Ok So Can Someone Tell Me Why My Period Was 10 Days Late Last Month And Now It's 10 Days Early?

I think the message of Howl’s Moving Castle is that in order to maintain a successful relationship with some kind of fucked up wizard, you must find it in yourself to also be some kind of fucked up wizard.

my singing voice is good for showers and mornings in the kitchen and drunken nights and lullabies for babies who need sleep and im okay with this

Summonings

Ever since Danny Phantom became the Ghost King, he’s had to deal with an endless amount of crap. An eternity of it, actually, and it was constantly causing him unending amount of existential crises and stress.

First, there was the paperwork. Pariah Dark, the incompetent asshole, had left him decades worth of bureaucracy to painfully sift through. He ended up hiring some ghosts with paperwork obsessions to sort some of that out. Who knew ruling the infinite realms would require this much paperwork? He’s lucky each section of the underworld had their own systems to report to their own rulers who, in turn, report to him.

Secondly, there were the Observers. And other ghosts, like his own rogues, but they were the main issues. Eyeball menaces. They protested his appointment, something he actually agreed with. Putting a fifteen year old on the throne is rarely a smart decision. But the Infinite Realm values strength, the only type of currency that matters in the land of the gods and the dead. Danny? Phantom? He’s got strength in spades. With only a few months of being a ghost, Danny had managed to defeat Pariah Dark, who had cowered gods and struck fear into the hearts of ghost heroes.

But Danny hasn’t quite realized the significance of that yet, too focused on the realization that he was about to be in charge of the infinite realms. The Observants, since his reluctant and extremely limited coronation, has been up his ass about doing things the “proper way.”

Danny’s main problem lies with the ridiculous amount of paperwork though. It’s fine. Tedious. But fine.

But if he gets one more fifteen page essay style complaint form about some guy named Constantine, Danny might seriously reconsider donning Dan’s ruthlessness and offing the guy himself. Perhaps grab the man by his shoulders and shake him like a rag doll and ask who the fuck told him it was a good idea to sell his soul out like that? Danny eventually just sent out Skulker to hunt down the contracts and trade minor services for them. He owns most of the soul now, and perhaps he’ll hunt this guy down and force him to do paperwork.

Regardless, paperwork was just often tedious. He’s worked out a system for himself. The halfa, true to his teenage form, had better things to be doing. His homework, for one. Hanging out with his friends and logging in hours for Doomed 2 would be another. But no, he’s here, twirling a pen as he glared down at a stack of forms for a zone expansion. What the fuck does Zeus want to expand his zone for? The current share space of the sky domain is literally a perfect balance with respect towards the other gods. For the love of- Danny slams down a red ‘REJECTED’ stamp on top of the stack. His hair flickers wildly in annoyance, the iced over Crown floating above his head emitting concerning levels of frost. To anyone else but himself, of course.

He then feels a soft tug on his core.

Right. The third most annoying thing about becoming King: the fucking summoning. Danny taps his pen against his lips, clicking it against his fangs, as he considers the summoning circle that calls him. Huh. Desperation. Mildly bloody. Fear. Resignation- ah, fuck it, it’s not like he’s too enthusiastic about staying to do work with the Observers poking around. He takes the summoning, allowing his regalia to overtake his normal hazmat-clad form, and approves the summoning.

Oh hey, Danny thinks he recognizes that ugly ass trenchcoat.

—-

John Constantine has had more than enough practice summoning things that would give people nightmares. But there are things he normally refuses to touch, refuses to even entertain the idea of trying. As usual, desperation made John its bitch and the Justice League’s battered and bruised faces tugged on his shriveled heart.

He’s going to summon something from the Infinite Realms. Oh, but he wasn’t just summoning any old ghost. No, he thought, I’m just going to summon the one being that’s guaranteed to be able to crush our universe without breaking a sweat. Bollocks.

“Is it ready?”

“Untwist your pants, spooky,” John snaps, wishing he had a crate of whiskey he could down. “We’re trying to summon the Ghost King, not your average demon.”

“What do we know about him?” Batman’s gravelly voice demanded.

“Powerful enough to take us all out without even breaking a sweat. Defeated the bloody tyrant who ruled over the Realms last I heard.”

“That’s it?”

“You could ask Deadman, but I heard he’s on the outs with the Infinite Realms on the fact that he’s made of pure magic, not ectoplasm.”

“There’s no guarantee the king will work with us.” Zatanna says, pressing her fingertips together tiredly. She had been at the forefront of the battle and had paid the price for it. “But he’s supposedly more benevolent than his predecessor… and we’re out of options.”

“Hm.”

“Just make sure to shut up and let me do the talking.”

“Hn.”

John rolls his eyes and takes a fortifying breath, something that does not go unnoticed by the League. They all tense up, preparing themselves for a battle. Another one, seeing as they all got their ass kicked by a ghost only ten hours ago. The League is spread thin, running interference to distract the ghost in question and evacuating civilians.

John Constantine started chanting, the glow of his magic lighting up the circle as he spills his blood into the circle.

He waits, heart in his throat, for the summoning to work.

“Is it supposed to take-” Red Robin asks, only to cut himself off as the circle flares once more. Power pulsates outwards from the circle. Frost crackles on the frost resistant floors, spreading outwards as a green portal rips open the fabric of time and space. Long, spindly imitations of a hand grabs the edges of space and pulls, heaving the rest of his celestial body out of the tear in reality. John does not look away. He can not look away, not from the eerie green pallor of the King, not from his torrential white wisps of hair, not from the black-hole like material of his outfit, not from the nebulas and beginnings and endings tailored onto the King’s cape. John could not look away from the ice crown that floated like a bastion of power above the king’s head.

His mouth is dry. What price will he have to pay to save the world? What price will this being demand of him, of the Justice League, to save the world?

John desperately needs that drink.

—-

Oh! He’s in his home dimension! His core purrs at coming home, at the close proximity to his first haunt.

He was expecting cultists, or even the Winchesters again, but this is nice.

The Justice League- summoning him. Sam and Tucker are going to flip when they hear about this.

They’ve been staring at him in silence for a bit now. It was getting awkward.

“Why have you summoned me?” He asks, softening his tone. By their winces, he didn’t get it as well as he thought. Danny grimaces. At the first sign of discomfort though, the man in the trenchcoat- is that fucking Constantine?!- launches into a nerve filled tirade.

“Your, uh, Majesty.” He starts. “One of… One of your subjects is wreaking havoc on the world. We would be extremely grateful if… if you could reign him in?”

Danny’s face sours, only to quickly clear his expression as he realized how much even a small hint of displeasure causes the jumpiness in Constantine and the others.

“To do that, I will have to make a contract with you, seeing as you’ve summoned me.” Danny drawls, letting his overly long digits wave at the summoning circle in question. He could break it, of course, but Danny’s bored and trying to draw this out. He’s not saying he’d take a batch of cookies as payment but that’s exactly what he’s saying.

“The price… you could always have my soul?”

Danny pauses. “Your… soul?”

Oh, he did not say what he just said.

“Yes. My soul.”

Oh, he did.

Fuck it. Danny’s flashbacks of suffering through the reports pushes green into his irises and urgency to his action.

He breaks out of the circle, hands lunging and gripping Constantine’s jaw tightly. Danny ignores the shouts of alarm as he allows the thrown weapons to pass through him.

John Constantine is panicking now, struggling in the air as Danny lifts him an inch off the floor in agitation.

Good.

“Your soul, little wizard? The one you’ve split eight ways till the thirtieth of February? The one that caused,” he tightens his grip, no doubt bruising the man. “An insane amount of paperwork that I’ve had to suffer through. Your soul, John Constantine?”

Danny hisses his name. The man makes a warbling noise that Danny takes as acknowledgement. Danny bats away the weak spell Zatanna sends at him with a hand.

“You’ll find that I am in the possession of most of your soul contracts. To simply put,” he grins, teeth made of dying stars on display. “I own your soul. My soul, now.”

He drops the wizard who collapses onto his knees to stare up at him in horror, eyes flicking between the circle that was meant to contain him and Danny, who is very much not contained. He crouches down- something necessary but disjointed as he’s not used to this taller form- and speaks to Constantine in a slow, dead serious, drawl.

“If you ever sell your soul again, you and I are going to have issues. Is that clear, John Constantine?”

“Uh- yeah, yes, yes, your majesty.”

Patting his cheek condescendingly, Danny gets up and sighs, stress relieved. He’s starting to feel bad, though, so he allows his form to ripple back to his normal teenage Phantom self.

“Well, it’s not like anyone will buy it, since they know they’ll have to go against me.” He chirps, flipping 180 from his terror inducing eldritch voice. “So, what’ll you pay me to get rid of whatever ghost you’ve got?”

“…. Nothing?”

Red Robin holds out a bag, eyebags betraying his exhaustion. “I’ve got fifty dollars and a bag of cookies.”

Phantom beams at him. “Throw in a couple of autographs and you’ve got a deal.”

“That’s- yeah, okay.” Red Robin says, inching forward cautiously to hand him the bag.

“Great. I’ll be back for them later. You can call me Phantom. ‘Your Majesty’ gets annoying after a while.”

“Thank- thank you for your mercy, Your- Phantom.” Wonder Woman says.

“Sure. Make sure this idiot doesn’t make any more deals with demons while I’m out, yeah?”

With that, Danny Phantom grabs the bag of cookies and fifty dollars and flies through the wall to do his job.

John slams his head onto the space station floor.

“Fuck.”

—-

Danny: lol I’ll do it for the shits and giggles

Constantine and the League: he’s terrifying, a bastion of pure power and authority

Red Robin, Young “we commit war crimes bc it gets shit done” Justice leader and fellow gremlin: he’d probably do it for cookies. I would.

Whenever Technoblade wasn't an anarchist war hero he was the bugs bunny of the dream smp. He hid on a wanted poster of himself. He avoided a death trap by sending skeppy to go in, get exploded off camera and show up covered in ashes until he made it through. He met god and wasted a wish on a bell. Hbomb made him another death trap disguised as a playground and he made it through like it really was one. I am convinced he could have walked out of the prision if he had improvised a dress out of his cape and winked at Sam

ANNA KARENINA (2012) | costume design by JACQUELINE DURRAN

its just. so weird to me when people treat x reader as some like isolated cringe and ooc phenomenon. have you ever been in the tags for a popular mlm ship before in your life. you're saying that every single thing in there is objectively better than all of x reader? is that the hill you want to die on?

Richarlyson: OH TRUE TIO PHIL did you ever saw I have arms now? But apparently I have arms but I shriken got smaller

Phil: What? [GASPS]

Forever: Richarlyson is smaller than the other Eggs.

Phil: What the fck? You shrunk? Was it all the honey?

Forever: Yeah. Chayanne, get like next to Richas.

Phil: Wait, you are smaller, what? Wait... huh? [Richarlyson and Chayanne both put on mooshroom hats and stand next to each other to compare heights] Awww! Yeah they have to be aligned, they have to be lined-up. Oh, my God, you're right. Look at you! You're a little bit– little smaller. That's cute– [Richarlyson hits him] Ow. That's cute! I didn't know that, I didn't know you guys had different heights. I had no idea you guys had different heights. I wonder if it's the honey. I wonder if the honey stunted your growth.

Richarlyson: [Starts smacking Phil, who cracks up] STOP

the tiktokification of ao3

or: some of you fundamentally misunderstand ao3 and it really, really shows

i was talking about this with a friend a few days ago and since then i've seen multiple posts of various sorts that have just made me think about it more, so. here is me breaking down a disconnect i see particularly with younger members of the marauders fandom (i say marauders specifically just bc that's the only one i'm plugged into):

okay, so i've seen many (usually younger) marauders fans either talking online about how they wish ao3 was more like social media (specifically regarding algorithms) OR talking about ao3/fanfiction/fanfic writers as if they are operating under the same etiquette/guidelines/assumptions they would bring into social media platforms. this ranges from being mildly irritating to genuinely harmful, and i want to talk abt why.

first - you have to understand that social media, in this day and age, exists in a profit economy. and when i say social media here, i'm referring to platforms like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc. all of these platforms exist in a profit economy where content is a product that can be monetized. this leads to a few important distinctions:

people posting on these social media platforms are generally posting with the intent to get their content seen by as many people as possible, as quickly as possible

they post with this intent because once their content is consumed by enough people, it becomes a product that they can monetize

therefore, if that content gets popular enough, these people can become influencers, where content creation is an actual job and their audience are, in a sort of vague and obscured way, similar to consumers purchasing a product

because of the profit economy surrounding social media, there are certain assumptions + forms of interaction that bleed across almost all social media platforms. the ones relevant to this little essay include:

operating under the assumption that anyone posting anything on the internet wants to go viral, ie. be seen by as many people as possible as quickly as possible in order to grow an "audience"

these influencers are creating content for us, their audience, so they should want to please us. they should also be trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience. therefore, if we dislike their content, we have a right to make that very, very clear.

in that same vein, we have a general right to critique content creators, as they are making a profit and we are the consumers purchasing their product--much like you might feel entitled to a certain standard of service in a restaurant where you are paying for the food.

when you carry these assumptions over to a platform like ao3, it creates problems. why? in a nutshell: because ao3 exists outside the profit economy

ao3 is a non-profit. it does not have an algorithm because it is not trying to sell you anything. this means that the writers posting their work on ao3 are not making a profit. we are not influencers. we are not creating monetized content to sell to a consumer-audience. where consuming content on other social media platforms might be comparable to eating at a restaurant, reading fanfiction on ao3 is more like coming over to someone's house and eating cookies that they made for free. you are in their house. the cookies are free, given as a gift. so what happens when those assumptions outlined above start to bleed over from other social media?

assuming that anyone posting fanfiction online wants their work to go viral -- i've seen this with popular fic writers getting questions like, "are you worried x isn't going to be as popular as y?" those questions are usually not ill-intended, but they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about why writers post work on ao3. it's not to go viral. it's not to build any sort of online following. most of us who post on ao3 have jobs or schoolwork or other commitments, and writing fanfiction is something done for fun, out of a love for writing. those sharing their work online might be seeking community, but that is fundamentally different from seeking an audience, and in no way involves internet virality. if someone is posting fanfic on ao3 with the hope that it'll "go viral," then they likely either won't continue writing fanfic for long or will reach a point where they have to re-evalute their motivations, because seeking joy and validation by turning your art into a product for consumption just isn't very sustainable.

influencers are creating content for us, so we have a right to let them know if we don't like it -- nope!! fic writers are not influencers. yes, even the popular ones. no matter how much other people might blow their work up on social media, fic writers are still outside the profit economy. they are not creating content for an audience. they are not creating content for you. they are writing because they love it, and they are generously sharing it. if you don't like it, don't interact with it. you are never entitled to loudly and publicly proclaim how much you dislike a fic. i talk about this more here

we have a general right to critique fic writers, the same way we do with content creators/influencers -- again, no. you should not be treating fic writers the way you would treat an influencer on another social media platform, no matter how popular they may be. this is not to say fic writers are beyond all reproach; rather, it is a call-in to check your entitlement. fic writers are not little jesters entertaining in your court. they are not subject to your whims. they do not have to do things for you. they do not have to write things you like. in that post i linked on point 2, i talk about what etiquette might look like if you're really concerned that a fic writer is doing something harmful, but that is not what i'm talking about here. i am talking about the proliferation of negativity i have seen, especially on twitter and tiktok, where people essentially just talk shit about fics or fic writers as though they are entitled to have those fic writers working to please them. this is gross, and it needs to stop. you wouldn't go over to someone's house, eat the cookies they baked to share, and then spit those cookies back in their face and start shouting about what a shitty baker they are. or maybe you would--in which case, congratulations! you are Not A Good Person.

anyway, at the end of the day, a lot of this can be boiled down to: Because ao3 exists outside the profit economy, fic writers are not influencers, and you should never be treating them as though they are. i think i see this disconnect largely with younger people just because they've maybe only ever really understood social media within this sort of influencer-consumer-culture economy, and genuinely don't understand how to interact differently with the internet. so, consider this post a call-in to reevaluate the way you interact with fic writers and the etiquette you use when it comes to engaging with fanfic on ao3! i promise that ao3 being different from social media is a very, very good thing, and also a very, very rare thing, so let's treasure it and focus on fostering community rather than trying to morph it to fit the mould of influencer-audience dynamics that we see almost everywhere else <3

YOU HAVE ENTERED

SATURDAY

"if you have learned anything about me..."

My guy... you do not shut up, I can't not learn about you although it is all against my will