#but ugh my copy is so bad

[be-the-glenn-to-my-maggie]

Here is the first headcanon we are expanding on:

-I think once adopted, Spider is a mama’s boy. He craves physical attention and he has been raised essentially Na’vi in a way that Jake hasn’t. I think he would connect with Neytiri’s parenting style more, I think they’d do a lot of weird shit together that the other kids would rather die than help with, like cooking or mending shit. I think Spider would be literally delighted to help with boring household chores with his mother and that’s so mamas boy of him. He’s a “mother, do you need help with dinner, can I do the dishes so you can sit down?” kid while all the rest of them are gagging and calling him a suck up in the background.

-Spider likes cooking. It's always been something he could help with easily even if he couldn't always eat what was being made. Kiri hates cooking and always has because she hates when her brothers expect her to cook. On Jake and Neytiri's date nights to avoid a fight, Spider would always just offer to help Neteyam.

-Neytiri does most of the cooking for the family. Jake is not a bad cook, he's just not a good cook. He has skills but they are mediocre. She does not mind, because she likes it. It's a chance to personally use Eywa's gifts and transfer them into energy for her family, a way to thank Eywa herself instead of just accepting the bowl from the clan cookfires. It's a calming mental reset every time, and the natural conclusion to every hunting trip.

-None of her children have taken any interest in this particular lifeskill. Kiri, who would sooner let her attention drift and let the cookfire burn the mauri to the ground, doesn't have the attention span for anything other than Eywa. Lo'ak has to be essentially bound and shackled to the cookfire to do any work, and he complains the entire time to the point that Neytiri gets a headache. Neteyam always helps with no complaints, but he obviously does not enjoy it much and it always makes Neytiri feel bad for forcing him because he's the most agreeable. Tuk is too young to be anything other than a nuisance during a task like that.

-So it's comes as a great surprise when, after Neteyam was shot and the demon child rescued, she finds him watching her every move every time she prepares a meal.

-At first she thinks it's because of the boat and the cut on his chest. The knife in her hand as she chops the roots. It's not not that, but it is something more. A curiosity for the direction she stirs a boiling pot, and for the order she adds the spices.

-It had honestly never occurred to Neytiri at all that the child had a personality or interests outside of things mimicked from her children. Insolence and loyalty from Lo'ak, disobedience and morality from Kiri, honesty and stubbornness from Neteyam, even playfulness from Tuk. But none of her kids are at all interested in cooking.

-Spider and Neteyam are both confined to the mauri for recovery, and Neteyam is out like a light by eclipse every night and has to be awoken for evening meal. Spider is silent at Neteyam's side, where he spends most of his time, like Neteyam has to watch him to be sure he's there. She doesn't ask him, just slides over a cutting board and a knife and then passes him a vegetable to cut.

-Neytiri would have to be blind to not notice how perfectly he copies her cuts from before.

-That continues, with Jake and the other kids none the wiser, for a few days, until eventually she puts him in charge of stirring. He has to leave the safety of Neteyam for that, but the lure of the task is too great. He stirs, counterclockwise four times and clockwise twice, just like she always does.

-The next night she tests him. Asks him to get out the ingredients for a certain meal, the one she made the first night she noticed him watching, over a week ago. He doesn't miss a thing. They work shoulder to shoulder, side by side. Every night on, she has him fetch the ingredients unless she shows him something new.

-Tuk is the first to catch them in their silent little game, coming in to see if Neytiri will deem Spider well enough to at least come see the stars, which look particularly clear that night. Neytiri says he can go, and is shocked by how sad he looks for one second before turning to Tuk, like she'd kicked him.

-When she directs him to start the meal the next night he seems surprised, and she realizes he thought the dismissal the night before was a permanent one. So when Tuk comes for him again when he's helping with lunch, she tells Tuk that he's busy. She is not good at reading body language without a tail or ears to judge with, but he turns even pinker than usual and seems to vibrate with energy for the rest of the day.

-Neytiri is fairly sure the entire family knows about the cooking thing, because she's pretty sure Neteyam is not actually asleep at every mealtime still at this point. He's really recovered a lot by now, and she's pretty sure he ratted her out and that's why the mauri becomes essentially off limits to everyone besides her and Spider during every meal prep time. Sometimes she thinks she can hear Kiri and Lo'ak chasing someone off who was trying to come visit.

-Spider and her do not talk for the most part, they just become increasingly in tune with each others movements. Cooking with someone is a hard pairing to match, and Neytiri usually finds it incredibly frustrating, even with Jake sometimes. Spider seems to be able to read her mind, hand her the exact right spice before she even finished the thought about how it was needed, or finishing dicing at the exact moment the vegetables need to be added.

-She finds his personality in tweaks he adds to her recipes, some needed to adjust for his human palate, but always compensated for in an explosion of creativity between them both to find an adequate or even superior substitute. She apologizes in lessons, basics and then the hard stuff, things she should've been teaching him for years. They learn in tandem, each other and the Metkayina cuisine, types of squid and clams and seaweed that add tastes that must be enhanced and balanced with the correct tools, just as a child must be to grow properly.

-She finds herself mourning days alone at the cookfire, or days with one of her other kids who wanted to be anywhere else. Days where he was likely waiting for them outside, interested in what she was doing but not wiling to ask.

-There is no direct apology, not yet. For now it is learning, and building new memories and experiences. His songcord, which she has now seen, is basically a recipe book at this point, Jake says. But so is hers. Songs of slicing meat that provides energy from Eywa, and souls meeting souls for the first time.

[nowjumpinthewater]

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[monimolimnion]

me: yeah im so settled in my identity, im old now, im chill with my place in the world piece of media: puts in a character that explicitly IDs with the labels i do me: OH.... OKAY......

[skitskatdacat63]

I will read the most inane and useless stuff for hours just for my own interest/enjoyment, but reading academic papers is like pulling a tooth 😭😭 like I genuinely think I'd find the info interesting but the fact that ik it's in pursuit of doing an assignment somehow manages to kills my motivation 100%

[athenaholmesartistsguild]

I just finished Gaiden and I’m gonna have to digest it a bit before I can get super analytical but holy shit that was really fucking good.

[enbeemagical]

OK Google: how to combat imposter syndrome and pull out a relevant analysis of someone else's mini-essay thing when you don't have anything to add

[no results]

[cheekblush]

just woke up from a horrible dream about my chemistry final tomorrow 😭

[themeposts]

Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!

[lord-squiggletits]

Getaway and the whole mutiny arc literally is one of the most disappointing things in all of phase 2 lmao and it’s not that I’m like “oooh Getaway should’ve been a perfect angel who was right and a better captain than Rodimus” it’s more that I would’ve liked to have him NOT immediately descend into cartoonish levels of pure evil and for him to have gotten to make a point about Rodimus/Megatron being shit captains besides the final confrontation between him and Rodimus. Like goddamn I understand now why there are so many Getaway fans/Megatron haters because I’m pretty sure if I didn’t come into this continuity as a Megatron simp I would hate him too

[obstinatecondolement]

Trying not to be a weirdo conspiracy theorist with a persecution complex about this, but I am getting the impression that the co-worker who has been chilly with me lately has asked not work with me as much as is possible/my manager is trying not to roster us together as much as is possible because the co-worker complained about me.

[raivaryn]

counter intuitive, but this bummer cheers me up on the reg

[ame-to-ame]

love being nd and have the tism wolf Inside me be so drastically uncomfortable with uncertainty that i physically cannot think about school and having to deal w the unknown of that whole situation without losing 5lbs in 2 days

[littlebigplanet]

my beloved mutuals. play red dead NOW

[landofgay]

bought p5strikers so I can motivate myself to finish p5r. and also cause it was on sale.

[phagodyke]

yet another evening of cooking showering then sitting at my desk and sniffling miserably for 2 hours bc I can't work up the motivation to click open any of the hundreds of videogames or movies or drawing wips or literally any kind of enjoyable activity on my laptop and then going to bed at 9:30 before i throw myself off the roof

[cjselbybooks]

So I'm having to take down the link for the paperback of The King's Champion because there must have been a corrupted spot on the file and they're coming out misprinted in a couple of spots. I'm trouble-shooting the issue now and will be making sure that it doesn't continue in future copies.