#dante lai

[broken-balance-baby]

far cry fantasy au sketches (aka i need to start coloring my concept art 💔)

[cloudyyycolfer]

sometimes i think about how zuko begging the universe to strike him with lightning when he was trying to learn how to redirect it. even though he hadn’t successfully done it before and he had been struggling with it in the episode. and he knew that if the lightning struck him and he couldn’t redirect it that he would die because he would be essentially be struck by lightning. zuko was pretty much on his knees begging the universe to end his life.

[visikonn]

He made the mistake of falling asleep on the couch

[rockingrcks]

these king of hell bonus pictures of lucia and dante are so 🥺🥺🥺 like dante laying his head on lucia's lap, then theres lucia holding ivory and them riding together on the bike...what if i explode....theyre so cute 😭😭😭

[shadowquokka]

(Some) books and series I have yet to finish/catch up on:

Which should I finish first?

[an-au-blog]

Oh, your love is sunlight

Happy (late) Valentine's Day (version without text ↓ +description in tags)

[darkfictionjude]

Yh I get its dark romance, i love dark romance but in most dark romances the guys would never put their girl in a dangerous position

From what I’ve seen lately I beg to differ 😭

That’s all they do especially with the topic of “breeding” even worse a lot of popular dark romances right now include scenes of SA from the male lead towards the female lead which is putting a person they love in a dangerous position. I think in one of the SJM series, the male lead doesn’t tell the female lead that her pregnancy could kill her because he wants the child? Like this is actually a pretty common topic with parenthood in dark romance

[deepthought-1]

A farmer that tends to his backyard garden in a now un-abandoned house, he’s probably the WORST guy you can ever try to talk to on account of his *reading off the back of my hand*

Wonderful and totally social aptitude for meeting others

(Transparent under cut!)

[lesbiankoby]

THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS A JOKE dante and lady have an oops baby but lady is transgender and would have aborted that thang if she had the right equipment anyway so what happened was actually 100% dante’s fault and also:

it WAS just there when he woke up. what the FUCK!!!

(neither of them can figure out what niche confluence of demonic energy spawned a demon baby egg because dante has never received demonic sex education but this has definitely scared him off of a) fooling around in his devil trigger form and b) sex in general for like, the next couple of decades. minimum.)

[nearer-than-the-eye]

LITTLE SAINT

listen Ahi giustizia di Dio! tante chi stipa nove travaglie e pene quant’ io viddi? e perché nostra colpa sì ne scipa?

"Ah, Justice of God, who heaps up such strange punishment and pain as I saw there? and why do our sins so waste us?" For Santino D'Antonio: John Wick's bitter ex, my most beloved villain, and whose name means sacred or little saint.

___

John Wick 2 may have come out nearly a decade ago, but being a Santino girl is a chronic condition. Cover and track list images are details from Caravaggio's Bacchus, and the epigraph is from Canto VIII of Inferno, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander.

Some extended thoughts about my process and choice of epigraph and cover under the read more!

This playlist mostly started because I was listening to "Young Caesar 2000," said to myself, wow, this would be a great Santino song, and put it alone on a new playlist. From there, for about a year, I'd throw on anything that particularly reminded me of Santino, songs that felt, not like they described him, but that they might narrate part of his inner monologue and feeling. Some John/Santino vibes starting slipping in there (almost inevitably), but I knew I wanted to keep things really closely tied to how Santino understands himself. I narrowed things down, did some ordering for the overall arc and (hopefully) smooth transitions, and here we are!

Essential to my understanding of Santino (and thus this playlist's formation) is NeverwinterThistle's Unholy Union and asuralucier's The Man You Want to Be, both of which you should absolutely run, not walk, to read.

I'll let the tracklist mostly speak for itself, but I hopefully captured Santino's arrogance and the fundamental emptiness and deep insecurity that arrogance covers. I really do think John is something real and true for Santino, in a world full of posturing, but he eventually cannot resist instrumentalizing John, just like everyone else. JW 2 is one of the JW movies most pessimistic about masculinity (if not THE most pessimistic), and the arc of this playlist would certainly be very different without Mitksi's "I'm Your Man." Which is Mitski's most pessimistic song about masculinity! So it all works out.

The title -- The fact that Santino's name means "little saint" has fascinated me since my first cursory google search that delivered this factoid, and I've always kept it in my back pocket when thinking about Santino as a character. He's always the little brother. His petulance and pettiness is so essential to his character, and it's, of course, what makes him such a great foil to John (who imagines himself as a rational actor, but has his matching streak of the petulance). Santino inherits all this splendor, and all he can do is try and claw out more and more. A petty saint, and certainly never a god.

Why Bacchus? -- Well, I was trying to get a good film still for the cover and eventually gave up, so then I went to go find something appropriately aesthetic for a playlist cover. I was going to do a Dutch Golden Age still life bc that's what I'm writing about rn and lushness (and rot) is so essential to Santino, but then I was like. this guy is Italian. SUPER Italian. Who's an Italian with dramatic shadows and lush still lifes? And thus Caravaggio. Bacchus because revelry, excess, beauty, ect....also the invitation of the painting--he's holding out the goblet to you, asking you to join him. But mostly because it's beautiful.

Why Dante? -- I KNEW this bitch had to have an epigraph from Inferno once I realized this was going to be a real playlist. I mean, speaking of pessimism! The Divine Comedy feels so crazy to read as a modern reader bc it's like. yeah all this suffering is God's perfect justice. That guy eating his own shit is part of the divine plan. Which, to me, lines up really well with my read on masculinity in the JW movies--perfect, unchangeable, and committing you to endless suffering.

Alright, let's really get into it. This tercet ("Ah, Justice of God, who heaps up / such strange punishment and pain as I saw there? / and why do our sins so waste us?") come early in Canto 7, as Virgil and Dante (our POV character and protagonist) leave the third circle of Hell, Gluttony, and enter the fourth circle, Avarice and Prodigality ("Why do you squander...Why do you hoard" is probably the most famous quote from this circle). If Santino was to end up anywhere, it would be in one of those two circles, so I enjoy that this is the point in the text Dante asks these two questions!

Speaking of: despite God's perfection, Dante sure loves to question what he sees in hell and then...not resolve those questions in any way. It's interesting to see that "who heaps up / such strange punishment and pain as I saw there?" is a question addressed to the "Justice of God" when. well. the Justice of God is the thing heaping up these strange punishments and pain!

Dante seems unaware of the paradox, here, which has a real resonance for me in the way Santino is just like, well, I HAVE to blow up your house, John! I HAVE to put out a hit on you after you fulfill the marker, John! But to point to the times he acted out of compassion (not calling in John's marker during his retirement) would completely undermine that logic. It says "there are some things more important than power," but if Santino acknowledged that, then he wouldn't be able kill his sister.

Dante can't walk through hell and say with his whole chest, "I don't think it should be like this, actually" and still trust and love God, so he doesn't. Santino can't believe "more power will make me more happy, our culture says so," and also consciously acknowledge that it's the culture under the Table (and his father!!! his god!!!) that has pitted him against his sister his whole life, that has instilled in him values that ultimately leave him empty. So he doesn't! And he dies trapped in that paradox.

And then that second question. "And why do our sins so waste us?" UGH. ugh. Dante. You fucking hit me hard with this one. This is the line that made me choose this tercet. There's so much to Santino, so much beauty, so much divinity--but our sins waste us. All that power is used only in pursuit of more power, and, in the end, he's destroyed by that pursuit. The first two lines of the tercet key into culture and the way we contort our selves to fit into culture, but this last line is just an exclamation of the tragedy. Why? we ask, and nobody answers.

[oldtreeinanalley]

i habe so many books i want to read

[broken-balance-baby]

vaas harem lol (pls click for full view there is so much happening in the coloring style)

[peacesmith]

i passed my exam :3

[dante-and-dragons]

Karlach is literally the sweetest character ever... oh my god. I literally. Any time she says anything I'm just like "OH MY GOD KARLACH IS SO SWEET I LOVE HER." She's. So. Sweet.

[loathed-to-be-her-hound]

Camping with heavy rainfall rn. Thinking about Aphmau taking Garroth with her on her adventures. He acts as her personal guard. In this scenario this is following his werewolf transformation. It turns into an absolute downpour on the two. Thankfully, Garroth covers Aphmau with his cape in hopes of keeping her warm and dry. When they finally set up camp to sleep she is still freezing. She asks him to sleep close to her. He ends up sleeping on her. He rests on top of the blanket and wraps his large form around her, tucking his fluffy head underneath her chin. Due to being a werewolf, he’s generally warmer. He also weighs a lot more than Aphmau. He keeps her warm throughout the night. He finds it embarrassing but never complains. He is her guard, he must keep her safe and warm.

When it’s raining and they cannot camp, he carries her on his back with his cape over her. He gets absolutely drenched but doesn’t voice a word of discomfort. Aphmau feels bad. She says he should warm himself up too. He convinces her that he’s completely fine.

When with Laurance and Dante he tries to protect them too. The difference between the three is that Garroth is the larger of them. He’s taller, wider, and fluffier. Thankfully Laurance has his inhuman properties so he mostly cuddles Dante and Aph.

When he and Laurance end up travelling together he is kept dry. Not from a lack of trying to protect Laurance. Laurance is simply very caring and forward. He makes sure Garroth is looked after too. It’s very odd.

Reality is, because of his werewolf transformation, he can sleep pretty much anywhere. He won’t die of hypothermia if he sleeps outside with nothing but the clothes on his back in the pouring rain.

Though he doesn’t like being freezing or soaked. He has to dry off and his hair gets very frizzy after being in the rain.

[muse-write]

Verlady Week Day 5

Prompt: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

@verladyweek

I see a Wuthering Heights quote, I use it. This turned into a little bit of a character study and a reflection of one of my favorite books, but still heavily focused on Vergil and Lady’s dynamic. It was so fun to write!

Lady had never had much use for reading. She had enjoyed it occasionally in school, but most of her time and focus had been on her gymnastics program. Reading, even for school, had been reserved for car rides shuttling her to and from competitions or when she couldn’t sleep before a big day.

Wuthering Heights had always been a secret favorite, and even now, she kept a battered copy of it on the stand by her bed. It was a secondhand copy bought for a dollar at a thrift store years ago and had an awful pink cover and no margins, but she flipped through it and read her favorite parts every now and then. Reading now was reserved for slow moments in Nico’s van on the way to and from missions, or rare moments of peace and quiet before she went to bed.

One line had struck her on her first read as a 16 year old—only months before her mother would be found dead in their living room, when Lady had been Mary, a student reading Wuthering Heights for her sophomore English class. “Whatever our souls are made of,” Catherine Earnshaw had claimed, “his and mine are the same.” Wuthering Heights had enchanted her then, the story of generations impacted by one man’s lust for vengeance, by one woman’s insane love for someone who didn’t deserve it. And then months later that enchantment was utterly destroyed, when Mary’s mother died at her father’s hands and a tower rose from hell and destroyed thousands of lives and she threw herself into the world of demons and devils and one particular tormented, depressed, charming demon-hunter.

And now his brother had joined that group, and it had been 20 years since Mary Arkham had picked up Wuthering Heights, and she was a very different person than she had been then. Lady—for she would never go by Mary again—did not think of that quote with the childish naivety of a student, but with a jaded edge of derision: toward Catherine Earnshaw and the terrible thing she had called love, toward Heathcliff and his obsession, and toward herself, who had had no idea what was to come.

But something made her think of it now, as she marched beside Vergil up the isolated hiking trail, following the last of their quarry. The escaped demon wasn’t a real threat, more of a nuisance, but it was best not to leave it to make trouble. In the lack of conversation and with no need to make a plan for finding what they were hunting (the broken branches, crater-like prints, and demonic slime were quite enough to tell exactly where it had gone), Lady’s mind wandered. Perhaps it was the landscape around them—the bleak plains stretching out below the edge of the mountain range, the overcast sky heavy with dark clouds, the chill autumn wind whisking across her cheeks—that put her in mind of her old favorite book. “Whatever our souls are made of,” she murmured, partly to savor the taste of the prose on her tongue, partly to fill the silence that had fallen between her and Vergil. They didn’t go on hunts often together without Dante or Nero or Trish as a buffer, though they were perfectly capable of remaining professional on jobs. At least, Lady was.

“His and mine are the same,” spoke up Vergil from beside her.

Lady glanced at him, a little surprised, but on further reflection, she supposed it made sense that he would recognize the line. “Have I found another fan of Wuthering Heights in the wild?” she asked him.

“I read it when I was a child,” he said. “I don’t know that I can say I was a fan. But I liked Bronte’s prose.” He lifted his eyes to their surroundings, and she wondered if he had noticed the similarities that she had. “I’m sure much of it was above my ability to comprehend then, and I haven’t revisited it since.”

“I have a copy of it,” she found herself saying. “If you ever want to borrow it.”

His eyes lighted on her, a little surprised. “Perhaps one day. Thank you.” They walked along in silence until he continued. “What made you think of that line?”

Lady shrugged. “The landscape, probably. I read that book back in high school, and that line stuck out to me then. I think I enjoyed the drama of it. The tragedy.”

Something close to a smile played around the corner of Vergil’s mouth. Lady almost laughed; if she had realized sooner that discussing literature with Vergil was one of the few things that didn’t end in threats of death—not yet, anyway—she would have brought it up sooner. “That’s why I enjoyed William Blake as much as I did,” Vergil mused. “The drama of it. I remember Wuthering Heights primarily for the setting, the Yorkshire moorlands rolling out beneath a dark sky, ghosts haunting old houses.”

“Maybe the ghosts aren’t really there,” Lady suggested, her high school English class coming back to her. “Maybe they’re simply psychological manifestations of trauma.”

Vergil grunted noncommittally, and Lady winced, remembering too late what she had heard about V’s familiars. Perhaps the ghosts of Wuthering Heights should be just that—ghosts, to plead with and die with and be done with, instead of memories of trauma and abuse and other things that were altogether too real, and far too recent in both their minds.

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

It struck her then, as it never had before, how different Vergil was now to who he had been in any of his other versions. This was not the power-hungry teenage Vergil who had raised a tower from hell. Neither was it V, the crumbling shell holding together the dregs of his humanity with sheer willpower. And, most importantly, neither was he Urizen, who had imprisoned her in armor not so very differently than Nero Angelo himself had been. This Vergil fought with his brother and killed demons at his side and sat through awkward dinners with Nero and his fiance and discussed a book he had not read in 30 years with someone he seemed to hate.

Lady was not a foolish girl like Catherine Earnshaw, but neither was Vergil a Heathcliff. He was working—however falteringly—to make amends with his family and to right his old wrongs. And Lady could respect that, because even if it was the bare minimum, it was more than he had done decades ago.

There was a flicker up ahead, and she put thoughts of books and change and decades of simmering resentment out of her mind for now. They had a job to do. But when the job was over, maybe she could give a little more thought to this new Vergil.