#also hating on any of the boys is a crime against humanity

[sizzy-ling]

why would you hate on any of the poets, though? Like, c'mon guys, don't be weak ass bitches

[nightingale-prompts]

Overworked- DCxDP prompt

The knight led the group of selected heroes into the throne room. Sitting before a crowd of his people was none other than the ghost king.

"Do not test His Majesty, his mood his well this day. Say only what is necessary." The knight warned before stepping aside.

The kind wasn't what Constantine had mentioned. He was young and rather small for the throne he now sits on. The green flaming crown was unmistakable though.

The young man glared at them with intense animosity, his upper lip curled as he held back a reflexive snarl. Sharp canines peeked out just for a moment as he schooled his expression.

"Do you have any idea what you've done?" The kind said drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair. His black claws each clicking aginst the cold metal.

The group had been briefed on the situation by Constantine after they were summoning to this realm.

The short and sweet was that they were being mandated to appear before the king of the infinite realms for a long list of violations against the order of the universe. The current group contains Bruce, Clark, Wally, Kon, Jason, Hal, Barry, and Damian. Constantine himself will also be there but he already knows that this tribunal will have multiple groups.

The group reamined mostly silent.

"Where you not read your list of crimes?" The boy asked this time.

An attendant scurried through the crowd with a large scroll in hand before the king immediately waved him off tp return to his post.

"No, lets skip the reading. It would take cycles to get through the charges. Let me be brief. You have all been found guilty of charges of resurrection, time traveling, timeline manipulation, Planetary rearranging courtesy of Mr.Kent here, Interdimensional universe travel, and UNIVERSE MELDING! THE LIST GOES ON!" The king became more irate with every charge. "Tell me why I shouldn't banish you to an empty dimension right this instance."

Constantine knew this was all politics at the end of the day. This whole thing could be smoothed over with the right words by the right person.

"We are human." Bruce said firmly before anyone could stop him. Jason held back a groan of agitation.

"...So you are. What does that have to do with anything?" He boy asked.

"Isn't it natural for us to want to live and do whatever we can to keep living?" Bruce responded

Murmurs erupted amongst the crowd of onlookers.

"So what? Do you think you are the exception then? Look around heroes. This room is full of ghosts who would also have done to keep living. My people couldn't avoid death but they accepted it. What can I say to them if I let you go while they paid their price? How fair would that be?" The king condemned.

The murmurs turned into cheers for their king's words. It was unfair. Why do they get to do what they want without repercussions when they died without even getting the option to live?

"If it counts for anything many of us died to protect as many people as possible," Hal said.

"Well, good for you. How much was that sacrifice worth in the face of your resurrection? That probably doesn't feel cheap at all." The king said sarcastically. "I suppose that goes for most of you."

"I have an objection. Resurrection is not a choice if someone chooses to bring us back we don't get a say. By default we shouldn't be charged for it." Jason argued.

The king paused and raised a hand silencing the crowd.

"Hmmm, I suppose you are correct. Fine, I will strike it from the record." The kind relented.

The heroes had finally found an in. If they could argue their charges down they could leave.

"None of use have willingly time traveled. Hell i hated it. Being lost in time was not a chose we made." Wally said as Barry nodded along.

The king bit the inside of his cheek as he pondered the response.

"I suppose I can overlook it."

"Let me just say that any melding of the universe happened as a consequence of our battle with Darkside." Clark said getting rid of their their biggest charge.

"Darkside?" The king narrowed his eyes.

A courtier stepped forward and leaned down to whisper into the boy king's ear.

"I see. He will be added to the ledger for his crimes. His trial will not be as forgiving as yours. You will not be seeing him again." The boy silently signaled to the knight who bowed and exited with a group of others.

The boy sighed and stood up.

"Follow me."

The group was led down a long corridor to an office with stacks of paperwork from floor to ceiling lining the walls.

"Welcome to my personal hell." The king announced.

Constantine whistled at the sheer number of documents scattered across the room.

"Sorry about the whole court thing. I don't really want to do it but I kind of have to. The Observers demand some kind of punishment for violations. Also, you need to understand that your actions are kept track of and you can't escape it. When you break the rule I have to do the paperwork. AND I HATE PAPERWORK. So here is the deal. You guys bring me the people that have done worse than you on this list and I'll call it square. And if you don't I take everyone's souls." The King handed the scroll to Bruce. "I want the Al Ghul clan first."

"Wait but my-" Damian spoke out but was cut off by the King's raised hand to silance him.

"It is irrelevant to me what your personal issues are. Every violator will be judged for their crimes. If they can give me a good plea then they can return. Consider yourself lucky that you're too young for a full sentencing. As for the rest just do what I say and make up for your crimes. This is a mercy so don't complain."

It was clear that the moody young king wasn't going to argue. It was best to keep quiet and before they knew it the group was sent back to earth.

"You have no idea how lucky we got," Constantine said lighting up a cigarette and leaving to get a drink.

[godsandvillains-if]

Gods and Villains is a superhero/horror story set in a dystopian future where Earth is filled to the brim with crime and corruption—a.k.a MCU meets The Boys.

Warning! injury to major characters, gore, body horror, trauma and PTSD, amnesia, death, and sexual content. Rated +18. More specific content warnings will be provided at the start of each chapter.

You take control of a powerful metahuman, an otherwise ordinary human on the outside but who has the meta-gene, a potent mutation deep engraved in their DNA, which gives them superhuman abilities. This next step in human evolution comes with a setback, however, for the curse of madness seems to follow their every step. It lurks in the shadows, patiently waiting for the opportunity to strike—many metahumans fall prey to its alluring promises. 

With a dark and traumatic past filled with untold horrors and inhuman experiments, you are rescued from the clutches of crazy terrorists by a team of heroes that might lend you all the tools you need for redemption or complete self-annihilation. 

As the only metahuman with the ability to wield the powerful Chaos Magic, your very blood holds the answers to unlocking the secrets behind the control of time and space, but it has the drawback of being almost completely volatile. 

Who can you trust to keep you safe other than yourself? Trust no one, and maybe you can get out of this literal hell alive.

Play as male, female, or non-gender specific, along with transgender choices;

Romance one of seven characters, and if your heart is big enough fall in love with two of them. There's three possible poly routes available: Archon and Stardom, Archon and Mars, Paladin and Wildcat;

Customize your appearance, personality and powers;

Struggle against the shackles of madness trying to take hold of your psyche;

Battle a multitude of villains or become one yourself;

Uncover the secrets behind the meta-gene and your abilities;

Help the public fall in love with superheroes or forever destroy that chance;

In total there are seven romance options, each with their own personality, and dark secrets for you to uncover. You can read more about them below:

?

The villain, or anti-hero, whatever you want to call them, Mars is an enigmatic figure; the very concept of life seems to hold no value to them. A trail of bodies follows wherever they go, and on the news, they are regarded as the biggest menace of the century. They will have the unique ability to sway your loyalty. Beware, their sweet words and promises may drip with honey, but they also drip with the blood of their victims.​

Trope: Forbidden love, emotional scars, blood-play

Zev/Zena Hammer

The oldest of the bunch and not a metahuman per se. Hammer acts as the spokesperson for the team, mitigating the often tenuous relationship between humans and the so-called "mutants". As a retired police detective they've learned firsthand how rotten the world can be for the innocent, and they've vowed to protect them at any cost. Their analytical and communication skills will go hand in hand when dealing with various crimes, just as their implants.

Trope: Widow/widower, age gap, don't-call-me-daddy/mommy

Adam/Ada Armstrong

The current leader of the Alliance Team. Headstrong and dauntless, they are regarded as the strongest metahuman in modern times and the most enigmatic of them all, whose past is shrouded in mystery and unknown even to their closest friends. On the outside, they might seem apathetic and unconcerned with human suffering, but their true feelings are hidden beneath layers of deep trauma. Superhuman strength and invulnerability are their greatest assets when fighting villains.

Trope: Nobody thinks it will work, love/hate, fucking-your-boss

Edward/Evelyn Osborne

The former leader of the Alliance Team and Archon's best friend. On the surface, they are the stereotypical showboat: cocky, greedy, and egoistical. Stardom does whatever they can to gain attention, fame, and riches. For them, the best feeling in the world is an adoring fan and a beautiful person fawning over their heroics. The meta-gene gives them a genius-level intellect, which in turn is used to develop several pieces of equipment that are employed by themselves and the team during fights.​

Trope: Billionaire, belated love epiphany, good-people-have-good-sex

Johnny/Johnnie

If Archon's past is shrouded in mystery, Paladin's is drowned in it. For all you know, their name is not even Johnny/Johnnie but an alias of their choosing. They are known to be the silent loner type and are somewhat socially withdrawn from other members of the team, only speaking when called upon to do so. Behind their silver mask, they harbor more than a few inner demons, and together with their superhuman weapon and combat proficiency, they fight for the innocent.​

Trope: Secret identity, oblivious to love, weapon-fetishization

Pedro/Pilar Flores

The youngest of the team, considered by many a lighthearted jokester without any real talent beyond their obvious powers—which set them apart from every human that walks the earth. With their metahuman status so evident for everyone to see, hiding just didn't seem like an option, so they chose the next best alternative. Known to be playful, energetic, and often immature, they are responsible for balancing the team's more serious side, and when someone can take the form of any living being on Earth, the repertoire of pranks is endless.​

Trope: Beauty and the Beast, broken in some way, begging

Doctor Malik/Malika Aziz

The renowned Doctor Aziz, a famed archaeologist and considered to be the most powerful sorcerer, or magic user, in the world. They wear several enchanted artifacts that, in turn, accentuate their already tremendous knowledge of the mystical forces. With an extremely strong moral compass and kind demeanor, they will show themselves to be the best teacher you could ask for, but why do they seem to be everywhere you look?

Trope: Time travel, twin siblings or clones?, teacher-student

LINKS

DEMO ✶ PATREON ✶ KO-FI

[quotidian-oblivion]

I've been thinking about Jason's memorial case in the Batcave recently and came up with a few thoughts.

Obviously, there are a few things wrong with it, mainly the title of a "Good Soldier" being attached to a child. And I've been thinking aboit that mostly.

There's no questions of how intensely focused and obsessed Batman is over the war against crime in Gotham, we see him quoting it multiple times in the comics and even the movies, animated and live-action. And so he thinks everyone in the war is a soldier, including Robins. I hate that and loathe it.

Not because I'm a Batman apologist, I'm not. It's because I like to see and believe in the better parts of Batman. The reason why he doesn't kill in the first place--because it comes from a place of compassion and a place of strong belief set by an 8-year-old boy who grew up too fast. Because he believes anyone can be redeemable because ultimately everyone is human, as proven in the older Batman comics and Batman TAS when he helps Harvey, Harley, Baby Doll, etc.

And the biggest reason of all--because Batman, whether anyone likes it or not, represents a strong symbol in Gotham. A burning torch in murky darkness. A hope--one shrouded by shadows--but a hope nonetheless. It's in the psychology of Gothamites, it needs a Batman because of that symbol which is lethal to criminals and a relief to citizens. I'm heavily referencing The Dark Knight Returns I and II (animated movies) here. Watch it if you haven't yet, you'll see what I mean. This is why he can't kill the Joker. It will be completely tainting that hope and we can see its effects in The Dark Knight Returns II.

In any case, Tim was right about Batman needing a Robin. Because in the end, Batman is just that--a man. And Robin is a child.

Lego Batman is really good for this reason. The concept of found family in that movie is just amazing. I love how Bruce fears having a family again after he lost his old one.

Batman needs a Robin because Batman was originally born out of a vengeance scheme of an 8-year-old newly orphaned boy who lost everyone. Trauma lasts. Batman needs a Robin because Robin is a family. And that little boy who lost his parents needs it. And so does Robin.

I love in Young Jusitce when Batman says "So that he doesn't" in response to Wonder Woman asking him if he pulled Robin into this life "So that he turns out like you?". Because Dick was also a little boy bent on revenge. Bruce gave that to him in the only way he knew how, but a better version because he himself has matured and understands how dark he has gotten. He doesn't want that for Dick, or Jason, or Tim, or Damian, or Cass--or any of his kids. He gave them early on what he didn't have--a family. And he received a family back. And having that family keeps Batman from tipping oved the edge into insanity. Because revenge is a poison, even if it's an 8-year-old boy imagining it.

But that still doesn't change that he sees it as a war. And he sees Robin and himself as soldiers.

So I came to a conclusion.

He doesn't.

Bruce doesn't.

Batman does.

Here's how I'm piecing it out:

"A Good Soldier" carved on the memorial case because only soldiers can fight so openly and outwardly. Even if they're dubbed as vigilantes, they are soldiers. And I think Bruce thinks it this way.

So when he sees a Robin or a Batkid out there, kicking rapists in the face and whatnot, he sees how someone so young can bear so much weight. He sees how a child can hold so much bravery--like the soldiers in the frontlines--doing this because of the morals they believe in. He sees how Robin is a good fighter, a good helper, a brave one, a confident person, a soft hero.

He sees how Robin is all that and he thinks "A good soldier." Because Robin is one. With the thing they're doing, he is one.

But yes, it's wrong. Children cannot and should not be soldiers. But a) this is the worst type of fiction, comic fiction 😂 and b) Batman is fucked up himself and considering he started training to be Batman from a young age too, he himself was a child soldier.

In the world of DC comics, the people there need someone like Batman while the people in the Earth we live in need someone like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malala Yousufzai, etc.

So yeah, Robin is a good soldier--a great soldier, because he holds the bravery, determination and strength of a soldier. It could mean a literal thing, but it could also mean a metaphorical thing. Bruce could have engraved those words to Jason's memorial case because the only thing he can think of to sum up how Jason was as a Robin was a soldier. Because soldiers are brave, and Jason was the bravest.

And I think comic writers after that took the whole "war against crime" psyche of Batman too literally and too much creating the abusive ass prick in some of the continuities.

But you can't tell me that Bruce--not Batman--Bruce has a case of his own for Jason. Maybe a physical one, maybe an imaginitive one. A case which holds Jason's annotated copy of Pride and Prejudice, his first aced test paper, and his favorite hoodie, all kept tidily in the case with the words "a good son, be well loved, Jay lad" written under it. A case which he holds private because it was his son who he lost. Jason.

A little boy who survived so much until he couldn't. A little boy who he tried to protect until he couldn't. His son. Jason.

[genderkoolaid]

so many people on ur incel post thinking that a Bad Person doesn't deserve any compassion, and any and all punishments become justified, despite those punishments being totally incompatible with feminist ideas.

this is the same thought process behind denying incarcerated people their rights

Also like... I am 10000% sure that, especially online, there are young boys in those communities who are there because they feel like shit and think it's the only community that they can have that will support them. See this reply by @havinganormalone

Most of these guys are not mass shooters or murderers. There's a good chance they are assholes of varying degrees of severity, and pretty much guaranteed to be some level of misogynistic.

But I don't want anyone to end up hurting themselves out of self hatred!!!!! Sorry but I don't!!!! I want them to stay alive to have the chance to become better people!!!! I don't enjoy wishing for the deaths of people in hate groups. If there is no other way to protect vulnerable groups I'm not against it, but ideally I want them to grow and change as people. And I am committed to seeing people's humanity and suffering, because pain is where the vast majority of shitty actions come from. So we can't deal with those shitty actions without confronting the fact that the people who do them are not mindless robots of evil, they are people who are hurting. We can hold people accountable AND acknowledge their pain.

& people keep saying "we don't hate them for their dysmorphia we hate them for being incels" but why do you think a lot of those guys ARE incels?? A lot of them view themselves as inherently ugly & unlovable. And you are mocking their self-hatred. That's not helpful. If an incel, like, gets punched by a woman for being a misogynist and cries about it online, I am gonna think it was well-deserved. But this is about them self-harming as a result of self-hatred, which is deeply concerning when it happens to anyone. & I very much did see people saying things which encouraged the idea that their dysmorphia was justified or mocking them for not just getting plastic surgery. Just like how people mock incels for being fat neckbeards!! Which people also justify by saying "well they are a hate group!!" so they dont have to think critically about why they are okay with bodyshaming when its against "bad people".

Incel ideology as I understand is built on the pessimism of men who feel they are inherently less than conventionally attractive men. They view themselves as inherently lesser people because they don't fit conventional masculine standards. And blame women for this because they are misogynists who haven't critically examined their misogyny and so they ignore the way the patriarchy is the one doing this to them. But if you are going to fix an issue you need to address the root cause. And the root cause here is self-hatred. Incels self-harming because they think they need a certain bone structure to be attractive isn't a coincidence, its fundamentally related to their incel-ness. & again I can't imagine there will never be a young boy who isn't even involved in those spaces who will see that or smth like it and feel like it would fix his self-esteem issues.

& you are very right about the incarcerated thing. The idea that "bad people" deserve no compassion & deserve every bad thing that happens to them is how horrific abuse in prison gets justified. And some of those people are innocent or jailed for objectively stupid crimes, but many aren't. And they don't deserve that abuse, especially since many of them are criminals because of some sort of suffering they experience.

Tumblr in general encourages revenge & dehumanization of "bad" people. Its no better than the criminal justice system in that regard, telling us that revenge is helpful, punishment is helpful, and we should all feed our gut desire to see bad people suffering as much as possible. & I do not subscribe to that. I don't think you can really be a prison abolitionist and subscribe to that (& in a larger sense I dont think you can hope to built a better society than we have currently and think like that). It's hard work sympathizing with people who do awful things but like I said, you can't let dehumanization thought patterns take root in your mind. I am very devoted to having compassion for everyone & once again people are surprised when that includes EVERYONE.

I'm not even really doing this for incels. I don't get in debates with people unless I believe they will actually listen to what I say and consider it in good faith, and many incels won't. But I'm not going to be a person who encourages this kind of self-harm, and I especially don't want to be someone who does that and justifies it to myself because they are "bad people" who "deserve it". I'm no cop or prison guard. And if there is someone who might be open to that kind of deprogramming, I want them to see my blog as a space that has compassion for their suffering. I want them to get better, not kill themselves and never get that chance. You can't have both.

[homestuckreplay]

Week 1 Retrospective: Who Is John Egbert?

It’s official - Homestuck is one week old today! And while a week is not a long run for a comic, it’s already got more pages than the author’s earlier work Bard Quest, so maybe it’s something worth recognizing. So I wanted to mark a week of Homestuck by doing a deep dive on what we’ve learned about our protagonist John Egbert so far. It’s some fact collection, some wild speculation, and some ongoing questions. It’s over 3000 words, so it’s under a readmore for anyone who’s interested.

If that doesn’t sound like a fun time to you (or even if it does), you can take the John Egbert Big 5 Personality Test to see how you score on John’s five key personality traits. It’s 14 multiple choice questions, so a much quicker read.

We’re introduced to John on page 4, where we’re given five key interests of his: bad movies, programming computers, paranormal lore, amateur magic, and gaming. I’ll take these one by one and use them as a framework for John’s character so far.

“You have a passion for REALLY TERRIBLE MOVIES.”

John has eleven (11) movie posters on his walls. Of these, three star Matthew McConaughey and two star Nicolas Cage. More notably, six have a Rotten Tomatoes rating below 50%, and two of these are below 10%. I haven’t seen any of these movies, but as far as I can tell, here are the one sentence summaries [broad spoilers for all these movies].

Little Monsters: A boy befriends a monster and visits the monster world, where they try to convert him into a monster too.

Con Air: A paroled man disrupts a gang of prisoner’s escape from a prison transport plane.

Deep Impact: Earth tries to prepare for extinction after a comet is found on a collision course with Earth.

Ghostbusters II: After going out of business, the Ghostbusters reunite to combat a negative energy slime monster.

Mac and Me: A boy befriends a young alien who gets separated from his family and lost on Earth.

Contact: An Earth scientist successfully discovers alien life and travels to an alien world.

A Time to Kill: A father is acquitted in court for killing the perpetrators of racial hate crimes against his daughter.

Failure to Launch: A 35 year old man’s parents hire a woman to persuade him to finally move out of their home.

Face/Off: A terrorist and a FBI agent go through facial transplant surgery and temporarily swap identities.

Armageddon: A group of space workmen go on a mission to stop an asteroid from destroying Earth. 

Ghost Dad: A man temporarily dies but is able to interact with his children in ghost form.

From this we can see that John really likes science fiction movies related to aliens, ghosts and monsters, as well as action comedy. We also know from page 21: ‘Films about impending apocalypse fascinate you’. A Time to Kill and Failure to Launch are the only ones that don’t fit his taste. The implication here is that John really loved Matthew McConaughey in Contact and so watched his other movies even though they were things he wouldn’t usually watch.

I’m curious if these movies are intended as clues to John’s character, the future of the comic, or both. In terms of his character, they make me see him as someone who’s imaginative and goofy, young and carefree, not concerned with other people’s opinions, more interested in watching movies for their surface meanings and exciting stories, maybe wants to escape to a different world, might be a little bit gay. 

In terms of the future of the comic, it could be that we’re going to see literal aliens or monsters - they could even be already here, keeping John ‘homestuck’. Slime monsters are particularly highlighted, with Slimer from Ghostbusters appearing on John’s shirt and computer background, and his chumhandle, ectoBiologist, relating to slime. Slime invasion honestly feels too obvious, and anyway, several of John’s movies are about befriending a more benign supernatural force - could John’s Pesterchum friends be something other than human? Or maybe it’s a more metaphorical meaning, referring to John having a very different life to his friends? 

Two of these movies feature Earth extinctions by giant space rocks, but there’s absolutely no indication of this being a real world threat John is dealing with. Again, it could refer more generally to a sudden, life changing event that’s about to happen to disrupt John’s current state, something that would fit thematically with this being John’s 13th birthday, a milestone age.

There’s also a theme of crime and the legal system in several movies, including Con Air, the one that’s been most highlighted. The most obvious interpretation of John’s dad right now is that he’s a clown or performer, but there’s an outside chance he could be in law enforcement, or a criminal. It’s even possible that he’s currently in hiding or some kind of safe house. This would explain John being ‘homestuck’ and sick of spending time with his dad.

Speaking of John’s dad, I’m concerned for him based on the Ghost Dad summary - the comic keeps teasing his presence, but we haven’t actually seen him yet. Could he be a ghost? Or become one at some point? Alternatively, we know John has an already dead relative - could his nanna be a ghost? Did John dropping her ashes release her ghost? Family is a really common theme in movies, so I don’t know if a large number of these movies being about family (especially fathers) is relevant, but I’m noting it all the same.

“You like to program computers but you are NOT VERY GOOD AT IT.”

John claims he ‘likes to program’, but it actually seems to make him angry. We first learn ‘[y]ou were never all that great with data structures and you find the concept [of the stack modus] puzzling and mildly irritating.’ We then see three files on John’s desktop, two in ^CAKE - ‘pff.^CAKE’ and ‘FUCK FUCK FUCK.^CAKE’ and one in ~ATH - ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH.~ATH’. These tell a clear narrative of John trying to work on his programming and getting increasingly more frustrated with his attempts, until inevitably giving up. Both of the programming languages are puns, too. ^ is often called a carat (carrot cake) while ~ is a tilde (til death). 

I know this is wild speculation, but… John started off coding in a harmless programming language, was already struggling, then for some reason switched over to the most ominous possible sounding language, screwed it up even worse, and now… he’s constantly haunted by the ghost of failed programming attempts in the form of his sylladex, which he appears to be new to using (he had no prior understanding of it on page 7 - although this could be handwaved due to video game tutorial logic), and which operates similarly to a computer program and seems to cause John endless frustration. He’ll have to figure out how to exploit the inventory system in ways that help him, which involves actually figuring out some stuff about coding, in order to partake in some real life ghostbusting, or monster hunting, or dealing with whatever threat he’ll have to deal with by using inventory hacks.

“You have a fondness for PARANORMAL LORE,” (...)

By far the interest of John’s that we’ve seen the least of so far, John’s love of the paranormal is mostly inferred through his movie preferences, and we don’t see any direct evidence of an interest in lore. However, I can’t stop fixating on John’s chumhandle: ectoBiologist. The comic’s first act was to draw attention to giving John a name, and for many 2009 kids, the names they go by online are more meaningful and representative of them than their real world names. 

‘ecto-’ means ‘outer, outside, external’ according to dictionary.com, and it’s actually a common prefix in a variety of fields of biology, but there’s no such thing as ‘ectobiology’ as a field, or an ‘ectobiologist’ - neither term has any search results prior to Homestuck. I think it’s way more likely that this refers to ectoplasm, a term from both cell biology and spiritualism that was popularized by Ghostbusters to mean any substance secreted by a ghost, in practice often manifesting as green slime. Slimer, who we can guess is John’s favorite, is a benign ghost made of pure ectoplasm. I love the idea that John loves this dumb ghost so much that he’s memorized all the lore about them in their appearances throughout the franchise, and devised this username based on being an expert on these ghosts right down to their biology (or at least thinking he is). 

The only catch is, ‘fondness for paranormal lore’ is very passive and doesn’t even imply much knowledge, much less action, while ‘biologist’ implies that John has been doing actual experiments. The idea of John trying to create a real life Slimer the same way other kids make slime in their kitchens is really entertaining, if an off the wall theory. Does ‘homestuck’ just mean John is grounded for an unethical science project? 

(...) “and are an aspiring AMATEUR MAGICIAN.”

The magic chest is one of the biggest, most eye catching and most colorful objects in John’s room. We see its contents on page 8, which lean more into joke store items than things a magician might use, except for the trick handcuffs and perhaps the collapsible sword. The narration on this page states that John is neither a skilled magician nor a cunning prankster. I’m nitpicking definitions here, but everything John has done so far has been way more about pranks than about magic. 

John’s uses of the magic chest to date are…

various putting things into his inventory and removing them (funny, but unintentionally)

combining fake arms with cake (p.36) out of necessity, which ‘makes the cake at least 300% more hilarious’

merging hat with beagle puss to create a clever disguise (p.45) and wearing it for 25+ pages, which he acknowledges is a ‘shitty disguise’

attaching fake arms to harlequin doll (p.65), which makes it ‘AT LEAST a million percent funnier’

All of which are definitely not magic tricks, and honestly not even pranks. Arguably John’s best and most successful prank so far has been when he pretended not to have arms for the first six pages, before revealing his arms after the interface had gone to the trouble of moving the cake off his magic chest to get him some arms.

John keeps thinking about reading Colonel Sassacre’s Guide to Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery, but always finding some excuse not to. He can’t read it until he captchalogues it, but once he does that, it gets buried in his inventory. He assumes that the book can tell him the exact percentage increase of hilarity a prank leads to, but it’s too big for him to actually look anything up. 

An outside theory for this that I don’t think is likely simply because it’s so much darker than the comic has been so far, is that John loves this book, but since the incident where his nanna was killed by a copy (perhaps even this copy?) he hasn’t been able to bring himself to read it. A far more likely theory is that while John is an aspiring amateur magician, it’s more of a big idea, and he hasn’t actually done any magic yet. This also tracks with his weaksauce pranks above. And if that’s true, then it says a lot about John that he defines himself by a hobby he aspires to but doesn’t actually practice - he’s someone with big dreams and less motivation, just like his big dream of going to collect the mail from his father despite the lack of motivation that’s kept him messing around for 70 pages. 

“You also like to play GAMES sometimes.”

Potentially most important of all is Gamer John. We get a list of games John likes to play from inspecting his CD tower the same way we get a list of movies from looking at his posters. 

Bard Quest

The Caper Havers

Problem Sleuth

And It Don’t Stop

What Pumpkin?

Ghostbusters II MMORPG

Little Monsters (for Nintendo)

Harry Anderson: Call My Bluff!

The first five games all reference previous work by the author of Homestuck, and as such probably don’t need in depth analysis. However, the fact that within the world of Homestuck, these are all games (instead of comics) is one of several suggestions that we should think of Homestuck as a game, something that needs further analysis. 

The next two games are video game adaptations of movies we know John likes, and the last is a branded video game from Harry Anderson, whose book we’ve already seen in John’s magic chest. Notably, none of these are real video games in our world either. It says a lot that John plays game versions of things he already likes (he’s put ‘countless manhours’ into this assortment of quality titles). 

However, it’s undeniable that the most important game in John’s life right now is Sburb. The poster is behind his head in the first panel, placed centrally with one of the only two splashes of color in the panel. The beta release is the only thing marked on his calendar for April besides his birthday, and the Sburb logo is even the picture printed on the calendar - perhaps it’s a calendar themed around new game releases? There’s clear delight on John’s face when he thinks about getting the beta, and his quest to fetch it from the recently delivered mail is the closest thing to a story this comic has so far.

Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about Sburb, so we don’t know what it says about John that he wants to play it. It’s publicized as the Game of the Year, and according to GameBro, the game may be about houses and the player may not get to thrash anything, although these details are provided by someone who hasn’t played the game so I’m not taking them as expert opinion. It might be multiplayer - TT has been pestering TG all day about playing it with her. Maybe John just wants to share a game with his friends.

Speaking of GameBro, John can’t stand the magazine, although he for some reason has a copy on his desk. He describes the publication as ‘a joke’ to TG, and he makes the effort to take it downstairs to the fire and burn it, presumably releasing asbestos fibers into the house and causing serious lung damage to himself and his father. Does he read this because it’s the only games magazine that exists? Or did he like it just fine until now, when it trashed the game he’s excited about, and now he’s furious with it? Either way, it tracks with John’s overall fondness for critically panned media that he would be angry about contrarian critics. 

–

All of this has left me with a few questions about John as our main character. These are the things that I’m keeping an eye on and trying to answer as the story continues.

What is John good at?

We hear so much about what John is bad at. He’s explicitly stated to be bad at programming, pranks, and magic. He’s bad at using his sylladex. He’s clumsy and knocked over his nanna’s ashes. He’s got bad taste in media. He’s funny but only when he doesn’t try to be, and even then he’s sometimes the butt of the joke, where the joke is how not funny John’s joke is. He was tempted to squawk like an imbecile and shit on his desk. He has like six different prankster props and he doesn’t even use all of them. I’m saying all this with love and kindness because he also just seems like such a sweet kid, but so far he doesn’t have any defined strengths or skills. 

Is he going to turn out to be really good at gaming and kick ass at Sburb? Are we going to get a curveball where it turns out John is an amazing baker, and he hates the cakes in his room and the smell of Betty Crocker because he can do so much better than that packet mix? Or is he starting off from this low point so he can develop skills as time goes on?

What is John’s relationship with his dad really like?

John doesn’t want his dad to monopolize his time and feels trapped in his room, despite his dad baking cakes and leaving notes on gifts telling John he’s proud of him. John’s dad gets his son one great present that John’s really appreciative of, and one terrible present that John immediately hates. All of this feels very reasonable and normal for a teen feeling misunderstood by a parent who’s trying their best. 

And then there’s the clowns.

John can excuse magical frivolity and practical japery, but he draws the line at harlequins. He’s an aspiring magician, but his dad’s figurines are ‘fucking garbage’ and his dad ‘sure can be a real cornball’. John seems like somebody who gets angry at ultimately unimportant things, like bad reviews of games, too many cakes, and harlequin figurines, but because of the subject matter it reads like an intense rivalry between two highly specific subcultures that outsiders would group together. John is really making a huge deal of needing to disguise himself and mentally prepare himself to go down and face his dad, and I want to know if there’s any genuine reason behind John’s fear, or if it’s solely the overdramatics I’m starting to think are typical of him.

Is John ‘Homestuck’?

‘Sometimes you feel like you are trapped in this room. Stuck, if you will, in a sense which possibly borders on the titular.’ (p.30)

John clearly feels like he’s stuck at home, but is this the extent of the title’s meaning? His dad has recently returned from getting groceries, so leaving the house is in theory possible. Reasons why John might be homestuck include: he’s not allowed to leave the house (for example, he’s grounded, or his dad is very controlling), he can leave the house but there’s nowhere to go (he lives near major roads, bodies of water, farms, or other obstacles, and there’s no public transport to get anywhere), or he can leave the house but it’s not safe to do so (there’s some sort of external threat, either supernatural like a monster or alien invasion, or mundane like a criminal or bomb threat). Seeing out of John’s window and into his front yard does not provide any clues; it looks like an extremely average front yard with a tree, swing and mailbox, and we know the mail was recently delivered, so there can’t be anything too world-ending happening in the neighborhood. Right now John’s goal (the Sburb Beta disc) is inside the house, so this might not get answered right away - in fact, my running theory is that the game itself might hold the answers, as its logo is a house.

What’s the differentiation between John and the narrator?

My biggest question of all, and one that probably deserves its own essay. I’m fascinated by the lines ‘In a kid's yard, a tree without a tire swing is like a proper gentleman without a monocle.’ (p.27) and ‘In a home, a FIREPLACE needs a fire, because that's what FIREPLACE is for.’ (p.50). These lines carry so much opinion, but because the narrator is constantly addressing John with the second person ‘you’, I don’t think these are John’s opinions. The narrator does have a window into John’s thoughts, so the line between them can be blurred, but there's clearly a distinction somewhere, because there have been pushbacks and disagreements between the two of them. 

One theory is that John’s dad is the narrator - John’s at home a lot for whatever reason, and so the constant and overbearing presence of his dad means that he can’t get him out of his head even when he’s alone, the commands at the top of each page reflecting John’s dad’s level of control over his son’s life. But I think this question is open ended enough that I’m not willing to commit to one theory yet. After all, we ‘examine 3rd and 4th walls of [John’s] room’ which is a directly meta allusion to the comic’s audience that only really makes sense if the narrator isn’t a character in the comic itself. 

–

I think John Egbert has been really well characterized so far. He feels like a real kid, one who keeps getting off track and forgetting what he should be doing, but one who it’s enough fun to get to know that I don’t really notice. While the main character in media often doesn’t end up being the most interesting character, I do want to keep an eye on John because I think he has a lot going on to analyze. Above the style and the world and the mechanics, John as a character is the aspect of the comic I’m most interested in right now.

[violetlunette]

Twst spoilers for Book 7 and playful land

Just a heads up I’m going to be discussing the only actual "villain" in TWST and why his characterization bothers me. Also, keep in mind this is for the games only.

Okay, I’m slowly putting together why Henrique’s design and characterization bothers me story-wise and I think I figured it out.

It’s because his portrayal goes against things TWST set up: that no one is a “villain” and their crimes can be overlooked, no matter what.

The Overblots boys are a prime example of this, namely Azul and the Tweels who tricked their entire dorm and several other students into dodgy, immoral contracts that essentially turned them into slaves (and, I believe, gave the trio the “right” to literally beat them, but don’t quote me on that last part). However, after his contracts are burned and he recovers from over blotting, everything seems forgotten with no consequences.

And it’s not just the main cast either, it’s the side foes as well.

Eliza kidnapped Idia and was going to give him the literal kiss of death to fuel her delusions and wish for a “happy marriage.” Yet she is portrayed comically and a minor inconvenience even though, again, she was going to murder Idia.

Rollo used an ancient flower to steal magic from mages causing havoc for the city and endangering everyone, but gets no official punishment. In fact, no one other than the main cast knows he was behind it.

Even Fellow and Gidel, who were fucking human traffickers and who submitted people to fates worse than death, weren’t portrayed as villains. They were antagonists and a threat, but not "villains." And in the end they dance off into the sunset to start a school without even a call out for their sins.

While I personally hated this theme—as I just hate the easily forgiven trope in general--I can’t deny that the writers were consistent in how they handled all the antagonists in the game.

As terrible as their actions were, they were given humanizing traits and had their acts hand waved at the end. (Mostly, anyway. Jamil’s rep apparently took a blow but nothing major.) The writers had a theme and they stuck to it. Then Henrique appears.

Henrique is the only actual villain in TWST without any sympathetic traits or attractive features. He is just presented as a fat, stupid, irredeemable bastard. And while it’s a change of pace, it’s also an inconsistency within TWST.

With every other for they are presented as hot, or at least cute. I mean, look at them;

Even the side villains are cute in a way;

And look at Henrique;

See how the pattern has been thrown? The only other ones that might be deemed “uncute” are Gantu, the Trick or Treaters, and the ghosts. (YMMV)

And then, these guys aren’t seen as villains, just obstacles. Henrique, on the other hand is presented as being the old stereotypical villain twst has always steered clear from.

Appearance aside, his personality is shown to be prideful, gluttonous, greedy, and manipulative who plays on people’s emotions to get what he wants. And there are no sympathetic traits shown to balance those out which, again, goes against everything that had been presented before.

For example; even though Eliza wants to MURDER Idia, we see that she is beloved by her people and we are told that the reason she’s the way she is is because she never got to fulfill her dream of a perfect wedding due to being invaded and murdered that day.

Another one is Rollo. Although, he causes a lot of harm, the audience sees that this is a trauma response due to losing his younger brother who misused magic.

Now, the reason for this MIGHT be because when we see Henrique it’s in Lilia’s dream.

Yes, it's all Lilia’s memories but they’re being brought to the surface by Malleus’ spell which, as we saw in other dreams such as Epel’s, has interesting effects. Therefore it’s possible that Henrique wasn’t completely one dimensional or the only ugly person in the story. After all, Lilia would have bias pov against the man who lead the Silver Owls to invade his homeland. In reality, Henrique could have been handsome, just a bit beefy and he could had “sympathetic” reasons that Lilia wasn’t aware of. But alas, that’s theory.

As of now, we have to take it at face value that Henrique was a pathetic, nonredeemable man whose hideousness is reflected inside and out. And whose characterization conflicts with TWST’s theme.

Another reason is that it could be because Henrique wasn’t the main antagonist; The Knight of the Dawn was.

After all, he slayed Malleus’ parents and led the Silver Owls to invade. Therefore, the Knight was the main villain of Lilia’s and Henrique was just the villainous force pushing him, like Riddle’s mom in book 1 and the owners of the carnival in the Playful Land event. But in that case the writers should have kept Henrique faceless and off screen just like the other two examples. However, I acknowledge that would be harder as Henrique plays a more hands on role than the other two. In which case, he probably should of had a helmet on. That way it keeps up the theme of actual “villains” being faceless.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m NOT saying justice for the bastard.

As stated, he was a prideful, greedy bastard that manipulated others emotionally to get wanted. He single-handedly started a war using the fear people had for the fae and manipulated the Knight of the Dawn through his devotion to Leah and the king, all to get Malenore’s amber. He had no empathy for those around him and cared not for the people who were hurt because of him. He even bragged about wanting to use Malleus as a stead after they killed his mother. Oh, and there’s the whole stealing resources and invading a foreign land thing.

Henrique was a bastard and a villain through and through. And because of that, he out of place here.

He doesn’t fit the story or pattern of villains shown before. He doesn’t fit TWST’s theme. His character doesn’t belong.

Am I over thinking it? Obviously. But like I said, it just bothers me from a story perspective. Sure I’m misunderstanding something and I’m sure others will point it out. This post is just to sort my thoughts as I’m trying to figure out what bugs me about Henrique’s portrayal. If anyone has similar thoughts, pleas share.

[dualityvn]

HELLOOOOO I may be new but I backread A LOT and it just made me so sad (and beyond angry tbh) seeing the way people treat Keith and Tenebris. Like, I get that some people are weird but YOU GUYS DIDN'T DO ANYTHING??? LIKE, IS EXISTING THAT BIG OF A CRIME??? And then people started getting upset at Keith for being pissed that he was being treated like shit?? Telling him he's a monster for being mad???? I really don't get that because what did yall expect, that he would just take it? And then calling him a monster for being mad... but that doesn't make someone a monster, it just makes them human? It's a perfectly normal and acceptable response?????????? Anyways, I wish to give both precious boys big hugs and tell them how proud I am of them.

Keith, I'm proud of you for getting upset... weird thing to be proud of huh? But I am, people do not get the right to treat you like this and I'm proud of you for being fed up with it and standing up for yourself. You have every right to be pissed at people when they wrong you. Tenebris, I'm proud of you for not taking shit from no one. People are saying rude crap? TELL THEM OFF!! And that's exactly what you did, you stood up for Keith and your resilience against the stuff being said is award-worthy.

Anyways *screams affectionately and smothers them with kisses* LOVE YOU BOTHHHH!!! <3333 (PS. I am well aware that not everything that was being said was serious and most of it was for roleplay purposes and will not hold this stuff against those people, but for the people who genuinely found Tenebris and Keith's suffering amusing, or even arousing... please seek help immediately /sillybutnotsilly!!! And for those who found my message offensive in any way.. come for me, attack me in the comments, I dare you /srs. ALSO SORRY FOR YAPPING SO MUCH I just hate seeing my favourite boys being hated on for literally sharing the same plane of existence 😞)

Ah, I believe this time the conflict started because Keith killed Jacob a while back, who had fans. And then he was forced to dye his hair pink and it sorta escalated from there.

"Thank you, my love. Though I'm sure I still have a lot to learn about controlling my reactions better..." - Keith

"Eh, I'm used to it. Been doing it since we were kids." - Tenebris

[selenedistress]

Unsounded is an amazing comic with wonderful characters and dialogue. I have read it one and a half times now, and I think I have found satisfactory answers to a very important question. What are the characters' opinions on trans people?

Duane Adelier: I think he would be supportive of trans people if he met and talked to one. He would still need a bit more convincing to accept non-binary genders though, and he'd probably still be casually misogynistic.

Sette Frummagem: She would probably be supportive but would also make transphobic jokes occasionally, no matter what boundaries any individual trans people have set. I'd put the rest of the Frummagem family in this category, with varying degrees of disrespect, except from Anadyne, who i think would be just supportive, as she is not interested in petty bouts of one-ups-manship.

Mathis Quigley: I don't think he cares for trans people. But only because he is generally misanthropic, not because he is particularly bigoted. Nevertheless, I wouldn't expect any allyship from him.

Matty: He's a sweet baby boy. He would definitely be supportive.

Jivi: He would be supportive, but he would be prickly about it initially. Like he might get one's name or pronouns wrong and when they correct him he'd get mad, but I think that eventually he would get over it and be normal about it.

Emil Toma: There is a point where Mathis debates Duane's humanity but Emil is like "you say your name is Duane and I accept it and that's how I'll treat you". So I think he would be supportive of trans people. If a trans person committed crimes against the crescian queen, Emil would definitely use their correct name and pronouns as he arrested them.

Elka: She would be generally positive, but she would misgender a trans person she thinks did something bad.

Bastion Winalils: Supportive, but he may or may not be a chaser.

Queen Sonorie: Of course she is supportive of trans people. However, her plans as a politician do not include them, as she believes she has much more pressing matters to attend to.

General Bell: If Bell lived in the current real world he would be a youtuber that made videos about being an alpha male, so I'm pretty sure he would be a transphobe.

Cutter: Transphobic, but only because he hates everyone already.

Starfish: Transphobic. He would commit hate crimes.

Murkoph: Supportive. He would commit hate crimes.

[codenamesazanka]

Dekus "I want to save that little boy" (instead of the ADULT MAN who was right in front of him and ALSO a victim) never sat right with me and I hate that I was right. The story gave up on Shigaraki before deku even decided to save hi-- I mean the little boy

It was just so weird that Deku's supposed/perceived great amazing compassionate let's-turn-into-besties saving hinged on... the memory of a crying child 15 years in the past. He was never going to be able to bring the child into reality and the present, save some truly bullshit quirk magic, so it was always going to be a 'healing past trauma' gesture to stop Shigaraki's anger and destruction, which means in terms of what will actually happen as actions would be at best Shigaraki meekly head off to jail to pay for his very real present crimes and Deku might feel enough pity to visit him from time to time; at worst Shigaraki will have to kill himself off to pay for his very real present crimes.

At no point did any of this involved Deku advocating for the Villain Shigaraki against other Heroes and the world and treating him as human despite his very real present crimes because Deku doesn't need to - he only needs to deal with The Crying Child.

Plus like. What if he had never seen that psychic vision of The Crying Child? What if he only just saw Angry Adult Shigaraki? Does that mean Shigaraki doesn't deserve to be saved? No, not after what we readers have found out about him. It does however mean Deku becomes a dick who only cares about someone is in pain if they're visibly looking like they're in pain, and he can consider them innocent and good in some sense (see: Overhaul as someone who's clearly unwell but is Evil so no saving for him until he shows remorse!). Without the very convenient psychic vision of The Crying Child, Deku would've just proceeded with defeating a visibly-showing-no-remorse-but-readers-know-his-clear-agonizing-nihilism Shigaraki.

(If the story had just gone with the 'You look like you needed saving' line from the end of Chapter 295 because Deku saw Angry Adult Shigaraki struggling against the creepy parasitic AFO, it would've worked out better!!! But no!!! It turns out he only cared because he felt inside that a little boy crying. So the body horror merge wasn't enough for Deku to care; and he backs this up by only ever talking about saving the Crying Child from then on.

But I guess if Deku wanted to save Angry Adult Shigaraki, he would have to ask why Shigaraki ended up with AFO in the first place. Why Shigaraki is so angry. Why Shigaraki became a villain, and insist on destroying. And all answers would inevitably end up being 'Heroes failed for 15 years to save him from AFO*, failed to give show him anything other than rejection, failed to save his friends and now he's angry on their behalf as well,' which means Deku would actually have to address the major flaws of the society he lives in, which he and the story was never going to do because Heroes! So! Cool! Wish Upon Them Like Gods!

*doesn't matter that AFO is a supervillain and hid him away, it's still a failure on the Heroes' part; even worse failure, because All Might went and beat AFO's head to a pulp without ever finding all those kidnapped children and corpse experiments, which is a massive oversight????

It's possible it would've still been 'Shigaraki Thinks Decay Made Him Evil :(' but by Act III Shigaraki has also clearly integrated the League's grievances into his own, so it wasn't just Decay Made Him Evil. The Crying Child allowed the story and Deku to cut out the League context, and only add it in later, as it did in 418. Taking the easy way out.)

So yeah. 'I want to save that little boy!' filled me with dread since day one. Shigaraki was right there, an ugly adult, sure, but still a victim of society and AFO. But Deku simply could not care about Shigaraki without seeing the frozen in time Tenko. Is it any wonder that when it came time for this final battle, because there was only Adult Shigaraki In Physical Form, Deku can smash without a care?

But really he's been disregarding anything Shigaraki actually says and smashing Shigaraki without care all along even knowing of The Crying Child inside since Chapter 369. So. Saving!

[davekat-sucks]

I have my troll headcanons, and this is gonna be a long one, I’m doing all the Beta trolls. Also note these headcanons assume all characters survive and exist on Earth C.

Aradia Megido is trying to puck back up on the hobbies she abandoned when she became a ghost, and with her luck Earth has a vast archeological expanse of history and paleontology that Alternia destroyed to legitimize the Condesce’s rule, and to erase any mention of organized rebellion against the empire. Of course, history still existed, but is almost exclusively known by highbloods who have the class and age to study writing, own journals to write on, live long enough to document dozens of sweeps of their life history, and have less of a chance to get culled by drones controlling population growth. Reassembling Alternian history on Earth C is like finishing a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces hiding across the empty void of space. Aradia likes to search for fossils, but her interest in the dead and telekinetic connection with ghosts make her a professional paranormal investigator as well, she once snuck into a haunted house being filmed for a ghost hunters TV show, and was caught on camera. Her ripped clothes and ruffled hair from attempting a breaking and entering made her look like an undead troll.

Tavros thinks Pokémon is too simple and amateur for him, when in reality he’s mad he still loses in competitive matches in both card game and online game. He still likes the Pokémon anime! A boy who never grows up going on adventures against an organized crime syndicate trying to steal a powerful ally and nonverbal creature! Not to mention that the Ash character has friends to tag along on their perilous journey! When it comes to fighting with mythical magical monsters and complex bullshit with cards, Tavros has a soft spot for Yu-Gi-Oh, and Seto Kaiba reminds him of a troll that kept on meddling with him… and still does.

Sollux is possibly the best software technician on Earth C. He is an admin for a forum that discusses obscure desktop/master software. He obviously uses Linux and Gnu, and codes .ath viruses as practice for whitehat hackers to disarm. His Earth C hive is entirely themed by bifurcation. His curtains, his furniture, his goddamn toilet are themed by 2 colors. Karkat calls it ugly, Kanaya calls it creative. To cope with his psiionics and his loss of them, Sollux teamed up with Aradia, Karkat, and Feferi to code and design a walkie talkie that can talk to the recently deceased, this was also done so people could stop running specifically to him for predictions of armageddon.

Karkat is trying very hard to accustom himself to human culture, he has watched a lot of human film (mostly American, a few Fench and Soviet films and a bunch of Tokusatsu and Anime slop) to get why humans were like that, and if everyone was like Dave and Rose. He finds human film boring and generic, but continues to watch it anyway, to connect with the human way of life. He also follows John’s Youtube account… to leave hate comments, they don’t even attack John’s appearance or the points John makes about the film, it’s general allusions to how frustrated he gets watching John’s videos.

Nepeta has been banned from New York C’s central park zoo for scaring the bears at their enclosure and intimidating them into smashing the glass. Nepeta was allowed back in 2 years later when she promised she would not harm any animals because “it would be too easy to hunt them.” Nepeta is a professional huntress who is unique in that she doesn’t use firearms, she just catches the animal in her mouth and slices their neck if it’s big game like deer or wild boar. She meets her maximum bag capacity within a day. She is the scourge of human huntsmen and she is known as “the green lioness” to many.

Kanaya was able to pass on the duties of brooding cavern patrol once the first Jadebloods reached maturation after 9 sweeps. On Earth she was introduced to a new series of monsters and beasts after being accustomed to the animated corpses she’d hunt during the Alternian day and rainbow drinkers in her trashy teengrub erotica. Since she was always around Rose, a girlfriend and devout student of zoologically dubious, she became a cryptozoologist and eventually a bigfoot hunter. Her agility, strength, night vision, and rainbow drinker hearing made her perfect for hunting North America C’s most hidden animal. She would mostly stalk the rustling of leaves and moaning from the shadows of the forest to find it’s a human hiker or a bear, until she actually caught Bigfoot in an open Brush 30 miles West of Marquette C, Michigan C. Notably sightings were made days after Kanaya caught the creature, and after a week on news channels, talk shows, radio interviews, getting a nobel prize in biology and ecology, and getting a giant golden trophy called the “first big step” she now is treading westwards for possible other bigfoot sighted from California to Idaho. That is, when she can schedule it, she has a girlfriend she also wants to be there for. Of course, Rose has joined Kanaya on a few bigfoot searches to support her girlfriend.

Terezi IS the law. Professional trollcop and private investigator, she has her own TV show like that of Chris Hansen where she roleplays as different people, ranging from kids that pedophiles prey on to lone wolfs and depressed deadbeats that drug cartels search for to hire as peddlers and soldiers. Terezi’s strongest expertise is hunting down anti-troll hate groups, since she gets to be herself instead of roleplay as a human. She struggles the most catching anti-human troll groups and Neo-Condescites considering she has to fight against her own species, which have an easier time sniffing out if she’s faking her human archetype and some of them are super strong indigobloods.

Vriska haaaaaaaates how boring and fake human roleplaying games are. In FLARP you had real costumes, stat bats, real loot, month long continuous sessions, and dire consequences if you lose. To keep herself not bored she has become a practitioner of the extreme sport of rock climbing, since Vriska hated walking down and up all those stairs just to get to her lusus, and climbing a shear face would be more safe than slipping on those infernal steps! She also wanted one day for her lusus to watch her climb, as spidermom laud down in that pit of webs, too fat and loud to crawl up herself. Spidermom has been dead for sweeps now so Vriska still won. GET F8CKED FUSSYF8NGS!!!!!!!!

Equius was an unfortunate troll who got caught up in strange human subcultures, and that subculture was human hypermasculinity and “alpha” male mentality. He has a Youtube channel, Twitter, and Instagram dedicated to exercising routines, habits, and hobbies that make male trolls, humans, carapacians, and even denizens respected leaders in their community. Equius tried to co-opt My Little Pony as being masculine and sigma despite the protagonists being all colorful horses. Equius believes all of the protagonist ponies (the mane 6 as they’re called in fandom circles) each hold masculine traits that can correlate with the masculine archetypes in alpha men. Think how Twilight Sparkle exemplifies intelligence and planning, AppleJack has strength and stoicism, Rarity appreciates natural beauty and appearence, etc. Also they are horses, and Equius is frustrated that humans took the maned roarbeast (lions) and striped fangbeast (tigers) as the mascot of alpha males. Equius made his own personal gym in his hive because he was banned from all the gyms for excessive sweating and never cleaning up his station. He films fighting tutorials with his combat robots, but they all break in one punch, so Nepeta has to be invited for any successful demonstrations on how to demonstrate Equius’s fighting style and not break in one punch.

Gamzee is in a mental Asylum becaise of the whole murder thing and has only broken off from Lord English’s control for the first time in his life. He expresses himself by rhyming the GREGCLOUROIAN WICKED RHYTHMS for THE FROWNING MASSES to proselytize the NEW COMING OF THE DARKER CARNIVAL. After 5 sweeps in a straitjacket Gamzee was deemed sane and pacified, so he can finally start his real life. He immediately asked Tavros to start dueting some sick bars he wrote in the brig to bring forth the new prophesy of the evanjesters. Tavros agreed without hesitation. “Mike Club” and “Wild T” sell albums as the “UNHINGED PAGLIACCI TROUPE” and have gotten many a negative review as “the worst rappers in all paradox space” but in the end, built up a dedicated fanbase of clownfolk and followers of the true faith.

Eridan doesn’t go out much, if at all. He plays a lot of video games, grand strategy, roleplaying games, a few puzzle games. He feels mixed about First Person Shooters and asks for a good story in an FPS campaign. He sees himself as honorablenand only shoots with a reason, like how he killed lusii to feed G’bolg’lyb and stop the vast glub. He doesn’t want to shoot people because some authority tells him to! Honest! Ask Sollux and he’ll agree Eridan shot in self defense! And Sollux is still alive and happier that he doesn’t hear the boices ofbthe dead doesn’t he?! Maybe Sollux should THANK HIM FOR BEING CONSIDERATE. Sorry what was I talking about? Eridan does not regret a lot of things, but he will still talk about them when you bring them up to insist he does not regret anything, nope, he’s fine. He does hang around with the people, or rather, person he tolerates. Karkat. Everyone else are lowbloods that don’t like him because he’s better than them so they insult him and say he smells bad when that’s the natural smell of the ocean and they don’t understand how important he is, or Feferi who toyed with his emotions and left him for some bipolar mustardblood and avoided him after ALL HE DUD FOR HER AND WAS SO NICE TO HER AND SHE DIDN’T RECIPROCATE THOSE FEELINGS wait what was I talking about? Eridan insists he does not need help. He’s fine. He’s fine fine fine fine fin.

Feferi loves Spongebob Squarepants, it’s a match made in heaven, but she’s not obsessed with it. She still went far enough to paint her recuperacoon blue with the colorful flowers that dotted the oceans of Bikini Bottom. She is an advocate for saving all the coral reefs and has sued many companies with her nonprofit organization and vast personal wealth for spillover of hazardous chemicals into protected waters. Considering how often CrockerCorp gets into these environmentalist lawsuits, Feferi gets under Jane’s nerves. A lot.

Final thoughts. Eridan, Karkat, Nepeta, Vriska, Tavros, and Terezi (sometimes Sollux but he’s busy most of the time) all run a discord for roleplaying and video games. Eridan Karkat and Tavros like to play the Elder Scrolls series, Sollux likes to play the Fallout series, Vriska, Nepeta, and Terezi like both. Sollux tried to get Eridan to play Fallout: New Vegas once, but Eridan got bored after a few hours and thought the morality system was too simple. Between the organized disciplined and stable Caesar’s Legion or the corrupt incompetent bureaucrats of the New California Republic, or the selfish authoritarian Mr. House, or you thrusting the wasteland into chaos as you throw all 3 of the remaining lighthouses of civilization into collapse. Sollux has a let’s play channel but the only uploads on it are Nepeta’s playthrough of Postal 2 she shared on the discord server.

Karkat does a lot of human movie watchparties with his old friends to keep his trollian friends close enough that they don’t kill each other or wander off on this new weird alien world, and to his surprise they like some of the human films even though they are bottom of the barrel compared to peak alternian film. Each of the trolls favorite films are:

Aradia: Carrie (1976)

Tavros: Pokémon the First Movie (2000)

Sollux: The Matrix (1999)

Karkat: Con Air (1996)

Nepeta: The Lion King (1994)

Kanaya Maryam: Harry and the Hendersons (1987)

Terezi: Trolls (2016)

Vriska: Pirates of the Caribbean (2005)

Equius: Spirit (2003) and Fight Club (1999)

Gamzee: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Eridan: Waterloo (1970)

Feferi: Atlantis the Lost Empire (2001)

Final fact: since films from the beta kids library still had a chronological year, the release year of films gets confusing, so to make up for it, films on Earth C are released on a separate calendar, the year on the Earth C Planetary Film Board is equal to current year (number of years after the original kids touched down on Earth C) plus 2009. Old Alternian films are hard to chronologically measure since they were made billions of years before April 2009.

This is a long one!

These are all amazing!

[catbountry]

Does anybody else remember Pandora? Not the box, or the fictional planet where James Cameron's blue alien cat people live where there's a literal mineral called "unobtanium" that can only be harvested from that particular planet. My man literally called that shit "unobtanium," fucking portmanteau of "unobtainable" and the "-ium" suffix for newer elements. No. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything else I'm writing beyond this point. This is a post about music.

This is a post about the customizable internet radio station Pandora. And also it's going to briefly cover ClickRadio, it's going to talk about my experiences with YouTube Music, Spotify, my own iPod and how I find and listen to music, and how it's a core part of my creative process and I put a bunch of music references in pretty much all of my creative work. None of it being musical, by the way. I can barely carry a tune and I can't play any instruments more complicated than a kazoo.

It also got really long and rambly, look, I'm high, I'm sorry. You've been warned.

It's 2001. I'm in high school. My life looks like this drawing I made a few weeks ago.

Music is a big part of my life. The internet was a lot slower. It would take several minutes to download an .mp3 file of a song that was only about three and a half minutes long, so I would listen to the radio a lot. But the thing about listening tuning into radio is that it's not the internet. You can't pick which song to listen to whenever you want. If you want that, your best bet is to own the songs you want on their physical CD releases, or risk exposing your mom's computer to a million viruses. But in order to skip a song, you have to press a physical button to skip a song. And of course, if you're listening to the radio where you can discover new songs, you can't skip the latest Limp Bizkit or Disturbed track with the vain hope that maybe they'll play "One-Armed Scissor" by At The Drive-In or "Go With the Flow" by Queens of the Stone Age, or any single off of Kid A. Everything you hated the most, hated more than Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys, was all lumped together under the formless "alternative rock" label, which weirdly included hip-hop artists like Eminem, House of Pain, Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Gorillaz and Outkast; all stuff that I guess radio stations looked at and thought "yeah, this can appeal to white people."

You know I heard Dynamite Hack's version of "Boyz N The Hood" before I ever heard Eazy-E's? That should be a crime. That should be considered a human right's violation. Fuck you, Dynamite Hack for introducing the entire world to the concept of ironic hipster covers hip-hop songs which led to the fucking white people with ukeleles versions of Tupac songs. I am so glad that we, as a society, have all come together against these dynamite hacks and decided this was cringe and something that belongs in the past.

But this isn't an essay on awful YouTube music trends of the early 2010's, this is listening to music in the internet age in the early 2000's.

In 2001, ClickRadio launched. It was a desktop application that allowed you to listen to radio stations via the internet, but it had something real radio stations did not; if a song like, say, Dynamite Hack's cover of "Boys N The Hood" came on, you could click a thumbs down button and it would let out this cartoonishly loud "thud" and then that station would never play that song for you again. And if they played a song you really liked? You could click a thumb's up button and it would play that song more often.

I cannot understate how fucking mindblowing an idea this was in the early 2000's. Yes, ClickRadio would slow down your computer as the Neopets Flash games you would play gringing for Neopoints to get a Halloween brush for your Lupe that you named after a member of your favorite band. Anybody else do that?

No? Just me? Okay then.

ClickRadio would quickly get enshittificated, within only about a year or two being filled with more and more unskippable ads. I went back to just loading up MP3s in Winamp and playing music that way by the time I was in college, but it was a pain having to listen to whatever song I had physically on my hard drive, or a few years later, going to YouTube to see if somebody uploaded a crusty version of a NoMeansNo song with a Spanish-speaking DJ speaking in the opening bits of the video. Not ideal.

But then Pandora showed up.

I don't remember where I first heard about Pandora, but after Napster, there were a bunch of music start-ups hoping to be legitimate in the eyes of artists and record labels. Clickradio was just a radio station. But Pandora... was an experiment of The Algorithm.

You see, Pandora started what is known as the Music Genome Project, a way of organizing music into hundreds of different subgenres across five large umbrella genres; Pop/Rock, Hip Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music and Classical. What Pandora did was use this as a way to allow users to craft their own custom radio stations. And not only would it play the stuff you liked, but it would be tailored to a seed artist or song; you put in Nirvana, you get a lot of 90's alt rock radio faire, but then maybe it plays Mudhoney. Maybe it plays Sonic Youth. Maybe it plays Melvins, and you like it. And when you give a thumbs up, you hear more and more artists in similar subgenres. And let's say you've been looking into obscure or underground music for years before you start using Pandora, and suddenly you're introduced to artists you never would have come across more organically. And buddy, you'd bet my Pandora station was a fucking hodgepodge of hundreds of seeds, which allowed me to discover highly influential /mu/ core bands like Swans, Animal Collective and Neutral Milk Hotel, but also bands that are so obscure that their Spotify listens are in the lower four digits at maximum and maybe a couple tens of thousands of views on YouTube. So many songs I found through Pandora are from bands that I very rarely hear a lot of people talk about, but they've made songs that have just lived in my brain for decades.

And for a couple years, I'd be listening to Pandora radio while writing up new TF2 fanfiction to terrorize TF2chan with. Certain songs would come up so often because I specifically bookmarked them. I didn't really know a lot about shoegaze before Pandora, but now I own a physical copy of all three of Slowdive's albums, and you fucking bet "When the Sun Hits" was in heavy rotation while I was writing Respawn of the Dead.

Yes, this was playing while I was writing out Respawn of the Dead, chapter by chapter. And so was "Beautiful Plateau" by Sonic Youth, "The Sound" by Swans, "Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and "End of the Line" by Murder By Death. And also this song by a band called The Clock Work Army, which split up and reformed into another band called Calico Horses, and I know this because I found this out while trying to track down a song that would play constantly on my Pandora station and it has, as of writing this sentence, 2,588 listens. And it might have more by the time you read this because I might just put it on loop because oh my god, I love this song so much, it hits so perfect for me, why don't more people know about this song?

It's not on YouTube, where I usually tend to listen to music, since I'll go through a rotation of songs that I call "work songs." I put on music while I write, and some songs are just so perfect that I can listen to them on loop with a very select number of songs that just never, ever get old for me. My neurons in my brain light up as though I was hearing it again for the first time.

Swans, Sigur Ros and The Dillinger Escape Plan are all artists who I found through Pandora that I've had the privilege to see live. By the time I was just discovering bands because I had a bunch of friends and mutuals with similar taste in music to mine, Pandora was slowly getting more and more ads. It was getting to the point where the free service would, if you were lucky, play only three or four songs before playing an ad. And when the length of those songs can span anywhere from less than three minutes for much of my beloved 80's and early 90's punk, to up to a half an hour for post-rock, noise, or ambient music. And the number of ads that played between songs had increased. What was just one every half an hour or so was now two to three for what could potentially be only after seven minutes of music. Pandora really doesn't like it if the music you like includes a lot of songs that are longer than an episode of The Simpsons.

I never hear anybody talk about Pandora anymore. Spotify is THE name in internet music streaming, and it favors listens of entire albums and other people's playlists. I don't like Spotify; sometimes I just want a specific song from a specific album. I could make a playlist of these "work songs," but I like when YouTube notices that I'm listening to music, and in the recommendeds, there's another song that I've listened to on repeat. Why yes, I would like you to play "Classical Homicide" by Dälek for me again. What's that? An hour loop of Deadmau5's "Professional Griefers" featuring Gerard Way? Yes please. I apologize for nothing. That dude's way better than Skrillex.

God, do you guys remember the Deadmau5/Skrillex shipping that was all over Tumblr in the early 2010's. I remember it. I remember it so hard. Everybody shipping them and the members of Daft Punk, posting Steam Powered Giraffe (blech) and Die Antwoord (lol) on my dashboard. In Die Antwoord's defense, they had some pretty funny music videos.

I got AdBlocker for YouTube, so the ads aren't a problem there. I mean, I could make a playlist for Spotify of my go-to songs, but I'd have to deal with ads. And there's something nice about YouTube's robots that sell my precious data to faceless corporations at least having the courtesy to be like "You look like you could use another stream of 'Anything (Viva!)' by Foetus. Or Scraping Foetus off the Wheel. Or... whatever, fuck it, it's J.G. Thirwell's band, okay? It's the guy that does the music for Venture Brothers."

Foetus was introduced to me through a friend but it was Pandora serving me up more of their music that made their albums "nail" and "Flow" ones that got the honor of Being Downloaded onto my iPod so I can Listen to This in my Car. I still use my iPod and even if there's albums that I haven't gone back to in years on there, I like having them there. I haven't listened to the soundtrack for Panty and Stocking in ages but having access to it so that I can FLY AWAY NOW, FLY AWAY NOW, FLY AWAAAYYYY on a long drive? I like having that option.

I still buy CDs so I can burn albums onto my iPod. My iPod doesn't have ads and switching between artists doesn't mean I have to flip through a CD binder. I also try to buy albums off of Bandcamp. Especially for smaller artists, or artists whose work I love enough to want to give them my money. I don't want to listen to ads. It throws off my workflow, shakes me out of the trance-like state that is pure, focused creativity. Whether it's working on comics or thinking about things I want to do in those comics, I'm usually listening to music. Sometimes the same album, hundreds of times over. I admit I haven't listened to that much King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, but I've listened to Nonagon Infinity front to back more times than I can count.

Nowadays it feels like I don't have a lot of friends who share my taste in music. I've so fully entrenched myself in fandom circles that I've been exposed to the average person's taste in music and I'm like "oh yeah, most people aren't as big of a fucking nerd about this as you are." You know how hard it is to get people who aren't music nerds to get into The Residents? Everybody I know that likes them already knew about them before we met, and people who had never heard of them before they met me usually find them deeply weird and never get fucking obsessed with them like I have. I own a physical copy of, not their original version of their album The King and Eye, which is an entire album of them covering Elvis that sounds like this, but the fucking remix of that album that does shit like this to their covers of Elvis songs. And you know what? I love both versions, but that remix of their cover of "Surrender" is a work song.

Listening to music is the only way I can guarantee that I'm actually working on something and not playing with my phone. I guess what I'm saying is... it sure would be nice if Pandora existed like it did back then right now.

Especially because I stopped cleaning up a page of my horrible Deltarune fan comic (MASSIVE Dead Dove warning, not even kidding, the entire story hinges on some very upsetting topics) just to write all this down and make sure there were links to every song in this essay. And like... I've even used the comic as a not-so-clandestine way into tricking them into listening to my music before. Whether it be directly namedropping bands and songs, writing about a specific character's taste in music and using that in the story somehow, or literally just making the title of one of my comic installments... this.

It is really good. 686 listens on YouTube. Absolutely criminal. And the example above? That's me not putting in hundreds of references into the comic and wondering if anybody else has noticed them.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am a huge music nerd, even though I always feel like I'm getting into artists super late (unless they're like Death Grips, but that was only after The Money Store had come out), but I fucking hate Spotify. I want more physical releases that can be preserved digitally, and I don't have the money to get into collecting vinyls as a hobby. All the vinyl I own is toys, and uh... I own a lot of those.

Thank you for reading through pure, uncut music autism mixed in with nostalgia and griping about capitalism because that's apparently where my head is at all the time when I'm not daydreaming my little stories or making up video essays in my head that will never be made. That's why I do stream of consciousness Tumblr essays full of minute details that absolutely are not necessary, but this is how my goddamn ADHD brain works. Now you know what it's like to be in my Discord server.

That post is, of course, pinned in the music channel.

As it should be.

... Fuck Pandora, I don't even fuck with it no more, I miss Grooveshark, weh, my playlist on that site was eight hours long before they shut it down in 2014. Devastated. I was in the middle of using it when it went offline.

Okay now I'm done for real, sorry.

[hologramcowboy]

I usually stay far away from Twitter and fandom drama and I don't follow fandom groups but given the dehumanizing posts I've been seeing online, I am going on a fairly long rant, this is just my view, of course, so please discard it if not relevant to you:

The people making posts like these:

are at the core of the bully mentality. You are dehumanizing a Human Being with the entitlement that you get to define how a negative experience affects them. You do not, in any universe, get to tell someone who has been affected by something at what level they have been affected. Simply because you are not them. Furthermore, you are biased and discriminating against Jared Padalecki because he is a celebrity. Jared is a human being first and foremost and, as we've seen in the past, he does do social listening. This means death threats and other cyber crimes do affect him, not to mention the very real stalking some of you do when he moves from country to country. You end up following him under his hotel or even worse situations.

This discussion happening within fandom should include him because he is a direct victim. Also, the intent to commit cyber crimes and sending death threats does not get cancelled out just because that person may or may not have read the thread/post. Do you get this? Do you understand that if your intention and energy is vile, whether the content reaches your target or not, your cyber crime is still in effect? "Jared is a big boy and he doesn't care". Really? In what universe would you be okay with receiving death threats, would your family love that for you? Oh, they would not? So why on earth would you say it is alright that Jared received death threats? Fans do affect an actor's psyche, actors live to bring you joy and when they see you go toxic and dangerous it does affect their psyche.

Aside from this, as mentioned earlier, some of you actually stalk him at cons and at different locations and do so with hateful intent. The gravity of your actions is what causes actors to hide in public, avoid open spaces, reinforce their security, have panic attacks and fear for their life. Yet here you are, online, claiming that it's all good because said person is a celebrity so who cares.

If you dislike Jared, that's a matter of taste and your business but if you dehumanize Jared to the point of denying the very real atrocious actions perpetuated towards him, then you are no different than the perpetrators. You are, in fact, the enablers so you are even worse. A bad intention or idea cannot form into action unless people enable it and you played a key part with your bias and lack of care.

Think of all that evil hitting your child or loved one or even yourself, is it still nothing now? Do you see how wrong it is to minimize the abuse people perpetuate? Jared is a kind human being, so he avoids getting into drama as much as he can but that doesn't mean he is not affected. Also, someone not being affected is never, ever, an excuse to abuse said person. It's pretty interesting how someone suddenly doesn't count as human in your eyes. Talking about the abuse Jared gets in no way takes away from the other victims, in fact, it provides evidence of the intent and maliciousness of the people who attacked those victims. So it is highly important to consider as well as discuss. If you actually care about the topic at hand and the people involved that is. If you actually cared about shifting paradigms and improving fandom experience.

Lastly, Jared does deserve an apology too, the behavior displayed towards him is inhuman, degrading and damaging. He's no different than all the other persons at the receiving end of atrocious behaviors. The fact that you cannot comprehend that shows you lack humanity and empathy. If this was you or a friend at the receiving end, you would do the right thing but because you resent Jared, you are trying to twist an important discussion to damage him further. Jared doesn't know you and never did anything against you yet you feel entitled to dehumanizing him.

Then there's this: The people who perpetuated these behaviors displayed them publicly as well, especially towards him, thus providing a horrible example for others to follow. If you really cared about resolving bullying you would know those were seriously damaging paradigms being disseminated online and encouraged. Those people felt entitled to tell others to end their existence and the reason this happened was because you chose to ignore it thinking "people are grown ups and they can defend themselves" and "that's a celebrity, I don't care". So you saw the very clear signs but ignored or encouraged. You enabled. Now you are trying to create drama centered on one of the victims instead of owning your part in all of that and working on ways to create healthier fandom experiences.

Let's look at this one:

"We can attack Jared haters(or Misha haters or Jensen haters) on any other day of the week" Not only is this person directly admitting to being no different than those perpetrators, she is actually saying that attacking is what they do on a daily basis. Is that supposed to be the normal response? To attack? So bullying is the solution to bullying? Since when? Since when has mobbing people become the norm? Behaviors can be addressed without even remotely attacking someone. If you've created vicious cycles where you gang up on each other then that's only going in one direction, the same one those cult girls had.

My point is, please gain awareness and focus on creating healthy paradigms rather than on victim shaming/blaming, attacking whoever you disapprove of (same pattern those cult girls had, silo mentality and one sided views) and stop enabling the people who created such a negative impact within fandom by allowing them to display disempowering behaviors. Stop feeding into negative patterns and starts building healthy ones. Change starts with you and, whether you are aware of it or not, your choices affect others.

It is truly heartbreaking how people can twist their love for a show into hating actors and other people instead of using that passion to connect with like minded souls and create beautiful experiences together.

[pennysperfectpolls]

Adoption poll round 2 match 14

Elphaba Thropp (Wicked)

Nahida (genshin inpact)

Propaganda under the cut

Elphaba Thropp (Wicked)Propaganda

Big spoilers

If we’re going for characters with bonkers home lives, Elphie has got to be up there. Depending on who you count as a ‘parent’ Elphaba has like five of them.

Her bio dad is super duper evil and keeps having her friends and family killed (to the point of like, having her dead boyfriend’s widow’s sisters executed, ten years after she’s made any active moves against him). He’s a literal evil dictator, so, bad look all around.

Her parents as far as she knows them are a nutty preacher who sees her being born green as a manifestation of his own sin, calls her a punishment from his god in front of her when she’s like seven, and openly favours her sister to an absurd degree. Her mother sort of just tolerates her, and is usually too high to even do that— also she was so desperate for a boy that Elphaba openly calls her younger brother, who her mother died without meeting, mother’s favourite child.

Nanny comes in to look after Elphaba and is the best parent she has in that she seems to care about her even a little bit, but she also ends up having to favour her sister. Also she is an employee, which narrows things down a little.

Her parents also have a boyfriend who she seems to like a fair bit, but he was human sacrificed when she was very young, so there’s that. Oh, and the goat professor she gets very close to, and then he’s murdered, and she has to break into the crime scene to save his research from being destroyed by her dictator dad. It’s a mess really.

Other important things include; her mother being so determined not to have another child who looked like her she took medicine that caused her younger sister to be born with a disability (and her being constantly blamed for it, in the musical), her parents deciding to raise her in a swamp despite her having a severe water allergy, and therefore presumably causing her constant pain. Her parents dragging her on missions where she apparently saw enough deaths to be able to competently recognise the signs at seventeen.

Oh, also her bio dad had her first boyfriend murdered, which led to her being pregnant in some kind of trauma coma in a convent. So that’s awful too.

Please ignore the propensity for domestic terrorism and the fact her hobby is amateur monkey surgery. We can work on that.

Nahida (genshin Impact) Propaganda

Was born to take the place of her predecessor as the God of Wisdom, except the sages were like “lol nope we hate you and are gonna lock you away forever and keep you from seeing people and keep people from seeing you and clear the Akasha of knowledge of you and bully your genuine worshippers for not abandoning you in favor of our dead oshi who we’ll constantly remind you of and remind you of how you don’t live up to her and give you an inferiority complex and low self-esteem”. There’s a reason the Genshin fandom was memeing about beating the shit out of Azar leading up to the end of the Sumeru chapter! Her birthday was before she released and Hoyoverse released a sad birthday teaser and everyone was so prepared to finally free Nahida in the story and pull her in the gacha after that. She deserves so much!!

[methoughtsphantom]

typical Bats-don’t-know-he’s-Jason Red Hood surprise kidnaps Robin but has to wait to do his dramatic monologuing because the little bird is unconscious from where Jason found him with human traffickers. Hours pass, and the kid not stirring begrudgingly makes Jason feel a tinge of worry, which no, he doesn’t appreciate. He’d planned to beat the kid senseless, and now he’s here stuck with him while not being able to, kid is hurt already. Aaand why was that really? The time is the factor that gives Jason the space he needs to really ponder over where exactly Robin had been when he’d found him, how easy it had been to take him and why Batman had not been there to stop him.

among many others just,, imagine Jason seeing Robin for what he is, for what he was, and having a mini crisis about whether is okay to be mad with a kid who in this sorta mirror scenario batman was also not here to protect and stop the man who kidnapped him in the first place. …he recalls how he used to feel when he was the one hiding behind Batman’s shadow and well, he’s cringing over wanting to see this kid who’s wounds he wrapped boded against him. Now Tim’s perspective,, poor kid is super confused in the little time he’s been awake because the man B has been worrying about for months is asking why wasn’t he with Batman?? asking if the man had forgotten what happened to the last boy who worn those colors? if he even cared?? really just, picture Tim having to hear this random crime lord sounding all angry and hateful and making allusions to his predecessor’s fate and run as Robin without even waiting for any input (like this is a version of the dramatic monologue let my boy ramble) and 0 to 100 passing from panic alarm fear you know who we are?? to what the fuck are you defending me?? you mad in my behalf?in Jason’s?? what is this shit

[rimzieiei]

I HEARD FATUI KAVEH AU AND PLS TELL ME EVERYTHING I KNOW NOTHING. GIMME ALL THE DETAILS PLS

HI OKAY I DIDNT EXPECT TO ACTUALLY GET ASKS BUT ILL DO MY BEST TO EXPLAIN MY AWFUL BRAINROT :3

(im so sorry any die hard kaveh fans because this au fucks him up beyond comprehension this is NOT your babygirl anymore)

(also, ive made up a LOT of characters and lore for this au so bear with me while i explain it all)

brighella, the beast (4th of the 11 fatui harbingers)

he is in charge of the realms investigation division, aka fucking around with the abyss/the elements/celestial stuff and finding out

kaveh was recruited to the fatui right after his mom moved away to fontaine. the fatui had an interest in studying his unique constitution. during this time, he worked closely under the innamorati (the previous 4th harbingers). going so far as to become a right hand man.

after a tragic incident where one half of the innamorati attacked and killed their partner (before being taken out by kaveh), he was promoted and took over his old boss's position.

kaveh stays in sumeru (instead of working from snezhnaya) because its the easiest place to access irminsul, and (before the sumeru archon quest) it was a hot spot for abyssal activity.

also, with how awful the fatuis reputation is, id make a bet that most nations try to keep as many of them out as possible. but they cant really get rid of someone that was born there and has citizenship. dottore probably got his citizenship axed after his crimes against humanity or revoked it himself because he could just live in snezhnaya. tldr kavehs the only harbinger that can waltz in and out of sumeru without any problems which gives him an intensive to stay and manage the fatuus stationed there.

id say kaveh has a generally good relationship with the rest of the harbingers. he gets along well with sandrone. he often exchanges information with signora and dottore (plus they both attended the akademiya) so theyre friendly. with pulcinella and tartaglia, they just exists together. generally positive i guess!

the closest harbinger to a friend is definitely columbina! (columbinas role in the fatui is a historical archivist because i believe the theory that shes a seele so shes old as hell) most of the motivation for kaveh ending up as a harbinger had to do with understanding the fuckfest that is his family history so columbina would have been a big help to him! which would then lead to them becoming friends not friends (also i think them talking shit about the other harbingers together is such a fun concept) (you CANNOT tell me columbina isnt a mean girl LOOK at her)

and because capitano and columbina are basically mother and son (this originated from a theory video about natlan lore all in all i think theyd be pretty close due to their lore intertwining) kaveh and capitano are friendly.

anyways! onto the harbingers hes not on good terms with...

pantalone would dislike kavehs because the abyss is dangerous and verrry expensive to deal with safely (paying out the families of fallen agents...). he didnt have this problem with the innamorati. kaveh would despise pantalone for making it incredibly difficult to get funds.

scaramouche hated everyone.

and ohhhh boy arlecchino... these two have the craziest beef with each other. if they werent both harbingers, the other would be dead. ill probably make a separate post at some point that describes their eternal feud. but in simple terms: theyre like each others twisted mirror version.

i dont really know what else to add to this??? but i will definitely be posting more about it :3