#i wish it wasnt that way

[xkuja]

Popular opinion:

I think short replies are underrated. There should be no need to say 'sorry its so short' when you've written exactly the right amount of words to get the point across.

[wizardsimper]

I'm so sad that the romance party banter is bugged because some of it is so freaking cute, here's my personal fave

[stevenrogered]

We're becoming some kind of team, huh?

[transthatfag]

kinda vampy

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Something something Merlin is Arthur's bane.

[sualne]

snakeman luffy

[buwheal]

Without color

Trying to warm up because ive been slacking on the askbox!!! Yay!!!

[nonranghaes]

joshua thinks he loves you too much. that's why he's strolling up to this house 'late' for this christmas party, dressed up in a suit (rather than waiting for you in cozy sweats like you promised), and a bottle of wine he stole from jeonghan's apartment on the way over. this, in his humble opinion, is what a best friend is for: pretending to be your date when you see your ex with someone new at a christmas party you didn't know he'd be at. it's easy enough to find you socializing with this tight-lipped smile that melts into something genuine when you see him. he passes off the bottle of wine to the host and makes a beeline for you. you're a vision in blue and it's all too easy to look at you like you outshine everyone else in the room.

"hi, honey," he says, pressing a chaste kiss against your cheek. he lowers his voice to a whisper, "you owe me."

"i know." but you curl an arm around him all too easily, pulling him into your side as you immediately start introducing him and coming up with some casual lie as to why he's late.

the moment the two of you have a second to yourself, he leans in, pretending that all he's doing is stealing another little kiss and not also whispering to you. "where is he?"

"tall guy in the green sweater across the room. his new fiance looks like a candy cane."

joshua glances over, eyes widening a little at the red and white stripes that seem to jump out at him now. it's cute, sure, but still catches him off guard in a 'how did i miss them...?' kind of way. he turns back to you, and suddenly the word hits him harder. "fiance?!"

joshua remembers this guy too well: mister 'i don't think i'll ever get married again,' which wasn't a problem in the slightest in general, but it was one of the multiple reasons you ended up ending things with him. you just give him this tight-lipped smile, a hand coming to rest on his chest for a moment. you know. he can see the way you waver a little in front of him.

"fifteen minutes," he says to you. "and then we'll fake an emergency."

your hand slips into his, and he feels the way your lips press against his cheek and linger a few seconds too long. long enough to make him think a little too much about what it could mean. "thank you, honey. i owe you."

(his payment comes in the form of watching horror movies with him, dressed in your sweats again... and again when he feels you fall asleep against his shoulder, his heart fluttering in his chest.)

[the-pea-and-the-sun]

"teruhashi sucks bcz she was creepy an overly obsessed w saiki!" "no teruhashis a good person she didnt do anything wrong!" ok well i think she was a little bit creepy but i think thats awesome of her thats why i like her. she could've been a lot more creepy tbh she could've been outside saikis house with binoculars and id still support her

[nyaiiaii]

hello can we have some slabtek maybe perhaps...

Inspired by my weirdass sleep positions... hope you enjoy anon ♡

[ganondoodle]

the closer we get to arcanes finale the more worried i am bc so often .. if not always .. things i like end in a way that i dislike so much it ruins everything else for me

and im so worried they pull a 'this is a multiverse' thing bc then they can say every skin is somehow canon bc its all different universes you seeeeee and jayce went mad bc he lived through all of them or something, or force it to end in a way that makes the champions end up like they are in game- Vi is a shitty cop, Jinx is just heehoo craycray bc xyz etc

[wishchip106]

“Erik, you can’t just kill all the humans, that’s illegal.”

Live Magneto reaction:

“But Charles, whats more illegal? briefly killing the entire human race? or destroying all mutant kind? 😨”

“KILLING THE HUMANS ERIK”

[twst-mer]

[infizero-draws]

i will never stop loving these two. you absolute freaks

[autism-connoisseur]

this has DEFINITIVELY been talked about before but idgaf. something about this shot-- about oswald holding the last thing connecting kristen to ed after he has all but taken her place in his life (lee even unknowingly compared them DIRECTLY!!) and yet matches ed for ALL he is... after he passed the 'test' that kristen didn't, after he not only accepts ed's homicidal streak but actively engages with it, when the first thing they did together as friends was to violently torture & kill a man, someone who had indirectly hurt oswald that ed brought as a gift to him, when the reason kristen and ed wouldn't work out was that after he did the same (got rid of a man who had hurt her) kristen didn't accept him for it... and yet, did ed kill dourghy for kristen or for himself? he definitively enjoyed it, he had wanted to do it ever since he saw the way he had hurt kristen AND the way he treated him when he confronted him about it, and he hid what he had done from her because he must've known she would hate him. and yet mr leonard was a GIFT for oswald, so he could take action and revenge, to cheer him up. because sure ed WANTED to see oswald work but he wanted to do something for him more and that's why when mr leonard didnt work he went for the song. because the goal was to see oswald be the man he used to be.

tldr oswald is to ed what kristen could have never been. its not that he has replaced her is that the place she occupied in ed's life was always meant for oswald because all ed wants is for someone to see all parts of him and not turn away and that's exactly what oswald did. that is why he's the one that gets to get rid of her once and for all. metaphorically speaking.

[jemmo]

Making sense of love for love's sake: the game

Despite all the things i absolutely adore about how the plot unravels and expands in love by love's sake, upon first watch, there's some things i couldn't piece together, which @lurkingshan echoes in their post:

'The way the author was messing with Myungha and forcing cruel choices on him really does not track with a desire to help him find happiness.'

And to preface, this is not something i fully get yet either. I think i'll need a good month and a sizeable reading list of relevant resources to understand just what/who this author/sunbae is and what his role is and how he is associated with myungha. But as always with the best shows for meta (aka bad buddy), as a plot unfolds, you can always find a better understanding by looking backwards and re-contextualising what you've already seen. so i watched ep 1, specifically the scene between myungha and his sunbae at the bar. And i will talk about how everything said in this scene has a whole new meaning now we know the full story, but for now i wanna focus on that question that they keep coming back to; "Then... will you change it for him?".

When you watch the show for the first time, your brain follows the simplest, most obvious version of the story you're being told, one where myungha has been pulled into the world of his sunbae's novel that's being turned into a game and given the opportunity to fix the thing he didn't like about it; making yeowoon happy, and thus you just think the rules of the game are imposed by the author, and so when these cruel choices first come up, you see them as the difficult roadblocks that are nevertheless necessary to any kind of game, forcing the player to make an impossible choice so that the game can continue in a certain direction and its only after that you learn whether it was the right choice or not, or there is no right choice, it simply changes the game you are playing.

And when its revealed what this game actually is, at first i tried to interpret these cruel choices, namely the choice between yeonwoon and myungha's grandma, and at best i could come up with the concept of this being a choice between staying stuck to the past aka choosing his grandma, even though he knows that choice doesn't mean she's safe bc he knows the future where he loses here, its an inevitability, but thats the small happiness he knew before it was taken away and thus that happiness is known and safe, theres no risk, versus choosing to pursue a new happiness, a love of yeowoon and thus himself, which he doesn't know, he hasn't experienced yet, and could be risky. Its a happiness that isn't guaranteed like his grandma, but its a happiness that looks to the future and has hope in it that he can find a new happiness to pursue despite what has happened in his past.

And that fits nice, okayish. But then i watched ep 1 and heard that question "Then... will you change it for him?" And watching through the rest of the eps, we come back to this scene at the bar and each time we get a new run up to the author asking this question, either new dialogue is added or we hear a different piece of the conversation entirely. It starts at the beginning of ep 1 as:

"Because Cha Yeowoon is the only one who's miserable." "It can't be helped that some people's lives are like that" "The fact that some people are destined to live that kind of life is what's vile."

Then a bit later in ep 1 we go back and its expanded.

"It can't be helped that some people's lives are like that" "The fact that some people are destined to live that kind of life is what's vile." "Why? Do you think you'd write it differently?" "Yes, definately. Someone like Cha Yeowoon, or someone like me with an awful life, can also be happy."

And then all the way on in ep 6, we get this new dialogue.

"I don't like talking about destiny." "Why?" "Because it means everything is predestined." "Then do you not believe in fate?" "Fate and destiny are the same. My grandma likes to say that. She said life is like a written book, and how you'll live and die are written in it. (...)I don't like things like this. Even if fate is already destined, I think it can still be changed. Otherwise, there's no point in trying." "Really? Then Myungha..."

And while we don't hear the author ask the same question, I feel like him getting cut off like that insinuates that the conversation leads to that same ending point. All that is to say, every time we hear this question being asked, its like we learn more and more about what this whole thing is, what the game is, what myungha is saying he will do by agreeing to do what the author asks. And every time, we see myungha being more defiant against the idea of yeowoon being resigned to his miserable ending. He starts off thinking that kind of life is destined, and while it's miserable, its not something he can fight. Then he says he'd want to write the story differently, bc yeowoon, or even him, could be happy. He challenges the idea that yeowoon, and thus himself, is fated to be miserable, and opens up the possibility for happiness for them both, but doesn't yet have the means or resolve to do it, its like he knows its possible on a fundamental level, but doesn't see it as something he can actually achieve. But then we circle back to the idea of destiny and books, both of which came up in the previous quote, and seems incredibly pertinent seen as this whole thing is about a novel this author has written. Myungha talks about how he hates the idea that life is a book where everything written is predestined to happen, from the moment you live to the moment you die. He says "Even if fate is already destined, I think it can still be changed. Otherwise, there's no point in trying." That vile way of life he described before that he said was destined, he is now saying it can be changed, and that possibility is now something he's holding onto, its what he sees hope in so that he can keep trying, bc now he finally is trying, he has the resolve, he's trying to realise this thing, this impossibility of rewriting the life he thought was destined through the way he loves yeowoon.

And coming back to those cruel choices, given this fresh context, it made me think. bc this isn't actually a game that myungha has been put into where the rules are dictated by an author completely separate from him. He said himself, he'd rewrite it, he'd change things for yeowoon. And when you start to think of it less as him fighting against a rigid, removed system and more like him being a character in a story he is trying to rewrite himself, that has both the author and his own limitations, or just his own if you're in the school of thought that the author is some figment or part of myungha himself or his conciousness, then you can start to see where these cruel choices might come from. They could be myungha, the author making edits to this new story, imposing his own doubts and limitations on himself. When he says he has to pick between Yeowoon and his grandma, what if that's the new author myungha seeing this story unfold and thinking no this isn't right, he can't have it all, i'm not deserving of this much happiness.

And what makes me like this idea even more is that when we get that second choice between ending after 14 days or getting 100 days back at the cost of resetting Yeowoon's affection to 0, that whole conversation happens in what I think the bar actually is which is this frozen moment in time where myungha is in the water with this extension of a voice in his head that is talking through these things. That conversation in itself needs its own post, but when you look at it both as a decision to break up or not or a decision to hold onto life or not, you can see how the author is just this soundboard relaying the decisions myungha is going through in his head. The author's voice is his own, weighing up his decisions. And if he is the author here, it only reinforces that the person making the rules of this game is him. You can even extend it further to the idea of the debuffs, where he puts in place this thing that makes it so he causes harm to yeowoon when he's around, and its only by garnering affection that he can prevent it. He gives himself a reason from the get go to stay away from yeowoon and reason it as him doing it for yeowoon's safety, when in fact the only way to make yeowoon safe is to increase his affection, which he can only do by being near him. Its a system that at first gives myungha a reason to stay away aka not like himself, but ultimately says the only way you're going to make yeowoon like you, or the only way you can like yourself, is if you accept risk. And that in itself screams to me of a myungha writing in these game systems that are trying to encourage his own-self love while falling at the hurdle of his own lack of self-worth.

The idea is still messy in my head even for me, but i just really like the idea that myungha could be trying to fix this thing both as a character and game master, and that both these versions of him have these flaws that manifest in their different ways to cause the events we see. It kinda is the definition of being your own worst enemy, the idea that in order to work towards loving yourself, the biggest obstacle you have to encounter is yourself, bc we are the ones holding ourselves back, making all these rules that make it harder to like ourselves and pursue our own happiness. The voices in our head telling us that we aren't good enough and aren't deserving are our own, and while the things that happen to us can inform what they say, we're the one's reinforcing those words. And what this show teaches us is that, if we're the one holding that pen all along, we can choose to change what those words are. If we make the rules, you don't have to create a game with concrete ultimatums, you can create a game where rules don't control you. Instead, you make the decisions, and you can make the ones that make you happy.