#i'll try to think of more later

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

main take aways from Halloween (1978) rewatch:

michael myers is canonically 21??? this bitch should be at the club

*sees tiddies* ***MURDEROUS RAMPAGE NOISES***

that's it that's the movie

outside of the fact that everyone who has sex is murdered by the narrative, this is a surprisingly chill portrayal of female sexuality? these teen girls are horny and actively enjoying Getting It On with their boytoys. no pushy boyfriends sneaking in through their bedroom windows--these ladies are taking the initiative to sneak out and GET SOME. one of them gets laid and then immediately orders her boyfriend to get her a beer. (yes she gets Slashered soon afterward, but so does the boyfriend so honestly, gender equality.) yes the Final Girl is the only one not having sex, but she's not bullied for that, nor are her friends slut shamed except possibly by being murdered by the narrative

actually the only character who is shown being morally condemned on-screen is michael myers. specifically FOR his violent overreaction to other people's sex lives. (people he is spying on). metaphorically, the villain is American Puritanism sticking its judgy nose into other people's business.

aka Michael Myers Is A Republican

but actually the real villain is the doctor. guy's a judgemental, shaming, pathologizing asshole. and he's been in charge of michael's care since he was SIX YEARS OLD? kid never had a chance. i'd go on a killing spree too

also the parents. where are the parents? it's halloween night and all the teenage girls are home babysitting their younger siblings? come to think of it, michael's first victim was his own older sister, whom he killed while she was babysitting him. teen girls are really shouldering a labour burden here. maybe parentification is the true villain

side note: mike commits his first murder wearing a clown costume...which is never referenced again? his 'iconic' costume is a generic mask and wig and jumpsuit, when we coulda had a Killer Clown Michael Myers??? travesty

i like how the Final Girl and her friend casually smoke weed in her car. yeah she's an honor student and her friend is the sheriff's daughter. yeah they smoke weed. so what it's 1978

(to reiterate, mike is 21 and should be at the club. im not saying he shouldn't be rampaging, im saying it's sad that he broke out, tasted freedom for the first time in his life, and immediately snuck back into his childhood home to go rampaging. let's have a remake where he goes to a nightclub and has a few beers. maybe some slutty dancing. then rampage)

oh no he's hot

[bubbarnes]

“... it's the winter soldier. that guy is so cool.”

[rapidhighway]

HI, i'm just gonna drop this in your lap and run actually, a future AU

Part 2

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 3: Enveloping Feelings.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)

[thilsiktonix]

small little doodle page for you @niceguyanonymous !!!!!

((I tried my best, I'm not a very good writer, but I hope you like it <33 sorry I didn't put too much detail into this one, I wasn't sure how exactly to interpret it!))

[vagueconfusion]

double trouble (video posted on here by @simpleapparition here)

[salamispots]

read a manga and went a little bonkers

[transingthoseformers]

Tfa Optimus should absolutely be more than the deceptions can handle. I bet Megatron barely makes out out of that room alive. Blitzwing and Lugnut need medical attention afterward. I bet Ratchet is looking over the scene like "Ahh, I remember those days" because the party ambulance was no different. The only reason Optimus didn't become some sort of urban legend is because Sentinel and Elita-1 put their whole back into preventing it. Troopers frfr.

I think after being imprisoned, Megatron should think about Optimus. That little mech could keep up with him in a fight, sure, that's nice. But completely domming his processor out? He's obsessed. Optimus gave him a new kink, and he can't even explore it because he's in jail.

Make that strong, scary warlord into a wet paper bag in bed. Not because that's how he is, but because that's what Optimus is capable of. Black arachnia and Sentinel sense this happening btw, they're both losing it trying to find him and stop him.

Oof on Lugnut and Blitzwing, damn

It'd be funny if Optimus did become some sort of sex urban legend in the academy I'll admit

Sentinel and Elita are like the opposite of wingmen here, for Optimus's sake

Megatron, who is bored out of his mind in his cell:

Megatron, when it starts to hit him: oh

Megatron: OHHHH

This is gonna create such a fun dynamic after the decepticons break out

You know this puts an interesting twist on some of Sentinel and Elita/Blackarachnia's interactions with Optimus (plus of course the canon stuff of course)

Blackarachnia: I sense a disturbance in the force /ref

Sentinel Magnus: something just happened; why do I feel like it's Optimus's fault

[off-mozzarella]

A lil something for Whumptober day 10: blow to the head

[sforzesco]

I love how much Lucullus can't stand Pompey, and also this

Pompey the Great: A Political Biography, Robin Seager

with something from this thrown in for extra flavor

Crassus and Pompey, on the other hand, ridiculed Lucullus for giving himself up to pleasure and extravagance, as if a luxurious life were not even more unsuitable to men of his years than political and military activities.

Plutarch, Lucullus

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[lemonisntreal]

Avoiding lineart at all costs

Also hey yeah I changed the blog aesthetic, next post's gonna be an "About Me" because I want one lmao ☝️ [edit: me when I lie]

[bistaxx]

I haven't seen anyone post these yet on tumblr so here's Bagi's letter to Tina she wrote today ^_^

( Sorry I can't translate them, I'm not fluent in Portuguese ;u;)

[jumpscaregoose]

tss is kind of a weird manga if you think about it. I've been doing that a lot

its main goal is to be a sequel to flowers, and in that a sequel to the original shaman king, but then you read it and that's. really just the tip of the iceberg. tss is already a confusing, messy story if you know what it's doing, but if you go into it only having read og shaman king and flowers (like I did the first time around) you are going to be so lost

takei has this habit of reusing characters and concepts in his work, he's been doing it literally since the beginning. if we're counting each one separately (including alumi), he's written five anna the itakos. the anna that shows up in butsu zone is almost identical to anna from the original oneshot. he does this reduce reuse recycle thing in shaman king too, most obviously with anna and gandhara. and of course this continues into the mainline sequels.

flowers is interesting in comparison to tss, because it is a shaman king sequel in the way you'd expect. it repeats many of the same characters and plot beats as the original (apathetic main character, itako no anna fiance, edgy rival with a goth older sister). hana even mentions a few times that he doesn't want to relive the same beats as his father. compared to tss, the prior work flowers draws on the most is shaman king. for a few chapters. because then we get yahabe.

yahabe is probably the cleanest copy paste into the shaman king universe, excluding butsu zone. it was a oneshot that wrapped itself up after clearly defining its premise while leaving room for the story to continue. except, instead of this continuation being a full yahabe serialization, we just get yosuke in shaman king. yahabe!yosuke and mankin!yosuke could exist on the same timeline, and with how the flowers anime reuses shots from the yahabe manga and ova, that feels like what's supposed to be canon. any deviations from the shaman king canon in yahabe itself can easily be explained away by yahabe being from yosuke's perspective as a non-shaman who doesn't know what the hell is going on. he integrates so cleanly into flowers I didn't even know he was from something else until earlier this year. the same thing applies to death zero, because I fully forgot that was a different thing while writing this.

so flowers has shaman king, and yahabe, and death zero, and it sets up the main plot. and then there's tss.

tss is completely incomprehensible if you haven't done at least 30 chapters of external reading.

or, it's comprehensible, but it's also bad. the reading experience is made so much worse if, for example, you haven't read ultimo and don't know how terrifying not-stan lee actually is. or how important the themes of ultimo are to tss itself. ultimo is a conversation on the objectivity of good and evil, in the same way tss is a battle of ideologies between gods. if you haven't read ultimo, the dong family comes out of absolute nowhere and make even less sense then they do with context.

and then there's senju. the page where senju, when asked what he's learned on his 40 (20 in real actual life) year journey, smiles and says he "can't save people after all" is probably my favourite moment in anything takei's ever written. the weight of that statement means nothing to the reader who's only come from shaman king, because the senju we see in shaman king is sati saigan's spirit ally and nothing else. "I can't save people after all" is an answer to the main thesis of butsu zone, an answer given decades after that manga was cancelled to a collection of readers who might not even know what that is. it's an impactful moment if you've read butsu zone, if you know how it was cut short before takei could take the story where he wanted, if you know the creator has been writing about the same things, about the state of the world and doing what's right and how there are no bad people who can see ghosts, for decades. it makes you think about the thing you're currently reading, the sequel to the one story that author told that made it, that got to say its piece.

because takei's work is kind of cursed. his manga are frequently cancelled, his oneshots never picked up for serialization. the magazines his sequels run in getting cancelled themselves, leaving his stories in limbo. even shaman king, his most successful work, only got its true ending years after it concluded. there is so much in takei's work that has gone unsaid.

when senju stands in front of daremoine and says he can't save people, it's satisfying. it may have been what takei set out to write in 1997, or maybe it was something he thought of in the years between, but either way. this is the ending of butsu zone. this is how its theme's conclude. in the sequel to the sequel of a manga from which its original protagonist was a side character, and underdeveloped plotline. and when you've read butsu zone, it feels good, it feels complete. it hits you like a ton of bricks

this is why I think flowers and super star lose people. because they aren't sequels to shaman king. they're sequels to everything takei has ever written.

to get the most out of super star, you need to have read not only shaman king and its spinoffs, not only flowers, but butsu zone and ultimo and yahabe. hell, to understand shaman king you need to have read mappa douji, or the entire ending falls flat on its face

if you lean into it, this creates an interconnectedness to takei's work, a sense that what you're reading right now is a part of something bigger. whatever is being contemplated currently ties into a much larger conversation about society and morality spanning one man's entire career.

if you don't, you get... a bunch of messy stories. tss makes no bloody sense half the time. ultimo is insane enough on its own, and you're supposed to keep track of that and all the little changes that fit it into this timeline? not to mention the flaws in takei's writing itself, how he tends to pace things weird and leave gaps in his stories, all of it makes tss specifically pretty inaccessible to the average reader.

what is there to take away from this?

I'm not sure, really. I love tss, a lot actually. I enjoy the sense of discovery that comes with engaging in this twisted knot of a story. I think that if you tried to read tss with only shaman king and were frustrated, you should check out yahabe and ultimo and especially butsu zone and try again. you might still think it's a mess, but I think it's worth it to see if that's what lost you

but I know that's also a big ask, that's over 80 chapters of manga to read just to have the backstory for the insane stuff in tss. not everyone's up for that, and that's fair

do I think tss would be more accessible if it only drew from shaman king? yes. do I think it would have been better?

no

[accirax]

I am dying to know your thoughts on Eva Tsunaka now (Damon too. and, to a lesser extent, Desmond, Eloise, Toshiko, Kai and then everyone else)

combining these two asks bc they're pretty similar! clearly, the people crave Eva Tsunaka. spoilers for P:EG Chapter 1!

well, kinda-spoilers, anyways. Venus and I are working on a larger Ch1 think piece together, and lucky for you, i'm writing the section on Eva! i have a hell of a lot to say about her, as she was obviously one of the most major players in this chapter. however, i'll probably save my really in-depth thoughts for that post, and not write them all out here. so, please look forward to that post sometime soon!

as a short version, though, i will confirm that i also really liked Eva. making her the Ultimate Mathlete instead of the Ultimate Liar was a galaxy-brain move, and i'm so happy that they stuck with it until the end. it opened up really interesting character possibilities too, which were explored both in her FTEs (or so i imagine) and in her post-Trial.

as i was playing the daily life, she was one of my favorite characters, although-- perhaps contrary to popular opnion-- she actually dropped in my ranking slightly during the deadly life. not because i felt betrayed or anything like that; i'm always a fan of characters showing their darker/more villainous side. i just felt that some of the things she said and ways she reacted in the deadly life were inconsistent with the character we'd grown to love in the daily life, and therefore undermined my established like of her. again, i'll explain more of my thoughts on this in the major post.

but again, to reiterate, i still really like Eva! and i also think that the character she presented in her breakdown and post-Trial speech was really interesting and unique. you can feel her belief that she knows more than everyone else (even when it comes to how they speak) bleeding into every word she says, and that's super cool.

in general, this tierlist is a good guideline for how i feel about everyone:

i didn't see a tierlist option with Tozu on it, but honestly, i'd put that guy in ily tier. he's great. if i had to rank Mara, i'd put her at the bottom, as she has given me nothing so far other than a cool design (which everyone has).

but let me stress that i don't dislike any of the characters, there are just some that i haven't clicked with as much yet. the closest i've gotten to disliking a character is Jett, just because he was more mean than i expected. but given that the reason why i like Mark is because he was mean, it'd be kinda hypocritical of me to dislike Jett for the same reason. but maybe this tierlist is from ~beneath the veil of hypocrisy~

[cutie-lumi]

Every femstars artist I've seen draws Mugi with big boobs and I'M NOT COMPLAININGJFKSNGK I just love how she has the biggest boobs and then nat is like.... Flat.. I feel kinda rude saying thatdbsknf😭 I love them so much ❤️❤️

I LOVE WHEN PEOPLE DRAW THEM LIKE THIS!!!!!!! it's my ultimate hc for their bodies ever since I?? started shipping them ig?? Fem!Tsumugi not caring about her looks yet being well endowed while Fem!Natsume is like. always looking super pretty, but being flat as hell (and a little bit jealous of mugi's overall body proportions)? SIGN ME UPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP IT'S MY FAVE SHIP DYNAMIC. I EAT IT ALL UP ALL THE TIME. I love seeing other artists having this as their hc as well!! Imo it suits them so much OUGHHHHHHH i need to thank all the artists who also draw them like this bc you're the reason why im so well fed. thank u for your service.

[calamitoustide]

There are tears in James' eyes when they look back. They found themself a tragedy. Regulus isn’t the best at saving people. He’s never done it before, but he’ll succeed for them. They might be the only person worth succeeding for. The moment settles over them, and their lips turn upward. Not very much, it’s hardly noticeable even in the light, but it’s something. The ocean is still climbing in their eyes, and the tides go in and out with their breath, but they’re smiling now. They’re safe. Regulus will save them again if need be, any time no matter where. He’ll do whatever they want. Whatever they want. I Might Like You Less Now That You Know Me So Well

Leonard Cohen - Boygenius/unknown/unknown/More Than This - Patrick Ness/Cowboy Take Me Away - The Chicks/We're in Love - Boygenius/Cowboy Take Me Away - The Chicks/Alex Hirsch/Unknown/Unknown/Leonard Cohen - Boygenius