#*head in hands* god

[yonker-tonker]

nightbird has a theme of being used, like this is in most of her appearances. Examples: getting kidnapped and used as a tool in her debut. the mass production in legends for profit. exploited employee in cyberverse. under unicron's thumb in rotb.

[hanakihan]

sometimes I’m sad how SVSSS did Shen Jiu dirty considering he was such a perfect villain bitch that had understandable background but it absolutely didn’t excuse his behavior, truly a man who could’ve looked at life form different angle when given a second chance

and then apparently he gets yeeted out of his own body without any information on whatever the fuck he’s even existing anymore

like yea i like SVSSS but dear god Shen Jiu was a fucking golden mine and the way he oh so conveniently got yeeted out of story makes me fucking sad

[hinamie]

10 years later

[nidbaesenpai]

Happy one year anniversary ISAT! To celebrate I wanted to share the lil strips I made for my friends when they reached the end of the game! They're all meant to be snippets of life post game and a glimpse into the world I'm making for Loop.

[glitter-stained]

Prompt:

After Red Hood stopped killing and someone leaked footage hinting that he's the second Robin, he expected to fight for every morsel of territory, for everybody to desert him and the murder attempts to triple.

And, well. It's not like he doesn't find himself in a rigged warehouse on Monday, walking off that one explosion with singes on his back. It's not like on Wednesday, a bullet pierces through a hole in his armour and he's losing half his blood in an alley. And sure, someone takes advantage of him throwing his helmet away on Friday (he was out of grenades and needed a bigger bomb) to fear gass him, but it's fine, he can function normally under fear gass nowadays.

Except. Except nobody deserts him. By Monday, the attempts have completely stopped. He walks into a meeting with his men and sees his goons' hands won't stop shaking, and even his lieutenant won't look him in the eyes.

Jason is confused, and so are the other bats, but soon the rumours reach their ears: you can't go after the Red Hood, because no matter what you do, once you've targeted him it's over, like a dog with a bone, he'll get you eventually- no matter how you shoot or how many explosives you use. It doesn't matter that the Red Hood doesn't kill, because the Red Hood doesn't die.

[paper-lilypie]

so Oswald’s dad totally isn’t the FNAF 4 Freddy mask bully right. right?

[luv4lain]

really fast quixote

[bisexualcroissant]

andrew helping neil shower was so tender i’m crying into my fucking fist. andrew wrapping up neil’s wounds so they wouldn’t hurt in the water. andrew helping him take his clothes off to shower because it caused neil too much pain to pull them all the way off. andrew washing neil’s hair. andrew helping him stand up when he was struggling to balance. and then neil crossing his arms behind andrew’s head to keep him closer, tilting andrew’s face up to kiss him. i’m so fucking soft for them oh my god

[myrkulitescourge]

the way that one line from the new epilogue in an astarion romance is going to HAUNT me

just. what a profoundly intense thing to confess to someone.

like, just these six months of newfound happiness with you exerts a force on his heart equal and in direct opposition to two centuries of endless torment, the gnawing hunger and exploitation. this flashbulb-bright fraction of his long life holds the same gravity to him as years upon years of darkness and suffering.

in all likelihood, he hasn’t even known his lover for as long as his worst memory lasted, that year sealed away to go mad from starvation and sensory deprivation, yet he still tells them this brief time has been so fundamentally and powerfully important that the weight of even that unimaginable hell is vanishingly small compared to this present he has now and the future ahead of them both.

how am i supposed to act normal about this.

[zaahvi]

dark grows the sun, and in summer soon come mighty storms...

[wishchip106]

i’ve been using my brain more than its used to

gonna think about gay mutant road trip hope my brain doesn’t explode

[rotruff]

wising you a very sleeping on your f/os chest so you can hear their hearbeat or vice versa. wishing you a very instinctively moving towards one another and pulling eachother close and holding on tighter in sleep. wishing you a very one quietly talking to the other who's spouting off sleeptalk-nonsense in loose responses. wishing you a very ignoring blankets in favor of eachothers warmth. wishing you a very kisses to the crown of the forehead and the cheek and the collarbone and the shoulder and the crook of the jaw right where it meets the neck. ok?

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[hinamie]

new official illust of them with puppies healed something in me

[steampoweredwerehog]

When Gina graduated with accolades and got her dream job, she never knew her assignment would be so…alive.

A bunch of scientists scooped some weird spaghetti out of a dead god and turned it into a computer. Is that good? Hard to say if this is bad or good.

Tethis uses it/its btw

[lotus-pear]

soukoku shippers name ONE (1) song that ISNT partners in crime by set it off that accurately characterizes their dynamic challenge‼️‼️‼️ (IMPOSSIBLE)