#and i still fucking grieve for it.

[glados-kisser]

I miss my friends who aren't anymore. People who I connected with so briefly and strongly.

[dontron-9000]

Cass’s Apocalyptic Series has a death grip on my heart... and has been ripping it to pieces with this latest update.

But I trust Cass, and their reassurance that there will be a happy ending; and that it’s not the end for Uncle Tello.

Unfortunately, that triggered something in my brain that I absolutely had to get out before it killed me.....

Please accept this meme to help cope

@somerandomdudelmao​ I am so, so fucking sorry.....

[guardianbee]

rewatching s1 meljay scenes just to feel something and while I want to do an analysis of their relationship to argue against every bonehead that touts "mel manipulated jayce" I got to the end where jayce tells the council to go fuck themselves BUT THEN POINTEDLY TURNS TO MEL AND SOFTLY SAYS "Except you. You were right. You were always right." And I CRY OKAY. Her eyes widen and it sinks in that there's someone who supports the same vision of peace she has, who VALIDATES her views. And one of the LAST scenes is them smiling at one another when the council agrees to Zaun's independence. They made peace without going to war. Without using hextech and corrupting jayce and viktor's dream. Without compromising mel's values.

And then s2 fucked that all up.

[daenerystargarycn]

hot take maybe but the only reason most show runners/producers/writers/etc. age up the (female) characters from book to show adaptation is to overtly sexualize them and not face mass amounts of scrutiny for it.

put 13 year old daenerys next to 30 year old drogo and the audience understands that daenerys is a victim to him and not an equal. put 22 year old emilia clarke as daenerys next to 32 year old jason mamoa as drogo and they’re seen as a budding romance with a tragic ending (by the general audience) due to their on screen chemistry.

flash forward to today, and now we’re dealing with 21 year old milly alcock playing rhaenyra from 14-19 and how her relationship with (28 year old fabien) a mid twenties criston is seen as -morally acceptable- and not a result of a degenerate pedophile taking advantage of and grooming his charge. “ser criston protects the princess from her enemies, but who protects the princess from ser criston?” rhaenyra was 14 when rumors started speculating that she slept with an almost 30 year old criston. a criston who had know her since she was 8 and had been her sworn shield since she was 9. obviously seeing a teenager in the early stages of puberty next to a fully grown man would emphasize rhaenyra being THE victim, as opposed to the show having an 18-19 year old explore her sexuality and seek out ‘consensual’ sex with her peer bodyguard. the discourse has even reached the point where certain stans try to paint the much younger woman as the perpetrator and aggressor of this event, who forced the unassuming man into having sex with her.

i’ll even take this a step farther, and bring up how if they had shown a 19 year old alicent abusing a 10 year old rhaenyra it would be identified and mutually agreed upon as a reprehensible act on alicent’s part. instead they’re of similar age, so people can attempt to paint the picture as two women of equal standing hating each other, and not a much older woman bullying a motherless child. once again however, some stans even go so far as to try and paint alicent as a victim of rhaenyra, and not the other way around. further cementing this is how both versions of alicent are younger than both versions of rhaenyra, AND how criston is still played by an actor who is younger than older!rhaenyra despite his character being the same age as daemon in canon.

they know exactly what they’re doing too, considering they aged alicent down to give her that innate compassion one typically feels when seeing children being abused on tv (something that can no longer be applied to rhaenyra). despite that never being her story; *she* was the abuser, and rhaenyra was her victim. criston’s victim. it’s a nasty cop out, and i wish more people would call out how sickening it is to flip the switch and attempt to make abusive individuals more sympathetic than the *actual* victims of said abusers.

[physical-manifestation-of-spite]

I keep thinking about Arthur's regression at the end of Season 2 and then into Season 3. I keep thinking about how victims of trauma tend to get worse once they escape their traumatic situation. How their body and mind start to crack and shake under the weight of the horrors, now safe enough to escape the survivorship mindset but now forced to endure the fallout.

I keep thinking of how hard Faroe's death hit Arthur. How his guilt and grief were so intense that he wanted to kill himself, so low that he drank himself into a stupor for who knows how many years to just dull the pain. I keep imagining how hard it was to pull himself out of that, to work with Parker and find a new meaning in life, to walk away from his guilt of killing his daughter, and instead to help people.

(I keep thinking of how Arthur finds a vial of alcohol in the Dreamlands. How he sniffs it and recoils in disgust.)

I keep thinking of how long it took for Arthur to build himself back up from his lowest point, to tuck the guilt of Faroe in the deepest corner of his mind just so that he has enough room to breathe, to live, to be a better person. (And yet, Faroe is every facet of his life. It's his first memory in Season One, when he plays Faroe's Song, when he doesn't even remember his own name. It's the last name on his lips when he dies on that boat. It's his only memory when John is torn away from him.) I keep thinking about how Arthur is consciously repressing her every second of every day just so that he can keep going.

And then John pushes, and asks, and asks again. And finally, after almost dying twice with this entity, after surviving time and time again, he thinks he can trust him. He thinks he can share his deepest secret, to pull open the wound he keeps stitching over to protect himself. How he risks feeling the grief he's suppressed for years to trust someone. I keep thinking how John seizes it and, because he is ancient and young and inexperienced, childlike in his tantrums and his fears of responsibility and consequence, he uses it as a weapon the moment he's backed into a corner. I keep thinking of how not only the trust is torn away from Arthur, but how his wound is stretched and torn, and not only does his guilt and grief come back, but it's like a tidal wave that he cannot suppress this time. He's opened that wound and John has pried it wider, and now Arthur can't shut it. He survives in those pits, but she is all he thinks of. He escapes those pits, and ("Goodbye, Faroe.") she is all he thinks of. He slits his throat and she's all he thinks of.

He enters at icy cabin (a small gurgle, a bundle of blankets in his arm, a warm hum rumbling in his chest as he lulls his whole World to sleep) and he thinks of her to keep going.

And then Yellow enters, a blank slate, a John before he was John, and the pain is too fresh. This is the thing that tortured him. This is the thing that starved him. This is the thing who asked who his daughter was, and when he told him, the thing called him a killer. John and Yellow and the King are all the same in that moment, and Arthur's too fucked up and traumatized to separate them tangibly, as much as he insists that he can. His hatred grows and grows, all from himself, until it bleeds into Yellow, and he remakes this entity in his image, in his self-pitying hatred.

So when Yellow finally calls him a monster (and Arthur knows, he's called himself that the moment he saw the water spill from the bathtub onto the tile below), Arthur holds it close to his chest, and becomes it.

[quinn-of-aebradore]

Once again thinking about the fact that, per the Caleb Origins comic, Wulf is the reason Caleb spent 11 years in Vergesson. Just. What do you think haunts him more; killing his parents or the fact that in the span of a few seconds he damned one of his partners, someone who was engineered to be one of his closest bonds, to spend gods-know-how-long in one of the bleakest places in the Empire?

[mohntilyet]

more than anything in the world it kills me that illario did not do the easier thing, which would be to kill caterina. and i think that’s of course largely to do with lucanis. a world where he kills lucanis is fine because he doesn't think caterina was ever going to love him anyway. a world where he kills caterina, he loses lucanis too.

[crookedfivefingers]

3.13 | ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴏʀᴅꜱ

link to the post I accidentally wound up prattling endlessly about in the tags 💀

[merwgue]

Me core

[rosemaryandthejack]

I want to talk about Harry Potter.

Well. Sort of. I want to talk about Harry Potter in a roundabout way, in that, I want to talk about the reaction my friend group had when shit started really going down with That Bitch Rowling.

Because Rowling is a horrible person. She’s a TERF, a denier of Nazi Crimes, homophobic, anti-Semitic, the list goes on and on (and most recently, has been attacking a trans soccer manager, if my dash is to be believed? Somehow, she just seems more cartoonishly evil with each passing day). But this isn’t about That Bitch Rowling, not really. Or if it is, she’s merely a footnote in the story.

Harry Potter was, and I think this is true for many of us, a large part of my childhood. While the writing may be mediocre at best, it was wildly influential. I didn’t know a single kid that wasn’t hoping for a letter to Hogwarts. It was a Big Deal for a lot of people, and that included my friend group. My friend group, which is made up of members of the LGBTQ+ community. My friend group, which includes a young lady who we didn’t always know was a lady. I’m sure you can see where this might be going.

The day I got a tear filled phone call about That Bitch Rowling was, frankly, heartbreaking. She was mad because a woman she had respected up until now didn’t respect her. She wanted to get rid of her copies of the books, but didn’t want to donate them. I never want to hear her cry like that again. So I made a decision.

I told her to hold onto her books for just a little while longer. I phoned the group. I figured out when everyone could get together for a weekend, and when I had hammered out dates, I packed up my car, and drove the six hundred miles back to my childhood home.

In the passenger’s seat, was my set of Harry Potter books.

Excluding my trans friend, there were seven of us. I had made a plan, and my father had the space to enact it - I grew up on acres of land; complete with 200 year old oak tree, creek in the woods in the backyard, and a massive fire pit.

Nostalgia and youth, I find, paint everything with a rose tinted hue; if Rowling had just kept her mouth shut, I’m sure many of us would have looked back on the Harry Potter series with some amount of shame. But I don’t think it would have suffered the sort of fall from grace that led us to this point.

The fire pit is important for several reasons. For example, it had been the popular gathering place for my friend group of literal decades at this point. Small towns mean that you know everyone from a very early age. We lived right beside the woods, so we used the fire pit to burn the leaves, and the branches storms took down, of which there were many. And when the first six of my friends rolled down the half mile driveway that day, I had already collect enough wood to get a decent fire going.

Six of my friends. We told the seventh a later time. We wanted to be prepared, and anyway, we all had the same cargo (six sets of seven books joined mine on a rickety folding table). I put them to work collecting more firewood (is it really a good bonfire if you’re not risking setting the barn on fire?).

By the time our last member rolled up, I had a fire going.

She had her set of those damn books too.

(There is a visceral grief that comes from being let down by your childhood heroes, and I fully believe that That Bitch Rowling embodies the phrase “never meet your heroes,” because folks, as a general rule, I am not a fan of burning books. But I was prepared to make an exception.)

We burned our copies of the Harry Potter books that day, all eight of us. They were well read, beaten to hell and back, with cracked spines, and dents in corners, and pieces of the pages missing where we had bent down the corners one too many times. And I won’t lie to anyone. We cried. Tears of sorrow and rage, for the piece of our childhood that we were choosing to give up, because to keep it would be to disrespect the woman we had known and loved for longer than we’d ever had those books.

Letting go sucked. But it was the right thing to do.

When they were gone, we put out the fire, went inside, and built the pillow fort of our dreams. We marathoned Star Wars, and ordered too many pizzas, and had way too much soda. We fell asleep playing Risk, because that’s what our friend choose, and in the morning, I made waffles with chocolate chips and too much maple syrup.

I wanted to talk about this, not just because this is a fond memory for me (even though it is), but because one of my coworkers confessed to me that they hated Rowling, and everything she stood for, and they refused to have anything else to do with the Harry Potter franchise, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of the books.

I said I was happy to host another book burning.

But I wanted to write this down because I know that sometimes it’s hard to take that final step, to leave behind that last thing. So for anyone who needs to hear it, it’s okay to grieve the things we loose when we grow up. Letting go can be hard, but I promise you’ll end up better off. It’s been awhile since things really went downhill, but I maintain that, in this case, death of the author is nonexistent, and it is better to have loved and then lost, than to hold on too tight.

Don’t hurt yourself on the shattered remains of your childhood magic.

[fuupan]

i had this in mind a few days ago while running on 2 hrs of sleep

decided to finally draw it lol

i have some more ideas in mind of them that i will hopefully get to get around drawing

[frobby]

I think one of the funniest framings of the first ep of blue exorcist is hypothetically Yukio and bon met cuz they originally shared a dorm only for Yukio to immediately leave and not return until a week later and now he's his teacher

[spaceguylewis]

Horizon: Zero Dawn (72/ꝏ) | REMASTERED Avad's Offer

[friszil]

i'm not much of a doorkeay shipper but every time i think about "anybody else" by dom fera as michael distortion and gerry my brain stops workingi'm like ndksodmrnwpalsnfne oh ogdo oh my ogooooood oh god oh ood please no

[fanfoolishness]

resolve

The blight crawled and writhed and wove a threading mass throughout her mind, her veins, her bones. Its song wailed in the hollow spaces between her thoughts. Neve breathed in the ashen air of Minrathous and tasted death.

She blinked. She was still here. Still fighting, dammit, because that’s who she was, wasn’t it? Trying to be an inspiration. Trying to stand for Dock Town. Trying to hear her own words, not the blight’s song. But the song was so. Damn. Loud.

How could she fight something woven into her very flesh?

Then there was Lucanis, a world of sorrow in his eyes, holding out his hand to her.

“I’m a monster, you know,” she said. Tried to remember how to form a smile with lips and tongue and teeth. “I’ll break your heart.”

“I was a monster first,” he murmured. “And you’ve already broken it. I don’t care, Neve.”

“Don’t touch me, Lucanis. Please,” she whispered. The song, haunted and hallowed, ringing round her mind. She couldn’t bear it. “This isn’t — Spite can’t save you from this.”

“I’ve been a dead man walking all my life. It doesn’t matter. But you do.” And he reached out, taking her into his arms and holding her close.

Despite the blight.

Despite the risk.

She listened to his heartbeat, still untwisted, beating true. She could hear it past the song, and she remembered what her own once sounded like. She brushed the hair back from his face, her hand trembling.

She gazed into his eyes, and she remembered how to smile.

She knew then what she would do. Knew that she could stand, that she could fight: for a little longer, with a little help.

She was Neve Gallus, not a monster, and she had this.

[mosscaps]

let's all think about roman literally on his knees at gerri’s feet, begging to be saved. but you can’t be saved from Logan, that’s the whole point, he is a planet of a person he’s a black hole he is every decision already made. gerri tries to get him to see this — there’s no way out, no move they could possibly make against him, because Logan. always. wins. maybe if roman could give her one reason to fight for him, but there aren’t any. it’s pointless. it has nothing to do with roman, really, and everything to do with the harsh reality that Logan is the center of their universe. but all that nuance is completely lost on roman, because in that room he is seven years old again and always. and when she asks how it serves her interests, what she is saying is show me a way out, but what he hears is that she doesn't care about him. and maybe she never did.