#it's complicated 💖

[intervalart]

:)

starting the rounds of AU summaries/intros, here's a quick sum up of the BBFF AU

some of this is stuff y'all already knew, some of this y'all didn't. hope you enjoy all the same

[hermit-frog]

[Furiosa] This is our first fruit, but it’s not for you and me. Each of us in our own way will vanish from this Earth. And then perhaps… some uncorrupted life will rise to adorn it.

[coolauntlilith]

Caitlyn makes me lowkey so mad bc she's lived in objective privilege her entire life, even when she tried to be a grittier cop in s1, she literally has a true safe haven to go back to with her two parents to care for her and listen to her. In s2, yeah her mom has been murdered, but holy shit can you imagine how much food and other resources the underside could have gotten for the cost of that funeral and that casket? Caitlyn has her way because of her name, gets platformed to the highest degree for her name even if she's being manipulated. She still has every resources at her fingertips despite Jinx's terrorism.

And yet when Vi, who is literally trying to kill her own sister, just didn't want Caitlyn to potentially shoot a very young child, Caitlyn acts like she has suffered more than Vi's whole existence. "I keep telling myself you're different but you're not." GIRL, YOUVE LOST IT. YOU HAVE NOW BECOME THE KIND OF ENFORCER VI FEARED AND HATED AS A CHILD. The mirror pointed back at Caitlyn with that sentence thrown at Vi is harrowing, holy shit.

[starleska]

lil Nordic Bunny wip and oh my god guys he is SO fun to draw 🙈🎸🤘

[ninadove]

tell us about glitter and gold?

Thank you for the ask, Anon! This one is actually almost finished (26 chapters and counting)! 💖🖤

Adrien hated everything about Cat Walker: the stiff leather of his boots, the stupid ponytail, the golden chain slashing his chest. It was so on the nose it was almost pathetic.

Then again, he did not have a choice.

Loveybug was… nice. Great, even. But her perfume was sickly-sweet, her eyes too big, her smiles so wide and bright they rivalled the crushing billboards. After every fight, he would offer his fist; she would leap and strangle him into a hug, pressing wet kisses against his cheek.

Which was fine, he supposed. But also suffocating.

Glitter and Gold was, originally, an exploration of comphet on both Loveybug and Cat Walker’s sides. The plan was to have Felix there as a secondary character, but then he started doing his own thing, aaand now we have an entire plot to deal with. Unfortunate, I know.

This fic is also a very fun experiment, because I introduced not one, but two unreliable narrators. Hehe. I have even drawn some designs, but they are very spoilery, so I’ll wait a bit to share them.

Another fun fact is that the title can be interpreted in two different ways: “Glitter and Gold” could refer to Loveywalker, but also to the cousins (with glitter being a callback to Adrien’s modelling career and Felix being associated with gold).

[dear-fictionkin]

Dear followers of dear-fictionkin,

Mod Stardust here, brushing the spider webs and dust off our little post office. Crazy that it's been... A year and a half (???) since the last letter was posted.

I know this seems like a rinse and repeat for this blog, but I will be working on getting through our current stockpile of letters (63 at the time of writing this!) and get them in the queue. I'll be adding a "postage date" since some of them are VERY old at this point. Very sorry to those waiting all this time for your letters to be sent, and thank you for your patience! 😅

From there, in this new year, we will do our best to keep up with the incoming messages! 💖

✨Mod Stardust✨

[riddlerosehearts]

thinking about the sakyo and azami dynamic for the millionth time! and i am just very very sad about the fact that sakyo's whole portrait was about how deeply he regretted not pursuing his dream of becoming an actor at mankai company. and then later we find out that he ended up feeling guilty for achieving that, for having seen himself in azami and encouraging him not to give up on a dream that they both believed would never come true, only to go off and live out his impossible dream while azami was unable to pursue his own. he had finally gotten what he always wanted but he couldn't even truly be happy because in the back of his mind he was always thinking about how he'd left azami behind!! that intense regret that he had over missing out on his dream just got replaced by regret over having made azami hate him!!

and then i'm thinking about sakyo tripping and breaking his glasses when he finds out azami was in a car accident, azami calling him lame for panicking like that when he barely even got hurt, and sakyo asking him "do i not even have the right to worry about you anymore?". about how azami spent all this time genuinely believing sakyo didn't care about him, and that there was surely no way he'd care enough to remember the card game they once made up together, but sakyo remembered the stats and abilities of every card. thinking about all of the love that was passed down through those cards, with sakyo's mother originally creating jin-gi-oh as a way to make him feel happy and loved and then sakyo going on to do the same thing for his son azami. thinking about sakyo telling everyone embarrassing stories from azami's childhood, just like a parent would do to their child, and how it shows that sakyo always loved azami and was there for him so much more than his "real" father ever was. about how much azami learned from sakyo and how he thinks he's nothing like "that shitty old man" but they are both equally terrible at expressing how they feel and they both have a naggy "blah blah blah" rant mode that they go into. thinking about how azami literally openly admits that he thought of sakyo as his dad when he was little and he still does. about how in the end, they finally both get to achieve their dreams and everything is okay because they may still fight, but they're together again and they know they love each other.

i'm also thinking about how sakyo insists on buying bargain juice and watering it down. azami is right, this man truly is a monster.

[friend-dogor]

actually wait in relation to the last post about ghibli and how it is aestheticized into bland and toothless images of comfort, it's got me thinking abt Ursula K Le Guin again

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

(from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, 1973, top of pg.2)

i think that the original post is guilty of this to a degree, seeking to refute the idiocy and simplicity of focusing on the "happy" themes of ghibli movies my instead shifting attention to the horrors and pains contained within the text—those which could be seen as intellectual, needing perhaps a more sophisticated understanding of environmentalism and geopolitics.

but, furthermore, i think i'm guilty of it even in trying to defend miyazaki's often returning narrative commitment to hope and environmentalism and anti-war sentiment and kindness—after the last tag, i wanted to add something about "i know that putting kindness above pursuit of power feels like a baby theme for babies" because it Does, to me. "be kind" is, like, the first and simplest rule most of us are taught as children, be kind, don't hit your brother, be kind, share, be kind.

i don't refer to this as one of his more challenging themes, of course, because why should i? we all know to be kind. of course, i refer only to topics of war and environmentalism and grief as challenging. kindness is simple!

(nevermind that one of the biggest challenges for myself and a lot of people i know is how to stop being cruel to oneself after decades of practice and learned examples and instead to learn to be kind and forgiving with one's own mistakes and failures and perceived flaws)

and i wonder two things: 1) is it possible that the self-aestheticization of miyazaki's movies (for example, the rapturous visual attention paid to food, the attention paid to soft chairs, pillows, small and pleasantly cluttered environments, with plenty of natural light, lush plantlife and endearing creatures) contribute to miyazaki's more "challenging" messages, and if so, that there's a degree of success in people remembering the thick-cut bacon and eggs on toast from Howl's Moving Castle before they think of Sophie Hatter's town on fire because of the king's war? Has Hayao Miyazaki succeeded in making war and destruction at once horrifying and banal, but a simple good breakfast fascinating and compelling? ——not to say that people who simplify the movie to Only the aesthetics are right. they still aren't. they exist in dialogue with the destruction and it's ridiculous to sever the two. but is it possible that the majority of people thinking first of the "cozy" elements of Studio Ghibli's work is not nonintellectual and reductive, but rather contributes to a larger point of attention?

2) i ought to find other examples of media which do not treat "happy" themes or "light" themes—(i struggle even to talk about the category i mean without dismissing it entirely as Simple, or mischaracterizing it. i mean things like kindness over power and compassion over fear, things like that) which do not treat the themes as childish or nonintellectual, but also do so without fetishizing violence and suffering as Special and More Deserving of Thought than Simple and Stupid Good Feelings so that i can kind of investigate this concept a little more

[lumiereandcogsworth]

Challenge: make a poll with five of your all time favourite characters, and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone’s favourite

tagged by @caesarclowningaround !!! <3

tagging: @gayassbenaffleck @roberrtphilip @ihrtmichael @ariiiloves @misscrazyfangirl321 @autumnrose11 @ginnyweatherby @japhan2024 @thavron @romeoandjulietyouwish + anyone can say i tagged them !!!

[sainz100]

upcoming Carlos x chess content soon ❤️♟️✨

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

Oh ho ho what a highly interesting question, anon👀

(Answered under the cut because it's a bit long)

ㅤ

Before I give my proper answer, allow me to explain a bit of my interpretation of Tails. I actually see him as a sort of naturally jealous person with some innate possessive tendencies who has grown used to curbing these tendencies of his, which he had to do due to a number of factors.

One major reason is due to Sonic himself. To me Sonic has always had a complicated relationship with different kinds of love or attraction (and I do see him as on the aro/ace spectrum). So, when absolute strangers (or those he doesn't particularly like) obsessively pursue him for clear romance/possessive reasons, he tends to react with strong rejection or indifference, in contrast to how he welcomes ego stroking and praise from those who can be merely categorized as "fans" (or those he does particularly like). To me, Tails' initial admiration and pursuit of joining with and becoming like Sonic very well parallels how Amy Rose began to admire and pursue a romantic relationship with Sonic. Even if we consider that Sonic did save Tails that one time from being bullied (according to Sonic Prime and a new animation for Sonic 2 present in Sonic Origins), his pursuit of trying to work together with his hero (which is detailed a bit more in the jp manual for Sonic 2, and includes Tails going so far as to follow after Sonic everywhere and modify Sonic's plane) really isn't any more "normal" than how Amy begins to pursue a romantic relationship with her hero after Sonic saves her from Metal Sonic. The only real differences here were that Amy was explicitly pursuing romance, and that Sonic rejected Amy's advances but eventually took Tails on as his sidekick/little buddy.

This is also not to mention the implications here and there in what we can find of Sonic and Tails' backstory that Sonic would continue to run away and pretend he did not care, while secretly keeping an eye out for Tails.

And beyond that, as one of Sonic’s oldest friends, Tails gets to spend a lot of time around Sonic, and gets to see firsthand how he reacts to romantic prospects, his complicated relationship with "love" as a concept, and is present as Sonic’s group of friends steadily grows.

With all of that, I at least see Tails learning to deal with his innate jealousy and possessiveness so

Sonic doesn’t reject him

Because he doesn't want to keep Sonic from pursuing relationships with others

And for the sake of one's image/being a good person

If Tails has learned that confessing and making his romantic intentions clear could lead to Sonic rejecting him or it ruining their friendship (since he's seen first hand how Sonic has reacted in certain cases to love confessions or overt romantic affection), it makes sense to me that he would try to hold his feelings back (both those that are not squarely platonic and are explicitly romantic and/or sexual). And when it comes to Sonic, there's a guilt factor and an impossibility factor when it comes to keeping him from other people. Not only would Tails feel at least a little bad for restricting him, but Sonic does not respond well to being controlled. Now of course, how he reacts does depend on the time of his life and who it is, but there is nevertheless a futility in trying to control Sonic "I have no master except the wind that blows free" Hedgehog. And finally, my view on both Sonic and Tails, well... I believe that image and visual alignment is a big thing for these two, and that the two are secretly more...in the gray (or at least, that they're surprisingly immoral so to speak). In their origins to me, Tails is just a kid, minding his business, who does not inherently seek to hurt others (though his faith in those around him does matter), and Sonic is just a kid, free as the wind, who doesn't particularly care about being a good guy, but loves the attention. Essentially, though he does save some people on whim, the idea is that Sonic originally fights Robotnik simply because the Doctor, his machines, and his pollution have such a negative effect on his home. So beyond this point, he fights as a hero both out of interest of having his home intact/being alive, and because (simply put) he likes what comes from being considered a hero (all the praise and perks). And so because Sonic is someone that Tails admires, because Sonic has to uphold a baseline image or reputation so he can still be considered a hero/good guy, Tails becomes accustomed to doing the same. That's a bit of an oversimplification (how I see them and why is the subject of a proper essay about that), but the point is that Tails is also conscious that trying to overtly control or manipulate Sonic would not objectively be considered "hero or good guy behavior", especially if it goes too far.

And so with all of that plus the fact that Sonic has never seemingly accepted anyone's romantic inclinations or dated anyone, Tails curbs his natural inclination towards jealousy and possessiveness so he can be content enough to be at Sonic's side. Perhaps there are more friends Sonic is going to get, people he's going to show an interest in, but Tails can put stock in the fact that it's unlikely that Sonic will date anyone. Plus, even if that somehow does happen, Tails is largely fine as long as he's guaranteed to be by Sonic's side no matter what. So as long as he can be with Sonic forever, no matter their relationship, he's as content as can be.

ㅤ

But then Sonic starts dating Nine, right?

And hahaha don't get me wrong here. Tails is pretty practiced. He's not gonna blow up or anything.

But once he gets past the initial shock of that being true, I think he just feels jealous and conflicted by default. I mean, he's just been accepting that there's no hope of ever being in that kind of relationship with Sonic. And not only has someone gone and done it, it's not just anyone.

It's a version of him.

And if a version of himself managed to do it (a version of himself who once lashed out at and fought against Sonic no less), then what does that mean about him? Does it mean that there's something about Nine Sonic likes better? Does it mean that he's had this entire situation wrong? Does it mean he lost his chance and he'd been so afraid for nothing? Does it mean that he could have had that this whole time?

And that's not to mention navigating this. Even if I believe Sonic is very very capable of having multiple best friends or even partners, it's only natural for Tails to get a little afraid of being replaced (especially if he learns that Sonic also considered/considers Nine as a best friend also)

But Tails is the type to not want to burden Sonic with all of this while becoming increasingly more worried. And although he would naturally have a complicated relationship with Nine, I still think he would generally like him and not want to take out his feelings on him. So with that being said, I think he'd sort of try to hold it in and act normal while really not acting all that normal, because though he could hide his feelings better if he wanted to, he still kind of lets it slip because he kind of does want to talk to Sonic about it or let his feelings be known.

I think that whenever Sonic eventually does see that Tails is acting a bit off he'll eventually talk to him about it or try to get him to, but, honestly, even if Sonic could say things (true things) that would make him feel better, I don't think Tails could be as content as he would be if it was idk... Knuckles or Shadow or what have you. Because if it was anyone else, Tails could be more content knowing that his relationship with Sonic is special and that he'll always be by his side, even if he's dating someone else.

But with the fact that the person that Sonic has chosen to date is another version him—a version of him which Sonic has also kind of clearly developed a similar "best friendship" with? I feel that even if Sonic tries to reassure him, Tails will forever be plagued with bitter and jealous feelings. Even if he'd never force Sonic to stop dating anyone, much less force him to date him, I don't think he can even really feel content here unless Sonic chooses to date him also if that makes any sense.

So, yes. That's my answer. Tails would try to be really good about it, but he's still bitter and annoyed and jealous and wondering if he's enough or has been doing something wrong. He's wondering why it couldn't have been him. And he won't be able to just be content at Sonic's side if he can't also be with Sonic. So while I can't say how long it will take, something will have to give eventually. I think at some point in their future, Sonic will have to tackle his specific feelings for Tails and they'll have to talk about their specific relationship, especially if he's dating Nine right in front of him.

[leibholz-moved]

Happy Heart-shaped Day everyone (*˘︶˘*).｡.:*♡

(i had a different drawing in mind for today but the post below took my brain hostage this morning and didn’t let me go until i sketched us being. disgustingly sickeningly sweet. have a great valentine’s day and don’t forget to kiss your f/os tons tonight byyye)

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

Watching my partner try to romance the Red Prince in multiplayer is wild. He made a beautiful lizard lady (who I'll call "our lizard lady"), just for him. She is of noble background, because of course, nothing but the best for the Prince.

However, eventually we find out his quest is all about looking for some female lizard from his dreams (who I'll call "dream lizard"). Apparently, it's Prince's destiny to find this dream lizard chick and have little dragon babies with her. Our lizard lady is sceptical. Who wouldn't be, about a prophecy like that? If anything, she should be that special lizard! He doesn't even know this dream lizard and has never met her, but he dreams about her, which is suspicious if you ask any of us. We all know by now that the Red Prince consorted with demons in the past. Maybe it's a trick? Hmm.

Eventually, we find this dream lizard that the Red Prince so loves and desires without even having met her (unlike our lizard lady), and she loses absolutely no time and the first thing she does is that she invites Prince into her wagon, which she arrived in, for some... private time. How very romantic. And, yeah, it is exactly as bad as it sounds.

So, we are all awkwardly standing outside, waiting as Prince is doing the nasty with his dream lizard girl in the wagon, making sure to pump her full of his lizard baby-making juice, no way around it.

My character and Sebille are just giving each other and their cucked friend nervous silent looks, like

While our lizard lady is out there with us, just waiting the ordeal out, probably wishing for him to get an erectile dysfunction or something, like

Afterwards, Prince is quite happy with how things are going. Well, except for the fact that somebody tries to assassinate him (and with him also the rest of us) right afterwards and his dream lizard bride conveniently escapes full of his lizard man stuffing. Our lizard lady is much less delighted. She gets bitchy about it with him and receives a lot of disapproval for it, but hey, it's fine because we're begrudgingly helping with his personal quest and being supportive, so he still likes her a lot and has like 90/100 attitude with her.

Somewhere along the way, the Red Prince admits that maybe he likes our lizard lady more than he should. While she jumps the first horny NPC's bones that we meet out of spite.

Now, my character and Sebille are travelling with two pompous lizards who are flirting, arguing, and trying to one up each other in their sexual exploits the whole way. I have absolutely no idea how this will end, but I'm kinda dying to know.

[ameliafuckinjones]

thinking about how England is the mind and France the heart and America the soul (the summation of both mind and heart) of the West...

Edit: look!!!

[darth-grips]

This might be my toxic trait as a Star Wars fan but I really have no interest in exploring Leia’s relationship with Vader, and to a lesser extent Padmé. Leia had parents who loved her and influenced her infinitely more than some biological bonds to people she either a) DESPISED or b) admired but never knew because they were dead. Leia never recognized Vader as her father, despite wholeheartedly accepting Luke as her brother. Meanwhile, while Luke grew up with guardians who wanted and loved him, he always knew they weren’t his parents. He loved his father before he ever met him and loved him when he died. To me that is MUCH more compelling than exploring a relationship with Vader that Leia neither wanted nor needed.

[leapinarmadillo]

i feel a little embarrassed about my gay interpretation of That's What You Get (For Being Polite) now. i think his real intentions and meaning are pretty clear in that song. However, it's fun to have different interpretations of things even if they're 'wrong,' also can i just say that the gay interpretation is quite masterful and cohesive. and even going with how i think he meant all of it, "makes him buy things for the girls" i still think he threw in to make it vaguely about romantic relationships when it really wasn't