#ironically the character with the most love interests

[asongofstarkandtargaryen]

What do you think Sansa ending will be like?

I was thinking she could do something artsy or creative.

That's a very interesting question!

First of all, let me say that I believe that Sansa will survive the series and have a happy ending.

With that being said, I don't mean a fairy tale like ending where she gets everything she ever wanted as a kid because a. Sansa has moved from her childhood dreams, when once she was dreaming to marry a handsome prince and become his queen one day, she now dreams of her home and what it represents (aka unconditional familial love, safety etc) and b. I doubt that Martin will give any character - even his most important ones - a fairy tale ending where they will get everything they even wanted.

I have many different predictions on where she could end up with, and since there are only speculations on my end I could totally be wrong.

Could she marry Harry the Heir ( if/once her marriage with Tyrion gets annulled) and become Lady of Eyrie? It fits her arc and her anti-parallels the previous Lady of Eyrie, who was also a Tully woman - remember all Stark kids are half Tully from their mama- and she in would be a Lady of an Important House like her Mother - with whom she shares some great parallels - once was. And not any castle, but the place her father spend many years . Thus a place that connects to both her Stark and Tully heritage. The only negative in this theory is that Harry currently seems an arse and I don't want her after everything she had to endure with an asshole. Maybe he's actually not that bad? Who knows we have two more books to find out, assuming that Harry survives them.

Another option would be for her to remain married to Tyrion. And I don't mean for them to suddenly have a great passionate romance but a mutual understanding that their union could benefit them both. They get to be the Lord and Lady of Castelry Rock and visit/or even stay at Kings Landing as I can imagine Tyrion will be heavily involved in politics and probably have a place in the small council of whoever gets to become the next ruler of Seven Kingdoms. I don't think that Tyrion would have a problem with his wife following her arty talents, and Sansa could continue hosting parties - like the one in Eyrie- and be an important influential Lady popular among the other nobles- especially if she is the wife of the Hand of the King/Queen/ whoever sits on the Iron Throne. That could even help elevate her husband popularity and in return Tyrion could offer her security and freedom to pursue her talents and hobbies. It's not the ideal fairy tale marriage but it's better than most arranged marriages in Westeros- her own parents started their union with even less and they managed to be happy together.

Or she could eventually marry a Northern Lord and live close to her childhood home and visit Bran and Rickon ( and anyone else reciting at Winterfell) more often than most ladies of her status visited their family.

Speaking of Winterfell, I personally believe - and as I said before since those are only speculations I could be totally wrong- that the younger Starks ( Sansa, Arya, Bran and Rickon) at the end of the series need to spend some futher time on their home before they consider moving out due to marrying. Because they are still very young and I believe that they would all benefit by being close to each other.

Sure not of them is an adult and therefore they can't act as the guardians of the younger ones - Maybe their older brother Jon who is adult could temporary do that?- but they can still help each other. Like for example, Sansa who learned how to act like the sort of Lady of Eyrie - while posing as Littlefinger's daughter - could help her brother, Bran, with the ladyship duties until he's old enough to pick a wife to fill that role. And more importantly than usefulness in managing to rule Winterfell, these kids are all traumatized and they deserve to spend some time to their home in order to heal. And to get to reconnect as a family - and least those who are still alive :/.

In Winterfell, I believe that Sansa could also purse her artistic talents because I can't imagine Bran, who is not only the sweetest kid according to his family but also very observant and empathetic, stopping his sister from doing something that gives her pleasure.

And I wasn't supposed to write so much but I was carried away bc I like speculating about characters I've interested at.

( And if you noticed the lack of mentioning Sandor as Sansa's possible endgame isn't because I don't believe that Martin has given them romantic undertones. It's because I unfortunately don't see him surviving the end of the books - again my personal prediction, feel free to disagree- so anything that happens between them I believe it won't be at the epilogue of the series).

[musubiki]

this meme has not left my brain for three days and three nights

[can-of-slorgs]

The other researchers are also here! (magical edition!)

[sweetvillainjude]

Jude + Cardan parallels of becoming “worse”

They were made for each other.

(of course their reasons are a bit different; Jude’s comes from feeling powerless and disrespected, more like “if you can’t respect me for being better, then let me be worse than you, I will show you what I can do” whereas Cardan’s more like “If I can’t have your love then let me have your anger / If I can’t be good then I will be awful, I’ll show you how terrible I can be”. just perfection)

[welcometogrouchland]

I also think it's nice that they made Camilla a sci-fi nerd and Luz a fantasy nerd. They're genres that are often seen as completely opposing one another by many people, which is what we're led to believe about Luz and Camilla in season 1. Luz is silly, nerdy, frequently in over her head and irresponsible and loves the boiling isles. We're led to believe that Camilla is the normal, conventional TV mother who'd be disgusted and terrified by the demon realm if she saw it.

Then yesterday's lie gives us a lot of nuance to this, and we realize that while they're still very different and now on opposite sides of a conflict, both mother and daughter are incredibly kind people (seen in their treatment of Vee) who love each other but struggle to make the right choices without hurting one another.

Then thanks to them drops all this Camilla characterization and we realize! She was a nerd too this whole time! The wedge between Camilla and Luz is motivated by past traumas and grief! and for the future has them switching sides on the central conflict of where Luz should stay (Camilla now wanting Luz in the demon realm because it's what's best for her, and Luz believing that staying in the human realm is what's best for the people she loves). They finally talk and realize that, like Willow pointed out earlier in the ep, the two are so alike. Camilla reveals that she's a secret nerd too! That she had a hard time growing up and accidentally hurt Luz trying to save her from the same fait! It's so important to me that Camilla keeps calling Luz a good witch. It's affirming her interests and goals, reminding her that she's just as good as the hero of her favorite story. And Luz finally only realizes that she wants to be understood...when she's finally able to understand her mom. When she realizes that the woman she loves and admires is just as much of a nerdy screw-up as her and that there's hope for her. Her palismen ends being multiple animals at once, showing both how Luz making unconventional choices (like carving an egg) keeps paying off for her and how her potential is limitless now that she finally knows and accepts her own goals, but to me it also reminds of the fact that Camilla is a vet and passed a love of all the weird and unliked animals (like wolves, possums, snakes, etc) to her.

It's just so so sweet and it really shows how much love and thought the crew put into this mother daughter storyline (FTF haters are not welcome on this page, respectfully). I can't wait to see how both of these misunderstood but healing women (who radiate "little/big sister" and "mom" energy respectively) are gonna interact with a) the lonely, easily manipulated and well intentioned but ignorant collector (a mix of both their interests as a magic being with a space motif! I just realized that lol) and b) the nasty puritan white man who's really obsessed with conforming to society's norms even when it literally doesn't benefit him at all.

Anyway, I believe in noceda( AND clawthorne 👀) family supremacy 💙

[lollytea]

The Blight family are so interesting IN THEORY. In execution they are....😬

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[grimm-the-tiger]

My FL main went through some really weird, organic development over the...oh god, I think it's been five years since I started playing now.

So my main is named Skadi Larkin. They are a little bastard. They started out extremely 2D; I named them after my favorite Norse goddess and the protagonist of the book I was reading at the time. I originally wanted to make them female like both of their namesakes, but the second I saw the third-gender option, I thought it was too good to pass up. This is where they got their primary base characterization as a mad scientist who wanted to Cause Problems.

Then I started the Nemesis ambition and forgot which option I'd chosen for who I was trying to avenge, so they lost both their lover and their older brother under tragic circumstances (only the lover was killed by Nemesis's antagonist, though).

Then I got an Exceptional Friendship and had to give my tragic backstory in order to gain entry to the House of Chimes. Skadi pulled said tragic backstory (orphaned in a hansom accident) more or less out of their ass, but it did establish that their parents are dead.

Somewhere down the line, I realized that technically Skadi is a linguist, since the Correspondence is a language, and I made that their profession on the Surface as well.

Around this time, I started working on character designs for my fan comic. I got really into messing around with skin tone, and somewhere along the line thought it would be fun to draw Skadi (who was originally white) with darker skin, and it stuck.

Then I abruptly realized I was taking a lot of options that increased my Melancholy, and almost all of them were based on the Surface. So now Skadi has a longing for the Surface.

I left the game for a few years, but somewhere during this stretch of time, and I don't know how this happened, but I decided Skadi was now Native American; specifically, Metis. I changed their design to incorporate a sash woven in a style characteristic of the Metis, which also added a bit of color to their design (which was mostly black or grey at this point).

During this time, I started incorporating Skadi into my fan comic. This would eventually lead me to actually flesh out their backstory in greater detail. When I started playing the game again, I also created my first alt by total accident (long story), and I decided to weave her backstory with Skadi's.

So Skadi is in the interesting position of being an Indigenous person who is what we'd probably consider Two-Spirit today but they'd just call "Bollocks to that gender crap". They never belonged on the Surface, since the Metis are in a bit of a liminal space compared to other tribes due to their interesting background (the Metis are the descendants of French settlers and Indigenous inhabitants, mostly Cree), and Skadi exists in a liminal space within that liminal space due to only being half-Metis and raised primarily in white culture, although they still maintained a connection to it through their late mother. They also never belonged because no one else on the Surface outside of the communities they already felt isolated from would ever accept them for their gender. London gave them a chance to express one of those, but not both, and despite knowing that the Surface hates them just for existing, they still long to return.

[nerdie-faerie]

Thinking about how most of the times we see Kol in tvd he's acting as errand boy for his siblings, starting with Rebekah asking him to kill Matt at the ball. If he cared solely about killing someone to spit in the face of Esther's rules he could have killed anyone else after Rebekah changed the plan. The second time, he's in Denver with Jeremy and texts Klaus to let him know if there's anything else his brother needs from him. And later Klaus calls on him to use his presence with Jeremy to threaten Bonnie into undoing the linking spell. Then he's there again to kill Mary when he finds out from Klaus that the mfg are trying figure out who they're sired from after breaking his cover in Denver. He's not even in series 4 up until Rebekah gets undaggered and suddenly he's there to retrieve the professor for her

I just think it's interesting that he's characterised as the volatile and reckless sibling and in the originals we learn that he constantly feels like an outsider in his own family with Klaus, Rebekah and Elijah making up their own little trio with Finn daggered. And yet anytime they need something he's there, almost as though he's still desperately trying to endear himself to them until he inevitably lashes out and gets daggered for it, his efforts constantly unappreciated. The only time he asks them for a favour that I can recall is when he swears Rebekah to secrecy about the dagger he's working on against Klaus only for her to tattle and get him daggered

[fragmentedblade]

Boothill's presentation being entirely on the twitter post makes me think he will be irrelevant in the story in the long(ish) run, and that the game itself won't dwell on him almost at all

[sserrafeim]

My biggest gripe with the Fourth Wing series is that Tairn is not the love interest

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Queens of Innis Lear

slow-moving political fantasy, retelling of the shakespeare tragedy king lear

set in a dying island kingdom, where the prophesy-obsessed king (having neglected the wild magic of the land) must pass on the crown to his three daughters

the elder two hate their father and have been planning their rule for years, and the youngest loves her father and does not want the crown- but does care for the magic of the land

but when the king makes an unforeseen decision, and other kingdoms and spies circle, vying for land and power of their own

earth magic, fate and duty, complicated sister relationships

[coelacat]

just know if you take a faceless character (covered by a helmet, hood, anything like that, just generally a masked face) and give them a face this is ruining autistic representation. just so you know

[patzweigz]

finally watched strange world and im still flabbergasted by how bad it was

[4arconinoma]

Doki Doki Plus is genuinely such a nice and sweet extension of the main game the fact that people were so dismissive of it solely due to it not being horror based like the main one makes my heart ache so much. This is genuinely one of the best character explorations I've ever seen in my life, written so wonderfully and realistically to the point where it's almost frightening and so emotional, it makes me so sad that people are so harsh on it

It delves so much into themes of friendship, humanity and people etc. Every time I play it it shifts my perspective on life and other people to a more positive one. It's literally like therapy to me. It's so sweet and has legitimately valuable lessons to be learned... I will always defend it man. I recommend that everyone tries it out if you particularly cared about the characters in the main game and not just the horror elements because it fleshes them out so much. They're so real and relatable. It's so delightful. I like it so much

[arolesbianism]

In other news Odile crashed my game during her friend quest. Smiles in pain.