#in a corruption arc way

[moka-pot-official]

ÉTER who's ur oc Gabriella that you tagged in that post 👀 sorry if you've mentioned them before and I forgottttt (🫶🫶) but I'm curious now so feel free to ramble about this oc hehehehehe 👁️👁️

I have mentioned her but I've never really explained her! 👁️👁️

She's an oc from an old discarded fantasy story, I had trouble forming the worldbuilding and power system so it didn't go very far and are very vague. Resuming them the powers/magic were divided by two different energies, dark and light, most creatures in the kingdom were users of either in different levels. The only almost 'pure' users of dark magic were demons, the 'royals' (the users of almost pure light magic) became afraid of being overpowered by demons so they declared war on them, killed many, casted the rest to hide forever in a mountain hive and deemed every demon and dark magic users evil.

In all of this two humans appear in the kingdom, Olvido and Gabriella and soon discover that they are users of actually pure light and dark magic respectively, Olvido is the protagonist of the story who doesn't remember who she is, and Gabriella is the antagonist.

Gabriella is a lunatic and snappish young woman whose intentions are to take control of the kingdom and release the demons from their hive proclaiming herself their queen. She's a mastermind in what she does tho, taking social power and expanding the assigned demon territories at a rapid rate. She takes special interest in Olvido 👀, seemingly angry at her amnesia. She's always accompanied by her two closest allies, Ciacco the last standing demon in the kingdom and Carja a runaway fairy of laughter. The reasons behind her goals are a mystery to everyone but she'll do anything to achieve them, from conquering town after town to carving her own skin with demonic runes in her proclamation of Queen of Demons

Overall the story was a bit generic and vague that's why I discarded it but I like to come back to it from time to time because I liked the geography of the world and some of the races and characters I made up for it and the dynamics between Olvido and Gabriella and the concepts behind their characters. I'm not sure I'll ever continue it but they're still a recurring daydream!!

Also here is Gabriella

[canisalbus]

I've been following you for years, and I love your art. Seeing you repost your older art pieces reminded me how much I loved the angry, bitter, miserable Machete art and how it resonated with me... but a part of me is also so happy to see the current art of him being happy. Cute art of him as a unicorn, or chilling in a bathtub with Vasco. Like, we're all growing and healing :')

[hopeswriting]

daily life arc miura haru. does anyone know who i'm talking about. do you guys remember her. i still can't believe what happened to her 😔

[starleska]

i see this opinion echoed across the Doctor Who fandom: that we really enjoyed Maestro, and love the idea of The Devil's Chord, but feel like the episode was lacking a little something in the writing department. so here's my suggestion: they shouldn't have killed off Timothy Drake 👀🎶 hear me out:

from the start, we're introduced to Timothy Drake as a deeply talented individual, and one disgruntled with his position in life. his passion and genius have been squandered, and he's been relegated to teaching his craft to disinterested schoolboys. but we learn he has a darker interest...Timothy is a scholar as well as a composer, and he decides to spice up his day by telling his pupil about the lost Devil's Chord. and then, Maestro erupts onto the scene...and they are everything that Timothy has never been able to be. Maestro is loud, and flamboyant, and unreservedly powerful: every glittering gem on their body screams you will look at me, and you will listen. and while Timothy's polite-society conditioning and time-typical bigotry are his initial response, we can tell that Maestro intrigues him. in return, Maestro doesn't just talk to Timothy, oh no. Maestro all but seduces the man, by speaking aloud all of Timothy's most private thoughts: that he's a misunderstood genius, and that it isn't his fault he never got that break. in this way Maestro manifests as a Devil figure, luring Timothy into an unspeakable Faustian bargain. here he is, wasting his life and talent and songs away in some stuffy school...when he could have so, so much more. like Maestro, he could be powerful. he could be who he wants to be. and most importantly: he could make people listen to him. i would've loved a version of The Devil's Chord where Maestro manipulates Timothy Drake into drawing out the music of others, thereby killing them, and feeding Maestro in the process. perhaps there could have been a caveat to Maestro's power: as the Essence of Music, it could be that Maestro has to operate through a living being, much like a demonic muse. not only could Timothy get all of the attention he ever wanted, finally being recognised for his musical brilliance...but he could exact revenge on those who said he'd never make it. wouldn't this have been a fascinating parallel with The Beatles? what if we'd seen an increasingly power-mad Timothy Drake, rising to stardom in an alternate timeline where everyone is devoid of musical inspiration, leaving him as the sole musical genius in the world? what if the Doctor and Ruby's horror at a devastated world included the theme of creation for creation's sake, as opposed to the manic pursuit of adoration which Timothy so clearly desires? perhaps i have lost my mind. perhaps i am reading far too much into the way Timothy looks at Maestro in the latter half of the clip above. but i think the terror of Maestro would have come through even more if they'd kept Timothy Drake around, and trapped him in a Phantom of the Paradise-esque doomed narrative with Maestro whispering in his ear and helping him take control of his destiny 🎶🔥

[h-doodles]

And our love is here || A webweave studying MC's part in Miranda/MC themes :)

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

sometimes I see David Tennant's face in Doctor Who as he monologues about time travel/immortality/the eternal loneliness and I go...that's him. that's my rotten lil guy. my wretched wreck of a dude. wreckage in humanoid form. the lonely divine corrupted by himself forgiven by himself made by himself made by his companions made by the universe. horrible and horrifying and far too human and not human enough. the worst thing to ever happen to so many (Martha, Adelaide, Astrid, everyone else who flashed through that whole montage thanks to Davros). a corrupter. a corruption. a cleansing. a man carved out of grief and love and pathos and hatred and grudges and forgiveness who can only make the worst decisions with the best, most selfish of intentions. a man who loved until he lost everything. a man, more than any other doctor, who should never be left alone, and yet he dies alone, with the shortest regeneration speech of any doctor. desperately lonely, desperately tragic, a disaster of a man who is too careless with everything and everyone around him.

And yet I care about him so much, because he is also the man who at the end of it all, after he lost everyone and everything he held dear, after he lost rose and donna and sarah jane and jack and martha and mickey left him and he was more alone than he's ever been, he does the right thing. the kind thing. he stops the time lords from descending on the earth. he once again gives up his people because he understands that the Time Lords Victorious cannot and should not ever be the way to go. he steps in and he saves wilfred mott. he lets himself become the doctor once again. he doesn't want to go, but instead of taking that one final step into godhood, he gives his next self a chance at being a better doctor than he ever could be.

[rehide]

just barely started my reread but. i think one of simultaneously both the most interesting and devastating aspects of rize, whose entire character is about her stolen autonomy, is that we never really get to know her outside of other characters perceptions of her. we know her through kaneki's brief meeting with her and his once hallucinated version of her, through furuta's idealized memories of her in the garden and the twisted perception he has of her now, through tsukiyamas run-ins with her, briefly through shachi's ideas he got of her as she was growing up, but we still rarely get to hear from her. and despite this, she's still overwhelmingly present in the narrative, though more as a concept than anything. we do briefly get that scene in re where she talks to kaneki about the garden, but it still cycles back around to what he has to accomplish going forward. a lot of the information we know about her comes from the people fighting so hard to control her and take the autonomy her entire arc is about in the first place. just something i've been thinking about. how we know rize is so overwhelmingly present in the narrative but the people who she's tried to escape from her entire life are primarily who we've learnt about her from.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

FOR A BEAT OF HEART, THE BREATH IS SHOT. AND WITHIN A BREATH, THE HEART IS CAUGHT. THE PIPES ARE BURSTING, UNDER GREAT STRESS, BOLTS TORN ASUNDER, MAKING A MESS. A FINAL COUGH, A FINAL RETCH, A GOREY SLOUGH, CLAIMED BY WRETCH.

[oliviabear]

i actually think oshamir is similar to haladriel from rings of power. halbrand deceived galadriel but he still treated her with a lot of respect and there was actual vulnerability between them. him asking her to join him in the end came from a place of desire to “rule the world together” which is similar to the power of two that qimir was talking about. and halbrand obviously sensed galadriel’s inner darkness, made her more aware of it and in turn she learned how to kind of channel this to her benefit and become more powerful. it’s similar direction where oshamir might be headed. but maybe unlike galadriel refusing his offer, osha will actually join qimir.

i love when my etl ships do that and there’s no “i can fix him” mess. for me personally lol

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[seleneprince]

A Court of Shadows and Blood (ACOSAB)

Summary: What if Nesta's trip to the Wall went different? What if she managed to get through without help? And what if, instead of Feyre, she found someone else?

After witnessing her sister being taken by a powerful Fae and enduring the burden of being the only one of her family to know the truth, Nesta Archeron decides to take matters into her hands and rescue Feyre herself, going up to the one place she was taught all her life to fear and avoid: The Wall.

But when she reaches the land of Fae, it's not Feyre whom she finds first. Instead, she comes across a man made of shadows that likes her venom and ends up as his prisoner in Under the Mountain. Nesta has to manouvre her way around this court of death and monsters with only her wit as weapon, at the same time she endures Rhysand's games made to amuse himself at her expense.

But Nesta was raised for conquest, nurtured with her own blood and tears until even her mind was made of iron. This Lord of darkness won't break her, nor the red-haired demon he serves. She'll save her sister one way or another, even if she has to become another monster herself to do so.

First chapter

[arainaizevran]

there's way more layers to "wyll cannot be morally corrupted" and i love the drama of wyll turning his back on a dark urge lover (and on certain routes, trying to kill them) because they accepted bhaal etc.

but im also a believer that if you told him the right lies in the right way, he would believe it. at first. not in a naive sort of way but in a "i know you're a good person and this is for a good cause and i know the cost of sacrifice for the greater good etc" way. do you get it

however! he will not believe that lie forever. his moral principles will always win out. the longer he believes your lie/manipulation, the more righteously furious he'll get when he eventually comes to his senses. and i think that's beautiful

[rebornofstars]

nobody fucking touch me rn i went to see tf one in the cinema and im shaking. they actually made a good transformers movie. what the fuck

[rainibao]

I really hope Liu Xiao offering his barehand to Tianchen does represent the trust that Qian Jin didn't have in him (started wearing gloves bc of his ability it seems), and not just the fact that LX is likely capable enough to not have to worry about possession.

Antagonist or not, the boy deserves a somewhat stable older male figure. I can only imagine what it felt like when he agreed to carry out his first murder mission, probably as a favour, only to find out that the man was innocent and that Qian Jin was basically the same as his abusive father.

[bu-blegh-ost]

Hey, hi.

Sooo, I've been rewatching Riptide as you do right? And so I finally got to the episode in which Chip makes his deal with Niklaus and after refreshing my memory on that I do believe that we are entering the point in which Chip has to fullfill his end of the bargain and I'm so fucking worried actually. So first things first let's look at what Mr. Hendrix actually requested from Chip.

So in exchange for returning lost years back to Ollie Chip Has to:

-First: Make the right decision in the hole in the sea.

Arlin is supposedly still trapped below and in great pain. Niklaus for some reason NEEDS Arlin to be kept alive and he wants Chip to keep him alive no matter the consequences which worries me so fucking much. Cause first I was just worried that they are gonna go to the Black sea and find out that there is no way to save Arlin, that he'll die and this will break Chip beyond repair, but now what I'm dreading is that Arlin can't be saved in a way that matters. That Chip will have to make a decision between killing Arlin to let him rest or keep him alive and let him suffer, or even doom the whole world for the sake of preserving his painful existance and that...shit guys, just saying, we're in Black Sea now so brace your fucking selves, we're gonna C R Y. AND THE THING IS if Arlin dies SO DOES CHIP, so he really fucking Has to survive. Cause Chip promised Nik that Arlin survives so even mercy killing Arlin will be breaking a deal and Chip will turn into goop and that's just so damn bad jejdjdjsi

- Second: Supposedly there is an Orb at the hole and he can't touch it. I don't like the way he said it. Nik said sth like "not YOU at least". So what worries me is that he wants someone else to touch it and sth nad will happen because of it, but who then? Gill? Jay? I mean if they find a room with a suspicious object we can kinda count on Gill to touch it immediately, so I'm hoping that Chip doesn't get the chance to interact with it, even if he doesn't remember that he wasn't supposed to. Or maybe sth would happen if Chip touched it? Sth that Nik doesn't want to happen? Either way Chip can't do that now cause if he does he breaks the deal and fucking dies probably, so well shit.

- Third: When the time comes and Nik requests his favor from Gillion, Chip can't interfere. Whatever Nik will have Gill do, Chip can't stop it. He cannot and that of all things I fear will be the hardest thing to do. See, Nik never expected Chip to even come to him. But he was clearly glad that he can use him to shift things in his favor. I feel like whatever dark force turned Sakura into the Black Sea is connected to Alrin's life force and Nik wants the Black Sea to stay. It is messing with the world and unleashing twisted magic into it and I feel like he needs it to stay that way until Gill's time to fulfill his prophecy comes. And whatever Nik wants Gill to do Has a potential to be catastrophic.

Black Sea is definitely not the last chapter, but it's gonna be full of anguish and sorrow. Buckle the fuck up lads, we're in for a ride

[permanently-stressed]

i can trace the exact moment Sophie's identity became grounded in being the moonlark and that moment is flashback.