#endlessly rereading

[delawaredetroit]

"I gave Shouto everything."

Everything about that line is terrible parent coded. Pro tip: if your child can't stand you and "I gave (blank) everything" is your first thought, reevaluate all of your life choices and go back to the drawing board.

Also for some cultural context, twenty years old was traditionally the age when someone reached adulthood in Japan. (Japan's age of majority was lowered to eighteen in 2022, but that was after this was published and Endeavor is more of a symbolic representation of traditional Japanese values anyway.) So Endeavor peaked in terms of how far he could go in his career by the time he became an adult.

[irhabiya]

the stillborn, arwa salih

[misguidefate]

pandora hearts my beloved best friend. the most profoundly special media to me of all time. accepting your story as is, the pain from people and events that hurt you shaping you into who you are just as much as the love you’ve been shown from those who care about you has, and refusing to look away from yourself no matter what. accepting your past but not allowing it to chain you, making sure to live in the present, persisting into the future despite futility because you have hope!! realizing it’s okay for you to exist and self-actualizing through the bonds you’ve formed 😖 they too hold within them the proof that i am me!!! an enveloping darkness also contains the light of hope!!!

[metidax]

In the first chapters of Demons Dostoevsky mentioned that Nikolai Stavrogin's face resembles a mask. And I've just realize that it's a reference to a death-mask because by the beggining of the plot Stavrogin - as a person - is already dead. Аll is left is facade, a death-mask of human being who once might experience emotions, passions and sorrows. But in the present he is hollow, and we could find it out by just one comparison

[gay-enchilada]

can't believe i have fortnite to thank for putting me back on my korrasami bullshit

[kyouka-supremacy]

Well.

[cerealmonster15]

haikaveh... save me haikaveh...

i KNOW it's been talked about to death but. the haikaveh research project. it literally haunts my mind. i cannot get over the implications. alhaitham going through his school life as someone that most people dont even really know about because he keeps to himself and doesn't socialize, with kaveh being the one exception to that, finding his way into his life as his Best Friend, and then leading to alhaithams one and only time he participated in a research topic. his bio says he only ever did ONE joint project!!! one!!! the one with kaveh his best friend and i think also his only friend at the time!!!! and then it ended in not only the project falling apart but also alhaithams only friendship. kavehs best friendship. they were each others closest person. they had no family around - alhaithams parents having died when he was young and his grandmother dying before he joined the akademiya, and kaveh's dad dying when he was young and his mom having moved to fontaine. like even if you dont look at it through a romantic lens it's still undeniable how important they were [and are] to each other..........

i'm getting off track but my point is very specifically for alhaitham, the one time he got close to someone, made a friend, even agreed to join one(1) group project ever, it ended in disaster. it led him into a fight so bad that his one and only friend said he regretted that friendship!!!! it was so bad alhaitham left the project and he and kaveh didnt speak for ages until they just happened to run into each other again at the tavern!!!!! like obviously it has to be incredibly awful for both of them but i just think how this probably had alhaitham in the cynical mindset that friendships and collaborations like that might just never work out for him because the one time he let someone into his life, it blew up on him and he was all alone again. even though alhaitham never seems to care much if people dont like him, that clearly cant still apply to someone he was exceptionally close to. like if he didnt care he woudlnt have been the one to take his name off the project and mutually not speak to kaveh...... kavehs words are the ones that hit the most significantly to alhaitham.......... kaveh is said/implied to have had at least some other friends while at school / people knew who he was, but not so much alhaitham. people didnt know him and the ones that did just knew he didnt socialize/he was not easy to get along with. he only had kaveh and then, for a while, he lost him too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[insufferablemod]

yall got any dave centric fanfic recs??

[conceptofjoy]

yeah they're very cherub-y

[juney-blues]

i need to get injected with whatever fucking chemicals my broken brain isn't producing on it's own because i am so sick and tired of being crushed under the weight of a couple managable tasks, each going undone, until they all add up and i have literally thousands weighing on me each day

there was stuff i wanted to do last week that i didn't do, so now i want to do it this week, in addition to whatever comes up this week that i wanna do

the stuff i wanted to do last week? why of course that includes the stuff i wasn't able to do the week BEFORE last week

oh and naturally the stuff i wasn't able to do the week before last week, includes the stuff i couldn't do the week before that

and the stuff from the week before that? well i'm sure you get the picture.

"surely the solution is to just do the things as they come up", a particularly naive member of the audience might suggest

and YEAH.

you'd THINK it'd just be that simple, huh?

you'd fuckin THINK.

[mymp3]

getting excited for reload and thinking about reload, so here are my favorite Minato/Ryoji posts I've made

[whamss]

Great to check HStwt and confirm to myself that Homestuck fans still can't read

[morethanwonderful]

ALSO while I'm losing my mind over the Note of Desolation page and how it lays out John's arc: look at this!

One fundamental underlying aspect of John is that I think he feels really lost when he's not given external purpose and doing Main Character Stuff. He seems to just kind of stall and wallow at home in his depression during the end credits and pre-prologue epilogues. He has a huge breakdown seemingly out of nowhere after two years of idling on the ship between worlds. And here, we see that's not just something that comes from the trauma of his first session of the Game.

To some extent, for the whole first twelve years of his life before sburb, John Egbert has felt like he's missing something.

There's two different ways that you can read this, and I think they work in tandem.

On one hand, there's the meta reading. John as a person was born to be The Main Character. Sburb's whole thing is meta narratives and turning its players into characters in a creation myth. John is the main character of his story. He's the first to boot up Sburb, the first to enter the medium, and the first to go god tier. He's the friendleader. He's the one that does his world's ectobiology. Of course, in the context of Sburb and its narrative, he always feels like something is missing from mundane life. He exists to play the Game and serve its story, and he's divorced from his purpose if he's not Being The Protagonist.

But at the same time, this also works really well as a mundane symptom of depression. For as long as he's existed and had the capacity to feel complex emotions, John has felt like something is missing from his life. The Game only works as a temporary distraction from this feeling. Sburb gives him urgent concrete goals to focus on, and it's hard to feel empty and listless when you're constantly in crisis mode trying to keep yourself, your friends, and your universe from dying. But running on adrenaline and living a task-driven life can't actually cure his depression, and in the quiet moments between sessions and after Game Over, he's left with that same feeling of something missing. Something empty.

Given all that, it's fitting that this emptiness is first raised as an issue when John looks in his mailbox and sees that Sburb isn't there. In line with the meta reading, it's impossible for him as an entity to feel complete when he's missing the Game because he's the main character. Not getting his hands on the physical game might not be the cause of his listlessness, but getting divorced from his protagonist purpose is. He's nothing without Sburb.

Yet, we're told Sburb isn't really the true cause. He feels desolate before the game, he feels desolate at points during the game, and he'll feel even more desolate after. He feels like his life is a trick played on him by some "unseen riddler," whatever thing that might complete him held constantly out of reach. Not having the game, be it the physical disc or the Game that gives him purpose as a god, is ultimately just one more frustration in a life full of the feeling of lack.

John's the Main Character and incomplete without his protagonist role to play, but he's also depressed. And in the end, even becoming a god, creating a universe, and fulfilling his glorious purpose can't fix the sense of lacking in his life.

It's a cruel trick—fulfilling the plot contrivance that helps bring about his sense of Absence in the first place cannot actually fill the hole or help him move forward. Not in any long-term sense.

[francesderwent]

Harriet Vane, my whole heart

[fightaers]

sometimes i think abt how sakura's become so widely-spread and misinformed in that mass-production that she's almost become this caricature of the third female member in a trio who is a 'girl-boss who is so cool and is so sexy or so confident etc' when, in fact, she's actually a character with believable flaws and unique characteristic pertaining specifically to the experiences she's endured, and she's beyond someone everyone mass-ships or mass-hates, and in this essay i will—

[lilacerull0]

the everlasting urge to reread anna karenina