#➟ SIXTY WORDS

[hashbrowpn]

𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐍 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑...

➜ ┊: SCARAMOUCHE FLUFF  ᵎ ✰

໒꒰ྀི´ ˘ ` ꒱ྀིა scara's love 4 u is evident, even in the span of 60 WORDS.

➟ ˚₊‧꒰ა SIXTY WORDS ARE ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH HE LOVES YOU ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

"Lean over." Scaramouche said. You looked at him suspiciously.

"Uhm, why?"

"Just do it."

"W-" He grabbed your wrist and pulled you, sighing, an exasperated look drawing his brows to furrow, but a teasing grin played at his lips, resting his other hand on his electric guitar, fingers marked from the strings he plucked.

"So I can kiss you, stupid."

૮꒰ྀི∩´ ᵕ `∩꒱ྀིა YOU'VE REACHED THE END !! THANK YOU FOR READING !!

[c0nn0rsseur]

Can we take a moment to appreciate Bryan Dechart’s performance as Cyberlife Tower Connor aka Sixty and Sixty as a character? 🤌

Though Sixty and deviant Connor are physically identical (minus their demeanors, e.g. the way they stand and walk, like wow, Bryan, wow) and their voices technically aren’t different from each other, the distinction is still clearly there, at the same time it’s so nuanced too. Sixty sounds condescending, imperious and callous compared to deviant Connor whose voice is empathetic, curious and sincere. I’m not even talking about their lexicon, their choice of words here (there’s of course a difference too). Even when Sixty tries to convince Hank he’s the real Connor, you can hear how he’s failing to sound exactly like his counterpart because he can’t replicate deviant Connor’s voice and speech pattern just so. Sixty’s also being very commanding when trying to fool Hank into shooting the real Connor (Hank even gets irritated because of it). Damn that’s brilliant acting, all hats off to Bryan. His performance in this game never fails to impress me. (I wish there were dialogue for RK900 too, I would’ve loved to see Bryan’s take on his voice and presence.)

Also also I have to mention I love the take that Sixty really was a deviant all along too, an ”evil” version of Connor if you will; cold, calculating and even enjoying the situation he had Connor (and Hank) in. You know, doing all of it because he wanted to, because he liked it. Why else would he deliver a whole ass villain monologue before executing deviant Connor, gloating about how he knows what he is and that he is the obedient, favorite child, plus calling Connor a disappointment (and a disappointment to him especially, like how Connor should care in his final moments that Sixty despises him for not being a good little robot)? AND shooting him several times non-lethally before landing that final shot (if the story goes there), like savoring the situation. Of course he also has to ask if Connor has any last words too. That’s definitely not what an efficient machine would have done to make sure it accomplished its mission. In some outcomes his stalling costs him the victory.

Top that off with the ending where deviant Connor dies but the androids still wake up, Sixty is scared and emotional because he failed, scared to be deactivated because of his failure. Then there’s this scene where he shoots deviant Connor eleven times in front of his friend. After that Sixty takes in Hank’s reaction and even torments him by saying Connor’s death was his fault. Still doesn’t sound like a machine much, huh? More like a sadistic psychopath.

Man, I wish we could’ve seen more Sixty, it would’ve been chilling to see if he went full-on rogue, maybe being Markus’ right hand/attack dog on a leash in the violent revolution arc, maybe with his own agenda of taking Markus’ place and wanting to subjugate humanity. Or maybe deviant Connor could’ve persuaded him to their side by making Sixty to see he was nothing but a tool, unintentionally prompting him to seek revenge and to reduce Amanda and Cyberlife to atoms (not what Connor intended haha). There could’ve even been a redemption arc for him, like in a ”what’ve I done?” type way. You know, a bit of an internal moral struggle. And of course, our fave ”sack of shit” (as Hank so eloquently put it) demanding answers from his maker, Kamski, in a not-so, uh, conventional manner. Let them measure their respective arrogance and wit and see who comes out on top. Or would they team up?

Such a delicious character, so many delicious what-ifs.

[brittsekland]

Handwritten letters from Maureen Starkey to Beatle fan Caroline, 1967.

[dinomight]

maybe it’s just the middle child in me but there is something so tragic about wu erbai and his relationship with erjing. like imagine constantly being overshadowed by your younger brother, constantly dealing with the fallout of his actions. imagine watching the person you love be in love with him, while he doesn’t even bat an eye at her. (imagine watching your nephew idolize him even when you’re the one who’s there.) and then along comes this man who wants to be yours. your right hand man. the person you trust. the person you depend on. the person who protects you. and as it turns out he’s just there to get back at your brother. he’s there for sanxing, not you. who would be there for you?

[labelma]

Men need to STOP bringing up Thrawn to me on a first date unprompted it’s making me crazy 😭

Most recent guy asked me who the blue guy is to test if I knew who he actually was??? And I had to refrain from being like “you should see my fucking Google docs”

[fanchonmoreau]

New Doctor Who was just extremely cringe but in the exactly the way it should be. Like this is show I have chosen to love, yes it is Like This. Embarrassing. I will watch ten more.

[javelinbk]

The Beatles performing I Want To Hold Your Hand at Granada television studios, 25th November 1963 - part 6 (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)

[butchladymaria]

[wishchip106]

thinking about cherik post paris proposal taking a year long roadtrip around europe before they move to genosha together.

they do touristy things together

being sappy old men

man i’m all angsty rn need me some comfort stat

[beigetiger]

Kind of a continuation of this post, but I want to talk about fascism in Skulduggery Pleasant and how it’s handled, especially since it’s so relevant to our world at the moment (escapism through books? Never!) and because my interest has been captured by the way that this series clearly lays out impacting factors, where everything comes from, how it gets worse, and so on. Lot of stuff to handle, and I’m actually going to try and organize this beforehand instead of just vomiting words into my phone. I’ll also give you all the text cut of mercy.

I might have mentioned this before, but phase 2 (and by the looks of it, phase 3) depict and focus on fascism within their societies. There are several examples of this in phase 2 alone.

For example, Mevolent is introduced back in Kingdom of the Wicked, but the reality of living in a society ruled by him is most properly shown in Seasons of War. His society seems almost perfect for the sorcerers that live within it, but that’s only because those who didn’t fit the mold perfectly were killed. He has thought police and is personally able to track what his subjects are thinking about. And, of course, the Leibniz sorcerers dehumanize, oppress, and enslave their mortals because it’s all they’ve ever been taught to do. This particular flavour of society is probably least reflected in our current society of all the examples that I’m going to talk about, so I’m not too stressed about this one.

There’s also Martin Flanery, the very unsubtle stand-in for Trump. I’m mid about him as a character, but I think the series did a good job showcasing the difference between Creed, who’s calm and calculated and takes advantage of his follower’s rage, and Flanery, who feels and acts upon his rage just as much as any of his followers, while also showing that Flanery is still a threat. His lack of calculation doesn’t make him an easier opponent to defeat, it just makes him more of a wild card. And his soldiers are very much a reflection of this as well. Flanery’s soldiers use Splashes to become stronger but often have roid rage as a result, and they constantly get into fights and kill each other, causing incredible collateral damage in the process. The cops who worked under Creed, on the other hand, tended to be a lot colder, sneakier, and all-around more strategic, reflecting the climate that they’re thriving in. This isn’t just limited to Flanery, but this series also does a really good job at depicting the sheer idolization that these literal fascists are regarded with by their subjects and how it effects others.

But enough of that, I’m now going to talk about the whole reason I decided to write this stupid thing: Roarhaven and sorcerer culture as a whole.

Roarhaven post LSoDM has a whole bunch of factors impacting it and it’s social development, but one of the more major ones is sorcerers finally being given a place to be themselves and develop their own culture as opposed to just adopting whatever the mortals are currently doing. Sorcerers didn’t really have much of an individual culture for hundreds and hundreds of years because they intentionally repressed themselves so that mortals wouldn’t find out about them and possibly try to fight them. There was some slight amount of culture in places like when Roarhaven was a tiny village or those streets that are entirely owned by sorcerers, but those places were often bitter and in poverty in order to make themselves go under the radar, and so would only have offered comfort to certain kinds of sorcerers who just want others that they feel understand them.

But although the Sanctuaries may agree that silence and repression of diversity is the correct way to go about their lives, it’s extremely clear that there are many sorcerers who disagree with that (see Mevolent and his followers) and it’s clear that the Sanctuaries never bothered to stamp these disagreers out entirely as Mevolent did to his, only punishing them if they tried to reveal themselves to the mortals. This left these people alive to spread their ideologies to others.

And as I said earlier, the war that covered nearly the entire planet and was somehow kept from mortals for hundreds of years is also a huge factor for sorcerers. Between that and the inter-Sanctuary war, nearly the entire sorcerer population is a war veteran who was stood witness to or even committed absolutely sickening acts that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. They have nearly nothing resembling actual functional therapy and PTSD is probably incredibly common among the population. The Corrival kids, the ones too young to have been in war, have had to grow up in these environments and being raised by these people, and we see so clearly in phase 2 just how much generational trauma impacts people and ruins uncountable numbers of lives. Sorcerers also pretty much never die of old age. A select few of them live to be old, yes, but even they always die violently. There is no peaceful or happy ending for sorcerers, their lives are dark from the beginning through to the end, even to the point where the knowledge that they’re going to die acts as a comfort instead of a curse.

The sorcerers have also watched mortals commit countless genocides and acts of horrific discrimination and destruction and have been unable to do anything about it due to this idea enforced by their governments that they cannot interfere with the affairs of mortals, and that the mortals must simply learn to be better on their own. Hell, a lot of sorcerers have probably been directly impacted by these genocides, and their friends were probably tormented by the fact that they could do nothing about it. And due to their lack of culture and overall opportunity to do these things over the years because of the war, many of the sorcerers (especially the students who weren’t soldiers) start to feel just a little too good about themselves and their people, pointing out that they’ve never done things like that while failing to realize that the reason they’ve never really done that is because they’ve never been given an opportunity to do so.

And of course in modern times, there are issues like climate change, impending war, and increasing discrimination that sorcerers still aren’t allowed to do anything about despite living in the same world and still being impacted by, leading to a sort of “I wonder if things would be better if we were in charge”, as discussed often by Corrival kids and sometimes the Sanctuary workers. They’ve all heard of Dimension X of course, but those who don’t straight up agree with what Mevolent was doing either justify the thought by claiming that they’ve seen his mistakes and could do it better (introspection, anyone?) or, in the case of people like Valkyrie, just shake off the thought and tell themselves that it would never work out in practice.

And how sorcerers view mortals, even the supposedly good sorcerers, is also an important thing to consider here. There are, of course, sorcerers like Nefarian who have a cartoon villain view on mortals and think of them as little more than cattle, but there are more nuanced ways of thinking about mortals that are still not actually that great. In HBL, Ghastly talks about how he’s worse than mortals because he’s been given this gift that elevates him to some status above them, and yet also chooses to compete in wars for seemingly no end. And that’s the thing, this way that he subtly thinks of mortals as simple creatures who don’t understand the glory of the world as he does, who’s actions are understandable because how could they ever know better?

I also think that Valkyrie’s perception of mortals is fascinating because of how we get to see it evolves over time. When Val is fourteen or so, she actively rejects the term “mortal” because she sees it as dehumanizing and elevating of the sorcerers to a higher status. But as she grows older and becomes more attached to sorcerer society as opposed to mortal society, she stops complaining about the term and begins to adopt that mindset that so many other sorcerers have of almost being a shepherd. Instead of protecting mortals for the sake of keeping other people safe, it sometimes feels more like a duty to keeping the livestock alive more than anything else, and she actively refers to mortals as bumbling fools who get themselves killed unnecessarily in HBL.

Now, this is where Roarhaven as a city actually starts to come into play. After all, it lends sorcerers an entire city away from the prying eyes of mortals, and there’s nothing that actually makes them go back to interact with them. They can just live in the city forever and have all the resources they need. But spending so long away from and never interacting with the mortals they’re supposed to protect leads to disconnection with them from the sorcerers. The sorcerers see their city as cleaner, nicer, more organized, and overall better than anything the mortals could possibly create. Sorcerers live longer lives, are more open-minded, are stronger and capable of doing more, and so they must be better than those foolish mortals who become more close-minded as they get older.

And of course the Sanctuary is supposed to disagree with this sentiment (emphasis on supposed), but it doesn’t really matter because the Faceless Ones worshipers who have been saying this for hundreds of years and haven’t been stamped out by the government get to spread this idea around to their fellow citizens, who refuse to go back and actually reconnect with the mortals. It’s like how fast transphobia spreads among those who don’t actually know any trans people; the lack of ability to disprove the information and ideas you are being given causes them to become real to you.

And now for the children, who have less life experience and even less memories of mortals than the adults do. The students are easy to leave imprints on, and we’ve already seen how even the best intentioned kids express some anti-mortal sentiments. They know that their world is dying and it’s the mortals faults. They’ve grown up in this world being told over and over that they are better and wiser than mortals, and have been taught by their parents and by each other to view mortals as mayflies. Nothing more than insects. Even people like Omen wondered if maybe things would be better if they simply took over. Quietly took the world off the mortal government’s hands and into their own, where their everlasting wisdom can lead them to a better future. Because the kids don’t remember what the war was like, and it leads them to be disconnected from their parents. And that leads them to find affirmation among each other instead, at a boarding school where they almost never see their families and where even the teachers will indulge in anti-mortal sentiments. It’s such an easy rabbit hole for them to fall into, especially since Roarhaven hasn’t developed any sort of system to keep the kids up to date with the world and politics outside of Roarhaven, and so they just learn from each other.

And the reason that Roarhaven’s government isn’t able to do much about the children turning towards fascism is because the government kind of sucks. They have this idea that they don’t need things like lawyers because they have mind-readers and lawyers are a measly mortal invention while failing to consider the fact that lawyers exist to make sure that rights are being followed. Except that I’m not actually sure that the sorcerers have anything like rights outside of loosely following what mortals have, since police brutality seems incredibly common and the cops seem allowed to just do whatever they please. They also have nothing like a democratic system and their top governors can be easily put under influence by someone with money (e.g. China and Damocles).

There’s definitely more I could say to point this out, but I think it’s already clear enough (hell, it’s even discussed in the series itself) that the Sanctuary’s current government system is corrupt, outdated, and leaves room for dictators and fascists to take over and for the people to continue harming each other with no end in sight and needs to be replaced with something that would allow sorcerers as a whole to grow from the trauma that has brought them ruin for hundreds of years and maybe even finally help to create a better world for everyone.

[mantisgodsdomain]

You may say to yourself things such as "wow, mantis god, you seem really behind for bugtober this year", and you would be right, but what you can't see behind the scenes is that we are actually being surprisingly productive in the hours of the day that are not dedicated to school, it's just that some months ago we happen to have thought to ourself "well, we enjoy learning things, so maybe we should take a hack at school since the grant is decent, get some actual certification on our resume so we can get a real job" and then forgot that the reason we don't already have official certification is because formal schooling historically has had worse effects on our overall mental health than almost literally anything else in our life, and now that's eating 4-6 hours of our life per day with an extra few hours of recovery after which makes it unfortunately difficult to work on art.

[hashbrowpn]

𝐘'𝐅𝐋𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃?...

➜ ┊: SCARAMOUCHE FLUFF  ᵎ ✰

໒꒰ྀི´ ˘ ` ꒱ྀིა scara's love 4 u is evident, even in the span of 60 WORDS.

➟ ˚₊‧꒰ა SIXTY WORDS ARE ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH HE LOVES YOU  ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

Scaramouche always succeeded in making you blush, with teasing words and actions. Right now, for one. He traced his index finger up your neck, making you shiver from his cold touch. "Your hand's so cold." you commented quietly, face going a little red as you felt his thumb brush over your lips.

he smirked teasingly. "And your face's warm. Y'flustered?" 

૮꒰ྀི∩´ ᵕ `∩꒱ྀིა YOU'VE REACHED THE END !! THANK YOU FOR READING !!

[labyrinthofstreams]

Letter sent from Leonard Cohen to Marianne Ihlen. Dated March 10, 1962. London, England.

"I miss everything that I love. I long for you and blind love, brown bodies that speak to one another in a language we don't want to understand, I long for readers to devour my soul at a feast, I long for health in the sun, woods I know, tables of meat and fruit and bread, children shattering the monarchy of the home, I long for cities of preserved elegance and the chaotic quarters of modern cities where the village persists, for loyal restaurants, for parks and battles. I have so much affection for the world and you shall be my interpreter. I want to get back to Canada and rob a bank. All my love, Leonard."

[stories-by-rie]

how to feel excited about my own projects again

[hiyutekivigil]

[loveshotzz]

The question of the night is: Will Leighanne finish writing this game of never have I ever that leads into an almost kiss? Or will she get too stoned again and stay in this perpetual barbecue at Steve and Eddie’s trailer.