#four kinds of falling

[toribookworm22]

Themes Tag

Thanks to @unstablewifiaccess @clairelsonao3 @vsnotresponding @cljordan-imperium for the tags! ♥️

No pressure tagging: @sam-glade @inkspellangel @writing-with-melon @talesofsorrowandofruin & my open tag!

Rules: bold and/or color strong themes and italicize and/or color loosely covered themes in one of your works.

Four Kinds of Falling

addiction | beauty | betrayal | change vs. tradition | chaos vs. order | circle of life | coming of age | communication | convention vs. rebellion | corruption | courage | crime and law | dangers of ignorance | darkness and light | death | desire to escape | dreams | displacement | empowerment | facing darkness | facing reality | faith vs. doubt | fall from grace | fame and fortune | (found) family | fate | fear | fear of failure | free will | friendship | fulfilment | good vs. bad | government | greed | guilt and forgiveness | hard work | heroism | hierarchy | honesty | hope | identity crisis | immortality | independence | individual vs. society | inner vs. outer strength | innocence | injustice | isolation | knowledge vs. ignorance | life | loneliness | lost love | love | man vs. nature | manipulation | materialism | motherhood | nature | nature vs. nurture | oppression | optimism | peer pressure | poverty | power | power of words | prejudice | pride | progress | quest | racism | rebirth | relationships | religion | responsibility | revenge | sacrifice | secrets | self-awareness | self-preservation | self-reliance | sexuality | social class structure | survival | technology | temptation and destruction | time | totalitarianism | weakness | vanity | war | wealth | wisdom of experience | youth

[alch-emi]

And from then on the Chain made sure they knew exactly where Hyrule and Wild were at all times. Especially Wild.

A comic for my bestie @mirensiart ‘s LU pain sharing au! I love all the angst potential of it but I wanted to do smth a lil silly w/ one of my favorite duos :)

[sweeteastart]

Ravioli day 5 four days later for raviolishipweek by @breannasfluff

I finished this 25 panel hell of a comic. It's resolution is a bit quick but i don't think I'm impartial after spending days on it

[cybertron-after-dark]

I started watching Rescue Bots and. BLADES IS AFRAID OF HEIGHTS? AND HE'S A HELICOPTER? GUYS NO- like im sure this will be a meaningful character development arc but GUYS YOU COULDNT HAVE MENTIONED THAT TO OPTIMUS???

We got another one, boys.

[nothingbutvultures]

FOB X AC

[sabbathbloodysabbeth]

A repost of something that I wrote, and put on my second account before here :)

Eddie was crouched on the curb of the building when one of the back doors to the mall suddenly flung open. He was behind the mall near the dumpsters, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to slam the door with their legs while their hands were full of garbage bags. What was not normal, however, were the tiny shorts on this guy's ass.

There were no shorts that needed to be that short. Though it was the eighties, crop tops, and short shorts on men were a trend. That didn’t mean Eddie had to enjoy it. If anything, he enjoyed it so much that it did a full one-eighty into a bad case of loathing.

But this sailor, in his short blue shorts, maybe one in a million because Eddie's enjoyment was doing a full three-sixty on repeat. He’s pretty sure his eyes were doing that silly animated thing too, where they continuously popped in and out of his skull.

As he kept watching this fine-looking sailor, he noticed the other man struggling to carry three garbage bags in his two hands. His arms were visibly straining from the weight. The man was also purposely stumbling to the dumpster to avoid one of the leaking bags, leaving a trail of melted ice cream behind him. He was a walking disaster just waiting to happen and Eddie found himself slightly more into that than he had previously thought.

What can Eddie say? He has a thing for dumb men and nice asses. And this gorgeous, gorgeous fool in front of him was the epitome of dumbassery.

Eddie was so distracted by this man that his cigarette burned to the nub, and he wasn’t paying attention to the heat slowly beginning to reach his fingers. Not until it was too late did he notice the tiny lit flame against his skin. Some of the ash landed on his pants, hands, and even his favorite ‘Ride the Lightning’ tee.

“Fuck,” he yelps as he hops up and purposely drops the nub under his show to put it out. His right hand, which got burnt, was doing a dramatic jazz hand skit, while his left made a feeble attempt to brush off the ash. He then looks back up to see the sailor, who had been two-thirds of the way to the dumpster before Eddie did his small fire dance, was now looking at him.

From where he stood, Eddie could hear the other chuckling at him. Embarrassment washed over him before it slowly turned to anger when he finally comprehended who he was looking at.

Standing almost ten feet away from him was Steve Harrington, the same Harrington who was a complete douchebag in high school. Now, said douchebag was holding back soft laughter. The asshole even opened his mouth, probably to give Eddie shit, when the bag that had been leaking the entire way to the dumpster finally broke.

Ice cream and trash go everywhere, most landing on Steve's shoes and hairy legs.

Eddie doesn’t hold back the laughter that catches him by surprise, his anger leaving him before he can say anything too stupid. However, he quickly stops when the other boy's gaze falls back on him.

He’s afraid he’ll have to run away from a trash-covered king, but that fear quickly dissolves when he hears Steve's laughter slowly join his.

“I suppose that's what I get for being an asshole.” Steve comments, scrunching his nose in disgust as he steps out of the puddle of sour milk at his feet.

He looks back up, about to say something to Eddie, but the door he exited less than five minutes ago flings open. This time, a disgruntled girl with a slight bob and matching sailor suit emerges.

“Hey, asshole-” She stops mid-sentence, her expression morphing into disgust as she processes the mess surrounding Steve.

Eddie glances back at Steve who is now frantically moving much faster than before. He throws the garbage over the dumpster and quickly begins to pick up what he can, which isn’t much before he runs back to the girl at the door.

“Sorry, I didn’t see the bag was ripped until I was like five feet away from the exit, and I was hoping to get it all mopped up before you noticed, but the bag broke and–” Steve’s words were flying a mile per minute, each hitting his coworker in the face all at once.

Once again, Eddie is surprised by the boy's behavior and so is Robin, whose name tag he had managed to catch when she takes a step back from Steve. Who now reeked of garbage and seemed oblivious to this fact along with what personal space was.

“Ok, ok, I get it, dingus.” Robins's hand moves up in a stop motion. Both she and Eddie watch as Steve’s anxiety train slows down to a halt before it goes too far off the rails.

“We can get a janitor to clean it up or something, but I need you to get back in there before I piss myself. I’m having one of your kids watch the booth while we are away and I don’t think we have enough time to piss and get you cleaned up before they start robbing us clean.” Robin rambles out.

Eddie can’t help but think that the two were perfect for each other because they sure did ramble a lot.

Eddie’s existence is again ignored as the two sailors head back in. Before Steve is completely gone though, he sends a small finger wave Eddie's way.

And at that moment, Eddie decided he was going to loathe that boy's ass forever.

[kousagi7hikari]

Uhhhh…

UUUUHHHHH??????

[carlyraejepsans]

i was thinking about that ask i received the other day and how uncharacteristically upset the topic had made me when i usually just think "mh. gross!" and move on, and after mulling it over a while i realized it wasn't about the topic at all, it was the ask itself that freaked me out. i've mentioned sporadically before (for obvious reasons lol) that i used to be involved in fandom discourse when i was younger and that!! fucked me up quite a lot. between exacerbating my ocd and straight up getting cyber stalked (i almost feel guilty using that word, like i don't deserve it but. yeah that is 100% what happened to me), the topic is something I have very complex and personal opinions on but that i hate talking about in public because it still sets off my fight or flight response.

i know some people in the fandom are like "let me know if i ever rb someone who wrote/drew gross stuff" and that's entirely their choice and i respect it. but for the record, i am not one of these people. please, for the love of god, i am asking this genuinely do NOT come into my DMs about this, I don't want to know. assume I'm either living in blissful ignorance or my blacklist already covers me quite nicely & i wanna keep it that way. i vastly prefer the discomfort of stumbling into something unprepared and deciding what to do about it on my own, to the utter pit of dread i get whenever i open a message that starts with "hey just so you know-". i have blocked multiple people in the past over it. i WILL block more. be warned.

[note. this doesn't apply to people who have either hurt or behaved inappropriately with other members of the fandom, or spread bigotry and discrimination like racists and transphobes. please do let me know in those cases]

does this make sense? idk I'm kinda feverish you guys figure it out. I'm going to sleep.

[blinkandyoumissit]

17 JAN 2018 | MTV • Fall Out Boy on MTV Total Request Live [clip]

[zenaidamacrouras1]

It's not that I have trauma but every time I go to clean up the stacks of math worksheets and half finished drawings on the dining room table I remember cleaning after my brother died and finding my brothers 3rd grade journal where he wrote about going to an airshow and seeing a hot air balloon and feeling happy.

then I picture my own children dead and that is why I have cupboards full of math worksheets and half finished drawings so anyway probably I'm fine.

[toribookworm22]

My Aro Characters💚

For the last hour of Aromantic Visibility Day, I thought I'd share some of my arospec characters:

Ruth Eymmons - Aromantic

Angie Farley - Aroflux

Maybelle Clark - Demiromantic

Gwenevieve Hampshire - Aromantic

Edward Sundune - Greyromantic

Jade - Arospec

Javon Midori - Platoniromantic

Cass Calvino - Greyromantic

Daniel Corsair - Demiromantic

Tomas - Demiromantic

Micah - Akoiromantic; desinoromantic

Kib Gree - Aromantic

Malkaline - Aromantic

Orchid - Aromantic

Charley Hanner - Arospec

Kathy Abago - Aromantic

[alex51324]

OK, so I'm now caught up on Interview With the Vampire (TV). I have some observations:

Wow, was that trial ever a master-class in poor-little-meow-meowification! I was legit getting flashbacks from the (season 1-hiatus) Izzy Trenches, with the whole, "Pointing out that he doesn't have to put up with my behavior, and he wouldn't recommend anyone else do so either, is--due to Meow-Meow's personal circumstances--an act of such exquisite cruelty that it excuses pretty much anything he does while he's upset about it," and "sure, yeah, this thing Meow-Meow did sounds bad to you normies, but because we're pirates vampires it's barely anything; a slight loss of temper for which he should be forgiven completely because the other dude said something mean", thing, plus the side of "Oh, but that threatening to leave is the most brutal form of abuse thing applies only to Meow-Meow, and in only one direction; it's fine for decide to part ways with anyone else at any time for any reason, and nobody else has any right to find that at all upsetting."

(To be clear, I genuinely liked this in IWTV; it was interesting seeing an audience falling eagerly into this trap, when the audience is also fictional, and the show itself is winking and nodding to us about it.)

(I do wonder if the show is going to grapple with this at all next season--the reunion suggests that Louis had also fallen into this trap. I'm unconvinced by the fan-theories suggesting that Lestat was an unwilling participant in the trial; there might have been some use of vampire mind-powers to keep him on-script during the proceedings, but I think he genuinely didn't realize he gave a shit about Claudia until it was too late.)

2. The aging-up of Claudia's character (she was a little little girl in the books) puts her at right about the same age as The Vampire Currently Known As Armand was when he was originally sex trafficked as a human, and I wonder about that stirring up some long-buried feelings. Does the grotesque parody of innocence inherent in Baby LuLu have some parallel in his experience as a sexually exploited child? What happened to Arun--or to Amadeo, even--if he failed to play his part with a reasonable facsimile of enthusiasm?*

On the one hand, I'm interested in these potential parallels; on the other hand (glancing back up at point 1), it's a tricky needle to thread, to see these parallels as contextualizing Armand's actions, but not excusing them. I do not entirely trust fandom not to turn this into, "Well, she reminded him of His Worst Trauma, so everything he did to her was basically self-harm, and he pretty much had to kill her in order to achieve closure on that period of his life**."

(*Some of this may be addressed in the books? The Vampire Armand came out on the waning edge of my Anne Rice phase; I'm pretty sure I read it, but I don't remember much about it, and I don't have a copy. The parallels with Claudia wouldn't be, though, because in the books she was 5.)

(**Izzy Trenches flashbacks again.)

3. As someone who read the books back in the day, I appreciated the brief mention in S1 that Louis's grandfather had owned a plantation, worked by men who "shared his complexion but not his circumstances." To me, that line opened up the possibility of reimagining Book!Louis as also being Black.

(To be clear, he canonically could not have been; beyond that fact that It Would Have Come Up, in the first few pages--which I just re-read--he is described as being bone-white. Even if he was mixed and white-passing, it doesn't quite work.

However, Anne Rice did write a book, Feast of All Saints, about a mixed-race protagonist, who was the son of a slave owner and a woman he enslaved. I remember almost nothing about it, except that the white father had promised to free him and send him abroad to be educated, but broke that promise. Porting some of that over onto a book-canon-era Black Louis could be very interesting.

I'd have to re-read both books--and probably TVL, too--to be able to even think about writing it, which is...unlikely, but I put that idea out into the universe.)

[mobiusstripper]

Filip calling out Marco in front of everyone in Babylon's Ashes is such a good moment. It sucks how many people shit on Filip as a character. Yeah, he did some really, really bad things (or, at the very least, was extremely complicit in them), but he was still a CHILD who was manipulated from birth by a man he (almost literally) looked up to as a god. (Seriously - look closely at the language in Filip's early POV chapters when he talks about Marco. It's almost Old Testament.) He was given life-and-death responsibility that he lacked the maturity to really even comprehend at his age and was saddled with moral injury that lasted the rest of his life. Seriously, think about the dumb shit YOU said, did, and believed at fifteen, sixteen.

There's no way he didn't know the consequences of standing up to Marco like that, especially in front of other people. I don't really give a shit about the "were they redeemed/weren't they redeemed/can they be redeemed" conversation around fictional characters because redemption is a subjective moral judgment. All I'm saying is that took real courage. And walking away took real courage. And it takes real courage to find an open door when someone else has already shut so many of your doors for you before you even knew they were there.

[britneyshakespeare]

you know someday i'm gonna feel so good when i have my student loans paid off

that ain't gonna be soon, trust me, but i think about it

[charcadett]

Can I request Rika with a short s/o

Finally getting around to doing requests hehe! Excited to start off this batch with Rika my beloved.

Rika With A Short S/O

- Rika herself isn’t as tall as she would like to be. If she had her way, she would be six feet tall, give or take an inch. She’s not short by any means, sitting at an average 5 '8, but she won’t deny that she’s always wanted to be taller. The height difference between you and Rika gives her a bit of a rush. You make her feel like a giant, even if you’re only a few inches shorter than her yourself.

- The opportunity to tease you is too much. Rika jumps at every chance she gets. Her favorite is resting her arm on your head or shoulder, depending on your height in comparison to her. A sly grin stretches across her face. It doesn’t matter if you get flustered or give her an annoyed eye roll. She eats up your reactions either way.

- Rika would be lying if she said she doesn't enjoy caging you between her arms, your back against the wall as you look up at her. You look adorable that way. She can’t help but give you a quick peck on the forehead before pulling away. If you give her a taste of her own medicine, instead of her playful grin, she’ll blush and avert her eyes. Rika flushes even darker when you give her a peck on the nose.

- Good luck if you need to reach things on the top shelf. Rika hides your step stool specifically so you have to seek her out. You can either give in or haul yourself onto the counter. If you go for the latter, Rika stands behind you, prepared to catch you if you fall. As if she could. Just as with her height, she doesn’t have as much muscle as she wishes. Sometimes, she’ll try to lift you up, only to crumple beneath you. Her enthusiasm never wanes, no matter how many times her arms give out.

[heartharps]

spicy six ocean’s eleven au

--

nancy is ocean, obviously. she's the mastermind. we catch up with her as she's being released from prison at the end of a grand theft sentence. she meets a blackjack dealer in a local casino, who insists her name is maya even though nancy calls her robin.

"where is he?" nancy asks, referring to their longtime friend and partner in crime, steve.

robin explains he's in LA, teaching movie stars how to play cards. nancy is surprised they aren't still joined at the hip.

"i got a girl. i got busy. he threw a fit, flew to cali, and now he calls me every day just to tell me which celebrities are assholes."

it takes nancy no time at all to find him running a game in some flashy hollywood club. he isn't even surprised when he walks into the room and nancy is there, easily winning all the nepo babies' pocket change.

nancy and steve head to a bar, someplace quieter, almost empty at that hour. just seeing each other is all the catching up they need to do. they know each other too well. they've been in this business together for years. it's always the same story when they find each other.

“so tell me," he says.

"it's tricky," she answers. "never been done before. lots of planning, and a large crew. the take -"

"what's the target?" steve asks.

"the take is eight figures," nancy promises.

steve knows somethings up. "whats. the. target."

it's a vegas casino. it's crazy, the hardest con they've ever tried—but nancy has a solid plan, and talk about a jackpot.

steve still thinks she's hiding something. he keeps pressing her for the reason why. why so complicated? why this? why now? she plays it off, pacifies him with vague talk of opportunity and honor.

steve is itching for a real job again. and he's followed nancy into worse, hasn't he? and talk about a jackpot!

so they get to work.

they need a crew. they figure it out while robin moves to vegas, claiming her girlfriend loves the heat.

jonathan will handle electronics. argyle is still the best driver around.

"what about munitions?" steve asks. their go-to guy retired after losing a couple fingers.

"we're set," nancy says. "i found someone new."

steve is reluctant, not wanting some trigger-happy hotshot stepping all over their job.

"don't worry. you'll like him."

she hires eddie. (steve does like him, eventually.)

nancy thinks they need one more, so steve goes to indianapolis to pick an up-and-comer recommended to them by an old mentor. (dustin gets linus' intro. he's surprised steve offers him the job so quickly. "claudia has faith in you," steve says. "well, mothers are like that.")

they all convene in vegas. nancy is shocked when robin shows up with a bouncy 5-foot-nothing blonde on her arm, introducing her as chrissy.

nancy pulls robin aside to say what the fuck? you can't bring a plus one to the secret crime meeting!

"we need a grease man," robin says. "chrissy is SUPER flexible!" and she’s maybe a little too excited about it.

nancy rolls her eyes but agrees. they do need a grease man. grease woman? someone tiny to sneak around and hide in tight corners. apparently chrissy had joined a local circus troupe, so she was plenty qualified.

they debrief the job. they're knocking over tommy hagan's casino. none of them have met him before; he's just a wildly successful casino owner.

there is a reason why nancy picked his casino, but she lies and says it was random.

steve figures it out a week later.

dustin's job was to follow hagan and learn his schedule. (the kid didn't like the low-stakes work, but stopped complaining when steve threatened to send him back to indiana.)

dustin reports to steve, walking him through hagan's daily routine. it ends like this: "and then comes the girlfriend."

they both watch as a gorgeous woman with bright red hair struts across the casino floor.

"this is the best part of my day," dustin says, stars in his eyes. "i'm not sure if we can use her yet. i haven't even caught her name."

steve sighs. "barb," he says. "her name is barb."

steve confronts nancy. "tell me this is not about her, or I walk off the job."

"who?" she plays dumb.

"barb! tell me this isn't about screwing the guy who's screwing your wife!"

"it's not about that!"

"seriously? im not stupid, nance!"

"...it's not entirely about that." she's honest and somber now, speaking with a dark look in her eyes. "remember when we got into this business? we said we'd play like we had—"

"we had nothing to lose," steve finished.

"well, i lost something. i lost someone."

it hit steve then, hard like a smack in the face. he knew it had been tough for nancy, when barb found out about her career and left her. but he thought it wasn't that bad, that she was getting over it. he never realized how hurt she was.

so now, as nancy said, "that’s why i'm here."

steve knew he had to stand behind her.