#did I answer your question?

[aye-aye-sir]

Zoltan/Letho/Geralt?

Heya! I'm back on being (more) active on Tumblr so I'll try to get through all the questions I received 🩷 However, this one is the easiest so I decided to respond to it first my dear anon.

I really don't have any opinion on Zoltan, good side character, good friend. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I dislike Letho, a lot, I just can't forget Foltest and I think he's annoying. Idk why tho, I'm just not interested in him at all.

And now ....GERALT?

My love, my life, my everything. Period. My favourite character ever, AND I'M ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME VERSION.

Idk how can anyone prefer Henry's fucking square ass face over this Slavic perfection 😘

[sirthinks]

What does 42 degrees Fahrenheit feel like, emotionally and spiritually? What makes for an appropriate outfit in these circumstances?

Well, with a converter that's about 5 degrees Celsius.

5.55555556

to be more precise. So five and a half with a slight tilt towards warmth.

Okay:

After some field research (going for a walk out tonight) in slightly different circumstances, 7C or 44F (although that nifty little 'feels like' feature says 3C or 37F), I can determine that 42 degrees Fahrenheit is the perfect temperature for a wistful or reflective short to medium walk; depending on your cold tolerance.

For me, at 7C, my walk was about 20 minutes, although I didn't time it, I listened to Garbage's 'the trick is to keep breathing' Maxi CD (four tracks adding up to 13 and a half minutes, plus listening to one 'strange' track (as in I don't know the name of it) from a MP3 mix CD that's about 6 minutes long). This is honestly mostly because I had work today and my legs are kinda dead.

The fact that the temperature (or the fact it began to lightly rain) wasn't the deciding factor in me going back home, is evident of how pleasant the walk was.

I even took the time to feel slightly disappointed that I couldn't sit and read (I forgot my book).

So emotionally, I'd say, the cold welcomed me and although I zipped up my jacket, I felt very comfortable feeling however I wanted to (which is this case was calm and slightly melancholic reflection).

Spiritually, I felt overwhelmingly soothed. I felt as though the world was holding me as I walked.

I love a nice cool walk. A night time walk especially. There's something so kind about the night, and so upsetting to me that it's been twisted to mean hurt and worry. To go out at night nowadays is to worry for death. The night itself does not deserve this judgement (in my opinion), and should be weighed upon humanity and our actions alone.

Beauty is night and cold, to me true beauty is natural, harsh, and understanding of it's own nature. A walk in a dark night with a thick fog and a drizzle hanging in the air. A sun-bleached bucket with a rusted hole at the bottom. A tree, fallen and ripped from the ground, still growing new leaves. A cool-looking cloud, a bold green lawn, a warmth that could only be made from the sun and a cold that could only be made by the absence of it.

TLDR; Spiritually I think 42 degrees F would be perfectly enjoyable.

I wore my cargo trousers out, a cotton t-shirt, a jacket made out of football scarves (you know the one, Traff), and some fingerless gloves.

This outfit worked perfectly fine for me at 7C, if being a titchy bit warm on the arms, so I think it'd be fine at 5C or 42F as well.

Hoping this answered your question, and that you haven't waited outside in 42F the whole time I was answering it;

-Ace x

[mumblesplash]

gem, what happened to your eye?

(wanted to upload this panel separately, original is from this comic)

[linddzz]

Jayce is literally a guard dog from the moment he met Viktor and I just know that he can be wayyy worse in fics if people weren’t playing it safe

So small disclaimer that I can't say much about how he's portrayed in fics or if I have any thoughts there. Tbh when I'm first getting into writing my own stuff for a ship I don't read or seek out a lot of other fics for a mix of weird brain reasons. A mix of a lot of doubts from comparing myself, but also I like getting a solid feel of my characterization without too much general fandom influence getting in there or end up accidentally stealing a concept/dialogue that just sticks in my brain.

(exceptions tend to be made for mutuals who I know are excellent writers already in which case I will psych myself up to not fall into the self comparison issue dkdjdkdk)

ANYWAY!!! Tbh I'm not surprised that there's not a lot that goes super dark on the possessive Jayce OR possessive Viktor just because they are such a weird little mix of legit fun and goofy and dreamy eyed for each other, AND canon pretty much laid out the dark side of their relationship I think. Jayce had already been confronted with Viktor's impending death, they already had their conversation where he had to promise to destroy the hexcore, which was them both in a way accepting Viktor's death. And he immediately broke that the second he was actually confronted with that death.

It's not dark to me as in "grr no one can touch you but me I'm going to lock you up in the lab to make sure you can never leave me and nothing can ever hurt you" which is how most dark possessive fics/romance lit tend to go. And I guess it can be hard to tap into what IS very dark and fucked up about Jayce and Viktor's codependence in a way that doesn't erase how wholesome they can and do come across in canon.

The dark is in the devotional romance of it, the almost instant codependence, it's in how beautiful it all is (like how Viktor's evolved forms are both beautiful and deeply unsettling for all their elegance). It's in thinking for just a liiiittle bit and realizing that Mage Viktor is knowingly dooming timelines by sparking Jayce's fascination with magic (and by making himself the thing that starts Jayce's obsession).

The dark possessiveness for Jayce is best captured when the partner he broke his biggest promise to, whose heart he replaced with the hexcore, stumbled out as something metal and inhuman. The dark side of Jayvik is; when Viktor's voice came out warped and mechanical as he stared at his own hand with confusion and fear, asking "What am I?"

Jayce smiled, laughed with that bright loverboy earnestness, and said "You're alive!"

[the---hermit]

how I take notes on non fiction books

I recently made a post on my study method, and decided to make a whole separate post on my note taking method. The structure of the notes I write doesn't vary too much from my lecture notes to things I might have to read. A couple of useful informations you might want to know before I start actually talking about note writing is that I am mainly focused on studying history (tho I have had other humanities exams in my degrees), and that I study for oral exams in which the material is mainly composed of non fiction books, but sometimes include articles as well as lecture notes. Somehow I have also failed to mention that I am speaking about HANDWRITTEN NOTES. I only do handwritten notes, I don't work well digitally, so keep that in mind. And with this being said brace yourselves for a very long post. The bullet points I will be making are not really in a specific order and I will be including a few pictures too.

The first step when I am working on the materials for an exam is to figure out in which order I will be reading (and writing notes) the books. This hasn't really much to do with the notes themselves, but it's important to know which of your materials is more general and what other things go more in depth, so that you don't struggle too much while studying. Another plan related thing I always do is to write down each chapter of the book I have to study on my bullet journal and how many pages it is so I can plan my studying more comfortably. If the chapters are very long, and divided in subchapters I sometimes also write those down.

The goal of the notes I write is to fully take the place of the book, so they tend to be very detailed and long. I do this because the very act of writing is part of my study method, and working on things I have written down in my own words is just much better for the type of learner I am. So basically I read the book only once, then it goes back on the shelf and I work exclusively on the notes. This means my notes need to be detailed and well organized.

My method is to read a chapter, underlining important stuff as I am reading, and then right after I am done reading I work on the notes for that chapter before moving onto the next. I do this because it makes the note writing more effortless, I am fresh with informations I just read and I basically just need to skim over what I have underlined.

On underlining, since it is so important. I underline everything I will be including in my notes, it might seem much as sometimes it consists of full paragraphs, instead of key words. But this is okay because my notes I don't just copy and paste.

To create useful notes you need to be re-elaborating the informations. You need to read, understand what you read, and be able to write it down using your own words. That way the notes will be easier to review, they will often be composed of shorter sentences, and by doing so you are also actively making writing part of your studying and not just a mindless activity.

Personally I don't work well with full pages summaries, I need the text to be visually broken into sentences/small paragraphs, and I use a lot of symbols as well as abbreviations.

Symbols and abbreviations are in a way part of your very own language when you are writing notes, you tend to develop these with time, but they are so useful. I personally use different types of arrows, all caps words, position of the text in the page, different methods of highlighting and abbreviations (usually for words that come up often like country names, for example Italy becomes ita, France becomes fr, etc.).

Your notes need to be useful for you, they don't have to necessarily be comprehensible for another person (which means you can and will fuck up sentence structure because sometimes skipping a couple of words makes the notes shorter and still understandable), and they do not have to be pretty. They should be as tidy as possible, but again that might change from person to person, I have some very messy looking notes that make total sense to me. With time you'll learn what works best for you.

I have a visual memory so as I mentioned titles, highlighters, all caps, the placement on the page and other similar things are very important in my notes. I cannot fully exapain some of these things because some definitely only make sense to me in the moment (like the words I choose to write in all caps, or the way I highlight things).

I like to have a clear chapter and subchapter break (so that in case I need to refer back to the book it's super effortless). I like to write those with a red pen, usually the chapter title is in all caps and the subchapter in coursive, but it really depends.

I use only two highlighters in each set of notes yellow for dates, and the colour I associate with the book/the subject of the book (I have synesthesia I don't make the rules when it comes to colours). This of course might change depending your preferences and on the element of your notes you want to focus on. I like to have spacific colour for dates and time periods, because of course while studying history that is a fundamental element. If you are focusing on other subjects you might want to have a specific colour for names, or other elements.

I like to leave a big side margin to add either key words (especially in lecture notes since they might be messier and jump around informations more often), or additional information in a second time (sometimes it happens, after you read another book, or attended a particular lecture you have to add a couple of sentences and I rather have a blank space that never gets used rather than no space at all for emergencies).

I honestly mentioned everything that came to mind right away, but since note writing is now basically a mindless skill I have been practicing for years I surely forgot about something. I might end up adding to this post in the future or write another one. My note-writing method has also changed a lot thought the years from high school to university, it's a skill I have been perfecting for the past decade. This to say that depending on what you are working on things might change, and by experimenting with different things you might find out things that work very well for you. If you have any questions on specific things I didn't mention or that wen't clear my inbox is always open and I am more than happy to help.

Since this post is already very very long I am adding the pictures below the cut

Example of a page of notes before and after highlighting

Example of symbols and structure of the notes and the way I highlight things (in which you'll hopefully be able to understand my handwriting, and in which there might be some spelling errors but alas that often happens in my real notes as well so if there are any it's for the sake of accuracy lmao). If I end up adding informations on the margins I always use a pen of a different color so I can tell which informations I got from what source (ex. main notes from lecture, colorful notes from additional article).

Example of messier notes in which the main text in black are the notes I took during lectures and the additional colorful text was added while writing the materials (I rarely do this, it usually happens when the lectures follow a book precisely, which happens when we have to study books or summaries written by the professor). As you can see I often use post it notes to add more writing space, and sometime I even use them to create visually separated sections. If I end up adding some drawings I also usually like to have them on post it notes so they stand out more (and if you are wondering why the hell would an history student need drawings it's usually either because I need a map or a region/state to mark things out, or when studying for archaeology exams I often needed visual references, for example to identify different types of vases or decorations).

[mamawasatesttube]

last night i had a dream i had to go to school to take an exam in my young justice (1998) class. and i was bewildered as to what could possibly be on an exam in a yj98 class but i showed up and sat down and got my exam paper. the first question was "which of these medical conditions do you have but have never disclosed?" and it was multiple choice and i don't remember all the options but one of them was "asplenia", and i looked up and in one of the other seats in the classroom, tim drake was sitting there and just Frowning at this exam paper.

[glassedplanets]

a few months ago giffy was like "haha hear me out, what if tattoo au" and then we blacked out and talked about nothing else for like three weeks

[yuwuta]

Oh we need more of the tennis player yuuta.

so true we do. a match was cancelled and rescheduled due to inclement weather, which is fine, it happens occasionally. except, the reschedule interferes with your work trip, which is how yuuta ends up with your baby boy in his lap at his pre-match press conference. yuuta was worried at first, your son definitely wouldn’t be used to the cameras and reporters, and it was also seven in the morning, so he really hoped the baby wouldn’t become too irritated, but all his worrying was for nothing. 

your baby boy didn’t seem to the mind the cameras, or the large crowd of people, his father was right there to hold him through the entire thing. with them side by side like this, their similarities really show; their droopy eyelids and tired expression, the occasional slow blinking when they’re confused or in thought, the same nose scrunch that makes everybody coo when it happens. one reporter mentions you by name, and that makes the otherwise sleepy baby perk and babble “mama” into the microphone instinctively, which melts everybody’s hearts, yuuta’s included, “that’s right, baby, that’s mama,” he coos, pinching his kid’s cheek before returning his attention to the reporter, “but, yeah, my wife—she’s great. she’s away on work right now, and we miss her a lot, but i’m so proud of her. i got to speak to her right before this conference actually, and she said she’d tune in when she could, so i hope she’s watching—wait, sorry, um… what was the question again?” (his rambling off about my wife my wife my wife is not new. it happens in every conference and interview, he’s just a loverboy through and through). 

during the match, it’s dead silent when yuuta’s about to serve and then there’s the tiniest cry of “dada,” just as he’s about the throw the ball up, which makes him smile and stop and turn to his son, and the entire crowd coos. yuuta is not too proud to blow a kiss before going to serve again.

[sergle]

yall are about to piss me off by not having any PASSING basic knowledge of the way the u.s. military manipulates its recruits into joining by typing up one of your uninformed, unresearched, unempathetic, individualistic, unbelievably annoying posts about how 100% of the people in the military ended up there because they just Love America So Damn Much! they're extremely mature and informed at time of recruitment, they can totally leave anytime they want, they totally had tons of other avenues in life they could've taken, there was no rush at all to get income as fast as possible, and everyone in the military also totally is part of the combat divisions and personally enjoys being IN the military very much, big believers of violence. everyone in the military is shooting guns all day, that's how that works. they LOVE BLOODSHED. also I love the "amewicans haha" twang to this type of shit because you're actually TOTALLY stealing our Thing, which is turning systemic issues into Individual Issues. Instead of talking about the powers that be, it's so Personal Choice up in here. It's, "well you shouldn't have done it then. I totally wouldn't because I know better." you don't wanna talk about the military industrial complex as a whole, and you don't want to talk about recruiters, you just want to pin the blame on Specific Individual People one-by-one, as if they're responsible for the system that they're being ground up in. someone was in the military? bad person, no matter what. it's easier to believe that, I guess, than to acknowledge that Normal People (with high school educations) are manipulated and incentivized into joining a system that is Bad. at like age 18. but yeah no that 18 year old should have just been smarter lol haha anyway here are some screenshots for no particular reason

side note this reply of someone going "umm just get loans and go into a high paying field it's easy XD" as a direct response to someone trying to explain how most americans joining the military are being funneled in that direction out of a need for money.

and another person who Decided that americans join the military just CLENCHING their teeth thinking of other people, and not thinking completely selfishly about their own selves and their own income/housing/healthcare.

[ratatatastic]

Vanha Kauppahalli date: en full, a 2 minute 50 second masterpiece...

Primetime Panthers | 11.6.24 (x)

[twinliches]

hi would you say the barrier of entry for sailing is very high?

my family had a house near the beach so i spent every summer in the sea so i absolutely ADORE IT and wanted to learn how to sail recreationally but it's always seemed so expensive + hard to get into

advice or opinions are greatly appreciated if you have any to offer<3

btw i love ur blog ty :)

i would absolutely encourage you to try sailing out and i think it's a great sport to get into! i have introduced dozens of people to sailing so far and almost all of them hit the ground running. the learning curve is steep and even just joining for the first times without touching anything is exhilarating so no moment learning is wasted. strong motion sickness or a paralyzing fear of the ocean notwithstanding, i truly think everyone can learn the ropes (haha) and that quickly! we always joke that it is very easy to get a boat sailing and very hard to get it sailing fast, but you have the rest of the life to figure out the latter and even if you don't you will have a grand time on the water.

you did not specify if you want to get on a sailing yacht (that you can sleep and do long tours on) or a smaller dhingy so i will answer both and i hope it is helpful!

SAILING YACHTS:

when it comes to sailing yacht, the real challenge is not sailing but owning a boat, and that is where the financial barriers come in. i will not lie to you - owning a boat is really expensive, and i am talking 5 to 6 figures a year expensive for a middle-sized sailing yacht including mooring, fixes, equipment, utilities, tools, and everything else. you can absolutely find cheap boats sold at every coast line - but buying a boat is not expensive, having a boat is. (guy who just bought a rope for 600 human dollars voice) heed my warning.

THE GOOD NEWS: you absolutely do NOT need a boat to learn sailing on a yacht. everywhere there is a marina there is people looking for crew, and many sailing clubs have programmes for beginners to get you on a yacht and try it out! there are also many summer programmes to join on larger tours and learn sailing. i would encourage you to bring a friend or two because it's much easier to flounder around on a new ship in groups, but it is absolutely worth trying out and again - even being on a boat is exiting, and you learn by doing!

now. sailing is not a dangerous sport and this is my heightened sense for safety of a sailing instructor speaking. but! if you join on a boat even as a visitor please think of that sailing tumblr blog in your life and tell the captain that before you go out of the water you would like to know: 1) the number for local search and rescue, and 2) the position of the fire extinguisher, the lifeboat/life ring, and the emergency shut-off and 3) that you want to wear a life vest unrelated to weather conditions. if they make jokes about you being a worry-wart, take them in stride, but if they refuse to do any of this, you tell them that they are irresponsible and leave. things rarely go wrong but they can and i want you to know what to do. okay? sailing is not scary but being unprepared is. okay PSA over.

DHINGY SAILING:

dhingy sailing is the most fun, the closest to the water, and the fastest way to learning sailing because you are together with one other person max facing the winds. yes you will most certainly get wet, but it is very safe, close to shore, incredibly fun and exhilarating, teaching you self-reliance, reflexes, trains your sense of balance and gives you abs. it's the perfect sport. can you tell i teach dhingy sailing

if you want to learn dhingy sailing, again, do NOT immediately buy a dhingy. while they are far less expensive they are still a hassle and setting up the mast without knowing your way around a boat will discourage you from sailing forever. instead, again, join a sailing club or a short course to learn dhingy sailing!

many places can give you intensive courses and certificates that qualify you to lend out dhingys afterwards our you join a sailing club with their own dhingys (which there are a lot of everywhere!). most offer weekly or even daily sailing lessons and group sailing and faster than you know you will flying over the water. the financial barrier here could be the course cost as they vary widely (my students pay 50 euros a year but some places will cost you that or more an hour it's hard to gauge). apart from that, you will have to invest in a neoprene suit and a sailing west, but that's the extent of it.

all in all, give sailing a try! it is the most rewarding hobby i can think of and my heart aches for everyone who lives at the coast and doesn't best the waves one way or another. and again, i cannot stress it enough: being on the water is half the fun. everything else will happen in due time. the ocean waits for you! happy sailing!

[gabrielsbubblegumbitch]

I just wrote the scene where Vox asks Valentino if he's a communist, and honestly, I think it would be hilarious if Val were a communist.

Vox learns about it during their fourth sleepover (I assume they started seeing each other not long after Val's death, when he wasn't bourgeois and still held some of his beliefs). That revelation causes Vox's existential crisis because he can forgive being a rapist, murderer, and queer, but a communist? He vents about it to Alastor because you know how angry some people get when you suggest that maybe ten people shouldn't own all the money? And Alastor, who is of course an anarchist, says something like, "But you said he was stupid!" That sends Vox spiraling because apparently, he's weirdly attracted to men who are red in more than one way.

[fantastic-nonsense]

I love your thoughtful SoC meta! I would love to know your thoughts on Kaz and Jesper’s relationship. Specifically, I adore Kaz but one thing in particular that always seemed so dark to me was that he enabled Jesper’s gambling addiction even though he obviously does care about him. Kaz is obviously willing to do a lot of fucked up things in service of his goals, but this one in particular, toward his own brother figure, I find sad. It’s kind of addressed during their fight at the end of CK but still feels a little unfinished.

I love Kaz and Jesper's relationship. There's sooooo much to dig into there (way too much for a single meta); it's super juicy and complicated, and one of the best complexities of it is that they often enable and feed off of each other's trauma. The pre-canon status quo is a situation where Kaz and Jesper are, in many ways, using and abusing each other as a way of avoiding dealing with their own trauma. It's a fascinating push-and-pull dynamic because neither of them are pushovers and yet neither one is particularly interested in facing their Issues™ head-on, and they both seemingly recognize that in each other and give each other an uncharacteristic amount of grace in helping the other avoid dealing with it.

In Kaz's case, that most often looks like enabling Jesper's gambling addiction and then repeatedly bailing him out of trouble under the justification of "he's loyal and competent, it would be wasteful to let the other gangs kill him." In Jesper's case, this looks like ignoring Kaz's countless and extremely obvious issues in favor of playing the loyal second. Basically, it's not just Kaz enabling Jesper's gambling addiction; it's also Jesper enabling Kaz's unhinged ruthlessness with little pushback other than a few snarky comments.

They also project a lot of their own issues onto each other! Kaz pushes Jesper away in part because he's projecting the grief and blame he feels over Jordie's death onto Jesper, but Jesper is using Kaz's ruthless pragmatism to escape the crippling disappointment of returning home to face his father's judgement for being a college drop-out, gambling addict, and gang member. And Kaz withholds praise and verbal declarations of trust from Jesper because he hates acknowledging that he cares about people, but Jesper uses Kaz's emotional detachment as a crutch to avoid dealing with his own commitment issues by pining after a boy he knows will never reciprocate his advances. This status quo is, of course, insanely unhealthy for both boys long-term, but where would we be if any of the Crows actually dealt with their issues in a healthy way?

That dynamic, imo, is also only possible because Kaz and Jesper have known each other for longer than anyone else in the main crew; Kaz may have let Inej in further, but he let Jesper in first. As far as we know, Jesper is the first person Kaz genuinely lets past his mile-high walls since Jordie died...but he very deliberately holds him at arms' length in a way that he does not with Inej (something that Jesper notices and is jealous about!). Being "the first" in this case unfortunately comes with a lot of baggage, and Kaz and Jesper would both lowkey rather die than talk about how much they care what the other thinks of them.

Kaz clearly didn't recruit Jesper looking for a friend or someone who reminded him of his dead older brother; he recruited him because he saw someone with a useful skillset who he preferred to be at his side rather than in a rival gang or dead in the canals. It's to Jesper's credit that he managed to break through those walls anyway, but there's only so much he can do in the face of Kaz's armor. And like Inej, Kaz's closed-off personality and actions hurt Jesper repeatedly. But he stays anyway, because he (like Inej) sees the boy underneath the mask that Kaz wears and cares a little too much to let him go:

“He wouldn’t—” Jesper stopped short, and then he laughed. “Of course he would.” Jesper flexed his knuckles, concentrated on the lines of his palms. “Kaz is…I don’t know, he’s like nobody else I’ve ever known. He surprises me.” “Yes. Like a hive of bees in your dresser drawer.” Jesper barked a laugh. “Just like that.” “So what are we doing here?” Jesper turned back to the sea, feeling his cheeks heat. “Hoping for honey, I guess. And praying not to get stung.” Inej bumped her shoulder against his. “Then at least we’re both the same kind of stupid.” “I don’t know what your excuse is, Wraith. I’m the one who can never walk away from a bad hand.” She looped her arm in his. “That makes you a rotten gambler, Jesper. But an excellent friend.” “You’re too good for him, you know.” “I know. So are you." -Ch. 17, Six of Crows

Kaz is unused to verbalizing the trust he places in others and actively in denial about how much he cares about them until Crooked Kingdom; he spends his time deliberately being cruel and pushing people away even as he proves over and over again that he doesn't actually want them to leave him. This casual assholery hits those closest to him (Inej and Jesper) the hardest because they are clearly trusted with his life but not with his heart, and that hurts them both.

For Inej, resolving that behavior looks like giving him an ultimatum ("I will have you without armor or I will not have you at all") and telling herself to walk away unless he meets her challenge. For Jesper? That looks like duking it out on top of the Geldrenner when they're both at rock bottom, because of course that's the only way either one of those boys is ever going to verbalize the tension that underlies their relationship. There's just a lot of baggage and mutual toxicity and unsaid words that neither of them are very interested in dealing with until everything comes to a head during the Clocktower fight.

I think we also forget that the Kaz-Jesper dynamic we see in the majority of the duology is not their normal dynamic: it's how they interact when Kaz is mad at Jesper. And a mad Kaz is, within the scope of canon, a pretty cruel Kaz, which is something that I think a good portion of the fandom likes to handwave away in favor of pointing towards Kaz's active attempts to be better in the back half of the duology.

Ultimately we only see the "normal" Kaz-Jesper dynamic for the first 12 or so chapters of Six of Crows (when the Dock Fight/Eyeball Incident happens) and the last few chapters of Crooked Kingdom. Those chapters are a really interesting look into what that relationship looks like when they're on good terms. It's clear that they're good friends, trust each other a hell of a lot, and joke around with each other quite a bit (the "saves ammo" joke in the parley chapter, their interactions during the Hellgate breakout, the "man with a knife!" "man with a gun!" exchange immediately after Kaz throws Oomen overboard, etc), but we also see the stress points: Jesper getting mad at Kaz for not telling him about Big Bolliger's betrayal, Kaz sending Wylan with Jesper during the prep chapters to keep an eye on him, and Jesper's bee and honey conversation with Inej on the Ferolind, for example.

These stress points are what fracture and crack in the aftermath of Jesper accidentally alerting the other gangs that they were headed out on the Ice Court Job and nearly causing Inej's death, and further buckle under the stress and pressure that Kaz and Jesper deal with during the following month and a half: the Ice Court job, Van Eck kidnapping Inej on Vellgeluk, Colm showing up in Ketterdam, and the Sugar Silo/Auction scheme.

In this way, I think Kaz enabling Jesper's gambling addiction is less about Kaz being actively cruel towards someone he sees the ghost of his brother in and punishing Jesper for the sins he percieves Jordie to have made (which is also true, and a meta for a different time!) and more about the weird balance of toxic mutual leniency Kaz and Jesper have allowed the other to provide for them for over two years...and how that leniency breaks down once it's not just Kaz's life or time on the line when Jesper fucks up.

Put more succinctly: for a long time, Kaz and Jesper existed in a toxic balance of enabling each others' worst impulses and behaviors, which was only able to be verbally addressed when they were both at rock bottom, desperate, and seemingly had very little left to lose. This conflict is somewhat addressed and resolved in the conversation where Kaz refuses to give Jesper the last of the parem and offers up a tiny bit of information about Jordie—showcasing his own growth and how he's finally trying to break the cycle by refusing to enable Jesper's self-destructive tendencies—but that level of tension is unable to be properly resolved in one single blowout argument. And I think it's deliberately left a bit unfinished because neither of them are really in a place where they're ready to address everything they've left unsaid for so long, even in the epilogue chapters.

However, we do see the beginnings of that reconcilitaion (Kaz asking Inej to tell Jesper that he's "missed around the Slat") and the story ends on a hopeful note regarding Kaz's commitment to removing his armor, which implies a lot about the resolution of that dangling thread. And of course, we know that by Rule of Wolves they're back to being thick as thieves and fucking around as usual, so clearly they hashed it out at some point in the in-between (and personally? I don't think it took either of them very long after the CK epilogue chapters to do that hashing out).

tl;dr: I love it when two traumatized and emotionally constipated teenage boys use each other to avoid facing their own personal problems and then get into a fistfight to avoid talking about how much they care about each other. Top-tier dynamic. Chef's kiss. I could talk about them for hours.

[askblueandviolet]

[celestialseamysteries]

did some JLI headshots to try and get a feel for them

[tethered-heartstrings]

Do you think Hannibal was in love with Alana and Bedelia the same way he was in love with Will? Or how do you see their relationship with Hannibal compared to Hannibal's intense love relationship with Will?

I think Hannibal cared about Alana and Bedelia when it suited him. He did care and possibly love them, but it wasn't that deep. He wasn't in love with them. They were pawns just like everyone else. They only knew the things about him they let them see and he made sure it was superficial at best. He shared more about himself with Bedelia than with Alana but it still wasn't all that much. It was vague, enough to keep her interested. She was only there because Hannibal intrigued her, like a bug under a magnifying glass, definitely not because she loved him or really even liked or trusted him. If they could ever accept who he truly was, then maybe it'd be different, but they couldn't (and wouldn't).

Will, on the other hand, he was in love with. Will saw deeper into who Hannibal was, down to the very core of him. And he understood it, and by the end he accepted it. From the very beginning, Will dissected him without knowing who the Chesapeake Ripper even was. But he still understood. How could someone already know more about him without even putting a face to a name as Will had done, and so effortlessly?

Hannibal looked Will in the eyes and said "I let you know me, see me. And you didn't want it." He had never let anyone know him so deeply. It was heartbreaking because not only did Will see it, he understood it, and pulled back. To be rejected is one thing, but to lay yourself bare and then be shot down is a pain Hannibal had never felt. A pain one can only feel if they really loved someone. We are hurt most by the people we love and let ourselves be vulnerable with. And then he held him as he gutted him, and kept holding on. That was a raw intimacy not granted to anyone else. Even when Will rejected him, Hannibal waited. and waited. and waited. He was patient. He'd never grant anyone else his freedom or his time like he has for Will, because he truly loved Will.

By the end, Will loved him back, and with that love, Hannibal let Will pull them both off a cliff. No one else would have the pleasure and chance of killing him so easily except for Will. To die by his hands, in his arms, was a reciprocation of love and confession all its own.