#however simple it was

[ao3feed-p5-boyslove]

Well, folks, I think I need to admit defeat OTL Even with the DDOS attack on Ao3 defeated, the bots keep malfunctioning and reposting the same things over and over again. Maybe it’s the new cloudflare protection, or something? I don’t know shit about how this works. Regardless, I don’t have a clue how to get the bots in order.  Plus, with the permanent removal of the legacy post editor impending, that would break bots or make the posts useless, anyways.  I’m afraid this is the end, my dudes. As scary as it sounds... you might need to check tags manually from now on. Dreadful, I know. Or set up personal RSS feeds or something. I dunno how that works. I’ll probably look into it though because I have way too many rarepairs in my other fandoms to keep up with. Maybe I’ll let you know how that works out.  I paid IFTTT six bucks a month to keep this and a few other blogs running, anyways. Good with the bad.  Seeya, folks. =(

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I want it back / I drag its dead weight forward.

[clownsuu]

i never leave asks but i NEED to say that ur interpretation of wally is the best i’ve seen in the fandom and my absolute favorite hdkgnskgs like hell yea go completely unhinged u tiny fucking freak /affectionate

in love with ur art in general <3

WHEEZE lmao thanks my guy! I try my best to appropriately display wally to the best of my ability

cw obsessive/possessive behavior

He’s just a lil silly, maybe even a lil goofy (and dare I say, even a lil quirky-?)

[eldritch-ace]

I need more bestie Will and Bev content so I make it myself. They are the only cool people to ever exist in the FBI.

Also the Fred(dies) whom I despise (I love them with my whole heart). They are my favorite AO3 authors.

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[khiptid]

absolutely FOUL and DISGUSTING creature. let's kill him

[anglerflsh]

Watchful eye

[kagekitsuneoflight]

It’s kinda funny that Jason is, in every sense of the word, the most normal Robin. Unironically, there wasn’t anything uniquely special about him before he was Robin. He was a street kid. His dad was a goon (which makes sense for Gotham. It’s a goon breeding ground) and his adoptive mom was a girl who fell in love with the bad boy, got disowned by her upper middle class parents and adopted her boyfriend’s infant son. Even his biological mother isn’t anything special! She was just a doctor who ended up becoming corrupt.

Jason Todd was no circus kid who could do an impossible signature trick. He wasn’t being scouted by some evil hidden organization.

He wasn’t the rich boy genius who lived next door.

He’s not the son of a supervillain (as lame as cluemaster is, he still *counts*).

He’s not the secret son of Bruce Wayne.

And he’s not a metahuman, nor did he led a whole organization of teens to fight when Batman couldn’t.

He’s the most regular boy to ever enter become a hero in Gotham. He wanted to do good things for the sake of doing good. He grew up poor with regular parents, where bad things happened to them. The kinds of things that could happen to *any* person living in Gotham.

There is nothing about him, pre-Robin and as Robin, that makes him Not Like Regular Kids.

His dad was a goon (who, depending on the run, was either killed by Two-Face OR. Just sent to prison and killed in prison! Which makes his backstory even PLAINER-) and his mother was a drug addict with cancer. Jason ends up homeless, and almost steals the bat mobile tires. The only thing that makes him stand out from any other tragedy befallen kid in Gotham is the fact he was bold enough to do that, get Batman’s attention, and continue to be bold enough to go against a crime lord (who was apparently his grandmother, the most interesting person in his family, but since she’s almost never brought up, she’s likely no more significant than a one-issue villain in the crime lord power hierarchy). Batman realized that Jason wasn’t going to really stop, and honestly he kinda grew on him, so he decided to adopt Jason, and eventually allow him to become Robin.

There just isn’t anything amazingly special about his backstory. The few moments where something could have been done to make it more interesting (like his biological mother) but ended up taking the most boring option. You can’t do much of anything now to enhance his past without upsetting much more well established canon, and not without making people wonder “well if his grandmother was such a big name in crime, why hasn’t she been brought up before?”

Jason Todd was a wonderful Robin (providing that he actually has a writer who likes him). He has a golden heart, he’s the voice of reason. He’s everything that a Robin needs to be for Batman. But compared to everyone else, he was nothing special. In a way, his lack of Not Like Regular Kids makes him stand out in a much more subtle way.

As if someone asked the question “Do I need to be someone special to be Robin?” And the answer was “You don’t need to be someone special, you just need to be brave, like Jason Todd was.”

[saturdaysky]

hunger is whatever shape the moonlight pulls your shadow into.

The cover and first two pages of a comic about Essek and touch, set just after episode 97 and the reveal of his treachery.

There are nine pages. I will post them in batches as I finish them, and each post will be updated with the links to the other pages. 💜

I've had this idea sketched out for several years (check out my user icon, which hasn't changed since I made this account 😉 ), and I am excited to finally sit down and finish it! Here's a close-up of the Rosohna and Xhorhaus panel on page 2.

An absence is also a presence, no?

Poetry source is ONE SIDE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE by Hanif Abdurraqib.

[side-of-honey]

Whoops it’s been a hot minute LOL but I finally finished these 2 :) Feat the hardest one for me to draw & the easiest </3

[geegers22]

Just saw someone call zutara a crack ship…

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

[misstrashchan]

So. What's the opposite of a sacrifice?

With the final episode looming it's a question we've been turning in our heads, so I wanted to give my best guess/analysis as to what it might be before Jon and Muna come to tear our hearts out in the final episode.

This is the question Hayward asks Paige, and later Carpenter, and it seems to be the underlying thematic statement of the series, in response to Carpenter's exposition in the first episode of the Silt Verses that introduces us to the fundamentals of the world and system they live in:

CARPENTER:

A god must feed.

A god must be fed.

This is a fact agreed upon across every territory in the Peninsula. And so, really, the only difference between the people born to the water and the people born to the land...

...is the precise nature of the sacrifice we need to make.

There is a God for anything in their world as long as there is someone believing in it. But all Gods need human sacrifices. A god must feed. A god must be fed.

These simple rules have been used as fascinating and horrifying metaphors of our modern society, and to explore themes of faith and sacrifice throughout the story.

And so the final question the last season proposes is if we can find a way to make something better, that can exist outside of this ultimately unsustainable exploitative system and the harm it inflicts upon ourselves and the world, when it has come to define so much of the way we live and how we think. And that means figuring out the opposite of a sacrifice, if they want to kill the idea, the lie, that is at the heart of their world.

At first I thought the opposite of a sacrifice, of offering up to the gods, was about killing your gods. Starving them out. Refusing to offer up anything. And that is part of it, I think. I mean it's literally been a repeating mantra of multiple characters this season once they've reached they're breaking points. Violence in revolution as a tool to overthrow oppresive systems is sometimes needed and necessary. But what about after? What kind of future or vision for a better world can there be? There needs to be something at the heart of that movement that isn't just about violence against their opressors, because you then define yourself in relation to them.

This is even illustrated in the Many Below god Paige created having predator and prey emeshed together, a movement defined by their resistance against the predators of the world, the beasts, cannot seperate themselves to meaningfully create a better future that exists outside of that dichotomy. I think Hayward realises that even earlier in S2:

HAYWARD:

There’s a hare in the grass, half-buried and bloodied.

A barn owl has latched onto its back, its talons driving deep into the flesh of the hare.

Both animals are dead.

Familiar black stone veins protrude from the carcass of the victim, twisting like branches, driving upwards into the predator’s skin.

Hare and owl are locked together, inseparably.

The god must have struck just as the prey died.

White crocus is flowering up from the two entwined bodies.

(Unhappily)

And suddenly I begin to feel deeply afraid.

It all makes me think of a dormouse, dead in the dirt, its ribs showing. Of rabbits, teeth chattering, hungering from their cages

I kick dust up over the corpses. Nudge them aside into the long grass so they can’t be seen from the path.

Paige doesn’t need to know about this, I tell myself.

There’s no sense in worrying her. Not yet.

Which then makes sense why he's the one proposing the question of what the opposite of a sacrifice is to Paige (and Carpenter), for this very reason.

I think the answer is pretty simple and yet, like most simple truths in this world, it's forgotten and overlooked or twisted as naïve.

Preservation. The opposite of a sacrifice is preservation. To better explain this let me use an example:

If someone who cared about you tells you you're working too hard at your thankless job, sacrificing your sleep, your time, your personal relationships, your physical and mental wellbeing, far past the point considered sane, they'd tell you to stop. To make sure you take care of yourself. Instead of endlessly feeding yourself into a machine to justify your existence.

Applied to the world of the Silt Verses, it's not just self preservation and caring for yourself. It's about caring for, protecting, and preserving the lives of those around you, that is the ultimate act of rebellion and political warfare, the first steps forward towards a better world. Caring for humanity.

Whenever our characters reach a breaking point of turning against their gods, there's a common thread of wanting to save their fellow man, and realising the inadequacy of a god's ability to do that. Whether that's somebody close to them (like Faulkner and Paige):

Or humanity as a whole (VAL and Shrue):

SHRUE:

Use them, pass them on, do not forget the suffering that keeps the engines of this world turning, forget the name of your god and cherish the name of your neighbour that was swallowed up by it-

Cherish your neighbour. Be kinder to one another.

This can even go back to Carpenter's rejection of the Trawler-Man back in S1, her fury at the fact those she loved had been eaten (her family) and would continue to be eaten (Faulkner).

CARPENTER:

(Yelling to the river)

It's over between us, you twin mouthed prick!

Do you hear me?

Does that stir you from your torpor? Pry the barnacles loose from your sodden ears?

My father and mother were Gregory and Sandra Glass. My grandmother was Adalina Glass. My brother was Em.

They died for you.

Every single one of them died for you and they thought it meant something.

My name is Carpenter. And I am still alive!

I have loved you for so long. I have tried to know you for so, so much longer.

And I'm done with you. Here and now. I'm not laying down my life for you.

I'm not dying, do you hear?

The same breaking point for Faulkner at turning against his parish and finally snapping is the idea of Carpenter being offered as a sacrifice, an offering returned, begging for her to live.

I must clarify this is my own interpretation of the question and themes the story proposes. I'm

I'm not sure we'll actually get a hard answer so much as different characters offering their own answers and us as the audience encouraged to think for ourselves what it might be. I think this is what Hayward's answer might be at least, anyway, because like me he's a corny motherfucker:

If a sacrifice is the idea that the most meaningful and transformative thing you can do is to give up your life, your sense of self, to die, then the opposite of that would be to try to keep on living, and finding meaning and transformation in that, surely?

[luminarytex]

have you ever drawn genderswapped benchtrio..,, and would you consider it (please)

i actually haven’t drawn them genderbent, i guess maybe ranboo? if you count me drawing the occasional tfem oranboo? (i usually draw them extremely gnc)

[julesdap]

It’s my truth against yours. Are you feeling confident?

[peterbwatsonparker]

spider-man is so funny because his upper bound of strength is however much he needs to hold out. he needs to throw cars around? hes got it. he needs to land a (small) plane because his aunt is on it? he's got it. he need to act as a support beam for the daily bugle so it doesn't collapse? somehow he's also got it.

someone asks him how much is his actual max bench press and he just goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[nightmareonpeachstreet]

Arlecchino "Will Become A Winged Demon and Make You Duel Her Because You Didn't Finish Your Homework and You Need to Learn to be Strong to Survive on Your Own" and Arlecchino "Fuck You if You Ever Look at Her Wife Funny She's Been Depressed and Suffering for 500 Years and She'll Spoil Her if She Wants to" are the same person