#die the second they picked me up

[beebfreeb]

Hiii! Not sure if you've gotten this question already, so feel free to ignore this if you have, but what do you think Combo Breaker's reaction to Candybug would've been if he saw him like that? (I like Breaker a lot and was so curious about what kind of thoughts he'd have about that abomination because I legit had NO idea how he'd react, so figured I'd ask the source lol)

LOL, glad to hear that you like him ^_^! I did think about like, if he arrived a little earlier... provided that a cybug wouldn't, like, carry him away before he saw KC.

He would think KC looks very cool and say strange things like "woah what's those weird tubes you got?" and "Can I stick my fingers in the space between your joints or is that weird?"

[blue-mood-blue]

I’ve grown to appreciate the aus where Shen Yuan enters the story as “Shen Yuan” - same name, probably similar face, generally able to interact with PIDW as himself and change the story through his added presence. I like the sense of “if only you’d been here, things might have been better the first time around” of it all.

And I was thinking, it’s a funny coincidence in that scenario that someone named Shen Yuan gets put into… another Shen Yuan. What are the chances? What a weird twist of fate that Airplane would pick out the name that his most dedicated critic could slip into seamlessly.

What about a version where it’s not coincidence at all?

Airplane goes to school with a kid named Shen Yuan. He’s prickly and hard to approach and a little intense, but Airplane is persistent. In fairness, Airplane is relentless - and maybe it’s a good thing that they end up being friends, because they’re a little too much for anyone else to handle. They balance each other out. They’re the “weird kids” in class and they’re okay with that, because even when they don’t have any words for it, they know they’re not like their classmates, not really. That’s okay; they don’t want to be.

Recesses and breaks are consumed with the elaborate stories that Airplane wants to tell, and all the holes Shen Yuan pokes into them. It’s not mean-spirited, though, even though Shen Yuan isn’t the kind to temper his words. It’s passionate. He cares about those stories the way Airplane cares about them, and it can’t be mistaken for anything else when they lean together conspiratorially across the lunchroom table. They’ve both got notebooks filled with details and characters and monsters. Shen Yuan’s practically got a whole bestiary sketched out in wobbly childhood attempts at art, entries fervently scrawled beside them. Airplane prattles out plots nonstop, always with the promise of shining eyes and being asked “what happens next?”

They come up with a whole world together. Airplane’s going to write about it someday. Shen Yuan is going to read every word.

Shen Yuan misses school. Shen Yuan starts missing school a lot.

Airplane goes to the hospital room instead. He doesn’t think to worry, because Shen Yuan is okay - that’s what he says. He looks okay, and he’s a kid, and it doesn’t feel real that anything bad should happen to a kid. He doesn’t think to worry. He doesn’t think to say goodbye.

It’s one of the older Shen brothers who catches him on the way up to the room one day, in the hallway just outside - snaps at him to go the fuck home, and when Airplane hesitates, pushes him into the elevator and tells him not to come back. “Tells” is a generous way to describe the way the words come out - a growl, a hiss, the sound an animal would make when a hand got too close to a wound.

(It’s not fair to name a villain after him, even if the name never really comes up in the story. He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d lost a brother minutes before, and he was getting his brother’s friend out of the way so he didn’t have to… see. It isn’t fair, but then, none of it is fair.)

Death feels very real after that.

The notebooks get shoved into a closet, and it’s not until Airplane’s moving out and one falls on him from a high shelf that he thinks about it again. He’s written things, lots of things, but nothing as ambitious as this - nothing as important. It could be good, he considers. He’d promised. Shen Yuan wanted to read it.

The problem was that no one else does, not for a long time, not until Airplane has whittled himself and his art into a corner and into such an unfamiliar shape that he has to wonder how it’s still his own face he sees in the mirror. He has to eat. He has to pay rent. Shen Yuan would yell at him, but Shen Yuan isn’t there to yell at him, and who cares. Who cares if it could have been better? The people who actually are here love it, and it’s paying his bills, and sometimes stories don’t go the way they’re supposed to and the world is fucking unfair. It doesn’t matter.

(It does. But he shoves that thought away along with styrofoam cups and soda bottles to the bottom of a garbage bag.)

Authors are not gods and their power is limited, but Airplane exercises just a sliver of what he’s been granted and gifts an inconsequential sort of immortality. He thinks about making him a rogue cultivator, maybe the kind that goes around documenting beasts and compiling his findings. He thinks about making him someone too powerful for death to touch, or too important to threaten, but when Airplane looks at the world he crafted and everything that’s become of it, it feels like the kindest thing he can do for Shen Yuan is a childhood where he’s loved, and a death that’s peaceful. What does it say about that world, that he’d kill off his best friend too early again instead of making him live there?

(The best writing he ever does is the only, shining moment of humanity that his scum villain ever displays: a lament about death that comes too early, about a brother gone too soon. The commenters praise him. The commenters flatter over how real the emotions feel. The commenters don’t get any response from Airplane on that chapter.)

Death is incredibly real when it comes for him too early, too, still hovering over his keyboard with the story technically finished and incredibly incomplete. Airplane could tell himself that’s because the written version can never be the version in the writer’s head, always shifting and with every possibility still on the table, but he knows better than that. The System knows better than that, with its condescending message about “improving” his writing and “closing plot holes” and “achieving his original vision”...

…and he’s a child again. He’s a child in his own story, he’s Shang Qinghua now without the benefit yet of a peak or cultivation or anything, and maybe he’s a little bitter, and a little scared, and…

And Shen Yuan - with longer hair, with robes, with a couple of older kids watching him from across the street, but undeniably the prickly little boy who used to sit down imperiously across from him and tell him everything that was wrong with the chuck of writing that had been handed to him last period, but with that smile that said he was only invested because he knew it could be better and they were going to make it better - marches up to him with a fire in his eyes and a frown that warns of a coming tirade.

“You told it wrong,” is the first thing he says.

Shang Qinghua wants to ask how him how he’s here, how this is possible, or maybe laugh because, yeah - yeah, Shen Yuan has no goddamn idea how wrong he got absolutely everything.

(Shang Qinghua wants to say “I missed you” and “why did you leave so soon” but he’s here now. He’s right here.)

“I know,” he says instead. “I’m sorry. It all kind of… spiraled out of control.”

Shen Yuan frowns, but then it dissipates the way it always does, and his eyes shine with ideas the way they always used to. “That’s okay,” he relents, grabbing for his hand. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it what it was supposed to be.”

[midnightdemonhunter]

But don't worry. By then, he wants to.

(@romanromulus :D )

[levinbolts]

nothing sexier than a skilled, effortlessly lethal man

[moeblob]

Erin, to her crush: You're a dick

Mason, the crush: I won't argue! But to clarify -

[impossible-rat-babies]

I’m still thinking about that “you promised” “I know” post

[3416]

thinking about "mitch will assault me if i don't pick him" again.... i circle back to it all the time but it's like..... auston KNOWS how he feels about being left out and will always tease him for it but ALSO wouldn't dream of not including him anyway ...as if it were a given that mitch will always be his pick.......... his face when he says it too. i will never get over how relaxed he seems and i will NEVER stop wanting the mitch and auston leaf to leaf we are OWED. it is so long overdue, how do the leafs not understand this

[moe-broey]

How to stop losing confidence in my long term projects... please....

[yazzydream]

I love that Mei Mei is such an off-putting freak. Even if I don't personally like her, I love that she exists. I love that Gege Akutami is not afraid to fuck up, scar up, and kill off his female characters. I love that they're as strange and eccentric and varied as anyone could be.

He doesn't treat them delicately, or with kid gloves. He treats them with the exact same consideration he does his male characters. As vehicles for the story first-- because that's what they are.

[kaisollisto]

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

having a lot of allie X and similar in my hoard of songs that inevitably end up going in my playlists for abusive ship dynamics is wild, because then you get haunting high-voiced trauma pop but it's just like, scranky scooby doo villains. anyway pericky blast

[wolfchans]

The fic I've been waiting for 3 weeks to update is getting a new chapter this Friday and I just learned the chapter is gonna be titled 'trauma'..........

[butchladymaria]

honestly re: my last post about The Blood TM, i guess it’s another reason i’m an Eileen Lived Truther lmao

like bloodborne doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the horrible fates of beloved characters (looking at you through my tears, gilbert). but every example i can think of, arianna, viola, simon, annalise… when they die, we find them very decidedly dead.

but presuming the old blood heals via reanimating the person who takes it, no matter how sorry a state their body might be in… maybe that would give a bit of credence as to why we only find a drying pool of blood rather than eileen’s corpse. maybe she really did manage to get up and have a happy retirement? i can dream, anyway

[fragglerockopinions]

How to find will to live and purpose in life when chronic pain is destroying your body and mind.

[kuromi-hoemie]

i just finished iron blooded orphans and need to lay down for a bit

[daisywords]

when your only friend at the party actually enjoys mingling