#edit: changed some words

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

I was thirteen years old when I ascended the throne. My memory of the most important day of my life was nothing but a frenzied whirlwind of fanfare. I had started the morning by vomiting discreetly behind the royal carriage and my mouth still tasted sour. Eunuch Zhao, an attendant who was not much older than I, but already impossibly calm and worldly, had held onto my robes so they wouldn't get dirty. Afterwards, he rubbed my back and whispered raunchy jokes into my ear because he could see I was on the verge of tears. The tears were not for the dead king, I had no sympathy for the stranger who had callously abandoned my mother and I in the middle of enemy territory all those years ago. I was mourning myself.

With the pounding of the procession drums still echoing in my chest, I bowed in the four cardinal directions, careful not to knock askew the guan which was an unfamiliar weight on my head, and climbed the stairs to the throne, supported under each arm by an attendant. Zhao Gao had been left behind, these eunuchs were the Prime Minister's creatures. I still remembered the stern lecture Prime Minister Lu had given me at yesterday's rehearsal. The King is suppose to move ponderously, as if weighed down by the affairs of state. He must not rush. He must not trip. He must not stutter or cry or misbehave.

I sat trembling on the throne as hundreds of my father's ministers--now my ministers--bowed and scraped, reciting in unison "all hail the King of Qin! May His Majesty live ten thousand years!" Construction for my mausoleum began on the same day.

[irodimww]

silly late night redraw of that scene where cole gets jumpscared by zane’s falcon

(deeply apologize for any puerto-rican spanish speakers looking at this and going “this sounds wrong” FEEL FREE TO TELL ME WHAT TO FIX !!)

[courfee]

look at that!! i've talked about it so much and now chapter 1 actually exists in real life!!

[u5an5]

spanish dub this, french dub that

why is no one talking about the fact that in polish dub Wade on their first meeting straight up asks him out for a date?

[lyculuscaelus]

I just realized that if y’all are picturing the Iliad with historically accurate armor, specifically, with the ones similar to the Dendra panoply, then Hector would not die the way he died.

During the duel, Hector was wearing Achilles’s old armor, which means it’s a Mycenaean panoply, and the most famous one looks like this:

As you can see, the neck is well protected by the cuirass, so the thing about Achilles finding Hector’s open throat exposed thus stabbing him through the neck—that’s not gonna happen. Achilles would not be aiming for his throat for this reason, with this outcome.

Such a historical Hector would not die an Iliadic death.

[bookshelfpassageway]

one of these days i'm writing some kind of essay about lost media and humanity's need to solve loose ends. people only care about it because its lost. people only know its lost because somebody cared about it. it's such an achingly beautiful concept. it's such a horrifying fate. it's about mortality and the traitor that is memory and about love. its about the human spirit and a new kind of folklore. all forms of media preservation are a race against the deprecation and physical decomposition of their storage medium. i hope there's a heaven for art.

[ghostespresso]

staff logging on to tumblr dot com today

[hedwig221b]

I finished it. I finished the fic. Why am I crying

[roomba-mangga]

thoughts on thistle and yaad's dynamic that i vomited in the tags of another post but will now try to articulate here: they're not actually family, or at least they shouldn't be. not in a conventional sense anyway. framing them as uncle and nephew (even in a non-literal, silly fantasy world way) rides more on technicality than anything concrete.

what i mean by this is yaad calls thistle by name and says he and delgal were raised "like" brothers. he talks about thistle like he's an outsider imposing himself into the melinis' space, and it's clear that thistle was never legitimized as a member of the family. for thistle's part, though we don't know how he would treat yaad pre-demon brainrot, it's safe to assume based on the way he punishes him—turning him into a doll—and how little is shown in the way of any sort of relationship between them that thistle only cares* about yaad as an extension of delgal (otherwise i'd expect something like kabru and milsiril, because it's not like another complicated interspecies family dynamic would be out of place, yet there's next to nothing on them even in bonus content, just their scant interactions in the main story).

in essence, they're strangers to one another. thistle's desperation to preserve the illusion of a family, a model where he doesn't even fit, was the snare they were caught in for the past thousand years of stasis. yaad-as-nephew is a prop to uphold that illusion, and thistle is playing a role he's unfit to play. in the context of post-canon interactions, attempting to reconstruct that facade would only be a reenactment of trauma for them both (in a deeply compelling way i'd love to watch unfold, tbh), as that "uncle and nephew" framing places thistle in an implicit position of power over someone he's already traumatized through misuse of authority in the past, a role which also perpetuates his adultification and yaad's infantilization in turn. it'd mostly be an obstacle to any real connection.

best to burn the melini family bridge, i think, and if there's still anything salvageable left in the rubble, let something different supplant it.

[ash-and-starlight]

you’ve probably gotten a lot of asks like this, but I just haven’t seen any posted. what are your feelings on the remake, if you are watching it? more specifically, what do you think was the biggest problem with it?

i rlly havent actually! i think it's bc im really trying to Pretend I Do Not See It. rn i'm fighting TOOTH AND NAIL against the temptation to hatewatch because i do not need that in my life lmao.

the thing i cannot get over with is how Cheap it looks, it rlly smells of poor rushed workers to me, despite the astronomical budget that went into it. 15 MIL!!??? same as the late seasons of game of thrones!! now i'm not saying GoT is a pinnacle of virtue but it featured: a really good burn scar make up that took up half a character's face, a really good Notorious white hair wig with intricate hairstyles, really good costumes and heavy winter furs, really good location and fantasy beasts cgi and ummmmmmm from what i've seen of natla well. it had nothing of the sort. it's just bad gary it's uglyy

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

one foot in your bedroom

and one foot out the door

[first-ex-wife]

Good... bad... I’m the guy with the gun.

Army of Darkness (1992), dir. Sam Raimi

[flowery-king]

So in Elsewhere and Elsewhen apparently the reason Philip got his scar was cause he was using palisman to manage his curse and it kept his injured nose from healing. I always thought that on one hand he's able to deal with the effects of the curse now, but in the long run it's very harmful and because of that his nose wasn't able to heal right and it got a lot worse, turning into that giant scar. When Philip expels the palisman from his body does that mean that his scar finally starts to heal properly?

Yea it does! Or atleast it doesn't spread any further. The scars and crooked nose don't just magically disappear hah, he's stuck with those.

I have a headcanon that Canon Philip's face scar is pretty small compared to the marks on his body. His body is covered in this one massive scar wrapping around him like rot and it just continues to spread since he has no intention on stopping the use of Palismen.

Defanged!Philip doesn't use palismen as frequently because he KNOWS it fucks with his body in some way - so it's not as severe, but he is still actively taking it. Sure, the scar has also started wrapping, but the moment he found it started spreading to the rest of his body and crawling into other scars he has, he panicked and decided to just consume palismen only when it starts getting very bad.

Quick doodle of his scar placements :P

[dj-wayback]

What made you choose the name Slinky for Slinky? Did you just like the vibes?

Just kidding haahaha lol ….. i don’t get those ….. totally ….. She just told me

[mirai-desu]

I agree with this article 💯, as Rachael New et al. are now undermining the entire premise of the show, and I want to highlight and comment on a few parts of this excellent take:

We're losing a central character whose emotional journey we were invested in and a vital piece of the primary reason we were told to watch Miss Scarlet & The Duke in the first place. Whether you want William and Eliza together romantically or not, the show was always predicated on and grounded in their relationship, and to pretend otherwise is to deny the original premise behind its very existence.

Exactly this. "Miss Scarlet" might be considered more lead than him, but he was still a titular character, and we were invested in his journey as well as hers. Their bond is the foundation of the show. The teenage flashback episode in particular proves this to us--and proves William’s importance to the greater story. But even before that, it's been there all along:

And, honestly, the official description of Season 1 is blunt about what’s happening: “Eliza and The Duke strike up a mismatched, fiery relationship that will crackle and smolder with sexual tension as they team up to solve crime in the murkiest depths of 1880’s London.” So let’s say it as plainly as possible: No one planned to tune in to this new program simply because it promised a crime drama in period dress. The series’ hook, apparent from its first marketing materials, was this unique relationship at the show’s center. The real story of Miss Scarlet and the Duke has always been just that: Miss Scarlet and the Duke. 

While RN et al. can dig in their heels and claim that the story has always just been Eliza's, but we know better than that. Since Day 1, the promotion and the interviews all catered towards the UST. As time wore on, Stuart really began championing the romance in earnest, and it was a logical next step. He was not wrong to do so. What was actually happening on screen was heading that way, as part of a beautiful slow burn.

After literally years of dancing around the rarely mentioned but blatantly obvious feelings between them, this season finally pushed their relationship forward. We got a whole flashback episode dedicated to how they first met! There was a kiss! William said the L-word! The genuine forward relationship progress that so many fans had been waiting for was finally happening! [...] What makes this even more painful is that Season 4 finally felt like the show was moving forward, at last, at least where its central relationship was concerned. Yes, William left, but it was for a good reason: to give Eliza the space and opportunity to decide what she wanted from their relationship on her own terms. (That, as the kids say, is growth.) But if he was never coming back, why bother with most of Season 4?

While we know that in part we got some of the romantic moments in S4 due to Stuart's requests, but I think ultimately, RN's reluctance to move things forward with Wiliza is what put Stuart at odds with her, as she likely did not take too kindly to him suggesting his own input (even when he became an EP) and perhaps felt like he was telling her what to do with her own show. And her goal is to keep it stuck in a cynical pattern; one that William wanted to resolve, and one that Stuart had to remove himself from, because RN favors rinsing and repeating, versus actually diving deep into longer character arcs. That's how she think she can keep the "longevity" of her show, or so she thinks.

Because look, I love Eliza. But I realize it's really because of the potential of who she could be. William never returning prolongs her characterization being stuck. She was supposed to spend the year thinking about what changes she needs to make so they could be together. If he never returns, then what's the point? The catalyst for change is gone. William staying on the show should have actually forced her to grow, not kept her stuck. Removing William entirely reinforces the patterns versus ending the cycle. Especially if he is just replaced with a new love interest, who just flirts with Eliza to keep a "will they / won't they angle" that's never moved forward.

Any writer worth their salt would have Eliza grow in interim and have major development upon William return. But that would end the "put them together / pull them apart." Which is not what RN wants, hence why she refused to put them together. She thinks these patterns are what maintains the show vs spending time on actual storytelling. And this is also why I cannot believe the party line, and truly feel that we haven't gotten the whole truth on why Stuart's exiting.

Thinking about the scenes in the flashback episode of William and Henry, and how important they were, it makes me sad that apparently in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter to RN. And it's sad they keep trying to paint it that the two most important people to Eliza were “overshadowing” her all the time.

I fear is that this new retooled version will just ignore and erase the importance that William has had on her life. At least in the S4 finale we saw how his words still affected her, even when he wasn’t there, encouraging to reopen her own agency. But I can’t see them continuing that, when clearly they want to reboot the show without him.

I had been working on my post S4 fanfic before the news of Stuart's departure hit, and I looked back on how I was developing Eliza from where we left off and how I wrote William's return. When I was outlining it, I was thinking about how RN only just barely has touched the surface of Eliza's psyche. I wrote her as torn up about William leaving--and how he left not long after he almost died. Eliza should have grown from the trauma of almost losing him and we seemed to be on that path in the show, with her at his bedside, and having him recover in her home. We could have dived into how the lost of her mother at a young age affected her, and how Henry's death still was painful. At her father's funeral (which mind you, is in the very first episode) she talked about being alone, and William wiped her tears away. And now... Eliza has lost another person close to her. Literally, it's not William's existence stopping Eliza's development--it's RN's lack of talent, I'm afraid. And who knows, maybe that statement that she cannot be developed while he is around is just a cover to explain his exit, as it's clearly not an actual reason.

Likewise with William, in addition to dealing with his feelings for Eliza, there's so much they could done with him leaving Scotland Yard and the trauma he survived. He didn't have to have PTSD, but he's already had a pretty traumatic life and survived so much (which again… why show all that in the flashback if they were ditching his character - Ben, not RN, wrote that episode so maybe that was a sign). But he held onto the identity of being part of the police, because of how he came get that job (i.e. Henry) and get off the street, and they could have explored what would it be like to shift away from that identity. There just was so much potential and so much richness that could have been written, for a man who came from nothing, but wanted to belong, and wanted to be loved. And maybe Stuart was just so very aware that the show was refusing it take it there. He took William as far he was allowed to, but not as far as the character could have gone, if written by the right people.

Frankly, both William and Eliza deserve better. Stuart deserves better, and we the Wiliza fans do as well. Ultimately, regardless of what (and at what point in time it) really went down between Stuart and RN, the series should have ended with S4, but with a happy conclusion. All signs pointed to William joining Eliza at her detective agency, but now we just have to imagine them there, working together as equals and in love.

[geosaurus]

Get Your Life Together AU