#but something seemed off

[drowninginthoughts27]

11/8 Sun Cream Word Count: 854

(infidelity) @pandalilymicrofics

“Did you sleep with him?” Her voice comes out pained, hurt, exhausted even. “Huh, Pandora?” The roughness of it not unlike one of a woman who had be crying, sounding not unlike Pandora’s voice only hours prior. The utter desperation of it, stripped down to the bone, vulnerability at its best. The humility of it almost made Pandora break with her, but only almost, she was done letting herself break for the time being.

“Why does it matter, Lily?” She pressed, biting the inside of her cheek as she spoke and praying that Lily didn’t hear her mirrored pain on the other end of the line. She couldn’t have been more thankful that this conversation wasn’t happening face to face cause if it was Pandora is more than certain that she couldn’t have schooled her emotions as well as she was fighting so hard to do now. Not to mention how she would most definitely react upon seeing Lily so broken if just hearing the hurt in her voice alone distressed her so deeply.

Lily's voice comes through the line much harsher than the barely there whisper that it had been mere seconds before. Almost yelling as she says, “God dammit Pandora! Because it does matter. We matter, or at least we did. To me at least.”

It’s silent on the other end of the line thereafter, aside from Lily’s erratic breathing accompanied by the obvious sounds of her pacing around her apartment (an apartment that up until only a short while ago they had both called home) in a desperate attempt to expel some of her pent up energy despite the people living below her and their rather frequent noise complaints. But Pandora could just barely make out the last few words that she had said, the ones mumbled under her breath, if more to herself than anything, ‘To me at least.’ And all Pandora wants to do is shout back to her that they did matter, that they do matter, that what they had wasn’t one sided at all. That it was true and it was real and it was filled with so much more life and love than anything Pandora had ever experienced before.

But she doesn’t say this, she can’t bring herself to. She doesn’t say anything for that matter, despite how much courage she tries to muster up inside herself. And that’s all the answer Lily needs as she ends the call without even saying goodbye.

And that’s what hurts Pandora the most, not the anger, or the obvious pain in Lily’s voice, it’s the lack of a goodbye. That so deeply uncharacteristic act of Lily’s that makes Pandora truly realizes the severity the situation at hand. How hard the final nail on the coffin that now holds their relationship had just been driven in.

Lily had never left her with that little of a goodbye before. Never before had she not at minimum said a simple ‘I love you’, reassuring Pandora that she would be back, telling her how much she meant to her before either one of them headed out the door. No matter if it was the early hours of the morning when Pandora was barely conscious and Lily was running off for her morning swim at the beach just down the road, rambling on about how she can’t forget her sun cream again for the millionth time. Or in the evenings before Lily went out to the pub with her friends to celebrate whatever major sporting event was on tv as had been a long standing tradition for her. All to come back home to Pandora at the end of the night in her slightly tipsy state and snuggle up next to her, relaying all the stupid stuff she had watched go down throughout her evening out. Or even in the midst of their fighting when Lily needed to just go outside to clear her mind and get a breath of fresh air before they could have a more civilized conversation, even then she said goodbye.

But then again never before had they been in a situation such as this. And Pandora knows deep down inside of herself that she won’t get another chance of redemption after this. To spare their relationship anything more than grief and regret from this moment forward.

Despite how much she tries for it all not to feel real, not to feel so painstakingly true, it does. Not in the way that cold water sends a sharp burn or the breaking of a bone provides a sickening snap. Instead, in a true, gut wrenching way that sinks into every crevasse of her being, reminding her how fatal her mistake had been. Just how much it was bound to cost her.

At the end of it all she can’t help to think how destined she was for this to happen. How she never had been fit for that sort of love and adoration that Lily had given her so freely. She had to go and sabotage it for herself in some subconscious way. Because in the end it was no one else’s doing, all Pandora’s, and there’s nothing she can do to fix it now. It’s simply over.

[hamletthedane]

I keep seeing ads for cotton candy flavored vape pods on tumblr and it made me wonder…

Why/Why not in the tags?

I’m interested because I feel like when I was in high school/college in the mid-10s, almost nobody smoked - even if you otherwise had some pretty hard vices. I think it was considered not really worth it for something with such a small buzz. But now, idk. Maybe the advertisers are right to target people here because it’s just that popular again??

(Reblog for a bigger sample size etc etc.)

[egophiliac]

oh, uh, this...this isn't Silver's backstory after all.

[doctorsiren]

give this angle another tri

[daily-odile]

played limbus company recently

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[paperglader]

they really put alicent in bridgerton blue on the reunion and genuinely expected me to think that she didn’t in fact march all the way to dragonstone to get wifed up? bfr

[syn0vial]

imagine vader trying to do his trademark "disciplinary force choke" thing on boba after he gets a little bit too impudent, and boba just gritting his teeth and pushing forward until he's close enough to force vader's actual physical hand around his throat, not even remotely as a gesture of devotion or obedience but fully a declaration of, "you think i'm scared of you?? you think you're so precious you can strangle a man and not even get your hands dirty??? let me show you exactly how little i think of your pretentious fucking magic tricks, you pompous wizard fuck 🤬"

and meanwhile vader's just standing there with his hands full of Angry Bounty Hunter like, "unfortunately, i have decided this one is my Favorite :/"

[fawn-tongues]

Loop and Mirabelle hours (3am)

[edwinisms]

you know. I think the reasons it feels so literally narratively wrong when people refer to charles as being straight (such as in interviews where his love life comes up and so on) are that A) he’s never deemed outright straight in the show, so it’s just an assumption that he must be straight by default (which is silly in a show like this), and B) what he says following edwin’s confession. I know I’m biased, but even when I try to look at it as neutrally as possible, the way he reacts in general and the specific words he uses just don’t sound right when you imagine them being said by a Totally Definitely Straight guy.

first of all if you actually listen to it instead of absorbing the scene superficially it’s not particularly a rejection at all, and the actors have stated that themselves– it’s not him saying no, it’s him saying “I can’t give you an answer right now, but I will eventually”. that’s not an interpretation, that’s literally just the truth of what he said (and again, the actors agree). can you imagine a straight guy saying that, or possibly even more damning, “we have literally forever to figure out the rest [“the rest” meaning anything that goes beyond the kind of love charles already solidly has for him]”.

imagine you’re a straight man who’s unwaveringly confident in his orientation and your gay best friend confesses his feelings for you. you would not respond with the implication there is a “the rest” to figure out. since the main, obvious obstacle would be your solid lack of attraction to men, that’d probably be essential to your response– it wouldn’t be a “I can’t say–“ it’d be a “I can’t be–“. and on top of all that, I feel like the whole thing would have to sound far more apologetic– “I’m sorry, I love you and that’ll never change, but I just can’t love you the way that you love me.” something like that, right?

tldr: this is a rare instance in television where assuming a character is straight by default makes Less sense than the alternative. and charles’ choice of words in the confession overtly suggest that he is, at the very least, unsure of his orientation.

[abisalli]

sometimes he forgets the power behind his magic and goes a bit overboard-

[itsnotacostume]

we as a fandom do not talk about this scene enough. what the fuck is this. why did he feel the need to install this? so he could stare at his boybestfriend all day without having to get up?

[egophiliac]

the lovers, reversed

(aka I'm still freaking out about Jou)

[nerdgirlnarrates]

Even though it's been months since I switched from neurosurgery to internal medicine, I still have a hard time not being angry about the training culture and particularly the sexism of neurosurgery. It wasn't the whole reason I switched, but truthfully it was a significant part of my decision.

I quickly got worn out by constantly being questioned over my family plans. Within minutes of meeting me, attendings and residents felt comfortable lecturing me on the difficulties of having children as a neurosurgeon. One attending even suggested I should ask my co-residents' permission before getting pregnant so as not to inconvenience them. I do not have children and have never indicated if I plan to have any. Truthfully, I do want children, but I would absolutely have foregone that to be a neurosurgeon. I wanted to be a neurosurgeon more than anything. But I was never asked: it was simply assumed that I would want to be a mother first. Purely because I'm a woman, my ambitions were constantly undermined, assumed to be lesser than those of my male peers. Women must want families, therefore women must be less committed. It was inconceivable that I might put my career first. It was impossible to disprove this assumption: what could I have done to demonstrate my commitment more than what I had already done by leading the interest group, taking a research year, doing a sub-I? My interest in neurosurgery would never be viewed the same way my male peers' was, no matter what I did. I would never be viewed as a neurosurgeon in the same way my male peers would be, because I, first and foremost, would be a mother. It turns out women don't even need to have children to be a mother: it is what you essentially are. You can't be allowed to pursue things that might interfere with your potential motherhood.

Furthermore, you are not trusted to know your own ambitions or what might interfere with your motherhood. I am an adult woman who has gone to medical school: I am well aware of what is required in reproduction, pregnancy, and residency, as much as one can be without experiencing it firsthand. And yet, it was always assumed that I had somehow shown up to a neurosurgery sub-I totally ignorant of the demands of the career and of pregnancy. I needed to be enlightened: always by men, often by childless men. Apparently, it was implausible that I could evaluate the situation on my own and come to a decision. I also couldn't be trusted to know what I wanted: if I said I wanted to be a neurosurgeon more than a mother, I was immediately reassured I could still have a family (an interesting flip from the dire warnings issued not five minutes earlier in the conversation). People could not understand my point, which was that I didn't care. I couldn't mean that, because women are fundamentally mothers. I needed to be guided back to my true role.

Because everyone was so confident in their sexist assumptions that I was less committed, I was not offered the same training, guidance, or opportunities as the men. I didn't have projects thrown my way, I didn't get check-ins or advice on my application process, I didn't get opportunities in the OR that my male peers got, I didn't get taught. I once went two whole days on my sub-I without anyone saying a word to me. I would come to work, avoid the senior resident I was warned hated trainees, figure out which OR to go to on my own, scrub in, watch a surgery in complete silence without even the opportunity to cut a knot, then move to the next surgery. How could I possibly become a surgeon in that environment? And this is all to say nothing of the rape jokes, the advice that the best way for a woman to match is to be as hot as possible, listening to my attending advise the male med students on how to get laid, etc.

At a certain point, it became clear it would be incredibly difficult for me to become a neurosurgeon. I wouldn't get research or leadership opportunities, I wouldn't get teaching or feedback, I wouldn't get mentorship, and I wouldn't get respect. I would have to fight tooth and nail for every single piece of my training, and the prospect was just exhausting. Especially when I also really enjoyed internal medicine, where absolutely none of this was happening and I even had attendings telling me I would be good at it (something that didn't happen in neurosurgery until I quit).

I've been told I should get over this, but I don't know how to. I don't know how to stop being mad about how thoroughly sidelined I was for being female. I don't know how to stop being bitter that my intelligence, commitment, and work ethic meant so much less because I'm a woman. I know I made the right decision to switch to internal medicine, and it probably would have been the right decision even if there weren't all these issues with the culture of neurosurgery, but I'm still so angry about how it happened.

[stardynamite]

I love the Cass apocalyptic series so much y’all it’s crazy

Anyway, I havent really gotten the chance to do rottmnt fanart UNTILL NOW

BOOM

I know that if Casey does a reveal it wouldn’t be like that but I just wanna see what @somerandomdudelmao has in store for us lmao

Also, look at Leo’s flappy shirt arm, just tie it up bro 😭/lh

Full page ⬇️