#but I know if I don't chill

[populousgraph]

A 6th AND 7th rancher has made it to the Far Far Range!

Nicole Leclerc and Mercudi Panza belong to @lovelygirlnicole15

My brain is melting omggg...

These two are really cute, and they probably have so much fun working together. Nicole is in charge of the vac pack where Mercudi has got the slimepedia and bag.

Together, they explore what this strange new world has to offer, and they made a friend too!

...

....Two people and a kitty creature....

[teaboot]

I totally forgot till just now but one time a new therapist handed me a pad of paper and said "draw me a picture of how you feel" and after spending like five whole minutes of dead silence scribbling a teeny tiny pitch black dot in the middle of the pad that dug a hole straight through like 15 pages I gave it back to see him staring back at me like

[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.

[raticalshoez]

Was thinking of my post about dream teams and got really invested in whatever Unrequited Hate has going on

[azulhood]

Danny was tired, like 'I feel it in my bones and soul' tired. And he didn't want sleep at home because there's only so many nights, he could spend lying awake making sure his heart was beating in case his parents checked on him.

Currently he was flying aimlessly not really taking in his surroundings, but he could neither sleep while flying or fly forever. Normally he'd sleep over at Sam or Tucker's, but the Mansons had made it clear that he wasn't welcome at their house anymore and Tucker was grounded. Both would sneak him in if he asked, but he didn't want them to get in trouble for him. Which leads him to decide between his two choices, sleeping in a graveyard, or sleeping in a forest.

The graveyard was a little crowded with all the ghosts that called it home but he could probably find a quiet spot to sleep. The forest had a great view of the stars but was filled with traps from both his parents and the GIW after tracking his ecto-signature. Both options weren't appealing, but he wasn't about to chance sleeping on the roof of his house again. There were too many ghost detecting guns attached to it now. Danny sighed, graveyard it was, at least the ecto from all the shades/ghosts would hide him well enough. Decision made, now all he had to do was make his way over there. But first, where the heck was he? Danny looked around at the unfamiliar grey sky and gargoyles littered around and realized he had no clue where he was. He must have flown too far away from Amity without noticing...Again. It was really becoming a bad habit. Danny stared down at the city's inhabitants that were going home or heading to nightshifts or whatever and dreaded the long flight back to his town. And maybe it was ghost instinct, or maybe it was just his exhaustion. But his brain suggested 'What if I just possess someone?' And to him that seemed like a perfectly logical train of thought. He wouldn't control their body or anything, just sleep in their skin...That did not make it sound better at all. Before he could think twice, someone left a general store, arms filled with stuff and somehow projecting an aura of safety. The two thoughts of 'They look comfy' and 'screw it' clashed together in his head as he made the very stupid decision of performing a swan drive right into the someone. "WHAT THE-" "Don't worry, I'll be gone by morning I just need to sleep" Danny cut off the persons freakout-he should really get their name at some point- he would have explained more but the sleep gods had already done their job. This left one very confused, scared, and freaked out Batkid.

[kedreeva]

I need you to understand that the very straight and immediate line from someone's very confident "I don't like mice/I've handled mice before so I know what they're like" to joyous wonder as they hold the first calm, friendly mouse they've ever held and murmur "they're so soft/sweet/warm/gentle" practically to themselves is basically a drug

"I work at a petstore," says the young man with much disdain, "so I don't really need to hold another one. I know what they're like."

"These aren't petstore mice," I say, as I turn my hand over and the mouse holds on tighter. "They're not like any mouse you've ever held," I say, as I close my hand gently around the mouse and flip her onto her back for a second so I can touch her mouth and demonstrate how difficult it would be to get one of my mice to bite.

"I'm sure you've handled them extensively from a very young age, though."

"They haven't been handled before today, except to be moved into clean cages." She arranges herself in my hand and cleans her face. "Are you sure you don't want to hold one?"

He opens his hands, and she pours from my hand into his like a viscous liquid. She is soft and warm and sweet, and his entire face lights up when she hunkers down onto his warm hand and closes her eyes.

"....She's changing my mind."

"They tend to do that when you leave it open."

He took her and two companions home.

[pianokantzart]

Ravenous about the fact that Super Paper Mario actually ties off the loose ends of Mario and Luigi's character dynamic in Paper Mario 64. Mario goes from leaving his brother behind out of worry to leaving his brother behind... reluctant every step of the way... because he trusts him and cares enough about Luigi to show that he trusts him. It's like poetry, it rhymes, listen-

[aziraphalalala]

I am not entirely certain what will happen once the actors & writers strike ends, but I'm pretty sure Michael Sheen will break the sound barrier with how fast he will go feral on the internets about how Aziraphale wants to eat Crowley's ox rib

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Just rewatched centaurworld with my sister, is this anything?

[keferon]

Imagine you're in the world of Transformers. Imagine you woke up randomly in the med bay and you're a giant robot.

You don't know which version of Transformers this is, the movies or the TV series or the comics? You don't know.

But you need to pick a faction and join it right now.

[qifreyplushie]

promise you'll never leave me

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

Warden: You've never killed an innocent?

Zevran: Now there's an interesting word, "innocent." How many men do you know who can claim to be truly innocent?

Zevran: But if you're talking generalities, such as children and relatives and bystanders and such… never on purpose, but it happens.

Zevran: It's unfortunate, but death comes to us all. If not me, then some wasting disease. Or a fall down the stairs. Or at the hands of a darkspawn. It's all relative in the end.

Zevran: "Death happens," as we like to say. And when I get paid for it, death happens more often.

-

Zevran: In Antiva, being a Crow gets you respect. It gets you wealth. It gets you women… and men, or whatever it is you might fancy.

Zevran: But that does mean doing what is expected of you, always. And it means being expendable. It's a cage, if a gilded cage. Pretty. But confining.

-

Davrin: Lucanis, how do you decide when one of your targets deserves to die?

Lucanis: Usually when the client pays up front.

Davrin: I'm serious. Do you just kill anyone?

Lucanis: No. There has to be merit.

Davrin: "Merit?" Who decides that?

Lucanis: The Talon of the house.

Davrin: And then you just carry out the order?

Lucanis: It's my job.

Davrin: Must be tough to sleep at night.

-

Lucanis: You kill for a living, too, Davrin. How do you sleep at night?

Davrin: Like a baby. The things I hunt are pure evil. Monsters. There are no shades of grey with darkspawn. But you...

Lucanis: Provide a service.

Davrin: What if your target doesn't deserve to die?

Lucanis: Who does? Good, bad, everyone dies eventually. We just speed things up.

-

Emmrich: Do you have any say in your... targets?

Lucanis: You want to know if my victims deserved it.

Emmrich: Forgive me, I shouldn't have asked.

Lucanis: Everyone wonders.

Lucanis: I've never killed an innocent, by my count.

Lucanis: I cannot say if yours would agree.

-

Emmrich: Lucanis, do the implications of your work never trouble you?

Lucanis: Everyone on this team has killed before. I'm hardly unique.

Emmrich: Yes, of course. But in your case, it's a profession, rather than an act of necessity.

Lucanis: I'm not sure the Venatori or the Antaam see the distinction as you do.

-

Emmrich: I find it extremely interesting, Lucanis, that you consider the point of view of your enemies in battle.

Lucanis: I have to. It's much more difficult to find and kill them, otherwise.

Emmrich: Exactly! A utilitarian attitude towards death, and yet you extend empathy to your victims.

Lucanis: Not that much empathy.

Emmrich: Enough to wonder how the Venatori and Antaam view your actions.

Lucanis: Death comes to everyone, in time. I get paid to deliver it. Like a letter not everyone wants to read.

-

I think about this a lot. I'm always... surprised when I see the talk that they're supposedly trying to make Lucanis into the perfect "cinnamon roll" in Veilguard, because his sweet personality doesn't "match" his profession and background. Like, no? That's a very surface level of looking at it, I think.

Zevran is like this, too. He is an incredibly chill guy, and when you romance him, he is also very sweet and vulnerable, despite being an assassin. They're not that different in that department. They were both trained to be assassins since they were children. They're both traumatized in various ways. But neither of them acts like a bloodthirsty, evil freak. But they both also take pride in the job they do (or did), and how well they can do it, and have no intention of stopping. And yet they both express surprising empathy. (Zevran argues against annulling the Circle! Quite extensively!) And they make pretty much the exact same arguments about being killers for hire, as shown above.

Death is a natural part of life. Sometimes it just comes sooner, because we're there to deliver it. There's (almost) no such thing as an innocent person, so my victims aren't innocent people. Therefore, I've never killed an innocent in my entire life, as far as I know. (At least not intentionally.)

And that's interesting and fun about them! It's beautifully deranged. Lucanis completes an assassination mission, slitting somebody's throat or what have you, and then goes on his cosy coffee break, satisfied with a job well done.

The fact that they both say that they've never, in their opinion, assassinated "an innocent", so it's all good, doesn't automatically make it true and doesn't mean it's not complicated, however. Not every line of dialogue can be taken at face value. As video game players, we're rather desensitized to this, but hearing this should normally be at least a little alarming. For a regular person, at least. And it is for the people in the game! Like Emmrich and Davrin. Davrin has several banters with Lucanis about it. Like, who decides when somebody deserves to die and which contract's going to get carried out? Well, the "CEO" of "the company," of course! What could ever go wrong that way? Emmrich tries to coax Lucanis into saying that he does feel something about the whole thing, because he really wants it to be true. While Lucanis is very matter of fact about it. He knows what the Crows are, and that's it. He doesn't glamorize or demonize it.

So, it definitely isn't that "Veilguard says that Lucanis has never done anything wrong ever in his life," just like Origins doesn't do it with Zevran. Both the men's attitude towards killing is warped in an interesting way, completely in line with their background and upbringing. It shows when Lucanis argues with Davrin about them both being killers, because it completely escapes him (or maybe he ignores it for the sake of the argument) how the killing he does (contracts where the targets tend to be people) and the killing Davrin (a monster hunter, a darkspawn slayer) does is of different kind entirely. His logic is flawed at that point. But to him, it boils down to the fact that "it's just a job," and "killing is killing," and "death is death" regardless of form, and that rightfully baffles Davrin to no end. If anything, it shows how the Antivan Crows are taught to hand wave the issue, because the arguments Lucanis and Zevran both present are too similar to be anything else.

Of course, Lucanis, unlike Zevran, as the grandson of the First Talon and her favourite, might have had some extra privileges and wiggle space in comparison, which might have allowed him to bend the rules sometimes, give him space to show more compassion and act more heroically, because people are complex and there are many layers to what each person might consider right and wrong (e.g. killing is okay in various circumstances, and slavers in particular can get fucked - hell, we do it in video games all the time), but still. The fact that his grandmother wanted to tap a new market, so she made Lucanis specialize for hunting mages, which ultimately led to him killing a lot of Venatori and blood mages, makes it cleaner, which is nice, but then again, we hardly know the full extent of all his work. Moreover, when you ask Zevran to tell you stories about his jobs, you don't get much dirt out of him, either. He talks about some of the goofiest ones he's had. One of his targets that he (unsuccessfully) participated in taking out, a royal that got his position through plotting and murder, he also describes as somebody so immoral he basically deserved it. Also very clean. (Compare both these guys with somebody like Blackwall who truly committed a despicable act of murder for money that we do know of. And this single crime sounds so much more upsetting than anything either Lucanis or Zevran describe. None of the things Zevran says is as awful, besides the murder of his lover, which is framed like it wasn't really his fault, because he was misled.)

It's also worth noting that Zevran talks about how he was the best the Crows had before he left and how it brought him respect, wealth, women, men, or "whatever it is you might fancy." All in all, it comes with benefits. By his own admission, he was well off. But of course that came with a catch, as well. The "gilded cage" Zevran talks about. But that's not what made him leave. It was the plotting, backstabbing, and ever present distrust in the end, which led to the biggest mistake he'd ever made. Much like him, Lucanis also mentions that he had a comfortable life before getting captured, in the same quest where he also talks about how he didn't actually have full control of his life. ("Even before I was captured, my life was not really my own. So much had been determined for me.") The gilded cage comes up yet again. And it was plotting and backstabbing that made him lose a year of his life in the underwater prison.

My point is: Lucanis and Zevran are both assassins, because that's what they've always been, they were trained to be assassins since they were kids, they have a very pragmatic approach to death and killing, which they were most likely taught or perhaps were forced to develop, and they both take pride in how good they are at their job, and express no intention of ever stopping. And yet they both show that they have a good heart in various other ways, turn out to be friendly and incredibly loyal, and even very sweet as lovers. Because people can be complex, and so can be fictional characters. Yes, they're very different men, with different problems and personalities, yet also not that different.

You can't think that Lucanis is "too good" without also thinking that Zevran is "too good." You can't have this problem with Veilguard unless you also have it with Origins, is what I'm saying. And I think this may also apply to some of the other Crows we meet in Veilguard.

[thekittyokat]

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah

[ozziyo]

she's become adept at holding shirts and ungraded term papers for ransom

[miamiweisz]

The living. The dead. Can they co-exist? That's what we're here to find out.

(BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE, 2024)

[echo-river]

The first part separately as a bonus: