#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.)

[mochasucculent]

Was looking at refs and since Viktor has two different leg braces I was wondering, do we think he wears them simultaneously?? The refs don't perfectly line up perspective-wise so it's hard to tell but parts of the one he wears during the Hexcore scenes look like they could maybe line up with the brace that he wears over his clothes, but also some parts really don't and look like they'd be super uncomfy. Also HOW does he take these on and off. Experts weigh in

[whileyoureinschoolidothisallday]

so somebody on reddit actually just emailed ACC why he didn't approve the OST and he answered! And it's very reasonable!

tl;dr the soundtrack has been free to use for almost 20yrs and he didn't want projects that sampled OFF or used the original soundtrack to suddenly get copyright struck

[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."

[egophiliac]

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

[doctorsiren]

give this angle another tri

[daily-odile]

played limbus company recently

[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 :/"

[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

[sorceressofthesky]

Is Vander talking about Silco here 👀

[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?