#borrower!stan

[hey-there-itskayla]

More South park g/t art :D

@cyncerity >:]

[rainofthetwilight]

uahghdhghrhghghshf the way cole connects with the team uniquely will never not make me go insane 😭 like, how he's able to talk and engage with them all with things that interest them because he cares about them just feels so genuine and sweet man, he's a sweetheart and such an empathetic character I love him so much 😭😭

[slobbykitty]

baby activities on the train ride

[corpusdiem-seizethedead]

Angel: I just heard Husk yell: “You USED me!!!” from the living room, and I’m sitting here like???

Angel: Two seconds later Nuggets comes running into my room holding a french fry in his lil baby mouth

[mountainscouts]

the afterparty

[johnskleats]

Azula would have lost the Final Agni Kai no matter what. Here's why:

Azula is insecure. That's why she takes cheap shots. She did it with Katara, and she did it with Aang in CoD, AND she did it with Iroh striking him with lightning. One could even argue that her behavior in CoD foreshadows some of what happens in the Agni Kai, where in CoD, Katara fights Azula, and Zuko saves her, whereas in the Final Agni Kai, Zuko fights Azula and saves Katara. It's a little mismatch of dynamics.

Azula cheating (constantly), is a staple of dishonorable behavior, which I think is interesting.

We see her "play with her food" like a cat, with the Dai Lee and other opponents she encounters. She tricks them and manipulates them and there's no threat. Killing Aang with lightning was SUPREMELY stupid on her part, and she wouldn't have done it unless she was cornered. She didn't even stick around to make sure he was dead or have any of them followed-- because she was scared. Zuko NEVER flees in fights out of fear. He doubles down like a lunatic and tries to get himself killed instead. Azula is not willing to risk her life, and that's why she's a worse fighter. The insecurity gets to her head and she psychs herself out

Azula has a lot of fire power (lol), but Zuko has the heart and commitment to see actions through to the end. That's why he would have won, had Azula not cheated.

By the end, they were evenly matched in firepower anyway. They did the Raging Line of Flames Competing Colors thing and met in the middle, and stayed there. That's how animation tells us about their ability.

Azula's seat of power in her firebending is spite and fear. She's not even mad, bro.

Zuko's seat of power, at the end, is light and life and love. One is a powder keg that runs out after you blow it up once, and the other is like an oil fire in a parking lot. There's essentially infinite fuel there.

Zuko would have certainly outlasted her. And did, if you think about it. Because she panicked.

Azula's entire persona is a mask, just as Zuko's bravado and pettiness in the first season was a mask. (Funny, that he can only be himself when he's hidden the scar with the blue spirit mask, therefore freeing himself of the shame and the mark that brands him as a villain)

They show us that Azula's mask is not only slipping, but cracking, crumbling in the mirror scene. That's why it's there: to show the audience that all of her running has finally caught up with her.

This world that Azula created has been a sham from the beginning. Castles in the sky to make up for what she lacks: love.

Which is why she would never win against Zuko if they both reached their full potential, as they did during the comet.

[rosiesdisneydrama]

Borrower Stan AU Ideas

Soooo... A while back I talked about wanting to find a Borrower Crossover with Gravity Falls where one of the bros was turned into a borrower.

I had some ideas. So I'm gonna post them for folks to use, mostly with Stan falling face-first into Borrower-fication and ending up in Ford's care.

Starting with some general things.

Stan gets kidnapped/cursed while on the road and turned into a ��borrower”. He is now small enough to fit in someone's hands and has mouse features. He is terrified because everything is so much bigger than him now.

He will never take his normal height for granted again.

After “moving in” with Ford, Stan gets a fancy dollhouse of some kind, or even just one of those things to make little model rooms, and turns it into his bedroom/private space. May start as a single room, then later gets the house so he can have more space that won’t risk any accidental injuries while he’s tiny.

He’s attached to it even after he gets turned back to normal. Possibly picks up dollhouse making as a hobby? They are surprisingly intricate and that turns out to be a little bit fun to get into.

Also, Shermie is the one with Stan’s car. It didn’t get wrecked or whatever. He got the call and picked up the car bc Stan was his brother. Their dad had been awful to him, but that didn’t mean they should just let it be lost. That they should brush him under the rug and pretend he was never there.

He planned to talk Ford into taking it so that he would have a car again but keeps forgetting to bring it up since it’s usually their Mom who calls them all.

That, or he has told Ford and now the whole family is quietly freaking out bc WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?? Why is all his stuff still there? Why does it look like he was living out of it??

Now for the actual starting points, bc I had 3 of them.

Stan getting to Ford V1- Is This Yours?

Illegal Pet Trade is def a thing and possibly what they were planning to do with Stan after turning him Tiny.

They kept him with a natural borrower for a few months. Borrower tried, desperately, to teach him as much as they could before the “unnatural cold” made by their captors took him away. (Deeply hoping and praying that they could teach enough for him to escape and survive.)

Magic crime ring responsible either gets busted and all the turned-borrowers are rescued and slowly returned to their families. With Stan being delivered to Ford while still in hibernation by one of the witches.

(Used magic to find the relations and scope them out for safety before actually handing over the victims. Don't want to leave them in dangerous places by just assuming the family would care. Some families, though well-meaning, turn worse when faced with supernatural stuff.)

Ford gets the box Stan is in, reeling because that's his brother in there! Small and vulnerable and he almost ended up in the hands of people who would have treated him as little more than an exotic pet for them to brag about.

(There is a horrific lurching in his stomach at the thought.)

He is also given the witch's home phone number when he declares that he’s going to find a way to fix it. Telling him “If you figure out a way to undo that magic, I will pay you in solid gold for it. Literally.”

He then sets to carefully wake Stanley to try and get as much information as possible out of his brother in hopes of reversing the magic/curse. (Without hurting Stanley either.)

Their rocky relationship does get brought up, Stan’s self-wroth issues get brought up, and a shocking amount of baggage (and then comfort) get addressed in the interim.

Stan Getting to Ford V2- Delivery for the Science Man!

Ford, while talking to someone/thing in the forest, learns about tiny people who refer to themselves as “Borrowers” who often live in the walls of normal human homes/towns. Endlessly curious about such things, he asks for more info.

He’s told that they’re (overall) just very small humans, though they share some stuff with mice and small rodents. Some are even able to hibernate over winter. The, let’s say fairy, explains that Borrowers are really hard to find by people like Ford, despite their proximity, because they’re terrified of big people like him. “They’re tiny and honestly pretty frail. It would be easy for someone like you to crush them in your hands if you weren’t careful.”

He asks if there would be one in his house and gets told “Probably not. Your house is too new and the walls are a little on the thin side. They usually live in older houses with thicker walls and floors.”

He is disappointed by that info, but then the fairy tells him that they’ll keep an eye out and see if they can help him by coaxing one into letting him talk to them.

A While Later, just long enough for Ford to have put the idea out of his mind, the fairy leaves a package at his door with a note saying something along the lines of “told you I’d come through”.

He brings the box inside, because Um? What? And opens it to find Stan inside. Deep in a mouse coma and probably not able to wake up until Ford can raise his body temp enough so it doesn’t think winter is setting in anymore.

On Stan’s side, he got made mousy a while ago (maybe a year or two? Possibly three if I wanted to really stretch it) and got sort of adopted by an Outside Family (Borrowers who live Outside) who took it upon themselves to teach him how to survive. They kinda just- looked at this clueless man and went “Oh, oh you are going to die if someone doesn’t help you soon.” And then they did that.

He stayed with them for about a year before getting separated while they were moving north. So he is without his help when he ends up in the Gravity Falls area.

Was kind of rescued by the fairy, who clocked the family resemblance and told him “Oh, cool. I know a place you can stay. New place in town and the guys is such a scatterbrain. He totally won’t notice you there. Plus it’s so much safer than running around in these woods if you’re not magic.” Then used magic to send him into a mouse coma (possibly by claiming it was safer than trying to fly him around themself while he was awake), packed him in a magic box to keep his temp down, then dropped him in front of Ford’s place.

Neither of them is ready for this to be their reintroduction to each other.

Stan getting to Ford V3- Oops Fidds Broke Up a Crime Ring

It starts with Fidd’s little Tater-tot overhearing some guys at the park talking about grabbing people for sale. Even hearing a tiny voice shrieking to be let go. He, being a good boy, races to tell his mom and his dad that there are bad people who are trying to hurt a bunch of mouse people.

Fidds is hesitant because Mouse People? That couldn’t be real. But his Tater-tot is insistent that someone is being hurt so he feels like he should at least do something to check. So he takes a couple of little robots he made and sends them off to grab evidence.

And they bring back evidence. A lot of it, actually. Which looks like stuff for some kind of illegal pet trade. Clearly whoever was doing this did not factor in robots to keep their secrets safe. He is very alarmed about it.

One of the pieces of evidence is a box that’s cool to the touch. That, according to some of the papers he now has, says that it’s keeping the “products” from being able to escape. A note about the cold sending them into hibernation.

And, inside that box, is a cage full of tiny mouse-people. One of whom bears a rather striking resemblance to his old college buddy. And a few others who look like children.

Many things can be said about Fiddleford McGucket, but standing idly by when children were in danger wasn’t one of them.

He proceeds to put the fear of GOD into the criminals before handing (slightly altered) versions of the records to the police.

Emma-May, as a mix of hobby and side income, likes making fancy dollhouses for people. Gets damn good commissions for them. A love she learned from her grandfather who left all of his dollhouse-making things to her after he passed away. She sets up the Borrowers in the VERY FANCY house that was passed down to her.

Some of them reveal/explain that they’re not supposed to be mouse-people, Borrowers is the term, but used to be homeless/drifters who were snatched up at some point. (Stan, reluctantly, admits to being one of those, and hoo boy does that give Fidds some Concerns.) Some of them say they can’t even remember how they were snatched, just waking up in a cage one day and suddenly being small enough to fit in someone’s hands.

They get stuck for a bit trying to figure out a way to turn the ones who weren’t born Borrowers back to normal, but help comes when Fidds remembers that Ford studied the strange and unusual and tiny people certainly fit that, right?

.

.

And that's all I have. If anyone wants these ideas, go ahead and take them!! I would try my hand but they are already full with other GF aus.

[nenoname]

this has "dipper reacting to stan reading duchess approves fic at a funeral" energy to me

[mono-socke]

wholesome brothers interaction, ft. trans fips

[incorrect-green-lantern-quotes]

So a thing about Kyle Rayner is that he gets compared to Peter Parker a lot. Which is y'know not invalid, insofar as that they're both everyman characters who got great power by accidentally being in the right place at the right time, and had to learn great responsibility as a result of the guilt of losing a loved one.

Thing is, while all that is true, I'm a firm believer that if Emerald Twilight was written today, Kyle would be compared more with the other Spider-Man. Because while he has a similar origin to Peter, our boy Kyle is a legacy hero like Miles. Both of them had to struggle to figure out what it meant to be a hero with no help from their predecessors, ultimately taking the name and making it their own

Hell, in the Spider-Verse movies, Miles is an artist!

[girderednerve]

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated.

With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

“Investigating these authors, their book covers, their social media, etc takes A LOT OF TIME, especially with the volume of questionable material increasing month to month (and that's not including the sheer amount of legitimate books published each month in adult fiction that I'm looking at),” one librarian who asked to remain anonymous so she could talk openly about her job, told me. “Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”

This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry. While the term now encompasses what seems like AI-generated content as well, it predates the rise of generative AI, and also refers to the glut of low quality, often self-published ebooks or book “summaries” that are common on Hoopla. As some librarians told me, the sheer quantity of books in Hoopla’s service makes it seem more valuable because it offers such a large number of books, but in reality that number is misleadingly inflated by this slurry.

Several of the librarians I talked to said that they are worried about discussing [the problems raised by Hoopla's weak, unclear selection policies, including the 2022 inclusion of explicitly white nationalist texts,] because of the growing hostility towards libraries and groups like Moms for Liberty demanding that books about LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity be removed from libraries. One the one hand, librarians want to curate their collections and make sure their patrons are getting access to quality information. On the other hand, they don’t want people to think that they are trying to censor what materials patrons can access in way that’s comparable to what organizations like Moms for Liberty want. None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information.

[trash-soup]

Weirdmageddon would have ended much sooner if Mabel Pines had a sawed off shotgun

[corpusdiem-seizethedead]

Velvette: Vox is smiling, did something happen?

Vox: Can't I just smile because I feel like it?

Valentino: Alastor tripped and fell in the parking lot.

[nekucreates]

Possessed Stan Marsh :D

[rosiesdisneydrama]

I'll be honest, I don't know anything about borrowers or borrower aus, but your borrower Stan au is excellent. I especially love the version where Fiddleford is the one to find Stan. When does Fidds figure out Stan is Ford's twin? Is it instant, or does it slowly get revealed?

I'm personally a big fan of dramatic irony and (funny) miscommunication, so I'm just imagining Fidds not realizing they're related (and Stan avoiding mentioning any family, especially not his twin) so when Ford shows up, absolutely ecstatic at being able to study this new anomaly, everyone is caught completely off guard.

Thank you! I’m kinda glad so many people like the idea behind this little lark! (Even if I don’t plan on writing it out myself. I’m already juggling 2 other gf aus rn.) It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who thinks they would be fun to read/mess around with.

Fidds definitely suspects that something is connecting Stan and Ford at the start just because the resemblance is too strong to be just from chance. I mean, they’re twins and the odds of some random stranger on the streets looking just like your roommate from college are pretty low in the first place. So he’s pretty sure the two are related in some way.

I’m also of the opinion that Fidds does know that Ford has two brothers and not just one.

Like, Ford and Stan spent the entirety of their childhoods and almost all of their teenage years together. I feel like there’s no way he could have completely omitted Stan’s existence from his roommate while cramming as many credits as possible into his college schedule. He may not have told Fidds that they were twins, but I don’t think he can have fully pretended that Stan never existed in the first place.

He may have been vague about the things from their childhood/teenage years but he didn’t try to wipe Stan from his own history.

Fidds might suspect that Stan is Ford’s missing brother but he would also believe they could be cousins instead. Until he gets some form of confirmation about it.

The most he’d probably be able to pry out of Stan before Ford shows up is that he was homeless/a drifter and that he (probably) didn’t think his family would have cared much about him maybe being missing. (Which makes Fidd’s heart go out to the poor guy because ouch man. That’s gotta sting…) Except for his Ma. She might file the missing person's report if Pa didn’t try to stop her.

And Stan wouldn’t suspect that the “Stanford” that Fidds was talking about might be his brother because, after all, the name isn’t that unusual. There are probably plenty of guys named Stanford out there. Just like there are plenty of guys named Stanley!

It’s not until his dorky brother practically breaks down the door in his excitement that he realizes he should have asked more questions about the anomaly guy.

And Ford is just blindsided.

[brothersapart]

Hey, so I had a guess for Stan Baker's knack. I read a post that it had been used in Brothers Chosen, and I thought about how Dean had somehow managed to forget an entire being on his person. Who also might have been a threat to him. So does Stan have like a stealth ability to kinda make people forget he's there. Like how sometimes someone is so quiet that people forget they are there?

( @borrowedtimeandspace )

This is actually the closest guess to his actual knack that anyone's gotten, so we're gonna give it to you!

Attention Manipulation: The ability to psychically manipulate a human's attention.

Stan's knack works a bit similarly to John Winchester's, in that he is able to divert humans' attention from himself if he focuses on it. In the case of the scene you mentioned in Live and Let Die, Dean was a bit distracted doing what he was doing on that hunt, but Stan was definitely putting out 'don't look in your pocket' vibes that sealed the deal. At least for a bit.

While Stan concentrates on not being seen, humans' eyes won't focus on him and/or they might ignore his general vicinity. Even if he were out in the open and a human tried looking right where he was, with his knack active their gaze would simply slide off him like... uh, whatever it is water slides off. It's an incredibly useful skill for a borrower to have, and even in AU like Brothers Chosen where he doesn't realize he has it, he can still use it!

And though it isn't as easily discovered by him, his knack also works in the reverse: Stan can draw a human's focus towards himself, making it difficult for them to ignore him or even look away if he's really digging in. This could be a handy tactic for diversion, or a way to alert a friendly human that something's going on with him.

Like most knacks, Stan's does have its limits and rules. It works similarly to Sherlock's knack, where it only affects Stan at its base level but he can train it to affect others in a larger area with much greater effort and higher chance of burnout. It also doesn't affect borrowers/littles' attention at all, so even if he's fully hidden from human view, a fellow smol will be able to see him just fine.