#But it really is quite the shame

[therealslimshady]

Hey guys, now that we are closer then ever to the Percy Jackson show coming out, can we all make the executive decision to use the tag #pjo tv whenever we're *explicitly* posting about the show?

Adaptations are always going to be different then their source material, and it would be a real shame to lose the original fandom in a sea of excited posting about the show. It sounds tragic, but it's what's inevitably going to happen unless we all decide on a tag now before the show comes out

(Here are some examples of how the tag could be used #pjo tv #pjo tv annabeth #pjo tv criticism #pjo tv s1ep4 #pjo tv spoilers . Etc etc. This would also mean NOT using the pjo tag for the show. That would solely be used for the books)

Anyways, can't wait for the show, and can't wait to see how the fandom booms even bigger! I just hope we're still able to keep something of what we have now in that future

[crimescrimson]

Albert Wesker in Resident Evil Remastered (2002)

[maniacalmole]

Wait is Revolutionary France Crowley doing the book cover pose

Are you telling me that he is making fun of the book cover pose and I never realized or noticed that in four YEARS

Are you telling ME that I have not seen a POST about this in four YEARS and I did not NOTICE

[ink-the-artist]

“Social media has made this generation so narcissistic and self centered everyone’s always posting selfies and posting about everything they do during the day” shut up. The human desire to show you exist and you were here is innate and we’ve been doing it since the days we were leaving hand prints on cave walls

[hideawayfairy]

Hellaverse G/t Appreciation Post

[midnottart]

Lorelei and Loki • it's a shame that these two never interacted with each other in the MCU. I like to think that Lorelei's magic does not work on Loki due to his feminine side and seiðr skills.

[amygdalae]

even my good dark urge characters always loot all the roast dwarf from the goblin camp and eat it all as healing items later

[skitskatdacat63]

Happy Birthday to Seb, and Seb only.

+ some explanations

I realized as I was making this, some of the little stuff probably only makes sense to me, and maybe people who have been following me for a while atp. So I wanted to explain some of the little details I included cause I really love them!!

First of all, I wanted to incude my original sketch for this(from like 5 hours ago lmfao), bcs I find it sooooo cute. Look at him!! Little guy!

I. Fernando's Gift

This is of course a reference to the Fernando teddy bear, but more specifically to the vettonso comic with the bear I drew a while ago. As you can see from my sketch, this is the first gift I came up, which I'm pretty happy about!! It's always so cute to me no matter its form. Though...I don't think teddy bears existed yet in the early 1700s, but Fernando found a way, okay? I like to think Fernando is all gruff in the beginning, but gives Seb this or something similar and remarks "to keep you company when I'm back in Spain," and then he has to pretend he has food poisoning rather than living with having said something so sappy.

II. Mark's Gift

I don't think this is really a reference to any specific post of mine. Dog!Mark is just an important Mark characterization in general, but especially in boy king au where he is really reduced to the status of dog by virtue of his upbringing and vocation. He definitely plays this off as wanting Seb to get another hunting dog(something he advocates for often. Seb knows it's entirely self motivated but loves to humor him bcs its cute to see how much he loves dogs. Well Seb loves dogs too, one dog in particular-)

III. Jenson's Gift

AAAAHHHH I'm so proud of this one bcs of how many leves there are to it!! I couldn't for the life of me think of what Jense would gift him but then I remembered I characterize him as horse obsessed(read: ye olde carfucker.) So this is basically the ye olde version of him getting Seb ultra detailed minatures of his cars. HOWEVER this is also a callback to one of my favorite posts I've ever made, back when I translated Seb's car names into Latin. So it was fun to actually get to canonize that in a way. ALSO! BTW! Those horses are specifically Lipizzans, which are a very iconic horse breed in the Habsburg Empire and Vienna specifically. A horse breed sought after by the Habsburgs for both war but also riding schools, and they still remain as the breed of horse trained in Vienna's Spanish Riding School today. The emperor Seb is based on comissioned the school's main riding hall, and his portrait still hangs above where the riders enter. So I thought that was a fun little easter egg to include!

Also the characterization in this is so funny. I guess I'd consider them a polycule, like they're a unit and all have interesting relationships between each other. But one of the main focuses is the kinda love triangle between sebmarknando. Like Mark and Fernando constantly fighting for Seb'cs undivided affection and attention. But as per usual, Jenson, who is on the sidelines, swoops in effortlessly with the most perfect gift ever. I feel like he understands and gets along with Seb the best out of the three, but just doesn't want to deal with such a complicated thing so he's satisfied being a bit distant(he secretly takes a lot of joy one-upping the other two. It's impossible to not crave your ruler's attention, no?)

[spearxwind]

Whole gang's here :]

[gingermintpepper]

I saw it in your tag game post that you're also fond of the Apollo-Heracles conflict 👀 for a myth that appears in only a couple of sources, it sure has a lot of presence in the vase paintings (no seriously, everytime I think I've seen the last of it, I find ten more)

SO do you have any favorites among the paintings that represent this story??

OMG OMG THIS ASK IS A GIFT. IT IS A GIFT THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR LETTING ME TALK ABOUT THIS

I also think it's extremely interesting that it's a story so popularly portrayed by vase paintings and in such a variety of ways!! It's certainly one of the stories that gets left out of written compilation of Heracles' legend a bit (which is a shame, I think it's a fantastic story) but Apollo had a very peculiar relationship with Heracles in general that I just kind of find amazing (and very, very funny).

Apollo is not a god with any legitimate grudge against Heracles, but he does argue with the mortal a bit like he argues with his favourite brothers 😂Part of why I love the story of Apollo and Heracles fighting over the tripod so much is that it is such a little brother thing for Heracles to be upset with the proclamation his elder brother has given him and so, he throws a great fit, taking up the chair and declaring that he'll just give himself a better prophecy! And Apollo, instead of being a marginally professional big brother, decides to fight him for it until their father has to break up their cat-fight. Like was that not just the plot of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes? Is this not exactly how Apollo treated Hermes when he was a child and now those two are inseparable? 💀

Because of this, my favourite vase paintings tend to be the ones that highlight the personal squabbling between Apollo and Heracles the most. There are some very elaborate ones that have the full host of them - Athena, Heracles, Apollo, Artemis, usually a dog and a doe, I've even seen a couple that had birds and plants etched on them, but the simplest ones that show Heracles about to bonk Apollo with his club out of frustration or depict Heracles nyooming away from Apollo while Apollo (presumably) yells curses about how he's going to fling Heracles head first into Tartarus for daring to take his things? Yeah, those are the premium big brother/little brother things I'm looking for.

(Photo. Marie-Lan Ngyuen)

(Photo. Museo Claudio Faina)

Also the one in the Theoi.com archives is a real classic - perfect energy.

[hysenty]

it is so disheartening seeing people being able to correctly identify and criticise the actions of russian invasion of ukraine and not be able to recognise/not giving the same scrutiny to the israeli genocide.

[dailyperkele]

(CW: explicit talk about internal anatomy/organs

Ough, I love so much when people interpret/draw Per'kele with his guts out. Man literally going around with his organs on show with just the peritoneum working overtime to keep them in place, just trusting that he got the strongest mesentery in town to keep his small intestine from pulling off a ratkin look- *chef kiss* Majestic.)

[batsplat]

Brno 2003: Sete Gibernau sprays champagne at race winner Valentino Rossi, who is holding up his ball and chain that symbolises how he is 'condemned to win'.

From Rossi's autobiography:

In the summer of 2003, HRC sent over new exhaust pipes. I chose not to use it, precisely because I was sick and tired of hearing that I had an edge over everybody else. But, partly because of the stress, partly because I was also in negotiations with Yamaha, Honda and Ducati, I was in far from perfect form. Sometimes I would lose concentration and make mistakes. When I famously missed that turn in Barcelona and ended up in the run-off area, it was a result of the fact that I was napping behind Capirossi. This incident, and others, caused people to say that my bike was so much better that I could afford the luxury of sitting back and simply turning on the juice late in the race, beating everyone in the final lap. Obviously this was not the case. If I have the chance to pull away, I pull away. Always. Because if you hold out for the last lap you're taking a huge risk: you might finish second! Whereas if you can pull away at an earlier point in the race, you can avoid trouble later on. I only ever sit and wait when there is no alternative. That's when, for me, lying in wait is a good tactic and the best way to win. In Germany, for example, I made a mistake on the last lap and Gibernau made me pay for it. But it's not as if I was planning to wait for the end, as a way of humiliating my opponents. I simply made the mistake of not passing him earlier, so that I could then build a gap. It was a tactical error. After losing that race in that way, because of a distraction, I got so angry that on my way home I told myself, "Enough! From now on, I'm taking no prisoners!" So from that moment on I raced with the aim of dominating every lap and I won five of the last six races of the season. The only one where I finished second was the Grand Prix of the Pacific, in Motegi. But as you know, that day I raced after getting virtually no sleep the night before, because that was the night I had decided to leave Honda. As you can imagine, I wasn't totally focused, to say the least.

The race at the Sachsenring in 2003 was a particularly painful loss. Rossi had overtaken Gibernau on the penultimate corner, but had made a mistake into the final corner that let Gibernau get a better run to the line and beat him by a mere 0.06 seconds. He was criticised by the Italian press in the aftermath, as had become increasingly common that year. Despite leading the championship by a healthy margin, this was widely perceived to be a weaker season than his overwhelmingly dominant 2002, not least because he had achieved only three race victories to Gibernau's four. He had already felt disillusioned with Honda from the start of the year, sick of a culture of winning he found as oppressive as it was relentless. Sachsenring was the last race before the summer break, and he went off to Ibiza to clear his head and get a new haircut.

^The new haircut in question.

Excerpt from the Brno race commentary:

Rossi hasn’t won for four races*. He is desperate to win here this weekend. He turned up at the circuit this Thursday with a bright red haircut that he got on the beach at Ibiza - he was feeling very jovial, very relaxed, and… Well, it’s been suggested in some quarters that it’s a psychological thing he’s trying to pull on the other riders, because he’s coming under mounting pressure from the press and the fans - and Rossi just wanting to show he’s still the party animal he always was and he’s having fun out there on the bike.

*His results during that time were P2 P3 P3 P2.

Fresh from his time off, Rossi got involved in a tight five-way battle with Bayliss, Gibernau, Biaggi (in the first half of the race), and Capirossi. His victory was far from inevitable, and when Rossi managed to get in front for the first time he was unable to make a break for it. After the group of riders fought it out for most of the race, the contest for the win eventually came down to a direct duel between Rossi and Gibernau. With one and a half laps to go, Rossi ran it wide and let Gibernau get back in front once again - and made another mistake that seemed to give Gibernau the decisive advantage. Rossi made the overtake for the win with only a few corners to go.

^Gibernau congratulating Rossi, at a time when the two were still good friends. According to the commentary, the two of them had partied together over the summer break on Ibiza.

^From Rossi's autobiography: "This gag was supposed to be ironic, underscoring my situation with Honda. Everybody expected victory from me. So I was a condemned man, condemned to win..." (See here for gifs of the celebration.)

Rossi finished 0.042s ahead of Gibernau, with another close run to the line... so the elaborate celebrations could very easily have not come to pass. He ended up breaking the circuit record on the last lap - and went on to win all but one of the remaining races that season.

From Mat Oxley's Valentino Rossi: All His Races:

And then his first post-race theatrics in a while: he wore a prison inmate's hat and ball and chain to poke fun at the Italian media. "They said I was in crisis because I'd been beaten at the last four races. Leading the championship and finishing on the podium obviously isn't enough for them, so now I must work on the chain gang!" And beneath the striped cap was a new red hairdo, which restarted the Ducati rumours. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. During a secret midnight meeting in the paddock, Vale told Yamaha that he would ride for them in 2004.

An excerpt from the commentary at the next race in Estoril:

Well Valentino Rossi arrived in Brno three weeks ago with a bright red hairstyle and a lot of criticism from the Italian press saying he wasn't as focused as he had been last year; he'd just lost that race at the Sachsenring in Germany. He's fought back in the best possible way.

^Rossi's fans at Sepang 2003.

When he sealed the title in Sepang that year, he brought back the convict celebrations, this time equipped with a big novelty lock and key - so that he could free himself of his shackles at last. He left Honda at the end of the year to embark on a new adventure with Yamaha.

[transmascutena]

finding a good reaction series for any anime is so hard, and then trying to find one for utena is like trying to find a needle in a very small haystack, i think i've only found like one or two??? that have actually been pretty enjoyable?? and by that i mean, like, where the reactors actually take the show seriously and try to analyze and understand all of the symbolism/meaning/commentaries on society instead of being just like 'woahhh that was weird ig, oh well' and just moving on. although one of the ones i enjoyed also completely missed that juri was in love with shiori in her first episode but honestly i found that more hilarious than frustrating considering how good they were at picking up other small details and how blatantly it was spelt out hfsiuacjk. suffice to say, they figured it out later.

but like when I found the other good reactor to utena it was SOOO nice. like. i don't need the reactor to be absolutely correct on everything and catch every single detail, i just need somebody WILLING to actually engage with the show, and have the ability to look deeper than surface level. i've watched this reactor regularly for a while and i figured utena was the type of weird symbolic stuff he would really enjoy, but when I was proven right and he loved the show and loved the characters and created well-reasoned theories and predictions it was SOOOO satsifying. and i can probably never recommend him to anyone in good faith because he can make some tasteless jokes that i've been pretty desensitized to over the years because he says them more as a bit, but it's still to the extent that I can't tell how other people would take it if they were to watch him for the first time. but when it came to the utena and akio stuff he immediately understood that the show was depicting grooming and abuse and treated it as such in his commentary even before episode 33. and i know like that's probably a low bar, but after seeing people think it was a legit romance, it was so gratifying to see the actions of akio being responded with immediate disgust. he said that utena was probably in his favorite shows of all time at the end of the series, and he was so excited at almost every twist of the plot, so altogether my favorite reactor.

anyways, all that's to say, do you have any reaction series recommendations for utena that you think were a good watch? thanks for your time and all of your great utena posting!

only utena reaction series i remember liking pretty much all the way through was the one by semblance of sanity. there were probably things they missed or whatever as there will always be on a first viewing, and some of the things they said about the final episode in particular were a bit odd (though i've forgotten what exactly it was), but generally it was very enjoyable to me. you could tell they liked the show a lot and wanted to understand it and i think it also helped that they were two people who could bounce ideas and theories off each other. most reactors do it alone which can in my opinion get a bit stale at times. it was really just one of those things where i was looking forward to the new episode from them every single week (maybe helped too that it was only my own second or third rewatch and i was looking for new stuff myself still). i even subscribed to their patreon for a month towards the end so i could view the full uncut reactions, meaning i effectively watched the whole thing twice, but i don't think that was the smartest use of my money or my time lol

[dylanconrique]

despite their strained relationship, penelope truly is her mother's daughter at the end of the day, because the way portia said, "what dreams? ladies do not have dreams" you can tell she gave up all of hers, and that makes me so. sad.

[malaierba]

Been thinking, there's an issue with how creators and readers often approach the theme of "coming back wrong", since so much of the emphasis ends up being put in the "they came back part". Especially on the readers' side, the idea that someone would do whatever it takes to bring you back is parsed as romantic and devoted, which it can be, but it overlooks a big element of the concept.

Coming back wrong, or even just performing forbidden rituals etc in general, for it to be impactful needs to place a big AND constant focus on the in-universe equivalents of Do Not Resuscitate & bodily autonomy when one can't consent.

It's not just the coming back. It's that you don't know what type of body, what type of mind you're coming back to. It's the dysphoria, if it can exist (and it should), and the expectation that you'll be okay with whatever was done to your inert body when you couldn't decide over it. You're back, you're alive, surely you can get over the circumstances under which it happened, be thankful.

You don't even need to get abstract with "the inherent feeling of wrongness that comes from being brought back from death", most humans can't relate to that, it's vague to the point where it isn't real stakes. It's just a non-issue mentioned to give a fake sense of stakes.

But if you take inspiration on DNR, from people whose lifestyle was changed radically from being saved from a situation where they may have preferred to be allowed to pass on. Like, say:

You come back, and you gotta learn to use your body from zero, and you'll be reliant on others forever. Or you come back and you look so different you feel disconnected from yourself, and every waking moment is uncomfortable. Or you come back, and too much time has passed, you feel like the life you were meant to live got away from you. Or you come back, and what was done to your changes you so fundamentally you end up isolated even if it's no one's intention. Or the ones that brought you back didn't do it selfishly but out of entitlement to your life.

The wrongness needs to be acknowledged often to the point of tediousness, only then would the spectator get a real sense of "okay, I see now why that'd be an issue, and why many would hate it".