#but he needs to change that last line

[triglycercule]

would i be considered a lunatic if i said that horror's story could be read as a parallel for SA. Hear Me Out: (obviously be careful for reading this bc like,,, sensitive topic)

i feel like the largest parallel could be the actual event of getting his eye taken. a part of his body is "taken" and literally or metaphorically horror was pinned down and forced to give up his body (even worse considering that a literal part of him was PULLED out with a foreign object designed solely to hurt HIM SPECIFICALLY). it's digusting and horror claws and fights his way out to prevent it but unfortunately it still ends up happening no matter what he could've done. no matter how many backup plans or extra contibutions or begging or fighting he did. which like. sounds honestly pretty simple to the reality of victims of SA. that hopelessness of knowing that even if you did as much as you could, covering up, devoting yourself to a life of chastity, not hanging with people like thay, there's still a chance that something bad could happen and all of a sudden everyone's out to get you and how could they just stand by and do NOTHING while you were left to suffer and defend yourself

which leads onto the next point i wanna bring up which is horror's rage immediately after getting his eye stolen. his anger at the betrayal is (very justified my boy did nothing to deserve this) solely about him and his bodily autonomy. undyne (and alphys ig,,,,) couldn't consider ANY other possible solution than to deprive him of his autonomy and decide to just take what they wanted from his body??? AND THE FACT THAT ALPHYS SAID THAT HE MIGHT AGREE TO GIVING UP HIS EYE? it's giving very much so "oh it'll feel good so don't worry" type shit or whatever (horrortale alphys i DONT like you). a betrayal at the hands of someone you trusted a lot about your bodily autonomy? it just gives off that sort of parallel

and the sheer anger and fury that horror felt and enacted on alphys and undyne and everyone else at the CORE just like DUDE. that is a type of anger that only comes out when you've been deeply wronged. sometimes when a horrific experience like getting SAed happens you just wanna explode and drag down everyone around you and ESPECIALLY the perpetrators no matter how much you rationalize. you can have as many people as you want try to convince you that revenge and being hateful isnt the way but it doesn't matter because they havent been wronged the way youve been. horror deserved to be that cruel because undyne and alphys were just as cruel back to him, so he'll be the same and return it 10fold (he probably wasnt even out of bones when he decided to turn them into chips he just wanted to make it a point that he didn't even need to use his full strength to hurt the guards. horror could've EASILY killed alphys but no he wanted it to hurt for her so she could live a life of eternal suffering and fall to her lowest and to ESPECIALLY hurt undyne. because they deserve to suffer just as much as he did if not more for the crime commited against him)

a betrayal as bad as alphys's is only worsened when she tells him that she doesnt regret a single thing about using him for the underground. that has to be the single most infuriating thing for horror to hear because WHAT DO YOU MEAN alphys doesn't regret a thing? that's exactly what some people gloat about after doing terrible things; they try to sweep it under the rug as nothing that bad or justify it OR JUST STRAIGHT UP ADMIT IT!!! nah horrortale alphys deserved to suffer idc

and back onto that feeling of wanting to kick and scream and drag everyone else down with you after being left so used and betrayed due to getting SAed: i know it was bad that horror tricked snowdin into eating humans it was TERRIBLY BAD but really horror was just operating on anger and spite and the need for vengeance. nobody in snowdin ever did anything to hurt him (and i'm sure horror knows that considering he definitely regrets what he did) but to him maybe they also should feel the pain he feels so they can all relate. so that they can't try and fight against him when he says his side of the story and say that undyne was right with what she did. that maybe he wouldn't feel so absolutely devastated after what happened if he saw everyone around him suffering too, and maybe JUST MAYBE he'd get a bit of something back from his sacrifice that he never consented to

i KNOW i'm not reaching with this but idk if i phrased it the best. but to me horror's story really does genuinely parallel to one of an SA survivor's: the betrayal, the anger, the feeling of loneliness and isolation and just feeling absolutely used for a simple thing as your body. chapter 4 of horrortale really is amazing storytelling and so is horror (he was reasonable in what he did IDC WHAT ANYONE SAYS he might be WRONG but it was reasonable. i love horror sans)

[inamagicalhallucination]

i know i say that atsushi likes to spend his extra cash on kyouka but i also dont think kyouka lives there for "free" like she could, atsushi wouldn't mind, but i feel like it makes more sense for her to contribute since its not like atsushi's rolling in cash

maybe atsushi wouald be hesitant at a 50-50 thing becuz she's so little and he cares so much about her but i dont believe its 0-100 ya know?

[jq37]

Descendants: The Rise of Red is kind of a bizarre movie to talk about critically because, imo, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about it in the usual terms of good vs bad or enjoyable vs not enjoyable when the way more obvious tension is finished vs unfinished.

Because, more than any other movie I've ever seen, it does *not* read as a full movie. And I don't mean in a "this movie has a cliffhanger" kind of way. The Empire Strikes Back and Across the Spiderverse fit that description. They end on big dramatic cliffhangers that point to a resolution in the third installment.

But Rise of Red just sets all this stuff up and then...ends without concluding anything. It doesn't feel like the first movie in a trilogy (or duology). It feels like the first act of a two-act musical. It very specifically reminds me of the end of the first act of Into the Woods where all the main characters sing the song Ever After about how they all fixed their problems with magic and nothing bad will ever happen to them again and then the narrator ominously says "To be continued" before the curtain drops. But in Into the Woods you know there's a second act and this movie wasn't sold as the first act of a bigger story. Like sure, it has the, "You didn't think this was the end" tag at the end like all the other movies, but those movies were complete, self-contained stories even though they had sequels. This was NOT a full story. It's half of one story.

Like, if we're supposed to take this as a full story, there are so many bizarre choices:

Why did they make sure to mention that Cinderella and Charming fell in love at the ball at the top if it wasn't meant to set up Back to the Future style, "Oh no, I accidentally got my mom banned from the ball so she's not gonna fall in love with Dad and I won't be born" shenanigans?

Why did Maddox very pointedly have that bit about "you could lose your mom completely" if that was never going to come into play? Red never did anything to endanger Bridget or endanger her own birth so it doesn't make sense as a warning in that way.

Why was there all this focus on this Carrie on prom night moment for Bridget if we LITERALLY NEVER SAW CASTLECOMING? Why dance around this moment and talk about it all cloak and dagger with no specificity if they weren't building up to some big reveal that it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed? And like, they leaned in HARD with making Bridget the nicest, sweetest, cotton candy princess as a teen so I need WAY more than, "She got pranked by known bullies she's been enduring with a smile very handily up to this point" to buy that she went from that to "murderous dictator". And even if she did become murderous, I find it insanely hard to believe that she'd include her best and only friend on the list of people she wants to suffer unless there was a betrayal. I find it INSANE that there wasn't a falling out scene at any point in this movie with how thickly they were laying on the admiration and camaraderie.

(Note: And adult Cinderella def has guilty vibes re: the Queen at orientation. Which I know I'm not imagining because it's literally spelled out in the Jr Novelization!)

Before the time travel element of the movie started, I thought they were going for something like they go to the past and realize that Bridget was bullied not by the VKs but by the spoiled royals, and Ella ends up joining in the bullying once she gets with Charming, betraying Bridget and justifying her whole "Love Ain't It" philosophy. Or Ella ditching her at the last minute to be with Charming meaning she has to deal with the monster prank alone and it was the being alone rather than the prank itself that hurt her (though that is NOT a good enough reason to go all off with their heads on your subjects). The fact that, as far as we know right now, it literally was just a relatively mild and reversible prank that caused all of this is just, such flat storytelling, you know?

But! All of this makes way more sense if this is meant to be the first act of a single contained story. And I don't wanna be all "Pepe Silvia, secret good 4th episode of Sherlock" about this but I did see this picture:

Which seems to indicate that this was written as a Part One. Which, if so, idk why they wouldn't advertise it that way but whatever. The point is, if that's the case then it means that we're potentially in bad pacing territory rather than straight up bad storytelling territory. Because this isn't a bad place to be halfway through your story:

The heroes, warned that time travel is dangerous, have gone back in time to change the heart of a brutal tyrant before she can stage a coup. They seemingly succeed in their mission and when they come home, everything is great! But then, the side effects of time travel start to catch up with them. Chloe realizes that, in breaking the vase, she prevented her mother from going to the ball and falling in love with her dad (who was conspicuously absent from the final scene btw) which means she's starting to be forgotten and erased from the timeline. And Red realizes that though this new version of her mom is as sweet and kind as the teen she once met, she's a complete stranger to her (fulfilling the Hatter's warning that she could lose her mom completely). So they have to go back in time once more to make sure the Ella and Charming fall in love again, perhaps at the cost of whatever bad thing that happened to Bridget happening again and bringing back the original version of her future self. But, now with more context of how her mom became that way, Red can now talk to her mother and persuade her to give people another chance.

Boom, that gives us time to go back and hit everything we haven't yet hit. We can pay off the time travel tropes that were set up but not explored. We can go to Castlecoming which feels so obviously set up to be the centerpiece of this story (like, come on, Back to the Future literally does the school dance thing. This is Time Travel Storytelling 101). We can actually get info about what the prank was and why it affected Bridget so completely.

(Note: This is a side thing but it really strikes me as so crazy that Bridget would so SUCH a big 180 here. Like, I know the Queen of Hearts is a silly, goofy, campy villain, but she straight up murders people and there's no way to get around that if we're taking her out of the surreal story she comes from and putting her in a (comparatively) grounded story. If I wasn't doing a betrayal plot, I would make the twist that the spell that turned Bridget into a "monster" didn't just have a physical effect, it had a mental effect and it magically twisted her personality to be the way it is now. So they broke the physical half of the curse, but neglected the other half and it's been festering the whole time, turning her as evil as she was sweet. Because like, a simple physical transformation isn't that big of a deal to have such heavy security--Bridget made cupcakes with a transformative effect and that was totally fine. I'm not saying that that's what's gonna be the case. I just think it would be an explanation that makes sense for why she changed so crazy much that makes more sense than a simple prank or even a betrayal. Her mom wasn't even evil! How did she go from zero to murder without even an evil mom to push her onto the path? But I'm super digressing right now.)

(Note #2: OK, one last thing. The trap on the book presumably would have hit the VK's and trapped them in Merlin's office regardless of what Chloe and Red did, right? That's like, net zero influence on the timeline. I genuinely can't tell if that's a straight up plot hole or set up to be like, "Oh no. Actually when she said that she was turned into a monster in front of everyone it was meant in a less literal way." Like she was just made to look bad and that was the real thing that pushed her over the edge. Like idk. It really feels like the only thing they really did that would change the timeline was get Ella banned from the dance and presumably out of the way where she couldn't hurt Bridget. OK NOW I'm done.)

Anyway, my point is that this is not how I would have structured my movie and I think this was a super weird way to go into the second era of Descendants movies, but they can still tell a complete story if that's their plan. I'm genuinely really curious to see if this pans out to be a fairly competently told story that just happens to be split over two movies or a complete fumbling of the narrative bag because it could really be either at this point and it's fascinating to me.

[pass3ra]

cressida's storyline was genuinely shameful tbhhh it's like they started rewriting it in the first half of the season then completely forgot about the changes they'd made to make it fit the book plot and it just ends up making everyone else look bad😐 every character in the second half got a "penelope did nothing wrong" lobotomy so we ended up with eloise completely ignoring cressida being sold off to an horrible man (when she made every effort to support her in the first half of the season) and for some reason resenting her for pretending to be lady whistledown? Then they somehow frame her ignoring colin's offensively bad pleas as it being her turning away from redemption when all she's trying to do is escape being trapped in the country with her likely abusive aunt... and it ends with her meeting her horrible fate and it still being framed as tragic only to immediately juxtapose it with the bridgerton family winning the idgaf war while gleefully seeing off francesca and her future dead husband. The bridgertons were the villains of the season frfr

[raphaerolo]

Last line challenge

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or as many as you like).

Tagged by the lovely @merlyn-bane

I was (unsurprisingly) working on the little codywan surfer au, doing a design sketch for fox, the resident lifeguard. The last line was the shading above his shorts and as you may notice i'm once again getting carried away with a design sketch 😅

I will draw him some hands eventually... he'll need those to swim...

No pressure tags for @alamogirl80 @pyromanicdaydreamer @chiliger @notthestarwar and @anaclastic-azurite (head honcho of surf au btw)

[feline-evil]

Dick or no dick confirmation Pickles was always going to be trans to me anyways; if he's swingin' somethin that's phallo babes, if he's not then his t-dick fat. What's not to get.

[jichanxo]

how it started:

how it's going:

[moe-broey]

Fuck tjis shit I'm making base Alfonse my greeter again

AWESOEM......

[yanderespamton78]

ive already shown this to anyone who actually cares pretty much loll (anyone following the addison arg) but i might as well post it on here

this is actually the first proper animation ive done :'D like other than this ive animated a ball bouncing but that was more to test the software than anything,, lucky for me i consume animation memes more than i consume water so i know the basics B)

[toastytrusty]

thinking endlessly about how romans main relationships outside of the family in later seasons are lukas and mencken, and how their dynamics with rome foil each other both narratively and in-universe. lukas represents them selling waystar, represents emotional vulnerability, represents freedom. mencken, on the other hand, represents them keeping the company, represents the toxic façade of who you Need to be, represents remaining trapped. the way romes emotions fuel the contrasting dynamics between them is endlessly fascinating

lukas, upon his second time meeting rome, immediately continuously attempts to talk abt deep kinda personal/emotional stuff, which rome shut down because he's afraid of self expression, even though deep down he craves connection. this probably scares him, so, especially after logan's death and lukas' reaction to it (on one hand being a dick and not pushing back the meeting, on the other hand trying in his own autistic way to connect and empathize with their loss, as well as being real about how awful logan was), roman distances himself. he feels pushed to the edge of his sanity and reverts to what comes most naturally to him, you guessed it, eeeemotion. he freaks out at lukas on the cliff, in his head burning any bridge built between them, which tbf he pretty much does. but to lukas, this is almost like a win for him. he's been trying to encourage roman to open up to him since they met, and he finally did! so the $5 price bump is almost like a congratualtions or a reward, as well as a spiteful fuck you. narratively it takes them one step closer to selling the company, roman's emotion being what puts him there, and in this case it's being appreciated. really, rome wants out of the company; he wants to sell and he wants to be free of it and all the pressure and expectation that comes with it.

whereas mencken was always very business-focused with roman; joking and laughing in a detached, not very real way. his focus was always succeeding and going far and not really caring how he got there, and i think that's part of why roman liked him. there was no expectation to be genuine or actually connect; he could just put on his brave face and do what they felt needed to be done. when he pushed lukas away because things got too real, he continued seeking out mencken because mencken was easy to appeal to in that way he so often does; changing himself to suit there needs. he puts mencken over everything else that mattered in his life (relationships with his family members mainly he doesn't gaf about The Economy) because he didn't have to be real with mencken. it was all just the blind pursuit for power he didn't really want and a security he felt more threatened by than anything, because he got too far in and set his sights on something (or more accurately kendall set his sights on something, and who was rome to protest?) and had to acheive it. so when the façade breaks, and mencken sees him for the first time not as the charming, witty, businessman, but as the damaged person who just wasn't built for the world, he walks away, no longer looking to protect waystar, or roman. love and sensitivity and emotion are all weaknesses to mencken, weakness he had previously not seen in roman, but now that he had it was too late. rome couldn't pretend forever and mencken bailed, handing waystar (and roman!! becase their ties to waystar are through roman!!) back to lukas and the gojo deal on a silver platter.

this inadvertantly pushes roman back towards freedom, and, in a way, back towards lukas. he told mr emotions to fuck off and ran away to be his self absorbed emotionless husk with someone who wanted nothing more from him, but that didn't work out too well. he can't stay in the cage that is waystar, he can't spend all of his time being someone he's not; it's exhausting. lukas represents his ability to acheive freedom from the toxic environment of waystar, as well as the fact that he will eventually have to confront reality, and mencken represents his unhealthy, and ultimately doomed to fail, coping mechanisms and avoidance behavior. when he tries to twist his perspective of the people around him to make them seem like good people (logan, MENCKEN), lukas shuts it down (at least with logan; i don't think the two of them ever talk abt mencken) and makes rome confront the fact that they aren't, and when rome is so deep into being someone he isn't, lukas encourages him to be himself, whereas mencken condemns him for it

[llilychen]

it’s really sad that i always looked forward to rhaenyra and/or alicent scenes last season but i now feel the urge to fast forward every time one of them comes on screen

- every alicent scene is her looking sad or crying or her with cole but nothing she does adds anything of value to the plot

- we get the same black council scene in which the men are undermining rhaenyra twice per episode and still nothing is done (i do believe she will make some progress in the next episodes but it’s just so boring to watch her have the same scene over and over again)

cersei and dany i miss you both so much

[theheightofdishonor]

when I mean quit traumatising me with thoughts about a volleyball manga, I meant it. What am I supposed to do with the knowledge that Hinata knew his weakness from the start and seeking individual growth (greed being a positive thing) doesn’t make him any less of a team player? Or that their extreme love for volleyball is what isolated them until they found each other? (or how entirely besotted Kageyama was with Hinata right from the start lmao) But really, reading your posts give me a greater appreciation for the manga and I didn’t even know that was possible! Thank you for your analysis, although I will be suing for psychic damage every time I see your posts in my feed because I end up thinking about them too much. I really like that you love Haikyuu so much, that love is contagious and you make me like it more.

Dunno, personally I find it fun to inflict my brain rot on others. The joy of suffering together or whatnot.

As for what to do with it, you can always just spin all that around your head for eternity and spit it out in various ways the way I've been doing for like 2-4 years now. Or use it to extrapolate even more insane heartbreaking headcanons and aus. They're both fun!

(Re: kageyama being besotted for hinata, that reminds me I have a post somewhere about kageyamas canon three step journey of falling in love with hinata but idk where it is. If I have time to find it I'll repost it for you because it's a good post (they make me want to chew on glass))

Im glad that I make you love hq more because honestly, there's few things better than being able to share your love of something with someone else and when you can bond with other people over that shared interest. It's sooo delightful. And like personally, interacting and having conversations and talking at people makes me like it and think about it more. It's also the way that i flesh out my thoughts. Whenever I post something especially long on here, it usually because I talked about it recently to or at someone.

Feel free to sue me for psychic damage, I find the idea utterly delightful but also you're really to blame because your asks make my day and make me want to write more about hq and kagehina

[blessedmoonsoul]

kimmel's ugly ass crying just annoyed the hell out of me libs are so fucking irritating

[lem-argentum]

it took me until dt to change rudy's hairstyle, but i ACTUALLY think he would've cut it back in post-stb when he became a reaper. the trope of "character cuts hair to feel more in control of their life" is cliché but REAL. and also the visual of him cutting it with his scythe is fun

[the-halfling-prince]

I need to do this for the Harlow series one day.

"I figured y'all would really like this character. Me too. Aren't you so glad I didn't have him die at 14? Me too."

[selvepnea]

Thinking about. That one post about art. And how it's never good enough. Since you're the one that made it. And how. It might relate to how I view myself?