#because i do try

[halfdeadwallfly]

how are people out here just forming genuine relationships with other people

[lazylittledragon]

some domestic shadowlachs <33

[napping-sapphic]

take your clothes off and get on the bed what no we aren’t having sex right now we’re cuddling and pressing every inch of skin together as close as possible for the next six hours

[chiptrillino-art]

(ID in ALT text)

"got your nose"

[stemmmm]

more people gotta try this shit where bill has not improved and will not change but he's just chilling so its fine probably. its great

[noodles-and-tea]

Continuation of this

[dr11ft]

chicana miku 🤎

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[novelconcepts]

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

[blueskittlesart]

Open your eyes...

[humming-fly]

was anyone gonna tell me shadow saved rouge's life in sa2 or was I just supposed to find that out playing the game myself

(this worked out as a rather fitting closer for the Final Day in Year of Shadow haha, hope ya'll have a fun new year! 🎉🎉🎉)

[egophiliac]

it's never the last time.

I was trying to justify to myself having Leona know how to use a waffle maker, and. well. sometimes you just gotta go where the flow takes you.

[ilions-end]

i've noticed just how often achilles' dragging of hector's corpse is framed mostly as an act of extreme disrespect, or only some brutal show of triumph. personally i think that's underselling both achilles' intention and what the trojans must be thinking as they watch it happen.

hector's corpse is divinely protected so it can't be damaged by the greeks after death; all that effectively happens in the iliad is that his body gets dirty. but under normal circumstances (and i'm not gonna impose realism on mythology, but the iliad is famously detailed when it comes to bodily trauma), the physical reality of dragging a corpse along stony ground for miles would be severe disfigurement and dismemberment. first the skin would wear off, then soft tissues, then extremities would start to detach. i think the iliad's original audience would be aware of that as an intended outcome.

achilles (who doesn't yet know that hector's body has been granted divine stasis) doesn't just want to parade his enemy's corpse around, he wants to tear it apart ("i only wish that this fury inside my heart would drive me to carve you to pieces and eat your flesh raw..."), he wants it to not resemble a human anymore. he wants hector's blood and flesh to circle the city of troy. he wants to make it impossible for hector's family to gather the pieces of him to cremate and that way hector's spirit won't find passage into the underworld. that's what the gods are preventing from happening, they're not just keeping the corpse pretty for priam to pick up later.

[smoosie]

A different tomorrow

[mooreaux]

Love Undying

[lindenhe]

I was practicing with clothes and got a little carried away~

Also a little contribution for the tailor!Astarion au, because my Tav is a bard with a noble background and usually has a need in fancy outfits.