#he looks so good it hurts

[tightjeansjavi]

[marked-unknown]

Flower boy 😤🥺☀️

(W Korea vol.6 preview)

[ameliagiovanna0]

Fighting the urge to make this my home screen

[domesticatedangel]

i am not joking when i say that i convulsed so hard at seeing this picture that i accidentally threw my phone into my face

[hinamie]

to moving forward

[bunnieswithknives]

AU based off Nature except I kept thinking about it too hard. Dales not a good dad, but its such an easy problem for him to throw money at, and what do you do when a part is damaged? Well, you replace it.

Basically an AU where Dev gets to experience medical trauma and realizes much sooner how much his dad doesn't love him

[shima-draws]

I'm rewatching GF since the whole world seems to be into it right now (thank you Alex and the Book of Bill) and AGHHH I FORGOR about the body swap episode when the twins find the secret room and Stan picks up Ford's glasses and later we see him sitting on the couch looking at them wistfully...

Shut up shut UP that's NOT okay

[stealingyourbones]

Out of all of the people The Ghost King Phantom expected to relate to, it definitely wasn’t the scrawny red headed photographer of the Daily Planet. Jimmy Olsen has gotten so many temporary superpowers over his time being Superman’s friend. Hell, he once gained a 4th dimensional being’s reality warping abilities when he was given said dimensional being’s powers during a fight. Sure there’s a dozen or so heroes with the same amount of powers he has, but none as suddenly granted to them as a all powerful god that can relate to a teenager.

[minhosblr]

Lee Know ✰ DICON

[cloudabserk]

so frustrating to me when people say sasuke needs to get put in his place… he spends the entire first part of the series getting the shit kicked out of him. by haku, rock lee, orochimaru, gaara, and itachi. even after vote1 we see him constantly struggle. he kills orochimaru pretty quick but his fights with deidara, itachi, killer bee, danzo and naruto almost kill him each time. he spends the entire series in and out of the hospital and sickbeds.

the whole point of sasuke’s character is that despite being very talented and naruto looking up to him, sasuke sees himself as the weak vulnerable little boy he was when itachi left. that’s why he wants so desperately to be powerful and not rely on others. so no one can hurt him like that again.

if you think he needed to be knocked down a peg with physical violence then you didn’t understand the point of his character at all… sorry to say it but you fell for his facade !

[momomallowart]

He misses his dad.. 🥺

[guqin-and-flute]

Something about the fact that these shots are all grouped together, one after another, visually giving them equal weight just gets me. The narrative knows what's going to happen between JGY and Huaisang at this point, knows how it's going to treat JGY at the end of everything. And it still takes time to show Meng Yao instinctively and immediately going in front of Huaisang and Huaisang instinctively and immediately hiding behind him. It takes the time--literally, showed it in the background and focused on it with the same general amount of time as the other shots--to show that this act of protection and trust are just as real and true as Jiang Cheng defending his sister, as Wen Qing defending her younger brother.

Like, I dunno! There are other Nie juniors there! They have swords and shit! Huaisang could have gone and hid behind the wall, but he hid behind Meng Yao! And Meng Yao could have moved back with Huaisang, but he steps directly in front of him!

There's a lot CQL did to JGY's character and narrative that I don't like and that flatten or just straight up erase his full complexity. But I really appreciate the lengths that it went to in Episode 4 to explicitly tell us that he does not hesitate to protect Huaisang, even though at this point he does not have a sword and definitely does not have anywhere near the same cultivation power (if any) as any of the rest of the people in the room.

Right now, after being publicly humiliated, unarmed and definitely outclassed, he is brave. Along with the rest of the characters, he's allowed to be uncomplicatedly young and loyal and just as innocent as any of the other students there.

[elsecrytt]

so i had a thought.

what if 236 is actually jujutsu tech propaganda?

mei mei is broadcasting this entire thing, right? what better way to protect gojo from bounty hunters etc., than convince the entire world that he's already dead?

the final battle happened offscreen, with significantly less fanfare. gojo rescued megumi, defeated sukuna. the day was saved.

at a cost.

gojo gave up everything - at least, everything he valued. the six eyes, his abilities as a sorcerer. he assumed that would make him a normal man, and he was right -

what he didn't realize was that it would also make him blind.

so now... you live in a nice apartment complex. a guy moves in next to you.

you can't help but notice he happens to be blind - at least, he's wearing a blindfold, uses a cane, but he's often swearing and stumbling through his porch, over his entryway. he is very, very blind.

you, wondering what the fuck up is with your obviously blind neighbor who seems to have no sense of self-preservation.

he walks into objects all the time, especially hitting his head on things, since he's so tall. forgets his cane when going out. the dude just left his door open the other day, like, WIDE OPEN, who DOES that?

helping gojo learn, not only how to be human, but how to be disabled. how to not be disgusted with being disabled.

gojo learning that being blind isn't the end of his life, nor the end of his happiness - life is still worth living, even without one of his senses.

helping gojo mourn his lost sense while still finding things to enjoy. gojo who learns to cook by taste, by feeling heat or texture, with your help. gojo learning to organize things so he always knows where they are from memory.

bringing gojo audiobook versions of your favorite stories even if he teases you for your taste. he listens to them when he has nothing to do, which is most of the time, now.

he goes out on walks all the time because he doesn't have a job, you learn. while it's nice to not have to work, you can tell he comes from money, his life comes with a gaping hole inside it, one that isn't entirely explained by the blindness.

gojo who's overstimulated all the time because he no longer has infinity as a barrier, but somehow also as touch-starved as ever, alone in a foreign country away from all his students and colleagues.

gojo, who has only ever done Big Things with his life, who has only ever been an Important Person doing world changing things, now, just an ordinary guy.

he barely cares what happens to himself now. it's not that he wants to die, or anything. it's just that he doesn't have a reason to live.

and that wouldn't change overnight. not with cooking lessons or audiobooks or friendly greetings whenever you see him by the door. not with smiles or waves (he can't see them) or a braille rubik's cube you find online (how did he solve it in under a minute??) or karaoke (he has an AMAZING singing voice, and he knows so many songs better than you do?).

it wouldn't change overnight, because nothing worthwhile forms in a day, or two, or even a week or a month.

but gojo's life doesn't have to be amazing a day after he's gone blind. or a week. or a month. it's okay if it's difficult, he learns, it's okay if he hates it, hates himself, hates every choice that brought him here, even if he would never take it back.

it's okay. it gets better. with you there? it's getting better.

[hinamie]

brighter days ahead

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[makiswirl]

can i just say. and this is probably a niche hill to die on. that i am so gobsmacked every time someone vaguely hints at the idea that jotaro doesn't care meaningfully for the other crusaders, usually particularly kakyoin and joseph, when those two actually tend to be the ones he reacts to being hurt the hardest

like he cares for his loved ones!!!! that literally plays into his character motives in every single part he shows up in!!! stop lying to me!!!!!!!