#don't know him enough sorry)

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Pokemon AU my absolute beloved 🙏🙏

(Translation for Ford's cursive/complete image description in the ALT text ❤️)

Made a companion piece to this!! See it here ❤️

[anoant-haikyuu-dump]

never trust the guy with a bright blonde mohawk to style your hair

[varpusvaras]

I know some people aren't fans of really domestic jayroy, but for me it's getting even more desirable, especially because of what happens in Gotham War.

Because I know nothing more ironically comical than Jason being actually very capable of just living a normal domestic life, and it's purely because the people he is living that life with are people who are not constantly antagonizing him.

[yakuzabrainrotlive]

Some stuff I whipped up coming down from my fever lol

[dendroaspis-viridis]

I'm begging you, BioWare... Learn from the mistakes of Baldur's Gates past...

[soapsbaby]

Goodbyes

Summary: How you and your CoD partner would spend the last day and night before they have to go off on a mission.

Characters: Simon “Ghost” Riley, Johnny “Soap” MacTavish, König, Kyle “Gaz” Garrick, Alejandro Vargas, Rodolfo “Rudy” Parra, John Price, Valeria Garza, all x gn!reader Rating: SFW Themes: Angst, sadness, softness, no warnings needed Word count: 1300ish

Ghost

He’ll try to push you away, as if that would make it easier for both of you.

Once he can tell that he just makes you upset, he apologizes and makes sure the two of you get to do whatever you want to, usually you prefer to just get takeout with him, stay in bed and cuddle.

To him it’d be easier to not do that, it makes him miss you even more, but he does it for your sake. He knows that if something bad happens to him that you’ll be the one who suffers most, so he makes sure your feelings are prioritized.

He makes sure to say goodbye to you at night so he doesn’t have to wake you up in the morning and make leaving even harder on his part. He tries to be stoic about it but he hates every second of it, especially if you fall asleep on top of him and he has to gently shove you off and then just leave you behind.

Soap

He will absolutely not leave your side at all, trying to make the most out of your last hours together. No matter where you go, he’ll have a hand around your waist, is constantly kissing you and showering you in affection.

He tries his very best to be as cheerful as possible even though it’s hard, but he hates seeing you worried or sad. 

Before he leaves in the morning he makes sure he has something prepared for you, he puts flowers in the kitchen for you to find, notes on the mirror. You’ll also almost always wake up to a voice message on your phone by him, telling you that he loves you and that he’ll be back as soon as possible and there’s always a suggestion on what you will do, whether he wants to take you to a fancy restaurant he heard about or some nice café.

König

He gets quiet. His anxiety almost always tells him that something terrible will happen to either you or him once he leaves and the thoughts slowly drive him insane until he leaves and his brain switches into work-mode.

Even though he doesn’t really talk to you about it, you can tell that it bothers him and so usually you are the one trying your best to cheer him up. It also helps when you plan things you will do after he comes back and not even let the possibility that he might get hurt become an option. Oh, it’ll be just a week until you’re back, I might as well book the cinema tickets right now, right? 

He has a hard time expressing it, but he is eternally grateful for how casual you are on the outside even though you are of course freaking out as well. His job is really, really dangerous and him not coming back is always unfortunately a possibility.

He'll cuddle you to sleep and kiss you in the mornings, softly telling you that he loves you.

Price

He always makes sure to treat you to a nice dinner before he leaves, to leave a good impression, as he puts it. This can mean that you go to a nice, upscale restaurant, but he also loves cooking at home for you. He loves providing for you in general but the days before missions are the ones where he goes all out, going to the market for the fanciest ingredients and making sure you have an appetizer, main course, dessert and whichever expensive wine fits the meal the most.

He’s usually in good spirits before missions and not too worried about his wellbeing which rubs off on you. He is confident that nothing will happen, so you are too. 

You get up with him so you can have an early breakfast and spend some time talking before he has to leave.

Gaz

It hits him so much harder than it hits you. Not even because he is afraid that something will happen to him when he’s gone, just because he hates being apart from you for so long. 

If he got his way you’d just spend all day in bed, his face buried against your chest and rubbing his back but you usually try to at least get him out of the house a little bit, go for a walk or grab a coffee somewhere.

He is always affectionate but those days you won’t be able to get rid of him, not that you want to. He just needs as much reassurance as you can give him.

He really struggles getting out of bed in the morning, usually he’ll roll over to you again and kiss you awake, telling you he doesn’t want to leave and how much rather he’d stay with you. It doesn’t matter whether he has to leave earlier than you, usually you`ll get ready with him, giving him as many hugs and kisses in the process and sending him off with a smile. He doesn't have to know that you break down once he has left.

Rudy

The day before is always reserved for a family party, a barbecue or some other get together. He goes away often so not his entire family will come over every time but there’ll always be someone there. His family is incredibly important to him and he also feels much more secure knowing that you have a good relationship with them so you are taken care of if something were to happen to him. 

Once it becomes evening, though, he will make sure that he can focus on you and you only. Usually you won’t do anything “special” but he makes sure to take his time to talk to you, to make sure you are alright and that there is nothing on your mind that you are not telling him. There is nothing more important to him than clear communication and making sure he is on good terms with all of the people he loves before leaving for a mission.

You’ll fall asleep in his arms and wake up the same way, he would never leave before saying goodbye to you. Usually you’re still sleepy and he’ll kiss you goodbye, tuck you back in and let you keep sleeping.

Alejandro

He tries his very best to be as casual before missions as he can, going through his regular schedule and not to make too big of a deal out of it, but you can tell that he is giving you more affection than usual, being a little more touchy and telling you how much he loves you even more than he does otherwise. 

He’ll make sure that everything is taken care of before he’s gone, taking you grocery shopping before and stocking up on everything that you might need. He also makes sure you pick up extra on some items to make the time easier for yourself, a good book, some snacks, maybe a bottle of wine. 

He is a true romantic at heart but he keeps the special dates and occasions away from your last days, it feels like bad karma otherwise.

He’ll make sure you are comfortable getting to sleep and that he has told you a million times that he adores you, that he’ll be back so soon and that you don’t have to worry one bit.

Valeria

She tries so, so very hard not to show it, but she is terrified every time she leaves that it will be the last time she gets to see you. Hell, she might not even get hurt but she might get caught and go to jail for the rest of her life.

She always makes sure that she has her affairs in order before she leaves, makes sure that you have access to everything you need so you can get away safely and not be punished for your connection to her. 

She’ll be extra affectionate, making sure that you know that she loves you and also making a point that she would never be mad at you for denying any connection you have to her if she gets into legal trouble. 

She treats every goodbye like it might be your last one, kissing you like she never gets to again and spending the entire night holding you. 

[thiinka]

[eatgras]

doc warmup

[s2pdoktopus]

I gave him a girlfriend.

(this scene starts with them kissing, actually. I just didn't want to draw people kissing. Jiang Cheng pulls back because he doesn't want to ruin their friendship, nevermind that she initiated. He apologizes for how inappropriate that was. Meihua, undeterred, asks him if it's inappropriate because they aren't exactly courting each other. Jiang Cheng doesn't answer so she took that as a yes and then the comic happens.)

[epickiya722]

Sometimes, I forget that there are people who find protagonists like Izuku, Tanjiro and Yuji "boring" because "they exhibit typical shonen protagonist traits" and one of them woukd be "They're nice, they're kind, they're all sunshine".

Which, okay, have your tastes, that's fine.

But when it comes to characters who are kind and/or nice, there's layers to them.

Just because a character is nice, doesn't mean they're kind and vice versa.

A character can be the most evil one in that story and still show kindness to some people somehow. A nice character may be the one to do immoral things, Yuji being an example.

The reasons for why a character is nice and/or kind varies, too.

Some are just genuinely born that one. Some may be selective as to who they show those sides, too, because of their own morality. Maybe, a character is being kind or nice to also manipulate others. Some characters may choose to be kind because who will, despite the cruelty of the world?

Also, I feel like, even with people outside of a fandom, they hear or seen a character being nice and kind, they just stop at that and don't think they're capable of being ruthless.

Like, Tanjiro canonically has a pure soul, but multiple times he has shown he is not only a menace in a fight, but he has shown to be one in casual situations. Sometimes, he's not even aware he is because he is so nice.

Izuku, he's a sweetheart, too. But even he will just shut off that "sunshine" to literally tear into you. He has been told in canon to hold back his emotions, the most prominent one being his anger. When he's angry, go apologize!

Yuji, look, let's be real... he is sunshine and rainbows, but that boy is probably the least sweetest one out of these three examples. Hold back? Yuji don't know what that is. No, no, he really don't. I kid you not, this kid doesn't. You can't even use the fight against Junpei as one because he punched Junpei UP into a window. Had Junpei not have that shikigami, he would have gotten major injuries.

My point is!

Just because a character is kind or nice or both, it doesn't mean...

A) it's the only trait they have.

B) they're not capable of not being kind or nice.

I think some see nice and kind and associate it with being "soft" in a derogatory manner.

Which, first off, there's nothing wrong with being soft.

I'll be honest, it will sound silly (go ahead and laugh actually, I encourage it), but if you asked put a character like one of the mentioned protagonists in front of me along with their villain and asked me "who I'm more scared of" I'm pointing at the protagonist.

Listen to me. Don't let that cuteness fool you.

With a villain, I am well aware of that villain being evil and will hurt me no matter what I do.

With someone like Yuji or Tanjiro or Izuku, they look nice, they look kind but it's like you have to be careful to not to trigger them in a way to set them off. You're caught off guard but those sweet faces and then next thing you know, BOOM! You got knocked out.

If anything, as much as people like to clown on these characters, they're only just following the footsteps of the ones before them.

Just like those legends, they started from the bottom and grew stronger over time and even with being a chill person or don't want to do evil, that doesn't exempt them from being not "a sweetheart".

I said it before, but a sunshine character to me is a character who is warm but lethal, like sunlight.

[littlespoonevan]

.

[canisalbus]

About the accents: if someone has a very "proper" Italian they are either foreigners or politicians/dignitaries/etc. So that fits perfectly for Machete, but I think it would be so funny if he sometimes slipped up and used a Nepalese word bc he forgot one in "proper" Italian lol

(Funny to me cause Naples has its own language in addition to accent, and most people don't actually know those words)

.

[pigeonstab]

veryyyyyy old sketch of Enoch

[marfian]

Does Daemon fuck Viserys in a hallucination? Has Daemon fucked Viserys in a hallucination? Will Daemon fuck Viserys in a hallucination? When will Daemon fuck Viserys in a hallucination?

[warning-heckboop]

"Why did you make Peri mad at Dev instead of wanting to forgive him?" dunno. Vibes I guess

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.