#it’s a real tragedy

[kylermalloy]

Okay. Okay. Objectively, I think that Midnight Sun is the best episode of Attack on Titan, and the closest thing the show has to a thesis statement. But my favorite episode will always be I’m Home.

⚠️Spoilers for Attack on Titan below⚠️

Even just hearing the music from that episode, from Sasha’s fight, got me over-emotional and sentimental today. And it’s not because we lose Sasha later. It’s not even about Sasha, in a way. Well…it is, but it isn’t. If it had been Conny, or Jean, or somebody else, I would be equally emotional—but Sasha’s the one who falls into this situation.

I think…it might be because this is one of the first times we’ve seen any of the 104th fight directly to protect a civilian. As soldiers, their battles have, so far, been over territory, or against a particular Titan. Any time civilians have been around have been…coincidental? Their main objectives have not been about the civilians. (Okay, there was that one time Mikasa took down a Titan and saved some people of Trost, but it took her, like, five seconds.)

This is the first time any one of our lovely child soldiers has engaged a Titan solely to protect a civilian. Sasha went looking for her family, but all she found was this little girl. Everyone else had run off and abandoned her, knowing her mother couldn’t flee.

Sasha is unprepared and panicky, and things keep going wrong at every turn. Her main goal is to simply escape. To live. She could’ve run off and left Kaya too, but she didn’t. She stood her ground, she told Kaya to run, and she fought.

And the way this episode has set Sasha up to have been short-sighted and selfish (like any child of…twelve? thirteen? would be) before she joined the army—willing to retreat from the world and the people ~intruding~ on her corner of it. Let them worry about themselves, and she’ll do the same.

But not today. Today she faced a Titan with a bow and four arrows and fought with her feral fierceness for Kaya and herself to live. She didn’t even kill the Titan! That wasn’t the point! She did enough to save a life. And that life would ripple out and save other lives, years in the future, even after we lost Sasha herself.

But even that’s not the point. Sasha didn’t save Kaya because Kaya would later go on to deprogram Gabi and end the cycle of violence. Sasha saved Kaya because it was the right thing to do, and that earned her praise and pride from her father, the hero of Attack on Titan himself, Mr. Braus.

Idk. This episode always gets me up in my feels.

[thetorturedlovergirl]

I NEED HIM BACK AND KISSING THE DOCTOR GOD I LOVED HIS ENERGY

(Jonathan Groff we’re one and the same)

[platoapproved]

Wherever your miserable life takes you, whoever you find to endure time with, whatever pale proxy of me... I'll be with him. Just wanted you to know that.

[dottyistired]

i'm not seeing any posts about it here yet, but they solved the silas birchtree riddle on reddit and there's some pretty juicy lore! first, entering "paranoid" backwards nets this conspiracy board:

then, from the black letters in the corners of some of the pages people pieced together the code "connect the dots", backwards again, gets a whopping 12 page chapter about the ciphertology cult! it's...something.

so in summary, bill puppeted a guy's corpse, became a cult leader, seemingly married over a hundred people, mass-possessed his followers, tried to get them to build his portal. his lone dissenter was a spinster who made anti-bill chick tracts and started a fire. a waco-style shootout ensued, killing silas' already-rotting corpse a second time in a disturbingly detailed manner. at some point he made some of his followers drink the kool-aid too.

entering the lady's name, emmaline butternubbins, into the computer finally gets you the reward for solving all the riddles: hd wallpapers of various graphics from the book of bill. but frankly this is more interesting and fucked up to me.

(alt text under cut, wip)

[Image 1: A cluttered conspiracy board centered on Bill Cipher. Red string and pins connect various newspaper clippings, photos, drawings and pamphlets.]

[Image 2: A history-book style chapter page. Header "LESSER KNOWN AMERICAN CULTS."

"Have you ever heard of Orchard Lake, Kansas? Chances are you haven't. It was erased from every map, book, and historical record, and the US Government's official position on it is "stop calling us or we'll send a drone to your house." (I learned this the hard way.) But if you drive to the exact latitude and longitude of you'll see bullet casings, faded billboards, and bow ties strewn across the desert sands.

That's because Orchard Lake had another name before it was wiped off the record: BillVille.

CHAPTER 3: BillVille

The First Cult In History That Was Right

FIG A: A tumbillweced

As a historian of esoteric religions, I thought I'd discovered the strangest sects America had yct to offer (see "Chapter 3: Kevin's Gate") but that all changed when I found the following items tucked away in an old trunk in an estate sale on the out- skirts of Bootstrap, Missouri."]

[finelythreadedsky]

it's so great that in greek tragedy there are only three paradigms for a woman leaving her house (her wedding, her funeral, and maenadic rites) and they're all kind of the same thing also

[toadtusks]

I’ve seen some people thinking that the Mighty Nein cartoon isn’t adapting the texblade accent for Fjord, but the clip shared takes place pre-campaign in which canonically he wasn’t using the accent yet. Which Travis seems to have confirmed on Twitter. So it’s still quite likely Yeehaw Fjord will be making an appearance.

[0mka]

He does this every time they end up in a windy place😔 doesnt even have to be that windy honestly, he'll just do it

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bare skin, bare feelings.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[leafuxxtea]

'Oh God, they're beside me again, aren't they.'

LMFAOOO WHAT DID THIS GUY DO TO DESERVE THIS. imagine just sitting there, eating your lunch peacefully while one of your comrades (he's not even eating food, wtf is he doing there) goes and harass the other one once again with his weird homosexual activities (wiping the other's blood and licking it???). I'd lose it, personally.

[loveinhawkins]

ao3

A gnawing sense of foreboding creeps up on Steve as they head to Eddie’s trailer, armed with weapons.

He tries to outrun it through action: ensuring he’s the first one to go through the Gate; jumping back and forth between The Upside Down and their world whenever someone forgets something, “It’s okay, I’ve got it!”; triple checking that the cables for Eddie’s amps are long enough; searching for the slightest thing than seizing upon it with an enthusiasm bordering on desperate, “Hey, we could use this, right? Better take it, just in case.”

But that only works for so long, and then Steve’s just standing in Eddie’s kitchen, the real one, staring blankly at the cupboards, all out of distractions.

Out of time.

He hears a grunt of exertion behind him, then an unsteady landing, a muffled curse. Eddie.

“Jesus Christ, Steve. Wanted to fit your aerobics routine in?”

He’s teasing, so light-hearted despite it all; Steve can’t stand it.

Keeps his back turned, gut twisting, opening the cupboards then slamming them shut, thump, thump. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He never has.

“Uh, so I was thinking,” Eddie continues, like Steve’s not doing anything weird, “that I could stretch out the, um, the song? My playing? Could buy you some more time, anyway.”

“Sure, great,” Steve says shortly.

He thinks—with a numb kind of calm—that he’s going to be sick.

He gets to the bathroom, tries to shut the door, but his grip slips on the handle.

Turns on the faucet, scoops cold water from his hands into his mouth, and it helps until it doesn’t, until he’s almost choking on it, and he’s been here before, the feeling familiar: a shadow looming over him, just waiting, waiting, and he knows it’ll pass, it always does, but he can’t stop thinking of Robin, it might not work out for us this time, and what if, what if—

He can hear Eddie knocking on the doorframe, just out of view—as if he’d seen Steve’s failed attempt at shutting the door and wanted to respect it.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Then Eddie mutters to himself, “Obviously not, get a fucking clue.”

Steve’s laugh is strangled but real. He wipes his mouth dry and shuts off the water.

“You don’t need to talk to a wall, dude,” he says.

And Eddie steps into view, leans against the open door. His eyes flicker across Steve’s face, and Steve doesn’t want to know what he’s noticed, so when Eddie opens his mouth hesitantly, he speaks first.

“We should—they’re gonna wonder where we are.”

Eddie pauses on the verge of speech; Steve watches him reevaluate whatever he was going to say.

“Well,” Eddie says, gesturing to the bathroom, matter-of-fact, “we could be peeing.”

Steve manages a chuckle. “You’re an idiot.”

Eddie grins like he’s saying yup, that’s me, like he’s won a prize.

Steve has seen him wear something close to that expression not even an hour ago: when the kids had started a line to use the bathroom in the RV, and Eddie had snorted, giggled with a childish kind of delight, “You—ha! You all look like you’re on a field trip,” before joining the line himself—calling out that he hoped their plan accounted for bathroom breaks because, “There’s no way I’m pissing in the alternate dimension,” and that had made Nancy break, laughing in a way Steve was certain he hadn’t heard since ‘83.

Eddie steps into the room and shuts the door quietly. Steve gets why: his breathing’s still all wrong, and if Dustin happened to see him, he doesn’t think he’d ever forgive himself.

“Sorry.” Steve sucks in a breath, tries to hold it. Loses it in an exhale that shudders at the edges. He speaks through the tail end of it, hoping that’s enough to conceal the sound, “Gimme, like, two minutes.”

“Make it ten,” Eddie says.

The way he says it makes it seem like it’s already a done deal; he must’ve spoken to Robin and Nancy before he tumbled through the Gate.

Despite himself, Steve feels a wave of relief: just for a little while, he has time; it overpowers the shame, leaves him sinking down to sit on the closed toilet seat.

He closes his eyes, just breathes. In… out… in…

He doesn’t realise that Eddie’s sitting down, too, until he hears the clunk of his boots, the rustle of clothing as he moves.

“Sorry,” Steve says again, and it annoyingly still comes out a little shaky, like he’s in the pool and he’s left it too long to snatch a breath. “You can go back, man, I’ll… I’ll be right there.”

He opens his eyes to see Eddie shaking his head, sat with his back against the bathtub.

“Stop apologising,” Eddie says, and then it’s as if the seriousness of it is too much for him, because he adds, with a self-deprecating smile that Steve hates, “I get it. You’re walking into the dragon’s lair, I’m just putting on a concert.”

“Don’t,” Steve says, and he doesn’t intend for the word to come out as sharp as it does, but that doesn’t change the fact that he means it. He means it.

Eddie’s smile fades.

“Don’t,” Steve repeats, quieter. Not quite an apology.

Slowly, he moves off the toilet seat, until he’s sat next to Eddie. There’s just enough space that they don’t need to touch, but Steve presses his shoulder against Eddie’s anyway, like he can somehow pass on everything he means through that alone.

Eddie sighs, presses back for just a second. “Don’t what?” he asks. He sounds tired all of a sudden.

“Don’t—don’t joke like that,” Steve says. “Like you’re not—” He swallows. “Like it’s not dangerous.”

There’s a pause. Eddie reaches across and puts a hand on Steve’s knee. Squeezes briefly and pulls back; already Steve finds that he misses the warmth of him.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Eddie says. There’s no joke in this, not a trace. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to Dustin.” Another smile. Gentle. “Swear on his mother.”

I’m not worried about that, Steve wants to say, but of course that’s not true; he’s tried hard not to look at Dustin directly ever since they arrived at the trailer, because his throat would start to close up alarmingly whenever his gaze lingered, and he knows the kid’s doing that whole semi-aloof teenager thing lately, but a part of him still wants to hold him tight and never let go.

It’s more that the shape of Steve’s worry is different to what he thinks Eddie’s imagining, covers more than Dustin’s safety alone—that the cold dread in his stomach brings him back to the tunnels in ‘84; to clutching Dustin, who was so small, Steve desperately trying to shield him with his own body, thinking the kid’s thirteen, only thirteen, this isn’t fucking fair; and that if this had to end one way, all he could do was pray that he’d be the only one to…

And Steve hadn’t wanted to die, but he was suddenly facing it anyway, and Christ, looking back at it, that was crazy, the whole damn thing was crazy, but it all made a twisted kind of sense at the time.

Eddie must spot that his train of thought’s gone down a dark alley because he knocks their knees together, but he doesn’t say anything. Just breathes, slumped against the bathtub; it’s probably the first time he’s been still—truly still—in a long while.

He must be exhausted, Steve thinks.

The gnawing feeling digs in, grips his heart.

“I can hear you thinking,” Eddie says quietly. “Listen, Steve, I know I’m new to, uh… all of this shit, but I’m on it, okay? Got it all up in here,” he taps the side of his head, “trust me—”

That’s not what—I trust you, of fucking course I do, but—

“—no deviations, and—”

“Plans change,” Steve says, and he hears himself, the calm decisiveness, just get ready; Dustin’s scream carrying across the junkyard, Steve, abort, abort! “Just… just promise me.”

“Promise you?” Eddie murmurs.

Steve feels the words on his tongue, the weight of them. Don’t do anything stupid. 

He swallows them down—afraid suddenly that if he really puts a name to it, it’s going to happen.

Fuck it, he’s exhausted too, and for a long moment he evades speaking: gingerly rests his head on Eddie’s shoulder. Feels his body heat, the swell of his breathing.

Eddie doesn’t tense up, just lets him rest there. 

If I kissed you, Steve thinks, drained, would you stay?

He doesn’t say it. Instead he lifts his head and asks, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

Eddie chuckles. They’re still so close, Steve can feel his amused sigh.

“Tomorrow? I’ve not really… like, hopefully I’m not in jail. Anything else is a bonus.”

“We’ll fix it,” Steve says fiercely. “Trust me.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Eddie says, grinning fondly, but he sounds genuine. “Shit, man, I think you could do anything.” He gestures outside. “Got the fucking dream team out there.”

“We solved a secret Russian code last summer.”

Eddie laughs. “Did you?” His eyes sparkle with mirth.

You’re beautiful.

“Gospel truth, I swear,” Steve says. He tries to stay light, but he makes the vow anyway. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

I have so much to tell you.

They stand up, and Steve doesn’t know who’s the first one to move—just that they both probably sensed the time dwindling.

And maybe it’s that, the inescapable thought that something’s coming to an end that does it. Steve doesn’t know for sure, just knows that his eyes are burning suddenly—mortifyingly—with tears. He looks up at the ceiling, hurriedly trying to push them back, but Eddie notices anyway.

“Steve, what is it?” he whispers, with a look of utter devastation.

Steve shakes his head. “Just being stupid,” he says, voice brittle, cutting himself off before he can say something ridiculous.

God, Eddie, let’s just stay here and grow old.

“You’re not stupid,” Eddie says, heartfelt—he stops just short of touching Steve; he clearly wants to help so badly, but he doesn’t know how.

Steve wants to tell him it’s fine. He doesn’t know either.

Maybe nothing can help this.

They leave for the Gate in unspoken agreement; at first Steve finds comfort in the sight of Eddie dangling on the rope, not quite in either world. Like every possibility is laid out before him.

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

But there’s a near imperceptible shift as Eddie keeps climbing, and Steve needs to look away, anything to avoid the pit in his stomach: the suspicion that the path’s already been chosen.

[sneezypeasy]

If Katara became Fire Lady, the person who this'd suck the most for isn't actually Aang, it'd be Bato's kid (or whoever's mum or dad happens to be good friends with Hakoda). Can you imagine? Your mum's voice?!?! Hakoda's kids are your age and they're out there being chief of the SWT and co-ruling over the Fire Nation. Who are you chieftain of?? You can't even govern a penguin. Disgusten.

[cupidsbeaux]

hey guys i have my guesses about what this could be referring to but Please i need to know everyone's vibe checks on this. what tragedies do yall see in the future of the suckening?

[vingler-mirror]

So... we all know that Chapter 6 draws parallels between its characters and the casts of the opera "Tosca": Isolde is Tosca, Marcus is Angelotti, and Kakania, as lovingly said by Isolde, is Cavaradossi

Fun fact: Cavaradossi actually dies in the story. Granted, every major characters dies because it's a tragedy... but what's particularly interesting is the way he dies

Remember that Scarpia forces Tosca to give herself to him in exchange for Cavaradossi's survival? He promises to fake Cavaradossi's execution by making the guns shoot blanks. But just like Tosca, he doesn't play with his part of the deal. The bullets turn out to be real, and Cavaradossi dies for real

So. Dying because of a trick involving a gun... sounds familiar?

Yeah. I'm afraid that Kakania plays too well to the character parallel and almost meets the same fate as Cavaradossi. Props to our girl Marcus for preventing that from happening

[strawberri-draws]

shuichi posting

[hollow-dweller]

i think it's time for fandom to accept that some AUs are simply A Bad Idea. your lilo and stitch au with two white dudes is a bad idea. your portrait of a lady on fire au with men is a bad idea. your encanto au with a white family is a bad idea. culture and gender and race *matter* in many source texts, and erasing or appropriating that in order to see your two favourite white guys hug is, you guessed it, a bad fucking idea.

[lackadaisycal-art]

Love the energy of the new doctor who episodes, love Ncuti Gatwa's charisma and the show's willingness to take risks. That being said I'm a bit sad we don't seem to be getting the old character focus of the og RTD seasons. I really like Millie Gibson's performance but on a script level Ruby Sunday doesn't feel like a real person to me. What drives her, what are her flaws, what's her socioeconomic background and how does that inform her behaviour, what are the unlikable parts of her, what does she want most? What's her relationship to her mother like beyond aspirationally and non-specifically positive? How does she dress when she's just sitting around at home? What might she butt heads with the doctor about???