#Golden Offer

[kiwiaok]

andrew minyard actually and I will DIE on this hill

[untitledgoosegay]

re last reblog I do see fanfic culture pushing/replicating a certain model of "what trauma looks like," "how trauma works"

this is a problem across all areas of society obviously, but transformative works are, well, transformative. they're about crafting and modifying narratives where the fan-creator sees a flaw or a lack -- often for the better! don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of "I take a hammer and I fix the canon," it's the main thing that gets my creative gears spinning -- but what happens when that "flaw" is simply a narrative not conforming to popular expectations?

some people just don't get PTSD from events that sound obviously traumatic. they're not masking, and they're not coping; they just straight-up didn't get the permanently-locked stress-response that defines PTSD. they walk away from a horrible experience going "well, that sucked, but it's over now." some people do get PTSD from events most people wouldn't find traumatic. we don't really know why some people get PTSD and others don't. but fandom has an idea of events that must be traumatizing, of a "correct" way to portray trauma. you see the problems with this lack of understanding in e.g. fans pressuring the devs of Baldur's Gate 3 to add dialogue where the player character badgers Halsin about his own feelings on his abuse -- because he must be traumatized, and his trauma must fit a certain mold and presentation of sexual trauma, under the mistaken impression that anything outside that narrow window is somehow "wrong" and disrespectful or even harmful to survivors.

take, for another example, the very common trope of a traumatized character who hates touch or sex "learning" to like touch or sex as a part of their healing process. certainly that can be healing for some people; other people will never like, or want, touch or sex, because of trauma or because they just don't. the assumption that someone who doesn't want sex or doesn't like to be touched must be traumatized, must be suffering from this perceived lack, is seriously harmful -- to asexual people, to people with sensory issues around touch, and to people for whom healing from trauma means freedom to refuse sex or touch.

and there's a secondary trope, one that's slightly more thoughtful but ultimately repeats the problem -- that once someone has learned that their boundaries will be respected, they'll feel it's safe to soften those boundaries. once they feel safe refusing touch or sex, they'll feel comfortable allowing it on their own terms. but many people don't, and many people won't! many people will simply never want to be touched, and never want sex, and they are not suffering or broken or lacking because of it. the idea that proving you'll respect someone's boundaries entitles you to test those boundaries -- the paradox is obvious, and yet this is something i've seen hurt (re-traumatize) people i care for.

people are imperfect victims. people don't heal in the ways you expect. many people have positive memories of their abuse, of their abusers. many people hurt others in the course of their trauma, in ways that can't easily be unpacked in a 5k oneshot. very few narratives of trauma and recovery actually fit the ones put forward by popular children's media and romance novels -- which are the ones I most see replicated in fandom spaces, because they provide the clearest narrative and easiest catharsis, and so they're easy and soothing to reach for.

that's not necessarily a bad thing! i am not immune to goopy romance tropes. i am not immune to teary catharsis. not every fic has to grapple with ugly realities. but there's a problem when these narratives become predominant, when people think they're accurate and realistic depictions of trauma, when the truth of trauma is unpleasant and uncomfortable, and doesn't fit any single narrative, let alone one of comforting catharsis

[beautyofaphrodite]

Aphrodite Areia wants us to know when to be courageous and stand up for ourselves

Aphrodite Androphonos wants us to know when to seek revenge

Aphrodite Melainis wants us to embrace the darkness in ourselves

Aphrodite Ourania wants us to feel beautiful and heavenly

Aphrodite Philomedes wants us to find happiness and laughter around us

Aphrodite Antheia wants us to see the beauty in plants and flowers

Aphrodite Pontia wants us to see the beauty in the sea

Aphrodite Aphrogenia wants us to remember what made us

Aphrodite Kypria wants us to remember where we come from

Aphrodite Pandemos wants us to find unity and acceptance

Aphrodite Chrysea wants us to know that we are golden

Aphrodite Nymphia wants us to be able to marry who we want if we choose to

Aphrodite Erototrophus wants us to feel motherly love

Aphrodite Xenia wants us to be hospitable and friendly to all

Aphrodite wants so much for us all, for She loves us 🫶

[always-a-king-or-queen]

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

[nectar-cellar]

4t3 Conversion: Short Receding Combed - Perfect Patio SP

Another short, neat, everyday men's hairstyle.

2 versions: regular and flipped

low poly count: 3600 poly

custom thumbnails

Download: simfileshare / mega

[numum]

the he

[daily-hanamura]

[witchininthewoods]

𝐴𝑝ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑒 Χρυσεη - 𝐺𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑒𝑛.

A devotional post for Lady Aphrodite Chrysea.

O sweet Lady Aphrodite,

Foam-Born Goddess of velvety waves,

She as golden as the apple of Paris,

Upon the shimmering water, I see your dancing form,

In the brilliant evening sun I see your golden smile,

Amongst the frolicking dolphins, I see your joy,

I praise you in all names, sweet Goddess

[freethrows]

🚲

[justahumblesideblog]

Our boy really did the anime “tch” and immediately got hit by the karmic retribution bat, huh?

Which kickstarted the whole Belos possession slope because of that one finger cut

[slythereen]

lestappen playing padel publicly… rbr and christian posting lestappen content… openly supporting their friendship all of a sudden… do you think christian horner sent max on an extraction mission

[spriteofmushrooms]

The interesting thing about Jiang Cheng is that he refuses to be his mother's golden child to Wei Wuxian's scapegoat; he actively chooses Wei Wuxian again and again. He defends Wei Wuxian from her until she dies. It's unusual.

This doesn't mean that Wei Wuxian's experience was any less fraught--being hated by a caretaker is awful even if everyone else loves you. But it was an interesting choice by MXTX.

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Friendly life advice from our friendly neighborhood Ganondorf :)

The captain sighed a little, leaning back against the palm tree. He watched Ganondorf for a while, watched as he rocked gently in the hammock seat that had been his perch for the last few hours. His gaze trailed down to the teenager in the man's arms, and he caught sight of the remains of skin paint that had mostly washed off, some kind of mark of royalty in the ancient past.

Royalty. The kid was a king.

Link sighed again, thinking about his own circumstances.

"Something's clearly on your mind," Ganondorf commented, his voice quiet as he watched the boy, continuing to rock both of them gently.

Link crossed his arms a little defensively. He supposed he was being fairly easy to read. "I just... I need to get my life together."

Ganondorf's eyes flicked upward from the sleeping teenager to the captain. Link felt himself shrink a little under the scrutiny; no matter how calm or gentle Ganondorf was now, his gaze was as intense as ever.

"Don't give me that look," Link accused, trying to glare back.

Ganondorf didn't comment. He didn't have to. He knew his presence was enough. Link hated that.

Rolling his eyes, he admitted defeat. "It's just... he's... he's my predecessor. All the expectations that have been on me... the entire war that Cia started... it's all from past heroes. And he's my direct predecessor."

"So you assume that you're inadequate in comparison to him?" Ganondorf surmised, though the flat tone of his voice clearly indicated his opinion on the matter. "Do you not recall the state he was in when I brought him here?"

"I recall Lana having a meltdown," Link laughed before growing somber. "But yes, I... I don't understand. I just... I don't know. He's, what, eighteen? And he's a war hero, a king, rebuilding Hyrule--"

"Are you not also a war hero? A captain? Rebuilding Hyrule?"

"I'm not rebuilding," Link grumbled, looking away and glaring at nothing in particular. "I'm just existing."

"And what of it? You need your rest. You cannot accomplish anything if you don't recover."

"Everyone else has!" Link snapped, rising.

Ganondorf sighed, looking down at the teenager again. "He is an example of what happens when you don't. I will not let both of you give me a heart attack, nor will I let you hurt yourself like that."

"I need to get my life together," Link finally repeated, wilting.

"Link."

Reluctantly, the captain straightened, looking at the Gerudo. Ganondorf had stopped rocking, sitting up a little more, full attention on him now.

"You're twenty years old," Ganondorf pointed out. "I didn't start 'getting my life together' until I was forty-five. We all learn and grow at different points in our lives. Do not try to figure it all out now. Simply take one day at a time."

Link finally laughed, relaxing. "What a day, for the Hero of Hyrule to be taking life advice from someone who started... how many wars?"

"Two," Ganondorf answered dully, returning his attention to the teenager. "And you know I'm correct."

"Yeah, yeah," Link agreed casually, approaching the pair. Ganondorf moved the boy's feet a little, making space for the captain, and he slowly plopped down beside him, letting himself lean on the Gerudo a little. He didn't protest when Ganondorf's arm slid around him, pulling him closer. He just sighed again, less disconcerted, closing his eyes and feeling the warm breeze.

[x-monochrome-x]

g/t vday time!!!! day 1: roses

from @sviolet-sizefeels's prompt list!!!

keres the giant demon with an offering from his beautiful husband to be... he's never been this flustered from a human gift!!