#a muse in her feelings

[chloesimaginationthings]

I know Vanessa regret saying this in the FNAF movie,,

[protect-namine]

this post is about qiao ling. but first, I want to talk about the power rangers of this show.

so. I'm really glad YE2 is putting the triple star warrior mirroring in a more interesting context

because that's clearly the intent and it's not like it doesn't make sense back in S1, but the actual execution of that mirroring seemed shallow at best with just S1 knowledge

(look! qiao ling even bought cake of them in the S2 finale)

I think it's because I couldn't quite place qiao ling's role in this until now. she's the star of wisdom, but she's the one who is the most out of the loop and lacking in knowledge... or so we thought. but with the S2 ending giving her tianxi's ability, and YE2 showing that it's a pattern for her to keep relevant information, then yeah, it's starting to make sense. the triple star warriors really are their character arcs.

star of justice, bringing hope (cheng xiaoshi's kindness being both a strength and a weakness that can either uplift or endanger other people; "even if you don't see hope, it doesn't mean it's not there")

star of courage, conquering fear (lu guang timelooping himself is the most extreme response to fear he has over cheng xiaoshi's death)

star of wisdom, serving knowledge (qiao ling and the burden of knowledge that she keeps from people out of guilt or protection)

and they really do need to overcome all of that to get the good ending.

anyway, I just think it's neat. I thought the triple star warriors mirroring was cute back in S1, but now I love it even more knowing qiao ling's place in all of this. I actually love this trait about her. she is always taking care of other people and has "big sister" vibes. she's the one who actually goes out of her way to find clients for shiguang to help and hearing their clients' troubles, even when she had no idea how their abilities worked. she's the one who truly connected with tianxi and knew how to communicate with her — even better than cheng xiaoshi could, and cheng xiaoshi was the one who actually got to live as tianxi.

it's in her nature to care for others, but it's also her biggest flaw. much like lu guang, in her desire to keep cheng xiaoshi safe in her own way, she hides relevant information from him. and the act of secret keeping causes her to keep doing it out of guilt too — as we've seen in the doudou case. it's a very human trait to have.

it puts the earthquake arc in a new context. a young cheng xiaoshi went to qiao ling, distraught over the possibility that maybe his parents died in the earthquake. young qiao ling, wanting to comfort cheng xiaoshi but also knowing that her parents were advised that it's safer for cheng xiaoshi to not go to bridon, tells him that his parents are probably somewhere "far away" and wasn't caught in the earthquake. this isn't just words for the sake of comfort. she has reason to believe this is actually true.

she's in a tough spot when S3 rolls around, because she should, by then, know about cheng xiaoshi's death, if not possibly everything that happened in bridon (through tianxi's power/memory transfer). unlike lu guang, who is dead set on timelooping himself as a way to fix things, qiao ling is in a precarious spot.

should she honor aunt shao's wish and keep cheng xiaoshi safe, which she also wants? or should she tell cheng xiaoshi information he rightfully should know, thereby allowing him to exercise full agency over his own future, even if that future has the risk of death? and whatever she chooses will affect lu guang too. what is the wise thing to do here?

on that note, others have pointed out how this recontextualizes S1E1 cheng xiaoshi talking about his parents. looking back, it's insane to me that S1E1's opening scene (not the dive rules, the one after the op plays) has cheng xiaoshi saying, "I won't go anywhere until my parents come back. if you drive me away, I'll hang myself here! then your father will never get a new tenant."

(it's looking like whatever he learns in bridon won't carry over to the cheng xiaoshi of S1, but I digress)

he says this, and both lu guang and qiao ling are sitting there calling him a childish idiot, all the while harboring knowledge about his parents that cheng xiaoshi doesn't have. (lu guang also has the extra knowledge of cheng xiaoshi's death and what happened in bridon at this point probably, but this post is not about lu guang)

like... in S1 this could just be seen as a little "haha okay so this is exposition and this is their dynamic" scene but now... man. qiao ling knew all this time, in this scene, where his parents might be. she knew during the earthquake. she knew while they were renovating the shop.

I understand the reasons behind it, and in her eyes it probably was the wise thing to do. but when S3 comes around, should she still keep hiding it, like she did with the doudou case? when she confronts lu guang about his memories, what will she do?

I have hope that she'll bridge the two boys together. we saw how her strength has always been communication and delivering words. she is the person the clients look to. she is the person that gained tianxi's trust and knew how to meet her where she's at. she is the person who knows cheng xiaoshi and lu guang best.

here's hoping that she can overcome her guilt and desire to protect cheng xiaoshi from himself, and become the star of wisdom the show wants her to be

[taffywabbit]

a cover of "Panic Station" by Muse, ideally suited for chases through futuristic train platforms full of loop-de-loops and hostile robots!

usually I have a really hard time doing arrangements of existing songs, but I felt unusually motivated to tackle this one and managed to see it thought to completion! (took me a while because I kept spending too much time jamming out to what I already had done instead of working on the next parts lol)

♫ made with OpenMPT! ✎ cover art by me! ► SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/taffywabbit/turmoil-terminus-zone ★ original song (for comparison): https://youtu.be/vk24UKKI4yY?si=RdQkA4BAHoRX1d7P

and here's the full-size cover art, while i'm at it!

[skrrtscree]

the ghost of you 🤍🪻

[ghost-bxrd]

Y’know sometimes I’ll get a painful/rude comment on a fic and it makes me sad for all of two minutes until I make myself look at all the positive feedback and remember that there’s equally, if not more, people who enjoyed reading it 💚💚💚💚

[yoohyeon]

Gyeongree’s First EP ‘Eternal bloom’ Concept photos 1&2 + Track list

2024.08.21 - Do not repost

[cripplepunkbarbarian]

I am so glad that the kid spectrals have such normal and caring spirits who will definitely not physically endanger and/or cruelly betray them in the midst of their lives already being destroyed by cults, monsters, and interpersonal drama. It’s so cool and nice 👍

[berrihyo]

youre worth more than what you give btw

[expectiations]

The Husbands of River Song is not and has never been about the Eleventh Doctor being a deadbeat, distant husband (gross mischaracterization by the way) and the Twelfth Doctor being the "better, more mature, affectionate" husband.

It was about River Song. It was about River and how the events in Manhattan took such a toll on her. It was about letting us see River dealing with grief the way The Snowmen showed us how the Doctor coped after losing believing he had used up all his time with River.

Looking at THORS now with The Ruby's Curse in mind, I get the instinct (for lack of a word that I cannot remember) that the Manhattan incident Blue Roach read from River's diary was not the Manhattan episode that we saw in series 7.

On that note, I'd also like to bring up the fact that the Doctor grounds River and River grounds the Doctor. As Tree talked about in one of her tags, River's empathy is more cognitive than emotional and after musing on it for a bit – considering that the Doctor can no longer go to Manhattan (which may have changed in later series but I wouldn't know at the moment because I have yet to overcome series 7b) and that River does spend time with her parents in Manhattan post-TATM, would the latest Manhattan incident in River's diary be the funeral for Amy? Amy's death? Perhaps even Anthony's? I mean, we already know Rory died five years earlier than Amy. So, knowing how deep River's love for her mother is, it's not too farfetched to say that River spent that time with them. River was by their bedsides as they drew their last breath.

Then Rory's gone, Amy's gone, Anthony's gone. Where does that leave River? Where is the Doctor? (sulking on a cloud on top of Victorian London? trying to figure out the mystery of his newest companion? all while constantly mentioning a certain Professor Song who actually turns out to be his dearly sort of departed absolutely beloved wife?)

Without her parents (and her husband) to ground her, she goes on this maddened, grieving space Robin Hood spree. She seeks fun to fill in the void and takes up marriage as a hobby/side quest. Does she look for the Doctor? Perhaps. Yes, actually. Considering she crashed her latest sort-of-husband's ship onto a planet where she purported the TARDIS to be.

But... she's stealing the TARDIS. She could have just called the Doctor, yeah? So, she doesn't want the Doctor to know then. Well... yeah, considering she has two sort-of-husbands in hand.

So, River would just have gone on from one space Robin Hood spree to the next had the TARDIS not sort-of-stranded herself on Mendorax Dellora to make sure her Water stopped being stubborn and reconcile(?) with her Thief?

Also taking note of how River has read stories about them and knows that Darillium is purported to be their last night together (I could also bring up the fact that this is why I find it easy to digest the "River meeting regenerations of the Doctor younger than the Tenth Doctor makes sense and doesn't break cannon nor ruin SITL/FOTD" but that would take a whole other post). Does this River believe her time with the Eleventh Doctor has ended? The same way series 7b Eleven believed his time with older versions of River has ended? Is this all part of some grand fuckup in communication all thanks to their tangled timelines?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But has River not just been running from her family's death? Has River been running from her supposed last night with the Doctor?

"But River doesn't run." Oh yes. Yes, she does. She knows when to stand her ground. She knows when to charge. And she knows when to run.

"That's out of character for her." No, it's not. She's not invincible. She's this well trained assassin, yes. But invincible? No.

Invincible from the tendency to be blinded by their emotions? Obviously not.

River lies. And River runs.

She is not afraid of her death. She is afraid of the day when her husband, her Doctor, looks into her eyes and looks right through her. And it shouldn't kill her but it does. It did.

So she ran and ran until her bigger-on-the-inside Mum gently reached out and put her back together with the only person left who could ground her. Who she didn't recognize at first but still fell in love with (and would have loved even if he hadn't been revealed to be her actual, long missing husband). Who finally found out their last night wasn't just any night – it was a twenty-four year long last night. Who finally gave her a breather from all the running she'd been doing.

And oh what a night that was (it was the talk of the universe).

[blood-starved-beast]

Not dissing on anyone in particular but it's interesting to see people trying to retroactively justify or otherwise "call out" on the fact that Melinoe has no connection to her birth family. It's the Point I'd say. And thematically, she's likely never coming "home" for real. Cause it was never home. Can no longer be home and all.

[ossifer]

wrt baru my hottest take is that i do not personally read her as being low empathy and instead interpret her tendency to model other people + herself as rational actors & pragmatism throughout the traitor as stemming from her scholarship courtesy of falcrest & farrier, and how her earliest motivation is to 'outlaw the deaths of fathers' and rewrite the doctrines. a key part of the traitor is that she abstracts the people of aurdwynn prior to her various encounters with tain hu and treats the province with an only-partially affected level of emotional indifference, and to me this reflects how her focus begins and ends with taranoke initially: the subversion of the masquerade is an incidental detail to her infiltrating them; the horror of the policies she hasn't witnessed, the subjugation of the people she holds no loyalties to, elude her nascent perspective and thus she is unbeholden to them for a while (“I am an accountant. Heredity is not my concern”)

this is all to say that i do not think her obstensive low empathy is a matter of any particular tendencies but rather a byproduct of the fact she has unwittingly adopted the attitudes of an imperial technocrat in a foreign land, albeit with an added detached disdain due to her disquiet with falcrest: she internally characterises herself as seeking to rewrite its doctrines, loosen its hold on taranoke, but not to abolish it & this means that she—in her privileged position within aurdwynn—is content to let the specificities of it fall to her blind side. her gaze remains turned to taranoke and thus she is able to treat aurdwynn as an abstracted dilemma, its people as either unagentive or as following a linear path in pursuit of their goals; baru has fallen prey to thinking herself as an accountant, adopts falcresti modes of thinking so long as they suit her goals, and walks the path of complicity.

this changes over time, of course, and as time goes on we see these patterns of thinking break down as she draws parallels between aurdwynn and taranoke, as she rebels and cannot continue benefitting from the comforts of her imperial office, as she strays from accountant to revolutionary. she fulfills the role of traitor but it comes at a great personal cost that weighs on her: she trades the dukes as currency, buys her ascension, but she accrues an emotional debt that while not in of itself incompatible with her having low empathy does involve a large degree of guilt that i personally think showcases how imperial thought & farrier's process both rely on momentum. baru was conditioned to repress herself and to act with decision & directness because those are the conditions integral to maintaining her detachment: when she loses momentum, collides with tain hu, it comes undone.

what i find fascinating about her perspective is that while she has a vested interest in falcrest's demise, the process of arriving at that as the logical conclusion is one that takes time and requires her to see her illusions of its merits shattered: despite understanding it as an oppressor, she initially conceptualises its power as a neutral thing, something to be coveted and stolen away from it, rather than existing due to its exploitative nature. but that flawed conceptualisation stems from a partial perspective that is informed heavily by the education she received. i do not think that baru's perspective is a 1:1 with that of a citizen within the imperial core by any means but i do think she is a poignant illustration of how one's thought is inevitably informed by the predominant hegemony & the means by which imperialism indoctrinates: falcrest extensively employs various forms of social coercion rather than open force and baru's obstensive low empathy is to me a key illustration of that in practice

i personally think that baru has an excess of empathy, enough that it proves narratively significant at several points, but the reason it comes across as low is because her perspective is one that was engineered to suppress it. the farrier process is a more overt and expedited way to convey what happens when your perspective is informed by the thought of those who live comfortably off the dividends of the very same systems of oppression that leave you subjugated, when the culture you were raised in is primitivised and you are taught imperial sciences that allow you to abstract the fact of your neighbours dying of plagues introduced by the arrival of your coloniser.

“I’m not doing this,” Shir said, with terrible distance. “You are. You set the terms. This is your choice, it is the shape of you, to spend people for power.”

[ramblingsfromthytruly]

actually fully got through preacher's daughter (including reading the lyrics + genius annotations, replaying each song multiple times, hthaze reaction vid for cathartic purposes) and just ... wow

[protect-namine]

thinking out loud. idk if this was ever confirmed in canon or not. but does liu xiao know about li tianxi's (now qiao ling's) ability?

I assume he knows about li tianchen's possession ability. but how much did li tianchen tell him? would he have told liu xiao everything, or would he hide li tianxi's involvement?

like, let's do a quick check. who actually knows about li tianxi's ability before S2? qian jin and li tianchen both knew about it. did liu min know? I don't think li tianxi joined any of the meetings with liu min iirc, so maybe li tianchen never told liu min (and why would he, anyway? all liu min needed was someone to do the work for him, and for all he knows, li tianchen is enough to do it). so maybe liu min doesn't know.

more importantly, does liu xiao know? would li tianchen tell him, pre or post S2? or is this something liu xiao just kinda figures out on his own?

'cause I'm thinking about if he knew li tianxi's ability... would yingdu even happen? li tianxi's ability is probably the most useful to liu xiao while he's in his "getting the necessary items" phase right? (his goal each season was to possess a key item like liu min's phone and cheng weimin's notebook). guess it depends on how easy it would be to get a good photograph though. 'cause for yingdu, for example, it's either they bait cheng xiaoshi to bridon, or they find a photograph and then get li tianxi to use her ability to search wang qing's memories so they can figure out where the notebook is. I guess that still requires them learning about who survived the fire (learning about wang qing), which is the info that cheng xiaoshi unknowingly uncovered for them.

of course the simplest answer would be that, "not using li tianxi makes for a more interesting story" which is real and valid.

but if we're just looking at the story from a watsonian perspective, I feel like a lot of liu xiao's plots would just be less messy if he had roped li tianxi into his plans (which involves a lot of information gathering). so since he never uses li tianxi, I'm assuming he doesn't know about her ability. which has interesting implications imo. because if liu xiao knew about li tianxi's ability, would he have let such a valuable chess piece die in the first place? (perhaps not "let die" but more of... "ensured her safety" -- which is also a viable method for gaining li tianchen's trust). but he must not have known, because if he did, then is li tianxi's death (and the perceived loss of her ability) a valuable enough trade in his eyes to ensure li tianchen's descent in darkness ("those lost in the darkness are my friends") and subsequent loyalty to liu xiao?

moreover, if liu xiao never knew, what does that say about li tianchen? like I think li tianchen would have told liu xiao about his possession ability. but although he clearly idolizes liu xiao, perhaps he still prioritized li tianxi's safety over him. because it would still be safer for li tianxi if nobody knew what she could do. but at the same time, do you think li tianchen would have trusted liu xiao that he'd tell him?

like I guess I'm just wondering what liu xiao ever thought of or knew about li tianxi, since he seems to have always targeted li tianchen, but li tianchen is way more "useful" when he can link his ability with his sister, you know?

[avichor]

many thoughts about vampires and how consuming their media with a strict, humanistic moral lens defeats the purpose

[emmm-uhhh]

Had to get a sketch out of my system, it’s been a while since I’ve drawn, boohoo adult responsibilities

I think this is a sign I need to rewatch my favorite romance anime of all time (it is, I made the sign for myself)

[presiding]

dishonored 2 rewrite: the monster in the hull updated this week 🍷