#but that's a different post

[lady-harrowhark]

okay you know what. i'm not saying fall out boy's so much (for) stardust is a concept album about the locked tomb series.

what i AM saying:

there is a track titled 'Baby Annihilation'

We're here and we're ready to livestream the apocalypse

Scar-crossed lovers, forever, I'm checking myself out forever

Part-time soulmate, full-time problem

The band has previously been inspired by modern sci-fi classic Pacific Rim, resulting in the song Jet Pack Blues

so i'm not NOT saying fall out boy's so much (for) stardust is a concept album about the locked tomb series, is all i'm saying

[thestalwartheart]

Having thoughts about James Bond and sex again (what's new - it's my favourite topic).

It occurred to me this evening that we don't often see Craig!Bond having sex, at least not to the extent his mythology suggests. He kisses quite a few women, flirts a lot, but more often than not, he leaves them hanging (see: Solange Dimitrios, Camille, the nameless woman at the beginning of Spectre). The women we do see him have sex with:

a) are of use to him in the field (they either help him with logistics or intelligence),

b) are people he turns to in crisis (hello woman in Turkey during Skyfall ily), or

c) are the women he loves.

And I started to wonder why that is. Maybe it's an issue of just not wanting to. Maybe he's short on time. Maybe it's a combination of factors, but I'd like to float one at you that I don't hear mentioned very often:

Sex is an exercise in vulnerability. And not just for Bond; for his partners, too.

Bond has long been pigeonholed as a 'love 'em and leave 'em' type, but I'd argue that isn't strictly true. Yes, a lot of his dalliances are one night stands or casual flings, but he doesn't up and leave right away. He lingers (see Fields and Lucia Sciarra for a couple of really good examples, Vesper too if you believe they slept together after the shower scene).

I think Bond recognises that sex is a vulnerable thing. You are quite literally opening up your body to another person. No matter how fun or lighthearted or short-lived you expect it to be, it is still a momentous thing. An intense thing. I've no doubt it's anything less than intense with Bond.

To add to that: Bond is generally kind to his allies. He's aware he asks a lot of them, and he's predisposed to protect the romantic and sexual partners he meets in the field (even when it doesn't work out). I think his nature leads him to stay a while after sex - to cuddle, to reassure, to revel in beauty pleasure and gratitude and - I'm just going to say it - aftercare.

And that's maybe why he doesn't invest in it as often as people expect him to. Because it isn't just sex. It's aftercare and closeness and riding out that post-sex wave of vulnerability and feeling.

If anyone understands the pain in baring your soft parts to another person, it's Bond. In the face of that, I think leaving right after the deed is done would go against all his instincts.

Better to let someone down after a kiss, after all, than to leave them shaking and gasping in a cold hotel bed.

[ratherembarrassing]

fuck it, i'll say it. hotd s2 is better for ending where it did, even if it was never the plan to end there*. alicent and rhaenyra is the story they want to tell. i refuse to be gaslit into thinking that's not an abundantly clear fact. the actual war bullshit isn't. the actual war bullshit is the compromise they have to wrap around the real story to get certain people interested. violent sugarcoating, if you will.

and then they lost the violent sugarcoating around their lesbian divorce drama and now the lesbian divorce drama is all that's left. and some people viscerally hate it, because that wrapper was the only thing they ever enjoyed. but it's a wrapper; it's the expendable part of the story they're telling. and instead of some diluted version of this story where that meeting is buried 2 episodes before the finale because that's what structuring your season around the sugarcoating dictates, we got. what we got. the real core of this story sitting as it's capstone.

either they always planned to end exactly this way (bold if true!) or they didn't and circumstances forced them into telling the most honest version of the story they want to tell. and that's good.

[postsforposting]

in dp1, "you can't buy love but only rent it for three minutes". dancers lend a hand.

you still gotta ask dancers if they want your hand.

calling for resumes but not paying medical/dental is asking to rent a hand without benefits

(everyone but domino got a little death in the end though: that's doing your friends a solid)

you can take advantage of your friends, and that can be forever, but that's only friends with benefits

especially if they're not always there for you

so if you want more than a little death,

you can't rent that, you can't pay for it,

so if you want more than just a little death

you need someone who isn't already married

or currently being nailed by someone else

you need to give it away for free

and dance

if you want a life together

[knownoshamc]

Since I've been seeing a lot of it lately, I want to ask: is racism in the states (most if not all posts are from either there or western Europe, I think) only towards black people? Do brown people/people of colour not face racism at all? in Europe, my experience is that if you aren't the whitest of whites and from a western country, racism against you will be a thing. is it so different over there that brown actors are considered as privileged as white people? Or is it just racism

I mean I know the answer, I think, but since I don't live in America or even Western Europe, I am wondering

[poetry-protest-pornography]

Babe bringing the immediate anxiety to the boyfriend proposal that's usually missing from a romance.

Big "this is my boyfriend"/"I'm your husband, stop calling me that" energy.

Poor Charlie lol

[faceofpoe]

The thing about Infiltration and Extraction (and touching on Point of No Return) -

CX-2 undergoes this chaotic mashup of Crosshair's experiences throughout the show.

The fire blinding the scope - Crosshair on Barton IV. Crosshair ripping his helmet off on Barton IV. Crosshair having his eyes opened on Barton IV?

The smaller scale echoes of the engine incident on Bracca - the way it's his own shot that ultimately causes the explosion that flings him into the wall and buries him.

The way he (after getting a tiny bit blown up again) progresses through recklessness (shooting down the ship, firing into the group where he's just as likely to hit Omega as anyone else) the same way rather injured Crosshair insists on manning the ship guns himself trying to shoot them down while they flee Bracca in the aftermath of Omega's abduction.

But then the next time we see them (Crosshair on Ryloth; CX-2 with Phee & then on Pabu) they're more restrained in their bloodthirstiness actions and CX-2 is again cooperative with the reinforcements and... really does leave Pabu shockingly intact? (minus the docks)

Getting the rifle shot out of his hands a la Omega's crucial shot in Aftermath.

To stick with the Crosshair/Omega parallels and the CX-2/Crosshair parallels, a dramatic near-drowning - except with CX-2 as would-be killer rather than savior.

Being held down underwater vs pulling Mayday up out of the snow.

Echoes of Crosshair's bitter griping at Hunter - "Don't make the same mistake twice; don't become my enemy."

But like - more intense (more... severe and unyielding, one might say?)

"You had your chance; you chose the wrong side."

And ultimately tumbling down a big-ass waterfall and crawling onto shore looking eerily like Tech in The Crossing and flopping on his face looking eerily like Crosshair in Reunion.

The thing about Crosshair is that, perhaps more than he really expects (or wants, to get dark with it) to be at various points of the show, he's a survivor. Starting to raise his rifle against Hunter after the droid fight in Return to Kamino, with 5 people aiming weapons at him. Staying behind on the landing platform.

You cannot tell me he did not expect killing Lt Nolan was going to be his death sentence.

Or slipping away from Emerie to get the message out.

Strong implications that the CX training/initiation comes with a high fatality rate, "the few that make it through."

The thing that makes the CX clones terrifying as a concept (and I wish we actually got to see more of them) is the idea that they just. keep. coming. Their identities are erased, they'll kill themselves before they'll talk, and then another one will take their place.

With CX-2, we instead get this 2-episode long sequence of things that really ought to have killed him and he just - is a survivor.

[tsuki-in-faerun]

you, tumblr user, are actually k tanaka: part deux

i decided to make this it’s own post instead of ranting in the tags of somebody else’s.

if I could browse the evan/sam tag without seeing k mentioned, i could get on board with the shippers. not the ship itself, the community. conceptually speaking, i have no problem with anybody’s shipping habits. i love the chemistry between danielle and brennan.

my issue is that 1.) k bashing lives alongside the actual shipping to the point of being unavoidable and 2.) the opinion that ‘romantic love can’t heal someone but it can help the process.’ both of these things together give me the impression that people don’t actually disagree with the idea that evan can be fixed with love, they just think k was doing it wrong.

so, yeah, i still think people are projecting a lot of self-hatred onto k for having done the same type of shit that they themselves do or want to do for evan. if there was the ability to separate that noise out from the sam/evan shipping i wouldn't say anything, but as it stands, i hate seeing two characters of color being triangulated around a white love interest like this. because k/evan happened canonically, we don't get to let it live 100% in the realm of fantasy fulfillment, we have to deal with the messiness that happened between them. sam/evan gets to be tender because they don't have that baggage, we don't see the points of friction that would exist if they were together, and some people are using THAT to mean that it would inherently be healthier. i've heard at least one person complaining that folks are being too 'moralistic' about sam/evan and again, i can't help but contrast that critique to fan treatment of k this season. we can’t apply a moralistic lens to k and then put it away now that you like this other dynamic better. what it feels like is happening is that there is a portion of fans that do want evan to be rehabilitated thru romantic partnership and because that's the fantasy, k deserves to be punished for failing at it and sam can be the clean slate. i don't think any of these characters deserve that, nor does that square with how they are being played in mismag itself.

[starlight-bread-blog]

We All Know Muse Has Range, But...

Today I got curious, and went to look at their Wikipedia page, to see what genres they are exactly. Are you ready?

"Described as a band that fuse alternative rock, progressive rock, space rock, hard rock, art rock, electronic rock, progressive metal, indie rock and pop, Muse also mix sounds from genres such as electronica and R&B, with forms such as classical music and rock opera, among many others, also being included".

Yeah, good luck answering next time someone asks you about them. Yeah, that's why I can listen to them for days without getting bored. Yeah, I fucking adore them.

[mischief-lies-and-stories]

Why Kid Loki's Backstory in Loki Proves (More Than Anything Else) That the Writers Don't Understand Loki's Character

I've mostly already talked about this in a theory around Kid Loki, but now I'm going in a comic-heavy rant direction with it. Spoilers for Loki, Journey into Mystery, Immortal Thor, King Thor, and possibly more.

So Kid Loki in the show says he's taken in by the TVA for killing Thor. It is not clear whether Thor is also a child at this point in the timeline, or (as in my theory) this is Kid Loki from Journey into Mystery, a Kid Loki from our Loki's future (a future that hasn't happened yet in the main timeline of the MCU). Which would mean that the Thor he kills is an adult (probably. The future MCU option could deviate from Journey into Mystery and mean Thor is also a younger, reincarnated iteration of himself).

In the comics, the closest Kid Loki comes to killing Thor is 1., in Journey into Mystery, when he influences events during a battle to end the bloodshed by helping bring about Thor's sacrifice for the greater good. If he had not died, the battle would have gone on and led to more terrible destruction for Asgard. 2., In AoA, after "Kid Loki" ages up in Young Avengers, when he stabs Thor with Gram in order to free him from Loki's evil future self, who has hitched a ride inside Thor as a symbiote-like parasite.

In JiM, Loki privately and very deeply mourns Thor's death. (He also does so publicly, but in a way to avoid the suspicion of Asgard that he had something to do with Thor's death. But then the Asgardians go away and he's left alone, and he cries.) He knows what needed to be done, but he has lost his brother, his protector, his friend. He loves him. He is often shown throughout JiM to care about Thor. He calls for him instinctively when something he summons turns on him. He tries to make Thor promise to kill him if he goes bad again. He names his dog after him.

In Immortal Thor, we are reminded that Thor sought out Kid Loki, Thor awoke the piece of dormant soul inside him, Thor brought him back to himself and home to Asgard. Kid Loki would never kill Thor. Unless he had to.

Likewise, in King Thor, most of the comic is Loki, armed with the Necrosword, fighting Thor. Yet even here, even influenced by the elder god of the symbiotes themself, he cannot bring himself to annihilate Thor. (Now, he certainly does a good job of trying, even when he isn't as much under All-Black's influence. He makes an effort, I'm not discounting that. I'm not saying he's pretending to kill him, but in the end there's a shift.)

At a certain point, it stops being about Thor vs. Loki and the fight of an Asgardian lifetime. At a certain point, Loki very nearly gives it up, and Thor lets him. Loki says that it's too late, but not for their bond, not for a truce between them. It's too late to end this fight, because Loki has unleashed All-Black back into the universe, and it is too powerful even on its own for Loki to contain or control.

But the important thing here is that Loki stops. He stops fighting Thor. He stops trying to kill him. And when all hope is lost, as All-Black devours them, drowning them in despair and its own viscous, all-consuming darkness, Thor reaches for Loki, and Loki reaches back.

And this is a comic. We can make assumptions based on what we know about these characters, but at the end of the day, this is a comic, a stationary form of visual storytelling. Meaning that the panel portraying this moment does not display the first reaching hand, and so we cannot truly know who reaches for whom first. The important thing is that Loki reaches, too, but he could easily have reached out first.

Therefore, if Loki can reach for his brother, for comfort and peace and a promise of tomorrow, when all hope and light is dying around him, when he's about to die himself in a universe-ending disaster of his own making, centuries and millennia into a future of antagonism and villainy and sibling rivalry played out on a cosmic scale, then why the hell would he ever truly kill Thor as an eleven-year-old?

Aside from the shock factor (for both the main Loki and the viewers), it makes absolutely no sense. And if the writers cannot even comprehend that this would never happen, not in any universe (JiM and King Thor have nothing to do with each other, yet are connected by this one truth), no matter what Loki may claim, then why should they be expected to know anything else about Loki's character?

[didntwanderstillgotlost]

One of my favorite things in media is characters who are two different people. Ed is NOT Blackbeard. Blackbeard is the world's most terrifying pirate. Blackbeard is a myth. He's a legend. He's a ghost. He was created as a way for Ed to survive at sea, first on Hornigold's ship and then on his own. Ed is a middle-aged man who just wants to be loved. He wants friends and fine silk and lavender soap. He's soft and caring and he wants people to like him for who he is.

I think that's why he went completely off the rails when Stede left. He was actually coping in a semi-healthy way at first. He wrote a song. He was encouraging the crew to express themselves the way he did if they wanted to. He wanted everyone to call him Ed. Then Izzy told him that he served Blackbeard, not Edward and that Edward better watch his step. Ed fell back into the person he created to survive. Blackbeard was reborn, but underneath Ed was still grieving and he didn't have an outlet for it anymore. He did increasingly fucked up shit to the crew hoping they would kill him because he thought death was the only way to stop the pain, but he couldn't do it himself.

I'm absolutely not absolving him of his responsibility. He needs to have a conversation with everyone the way he did with Fang and give sincere apologies to all of them. I also don't think that Izzy deserved anything that happened to him and I'm living for this character growth, but I do think that what happened was partially his fault. He should've let Ed cope the way he was instead of threatening him into becoming the worst version of himself.

Anyway, just my thoughts on season 2 so far. Feel free to disagree and if anyone wants to talk more about this don't hesitate to message me. My best friend just starting watching the show so I can't scream about this with her just yet.

[bugs-in-situations]

we can't get the illustrations done so we're just going to talk about the "how leif forgot what kind of animal they are" saga so we don't go insane in here

as we said in the last post, wearing each other's pelts as apparel is usual for married selkies. muse and leif had figured out a practical application of this: wearing their pelts on missions so they had a way to signal to each other while split up. one tap on the pelt for "i'm stuck in place", three taps for "i'm in immediate danger", so on.

muse felt it when leif died in snakemouth den, when the feeling of leif clawing at her pelt for help stopped and when their pelt turned cold in her hands. she wasn't allowed to go back in to find leif or her pelt, and lived out the rest of her life sick from pelt separation. she couldn't stand looking at leif's pelt anymore and put it away in a box, buried in storage until she died.

leif was still wearing her pelt in the spider web.

decades later, when they awoke, all their memories of being a mongoose selkie wiped, and with a sea lion's pelt on their back... the logical conclusion, of course, is that they had been a sea lion selkie. their head was still fuzzy, and their memory was malleable - a few events that didn't really happen began to implant in their mind. what other explanation was there? they don't remember any selkie tradition that would explain why they would wear someone else's pelt.

it takes leif a long time to remember muse even existed.

in the mean time, they're trying to be a sea lion and... not doing it very well. when they wear the pelt fully, it hangs on them loosely and is incredibly uncanny to look at. they're afraid of water and can't stand to be in their "natural" environment. they don't crave fish like the other pinnipeds around them, instead craving much crunchier and explicitly forbidden prey.

there's also the fact that their pelt is cold in the way only a dead selkie's pelt should be. they rationalize this as being because of their ice magic. it's harder to explain why nothing happens when someone takes it away and tries to command them.

despite all of this, leif can't bear to take the thing off or leave it anywhere they can't reach.

tl;dr leif died wearing muse's pelt and now thinks her pelt is theirs and they're being very normal about it

[micahdotgov]

this conversation is so strange and has been on my mind since i first watched it like. how in any way is it rusts fault that marty cheated on his wife especially when the affair started before he had even met rust like how could this be on rust. martys reasons for cheating on his wife are that his dad died a year ago and rust exists. also rust misogyny reveal people say he isnt sexist bro look at how he is talking about women. bimbo. crazy pussy. and im not even going anywhere near "all the dick swagger you roll" what does any of this mean what is wrong with them

[calictii]

Anyways i got legends arceus the other day. because it was cheap. And like. The Autism brain to hear people talking about how different a game is, and to throw out everything i know on the topic because well it's so different. And while it is different. Massively so. It's still a pokemon game. And Still abides by some pokemon rules (or video game rules in general). Like this game has loading screens in it.

I'm always so disappointed when i prepare for these absolutely world changing things, and then it's like -_-

[annacaffeina]

My husband had apparently never heard the term 'girlboss' before. I did my best to try to explain it to him. He ultimately just said "Until anyone is ever talking about whether it's good leftism to have a 'boyboss' I don't want to hear it. That's just cute internet misogyny."

[werewolfetone]