#i am just rambling really

[eternalmomentss]

I love where Dorian is going right now so much. Downfall mirroring his own experience with the Crown Keepers so perfectly. The gods being presented as "just a fucked up family like us". A family with intense biases and intense human emotions that are willing to doom others like Opal or Cyrus or even an entire city for their own betrayer siblings. How is that fair? How could Dorian not wish to shatter that hierachy? How could he not agree that the power imbalance isn't right at all? His anger is so fresh, he's so broken, has no time to process and hides it all away. It doesn't matter. Other people are suffering too. He cares so much about them. He doesn't want to think about consequences. That maybe he is at fault and now he has to explain it all to his parents and accept his role as heir and leave the life he wants behind. And maybe he cannot do anything but seek revenge to rid himself of that anger. Maybe all he can do to ease the pain and guilt is kill a god.

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

Viago, when playing as Rook De Riva: you IDIOT you were my favorite fledgling why did you have to make a mess of this now I have to jump through all these convoluted hoops to keep you safe. Teia stop telling Rook how much I missed them it's not funny they could have DIED. also your room is exactly the way you left it please come home

Strife, when playing as Rook Aldwir: Why hasn't this weird bug i kicked out of our camp ages ago died yet :|

[tanatola]

pathologic 3 announcement made me return to the classic game and finally play it properly! i think my favorite part of the bachelor's route is when he talks to maria kaina (or whoever's in her body at the time) and they explain that their planned Utopia isn’t even supposed to be a 'perfect' place but instead 'the mystical manifestation of a world inscrutable and inaccessible to men' going back to the original meaning of the word irl and instead of despairing Daniil fervently agrees that this kind of unimaginable leap is worth it, no matter where it actually leads

[lazylittledragon]

taking all my american followers by the shoulders. listen to me. just because you have a more promising candidate now doesn't mean you just assume it's going to be fine and don't bother voting. assuming trump wasn't going to win is how you got here in the first place so you go out and fucking vote for harris and give everyone a fighting chance.

also if you're still in the 'they're both as bad as eachother' delirium, please take your head out from between your cheeks and consider that your options are an imperfect president and the literal worst person alive who is going to get masses of people killed. i've said it like this before, but it's like deciding between maybe getting food poisoning or definitely having a brain aneurysm. take your pick i guess but don't be surprised when you drop dead.

[aethersea]

I do think Blazing Saddles handled its one depiction of native americans very poorly, and the full extent of its representation of chinese workers on the railroad is they were literally just there. not even one single speaking line. unclear if this is worse or better than the redface.

it's fucking phenomenal at lampooning antiblack racism though. extremely blatant, extremely funny satire, which is constantly and loudly saying "racism is the philosophy of the terminally stupid at best and morally depraved at worst, and we should all be pointing and laughing at them 24/7"

plus the main character is a heroic black man who has to navigate a whole lot of bullshit but is constantly smirking at the extraordinarily stupid racists and inviting the audience into the joke. the one heroic white character is a guy who was suicidally depressed until he met the protagonist and they just instantly became buds, and he's firmly in a supporting role the whole time and happy to be there. the protagonist saves the day with the help of his black friends from the railroad, and uses the position of power he was given to uplift not only those friends, but all the railroad workers of other minorities too, in an explicit show of solidarity.

anyone saying "Blazing Saddles is racist" had better be talking about its treatment of non-black minorities. it had better not be such superficial takes as "oh but they say the n-word all the time" or "they have nazis and the kkk in there!" because goddamn if that's the full extent of your critique I very seriously suggest you read up on media analysis. there is too much going over your head, you need to learn to recognize satire.

[huginsmemory]

Been thinking about how Bill legitimately had a horrifying reason (the literal progressive disintegration of the nightmare realm that erases whatever it disintegrates from existence completely) to move himself and his crew into a new dimension. Like that's terrifying. And yet he never utilizes this to his favour. He could have been honest about this with Ford, and you KNOW as long as Bill didn't mention plans of overtaking the earth, Ford would've made the portal for him, both out of Ford's own interest and because Ford when faced with these big moral questions will pull through. But this is a card Bill NEVER plays because although he needs to leave the dimension, he cannot lose face. He can't put aside his pride and admit to the humility that he needs to flee from his dimension, that he's not actually all powerful. And so instead he pretends to be a muse and when Ford figures out something else is going on, instead of being open and humble and saying that his dimension is unravelling, Bill focuses on that he's going to over take earth, that he's actually been a monster all along, surprise Ford!

And part of it is definitely because Bill's built himself up on power and violence and to grovel and earnestly ask for help, to admit that he cannot stop the unraveling of his dimension completely invalidates that; showing vulnerability? Can't do that, even under the guise of lying to get his way. And part of it makes you wonder if it's also a form of self-sabotage, because underneath his deep denial Bill is guilty over what he occurred; he sees himself as a monster and so he'll be that monster, and having people recognize that feels good in the same way that pressing a bruise feels good. But it makes you wonder what would've happened if Bill even just was open about his dimension unravelling and had lied about overtaking the earth.

It's also interesting because although Bill has SOME charisma and can manipulate people decently well (as evidenced by his cult, and pandering to people's desires with Ford, Mabel and Blendin), he refuses to be vulnerable, refuses to not be true to his off-putting self, even when if he was just vulnerable of pretended to not be himself, to put aside the (false) pride he has in himself he would've gotten a portal by now. and part of me wonders if it's because it's this false pride that built on insecurity and denial on who he is he cannot drop that mask.

Further thoughts on this!

[dizzybizz]

"this is regrettably the best kiss of your life, you understand?"

[izzybluebell]

Huevember: Day 3 - Amber Stalker 👁️🌲🌟

[theesteppenwolf]

More Lucanis rambles because I’m still thinking about it and got nothing better to do :P

I am not here to tell anyone how to feel but putting words into peoples mouths who criticize the Lucanis romance (or Lucanis in general) for being unsatisfactory by saying;

“You don’t know what a slow burn is/ it’s because you expected zevran / you don’t get it he’s traumatized/ you just wanted something spicy and didn’t get it so now you’re mad” etc.

Is completely disregarding the fact that his lack of reactions and lack of content actually led people to believe he is bugged. Most DA fans didn’t expect spice or steam or whatever but they did expect an effective story, one they didn’t get.

This is at the end of the day a visual storytelling medium and implication will only get you so far, if i have to start thinking up entire plotlines in my head to make sense of the story or relationship progression then they failed at good storytelling. If i have to write paragraphs of explanations that the game doesn’t even remotely touch on then that isn’t a slow burn, it’s just a lack of content and poor pacing.

If he is traumatized and reluctant because of it you have to give me a scene where i can actually read that. If he is awkward and doesn’t know how to react to flirting you have to exaggerate to an extent for people to tell. If there is longing and angst give me banter that reflects it.

A romance in a game should give me some kind of deeper personal insight into a character and if i have to do the writers job and in my head think up those insights then the actual romance is mostly moot. I’m not saying give me all the details i’m saying at the very least give me a jumping point, some info buried in the game i won’t get otherwise. His romance fails at this.

Mary Kirby was fired yes and it’s awful what happened but unfortunately the product still remains and it leaves a lot to be desired for a big amount of people. When players are straight up going back on saves to romance someone else it’s a real problem. For me, it soured my first playthrough, especially later when i saw how Davrin and Emmrich had content, convos, specific romance outings and at the bare minimum actually had a noticeable reaction to flirting dialogue.

Again I’m not telling anyone how to feel, if it works for you that’s awesome, but to disregard his obvious lack of content by calling other fans basically stupid is incredibly disingenuous.

I love his character, loved it since The Wigmakers Job and he is still my favorite after my first playthrough. I think the beginning of his romance was very promising and the end is great but everything else is missing I’m sorry. His romance was not well executed and i honestly don’t think his character really was either. (But i won’t vent about that right now)

I know what a slow burn is, i was not expecting Zevran, i did not want a steamy romance. I wanted a well executed story and i didn’t get one. I am critical because i think it could’ve been great, i still love the game and i am not shitting on it, his character or other fans i just hate wasted potential.

[remxedmoon]

NILLE BLAST

aaaa worked on these a while ago but!! i’ve got a pétronille design finally!! and it was nowhere near as daunting as i expected to be!!!! this was really fun to work on actually. don’t look at that leftmost doodle btw. it’s. Not Great (by my standards for myself at least).

aaaanyways. design notes and greyscale versions below!! most of this isn’t. super set in stone or anything? just Night Ramblings

in terms of colors she’s mostly just a Slightly Edited version of bonnie’s palette. the only noteworthy addition here is the blue (or. well. more like grey actually) i added to her shirt, hat, and waist wrap. no real reason here, i just thought it’d contrast well with her colors!!

i also kept her outfit pretty similar to bonnie’s! bonnie’s official ref mentions that their shirt is too big for them so! i think it’d be cute for all of their clothes to be hand-me-downs from nille🩶. i imagine she cares more about practicality than fashion, so her outfit’s pretty simple! breathable clothes she can move around in, a bag to hold her stuff, and a hat to keep the sun out her eyes.

generally went for more. blocky??? shapes here? i wanted to set her apart from bonnie! idk. not much to say here!

this didn’t affect her design That Much outside of the bandages on her hands, but she’s rock type here! it just Made Sense with her hammer. in hindsight i wonder if that influenced her design being more Square…

aaa you can probably tell i’m writing these while tired. sorry if these are even more disjointed than usual (somehow). here’s the greyscale versions!! thanks for reading and stuff!!

[ty-dye-rabbit]

Megatron’s original designation was “D-16”, and was a miner.

If you change the Numbers into letters:

His name spells “DIG”.

Megatron; Leader of the Decepticons, Gladiator of Kaon, Galactic Warlord, etc—

was literally named. fucking. “DIG”.

[ineffably-human]

So here's my problem.

And it's not about Nandermo, not exactly anyway. Because I didn't expect Nandermo to become textual until the very end, if at all. The show kept making it clear that they liked their ambiguity to keep the relationship on the razor's edge, and Paul Simms made it clearer and clearer that for some reason (put a pin in this) he just couldn't see their connection as a sexual one.

But I frankly don't care about that, because if anything is canon in this show it's that the vampires will eventually fuck everything, and Nandor canonically fucks his other friends. More importantly, their connection was always the emotional core of both characters. And Paul always did say he saw their relationship as a romance, if a strange and non-sexual one.

So I figured we'd maybe get Nandor confessing that Guillermo meant a lot to him (and immediately walking it back a little), or Guillermo confessing how lost he feels without his vampire dream and Nandor offering him a place. Maybe an ambiguous, could-just-be-queerplatonic-partners 'I love you'. Maybe just the hug they kept teasing for three or four seasons and never got. We got like...half of two of those, in episode 10, so I guess that's a wobbly semi-fulfilled thing by my definition of it.

But it's not the Nandermo of it all. It's the Guillermo of it all. And how this final episode seemed to almost mock Guillermo's place at the emotional core of the show.

And the Guillermo of it all is why we never got the Nandermo of it all.

Shadows has vampires doing absurd-ass things, but every character also has things they want and feel, and there are various amounts of emotional ink spilled about it. The show has found space, sometimes very poignant space, to take that seriously in between the piss and sex jokes. The vampires change very slowly and in spirals, they repeat a lot of their old issues that stem back even to their mortal lives. But they always try.

And things do change in the vampire house; that is not the same household from the first season. Every single character, right down to the Baron and the Guide and Derek, are in different and better places than they were before the show began. They've made progress in their individual desires, and a lot of that is due to the improved connections they have with each other, connections we've watched them foster. A lot of the time it's because they're talked about as a found family, something Guillermo started and Guillermo believed before any of the rest of them did.

---

So where is Guillermo this season? Our human point of view, our dynamic character, the character who has a dream and wants something more than any of the others? Whose dream drives the storyline of the entire show?

Guillermo has chosen to be human, and he thinks he can't be part of the household if he's not a vampire. We watch Guillermo try to throw himself back into the human world trying to make up for lost time - to the point that he forgets the person he called his best friend, the people he called his family, in a way I think we never fully resolve. He thinks he's thriving, and he doesn't even seem upset about leaving the others behind.

We watch him revert (and that's fine, people revert sometimes) to the same waiting lapdog he was when we started the series. We watch him realize that and he says no. Nandor stands up for him, and feels better and more fulfilled in doing so, and that's a great capstone for Nandor and Nandor's own tendency for selfishness. And that's excellent. Episode 10 was a great start for all the ground they had to cover.

Nandor offers for Guillermo to be his partner in crime. His sidekick, but Guillermo expressed that desire back in season one so it's not an insult inherently. But here's the problem. Here's the part of Guillermo that has frankly always been a problem, because I thought it's something the show was eventually going to cover respectfully, and instead it was always part of the joke.

---

Guillermo is someone who made a decision sixteen years ago as part of a very young man's desire, to be respected and have cool powers, to live forever, to see the world. (He somehow thought being a vampire, and only a vampire, could get him those things but that's a rant for another time.)

That young man has grown up. He's in his mid-thirties, he has a body count. We've watched him at various times be empathetic, clever, cunning, and brave. Also extremely sexy in bodyguard gear. (And for some reason, the show keeps wanting us to forget that for a season he was extremely competent and badass and sexy pretty much all the time, and he seemed thrilled to be in that role, and he didn't even care about being a vampire if he could protect Nandor in that way and be regarded as 'part of the team'.)

Then Nandor dresses him in a stupid cowboy costume, and gives him a sidekick name ending in 'Kid', which he seems less than thrilled about. They all still talk about him the entire episode as if he's a disobedient child. The vampires speculate if Guillermo is having a fling with the crew, but no - Guillermo's had one boyfriend, who we saw him hug once and nothing more. Despite living in a house for fifteen years that is openly raunchy and shameless, he seems like a character designed to be both desexed and humiliated, and they never expand on the reason why.

(And if Guillermo were ace it'd be amazing, hell it's my headcanon at this point, but I don't think that's what they're going for. I think the show just desexualizes Guilermo. As a matter of praxis. For some reason.)

And the show has done this more and more to Guillermo in the later seasons. Nandor says he could steal original!Freddie easily from Guillermo if he wanted to. The vampires laugh at the thought of him being a vampire - "a little bat pooping everywhere," and Guillermo's time as a vampire has him basically feeling no different in his sexuality or, after a very brief moment, his confidence. Even Nandor's big climactic moment in Episode 10 has him saying that just because Guillermo isn't as cool or hot or interesting or strong as Jordan (or Nandor) doesn't mean Guillermo deserves to be treated poorly.

Look, I don't know if it's because Harvey Guillen is babyfaced, or because he's fat, or because he carries a different energy to his masculinity. Or because it's great to talk about gay sex and being horny, but writing a gay relationship is just too hard. Or some fun combination of all those things.

But I keep thinking about everyone freaking out when Nandor swooped into the collapsed floorboards to save Guillermo in season 4, and everyone freaked out and swooned. And Paul Simms expressed that as "[Nandor] has to save his little buddy."

Guillermo is a grown-ass man, with a desire to feel powerful and special and accepted, who Nandor sees as his little buddy. (Who everyone in the house sees as their little buddy, and it's nice he's part of the family, but...) After every emotional beat that makes them seem like equals with a special connection, he reverts to the less-cool sidekick who makes Nandor feel special and important. And Guillermo's prior devotion to Nandor - not to vampirism, not to a job or promotion, to Nandor - changes to other things, but Nandor never figures out why that hurts him so much. And for some reason the deepest bond of the series just isn't sexual, the showrunner just can't see it that way, in a house where everyone's fucking but not you Guillermo.

We're at the end of the story, and that's our punchline.

---

And we don't end on one of the points where Guillermo is asserting himself as someone who deserves to be taken seriously, and given the things he wants - and the show has had plenty of those moments, all of which seem to be building and evolving his relationships over the years.

We end on Guillermo being told that suddenly, the documentary is packing up without any fanfare or clarity on what they were looking for in the first place. We get Guillermo stumbling for clarity on what it all meant, what the point was for him and what his life is going to be now. We're told over and over again the documentary (and Guillermo, and the viewers) needs a satisfying capstone, needs emotional closure.

And the vampires tell him to shut up. And they tell him this has all happened before, and none of it is special to them. ("No human is special," Nandor said several episodes ago, and never went back on it.) And they tell him to do a little dance for their amusement, and Colin recites some pithy lines. And every attempt to take a moment to care about Guillermo's journey, or the core of his character and what he needs, is turned into a joke for him and for us.

Guillermo's looking for a point to it all, for some kind of fulfillment, and there wasn't one. And everyone is satisfied in that but him. And even if there were times Guillermo got the chance to be respected, to have cool powers (which he kept, but the vampires keep forgetting them), to live forever (he will die and leave Nandor someday!), to see the world - none of these things are going to come to him now.

It would make absolute, complete, and devastating sense for Guillermo to feel he's outgrown them and to leave. Nandor doesn't even seem upset enough to try and stop him. We never really get a clear reason about why he decides to stay.

I mean, it's for friendship or something, with a line about how they can still be close but he needs 'his own thing'. But in six seasons, over and over and over, we've been driven back to the idea that the most emotional part of this story is Guillermo's desire to become accepted in this family, and the effect he has on Nandor. That Guillermo needs this home and he consistently makes Nandor softer, kinder, less selfish and more fulfilled when they're together.

But those parts of their relationship, the love story parts, don't matter. Guillermo is going to find 'his own thing' when it's been clear how entrenched in this world he is (right down to his DNA), but Nandor will drag him back into shenanigans anyway, probably keeping Guillermo from whatever 'his own thing' is.

And Guillermo will always be Nandor's sidekick, his little buddy, never to be taken seriously. And one day, Guillermo will die, and he'll be someone they all forget. And for some reason, he'll be just fine with that, because he belongs with them but will never really be in a better position.

And he'll be satisfied with that. For some reason. But I won't.

[verflares]

collection of some loz origin au stuff i've been chipping away at for awhile now ^_^ with a healthy amount of dunmeshi insp for good measure LOL (the ooccoo isnt relevant she's just here for size comparison purposes)

feat my beloved good friend @linkvcr's hylia design also. because i am obsessed with her and you should be too 🫵

[journey-to-the-attic]

one thing about ik is that she will always reach out

[lazylittledragon]

every day i get hit with the agonising urge to post about my novel while not wanting to be an annoying person who posts about their novel

[marigraphia]

I've had this pose ref saved for a while and the Superman set photos just gave off the same energy 👉🏻👈🏻

The reference is this photo of Katharine Hepburn as Antiope and Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in the 1932 play 'The Warrior's Husband' (and I'd love for people to turn into a draw your otp meme pls pls pls this pose is so good)

And also, of course, the Superman (2025) set photos