#BUT HE IS!

[fearsomeandwretched]

I know max is so sick of me in his ear like my wittle babyyyy lol

[sjofn-lofnsdottr]

What's a situation that you've always wanted to write and/or rp Dusk in? Alternatively, what are some more common topics you like to write for him?

Hmm hmm hmm.

For general context: I only really write about Dusk in a non-fic sort of way (like the nonsense I ramble here when provoked). It's kind of a mess, I don't think very highly of my, er, skills on the writing front. But I enjoy it, so who cares? I also RP him with one other person (@petitfarron <3) and it's been also a lot of fun, but boy does everyone speak a lot more casually in that version of Eorzea. :P

Anyway! You'd think I'd have a ready answer for this, but I am a very, er, spontaneous sort of writer. Thinking about it, though, while I've RP'd Dusk explaining the dark knight quest line to someone (which was fun!), I think I'd like to write out how he experienced those firsthand some day. I'd also like to write more stuff about his pre-Calamity life. I really enjoy the 1.0 lore, and love finding things from it to mix into his background.

As for what I enjoy making a habit of writing for him, a glance through my history indicates I love ~fluff~. He's a loving, affectionate man and I enjoy putting him in situations that make it obvious.

I'm also horrible, though, so I also like putting him in Situations, although when I do it's with confidence he'll come out the other side with a stronger sense of who he is and what he wants to be. He doesn't always cope perfectly, or even well, but by and large I like that he's pretty much Okay, in spite of everything so far. It might just take a while to work through his feelings on certain things, like his wrestling with his relationship with Halone post-Heavensward, or dealing with how the end of Endwalker left him feeling.

Thank you for the ask!

[flashbic]

@fritz-valentine i did it i answered the ask game for the other two!!

2. Favorite canon thing about this character

Cartouche: One bit the show doesn’t lean into enough imo but it's there is that he’s overconfident! Dude is self-assured to a fault! He can make an effort to plan things sometimes, but usually he doesn’t like to bother unless he made a first attempt beforehand and fucked up. He runs into fights unarmed all the damn time! also the bit from the first ep where he’s being smug at Galichon like “of COURSE this is the door to the exit, I trust my instinct on this one, I just KNOW” and they open the door and it’s like. the guards break room asdfgk it’s funny ok

also his whole deal with Isabelle!! His dumb crush is showing at all times, he’s not as smooth as he thinks he is, i just think he’s cute heehee

Falconi: MY BOY HAS ANGER ISSUES. It's so funny how he's presented as the cold, quiet, calculating bad guy… but actually he's fucking seething all the time. He's got that anger always bubbling up right under the surface, and not only is he massively pissed off, it makes him so fucking stupid too, it's great. 

I love his sad backstory, but also love that the whole thing happened over 10 years ago and it doesn't excuse any of the shitty things he does through the show, like, at all, except for the multiple murder attempts on le Lorrain. 

(also the fact that they had to nerf him for the hero-villain team-up episode is never not funny)

12. What's a headcanon you have for this character?

Cartouche : He argues with Isabelle when she calls him a bandit, but look, the guy didn't learn to commit crimes by being nice and never breaking the law, right?? My headcanon is he used to be a whole lot less nice, but ended up being swayed into helping people as the situation in Paris kept getting worse. He’s a good dude in the end, but he did grow up on the streets with no one to rely on! You can’t blame a guy for enjoying a bit of crime, i think… 

He is very good at card games, and actually taught himself how to count cards! He used to gamble a lot but has generally put that all behind him these days and only plays for fun with his friends. Without cheating, for the most part. Honestly he's infuriating at most luck-based games.

Absolutely thinks of his friends as his family. He'd do anything for them <3 But out of all of them, le Lorrain is the one he most consistently on the same wavelength with. Le Lorrain is the one who joined the gang most recently, but as far as Cartouche is concerned that doesn't matter at all: they just get each other!

Falconi: When he first arrived at the academy, for a brief moment he really thought he’d be able to fit in with the other students and kinda hoped to make friends! When the whole friends thing didn’t pan out (the most popular guy around and his friends deciding they don’t like you will kinda do that, but he struggled to connect with people who weren’t hostile too), he kinda gave up on that to focus on training, which had always been the most important thing to him anyways.

My other headcanon here that kinda ties with the previous one is that there was never any real possibility of him ever marrying Anne de Montsirac, but he genuinely let himself believe it might happen. He was lonely and didn’t know how to fit in with all these rich people, and she was gentle and kind and pretty, and he fell so hard for her… She did like him back, but her feelings didn’t run as deep as his, and in the end her family never would’ve let any kind of proposal happen anyways. It was never going to happen, but everything went so badly that Falconi never quite stopped convincing himself that everything could've been different if he'd been able to propose first.

The bonus Falconi headcanon is he absolutely has a hands kink. He just does.

[marvelsmostwanted]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[stealingpotatoes]

it’s eunuch Tucker’s adoptiversary and defacto birthday today <3

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

now that trump has tiktok, twitter, facebook and insta in his pocket, get ready for a massive wave of internet censorship. one of trump's greatest weapons has always been misinformation; it's going to become harder and harder to spread facts and criticism going forward. posts that aren't made invisible will be magically ignored by the algorithm. dissidents will have their accounts deleted and voices erased.

this is a suppression tactic. this is another stage of fascism.

[fairysbrew]

not to be a dirty commie or anything but i don't think any one person should have enough money to solve world hunger and then get to decide not to

[mylittleredgirl]

mercy seems like a long shot here, so my prayer for inauguration day 2025: may they be incompetent. may they just be really bad at implementation. may their egos choke their effectiveness. may they drown themselves week by week with infighting and selfish posturing. may they be easily distracted. may the very governors and senators and agencies and religious leaders that the new administration expects to be friendly force endless stalemates to preserve their own power. may every delay turn into a three ring blame circus so chaotic that no one remembers what they were doing. may the good and necessary parts of government be too boring to draw attention and keep running quietly in the background. may the next four years be full of sound and fury and signify nothing.

[gongyussy]

good thing from jp twitter this week is queen of old man yaoi michiru sonoo discovering the term old man yaoi

update: somehow it got impossibly more wholesome

quick translation: おかえり: welcome home あ 終わった 終わった: ahhh, it's over! it's done! コーヒー? お茶?: coffee? tea? コ~ヒ~ ありがと: coffee, thank you~ ネクタイレア★★ ネクタイ取るレア★★★★: seeing him with a tie on, rarity level ★★, seeing him take a tie off, rarity level ★★★★ にあうな~: it suits him~

also please do follow: AraigumaSha: sensei's twitter account marureviere: maru, who does such valuable work highlighting bl manga for an international audience

[smoliboops]

[casualfoxwitch]

[twinliches]

the city where we live doesn't allow public barbecues so my brother fucking welded a grill to a handcart and now hosts "chill and grill sessions" where he sends all his friends his live location so they can hunt him down on their bikes with sausages in their backpacks while he carts it around evading the police like some sort of barbecue vigilante, grilling on the run. i have never been prouder of him

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

fyi if you're trying to use the fact that that rancid ass muskrat cunt is autistic to be like "oh he didn't know what he did was wrong" about the fact that he threw up a fucking nazi salute then you are one of the stupidest fucking cunts to walk the earth and since we're in a housing crisis you should start offering the massive amount of empty fucking space in your skull for rent

(signed, an autistic person)

[wolfythewitch]

jesus in the hades art style

[scramratz]