#i want them to get nasty

[yuhi-san]

hmm now i want to write more vashwood smut... have some spesific ideas

i mean i have a something really sad in mind and also a hurt and hopefully comfort thing cor vashwood week once it comes up and i should write for observation. which is bad timing because it is sooo tempting to have them get down and dirty in the chapter i am working on ahh

what did vashussy week do wo me

[thinking-emoji]

You know what if I was Dan and/or Phil, I wouldn't necessarily care about my fans putting their romanticised idea of my relationship in competition with some actor or musician or whatever celebrity has tumblr fans. But if I was up against JESUS AND JUDAS FROM THE BIBLE? I would find that so funny and I think I would like to see that poll. Idk what do you all think

[carnytaurus]

Dilo Doodle while I wrestle CSP into working on my tablet

[rainbow-sunshine-unicorn]

The need in Anthony’s eyes as he thrusts in the air, like just looking at Kate has made him desperate enough to hump the air????

While Kate deliberately walks extremely slowly towards him to prolong the torture and bites her lip in amusement at his neediness????

Oh they are such FREAKS!!!

[alexwilltellyouthings]

There's one thing, though, that makes romantic payneland better.

It's NOT that the love or bond would be stronger, or that it's "more than friendship", etc. This post I did about the line between platonic/romantic is where I stand in this regard.

The thing is: Edwin wants something new now. And it's unbalanced, when one part is craving for something and the other is not.

That doesn't mean the relationship is at risk. I'm not talking about the feeling, I'm talking about what you want to do about it. The feeling is there and it's safe. But not being able to express it as you wish, having to repress the desire to touch and speak new words and act differently, well, that hurts anyway.

In another world, maybe Edwin could eventually stop craving those things, but I don't really see it happening. Not in a looong time, at least.

So if Charles reciprocates, that is them finding the balance again. It's not about loving more, it's about loving the same way, you know? If Edwin wasn't in that place, they could remain platonic forever and nothing would change. But Edwin is there. So I really need Charles to follow.

[heybiji]

"Do me a favor and put your arms around me."

[ruporas]

honeymoon phase! (ID in alt)

[bxriles]

I’m sure that this is not a hot take and that a lot of people feel the same way but like…

The question “does it have spice?!🌶️🔥” makes me want to jump off a cliff. I’m out here looking for gothic book recommendations on Reddit, tumblr, and goodreads and WHY is this the first question so many people ask 😭

Look, I love erotica as much as the next person but come on. There have got to be other things that matter when recommending books or choosing to pick one up, my GOD.

[dilfmobius]

i took a break from suits because the only reason i was there in the first place was for how absolutely batshit insane harvey specter is when it comes to mike ross and once mike went to prison i kinda went okay i think the shows run its course for me byeeee

anyway i just started s6 and i'm happy to see harvey specter is still batshit insane for mike ross

[fyodior]

this is literally so cliche but i’m Thinking Thoughts about being a groupie for chuuya’s band. he’s ultra sleazy and smokes cigs like they’re air but he shreds guitar like no other and fucks like a porn star

[eroguron0nsense]

Soren and Rajaion

I think sometimes about how Soren's entire identity and all of his insecurities stem from being abandoned and unwanted, and while that's generally associated with his subaltern branded status and the violent oppression that comes along with it/need for secrecy and consequent self hatred, there's also a lot to be said about how he fixates on the constant cruelty and denial of his childhood; in his B support, he expresses some envy over Ike having had loving parents, and repeatedly mentions how the people who raised him either resented having him or kept him around solely because of the false impression he was a spirit charmer rather than any kind of actual affection. His entire life up until he meets Ike is one of rejection and lovelessness, and he preemptively pushes anyone else away and keeps himself distant from anyone else at LEAST until the end of RD. We see him healing through his and Ike's friendship/love, him trying to come to terms with himself and opening up to people to some extent, and quite possibly trying to confront the violent internalized racism and rejection his life has been defined by, but he's still in many ways figuring himself as someone fundamentally unacceptable in his society and who's only able to trust a tiny number or arguably one single person with that identity, which is–unfortunately–true. There are a great many people in PoR/RD who would find him fundamentally unloveable and unacceptable if they clocked him and his very existence opens him up to anything from severe marginalization/exclusion to straight-up "honour killings". Ike isn't just the first friend and (arguably) the only friend Soren's ever had, he's the first person who hasn't immediately considered Soren unloveable and who continues to love him while affirming that the identity he's most ashamed of isn't going to put him in danger of yet another violent rejection

This makes it all the more heartbreaking when we realize that Soren was loved–deeply, in fact–by a family member, who willingly sacrificed his life and personhood in an uncertain bargain with Ashnard to save his infant nephew. Soren's life, which up until this point is regarded as entirely loveless, was regarded as precious enough by Rajaion so that he was willing not only to die for, but to subject himself to unspeakable torture and degradation, and his continued existence was only possible at all due to love and sacrifice that Soren himself will never know about, or realize that people found him worthy of

[cybertron-smash-or-pass]

TF One D-16

[bittsandpieces]

Interesting overwhelming theory. They say our kinks are hereditary… the fuck.

so the actual studies that have been done found that body related fetishes (like a foot fetish, or a size kink) have some genetic correlation, object related fetishes (like latex, or balloons, or rope) and primarily influenced by early life experiences, and that behavioral fetishes (like daddy kinks, master/slave dynamics, and praise kinks) are primarily influenced by the personality and life path of the individual person. There haven't been enough studies done on it for me to say that that's the definitive answer to it all, but frankly I'm not that worried about what my actual relatives are into, whether it overlaps with me or not

[phantomsies]

fat bodies are so fucking beautiful. Like we really are God’s most divine creation I think.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[canisalbus]

I'm sure you get this a lot but because my cousin and I love that one Danny Trejo action comedy, I always have to snap my brain into the right position when I read Machete's name. Maybe I should draw them both chilling

.