#It's MY Story. (Musings)

[metamorphesque]

"Good morning, Jack. How was your night?", Vardges Petrosyan (translated by metamorphesque)

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Idea for an animated kid's movie/comedy.

So there's this dinosaur park that's a thinly veiled Jurassic Park knock-off (call it Cretaceous Island), and it's a bit of a toy story situation, in that the dinosaurs can talk and communicate when the humans aren't looking, mostly at night.

The dinos don't really want to break out since they like their cushy zoo lives and five-star treatment from the staff, so they're willing to get oggled by a bunch of twelve year olds to keep the food coming.

Out main characters are a T-Rex, two raptor sisters, and a wise old triceratops. The raptors are bored with their lives and long for adventure, the triceratops is a wise-old mentor figure, and the T-Rex is lonely since the park won't engineer any other T-Rex's for safety reasons.

Through magical shenanigans they get sent back to the actual Cretaceous period.

Now these pampered genetically engineered dinos have to survive in the savage dinosaur era. To underscore the differences between them, the future dinos are animated as pretty standard cartoon dinosaurs, a la Land Before Time, while the dinosaurs from the past are animated to be as scientifically accurate as possible.

The dinos go through shenanigans, amke friends in the past, evade predators, and eventually make their way home through magic portal stuff, except for the T-Rex who elects to stay behind since he's fallen for a female T-Rex he met in the past. His friends are sad to leave him behind, but go to the present anyway.

Back in the present, the dinos think nothing has really changed, but they find that the exhibit in the visitor's center, previously a single roaring T-Rex skeleton, has been replaced with two T-Rex's, famous for being found fossilized together called "The Deadly Lovers", and its their friend and the mate he found in the past. It ends on the bittersweet note.

[miss-tarja]

Silly thing I did jsksk. I still love him, your honor.

[dreamdripdistance]

delicate but vivid, the filament illuminates the world! ☆

[crabsnpersimmons]

happy lunar new year! 恭喜發財!! 🧧💕✨

[coochiekrab]

my period started and i have hardcore baby fever rn so bless u for all the baby and kid pics recently im so in love with freak thang and the lebeubies 🙏🙏🙏💕💕

does this help

[on-wine-dark-seas]

Personally I think Sukuna is being too soft in your fic.

Was my writing an entire chapter about him butchering people, eating them as he killed them, and loving it, not enough to convey the complexity of his nature?

You're not the first person to send me a message like this, and I'm sure there's people who wish I'd turn my comment moderation off so they can give me opinions on my interpretation of Sukuna in this fic.

And the context that's missing is that Sukuna and I did not begin as enemies, but as friends.

But let's call a spade a spade: your issue isn't that he's too soft. There's a plethora of soft!Sukuna fics floating around in the tags with thousands of notes, thousands of kudos, and thousands of flailing comments. So it's not his softness that you take issue with, I think.

Your issue is that he is refusing to hurt me specifically. Because he's certainly hurting everyone else in this story, but because he chooses not to harm me in ways that are somehow worse than how I've already BEEN HARMED IN THE STORY, and even asks my consent before doing things with me because of the harm I've already suffered, it's a problem.

Take a moment to ask yourself why that is, anon. Why does that bother you?

[geekthefreakout]

Gaara's issue with Sasuke isn't even jealousy over Naruto, not really. It's frustration.

Gaara identifies with Sasuke's pain so much. When he sees how lost Sasuke is, it hurts because he has been there, man.

But Sasuke has always had what Gaara always needed- a friend. Specifically, he's always had Naruto. And Gaara finds it really egregious that Sasuke has Naruto caring about him so much that he will follow him anywhere on the planet and fight him about it... and yet Sasuke is unmoved. He's ungrateful. He's not LISTENING.

Naruto kicking Gaara's ass and then being his friend changed Gaara's whole LIFE. The man became self-actualized because of this incident, and he thinks he's so lucky to have met Naruto this way. And then there's Sasuke constantly rejecting that gift, and THAT is what pisses Gaara off.

[psychopomp-namine]

yingdu episode 5 spoilers

ohhh my god this is everything I want from cheng xiaoshi. yes. perfect. sorry, but I'm a cheng xiaoshi whump liker and link click always brings out the best of them in episode 5 of each season.

there's just something cathartic about how when cheng xiaoshi becomes an emotional mess, it's also when he's most disconnected with the people he knows (physically, as he's diving in a photo and his only link to his home timeframe is a disembodied lu guang in his head) but it's also when he's most connected with strangers (when their own personal trauma lines up with his). to me, it's a showcase of empathy and a strange manifestation of his own agency. something about how the disconnect gives him the space to blow up, and the connection heightens it and grants him permission, almost, to express his anger more freely for his own sake and for another person's behalf.

like. listen, okay, I'm gonna ramble now because cheng xiaoshi is my favorite character in this entire show, but listen. sometimes some fans will conflate adjectives to his character that are usually associated with his character archetype, but they aren't necessarily true about him as a character. and I don't mean it in a, "he's not like that because he grows out of those traits" kind of way. I mean it in a, "he was never like that" kind of way.

one of those adjectives, for me, is when people call him immature. he isn't! to me! imo! he's got big emotions, yes, but I personally don't think the presence of big emotions indicates anything about maturity. because you know what? as long as his primary trauma (feelings of abandonment) isn't touched, he is very good at handling interpersonal conflicts, and that's what's interesting to me.

qiao ling hides relevant information from him? he removes himself from the situation to give himself space and sort out his feelings. he tells her he's fine and that he'll be back.

post-earthquake arc? I'll just copy paste what I already said in a previous ask:

what initially got me was when I was first watching S1, I thought the earthquake arc would have devastating effects on [shiguang's] relationship. listen, I didn’t know what I was getting into with link click, but I thought that was expected. it’s ripe for drama! but how do they handle the fight? they put their side business on hold but they still keep being roommates. they still do their day job. they still talk. they’re still upset but they give each other space but not to the point where they can’t stand existing in each other’s spaces. that’s when I realized that oh, they really trust each other. they have a very solid foundation for their relationship that not even the earthquake arc can break. they’re pretty level-headed about this, actually, all things considered? all the doomed yaoi stuff came later, but that’s just the cherry on top. it’s the way they handled conflict and disappointment in S1 that got me.

okay, protect-namine, why go through that whole tangent? BECAUSE! circling back to yingdu episode 5, we finally, finally get to see cheng xiaoshi let out some of his anger. and it's precisely because his primary trauma point was on the table. he can forgive a friend lying, and he can forgive being told not to change the past. because at the end of the day, qiao ling and lu guang stayed. they never left him.

but he cannot handle abandonment. he cannot understand why people leave. he cannot understand why he's been clinging on to false hope this entire time. and more importantly, he cannot understand how someone can be such a hypocrite about it. "a man who'd rather be kind to strangers than face his own son" like fuck man. cheng weimin you fucked up so bad.

it's the disconnect/connect thing again too. thematically, it makes sense. when does cheng xiaoshi blow up? when he's alone, far away from the people that ground him. alone, the feeling he hates the most. he's not even in his own body. he blows up when he's inhabiting a stranger's. he doesn't even get to be angry as cheng xiaoshi.

how fucked up is that. man. I love him so much.

also I'm going crazyyyy over the family themes going on in link click. much to say about the show itself across all seasons (the twins, qiao ling and cheng xiaoshi, even the liu siblings), but for this episode... god. okay this is slight speculation territory now and I'll try to keep this very short, because this is only tangential to the post. but. imagine xia fei getting the good parent figure in cheng weimin that cheng xiaoshi never had. and he doesn't know!! he's bitter inside about his dad and he's having hotpot with xia fei and he doesn't know he was in that school!! fuck that's so good. that's so juicy.

okay, sorry, I have a lot of feelings about cheng xiaoshi. he's my link click blorbo of all time, and I love when he experiences The Horrors™ because it's also when other sides of him gets to shine.

on a brighter note:

VEIN AND CHENG XIAOSHI MEETING AGAIN!!! their greeting was so cute. also omg does xia fei know? that his boss is maybe possibly a cannibal? actually, wait, I don't think I'd be surprised if he does know.

ah and finally. finally:

I've been having many thoughts on how yingdu approaches "friendships" and their transactional nature (mostly with regards to liu xiao) but I mostly thought they're headcanon stuff. but now. I'm so so happy that episode 5 is bringing out more of the quid pro quo theme. liu xiao with the gift giving. wang qing's "friends" (bullies) demanding her to cheat on the exam for them. and now, vein and cheng xiaoshi having a friendly greeting but also exchanging favors. so good. so good. it goes along with how there's so much handshakes and handholding this season (not just with lu guang and cheng xiaoshi, but with cheng xiaoshi and the the antagonist trio too, who have all met him by "helping" him in some way). something something trust and favors. probably something that deserves its own post though, but I wanted to point this out because I am soooo here for that. it's goes hand in hand (ha!) with the whole fraud/lies vs innocence/honesty theme this season, and deals/contracts being an equalizer to the two. very good. very tasty.

edit: ooh they also point to this in the YE6 trailer too. nice, nice. if you knew someone's true colors, would you still be their friend?

man, I love episode 5. it just hits all the stuff I personally wanted to see. the only flaw is that we still haven't seen the older version of wang qing, but yeah I kinda expected that they'll hide her until episode 6. they're giving her the liu xiao treatment from season 2. sigh. really wish she'd keep showing up in S3, we need more female characters in this show 🙏

[bogkeep]

it fascinates me how often a choice of first or - gasp - second person storytelling can create so much derision and discourse. having preferences is fine obviously, and as a writing choice it Does matter, because all writing choices matter. i don't really... notice?? anymore??? or like, i DO notice, but more in a "what information will the narrative give me access to" kind of way.

i know second person especially can be jarring if you're not used to it, because it's "he would not fucking say that" but for yourself. but it's also like... so many song lyrics have "you" and "i" and to me they're just. a story that exists separate from me. (to the degree lyrics exist to me at all as something other than Sounds that are part of a music piece, but that's the audio processing disorder/'did not grow up with english as a first language and never bothered to decode lyrics' of it all speaking)

i suspect a lot of derision towards first person narratives comes from a derision towards the genres in which it is a staple, rather than that it's somehow uniquely bad. there's really not much difference between a first person perspective and limited third person perspective??

[roboticfellow]

A bunch more of these quick thumbnails (this au is genuinely devouring my brain 24/7 /pos)

I'm incredibly tempted to fully draw a bunch of different scenes, eventually I'll cook something up :P

[slushfaerie]

i'm thinking about riff lorton

[darkxsoulzyx]

Magma Doobles!!

Gladiator AU by @just-a-drawing-bean

Muses AU by @starrspice

I LOVE BOTH THESE AUS SO MUCH AND HAVE BEEN BRAINROTTING ABOUT THEM IN THE BACK OF MY MIND EVER SINCE I JOINED THE DCA FANDOM 💞💞💞💞

[quibvsposts]

a small tribute to the wonderfully written ‘Hounds’ by @xx-vergil-xx

thank you for writing something so amazing for this fandom ))))

[on-wine-dark-seas]

Šetû Asiri

Pronounced SHAY-TOO AH-SEER-REE.

A face only Sukuna could love.

Selfshipping is making me appreciate myself more ngl. Sukuna is going to teach me the pleasures of revenge in this story.

[writesailingdreams]

Feeling some kind of way about the girl saving Nami (& crew) by doing something Nami-like, but in her own kind of way (rather than steal the passkey, she gave the impression that she had)