looking down, and saying "you've been trying to tie your shoelaces for a while, do you need help" And I know this one was quite popular too, it was a romance manga