#<3 i'm having feels

[blackjackkent]

Despite the unexpected darkness in the process of getting into the circus, Rakha has to admit that the event itself is unlike anything she has experienced previously.

It is crowded and loud, normally things she does not enjoy, but all of the noise is of excitement and laughter and cheering. She has never been in a place where everyone was happy before. The sun is bright and warm after the stinging darkness of the Shadowlands.

It is not peaceful, not with the way the beast in her head is growling eagerly at the sight of so many innocents ripe for slaughter. With every breath she is fighting it back, struggling to keep it from taking control and painting the whole place with blood. But at the same time she is conscious of a lightness in her that has nothing to do with her own emotions and everything to do with those around her.

Especially Wyll. He is all but bouncing on the balls of his feet at her side, smiling from ear to ear. She has never seen him look so pleased in all the time they have traveled together. He trots from stall to stall, examining goods, watching performers, chatting away with other patrons. For a moment, here and there, she can see flashes of the boy he used to be, the lighthearted youth that was stripped away from him by Mizora's cruelty and his father's dismissal.

(He avoids the facepainting booth. Unbeknownst to Rakha, he is very tempted - but he remembers her meltdown in the shadowlands after Dolly cursed her into clown makeup. It'll be tough enough, no doubt, when they go to see Dribbles - he's not going to force her to see that paint on his own face.)

The best moment for Rakha, though - a brief moment of true joy before the whole thing comes apart - is when she spots a bard performing to a crowd of onlookers at one corner of the central square.

This is (as near as I can recall) the first time she has actually seen music performed by someone who really knows what they're doing. Rakha's experience with music has primarily come through her own experiments with Alfira's lute, through which she has slowly learned to manipulate the Weave with the power of song - but the songs she has created are strange, atonal things, unpolished and based only on how she feels the magic around her shift in answer to it.

This is very different. The dragonborn playing for the crowd is a practiced bard and the music he plays is lovely and lilting and rhythmic, rising and falling in a smooth cadence that sets the Weave rolling in tandem. And it is among the most beautiful things she has ever seen.

After several songs, the bard notices the rapt way she is listening to him, and Alfira's battered lute strapped to her back. He gestures her forward, invites her to play with him.

She doesn't really know what she's doing, and certainly doesn't know the song he's playing. Her head hunches self-consciously in contrast to the bard's exuberant performance. But she is quick and observant and after some experimentation she manages to pick a very simple line of notes underneath the song's flourishes and melody.

Something seizes in her heart and, astonishingly, tears prick at the corner of her eyes. A few voices in the crowd call out with cheerful encouragement. Behind them, she can see Wyll watching her with that quiet, happy smile on his face again.

A strange, heady warmth settles through her and, for a moment, even the beast seems to fade to quiet, masked by the rhythm and harmony and the magic swirling around them all.

Then the song ends. The bard smiles, claps her gently on the shoulder, and turns away. The moment passes.

The warmth lingers, though - and it is because of this that she agrees when Wyll suggests playfully that they should speak to the dryad in the booth next door.

[snarkspawn]

based ofc on this

[brick-brooke]

[bigturtl]

i love lawyer game

[sexy-sapphic-sorcerer]

BBC Merlin & Text Posts (18/?)

[ao3usermelancholyhues]

rb for larger sample size! feel free to elaborate in tags about your process.

[asharaks]

it is, i think, symptomatic of the way larian has built this brand: bg3 was always marketed as being mature (read: sexual), and that was one of the big draws for players - myself included! especially as media pulls more towards extremes, with mainstream video games starting to get increasingly graphically sexual, graphically violent, and the vogue for 'grey morality' becomes the norm, those boundaries get pushed, and it becomes more and more of a selling point.

larian obviously focused on this, along with the How Do You Do, Fellow Kids brand, the increased accessibility of game devs on twitter, and adopted it heavily into their marketing strategy, and are now pretty reliant on the horny gamer crowd for a lot of their audience, and more importantly, they're doing this on purpose.

which is how you end up in situations like this.

characters (white men) the players want to fuck get centred: they get updates, they get more content, they get favoured. halsin's gone from a side character in EA to a half-fledged romance option, to a full romance option: he shows up in the promotional material, is larian's poster boy for the sex scenes, he gets more content with every update.

now gortash gets more heavily implied situationship lines with the dark urge, because players are horny for him. nevermind that some people aren't playing that way, or that he was originally set up to be a lower-level antagonist; nevermind that if the durge's storyline needed expansion, it should've been with orin and sarevok and bhaal, or that it muddies the writing for the rest of gortash's arc + characterisation: people want to fuck him, so it gets put in the game. it's not even to do with karlach, whose quest so desperately needs expansion! it's specifically catering to the people who want their character to have a Relationship with the slaver, because they're either not interested in or not able to focus on strengthening the weak spots in the narrative: they're just doing things that will net the 'my favourite dating sim' people lmfao.

meanwhile, literal main character wyll gets his quest demoted to a subquest, doesn't get bugfixes, doesn't get a single unique romance greeting after 6 patches and months of requests. he's not a Horny character, so he doesn't get the focus: he's not a player favourite, so he gets nothing. it's just... so unbelievably, indisputably racist, and it's incredibly grim and disappointing to watch it happen in real-time.

[hinamie]

bunch of portraits

[sysig]

Permission to headbutt: Granted (Patreon)

[inkskinned]

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

[mari-lair]

First friend

for the AU where Gon was raised on Greed Island instead of Whale Island.

More info on it here

[houndstar]

Wake up sweethearts, new Evil Wyll content in today's patch 7 release

[caffichai]

Mandragora Arknights good ending

She got got better as a person and also physically :)

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[lazylittledragon]

modern au gale+cyra/dadkarios for soul healing <33

cyra should not have a phone her internet history would have her on a watchlist

[doodleswithangie]

THE ORIGINAL MYSTERY TWINS

[Image description: Fanart of Stan and Ford Pines from "Gravity Falls." Alt text is provided and copied below the cut. End ID]

Copied Alt Text

Image one: Three photos from when Stan and Ford as kids, teens, and adults respectively. The photos are digitally drawn and layered over a photograph of a real desk.

Image two: Photo of kid Stan and Ford on Stan's bed. Ford laughs at Stan acting out a story with their flashlight.

Image three: Polaroid captioned "Thumb War!" of teenage Stan and Ford at the beach. They're poised to play thumb war.

Image four: Photo of adult Stan and Ford on their Arctic adventure. Ford has an arm slung around Stan's shoulders. They're laughing and palling around.

End Copied Alt Text