#EIGHT HAS EMOTIONS

[appleciderjulie]

headcanon that eight is the mean one and captain is just a little guy

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I was *not* longing, I swear.

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[tangledinink]

in an older ask (before the bracelet comic) you broke down, basically, the odds of donnie recognizing his family to different degrees on any given day... i'm curious, what would the odds be now, now that he has the bracelet?

Hell yeah let's do more Swanatello Math~

Let's say his family visits him eight times-- this time with the bracelet.

-> Maybe one time out of eight, usually less, Donnie will not be able to recognize them and will treat them as intruders, driving them off. There are occasions when he disregards the message of the bracelet or forgets it too quickly to be helpful.

-> Two times out of eight, Donnie will be able to recognize them enough to not view them as threats, but will not be able to organically recall any further details about them. He is confused and frustrated. He recognizes something is wrong, and can comprehend the research materials he's reading, but no actual memories are being pinged in his brain, leaving him in a very frightening, bizarre, uncanny-valley sort of space. He has to repeatedly reference notes and journals to try to puzzle the identities of his family together, which is upsetting and embarrassing. Days like these focus on providing comfort and support to Donnie, but the context that his research board and bracelet provide does make this easier to manage now.

-> One time out of the eight, Donnie will be able to recognize his family but struggles to comprehend his current situation or recall details surrounding it, though he recognizes something is wrong. He knows that Raph is here, and he remembers Raph fully, but has a difficult time processing why they're here at the lake instead of being at home; it's just not sinking in for him. Things in his brain are not matching up, and he is confused and frustrated. His family will have to re-explain to him what's going on, typically multiple times. Days like these focus on providing comfort and support to Donnie, but the jumpstart that the research and bracelet provide often makes this process much easier.

-> One time out of eight, Donnie will be able to recognize his family enough to not view them as threats, but will not always be able to recall further details about them. He's not able to fully process that anything is wrong unless it's explained to him, (usually more than once,) but even then it seems to overall elude him and not fully sink in. He will happily spend the day showing his lake off to his family, dancing with them, etc. His bracelet and research board help, but on days like these he often seems unable to fully retain this information throughout the day. These days are usually pretty frustrating for his family, but are overall lower-stress for Donnie, at least. False memories are common on these days.

-> Three times out of eight, Donnie is able to both recognize his family and recall details about their current situation. He remembers the family members who are currently with them, and sometimes even those who are absent, and understands that he is currently being affected by magick that manipulates his memory and patterns of thinking.

Overall, the bracelet has improved the situation. The family has to take care to try to be present as much as possible, however, as receiving this information from the bracelet and research board can sometimes be very scary or disorientating, and they've found that having someone around either during this process or immediately after is very important. Typically, if Donnie wakes up, receives the message from his bracelet, inspects the research board, and waits for the promised family to arrive... and then they don't, he'll panic and quickly lose trust in the information. He may react negatively to any family members once they do show up. Swanatello overall tends to do poorly when left alone, they've discovered.

[fandomoni]

Just noticed the worst part of episode seven.

They took spoons spoon, at the club.

[raytm]

[auntieoneandauntietwo]

Seeing as the big high point of Dragonflight is the relationship between Lessa and Mardra, it’s a bit of a shame that the conflict in Dragonquest doesn’t actually center around the collapse of that relationship

[gen-is-gone]

The bridgerton episode was really fucking good what the fuck

[indigosabyss]

Saionji Ukyo reborn into Naruto would be like. A prodigy. But at being an average foot soldier. From single digits of age he will show incredible promise at being a standard chunin and nothing more. As if he were born to do mindless drone things like boundary patrol and courier duty. From the minute he puts on that headband it's like he's done it for a decade with no signs of stopping.

[eorzeashan]

eight as commander during the traitor arc: (no reaction)

eight when someone else is commander during the traitor arc: (sends unsettling letter made of huttese newspaper cutouts to theron that says something vaguely along the lines of 'your fingernails will be pulled off')

[homolobotomized]

such a big fan of this page. nagumo's text emboldened, yotsumura's expression,, "shaddup ab why im keeping this dude who has no chance of recovery (barely) alive. let's talk ab the reason im keeping this dude who has no chance of recovery (barely) alive",,, good shit

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

year six of being salty that around halfway through RoS the writers went 'shit we accidentally wrote five way too sympathetic and reasonable, and he is rapidly going through a redemption arc. quick shove in random serial killer shit out of nowhere without explanation, which completely contradicts his character and its development up til then. wait fuck he's redemption arcing EVEN HARDER in FoT. shit shit shit okay just make him hannibal lecter'

[scarecrowdrugs]

Some assorted SV Jonathan sketches I've made over the past few weeks, along with Clarice, his half-sister/daughter figure/kidnapping victim

[whitehartlane]

as a fan of another pl team i think your problem is that your captain is son. he's too emotional and soft and instead of demanding better of your players he goes around comforting them and protecting them from the refs. idk i feel like he's probably let the band get to his head a bit and now he's pushing people like PEH (who have proper authority) away from the refs, it's a bit weird. strange appointment. he's trying too hard

know him do you?

[ballsballsbowls]

Slate recently published a relatively short interview with Holly Black and I just...

I cannot stress enough, here where you can see it, that I don't have strong feelings about Holly Black specifically. I've read just enough of one of her books to be pretty confident that it's not for me and I doubt I will read anything else. Holly Black just happens to be the person they interviewed and the person who said these things specifically. I have no quarrel with her.

What really drew my attention was this, which unfortunately I suspect is hardly unique to her.

Q: In The Prisoner’s Throne, there’s a scene early on that I thought was going to go in the way many romantasy books would go these days, but it didn’t. A lot of readers are here for the smut, but some authors, like yourself, will go the “behind closed doors” route, where the sex isn’t explicit or it’s assumed to have happened off the page. Are you at all interested in exploring the smuttier aspect of fantasy? 

A: I think that I certainly could push myself a bit more out of my comfort zone, but I don’t know how much I would want to explore it. Mostly because, as a reader, I find long sex scenes to be paced strangely—you’re moving through everything else at a certain pace, and then the pace just drops off, like, OK, now we’re spending, like, two chapters like this. I know there are people who enjoy it, obviously. I recognize that readers wish I could make the scenes a little longer. I had a reader ask me, with the Folk of the Air series, if my editor had made me cut down the scenes, and I said, “No, actually, my editor told me to expand the scene.” And she said, “Well, why didn’t you?” Friend, I did.

I also had somebody talk to me recently about how, in a certain kind of book, what you have is levels of physical intimacy being symbolic of the characters achieving a greater amount of emotional intimacy. That’s just not something I’ve ever thought of as being equivalent. I’ve been like, Oh, I have to get them closer here, but I never really thought that people often are using physical intimacy as a stand-in or as a way to communicate emotional intimacy. Building up into a greater and greater level of physical intimacy is doing work that I’m just not thinking about doing in that way.

~

Paragraph 1 of her answer is interesting in its own way. I'd always wondered why people feel compelled to write 2-paragraph sex scenes because they are my least favorite way to convey that information. I'd much rather a fully closed door OR a 2-page treatment with no in between, but you can't generalize her answer to authors generally.

But Paragraph 2 was actually kind of illuminating and, I think, is actually a notion that can be spun out and applied to other authors rather than being specific to her. I like category romance a lot (among other genres, the difference is that I never shut up about romance because nobody is spending a lot of energy being dismissive and shitty about fantasy or sci-fi as a genre anymore), but I have struggled with basically every new romance-esque genre out there that should be appealing! It's romance AND something else! But I didn't vibe with any of the rom-coms I read, which I forgave because 'rom-com' isn't a real genre, it's basically just a marketing thing.

But I also didn't like any why chooses/RH; I didn't like any 'romantasy' (despite liking both romance AND fantasy!) —even Paladin's Grace was pretty much a spite finish for me and that's the work of an immensely skilled tradpub author—not to mention, I have no idea whether she considers that series 'romantasy' or not (I doubt it). Hell, I'd dump shifter romance/urban fantasy romance in here too and it's been around longer than any of these upstart new romance-adjacent sub-genres.

But I think Paragraph 2 of Holly's answer maybe gets to some of it. She's either saying that she doesn't understand a correlation between sex and emotional intimacy in general (which is all well and good but maybe romance-adjacent author is not the career for you?)

Or she's saying that she doesn't understand a correlation between sex and emotional intimacy in romance writing, which was a lightbulb moment for me. At the risk of perhaps overgeneralizing:

A lot of these authors are writing romance-adjacent books because they think romance is a cool thing to have in a book but they don't understand why category romance does what it does, and what it signifies, and why it works, so they just...throw everything out because they are Too Cool For Category Romance because it's Grandma Porn or whatever, so they write something that's marketed as a romance that doesn't comprehend how to write or discuss emotional intimacy at all, and typically can't juggle it under the weight of the rest of the plot even if they do.

So you end up with between 2 and 7 leads with the emotional depth and chemistry of smooshing two barbies together to kiss because they don't have a clue what chemistry between leads should look like because they're Too Cool For Category Romance. And a lot of them that I have read have had sex scenes, so they're not afraid of smut, but they can't integrate emotional vulnerability or chemistry into it at all.

I think this is where her complaint about the 'pacing' of sex scenes comes in. This newer, ultra-lean writing style where everything is first person present and paced oddly and every dialogue is sparse and lacking dialogue tags and every two-page spread is mostly white space is here to stay, unfortunately, and in a world where you're trying to reduce word count and have an additional entire plot besides the romance, who has space for intimacy or whimsy or anything but maybe 2 crude indicators that they trust each other?

[youssefguedira]

i read a movie review and i really wanna complain about it but i respect that other people have opinions i don't necessarily agree with and this is natural. i DO really wanna complain tho

[diegoshargrieves]

listening to mcr while at a horribly low mental point is... an experience.