#and then he DOES take his first steps

[stiltonbasket]

when the cloud recesses find out that yi-bao is mobile under his own power, there's totally an influx of applications for extended trips outside of the cloud recesses? research trips, night-hunting trips, vacations - everyone wants to spend at least six months to 5 years away from this tiny chaos agent.

This reminded me of Jingyi's introduction in TMAAF:

Everything was peaceful and sedate and perfect, and then Lan Jingyi grew old enough to venture out of his parents’ quarters by himself. 

The Cloud Recesses never recovered. 

[vaguely-concerned]

it's so funny whenever rook -- degree of 'of all people' implied of course depending on the individual rook but never, I feel, completely a non-factor lol -- has to serve as the voice of reason for one of the companions. applicable at many points during the game needless to say but specifically brought to you today by rook's long-suffering 'we can have some killing elgar'nan later buddy right now we're on a rescue mission remember?' response to lucanis' wild-eyed 'put me in coach!!!' energy in blood of arlathan

[wishchip106]

i wonder how long it took for charles to get out of his habits and depression after dofp

putting my problems on charles lmao

charles not wanting to change but knowing he needs too because nothing beneficial will come out of staying in his sad little bubble of alcohol and the serum.

i find it kind of unrealistic to just be able to get out of that hole. he would be going through two different types of withdrawal and his ex kinda broke his heart again

the main reason he got out of the house was because logan told him about the future and that his sister was going to be tortured and experimented on

he would also have to get re-used to not using his legs AND telepathy

bro stronger than me damn

i feel like mental health was also definitely not treated the same way it is now compared to the 70s so he pretty much just has hank as a support beam

change is an incredibly difficult thing so i bet it took at least a few years for charles to heal from all those years of drinking and taking too high a dose of the serum and depression. even then he still clearly has some lingering habits as we can see in dark pheonix he resorts to drinking whenever he struggles with something (and this is 20 years after dofp)

this guy crazy forreal

[raddest-laddest]

ok. someone’s gonna have to come get my dad or i’m gonna tweak.

[hsslilly-blog]

claire should be allowed to engage in psychological warfare against hunt. and my god if she isn't the greatest psyop of them all

[raayllum]

And then you called me a mage, and that felt right. (1x04) / Callum, I know you love magic, but I hope you're careful. Because it can change people. (4x04) / Who am I if I'm not a mage? (Callum's Spellbook)

[winepresswrath]

hi! i always love your MDZS/CQL takes; can i ask what are the questions you think CQL is asking, as compared to MDZS?

I haven't actually revisited either canon in ages, which is making me nervous. what questions the novel is interested in can be pretty contentious all on its own! @mikkeneko has an excellent answer in the notes here which I reccomend to everyone. My own thoughts are honestly pretty scattered- I keep on deleting things and going hm, that's not quite right.

So, for the obvious-to-me example, people reasonably zero in on the creation of innocent doctors/radish farmers who Wen Ruohan is holding hostage. In CQL it's easy to infer that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are maybe the only cultivators and almost certainly the only combatants among the Wen remnants, and their status is much more ambiguous in the novel, which I personally think is asking, essentially, "and so what? were they wrong to run, when they had a chance? Do they deserve what Jin Guangshan will do to them if they go back? Aren't they just people, actually?" Whereas the question that CQL is asking is more to the effect of "What does Wen Qing owe these people, when she is their only defence? What is she entitled to do to save them, at other people's expense? If she fucks up that moral calculus, what then? Does it matter if she's personally fond of some of the outsiders who are going to get hurt? If one of them saved her brother? Later, this question will flip to what Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and the parallel to Jiang Cheng's situation in particular is, I think, genuinely pretty fun. You're giving up the Wen as soldiers who've laid down their arms in exchange for Wen Qing also grappling with leadership and the question of how many horrors she can stand to look the other way on to protect her own people. one reason I keep deleting so much is that a lot cql's changes were motivated at least in part by censorship, which I think we mostly share a general and justified distaste for! but I also think that within the bounds of that censorship the creative team put a lot of work into actually doing something interesting with those changes. Or, for another example- nieyao! There's a much greater emphasis on the nmj-jgy relationship, it's unambiguously very close and they are clearly extremely important to one another, and I think that's because the cql team has a lot to say about love, trust, power, and the ways those things interact, and that reflects back on all of the other relationships in play, including Wangxian. Almost every time, when CQL chooses change a relationship they make the characters in question closer- that's true for Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, for Wen Qing and the Yunmeng contingent, for Zixuan and Mianmian, and Huaisang and Meng Yao. It's even true for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who have a close and trusting relationship in first life! CQL puts a much greater emphasis on "all right, so you care, what next?" How do you choose someone and then choose to be good to them? What if there's a massive power disparity between you? What if you seriously disagree about your priorities and morals? How do you trust someone who's betrayed you? When is it a stupid choice to trust at all? How do you have faith that you know someone well enough for that trust to be meaningful?

for legal reasons i would like to specify that it's not that mdzs isn't interested in these problems. i do remember wangxian's literal trust fall. cql is asking these questions all the time about everyone. also for legal purposes i'm not suggesting that cql lwj and jc love each other. but! they establish a three month wartime partnership looking for wwx and then jc immediately drops him on wwx's say-so despite apparently having a positive enough opinion of him to tell wwx he thinks they should make up twice. lan wangji will later tell wwx he thinks he should loop jc in on the second flautist! these are people trying to navigate some kind of relationship/shared interest/community, as opposed to a hateful void. cql wants to say hey, how do you go about this? while I'm here and rambling cql also puts a lot of emphasis on wwx's connection to yunmeng and changes things up so instead of feeling alienated right before he leaves our last glimpse of him there is happily picking lotuses and playing with a kid! in both stories the narrative is asking who do you protect? who do you leave behind? can you ever get it back? but the angles are very different.

[suranastair]

Kestrel "Kes" de Riva 🐦‍⬛

🟣 Age || 31 🟣 Lineage || Human 🟣 Pronouns || He/Him ~ Transgender 🟣 Identity || Gay 🟣 Class || Mage 🟣 Specialization(s) || Spellblade 🟣 Faction || The Antivan Crows 🟣 Romance || Lucanis 🟣 Besties || Neve & Emmrich 🟣 Frenemies || Davrin

[silverselfshippingchaos]

y'all ever think about how j.oongi wears eyeliner 😳 I do. A lot haha.

[vigilskept]

really interesting hearing people interpreting solas' statement to rook that it was "good to help [his] people for once" after rescuing the dalish prisoners as being genuine. i wonder if it's a worldstate thing that informs how people read it? because for my playthrough that read as a very calculated way to gain trust from rook

veilguard doesn't have a tarot card that explicitly asks you whether the inquisitor and solas' relationship was a high or low approval one. instead, for an inquisitor who didn't romance him, it seems to map the choices of saving/stopping solas onto high/low approval respectively

if, like me, you imported an inquisitor that chose to stop solas and your rook asks him later in that conversation: "what about the inquisitor? do [they] not count as a friend?" solas will deny that they were friends at all, and tell you that the inquisitor was useful, for a time. it's so callous and dismissive!!!

... and it's very in line with how he speaks to a low approval inquisitor trespasser. if the inquisitor is angry with solas about him using them, he'll dismissively tell them they should be grateful they got a castle and a position out of it! if the inquisitor confronts him about not even seeing the rest of them as people, solas essentially says "yes but thats not your fault, it was my creation of the veil that prevented you from being people"

i think there's definitely a version of solas here that could have grown to see the elves of the present as his people, especially if he was in a relationship with lavellan. solas who was close with an inquisitor of any race will confirm he does see those alive now as people, even if they aren't his people

in both cases, that requires an inquisitor showing compassion to the spirit of wisdom, treating her with the same care that they would have for any other person. this is the only way for solas to be able to see anyone as capable of full personhood other than spirits

if the inquisitor did the opposite... solas does not change his mind on this. he might have a certain level of compassion for them, but he doesn't see any of them as people, let alone his people

[cator99]

I always get detained at da border because PROFUNC never ended but basically I'm like if a targeted individual didn't even care

[poppyseed799]

btw I don’t know if this is a thing anyone is thinking about but I’m not gonna stop drawing Jimmy as a canary. It’s a lovely bird. It’s still something that’s been really important to his series. There’s no reason to drop the canary headcanon just cuz Lizzie fell into the void.

[akkivee]

there’s usually a q&a section in the hypster magazine where the cast are asked a question and the recent volume had them answer what do they do to relieve stress and tbh bat’s has been on the mind lately lol:

📿: he responded by saying that’s a stupid question since he couldn’t call himself a monk if allowed stress to build up. but if there’s a situation that he has no control over, he goes to surround himself in nature

🌙: he likes weeding the family garden!!! it helps him clear his mind and forget about the things that were bothering him and it makes his family happy to see the garden looking pretty too!!

⚖️: he finds a place where there’s nobody around to scream with all his might. it’s a great feeling since you don’t often get the chance to let out as loud as possible

[willowser]

the thing so sweet to me about step dad!touya specifically is that your daughter isn't being raised in a toxic/abusive household. no, you and her father aren't together, but you both love and care for her, time is split fairly, you two can stand to be in the same room as one another and at events together to support her — so she has no qualms about being like "love you!" to touya and that THROWS him OFF.

[xserpx]

‘Maybe I’m the better brother,’ said Calder, ‘but you’re the elder.’ He brought his horse up close, and he pulled their father’s chain from his pocket and slipped it over Scale’s neck, arranged it carefully across his shoulders. Patted him on the back and left his hand there, wondering when he got to love this stupid bastard. When he got to love anyone besides himself.

— The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

Bayaz had been right. You don’t get to be a king without making some sacrifices.

[jemandrr]

Unironically, Ben Shapiro's greatest win against the left was turning left/centerleft laypeople off from the idea of a 'debate with facts and logic' because of his bad faith arguments. Like it's almost...triggering to people, and that leaves a lot of people with unsharpened ideas and an unwillingness to explain them in a rigorous manner.

One example phenomenon that this has fed into is a continuing degradation in the lines of thought people use to reach certain conclusions - so person A expresses opinion X that person B agrees with, but because person B never really sees the entire line of thought laid out by anyone else, their formulation of opinion X based on their own intuition might randomly lean on some idea Y which person A doesn't care about. As a result, if Idea Y lacks actual backing, person B might wrongly defend opinion X and give an impression that the entire thing is flimsy, or person B might lose their own footing and assuredness and change sides.

I also think that he so badly mangled the concept of debate in the casual public consciousness that it's a contributing factor to the vague anti-academic sentiment in recent years. (Which, while academia as an institution has problems, there's certainly an undercurrent of less directed discontent that is contributing to low public opinion of education as a whole - and a greater feeling expressed on social media that 'casual reference of marquee media' is in a way insulting to people who have not consumed it, rather than an invitation to partake or something you can pass by without caring. Not on tumblr though, where we see Dracula and then we read Dracula.)

tl;dr his pseudo-intellectualism meaningfully contributed to certain common sentiments of anti-intellectualism because of how badly and annoyingly he and the people who emulate(d) him did/do it.