#Three more shifts

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

None of our hands are clean

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[arschbiene]

That night, Feliks learned Gilbert's violence towards his own men was growing habitual and his dreams were fraught with visions of the boy taking knife to his own throat. The next day, he bid Gilbert to take his knights and leave his kingdom and was stunned to be refused.

i like to think some humans can be really driven mad around the presence of a slow growing immortal child, so for teuton i think a few of his knights developed a sort of religion fueled schizophrenic paranoia about him, like just from exposure to him and his increasingly belligerent and wild behavior.

I think he grew harder to control as he grew older within the knights and the entire atmosphere was oppressive, abusive, and violent. I like to think teuton gets to the point where he can't handle the bullshit anymore and starts culling men left and right it's like a mutual descent to madness where he thinks he's the sane and righteous one, but he's just as sick as the men who are seeing him as a demonic entity (who we can probably argue are they really sick or are they just seeing things as they are lol).

I like the wedge being driven between him and feliks' bond as the Feliks sees the deterioration of Gilbert's mental health and morality, thinking you know someone when you absolutely do not. Betrayal, hatred, horror and deep pity entwined deeply in this situation.

[girllblogging777]

[intotheelliwoods]

Semi related to this ask, but behold! The (inconsistent) colors of 2al!

Bonus:

[iristial]

Welcome to the Desire Grand Prix!

[batsplat]

this is how i think the valentino/casey rivalry plays out in their minds

[pinesorneedles]

the thematic narrative in season 6 of the three OG Scoobies struggling with powerlessness and dealing with it in different ways (Buffy not feeling anything at all, Willow by abusing the material power she does have, and Xander repressing), and all three of them being brought out of it by reaffirming their connection to the world through their platonic and familial connections

[izuizzy]

HUMAN TALIAAAAA!!! the trio of sonadow kids is complete! \o/

[corvidaedream]

now that my time at the boston tea party is coming to a close, im reflecting on my favorite facts and i think the best one is that one of the guys involved (my nemesis lendall of the john gray gay panic incident) is the distant ancestor of the guy who made the first philosoraptor meme.

history is a funny thing

[moeblob]

having a stressful time at work but i think it's very important to point out the other day i was asking a guy for help and he's like aight gotcha and then we go to this freezer room and he, from somewhere beyond a mound of boxes, just goes "you like anime right?"

sir this is the FIRST TIME we have spoken how did you clock that.

(he claims i had the vibes of someone who liked it then i was like oh like the woman in the deli wearing a jujutsu- and before i can finish the series name he says "no not her, she just liked the shirt. she's never watched anime". . . oh. i see. you have already had this debate with her then. okay.)

EDIT UPDATE:

So I got clocked AGAIN as a weeb by a coworker because I saw part of her outfit and was like "oh, Attack on Titan?" and while I then said I've never watched it she said that's fair then "do you know anything about vtubers?" and I just. Are you kidding me. I mean yeah but like. Why is your safe question with me "do you know about vtubers".

WHAT AURA DO I BRING TO A GROCERY STORE TO BE CALLED OUT LIKE THIS?

[herefortheships]

I know I totally just posted about this in another post, but I thought it deserves its own post, since it was at the end and it's a pretty long post.

Here it goes. I am getting a vibe that the WB wants us to see Betelgeuse, Lydia, and Astrid as a family.

Not only are they front and center on the DVD cover, instead of them having something like a big picture of Betelgeuse front and center and the Deetz women next to him or below him, with the rest of the cast around, or something like that; a choice was made to have Betelgeuse, Lydia, and Astrid together front and center, separate from the others, as we've all seen now. Then there is this promotional TikTok they put out, hinting at Lydia and Betelgeuse as part of Astrid's "strange family". Lydia is her mom, but why is Betelgeuse included as a part of her family?

So you see? Maybe it's my shipping goggles, so please don't take this for a fact, but with the talk about Tim Burton having official meetings with the WB about Beetlejuice 3, and now seeing these little details, it kinda makes me go "hmm 👀".

Tell me, do you get this vibe as well or am I imagining things? 😂 I feel like they're leading us to see these three as a family or as a unit. My hope is that they will take Beetlejuice 3 in the direction of establishing them as a family by the end. Of course, it might be wishful thinking. But I have a vibe, ok? A vibe. 👀

Editing to add these links to Beetlejuice merch promoting Betelgeuse as a stepdad and the trio together. That one also has Bob though, but the fact that it’s referring to them as a trio is what caught my attention. Putting up the links from Hot Topic, but other stores have the same designs since these seem to be officially approved designs to be on BJBJ merch. ✨

[trensu]

do you think you'll put "Stasis in darkness" on AO3 eventually?

see, when the idea first came to me, I hadn't really planned on doing anything with it because I wasn't sure if I could make it work. there's a level of gravitas in the relationship between a god and their devoted servant that I didn't think would translate well to steddie because, let's be real, those boys are goofy dorks. but the idea wouldn't leave me alone so I typed up the original post in an attempt to work it out of my system and move on.

(the post kind of blew up, which I was not expecting at all!! like, not even a little bit! i post all sorts of rough little ideas for my own amusement and I've been able to do that without drawing much attention until that point.)

Anyway, I wouldn't have done much with it but @acowardinmordor left some comments/tags/what have you that helped me nail down the setting in my head which really opened the door for me to explore how the story could progress. (apologies, strife, I'm not sure I ever properly thanked you for that burst of inspiration, so please accept this shoutout as an expression of gratitude). And the amazing @ent-is-indecisive allowed me to rant about it which really helped flesh out the story. Seriously, there are elements and lore coming up that would not have existed if it weren't for ent. (and thank you once again ent for the ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL fanart you made for the reveal scene, I'm still overcome with joy whenever I think about it!).

Once it got to that point, I knew I wanted it to be a self-contained story and I was afraid that if I did a multi-chapter fic I'd lose the thread and never make it to the ending I want the fic to have. (no, the end scene hasn't been written yet but I KNOW what it's going to be and I hope everyone will love it as much as i do). So I promised myself that I was not going to post it on ao3 until the whole thing was written out completely.

However, I occasionally need a confidence/motivation boost so I've been posting consecutive parts of the rough draft here. you have no idea how much the people who reblogged with tags or left comments have helped me fight off the discouragement my brain likes to bog me down with; off the top of my head, @godsweakestboy , @redfreckledwolf, @fuctacles , @spectrum-spectre , and @lawrencebshoggoth have given me lovely, enthusiastic words of encouragement. and they're only the ones I can think of at this moment. there's so many other people who've done this, so if you've ever left me nice tags or comments, please know that I've read every single one of them repeatedly whenever I need to get over a slump. I'm so grateful for all of you!

Anyway, all this is to say yes! It is going to be posted as a oneshot on ao3 once I've finished writing it. <3

[jettreno]

there obv IS a prevalent and aggravating trend of stories having an antagonist who correctly identifies a flaw in society and aims to fix it but also commits atrocities along the way that the narrative claims to undermine the entire goal and then when the hero defeats them it is in the name of the status quo - but people sometimes point to legend of korra as an example of this which is so annoying bc like man how can you not understand a show written for children. every single season ends with korra defeating the villains and then saying "they had some points tho!" and then changing the status quo to address the flaw the villain identified

[whetstonefires]

I think a part of the reason I feel so connected to JGY and XY is that I, too, think everyone is lying about what a good person they are. Sure, there may be a few genuinely good people, but those are in the minority and never claim the title.

I don't know about never; some people are pretty straightforward.

And in some ways the whole point of the concept of 'a good person' is that the feeling of losing the right to consider yourself one can impose instinctive recoil from doing wrong, in situations where you don't have the leisure of working your way through an ethics diagram and choosing the logically moral path before reacting to a situation. It has practical utility.

But that system can backfire pretty horribly too, in a lot of ways. It can be hijacked by definitions of 'good' that actually make you recoil from ethical acts because they're deviant. It can lead to disappearing up your own ass lmao.

And definitely the threshold for 'talking about how you're a good person' enough that it makes you suspect as either a) a liar or b) someone who values that self-image over objective reality and other people's wellbeing is. Not very high.

Jin Guangyao, ironically, is one of those people who's so performatively A Good Person in his public life that in retrospect it looks like a red flag. Which knowing this about himself in an ongoing fashion ofc just reinforces his own cynicism about everyone else lmao.

Even Lan Xichen, who I think he may see as a genuinely good person, he also sees as an easy mark who will reliably choose what is comfortable over what is 'right,' if you just structure the scenario to make that an easy choice that's easy for him to justify.

Xue Yang's bitterness is in many ways more exciting than Jin Guangyao's because he has a way more unusual relationship to reality, but it does share a lot of notes.

The role of deception in his psychology fascinates me because as far as I can tell he's as instinctively straightforward a person as Lan Wangji, albeit along quite different lines involving a total lack of impulse control, but has adopted 'deceit' as a weapon against the wicked world in the same way he has adopted 'murder.'

But when he feels someone is not merely lying but papering over bad behavior with principles they are not living up to he is livid.

People claiming to be better than him because they're 'good' when 'good' is a construct of privilege, is the underlying idea he's not equipped to articulate. Except he takes that and applies it to 'hitting me to interrupt my random murder of some guy who happened to be within arm's reach when I wanted to hurt someone.'

Which isn't like philosophically perfect, but the underlying problem he's actually reacting to is that he understands the social contract as a lie that has never protected him but seeks to control him, while protecting rich men it has no power to control.

Which it is fair to be mad about, but then his feeling is that since that's the nature of the world and all people, he is entitled to amass for himself the power to inflict hurt without consequences as much as he possibly can, and to use it against the vulnerable for fun, and no one is entitled to interfere.

Which brings him to a place where he is violently angry at anyone talking about trying to treat other people well as a value, because either they're a hypocrite and a liar or they threaten his entire system of rationalization for why he can be The Worst and still In The Right.

'Everyone is equally bad, actually' is like, an understandable take for anyone who's had cause to become embittered. Everyone is free to make whatever philosophical peace they can with the world and by and large there's no ethical weight to any such opinion, in itself.

But it's an ideological crutch people tend to wind up leaning on very heavily when they can't or don't want to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Which is an approach that Xue Yang, Jin Guangyao, and Su She all share, and which not only is shitty of them, it...traps them in a wheel of doubling down on their own worst impulses because rather than going 'that was bad and I shouldn't do it again' they've repeatedly invested all this energy into making what they did actually the correct thing, according to their interpretation of the context. Which means they're more likely to do it again.

(I think this is how Jin Guangyao became a serial killer, for example. He followed a doing-a-murder-impulse and then internally doubled down on how he had nothing to be ashamed of, so he was more likely to do it again, every time.

Wei Wuxian's strain of self-righteousness about his revenge was less...thorough than Jin Guangyao's, because he had the benefit of going after people on the opposite side of a war from him while Meng Yao's first known murder plot was against a shitty boss. But it probably didn't help him not try to solve army-shaped problems with mass murder, even after that stopped being allowed.)

If any of them had just like, zero moral sensibilities they would have created very different problems, and very possibly fewer of them. It's making a central goal of your operations 'self-vindication in your own internal narrative, created retroactively via reframing' rather than 'figuring out what I think I should do and trying to do that' that traps them in the self-reinforcing murder pissbaby vortex.

So if you look at it one way, these three villains are themselves perfect examples of how pursuit of the 'feeling of being good' (or at least 'not the bad guy') can make you worse.

Notably Wei Wuxian was also extremely sensitive to hypocrisy in his youth; it was the only part of Madam Yu's behavior he was ever shown objecting to. But he's sufficiently mellow and cynical from regret and burnout by the 'present' timespan after his resurrection to just get disgusted and alienated about it, rather than outraged.

He wasn't even all that mad at Xue Yang, though honestly that may be partly because he stopped entirely characterizing him as a person at some point during their interaction. Like, there's no point being angry at someone whose moral sensibilities operate exclusively on the plane of 'is this unfair to me' for manipulating and destroying people who were good to him, and then getting obsessed with his own self-pity about it. This is not a person who understands how not to be, metaphorically speaking, a cannibal.

And Wei Wuxian did know better and still got roughly the same result, so what business does he have getting angry?

Anyway yeah those two villains are both delightfully relatable if you sit down and put their perspectives together; they are clearly operating with the same basic suite of human needs and emotions as everybody else, without that being in itself particularly exculpatory, which is honestly refreshing. They've just got the most fantastically toxic interpersonal habits that knowing them counts as some level of Suffering A Curse.

Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang do both stand as scathing rebukes of the society that created them. But within the narrative, wherein they're people, the fact is that each of them had agency and one of the things they chose to do with it was develop rationales for why they were the most special little guy and everything was someone else's fault.

And their moral nihilisms, while also grounded in serious trauma, ping me as emotional masturbation of this variety.

[yardsards]

my patient's wife was so apologetic and thankful when i offered to put together some flat-pack furniture for her. don't be sorry buddy. this is big legos to me. this is Enrichment. im playinge with my tuoys.

[lazycranberrydoodles]

every time he steps into the kitchen he invents a new health code violation

follow for more. whatever this is