#about the nothingness

[sorryiliketoscreenshot]

Mission Successful

[two-longing-loves]

i want the twins to be friends. i want them to be able to sit next to each other in comfortable silence in the dining hall. i want aaron to go grocery shopping and andrew to tag along. i want them to play games together where andrew keeps winning. i want andrew to quiz aaron. i want them to joke around. i want them to pull identical twin pranks. i want aaron to look after the cats when neil and andrew are not home for a while. i want them to feel like family, not just a legal obligation.

[shrimpchipsss]

read Living With a Tiger by x_los !

[ptvstvrrr]

This is genuinely probably the craziest and dirtiest edit I've made

[kismetconstellations]

"Please! We come from a peaceful planet! We mean you no harm. We're unarmed!"

[beastking-golion]

Who give af if the writers didn’t “confirm” jayvik, girl have you people ever shipped shit before? You gotta do the legwork yourself, being confirmed doesn’t matter. You weaken yourself on such pointless principles.

[carniistir]

finished that nicki sketch instead of working on my thesis. i have so many normal and well adjusted feelings about him.

[thebitchesterbrothers]

I thought a lot about Hob meeting Death for the first time and of course they’re hitting it off straight away … but what if instead of Dream it’s Hob who accompanies Death while she’s working? Just because he’s a curious brother-in-law and none of the Endless can say no to his pleading cow eyes.

He witnesses how calm and peaceful it can be to leave the living world behind with someone as gentle as Dreams sister to guide someone’s soul.

It scares Dream; what if Hob decides he wants to end his life after all?

But in reality it heals a part of Hob that he never was able to piece back together before.

Eleanor. Robyn. The baby that never got the chance to take its first breath. His memories are still painful, still make him tear up.

But seeing Death do her job makes him feel … grateful. Knowing that she was with them at the end of their days, smiling at them, taking their hands, holding them in her arms.

It also makes him appreciate life even more and he promises to enjoy every single day as much as humanly possible.

[cowlvent]

clara reaching back into the unknown darkness for several long, agonizing seconds "i'm right please god say i'm right" AND THEN SHE IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the core of their relationship plays out right there: clara can and will defy death, and the doctor will always save clara, even when it seems impossible. (and it's crucial that this is the first really doctor-y moment he has as twelve.) the growth and distortion of these fundamental beliefs drive the two of them to their eventual end.

[redladydeath]

I've seen a couple posts now talking about the concept of an AU where Vox somehow gains control over Alastor's soul/contract. While I do agree with the common take that he'd probably try to mind control Alastor or break his spirit at first, I think he'd actually get bored of that pretty quickly. Alastor's appeal is all in his personality; putting him in a situation where he just shuts down and stops giving the reactions that make him who he is would lose its novelty for Vox within a month or two.

Imo, from there I see it turning into a "gilded cage" situation. Vox sets up a nice little club for Alastor to live in; it's classy and Alastor is free to do what he pleases with it, but he cannot leave and whatever Vox says goes. It's a kind of faux freedom that's just tolerable enough for him not to go insane, but just restrictive enough that he still feels like some kind of pet. Vox isn't physically around that often, but he's always watching; Alastor's free to make his own choices, but can only chose from a small, pre-approved set of options. It's actually not too dissimilar to the situation he put his own contractees in, and Alastor loathes that fact.

[sincerely-sofie]

You're scared you'll never care about someone. You're scared you never have. You don't know how much love is held in your chest. You never will.

[skinnypaleangryperson]

God, quirky and autistic people are so much more interesting if not off-putting than the neurotypicals that run America. Too bad that we're told in all kinds of ways that 99% of the time our personalities and our complexity and fascinations and projects don't matter, just because we're not singing the most bland love songs you ever heard like all the pop stars neurotypical waste their lives pretending are worth a damn.

[sleep-nurse]

[yellowocaballero]

So fucking glad to see someone talk about SSS Class revival hunter 😭 I lived it so much and I feel like no one ever mentions it against more popular titles like ORV or even The Lout of the counts family, so I'm so glad to come here and see your amazing takes :>

Thank you for the ask which lets me talk about SSSCRH (the version I read was titled 'Suicide Hunter', which tbh I like more - no beating around the bush).

It's hard to draw an accurate comparison since I'm going off just the webtoon for SSSCRH, while I'm going off both the webtoon and the webnovel for ORV. And I love ORV, ORV is my media blorbo right now, it hydraulic presses my brain, I am writing ORV fanfic - it's, like, funner to enjoy. But SSSRH is just better. In the vast majority of ways it is is better. It's better than the holy trinity by a wide margin. TW talk of suicide obviously.

I can't believe I'm saying this but you need a basic understanding of Buddhism in order to understand SSSCRH. It's not about Gongja's suicides - he doesn't suicide from depression or lack of self-esteem. SSSCRH is about suffering in the Buddhist sense - dukkha. I don't want to make this an essay, so I might reblog this with more information, but extremely shortly:

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. You've heard that Buddhists say 'life is suffering'. To put it one way that doesn't require defining a lot of words: the cause of suffering is experiencing the world as we percieve it instead of how it truly is. Suffering isn't just being miserable and in pain, and life isn't suffering because life sucks and global warming exists and people voted for Trump. Life is suffering because we can experience beautiful and joyful moments in this world, but we do not exist in the moment of that happiness or place our ego/'self' between us and that happiness. Living in that moment, accepting the moment as it is unconditionally, is freedom from suffering. The Buddha tries to free people from suffering through teaching Buddhism.

"What does this have to do with the webnovel and manwha about a guy murdering himself thousands of times" it has everything to do with it. Because SSSCRH is about suffering, and it is about using suffering as a tool in order to experience a world unfiltered by ego and break down the artificial boundaries between human beings. Suffering in SSSCRH is not a bad thing. Gongja has the unique capability to (reincarnate.) experience a person's suffering in unity with them, which dissolves the delusion of separation between people and puts us in touch with the reality of oneness.

The Murim arc was fucking insane because Gongja pulls a Big Bodhisattva Move and walks through the suffering of the world in order to achieve full understanding of the human experience. He takes all of the suffering of the world into himself and is liberated. You can tell it's Buddhist because death was not presented as a bad thing - death was an aspect of a happy ending for the Heavenly Demon lady, because she was finishing her life according to her own joy, and because her teachings were passed on she did not truly die.

But the purpose of embracing suffering is to discover the ability to fully embrace life, and that's where Heavenly Demon's teachings were incomplete - as the ghost dude said, Gongja hasn't even experienced his own full life and the infinite capability for his own happiness. You can only feel the depths of sadness when you've felt the depths of happiness. Sadness deserves its place in the world and it can strengthen you, but so does happiness.

Gongja is attention-seeking, envious, and unbelievably petty. When he drills down into his own desires and why he wants the things he wants, you see that he has a very strong sense of justice and right and wrong - he realizes he doesn't want to be famous, he wants to be acknowledged, but on an even deeper level he is desperate for love and to be loved. Everything he does is to experience love, and as such he learns to love others. His love for the Flamey Asshole was purely parasocial and ego-filled, with no concern for who he was as a human. Throughout the manwha, he grows to care for people as they truly are and pierce through any delusions or misleading outward appearances. He has released all attachment to life and death, and as such does not fear death, and as such has taken a step on the road towards becoming a Boddhisatva who frees others from the cycle of samsara, and as a result has learned sick sword techniques and is sooo good at beating people up.

I think the only other thing I want to mention here because otherwise this is an essay: in almost every time loop/regression story, only the final regression matters. In stories with dungeon monsters and NPCs, only the humans matter. The regressor exists in a space where there are no consequences for their actions, so they act terribly and do whatever because none of it matters. In Groundhog Day Bill Murray acts like an asshole because he can. That's not the case here. Everything Gongja does matters. The NPCs are fake, but Gongja never treats them as anything less than real people who deserve life. Once he understands a person's life he never treats them as unimportant. No loop is thrown away and no person or life is disregarded. His choices matter, the way he treats others matters, and Gongja never treats anybody as if they don't matter except for himself.

That was not short. There is a lot more. The female characters are so good and so rich. From a craft perspective it is excellently paced and has a wonderful sense of set-up/payoff and balances tone and maintains a lot of momentum, which is really hard in a time loop story. You have to do a few very specific things to write OP characters well and SSSCRH does it very well. There's more to say from a craft perspective and it's hard to judge accurately from a webtoon but it's good. I was so strangely struck the entire time about how sincere and genuine it was, how it said what it said with no trace of irony of confusion, and I think that's what stuck with me the most.

TL;DR: SSS Class Revival Hunter is good for a lot of very normal reasons, such as excellent pacing and set-up/pay off and characters, but it's also so sincerely and genuinely Buddhist that it blew my tits clean off.

[kismetconstellations]

♡ ♡ ♡ for @sockdooe

[angrybatart]

Fear & Hunger comic Part 2/?

Still working on this! Nas'hrah's a pain in the ass to draw. 😑 But interesting! I'll try to draw MORE if the characters in the next panel. I'm just feeling a little lazy at the moment.

Ragnvaldr asking all of the important questions.