#I THINK IT'D BE INTERESTING

[misc-obeyme]

"Can you see us in every timeline?" you ask.

Barbatos smiles down at you, meeting your bright and curious gaze. Your head is in his lap, both of you stretched out on a soft blanket in the castle garden. Barbatos is leaning back against a tree, a cup of tea held in his gloved hands. The sky drips with stars.

"I see many possibilities," he says, his voice eternally gentle, forever content to answer your endless questions.

You reach up and brush your fingers through his strand of bright hair. "It's just that I wouldn't be the same person without you," you say. "And the thought of there being other mes in other timelines that aren't with you… well, it makes me sad."

You blush a little at this admission because it sounds silly when you say it out loud.

Barbatos chuckles softly, but he puts down his teacup. He takes your hand, even as your fingers are still entangled in his hair. He puts his other hand against your cheek.

"We may not find each other in every timeline," he says. "But I have found that the echoes of each timeline ripple through the others. You are inevitably linked to every other you."

"But they won't feel what I feel," you say.

"They will have impressions of your feelings," Barbatos says. "Have you ever had an inexplicable feeling of hope or despair wash over you? That is a reverberation from yourself in another timeline."

You consider what he's saying. That somehow, you in your present time and space can impact the lives of other yous, if even briefly.

"What do you think they feel from me?" you ask.

"I cannot predict it," Barbatos says. He smiles and the way it lights up his face is so entrancing, you lose yourself in it. "I can only hope they receive soft moments where they feel my love, every time I see you, every time I touch you, every time I kiss you."

Your fingers squeeze around the hand that's holding yours and you lift yourself up to kiss him. His arm moves behind your back to lend you support as he returns the kiss - soft and sweet and with the lingering taste of hellfire rose tea. In another timeline, an unexpected warmth floods through you.

masterlist | Thank you for reading!

[broken-clover]

I like thinking about crossovers with guilty gear and samurai shodown because of baiken's dlc status in the latter but whenever I come back to the concept it ends up making me profoundly sad and it's basically always for one of two reasons

One is the fact that from the get-go, Samsho in part shows off its archaic setting by having a character, Ukyo, that's contracted tuberculosis, in a setting where it's more or less a guaranteed death sentence. Of course his repeated presence as a playable character means he has a bit of plot immunity and has had at least one death retconned, but still, a lot of his character relates to the fact that he's a terminally ill man who's deeply suffering from something that will, inevitably, kill him. Guilty Gear, being a futuristic setting with magic means that even if conventional treatments were potentially wiped out, TB very likely is something that's relatively trivial to cure. And I could see that being either a happy-sad or just a sad thing whether or not it's something that Baiken would be capable of fixing.

And one is the fact that, suddenly, Baiken is home. It's not the place she grew up in, she's a couple of centuries early, but the grass and dirt and rock beneath her boots belong to a place that, in her world, was literally blasted out of existence. Even if it isn't the same people and exact places she lost, she suddenly sees her own culture alive and thriving. Everything in her world that was destroyed or died off or banned is just...right there.

But at the same time, what does that mean for her sense of vengeance? The place she's mourned for decades and fashioned into a deep well of fury and will to survive is fine. It's all been undone. Even if she may or may not have come to terms with the loss, suddenly the thing you've devoted so much of your life to, used to power your will to go on, and it meant nothing. And in having her old existence handed to her on a platter, would she even fit into it anymore? Baiken the person, who she exists as now, owes so much of that to rising from the ashes of her homeland. She isn't the happy, innocent little girl she was when her home was still standing. Adult Baiken has only ever had a burnt-out husk of a home. How do you just suddenly pretend everything is fine when everything you've done has suddenly been made completely pointless?

[crownedinmarigolds]

Alternate Universe OC Lore nobody asked for: Noa would be a Bone-Gnawer were she to become a Garou.

[hoarding-stories]

They're probably going to be too busy, but they could go swim in the Matron's blood pool

[lazyreginald]

Danganronpa Hazbin/Helluva AU where the og surviving cast of the games are born-demons and everyone killed off are sinner demons.

[diarydiarydiaryblank]

there should be an option to remove your skin temporarily. not painlessly just not permanently.

[wishpact]

if i write keqing it'd be for the metas of her finding lord and savior rex lapis-morax-zhongli

[swampybogg]

[whimsythepuntable]

Story that starts with a "you're probably wondering how I got into this situation," type narration, but the narrator is just as confused, if not more, as you are.

[starry-bi-sky]

wolfpack. aka: if not friend, then why friend-shaped?

"Hey-- uh, Danny?" There's an almost imperceptible tremor in Tucker's voice.

Danny doesn't look up from what he's doing, his pencil scritching across his notebook as he tries to do another quadratic formula question. "Hm."

"What's -- uh -- what's with the dogs?"

He looks up now, and finally sees where Tucker is -- standing in the doorway of his room with an ashy look on his face and a skewed, nervous smile. He's got a white knuckle grip on the doorknob. Sam is wide-eyed behind him, and using him as a partial meat-shield.

Danny looks down to the two giant ghost wolves sprawled next to him lazily. One large green one with his head in Danny's lap, letting him use him as a prop-up for his notebook. Another equally large black one splayed against his hip, sleeping on her side with her head tilted inward to his calf.

Automatically, a grin tilts across Danny's face, and he lifts his notebook up to scratch behind the green one's ears. He opens a lazy eye, one that is bloody red with a ring of yellow around the pupil, before slipping it shut and leaning his head into Danny's touch. "This is Sirius and Procyon," he says, and reaches down to scratch Sirius' belly. "And they're not dogs, they're wolves."

"Great," Tucker says, his voice suddenly much smaller and faint, "Love that distinction."

Sirius makes a great big groan, and Danny's grin widens, his heart swelling with fondness. His hand slips away from her belly, and before he can put his notebook back down, Procyon pushes his head up his lap until his ear is against his stomach, demanding pets now too.

Sam peeks her head up from over Tucker's shoulder, "I think what Tucker's asking here is what are they doing here, Danny."

He shrugs, scratching under Procyon's chin. "They kinda just showed up. I tried sending them back to the Zone, but they keep returning." And they were weirdly intent on just following him around, which is the only reason he gave up on returning them. They weren't causing trouble, and they knew how to hide around the living. Plus, he just loves dogs. "So now I have two wolves living with me."

This, oddly enough, did not do anything to calm Sam and Tucker down. Tucker's mouth purses into a thin line, and he presses the sides of his palms to his lips in prayer. "How have your parents not found out about this?"

Danny wordlessly raises his hand, and his sleeve slides down to reveal a thin chain bracelet hooked around his wrist. He whistles sharply, and both Procyon and Sirius jerk their heads up to look at him, ears pricked up and eyes alert.

Silently, he points to his wrist and rattles it twice, and in unison both wolves stand up and pounce. Instantly, they turn into a respective, opaque black and green mist that swirls around the bracelet and forms into two, flat wolf charms.

Both wolves are posing in the stereotypical wolf howl, with little stars indented on the sides. Procyon's charm has the Canis Minor constellation engraved on it, while Sirius has the Canis Major.

Danny faces Sam and Tucker, and points at his wrist. "Like this."

[poobirdy]

happy bingge for gibsonrae1's donation to svsssaction! instead of amassing a harem, bingge becomes a cat dad bc happy cats make happy people! (even though the event is no longer accepting donations, perhaps consider donating to fundraisers vetted by gaza funds / gaza esims as supplies are very low!)

[illmoraineakoi]

So, I know I'm a little (very) late to the AvA stuff, but I was rewatching AvM Season 3 for the seven hundredth time and, well, I noticed something and I'm curious to know if it's been discussed before.

AvM Episode 29, Purple's story, specifically, Pink's death.

Her color changes as she dies, or is represented to have died.

It fades to grey.

Now, the question is, can we, or rather should we, use this to infer anything lore-related? Was this just an artistic choice to depict the act of becoming unhealthy/dying, or could this be what actually happens to stick figures that die over a period of time? Are their colors linked to their health?

Let's have a bit of fun with it, and presume that the fading of one's color can happen to a stick figure for health-related reasons, as the scene could imply.

This fading seems to involve loosing the saturation of one's color into grey. Saturation is how vibrant a color is, and the complete lack of saturation is greyscale.

The World-of-Alan reason for Pink's death is that she 'got sick', which is where the health connection of this theory comes from. If she did loose her color as she was dying as the notes depict, that loss of color was likely a result of her failing health rather than any other factors, like age or outside variables. A whole bunch of human body stuff are indicators for good vs poor health, including skin color (jaundice and cyanasis are good examples) so why not a stick's color for them?

What if, when they fully die, they lose all of their original color?

Now, let me propose this…

Who else do we know of who has had their color loose vibrancy?

What if Victim's color has lightened because he's ill?

[lonndoodles]

Me too Eda. I wouldn't be able to keep it together if Raine looked at me like that.

[glitter-stained]

I always feel like a little sad seeing posts about how Jason's character is inherently tragic and that's what makes it good, how him being unloved, a tragic consequence of his own actions, is inevitable, and how that shouldn't change because any change on that regard is a fundamental misunderstanding of his character. Yes, Under the Hood is a tragedy. Yes, Jason survived and for a long time people have been pretty confused at what to do with the character that survives the tragic ending. That doesn't mean he should continue to be trapped in the tragedy, that there's only value in him as long as he's unloved. And maybe that's me preaching and being a party pooper again but the idea that the teenage-to-young adult character with a mental illness that has damaged all his relationships is doomed to be lonely and have bad/upended relationships forever, that he's only good as a character as long as he's hurting others and/or himself (and usually both) and isolated because of this... It's sad, at the very least. I refuse the presumption that tragedies are the only stories wise and worth telling.

Also I personally really dislike the idea that Jason isn't and shouldn't be anyone's favourite, because he made himself nobody's favourite on purpose. Did he make himself a villain on purpose? Fuck yeah. Does any of his early attempts at reaching out to people hurt them? Indubitably. I maintain that this is because he wants to be someone's favourite as he is, at his worst, with his hands covered in blood. And I think he should be. (Without contradicting or damaging, by comparison, the relationships between other characters, that's the tightrope we need to be weary of when making such things, of course.)

It's like this: love, in most relationships, is conditional: you don't owe your friend or your partner to continue to love them if the relationship changes, if you change, if you become violent etc. If my girlfriend started murdering puppies, I would stop loving her. Ideally, however a parent's love for their child is unconditional. That's very often unfortunately not the case, but ideally it'd be, it's really not great for a kid to have zero parents that love them unconditionally. And most importantly, it's not just about actual unconditional love, it's about it being perceived. So it doesn't matter in the debate if Bruce actually loves Jason in spite of the murder, it matters that Jason asks for confirmation of it at the end of UTH and receives a negative answer. (similar arguments to be made about Catherine loving Jason and dying of drug overdose and Willis going to jail and dying - it's the potential perceived abandonment of it that would matter, not their agency and actual love. And it's not a question of whether he would be angry at it so much as that he'd yearn and hurt for it. And of course Sheila didn't love him at all.) That's why he, upon learning about Mia and reaching previously unknown to man levels of projection*, tries to rally her with the hope that, because she's "so similar to him" she would understand him. That's why upon learning about Dick "killing" Blockbuster Jason, again projecting more violently than a bullet, Jason makes Dick into his new favourite person (god, the concept behind BiB has so much potential why did it have to suck so bad...) Anyway, Jason to me is a character with a very intense, very overwhelming conception of love both in who he loves and how, who struggles to understand that other people love and show it differently, and it makes so much sense for him to keep looking for a person who will love him unconditionally (something that's both very rare and not necessarily healthy since, again, most relationships aside from parent-child relationships do not and probably should not include unconditional love). This is particularly interesting in the context of him having bpd (again, using bpd because i'm focusing on the interpersonal dimension that's been mostly studied within that frame) because BPD often functions around a vicious circle of "is afraid of rejection/abandonment -> does maladaptive behaviour in attempt to prevent rejection/abandonment OR protect oneself by being the one to leave first" which is what leads to the instability in relationships. It's a doomed prophecy: i have maladaptive patterns that make me think my girlfriend is gonna leave me at any time, I keep demanding to see her phone, assuming she's cheating everytime she leaves and thus demonizing her even though I was glorifying her five minutes earlier" then she's going to leave me, which is gonna reinforce my thought pattern that everyone always leaves me. But that also means that in rare instances in which the other person in the interact, for whichever reason, sticks around through that, then these incorrect thought patterns begin to change through the sheet logic of extinction: if i think that people always leave me because of something fundamentally wrong with me and people don't leave then eventually the idea that people are doomed to abandon/reject me is going to lose its power. That's, btw, an important part of why therapy works.

(*that one's a joke, btw. He's not projecting onto mia and dick to levels impossible to mankind, just pretty intensely. Very human levels of projection, might I add'. Just to clarify.)

Now, be mindful: I'm not saying make Jason an abusive boyfriend. I'm not saying put him in a relationship where the other stays because they're afraid of him, that's not unconditional love or acceptance that's just fear. Of course, the ideal version of it would be Jason goes to therapy but because dc hates me specifically this is never gonna happen, but imagine him being in a relationship, romantic or otherwise, with someone who is as intense and "unwell" about him as he is about them. I'm not saying it would fix him (again, get him so goddamn therapy jfc) but it would change him. And just as it doesn't have to be healthy it doesn't have to be tragic.

I was asked a while ago my thoughts on Jason's current stagnancy as a character and if I thought he could become interesting again, and I said yes and talked about the directions I dream would be explored with his character and their potential. My answer hasn't changed, and it's completely compatible with this, but I will add: I think Jason as a character has largely and for long enough been defined through his yearning to be somebody's favourite, and that if you want his mode of interacting with others and dynamic with different characters to change then this is a very logical way to do it. And it would make a lot of sense for it to be the catalyst for other changes in his character (ie in his name or philosophy).

Get that boy into a super intense long-term codependent situationship, is what I'm saying. Please.

[cosmicwhoreo]

BEHOLD! I gave Pearl chronic headaches! now she's just like me fr fr-

[canisalbus]

so a few weeks ago i went to a local scandinavian fair/market (i live in the northeastern part of the usa, so not a Huge population of scandinavian immigrants/ancestry. a pretty small but really nice gathering!), and there was someone there selling imported Finnish candy. i thought of you talking about salmiakki and asked if she was selling any, which apparently she was, but sold out pretty fast! i still bought a bag of assorted Finnish candies that she had put together herself, and i really liked them! however... one day i will try salmiakki, I've got it in my mind now.

Ooo that's so cool! It feels really strange to think of Finnish candy being sold as rare imported goods on the other side of the world, but that's how it goes, of course. Where I come from, some common American brands are still exotic and rarely stocked by stores, I remember coming across Reese's cups in person for the first time just a couple of years ago and going "OH I've heard of those!!"

Salmiakki is a powerful and unique flavor, and as a finn it genuinely brings me such glee that you remembered me mentioning it once and were curious enough to try to give it a taste! Sorry they were sold out. I hope you'll get your hands on some sooner or later. (I personally like the hard candy varieties like turkinpippuri, oukki doukki, patruuna and dracula piller the best, but I'd say those can be on the more aggressive end so, like, brace yourself a little if that happens to be your introduction point).