#finally I know the tale

[valentimmy]

where are they going

[miabrown007]

Félix: kidnapping is a love language Kagami: you have no social skills, idiot

*two weeks later*

Félix: okay, so when Marinette's at her most vulnerable, I'll gaslight her into thinking I'm her boyfriend, so she'll follow me into an abandoned building where we can put her in an altered mental state and present to her my family's life story in the imaginable most cryptic play of theater she has ever seen, which will reveal to her our horrible secret and the fact that her abusive father-in-law is also her arch-nemesis Kagami: you're so big brained, bae 🥰

[betelgeusing]

watched The Substance and I cannot lie I LOVE the part where she goes goblin mode

[le-fruit-de-la-passion]

Omg I loved your herald viktor epic line idea I’ve been thinking about it nonstop. If u have time and energy id love to read it sooo much ❤️❤️

Since the Ithica Saga dropped last night my brain has not known a single moment of peace. "Would You Fall in Love with Me Again" is just so insanely perfect for a Machine Herald Viktor x Reader AU it makes me physically ill. Like, seriously:

I am not the man you fell in love with

I am not the man you once adored

//

Would you fall in love with me again

If you knew all I've done?

The things I cannot change

Would you love me all the same?

//

Would you fall in love with me again

If you knew all I've done?

The things I can't undo

I'm not the man you knew

Viktor is so Odysseus coded it is PAINFUL. The pain of sacrificing so much of himself to survive. The regret of everyone he's had to leave behind, to betray. The ghosts of his legacy haunting his mind. All for his goal, the one thing he knows he's meant to do with every fiber of his being. Nothing, neither magic nor gods, will stop him from fulfilling that dream. He will not be the same once all has passed, and he will never regain all that he's lost. Can the person who loved him the most as he was before still love this version of him?

And the reader's answer...

I will fall in love with you

Over and over again

I don't care how, where, or when

No matter how long it's been

You're mine

Because what you loved about him is deeper than any of the ways he's changed. It's something at his core, in his soul, in the light of his eyes, no matter how tired they may seem now. It's your first kiss, it's the sound of his voice in your ear, it's the curve of his lips when he smirks, it's the way he looks at you like he falls in love all over again every day you're with him. Time may pass, and the world may change, but not this. Never this.

He is yours just as you are his, and that is the one thing that will never change.

[crimeronan]

why get stressed about online discourse when you can instead google the current wildfire situation in your area and discover that hikers keep fuckin' walking onto trails that are specifically closed..... Because The Woods Are On Fire.

you will experience the same sharp rise in blood pressure. with none of the queer infighting!

anyway. this warning SHOULD be even less necessary than the one i gave a few weeks back about checking the summit conditions when you hike unfamiliar mountains, BUT:

IF you live in fire country.

please. Please.

do not.... go hiking.

on a trail.

that is actively on fire.

🙏🙏🙏

[freudenstein]

Simulanka fed us so well that was great....a W for the scara fans especially. The parallelism with Durin linking important pieces of the lore together while creating a heartwarming storyline with a solid message made for a pretty worthwhile investment.

The crumbs regarding Scaramouche's personal feelings and his lingering scars and insecurities, the subtle hints towards future plots that remain unresolved, and Scara's character development as overseen by traveler and Paimon were satisfying. Moments like when the traveler silently gave him a VERY loaded look after someone mentioned the hero of simulanka, and his snide and dodgy responses, his awkwardness and avoidance and Traveler's giddyness, absolutely sent me lol. The idea of making Scara act kinder to himself via extending kindness to his thematic match is pretty good, and having Durin put more words to the pain they share was nice. Scara is a refreshing hero to follow because he's self-aware and is more savvy than the other characters, so he comes off grounded and easy to empathize with in a more profound sense and he cuts through the bullshit and gets to the heart of things efficiently. I think it's cool and good writing that Scara was the hero of Simulanka because of his strong sense of compassion, one willing to show bravery in following that big heart of his. Coming immediately after the Sumeru archon all I can say is that his characterization is solid and very consistent. Plus, he's very fun when he's being mean, and while he shows that he knows what to do in his self-aware state of villain redemption limbo, he still acts in ways that make Paimon yell at him LOL.

Plus seeing scaramouche get flustered and angry because he's acting nice was like, crack cocaine, so.

It was very nice to see Navia and Nilou and Kirara as well. Surprisingly enough, this ragtag group of people worked well together. In my opinion, Kirara's presence was the weakest, but the Narrator Footnotes story was very, very fun to play through with the 4th wall breaking stuff and bright sense of humor. The themes in this event were rather interesting and heavily pandered towards some theories I've held about Teyvat its lore. I'm still confused about a lot of the lore drops so I gotta check out what the theorycrafters and meta posters are cooking up about this event. Nilou's chapter felt the weakest but she as a character came off pleasant still. Navia was gorgeous and I took a hundred screenshots wherever she was on screen.

That's about it for my thoughts I guess.

[feelo-fick]

WELCOME TO PHIO'S EXTREMELY SELF INDULGENT AU HOUR!!!

"Oh, FINALLY, another visitor! It's so quiet in here, it's unnerving..."

—

This AU was meant to be posted on halloween but eh.... Happy Thanksgiving? HAHAHHA

still dont have a name for it, but basically, back in october i was suddenly hit with the need to have a halloween au, so now we have ghost-ified prismo and vampire/witch-ified scarab :D ( although didnt finish the scarab reference spread in time because uh, school and i lost motivation unfortunately )

au synopsis and rambling below the cut!!

the premise of this au is simple : scarab is a real estate agent whos known for his manners ( never barges in, always waits to be invited! though it is a little weird how he keeps asking to be let inside even if they already agreed that he was going to come over... ) and efficiency at his job - that is, convincing people to buy high-end housing for a good price. although his social skills need some... work, his ability to persuade people isnt something to be laughed at.

unfortunately for him, persuading the higher-ups is a completely different story - which he learned the hard way after flunking something big for the company. they dont choose to fire him, no. instead, they put him through a trial, assigning him to sell their most unprofitable property : the mansion in a small town locally known for being haunted by an "evil spirit". if scarab manages to sell it (for good profit) within six months, he is excused and is able to go on with his job. if not... well, best not to think about it, yes? after all, he'll succeed with ease - all he has to do is dispel any worries about some fake "ghost" that only exists as a result of filthy rumors. maybe clean up the place. not too hard, right?

meanwhile, stuck inside said mansion is an extremely bored prismo. hes been hangin around this place for like... how many years now? forty? a hundred? meh, all the same, lately the place has been quieter than usual. i mean- of course people dont just walk into a creepy mansion every day, but there would usually be at least a few bold kids or vloggers coming in now and then for him to entertain but even then they wouldn't stay long ( for obvious reasons ). and now, just some unbound spirits or dumb animals would pass by and thats about it. a guy can only entertain himself for so long, yknow?

that is, until today. when some posh-looking business man entered the premises and started snooping around ( whats the deal with that, by the way?? ). must be prismo's lucky day!! this is the perfect chance to pull out all the stops and play the FUNNIEST prank ever! hah!

... oh. looks like things've gotten a little out of hand.

—

WOOT WOOT WOOTTTTTTTTTTT!!! im so so happy to finish this because ohhhhh my god this has taken ages for no reason other than the fact that ive been really dragging myself to make presentable art JSNDJSJXNSJX.... i realize that i have never worked in real estate ( or at all ) which means i have probably fucked something up but uhh um ill deal with the backlash later :"D im also realizing how many odd unanswered bits and bobs this au is going to have in the future, which... i am ignoring for the most part for now, but there are SOME things that i DO have figured out like ghost lore... but thats for another time, for now i leave you with this >:)

[queenlucythevaliant]

harder than you think

i. When the Narnians stole Edmund away from beneath the Witch's blade, they told him he was safe. This wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either.

ii. They brought him to the Stone Table. It was night. Edmund doubted very much that he would find safety there, for he still recoiled at the name of Aslan. He slept fitfully and woke the next morning before the sun was up.

iii. A sliver of gold just beyond the tent flap captured his attention, there in the dark. Unaccountably, Edmund felt the urge to rise and go towards it.

iv. And there was Aslan, who was supposed to be fearsome, supposed to be dangerous, supposed to be powerful, and he was he was he was. Dimly, Edmund felt himself hitting the ground.

v. But then Aslan said, “Come, Son of Adam. Let us walk a while, and reason together.”

vi. And as they walked together, in the cool dewy grass of early morning, the Lion told Edmund everything that he had ever done.

vii. They were standing in front of the Table when the conversation turned. Aslan spoke a riddle of a house blasted into rubble which he would piece back together overnight. He spoke of flesh being pierced, blood being shed, and of rejected stones being used for new foundations. He spoke about water welling up forever, washing you clean of everything you ever did wrong, all the blood that you ever thought of shedding, everything you ever tried to steal, and a river that carries you home when you can't walk anymore and spits you out brand new when it reaches the sea.

viii. Edmund's head swam. Silently, he yearned for the wisdom to understand what he was being told; or, failing that, at least to remember it for as long as it took him to puzzle it out.

ix. And then, the Witch. Then, the battle. The thrones. A year passed, and winter came. In its time, it melted back to glorious spring.

x. “Edmund,” said Lucy one day. “There's something we need to tell you.” She and Susan were cloaked in springtime gossamer, like fairy queens in poems he only half remembered. They sat on the window seat in his study, holding hands white-knuckled: his two beloved sisters.

xi. “It's about Aslan,” Susan said. “And the White Witch, and how he made her renounce her claim on your blood. The night before Beruna, he went back to the Stone Table.”

xii. “He let her kill him,” Lucy cut in. “Instead of you. And then, because he hadn't done anything wrong, the Emperor's Deeper Magic brought him back to life.”

xiii. “We've been arguing all year about how much to tell you,” said Susan wryly. Then, a little gentler, “We don't want to hurt you, but we feel you ought to be told what he did for you.”

xiv. And Edmund, who had never forgotten what Aslan told him on that cool, dewy morning before the sun came up, shut his eyes and whispered, “I know.”

xv. I know, he said. I know that he died. I know that he did it for me. I know he lived again because I saw him the next day, and the next, and the next. I think I know what it means - or at least, I know the shape of it.

xvi. “Oh,” said Lucy. “We should have realized that he would have told you himself.”

xvii. “Yes. But please, tell me the story all the same.”

[starrynightsxo]

ANNOUNCEMENT: I WILL BE BACK

hey guys so I'm gonna be on and off tumblr for the moment as I just wanna limit my social media time lol but nevertheless, I will be here to spew my nonesense!

LOVE ALL MY FOLLOWERS AND MUTUALS SO SO MUCH and I just know you all understand and I appreciate you guys so much! So don't go anywhere cos I'll be here often enough, ready to yap and giggle with you all <3

LOVE YOU ALL 💕

- alims ❤️

my side blog: @bookgirlfanatic <3

cr: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

cr: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Books I've read this year 2024 (so far, in order):

Powerless by Lauren Roberts

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

Letters to the Lost by Brigid Kemmerer

Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes (reread)

Truth or Dare by Sophie McKenzie

Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J Maas

A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J Maas

How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories by Holly Black (reread)

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Destroy Me by Tahereh Mafi

Unravel Me by Tahereh Mafi

Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi

Fracture Me by Tahereh Mafi

Restore Me by Tahereh Mafi

Shadow Me by Tahereh Mafi

Defy Me by Tahereh Mafi

Reveal Me by Tahereh Mafi

Imagine Me by Tahereh Mafi

Believe Me by Tahereh Mafi

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Hawthorne Legacy by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Final Gambit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Icebreaker by Hannah Grace

Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross

Dead Poets Society by Nancy H Kleinbaum

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Brothers Hawthorne by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Hunger Games Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Reckless by Lauren Roberts

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Normal People by Sally Rooney

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Caraval by Stephanie Garber

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides

I have reviews to most of these if you check my tags somehow lol.

40/30 books this year. YAY! Happy Reading everyone!

A picrew of me <3

[puckpocketed]

i just hate when players do this and people call them “warriors” i know you wanna play in the playoffs to help your team but YOUR FINGERS ARE LITERALLY BROKEN MY GUY THEY COULD NEVER GROW BACK TOGETHER THE RIGHT WAY im crying

my poor cringefail wifes i love them all so much i hope they all take the rest they need

GOD I hope they get rest too :((

breaking soooo much character right now to give my fullest take, and it’s that we can hold multiple ideas in our minds and i don’t think they conflict

playing through injuries is terrible.

They are whole adult human beings and professional athletes who have resources to keep them informed about long term consequences, and they still get to make those choices even if we hate the choices they make. Even if those choices drastically reduce the length of their career. Even if those choices end with long term heath complications.

i might lose some people on this one but i don’t care!! it’s what I believe: being disabled or chronically ill/injured/in pain is not a death sentence. it is not the worst thing in the world. people live full and happy lives whilst also being disabled. can it suck for the person living through it? yes. absolutely. but to me, people are not and never will be defined by how able-bodied they are!!!

All of this is true (to me) and also we can still condemn the circumstances that cause them to make these choices. (culture of not wanting to be seen as soft, the normalisation/valorisation of playing through injury, all the other [gestures wildly] forces at play that set athletes up to make these decisions) Like i’m sorry to get political but choices do not exist in vacuums. sports does not exist separated from hegemonic models of masculinity or capitalism. there are so so so many reasons a player might choose to harm themselves by playing through injury and not all of them are noble or valid, some of them are stupid and informed by bullshit!!! and we should be mad at that bullshit!! because it’s awful!!!!

these are their jobs, and i’m talking in the sense that they are performing labour and i think labour laws and workplace health and safety must apply here too. I think we have to start talking about these things in terms of workers rights, in amongst all of the compassion we have for them as players. there’s the pressure to perform due to contract status and salary bonus milestones; there’s team doctors having direct conflicts of interest, a monetary and cultural incentive to look the other way when clearing people to play; there’s the plain fact of the best possible safety equipment (cages/bowls, neck guards, cut resistant protective gear) not being mandatory; the blatant denial of CTE coming from the league itself. there’s a lot. and it’s a workers rights issue, not just a moral one. someone will play through xyz because of the culture, because of the pressure, and they will die from it.

EVEN STILL. there is beauty and narrative resonance and something compelling about it all, and I don’t want to deny that. as someone looking from the outside in, sports captures people’s hearts because of these narratives. sacrifice and teamwork and triumph — we have an appetite for these things. I am never going to sit here and deny that I feel compelled by it (which is simultaneous to the anger, the fear, the deep deep well of “i’m sorry you have feel you have to do this”) This appetite I/we as a society have for pain — unpacking it and addressing it is a whole other conversation and I am not qualified to have it. I’m just going to acknowledge it exists because I think pretending it doesn’t would be dishonest of me.

we are allowed to feel fucked up about all of this. call it parasocial, call it entitled, call it inappropriate, i don’t know!! we are people and knowing other people are in pain tends to fuck us up — and as much as I try to keep a healthy distance from these celebrities, as much as I remind myself they’re strangers, I care when they’re hurt because I’m human.

anyway. YES OUR POOR CRINGEFAIL WIVES 😭🤲

[sb-tmblr]

We finally have the murals in high quality !

And also the penstagram pics at the beginning and a nice background !

[the-gateway-to-madness]

anytime i see posts about how 3Below was a mistake and that it didn't fit into Tales of Arcadia or that it's bad or really just ANYTHING complaining about it, my brain reminds me of when this site used to cross over Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons and the Futuristic Four. At the same time. not to use an old meme but you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me (hiccup haddock and hiro hamada being friends. emo edits of rapunzel. Do you Remember? I Remember.)

3Below being part of Tales of Arcadia feels like HOME to me. It's the part that resonates with my brain and my feelings. It makes me feel like the way my head and humor work has a place in this universe I love- 3Below is my anchor to the franchise.

I wouldn't be who I am without this show, and the show wouldn't be what it is if it weren't part of Tales of Arcadia.

[somnimagus]

it is cold and mentally i am here in the role of snowman raven

[reayerambles]

Ladybug and Chat Noir, but in Old Hollywood Glam

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 13: Ava Lisbeth Morgan

Women and the Paths of Bullets

It's a special edition for our unlucky thirteenth edition of this series - an Edition of Two Firsts!

This is our first edition so far to be illustrated by a woman (yeah I know right)...

I have no idea if that Dickens portrait was made by this week's illustrator or not, sadly.

...and it's also our first to have (allegedly) been shot with a gun! Hello!

I've had this edition for a very long time - it's one of the first editions that I ever bought off the Internet, if not the first! I simply could not resist the absurdity of what I was seeing - what a story this book could tell if it could talk!

Sadly, I never saved the link to the online shopping page where I originally found and bought it, and based on my repeated failed attempts to find it again, I think it's been taken down - so you'll just have to take my word for it that the listing claimed it was a bullet hole!

The (alleged) bullet hole was the only reason I bought it, and once I had collected this little piece of intrigue and slotted it into its place on my shelf, I left it there for years.

I knew that it had these beautiful end papers, but many editions have illustrated end papers like this, so I thought little of it, especially since none of these are explicitly A Tale of Two Cities-related.

In all that time, I didn't investigate it much further (evidently not even to take a closer look at the title page) - I just let it sit there, in the back of my mind, separated off from the collection of illustrated editions that I have slowly begun to amass over the last half-a-decade.

One day recently, though, I opened it up again for the first time in a long time just to show it to a friend who was visiting - and when I thumbed through it to show the friend the path of the (alleged) bullet, I was shocked and delighted as the path led me to a new story, a new piece of intrigue that this edition had to offer:

An entire set of six illustrations that were not only "new" (so to speak) to my collection but which I had never even known to exist, by an illustrator I had never heard of! Completely new to me!

The incredible irony of this is not lost on me - I work hard to be complete and thorough in my research, and yet, on my own bookshelf, I had glossed over an entire set of illustrations - and the first (and only so far!) in my physical collection to be illustrated by a woman!

Pondering my own lapse here in living up to my usual intentions, I started thinking more about Morgan's intentions, especially along those lines - namely that, unique among the baker's dozen of sets that we've seen so far, almost all of her illustrations feature female characters as subjects.

It makes me wonder a lot about Morgan - who she was, what her interests were, what got her into illustrating, why so little appears when you look her up, what her life was like as a female illustrator in the 1940s, how she dealt with all that being a female illustrator in the 1940s must have entailed, how much control she had over what she illustrated, what her feelings were about A Tale of Two Cities...

How would Ava Lisbeth Morgan feel seeing this post - these bizarre images of the path of a mystery (alleged) bullet through her own work in a copy of a novel that has otherwise survived for generations? How would she feel tracing its path with us as it travels out of the book just before her final illustration for the novel

of the death of Madame Defarge by her own pistol?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[joanwatsonias]

plot summary tale of the body thief