#and that’s the full extent of my family

[three--rings]

Okay this seems like an appropriate space to tell my own story. I used to be a devout Pagan and I believe in magic and rituals and spells and all that. I was mostly in it for the religion, and I'm not attacking people who sincerely hold those beliefs. Like most religion, there are genuinely good things to be drawn from it, but also some harmful aspects.

What happened to my faith was a few things all coincided. One was I started working as a social worker with people with severe mental illness. And then I had my first full-blown panic attack and eventually had to concede that the sensation I'd thought was "sensing magical energy" was actually the same thing as "anxiety headed towards a panic attack" and that I had a lifelong anxiety disorder.

And from talking with and listening to people with severe symptoms, I realized that all these things are a spectrum. Severe mental illness are the same kind of things everyone can sometimes experience but turned up to 11 and to the extent it really harms your life. I saw people with psychotic disorders talk about the same kinds of things people in my religion talked about, but it was just a little more extreme.

And thus I became an atheist. Brains are complicated and weird, and we all have delusions and magical thinking, but some of us have that switch miswired and out of control. We all can hallucinate, some of us take trance states or drugs to trigger it, but some people don't cause of a misfire of neurons.

There are also a lot of people out there who do not know they qualify for a serious mental illness diagnosis, who are getting by in life mostly, until some crisis happens and suddenly they are 45 and getting their first encounter with mental healthcare. I saw it all the time.

(Also a lot of times drug use can throw someone into the mental illness category by permanently changing brain chemistry. Please be careful with what psychoactive substances you throw at your brain, especially if you feel you have family history or are at risk. This includes weed and alcohol.)

Anyway, yes the categories of "normal" and "mentally ill" or "psychotic" are way more permeable and fluid that you are led to believe.

there's a lot to be said about how the average person indulges in delusions far more than anyone is really comfortable grappling with. every now and again, a poll comes out that reveals some sort of number of people who believe they have magical powers, usually pretty high, and everyone takes turns making fun of it and affirming their own Sanity

this is more observational than scientific, but it really does seem like writing off delusional thinking as the realm of the "insane" creates this valley where the "normal" person's thinking (especially a person who considers themself normal, but that's a whole other kettle of fish) must be more empirical, because, categorically, they are not insane

[vindicated-truth]

Despite the fact that Han Kihwan is undoubtedly the weakest and most pathetic villain among the fray of villains in Beyond Evil, he becomes in the end the central villain of the story for his central role in Joowon's and Dongsik's relationship.

In the overall arc of the story's sublime writing and impactful messaging, Han Kihwan is the main villain spotlighted to demonstrate the extent of his monstrosity in dual ways: how he destroyed lives both externally and internally.

Han Kihwan destroyed lives externally: he was a complete stranger outside of Dongsik's sphere, and yet because of his carelessness and heartlessness in killing and abandoning a young girl full of promise and life, not only did he commit the heinous crime of destroying her life, but he also destroyed the lives of that girl's immediate family and everyone who loved her, subjecting them to a life of misery and insanity and—in Dongsik's specific case—having your innocence forever tarnished in being wrongfully accused. He did not only destroyed lives, he destroyed livelihoods and dreams and families.

At the same time, Han Kihwan destroyed lives internally: as the patriarch of the Han family, whose role is supposed to be their pillar, he was also the one who destroyed the Han family from the inside, sending away his wife and his son's mother to her eventual insanity and death, and then sending away his own son to a life of exile and neglect to grow up away from all of his son's support system. He was an abusive husband and an abusive father, and not only did he destroy his son's relationship with his mother, his son's youth and innocence, and his son's entire childhood, but he also destroyed his own son's entire future in destroying his own family's image and career.

And when the two central men whose lives Han Kihwan has destroyed the most come together, it is with that bittersweet irony that he becomes the catalyst for their relationship and eventual devotion to one another.

Joowon kneels before Dongsik as a wordless vow:

"I have seen firsthand what my father has done not only to you, but to everyone you love. I have seen first hand all the lives he has destroyed because he killed and abandoned your sister, and he deserves to go to hell for it. And I will make sure he does, even if it means I go to hell with him. For you, for your sister, for your family, for the lives of everyone you love that my own father destroyed—I will bring him down for you."

And Dongsik holds out his own wrists before Joowon as his own wordless vow in return:

"I have seen firsthand how you uphold justice and hold everyone accountable in equal measure, without exception—including your own self. And I have seen how your own father has evaded justice and escaped that accountability for twenty-one years, and how he's become the biggest disappointment to you as the son he should've loved the most. I've once cruelly said that I see your father in you. As long as I draw breath, I will never let you see your own father in me. I will not do what he did: I will not escape my own accountability. I will never be like your father."

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

.

[secretarysong]

so much Mayday stuff (& a smidgeon of Vinyl City worldbuilding) in my head. ooouugghh. wrote this at 12am last night and i'm not the best at articulating my thoughts so forgive me as this wooonnt be the most polished. this is likee a mini conglomeration of personal headcanons and a bit of analysis (reading too far into things) ... i just wanna talk about her REEEAALLL BAAADDDD

i've always thought of Mayday as someone so deeply intertwined with Vinyl City (specifically the working-class & lower-class areas; the 'little guys') that her dream of becoming a big famous rockstar also stems from a desire for agency/power. power to be able to do SOMETHING in the name of her communities after personally living through, like, 2 decades of neglect—condemned by NSR to live in the shadow of the more tourist-oriented/commercial/profitable parts of the city—even if it means rising to charterhood under the same stupid record label that's the source of all her problems in the first place ...

i also like to believe this, in tandem with her rumbustious nature, is why Mayday IMMEDIATELY switches to aggression (dare i call it a TV meltdown...?) following her & Zuke's flames being so harshly snuffed out during the Lights Up Audition.

Mayday was probably warned beforehand by the adults around her about the EDM bias. i think she ignored/dismissed every warning/dissuasion because she believed in herself and her ability and her principles too unshakably for her own good. and then for the judges (particularly Tatiana) to unanimously strike her dream down like that, thus proving their warnings right & her hard work (and ignorance) in vain... FURY!!!! (Mayday is NOT the best at taking losses with grace)

and then the banning of Rock from the Lights Up Audition happens. and then the subsequent blackout and diversion of energy happens. and seeing the extent of what happens across the city with her own eyes from atop the ledge (after being limited to her own ground-level experiences on the outside, looking inward) is what finally tips her over the edge and into the vat of a full-blown revolution.

semi-related, but i also view Mayday's hatred towards EDM as. like. a general prejudice. it goes a bit deeper than just Not liking the sound/style; she associates it with NSR, and therefore links it with everything wrong with Vinyl City. rock music, a dying art in the era being upheld by her tightly-knit community, untouched by NSR, to her is authenticity.

she also loathes the "Order leads to progress in Vinyl City." slogan because, to her, order means complacency... and complacency has done shit all for anyone she knows. ("If chaos is what is needed to get things done around here, so be it!")

i know i'm kind of bouncing back to the second paragraph but. like. there's just something so dear to me about the idea of a Mayday whose a roving city girl from off the streets... armed with her guitar, her passion, and her support system, doing everything she can to prevent rock—her home—from becoming irrelevant. always chasing a fantasy about being something bigger than herself. even if the odds are stacked against her. even if Mayday's own impetuosity is a double-edged sword that impedes her just as much as it enables her.

to me she's. like. a melting pot of ambition and stubbornness and righteousness and naievite. Mayday girl i love you SOOOOOO SOOOOOOOOO MUCH ideally i would put this all into a legitimate form of writing like a backstory fic or something but gah i don't even know where to START

[teecupangel]

From @thedragonqueen1998

Anything with dragons immidiently gets my interest. XD Especially when it includes Temeraire, my absolute favorite book series. A thing to note is that in the Temeraire universe, dragons grow up quickly. Like, in a year, they have reached their full size(really large heavy weights might still grow more, but it's apperantly not common). XD I believe Temeraire(the dragon) reached sexual maturity around 6 months old, so Desmond would be fully grown if he spent a few years hiding. Idk, might be me nitpicking, but Temeraire is has such a small fandom that any mention is precious to me. ^^ Either way, i can just imagine Desmond being so protective of Ezio(and by extention, his family), everyone believes Ezio raised Desmond in secret and is denying it now(maybe it's illegal to privatly "own" a dragon?). Ezio has no idea why Desmond has seemingly chosen him as a captain, but is just grateful Desmond saved his father and brothers.

That was why I went with something vague as ‘sooner or later’ hahahaha

That way we have the freedom to pick just how young Desmond will be when he’s captured. If anything, even if he’s now an adult dragon, he still needs to get used to his body because he’s moving instinctively and that instinct is still warring between his dragon body and his old human body.

Ezio will deny it but no one believes him because his entire family remember how he threw a tantrum, laid on the floor and refused to get up until he was given a dragon.

Ezio is embarrasses by it because he didn’t even get a dragon in the end, finally ending his tantrum when he got too hungry to continue XD

Ezio and Desmond would have a non-traditional dragon and captain relationship because Desmond doesn’t necessarily need to do what Ezio want. Most of the time, Ezio has to ask nicely.

He’s lucky Desmond is willing to do what he wants ‘most of the time’. He just enjoys reminding Ezio that the word ‘please’ exists (which is quite offensive because Ezio is polite most of the time, he just tend to forget it because he was raised to see dragons as… well… not people)

Desmond reborn as this breed of dragon. There are no flaws in this plan. Native to Italy so wouldn’t be out of place in Ezio’s era, naturally Assassin colours, and as far as I know Imperator are upper middleweight/lower heavyweight in size so he’s big and can carry full crew of Assassins/mercenaries. He could help defend Monterriggioni from Borgia invasion & probably save Mario’s life.

There’s not yet a full analysis sheet for this breed of dragon but there are a few more drawings in Atrocitas’ tag that can be used as size comparisons with other dragons, and if you then hop over to Genevieve’s tag (golden-white dragon) you’ll get an accurate picture of Imperator size (Genevieve is compared with her crew & Captain in one drawing)

Additional info from @wynterwulf7

More info on More info on Imperator/Asta di Marte (bc I just remembered that post that explored it a lil bit)

I’m going to assume we’re making a Temeraire x Assassin’s Creed crossover where Desmond is reborn as a dragon of that breed.

Of course, we’re here to make Desmond’s life ‘interesting’ so we’ll set this up where Desmond died in canon and is reborn in Renaissance Italy with the dragon elements of Temeraire.

He wakes up alone in one of the most remote places in Tuscany so he still thinks he’s in a world where dragons don’t exist. This means that he’d spend a few years trying to hide as he grows up.

Of course, just because he’s hiding, doesn’t mean that people won’t know about him. He’s a dragon trying to learn how to be a dragon in a world where dragons exist and is known by the people.

Sooner or later, he gets captured because he was trying to not hurt anyone.

And that’s when he learned that dragons isn’t something that could be considered as an anomaly in this world.

If anything, it was quite ‘common’.

Desmond is still a growing dragon though and he’s been noted as ‘wild that needs training’.

Whatever plan they have is cut off because Desmond learned that it’s December.

Of 1476.

There’s no big entrance during the execution.

Desmond used his large body to crash into the Auditores’ prison and performed a jailbreak with two reluctant men (Petruccio is totally on board though).

From there, it becomes more of a case of House Auditore becoming Firenze’s enemy number one because of said jailbreak.

But hey…

At least they have a large powerful dragon is totally on board with protecting Monteriggioni and helping with the defenses (and counterattacks).

Giovanni is absolutely sus about it the entire thing because Desmond can’t be controlled or even guided. Giovanni tried to get him to take them to Spain but he was adamant on taking all of them to Monteriggioni.

The fact that Mario doesn’t know ‘who’ Desmond is and how he knew of Monteriggioni only served to make Giovanni more suspicious that there’s something more to this entire thing that they’re not seeing.

Something like…

Desmond may be getting orders from someone else who wanted everyone in the Auditore family in Monteriggioni for some reason.

Yeah.

That someone?

Is Desmond himself.

But it’s not like Desmond can try to make them understand him.

He’s too busy trying to get these rowdy dragons that Mario purchased for his mercenaries to stop trying to bite him or groom him or…

Honestly.

Desmond doesn’t know what these dragons want from him.

[e-adlirez]

Spoilers for Sinsmas/Sinsmas ramble

So I had Sinsmas paused on my browser to do life stuff as usual, I Will Be Okay was in my head, and I walked back to my computer after life stuff and realized the frame I had it paused on was

D

Do you see what I'm seeing

Their positions aren't just similar, they're reversed. In "I Will Be Okay", Via is on the floor and Stolas's shadow is standing up, looking down on her and reaching a hand to her from above, which she swats away. At the end of Sinsmas, Stolas is kneeling on the floor, with Via looking down at him from above, and her hand resting on Stolas's, which she pulls away from.

AND THE PARALLELS AND REVERSALS DON'T END THERE

From what I could see, it seems like there's only one instance where the parallel doesn't totally apply.

This.

Merry Sinsmas, Helluva Boss fandom :D

:'D

[khattikeri]

i'm gonna be honest i believe that jin ling's postcanon opinion of jiang cheng eventually shifts to "you're my family, you raised me and i love you, but you're exhausting to deal with"

[gutfaced]

just a reminder to the people that there's no way haymitch wasn't majorly affected by the injury he sustained in the arena at the hand of the d1 girlies’ axe. i did mention before that it hinders with his eating habits as obviously. abdominal and digestive trauma but i'd like to assume that he did have a stoma bag when recovering from said injury. shrug shrug. intestines = major major digestive organ. the capitol probably didn't have the same high tech as they did come the 74th, and so the healing was possibly way more grueling/longer. all this to say yes i believe he has a large scar from the initial injury. yes i also believe that he's got a stoma scar in the hypothetical idea of him needing one in the first place.

↑ girl who is not a medical professional nor has had a stoma bag before. i'm just considering the fact that he definitely had to deal with a lot of rebounds and this could be one of the resulting factors! i'm literally a teen who likes to look up medical conditions/treatments as part of my special interest. this might not be totally spot on but i wanted to apply my small parts of knowledge.

[uncanny-tranny]

Something kind of funny I never anticipated about crocheting with longer hair was pulling out a piece of my own hair out of my project that I somehow crocheted into it

[supercantaloupe]

What is the antisemitism in TUC season 1? Does it have to do with Wally the golem?/gen

[ID: an ask from an anonymous tumblr user that reads "would love to hear more about the antisemitism in unsleeping city! was a while ago that i watched it and can't remember what you might be referencing but definitely want to be aware of it.]

no, it's not about willy the golem -- i actually think willy is a great addition to the season (even if i wish we got to see more of him), and an indication to me that brennan/the showrunners were definitely trying to be sincere and inclusive. i want to make it clear that i don't think anything antisemitic in tuc is there intentionally; i think it's there out of simple ignorance, which is also why i think fans don't frequently see/comment on it either. but i don't think that's an excuse, either.

my grief with tuc1 is largely centered around its portrayal of robert moses as the villain. especially by making him a greedy, power-hungry lich working en league with bloodsucking vampires. (also his mini is literally a green skinned skull man in a suit. yikes.) here's the thing; i know robert moses was a real life horrible person, who actually was racist and powerhungry etc etc. and i know that robert moses, the real actual person, was jewish. my grief with tuc1 is not that they chose to use robert moses over literally any other person (real or fictional) to be their season villain (though i'd be really curious to know what tuc1 would have looked like with a different villain), but that they chose to take a real jewish person, turn them into an antisemitic caricature, and then only barely add other portrayals of judaism to balance that out.

like, tuc isn't completely devoid of other jewish representation. as you mention, there's willy the golem -- and again, i really like willy, and i love that it's a portrayal of a golem that's faithful to jewish folklore (ie as a benevolent, guardian construct rather than a mindless destructive monster. i am not a fan of how 'golem' is so frequently misused as a generic enemy creature in other fantasy and ttrpg spaces, including other seasons of d20). but as i said earlier, i wish we see more of him in the season, because he's not around very much, and feels a little more like worldbuilding than a full character to me. also, he's not human. jews are people.

the only other human jewish character in tuc1 is...stephen sondheim. which, again, yeah, that's a real person who really was jewish. but i really wouldn't blame you if you had no idea of that when watching tuc1. maybe from the name you could guess he might be jewish, but i don't think people ought to make a habit of trying to 'clock' someone being jewish by having a 'jewish-sounding' surname. as he's portrayed in tuc1, you'd never know he's jewish, unless you happen to already be pretty knowledgeable about the man in real life. it's far more likely you'll know him as a theater legend than anything else (may his memory be a blessing).

now i'm not saying that brennan or the showrunners should have played up the jewishness of Real Person Stephen Sondheim to counterbalance the depiction of robert moses; that just feels weird to me, especially considering that sondheim was literally alive when tuc1 was filmed and released. it's a tricky thing to portray real people in fiction alongside made up characters, especially when they are contemporaries, and i don't think 'outright caricature' is the way to go about that. nor do i think that moses' jewishness should have been played up at all, because again i don't think that would have been particularly true to the person/character, and also Fucking Yikes. but, c'mon, if you hear the names 'moses' and 'sondheim' next to each other, which one do you associate more with judaism?

and as it stands, these are the only representations of judaism in tuc1. one admittedly nice but very minor nonhuman character; one human character you'd never be able to tell was jewish; and a third human character who, while never explicitly referenced as jewish, plays into some really hurtful antisemitic stereotyping. and it was a choice to not include anything else. maybe not a deliberate one, probably more likely one made out of simple ignorance than anything else, but a choice nonetheless. in a city with one of the largest and most visibly jewish populations in the country, and a culture that is inextricably influenced by that jewish population. a jewish population which has been and continues the target of rising hate crimes for years. i know that nyc means different things to different people, and everyone's nyc is their own -- but my nyc is jewish, and it sucks that that its jewishness is referenced directly in only one very minor way, which is greatly overshadowed by its, in my view, really insidious indirect references.

i don't know exactly how to go about addressing this. obviously, the show can't be changed by now. even if it could, i think the final product would be very significantly different from what it is now if the villain was something/someone else. i think including more references to jews in new york, more (human) jewish characters, hell, even mentioning hanukkah celebrations and menorahs in windows (it takes place in late december, after all; depending on the year it's not at all out of place for hanukkah to coincide with xmas!) would help. having literally any more positive jewish representation in tuc1 would, i think, help balance the bad stuff that's there. because, yeah, robert moses was real and he was terrible and he was jewish. but he's one jewish guy in a city with over a million jews, the vast majority of whom are just normal people. i don't want him to be the only vision of us that people get, in tuc1 alone or in any media. i'm not saying that jews can't or shouldn't be villains in fiction; but especially if you are a goyische creator, you should be really careful in how you're portraying us, and if there are other contrasting depictions in your work, too, in order to not (even accidentally) demonize jewish people as a whole.

[ohitslen]

Watching Stampede with my family made me realize how genuinely insane I have turned thanks to it

Like wow the actual physical EFFORT it took me to not randomly start explaining the composition of a scene, the color choice, the framing, the voice directing and the choreographies of certain scenes, as well as some of the lore behind it I should not explain because spoilers.

No, sorry. I lied on my résumé . I can’t like anything a normal amount. I’ve liked this for less than 4 months and I’m very deep into the trenches. And it will unfortunately become everyone else’s problem as well, because this one will stick around for a long time.

[cuteniaarts]

Wine stains on porcelain

(Alternatively: @katkastrofa and I have created 5 OCs in 3 days and I suffer from chronic “I wanna draw the little guysssssss” disease)

[seventh-district]

tfw u finally go to make urself a dinner plate and some nasty ass man walks into the kitchen, picks up the entire serving bowl of creamed corn and puts his filthy mouth on the bowl like it’s a giant cup and tilts it straight in. multiple times. 🙃

[puhpandas]

I wish we had gotten to see a scenario where gwen thought ben was dead in OS era like how ben thought gwen was dead in SOTO so bad. I know about doom dimension (which I'm still obsessed with) but that's in UAF era, I'm talking OS when they're just then starting to bond and get along and realize they really care about eachother

[teteminne]

Watching The Borgias from the beggining and lol its episode 2 and Cesare's already murdered like... 4 people? All indirectly through Micheletto's hands so far but like... even Rodrigo is like "murder is a step too far, u won't do it right Cesare?" at this point, and then Cesare's like "I will, actually. Thank you tho :)"

[anachronistic-falsehood]

jesus my mom said "hey if you're into murder mysteries, jk rowling has some really good ones" and i said "no i don't read her anymore" and she said "oh yeah because of the stuff she's said?" no it's not just because of vague transphobia. mom she has actively donated to anti-trans lawmakers and wants people like me gone mom please