#i fell for the trap

[ninyard]

i found posts from the very first time i ever read aftg and listen. growth is real. people change. i am no longer the person i was 8 years ago

[pikachu-deluxe]

what playing 13 hours of stellaris does to a mf.

[mequetrefis]

free him

[sallufix]

ISOLATION

That update was fucking gay and crazy I have NO WORDS I do thank the Devsis gods for giving us like 4 more SM sprites though 🥳

[risibledeer]

take a joel i did on the magma thingy *insert thumbs up emji im too lazy to find it* WILD LIFE WILD LIFE WILD LIFE and joels

[useless-germanyfacts]

for clarification i am a european gay i love belgium

belgium's really counting on the european gays' votes

[forgettable-au]

You guys don't yet comprehend the mess I made to make the undertale timeline make sense in this AU LMAO😭😭😭but you'll find out soon enough.......

But like....what was I supposed to do? The timeline makes no sense to begin with.....

[mrs-gauche]

I just listened to the new episode of Split the Veil and Ghil Dirthalen (member of the community council) clarified a few things that had us a bit confused about the Game Informer article!

As many of us suspected, the Lighthouse is NOT in the Fade, but rather in its own sort of "reality bubble" in the Crossroads.

Solas is apparently trapped in the place that was intended to be the new prison for the gods (as the old one was failing).

The part about Rook's blood being connected to the Fade will be much better explained in the game.

[eggsistential-breakdown]

Watched that m night shyamalan movie about the cringefail girl dad who gets stuck at a concert. the plot was holier than the bible and i have one hundred bones to pick with it but I had fun

Alternate versions based on trailer 2 under the cut

[haifoct]

Li Lun (Fangs of Fortune) & Gong Yuanzhi (My Journey to You)

[thescriptorium]

cait touching her with her fingertips, like she’s not sure if she’s allowed to anymore ❤️‍🩹 vi finally using her strength on her, promising she won’t break ❤️‍🩹

[bentrollio]

Breaking News: Margit the Fell Omen Found Dead in Glue Trap Shackle

[lansangprincess]

i initially didn't want to talk about this scene bc personally i think it's been blown out of proportion but if you want to get real and talk about symbolism, I'll come to play.

For Belly's entire life, Conrad has been "the sun". She idealized him so much that all she could see was him and no one else could compare, leaving Jere in the shadows despite always being there for her (and literally being nicknamed "the sunshine boy")

So many people have tied this shot to that quote "For Belly, Conrad was the sun" and have understood the light here to be the sunlight radiating on Belly and Conrad. But the thing is—despite so many people's misinterpretations of the shot—it (he) is not the sun.

It's artificial lighting. It's not real.

He isn't the person she built him up to be no matter how many times she had convinced herself he was. She just didn't realize it immediately.

When Belly wakes up (that in itself could also be a metaphor), and she is able to think clearly and decide for herself what she wants and what she needs, she chooses Jeremiah. And what exactly happens when she does?

The sun shines on both of them. There is real sunlight bathing the shot because she doesn't idealize him and he doesn't idealize her, they see each other for who they really are and love each other anyway and that's what's real.

it's so important to me that it comes across that the sun shines on both of them. she didn't find a new sun, she didn't choose a different person to revolve her whole life around—she wanted the sun to shine down on her as much as it did her partner bc ultimately, she is now also choosing herself and what makes her truly happy.

[lord-squiggletits]

"To Children Ardent For Some Desperate Glory": A War Story Reading of Tarn's Death

From a narrative perspective, Tarn's death in this scene as a long-running antagonist of MTMTE is extremely cathartic in that, because he's evil, his death is satisfying: the dramatic irony of how Tarn was made by Megatron and now is unmade, that he trapped himself in the means of his own death, and, most importantly for this meta post, that he talked a big game about being willing to die as a Decepticon, only to falter and panic once the moment of his death was actually upon him. As a reader, there's a sort of vindication that you get from seeing Tarn, a supposed zealot, suddenly too cowardly to die for his own ideals, and so Tarn's death is satisfying to read under this judgement of his cowardice.

Cowardice? Perhaps not. Although it's definitely valid to read Tarn's panic here as the last of many signs of hypocrisy he's demonstrated throughout MTMTE, the tragedy of his death comes when you read this scene from the lens of the war story genre: That is to say, I read Tarn's fear in the face of death not as a demonstration of cowardice/hypocrisy, but as the moment that, for him personally, "the old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" was finally pulled from his eyes (literally, as the mask Tarn used to hide himself was ripped off by Megatron to expose his fear) and he realized that it was not, in fact, worth it to rush headlong into his own death for the sake of ideology. The Old Lie that it's glorious to die for one's ideals protected Tarn for that one moment of him declaring "At least I'll die a Decepticon," offering him that comfort/delusion that his death would have meaning... then, of course, having that ripped away as Megatron informs him, "Everything you did was for nothing."

Bringing this quote forth from War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges:

And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war's simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me-- maybe it is a part of many of us-- that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war and very stupid once the war ended.

Tarn's choice to pursue revenge against Megatron was his "intense and overpowering moment" that won over choosing to retreat like Nickel and Deathsaurus did, as they, unlike him, realized that throwing away soldiers' lives in a grinder for the sake of a useless grudge was the wrong thing to do; they went "back to the routine of life" and failed to be claimed by The Old Lie.

Another interesting part of WIAF is that, throughout the book, Hedges makes comparisons between the illusions of power, meaning, and righteousness that war brings and drugs/narcotics/addiction, which brings to mind that Tarn is actually canonically an addict of multiple substances, meaning that the "drug of war" is both literal and metaphorical in his case.

So, when recognizing that Tarn was peddled The Old Lie not just as one of many generic soldiers in a lifelong war, but as a target for brainwashing Megatron personally singled out, it becomes impossible to view his death simply as a karmic death for a hypocritical jerk. The idea that Tarn is a coward for not being able to "die as a Decepticon" being brave and unafraid relies on the assumption that dying in battle for a Cause that doesn't care about you is a demonstration of bravery and sacrifice rather than a pointless destruction of life in service of propaganda.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in [...] My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

I would argue that the fact that Tarn was drawn so heavily into Decepticonism (and indeed, a smaller cult-- the DJD-- based on worship of Megatron himself) that he would choose to fight, kill, and die in a crusade of revenge against people who wronged his Cause (Megatron) is not a fault of his moral character, but rather a tragedy of his conversion into a rather common lie of war, exemplified by the poem above: It's all well and good to talk about how awesome a glorious death in battle is until you're the one dying and witnessing other people around you dying. In my mind, it's not cowardice or hypocrisy that made Tarn terrified of "dying a Decepticon": it is, and has always been, a moral fact that life is greater than death and that choosing to live in peace is better than fighting a perpetual war. His terror came from the fact that the veil-- or rather, the mask-- convincing him otherwise was ripped away from him. He did not experience a fall from principled morality into hypocritical cowardice: he experienced a revelation from propagandistic lies to hard, tragic reality.

To those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed.... They can abandon even self-preservation in the desire to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama. This vision is accepted even at the expense of self-annihilation.

Tarn's story basically follows the formula of the war story genre near-perfectly: The beginning of his life as an otherwise ordinary person (Damus/Glitch), his fall into a militant group as part of a desire for meaning and battle against an oppressor, his committing and excusing of heinous acts in the name of that false meaning-- and finally, his inability to detach from The Old Lie and the subsequent terror and futility he faced upon dying for the sake of that Lie.

All this to say that, as vindicating and fun as Tarn's death is from a pure entertainment/satisfaction perspective, I do like to look at this scene and remind myself that it's not cowardice to be afraid of dying, especially to be afraid of dying for no reason and in the service of an ideology (and in Tarn's case, person) that does not and never did care about you.

[goosessideblog]

do you think tabi was always trying to push away and be mean to evbo because she knew this was going to happen otherwise.

[twisted0mens]

HIIII IM BACK! Did someone ask for one of “Bill & Ford's physical altercations”? @ckret2 👀

Not sure why but this one had me on edge!!

I also made sure to add Bill’s accessories in this one. Unfortunately forgot about them in the last one!

Like before If you haven’t read ckret2’s fic…READ IT! Or be Hexed!