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BAELOR — "my prince."

Yes, I know. You thought I'd pick something clever. I'm not going to pick something clever. It's my prince and it's devastating and it works every single time because of exactly who he is. Baelor is the Breakspear. Baelor is the realm's. Baelor is everyone's and has been since the day he was born. His father's heir, his mother's pride, the kingdom's future. The word "prince" is public property; it belongs to councils and courtiers and commoners shouting his name at tourneys. My prince is the possessive that nobody else in the Seven Kingdoms is permitted to use. And when you say it (low, at his throat, fingers in his hair, my prince) you are reaching past the title, past the crown he hasn't even inherited yet, and claiming the man underneath the inheritance. He goes still every time. Every single time. It doesn't wear off. The hand on your waist tightens, his mouth finds your pulse, and whatever patience he walked into the room with leaves the building in a blink. Say it again.

MAEKAR — "good."

That's it. That's the word. One syllable. No embellishment. You, looking at something he's done (anything, any small competent Maekar thing, tightening a girth strap, passing you the salt, whatever) and saying good in that quiet absent northern way you have, the way you'd say it to a well-trained horse, the way you'd say it to a capable man who has done what was required of him. He will pretend he did not hear you. His jaw will clench. His ears will go red. And later, when you're alone, he will try to find a way to engineer you saying it again without having to admit that's what he's doing. Maekar has spent his entire life being not quite enough (not the heir, not the favourite, not the one anyone picks first) and you handing him a single word of plain approval, in the voice he trusts most in the world, undoes him in a way the filthiest declaration never could. Bonus points if you say it when he's between your thighs. He will lose any semblance of self control real quick. He won't speak for the rest of the night but you'll wake up with finger-bruises on your hips the following day from him holding you down.

AERION — "there's my good boy." && "my Aerion."

Two phrases for him because he's the one who needs two. One for owning, one for being owned. He needs both from you. He's dangerous. He's mad. He is, by every external measure, the most volatile person either of you know, and he is absolutely, ruinously, unsurvivably in love with you. In canon!HW you're forbidden, you keep him at arm's length with that polite imperial distance of a woman who has already been claimed by his uncle or by duty itself so the wanting has nowhere to go, and it calcifies into this permanent low-grade fever that he walks around with constantly. He's always five minutes from doing something he can't come back from. You know it. He knows it. Everyone at court knows it. That's the whole dynamic.

So the two phrases work in tandem, and they work on opposite wounds.

"There's my good boy" (drawled, slightly amused, the way you'd reward a clever hound for behaving) is the one that handles him. It's the leash. It's the word that says I see you performing for me, I see the tantrum you're having, and I have chosen, graciously, to reward you instead of punishing you. Aerion has never in his life been handled by anyone who could actually manage it. His father's idea of control is cold disapproval. His brothers' fear him. Yours is amusement or cold discipline he cannot break, and that's the part that gets under his skin, that make shim bare his teeth. Because it means you're not afraid of him. It means you have already calculated every dangerous thing he could do and decided he isn't one of them, not to you. He'll scowl. He'll sulk, he'll act out. He'll say something cutting. His pupils will blow. And then he'll do whatever demented thing it takes to earn it again. He'll behave at dinner, stop tormenting some courtier, bring you the head of a man who looked at you wrong, he doesn't care, he'll do any of it. That's him letting you own him.

But "my Aerion" is the one that ruins him. That's the one he can't defend against. Because the entire problem of being him is that he's never in his life been anyone's (not really, not the way he wants). Second son to a fourth son, his mother dead, his father cold, his siblings a nuisance, constantly chafing against the thought that his destiny has been stolen from him. He owns everything and belongs to no one. And you, who hold him at arm's length by necessity, who cannot and will not claim him in daylight, who smile past him at feasts and dance with other men and call him nephew in front of the whole court—when you say my Aerion, quietly, in a moment you've stolen, behind a door, with your hand flat against his chest—you are giving him the single thing he is not allowed to have. The forbidden thing. The possessive he cannot wear in public even if it's not the shape he wants. The proof, whispered and private and yours, that despite everything (despite his uncle, despite the vows, despite the rules of gods and me) he is still, somewhere underneath all of it, yours.

He wants to own you so completely that no other man could ever touch you again. But underneath that, deeper than that, more dangerous than that he wants to belong to you. He wants to be claimed. He wants to put his head in your lap and hear you say my Aerion and know that somewhere in the world, in a language only you two speak, he is not alone.

BAELOR: He’s at the washstand, shirtless, wet hair dripping, and you come up behind him still warm from bed, press your cheek between his shoulder blades, and just—nip. Light. Teeth barely meeting skin and he freezes with the razor halfway to his jaw, and then he laughs, low and warm and disbelieving, and you feel it through his ribs before you hear it. Baelor understands it immediately (half-Dornish, raised on warm physical love) he knows what pack is, he knows what you’ve just said to him. When he turns, towel in hand, he’s looking at you like you’ve handed him the whole North wrapped in a ribbon. “Again,” he says, mock-serious. You do it again. He kisses you with shaving soap still on his jaw and doesn’t shut up about it for a week.

MAEKAR: Late night, the solar, ledgers everywhere, him grinding through grain stores and winter provisions in that low rumbling voice he uses when he’s concentrating. You’re sat on the arm of his chair half-dozing, his hand resting on the table in reach of yours, and without thinking—without anything, really, it’s not coquettish, it’s less than coquettish, it’s a yawn—you lift his hand and bite the fleshy pad below his thumb. Not hard, just teeth, just mine. He stops mid-sentence about Umber grain reserves and doesn’t speak for a full five seconds. When he looks at you his eyes have gone dark in that particular Maekar way where he’s feeling something too big to show openly. “Wife,” he says, gruff. That’s all. But he doesn’t move his hand and for the rest of the evening every time you glance over he’s watching you with this muted, near-greedy look, like he’s waiting to be nipped again and would rather die than ask.

AERION: He’s sprawled across your lap on some ridiculous chaise complaining about some courtier, running his mouth the way he always runs his mouth, and you lean down and catch his earlobe between your teeth mid-sentence the way you’d swat a puppy for nipping your ankles. He stops talking. His whole body stops talking. You feel it happen under your thighs, that ripple, that going quiet. When you pull back to look at him his pupils have blown so wide there’s almost no violet left, and his mouth has gone soft, and he’s looking up at you with an expression you have never seen on Aerion’s face. No sharp edges, no venom. Open. His throat works when he swallows, and then (slowly, deliberately, eyes still fixed on yours) he tips his chin back against your thigh and bares it. Long, elegant pale line of him, the vein at the side fluttering visibly, a gesture so ancient and wordless you feel it in your spine. “Again,” he breathes, and his voice is nothing you recognise—no sneer, no command, just unfiltered want stripped down to its bone. “Wolf. Please.” You can see, quite clearly, through the thin fabric of his breeches, what one nip has done to him. He doesn’t try to hide it. He is absolutely gone. You bite him again, slower this time, teeth grazing the tendon at his throat, and he makes a sound like something unlocked. For the rest of the hour he doesn’t move from your lap, doesn’t speak except to turn his head occasionally and offer you a new patch of skin (jaw, pulse, the inside of his wrist) and every time you indulge him his eyes flutter shut like you are putting a hand on something inside him that has always hurt.

I cannot take another amazing author leaving or contemplating leaving, because of lack of reblogs! This site will be boring asl without fanfictions (and the amount of stories being published is decreasing already, since I’ve been on here)

writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.

using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.

long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.

“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.

italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.

stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.

because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."