#it rattles around in my brain

[me1lark]

i need to talk about this particular conversation between haymitch and katniss set within the mockingjay after peeta's hijacking because it's been stuck in my head ever since i reread it.

“what are you trying to do? provoke him into an attack?” he asks me. “of course not. i just want him to leave me alone,” i say. “well, he can’t. not after what the capitol put him through,” says haymitch. “look, coin may have sent him there hoping he’d kill you, but peeta doesn’t know that. he doesn’t understand what’s happened to him. so you can’t blame him—” “i don’t!” i say. “you do! you’re punishing him over and over for things that are out of his control. now, i’m not saying you shouldn’t have a fully loaded weapon next to you round the clock. but i think it’s time you flipped this little scenario around in your head. if you’d been taken by the capitol, and hijacked, and then tried to kill peeta, is this the way he would be treating you?” demands haymitch. i fall silent. it isn’t. it isn’t how he would be treating me at all. he would be trying to get me back at any cost. not shutting me out, abandoning me, greeting me with hostility at every turn. “you and me, we made a deal to try and save him. remember?” haymitch says. when i don’t respond, he disconnects after a curt “try and remember.”

firstly, i want to start by saying that this is in no way an anti-katniss post, because i do not blame her for distancing herself from peeta in this way. she was traumatized herself and had zero healthy emotional regulation going on. katniss has never had the opportunity to sit with her emotions and process them, always needing to focus on surviving and moving forward. truly stopping and facing peeta's issues with him would have been almost debilitating for her. i cannot blame her for being stuck in survival mode. it doesn't make her a bad person. it doesn't mean she loves peeta any less.

but, i do wanna talk about how it's true that if the roles were reversed, peeta wouldn't act the same way. haymitch knows this. katniss knows this. hell, even hijacked peeta knows it. he doesn't make a comment to katniss about how she isn't a very nice person for nothing. for peeta, that kind of selfless kindness has always been natural. especially in regards to katniss. in the first games, he uses his interview to make katniss look desirable. in the arena, he joins the career pack to lead them away from her. he's willing to let her shoot him so she can go home to district twelve and her family. in the quarter quell, he makes a deal with haymitch to save her. he ask effie for a golden medallion with pictures of the people katniss loves to help him convince her she has to live.

not once, in any of those moments, did he think of himself. of his own survival. does that mean he has a death wish? no, i don't think so. i think peeta sees an inherent goodness in the world that most people miss. he sees a lot of beauty. he just also sees a lot of that goodness and beauty in katniss and he thinks that without her, the world would be a lot less worthwhile for quite a lot of people, least of all himself.

[zinesbycee]

himbo this, bimbo that. in my day there was mambo, and there were five of them.

[eastgaysian]

[saints-who-never-existed]

“In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy—as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid’s naked flesh—as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege—as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover—as long as he is riddled with bullets. 

Violence makes the homo-eroticism of many “male” genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.”

–Tarantino’s Incarnational Theology: Reservoir Dogs, Crucifixions, and Spectacular Violence. Kent L. Brintnall.

[houndvoice]

Treviso Date Night dance anyone???

Bonus:

[mothflyy]

he's slowly becoming the only character I draw...

[brainzzzeater]

Happy April fools!

[bedrock-to-buildheight]

[captaincalamity]

the thing that pisses me off about the minecraft movie is how boring it is (or will be). people have consistently proven that complex stories and ideas can be conveyed through minecraft, with it not just acting as a backdrop- instead we get jumanji: block edition and it’s so annoying. minecraft is a beautiful game that has brought so many people together, that influenced countless childhoods, and this is what we get? i’m pretty sure it’s going to be the same plot as fucking angry birds.

this movie is taking all the momentum that countless creatives have provided to minecraft for 15 years and acknowledging NONE of it. you can have your opinions of mcyters but at least they have the guts to tell a story.

fuck, maybe my expectations were too high- but it’s hard to not expect more when we consistently got more from way weirder sources. things like stampys lovely world, the fallen kingdom saga, dantdms lab, hermitcraft, the dsmp and qsmp, genuinely every minecraft let’s play has SOME form of story- it’s just disappointing to see mojang fail to create a better story when they’ve had so many examples.

the world has MUCH bigger problems right now, but it’s still upsetting- i was born right in time to grow up with minecraft. and while im not surprised, i am disappointed.

[otherwolves]

Entwined Souls

[flawlessflesh]

sometimes, yaad wonders how he became his grandfather’s brother’s keeper.

[manicpixiedreamedwins]

listen. listen.

I know it’s a fandom joke to be like “Edwin can’t read social cues and that’s why he’s a bitch lol” but like… yes he can? I kind of think there are moments he chooses to be kind and compassionate and gentle, and then moments where he’s just being cunty on purpose. Like this scene? Right here? This is on purpose (and Crystal clocks it, and gives it right back and I love their bitchy besties dynamic).

That doesn’t make him irredeemable or mean that we can’t like him as a character or whatever (the obsession with Good and Moral characters is definitely directly contributing to fandom rot and character interpretation, in this case). But I really need people to stop pretending he doesn’t know what he’s doing, because I kind of think he does.

Take the scene with Charles and the pot that the sprites were originally in. Charles did not drop the pot like Edwin claimed. As plenty of people have pointed out at this point, he broke it on a skeleton in a moment of panic because he was protecting Edwin from those skeletons in the dandelion field.

Edwin, however, subtly changes his description of events from threw to dropped. He knows what happened. He was there. He’s also trying not to make tensions worse, and he knows telling Crystal that Charles broke the pot intentionally would escalate things. So he doesn’t tell her. (Everything works out the same in the end anyway, and they do save Niko together).

Then there’s the scene on the cliff, after Charles pushes The Night Nurse into the fish. This one is interesting to me because I feel like it gets misinterpreted so easily. Edwin tells Charles what he did was extreme. Perhaps the wording was poor, because Charles feels like he’s being criticized for what he did and crumbles. I think Edwin was concerned for Charles, though, because he steps forward and does something that Charles does for Edwin when he’s upset or stuck on a case- he reaches out to touch him. This is unusual for Edwin, but he has to know it’s meaningful for Charles if he does it so often (there’s similar shoulder touches in episodes 1&2 pictured here). That’s a small, subtle gesture that he noticed over time. (He does get shrugged off, but he did try).

Or like— people have commented on this situation. I’ve heard a lot of “surely Edwin doesn’t really think Scooby Doo is that thrilling/clever/intelligent”?

Hear me out. Niko is his friend. When you’ve made a friend, you show interest in things they enjoy so you can spend time together and get to know what is meaningful to them. That in itself means he is aware this is important to Niko, which is very sweet. (Although I would like to think he genuinely likes the book recs, I’m sure those healed something within him).

So it’s not that Edwin can’t choose to be subtle, and it’s not that he isn’t aware. It’s that he simply decides to be a bitch sometimes (and tbh I would love to go into the why behind that sometime).

[artilite]

stay unserious chaos sonic <3 never change

[steddietogo]

Thinking of NICU nurse Steve and single dad Eddie😭

Eddie getting the news on the day of the birth and rushing to the hospital only to find that the mother of the kid has already left. Eddie sitting in the NICU looking at tiny fingers and toes in a pink bundle and deciding he was going to love her forever.

Nurse Steve watching the long haired man always showing up alone, sitting by the tiny cot for hours on end. Steve seeing this big tough metal head cry the first time he holds his daughter and mentally deciding to adopt them both.

Steve runs into him at the dinner at 3 am after a long shift. Eddie’s sitting at a booth looking sad, nursing his coffee all alone. Steve eats his dinner (breakfast??) there with him even though he was planning on going home. Steve tells him about the small town he was raised in, the best friend he moved across the country with barely anything to their names. Eddie tells him about his uncle, his struggling music career and late night bartending gig. Steve watches Eddie get lighter, his smile getting less strained the more they talk.

Eddie brings him coffee in the mornings they’re both there. They grab shitty cafeteria sandwiches for lunch together. Eddie develops an ill advised crush on the pretty nurse with the warm hazel eyes.

The day little Grace is finally discharged, Eddie’s sad eyes are back. Steve doesn’t like that one bit. When he’s signing the forms and shit, Steve comes up to him, pink faced with a piece of paper with his personal number on it. Tells him he should give him a call if he needs help with Grace. Or if he just wants to.

Or if he wants to get dinner together sometime.

Back home when they’re all settled, Grace finally sleeping, Eddie waits for the clock to strike 3 when he knows Steve gets off his shift. He keys in the numbers in the carefully folded piece of paper. It barely rings twice before Steve picks up.

So, about dinner…

[thestuffedalligator]

“It’s really very sad,” the pixie on her shoulder sighed. “She was so excited to be named Lady of the Thaw. It used to be a very esteemed title in the fey courts, you know. Only given to fey of particular nobility.”

“Really.”

“Oh yes. The rank of titles in fey courts are determined by human perception. To be the Lady of the Thaw was to be how humans felt watching snow melt and seasons change. It meant being the joy of seeing winter’s end, the love of spring, the hope of rebirth and sunlight and green things.”

“Mhm.”

“But it was only after she got the title that it was — reduced, somewhat.”

There was something in the pixie’s tone that finally caught the human’s attention. She looked up from the huge, dusty tome. The pixie’s face was a tiny gleam of secondhand embarrassment. “Reduced,” she said. “How do you mean?”

The pixie wrung the hem of its skirt. “Well,” it tried. It stopped. It started again. “The title is tied to human perception, and popular perception around the thaw — it changed a bit over the past century. Now when humans see snow melting, they go—” The pixie tried its best to drop into a baritone. “‘Oh no, the snow is melting already, it’s too warm for January, I’m watching the disappearance of winter in my lifetime,’ that sort of thing.”

“Also dog crap,” said a nastier voice further down.

The pixie scowled at it. “Oh, don’t, it’s bad enough.”

The boggle had scrabbled up onto the desk. It snickered darkly. “That’s what all you humans think these days when the snow starts to melt, isn’t it?” it said. “You walk around and go, ‘Fucking hell, look at all this dog crap. There’s so much dog crap under the snow. Did nobody pick up after their dog this winter? Jesus Christ, there’s so much dog crap.’”

The pixie gleamed pink. “Thank you, boggle.”

“Mountains of the stuff.”

“Thank you—”

“Heaps and heaps, melting with the snow and getting all runny, and you step outside for the mail and—”

“Thank you, boggle, that’s enough.” The pixie had put its hands over its ears.

The boggle grinned. “And that’s what she is now,” it said, sweeping off its hat and dipping into a mocking bow, its voice a low and awful growl of evil delight. “Her imperious majesty, the grand high lady of climate anxiety and wet dog crap.”

“It’s really very sad,” the pixie sighed again. “She’s tried for decades to find someone to switch titles with her, but no one wants to touch it.”

“Or her,” said the boggle. “On account of the smell. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.”

[emily-e-draws]

mine, all mine 💛