#and also retribution

[lavellaned]

in my heart of hearts the mythal in the crossroads is 6 feet tall, horned, decked out in armor fitting a self-appointed goddess borne from primordial war and a giant fuck-you dramatic feathered cape. it hurts to look at her directly. out of the corner of your eye you swear the shadow she casts is in the shape of a dragon. she's been stewing in resentment for so long the air just always smells like a wildfire and lightning strikes. ya'll remember the fucking puzzles in her temple? you wouldn't be able to just walk up to her and start talking to her, idc how long it's been since she's had petitioners.

if you want me to believe in the "like holding a piece of the sun" line you have to do better than the pajama-wearing default character creator template num 9 that we actually got.

[thankstothe]

eat him alive <3

[kidhellion]

its been 6 years since i first drew the iconic diner scene and ive finally redone it

[olessan]

☼ The Sun Rises ☼

[charleemoon]

cant believe some people still dont think will graham outfreaks hannibal when his FIRST solo mimicry of hannibal's kills he makes the most beautiful fucking thing ive ever seen. that dragonfly is genuinely more complex and gorgeous than half of hannibal's onscreen kills. ON HIS FIRST TRY

[lucabyte]

A belief in Nominative Determinsim

[wistfulwatcher]

2.05 The Aftermath | 5.01 Nameless, Faceless

[quiddling]

feel like pure shit just want spoon back x

[veatomis]

Los Diablos best (..most??) dressed vigilante <3

[setevulpo]

lovingly pointing out that the cat king did to edwin what edwin did to his cat

step by step, even. offered him something he wanted (even if only deep down), put a binding spell on him, then asked for something he wanted in exchange for freedom

obviously they wanted different things, but it's funny that the cat king just decided "let's copy paste the crime as the punishment"

[localcryptic]

sidestep doodles for todayyy <3 putting ripley into the torment nexus

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[serpentface]

Hey bro you want some stew haha (Brakul at the age of 18 being hit on by what would soon become an off and on lover of three years, another herder from the neighboring Silde-Urbinnas tribe named Dirgrani.)

As a young unmarried man, Brakul had the responsibility of bringing his family's cattle up the mountain to their clan's summer pastures for grazing. He had been doing this since he was 14 and wasn't fond of it- Brakul heavily favored the comforts of home, and this was three months of living mostly on milk and dried bread, sleeping out in the cold, and squaring up against the occasional particularly intrepid hyena, all with nothing but cattle for company. He had a marriage engagement secured for when he returned in the fall, which he was fairly excited about as it would get him out of the task of summer herding for good.

He met Digrani up at pasture that year. Brakul had been seeing evidence that someone was trespassing on his clan's land and grazing cattle there, and finally encountered the culprit two weeks in. Dirgrani was friendly and charming, and Brakul was very, very easily persuaded out of chasing him off with a stick, instead agreeing to let him share the pasture.

The two of them struck up a friendly relationship, and would stop to chat and share food whenever they met up. Dirgrani, being a decade older and significantly more experienced, picked up on Brakul's sad wistful gazes and frequent excuses to disappear behind some rocks and jack off. Dirgani quickly went from casual flirtation to openly coming onto him. Brakul had a few prior sexual experiences with women but never someone he was actually attracted to, and he accepted these advances and got his shit absolutely rocked. The two stuck together for the rest of the season, meeting up every night to make camp together. When the time came to part ways, they agreed to join up again the next year and continue as they were. Brakul was thrilled at the prospect and completely and utterly head over heels enamored with the man.

Brakul broke off his engagement upon his return (very rudely at that, which caused problems for his clan) and put off any further attempts at getting hitched in favor of continuing his summer herding and seeing Dirgani again. This went on for two more years, with the two joining up in the pastures and seeing nothing of each other for the rest of the year. As time wore on, Brakul became fixated on the notion of working out some kind of arrangement where he could stay a bachelor and live with Dirgrani year-round. Marriage was a firm expectation of life and avoiding it as such would be highly frowned upon, but not unheard of. The Bict and Silde Urbinnas tribes had fairly good relations, and even if Brakul didn't contribute to his clan's wellbeing with the security of marriage, he figured could still provide through close connection to an ally.

His romantic outlook on the situation came to an end when Dirgrai firmly rejected this concept. It finally got through Brakul's head that Dirgrani had no such interest and was mostly just fucking him because he was there, decent company, willing and eager, and it helped pass the long days of boredom and loneliness up at pasture. Brakul handled this badly and blew up at him, and initiated a physical fight. He lost, badly, and Dirgrani stole all but one of his cattle in retribution and ditched. This was the last time they ever saw each other.

Brakul returned home heartbroken and humiliated and having to explain in detail to his extremely aggravated mother where the fuck their cows went. Feeling depressed and tremendously guilty, he finally conceded to courting Sirudan, a cattle-wealthy and dear childhood friend of his, and would marry her the following year.

This affair would continue to haunt his life for the next couple years. Brakul having strained some of his clan's key relations by playing fast and loose with his marriage proposals and then 'losing' all but one of his mother's cattle was already embarrassing, which was compounded by word that a Silde-Urbinnas man was bragging about having repeatedly fucked a younger Bict-Urbinnas herder (who was very enthusiastic about taking it 'like a woman'!) and effortlessly stolen his cattle. Most people in Brakul's life managed to put two and two together, which utterly humiliated him and felt impossible to live down.

Sirudan was a good friend to him and (though Very put off by all this) didn't hold his failures over his head, and encouraged him to just put it all behind him. But Brakul was scared to death by his wife's impending childbirth and haunted by memories of a time where he felt happy, in love, and with hopes of a fulfilling future. When he would later find himself in a friendship and burgeoning romance with a man who was genuinely enamored with him, he was fully primed to skip out on his wife and child, put absolutely Everything behind him, and chase after that possibility of a new life. And so it goes.

[broareweabouttoviberightnow]

adore thinkin about tex havin mark n dallas as half brothers. tex who cried when someone THOUGHT he was shopliftin. walkin around with Dallas Tucker Winston n Mark Jennings. aka #1 n #2 criminal. funniest shit I've heard all week.

[lucabyte]

Hmmm just gonna spit this headcanon out in text post form since A. I don't think I could exposit it well enough in image form and B. It's not actually textually/thematically substantiated and I don't like actually staking my stuff on just vibes alone*

But anyway. I'd say it's pretty evident that all the islanders forgot their names, right? King obviously. Because why the hell else would he do that, but also Siffrin No Middle Names No Last Name.

They're 'pretty sure' they've 'always' been 'Just Siffrin' 'as long as they can remember'. It's a pretty cruel twist of the knife to say that they don't even get to keep their birth name as a memento, which is why I'm saying as such.

My utterly unsubstantiated claim is I think it'd be cute to say that Sisyphus *is* the name Siffrin initially picked, assuming the myth of King Sisyphus is recontextualised as idk, just a play or something in the setting. But I like the idea of Siffrin going 'oh shit 🫵 he's just like me fr' at a tortured fictional character long before the irony kicks in.

As for how Sisyphus -> Siffrin. I think that chronic mumbler and emotional doormat Sif just did not correct people who misheard the name during their time travelling, and went through enough places with incompatible phonologies (pronounceable sounds in the language) without ever really writing it down that it just got kinda. Changed until it was unrecognisable, and Siffrin just went with it until the earlier pronunciations slipped out of their swiss-cheese brain. And they just kinda don't remember any of that.

Also, something something the horrid realisation that Siffrin also named themselves after a King. Just not as blatantly.

*(though I think there's something here about Siffrin, a guy from a belief system that seems to thoroughly disincentivise autonomy and self-motivated choice continuously having their hand forced to make changes/choices they don't want but have no choice but to... It's not solid enough to really back this up tbh, but it informs it.)

Anyway.

[ambigrueity]

Incredibly long post about Trey and Riddle's Relationship that I vaguely said I'd do in the tags of my posts somewhere

Disclaimer: this is not intended to be shipping in any way I very much view them as family, even more so after these updates. To start with I'm going to separate their relationship into 3 distinct stages and focus on their perceptions of each other at each stage. I think their relationship is wonderfully written As usual, I ramble so sorry in advance, but I really want to analyze how complex they are.

Stage one: Childhood: ||Riddle|| A friend: Trey and Chenya were Riddle's first friends. Riddle had spent his whole life knowing the four walls of his home and his mother and both Trey and Chenya were his gateway to experiencing the world outside his windows. As such, they're immensely valuable to him. Under his mother he had no other way to grow socially, so when provided with a logical reason for going out and playing (Chenya stated his grandpa believed play is a form of study) he jumped at it because he wanted that connection. Trey specifically was his ideal. I think he looked up to him a lot. Normal home life. His mother didn't confine or trap him in any way. And he could eat whatever he liked. That's why when Trey said that one or two slices of tart wouldn't hurt, it was good enough to sway Riddle. All his life he'd grown up hearing about sweets being poison. But Trey seems happy and fulfilled so surely it's not as bad. However, breaking his mother's rule made him lose everything. The momentary friendship he'd built and any chance of freedom. It impressed upon him the importance of following the rules because breaking them lead to loss. And on top of that, it left him with guilt. I talk a lot about Trey's guilt in this situation (and I will talk more) but Riddle has his own guilt too that just manifested in a different way. More on that later.

||Trey|| A brother: While Riddle might have viewed Trey as a friend (no doubt because he was an isolated only child with a different perception and a lot of baggage tied to the world family), Trey saw him as a brother. He expressly states in his dream that Riddle was smart enough to identify plants and flowers and had enough magic control to get their soccer ball out of the trees, and he felt proud to have a smart little brother. And this sort of label is easier for him because he comes from a rather healthy family with siblings and has a blood brother around Riddle's age. Instinctively, Riddle became someone he wanted to care for, spoil, and cherish. That's why after knowing Riddle wanted to try a tart he wanted to let him. Later on, he tries to dismiss or come to terms with his actions in various ways, stating that it was not his place and of course anyone would get upset if their house rules and dietary restrictions weren't being respected. He tries to make it out into a joke, saying it's become a family incident of sorts that they just laugh about. "Who gets that mad at children playing." But underneath all those attempts to bury his own trauma, lies guilt. Because he feels, deep down, that as a brother he should have protected Riddle better. And instead, after just 2 months, he had to see everything that made Riddle happy stripped away again. More on this later. Stage 2: Riddle's First Year

||Riddle|| A stranger. Riddle's changed. He's developed some of his mother's anger. He's been confined for years. And because of that one incident with the tart, he firmly believes that growth and by extension fulfillment can only happen under the rules. Moreover, since Trey represents that period of his life where he learned that lesson rather harshly, he ices Trey out, pretending he barely knows him. After all, they might as well be strangers after all these years. Especially since Trey is banned from his house. This is a result of the guilt I mentioned earlier. He failed to follow his mother's rules and the punishment put Trey and his peaceful family that he looked up to in the crossfire. I think a part of him doesn't know how to face Trey after all that, worried that he might hate him. However, he cannot fully erase his own memories. So it is Trey he consults when he asks how to challenge a dorm leader for the seat. Even if he's distancing himself by calling him "Clover-senpai" Trey still remains someone he trusts to a degree. After Riddle takes the throne he makes a decision I find interesting. He doesn't select a vice, instead he leaves it to the popular vote. This could be read two ways IMO. Either, he didn't feel the need to have a vice because he was so confident in his own skills, but was aware that it was customary to have one so it didn't matter to him who it was. Or, deep down, he was afraid that no one would be willing to work with him. After seeing his dream, I do think it might be the latter. All of the darkness versions of his card soldiers showed some form of disloyalty. Willing to go along with the idea that they might jump ship, or that Riddle could be overpowered. It's this insecurity born from his own fear of his mother. He knows he's become a reflection of her, and he's worried how other people might react to it. In the end, he's still chasing those relationships from childhood, but is stuck believing that rules are the only way to keep what little happiness he has which alienates him from Trey to a degree. ||Trey|| A brother still: Despite the years, Trey's feelings about Riddle hadn't changed much other than being swamped with underlying guilt. Upon realizing that Riddle was going to attend NRC, his first instinct was to create a space for him. Trey generally, is introverted but excited to see his childhood friend again, he ends up talking to the people around him saying that Riddle was a quiet but studious boy and he hopes that people will welcome him. That was at least, before he saw what Riddle had become (he ended up fighting Floyd at the entrance ceremony) leaving Trey with the realization that this was not the boy he knew anymore. And worse, he was pretending not to know him. I'm sure it hurt, but even so, when RIddle asked about dueling the housewarden, he did try to accommodate him (after getting over his initial shock). The thing that gets me the most, however, is that Trey still saw the good in him. Trey in the rose maze part of Riddle's dream tells Ortho that the first thing Riddle did when he became housewarden was tend to the roses. To him that was a sign that Riddle was still somewhere in there and he was willing to support that. He would have been resigned to accepting that he was a stranger to Riddle if he hadn't been elected vice, but regardless of how Riddle felt, Trey still felt responsible for him. Both out of guilt and because he was still family.