#Yes that's a thing & that's a problem. same but reverse also exists & is also a problem.

[gender-euphowrya]

y'all are so fucking stupid Disrespectfully

[ayel-goetia]

❌HELLBORNS❌

---Helluva Boss AU---

"Hey you! Yes, YOU, average, ordinary citizen of hell! Are you tired of your boss treating you like a constant walking piece of shit? Has your wife cheated on you for the fifth time this week? Your neighbor's hellhound won't stop defecating in your garden? Well, stop crying and complaining about your existence like a little whore in this pit of hopelessness and eternal suffering and call HELLBORNS now! We will take care of all your ills once and for all in the quickest or most tortuous way possible, it's up to you!

HELLBORNS is a company of assassins specialized in different branches of the art of murder, everyone here is a certified professional, we are legally qualified to practice this profession and we are not accepting contracts from sinners in a secret and illegal way to murder people on earth. We guarantee safe and quality work while respecting 100% the law exercised in hell.

What are you waiting for? Call HELLBORNS today and let the people who were born to do it take care of your problems forever!

Once the murder is done, there are no refunds. We are not responsible if one of our specialized assassins kills a client."

—Black Swan Company.

✨ Hey guys!✨

Well, I finally did it, I brought this AU!

One day I thought about how it would be if I swapped the roles of IMP with the "antagonists" (Verosika is still one?)

But not only that, I also wanted to give it a few differences from the original so that it would have something new and different and not just a simple swap.

So...

⭕What's HELLBORNS?

HELLBORNS is an alternate universe where the roles are reversed, now, Striker will take the place of Blitzø, Chaz will take the place of Moxxie, Verosika will take the place of Millie and finally, Vortex will take the place of Loona.

However, they don't completely take the role of the original. For example: Vortex wasn't adopted by Striker as Loona was by Blitzø.

Characters like Stolas and Stella, for example, do not swap roles, they remain the same. Only the characters mentioned at the beginning (and those involved in their backgrounds) have the swap.

⭕What's the diference?

Many things, actually! For example, they are no longer an independent company that works only killing humans! Now, they work for someone, they also do murders in hell and on earth, and they don't use the book, thanks to the Asmodeus crystal that Verosika possesses.

⭕Is there a difference in relationships?

Of course! In fact, only two of the HELLBORNS group have any relationship beyond coworkers during the beginning, and it's family.

Regarding ships, this AU is already a Straz (StrikerxChaz) AU, so this will be the main ship. The Stoliz will still be present, as well as M&M or practically any relationship already canonized in the series...

Of course, I will take the liberties of developing them in a different way ;-)

(Image without the final details.)

•Characters•

These are the first designs, and I'll admit I made them at a time where I didn't think I would take it any further, so they are redrawn over the official images lol, sorry...

Here they are drawn one hundred percent by me, and also with the designs that I consider the final ones!

Yes, I know, I forgot to add Vortex, but I haven't done it yet... Because I was a bit tired and lazy haha.

Well, that's all for now, I'll probably keep uploading content about this alternate universe. I hope you liked it and found it interesting!

✨See you later and have a spectacular day!✨

[gurggggleburgle]

Every time I think about the return to childhood extra I'm reminded that the reason it's no fun for Luo Binghe is that it forces this budding and progressive communication and understanding going on between the two to a standstill and in some ways reverses it.

And it's simply because Binghe has already been the doting child of Shizun before. He already knows what it's like to be seen as the fluffy kid hanging around his Master. He already knows what it's like to feel powerless and on an uneven ground with his Shizun. Binghe wants to turn back ASAP because he is finally getting to have an adult relationship and be seen as equal. He doesn't like being helpless (he may cry for attention but hes not helpless) but he also doesn't like being back where he was when he was a disciple.

And yeah it would suck. He can't be romantic with his own husband. He can't express himself and be taken seriously. Everyone is quick to pinch his cheeks and try to steal his husband. Your body isn't tall enough to reach the shelf you placed the pots and pans on. The knife is awkward in your child sized palms. Brooms are too tall. You can't scare off any of the people you dislike and you don't have a network of friends you can explain this too because you're a super scary demon lord and your closest possible friends are your coworkers and you happen to be their boss (and right now they might try to kill you) so you can't be vulnerable with them.

And yes. You can be open with your husband but he doesn't see the big deal the same way. He doesn't get it because functionally this is a good enough time for him because you're a cute dumpling and it's temporary. And yeah it is but also it's that you feel your husband is being nostalgic for a version of yourself that exists in the past that you don't necessarily want to repeat. Not to mention Binghe had a frankly shitty childhood. Yes his life improved once he moved in with Shizun for 3 years but that's 3 out 17. Most of that was spent in poverty and being stepped on by everyone else around him. He doesn't have a nostalgia for childhood. He doesn't miss being a kid. What he wants from that time is the lack of animosity and misunderstanding, the simplicity, that came from the abyss which by this point is mostly a mute desire. So it has to hurt being stuck in a situation like this. An emotional limbo of expression where you can't really say what's on your mind and people basically express the same opinions you're certain they already would say to your face as you stand smoll in the room. That has to hurt. That has to make you doubt things in your relationship. To hear every bias you have built in your head that others have confirmed constantly but now directly to your face while they think you're your own son.

It's a baad time.

If Shen Qingqiu had turned into a kid honestly I think Luo Binghe would have had a marginally better time. He'd love to see and dote on a tiny Shizun and pinch their cheeks and tease. But he'd be over it by the end of the week for almost the exact same reasons. Like yeah he can attic wife his husband so easy right now but he doesn't care about Shen Qingqiu being a kid. He has no reason to be invested in that experience. He doesn't get anything out if it. He still doesn't get to do what he wants which is an adult relationship with the person he loves that he can show people and present this to the world. Binghe doesn't get anything out of a child Shizun. It becomes a stall in exploring and learning each other which is the point of the extras. Yes, it probably be a wholesome good time but the same problems would happen but Shen Yuan isn't likely to nearly the same reaction because he's already a trophy husband. It's not like he's cooking or cleaning. He's already used to everyone wistfully staring at Binghe with interest. This doesn't effect how Shen Yuan processes their relationship.

It makes the fact that Luo Binghe still thinks that Shen Yuan will say no to marriage even after everything just hit harder. Because even after everything he's still thinking of that probably. There are more extras assuring him but that doubt remains and it's so juicy.

[mysticstronomy]

HOW TO DESTROY A BLACK HOLE??

Blog#460

Saturday, December 7th, 2024

Welcome back,

Black holes want to absorb all matter and energy in the Universe. It’s just a matter of time. So what can we do to fight back? What superweapons have been devised to destroy black holes?

Black holes are the natural enemies of all spacefaring races. With their bottomless capacity to consume all light and matter, it’s just a few septillion years before all things in the Universe have found their way into the cavernous maw of a black hole, crushed into the infinitely dense singularity. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that it’s mankind’s imperative to survive against all odds.

So will we take this lying down?

Heck no!

Will we strike first and destroy the black holes before they destroy us?

Heck yes!

But how? How could you kill a black hole?

This… gets a little tricky.

For a black hole, any matter entering the event horizon is added to the mass. Shoot bullets at a black hole, and you just make a slightly more massive, slightly more dangerous black hole. Detonate a nuclear bomb inside the event horizon, and you only make the black hole more massive.

Fire your forward phasers at the black hole, and that’ll still make it even more massive. Swap those bullets in for lasers and black holes don’t care. Within the event horizon, energy and matter are one, and those very same black holes can convert that energy into mass. So all your projectiles and energy weapons inevitably just make it more dangerous.

What if we crashed a star into it? Would that fill it up, or burn it out? Nope. It would just gobble that star up, and go on with its business. If we smashed another black hole into it? Would that tear it apart? The cause is also the cure? Not even maybe. As soon as black holes get within each other’s event horizons, they’ll just merge into a more massive, and even nastier, meaner black hole.

Number 1, it’s time to bring out the big guns. Reverse the particle flow, flood the dilithium chamber with exotic particles and route it through the main deflector dish, and construct your own black hole out of antimatter. Then kamikaze this new antimatter black hole right into a the black hole you want to destroy. Would that do it? Would that solve our problem?

As you probably know, when you crash matter into antimatter, you get an explosion of pure energy. It’s the most perfect energy weapon we can envision. Unsurprisingly, this brings its own set of complications. It’s not entirely clear you’ve still have antimatter in your antimatter black hole. It’s possibly been converted into a regular flavour black hole.

Still, if you *could* crash an antimatter and regular matter black hole together, you would get an incomprehensible explosion. Converting that entire dense and gigantic mass into pure energy, as calculated by Einstein. As soon as you did, all that energy would be immediately converted… into more black hole.

Nothing, not even light itself can escape a black hole. That includes all your magnificent explosion energy from your antimatter impact. You wouldn’t even see it happen. You’d just end up with a black hole with twice the mass. And that might be just what it wants.

As we learned in a previous episode, we can extract angular momentum from a black hole. By dropping material into the event horizon, we can remove energy and slow its rotation. We can even bring it to a stop. So we can slow down its spin, but that won’t make it go away.

So, is that it, are we out of options? Good news, we have one last strategy, and it’s so crazy it just might work. According to Stephen Hawking, black holes can actually evaporate over enormous periods of time.

Virtual pairs of particles are constantly popping into existence all around us. Then they recombine in a flash and disappear from the Universe. When one of these particle pairs appears right on the edge of a black hole, one particle falls into the black hole, and the other is free to fly off into space. And here’s the amazing thing. This might actually reduce the overall mass of the black hole.

So, over an incomprehensible period of time, even the most supermassive of the black holes will have evaporated away into a harmless soup of particles. It turns out, in order to defeat the black hole menace, all we need to do is ignore them, and they’ll go away all on their own.

Originally published on https://www.universetoday.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, December 11th, 2024)

"HOW ARE BLACK HOLES CREATED, AND HOW DO THEY GROW??"

[odusseus-xvi]

Just saw a post saying that it didn't feel right for q!Baghera to bond with q!Jaiden about their neutrality for Cucurucho especially considering what recenty happened to q!Forever. And at first, yeah okay, it's definitely unealthy, I understand, HOWEVER what made me do a double take is the later comment "It makes sense for q!Jaiden because it's her character but I'm disappointed in q!Baghera." And I was confused, because her pov makes sense in that. And then I saw the "I don't watch her pov, it's just what I see of her character." and that's where I went "OH, I can help with that ! :D" Because it does make sense form her pov.

So, time to clarify :

First of all, talking about Baghera (it's the character from now on) and Cucurucho's relationship, she has never been anti Cucurucho. She has always shown compassion for him. HOWEVER it was never in the way "he's a perfect little guy, it can do no wrong" but more in a "They might not have free will, someone or something might be suffering under all this. "

Because that's the thing, Cucurucho is not just Evil Guy tm that uses the fact he's nice to people in order to manipulate people on his side, it's a anthropomorphic white bear, with a robotic voice, godlike powers, and that might not even have free will or anything. To her POV there might be someone suffering. Does it know what it's doing, Can it make choices on it's own, Was something transformed against their will to become this. Are all those acts Cucurcho or the Federation using him ?

Their is then the shock and the recent revelation. You have to realise it's not just "the trauma she rediscovered is blinding her a little bit on some subjetcs." It's so much more intense. The PTSD was so intense she dissociated for 2 full weeks. The Federation had to go fetch her in order for her not to die. It was clear that this happened before AND can happen again. This is one of the reasons she tends to just clock out important and negative details that can induce stress, ESPECIALLY since she discovered she was created entirely by the Federation, in her pov yes Forever is part of her chosen family, but at the same time a BOMB of an information was dropped on her and the first reaction you have is not "It's okay, they are not my chosen family, I'm gonna focus on the people I care about." It's "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DOES THAT MEAN ABOUT ME" And that might be something she sees in Cucurucho, it might have raised her. And it might be in a similar situation. She was also so Anti-Federation for so long that now that she knows she was made by them, that she can't escape them, she is so terrified that people would start seeing the Federation in her the same way they see it in Cucurucho.

In a way it's a bit like realising years later your parents are complete assholes, but in reverse. She realised the Federation are the reason she is alive, the reason she exists. She might know they are evil, but they raised her.. She HAS to find some good in them, there has to be right ? If she is of them, there has to be some good.

In a similar way the "Cucurucho has never done anything bad to me" is not JUST reassuring herself and blocking out the problems of the others (it's partly that, and I agree it's very unealthy, that's why we are cheering, we want the angst) but it's also "I know they are capable of good, I've seen it, there has to be a way to point it towards that good and fight the Federation's influence". Imagine the "I can fix him" meme but infinitely more fucked up.

I want to be very clear everyone who follows her POV realises everything she is doing is VERY unealthy and unfair to a lot of people (to q!Forever, among others yes, q!Etoiles himself commented on how she acted strange recently), BUT it does make sense from her pov, and because she hides things to the others, I do realise now that YES, from other povs it feels like a shift, and her just not caring, but she does care, she is just REALLY lost, confused and scared at the moment. And that is partly why we are all SO interested and invested in her bonding with Jaiden, because it's terribly unealthy and it offers two amazing possibilities, either they get out of it together, with some help or not and it's beautiful, OR they make each other worse.

I can't wait to see where they go with it.

[amethystfairy1]

I am so sorry in advance because this is a really overthinky question for a really basic thing and I doubt that too much thought was put into it but I've been so curious about Tango (and blaze-borns in general ig) and how he works since reading TT esp, because of the burns, so I have a few questions :) [post-writing extra apology for possibly the longest ask in tumblr history, I should just make a Google doc and start sending links atp 😭]

°•~°•~°•~°•~

Just to walk you through the thought process, I tend to really, really think about little things since I zone out so much and need something to occupy my brain-time lol, so it started with the question how do the blazeborn water burns work? And that led to a slew of other questions.

The first question was "why water?" Ofc the first thought is that it's a temperature thing, as in TTSBC, super hot water doesn't have this issue. However, it's not like every room-temperature thing hurts them. So second thought was that blaze-born have something lava or fire-like just beneath their skin, with their skin acting as insulation. This makes sense, as they have an "internal flame" they can will to heat up on command, and also makes sense since there has to be some layer of insulation given that Zed describes his hands as "warm", but he's not actually being burnt, which, given that Tango can melt glass and metal after heating up, it's safe to assume even his base temperature is really hot.

I'd guesstimate 1000°c since that's about fire temp, so the skin layer has to be HELLA insulated. I also had some questions about why blazeborn even were that temperature, since, given the nether origin, there's no real evolutionary reason for netherborn in general to be able to cool enough to not hurt flesh, but I guess piglins exist... I also thought way too hard about that and started questioning how the hell (haha) blazeborn exist in the first place as they're implied to be part human to an extent... and that train of thought was left in the dust. More important questions to be had.

Anyways so I read a zedango one-shot I'm at least 75% sure was written by you, where Tango says water burns him "like lava burns [humans]". So naturally I did a ton of research as to how lava burns humans, and how burns work, and the chemistry behind it. Google, surprisingly, failed me miserably, and I had to use Google scholar and guess a ton, but I think the gist is that (and thank you Wikipedia) when fire is on stuff, the heat energy causes said stuff to turn into a vapor and make light. Human skin has a buncha oil and carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, all stuff that's great for fire. This tied into another question I had, which was "would pouring lava on the burn help?"

So first question: why does water help burns, and why does it hurt fire, and is it related. Short answer: yes. Long answer: water is REALLY GOOD at absorbing *temperature*. When water goes on fire, it basically consumes all the heat energy, making the fire die out, since, as discussed prior, fire (and lava!) work by using heat energy to make light. It helps with burns for the same reason, basically taking the temperature off of the burn. Cold water is bad for burns, though, as it doesn't absorb the temperature as well (being cold) and skin being cold is bad for the damaged tissue, and the cold constricts blood vessels trying to heal the area.

So, with this logic, should it be reversed, pouring lava on the burns would hypothetically help, since the initial problem is that the water stole all the heat, and pain is doing it's job of saying "hey, something's wrong here, stop moving so we can fix it." HOWEVER, while typing this out, I remembered something.

In TT, Tango's water burns are described as purple and bruise-like. I've been using real-life logic, but this isn't a real life earth setting. This is a minecraft setting. And what happens in minecraft when water meets lava? No, not cobblestone, that's the other way around. Obsidian. A purple rock. This means that the earlier theory that blazeborn have lava under their skin is basically confirmed. It also disputes the earlier theory that lava would help, as Tango was wrong. Water does not burn the same way lava does, it burns the same way liquid nitrogen does (which, really, makes sense).

Remember earlier about cold water closing off blood vessels? Well, in severe frostbite situations, something similar happens. The lack of bloodglow is the main problem. Safe to. Assume the lack of lava-flow would ALSO be bad. Obsidian forms when lava cools rapidly, which makes sense. Tango's under-skin layer turning to rock resembles frostbite in a lot of ways. It's hard to move, hurts a ton, and even turns purple-blue. How do you treat severe frostbite? Well, warm water does help, but using the warm water method hurts INSANELY. The recommended action is to just try to warm it up the least painful way possible and take a ton of painkillers. Now, people can dip their hands in liquid nitrogen and be fine. How? The internal heat of one's hand and insulation of their skin plus the fact that LN is hydrophobic means that the oil and moisture on your skin should keep you safe for a second or so. But pretty quickly your abysmal heat gets beaten. Now take water, which is really good at absorbing heat. Frostbite in seconds.

That leaves only two questions: Why does the blazeborn skin only insulate one way? Given Tango's ability to be fine to the touch, you'd think that he's super insulated and thus protected. Easy answer? Being nether-born, there's no real reason to be immune to the cold in general. Water is literally not a thing. The second question: Why does Tango need to drink??? Easy answer; it's one of the criteria to be "alive." Need water to function. But water is completely unavailable in the nether. "They drink lava" makes no sense, as lava effectively is just hot rock. It makes sense Tango needs water, as things like... tongues, eyes, ect really need that stuff. But blazes don't, as they're fire. There's no way to get water from food, as nothing else (in the nether) has a high water content, and in ttsbc, water hurts even to drink prior to entering the mouth, but the digestive tract can handle it. Is it the human side? If so, how did Tango live in the nether so long in TT?

I was tempted to go "okay too much overthinking" at this point, but I refused to give up. So, I've determined something. A quick Google says humans need water to "regulate temperature, digest, circulate blood, salivate, and pee". How does water help with these things? It's a really really good solvent. What else is a good solvent? Basically just nail polish. Okay. New plan. Piglins exist in the nether, and they are flesh-based, organic, and pretty close to the overworld mob, well... the pig. Crazy, I know.

Anyway, [how've I not hit a character limit] that means water HAS to exist in the nether. What else proves this? BASALT! Pretty sure I watched a matpat theory that said something like this, but eh game theory is always gonna beat me to it.

Water has to exist somewhere in the nether. Where? How? I daresay, ice. In earlier versions, ice in the nether would become water. Later this was removed. However, now, ice placed in the nether will stay ice. How? Who cares, it's perfect!

Should the ice exist beneath the rocks, say under basalt or netherrack (which we can assume netherack is really good at insulation as it doesn't burn like magma in MC) people of the nether could eat that ice, which would melt without using too much of their body heat and dehydrating them like it does normal people due to the fact that their body isn't working overdrive to melt it by heating up, since theyre already more than warm enough, and it means the piglins likely just melt their ice and drink it super fast. The ice could be held by the claws, preventing burns, and BAM. Blazeborn mystery solved.

°•~°•~°•~

TL;DR? I ask too many questions and think too hard. Also, blaze born get frostbite, not burns, eat ice, and should not be thought of from an origin perspective. (Seriously, given the serious variations types of hybrids and mutants, what were people doing????)

Come back next week for my rant on Doc being our only cannon double-hybrid/mutant as a creeper goat and the implications of interspecies children and what is considered a "main" subspecies and why, as well as the consideration of a possible history of purity in breeding given the amount of people who are just one thing, how many of trait get passed down and why, weather the bird side can become more dominant in avians, how siblings can have different bird subspecies,(raven and parrot?) and why TT avians have bird legs and TTSBC ones don't!

[After consideration I'm sending this anonymously because it doesn't matter whether tumblr says there's no way to know, I think it's possible to guess who I am given... uhh... the book in your inbox]

I.

I think you're giving me a lot of credit here for thinking things through this much...I do try to think things through but this is...

WOW!

This is AWESOME! You did so much research into it and that's SO SO SO cool! I love it! I don't really have much to add too it...but I can help with that second bit! I've mentioned before, but if your parents are different subspecies, you will ALWAYS be born of one or the other. For example, if Joel and Lizzie ever had a kid in TTSBC, that kid would be either a cat hybrid or a butterfly hybrid, not both, and no mixed traits. If they had another kid, it would flip the coin again. Avians feather colors are similar coin flips based on parentage! As for why the TT avians have bird feet and the TTSBC avians don't...? Well, if you wanna deep dive on that, go for it! This whole thing was SO COOL to read! Thank you so much for reading and enjoying my AUs so much!

[maxwell-grant]

"porous and easy-to-transplant like Spidey's villains" is it just me does Marvel have more of these guys than DC? Like we can just have random buff list villains go after a a variety of different characters?

Oh yes, Marvel absolutely has the advantage when it comes to rogues gallery transplants, it's not even a contest. That's in large part because Marvel existed as a shared universe from the get-go: DC didn't quite jump on that wagon for a while. For most of the Silver Age, there was little to no cross-pollination between Superman and Batman, the existence of the Justice League not really mattering in their titles, where as Marvel was crossover town from day one. They each offer different kinds of narrative real state for their villains to exist in.

The DCU's defining figures, Superman and Batman, live in opposite cities with opposite tones and opposite casts and everybody else has to occupy the space between their two extremes, and most of the other bigger heroes have their own cities: your Star Cities and Central Cities and Hub Cities and Bludhavens and whatnot. Thus most of their villains and villain casts are centralized, and sometimes they even have formal agreements about this kind of stuff. There's almost like a Venture Bros-esque union thing going on sometimes in the DCU where most of their popular villains and heroes are fairly exclusive to one another, with characters like Killer Frost, Gentleman Ghost and Solomon Grundy who transcend this being mostly such due to their heroes being more absorbed and integrated into ensembles than their own adventures.

The major exceptions for these tend to be villains specifically made or set to menace the entire universe, like Superboy Prime or Perpetua or, Amanda Waller this month I guess, and Event Villains are kind of their own thing (and mostly not very good). DC doesn't have a Doctor Doom, in the sense of a big great iconic villain for the whole universe and specific heroes in it who also can and will fight anyone and it will pretty much always be great no matter who he's fighting. They try to make cosmic baddies like Brainiac into those kinds of figures and it never works as well, it always just makes them too generic, there's no spark to the ensuing dynamic. Vandal Savage is probably the closest to one that works and, love the guy, but he's sporadically great and simply not up to the standard this requires.

Marvel, in turn, has been in the business of regularly loaning out bad guys, maybe ever since Sandman joined up the Frightful Four? He wasn't just a one-off thing like that time Daredevil and Doctor Doom swapped bodies and fought, no he was regularly showing up as a villain in F4, in a new costume even. Marvel already started with all of their major defining characters living in the same sandbox, everybody is within a few blocks away from each other most of the time, and so everybody is everybody's problem most of the time, it's the bastardverse and they are all crammed together, and it's not terribly surprising why they fight all the goddamn time. All the major Marvel villains are shooting to rule the same city/planet and destroy more or less the same people and therefore they kinda have to be on a first-name basis with each other, and all the middle-leaguer/second-stringer baddies are getting beaten up by the same people in the same city. Reverse-Flash and Joker going after anyone other than their respective arch-enemies feels fake and perfunctory, but guys like Ultron and Norman Osborn, who also have specific arch-enemies, can transit between individual problems for different heroes and larger-scale problems for everybody just fine. A DC hero will rarely be in Lex Luthor's line of sight unless they are specifically doing something that will piss him off, where as if you are a Marvel hero, it's a fact that sometimes you'll just randomly orbit Wilson Fisk's business and thus you gotta dodge gunfire for it that day.

This especially applies for the smaller-scale villains, not too strongly attached to the hero they may have started out with to the point they become ensemble villains, the ones that easily and eventually become someone else's problem. Your Mr. Hydes and Absorbing Men and Arcades and High Evolutionaries and whatnot, Spider-Man is stuffed with these. Sometimes these characters will click so well with specific heroes they'll achieve wholly different kinds of stardom or characterization (Kingpin in Miller's Daredevil, Brain Drain and Kraven in Squirrel Girl, etc), and sometimes they'll graduate into the position of supporting character or even main character. The peak example of this is Taskmaster, because while the likes of Loki and Venom can claim greater stardom, they did so by becoming anti-heroes and are generally still attached at hip to their heroes of origin, where as Taskmaster is a midcard villain to the bone and it's extremely easy to forget he was an Avengers villain at first, he is just fully A Guy in his own right who will go anywhere and menace anyone for the right price (except Moon Knight, because he is too scary), he'll scale up and down and be everyone's problem until he's not being paid to do so and then it's cool. DC doesn't really have an equivalent to him (they kinda try with Deathstroke but, pfft, please, that guy is a diehard obsessive Teen Titans villain and that's not even the more embarassing thing about him). They have countless midcarders just picking dust within their respective rogues galleries that could easily be migrated elsewhere.

But on the other hand, Marvel doesn't quite have what you'd call a Legion of Doom/Injustice League, in the sense of being able to pair all of it's biggest villains from the biggest corners of the world together in a team-up and have it work. There's been attempts over the years to make things like the Masters of Evil and the Cabal land as such and they never really stuck, the closest you get to an iconic Big Villain Team is the likes of the Sinister Six and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, groups tailored to menace specific heroes or hero teams, or things like The Black Order and the Dark Avengers, ultimately extensions of bigger villains (the Thunderbolts are their own thing). Maybe it's because Marvel doesn't really have a major concentrated dominant heroic force on the level of the Justice League that would demand all their villains to put everything aside to try and stop it (although DC can't really justify the Legion of Doom/Injustice League as an ongoing thing most of the time, they don't exist as a regular thing). It might be a mismatch of priorities, that it doesn't have a Lex Luthor as a a clear-cut Union Chief to properly call in and command other arch-enemies who would be willing to pay union dues and work together to better destroy the specific guys they individually hate. Marvel's major villains are a clutch of arch-bastards all trying to be king of the world who hate each other as much, if not more, as they hate their heroes and the only one who could rise above them to the top leadership position is Doctor Doom, who has no need to be leading or participating in something like this. Loki had to put on a whole charade of pretending to be subservient to each of them in order to pull off the gathering he did in Acts of Vengeance, and that only worked once.

Another obvious immediate answer for why is that, as Acts of Vengeance and other stories have shown time and time again, you kinda can't gather all of Marvel's biggest villains in one place and not include the Red Skull, and thus other villains jumping over themselves to murder him the second he walks into the room. But they've done attempts without him or a significant Nazi villain in the room, and they still largely didn't land. It might be overall that, the point of the Legion of Doom is to force all the separate characters and domains of the DCU to join forces to oppose it and that's why they have to be a threat to the Justice League, with none of it's villains exactly meeting that standard on their own, but Marvel's heroes are already all crammed together in cliques on the same places and fighting/putting differences aside to tackle bigger threats all the time, and so there's not really a point of forcing that through a especially big villain gathering.

There isn't really a unity among the Marvel heroes comparable to the one that demands Lex Luthor to call in all the other arch-enemies to try and break, and the one time Norman Osborn attempted to call in one at the height of his power, it was repeteadly emphasized how stupid he was to expect to be able to gather and control and command said people (and when Namor tried to revive the Cabal for the sake of succeeding where the Illuminati failed, things went even worse for him). In the end, Marvel is just too chaotic for the villains to exist in a centralized ruling body like that, if the heroes can't agree on anything why would their villains be any different.

[prince-liest]

since you acknowledged vox and valentino as a uh. less than healthy relationship (lol) several times (going feral over what vox was implying in that latest 666 fic), do you think there's ever the chance of alastor feeling... probably not protective haha but maybe possessive over vox the next time he's a little banged up? alternatively, how else do you think alastor would react if whatever they were getting up to is halted by vox nursing some kind of injury from one of his and val's fights? - ✨

I think it really depends on how Vox presents the situation, to be honest! They, uh, bang each other up a lot themselves, hahaha, and Alastor doesn't really register it as problematic. A lot of writing 666 is balancing the idea that these guys are living an existence where the a real life normal-meter really can't accurately be applied, and also maintaining that they still do have personal boundaries and lines that might be crossed.

A reminder of some (but not all) of the fucked up things that Vox and Alastor have done to each other over the course of 666:

One murder attempt that Vox didn't draw a line in the sand over

Vox got annoyed and slapped Alastor across the face hard enough to knock him down, with no warning or prelude, in a sexual context

Vox slammed Alastor's skull into the ground, out of anger, several times until he was dazed and bleeding

Alastor literally tried to eat a chunk of Vox's shoulder, most likely resulting in the reverse of the scenario you're describing: Vox having to take it easier with Val because he has a gaping shoulder wound courtesy of Alastor and can't lift his arm

About three dozen bucketfuls of severely under-negotiated and sometimes not-at-all negotiated edgeplay (as in, not safe-sane-consensual) kink from both ends, including but not limited to: choking (via hands and via dick), fearplay, deliberate boundary-crossing wrt touch, hypnosis, painplay, bloodplay, wounding, and gaslighting for the purpose of humiliation

Like, Vox asking "I want to make sure I didn't cross any boundaries!" in the second 666 fic does not in any way absolve him of having deliberately crossed about thirty of them immediately prior, and the fact that Alastor enjoyed it is mostly just because Alastor is also fucked up. Some people seemed quite surprised at Alastor crossing so many boundaries in the wireplay fic compared to all the shit Vox had pulled prior to that point, and I think it's because he, unlike Vox, didn't pay lip service to it, though they both do about the same amount of actual "keeping an eye on things".

Them caring about each other does not mean that their concept of "boundaries" or even "okay things to do to another person in an intimate setting or otherwise" aren't very, very colored by them being demonic overlords who live in hell and haven't so much as waved 'hello' to a single healthy intimate relationship in the past hundred years.

Vox having to take a breather because he has some kind of injury from Val is, unless he's actively making a 'this is fucked up and I'm opening up to be vulnerable and unhappy about it' kind of deal about it, is not really going to ping on Alastor's radar as a problem.

And Vox isn't going to make that kind of deal about it because that isn't how he sees his relationship with Valentino. Yes, Val often treats Vox in abusive ways in 666. That is also colored by both of them being demonic overlords who live in hell, and Vox treats certain aspects of it as frustrating and upsetting (and often takes that out on Valentino - hence the frequent off-again-on-again nature of their relationship), but he doesn't actually, like, see their relationship the way that we do.

He loves Val. Val loves him. To him, the rest is either normal overlord behavior or their own damage, and they've found a balance where the general response to a shitty happening is, "Eh, we've worked through worse."

TL;DR: Valentino, Vox, and Alastor all need to have "DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!" stapled across their foreheads. To paraphrase Bay: They're in hell. The insane acts of violence are basically a love language at this point.

[coraniaid]

for the ask meme: principal snyder

[Reverse unpopular opinion meme.]

Not sure how unpopular a take this is but I really like Principal Snyder.  He is genuinely one of my favorite minor characters on the show.

There are, I guess, a few different reasons for that.

The first is just a question of good timing. Snyder arrives during the second half of the first season, which is – to my mind, anyway – the point where the show really starts to find its feet.  (This is also, I suspect, part of the reason I’m so fond of Jenny Calendar, who shows up at around the same time.)  And he’s a recurring figure throughout the show’s second and third seasons too, which – while they might not be objectively the show’s best years – are certainly the seasons I personally have the most nostalgic feeling for and whose failings I’m most willing to overlook.  Snyder’s part of my favorite two and half seasons of the show, so I’m predisposed to enjoy him as a character.

Second, and along similar lines, Snyder is a type of character that I think that the latter seasons don’t really have: a recurring character who is somewhat important to Buffy’s regular life but entirely ignorant of the supernatural side of that life. Yes, we find out early in Season 2 that Snyder knows more about vampires than he lets on, and that he’s reporting directly to the Mayor; but that connection doesn’t seem to add up to him being in on the Mayor’s big Ascenion plan and he doesn’t show any sign of knowing that Buffy herself is the Slayer.

After the high school seasons, who else is there like this?  Parker Abrams, I guess, very early in Season 4, but … that’s it, right?  There are characters who could have taken up Snyder's mantle – Dawn’s social worker, for example, or Buffy’s second manager at the Doublemeat Palace, both in Season 6 – but for whatever reason nobody does. Almost everyone else Buffy meets after high school either turns out to be deeply connected to the supernatural -- other than Parker everyone she spends any time with in college turns out to be a demon, a witch or a member of the Initiative; the next Principal of Sunnydale High is the son of a previous Slayer, the doctor she starts talking to when her Mom gets sick is the mortal vessel of a hell god -- or just not a regular part of the show at all. I can’t even remember the name of any of Buffy’s college professors other than Maggie Walsh. 

And I think that’s a shame, because the existence of Principal Snyder as a low-level recurring antagonist makes Buffy’s life as a regular teenage girl feel a lot more consequential than it otherwise might.  If Buffy only had problems with one-off teachers we’d never seen or heard of before, or if she frequently complained about getting into trouble with an off-screen principal we never got to see on screen, the world of the show would just feel a little less grounded. And, in particular, Snyder's function as the show's clear unsympathetic authority figure implicitly helps make both Buffy's Mom and her Watcher much more sympathetic than they might otherwise be

More important than either of those points though, I think Snyder is just really fun to watch?  For my money, the writers strike almost the ideal balance between making him an unpleasant self-important bully and making him a ridiculous comic figure (one who, crucially, at no point shows any sign of being in on the joke).  Armin Shimerman is unfailingly great in the role from his very first appearance, and he gets such wonderfully silly lines to say. 

Some of my favorites:

“There are some things I can just smell.  It’s like a sixth sense.”   

“What are you, ghouls?  There are no dead students here … this week.” 

“That’s the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten.” 

"Children everywhere ... Like locusts, crawling around, mindlessly bent on feeding and mating, destroying everything in sight in their relentless, pointless desire to exist."

“Why couldn’t you be dealing drugs like normal people?” 

"This is a time of celebration. So sit still and be quiet."

“There are things I will not tolerate: students loitering on campus after school, horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also smoking.”

Finally, I really like the fact that – unlike, say, Shimerman’s other big 90s genre TV role, Quark on Deep Space 9, and unlike somebody like Jonathan who was also a recurring character in the high school years who didn’t (then) know that Buffy was the Slayer – Snyder really never gets any more depth or attempts to make him sympathetic.  He never gets fully brought into the magical world or gets given some sort of character arc or has any previously well-hidden virtues suddenly revealed.

Yes, okay, there’s the aforementioned ties to the Mayor and the brief glimpse we get of teenage Snyder in Band Candy. But for all practical purposes the Principal Snyder we see in Season 1’s The Puppet Show – delighting in causing Buffy and her friends problems for no reason while boasting about how, unlike his predecessor, he’s too tough and disciplined to ever get eaten – is the same Principal Snyder we see in Season 3’s Graduation Day, getting eaten.

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

Hello! Really random but I was talking to a friend about the deal with the “evil altean” alternative universe that unfortunately exists and knew you had some thoughts on it!

I want to be able to explain it better but you have a better understanding than I do! I hope you don’t mind me asking your thoughts on it!

Hollow-dweller has explained it much better than i ever could here and here, and most of my reply is just giving out the same points they made. Anyway in my opinion Hole in the Sky is a shit ass episode and i deeply resent it.

To start with this episode is another example of Reverse Racism the vld writers love so much and one of the many many many many Many examples of the fact that vld is very much written by white writers for a white audience and focusing on a white UsAmerican narrative that pretends to be progressive and inclusive but is absolutely shallow in its ideals and is not at all sympathetic towards minorities, victims of oppression, and those who are not white american. Furthermore this episode is yet another example of this shows contant need to criticize and punish Allura for wanting to reconnect with her dead people and culture.

First of all lets look at the motivation of Empress Allura that led her into making a colonizing mind-washing empire out of her once peace loving diplomatic people. Apparently it is similar to main reality in that the Galran attack and Alfor was killed, however this time they went with Allura's plan in the first episode to bring voltron together which leads to the Galran empire's defeat and Altea becoming the colonizing force instead (i rewatched that stupid episode just to answer this ask, so yes this is literally what happened in that episode. While the evil alteans dont say that Empress Allura brought the voltron together, it was jds who mentioned in an interview that that's what happened)

Problem with that is we already know how Allura would react to such situation! In canon! And sure she was (rightfully) hurt and angry about it, but she never let go of her kindness because of it! She lost her father And her planet And everyone she ever loved and still remained a kind and giving person to her own detriment.

And inspite of what your average Allura-hating Keith/Lotor/Klance stan would have you believe, her hatred towards Galran was never this deep to the point of enacting unjust violence on them, let alone destroying the universe because of it. Yes she was distrusting of Ulaz except he also broke into her castle and beat up her teammates which most likely did colour her opinion. Yes she was cold towards Keith except it only involved side-eye and a cold comment for which she apologized in the very next episode without anyone else's prompting. And people bring up her actions against Lotor after his reveal and rage against good!Zarkon to say she's a bigot, and i am sorry i don't have to explain how that's just plain stupid, all i can say is that even after everything the stans still think that she didn't deserve to kick both their asses let alone genuinely consider she was in the wrong then i am sorry but there really is no hope for them.

Also even if she had a damning corruption arc, do you really think Coran and the paladins of the old who very likely were alive to defeat the galran would have let her go that far? Do you really think she wouldn't have crumbled immediately if Alfor's Ai had come to know about this and looked at her with shock, pity, and disappointment?

Not to mention Alteans were established to be a peace loving diplomatic species. How did they end up being this colonizing brainwashing race? This was certainly not written to be a nuanced take on topics like "trauma and tragedy causing a massive shift in a culture causing continued cycle of violence" or "Oppression is relative in nature", because this was only one episode. One episode and the only thing we get is "All Alteans in this reality are evil" with no "it's not black or white" notion this series wants to preach but absolutely fails at.

This show does this thing a lot where it's much more critical of victims being angry at their treatment while coddling the perpetrators. Galra get the "They are not All Bad, they were just following Zarkon's orders who is also Not All Bad poor baby just got corrupted by bad quintessence and also if you are mean to them you are just as bad uwu 🥺🥺🥺". Meanwhile Alteans are just, "All Alteans in this reality are evil", and there's certainly no corrupting purple quintessence involved cause otherwise everything would be purple.

And yeah i knowww it's because it's one off episode vs entire series but it still could and should have been better. Have Sven be an Altean which actually makes sense given Guns of Gamara represent Blade of Marmora in this reality, or make it so it's not Allura who created this empire, or better yet! Just Don't Write that episode! One of the links i added above talks about an alternative dark!Allura which i found to be much more interesting and provided for a much more meaningful introspection and possible arc for Allura without turning into another "Oppressed can be as bad oppressors" shallow life lesson white people seems to think is height of nuanced truthful worldview. You could have had a Galra-won bad end timeline to establish multiple realities. There were just so many options.

And of course this episode is another example of putting down characters of colour to put fucking Keith on pedestal. All throughout the episode is Keith as this "logical, voice of reason who's always correct" white-coded man, While making Allura out to be "illogical dumbass who nearly handed clearly evil alteans an ore that would threaten all the realities all because she wanted the help from those Alteans 🙄🙄🙄" Black-coded woman. Maybe it was her trauma and wishful thinking talking but i feel like the moment she heard them call her Empress Allura while a Shiro looking hates Alteans, she should atleast some suspicions. But nope, Allura has to be an idiot specifically because she wants to get in touch with her culture while Keith is the extremely Specialist Boy who is always right. I fucking hate it here.

And of course the shit cherry on the top of this enormous shit pile of tone-deafness, you have this episode framing Alfor's decision to hide the lions be that if they had formed it.... It would result in evil altean reality. Not because the head of voltron is controlled by Zarkon, not because it's an extremely powerful weapon with very high chance of falling into wrong hands, not because they did not have enough paladins to pilot the whole thing, not because it was literally a losing battle. Nope! Apparently it was possible to win the war 10k years ago, but there was a possibility that living Alteans, including his own daughter would go on to take over the universe for asinine reasons so he pretty much hid the weapon so that the Galran can take over the universe and take over the universe and destroy multiple planets including his own. Yup this is totally a normal and logical thought process to have, nevermind that Alfor's ai literally says they should have gone with Allura's plan in the very first episode. Yup this a totally normal and logical thought process to have/s

Tldr- it's a shit ass episode

Honestly if you want to improve on it/keep it's elements here are my suggestions-

Make it a Lotor focused episode instead of Allura focused episode. Let other reality Lotor be the one who formed the empire instead of Allura. Especially if you want to redeem him. He's the one this obsessed with Alteans and this hateful towards Galran. He's the one who believes in sacrificing as many people as there needs to be in order to achieve peace. (In this episode it is implied he cause the death of many pilots while trying to get the Ore). Let him see this version of him who has achieved what he could only dream of, except he can stare in horror seeing a version of him has become just like their father

Or

2) Make Sven and Slav be unreliable narrators being lied to by Guns of Gamara and the two Alteans we see as lying liars who lie. Make these two Alteans extremists lying to Allura because they truly believed that she would agree with their plans and wanted to impress her. There's no Altean empire just Altean planet ruled by one of Allura's descendant who's trying extremely hard to arrest this extremist almost cultish group. No they haven't captured entire planets but instead kidnapped few aliens and brain washed them and the descendant is trying their best to stop these idiots. Have Sven and Slav be ex-victims of brainwashing by the extremist Alteans only to be "saved" By Guns of Gamara, who is anti-Altean faction who lied to them that the Alteans have colonized the entire universe whereas the truth is Alteans are just.... Alteans. Nothing sinister going on.

[lunarsilkscreen]

On Social Capital, The a Military, Executive Hazing, and the Illuminati

I assure you; this is not going where you want it to go.

Beginning before my last enlistment and enrollment in a training materials development squadron; many of us (My Team) were selected to be placed on terrorists watch lists.

Some of you were placed there because of me, and some where placed there because of you. It's hard to tell since us derps were marked as an elaborate underground group thanks to us just being Online Derps, Derping online together.

Even though we didn't know we were each other; the government, especially the NSA knew. And because of this; and black hat hackers; 4-chan; Guy Faukes; Anonymous; and Reddit

Because the NSA knew we were linked in all these ways; but we didn't; we looked like this amorphous blob of *Scary*.

And then Bread Tube popped into existence.

Guess who's responsible for making breadtube?

I mean, guess who the fans of Bread Tube are?

Guess who the incels and Manosphere is?

It us; *we* are the problem; We are *also* not the problem.

That's why we're here right now.

Because after frustrating ALL THE THREE-LETTER-AGENECIES with so much random bullshit you will learn at a later date; and just... Laugh at how obvious it is in hindsight.

Because that's all we can do *is* laugh... When you find out your literal life was on the line because of the way you played video games.

That's why we scare the agencies. Because we figured it out *while* they were still piecing things together. Because we are literally expert tactical minds who have been literally training in secret for decades...

My Fellow Americans... We *are* the Battle School to European Hogwarts. And yes; that sounded exactly as stupid as I thought it would despite the truth that makes it reality.

And instead of doing terrorist things... We did reverse Terrorism*every* step of the way. We literally passed the prisoner's dilemma with flying colors because of the "Power of Friendship" and having played too many psychological thrillers...

Mostly because we didn't know what the fuck was going on; and because of our desire to make the world around us a better place.

For me; They took away my Pets, My Family, My Belongings, and even made it impossible for me to get any money for several months where I literally starved.

If you're wondering why I lost all that weight...

And then they did the same things to my friends...

They also found *my* wife in the process. Which... Let me tell you... Was a *whole thing*...

Imagine somebody arrests and interrogates you for being *my*(of all people's) love interest... And then you find out that you actually hate that person because they're your Rival.

And then your Rival is also your teammate; and now you have to spend two years of therapy just to make sure it isn't some *elaborate* Stockholm syndrome...

Yeah, I through up at the mushiness of it all too. It's absolutely dizzying and terrifying.

This particular system the NSA has perfected to Identify people like *us*... Literally "Dark Celebrities." It has been used *solely* for the purposes of Anti-Terrorism and Anti-Narcotic endeavors.

And we have a chance to dismantle or change this system to work better for all Americans.

Congrats everyone, We're popular. Yay. It's everything we ever dreamed it would be.

Get ready to go to work.

[thelunarfairy]

Holiii, For a long time I have thought that JSHK's ending tells us or makes a metaphor for the end of the story.

So I decided to do a quick analysis of what the ending can tell us :)

First we see Nene walking and how she leaves her friends behind and how the further she goes things get worse, as if something bad was going to happen, because even though they are on the surface they are not safe.

In the next scene we see Tsukasa and Hanako walking towards where the other is, they get together and there is something bad, a problem, a catastrophe, as if in the place where they are both everything goes wrong.

Then there is the scene where Kou encounters Mitsuba but he disappears, while Kou remains on the surface and continues moving forward, which from my perception tells me that he will move forward with his life and will only be left with the memory of Mitsuba.

Then Nene is left alone and begins to join Hanakp, going deeper into the other side, giving what seems like a kiss with Hanako.

But they begin to sink and get deeper into this.

Nene transforms into a fish and leaves Hanako's hands, watching as Nene gradually moves away from him.

He takes it again to get it out of there, wanting to take it to the surface.

But it doesn't reach the surface, Hanako can no longer do anything but watch as she sinks deeper to the bottom.

Nene reaches the sky, he cries and there is a sun, but neither Hanako nor Nene are present.

What I understand is that Hanako made a new attempt to save Nene, but again it doesn't go well, he sees that Nene is in danger and tries to get her out of where she is with him, but she dies anyway, which will be a hard blow for him, that's why he sinks or maybe he sacrificed himself for the good of Nene's soul but that means he will cease to exist.

Another theory I have (that you already know) is that Nene will sacrifice herself for Hanako or to reverse the catastrophe that is happening.

There is a lot of symbolism in the ending, I would like you to give me your vision of what the ending can say :)

In fact there is a video in Spanish explaining certain ending things.

Is called: Teoria sobre la muerte de Yashiro nene, It's on YouTube and it's from the user Me No.

It seems to have a direct relationship with the day of separation.

Right at the beginning we see the sun and moon completing each other, then they are covered by clouds that rain in reverse, yes, the raindrops go up instead of going down. This could mean the return of time, or travel from it.

The near bank and the far bank, they oscillate at certain times, keeping this in mind, let's define that the light part is the near bank, life, and the red part is the far bank, death.

Yashiro is the only one who has a white reflection on the red part, representing that she will die soon. When the banks waver and the light part becomes dark, we see Nene being represented by a fish, showing the bond she created with Hanako and that she becomes a type of supernatural.

Following that, we have the twins part. Both are being represented in life, but for some reason, the margins are backwards, the light part is at the bottom and the red part is at the top. Perhaps this could mean the distant past (a hypothesis)

Or, a situation where both were alive but were already supernatural. The union of the twins results in a kind of large hitodama, as if the four were united, at the same time as two flowers (?) bloom on each side. They are also shaped very similar to a heart, so it is open to interpretation.

The moment this happens, the margins change again. We have the red part and the black part, inverted compared to Nene's.

Perhaps the flowers represent the twins and the hitodama the creature that is linked to them both. Assuming the two come together when the seal is removed, not just Tsukasa's but Hanako's as well, something could happen. And it doesn't look good. Both going in opposite directions.

We see Kou meeting Mitsuba, who after death becomes a camera that follows Kou, it's self-explanatory.

Then, we have Nene crossing to the far bank, where Hanako is.

This is where the key is.

The moment of the kiss

Nene went to the far shore to find Hanako and save Aoi. When the two reunite, they kiss. Just like what happened to them at the end.

Then Nene becomes a fish and Hanako throws her away, then sinks.

At this moment we can see a representation of previous events. There are two birds and two fish, they change positions simultaneously between the banks, which could mean the exchange of Aoi's life for Nene's.

Hanako pushes Yashiro away, throwing her into the clear part, part of life, it could represent the moment in which he saves Nene's life, leaves and closes the gates of the supernatural world.

We see Nene crying in the clouds, far from the banks, the drops fall normally, at the right time.

It suggests that it refers to the moment when Hanako tries to sacrifice Aoi and moves away from Nene, closing all the gates (most) to the distant bank. She cries about being away from him and her friend.

The only thing that is out of order is the kiss, considering that the ending scene is a kiss, if it is a hug, it fits perfectly, as they say goodbye with a hug before Hanako disappears.

If it's a kiss, it could just be the anticipation of the moment of reunion.

The order of events is not precise, so this opens up possibilities for discussions

[amethystina]

"Han fattas mig."

One of the compliments I often get on my writing is just that — my writing. My word choices, my sentence structure, my imagery, my rhythm, my originality, etc. Now, I never thought I'd reach a point where I’d become that good at the craft itself, especially not in a language that's not even my native tongue. Partly because of imposter syndrome but also because I'm usually such a perfectionist that I never thought I’d dare to write something that doesn't strictly and stiltedly follow the rules.

Sentence fragments? Words used in unusual contexts? Odd or highly specific imagery? No can do!

Except, clearly, I can. I should, even.

And I want to share one of the monumental pieces of writing that made me realise that. And it’s not even a whole work. It's just one sentence, really:

"Han fattas mig."

Now, that probably looks a bit weird to those of you who don't understand Swedish, so let me explain.

That's a quote from the children's book Ronja the Robber's Daughter written by the famous Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. It was published back in 1981 and while I didn't actually read the book as a kid, I DID watch the Swedish live-action movie many times. But, even then, it took until my adult years to fully grasp the utter and heart-breaking brilliance of that quote.

For some context, the book/movie is about Ronja who, surprise surprise, is the young daughter of a robber chief. That quote is said by her father, Mattis, when one of the old robbers of their clan suddenly dies. Now, this old robber, Skalle-Per (uh... I guess the translation would be Bald Pete?), is clearly a father figure for Mattis. A wise old man who, while gloriously snarky, is also incredibly nurturing and emotionally mature. Which stands in stark contrast to Mattis who is the somewhat traditionally dominant, macho man. He HAS to be, on account of being the chief for a clan of rough and tough robbers. They, in many ways, complete each other, where Skalle-Per is kind, thoughtful, and sensible while Mattis is brash, violent, and impulsive.

Now, predictably, when Skalle-Per dies, Mattis throws a full-on tantrum. The kind that shows just how inexperienced he is with dealing with emotions without Skalle-Per to help him work through them. And, since the whole problem is that Skalle-Per is now dead? Mattis has absolutely no idea what to do.

He starts pacing back and forth, crying, flailing his arms, and yelling things like: "He's always been here! He's always existed, and now he doesn't!" And no amount of calming words from his wife soothes him and, eventually, he says that line:

"Han fattas mig."

And there is no direct translation I can give you that fully conveys the amount of raw, almost childlike, grief in that one sentence. This sentence was the one that made me realise that following the rules doesn't matter because, strictly speaking, this one doesn't. The words used are unusual to the point where they're even a little odd at first glance but, once you look deeper, also so incredibly impactful.

The rough translation would probably be "I miss him" but, as said, that doesn't convey the sheer desperation that those words do in Swedish. First of all, it throws the words around, completely changing the focus and weight of the sentence. "Han" is "he" and "mig" is "I." So saying "I miss him" reverses the order where the emphasis SHOULD be put on "him" but the main subject of the sentence now becomes "I" (i.e. less about the loss and more about how "I" am feeling). In “Han fattas mig” the “he” is the most important part.

Second, you have the word "fattas" which, yes, directly translated means "missing." But not the kind of missing that we Swedes normally use for grief. We have another word for that called "saknar." If you miss someone who has died, you'd say: "Jag saknar honom." Which is basically the same as the English “I miss him.” The word "fattas" is for a completely different context — a much more mundane one, with almost no emotional stakes. It's what we use when a piece is missing or something is lacking a required component. Kind of like you would say: "This stew is missing something" when it doesn't taste the way you want it to. But it can also mean "lost" as in "there's one puzzle piece missing."

So when Mattis says those words, he doesn't say "I miss him." He's saying: "He is a part of me and he is now missing," and "he is a part of me and I lost him," and "he is a part of me and now there is a hole where he used to be."

He is saying: "I will never be complete again."

Because "fattas" is also the word we use when something is missing and the thing won't be complete until you add it/return it/get it back. And, in this case, since the man in question is dead, you know Mattis will never get that chance. He will never be whole again. Which, sure, is a rather terrifying take on grief, but also not an untrue one. Grief will lessen over time, but the loss will still be there.

And this isn't me doing some sort of complex linguistic analysis — I don't have to. Because it's all there. It's so simple yet so effective. And yet, somehow, no one had really thought to use the word "fattas" to describe grief before. Because it's just a simple and mundane word we use for entirely different things, not big, painful emotions, right? Except Astrid Lindgren did. And while she no doubt did so to make it easier for children to grasp the concept — since most kids can relate to the feeling of losing something in the context of "fattas," which is much more direct and real than the elusive emotion of "saknar" — it also changes how an adult can view grief and loss.

Not even "I lost him" can fully encompass the absolute BRUTALITY of the grief found in the sentence "Han fattas mig."

And that is why I give fewer and fewer fucks about the rules. Now, obviously, I doubt I'll ever come up with something as brilliant as this sentence (it honestly rocks me to my core sometimes) BUT it's worth trying. It's worth being creative and experiment with the words you know and in what order you place them. Just maybe, you'll end up with something really cool. That's not to say you should ignore any and all rules, but it's okay to play around. It's okay to do the unexpected.

I think it's important to remember that. Writing is creative. We write to express things — to find ways to describe and explain complex emotions, grand adventures, and sweeping love stories. It connect us and gives us a way to share our experiences, thoughts, and feelings. And, sometimes, the set boundaries won't be enough. Sometimes, we might just need someone to look at how we describe grief and go: "I can make it simpler and, at the same time, so much more painful."

And it doesn't always have to be complex. It doesn't have to be difficult words and purple prose. Sometimes, all you need is three words so easy that a child can understand them and, somehow, you will describe a sense of loss so deep and so fundamental to that character that you KNOW that they will never be the same ever again.

So experiment. Be bold. And, above all else, have fun.

And, one final heart-wrenching fact to wrap this all up: The actor who played Skalle-Per — Allan Edwall — was in almost ALL of the movies/shows based on Astrid Lindgren's books. He played different roles, of course, but he was a staple — synonymous with her works. And, when the actor died back in 1997, Astrid Lindgren was asked how she was handling the loss and her reply was the same as Mattis’s:

"Han fattas mig."

[jalicefanficblog]

I don’t remember if this was already a real episode or not

But can you write a Kim Possible story where Kim somehow gets Shego’s powers?

A/N: Kim learns that walking in other peoples Shoes or dealing with their Powers is kind of more tricky than it looks at first.

Caution: Hot and risk of burns

"WOAH KP…..what happened?"

Ron had read the text message and had taken the fastest route to his very best friend Kim Possible's house…on his bike…his scooter was broken and he still has to save up the money he earned…so he has to use the bike now.

"What does it look like?"

"Um….your curtain to the window looks….slightly burnt and….you hate panicking like crazy?"

"Wow, I would never have thought of that"

"Did the twins try to blow something up again?"

"Like your Barbie car for your 10th birthday?"

"Don't remind me"

"What happened KP?"

"You remember the last mission?"

"You mean the airplane adventure…the bouncy castle and the climbing ropes?"

Kim nodded and Ron remembered…it had only been yesterday evening and it had been pretty chaotic…but the duo had won, as always, against the evil of the world…in this case the battle against Shego and Dr. Drakken.

But why was Ron standing in his best friend's room that afternoon and looking at the burnt curtains on the window…thick, round burn marks adorned the otherwise beautiful girl's colors…was KP having his one week of the month again…or was she heartbroken?

"You know that strange device that Drakken used just before the climbing ropes were put in and the bouncy castle exploded…it sparkled so strangely and Shego complained of headaches?"

"Yeeeeees…"

"Look at that, Ron!"

It took a moment before Kim could demonstrate to him exactly what she meant.

Ron was amazed when Kim's hands glowed the same green as Shego's.

Kim had Shego's ability… because of Dr. Drakken's weird device… how crazy!

"Heyyyy do you know what that means?"

"I have even more problems with outbursts of anger…I think it's somehow connected to Shego's powers…they seem to be linked to emotions….."

"What? No, that's so cool! You need a new slogan - Kim Possible the Teen Heroine - now with a super power upgrade!"

Kim laughed for a moment.

"Okay…if Shego can handle it, it won't be that difficult, right?"

Kim quickly learned that it was wrong and that with supernatural power comes a lot of responsibility…and a lot of problems.

The teen heroine who can do anything…had problems getting used to this new thing. And there were many situations in which Kim…with the ability to destroy things…with the plasma green beam.

Her favorite mirror that she uses when putting on makeup was destroyed, as was one of the tops that she has taken to her heart… and she almost burned her bangs… and damn, cheerleading training was a challenge.

A week with the ability had been so demanding… it had advantages but it was also complicated to master… Kim was glad that she no longer had to feel the hot green plasma around both of her hands with every emotional turn.

"I was able to contact a scientist who can reverse the effect using a device that exists…" - Wade sipped his soft drink and tapped his keyboard on the computer to give Kim the adult's address.

"No more burned clothes," said Kim with a mixture of sarcasm and relief.

"Oh come on, as if you weren't happy that Bonnie runs away every time you act like an aggressive Shego… she's totally panicking"

Now it was Kim who laughed amusedly… oh yes, that was definitely the advantage.

"You can look at it that way…"

"Oh KP… I have the best idea, before we leave and you soon have to live without Shego's powers… wait, I'll be right back!"

It took less than three minutes until Ron came back with a pack of chocolate cookies and marshmallows and rustled the two bags demonstratively and euphorically.

"S'Mores?"

Kim nodded in agreement and let her right hand glow, which soon sparkled in the green-black plasma.

"S'Mores!"

THE END

[khajiit-reads]

I’d happily return your reading in kind. Alex, she/her, general and whatever the spirits say. No preference on anything else.

Well met, internet traveler!

Today, there's no spirit guide present, and the deck is Bellamy (they/she/he), the Magickal Botanical Oracle by Maxine Miller and Christopher Penczak.

Each card is speaking on its lonesome about something different today, so I'm going to go over each one individually and elaborate as much as I can about it.

Hellebore Upright speaks mostly about alone time and needing to defend our boundaries related to it. We needn't constantly concern ourselves with others and what they're up to, because we can rest easy alone from time to time. Alone time is also important for mental wellbeing, for it provides time to consider what's going on, to think, to rest, and to decompress.

You need to spend some time sitting back and relaxing. Work is good for the mind, yes, nobody can be fully fulfilled without some level of working, be it for a hobby or a job or whatever. But at the same time, we must rest as people. And now, it's your time to rest. If you feel you've already been resting, then ask yourself, "What is stopping me from fully relaxing? What am I thinking about when I am relaxing?" and debate if your rest is truly restful to you, or if you're just going through the motions of rest while gaining nothing for it.

Ivy Reversed asks if you feel uprooted and ungrounded? It's time to re-root yourself back into the earth and ground yourself back in. This can be both in the sense of "figure out what you want", as well as the sense of "be grounded into reality".

Tackle why you feel uprooted and ungrounded. Is something going wrong in your life that you feel you can't control? Did something big and major change for you? Or is something else entirely the source of the problem?

You need to know your end goal. It doesn't have to be absolute, all things change with time, so your end goal too shall. But just pick something to pursue right now and begin making those steps to do so.

As well, the act of being grounded in reality is spoken more in the sense of being aware of what's happening and how things are working. It's not saying anything like abandon the mystical, because that is reality too (bares saying), but rather maybe to use the mystical to help gain an awareness of your reality and what all is occurring for you.

Wolfsbane Reversed brings light to fear and anxieties. What scares you, right now? Wolfsbane asks us specifically for the things scaring you right in the moment and that you cannot flee from. How can you deal with it and move forward?

Fear is normal and fear is justified. But fear must also be dealt with. Sit with your fear for a while, ask it why it exists and why it yells so loudly in your ear. Try to work alongside it, instead of against it, to help create a safer feeling future together.

And that's that! I wish you the best of luck with all of this, thank you for coming by, and feel free to stop by again soon!

As for the reading in return you offered, I'll be happy to take it, let me know in replies/reblog/whatever where you'd like me to ask for it, like... your ask box or DMs or where-have-you!

Thank you so much for your patience with me performing this reading.

Reviews are helpful, but optional. You can send them in replies, my ask box, or reblogging this post. Feel free to reblog this post with your thoughts in general, or without a review! You can also reblog my guidelines post if you like. If you feel particularly satisfied with my work, you may leave a tip in my Ko-fi. No pressure for any of this!

Please do not reblog this post if you are not the querent. If you want something to reblog, please reblog my guidelines post. If there's something within the post you want, you may ask, and depending on the request, I might fulfill it! Thank you!

I hope you, and all readers, have a wonderful day!

[fanboyvini]

i'm seeing a lot of posts about how huntlow is heteronormative or not canon, so here are my thoughts

First of all, "Heteronormativity is what makes heterosexuality seem coherent, natural and privileged. It involves the assumption that everyone is 'naturally' heterosexual, and that heterosexuality is an ideal, superior to lgbt."

A f/m couple is not heteronormative, it is something normal and will always exist as well as queer couples

"But it makes it seem like girls and boys can't be friends!"

Gus is friends with Willow, Amity and Luz. Hunter is friends with Luz and Amity

Luz and Amity being queer and being in a queer relationship is not like they are an exception for being queer, but exactly one of the reasons why the show (and huntlow) is not heteronormative, by using the right definition of the word

"They don't blush anymore"

Nor Raeda and Lumity. It's what happens in real life too, when we're in a long term relationship we don't end up blushing as much as we did at the beginning.

"But they didn't even kiss on the cheek!"

Well yes, but why can a romantic relationship only be confirmed canon if there's a kiss?

I honestly liked Dana's choice, and that's what happened with Shera 2018 season finale as well. In many media, queer characters are implicitly confirmed, but we all know they are queer canon. While non-queer characters and couples are explicitly confirmed.

Dana (and ND) simply reversed the roles by making f/m couples non-explicitly confirmed while queer couples are explicitly confirmed. This is brilliant!

"Willow becomes a damsel in distress who needs a guy's help!"

I'm going to have to stop you right here.

Willow's character arc is that she saw herself as weak and managed to get stronger physically and emotionally as time went on. On the one hand this is great, but as time went on Willow was no longer allowing herself to show "weakness" and talk about her feelings, because she didn't want to go back to being weak.

This also kinda happens with Hunter, the fear of being vulnerable.

Hell, this even happens to Amity in season one and even halfway through season two! (off topic i also want to make a post on amity about this later)

Being vulnerable with people who love you and not having that need to be strong all the time is not a bad thing! It's totally healthy!

And many times Hunter protects Willow, Willow protects him in others scenes too! (i can make a post about this scenes later too)

"Huntlow says that only romantic love heals!"

Eh... no? Hunter has several key moments with Luz and Gus (I think he would even have more with Amity and even Vee if the show wasn't cancelled).

Just rewatch Eclipse Lake (Amity tries to help Hunter), Hollow Mind (Luz and Eda tries to help Hunter), Labyrinth Runners (Gus helps Hunter with an anxiety breathing technique, and then Hunter helps Gus later in the ep), Thanks to them (Luz helps Hunter and then says he's family too) and For the Future (Gus and Willow talk about Flapjack and that they don't care if Hunter is a grimwalker, and then while Willow vents, Gus is there helping her too!!)

And what about Lumity and Raeda? Did the characters' problems go away when they got into a relationship and does the romantic love heal everything? of course not! the same goes for Huntlow

You're forgetting (or ignoring) the canon, and all the character development and their relationships

Just because the characters are in a romantic relationship doesn't mean they're implying that a romantic relationship is the only kind of relationship that matters or anything like that