#barely anything happened

[canisalbus]

I love the duo, both the historical setting and modern AU. Does Vasco ever go to confession while Machete is running it, just to 'confess' to something they did before as a way to tease?

[ddelicatemp3]

why was that episode… not good

[crowiin]

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[leopardom]

are you new to the joker out fandom and wondering what's up with that group of slovenian men? have you been around for a long time already? either way, this one is for you all

before saying 'goodbye' to 2024 let's say 'welcome' to the joker out iceberg ✨

edit: a huge thank you to everyone who helped me with sending me facts and shoutout to @fifi-goes-to-hollywood for helping me sort out some of this mess 🫶

[lefthandarm-man]

Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff The Avengers (2012)

matching each others freak

[gideonisms]

"don't walk alone at night as a woman" "don't live alone as a woman" "don't try to buy a car by yourself as a woman" damn it's almost like people just don't want women to do things

[onebizarrekai]

basement gang activity…

[navree]

Incorrect, the fact that Biden has dropped out and a candidate with history of supporting medicare for all and being more receptive to a ceasefire in the I/P conflict has made me go from "I cannot morally support the Democratic nominee" to "I am voting for the Democratic nominee despite the fact she isn't perfect in every respect." I'm really happy this played out. The Dems for the most part abandoned the old Obama platform and it feels like its possible an actual progressive agenda could come to pass in my lifetime.

Kamala 2024!

If you weren't going to vote Democratic in this election before Biden dropped out you're a dorkass loser who does not care about any of the issues you're yammering about here and also a fundamentally bad person, and I hope you get run over by a bus.

But you got one thing right in all of this gibberish, Kamala 2024.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[claitea]

thought it would be fun to put alto in a plasma grunt uniform and it was a good excuse to doodle the ranger n i keep thinking of as well

[artuurle]

So what happened to Gru's eye anyways?

This will be very very tied into my personal headcanons about both Grujaja and a little about the drain so be warned:

info under the readmore for sanity reasons hope u understand<3

My interpretation of the drain is a very bad place to raise someone. The whole place is essentially the slums of a city- though the most dangerous part of the place isn't because of anything living, but because the place is actually crumbling from poor infrastructure. Gruja was from a very low income family that lived in that area; just trying to live like anyone else.

The infrastructure expectedly ended up failing and in the collapse he got cut really badly by some of the resulting shrapnel across his face and left arm. He was one of the "lucky" ones. If you could even call it that.

He sure didn't.

[ingravinoveritas]

When someone deliberately schedules their seventh 40th birthday party on the same night as the closing night of their partner's critically acclaimed play, there is absolutely a problem...

[khaopybara]

❝Let's go talk somewhere else.❞

FIRST KANAPHAN as KANT PATTANAWAT and KHAOTUNG THANAWAT as BISON episode 4 of THE HEART KILLERS

[erosyrup]

will we be getting drawings of any of the other first few days of the new year? or maybe 元宵节? i love your 春节 and 初一 drawings (and all of your art)!!

hi!!! :D yess I'd love to make more culture-specific art for my modern/teacher AU characters! It's easier for me to do so for my Asian characters since I'm more familiar with them, but I shall try my best to have the other characters have fun celebrating their own holidays and festivals too!!

For you: Valjean celebrating CNY with his family ❤️

They are the real reason why Valjean gives so much money away in red packets 😔 To him, he's simply giving out what he owes his nieces and nephews that he'll never see again.

[jomtones-bussy]

People on tiktok infantilizing curly from mouthwashing and saying that him becoming crippled was his punishment. Killing u. With my teeth.