#I don't know what's his age at the end

[daeley]

Human

Vampire

Old vampire, dark god?

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

I'm not ready to shut up about Aveline and Carver--so, when you go see Aveline in Act 1, you can catch up with her a little bit and that's where this conversation can happen:

Aveline: "It's just one more change, though. The real end for me was Ostagar. What about you, Carver? You were there. Do you feel something similar?" Carver: No. Aveline: All right, then. Bit of a tit, your brother.

I wanted to see what she would say if Carver isn't in the party. Instead, she says this:

Aveline: Carver was there. I imagine he feels something similar. If he allows it.

......well, at least she didn't call him a tit?

[vaguely-concerned]

there are two wolves inside me. one wolf doesn't want to make dorian pavus archon because that's just a lot. of lotness for him to deal with and I love him and would like to spare him that at least, and also even posthumously it means sort of giving halward pavus a win. which galls, naturally. the other wolf thinks it would be very very funny for iron bull to have to deal with being married in all but law to the archon of tevinter.

[mossattack]

if anyone is looking for some inspiration and/or generally wants to feed their emmrich brainrot, consider giving cigar by tamino a listen. not only does it suit our necromancer, it's also a wonderful song in itself :)

[blorbosinmyheadcentral]

Really curious to know where in the heck people got this "Caine is an old man" thing from

[mikesbasementbeets]

to be real for a second, i think there is a moment in the show where mike has a ~realization~ of sorts about his feelings but hasn't quite put two and two together yet.... and it's this:

this realization of "hey my feelings for will are actually maybe different than my feelings for my other friends, but i'm not sure why" happens at the end of season two. and then mike spends the entirety of season three acting sort of strange and different around will while having his relationship with him constantly juxtaposed with his relationship with el. reaching the end of that season which, despite all the supernatural shit going on, took the time to focus so heavily on those two relationships (and how fundamentally different they are), and having mike have the same realization he had at the end of season two makes no sense because it would mean he accomplished absolutely nothing in his emotional arc during the course season three

especially to claim that he still believes he has feelings for el going into season 4. especially to claim he still believes he has feelings for el by the end of season 4. it's to claim that he has not made any emotional progress in his relationships for at least two full seasons, that he's been going through all of this for it to not have made any conscious impact on him, and the changes in the way he acts from s2-3 and from s3-4 aren't a product of his character developing (growing, changing, to quote hopper's letter) but rather..... ? i don't know actually. just him feeling weird but not understanding himself at all. still. it just doesn't make sense to me. he's one of the main characters of the show, and to keep him emotionally stagnant for 4 out of 5 seasons (especially when we can see that his behavior is changing, that he has not been stagnant at all but rather deeply affected by everything) would be a disservice to his character, first of all, but also a disservice to the narrative which has been showing us his (as well as the other characters') struggle with growing up and growing into himself every season. and it simply doesn't align with what we're being shown

mike is already having realizations by the end of season two. but by the end of season three, he's starting to be really honest with himself about what they mean

[bakafurai]

I dunno where some people seem to have gotten the idea that Kenji doesn't like/care for Rio or smth because like. have ya'll actually gone through her social link???

like,,,

and it's at this point Rio's teammates and Yuko run and yell at him, Kenji panics and then runs off. When Yuko grumbles about Kenji comparing Rio to a bowl of ramen, Rio says this:

Ramen is his favourite thing in the world.

Kenji telling Rio he likes her "about as much as ramen" means that he likes about as much as his favourite thing in the world.

I think people also seem not to understand how things seem from Kenji's perspective.

To him, his childhood friend comes up to him and suddenly asks what he thinks of her, if he likes and how much which. is kind of a random thing to suddenly ask your friend that you've known since you were kids??? assuming they were like 5 or 6 when they met, that's basically a whole ass decade? Like it's clear in the way he speaks that he's confused and honestly I would be too???

Another thing to consider is that he and Rio where alone, Kenji likely said it the way he did bc he knew Rio, his childhood friend, would understand what he meant.

Like, I can get that he can sometimes come off as dense or insensitive but tbh I think he's just bad a picking up social cues? (oh he's just likely me for real- what do you mean i'm projecting?).

Like yeah sure Kenji very likely only sees her in a platonic sense (sorry Rio my heart goes out to you honey) but to outright assume he doesn't care about her is. raaggh.

(side note: in reload there's a dialogue from Kenji during the koromaru walks where he says "I mean, I keep telling them that we're just childhood friends, but they won't stop prying about it." and it is very likely he's talking about Rio bc this is 100% "my parents keep asking me if i'm dating my childhood friend that is also a girl" talk. Plus Kenji doesn't seem to be that close to many people so. interesting piece of info though ngl so I thought i'd mention it.)

[bonebabbles]

wait im sorry. ive never read past the first book of dotc and all my knowledge of it really just comes from your blogs. wh. why did the erins decide to include sexual violence in warriors? like. that seems a little. too much? like all im hearing of dotc is just. terrible shit. i like reading more angst/serious stuff (i wanna say darker but not in the way "dark media" usually means on this site) but this feels like WAYYY to much for a book series meant for kids....... what were they thinking??

I legitimately do not understand what people like about DOTC. You can go back to where I started this re-read, and you can visibly watch my charitability drain as the project goes on.

It feels like literally everything that people say they like about this arc is not there, while they've completely forgotten or misremembered SERIOUSLY awful shit

And now, listen. I'm a huge fan of xenofiction, which is a genre that is full of kid's and teen's media, but I do love more adult fiction. I love nuanced themes, dark subjects, and complicated plots.

DOTC's message is just plain odious. None of what it sets out to say is worth saying, and it's borderline incompetent at even saying it to begin with.

What they want to say with Clear Sky and Slash is that Clear Sky isn't "evil." He's a "fundamentally good person," and all of his intentions were good, so he learned a valuable lesson from all the abuse and murder. To say this, they CONTRAST him to Slash, a REAL evil person, who just loves hurting kids and harassing women. Clear Sky is good because he is not "real evil" like this fake, cartoon caricature we just made up.

There was absolutely zero need for them to write Slash the way they did. They really want you to be distressed for Clear Sky as his wife is assaulted in front of him and hauled off while kicking and screaming, and they decided the best way to do that was pregnant woman pinning face licking. Sexual violence is an easy way to disgust and anger an audience, simple as that.

As a kid you may not realize how messed up it is (though the asks I get on this blog are a testament to how many kids did, but didn't have the words to express their discomfort) but as an adult with your critical thinking on? It hits different.

[omo321]

fanart of older Koito with Tsurumi's exact facial hair layout/hairstyle is so thoroughly unnerving, do NOT like do not wanna think about it nope nope nope

[starryalpacasstuff]

Last Twilight; Mee's legacy continues

I know that we're all mad at how episode 11 went. Believe me, I am too. I'm not going to be talking about the issues in the episode, several others have already done so, and far more eloquently than I could. Because despite the episode's failings, there are still some things about this episode that I think deserve to be talked about.

I've loved keeping up with Mee's story as the show has progressed (written about it here and here). I thought that Mee's story ended in episode 9, but it continues to be present in the narrative. The most obvious clue to this is, obviously, Porjai's daughter, whom they named Mee. In addition to that, episode 11 focuses on highlighting the fact that Day 's blindness is not something that can be cured, just as Mee could never return to her life before she was cursed. Just as Mee had hoped that the last twilight would allow her to return to her normal life, Day hoped, even fully believed that the surgery would allow him to become "normal" again (the medical inaccuracies of the process aside). In the end, neither can return to a sense of "normalcy", as Mee turns to stone and Day's surgery fails. Both stories are haunted by a sense of grief, helplessness, and hope that is given and taken away. But the end of Mee's story isn't written as tragic, it's written as joyful. The exact same ending could have been written as tragic and solemn, but it wasn't. In the end, Mee was able to revel in the fact that she would never turn invisible again, despite turning to stone. And that's what I'm hoping that Day's final arc will resemble. Because we know that Day is still insecure about his blindness, and about people's pity for him. His buying that cane was a massive step in the right direction, because it showed that he was willing to "announce to everyone that he's blind", to be less afraid. But, as the breakup showed us, he's still insecure about his blindness. If the theory is right, episode 12 should show us Day accepting his blindness, and maybe even celebrate it as a part of him, as Mee does.

Mee's story has run parallel to Day's since they began to read it. Mee's story is over now, but Day's isn't. We see that Mee continues to have a presence in Day's life, be it metaphorically, through her story predicting his, or literally, through Porjai's daughter. Besides fixing a lot of the damage that was done in episode 11, if there's one thing I'd like from episode 12, it's one final call back to Mee's story.

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[hanzajesthanza]

Bez krwi nie ma wampira. Jest to substancja, która decyduje o jego istnieniu, podobnie jak o istnieniu człowieka. Without blood there is no vampire. It is this substance which determines his existence, just as it does the existence of a human.

Maria Janion. "6. Krew i ciało," in Wampir: Biografia symboliczna. ("6. Blood and body," in Vampire: A Symbolic Biography.)

[magniloquent-raven]

yo, respectfully, i don't understand why some of yall are so worried about jim and olu kissing other people?

we already got "see, we don't own each other" from lucius & pete in s1, the writers seem comfortable writing not-entirely-monogamous relationships. and like. they both clearly still have feelings for each other, i'm sure they'll be fine my dudes

[iniziare]

While finally writing a thing, I suddenly remembered that I never shared (I don't think) when I HC Guizhong's birthday to be: the first day of each year, January 1st. Why? Well, I was thinking of the Guili Assembly, and how it seems really rather likely that it was created from the names that she and Morax, at the time, went by (not Zhongli, or... well, maybe that was exactly what he went by actually, come to think of it; why wouldn't he?) Which, to me, is further confirmed by the translation of the area's name's from the Chinese source directly. We have the 'Plains of Returning and Departing' (歸離原), which correlate with the meanings of a symbol in each of their names, the 'Gui' (歸) from Guizhong which means 'to return', and 'li' (離) from Zhongli, which means 'to depart'.

Now, regardless of the perceived nature of these two to others, I think saying that they're intertwined in stone (history) and memory either way, to hardly be far from a stretch at all. Now, keeping the above two translations in mind, and remembering that they put Zhongli's birthday in our western calendar on December 31st, I think January 1st would be a beautiful decision for Guizhong's. He represents the end of a fruitfal year, and she represents the start, or chance, of a new. I love the symbolism more than I can put into words.

[fluffle-writes]

I wanna. Pick them up in my mouth and shake 'em around like a dog obliterating a squeaky toy

[a-host-of-dancing-daffodils]

And because I recently read the Chocolate Box...Please enjoy one of the only things I feel like the show did right with this particular story...

Poirot looking super dapper in his Belgian police uniform:

The cut of this uniform is very flattering on him, I must say...especially with the way it accentuates his chest, his waist, and his ''''''''seat''''''''

And I love the design on the collar/sleeves. Very fancy/official

also. please look at his very silly official hat

Gotta say. Hugh Fraser may have been the eye candy of this show, but. David Suchet sure knows how to be pretty, too