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Mel ✨

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northern hemisphere babes we made it to the longest night of the year. we made it. for the next 6 months, every day will give us a little more daylight than the last. let's go. take my hand. climb out of the darkness with me

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Mel really stayed true to herself through it all. That's so rare for a character with this kind of arc. She never let go of her compassion, even with being kidnapped and tortured. It didn't harden her into someone unrecognizable. I did joke about a villain arc because that's what a character like that usually gets when it's time to be calculated and kill the thing that needs killing.

But Mel didn't need that to be badass, embrace her powers, and cut off the head of the dragon even though it happened to be her mother - her mother who thought she was so weak just because she wasn't brutal.

She is the wolf but only out of necessity. She can make the hard calls. She can even deliver death, but she won't without trying everything else first.

That's a leader. She's a leader her mother could never fathom, and now she has her army.

Arcane man... good shit.

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Watching Arcane season 2 and outright, Ambessa Medarda is one of the best-written characters I've encountered in media recently. Duty-bound, meticulous, cunning, strong, not turned into a 'monstrous' woman despite being centred in power (both in physique and in political draw), and to still have her experience fear and show love in her own fucked up way!

Ambessa! You're a delight to watch weave your way. And to have such a polar opposite of a foil in Mel, someone so ardently against growing in her mother's shadow, someone to show the softer touch of power, the will to let the people who appointed her to power keep (the illusion of) their agency compared to having an iron grip! This family!!!

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(Description in alt)

FUCK YES TEAMSTERS!

This is as of December 19, 2024.

Link to post

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I’m rewatching arcane and season 1 Viktor and Jayce are so cute?? Like the immediate sass between them was so fun to watch, and the banter between them when they don’t know each other is my favorite thing. Like Jayce is about to JUMP OFF A BUILDING and Viktor saunters in, solves his equations, insults him, and then becomes his partner. And then Jayce is like “absolutely, who are you?” THEY DRIVE ME INSANE

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my viktor/arcane style study!

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Can we hear your thoughts on Jayce’s and Viktor’s intelligence? I can’t help but feel like Jayce is often…dumbed down. Which feels insulting to the both of them.

Rarrrr.... I should be doing other things... but this is a rage button issue for me... so....

Jayce is just as smart as Viktor.

The reason he doesn't come across as just as smart has multiple elements:

1 ) Arcane S1 in particular does a lot of sleight of hand to set up Jayce as facing down a corruption arc where he's tempted by fame and power. They achieve this in multiple ways. On an emotional level, they often zoom out for his more tender lines and zoom in when he says something dumb or unfortunate.

Intellectually, they tend to show things like his chalkboard after the fact, when he's not at it, but they show things like Viktor actively working in the lab quite a lot. Basically, we see Viktor doing a lot more active science stuff while he's doing it, but with Jayce we tend to see the effects of the science stuff he's already done, like presenting prototypes that are already made, him holding hexgems that are already created, showing equations and notes of his that are already complete instead of showing him making them.

Overall, this creates a visual impression that Jayce is the dumber of the two, because we see him doing less actively, but if you pay attention he's doing at least as much science as Viktor regularly, it's just more off-screen.

2 ) Viktor wouldn't partner with someone who's not as smart as him.

Viktor reroutes his entire life to work with Jayce after reading his notes on Hextech. It's insulting to Viktor's intelligence to think he would "lower himself" to working with Jayce. Jayce is his equal, his partner, they compliment each other and both accomplish things the other couldn't.

For my money, Viktor is the more out-of-the-box thinker, Jayce comes from a family of tool makers and he tends to think in straight lines, most of his innovations are direct results of the spells he saw his Mage do, like weightlessness and transportation, while Viktor tends to come up with things like the Hexclaw and the Hexcore.

But both are also craftsmen and tinkerers, and it was Jayce's idea originally to do magic with technology, Viktor is working with him to innovate on that vision.

3 ) Jayce is a better public speaker and he's physically attractive and muscular, in a way that makes people underestimate his intelligence. It is very common for people who are good at speaking, people who are of above average attractiveness and, god forbid, people who keep an exercise routine to be seen as less smart even though those things have nothing to do with one another. Because Jayce is seen as the "face" of Hextech it's assumed that he's the lesser intellectual partner, when the truth is, it's just a division of labor. Viktor is terrible at public speaking and doesn't like doing it, Jayce is charismatic so he does it.

He's not a gym jock, his muscles come from the forge where he makes absolutely mind-bogglingly advanced items like Caitlyn's sniper rifle and his own hammer, the guy is basically making Hadron Colliders over an anvil. But because people tend to judge based on appearances, people tend to think he's dumb.

4 ) Jayce thinks in straight lines. He's incredibly direct. The reason he agrees to raid the Shimmer Factory with Vi is because he's sick of politics and he's sick of the corruption, and he wants to just deal with a problem directly. That's why he and Vi bring out the worst in each other, because they both think like that, and straight lines aren't always the best way to tackle a difficult problem, but Jayce is a scientist, he's used to seeing a problem and just fucking solving it.

The problem is, that doesn't work for all problems. He's incredibly smart as an engineer, literally Ambessa can't even find a scientist in Piltover as good as him and Viktor, but he's not widely read. He's not a politician or a diplomat or a social scientist. This also lends to the perception that he's dumb but you'll notice, Viktor is never put in a position to make decisions like that, Mel is never put in lab to solve a scientific equation, and in general, most characters aren't put in a position where they have to perform at the top of more than one field in the way Jayce is, so yeah, Jayce ends up looking dumb because he has to handle being the leader of a city when he spent his life working on Hextech and promoting Hextech. Of course he's not going to be perfect.

But that's also another case of sleight of hand, we see Jayce failing at more things because we see him thrown in a position to impact more things. A lot of characters maintain their image of being smarter or more skilled than him because they're not asked to work outside their range of skills nearly so often.

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Being a day one Jayvik shipper really paid off like you’re telling me my run of the mill “mutual pining/friends to lovers” ship became “ fated soulmates/ I will love you in every universe”?? Insane.

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heartbreak

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@unwanted-dandelion-seeds

(about this guy)

a kiln god is a small clay sculptural creature that stays on/in/near a kiln while it’s firing, to watch over the pottery inside and protect it

mine are all vaguely humanoid and holding pottery, but they can be anything

a lot of people leave their kiln gods unglazed, and only ever make one or two. because I work with a shared kiln, my kiln gods have to be inside the kiln so they don’t get bumped or broken, so it makes more sense to glaze them and keep making more

(^this one I kept, she lives on my pottery desk)

people have lots of little traditions around kilns and pottery. there are so many variables to successfully finishing a piece of pottery, and many of the steps are out of our control. it’s nice to have a kiln god watching over our work

if you take a pottery class, your teacher might mention the kiln gods. for some potters/studios they’re more of a concept than anything physical

what can I say, humans just love to make little guys

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purge of 2002? of 2012? what ARE those?

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

It’s what led to the creation of alternate hosting sites for smutty fic…AdultFanfiction was the one I went to…but thousands of fics would never be recovered. 

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Okay, you know what? After reading this post, I jokingly said we should all just make a pact to reblog it five times a day forever. So I'm gonna do this louder for the people in the back:

AO3 WAS CREATED BY FANS, FOR FANS

AO3 IS RUN BY FANS (VOLUNTEERS, NO LESS)

AO3 IS PART OF THE NON-PROFIT, ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS

AO3 IS NOT OWNED BY ANY COMPANIES AND DOES NOT EARN REVENUE

AO3 OPERATES ON DONATIONS FROM FANS

again:

AO3 WAS CREATED BY FANS, FOR FANS

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So I was just thinking about those posts you get in the Discworld tag about the way belief works on the Disc and how Vetinari and/or Vimes is so integral to the way Ankh-Morpork works that they might just sort of… not ever die.

You know, the ones like ‘Vimes is going to become a god of policemen and he’s going to hate it”.

Well. What if it happens to both of them? There are two parts to the city, after all. ‘Proud Ankh’ needs taking down a peg or two (or seven) by Sam Vimes, and if anyone can terrify ‘pestilent Morpork’ into being better then it’s Havelock Vetinari. And they can drive each other mad with stealth puns for centuries, if they want.

Also, this would potentially make them literally Law And Order, and that just seems very fitting in a way that would probably annoy them both.

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Thinking about how Crowley would not tolerate any of the unreasonably negative takes about Aziraphale. I don't even think he would tolerate REASONABLE negative takes. If someone was like 'He's not a very good bookseller' Crowley would probably say 'Well maybe YOU'RE not a good enough customer' and then curse them to always mistype their password or something. He spends all that time complaining about Az's magic act but the instant Aziraphale goes I'm not a professional conjurer :( he's all 'What? Who told you you were bad? You are going on the West End, angel! You're the best!!' He's down bad for every aspect of his angel.

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i've seen enough horror movies starring upper-middle-income white families stuck in spacious haunted mansions. gimme stories about millennials stuck in haunted studio apartments. consider the realism:

why is this protagonist staying in an obviously haunted building despite the glaring warning signs? because a week at a motel would send them spiraling into credit card debt, they'll take their chances with the vengeful spirits. why did they chose this apartment complex to begin with, despite the many many unexplained mysterious deaths that show up on the first page of a google search? hon some of us don't have the credit score to move away from high (paranormal) crime areas. how could i be so careless as to sign a soul-binding contract with a demonic entity? bitch they're called LANDLORDS