#i was nearly blinded

[hotgirlkorra]

I knew Percy was white but I didn't expect him to be alabaster pasty White

[dandeeliion]

the thing is. you are dick grayson and eight years old, and your parents’ deaths are a spectacle. then, you are dick grayson, with many more years behind you, and the unveiling of your identity is a spectacle. you are a flying grayson, the last of the flying graysons, and so your own death, too, is made a spectacle.

[cuteiemonster]

Honestly I don't have much of an explanation outside of I like the irony of a Blind Watcher. And. Well. Grian is right there for things to go awry like that. So,

This was created for the 2024 Reverse Big Bang hosted by @mcytblraufest !! Us artists had to create artwork for the writers to claim this time around! >:)

and speaking of writers.. my art garnered the attention of not one, but two writers, who both created fanfics based off of my art!! It's been such a cool experience seeing how differently they've both taken things and they're both VERY WELL DONE!!!!!!!!

" Glass " by @honeylashofficial

Parts make up a whole, but Mumbo hasn't been a part of anything for a very long time. He was okay with that though. The world was more than welcome to continue outside his window, as long as he had his oven and his cable tv all to himself. But every once in a while, the outside world comes inside, and he has to chase it back out with a broomstick. This time, his technique backfires in a way he never could have imagined. Or... Mumbo could count the number of his friends without even raising a hand. Who knew that a 30,000 year-old creature stealing his bed comforter could change that?

" Lost To The End " by Sary_Sary

Six months ago, Mumbo’s closest friend vanished without a trace, leaving nothing but unanswered questions. 6 months later, a strange creature appears in his bedroom, with no inkling of how or why. With no clue how this creature got there or what it wants, Mumbo is thrown into a whirlwind of confusion as he tries to figure out what is going on. Now, Mumbo has to continue trying to figure out where Grian went, all while learning what this creature even is, and how to help him without harming him in the process. To make matters worse, the only person who can help him unravel this mystery is the one person Mumbo swore he would never work with: Scar.

[nootcoups]

HAPPY CHOI SEUNGCHEOL DAY ♡ #영원한_대장토끼_승철아_생일축하해 #OurCherrySCOUPSday

[logicpng]

so hanging out on cohost from time to time i ended up getting propaganda'd into playing corru.observer

so. if you haven't. you should play corru.observer. i'm just studying the characters mostly while i'm processing the whole experience

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

So, I started watching Link Click...

[dovewingkinnie]

i give this

[frmulcahy]

I love absurdly long and unhinged video essays like yes please tell me a nearly 6 hour long history of Kirsten the American Girl Doll whilst I crochet

[moons-among-distant-stars]

so i've been lurking through the lancer rp tag for the past couple days and can i say? HOLY SHIT!! you are all so cool oh my stars!!! like wow!! the stories you all tell!! i'm captivated!! and like they're so involved and complex and so rich!!! and it's all collaborative storytelling!!

and stars above the dynamics, stars... don't get me started on Zero and Khione's dynamic because.... wow.... the tenderness, the fondness that leaks through every word... the grace and like ugh every word feels perfectly chosen... and just ugh ugh ugh it's so good!! actually in love with the story you two are telling...

so shoutout to literally the entire lancer rp community on here y'all are doing the coolest thing ever actually

[cosmichorrorlesbians]

what's your dissertation about? you mentioned it in the siltcord and i'm really interested

oh my god hey I'm so happy you're interested! broad strokes because I've only been working on it for a few weeks but: the current theme is 'resistant landscapes' (both man-made and natural) in the later writing of Shirley Jackson!

Essentially, my main thread is that Jackson had two parallel strands to her work, which as far as I can tell began kind of interrelated but then diverged quite significantly? She's probably best known now for The Haunting of Hill House and to a lesser extent We Have Always Lived In The Castle, which are these. weird surreal psychological horror novels, engaging explicitly or implicitly with the supernatural, and centred around introspective, strange and sometimes deeply misanthropic female characters from isolated social units with dysfunctional, possessive relationships to each other.

Aaaaand then on the other hand she was known for being a 'happy housewife' who wrote these whimsical, quasi-autobiographical stories about all her children and how hopeless her husband was. These were popular too. Betty Friedan called her out in landmark 1963 feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique for essentially spreading patriarchal propaganda.

The interrelation between the two is really jarring, because in one family is a source of horror and tragedy and in the other it's a source of, like... laundry. And Jackson's home life wasn't everything those stories made it out to be-- her marriage was unfaithful, her mother could probably be fairly called emotionally abusive, and as I talked about on the siltcord, she developed severe agoraphobia which often left her housebound.

So, yeah. My plan is to explore the depiction of families as constructed social units in dialogue with the environments they are constructed in in that work. Obviously a lot of that is relation of house to family, in the context of which Hill House is especially rewarding to consider, but I also want to look at relationships with nature and urban environments (especially in the context of settler colonialism and how that has had an enduring legacy in Jackson's particular part of New England), xenophobia (largely in regard to class, though racism and anti-Semitism are presences in her writing), domesticity and the idea of the housewife, and how horror relates to All Of This. The ideal of making a home within a hostile environment and of that environment turning on you, essentially.

I don't yet have particular areas of focus within that broad umbrella, but I might update with bits and pieces about it as I work? I don't really talk about academic stuff on here but I am very much Critical Literary Analysis Guy and I do also post relentlessly about haunted houses as a concept so if people would be interested in it maybe I will

anyway if you've read this far I recommend Horror in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition (2024) by Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing which is a book about how horror movie tropes can be mirrored in built environments! I'm reading it right now and it's conceptually fascinating plus fairlyyy comprehensible by academic standards (if a little dense) if you, like me, are a Fool who knows nothing of architecture. very good also for getting to look at pictures of some of the most Fucked Up Buildings (affectionate) you've ever seen.

[wildsaltair]

respectfully I need to climb him like a rope ladder and do him so good we both ascend into the clouds and never recover

[silviaflowers]

(CW: discussion of the isat dagger events below the cut)

I think its very interesting that, in general, In Stars and Time was able to tap into a part of me I buried for almost all my life after I got into Undertale: the part that views characters as, well, characters. Often I tend to view them very much like people (especially so as a writer, when i try to find out what makes them tick)

And it took that part, it got me comfortable thinking that way again, and then DESTROYED IT with the dagger dialogue. Genuinely, after I acquired the ability (nearly entirely on accident, by the way! I didn't think it was something you could do, and I was trying to act as "siffrin-like" as I could,) I was apologizing to Loop for like 40 MINUTES as I played through the House again.

I was at the end of Act 4, and didn't know you could loop back by talking to the Housemaiden without proceeding to Act 5, but I really wanted to see if I could get Isa to confess and hadn't met the requirements yet. So I hid out of my party's view, and I considered using the dagger. I interacted with it once, saw Loop plead, and immediately went back into misery.

I think I debated with myself a solid 10 minutes until I decided to talk to Euphrasie and proceed anyways.. And then realized the entire crisis wasn't even necessary. On my next loop I ran to Loop and begged them to take the dagger from me, basically.

Consequently, the dagger dialogue is one of few parts of this game that remains entirely untouched by me and the reason I doubt I could ever 100% it. It's one of the only depictions of self-harm and suicide that makes me viscerally upset and actually disturbs me. Genuinely, I think you could show me much more gruesome methods of the same goal and I would always be more disturbed by how In Stars and Time frames it.

Loop's reaction coupled with Siffrin's declining mental state just.. really seals the deal, for me? How Siffrin is so nonchalant about it, and Loop is so against it. Its for this reason I never used the dagger, because I felt like Loop. I felt like it would damage Siffrin so much more than the other methods of looping did. It was different. And it was conveyed very well.

[zhuoyichenpretty]

Ep 22-23 Commentary

Ha...I was inexplicably nervous for eps 22-23 and it looks like I was right to be (-: What a rollercoaster. Spoilers below!

I've just come out of ep 23 and uh????? holy shit????? ZYC????

Ok ok but to backtrack, let's do my comments semi-chronologically:

Ep 22:

A carry-over from ep 21 that I have to mention—heck yeah PSJ give WZY hell. She doesn't have all that many lines but she sure knows how to make them count. Also seeing PSJ and WX get screen time just the two of them makes my brain go "yay <3"

Back to ep 22, loved the fake-out sundial ayeee that was a nice Chekhov's gun that also brings the real sundial back into relevance for later. Also me eating up the PSJ and ZYC crumb of an interaction has brought to my attention how starved I am of their screen time together.

This whole ep was a great lament towards the feared inevitable. Every sad downcast look from ZYC, every complicated glance WX gives him. A wonderful, terrible crossroads for these characters. I love that for ZYC especially, it's such an incredible mess of emotion coming to a head. Bad enough that he's come to care about the demon who killed his family and ruined his life, bad enough that he's sworn a blood oath he regrets and tied himself to punishing someone he no longer finds culpable, bad enough that ZYZ's life or death depends solely on his choice and ZYZ is constantly practically begging for death when ZYC wants him to live. How much immensely worse it makes the whole situation that WX is literally ZYZ's soulmate. And obviously the whole team has only grown more and more attached to ZYZ, too. ZYC's personal turmoil aside, how heavy must that responsibility and guilt be? For the finishing blow that only he can deliver to also deeply threaten every other person he cares about? Everyone understands in the abstract what must happen and why, but just like seeing ZYZ lose control firsthand, the gulf between understanding and experiencing is so unimaginably wide. If he kills ZYZ, can there really be no resentment from his friends? From WX?

Also it seems ZYC only wears cloaks so that he can give them to other people lmao

Ah fuck, the farewell drinks. I didn't even factor in how ZYC might not survive the encounter (''': The drama truly was like hm can we possibly give ZYC a worse day than that night his whole fam died? Maybe give him a bunch of new family members and also the blade and the fate and the sole responsibility to potentially irrevocably scar said family members with? And he might die in the process too? (-: haha maybe? (((-:

Oh. Oh. Addendum. I forgot this til I saw it mentioned in another post—ZYC recounting his oath as he watched WX smile when they discussed reviving the tree...I could feel him weighing those words against his own life, against ZYZ's life, against WX's happiness. One way out of this impossible situation is indeed to doom himself. I'm in pieces.

Damn if WX isn't dedicated heart and soul, going into the sundial like that. I'm sad no one could keep her company for those 300 years but also I guess that's kind of an impossible ask (and maybe not survivable for the other non-goddess mortals? I'm admittedly very unclear on sundial time loophole logistics). It would have been nice to see someone offer though, even just to be turned down.

Ooh I like the soul needle fake-out, given this show's penchant for retroactive "actually we had a plan all along" moments. A good subversion of the narrative's own style.

Also I saved this for the end because it doesn't really fit the linearity of my comments but what the fuuuuuuuck oh my god I absolutely flipped out at this scene:

I am at once rabidly intrigued and at the same time not sure if I'll be satisfied with whatever payoff will come for this so I don't want to overindulge in theorizing and setting my own expectations too high. Maybe this is just a fevered hallucination, maybe it means nothing (I hope it means something). But damn!!! What a gorgeous man crazy scene.

In conclusion, ep 22 had some good stuff for me. Plot development and reflection and tension enough that I may have been satisfied with just that one episode. But they gave us two, so onward to ep 23 comments!

Ep 23:

I like how many solid reasons the team has to suspect ZYC being possessed. Even though I withheld judgment during my watch given how quickly the show usually confirms that kind of stuff with a possession mark, just simply casting that doubt made the whole build up that much more intense.

ZYC slowly walking down the corridor with the whole grounds lit a somber and haunting gold—*chef's kiss*

ZYC's monologue to a catatonic ZYZ is so important to me. The closest we'll get to his internal monologue about this whole situation. The kinds of things said when we think there's no conscious listener.

Okay so, having finished this episode and looking back, Li Lun's hands coming up from behind ZYC was not to denote possession (at least in this episode), potentially is a visual from ZYZ's POV, and seems related to the above screencap. I am so, so curious. Once again, I'm stopping myself from further speculation because I want to be surprised but ahhhhhhhhh

PSJ shooting at Ao Yin is so gorgeous. Her action scenes seriously never disappoint—the creativity of her fight choreos!! Also very cool that the whole team is getting to take part in the action, not just the two male leads.

Bai Jiu possession was not on my bingo card but I sure do love that we literally saw the possession take place and I still didn't connect the dots. Good shitttt. Also oh no ): ZYC was telling the truth about the soul needle, he was just tricked ):

Seriously from the Ao Yin case to getting PSJ released to reviving the Divine Wood to getting tricked by possessed!Bai Jiu to making pear soup to fighting ZYZ to fighting Li Lun—when will ZYC get a single goddamn vacation day holy shit.

Also when will WX tear up that contract so ZYZ can stop having a mild heart attack every time he wants to kiss her ): &I love that they saved the 300-year montage for this moment. While their ship doesn't give me brainrot personally, who could be unmoved by that incredible and undisclosed sacrifice? That's soulmatism.

Okay, I'd seen clips of them filming the ZYC and Li Lun fight but damn I did not expect it'd be happening right now!! Right after already taking damage from ZYZ? And my god is Li Lun brutal. The two actors did such an impressive job on this entire fight, what with Li Lun's ease and ZYC's suffering. I really appreciated the extensive hand-to-hand combat after Li Lun literally obliterated ZYC's sword. (Also though, given the origin of that sword, I kept hoping for a flashback to ZYC's brother once it broke, but alas, no dice.) Anyway, the show does not play around about ZYC whump it seems. I was very very shook by that throat punch; that shit legitimately looked like it hurt.

Honestly, I had a hard time with the extended ZYZ and Li Lun conversation at the very end because oh my god someone please heal ZYC lmao. But of course, that's the end of the episode~~

Y'all...check on your local ZYC stans because I was not okay after all that (': I need a heaping dose of comfort after all that hurt, but as always I'm cautious of hoping for much from canon itself. So yeah! Ep 23 was solid, but I would probably be in better shape if today's release just ended on ep 22 ((':

Time to go wait for the cast's Hi6 episode to drop so I can heal my battered heart ;-;

[biblicallyaccuratecrow]

thinking about this post today and wondering if siffrin would feel more jumpy postcanon if he has phantom sights. seeing something out of the corner of your blind eye after. yknow. *stares at act 5*. that's gotta do something to ya

also i imagine that siffrin got really good at navigating the house unconciously, mentally mapping it to where they could get by without running into things (save for. the cursed kitchen counter), but postcanon he has a harder time getting used to unfamiliar spaces and navigating them...

[rookeryyy]

Struck with a vision.

[milesofstars]

posting this before i start disliking it

chat is this anything

i need to clarify that i have only just completed the gluttony palace and if i get any spoilers ill cry

also i know like jack shit about akechi ive talked to him a whole 3 times but the first time i saw him in that one beginning cutscene i was like "I NEED TO SEE THAT TWINK AGAIN" and got excessively excited when we met him ingame so i have been overcome by the urge to make him my best friend (which i will do. he will be my best friend.)

its also so funny bc everyone ingame is like "ugh that akechi is so annoying.. ruining our rep... hes so infuriating.." and im sitting here like "man i wonder if akechi will like this next case.. sigh i wonder where he is rn.. i like his voice"

og screenie:

i Cannot Be Bothered to draw the background so they r in the blue gacha void