#but i'm not entirely sure it's not relevant

[svtellify]

the ultimate link click meta theory

contrary to what narrative exposition has given us so far, this story starts with qiao ling and the photo studio. it's awfully nice of her dad to rent the studio out to cheng xiaoshi under the condition that he run the studio while he waits for his parents to return, but (and this is me assuming based on what we've been told so far) it's a little weird that her dad doesn't just. take cheng xiaoshi in? it's my understanding that cheng xiaoshi lives alone either in the photo studio or his parents' home and qiao ling checks up on him as best as she can.

which is, admittedly, off? why agree to give a kid a 10,000 debt under the condition that the debt can be paid off by running a photo studio of all things?

we don't know when cheng xiaoshi's ability was first triggered but if we assume that trauma is the trigger, like it appears to be with li tianxi, there are 2 possibilities:

1. cheng xiaoshi's parents leaving is the trauma that triggers his ability. specifically, that moment where he's panicking about the earthquake with qiao ling.

2. there's something else that's traumatizing that happened between the events of him meeting lu guang and his parents leaving that triggered his ability.

either way, something traumatic would've triggered this ability and while qiao ling doesn't directly know what it is, her dad has possibly sent her to monitor the photo studio for some reason. she's likely unaware in the scheme that i'm projecting:

her dad and these other scientists are all in on this scientific experiment to test these abilities and see what can be done. cheng xiaoshi's parents' disappearance could have even been a part of this experiment with them being involved as scientists as well.

this would definitely explain the kid from the water fountain who li tianchen is kinda just in awe of - it's cheng xiaoshi. the speaking mannerisms sound a lot like adult cheng xiaoshi and on top of that, the outfit is definitely cheng xiaoshi coded. the impulsive nature of diving into a fountain for a ball? cheng xiaoshi. lu guang's reaction to li tianchen telling this story definitely has me thinking that if there's anything i've gotten right so far, it's this.

it makes me wonder if the siblings got out of the experiment/found out the truth and sought out qiao jin to exact their revenge on cheng xiaoshi for "choosing" to stay in the experiment. it's also possible that qiao jin got them out himself for his own agenda and vendetta against the police force and this whole thing with lu guang and cheng xiaoshi is just to get them on his side (even forcefully) if it means that he can get what he wants.

(no but seriously, how were cheng xiaoshi's parents not even reported missing? it feels more important than just parental trauma that shapes his identity - it's definitely a part of the plot.)

as for where lu guang plays into all this:

i see the time travel theory. but i also think it involves all three of them - qiao ling as the one who either 1. rewinded time without any recollection of the future (only lu guang and the li siblings remember what's to come) or 2. sent lu guang back to the past to fix things that went really wrong in the future

considering their abilities and how well established they are, i'm almost against anyone with previously introduced abilities from developing more advanced abilities for the plot - and it would definitely explain why the siblings target lu guang and qiao ling.

this sets up the following:

the original timeline that we haven't seen: lu guang and cheng xiaoshi become friends and they play basketball together occasionally, but they're not as close as they are in the timeline that we see. they go their separate ways and remain acquaintances in college, but not as close friends. he walks by the photo studio after just saying hi, but doesn't stop to help paint. cheng xiaoshi runs the photo studio alone and tries to go into the pictures himself after he accidentally does it once. qiao ling finds out later when he gets himself involved in a Much more serious case. at a college reunion or sometime briefly in the future, lu guang comes across a photo and when he looks through what happened, it's catastrophic in more ways than one. it involves cheng xiaoshi's death (which triggers qiao ling's time travel ability) and he likely sees himself there too, trying to help qiao ling before disappearing. aka, he sees himself time traveling.

the present timeline that we see: he changes it all by staying to help paint. hence the emphasis on lu guang being a lucky coincidence in their lives. and he's actively working to prevent that tragedy and prevent cheng xiaoshi's death from happening. this would mean that qiao ling never unlocks her time travel ability, but it would lock in this present as reality.

(the orv of it all, truly. lu guang regressing to see cheng xiaoshi again and qiao ling rewriting their reality just to save cheng xiaoshi.)

there's my long winded take on it! i'd love to hear what other people think (and feel free to send me all the link click and orv asks bc i'm mentally just stuck between both of those rn) but i hope this made some sense!

[will-pilled]

Cringe culture ruined being a kid.

I keep seeing the idea that teen members of Gen Z are the last generation to experience an actual childhood and honestly? I agree.

We as a society have made being a child so hostile, so miserable, that kids aren't interested in being young anymore.

How children are constantly told to grow up, how the color has been sucked out of the world, how because of cringe culture children will be fucking torn apart by grown adults all over the internet, how children are experiencing crisis after crisis. Children are shamed for their interests and hobbies and style by grown ass adults and teens who are far too old to be doing this. How kids aren't allowed to be anywhere without being made fun of by adults who are miserable.

Being a child is fucking hostile now, and I don't blame this generation of kids for trying too hard to be mature/grown. Because people treat children like shit, so who would want to be one?

[wonder-worker]

“Studies of Elizabeth Woodville […] have been hampered by the continuing fascination with her brother-in-law, Richard III. The Ricardian [and Yorkist] apologetic is now largely dependent upon the argument that the Woodville family posed such a threat to Richard of Gloucester, and the kingdom as a whole, that Gloucester had little option but to take the throne from his Woodville-dominated nephew. Although this argument has [irregularly] been contested, a reassessment of the queen's role in 1483 has not yet been attempted. Michael Bennett, in his 1987 account [...] still dismissed her as `an inveterate intriguer, capable in her vanity and fecklessness of some remarkable shifts and turns'. But more often she is scarcely mentioned in general histories of the period.”

-J.L. Laynesmith, “English Queenship 1445-1503” (thesis for the degree of DPhil in Medieval Studies, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, April 1999)

[yuseirra]

Aratate Shrine is dedicated to the two kami deities, Ame no Uzume no Mikoto and Sarutahiko no Mikoto, and celebrates their marriage to each other. Ame no Uzume is known as a deity of song, dance, and the performing arts. Sarutahiko is known as a deity of guidance in travel and education, among other things. Together, they are kami deities of matrimonial happiness and fulfilled wishes.

The nature of this shrine draws followers with creative aspirations, including some well-known actors and actresses. Many who seek guidance in their careers or love life come here to pray and consult the priest.

So this is the description of the Aratate Shrine that makes an appearance in the story(that everyone goes to pray, it's going to be there in anime S2 soon too!)

Oh.. Okay?? Okay?? Didn't Kamiki mention about wishes when he talked to Ruby and Aqua??(147,153?) About fulfilling them?? Didn't he congratulate Aqua about it? What's with him?? Is he really some sort of god? Actually, I'm pretty positive about the entire Hoshino family being "gods who don't realize they are gods"..(144)They really have to start discussing what they're going to do about those random ideas about gods they've been throwing out there. It's about time, it's the final arc!!

If the guy is about "guidance", it's going to be really bad if he gets corrupted. The songs imply someone being given a "flaw", isn't that about him? I had this thought going for awhile. I really hope they tackle this whole idea of gods being there soon if that's supposed to be important. And if so, saltwater could really have some purifying effects. Sarutahiko has to do with Misogi and I looked into a little bit, it does involve both salt and water. I'm half serious. It really may help him if he gets dunked into the sea then. Have him fall. He won't die. Rather, I feel he CAN'T die. Something is making him suffer but I feel it's also preventing him from death too. I feel like he would have followed Ai long ago if he didn't have any hope of meeting her or such.

[scarletfish]

listen I HATE endeavor but I LOVE the way mha portrays his character arc. (note: character arc, not redemption arc - I don't think redemption was the intention or result).

I don't get the vibes that the show wants me to forgive him or take his POV as absolution. even at his lowest points, enji still has flawed thought patterns that lead him to commodify his family and keep him from realizing WHY his behavior was wrong.

mha isn't cramming some redemption narrative down my throat, they're showing me a shitty guy who's the product of the society he grew up in, with realistic goals and opinions born of that structure, trying to figure out how to do right by a family he irrevocably fucked up.

let's be clear: I Personally Do Not Like this guy.

but god is it real to watch his family come to terms with his place in their lives.

like, sometimes you grow up and you cut your abuser out of your life for good and you never forgive them (natsuo).

sometimes you have to reckon with the fact that your own trauma led you to perpetuate the cycle of abuse, and that isn't your fault, but it IS now your responsibility (rei).

sometimes you grieve what you could have had and play peacemaker at your own expense (fumuki).

sometimes you face the impossible puzzle of fitting your abuser back into your life - setting boundaries, having painful discussions, and deciding which compromises you can bear (shouto).

.....and sometimes you fake your death, get some sick piercings, and dedicate your life to setting your piece of shit father and every sanctimonious thing he stands for on fire.

I JUST THINK all of these responses are very valid and realistic 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

love a good "cut them out forever and don't forgive them" narrative, but as someone who had a more complex journey I LOVE seeing that reflected on screen.

[tenojan-in-tevinter]

hilarious how much my hawke goes on and on about how blood magic is evil and blood mages suck and there's never a good enough reason to use blood magic. My guy. What was all that shit you did back in Kirkwall then huh? What did you do when you ran out of magic? I guess every time you pulled the blood up from corpses to keep yourself alive was just nothing then huh. Every time your enemies' blood boiled in their veins was just the wind I guess.

[anderstrevelyan]

Hi tumblr, I'm back!

Spent the past month glaring at people in bg3 and it was glorious

[baekuras]

Veilguard thinks its funny having me choose between 2 of my favourite companions/their factions/cities smh

Other things I've found slightly amusing is pre-launch people who had their eyes set on Lucanis, aka Mage Killer galore, ready to make mage rooks and it turns out he is actually super chill with anyone not his target or who hasn't wronged him/his

Other thing I've found bemusing looking back is people looking at Taash and going "omg butch lesbian" and rn that's very much on the brink of shifting at least from what Taash just told my Rook in a cutscene

[damnation-if]

what are the norms for sex and relationships in the regular (not-hell) world that mc comes from? obviously there's lewis and clement's whole arrangement and the beechcroft's daughter had much the same with other servants, but how common is that more casual attitude about sex? we have the opportunity to decide our own mc's attitudes about sex and sexual relationships, but i wonder what society's attitudes at large are around that topic (mainly so i can know how my mc's own attitudes fit into social acceptability)

oh, this is an interesting question... one i'm not sure that i'm entirely qualified to give a full answer to haha. one of the tricky things is that for a society (fictional or not) to function, there can never just be One culture. so there will almost always be a variety of attitudes out there.

a good example of this is, like. Victorian England. people like to rag on the victorians for being repressed all the time, but part of the reason victorian england managed to keep itself limping along under such tight restraints for so long is because nearby there was the much less restrictive later romance period in continental europe, and the ever-different mediterranean cultures just to the south, and all of those cultures intermingled, so that people who didn't fit particularly well into one or the other could try to find a better space.

you could, potentially, if you wanted to i guess, write a story where literally everyone behaves like a victorian-era londoner, but that 1) wouldn't be reflective of how societies work in general and 2) isn't even reflective of the actual victorian era itself. so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i guess in general i could say that i don't like to write societies that are too strict or sex-negative (and i absolutely cannot Stand abstinence doctrine lmfao). there's definitely - especially when it comes to noble families like the Beechcrofts - a kind of expectation of keeping certain activities behind-closed-doors, rather than fully visible to the public, but that's more about a sense of honour and decorum associated with the family name than prevailing attitudes towards (or against) sex.

however, certain of the gods take a more unfavourable view on things (and many gods are quite unreasonable) so there's definitely a possibility for a wide variety of attitudes to be present... obviously the Beechcrofts are not a particularly religious family, so I guess you could say maybe that the manor house represents a microcosm of the more secular sides of society (of which there are many).

[astradyke]

i love dan and phil so much but the sheer stress i have experienced trying to figure out these terrible influence tour tickets makes me want to beat them or someone else to death with hammers

[martritzvonmercie]

i love to come up with a new p3 headcanon and tell it to my friends who have not played the game yet so they can instantly agree with it and adopt it as their personal canon, completely biasing their experience for when they do play

[jayswing101]

Hi hello I am currently rewatching Guardian and I think I've had a revelation. Has someone else probably figured this out before? Almost definitely. But I have connected the dots and am excited so I'm writing about it anyways. Spoilers for basically the whole drama ahead

So. Episode 5, there's the resolution of Wu Tianen and Wu Xiaojun's case, and Heipaoshi brings them to Dixing. After Shen Wei vanishes the guards who were sent to kill Wu Tianen and Wu Xiaojun, he asks Wu Tianen what happened to the team he sent up to search for the Hallows right? Wu Tianen says they were attacked by youchu, and he was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, everyone else was dead.

Except they weren't. Shen Wei says that the captain of the mission survived, only to later be shot and killed before Shen Wei can meet with him. Shen Wei then says "pity it's another dead end," and Wu Tianen drops a bombshell we don't even realise is a bombshell. He says the captain's wife was pregnant at the time of their failed mission.

The captain may have living descendants.

The next scene? Zhou Weiwei getting out of bed and disappearing out of her bathroom. Which implies that mirror!Zhou Weiwei is that captain's child. And, at the end of episode 6, Shen Wei and mirror!Zhou Weiwei talk and it's confirmed - the captain of the Hallows retrieval mission was her father.

But who was he? Why isn't he given a name? Just "my competent subordinate," or "the mission captain." Why aren't we told his name?

Because It's Zhang Shi.

His power is similar to mirror!Zhou Weiwei's, where they can both "be" someone else. He can possess people and take over their bodies that way, she can take on the appearance of anyone who offers her a face through the mirror. They're connected powers in a way, and we know from Shen Wei and Ye Zun that family members sometimes have similar powers to each other (Shen Wei's learning from observing vs Ye Zun's taking through absorbing/devouring) — so it makes sense.

And then there's also what Shen Wei tells Wu Tianen, that the captain was shot and killed. Except it's kinda implied that regular bullets don't work on Dixingren, that only dark energy bullets can hurt them. Who is the only person we know of, other than Zhao Yunlan, who has used the dark energy gun? Zhao Xinci. Who killed Zhang Shi's previous host body? Zhao Xinci.

As we find out in episode 31, Zhao Xinci shot and killed Zhang Shi's host with the dark energy gun. That's how he ends up becoming Zhang Shi's current host.

Zhang Shi is also one of like two Dixingren we see Zhao Xinci actually shoot in the drama too, which also adds to the likelihood of Zhang Shi being the captain of Wu Tianen's mission and mirror!Zhou Weiwei's father.

The only missing piece is connecting Zhang Shi to that mission to retrieve the Hallows. Heipaoshi tells mirror!Zhou Weiwei that her father was his subordinate, and that he had secret information that he never had a chance to report. Hearing that, mirror!Zhou Weiwei remembers her father mumbling: "山河水镇天南一方。"

The subtitles on YouTube (before we lost those videos rip) never translated that line, and I couldn't understand any of the words last time I watched Guardian, so I never caught it before. But I'm like 85% sure that what mirror!Zhou Weiwei says roughly translates to: "The mountains and rivers of the South are protected."

But what does that even mean???

Well. In the novel, the four Holy Tools are used to seal the four pillars that hold up the sky. The Longevity Dial for the East, the Ink Brush of Virtue for the West, the Awl of Mountains and Rivers for the North.

And the Lantern of the Guardian for the South.

That Guardian Lantern is that final piece, the thing that makes everything click.

Hidden at the SID for so long, no one even knows it's there. I think Zhang Shi was successful in finding one of the Hallows when Shen Wei sent that team to Haixing ~20 years pre-canon. I think he found the Guardian Lantern, and kept it hidden even from Zhao Xinci for all those years, hid it inside a box at the SID where no one would think to look into it, but where it would be safe from anyone else that was also looking for the Hallows.

And he succeeded in keeping the Guardian Lantern safe. No one knew where it was until episode 34, when Ye Zun accidentally activates the Hallows and the wormhole to Ye Olde Haixing sends Zhao Yunlan on an expected holiday.

In conclusion: Zhang Shi was the captain of the mission to find the Hallows with Wu Tianen, and mirror!Zhou Weiwei's father. Contrary to Wu Tianen's beliefs, Zhang Shi wasn't killed by youchu, he survived the mission and went on to find the Guardian Lantern, which he kept hidden somewhere safe until Zhao Xinci killed him. At that point, to continue protecting the lantern, he hid it at the SID, where it was overlooked and kept safe for years, until Ye Zun sets off the Hallows and Zhao Yunlan gets yeeted through time.

And the only way any of it makes sense is if you have the novel context to know that each one of the Hallows is tied to a cardinal point

[scorndotexe]

I hate fake freaks, why the hell are people freaking out about the grave scene in Saltburn? I haven’t even seen the fucking movie and even I know it’s supposed to be symbolic/thematic/representative WHATEVER

nah anon you've got it wrong i need it to be about 30-75% more intense. there should have been actual necrophilia. cannibalism too actually. also no shitty twist at the end so the symbolism of the acts remains relevant. i know you havent seen it but jesus christ it was such a bad film

anyway people are freaking out because they don't actually care about the themes or symbolism of saltburn they just want to be like "ooooh this film is sooo fucked up oh my god emerald fennell is a sick sick woman."

[supercantaloupe]

also i swear to gd i Need to get less weird and anxious about the mere concept of talking to maestro. i have known and played with him for seven years and in that time he has been literally nothing but kind and friendly and helpful and supportive. and yet every single time i have to ask him a question (or if he comes to talk to ME or like sends me an email or something) i swear to gd my heart starts racing like i’m about to get banned from every orchestra ever or something

[gender-euphowrya]

motherfucker

[blujayonthewing]

doing a bunch of unnecessary homework for the sake of a silly little sketch I thought might be nice, as usual