#again I know this is a NOT FUN time

[cecoeur]

Fun for fanfic and all. But in no reality, Max irl would ever think of that Martin post. It has been 8 hours, almost half the drivers on the grid posted about him. Pierre fucking gasly did it, of all people! And we are to think Max is tossing and turning in his sleep over Daniel? No, you know where he is? He is bloody streaming. Yeah, when his organisation is nailing the final nails to Daniel’s legacy (after they have done the same to Daniel’s career) all he had to offer was a comment on daniel’s post. Daniel was good for him as long as he picked up that one point that his shitty teammate couldn’t do. Max, like the rest of red bull, will think of Daniel as a footnote for their “bigger picture”.

Listen. This is not going to be an eloquent response but here goes. I get that you’re upset but this take…it ain’t it, bud.

The absolute last person I’m worried about having Daniel’s back in this or any situation is Max Verstappen. Max has been a genuine friend to Daniel from the beginning and equating his social media engagement or him living his life (?) to his level of love or respect for Daniel as a person and a driver is shortsighted and incredibly unfair.

Max was THE only person in the RedBull “family” over the weekend supporting Daniel during what was clearly a mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting weekend. We heard and saw proof of that on multiple occasions.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, take Daniel’s. He said many times in multiple interviews after the race on Sunday (and before) what max has done for him and meant to him over the years.

Most of all I think it’s important to remember that just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The most meaningful interactions are not broadcast for the entire internet to see and consume because quiet frankly that’s not the fucking point.

[blackkatdraws2]

[Toon x Mobster] A tender moment.

[Animation timelapse here!]

[AUDIO USED:] Chet Baker - Almost Blue Sound Effects edited by me!

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[suntails]

airplane!

[ionomycin]

Shore of bones

[lazylittledragon]

ok so i just experienced what i think would be the climax of the film about my breakup

i just went to see neck deep and i was supposed to be going to this show with my ex for my birthday, but i went by myself because i’m not missing it because of him, and i crowdsurfed for the first time ever during the song “heartbreak of the century” and i don’t even feel like i’m real right now

[inspisart]

dick took the news that a strange thirteen year old broke into his apartment while he was away at the circus pretty well, I gotta say

[lazycranberrydoodles]

english translation book 5 baby we are in the ‘people assuming kid form hua cheng is xie lian’s son’ era 🔥🔥🔥 / follow for more hualian silliness

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

Hey hey hey may 31th anon! How's 2024 going? ☆ヾ(*´▽｀)ﾉ This year I have for you a leaked Sherlock season 5 image. Thinking of you!! And everyone!!

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[abisalli]

fashion, put it all on me!

[kyurochurro]

"gentlemen i believe... we are lost."

(entering the new year with a stv drawing since im still on a st movie kick from the marathon my dad and i had HEHE >:D)

[flesh-and-fangs]

Y'all, I hate to say it, but no, Nandermo did not "go canon", in an "alternate universe" or through "implications" or otherwise. They were making fun of us. That was the point of all the little nudges and open questions that were quickly squashed. That was the point of the hypnosis ending. The point of that hypnosis was quite literally "Here, let's give the perfect fake wish-fulfillment ending to parts of our fanbase" (which is why there were three. They're fake. That's the point. The point is that they are supposed to be fantasies to appeal to people's hopes for the show).

Having Nandor and Guillermo as a classic sitcom couple set to a laugh track in a universe where none of the other characters exist was a jab at shippers who wanted Nandermo to be canon and cared more about that than the other characters or the premise of the show. They were making fun of "and they lived happily ever after" type fanwork. They were making fun of people who, in their eyes, ignored the irreverence and violence and black comedy of the show in order to make fluffy slash content. They were explicitly saying: "This is how we see you, and this is how we see what you want from this show, and we are telling you that it won't happen and we in fact have contempt for the very concept."

Why do you think they kept baiting the ship until the literal last lines of the show? They were making fun of us. They were saying "Ha! You still thought this would happen? After years of us saying it won't, to your face? Idiots." It's a comedy show, and they were making shippers the butt of the joke. They've been doing it for seasons now.

This is literally what Supernatural did back in the day. And nobody said that they made Destiel canon when they had an in-universe/alternate-universe stage play where the actors "explore Destiel". Fans back then recognized that it was a joke at their expense. That's what this is. Same as what happened in BBC Sherlock that one time, where in-universe conspiracy theorists said that Sherlock was in love with Moriarty (a ship the creators deliberately baited, mind you, same as they have here), specifically for the purpose of laughing at and making fun of that theory.

I'm so sorry, guys. I know you wanted to hope. I know you wanted to believe that the things the writers said at that con weren't true, but they were. I know because I wanted to hope too, even when I knew full well it wouldn't happen. They've been plain about how they feel about the ship for years. They saw it as a joke, one that drew in viewers, but was objectionable at its core. And they've followed through on that by baiting and jabbing up until the very end.

[skymantle]

what does it all mean.

[chalkrub]

thank you for a great art fight! here's some of my final attacks. had a blast, already missing it - see you next year!

[accirax]

sprite redraws be upon ye! i missed drawing the guys :,)