#NEVER doing this to myself again

[guzhufuren]

ATEEZ 2025 SEASON’S GREETINGS Yunho

[proxycrit]

Day 44- GERUDO TOWN

Bug Zapper 9000 worked too well. Not only did we get the terrifying normal corpses, we accidentally found its brood mother that can summon localized sandstorms to protect its underlings.

At least it got chased away by Riju’s lightning. Big win.

This totk au is called familiar familiar! It all started when zelda didnt fall back in time and devolved into wild violence

((Wanna support me? Check out my patreon, with my throw away sketches and references! Remember to use web or android folks, apple charges 30 percent tax.))

[lotus-pear]

11/20

[sw4gg1e]

Patrolling on the rooftops.

DDVAU created by the fantastic @xmaruu11 and @kitsuneisi

[egophiliac]

he did it! 🐍 and it only took...uhhh...well, there probably could've been less punches, but why hold back!

PUNCHES FOR EVERYONE

[dreamsteddie]

Steve and Eddie who kind of flop in life and end up poor, living in a trailer in a different small town living quiet lives of no import.

The kids, Robin, Nancy, and Johnathan all seem to take the small handful of opportunities offered to them by the government in the aftermath of the Upsidedown to take off and make something of their lives. They're off writing headlines, making news, and living their lives to the best of their abilities, but Steve and Eddie find themselves stuck.

Steve stayed in Hawkins until the kids graduated and left for college. By then Nancy, Johnathan, and Robin are all in their second or third years of college. John and Nancy have their own apartment in New York together and don't reach out all that often, only seeing the rest of the Hawkins crew on Holidays and some vacations. Robin is flourishing at an all-women's college in Maine and has a partner and a cat and plans for graduate school brewing. She's always saying Steve can come out and join her whenever he's ready, but when the time comes it feels like he would just be trying to insert himself in the middle of a life he doesn't know how to fit into, so he turns to Eddie instead.

Eddie is permanently disabled in a number of ways following the events of season four. He struggles with chronic pain, has breathing issues due to the loss of part of his right lung, and lost enough muscle mass in his left leg that walking will never be easy or done without the use of a walker or arm bar crutches. The doctors said he recovered as well as he could have. The kids said he would get better with time. Wayne said it didn't matter if he never got better, he could do anything he set his mind to.

Steve is the only person who tells him the truth.

Steve tells him that it sucks. Tells him that it will probably always hurt. Doesn't give him false hope when he's trying to grieve the loss of the life he wanted to live. The goals he wanted to reach. When he falls deeper and deeper into himself, stuck in the muck of depression, Steve is the only person he lets in. The kids try their best but their lives are moving fast, and taking care of someone like Eddie is exhausting, no matter what they try to say. Eventually, everyone but Dustin gives up on reaching out, the younger boy showing up every Sunday to try and get Eddie out of the house. He always leaves disappointed.

When Steve asks him if he wants to use what's left of their partly government payouts and Steve's equally meager Family Video savings to buy a truly shitty trailer in a town an hour and a half south of Hawkins in the fall of 1990, it feels like the first boon he's been given in almost five years. He'll never be who he could have been if he had ignored Chrissy that day in 86', but he's always thought maybe he could be more than a ghost between Wayne's walls if he could just get out of this god-forsaken town full of people who know too much and too little of what's happened to him.

They get the trailer, pack what little they have, let Wayne hug them close, and leave.

Steve has already transferred to their new town's Family Video, moving up to claim the dubious honor of being the opening manager. Mostly he just unlocks the door, signs into the computer, and makes sure nothing catches fire. Eddie hoped that moving would miraculously make him fit to enter back into the world, but he spends most of his days with a blanket on the front porch, watching people pass by. He does, though, finally accept that he needs to apply for disability to help Steve keep the lights on and the water hot. That last little bit of hope that he could be what he used to be dies, but he's learning to be content with what he does have. He starts taking a walk, just ten minutes around the loop of the trailer park saying hi and trading polite nods with his fellow residents. He's not ok, but he's starting to build a new community of people not too different from himself.

The new trailer only has one bedroom. Eddie sleeps on a fold-out mattress in the living room. It had been a major argument when they first moved in with Steve insisting that Eddie needed the bed. Eddie argued that it wasn't fair for him to take the room when Steve was the one working 40 hours a week to keep them afloat. In the end, Eddie was the more stubborn of the two. It helps that Eddie has absolutely no qualms about crawling into bed with Steve on the nights when the couch bed really won't cut it for his aching body. Steve never questions it, just shuffles over a little and lets the other man in.

Steve doesn't question a lot of stuff.

He doesn't question when all their effects are shared between them with no effort to distinguish between yours and mine, Eddie's and Steve's. He doesn't question it four months in when Eddie starts to get his feet under him and decides to take up cooking, always trying his best to have everything done just as Steve walks through the door. He doesn't question when a good chunk of Eddie's first disability check goes to buying Steve a sturdy, if not very fashionable, new watch for his birthday since his old one went bust almost a year ago.

He doesn't question it when Eddie holds his hand for the first time under the stars hanging above their front porch.

He doesn't question it when Eddie introduces him to one of his new neighbor friends with a hand resting comfortably on his lower back

He doesn't question it when Eddie starts sleeping in the bedroom every night.

Or makes him box mix cupcakes for Valentine's Day.

Or kisses him for the first time on the couch that's never a bed unless they want to spend the day binge-watching bargain bin films.

Because really, isn't this how it was always going to go? Wasn't this exactly what Steve was asking for when he asked Eddie to skip town with him?

Isn't this what Eddie was hoping for when he said yes?

[deathricedrawn]

i'm ready to try

[shellshooked]

children of the gods

[chrliekclly]

——————

it’s been 6 years exactly nd i apologize for everything about this

[tw: implied csa]

[nailsinmywall]

Descendants of finwë (incl. kidnapped children): sons and daughters of fëanor, fingolfin and finarfin

[bodysnatch3r]

what veilguard is doing with the theme of grief... man. dragon age has always been, one way or another, about grief. how you can never go back. how you could go back, but it will never be the same. you must learn to be-with (in the heideggeran sense, as in "each one exists in a world saturated with others linked through shared social practices") grief in order to make it out alive.

as the warden, you lose everything you ever knew before: your family, your home, your friends, everything. it is all still there–except, maybe for cousland and aeducan–but you can never return to it. not as you were, and not as it was. you have been changed, and your past has changed with you.

as hawke, you are a refugeee. your very name is synonymous with grief. you claw your way out of a dying country only to find a dying city instead. all of your friends should be dead but aren't. you should be dead but aren't. whatever you do, you will fail. there is no returning to ferelden. there is no saving kirkwall.

with inquisition, because your character backstory is so much less defined (in-game, at least), the theme of grief is expanded towards the rest of the world. the theme shifts from being personal to global, the grief theme becoming intertwined with greater, historical questions. what does it mean to grieve empire? what does it mean to grieve a system that was, even if it hurt so many?

and, from what i've seen so far, veilguard is bringing that theme forward and honing it into a thematic spear. every quest, every companion, every npc story you follow. all of it is building together to try and answer the questions the previous three games have been asking:

can you go back? should you go back? is it healthy to want to go back? what can you do, when "back" is gone, a dream from a lifetime, a memory, a thousand years ago?

your brother is dead. can you mourn him? your grandmother is dead. can you mourn her? your mother is a refugee who did the best she could and it still wasn't enough. can you mourn what could have been? can you mourn your city? your purpose, when all you were was built to die and you didn't? can you face death singing? you have to. the blight can be soothed but not beaten. the veil cannot be taken back, a thousand years of elven deaths and mage deaths cannot be taken back. there is no other way but through.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

crusty evolution redraw. in theory.

[slfcare]

the most difficult thing about growing as a person socially, as in getting out of your shell and noticing that you are, is that there will still be times when it doesn’t feel like you’ve grown at all! times when you can’t really connect with anyone around you, times when you fail to enter into an existing conversation, times when you say the wrong thing (or nothing at all when in hindsight you probably should’ve). but that’s also kind of the best thing, because that’s the thing that helps you realize that sometimes, it’s not you or your lack of skills or any shortcoming. sometimes certain environments just aren’t for you and certain people aren’t your people, and that’s okay. that’s human. it’s okay to not feel the progress you have made all the time.

[lotus-pear]

mourning black and the death of ideals

[anatomical-puppet]

get back up. that’s all you’ve ever been good at, isn’t it? knocked down, beaten, forced to pull yourself back to life. nothing’s ever changed. nothing ever will. just get back up. it will happen again.

[bucksblr]

OLIVER STARK as EVAN “BUCK” BUCKLEY in every episode of 9-1-1