#im probably not allowed to talk in the tags like this

[lunarriviera]

What are your thoughts on the last ep of under the skin...that cant be shen yi right...im seeing a lot of twin theories but thats a weird plot twist honestly 😅

to answer this question i guess i have to get up off the floor first, where i have been lying facedown and motionless since uts2 ended over a week ago. two weeks ago? yesterday? today? i don't know anymore i've lost all track of time, who are you? where are we?

oh right—the s2 ending. you must mean this scene, right? what a great way to end things! du cheng, happy, walking to meet a group of friends at his birthday party! truly wrapped up the whole drama, and left us in such a heartwarming place with our favorite characters!

...oh you didn't mean that ending? you mean there's another one?

[mindless screaming behind the cut AS WELL AS SPOILERS]

[and this winds up being about all of s2 as well as the final tag, OOPS]

so okay listen before i can even address this without the mindless screaming, i have to level with y'all here: s2 was rough on me. there are only like three du cheng stans in all of anglophone cdrama fandom and i'm probably two of them ( @wannings-wontons is the other one, thank god for her). i've written eleventyleven fics from his pov so i am ferally protective of my big stupid hot cop son. this season put him through the goddamn wringer and for my taste there were just a few too many scenes of du cheng looking like he was about to burst into tears while shen yi was smiling winsomely, for all the world as if he were not the one personally causing his captain to experience devastating mortal agony. allow me to demonstrate.

in the driver's seat: unspeakable anguish. literally can't talk.

in the passenger seat: hey nice air conditioner! guess what i have a new friend! i spent the night at his place, talking about infinity and human potential! in a few more episodes he'll be a murder suspect!

(i'm getting to the cliffhanger, believe me i'm getting there, no really i am, we just have to spend a minute dealing with the divorce arc first)

because, while i absolutely adore angst bambi (as @whomst-art-thou-whomst-whomst has immortalized him), and thanks to @elenothar have firmly adopted him as a most beloved emotional support twink (not least because i suspect tan jianci is himself kind of a genius; no triple threat should be this good of an actor), i also honestly not infrequently this season wanted to drag shen yi into the men's room by his pretty hair and flush his pretty little head down the [redacted] until he came to his pretty little senses. because while later in the arc he clearly is, you know, attempting that deep-cover thing, and has to reject du cheng to his face, right in front of Evil Eugenicist Art Critic Weasel Man, in order to gain Weasel Moriarty's trust, etc.—

there are also a bunch of times when du cheng is visibly upset and miserable and in genuine pain, and shen yi just laughs. literally laughs at him. like tan jianci what are you doing, do you want the audience to dislike you? how are you trying to play this?? are we supposed to think, wow shen yi sure knows what he's doing? are we supposed to think he suddenly has the world's worst taste in men? because long before Weasel Man smashes a vase and snaps at his lab assistant and possibly kills someone and has assorted tantrums which start to tip off shen yi that maybe his new bestie is kind of a bag of dicks—long before that starts happening? shen yi just likes that guy. he LIKES him. enough to quote whitman to him (fang kaiyi you take his queer name out your mouth); enough to stay up all night painting the stars with him and we don't know what all else. enough to hang out in his lab for days on end, listening to junk science and pretending to understand the human genome and just what. shen yi. WHAT. he's literally a Bond villain styled like an asymmetric reptile—all this, just because he's tall? and he's gone to the symphony a few times? what, because he negged your painting, and that turned you on? i shouldn't have said any of that, but i did; and now i refuse to take it back. because inside me are two wolves, and they sound like this:

one wolf has been extremely online for many years, and thinks she's very hip and chill and jaded. this wolf talks in memes and laughs at herself, and she's like: “haha fun drama! Solving Crimes Through Art! lol i can't believe this turgid love song playing over a romantic montage, wow it's so stupid.” and also: “lmao divorce arc so hilarious, WELCOME HOME CHEATER lol get it, good joke right?” and: “oh my god why is there another pointless cliffhanger, they will NEVER GET a s3 what are they thinking. this scene is therefore not canon and can be safely ignored, just like the s1 tag turned out to be a ~~~dream."

but the other wolf is lying motionless in her barrow in the darkness flat on her stomach in mouldering leaves and mud head resting on crossed paws staring into the night with her old yellow eyes and she says they stabbed my son and left him alone in his blood and the last thing he saw was a cruel face worn by the boy he has come to love a boy standing at the end of the alley looking down at his phone who then moves past him and keeps on walking

and then, you know. then i lie on the floor for a week! which is fine, i'm an extremely psychologically healthy person who has certainly not at all outsourced her entire emotional well-being to an imaginary public safety bureau criminal investigator on the coast of southeast china.

so what do i think about the cliffhanger? here is what i think about it; and again, sorry for the hatchet job on shen yi but it was relevant:

1. i do think it's a dream, yes. they've already played that game with us—we waited two years to find out who was carving up shen yi's creepy murder-red self-portrait and whomst should it be but…nobody! just shen yi having nightmares about his future fling, apparently. (notice, too, how fang kaiyi GRABBED that craft knife, which shen yi had deliberately left on the easel, and didn't even ask why it was there. he might be tall and elegant and have good taste but he's nowhere near as smart as you are, shen yi. do better.)

2. whose nightmare is it, though: shen yi's, or du cheng's? remember that the first time du cheng meets fang kaiyi, he tells shen yi, "he reminds me of someone: the old you." (and shen yi laughs merrily, even though nothing about that is funny, either the observation or du cheng's immediate mistrust and jealousy. TAN JIANCI WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING). then, later, on the precinct rooftop, after the case is all over, shen yi confesses yet again that there's something in him that's not altogether good, that he has quote "demons," and that if he hadn't met du cheng, he might have gone down some vague unspecified dark path. not quite sure how a portrait artist was gonna become a mass murderer or whatever, but okay i guess. there was something off about shen yi 1.0, and du cheng could see it even a decade ago and he didn't like it then any more than he does now.

given all that, then, the nightmare is probably shen yi's. he's prone to them anyway, and he knows now how badly he's hurt du cheng, and that he came dangerously close to, well, getting into bed with the enemy. i don't think it's even until fang kaiyi is so limpidly nonchalant about zhou shanshan's death that shen yi's inner moral compass comes shrieking back into play (and then it really does; shen yi who never raises his voice out there just shouting that man down).

there's one argument to be made for the case that it's du cheng's nightmare, though, which is the way that he looks up at the camera at the very end of the shot, and laughs. shen yi 1.0 is standing too far away for that to be his point-of-view. so who's standing over du cheng? and who would he laugh at, in recognition, like that? shen yi 2.0, presumably (or 3.5? not sure what version we're on anymore).

either way here's my final observation, and then i swear to god i'll shut up, before the shen yi stans come for me like maenads. i was chatting with @wannings-wontons and she said something that absolutely blindsided me, which is that the cliffhanger literalizes the arc of the series: shen yi did, in fact, metaphorically stab du cheng in s2. why else would either of them dream that? du cheng being badly, even fatally wounded by arrogant young artist shen yi is precisely what happened during the divorce arc. and their reconciliation was so heavily censored as to be, to some of us anyway, unpersuasive. (two cops, talking on a rooftop all night! five feet apart cause they're not gay!) as @wannings-wontons said: "the last scene just reflects how badly hurt he was. and we're left to decide whether he'll recover."

so which is worse, dreaming that your lover stabs you? or dreaming that something twisted inside you stabs the man you love?

tldr, shen yi doesn't need a soap opera evil twin: he's his own evil twin, and he knows this. and what is more, du cheng knows it now too. if there's ever a third season, which seems completely impossible to me, the writers have to know that they have NOT fixed this.

fortunately, we have something censored production companies don't have, and it's called fanfiction. so bring on the episode codas, my friends. bring on the long painful conversations and the shouted arguments (du cheng never even got to yell, except once in a parking lot because he was frantic). bring on the tender reconciliations that can only come after those blowout knock-down-drag-out fights, and are therefore real and grounded, not stilted, wooden, woefully inadequate mockeries of reunion. let people throw furniture and cry and try to explain and plead and confess and even, sure, why not, grab the other person and kiss him breathless, and say I don't want to do this without you, say don't put me through that ever again, say but this isn't enough and I need something different, say okay then let's figure that out together, say i'm sorry i hurt you, you're the most important person to me and that's the last thing i ever want to do.

it's up to us, not to leave them there in the alley like that. but the good news is if it's work, it's only work. and it's our work to do.

[dailydikke]

day 55 🤫🤫🤫

[kaiserouo]

sometimes its weird to think of ordis as ordan karris

[r0semultiverse]

Hey, Jake & Jack fans, is this anything?

Both men imprisoned (literal & metaphorical).

Both offered an out from their current predicament by an outside force (arguably in the case of Brain Ghost Dirk).

Both have loose ties to Lord English visually.

Yellow initial glow & Gamzee involvement too.

Sometimes a guy just needs to explode (same pose too).

Both dual wielding weapons.

That same said weapon type (for Jack Noir) having killed Jane Crocker.

It's really looking like Jake is going to do her in.

I would also like to point out that we've had interactions involving these three (Jane, Jake, and Brain Ghost Dirk) before that consisted of similar topics & themes.

Brain Ghost Dirk implying that he's just there as moral support, a manifestation of Jake's powers, and as a coping mechanism. Jane also talking about ruling an empire with him while talking down to him, similar to how she saw and/or still sees him in Beyond Canon's Candy timeline. Jake also being uncertain about doing anything to harm her despite all the bad things she's doing.

Brain Ghost Dirk going away tells us that Jake's more hopeful than he's ever been. This is the moment where he is the most sure of his decisions than he's ever been in his life, whatever those decisions may be in regards to Jane and how to handle this situation.

He is probably going to shoot Jane down, quite literally. I would also argue that after all this time, the lad isn't beating the Lord English allegations. We might as well have a parallel of him killing Jane much like how Jack Noir killed her right before he got possessed by Lil Cal & given some of Lord English's immense power.

Alternatively maybe we'll get to see what the power of hope or hope bullets can do to someone whose done so much wrong & come so far off the deep end in terms of moral wrongdoings. Maybe with every shot that hits her, she'll begin to be swayed to the side of good & start to self-reflect.

I'm still not fully convinced that Gamzee actually cured Tavros' peanut allergy, I mean just look at the panel.

This could absolutely be interpreted as Jake injecting his hope power into the epipen and by proxy injecting both his power & the epipen into his son! If younger Jake is strong enough to defeat Grimbark Jade, then adult Jake might just be strong enough to defeat a peanut allergy is all I'm saying! In fact, now that I'm rambling about it, this seems like the more likely outcome is Jake's hope power swaying or (in the very least) confusing Jane mid-fight. Hope bullets, they would look cool & would be pretty strong!

The power of believing in others & wanting things to change can be a strong tool indeed, Mister English.

If there's one person who still believes in changing Jane's mind (or bringing her back to proper canonicity depending on how you interpret the recent lore), it would be Jake English, the believer.

Okay, maybe this is something! Tally ho!

[skeletalheartattack]

have you posted about gelato before :o ?

honestly, every mention ive made of Gelato in the past month or so has just been through the tags of some posts ive reblogged on here, it's only been until now that ive gotten around to showing him off!

this is Gelato, a Flamingo/Secretarybird mix that my friend @meetthehelper put together!

for a while, i've been wanting to figure out a bird fursona for myself, and i wanted one that had a similar silhouette to that of Scratch (i.e. Scratch & Grounder), and the bird that seemed to make the most sense to me was a flamingo. it was Helper's idea to mix him with another bird species, and i really like what she ended up with :)!

[blyszczopies]

using one of the goofiest photos of pusia as a reference image

[kawaiianimeredhead]

Learned today I'm basically the cause of a 2 or 3yo boy who went around making fart sounds with his mouth saying he was breathing like a turtle and I think I'll be riding this high for days tbh

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

**Spoilers for episode 30 of dndads**

i'm taking that last sentence so literally rn "i guess i'll make myself at home. i cast fireball" i've had a hc that scarys parents would fight at home n stuff for a while. this solidifies my hc damn

[dizzybevvie]

For the choose violence ask game, would you mind doing 3 and/or 24 for ace attorney or httyd?

AAAA YEASS >:))) HTTYD

3. Worst take you've seen

OH GODDD I. WOW SO MANY. i think the question specifies tumblr but im in a httyd discord server (which is super inactive now but super duper thrived in early 2023) and the amount of strange people in there was wiiild

I remember seeing someone who absolutely HATED Astrid with their whole being, like made an OC to replace her etc etc, but like just COMPLETELY missed the point of her character.

Idk if I ever interacted with them directly but one of the main reasons they hated her is because in HTTYD2 when Hiccup becomes chief she smiles. Baffling. Like, she's obviously very upset Stoick is dead, but she's smiling because she's proud and staying strong for Hiccup. she's not "happy that Hiccup is getting the throne". i remember thinking it was so weird specifically because almost anything negative you can say about Astrid, you can say about Snotlout. but they had no problem with him. figures

24. Topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

oh godddd okay uhhh. i dont super-duper interact with the httyd fandom space outside of tumblr so i dont really knowwww. The Hidden World and the light fury is always crazy but idk.

The Snotcup debate is always fun /sar. I understand that they are not CANONICALLY cousins in the movie series but i truly just cannot see them as anything else theyre so cousins to me. i do NOT like Snotcup even a little bit.

Dagcup too actually? Dagur calling Hiccup "brother" of course but the age difference is the most concerning bit to me LMAO. I'm more of a Riders/Defenders of Berk enjoyer, so in my head theyre like, 15 and 20. not for me. (Although in my experience Dagur fans are often the biggest freaks sorry sorry sorry sorry)

I havent seen bad ship discourse in httyd fandom tbh but im sure it exists especially on twitter 💀.

[autisticlee]

the whole "you shouldn't identify as X, don't form an identity when you can't/don't know yet, you're too young, what if/you might change your mind!" etc etc. it's so silly when you think about it. what's wrong with changing your mind anyway? why did we all decide that gender/sexuality identity has to be static and can never change? why did we decide that it's a bad thing to change? because the old generation tells us change is bad? because they (mostly conservatives) want to conserve "the good old days/the way things are supposed to be" in their minds???

WHO CARES if someone says they're gay then realizes 5 years later they're bi. WHO CARES if someone says they're a girl and realizes after trying it out they're not. let people explore who they are until they figure it out even if they go through every lable available to them! maybe none fit and they make up their own! who cares! who cares if they change it every year for the rest of their lives! humans change. that's the only constant about us! why is it a bad thing, even taboo, to accept change and exploration within sexuality and gender specifically?

there's always so much shame that comes with someone realizing they were wrong, changing as a person, or discovering something new about themselves. i've seen people afraid to explore themselves more or afraid to talk about a change in identity, for fear of the queer community pushing back on them the same way they're afraid to come out to the cishets in their life who are trans/homophobic. that's just not fair that their own community can become hostile towards them, too. being in a closet within a bigger closet essentially. everyone is always told to figure it all out first before claiming an identity, because then you're locked in it for life, apparently. you can't change your mind after that. why though? what's the point of that really? why can't we embrace fluidity a bit more? why can't we accept that humans do change all the time? why is making and trying to prove that these identities are static/unchanging/innate the only way to validate them? why can't they just, I don't know, BE VALID. without reason. why must we jump through hoops to be valid when we should just automatically be valid because we are human. stop letting the cishets gatekeep everything, leading to us gatekeeping each other!

I am sometimes very hesitant to talk about my own identity. I identified as a gay/biromantic trans guy for like idk 8-10 years? transitioned and everything. then like a year or two ago, I realized/decided that doesn't fit right anymore. now i'm a nonbinary, but also kinda fluid, aroace person. sometimes I don't like to talk about that because of the stigma behind changing your gender/sexuality identities. but you know what. i'll talk about it anyway and people have to learn to accept it.

what were the consequences and bad parts about changing my mind/identity like that? none. absolutely none. (outside of people being weird about it for no reason) but the benefits are feeling more comfortable with myself, and that's no one else's business.

[olymphianblood]

ok guys its not funny anymore when is d&p hard lauching im starting to getting anxious /hj

[elegyofthemoon]

i kinda forgot how mochizuki does expressions so well that they speak more than texts in an image

esp for someone like oz who has identity crisis going on for him that he doesn't really care who he is as a person so long as it makes others happy (the way later he could care less if people see him as jack the hero rather than just oz)

but the shock in oz's expression as though he had been read so clearly by sharon's words.

also idk it never crossed my mind while i was rereading, but i love that this is just in chapter 2 -- that things would go bad if oz should ever lose sight of himself

bc that's the gist of oz's whole character arc, inching away from just being whatever people want him to be, shying away from his emotions, and accepting himself and what it means to be himself - emotions and past - alike.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

While we're here, I just want to add an example of a good response to Harris' video.

In the first half of the video, Harris briefly mentions a creator called Lukeypoo (who now goes by Luke Stephens) who had plagiarised Harris' Bloodborne review, and his response at the time was to deny it, signal to his alt right buddies and insult Harris.

After the video came out, Luke Stephens made a post on his community page regarding it:

For those, who can't see the screenshots, it reads:

A video went up on YouTube last night that showed something I did 6 years ago in early 2017, of which I'm very ashamed. I've talked about it on stream plenty since then and try to be very open about it, but I know a lot of people haven't been watching me since 2017 or have not heard me discuss this before. I don't want to hide from my mistakes or deflect, so very plainly here's what happened:

I was just starting on YouTube and I ripped off a phenomenal video on Bloodborne. It was a fantastic video by hbomberguy and after finding it through a Reddit post I tried to take his 1.5 hour masterpiece and make my own suckier version at around 7 minutes. I copied the premise, jokes, structure, and then pretended like it was all just a coincidence that they were so similar. I was a 19 year old idiot who thought it didn't matter because "he's a bigger creator so it's fine" and "it's just the internet." When I was rightly called out for copying his video I dodged, lied, and even attacked and insulted the appearance of those holding me to account, including hbomberguy himself. I copied someone's video, in parts word-for-word, and I pretended like *I* was the victim and *they* were being unreasonable. Unbelievable. There is no question at all: I was in the wrong, fully.

Let me be very clear: I whole heartedly disown who I was back then and what I did. Politically, religiously, and even morally/ethically I was a person that I hate today. I was an extremist, a bully, a religious zealot, and above all, a prick. This event sparked a spiral in my personal life that I didn't document online, but that has led me to who I am today. Someone who tries very hard to respect my fellow creators, audience, and to uphold a high ethical standard for myself. I strive every day to be a better man for myself, my family and kids, and for the community around me. And that's why I'm writing this, because I don't think we should hide from our mistakes or pretend they didn't happen. I screwed up, big time, and I stole the hard work of an incredibly talented creator and for that I'm incredibly sorry. I was 19, hard headed, and above all arrogant and unwilling to acknowledge I had screwed up. It took a couple years after that before I could openly admit what I had actually done, and that it took that long is all the more shameful.

I don't expect a response or certainly forgiveness, but for what it's worth, I am truly sorry for everything, @hbomberguy

For the last 6 years I've been working my butt off to be someone I can be proud of being and I hope you all can see that the man I am today is not the shameful excuse of a person I was back then.

I've never watched a video or stream by Luke Stephens so I can't attest as to his content, but this is one of the best responses I've seen to any kind of accusation, and so I lean towards believing him to be a better man than he was six years.

I thinks it's important to highlight the good response/s to Harris' video, to remind ourselves that plagiarism is not such an immoral action that from which you can't redeem yourself (though in Somerton's case, I'm less sure of that) if you take accountability for your actions, and to remember that in most cases, we should give people space to grow and become better.

The swiftness and brutality of Hbomberguy’s complete evisceration of James Somerton’s career cannot be overstated.

[itsalwaysdark]

sry for never using paragraph breaks in my posts. Theyre putting me down tomorrow if that makes you feel any better

[conflictedkismet]

love reblogging Ester's more emotional posts. Surprise! You get an hour or so worth of this poor puppet struggling with themselves

[linddzz]

Does mage Viktor's reality-hopping and 'only you can show me this' line imply that dozens if not hundreds of other Jayces have done what our Jayce did and end up there on that slope hearing the same thing from him? Did the Viktor that succeeded and lost everything, lost his own Jayce, keep getting to meet new Jayces one by one, allowing himself a small modicum of wistful joy in getting to see Jayce living and breathing again if only for a short time before he sends them back? talk to me here

Not only is it implied, we for sure see at least 8 (if my count is right) times Viktor has saved Jayce as a child, including the current one. You see them flash through and each time, he gave Jayce a different runestone

(gifs by @hextecht)

Since his phrasing was "all timelines, in all possibilities" it's pretty safe speculation that Viktor has been at this for way more than 8 rounds. We don't know if he's tried messing with other points of the timeline or if any other Jayces got as far as the our Jayce did when he reached the center of Wizard Viktor's hellscape (and I made such a distressed noise when the clouds parted and I realized the only beautiful place left, the center of the storm, the oasis, is where Jayce got assimilated).

The general consensus is that this is most likely the first time it worked, because Ekko used the rune Jayce had been given (the "acceleration rune" as Ekko calls it in S2E7) to make the time travel Z-drive that he cranks up to "break reality" levels before chucking it at Viktor's head and knocking that dork off enough for Jayce's "power of love" gamble to actually get through to him.

(I also have the opinion that Wizard Viktor is not going to stop here. He's got nothing but fields of dreamless solitude for him, this IS his project and he's probably going to keep trying to refine the process across timelines until some kinda multiverse cops show up like "dude. Fucking quit it!")

And OH BOY can I sure as hell talk about the way Viktor looks at Jayce over the top of the Jayce he destroyed!!!!

(gif by @glassrunner)

Look at him. LOOK AT HIM. His expression is already wistful and pained as he turns, but you can see him exhale with the breath knocked out of him. his eyelids actually flutter. He softens, he's struck. He looks like he's barely able to keep himself from crying in that moment where he not only looks at Jayce, but lets himself be seen by Jayce in return.

And which is more heartbreaking? That this is the first time Jayce got this far, the first time Viktor had to finally properly look at him after so many tries?

Or has this played out over and over for him? Has he looked over like this time and time again, and every time it takes his breath away? Subjecting himself to this repeatedly, and every. single. time. he's hit with the most classic doomed romance line

(Im holding myself BACK from rambling yet again about how Actually Deranged it is for Wizard Viktor to be doing this but @avelera and I talk about him being a fucked up little guy so much that I need to consider just having a wizard Viktor tag lmaooo but for more Wizard Viktor rambling enjoy

Wizard Viktor doesn't care about saving the world, he's just making sure Jayce and himself are intertwined

How many times has Wizard Viktor had to watch this himbo yeet himself into Pretty Hippy Viktor's cult?

Me giggling and kicking my feet in the air over Wizard Viktor being a control freak egomaniac about Jayce )