#(Seriously why is this so real?)

[juney-blues]

there is, famously, a huge amount of social pressure on gnc cis people to transition. society just wants more trans people, trans women especially. this is a real and serious problem. there are just too many trans women making egg jokes. we have to protect the poor cis people from being compared to us (which is clearly and self evidently a horrible thing to do clearly)

[temeyes]

simon riley, ang panget mo talaga (affectionate)

[malamilkbeats]

Silly animation:

Let him be your boyfriend

No Edgars got hurt in the making of this video

[jinikaris]

/ᐠ > ˕ マ Ⳋ birthday cat ⟢ 2024 birthday stream

[pepstarvanmoon]

Someone please get El out of there

Is it not obvious what this is? Do you really not know what you should be doing? SAY THE DAMN WORDS.

Why do you think she’s doubting you? Can you really not tell?

Mike, sweetheart, your relationship balancing skills are a terror to your friends, family, and romantic partners.

This is why people found Midleven cuter in S1/2, because the day you made it official marked the beginning of El’s doubts in your feelings for her.

You cannot seem to grasp that El is your friend AND your girlfriend, and somehow treating El like a girlfriend equates to treating her like shit.

You cannot make this up. El needs WORDS because Mike’s ACTIONS actively make her feel unloved. She does not feel it, so she wants some kind of verbal/written affirmation because of how emotionally distant Mike feels.

(someone talented please edit Elmike to Hamilton’s Burn or send an existing edit my way, thank you ♡)

His actions do not align to her expectations of love, not that it’s a good idea to let TV define romance for you, but you’re allowed to want/expect certain things in a relationship, and El isn’t getting that.

And let’s not act like Mike isn’t good at making people feel loved/cared for. Will is in love with him for a reason. El loves him for a reason.

(It was difficult to pick scenes for this because I’ve read arguments for how these aren’t really romantic at all, but from 12/13-year old, “fresh out the lab” Eleven, it’s as romantic as romance gets imo)

El has been trying to convince herself that their relationship is better than it is, because once she admits to herself that it’s not working, what does she do?

Her day-to-day life isn’t that great. Sure, she has her new family in the Byers, but her dad recently passed away and she’s being bullied at school. She has no friends outside of Will, and while I’m sure their relationship is great (wasn’t explored that much tbh), he can’t keep her from feeling isolated, and his own trauma with bullying keeps him from standing up for her.

One good, unchanging thing she has is her relationship with Mike. He’s the one who took her in and housed her, he taught her what it meant to be a friend, and… I’m having a bit of trouble here lol. I was going to say:

Never used her for her powers (not true lol)

When she was burnt out, he never expected more from her (not true LOL)

Never treated her differently for her powers (for this one, he found her awesome in an awestruck way rather than a Brenner “I’m gonna exploit this” way, but when he thought she lied about Will/hurt Lucas he was on her ass lmao)

My girl has those ‘first love’ blinders on. I keep having to ask myself what she sees in him besides ‘first person to accept me + we kissed’ like besides the latter, Dustin was right there. A lot of the parts of Mike I enjoy don’t reveal themselves around El outside S1 (barely S2). He’s shown as caring and protective, but he’s like that for all of his friends?? Especially when they’re in danger so idk what’s different. I’d have to peruse the milkvan tag to get a hint, but I’ll probably get a better idea watching Sleeping Beauty.

I’m a firm believer that Mike kept it ambiguous because he didn’t want to admit what the real problem was to Will.

“I couldn’t tell El that I love her.” - simple as that. Must be something about Will that has him holding his tongue because after S3 I doubt he’d have that much trouble telling Lucas.

Are you embarrassed? If you thought it wasn’t that serious you wouldn’t have told Will that it was something you “can’t come back from”. Is love serious to you, Mike? Because you can’t love El in the way she wants, do you think you’re incapable of it? Do you feel wrong? Do you not want Will to know?

Hit a little too close to home, huh.

(and let’s not get into the "team, friends, best friends" scene they had together like what was the point in having them make contact a SECOND time.

They already established a connection between them. Mike could’ve asked to be a team after the "guess it's gonna be up to us again," and Will could’ve taken the painting offscreen (the focus shot of Will grabbing the painting gets me so bad like WHY), but instead they wanted them to blush and giggle over each other AGAIN before they got to the van.

Make it make non-Byler sense I'm begging.)

You’d think that’d be good enough, but Mike still feels conflicted and has to make it Will’s problem (actually, Will kinda made it his problem. The way they shot the triple take makes it seem like Will dragged Mike away for another talk because of how spacey he was being. Who knows.)

Tf do you mean you didn’t know what to say? “Maybe if I said that thing” so you DO know? It’s painfully cut and dry if you take emotions out of it. El wants Mike to say that he loves her, so to fix this, to come back from that fight, Mike has to say he loves her.

Why is it such an internal battle for him? If I were to take it at face value, I’d chalk it up to what he said in the van scene.

So your solution is to push your relationship to a point that has El crying and throwing all the loveless letters you sent to the floor? To tell her that she’s incredible and a superhero and that she should know how you feel about her because, despite the tears streaming down her face and her DIRECTLY asking you if you still love her, she must know how amazing she is too?

NEWSFLASH, Queerler! She’s learning just how much she doesn’t need you right now, so I guess it’s time to face your fears!

This isn’t what I meant, but go off ig (don’t, actually, this is awful for everyone involved).

No way you expect El to buy this. You’ve expressed this fear of "losing El" to Will, I’ll give you that, but nothing you’ve done IN FRONT OF EL has conveyed this. Your letters weren’t helping, and you being there in person only made it worse.

Eagerly awaiting the day Michael Wheeler stops lying.

Well, I guess he doesn’t lie ALL the time.

[socksracoon10]

"What app are you addicted to?" every other driver: tiktok, snapchat, instagram, etc. Carlos Sainz Jr. : THE WEATHER APP!!!!

[starrieisdelusional]

i love how kh fandom in collectively agrees that the six hour riku is gay video is the best….riku is gay video

[invinciblerodent]

See, the Treviso vs Minrathous choice would be cool! It's a good choice on paper, but it's executed... not so great (the game's framing as "if you don't save this city it will have Political Consequences vs if you don't save that city All The Civilians Who Can't Flee Will Die because the whole water supply will get blighted" when you have to make your choice is kind of ass, as a baseline) and then it gets further undermined when the final battle is in Minrathous so the city gets fucked up and the venatori mostly take it over in the chaos anyway because Rook gets stuck in Fade jail for several weeks. It turns the decision into "do I want to blight one city or both?" on a second playthrough which does, indeed, have a 'morally right' answer.

And that's the problem with this 'complex and interesting moral question'. This is why people are unhappy with it. Because it completely fails to stick the landing.

See, this is nothing against you, but I knew I was going to get messages like this, even before I would have hit "post".

I'm not saying that either decision is "right". That's the point of it all, that there is no "right" answer, and arguments can be (and are, within the game) raised in favor of both. That's what it's supposed to be about, that from Rook's point of view (as a character, not your point of view, as the player), there are good, significant reasons to save both, but they can only aid one, because they are only one person. It's meant to make your character feel small, and to highlight the enormity of the foe that they are facing. Its purpose is to make Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain feel like they have all the tools to win the war, even when they lose a battle.

Now, ngl, I'm just going to straight up ignore the "oh Minrathous gets blighted in the endgame anyway so there's no point" line of reasoning altogether, because Rook has no way of knowing that. That's metagaming, and if that's the way you want to play your game, you're obviously welcome to do so, it's no skin off my back, do whatever you want forever... but characters in linear stories should, theoretically, only be capable of acting within the confines of their narrative. If we want to actually talk about the ramifications of certain decisions, it doesn't make sense to me to act as if a character should have the ability to make a decision based on information that they have no way of having. I don't think that's productive to the conversation.

(plus, I would argue that adding that as a potential regret, the knowledge that them dooming Treviso ultimately didn't accomplish nearly as much as they thought it would, is far more compelling from a character- and a storytelling point of view, than going into it all with the intention of making All The Right Choices, with Rook secure in the knowledge that at least they are going to be proven "right" by posterity. That does far less for me, personally. I think your Rook is allowed, even encouraged, to have complex, contradictory feelings about the decisions they make.)

Second of all, for three games now, we have been told that Tevinter and the constant, decades-long war they have been engaged in with the Qunari is the only thing that stands in the way of the Qunari expansion towards Orlais, Nevarra, the Marches- there is a reason the occupation starts in Rivain and Antiva, the coastal regions of the mainland furthest from the Imperium.

For two games, we have known that the Venatori (due to many of them being old money, old blood, powerful magisters) have infiltrated the highest ranks within the Magisterium, that they are cunning and dangerous and lying in wait, and that they pull the strings from many directions, with not much besides a handful of Magisters (Dorian and Maevaris included), the Shadow Dragons, and the Archon (who, if the Inquisitor kept Radonis in power, is not only an ally to the Inquisition, but also vocally opposed Corypheus, and, by proxy, the Venatori) to stand in their way.

Yes, there are always many civilian lives at stake. Yes, Treviso is devastated in the attack and its aftermath (physically to a much more extensive degree than Minrathous), and yes, the immediate threat of the dragon causes more obvious destruction there- blighting the canals, causing a staggering loss of life, all of these effects will stretch far into the future.

But in Minrathous, the dragon is not the focal point. It's a distraction.

In Minrathous, the dragon is there to create chaos, to rampage and destroy all it can in order to sow discord and divert protection away from the Archon's palace (notably the place with the cannons that it very well can't turn onto itself), so that the Venatori can break through the Archon's guard, and successfully pull off a bloody coup that then puts them unequivocally in control of the capital city of one of the most powerful and influential countries of Thedas: military, magic, power all together.

And while saving Minrathous at that moment doesn't result in the city being perfectly peaceful, all fine, great and dandy, the Archon still dies as a result of the attack, it does at least ensure that their defenses are not stretched too thin, fighting on two different fronts at the same time. As a consequence of that, it ensures that the Black Divine, one of the pivotal people standing in the way of the Venatori expansion, doesn't contract the Blight. It stops members of the abolitionist group that's known- and respected for standing up for the needs of the disenfranchised and oppressed from being openly decimated, and strung up in the streets like Christmas lights.

It stops the Venatori, who then have next to no one to oppose them, from doing damn near irreparable damage, and tossing all the political progress of the last decade into the nearest shitter to catapult Tevinter back to times when nobody bat an eye to the rich and powerful using people as furniture.

(And, though this is pure speculation, this can be disregarded, however fractured the Antaam is, however many of their forces they have diverted towards Rivain and Antiva, I don't think it's such a stretch of the imagination to say that it'll likely only take them time to realize that with their allies now in control of Minrathous, they have an open avenue through Tevinter to enter Orlais, seize Val Royeaux, seize the Marches city by city, and force the Blight-ravaged south to fight on two fronts at the same time.)

I don't think any of these are things that I'm pulling out of my ass, or something that Rook isn't made aware of. Neve doesn't hammer it home quite so clearly, she also doesn't have the gift of foresight, but in the blind panic that she is communicating in that moment, she does say that her primary concern is the Venatori coup, and the player has been introduced to the Shadow Dragons and told of their significance before that, even without the context that Inquisition, Trespasser, and the comics provide. We've met the Viper, we've met Maevaris, we've met Dorian- we've talked to all of them, and we know what they're up against.

It's not an easy decision, and it's not meant to be one, or one you're meant to think about as "well you're either siding with X and are right, or with Y and you're wrong". This is not the mage uprising, where the choice falls flat because one side's point of view is "no genocide good", and the other's is "church-sanctioned genocide good".

I think that this choice is a relatively early game decision that is meant to make you think about whether your Rook, right then and there within their arc in the story, is the kind of person who would do anything to save even one civilian life even if politically it's devastating, the kind of person to think about the big picture and consider all the political ramifications even if it means a sacrifice of lives- or, alternatively, the kind of person who would do anything for a place that they call home, even if it means dooming another and letting down their friend.

You say that it fails to stick the landing. But that's very easy to say if you are the one yanking the mat from under its feet.

[autisticandroids]

FAMINE: That's one deep, dark nothing you've got there, Dean.

[youtube with closed captions]

dean and his father. dean and his family. dean and how bad it is.

(via @closetoyou1970)

[verityasian]

I'm sorry but why is my JJ Maybank ai so dirty? Also am I the only one that thinks the filter's gotten weak lately? Not that I'm complaining🫣

[uncanny-tranny]

I know for a fact I've talked about the golden records, but I don't care because here is a sample of some of my favourite greetings on those discs

There is something so vulnerable, precious, and human about sending up pieces of our hearts into space. Even when we know that there may not be anybody out there to hear us, we are still whispering to whomever might listen how much we love them, how much we want to connect. No matter how small the chance is, we're taking it to say that love is real, that we are real.

How is that not something to be in awe over?

[lizzybeeee]

Inquisitor: "Is there any way Solas can be reasoned with?"

Me after Solas has killed Varric, used blood magic on me, trapped me in the fade, created the blight, made the titans tranquil/fucked with the dwarves, started the chain of events that led to Southern Thedas being destroyed, and stealing all my good gear from Inquisition:

[storywestistrash]

watched mouthwashing finally. the fact that i saw people be more aggressive towards curly than jimmy is kinda strange. kinda real weird

[maesonc-artistic-adventures]

I’ve been scrolling through some of the Linked Universe tags the past few days and every so often I’ve come across your art, mostly of Warriors and Time and I just wanted to say I absolutely love it! Your art style is really cool and I love the way you colour the pieces you draw, it’s very nice! I hope you’re having an excellent day!

Thank you so much!! I’ve had so much fun drawing Warrior and Time shenanigans and it’s really helped push my art wrt character interactions

I’m so glad you’re enjoying it! 🥰🥰🥰

.

Time: So, what’s going on here?

Warriors: Not sure, but it definitely seems like something you should deal with.

[anoant-haikyuu-dump]

First time drawing them vs recent time

[commandertartarsmoocher]

On this Friday I present to you:

a small batch of today's doodles !