#for worse or for even more worse

[molter-writes]

dude i have a question that might be considered out of pocket but i need your brilliant take on it

i was rewatching the finale last night (because i like to cause myself pain) and i got to the part where aemond said he wanted to make a gift of luke's eye to his mother

so my question is

genuinely, what the hell do you think alicent would have done if aemond returned with luke's fucking eye😭😭😭

lmao welcome to my entirely unrequested character study of aemond. short answer: she'd be horrified, and that scene more than anything speaks to the beautiful fraught asymmetry of alicent and aemond's relationship, palpable and tragic and woefully understudied.

alicent does not desire violence and does not particularly respect violent people. e.g., we can imagine characters who might have been heartened or reassured — even if interspersed with guilt — that larys had been willing to kill to advance their interests. alicent is never shown to appreciate this silver lining; she is deeply remorseful and properly disturbed. the end of the season finds her attempting to stave off catastrophic violence surrounded by men who are effectively unbothered by the thought. aemond is one of these men. he is also her favourite man. i think this breaks her heart a little.

i'll preface this by stating again how much i sympathise with aemond, who is really neither a slick badass — his facade — nor a calculating psychopath — his caricature. aemond spends his childhood awash in a feeling of inescapable, humiliating powerlessness, and everything he becomes is a direct response to this experience, including his unfailing loyalty to his mother, his sole childhood advocate and ally. but aemond clocks alicent's powerlessness, too; and probably at no other time more palpably than during the quarrel at driftmark. viserys leaves her in the lurch; cole backs out when the rubber hits the road. when he tells her i gained a dragon, i don't think he's actually saying it was a fair exchange; clearly he doesn't really feel that way — he's still seeking his revenge years and years later (and fair enough). rather, i think he's telling her — and importantly, telling the people he perceives to be her enemies — we have real power now. we're safe. i got you.

aemond consistently strives to be alicent's one reliable ally. aemond also spends his life trying to make himself more powerful, and, if i were to really speculate, probably hasn't determined within his own heart whether he's done so to protect himself and his mother in the conflict he's seen presaged at driftmark, or in excited anticipation of that conflict as an opportunity to seek revenge. herein we find the crucial difference in how alicent and aemond each perceive safety, and perceive power — alicent thinks safety is found in the absence of violence, and power is the ability to be free from it; aemond seems to believe safety is found in a monopoly on violence and power is the ability to do it. it's entirely unrelated, and not to be insensitive by mixing factual and fictional tragedy, but i think sometimes about something prince harry once said about his childhood experiences watching the press chase and torment princess diana — his frustration knowing he would one day be a man, that he would one day be able to protect her, but not yet — and the anger, the frustration that caused. i append to aemond, though fictional, a very similar pain.

regardless, to whatever end, aemond's intention is to be feared and to be dangerous. he tells cole i don't give a fuck about tourneys for the express purpose of tipping us off: aemond is trying to become as effective as possible at killing real opponents in a real conflict. two things here: first, though aemond may not care for tourneys like the knights Rhaenys calls green as summer grass, he's equally inexperienced; he also doesn't know — cannot know — the true meaning of war or the costs associated. (see, e.g., his crucial misunderstanding of the nature of vhagar.) and second, tragically, though he's probably (if perhaps only partially) done so for her, he's become exactly the kind of man who has left alicent feeling trapped and perpetually terrified. olivia cooke somewhere noted that alicent lives in trepidation surrounded by 'psychopath men', and part of this fear seems to be what these men will do in her name and under the guise of advancing her interests. e.g., she knows larys' murder of lyonel did double duty. Tis only a look of pride, Ser Criston. Larys is the new lord of Harrenhal. to have become somewhat afraid of aemond — apprehensive, at least, of his adult nature — will likely only grow harder on her and harder to ignore. and the same will likely come of aemond's unintentional killing of lucerys, and would come had aemond returned instead with his severed eye: horror at the act; guilt and terror and frustration at the knowledge — however deeply buried — that aemond would have done it not for her, or for their family, but for himself; and that once again, she has been made the unwilling catalyst for the very violence she strives so painfully to prevent.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

couldnt draw my thang for mid-autumn so treated myself to a calne redesign instead

[jobycewl]

I believe in the “Everyone is jealous of Shang Qinghua” agenda

[agoddamnrayofsunshine]

Aftg being set in university is objectively hilarious can you IMAGINE being in a group project with Andrew fucking Minyard

[theoldkyokodied]

The Allegiance of the Ascended Vampire and the New God of Magic

[bethsvrse]

when I find a brilliant, jaw dropping, amazing x reader fic but suddenly I’ve been given a first name, last name, hair colour and eye colour

[lucabyte]

monologue

[sandflakedraws]

re : how each brother reacts learning that they can't go back

you'll have to pry the "all the Brozone Bros knew what happened at the tree" headcanon outta my cold, dead dead dead hands.

[hinamie]

big fan of panels where they look like they wld beat me up

[starkitten101]

Made this in like a minute out of frustration over a couple memories. Is this anything

[bet-on-me-13]

Harley and Ivy meet Jazz while she's Interning at Arkham, and think she's their daughter from the Future. Somehow.

They're not wrong.

Turns out the Fentons decides to test a Prototype Ghost Portal one day 18 years ago and accidentally made a Time Portal instead. Deeming the experiment a Failure, they were just about to close it and start again when a Baby was launched out of it and into Jack's arms.

The moment he looked into her Eyes he knew he wanted to keep her. Maddie was much the same.

They did Try to return her at first, but turns out the Portal was Unstable and constantly shifting between dozens of different TimeZones, so they could never find where/when she came from. She could either be from Earth 18 years later, or Mars 5 Million Years Ago. No way to tell.

So without any other option they decided that she was their Daughter now.

It helped that she looked so much like them, and that both had been in the Lab for 9 Months straight building the Portal so nobody would question the sudden Baby. They just told the Hospital they had an At Home Delivery and officially made her their Daughter.

They raised her believing that she was their's Biologically, because after a while they honestly forgot she wasn't.

Now Jazz is working as an Intern at Arkham Asylum, and has met the 2 Patients she will be helping take care of.

Doctor Pamela Isley, and Doctor Harleen Quinzel. Aka, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.

This should be an interesting internship.

[starry-bi-sky]

this just in: danny fenton is just as much of a mask as Brucie Wayne? - another danyal al ghul au

Turns out, being placed in a civilian family who have no knowledge of your background is actually detrimental to the health and development of a child assassin due to lack of proper support! Surrounded by strangers in a foreign city, Danyal Al Ghul does as assassins do best. He hides. Espionage is one of many teachings one learns in the League, and it only takes half a day for Danyal to construct a new persona to hide behind: Daniel Fenton.

By the time dinner rolls around, Danyal al Ghul is safely and securely tucked behind the face of Danny Fenton; brand new adoptive child of the Fenton family who came from overseas. A shy, quiet little boy with a thick accent and curly hair, with brown skin and blue eyes, and an avid interest in the stars. The best fictions are always cobbled together in a little bit of truth, it's some of the only truth he ever lets through. He apologizes in a meek voice for his behavior early, he didn't mean to be rude, and he watches the three of them eat it up with coos.

Lies roll like silk against his lips, he struggles to meet their eyes and offers them his weakest, shyest smile. It's too easy. It's easy to go from there.

Danny Fenton, adoptive son, shy and awkward and unconfident but friendly. Who struggles in his classes and isn't the brightest, but tries his hardest. He makes bad jokes and has a quick tongue and a sarcastic mouth. He wants to be an astronaut. He's got the best aim in school, and is a terrifying dodgeball player. He's one of the least athletic kids in his grade.

It's like playing two truths and a lie, but there's only one truth, and the rest are lies. It's easy to pretend when he knows it's insincere.

Danyal Al Ghul, grandson to the Demon Head. Deadly, trained assassin. Has spilled blood, has had blood spilt from. Environmentalist, animal activist. He loves the stars. He owns a calligraphy set. A sharp tongue, an even sharper blade. He's clever, quick-witted, he would be top of his grade if he tried harder. He purposely doesn't.

He misses his family. He misses his mother, and he misses his brother. Mother visits a few times a year, so few times that he can count it on both hands. He cherishes every visit, as brief as they are. It helps remind him who he is.

Sam and Tucker are Danny's best friends. They've never met Danyal, but Danyal's met them.

It becomes routine to become Danny Fenton. As familiar and as easy as pulling on a shirt in the morning. Danyal wakes up and is always first to the bathroom in the mornings; stares at himself in the mirror until he can finally see Danny staring back at him. At night, he locks his door and sheds the mask.

Dying throws a wrench in his mask; splits a crack straight through the porcelain. He's able to smooth it over with sandpaper and liquid gold, but it's a little hard keeping his ghost form under wraps. It instinctively wants to shift to show his true self. Danyal can't have that, he's spent four years as Danny Fenton, he'll spend another four as him as well. Even if the feeling of the hazmat suit in his ghost form feels restrictive, like a too-small shirt suctioned to his skin that needs to be peeled off.

He'll live. Er-- well, you know what he means. It's frustrating however, trying to keep his Danny Fenton mask up even as Phantom - fighting in the air is something he needs to get used to, and the sudden propping of powers throws him off. But he is nothing if not adaptive, and he hates that he needs to slow his own skills down in order to keep pretenses up in front of Sam and Tucker.

The first time Danyal summons a sword when he's alone, is one of the few times Danyal gets to grin instead of Danny. He's fighting Skulker, and from an invisible hilt he draws a katana from thin air. It startles them both. Skulker takes a step back at the smile that spreads across his face.

They're both silent as Danyal examines his new sword.

"Do you know what people like me do to people like you, poacher?" Danyal finally asks him, the accent he began to hide a few months in slipping through. He drops all pretense, dragging the flat end of the blade slow and appreciatively against his palm. It's a good make, and when he cuts it through the air, it slices through like butter. He looks up at Skulker with a smile; "are you ready to find out?"

When Sam and Tucker ask about why Skulker seems so skittish around Danny now, Danny shrugs at them and says with a playful smile; "I don't know, I guess I kicked his butt too hard after our last fight." and he watches as Sam rolls her eyes exasperatedly, and Tucker snickers with his own joke.

By the time he reunites with Damian before their 15th birthday, Danyal is buried beneath so many layers of Danny Fenton that his brother will need a shovel to dig him out. He's not sure what he'll find.

[turtleblogatlast]

I love Raph and haven’t said that enough so to be more specific I love that Raph is a soft boy who loves bear plushies, a gross boy who eats an assortment of things that are definitely better left alone, a smart boy who is more than capable of taking down villains through planning and fortitude alike, a strong boy who is dedicated to training his muscles and fighting prowess, a teenage boy who loves his brothers but is more than happy to tease and roughhouse with them, an angry boy who sometimes lets his anger take a hold of him to cover the fear, a gentle boy who is generous with hugs and affirmations to those he loves, a capable boy who takes on more than should ever be expected of a teenager, a good boy who just wants to be a hero and slowly comes to realize the cost of that duty, a good boy who has no reservations about putting himself in the way of harm coming to his family, a good boy who’s a great brother and son and person and deserves only the best the world has to offer.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

oh hey! i was reading a fic the other day where Wangji was once misspelled as Wangu. which leads me to: MDZS Pingu-style??? noot noot!

Do you think love can bloom on the sea ice?

[random-lil-illing]

i had a vision,,, asexual dps fans what do we think

[bixels]

I'm not explaining why re-imagining characters as POC is not the same as white-washing, here of all places should fucking understand.