#i think it might make me mad

[isa-grapes]

i think normal oak’s most harrowing battle is being the only kid with a sibling in a sea of only children

[jacqcrisis]

I like how in the first game, Aphrodite is like 'Mm Charon? Oh, cool, yeah, you bought my boon from the boatman and his nasty trash :/ As least he's a greedy weirdo, otherwise I couldn't make head or tails of him.'

And now she's all 'oh Charon! I love him. He's so tall and strong. Of course who wouldn't fantasize about him coming to your aid~'

I like to believe that this is because, as the goddess of love, she couldn't figure out a damn thing about Charon since he's in the underworld, and, canonically, the Olympians can't feel what's going on down there. But then she saw Hermes slobbering all over him at the post-game party, and after god knows how long with Charon and Hermes being topside and pining completely platonically over each other due to their separation, she's realized Charon is a prime cut of grade A Beef as she should have centuries ago.

I'm very proud of her.

[orangechickenpillow]

Jayce Talis was 100% an "are you mad at me?" child. Breaks something? Immediate "are you mad at me" with the biggest wettest saddest eyes a 7 year old can muster without causing himself physical damage. Dad had a long day and greets him less energetically than usual? "Are you mad at me 🥺🥺🥺" The energy in the household is one degree off? "Are you guys mad at me?" Thinks there's a possibility he made a mistake? "I'm sorry please don't be mad."

It probably took Ximena like 15 years of gentle parenting to get it through Jayce's head that he doesn't have to constantly repent for things, that not everyone is mad at him all the time, and that someone actually being mad at him is not, in fact, the end of the world.

[bunnieswithknives]

Okay but does Peri KNOW that Dev has a robotic leg when he shows up? Something about the fact that Peri's wand is a cane and the fact that Dev could have kept his leg and just had a cane for the rest of his life instead tickles my brain.

I mean he doesn't know immediately, he wasn't like briefed or anything, but he basically lives in Dev's house so he definitely finds out. Peri doesn't comment on or react to it all though really, there's no reason for him to think anything of it, plenty of people have missing limbs, a lot of people are born without them, it doesn't necessarily mean anything sinister happened. He had no reason to pry or ask and I think Peri's lack of reaction to it helped Dev feel a bit more comfortable in his skin. (Not by much but.. a little bit.)

[avocado62524]

[ladyriot]

It's really all the mini romance arcs in this damn show...

3x08 Cuts Like a Knife

3x12 Love The Way You Lie

The undercurrent of season 3 is Maura trying to get Jane to drink more wine for her health and every single moment of it feels like a romantic B-plot.

[glittergoldie]

obey me stoners who’s in your dream blunt rotation who’s in your nightmare blunt rotation I’ll go first

dream: mammon (says really stupid stuff that makes you laugh really hard, can keep up with insane and convoluted bits), beel (experienced stoner, keeps a cool head when everyone else is fried out of their minds, always has munchies), belphie (really good at finding the most comfortable spot to smoke, passes out early so you don’t feel bad about getting sleepy), asmo (will fill the silence with chatter when you’re too high to think anymore, looks really pretty with hooded eyelids <3)

nightmare: levi (the filter is always wet when he passes it back to you :/), solomon (he’s your dealer but the kind that it feels really weird to smoke with yet he insists on smoking with you every time you buy from him), lucifer (NEEDS to fucking relax, gets paranoid instead), barbatos (seems completely unaffected by the blunt and makes you feel stupid)

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[irenespring]

Fellow progressives: do not spread images with the red triangle

Possibly stepping on a minefield but what the fuck. Someone I follow just reblogged someone celebrating the Hamas red triangle and the post is full of notes saying people calling the red triangle antisemitic are just against Palestine and are colonialists.

This has also happened before with a mutual so it seems like something non-Jewish people just might not know: the red triangle---unlike symbols such as the Palestinian flag and the watermelon---is explicitly pro-Hamas. Not pro-Palestine, pro-Hamas. Hamas is the organization that singled out civilians rather than actual military targets in order to kill the largest number of innocent Jews possible. They committed mass atrocities ending in the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians in one day since the Holocaust.

You cannot be pro-Hamas without being antisemitic. You cannot spread Hamas symbols without having done an antisemitic action. So, don't spread the red triangle. It isn't pro-Palestine. It just makes your Jewish mutuals upset and uncomfortable around you.

[oddlyzephyrous]

working on my KIY design... oughhhhh

I'm LOVING designing him, the king in yellow has long been my personal favorite elder god/entity, even before I got into malevolent, so it's all a bit of a dream come true for me to do this. DESIGN THOUGHTS INCOMINGGGG ->

when designing him, I take a lot of inspiration from the fact that the King in Yellow as a concept is not originally part of the Cthulu/lovecraft mythos proper, having been adopted by writers in that space from Chambers' work, so in my mind i kinda want to differentiate him from the classic aesthetics of cthulu mythos (i love tentacles as much as the next gal but wanted to try something different!)

I wanted to keep the "tattered" vibe here but make sure he was sufficiently beautiful and kingly, hence the tassels, scalloped layers, chains of sparkly metal, and the organic "crown" of bone/horn. Since the KIY in Malevolent is still the more cthulu mythos interpretation, the edges of his cloak flow out into tatters that move and writhe like tentacles without being actual tentacles.

It didn't fit with the composition of this particular sketch but part of the design is a two-ring halo representing the twin suns of Carcosa. (you can see it in this piece i did) I'm still messing with the specific look of that, maybe he only shows it sometimes when he's trying to be very beautiful and terrible X3

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Still very wild to me when people try to gotcha Jason with the whole "if you can kill other people for being evil why can't they kill you" when jason is like. One of the most passively suicidal characters I've ever seen. What if man

[muchmossymess]

uh oh guys, hot take alert:

i think revali may have invented hand held aerial archery HEAR ME OUT- (this is a long one boys)

okay. evidence one: why the fuck would a rito shoot like that. like, it makes nearly zero sense, it would be such a hindrance to their flight and their main stake is that they can be higher than you can shoot whilst still pinging you... which revali has overcome with his gale

evidence two: tulin and the concept arts. obviously rito style archery would be held in their talons. before totk came out idk if anyone had really thought about it too much, but the developers had, as you can see in concept art (from the creating a champion book). and like, its logical, powerful, and allows for peak maneuverability. also, when in flight revali (and teba) holds his bow in his talons before switching to his wings. surely its easier to keep it in your wing (obvi ignoring the effects to flight but hes doing that anyway firing the damn thing) rather than switch back and forth- unless you were taught that way, because why would you hold it elsewhere, you need it in your talons to shoot.

evidence three: we dont see any other rito do it (...kind of). throughout botw and totk, we never see another rito flying with a bow in their hands. in totk, its mostly tulin, who holds it in his talons, but in botw the big one is teba. during the medoh quest, he actually gives *link* his bow, and therefore does no shooting in the sky. teba and harth had both tried to take on medoh before, but we never see this, and while they holds their bows in their hands *on the ground,* we dont see it.

...except for aoc (uh, spoilers?). there are two times we see a rito other than revali hold their bow in their hand for aerial archery. but it is not with any rito soldiers, either during cutscenes (the bows are only on their backs) or gameplay (they swoop down, and then hand hold bows on ground. they arent seen flying at all but thats prolly for the same reasons as botw: its very hard to code that (and so they write the lore around that fact)). the first time we actually see another rito do this, we dont see it. Its teba, as he comes thru the portal, but all we see is the arrow shot, and then him freeze frame with the bow in one wing. we dont see the bow in his hand for the rest of the fight. the second time we actually see him fighting like this, it *is* in the air, but its noticeably different to revali.

hes a lot slower, it clearly takes a LOT more effort to shoot the bow, and he only pulls off one arrow at a time. its canon that revalis bow is heavier/harder to draw, and he manages to effortlessly stream arrows whilst fucking floating midair. i think teba, forever a revali fanboy, heard of how the champion mastered his own style of archery and sought to teach himself, but lacked one key thing: revalis mastery of wind.

evidence three point five: revali could easily use his powers to hold him in the air longer/slow his descent long enough for him to fire his shots. it makes sense, really. if he can use his gale to propel him, he can sit on the updraft for a hot sec, or even curve the path to carry him along while he lines up the shot. this would mean he wouldnt need to flap as much as other rito, who would obviously need to keep flying

evidence four: revalis fighting style and his needs. revali works with non rito, obviously. he needs to be able to communicate with them on the battlefield, and they wont understand the muffled chirps if he holds his string in his beak, so he needs his mouth free to speak hylian. also, revalis main tactic is fly up with gale, shoot, fall, either shoot more or use velocity and weight to knock around opponents, and then fly back up. he often needs both feet planted firmly on the ground to get a good hold of his gale, something that is harder to do if you have a bow in the way.

also, take for example the kick he delivers link in their fight (aoc). that would possibly damage the bow, or give the opponent a chance to grab his weapon, if he held it in his talons. and to switch from feet to back is a risky maneuver during freefall, and could lose precious seconds, and then when you get back in the air you need to get it off your back again. its much easier to keep the bow loosely in your wing the whole time, meaning your free to attack melee, land and rise all while not wasting a single moment getting your next shot lined up.

so yeah, i think the rito used the talon grip for aerial archery, and would often use the hand held method on the ground for a variety of reasons (more powerful shots?, easier in some situations like hunting), but revali was perhaps the first to use hand held aerial, another reason he was one of the greatest archers ever.

[thelaurenshippen]

ah yes, the sweet sting of rejection from a billion dollar corporation who believes that "action stories don't appeal to romance audiences", welcome back my old familiar friend

[bigmfrat]

Having a rough time so have some spec evo crumbs that have been sitting in the squidcord for months that I only just got around to drawing to distract myself with

Teeth fall out regularly and are quickly replaced.

Only Minor and Minor/intercaste (more on this below the line) have feeding Tentacles.

Feeding Tentacles are stiffer than your regular tenties and remain in pockets when not in use. The ends also have very small teeth for gripping, they feel like velcro.

Teeth are dull but their jaws are for crushing bone so it doesnt matter.

"Venom" (bone melting enzyme) is black, sticky, and viscous, can be spit but is always a last resort. Most bites are dry bites.

Claws come out of the tip of the finger as apposed to the top like humanoids

Like cats and dogs, Illithid have a quick, if damaged it will bleed (a lot)

Claws dull with use and must be taken care of to be sharp

Caste System

The Primordial Illithid society resembled that of an ant colony but on a smaller scale, their species naturally came in three basic castes that had their own biological functions. The modern Terrestrial illithids have retained the physical characteristics of their ancestors, though are now much smaller, and they no longer serve any function in their society.

The three base castes are:

Major

Height Range: 6'8 - 7'5

Prey species: Humans, Half Orcs, Dragonborn, High Elves, Tiefling

Physical Traits: Longer tentacles, Longer and usually pointed braincase

Birthrate: 1

Media

Height Range: 5'7 - 6'9

Prey species: Humans, Elves, Tiefling, Drow

Physical Traits: Medium tentacles, Rounded head, Most often have "beaks" - but not always, this trait is seen less with each generation.

Birthrate: 3

Minor

Hight Range: 4'5 - 5'9

Prey Species: Gnomes, Halflings, dwarves, Drow

Physical Traits: Shorter tentacles, Longer and pointed braincase.

Birthrate: 4

Minors have a few unique features and are the most faithful to their home world ancestors, the first being two long and thin feeding tentacles that remain retracted in their throats until they find prey, and two specially adapted tentacles on their forehead used as communication displays, these two traits have been entirely lost on the other two castes, Despite these 4 extra "tentacles" they are not to be mistaken for Ulitharids. Minors are also extremely rare outside of colonies despite being the most plentiful caste, this is due to their function in their original society as caretakers and homemakers, a Minor is more likely to take re-education over expulsion due to their social needs and most renegade Minors tend to be Inter-caste.

Each caste is biologically inclined to its individual food items, even with free access to enthralled meals of any race, they will usually stick to their preferred prey.

Three additional castes:

Ulitharid

Height Range: A foot above the intended caste's average height

Prey Species: Humans, Elves, Tieflings, Dragonborn, Half Orcs

Physical traits: Two additional tentacles, usually thinner but longer than the main four.

Birthrate: 0.002

Any caste can become an Ulitharid.

Inter-caste Inter-caste is the closest thing you will get to a hybrid when it comes to Illithid. Each tadpole holds the full range of natural genetic code and has the potential to become any caste, what determines the end result is the tadpole's lineage; If the parent was a Media, the child will also be a Media. In the case of Inter-caste, however, one or two traits from one of the other castes may unintentionally come through. This can result in a Major with shorter tentacles or an unusually tall Minor.

Apex (more on Apex Illithid found here) Illithid super soldiers. Built like a tank with an intelligence to match, while their psionics are rather basic, they make up for it with an insane might and an ingrained determination to get the job done. Very rare and will ALWAYS be pure Majors.

None of these castes are natural, Ulitharids and Apex specifically did not exist until Elderbrains took over the race and while inter-castes did happen on occasion, they were much rarer before the Illithids were domesticated.

Other traits unrelating to castes:

Illithid DNA is very malleable and significant changes can be made in a single generation, while Elderbrain aren't the best at gene editing some differences can clearly be seen between colonies. The most noticeable example is their foot configuration: while Illithid living in a more aquatic environment will have the standard two webbed toes tipped with a large claw, their somewhat "dryer" cousins may sport a more humanoid approach with 3-4 webbed toes in the traditional Illithid style. A mindflayer with Human hands or feet however would be seen as deformed.

[termikenart]

Safety.

[quirkle2]

[zombie au] when ur.when ur brotherturns into a z.when ur brother turns into a zombie and u spend the next several years of ur childhood braving the most fucked up shit ever so u can find a cure and it gets to the point where ur killing parts of urself just to pick up the pieces of ur brother with shaking, cut up hands and glue him back together but at that point ur just going to end up bringing him back to a world that's not worth living in