#i did say bad advice

[comikbook]

So my ttrpg group is not inviting someone back for our next campaign. Our DM has already talked to them about it and they are not taking no for an answer. We’re having a meeting tonight about it, how should we handle this?

Thx for the advice (and for the sick ass art that graces my dash <3)

have everyone commit to the bit that they were never apart of the campaign to begin with and also you guys dont actually play anything actually. i love lying

[dawnthefluffyduck]

feeling of being watched

[the-lark-ascending69]

Sick of "Robin wouldn't date her best friend's ex". Get ready for "haha Steve i'm fucking your ex"

[evilfloralfoolery]

I don't know if this will help any of my fellow writers, but a good friend of mine put some things into perspective for me today, so I wanted to share.

I often wonder why some things of mine get a decent amount of engagement while others do not. Is it the content? Is it the length? Is it not enough snzfuckery? Blah, blah, blah.

My friend writes for a well-known organization in our town and told me that she experiences the same thing with her articles. She says that her most popular article is actually quite bad (lol) and she's not even sure why people love it so much. So, she started running statistics on all of her stuff, literally studied trends, markets, etc. She found that it has absolutely nothing to do with her content at all. It's all timing. Every bit of it. Did the right people see it at the right time? Was there a good amount of traffic on the website at that time?

So, if you feel like your stuff isn't being seen or isn't being commented on enough, sometimes? It's probably the timing more than anything else. Did people reblog it at the time when others will see it? Did you post it when people were actually there to read it?

Just something to think about before you go all "I MUST SUCK!" on yourself. <3

[sharknark]

⬇️rant about a really good hengren (reverse renheng) fic i read. link at the bottom give it a whirl

i've never read a fic so well-catered to my tastes before in my life and the best part is that i was so caught off guard by how good it was cuz the tags and summary had me like "right this is some omegaverse-esque, rawr XD mating shit"

but from the very first paragraph i realized it wasn't just ao3-typical possessive mating shit it was (dare i say) IN CHARACTER possessive mating shit. underappreciated dan feng lore is the two hearts shit, duty expects him to smother his own empathy and perform cruelty obediently (and that being in his dragon form literally numbs his empathy towards mortals) but then it's flipped around and he's criticized for being too heartless

there aren't a great many english fics that take advantage of the 'numbed empathy' thing, so this fic using that to explore the toxic codependency that drove dan feng to making yingxing immortal in the first place is so!

dan feng's dragon heart prioritizing it's own indulgence and power, his human heart screaming against it for empathy and restraint, but both hearts united in this possessive adoration of yingxing... dan feng is possessive to the point of harming his partner, forcing them to take his affection, inherently contradictive to the protective impulse to see the other unhurt.

dan feng makes yingxing immortal in a really sketchy operation, despite knowing that yingxing is literally defined by his pride in being a short-life. he wants yingxing to be with him so badly that he does the one thing that would hurt yingxing the most, too blinded by possession, this sickly overbearing affection, to empathetically respect yingxing's death.

yingxing lived cramming every second he could into his craft and his goals precisely because he has so much less time than all the immortal species around him, but when he's forced into immortality, his hands are scarred and ruined past the point of ever crafting again. he suddenly has so much time, all this time he would've cherished as a mortal, but is totally useless to him now that his purpose for living and passion is gone.

so there being a scene in this fic where dan feng is moping "yingxing doesn't wanna fuck because he's glued to his workshop", being followed up with a scene of dan heng fucking blade while kissing his scarred hand and crying that he's "so sorry", yeah no shit asshole, his dragon heart got what it wanted, blade has all the time in the world to fuck and nothing competing for his now limitless attention and no one's happy about it.

as arrogant about being a short-life as yingxing was, it really is compensation for the discrimination he faced for it. other immortals looked down on him, so having dan feng, THE top dog, be so deeply enamored with him stirred his own toxic codependent urges. he was so desperate to have dan feng's eternal regard that he's willing to die for him (as in the sedition), his death being the force cementing his place in dan feng's heart forever.

so the fic having yingxing ruminate on this, that he had hoped for dan feng to love him even centuries after he inevitably died, only for the fic to end with:

yeah yingxing... you left an impression... he made you immortal.... everyone's upset by this

(that's what makes dan heng forgetting blade was ever yingxing to begin with all the more painful because, you went and turned him immortal and when it backfired horrifically you went on and fucking forgot, bitch i'd be pissed to the point of centuries long bloody pursuit of vengeance too.)

here's the fic go read it and leave kudos and a comment, technically porn but i got so invested in the character study that part barely registered. also yeah if you hadn't realized already super dead-dove:

blah blah "renheng is toxic" sorry that's why i like it

[justarandomhelluvablog]

sorry sorry last time I'm talking about huskerdust tonight but does it fuck anyone else up knowing that Husk and Angel basically lived at the same time but were on opposite sides of the country. But also Husk went traveling. Like these two could have met while they were alive and wouldn't even know it. They didn't even know the other existed until they met at the hotel

Like I have. so many thoughts about this.

[day-mark]

okay gnite, dteam forever

[quilleth]

Bioware made a mistake bringing Isabela back for da4 because like hell she wouldn't tell the entire da2 crew about what's happening with Solas which means they'd all show up ready to curb stomp him about Varric. Even moreso if hawke was left in the fade. That's two of their number down because of this fucker. Also Merrill should get to deck him specifically while also being like "what, like it's hard?" about fixing the eluvian that was blighted and cost her two of her closest childhood friends (potentially), her place in her clan, and her home. Again, going back far enough, because of him.

I just miss them 🥺

[street-corner-felines]

Zero Day (2002)

[sangfielle]

would love your take on the saarebas as a part of DA canon (until recently i guess lmao) because they're a piece of qunari worldbuilding that i am oddly besotted with, but they also feel to me like another one of those details added to make qunari seem more "barbaric", which was then given some cursory nuance to try and make it not look as uniquely bad (for example, you can draw a comparison between the abuses circle mages suffer in kirkwall and the plight of saarebas, but the visual language of one group being confined to barracks and the other being chained and collared like animals is still going to have someone engaging with the work associating some very fraught traits to an arvaarad that they then wouldn't to a templar). i don't really know how to work with them in a fanon context for my own enjoyment that doesn't feel like uncritically leaning into the most racist parts of how the qun is presented, but deleting them the way DATV did feels worse. what do you think?

also you made a post abt them all being Government-Assigned Nonbinary that gelled with my interpretation of them lol

i sat with this for a little while, because i wanted to have something better to say than "i basically agree with you about all of this", but the problem is that i basically just agree with you and there's not that much you can say about saarebas that you can derive from the actual text of the games. they're categorically denied depth and we're refused any insight into qunari society and, like, the non-antaam qunari mind (sten and the da2 arishok, specifically, i guess -- inquisition doesn't want you to consider iron bull qunari so i won't, tallis is semi-useful as an insight into the position viddathari are forced into when speaking to those outside the qun but that's it [just in da2, i thought about revisiting redemption in case it would provide any insight but i feel pretty confident every character in that show is one-note without re-watching it], i guess you can have that one conversation with ketojan before it* kills itself?) (tevinter nights would have been a great place to put a story from the perspective of a saarebas but that didn't happen, so whatever).

i don't know how much help i can be of in terms of "how do i engage with this in a non-racist (etc) fashion", because i think the answer might be that you can't? i think that for basically everything surrounding the qunari, it's very difficult to not play into the bigoted stuff baked into them without doing a ground-up rewrite of the entire society. you're right that totally ignoring the bigoted writing and just hoping that works like vg does isn't really a solution either though. my suggestion would be to just go into whatever you're doing aware of the politics of the depiction of the saarebas and be mindful to not act like their treatment is uniquely barbaric relative to circles. if the thing you're doing isn't solely focused on qunari, spend some time looking at andrastian treatment of mages and make a point of comparison? if you're writing, make an effort to treat any saarebas and arvaarad as, like, people with interiority in the same fashion as you would templars and mages? if you're an artist, uh. it is much harder to get away from the imagery. i don't actually know what to tell you about that.

that's very basic advice but i don't have much specific rewrite advice besides "probably be mindful of and utilize the fact that in-universe it's implied that ketojan's treatment was extreme and not the typical way saarebas are handled (the specific visual language of the stitched lips are supposed to be a second-to-last resort handling method, not typical practice. i will say that i really deeply dislike the stitching scars that people love to put on their tal-vashoth mage ocs. that's probably more personal preference and me being anal about minor lore notes, but it feels to me like it leans into the idea that qunari treatment of mages is worse and more damaging than andrastian methods, especially when people don't really treat tranquility with the same weight despite that being... worse, probably). iirc saarebas (redemption) was treated notably harshly throughout its* life in the qun but didn't bear any specific visual markers besides the collars that would imply that it was held on a particularly tight leash. again, didn't rewatch redemption for this and it's a pretty vauge memory in my head, so i'm less sure about saarebas (da:r) than i am about ketojan and hissera (and i admittedly don't know jack shit about saarath, but there's very little to know, it seems like?). hissera and saarath have the stitches, but i'm pretty sure that's because they wanted to maintain a visual continuity with the saarebas more than anything else, because hissera isn't noted as being a mage that needs to have a close eye kept on it*, on account of... it's allowed to travel around thedas by itself under its own supervision. so i guess that's another thing worth keeping in mind, that a few saarebas are trusted to just be by themselves and do whatever, like wynne is with the circles? actually probably the most straightforward comparison in terms of level of treatment of the typical saarebas would be to fereldan circle mages specifically. if you want something to use as a yardstick for their treatment (similarly to andrastian circle mages, though the chantry will less readily admit it than the qun, is that the primary role of a mage is being a tool of war). also worth being aware of the fact that unlike thedosian cultures, saarebas are specifically noted as being revered in the qun to some extent. people don't... hate them, probably. the qun is too much about anti-individualism and living as a part of a whole for that to be the mindset about people who are occupying a very restrictive role

*i mean, you saw my post about it. i feel like the -bas suffix denotes a set of pronouns and a gendered role.

[dragon-age-here]

The MGiT would actually be great for Veilguard because you can just explain Rook’s incredibly sensitivity and awareness of mental health and identity stuff as someone who did go to therapy for years and has the skill set but like, isn’t using it for themself.

Like yes, I have seen 13 papers/wiki articles/youtube discussions on gender identity, do not ask me what that means I cannot tell you, btw have you heard of the wide spectrum of sexuality and gender-

[hauntingblue]

WATER SEVEN BABYYYYY

Look at robin reacting when luffy says he wont give her up.... 🥺🥺

This is a joke right now but its actually a one piece tenet aldjsisjka

Usopp aksbaksjakqk the foreshadow is foreshadowing... Also Robin being happy with the crew after the Aokiji incident... Fuck!!!!

Sanji thinking robin just vanished or flew away and suddenly usopp is soaring thru the skies... imagine

AAAAARGGGGHHHH YOU CAN SEE THE GEARS TURNING

Zoro talking to merry..... only while he is alone of course

Why are nami and sanji matching ajdhakjsk look at the citrus sisters

Carpenter: maybe it was the government

Gov agent: I don't think so, also don't say that they are everywhere

LUFFY SUPPORTS WOMEN'S WRONGS!!!

Don't scream att chopper like that!!! Look at him... So small....

Imu tease???? (No) (Also I've changed websites again bc the translation is kinda off , I can't find a good quality b&w spanish translation and the colors scare me (i want the real manga experience))

GET HIM ICEBURG!!!!

I truly forgor if this is just a lie about her wanting to find the rio poneglyphs or genuine because she wants to die and will do it for them... because in skypiea she says she is not interested in the weapons so maybe if the gov pardons her but considering what she wants is illegal then idk abdjabjs this is such a dumb thing to forget... like thats important girl where did it go (reading this after remembering and it's kinda funny... i will make any sacrifice to kill myself (and keep you safe)... she goes HARD)

Little paulie and mozu and kiwi.... omg hello (the SBS says the twins wanted to be shipwrights too omg)

Franky's backstory is small but it does so much for me like it is so central to the themes... boats and people...

DID SOMEBODY ORDER MORE TRAGIC BROTHERS?

The fact that franky needs to learn this lesson to pass it on to robin.... do you understand how big this is.... also Tom does exactly as he says and takes responsibility for franky and what he has done... because he has done nothing wrong AND THAT'S HIS SON and he just punched spandam bc he wanta him to feel the pain franky feels... Tom is such a man..... proud of having built eater 7 up with the sea train.... goes out with a boom.... should we all kill ourselves....

I am crying again................... franky my god.... and the fucking frog!!! And of course franky can't stop Tom's hope for his island... of course he can't.... he hasnt learnt the lesson yet but this guy isn't over yet!! He has a life of being a pervert cyborg ahead!!! Iceburg following Tom's footsteps but franky not being able to do that bc of his guilt....

This is one of the coolest things chopper has done btw...

NAMII 😭😭😭

Robin damning the world for her crew when all she has ever done is damn her companions for her own sake.... how big is this...

I can't take this...... it's always nami in these positions... it happens AGAIN in Zou with Sanji... there is no way

The love letter gag is too good like damn that's so funny

AND IT'S NAMI GOING THROUGH IT AGAIN!!!! SHE LOVES ROBIN SO MUCH!!!!

[pup-pee]

kon on the practive whiteboard,,,,,save me save me pls

[thebirdandhersong]

well mark that down as situation 2938489 that I don't know how to handle

[mirchloe]

while i'm still logged in, i think my biggest story criticism for pn2 is how it's sasha reprimanding raz for what he does to hollis...when sasha is in the same boat lmao. now, i'm not saying "bad writing" or something, but it does contrast with sasha's character seen in the first game.

sasha is the one inviting students for advanced training that isn't quite approved. using the brain tumbler to get into kid's heads is definitely not permitted by the motherlobe - it circumvents the psychic kids protection act or whatever it's called - but he's doing it anyway. with the kid's consent, this is seen as acceptable in sasha's eyes, in which he is then allowed to gather data while the student is in a seemingly safe environment - or so it seems, as with whatever happened to bobby wasn't good. (i know some interpret this as a bad trip to the gpc, but since bobby freaks out specifically over the red button, i think it had to do with sasha's training and the brain tumbler. he also was fine to trap maloof in the gpc, and if he was so afraid of the gpc itself, he would've steered clear from it and just kept locking maloof in the outhouses.)

through sasha, raz gets a pretty warped idea of what's acceptable to do in someone's mind. i think i would've liked to see some acknowledgment of sasha's own actions in that specific cutscene where he chews in to raz. maybe admit that his own ethics were a bit skewed when he took raz under his wing for advanced training while still drilling home how raz was in the wrong for what happened to hollis and the abrupt, dangerous changes in her mind (regardless of any peer pressure from the interns). it just makes me cock my head to the side knowing that it's sasha being that upset when just days ago, he was the one showing raz his slightly dubious nature when it comes to getting consent to enter a mind.

[ltlemon]

Beweeepp bwop bweop bep bep bop bep bweeeeeap bwamp. Bewmp.

LMAO

SORRY I JUST CLICKED ON THE NOTIFICATION IN THIS 👇IMAGE