#do it yoursel

[prouvaireafterdark]

listen I know it's heartbreaking that Claudia dies and it's understandable to wish she didn't, but let's please not accuse the writers of fridging her. to do so is a fundamental misunderstanding of the story and is frankly insulting to the intelligence and skill of the writers of the show.

Claudia's death, and the overwhelming grief and regret her parents experience because of it, is quite literally the point of the entire story. she dies because Anne's daughter Michele died of leukemia when she was five years old and there was nothing she or her husband could do to prevent it.

writing IWTV was how Anne coped with the unimaginable loss of a parent losing her child. she created a story about a little girl that could not die and then killed her anyway. Claudia's death is a senseless, unavoidable tragedy, just like Michele's was. the grief that haunts Louis and Lestat for the rest of their lives is the same grief that haunted Anne and her husband.

so when you're accusing people of killing Claudia off to benefit a story about two men, please remember that in real life sometimes parents lose their children. please remember Michele Rice.

she's the reason Claudia exists.

she's also the reason Claudia cannot be saved.

[chiisana-lion]

the thing about midori and yuzuru to me personally is that even how midori usually gets yuzuru's guard down by his very passionate attachment to him and his art, realistically speaking there's no way yuzuru wouldn't have to jump at least several dozen mental hoops to let himself get too close to someone whom he shouldn't have had any particular relation with initially. while i do love drawing them just hanging out a lot (enrichment!! i think itd be good for them both) a majority of the time it comes from a place where i think this guy would never let himself get too carried away and forgo any chance of making needless deeper interpersonal relationships and goddamn if im not going to study it

[ispyspookymansion]

EVIL BOOPING ME?

[fraudulent-cheese]

do you guys have any analyses of female TD character's anything because i need to read analysis that isn't just my own shit istg

[caterpillarinacave]

Who needs a GPS when you’ve got a Frederick

[juniperhillpatient]

it’s time for my friend to get back from vacation I’ve been bored of my hair for so long I’m about to cut it even tho I still haven’t reached my length goals I need to dye it right NEOW

[subsequentibis]

im so unwell about vkaz

[v-arbellanaris]

i think the problem (?) is that the only kind of (fictional?) love that interests me is the kind of love that changes the world. the kind of love that derails the narrative, the kind of love that changes everything -- not necessarily by how special or unique the love is but by the very mundanity of it. the love that grows, not in spite of the barren lovelessness of Before, but out of it. i think that's why I'm always so invested in ships that are two people diametrically opposed to each other, or enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, or two people on separate sides of the morality issue coin, because i love it when love... not that it changes a person but it allows the person to Become. the space, the grace, to change. to love the monster, to love the unlovable and the intolerable, is to make it something other than a monster, than unlovable, than intolerable. i love it when being loved at your worst, ugliest, most horrible self is what makes you want to be someone worth loving. like is this ANYTHING to anyone or

[gray-warden]

I'm so so tired of how any time someone is being super homophobic the immediate response is "lol they must be secretly gay", especially when it's straight people saying that. 100% straight people are actually perfectly capable of being super homophobic, closeted gay people aren't the only ones capable of being that way. Stop putting the blame for vile homophobia on gay people. Stop trying to insult the homophobe by calling them gay, it's just really telling when people, esp straight people, use the idea of being a closeted gay person as the basis of a joking insult. And if someone really is a violent homophobe bc they cant accept they're gay then that's fucking awful, and where do you think they learned all that homophobia in the fist place?

[panvani]

And ofc there's no way to specifically argue about that point beyond like. A basic policy of self acceptance because it becomes either essentialism or just incredible selfishness on the basis of Just Being That Way. But I do think like. As it becomes more generally accepted that things like gendered attraction cannot be suppressed without immense trauma to the person that experiences it, I wish there were more general understanding that people are not perfect masters of their own minds and selves

[courtillyy]

i think this episode showed why fred/gunn never would have worked long term. sure theyre fucking cute and fun and they have chemistry and i do like them !! but gunn since day one and til right now has always treated fred like she's not as capable as him and angel of making her own decisions and you just cant have that in a healthy relationship

[p4nishers]

(...) And she’s keeping you angry. If you’re full of anger, there’s no room left for fear.

“You hold that anger,” Mistress Weatherwax said, as if reading all of her mind. “Cup it in your heart, remember where it came from, remember the shape of it, save it until you need it."

one of the most important things terry pratchett has taught me is that it's okay to be angry. no one has ever said that to me before. he taught me that anger was an engine. that you can use that anger. that it goes hand in hand with love. he taught me to never underestimate my anger, because it's one of my strongest points. he taught me genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. he taught me i shouldn't be fighting my anger, but what caused it. he himself said rage underlines everything he wrote. i never heard anger talked about so openly like that before and it's freeing, i suppose, to realize you are truly, truly not alone in your rage at the world. you never were.

[sinecosinewheel]

yeah this is a vent post

[cyreneduvent]

You find yourself in a room. You look around in mild confusion. You open the door.

---

You find yourself in a room. Wait, weren’t you just here? You open the door.

You find yourself in a room. It is bland, with white walls and a white ceiling and wooden flooring. It is the same as the room you were just in, and the room before that. Furrowing your brow, you open the door.

---

You find yourself in a room. It is the same room. You look behind you. There is a plain white wall. Your heartrate rises. You open the door.

---

You find yourself in a room. “Did I… walk in here?” you ask yourself. You’re standing in the centre of the floor. You take three steps forward and open the door.

---

You find yourself in a room. You didn’t walk into the room. You were stepping through the door, and then you were standing in the centre of the room, and your memory skips smoothly between those two events. You open the door, and slowly reach lift your foot up, over the threshold, down towards the floor on the other side.

---

You find yourself in a room. Before your foot hit the ground, but only barely. No moment of vertigo or continued momentum, nothing to suggest that anything happened between stepping through the doorway and standing in the centre of the room motionless.

The wood flooring is only printed plastic. You open the door.

---

You find yourself in a room. It is so bland it is nearly aggressive in its monotony. The walls are white, although the kind which gets called eggshell in paint stores to differentiate it from the twenty two other shades of off-white. The ceiling is the same colour. The fake wooden flooring would be called honey-coloured, but it lacks all the depth and saturation of fresh honey. It is so different as to almost be a falsehood. When you tap your foot on it, it does not sound hollow, but it does sound insubstantial. The room is lit by small windows, high up on the side walls like a basement apartment in an oddly narrow house.

You reach for the window on the right wall. It is just barely low enough for you to slide it open and pull yourself up, kicking and scrabbling against the wall. You pull your head through.

---

You find yourself in a room.

“Fuck,” you say. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” English is unfortunately uncreative in its common swear words.

You look again at the wall. Despite your flailing to reach the window, this wall is pristine, with no scuffs or dents.

You open the door.

---

You find yourself in a room. You run forward to the door, opening it and throwing yourself through again and again. The change from running to stock still in the centre of each new room would be disconcerting if you thought about it at all. You pass through dozens of doors before stopping, folding down with your hands on your thighs, heaving rough breaths through a dry throat.

After two minutes and twenty-seven seconds (you do not know this. This room has no clock.) you straighten up somewhat. You observe the room. The walls and ceiling are eggshell. The floor is fake wood, plastic and cheap. The windows are set high up on the walls on either side. The door stands across from you, the same colour as the walls, a round silver knob, silver hinges. Behind you is a plain white wall.

It is exactly the same as every other room you’ve been in.

You step forward, slow and staggering, the lactic acid flooding your leg muscles trying to anchor you in place. Still, you are pulled forward by curiosity, by hope, by the most human of emotions. You grasp the silver knob. It is smooth and cool, but warms swiftly in your hand. You turn it gently, pull the door open and step back instead of through. You try to look in front of you. There is nothing there.

Not blackness. Not whiteness, not tv-static fuzziness. A nothing that undulates as you try to look at it, like the patterns that form when you close your eyes. A colour that does not exist and also is no colour at all, a space that your eyes refuse to resolve, an empty doorway that would be threatening if your brain wasn’t trying to ignore its existence.

You realize even as you look at it that this is why you never saw anything on the other side of the door. There was nothing there.

You reach out your hand to touch it. After all, you’ve done it before. You can see your hand even as it enters the nothing, your brain taking advantage of the tangible intrusion to ignore the impossibility around it. Or rather, to ignore that there’s nothing to ignore. Your hand is in a doorway, and there is nothing else. You lean forward to stick your head through as well.

---

You find yourself in a room. It has a door, and a window. The floor is vinyl wood, light coloured and bland. You sigh, and lie down on it. You close your eyes.

You do not sleep, although your mind does drift. A waking hibernation, letting time slip by for lack of anything else to do. Sometimes you open your eyes again and stare at the ceiling for a while. Eggshell, so plain you feel as if you should see the same sort of swirling patterns that come in complete darkness. They don’t come – there is a depth to darkness, even just that of closed eyes, and this room contains no such depths.

The floor heats with the warmth of your skin, but never quite enough to be comfortable. It digs into your back the way only a flat surface can. After thirty four minutes and eight seconds (again, you do not know this. Not only is there no way to measure the time, but there are no events to delineate it in your memory. There is no meaningful difference between a minute and an hour) the discomfort finally outweighs the stasis of boredom, and you roll over, flopping vaguely onto your side. You stare at the baseboards.

There is a corner of the floor where the vinyl sheets haven’t quite clicked together. It stands out strangely, a mistake amongst the inhuman nothingness. Pulling yourself to your feet, you shake out your joints, where the coolness of the floor had settled in exchange for your warmth. An exchange which follows the laws of physics if not those of fairness. You take the two steps to the corner, and crouch over the disjointed seam.

It's nearly invisible from above, but your fingers catch on the lip easily when you run them along the printed grain. You can just barely get your fingertips under the edge, just enough to pry upwards. The sheet flexes as you pull, the edge popping free bit by bit, each releasing clip startlingly loud in the perfect silence of the room. Once the side is detached the ends lift free easily, and you prop the section of flooring up against the wall.

Beneath the floor is grey cement, the room set directly on a foundation. And set into that foundation is a trapdoor. Real wood, still rough. Iron handle, dull grey with time and disuse. You grab the handle. It’s cold in your hand, the metal swiftly pulling heat from your fingers. You lift it, and climb through.

---

You find yourself in a room. It looks exactly the same as every other room you’ve been in, but is it? The door, the window, the hole beneath the floor. Is there more to this aggressively plain eightly square feet than meets the eye? “Maybe it’s all a puzzle,” you say. “Maybe I just need to find all the exits.” No one replies. There is no one else here, after all.

The other window. (You find yourself in a room.) Flaking paint in corner concealing a crack in the drywall, only noticeable by the residue it leaves upon the floor. You claw it wider with your bare hands. Your fingernails break and bleed. “Maybe it just wants my blood,” you muse, somewhat nonsensically. You may in fact still be panicking. The crack is wide enough. You slip through. (You find yourself in a room.) You pull apart the door’s hinges. Maybe the door itself was the problem. The door is white. It is all so bland that it burns. (You find yourself in a room.) You pick apart every inch of the eight hundred cubic feet that is all you have seen for hours.

---

You find yourself in a room. You sit down in a corner, one of the ones next to the door, and you begin to cry. Softly, tears without sound. There is no one else here to hear you, after all. No one that will hear your sobs and ask what is wrong. You are so, so tired.

“Is this a test?” you ask a god you’ve never really believed in. “Are you seeing what it would take for me to beg you? What the human mind is willing to take?”

You haven’t gone to church in a long while. Was whatever greater being who seems to have decided to trap you on a whim upset with your lack of devotion? With how you liked the music but hated the lyrics? With the parts of the prayers you wouldn't speak?

“Or is this your doing? Some punishment for it all,” you say to the devil you believe in even less. “Doing god’s dirty work, or just doing this because you can.” At least you’re not a pawn, in some game between deities. If this is some devil, by some quirk of existence, then they cannot be in opposition to god. Any god in this world is cruel enough on their own.

You get to your feet again, pushing up from the wall. You wince as your limbs unbend and your stiff joints shift.

“Onward, then,” you announce to the room. To anything that may be listening within it. “I’ll dance for you, you god or devil or room full of aliens. I’ll fucking dance.”

You set your pace and begin to walk. Through door after door after door. If this is a test, your options are to pass it or to die.

It must be a test.

(It isn’t)

---

You find yourself in a room. You have been walking for hours. You do know this, because your feet are aching and your legs shake and it cannot possibly have been any less. You curl up in the corner, pull your sleeves around you as you wish they were a sweater, and shiver yourself to sleep.

It is not morning, when you wake. It is not morning, because it has never been night, or afternoon or evening. The light in the room never shifts. It streams in the windows, set high on the walls, just as bright and as heatless as it did the first time you found yourself standing here.

It is not morning, but time has passed, and your body had renewed some of its energy while you slept. You are cold, and a headache is beginning to poke at the back of your skull, but for now, at least, you are still alive.

You set your jaw, and set off for the door with one last hope. “It must end,” you mutter to yourself. “All things end. Nothing is truly infinite.”

You open a door. “It must end.” You find yourself in a room.

You open a door. “It must end.” You find yourself in a room.

---

            You open a door. “It must end,” you say, your voice going, the words coming out less as a mutter and more a ragged whisper. “It must.”

(It doesn’t.)

[cicidraws]

i know for a fact ive been very much spoiled, im very thankful for every bit of money-help i get or gifts or things on my list bought.

i appreciate that so much. im thankful for what i have for sure. thank you for supporting me and helping me out when able.

[golswia]

Do it again

Do it yoursel-