#I didn't ask for this

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Are you sure Leona is the one with a grab-able waist and “shittiy attitude” and not, well some feathered lady?

[Referencing this post!]

QUITE HONESTLY THE PHRASE COULD EASILY APPLY TO ALL (if not most of) THE PEOPLE AT NRC...

ADBHLVUAOORQE;guoeqqpfN286T0PQE;.M;'K LJS'F i NEED YOU TO EunDERSTAND THE UTTER dWESPAIR THAT SHOT THROGUH MY GUT WHEN I sAW THIS ASK AND THE ARTWROK THAT CAME WITH iT..... . . . ....... . . . ....... . . ............ . . . . .. ..... . .. . . .. . .. . . . . OTL I ZOOME DIN TO CHECK, WHYS' s HE . BLSUSHGINGF WHIEL LOOKGIN AT . THE L WORD

I really love how simple the line art is! It's able to convey a lot with just a few strokes. The fluffiness of Miss Raven's feather shawl, the hair and tail that look as though they're forming a loop around the characters... It's neat ^^ Thank you very much for this fan art, it's much appreciated!!

[nina-s0]

Ao3 is down. The world is on fire.

[runawaymac]

what do you mean my little project requires spending hours in illustrator

[sorinethemastermind]

Whumpuary 2025 | Prompt: "I Didn't Ask For This"

 Viren slammed the door shut behind him, hearing it shake on it's hinges. He paced across the room, head in his hands, fingers furiously combing through his hair. All for nothing. All of it was for nothing. 

 His fist slammed down on the table, “Nothing!”

 The bird cooed in the corner, tilting it’s head at him quizzically from inside the cage. He glared at it. 

 “Are you mocking me, now? Is this kingdom’s doom amusing to you?”

 The bird said nothing, merely adjusted it’s footing on the perch. Viren scowled. It was becoming harder and harder to tell what was bird and what was… what wasn’t. How long could you be trapped in something else’s body before you became that thing? How long could you cling to someone you no longer were before it was lost entirely?

 It was something he might have pondered, once. Discussed with Harrow. Written theories on. Something Kpp’Ar would have found-

 Viren sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, “I’m sorry. You need your seed, don’t you?”

 He opened one of the nearby cupboards, pulling out the little sack of bird feed he kept there. He walked over to the cage, sprinkling some in through the bars. He knew better than to open it. Not after last time.

 Pulling back a chair, he passed the bag of seed between his hands and watched as the bird ate. It pecked at the floor, scrounging for every scrap and morsel. Viren looked away, unable to watch.

 “I didn’t have a choice, you know,” he said, addressing the far wall. “You left me no choice.” When no reply came (how could it?) he continued. “It was the only way forward. For our kingdom. For humanity. The only way I could protect them. It was the only way forward for you,” he did look at the bird, then. At it’s unsettlingly strange yet familiar eyes, “You’ll thank me someday.”

 It said nothing.

 Viren stood, leaving the bag of seed on the table, and began to pace the room. “I didn’t ask for this,” he told the bird. It lifted a seed in it’s beak and cracked it.

 Viren snarled, “See, you say that but-” he paused, catching himself, and stared at the bird. It had said nothing. Could say nothing. It was just a bird. And yet-

 Viren’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, and he sank back into the chair, staring at it as it ate, “Are you even listening?”

 The bird picked up another seed, tilted it’s head back, and swallowed it. Viren sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Can you even listen?”

 The bird said nothing. 

 “I am not going to give up. Not on humanity, not on this kingdom, and not on you.” Viren stood, brushing his hands down his front to straighten out the wrinkles in his robe, “No matter what you think of me.” 

The bird said nothing as he swept from the room, closing the door with a sharp click behind him.

[heretherebedork]

Dear Shadow wtf am I supposed to do with you dropping seven episodes tomorrow!? Each one is 45 minutes long. What do you want from me? How am I supposed to do that!? I still have Kiseki and, you know, a job. Why?! Come on!

[rattkween86]

y'all ever seen the Hat Man? Because I had just thought I sometimes had really weird dreams or night terrors a couple of times in my life, and then I happened upon a thread where tons of people were discussing and illustrating him, and my Hat Man is the same as their Hat Man, and idk what it means, but I feel super weird about it.

[salty-trainer]

Is there some new scam on Tumblr where bots make posts for hiring people?

[lucky-ladybugs-lovelies]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/62438275

Hello, I wrote a very silly but whumpy fic involving Cloud, Sephiroth, and a random animal casting Small on Cloud. I have just added several more scenes too, so for anyone who enjoyed the first edition, please check out the new scenes!

[writersblockiskillingme]

When I said that I want to be a main character in a book I didn't mean a Russian novel.

[iridescentis]

yall ever get a feeling in your chest somewhat akin to anxiety whenever a new interest has entered your brain and you just have to wait it out and see if it becomes an obsession or joins the shelf of "shit i like when im bored"

[colormeskye]

Who decided that we had to work for a living?? I JUST WANT TO TALK. 😤

[mitsuki91]

I just had a TERRIFYING THOUGHT about Snow and a what if: he lets Katniss have it as a winner with Peeta and doing something else with the quartel quell, so no rebellion but Katniss of course is a mentor now, and Snow... Snow... Of course he doesn't sell her but he buys her (nothing sexual please this man is 80+) and asks her to sing the songs of the Covey and sometimes he hugs her and kiss her hair and Katniss has to sing, terrified, never know what that means, and... I am not well.

[ostensiblywhump]

The Millstone—Emerald or Crimson?

Whumpuary day 11: "I didn't ask for this" | blood | abandoned

Word count: 1,101

Content warnings: none

———(0)———

Maa likes brushing her thumbs under Brier’s eyes. Who knows why, but it’s with that smile with eyes that see something else, so if Brier asks, maa might not even hear the question.

“Maa?” she says anyways, her mother’s callused thumb scraping over her eyelid. “Why do you do that?”

“Hmmm?” maa hums, and blinks, now actually looking at Brier. Her bells go ting-ting-ting, rising up like a question.

“This!” Brier says, plopping her hand over her maa’s.

“Ah,” maa says, and smiles again. The smile she gets when the man she says to call maba leaves. “Because your blood is green.”

Brier blinks, then scowls, because: “That doesn’t make sense, maa! My blood’s red!” She tripped and scraped her knee while playing with the other kids in the village they were in last week, and it was definitely red. It stained the bottom of her skirt a little. Maa had to scrub a lot to get it out.

Maa laughs, but her song doesn’t change from the deep, long bell, like the one Brier once heard ringing for a funeral. “You’re right,” she agrees. “It’s red, silly me. I meant your eyes are green.”

She leans in a little, and the gold of her gaze pins Brier in place. Her song still rings for a funeral.

“Green as the mountains, the forests, the country itself. It means you’ll rule one day, little heir, just like your ma’ba.”

Maa lets go, and lets Brier go, and Brier has her answer that didn’t really sound like an answer. It doesn’t stop her from frowning still, because if she’s going to be like maba, then ‘you’ll rule one day’ just sounds like ‘you’ll leave one day.’

———

The man Brier is told to call maba is back. It doesn’t make sense—her brothers like him when he’s here, and he’s nice, but shouldn’t he be thann, not maa? Maa stays. Thann is the one that comes and goes.

But Brier is good, and does her best to do what maa says. So she does.

She’s with maba now, learning how to show the animals that she’s a friend. It’s hard, because she can’t hear her own song, but she has to make a sound that the animals can hear and know is friendly, not confused or frustrated or whatever she’s feeling instead. But maba just tells her, “Try again.”

Brier flops sideways—one of the good things about maba is that he doesn’t care if she moves or fidgets, like maa does when she’s showing Brier how to do things. He just cares about her actually doing the stuff he’s showing her. “Mabaaa,” she says. “It’s hard. Can’t I try again tomorrow?”

“Not without my supervision,” maba says. “And I will be going tomorrow. So you must learn today, or wait until when I visit next.”

Brier groans. “Why can’t maa super-vise? Then I have every day to practice and I can show you I did it when you come back!”

“Because she cannot do what we can.”

“Maa can do anything!”

“Not this.”

“Why not?”

“Because she wasn’t born to it.”

Brier’s face scrunches. “Maba, I don’t know what that means. What does being born have to do with being friends with animals?”

Maba’s head tilts, green eyes staring. Brier stares back, because she’s really good at staring contests, and she wants to know why maba thinks maa can’t do a stupid thing like making animal friends when she can do everything, and she … likes looking at maba’s eyes. They’re the only ones she’s seen that are like hers���everyone has yellow or brown or black or sometimes blue or gray, but never green. Only maba, and only her.

“Belladonna wasn’t born to rule,” maba says, and Brier is confused for a second until she remembers that’s the word her family calls maa. “She can’t project her—song. Can’t impose her presence. Her eyes aren’t green, so it’s not in her blood.”

His head stops tilting, and his face doesn’t change, but it never changes anyways. It’s his song that presses down on Brier, a boom-crash like lightning strikes and glass breaking at the same time. It makes Brier lose the staring contest, and her hands to curl into the grass.

“It’s in your blood,” he tells her. “It’s your nature, mine, and no one else’s. You were born to rule.”

His song dulls suddenly, lightning trapped behind glass again. Learning how to breathe without a song putting a weight on her lungs, Brier doesn’t say anything to the contrary.

———

“You were born to rule,” Bion hisses. “It’s your blood, and to reject it is to reject the heart beating in your chest, my Ruler.”

The two times Brier was told that outright, she said nothing. Now, she laughs, giving voice to all the discontent she’d felt those two times and this one, when someone tried shoveling that load of horse-shit with her.

“I didn’t ask for it in the first place,” she says, dropping down to Bion’s level and speaking in their mother tongue. Maybe that’ll make this stupid old scribe actually listen. “And my so-called heart must not be so vital to me, if it abandoned me before I learned that it wasn’t worth anything.”

It isn’t logical. She was taken away from her maa and eldest brother, not abandoned. And when her other brother disappeared after years of surviving together on the mainland, it had hurt, but even in her darkest moments, she always suspected he was taken in turn, not anything else.

But scrabbling in the mud, young, alone, face throbbing with the scales pushing themselves out of her skin and in such blinding pain, she’d called for her maa, her brothers, even her maba. Three of those hadn’t, couldn’t, answer for years already at that point. But one always had, and when only silence replied to her desperation, it had been ….

What had their homeland done for her? For Bion, even? Given them both something to yearn for, only to yank it away in a wash of carnage and despair. It had placed this duty on her, marked her with these eyes, and crushed her with the burden of it. Blood and birthright meant nothing, when all it did was hurt you.

“If you’re so fixated on blood, then listen to your ruler as you are born to do, my people,” Brier says. “Heal, retake your life away from the homeland and the damage it did. And then you’ll know that you never needed a 15-year-old with green eyes to tell you how to be happy.”

[broadraiwrites]

If You Should Feel My Gloom Whumpuary Day 11: "I didn't ask for this." Verse: All Elite Wrestling Characters: Brianna DiBiase (oc), Brandon Torres (oc) Pairing: None Mentions: Angel Michaels (oc), Ted DiBiase Jr, Cody Rhodes, Cassidy Cabana (oc) Warnings: Depression, Internalized Ableism, Divorce Word Count: 1,257

Sitting in her chair at the island between her kitchen and living room, high schooler Brianna DiBiase looked down at her Algebra 2 textbook with a piece of pull and peel Twizzler hanging from her lips. Four pieces set on top of a blue folder for her sister while the remaining pieces sat in the spine of her book, marking the page from her homework problems to the lesson they had worked on in class that day. She slurped up her snack like a spaghetti noodle, typing the problem into her TI-83 calculator before using her Twizzler bookmark to flip back to the lesson to make sure that she had put the problem together correctly.

Bri had been a straight-A student for as long as she could remember, but the last few months had been difficult. Even she could see her grades slipping since she and her mother had moved back to San Antonio. She was grateful that she had been doing high school online in the first place so that there wouldn't be an adjustment to a new school in a new area. It just made things easier when traveling with her mother, going from city to city with AEW or country to country with the Eras Tour Her life was anything but that of a normal teenager. That's not even counting the lack of normalcy caused by internalized ableism, but she wasn't going to talk to anyone about that.

She heard the squeak of the screen door, though she hadn't heard the main door open before it, but maybe she was just too focused on her problem to notice. Having thirty algebra problems due by midnight could do that to a person, but that was just honors algebra 2 for you. She didn't quite recognize the footsteps headed in her direction and hadn't heard her mother talking to anyone when the door came open, so she wasn't sure who exactly was in her home, but she had more important things to worry about. That was until he spoke to her.

“Bri?” Brandon Torres sat down in the chair at the end of the island, two seats away from her, giving the teen her space but making it clear that he was there to see her.

“So now you remember we exist?” She scoffed with a heavy dose of venom in her voice, blending with the usual teenage snark. She wasn't the young girl that Brandon had once done math problems with her stuffed animals before her doctor's appointment. In fact, she seemed angered by his presence.

“I deserve that,” Brandon admitted. “I get that you're mad at me, and I can't blame you for being mad at me. I promised you when I and your mom split up that I would be here, and I haven't exactly done that, and for that I apologize.” He paused for a minute, trying to gather his words, trying to figure out how to talk to a girl who was so much different than the one he had originally met with so much anger in her heart for so many different people. “You obviously don't have to accept that apology, and I'm not here to ask you to forgive me. I know things must be hard for you right now—”

“You have no idea how hard things are for me right now. Don't pretend that you do. Don't sit here and try to pretend let you know how I'm feeling.” She looked up at him for a moment, tears brimming in her eyes, but then returned her gaze to her textbook. “He walked out just like he's done before, just like he'll probably do again.” She paused for a moment, her voice smaller when she spoke again “just like you did.”

Brandon considered his words for a moment, understanding how much Angel's separation from Cody must have hurt her daughter, how much his returning to her life in this moment must have brought up old wounds, even if he was there to try to fix them. “I never wanted to walk out on you, Bri. When your mom and I separated, it was a mutual thing. I wasn't trying to walk off and abandon you like your dad or Cody have done. I got caught up in my own shit, and maybe a part of me lost track of things; maybe I didn't want you or your mom to get pulled into things. The point is, I'm not like them. I don't want to sit here and give you excuses; I'm sure you've had plenty of other adults do that lately. I know you and your mom used to tell me that you blamed yourself for the fact that Ted left, but I want you to hear from me that the fact that I wasn't here isn't your fault. I don't want to be another adult you blame yourself for pushing away.”

A few tears fell on the pages of the textbook as Bri reached to wipe her eyes. “I just want people to stop leaving. I just want people to stop breaking promises, to stop saying that they're going to be there when they aren't.” She gestured to the wheelchair that she sat in. “I know this thing is the reason my dad left. I know he couldn't handle a disabled kid, but I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to be unlovable. I didn't ask to be too much, to take up too much space. I didn't ask to be easy to leave, but apparently I am.”

Brandon reached over to place his hand on her arm and took a deep breath as he shook his head. “You were never unlovable; you were never too much; you never took up too much space or any of that. You were never the problem. I know you want to blame yourself for the things that your mom has gone through, the things that you and your sister have gone through, but it was never any of your fault. I was an ass. Cody has turned into something I don't even recognize anymore, and your dad was an idiot for walking away in the first place. These are not your burdens to carry. If you'll let me, if you could tolerate being around me for more than five minutes after everything, then let me carry it for you and your mom. I can't promise that I'll be perfect, but I do want to be a better friend to you guys than I have been. I want to be better at keeping that promise. You shouldn't be caught in the middle of any of this and neither should your sister I just want to make sure that you aren't. Let the adults be idiots, and maybe one of these days you can play me the plankton rap you are always so excited about.”

Bri sighed, pulling another piece from her candy bookmark and popping it into her mouth. She wasn't sure if she wanted to trust him just yet. If he was just another adult giving her empty promises. If this was just another chance for him to walk away and leave her wondering where things went wrong, but for now he was here, and the thought that he remembered something like their conversations about the SpongeBob musical did make her happy to think about. With him and Cassidy around again, maybe she could finally make sense of things, and maybe all of this wasn't her fault after all.

[callmearcturus]

borderline encyclopedic recall for the source material of a fandom is one of my weird superpowers, but I can only do it with one fandom at a time.

when i was in TMA fandom, i could tell you what episode you were thinking of just from like a line of dialogue. in WTNV, I knew the plot of every single episode and could pinpoint them from almost any detail. in HS, I could pull exact pages from nearly any moment in the entire story in 10 seconds and could correct ppl's memory of lines with verbatim recollection. in MI, i have extensively annotated mental copies of all the films but MI2 (sorry its boringggg).

but i can't do the TMA holistic knowledge thing and I ppppprobably can't do magical HS recall. it really is one at a time.

[heretherebedork]

Why are so many people coming to pontificate and moralize about Only Friends in my inbox? None of them are perfect, none of them are better than each other, please stop trying to vilify any of them, thank you very much.