#I'd make things just to unmake them but I know I'm not capable of that

[srrrokka]

I really like crocheting and the general concept of it but... what am I even supposed to make?

We don't use tablecloths at home, I don't particularly like crocheted clothes, not the biggest on amigurumi...

The only thing so far I found useful to make is coasters.

[the-everqueen]

001: Sandman - A random thought

002: Rose/Corinthian

003: Rose Walker

sandman - a random thought if the corinthian has multiple apartments, does he hire cleaners? or is there like, dreaming magic that keeps the places dust-free? or does the corinthian have a secret assigned cleaning day? (imagine him in an apron and rubber gloves scrubbing the kitchen.)

send me a ship - rose/corinthian when i started shipping it: i think it was after reading heavy lies the crown? that fic is just...mm. delicious.

my thoughts: coco/rose plays with so many themes i find fun. what does it mean to be a person. what do you do after a narrative has ended but you still have to live. what is the difference between devotion and love. can you ever truly love god or is that relationship fundamentally fucked. what if god was also just the girl whose brother you saved and she thought you were some kind of potential guard dog. what if god held your leash and you liked it. what if you bit the hand that feeds you and it still came back for pets.

what makes me happy about them: the thing is, i think rose fundamentally understands the corinthian as a person, in a way that dream never will, because dream knows what he really is was made to be. meanwhile the corinthian understands rose as both human and Endless (because that's his whole function). they get each other. also i'm a diehard believer in giving the corinthian to one of sandman's female characters, because frankly anyone is going to be better at handling him than dream once coco is outside the realm of "favorite" and it leads to Fun Shenanigans.

what makes me sad about them: the thing i'm grappling with in the la guard dog sequel is that, while they get each other, i'm not sure they can...fix each other. like, none of us can really "fix" each other, and both of them have deep-running trauma that goes beyond the other's capacity to heal. there's a part of me that could see a bad ending au where essentially the corinthian makes rose Worse, whatever that might look like. also, at least in canon, that they don't talk again before dream unmakes the corinthian. what does rose think about him, really, in the end? it feels very much like he's Trying with her, even if that's tangled up in his attempts to overthrow dream and save his own life, and even if inherently it's performative on some level.

things done in fanfic that annoy me: a lot of the wider fandom treats rose like a kid. which feels unfair, given that she's a) in her twenties, so a legal adult, and b) shouldering adult responsibilities plenty of her peers don't have to worry about. [insert rant about how Black girls aren't allowed to have childhoods but are also not seen as capable once they're adults.] most coco/rose people are already thinking about rose as a consenting adult and someone with very real trauma, but i guess the other thing would be it's easy to forget the corinthian is an inherently hungry thing.

things i look for in fanfic: ...fics of them at all? authors grappling with categorization of "thingness"? the absence of hob as some kind of uncle figure to the walkers.

my kinks: debates about personhood. pain play. unequal power dynamics. (this is a whole bhol characters thing, i think i just want someone to tie up that white dude.)

who i'd be comfortable with them ending up with, if not each other: again, too poly for this question to ever apply to me. i'd like to see more Rose ships in general.

my happily ever after for them: well, that's just the la guard dog au.

give me a character - rose walker how i feel about this character: big. i care about her. i want to hold her in my arms. i want to bite anyone who looks at her as just a prop for morpheus. tv!rose is SO fucking interesting, the show fleshed out so much of her character in relation to her positioning as a young Black woman, and that is DELIGHTFUL, and i want more people to engage with her.

all the people i ship romantically with this character: obvs i'm writing coco/rose. there's a whole other unwritten thing that is cori/matt/rose as a poly triad. rose/calliope has Potential. rose/barbie, of course, is adorable.

my non-romantic otp for this character: i think rose and lucienne could be such good friends. another storyteller for the librarian??

my unpopular opinion about this character: rose is a lot less naive than people think she is. she's young, yes, but she's experienced, she's intelligent, and she knows her values.

one thing i wish would happen/had happened in canon: i hope we see more of rose in subsequent seasons! she features as a recurring character in the comix. i do wish comix rose had been more nuanced as a character - she's so much the coming-of-age archetype that she's basically not really a person anymore.

my otp/ot3: apparently i am a coco/rose truther. (let the everywoman fuck the eyeball eating nightmare!) but mostly i'd like more people to engage with rose as a subject in general, rather than relegating her to the sidelines or ignoring her altogether.

[justdishonoredthings]

Hi, different anon here, I'd like to ask where Billie seems scornful about Daud's relationship with the Outsider. To me, she sounded pretty fascinated (even asking if Daud thinks she might meet him too). I'm not arguing the rest of the post, I'm just interested if I missed something. Maybe it changes depending on chaos?

Sorry, I was wrong.

“I’ve always wondered - what does he smell like? Rotting flesh? Wildflowers? Does he ask you questions? I wonder when he’ll speak to me.

You were in a daze. I hope it was enlightening.”

There’s nothing to suggest Billie is scornful. In fact she seems genuinely interested. (And just for your information these screenshots are from a high chaos playthrough but she’s said the same thing in previous low chaos playthroughs so it doesn’t change with chaos.) She seems genuinely interested in meeting the Outsider. Perhaps she thinks that she’s on a trajectory that takes her from mundane to Arcane Bond to Marked? Because we have no evidence to support that. It seems like people fall into only three categories - normal, Marked, or in service to a Marked one via Arcane Bond. We don’t know of any stories where a Bonded individual goes on to become Marked.

The point I was trying to imply was that Billie’s interactions with the Outsider in DOTO seem off. I don’t get a clear picture of Billie’s personality or motivations when she’s talking to him (and I put that down to the poor writing in DOTO) just like I don’t get a clear picture of Billie’s personality when she’s talking to Daud. I can tell she’s supposed to be somewhat contrary and different to Daud, Corvo and Emily in that she doesn’t actively seek the Mark in DOTO (according to the Outsider). But that’s not a very substantial point cos not everyone who seeks the Outsider’s attention or the Mark gets it, and likewise there are people such as DH1 Corvo who weren’t given a choice of whether or not to accept the Mark.

Now if you do take the “Billie is on a slow but constant trajectory to become more and more involved in magic and the Void” then it makes sense for her to be interested in when she’ll meet the Outsider, because you can draw a clear line from her in KoD to DOTO (given that she was pretending to be someone else in DH2, so we ignore that) because firstly she has no powers, but is plagued by nightmares after Emily intervenes in the past; then she gets her arm and eye converted into magical apparatus, which apparently stops the nightmares as well as giving her powers; and finally she finds the Twin-Bladed Knife which is capable of a LOT, but we only use it in-game as a sword, occasionally as a blaster rifle, to make bonecharms, and to deal with the Outsider. I expected Billie to become a Void God or Void Entity or the next Void God or however you want to phrase it, at the end of DOTO. That would, logically be where her trajectory is going. And this makes sense because she is unusual in that she used to be Bonded, but then she lost her powers, then had a weird thing with her arm and eye, and finally acquires everything necessary to unmake the Outsider. What’s to say she doesn’t have everything required to make the next Outsider?

Specifically the Outsider says “The world was wounded around you, and you carry the scars.” Referring to the fact history was changed and she is the only one who carries physical evidence of that change. (I mean Emily is the one who did it so obviously she knows about it too, but the only evidence Emily has is a calendar from 1849 which… I’m sorry, Emily, but it’s not that difficult to get calendars or diaries from past years. You can find them in library archives, or in ppl’s houses in bookcases, or holding open a bathroom window. Unless the Abbey has a policy that everyone destroys calendars from past years, Emily’s souvenir isn’t that special.) 

You could propose a theory whereby Billie is fated to change the Void and the world by killing or saving the Outsider. Maybe the Outsider has a sense which allows him measure some sort of “Historical Potential Energy” associated with events or individuals, such that he can tell who will affect history significantly and who won’t. Going further, since any system always tries to find its state of lowest energy, perhaps the Outsider has a sense of tension if the Historical Potential Energy goes above a certain level, and a sense of relief if the HPE goes below a certain level. So in this way, for our example, he might have been itching and anxious until he found Billie, sitting at her desk aboard the Dreadful Wale in DOTO, and gave her the arm and the Eye. If you didn’t want to treat this as a scientific theory then you call it prophecy or the re-balancing of magical states. 

Basically what I’m getting at is that I expected Billie to become the new Void God at the end of DOTO. I thought that we would a number of choices i.e.

save the Outsider and Billie becomes the new Void God

kill the Outsider and Billie becomes the new Void God

save the Outsider and Billie decides she has enough magic in her life so she turns the Knife toward Daud at the last second and he becomes the new Void God - different to the Outsider, since Daud’s body never made it all the way to the ritual hold (plus of course his personality and history is different)

kill the Outsider and Daud becomes the new Void God 

etc. I just expected a bit more at the end of DOTO. There is a lot of cryptic shit going on with what is or isn’t supposed to happen, there’s a lot of Billie and Daud ignoring the tension between them, and I thought we would get a proper resolution to everything.

You could even imagine Billie plays DOTO high chaos and Daud doesn’t agree with that and they never reoncile their differences, and Daud says “the Outsider has to end. No one should have that much power” but when Billie arrives at the Ritual Hold, with more knowledge and power in the journal and arm and Knife and Eye than Daud ever had, Billie knows that this particular Outsider must be replaced by another, immediately, or the Void will burn and die and take the world with it, so she cuts Daud’s throat and Daud opens his eyes as the new Outsider and says “why have you done this to me?”