#i'm chewing on it

[toxictoad]

No thoughts just de-aged Bill meeting Ford and reminding him so much of his younger self that it gives him a whole ass existential crisis while Bill is just sitting there

[rest-your-head-in-my-lap]

Fuck. I cannot emphasize to you the beauty of having love written in words, on paper, via text, whatever the method... Something special about being able to look at something physical that tells you just how much someone loves you. Being able to look at it whenever and think to yourself: "They put so much effort into this..." Because they did, even if it only took 5 minutes to scribble down, even if it's not a literature masterpiece that's not what matters. What matters is that they went out of their way to pin down the words best they could and write them down so you could see them. It's no replacement for verbal, they are different things, but they are beautiful differences. Beautiful and lovely unique methods of communication and acceptance and love.

[definitionofacritter]

tfw your friend secretly crosses a fucking ocean to play a deity / GM for the first time in his life and you had no idea he was even in the country, much less your studio

Abubakar Salim, the man that you are!!!

[yashley]

The Mighty Nein Reunion: Echoes of the Solstice 

[anastoza]

Mmmm yes, two of my favorite flavours in Gale's epilogue I'm not sobbing you are

[athenas-only-daughter]

The thing about the prologue to Downfall is that it also makes The Divergence a tragedy (or underscores the tragedy of it, depending on your view)

These beings came to the universe with Exandria broken, lost, and scared. They lost their home, they lost some of their family, and were somewhere totally alien to them, in bodies that were alien, too. Clinging to their siblings that survived.

And then, millennia later, they will seal themselves away from it, and largely away from each other, too, because they were fighting too much for this new place, this new home, to survive. They were going to end up destroying it.

If you think about it, much of the history of Exandria (its theological one, anyway, which is tied up with most of its history in general) is the story of a family dissolving, growing estranged and breaking apart. It's just that the family is a group of gods.

[mossymeep]

I've admired Lorroakan for years-

[fishatar]

More gear

[benevolenterrancy]

Mobei-Jun getting abandoned in the human realm by his favourite uncle and being left alone and terrified?? baby???? gonna lie awake thinking about him and Shang Qinghua meeting as children

[foxstens]

andrew always being at kevin's side because kevin needs it and andrew driving kevin to night practice and andrew patting kevin down to check for injuries and andrew promising kevin it'll be fine and andrew looking awake, interested because of kevin and andrew conserving his energy for kevin's quiet meltdown and andrew smiling for the first time without the drugs because of kevin and andrew always picking up when kevin calls

[lethal-spaceship]

I am about to explode.

[lifemod17]

We as a society do not talk about Wasteland, Baby! on electric guitar enough!!!

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

This is a fair point and we do need to account for the fact that Jeeves is a known bullshitter. I have some thoughts about this.

From a Doylist perspective, it’s possible that the no-married-gentlemen policy is simply a retcon. Plum hadn’t quite nailed down the characters in those earlier stories. Over the course of the series, Bertie and Jeeves both become increasingly hostile toward the idea of Bertie marrying. The attitude we see here of "don't love the idea of it, would rather not- oh, and she wants us to end our working relationship? fuck that" gradually morphs into Bertie and Jeeves sharing an unspoken understanding that any hint of an engagement to anyone on the horizon constitutes an emergency that requires immediate intervention.

From a Watsonian perspective, I can see a couple possible explanations.

1: Straightforwardly, Jeeves has no such policy and was lying to give himself a pretext for leaving Chuffy without admitting that he really just missed Bertie (“I’m not leaving Chuffy FOR YOU, I was going to leave anyway, and if you HAPPEN to have an open position...)

2: Jeeves had no such official policy before coming to Bertie, but really HAD only worked for unmarried gentlemen, whether this was down to coincidence, personal preference, wives not liking him, etc. He didn't decide to make it a hard rule until the end of Thank You, Jeeves, which was the first time in the text that he and Bertie basically married each other (the second time is, of course, Much Obliged, Jeeves/Jeeves and the Tie That Binds). The codification of the no-married-gentlemen rule is both Jeeves realizing that he wants his life with Bertie to remain as it is indefinitely, and him laying out the terms he wants to set on their relationship. Bertie's agreement to take Jeeves back represents a tacit acceptance of these terms.

3: Jeeves does have a policy of only working for unmarried gentlemen which he is prepared to enforce through either resignation or sabotage, and was lying to Bertie about his motivation for breaking the engagement to Honoria. We know that Jeeves has exacting standards when it comes to employers. He left Lord Worplesdon over a sartorial disagreement. He's been turning down offers from Bertie's friends promising higher pay since as early as "Hard-Boiled Egg." He left Bertie himself over a banjolele. If he has a problem, he will leave. If he doesn't want to leave, he'll manipulate the situation to get what he wants.

4: Some combination of the above (I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive).

So is Jeeves's concern remaining in Bertie's employment, or is it having Bertie to himself? To gain further insight on this matter, we can actually turn to Jeeves himself. Later on there's a story called "Bertie Changes His Mind", the only Jeeves story written from Jeeves's POV. For those who haven't read it (I don't know if it was adapted into an episode), in this story Bertie announces that he's lonely and tired of monotony. Jeeves reacts thusly:

I confess that his words filled me with a certain apprehension. I had heard gentlemen in whose employment I have been speak in very much the same way before, and it had almost invariably meant that they were contemplating matrimony. It disturbed me, therefore, I am free to admit, when Mr Wooster addressed me in this fashion. I had no desire to sever a connexion so pleasant in every respect as his and mine had been, and my experience is that when the wife comes in at the front door the valet of bachelor days goes out at the back.

Bertie then says that he wishes he had a daughter, and decides on the spur of the moment that he wants to buy a big house and invite his sister and her three daughters to come to live with him and Jeeves. You can guess how Jeeves feels about this:

I concealed my perturbation, but the effort to preserve my sang-froid tested my powers to the utmost. The course of action outlined by Mr Wooster meant the finish of our cosy bachelor establishment if it came into being as a practical proposition, and no doubt some men in my place would at this juncture have voiced their disapproval. I avoided this blunder.

We can gather from this that in the past, the marriage of an employer has resulted in the termination of Jeeves's employment reliably enough that now the mere idea of an employer marrying fills him with trepidation. I thought this was pretty straightforward when I first read it, But I find What's interesting to me is how his phrasing subtly shifts from the first quote to the second, becoming both more certain of the end of his employment and more ambiguous as to the reason why.

In the first quote, Jeeves isn't saying he's certain that Bertie marrying would "sever [his] connexion" (i.e. end his employment) with him, only that his experience has taught him that this is a thing that tends to happen. The implication seems to be that the valet is dismissed after the employer is marrying, whether at the behest of the wife or because the employer feels his services will no longer be needed, but that actually isn't stated either. The valet could just as easily be going out the back door of his own volition. Maybe he can't get along with the wife, or doesn't like working in a larger household with other servants. However, the concern here in any case is about maintaining his employment status.

In the second quote, the hypothetical future wife is out of the picture, taking her hypothetical demands for Jeeves's dismissal with her, but Jeeves remains concerned. If anything, he's more concerned. He's no longer uncertain that something bad will happen, but rather makes a firm statement that the plan WILL spell the end of his "cozy bachelor establishment." It's ambiguous whether this means he would resign, or whether the household would simply change in a way that isn't to his liking-- technically if Bertie remained unmarried and lived with his sister, he would still be a bachelor. Either way, we can infer an obvious preference here for working for a single gentleman who otherwise lives alone. Observe that his fear has now shifted from losing his position to losing his current way of life.

I think with all these ambiguities, you could reasonably interpret this story as supporting any of the three explanations listed earlier, or at least not contradicting them. We get no explicit confirmation that Jeeves will automatically resign a post when his employer marries, and he seems specifically concerned that the wife will be what brings about the end of his employment (he's lying about having a policy). It sounds like any previous attempts to work in a married household haven't worked out for him, and he's specifically worried about losing his position with Bertie, which he finds pleasant (the policy isn't an official one at first, but becomes so when it applies to Bertie). His immediate reaction to his employer wanting to bring other people into their lives is to start the gears turning on a sabotage plan in a way that feels very practiced (he wants to work for unmarried employers and will make sure this is so one way or another).

We also know that one of his very first acts as Bertie's valet was breaking off his engagement to Florence, and as far as we know, she never threatened his employment with Bertie. In the case of Florence and the case of Honoria, he gives Bertie the same explanation: "she wasn't suitable to you." In the latter case there was the additional impetus of the threat to his employment, but we don't know that he wouldn't have broken the engagement regardless. To Bertie, "self-interest in own employment + feudal desire to serve y.m.'s best interest" is probably a more understandable and acceptable explanation than "you can't get married, ever."

This is where I decided to do a detailed close reading of the entire conversation at the end of "Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch," and when I had finished THAT I decided I needed to do the same thing with the conversation at the end of "Jeeves Takes Charge" in order to compare and contrast, and then I realized that this post was spinning wildly out of control, so I copied all that stuff into a Word doc for another day, so, uh, to be continued I guess

I haven't read "Thank You, Jeeves" yet, so I should probably shut up, but "Sir Roderick Comes To Lunch" calls into question whether Jeeves truly has, or has ever had, a rule about not working for married gentlemen, like he says in "Thank You". It seems that in RODE, he acted when he learned that Honoria intended to fire him after she gets married to Bertie. But if he had a rule about not working for married men, it wouldn't matter what Honoria thought of him, because he'd be out of the household anyway. It's almost like the actual rule Jeeves has is "I will do whatever it takes to keep Bertie for myself, and happy" (which means getting Bertie out of an engagement with a woman who makes him listen to her reading Ruskin and dislikes Jeeves, and also getting reunited with Bertie after Jeeves' brief stint with Chuffy).

[zivazivc]

so many brainworms about life in the troll tree and jd's adventurous side...

[fuckitdoaquadflip]

Idk yall the whole premise of wade believing so strongly that there was another logan out there that would help him because that's what HIS logan would do and also the "worst" logan at his lowest and still being willing to help when none of the rest would even hear him out and then finding someone to live for again is just so fucking fruity like

[wistfulwatcher]

EMILY & HOTCH DANCING in 7.24 RUN