#existential something

[im-not-okaye]

I just watched In The Mouth of Madness. My brain feels like a playdough sculpture of castle gray skull. Like someone went at my skull with a chisel and just split it open. What the fuck did I watch, and why do I have the overwhelming urge to watch it again?

[jonsrolling]

i have about 10 missing assignments i need to do bc my procrastination is kicking my ass rn and i don’t ever reflect on that fact until past 11pm but also the melatonin is calling for me and i love to sleep‼️

[lotus-pear]

learning to love

[returnsandreturns]

i SCREAMED when i heard andy beshear come after jd vance for pretending to be from appalachia. a dem capable of pulling kentucky of all places is a strategic fucking vice president pick.

[knifearo]

being aromantic is like. hey btw you're going to live a life that is the culmination of most of society's worst nightmares. sorry lol ✌️ but then you turn around and take a really good hard look at it and it turns out that living in that nightmare is fucking awesome and you get to wake up every day and take that fear that other people have and laugh and hold it close until it's a great joy for you instead. and being happy is a radical act that you define instead of someone else. and you're sexy as fuck that's just a fact of life i don't make the rules on that one

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[watmalik]

Poolverine out of context…either they have a pain kink or they just like getting tied up…or both? Let’s do both.

[corviiids]

my little pony lawlight. thoughts?

light (unicorn) is a late blooming blank flank who only gets his cutie mark after he becomes kira and then has to hide it from everyone so he gets a fake cutie mark made up (notebook and pen to symbolise being really smart 😊) which he has to meticulously reapply every week or so when it fades. he is still committing real murders even though he is a pretty pony. equestria is rotten.

L (earth pony) has been sent to ponyville by princess celestia to investigate the disturbing pony murders, and hopefully make some friends along the way! 🥰 he doesn't. he (pony) does move in with light (also pony) allegedly to get light's scholarly help with stopping pony kira but mostly because he suspects light of being pony kira. also kira keeps being foiled accidentally by pinkie pie's random hijinks mostly because she's always delivering sweets to L pony.

oh wait also light pony's name is Light Turner because he turns things to the light! 🥰🌞 and his voice actor is nat wolff. from netflix. that whole plot with nightmare moon and also everything else in the show still happens btw L and light pony just have their own shit going on in the background and also ponies keep dying. i hope this helps

[hiding-under-the-willow]

Okay. hear me out. Creaking Helsknight

[otaku553]

Procrastination doodles of sabo for the king sabo au :)

[mumblesplash]

i always imagine scar as having scar tissue on the side of his face that pulls the edge of his mouth up slightly. not enough to look strained or uncanny, not enough to even realize that's what's happening unless you've spent a lot of time around him, but just enough so that it looks like he's constantly, always smirking a little bit

oh man so see this is Interesting, bc you honestly don’t need the scar tissue to even pull much to get this effect, just giving him a lip scar in the right place would make it look like he’s always slightly smiling

^tried to show what i mean here, literally nothing else about his expression is different between the two images, just that one tiny mouth scar

(imo a bigger scar there would actually affect his expression LESS than this, because eventually your brain goes ‘oh that’s not part of his mouth that’s something else’ and doesn’t register it as much)

[im-not-okaye]

Is there any evidence that anything we do really exists? What if dreaming was the real world and this one was us sleeping?

Meaning according to my hypothesis, the dragon i befriended last night while I was "asleep" was indeed real, and you saying "get over it, it was just a dream" was the real dream.

Get dream zoned punk.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

"See you tomorrow"

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 4 [prev parts]

[edwinisms]

you ever think about how edwin got like. no warning, no time time to process, nothing, when he reappeared on earth faced with the fact that virtually everyone he knew in life is dead. his parents? probably died in the 1950s or so (at best) almost forty years prior to edwin’s return. if any of his classmates were still around, they’d have been elderly, possibly senile, and in a few years they’d all be gone– except, of course, edwin. nothing looks the same, cars look like spaceships, there actually are spaceships, he can no longer see the stars, and everyone he knew is dead.

[picaroroboto]

actually i lied the real crowning moment of Endwalker is the final Zenos battle. because what could be better than defeating the embodiment of despair in a battle to prove the worth of existence, literally the highest stakes possible, and then turning around and fighting your rival. not to save the world or because anyone asked you to but just because you want to. because it's fun.

Fighting just for the sake of fighting - because you can, because you find it fun and meaningful, because it's part of who you are. Adventuring just for the sake of adventuring, living for the sake of living.

[vaperarmand]

what i need is for daniel to realize at different points that his past/present/future relationship with armand is EXACTLY like the parts of louis' and lestat's relationship he mocked the most. ie "is THIS the fucked up gothic romance?" "are WE the whiny existential queens?" he doesn't have to do this out loud but i want his relationship with armand to be so disgusting and hot and terrible that he reaches brief moments of clarity. and i'll be able to tell he's thinking it just based on the look in his eyes