#IT WORKS TOO WELL

[spooky-pop]

Putting this here to save for later...but I need to redraw this meme but with Punk Rock Branch and all of his normal pop brothers

[arithmonym]

hey. locked tomb orchestra AU where palamedes is the concertmaster and camilla is the principal cellist.

harrow is palamedes’s stand partner. gideon plays bass, and she has very strong opinions about bow styles.

[artfartt]

[hkthatgffan]

I saw someone say that the Gravity Falls finale credits would work well to Renegades by X Ambassadors. So naturally, I had to check...

Spoiler, IT DOES!!

[sennamaticart]

Zoltan likes to read before bed, helps him sleep!

[thinkingisadangerouspastime]

i can't believe im typing this, but i literally just had an idea for a zk fic (of sorts):

kataang are happily together, traveling the world and restoring air temples and always returning to the swt. mai and zuko had a peaceful breakup, where maikka (always pushing my maikka agenda) are now together. zuko and aang are indescribably close (they're the avatar and the fire lord, their fates have always been linked, how could they not be?), more so than the history books would dare to report.

in the vein of some of my fave spider-man fics, aang was always going to die young.

it's sudden. it's unexpected. it's avoidable but inevitable.

katara is wrecked, imploding with grief. zuko disappears into a deep depression.

no one can understand their grief. no one can understand the depths of their mourning. mai and sokka and toph and suki and ty lee try, but it's not enough. katara has lost the love of her life. zuko has lost his soulmate. aang and katara chose each other, despite the war and the hurt. aang and zuko were always intertwined, because of the war and the hurt.

no one can understand their grief.

except the other.

they can't say they ever fall in love. how could they, after what they've lost? but katara is there for zuko, zuko is there for katara.

aang is dead. part of katara, part of zuko died with him.

but maybe, just maybe, the grief reflected across their eyes will be enough.

maybe they can both find aang in the other.

[patchwork-crow-writes]

Sometimes you are struck with a revelation so forcefully it makes you reel back, as if smitten by a thunderbolt. I've had one such revelation today, which I can only proceed to transcribe in words, as I have not the drawing ability to render my vision to you with all the bizarre and brilliant glory it deserves.

My vision is thus: Ralsei dressed as the Milkybar Kid.

[princescar]

Me: I need inspiration to write Ryoko and/or Hajime :(

Me:*sighs and puts on CG5 Ranboo song*

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

before I nap away the unwell feeling thinking about c!dream studying literally everything about c!tommy again. seeing literally every part of him as fascinating in the same way a newly discovered and strange phenomenon might be. from innocuous or even sweet out of context things like testing to see how much he enjoys and is capable of every activity you can name and figuring out ways to make him smile, to dutifully and obsessively categorising his response to every sort of traumatic experience possible and seeing how quickly he responds to triggering stimuli, to stuff like dissections and testing how long it takes for various serious injuries to heal. and he'll never run out of stuff to test and even if he did he finds everything fascinating enough to repeat again and again and again forever. the results are as captivating as the mystery.

[shwoo]

The river in the Outer Wilds DLC represents the flow of time.

The river in the Outer Wilds DLC represents the flow of time.

The most obvious evidence for this is that the records you find along the river are in chronological order. You find the record of the owlk discovering the Eye in the earliest, least built up part of the Stranger, and the record of their study of the Eye and how they reacted to that in the second area. The second area is more raised up, and also has their church of the Eye looking building. You find the heavily redacted record of what they did after that near the extra technological lab in the cliff.

And all through those section, the current propels you along while you're on the river, and you only need the raft controls to steer. Then you get to the reservoir, the current stops, and the upbeat river music is replaced by a quieter track with an accompaniment that sounds like a ticking clock. You can find another record that's set even later than the last one, and is even more redacted.

The river doesn't flow at this point because the owlk dammed it, and that ties into their rejection of change. I don't think I can elaborate without being more free with spoilers, so continuing below!

So according to Solanum, the Eye of the Universe represents extreme changeability, and you have to solve a bunch of puzzles to get to her to hear this, so she's probably right, at least on a thematic level. In rejecting the Eye, the owlk rejected the concept of change, something that inevitably comes with the flow of time. They wanted things to go back to how they were before they saw a really cool thing in the sky and destroyed their homeworld over it, and since that wasn't possible, they made an unchanging simulation so that they could pretend. Metaphorically damming up their time.

The programmers don't even bother fixing all the glitches they found during development. It's been hundreds of thousands of years, you could probably get around to making it less easy to fall through a loading zone.

The simulation also becomes progressively more built up the further along the river you go, like its real world equivalent, until you get to the equivalent of the reservoir and there's almost nothing there.

But they can't keep things dammed up forever, and halfway through the game's time loop, the dam breaks, literally and metaphorically. It's because the ship starts to accelerate into deep space, but it was that or be incinerated. And if it broke that easily, it probably would have failed on its own anyway.

All they did was put off change until it exploded through and killed a bunch of people without warning and destroyed their stuff. And I assume they had a mechanical reason put a dam on their spaceship in the first place, maybe for power generation or heat distribution, so it doesn't look great for the surviving group of owlk. Or the Prisoner, but the Prisoner probably isn't as into eternal life as the rest of them seem to be.

The simulation also becomes progressively more built up the further along the river you go, but I didn't want to say that above the readmore.

Also, the music for the reservoir, River's End, doesn't play after the dam breaks. What actually convinced me at first of this river = time thing was the melody that you eventually hear in that song. It's a minor key version of Travellers, which plays nowhere else in the DLC other than the ending sequence. I'm not 100% certain that this is why it's in River's End, but it is the song that plays at the end of the universe.

In conclusion, the river in the Outer Wilds DLC is a metaphor for the flow of time.

[inalienable-wright]

listened to the sangfielle soundtrack back to front in the car earlier and my Terminal Pattern Brain has inflicted me with a new extremely specific opinion that i nonetheless believe with absolute inassailable conviction:

Chine is 'Beat the Champ'-coded.

this assessment is based on vibes and also like musical motifs.

[elis-corner]

the idea of doc being some tyrannical leader in a dystopian world is something i think we really should unpack and explore the possibilities of.

[rosenbergamot]

hermitcraft grad residence au my beloved.

[journey-to-the-attic]

OKAY BUT THE FACT THAT IN JTTA THE CELESTIAL REALM'S LIGHTBRINGER FESTIVAL IS NAMED FOR LUCIFER AND THEN THE NEW GAME BASED ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS REBELLION IS CALLED NIGHTBRINGHER???

COINCIDENCE? YEAH PROBABLY BUT IT MAKES ME INSANE ANYWAY

OH i didn't think of that at all!! that's so cool :00

[dawns-beauty]

honestly, can’t wait til I finish the Khajiit Will Follow addon for PJKJ and have to do a group shot… it will be like ‘tall, tall, GIANt, and here’s this shrimp of a man’

[ileftherbackhome]

The more I think about it, the more I think midnights is 1989 grown up and out of the closet.

Welcome to new York to Lavender Haze (she moved to New York to be queer and came out of it more closeted than ever)

Blank Space to Maroon (you can tell me if the high was worth the pain vibes of maroon)

Style to Anti-Hero (style is rumored to be queer in some way, I think this represents her desire to date Harry Styles because he was the IT boy of the moment in order to be the "good girl" the normal heterosexual girl who dates the heartthrobs whereas anti hero is an honest admission of how much she hates her compulsion to be heteronormative and all the other parts of herself that she hates)

Out of the Woods to Snow on the Beach (out of the Woods can be interpreted to be about queer anxiety of not knowing if your girlfriend loves you as much as her boyfriend and then snow on the beach is about the first time you fall in love with a woman and you're both realizing that it's love at the time and how unique and special it feels vs how common it actually is. Also like the glow up of the start of the relationship being anxiety fueled vs it being easy and mutual and you know exactly where the other person is standing).

All You Had to do was Stay to You're On Your Own Kid (I think this is about her transition from needing a prince charming to save her to being alright with not ending up with a man at all and saving herself)

Shake it off to Midnight Rain (this is her mentality during the 1989 era, like shake off the bad feelings don't let it catch up to you and midnight rain is an admission that those feelings never go away and you need to work them out in order to move on in life. Like she's looking back and being like this still affects me, I still feel a certain way about this relationship that I fucked up when I was 19 and that's okay. This is how I process things, making music of feelings I don't need to shake it off. I need to change like midnight through my music).

I Wish You Would to Question...? (This is her taking a look inward at all the things she didn't do in a relationship and seeing how she may have been the problem and why relationships didn't work out. She wrote songs about what she wanted the other person to do without telling them and they took it as her abandoning them. Question is about both Harry and Karlie and how she abandoned them in some way. For Harry, she felt like she was waiting for him to show up without ever telling him and she can see now how he could have perceived that as her not caring enough to show up for HIM. Also, for Karlie, she regrets making them stay in the closet for the sake of her career because she never made her a priority and that cost her the love of her life at the time).

Bad Blood to Vigilante Shit (hello, bad blood is about a surface level betrayal that she was able to forgive and vigilante shit is making fun of the fact that 25 year old had no idea what bad blood would actually look like. The hot cold reaction lol pun not intended to vigilante shit resembles the hatred people have for bad blood for being juvenile and the use of cringey tumblr quotes in vigilante shit is such a self aware poke at the perception of bad blood. Like she is admitting that bad blood aged poorly and being like here's what really matters to me while also admitting that she'll never be perfect and she'll always want justice to be served.)

Wildest Dreams to Bejeweled (WOW. when I wrote this, i blew my own fucking mind. If you've read my bejeweled analysis, you know exactly where I'm going to go with this but wildest dreams is sick taylor wishing to be impactful enough to haunt her ex lover in their dreams forever. Bejeweled is a self aware stab at what that actually looks like in reality. Karlie and Calvin dream about her and the dreams are wild but not in the way she wishes and it's her being so fucking vulnerable with the fact that she regrets how she treated those two people deeply because they were collateral damage in her sick need to be the best at everything. But that bridge in bejeweled is so beautiful because she admits that she is still worthy of love, even in all the fucked up ways she's hurt other people and all the ways she's been hurt by other people, because there will be someone who sees her as moonstone even in her worst light. God I love dress. Anyways. Like wow, bejeweled is so deep and compared with wildest dreams I'm screaming at the depth and the growth).

How You Get the Girl to Labyrinth (this is a second WOW. Taylor is letting us know how Joe got the girl with labyrinth by accepting all of her obsessions and hang ups and anxieties and flaws because he thinks her good outweighs the bad. Like, she values her as a person who is dynamic and flawed and human and also I like the perspective change on how taylor is turning the finger inward, saying things like "im the one who gets hung up on things" instead of "you left me all alone and fucked us up." Like, idk, I like that she is speaking to her partner using I statements to express her anxiety about falling in love with them and not placing blame on her partner.)

This Love to Karma (this one stumped me for a little bit. I think this about the change on perspective of Taylor being like waiting around for love to come to you isn't going to bring about anything good. Like the idea of karma in america is like you get what you put out into the world and that works with love too. Like karma is my boyfriend because she realized that being self destructive caused bad love to find her because she didn't want good love at the time. They'd notice her self destruction and want to help her heal and she wasn't ready to heal at the time she wrote this love? Idk maybe I'm being too stoned and this analysis sucks actually sorry I fucked it up the first time).

I Know Places to Sweet Nothing (the contrast between I know places we can hide to you're in the kitchen humming. Like she doesn't have to beg her partner to hide away with her anymore. She found a person who gets it).

Clean to Mastermind (god, God, this entire analysis has hurt the fuck out of me but this one. Wow, I've touched on the blank space vs mastermind but clean vs mastermind is so. Clean, while it's about the desire to not need the love of someone else and being okay with being on your own, mastermind is about admitting to your partner one of the worst parts of yourself that you're the most ashamed of the desire to need the love of another person in your life. I think mastermind is a quiet fuck you to the culture that makes young women feel shame for wanting to find a relationship and wanting romantic love. It's asking why society and men make women feel crazy and clingy for wanting to be shown affection and love and romance. It's telling your partner that you've been playing the long game this entire time and them responding samsies and there is no judgment there. They felt it too, that momentum pull to each other the first time you meet someone and you see a future with them because the chemistry is that incredible).