#idk where to leave this I’m just >:

[yuurionviktor]

Gonna finish Gideon one soon, but for now you can have this Harrow

[little-pondhead]

The Curse Of Hope

_

Danny is in another universe. He had a reason, but he doesn’t remember anymore. He can only stare, horrified and disgusted, at the sickest city spirit he’s ever seen. Shivering and swaying with every step, core exposed, and ectoplasm leaking from wounds that are decades old. A ratty blanket was thrown over their shoulders, barely hiding the spirit’s pale grey skin and protruding black bones.

The spirit didn’t even sense him until he reached out to touch its wispy shoulders. The spirit flinched, clutching at the dozens of trinkets hanging from their neck and tucking in on themselves like they were expecting a blow.

“Oh, shit,” He swore, floating back a few feet, hands in the air, to show he meant no harm. “I’m sorry. I promise, I’m not here to steal from you.” The spirit shivered again and rolled a pearl necklace in between their fingers. A nervous habit. “Uh, I like that pocket watch? It’s very nice.”

That got their attention. They peeked at Danny, and he saw that more tattered cloth was covering their eyes, blending in with the stringy hair that reached the ground. Their blanket fluttered weakly, revealing hundreds of thousands of tiny marks etched into their skin. Scars, really. Scars that wrote out curse after curse onto the spirit’s very being. They burned with evil intent, and even reached inside the spirit’s body and wrapped around their core.

Occasionally, blinding specks of color raced across their body, temporarily erasing the writing, but it always returned quickly. He watched, a little detached, as one particular line rewrote itself across their rough forearm, drawing fresh ectoplasm like someone was writing it with a thin knife.

“Are you…alright?” Danny stuttered. A stupid question.

The spirit cocked its head. He couldn’t see their eyes, but he felt their burning gaze as they pondered the question.

“The pain of others becomes mine own.” They rasped. “The lights of the city dim as rotten wealth clogs mine veins. Magicks long forgotten have eaten mine skins, pulled mine cloak, and darkened mine skies. Helios has refused to grace mine doorstep, and the seasons of the Earth have revoked their kindness.”

Danny held his breath. It felt like he was the one with the exposed core, not the spirit.

The spirit shivered once more. “Tell mine soul, little lamb. How could this Forsaken City know peace, when it was long since ripped from mine hands?”

Shit, he needed Frostbite. And maybe Clockwork. Now.

-Or-

Danny meets the spirit of Gotham City. The villains and rogues that have plagued the city for decades are literal curses that are taking quite the toll on Gotham, and honestly, Danny isn’t sure how much longer they can hold out. The heroes seem to be doing some help, and are probably the reason Gotham made it this far, but the poor city needs help from the Realms if they want to get better.

Luckily, Danny can provide that help.

But only if he could get Gotham to leave their city behind. Because recovery is going to take a very long time.

[wispscribbles]

When I finish my ghoap Christmas oneshot that I started way back in start December, and have been struggling with since, then it’s over for you fools 🎅

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

thinking evil thoughts (best friend’s brother trope)

[silkjade-archived]

i haven’t been here much recently, and i’m sorry i’ve only been negative on the off chance i’ve been online, but let me just say one last piece before the end of this month, so that maybe the next might be better….

[spyderschaos]

Man I haven’t worked on this comic in forever

<- prev

[dmclemblems]

“Claude in Hopes is exactly the same way he is in Houses! He’s always been like that and has the same feelings/morals!”

Claude in GW/Hopes:

Claude, literally, in Houses:

Let that speak for the fact that Claude was written with a 180 characterization in Hopes.

Claude wants peace and to bring everyone together; not to tear them further apart. That is his character.

[grocerystoreanxiety]

my tolerance for ppl is getting concerningly low

[ozcarma]

I’m actually so upset over the grimmons resolution I’m tempted to start a YouTube channel and make a whole video breakdown of their fucking queerbait

[bleedchan]

not to go on about it but i think i’m way nicer to people and objectively less harmful than like virtuous puriteens. i’m not out there in peoples dms telling rape victims they’re just like their rapists now lol. jesus. the way some people think is acceptable to treat me lol

[whoblewboobear]

I genuinely don’t think bb was the best place to show off Cirie as a player because going in blind with her I’m still pretty meh about her gameplay overall…

Either wrong cast or wrong show bc something’s not working. We’ve seen legendary gameplay on this show and her game is talked about like she’s playing at that same level and it’s just… not true? It doesn’t take much for her to sway people in the house bc they’re not the best players in general.

We’ve seen better bb players so is it that people love her enough to hype her up like she is or is there something I’m missing completely?

[magpiesbones]

Agott has known she liked girls since forever, probably, and was fine with it. Whatever. She had bigger problems, such as making all of her spells perfect all the time. And then there was Coco.

And it wasn’t that Coco was her first crush, but first it was that Coco was breaking the rules and then it was that Coco visibly loved magic in a way that Agott never had, never had even thought to. Magic was like her hands: it was just a part of her. It was something she could do, like breathing. Why would she love it? Coco taught her how.

When she confessed, almost a year later, they were close enough that they stayed friends when Coco said, haltingly, that she didn’t like girls. Agott was her best friend, and she was Agott’s, and that was more important, actually. Also, they were thirteen. Agott knew it wouldn’t have lasted— if she didn’t then, she knew it later. It was easy to dismiss the wants of your childhood self, in hindsight— anyways, everyone knew there was no such thing as a good decision when you were thirteen. Being best friends was much more comfortable, anyways— Agott didn’t have to think about that squirmy thing in her stomach that surfaced at the thought of involving herself in romance, or (ew) kissing.

It didn’t mean she wasn’t jealous, when Tartah was Coco’s first kiss, but she got over it quick.

Things kept happening. They went for the third trial; Coco and Tartah had a dramatic but painless breakup; Qifrey took them on a repairing tour; they went for the fourth trial. The years kept passing. Coco got a new boy, except this one sucked, and didn’t last very long before he got in an enormous fight with Tetia Agott regrets not being there for and was summarily dumped. Coco was always a little awkward, talking about what led up to the actual dumping.

Coco went for the fifth trial. Agott didn’t.

It took a long time.

There was a conversation, with Olruggio. One of many, but this time it struck Agott, who was ready to think about it, ready for it after years of the slow unlearning of all the unspoken rules. After learning what could and couldn’t be changed.

Olruggio had been a girl for a while, as a child. He wasn’t anymore, sometimes said that he wasn’t sure he’d really ever been, but he did like to talk about it with Agott. He let her sit in on his inventing sessions, just watching, studying how he solved the problems, until she was ready to ask.

Agott figured himself out in a slow slide, and a sudden and merciless impact. It felt like learning magic was something he could love: his body was something he could like. Something that he could change.

He’d been writing to Coco— he’d wanted to keep up their friendship, while she was away at the tower and he was alternatingly touring around the land fixing things with Professor Qifrey and completeing what totally wasn’t an apprenticeship with Olruggio except he was teaching him all of the tricks he’d learned in his own career of contraption-making.

He’d forgotten to mention the gender. He wasn’t sure why— or how— when a quick ‘oh by the way, I’m a guy now’ could have been appended to any one of the many letters they sent. It was so important that it just— slipped his mind once, and then well of course he’d told Coco, because he told Coco everything, and of course everything included his gender.

Really it was probably because around the time he was figuring it out Coco was trying to decipher this one really interesting book and well. Magic was cool, and more interesting than the boy thing. Especially because Coco thought that one of the symbols should be able to form magic into brushbugs.

It was a little— more than a little— embarrassing to call out to Coco and see her not recognize him, until—

“Agott!!” She was running to him, and then they were hugging, and he was taller, now, wasn’t he? He hadn’t noticed, but either he was taller or Coco was shorter. “Agott, is that you? You look so happy!”

“Yeah,” He said. “It’s me. Hey, wait, you said you’d show me that new installation—“ And it really was all the same, wasn’t it?

Coco passed the fifth test, deservedly so, and Agott continued to not take it. It felt transgressive of him, every day that went by where he didn’t. He didn’t want to.

Coco moved back into the atelier, and it felt nice. Good. Right, almost: of course it would be the four of them. Qifrey, very politely, didn’t kick them out, but suggested that maybe they’d like to see what it was like being witches in a town for a while?

It was partly that, and also partly that Coco got a letter from Tartah inviting her to come and see the shop he’d recently set up in a space that was separate from his grandfather’s, and also help out because he was just swamped. So Coco went to help, and Agott, because he didn’t really have anything better to do, went with, and— well. He had been making contraptions, and now he was selling contraptions. And it was pretty good.

He pretended not to notice the way Coco would glance at him. He tried not to think about it. They were best friends. Coco, categorically, didn’t like him. Anyway, they lived with her ex.

Probably Coco just forgot he was a guy now, and it surprised her sometimes. It still surprised him, when he caught glimpses of himself in the mirror, the way it made him feel real.

He mentioned it to Tetia, once— how it kind of seemed like Coco liked him, sometimes, but he’d confessed and been rejected already so he was probably imagining it.

Tetia had reminded him that they’d been thirteen, and also had all thought Agott was a girl at the time, and ALSO also like ten years had passed, and people changed. Feelings changed.

Agott’s feelings on the matter kind of hadn’t, much. Except for the squirmy thing in his stomach that turned over when he considered it, and found it to be the vestiges of discomfort at the thought of loving someone in a body that wasn’t really his and that he didn’t really like.

It wouldn’t have been serious, when they were thirteen. It would have been the summer, maybe, and then nothing. It was serious now, though. It could be.

He’d never been good at hiding how he felt, or beating around the proverbial bush— he did just ask her. They were cooking together, and Coco was— watching him peel turnips, and— he’d always been good at shutting up, except around Coco.

“Um,” she said. “Yeah. It doesn’t have to mean anything, though.”

Agott kind of wanted it to. He said so.

They made it mean things.

later, Coco said she had liked him, not when he’d asked, but later, around when she was dating that boy whose name neither of them actually remembered. She’d been so confused, because she didn’t like girls, hadn’t ever been attracted to another girl, so it did make sense Agott wasn’t one, honestly, she could really see it, even back then, and— (coco had buried her face in her hands, before she was able to say it) the confidence was hot.

Agott had blushed to the roots of his hair at that. He got it, kind of— Coco was very attractive ink-smeared and exultant— but Coco was always like that. she loved magic. She’d taught him how to break rules.

sitting there, on Agott’s bed wrapped in all of the blankets he owned, he thought that they were going to live forever.

[thefloatingwriter]

wiress with cats.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

we watched the sun set over the castle on the hill

Natalie Wee // Leonard Cohen // Sophokles (tr. Anne Carson) // Richard Siken // unknown // Jandy Nelson // Vance Joy // Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) // Eden Robinson // David Levithan // unknown // Adonis (tr. Khaled Mattawa) // Taylor Swift // via Pinterest // Yannis Ritsos

[corpsentry]

there’s something so epic about hetero chinese period dramas and i think one part of it is that there is absolutely nowhere in the narrative i could exist.

lately i’ve been on a western media detox— i’ve cleaned english language music out of my playlists and have never been able to stomach western dramas anyway, so that part is easy— which might seem funny, because if i’m in singapore and i hate it and i won’t touch american music then what’s left? the answer is the false binarism of chinese period dramas, at least for me. the badly written ones are misogynistic and stupid and the better ones are less of those things, but regardless the world that emerges is clean-cut and easy to parse. there’s someone to root for and someone to hate. there’s a girl and a boy. there’s the comedy and the drama, the sheer thick drama, the music that signals to you precisely how to feel before the scene even starts going

try to jam a fifth culture transnational transgender they/them with 2 mental illness and 1 autoimmune disease into this world and it simply doesn’t work. and that’s kinda epic lolzers! it’s like watching high fantasy, or super hardcore sci-if. it both represents a simulacrum of the real world and is so far from the reality you know that you understand it as a hypothetical universe, one that disincludes you on principle. i exclude myself from the story and in doing so fangfei from moyuyunjian’s steely gaze becomes all the more important. i give so many shits and laugh and yell and spectate. but i am safe from the eyes of its inhabitants. if i entered the story it would break. so i sit outside of it, clapping by myself

in other news, we gave up on mysterious lotus casebook 16 episodes in. there are many character archetypes in these shows that i can no longer stand; the salacious sexy seductive supervillain lady is not necessarily one of them but the way they did miss ‘this man didn’t even Look at me when all men fall at my knees so i hated him’ ‘no one is allowed to steal buttchin from me’ jiao was way up there. surely a woman can have multiple personality traits and yet you would think from this drama that that is not at all true. and the strange harem that grew around li lianhua despite his absolute loser attitude— like i get it, he’s the gintoki of this show, that’s hot, but the way the women who were into him were written made me want to Eat Horse. it bothered me that di feisheng and lianhua’s homo as fuck dynamic was so intriguing and them + fang duobing was a winning trio but all the women in the show were written like complete fucking ass, and one of the big antagonists being a woman, the stakes throughout were not only lost to me but also Pissed Me Off. also, that case about the corpse flowers dragged on forever and all my pocky wilted

I Just Think, women deserve better in these damn stories. make them slutty as hell, sure, but make them other things too and i mean this in the most generous sense. slutty and proud. slutty and weird. slutty and oblivious. literally anything at all so they don’t come out cardboard flat from all angles. this is why i have a personal vendetta against the ditzy clueless female protagonist as well because if everything stems from the fact that she doesn’t know shit it’s like please someone Please tell her shit i’m on my hands and knees begging. give her more to chew on she’s dying of boredom over there

this is why i liked the so called antagonist of blossoms in adversity best (spoilers ahead). he was cruel as hell to huazhi and gu yanxi’s only parental figure. he was paranoid and selfish and lonely and craved a son’s love from the one person he couldn’t hold onto. in the end he is pushed further and further by huazhi, who won’t give in, to isolate yanxi from the people he loves and to lash out at those people as a way of punishing yanxi. and when he dies it’s because of his own distrust, his own negligent parenting, his absent cruelty from decades of insomnia and lack of faith in his people. but he cries for yanxi, and there’s something so human about that. to think of evil not as a first principle but rather an adjective for a verb that is set in motion by other events. to be honest, i haven’t seen such thoughtful writing in any chinese period drama before or after that and i strongly suspect i will never see such writing again in this genre but man, it was so fucking good (spoilers end).

in the meantime, i’ve dragged my mother to moyuyunjian/the double for the return casting of liu xiening and wang xingyue who are Eating so hard. they’ve got wang xingyue done up with the sluttiest makeup and liu xiening is breaking my heart with her pout and her Sassy Mean constitution and this is a revenge story, yes, but it’s a double revenge story. it’s a grief story. and fangfei is carrying more on her shoulders than lingbuyi imo, and doing so with much more grace too. her step mom’s a dick but she’s a smart, 5d chess playing dick who wears hot shades of green so i’m personally interested enough to keep watching (something lotus casebook DID NOT accomplish with their epic female antagonist…. mein gotte). and the princess too. unhinged as hell but god, so charismatic. and beautiful, with scary big eyes and the sweetest head tilt. fun fun fun! that’s fun character writing right there. the comedy might be too straightforward for my tastes but everything else is kind of hot and sexy And after the coming of age ceremony when jiangli appeared amidst the flowers i felt my throat close up even though we saw her for all of one (1) episode). i was like yes. they got me alright. i Care now

really that’s all that matters isn’t it. we want stories about people we care for. we want to give a shit. why else would we listen to the stories of other people. we are looking for us and the people we love in them

oh also moyuyunjian soundtrack goes hard as hell i love a little three step waltz. here’s a pic from the ‘gym’ for ur time. guten night

[dolorianwolf]

A tear in the membrane, allows the voices in