#And who was I to refuse! LMFAO

[lunalycana]

👗 and Infinite?

👗: draw a character in a sundress

Just an average beach trip! 😊💕

[gingermintpepper]

I would love to hear you talk about Kassandra???

So, what can I say about Kassandra.

Well, firstly, I've been thinking about how I want to answer this question since I got it however many months ago and I figured I wanted to speak about my own interpretation of things rather than formal stuff - half because I don't want to cite anything since going through Iliad based papers brings me little joy and half because I figure I could treat it a bit more casually this way. So here's like, a very brief selection of thoughts I have about Kassandra, Saintess of Troy.

I view her tale as a microcosm of the wider tale of the Fall of Troy from Apollo's perspective. A human is given a choice and, of their own free-will, they make the most destructive decision ignorant of the way they're sealing their own fate and no matter how much their patron will want to save and help them, they will be unable to so much as lift a meaningful finger because the choice made is one that is sealed in Fate and powers far beyond any one god. The themes of doomed love are also shared; Kassandra loved Apollo just as Apollo loved her but she couldn't be what he wanted of her. She couldn't accept what it was he was offering, no matter how much power, honour and love he tried to tempt her with and in a lot of ways, I think of her devastating visions of doom and death(tm) as a physical parallel to the feelings Helen must be tormented with knowing that she will be cited as the reason of such mass death, destruction and violence. Likewise, I see Apollo's inability to save Kassandra up until the end as representative of his wider inability to save Troy. All his love and blessing were not enough, even though all she had to do was take his hand, it simply wasn't meant to be and so I imagine that must be a fresh hurt for him with each beloved mortal he loses during the campaign.

Kassandra is genuinely so interesting? Both as a character and as a narrative idea; she sits almost in the center of so many fascinating parallels and foils that it gets me so excited whenever she comes up in conversation! I've mentioned it briefly before but she forms a very neat triad with Iphigenia and Troilus which runs parallel to the three dominant male powers in Iliad - Agamemnon, Achilles and Apollo. They're what I somewhat refer to as the sacrifice trio, innocents who must ultimately be abandoned and stripped away for the sake of the desire of their sacrificer, in turn revealing something intrinsic about the nature of the man. For Iphigenia, she reveals that Agamemnon truly values his ambition over all, that his image and status as a leader is more meaningful to him than the love of his family (which, of course, dooms him in the end). Likewise, for Achilles, Troilus' sacrifice reveals that no matter the glamour or glory that crowns Achilles' head, his rage is ultimately his most powerful feeling and it burns bright and hot no matter the circumstance, opponent or arena. For Apollo, Kassandra's sacrifice (which is much more symbolic as he is a god and therefore need not actually physically kill her) reveals his position as the 'loser', one who will be scorned and reviled and lose all the things he loves no matter how closely he cherishes or adorns them. He can't protect the mortals he's blessed, he can't protect his children - he can't even save one woman. She also has that aforementioned triad with Helen and Andromache - the sequestered women; doomed to wait and pray but each, in their own ways working to save and support their own in the conflict. They're all haunted by the promise of what awaits them - Andromache's hopes and future lies with Hector and with her son yet she is the embodiment of a war-wife, solid and stoic in her support when Hector returns but suffering deeply knowing each fight could be his last. Helen, of course, carries with her both the suffering of the greek women and the hatred of their men - if Andromache fears death taking the breath from her beloved fighters then Helen bears the weight of death upon her shoulders, all grief and scorn is bore like a crown upon her head and she must bear it. It is her duty to bear it. Kassandra then becomes the suffering of the young women - they who are surrounding on all sides by throngs of death and do not know why it has come, they whose screams intermix with that of the dead upon them. There is no avatar for Kassandra to experience the war through, no reason for her to be stoic or strong or upright. She tears her hair, hysterical at the suffering that is poured into her mind day in and day out, wild and unrestrained where her elders must hold their grief and tame it. In this way, she gives voice to the voiceless, she screams for those who cannot and is reviled for it - a young woman surrounded by death yet ordered not to speak a word of its stench or horror. There's many more things I can talk about too such as the whole Kassandra as Apollo's living Palladium thing or the Kassandra-Electra-Clytemnestra trio or even Chryseis as a reflection of Kassandra and how the taking of a priest's daughter could be seen as tantamount to trying to steal away Kassandra (and how this eventually wraps back around to the actual incident of Kassandra being stolen away and ending up right back under Agamemnon's care just as Chryseis before her) but like, we would be here all day.

Y'all maybe this is a hot take but scorned woman Kassandra is like, the most boring interpretation of her ever. She has so much life and passion in her, so much joy, so much despair, so much love - making her jaded and cynical towards both her fate and her god is such a slap in the face to me of what her character could and generally does seem to stand for. Kassandra never stopped loving Apollo - likewise, Apollo (at least to me) never abandoned her. All in Troy suffer heavy, cursed fates - Kassandra is one of the few who at least had some awareness of how hers would turn out. I like that she's a fighter. I like that she screams and cries and spits and is expressive and ugly in her torment and grief when so many of the women around her cannot afford to be. I like that she said no and despite how much she suffered for it, she never begged for her yolk to be taken from her because she knew that the choice she made was the right one for her. She's raw, she's vivid, she's human and more than anything, that's what I love so much about her.

[cobaltfluff]

happy crossover christmas to me !!! left: crossover / right: AU :3c

[mrmeepsmadmind]

neurotic carrier and his neurotic carbon copy son

' i'm SO glad ironhide is getting too dusty to function anymore. we won't have to deal with HIS crazy ass soon-'

the evil ironhide idolizing cliffjumper who's somehow even MORE violent than him:

father and daughter. mother and son.

Single old parent ironhide wants to get with single old parent optimus & optimus wants to get with him ! & theyre like this is gonna go great! Cliffjumper is getting along excellent with bumblebee! They're already best friends 😁😁!! cliffjumper hugs bee, secures their matching friendship bracelets bee made for him out of melted bullets (cliffs suggestuon) then stomps over to optimus, stares up at him, & says fuck you

[right-there-ride-on]

Sbr is only mildly morally ambiguous and that’s okay

okay so the title is misleading 🫣 this is just a short examination of Johnny v Valentine (and Johnny & Valentine) with a little analysis of the confrontation.

for me valentine’s defining character trait isn’t his patriotism but that’s he’s a massive fucking liar. excellent writing for a politician. the only promise he ever kept was the one he made to lucy not to harm steven. and even then valentine is also super vindictive, so even though he didn’t kill him he made sure to torture him a little. Valentine is not at all the magnanimous man he presents himself to be and the constant discrepancy between his words and his actions proves that. when he’s trying to trick johnny into ending the rotation he hits all correct appeals but johnny knows in his gut that this man is a liar.

sometimes ppl act like sbr proposes a huge moral quandary about valentine’s intentions and whether he was the one “walking the righteous path” all along. but there’s really not. that’s Johnny’s internal battle. Since nick’s death johnny believed himself to be a curse / burden / bad person, but through the race he undergoes several trials that end in self-improvement and learning to have grace with himself. by the end of the narrative Johnny has evolved into someone who does have the strength of character and integrity necessary to judge the actions of someone else, whether he believes it or not, and regardless of whether he feels the right to. So yes, johnny was right to kill valentine. there’s no ifs or buts about it. the true brutality and cruelty of Valentine’s ideal world was very clearly portrayed in the way D4C Love Train functions. the corpse appeared to ‘choose’ Valentine by granting him Love Train, but at the same time it was also healing Johnny. if we look at the corpse through the lens of it primarily being a tool used to achieve the collector’s desires, we see that it empowered both Valentine and Johnny and indirectly or not set them on a collision course with each other. Perhaps there was a question of who was ‘righteous’ for the corpse itself, but the narrative itself tells us over and over again that it’s Johnny.

look at it this way. Johnny, who for most of his life believed he was spiritually and later physically damaged beyond hope, was empowered through the corpse and ended the narrative with a new chance at life. Valentine, who desired a world where not just America would prosper, but where he would be the head of said prospering state, and embody the power behind it, was granted the ability to achieve that world. Yet during their confrontation, the callous cruelty and negative consequences of Valentine’s vision is made apparent over and over again. First with Lucy, then with the innocents killed ‘somewhere else’, and lastly with Gyro and Johnny. Valentine’s actions always betray the truth of his intentions; once he proposed the deal, should Johnny have accepted, he intended to backstab Johnny and kill him the moment he got what he wanted. If he had truly been the ‘righteous one’, he would have kept his word and left Johnny alone once the rotation was reversed. But leaving Johnny alive would have meant he was no longer the most powerful man in the room, and that idea is something Valentine can’t stand.

Valentine is not a good person with good intentions. He claims to care about America, yet throughout the story discards his men and citizens like bugs (consider the train engineer). His actions continually demonstrate the reality: Valentine is power-hungry, petty, vindictive, ruthless, and above all else, a manipulative liar.

Valentine’s patriotism is the motivation behind his actions, but his brutality and deceptiveness defines those actions and is evident in everything he does. The implicit reason Alt!Diego failed was because he believed Valentine. By the end of the story there shouldn’t be a question on whether Valentine or Johnny was in the right. Valentine was the villain and he needed to be defeated. His ‘righteous’ world was, unequivocally, wrong.

[meadow-mellow]

me, getting notifs on twitter: *baby's first time being harassed by unhinged Romys <3* Sure, go off, lol. *proceeds to draw Magneto eating Rogue out*

[pseudophan]

gonna be so sad when tonight is the first preshow space with good audio and i'm asleep because i have a psych appointment tomorrow

[fxnker]

my boy ! 💚 my friend ! ❤️

[pop-punklouis]

-

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

every now and then i remember the time a few years ago, when sdmi fandom first had its revival thanks to netflix, when a wildly popular sdmi blog run by an anti said the words 'perfectly good Black woman' in reference to why you should ship [man you could easily read as white, whose arc she was fridged for] with her instead of [hatesink character whose race is ambiguous due to being a furry, but has a BLISTERINGLY antiblack narrative under a thin layer of fantasy racism, with a fun side of homophobia and holocaust denial the latter of which is directly invoked in the post], which got hundreds of notes, and i grimace my face through the back of my head all over again lmao

[pigeonclaw]

the amount of times I have potentially controversial opinions that I type up and then save in my drafts forever because I still feel them but am too shy and afraid to choose violence in any way

[loptrcoptr]

Your “my god how out of touch am I” moment of the day is: I keep getting comments on this fic I’m writing that are like “worth waiting for the update”, “this was worth the wait” and I’m so confused because I have been posting chapters… every ten days at most? what wait, that’s a fast schedule, I thought! And the chapters are between 5k and 7k words each! Each! The fifth chapter is currently sitting pretty at 10 fucking k so I’ll probably have to split it in half…

But I’m dying over this I think it is wild lol. Do people not remember what it was like to have fics that updated every six months, if that, for nearly a decade? Is this something no one else remembers? Have we gotten so into instant gratification culture that waiting a week for 5 thousand words of fanfic is a long time?

This is all so wild to me so I guess I’ll go write another 5k about it lmfao

[thetrashthatsmilesback]

i watched a compilation of other youtubers complaining about DnP, and when the complaints weren't just "the phandom is annoying," they boiled down to:

DnP are both nice but are aloof/weird/insert other trait that makes talking to them at gatherings difficult.

Phil is nice but Dan's a Bitch who Doesn't Let Phil Talk To Other People (which... Phil is a grown ass man but okay. Maybe he just doesn't want to talk to you but whatever, sure.)

DnP are nice but they queerbait (ig now they're the ultimate queerbaiters since they own a house together lmfao)

DnP are nice but Phil is nicer and Dan is hotter (which,,, I honestly don't know why these clips were included but I'm going to take it as "They're both nice but Dan is more aloof" which is funny because that's a character trait he's said he has for years and as a fellow aloof bitch its very funny to me when people complain about it lmfaooooo)

I'm ngl, the amount of people who were in the compilation just because of the Phandom, or who's complaints boiled down to "DnP are both very nice but very awkward/aloof/stick to themselves" makes me think that they're generally nice and other people just don't understand that not everyone likes talking all the time lmfao

[deus-ex-mona]

such is the tale of a ✨chronically online hypocrite✨

[desperatecheesecubes]

You can really see how irritated Tim is that he isn’t doing his homework right now

[petruchio]

ok bonus tracks got a bit repetitive and i don’t rly have a grasp on any of the lyrics but now im going to sleep lmfao. but so far i liked thank you aimee, the black dog, imgonnagetyouback and so high school. im sure ill come back tomorrow