#(BUT LISTEN L I S T E N)

[keferon]

“Mistakes on mistakes until” ch 69 spoilers below!

Ahahahahahahah here I go again

Mistakes on mistakes until until I can draw Jazz with my eyes closed

I woke up, checked my phone, woke up for real and decided that whatever plans I had for this day yeah no they can wait a little bit kfkgnfk

Also. Consider listening this while reading. Or don't who am I to tell you what to do~

[doriansbutt]

This life is amazing

When you greet it with open arms

[cyberphuck]

Finding out your boyfriend is a werewolf

[ninja-knox-ur-sox-off]

Mks so good at pretending he's a silly goofy guy he's got the entire fandom fooled

[sassymajesty]

hate to see you go, but love to watch you leave

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

I've had a pretty busy week, but I've also been accumulating more hours in the Aasimar Barbie Dressup Simulator BG3 modding toolkit. And you all get to hear about it. Rejoice! It's that thing where to get good at something you just need to get really obsessed with endlessly redoing one blorbo in it.

(I was trying to have a conversation in Discord about this but my messages kept getting flagged... hence the post hoc moon pasties on some of these, sorry. I tried to be funny with it.)

I've actually redone and spruced up all my textures so now they're much more high res and not annoyingly muddy anymore.

I've also done a ton of streamlining, hoping to remove as many steps and prerequisites/dependencies as possible. No more mucking about with body tattoos and endless interfering layers and neck seam nonsense - I have one proper Larian Virtual Texture for the body and one mask for the metallic "non-skin" colour of the kintsugi. Now all that gets adjusted is a single parameter, applied to the "Nightsong" skin colour preset - which means no more struggling to match her unique marble-pale skin tone with "close enough" character creation options, either!

Thanks for the quick outfit loan, Karlach, it's great to see everything is showing up as expected with regards to gaps in clothing, too.

Also fun, when you load equipment visuals, you can apply the "Nightsong" armour colour preset to them, which is like applying a dye in-game (so colours change depending on the material they represent - leather, metal, fabric, so on). And so you get all the outfits in Aylin's personal colour scheme. Pretty cool! So here's, say, Avernus biker Aylin. Or Selûnite robe Aylin.

Same goes for any of the racial underwear options (this is half-orc and dragonborn). (This is also me showing off the textures again shhhhh.)

So much blue! I know this is the result of her armour having this particular blue defined as the main "fabric" colour for those three fancy belt favour/banner things she has, but I like to think Aylin just has a favourite colour that she prefers with the same intensity she does everything else in life.

In any case, I'll see about packaging this up and reuploading pretty soon!

[saltpepperbeard]

Get off my ship.

Now.

(For @not-nervous-jester)

[yshtal]

people are always hating on the hinterlands but I am here with a hot take: the storm coast sucks SO much worse

[alolanrain]

Regarding Ash's released Pokémon in the Poké Beast AU, I can see the following happening:

Butterfree: Breaks out of behavioral school with his new swarm and goes full on folklore cryptid status.

Lapras: Never goes back to the herd after being rejected for the first time; Ash is more important and the baby has tasted blood and taken down a Moltres.

Larvitar: Is too rowdy to stay at the preserve and given back to Ash.

Goodra: Stays with Ash after resolving the conflict in the marshlands but ominously promises to return if anything else happens.

Greninja: Kalos caused the problem, Kalos can fix it. Kalos hurt Ash, so it owes the region no loyalty.

Naganadel: Is usually mistaken as the second coming of Necrozma due to the level of feral.

Nebby: Is waiting for a chance to go supernova on Ash's enemies he really wants his Meema to say yes.

…. I really wanna read a fic where Nebby, once evolved at the alter, just lowers their head and growls at Gladion before allowing the class on his back. Gotta but that boy back in his place.

[revasserium]

Can you do #154 with Hoshiumi or Bokuto ❤️🥺

send me a prompt and a character, and i'll write you a drabble (or ukno, like a 2k fuckin fic)

154. Leap into my arms @thisbicc

diving into the wreck

bokuto; 1,815 words; angst in the beginning, but its honestly more hurt/comfort, and the ending is fluffy ;) ish.

he is a volcano, he is a thunderstorm — he is every natural disaster poets have ever tried to tame with language and still, the truth remains — bokuto koutarou is a force of nature. but the thing about natural disasters is that they end. they pass and, like shooting stars, all that remains is the wreckage they’ve left behind, the imprint of light across a moonless night.

“losing isn’t everything, y’know.”

you run a hand down the curved planes of his back, trying to sooth the tantrum building just beneath the surface.

“it is! and you know it is! you just — you just don’t know how it feels! you don’t know anything!”

the words seep through the house, oozing blood like an open wound, soaking the carpets and weighing down the curtains, staining them till neither of you are sure what color they used to be when you first got them.

(”look! look! these are on sale! and they’re the design i like!” “ah, well if they’re the design you like, then i guess we gotta get ‘em, huh?” “oh shut up, you big goofball.”)

you pull back your hand and sigh.

“you’re right… i don’t know how it feels to lose like you do but —” you bite down hard on your lips, swallowing down the words —

i know how it feels to lose you.

he looks up, his expression desperate. he wants to reach out, to pull you close to say no, i didn’t mean that or no, i’m sorry, let’s get some icream or some popcorn or some new damn curtains but he looks away instead.

(”how do you jump so high?” “huh? me? oh… uh… well, i mean… i just kinda do it… i guess.” “but… aren’t you afraid you’re gonna fall and hurt yourself?” “nah. like, the floor’s not goin’ anywhere, y’know?”)

“bokuto… i — i think i’m gonna go stay with a friend for a while.”

bokuto feels the world press in, the walls inching towards him, the ceiling pressing down. he wants to curl in on himself till there’s nothing left, he wants to crush you to him, to hold you so tightly you become a part of him but his body won’t move. his lips are still. and there’s a part of him that wonders if he does this to himself just so he’ll have something to fight for.

because the truth is — he doesn’t know how else to love you.

he doesn’t know how else to love but like this — with no training wheels, with his eyes closed and fists clenched and wild hope pounding in his heart. and he knows he’s not good at this — he’s never been all too good at this but he never thought it would hurt — he never knew that the floor could disappear from beneath his feet and that sometimes, just sometimes, you really should look before you leap but…

“for… for how long?” he asks.

“i… i’m not sure yet but… i think —” you take a breath like gasping for air in a vacuum-sealed space, “i think it’d be good for us,” another heaving breath.

“some time… apart.”

bokuto feels the air leave the room like a scolded child, slipping away through the opened doorway, disappearing into the darkness of the hall. he tries to breathe and finds that he doesn’t quite remember how.

(”so… its like a trust exercise. with the floor.” “w-wha?? you still talkin’ about jumping?” “yeah! like… in order to jump that high, you gotta trust that the floor will be there to catch you, right?”)

“okay.”

the word burns through him, a comet with a too-long tail, singeing his tongue. it tastes like cinder and smoke and all the words he never had the courage to say out loud.

“okay,” you echo, with a tiny little nod.

he feels the ground beneath him crack and crumble, and for the first time in his life, bokuto is afraid of falling.

“i…” he nearly chokes on the word, but he forces himself to his feet, his fists balled at his sides. like this, he towers over you, like this, he’s a huge, imposing thing, but like this — he feels the smallest he’s ever been.

i’m sorry.

“i love you,” he says, finally. after a long-held breath.

you look up at him with wide, sad eyes and after a moment, you let out a small laugh. it shakes your shoulders and breaks something inside him. because this, at least, he knows to be true. he might not be good at it but he knows that he loves you. he loves you strong, and he loves you hard.

he loves you like a thunderstorm might love a lightning sea, too much salt, and not enough water —

“yeah…” you say, “yeah… i know.”

(”ahh… there’s no fixin’ that, is there?” “what, the dish you broke cause you put it in the dishwasher wrong? nope. don’t think so.” “mm… but what if we keep it anyway?” “aww, you big baby, i always knew you were the sentimental type.”)

you run a hand through your hair, leaning back against the kitchen counter with a deep, heavy sigh.

slowly, the air trickles back into the room.

“let’s go swimming,” he says. and you look up, all sadness gone and replaced by confusion, but bokuto is smiling, a hopeful, indulgent sort of thing.

“what, right now?” you blink at him. he rocks on the balls of his feet.

“yeah. right now.”

for a second, you narrow your eyes, for a second, you wonder what this might be about. but years with bokuto has taught you that there are moments where you don’t ask why or when or how. it is only the who that matters — and it has always been him.

the pool is closed but bokuto manages to find the key tucked in the gym manager’s drawer and you bite back an exasperated sigh as he unlocks the door and lets you both in. there’s a triumphant smile on his lips and you can’t help but laugh. when he cannonballs into the water, whooping out in joy, you stand by the poolside and watch him — and for a second everything is fine. for second, everything is forgotten — all the big fights, all the long nights, all the things neither of you really meant to say — washed away by the chlorine-scented water dripping down the length of his spine.

“c’mon! come in! the water’s great!”

bokuto motions for you to join him, and you only hesitate for a second before pulling off your shirt and slipping into the cool, temperature controlled water. you let yourself sink beneath the surface and you feel the world above you slip away.

you open your eyes to find bokuto there, right in front of you, his eyes just as wide open as yours. his lips are moving, bubbles streaming from his mouth as he speaks but you shake your head, feeling the laughter curling up within you.

“b-bokuto — i can’t hear anything you’re saying!”

you break the surface and reach out to pull him up. but he only shakes his head and drags you under again. you shake your head too, about to break away when you see him mouthing the words —

i’m sorry.

don’t leave me.

you still, and for a moment, you both hang there, suspended by the weight of water, the sheer lack of air. and for once, bokuto is thankful for it.

(”i — i’m not that sentimental! i just… i like holding onto broken things, sometimes.” “bokuto… but… we can just get a new dish —” “no, like… i just think… that it’s worth a try is all.”)

this time, when you break the surface, bokuto comes up with you, gasping for air like a drowning man. he takes you by the arms and shakes you, ever so slightly. water droplets cling to his hair like gemstones, glittering in the refracted blue lights.

“we — we’re not broken,” he says, his voice a bit waterlogged, his chest heaving like some great beached whale, fighting for every breath, for every word.

you purse your lips, a wave of something cresting inside your chest.

he gives you another shake.

“and… and even if we are…” he gulps, “i — i think we’re worth fixing.”

you let out a tiny sob, the hot prickling behind your eyes bursting out in a maelstrom of salt and water and bokuto holds you at arm’s length and lets you cry. he lets you scream and struggle and tell him all the things you’d never have told him otherwise.

he takes it the best he can. he weathers the storm. he waits it out like a patient beach, knowing that eventually, the tide will recede. that eventually, even a hurricane will blow through it’s course.

“i’m sorry,” he says, finally, when you’ve cried yourself out, still hiccupping with his hands on either side of your arms, both your fingers pruning in the water.

“y-you better be.”

bokuto laughs, nodding, finally pulling you in for a kiss.

“i am… and… i’m sorry that i’m so bad at apologizing.”

you let out a watery laugh and make a half-hearted attempt to splash him.

“as long as you don’t make a habit of breaking into the gym pool at midnight just to say sorry.”

“i dunno, it’s kinda nice though, isn’t it?”

“what, a midnight dip? i guess it is…”

for a moment, the both of you are quiet. and you both know this isn’t the end, that there are still words to be said, new curtains to buy, old dishes to mend.

“hey, wanna try something?” bokuto’s voice is hopeful, but as you turn to look at him, you allow yourself another smile. because isn’t this what you fell in love with in the first place? the highs and the lows, the sunlight days and the stormy nights.

“sure, what do you wanna try?”

bokuto points at the diving board hanging over the deep end of the pool with a wide, wayward grin.

you hike your eyebrows.

“c’mon! try it! i’ll catch you!”

trust me.

you hesitate for a moment longer before swimming to the edge and heaving yourself out of the water. bokuto whoops as you walk onto the diving board and look over the edge.

he opens his arms and waits for you.

you take a breath, and —

you jump.

[stevethehairington]

kinda obsessed with mustache eddie okay

[strangefellows]

excuse me for a moment while i go on a little rant about my limbus theory under a cut (and untagged because fandom scares me) bc i went on this rant earlier to a friend i want to post it

So one of the biggest complaints I've seen people have with the Dante-is-Ayin theory is that it's "bad writing to repeat the twist from the first game" and objectively, yes, but that's not what they're doing at ALL and I've said it before and I'll say it until I'm blue in the face. It's actually giving Ayin a chance to be a character with agency, and give him closure/a real ending.

Like. Okay. In Lobcorp. he has NO actual dialogue beyond player choices sometimes - which we know doesn't count thanks to games like Persona who have similar arguments about their PCs - and we never see his face until the very last Day of the game....and it's not even really 'him' it's basically his shadow talking to him! And even the flashbacks are almost certainly narrated by that shadow rather than the X/A we're playing as. Not to mention the amnesia for the first half of the game; and even after he remembers they call him A rather than X -- and we don't even get his full name until the very last lines of the game.

And let's be real here, I think it's very telling of his lack of agency that the last lines are "Your name is Ayin. Now close your eyes and fade away."

As he disappears into the Light he just spent the entire game generating.

Left on its own, and especially with the entirety of Ruina giving Angela closure and a place to overcome her trauma and issues, it's grievously unfair.

When half the plot of the game is Ayin helping save and guide the people in hell with him into closure and moving forward-- what does he get? Someone else telling him to fade away his role is over bye.

He doesn't get to get that closure and forgiveness and chance to move on that Angela does! He spends the whole game acting on someone else's last wish, someone else's dream, trying to save the people he'd condemned to hell and make up for his actions, and then he doesn't get to be saved with them.

He has no voice, no face, barely a name. No agency -- everything he does in Lobcorp is because of Carmen's wishes. Everything we hear about him is from the perspective of other people, and incredibly biased; even the flashbacks aren't from the POV of the X/A we're playing as but the 'shadow' (mirror self? haha looks at yi sang) from Day 50.

And more than that -- we don't know Ayin outside of Carmen. We don't know anything about his life before he met her. We don't know who he is, what he likes, what he wanted, what he studied, what he did before her. Everything Ayin has been in this series so far is from the lens of someone else. (So any theory tying him to Demian - even if Demian isn't related to Enoch, which is still possible - can still apply; because we don't know him outside Carmen, there could very well be a tie from before then.)

So Dante's faceless, voiceless nature, how they're just kind of forced into the situation they're in and how they're slowly gaining their own agency and deciding on their own will what kind of person they are and what they want to do, from their own perspective, as they seek to regain their voice and face and Self...

It's perfect.

It's not "bad writing" at all. It's like that quote from George Lucas: “Again, it’s like poetry, so that they rhyme. Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one.” It's poetry.

A mirror of the first game, not a rehash of the same twist, a continuation of the story of the one character who never got his ending, who was never allowed to be a character, a person, who was never given his own choices on his own will, who was never given the opportunity for closure and moving on everyone else got. It's Ayin's chance for an ending, a real ending, one he's allowed to make with his own hands for himself. Face the sins and all that.

[Sits back with my 90+ page evidence document and sighs.]

[deeisace]

Mitchell Being-Human, flecked with his own blood, letting his messed-up one-night-stand-who-he-turned-into-a-vampire-and-(pardon the pun)-ghosted feed on him

[saltpepperbeard]

yes, but are you mentally ill and/or pirate-deprived enough to make gentlebeard in heroforge? 🫡

[bestworstcase]

i do think the key to how things will fall out regarding death on remnant is the jabberwalker, bc like

the brothers created death by creating him

the god of light, fearing they had disrupted the balance, tried to get rid of him. the god of darkness refused to countenance this, and they fought about it.

they leave the ever after. jabber remains, implying one of three possibilities: 1. dark ‘won’ the argument and both brothers agreed to let jabber live, 2. dark recreated jabber one last time in secret before they left, or 3. jabber came back later a la modern humans. given light’s general inflexibility my inclination is 2 or 3.

in any case the tree seems to accept jabber as part of the ever after and the presence of his figurine on the blacksmith’s worktable implies that he will continue to exist in some form.

during the creation of remnant, the brothers agree that death will be permanent. their reasons are not yet fully clear, but light was the only one concerned about enforcing this rule; i think it is almost certainly a rule that originated with the god of light.

“but balance cannot be restored by force or calculation; true balance finds its own equilibrium”

force = destroying jabber. calculation = creating a new world with permadeath.

—

the god of light conceives of balance as a fragile order that must be meticulously maintained or else fall apart: his purpose, as he sees it, is to maintain order. everything he does comes from this. he cannot tolerate change because he lives in abject fear of ‘disrupting the balance’ again—as he believes they have already done once, by creating jabber.

so there is a certain narrative equivalency being drawn here between removing jabber and making death permanent for remnant. both decisions are predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of what balance is.

thus the problem of death is not that it exists, per se. the problem is that death is the locus of light’s anxiety about change.

he first attempts to fix the ‘problem’ by getting rid of jabber, eliminating death. but he can’t, because dark won’t let him. so plan b is to leave the ever after and create a new world where death is part of the design—which isn’t contradictory at all if the intention is to prevent disruption of the existing order.

and something to keep in mind here is that 1. the cat and the jabberwalker were both deathless and unable to ascend, and 2. the brothers created death by mistake. for light these are crucial factors that must be accounted for in the new design. the only way to ensure that the disruptive introduction of death can never happen again is to include death from the start, transforming the accident into a deliberate choice.

which is all well and good except for one teeny, tiny wrinkle: for humans, death is not actually annihilative. they don’t simply cease to exist when they die.

i think it’s extremely likely that wasn’t supposed to happen. in a system where death is final and forever, spiritually immortal humans pose an obvious risk of disruption—and the ‘afterlife’ is evidently just permanent unconscious stasis, so it doesn’t seem like human souls were preserved for any purpose.

if your aim is to design an orderly system that can be maintained exactly as-is forever, and one of your core building blocks is that death is permanent, no exceptions, then why would you ever create beings capable of rising from the dead? you wouldn’t!

but once humans with immortal souls exist you’re sort of stuck with them, aren’t you? and i think that dilemma makes the most sense of why light’s afterlife is… like that. the souls of the dead ‘resting’ in everlasting oblivion in another realm that living humans cannot enter is the same in practice as annihilative death as long as every being capable of reaching the afterlife follows the stated rules.

the instant dark decides to make an exception, the whole system collapses. it reveals to salem that death isn’t inherently final or forever—that this is an arbitrary rule that the brothers decided, and one of them is open to the idea of changing those rules. then the gods make her immortal and light reprimands her for failing to understand how important his rules are (rules his brother just broke with no consequence except that light got mad), but ultimately what she learns is that the brothers are fallible and their rules can be changed. her rebellion is underpinned by this revelation.

the divine order suffers one small disruption and almost immediately, catastrophically fails, just as the god of light feared.

but that failure did not happen because of the disruption; the system failed because it was artificial. the brothers designed it a certain way and then light focused all of his efforts to keeping it that way, unchanging, forever—because their world wasn’t an ecosystem so much as it was a lawn in arizona. that lawn can only exist for as long as someone is doing the work to keep it on life support.

anyway the point i’m getting to is that remnant still isn’t in stable equilibrium, largely because of salem’s immortality and ozma’s reincarnations but also in the more general sense: the people of remnant are spiritually immortal but made to spend the vast majority of their existence essentially comatose because One God is afraid of change.

you can’t bring remnant into equilibrium by eliminating death: killing the jabberwalker isn’t the right answer. and you can’t restore balance by restoring the old system of divine rule and rigid adherence to the original design, because that system was a spindly papier-mâché machine that imploded the second somebody breathed on it wrong. and you can’t just yank the dead back to ameliorate your grief because that isn’t your choice to make, that’s an ethical position the narrative has made very clear.

which… really leaves changing the nature of the afterlife as the likeliest direction. death isn’t the problem, the afterlife of eternal stasis is. death isn’t the problem, light’s refusal to allow beings with immortal souls to keep going after their first life ends because the rules say death is final is the problem. because that finality is just… not reality. a person’s soul persists after death, ipso facto death isn’t the end.

but the reverse idea that death shouldn’t happen at all is not reality either. salem can’t die and her immortality is isolating and endlessly painful. ozma can’t stay dead and it’s eroded him down to a miserable shell of who he used to be. afterans choose to leave their memories behind when they ascend—nothing can happen to you in the tree except what you want to happen. without destruction, creation stagnates. death is part of life, not its enemy.

i doubt very much that the endgame here is for afteran ascension to be directly ported over into remnant—these are different worlds, different peoples, different systems, and while people from remnant can spiritually connect with the tree they are still fundamentally not part of it. afterans are emanations of the tree; humans and faunus are not. when afterans ascend they return to the roots of the tree and flow upward to blossom again from its crown, and that is, to put it mildly, not a system of reincarnation that physically makes sense for remnant, where things reproduce and have babies instead of new lives budding from the cosmic tree. if reincarnation brings equilibrium to remnant then it will presumably happen in a manner more natural to remnant’s people, and may not even involve passage through the tree at all.

it’s also not the only possibility: for example, there’s no reason that remnant’s afterlife has to be eternal sleep. it could just be… a new realm, a new world to live in after your life on remnant is ended. the brothers’ departure from the ever after into the boundless potential of the unknown is as likely a model as ascension. maybe remnant’s dead can’t return except by an act of god, but “gone from remnant forever” can coexist with the afterlife being… alive, as opposed to cold storage for inconveniently immortal souls.

basically the narrative setup isn’t toward rejecting death, it’s toward rejecting the state of affairs where you die and then millions of years later a god wakes you up and you have no awareness or memory of your existence since the moment of your death because you were kept unconscious until that god needed a servant. the point is that death isn’t the natural end of existence (because souls are immortal, on remnant as in the ever after) and remnant’s dead shouldn’t be held in stillness by light’s futile effort to make the facts of reality conform to his intended design.

the jabberwalker has existed for eons without bringing the ever after to ruin; the balance shifted, things changed a little, and life went on. remnant is existentially threatened by the factual reality of life-after-death only because light is so convinced of this danger that he is determined to prohibit it by any means necessary, including “demolish everything and start over from scratch.”

even a god can tilt at windmills.

[deus-ex-mona]

‼️reset the counter‼️ it has been ✨0✨ days since the last chizuutan content drop‼️