#but so is sand’s

[makieos]

on sand in that fight scene

and ramblings about why ray is such a great character

i genuinely feel like we have to be watching different shows and it’s starting to slightly bother me. these are just some thoughts on what ive seen said about sand (and ray) in light of the recent episode, specifically the fight scene.

let me start with the following: sand hasn’t ever thought his love was gonna heal ray. i honest to god don’t see how you could ever reach that conclusion. one of the main things about episode 10 is that he’s pushing him to get professional help - he’s under no impression that he could ‘fix’ ray by himself.

‘he made everything about himself during the fight scene’ doesn’t sit right with me at all. saying that he cares about ray is not making everything about himself. it’s just the truth. you’d EXPECT a person to say this when someone’s berating them for not caring, especially if it’s someone they love. saying ‘you think i have no dignity’ isn’t making everything about himself, it’s a reply to ray accusing him of only caring about money. you’d EXPECT a person to be hurt at that kind of comment - to voice it - especially a person like sand, who’s made his stance on money when it comes to his personal relationships clear.

i’ve said this before, but during the fight scene, the worst thing sand did is not explain clearly - saying he was hired but not explaining the context. surprisingly, just like you can see the reasoning behind ray’s actions, empathize with them, you actually CAN see the reasoning behind sand’s too! might be shocking but he’s actually not an asshole just for fun!

i understand being annoyed at sand for not talking. i even understand thinking that maybe there’s something he has to apologize for. but claiming that in his self-centeredness he - and the show - are always making out ray to be the asshole who needs to apologize is almost uncomfortable for me. not only because sand is just… not self absorbed, but also because - and i know some people might not want to hear this - ray HAS been an asshole, and he SHOULD apologize. not just for last episode.

ray’s reaction to finding out sand had ‘duped’ him is so honest that it’s almost devastating in its rawness, in its intensity. his feelings are valid and expected, but your feelings of pain being valid and expected doesn’t ABSOLVE you of being hurtful towards someone else. if you’re an asshole while at an emotional high, you’re not excused for it. you’re not blameless. the right thing to do is apologize.

saying ray’s feelings are being dismissed by the narrative is borderline outrageous to me. in the last scene, his feelings ARE acknowledged, they’re spelled out for the viewer - ‘i was so angry because I care for you’. in the last scene, the viewer is MADE to empathize with ray, to understand him in case they hadn’t just yet. they’re also made to understand that he HAS ultimately made mistakes and most importantly - that he’s sorry for them. that he wants to apologize.

this approach to ray of ‘he’s always made out to be the asshole’ ‘his mistakes are a result of someone else’s goading’ is so reductionist and it bothers me because I feel like it’s a genuine disservice to his character. ray is such compelling character BECAUSE he’s not perfect, not DESPITE it. because he messes up, and he feels things that are painful and reacts to them. because he’s human. his faults are a part of his journey - a part of his recovery. we don’t need to erase them to love him.

[s-aint-elmo]

pass it on!

(ID in alt text)

[kitskiis]

What I am gathering from current fandom discussion

[lemongogo]

life of regret

[proxycrit]

Day 39– ARBITER'S GROUNDS

Weird Gross Skinned Things in the Sand that burn in the light!?!? The desert is WET? We are not off to a good start.

(This totk au is called Familiar Familiar! It all started when Zelda did not get whisked back in time and devolved from there.)

((Want to see behind the scenes and other sketchbook crimes? Check out my patreon!))

[doctorsiren]

The books reveal that Ford is actually a secret partier

(Available as a print on my Etsy Shop)

(wips under cut)

[sciderman]

well - webtoons is over, gang

[socra-time]

Genin team power swaps!

[skybulb]

i know what it means, how it feels to be atypical

[wyervan]

hello👋 I really love your art😍 I must admit you are amazing. but can I make a request? Like drawing the sun and the moon with a hoodie. I would really love to see them in another outfit, especially with your amazing art style. 💖💖

friend u have activated one of my artistic trap cards: baggy clothing.

o to be swallowed whole by a dca-sized hoodie

[rapidhighway]

at last, knuxadow kiss

[ravencromwell]

Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge's troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley's death. For we know that Scrooge was a "Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" And we know that he and Marley were "two kindred spirits"

And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we're told, "secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster." How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley's sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, "friend." How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?

Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley's death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes "one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again." The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.

Marley's name is still above the door of Scrooge's counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn't bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. "sometimes," Dickens opines, "People new to the

business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him."

This is why "death of the author" matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his "melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern" becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood's A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.

And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn't "discriminate between sinners and saints", to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold "the good sorts of politics". But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?

Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we're ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.

[mayhemspreadingguy]

"The lightsaber is a Jedi's life"

[alittleleverage]

[vaguely-concerned]

the more I play the more I think lucanis basically knows it's illario who betrayed him right from the beginning (he's had a year in the ossuary to think. not that many people knew where he was going. when you ask him 'did Illario know you'd be on that ship' his only answer is the hardest flattest 'yes' you ever heard). so it's not so much about figuring out who the traitor is (because that's ludicrous. we all know. immediately. they didn't really bother to hide it lmao) as about methodically closing off every single avenue of denial lucanis has clung to that whole time with as much or little gentleness as you might prefer until he has no choice but to admit it. because the moment he has to admit it, he'll have to do something -- feel something -- about it. and that's such a catastrophic event in lucanis' inner landscape (he has had TWO people in this whole entire world up until now and will do anything to hold on to them with a heartbreaking child-like desperation, even at and especially through the detriment of his own self) that he'd rather just. not. what if we quite simply. didn't. what if we just stayed here in the emptiness where we can both pretend you didn't hurt me in a way I should never forgive. I have so much practice in that with caterina already it's always worked out great for everyone so far. (press x to fucking doubt but that's trauma logic for you lol)

after everything illario did, so much of the storm of lucanis' emotions around it is 'what the FUCK did you get yourself tangled up in this time and how do I get you out of this mess safely'. what's worse: the fact that your brother murdered you, or that he put himself in horrible danger doing so and thus exposed you to the risk of losing him forever. lucanis' heart certainly has an opinion here and it's fucking unhinged (affectionate)

the themes of dissociation in lucanis' character in general makes me feel nuts. allllll these contradictory messy things he needs to cut off from each other because they can't coexist or be easily reconciled inside him. but all remain stubbornly true separately anyway and will have their due one day. love and resentment. tenderness and fear and rage. terror and longing. love and freedom don't coexist. the burned out golden child anthem is playing in the background. he was always caterina's favourite and he has to keep striving to deserve that dubious honour with every breath he takes and then, presumably, mercifully, some day he will die and be excused and can rest. and until now he's suppressed all the -- natural, healthy, protective! -- negative feelings that threaten the few attachment relationships he actually has, at the cost of ever actually having his needs for connection and safety met and leaving his core self imprisoned and compromised. and spite goes 'what. no. that's dumb fuck that' (*spite voice* I do not understand that and even if I did I would not respect it) and does not allow him to fall back into that, which I think is what saves his life, ultimately. it took being possessed by a demon for lucanis to even contemplate telling anyone he loves 'no' in any way, but hey. whatever gets you there right lol

lucanis is dealing with the freeze response allll the way down baby. and he was even before the ossuary, that just turbo powered it and brought it to a breaking point way before it could happen naturally. but something was going to break eventually no matter what, and I'm just glad that in the end, through the power of friendship and also pure spite, it doesn't have to be him

[levanlanse]

♪ It's time for Fish Fact Friday! ♪

Kuhli loaches are worm-shaped freshwater fish which can live for around 10 years on average! They have a little spine behind each eye to protect themselves from predators, and can often be found burrowing into soft sandy surfaces.

They are popular aquarium fish for their calm nature and unique appearance. (Also because they're really cute and wiggly!)