#hi yes its me

[askthecasteliadetective]

[alilfroginacove]

lmao guess who just got engaged 😭

[crqstalite]

Title: Redamancy Fandom: Mass Effect Trilogy Pairing(s): Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard, Garrus Vakarian/Female Original Character Character(s): Female Shepard, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Kaidan Alenko, Liara T’Soni, Garrus Vakarian, James Vega, Jeff “Joker” Moreau Additional Tags: Mass Effect 3, Tags to be updated, Romance, Canon-Typical Violence,  Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Found Family, Mostly minor canon divergence, Brione Petrakis, Kodelyn Shepard, Citlali Velasquez Language: English Part 5 of Eye of the Storm Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

Published: 2020-12-11. Updated: 2022-12-29. Current Word Count: 57,335. Chapters: 8/?

Summary:

(noun) The act of loving the one who loves you; a love returned in full.

-

“I just want to know,” She’s slow to lift her head to meet his gaze, beating back the burning eyes by blinking a few times, “Is the person that I followed to hell and back, the person that I —”

“That?” Kodelyn raises an eyebrow when he pauses trying to get the sentence out, her armor clinking as she crosses her arms over her chest.

“The person that I loved, are you still in there…somewhere?”

If she could’ve short circuited in that moment, she would’ve. She’s nearly sure that she has, considering her train of thought grinds to halt. She bites her bottom lip as if to keep it from falling open after his admittance to caring about her at some point in time.

Loved.

Archive Of Our Own Link.

[eydilily]

(look at what i have to offer) — this is the spider's nest.

[chloesimaginationthings]

William gives Michael a very “good” FNAF gift..

[beastlyidiocy]

my sweet old man who is genuinely too kind for the world he lives in :(

[noornight]

Long distance besties. This definitely happened after the third movie (source: trust me bro)

Based on this

[uncharted-constellations]

The entire ALBW team

Links about to become Lorules #1 hytopian fabric exporter

[kettle-bird]

I've been getting into X-Men lately! Or, well. One specific X-Man.

[theoldkyokodied]

One wedding and three funerals

Background paintings under the cut

[crqstalite]

evolet is constantly at odds with reyna because her desire to protect her family is so strong and loud it might get her killed.

reyna, however, is constantly at odds with evolet because her desire to protect her family is so strong and loud it might get her killed.

reyna's fear is loud and violent. it takes the form of blood soaked templar plate, of big acts of destroying what stands in her way to create a path for her loved ones.

evolet's fear is quiet and ever so sure about her next step. it takes the form of long nights and shut lips, of small acts of rebellion that eat away at her and make her paranoid, but at least they're safe.

both of them are so self-destructive that its like looking in a mirror. and that is the crux of the issue when reyna defends anders in the end, and both women have to wear the scars of their decisions. the tendrils of purple that decorate reyna's back like a curtain of poor choices and the sharp, decisive blade cut along evolet's neck.

a moment where grey orbs meet brown, where blade meets the arcane. the ones they love are in danger, and theyre so desperate to protect them that for a moment each sees red. but the same sense of justice colors their outlook one the world. they want the same thing, but what are they willing to destroy for it?

burning their bridges between family members? the massive loss of life? holding ones tongue instead of defending each other? cherishing safety over what was right? over what would ensure them freedom instead of the status quo? what was the right answer?

was there a right answer?

[daftmooncretin]

supernatural movie reboot but its a ghostfacers mockumentary about their attempt to make a “serious film” about sam and dean winchester. opens on ed and harry going “CUT!” and the camera pans to a guy that looks kind of like jared padalecki pulling off a party city wig. turns out the finale was actually part of the ghostfacer’s retelling of supernatural. Sam Dean and Castiel spend the entire movie chasing after ed and harry trying to stop the thing being made. (its a huge commercial success and they screen it at the destiel wedding)

[bastardlybonkers]

feetman

[a-very-sparkly-nerd]

Annabeth: *tries to sacrifice herself for Percy*

Percy:

Percy:

Percy: *jumps off the St. Louis Arch*

[jaspersbaseballsack]

It's the fact that so far Armand is the most inhuman monstrous vampire still walking the earth that we as readers have met. And yet we see him fall hopelessly in love with the most ordinary human man.

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."