#it was a hard one to conceptualize

[doevademe]

As a continuation for the time travel prompt (big up to the one who came up with it and to you for giving life to it, I love how your brains work) I propose maybe a plot twist: by the time young perce and nico come to terms with their future, they hear the wailing of a few months old baby girl who looks legit like a mix of the two from upstairs? And chaos ensues? Maybe? (By that I mean they re not only married but they discover they re parents too thanks to godly magic).

[Other parts of the fic: 1, 2, 3]

"So in the future you become like a badass demigod mercenary? And sometimes you take me with you?" Young Percy asked Nico's younger self, who just shrugged. "That's... actually really cool!"

"It is pretty cool," his Percy commented as he opened a can of spritz from their last trip to Venice. "And after brainstorming last night, we think your being here is a consequence of our last outing."

"What were you guys doing?" His younger self asked curiously as Nico just tapped his foot, waiting for the image to clear.

"Getting some sand for a primordial," he said. "It's the primordial in question that makes me suspicious."

"You called exactly when I expected you," the magical image finally spoke. Nico had enough experience to know that the older a deity, the more exentric and weird they were, but he still had to double take at the image of a crone with a young woman's face the primordial of Destiny sported.

"If you knew, why keep me on hold, Ananke?" Nico asked, all fake politeness. The goddess changed, now having the body of a baby and the face of an old woman.

"Woah, that's really frea—" his husband acted quick, putting his hand over his younger self's mouth. Nico gave him a grateful smile.

"I also answered when I was expected to," she said, looking perplexed. "You are wondering why there's time displaced versions of yourselves with you."

"Yeah, that's pretty much it," Percy said as his younger self struggled to get out of his grip. "Was there something in the gem you paid us with or something?"

"Nothing of the sort," she said with an airy laugh, changing to a woman in her forties with a baby face. "It's because the sand I needed for my clock is filled with the essence of Aion."

"The primordial of Time," Nico said, mostly for Younger Percy's sake (and his Percy, too, but he knew better than to ask questions while he was talking with deities). "We rolled on the stuff to get away from a Drakon, so we're also infused with his essence."

"Time is eternal and cyclical. By getting his essence, you pulled on people from other times, and they are anchored to you. They'll remain in this time until the essence fades."

"In other words, we're radioactive," Percy said with a sigh. Young Percy used the opportunity to break free and get in front of Nico, glaring at the woman.

"Okay, so I have two questions," he said loudly. Nico resisted the urge to facepalm. "One, how long will that essence cling to them? Two, will we remember what happened?"

Nico loved Percy. With all his heart, even at his worst. But right now, he wished their Time-radioctiveness had brought a mellower old man version of his husband instead of him at his most... Percy.

"Destiny is found out by mortals in time, my dear... but depending on how much essense they absorbed, it could be anywhere from a few days to a month."

Their eyes widened. He and Percy tended to get... busy right after a mission (don't judge him, it saved them a bath), so they had had that sand clinging on them for hours!

"As for the other question.... Your Destiny was to come here. While the memories will be gone, the experiences will remain. A tiny little voice that will remind you 'I should be doing this'..." Ananke said with excitement. "It was needed so neither of you would give up on each other! And just like that, our time is u—"

"Please toss another Drachma for five more minutes," Fleecy's automated message recited. Nico sighed and dissipated the rainbow.

No one spoke for a few minutes, teying to proccess the information.

"Percy mentioned a gem," Young Nico said finally. "What was it for?"

"Uh... for our future," his Percy said evasively. "Look, we only take on jobs from primordials for special things and... it's nice to have the option."

"Option for..." Young Percy drawled, finally finding an opening to bother his older self. His Percy looked away, coughing. "Come on, your future husband asked you a question. Answer him."

His younger self blushed and hid behind him. Nico was torn between considering himself adorable or embarrassing.

"It's a tiny, tiny fragment of the World Egg that birthed the universe," Nico said. "It can create anything... within reason. I'm not very trustful of Love and Fertility gods, so this was a nice compromise for eventually... having a baby."

Nico knew that Percy had wanted a family of his own since he was little, and that was the one thing Nico wasn't sure he could give him. When Ananke offered the gem in exchange for a job, he had jumped at the chance. Young Percy's eyes widened and he glanced at Young Nico for a moment before blushing heavily.

"Oh, speaking of baby-making," his Percy said, making their younger selves squirm. Nico raised an eyebrow. He was doing it on purpose. "We need to set ground rules for you guys."

"Ground rules? This is our house too!" Young Percy argued.

"You're minors, and this won't be your house for another four years," Percy said, blowing a raspberry. Nico looked away. His husband was a five year old in a 27-year-old body sometimes. "So, first of all, now you know you'll get together, but I want no exploration of that in this house."

"I wouldn't!" Young Percy exclaimed. Young Nico shrank on himself, making Young Percy's eyes widen. "Not that I don't want to— I mean, I'm still with Annabeth, and I'm not a cheater!"

Young Nico nodded, relaxing a little.

Adorable, Nico decided. I was adorable.

"Good. Second of all—"

A loud cry stopped them all in his tracks. Nico and his husband reacted first, followed by their younger selves as they opened one the rooms.

Inside was a craddle with little baby with dark black hair and striking green eyes. The name 'Emilia' was carved on the craddle.

Nico moved first, picking up the baby and rocking her lightly. The girl looked at him and stopped crying immediately.

"It's okay, Emmy, papa is here," he said softly, checking to see if there was anything wrong with her.

"Did you guys use the gem already?" Young Percy asked, looking at the baby. "It sounded like you didn't!"

"We... we haven't yet," his husband said slowly, getting closer to Nico and the baby. "But there's this feeling when I look at her... I know she is my daughter."

From the look Nico saw on his younger self's eyes, he knew both were thinking the same.

Aion's essense. If it pulled them from the past, it could also pull someone from the future. Someone so close to them it was basically their conbined selves.

Like Nico and Percy's future daughter.

"Damn Time Radioactivity!" Young Percy said once he caught on. Young Nico slapped his arm. "Hey!"

"Watch your language in front of our daughter!"

Percy and Nico looked at each other.

This complicated things even further.

[suntails]

⚔️👑

[jorrated]

if they made sonic a prick, one can imagine how much of a wanker shadow would be if STC continued

[lemongogo]

[longing-for-rain]

I think it’s funny how people point to the existence of female kataang stans as proof that kataang isn’t written for the male gaze when every female kataang stan I’ve interacted with has said something to the effect of “but he’s so nice, he wouldn’t have done something like that” to dismiss his blatant violation of Katara’s boundaries on screen. It is unfortunately not uncommon for women to flock to the defense of male interests.

[codenamesazanka]

Shigaraki/Tenko wanting to destroy the false sense of peace All Might and Heroes created

.⬇️.

Shigaraki/Tenko wanting to destroy everything that lead to the existence of that house, which he conceptualizes as the embodiment of rejection and injustice in the world. Be a Hero for the Villains.

.⬇️.

AFO basically literally created that house

.⬇️.

Shigaraki/Tenko helps defeat AFO

.⬇️.

Deku telling him 'you already destroyed it' is... apparently Shigaraki/Tenko having finally gotten rid of the true cause of (his) rejection and injustice? main antagonist's big problem that represents an overarching major issue of the story/in-universe society... solved? (main antagonist's big problem that represents an overarching major issue of the story/in-universe society not actually being the problem he thought it was but now also solved?)

.⬇️.

No longer a need for there to be a Hero for the Villains, Shigaraki/Tenko dies.

.⬇️.

Heroes not to be blamed in the first place. also fuck everyone else and all other 'actual' outcasts I guess.

[cursezoroark]

by luck I was already working on a geara page. so I cleaned it.

@emissary-of-dog (for the rq)

[liquidstar]

Today my niece (2) wanted to play with my anime figures, and she picked the Lelouch and Suzaku linked earning figures bc she thought they were "mama and dada." She later picked my Homura and Madoka figures and again decided they were mama and dada. Gay rights??? Thanks kid

[compacflt]

I just wanted to say as someone who has stumbled across your blog and has read your Wednesday wips and posts about anything topgun related that your thought process and consideration of mav and ice, specifically their political beliefs and relationships with their own identities, is honestly so impressive and cool. You have brought such realism and life to these characters which is just so refreshing to see. idk i just wanted to express how cool and awesome i think that is

Because of the thought into these characters does it make it difficult to like them or understand them if you have differing opinions from them? for me personally i feel like if i were to ever actually have a convo with ice or mav regarding identity politics i would actually start to lose my mind (like how one feels when your dad or fun uncle talks for too long at thanksgiving dinner). If it does make them difficult to like, does that make it difficult for you to write them sometimes?

oh yeah! i think, my ice i really empathize with & really love & really could get along with, once he grows out of the sexism of his teens & twenties, but my maverick drives me crazy. someone sent in an ask a while ago that was like “WHY is cyclone simpson your one true love??” And it’s because i too would absolutely hate maverick & hate working with him lol. people who are overly cocky & un-self-aware & a bit self-centered make me CRAZY. (narrator voice: compacflt is a hypocrite as all these things also apply to compacflt.)

Politically… It’s difficult to say. no one really wants to hear the intricacies of one person’s political journey, which is why i won’t give you mine, but suffice to say—since the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine, and my semi-concerted effort to learn more about the political landscape of modern warfare, my own personal beliefs have shifted a whole bunch. definitely aided in that shift by my top gun fic project that specifically aims to understand the conservative straight-passing male mindset as it relates to military matters… there are many end goals to a project like mine, but one end product is a filter you can take away and hold up in front of your eyes and see the world through it. When writing from the eyes of a conservative straight (passing) white man, your priorities totally shift. I had to write from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care about identity politics. Because they don’t! A core tenet of conservatism is very proudly not caring about that stuff, and being very annoyed when people (usually left-of-centers) make that stuff very visible and want you to care about it! “Don’t shove it in my face,” etc., etc. Don’t force me to care about this taboo, private thing I really don’t care about. It violates my freedoms, or whatever, to be forced to care—or even bear witness to—stuff that i don’t care about. Etc. And then, to be nominally a part of that community that you really, really don’t care about, and then to be told that you have to care about it because of your publicity… people asking you to be proud of something that has had a negative connotation for much of your entire life… that’s not a transformation that happens easily.

Jesus, I could write an essay about this. I have, several times by now in responses to asks over my blog. But there is so much that I could talk about. I think… I really worry that some of my writing falls into the first of the below categories:

I really try not to romanticize conservatism in my writing—I tried to show that ice and mav’s happiness is the price they pay for their conservatism. They’re actively choosing to be unhappy—but because they prioritize their honor over everything, due to EXTERNAL PRESSURES they cannot control, and which I think are often ignored in the fandom space for one reason or another. The fact of the matter is, in 99% of IPs, characters prioritize something other than their sexualities. It’s never Maverick’s personal identity that is at stake in either Top Gun or Top Gun: Maverick, because he has built himself so impermeably masculine that there are no grounds upon which to question his personal identity. He just isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about how to get into Charlie’s pants, how to win the Top Gun trophy, how to uphold his promise to Goose, et cetera. If he’s fucking guys on the side, it’s because he wants to and because hes maverick and he does what he wants without thinking about it—that’s the whole point of his character, from a story-construction standpoint. That’s his archetype. He’s a renegade maverick superstar who is both thoughtlessly brilliant and thoughtlessly dangerous. He’s thoughtless. His priorities are to survive and to look cool doing it, and that’s it. He is a savant in the Naval Air Force, where honor is your lifeblood, who feels he has been dishonored by his own family name, and who willingly joined the conservative post-Vietnam Navy right when/after Ronald Reagan was elected President, and who wears cowboy boots and who disrespects women to their faces, and who is eager to get into altercations with Soviet-Chinese-DPRK-X-second-world-country-coded-but-EXPLICITLY-Soviet-manufactured-Mikoyan-Gurevich-MiG-28s(-F-5s-painted-black)… I’m sorry. In my opinion, the conservatism is baked into him as a character. I find it extremely difficult to separate him from his conservatism, because in some ways his patriotic conservatism is his raison d’etre. IMO if you take that away from him, he ceases to exist.

Same thing with Ice and his unwillingness to openly rebel or go against the grain. That is his whole reason to exist in the story at all. I know that I’m saying this in a fandom space where the whole point is to change characters & put them in different situations (fanfic) but… in kind of a perverse self aware way, as in I know I sound ridiculous and pretentious, i guess i don’t really understand an impulse to change the core tenets of a character irreparably in fanworks. We are shown that ice always goes by the books in TG. Then we are shown that he achieves the fruits of that labor (four stars) in TGM. So he is rewarded for never rebelling, whereas Maverick, who always rebels (but NEVER in a way that challenges his personal identity), has stagnated in the ranks at full-bird O-6. And that’s Ice’s character. That’s what he’s there for in the story—he’s a tool to show us the value system of rank and prestige you earn by following the rules of the Navy. Why take that away from him? That’s his priority! Canonically, that’s his priority and reason for existence! And historically the way to achieve that priority is through conservatism.

And you ask me if it’s hard to like my ice and mav. Yes, but that’s not my choice. The movie already did that for me. They are not, I’m sorry, likable people. I am not a straight white conservative male writing about straight white conservative men to validate my own beliefs—I’m a queer AFAB person of color writing about straight white conservative men because I want to understand the limits of their conservatism. What they do and do not care about, and what it takes to make them care. And from what we are shown in TG… ice and mav would not care about ME. At all. And they would not want to be forced to care about me. Ice’s casual careless dismissiveness… “the plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies’ room…” mav following Charlie into the bathroom… turning the key in the ignition and driving away while pretending not to hear her… “what?? i can’t hear you! 🙉” … they do not care. They have no desire to care.

Again. Maybe I subscribe to a very very old-school and labored and pretentious ideology when it comes to writing… I know a lot of people write just to have fun. I do not. I wish i could, but I don’t. And when you’re not writing to have fun, you don’t have to like the characters you’re writing about. They’re nothing more than tools at your disposal to get your point across more effectively. No, I don’t like them! Of course not! My ice is cruel and cowardly and careless and hypocritical and subservient and weak, and my mav is demanding and dangerous and dismissive and oblivious and so, so, so unbelievably bitter.

And that’s what my story needed, to get my point across. So, shrug. My point was my priority. I don’t care too much about the characters themselves.

Re: icemav & identity politics. Part of hopefully selling this story is the attempt at empathy for the conservative male, to bring this discussion back to the top. Why write fiction at all if you’re not going to write about people different from you, and why write about people different from you if you don’t want to understand them? So… part of trying to understand them was to understand and have empathy for this shift in priorities. Conservative guys do not want to care about labels, or sexual orientations, or, God forbid, discussion of their gender identities. I can kind of see Ice tolerating it by the end… but, there are limits. Again, it’s supposed to be private. I think he’d chafe against getting labeled gay—he wouldn’t want to be called the first gay compacflt, or SECNAV, etc. He can’t say, “i slept with like a hundred fifty women before I even MET the ONLY man ive ever slept with,” because that’s like intensely private personal information!! No one deserves that information, but people still want to call him gay, even though in his head he really is not!!!! Again—from the conservative perspective, it’s a public imposition of left-wing, overly sexualized, too-neat labels and politics onto an area of life that has typically been kept private and respectable—I don’t agree with the conservatism, but I can at least empathize with it. Pre-Maverick’s death (pre-coming to terms with it), it would’ve been shameful & embarrassing to him; but even after coming to terms with it, it’s still not something he “takes pride” in. I think he thinks of it like this—most people aren’t proud of being straight. Like, it’s weird if you are. Same thing with being proud of being white, etc. Why be excessively proud of things you have no control over? Why not take pride in your ACTIONS—for instance, his career that he has actively sacrificed so much of his pride for? I can really empathize with that thought. I don’t necessarily agree, but I get it, especially in his professional circumstances, where he has so much to be professionally proud of, and yet people keep wanting him to publicly care about this private part of him he has no control over and can’t change.

Maverick though. I think he’d be actively hostile about talking about it in public. He Does Not Care. he does not want to care. It’s all an insult. They call him the first openly gay Ace cause he’s married to another man— “okay, but, like, I’m not. Stop calling me that. Neither of us are. Oh my god we have slept with so many women. Stop calling us that.” Ok then what do you want us, the press corps, to call you? First openly bisexual Ace? “No that’s worse!! That’s a word some teenager made up and doesn’t mean anything!! I’m sixty years old stop asking me to talk about this stuff im too old.” What do you have to say to LGBT kids who want to go into the navy? “😎👍 there’s a place for you etc etc. Let’s go back to talking about all the planes I shot down.” Maverick does what he wants without thinking about it. That’s the core tenet of his character. Very conservative. Don’t ask him to care too much.

Idk. No I don’t like them. But I understand them, if that makes sense. Like their conservative anti-label logic does make emotional sense to me. So that’s part of what I took away from this project, for better or worse… probably worse: I understand why conservatives don’t like the modern over-publicity of sexuality. They don’t care and they don’t want to care. And because they are small-C conservative, my ice and mav still don’t care lol. So, yeah. It doesn’t make them hard to write, because thats why I wanted to write them in the first place.

[petitpiedgalbe]

Lollipops by Petit Pied Galbe!

We did it! The idea was to create something sweet and abstractive at the same moment. And I am happy about the result, this time shoes aren't "too long", they could be a little bit more precise in details, however the general assumptions of the project are successful in my opinion. The whole set is about 15 photos, so today I will share with You first two of them, the rest I will leave for another occasion.

And from announcements: From the middle or end of next week I am taking a little break, of course I will be checking what's going on here and how You do. However, because of a lot of work and the fact that I need to sort out a few things – I need some time :) But I promise that I will be back to posting faster than you're gonna start to miss me :)

Have a great weekend all, and as I wished You at the beginning of the week: let the power of creativity be with You!

[misspickman]

rr09 is such a funny comic bc even the people who read it havent read it

[chiropteracupola]

I like when books have Maps and Charts in them and I think that all books should have such things.

and books which already have them? I think they should have More Maps and Charts.

[titsthedamnseason]

i actually feel like crying. it should be illegal to drift apart from your friends

[ejga-ostja]

DAY 19: Woodkid- Land of All

- I wanted to make this drawing about how Jordie came to Ketterdam wanting to build a new life for him and his brother, but instead that city meant his death.