#i feel like this has been asked before

[seiwas]

which of your faves has a good singing voice 🎤

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[felassan]

What kind of spirit do you think Felassan waz?

Swag

[crossbackpoke-check]

blessed be (lorscher bienensegen) | telling the bees (wiþ ymbe)

"Bees" [remixed, abridged], Claudia Emerson // "Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now" [remixed. abridged], Matthew Olzmann // "Letter to my Great, Great Grandchild" [remixed, abridged], J.P. Grasser | Len Redkole, Nina Weiss, Brian Babineau, Christian Peterson, Mitchell Leff, Dave Isaac, Megan DeRuchie

[lovesickeros]

popping in randomly after almost an entire month just to talk non stop about the tsaritsa again everyone sit down.

specifically just thinking about the implications of tsaritsa's ideals originally being about love + the abandonment of those ideals to complete her goal of, presumably, destroying Celestia or whatever she's cooking up. to the point even her people don't love her and I probably don't even remember a time her ideals were of love. now it's all just ice and snow and cold.

which makes romantic fics w her even funnier because she's purposely removed this part of herself and suddenly reader walks into teyvat like they own the place (they do) and I can only imagine her reaction. angry, probably. because why you? what are you doing to her that's caused her hundreds of years of strict adherence to rejecting "love" both from others and to others to just. collapse. absolute shattering of her world and you probably don't even know it bc if nothing else she's good at hiding it. a lot of denial. tries to pick you apart and see what's makes you so different.

and oh she just hates it. she loathes it.

basically one sided enemies to lover trope because she can't stand you for a while but if you stick around she starts warming up to you and it makes it WORSE. so much worse. tries to distance herself but your just everywhere and it gets on her nerves because why does she love you? she isn't capable of love, not anymore. she thought she was.

g-d forbid one of the harbingers or PIERRO notices she'd never live it down. might even consider the implications of just killing you (she doesnt). worse if you know about it and act like a brat she will lose her damn mind

just the tsaritsa being an absolutely horrible mess internally.

[francesderwent]

“decrying the manipulative cowardice of cohabitation” I would love to hear more of this take on TTPD if you’re willing

boy am I willing!

I am going to start with You’re Losing Me, because I think it’s a crucial prologue to the album. You’re Losing Me is about a relationship that’s dying, because the partner she’s singing to is stuck in inactivity. she begs, “do something, babe, say something. lose something, babe, risk something. choose something, babe, I’ve got nothing to believe unless you’re choosing me.” we’re in new territory, for Taylor. she sings, “now I just sit in the dark, and wonder if it’s time.” he isn’t leaving (Forever & Always), and he’s not doing something so awful that she has to leave (The Moment I Knew). he is staying—which for so long has been the hallmark of a happy ending in her music (Stay Stay Stay, All You Had To Do Was Stay, New Year’s Day, The Archer)! but he won’t make some decisive move, won’t risk something, won’t choose her. but he is with her, so what is that choice?

and the thing about TTPD is, when she’s speaking directly about that relationship, she doesn’t exactly just tell us. So Long London is more about what the collapse of the relationship felt like for her than a story of how it collapsed—she felt like he wasn’t giving himself to the relationship, she felt like she was putting in all the work, she felt like her sadness wasn’t taken seriously, she felt unsure of whether he even wanted to be with her. and she throws in there amidst all of this: “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free” and “you swore that you loved me but where were the clues, I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” they were together for a long time, but still she’s waiting for something—still she felt like she was taken advantage of when that something didn’t come. the altar line is the clearest hint—along with “my beloved ghost and me sitting in a tree D-Y-I-N-G” in How Did It End—what was missing was marriage. she felt left at the altar. the relationship that should have followed the traditional trajectory of “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage” stalled out after love.

don’t get me wrong, I think she totally captures the feeling of slow despair when your partner won’t commit—but she doesn’t come out and say “you liar, when I fell in love with you, you told me we would get married and have a family, but you never followed through”. on the face of it, she barely focuses on this relationship at all—at first glance only the track 5s are obviously about the long-term live-in partner. instead, she presents us with a twist: not an album about the six year relationship which ended out of nowhere, but an album seemingly mostly about a rebound that only lasted a few weeks.

but the rebound doesn’t leave the theme of marriage behind! no! in fact, marriage comes to the forefront right away in the title track: “at dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on, and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.” and again in Fresh Out the Slammer: “ain’t no way I’m gonna screw up now that I know what’s at stake here at the park where we used to sit on children’s swings, wearing imaginary rings.” so despite everything that she knows from the get-go is wrong with this guy (“you’re in self-sabotage mode, throwing spikes down on the road”, “all your indecent exposures”, “I know he’s crazy”, “the jokes that he told across the bar were revolting and far too loud”) it’s evident to me why this is the one she wants—because this guy says, clearly, that he is willing to give her what her last partner would not. marriage isn’t the unspoken wound that’s made the relationship bleed out—it’s out in the open! this guy is making moves! and so the story of how the live-in partnership fell apart starts to come together: she was lured away by the rebound guy, someone she had a former acquaintance with but who’s appeared again in her life at a decisive moment (see: Fortnight & Guilty as Sin) precisely because here was a way to actually have the happy ending that she thought she was promised in her old relationship. “it’s gonna be alright, I did my time”!

but of course, that’s not what happens. just as quickly as the rebound guy swept into her life and promised to fix everything, he disappears without a word. Down Bad paints the picture starkly: their love affair was so quick and so dramatic that she feels like she was abducted by aliens and then dropped back at home with a story no one seems to believe—but it was real, he did say all those things, she was in love. until finally, in The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, she has to admit: whatever he was after, whatever his motivations were, it wasn’t love. he used her.

why is this important, when we’re talking about cohabitation and not rebounds or hookups? let’s turn to loml. loml tells the story of a relationship which from the beginning seemed like it was heading straight from the first kiss to marriage, but which turns out to be not what she thought it was—“a con-man sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme”. perhaps the most telling line on the whole album, “you shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles”, tells us: in private where no one could see, he made her all these promises. but she can see now that he didn’t mean them, that although she’s mourning the loss of their love, what she’s mourning wasn’t even real: “something counterfeit is dead”. who is this song about? lines like “in your suit and tie” “you low-down boy” “you holy ghost” “told me I reformed you” and “Mr. Steal Your Girl and make her cry” seem to point to the rebound—but lines like “you stand-up guy” “you cinephile in black and white” and “all those plot twists” seem to be references to the partner. and the closer you look, the blurrier it gets. “you holy ghost” applies to both of them—one ghosted her by disappearing, but the other became a ghost in their home. “told me I reformed you” sounds like I Can Fix Him—but her relationship with the partner started in an album that opened with “knew he was a killer first time that I saw him”. the rebound stole her from her partner, making him Mr Steal Your Girl, but the partner did the same thing back in the day. “something counterfeit” could be pointing to “was any of it true” in Smallest Man—or it could be pointing to “your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in”. the more you know the lore, the more you have all her old lyrics memorized, the more references you see.  Taylor has always been famous for calling her boyfriends out publicly, but this time, she didn’t hide any identifying clues for us to unearth. she blurred the details, she painted everybody with the same brush. loml is about both of them. they both told her they were heading towards marriage and kids—and they both disappeared on her.

and once you start to see the parallels, they start popping up all over the album. the title track is about the rebound—but it says “I’ve seen this episode and still loved the show”, hinting that everything with him feels familiar for some reason, and her plea “who's gonna hold you like me? who’s gonna know you like me?” echoes her triumphant statement to her partner in ME!: “I promise that nobody’s gonna love you like me”. My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys tells the same story as loml of the man who gave you all kinds of attention at the beginning and then when he saw forever coming, smashed it up—“I’m queen of sandcastles he destroys” parallels both “once your queen had come you’d treat her like an also-ran” in Smallest Man and “salute to me, I’m your American queen” in King of My Heart. “but you should have seen him when he first got me” is the thesis of practically every song she wrote about her partner from evermore to Midnights, when she had to go back to the beginning of the relationship to find something romantic to sing about. Down Bad is the same story again, of singling her out and making her feel special, and then abandoning her. Fresh Out the Slammer parallels High Infidelity, which had her current partner cast in the part of the one she was running home to, the one who brought her back to life. “we’ve already done it in my head” in Guilty as Sin is the sinister reprise of “in the middle of the night in my dreams, you should see the things we do, baby” in Ready For It. is The Albatross about the public outcry in But Daddy I Love Him, or is it about “here’s to my baby, he ain’t reading what they call me lately” in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things? in Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, who is she talking about when she says it would haunt her to know their love was real? Peter weaves the two stories into each other: both men met her when they were twenty-five—one said he wasn’t ready for a relationship but maybe they’d connect again later, the other said he was ready for a relationship but he wasn’t ready to get married. “we said it was just goodbye for now, you said you were gonna grow up then you were gonna come find me”. but all those promises, from both of them, from every guy she’s ever dated, were never ever kept.

in the album liner notes, she sums it all up: “and so I was out of the oven and into the microwave”. both men did exactly the same thing—the only difference is one did it slow, over six years, and one did it fast.

that’s a really powerful, and a really unexpected statement. think about it. most people in our society don’t really believe that marriage is until death do us part; they believe in the possibility of divorce, they believe that marriage is until one or both parties call it quits. therefore, marriage is essentially no different from living together: both are committed, but not unbreakably vowed. so the death of Taylor’s six-year cohabiting relationship is, for many people, the death of the most serious kind of relationship there is. and instead of delivering the “mature adult breakup” party line of “sometimes things are good and right for a season of life, but they just don’t work out”, what the album says is “what you did is exactly the same as if you’d fed me a few pretty lines to get me into bed then stopped answering my texts”. living with someone without proposing marriage to them EQUALS love-bombing them then ghosting. one lasts a lot longer, but it’s still just manipulation and use. she has to ask herself about both of them what it was they really wanted—“were you writing a book, were you a sleeper-cell spy?” about the rebound, and “was it hazing for a cruel fraternity I pledged and I still mean it? were you making fun of me with some esoteric joke?” about the partner—because they clearly did not want her.

I think in the end what she saw was that it’s not about timing, it’s not about fate, it’s not about anything other than whether the man has the courage to make a commitment. she says in loml “the coward claimed he was a lion”, and in The Black Dog “you said I needed a brave man, then proceeded to play him until I believed it too”—these men pretended like they were brave enough to get married, but then “there was danger in the heat of my touch, he saw forever so he smashed it up”. he gets scared and gives up; he’s “lost to the lost boys’ chapter of life”. all that courage was false bravado. “tail between your legs, you’re leaving”. by the end of the album, she has lost all patience and respect for these blokes who warm the benches on the fields of love.

I really do believe that the album she gave us is more sophisticated than if she had simply written a callout of her partner in the style of Smallest Man or Should’ve Said No. she can give detailed accounts of individual sins all day long, but by looking at the big picture and drawing equivalencies, what we get isn’t an accusation so much as it is the development of an ethics.

I mean, come on. that’s cool.

[brotherlouis]

guys, it's been years,,, I think I've finally gotten the courage to ask... what the fuck even is the plot of the Vampire Chronicles?

[i-like-forcefem]

17:00

“Hi darling!!! Congrats on the big win!!! I’m so so proud of you! I know you have to get a flight at 22:00 but I thought we could get dinner at my place to celebrate!”

16:30

“Here we are! Just make yourself at home cutie, you’ve worked more then hard enough for the day, give me your luggage too I’ll make sure it stays properly safe!”

17:00

“I hope you enjoy lasagna! It’s the only thing I know how to make… what do you mean it tastes a little odd? No i didn’t put anything special in there, being a winner really makes you paranoid doesn’t it?”

17:15

“Oh I’m so sorry dear! I ruined all your clothes! I feel so bad! I’m such a kluts! I shouldn’t be allowed near any glasses. Finish up the last bite of your lasagna and go take a shower hun! I’ll make sure desert is ready when you leave”

17:30

“Oh hun you need some clothes? Well you can borrow some of mine if you want!”

“What do you mean you gave me your luggage? No you didn’t? You told me you left it at the apartment? I know you’re in a big high right now after today, but it’s really making you very forgetful”

“Here throw your old clothes through the door and I’ll give you some of mine!”

“Oh honey of course it’s a skirt! I don’t own any pants! Sorry, would you rather have a dress?”

“You look so lovely dear!!! Oh I knew this would look amazing on you I’m so glad to be right!”

“Plan this? Of course not! Please stop being so suspicious, here I understand that you’d rather no one sees you like this so do you want to give me your room keys so I can go get your luggage?”

“Honey we’ve been over this I don’t have your luggage!”

“Alright good! I’ll be right back dear!”

20:00

“I’m sorry dear, I couldn’t find it! I know, I know, I’m sorry, I really looked everywhere believe me!!! You’re sure you didn’t leave it in transit somewhere?”

“I know dear, you are a klutz, but that’s okay!”

“Listen I know you’d rather not go on a plane dressed this cutely, but I don’t think you have any choice right now! Your baggage will turn up later!”

“I have an idea! What if I do your make up and style your hair? Then I’m sure no one will recognise you! They’ll only see a beautiful girl!”

“Put some trust in me dear! I know what I’m doing!”

21:00

“There we go! I must say I’m proud of myself! Take a look at yourself!”

“I know right??? You make such a beautiful girl! You’ll be turning so many heads at the airport!!! And best of all we finished on 22:00 on the dot, the perfect time for to leave and get your plane!”

“What do you mean the planes leaves at 22:00? I thought you just had to leave at 22:00!!! No dear you don’t understand I never bothered to update the clocks time for daylight savings! It’s an hour forward!”

“Oh I am so sorry honey!!! If only you communicated better!!! Now you’re lost here in a country where you don’t speak the language without any luggage for at least another week…”

“But don’t worry! I’ll let you stay here for that time! I’m sure we can get to know each other a lot better in that time!”

“What do you say cutie?”

“Good Girl”

“Huh? No I didn’t say anything, you must be imaging things again, let’s watch a movie and then get to bed dear, I’ll make sure you’ll enjoy your time here!”

[bacchuschucklefuck]

caps from comic Im doing

[pwouted]

going to keep this short .. but my family and i are currently in need of groceries ;w; anything would help and would be vv much appreciated :

my ko-fi & my paypal !

[aroaceleovaldez]

in your most recent tyson post, you said something about leo being distinctly autistic-coded and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that? it sounds really interesting (sorry if you've already posted something on this, I couldn't find anything though)

Of course! I do have a specific tag for talking about Leo's autistic-coding/traits - [here], and [one for Nico as well].

The main aspects with Leo being autistic-coded actually have a lot to do with Nico being autistic-coded, because it's the comparisons between the two that most clearly indicate Leo is autistic-coded rather than it just being his ADHD or etc.

So with Nico being autistic-coded, it's very clear in the Titan's Curse that he's intended to be autistic. First, the first series has a repeating pattern of secondary characters being very distinctly neurodivergent-coded in different ways (Annabeth's adhd/dyslexia, Tyson's down syndrome-coding, Nico's autism-coding). With Nico's introduction, he's pretty stereotypically autistic and we're given a lot of descriptors about him that are notably not attributed to him being ADHD, like it would be for other demigod characters. He doesn't register social cues such as people getting annoyed at him, he's asking/making inappropriate or impolite questions/comments, he gets particularly upset about change (such as Bianca joining the Hunt) and generally gets emotional, and one of his most notable traits he's introduced with is the fact that he has a special interest (MythoMagic) - and we're shown that this special interest particularly colors how Nico navigates the world. While ADHD has hyperfixations, we don't really get much acknowledgement of hyperfixations with demigods usually - Annabeth gets a little, but most others don't and it's not nearly as focused-in on as Nico's is.

Then as the series continues we see these traits stick with him and him start to show or voice more traits that similarly indicate he's autistic: He regularly mentions how he doesn't understand living people and prefers the company of the dead (social issues). He has more notable stims than other demigods (twisting his ring, fiddling with bones, etc). He's indicated to have strong sensory preferences (usually wearing mostly black/aversion to bright colors, usually wearing layers/his coat, multiple times he's described as wearing loose/baggy clothing or clothes too big for him). He has specific comfort items (his ring, likely his jacket(s) as well). We later get even more information about his special interests (Mythomagic/mythology/history and an older interest in pirates - the latter he specifically notes likely heavily influenced his feelings towards Percy). He struggles with emotions and facial expressions and tone. He struggles particularly with ostracism and feeling like he doesn't fit in and has something distinctly different about him from the people around him (who notably, all have ADHD, which indicates it isn't the ADHD that's making him feel that way), and other characters regularly describe him as being off-putting because of his strange behaviors - again, different from specific ADHD traits they recognize. And that last point is kind of notable because we have Hazel and Bianca for comparison - we know people are off-put by both Nico and Hazel because of being children of Hades/Pluto and their powers/aura, but other characters get past that general feeling of discomfort way faster with Hazel. And even after characters get past the death stuff with Nico, there's a second thing that they aren't moving past that isn't a factor with Hazel (Nico's autism).

So that brings us to Leo - Leo is paralleled to Nico a lot. And there's some very specific traits about him that we know are autistic-coding because of how they're used with Nico: He similarly struggles with social cues/etc, and in a very similar parallel to Nico describes how he prefers the company of machines to people because machines make more sense to him. He has similar types of clothing/sensory preferences (again some stuff with layers but also - pockets! He likes having pockets and things to put stuff in! He's even introduced as having a jacket with lots of pockets), and he has a distinct special interest (machinery) that we specifically know heavily influences how he views and navigates the world (constantly comparing things to machinery, describing things with machinery metaphors/terminology, etc etc). He even describes his entire general worldview to Hazel and it's a machine metaphor. He also similarly struggles with ostracization like Nico does, the only difference being that Leo specifically puts on a persona to compensate for areas he knows he's lacking in and very explicitly describes it as a means to make people like him, because without it he normally struggles to fit in (He's masking!). We also see notes of characters describing that similar discomfort with Leo's behaviors that they do with Nico, except without the aura of death this time. And when we're in Leo's POVs we see a very stark difference between his masking and his actual personality/behaviors such as his internal dialogues or how he behaves when he's alone. Also, like Nico, he stims more than other demigods, though for Leo it's more attributed to his ADHD. Leo also, more often than most, similarly struggles with tone and reading the room, such as making misplaced jokes/comments or etc.

But yeah! It's really interesting. Also it's just a fun thing that ADHD/dyslexia and autism have comorbidity, so it makes sense that we see demigods who are also autistic. It's also really fun to look at how other characters are coded in the series, what coding looks like in the riordanverse specifically (usually it's tied into the mythological stuff - like Chiron being in a wheelchair but he's actually a centaur, Grover being introduced as having a muscular disease but he's actually a satyr, demigods having adhd/dyslexia, Tyson being coded as having down syndrome but he's a cyclops, etc etc - it's a lot of specific metaphor stuff that I've talked about a bit before), and to look at how characters are compared to one another.

[kelocitta]

There is currently a rather large discussion ongoing about the RW fandom behavior, drama, etc. I am not going to talk about the specifics of whats happened for a number of reasons. But what I do want to say is that if at any point you've harassed people over it, whether that be through anon asks or public posts- you did nothing but damage the ability for people to correctly process what is happening. You contributed nothing but harm to an already delicate situation. It does not matter what "side" you were on and I will not tolerate further interaction with me or my work if I found out you did such. If you let your personal hate for anyone boil over into threats, wishes for long term harm and petty comments meant to contribute nothing but slander or mental distress for the individuals involved who were already distressed (or acting irrationally) you did nothing but make it harder for people to process their emotions, thoughts and behaviors constructively. Regardless of who you think was in the right, who fucked up, whatever. It doesn't matter if they deserved it, or earned it, or if its an eye for an eye. Its difficult enough as it is to think clearly when presented with any kind of stressful situation and heckling people does nothing but make it worse and harder for them to explain themself in any capacity. I don't want you anywhere near me if you think that is an acceptable way to act.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

priest!geto who falls so deeply in love with you that he assumes you were sent by god to test his faith. is this anything /taps mic

[vaguely-concerned]

walking through lucanis' mind prison. the tam lin of it all

[ittybittyremy]

Robbie Daymond’s Fireside Chat is tomorrow, I better see some good questions!!

[thurio-edau]

me when i find two perfect labels for myself but theyre microlabels that NO ONE FUCKING KNOWS