maharlika

[maharlika]

sleepy byaren thoughts

i'm so tired and sleepy and i'm writing down some of my headcanons for byakuya and renji's sleeping habits because my brain is in the byaren pickle brine

- renji is a big person but he sleeps all curled up, because he's used to not having any space to sleep in. he's also a light sleeper and prefers to have his back to the wall

- byakuya has never wanted for space to sleep in, so while he doesn't quite *sprawl*, he does move around a bit in his sleep. he also hasn't had another person in bed with him for a long time, so he's accustomed to having the space all to himself

- when they start sharing a bed, there are a few nights where renji wakes up suddenly, adrenaline flooding his body and telling him to get up and protect himself, before he looks down and finds that byakuya has barnacled himself to renji's side and is making grumpy sleepy faces because renji is too stiff to be a comfortable pillow

- renji likes to smell byakuya's hair. he likes to smell all of byakuya. it's RELAXING, okay. he just smells so nice and clean and mildly floral, and renji loves nuzzling his hair and neck and chest like a big, lazy cat. sometimes byakuya wakes up with his sleeping robe undone and renji's face in his armpit. this too is love!!!

- byakuya usually gets out of bed first in the mornings, usually at a very early hour, out of habit and a sense of duty - if his household is Awake, then he has to be too. renji makes it his mission to get byakuya to acquiesce to 10-minute cuddles every morning. he times the cuddle sessions and everything

[maharlika]

Elephant SHROO!

Are they monogamous? The sillyness of snouted orbs dancing together followed by a snuggle feels kinda romantic?

[maharlika]

Are you becoming what you've always hated?

Isle of Dogs / Game of Thrones / Painting by Jenn Mazza / Unknown / Ancestral Memory by Hari Alluri / Unknown / Venetta Octavia / Emma Tranter / Unknown / Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo / @ machineryangel

[maharlika]

Hey here's a reminder that you're allowed to publish unfinished fics and snippets of fics that you're never going to continue and you're allowed to abandon WIPs and you're allowed to orphan unfinished fics and ficlet collections and you never have to finish a single fic if you don't want to.

And there will always be someone who reads that unfinished work and is happy with it and feels glad that they read it even if it's never continued.

[maharlika]

finished watching Kaiju no. 8 today and I am OBSESSED with these two, they’re the most beautiful, perfect and amazing characters in the show, literally the baddest duo in the entire anime

[maharlika]

You know what I think its grossly under-rated in fandom? Second loves.

What it's like to love and lose and then love again. To suffer through either the death of a loved one or the death of a love you used to share. To know that loss, to know that hurt, and to still make yourself vulnerable to someone again. To love scared, to love wounded, to love anyway.

[maharlika]

[maharlika]

It’s insane to me that Dragon Age 2 is sandwiched in between two WAY HUGER and WAY MORE SUCCESSFUL games about more traditional fantasy protagonists facing off against world ending threats and winning and it’s this…weird, raw, personal tragedy about how no matter what you do, you can’t always stop crisis and disaster from occurring. Like The Hero or Ferelden, no matter who they were, wants to stop a Blight. The Inquisitor wants to repair the sky. And Hawke, like, wants to make some money, hang around their friends, and keep their family and their adoptive city safe. And they can’t even fucking do that, so unlike the heroes before and after them. You spend seven years in Kirkwall until the game says, “yeah, no matter what, the prejudices and traumas and hurts of this world are Too Much for one person to stop them. The world changes, wars roll over the land, you cannot stop history, Hawke. You tried. You failed.” And then you just sit there, sixteen years old, listening to “I’m Not Calling You A Liar” and you’re like….well, I guess I really wasn’t a hero. Damn. I love it.

[maharlika]

Oh yeah I forgot- Here's a scrapped panel from the comic.

and this cause I was losing my mind. Narinder didn't take the rejection well haha.

[maharlika]

i know this is themed after the taylor swift but there is something so deeply funny about getting a cutesy wootsy beaded bracelet at claires that says "tortured". who else is being tortured in this claires⁉️ if you're being tortured in claires make some noise ‼️💯

[maharlika]

trying a new brush, i like it so far

[maharlika]

hyperfixation please stay with me long enough to complete the project. hyperfixation do not fade. hyperfixation finish what you started for the love of god

[maharlika]

contrast

I needed to practise drawing kisses. This was supposed to be part of some quick sketches, and yet here we are Art blog: questionartbox

[maharlika]

thinking about this again and realized today that my other otp requirement is some kind of power imbalance, whether that is simply perceived or actually present

examples:

halstarion - no actual power imbalance for the most part, but astarion would be fucked up enough to make one up out of thin air and it is very nice to imagine them in situations where there is a power imbalance

thorki - lol. lmao. OSTENSIBLY thor and loki are equals but then thor is going to become king. okay. they're still brothers. but then loki finds out he's not even thor's brother and is in fact a war prize from a diminished and broken people. fucking delicious

cazstar - i mean, come on. this is an actual master/slave relationship, there was no way i was going to not ship this

byaren - this is like crack to me. not only do they have the military hierarchy thing going on, they also have the class system stuff, the actual strength/power differential, and a fucking. boss/employee relationship which is so fucking funny. like yeah their main job is government-mandated murder but they also have to sit around doing paperwork. sereitei is incredible

there's probs a lot more but basically give me a power imbalance and an unhealthy amount of devotion and i'll cook myself up an otp

rambly otp thoughts

it's midnight and i'm waiting for my brain to wind down after reading some really choice fics for a ship i barely know anything about, from a fandom i am pretty ambivalent on (it's zhongli/xiao from genshin impact ansnnsnsns)

anyway it made me realize that probably the number one thing i look for in a ship is a level of loyalty that can veer into devotion and even obsession. anyone who has known me for a while will not be surprised by this. i have always had a ridiculous fealty kink lol.

some otp thoughts under the cut!

i was thinking about this in terms of bleach ships and while i can and do ship byakuya with a lot of characters, i am particularly drawn to byaren because the captain/lieutenant relationship in bleach is just. so good. renji in particular is an extremely loyal character, and somehow byakuya has managed to garner his devotion (whether he deserves it or not is another story, but i think he gets there eventually). renji is the paragon of fealty. the thing is, i can just as easily see byakuya returning that loyalty. i think byakuya is the kind of person where, when a switch is turned on in his head and he realizes he cares about someone, it's almost impossible to turn it off. he's like that with rukia, with ichigo, and of course with renji. aside from the obvious other reasons why i think byaren are good together (contrasts and parallels!), the potential for mutual devotion is REALLY GOOD.

then i started thinking about this for my other otps and like. yeah. going through the list starting with the v obvious ones: thorki, plantcest. yeah it's incest and they're extremely powerful beings who know each other better than anyone else. there is at least one insanely possessive person in each of those ships, and one who is lowkey but no less devoted.

[loki voice] don't tell me...IT WAS THAT WOMAN

yeah, that tracks. okay, next

cazstar - clearly cazador is fucking obsessed with his favorite spawn, but also i'm not sorry about shipping astarion with the single most important person in his life for 200 years lmao. if you can't make your own devotion, manufacturing it through horrific torture and vampiric compulsion is just fine too!!!

e/R - look the devotion is built into the ship, even if it's one-sided

nina/matthias, damen/laurent - their particular brand of "society-enabled enemies who then learn to see each other as people and become lovers" cultivates a good level of devotion because deciding to love someone you'd dedicated your life to hating means you're gonna have to go ALL IN

that's all the examples i can think of for now!! there are probs more and obvs i have ships i enjoy that might not fall into this pattern, but as long as the potential is there, i'm probably down

[maharlika]

am always obsessed when someone says to a character “call off your dog” about another character.

[maharlika]

Haha so uhmmm remember how I said Narinder fell first and harder? It doesn't go well for him for a while lmao.

He confessed with full confidence that they would accept him over everyone else cause of course. Why wouldn't they? Oh? They said no! Well actually, they said they're gonna pretend that they didn't hear that haha whoops. Lamb fumbled for another 200 years.

Its fiiiine this opened them both up to talk about it later and they'll test the waters soon.... In another few years. Boy gotta yearn for this lamb. It's what they deserve.