#but it does contain spoilers so

[catsarewitches]

massive trigger warning for suicidal ideation and mention of a suicide attempt

but ed choosing to wear the cravat stede gave him the day they met specifically on what he hoped was his last day on earth. this show saying in no uncertain terms that if even just one person loves you, life is worth living and that you remain worthy of that love even at your worst. when not that long ago, i had put on my favorite outfit and walked to a bridge in hopes of jumping.

i don’t think i even have the words for what this show means to me

[shittinggold]

I need to write a full piece on this but the reason "Ruby's mother is just a normal nice woman" doesn't work as a twist is because it's not a challenge to Ruby. A nice normal woman who fits into her her existing family without conflict is exactly what Ruby always wanted. So when she gets that, it doesn't challenge her worldview or force her to grow as a character. It just reinforces where she already was, and indeed where she started the season. It neutralises her arc, and makes her an overall very static character.

[catatonicatnap]

Art for my fic, Not for Long. (Ghost Trick spoilers for Chapter 14).

I love Ghost Trick.

[pancake-breakfast]

Found an old post on another social media platform from when I first started watching JJK. At some point in the comments, I told a friend, "I love how flippant the sensei guy is about all this. He reminds me a bit of Urahara Kisuke from Bleach."

As you may have guessed, this is "the sensei guy" who reminds me a bit of Urahara Kisuke from Bleach.

So I must now ask myself, does Gojo still remind me of Urahara?

And the answer is no.

Obviously, the writing in Jujutsu Kaisen is good enough that Gojo's his own character, but while Urahara's flippancy was (to the best of my memory... I never did quite finish Bleach) something of a mask for his power, his care for others, his regrets, etc., Gojo's flippancy is rooted in arrogance. He's the strongest, and he knows it, and between that and canonically growing up as a spoiled little brat, he just doesn't take a lot of things very seriously, even when they are genuinely serious.

He's confident he'll find a way to overthrow the corruption in Jujutsu Society. He's confident he's building up great allies in his students. He's confident he'll defeat Sukuna.

In fact, the only thing that seems to give him genuine pause is not a "thing," per se, but a person....

He hesitates during missions to allow Geto to be the moral center (even if he proceeds to give Geto crap for it later). He hesitates when he's sent to kill him. He hesitates for YEARS on going to hunt him down. He puts a great deal of thought into figuring out how to defeat him during the Night Parade of A Thousand Demons. He hesitates to properly dispose of Geto's body. He hesitates when, in Shibuya, he hears that familiar voice and sees that familiar form that he genuinely thought he'd never see again.

Aaaaand now I've turned this from a comparison post between Gojo and Urahara to a Satosugu (or at least Satosugu-adjacent) post again. Sorry about that. Let's get back to the point.

No, I don't think Gojo and Urahara are nearly as similar as I first thought they might be.

While Urahara is certainly a capable fighter (and I daresay enjoys showing off a bit during them), you get the distinct impression he'd be just as happy in a support role, perhaps forever running his shop and taking more of a covert or informal role in Soul Reaper Society. Meanwhile, Gojo lives for the fight. As Nanami notes at one point in the manga, Gojo loves being a jujutsu sorcerer in a way that extremely few others do. If it weren't for his beefs with the higher-ups and lingering trauma over Geto, there's a good chance Gojo wouldn't bother teaching.

Not that he doesn't value his students, but from the beginning, he sees them more as potential strong allies than as teens who need to be parented. Whether he's providing love advice to Yuuta or boosting Megumi's confidence, he's not doing so because their hearts need this, but because doing so is going to make them into stronger fighters. Meanwhile, if one of the people Urahara has deemed "under his care" needed to just sit down with Urahara and have a chat about the difficulties of life, he would probably offer them tea and listen, and then provide solid and realistic advice regardless of how the outcome might benefit his personal future goals.

MAJOR MANGA SPOILER FOR JJK AHEAD

Additionally, when Gojo goes to fight a possessed Megumi, he doesn't even flinch. Instead, his first thought is, "This will be easy since Megumi looks like his dad." Which is a weird way to approach possibly having to kill someone you've been the closest thing to a parent figure to for the last ten years. He even follows it up with a dismissive statement about worrying about Megumi afterward.

I wouldn't say Urahara wouldn't beat the shit out of someone under his care if he had to (those slaps he gave Ichigo and others during training don't even count as "beating the shit" out of anyone). But if he had to do it, it would be with a heavy heart. It wouldn't be his preferred plan of action. It certainly wouldn't be one he reveled in.

So I guess what this all boils down to is that they aren't actually that similar after all, if only because Urahara seems to genuinely care for and respect a great number of people, and Gojo... well, he respects the strong, and is more than happy to nurture untapped strength in others, but I think you could make a very solid argument that there's only been one person he ever truly cared for, and even that is in no small part because he was already strong when Gojo met him.

[tango-but-everywhere]

They’ve (Cleo and BigB) got the strangest dynamic. Love it when people can hold a grudge. And Tango’s also there, as witness,

Cleo, secret life episode 5.

[ID: a minecraft screenshot taken on secret life, at the heart foundation at night. BigB is very close to the viewer, Cleo. He’s crouching and looking up at them, wearing full diamond, holding a diamond sword and shield. There’s a dog to the left looking at him. In the background behind them, on the left is Skizz who’s walking away. He’s similarly wearing full diamond and holding a shield, as is Tango who is slightly closer on the right of BigB. Like BigB, he’s holding a diamond sword, and he’s facing Cleo but looking to the left of the image. End ID]

[saltedsolenoid]

hello frog detective fans and fans of my writing alike. i have posted the first chapter of my frog detective fanfiction and i think it's perfectly fine and i might even go far enough to say that i'm a little bit proud of it so far.

How do i embed a link There we go

i hope you all enjoy ^_^

[badnew2005]

but you can’t feel it for the first time, a second time macdennis x ‘first time’ by lucy dacus

[vivitalks]

[read on ao3]

"You okay?"

Lydia has her elbows on her knees. Sitting in the waiting room of Deaton's clinic, her blue dress paradoxically bright against the bland color palette of the room, she's a contradiction unto herself. She looks tired and shaken. She looks glad to be alive. She looks unprepared to believe that being alive is going to last.

"I've been worse," is how she answers him. Then, "I've also been better."

Stiles takes the empty seat beside her.

"Feels like we're always hovering in the middle there," he offers.

Lydia nods. "Ethan and Aiden are going to be okay."

"Thank God," Stiles deadpans. "I would have been heartbroken to lose them.”

Lydia gently shoves him. "They did the right thing in the end. They're not that bad."

Stiles only hums, drumming on his knee with restless fingers. A deafening silence crowds them in. Stiles reflects on the events of the last twenty-four hours and finds them alarming when compressed into such a small time frame.

"What's on your mind?" he dares to ask, after the quiet is almost insurmountably heavy. If Deaton is still in the exam room with the twins, they're being very quiet. Suspiciously so. Something for Stiles to check on, once he's done checking on Lydia.

Lydia who is smoothing out her dress with a persistence that could be called obsessive. Every motion creates a new wrinkle, and every time, Lydia flattens it under her thumb.

"Oh, you know." Her tone is light, but her twisting fingers betray just how uneasy she is. "Thinking about how the last time I was sitting in this waiting room, you were dead for sixteen hours."

Stiles takes that one to the solar plexus, though he's not sure how else it could be taken.

"I wasn't…really dead. It was more like a long sleep. A long, icy sleep."

"You stopped breathing." Lydia stares lasers into her knees. "You didn't have a heartbeat. Deaton kept saying it was okay, that this was normal, that if something was really wrong we would know, but he was lying, I could tell. He wouldn't let us near you guys — he said he didn't want us interfering with the process." A fist forms in her lap, creasing the folds of her dress. "Sixteen hours. I didn't eat, I didn't sleep. I just sat here. Waiting. Hoping Deaton wasn't full of shit."

"And he wasn't," Stiles says, morbidly upbeat. "We came back!"

"You don't get it," Lydia says, sounding angry and scared and deeply wounded all at the same time.

Stiles frowns. If she would just look at him, maybe he could read her expression, but he can't tell what she's thinking from the set of her shoulders. "So help me get it."

Lydia breathes out, out, out, expelling air like it's a toxic gas.

"Humans have a reflex," she says in a small voice, staring through her palms. "It prevents them from drowning until the last possible second. The survival instinct is so powerful that it overpowers the breathing instinct, even when holding your breath becomes excruciatingly painful. It's called—”

"Voluntary apnea," Stiles says dumbly.

Lydia looks up at him and nods once. Her green eyes latch onto his.

"You told me once that death happens to the people around you," she says, biting her lip. "I can't imagine how it must have felt to be in that ice bath…but can you imagine how it felt to be the one holding you down?"

Stiles is too dumbstruck to answer.

"I killed you. I did that. It doesn't matter that it was temporary. I didn't know that, we didn't know that for sure. I held you in that water until you died, Stiles." Her hands tremble. "You were dead for sixteen hours because of me. I was a murderer. For sixteen hours."

"Whoa whoa whoa, hey," Stiles says. His 'Protect Lydia Martin' instinct is back online and the alarm is blaring. He grabs her hands in both of his, keeping them still and warm.

"Okay, first of all, you didn't murder me. It was consensual drowning! If anything it was more like assisted suicide." Lydia glares. "Not helping. Right. Sorry. Um, but secondly, and— and way more importantly, Lydia, yeah, maybe you temporarily killed me, but you also— you brought me back to life." 

She’s unmoved, he can tell, so he shakes her gently. "Yeah. You did that. Look, anyone can kill me. I'm not even six feet of fragile bones and zero muscle mass, and my best friend's a freakin' werewolf, okay, killing me is not impressive. Bringing me back? That takes something else. Something special, and only someone who—" He tries not to stammer but his tongue sabotages him, "who cares about me enough to bring me back to life could do that, and honestly, those are in short supply, so yeah. Maybe you were a temporary murderer, but you were also a savior. My savior." He smiles weakly. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."

Lydia holds his gaze. She holds his hands, too — not passively but decisively, clutching them like a lifeline, like she's the one who's drowning. Reflecting once again on the past twenty-four hours, it occurs to Stiles that he is not the only person for whom that stretch of time has been alarming.

"That's certainly a nicer way of looking at it," she yields softly. Then she shakes her head. "But it doesn't change the fact that in order to save you, I had to kill you." Now she weaponizes that arresting stare, seaglass green pinning him to his seat. "I'm never doing that again, you understand? I can't."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

"You don't know what it was like," she murmurs — seemingly talking to herself now, more than him, anyway. "Watching you. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't do anything but sit there."

Something niggles Stiles's brain, that feeling he gets when a few different threads braid themselves into a discernible pattern. The emotional tether. Lydia's remorse. Sixteen hours of sitting and waiting.

"Sitting there was exactly what you were supposed to do," he realizes, also half to himself. It gets her attention anyway; she frowns at his conclusion. Stiles goes on: "An emotional tether, Deaton said, someone to bring us back, I didn't really get it, how that could work, but you just said it. You all just sat there. For sixteen hours. You waited. You stayed, so I had someone to come back to. The way only a tether could do. Think about it, right? If a fisherman casts a line and then walks away from the fishing pole, it doesn't matter whether he hooks a fish because no one is there to reel it in."

"Are you comparing yourself to a fish?"

"We were underwater, I was thinking about water, it was the first metaphor that came to mind, give me a break,” Stiles says defensively. "My point is, sixteen hours is a long time. Long enough to get bored, to lose faith, to give up and walk away and pronounce us dead. But you guys didn't. You didn't."

"Deaton said—”

"You just told me you thought Deaton was full of shit. But you stayed anyway, right?" Stiles presses, looking Lydia in the eye. "You had a feeling. Or maybe you just believed. Whatever it was, you stayed. That's how you brought me back. You thought you weren't doing anything, but you were doing the most important thing." He squeezes her hands. "You were waiting for me."

[gallows-into-oblivion]

Karlach is Gideon Nav. Shadowheart is Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Lae'zel is Ianthe Tridentarius. discuss.

[leelreallylikespersona]

Why are my favourites always eggs ??????

[tragedia]

based on this, meet rook.

i was gonna do an elf and i have started an elven female playthrough, but i need to think through the backstory more for that one.

for this one, he was clear as day in my head with his pale ass and genetic sass, and i've already had a backstory since ages ago. purple hawke (my beloved), this is the spiritual successor and i guess, cousin (first time playing a guy first in da, as my mains are female rogue tabris, mage marian and female mage lavellan).

few things:

name's winfred. human mage. not thorne, but so far that's the only canon divergent thing. one of the four unnamed siblings of warden amell and revka amell's child.

in my head he only has sisters, but i'll leave that only as default and up to plotting, especially if anyone else wants to make characters (5 kids to choose from, you know? and one's a canon warden). i feel like he might be the middle child.

grey warden like his eldest sibling. how that happened and backstory coming soon.

since they rarely send siblings to the same circles, he drew the unlucky straw and got sent to orlais, of all places. whether he ended up in the circle though, is a whole other thing. this has resulted with slight orlesian accent slipping through with certain words sometimes.

the extensive scarring are courtesy of a dragon that he'd acquired young. you'd think this would repel him from dragon encounters, but actually got him obsessed with dragons instead.

[angelofthepage]

WIP shot for something coming later in the week. Really proud of how this piece is turning out, can't wait to show you. <3

[arsenicflame]

idk theres something very poetic for me about making the decisions i made earlier in the week and then having this happen. like thank you youve taken away my one consistent source of happiness, youve fucking killed him and done it in such a way that feels like a big old fuck you to me for caring. and while it doesn't change anything for me it is simply, one less string tying me down now. it makes everything easier

[jils-things]

favorite imagine is the silly found family (aquila, magpie, ca.lamus and a.lula) all go to the refuge to visit the library. cala.mus is eager to develop his reading comprehension, alul.a is there just to read the picture books and aquila is also eager to read more of the author's books... and also teaching magpie how to read ... :]

she would try to teach him but he gets soooo fixated on how she looks when she reads so he's really not paying attention to her until she asks him "did you catch that?" and he would briefly snap and say "yes" (lie) and then she proceeds to continue reading... but silly ol maggie was trying to buy more time to look at her WWKEKWKWJWHWHWHW EHEHEHE and then she tells him to recite what she said and he's like "🥺 can you run that over for me again 🥺" (HE'S CHEATING...!! HE WASNT LISTENING...!!!) and she assumes hes just a lil slow to understand (no i think he can understand quickly if he tries hard. not now tho because pretty girl is being pretty so sad) so she keeps going. and he keeps staring. LOVEBIRDS GOOFY AHHHH AHHHHH

[krakenguard]

The difference between us fic writers is, we write about all manner of nasty things. But we also tag them as a means of warning readers. If the work contains something I don't want to read about, I don't read it.

In the case of Our Flag Means Death: There was no tag warning about the death of a major character. But I learned about it through other people.

So with that in mind, I will not continue my viewing of the show. Because I honestly don't want to see this character's death.

I hope it DOES continue onward. Maybe Izzy WILL be brought back through some miraculous twist of fate. Or maybe it's wishful thinking.

But, as it is, I am putting this story down... Our Flag Means Death ended with La Vie En Rose.

[styrofoamdoor]

I need someone to tell me if what I'm writing is just nonsensical ramblings or actually readable. I'm unwell and cannot judge it for myself.