#climbing hands

[hyunpic]

🤏

[justn0t]

Immediately collapses after walking 3748847 stairs

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[foxstens]

andrew always being at kevin's side because kevin needs it and andrew driving kevin to night practice and andrew patting kevin down to check for injuries and andrew promising kevin it'll be fine and andrew looking awake, interested because of kevin and andrew conserving his energy for kevin's quiet meltdown and andrew smiling for the first time without the drugs because of kevin and andrew always picking up when kevin calls

[sourtrot]

SKETCHES INSPIRED BY BIRDCATT FICS :3

[rainbow-sunshine-unicorn]

It’s practically a Bridgerton hereditary trait to wrap themselves around Kate, like a barnacle

[flickering-nightfall]

How long do you think they would last if a pink lizard walked in here? 10 seconds? 20, maybe,

[somegrumpynerd]

Assorted Horror and Killer doodles since there aren't enough of them c:

Killer by Rahafwabas Horror by Sour-apple-studios

[rokudaimeplease]

you guys, tenten just wanted to train...

bonus: the aftermath

[solargeist]

nervous parent things

[banditblvd]

Bad boys..... Ssave me bad boys..... Oh God oh no.......,,..

uhh

[chiimeramanticore]

had too much to drink during their night out at the Tops

[uncanny-tranny]

"The only person who can save you is yourself, don't rely on anybody else!"

Actually, what has saved me is books and my favourite video game and my cats and my friends who I've shared late nights and too-early mornings with and the dew-covered grass I walked on on the way to a competition bus in ninth grade band and the sunburn that kept me out of school for days the month prior.

I understand the viewpoint of how you are ultimately the person who can save you, but don't discount that you aren't an island. You aren't meant to be your sole savior. Let others save you, too. You are worth the care and love the universe has for you.

[ethan-acfan]

Okay, so desmond behaving like Altair due to the bleeding effect is my favorite flavor of desmond, because everything that Altair was doing at Masyaf was considered normal, but doing that in modern day New York after just being kidnapped (twice) is not normal.

Example:

*desmond finds out Rebecca ate his food*

Desmond: *starts insulting her and her entire bloodline in Arabic*

Rebecca: "...what😀"

Desmond: *On the verge of committing a war crime* "nothing🙂"

----

Desmond: *grabs knife* "Oh my god, this knife is so dull it's an insult on the blacksmith."

Shaun: "desmond, that knife is not dull, and blacksmith isn't a word that's been used for centuries."

Desmond: "Okay, but look!" *presses knife against his finger* "it didn't cut me, it's fucking dull."

Shaun: "... yeah, because it's NOT MEANT TO CUT FLESH LIKE THAT??"

----

Desmond: *on the ceiling rafters*

Lucy: *exhausted sigh* "Why do I always get the weird ones?"

----

Desmond: *jumps off a 7 story building without warning*

Everyone: "Holy shit desmond! That was super dangerous. Are you okay?!"

Desmond: "Yeah, I'm good, I've jumped from higher."

-----

The moral of the story is that desmond doesn't realize he's fucking insane and everyone has to deal with it

[abby-howard]

You deadlift? What's your PB?

My current max is 250 pounds! Gotta catch up to Tony, he's at 300 now 😤

Also someone else asked about how deadlifting doesn't kill my back, and the answer is that weightlifting with proper form is good for back pain >:]

Strengthening your stabilizer muscles is so good for your bones and posture! It doesn't mean accidents don't happen, as we will all decay in time, but it definitely helps me draw all day and night without crumbling into dust 👌

[peaceandgentletragedy]

Nightingale Floors: Floorboards designed deliberately to squeak when stepped on to deter ninjas. Said to sound like chirping birds, or in this case, Casey Junior’s Nebulous Uncle-Dad Turtles.

As a gift to @somerandomdudelmao and myself after that one comment about the little turtles watching Casey Junior clamber on and cling to his “Master/Sensei” figures and having an “Oh he means Dad” moment.

They are having the turtle pile they deserve in the pillow-fort that was demanded when they found out Uncle Tello splurged on an obscene amount of cushions and installed Floor Heating and a Heat Lamp.