#in the normalest way possible

[girltrickyuri]

i would let her preform medical malpractice on me

[brothersonahotelbed]

gives you a little hug. maybe a big one. nothing going on in particular i just wanted to hug you. this might get a little tired but we're tying a little string over our joined stigmata wounds ❤️❤️

hi sorry im normal . hugging you so hard that a part of myself is imprinted on you adn you cant wash it off i love you so much our stigmata hands are holding each other's tightly <3333

[kosmicdream]

my comics dont have a big fandom or anything, which has its pros and cons! (the cons are that i dont have as much money and i am attention starved at ALL times) but sometimes i try to imagine what discourse would happen if it did.. like obviously theres still discourse that still happens!! but it doesn't really develop/last the same way.. i dont think id handle big fandom discourse well, so its probably a good thing it isnt like that. but also i love drama and watching people fight abt my characters would probably be a bit entertaining. like the evil grinch aspect of me wants to see fandom wars.. although i guess its still very hard to imagine FFAK/NRD ever getting like "Big" you know. is that kind of thing still possible for webcomics?? i mean.. i guess??? im sure it happens? i dont know, im just thinkin' out loud. NRD is over 1000 pages long now, and soon NRD/FFAK combined will have over 10k pages. i have technically drawn over 10k pages if you add up ALL my comics.. but like just those two alone will have that many.. and what have i learned as a storyteller? at least one or two things i guess. i cannot be good at all the types of storytelling, but i can create psychosexual slapstick comedy horror dramas that make it difficult to recommend to your friends

[serpulalacrymans]

no need anymore ! i already came when you called me dumb <3

thanks for the free nutt daddyking !

I'm just that good! I'm just that good!!

..You're really just goin', huh?

Okay.

Good riddance, anyway. Bitch.

[nadia-cannot-think-straight]

Hitting your Daniel Cain with cartoon-fication beam

[major-fukkup]

Astarion will literally drink your blood until you die if you let him lmaoooo

[whetstonefires]

Very fun thing actually about Jin Guangyao is he spent so much time and energy passing himself off as normal. The Normalest Guy, Look How Normal I Am. The Very Best And Most Skilled At Normal Things, Like Being Normal And Having Normal Opinions.

Which is great because on the one hand it reflects how he was kind of aware he absolutely was not. (And that by default this isolated him and this was Very Unsafe.) But on the other you see, with all the times he falls into the typical mind fallacy under stress and projects weird shit onto people, he also on some level believed everyone was doing this.

That being a Normal Person who had Normal Reactions to things, like being appalled by brutal violence, was an elaborate social lie everyone had to maintain to keep up the facade of civil society, and actually everyone was basically the same as him deep down. He was just better at it, and also the smartest.

Which is a very long way to say his character arc is heavily tied up with his evolving relationship with and skills at masking. I'm not gonna armchair diagnose him because that's beside the point, the point is that he is trying so fucking hard to be normal, but without a particularly well-developed definition of what's abnormal about him to begin with, resulting in some misfires.

And then you contrast him to some other characters and it gets more fun. One of his direct foils is Nie Mingjue, who literally does not know how to mask at all, not the slightest bit, but is fortunate enough to have been born the exact kind of weirdo his position in life demands, with special interests in 'saber training' and 'destroying evil.'

(He explicitly, per narration from wwx being inside his head, has no other interests and doesn't really understand the idea of having more than one activity you care about, do not tell me Nie Mingjue is walking around with a normal brain.)

So he is (jgy has a point about this, although he actually makes it about the luxury of having moral compunctions) free to totally embrace the conviction that everyone should basically be their authentic selves at all times, and just not do evil things about it.

On the other hand, and this really illuminates their relationship for me, Lan Xichen is absolutely trying to be normal. Like, he does try to excel, he wants to be best and he knows he's good, but as a person he is also trying to be as normal as circumstances allow.

He understands 'being normal about things' as a goal not in jgy's terms as an elaborate social fiction but as aspirational shaping of the self; if everyone is normal about everything then there won't be needless conflict. Living as normally as possible will optimize your mental health and your respect for others, and it's just a good baseline from which to be good.

Which is fine as far as it goes, but means harmless eccentricity (including gay) is to be tolerated and swept under the rug rather than really supported, and prejudices him to instinctively side with Jin Guangyao and anyone else who is pushing for Let's Be Normal About This, even when the people being weird are in the right.

(This is also to a non-zero degree a trauma response behavior; what Lan Xichen experienced as the largest existential threat to him growing up was something along the lines of being perceived as a selfish disruptor of norms, like his father.)

And then contrast that to Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, who are both very concerned at least initially with how things and people and they themselves are supposed to be, and feel some responsibility for ensuring this supposed-to is reflected in reality.

But neither of them makes any particular attempt to be normal about it.

And then ofc Wei Wuxian, another jgy narrative foil, never attempts to pass himself off as normal. He will sell 'I'm better than everyone ever' and 'I'm scum of the earth' in the same breath before he will try for normal.

Except that he genuinely seems to think his most virtuous traits, his throw-himself-between-victim-and-weapon impulses, are basically normal. If not everyone (who isn't a total shithead) does it, it's because not everyone has his insane confidence they can pull it off.

Which in a good mood he would say is fair, because he is in fact awesome and really good at winning. (In a worse state of mind he would definitely hate on all the selfish cowards.)

Nie Huaisang is probably the most genuinely normal human being in the main cast, probably even more normal than Jiang Yanli, and he's very happy to play that up and present himself as actually even more normal and average than he is, in order to keep expectations down.

Up until his whole life gets fucked and this little pretense turns into the most elaborate and successful mask in the entire book.

[tiktaaliker]

the dreamer trilogy is so funny to me because it manages to pull some really gruesome and hard hitting shit (hennessy's nightmare, the nightwash, mattew finding out about being a dream, declan dealing with the consequences of being surrounded by dreams and dreamers, parsifal, tbh literally everything about the moderators and visionaries, etc) and then also just do goofy ass shit (ronan constantly worrying about adam replacing him in the funniest way possible, ronan and hennessy lugging around dream swords everywhere, declan trying soooo hard to be the normalest guy ever, escaping from the big confrontation using a stupid floating piece of wood as a skateboard, they have a not-quite-invisible car named burrito, bryde having the most pretentious ass dialogue ive ever read)

[chaos-has-theories]

[watchingthecredits]

we need line time in the normalest way possible

we would make the normalest line we would stand so normal with our normal heights and act reallyreally normal about it

[zhongrin]

being from dragonic lineage, do your kids age differently/slower than other kids? do they live longer? do they have any particular affinity for geo like their father?? augh i love ur kids (that sounds a little odd but i mean it in the normalest way possible, i swear-)

- sachie

hmm.... technically, their 'human' form is them shapeshifting (they still have full dragon noodle forms but i'd like to think shifting into human forms came to them naturally because they do have human blood from my side). hence, i think they would 'grow up' at a normal rate in terms of their human appearance because 1) zhongli teaches them to and 2) they do go to school and play with other kids their age, meaning they would observe their peers and notice their growth, so they'll unconsciously do the same to their appearance.

but yes, they do live longer ;w; ....... when i feel evil i imagine a future where i die of old age and them having to cope with that kind of impactful loss for the first time. bonus imagine of zhongli having to bear the burden of me passing away AND the making sure the kids deal well with grief ˙ᵕ˙ /smacks myself

as for geo element affinity, i answered it here but tldr version is: yes i believe they would be able to wield the geo element :3

[seratlantisite]

How long they took to get together:

Apollo x Klavier: only a matter of months. The normalest relationship here. They meet, they're cute, none of their hangups are really about each other so they just. Ask each other out. Apollo voice "what like it's hard?"

Ryunosuke x Kazuma: like a week from meet ugly to first date? Kazuma fell real hard real fast man idk what to tell you. They've been dating for months by the start of the game.

Phoenix x Miles: three years. Post T&T Miles is doing much better and Phoenix finally has closure on his last relationship. They can't just hibernate for seven years hoping krist goes away. They're grown men, they're in love and they already do a lot of work for each other.

Maya x Franziska: five years minimum. Maya is only finally admitting she doesn't want her family legacy maybe possibly not at all and Franziska is walking around like shes still the best so everything is fine so she's kinda like where Miles was in RftA. They've got a while to go yet. And a lot of therapy to get through.

Simon x Nahyuta: seven hours and an argument about city traffic on the way.

[libraryoffangirl]

I am so so so normal about Izzy Hands normalest I could possibly be no one more normal than me when it comes to Izzy Hands my beloved in a normal casual way

[autisticandroids]

one thing that struck me about season one on the rewatch is how... generic it feels. very syfy motw xfiles clone number 3. a lot of the themes and narratives that seem in retrospect to be obviously present once you've watched the rest of the show clearly weren't on the writers' minds while writing the episodes. in particular, the searching for dad stuff is really thin - it doesn't have a ton of thematic resonance until, like, shadow. i guess arguably there's some in home and scarecrow but it's like, really noticeably absent in faith - dean is dying and sam calls john and gets voicemail and there's no like... we don't really sit with that. that's not the drama of the episode, the drama of the episode is dean's trauma and suicidality related to hunting (and indirectly, we as the audience know, to john, but this doesn't actually come up). in salvation, dean criticizes john for it, so we as the audience get it retroactively reframed as a thematic thing, but john's absence in season one is pretty much pure plot device until 75% of the way through. the trauma the narrative actually chooses to linger on is the much more generic dead girlfriend and dead mom stuff. the mary stuff doesn't even really make sense - obviously you can make it work if you think about it, if you've watched later seasons, if you've spent a lot of time contemplating dark side of the moon, but as presented it's actually just a little goofy. it's treated as dean's formative trauma in the same way jess is sam's, except, well. he was four. not only was he four, but he's lived an incredibly traumatic lifestyle since then. but the show isn't reeeeeaally interested in the ways salmondean are actually freaks, have lived unrelatable and strange lifestyles. this is gestured at with dean, particularly in faith and skin, but it definitely doesn't really consider the person dean is because he grew up hunting. sam gets hit a lot harder with this - he's the everyman protagonist, and the show takes every opportunity to contrast sam's normal with dean's wacko, so dean ends up making a little more sense than sam wrt hunting because sam's fish out of water routine is a little at odds with him having grown up in the life, even if he has been out for four years. it's also interesting to see that the "sam is a freak capital F" thing is really not an interpretation that appears in season one; that's absolutely a season two addition. in season one sam is absolutely and incontrovertibly the normalest everydude possible, while dean is much more questionable, someone who exists on the fringes of society and is not welcome. overall the theme of family really isn't pulled on and when it is, it's not in interesting ways? at least not until, like, shadow. the main tugging we get is re: mary, which as i said is kind of silly if you don't apply some kind of interpretation yourself to justify it. obviously the last few eps of the season make up for that lack: shadow, something wicked, dead man's blood, salvation, and devil's trap are all crazy family drama, but before that it just was not there. like, you could read it as being there. dean has a few batshit lines re: sam in particular. and it's there in like, scarecrow. but the show is not...... it's just not supernatural yet, you know? it's got very generic themes and narratives. obviously it starts becoming supernatural eventually at the ends but it's just... weird. anyway what i actually wanted to say was what ends up standing out the most about it is like... how much the brothers like and care about each other and know each other. like their relationship is sweet, believable, and incredibly charming. that's what lifts the show up before it really meaningfully becomes supernatural.

[bredforloyalty]

ok and what i also wanted to say is that i like him a lot in a normal way the normalest possible and i don't understand and this disturbs me a little

[error404vnotfound]

I do dare ask. Horrify me on this fine Halloween day

what do you mean these are the most normalest plots ever

so i know you were asking about GoT but fnaf was mentioned in the post too and I know way too much about both of them so. um. sorry

SO. fnaf. why is there children murder in the spooky murder robot game? well because the murder robots are the murdered children of course. the how and why requires a 8 hour long video about the lore tho so you just have to accept this fact

and now GoT. first you'll need a history lesson. basically all noble families have incest in them (of the cousin cousin uncle niece variety) but the Targaryens came with their dragons and their sibling incest, conquered everything, and made their sibling incest religiously approved (in account of the. you know. dragons). people kept marrying their cousins and targs kept marrying siblings and all was good until the Dance (aka what the show House of the Dragon is about)

because it's about our favourite incest family ✨the targs✨, there is a lot of incest in hotd. what's more, the non-incest pairings are arguably the more hated ones, and when the incest ones are hated it's not in account of the incest. go figure

okay and now fr we get to GoT. the targs are mostly gone but this doesn't mean we don't get more sibling incest !!! meet the queen and a kingsguard. a kid finds them fucking in a tower on episode 1 season 1 and then he gets defenestrated.

the pair are not only siblings, but twins, and somehow the sibling incest is the least fucked up part of their relationship

also they are passing their incest children as HEIRS TO THE THRONE. this causes lots of problems

also also a popular ship features an aunt and her nephew who is older than her. people ship characters that have grown up as siblings (even if they are cousins) like it's nothing. because it is. there are ice zombies and dragons to worry about we don't have time for the incest

so yeah, people that go to the incest show tag and find warnings for incest boggle the mind. same with the children murder in the "all kids ever in the games are either murdered or possibly robots save for one whose fate is unknown atm" games