wow! no! baran has charisma. she's not the type of dom to degrade or be rough- she seeks approval, clearly (which makes her more like a service top imo)- but i think she definitely likes to have control and know where she stands in a relationship. baran can be flirty and cocky and charismatic and also be awkward, brittle, and pushy. two things can exist at once. and in my mind, the most ooc baran (very very dom) is just acting to please her partner, like it's a consensual arrangement they have. maybe she's just like that in the bedroom!

i think the two bad points boil down to- A) people making baran a very degrading top as if that's just her personality, ignoring her softer and more realistic traits and B) people assuming that because she's disabled, she's physically unable to be flirty, cocky, confident, etc.

chapter 8 of her last summer below deck is out now!

Trinity set down the phone.

It didn’t surprise her that her mother wanted to know when she was moving back. Of course she would tell the boys that like it was a fact. She knew that their school was paid for by Trinity, or Trinity-adjacent, and that was enough to know that Trinity would need to move back home.

But Trinity wasn’t going home.

Even that word felt wrong in her mouth.

Home.

Where was that exactly? Was it the studio apartment she shared with her mother before the boys were born? Was it the one-bedroom that they couldn’t afford where she shared a bed with Theo while Luca screamed in a crib a couple feet away?

She knew it wasn’t the backseat of the minivan that one winter. It wasn’t the house with the green bed sheets either.

Her chest tightened and Trinity pressed her palm flat against her sternum until the feeling passed and she could cling to the numbness again.

Trinity had been moving her whole life. From an apartment to a car to a townhouse and then to a dorm when she was finally old enough to escape. Each summer, she would tell herself Sirocco was home and it felt like it. But it wasn’t hers. It belonged to an owner that was friends with Baran and Yolanda. And at the end of the season, she would have to leave it, like she left every other place that had once meant something to her.

And her mother thought that home meant her. It made her stomach turn. She thought it meant Ohio and the boys.

Her mother thought home was where Trinity felt the most trapped.

Wherever her mother thought it was, she was never going there again. She wasn’t going to the townhouse her mother lived in or going to be the person she was inside of it ever again. Trinity had shut that door when she hung up on her on that balcony and the door was staying closed. Her mother could tell the boys whatever the hell she wanted about that.

Even if med school was gone—and Trinity probably needed to stop pretending that deferred meant anything but never happening—she’d rather spend the next year living in her car by herself before going back to that place.

And she’d get a job. Jack would get her that job on the Bravado, or he would know someone who knew someone who would have something for her. Then she’s be able to start earning money again and point it towards… well, something.

Trinity picked back up her phone.

Theo’s question was still waiting for her to respond.

She could lie. She was so good at it. It’d be the same lie she was telling everyone else; she could say that she deferred for a year so she could save more money before going to medical school. She could present a version of reality that didn’t actually exist. One where she hadn’t given all of her money so that they could go to the private school, so they could get what they wanted without a weight being held over her head.

It wasn’t different than what she had done with them for years. Their entire childhoods were built off the lies that Trinity kept to keep them protected. To keep them from knowing the truth about what life actually was like.

But Trinity was so tired of lying.

She had been lying to protect people since she was old enough to speak. She had been lying to her brothers for years under the guise of protection, but it hadn’t protected anyone.

world heritage post: avatar femslash fans on livejournal discussing the possibility of a lesbian or bi lead in the legend of korra in 2010, 2 years before the series first aired. four years later, korra and asami walked into the spirit world together holding hands.

Pride month Day11

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Noelle Carbone, writer (Rookie Blue)

absolutely, you can! i love getting to love on yolanda garcia.

a few things i like about everyone’s favorite trauma surgery fellow:

1) her competence and her confidence

yolanda garcia is skilled and aware of it. she makes others aware of it, makes even her superiors respect and revere her. as she should!! even when she turns out to be wrong—which season 2 leaned somewhat heavily into for all other disciplines, as if to prove the supposed superiority of emergency medicine—she retains that confidence. she doesn’t doubt, doesn’t let it delay or affect patient care.

2) her regard for her patients

say what you want about her ribbing with other doctors and flirting with santos as she works—yolanda garcia puts her patients first. she introduces herself to conscious patients, seeks to reassure them when appropriate, advocates for pain management, and acts. i think she is very procedure-oriented, going by the book, and sometimes that approach is limiting, but it is what is proven. she only wants what she thinks—and what evidence suggests—is best for those she treats.