#im just rambling a bit here

[clytemnestraenjoyer]

Can I admit I didn't like house of names solely because there was no pylades

[the27percent]

[thinking about just ati dealing with weird, weird thoughts that they are just kind of trying to .. keep themself moving and busy or .. active with other activities to kind of avoid.

but every time they do run into a specific person - it gets poked at. and they are not sure how to feel about it - making them grimace and just be like what the hell is this. imagine this happening over long periods of time and so every time when atieno thinks.. ay maybe i'll have a chance to not think about that for a while and settle into their other routines - this comes and their just like.. damn it.

do i even have the time or reason to focus on this .. what ]

[crowkip]

yeehaw, baby!

[dreamsy990]

TELEMACHUS AND ANTINOUS. FINALLY

[welcometoteyvat]

"Come on. Everyone's waiting for you."

[swordmaid]

brienne but she's wearing 1949 cocteau's beauty and the beast inspired fit!!! this is the inspo pic i used if ur curious.

gonna be posting more of this redesign thing (and also jaime's ver) some time in the future but i just wanted to share this one <3

[willyhoos]

this is my favorite scene in the game because its just italy trying to make things as confusing and frightening as possible for reasons that end up benefiting NO ONE in the end

[buttercups-revenge]

!Long post because I DO love writing about how unhinged Snow is and how he loves shooting himself in the foot—

Remember in Catching Fire when Snow just APPEARS in Katniss’ house to threaten her before the victory tour like the ghost of hunger games past?

Knowing now his obsession with Covey girls and not loving their partners, these lines are a helluva lot more impactful.

(“Peeta. How is the love of your life?” he (Snow) asks.

“Good,” I say.

“At what point did he realize the exact degree of your indifference?” he asks, dipping his cookie in his tea.

“I’m not indifferent,” I say.

“But perhaps not as taken with the young man as you would have the country believe,” he says.

“Who says I’m not?” I say.

“I do,” says the president. “And I wouldn’t be here if I were the only person who had doubts. How’s the handsome cousin?” (Catching Fire, 7))

Snow openly states that he DOES NOT believe that Katniss is capable of actually loving Peeta. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s because of his bizarro obsession with Lucy Gray).

Meanwhile, she has risked her life MANY times to save Peeta, thinks about his dreamy eyelashes, and the biggest reason she does not think about him romantically is BECAUSE of the situation that Snow has put them in!!!

(“I want to tell him that he’s (Peeta’s) not being fair…That I can’t explain how things are with Gale because I don’t know myself....That if I do have feelings for him (Peeta), it doesn’t matter because I’ll never be able to afford the kind of love that leads to a family, to children. And how can he? How can he after what we’ve just been through?” (The Hunger Games, 373))

Snow asks about Gale because he remembers Billy Taupe, and sees Katniss’ indecision around him as infidelity toward Peeta. He is MAD projecting. Even if Katniss WAS as deeply obsessed with Peeta like she pretends to be, I doubt that Snow would recognize it.

Further, when Katniss tours 8 in Mockingjay, people in the Districts ask her especially about Peeta (“Despite his controversial interview with Caesar, many ask about Peeta, assure me that they know he was speaking under duress.” (Mockingjay, 81). PEOPLE IN THE DISTRICTS BELIEVE THEIR LOVE STORY IS REAL. Maybe not all of them, but enough that INJURED rebels are insisting to Katniss that they know he is being tortured, and know how hard it must be for her. Even THEY are able to recognize her love is real.

In projecting his shit onto Katniss, Snow has prevented her from realizing her actual love for Peeta, because he emphasizes her need to PERFORM rather than to feel love. And he emphasizes this BECAUSE he STILL does not understand how love really works, only how to manipulate and control. If Katniss had more space and time, (and if a DISGUSTING AWFUL OLD FASCIST MAN wasn’t OBSESSED with her needing to perform love toward Peeta), there is a good chance that she would have figured out her love for Peeta faster and more organically!!!

ADDITIONALLY (I do so love slam dunking on coriobimbam): the fact that snow makes it seem like (or genuinely BELIEVES) their stunt with the berries is THE thing that causes the revolution is so telling to me.

It is the LOVE that Katniss and Peeta have for each other that led them to take the berries in the first place:

(“No, you can’t kill yourself,” I say. I’m on my knees, desperately plastering the bandage back onto his wound.

“Katniss,” he says. “It’s what I want.”

“You’re not leaving me here alone,” I say. Because if he (Peeta) dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena trying to think my way out. (The Hunger Games, 343))

BEFORE she thinks about outsmarting the gamemakers, BEFORE she thinks of revolution, she is DESPERATE to save Peeta. The people in the Districts aren’t seeing the BERRIES as the rebellion, they’re seeing the love that these two have, DESPITE the horrible situation they are in (the situation that SNOW HAS PUT THEM IN), as the revolution. They see that these two act OUT OF LOVE, not out of maliciousness, and THAT is what inspires them to rebel.

AND SNOW DOESN’T GET IT!!!!!!! His (any fascist’s?) inability to understand love, to understand compassion and self-sacrifice, hell maybe even just FRIENDSHIP is what leads to his downfall.

TLDR: snow ‘s inability to understand love and his NEED to project his issues (in an UN-FUCKING-HINGED manner) onto Katniss and Peeta are what led to his downfall.

[theunconcernedembalmer]

Purple sop purple sop purple so

[meamiki]

Happy Anniversary In Stars and Time!! Have some Friend Quest based drawings :D

(These have specific quote picks related to them! And there's also a long ramble on why I like those specific quotes below if interested)

(And by long, I mean roughly 2k+ words of proper ramble total, so be warned before clicking keep reading this link right here to the rb!!)

[razzafrazzle]

another character from die as lovers may, my funney vampire story... had this design bouncing around in my brain for years honestly

[image description: a reference image for an original character named dr. pranali guin, a fat, older dark-skinned woman that has black hair with a white streak pulled into an updo. she is wearing a tight white dress with a cropped black jacket and an orange ribbon around her neck. next to her are blurbs stating that she is 55, that her pronouns are she/her, that she is an aroace woman, and the following: "acclaimed sexologist who is rather humorless. incredibly suspicious of rowan, but isn't quite sure why. not as stern as she looks. has really bad eyesight, but refuses to wear glasses out of spite. loves melodramatic soap operas and keeps a journal detailing every plot point in them. probably autistic." end id]

[xxplastic-cubexx]

it doesnt need to be said but its genuinely so funny how at-the-hip charles and erik are in krakoa like they really had the green light- the OBLIGATION- to be as obnoxiously close to each other as possible and abused that right to the fullest extent

[dreamsy990]

Could you perhaps draw how Penelope and Odysseus met in your monster AU?

it was a pretty friendly meeting i think

[the-one-who-lambs]

50 Lamb Questions

I'm answering these questions for how I write Lambert in The Risen Lamb and the Fallen God. These will contain spoilers, and I'll put them under a cut when I include them! There are so many things I've been wanting to talk about and this is totally enabling me.

1. Does your lamb go by any name other than The Lamb? If so, what?

Many readers have noticed by now that names are a huge theme in Risen/Fallen. A longer ramble that includes spoilers will be below the cut, but they originally had a name that was given to them by their family. Over time, they lost much of their identity, and with it, their name. (Lambert's loss of identity shows up in tons of other ways as well. It's a major question they have to grapple with over the course of the fic and guides their choices, for better or for worse.) As they worked to fit the leadership role they were thrust into, they eventually became just "the Lamb." The impersonal title encompassed much of what they had become, especially the parts of their identity that were out of their control: being an endling, the prophesied liberator of The One Who Waits, a leader of a civilization who needed to rise above the image of the mortals they commanded. These were the parts of themself they felt reduced to, and all they held onto for a long while.

In Chapter 6, "How to Be a God For Dummies," when they admitted to Narinder that they'd forgotten their original name, Narinder felt a twinge of guilt. If he'd asked them for their name more than a century before, maybe they wouldn't have forgotten, or maybe he would know and could have reminded them, but this was one of the moments that made him realize how downright selfish he'd been towards them. Despite how angry he was about their attitude and bitterness after the final boss battle, this kind of forced him to face the fact that much of the person that the Lamb had grown into was his fault and now he was suffering the consequences of that in a way he wasn't prepared to.

Did he get this through his mind completely? Absolutely not. He's stubborn to a fault, after all, and so are they. But he reckons with this just enough to want to give them a name. He names them Lambert in his head, tries to keep it to himself, and accidentally lets it slip at the end of the chapter. Thus, the Lamb got the name Lambert because Narinder gave it to them.

There is a lot more significance to this and all will be revealed in the story once Chapter 15 goes up. But since I'm using this as a writing warmup, I'm gonna give y'all a treat and spill below since it gets me excited. (Btw, Spring Break started yesterday for me, so I think I'm gonna get most if not all of the rest of the chapter done over it!! Manifesting)

I use names very particularly in the narration, though. For Lambert, this has meant that even after they receive their name from Narinder, I refer to them as "the Lamb" sometimes still. How they are referred to in the narration depends on the context of the setting, especially who is around them in a scene. When they're around followers, the narrative voice simply refers to them as "the Lamb." When they're around Narinder or Ratau, they're Lambert. Their followers don't get to know their authentic self; that's a privilege reserved for a select few.

With all that said, though... I'll get into some spoilery talk about this below the cut.

And since I'm having a fucking blast finally getting to talk about this, there's one more part of names that I'm gonna reveal ahead of time. Lambert's original name will be revealed soon as well, which forces them to choose between accepting the past and moving forward vs. continuing to blame themself for it, symbolically. Their original name and its significance is under the readmore as well.

SO.

Long story short, names are such a massive motif in Risen/Fallen because they not only reflect how a character is perceived by others, but also how they choose to take charge of their own fate.

There is… so much to this. But I wanna make sure I talk about this theme explicitly somewhere on my blog, even though it's all gonna be very clear in the story soon anyway.

The Mystic Seller, Vic, has known way too much for a long while now. About what's happening between Narinder and Lambert, but especially how they've orchestrated their own entangling in each other without them even realizing exactly what they've done.

Narinder named Lambert, yes, but Lambert named Narinder, too. This is mentioned a couple of times in the earlier chapters, but it's a game mechanic as well: when you indoctrinate him, his name is still "The One Who Waits." The Lamb has to make an intentional choice to return Narinder's name to him. What this means symbolically is up to the player, but in this fic, the Lamb (yet unnamed) does so as an act of mercy. Narinder himself doesn't quite see it as a representation of a second chance for a few years, because he takes it as pseudo-mockery at first, but ultimately the Lamb wants to force him to acknowledge that he is not bound to his past mistakes. He may be so set on holding himself to them (and holy shit does he ever, especially going into chapter 15, hint hint wink wink nudge nudge), but this frustrates the Lamb/Lambert in pretty minor ways... up until the scene that I finished writing about a month ago, when Narinder fucks up badly and hurts them both.

To each other, Narinder and Lambert come to see their exchange of names as something that simply shows how they've come to care about the other. But Vic keeps hinting to them that something about that is much bigger.

When you're interacting with ??? for the first time, it asks you to make a contract. This contract is sealed by giving it a name.

In the language of gods, bestowing a name upon someone else is much more than just a name. And because Narinder and Lambert have both given a name to the other, because they have turned this into equal and mutual exchange, they have made something much more binding than a one-way contract. In divine terms, they've made some sort of promise, some sort of vow.

What this means hasn't quite clicked yet for either of them, but this is only the first of two ways that Lambert and Narinder tie their fates together. Lambert's going to have a realization about it very soon, and when they do, they'll tie themself to him in that second way.

On Lambert's original name:

A bit of cultural history first! I chose their old name from biblical tradition and cultural Judaism. In Judaism, God has an actual name like people do, and "God" is more of a title. However, God's name is traditionally not spoken aloud out of respect. One interpretation is that God's identity is considered pretty much incomprehensible to humans, another is that using God's name in vain is avoided and so by extension it is not really used at all because one might feel that no praise would be great enough to warrant using it. So, in Jewish prayers, whenever the word "Yahweh" is written in text, people will avoid saying it and instead say something else like Adonai (Lord), HaShem (The Name), etc.

Similarly, Lambert became "the Lamb" to their followers because, as a cult leader, they needed to maintain this idea of perfection and so their identity (and all the flaws associated with it) was something that needed to be kept private. So I took the idea above and slapped it directly onto the Lamb. Lambert's original name is taken directly from God (Yahweh). But, I used the Latinized spelling of it instead: Jehovah.

So when my lamb is eventually faced with the choice between Jehovah and Lambert, they choose going forward as Lambert into a new future they'll be able to share with Narinder without being weighed down.

Is this blasphemy? Eh. Maybe. That's an issue for my rabbi and also for God if they're mad about it.

Anyway, my Lamb's names have gone from Jehovah -> The Lamb -> Lambert.

And I've been rambling about this for too long this has become too long of a "warm up" BUT ONE MORE THING

In Lambert's dream from Chapter 8, when Juno addresses Lambert and it comes out as a garbled utterance that they know was their name at one point, I left exactly seven spaces for the seven letters of their original name. :) This happens again during the flashback in Chapter 11.

[crustyfloor]

"Let me drown in you" - Till knowing deep down that Mizi doesn't love him in that way, but he still asks for that chance because he wants her to love him back

Till being desperate for Mizi's attention, love, ect. he has nothing left going for him, so if she could at least lend him her heart so that he could forget his own pain he'd willingly put himself through the pains of being in Alien stage to get there. He'd let himself get lost in perfect picture of her if only for some semblance of meaning.

"I'll drown in you" - Till giving Ivan his heart isn't an option and he knows it, but Till has nobody else to fill that void, so he'd be willing to let himself be lost in that one-sided fantasy even if Till doesn't reciprocate, because at least he's letting him, and Ivan will continue letting himself be seen as a different person even after he's not useful anymore.

Ivan wants Till's attention, love, etc. and even though Till has nothing to give Ivan, Ivan takes what he can get and puts himself and his pain aside to be next to Till, if only to get Till's heart to himself.

[ganondoodle]

(Original art) Xaror, any pronouns, species (?), age (?)

short summary about them; they act as both an antagonist and an ally since they are only really interested in what they want or whats fun to them, they are immortal and call themselves 'death itself' since they have a special connection to souls (being the only one able to communicate with them) and the ability to seperate souls from their bodies in such a way that nothing can harm the soul afterwards their main goal is to .. bother and disturb the 'celestials'*, which they hate, as much as they can, breaking into their palace, freeing prisoners, destroying research, destroying the place, and most importantly, making as many souls unusable to them as possible-

they dont want to destroy the celestials though, they cant fight them anyway and this game of doing 'good' only with the goal of annoying them is their most treasured activity, so Xaror doesnt intend to stop them from killing or hurting anyone, only from harvesting what they are actually after (though Xaror doesnt actually care as little as they think they do about people, and has a soft spot for demons)

most of their appearance is later into the story; Zaphira (the empress) had been in coma and the medical facility she was treated in was destroyed by Shargon (orange eyed demon who acts as her bodyguard for the first part) in an attempt to save her from her estranged relatives taking over her country after they heard of her decline in health, she is believed dead but washes up on the shore of the mountain Xaror resides at years later (it has a reason, too much to write here) and they slowly nurse her back to health, the reason they give for it is that they found their first encounter very fun, thats all (is it?)

(more lore under the cut bc this is already so long .. im trying to keep it short q-q ......... this is stuff i have been working on since i was a kid so uh, some things might be cheesy but i cant change them anymore ..)

just to get some basics out of the way; theres three worlds, the celestials palace, human world and demon world, each are their own planet connected via different gateways

*celestials (possibly not final name, loosely based on angels) are the last remaining "survivors" of their planets demise, when their world died the most powerful among them cannibalized the weaker to sustain themselves until there were only less than 10 left, who each turned into different beings from it and dont resemble their own people much anymore, they built a palace from what was left on their world that protects them from space as its atmosphere collapsed shortly after- however they still needed something to live off; they discover the human world and are delighted to find rather short lived people with powerful souls, the best kind of sustenance for them (now), they aim to herd them like cattle, but a problem arose when it turned out another world has long been in contact with the human world; demons

demons are semi immortal creatures that act as protectors for their world, protection they extended, more or less secretely, to the human world ensuring them a long and secure life- the celestials need them to die at their whim though (demons are few in numbers, hard to kill and rarely have offspring, not an ideal target); as they worked out a plan on how to get rid of demons one of the celestials, Xanthriel (time) grew somewhat fond of people as they spent alot of time in the human world to observe and research them; in the end turning on their own completely, but losing the fight against Uriel (knowledge)

Xanthriel was supposed to be executed for their betrayal, but it doesnt work, instead they are splintered into many parts after a lot of struggle, most body, memory and most strength is one part (ending up as motionless forever bleeding corpse kept locked up in the palace), the rest is some time later gathered together and reforms as a seperate, weak mockery of them, they embody Xanthriels emotion- Xaror, without memory, strangely cut to pieces (hence all the missing limbs and broken halo) but driven by an unstoppable desire to disturb the celestials (they live seperate long enough to each become their own person, at some point Xaror discovers Xanthriels body after all and they merge back together, though as they are now two, Xanthriel only takes over once directly after merging, stays silent for a long time and lets Xaror be themselves, only later revealing that they are there at all .. hiding perhaps- i rarely have specific ideas for voices, but Xanthriels is like, like coarse rocks being violently rubbed against each other, less voice more noise)

(also, the celestials use Xanthriels blood from the day of their execution to create a plague that nearly wipes out all demons, only the youngest of them survived, effectively robbing them of everything, culture, history, knowledge etc- as demons rarely have children, like a complete restart of their society, they disappeared from the human world, and over time being largely forgotten as actually existing- the celestials wanted them all gone however, so they kept kidnapping them to try and find somethign that would work similarly against the young ones too (and then in general, bc the only usable blood of Xanthriel was from the day of their fall, and that has long since been used up) one of the young ones was Shargon, he was the only one still alive from his group

(also, the celestials use Xanthriels blood from the day of their execution to create a plague that nearly wipes out all demons, only the youngest of them survived, effectively robbing them of everything, culture, history, knowledge etc- as demons rarely have children, like a complete restart of their society, they disappeared from the human world, and over time being largely forgotten as actually existing- the celestials wanted them all gone however, so they kept kidnapping them to try and find somethign that would work similarly against the young ones too (and then in general, bc the only usable blood of Xanthriel was from the day of their fall, and that has long since been used up) one of the young ones was Shargon, he was the only one still alive from his group (he wasnt the strongest or special, he was jsut the last in the row and always got the lowest dosage) when Xaror found them in yet another break in into the palace and got him back to the demon world .. where he was promptly blamed for the others that were taken and treated like a pretender/fake/spy bc what he got put through changed his eye color (something that demons cannot change in any form) to one that does not exist among 'real' demons (orange ... notice the inner color of Xarors broken halo? :) ), some even suggesting killing him, but none of them were brave enough to do it (they were all kids still) .. except Eadrya (the big blue-ish one, largely regarded as the strongest demon alive) but Shargon managed to escape, and since then lived largely in isolation- this is part of why he is so hated, and why he starts to spend so much time in the human world after rediscovering the pathway there)