#grief is just such a funny thing

[stellarphileistic]

Ruined one of my favourite songs by listening to “All I need” whilst they lifted the cakets’s top off so we could view my uncle one last time (he passed a month ago, so they didnt prepare an open casket funeral ) and he unfortunately has already started decomposing. I can’t get the image of it out of my head despite being able to handle gratious gore all my life. It’s like a haunting image in my head. Bonus point that the end part of “All I need” was playing when they took the lid off so now anytime I hear it on TikTok the sight haunts me.

[radiance1]

Ghosts are Dragons.

But.

Instead of being protective or caring for one another or caring about child ghosts.

They actively view each other as threats.

Like:

"Oh, nothing personal but you gotta die now."

"Oh yea I totally get that but you also have to die now."

"Understandable."

Inspired by this glorious fic.

Dragons don't really hate each other, they just have to kill each other on sight no biggie. Even more when they feel like their hoard is in danger or a dragon is getting too close to said hoard.

So.

Danny and Vlad.

Phantom and Plasmius.

I would like to say that they're seen as really weird entities by the ghost community. On one they manage to act civil with each other (I.E not trying to tear each other's cores out or something) and then on the other they're literally how dragons would expect them to be (Phantom and Plasmius).

Of course, a ghost's act of civility is not the same as a human's, so they're just viewed as... really fucking weird. In human form their instincts are kinda on the back burner but still there so they're somewhat antagonistic with each other.

In ghost form?

Bloody brawl.

Even worse if you try and fit into the idea of the Fenton family being apart of both their hoards. Most common link being Maddie but if you wanna get kinda cracky with it could be Jack too for a Vlad/Jack angle.

On one hand, Vlad wants Danny to be his kid. On the other it's like "Okay no hard feelings but you really need to die now."

Then imagine if this was a Nasty Burger explosion au and Danny falls into Vlad's custody. It's like, okay, cool, Vlad got what he wanted but wow does his dragon side want this kid dead and damn he has really good self-control and somewhat morals to not try and strike a grieving child.

Danny, on the other hand, is very, very sad and his dragon side also, very much, wants Vlad dead.

They get into some fights. Well. A lot of fights. Nothing big.

By dragon standards anyway.

Look! Two dragons! In one house! And they haven't torn out each other's cores and disabled on another! It's a miracle!!!

(Sidenote, I feel like Danielle wouldn't really be around in this au because, you know. Dragons kinda want each other dead and all that.)

So yea, in the eyes of ghosts those guys Phantom and Plasmius are really, very weird dragons. And so, extremely but confusingly civil.

In the eyes of humans, however... well.... kinda... paints a bad picture.

To one Bruce Wayne especially when they meet each other at a gala.

[sapphiclinos-moved]

like I need u to understand that this made me absolutely piss myself

[lurkinginnernarrator]

au where SQQ does undergo the 'qi-deviation' and is 'changed' but in reality the twin of Shen Jiu, Shen Yuan made a comment one day about how all Shen Jiu did was bitch about his martial siblings. Never one to turn down a golden opportunity,

Shen Jiu: bet

And so the twins decided to switch lives!

The qi-deviation is just so they can explain away any differences of temperament and so sj can hightail away easier.

Shen Yuan: this is going to be so easy

(spoiler. it wasn't)

Between useless sect meetings that could've been not even an email but a text message, reading fifteen different preteens attempts to sneak in dick jokes into their poetry assignments, the head cook alerting him to the fact that they've somehow run out of rice??? They're the greatest cultivation sect??? How does that happen???

Anyway, two of his Hall masters eloping together and taking an extended honeymoon (he's happy for them, but. Who's going to teach those classes now??? Him. Apparently.), sect politics and his 'martial siblings' barely even attempting a farce of civility or courtesy AND his guqin strings needing to be replaced and restrung ?

Shen Yuan is sorry 🙏🙏please come back🙏🙏🙏

Cue the allotted period of switching ending and Shen Yuan dramatically throwing the fan on the ground as Shen Jiu rolls up and goes "thanks for the vacation didi"

[linipikk]

I want to say one thing about the setup for Jinx leaving.

The Silco in her mind told her to walk away to be free and she immediately thought about dying. That was the plan.

But THEN-- then Ekko stops her from blowing herself up. The thing is how. Because talking Jinx out of that mindset would require a whole team. And it does.

We can infer he told her that there is another version of her, of course. Powder and Jinx are the same, and as Powder told him "you want me to change" Jinx would think the same! except Jinx believes there is no "good version" of her

But as we know, it is not about one version being superior to the other or how Jinx and Powder being different. But it's about how Ekko has everything to recontextualize something that our Jinx knows deep down.

Because that is the same conversation she had with Silco in the cell, but this time not from a hallucination but from someone who is treating her as a real friend, part of the support system Jinx lacks, but she clings on so desperately.

So I'll go back to Powder for a sec

This is not the first time Vander and Powder have this conversation about her potential, about her leaving

And Vander did say something about it to Ekko. He knows her daughter

As well as Silco's words of wisdom.

Here he might be talking directly about Vander but, we know that it is also about oneself, after all that's what Jinx is all about. She is The Jinx because she destroys everything right? she is her walking reminder of all her failures.

And that's the Ekko's secret knowledge that saves Jinx. We don't need a recap of that episode, we just watched it. and Ekko is there to reach for Jinx, finding her, rewinding the explosion as many times as he has to. He tries very hard for her.

Jinx, as much as she claims to destroy everything, she creates, the one thing she knows how to do, and that's where she is more herself. She builds things and she might find someone worth trying for, not her ghosts or her guilt, but just herself.

Now, here they are: you've seen them, you love them, our acclaimed shimmer ray from the explosion and the ship sailing away.

Jinx leaving is about her following her dads advice and believing in Ekko's words. And I bet she does.

I just.... find it so charming that the glimpse of hope Ekko gives her is not just from himself but also about the fathers she lost so many times.

and to tie up the box, we have the final lyrics of Wasteland (that the series leaves out for ambiguity imo)

bonus monkeys, i bet it is the second Jinx kind of knew that Ekko was talking about her when he said "someone very special"

"someone worth building it for"

[the-holy-ghosted]

congrats 2 henry peglar for being the only bitch confirmed as to be Fucking That Old Man

[zosonils]

an aspect of shadow's trauma that i've been thinking about a lot since the sa2 replay is how fucked his perspective of gerald must be after everything, especially assuming he was family to shadow just as much as maria was [which i do every day]. the man who raised you, created you from nothing but tissue samples and energy and hope, the man who could have easily decided you were a simple thing to be used and yet welcomed you into his family as easily as his own granddaughter, who treated you as a person when so many others treated you as a lab rat or a weapon or another soon-to-be-failed prototype, in a moment of unfathomable despair, decided you were to be a tool that would carry out his final plan. perhaps treating you this way was another symptom of his mental breakdown, perhaps deep down he's always seen you as nothing more than a thing to reach his goals with. you will never know, because he is dead. every comforting memory you have of him, every time he encouraged your curiosity or stayed with you during a test he could have observed from afar or told you how proud of you he was, forever tainted by the thought that it could have all been a lie. a variable in an experiment, a means to an end. how would you ever trust anyone ever again man i'm in shreds

[eldritchqueerture]

please please please please please let this be addressed in season 5. please tell john he is still undefeated it literally does not matter what happened in the dark world he had to take the deal with kayne please i need john to break down sobbing style and arthur to tell him he is still undefeated beCAUSE HE IS

[asurrogateblog]

just because you two are the blue ones to your red counterparts does not mean you're the normal ones

[shyguygubbs]

I was thinking about kotlc recently and how the Black Swan originally wanted to wait to bring Sophie into the Lost Cities until way later, probably when she turned 18, and how different of a person Sophie would have been if that were the case.

Like at the start of the series, she's this child prodigy who has to go to community college in the fall at the age of 12 because her parents won't let her go to Yale (a totally valid parental choice btw), and the thing is I think she would have THRIVED in that environment. Like at first she would be scared and hesitant because in all other school environments she has been bullied for being as smart as she is, but now she's going into a school that people choose to go to in order to learn. Community college doesn't just have mean, jealous teenagers who attend, there are people of all ages and all walks of life who are ready to learn. Sure, Sophie would still be the youngest one there, and I doubt it would be super easy with the whole mind reading thing, but she would be in a much more supportive environment when it comes to learning than anything else she's experienced.

She'd be able to make friends with her peers, being able to bond over a shared love of whatever they're studying, and these friends don't think she's too smart or too weird. She maybe finds some way to muffle the voices in her head better than her earplugs did. Yeah, she still gets headaches, but she can manage it. I can see her taking as many classes as she can, figuring out her passions and what she might want to do as a career. She'd be in a fantastic place academically to transfer to any school she wants when she turns 18. I can even see her parents letting her graduate when she's 17 and allowing her to transfer to a four year college to get a bachelor's in whatever she wants to study, whatever she finds her passion for, because she worked hard for this, and doesn't hate school now, and has found a path for herself in life that feels right.

And then the Black Swan shows up and whisks her away from all of that, and she's heartbroken because she doesn't need to be taken away from everything she's worked so hard for. Yeah it feels nice to finally have the whole mind reading question answered, but she doesn't need a new place to belong, she has one. I imagine this Sophie being a lot more confident in herself, but a lot angrier too. She's fascinated by her new world, but desperately wants to go back home, to just live out the life she's been working towards. I can see her working side by side with the Black Swan from the jump, because she's in a world with injustice and she can't just sit back and let this slide, but constantly fighting back this resentment for them and how they took everything from her. I think of how canon Sophie had a brief moment of hesitation when it came to training her Telepathy, and I think this older Sophie would be conflicted between wanting to know more about this abnormality that she's been dealing with her whole life, and wanting to cling to her human identity and her old life as much as she possibly can. Because she's been ripped away from it, and no matter what her genetics say, this Sophie still views herself as human.

[astranauticus]

link click yingdu ep 1 is truly the gift that keeps on giving the more you think about it the more layers you unlock. at first i thought the 'video call with phone in shirt pocket' trick is a pretty effective way of replicating their dives with like.. normal human technology without their powers and then i realised that's probably because lu guang specifically thought 'this is a situation that would call for a dive except cheng xiaoshi doesn't know about the whole time travel powers thing yet, what would be a good and reasonable approximation of that that i can spring on him rn'. also, we know this is not the first time he's experiencing this day because he was checking the clock before he proposed the whole video call phone camera thing, implying that he had the 'script' for this day just like he did with the anime convention, but even then he could only warn cheng xiaoshi about the guy behind him with the bat right before he was about to get hit - probably because cheng xiaoshi kept 'doing unnecessary actions' and messing up the timeline/lu guang's 'script' and forcing him to improvise. once again, lu guang's trying to protect cheng xiaoshi while also hiding information from him and cheng xiaoshi's failing to follow lu guang's instructions and putting himself in danger because of his own kindness and impulsivity - their entire dynamic moving forwards, captured in their first (arguably more like.. the 0th) 'job' together.

[dazais-guardian-angel]

Well, at least Fukuzawa got his wish granted, I guess.... he's finally inside Fukuchi <3

[if-we-are-free-tell-me-why]

every time I hear someone say "oh you have to listen to Dear Evan Hansen it has such good mental health representation" I cry in Next to Normal

[oceanwithouthermoon]

"doing all his talking in between panels"

a few examples of this (where he had to have spoken otherwise it doesnt make sense):

some im pretty sure he spoke in but not 100% confirmed:

(he most likely said something in the first part, otherwise idk why they would know he was lying about doing stuff, but then just walked away wordlessly in the second part ☠️ im not sure)

(its most likely that he said something but its also possible that they just noticed his shock and explained. but the others do explain their situation and dont give any indication of being asked like these two did, so im pretty sure he said something.)

(more direct indications of being asked a question, but he probably couldve asked with gestures or expressions, so not sure)

[nathaniacolver]

i know caitlyn kiramman isn't a REAL jinx hater bc she would've known jinx's STUPID bangs are on THE RIGHT

like that's a mirror babe

[lapis-lazuliie]

idk just kinda insane to me how, seven years on, steve and reece still very openly cherish the one and only ep of their anthology series that was filled with gay subtext