#context: im fucking sick and feel like dying

[meraki-yao]

I so desperately need TZP to read bad metaphors about maps

[strgrlxox]

𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐇 𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃. ❜⠀❫❫⠀───⠀🍞 ⊹ ، 𓏸 𓍢 ❝ give me a person & a scenario and i’ll write so headcannons ( sfw & nsfw ) ❞ 𓄼˚

okayyyyy i need protective ellie headcanons please jo im begging nicely

GOD AERIAL ,, you get me sooo well ily ily <33

ellie is 100% so overprotective. like she quite literally hates leaving your side at any given point but would never–––and i mean NEVER even consider letting you go on patrol without her. if you ever asked her why she doesn’t she’d say something like “i don’t trust anyone else to keep you safe like i can” with her lil cute puppy dog eyes that make u wanna kiss her yk??

she will not hesitate to protect you!! like in any context. whether you’re getting cornered by infected or someone’s getting a little too friendly/comfortable . . . either way, someone/something’s either dying or getting hurt she could not give a fuck if she trieddd

prioritizes ur health . . . even if it’s over hers :/ she is determined to keep u warm, fed, and hydrated. like even if she’s dying of hunger, she’ll always offer you her food–––lies through her teeth, saying she “isn’t even that hungry”

kinda creepy but i think she watches you sleep lmao 😭 not for long periods of time or anything…but for like two minutes, she’ll jus watch you sleep to make sure ur okay. she has to reminder herself that ur alive and well and right there next to her (where you belonggg) it’s the only way she can sleep well

she goes absolutely INSANE if ur sick like checking on u constantly, making sure u get ur fluids consistently, “are u feeling any better?” like a million times a day. don’t even try to do anything that isn’t rest, if she sees you out of bed trying to do some housework or something, u will be getting chastised and promptly ushered back to bed.

OHHHH and she’s so fucking tactile. literally always touching u. a hand that lives on ur thigh, fingers that trace shapes on ur back, a palm that seems to itch unless it’s embracing yours. what can she say, she likes to keep you close. ESPECIALLY if ur on patrol so she can keep u extra safe

if ur cold she’ll take ur hands and rub them till they’re warm + she’ll smile at u all cute and shy after

if ur hair is tied back or something and a piece falls out she always fixes it for u

gives u her jackets and shit. she’ll be so confused if u ask why “so you can stay warm?” and she’ll look at u all questioningly

if she knows ur not up for it, she’ll do all the chores she knows you don’t like. i mean, ellie would do it anyway but if ur tired or you’ve had a particularly long day, she’ll do it extra well with the sappiest, lovesick smile on her face. one of her top love languages is MOST DEFINITELY acts of service

[wiihtigo]

i sent an ask sayinh "NELL DIED????" but then tumblr gavev me a scary error message so maybe it ate it... sorry if it didnt but NELL DIED?

SOB...YES.....I DIDNT WANT IT TO HAPPEN..!!! i encourage you to go knock down the door of @megamind2010 for more in depth answers about nell lore if youre a ladybughead.

but the basic deal is that this happens...later...sometime later. in their lives. ladybug following the proud blue beetle line of being exploded in action (i drew smthn inspired by the despair i feel when i think about this ^_^)

this affects casey really badly. ARE YOU SURPRISED..? DID YOU THINK SHE WAS HEARTLESS? so did I. mm basically she goes like catatonic immediately after (even through the funeral which michelle has to guide her to like she could float away at any second)

michelle is a supportive presence for her during this because shes like jeez idk she might kill herself im worried. and shes ALSO fucked up about nell dying bcuz she was involved in the same event ladybug was killed in (goldstars very first crisis event we;re so proud of her) and you know. shes never experienced the classic superhero experience of one of your hero peers dying horribly tragically. so her looking after casey is probably also her way of coping, like a way of keeping her hands busy because shes realizing hero work is actually kind of scary

shes only broken out of her 0__0 state by ..um. BOOSTER GOLD COMING OVER BECAUSE HE WAS LIKE MAN..SHOULD I SAY SOMETHING? (hes genuinely a little worried) (BUT NO DONT)

ive posted these before without context but this was the context LOL

seeing booster breaks the dam in her heart and all her feelings coming flooding out in form of crazy migraine inducing rage (im getting deja vu) and she throws shit at him screaming at him to GTFO and hes like crawling away with a broken nose OK good talk and ted and michelle are like WHY TF DID YOU DO THAT?and after that casey goes into the worst state of depression shes ever experienced in her life...ive mentioned in an ask before i think that she doesnt really get sad? when bad things happen to her she just gets angry. she never cries genuine tears. so the state she gets into here is really scarily jarring because its so fucking WEEEIRDLY OUT OF CHARACTER. she spends all day crying and whenever michelle comes over now she feels sick looking at her and she cries and cries and cries and whines that she doesnt want to see her she wants nell and she stays holed up in their apartment until shes kicked out because no ones paying rent and shes moves cities without saying a word to anyone. she only realized after she died that she actually did love (EW. sorry) nell and now she doesnt even have any way of knowing if they couldve done anythng with that. she hates booster more than ever she hates ted she cant talk to michelle anymore she hates gotham she hates her life she hates everything, eventually she does get a job in the film industry as like a screenwriter/editor but she hates that its not exactly what she wanted that shes just barely almost there and she should be excited to be so close to her goals but shes not so shes just this grouchy miserable (but good at her job!) woman that no one wants to talk to and then she dies. the end.

(but look-- here they are reunited in hell..!)

wehwwww SORRY FOR JUST COVERING CASEYS SIDE OF THINGS AND NOT NELLS....i figure youd get more juicy details if you ask marty :)

[my-castles-crumbling]

hi cas <3

cw/tws for medical stuff, complex family relationships, discussion of death

so, for context, im a regulus black kinnie (itll make sense, give me a sec aha). ive got a difficult relationship with most of my family, but most especially my mother and older sister. my sister is a lot like our family's sirius (except if he still had walburga's narcissism, cruelty and manipulation), and she really doesnt get along with either of our parents. my mother is... a difficult woman, in that she likes to victimise herself in every situation, shes homophobic/transphobic/all the phobics, shes also very narcissistic, and likes to make uncomfortable comments without bothering to be nice about it. all in all, i try not to be around her much. im also supposed to be moving out soon, and planned to minimise contact as much as possible once i do.

to the point: my mother was diagnosed with cancer yesterday. my father (hes kind of a neutral party in the family dynamics, btw) was the one talking to me about it, since she's in hospital at the moment. he said they caught it early enough where a bit of chemo over the next few months should get rid of it and she'll be okay, but 'cancer' is a scary as fuck word. he also then told me that this isnt her first time with it — she had a different type of cancer around 20 years ago.

honestly, i feel like my brain is battling itself about how i should feel. on the one hand, ive been looking forward to not having to be around her now for years, and i hold very little love for her at this point. why should i care? she'll be fine at the end of it anyway. but shes still my mum, yknow? and i feel awful having these thoughts about how badly ive always thought of her and how much ive wanted for so long to get away from her and how it almost feels like this is some sort of sick fucking joke from the universe about how i should be careful what i wish for or something.

this whole situation keeps making me think about regulus in best friends brother(? i think thats the right fic) or p much any modern au where walburga dies so tbh ill probably end up writing a fic about it to cope, but still i just... i guess i needed to tell someone? my father asked me to keep it to myself for now so that it wasnt spread around where we live (its a small area; everyone knows everyone).

and the bit with my sister - as i said, she doesnt get along with our parents. i dont talk to her much anymore either because she seemed to inherit a lot of our mothers worst traits, but im afraid that if we do talk about this then she'll have some awful thing to say about it. she makes some really dark 'jokes' sometimes about suicide and death and such, and im nervous that she'll say something about how she hopes it kills her (again, my sister fucking sick, and has zero empathy), because shes made similar jokes about other stuff in the past. i also dont think she'd understand that im still afraid for our mother even after everything shes done, and i hate the way my sister turns on me and rips the piss out of me when she doesnt like what i do.

it all kind of circles back to how im supposed to feel, i guess. part of me wants to not care and brush it off, whatever, but theres still part of me dying for my mothers love and approval and is terrified of losing her, even with the low possibility.

sorry this got so long, and for how heavy it is. i hope youre doing well cas, and thank you for all you do for us <3

Hi hon!

My god, you ARE a reg kinnie.

Here's the thing- there is not a RIGHT way to feel about those things. You have a complex relationship with your mom, so of course you'll have complex feelings about the situation. You don't need to feel guilty for feeling any certain way, because there's no right or wring way to process this. You're allowed to feel scared and neutral and confused and ambivalent. That's okay!

Your feelings aren't a betrayal to anyone, and you have a right to them. You also have a right to any action you choose to take. Remember to do what feels right for YOU, because YOU are important.

I'm here if you ever need to talk <3

Naming you reg kin anon.

[morerandombullshit]

Y'ALL I GOT DRAMA LUKE'S GAY CONFIRMED??? also some other random shit plus a free Spotify playlist

CW: a homophobe acting gay, slightly NSFW themes (only if you squint)

OH MY GODS THIS SHIT IS LITERALLY THE FUNNIEST THING IVE EVER SEEN BUT LIKE

SO MY BSF HAS THE SAME GYM CLASS AS LUKE AND FUCKING SHIT (ok technically we all share a gym class but then there's the gender split my nb ass is silently dying inside every fucking time) AND THEY WERE DOING HEALTH CLASS IN THE CAFETERIA BC THEIR NORMAL TEACHER WASNT IN TODAY, RIGHT?

NAH BC I TOLD MY FRIEND, "Take pics if there's drama" AND LIKE, THERE WAS DRAMA

SO IT WAS LUKE BEING A GAY FUCKER DESPITE BEING A HOMOPHOBE, BUT WE ALL KNOW HOMOPHOBES ACT THE GAYEST EITHER WAY

SO

HE GOT A COUPLE PICS

EXHIBIT A IS THIS

SO CONTEXT FOR THAT FIRST IMAGE ACCORDING TO MY FRIEND AND ANOTHER MUTUAL FRIEND WHO APPARENTLY WATCHED THE WHOLE THING WAS THAT LUKE WAS LIKE, HUMPING AND THRUSTING INTO THE DUDE HE'S CHOKING ON THE TABLE? (the other dude's name is Lachlan btw) AND THEN MAN STARTED FUCKING THE OTHER GUY IN THE ASS? IDEK ITS SO CONVULUTED BUT

little sidenote: my friend had to hide behind a pillar so the sub didn't catch him getting the pic and like, the sub broke it up by calling them out too

ANYWAYS EXHIBIT B

IDEK WHATS GOING ON IN THIS I THINK HES HUMPING A CHAIR OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT??? ITS FUNNY AS SHIT THOUGH

LIKE ITS SO FUNNY I CANNOT

also yes, i realized this is basically showing you guys his face and ig i begrudgingly agree with that comment from the guy trying to set me and him up (fucking still) that he is kinda "hunky"

AND AND I LOST FEELINGS WOOOOOO ITS BACK TO 24/7 HATE LETS GO

also im just gonna drop man's last name here—his last name is Tyler. like, can you get any whiter than a name such as fucking Luke Tyler?? (i say as i'm fucking Polish but we aren't talking ab me here are we)

OH AND IM GONNA DROP HIS TIKTOK

ITS FUCKING @lukewild123 AND ITS THE CRINGEST THING ON EARTH I SWEAR I WANTED TO TOSS MYSELF OFF MY COUCH FIRST TIME I SAW IT BUT

WHAT I WANT Y'ALL TO DO, IS TO SPAM "gay boy" ON ALL HIS TIKTOKS

FOR THE FUNNY AND BC I WANNA TORTURE HIM (ig this is where my moral questionability comes in but)

oh yeah and the week before spring break (which was last week) i was sick and that's what inspired my V x Reader a lil while back and like, i didn't see Luke for two weeks (new fucking record WOO) and then Monday i saw him but he didn't see me right? NO because he gives me The Luke Stare™ (yes i'm trademarking it and what i mean by it is like, those looks he gives me for no fucking reason at all- also I was giving my bsf a play by play as I wrote this post and he suggested "The Luke™" as a pun of "The Look™" i can't 😭😭) on Tuesday and i wanted to die and seep into the floor

anyways thanks for listening to my rant and yes i swear im gonna write and post smth at some point idrk when yet but

stay safe, make sure to keep your friends safe too and be chaotic

OHHHH WAIT I ALMOST FORGOT

YOU GUYS GET A FREE SPOTIFY PLAYLIST I MADE THATS PUBLIC AND IS BASICALLY A COLLECTION OF SONGS THAT I THINK FIT LUKE KINDA?? IDK BUT

actually bye now lmao

[sehodreamsthoughts]

VINA PLS😭😭 no cuz that was soo good like i never want to pressure u or demand anything but i definitely want ur input!! i love that u add context to it and i love to read what u write about it<33 and omg that was really good i really loved it🤭🤭 i can totally see everything u wrote .. jungwon seems like.. kinda sneaky loser.. but also he’s just figuring things out, and he wants to break out of the archetype he’s been put into🤭

it’s okay it didn’t have to be dark at all like i said, i was just thinking mean!dom and i’ve been having a lot of noncon thoughts but i love ur descriptions of his view of reader like omggg pls🤭🤭 so hot im dying immd😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😫

i’m about to go into work but with dealer!sunghoon.. i see him as like dealers i knew in college because he’s more reserved, not necessarily quiet but he’s just.. calmer than some of the other boys.. could see him doing it just for the money and not even actually using.

i rmbr i was hanging out one time and one of the guys i was there with said like.. i don’t rmbr exactly but he basically said we shouldn’t have to do c0ke in fear, like this sucks, it’s his space and he shouldn’t be afraid of the residence advisors catching him😭😭😭 like BRO it’s illegal!!! ur dumb (and that just feels like smth jake would say lmfaoooo🤭🤭🤭)

- 🥟 anon

I don't know what's been going on with me and Jungwon, I've been seeing him way too fine lately 😭 (Jake's still my number 1 tho).

I SAW DEALER! SUNGHOON LIKE THAT TOO 😭. SO, i wanted to write something short and I got lost, and I don't think this is even half of it but I don't want you to think I'm ignoring this convo like our jake/heesung working at a store (I still have the draft that's not finished hahaha) so I leave this part here to hear your opinion. I honestly think that one of my biggest problems with writing is that the theme keeps getting twisted. I can't do just dark or non-dark content, it's as if it was all mixed into some weird stuff, I thought first of Sunghoon using his client, but then I kept writing and it became this thing that I think is romantic but at the same time it's kind of sick if you analyse it 😭

Well, it's only 1.5k, what do you think?

He goes to parties just to stand in a corner with flat lips and a half-full drink in his hand, just waiting for people to approach him for the stuff he's selling, he's not even into the excitement everyone shows when he brings better stuff, and he knows about it, he knows about what the things he sells do, but he simply does not give a fuck about trying it because he's there for his cash and nothing else.

He's a big follower of you don't do what you sell, and he's not publicly proud of living by that motto, but again, he doesn't really care about other's opinions. If they say he's boring, if they say he's a prune, he doesn't mind because, at the end of the day, he's the one going home with their money in his pocket.

Still, the minute you get into it, he starts to get nervous. Sunghoon doesn't have a problem with drugs, but he has a problem with beautiful things.

As he calls you every time you meet him in disgusting party bathrooms, "Hey, gorgeous'', he hasn't been able to stop taking in your image whenever you appear in front of him, and for him is frightening how he's been so into you since you appeared in front of him with that pretty smile and your voice whispering almost scared "hi… I'm here to buy some candies?".

Sunghoon still laughs at the innocent image of you starting some shit you hadn't been introduced to by anyone. You did it on your own, which was unusual. You walked to him, no old client beside you saying with an overexcited voice "This is Sunghoon", believing they could get some freebies for giving him new clients. You had heard about him around and you went to his corner by yourself with shaky eyes and too much cash inside your phone case.

It started soft, a few gummies since you had said candies and he thought you honestly just wanted candies. He carried a few bags for the dumb boys who wanted to relax their girlfriends without them noticing it (Sunghoon didn't care what they did with the stuff people paid him for. In his head, no one should trust people too much, and if they did it, it was their own mistake), and for the hello kitty girls that enjoyed them a bit too much, but even if in that case they consumed them on their own will, he equally disliked them because they always asked for discounts. You, to his luck, hadn't even asked for your change.

You looked frightened, as if the money he tried to put in your hand burned you with its graze, and you pulled your hand away the second he tried to give you the bills, brushing him away with an almost mute "It's okay."

It was hilarious to him how you would excitedly look for him in every party he attended, asking again and again for candies, and how you would run away the second the interaction was over. You’d take the gummies like a kid, and you wouldn’t accept his money (which was technically yours since it was just your change) as if he was a creep offering you sweets in a park.

He realized, after some time, he kind of was.

At first, you searched for him between the bunch of bodies drinking under the limp lights. You’d scan every face around until you found him, and he would wait for you to do it. He didn’t need much to feel you had arrived, it was as if his body had a sixth sense telling him she’s here, and he would only need a second to spot you moving your eyes through every person as if he wasn’t always in his corner.

He never moved to let people easily find him, but you needed more than a few weeks to realize that (oh, and that if it wasn’t you asking, he’d never leave his sacred spot). Everything felt like an innocent game with a not-so-innocent prize. You wouldn’t stop looking for him until you found him, and once you did it, you’d walk to him and ask him for your usual stuff, and then, when you got tired of it, for more adult stuff (your words, not his).

He never cared about other people. To him, they could all go and fuck off their lives with opioids, and he would gladly sell them if that little conscience left in his body wasn’t still there after all the shit he had done. Sadly, that tiny part of him stopped him from teaching you about the heavy stuff.

He needed a month to introduce you to real weed, and closing the door of an unknown room in the house of a guy he knew even less, he sat beside you and taught you how to smoke it (he really didn’t want you to learn from anyone else. Yeah, it was wrong that you trusted him, but he knew it would be worse that you trusted someone there that wasn’t him).

Inhaling a few times, he kept a straight face to calm you with his mostly theoretical knowledge, proudly looking at you doing it on your own like a champion after a quick three-minute class on how to roll a cigarette and light it.

You laughed when you finally did it on your own, presenting it to him like a work of art and your wide smile. ‘’You’re a fast learner’’ he said.

‘’Yeah, always top of the class’’ you answered, licking your lips and then moving the slightly too thick roll to your lips (he never told you that you kind of overfilled that one. You looked too pretty to push you out of your cloud).

He stayed there beside you, perfectly knowing that he was probably losing customers downstairs with his sudden absence and that he, indeed, was going against his life motto. He was, indirectly, doing what he sold.

The laughs you shared, what went through your mind when you approached him, all of it is there in his mind. You mentioned something about being stressed, then that you were tired of smoking normal cigarettes, and that vapes felt like a game you didn’t feel like playing.

‘’It’s too sweet, the aftertaste’’ you said.

‘’The gummies are sweet too’’ he laughed. He wasn’t smoking after those few first hits to teach you (although you had some real experience smoking already, which explained a lot why you didn’t even cough when you took the first drag).

‘’It’s different’’ you smiled and turned to see him more comfortably. You looked at his face, and he let you, doing the same, until you talked again. ‘’I need more than just a sweet treat.’’

You two were sitting on the floor after needing a firm surface to roll the leaves easier, and after almost 30 minutes of you smoking your own made cigarette, you followed him into leaning against the foot of the only bed in the room, looking at him with the soft light of the study lamp the boy had there, stopping you from being in complete darkness (Sunghoon deduced it was a boy’s room, otherwise, it would be difficult to explain why there was a big soccer t-shirt with the name Jake framed and hanging on the wall, or the box of tissues over the nightstand, because it was either a room owned by a boy, or by a girl that cried too much over a boy named Jake, which was more concerning than a boy that jerked off probably every day— He also deduced that when the box got empty after he pulled the last tissues to make you more at ease at doing your first try).

Sunghoon nodded, and both of you observed each other with relaxed eyes, comfortable with the atmosphere you had unintentionally created. After slowly blinking a few times, he exhaled through his nose, feeling more liberated than never, and he moved his eyes down to your lips, thinking that they would probably be way sweeter than all the things you had talked about that night.

At the next party, he realized he had a problem when he stared at the entrance door since he arrived, quickly brushing off his clients without much small talk, and accepting to give the hello kitty girls their discounts so they left him alone.

He even got angry when the same guys tried to buy some gummies for their innocent girlfriends, sputtering without hesitation a ‘’Sorry, just sold the last one’’, which was a complete lie since he always carried an extra bag in case you also wanted them. You had stopped having them since you learned how to roll your own cigarettes, but Sunghoon still liked to have them in hand, as if it was his strawberry lucky charm.

Well into the night, almost at 2am, he realized you wouldn’t arrive, so he sold the last stuff he was holding on for you. In the end, he left with a successful night in his pocket, but feeling worse than ever, even more than when in his first night selling almost no one dared to approach him because he was (and continues to be, by their words) too pretty to be a dealer.

[mindthedocent]

Would you accept some week late writing ask game q's?

3, 23, 25 :)

absolutely!!! thank you so much!!!!!!

its this post to anyone wondering, or if you wanted to RB it for yourselves [link]

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

huhhhh this one is hard because i have so many ideas flitting through my brain that theres no one idea id single out.

maybe the hanahaki au, where ryan is just BEGGING min to admit he has a crush on him. not because hes in any danger of dying (bc fuck that), but because its been years and allergy season is hell every year??? once a year min spends weeks out sick and then has to catch up on all his homework in the month after because the flowers are blooming out his mouth and hes allergic to pollen. and ryan, whos probably only RECENTLY realized that the "unrequited" love min has....is for RYAN, is like "for the love of god min, its not worth it, just admit you have a crush!!!" and min, red-eyed and sneezing, nose stuffed up, coughing up flower petals is like "....wym I don't have a crush" because he'd rather be laid out in bed for weeks than submit to the horrifying ordeal of being known.

23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

probably the no-train catch-eyes-in-a-bar au, that i always wanted to expand upon, based on gooselycharm's absolutely wonderful art piece here -> [link]

its one of my favorites, and the world ive built up in my head about it has sort of become the one i always revisit. i hope to write it one day! i think its next on the docket after my current project (which is also on hold bc i got lost in the sauce on another, THIRD au that im drawing some art for, and also life stuff but u dont need to know all that lol)

25. What part of writing is the most fun?

reading it back.

IS THAT DUMB? LMAO! writing is fun, but can get tough. editing is great for training my eye for grammar and flow. but reading it back is the best! i usually stop mid-scene when i write, because who cares really if i get it all out at once. and i come back and read over the last few paragraphs (or all of it) to get a reminder of where i was and what the tone was, and....its great! its like! hey, i built all this! and it makes sense? and it feels good to read? and i think we are all writing partially for ourselves and partially for our friends, but its especially good when you wrote for yourself and youre like "yeah this was MADE for me." made for spiders, by spiders, OF spiders. you know.

i also like revisiting months or years after the fact and seeing where ive grown, or catching a phrase that i forgot about that Hits. its just really good to create and learn to be proud of what you made!!! its taken me a long time to get here but its soooo so rewarding to be able to take your work at face value and be grateful to your past self.

thank you thank you so much for this ask!!! this brightened my day!

[c0rpseductor]

this is nothing bad its just me being a little bitchy? rude i guess? idk. im not trying to say anything bad about anyone im just trying to sort through some complicated feelings that have very little to do with this person and are not super charitable

anyway on my selfship account i am following someone who likes the moon knight guy(s) as, like, friends or something im not sure. recently a lot of people have been talking about episode 5 and they were like, upset about that episode and were just vaguely like “fuck you marvel for ep5″ so i decided to look up what exactly happened in it, and like

im not sure which part was most upsetting for them, but in regards to the abuse, i very much kind of felt like...”well, it’s a television show about someone with DID; the fact this character was horribly abused as a child ought to have been obvious from the jump.” 

which i get is kind of cruel of me, bc it’s still got to be a bummer for people who are attached to the character(s), and obviously watching it on tv instead of reading it as a recap it’s probably kind of upsetting and could activate PTSD symptoms if youve been treated that way. i also realize in some ways i’m very sensitive about child abuse but in others i’m incredibly desensitized, so my emotional perspective is usually not normal. but i really kind of feel like, why be mad? that’s obviously going to have been the case.

i guess given the context of everything they mightve been upset about steven (?) dying (??) but not marc (???) which. is more comprehensible to me. i don’t know why that was a writing choice though. it’s so utterly bizarre, especially for a show that otherwise seems fairly concerned with accuracy. but i would get being upset by that. actually i bet that’s why they were upset and not the fact that he was abused as a child. that’s just a given. i just never know sometimes, like i feel sometimes like people react with a lot more shock and surprise to child abuse than i’m used to bc as fucked up as it is i just like...idk it does upset me but usually it doesn’t shock me unless it’s really really far beyond egregious. like they said in the recap he was beaten by his mother and i just was like ok. (but i guess thats normal bc he’s not real and that’s barely anything to go on.)

i feel like kind of a jerk about being a little confused and conflicted about this and their love of the show. there’s a part of me that feels like having a big emotional reaction like shock to something like this or to my own abuse is, like, “soft” or otherwise kind of weak and embarrassing, but part of me feels kind of like, uncomfortably vulnerable at like, wondering what this acquaintance might think of me based on this tv show. i feel intensely uncomfortable when people express really effusive sympathy or like shock and horror when i relate any part of my abuse, which is more like gross and socially unacceptable to talk about, so it kind of concerns me even if i’ll never tell this person, like just hoping they wouldn’t also react to me with shock and horror.

once again, probably a moot point bc it makes WAY more sense to me to be upset a fictional character died than to be upset they were abused as a child, but with how popular moon knight is right now i feel kind of like nervous about the increased attention on DID. i don’t have an issue with the show or think it’s bad but the last thing i want is to feel like my life is somehow indirectly being exposed to marvel fans, and the fandomization of DID kind of terrifies me (i’ve seen people posting fanfic for “DID AUs” in the DID tag who don’t even have it, which made me so sick i had to go take a shower). i know the answer is to just ignore the show and not go digging around in the tags when there’s usually nothing of value to begin with but like. it’s rough out there lol

[pigeonxp]

YGCMA songs and how they relate to c!Wilbur based off of yesterday’s lore (in my biased opinion)

This is so dumb and i literally don’t care. I can’t think about anything else other than doing this synopsis even tho like 28480329204 other people are going to do it. idc. 

(I listened to the songs earlier, and i’m also listening to them as i write the opinions. these are basically just my thoughts while listening tbh. im also not doing the full song, just some things i feel relate within each song)

- Jubilee Line

the lines at the beginning of the song, “hate to see you leaving / a fate worse than dying” could relate to how wilbur feels after tommy gets pulled back into the overworld. or, he could be referencing L’Manburg and how he hates to see his country leaving him (ouch). 

then we have the lines “your city gave me asthma / so thats why im fucking leaving / and your water gave me cancer / and the pavements hurt my feelings”. This could be in relation to L’Manburg as a whole. He put everything he had into L’Manburg and it only ended up hurting him in the end. yikes. 

now we have “shout at the wall / ‘cause the walls dont fucking love you” repeated. This could be in reference to when he said he was fucking kicking and screaming to get out of the train station. hes screaming and he doesnt care because it doesnt matter to him. it doesnt love him just like how the people of L’Manburg didnt love him. wilbur get therapy challenge.

so based on the lore from yesterday, we know that c!wilbur’s limbo was a train station (props to fanartists. i love you.), presumably the YCGMA album cover type deal. when he sings “Theres a reason / that London puts barriers on the tube line / theres a reason / that London puts barriers on the rails” repeated. if the train station looks like how they do on the album cover, there could be barriers where he is. maybe hes trying his best to just kill himself over again by jumping onto the tracks. just in an attempt to escape. jfc 

“theres a reason they fail”. he was still in the train station, wasnt he?

- Saline Solution

for this one, i feel like hes pretty far into the void and regretting his decision to have phil kill him. hes tired of being in a fucking train station for years on end. 

“i think this time im dying / im not melodramatic / im just pragmatic beyond any / reasoning for thinking ive got / fuckin rabies or something.” hes so fucking sick of being in this goddamn train station and he thinks hes dying. hes so pent up and sick of being there, maybe hes just in so much pain that he feels like hes dying. if hes been there for a while, hes probably bound to go crazy at some point, hence the “pragmatic beyond any reasoning.”

“I think ive lost my mind / blurring the fact and the fictions” this feels like he really does believe hes going crazy and is mixing up the things he really knows and the things his mind is creating for him. maybe this is when tommy first arrived and he cant tell if he real or not (thats a stretch but i figured id share it anyway.)

“I think ive made my choice / im a deceased playing victim / slip the face, slip the victory” he quite literally says that hes a deceased playing victim. hes literally saying hes dead HAHHAHAH anyway. maybe hes blaming himself again, because us c!wilbur apologists all know that hes very good at doing that.

“Sit secluded in hatred /.../” hes sitting in a fucking train station for god knows how long beating himself up over and over again and just hating himself. hes all alone. with himself. someone he fucking loathes.

this is honestly all i have for Saline Solution, but i will definitely add more later if i get different theories. 

- Since I Saw Vienna

This is my favorite song on the album and my comfort song so that could factor into this bit ahaha

im going to skip through this one a little bit and go to the line “The roads are my home, horizons my target / if i keep on moving, never lose sight of it / treating my memory of you like a fire, let it / burn out, don’t fight it, try to move on” this sounds like hes reminiscing on his home in L’Manburg and his presidency was something he relied on and he would fight to get it back, but now that hes dead and said that it should remain that way that he should just let it go. trying to move on from his symphony, forever unfinished. 

 “its been sixty weeks since i saw vienna / a bandage and a wide smile slapped across my face / ill pick up my hiking boots when i am ready / and ill put down my roots when im dead.” THESE LINES FUCK ME UP IN GENERAL BUT HOW THEY RELATE TO C!WILBUR RN IS JUST SUIBHYSBUSHDXNSKJDNHBD YK???? in the context that vienna is L’Manburg and he died, its saying that its been a long ass time since hes seen it and hes faking being okay about his death. he misses it but doesnt want to admit it. the picking up the hiking boots when hes ready is him moving on from his L’Manburg, and putting his roots down when hes dead is finally being okay with not living there/being an important part of it. he believed his death was the best for the people in L’Manburg and L’Manburg itself. it seems like hes still trying to convince himself. 

“Ill be gone then, for when you must be alone.” hes gone. hes dead. hes in the train station. he left the L’Manburgians alone and hes alone in his limbo. man. 

- Losing Face

this song is angry. hes so fucking angry. my thoughts are that this is about the following presidents after him. he feels like the L’Manburgians were happier without him and im pretty sure he believed that even when Schlatt was president. this is so evident in the lyric “Is he better than me?” Hes literally asking if the other presidents were better than he was. he doesnt believe he did everything he could to be the best president, even though we all know that he gave everything that he was into that country and then some. he broke himself for the L’Manburg but he doesnt believe hes enough. sheesh.

“Ive seen him / ive been him / ive felt the same way” even though he cant see the new presidents being president, he knows what its like. he knows that they might break under the pressure. hes been there. he knows how if feels. yikes. 

“Ive lost all meaning / ive lost my sense of hope” this feels like when he was nearing the end of L’Manburg when he blew it up, and that he feels like trying to win it back is pointless. he has no hope for it anymore, so why not give up? his mental state is already shit yk so i cant really blame him for feeling that way. 

“i dont care / i want you here / as long as youre happy, i dont care” this line. this fucking line. hes lost hope in being president, but he doesnt care. he just wants the L’Manburgians to be happy. that was his whole thought process while he was president. he didnt matter to himself, he just wanted them to be happy. he sacrificed his mental state for them. cries in wilbur apologist.

- Your Sister Was Right

this is my second favorite song on the album i think HAHAHAH

anyway

“I use everyone i ever meet / i cant find the perfect match / abuse those i love / while i ostracize the ones who love me / back.” wowie wow wow fucking ouchie. He feels like he uses his friends. this whole thing is a projection of his shit ass mental state rn fucking hell. he feels like hes abusive. thats what everyones been telling him. they tell him he was awful and a shit president and all that jazz even though hes been killing himself trying to be the best for them but its still not enough (pigeon projecting? more likely than you think)

“every time that i miss you / i feel the way you hurt / and i dont deserve you / you deserve the world / though it feels like we were built / from the same dirt.” man. hes dead lol. he misses the L’Manburgians. not only were they his supporters, but they were all his friends too. every time he misses his friends he feels their pain of when he first blew up L’Manburg. he feels like because he caused them all pain that they dont like him and that they never liked him and that he is undeserving of their friendship. he still wants to be friends with them. he still loves them. he still wants the best for them. he thinks theyre so much better than him even though they all created L’Manburg together. in reality they are all the same, but their actions impact each other and he feels that his actions make him worse than them or less than. fuckisonmdfnpbhife

“and i hate to say it / but your sister was right / dont trust english boys / with far too much free time” sister is dream mayhaps. fuckngeionsfjg that hurt sorry uhhh anyway yeah sister is dream?? he did say that wilbur would be a shit president and he believes that hes a shit president so he thinks they were all right about him being a shit president  fbhjebinfnejg. maybe sister is just everyone who didnt believe in wilbur. man....

“a fucking waste of time” do i even need to explain this one? he fr doesnt belive hes worth it anymore and that hes literally a waste of time. hjkfbhnfve

- La Jolla

this one feels pretty far into train station limbo to me as well. namely from “and im lonely / there i said it” this could either be him being lonely as president and feeling like he doesnt have anyone to talk to really because hes too busy trying to hold himself together for everyone. either that or hes lonely in the station and didnt want to admit it because this is what he wanted. he wanted to die. he wanted to be dead because he believed thats what everyone else wanted and he just wanted the best for them. 

“i could go away / i could pack my things and be gone before you wake” he could leave if they asked him to. he would do anything for them. 

“you know ive tried hard to love me too / it always seems to fall in, through” this line already physically pained me but now it hurts even more having to relate it to a character i love. we already know that his mental state was declining as his presidency continued, but this would confirm that hes just trying to love himself even though he can never seem to get it right. 

“my own personal sunset” this is just the ‘this is my sunrise’ line but different. my man misses the sun. fuck. 

- I’m Sorry Boris

this song is almost definitely from a long ass time in the limbo. 

“and im sorry / but, boris / im leaving / im not good for anyone here” boris represents L’Manburgians!! hes talking about how hes leaving the world by planning on killing himself. fuck. 

“we reached the end of a decade” mans been dead for a decade. sheesh. 

he then goes on to say that he cant believe hes leaving, he doesnt think he wants to leave them, but he thinks its whats best for them.

he talks about how they do all of these bullshit things before helping you and i know its in reference to london but for the sake of my sanity its about the presidency role and how it will fuck you up before bothering to help you not want to kill yourself.  

should i do a separate post about how i visualized it/about how i thought about the song in paragraph form like a lowkey explanation? idk how to explain it but in this one i wanted to just cover some of the lyrics of the songs and my thoughts on them. i think c!wilbur wrote these in the limbo after he died. i know this is also shit and Not Good, but i really just needed to get my thoughts out before it killed me. i also didnt reread this. its probably repetitive and shit yk. i do Not Care. id also love to hear thoughts on this if yall want to. if you made it this far i love you please hydrate and eat today and youre so sexy ahaha 

“and even though im finished / im not quite done with it” even though hes finishing his symphony by blowing it up, hes now realizing he wished he hadnt blown it up and that he hadnt killed himself. man. 

-

[flyonthewallmedstudent]

Watching House as a Physician.  Season 2 Episode 3. Infectious diseases & Respiratory.

Welcome to another episode of medicine done badly.  I’ve been watching House on Amazon prime.  Got the subscription during the pandemic, as like everyone else, I’ve garnered an online shopping habit now. 

Alright. In the opening scene a young roof worker falls off the roof presumably due to acute shortness of breath. i.e. trouble breathing. (why do we use the term shortness of breath? it’s the english version of the greek term dyspnoea - the actual preferred language of Western doctors. Fuck do I know why we like Greek and Latin so much. Moving on.) Then cut to Dr. Cuddy examining him in the back of the ambulance. 

This would never happen in real life. Yes you can be on the scene and handover to the paramedics or EMT when they arrive as a doctor. But they would take over. I personally wouldn’t have the balls to look after a patient in a different environment, different resources and field I’m not familiar with. You can have field Emergency docs - but requires different training. 

Also, ethically, you’re not meant to treat family or friends. Dr. Cuddy later in the episode gets a bit emotionally involved - this is why we don’t treat people close to us. We lose objectivity. We make mistakes. And you see later see Cuddy do some pretty bad ones. 

I feel like much of this episode is not really IM. THere’s less differential diagnoses being made. More side tracks into trauma, emergency, intensive care or vascular surgery. 

Anyhoo. Trauma and emergency would manage the fall and post fall traumatic injuries. And the trauma protocol was either not shown or completely off in this episode. Surgeons don’t seem to exist in House, at least not very much. Similarly, no other doctors exist except surgeons in Grey’s anatomy.  Also you can’t clear a C Spine clinically, which is what Dr. Cuddy does in the back of the ambulance. You’d need a CT first and clearance both radiological (by a radiologist) and a clinician. 

Aaaanddd, you can’t just listen to the chest and go no pneumothorax (air in lung or collapsed lung) - yes it’s reassuring, but again you’d need imaging to confirm this, given how serious a condition this is. It is realistic to consider in the setting of a fall, particularly if there are rib fractures that can puncture the lung.

Once the more critical injuries are managed, we would look after the IM side to things. 

So. Finally.. differential diagnoses.

Takes what seems and feels like days before they finally sit down and go through differentials. Really not much on that white board. Dark fingers, broken ribs, fever and lung infiltrates. Time line’s not clear on when he developed the fever.

Presenting complaint isn’t really addressed. It could be: - Dyspnoea, leading to the fall, he’s requiring O2 via nasal prongs, which suggests that he’s hypoxic (this is definitely odd in a young guy who’s normally very physical fit if he works as labourer). so much to unpack here, but they never get into this well.  Post fall, Cuddy notices his ring and pinky finger becoming dusky, which becomes very central in this episode. Very few things would cause this. pains me that they do no differentials on a white board for this alone. 

Then a lot of throwing around medical terms. 

PTT prolonged and Fibrinogen off. These are markers of your coagulation pathway and signs that you’re not forming the clots the way you should if you have an injury.  DIC is also thrown around. What is DIC? Disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. Certainly severe sepsis and trauma can cause this and lead to severe bleeding. It will throw off your coagulation pathways (things that stop bleeding). It’s not common. I’ve treated it once, while I was rotating in ICU, it is not standard ward medicine practice. Standard therapy is fresh frozen plasma (FFP) and even large metropolitan hospitals only have a limited supply. It’s a huge concern for surgery and post-op (as you patient will just not stop bleeding after you cut them open, and if not treated, potentially bleed to death). Cuddy mentions ARDS. Acute respiratory distress syndrome, it could be a complication, but it’s not a cause. Again, falls more into the realm of critical care (a la ICU). However, patient had SOB prior to the fall. Finally HOuse makes the observation. of “what if he was sick before he had his run in with gravity...” Everyone jumps to Pneumonia. And this is where it gets confusing.  If he was unwell, the minute he entered the emergency department with a fever and hypoxia, they would have worked him up for any garden variety pneumonia, bacterial or viral. Cultures would have been sent and imaging. Any young hypoxic patient would prompt a closer look at the chest. And no one waits that long to start antibiotics - “sepsis kills” is a slogan often used around hospitals. You have to initiate empirical therapy within 30 mins, to reduce mortality and morbiditiy. 

Ordering an Echocardiogram (USS of the Heart) also makes no sense in the context of a lung infection. I would order one, but not to look at the lungs.

Then there’s the most unrealistic thing about this series. Doctors breaking into patient homes.

It is however, a good way to showcase social history. It’d be boring to watch a doctor ask the patient outright about their living situation etc, but it’s far more interesting to see exactly how they live. We try as much as possible to illustrate to each other and ourselves what the living environment and working environment of our patients are like. 

In the context of infection, a good social history can point out exposure. As they exemplify by showing dead rodents and mould. This leads to 2 further differentials: Rat bite fever (caused by streptobacillus, something you’d see in the US, but probably not anywhere else), it’s an unrealistic differential in general. And the 2nd is aspergillosis.  Okay..  So aspergillus is a mould commonly found in our environment. In fact it’s everywhere around us. 

THere’s few times when it’s an issue.  It is a concern in respiratory syndromes like asthma or bronchiectasis. And also as an opportunistic infection in immunocompromised individuals. in the context of asthma, it’s not so much the aspergillus itself that causes issue, it’s our body’s over reaction. It’s a hypersensitivity issue that causes inflammation in the lungs or a pneumonitis. We even gave it a name. Allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis. It’s still badness, but it doesn’t happen that quickly. We also have specific tests for this, which were obviously not considered in this episode of medicine done badly. In the immunocompromised host (steroid therapy in transplant patients or those on chemo, etc.), you can get the invasive mould as an opportunistic infection.  I don’t really understand why they think it would be the case here. Also, killing the bug with heavy duty anti fungals will only give more issues rather than do anything. They start him on amphotericin. this is not standard practice.  And now it flips to why amphotericin is not standard practice or first line treatment for invasive aspergillosis. The patient has now become anuric (not making any urine). (First line drug by the way is voraconazole, superior efficacy in trials with a lower mortality rate and ADRs) Also, note that they have just jumped straight to dire renal failure from the amphotericin. No work up. That said, heavy drugs like amphotericin are often a cause, but  It’s often temporary with the appropriate supportive measures (stop insulting agents, give hydration, monitor fluid balance), reversible, even if you require temporary dialysis or haemofiltration. Anyways, would get into AKI another day, that’s a whole other post in and of itself.  Then his hand is apparently “dying.” There’s pain on light touch, but it’s not a cold, pulseless limb. Or discoloured. doesn’t add up. This now enters vascular surgeon territory. Again. It’s interesting that there’s never any referrals to any other teams. If he has good circulation, I would imagine they would try to save the hand and consider other differentials. 

The only time I can think of an emergency amputation in this situation is necrotising fascitiis. That’s the only thing that would occur that rapidly  AND necessitate losing tissue or limb.  With a young person who’s this ill, there’s often multiple subspecialties involved by this point. I’m also surprised he’s not in ICU.

Then there’s a buncha filler scenes of the cast of house getting emotional. Ho my god, they’ve taken the hand of a young 20 something physical labourer. Indeed, this is badness. Unlike House, we actually are trained to always consider how a patient’s illness impacts their activities of daily living and livelihood. 

I find the general population assumes that we practice medicine in a vacuum, we merely treat the clinical illness and ignore everything else. They imagine that we all must be like house. 

Actually we try to put things in perspective as much as possible and knowing our limitations in this area, we often enlist the help of friends - physiotherapists, occupational therapists and social workers. They never exist on TV or on the movies. Ever. Unless it’s to portray how terrible it is to be a social worker.  From time to time in this episode, Cuddy laments that being chief of medicine is too administrative and she hasn’t been a doctor in years. That also doesn’t happen in real life. If you’re chief you’re still a doctor. You have admin shit to do deal with yes, but you still practice. It’s like being chief resident, in all the TV shows with one of these, you still seem them working as residents, be it scrubs or grey’s anatomy. 

Back to the differential. They finally get to endocarditis. Culture negative to be precise. That indeed would explain the bilateral dusky fingers that led to unnecessary amputation. Septic emboli. 

Going to stop here, more out of exhaustion now. I’ve created quite a lengthy post. Happy to reblog thoughts on culture negative endocarditis on request later. This is a worthy topic to study up on for students or residents. At least review Duke’s criteria and think about your clinical features like Roth Spots and Janeway lesions or Ouch Osler’s nodes. 

The ending is also a far fetched connection to make, but is one that we would consider. In fact, we would ask in detail every time from day one - have you had any exposure to animals. It’s very rare to see someone so young be that sick out of the blue when you’re immunocompetent and have no underlying predisposing conditions. If there’s no focal source, then we would even ask about injectable recreational drugs, exotic travels, sexual health. 

Most of the time, patients that sick are honest to their doctors. 

But what about..

Frankly, much as we lie as humans, when our lives our on the line, we’re generally pretty honest (sometimes too honest) with the people we want to save us. 

Any patient who is young and comes to hospital requiring inpatient admission, they’d be investigated by subspecialties with expertise in certain areas such as infectious disease. The dept of infectious disease would either be home team, or all over this patient as they special in the realm of both common and rare infectious diseases, culture negative endocarditis would have been considered before a hand amputation.

The term, “department of diagnostic medicine is laughable,” particularly when they consider it the only department in the world in the show. 

In actuality, it’s a department that is universal and exists everywhere. it’s Internal medicine. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the next surgeon general (and also the last one under Obama) is an internal medicine physician. Ken Jeong of Community and the Hangover fame is also a physician of internal medicine. 

Beginning to get the sense that most episodes are going to end with a diagnosis that is either infectious disease, rheumatology or haematology. But generally those tend to be most interesting and give the most plot twists or meaty differentials V.s. a stroke or acute myocardial infarction is fairly straightforward to diagnose. 

This is a very twisty episode in all the wrong directions. 

Dyspnoea is a very common presenting complaint. There’s a properly done approach to this in the podcast by the Curbsiders by the way. 

[waltongoggins]

i finished the first 3 eps of the boys s2 and i have just some Thoughts

there continues to be what feels like a disproportionate amount of gratuitous violence that’s directed toward people of color even when the on screen racism /is/ intentional to reinforce the themes of the show, it doesn’t really give it a pass in the ways that its constantly depicted, which can be really tiring. do we really need to see A SECOND montage of horrific violent deaths in syria? there’s very little balance in the cast which makes it worse. just because the show tackles issues re: racism, xenophobia, propaganda etc. and just because it is an inherently violent show, we still need to look at these things outside of the context of the show as well. and it’s a problem that has persisted through the series, so . that’s not Great.

but overall i’m really enjoying MOST of it. i’m sick of the deep’s storyline already, i frankly do not care about him nor will i ever, no matter how badly he feels about himself or how much he cries about it.

the confirmation that becca /was/ raped (it was left ambiguous last season whether or not it may have been consensual), upsets me in the way that i’m sick of rape as a plot device and they already subverted the dead wife trope so i had thought they might do something here but alas. that being said, i would die for becca. every scene between her and homelander is absolutely gut wrenching. the fact that she allowed homelander to visit ryan only if he let butcher live is gut wrenching. im very emotionally compromised about everything and i can’t deal with it.

i love the way they’ve given kimiko the opportunity to communicate and show her voice in a way. her journey with her brother is beautiful and tragic and painful, and i really feel as if she’s going to be the standout of the season. i hope that frenchie learns to communicate with her in a similar fashion, and that maybe someday the others do too.

butcher is very stupid and i love him very much (what was that tracksuit i’m dying to see the short film where we get to witness what he was doing while he was away). this push and pull he has with hughie, and the way that in some fucked up sense he ended up being his “second wind” despite hughie wanting nothing to do with him is bittersweet. they’re a terrible pair. butcher needing him to be his “canary” while he slowly drags hughie through shit...mm, on the other hand, actually being a Decent person to hughie makes me very happy. when he refused to leave him in the whale....he’s too good......i’m sad. the parallel between mm straight up telling hughie that he Doesn’t want to beat the shit out of him, while butcher actively tried to :| im having feelings.

i’m mad about raynor and i will continue to be mad about that for a long time. (however the edible arrangement callback...Lord.) but i was excited we got to see more of mallory and actually feel more of who she is as opposed to the jaded almost numb ex soldier. there is something almost sweet (dare i say? borederline tender? in a weird way?) about her and butcher’s dynamic and i hope we see more of it.

giancarlo is a king, he pulls your attention in like a magnet, delightful even if stan edgar is horrible. it’s nice to see someone whom homelander Does Not see as an equal get the better of him. another character who despite myself, i can’t wait to see more of.

this is getting long and im running out of talking points.

i hope mm gets to finish his doll house someday :(

[not-tryin-2-have-a-debate]

i really just don’t understand how we are meant to function, or i don’t understand how to function, how other people seem to function, under the weight of human suffering and pain. i dont understand how we’re are expected to or ever could just deal with it and i dont understand how so many, especially in this fucking country just seem to not care and not think about it and not understand or delight in that suffering and do whatever they can to add to it. i dont know how to google or what book to read to help me figure out how to not just drown in it and drown in my inability to cope with it  and part of the problem is that i understand my own immense privilege and luck and comfort of my life and i’m really not trying to whine and white guilt about it but its hard to seperate guilt from not being able to do anything? and i feel like the way we discuss these things is kind of counter intuitive because i don’t know how to openly ask like what are we supposed to do how are human beings supposed to try and fix this how do we just not die without it reading as me being whiny about how hard it is for me that other people are being tortured in poverty and war and sickness and slavery

and like i dont have any money. i dont have an ability to work a normal job. i dont have resources to offer. i can barely leave my house or speak to strangers. my mental illness has disabled me to the point where i feel like just a completely worthless pitiful pathetic little child, especially since i am so incapable and so incapacitated for reasons i cant even articulate when i live in such luxury compared to most human beings on earth? i kind of feel like, i dont know, how dare i be wasting my time existing like this. how dare i not be...helping more? but literally how do i do anything meaningful and how do you mentally get passed and inability to deal with the weight of human pain so that you can start taking action to lessen it? how do i start finding and joining and helping out with community action and chairty and mutual aid when i can’t speak to people?

and honestly like. i really dont know who to talk to about like. what is the worth of being an artist or a historian in a world like this? what is the point of spending my time making pretty pictures and little made up stories and learning about people that haven’t existed for hundreds of years? i hate saying it because i do think that like movements in the past and present that think art and history are useless are stupid but on some level at the moment i’m kind of wondering if thats true because? what tangible good am i adding to the world other than maybe distracting people from their own suffering for a bit? is that even good? how much of distracting someone from their suffering is really just distracting them from doing anything about the like Whole suffering? i dont even know how to say what i really mean

everything just seems so stupid in context. all of it just seems so disgusting. how much money and resource in the global west goes into publishing and making and selling and buying fiction novels. what could all that money do to keep human beings in the real world from literally dying. whats the point? what does it mean that i put so much time and effort into something that i can’t see any real societal value in at this point? am i interested in these things in the first place because they allow me to distract myself from how little im actually doing for anyone? or because they make me feel like im some fake kind of helpful?

[purgatoryandme]

Hey! I can't seem to find the post you made with all the books references in Illuminate Me and the reason behind it? Is it deleted?

I know that there is an incomplete one floating around in my reply tag, and it should be in the Illuminate Me tag, but tumblr’s search features are so bad that I went back to the original word doc of the complete list, so prepare for that particular storm lol.  Quoted/Referenced Reading List (In Order of Appearance) Shakespeare: Macbeth I opened on a Macbeth quote (‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lighting, or in rain’) because I wanted to start with something immediately relatable. Most readers were introduced to more ‘dramatic’ plays through Macbeth. Beyond that, they were introduced to the concept of pathetic fallacy, which I think plays nicely with Tony as a character (a man who is CONSTANTLY imparting emotion onto inanimate objects…and then actually giving them their own emotions) and with one of the core problems in IM, which is deciding the emotions of others for them. I was hoping to get the ‘feel’ of that without having to lean too far into the actual concept. 

Bonus: I picked this quote in particular because of the importance of threes in Tony’s life (his core group of friends, iterations of the reactor, number of times reborn, his bot children VS his AI children, the number of lovers or almost lovers he has in the fic, etc). Milton: Paradise Lost ‘What is dark within me, illuminate!’ is a modernization of the original Milton quote ‘what is dark within me, illumine’ for readability. I actually feel a bit bad about changing this considering how many people think this is the original quote now. This wound up being a central (and title) quote somewhat by accident. I’m fond of it because of how much I liked a different one that I had originally wanted for Tony’s thoughts of the reactor: ‘yet from those flames, no light, but rather darkness visible’. I had originally wanted to start off on a sadder note, one that showed how much Tony hated losing his humanity, and so the flames of Hell and their physics-bending concept seemed thematically appropriate. I had always intended to eventually invert the imagery – instead of Extremis being (to Tony) flames capable of extinguishing light, the reactor would become a water-like blue light that couldn’t be choked or recreated by any of the shadows that pursued Tony in his life. I picked Milton SPECIFICALLY for the imagery of light and shadows. 

But, man, listen. Darkness visible is a great concept, but it’s also tired. It has, as you’ve noted, been discussed to death. So as I was reading ‘Milton’s darkness visible and Aeneid 7’ to refamiliarize myself with some of the broader themes attached to that particular piece of imagery, I wound up thinking about how to invert the darkness itself instead of the overall concept. The flames of Hell extinguish light instead of having to exist away from it. It is a bad that cannot be penetrated by good. 

Instead of chasing away shadows, which would be implied by shining a light ON them, the request Tony makes here is to actually invert the darkness - to have it illuminate in and of itself. It’s becoming something better instead of being removed or forgotten. On the flip side of that, the darkness within isn’t growing as light weakens, but rather under its own force. Two forces equal in nature and origin in a person. It’s a different take on lighting than the one most critics hammer home. Long ramble is long, but this was the basis for using that quote. It grew from there to have many different meanings, however the core has always remained. All in all I’m pleased with it.

EM Forster: A Room with a View Very forgiving even in its satirical takes on human nature. A lot of passages are very therapy-quotable in their urging to accept the inevitability of causing some harm in life. It plays on a lot of the same concepts with light being obvious metaphor for good and evil that Paradise Lost does, but softens them into more realistic shades of human existence. Isaac Asimov: Foundation Continuing on with themes of rigid morality vs the flexibility and romanticism of humanity, we have Asimov, master of machines and the three rules of robotics! There are lots of quotable epigrams in this beast. The quote pulled from this has two readings depending on what you assume of the man who has said it. If you see him as manipulative, there’s an insidious underpinning of killing off your own morals. If you see him as a kind man, then you could read it as foregoing morals in place of empathy. Tony’s therapist loves a very specific brand of double speak that lets Tony work through the conversation purely through interpretation. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina Tolstoy’s prose is lengthy...so so lengthy, but Anna Karenina is worth the read as long as you relate to at least one of its major characters. Frankly, I think you can choose to read a single character’s plot arc and leave it at that. It’s mostly a novel that is interesting, not because of its plot, but because of its study of relationship dynamics. Tolstoy was really invested in picking apart the idea of what makes a ‘family’ and, beyond that, what makes a class. It’s refreshing to see so much of the critique occurring within the lived experience of the characters instead of through a narrator or outside punishing moral forces. Baudelaire: Windows and Benediction I cannot recommend enough reading multiple translations of Baudelaire poems (fleursdumal.org has a wonderful array available). Benediction is a personal favourite. I love me some malevolence wrapped up in religion. Dante: The Divine Comedy There’s a lot of bleak humor in Dante if you look for it. Several interpretations insist of making each piece excessively grim dark, but faithful translations tend to have a hint of humor in them. It works well for engraving War Machine’s spine - a benediction and a mockery of human limitations. I try to pick quotes that not only fit the scene, but would still fit into the context of the grander themes from whence they came...unless I hate the author. Tennyson: The Lady of Shallot “I am sick of shadows” vs “I am half-sick of shadows”. Tony’s expressing more frustration here with being alone and his passive involvement in that loneliness. Another quote I feel vaguely bad about changing, haha. The Lady of Shallot is a very nice classical piece that I’m sad isn’t taught in schools alongside Hamlet. There are some nice Ophelia parallels here. I wanted a feminine influence on Tony’s loneliness and one that is somewhat youthful despite his age. Yeats: Vacillation I fucking hate Yeats as a person. That said, the man can write. The man can REALLY write. His pieces are almost always layered to the point of absurdity and he’s perfect to swiping quotes with multiple meanings. Definitely Tony’s kind of author. Goethe: Faust Speaks for itself and in the author’s notes on its reference.  Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamasov IMO a book that deserves all the acclaim of Anna Karenina and then some. Very VERY Russian in its ethical debates of, as always, religious morality vs free will. Also dips into familial struggles and patricide, because it wouldn’t be a Russian classic if it didn’t contain some deeply buried bitter resentment towards paternalism. I’m going off-script here, but this is a fucking excellent book. I don’t really have words for how much I enjoy how Dostoyevsky explores the concepts that he does. Shakespeare: Julius Ceasar Shakespeare: Twelfth Night Twelfth Night deserves more credit for its development and maintenance of an enigma. Twelfth Night has charisma in spades both because of and in spite of the exceedingly petty actions of some of its characters. It is also a refreshingly simple take on love for the sake of it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Stephen King: Lisey’s Story I consider Lisey’s Story to be the best of King’s work. The man has his obvious writing ticks and his even more obvious issues as an author. Lisey’s Story contains many of them, but navigates them far better than any of his other work. The monster here is all in the mind and is too vast to truly see or understand. It’s perfectly representative of a creeping sense of inescapable horror. It was fun to flip it on its head with a reference here – Tony isn’t terrified of dying, but he is terrified of his inescapable enjoyment of Bucky’s company. Maria’s family saying is inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Armitage: The Death of King Arthur A genuinely fantastic classic tale of heroism, filled with all the drama, tragedy, and sacrifice that you’d expect with strongly feminine undertones. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. TS Eliot: The Wasteland Excellent piece of poetry with many layered meanings and dual interpretations. I can’t really articulate my thoughts on The Wasteland, but I reference an essay at the end of this list that does that for me. Oedipus Rex Rupert Brooke: Safety Not directly quoted but obscurely referenced through Bucky and Tony’s war conversations + Bucky’s conversation about, you got it, being ‘safe’ with his therapist. His poetry is about WWI and is, largely, idealistic. Safety is…not quite an exception to that. His other poetry contains a certain sense of honour and duty, whereas safety, maintaining a seemingly light tone, has nothing of the sort. It is safety in the soul – something untouchable by the horrors of war or death. It treats that as a ‘house’, which leant itself to the article Tony send Bucky. Armine Wodehouse: Before Ginchy Not directly quoted but obscurely referenced through Bucky and Tony’s war conversations + Bucky’s conversations with his therapist. This is also WWI poetry, though far darker than Brooke’s work. It discusses the parts of the heart and soul soldiers lose. It is an extremely good piece AND references Dante’s Inferno. I had to work it in somewhere even if I didn’t want to directly quote it. Meyer and Brysac: Tournament of Shadows Referenced several times over in discussion of war, the great game, and British military history. Beautifully self-aware account of Britain’s insistence on rewriting history after the fact and the tiny hilariously embarrassing moving pieces that shaped what is often considered the heyday of espionage. Murakami: Kafka on the Shore I love Murakami’s response to questions about understanding the novel as a whole. There are no solutions, only riddles presented, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes place. It’s a great lens through which to view the book and individual passages taken out of it. Reminds me of The Wasteland having to be read in totality before you can begin picking it apart, after which each individual piece can be read of its own. Kafka on the Shore, with its musings on the uncertainty of fate and redemption, was the perfect book to outline Tony’s horrifying realization, which he is desperately suppressing, that he might be coming to accept Bucky’s feelings. This quote in particular, while I would’ve used it anyway, is also a great callback to the first chapter and its storms. Chapter 29 is a turning point. Beyond it there are some intentional quote contrasts that are probably more easter eggs than they are anything else. Yeats: A Dialogue of Self and Soul Great contrast with Vacillation. Some parts of self and soul are used in that poem and thematically they are connected and contrasted - self and heart vs self and soul. The symbolism and imagery in Vacillation is really on point and layered, but Self and Soul is peak Yeats for its reversal of the typical ‘the soul is pure and bluntly honest and the body is tainted and bad’ in Christian works. Also Self and Soul’s broader context is scrumptious considering the debate poems history of relying on divine forgiveness and lack thereof instead of on forgiveness of the self. 

It was fun to give this poem a double meaning in IM as both hugely ominous and ultimately pointing to the later forgiveness Tony receives from himself through the divine (if the soul stone can be called that) in the heavens (space!). There’s also another fun twist to ‘who can distinguish darkness from the soul’ in its contrast with ‘what is dark within me, illuminate’. To take that a step further, Vacillation was the beginning of the path of forgiveness for Bucky (understanding Tony’s heart…somewhat literally as he slowly gets closer and closer to the reactor itself), while Self and Soul is a final step (re: Bucky being presented the final hurdle of Tony deciding to move forward alone). Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha Hesse is wonderfully blunt at times. I gotta admit I love German takes on spiritual self-discovery because they always seem to tend towards much more straightforward answers than other countries. Hesse’s relationship with Buddhism in literature vs his lived experience is also really intriguing. Anyway, Siddhartha, in its humanizing of Gods, is wonderful contrast to the consistent imagery of the untouchable and unknowable forces of good and evil in previously quoted works. It has stopped bringing humanity to the divine and has started placing the divine within humanity. Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey One of the ultimate poetic epics. Now that we are nearing the end, I’m going overtime with making the grander themes of this whole piece hit home. A lot of IM was built on a foundation of poetic epics, of heroism, and a bit of Greek tragedy. The Odyssey embodies all of those things beautifully. It also suited Thor too well to pass up. Yeats: An Irish Airman Forsees His Death Ah, Yeats. Very blatant foreshadowing here that is keeping with the foreshadowing from Self and Soul. Fate has, up till this point, been a bit of a question. It has been ‘when will it come to me’ and ‘how will I avoid or overcome it’. Now fate is a set point. It is knowable and present. ‘I know I shall meet my fate, somewhere among the clouds above’. This goes for the true onset of Infinity War and for Tony’s feelings towards Bucky – when he had no one, he allowed Bucky in after essentially promising himself he wouldn’t. If that’s not an accidental admittance of love, nothing is. Henley: Invictus Absolutely fantastic poem. Continuing with the heavy fate themes coming into this climax. Now that Tony knows his fate, truly knows it, he is choosing to take it on directly. Agamemnon (Anne Carson’s Traslation if you prefer a more modern language approach, Lattimore is you prefer a classic) Agamemnon is forgotten all too often in the world of poetic epics and it’s a damn shame. I cannot say enough good things about it. I always wanted to use lines from Agamemnon in a Tony fic because the Cassandra parallels were too perfect to resist. The chorus in this play was also a perfect narrative device for interacting with something of a hive mind. Yeats: The Wanderings of Oisin Another poetic epic. Nice contrast with The Odyssey, The Death of King Arthur, and Agamemnon. Here the dialogue is between an aged hero and a saint looking into the hero’s past. It has the kind of reflective and aged mood necessary for this stage of the story, but is actually a poem I sortof hate. The line ‘And a softness came from the starlight, and filled me full to the bone’ is absolutely gorgeous, though. Some final inspiration pieces:

The Penelopiad 

The Iliad 

House of Leaves (for surrealism in the final chapters) 

Dante at Verona (used in an author’s note as an intentional jab at the dull uninspired nature of the this particular take on Dante. Repurposed quote, essentially) 

a broke machine just blowin’ steam by themikeymonster (great character study of Bucky) 

Frank Kermode’s essay “Eliot and the Shudder” (inspiration behind Tony’s entire interaction with literature)

[princesssarcastia]

The Rise of Skywalker Review

Well, I actually went to see it!  I wasn’t sure that I would, but I’m honestly glad, because now i’ve got thoughts.

The first twenty minutes or so seemed really slapdash and disjointed, like they wanted to set up things for later but didn’t want to take the time to set them up well.  Everything was really rushed and shallow for that period.

But! This movie had a lot of poe-rey-finn interactions which I enjoyed deeply.  Rey and Poe sniping at each other, Finn and Rey being adorably close and caring, Finn and Poe being adorably close and caring.  They feel like they’ve actually spent time together! Excellent.

Leia’s scenes felt a little weird, like they were shoehorned in, but i still miss her so I’m kinda glad for her presence anyway.  Having her train Rey, pick up where Luke left off and push her to the finish line, makes me delighted.  Yes, Leia is force sensitive!!  She trained with her brother!!  She knows how to pass on what she learned!!!  She built a lightsaber!!!!!! excellent. (sidenote her lightsaber was sick.  i loved it. i want one)

I also liked how we got to see some diverse planets and terrain.  did they do their best on that front? no.  would have loved to see some more weird-ass alien planets, or even weird-ass terrain that actually exists in the real world, but they’re deathly afraid of being like the prequels, soooo.

The whole thing with the “sith dagger” and C-3P0′s memory was a shit storyline.  Here’s a magic item that will do everything we need! Give you the location of your navigator thing!! Magically fit against the skyline of the wreck of the deathstar, even though it’s an ancient artifact and the deathstar is constantly battered by incredibly powerful waves on an alien planet! ugh.  dumb.

If that droid from the old shipwreck was gonna have that knwoeldge the whole time,,,,,,, why not just let Rey befriend the droid,,,,,,,,instead of doing a “psych! gotcha!” with C-3P0′s memory. 

JJ Abrams being afraid to give real consequences to the new trio’s actions was shit.  Let them kill Chewie!  Let them essentially kill C-3P0! Or leave it out of the equation entirely!!!  These fake-outs cheapen emotional responses and motivations of the heroes of our story.

and hey, speaking of cheapening shit, why the ever-loving FUCK did they bring Palpatine back.  why.  I hate that.  I hated that SO MUCH IT WAS SO DUMB.  SO.  DUMB.  so darth vader redeemed and sacrificed himself over nothing, huh??  Anakin Skywalker, dumb bitch to the end, couldn’t even die right, because palpatine was fucking alive the whole time.  fuccking hell.  any hey, guess what?? Jedi can force-heal people, too! ha ha ha hahahahaha ha h  h a stupid anakin for believing palpatine had unique force powers and turning to the dark side, when really, it was a light-side power all along!!! (kill me)

(side note: healing being a power of the light and not the dark is thematically better, but uh.  see petty retconning below)

Making Rey his granddaughter is inarguably worse than having her be a true nobody, which was my number one pick.  I might even have been fine with it if she discovered it on her own!! But noooo, we need to have Kylo Ren and Luke tell her who she is.  Oh yeah, they knew who she was the whole time, lol! Isn’t that cute, stupid women having to be told who they are and what their legacy is. 

Which also makes her previous conversation with Kylo in TLJ cheap too! Look, I get it, we all hated TLJ, and Rian Johnson’s choices.  But...having Kylo tell Rey who she is twice, in two separate movies, and tell her two separate things each time, and have it be played straight both times, is just.  so.      dumb.   petty retconning of other people’s work is kind of disgusting.

That being said, in this movie I didn’t feel like Rey’s storyline was about anyone but her.  I mean, palpatine elements for sure, but except for being told whose granddaughter she was, she was basically in control of her own destiny.  I liked that a lot.

Rey’s fight with Kylo on the wreck of the death star? *chef’s kiss*.  Amazing.  Incredible.  Lightsaber duels have gotten so much better and I love them.  somewhere inside me my five-year old self is screaming for joy and picking up her toy lighsabers.  Ridley and Driver have, unfortunately, very good chemistry in their scenes together, and the tension while they fought was so good. 

Poe as a former drug dealer makes me tired.  Poe Dameron, who idolizes Leia and had rebellion pilots for parents, was a drug dealer?? You kidding me?? ugh.

Also, if i’m being petty, I hated the way force ghosts could interact with reality. 

Lando Calrissian!! Lando I love you.  I love you so much.  The idea of all those people coming to the Resistance’s aid is pretty cool tbh, and I liked it.  I liked Lando playing ambassador and politician for the resistance. 

I absolutely hated the ““planet-killing-cannon”“ palpatine’s fleet had.  These fucking,  fan-pandering morons just cannot let the idea of a planet-killer go, can they?  It’s not like a shit ton of ships, the biggest fleet in the galaxy, able to blockade hyper-space lanes and entire planets, would be a good enough threat, oh no.  audiences aren’t smart enough to respond to something that complicated, so we need to make it SUPER OBVIOUS, just like in TLJ.  “the death star but bigger/portable” is dumb.

Finn finding other defectors was so fucking cool, I love that for him.  Also, like, Im pretty sure they were all force-sensitive like he is, which I think is amazing.  Confirming Finn’s force sensitivity was the best decision they made in this movie, tbh. 

The driving problem of this movie was, in my opinion, the exec and creative teams being unable to stick to their guns with Kylo Ren as the big villian.  Twice, people reached out to him for redemption: his father in TFA, and rey in TLJ.  Twice, he rejected that offer, and ascended to Supreme Leader.

But instead of letting him do that, they instead turned him back to the light for little to no discernible reason.  What, his mother dying finally pushed him over the edge?? You kidding me???? He LITERALLY murdered his father in cold blood. i call bullshit. 

And because they couldn’t let kylo be the main villian, they also had to bring back palpatine.  Look man, Adam Driver abso-fuckin-lutely has the chops to be a big bad.  He’s really good at his job, actually, and I believe he could carry the weight of being the scary leader and face of the dark side.  But no, y’all are chicken.

I mean, even though I hated him turning back, driver-as-ben-solo was fucking lit.  He was so good for those, what two minutes?? The tension during his rush to Rey??? Him fucking with the KNights of Ren?? His switcheroo with Rey, the way he nods and bows a little when the Knights all step back, knowing they’re about to get their asses kicked?? Oh my god! It was so fun to watch.  You could tell, even from that much, he’s a cocky little shit, and would have been so fun to watch for three movies instead of three minutes.

Their kiss at the end when he dies?? boo, hiss, no thank you.  Not a fan.  I’ll concede their chemistry as actors, but that was not romantic chemistry between their characters.  nuh-uh no way no how.  gross.

Overall, like a 5/10.  Wildly inconsistent.  I really liked some parts, and enjoyed other parts out of context, and really hated other parts. 

ps— me, watching the ot3 hug Like That™: NOW KISS.

[20021]

okay so i’ve been helping with the wiki a lot for like the past week or two and ive been suppressing my Need For Theorizing bc Objectivity but anyway

we know the gist of how each tezcatlipoca works except, obviously, the black tezcatlipoca, which has thus far been kept largely shrouded for what i presume to be story telling reasons

what has been stated explicitly by betsy is:

each tezcatlipoca does a specific thing to everyone. judgement scythe is destruction, mercy bow is healing, liberation machete is destroy magic. thus far, it seems in no evil, with the exception of charles, black tezcatlipoca puts people to sleep

each tezcatlipoca has a specific requirement of its wielder. white wants kind, red wants just, and blue wants willful. ill get into the blacks in a moment.

brother swan shows charon wielding the tezcatlipoca as something of a familiar, and as a means to extend her life.

charles can make weird spider things

the black tezcatlipoca is described as “silencing” things

in judgement we are told that the tezcatlipoca was supposed to serve as a push for unity through four different things.

judgement

freedom

mercy

peace

three of these are explicitly covered by a tezcatlipoca. 1 is red, 2 is blue, 3 is white, which leaves 4.

so the associated virtue for black is peace. we’ll see how that works in canon later, but for now we’ll get into form.

we see in and the raven brought fire and brother swan that the black tezcatlipoca will shape itself into a cat-like visage (likely a jaguar, reflecting aztec myth). we don’t see this with charles.

the forms we have for all four of the tezcatlipoca’s are weapons or tools. red is the judgement scythe/firepoker, which isn’t a true weapon despite its destruction, they are tools.

both the white and blue are explicit weapons, to some degree, what with the mercy bow being a...bow and the liberation machete being a blade. however, it’s good to note that the mercy bow is supposed to be an implement of healing, and so it’s only really a weapon in the hands of someone not meant to wield it. machetes can be used to cut vegetation in addition to being used as a weapon analogous to a sword. 

so what about the black tezcatlipoca, in no evil we only really see it hurting people, with charles as the outlier. in brother swan, however, charon is able to use it as a familiar and do various magical tasks.

this is what charon was says about her wielding the tezcatlipoca:

[Image Description: A cropped image from Brother Swan showing charon with a purple eye and curling spirals of black on her skin. She is dressed in a similar color scheme and has lavender hair. She is saying in a speech-bubble, “This dark power was given to me and extended my life. In exchange, I was to bring peace to the people of Scourosi, even if it means my life. This is not required of Font. But since the people of the Outer Ring refuse to be saved I will rescue the one who has reached out to us.” Another speech-bubble from out of frame says “So...you’ll...the Outer Ring?”. End ID]

with all that in mind, my proposal is this: the black tezcatlipoca’s virtue is peace, it’s form is magic, and it’s requirement is that the wielder was supposed to die due to strife. the reason it puts people to sleep/makes people sick is because its pulling the magic out of them.

to elaborate, both Charon and Charles’ pursuits are, at least initially, both aligned with peace, which is a component of their being able to use the tezcatlipoca. charon is supposed to bring peace to scourosi, and charles was to bring peace between hatfield and mccoy, both of which are on scourosi. 

note that, for the most part, charles was only able to get the pieces when strife was being resolved, or trying to be resolved. we don’t know what happened with ixtlilton, but xochipilli was trying to make the hatfield and mccoy kids stop fighting and xochiquetzal was making a deal with him instead of sending him away. this isn’t really the case with murder’s piece, because he just grabbed it, but also kitty did resolve the conflict of the red tezcatlipoca, which might count. 

^^this is less support for why the black tezcatlipoca is peace and moreso about why things might have been written the way they were

anyway:

charon is able to wield the tezcatlipoca much like a familiar and do great feats with that, but charles is somewhat limited in the tezcatlipoca’s use. we’ve seen him make his spider things, and they have been doing some spying in that vein. he’s able to put people to sleep. 

i won’t speculate too far into why charles is so limited, because there is any number of reasons of why that might be the case. it could be because, up until black, white, and red all over, he didn’t have all the pieces. it could be because he’s not actually pursuing peace, or because he’s pursuing peace on scourosi in such a limited scope rather than trying to reconcile the bigger divisions between, say, the industrial men/science folk and the traditional individuals/magic folk. maybe it’s because charles is less duty bound.

who knows! betsy does, but i sure don’t. 

anywise, my support for the black tezcatlipoca being magic is because its a tezcatlipoca.

just kidding, it’s the duality of the tezcatlipocas. judgement-mercy, liberation-peace. destruction-healing, magic negation-magic. it’s a clear corollary, and it’s supported in how both the wielders use it. charon has it instead of a familiar, it made a magic violin for fontleroy just. out of nowhere. like all the tezcatlipocas, it is a tool, and it depends on the wielder. charles is using it as much more of a weapon, because he’s like. 12. literally. i’m willing to bet that amaroq fucked off maybe two-three years after the black ick got sealed (which is supported by corn being more like a young kid, since he’s 15 in canon and the black ick was sealed 14-ish years ago according to betsy and also he was Literally Born in judgement).

like we’re told charles was supposed to die as a baby, except angel took him and amaroq just did shit. so there’s the meant-to-die aspect. charon was supposed to die when she was 10 or so if i recall correctly and she couldn’t be saved with medicine. so the strife bit comes in where charles was supposed to die because he was the child of a girl from mccoy and a boy from hatfield. charon couldn’t be saved with science and had to turn to magic. both went to mictlan, aztec land of the dead, before they were able to wield the black tezcatlipoca.

i think in angel is somewhat aware of this and that’s why she got baby charles. and was able to recruit charon later. that’s also not the purpose of this post.

the pulling-magic-out is mostly based on fontleroy, somewhat magic user, feeling sick when charon used it on him when the first meant and the spirits reverting to human form.

bonus theory below the cut:

what the fucks up with icky? 

well what i wish would happen is:

he just pops up like “whats up” and wields the black because he’s so conflict averse and is the link between science and magic that is missing in both brother swan’s outer ring and the industrial men. he’s skeptical of many magical aspects and likes to test them (the turquoise in alien), approaches them in an analytical way (makes a magic ritual in miniature even though he doesn’t use magic ), and is a spirit who genuinely tries to fit in w Hollow’s bs, which i think is more the result of a not-great upbringing in that context (see: his black eye in alien). 

also he looks like fontleroy who ends up black tezcatlipoca-adjacent bc of his working with charon. plus that fact that we have never seen him touched by the black tezcatlipoca--not in judgement, not in and the raven brought fire--until it literally will not come off him. i figure the almost dying thing could be covered by a variety of situations, but i would say that the situation in hollow would count because he’s caught between using magic like he knows he should to transform into his nagual form and maintaining his standing with the people of science. the black ick serves as something of a threat to life because im pretty sure it literally sucks the life out of things? 

but again this is somewhat a crack theory that i have wiggled support out of canon for.

also it explains why he won’t wake up, because the other wielder’s fucking shit up for him. 

other theory is just that, since he’s the only spirit we’ve seen get hit by the ick in human form, the black ick isn’t able to get to his magic and so it clings.

[florenceisfalling]

2 orchestra and huxley :”)

ty again for requesting ocs im :’))) 

some context for a detail: asad is huxley’s ex, who now lives out of state. 

“are you feeling better?”

Nothing makes a hangover feel worse like a looming cloud of guilt and disgust.

Huxley shakes, wrapping his pillow around his head after he turns on the fan. He feels sick, really, really sick, and his limbs are screaming at his brain, telling him he must’ve run a mile. He can’t quite remember if he’s just aching or if he actually did bolt that far.

A loud creak of the bedroom door pierces through his ear, the noise making a jab directly to his brain.

“Go away,” he mumbles into his pillow, frustrated by the effort it takes.

“You don’t look so good,” Orchestra notes, clearly undeterred, and flicks on the lights. It is a flickering mess of color and shadow, and Huxley squeezes his eyes shut to avoid more of a headache.

“For Christ’s sake, I feel like I’m dying. Of course I don’t look so good.”

Orchestra frowns with two mouths at the same time, before they both merge back into one set of teeth, leaving a relatively normal face behind. “Why do you say it that way? It’s not my fault you drank so much.”

Hux slowly opens one eye, with no purpose but the intention of glaring the shapeshifter down. “Yes it fucking is! It is your fault, you made me ki...made me k-kill...”

“What’s that, sweetie?”

Rather than reply, the boy shoves his face into another pillow, screaming into it until breathless. He’s shivering. He still smells bleach. His hands still feel too warm, too warm, too much.

Realizing he should be grateful for the hangover, since it’s something else to think about, Hux rolls back over to stare at his ceiling. But before he can even let his eyes adjust, he’s sobbing. 

“Oh, oh, darling,” Orchestra mumbles, its voice suddenly warm and kind. “You’re gonna dehydrate. I’ll be right back, okay?” The door creaks again, another stab at the teen’s composure. 

It does come right back, looking just like Asad, with kind eyes and brown skin and callouses on the tips of each finger. God, Huxley can’t handle this. He would scream from the pain in his heart again if he had any energy to. 

Gently, those calloused hands tap on Huxley’s shoulder, dragging his attention to a glass of water that Orchestra holds, a stupid bendy straw sticking out of the top. Despite the rage he feels, Huxley can’t ignore his symptoms, so he tentatively drinks it down.

“There you go!” The monster draws the cup away, setting it on the nightstand. “Are you feeling better?”

The answer is clear as he draws the blankets over his head and resorts to weeping.