#and the show will be fine i'm sure

[heretherebedork]

The Ex-Morning

Look, I love the meta commentary of Krist and Singto playing exes and I don't care about much else but also ADULTS!!! Gay adults!!! CAREERS! They're playing ADULTS, damnit. Thrilled. @absolutebl I am simple and pleased.

[wrongspacetime]

The Fall of the House of Usher 1.08 | The Raven (2023)

[knifearo]

ultimately when it comes to shipping and fandom space treatment of aspec characters i just don't accept "aro/ace people can still date/have sex" as an answer from nonaspecs. like yeah. mhm. okay. now i think we both know that you're not saying that out of real interest in the diversity of aspec experiences. so you can turn in your seventeen-page essay on why and how you plan to examine this character's aspec identity within the context of a romantic or sexual relationship complete with evidence from canon and peer reviews from multiple aspec people within the next week or i'm putting you in the pit from the edgar allen poe story

[katanashipping]

Seriously though, the general canon of TMNT 2k3 must be such a wild ride for Robin O'Neill.

Like. Here is your big sister, brainiac maniac science superstar, the smart one, the one who has it all figured out and who probably has three PhDs by the time she's 23 and the story begins. April just landed her Dream Job with an actual Celebrity Scientist and she is going to create Big Science that will Help Lots of People and--

--and she's quit her job one month in and announces she is going to reopen your late parents' antiquities shop now. Take some time to Find Herself, whatever that means. OK, right, we can work with that, what bout--

--her shop burns to the ground, and April prompty goes completely AWOL for three months. Great! Amazing! You're not panicking at all! This is April you're talking about, after all - the smart one, the good one, who has it all together, and she is dating Casey Jones, neighborhood vigilante now.

HOW DID THEY EVEN MEET.

So you're like. OK. I should probably go to New York and look into that. Meanwhile April rebuilds the antique shop brick by brick and moves back in, things get serious with Casey Jones, she keeps offhandedly mentioning a bunch of Italian men that like, fix her boiler and stuff, she's fine. She's fine. You don't think she's fine.

Before you can do anything about it, she goes AWOL for a few months again.

You eventually find out she has been hanging out with her boyfriend's country mum at a derelict farm. Cleaning. Cooking, sort of thing. Maybe you're a bit concerned now. Just a bit. You decide you will definitely visit her soon. She excitedly mentions that she has started practising kendo using a real sword, and her teacher is this old guy who gives her lessons one on one. You move your visit forward.

So you go to New York. You enter her apartment, which is the one you grew up in, rebuilt eerily similarly to how you remember it. Your sister is happy to see you. She's just going to nip out for a minute to grab some milk. That's fine. You go through the list of things to talk to her about in your head one more time: how are you? how are you Really? let's do some girly things, without the boyfriend and the teacher and the Italian men. Just us girls. Won't that be nice?

April comes back upstairs. You'll never guess who she ran into on her way to the shops!

Behind her stands your beloved uncle Augie, who went missing fifteen years ago without a trace.

Like. Holy. Shit.

That same evening, as you're trying to work out the new sleeping arrangements now there's three of you in the flat for the night, you pull uncle Augie aside for a moment. You're worried about April, you say. Something has been going on with her, and it's weird.

Uncle Augie looks at you for a long moment. His clothing is ripped, his beard is a growth on his face. There are deep lines on his face that you don't remember, marked not by smiles and laughter, but by sadness and fear. His arms are tree trunks. He smells like he hasn't showered in a month.

Nah, he says. I think April's doing just fine.

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[1pcii]

oh, you like the idea of zolu or find the fancontent cute but can't bring yourself to ship it because you HC Luffy to be aroace? (ignoring that asexuality and aromantisism exist on a spectrum. and that QPR's/relationship anarachy are a thing). should we tell everyone??? should we throw a fucking party???

[mainalias]

thinking about compiling screenshots of golden/silver age batman exclusively calling dick his ward to combat the allegations that it was “initially a father-child relationship”

[ampresandian]

The thing that the whole "Poseidon told me to stay away" sets up is that it's absolutely going to be thrown back in everyone's faces in season 5 I just can't decide who I want to do the throwing

There's Hermes, who upon finding his favorite (and evilest) son dead on Olympus, could scream in rage at his uncle that he was wrong and that advice caused all of their problems

There's Poseidon, who upon finding the ruins of Olympus and the ruins of his own kingdom waiting for his return but his favorite son shaky but alive, can announce to Hermes and the rest of the Olympians that he was wrong and it was bad advice they should never have followed

Or there's Percy (I think this is most likely), who upon the return of the Olympians to find death and destruction everywhere that they could have prevented, among his "you have to pay attention and claim your kids" speech, can throw back the "you once told me my father said you had to stay away even when it's hard. But none of you did that--if you had, I would have died years ago. I wouldn't have made it through my quests without help from each of you at different times even when you were told not to interfere. I couldn't have fought this war if I hadn't had the support of my father and my family/friends, and we certainly wouldn't have won. You can't ignore your kids, or keep them at arms length and stay out of their lives. That's how we got in this mess in the first place"

[commandermeg]

I don't want a shiny-new series every other year if it means the currently running ones get axed. Just settle on longer-running storylines, already.

I can't wait for the Streaming Bubble to explode because this currently method is ruining a lot of things.

[hollowboobtheory]

also I went to the mall to play dress-up today and I loved this one on me I was sad I have literally no reason to be buying a ball gown. also I almost passed out at hot topic

[icewindandboringhorror]

I got these shoes from someone recently but thought they were way too plain looking, so I set out on a quest to customize them with some sharpies and charms and miscellaneous ribbon I had in my craft drawers. Mostly sky themed (clouds, rainbows, rain, stars, etc.) because that's my favorite aesthetic, but I had to include some cat imagery as well, of course lol.

[silverwhittlingknife]

can we have a hint about what the spring break tim patrol chapter of red letter day contains? (you kept having dick say "if the joker shows up" and tim's "he won't." for me to be convinced that goes off without any trouble)

i'm sure it'll be fine. :D

i am delighted you're enjoying the story <333 i haven't updated it in soooo long but i got some very sweet comments lately so i have been looking at my scribbles again <3

[vaguely-gestures-to-the-void]

Adding this to my long list of things-andor-does, absence. We don't hear the screams Bix does. We aren't told Mon Mothma cares but is negligent in her privilege. We aren't told abt Kino's belief that he can keep his head down and live out his sentence.

Nobody's listening. But we see it.

[babykittenteach]

Alright, I signed up for things? Things. The OFMD Reverse Bang and the Jeeves & Wooster email subscription. I have things to engage with. I put my name in for things. I even joined discord servers. I'm very brave. Insert stedeiamadequate.gif here.

[kindahoping4forever]

A normal photo from The 5SOS Show Uncasville, posted for no particular reason, thank you, enjoy your evening, good night

[scentedcandlecryptid]

This goes on for several more minutes before they’re dragged away from each other by their respective team mates. (click for better quality)

sort of a sequel to this but it can be read on it’s own

...well, they did say please

@save-young-justice​ , Ask and yee shall receive! (I too needed this interaction)