#i just want to do what each character needs and is true for their character

[literaryvein-reblogs]

When your Characters Need to Stay in Love

To stay in love - means to maintain a romantic connection and relationship for a lifetime.

Whether or not you choose to solidify such a connection with your partner through marriage is up to both of you.

At the end of the day, putting in the effort to remain in love and avoid heartbreak has more to do with daily actions than a single wedding ceremony.

As long as you can continue to approach one another with an open heart, you have the chance to stay in love for a long time.

How to Stay in Love

There’s no one secret to what makes for a long-lasting relationship, but there are certain ideas you can put into practice to make it easier to stay in love. Keep these tips in mind as you spend each day reminding your partner how much you love them:

Communicate your needs. Every long-lasting partnership requires effective communication. Your partner won’t know what you need from them unless you tell them in the first place. If you notice your relationship trending toward a point of stasis, take a step back and ask yourself if you’ve told your partner everything that’s been on your mind. Make sure they know how you hope to receive love from them and ask how they would like to receive love from you, too.

Compromise on nonessentials. To have a healthy relationship, you and your partner will both need to decide what’s nonnegotiable and where there’s room for compromise. For instance, your partner can be honest that they can’t change something essential about themselves for you but also still be completely in love with you. Fortunately, when it comes to trivial matters, there’s likely to be plenty of room where both of you can meet each other in the middle.

Date each other long term. As you settle into a long-term and loving relationship, continue doing fun things together. Try to plan weekly date nights as well as occasionally longer romantic getaways from time to time. Go to places with sentimental value for both of you. Explore new areas you’ve both always wanted to see. Seek out concerts and other events you know will be positive memories for both of you.

Engage in productive conflict. Long-term relationships can sometimes flounder and hit significant speed bumps. For that matter, it’s common for even the happiest couples to experience at least some degree of conflict. In either case, relationships can sometimes feel like hard work. Circumstances like these require you to fight with each other fairly. Avoid defensiveness or cruelty, choosing to mutually listen and empathize with each other instead. Consider speaking with a marriage counselor if problems persist.

Express your love often. There are an endless amount of ways to say “I love you,” so do your best to zero in on the way your partner most palpably experiences love. For example, some people might want you to explicitly tell them you love them on a regular basis, while others might feel more love if you just do little things around the house for them. No matter what the case, do whatever will make your partner feel special and communicate what you hope they would do for you as well.

Maintain independence. A good relationship is a balance between individual independence and joint togetherness. Staying in love doesn’t mean being around each other all the time and putting your individual lives on hold. You should both still have time to see other loved ones, tend to your own mental health and physical wellness, perform meaningful work, and pursue enjoyable hobbies. When two fully formed individuals come together without any sense of codependence, they have a better chance of making their romantic love last.

Spice up your sex life. True love obviously goes quite a bit deeper than sexual attraction, but sex still remains a prominent aspect of staying in love. Sex can operate as a tangible experience in which you both can renew your sense of affection for each other. Try new things with each other in bed if you both are willing. Alternatively, there’s no problem with expressing your physical affection toward each other in more comfortable, routine ways, so long as you both remain satisfied.

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[blueskittlesart]

Can I have your directors insight on your Mipha comic? :0 I'd love to know why you chose certain imagery like the hand holding and head kisses and wounds.........I'm going insane over it 😭 🫶 Ive been a fan of your art for a while now and mipha's my favourite so Im so obsessed with this comic haha

YESSSS 😁 so as previously mentioned ive been attempting to write a mipha comic for a little over a year now, and most of the time what stopped me was the fact that there's SO MUCH about her that I found interesting and wanted to cover. the process for this comic was a little bit different than my usual one in that I actually started with the last few lines "i thought maybe if i loved hard enough, i could stop time / I could freeze you in place as i knew you once / the little boy whose skinned knees were so easy to heal / what a childish thought" and built the script out from there, which thankfully gave me a clear direction to focus on, i.e. wounds/healing and aging. the script also went through a few revisions (the first version was much more heavily based around the word 'pain' which eventually became 'wound' in almost every instance because I thought the imagery of a wound was easier to tie to the other concepts i was working with than a less concrete concept like pain.)

One of the major differences in structure between this comic and my sort of. standard i guess? is the aspect ratio--when i started drafting in my usual portrait orientation, I realized that a lot of the panel compositions and imagery I had in my head were very vertical, which meant I wasn't getting the level of gutter space I felt I needed for my text to have the right impact, which is why the final comic ended up in a landscape orientation! truthfully i'd also been getting kind of bored with my standard ratio--i'm doing a (VERY LONG) graphic novel in that same ratio for my senior thesis right now, and at a certain point the standard panel layouts that look good and flow well with a page shape like that kind of start to bore you. When I changed the orientation of the page all of a sudden everything clicked and the project started being exciting again!

As for the imagery itself, I usually have SOME idea of the imagery i want to use as i'm writing, and with this one the things I knew for certain had to be present were the use of red for both mipha's body and link's blood. you mentioned the wounds--honestly, the heavy focus on wounds and blood was in large part due to color. Mipha's character design happens to be this really striking red, and she also happens to be a character whose story deals very heavily with wounds and blood by virtue of being a healer, so the idea of using the same singular spot color for both her body and the wounds she was healing, inextricably tying up her presence in link's life with the presence of pain, was SUUUUPER compelling to me. (I do also just. really like drawing wounds. which sounds insane but it's true)

the hand-holding and head kisses truthfully weren't something I thought really hard about beyond like, something that was standard to me as a display of affection between children. One of the most important layers to link and mipha's relationship imo is their relative ages and the way in which that changes overtime. When they meet for the first time, they are both fairly young children. Their relationship at that point is what most childhood relationships are: uncomplicated. easy. they fit together without a second thought. Mipha is slightly older than him, but they're in similar enough phases of their lives that it doesn't really matter; they are able to relate to each other intrinsically in that way. I kind of thought about the gestures of affection common in children who are just starting to understand the concept of romantic attraction--hand-holding, maybe the occasional kiss on the hand or forehead, but never anything more intimate. That way, when they grow up, there's an extra layer of longing on top of it all. Now they're both older, but link has matured much more significantly than mipha in their time apart. Mipha still remembers him as the little boy she knew, and that's reflected in the way she treats him. She'll hold his hands and kiss his forehead, but she's completely unable to go any further. their relationship is so fundamentally juvenile that the only way she can picture his body, let alone touch him, is when it's a job for her to do, when there's a wound there that needs healing. She's younger than him, now, so young that her schoolgirl crush seems monumentally silly and immature in comparison to his adult problems, and the only time she ever comes anywhere close to adult intimacy with him is when there are striking, unavoidable reminders of the weight he has to carry literally carved into his body.

[hrrtshape]

hi ema! i came up with an idea for a method, and it plays off of your anti-method so ofc i had to share. i also have a bit of an odd request

this is an extension (?) of your method, and some slight (okay, more than slight, apologies in advance) ramblings. if you wanted to take full credit and use this for a post, you can have 100%. i might throw a lot out there, so apologies in advance

a little pre context- i have adhd and maladaptive daydream a lot. i decided to try and find a way to use that to my advantage, to the fullest extent (im stuck home alone for a week, just came back from one dr, dying of boredom (my husband is away, its a travesty) and am currently setting up the next, and literally have nothing better to do)

in my hogwarts university vampire dr (if you want to hear more im dying to talk about it), adhd is a superpower. not literally, but, one of the things i altered about my dr is that the power to create spells and charms is manifestation based, no books needed. hogwarts is less hogwarts and more of a place that people who live forever or at least for a really long time can go to be updated on the updated knowledge of intertwining magic into society through art and music and architecture and astronomy and potions etc etc

sorry that was a total tangent- anyways, adhd is a superpower because it gives you the ability to focus on multiple things at once- in fact, sometimes its even extremely beneficial to have multiple stimuli- so this works in tandem with that, rather than fighting against it

in this reality, maladaptive daydreaming and adhd can be bestfriends, and that can also be so so beneficial when used with intention and present-minded focus. you can quite literally hold multiple existing realities in your head simultaneously while also going about your day to day life? like, thats bonkers, absolutely nutso

with that: you gave us the anti-method, and now i give you, the castle method

what is it? the castle method draws inspiration from the main character from the tv show, convientiently also named castle. okay so check it out, castle writes crime novels based (a near 1:1 ratio, like same circumstances different font) off of true stories from his life as a police-consultant who works with a detective

the castle method is essentially doing the same thing. the same way an author or any writer would do, you spend time interacting with your "creation" (creation in parenthesis since creation is technically finished and anything you can imagine already exists etc. etc.) while going about your day to day life. this would just be doing it with the intention of strengthening the feelable (through feelings, emotions, states) connection to ones dr self

i.e. use your 3d to aid in your creation, rather than writing it off

I also like to imagine inception vibes, where one reality is simply coexisting right on top of another one while doing this. its not about making one reality stronger than another, its about entertaining both simultaneously.

the part where it ties into your anti-method, is that while imagining these things throughout the day, you treat them as memories, because they are- that "scene" already exists as a memory, point blank period.

because law of assumption is all about assuming that the desire has been fulfilled, this is also good for people who feel the need to check the 3d. by connecting to the dr memories through the connected feeling or emotion or state, its just taking advantage of a natural bridge between realities that one can simply walk back and forth from

if you ever played jump the creek as a kid, its kind of like that. its a game where two jump ropes are layed parallel to each other. kids take turns jumping the gap, and once every person has gone, the gap widens

this method is like that- getting practice holding both realities simultaneously, in small and increasing increments, the same way shifters who've already shifted have and do when they come back from a dr- meaning it should also help shifters who haven't shifted with the "act as if" aspect, not only in regards to their dr, but their identity as a sucessful shifter as well

i hope this finds you well!

this is literally genius, oh my god. you’re taking what the brain already does.....compartmentalising, storytelling, daydreaming, and making it work for you instead of against you. love how it builds off the anti-method too, treating dr memories as memories instead of something far away. also, the jump the creek analogy??? MHM. stunning. shifting isn’t about brute force; it’s just stretching that bridge a little wider each time.

tl;dr for people who want to use it:

the castle method is about treating your dr like an author would treat their story. interacting with it through your 3d, instead of separating the two. think of your dr like a memory that already exists and let it coexist with your daily life, kind of like running two realities at once (inception vibes). the more you do this, the easier it becomes to ‘jump the creek’ and shift naturally.

[markantonys]

3x01 cold open!!!!! between rafe and everyone hyping up this scene for a long time now and people from the brazil con reporting descriptions of it, we knew how it was going to go down, so no huge surprises for me, but so exciting to watch it for myself! it definitely lives up to the hype!

a few quick thoughts

what do liandrin, sharon gilham, lorne balfe, and the vfx team have in common? they're all slaying in this opening sequence! i'm not someone who's at all knowledgeable about or sensitive to production value, but even i can tell they've stepped it up yet another notch this season. it looks decadent! epic! i can see why everyone involved has been boasting about this sequence so much! what a way to start the season.

it's also fantastic setup for all the tensions and weak points within the tower, because we see our inter-ajah mistrust, we see doubt in siuan's leadership, and of course we see the black ajah. that faceoff outside the hall between red sisters and others was really great - it shows that not all reds are like liandrin and some of them are light-serving, that non-reds can be black ajah, and that light-serving enemy ajahs will have to figure out how to trust each other and work together if they want to be strong enough to fight the shadow. this sequence does a good job establishing that the tower isn't split into just good guys vs. darkfriends, but that the good guys themselves are fractured and opposing each other.

i'd thrown out a wild speculation of diem camille as a surprise tuon since nothing was known about what character she might be playing, but we see her here as a light-serving red sister! i was wishing for the x-ray feature of the normal episodes here to see if any of the new aes sedai have names we might recognize, or if they're just randoms.

i'd have to rewatch closely to take a tally, but we seem to have representation from just about every ajah in liandrin's group: liandrin for red, nyomi for brown (sob!), joiya for gray, the green sister who was glad her warders died, the yellow sister who healed liandrin, and i think i saw a blue sister as well. there might have been a couple others besides these ones too!

in s2 we had a few scraps between channelers, but i think this is the first extended multi-person channeling battle we've seen. it's so exciting!! and awesome to see the gloves come off for our usually-composed and regal siuan, and see what she's capable of. we also see her doing a tricksy evasion of liandrin's accusations about what happened in cairhien, since everything liandrin said is true and siuan can't deny it, so siuan is definitely set up to be in some hot water.

leane also killed it! loved that moment of her beating someone up with her staff - a good visual demonstration of the oaths placing no restriction on non-channeling violence (though i'm sure this would've counted as "the last defense of her life/the life of another sister" anyway). wild theory i'm by no means subscribing to without rewatching to check for it, but just throwing it out there: could leane have been stilled during the battle and that's why she's doing physical fighting here? just thinking about the CV leak that named lelaine as the keeper of the chronicles; that could make sense if leane was stilled here and needs to be replaced. but it's also entirely possible that CV leak was inaccurate or that lelaine is slated to become future keeper in salidar but not yet in s3, and there wasn't any moment calling attention to leane being stilled or anything like that, so probably not.

we got a time-check as well: it's been 1 month since the cairhien events of 2x07, and therefore since falme too since i think that battle takes place basically the next day. that feels like a reasonable timeskip to me. enough time for the gang to gather their wits and come up with the best way to handle the truth bomb of liandrin being a darkfriend (and for rand to grow out his hair a little haha) but not so long that it feels like they've been sitting on their asses when there's stuff to get done.

correct me if i missed her, but i don't think we saw ryma in this sequence, but she is reported to be in s3. so, either we'll see her in the tower later on, or she's still with the seanchan and maybe we'll see her in tanchico (at which time hopefully our gang will free her!). i would most expect her to be relevant to the story via nynaeve again this season, whether that be a tanchico encounter where nynaeve frees her or early-season lessons in the tower if she's already free (we see a reminder of nynaeve's block during the battle, with our poor girl once again failing to channel when she really needs to).

people have pointed out that that shot of joiya sitting on the floor in the trailer looks like it might be the angreal storeroom, so the theory is that she gets captured and taken prisoner in this battle. that would track with the books, where the wondergirls take her prisoner and eventually get out of her that tanchico is the place to go for their hunt.

speaking of the storeroom, people have spotted what looks like a redstone doorway in it!! i've brightened it up to see better:

this is VERY intriguing, as my current theory had been that mat would find it in tanchico towards the end of the season. but i do stand by that his neck doesn't look injured in the tanchico still from ep6, nor is he wearing a medallion (which we can feel pretty confident is coming this season since he has it on the poster), so it could be that this white tower doorway is only an easter egg and the ones that people actually go through are located elsewhere, or it could be that mat does take two trips after all and he gets his answers in the white tower doorway in the early season (perhaps his motivation for going to tanchico instead of joining rand or perrin?) and his items & hanging in a tanchico doorway at the end of the season. but there would also have to be one in rhuidean for moiraine and lanfear to go through, right? so could there be 3 doorways in showverse? tar valon, tanchico, and rhuidean? i don't think there would be any problem with that.

okay, i think that's all the thoughts i had off the top of my head! this is a sequence that happens offscreen in the books, and bringing it onscreen was such a smart choice. it makes great use of our established aes sedai players, sets up the huge tensions brewing in the tower just in time for elaida coming on the scene, and really drives home for the audience that ANYONE can be black ajah/a darkfriend, so we'll be feeling that paranoia and mistrust right alongside the aes sedai.

and this is only the first scene of the season! i can't wait to see everything else that's to come!!

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Hi. Question, what is Gabriel's fashion style? In the show he's apparently the king of fashion but some of his designs suck tbh...

I'm not going to pretend that I understand high fashion enough to label Gabriel's style. I'm also not sure if the animators understand high fashion enough to label his style. Nothing about the show actually screams "fashion" to the point where I can't tell if the akumas are bad on purpose or not.

While you can connect certain akumas to specific high fashion looks such as loosely linking The Bubbler to Vivian Westwood's 1989 Harlequin suit (see below images), I don't think that's what the animators were actually doing. Any high-fashion similarities are probably an accident, especially since the word of god is that akumas choose their own appearances. Gabriel officially had nothing to do with the designs. Given all of that, it's far more likely that the various designs come from the animators trying to keep things interesting while working within the confines of animation.

3D animation greatly limits what looks you can do. It's incredibly costly to animate a new character or even just a new outfit. That's why the characters generally only have one look and why most of Marinette's designs are things like accessories and posters. Those are way easier to animate!

Outfits and character designs also have to greatly limit their moving parts as each uniquely moving element vastly increases the cost. It's why all of the characters with long hair transform into heroes with pigtails or pony tales. Animating those is way easier than free flowing hair because you can treat those as one unit without it looking too bad, but free-flowing hair just looks silly as you can see when Marinette is riding her scooter:

I don't think any of this excuses the show's bad fashion sense, though. They chose to make the lead and the villain fashion designers. That's a choice with obvious repercussions for the way people will view the show and yet the show's fashion elements feel as slapdash as the Chinese elements, showing a clear lack of care for the world they're trying to create. It feels like fashion was only included because girls like fashion and not a choice made because the show wanted to root itself in the setting (Paris is the fashion capital of the world). While it's fun to joke about how terrible Gabriel and others look, when I get serious, I'm way more judgmental of the creators than the characters.

Knowing how to design a character isn't the same as understanding fashion. It is a specialty unto itself. A true field of expertise that people spend their lives learning. It's also a field that gets a lot of flack for being "girly" with women often being judged for caring too much about fashion. Those are two things you need to keep in mind if you're going to make fashion a big focus of your show for girls. And if you're going to have episodes focused on environmentalism? Maybe talk about fast fashion and not non-issues like trash being blasted into space?

What I'm saying is that, if you want to have a show or story focus on the fashion industry, then you do need to do some actual research and, ideally, hire someone to help guide those elements. A thing the writers absolutely could have done since they have the money for that! I don't think that's the route they took, though. I've never heard anyone mention it. Fashion doesn't even feel like a major part of Marinette's character! She rarely talks about it.

All of which is a very long winded way to say that I fully agree that a lot of the show's designs suck, but I think that fact is just one of the many little ways you can see how little care was put into the baseline world building. If Gabriel was a movie director instead and Marinette wanted to be a director too, then the bad fashion would still be commented on, but it wouldn't feel like a mark against the characters. Alternatively, the show could have used the bad fashion as a running gag in the show about Gabriel being bad at his job. Instead, we get people claiming that Gabriel is a great designer and I'm just sitting here going, "you couldn't even get this minor element right? Really?"

[altraviolet]

Just reread the echo garden again and I must say that Soundwave’s character development throughout the story has been both beautiful and extraordinary! (Even I was proud of him)

There is something that I’ve been curious about tho. What if Soundwave somehow got the chance to reunite with his universes Megatron at some point after the events of TEG? What might a reunion between them look like?

Thanks for the reread! =D

This is a popular question! I've been asked several times: it's something people are definitely curious about.

I never had an answer because I always knew we wouldn't be going back to SW's dimension in the fic. And even if we did, his Megatron would be dead or altered beyond recognition, due to the internal logic of the universe. I never needed an answer. And it felt like it would be very complicated and Too Much Work to figure out.

Unsatisfying but true, lol.

But, okay, let's do a little mind experiment. Off the cuff. No prior planning. Let's say that, somehow, SW's Megatron is preserved and in a recognizable state, and that the last we saw of him in TFP is also true in universe. And for some reason, SW wants to go back. And for some reason, they've run into each other.

The last we saw of Megatron in TFP, iirc, he'd just been freed from subjugation under Galvatron, and he stated that he never wanted to feel like that again, and he would not do it to anyone else ever again.

So disregarding RiD2015 as any possible source of further characterization...

...I feel like this Megatron would avoid Soundwave and the other Decepticons for a long time. He really sounded like he wanted a Very Long Time Out. His character change was stark, in those last few on screen moments, and there isn't much to go off of, regarding what New Directions he would head down.

He had a very calm air about him when he said it... but he's not an innately calm character. He's been driven by anger for a long time. He had expectations of being fully obeyed for a long time. He has just been handed the reveal of his life: that everything he did was extremely awful and he's only learned that because it happened to him.

So we have a character in an unknown state. How much growth will there actually be? Or will there be a backlash, a backslide into something similar to what he was before? There are no real answers (as far as I know of, in canon), so this becomes the domain of the fic writer.

And that's what I mean when I say this sounds like Too Much Work xD How do I proceed with an arc that feels Megatron-y, doesn't copy any other arcs we've seen, feels authentic to the character and world... what happens when you push a character to the destruction of their core values? How do they build themselves up again?

I don't know :D I'd have to rewatch TFP and then sit and think about it for a long time, and I'm not interested in doing that. I see several courses his arc could take, but I'm not sure which one is the most 'authentic.'

But, okay, people keep asking me.

Let's say TFP Megatron has been scrounging around, somewhat pathetically, on Cybertron (I honestly don't remember what state Cybertron was left in, at the end of TFP, but we're far into the future so uhhhhhh idk it's rebuilding), and our main characters meet because SW has returned to his home dimension for supplies. I assume SW would be accompanied by a few friends, probably including Rodimus.

There'd be some kind of first contact scene, but the thing the readers most want to see is SW and Megatron alone, so we'd have to plot for Rodimus & friends to go somewhere else (be amenable to giving them alone time, or get distracted by something, etc). So now we have SW and Megatron. And they're staring at each other.

SW is looking at the mech who destroyed him, rebuilt him, and then used him for millions of years.

Megatron is looking at the ultimate example of his tyrannic rule: a mech he shaped into a perfect servant.

SW sees Megatron as a pitiful thing, obviously living off scraps [since in this character arc branch we won't let him backslide into dark energon use or his tyrannical tendencies], obviously alone and doing terribly.

Megatron sees SW as a faded and scratched up, but obviously healthy mech, who initially arrived with allies. Allies who wear the Autobrand.

What next?

Well... I don't know. I'm going to give you some possible reactions Megatron has to this:

-immediately starts calculating how he can use Soundwave to his advantage. this Megatron IS clever enough, in my opinion, to possibly recognize that SW's associates are not Of This Universe. perhaps, he thinks, he can appeal to SW's loyal nature

-truly feels sorry for what he did to SW: either does or does not know how to apologize for it

-"Even you, Soundwave?" though Megatron has sworn off his old ways, he's still disappointed that his most loyal soldier has switched sides. it's a reminder of his own weakness and failure. he couldn't even keep Soundwave loyal

Some possible reactions SW has to seeing Megatron:

-!!!

-correctly recognizing him as the pitiful figure he is, and perhaps even going so far as to identify with the long process Megatron has ahead of him for healing, should Megatron even be able to find people to help him through it

-anger. despite the pitiful appearance, Megatron still did bad things, and unlike 0001 Megatron, never apologized or made any amends

-perhaps the most biting response: SW could look at Megatron for a moment and then just walk away. maybe Megatron calls out to him, but he keeps going. he lets Megatron see that he's healthy and thriving, and that he doesn't need Megatron, and that he doesn't care about him. he doesn't even need or want an apology, or any kind of response. he assesses and moves on, like Megatron is just another piece of scrap

or, of course

-some kind of hilariously inappropriate troll response, lol.

so yeah. as you can see, anon, there are quite a few ways things could go. there's an infinite number of ways things could go!

the way you choose which thing to do would depend on what you want the story to say. is there some kind of message about forgiveness? or is the message that there are some things you just can't forgive, and so you must move on for your own sense of self and preservation? cut ties, and so forth

and so that's the answer: there are too many answers and I'm not particularly interested, at this time, in figuring out which one is the best. I always say, hey, you never know: if I ever do feel like writing out this scene, I will

hope you enjoyed ✨

[maespri]

no hate to you op, and i'm not trying to rain on anybody's parade! but this really interested me and i wanted to talk about my own thoughts on it.

i feel like this sort of take on evamon and dieva respectively is obscuring your perception of both pairings a little bit. what makes eva an intriguing character is that we don't know whether or not anything she said was the truth, or a lie. as in... did she really trust damon, or did she just want to use him? did she just view him as a pawn to be tossed around? somebody to throw under the bus at the first signs of turmoil in the trial? framing him down to the very last second because, as eva herself says, 'everybody' was out to get her, and damon was no exception to that.

in eva's head, she was never going to be seen as the person she truly was, nor was she ever going to be appreciated for everything she could do. she became a classic example of learned helplessness. damon made attempts at tearing her walls down, which is especially clear in her FTE's, but you can never really see every facet of a person, especially not a person who has been lying to protect herself the entire time you've known her. additionally, damon only knew eva for a few days. that isn't to say that's not enough time to befriend someone, because, especially in a traumatizing situation like the killing game, it's more than enough time to place your trust in somebody else-- but not really enough to make a true, deep, connection with another person.

and after playing the first trial, i really do think it's safe to say that eva didn't view her alliance with damon the same way he did at all. the whiplash damon himself gets in the latter half of the trial, completely baffled as to why eva is suddenly going at him, is also a pretty strong indicator that the relationship the two had wasn't nearly as positive as it's initially made out to be, because eva, put quite simply, didn't trust damon as much as she claimed to. they were the underdogs, yes-- but eva viewed herself as inferior to even damon. eva believed she was completely alone. and that is exactly what led to her downfall.

the tragedy there lies not in the fact that they only had each other, nor in that they only trusted one another-- it lies in the fact that if eva had actually trusted damon, maybe she wouldn't have taken that traitor perk, and nobody would have needed to get hurt. the game juxtaposes the ways damon and eva handle their shared situation of being the targets of everyone's disdain-- damon with anger, but ultimately understanding and begrudging acceptance, and eva with deer-in-headlights fear and extreme paranoia-- to further drive home the point that eva is such a distrusting, manipulative-at-the-first-signs-of-trouble, person.

and on the topic of dieva, i want to say that statements like 'they hardly talked' and 'eva hated her' and 'wanted to punish diana' are not only rather harsh and surface-level, but also just... assumptions.

diana and eva shared a bedroom for days. it's fair to assume they interacted quite a bit whilst together. diana was the only person to stick up for eva and damon and cement herself as one of the people who supported them. diana expresses concern for eva to damon multiple times as well throughout daily life. additionally, eva didn't necessarily target diana simply because she "hated her" and "wanted to punish her"; put quite simply, diana was a really easy target. she's meek, wide-eyed and altruistic. in that regard, she's also a little too unquestioning and trusting of others, wanting to see the completely unfiltered good in them. it would be almost impossible for diana to defend herself under the right circumstances. and eva knew all of that and took advantage of it.

the things she says in the trial-- "it meant nothing," and "you deserved it," are difficult to interpret. eva seems completely defeated as she says it. she knows diana needs a reason, needs closure, and "you were an easy target" just doesn't come out with the same vitriol that eva had expressed toward everybody up to that point. maybe part of her meant it; maybe all of her meant it. i'd be a hypocrite to say that eva's lying there, because as i've expressed before, there are so many situations where it's impossible to know what was and wasn't a lie by eva. but i don't think it's out of left field to say that those statements could also be eva's weak defense in her own mind; she's asking herself why she did that to diana, and a baseless 'you deserved it' is just the easiest way to avoid a cognitive dissonance.

eva traumatized everybody by killing wolfgang. diana was arguably the most impacted, but damon is no exception to what happened. i'll be surprised if the betrayal eva did to him doesn't completely fracture what little amount of trust damon had left in the others.

if you're going to paint eva's actions toward diana in a light of hatred simply for the things she did and said, then you cannot also paint eva's actions toward damon as completely true and unfiltered. as i said before, eva is a liar. to what extent-- we don't know. but she lied to and manipulated both of them.

anyway, what i'm trying to say here is that i think both evamon and dieva are really beautiful relationships, platonic or not, because of the amount of nuance and mystery that they hold. what was and wasn't true? we don't know. eva is a complex character! and i love her for it.

i hope this doesn't come off as too defensive or mean, because like i said at the start, i'm really not trying to start anything! i just wanted to share my perspective on things. thank you for giving me a space to do so :3

🚨 Project: Eden’s Garden Spoilers!!! 🚨

I hope this doesn’t make anyone mad, but I don’t get why Kaimon and Dianeva are more popular than Evamon. I can’t understand how anyone could’ve played Chapter 1 and not seen the chemistry between Eva and Damon. They were the underdogs. They were the only ones each other trusted! They had SO much screen time. They were sooo silly and cute together, and Damon being like “a smile looks good on her”, like cmon bro pack it up, we all know you like her.

Now, with Kaimon I get why it’s popular. They also had screen time and suspicious/ funny scenes together. I don’t know if I’d say they’re in love, but I can see why people ship them.

It’s Dianeva that makes no sense to me. It just feels…forced. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good ‘enemies to lovers’ trope but I don’t think this is that. Eva and Diana hardly talked, and Eva HATED her. She literally traumatized her and tried to frame her for murder. As a punishment. Because she hated her so much. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that she hated everyone but Damon. I don’t see why everyone ships her and Diana, it just feels like the fandom wants to be able to ship two girls together, which is FINE, this is not coming from a place of homophobia as I, myself, am queer, but it just feels like such a odd pairing to me.

Anyways, I am in the trenches with Evamon on the daily. I love them SO fucking much. and it’s mildly upsetting that everything I see is Kaimon, and I just know it in my bones that there’s gonna be more Kaimon scenes in chapter 2 😭 I just hope they don’t entirely forget about Eva and Damon.

Damon BETTER have that damn feather.

🐦‍⬛❤️🐍

[lgbtlunaverse]

So I've said multipe times now (here and here) that thinking nmj is just so blinded by privilege he doesn't undertand that acting out of line gets people killed is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of his character that ignores the part where he's, you know, actively dying the whole time and thinks that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean I don't think privilege plays no role at all in how he views the world.

Specifically, his view that death (at least premature or violent death) means something.

Death isn't always a tragedy to NMJ, but it is always meaningful. If you kill an evil dangerous person for your righteous cause, that death had meaning. There was evil in the world and now there is less of it. Similarly, if you die in the pursuit of your righteous cause, that death has meaning, because the sheer dedication you gave to it that you were willing to die for it will further that cause, and your bretheren will be invigorated by your sacrifice to fight even harder.

If a death isn't meaningful, that's an injustice and it is up to the living to give it meaning. That's what cuts so deep about his father's murder. There were no consequences, no changes, no meaning. Wen Ruohan was just going to get away with it! He fights and wins an entire war to make it mean something, to make it so that the unjust murder of Nie Mingjue's father is part of Wen Ruohan's downfall.

But this is a view he can only hold because he's the kind of person who's death will be meaningful. Most ordinary people's deaths are meaningless. Not ontologically, not inherently, but they are made meaningless because no one cares. For death to be meaningful you either have to be so powerful that anything you risk your life for will be impacted in some way. (Like, say, if you sacrifice a long life for immense martial power in a faustian bargain with a blade) Or if people with that kind of power care enough about you to do so for you. For most people, this isn't true. A starving street kid has no power to change the unfair world that put them there, even if they risk their life trying, and no one will do it for them once they die.

Nie Mingjue knows this in abstract, and of course rightfully believes it's wrong. But all that does is make it yet another righteous cause people should be willing to die for. Everyone's deaths should mean something, we'll make it so or die trying!

This is what the conflict between nieyao is about at its core. Because Jin Guangyao, fundamentally, cannot conceive of his own death as meaningful. Nie Mingjue grew up around powerful men who could change the world but refuse to do so because god forbid they risk a single hair on their perfect heads. Meng Yao, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where no one of importance would blink twice if you died. He was surrounded by meaningless death. Indeed his entire early life is defined by that lack of care.

Meng Shi dies and no one cares. Meng Yao gets thrown off a flight off stairs and no one cares. He has to be the one to do the caring, and once he's gone no one else will do it for him.

So he has to live.

Jin Guangyao eventually gets far enough that he actually does aquire the power to change some things... as long as he's alive. If he changes too much, holds on too tightly to his ideals, he'll die and it'll all be for nothing. He can't sacrifice himself for his goals because doing so would immediately render those goals unobtainable. No one will care about what he tried to do. He won't be a heroic sacrifice, he'll just be trash that finally cleaned itself up.

And well... Nie Mingjue dies, and someone makes it mean something. Makes it mean so much that the entire story of mdzs would not exist without it. Jin Guangyao dies and it doesn't mean anything. Most people are glad to be rid of him, and the few that are not don't do anything to change that.

[citrusai]

taash said "they were doing it" and people ran with the interpretation of an npc that doesn't know solas or the history of the elvhenan even when bellara interjected and said, no, that's not right. that's not how it was for the elvhenan. they formed bonds before they had physical bodies. and people ran to doompost or create weird anti-solavellan shit even though mythal & solas refer to each other as old friends and when she releases him there is no tenderness or love in it. it is the act of unchaining a dog from his post, the stepping down of a general. but to each their own ig.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Every time I watch the cold open of Memorial and B'Elanna tells Tom about how she ASSEMBLED a 50's television set from SCRATCH just to surprise him (there's no reason beyond that - just an incredibly sweet and thoughtful gesture) and replicated popcorn for him to eat while he watches and Tom says "They didn't have remote controls in the 50's ♥ Also where's my beer?" I contemplate murder ESPECIALLY because B'Elanna responds cheerfully to it - GIRL!!! LEAVE HIM!!!!!! IS HE SUPPOSED TO BE CHARMING IN THIS SCENE????

[gigifujijifu]

Ok so I first wrote a mess in the tags but by the end of it I realized the actual answer, for me, is not just following impulses for who I want to play but also: spreadsheets.

My boyfriend and I make spreadsheets almost as a hobby. We have... a lot of alts, so to make it easier we have spreadsheets for things like which alts we've done holiday events on, and which trade-able cosmetics we've unlocked on who so we can pass extras around without having to log into everyone to check (not that I collect anything in a completionist sense with so many alts).

I also made a spreadsheet that lets us mark which WT stickers we need that week and it will flag which ones we have in common with each others alts so we can pair them off to do them more efficiently if we want.

I realize it's excessive but it's a kind of fun project and I love all of my characters and my bf dearly so playing with them no matter who I'm on or with is fun and there's always something to do.

people who have alts on ffxiv

how do you do it /g

[omarfor-orchestra]

.

[quietwingsinthesky]

Uhhh ship bingo: whatever assassins creed ship is in ur brain rn

alsdkjsakjd your support of my stint of madness is much appreciated, my friend. anyway twincest time.

every time i play syndicate im like OKAY. im gonna be normal about it this time. and then five seconds after loading the game up, im on the train and (jacob voice) OH EVIE HAVE I MENTIONED HOW PRETTY YOU LOOK IN YOUR OUTFIT. IM YOUR BROTHER BTW AND IM JEALOUS OF YOUR BOYFRIEND FOR GETTING ALL OF YOUR ATTENTION.

this is not my fault. i mean it's never my fault but it's even less my fault than it has been other times. im not the one who wrote that dialogue into the game. and besides :3 they're fun. they're stupid competitive. they're always bickering. they're annoying to each other, i love that they're annoying all the time, i love that you get shit like jacob putting his boots up on evie's desk for No Reason while she's working and evie making fun of him for blowing up a train because he was in the middle of making fun of her for. well. also blowing something up during her assassination mission. they explode things a lot. it's fun. i think they should kiss about it, too. what's a little incest between assassins.

[sysig]

Pivotal bright spot (Patreon)

[ladysophiebeckett]

marcela does a lot of cruel things throughout the series but i think her true moment of traditional telenovela villainy is that dinner she has with margarita and patricia, (the day betty gets made president) where she basically states 'yeah i know armando is still in love with her and i know beatriz is still in love with him but she believes everything in the letter and she has no way to disprove it. and armando has no witnesses to speak on his favor.'

and she's very smug about it:

in marcela's head she believes the only one she's really hurting by withholding this information is beatriz, how armando feels is not even much of an afterthought. marcela puts herself and her needs first. which is understandable. she has no incentive to help beatriz and why would she? she sees beatriz as the reason why her relationship with armando deteriorated even tho it's actually more complicated than that.

of course armando knows he doesn't have witnesses or anything to prove that in middle of everything he did truly fall in love with her and he's not going to ask anyone for help. mario offers to talk to her (tho not seriously) and even patricia says mario could tell betty the truth but marcela knows betty would never believe the author of the letter.

her only goal is to keep armando by her side. i dont know if she knows that she's hurting him or if she justifies her own actions as a consequence of his past actions towards her. or maybe its something she knows she's doing but doesn't care. (im gonna let the audience decide that bc im not even sure how i feel about that).

we see armando go through hell after betty disappears but when she returns he never once thinks to tell her about what exactly happened after she went away. he only says 'all the damage i did to myself' but never elaborates and betty never asks. it's deliberate that armando never tells her about his state of mind during that period of time bc he knows that to do so would be seen as a form of manipulation. that's not how you prove to someone that you've changed. and that's aside from him knowing that she would never believe him. (bc we know she wouldn't). he loves betty and although he's not yet at the point of truly understanding just how much pain and damage he's caused her, he would never want her to take him back bc she feels sorry for him.

meanwhile, way before the truth of the embargo happens, marcela tells him she would never survive him ending their engagement. that it would just as bad as when her parents died.

his face is immediately affected and she knows. she knows that the only way to keep him is through manipulation. and later on, participating in the act of withholding information that could help him, but again she doesn't see it as helping him. and never actually does. when she gives beatriz this information, it's actually in her attempt to save the company her father co founded. bc up until the last minute she was still holding out hope that betty's indifference to armando would push him back to her. not understanding that armando's changed indefinitely. he's not going to be manipulated by her again and he's not going to stoop to his past behaviors bc it never did him or anyone any good to begin with.

[leori-the-unlearned]

the way digimon does conflict/drama between two characters who should be or are close: chef’s kiss <3

the way sonic idw handles creating conflict/drama between two characters who should be or are close: *wilting flower*