#holy fucking wow though

[moons-among-distant-stars]

i love going from the most fucking heart -wrenchingly terrible and tense scenes to loop and sif being kinda gay

[amphibianaday]

day 1765

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

do they realize how fucking insane they were for this. did it ever occur to them

[dimension-20-every-introduction]

Everyone Introduced in Dimension 20's Fantasy High: Junior Year episode 20 (finale)

[dissentersbedamned]

I don't think a blunt and a shot of estrogen would fix him but it would do something funny + other bullshit on the canvas

art commissions

[marionmorse]

MARIONMORSE, DROP ANOTHER HELMETPARTY SCENARIO AND MY LIFE IS YOUUURSS 🙏🙏🙏🙏

do u think... Do you think sometimes when the team has a movie night, when they watch those 60's action war movies like "Von Ryan's Express" and "Battle of the Bulge" or spaghetti westerns like "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and "Death Rides on a Horse," Soldier pauses during or right after fight scenes or duels or whatever to obsessively overanalyze them. Like, he'll try and turn them into strategies to use on the job, takes, uhm, 'notes', (tactical doodles,) sets up nerdy models using a whiteboard map and improvised figurines, uses these examples when he does those psyche-up pre-battle speeches or during strategy meetings.

'Cause I bet he does, I bet he does that, and it completely kills the momentum of the movie to the point where the rest of the team gets disinterested and slowly leaves him behind to do their own thing.

I genuinely bet Engie wouldn't though, nah, I bet he's enough of a patient kind of gentle kind of man willing to stick through these pauses 'cause he's just that into the movie. And maybe he's just a teeny bit into Soldier's dissections of actiony chaos. Maybe gleans a bit of an understanding of Soldier's thinking that way. Admires the guy's passion about his 'research,' how thoughtfully he gathers details in an effort to help the team. Starts mixing in tapes for these sorts of movies more regularly to their movie night pool maybe subconsciously, maybe on purpose. The rest of the team doing their own movie night. losers.

[nottakingresponsibility]

"What the fuck does this mean. Why is it calling me that. I don't remember setting my name as that. Hey, wait a minute."

[jellyjamheadobb]

[goldengodcannibal]

my concept and general existence of gender doesn't exist but i'll watch or see something that just roots me firmly in loving being a gay man

[fisheadz]

I wanted to expand more on my SWTD + ISM crossover. I’m just… so ill for it. I swear to the hallucinogenic pasta noodles that I’ll be getting back to requests and stuff soon, I’m just still working on my fic and my life and now this shit.

Spoilers for both Still Wakes The Deep and In Sound Mind, of course. Tread with caution, and a tolerance for the long rants of a man taken by the brain worms™️.

What if Caz ends up in the CU at some point? Desmond would have to go back in to keep him from going nuts. If he hasn’t already, that is.

A headcanon of mine is that, once a person has succumbed to their Shadow, they’re left as a sort of husk, a shell of themselves. They function, yeah, but they certainly aren’t themselves. They move around, they do miscellaneous tasks and they even work, but they don’t speak, at least not normally. Like, if they’re asked something common, like if they’re alright or something, they’ll answer with whatever they usually say to that question. If they’re asked anything more complex, they’ll just repeat a generic, common response, or not answer at all. Think, the Shadows talking to themselves and Desmond, but not really saying anything complex outside of their feelings and their goals (mostly just to kill Desmond).

Something like that happens to Caz, after he gets exposed to AR like Desmond or Lucas had (I’m thinking Lucas, because whatever strain of the stuff they dosed Desmond with just sent him into a funky coma) in some way. They get a call from Suze (with Billy flipping out in the background) and she says that Caz has suddenly stopped making sense, and he’s just been doing the dishes, or sweeping the floor, or whatever, for an unreasonable amount of time now, and they’re worried about him. So they go to their place to try and get through to Caz.

I think Lucas was in the CU during his own exposure to it way back when, in a sort of "pocket space" similar to the patients homes, or Desmond’s office, or even the In Between Tapes. But he wasn’t there for long, either due to the dosage of the chemical, the strain, or some other factor. Therefore, he has some experience with it, but not as much as Desmond. I imagine there would be a brief fight about it, because Desmond’s terrified of going back, but is their best bet to help Caz, and Lucas knows Desmond’s scared but would have no idea what he’s doing. But they can’t both go in. Rosemary is busy, and the others are off the table.

Eventually, Suze gets fed the fuck up with how long this is taking, and puts her foot down. Either they make up their minds and take her with, or she goes in alone. Billy is… not happy about this, but he’s also getting impatient. This is their partner on the line, and they aren’t keen on wasting time when he could be in danger in there.

And so, Desmond and Suze (against his and Lucas’ wishes, but they can’t exactly stop her once she’s made up her mind) go into the Collective, and right off the bat, Desmond can tell something’s off (more so than usual).

Either due to the Shapes presence in the form of Caz (and maybe Billy and Suze, depending on if they’re Infected by now) or something else, things are definitely different. The Building is wrecked (again, more so than usual), and the town outside, while not as flooded as when he left, is practically destroyed, in a way that the tainted water couldn’t achieve.

So now, Desmond is trying to convince Suze to leave, because now things are even more uncertain, and she’s getting pissed off because of, well, everything. Lucas is on the phone with Rosemary, feeding them as much information and tips as he can through the radio, and suddenly he informs them that something’s changed with Caz.

Now they have a time limit, so there’s no time to fight about Suze being there. There search for Caz’s door, and find it somewhere on the first floor with the other’s doors. (I imagine it’s be a dark blue or smt, or maybe the same funky pink color the Shape was had.) They go in, and it’s their old home. The bedroom is kept shut by a sort of veil or small sheet or smt made of oil. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

They get Caz’s tape (he’s nowhere in the Building, so it’s their only option) and play it. Once they do, and once they listen to his session bits with Desmond, they find themselves - oh oh, guess where! - on the rig.

Of course, it’s not as wrecked as it was when Caz last saw it, more like it was soon after the first explosion, after Caz woke up. And they can hear him, his howling echoing through the rig. They can’t see him yet, but he sounds big. They find some more of those oil veils, though they don’t have anything to remove them just yet.

There’s the obligatory call from Rainbow to mess with Desmond, because I said so, but there’s also other calls. It’s similar to the session fragments in Lucas’ tape, though instead of how they were presented there, in Caz’s tape they’re the phone calls he had while on the rig, although not all of them are like that. Some of them are more like internal or external dialogue, like when he first encountered each infected, or when he talked to other survivors, like his conversation with Finlay before Gibbos section. If this were from a gameplay standpoint, they’d only find these calls or voicemails or whatevers by picking up a phone with something different about it. Depending on where the phone is, it will play a specific line. From a fic standpoint, they just hear the phones ringing once they get close. At first they ignore them, because they think it’s Rainbow and they don’t have time for that right now, but after answering a call from him while they’re safe, they go back and listen to them to try and piece together enough to defeat Caz’s Shadow.

Speaking of his Shadow, I’d like to think that it sorta takes the form of @milestonekestrel ‘s (sorry bout the @) Infected Lizard Caz. Big ol’ lizard chasing Desmond and Suze through the rig as it slowly but surely falls apart beneath them. It wouldn’t be all fleshy squishy though, it will be leaking oil (though I can’t decide if it want it to be AR oil stuff or more like the tainted water stuff, or a combo of Shape stuff and AR stuff) and parts of it will be practically made of it. It would be a bit bigger than the Bull, so that it can move through the rig, and get blocked off in reasonable spots, and just generally be terrifying while chasing Desmond and Suze. It would talk a lot like the Infected did, with some Shadow-typical stuff thrown in. They can’t really hurt it without the item, though they can briefly stun it by shooting its stomach when it lunges.

And, because of course, one of the things you need is Caz’s screwdriver, like in Max’s tape. I’m weak, okay?

The item/weapon for Caz’s tape is, you guessed it! His lighter. It would be in his room (Desmond and Suze would’ve entered the tape in the helipad) and with it, they can burn Caz’s Shadow by lighting its oily spots on fire. While it’s distracted trying to extinguish the flames, they run to a safe area. Wash rinse repeat until they reach the derrick.

The boss fight happens there, of course, and I suck ass at action so no specifics, but they defeat his Shadow (the Infected? Maybe just call it the Shape to be lazy? What about the Flesh? That’s fun) and, after the heart-to-heart with it, it fades away, and they return to the Building and het back in contact with Lucas, who confirms that Caz is back to himself and really wants his wife back. So they return, and that’s that!

I think that, like some of the other tapes, there would be echos of sorts of the other crew members, and while I’m on the fence about there being Inkblots, considering that Rainbow clearly had the ability to spawn them, though it’s unclear if he spawns all of them, and I’d like Rainbow to be a more neutral force here, I want there to be some sort of damage-causing force where the Infected were on the rig. Like how the echos in Lucas’ tape damage you sometimes, but on a bigger scale, requiring Desmond and Suze to sneak around the area to avoid getting hurt. Smt like that. Sorta like the mannequins in terms of lore and interactions but, evil, y’know?

Meanwhile, outside of the Collective Unconscious, Billy and Lucas are just chatting away. I have no idea how well they’d get along, but I think Billy would certainly appreciate the distraction. He’s used to weird shit by now, with where I put this in the crossover not-quite-story, but that doesn’t mean he knows much about what’s happening, so hearing about it from Lucas himself is comforting.

When Suze and Desmond finally get out of the CU, she, Caz, and Billy have a long heart-to-heart, and after a while of being ignored, Desmond and Lucas decide to check up on them later, and leave to have their own little post-angst comfort talk.

I have zero fricking idea how this turned into an almost-fic, but I’m not about to change it. I have so many ideas about Caz’s tape and his Shadow, and how many metaphors I can reasonably shove into it, but I do not wanna write it all out rn.

What his Rorschach test transcript said, and what song his vinyl is, is up for interpretation. I imagine that the last letter Suze sent him is near his lighter, and the one Suze reads at the end of SWTD is in the bedroom behind the oil veil. Ugh I have so many ideas bro :’^.

[toffee-and-tandoori]

on your side by the last dinner party is so rosquez coded, the vibe is “i shouldn’t love you but i do anyway and i’m so so attached to you and intertwined with you that despite everything if you called me and asked me to come over i would drop everything for you” and it fits PERFECTLY imo

oh. my. god. lee.

first of all i just want to take a moment to thank you for thinking of me with this and actually looking forward to seeing what i have to say. i tend to be a bit of a sap at times (especially when i get stressed with whatever - guess stress makes me sentimental?) but this truly means a lot to me <3

now for the song.

on its own it is so gorgeous. i genuinely cried while listening to it because the sentiment is so heartwrenchingly beautiful. especially when you really absorb the weight of the lyrics but also watch the music video where the girls are all leaning on one another (as a side note ‘prelude to ecstasy’ has been on my ‘to listen’ list ever since i heard ‘nothing matters’ on the radio and became immediately obsessed). no matter how hard it gets there's always someone to turn to.

and now for the rosquez of it all.

i don’t think anyone can deny how this is literally marc. as we both saw in that video, marc is literally “yeah...valentino may have randomly accused me of sabotage without a shred of actual evidence and subsequently tried to turn the whole fanbase against me...but god he’s such an incredible opponent and i’m so lucky to race with him <3”. like...marc...please stand up. (and then the fact that it happens again in argentina 2018. and misano 2019. and whenever valentino gets interviewed. and yet...marc will never deny valentino’s skill).

however, i’m a hopeless romantic who always wants a happy ending and believes in the possibility of reconciliation until my dying breath (yet i gravitate towards brocedes...towards pierresteban...towards rosquez...note to self to address this head-on someday...but not today!). which means that i will also choose to believe that this is also very much valentino.

no matter how much valentino talks about how marc’s riding style “destroyed the sport” (like okay bitch [affectionate? it’s complicated...] i’m pretty sure your younger self who thought casey was overreacting thinks you’re a sell-out), he never diminishes marc’s skill. valentino may regret this now but he once called marc the upgrade and as much as that scares him, i think a part of valentino still believes it. call me delusional (read: i am) but i think deep down a part of valentino will always be charmed by marc’s ways...because it reminds valentino of his younger self. 

that’s exactly what simultaneously endeared and frightened valentino in the first place and i am of the belief that that’s the foundation of rosquez and can therefore never change. marc and valentino are in many ways the same person and that’s what ties them together...whether they like it or not.

[blupengu]

Y’all is Hollow Knight hard or do I just suck because oh my god??

[uncaught-coolfish]

istg the fn//dm is so funny. I’m a fucking SW fan and have been for a while and even I know they don’t get as pressed about criticism

[voided-selfships]

Drawing the full body (clothes edition) for BL3 Warren is so fun because "Yes, Warren. You Should include all the shit he looted off of Jack's corpse after BL2!" [Is it looting if the body needed to be like. Prepped for a funeral anyway]

[mielgf]

besties…… i just completely impulse came out to my parents and it actually went very well given how abrupt it was

[angeltism]

Seeing cute fanart and then the biggest link to someone's nsfw art patreon in my life. I'm not even mad why would I be I hope you're making so much money genuinely