#crucial listening

[royb0t]

[1071png]

fanart of an evil guy bothering some demon twinks

[thatgaywizardoverthere]

Arthur keeping tabs on Merlin day 1 so they can “accidentally” run into each other at the market

[drbtinglecannon]

Anyone else here think about Laios/Shuro/Kabru or is it just me

[meat-loving-meat]

furiously typing a vaguepost about how my sperm donor post isn’t about jod and also cannot be about jod. JOD IS NOT A SPERM DONOR!! He is A DAD who didn’t know he was a dad. The instant he found out he had a kid he stepped the fuck up and made her an evil colonialism prince. Now Wake, on the other hand—

[aroaceleovaldez]

i stand by that a better, more sensible, and more intriguing plot for TSATS would have been, instead of retconning literally everything:

Bob is dead (because he was very explicitly absorbed/killed by Tartarus Himself in House of Hades, alongside Damasen), and nobody is going into Tartarus to save him. He made his sacrifice and is gone. However. Remember how the Titans, including Bob, were just kind of kicking around for several years? Particularly. On a cruise ship full of mortals. And Bob happened to be kicking around in general for an extra year versus all the other Titans. And he mythologically sometimes has a mortal demigod son who partook in the Calydonian Boar Hunt (Dryas of Calydon). Yeah.

So turns out, Bob/Iapetus leaves behind a demigod (demititan?) child. And because Nico was pretty much his only friend, he named Nico his child's godfather. And while he's not being left in charge of the child, as a son of Hades and godfather to this kid, Nico is duty-bound to fulfill Bob's last will and go find this like 2 year old to make sure they're safe. So Nico has to undertake this very unusual quest (that raises many questions, such as "demititans are a thing?" and "DOES THIS MEAN THERE'S POTENTIALLY MORE-?!" and "SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED ABOUT THIS?") and is kind of freaking out because. He's the son of Hades! He's notoriously bad with living things, and animals, and definitely small children! Even if he does find this kid and assure they're safe, he is the last person who should be undergoing any kind of quest involving even potentially having to babysit. Fortunately, his boyfriend is the human embodiment of sunshine and calmness and good vibes, and also once helped a nymph give birth, so he feels Marginally More Confident in theoretical demititan babysitting and offers to come along on this Epic Journey of Figuring Out What In Hades' Name Is Up With This Demititan Baby Business.

Proceed with wholesome epic shenanigans quest of Nico and Will scurrying around trying to locate this random OP baby while Nico has an existential crisis about the nature of his powers because he doesn't want to let Bob down! Both for Hades Kid Honor Reasons and because Bob was his friend! But what if he's destined to fail this quest just because of who he is? Because he's simply not built for hanging out with the living/mortals? And Will reassuring him that He Will Probably Not Traumatize The Weird OP Titan Baby And It'll Be Fine, and simultaneously getting a peek into the weird other life Nico leads hanging out with immortals much more than the average demigod, which Nico considers his norm. Bonus shenanigans of both of them getting caught off-guard and culture shocked from where each other's respective worlds (Nico's mostly-immortal versus Will's mostly-mortal) cross over and learning to navigate those for each other - Nico finally starting to make some mortal connections and get glimpses at modern mortal American life, and Will trying not to get his brain literally incinerated while Nico's happily casually catching up with some of his old friends who happen to be literal gods.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[alderaani]

something something 'work song' being the most tatooine husbands song of all time. cody freshly de-chipped feeling like he's crawled out of the grave, grappling with the crushing guilt of what the empire made him do, and finding obi-wan alive is the oasis he never looked for or thought he could deserve again. each of them being the other's safe place to land, both of them fragments of what they used to be

[ssruis]

Really admire people with pjsk sekai ocs because my only pjsk oc is a nameless faceless Kamiyama third year npc who is so so studious and constantly hitting the books and trying so hard at school only to constantly score second place to a guy who is deeply unserious, barely studies, is constantly getting into trouble for exploding things on school property, spends most of his time in class bothering his obnoxious friend, and dreams of pursuing a career in the arts. She wants rui dead so bad.

[daily-hanamura]

[thedreadvampy]

vaguing a post that's on my dash that I don't want to engage with (as usual) but actually no CPTSD isn't a diagnosis for 'when things were a tiny bit bad a lot' or 'if you experienced relationships that were toxic but not abusive' it's a diagnosis describing the impacts of CONTINUOUS TRAUMA. not less significant but more frequent trauma; trauma which is ongoing/continuous/recurring in developmental years.

like I'm not trying to gatekeep here and I recognise the value of saying 'it doesn't have to be a Single Big Obvious Trauma' because one key thing about CPTSD is that generally it makes traumatic incidents Your Normal so you don't necessarily view them as unusual or concerning. but I often see people talk about CPTSD as if it implies smaller individual incidents than PTSD and that just is not the case.

most experiences I have seen people be diagnosed with CPTSD for (myself included) are not 'a little bit toxic'. they are things which, each incident taken separately, an outsider would still recognise as traumatic - medical emergencies, rape and sexual abuse, significant physical violence, emotional abuse and coercive control, homelessness, severe poverty, war, torture, etc - and the thing that makes the PTSD C is not the relative level of the trauma, but the fact that it's enough of a repeated and consistent pattern, at an early enough stage, and sufficiently embedded in everyday life, that it becomes a person's baseline for 'normal'.

CPTSD is not a synonym for emotional microtraumas or cumulative trauma or 'death by a thousand cuts'. It's specifically defining the psychological differences in response to long term formative trauma as opposed to traumatic events which you process as an aberration (eg the difference between regular violence against you from trusted adults in childhood vs being physically abused for the first time in adulthood with existing experience of healthy relationships). Traumas causing CPTSD tend to be pretty similar in type, scale and severity to traumas causing standard PTSD - they are just more embedded and normalised earlier in life.

all this to say there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that cumulative microtraumas can't affect us in traumatic ways. there's nothing wrong with pointing out that there's a broad range of types of trauma, and trauma can include stuff like growing up marginalised or ill as well as abuse, war, injury or immediate loss. there's nothing wrong, too, with acknowledging that a lot that is traumatic doesn't necessarily feel traumatic to you.

but like. no. CPTSD is not a diagnosis for people whose trauma wasn't 'big enough' for PTSD. CPTSD is not cumulative microtraumas. CPTSD is a response to formative macrotraumas or to a long term traumatic situation without hope of escape or change and if you want to talk about microtraumas then do that but it's not what CPTSD is!

[morsmortish]

give us your xenadora headcannons

i absolutely think their relationship has something just a bit fishy like they met when she was 15 and he was 25, but pandora is 1. crazy and doesnt care about what anyone thinks and 2. i think it was very normal for pureblood girls to date guys 10 years their senior

oh it’s so fishy. age gap xenodora you will always be famous!!! i definitely think pandora is the one who pursues xeno; for whatever reason, she sees this quirky rich blond little pureblood heir and goes Yes This Is The One I Want. and then she uses all of her wiles to get him. he’s kind of just happy to be here.

in a modern au he’s the heir to some sort of multi-million newspaper/magazine/media franchise and he’s kind of clueless about the whole thing. his parents run the equivalent of the nyt and their only son just wants to smoke weed and ramble about his conspiracy theories. enter pandora, who decides she needs a sugar daddy and comes up with a twenty-step plan to bag xeno. she bats her eyelashes in his vicinity once and he’s gone.

[smimon]

some kind of Pygmalion and Galatea situation

song is Wymyśliłem ciebie - cover by Męskie Granie Orkiestra 2023

Dzisiaj nagle wymyśliłem Ciebie, Twoje imię zadźwięczało we mnie. Choć tyle innych jest, Znam tylko jego dźwięk. Do mnie mów najłagodniej, Jak tylko Ty potrafisz. I podaj rękę spłoszoną Szczęściem nagłym.

[pergaminaa]

Modern au

When asked, Manon would confess that pregnancy wasn't all that great, and she honestly can't understand how some people willingly put themselves through that kind of thing again and again.

The first few weeks were okay; she really didn't think too much of it, and from how things were going she believed it would be smooth sailing. Why were people complaining? Everything is seamless (she really thought she was built different)

A few weeks later, morning sickness began, and with it, Manon's earlier sentiments went out of the window. It was hard and downright brutal. She believes that calling it morning sickness is wrong because it was persistent all day and night long, for days and days and days. Really, it was endless. She was feeling sick most of the time; she wasn't eating and she was tired all the time. During that time there were regular hospital visits because she just kept throwing up and all that dehydration was not good neither does her nor the fetus growing inside of her.

A few weeks later it eased up a little but did not stop. She was still going to the hospital once every few days getting hydrated through an IV because really, her body is not dealing with this at all.

A while later when she was 4-5 months along, she began noticing some spotting. Dorian called the doctor and got them seen almost immediately. Things were okay, they’re baby is doing fine but from that moment on Manon was put on strict bed rest until her daughter was born.

At around the sixth-month mark, Manon was so over being pregnant. "Hate to break it to you, witchling, but you still have three more months to go," Dorian got kicked out of the room that night for his smart remark. But she called him back later on because she was lonely and by that point, she wasn't used to going to sleep without him being there.

It seems that all of her biology lessons in school have evaporated. And she was horrified at finding out some things she was certain she'd remember if she had actually studied them. She honestly didn’t think of what the difference is between giving birth and having a c-section in her mind she was just ‘a baby gets born’ without thinking how that would actually happen (Asterin was the unfortunate soul that discovered this and had to explain it)

'It's not too late to back out from this now, is it?' Asterin only rolled her eyes at her because yeah sure, by all means just stop being pregnant.

Newfound information aside, nothing actually prepared Manon for the grand finale: almost four days of (slow labor) and a little over 30 hours of active labor was all it took for her daughter to be born.

Manon, bless her soul, right in the middle of active labor, (literally her baby is only a few hours away from being born) realized one thing: she wasn’t her ready to become a mother.

The notion terrified her, and she seemed to realize it all of the sudden. She confidently thought that she can stop or try again later (???) but that wasn’t possible for obvious reasons. She wasn’t in pain (thanks to the epidural) but she was terrified. That is something she doesn’t know how to navigate and she was just panicking. She did end up having a panic attack and yeah imagine going through that while giving birth. (She really wasn’t having a good time)

Dorian was right next to her, his presence steadied her somewhat and after a WHILE she finally started listening to him and calmed down enough to focus on the main task.

Honestly the sudden cries kinda distracted her then she realized that her daughter is actually born and it took her a minute to fully realize that it’s all over.

Honestly, she'd rate the experience -10/10 even though her little baby girl is so worth it. She was born a little early (3-4 weeks, nothing too major) and she might have taken over 30 hours but she was out at last.

She won't do this again willingly though. Never.

Manon's both in awe and lowkey wonders of Aelin and Asterin are okay in the head. Her cousin went though this twice (willingly) and Aelin has like four children and Manon just cannot comprehend this.

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

Funny how just 5 years later it's finally downing on me that Louis can get his tongue cut– that if he does, he'll *never* speak again. And how much he probably thinks about all the times everyone told him they wished he'd shut up, how annoying he was, how his jokes are stupid, his singing sucks, etcetera etcetera. Not just him, I wonder how guilty everyone feels about saying all that stuff.

For the others, does he resent them? And for him, are they glad? Is there a part in all of them that think 'finally'?

And it's taken me this long to try and assimilate just how absolutely horrifying the situation actually is. we don't know how they did it but we can imagine, and it's not pretty. It's mutilation- pure torture. I know it's a videogame or whatever but everytime I think of Louis in that cell, dried blood running down his mouth and all the way down his chest, I feel sick, genuinely sick.

I was reading one of your old fics yesterday and it got me thinking, that's why Im rambling here on your asks. But yeah, no-tongue Louis should be non existent and considered a crime or something

Oh yeah, it's rough. It's brutal. I hate it.

I've only let Louis get captured a handful of times in all the years I've played TFS because 1. I'm clouis trash and I need them to be happy together in the end no matter the cost, and 2. I cannot handle Louis in the cells, I can't. He's my favorite character in all of TWDG, I don't want that to happen to him especially when I know I have the power to prevent it.

To be honest, I tend to pretend that outcome just doesn't exist. If I ignore it, it can't hurt me haha.

Don't get me wrong, I like a dose of angst in my fiction. I like tragedies. I like symbolic downfalls. I like recovery arcs. There's a lot of potential with the route where Louis isn't saved and he loses his tongue...

...But Louis is in a special category of characters where I'm like, "No, fuck you, he gets to survive and be happy! He gets to be understood! He gets to be loved!"

I think a lot of feelings come from it being a consequence of choice, too, y'know? Louis losing his tongue is only one outcome, one you can prevent. It all depends on who you save at the end of ep2. It's on you, and you can try to be like "noooo shut up, it's actually Louis' fault he got his tongue cut out because he wouldn't shut up!" when it's your fault he got taken in the first place, like... that's the game. Your choices have consequences and you can deny or justify them all you want... but in the end, you did it. You started the butterfly effect with your decision.

I also think this is why people get heated in fandom debates because "how could you NOT save Louis knowing he gets his tongue cut out, you monster!?"

I dunno, how can you not save Violet knowing that you'll find her blind on the beach? You monster?

Both outcomes are bad, it's just up to the player on which they feel is "better" or "worse."

We justify it to ourselves. We defend our choices. But that makes the choice all the more powerful, no? I save Louis knowing what fate Violet will meet. I trust AJ knowing Tenn will die on the bridge. I save Louis every time because in a game series where most of my favorite characters don't get happy endings [because they're fucking dead], I'll do everything I can to make sure Louis gets one.

I can handle an outcome with blinded Violet. As bad as it sounds, I can stomach that. I can find some hope in a recovery arc for her, and I can deal with her and Clementine having a rockier relationship after everything that happened on the boat. I can take comfort in the idea that Violet's going to survive with the help of people who care about her.

I can live with Tenn's death. It sucks, it hurts, it's bullshit... but I can live with it.

I can't handle Louis losing his tongue. There is no stomaching that for me, y'know? He's such a crucial part of Clementine and AJ's story for me that I can't fathom her not saving him in that moment during the raid, just as I can't fathom Louis without his tongue.

[memento--moray]

As someone who engages a lot with fantasy/sci-fi/horror media, one of the worst tropes I see again and again is the "this entire group of people is inherently evil".

The fact that it's so easily accepted, particularly in DnD and related environments, is deeply unsettling, particularly because of how much of it stems from racism (and other "isms"). Beyond the horrible implications of this concept, it makes stories far less nuanced and interesting.

I much prefer stories where evil is something on a societal or individual basis rather than inherent, since it allows us to explore why this evil came about. Exploring how propaganda, tradition, dogma, ect., might shape a society is far more interesting than just going "they're all born evil".

This certainly is not limited to DnD, just as someone who runs modules to practice encounter balancing, and has run 5e for people used to the rigid alignment system of earlier editions, you get reminded of this quite a lot in that space. There's a bunch of people talking about New Phyrexia in similar contexts, and while I don't feel like I know enough about the story to toss my hat into the ring, I will always be an advocate for nuance. Particularly when a lack of nuance means that "this group is inherently evil" accidentally ends up demonizing aspects of a very real group of marginalized people (as it often does).

Again, much more informed people than I have talked about this subject at greater length. All I can say as someone who's been in the fantasy/sci-fi/horror space for pretty much all of my life, I feel like there's certain standards that we really shouldn't accept as such, since they really don't have to be. In most cases, stories are more interesting when nuance is involved.