#I should relisten to it soon

[daydreamdoodles]

I've probably brought this up before and I'll definitely talk about it again.

But the one (1) TMA story that sticks to me the most is actually a Rusty Fears Competition Winner: "Nox Mare"

I think about it a lot

[stupidsexygrizzop]

the best part about rqg is the audacity of ben meredith

[geraiodli]

hi tumblr I have something for you

Bye tumblr

[knocking-on-peoples-non-doors]

may 28th, 2024

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

HIII mackerel macintosh good morninnng please say hi to les petits frogs for mee :(( good luck w work hell sending u strength i know u will survive!!!!! i still haven't gotten around 2 more bitb im still on ep 1 but it's sooo fucking good dude im losing itttt. rand is still my favorite guy... they all have so much wrong with them. anyway. blue ridge mountains for u <333

AAUGHHH MOUNTAINS..... ohhhh mountains i miss you mountains......... thank u they are so pretty..... I drove to Richmond last summer to visit one of my friends and went thru the blue ridges on all these tiny little back roads it was the prettiest drive I think iv e ever been on. omg. thank u for the nature pics they are so HEALING...... froggies say hi btw I actually just finished working with them hehe

EXTREMELY EXCITED FOR UR BITB ADVENTURE. also extremely delighted that rand is your favorite you're gonna love the horrors he goes through so much <3 personally i am a rolan guy I love him so dearly oh my godddddd. hi rolan. my little guy. squishing him.

[falloutcoys]

9 for the podcast asks if you're still doing them?

9.) what’s a podcast that you know the characters so well you can recognize their breathing?

in actuality I'm pretty terrible at recognizing voices but I've listened to wbg enough that I can probably say that lol

podcast ask game

[y-lisse]

they’re in the same spa room, they just don’t want to shout

[red-archivist]

Also re: the great tma relisten - its still going! I'm still doing it! Would I have liked to finish before protocol aired? Yeah sure, but ultimately this is a project I'm doing for me and sharing with you guys, she'll be done when she's done

[d0d0-b0i]

k just finished reading the eleventh hour taz comic edition. i am so so normal about magnus and julia once again (crying and lying)

[distant-velleity]

dakara kisu shite do you love sweet devil ...

[haunthouse]

beloved mutual I just need you to know that I started listening to the mabel podcast and I'm only on episode 4 but I'm already feeling insane about this

YESSSSS i love this for u!!! please keep me updated my favorite thing is hearing about how insane mabel is making all my mutuals feel <3333

[ghwosty]

I have had two (2) beers and am in the car (passenger! don't worry lol) and Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd just came on and I am SO fucking feeling it rn

[mourningmaybells]

really painful when most of the posts in a podcast’s tag are venn diagrams with other podcasts and blanket statement posts… is anyone drawing podcast lesbians here?

[thisselflovecamebacktome]

After I see you I feel dirty as hell, like you've contaminated me with that peculiar smell that comes from dishing up the dirt on all your closest friends "I mean like what the hell is with her, I mean, no offense" So please, don't take it to heart when I say can we start to spend time apart but frankly my dear, this friendship is toxic like a fox and a hound. I like you better when you're not around...

[artbyblastweave]

So, the thing about Ward's worldbuilding is, it's bad on purpose. This is something I didn't catch until a relisten of the earlier parts, but the disconnect between the actual literal apocalypse that occurred two years prior and the shockingly advanced levels of infrastructure and technology is very deliberate. The entire thing is slapdash and farcical. You have people out the door of a shitty concrete hovel lining up for bad coffee. You have cars built out of random scavenged parts, "dumpsters" that Victoria can't manhandle because they're made of clumsily-welded-together scrap metal. Victoria can't reliably navigate at night because power to the city below is intermittent (and her mother Carol happens to live in one of the parts that does have consistent power; that's unexamined, make of it what you will.) The mall cluster shitshow goes down in a "mall" that, IIRC, is called out later as having been basically a dead end economically, a doomed grasp at a sense of normalcy. The patrol block uses recycled PRT gear, Dot's interlude involves the machine army jumping a bunch of bog-standard apocalypse scavengers. What you're looking at isn't a new society built up shockingly quickly; you're looking at the previously-well-supplied-and-externally-supported outpost of the recently destroyed society, and after two years they're finally chewing through the last of the head start they got. The societal equivalent of Wile. E. Coyote hanging in the air above the cliff, or of the seemingly-untouched duelist seconds away from sliding in half. Unfortunately, due to choices made about the timeframe and focus of the story, the Coyote sprouts wings. The duelist whips out a staple gun. Or to come at this from another angle- in The Walking Dead, a comic I really like, I can sort of organize the arc of the apocalypse into three-ish big chunks. For the first eight or nine months in universe, about 48 issues, things are obviously bad, right, quite a few people have died, but there's a sense among Rick and company that they might be able to ride it out, that things are on the upswing. They've got crops going, they have new births, maybe help from the government proper isn't coming the way they thought it might towards the start, but things are looking up! Then, of course, the Great Fuckening of Volume Eight occurs, and you enter the middle phase of the comic, where they're down to like a third of their group, they're food-insecure, they're constantly on the move, they're under attack from rapists and cannibals who've descended into habitual atrocity because they're totally without hope. Children are having mental breaks and killing children, the first friendly guy Rick met in the whole comic is now an insane hermit feeding dead bodies to his undead son, on and on and on and on and on. Bad times, but a comparatively short middle in the grand scheme of things. Then they find Alexandria, and the back half of the comic is spent basically on an upward trajectory with some zig-zags, there are still periodic existential threats but they're clearly past the nadir.

Ward feels like it starts midway through that first part, the you-don't-know-how-much-worse-this-can-get part, with the emphasis on the social tensions, the encroaching winter, but then it just...doesn't get much worse. I mean they have a rough three months, but then they sort of speedrun right to the hopeful future ending as soon as the titans are dealt with. There were parts that I suspect were supposed to be the dark-night-of-the-soul I'm alluding to but they didn't land as such. I feel as though the superhero genre stuff kind of subordinated the apocalypse stuff, made it less visible by virtue of whose POV we were following, and sometimes I feel that as a remedy to this, Ward should have taken place over the course of years, and it should have Just Kept Getting Worse. For example Breakthrough should have had to kill and eat Rain to survive the winter