#I need an outlet to post my thoughts

[fluffypandajay]

How do you tell someone you’ve fallen in love with them? How do you tell them that it physically hurts when your part? How do you tell them? Especially when the feelings you have for them are one sided?

How do you tell them that even though your skin burns for them, that they shouldn’t touch you? That they shouldn’t trail their fingers over your arms while you are talking? That they shouldn’t kiss your hands? That the intimacy that you feel when they look in your eyes chips away at your soul?

You listen to their stories when they tell you of their one true love. You try to keep a blank face when they tell you that their heart already belongs to someone they can’t have.

How do you keep a straight face? How do you keep everything quiet even while you feel everything shatter into millions of pieces?

You can’t. Even if it physically kills you to do so, take a step back.

Stop sending them messages.

Stop getting together.

Just. Stop.

If they notice you’re gone, IF, would they look for you? Who knows…

But if they don’t… and they don’t come back to you… that’s when you know. That’s when you know that you were only there to fill the void.

And the worst part? That now that you know what you have to do, you suddenly realize how alone you actually are…

And you suddenly realize, with them gone, you will have no one else to tell your stories to.

[mohntilyet]

i’m having illario dellamorte thoughts. what if instead of knowingly betraying lucanis he did it like, unknowingly. idk how this would work but i’m intrigued by what it gives us. illario ‘i accidentally caused my cousin’s death & can never tell anyone’ dellamorte. genuinely grieving. blaming himself. does he take advantage of the year before lucanis comes back?? does caterina still ignore him the whole time?? how different is the canon plotline once rook shows up with lucanis post-rescue…..

anyways i would love your thoughts!!

95% of what i do with illario operates on the idea that he is frighteningly competent so you can see why the way the crows plotline plays out in the game might frustrate me. it’s also this reason why i don’t actually think too much about “illario got lucanis killed, but didn’t mean to do it”, because i like the idea that everything illario does in his life is planned to the second and that he’s too well trained to mess up this badly, if that makes sense. with that being said. 5% of my brain power does sometimes go towards “and what if he just sucked actually” and it was a theory i enjoyed before the game even released. so i have in fact been thinking about this anyway LOL . maybe he tries to honeypot zara, accidentally actually reveals lucanis’ next assassination job, and zara gets rid of him as a ‘gift’. illario is horrified and that gets even worse when lucanis’ body shows up, and he assumes this must be because he spurned zara by leaving her and not having the guts to seize power.

i think we could make his inferiority complex worse. illario’s worst fear confirmed: he is as worthless as his grandmother believes he is, botching something so badly that he accidentally sentences his cousin to death when what he wanted was lucanis just… out of the way for a bit (maybe while he kills caterina. LOL. i still think his resentment of caterina trumps his jealousy for lucanis though those two things are very intertwined its hard for him to differentiate them). so incapable that he got the only person who actually supports him killed, and now he’s dreading the idea of becoming first talon. he doesn’t want first talon without lucanis backing him, and now the only person left is caterina which is suffocating and makes him even unhappier. at least he hadn’t lived through her alone, and now through consequences of his own decisions, illario has no choice but to.

i think that would affect his plans for talon because of how horribly he’d fucked up, and tries to mask it because if he suddenly actually doesn’t want to be talon that would be a red flag for everyone. lucanis coming back would delight him (talon is within his sights again if lucanis comes back!) and freak him out. i think the plotline would actually be pretty similar because of this freak out, so he still shows up to zara’s fight to cover his tracks. lucanis can never know, caterina can never know, because what little faith they have in him will be lost. like he committed fratricide and didn’t even MEAN to😭 ...corpse whispering still happens, and zara is like “ohhh that coward. he can never finish what he started, can he?” + “elaborate.” + “i gave him what he most wanted in the world and instead of being grateful, he ran away.” so lucanis finds out about what happened but feels a mix of “illario, you idiot” + pity because turns out he didn’t even mean for it to happen, and keeps his secret for now, otherwise he’d probably have to kill him.

i also think not meaning to kill lucanis would sour his feelings towards the venatori, who are a reminder of how badly he failed, so the alliance wouldn’t happen. this does mean if the story goes on as it does in canon, he has to take desperate measures another way and kidnap caterina for some other reason but i can’t think of why….. maybe a thing where illario is like “ok. lucanis is distracted by the elven gods. this time i just have to kill nonna for real and then nothing is in my way” and recruits disgraced houses or houses that don’t like caterina to do so? not sure tbh but i don’t believe caterina made it so far without making enemies lol. this would happen post bloodbath + corpse whispering— lucanis leaves his cousin unchecked because while he knows illario didn’t mean for him to die, he has no idea how far he would go to have caterina dead. teia could find out about this and send word to foil the kidnapping and assassination attempt

so ‘murder of crows’ is still about saving caterina, the illario-lucanis fight still happens, but it’s a little more hesitant and lots of “why won’t you just let me kill her? i’m doing this for the both of us”. he’s had to live with being the un-favorite, but never would have thought lucanis would actually pick caterina if it came down to it. with all of his missteps here, i think the final decision (and i think it should be like this in canon anyway) would be to imprison illario or kill him. imprisoning him is just a lot of “i can’t kill illario as much as he couldn’t kill me”, vs killing him as is expected from him as talon, and what he knew he would have to do after finding out about illario's failures. unlike canon, where illario is actually meaning to kill him and can be seen as a 'good crow' despite the sloppiness, here he's like. just bad at everything. the allied traitor houses that went against caterina would also have to be imprisoned or killed. no happy ending at all here, and lucanis still becomes first talon. now that i’ve written it out this is actually probably the worst ending LOL

the above sticks a lot to what is canon to the game (plot points, choices, etc) and i didn’t go very far away from it so it's like canon 3 inches to the left. tho my thoughts on this are not fleshed out* because i think illario works better as an antagonist character that sets things in motion !! not necessarily the villain in a cain-abel story, but a character who opposes lucanis while still not wanting to hurt him. that kind of discipline where he finds a way to get what he wants (first talon) without compromising what he also cares for (family) is so much more fun for me than a man who apparently just loses it and decides to enact a bad plan to get rid of his cousin. if he waited 20+ years to become talon i think he’d be more careful when it came down to it. if i had my way illario would be playing insane 5d chess to rival solas (insert black sails “i once thought that to lead, to be liked was just as good as feared. and that may very well be true. but to be both liked and feared all at once, is an entirely different state of being.”)

[uncanny-tranny]

At this point, gender nonconformity is about what the person says their experience is.

If a woman with a beard or a man with lipstick and a mustache says they're gender nonconforming, then they are! If a woman with short hair or a man with long hair says they aren't, they aren't! And that's not even getting into the awesome nonbinary, abinary, genderqueer, intersex, and general genderfuckery that may both be and not be conforming.

So much of what is even considered gender conforming or gender nonconforming is based on a world of exclusion. When we start defining one's conformity with whether they fit into white cishetero perisex standards or not, we play into the idea that there's only a very narrow window of what is considered worthy of time and thought.

[angels444yuri]

i remember neverrrr being able to wrap my head around the whole topic of cheating being normalized because a genuine committed relationship has always been synonymous with undying love and devotion to me

[confusedfoam]

I am very concerned about this plot thru line that Normal desperately wants to help and is also a complete failure at it. Just some of his greatest hits (though he definitely wasn't the only one involved in some of these fuck ups)

thought he could fix hermie, actually opened the door for him to get horribly physically scarred and having the identity crisis of the century

Going to try and save his dad and uncle and ending up on the complete opposite end of an intense ethical debate

Definitely made Pepperoni Tony's marriage way worse before. not that it mattered in the end ig

Bringing Brad back to life only for him to be a miserable shell who resents every moment spent on earth

and the latest, trusts link to help him resolve the love anchor with empathy only to get the rug out from under him Again

So. Yeah time and time again Normal tried to do the empathic thing, tries to help people, and just Can't. And I'm very worried (read: excited but sad for him) about the direction this is setting for the rest of the season specifically as it relates to Normal and the Doodler.

It's growing increasingly likely that Normal fails to help it. I don't know what's going to actually happen, I don't think the cast knows what's going to actually happen, as long as Anthony was telling the truth about it being a dice roll. But either he fails or he nearly does we'll have to wait and see. Whatever happens I think this particular part of Normal's story (These are actually all themes of the podcast at large but i am going to mostly focus on normal and the doodler here barbecue otherwise this would be extra obnoxiously long.) touches on a few things.

-Agency

For Normal, so many of these failures (especially the anchor related ones) result after his agency and control of the situation has superseded. Pepperoni Tony's death was entirely outside of his control. he trusted his friends to help him with the anchors and they violate that trust and act in direct opposition to his interests while he is powerless to stop them.

The Doodler too, in spite of being a eldritch god of massive power, is lacking agency. It was hauled into reality without it's consent, was an unwilling passenger of the Oak family for generations, hell it's own summoning at the end of season one was not a result of its own actions. Other people's desire to use it's power or to prove their worth against it etc etc paved the way for all of that. It didn't tell the twins the prophecy. It didn't tell Lark who the Unsung Hero was.

-Projecting, the limits of support, and putting your own mask on first., whatever you want to call it.

There is this idea that you have to get your shit together before you're ready to help other people, and its true to a degree but its also not how life works. You have to be willing and able to keep working on yourself with the support of other people while also supporting them to do the same. I think one of the chronic problems of 90% of the cast is they are fucking up this balance one way or another. Normal's problem is layered. He really believes that its either one or the other and it you cant help yourself and someone else at the same time. So hes using it as an excuse to say Nope hes good actually he's done his growing his mask is totally all the way on and its time to Help People. because his family is selfless and self-sacrificial to the point it swings back around and is selfish again. He can't help anyone effectively because its a two way street and he's closed his side down.

-Cycles

small scale cycles, in the repeated breaking for Normal's trust. (Of intra-party trust in general which I could go off about some other time.) His trust in his father and his uncle has been under fire from pretty much every angle. Every time Normal trusts his friends they screw him over.

the obvious cycle of the burden of the Doodler in the Oak family, Normal and Lark both sitting on the throne. I mean what more can I say. And my personal favorite. The cycle of reaching out and failing. It haunts the Oak family. Hildy reached out to her son as he got lost to the call of power and failed. Barry reached out to try and mold Henry into his shape and failed. Henry tried to reach out to everyone around him and continuously came up short and his sons turned out all the worse for it. Sparrow reaches out to express his overbearing concern with his son and blunders it entirely. Normal reaches out to his friends and the slap his hand away, he reaches out to The Doodler and is steadily falling short of actually helping it in any meaningful way.

.

.

But Uhhh anyway those were some disjointed thoughts that needed to get out of my head after the end of last episode. Not all of them make total sense but thats what happens when you brain dump across two sessions and type things in no particular order. These fucking kids man. These fucking kids.

[driftwooddestiel]

comment so bad i read it in the jacksfilms your grammar sucks voice

[totaldramayuri]

ermmm anyway… send me some characters to draw while I get used to this new tablet

[sprytesukii]

RAH i need to start treating my tumblr like my twitter where i yap with no repercussions or a deeply innate desire for validation !!!!

[theheroand]

eye twitch.

[castielafflicted]

soup <3

[happyccino]

sorry about all my rambling posts and tags but ball it we fuck

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

as much as i am mentally unwell over tristamp rn... i think i will always prefer 98. this is weird coming from me because i am the guy whos favorite part of the entire series is weird plant biology and there is exactly 0 of that in trigun98 but at the same time like........ it just makes me so much happier to watch.

obviously the manga is objectively the best version of the story and i would kill for a beat by beat animated adaption of the manga (<<something i know is impossible) but i also have a hard time reading comics and cannot readily consume the manga as well as i can the animes

[willsilvertongue]

AHHHHHH SHE'S BAAAAAACK!!! what did you think of the suck session ending?

SHE SURE IS and thank you for allowing me to pick up right where i left off of lmao bc my mind is still firmlyyy in succession mode 😌

ok so honestly i don't know if this is a divided opinion (i have seen many of those this season) but i was quite satisfied with the ending! i was actually willing to take anything they were going to give me bc i knew it would make sense so my expectations were in order, but what they ended with felt like the right direction even if they /could've/ taken other routes.

the last shot of shiv with tom was the only time i didn't know how to feel since she HAD bagged the most secure place in this whole situation but it absolutely wasn't evident on her face. i didn't know whether to believe people saying she trapped herself to a fate of misery but this post explained everything that led to that moment quite nicely. there are losses but also some wins and for once she had the final say in making those decisions which i love for her. also feeling happier and hopeful about tomshiv now that i've come to terms with kendall's ending. SPEAKING OF-

i am very happy with this one. i am sick over what happened to him and the way in which it unraveled and of course the last few minutes where i kept thinking he had offed himself and NO ONE HAD NOTICED, but that last scene was so beautiful and serene and honestly just. really reassuring to me. my thing is that yes maybe he does eventually kill himself after the credits roll, he does say he'd die if he didn't become CEO etc BUT it's important that the show ended the way it did, with kendall sitting down on that bench. with the camera panning back to colin. i just feel like small details like that plant the seed of ambiguity into the ending and let the viewers decide what's going to happen which is really nice. an open ending like /that/, while being thematically consistent with the show, is just also a very thoughtful way to go out

i do think the season as a whole could've used more gerri and stewy but especially gerri buuut once again i will take what i got! this finale gave me the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows and that's everything i wanted to experience.

and yeah in the end it wasn't a shocking finale or episode bc the episode was going to end one way or the other, but it does feel very Succession-like to let the character you're rooting for almost nearly get what they want and lose it so very narrowly, and then have the reason for that boil down to "i love you. but i cannot fucking stomach you."

[foodlesoodlesdoodles]

Sorry my demons

[reikomakoto]

March got me feeling a certain way so I might just do something I've never done before and start rambling on here. A little bit of venting, some screaming into the void or sharing funny moments from my daily life, idk! I just need to get distracted and let things out. Feel free to blacklist the tag "reiko rambles" if you're here only for the stuff I reblog

[kordbot]

the mental illness (wanting to talk about the silly phone game) vs the horrors (anxiety)