#i've spent like 5 hours on this

[not-poignant]

Hello Pia. Could you please elaborate a little about challenging a peak alpha and how they really can or connot controll things when they are challenged? As I understand ardolphogen is pieaking when they are in this situation? And they MUST do something? Or? I was comparing two scenes exactly - Ef challenge Gary and Janusz challengeTemsen. Thank you!

Hi anon!

I can definitely elaborate on this :D

(Under a read more because I...well...elaborated.)

So, firstly, Temsen and Gary are different people, and how they react to things are going to be different. This is true across a lot of different situations. Consider, for example, that Efnisien has been rude to Gary many times and Gary has just let him, but if Efnisien does that even slightly to Temsen, Temsen scolds him immediately!

They are different situations. Gary tolerates Efnisien's rudeness because he finds it charming/amusing and he likes that. Temsen doesn't tolerate it at all, because he believes that as a doctor and a peak alpha, he should be awarded respect from other alphas, especially young alphas who have shown a pattern of violent, abusive, disrespectful or immature behaviour (which Efnisien has!) -

This is also why Temsen tolerates Janusz' disrespect better than he does Efnisien's, because he knows it comes from a place of severe trauma. Janusz has PTSD from his experiences with Nate, and that is Hillview's fault and responsibility. Janusz is right to be angry, and his challenge comes from a genuine place of injustice.

Temsen recognises that he is culpable here, and that he has no grounds on which to scold Janusz, in other words he recognises that he's earned some disrespect on this specific issue. He can also tell that Janusz is doing it from a place of stepping into his strength to take care of Nate - that's something Temsen has asked him to do and that he wants, even if it comes from a disrespectful place (momentarily - most of what Janusz says is measured, calm, and clear - and actually not disrespectful at all - disagreeing is not disrespect). So that situation has a lot of different things happening which causes Temsen to react / not react the way he does!

Most important, no one here has any idea what Efnisien does or says to mount the challenge in the next chapter. Assuming it's solely based on what happened in this chapter is understandable! But that's not what it is. If Efnisien doesn't do what he does in the next chapter (which I'm not going to spoil), Gary's reaction would never have happened. They would have talked about Gary's uneasiness around Efnisien feeling the need to protect him, they would have gone back to normal, and they would have been fine.

Efnisien is also experiencing something new for him that he's never gone through before, and no one's really mentioned it yet. Gary had his ardolphogen rage, Efnsien also has ardolphogen in his system. He was dissociated into his rage state in that chapter, and wasn't thinking clearly, especially as he escalated his violence against Cella. We have no indication that he's left this mental/hormonal space or that it's calmed down, because he lost consciousness, and hasn't really been himself since. Alphas and anger control issues go hand in hand, the ardolphogen is not like testosterone (after all, in the omegaverse, they make both!), they can't just go 'oh huh I've been flooded with hormones, let me not do what they're telling me to do.'

And, fun fact, actually most humans can't do this past a certain point! Tell a person with PTSD to simply calmly think through their fight/flight response and stop having flashbacks, and they're going to laugh in your face, or never talk to you again. Lots of people have intense hormonal states they can't just shrug off! They must respond. It's just that the hormones and the emotions are different.

Gary has PACS, an unstable internal emotional landscape, and has been treated as a pariah by the news media, James' entire family, and has challenging mental health issues, from being casually suicidal for years after James' death and hoping that something would kill him, to being very hostile initially to making intimate connections with other people.

Gary and Temsen aren't in any way starting in the same playing field here. Temsen is happy, he's fulfilled, he's got a greater capacity for not responding to disrespect, and he also practices early intervention selectively - badly behaved alphas get scolded, usually-good-alphas who have a reason get a pass.

That being said, we've never seen anyone mount a direct challenge to Temsen, so we've never seen his response to them. No one really does it. That would be the equivalent of someone trying to pin a peak alpha to the ground, mount them physically, take a 'dominating' position over them, threaten them with physicality, or threaten to kill them in a duel etc. Obviously there's very few circumstances where this would happen and very few people would be willing to try (except for other peak alphas lol), because it's legal for peak alphas to murder anyone who attempts it, because they aren't in control of their hormonal responses when it happens.

In fact the only way to easily take advantage of a peak alpha that way is while they're sleeping or while they're too sick to fight back.

And I'll leave that as the context for the next chapter.

But, yes, when an alpha mounts a challenge to a peak alpha, physiologically they must respond. And most respond with immediate, lethal force.

Comparing what Temsen's experienced with what Gary's about to experience is like comparing apples and oranges. They're just not the same thing, and they're not comparable. We've seen Gary be disrespected by Efnisien nearly 100 times by now, we know - with only a few exceptions that involved either domestic violence initiated by Efnisien or extreme verbal disrespect - he can handle that.

What we're about to see from Efnisien is not what he's done before.

[housederiva]

Is it just me or is there way less fanart being made for this game than the previous ones? Kind of makes me sad, I remember with dai I could check the tags every few hours and find something new weeks after launch, now I only can get away with only looking a few times and week and miss nothing.

I don't think that's Veilguard exclusive.

Things I and my mutuals draw now are getting less notes/reblogs than they did even one year ago, regardless of the fandom. Fanfiction is getting less comments and kudos on ao3 too (not that they were getting many comments in the first place) Less gifs are being made because gif makers weren't getting reblogs. Hell, most of the post I make have a huge discrepancy between likes and reblogs and add polls into that? A thousand people voted on something and only a dozen people reblog it. It's a hollowing feeling when you realise you're calling out to an empty void, I don't blame people for creating less art because of that.

I don't see a vast majority of the people who follow me in my notes because I have likes disabled. Multiple times someone has sent me an ask apologizing for spamming me with likes and I don't understand it? That is not a bad thing And unless you reblogged anything along the way, I didn't even realise you were doing it in the first place. And the people whose notes I do see are not annoying in the slightest, I love the tags you add and I'm sure the original poster does even more so

I'm not trying to shame anyone Into interacting with the fandom spaces they're in but the whole point of Tumblr and what makes it a blogging platform and not social media is that this is a show and tell website. You're supposed to look at something you think is cool and then wave it around for your followers to see and then they pick it up and do the same regardless of how old it is

When you reblog an ask game from someone it used to be common courtesy to send that person one of the asks from it. Folks used to leave comments analysing paragraphs from stories people wrote and theorising about what would happen next on every chapter. We used to send each other asks just asking about our ocs unprompted

If there's no interaction or community when you create something, then what's the point of creating it? It sucks that fandom is morphing into something to be consumed and thrown away the second it's more than a week old unless you're one of a handful of blogs that got lucky and picked up traction at just the right moment

I'm sorry for the rant but I get emotional when I think about the decay of fandom spaces for too long. And this goes without saying, but you guys can reblog anything on my dash if the button isn't disabled on it

[bestagons]

What Dan and Phil Text Each Other 4 + Familect (article)

[robinmage]

[wasabikitcat]

Finally drew what comes to mind whenever I see video of the mascot performer out doing the birthday song while the Chuck E. Cheese animatronic is turned off sitting in the dark, still clearly visible to the audience.

(Original meme I'm referencing below)

[kyouka-supremacy]

Finally gotten around scanning the September Animage issue. Please enjoy!!

[nebuladreamz]

Today you get painting of a genshin oc of mine

Tomorrow? Fuck if I know

[beesinspades]

happy pride month from vash the stampede!!!! 💜 seeing all the ace vash art makes me so happy I wanted to contribute!

[feliville]

why is it SOOOOO difficult to write SOBS

[moonflowerus]

Happy 5th anniversary, ONEUS!

[the-impala-is-my-home]

.

[vimbry-moved]

"likes don't do anything" they do

"there's no algorithm" there is

"well nobody uses the for you tab" I do

"reblog all art and fics you see" there's no thought put into that. if this does work on people, then it's just pity engagement borne out of guilt rather than genuine interest, which is arguably worse than having none, because it's totally hollow.

[aventvrines]

I love you. But for the man that you are. Not the god you'd pretend to be.

[suddencolds]

~

[late-night-vocaloid]

VVV Music Live live reaction that I'm calling a recap | Day 2 | Part 2

Last part, let's wrap it up!

I wish I knew what they were all saying

Okay now this is what I’m talking about

Also this is the power I’ve been missing from Ritsu’s voice. I guess I haven’t been keeping up

Dramatic!!

NO WAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!! NO WAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!!!

UNREEEEEEAAAALLLLLL!!!!

She’s so happy to perform it

I’m loving her expressions, is this what it’s like when you can understand the lyrics

They matched the drama!!

"RIP" is right!!

"Synthesizer V"? "Vocaloid"?

I really like the shape her ponytails give her with this outfit

Oh boy

Wow

Rivaling IA

RIVALING IA

Omg???

He’s going wild!!

He can put his hand in his pocket? He threw his hat off a second ago!

Yeah, you Are “Frimomen”

Wow they put everything into that

He’s playing the crowd

They should let him be in Guilty Gear

*Head in my hands* every Vocaloid man has some competition

Oh my god

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I knew he was coming

Well that was the highlight

NOOOOOOO I KNEW THEY WERE GONNA DO THIS

YOU CAN’T MAKE MY MAN GO ON AFTER THAAAAAATT

My poor guy. I believe in him

They better have a performance together now

Gakupo you have to serve

It’s so funny how casually they talk after their songs

Let’s go sword (I saw this beforehand)

VVV didn’t let Gakupo and Frimomen perform together because they knew they’d be too powerful

I like how they pushed his model’s expressions

Vocalooooiiiid

Her V6 ?

Her choreo on this one feels appropriately silly and happy for Gumi

Cute

Let’s go Unaaaa

This is who we had before Zundamon

They’re going to perform all of Kinoshita’s songs with all these concerts Una’s in

The void of space white noise……

Who is talking

And that’s day two!

VVV music live is always very long and packed with performances. I was looking forward to the choreography this year based on last year's and they didn't disappoint. I hope they can keep doing shows, they're always a lot of fun! That's all, thanks for reading!

[one-little-nerd-stayed-home]

Truly Genuinely and from the bottom of my heart: Windows Movie Maker, OBS, and Piracy sites were a mistake and I am about to become a problem for real

[Video ID: a 24 second video with clips of Sevika, Ambessa Medarda, and Captain Greyson from Arcane set to the first 24 seconds of the song Joyride by Kesha]