#i didn't mean for it to hurt!

[pokeberry5]

directionless anger

(or, something like: the robin mantle is a curse, but that isn't inherently anyone's fault and someone has to wear it)

i adapted the two pages below the cut bc they were haunting me—tim having a nightmare the day of his mother's funeral, from Batman (1940) #455: “Identity Crisis, Part 1”, from this post

[stucky-headcanon-bot]

💔

[starrylevi]

Levi doesn’t get how you find The Sims entertaining.

 “It’s a virtual dollhouse.” He tells you. “That’s what so great about it!” You retort. “Whatever floats your boat…” He mutters to himself. He says this but he makes sure you have all the sims 4 packs (there are A LOT of them). And when one is coming out, He’ll listen to you passionately explain the premise of the pack. “When it comes out, just let me know.” He’ll give you his credit card info so you can charge it as he doesn’t want you to spend any of your money.

“I made us in the Sims!” You excitedly sit in Levi’s lap with your laptop in hand.

“Hm?” Levi places his chin on the crook of your neck as his hands gently graze the sides of your thighs.

“The Sims!” You exclaim again. “Look, there’s you and there’s me…” Your finger points out each of your sims on the screen. “Oh, and we have a child together!” Levi’s eyes follow your finger as you point at the child sim. “Her name is Kuchel.”

You feel Levi tense up behind you for a moment. “Wait…what’s her name?”

“Kuchel.” You repeat, quieter this time. “Sorry, I can change her name if you don’t feel comfortable with it.” You add quickly.

Levi’s expression softens; he stays silent for a moment before speaking again. “...Can you make her?” He asks you quietly, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Your mom?” You turn slightly so you can see his face.

He nods to confirm.

 “Of course, I'll do my best.” You tell him with a soft smile.

You ask Levi to describe her to you, his eyes filled with fondness as he recalls her features and her personality. You spend hours on the Kuchel sim, wanting her to look and be as accurate as possible.

After a few days, you show Levi the finished product in the game as you have the Kuchel sim interact with the Levi sim. You look at Levi for a brief moment while the Sims are speaking to each other. The expression on his face is hard to read. It’s a mix of pleasant surprise, awe, and sadness.

“Is it okay, is there anything I should change?” You ask him, worried you didn’t capture her likeness as you watch him study her.

He silently shakes his head. “No…she’s perfect.” 

You tell Levi he’s more than welcome to play whenever he wants. You’re surprised when he does take you up on that offer. He picks up on the mechanics quickly and soon he has the whole family (Your sim, Levi’s sim, your daughter, and Kuchel) traveling all over the world, going on adventures, and trying new things together. At one point you suggest the Levi sim and the Kuchel sim spend some time alone together and Levi does just that, taking them to coffee and tea shops, having them take walks in the park, and going to the library. As you and Levi continue to play together, you learn more about Kuchel as some of the actions in the game trigger different memories of his mother.

Levi doesn’t say it but he’s thankful for this silly little game you introduced him to because he can now have a cup of tea with his mother, even if it’s only pretend.

[uncanny-tranny]

To my fellow US Americans: If you are planning on arming yourselves because of the election results and what might be on the horizons, I urge you to be a responsible gun owner.

Take as many classes as you can. Get certified in gun safety, even if it's not required to own a gun in your state. Get a gun safe. A good gun safe. Lock your gun up. Don't leave it armed. Don't wave your guns or gun-owning status around and don't pose with guns like they're toys. I'd say not to make gun buying an impulse purchase, either. You are investing in something that holds great potential risk to yourself and others - treat it like a responsibility.

I'm not here to argue about if Americans ought to exercise the second amendment in the way it currently exists. That's not the point - we have always had the second amendment, and I doubt it's going anywhere. I am more interested in making sure we don't see a surge in accidental, negligent gun ownership.

As a queer person in the US, I can understand the mindset behind people's spiked interest in arming themselves. I'm not arguing against that. As a child of gun owners, I know just how huge a responsibility it is to own a gun, and I hate the general attitude we Americans have about guns. Please don't contribute to that. If you own a gun, it is you inherent responsibility to take care of that gun (which is why I can't own a gun yet - I don't have the resources to pour into proper ownership).

[sysig]

Rainbows (Patreon)

[chaoticallyfluffy]

Ok consider:

A new hero emerges and the Justice League watches him for a while who make sure he’s not a threat. They see this giant clumsy man who moves like he’s not used to his body, smiles goofily every time he saves someone, and is clearly inexperienced with his powers and they’re all just like. Ah. This is a child.

Except they don’t think he’s a ten year old or however old Billy is at the time, no no. Clearly this hero came into existence shortly before his first appearance, just a few months ago. They don’t know how or why but It’s not the weirdest thing they’ve seen so it’s pretty easy to believe.

But they can’t just leave this toddler with the powers of a god to stumble around and potentially hurt someone by accident, nor go down the wrong path and become a villain. So of course they decide to ‘subtly’ guide him without alerting him to the fact they’re onto him.

They introduce themselves but instead of inviting him to the league they pop by every once in a while to ‘subtly’ teach him about responsibility and power, but also about love and humanity. They try to teach him to enjoy life and that he doesn’t have to act like an adult around them, instead encouraging him to enjoy his childhood even if it’s not an ordinary one.

(Too bad the Justice League suck at subtlety.)

Billy is certain they somehow found out he’s a kid before they even met him, probably because of Batman’s freaky know-it-all powers, but he isn’t very worried as they seem nice and don’t treat him like he’s dumb or fragile. They respect him as a hero despite his age so he lets himself act like a kid around them after a while.

When he gets comfortable enough to detransform Billy thinks that’s his identity reveal. The league thinks that he magicked himself a body that’s more of a representation of his true self and fits his developmental age better, possibly as a way to blend in with humans and experience what it’s like to be a normal child. Good for him!

Basically Billy gets a bunch of super powered parents and the Justice League get a newborn man that they think they’re raising from scratch lol

[trappedinafantasy37]

Since Minthara presents an exterior shell made of steel, and she's sometimes mean, and is an absolute badass in battle, she is often treated and perceived as someone who feels no emotions. And this often occurs to individuals who do put on such a tough exterior. It also does not help that many people perceive evil characters as incapable of doing or feeling anything other than evil. That love and evil are innately incompatible.

But Minthara is not emotionless, she does feel things. Sadness, grief, fear, loneliness, anger, anxiety, paranoia, vengeance, love. She can laugh, she can tell jokes, she can cry, she can smile, and she does get upset at things. If anything, she is emotionally repressed and emotionally guarded and the times where she does really express her more negative and vulnerable emotions is when it becomes too much to hold back and it comes out a little over the top. We have to remember she comes from a society in which such outward emotional expression would be rewarded with social punishment, religious scorn, or even death. So she really doesn't have the healthiest mechanisms to express her emotions.

She hides what she feels all the time as a means of keeping herself safe from punishment. She keeps it to herself cause she does not want you to see her as weak, as she would have been in the past. And she certainly does not want you or anyone else to punish her for it either. She hides behind little pet names and even using words from languages she knows you don't understand as that is the only way she feels safe being vulnerable with you. In her past, her love was rewarded with new wounds and new scars. She is terrified to open up to you, fearing that you will hurt her because she loves you. That her love for you won't actually be enough to stop you from hurting her. And she will only ever admit she loves you in contexts that have a high risk of death because there's really not much for her to lose at that point so she may as well tell you.

She also has a habit of intellectualizing what she feels and experiences so that they appear as "rational" and "logical" rather than emotional and to distance herself from her emotions. She says it takes a sharp mind to have sympathy for someone who suffers unnecessarily. She is trying to make it appear that emotions like sympathy is a matter of the mind, not the heart. That it is a mark of intelligence, because otherwise it would be the mark of weakness.

She blames herself for her own torments, like she deserved the awful things that happened to her. She frames the situation like she is more at fault and more deserving of blame, than the people who hurt her. It is the only way she can find any reason in what happened to her and any reason in her tormentors actions. That she did something wrong and induced someone's wrath upon her, rather than acknowledging that the person who hurt her is just a bad person.

She deserved what Ketheric and Orin did to her because she was "weak, passive, proud". That her emotional state had blinded her from the trap that was set, giving Ketheric and Orin ample opportunity to attack her. That if she hadn't felt those exact emotions, then it wouldn't have happened. She could have seen the trap coming, or she could have fought back.

Or if you attempt to tell her that her childhood was rough and her mother abused her, she immediately deflects by saying, "it could have been worse" and therefore, what she did actually experience wasn't really that bad. And yeah, sure, maybe she needed certain lessons given that she lived in a cruel and dangerous society like Menzoberranzan where she had to be prepared for violence at all times. But trauma is not born of love, it is born of fear, of pain, of agony, and her mother still tried to kill her. Regardless of her mother's intent, it was the first broken bond of trust and it left a mark on Minthara. Where she began to believe that her mother would torment her for torments sake, and she had doubts on whether or not her mother actually loved her.

When you encounter the first Orin imposter, it's pretty damn obvious she is terrified. And you kinda gotta squeeze it out of her to admit that she's afraid. Where it's "I'm afraid of Orin because she is capable of this, this, and this, and you should be too" rather than "I am afraid of Orin because she hurt me." And she begs you, BEGS, to keep her safe because she knows her fear makes her vulnerable to Orin.

She doesn't even truly acknowledge that she wasn't at fault for what Orin did to her until Orin is dead. She doesn't start putting the blame on Orin until Orin is dead. She doesn't go through the emotional process of sympathizing with herself until Orin is dead. And she doesn't admit that she undoubtedly has trauma, until Orin is dead. She gets so wrapped up, and so lost in her own fear and paranoia that she never has the room to properly process the things that happen to her. That her primary concern right now is keeping you, the others, and herself safe and her emotions can wait because wallowing in them will only make her weak. Only does the distance of death give her the room to start healing. Only problem is that there have always been threats and they never end, they never stop. So it is rare for Minthara to ever have a moment of peace and safety to work through what she feels and they just get backed up. Ignoring your problems does not make them go away.

So you wanna know what will happen when an embrace Durge betrays her? She will fall to her death, a knife in her belly, blaming herself for your betrayal. All her worst fears have come to pass and you were indeed a lover who hurt her because she loved you, and that she was a fool to ever trust you at all. That if she didn't love you, maybe you wouldn't have hurt her. She doesn't understand your reasoning, she can't make sense of it, she doesn't know why you'd betray her, so it must have been her fault for thinking you'd be different. That if she hadn't been so loyal, so devoted, that she could have been spared. That her belief that you would rule together is what damned her. She will die blaming herself for her own murder before she ever gets a chance to start blaming you.

[iwasbored777]

The fact that all Gwen knows about her variants in other universes is that they're dead is so sad. Like imagine you want to know what happens to you in other dimensions and it turns out that wherever you look you mean nothing, you're so unimportant that there's no bigger role for you other than dying.

And I've seen you guys pointing this out, where she's looking at what looks like her own death and even if it's not this is not just a "love interest" Gwen, this is a superhero who is supposed to mean something, but she doesn't. She's only here to die. And so far this (our) Gwen doesn't have any reason to believe that she won't die very soon just like other Gwens.

I think that one of the main reasons why she's rejecting Miles is not just her trauma and all shit she's been through and the fear of dying like other Gwens when they're involved with Spider-Man, but also because if they start something and she dies this will hurt him too.

It's easy to say "canon events aren't true she shouldn't believe in that" but this isn't just a regular risk, this is her life we're talking about.

[dollypopup]

one day fans will realize that treating real people like fictional characters and fictional characters like real people is, at the core of things, The Problem

[frootertooter]

"The way his father looked at him, he knew... something about him was... off. And he could feel it itching."

Illustration heavily based off The Boy Wonder #1's cover by Juni Ba because I think it might be my favourite comic cover ever??? Also seriously go read The Boy Wonder (2024)!!! There's only 2 issues out right now but they're absolutely phenomenal imo

Alternate Versions:

[yuwuta]

yuuta exhibits such previously abandoned, recently adopted dog behavior. incredibly anxious all the time, even though nobody’s out to get him or leave him behind. waits for you to return home or from school or from work excitedly, just to see you when you walk through the door. follows you around senselessly, hovering in your space just for the sake of companionship. initiates affection in prodding ways—starts off next to you, then a hand on your thigh, then deems it safe to lay all the way down, then slowly pushes his head into your lap. gets up whenever you need to get up, and resumes his position as soon as you’re ready. brings you gifts as a sign that he’s thinking of you, and maybe because he likes the affection it brings out in you, maybe because he likes the gentle affirming touches of a hand in his hair or a pinch to his cheek. rests his head on your stomach or his chin on your shoulder when he’s sleepy, stays there, immobile, and will not move unless absolutely necessary. sometimes he gets surprised when he hears you calling for him, there’s a moment of disbelief as he thinks “me? really? you need me?” but it’s very quickly overshadowed by this compulsive need to show up, to please, to do anything for you, which is why he always answers when you call. he doesn’t realize that he has puppygod eyes, especially when he’s excited or confused, but he does and it’s incredible endearing. very reluctant to share your space or attention after a while, considers that to be sacred and he won’t risk being let go or lost again, so as a safety precaution, he keeps himself right by you, waits for you always. 

[nightmarearian]

blood dripped from Poseidon's mouth, red.

red.

the day they overthrew Kronos, child-eater (stomach acid crawling around them, after maw of teeth grazing his small, child body), his golden ichor bled red.

god blood, degraded into a mortal's.

the day Typhon, father of monsters (as big as their father was, as big as the Titans with sharp claws and teeth) ripped out Zeus' tendons, his blood was red.

Poseidon, god of the tides, son of Kronos, looked up at the dark shape stood above him, his own golden trident in his hand, the teeth like prongs drenched in red.

Odysseus is a mortal. was a human.

sharp webbed ears spread out on the side of their head, scales grew around their neck and arms, shining like a coral reef, illuminated by their growing red eyes, that were shrunken to slits.

Odysseus' teeth glinted in the lightning, showing their unnaturally sharp point.

monster.

[momotonescreaming]

Thinking about a scene where Steve tells Dustin to stop insulting him at every chance he gets, it fucking sucks, actually.

Dustin just scoffs. Rolls his eyes. Steve can take it. Plus, Dustin's just saying things that are true. Steve is dumb. His grades were bad. He didn't get into college. He makes dumb comments and gets things wrong. Not to mention his hobbies. He says he can't pick them up from Hellfire because there's a basketball game he wants to watch, like what? He spends all his time watching sports and talking about sports and playing sports. Its either that or working on his car. What kind of hobbies are those? They're not real hobbies. Can't be much of a reformed jock if he can't even give up sports.

So Steve just tells Dustin that if he isn't going to stop being a bully, Steve doesn't want to be his friend anymore, and leaves.

And it's like a slap in the face.

[adamnablelittledevil]

Not justifying Armand, but you don't get through that amount of physical, sexual, emotional abuse, brainwashing, isolation etc to the point of amnesia and dissociation since you're a human child until you're a centuries old vampire (and vampirism amplifies their traumas and emotions) without accidentally reprogramming your brain in a really messed-up way. Specially when you're stuck in a teenage brain forever. This is not someone that lived a safe and privileged life, not even a remotely decent one, and decided to be evil. In many ways Armand forgot or didn't even get to learn what is meant to be human and have a healthy lifestyle and relationships with people. Obviously, it would take him a long time to catch up with his humanity and even develop a sense of identity (one of his many issues too).

[captain-flint]

For years, I've followed your every whim, I've managed your increasingly erratic moods, I've massaged this crew when they were worried about your judgment. I did all that because I was honoured to work for the legendary Blackbeard, the most brilliant sailor I had ever met. But now, you're just an insane unpleasant shell of a man who's merely posing as Blackbeard. || Ed, I'm sorry. I've been terrible to you. I fed your darkness, Blackbeard. For years, I egged him on, even though I knew you'd outgrown him, but the truth is... I needed him. Blackbeard, it was us. You and me. But you're good now. You're ready. Izzy, you can't go. You can't leave me. I wanna go. You're surrounded by family, Ed. Just be Ed.

[yunamiudon]

The crystal 💎✨🌟💫

(I can't believe it's been almost 3 years since I painted this! ↓)