#but im a dumb and very in love person

[mawvax]

i'm literally obsessed w this MegOp fic: Oribiters by Zombieheroine (you need an account to read it please its so good it's the RID i needed)

can't believe i'm even considering making a mutichapter comic just so i can moon over Chapter 4... the doodle draft pages are nearing 30 and i ain't even done

[citrusai]

taash said "they were doing it" and people ran with the interpretation of an npc that doesn't know solas or the history of the elvhenan even when bellara interjected and said, no, that's not right. that's not how it was for the elvhenan. they formed bonds before they had physical bodies. and people ran to doompost or create weird anti-solavellan shit even though mythal & solas refer to each other as old friends and when she releases him there is no tenderness or love in it. it is the act of unchaining a dog from his post, the stepping down of a general. but to each their own ig.

[oceanwithouthermoon]

one of my favorite (/sarcastic but not really cuz its like funny idk) things in fandoms is when people make ocs or self inserts or 'x readers' being shipped with characters, but the oc/sona/reader is literally just another character from the source material.. its like youre shipping the characters but didnt want to admit it, so you made a kinsona and branded it as something else..

and its NEVER subtle, actually its super blatant every time and im always shocked when nobody points it out..

i have seen uncountable saiki k x readers where the description is like:

"saiki meets someone whose thoughts he cant read for the first time, and even though he doesnt trust her at first, she keeps proving that she is kind and has good intentions!" you mean nendo? reader is girl nendo?

"this time, he meets a girl whose thoughts honestly match up with her spoken words almost perfectly for the first time!" hairo. youre shipping saiki with girl hairo.

"saiki meets someone whose thoughts are too fast and jumbled to re-" ITS AKECHI, THATS AKECHI, ITS LITERALLY AKECHI.

"saiki meets someone whose just as immune to teruhashi as he is for the first and only tim-" this is hairo again, awe bae you secretly LOVE haisai ?!?

"saiki sees his old childhood friend for the first time in years after an incident caused them to be apart and then they fall in lov-" WHY DID YOU EVEN WRITE THIS AND NOT CALL IT SAIKECHI.

its even funnier when they say its like that characters little sister, but the way they write it is still literally just the character, like their personality, dialogue, even their relationship, is the same..

not all of them fit this exactly, but the ones that take a boy character and turn them into a girl oc to ship them with a boy, it reminds of how in equestria girls they couldnt make applejack and rarity endgame so they gave them boyfriends who looked IDENTICAL to each other.. thats what youre creating, guys, youre creating heterosexual rarijack.

[starwarsanthropology]

Omega Squad!!

Drawing practice for expressions/features off the same slightly modified sketch base. They all have the same face, but I think I managed to make them distinct and identifiable anyway!

Who's who under the cut :)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OH ARTHUR BENNETT.. such a gorgeous and intriguing character. terribly burdened by a GRUESOME set of crimes, his light suffocated by a HEAVY century of GUILT. so tragic, so dark and broody, and yet PAINFULLY awkward in any social setting ever

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[softerhaze]

"side quests" in act 3 be like....what if u were faced with the most complex moral dilemma ever.....for the 3rd time today

[bookatans]

This is probably going to be a very long post but the more I think about the rise (and subsequent fall) of the New Mandalorians, the more that I get wrapped up in not only the colonialism committed by Satine and the movement, how it began in such a horrifyingly understated way, but also how it paved the way for Mandalore to be destroyed thanks to the almost-complete erasure of their culture.

First of all, Canon verse deciding to remove the True Mandalorians (and placing the "Old" Mandalorians in a similar, though less prominent position) feels particularly underhanded and paints everything in a black and white manner. Satine: a sympathetic character who is the only one standing against Death Watch, the last shred of peace left for Mandalorians to cling to. Which. Last standing? Yes, definitely. But not the only one.

A war where Death Watch and the New Mandalorians were the major players, only to have Death Watch defeated – even with the assistance of the Jedi keeping Satine alive – makes little sense from a technical standpoint. Is it impossible? Probably not. All sorts of things can happen in history, pure dumb luck makes every difference, but it's unlikely. A party which seeks peace is not going to survive against another ultra violent, volatile party that's pissed off at you because you want to erase the culture that they so deeply value.

Which, yeah I don't buy it. Even with the Republic stepping in later on, it's fishy. But for the sake of my sanity, I'm mostly focusing on Legends, because the more you try to create a coherent timeline (seriously, how is Clone Batch Math easier than this?) for the Mandalorian Civil Wars, the harder it is not to give up entirely.

Anyways. Satine did not survive years of conflict due to mere smarts and perseverance, and did not end the war by being charismatic and having good people skills. She was the LEAST THREATENING PARTY in a three-party war, hunkering down with her Jedi protectors and playing politician while the actual warriors in the conflict weakened one another and – for the True Mandalorians – were wiped out.

True Mandalorians. Death Watch. New Mandalorians.

So, okay. The approximate dates of the beginning and end of the Mandalorian Civil Wars don't necessarily make sense with Satine’s age. She'd have been slightly younger, and Canon seems to have a tendency to just wave their hand in the general direction of a time period and deflect onto another topic.

Which, you know what? Fine. I can work with that without having to think too hard about the dates. It kills me not to delve into it further, but. No. It's not like Disney's gonna pay me to fix their broken timeline.

(But if I had to, I'd shift Jaster's death to 47BBY instead of 52BBY, and push the Battle of Galidraan a year back to 43BBY, and—)

Here's what's important to remember, though:

- There are two Mandalorian Civil Wars. The first being True Mandalorians vs Death Watch. The second being the much shorter, and quickly solved Death Watch vs the New Mandalorians.

- The massacre of the True Mandalorians happened shortly before the beginning of the second civil war.

- The True Mandalorians had already been dealing with Death Watch for years, and they were winning. Death Watch wasn't just on the run, they were weak, they had to resort to TRICKING THE JEDI into killing the True Mandalorians for them.

Who wasn't weak? The New Mandalorians, the people that actively choose to turn their back on a culture that had survived for centuries. And yes, Death Watch remained even after the True Mandalorians fell. Tor Vizsla targeted Satine and the New Mandalorians viciously after that, there was even more destruction, but it wasn't with the severity with which he'd prosecuted the True Mandalorians.

Here's what happened next: Jango Fett escaped his enslavement. He hunted down Tor Vizsla, and he killed him. Whatever strength Death Watch had regained in those few years didn't matter, because the second their leader was gone they were certainly left unorganized and at a disadvantage.

Giving the New Mandalorians the opening they needed to cement in people's minds to their beliefs and convince the House and Clan leaders that abandoning their old ways was the solution. After all, how much more of Mandalore was left to destroy? How many more had to be lost?

With the public's approval and the Republic’s help, Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians scavenged the corpse of Mandalore, and they took what they deemed fit, left the rest to rot and – given time – be erased completely.

What's worse is that Satine's activism and speeches made it sound like that made sense (because, to Satine, it did make sense); abandon what Mandalore once was because that's the reason we've been destroyed, isn't it? (Not entirely untrue.) And these people, whose world had been ravaged, who's clans and families had wrecked everything with in-fighting, were tired and desperate enough that they listened.

Actually, here's what's really worse — Satine got LUCKY! The first time! It should not have ended like that. But because she got lucky, because it worked once, she tried to do the exact same thing when the entire galaxy went to war. And she ignored the suffering of people whom she should have known empathy towards, who were going through the very same torment she experienced as a child. Because her position of superiority where peace is the only answer was so ingrained in her beliefs, because she was ARROGANT.

And because peace was the only answer, because she'd disavowed any sense of warrior culture from her people, Satine had as much a hand in dooming Mandalore as everyone who went in with the worst intentions. Does it matter that it was doomed regardless, because Maul was the great evil that came to destroy them? No. Maul was just the most convenient means to an end the resurrected Death Watch could find, but if not him it would have been anyone — anything – else.

I do feel for her. She had to experience her father's death so young and step into a role he'd left behind, didn't get a proper chance to grieve because she had to be strong for everyone else who was grieving. She gave up the possibility of love for duty. Satine was a good leader, I won't argue that, and she was the last stand between Mandalore and total annihilation, but she was also deeply flawed.

[milkbreadtoast]

random but i resolved to post abt it every time i find a webtoon that I enjoy... and lately I've been having fun reading this one...

*rubs nose* heh... I do dabble in het from time to time... no but seriously it's a p straightforward lighthearted enemies to lovers romcom, not groundbreaking or anything yet im over here kicking my feet and giggling the main couple is SO cute to me... i luv them... I actually couldnt wait to find out what happens next so ive been slowly reading ahead in the kor whenever i have time and they're sooo cute😭😭 I also like the art style and costume design a lot!! it gives me like. a nostalgic 90s shoujo anime vibe tbh... w the puffy hair and babyfaces...

[nonsensechemicals]

crying whenever i talk about Cookie9 because all my friends have these interesting and unique theories on them while i take everything too literally and they all just stare at me like “dude… uuugh we r TIRED” <-they dont actually say this they are very kind to me but i can Feel It

[elisedonut]

Trans boy Percy can be a lot of fun

just a lot of people have a tendency to make it something he comes out about Pre-canon and that it changes nothing

while I'm over here like I firmly believe that Molly would not have continued having kids if she thought she already had a daughter

and i think she would be annoying as hell about him figuring himself out I just think she would be so disrespectful about it

Molly would be a "but your ruining yourself! you are my baby girl!" while crying type of parent and I believe that in my heart

She would guilt trip Percy like crazy about it while feeling 100% like she's doing the right thing.

Do I think that maybe she would realize after a few years that she's being absolutely terrible? I mean like I would hope so

[deus-ex-mona]

has chizuutan been sitting this close to aizo in class all this time…?

[enhanced-operatives-division]

Points at you. 10 and/or 11 for starstruck?

Two starstruck asks,,,,,,joy of joys,,

Part of an ask game linked here.

#10. What's an au you have for them?

Since them meeting at all is technically an AU i have 3 different ways that they do meet up. There's the one where Juniper ends up with the agency/adjacent to and ends up working with Reggie (have written a fic with this). The next one is Juniper surviving but basically going stealth and living as normal of a life as he can and ending up meeting Reggie through chance (most recent fic I've written). And then there's my personal favourite where Reginald "You're lucky my tracking skills are still up to snuff" Crane keeping himself busy after Phoenix was MIA and finding Juniper still alive (fic I want to write but haven't started mainly because it may end up multi chapter).

In terms of more AU canon bending taking them and putting them in a completely unrelated situation...I have a guilty pleasure Warrior Cats AU for IEYTD in general. Both JJ and Reggie have perfect warrior cats suffixes in their names already (Juniper and Crane) so they're called Junipersong (charcoal bengal) and Craneflight (tabby Norwegian forest cat). It's very silly but the amount of scenes I have in my mind for it...good lord...

#11. How was their first kiss like?

Augh my friend Imp wrote an absolutely excellent fic about it (tragically in the realm of unfinished Google docs) and I'm shaking their hand about it so hard. Basically Juniper kissing Reggie but he like wasn't ready/fully expecting it and Juniper absolutely panicking because he thinks he's misread every interaction between them both since they got closer. The second one is much sweeter though,,

[oceanwithouthermoon]

https://x.com/d3kutism/status/1741579841764475157?s=46

it should be illegal to be this fucking stupid so loudly and confidently omg..

mfs on the internet preach about "media literacy" yet they completely gloss over the fact that the only damn things that kusuo "canonically" is are a tsundere, an unreliable narrator, and a fucking liar LMFAOOO.. babe thats like basic reading comprehension, im sorry..

EDIT: it should go without saying not to send a person hate just because of a silly post like this one(+i dont have any reach anyway so im sure it wouldnt happen, but i wanna say this nonetheless lol) but i would just like to say that i just checked and realized that this person is 15 years old, so like... yeah, too young to be arguing with grown people on the internet. dont take this too serious or send this person hate pls lol..

[luck-of-the-drawings]

THE ORDER OF PALMS An order of holy folk that serve The Helm, working to create powerful Aasimar Paladins for the purpose of protecting any who hire their help. [BACKSTORY UNDER CUT]

One day, Gjör and her peers were lead by their mentor Opheria, to a mission far from their home. On the peak of that mountain village, they saw upon the horizon, the castle of their home go up in flames. Horrified and scared, the apprentices sought to follow their mentors guidance, and followed her lead into a small barn. It was there, that Opheria proceeded to slaughter each and everyone of the apprentices. It seemed she somehow had a hand in this sudden attack on the Order of Palms. Gjör D'annevual survived a sword through the 'heart', on account of a rare condition, that places her heart on the other side of her chest. When she finally managed to bring herself back home, the Order was insulted by her survival. She had so many better peers, why couldn't any of them have survived? This runt was seriously the only thing that survived Opherias wrath? It was better to just wash their hands clean of this. Thus the Order decided to banish Gjör from their ranks. She now travels the land in search of a purpose.

[tunapesto]

cosplaying is healing me personally (killing my wallet, also)