#because from what I can tell

[awakefor48hours]

write the azula/marinette fic, I will read it.

I promise I will one of these days. I probably do need to rewatch ATLA again because I haven't seen it since 2020

[egginfroggin]

Since I have other fics in progress, I feel like this is a good time to finally talk about the other other version of WTST that I mentioned here.

There is no difference to what Emmet goes through in Hisui, but what goes on with Ingo is. Uh. Worse than in the main fic.

Okay, first, to prevent confusion:

The Future Will Be Special, the Past Was Not (named after the extra stage theme, "Tomorrow Will Be Special, Yesterday Was Not," from Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith) is the companion fic to the main, original Welcome to Sinnoh's Temple fic; it has not been completed yet, unfortunately, but it essentially tells Ingo's side of the story, much in the same way that WTST tells Emmet's side of the story.

A Promise Broken Is a Lie Told is the version of things alluded to in the above post, where Ingo handles Emmet's disappearance... very badly. This is the version of things that I'm talking about in this post.

Fic talk below the cut -- be warned of themes such as self-blame, self-hatred, bad coping mechanisms, and self-isolation. Please let me know if I should tag anything else. Thank you.

Little changed about the incident -- Emmet's disappearance -- itself; it was really more of a hypothetical scenario where Ingo did not handle his grief well at all, taking his twin's disappearance worse than in the main scheme of things, and it leads to him making some very bad choices.

Bad choices include:

Taking all of the blame for Emmet's disappearance upon himself, even though there is really nobody to blame and it was, as far as anyone can tell, a freak accident. However, in the wake of tragedy, it is human nature to want to pin the event on somebody -- Ingo just happened to pin that blame on himself.

Isolating himself from his family. In the original companion fic, his family -- Drayden, Iris, and Elesa -- is a huge well of support for him. They still are in this version of things, but he spirals just a bit too far and, in his desperation to remove himself and his problems from them so as to not be a burden, he keeps them at arms' length, denying himself their support.

Applying value to himself based on things beyond his control. When he and Emmet were little, they lost their parents, and in an effort to comfort both Emmet and himself, Ingo promised that they would always be there for each other. Naturally, that was derailed, and even though it was a mutually-kept promise -- Emmet had insisted that it wasn't fair for Ingo to be the only one upholding it and that it was his promise, too -- he views himself as the one at fault.

As a direct result of the above point, Ingo considers himself a failure because he couldn't keep Emmet close -- whether something stole Emmet away or Emmet left of his own accord, it isn't 100% certain, but what matters is that he's gone.

Coping by "replacing" Emmet with something else to be protected. A way to prove that he does still have value in that he can keep something close to him, or that he's competent in being able to protect something. This is also a way for him to feel somewhat in control.

The replacement feeds into the points about denying himself familial support and keeping himself away from loved ones so as to not be a "burden." How? The last point:

"Proving" himself -- to himself -- by taking the title of Champion And chooses to remain in the Pokemon League, at the end of Victory Road, as much as possible, making it harder for anyone to get to him in the first place.

Surprise, Champion Ingo AU! He gets a coat.

As an aside, to pursue the Champion title, he resigned from Gear Station, thereby also cutting himself off from the Depot Agents -- also known as his family away from home because they are all fantastic beans who care for each other and very much, like a good little healthy work unit.

Speaking of healthy things, Bad Decision number... 6? 7? Number x:

Neglects himself in favor of looking for Emmet in his free time. Of course. He doesn't give himself any time to relax. This worries literally everyone he comes across, because it shows. In multiple ways. He does not look in a good way, even if he's all prim and proper for a challenger. Everyone can tell. Everyone.

He leaves Gear Station about six months after Emmet disappears, traumatizes the Elite Four and Alder, and becomes Unova's Champion. And then proceeds to near-murder every challenger who reaches him.

Politely, of course.

He may be drowning in self-blame that's bleeding into hatred and waging his self-worth on how well he can defend his title, but he's still polite!

Anyway, that's the basis of the fic. It's really an excuse for me to be mean to Ingo, much like how Welcome to Sinnoh's Temple was -- and still is -- and excuse for me to be mean to Emmet.

There is a happy ending. And therapy. Lots and lots of therapy.

Thanks for muddling through this! It's a bit nerve-wracking to post, like Pandemonic Planet, because apparently I am extremely self-conscious about posting self-indulgent things. And frankly, this particular flavor of WTST isn't fundamentally super different -- it's just hypothetical.

But also the urge to justify my hypotheticals is strong, and I... don't have much of a justification for this beyond "hehehe sad train man go brrrrrrrrrr." Sorry.

This is all still in progress, of course, cooking on the back burner behind all my other fics, but some things are subject to change in the future. Things will probably be added or removed as the idea develops.

Have a good day! And please take care of yourselves! <3

[morganbritton132]

No one tells you when you get a Big Serious Job™ how many fucking abbreviations you’ll be forced to learn.

[meamiiikiii]

silly comic based on a time i struggled to read live on stream :thumbsup:

context clip compilation below ASDASDFASA

(cw for brief mention of hospitals/strokes)

[swiggity-swexual-i-am-asexual]

As per usual, it’s DP crossover with (probably) DC, although you could probably adjust it for other fandoms

ANYWAYS

A little kid and his mother are trick or treating in another city, perhaps at some kind of event rather than knocking on doors, and the kid is dressed as Phantom. It’s very adorable, with his little ghost-shaped bucket and clearly homemade and already stained costume—listen, white only works if you can just fly over street grime or phase it out of your clothes—and his slightly I’ll fitting wig. The kid is SO happy to be out and about dressed as his favorite, and maybe even showed it off to Phantom back in Amity Park before his family left.

The hero, insert whoever you wish here, is probably in civvies and just enjoying the event. The kid, meanwhile, is so glad when people ask who he is so he can explain, and so- the hero gets to hear ALL ABOUT the local town hero who is probably pretty small time despite the kid’s clearly exaggerated stories. The hero certainly never heard of him, but the kid’s mom confirms that Phantom really was the town hero, despite some mixed reviews of the poor guy.

“Did you manage to show him your costume?” the hero asks.

“Yeah! We went down to the cemetery to leave flowers and I got to show him my costume.”

Wait. Cemetery? Maybe it was part of theme, because Phantom had to be named that for a reason, but… it sounded like…

The kid ignores the suddenly VERY still hero and instead turns to his mom. “Momma, do you think we should bring him candy? He doesn’t get to trick or treat like we do, and I can work super hard to get him a bunch!”

The kid’s mom just smiles. “We could, but maybe we should bring him something homemade. I bet he’d like something more filling, teen boys like him have a hollow leg.”

The kid wrinkles his nose. “Like Vernie with the pizza bagels?”

“Like your cousin, yes. We can make some cinnamon rolls and take them to his memorial, maybe bring some of the apples from your grandpa’s garden…”

The hero is pretty much forgotten as the two-part family wanders off, not quite intentionally forgetting the hero is there so much as the hero somewhat accidentally ended the conversation when they just froze and didn’t ask anything further.

Not that the hero didn’t want to. But they’d learn something very serious.

One—there was a small town hero they’d never heard of. Two—that hero was apparently a teen. Third—most pressingly, the teen hero was both beloved enough to have kids dressing up as him and dead enough to have a grave.

This… might require some phone calls.

[blackkatdraws2]

The narrator and the ugly ahh protagonist [Blank Scripts AU/non-canonical]

[turtleblogatlast]

I think a lot about Leo standing up for his brothers in the things that really matter to them.

Like- Leo is the one who immediately pushes Mikey and Donnie into finding Raph the second it’s clear that their oldest brother is missing because he knows Raph can’t handle being separated like that.

Leo is the one who stands up for Mikey when Mikey wants to go on a solo mission, actively vouching for him and being the one to convince Raph into letting Mikey go, because being independent and proving himself just as capable of standing on his own two feet as everyone else means so much to Mikey.

And Leo defends Donnie’s honor in particular when his brothers’ intelligence is insulted because Leo is well aware of how important Donnie’s smarts are to him - and how important having those smarts valued and acknowledged is as well.

All this goes right into just how well Leo knows his brothers. For as much as he’ll tease or fight with them, he knows them, and he loves them.

[gothra]

I’ll never forget when I was arguing with a person in favor of total prison abolition and I asked them “what about violent offenders?” And they said “Well, in a world where prisons have been abolished, we’ll have leveled the playing field and everyone will have their basic needs met, and crime won’t be as much of an issue.” And then I was like “okay. But…no. Because rich people also rape and murder, so it isn’t just a poor person thing. So what will we do about that?” And I don’t think they answered me after that. I’m ashamed to say I continued to think that the problem was that I simply didn’t understand prison abolitionists enough and that their point was right in front of me, and it would click once I finally let myself understand it. It took me a long time to realize that if something is going to make sense, it needs to make sense. If you want to turn theory into Praxis (I’m using that word right don’t correct me I’ll vomit) everyone needs to be on board, which mean it all needs to click and it needs to click fast and fucking clear. You need to turn a complex idea into something both digestible and flexible enough to be expanded upon. Every time I ask a prison abolitionist what they actually intend to do about violent crime, I get directed to a summer reading list and a BreadTuber. It’s like a sleight-of-hand trick. Where’s the answer to my question. There it is. No wait, there it is. It’s under this cup. No it isn’t. “There’s theory that can explain this better than I can.” As if most theory isn’t just a collection of essays meant to be absorbed and discussed by academics, not the average skeptic. “Read this book.” And the book won’t even answer the question. The book tells you to go ask someone else. “Oh, watch this so-and-so, she totally explains it better than me.” Why can’t you explain it at all? Why did you even bring it up if you were going to point me to someone else to give me the basics that you should probably already know? Maybe I’m just one of those crazy people who thinks that some people need to be kept away from the public for everyone’s good. Maybe that just makes me insane. Maybe not believing that pervasive systemic misogyny could be solved with a UBI and a prayer circle makes me a bad guy. But it’s not like women’s safety is a priority anyway. It’s not like there is an objective claim to be made that re-releasing violent offenders or simply not locking them up is deadly.

[fascinationstreetmp3]

I have what you're looking for. High quality. Befitting a man of my tastes. I have a room over on Divisadero, not too far a walk.

[ricky-mortis]

Curtwen Week Day 4: Haunted

[deancasforcutie]

Dean complimenting fellow queer people on their game

Bonus inverse, trying to out-game someone to vicariously flirt for/with your presumed-but-not-at-all-straight friend who has no game whatsoever:

[amphibianaday]

day 1821 - half a decade!

redraw of day 1, 364, and 1000, but with a twist - now it's also my frogsona :D

for now i'll be taking a (maybe permanent) break for at least the rest of the year! see you in 2025!

previous versions for comparison below!

[krysmcscience]

Saw this post and couldn't resist because,

1.) @tesscourtes' human!Bill is a lil cutie-patootie menace that I very badly wanted to draw, and,

2.) I have a - M I G H T Y - N E E D - for any version of human!Bill to find any way he possibly can to annoy Ford a whole lot :D

Also, 3.) I like to headcanon that Bill's knowledge in The Sciences is mostly limited to 'Ways I Can Make A Really Cool Doomsday Portal', and everything else he knows is just a slapdash mix of the stuff he remembers from whatever schooling he went through on Euclydia, a whole awful lot of lucky guesses (which he WILL gaslight you about if you tell him he's wrong), and - naturally - conning all the rest of the answers he needs out of any more educated saps who are unfortunate enough to be around him at the time (answers which he will then proceed to take credit for), so as far as I'm concerned, this "outfit" is perfect for him.

Ignore the shitty backgrounds, I am sick to death of doing backgrounds, I just want to draw goofy shenanigans, okay???

[swampthingking]

andrew’s definitely gotten in trouble with his pr manager for tweeting things along the lines of:

“no mania inducing medication will compare to the euphoria i will feel the day donald trump drops dead”

[blackkatdraws2]

Baby I'm Home [Blank Scripts AU]

[Song: Baby I'm Home - ODETARI (feat. Kanii & 9lives)]

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.