#OKAY!! I DID IT!! BOOK ONE IS DONE

[hatsbattlecats]

Their first gathering happens, but Mosspaw leaves Fire/Grey/Raven to go talk to the other medicine cats with Spottedleaf. Either Spottedleaf or Mudfur mentions it’s strange that Barkface didn’t show up to the last med cat meeting at the half moon, and how strange it is that he isn’t here now since Tallstar is usually very punctual

Fire and Grey still overhear Ravenpaw telling the tale of sunningrocks, and Tigerclaw still overhears. Brokenstar still demands hunting rights and reveals that he drove out Windclan, however, in this version, Bluestar already had suspicions that he’d done this as informed by a patrol of her own sent to give a message to Tallstar, and also from Spottedleaf, who brought news of Barkface’s absence from the meeting and the smell of Shadowclan in Windclan’s territory

When the clan starts rallying to go back and get rid of Yellowfang, Firepaw runs ahead, and Mosspaw stays back with the others to explain what he knows to Spottedleaf since he’s been spending a good deal of time helping Firepaw care for Yellowfang, and has heard plenty of stories from her. He’s certain Brokenstar is lying, and says as much to his mentor.

When everyone returns from the gathering, and many of them call for Yellowfang to be killed or thrown out, Mosspaw is right there with Firepaw ready to leap to her defense before Bluestar tells everyone to knock it off and stop being paranoid.

When Bluestar announces that she’s going to the moonstone, Firepaw already knows what it is (courtesy of Mosspaw) and is instead intrigued about why Bluestar is going now. She’s not a medicine cat, and she’s already been granted her nine lives.

During the Shadowclan attack while bluestar and the others were gone is when Mosspaw experiences his first real encounter with death in the forest, to actually SEE it happen. Redtail was already dead when he had first joined the clan, but the battle with Shadowclan? Rosetail, and Lionheart, both of them perished. He’d tried to save Rosetail, she was on the edge of the battle and Yellowfang had stepped in when the tortoiseshell had fallen to protect the kits, but she’d already lost too much blood. 

After the battle, he’d helped Spottedleaf care for everyone else, but he was stuck in a mixture of shock and grief, going through the movements and barely speaking beyond asking his clanmates where they were hurt.

Spottedleaf sits him down afterwards and they have a talk. She tells him that this is the hardest lesson he will learn as a medicine cat, that he can’t save everyone. When starclan calls, not even the most gifted of medicine cats can keep a cat among the living.

Things become progressively worse for Ravenpaw after the battle, and he starts hiding out in the medicine cat den with Mosspaw when Tigerclaw isn’t sending him on dangerous missions or fetch quests.The two apprentices grow close in this time, and Mosspaw starts having Ravenpaw assist him with herb gathering to get the other apprentice out of Tigerclaw’s grasp as much as possible. During one such herb gathering, Ravenpaw actually confides his secret to Mosspaw before he ever tells Firepaw and Greypaw, though Mosspaw encourages him to tell them too

Spottedleaf is killed by Tigerclaw after she confronts him about killing her brother both to help the apprentice gang gather proof, and for her own closure on the matter. Spottedleaf may be weaker, but she’s faster and more agile, as well as clever. The two of them are distracted from their fight by Clawface and his accomplice running away with Frostfur’s kits. Tigerclaw takes advantage of her distraction and finishes her off.

He comes back into camp just after Frostfur sounds the alarm about her missing kits. He claims to everyone that Clawface and Yellowfang (who slipped out when the alarm went up) stole the kits, and that he totally saw them. He had been out with spottedleaf and tried to fight them back for the kits, but poor Spottedleaf was killed by Clawface while he was trying to chase down the other thief.

Bluestar asks him if he’s sure he was Yellowfang, and (just in case he were to be caught in the lie) says that he isn’t sure, that they “ran past him so fast all he saw was a blur of grey before he turned back to help spottedleaf, but it was too late”

Mosspaw helps Willowpelt prepare Spottedleaf for burial. It’s at this point that Mosspaw notices TIGERCLAW’S fur in Spottedleaf’s claws. He goes to tell Firepaw, but the orange apprentice is already vowing revenge on Clawface, and Mosspaw realizes that not even Firepaw would imagine that Tigerclaw would harm a medicine cat. Not yet at least. Mosspaw wants to go with Fire/Grey/Raven to find Yellowfang and prove her innocence. He’s heard her stories about her past (not all of them of course) and he knows she’d never harm a kit, but Bluestar keeps him behind, telling him that Thunderclan just lost a medicine cat, they cannot risk loosing another

He manages a goodbye to Ravenpaw before the trio leaves, and remains in camp while Firepaw and Greypaw proceed as canon in liberating Shadowclan with Yellowfang’s help. Yellowfang returns with them to clear her name and also to become Mosspaw’s new mentor to finish his training.

After Spottedleaf is buried, Mosspaw finally removes his ribbon collar, leaving it on her grave as a thank-you for everything she taught him. As well as a promise to her that he will always stay with and protect the clan in her stead, for as long as he lives, and theneven longer from beyond when he someday joins her in starclan’s ranks.

[egophiliac]

should've just let Vil be the one to fly, it would've gone SO much easier. 😔

also HEY how are everyone else's pulls going, because I have had the most RIDICULOUS luck, seriously, halloween magic is 100% real

[goldkirk]

I don’t know how to explain any more clearly that it doesn’t MATTER if it seems legitimate to you. You have got to fact check every single headline and post and claim on the left just like you need to do on the right.

The left is NOT immune to misinformation and rushed reporting. And the more emotionally polarizing or shocking the talking points, sound bytes, and headlines are, the worse it is and more frequently it happens.

Learn to verify through multiple independent sources. If you can’t do that, you can’t trust it.

If you have to wait extra hours for the real information to come through vetted channels—NOT just one individual somewhere everyone links to, and not just one single media source either, EVEN if it’s a major news network—thats just how it has to be. What news outside of genuine local disasters near you TRULY needs your outrage and post-sharing in the next hour specifically?

Misinformation works best by not seeming like misinformation and by fitting in with the rest of what you already expect to see. It doesn’t help anyone to not be able to recognize and avoid the stuff.

[tangents-within-tangents]

Just some things I think deserve a super accurate movie/show adaption in a beautiful 2D animation style:

The How to Train Your Dragon series

Gregor the Overlander

Artemis Fowl

The Adventure Zone

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (fr so much was left out of the 1939 film!)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

The actual Little Mermaid story (there are a ton of adaptations I haven't seen yet so maybe it exists somewhere but we all know Disney’s didn’t even come close)

[seven-stars-in-his-palm]

the thing i love about bill cipher is that even after i've learned all of this stuff about him, seen him at the most vulnerable he'll ever get, seen him at his most innocent, i still can't give a flying fuck about trying to justify his actions. yes he's traumatized, yes he was twisted into what we know today, and while it gives a semblance of context to why he did what he did, it doesn't matter. he still ruined ford's life. he still drove and baited multiple humans to suicide. he still tormented every human he saw as his ticket out of the consequences of his own actions. he still took delight in his actions. he was willing to commit genocide for fuck's sake!!! (freezing all of the humans into statues). trying to explain away what he did does not get rid of what he did, but it certainly puts it in perspective. you won't be catching me being a bill apologist any time soon <3

[marcmorrigan]

@fenglianweek day 6: memories/growing up

the best thing thats ever been mine

[beanghostprincess]

Sanji loves romantic novels. And romantic plays. He keeps buying books about fairytale romances and scripts every time they happen to find a bookstore. He loves the poetry of it all. The dramatic and intensified feelings of pure, devoted love that goes against all odds and always has a happy, magical ending. Because that's what he has always wanted. He knows he shouldn't find comfort in books about royalty falling in love, but it's never really about the princesses and more about them running away to find love and fight for it. And they might be cliché and sappy but he likes them. They bring him happiness whenever he's feeling down. Besides, his mom used to read those to him quite a lot, so that's another reason.

But he never tells anybody because he's a bit embarrassed of being a 21 y/o man that reads these things. Not that it's bad,, And he knows the crew wouldn't laugh that much at him about it (except maybe mosshead). But still, he doesn't have good memories about situations like that. He doesn't even tell Usopp when they start dating. It's a secret, guilty pleasure he has. Even if the stories are dumb and predictable and idiotically hopeful and romantic... He loves them. But he doesn't want Usopp (even if he knows he wouldn't) to think less of him for that. An irrational fear, he supposes. Maybe he's just not ready to share his passion with him yet.

So he keeps hiding to read and some days he even disappears for hours to do so. Nobody knows where he is. Sometimes he says he's busy cooking and bans everybody (even his boyfriend) from coming in because he needs to focus, when he's actually just reading. And Usopp notices. Of course he does.

But Sanji doesn't find out about that until one day, Usopp appears with a ton of flowers (that are definitely not roses and definitely not pacific but they're tame now and they look sort of cute) on the deck, looking up at Sanji who's leaning on the railing of the second floor. Sanji does not know what's going on. He's astonished. Speechless. Everybody is around them witnessing what's going on. And that's when Usopp starts acting all dramatically, reciting by heart one of his favorite scenes of that one book he always keeps rereading.

And it's dumb and mosshead is rolling his eyes and Luffy won't stop yelling in the background and Franky is crying but-- But Brook is also playing one of his songs and Robin is staring at them with the softest of smiles and Sanji just can't seem to be able to look away from Usopp. It's cliché and dramatic and it's absolutely perfect.

So when it's his turn, he responds to Usopp, maybe not with the same intensity, but with the exact words he wants to hear. They haven't said 'I love you' yet, but Sanji says it anyway. Not because it's in the script or because that's how the book goes, but because it's how their story goes.

Usopp might not be a knight in shining armor. Or a prince. Or a superhero. But he's Sanji's overly dramatic sniper who would make a bouquet of lethal flowers and memorize a whole fairytale romantic confession for him. And you know what? Sanji is starting to think that the only reason why his books will start to feel ridiculous now is because they'll never be as magical as his reality with his true love.

[every-sanji]

[catinasink]

hahhhhh. cant belive i fucking asked MUTIPLE PEOPLE about the history hw and no one fucking told me about the notes. holy fuck

[james-spooky]

this is a test

[axe8472]

I have thoughts in my brain about six of crows and they may or may not make sense. So. The thing is when people talk about how the crows couldn't possibly be 16-18 because they're overly mature and competent and have life experience etc etc. i get that BUT is that not the whole point? I mean the books really hammer it home that notions of childhood in their world are entirely different from ours, like to the point where i would even say it's a main theme and kinda the driving force behind all the events in the duology.

Kids are taken away from their parent at like 11 to train as soldiers. Kaz was all alone in Ketterdam at 9 years old and there doesn't seem to have been any functioning system of care for kids like him, nor mandatory schooling. In Fjerda, it seems like the closest thing to foster care is being taken on by the Druskelle. Inej started training as an acrobat pretty much as soon as she could walk and was playing starring roles in performances by the time she was 14 (and probably a fair bit younger). I don't remember Jesper's backstory perfectly but I think he was put to work in the jurda fields (a hazardous agricultural job) as a small child, then worked with guns in some way, then got sent to school in a different country when he was like 15. This isn't exclusive to the crows - it's mentioned a lot that there are many kids in situations similar to Kaz and Inej in the Barrel. Even Joost, despite seemingly being quite sheltered, is working full time night shifts as a guard when he's not even old enough to grow facial hair.

It seems that there's just much more of a vocational focus for kids/teenagers in the grishaverse. This makes a lot of sense because many elements of culture across the grishaverse countries come from the ~1800s when the attitude towards kids was that they weren't all that different from small, inexperienced adults, especially in working-class and rural settings where you just had to get on with things. Kerch especially took inspiration from victorian England, where kids as young as 9 could legally work up to 60 hours a week in dangerous conditions. So yeah that's kind of the whole point imo. It's especially interesting because I read the soc duology as a (potentially semi-unintentional?) criticism of capitalism. This is highlighted by the fact that Wylan, the only one of the crows from a rich background, is also the only one who had a childhood and got an education even vaguely comparable to what we would consider normal. So clearly the whole childhood innocence vs being put to work at like 4 thing is closely tied to class. (obviously Wylan did not have A Good Childhood but it seems from the books that the standard for merchers' kids is to give them a really good and varied education with 1-to-1 tutoring etc, which is very different from what all the other characters seem to have had as kids.)

And okay yeah they're unrealistically skillful and competent and just generally smart, but that would be the case even if they were adults. Like you kinda have to just take liberties with your characters of they'll never manage to do anything, especially in a world that's so hostile toward them. And it's actually kinda hard to even say how unrealistic their capabilities are because their experiences are so different from the experiences of real-life modern teenagers. Like kids are crazy adaptable and good at learning things, especially when they've had no other choice, and the crows actually mostly have quite a lot of experience and had time to develop their respective skills because they haven't spent 8+ hours a day in school for most of their lives. The same goes for the degree of adult-ness in their general behaviour - they're really quick thinkers and less likely to panic in a crisis than any teenager I've ever met. Again I'd say that's the whole point. The charaters are acting older than they have any right to because the experiences they've had have forced them to develop the capacity to do so.

Idk maybe i just read it differently to some people but yeah i think that cross-cultrually throughout the grishaverse children just have very very different experiences to kids in real life. It makes sense that they would then grow up to be very different from real-life teenagers, and obviously the crows are an extreme example of that but there is like. clear historical inspiration behind a lot of the crows' backstories and the general cultural backdrop of the duology. And the whole thing with the books is yeah they're doing all of this stuff and they're capable of these amazing things but actually they are literally children and they are doing all of it mostly for the sake of survival and taking back the things that they deserve from the world. And everything they've done for years and the people that they've become has all been for the sake of survival. And they're kids.

[silverselfshippingchaos]

sometimes i think about how the first time ash and k.yohei slept together (literally slept, not had sex 💀) was during a there was only one bed situation orchestrated by their friends. the both of them are on opposite sides of the hotel bed, and way too distracted to sleep. this was so awkward!!!

what if ash rolled over and brushed his leg with hers or something?? he keeps thinking that maybe he's breathing too loud and it's obvious that he can't sleep!!! ash is freezing to death in that stupid hotel room and she's not comfortable at all!!!

in the morning, though, ash feels so warm and cozy. her face feels plenty warm too once she realizes that she's in her best friend's arms, her head on his chest as he snoozed away peacefully. oh my god. holy shit. 😳. this was fine!!! surely she could just sneak out of bed and act like this never happened and-

as she tries to move, she hears a sleepy groan and feels his strong arms pull her close again. he's still asleep, but he wanted to hold her so bad. ash couldn't deny that he was comfortable, more comfortable than any pillow the shitty hotel had to offer (or any other man she had been with for that matter). she felt so safe and comfortable and before she knows it, she's dozing off to sleep again.

during breakfast, they keep sneaking glances at each other. it's plenty awkward, and their friends keep smirking, asking them if they had a "fun night". they just keep freaking blushing. they talk don't much for the rest of their vacation, mostly because of the awkward vibe in the air between them.

eventually, though, they man up and have an EXTREMELY awkward chat about it where they both apologize. k.yohei wants to make it clear that he wasn't trying to come on too strong or hold her if she didn't want to be held or anything like that, and ash wants to apologize for being so snuggly even though they're just besties.

it's been more than two years since i thought of this scenario and here's a screenshot from the original discord convo that sparked it in the first place.

It is AWKWARD.

but they're so unbelievably in love with each other. it was some of the best sleep the either of them had in literal years. and w.alker, e.rika, and s.aburo are sick of it because everyone except for them can see how in love they are!!!!

s.aburo especially, being k.yohei's bro since high school, is extremely fed up. he's seen k.yohei date girls in the past, but he's never acted like THIS before. all blushy and shy all the time... if they weren't gonna make a move, he'd just have to set them up.

"Ash? You doing anything this weekend?"

"No? Why do you ask?"

"Great, neither is K.yohei. Movie on Saturday at 7 work for you?"

no one in the friend group is surprised whenever k.yohei and ash FINALLY announce that they're dating. in fact, they're surprised it didn't happen sooner.

the three of them give themselves a highfive for thinking up the whole One Bed plan because it seemed to really push them towards finally dating after crushing for months.

and hey, now they're married! so... thanks guys!

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

LITERALLY JUST WROTE THE WORST MOST DISAPPOINTING CLIMAX OF HALLOWED BODIES BUT AT LEAST IT’S WRITTEN!!!!!!

[ectonurites]

hehehehe

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023: LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND by Seanan McGuire.

One, I’m always here for Wayward Children, but two, this one is exceptionally perfect for Driscoll Vibes!! Featuring the blanket I’m working on for my mom.

[libertyreads]

I'm currently reading a book about a female serial killer who kills Bad Men. And she has a *crush*... On a true crime podcaster.

So, tell me why I've been hoping she eventually corrupts him and gets him to kill someone.