#but his injury tho :(

[absolutehumandisaster]

This is what true love looks like. Btw.

[majorasnightmare]

the tadpole/brain damage thing. its like. chekovs gun to me. obviously theres very little mechanical support ingame for having a disabling injury, aside from maybe an optional voluntary decision to drop the INT score, but similarly to choosing to write intention into the lack of dark urge Lore responses from the party, i just like to make mountains out of molehills and force game mechanics into In Universe Character Problems

like when dirge repeatedly mentions that he thinks the tadpole is doing something beneficial for him, that its helping him, it isnt JUST the power-hungry psionic ambition in him. its a parasite, that needs a host. it needs a LIVING host, or its own chances of survival plummet. and dirge gets tadpoled right after a life threatening injury to the tadpoles preferred habitat. neither of them want to die!! dirges body tries to recover, but cant in part BECAUSE of the tadpole (the netherese stasis magic rejecting outside influence and binding it to its host, having an unejectable foreign object in the injury site, etc), but its not like the tadpole WANTS its host to have a life altering injury

its not like its malicious (except when it comes to Hive Activity, and then it can be a right bastard), it just cant live any other way. it cant help what it is. halsin calls the illithid life cycle abberant and unnatural, but brood parasitism exists throughout the natural kingdom. is the wasp egg evil for having been laid in a caterpillar?

its first moments of life outside the brine pool, and its new home, its new life, its host, its caregiver, its food supply, is bleeding and dying and falling apart and trying to fix itself but cant and its trying to heal around you but it cant but if it doesnt do anything youll both die, so this larva, this tiny worm of psionic potential and instinct, does what it can. holds its host together with whatever force it can muster, soft gelatinous body (perfect for compreesing flat and squeezing through small orifice openings) keratinizing outside the acidic environment of the brine, its four oral tentacles (its only source of motion and movement when so young and soft, dragging itself along as best it can) made for interweaving with dense synapse clusters to passively absorb the psionic imprint of its host, now desperately intwined with bleeding meat just to try and hold it all together. driven by survival instict and a vessel of psychic potential, forced into passivity by the commands of the Elder, further forced by circumstance to leverage all its great gifts to keep its host standing long enough to eventually eat

my thought is that the reason why dirge still gets the cutscene of the emperor tadpoling him at the beginning of the game, is that the original tadpole orin forced on him is just so weakened and exhausted by months of effort trying to keep him alive through kressas experiments and meddling, that the emperor, currently in thrall to the absolute, feels the need to replace it with a fresher healthier specimen, which then cannibalizes and absorbs the previous one, and then just has to go back to doing the same shit as the last one.

i think that dirges tadpole isnt as twitchy or squirmy as the others because of it. that when omeluum gives him a psychic MRI, the tadpole is just burrowed down and its tendrils stretched like a dense net throughout dirges brain tissue, only moving or writhing occasionally but definitely not as mobile as usual, its web of tendrils especially twisted near dense scar tissue at the back of his head. this worm is already so fucking weird and the circumstances for this mind flayer MRI have already introduced a bajillion different variables that need accounting for, that i dont think omeluum immediately groks the specifics of whats going on but CAN peg the "you have brain damage and your worm is fucking Weird" situation fairly easily. but i dont think it gets enough time in dirges head to get a full understanding of what the tadpole is doing FOR him

cuz like. imo its definitely objectively helping. its a psychic information bank specifically designed to interface with a human brain. the reason why dirge isnt experiencing too many of the side effects of brain damage is because the parasite is doing its best to mitigate them. memory issues, brain fog, disorientation and balancing issues, theyd all be significantly worse without the parasite. when he brings up how he feels its helping him, objectively hes right and its not even the kickass psychic powers hes right about.

like it doesnt cure EVERYTHING, he has chronic migraines that are sensitive to light, and before he asks halsin to make medicine, he starts every morning puking his guts out when the morning sun makes him so nauseous he cant hold dinner down. even without the Urge Nightmares, he has insomnia and just cant meaningfully sleep. but keeping track of what day it is, remembering what happened a few hours ago or the other day, standing up from a sitting position and not immediately wobbling and/or collapsing, retaining his old muscle memory. all shit the parasite is helping with

which is why i cant help but fixate on those moments immediately after defeating the absolute. like oh thats juicy

[terrumdurak]

continuing those sketches with two more pages

[touchlikethesun]

sometimes, ngl, i do find myself wondering what it was that made lan wangji fall so desperately in love with wei wuxian - they really are so different and wei wuxian does represent in many ways the antithesis of everything lan wangji lives his life embodying, even if the audience knows how great and amazing wei wuxian is (we also read mainly from his pov and he is basically handcrafted to appeal to modern fandoms), we the audience are not lan wangji, lan wangji isn’t privy to all the same information we are. and then a scene will come along, where wei wuxian will be so earnestly and painfully good, to someone else or to lan wangji himself, and it all makes sense again. like, of course lan wangji was going to fall in love with him how could he not fall in love with him??? really he’s completely powerless when it comes to wei wuxian how could he not be

[slamrink]

Nothing to see here just steph stealing glances of klay like he’s afraid he’s going to get caught 😃😃 (via namxsj on twitter )

[thethespacecoyote]

ford eats like a bird most of the time, even on the stan o war, but when they make a stop at the boardwalk from their childhood ford goes CRAZY over all the sweets. he literally tries everything and stops stan every couple of minutes to get something new and even though stan knows he's gonna have a helluva stomachache later he can't bring himself to tell ford he shouldn't

also stan would 100% know the tricks behind the rigged carnival games and between that and ford's scarily quick reflexes they can basically win any prize they want

[hinamie]

domain expansion

[tblsomedoodles]

Why are you here? Comic

They're dumbasses, your honor. Like, at this moment, neither of them actually believe they're sibling. (Mikey and Leo are dead set on it but these two are skeptical.) Yet they spend two minutes alone and devolve into sibling bickering. something i had not planned on when i went to make this comic. They did this on their own lol!

Bonus Traximus Reaction to finding his ward bickering like a child with one of the newbies

Honestly, it's actually a pretty important moment for both Rafa and Traximus. Rafa because that's that's the moment they realize Donny has like no self preservation instinct, so if he won't protect himself, Rafa will, while he's around to do it at least. It's important for Traximus b/c for the first time in years, he's seeing his ward acting like a child and he pretty much decides right then and there that 1) They're definitely siblings, and 2) if these 3 strangers actually manage to escape this place, he is making Rafa go with them.

Anyways, here's my little experiment with limited color pallets. I'm not sure i'll do this again b/c it was kinda annoying to figure out the colors first (especially since i knew i wanted both variations of red and purple but couldn't find a good pallet for that. Thus i ended up with this one.)

ps. Donny's shoulder is a reoccurring problem at this point b/c he won't let it rest long enough to heal properly. The injury first happened during "shredder strikes back" events and since Donny decided to start his training pretty much immediately upon getting to the farm house, it hasn't had the rest it needs to properly recover. theoretically, it should be healed by now, but he keeps pushing himself and re-injuring it, a fact he's been hiding as much as he possibly can.

[harbingersecho]

grif's surgery but just a little more... obvious?

I actually rly rly ADORE frankengrif but I don't have an in-show reason why he'd have extensive long-term allogeneic skingrafts on his face 😔

[olessan]

I cannot believe that I never noticed that Elendil tests if Miriel is blind before he brings it up directly, by leading the horse closer to a tree and watching to see if she avoids the low branch (that he ducks to avoid) 🤦‍♀️

[tofumilkbread]

Do you think when Touya inevitably survived he was sent to prison for his crimes?

What if Touya was sent in one of the most protected prisons in Japan for a couple of years. Afterall there was only so much Enji's status could do.

Touya probably didn't even care. Afterall even this was better than going back to Enji, no? He just felt a sense of nostalgia in the medical pod when he thought he was dying but the more he thinks about it the more he doesn't really regret anything he did. So he was just "k" and went to the prison to serve his sentence.

Now while this life wasn't ideal in there no one dared mess with him because they all saw the news and the shit he did. Like some prisoners even tried to butter him up so that they could get under his wing but he was too distracted by the little cute junior doctor that worked around the place.

He saw them every week, just passing through his cell to get to another where a fight had broke out yet again but it was frustrating to see you from behind the bars so what does he do? He beats up his cellmate and FINALLY, you come waddling into his cell to take his roomie away. He'd able to see you fully and satiate his hunger.

But was it enough? Fuck no. So he just becomes someone who frequently gets into fights on purpose just so that the junior doctor would come and treat his small bruises because the senior ones would be busy with the inmates he had beaten to pulp.

[cosmicourple]

Movie! Cherik but the bullet got reflected into Charles eye’s so now he’s blind. Ye angsty angst for that but also. Bonus points if due to lots of fighting &/or whatever other revolutionary stuff the Brotherhood do, Erik has started to go deaf 🙃.

[tennispilled]

just randomly remembered that there’s going to be a whole ass docuseries about carlos that’s coming out next year. like i can’t even begin to imagine what we’re going to see in that

[starlightseraph]

feeling kinda good-naturedly superior that i’ve been into the tdf my entire life. my mum grew up with it. she watched it when she was pregnant. she nursed me with it playing.

now thanks to netflix my fellow members of gen z have discovered it and we can all go insane over blorbos together.

[battiegutz]

some doodles for that au i mentioned where squilf takes leaf and the kits out of thunderclan nd they end up in the remnants of bloodclan👍 ft. squilf defending her sister nd a design for jay (not jayfeather, the 3 dont have clan names in this au)

[beneathsilverstars]

i feel bad for making modern au siffrin et al's life soo shitty and traumatic but like. looks at canon,