#absolute fire no notes

[desceros]

ESSAY TIME

Disclaimer: I am ignoring the original context of the song to reshape these lyrics for this AU lmao sorry 

Disclaimer again: I may have missed posts or just have incorrect views on the boys and their relationships with lamb-chan and with each other! If I get anything wrong I apologize! I am just a silly goose! 

Lyrics will be in italics, my thoughts in bold, I did not include the repeats of the chorus and such :)

-

One, two, three, one, two, three

One, two, three, one, two, three

One, two, three

[Not deep at all, but I like this opening because there are three of you. This is the basis of the entire AU, that both of them have to share you, they have to put up with each other if they want you. It’s not “just the two of us,” it is inherently three, and this repetition here of the one, two, three is reminiscent of that, and I love it.]

You know that he trusts you and I know that he loves you

But somehow you convinced me again

[These lyrics are SO Leo to me. Like, Leo knows you have this intense relationship with Donnie, that you and Donnie are so intertwined, Donnie trusts and cares for you so much, and Leo doesn’t know if you really see that Donnie is in love with you, but Leo does. Leo sees it. And he’s very possessive and he’s such a little shit about his time with you, but I can’t help feeling that a part of him would wonder why you would want him (Leo) when you have this other person (Donnie) who is so clearly and wholly devoted to you, but you keep coming back, you keep seeking Leo out, and you have somehow convinced him that… maybe he can have love and devotion and softness and openness, too.]

My foundation rumbles and all my morals crumble

[This lyric fits both boys. For Leo, he has built a certain way of living, a certain persona, a certain set of “morals” as a person. For Donnie, he has created this idea in his mind of how life is going to be. And now, they’re both suddenly… unsure about those respective things. Like, here you come, and now everything that was once so clear and true and obvious is just. Not.]

My father's warnings run through my head (one, two, three)

[I haven’t seen any posts about the boys’ interactions with Splinter so I’m not going to really say much except I’m sure that Splinter would have something to say about the whole situation (and again we’ve got the repetition of one two three that calls back to the nature of the relationship)]

Your heart's a vine that I've bled trying to climb

Yeah, you're making a ruin of me

[Love can be painful, and it can change you. Leo is being forced to soften and open up, while Donnie is being allowed to sink his teeth in. That’s scary and uncomfortable, and the things that you bring out of them go against how they have always seen themselves - thus you are “ruining” what they thought they were by showing them that’s not exactly true.]

Try to survive, keep my spirit alive

But like a knife in the woods

Yeah, you hunt down the good in me

[For Leo, lamb-chan is finding (hunting down) the good in him that he kept suppressed/didn’t know was there. For Donnie, the “good” in him is being destroyed (almost like it is being hunted and killed) because of him being allowed to give in to those thoughts and urges that he always deemed so dangerous/wrong. And they’re resistant to change (try to survive, keep my spirit alive) but there is nothing they can do about it in the end, because you and the change you bring are inevitable]

One temptation sparked this

Now I can feel the darkness

It's my own fault but you had this planned

[These lyrics evoke more of the same for Donnie, I think. The “temptation” is you, of being with you in that way, of letting himself feel and act a certain way with you. Letting that “darkness” (possession, jealousy, lust, etc.) start to creep in and take hold. Feeling like it’s his fault for letting this happen, but also knowing that you have a hand in this, too, and you’re making decisions that allow this from him and even encourage it.]

All of me, you take now, like criminals and shakedowns

[For Leo, this lyric fits him in sort of in a literal sense (you’re taking all of me, including my shady shit) but this lyric also sort of fits in a different, figurative sense (you take all of me as if you were shaking me down, as if you were stealing me away and I cannot stop it).]

Yeah, you make me forget who I am (one, two, three)

[For Leo, you make him forget who he feels like he is supposed to be (a bad guy), you allow him to forget about this hard persona that he’s crafted, you let him be someone softer and more open and more vulnerable than he ever dared to let himself be. For Donnie, you being with Leo starts to change him (or, more accurately, reveal him as who he really is rather than who he’s forced himself to be), and then when Donnie is allowed to be with you in a different way than he ever thought he would be, it’s, again, this feeling of forgetting who he is/letting that darkness take hold/restructuring how he views your relationship with him. And once again, you’ve got the repetition of one, two, three calling back to the nature of the relationship.]

All of your good is mine

All of your good is mine

All of your good is mine

All of your good is mine

[This is the only part of the song that is sung in a female voice rather than a male one, so to me this is lamb-chan saying to the boys “yes, you are good, and you are mine, and the things inside of you that I am revealing are also good and mine.]

If my brain wasn’t soup, this would be better. I’m sorry jfkdlsa;jfdskl;

duuuuuuude this was fuckin INSANE a+ in red pen at the top of your essay. consider having your brain be soup more often

[art-o-gant]

baby i was born an effigy!

+ i taped them shittily to my closet

[deoidesign]

vampire and werewolf sitting in a tree

time trav e l i n g

first comes. trying to kill eachother then comes... learning you're his dead ex-lover then comes marriage!

(you can buy the book this scene is from for $15 it's really good. it's the fan favorite of the series!)

[princeanxious]

*baps @shamedump * it's the blood twins and yer littol oc Vermillion!

And for anyone interested in TSAMS and oc branch-offs, please check out their fic Vermillion! It's really cute and a nicer look on how the bloodmoon twins could have had their view changed! More doodles for this fic are absolutely incoming(and hopefully will get digitally colored lol) as I've got a bunch of little scenes I wanna draw out for little Millie and the fam they've made!!

I can't wait to see what happens next, as I have some theories on how things might play out and I'm eager to see how it all plays out!!

[harlequinoccult]

HIHIHI HELLO OK SO ITS THE ANON FROM BEFORE ASKING FOR RECS AND OHH BOY. I JUST FINISHED BINARY STAR HERO AND HOLY SHIT??? I am so ill abt Ray. That game has done things to me... But ANYWAYS, I'll spare you my insane ramblings!! I had a rec for you i thought you might like!! there's this game that dropped like, two days ago(?) that I think you'd absolutely love called Killer Chat!! It's a chat sim style game where you're an aspiring writer who asked too many suspicious questions online and got invited to a discord server full of killers as and now you're gotta blend in!! You have a good amount of agency as the player and can respond in a lotta different ways :) you can be pretty unhinged, and can actually kill one of the main love interests!! It's really fun!!! :D I'm absolutely in love with it, and it's part of the niche of like, kinda goofy serial killer games(?) (like yours!!) that I absolutely love with my entire heart <3 ok bye and thank you so much for the recs from before, I absolutely can't wait to play more of them!!!! :)

Yes. more people mentally ill about BSH. My influence grows.

And, funny you should mention killer chat, i literally finished Ronin's route last night [got the good "bad" ending first try :^)]

So, if anyone wants more of a grab bag of recs, I do have a big ass list of them on Itch.io that ive been adding to since?? 2015?? jesus christ. but yeah theres 140+ games on there and ive played every single one of them myself

[serpentface]

Oh, birthing & midwiferyposting, please

Ok I will Elaborate

(Content warning because this contains discussion of infanticide)

This is speaking about midwifery and childbirth in the Imperial Wardi context (this also should not be taken as ubiquitous for every facet of the Imperial Wardi cultural sphere, but this is a broadly accurate rundown).

Infant mortality rates are high, and pregnancies and births can be very dangerous for the pregnant parent. Midwives serve a vital societal function and the best form of reproductive care available.

Midwives come in many forms. In poor families, the duties are usually performed by a family member and the skillset may be passed from parent to child. Some communities have resident midwives who perform their services for free or at low cost. Professional midwives exist for hire, and are very common in the cities. An upper echelon of midwives are a kind of physician-priestess, who will have received extensive medical training and are considered sanctified and uniquely equipped to fulfill the spiritual needs of childbirth. A few will perform services for free, but they are generally hired and their services are very expensive.

Wealthy families may have their own personal midwives, and VERY wealthy families/royalty have personal physician-priestesses.

Midwives are mostly women, though whether this is an expectation or merely an average tendency is dependent on the specific context. Cases where this is an Expectation tend to be in cultural contexts where the Gaze of a man is believed to have a sexual element that is uniquely powerful and harmful to the nude bodies of women (all Imperial Wardi cultural beliefs include a concept of the spiritually empowered Gaze and disempowered vulnerability in nudity, but exact nuances vary). Physician-priestesshood is, in theory, reserved only for people designated female, though a few throughout history have been known or suspected to be eunuchs.

Physician-Priestesses serve Anmir-Ganmache (an epithet of God as the domestic sphere, close in meaning to Ox-Face of the Hearth). This is not a priesthood specifically devoted to this face of God in the same sense that Odonii are the cult of the Lion-Face and Galenii are the cult of the Lunar-Face, they are merely seen as serving Anmir-Ganmache by performing their duties and being uniquely empowered by this Face's blessing. Most begin their training and education at puberty (though it's possible to join later in life) and are expected to serve for 25 years before retirement. Their primary function is to behave as midwives, but they receive a wide spectrum of medical training and are considered uniquely equipped to tend to the overall health of women.

A midwife is usually expected to not perform their tasks while menstruating (this may not be practical for poorer families who have to take what they can get), during which time a person is considered ritually unclean. Specially dedicated physician-priestesses are usually expected to be virgins and to remain so for the duration of their service (a method to ensure an entirely ritually pure existence). This is not expected of common midwives.

Most of any midwife’s job is typical physical assistance with the pregnancy and birthing process. Births are typically done in a sitting or squatting position, often wearing a special skirt or blanket to shield both parent and child from full view (a spiritual element to reduce unwanted metaphysical vulnerability during the birthing process). Under the best conditions, a midwife has several assistants of their own (in the case of physician priestesses, these are usually priestesses in training) who will physically support the person giving birth and attend to their needs.

The infant is shielded from direct view during its emergence, and is immediately cleaned and wrapped in cloth upon the cutting of the umbilical cord.

Part of the toolset for a physician-priestess is a pair of horns from a pregnant cow sanctified via sacrifice to Anmir-Ganmache. The cow had taken God's role in its sacrifice and its remains are holy relics, and used to put the mother and child under God's full protection. One horn will have been carved into a cup and holds a sanctified oil (usually olive), which is gently daubed over the eyes, mouth, heart, and near the genitals of the child, forming a protective barrier.

The other horn is intact (usually carved with protective imagery, notably a motif of a lioness-headed woman that has protective qualities for children, and an abstract, twisting serpent that represents and encourages the incarnation of the child's soul) and is waved over the child’s body in the form of a blessing. The same is done for the mother, with the addition of anointing the breasts to encourage healthy and clean lactation. Common midwives are unlikely to have easy access to sacred sacrificial relics, but this blessing rite is considered vital and can be accomplished (to a less ideal extent) with any cow's horns, so long as they have been properly purified.

Protecting the helpless, naked infant from the gaze and immediately exposing it to purifying agents is believed to help expel any inborn dagia or other polluting agents. This is believed to support the child's spiritual and physical health and hopes to prevent congenital or otherwise lifelong health conditions.

The midwife performs a thorough inspection of the infant, and will give a recommendation upon whether the child is healthy and fit to rear. Infants deemed at high risk of premature death may be killed, as the cost of care and emotional attachment for a child deemed unlikely to survive will often be seen as too great to warrant the risk. This act (presumably with the parent’s permission) is usually performed by the midwife themself, and is ideally accomplished with a fatal sedative dose (this death is seen as peaceful and painless, while a traumatic death would risk the infant’s soul failing to reincarnate and instead becoming a vengeful wandering ghost).

This obviously may be a difficult and traumatic choice on an emotional level, but infants are not believed to have fully incarnated souls until they begin to speak (it is believed that the soul begins to enter the body upon conception, but takes significant time to fully inhabit it), and will be reincarnated if they die before this occurs. So infanticide in this context is not usually perceived as the murder of a full person or a denial of life, as the infant’s soul will have as many other chances as it takes to become fully incarnated. (There's a variant of 'old soul' beliefs, where an especially precocious child or one that learns to speak early is believed to have had many previous reincarnations)

Intentional abortion of a fetus carries no stigma whatsoever for much the same reasons (though the MOTIVATIONS for this act on the parent’s part may carry stigma, such as to hide an illegitimate pregnancy). Natural abortifiacients are available and widely used in cases of unwanted pregnancy (though these are not by any means as safe or reliable as contemporary abortion procedures).

In all cases (whether an aborted fetus, a miscarriage, a stillbirth, infanticide, or another death before full incarnation), the infant or fetus’ remains are given the standard funeral rite of cremation to ensure their soul is freed from the body and can be properly reincarnated. Basic rites are all that is expected in this situation, but some parents will undergo extensive funerals with lavish offerings to encourage a prosperous and healthy rebirth.

There's also certain rites to encourage the same soul to return to the same parents (as it would otherwise be reincarnated into a human at random), the physical element of which is anointing the body (ideally the lips) with both parent's mingled blood before the cremation, as blood physically contains a person's spirit and the sharing of it can establish a powerful metaphysical bond. This is believed to assist in leading the child's stray soul back to the same source, and may lend a tremendous sense of comfort to parents in the face of a wanted, dead infant.

A pregnant parent who dies in childbirth is given special status and are believed to enter an esteemed afterlife (located within the Lapis Moon, a paradise where they will reside among saints and other esteemed dead). Childbirth is regarded as one of many analogues to God's self-sacrifice to bring forth creation, with the mother symbolically crossing the threshold of death and spilling her blood to bring forth life from nonexistence. To die in such a state is regarded as one of the noblest deaths typically available to women. (This sentiment is also entirely reflective of the typical place ascribed to those designated women in this society, where their chiefmost value is in bearing children). It's still (obviously) ideal for most to survive the birthing process, but this belief may contribute to some choosing to undergo an (almost always fatal) caesarean procedure in a difficult birth if the infant is assumed to be otherwise healthy.

In the case of a healthy birth in which all parties survive, the child will then be presented to its father (who in some contexts is prohibited from attending the birth), who will formally accept it as his own and bestow it with the family name (the child is not given a personal name until a month from birth, and undergoes a formalized naming ceremony at either their first birthday or when they begin to speak, tradition depending). A child born out of wedlock or to an absent father does not receive a family name, though may be formally adopted if the mother marries later on, or be given the family name of the mother's father if he chooses to accept it.

The mother should ideally undergo a full blessing to recover from the metaphysical vulnerability of the birthing state (the physician-priestess can provide this, but otherwise this is done at a temple or family/village shrine).

It's also generally expected to offer sacrifice to Anmir-Ganmache in thanks and to ensure continued protection for parent and child (the best offering is a cow, but offerings of milk or at the very least some grain is acceptable). Most who can afford a physician-priestess can also afford to offer a cow, and it's also expected that the best meat (usually the liver and flank) and the horns should be removed before the rest of the sacrifice is burnt, and gifted to the priestess as a personal thanks.

[landfilloftrash]

Binged the entirety of Flogging Molly’s discography, and while listening to Every Dog Has Its Day I felt the muses start beating me with a stick to go draw the depressed dragon dad (so here he is)

[thedrotter]

average minecraft gameplay of elementary school kids (+the og doodle of it I did like. months ago)

[fingertipsmp3]

This is the spiritual successor to Four Seasons Landscaping. To me.

[firecooking]

Oh we've been having such thoughts about these two

[greyias]

I was today year's old when I discovered that if you unequip your instruments, you can whistle for the perform action.

[umbralstars]

Fódlan Landscape Series; The Sealed Forest

[unproduciblesmackdown]

maybe bsol is that time jen tepper mentions when she was so upset about a review of a show of joe's that she broke a glass (&/or threw it out a window)

[doriansbutt]

I’ve played thru da4 5 times now and have ~200 hrs in the game and have played it almost every day this month and now i have a rly busy week at work and can’t play til like Friday what the heck am i gonna do w myself

[jackals-ships]

momther is feeling Anxious bc of reasons of the universe Testing My God Damn Patience so while im o7 on it boss <- head empty she's feeling things

and i have No Idea how empathy works. but you can trade that out by instead putting kibble on someone and putting a cat on them. horrible little ASMR-ists with their crunchcrunchcrunch

[wavesmp3]

shawna!!! i picked up “the sea is yours to take” and genuinely so In love with your world building! can i know how you plotted the story out or how this world even emerged :OO

omg genuinely so excited to answer this ask, like you have no idea. i pulled out my laptop for it hehe

so as a disclaimer i must start by saying that i first started creating this fic and the world around it in 2019 (which can you believe was 5 years ago lol) AND i haven't really revisited all my notes since i was working heavily on this world in 2020 AND my notebook with all the details and brainstorming i did is at my parents' house and therefore do not have access to for the time being...

all of this to say that i am a little muddy on all of the nitty gritty details, but we continue forward nonetheless!

so as i said the initial idea that turned into this world came to me in the summer of 2019 in a silent chapel in the form of this drabble

(which, a note on the silent chapel part lol, i'm not a very religious person and i had never been to one before that but i think going to a place like that and thinking of the drabble there is why the piece has a strong emphasis on religion and like religious institutions, a lot of which was inspired by catholic ideologies such as the very idea of seven sins and seven gifts. and a lot of the emphasis on the religious beliefs of that world might not be as obvious in 'the sea is yours to take' (tsiytt) but it has more importance in the other installations (read: the world is ours to remake, posted as an original work somewhere on my blog as well as the crown is his to wear which was supposed to be the third and final installation that i never got around to writing rip)

but back to the point -- the drabble kind of set up the main plot which, to put it briefly, is that there is a king who is up to no good so much so that his own son is looking to overthrow him.

(note that the drabble was slightly different when originally posted and had been edited after the fact once i had created the entire world and overarching plot, but it was mainly the same as it stands right now apart from the naming of a couple things. fun fact: the gifts were called the virtues in that drabble)

and from there i kind of let my mind run wild.

i can't remember if i did most of the plotting/creation of that world during 2019 summer or if i did it during 2020 summer, but the main point is that i had almost a full year of just on and off thinking about this piece and this world

so from there (ignoring the timeline of all this world building) it was mainly just figuring out the answers to a whole bunch of questions like: why is the son trying to overthrow the king? what is the 'no good' that the king is up to? why did the prince seek out this other character in the drabble? what does that character know that can be of help? how or why do they specifically know it?

and it continued and continued like that for a long time until i had a pretty good understanding of what i wanted the plot to be. and because of the nature of the overarching plot with the plans to overthrow the king it kind of also did a lot of the world building too. i again had to ask and answer questions like why are all the sins and gifts apart from fortitude dead? why would the nomads know something that the rest of this world doesn't? why have the nomads ceased communication with the rest of this world? and a ton of other questions and answers that literally wouldn't even make sense with what is discussed in tsiytt but kind of helped informed what tsiytt needed to set up for following installations to make sense.

(note: kind of hate the naming of the nomads and the nomads land, it just feels wrong and a bit offensive of a word to use in the context that it is. i was young and really the only thing i was thinking about was the fact that it sounded like no mans land)

anyways this whole lengthy explanation is again just to say that i knew a certain couple of scenes needed to happen to drive the plot forward: like not knowing why fortitude sent the prince away, fortitude killing lord seth, the ending scene, and then a couple others that i won't say because they're probably spoilers.

and from there i just got to add in scenes to build out the love story as well as the characters. i wasn't following a very serious outline (especially when i started to write in may 2020) but rather just following my heart and letting words and scenes come out as i was writing them. but then because i was just thinking about this world and this piece so much i started to think up scenes that i wanted to write that would only happen much later. and so from there i was following a very loose outline. which was really just a whole bunch of bullet points of scenes i wanted to add. like they were so unserious. and to show how unserious, here is a sc i pulled of them (thank you google doc version history)

LOL

anyways i think that's kind of all i have to say right now, but i could really talk about that piece and that world for years, there is so much depth that will unfortunately never leave my little brainstorming notebook. even details like the zalazar river have so much more history and meaning to it than is explored or even brushed on in tsiytt.

i really apologize that this got so long (and if you can believe it, this is me trying to keep it short) and if it makes absolutely no sense. but if you have more questions or things you wanted to discuss or ask pls pls pls go right ahead. my ask box or dms are always open!! i love any excuse to talk about this world and these characters. they're my heart.