#i just think it's a pretty interesting concept

[kianamaiart]

Growing an audience takes time and getting people to care about your characters can often take more time. I've done a bunch of OCs in the past but none of them really got traction until my IDWTBAMG OCs. I steadily grew my social media following for well over a decade. A lot of checking socialblade, looking at analytics and generally drawing/posting everyday. I have a whole doc available about this type of stuff.

There's no particular shortcut other than happening to go viral or getting really lucky. But I will say "branding" or carving out a niche for yourself over time helps. Although I've been in a number of different fandoms over the past 15 years I've been on the internet, the kind of art I do has been pretty consistent. Lots of shorter, light hearted comics or vignettes highlighting relationships (be them romantic, platonic or familial) and people started enjoying my work for my writing style more so than just what fandom I was creating for.

Finding your community, creating stuff that aligns with those communities and engaging with others is huge. A lot of my work prior to IDWTBAMG centered queer people (specifically sapphics), Black and Asian folks and stylistically is very anime/modern western cartoon inspired. It's what became known for in fandom spaces and what people were following me for. So when I finally did make IDWTBAMG, a concept with anime influences, in a western cartoon style, with two Black, sapphic leads, it just fit right into what I was already doing. Like if you grew your following from doing cute, slice of life stuff, then suddenly dropped a psychological horror comic, chances are it's not gonna grab a large part of your audience. Might bring some new folks in, but you're ultimately kinda starting over and pivoting (that's why rebrands are hard to pull off). This may not be the best example but hopefully you get what I mean. Appeal to the communities you've fostered!

I hate using corporate speak for art but if you ARE trying sell your ideas to people and get your work out there, you do kinda have to learn how to market yourself and your art to some extent. Get in the head of a marketing agent or a brand manager. What's popular right now? How can I use that to my advantage? What times should I be posting my artwork to get the most eyes on this? Who is my target audience and how do I effectively appeal to them while staying true to my own work? Stuff like that. Genuinely, studying how social media managers operate as well as just observing how businesses market their products helped me a lot. "Okay I'm making this animatic, but it won't come out for the next four months. How do I keep people interested and hyped for that amount of time leading up to the pilot's release? I'll keep doing comics here and there so people connect with the characters by the time the pilot comes out. Once I get he VAs recorded, I'll make posts to get people hyped for the casting. I'll upload snippets and behind the scenes stuff to give people a taste of what's to come. I'll release during Black History Month since this is a Black led project with Black characters. I'll have a specific upload time at peak hours to get a good amount of people watching for the premiere and to give the pilot a good running start." This was all stuff I was taking into consideration and planning for.

Then generally, I think people connect to characters more than anything. You can have a cool concept and fun world building ideas but if your execution is bad and your characters aren't compelling, what's the point, y'know? IDWTBAMG isn't a particularly novel concept imo, but I think its strengths lie in the characters and how they interact. The concept is just a tool to give the character dynamics and relationships legs to stand on. So few of the comics I've done with these guys have to do with their lore, it's just small interactions of the girls in class, at a convenience store or just talking to each other in a void. Even though it's simple, that's often the kind of thing people connect with.

Then there's just the technical aspect of having appealing drawing! Getting better at your craft, if nothing else, is good for catching eyes and helping with your execution of your project. While it's not always necessary, I think it helps a lot. I know there's a lot of people who follow me just because they personally like my art style and character design.

Not sure how helpful this actually is LOL. It really does just kinda take time. We all have to start somewhere. I was a "small artist" too at one point. It was years of trial and error, mental breakdowns, finding my own artistic voice and posting artwork almost daily for like 5 years straight. I do think that's why IDWTBAMG ended up being so special to me. It really does feel like a culmination of everything I've learned and all that hard work up to this point and people can kinda feel that.

[stellabobana]

I think we both feel the other person is dancing around things, so let me try to frame it again.

Taxes are absolutely a form of coercion. I admit that willingly, but I also think it's a pointless question. Because my moral framework does not see perfect freedom as possible outside theoretical scenarios. So long as people will exist, all freedoms will encroach upon each other.

Land is an obvious one, but I'm sure you know the arguments up and down here. Natural resources that are claimed by one person, but of course is "I found it first" the best way to handle distribution? It's the one we did, and it certainly has the benefit of being simple. But I find it hard to say it's the most fair, or represents the most freedom. Then there's inherited wealth, which makes sense on some ethical branches and not others, etc, etc, etc. I don't rely on any specific argument here, not because I'm not willing to argue them, but because the specific one in question just does not matter to me. Picking any system will, 100% of the time, result in some party benefiting more than others. The most fair systems don't result in no inequality, but in the least inequality possible to achieve. Life is imperfect and messy.

You ask if it's ok to force you to do things. I think the obvious and easy answer is - yes, absolutely. Even you believe that! You are arguing for private property rights that certainly give you the ability to, say, limit what can be done on your land. Because *true freedom is a philosophical concept, not a natural one*. Beyond that, presumably you'd want force to enforce your private property, or else it doesn't mean much to have it. Then we get back to more rules about how we prove property, how we track it, what rights ownership grants, forever down the line. These rules did not develop over thousands of years because people long for the boot, but because they were (often imperfect) solutions to actual problems that come when people live near each other.

My argument for taxes is that it takes something that most people want - basic public services - and implements it in the best system we've figured out yet. I don't *care* that there's some element of coercion, anymore than I care that we can't build a road that has no wear and tear. These are elements of the system existing *at all*, not things that can be taken away.

All rights you possess, by their very nature, impose limits on others. Debating that seems pointless. Step two - what's too far, what's too little - is where society has been stuck for a while now.

If you want to ask if taxes are the best way to handle public goods, sure. If you want to talk about how we handle the messy business of being born into a world with rules that we didn't agree with, sure. That one's pretty tough and I've never heard a good answer. But trying to say a system is bad merely because it has some level of coercion baked in precludes those, because I find it as interesting as debating the proper tax system for Narnia.

“Leftists want to enslave doctors” is such a weird take to keep showing up. I think it’s a libertarian thing?

[wanderingapathy]

Headcanon that before the group got together, each ninja had a fear of each other’s element.

This is some old stuff I found in my notes app, but here’s the list of their fears

Kai: Water

Cole: The Incomprehensible (Lloyd’s power)

Zane: Lightning

Jay: Earth

Nya: Fire

Lloyd: Ice

I also found the reasoning for each one too, I altered a few things form the original version though

Kai: His fear of water is shown in the show as he doesn’t know have to swim. Self explanatory, but let’s also just say that as a kid he had the same fear and when he used to see Nya swimming he’d get super anxious for her. Perhaps also the innate uncontrollability of water made him uncomfortable because he could always put a fire out but how quickly could he drain water? I think also the difficulty tied to swimming also makes him feel like he had less control and therefore enhances the fear.

Cole: Fear of the incomprehensible is primarily because I don’t think he’d have very many feats of physical things. He was shown to free-climb mountains without any gear and honestly a lot of the fears at he develops in the show are based primarily on issues with himself (especially when he was a ghost). The fear of being forgotten is also pretty major at some point too. All of these are more so concepts, and I think it’s fitting if he’s afraid of something he can’t understand, such as Lloyd’s strange and seemingly ever-growing powers.

Zane: His fear of Lightning wasn’t due to any event he had experienced, but rather just some instinct that made him cautious of electricity. Since he didn’t know about being a robot before joining the team, he’d have no clue that lightning could potentially mess with him on a degree very different to a human. So he never knew why he had this fear, but it was still prevalent.

Jay: I feel like Jay was almost much more interested in the air and sky. He grew up in a junkyard in the middle of an empty desert so I really doubt he had anything other to look at. Plus lightning being is the sky during storms. Also he has so many themes tied to the sky (his makeshift wings, his vehicles tending to be jets/planes, etc). The reason why I bring this up his because I don’t think he ever saw how big mountains could get—or when he did it was briefly—so perhaps he has some form of fear in regards to how towering they are and how they’re so different from the consistency of the sky and desert.

Nya: Now originally I had Lloyd being afraid of fire, but I switched it around for specific reasons. Nya was afraid of ice because it was so much more rigid and intimidating than the flowiness of water. Now that I have her afraid of fire, I think it’d be more based that lack of control. It parallels with Kai’s fear, both of them finding that the opposing element is difficult and impossible to control in some way or another. For Nya, fire scared her because one ember or spark was enough to burn down homes or villages, that an uncontrolled fire is almost impossible to put out even with plenty of water.

Lloyd: Now his fear of ice is mainly tied to the Cole. Ice meant cold, snow, blizzards, winter, etc. I don’t think that he actually stayed in Darkleys the entire time he was schooled there. I feel like Lloyd would’ve ran away multiple times, only to come back when harsh conditions struck. And when it came to him being kicked out, he didn’t actual have somewhere to come back to. He was left out in the cold, subjected to whatever weather was currently happening. Not to mention the first interaction he had with Serpentine was in a cold, icy environment.

Of course, I don’t think they’d show their fears around each other or perhaps they had already outgrow their fears before the team was created, but it does offer for some interesting headcanons and story material. It can also be a nice thing to, with them overcoming their fears because they grew fond of the person who has control of the element.

[elbiotipo]

Asimov's galactic empire is ridiculous for having lasted several thousand years, but it's very interesting that the memory of earth as humanity's homeworld has completely faded by the time of "a pebble in the sky". The foundation sequels and prequels, alongside the last Daneel Olivaw novel (robots and empire) talk a lot about how history inevitably fades after enough time has passed

I actually think Asimov did a pretty good job (somewhat) of presenting the depth of a Galactic Empire. There's something lost in many sci-fi depictions of galactic civilizations about just how big and so deep in time and space any concept of a galactic empire can be. I think it is very reasonable to think that any space civilization thousands of years from now might be irrecognizable. (I would much rather talk about civilizations rather than empires).

I don't hold too much against Asimov because he was pioneering the genre, but I think modern authors could take a step back from the concept of an "Empire". Not because it's an evil concept, but because I think the concept "big fantasy Empire" or "galactic empire" is a narrative trope that started (sort of) with authors like Asimov, got reinserted in pop culture by people like George Lucas, and many authors did copy it just because without thinking of how such a thing comes to be in the first place, because it's just a fantasy setting trope

shameless plug, I wrote a couple post on the subject:

[throne-of-blood-and-roses-if]

Ngl, it reminds me of Odessa WIP IF. A good concept, that one, shame it'll sinking along with dashingdon. RIP.😮‍💨

On another note, are the heir had a preset personality or we can choose a set of persona for them like Odessa?

I'll be watching this blog with interest, and good luck to you. May the creativity flow and fall like a waterfall upon your head, so that you can write in ease. 👍

I'm really happy it reminded you because throne of blood and roses is inspired by Odessa dating games. Now as I say that I'm not trying to make a 1:1 copy nor am I trying to replace it i don't even think i could if i tried lol. I just loved it that concept and decided to share my vision of a story. And to answer your question yes, the yandere heir will have their own personas and the regular heir will have their own set of personas the player can choose from. Do i have to make it harder for myself? No. Will i do it because i find it pretty entertaining? hell yeah!

[goldendoodlerlockerlove]

5!

Thank you so much for invading my ask box again, Babs!! I appreciate you so much 🥹❣️

All right, The Cobra is my Marvel WIP (technically WIP even though it's published, because it's unfinished and I haven't been able to find the time to continue it for quite a while). But it's a fic I want to finish someday, eventually, though I don't know when. It's a fic that's very dear to me. It was my first big writing project that I actually published for the world to see, so I love it a lot for that. Okay, buckle up for some lore. I told @koko-raccoon all about my OC, so here's everything I told them:

Her full given name is Lucille Dorothy Barnes, but she goes by Lucy for short, or Luce (She/Her pronouns!! She's a Cisgender Lady :3 Tbh, I like to headcanon her as the type to put Pronouns in her Bio once she gets to the present and has an actual phone and learns how to use Social Media). Anyway, she's Bucky's younger sister, and he's her oldest brother (yes, she has two older brothers and one younger brother. I gave her two additional brothers because according to canon lore, Bucky's supposed to be the oldest of four, even though nothing about his siblings is known in canon).

She and Bucky are 1000% the closest to each other in their family, they were each other's first best friends!! That's the power of sibling love. The two of them eventually meet Steve, and she becomes Steve's bestie as well at the same time that Bucky becomes Steve's bestie. The three of them kind of become a friendship trio, like The Three Musketeers. Oh yeah, and she's also Aro/Ace, but doesn't figure it out until later, because of how taboo being LGBTQ+ was back in the forties. Her being Cis and Aro/Ace is based off my best friend, who is also Cis and Aro/Ace, pffffft (and despite being Aro/Ace, she's one of the most loving people I know).

Anyway, Lucy never gets powers, but does support Steve while he gets the serum, and actually does manage to join the army with him. Even though she's a woman, she still gets in because let's just say that's how desperate they were, lmao. And they also tour together selling War Bonds as Captain America and The Cobra (which eventually becomes her actual superhero name). Then they both get trapped in the ice. I don't know how she survived, because she never got the serum. Let's just say she's built different--and somehow the ice protected her all of those years, I don't know. I don't think I thought about that enough when I wrote it.

Anyway, they wake up in 2012, join the Avengers, and craziness ensues. But the craziest part is reuniting with Bucky, who she thought died all the way back in the forties. She definitely took his presumed death the hardest, she grieved so much. She never really fully recovered from when she thought she lost him. She actually turned to drinking to make herself feel better, it was that bad (she previously never even touched alcohol). And she even cut her long, brown hair and dyed it; it eventually grows back and regains its old, natural color, but it was still a huge, rebellious move for her. She gets even more upset when she learns that Bucky was brainwashed, and he's barely even her brother anymore. But part of her that she thought would never heal heals when Bucky is eventually freed of his mind control and becomes a part of her life again. They definitely become each other's support system when Steve goes back to live out his life in the forties and dies, leaving the two of them (and Sam).

And she's reminded just how fun it is to spend time with her big brother again. She just missed him so much 😭 I like to think that she's also trapped in the town Wanda creates in WandaVision, and actually forgets everything, and Wanda tries to justify it by saying that now she gets to live the life she lost. Very sad stuff. I actually kind of used this fic as an excuse to write a character going through the grieving process, sort of?? It was definitely interesting.

Here's an excerpt of Lucy dealing with grief and turning to drinking as an unhealthy coping mechanism:

When they got back, she turned to drinking. Being drunk erased the pain. It numbed everything. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but it helped. She was old enough anyway. She and Steve sat in the remains of a building, listening to a broadcast.

“Blackout is still in effect throughout the London area. Please wait for the all-clear. Your attention, please. All citizens should remain indoors until further notice. Blackout is still in effect throughout the London Area.”

Peggy suddenly appeared in a trenchcoat. Steve cleared his throat and spoke, his voice sounding rather raspy, “Dr. Erskine said that the serum wouldn’t just affect my muscles, it would affect my cells. Create a protective system of regeneration and healing. Which means I can’t get drunk. Did you know that?”

“I can.” Lucy hiccuped, pouring herself another shot. “It helps with the pain. Physical and mental. Also, Steve, m’pretty sure your metabolism burns four times faster than the average person.”

She heard that her words sounded slightly slurred, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“I was just about to say that.” Peggy grabbed a chair and sat beside them. “He thought it could be one of the side effects. It wasn’t either of your faults.”

“Did you read the report?” Steve questioned, probably sounding harsher than intended.

“Yes.”

“Then you know that’s not true.”

She slammed her shot glass on the table, startling Peggy, “I was a coward.”

“You did everything you could,” Peggy assured them. “Did you believe in your friend and brother? Did you respect him? Then stop blaming yourselves. Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He damn well must’ve thought you were worth it. Both of you.”

“That’sss Bucky for you.” Lucy’s “s” was slightly drawn out. She laughed drunkenly and then hiccuped again.

“I’m going after Schmidt,” Steve decided. “I’m not gonna sleep until all of Hydra is dead or captured.”

“You won’t be alone.” 

Lucy never forgot those words of comfort.

Here's an excerpt of a small part of WandaVision that I wrote in advance because I got so excited to get to it:

Lucy started to grow angry herself for not being listened to, “What is outside of Westview, Wanda?”

“You know full well what’s out there,” Wanda snapped. “Lucy, I did this for you, too.”

“What?”

“Haven’t you noticed? You’ve gotten to live through all of the decades you never got to experience. You never had to be a hero,” Wanda explained.

Lucy’s hands curled into fists, “I thought you were my friend, Wanda. How could you do this? People here are suffering!”

“You don’t understand.” 

“I don’t understand?” Lucy hit the table with all her strength and started to shout, “I knew damn well what I was getting into when I got into that plane with Steve!”

“You don’t get to make a choice for us, Wanda!” Vision exclaimed.

Also, the best flipping part about this fic is that Lucy is canon is some way thanks to The Falcon and The Winter Soldier!! Sort of. Okay, I still made Lucy up, and Bucky's sister never appears on-screen, so it can be assumed she never made it to the present and passed away at some point. Or he could even be lying. But let me have this!! When my best friend, Matilda, pointed this out, I squealed with happiness so hard.

[flwrkid14]

Buried Beneath The Laughter They Ignored

Tim is totally fine. Ridiculously fine, actually.

It didn’t matter that he woke up feeling this bubbling, manic laughter in his chest, like everything was suddenly so fucking funny. It didn’t matter that he’d woken up from another nightmare last night, crying, calling for his mama—not the mother he lost, but the mother he gained, Harley Quinn. And it didn’t matter that most days, he felt more like Joker Junior than he did Tim Drake.

It didn’t matter that no one else seemed to fucking care.

He shoved down every bit of laughter clawing up his throat, because he knew if he let even one chuckle slip, they’d all give him that look. The one they always did. Disapproval masked as concern. They didn’t like Junior. They didn’t want to believe Junior was still in there, clawing his way up every time Tim breathed.

It didn’t matter that no one ever asked him how he was doing. They didn’t want to talk about it. Because talking about it would make it real, and they preferred pretending it wasn’t. They expected him to be fine, to push it down, to carry on like nothing happened. If he tried to bring it up, they’d say he was being insensitive—insensitive to Jason's trauma. What fucking irony, he thought bitterly. As if it wasn’t insensitive to be stepping all over his by not letting him speak.

It didn’t matter that he caught them glancing at him sometimes, like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for him to snap, waiting for Junior to come out again. But they never asked. No one asked what was going on in his head. No one fucking asked.

It didn’t matter that when he finally snapped, when he finally screamed at them, sick and tired of pretending, they had the nerve to act clueless. As if they didn’t know.

It didn’t matter that Dick, of all people, screamed back. Yelling like he was being unreasonable. Like he was the problem. He screamed at Tim, demanding answers, to ask what the hell he meant by Joker Junior, as if—

As if they didn’t know.

They didn’t fucking know.

This whole time, they hadn’t known.

They didn’t know Tim had been taken. They didn’t know Tim had been missing. They didn’t know Tim had been held prisoner at the hand of the Joker for months, tearing him apart, piece by piece, until Junior was the only thing left of him. They didn’t know he had screamed for them, begged for someone to find him, but no one ever did.

They didn’t know how much he had suffered. Alone. They didn’t know how much he had changed. They didn’t know that every time he woke up now, it felt like he was still Joker Junior, just wearing Tim’s skin.

And they didn’t know how much it hurt—how much it broke him—to realize that they had never known.

Tim wasn’t fucking okay. And it mattered—oh, it mattered—that they didn’t fucking know.

Because if they didn’t know, it meant no one ever bothered to look. It meant no one ever cared enough to notice.

[headphones-lifeform]

Alright! Since it's quite long, the lair review is beneath the cut.

The Rot

The first tab in your den seems to be very much Plague Flight-themed. It's an aesthetic far from my personal preference [I have never had a good relationship with flesh, even my own], which makes me appreciate it more! I think it is beautiful that others can resonate so with things that have the opposite effect on me. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations :]

Anyways, my favourite dragon from The Rot tab might just be Ritual.

Other than the creative use of the invisibility cloak, it was the poem that made me choose this dragon these two chickens. The actual dragon beneath the apparel has quite a nice colour palette as well.

The Moor

Overall, the dragons dwelling in this tab remind me of a bog (though perhaps a moor would be a more appropriate comparison). The dull greens and browns definitely create an interesting atmosphere, one that I imagine being accentuated by the slightly-off chirps and hums of strange crickets and mosquitos.

It was difficult choosing a favourite from this tab, so for now I went with Velo.

I think the green apparel paired with the dragon's dark colours creates a really intriguing look. This is also one of the best/most interesting uses of the mosswood trim I've seen thus far- it's an apparel item I've been wanting to use for a while and lacked ideas for, so I would like to ask for your approval to use Velo's outfit as inspiration.

I also really liked swamp creature Krohne, and would like to know the origin behind SubjectTwo's name.

The Lost

"The Lost" is quite a cool name for an unsorted dragons tab. [Also, your art is really good!

There were so many intriguing dragons on this tab- I liked Tofu's lore, Sturmbringer's colours and Arcanum's wings. I ended up choosing two favourite dragons:

I collect Everlux dragons with wool, so of course I would choose Narugul. The bio- "a dirty sheep trapped in barbed wire"- is intriguing [apologies for using this word so often], and the design is excellent. I have seen this skin a few times before, but somehow never noticed the moon phases.

The other dragon I chose from this tab is Pahadron. While the dragon is absolutely gorgeous, the reason I chose them is the art in their bio. I really like long-necked creature designs, and the hand-shaped tail is such a cool concept!

Water Creatures

This tab, as the name suggests, is full of water creatures, including a whale fall and several sea monsters. Once again choosing a favourite was difficult- Geist being a seal creature is very interesting, and Anstix has octopus, one of my favourite genes, in an excellent colour. I ended up choosing Eerikki to showcase:

Eerikki absolutely looks like a freshwater creature! I can imagine them at the bottom of a lake, hidden by the murk and foliage, with only their eyes visible. Very cool.

Dunes

The colours of this tab are pleasing, and the lore seems interesting.

While many of the dragons were intriguing, Kargheit's purple accents immediately caught my eye.

Strike is one of my favourite Dusthide genes, and this dragon is just quite pretty- they look a little bit like a landscape of sorts. [And I would quite like to know the reasoning behind the name!]

The Graves

The dragons in this tab are mostly greyscale, and many have ghost as a tertiary. It's quite a cool vibe.

It was once again difficult to choose a favourite. I really like the accents on Shadow and Tamela, and Dogma is one of the best-looking Banescales I have seen thus far.

At the end, I chose Seide:

I don't usually like button eyes, but I think Seide manages to pull them off. The basic primary and secondary work quite well, and the dragon's name is definitely fitting. The little creatures in their bio definitely piqued my interest- what are they? They're exactly the type of design I enjoy.

Wandering Bards

There are so many interesting dragons in this tab! I especially like your miniature Bogsneaks. However, as choosing only one would be difficult and listing all three would make this post even longer, I ended up choosing Splash instead:

I have never seen any of these apparel pieces before, and now I must get the pillager's fur arm/legwraps as soon as possible. They look so comfortable! That aside, I also liked your art of him in his bio. His expressions are very interesting.

Korrn

Since you said this was your favourite dragon, I gave him a category of his own.

Korrn's bio contains so much excellent art, and his lore is fascinating.

Hope this was alright. This was my first time doing a lair review.

We're doing wish rising again? Oh man ... I really wish for a lair or dragon review - they've become so rare ;-;

https://www1.flightrising.com/den/166226 (all of my hibden besides project folders is fine)

Fav dragon: https://www1.flightrising.com/dragon/87537000 (boop him?)

[fumifooms]

What if we were both magic prodigies and it otherized us in different ways and we devoted ourselves to protecting a family member who has general other goals & priorities. What if we both did self-sacrifical devotion in opposite ways.

What if we were dark mirrors of each other and where I've grown overcontrolling you've grown complacent. What if, bought as a servant into a pretty loving home, ownership and control is what love looks like to me, and to you neglected and lonely growing up, love is gratefully taking any scraps of it you’re lent.

By belonging to someone, even if she comes back injured or fails at finding Delgal, she feels like she belongs and is cherished, by owning someone he feels safe in them not leaving him.

She’s what’s tethering him do you see… And he’s the only thing giving her direction and purpose in her state. She needs a compass and he needs a support.

They’re both so out of it 😭 It’s the weirdly intense and unearned mutual trust and reliance on each other?? They’re each other’s weird little comfort codependent teddy bear. Or at least they were headed towards that before SHE DIED THEN HE DIED THEN THEY BOTH FORGOT ABOUT EACH OTHER AND NEVER MET EVER AGAIN. Though she’s also the guard attack hound keeping him safe… And vice versa he heals her and can rewrite her very being with just one wave of his hand. They’re both so so mentally and physically vulnerable both but they cling onto each other. They can’t perceive things accurately but despite it all someway somehow they stumble into something closer to resembling companionship just before they both die. Falin is just that kind and Thistle is just that lonely. Overworked.

We both haven’t lived for ourselves in a very long time, haven’t we.

They both have a similar devotion to the people they love but again the difference is that Thistle starts overtsepping while Falin is self-effacing. The other difference between them is that people care about Falin <3 People have given up on Thistle long ago, and he has given people reasons to, while people refuse to give up on Falin. Yaad has a mini arc about it dw about it it’s ok he’s not all alone in the end 😭😭 He reached out for Marcille’s hand but they already all wanted to help him, they just had to be given the chance to, Yaad just had to be given the chance to, it’s okay I’m okay

Hey what if we learned to get in touch with our own identity and the world around us and living in the present again through being in the worst codependent situationship ever.

Falin and Thistle sitting in a tree, sucking on flowers together because they’re h-u-n-g-r-y 💕💕💕

I bet he’s only ever thought of flowers as useless ornaments. Weak weeds. But she shows him they’re tasty and useful and good and pretty in their own right too and deserve existing without proving their worth and waaa <33 Thistles…... Did you know thistles taste sweet if you remove the thorns and eat them?

"Even as a chimera, her kind nature remains" you can’t suppress her in the way that matters. You can’t soothe him in the way that matters. It’s doomed. You’re doomed. It’s all doomed. Save me.

[mordredpendragon]

obviously i have my biases, but i'm just curious.

a bunch of knights go through grail quest, but what i want to know is your preference for the GRAIL HERO specifically. bonus points if you tell me why!

as a refresher, here's all of the relevant texts they show up in and undergo grail quest

Percival

Peredur (Welsh) Y Seint Greal (Welsh) Perceval + Continuations (French) Parzival (German) Parceval (Norse) Perchevael (Dutch) Prose Perceval (Middle English) Perlesvaus (French) Merlin and the Grail by Robert de Boron (French) Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory (Middle English) The Quest for the Holy Grail (Vulgate) (French) The Quest for The Holy Grail (Post-Vulgate) (French) La Tavola Ritonda (Italian)

Galahad and Bors

Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory (Middle English) The Quest for the Holy Grail (Vulgate) (French) The Quest for The Holy Grail (Post-Vulgate) (French) La Tavola Ritonda (Italian)

Gawain

The Crown by Heinrich von dem Türlin (Diu Crône) (German) Perlesvaus (French)

Lancelot and Arthur

Perlesvaus (French)

links are supplied by the Arthurian Preservation Project!

[ninjaaa-go]

I was just thinking that, if we do actually get amnesiac Jay, him eventually getting his memories back could be really interesting. Because obviously you’ve got all the great memories with his family and the people he loves, but at the same time just— the horrors. The guy has so much trauma piled up from over the years and I feel like that would be A Lot to have dumped on you all at once.

[animezinglife]

There's not a single instance in which Elain says, "I don't want Lucien."

She says, "I don't want a mate."

A mate is not a human concept. Elain was just stripped of her humanity by force.

"I don't want a male."

She was engaged to a human MAN. Elain was human. Elain was weeks from her wedding and was looking forward to her human future: get married to a man she [thought she] loved, maybe have some kids [speculation, but would've most likely been in Graysen's plans and she would've known that], live her life as a lady with her garden, and eventually pass on.

The thing is, neither she nor Lucien seems to know what to make of each other at all. The only difference is that Lucien wants to open a line of communication to her and explore this chance: in his culture, this could potentially be one of the greatest gifts that can bestowed on them.

He's approached this in the form of an interested suitor potentially looking to court her. He's not trying to take her to bed. He wants to know who she is, what she's interested in, and occasionally, offers small gifts during the holidays he hopes will make her happy or will make her life more comfortable in some way (as with the gardening gloves).

He's not in love with her. Elain's not in love with him.

She is 100% correct in that she owes him nothing. I wish she were kinder to him, but she doesn't owe him her attention or time. I also wonder if the situation won't flip at some point if she thinks he's lost interest, but that's a different conversation.

She is physically and magically tied to a man ("male") she never asked for when she was still in love with another one. When she was actively experiencing the most traumatic experience of her life.

As a woman myself, all I'm saying is that once that dust settled...it would be fairly present in my memory that he'd been the one to cover me and try to preserve my dignity. It'd be fairly present in my memory that he were the one who lifted me off the floor and carried me away from that darkness.

And I wonder...why is this dismissed so much, when Azriel did something similar for Gwyn? To be clear, I am not making light of what happened to her—far from it. Yet there is a reason that despite the heinous evil she endured, she trusts him and feels safe around him. She's a tough woman, but I don't think it's for nothing that she feels comfortable openly flirting with him.

I don't like SJM's approach to anything but the mating bond relationships (namely Feyre and Rhys's). She wastes a lot of time and a lot of pages with casual, meaningless sex and attraction that offers nothing to character development, the plot, or anything else. She is wishy-washy at best in writing character relationships. She needs an editor, but again, that's a different conversation.

The part of this piece everyone tends to leave out is how wildly different Elain and Lucien appear to be when her smothering sisters aren't breathing down her neck and policing both of their every moves.

They do start talking when left alone.

She chooses to follow after him.

She starts to follow after him again—starts to say something—when he's about to put his life in danger.

She offered up a pretty intimate question in nature about being able to hear his heartbeat through the stone at night. That was all Elain, on her own, and of her own agency.

When he reaches for her through the bond, she does get jumpy, but it seems to more specifically overwhelm her.

Something in that moment made Lucien blush, and whatever it was, he was not talking. Knowing what we know about him...I don't think Elain is uninterested in him.

I think she's specifically not interested in the idea of a mating bond.

Lucien is quite the person for that mating bond she doesn't want to snap with.

The one her own happily married sister can't stop making thirsty observations about.

The one who made the Children of the Blessed fall to their knees.

The one Amren referred to as "the handsome one" to put on the throne.

The one who sat Cassian down with one look.

The one the king of Hybern of all people had to comment on (arguably one of the funniest moments in the books—imagine your enemy rolling up, stopping his evil villain cackling to verbally note that Lucien is gorgeous).

Immaculately dressed. Fire in the blood. At this point, Lucien is still the keeper of the one brain cell in this series most of the time (shared only with people he's directly related to, ironically enough).

He looks cut from the jeweled trees of Autumn and like he's one with the forest. He has all the practical skills of surviving in nature and looks really good practicing them.

He can see things others can't...and she's a Seer.

She wanted to travel. He's traveled, cultured, and well-connected.

He met her father (and I fully believe Papa Archeron at least silently gave him his blessing).

Elain is also a lady who does not think much of the Fae culture is proper. She's a grown woman and didn't even like discussing the change to her cycle with her own sister.

So when she's lost one of the few biological perks of being a human woman in a guy not knowing when she's riled up? Specifically, when he's the cause of it in a crowded room full of people breathing down their necks?

It's not so surprising she might want to put as much distance between herself and him as possible, not even look at/make eye contact with him, barely speak to him (if at all), and give him the coldest shoulder possible.

Elain isn't like her sisters. She doesn't roll random village boys in the hay just to scratch an "itch" or make prostitutes look like nuns. She holds herself to a standard that feels true to herself and feels right for her.

Her only exposure to mating bonds has been Feyre and Rhys and Nesta and Cassian. She is bombarded with this extremely overwhelming sexual connotation of it all the time.

She's only ever been with Graysen because she loved him.

I'm sure what she thinks is the expectation with the bond weighs heavily on her, and it's all doing so at a terrible time.

Lucien himself has done nothing wrong where Elain is concerned. On the contrary, he's pretty much done everything right: respected her wish for space, does not push his presence on her, and offers her thoughtful, polite gifts. He never pushes her. He's been a gentleman (which I think might actually be a small part of the issue, but that's yet another conversation.

But again, they don't know what to make of each other. She hurts him in how cold she can be, but not once does he ever expect anything from her. He's disappointed, but he doesn't blame her for it. He continues to open that line of communication—that small, humble offering of letting her know him—to see if this whole bond situation is worth it.

When he says he wants to see if she's worth it, he's not talking about her value as a person. She already has that.

He's talking about himself. What this bond will mean.

Whether the pain will be worth it if it comes to that—if she rejects him—or if it does blossom and he risks losing her like he lost Jesminda.

Elain and Lucien are parallels of each other, and not just because their souls are tied together.

The cruelest irony of it all is that if the bond hadn't snapped at their first meeting, I truly believe they would've hit it off beautifully. They would've loved each other and gotten along extremely well.

Women can say one thing and mean another it’s a romance plot trope!!!!

We have zero PoV proof of how Elain and Lucien actually feel about each other. No one can claim that Elain and Lucien are NOT meant to be because they are uncomfortable or disinterested with one another.

Just because Lucien is not following Elain around and groping her does not mean he is disinterested. Especially when we get lines in SF of him looking longingly at her, still.

And just because Elain has said in anger and frustration with her sister while still healing from her trauma that she owes Lucien nothing and she doesn’t want a good male, does not mean her feelings are not conflicted or could have changed.

Hell we have 2 other canon mate bond references to look at in the acotar books. And both of those sisters also stated they wanted nothing to do with Rhys or Cassian. And they both demanded that Rhys and Cassian leave them alone. But what we did have to know that what they said did not match with what they felt was being in THEIR PoV.

Just because Elain says one thing does not mean she does not feel something else. And any fan who decides to ship Elucien is not delusional for doing so when there is zero PoV content to prove exactly what Elain and Lucien is truly thinking or feeling for one another.

[canisalbus]

Different Italian anon, but the thing with Tuscan C is that it's pronounced like a very strong H sound, which is extra weird cuz the letter H makes no sound in Italian, normally. It sounds the way Spanish pronounce the J. We say it's "aspirato". So then people from there will say things like Hoha Hola (coca cola), and it's funny. It's also extremely contagious, I got family in Florence, you spend 3 days with them you start doing it too before you even realize.

.

[skunkes]

i loooove when ocs unrealized development makes them feel like real people like no i dont know whether talon is genuinely attracted to women after years of both clinging to them for safety and years of putting them onto that untouchable idealized Perfect Protector Pedestal that must remain untainted by any bad experiences, so he doesn't even try to Be With any. He doesn't know either

[wrenthetitmouse]

Not to make a long post even longer, but I really like a lot of the points people are making. Diagnosing people with ADHD or Autism in jest is another good point - I feel like as someone who is AuDHD I tend to project my experiences of the world and how my internal thought processes work onto other people and assume that they experience things the same way as I do, even when that couldn’t be further from accurate. I have to deliberately go ‘hang on, people’s brains work differently, I don’t know that this person is thinking about the situation at hand in the same way I would’.

I wonder if something similar is going on gender-wise? As a kid it took me a while to understand how being trans ‘worked’ because I didn’t get the whole concept of having an innate sense of gender - my approach was very much ‘well, if your assigned sex at birth doesn’t tell you what you are, then how do you know?’ Part of that was me being a child with very little life experience and minimal knowledge about trans and gender diverse people, being raised without a lot of pressure to conform to standard gender roles, and also being autistic and having a hard time relating to others. As I grew up and learned more about the queer community and also about intersex people and all sorts of other stuff, I started to ‘get it’ a bit more. I still don’t entirely understand many peoples’ approach to or explanation of their gender identity but it’s none of my business! I don’t have to understand to say ‘oh cool!’ and respect it.

Humans are hard-wired to want to have a solid explanation for things and to be able to sort people into categories or ‘boxes’, and I think sometimes people see someone being gender non-conforming and tend to sort them into the category of ‘non-conforming = trans’ as opposed to ‘conforming = cis’.

The trouble with that is, as @hollycantkeeptrackofthedaze says, that overly familiar assertion over the selfhood of a stranger, as well as a massive oversimplification of the concepts of gender identity and gender role conformity. There seems to be a somewhat pervasive notion that someone’s gender identity is something that can be seen and known based solely on external visual cues, which is just not accurate. Trying to sort someone into a box that describes their identity based on how they present or act is not gonna be super accurate, especially with people who don’t really conform to commonly existing boxes, because you’re missing some of the most important information there.

Then you get into the whole conversation about labels and how they help vs harm, which is a whole other interesting and deeply nuanced conversation, but basically from my understanding boils down to ‘can be helpful for someone to use to describe themselves, but not all that helpful when pushed on someone who doesn’t want it’.

I won’t go on with it because I’m just going to start repeating some of the excellent points that people have already made, but those are pretty much my (fairly unqualified) thoughts on the matter

Obligatory Not A Trans Woman so my opinion on the matter should be taken with a dinosaur-sized grain of salt, but I do think that the trend of telling dudes that behave in traditionally feminine ways or like 'girly' things that they are trans women who's eggs haven't cracked yet and then doubling down and insisting and acting like they don't know themselves when they say 'actually I'm just a dude who likes feminine things' is maybe not the enlightened take that I'm seeing it presented as

Like, trans women are amazing and wonderful and generally a light to the world and I am all for empowering women who haven't realized that they're women yet to come to that conclusion and be happier and more comfortable in themselves but there's a difference between 'hey friend i've noticed these patterns in the things that you say and do and that you've consistently expressed or apparently alluded to the desire to be a woman and I just want you to know that if that's how you feel, that's an option and it's okay and I support you' and a constant stream of 'lol you naive idiot, just wait until the egg cracks, I'll be waiting to say I told you so, it's so obvious' being publicly directed at someone

Absolutely open to correction and input from people more informed than me or who have personal experience but it's a pattern that I've noticed and I feel like it does more to enforce stereotypical gender roles and force gender nonconforming men into a box than it does to support trans women yknow

[thanatika]

people on that child support post are talking as if patho classic daniil is great with kids and it's pathologic 2 daniil that people are getting this negative idea of him from, which got me thinking...

daniil's main characterization of how he treats kids in patho 2 comes from artemy's POV of him, which is biased against daniil due to daniil making a really dickish first impression, and is also based off of unreliable narrator accounts:

first by some kids outside of rubin's house who lead artemy to believe that daniil refused to treat poisoned children when it was actually just dying dogs, which can be followed by artemy confronting daniil himself where he continues to misunderstand the situation and assumes daniil is calling children animals, until he finally visits the kids' warehouse and learns it was just the soul-and-a-halves' pets. which, obviously it would be a nice thing to save pets from dying, but he really ISN'T a veterinarian and there's a deadly plague starting. he's doing triage.

and then another early incident with the kid in the warehouse dying of sand pest, where notkin passes along a message telling artemy not to bother trying to save him that makes him sound very dismissive ("Don't waste your time on Patches, it's over for him"). reading between the lines though, it's pretty clear that he came to that conclusion not because he doesn't want to save people from the sand pest, but because this is a seemingly incurable disease with no medical cure, and at that point he probably hasn't had the chance to test the schmowders on himself so would have no reason to believe in their effectiveness, and assesses that loading patches up with drugs will just kill him. which, he's literally correct! whether you treat him with tinctures, pills, or a whole schmowder, patches dies that night. obviously trying to treat him or at least ease his suffering is a morally good dead, but you can also see the implied basis of daniil's actions, that every second is precious in the early stages of trying to prevent a widespread outbreak, so you shouldn't waste time on a patient who ultimately can't be saved. (which fits in really well not only with his arc in both games where he comes to the conclusion that the whole town is unsalvageable, but with the bigger emphasis on time management and manipulation that his remake has been described as having. hell, maybe from daniil's POV he knows for certain that patches will die due to whatever time manipulation that's going on with him, and that spending the time on that patient allows for a larger disaster to happen elsewhere). so, the situation is framed by notkin (understandably, because he's just a kid and that's his friend dying) and artemy (because he's honestly pretty petty about daniil) as just "the bachelor is an asshole and abandoned these kids" when it's more of a genuine ethical quandary.

he's also pretty rude and dismissive in how he talks about grace to artemy later on, but again, it's pretty clear that he's not just being a hater to a 15 year old for no reason, the point he's making is that she shouldn't be left in charge of a graveyard filled with potentially bio-hazardous corpses.

all that to say, the main canon info about how he treats children in patho 2 basically comes from the fact that a lot of kids end up disliking him, because he's extremely pragmatic to the point of being heartless, but still ultimately pretty understandable in what he's trying to do (stop a plague).

meanwhile when we do get to see his POV in the marble nest, i would say the way he treats children is pretty much consistent with how he talks to them in pathologic classic -- if anything, he's a bit nicer to them? he has some fed-up, yelling sort of dialogue options to the kids, but pretty much all of those are based on being upset that they're out breaking quarantine and putting themselves at risk of death. meanwhile other dialogue options make him come off very much willing to humor them and talk to them on their level. and when another adult is much harsher about the kids being irresponsible, he defends them, with no dialogue option to agree with corporal punishment:

meanwhile in pathologic classic, i do think that on the whole daniil is pretty nice to kids and willing to go out of his way to protect or help them (to the point of risking death, such as the late game sidequest where he can agree to go take on several soldiers to keep the father of two children from being wrongly executed). but he does also have some really unkind and spiteful dialogue options, like some of what he says to clara both in his own route and hers, and on the topic of corporal punishment...