#idk which version to pick

[elliedafish]

Rewatching Little Women cause why not.

[kenmaiii]

after two years i finally draw the favorite

[akkivee]

i occasionally say that bat’s colours are an off shade from other characters’ colours and this is what i mean by that lol

[szaryherbatnik]

Just finished reading the wicked book

I see so many people saying that elphaba is a very inspiring character and that shes relatable to a lot of people, that her story is very important, that her story matters. And although its mostly said through the filter of the movie i think its even more important in context of the book. Elphaba being convinced that she never accomplished anything, that everything she tried to do she failed at. And yet so many people consider her inspiring. I havent yet watched the musical, i dont know how it changes the book (probably a lot) but i too think if elphaba as inspiring despite it all. Because she tried.

[mllenugget]

I have only one word and one word only : CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI CRI

"I intended to skip Purgatory 2 to catch up faster on VODs since I was told they were unrelated lore-wise But my biggest mistake was to vibe check all the new players - I was not expecting to completely fall head over heels for Team Capybara, hot damn I love them all so much ????" - Me, February 2024

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I took @sunshinetomioka's werewolf Guill headcanon and ran with it btw, credit to it

[yuriyuruandyuraart]

motorcycle sketch featuring cross!! >:)

[weskie]

hi first glove anon here. i feel like i started something LMAO i’m glad you all share my vision

anyway i have more thoughts. specifically about medfet wesker… wooooo!!

wesker who insists on “examinations” in the medical supply room, dons his blue vinyl gloves and pries your lips apart to look at your teeth and depresses your tongue with his fingers to watch your face take on a subtle expression of confusion. he moves onto your throat and makes palpitations there, across your chest (bonus for lingering touches on an ftm reader with top surgery scars!!) and down to your waist, pressing into your hip dips just a little too hard so that you wince and/or have some bruising later from where he was slightly rough about it.

and, if you’re being pliant enough, he might just have to look in some other areas, hmm? examine your thighs and calves for “injuries,” just taking the time to casually feel you up. never taking it as far as you’d like so that the rest of the team doesn’t get suspicious. URGHHH I COOKED HERE.

anon i can't believe you made me learn this about myself just now lmAOOO (/positive)

ALSO YOU HAD ME AT THE BIT ABOUT CHEST SCARS HALLELUJAH

no but i NEED to see a super detailed close up of his hands in exam gloves in the absolute worst way now. any color, but green in particular i feel would really accentuate the details of his hands very nicely, especially the bumps of his knuckles and maybe even a vein or two

[jq37]

Descendants: The Rise of Red is kind of a bizarre movie to talk about critically because, imo, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about it in the usual terms of good vs bad or enjoyable vs not enjoyable when the way more obvious tension is finished vs unfinished.

Because, more than any other movie I've ever seen, it does *not* read as a full movie. And I don't mean in a "this movie has a cliffhanger" kind of way. The Empire Strikes Back and Across the Spiderverse fit that description. They end on big dramatic cliffhangers that point to a resolution in the third installment.

But Rise of Red just sets all this stuff up and then...ends without concluding anything. It doesn't feel like the first movie in a trilogy (or duology). It feels like the first act of a two-act musical. It very specifically reminds me of the end of the first act of Into the Woods where all the main characters sing the song Ever After about how they all fixed their problems with magic and nothing bad will ever happen to them again and then the narrator ominously says "To be continued" before the curtain drops. But in Into the Woods you know there's a second act and this movie wasn't sold as the first act of a bigger story. Like sure, it has the, "You didn't think this was the end" tag at the end like all the other movies, but those movies were complete, self-contained stories even though they had sequels. This was NOT a full story. It's half of one story.

Like, if we're supposed to take this as a full story, there are so many bizarre choices:

Why did they make sure to mention that Cinderella and Charming fell in love at the ball at the top if it wasn't meant to set up Back to the Future style, "Oh no, I accidentally got my mom banned from the ball so she's not gonna fall in love with Dad and I won't be born" shenanigans?

Why did Maddox very pointedly have that bit about "you could lose your mom completely" if that was never going to come into play? Red never did anything to endanger Bridget or endanger her own birth so it doesn't make sense as a warning in that way.

Why was there all this focus on this Carrie on prom night moment for Bridget if we LITERALLY NEVER SAW CASTLECOMING? Why dance around this moment and talk about it all cloak and dagger with no specificity if they weren't building up to some big reveal that it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed? And like, they leaned in HARD with making Bridget the nicest, sweetest, cotton candy princess as a teen so I need WAY more than, "She got pranked by known bullies she's been enduring with a smile very handily up to this point" to buy that she went from that to "murderous dictator". And even if she did become murderous, I find it insanely hard to believe that she'd include her best and only friend on the list of people she wants to suffer unless there was a betrayal. I find it INSANE that there wasn't a falling out scene at any point in this movie with how thickly they were laying on the admiration and camaraderie.

(Note: And adult Cinderella def has guilty vibes re: the Queen at orientation. Which I know I'm not imagining because it's literally spelled out in the Jr Novelization!)

Before the time travel element of the movie started, I thought they were going for something like they go to the past and realize that Bridget was bullied not by the VKs but by the spoiled royals, and Ella ends up joining in the bullying once she gets with Charming, betraying Bridget and justifying her whole "Love Ain't It" philosophy. Or Ella ditching her at the last minute to be with Charming meaning she has to deal with the monster prank alone and it was the being alone rather than the prank itself that hurt her (though that is NOT a good enough reason to go all off with their heads on your subjects). The fact that, as far as we know right now, it literally was just a relatively mild and reversible prank that caused all of this is just, such flat storytelling, you know?

But! All of this makes way more sense if this is meant to be the first act of a single contained story. And I don't wanna be all "Pepe Silvia, secret good 4th episode of Sherlock" about this but I did see this picture:

Which seems to indicate that this was written as a Part One. Which, if so, idk why they wouldn't advertise it that way but whatever. The point is, if that's the case then it means that we're potentially in bad pacing territory rather than straight up bad storytelling territory. Because this isn't a bad place to be halfway through your story:

The heroes, warned that time travel is dangerous, have gone back in time to change the heart of a brutal tyrant before she can stage a coup. They seemingly succeed in their mission and when they come home, everything is great! But then, the side effects of time travel start to catch up with them. Chloe realizes that, in breaking the vase, she prevented her mother from going to the ball and falling in love with her dad (who was conspicuously absent from the final scene btw) which means she's starting to be forgotten and erased from the timeline. And Red realizes that though this new version of her mom is as sweet and kind as the teen she once met, she's a complete stranger to her (fulfilling the Hatter's warning that she could lose her mom completely). So they have to go back in time once more to make sure the Ella and Charming fall in love again, perhaps at the cost of whatever bad thing that happened to Bridget happening again and bringing back the original version of her future self. But, now with more context of how her mom became that way, Red can now talk to her mother and persuade her to give people another chance.

Boom, that gives us time to go back and hit everything we haven't yet hit. We can pay off the time travel tropes that were set up but not explored. We can go to Castlecoming which feels so obviously set up to be the centerpiece of this story (like, come on, Back to the Future literally does the school dance thing. This is Time Travel Storytelling 101). We can actually get info about what the prank was and why it affected Bridget so completely.

(Note: This is a side thing but it really strikes me as so crazy that Bridget would so SUCH a big 180 here. Like, I know the Queen of Hearts is a silly, goofy, campy villain, but she straight up murders people and there's no way to get around that if we're taking her out of the surreal story she comes from and putting her in a (comparatively) grounded story. If I wasn't doing a betrayal plot, I would make the twist that the spell that turned Bridget into a "monster" didn't just have a physical effect, it had a mental effect and it magically twisted her personality to be the way it is now. So they broke the physical half of the curse, but neglected the other half and it's been festering the whole time, turning her as evil as she was sweet. Because like, a simple physical transformation isn't that big of a deal to have such heavy security--Bridget made cupcakes with a transformative effect and that was totally fine. I'm not saying that that's what's gonna be the case. I just think it would be an explanation that makes sense for why she changed so crazy much that makes more sense than a simple prank or even a betrayal. Her mom wasn't even evil! How did she go from zero to murder without even an evil mom to push her onto the path? But I'm super digressing right now.)

(Note #2: OK, one last thing. The trap on the book presumably would have hit the VK's and trapped them in Merlin's office regardless of what Chloe and Red did, right? That's like, net zero influence on the timeline. I genuinely can't tell if that's a straight up plot hole or set up to be like, "Oh no. Actually when she said that she was turned into a monster in front of everyone it was meant in a less literal way." Like she was just made to look bad and that was the real thing that pushed her over the edge. Like idk. It really feels like the only thing they really did that would change the timeline was get Ella banned from the dance and presumably out of the way where she couldn't hurt Bridget. OK NOW I'm done.)

Anyway, my point is that this is not how I would have structured my movie and I think this was a super weird way to go into the second era of Descendants movies, but they can still tell a complete story if that's their plan. I'm genuinely really curious to see if this pans out to be a fairly competently told story that just happens to be split over two movies or a complete fumbling of the narrative bag because it could really be either at this point and it's fascinating to me.

[b4kuch1n]

IT ARRIVED IT ARRIVED IT ARRIVED

DESPITE EVERYTHING DESPITE MY CHRONICALLY CURSED INTERNATIONAL MAIL PROBLEM I AM STILL THE ZONE RPG

[sieglinde-freud]

ok i think im done i think ive finally done it. i have completed the awakening ship chart with the second gen. except for nah sorry nah. yes i do love rarepair hell thanks for asking im never leaving

[coquelicoq]

good morning can i show you guys the christmas card my little sister wrote me in french (she does not know any french)

joyeux Noël, j'espère que vous comprenez ce que je dis compte tenu de la fiabilité de Google Translate. Jespère qu'à l'avenir nous voir plus de deux fois par an. Je ne sais pas vraiment quoi dire d'autre, alors joyeux Noël et j'espère que papa t'a offert. Profitez également des autres choses que je mets sur la carte au lieu de vous ècrire un essai complet.

and then she wrote me a little crossword and a "connect the language to its way of saying 'merry christmas'" game 😭

[jaskefer]

Obsessed with the idea of Extraordinary Things being a back and forth between Jaskier and Radovid, with Jaskier trying to draw him out in the first verse, and Radovid finally answering him in the second.

Cause like, with Radovid, Jaskier meets someone who he can't fully read properly. He knows there's something under the front of a drunken, bumbling prince, but he doesn't know him well enough yet to be certain as to what.

So, he tests the waters a bit. throws out a line to see if Radovid will take it—and he does. A little bit. But it's so interesting to me, because it doesn't just feel like Jaskier is trying to nail down Radovid's truth in this verse; it feels like he's injecting elements of his own mask into it, as well.

"Keep your words on ice, your gaze lights the fire. They say 'keep on playing nice,' but I have no desire. Why waste our words when lips were made for extraordinary things? It's not a want, it's a need, it is paying no heed to what others say to sing."

This is Jaskier's read of Radovid as he knows him so far: a man hiding more complex wants beneath the veneer of a drunken party boy. But it's also Jaskier admitting that he knows this about Radovid because he wears the exact same mask himself.

Much like how Jaskier and Ciri speak through Geralt and Yennefer in order to process their own feelings about them later in the season, Jaskier sings through himself in order to comprehend who Radovid is. Jaskier is using the performative persona he's crafted for himself in an attempt to coax Radovid out of his.

All of it leads into the main intention of this song: "The greatest songs are made up of unspoken words of love. Of them, I've had enough. with you, I am enough." I am tired of having to put up a front. I want to be understood. I think you understand me. Prove me right.

And Radovid sees what Jaskier is doing. He comments on Jaskier's ability to see people for who they are and not who they pretend to be. But there's still more he wants to understand. This still feels like a game, in a way.

It's only after Radovid sees the brutality of Dijkstra and Philippa up close, watches them orchestrate the assassination of the queen and threaten to incriminate him if he doesn't fall in line, that he then grasps the vulnerability in Jaskier's lyrics. Jaskier is also caught between multiple conflicting desires, that of his loyalty to Geralt/Yen/Ciri, and that of his work as the Sandpiper & how said work is backed by his continued commitment to Redanian Intelligence. That internal conflict and the desire to escape it is also highlighted in the song's first verse ("they say keep on playing nice, but i have no desire"). Only after all of this, when true fear begins to take over and the game stops being fun, does Radovid truly begin to truly understand Jaskier.

And so, he seeks him out. And he responds.

“Drop the sweet disguise, your heart’s beating too loud. The fairytales and little lies can’t drown out all the sound.” You were right. I do understand you. I know what you really want, because we're the same. You can’t hide it behind a façade of a song and a story and a persona.

“Take this heart and break this heart for extraordinary things.” I don't know what will become of this, or us. I still don't fully know if we can trust each other. But no one has ever seen me in the way that you have.

It's not a want, it's a need. With you, I am enough.

[keroinnie]

hmmm the physical album discourse im seeing on twitter right now sure is interesting..... don't think i like it actually

[keepthemacramesecret]

a funny thing that happens with classic literature sometimes is that you can read a book 3 times without having ever re-read it and also without ever reading the actual novel

[nyxypoo]

live laugh love my local library

[secretlystephaniebrown]

I think it's really funny how in fiction names are just weird.

Like when authors try to pick names for a baby they go back to a family tree and deep symbolism and have citations

in real life people go "yeah I flipped through a baby name book and I thought that this sounded good with the last name"