#causes ALL conflict

[shellxrls]

the writers rlly put in their all with rafe and said fuck everyone else huh

[turbo-tsundere]

*superglues them together*

Aka, eeeeh fok it. Here's some ougoku stuff I've been sitting on. Happy THOSE GUYS day.

[bixels]

Be honest, what are your thoughts on appledash? Do you hate it or its more of not a big deal

Not a big deal to me. I like it, I see all the appeals, I just personally like Rarijack more.

[hoaxghost]

Some File Recovery demon lore! Feat a rather unfortunate example

Angels outnumbered The Fallen by a great deal so many demons resorted to splitting themselves off to boost numbers. Many also took this root to essentially end their conscious, a thing that is rarely ever allowed for immortal beings such as them.

Splits are essentially their own people, the more simpler way I could prob describe this method is 'Reverse 2048'

Also a fun lil fact but Stolforns and Sezzi are of the same Split tree, with the latter often calling the other his brother.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

it's kind of funny that we're back at the start, as it was known from the very beginning, as the story always was, the old lore: "the Divine Gate was built in response to the destruction and suffering of the Calamity as the Prime Deities realized was far too much and, as such, they needed to also remove themselves from Exandria to protect it from the ruin that the gods dwelling here brings"

[andmineisyellow]

I'll be honest, my biggest takeaway from the sneak peek wasn't, "Yes Pen, read him for filth!" It was, "Oh Pen is totally shame spiralling out of control." Because yes, Penelope has every right to be upset with Colin and tell him why she is upset, but most of the emphasis in this scene is on just how much Penelope hates herself. She doesn't believe Colin when he compliments her dress (a direct parallel to scenes Pen has had with Marina and Edwina in the past), she calls herself a spinster even though she's only 19 (I'm willing to bet Portia refers to Penelope as a spinster at some point before this scene), she assumes Colin sees her as an embarrassment, and again she points out that even though she managed to change her wardrobe, she is still a laughingstock.

This whole scene does way more to demonstrate Penelope's insecurities than it does to paint Colin as someone who needs to grovel for forgiveness. If anything, Colin is handling the situation maturely. He openly communicates his feelings, he doesn't deny what he said, and it's clear he wants to work through the issue.

Penelope is so unhappy with herself that she's taking it out on him more than she should. It's easier to blame him for the one thing he said rather than force herself to look inward. But I think once Colin comes to her again with his plan to help her find a husband, this is going to shift. Penelope will be put in a position where she will have to reflect on those insecurities and Colin will be the one with her on that journey.

Which brings us back to Nicola talking about Penelope putting Colin on a pedestal. He might be off of that pedestal after what he said last season, but she still doesn't view him as a fully flawed human being yet. Once Penelope forgives Colin at the end of 3x01, it's going to open up her eyes and allow her to see Colin as a full human being and as her equal (not as her idol). This is how we get "You're my mess," and "You're the imperfect man of my heart."

[marcirose]

Nobody understands Kingdom Hearts that well cause everybody compares it to shonen anime when it's actually a magical girl anime because it has:

-A protagonist who is an ordinary lad who got given a special power that could save the universe

Teammates that the protagonist can lean on and who help the protagonist with said special power

A love interest heavily involved in the plot that both motivates the protagonist and is motivated by the protagonist

A monster of the week format that has its own standalone conflict that eventually leads to the next major plot point in the story

Overarching themes about love and friendships and connections and identity

[p4nishers]

what i absolutely adore about mobius is that he never stops being kind. EVER. he has gone through so much and no matter what happens he always chooses kindness over anything else. we've seen him comfort strangers countless times without hesitation because he's just THAT good and he would never turn away from anyone in distress. even when he's clearly upset he's still kind enough to explain to victor what he's drinking and not even be annoyed at his constant interrupting but just say "hold on a second" in a gentle tone then focus on him again DESPITE EVERYTHING GOING ON to get him hot chocolate bc why wouldn't he do so? he doesn't question these actions because they come naturally to him, kindness is in his nature. why shouldn't he try to lighten the mood and be kind while they wait for their end? why shouldn't he reassure and comfort everyone around him while he's actively falling apart? these aren't questions for him bc he's at his core the kindest person in the show and he will always ALWAYS have time and space to be kind. god.

[warning-heckboop]

Oh to be able to make the complex lore comic that lives in my head about the concept of fairies, anti-fairies, and pixies once being a civilization of one single species of fae that splintered both metaphorically and literally due to internal conflict

[lucabyte]

who's this asshole?

part one - (link)

[booksandmore]

reminder that the malec age gap does excist and does HEAVILY impact their relationship

[teathattast]

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[snek-panini]

Today's completed book is a bind of Glimmer, by @tawnyontumblr (hi, it's me, the person who asked to bind your story way back in April). This story is a Good Omens human au about sex workers in the Regency era, and it's gorgeous and lush and fantastic. Sexy and vulnerable and all the good adjectives. Go read it if you haven't yet, it's wonderful.

This is another legal-size quarto, my second (of 4; more are on the way). It really is an addictive size, and perfect for fics this length. The cover is done in this really pretty red damask lokta paper that highlights different parts of the image depending on the angle of the light. I was toying with the idea of binding this fic, and when I found this paper I immediately bumped it up the list because it's so perfect. The spine is dark gray lineco book cloth that I simply cannot resist putting on spines. I realize this is a pattern and I do not care. It's softer visually than black and it coordinates with everything and I will not stop.

More photos under the cut!

What did I tell you, it coordinates with everything. I used silver foil HTV for the title, and I elected to put it just on the spine so as not to cover up any of the floral patterns on the cover. Honestly, I thought about it but just couldn't bring myself to cover it up. The interior of this one has some very fancy fonts and I wanted one for the spine but they were all too spindly. But this one's a good compromise, I think. Delicate but straightforward.

Top view. I really wanted to do custom end bands for this one, for maximum luxury, but it was too thin, so it has pre-made black ones. They sort of disappear in the photos but make a nice contrast in person. I am totally in love with the starry endpapers even though they are only scrapbook paper from Joann's. It was surprisingly difficult to find something that looked good with the red cover, because plain solid colors looked too lackluster and most prints were too bold with the floral, not to mention a lot of colors clashed with the red. But I love these gray-on-gray stars. They're perfect. And a lot of the fic takes place under cover of darkness, and stars are a symbol of hope, and this fic's about wanting to escape your current circumstances, so it's kind of thematically appropriate. I'm going to say it is, anyway XD

So I think the title page is my favorite part of the bind again. I found this vintage valentine graphic on rawpixel for free and it's probably the most opulent thing in the whole typeset. The sort of uneven ink distribution is on purpose and adds to the vintage feel. I remember thinking about a year ago that my title pages were too plain and I needed to level them up somehow, and with the batch of binds I've been posting for the last week or two I think I've done it. The fonts here are called Annabel (the one with the trailing ends) and Victorian Decade (the swirly one that my bindery name is in). Both are available for free from DaFont. I did have to get a little tricky with the line spacing to get them to print correctly, but it was worth it. I wanted opulence for this one.

And that's that! I hope I did the fic justice, because I couldn't be more pleased with the outcome.

[hylianane]

Zoro demanding that Luffy not allow Usopp back on the ship seems to be a much more divisive topic than I originally thought. Looking at yknow, so many different sides, I think I understand how his words can feel cruel when you take into account how much Usopp grew in Enies Lobby and how much he pushed himself to the very limit trying to make things right. but then of course I have my own take away and. honestly this next bit might sound even crueler towards Usopp at first. I just don’t think that this was about Usopp at all. Or at least not in Zoro’s eyes.

His focus was on the way Luffy still needed to grow as a reliable Captain than on what Usopp needed to do as a crew mate. Luffy needed to reinforce his authority before moving on. He was formally challenged, and in Zoro’s eyes this couldn’t go unaddressed and untalked about- and let me pause here to reiterate that even though I’m arguing in this moment he was disregarding Usopp’s personal growth (as many ppl criticize him for) it’s not because he respects him less than Luffy or god forbid loves him less than Luffy- because as much as the Strawhats tend to disregard traditional rules of authority on their ship, Luffy is their Captain. And that means he’s holding their dreams in his hands. Someone challenging his authority is big, even if Luffy doesn’t want it to be, because how could he expect the Strawhats to continue to rely on him for leadership? When he’s willing to bury the hatchet without him and Usopp having even spoken to each other properly without a mask in between them.

“We’re not kids playing pirates” isn’t Zoro trying to say ‘Usopp’s actions towards Luffy were childish’ like many people think, it’s ‘you need to resolve this issue like an adult’. And though everyone’s allowed to read this moment differently, I really hope the ones who read it the same way I do don’t still think Zoro was in the wrong for asking Luffy to stand his ground properly. 

[earlgreyandanime]

Before officially meeting, do you think Matthew and Diana ever just casually passed each other while on campus? Cause I'm imagining Gallowglass watching from an undetectable distance, seeing Diana cross a courtyard, going in the opposite direction of Matthew and Gallowglass is just simultaneously panicking and relieved.

Gallowglass: Oh my God, it's happening! They're going to finally meet! After centuries of waiting and decades of watching, Diana will finally be- Wait! Why is she walking away? Auntie! Turn back right now! Matthew! Turn around and go meet your wife!

They both continue on their way, completely oblivious to who they just walked past.

Gallowglass, unable to decide if this was a good or bad thing: Ok, they didn't meet this time. So, I don't have to leave her yet. But it'll be sooner rather than later now. At least she'll be happy when they do meet...