#The literal and metaphorical shit

[johannepetereric]

With the help of Google, here’s how I just washed dog poop out of the rug:

Pour a decent mixture of vinegar and water into a bucket/bowl to act as soap (I used rice vinegar cuz I couldn’t find regular vinegar)

Wipe it off with paper towels until it’s just poop smudges

Pressure-clean the shit out of it with the garden hose until you think it’s all gone (sprinkling another layer of vinegar is optional)

I’m rn leaving it out to dry in the sun of the patio to see if that helps

[naggascradle]

[anonbinaryweirdo]

While it may seem a bit of an uncomfortable scent to have to constantly breathe in, the smell of the sweat that was faded into his clothes; and the smudges of dirt scattered about in his hair, matching how dirty his outfit already was; it wasn't exactly what one would describe as a pleasant scent . But it was fine. His gloves may be a little—just barely—damped in both water and blood; almost completely filthy and battered, but you wouldn't want anything more than the feel of it. To feel the quarter of that palm, of that very same glove against your skin, in your hair, squeezing you tightly.

"shhhh.." he pressed his chapped lips to the root of your nose, his heart only further breaking at the sound of your quiet, hardly concealed sob. Childe gently cupped your face in his hands, bringing your eyes to meet his own blue ones. His eyes, they never did carry a certain spark like any other, not since he saw the light of the outside world again after three months of blood and darkness.

But, you were always an exception. Just seeing you would bring an invisible shine to his eyes—one that no one could bring about.

His eyes were almost like an ocean; still, but only on the outside. Gaze into it, and you'd see the same thing as everyone else. They grew fierce during a fit of rage, like the waves of water flowing aggressively in a storm. You never knew what you were in for, just by staring into the surface. You never knew what was beneath it all.

But if you got the special chance of diving deeper into the hues of thick blue, if you get the chance of exploring the one place everyone else wouldn't dare tread into, you would see that it was full of life. It would consist of some dangers, of course, yes, but there was a sparkle that was shamelessly present, compared to what was shown outside.

and Childe believes, with a full heart, that he wouldn't even have one if not for you.

"I'm here now." he reminds you, trying to calm you with his voice and full promises. "and i'm not going anywhere. I promise."

You sniffle, looking up at your lover with wet, red eyes. you want to trust his words — and you do — it's just...

you needed to be sure.

You bring up a weak arm, battered in blood seeping through the ripped cloth, and hold out your pinkie. Your hand shakes. He knows what you're searching for and smiles.

He locks his pinkie with yours, and takes a deep breath.

“You make a pinky promise, you keep it all your life.

If I break this pinkie promise, you throw me on the ice.

The cold will kill the pinkie that once betrayed your friend,

The frost will freeze my tongue off so I never lie again.”

He doesn't let go of your pinkie, even after the chant is over. Instead, he brings your locked fingers to his lips, and presses a tender kiss to your curled one. "Is that better? Do you believe me now?"

you nod.

You've always believed him. He's never failed to be there for you, to protect you when you needed protection. and he's proved that, time and time again. He's proved that today. When your life was flashing before your eyes, when all the fight had left your body and you were helpless and surrounded by foes—all you needed was to blink and suddenly the grass was red.

You don't know how he did it. How he knew you needed him.

But you were glad he knew. You don't know what you would've done without him there.

And he wouldn't know what to do if you weren't here.

[lizzybeeee]

DATV explaining the 'Regret Prison'

A REGRET PRISON IS STUPID AND I'M TIRED OF PRETENDING THAT ITS NOT

TL;DR: a prison can serve as a metaphor but it shouldn't be entirely comprised of a metaphor.

From what I understood from what the game gave us: Solas has made a new prison to move the God's too - since bringing down the veil would free them from the Black City. This new prison is separate(?) from the fade or so far removed/contained that bringing down the veil would not compromise it...apparently. We interrupt his ritual, Solas gets sucked into the new prison he made, and the elven gods are free.

When Rook gets kicked into the fade they're physically there - which means it's a physical place in the fade, like how it was a mixture of physical/thought when we entered it in DAI. Which makes sense - the gods are real and living beings, they need to be in a place, there must be some aspect of physicality to it.

Alright, cool, it's a Black City 2.0 - I assume it's better defended to prevent people breaking in/out again?

NOPE.

We get there and it's a 'regret prison'?? It's tied to the regrets of those within it? Composed of regrets??? Solas had to wait for the right moment for Rook to be sufficiently 'full of regret' that they could switch places?

So is the prison tied to Solas's regrets? If so, how can Rook escape? The prison seems to work around the idea that it relies on the regrets of the person it's holding to work - which is how/why Rook was able to be trapped and later free themselves (along with whatever remains of the team apparently being able to do something on their end, not that we hear about it).

WHICH IS STUPID!

Are you telling me the prison intended to hold to megalomaniac elven gods was going to imprison them based on their own regrets? Is Solas assuming that Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are as self-pitying as he is? They'd break out quicker than Rook did! He made a time out corner for the elven gods to sit in and gave them an out if they reflected on their emotions/regrets or decided that they don't regret what they did. Elgar'nan, a spirit of tyranny, is not going to 'regret' his actions - he is going to justify them by telling himself and others that he knows what's best.

We can come across some of Solas's regrets in the prison if you run around a bit and explore:

Remnant of Failure - talking about the orb from Inquisition.

Remnant of Parting - talking about Mythal

Remnant of Reflection - more vague, talking about the Titans I believe.

So maybe he altered it - maybe he intended the prison to be 'locked' with his own regrets because after a millennia of having a pity party he still can't bring himself to self-reflect and look to the future. But what if Solas died? Or if his guilt lessened - would it diminish the strength of the regret prison?

We already have pre-established lore (though DATV has shown they don't really give a crap tbh) that once the being that has claimed/altered an area of the fade is slain, it's influence diminishes both in and outside of the fade. So if the prison was tied to his regrets then it would require Solas to basically live forever to keep it stable - especially if he brought down the veil and removed the one barrier that kept the world and the fade apart.

Rook and Solas needed some assistance to exit - but it doesn't seem like it was much! Solas used his dagger and Rook just...got out through a fade tear? This is Solas's 'more secure' second prison? It has a worse track record than the Black City! If Rook - who is not an elven god - managed to escape the regret prison what is to stop anyone else from breaking in and out of the prison?

And what did Solas intend to do with the blight - the bulk of which is apparently in the black city?? If bringing down the Veil would free the gods in the black city doesn't that mean that the blight would also be released?! Did he have a plan? Why does he go fully ahead with bringing down the veil at the end if the black city is still there and filled with blight?!

I get it: the 'regret prison' is a metaphor for how Solas holds onto the past and how Rook can move past their regrets and grow. He's trapped by the past - it's a prison. Cool. But this prison is supposed to by a physical place to contain the gods - not just to solely contain Solas. The mission is literally called 'A Cage for Gods'.

The Black City is an actual place that's so far out of reach of anywhere else in the fade that no mage can ever reach it while in dreams - let alone physically, which was only done once and took tremendous effort/blood sacrifices. It made sense - it was cool to see floating in the sky in DAO!

Though it's not said specifically, it's strongly implied that Arlathan is the Black City. You can see in the concept art that floating elven city is exactly the same as the black city in DAO! It's this foreboding thing just lurking in the sky - a constant reminder of the sin that led to the horrors of the blights and darkspawn. A real place with lore and history that also serves as a metaphor for the hubris and destruction of those who call themselves gods and act as tyrants -> for both the evanuris and the magisters.

I WANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS BIOWARE!

WHAT IS THIS KINGDOM HEARTS NONSENSE???!!

[a2trid]

Darry’s life is one to Icarus because the moment he was almost out of town and nearly had everything, his life burned and crashed because he flew to close to the sun and now has to deal with the crying sea full of ash and in this essay I will-

[blightbright]

mythal nuance

look, i love some yikes women characters!!! have i mentioned how much i fucking adore knight-commander meredith? yeah, that genocidal zealot? sympathetic lawful evil ftw. one of my ALL-TIME FAVE CHARACTERS is mariah dillard from the luke cage TV show. she is ABUSIVE, including to her daughter, she is devastating and so well-portrayed, and she is such a terrible person AND i just adore her in her harmful flawed tragic selfhood!

flemythal? fucking love her, she's awful, she's hilarious, she's compelling, i think it's a travesty that devs didn't get kate mulgrew's voice and the flemeth appearance back in some timey-wimey fade magic way. i love how she feels at odds with herself, sometimes vengeful, sometimes regretful. i love her sweetness toward merrill and her funny interactions with purple!hawke, i love her confusion that morrigan is upset with her, i even love the YIKES ambiguous, semi-motherly, semi-loverly, intimate owner-pet vibes head stroking and nuzzling between her and solas in the DA:I end credits. OUCH.

veilguard!mythal IMO feels more like a mediocre narcissist who wants to maintain the status quo, and of course is faux "loving" AKA guilt-tripping and strings-attaching her "care." that's not badly written since it's a real thing, but she's not for me. the fact that elgar'nan presumably abused her is not super compelling to me because IMO it gives the flavor of a confederate slave-owning white woman whose husband is a piece of shit AND ALSO she still thinks slavery is fine and actively upholds and abuses her power over other people. this is not an analogy: mythal literally owns people as slaves. in my fic i try to give her some fairy queen style, wouldn't-it-feel-so-good-to-die-for-me vibes where she's liberal with her magically-hypnotic praise if you please her, to make her more inhuman and therefore interesting to me, but anyway.

i'm seeing accusations of misogyny if people love solas and hate mythal, and while we can and should critique how women characters are written and discussed, given the canon content, it's NOT an inherently misogynistic reaction to hate the character who abused a character you love. i saw a thing insisting "solas is always defined by mythal" and to respect mythal and... really? critique the writers as much as you want for setting this up, but do people really want to say we should always identify a person by their abuser's influence, or offer respect to that abuser??

are you also gonna say "morrigan is always defined by flemythal, acknowledge and respect her when talking about morri" after we know for a fact that flemythal repeatedly exposed morrigan as a child to sexual situations that resulted in violent death, encouraged her to push down her own sensitivity and feelings and focus only on power and manipulation, and morrigan tells the spirit in DA:O that she's still acting too gentle to be the real flemeth, even after smacking morrigan hard across the face and demanding morrigan show some respect? she had an influence on morrigan's life, but holy fuck does morri deserve to define her life by her own desires and her own choices and accomplishments now

if people are aware that solas was given mythal's slave markings, since she was a slaver like the other evanuris, then he burned them magically off his face when he led a slave rebellion against slavers, and hear all the clips in veilguard where she is clearly in a position of power over him, and still claim there was no abuse, idk what to tell you. you are incorrect. please consider if you have some cognitive dissonance about how much you love to hate solas (tho you can still do that even if a character has experienced abuse) and/or how much you want to enjoy mythal (tho you can still appreciate an abusive character).

[izabellwit]

the thing abt metaphor refantazio is that the more u think abt Junah the more fascinating she becomes. character of all time actually

[flovoid]

It ain't nothing but a heart-breaker (War) Friend only to The Undertaker

[lilac-sweet]

Solas what the fuck have you been eating

[obsessedwithstarwars]

Danny makes jokes out of anyone finding out ghosts are real.

But only when it’s done through “accidental summonings”. In all fairness, if he hadn’t become a ghost at 14, he probably would have fuc-messed around with a ouija board too. So he can’t really blame them when the poor unfortunate souls happen to guess the correct phrase.

(And before you ask, it’s the ghostbusters theme song because of course it is.)

Instead of giving his victims summoners a heart attack, he decides to go for a more… Matrix approach. Incorporate a little humor into an otherwise terrifying experience.

Rather than a red pill and a blue pill though, he gives out a bright green glowing pill and piece of candy. He definitely gets annoyed more people don’t go for the candy. Just because it’s clearly the wrong answer doesn’t mean you should miss the opportunity for a delicious snack!

[threecowsusingthisforreblogging]

hear me out. gabriel and emizel are like. evil ghostknife.

keep entering situations where there Should Not be sexual tension and then fucking it up

cannot be left alone together for more than three minutes for the above reason

could maybe have some kind of relationship but neither of them can communicate for shit (in ghostknife's case this is because they are idiots. in gabriel and emizel's case this is because they are constantly trying to kill each other)

one of them has some fucked up body horror shit going on and has evaded death multiple times and the other one really likes stabbing

i have not finished either the suckening (ten minutes left) or pd (many episodes left) but this is my non expert opinion

[f4keplastictr33s]

thinking about flowers’ petal (that came right of blue’s mind via cabeswater) being compared to kisses and they landed right on gansey’s mouth meanwhile the petals avoided adam and landed all around him :/ also adam watching the petals fall bc he’s an eternal observer :/

[glittersumn]

They bury you alive.

[sleepyvib-es]

rick bringing percy and annabeth back in cameos just to consistently shit on their characters is enough to ruin my mood for at least a week

[miwiheroes]

if you ever see me crying its because im thinking about how california by chappell roan relates to byler

[essektheylyss]

this tarot deck REALLY wants to remind me to Hermit. this is convenient considering a) the Hermit is one of my favorite cards and b) I associate it with one of the quotes that I keep nearby at all times for writing purposes ("Do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence" from Michaela Coel's Emmy acceptance speech in 2021).

however this is NOT convenient because do you have any fucking idea how much I have to do before I can get to that, Hermit card?