#die peacefully

[thevalicemultiverse]

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Inevitable High School

Victor: Heh, sorry, I've already heard this joke. [pause] Please reassure me that it's just a joke.

[dirt-goth]

As much as I want to be a wholly joyous about the fact that Henry Kissinger is finally fucking dead, as he deserves... There's a lot of me that can't help being upset with. With the fact that he lived to 100 years old. He got better medical care, better housing, and a better, more stable life for those 100 years than billions on this planet ever going to see and he did it specifically through exploitation, state sanctioned murder, and lies. He lived to 100 years comfortably on a legacy of violence that rarely threatened his personal comfort. I want to be joyous that he's finally dead, because the world IS better with him dead, but the reality is he won a long time ago.

[vaguely-concerned]

rook falling asleep on the red couch in the lighthouse dining room while lucanis is making dinner....... they were helping out by keeping him company and peeling and chopping potatoes for a while there but then the potatoes are done and the room is so safe and warm and smells like coffee and good food and lucanis is trying to explain something to spite and his voice is low and soft and good to listen to and rook's eyes only slip closed for a moment. they'll get up to save the world again or whatever in a second just. one moment. while the world is warm and kind. and then they're being shaken gently awake an hour later because it's time to eat and everyone's starting to drift hopefully dinner-wards

[irestotles]

Adel Sabi's baby tots sketches

[hearkenfey]

Sacrifice leads to death, Sagira

[realbeefman]

it really fucks me up how often house md has this message of “the love was there. just not enough.” because of COURSE chase and cameron loved each other. of course house and cuddy were in love and foreman and thirteen were in love and wilson and sam were and cuddy and lucas and house and lydia and house and stacy and taub and rachel but. it just wasn’t enough. the love was there and it matters that it was there. but it saves no one. it fixes nothing. they still move on. they still leave. somebody is always left alone in the end. EXCEPT house wilson who broke this pattern For Yaoi rasones.

[sasanyaustala]

[warrioreowynofrohan]

One of the oddest Silmarillion takes that I’ve seen recently is the idea that Beren and Lúthien had it easy.

I mean, let’s take a look at Beren’s life. The Battle of Sudden Flame hits when he’s in his early twenties. He spends five years carrying on a guerilla war against the invasion of his homeland by orcs and other evil creatures; his mother and all his female relatives have to flee, and he has no knowledge of whether they are desd or alive, or captured. There’s a strange darkness speading over the forest and turning it into something out of a horror movie, a place most people won’t even dare to go into. The band of guerillas is slowly whittled down to about a dozen people, who are hunted constantly by Sauron and his wolves. Then, while he is away, his father, his uncles, and everyone else remaining are brutally killed, and he returns to find crows eating their corpses and orcs joking about looting the dead.

He carries on an guerilla alone, against Sauron, for another several years, in the haunted woods od Taur-nu-Fuin. When he absolutely can’t last any longer, he crosses the most horrifying wasteland in all of Beleriand, where the only water present is poisoned and turns you mad, filled with evil spiders and who knows what other creatures. He’s in his early thirties but he’s been through so mich that he looks like an old man. He has lost literally everyone he has ever known; he does not know if any friend or relative of his, anywhere, is still free or living.

Then he meets Lúthien.

When he leaves Doriath on the quest of the Silmaril, which every sane person in Beleriand knows is laughably impossible, he goes to Finrod, the one person he can hope for any assustance from. Finrod has an entire realm; I don’t think Beren is any expectation that Finrod will go with him personally. And what happens? The king of the largest remaining kingdom in Beleriand besides Doriath is overthrown by his own people at the instigation of Celegorm and Curufin and left with only a few loyal people around him. All of whom then die torturously in the dungeons of Sauron, followed by Finrod’s own death saving Beren.

On top of everything else he’s been through, on top of spending several months in despair being tortured in Sauron’s dungeons, the survivor’s guilt that Beren must be feeling is extreme. Even after Lúthien rescues him, it takes him a while to recover. And he still hasn’t made any progress on the quest itself!

Then they’re attacked by Celegorm and Curufin – the people who bear a substantial amount of respinsibility for the death of Finrod and the Ten, the people who very deliberately abandoned them all to due and coerced all Nargothrond to do the same, and the people who kidnapped Lúthien and attempted to force her into marriage – and they try to kidnap Lúthien again, and to murder Beren.

The fact that Beren does not kill Curufin in that moment is a deed of extreme moral fortitude. The difference between Beren and Lúthien compared with many of the Finwëans isn’t that they don’t face temptations, or that their choices are easy, it’s that they overcome those temptations.

So. Beren spares Curufin’s life at Lúthien’s urging and Curufin immediately tries to murder Lúthien; Beren jumps in front of the arrow, is severely wounded again, and for the third time since they met Lúthien gets to work healing him. Virtually all of their time together has been spent with Beren recuperating from physical injury, psychological injury, or both.

And as soon as Beren recovers, he walks away from the one person who loves him who’s still alive, and prepares to rob the gates of Hell, alone. Because Beleriand is dangerous, and as long as Lúthien is with him and therefore unable to go anywhere safe, she will be in danger from both the servants of Morgoth and the sons of Fëanor. And even if there’s a virtual 100% chance that him walking into Angband will lead to him being slowly tortured to death, that’s a better option than the one person he has left getting killed or, worse, captured, because of him.

And then she goes with him anyway. And beyond all hope they actually succeed in getting a Silmaril - and then he immediately loses it, and his hand, to Carcharoth, and it was all for nothing.

And for the fourth time since Lúthien met him, he’s near death and she’s desperately fighting to heal him and kerp him alive, while she’s exhausted to the point of collapse. And this is the moment when she gives up and goes back to Doriath, because that is what has the best chance of keeping Beren alive.

And then, at last, a ray of hope – Thingol looks at all they’ve been through and says, fine, you crazy kids can get married. And they’ve scarcely been married yet when they learn that oh, it’s not over, Carcharoth is rampaging through the land killing people and this needs to be dealt with. And Beren, even after everything, insists on going. (Because, hello, survivor’s guilt! he probably feels that this is his fault for, uh, getting his hand bitten off.)

(The fact that the Silmaril was, for a time, inside a wolf and outside Doriath, and Celegorm, noted hunter, never got near it, is, okay, rather amusing to me.)

And then Beren dies, saving Thingol, because he knows deeply what it feels like to lose his family and he’s not going to let that happen to Lúthien. And she loses him instead.

Now let’s shift to Lúthien’s point of view. Since her first meeting with Beren she has been betrayed by literally everyone she knows and everyone she meets except for Beren and Huan. She has been treated like a child, and a madwoman, and a trophy, and a pawn, and a sex object, and literally everything except an adult person whose choices have worth and meaning. She is not a superhero; she does not know what she is doing; she is terrified for practically every moment of it, for Beren’s sake even more than for her own, and for much of it she is hopeless. She does not know how or if she can achieve anything; she only knows that she has to try, because it is better than sitting in Doriath waiting to find out if Beren is dead. She puts substantial work and thought and effort into figuring out how to get out of Doriath (given in more detail in the poetic version) – and then, just when she thinks she’s found help (note: Celegorm and Curufin do not give her their names when they first meet her; she doesn’t know they’re the sons of Fëanor), she is again taken captive, this time with the goal of forced marriage and the threat of rape hanging over her. And she still knows Beren is in desperate danger, and she still can do nothing about it.

When Huan aids her and she goes to Tol-in-Gaurhoth, it isn’t because she feels she has the power to fight Sauron one-on-one! It’s because she’s desperate and can’t think of any other options. And in fact, it is not she who defeats Sauron, it is Huan; once he is defeated by Huan, she has the intelligence and strength of will to force his surrender by threatening him with something he fears more than defeat, and to demand – not the freeing of Beren alone – but the destruction of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, freeing all its prisoners. The reason she defeats Sauron is not that she’s a half-Maia badass who can wave her hands and do everything easily! The reason she defeats him is that she shows up there completely vulnerable and in effect uses herself as bait. That is an extraordinary degree of courage, not some kind of deus ex machina. And she’s putting all the strength that she has on the line – she’s pretty much passing out by the time she finds Beren. Similarly, all her healing of him is hard, exhausting work that she’s doing despite being, the whole time, terrified that he’s about to die. None of this is easy.

Likewise in Angband – Huan’s advice and Lúthien’s magic of disguise and sleep is invaluble in getting them through the door and past Carcharoth, but the reason she is able to enchant Morgoth and cast all Angband into sleep is not primarily because of extreme power, but because, like every other non-Beren person she meets, he doesn’t take her seriously. Morgoth finds the idea of using Melian’s daughter as a brief entertainment amusing (and, if you read the poetic version, makes some truly creepy sexual threats against her), and that’s how she is able to get him unguarded enough that she’s well into her song and he’s already getting sleepy before it starts to occur to him that maybe this isn’t going quite as he planned. Lúthien’s victories are not because she’s just on a different power level from the rest of Beleriand, they’re because she’s amazingly brave and willing to walk into the most dangerous places virtually defenceless. And she and Beren rely on each other utterly – after her sleep song she’s practically passing out and can only get out of Angband because Beren is holding her up.

So this is who they are, at Beren’s death. A man who has lost everyone he loves and everyone who loves him, every friend or family, often helplessly witnessing their gruesome death – everyone except for Lúthien. And an elf-woman who has been betrayed by everyone she loved or trusted, except for Beren.

When Beren dies, I wonder if he’s even relieved that it’s finally him dying instead of everyone around him. When he sees Lúthien in the Halls of Mandos, I believe his first feeling would be not joy or love, but horror. That the last living person he loved, and the one he wanted above all to save, had now died because of him.

But Lúthien isn’t done. She goes to Mandos, and she sings, and her song says: look at what we have been through, look at what all Beleriand has been through, Eldar and Edain. We don’t want realms or glory or power; we only want a few moments of peace with each other, and we fought so hard for it, and we didn’t even get that. And when she’s offered bliss and immortality for herself, she says No, I don’t want it, not without Beren. She isn’t promised happiness or long life – she only know that for the short time she will get, she will have the chance to be with Beren. And that is enough for her; for that, she gives up everything else.

This is a faerie-story; but it does not sound to me like a trite tale of easy victories handed to the heroes by Fate or by the author! They fought and struggled and sacrificed for those victories, amd they did it without ever letting go of courage, and mercy, and humility. There is a reason why this is the story that Frodo and Sam hearken back to for inspiration.

[softpine]

the problem is you can't be a casual simmer who uses a lot of mods because when you only play sims like once a month or less that means your game will need an update every single time you open it and then you have to update all your mods and change all the settings and by the time you're done it's over half an hour later and you're tired and you don't even want to play anymore. and repeat. it's sisyphean

[ghostorbz]

made this on mspaint i didnt wanna pick uo my phone

[iwasbored777]

The fact that all Gwen knows about her variants in other universes is that they're dead is so sad. Like imagine you want to know what happens to you in other dimensions and it turns out that wherever you look you mean nothing, you're so unimportant that there's no bigger role for you other than dying.

And I've seen you guys pointing this out, where she's looking at what looks like her own death and even if it's not this is not just a "love interest" Gwen, this is a superhero who is supposed to mean something, but she doesn't. She's only here to die. And so far this (our) Gwen doesn't have any reason to believe that she won't die very soon just like other Gwens.

I think that one of the main reasons why she's rejecting Miles is not just her trauma and all shit she's been through and the fear of dying like other Gwens when they're involved with Spider-Man, but also because if they start something and she dies this will hurt him too.

It's easy to say "canon events aren't true she shouldn't believe in that" but this isn't just a regular risk, this is her life we're talking about.

[goldengrecha]

That's all I have for you today guys.

[phoenixcatch7]

Oh yeah story idea: percy Jackson reaches his emotional/mental limits) (annabeth gets knocked down during a huge fight and nearly gets killed) and goes absolutely ape. We're talking hurricanes, earthquakes, a zillion exploding water sources, blood bending, poison bending, pounding rain, the works.

And it starts to kill him. Like eating too much ambrosia, his mortal body is burning up, too much power too quickly.

But through sheer force of will and the amount of divine energy he's putting out, he keeps clinging on as his body crumbles to ash, divine power building stronger and stronger and higher and higher.

And he accidentally brute forces his way into godhood.

And what would have been a true power reveal and two deaths, Percy being punished for his strength ala Frank, abruptly becomes a pseudo divine political drama, with percy at risk of any dozen horrific fates the frenzied council are slinging around (minus poseidon, who is also frenzied but unwilling to let his newly immortal son die) whilst dealing with all the ramifications of divinity and the new social strata of the immortal pantheon (and EVERYONE having opinions), all while trying to get back home.

But Annabeth survives because of it, so he can't really complain.

[tallyhawley]

AWW LOOK HOW HAPPY PYRO IS TO SEE ENGIE 😭😭

I flipping loves the final comic, and no, I didn’t cry.

[arttsuka]

Sorry for this super depressing poll but

[bequeerbehappy]

Nancy adopted Max during season 4.