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Dontcha just hate it when you get akumatized and Hawkmoth makes you gay

Drawing fanarts of my own fic before I even write the fic

Edit: it's now out

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A little late, but i had to do something for Nico's birthday, so, late colorless percico comic it is ღ

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Opinions of Snape summarized in one DuckDuckGo search

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do you think if someone gets pregnant on the isle & doesn’t know who the father is they just say it’s hook

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I have this wip where nathalie wrestles with motherhood + the time she lost with Adrien and anyway. he encourages her to go back into the archaeology field, lectures or symposiums or public classes that might interest her, and. it got me thinking of adrien planning a first day back to school for nathalie 😭

like. he wakes up early, earlier than her even, careful to stay quiet in the kitchen while he packs her a lunch. fighting off horrible suggestions from plagg as he bounces between pantry and kitchen and on the balls of his feet as he assembles whatever lunch he thinks up for her. 

he resists the urge to play her, though the thought makes him laugh. knock on her door and politely let her know that she has an hour before she has to leave. does she have her bag? does she have her homework?

no, it’s better like this, catching her shocked expression at the foot of the stairs, her eyes fixed on the brown paper bag he’s clutching. 

Adrien, you didn’t have to—where did you—? 

Adrien shrugs. It’s almost hard to speak around his smile. He saw this in a movie. This is how first days go. It feels good to him to give this to her. 

To Nathalie, this is a mirror of how she failed him. This is what he never had. 

Outside, he’s practically bursting with excitement as placide pulls the car around and nathalie is laughing a little now, telling him he can start his day now—but wait, he says, grabbing his phone, she has to take a first day picture!! He ushers her against the door, but the lightning is too dim so he runs down the steps, calling after her to follow. yes, here, where the sun is shining against the ivy and roses—

“You always make that pose!” adrien laughs, waving his hand at her torso, which her hands are hid behind. 

she scoffs down at her feet, fighting a smile. what pose? she doesn’t pose.

“bring your hands forward, c’mon! we’re celebrating nathalie sancoeur’s 17th first day of school!!”

reluctantly, awkwardly, she lets her hand fall to her sides and resists quite terribly to make them into fists. is she holding them too far out to her side? Sweat beads at the nape of her neck. 

he tells her to smile, and she does. genuinely. After all, it’s hard not to mirror his. 

he keeps snapping pictures—she was blinking, the sun was on her glasses, oh, the dreaded smear frame!! 

(they’re all perfect pictures, he just wants a lot.)

adrien opens the car door for her. she says she wouldn’t have minded walking, it isn’t far. he clicks his tongue, looks out past the gates. no, the house isn’t far from a lot, and there is a kind of thrill to running to school—

Nathalie says okay, okay. Before she can say sorry, he’s ushering her inside, wishing her a fantastic first day. smiling, both at his joke and at her, like she’s something worth smiling at. like he enjoyed, more than anything, doing this for her. 

placide is silently wiping away tears at the stoplight. nathalie, a failed-stoic and blubbering mess in the backseat, playfully tells him to cut it out. they’re representing a brand, she jokes, echoing Gabriel’s words from over a decade ago now, have some decorum. someone honks behind them; they’re taken too long at the light. what a softie he’s turned into, she whispers. 

the trepidation she feels on the institute steps makes her all too aware of how alone, how scared he must have been to see her call after him that first day. a lifetime ago, she held her mother’s hand on the way into primary school. she squeezes her hand into a fist. adds it to the running list of things she should feel guilty about forever. 

Later: nathalie feeling incredibly liminal on campus, alone and frazzled with emotions on a lone bench. she opens the bag and sucks in a breath. 

he put in a little note. it’s hard to read through welling tears. 

With a mind thick with guilt, slow moving and stuck on one question, she struggles through eating the sandwich he packed. 

What has she done to deserve this? The question comes in stereo, her voice and the ghost of two others. Her lip quivers and the question throbs like a headache, pounding, the early onset dehydration. What has she done to deserve this? Food sticks in her throat and she forces herself not to cry with little success. What has she done to deserve this, exactly? 

Sobbing into hands that’ve killed what he is, one of the easiest things she’s done, admittedly; no mess like a deer, no wasted arrow, no missed shot. poof, done. for her, that’s the current sum of her motherhood.

hands that have given over death to his mother, hands that promised her that she’d protect him. hands that have notched an arrow at his father, hands that have warmed a ring for him. Hands that rejected Adrien at birth and for the burgeoning years after. Hands that only regretted that too late. 

The way people mark heights and ages on thresholds, there used to be a jamb with this history in the house but it was sanded down after Emilie died. There is nothing she can do to lessen what she’s done, not now. She feels every mistake as viscerally as the scars on her body. Maybe those have kept the score. 

How many years wasted? Observing him, loving him and never doing enough, never doing the right thing, you’re a series of choices and you’ll always pick the wrong one. What’s that choice now, Nathalie—loving him as your own or telling him the truth of who you are? 

A dog that keeps dropping rabbits at your door. Presents, people coo, it means like love you—but it always makes your gut twist a little at the morbidity. You can either punish it for trying or accept fragile things. 

She breathes out, solemnly and steadily trying to catch her breath. Bring them forward, he’d said, and the fresh memory tugs on her heart like pushing on a bruise. 

Well, they’re forward now. They’re different hands now. No, they’re the same, but what’s the difference, the similarity?

Wiping her hands on her dress pants she resolves: they’re forward now. that’s all she can do.

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imagine pre-s6, alya reveals to nino that she was Scarabella so he, obviously, accidentally tells adrien too. So adrien spends days trying to come up with a plan to make alya tell him LB’s identity but quickly realizes that nothing would work bc alya is alya. and so in a moment of epiphany, he thinks that marinette probably also knows too bc she and alya are besties and tell eachother everything (like him and nino). and marinette is Not Good at keeping secrets and gets flustered quickly so he concludes that somehow convincing marinette to tell him LB’s identity is his best shot. but he thinks of no better way to do so than cornering her one day at school and pretending to be confronting her because he thinks she’s Ladybug. he obviously doesn't but it's a ruse bc that way mari will eventually need to reveal LB’s real identity in order to deny his claims, right? However when confronted, marinette panics because she is, in fact, Ladybug, and after 15 minutes of torturous instigation gives in and actually confesses. and adrien just stands there like haha what. no this was a joke. what. and they’re both simultaneously panicking now and that's how secret identities are revealed!!!

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Last update: March 10th, 2025

☆ Percy Jackson and the Olympians

☆ The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

☆ Harry Potter (more or less, not a JK Stan tho) + Marauders

☆ Marvel Cinematic Universe

☆ Phineas and Ferb

☆ Wayne Family Adventures

☆ Miraculous

☆ EPIC: the Musical

☆ Gravity Falls

☆ Legally Blonde (movie + musical)

☆ Heathers the Musical

☆ Varian and the Seven Kingdoms

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Member of checkout staff, Sainsbury's, Lords Hill District Centre, Southampton, 1978. From the Sainsbury Archive.

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Alligator Bites Might Never Heal, But Doechii Is Good At Holding Alligators

Doechii won the Grammy for Best Rap Album for Alligator Bites Never Heal, but she also should have won the coveted and definitely not fictitious "Best Alligator Handling" award for the way she held Coconut on the cover!

(Yes, it's this Coconut.)

And the best part? She released a BTS video showing how they shot the cover, meaning that we can see more than just the still image! If a picture's worth a thousand words, video's worth... a lot more. (Sorry if it autoplays I don't think I have any control over that either way)

So, using the photoshoot images and video as evidence, let's take a look at how Doechii handled this alligator very well! I'm going to go into excruciating detail here because I think it's important to know why something is good just as much as it is important to know why something is bad. It's hard to understand alligator body language a lot of the time, so in this writeup, I will address how Doechii's holding the gator and what she's doing right, as well as point out how you can tell from Coconut's reactions that she is not distressed.

Body Support

In the album cover image, Doechii is seated, which is good, because even though she's a small alligator, Coconut is a very strong and powerful creature. That tail is pure muscle! But even in the standing images, you can see that Doechii is giving Coconut great body support and holding her correctly- close to the body, but without grabbing too tightly or being restrained uncomfortably. I think for a gator of this size I would have recommended pinning the back foreleg against her body for a little additional support and movement restriction- but I don't think she had to restrict movement because Coconut seems quite relaxed!

In the seated image, Doechii has one hand under Coconut's chest, supporting her sternum and head. The other hand is on top of her tail, and her knee is under the pelvic girdle. This type of hold lets the alligator feel safe; remember that these are aquatic and terrestrial creatures. An insecure hold that risks dropping them is going to stress them out and make them uncomfortable. By holding the alligator gently against her body and not squeezing, she's avoiding any uncomfortable pressure.

Head and Throat Support

In all of the images, Doechii is bringing her hand under Coconut's neck, creating a cradle with her hand so that the alligator can rest her head. But what she's not doing is she is not squeezing or grabbing the throat. The throat is one of the soft bits of an alligator, and squeezing it too tightly is very uncomfortable for them. But the way Doechii is supporting her gives her several degrees of freedom to move her head if she so chooses.

Body Language

Another indication of good handling is that it's clear that Coconut is not uncomfortably stressed. Alligators express displeasure with being held in a lot of ways, including struggling to get away, hissing, and holding their mouths open. (If you want to know more and see my sources, you can read my post on alligator body language. LOTS of info there, including peer-reviewed ethology sources that explain what alligators do and why they do it! Go get your data-driven answers!)

But Coconut isn't doing that; she's calm and alert. You can see in the BTS video that she's active on set. She's not shut down, and when she wants to walk around, she's not restrained. Obviously the video is an edited timelapse, and it's not the whole story- but when people show alligators in media, they usually don't know enough about them to edit out any uncomfortable body language. So I think that if she had been upset, we would have seen that.

We can also see in the video that Coconut is unbanded, meaning her mouth was not held shut. I thought they might have banded her and then edited the band out for the cover, but no, there was nothing restricting any distress cues. Banding is usually done for public safety, but the facility Coconut's from... doesn't do that, so I'm not surprised she's unbanded. At least it gives more evidence that she's not trying to gape!

One more good indicator that Coconut was comfortable is that she's got her eyes open, which you can even kinda see in the video if you zoom in. Reptiles will often squinch their eyes shut to avoid distressing stimuli or signal distress, and albino alligators have even more reasons to do this. They're much more sensitive to light than their pigmented counterparts. But it looks like her on-set work was completed quickly, meaning that she didn't have to be around bright lights for long.

In conclusion:

Doechii's album cover is an example of good alligator handling. Yay!

That said, please note that this is only about handling and is divorced from any other issues surrounding this particular alligator. (Read the body language post if you want more on that.) These are not issues I'm touching in this post, because that's not the point! I simply want to point out an instance of good handling and how you can identify relaxed body language in an animal that is notoriously hard to read when posted on social media.

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nature.dew on ig

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Had to ban the phrase “tricky dick” from my classroom during watergate lesson because saying the word dick in front of 30 fifteen year olds is like lighting a bomb and throwing it through the doorway but now they’re just calling him Richard the Treacherous like they’re all medieval peasants. gonna lose it

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Wow. When I just wrote a beautiful kissing scene. Just wow

(In all seriousness though this is actually the best what)

'Someone is singing'

By L.J. Moore

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I'll show you how I swing...

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susie grits her teeth and grinds her jaw and spends the entire spring of their fourth grade year plotting how to get back at calvin for stealing mr. bun and dropping him in a mud puddle.

(it involves putting hobbes into a dress and taking polaroids; she still has the photos, even thirty years later)

she does her homework. does his homework too, sometimes, because mrs. wormwood gives them different math problems to discourage cheating, and susie likes math. his mom finds out when they’re in sixth grade, and offers her four times the going rate to tutor calvin in math. she agrees, because even at twelve she knows college isn’t cheap (not the ones she’s eyeing, anyway).

she has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because calvin won’t listen unless there’s at least one. she has her own opinions of aliens (real, but not the tentacled fanged monsters calvin draws in the margins; her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon), and dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so it’s only superheroes she lets him go on about.

this turns out to be a mistake. though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers on the back sides of his homework, he has a whole thing built up around stupendous man. she’s seen the costume, but didn’t know there was lore. she doesn’t want to know the lore.

it’s stupid. no one can just fly. that’s not how the world works. capes are dumb. she can’t believe his mom made him another costume after he hit a growth spurt.

she still tutors him, but they drift apart in high school. calvin and moe somehow become friends, become even bigger assholes together, and susie discovers calculus and girls. she gets into harvard and yale and stanford and others, chooses to go to california. he waves at her from his driveway while she drives away in the moving truck.

“you were never stupid,” she tells him on the phone when they’ve drifted back into each other’s lives her senior year. “you just didn’t care.”

“yeah,” he laughs, and she pretends she can’t hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and he’s now in the unfortunate position of acknowledging that his father was right and education was important. she has two finals to study for, the nasa interview next week, and a grant application to finish, but he’s had a rough week. she can take an hour to listen.

“the community college isn’t bad,” she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate stanford with honors.

“you mean i can’t just put on my stupendous man costume and live off the media attention?”

susie snorts. “not spaceman spiff? there’s a tv show there, i’m sure.” she’s been watching a lot of star trek in what little spare time she has.

“nah,” he says, “spiff’s always been your territory.”

they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosity’s landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; she’s in the middle of a move down to chile for a three-year stint at atacama.

a package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.

it’s a comic book. spaceman spiff, volume one. hardcover, full color. one of his signature tentacled fanged aliens takes up most of the entire cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. he’s gotten much better, but it’s still unmistakably calvin’s art.

except - she squints at the astronaut. she flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages.

spiff isn’t the calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.

it’s her.

mousy brown hair, button nose, mr. bun tucked away in the back of her rocket ship.

she flips back to the first page.

thanks for not giving up on me. - c

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Not on TikTok often but I heard this audio I had to make this edit with it. Here's a link to the original

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descendants + my favorite lines (part 1/?)