#and out of a LOT of letters

[monscrow]

hey tumblr i just got some beads so here's some kandi i made :3

[magpiedraws]

Once more have I seen the Count go out in his lizard fashion

[ruhlare]

i don't like it when someone is easy to reach. when someone is open to everyone, when literally anyone can get their attention. it is a question of values ​​and principles not to be open to everyone and not to have the need for everyone's attention. people who are easily available won't value soulful connections.

[lizardbrainlabs]

man, you gotta leave the guy alone

(bonus under cut)

[koszmarnybudyn]

So this song fits them so very well right?

[feroluce]

For some weird reason, I've always been fascinated by how wildly different Sampo operates in the Underground vs the Overworld.

Sampo is present in both places and even in official sources, he's not really counted as one side or the other- now that the theory has been confirmed in-game, he's generally just lumped in with the Masked Fools.

But there really is a big difference!

Probably the most obvious and well known instance of Sampo's...business practices *cough burglary and fraud COUGH* in the Overworld is from the Belobog Museum event. In it, you don't find out Sampo is the main culprit until near the end, because Pela has to set up a sting just to catch him in the act. And that sting is necessary all because the initial suspect they arrested, Norbert, had pretty much no idea of his partner's identity. Sampo wouldn't even speak to him face-to-face.

And whereas Sampo is normally very pleasant and friendly with the trailblazer...when he thinks he's talking to Norbert here, he straight up says that they are NOT friends. Like he really shuts that shit DOWN.

There's also an Overworld NPC, Chavez, who heads the "Dark Blue Scam Support Group." And he. Really really really does not like Sampo fjkdasjklfdj

Chavez clearly wants Sampo caught, and has literally no positive feelings about him. So. Why call it the Dark Blue Scam? Why not just out him by name? Chavez obviously doesn't give a single shit about Sampo's dignity or privacy. But he never once refers to him as "Sampo," and even the pamphlets he passes out make no mention of it. No one in the entire support group seems to know how to identify him or how to refer to him except by his hair color. If the trailblazer says his name, Chavez reacts as though he's never heard it before.

(I've seen people say this means Sampo Koski is an alias and not his real name? But Ray pointed this out, and honestly I agree; even the Fools call him Sampo, after all. I think it's just that Chavez never knew Sampo's name in the first place, and given his immense distrust, immediately assumes it's an alias.)

And then there's his characters stories, where he proceeds to pull off a heist in the Overworld while in disguise as Brughel Poisson the entire time. Literally his own stories don't mention Sampo's name even once.

So anyway, all this shows that when he's up in the Overworld working cons, Sampo is incredibly slippery and secretive about his identity. The only people who seem to know him are Pela, Serval, and Gepard. He doesn't get close to anyone else, and is even surprisingly unfriendly. Nobody knows his name. No one knows his face. He has zero qualms about backstabbing or double-crossing, and even plans for it in some cases.

Meanwhile, down in the Underground, I'm pretty sure literally the worst thing we hear of him doing is scalping tickets in front of the Fight Club. Which isn't even illegal in a lot of places (although it's certainly a dick move).

In Hook's companion quest, a vagrant miner steals Fersman's equipment and tries to sell it to Sampo. Even before the trailblazer and Hook jump in and out the vagrant as a thief, Sampo hesitates to buy it because it sounds like stolen goods, which he doesn't want any part of.

Even knowing that a geomarrow detector is rare and incredibly valuable in the mines, Sampo makes no attempt to double-cross Hook or profit off of her loss, and even tells her who to go to to get it fixed.

And my favorite example of Sampo in the Underground is the Survival Wisdom adventure mission. In it, Sampo starts up a business with Peak, another miner. And like. In wild contrast to all the cons he pulls above ground, Sampo is actually super nice and helpful here.

Just the same as with Hook's quest, Sampo talks to Peak face-to-face, with no disguises or barriers. When the trailblazer finds them, they're just in the Great Mine, no secretive meeting places. Peak knows Sampo, is familiar with him, and calls him by name. It's not even a con! There's nothing illegal going on; it really is just a business partnership. Peak is more than happy with their deal, he's even pretty enthusiastic about it, because thanks to Sampo he can now make enough money to get by while also accommodating his chronic fatigue.

The only person Sampo lies to in this whole ordeal is the trailblazer, who he manipulates into getting Peak's mining equipment back from the vagrants that stole it in the first place. And when it's done, he rewards them with a legit treasure map.

So when he's working in the Underground, Sampo is MUCH more upright and lawful. Part of this is probably to do with his "business" model- Sampo only takes advantage of the wealthy, and poverty runs rampant in the Underground. When he charges Peak an extra 30% (the same percentage he charges Norbert as a consultation fee in the museum heists- Sampo seems to go by percentage instead of a flat rate, which means his prices are more fair for lower incomes) for carelessly losing their supply, Peak literally starts counting out pocket change.

Dude's working for pennies and good will down there dknsmdmd

And you can twist this into a Robin Hood thing if you want- Sampo IS technically working to feed orphans and heal the sick. He says himself he's more than happy to make up the shortfall between the greedy and the marginalized- I mean he says it in the shadiest way possible, but I doubt the people benefiting from his work really care that he's a slimeball if it means they can survive another day. Even the two heists he pulls in his character stories are literally just him stealing absurd amounts of food.

Personally though I think it is solely because of Natasha, and Sampo is hilariously well-behaved specifically for her, because she keeps him on a short leash JSKZJMSMSKS

[fiendishartist2]

you appear familiar dear; you look just like my bathroom mirror!

[arovalentines]

watch it all go by

[kc-art-stuff]

behind the scenes!

keep reading for details about the drawing!!

on the upper left corner is a ticket to xinyan's concert plus a signed picture, the person with the newspaper is yunning (yun jin's manager) the newspaper has a picture of yun jin, on the upper right corner there's a note from shenhe that says 慢慢吃 or eat slowly/eat well. i also put a polaroid of shenjin <3

in the background there are some yun han opera troupe members!! one dan and one sheng.

on the table, you can see the sideburns opera artists use for their costumes, the makeup yun jin is using and tianshu meat which is one of yun jin's favorite dishes. and as shenhe's note implies, she's the one who delivered the food to yun jin <3

finally, yun jin is putting on make up and i drew her as a daomadan in a pink costume which im pretty sure signifies that her character is a young warrior!!

[niftukkun]

far travelled messenger

are you not curious to what you carry?

like clipping a canary's feathers,

low down do these random gods fall

[faaun]

what draws you back to your country what draws you back to your land when i was a kid i told myself if i ever left iran i'd never go back 2 years into living in the UK i started looking at news on iran again 10 years in and i visited it for the first time again and today i heard an iranian mother talk in farsi to her child on the train to london the way my mother used to and i wanted to cry i wanted to ask her whether they're still cutting the mountaintops whether the lakes are still drying today i showed the person i was with pictures of waterfalls and palaces and forests and snow-white north something odd pulls me back with increasing force i can't ignore it ever again

[clockwork-carstairs]

“You made yourself a different person than the one I loved” – on Kit’s letter, his projections & idea of Ty

aka where i try to make sense of kit’s letter in the context of who ty was to him. basically i think that understanding that kit may not have had an accurate image of ty in his head helps to contextualise why kit believes the things he does, regardless of whether they’re fair to ty or not. it makes more sense reading lines like:

“in all the world, kit had never met anyone he believed to be so incapable of evil”

“all his energy had gone into ty, all his devotion and hopes for the future”

because you can see so clearly how much kit was projecting onto ty. ty, more than a friend—or whatever you might call it—was also the personification of this new world and all it meant for kit. kit saw him as this overwhelming force of good, beautiful as an angel, someone who not only wouldn’t do evil but was “incapable” of it.

so you can kind of see why everything was lost for kit once ty went through with the necromancy: because by doing so he was breaking the image kit had of him. of ty as a saviour of sorts from kit’s previous life, the person who convinced him to stay, who made kit feel like he was really a part of something, something magical and exclusive that not everyone got to be.

further evidenced by other lines:

“he had been too fixated on losing ty to tell him what he needed to hear” -> kit knows he should have told ty much sooner how he really felt about the situation. kit knows he deflected and in various ways lied to ty about trying to bring livvy back. but kit had wanted to stay by ty’s side, stay included in ty’s plans, more than his desire to tell ty the truth that he hated the idea.

“you made yourself a different person than the one i loved” -> ty as a person being shaped by kit’s projections of all his hopes and dreams, the face of this new world kit was drawn into, the first person he really got close to after he was pulled from one world to another, the person who convinced him to stay.

was the “person [kit] loved” an accurate reflection of who ty really was, flaws and all? unlikely. and the image of ty in kit’s head didn’t allow room for the real ty’s complicated, overwhelming grief, either, and the ways he would try to cope with it: and i believe this is part of why kit was so shocked by what happened and why he’s still so angry at ty. because ty proved to him that he wasn’t what kit believed him to be, and so all of kit’s hopes for his new life came crumbling down.

do i think it’s fair to ty? no, i don’t. but i think both can be true: that kit is upset and had gone through a traumatic situation, and has valid feelings about it while also understanding that he had a very skewed perception of ty that wasn’t fair to him.

mostly i think we need more room for understanding ty’s feelings*. how it must have felt to lose his twin sister in a horrifying way, devised a plan that (to him) seemed completely reasonable** only to have his best friend switch up on him last minute, tell ty he loved him mid-ritual, later say he wished he’d never met ty and basically tell ty that he was selfish and then on top of that leave without saying goodbye.

i also stand by my belief that “how long do you think it will take you to forgive me” is something both ty and kit could/should be asking each other, not just one way around. i honestly don’t understand why both kit and ty would think only kit needs to forgive ty and not both ways. mostly i just don’t think the narrative that ty’s the only one who needs forgiving is very fair, or makes much sense with their characterisation + the context + what actually happened.

in sum, when kit says “you made yourself a different person than the one i loved”, the person he’s referring to is an idealised version of ty whom he had projected all his hopes and dreams for the future onto, and by going through with the necromancy ty completely shattered kit’s understanding of him. this is consistent with other lines in his letter: “you wanted that more than you wanted me”, “when you brought livvy back, you changed yourself” (did ty really change? or did he just prove to be different from kit’s idea of him? genuine question), and perhaps most strongly evidenced by this line: “i don’t know the person you are now. you took yourself away from me. i can’t forgive that.” i don’t understand why he can’t forgive ty for not being the person kit thought he was, nor how on earth ty was supposed to know this, but i digress.

* i hope this is addressed in TWP because between TDA and now, we’ve had FAR more insight into kit’s thought processes than ty’s and as such we’re only really seeing one side of the situation.

** i also think part of the glaring misunderstanding between kit and ty can be understood from their respective backgrounds. obviously for kit, growing up away from the shadowhunter world, something like necromancy is completely out of the question. the way it would be for you or me. but ty grew up in a world where bringing people back to life was something that could and had actually happened. so it’s a far crazier, more impossible idea to kit than it would’ve been to ty.

[liatai]

Question!

Neurodivergent peeps of Tumblr, I have a question.

I know that "nonverbal" or "selectively mute" are specific terms that mean "I cannot force words out no matter how hard I try," so... is there a term for "I can speak if I have to, but right now it requires extra energy?"

Like, I'm autistic. I have times where I can speak and even hold conversations, but stringing a verbal sentence together takes effort, the same kind of effort lifting a heavy load with your body would but in your mind. I can be perfectly eloquent and verbose in text when this happens, and sometimes I'll even make some of the limited signs I know in ASL without an issue, but speaking aloud uses up all my mental RAM and I can feel the metaphorical fans of my mind-computer whirring in overdrive. X3;

It's exhausting, too. Usually if I've been verbally social for a while, that's when it kicks in.

I can understand spoken words just as well as other times when this happens, as long as I don't have to speak to reply. If I have to speak, the mental effort and stamina needed to do it tends to push details aside in an endeavor to save processing power. ^^;

I know autism is a spectrum, and I'm hoping someone might have a name for this "not QUITE nonverbal but verbal words are VERY hard right now" feeling ^^; "Partially nonverbal" or "partially selectively mute" doesn't seem quite right.

Help?

[sableeira]

“Allow me to introduce you to the original you.”

[sesamenom]

the man in the moon went on too many sidequests

hilarious how the Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late / Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon implies that tilion once wandered off, got drunk, and after being dragged back he fell out of the Moon and got stuck in a fishing net

[huidol]

happy valentines 👍 day