#it’s just like different emphasis

[ariesalpinesavi]

Been a while since I did this redraw

[vaxxman]

"STOP TAKING THE HEALTH KITS"

He ubered the scout after this.

Additional sketches and some ramblings under the cut.

This is based on an encounter I had the other day, when a demoman took a medkit before my medigun connected with him. When he saw my health was down to 21, he would force me to stand at the spawn point and guarded me until I was healed. Wherever you are now, if you read this, you were a good lad and I love you.

Sometimes I think about how medic is emotionally very invested in the missions (which shows in his voice when he shouts at his team), but off-duty and during friendly taunts he seems to be among the most giggly, and fun-loving mercenaries in the team. I like to think he can get agitated very fast, but cools down just as quickly.

[izzyspussy]

the fact that they made it illegal to make ads louder than programs on tv in 2010 but haven't updated it to apply the same regulation to streaming. who do i have to call.

[urfavcrime]

dsmp is still SO insane to me. still not completely convinced it wasn't a social experiment. it is something that can never be replicated again due to the really specific circumstances that attributed to it's creation and popularity

[dionysism]

skimmed through all the translations i own looking for odysseus thigh mentions. homer you freak.... i get it. i do

[anghraine]

I've been moving and navigating further departmental nonsense etc (my pseudo-dissertation got approved for defending, though! l o l). But it was interesting to see the Worst P&P Takes poll I reblogged accumulating more results and the general tenor of responses in the notes.

I mean, the results are definitely to be expected if you're familiar with the side of Austen fandom doing a lot of the reblogging etc. But still, interesting!

Many Tumblr polls specify that they're asking about personal preferences that may be irrational—favorite/least favorite, coolest/most annoying, or something like that. This one, though, asked for the worst interpretation of P&P, not the most annoying one—and the current leader is "Darcy is never really proud, he's just shy and probably has anxiety" against some very steep competition on the Bad Takes front.

I was thinking about why that seemed a kind of tediously predictable choice even though I agree that the take is wrong, and realized that while I do disagree with the shy Darcy interpretation and I particularly disagree with the specific formulation where he is never proud at all, it ultimately feels to me like a failure of nuance rather than just completely wrongheaded like some of the others. And this is probably my fundamental difference with a lot of Darcy takes I see!

In my opinion, a character who is introverted and who feels awkward in various social situations and who doesn't like common social activities and who has to work himself up to talking to his crush and who is repeatedly suggested to behave very differently in contexts where he's more comfortable being interpreted as shy and anxious is not that big of a leap.

Yes, it's important that he is actually fundamentally confident and haughty, that he makes his personal feelings of discomfort other people's problem, and that he thinks he's such a unique and special butterfly that he doesn't need to even put in an effort outside his personal social circle. But it's a misreading that is easy to follow (and long predates the 2005 P&P, as I've mentioned before!).

The additional misreading that a shy and anxious Darcy is also never proud at all is a much more drastic leap, and in my experience, condemnations of shy Darcy interpretations rarely differentiate between "Darcy is shy as well as arrogant" and "Darcy is shy rather than arrogant" as interpretations (although their basic arguments are quite different). But even that as the worst possible misreading of P&P when Darcy is not even the main character is ?????????

I mean, for one alternative (not even the one I voted for!), the idea that Elizabeth is an author avatar Mary Sue seems a far worse misreading of P&P than basically anything to do with Darcy at all. The center piece of the entire novel is Elizabeth's epiphany of self-knowledge about her own shortcomings that do not particularly resemble Austen's at all, but were ethically a concern for her, and she's a complex, interesting character in general whom Austen correctly regarded as a major achievement. Inverting that into Elizabeth as an improbably perfect, reality-warping self-insert is deeply wrong and frankly pretty misogynistic as well.

(ngl though, it's a little funny to see such a blatantly terrible reading of Elizabeth rank so far behind the shy Darcy votes. I've gotten "does anyone actually think/say that?" so many times on my posts about Austen fandom's prioritization of Darcy's character development over Elizabeth's and yet...)

And even just going with the Darcy-centric misreadings, the idea of Darcy as a "bad boy" seems easily the most absolutely wrong take on him. His pride is at least complicated and the finer points can be fairly debated and it's a quality that actually changes somewhat throughout the novel, and you can have discussion over what happened when, whose testimonies should be weighted more, etc. But there is no point at which "bad boy" isn't utterly wrong for him. However, there's definitely a tendency in some wings of the fandom to find the idea of Darcy being misread too favorably more objectionable than him being read too unfavorably, regardless of the particulars, so it's not a surprise.

I suppose you could argue about what "worst" means in the context of variously bad interpretations. Like, is an interpretation that is about a fairly trivial aspect of the book but extremely wrong about it "worse" than an interpretation that is pretty bad but at least comprehensibly so about something very important?

[starlightswordfight]

new headcanon dropped (HELP ME)

I like to imagine that while there might be a universal "standard" language to make interplanetary communication easier (ex: Koppaite text is also found on the S.S. Shepherd among several other places), everyone's accents and dialects are still different depending on their home planet!!

this in mind. it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to tell right away where Bernard is from. this is because he uses so much lingo from different places he's been to and pronounces certain words in a Variety of different ways that it can be hard to trace if you haven't known him long enough

[starry-bi-sky]

honestly your dpxdc clone au gives me life, its adorable as all hell and im a sucker for found family but with that being said, its so freaking hysterical to me that Danny is going full feral liminal menace at Wes any time hes near and Wes himself is still 100% into it the freak (affectionate) and thats not even pointing out the paralles it could possible create since danny and dames gives massive parallels to dick and damian and dick does have a thing for redheads.

yeesSSSSS! I was planning on hoarding this to myself but i can't not reply. and i'll be able to find this again with the clone^2 tag so win WIN. i'm so glad you are as delighted by this as me. It's so hilarious to me that Danny just becomes a complete freak whenever he spots Wes, and I'm the one who wrote it into existence. Like- like i don't know how to explain my vision in words but like, its like Danny sees Wes and immediately goes 'what can I do to make his day worse'. And then he goes and does it.

(honorary read more because i talk a lot)

He's relatively normal around his friends too, which makes him going full-fledged unhinged around Wes even funnier to me. Like, Danny will spout weird shit sometimes to Sam and Tucker, but usually its prefaced with him talking about patrol or there would be context before he said anything. With Wes? Though?? he will just. say anything, completely unprompted. Slings an arm around his shoulder like they've been buddies since primary school and then spits out a weird new fun fact he learned about the bodily anatomy while researching his latest cold case. All vaguely-threatening but utterly insane things to say as way to start a conversation.

And sometimes its not even that, he'll walk up to Wes and ask him if he saw the latest daytime fight between Phantom and Skulker. And then he'll say "yeah i missed it myself but I saw clips of it being posted online" and then watch Wes mentally explode him with his mind. or he'll disparage Phantom for having such a young partner with him, "Can you believe he'd let a kid fight ghosts with him? I'd never let my brother ghosthunt with me if I was Phantom."

All of this with such a deceptive look on his face but the most delighted, shit-eating gleam in his eyes. Wes is chewing glass and he wants to yell that he does let his brother fight ghosts with him. Also you told him yourself that nothing would've stopped your demonic (Wes' words) little brother from joining you.

Damian gets in on the fuckery occasionally, but since he's not around often with Wes about, it doesn't happen nearly as often as it does between Wes and Danny. Sam and Tucker know he's screwing with him too, and both of them are a little wary about him being careless with his secret id. But he's been doing this since he was 14-ish and it hasn't backfired yet. So. They're not actively stopping him.

Danny walks back to his lunch table after terrorizing Wes and Tucker just asks him what he said, because Wes was about as red as a tomato when he walked away. Danny offhandedly sighs and innocently says he tried to have a conversation about Phantom with him. Wes didn't seem to like it all that much. Weird.

And yes, yes. Wes is totally into it and is slightly enraged about this fact, because not even he knows why he's into it. The freak (affectionate). Danny gives him this troublemaker smirk, and i did say smirk, and Wes doesn't know whether or not if he wants to smack him or kiss him. Or both. Like, yeah, pine, white boy, pine.

(And this is a dramatized image but I'm also highly entertained by the idea that Wes keeps getting routine dirty looks from various peers because they, too, have a crush on Fenton. Except Fenton doesn't talk to anyone else unless its his friends and sometimes Valerie, and Weston, the guy who keeps accusing him of being the local vigilante, is somehow routinely having conversations with him?? And BLOWING IT?? Like everyone else thinks he's fumbling so bad, and yet fenton keeps tALKING to him.)

And yes!! i'm always so pleased whenever someone brings up the parallels D+D have to Dick and Damian, because that was lowkey my intention when I was making the solo clone damian au. Although it was supposed to be more implied since I don't really know much about Damian and Dick other than they're very close and Dick was Damian's Batman for a year. And then of course the very smaller parallel (??) 'what if' between Bruce and Damian and D+D in clone^2 considering who they are both clones of.

And man this just makes me want to talk about when batfam meet D+D because I just want them to see D+D be so brotherly towards each other. Like I want them to see Bby Dames wearing his goofy fun fact shirts and stealing Danny's hoodies/flannels/etc and blatantly lying about it when Danny asks. Only for Danny to then throw him over his shoulder like Tadashi from BH3 and jump around.

And also. I do not know what Damian Wayne's (DW as I'll call him) stance on being called "Dami" is - the general consensus I've seen is that its usually used as a playful nickname in order to get a rise out of him, and he doesn't really like it.

But baby Dames being called that freely, and often, and its sometimes used to get a rise out of him but thats typically what nicknames do. Its used as easily as his full name is with the same amount of affection. And its like his main go-to nickname. "Dami" and "Dames" with the occasional "Bud/Buddy", "Squirt", "Little man", etc. Not once is he ever called 'demon-spawn'

(which i know is a fanon nickname but its a relatively popular nickname)

but yeah, uhhh. i think thats all of my thoughts on the matter. for now lmAO

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Asunder

slow-paced high fantasy

a woman who has a contract with an eldritch entity allowing her to see the dead & survives by taking various jobs

when a job searching for stranded smugglers in a cave goes wrong, she ends up with the soul of a dying stranger bound to her shadow

along with a scholar and her old childhood friend, they travel to his home country to find a way to unbind him and save them both

dark fantasy world with gods, demonic entities, arcane magic, and semi-sentient beasts used as transport

[pocketgalaxies]

and what if i'm looking for scenes of imodna holding hands and almost every single one is laudna holding imogen's hand to ground her? what if there's almost no examples of imogen holding laudna's hand to ground her? what then??? WHAT THEN???????

[moe-broey]

LMFAOOOO

It's very unclear! But Alfonse's "It's been at least 10 years since Sharena was a child" line is a rough estimate itself. I feel like it could place Sharena anywhere to 18 to 20 when she joined the Order of Heroes (this is just my headcanon though, based on what's typical irl -- there's also a possibility that in Askr, the age you're considered "an adult" is different, but that's also speculation)

But if Sharena was anywhere from 18 to 20 when she joined the Heroes, and granting that a few years have passed to get to Book 4. Maybe 22? 24? At oldest? If every book is a year. Which in that case!

Yeah she could be at this point actually 🤔 Or maybe 26.

And really you can throw any random number at Alfonse like. I kinda hc he's 3 years older than her, if not 4. They do seem close in age, but far enough that Alfonse has always felt more "grown up" to her (possibly by the way he was treated/raised, many possibilities). But going off those numbers, he could be 29 or 30ish current Book, if we're going w Sharena being 26 (makes me wonder if his Brave alt is gonna make him look "more mature"... like his portrait always read as young adult to me, but I wonder if he'll be a little less baby faced.)

[winepresswrath]

hi! i always love your MDZS/CQL takes; can i ask what are the questions you think CQL is asking, as compared to MDZS?

I haven't actually revisited either canon in ages, which is making me nervous. what questions the novel is interested in can be pretty contentious all on its own! @mikkeneko has an excellent answer in the notes here which I reccomend to everyone. My own thoughts are honestly pretty scattered- I keep on deleting things and going hm, that's not quite right.

So, for the obvious-to-me example, people reasonably zero in on the creation of innocent doctors/radish farmers who Wen Ruohan is holding hostage. In CQL it's easy to infer that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are maybe the only cultivators and almost certainly the only combatants among the Wen remnants, and their status is much more ambiguous in the novel, which I personally think is asking, essentially, "and so what? were they wrong to run, when they had a chance? Do they deserve what Jin Guangshan will do to them if they go back? Aren't they just people, actually?" Whereas the question that CQL is asking is more to the effect of "What does Wen Qing owe these people, when she is their only defence? What is she entitled to do to save them, at other people's expense? If she fucks up that moral calculus, what then? Does it matter if she's personally fond of some of the outsiders who are going to get hurt? If one of them saved her brother? Later, this question will flip to what Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and the parallel to Jiang Cheng's situation in particular is, I think, genuinely pretty fun. You're giving up the Wen as soldiers who've laid down their arms in exchange for Wen Qing also grappling with leadership and the question of how many horrors she can stand to look the other way on to protect her own people. one reason I keep deleting so much is that a lot cql's changes were motivated at least in part by censorship, which I think we mostly share a general and justified distaste for! but I also think that within the bounds of that censorship the creative team put a lot of work into actually doing something interesting with those changes. Or, for another example- nieyao! There's a much greater emphasis on the nmj-jgy relationship, it's unambiguously very close and they are clearly extremely important to one another, and I think that's because the cql team has a lot to say about love, trust, power, and the ways those things interact, and that reflects back on all of the other relationships in play, including Wangxian. Almost every time, when CQL chooses change a relationship they make the characters in question closer- that's true for Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, for Wen Qing and the Yunmeng contingent, for Zixuan and Mianmian, and Huaisang and Meng Yao. It's even true for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who have a close and trusting relationship in first life! CQL puts a much greater emphasis on "all right, so you care, what next?" How do you choose someone and then choose to be good to them? What if there's a massive power disparity between you? What if you seriously disagree about your priorities and morals? How do you trust someone who's betrayed you? When is it a stupid choice to trust at all? How do you have faith that you know someone well enough for that trust to be meaningful?

for legal reasons i would like to specify that it's not that mdzs isn't interested in these problems. i do remember wangxian's literal trust fall. cql is asking these questions all the time about everyone. also for legal purposes i'm not suggesting that cql lwj and jc love each other. but! they establish a three month wartime partnership looking for wwx and then jc immediately drops him on wwx's say-so despite apparently having a positive enough opinion of him to tell wwx he thinks they should make up twice. lan wangji will later tell wwx he thinks he should loop jc in on the second flautist! these are people trying to navigate some kind of relationship/shared interest/community, as opposed to a hateful void. cql wants to say hey, how do you go about this? while I'm here and rambling cql also puts a lot of emphasis on wwx's connection to yunmeng and changes things up so instead of feeling alienated right before he leaves our last glimpse of him there is happily picking lotuses and playing with a kid! in both stories the narrative is asking who do you protect? who do you leave behind? can you ever get it back? but the angles are very different.

[thedreadvampy]

unwarranted Cis Opinion but I'm getting really uncomfortable w people responding to bathroom bills by posting pictures of trans men like DO YOU WANT THEM IN WOMEN'S BATHROOMS

bc like. no they're men. they should be in men's bathrooms unless that feels unsafe. but. it really feels like it's not helpful to lean into the idea that seeing someone presenting masc or being read as a man in a women's bathroom means You're In Danger.

like I know several butch women and NB ppl who are really scared around being on T or getting top surgery bc they're not men and they don't want to be in the men's bathroom, and in that circumstance stuff like growing facial hair or reading more androgynously can be really fucking scary when people are being primed by propaganda to be on edge and hyperreactive to anyone who doesn't look like their idea of a Cis Woman.

and I'm not laying that at the feet of the people saying "hey uhhhh trans men are men and don't belong in women's bathrooms" bc it is not their fault. it's the fault of a concerted effort to make it difficult and dangerous to be trans or substantively gender nonconforming in public.

but at the same time idk I guess it just worries me cause sometimes it feels like "you fools! you are worried about this group of trans people bc you think they're the Lurking Danger of Men In Bathrooms? WRONG! the Men Making You Feel Afraid In Bathrooms are actually THESE trans people!" when in fact neither of those groups using the fucking bathroom is a problem. just piss and mind your business. people need to go where they need to go.

anyway this country is a hot fucking trash fire that somehow accelerates its descent into open fascism more every day so it's all super good and normal. so don't take this too seriously tbh cause it's somewhere near #2535654476457899009765 on the list of priorities for Queer Discourse right now when the fucking human rights commission is actively rescinding protections from trans people. Please ignore my gibberish.

[hephaestuscrew]

Fisher's death is a different kind of tragedy to the rest of the original Hephaestus crew, because it genuinely was just a horrible accident. And I think accepting that isn't an easy thing for Lovelace.

When almost everyone in your crew is dead, it's the opposite of a consolation to realise that the only other survivor is responsible for those deaths. But once you know you have been betrayed, once you understand that there was someone in your crew who was willing to sacrifice all of you for his own ends, once you've accepted that someone you used to trust killed people you loved, wouldn't it make a kind of sense to believe he was responsible for every awful thing that happened? Wouldn't there almost be a perverse comfort in the righteous anger of believing that Fisher died not because Hui's predictions were wrong, nor because Lovelace's attempts to save him failed, but because Selberg's sabotage doomed him from the start? Wouldn't it tie up the narrative of Lovelace's trauma more neatly if all of it was Selberg's fault, if he was pulling the strings for that first devastating loss? (Cont. below cut)

I imagine that Hui had a sense of guilt and responsibility for Fisher's death. After all, Fisher was only out in that meteor shower because "Hui's projections were way off". Blaming Selberg/Hilbert for Fisher's death would allow Lovelace to posthumously absolve Hui of that guilt. Whereas to accept that Fisher's death was an accident is to accept that it was the result of decisions which held absolutely no malice or willingness to harm.

In Ep38 Happy Endings, after Hilbert reveals that he infected Fisher with Decima first, he has this exchange with Lovelace:

HILBERT But intention was never for anyone to die. Not unless unavoidable.  LOVELACE (realizing) But Fisher did die.  HILBERT Tragic accident. One which even your addled mind has to realize was not my responsibility.

The 'realizing' dialogue tag could be interpreted in a few different ways, but I think this is the moment Lovelace realises that Fisher's death - to echo Minkowski's description of Eiffel being stranded in deep space - "wasn't anyone's fault. It's horrible, and pointless, and it just happened." I think that's a different kind of pain, for Lovelace to realise that - despite the malicious forces around the crew - there was no one to blame for that first tragedy. 

Fisher was the first of Lovelace's crew to die. Lovelace broke her arm trying unsuccessfully to save him. It was the event that turned the first Hephaestus mission from a series of fairly trivial sources of stress, to something ominous that not everyone would come back from. It would be easy to view it as 'the beginning of the end' of the first Hephaestus mission. The period after Fisher's death was "a very difficult time" (as Lovelace describes it herself in Ep35 Need to Know), to the extent that Lovelace developed an "alarming" "dependence on painkillers" (according to Selberg's medical journal).

And there's something particularly heartbreaking to me about the fact that all of that could have happened on a mission without any of the sinister background that the first Hephaestus mission had.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

I just had a whole actual married, mother of two adult woman be the first person older than about 21 to actually accept the fact that I don't want to get married and be willing to talk through what that means for me, instead of trying to convince me that I'll change my mind as I get older. I'm going to fucking cry

[fitzrove]

Fun facts about crown prince rudolf 🥰💖

Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria was this super tragic figure whose super tragic life was always tragic and very sad. Also he was an irredeemably evil sexist jerkface and if you like him you're a pick me girl who wants WOMEN TO DIE,, anyway here are some fun facts about him!

He died in 1889 from suicide :( Or he may have been murdered by French agents sent by his friend Clemenceau,, listen I know they were friends who were aligned politically, but Empress Zita said this ~40 years after Rudolf's death, and because she's distantly related to him through marriage it must 100% be true!

He shot himself in the mouth, I don't know why all of these adaptations change it to be the temple lol

He infected his wife with syphilis >:o

According to his writings (mostly Eine Orientreise where he frequently admires the fresh manliness of his Arab hunting companions) he was heteroromantic polysexual <3 representation

He used to keep this creepy sex register where he used different colors of pens to mark what kind of woman he slept with (virgin, of noble birth, etc...). No trust me bro it's legit even though nobody has ever presented proof of this register existing anywhere or even a credible primary source citation to point to someone contemporary describing it

During his travels in Egypt and Palestine Rudolf acquired many cultural and historical artifacts for museums in Vienna as well as for his personal collections<3 Explorer king. Wait what do you mean imperialism, graverobbing and arson?? Noo I wouldn't describe it as such haha...

He was really sexist and that's not ok tbh :/ How can anyone be interested in him when he was horrible to women :( I mean it's kinda hard to find 19th century european men who would not have been and a lot of our still-revered statesmen had comparable attitudes that people let slide, but actually when it's someone that was also mentally ill in a Scary Violent Way it's ok to center his negative traits and ignore everything else about him haha. Also women are only allowed to enjoy researching and discussing historical figures who are unproblematic and good representation<3 ALSO women are not allowed to make arguments about historical figures being interesting or sympathetic based on their political views/positions if those figures were awful people in their personal lives, it's like the rules of feminism or something! ~~

He was involved in this crazy conspiracy to crown himself as king of Hungary. Also he was really hyped about hungarian nationalism and independence and totally wasn't an imperialist first and foremost who would've seen the ideology as ultimately destructive regardless of any personal fondness for Hungary

The italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni actually really wanted to fuck him and this was a motivating factor for Lucheni's assassination of empress Elisabeth in 1898 😳

[THIS POST IS SATIRE (inspired by) and the "facts" are purposeful misinformation kfkfkfkf. If anyone can provide actual proof of that sex register thing that does NOT come from greg king and penny wilson (derogatory) I will graciously not duel them in the hofburg parking lot xD I hate that this disclaimer needs to be included because it ruins the joke, but a lot of these are such common takes that I can't not]