#and I do love subtlety

[scootkiddo]

Ellie's line of "But I'm still me, he's still Joel, and we-" and the implied "love each other" at the end of that sentence actually KILLS me. I know part of the game fandom doesn't like (and didn't like it in s1) when their dynamic is actually spoken about and not just implied, but i love it so much. it's actually something i wanted more of in the game. it makes everything more painful, but i still love it.

no bc same!!

I think if done in the right dosage verbose love can be just as impactful as implied. even if it’s a bit on the nose there’s a beauty to love that is more outwardly expressed. one of my favorite interactions between joel & ellie in the first season is “so time heals all wounds, i guess” “it wasn’t time that did it.” it perhaps lacks subtlety but still registers on SUCH an overwhelming and emotional level. imagine getting to know someone who’s been emotionally dormant, just broken for twenty years….and you were the one to help put them back together. that is a serious thing and something I do think would realistically be communicated

I see admission of love like this as less reiterating the obvious to an audience and more so as two people comfortable talking about how much they love one another ❤️ it feels organic to me

[worldsokayestmagicalgirl]

Ayyyyyye so… once again @demoncow97 breaks my SVSSS art block.

I’m so normal about them I swear 🫠 their reunion was everything I wanted it to be & I’m obsessed with this version of them 💕

Anyways go read What Is Found Behind Broken Walls . Do it. You won’t regret it.

Anyways Bonus image✨ :

Poor Yue Qingyuan…

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride…

[couch-house]

Listen to Me When I Say: I Don't Care What You Think

I wrote more :) Actually wrote this one before the other one (and it takes place before the other one), it just needed some extra editing time (thank you @gourde !). Shadow helps Rouge recover from her top surgery, and works through some feelings on friendship, suffering, and girls.

[lokimobius]

"Listen. That wasn’t tactical. I lost it." LOKI S02E02 “Breaking Brad”

[sevastiel]

Assorted Darius doodles with the Hex and more Chanho/Sol! (Belonging to @doggojin and @thatfluffyboi respectively ofc)

[turtleplushi]

I need to stop drawing them my god

[elfkissing]

My piece for the FREE TO DOWNLOAD @bg3zine!! What an absolutely incredible project, can’t overstate how talented this group of contributors is! If you’d like to grab it for yourself the link is here!

[citrus-cactus]

Watching Awakening Parts 4 & 5 is mostly just me waiting for my favorite failwoman to have a bazooka-assisted meltdown on national TV

[lazzarella]

I love that from the moment Tan kissed Fang on the cheek and Fang looks surprised and then has that super cute nose scrunch smile that he obviously likes him and that Tan brings out something in him no one else does (that we see)

But it’s also like… it’s always there, but it’s also a really lovely slow reveal of the full extent of his feelings? Until there’s no denying that oh, yeah, he’s just as gone as Tan is and just as adorably in love and that they’re perfectly matched

[gofancyninjaworld]

No one is born knowing how to communicate

A: And that's okay...

Dr Kuseno made it look so easy. He just swanned into Saitama's apartment, proferred him a gift of beef and the hero's hostility melted away.

Fubuki felt positively foolish, and yet encouraged.

Since then, however, she's found that the only thing meat bribes pull in are dogs. Literal dogs:

And even dogs need more than meat to be loyal.

What gives? Well, it's obvious that Fubuki mistook Dr Kuseno's gift for a bribe: more on that later. Probably. And yeah, it's funny, but it's more interesting than that.

Learning how to communicate is complex. There are a ludicrous number of unspoken conventions and rules in every human society, so much so that we don't fully learn how to smile socially until we're in our forties. Dr Kuseno carefully judged his gift: he had a legitimate reason to offer Saitama a gift in the first place, out of gratitude for Saitama going out of his way to mentor Genos. Then he chose a gift Saitama would be sure to appreciate and presented it at a time when Saitama would be thinking about dinner. The worst that could have happened is that Saitama took the gift but insisted on the doctor going home (and taking Genos with him) -- it would still have left the desired positive impression. And things went really well. Kuseno made it look effortless.

Fubuki is only in her early twenties and her experience to date has been far from typical. She's learned that either she can intimidate people or she can flatter them into doing what she wants. With Saitama (and later Bang, Bomb, and Kuseno), she has to learn how to talk to more powerful people whom she cannot overpower, over whom she has no leverage, and who are unimpressed by her looks, simpering, or flattery.

Fortunately, Fubuki is nothing if not astute. She's worked out that she needs to develop complementary skills if she's to make herself useful to the S-Class heroes she wants to hang with. How to talk to them to get the help and cooperation she desires? Ah, that's a work in progress.

B: ...Unless it's not

Let's move onto another miscommunication.

Something that I hadn't before was that, unlike the webcomic version where Saitama only thinks to himself that Genos seems depressed, in the manga, Saitama out and out asks him if this is the case. He wants to know.

It mirrors King asking Saitama that very same question and getting Saitama to open up and be vulnerable for the first time (ever, in any version of the story). So it is very appropriate to see Saitama trying to do the same for Genos, particularly as he is openly fond of the guy.

However, it goes wrong. Saitama feels himself under pressure to say something wise to make it better. So he puts on his best 'confident' face and inadvertently makes everything much worse. Oh dear. What makes this particularly painful in the manga is that Saitama is much more invested in trying to reach Genos, and it's made Genos think that Saitama saying that he doesn't see what he's doing must mean that earlier times when he's praised him must have been just Saitama being nice. For sure, Genos could have pushed back and made Saitama clarify what he meant, but he's even worse at communicating: and Saitama's glib remark about being bright struck him square in the insecurities.

I'm going to come to something that I only realised once I started typing this up. Even though I've pointed out their abilities to communicate, neither King nor Kuseno have the perfect words to say. Kuseno started out by first committing a faux pas in bringing his great big outside boots into Saitama's flat, then nearly boring Saitama to death with a long-winded explanation. King started out by trying to guess what was bothering Saitama. Both, however, did the most important thing about effective communication: they picked up on their going wrong and changed tack.

It's not about saying the right thing: it's about responding to the person you're talking to.

The thing that King did that Saitama was trying to do for Genos was to ask Saitama open questions, and shut up in the interim, letting Saitama talk to fill in the silence. He'd only speak to ask more open questions when Saitama ran out of things to say, and through that, gently started to challenge Saitama's thinking.

But doing so means being comfortable with several seconds of silence. And that is excruciating. It is almost irresistible to jump in and say something, anything. And it would have been a longish wait, for Genos to slowly sit down and decide to start speaking, which might well have started being about something only tangentially related to his worry. King did that for Saitama: Saitama started out talking about what was bothering him on the surface -- being too strong -- before eventually coming to what was really bothering him, feeling lonely and profoundly isolated from everyone around him. Saitama does not yet know how to wait a person out.

It's a problem in this case because it's introduced a big barrier between those two, not an insurmountable one for sure, but one that could easily compound later.

Ah well, no one is born a communicator. We just have to wait and see if they work out a way to open up and be honest with each other. So it goes! There's more ways to introduce conflicts than to have a monster trample Tokyo, after all!

And so help me, the struggle to learn how to communicate is 1000% worthwhile.

[gouinisme]

idk if it's fair to blame the chronically online brain (or the expectation thereof from writers) for recent movies being as subtle as a sledgehammer to the temple but i will either way. first the substance and now mickey 17 seem to have absolutely no faith in their audience's comprehension skills and just, hand you the metaphor and then make sure you got it about 80 billion times. maybe it's good to have such an obvious message in these times, especially given people's habit to interpret satirical characters as role models, but when your main antagonist looks about 2 foundation shades away from an snl trump impression it feels like you're just making bad art

[eri-pl]

@edennill and others, asking for your help, because I just realized I don't really have any human fave (actual human, not a half-elf) I mean I do like Amandil, but I'm not that interested in him, and I do have a ton of elf faves and that's kinda biased.

I don't think it's healthy to have faves only in the most powerful groups, I need some balance.

Recommend me some Men, with an explanation why they're cool? (Preferably from Slim, may be LotR, but Aragorn is too mainstream 🤣 and Faramir idk, I know they're both awesome but they're not my jam)

Thank you.

[mealbits]

compilation post of all my racing game characters +some unfinished designs

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

So Witches We Became

YA horror

a girl and her friends go on vacation to a house on a private Florida island, but when a strange mist and toxic tar surrounds them, trapping them there, they have to find a way to survive and/or escape

while she’s being haunted by a traumatic experience with her friend’s boyfriend - who just showed up - that she’s been unable to tell anyone about, and by a shadow from her childhood that she fears might have something to do with what’s happening

sapphic, explores complicated friendships, and surviving assault

[kaybkay8]

Something I really love about birth by sleep. The subtlety of why aqua was a master and the other two weren't.

Almost every world Terra is tricked by a villain. He can't tell a villain to save his life.

Ventus is better, but still isn't great at it. He helps good guys a lot. It's really mainly luck about who he encounters first. He believes villains a lot as well.

Meanwhile Aquas over here sensing darkness in people from the get go. Taking down the villains in practically every world.The Stepmother and stepsister just walk by her and she's immediately aware of their true nature.

It's not a huge thing, but it shows why Aqua is a master. Part of it probably is how hyper focused on their tasks ventus and terra are, while aqua is worrying about them and helping people.

[inkybinkyboink]

hi ok unpopular thought but you can tell when a cis/het person is playing a queer character because they always prioritize the queerness of their character over anything else