#i will find you in every universe like

[fortuna9]

the feminine urge to script the most soul-devouring, nauseating, crushing, devastating romance

[just-an-enby-lemon]

The thing about jonmartin is that Martin wants to be a romantic, he loves poetry and probably watches romance but for him it is a fantasy, a silly game he plays. Martin is at his core very cynical. Things don't work out for him so he doesn't really belive in romance, it is a pretty dream but that's it. He is pratical and realist. Dating Jon he has to remind himself it is real and he actually struggles with romantic gestures, it is something he has to remind himself to do, to remind himself he can do even and honestly who even has the energy and what if Jon doesn't even like it?

Jon on the other hand wants to be cynical. His first coping mechanism was pretend the things he was afraid of weren't real and goddam if he isn't afraid of love. It didn't really work to him so far so it's easy to pretend he doesn't care. But he is a romantic at heart. He saw love and he read about it and he has enough evidence that it is undeniable. And to be honest Jon was always to much a bunch of mushy feelings hidden in a grumpy (and bitter and afraid) trench coat. Dating Martin he has to hold himself so he isn't too much. He plays the grumpy unromantic guy at first. But he just can't stop giving flowers and planing dates (this is the guy that saw a theme park on a fear domain and considered how he wanted to take Martin to a romantic ferris whell date [until he discovered Martin was afraid of them]) and making all the silly things one does when in love.

TR: Martin is deep down very cynical about love but wants to/pretends to be a romantic and Jon is deep down very romantic but wants to/pretends to be cynical about love.

[bogdreamz]

korvo lost and farting 0 stars for you my boy

[adrift-in-thyme]

The fact that Wild ran to Time of all people to have his opinion validated is hilarious to me. My man that dude has seen horrors and oddities you wouldn’t believe

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[spasikonik]

me if making fanarts of fictional bands was a job

[wiihtigo]

non canon to casey official lore but what if she did get that son of a bitch

[lilacthebooklover]

me, looking at the most toxic, awful, horrendously unhealthy fictional relationship in the world: why can't i have what they have? :(

[phoenixcatch7]

Loz fandom stop being angsty and give the daydreaming kids on big fun adventures with a cool glowing sword some actual whimsy and joy challenge

[anthony-crowleys-left-nut]

i think lestat really loves being fucking annoying and he's so real for that cause same. what's the point of telling my shitty joke if nobody groans? get mad at me. find me irritating. i am nothing if not a fucking nuisance

[mmelolabelle]

Obi-Wan Kenobi: You need to kill Darth Vader! The very fate of the galaxy depends on it! He is pure evil. The source of all that is wrong in universe. Every bad thing that has ever happened ever is his fault - like on a personal level.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: You want me to kill him? Me? The master swordsman? The battle-hardened general? Arguably one of the greatest Jedi of all time? Oh no, I couldn’t possibly!

Obi-Wan Kenobi: No you don’t understand - I love him. Mind your fucking business.

[canisalbus]

Vasco and Machete are absolutely adorable, your style is so lovely and you draw the softest beds I’ve ever seen in any art ever

.

[vammppyre]

tired and hormonal and thinking too much about early dan and phil im gonna be sick

[atlas-the-bastard]

there are two wolves inside of me.

one wolf absolutely devours the zolu dynamic of "oblivious idiot and angsty pining idiot". like, a zoro who is constantly internally beating himself up because what the fuck he's gone and fucked it all up how could he fall in love with luffy he's practically betraying him luffy needs a first mate not a lover and it's not like luffy would ever even love him back he just has to suffer this in silence. and a luffy who doesn't even realise zoros internal crisis and is becoming more and more touchy and seeking out zoro more because he just. wants zoro. because being around zoro feels more right than anything. but doesn't stop to figure out what that feeling actually means.

the other wolf just goes fucking nuts for the zolu dynamic of "are those two together or what?" "no one knows they're just like that". they don't know when they started actually being "together", they didn't even really decide, it's always been this way, since day 1 they knew they would follow each other to the ends of the earth and beyond. they don't talk about it, they don't need to talk about it, because they just know, they know each other so well and understand each other as if they're literally part of the same brain. their relationship transcends that of "boyfriends" or "dating", they're simply luffy and zoro. it's always been a mutual understanding, luffy is zoros and zoro is luffys and they belong to no one else and. and. it just feels so natural and right and instinctual and being together is as easy as breathing. even the rest of the crew don't know what exactly they are, but they never question it because it just makes sense.

[stairset]

I think the portrayal of Spider-Man 2099 in Across the Spider-Verse is in-character in that aside from like Shattered Dimensions he's always been portrayed as a bit of an asshole who slips into anti-hero territory at times and generally has a "needs of the many over the needs of the few" mindset and given his specific circumstances in the movie it's not unreasonable to think he could take the actions he does. However it does kinda suck that since like 99% of moviegoers had no idea who he was before the movie came out their first impression of him is when he's in an antagonistic role and people think "antagonist" and "villain" are synonyms so now I'm gonna have to listen to people who've never read a comic saying he's a villain or isn't a real Spider-Man for the rest of time or at least until he inevitably changes his mind in the third one.

[myenterpriseisparked]

Okay I understand where people are coming from with the "emotional suppression in Vulcans is learned not genetic" talk re: "Charades" but, consider......... the emotional suppression is muscle memory, and the aliens took away the mental muscles that remembered how to do it. It's a crude metaphor on my part, but that was the way I saw it.

Also consider: it's a sci fi show using extremely high-concept bullcrap science on a weekly basis and maybe nitpicking it is a fruitless endeavor because none of it is going to make sense otherwise and enjoying the ride for what it is is a much more enjoyable way to engage with this franchise. Sometimes you need to shrug and let dumb things happen and laugh.