#but actually not sorry whatsoever

[peppered-moths]

imagine you were born hungry. imagine you were born with a hole in your gut that can never be filled, that is always writhing.

you are a mirror. you were born a mirror, surrounded by mirrors. the first thing you ever know is that you are not human. the second thing is that you are not him. you are a reflection, with his face and his voice and the people who loved him. you can mimic him, pretend so well that you are not anything else, but you cannot escape the aching hunger in your stomach, in your mouth.

he cared for the other one, the you-but-not-you. you hear that you died in his arms once. you don't know how to feel about that; you don't know him, don't care (because you're not him even though you want).

nevertheless, you are drawn to him. maybe it's the way he looks at you, guilty and frustrated and awe-struck all at once, a complicated mixture of feelings that has you shying away and inching closer, bit by bit. you decide you like the way he looks when he's happy, though you'd never say it to his face.

that's probably why you don't say anything, when the world twists, soft graphite and watercolors. because you like seeing him happy.

this world is good enough. it doesn't matter if it isn't real, it can be good enough. you can be alive. he can love you like he loved him be happier here, without the pressure, without the fear. isn't that good? why can't it be good enough for him?

you know you don't matter to him, not like the real you. you know that when he looks at your face, all he sees is the other one. he doesn't understand. it's not fair. it's not fair. you want something for yourself for once.

he says he'd die, if that's what you wanted. standing on the precipice. his heels slip over the edge, hanging in space. you want. you do not want. you want, but not like this. you imagine his body below the city lights, arranged like he's sleeping, a halo of red seeping into his hair. you wonder what forever looks like with him, what it might look like without him. he would die for you. you have never been so afraid of that.

he pulls you over the edge, hands entangled.

you are the only one who can stop this. you are the only one who can save him.

(part of you doesn't want to. part of you is selfish, and aching, and hungry.)

(what would he have done?)

you catch him. save his life. it feels like the worst thing in the world. you hate yourself, just a little bit, for not wanting it. the hunger coils in your stomach.

you leave for a while (because of the severance). you don't want to talk about it. the far shore has waves that beat endlessly against the sand, and you fell apart and shivered back together- and you don't want to talk about it.

you tell him to take you somewhere. anywhere. somewhere nice.

(a nice place to die, you think. you're too much of a coward, too much of a monster, to say it.)

it's beautiful, and he's smiling, and there's a gaping emptiness in your gut. you feel yourself shaking apart, skin to bones.

you tell him you are hungry, the words ripped from your throat like the awful truth they are. and he just looks at you, the way he always does.

and then he kills for you. not human, not yet (you wonder if he would), but it still screams as it dies.

he holds the heart in his hands. you are hungry. from here, it just looks like meat. it drips, plip-plop-plip, black blood splatting on tile. you are hungry. he offers it to you.

(despite everything, you sort of want to be human. despite everything, you sort of want to be dead.)

you close your teeth around his fingers instead. like a feral dog. like somebody who is not (has never been) human. his blood is red, and you are terribly, painfully hungry.

you tell him you are a lost cause, a monster with a pretty face and nothing behind it. that he should give up, should leave you alone, should let you die (should kill you himself, really).

he cries, salty and miserable, shoulders shaking. he cries. for you. because of you. all you can do is stare.

the heart drips on the floor between you. you are hungry.

(he does not look like an angel, or an icarus, or a savior. he looks like a fourteen year old boy in love with a monster.)

you have always been selfish.

you have always been hungry.

[wisteriasymphony]

And no one else was in the room where it happened....

[eddiegettingshot]

“i guess so” was so insane of buck to say. what do you mean you guess so. there was no reason to respond like that. why not just say yeah. YEAH. YOUR ATTENTION. what was the point of i guess so. he looks soooo relieved to have an answer for his feelings but he’s saying i guess so. girl what. what! you’re guessing? you still don’t know for sure? he’s standing in front of you and you still can’t conjure up an emphatic yes? you’re acting in ways so strange your sister is baffled? you don’t even know why your father figure would approve of your relationship? you don’t know what you’re ready for? you don’t know why you lied to your best friend or why you hurt him? you’re just not certain of anything? “i guess so” WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY KNOW!!!

[mazojo]

Anyways XO Kitty love interests summarized

Dae

Min Ho

Yuri

[kadextra]

idk guys I think it’s kinda weird that bad said a week ago that if he tells whether the October 1st stream was a hallucination or not it’d be a spoiler, then cucurucho moves into his house for a few days afterwards, then today when bad has “cucurucho lives in my house” as his stream title cucurucho’s bedroom suddenly disappears like it was never there except for the welcome bb mat, q!bad wonders if he’s hallucinating and has an emotional crying breakdown over cucurucho leaving him

i’m suspicious tbh cant help but feel like something more is going on here

[cistematicchaos]

Being crippled is so ridiculous sometimes like what do you mean I can't walk? That's literally what my legs are for. Are you telling me they just up and quit on me? For what? Better wages? In this economy? no not wages apparently they just don't like the fact my soul is inhabiting this body and until further notice lmao they're just gonna make sure I'm miserable. 👍 why, you may ask? Well, why not is the real question apparently

[rawkysawrus]

some idiot said sonic being trans was ooc yesterday so i made this lol stay mad

[fionvancia]

okay but no lie this time i am actually gonna try my best to not get side-tracked from my studies at least until after i take my psat 8/9. wish me luck i will see you guys once it's october ninth (the day after i take my psat 8/9 .. i'm so so scared to take it omg what if i make bad on it. what if i somehow 'fail' it. what if i miss a question that was EASY just because i wasn't paying attention or because i was feeling tired. oh nononononono i'm so scared to take this)

mini rant in the tags

[aviatrickss]

*takes a deep breath and leans in so close that my lips touch the microphone*

the tragedy of dick and jason’s relationship as brothers is not that they hated each other and then jason died, or that they were super close and then jason died. the tragedy is that dick did not know enough about jason to know how to mourn him. were they brothers? were they rivals? dick sure doesn’t know, and jason doesn’t either! but it’s fine bc they have plenty of time to figure that shit out, they don’t need to know each other right now bc there will be time to know each other later.

except.

[blueskittlesart]

i am an athena cykes defender forever and ever until the day i die but god. somewhere out there there is a universe where apollo justice got actual follow through and it kills me that i am not living in it

[partentts]

Down bad

Alt ver:

[ghost-bxrd]

are you implying that if you ended up in Gotham you would go chase down Jason Todd with a a crowbar or something

I’m implying that my self preservation skills are worse than those of a wet paper towel and I’m not even kidding.

And excuse you I would NEVER. Now, Joker on the other hand….

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

[bearenjoyers]

sorry im just thinking about bcs but like. why not add a few smaller scenes of gus interacting with his own men? why does it seem like, in comparison, mike is almost immediately elevated to a higher status than those two in bcs purely because we actually get to see him having normal conversations with gus? like i understand they might not keep the plot moving as well because of the fact obviously if victor is currently doing something it’s because gus told him to etc. but for the most part all of the smaller interactions gus does have with those two ends up being in a somewhat high stress situation where it feels very tense between everyone. and it’s just like damn! is it always like that?? why do those two even care that much about their jobs if their boss is a bit of a dick? etc. i think even an additional scene or two with those guys (either alone or the both of them) talking with gus in a more normal situation could’ve both added a bit more depth into how gus treats his employees (we got a lot with how he treats lyle and co., but not a whole lot with the illegal side of things), how comfortable vic and tyrus feel around him in a calmer setting, and exactly why they both feel the need to be as loyal as they are to the guy.

and also on the other side of this i don't think it'd hurt to maybe elaborate on their pay just a bit..? i'm not saying to randomly put a number out into the atmosphere but i just mean some smaller things like. do they buy nicer things for themselves? what's their housing situation? what's their car situation? are the escalade / yukon their own vehicles or does gus just use those two for business situations? do they use them when they're doing their own stuff off the clock or do they have their own cars? etc. that can also help with understanding their motivations a bit. don't get me wrong i don't think they should be visibly rich or something because that's not what gus would want but just smaller things! cause it's easy to write their loyalty off as Well they probably get paid super well, which i'm sure is true, but if they don't show a single hint of that then what's the point. even something as simple as giving tyrus a nice watch, or maybe victor having a nicer looking gun, etc. something small like that. because as it stands right now the average 41 year old viewer who watched the show once only knows and will only ever know victor and tyrus as those two guys in the background who do random stuff for gus with no clear motivation. just the personification of "On it boss (salute emoji)". and to be honest this is true for a whole lot of fans who do watch the show multiple times and enjoy thinking about it more in depth, because on screen we barely have anything about the two.

and to be clear i'm not trying to say we should have an episode just for them or something like no i understand they're side characters. i understand we don't need all that. and i understand this is also primarily Jimmy's show. but it's not like these two are on the same level as like, arlo or paige and kevin etc. these guys have been around since brba. victor was literally introduced in the same episode gus was. and they are a huge part of gus's story, especially in brba. s4 wouldn't have been what it was without victor and tyrus. and in bcs, ignacio's situation wouldn't have been the same if it weren't for victor and tyrus as well. and i just personally believe that if their goal with gus in bcs was to go back and elaborate on how everything came to be and show what he was like a few years younger, they could've dragged victor and tyrus into that. and i think his character would've benefited from taking that extra step with those two.

[starlooove]

I used to be very into hazbin and helluva boss but atp idec enough to think about anything but the racism but what I WILL say is that the reason fans are getting mixed signals between the actions and the characters is that viv doesn’t know how to balance seriousness and playfulness, she has a fundamental misunderstanding of how class and race impacts people on a societal and personal scale, and she thinks showing these characters exist is enough activism which allows her to avoid putting effort into the stories of anyone who’s not a white male and getting applauded by her 14 yr old yt fans

[19871997]

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