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Oh, wow. The usual version of wing tattoos where they’re folded up against the shoulder blades doesn’t appeal to me but these… oh yes.
GET ON MY BODY
still really love this.
Oh, there should be wing!fic where the tattoo changes to real wings as someone is watching …
You had always admired his tattoos. He was positively covered in them; a spade on the back of his left hand, the words “love is all we live for” across his chest, beautiful, vibrant splashes of watercolor-like skin-art almost dripping down his thighs onto bands of pink and red around his calves. They hugged him, lean and wiry as he was, and they suited him perfectly. It was like they bound his soul to his body.
But none of them seemed as real, as completely him, as his wings.
You’ll freely admit that you have a bit of a kink for tattoos, and you’ve dated more than one person with wings on their back, but none of them were as intricate or as realistic as his. Sometimes, you swear that as he walks around your apartment, bare of a shirt, the feathers ruffle. It’s almost like the dark ink is never the same way twice.
And god, he’s sensitive about them, too. You asked who did them, if you could get something like them, and he almost hissed. So defensive, he won’t tell who his artist was. Not like that was the only way he was sensitive about them. The way he moans when you’re having sex and you drag your hands over his wings, you’d think you were his fucking god.
You’ve called him your angel more than once. He always laughed, brushed it off. And you’d ghost your hands over his shoulderblades, marveling at how soft his skin was as he melted under your touch.
But not this time.
It’s been a year since you started dating, and you just proposed, and here your angel is, shaking his head, looking worried.
“You wouldn’t want me to marry you, if you knew.”
“Knew what?” You’re surprised at how distant your voice sounds. At how heavy the air feels.
He turns around and shucks his shirt, exposing his gorgeous shoulders, the beautiful curve of his spine, his lovely tattoos.
“What are you-“
You only get out half a thought when you notice the air around him shimmer. You blink once, then twice, convinced you’re seeing things- it’s almost like the feathers are moving on his skin. And then, you realize, they are.
It starts with the leading feathers, secondaries, you think they’re called. They peel off his flesh, like a sticker from paper. For a moment, they’re ephemeral, a two-dimensional apparition in three-dimensional space. Then the air shimmers some more (glittering would be a more suitable word) and you catch the barest hint of whispers, and they’re suddenly real.
The other feathers, and then the flesh and strong muscle follow, tawny and speckled, matching his freckled skin. They’re bigger than at first, too- the five foot wingspan that stretched across his arms and back rustling into reality at least fifteen feet wide. From where you’re standing, as he flexes the no doubt tense muscle, you’re walled in by impossible wings.
They smell like his hair.
It takes a few minutes when the transfiguration is complete for you to realize that he’s talking to you. You had been staring in awe at your angel’s feathers; he was staring at your face over his shoulder.
You stumble over your words. “P-pardon me?”
There’s a faint trace of his normal smile on his face, twisted by bitterness. “I said, see? I’m kind of a mutant.”
You shake your head and step forward, tracing a finger lightly over his wing joints. Dimly you’re aware of how he trembles just like always, his wings sensitive like nothing else. “Why would I- why did you keep this hidden? They’re gorgeous, my god…”
“Mutants aren’t really welcomed by most, you know.”
“I’m not most.” You turn away from his wings and wrap your arms around his waist, kissing the back of his neck and reveling in the feeling of farm feathers around you. “Can you fly?”
He chuckles lightly. “Of course I can.”
You duck under his wings, circling to his front so he can see just how big your smile is.
“Show me.”
brimming with danger: incandescentquill: tatterdemalionamberite: binghsien:...
narwhalsareunderwaterunicorns:
how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?
like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking ‘VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS’
was caesar like ‘ET TU ODYSSEUS’
sometimes i wonder
oh my GOD
the answer is yes they did. there’s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print.
here’s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn’t very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.
however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around.
but here’s the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too became…highly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otp’s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren’t immune-there’s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can’t handle all his feels, if they don’t get together he won’t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine’s tragic state (IIRC ehh).
conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people’s mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadn’t had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr.
(don’t even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who hand’t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.)
I needed to know this.
See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.
Ancient Iliad fandom is intense
Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It’s possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly that’s just as good).
And then there’s this gem from Plato:
“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus - his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)” - Symposium
That’s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.
Note that the printing press in China is invented much earlier and it has basically the same effect. Social conservatives in the censor bureau censored huge amounts of literature and poetry because of the devastating effect it had on the literati class (who formed most of the government bureaucracy, let’s not forget: So your state governor can’t work this week because he’s having Baoyu / Daiyu feels.) This did not stop it from leaking out anyway, in secret editions and hand-copied versions. And OMG the feels that these people have. There’s basically a constant struggle between the censors and this underground fandom, most novels are copied chapter-by-chapter, with people inserting fanfic chapters when they don’t have all the material (so if you have chapters 2, 3, 4, 10, 12 of your favorite book you might write your own 5-9 and circulate them) or just writing straight-up fanfic (famously in Water Margin and Red Chamber it _becomes canon_ after the author’s death.)
This post is the best thing, every part of it. Nothing to add except wow.
I’ve reblogged this before, but it had less information on it then. Shakespeare is almost entirely stuff we’d call fanfiction nowadays and his histories are RPF. We have evidence medieval nobility did things a lot like weekend-long LARP as entertainment, with paid performers as game organizers and NPCs. For centuries, there have been rumors that Queen Victoria knighted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in order to pressure him into retconning Reichenbach and continuing to write Sherlock Holmes stories.
I was an enormous Tolkien geek in middle school, and went as far as reading a lot of his letters/a lot of Simarillion meta. The short version is, he deliberately left gaps in the Silmarillion because Tolkien, as a professor of language and mythology, believed that for nearly all of human history storytelling had been participatory and involved many tellers of the same tales. He thought early-to-mid 20th century pop-culture and mass media were destructive because people did far less telling of stories, claiming of stories, and reworking of stories. I am pretty sure that, despite being a stuffy old professorial Christian white dude who would probably not read any porny fic or watch shippy vids, Tolkien is beaming in his grave over such things’ existence - over participatory storytelling having finally made its glorious comeback, over the 20th century’s approach to narrative being firmly established as an abberant nightmare that is thankfully mostly over. Did we get mythos we all reference and participate in to come back in style? Oh, by Harry Potter’s scar and every Jedi’s lightsaber, have we ever pulled that one off.
Anonymous asked: MWAH! Shnookums.
Anon what are you doing this is not what I mean by kiss me and call me cute names
except it is, pretty much exactly.
T-thank you
WAIT HOLD THE FUCK UP
IS ‘MRS’ JUST MR’S
LIKE BELONGING TO MR
OMG
Mr comes from the French monsieur, which I think literally translates as ‘my lord’ and basically just means master, and Mrs comes from maistre which is the feminine form of master, so actually—for once—no.
This was an extremely relevant comment and I thank you for educating me
I just want to get a cute apartment with a cute person and wear nothing but underwear and a big t-shirt or sweater and dance around, cook for each other, make our own movies and record each other while we’re playing, smiling, and laughing, and lay in bed together at night snuggled up warm together so close that we can hear each others pulse.
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Oskar let me colour this, so I did this instead of working. Time to pull an all-nighter! D:
ahH THIS IS SO COOL
im actually kinda mad that female gazelles arent called madamgazelle
depression is when you don’t really care about anything
anxiety is when you care too much about everything
and having both is just like what
preach
