#i think “i could never fucking do that

[blackrosecapri]

Nicholas The Punisher.

associated so closely with the weapon he uses that him and its names are practically the same. given to him by a false god and a shitty doctor when he didnt fucking want it. youd think he wouldnt keep it around. youd think the second he gets hed trash it and start again, i mean, he knows how to use other guns, so why keep it around?

you Have to assume its bc he humanized it, to some extent. he didn't have any humanity. at least that's what hes told, what he believes, and he wasnt allowed a sense of identity outside of it. outside of or away from "the punisher," so he Had to make it what made him a person. he HAD to embody it, he wasnt given any choice, really. he only chose to embrace it.

he hated everything else around him. of Fucking course he did, but he couldn't afford to hate the punisher. that's All He Was. if he hated the punisher, he hated himself, and he'd Never get out. never fully. so the punisher had to become something he enjoyed, and looked forward to, and valued. that's why i think he keeps it. he had to learn to love it so any semblance of identity or joy.

in order to make it through the eom he Had to learn to love it, even if he didn't want it, it was him now. weather he liked it or not, hed never escape it. but now? now he Genuinely dose. he doesn't like how it's from the eom, he doesnt like how it was forced upon him, But. he does like it. hes bonded with it, basically. if he can vaule his weapon then he can vaule himself. if he takes care of the punisher, to Love the punisher, it's catharsis. because That is Him.

and now he goes everywhere with it. is he still Nicholas The Punisher? maybe. ans maybe he hates that. but at least he can love the punisher itself. who that is isnt clear to him, not anymore, but it got him here. it got him out. it let him be happy. if he cant pity, or love, or process it all himself, he Can pity, ans love, and empathize with the punisher. whether he knows it or not, thats him.

and he can love at least that. even if he plays it off as a bit

(yes he calls it his baby girl, its funny, alright?)

[brainrotcharacters]

the easy grip on the knife. the leg over the seat. the hand over the other seat. the sassy "come get it" move. you know the bitch is smiling behind that mask even as he said the line.

[thatonedudeinthecorner]

Obsessed with the fact that the spideypool dynamic can be watered down to “miss you pookie bear” “oh lord” mindset

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[lotus-pear]

i love you royal trio (minus akechi)

[starry-bi-sky]

on a completely separate note; shizun luo binghe with a disciple shen yuan who fell into the abyss??? *thinks about LBH canonically stealing SQQ's corpse for 5 years* he'd hallucinate i think. like, like visual and audial hallucinations.

Keeps thinking he's seeing SQQ in the corner of his eyes, or wandering between the trees, amongst a group of disciples. Thinks he hears him calling for him, but its just the wind or another disciple.

Gets Xiu Ya reforged but patently fucking refuses to make a sword mound. Because his disciple Is Not Dead :))) There was No Body. He's Not Dead. And If You keep Insisting That He Is, He's Gonna Skewer You :). He's holding onto Xiu Ya so he can return his most favored disciple's sword when he returns. It's on his hip right next to Zheng Yang where it's supposed to be.

Also this motherfucker?? does not sleep btw. He has the image of SQQ, wide eyed and hysterical and standing at the mouth of the abyss burned into his fucking eyelids. Can't use the dreamscape to escape it either because he keeps trying to save him and either he does and it's an incredibly cruel trick to wake up to, or he doesn't and he gets his heart broken in several different pieces again.

There is no convincing this man that Shen Qingqiu is dead. Absolutely nothing at all. He is buried so deep in denial that moles would be jealous of how deep he is. He keeps making tea for two in the bamboo house only to remember that it's just him. SQQ's fans are hiding everywhere, little reminders of his presence. He goes to wake up SQQ on the mornings he sleeps in-- only to find the room empty.

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about not only the specific people lucanis pulls in to represent the 'locks' in his psyche, but the storytelling that happens in the structure/order of them. the underlying ideas are presented something like:

the lucanis who went into the ossuary never came back out again; he died down there (the boy caterina raised is gone forever) -> you're putting yourself in danger doing this (by being close to me), you should leave because I can't bear it if you get hurt because of me -> it doesn't matter even if we do try this, it won't work anyway (again because of me) ('you know what he's like, you can open the door but he won't walk through it' :'( oofie doofie) -> what if the real secret is that there was never anything but the monster in here from the beginning. you should leave, there was never anything here worth saving in the first place. (implicitly: what if I deserved what happened, all along.)

it runs pretty cleanly from outward-oriented attachment anxiety ('caterina won't even want me back like this, she won't recognize me (the same way I no longer recognize myself)) and gradually deeper inwards until we reach self-image and self worth. or you know, the harrowing basic lack of it lol.

"careful -- they'll know we're not right," spite says in one of their first scenes... but clearly, some very deep part of lucanis has feared or suspected for much longer than that that there's something inherently not right at the core of him, way before any demon entered the picture. and the voice he gives those lines to is the person who should know him better than anyone in the world, who he has loved more than anyone in the world -- and who deliberately chose to hurt him so horrifically anyway. 'It's better if I'm just a monster and deserved what happened than it is to allow for the idea that the brother I love doesn't really exist and maybe never did'. it's better if he's fundamentally flawed in some way that needed fixing to help him survive, and that's why caterina chose to hurt him again and again -- out of love. (this one I think he might have a very sad wakeup call on one day if he ever ends up with the responsibility and care of a child of his own in some way and realizes just how alien the idea of ever intentionally hurting them for any reason is to him. oh buddy. also interesting that he keeps caterina as the outermost lock -- there IS a distance he keeps there that he hasn't with illario. he doesn't resent her 'anymore' he says, but he also keeps her carefully further away from his deepest self.)

as far as I could tell the only note in the mind prison that's fully hidden and needs to be uncovered is the sad painful helpless stupid little truth that even after all this, even knowing what happened... he still loves his brother. is there anything illario could ever do that would make lucanis completely stop loving him, do you think? sometimes the trouble with unconditional love is that it is, well. unconditional, even when some terms and conditions probably would have been in order haha.

that's the pattern you see there again and again; he would rather destroy and abandon and imprison himself at every turn than let go of love, even when it's just scraps, even when there's only ever enough of it to hurt him. it's only when rook shows up and as it were takes his hand and walks along with him that he can entertain the idea of changing the story of what walking out the door might mean in the end.

[obsessedoverwater]

Sometimes the doomed old man toxic yoai gets so bad you just have to start writing about fucking revenge guac to get over the pain.

[aunmenosheteroenespanol]

2.12 Chimney Begins - 2.09 Hen Begins - 2.16 Bobby Begins Again - 7.04 Buck, Bothered and Bewildered

Tommy's family arc

[brekkie-e]

In my heart, when Solas and Elgar'nan are having their spill the tea bitch sesh during the Blood of Arlathan quest, and Solas tells him that Mythal only joined him to keep him at bay- Elgar'nan gives the best villian laugh in the series and says with so much false pity in his voice "Is that what she told you?"

[uncanny-tranny]

I recently had to do a project in one of my psych classes, and man, I knew that CBT was used for every little thing, but seeing over and over, "do CBT! CBT is the best for every mental illness!" was so jarring. I'm absolutely biased because of my own experiences, but I just don't think it's as universal a treatment model as it's touted.

If you didn't benefit from CBT, it's not because you're lazy or didn't try hard enough or lacked intelligence or foresight into your own needs. Frankly, it's a therapy model that (I think) shouldn't be the only readily-accessible model and among the only therapy models covered by insurance. Some of us should not be treated in a CBT model and that's okay. It's not a sign of poor character or unreasonable demands, and if you don't think it's a model that works for you, then it's your right to express that!

[dykedvonte]

Curly's little blurb on his steam trading card just keeps reminding me he is a much more miserable person than people realize.

We don't get a lot of his thoughts, inner confliction that aren't bogged down by what Jimmy says or does. Even in the The Last One and Then Another, his dialogue is reflective, not the Curly before the crash but the result of everything. Parts of the him he was are there of course, but also disfigured and warped beyond recognition just like he is physically.

Curly really doesn't think much of himself and desires. He clearly chases fleeting moments of happiness. He doesn't really have prospects for himself, assumes in a similar way to Swansea, that if it should make it happy then he is happy. Though, he hasn't reached the point Swansea did to admit it doesn't. He neither sees the glass half full or empty, it's just water, something he needs and he'll take it from any perspective.

He wasn't running from anything but he's never really been going towards something either. He's listless. I've been using the term complacent to describe how he feels about his life and the closest people (really just Jimmy) in it, but now that word feels too neutral, too nice. Happier than Curly really was. There isn't just one word for it, he's unfulfilled, uncertain, uninspired. There are no active problems he faces and that's the issue, why should he be upset?

I believe he really is a person who doesn't know who he is or wants to be. He follows a structure. I don't think he's suicidal, but he clearly doesn't think about what makes him happy. He's numb. I suppose that is a better word than complacent, used to the feeling even if he hates it. It doesn't hurt so why stop it?

[thekittyokat]

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah

[lazylittledragon]

ok i swear i'm not going to talk about my breakup forever but the thing that just keeps bothering me:

i know that not getting what you need in a relationship is a COMPLETELY valid reason to end it but also. i feel like having a very vulnerable moment where i opened up about my struggles with intimacy and being relieved that i didn't have to keep doing things i wasn't comfortable with, then being dumped a YEAR later because of my lack of intimacy. is something i should be allowed to be very hurt by???

[anistarrose]

TBH the Wonderland twins could've gotten over all their unspoken narrative-haunting grief about their third dead sibling really easily if they'd just ever met Magic Brian. They would've loved Magic Brian and he would've loved them. New brother unlocked (evil German edition this time which honestly to them is an upgrade)

[starry-bi-sky]

i think i'm hilarious -- aka i made blood blossom danny au memes

all of these come from my DpxDC prompt "i am pushing the batdad agenda--" and it's corresponding additions in the reblogs ksdjlf.

i am. rotating them in my head. forever and always. personally i think there should be more batdad aus in dpxdc, their dynamic could be neat. :)