#and I skim read it anyway

[twisting-in-wonderland]

let! him! have! his! octopus! plush! >:[

(messy extra stuff----)

meanwhile,back at NRC:

(+ here’s a WIP >:] )

[fumifooms]

Hijoushoku to Gochisou / A Feast of Emergency Rations

Mayonaka no Waltz / Midnight Waltz

Nagabe

[stellarstardust]

Wake up, babe. New cringey IkePri MC quote just dropped:

Me reading this: 🤦🏻‍♀️

And here is where Chevalier is me:

You deserve to be laughed at and feel embarrassed, Emma. I laughed and was embarrassed for you.

[sacchiri]

Hellsing 2002 calendar illustration.

Ein wunderliche und erschröckliche Hystori von einem großen Wüttrich genant Dracole wayda Der do so ganz unkristenliche marrter hat angelegt die mensche, als mit spissen als auch die leut zu Tod geslyffen

A wondrous and frightening story about a great berserk called Dracula the voivode who inflicted such unchristian tortures such as with stakes and also dragged people to death

[bibiana112]

The way how in We Know the Devil the couple you choose to go with always finishes the ending by pretty much confirming the worse insecurities of the girl who got excluded, Venus and Jupiter still keep trying so hard to remain good kids that they can't even hear Neptune anymore, Venus and Neptune hold hands without any effort without even trying like Jupiter did so hard in the only way she could bring herself to, Jupiter and Neptune look at each other the way they can't ever look at Venus

Just... the way that in the blue ending when the narration is from Venus + Jupiter's pov and they say they "won't let her stain" them referring to being "stained" with her "impure" but valid feelings, with her rage at being treated so poorly by those around them, they won't let those thoughts in because they want to be the good kids out of the bad ones and Neptune never did and even when she talks to them afterwards nothing she says will ever get through to them again. They chose to stay clean. The way the achievement for the blue ending is called "Lukewarm, I spit you out" and is the only one named after a Bible verse, and it's one about how spiritually "hot" people are active in their faith and spiritually "cold" people "can still be strongly influenced" but someone like Neptune who knows just enough to intentionally reject the word of god is the kind of person that "deserves" to be "spit out" like a lukewarm drink

The way that in the red ending when the narration is from Neptune + Venus pov they say they chose to be distant from her that they affirm time and again they had no idea she could possibly be going through so much turmoil that she'd turn out to be it, this sudden storm, and it's not because they were upset at her they at the end of the day just don't understand, they want to, because how could she possibly have had all those feelings deep inside her? They're safe from her storm, it does not break over them, in that moment together they no longer share in all that turmoil from Jupiter's at all. Their view of her may not be admiration but it's still so unreachable and unfathomable and distant from her true feelings and that way she'll forever stay. The way the achievement for the red ending is "No prince for the princesses" and Jupiter is the designated "tomboy" out of the three of them, how she's the one trying the hardest to keep this strong front and always do the right thing and help the other two but "always messes it up" in fundamentally misunderstanding what they needed in the end they didn't even need her to be all that for them because they needed each other and not her

The way that in the yellow ending when the narration is from Neptune + Jupiter pov they say they chose to hide their faces that they're the only ones to escape Venus' light because they do not see her the same way she sees herself, "he's" a poor unfortunate friend of theirs that they'll feel guilty for having to fight against but that simply wouldn't ever fit into this new freedom they found for themselves in each other, they can see their light their way out of this camp but Venus who wants so bad to see her light has it taken away from her with every time they stare into each other's eyes a bit too long, everytime she's suddenly invisible even when physically close and looked directly at they still see right through her true self. The way the achievement for the yellow ending is called "Help me God, I'm in love" and how the lights always appear when the other two are acting close, how Jupiter accidentally falls with Venus to the ground but instantly helps her up and turns her attention entirely back to Neptune right away and how afraid Venus is during this whole thing she just wants them to allow her that moment of "weakness" to be herself with them while all they want is their way out and not have to deal with the devil at all, all she wants is to embrace it

[shulkerbullets]

even if he didn't get to hear it, I think he'd be alright in the end.

(long ramble under the cut)

so...I feel a little insecure posting this, because I worry that it doesn't convey what I was trying to very well? I've thought a lot about why he might still be upset about this though, and I wanna talk about it a little bit.

Because, all things considered with him being VERY alienated from his peers, I feel like it'd make sense if he just had abandonment and trust issues that he tied back to her in his mind. Of course, they were just kids at the time, so this moreso I'm thinking about what that could've meant to him. And either way, she did still use and exploit him.

this post by @/roboroses puts it into words perfectly, I think. I used that as well as these tags on this post by @/m0th-gh0st as points to sort of incorporate into my thoughts here, as they're both written better than anything I could say on the matter, considering it's an experience I wouldn't firsthand understand.

I've also just had the idea in mind that the demon hipster chicks have probably been big supports in his life for a long time, maybe he had stumbled upon how to summon them at a young age accidentally or something. Either way, I figure they understand him to an extent on the outcast thing, and do their best to be patient with him through his bad moments.

BUT I also kinda think that because of his obsessiveness with who he ties back to the root cause of his abandonment and trust issues, he might take that support and patience a bit for granted at first. I don't think he actually had feelings for Ramona or anything personally, but I do think he loved the idea of having someone there for him for once. Especially someone cool and admired like her, in his eyes.

I don't entirely know if I'm explaining my thoughts well, and I feel like I'm rambling too much, but I hope this makes enough sense for you to understand the initial thought behind this short comic I drew.

AND FOR REAL. READ THE POSTS I LINKED. THEY'RE REALLY GOOD. <3 <3 <3 they put all this into words perfectly, imo.

[bogkeep]

for my fellow fans of longform video essays about media you may or may not be familiar with. i just watched laura crone's new video that's four and a half hours long and it's mostly about a book + tv series called the magicians, but ALSO the advertising/recommendation culture around books, and i really enjoyed it. i think i especially enjoyed it because i have been craving some Deep Thinks about like, what people criticize about booktok but without making it "it's uhhhh it's bad to only read bad books!" and i found this video both refreshing and insightful. i will give a CW for mentions of That One Wizard School Series, including in the title. just so you don't get jumpscared

[groovygrub]

[xxplastic-cubexx]

what is your favorite thing about charles and your favorite thing about erik? separately, as in what you like most about their characters :]

a devious question this one is, my friend!!! it's hard enough for me to explain my thoughts cohesively, but having to pick ONE thing i particularly love is difficult. with characters like charles and erik, theres been so much done with their characters over the decades and so they have so many components to them that make them so interesting and fun to observe. BUT I TRY FOR YOU TODAY. under the cut i kinda ramble and the size of this text box makin me anxious

i think if i were to be simple and broad, what i enjoy most about charles is his determination to help others, even if he isn't really thanked and/or if people don't even like him. ofc, this isn't to say he hasn't done wrong- to be honest, the fact he does wrong/questionable things at times is another aspect of him i really enjoy, maybe because- broadly speaking- he's meant to be altruistic (intent vs outcome and all that). i don't know if that's super exciting to most people, but it is for me

as for erik, my reason for liking him is easier to explain tbh. To Be Simple And Broad, his progression from villain to antihero over the decades has been fun to observe (as much as i have so far anyhow) and analyze. i think to be a bit more specific, him using his rage and pain as justifications for his villainous actions is definitely what compels me the most: hurt people hurt and the sort, an idea i've always found interesting (something something vicious cycles and the like). yet now, he recognizes this wasn't really. A Just Thing To Do and is beginning to change that, which i enjoy

[drenched-in-sunlight]

I gotta say I did not expect I’d love Miles this much, enough to look up shit like Secret War and Civil War II reading order, and worse, subject myself to Bendis’ writing of all things (he’s the reason why I stopped being a comic stan 5 years ago. I were a DC/ Superfam fan. You know the beef was BEEFING). Like, my tolerance of that dude now only stops at him being one of Miles’ creators. So that better writers can do the kid justice years later. That’s it.

Like, why is the “r u and Ganke together haha” a whole shtick that comes up multiple times during his run? It’s so annoying and painful to read. Miles can go around being paired up with different girls but the moment THAT question came up you know he gonna be super defensive and >:( about it which, eh, just does not line up with anything else happening in whatever story is happening at the time. At all.

The only silver of light is that Miles actually never says he doesn’t like boys, he just denies ever dating Ganke. Like, he could just say he doesn’t swing that way and the question would have stopped, but he doesn’t. So I know he be running around kissing the punk-est boy in the whole spider verse, ha!

Idk I’m near the end of Bendis’ run and some of it r good but a lot of them put me thru excruciating pain (cringe) so I have to complain about it.

Did I mention I were a DC stan 6 years ago? I were a DC stan 6 years ago so this isn’t even my first rodeo with white dudes writing weirdest things in American comic, but I just can’t believe I got dragged into this again because Miles blinks his bambi eyes on screen and makes me want to rotate him in my brain so I need to know the lore of him in every medium, apparently.

[fortjester]

hey!! that pyrrha dve line from ntn about moving pal & cam & nona to that half-flipped moon of g1deon's and teaching them how to farm!! she'll teach you to wait!!! that's her specialty!!!!!

[every-sanji]

[mightnotfeelrealbutitsok]

Faramir actually gave Éowyn his mother's cloak when they were in the Houses of Healing, that's too sweet (he really wanted to wife her up)

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[oh-no-its-bird]

I think a 'surviving as a maid' oneshot where Ash and the queen run away together would cure my depression actually

Same for a fic just about Mio and archmage Ciel interacting in literally any way tbh bc what the fuck the author really thought they could pull a "and there was only one bed" and just have us (the readers) let that slide???? Bitch I see you and I'm so here for it— honestly both from the casual familialness of it and potential shipping. I adore both possible angles of this dynamic

Mio, Ash and archmage Ciel as a dysfunctional little family / maybe throuple (but also it's incredibly unclear what's even happening there) is so compelling to me I'm sorry I'm fully checked out of like all other ships bc that dynamic is so interesting in literally all directions

Rolling it back to Ash and the Queen too, they have such good chemistry and I adore every scene they share together. The Queen has such this like gentle, elegant, tragic air to her that you can just tangible feel. The way I lose my fucking mind whenever Ash gets any real emotion out of her, just, ag. I love them. Fuck.

I can not find a single fic for this webtoon and this saddens me deeply. I think I need to fix this fact immediatley tbh

[markantonys]

one of my earliest WOT book-related memories is reading the brief wikipedia summaries for each book and getting to one of the slog books that mentioned "perrin continues searching for his wife" and i thought "damn, he still hasn't found her yet?" little did i know