#back on my bullshit but i am sorry

[pomdor]

I hadn't seen 50% off in years but I came across this scene randomly and it reminded me of the colours, so i threw a little comic together of my faves being illiterate

and a little bonus Vio content under the cut

hes such a bitch i love him

[shima-draws]

Nami: So really what I’m saying is that you should probably have some sort of requirement for what you’re looking for in a romantic partner

Nami: And then you can marry them. Like I married Vivi :)

Luffy: I just want someone who can cook for me!

Luffy: But Sanji already does that. And nobody can cook better than Sanji. And nobody is prettier than Sanji

Luffy: So I’ll just marry Sanji! :D

Nami: Oh my god??

Sanji:

Sanji: Wait hold on back up wait a second—

[ministarfruit]

straya outfit swap

[xxplastic-cubexx]

it doesnt need to be said but its genuinely so funny how at-the-hip charles and erik are in krakoa like they really had the green light- the OBLIGATION- to be as obnoxiously close to each other as possible and abused that right to the fullest extent

[thats-highly-significant]

The inherent homoeroticism of 70s cop shows

[phoenixmetaphor]

sorry to interrupt my drawtober stuff, but @samblerambles was talking chris in a dress and i had to do a flip through of my sketchbook to pull a couple of them. oh and of course there are rando leons too because it’s me.

i started this sketchbook in january and i am almost done 😭😭😭 2 pages left.

[quietly-sleeping]

Sqh and sy as an established couple in their og world. System pulls an uh oh, since their world isn't following what it was supposed to to allow for sqh and sy to be pulled for plot maintenance. Decides to dump the peak lords into their living room and tell them, hey fix them? Maybe? Idk.

Sqh and sy have a minor panic attack because that is just a group of sqhs traumatized ocs, sy drags the system into another room for a talk. Sqh stares down the peak lords with pure "what even is my life" and kind of manages to talk enough with yqy that sy comes back and explains better what's going on.

System wants sqh and sy to do some emergency therapy essentially, and sy has bullshit it so that the peak lords will be returned to their world at the end of the month no matter what.

Peak lords are iffy, qi is very sparse in this world, and they need to be back at cqm for it to run and not be turned into a demon fun house. Sy assures them the system has allowed for no time to pass in pidw while they stay with sqh and sy.

Sj does not believe him, insists on speaking with the weird god thing himself. Gets to basically the same point with the system but wiggles area for negotiation for compensation for both parties once this is over. Sy declares he needs a goddamn nap, hands over some of his classic novels laying around, some of his clean romances, and points them to the indoor gym on their floor.

Sqh goes to take nap with his bf/husband, doesn't really matter, while the peak lords kick their feet for a bit. Sj is hella confused as to why some rich people, he assumes so since they are in a very tall building with a very spacious living quarters, would just let some randoms wander around in their house unsupervised.

They really wouldn't, but sy has used all of his brain power with the system and the sudden addition of like 8 ppl in his living room, and he wants to cuddle his bf, sue him.

Peak lords fuck around a bit, lqg chills out in the gym for a while, they don't have a lot of weights but more cardio machines and room for mats and ballet bars, lqg just uses his sword and goes through some forms, the other peak lords following him since getting separated in a strange world is not the thing to do.

Sy eventually wakes up and sqh helps him sleepily slap together something to eat while they figure out what the fuck to do. They eventually decide that since sy technically owns the building and they are the only occupants of the floor, to just let the peak Lords live in the other apartments. They aren't completely furnished, bare minimum, but they can get blankets and such if they need them.

The peak Lords don't really have an opinion since, they can't afford to have one any way they don't know shit about this place.

Uuuuh more things happen, bonding, forced proximity, system events such as not being able to lie for 24 hrs, to which sj stretches to the limit with the help of og!sqh, and like eventually they negotiate limit travel between worlds and such because like no, sj has attachment issues that he passes down onto bing-ge he's not about to let the one guy and his weird husband go just because they live in a different world, take notes yqy.

Og!sqh is like pre treason or something. Lbh has not yet touched down on qjp, and qqq is 100% attempting to get sy's meimei to join her peak.

Sy's meimei barged into the apartments while the peak Lords were having mandatory bookclub and introduced them to TV dramas. Lqg is hooked, because he can do things!! While listening to the plot!!

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[azure-clockwork]

“I can dry swallow the Zoloft this once; there’s enough spit in my mouth that it’ll be fiiiiiiiiiine—” no. That’s the devil talking. He’s lying to you. Go eat food and drink water.

[demichrising]

For @hangmanbradshaw

[ozonecologne]

.

[camgoloud]

he still has his tonsils. by the way if you even care

[heyyesimtrash-whatofit]

“And all of this is captured by the greedy eyed photographer who stalks me like a vulture!” -Nick Carraway, The Met

(Non Text Version and ramblings under the cut)

Back to our regularly scheduled Gatsby Posting as of late. This time the song of inspiration is The Met from The Great Gatsby Musical! I would be a lying fool if I said the symbolism in this song has not had an iron grip on my writer brain from the very start. I adore the blatant spotlight it places on Nick and his constant being overshadowed and almost hunted by those around him throughout the story. Seriously, whoever wrote these lyrics, you are great. Also Noah J Ricketts an absolutely amazing Nick I just have to say that. I will absolutely be continuing to loop this soundtrack and am actively trying to plan a trip to NY to see the show live because if I don’t my sorry English nerd self will perish. Until my next post!

Non text version:

[catsandgoodbooks]

So. Punz and George. They're both very much defined by their relationships with Dream, probably more than anyone else on the server. It's hard to talk about Punz without bringing up Dream, and it's hard to talk about George without referencing him either. They have lives, of course, but Dream is always at the forefront of their minds. Punz spent a whole year of their life just waiting for Dream's escape; George dreams away the days even after the jailbreak in a fantasy world of his imagination where everything is perfect and he can be with Dream.

But they don't really have a relationship. They don't talk, especially not about Dream, because that would show that they cared, and George is trying to deny that to himself after the dethronement and Punz cannot allow anyone to consider even for a moment that they are on Dream's side or it was all for nothing. So the relationship they do have, weak and distant as it is, is based on bitterness and perceived betrayals and envy.

George doesn't really think about Punz much. If he did, he'd had to think about Dream, and not his Dream, not the Dream that exists only in his dreams now, but the actual, real Dream. The Dream who dethroned him without a second glance. The Dream he abandoned. The Dream locked away in an obsidian prison, rotting away as George sleeps. And George doesn't want to think about Punz. Not when it pulls him out of his dreams and makes him think about Dream.

When he does think about Punz, though, he's not exactly a fan of them. They betrayed Dream; undeniably, inexcusably, they did. They had his trust, and they threw it away for a little extra bit of money. George would never do something like that. Dream left first, after all. Dethroned George first and told him he didn't care what happened to him. Dream never did that to Punz.

And that's important. Dream never turned against Punz; they were the one who chose to betray him. Dream never quite trusted George the same way he did with Punz, and, in the period leading up to the dethronement, he let George in on less and less of his plans, grew closer and closer to his mercenary. George told himself it was because Dream wanted to keep him safe. After the dethronement, he accepted the fact that Dream just didn't care about him anymore, and that it had been a sign of that.

George tells himself that if he had been in the situation as Punz, if Dream trusted him, he would of never done what they did.

Punz...doesn't have a great opinion of George, to tell the truth. They might of pretended to betray Dream, but George (and Sapnap, and everyone who was there and just watched it happen) is the one who actually did. George left. He left and didn't come back, didn't even show up for the arrest/execution (because that's what it really was, an execution, no use dancing around it). He didn't even go visit Dream in Pandora's Vault, even when he had every chance to, even when he didn't have a plan dictating that he absolutely could not do that. Not like Punz did.

Unreliable. Untrustworthy. Uncaring. Those are the nicest words for what George is, at least to Punz. Dream died, twice, and George was nowhere to be found. Just because Dream had been trying to keep him safe. To make sure people didn't try to target George to hurt Dream. And George just left, like that was an option in this game they were all playing, that none of them save Wilbur had chosen to play, like you could just throw up your hands and say "okay, that's it, I'm done" and leave with immunity, taking everything you've done with you. That wasn't how the world worked. And it didn't matter if George understood that or not, because it still hurt Dream, and that was what was important. Because what George did was a betrayal, and because they were already familiar enough with that to know how bitter it tasted. Because Punz had to constantly pretend and reap what they had sown and deal with this betrayal they had committed - not the one they were infamous for but the one in their heart and their brain and the way people looked at them and laughed with them and the way they had agreed to the plan and let Dream die and the sneaking suspicion they had, growing louder every day, that something had gone wrong and that they had to do something about it but that too would be a betrayal - but George didn't, just because he had been there earlier and knew some people longer. Because people trusted him more and he didn't have to prove how reliable he was and how much he hated Dream and all that.

And because George had Dream's love in a way Punz never could. Dream loved too freely, that much was true, but he flinches at every motion Punz that was a little too fast, a little too sudden, and makes sure to call everything a business arrangement, makes sure they're mercenary and client, makes sure to suppress any little trace of attachment that could get either of them hurt. And, even now, even after George has gone and left, Dream still loves George; Punz isn't too blind to reality to miss it. And they had kinder days together, back before everything went wrong; there were no kinder days for Punz, and there never had been.

Despite everything, they're two sides of the same coin: wishing for something that is no longer reachable, no longer possible, because things have changed and because people have changed. Because Dream has changed, partially due to the decisions they made, and there isn't anything they can do to go back to how it was. Not truly.

And neither of them really care about anything or anyone else. They're not here to fight for ideals or morals, they just want to keep the people they love safe and away from the people who would want to hurt them. They are willing to kill for it, but, because of who Dream is, and because that would put them in danger, they can't. They're not allowed to, explicitly in Punz's case, implicitly by Dream pushing George away. Because Dream wants to keep the people he cares about safe, and that can't happen if it looks like he cares about them or vice versa.

(It's only okay if Dream's the one getting hurt, after all)

[twistedappletree]

alternative coffin scene ⚰️

[lucky-clover-gazette]

if it were up to me, kylo ren would have ended up apologizing to his mother, faking his own death to end the star war, stealing the millennium falcon and taking up chaotic space scoundrel nonsense with chewy as his copilot