#I honestly don't know which will win

[mollymauks-tapestry]

Logical side of my brain: Dorym college AU deserves your attention right now. You have so many ideas for it and you need to actually write it.

Monkey brain: Hehoo, AU where Dorym turn evil and are absolutely in love with how evil the other is

[generalsmemories]

every time i see someone shit on the xianzhou story quest on twitter i die a little bit inside.

[greenerteacups]

hi GT!

Lionheart had me the moment you kicked it off with “it’s a nice day to start again.” Might i ask why you chose that particular line?

And, if you havent already answered to this emoji:

❄️

P.s: you have my eternal gratitude for creating the most brilliant piece of writing i’ll ever read. I shout about it from the rooftops, share it on my socials, requested my spouse to read it so we may discuss it together (in lieu of a present for my 30th birthday), et cetera.

I see from your URL you are a fellow lad of taste.

There's a couple things going on in the epigraph for Book 1. On one level, it's a lyric from the first muggle song I picture Draco listening to on his walkman at the end of the book, so there's a cute full-circle thing there. The second layer is the theme of change and redemption, which, in Lionheart, doesn't so much come from major moments or self-sacrifice, but from the slow, grueling, everyday work of living, and living better. It's a nice day to start again because every day is. You always have the opportunity to start making better choices, no matter what lies behind you. That's the thesis of any Draco redemption arc, right? You have to imagine that he could have chosen to be better.

And then thirdly, there's the audacity of doing a full Hogwarts canon rewrite, a good 30 years after the original books came out, millions upon millions of words of fanfic later, and basically asking everyone to read the same story they did the first time around, only different. So it's a kind of winking entreaty. It's saying to readers, many of whom are understandably wary of doing it over, zeroing out the characters to starting positions, and starting from the beginning with 11-year-olds all over again. It's going: "hey. That was fun, right? Why not do it again?"

[silent-sentinels]

we have gotta actually finish the other account, it has been months and we want to tell revi that we're also plural hgkjgk

[c6jpg]

i should have paid more attention to the first part of the little saurian world quest bc i am now fully invested

[valyrfia]

i understand why charles signed the mega contract with ferrari and why it's important to him to stay and win with ferrari but dammit lestappen rbr would've given us some of the best racing in recent memory

[singaporehelmet]

god why must you give me a lando hater mom 😭😭

[astarlightmonbebe]

episode 5 has left me considering the different - and similar - ways taeyoung and kwonsook think about themselves, and how they respond to pain/violence.

kwonsook calls herself a monster, someone who goes crazy in the boxing ring. that monster, she says, was created by her father, and her father used abuse, violence, and emotional manipulation to create that monster. he didn’t treat her like human, so it’s no surprise that the way she talks about herself when she boxes is as if she’s discussing an animal: she gets cornered, gets scared for her life, and lashes out to kill. she calls herself a monster with resignation; it’s not what she wanted to be, but she knows it’s what she was. she ran away to escape that monstrosity, to live as a human, doing good things, but that part of her never really died.

taeyoung, too, calls himself a monster. he’s a SOB, he does thing no one with an ounce of humanity would do. he seemingly has no qualms about what he does, perhaps because he can always justify it to himself, always has an exit prepared for when things really get bad (until, i’m sure, he doesn’t). like kwonsook, taeyoung accepts the label of monster, accepts his own inhumanity, even if they are inhuman in very different ways. whereas kwonsook wants to break away from that monstrous part of her - she’s only returned so she can free herself from that part of herself permanently (and if she finds a way to box without a monster, then...) - taeyoung embraces it. it’s through being a monster that he’s found success, how he secures futures for his athletes, and how he’s able to ‘solve’ their (and his) issues. monstrosity was not imposed on taeyoung, but (due to what we know so far) is something he chose for himself (although the factors surrounding this part of his past are decidedly murky).

in this episode, taeyoung and kwonsook also demonstrate similar responses to violence and (emotional) pain. when taeyoung upsets kwonsook by working with her father behind her back, he offers her an outlet for her anger by punching him. later on, after ahreum has already slapped kwonsook, instead of lashing out, kwonsook offers to let ahreum hit her again if it will make her feel better. in parallel responses, both ahreum and kwonsook debate taking that opportunity to hurt, but decide not to (kwonsook because she’s taking a chance on taeyoung, or moreso giving him another one, and ahreum because she decides that she doesn’t owe kwonsook that, that kwonsook is beneath her in terms of boxing, no longer on her level). 

kwonsook learned to respond to pain at a young age. in boxing, you can’t flinch from the hit - you have to learn how to take the pain, absorb it, and get back up to hit again. outside of the rink, kwonsook absorbs the pain, but she doesn’t hit again. she’s experienced firsthand what her hits can do to people, and that terrified her. after all, she only boxed so that she could protect her mother. so when confronted with violence and pain, she takes the hit, because pain is what she knows and understands. it’s the emotions behind it that are hard for her. pain is easy for kwonsook, because she’s used to living through it, surviving it; beneath it, she’s always empty. she’s never really cared about boxing; it was what she had to do. the lee kwonsook that was a boxing genius was a monster she ran from, after all. but in order to break away from that monster, she has to come to understand the emotional investment of her fellow female boxers. before, they were just her opponents, never her friends, but now she has to face their own feelings about the sport, the passion they have for boxing that she never felt. like ara said, she didn’t feel happiness about winning, and kwonsook has never lost, so she’s never had to live with that humiliation, either. how her feelings will change in relation to boxing will likely be a reckoning for her.

taeyoung, on the other hand, is confronting his fair share of non-boxing sanctioned boxing. even though kwonsook is the boxer, it’s taeyoung who’s been touched by ‘true’ violence in this present timeline. his life is quite literally on the line, which has been shown again and again. he’s been ambushed by her father, threatened, blackmailed, and beaten up by chairman nam’s guys. he lives on the edge, anxious at every shadow, which is chewing him alive. to him, kwonsook’s anger is much easier to deal with. he knows she might hurt him, but his potential to hurt her is so much more (and if he does, in that case he’d find her anger justified, and probably let her beat him to death or something if what we’ve seen of his feelings for her is an indication of anything), and she might hurt him, but she’d never hurt him as much as other people in his life at the moment would (i.e. by killing him, or hurting the people he cares about). taeyoung is used to weathering the storm of other people’s dislike; he’s the scumbag, and he does bad things, deserves other people’s anger when it’s directed at him. 

both taeyoung and kwonsook want to resolve things through violence. i think it’s telling that despite being two emotionally aware people, they both consider other people’s feelings to be so easily taken care of. they want the quick, instant pain, and then they want to get it over with. because the violence is what they’re used to, and to a degree it’s what they both think they deserve. however, what lies beneath that, what doesn’t go away with a single hit, is much harder for them to confront and understand. 

[kagedbird]

So everyone in the Airbnb I live in is back from winter break, and my actual downstairs roommate (it's just us two) has decided he lives in the fucking bathroom every time I need it (out of coincidence but still, mate, hurry the fuck up) to the point where I asked the owners if I could just use the upstairs bathroom and it was the first time I've ever gone upstairs before (since we're usually not allowed) and hoLY SHIT THAT WAS TERRIFYING. THOSE STAIRS ARE A DEATH TRAP.

Anyways: here's to getting my first apartment at some point this year because I Cannot take this shit anymore. Please.

[turtlemagnum]

one of my favorite parts of strategy games like chess and advance wars is that feeling when you haven't quite won yet but the enemy has no real options so it feels like you're just sloowly wrapping around them like a snake. when all your enemy has is their king and you've managed to turn 3 of your pawns into queens, and all you've gotta do is get in juust the right position, and in the meantime all they can do is squirm. god, that's such a wonderful feeling. nothing quite like it

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

even in the middle of this relapse i can see how far ive come since last time? idk im able to recognise the black and white thinking way more, im able to talk myself down from anxiety, i can still remind myself that things might feel inevitable but they're not. like yall. things aren't perfect right now but they're a hell of a lot better than they were months ago. i don't think they'll ever be quite as awful as they were then.

[portlandwithyou]

I accidentally finished two different fics for the due south big bang. Which one should I submit? They're both F/K and roughly the same length

[gailynovelry]

When you suddenly become aware of a plot hole that probably 90% of anyone who ever looks at your stuff will not notice, think, or care about, but now it's in your brain and you need to dig up an old story to edit it into submission again.

[itwoodbeprefect]

i always thought there were two ways to rediscover old stories that you don't remember writing and they are 1) oh no i can't look oh no oh no that's embarrassing, and 2) hey? this is pretty cool actually? this sort of really rocks?, but today i've discovered the secret third option. and it's 3) i guess in 2018 i wrote 1500 words of original fiction about thor (the norse god) and the easter bunny (the easter bunny) on a blind first date in a starbucks and it's a little haunting that this reads pretty much the same as most genuine fluffy scenes i've ever written, but littered with egg puns

[the-physicality]

.

[volivolition]

what's the theme you're fucking going for here voliiii!!! what are you fucking getting at!!! what are you trying to say, what's the point??