#{ Even if it isn't 100% accurate. }

[peppered-moths]

imagine you were born hungry. imagine you were born with a hole in your gut that can never be filled, that is always writhing.

you are a mirror. you were born a mirror, surrounded by mirrors. the first thing you ever know is that you are not human. the second thing is that you are not him. you are a reflection, with his face and his voice and the people who loved him. you can mimic him, pretend so well that you are not anything else, but you cannot escape the aching hunger in your stomach, in your mouth.

he cared for the other one, the you-but-not-you. you hear that you died in his arms once. you don't know how to feel about that; you don't know him, don't care (because you're not him even though you want).

nevertheless, you are drawn to him. maybe it's the way he looks at you, guilty and frustrated and awe-struck all at once, a complicated mixture of feelings that has you shying away and inching closer, bit by bit. you decide you like the way he looks when he's happy, though you'd never say it to his face.

that's probably why you don't say anything, when the world twists, soft graphite and watercolors. because you like seeing him happy.

this world is good enough. it doesn't matter if it isn't real, it can be good enough. you can be alive. he can love you like he loved him be happier here, without the pressure, without the fear. isn't that good? why can't it be good enough for him?

you know you don't matter to him, not like the real you. you know that when he looks at your face, all he sees is the other one. he doesn't understand. it's not fair. it's not fair. you want something for yourself for once.

he says he'd die, if that's what you wanted. standing on the precipice. his heels slip over the edge, hanging in space. you want. you do not want. you want, but not like this. you imagine his body below the city lights, arranged like he's sleeping, a halo of red seeping into his hair. you wonder what forever looks like with him, what it might look like without him. he would die for you. you have never been so afraid of that.

he pulls you over the edge, hands entangled.

you are the only one who can stop this. you are the only one who can save him.

(part of you doesn't want to. part of you is selfish, and aching, and hungry.)

(what would he have done?)

you catch him. save his life. it feels like the worst thing in the world. you hate yourself, just a little bit, for not wanting it. the hunger coils in your stomach.

you leave for a while (because of the severance). you don't want to talk about it. the far shore has waves that beat endlessly against the sand, and you fell apart and shivered back together- and you don't want to talk about it.

you tell him to take you somewhere. anywhere. somewhere nice.

(a nice place to die, you think. you're too much of a coward, too much of a monster, to say it.)

it's beautiful, and he's smiling, and there's a gaping emptiness in your gut. you feel yourself shaking apart, skin to bones.

you tell him you are hungry, the words ripped from your throat like the awful truth they are. and he just looks at you, the way he always does.

and then he kills for you. not human, not yet (you wonder if he would), but it still screams as it dies.

he holds the heart in his hands. you are hungry. from here, it just looks like meat. it drips, plip-plop-plip, black blood splatting on tile. you are hungry. he offers it to you.

(despite everything, you sort of want to be human. despite everything, you sort of want to be dead.)

you close your teeth around his fingers instead. like a feral dog. like somebody who is not (has never been) human. his blood is red, and you are terribly, painfully hungry.

you tell him you are a lost cause, a monster with a pretty face and nothing behind it. that he should give up, should leave you alone, should let you die (should kill you himself, really).

he cries, salty and miserable, shoulders shaking. he cries. for you. because of you. all you can do is stare.

the heart drips on the floor between you. you are hungry.

(he does not look like an angel, or an icarus, or a savior. he looks like a fourteen year old boy in love with a monster.)

you have always been selfish.

you have always been hungry.

[mildmayfoxe]

❤️‍🔥 BESTSELLERS ❤️‍🔥 top eighteen just for fun!

[reverieaudios]

"Call the Nightingale" by Vian Izak and Juniper Vale + "[skototropism]" by Crywolf are officially the biggest musical influences on this new demon character. Also "where did the sun go?" by Lor.

sorry dude your life is gonna be a rough one

[cescalr]

Oooh, definitely glee for the fandom asks! <3

Always with the hornets' nests with these ones, I see! Though i don't think there's a fandom out there that isn't in some way a hornets' nest once it gets large enough... hm. Alright. I'm just gonna be as honest as i can be about this, and tag accordingly.

Glee:

my favourite female character: augh. argh. ouph. so difficult. so hard. Since I'm working off of half-remembered show and half recently-rewatched show... its a tossup. Mercedes, Santana, Quinn. Probably Mercedes. She did nothing wrong ever in her entire life <3 well okay maybe except that one time she smashed kurt's car windows (but it was a banger song, though). Can't say Santana because of the Biphobia TM and other things like excessive use of bigotry-based insults, and Quinn. Oh god girl. Cheating is not cool! Funnily enough! So I find them really interesting but 'favourite' is hard to say. Mercedes. Mercedes for sure <3

my favourite male character: Blaine sam blaine sam blaine sam yes. I am imitating ripping petals off of flowers and coming to a conclusion based on which is the last name i said. So I guess that means Sam! But really this is a tie.

my favourite book/season/etc: Mannnnn idk. I don't like shows for seasons as-a-whole. Also i could not tell you what happened in any given season if you held a gun to my head. I'm not good at that. The only shows i know 'seasons' of are Buffy and Teen Wolf because i've watched them like 100000000000 times (exaggeration) for various reasons (mostly fanfiction research).

my favourite episode (if its a tv show): I can tell you my LEAST favourite episode (blame it on the alcohol, thank you Kurt king of biphobia! this is a persona foible it's not the worst episode in the show. by far. by far. it's kind of an average one. I'm just angry at it.) BUT er. Favourite? Idk. Genuinely some of the earlier Kurt-centric stuff was really well done (his convo with Burt... <3) and the Quinn giving birth accompanied by bohemian rhapsody was obviously iconic, but if I'll be honest I couldn't name any episodes of this show (other than That One previously stated, anyway). And yeah most of the time they were named after song titles and No i don't remember those song titles either. I'm just so bad at this. My memory is that of a goldfish's being haphazardly bounced around on a sieve.

my favourite cast member: it would be really funny if I said Demi Lovato [she counts!] but the truth is N/A: i don't know these people !!! They are strangers!! (i don't. follow celebrities. at all. I couldn't even name most of them. They're just people doing a job and their lives are irrelevant to me beyond their ability to perform that job well. I do not need to know where they live and what coffee they drink. Stalker shit tbh. I'm kind of a very private person myself, so rpf-adjacent stuff just... creeps me out. I've never watched a single cast interview in my lifetime and I'm not about to start!)

my favourite ship: Difficult to say! Grave and obvious lie. Blam. It's blam. Quintana is a close runner up though Santana really needs to stop dating people who cheat on the regular (I'll accept Quinn has grown enough not to do this by the time a Quintana coupling would be viable - and satisfying in terms of character arcs - narratively speaking).

a character I’d die defending: Blaine Anderson did something wrong for sure but like Kurt did it first so shrugs. Cancels out. Bad for each other! Case closed!

a character I just can’t sympathize with: genuinely don't remember if I had one of those the first time around because I was like 10 and just didn't pay attention if I didn't care, but Terri and her racist self take that 'prize' this time, alongside the obvious predator in the room [original choir teacher. Sandy? I forget his name immediately after hearing it. He doesn't deserve to be remembered]. Also JBI is just.... a yikes character all around. I mean, he's a blatant stereotype for one, in a the people who wrote this person don't like jews kind of way. Unfortunately common stereotype too, for the era, so not only is he that, he's also lazy. Just a one-note pervert who's the butt of various antisemitic 'jokes' you've heard from era-peer shows a million times over, tired and awful and a sour reminder of bigotry that continues to this day. Really regrettable character who's lack of redeeming qualities was probably purposeful. (I know Rachel and tina are also jewish, but this comes up very rarely and mostly only when santana needs to say something kind of fucked up, as is her modus operandi, for 'comic relief'. Tina's jewish-ness wasn't even canon for several seasons, because she didn't have a surname or a family or anything resembling complex character depth for several seasons. The one time I really remember Rachel's religion being important was when she was pressuring Kurt into believing in some kind of god, which??? don't do that. Bad example. Trying to guilt trip a friend into faith sucks. I take back what i said earlier Mercedes did that too. Boo. Girls try again that was a bad showing all around. Though i have no idea why Kurt went the acupuncture route as his 'secular' option but i think that has to do a lot with the writers doing literally no research ever once in their lives (you can tell they don't by the way they write the football segments of the show, which make no sense according to football fans who watch Glee, of which there are numerous because real life isn't like fiction where you can only like music or sports. Most of the kids in my school year were doing the most of everything ever if they were the 'popular' ones - we do that differently; popularity isn't really based on who know know; for some bizzare reason literally everyone knew who I was? Even people I'd never spoken to?? - but more about like... how much you can do, I guess. Overachievers, but I'm not saying that negatively; these people were generally - generally - very nice, and surprisingly chill for people who had no spare time whatsoever. I'm not entirely sure when they slept; A* across the board, at least one sport, at least one instrument, several extracurriculars, parties every weekend, dozens of friends and an s.o. . Eh? Way too much going on. Scary lifestyle! Impressive burnout rate, probably. Er. Tangent! Back to the scheduled programming).) There's uhhhh there's a lot of bad characters on the show, but i'd say Sandy and Terri and her equally but more loudly racist sister are truly completely irredeemable ones. Like they're not interesting or anything, they're just there to be narrative annoyances (which, in the case of Sandy specifically, is insane. Arrest that man!!! He has actively sexually assaulted minors!!!).

a character I grew to love: difficult to say because I tend to just make an opinion and stick to it. Also i don't remember who i liked at first and who i didn't, this show came out when i was eight. I didn't watch it until I was a little older than that, of course, but I frankly have spotty memory until my late teens, so! I'm not sure!! Quinn, probably. Pink-hair-era Quinn helped me understand her more, and seeing the moments of kindness hidden behind practical cruelty, when you understand her family and situation, makes things make a lot more sense. It takes a lot to get me to sympathise with a cheater, but I can see where Quinn was getting all turned around in her head about life because of her upbringing and socialisation, not to mention the profoundly negative impact cheerios had on her mentally and that the school's culture in general was not exactly a breeding ground for empathy and optimism.

my anti otp: can you tell (klaine). I don't dislike Kurt!!! Please let him have a fun chillaxed boyfriend in new york with his vogue friends. But also please stop attempting to control other people's diets thank you!! Thank you!! I'm of mixed feelings. Blaine and Kurt both did at least one bad, relationship-ending thing, and proved over and over again that they just weren't on the same wavelength in regards to life goals and ways of living it. They can't even share the same living space, which is kind of required for a functional marriage. I don't know, it just seems like they settled for their first proper, serious boyfriend even if that's not really the best match, and I... wish they'd just got to see more of life first, you know? They got married at like 20! Or something! I'm 23, I cannot imagine getting married at 20. That's a baby. Let them live first!

(same for Santana and Brittney, imo. I also don't really like them together because Santana and Brittney have very different ideas regarding monogamy, which is just never going to go down well in the long run. If your girl cheats on you like twenty times and tells you to your face its not cheating in her view of things, but you think it is, break up with her because you'll just make each other miserable. Brittney sort of seems incapable of feeling guilt but if she were, this kind of moral pressure would be Not Good, and obviously Santana isn't comfortable with the idea and doesn't have to be!! Just move on!!! Find other people!!!! Don't marry your first girlfriend if you've broken up like ten times this is simple!!!! Please!!!! But Klaine wins out over Brittana because - in my opinion, glee fandom please do not persecute me, I am known for this specific thing - I see... interactions that verge on abusive between Klaine that I don't see in Brittana. So. Oof? Ex; use of public perception to disguise attack; deliberately hurting Blaine in a stage-combat fencing match (you are not meant to make actual contact in these) and thus using Blaine's own dislike of making his difficulties common knowledge against him in order to 'punish' him. This is no good! Don't do this!!.[Also just to err vaguepost about a comment.... that is. not. what i would call passive aggressive. Physically attacking someone with a sword - no matter the type of sword, fencing foils hurt just as much, they're just not stab-you sharp... er, these days - is just straight-up aggressive.]).

Note that negative things stick in the mind better than positive ones; on a rewatch I may well alter my opinion!

But also I'm really, really stubborn. So it's not likely. Klaine.

[sleepanonymous]

You fold the last and I'll cut the line But tell all the crowds that there's plenty of time You've got a ghastly look in your... So I'll make my own way through this everlasting night

We've all got to see this through We've got years left to pull it on to Sailing an ocean of upturned hands I feel like an anchor embedded in sand Screaming it out across all of the land If you want to escape then you'd better make plans And we've all got to see this through We've got days left to pull it on to Darling, darling I'm telling you now We're cornered and desperate, we've got to get out Wait here for every moment you doubt Is getting you closer to the death you found And we've all got to see this through We've got seconds left to hold on to each other It's the end of a simple world (We can't always trust each other) It's the end of a simple earth (We can't always trust each other) It's the end of a simple world (We can't always trust each other) It's the end of a simple world we believe in

The 349 views and 7 likes breaks my heart, man. This guy is so freaking talented 😭😭 He deserved so much more attention, and I'm glad he's finally getting it now.

[polysprachig]

@ langblrs

How do you define which languages you are actively learning?

[where-the-wind-travels]

with all the ME posting i've been doing i completely forgot i was in the middle of an ilw replay 😭 sigh my brain fixates on one thing and immediately gets rid of most the thoughts ive had about the fixation i had before...

[onekisstotakewithme]

🔥 TWW

I have many opinions on TWW and some of them are fairly unpopular so uhhhh here goes.

I'll get the biggest one out of the way first: for when it happened, I actually don't find the shuttle leak storyline out of character for Toby, nor do I hate it. If it had happened back in season 4, sure, and I'm mad at the post-Sorkin writing team for their slow destruction of Toby's character, but by end of s6, start of s7, it's not out of character for him. Could it have been better executed? Sure. But where he is as a character, unfortunately, it doesn't feel supremely terrible to me.

Second, the best Donna is season 1 Donna. A bit of an audience surrogate sometimes but in a not-overly-clumsy way, funny and spunky and just a bit quirky... and her dynamic with Josh is SO fun in season 1. I'm almost through s1 in my rewatch and I'd genuinely forgotten how much I enjoyed Donna. I feel like she really got flattened out once they really committed to the will they/won't they with Josh, and then was worse because of the whole season 6/7 disaster (that was a mess!), PLUS they had her make some very dumb decisions to advance the plot that did not feel realistic (the dumb shit with Cliff Calley, the accidentally voting for Ritchie).

(more under the cut because apparently I'm not done!)

I know season 5 was the weakest season overall, BUT season 4 was the weakest Sorkin season. I'm not saying season 4 needed to be all about re-election, but I feel like there was a better balance to strike between the "rush through all the election stuff by episode 8-ish" and "stretch it out into a season and a half long affair" (as in 6-7). It also just, despite everything it took to get to this point, felt INCREDIBLY rushed and unsatisfying. it didn't feel like there were any stakes! I wanted to see the whole debate, I wanted to see a genuine election night with stakes, dammit! And I think, much as I love Will, that dedicating so much time to THAT storyline was part of the problem. This also wasn't helped by the fact that Ritchie was a caricature and a Bush expy which worked when the episodes were airing but just makes him look cartoonish and one-dimensional now. Like Arnie Vinick may be a unicorn of a Republican and impossible to believe in now, but at least he's a person and not a cardboard cutout. Anyway! It feels like for all the build-up to the difficulty of getting re-elected post-MS scandal, it was just. they won, shuffle them offscreen again.

Okay, fuck, this is getting long.

I don't MIND Annabeth but I find the whole Leo-Annabeth flirtation thing REALLY weird and honestly out of left field. That scene in the elevator where she says they shouldn't be spending too much time together 'because of the tension', I was RIGHT THERE with Leo like 'what tension?' Like I'm sorry, I just don't see it!

Okay a few more bullet-point gripes just because

I got used to it eventually but I'm still not a fan that CJ got promoted to COS. Like yeah by the end she did a damn good job and she has one of the best relationships with Jed, but c'mon. she loved being press secretary, and she was a damn good one.

CJ's dark hair in season 7 is not a good look on her, I'm sorry CJ my love, but it doesn't look good. The only non-canon part of the flashfoward is that she definitely does NOT still have that hair.

Amy was fun when she first appeared, but in seasons 6 and 7 her character definitely got worse.

For the most part, I actually wanted less election plot in season 7 and more focus on the west wing (and I say this as loving both Matt and Arnie!)

Gina Toscano/CJ is a great ship also. I rewatched "six meetings before lunch" last night and remembered that I ship them.

Episode specific: the B-plot of Requiem makes absolutely no sense to me and I've watched the episode about 6 or 7 times now (the whole 'meddling in the speaker race' plot).

And finally: Danny should've been in every single season, as a regularly recurring character. I know that Tim Busfield was busy with other commitments but Mr. Busfield, I'm begging you.

TL;DR:

[remnantglow]

what book please share!!

it's "bone dance" by emma bull! it's def imperfect bc it does do the "conflating sex&gender" thing (so the MC's both intersex and nonbinary - at least that's how i think i'd describe it in modern terms?) but also. oh man when it hits it hits. some top tier gender fuckery if i do say so myself

[unbielevenary]

I have never gotten such bad second-hand embarrassment as earlier today when a freshman in one of my lectures interrupted the professor to tell a joke he stole off twitter.

[freezegirl]

Farzana Nayar (M/ehwish H/ayat & Z/enobia S/hroff) was Saraswati's hero support until Saraswati retired. Afterwards, Farzana followed her true passion which was to become a doctor. Nowadays, Farzana utilizes her power of biokinesis to heal rather than harm and can be found in the halls of Sky U as the resident doctor. Jawaharel Patel (F/awad K/han & F/aran T/ahir) was Evander's hero support up until Evander retired. Afterwards, Jawaharel took on the hero name Calculus and ran around with a superhero group known as the Young Gods, but he quit that group too when he met and fell head over heels for Farzana. Jawaharel has precognitive abilities, therefore seeing that he would one day end up marrying her. These two have raised Khione more than her parents have. They were the ones to check in after the Royal Pain fiasco; they were the ones to show up to her high school graduation and they were the ones to congratulate her when she got into Sky U.

[featherymainffins]

People be wilding, I hate when I ask for some dirty tricks to swindle my brain because therapeutic methods are slow and I would kinda like to do things even before they work, and people just recommend me what is essentially CBT coupled with exposure therapy.

[athalantan]

god I gotta make a fucking chart for all of El's descendants. one day, when I get up the energy and focus . . .

[thelastunison]

Are you fucking kidding me

[puppys-rhythm-heaven]

y'know ds set 4 has dj school but also ds set 6's games are all amazing. meanwhile ds set 4 has munchy monk-

[needleclanclangen]

wait. how did i mix up what moons that happened in