#HIS PRESENCE AND POWER

[andy-clutterbuck]

"𝘓𝘰𝘰𝘬, 𝘐'𝘮 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘶𝘯𝘴. 𝘐 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘺𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘰𝘳? 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 '𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘚𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘳. 𝘠𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘬…..𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘴. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘶𝘴."

𝟕𝐱𝟎𝟒 | 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞

[stealingyourbones]

Accepting a deal from Clockwork to keep his dimension alive and free from harm or destruction, Danny has to sacrifice himself in a way he never truly grasped when he agreed to the deal.

He could never go back to his original earth. He must take up the duties of a Monitor (it isn’t an inheritable position as far as I know in comics but consider the pain of a bleeding heart with the need to protect having to do a job of apathy and observance) And most importantly of all: he must not interfere.

Clockwork watches his apprentice watch over his assigned dimension, the young man watching keenly over all, fingers itching to move and take action.

Eventually something will push him to break his path, and when it does, Phantom will be put on the path of greatness.

[afterthelambs]

Goro Akechi is for the girls and the gays because he perfectly encapsulates the clinical insanity of being a teenage girl going through puberty. The underhanded compliments? The threats so subtle no one can actually complain? The pleasant composure hiding feral gremlin rage? Simultaneously admiring and envying your gay crush? He's like if Regina George could kill people

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[sweetmapple]

Elias ‘BPM’ Bouchard (Brutal Pipe Murder)

[hikarielizabethbloom]

Tolkien's work is about grief and loss. And it's about love in all its interpretations.

And the writers of Trop got it. The show opens with Galadriel and Finrod. It's their love that sets everything in motion.

Everything that Galadriel does is a direct consequence of that loss. Her season 1 journey is about accepting grief and dealing with it (in a healthy way).

And I think it's beautiful.

[souenkun]

Takashi living the warm, full-of-love life that reiko couldn't have (as far as we know in the current canon) feels very much like the grief that dawns for children when they finally realized how much sacrifice their parents didn't always tell them just to give birth and raise them.

Like, technically speaking, reiko only gave takashi a world of problems by passing down the sight and the book of friends decades after her death, but takashi also grasped the wholesome and the awful parts of interacting with both humans and youkai from the memories she had left behind, scattered among all these eternal monsters she had defeated, leaving in them unintentional, but important life lessons for him to find later on in the future. If it weren't for all those societal rejections that reiko received from humans and the hardships from youkai that led her to start the book of friends, takashi wouldn't be able to avoid repeating her mistakes (and, consequently, could be just as comfortable with isolation like reiko was), let alone make the precious balance we now see him have in the present time, where he can make genuine connections with humans and youkai while also maintaining a balance to them. Do you get what I'm saying 💔

[fromtheseventhhell]

I can tell I'm Arya-pilled to the max because I'll see other Arya stans talking about the questionable morality of her executing Daeron and I'm just like "That was so Lady of Winterfell-coded"

[feketeribizli]

no one cares but i got excited about it so heres the grid for kendalls time loop bubble

[andy-clutterbuck]

8x12 | The Key

[monstersdownthepath]

It really is a pity, if I'm being honest. If you told someone who had never dove into Pathfinder's lore that Golarion has its own version of the Joker and that he was an extremely powerful devil whose job and entire purpose for existence, specifically, is "conquer Golarion," this hypothetical person would probably have their flabbers gasted if you told them he has never been the Big Bad in an AP or even so much as a Module.

This guy

is Asmodeus' most trusted agent for the purpose of conquering Golarion, arguably THE most important planet in all of creation for Asmodeus to have total dominion over due to it containing Rovagug.

And yet, scarcely a mention in any book not specifically about fiendish divinities! One of the scant bits of lore about him (in Council of Thieves: Infernal Syndrome, pg. 89) tells of when his trickery was reversed upon him, while his second largest scattering of lore (throughout Rule of Fear) reveals him as the secret patron of a clown school, with his most fervent follower being a mime, who work to gather enough blackmail material to secretly control a whole city from the shadows.

NOT including him in more material feels like leaving proverbial money on the table, if you ask me.

[wildsaltair]

he's so ~in charge~ in his general uniform. I need him to give me specific orders and then immediately enforce them

[alexiethymia]

my favorite twilight is the one who can’t help but go gooey over his family😫

[bossuary]

some dumb blurry screencaps of Lucanis in battle. (plus a wider shot of his armor and hip-waders cunty boots from the party selection screen.)

A few observations: 1) He uses more than one apparently-magical attack, not just the wings.

Photos 6 + 7: The medallions on his belt 'activate', and glow red. He goes on to execute some kind of whirling shadow attack, sending red sparks flying. Photos 8 + 9: Certain moves envelope him in a fuchsia mist + sparkles as he teleports or swipes with his blades. If there is a pink + purple magical cloud on the battlefield, it is 100% Lucanis doing the Bisexual Backflip, finishing a fantastically unneccessary flourish with his blades, or using his teleport ability to move across a distance rather than walk or run (also gay).

2) At some moments, immediately after (maybe right before) executing a move (using a power/magic) his whole head is shrouded in twisting shadows and red sparks. And at least once, he sported what appear to be glowing red 'eyes' inside the shadow cloud:

[jessicas-pi]

The Time Heals ‘Verse meta ramble, part 2: In Which I Scream Some More About Sabine And Ezra

Whoo! So! What was SUPPOSED to be a little backstory about The Line from Time Heals All Wounds turned into a massive rant. But that’s over, and you’re all as depressed as I am, and now we get to move onto other stuff!!

(spoiler warning continues!)

So now I’m going to ramble a little bit about the specific relationship dynamic between Sabine and Ezra currently in this because AGH. I just. I gotta talk about it. fair warning, the following rant has no discernible thesis statement and wanders around aimlessly. but hey, that's just how I roll.

Okay so Time Heals primarily follows Sabine. So that’s the lens we’re looking through. And it’s easy to forget that Ezra’s timeline is entirely different from hers. But it is. A story that has taken a year-and-a-half, more or less, for her, has been mere months for him.

Because Ezra died only weeks after the Battle of Lothal, remember?

It’s six months after that, when Sabine gets pulled into the past. It’s months after that when she rescues him. By the time they’re reunited on the Coronet, Sabine has lived an entire year in a galaxy without Ezra in it, and a few months more in a galaxy not knowing he’s there.

She has seen him die thirty-three times. She’s mourned him. She still mourns him. She dreams about his dead body in her arms. He haunts her. To an embarrassing degree, her life is centered around him.

Meanwhile, Ezra’s timeline looks like this:

—he purgills Thrawn into the unknown and Thrawn imprisons him —some weeks later, Sabine kicks open the door to his cell, slaps him, hugs him, proclaims she’s watched him die 32 times, provides no further explanation, and then someone tosses a thermal detonator into the cell and it all goes black —he wakes up somewhere on Mandalore during the Clone War and promptly gets adopted by four tipsy art majors —a few months later, the Force tells him to get a move on —he reunites with Sabine that afternoon and everything's great!

So as of chapter 15 of book 2, which is where we're at now, Ezra’s spent three, four months in the past—missing everyone, yeah, but missing Sabine least, because she’s the one who saved him, and that’s given him a gut feeling that she’s still around. To him, Sabine has been a wistful thought that comes and goes. He tells his friends stories about her and misses her. But he doesn’t mourn her.

Meanwhile, Sabine’s spent over a year believing that he is lost to her forever because she couldn’t save him. (She doesn’t know she saved him, remember? She’s forgotten. It’s all a blank, and she’s afraid to hope.) She is still in the vise-like grip of grief, even if she’s functioning around it. There has never been a moment when she has not been thinking about him. (And in a way, it’s his fault, because he loved her, and he told her so. And she cannot forget it, no matter how hard she tries.)

His feelings towards her are soft and silent. He's content to wait until he sees her again, without aching too badly at her current missing presence in his life. He is at peace.

Her feelings towards him are tumultuous and fervent. She's desperate to see him again and terrified that she'll lose him. it’s like nothing she’s ever felt before. She is the farthest thing from peaceful.

So, while Ezra's feelings may seem to run deeper than hers—he is kinda in love with her, after all—he's also completely normal about her.

Sabine, on the other hand, has been torturing herself with the memory of him for over a year. He's a bundle of guilt and grief and mourning in her brain. Her feelings for him are clear-cut, platonic, and so all-consuming that they verge on an obsession.

So really, he doesn't care about her more. He cares about her differently. But not more.

But—and this is important, not so much for the story, but it's important to me that you know this—Ezra doesn’t know she's changed. He knows the old Sabine, who was his best friend, even if sometimes she was distant. He doesn’t believe she cares about him as much as he cares about her. And he's resigned to that! It’s ok! He’s ok! He’s used to it, he’s used to hiding how much he cares, and nobody else knows. So he’ll go on hiding it and she’ll go on ignoring it and it won’t matter.

But the Sabine that Ezra entrusted his blade and his homeworld to with one last, long look is a different woman than the Sabine that kicks down the door of his cell on the Chimaera a few weeks (a year) later.

And where does the difference lie?

It lies in the fact that she lost him. It lies in the fact that he died in her arms. It lies in the fact that he has consumed every waking thought of hers for months. 

It lies in the fact that she will. not. let. him. go.

She didn’t let him go when he was dead. And now that he’s alive? Now that he’s with her again?

Well.

There is no holding at arms-length. She would clutch his living form as tightly as she held his lifeless body, if she dared. She doesn’t, but she still reaches out to him—bumping shoulders, brushing hands, touching him just to know that he’s there. He is everything to her now. It’s not a love like his. It’s wider than that. It’s relief and joy and comfort in his presence and an impossible dream come true.

If Sabine had been the same Sabine he knew before, maybe things wouldn’t have changed course. If she had gone on ignoring it and he had gone on hiding it, maybe time would have faded his feelings, and maybe she never would have grown any for him.

But in a world where she holds him desperately near, near enough to feel his heartbeat and know he’s alive—in a world where their fledgling bond doesn’t lie dormant and unknown, but is woven strong and glows warmly, tethering their very souls together—in a world where he is everything to her, and she shows it—now that’s a different story. As he slowly finds out just how much he means to her—and he's grown to mean far more to her now than he did before—it throws him off-balance.

And as for her?

Well, this is where my Ramble Part 1 becomes relevant! Because he told her. And she knows. And now that she knows, she can’t look past it like it was never there, because it is there, and glaringly obvious when she looks for it. (She can't stop seeing it.)

The path they've always hoped to take—the one where it goes away and they are fast friends with nothing more between them—is no longer an option. By admitting his love, the other version of himself made it impossible for her to ignore it. By holding him so close, she makes it impossible for him to hide it. (In a way, they've doomed each other.) And she knows he can’t hide it, and he knows she can’t ignore it, so the only choice they have left—besides honest, which is a thing neither of them is ready to face—is to do their mutual best to pretend it doesn’t matter, and not talk about it.

But it does matter, and sooner or later, they'll have to talk about it.

And deep deep down, they both know that, too.

~~~

tune in next time for what I expect to be a ramble about a couple specific scenes! unless I write a different ramble first! We'll see!

[usernamesoft]

okay but what if armand just took louis out on a silly little art date but then louis got super philosopcal and was like ‘well who are you then?’ and armand had to change his main date activity to trauma dump