#I've missed this a lot

[marioxdk]

Soulmate AU but a tattoo appears on their face cheek when they touch each other but they don't realize it yet, making everyone frustrated by how dumb they are

I'm back! Purely because this intrigued me (thanks!). Sorry if I've misinterpreted the concept

The scholars of the Mushroom Kingdom are well acquainted with soulmates and how they work

The Kongs know of soulmates, but they're not deemed to be overwhelmingly important

DK was taught about soulmates but straight up forgot that they existed, more interested in fighting than the affairs of the heart

The human world has soulmates and it is well known how it manifests

By the time he is transported to another world, Mario has begun to believe that he has no soulmate

(Certainly not one in another world)

During their first fight, as they trade blows with one another, an entire audience of Kongs as well as Peach and Toad begin to suspect that the two combatants may be soulmates

Only once the fight is over, and Mario is perched in cat form atop DK in victory, does the entire audience realize that their suspicions are right

Cranky and Peach are frankly astonished

Peach: "Do you think they realize what they've just done? That they've just fought their soulmate?"

Cranky: "I give it 2 months before they realize anything's even off"

Cranky would turn out to be wrong in the worst way imaginable

Peach and Cranky pull the two of them aside after the battle and tell them what they've learned

Neither takes it well

"I don't have a soulmate! Is it even possible to have one from a different world?"

"I don't even know what a soulmate is!"

Peach and Cranky look at DK in frustration, and ultimately decide to table the conversation for later.

This is the biggest mistake

But they had other priorities

While working together in combat to rescue the princess, DK and Mario observe that a tattoo doesn't appear on Mario's face when they touch, and Mario can't see any marking on DK's face

They didn't want to believe anyway

And they're not keen on physical contact either

After the battle is over, and everyone is safe, the soulmate discussion resumes

"I'm pretty sure I'd remember a tattoo"

"There's no tattoo, trust me, I looked"

Everyone insists that they prove it

DK agrees if it'll get everyone to shut up about it

Mario disagrees

He was already shamed for having no soulmate in the human world, he doesn't want that shame from his new friends too

Especially not the pity

So there's no way to prove it to them, and Mario refuses to touch DK

And DK is perfectly fine with that

It's maddening

Because everyone knows what they saw, but the two idiots refuse to confront the truth

And the truth is this

Mario is colorblind

And so is DK

The tattoo appearing on both of their faces is such a color that it visually blended in enough with their natural complexions while they were fighting

The two of them couldn't even see what was right in front of them

And now it seems they never will

[cloudpalettes]

all too familiar

[redinthesea]

(He did it on purpose to piss them off specifically) I think the MADS people are easily the most wretched horrible people in this story. They are also, unfortunately, potentially some of funniest. And I wish them nothing but misery for my own entertainment. [Original Post]

[fattylime]

the full piece for @bg3zine !

I also really recommend checking out everyone's pieces here, there's a lot of really amazing people that helped work on, and put together this zine <33 (also cheers that i finally got to work on a zine which i've wanted to do for ages so thank you for having me :'))

[clarasghosts]

Evil - intro threats (seasons three & four)

[alecz-obssesionz]

I like to think they didn't have a good first impression on each other 💥💥👊

[vinylattes]

Aziraphale/Crowley + PRAISE

[rottmnt-residuum]

Part 21 of Arc II (Part 47)

*falls to my knees* finally... april my beloved

⇇ | ⇽ | index | ⇾

[nipuni]

Once again I bring you some Eriks 😊

[snarkspawn]

it's so nice to see my boy again, and to put him back into (more of the same) situations

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[canisalbus]

✦ 2023 summary of art ✦

[leftneb]

welcome back to episode 481 of "I made too many versions of this and all of them rock"

closeups under the cut as usual :3

[kathonyy]

KATE & ANTHONY BRIDGERTON + kisses 💋 in BRIDGERTON Season 3

[akiacia]

multi-step shenanigans

[wardingshout]

slowly getting back into stuff...