#it's fucking baffling

[symbiotic-slime]

you haven’t truly experienced the full spectrum of human emotions until you’re sobbing because your favourite character just died and then fucking memories by maroon 5 starts playing

[lindsayribar]

If a fair weather friend is someone who only hangs out with you when it's all sunshine and roses and no hardships

Then is a foul weather friend the person who drops everything to be there for you in an emergency, but on a day to day level just keeps fucking forgetting you exist?

[sp0o0kylights]

Grass is green, water is wet, and Jonathan Byers does not like Steve Harrington.

These are known facts in the universe.

Computers were going to take over the world, a “mobile” phone was being invented, and Steve Harrington had lost most of his hearing.

These were unknown facts--rumors even, if you will. Eddie had never seen even a grain of truth to support any of them. 

(Well, maybe the computer thing, but only because Grant and Dustin both had made a couple of convincing arguments.) 

So he doesn’t think about it, when his freshman gang up on him. 

Doesn’t even factor the “can’t hear well” thing in, when he was tasked (demanded, whined, bitched and moaned at) with helping them explain to Steve why going to the release party of the new D&D box set, located at a hobby store only a mere 2 hour drive away, was important.

Eddie’s not even sure how the little shits got him to agree to do it until he’s standing in the parking lot in front of the former King himself. 

“The store’s leading up to the release with a handful of one-shots.” He’s explaining, unsure whether to pull out the bored act or play up his court jester persona, and thus mixing and matching on the fly. 

He does not care if Harrington doesn’t know what a one-shot is. 

“They’re releasing the set at midnight. You have to be there to get it though, you can’t have someone else pick it up for you because they only got a certain amount in.” 

Harrington’s frowning (no surprise) but it’s not until Eddie is well into his spiel about how his van is already full with the elder members of Hellfire, and thus has no room for the freshmen, that he realizes Steve isn’t quite looking at him. 

Is in fact, looking over his shoulder.

Eddie stops. Follows Harrington’s gaze.

Parked across from Steve’s Beemer, is Jonathan Byer’s barely working clunker car. 

A handful of steps in front of it, and thus nearly right behind Eddie, is the man himself.

His hands are still moving, mouth shaping words silent as he goes, his gaze locked not on Eddie or the kids--but on Steve. 

Who turns back around as Harrington’s eyes slide right back to him. 

“And this is taking place next Friday?” He says, in that sort of annoyed but resigned way parents aim at their children. “After school?” 

“I’d like to go during  school, but the freshmen insist you wouldn’t let them ditch out.” Eddie tells him. “They had two separate arguments about it.” 

Loud ones, that had interrupted the game and given Eddie a migraine. 

Once again Steve’s eyes slide away from him, to Jonathan. 

“They’re not skipping school.” He says suddenly, a glare forming and Jonathan makes an annoyed noise. 

“They argued about skipping, they’re not going to.” He says aloud, and finally steps up so that he’s next to Eddie instead of behind him. 

“Munson slow down, I can’t sign as fast as you’re talking.” He adds, in the hang-dog grumble he’s notorious for. 

Eddie stares at him. 

“Can he seriously not hear me?” 

“No.” Steve and Jonathan answer together. 

“I can kind of still hear,” Steve adds, gaze returning to Eddie’s face. “But its more loud music or noises. I can lip read, but you’re also talking too fast for that.” 

Without pausing, he turns back to Jonathan and says; “Why can’t you take them?”

“It’s Friday.” Byers deadpans. 

Eddie’s not an expert on sign language, but his hands somehow looked deadpan too. 

He’s not sure how Jonathan did that. 

“So?” Steve snarks back. 

What follows is an argument that Eddie is not, at all involved in, mostly because he’s too busy handling the fact that Jonathan Byers has learned sign language, for Steve Harrington, apparently, and given the tone the argument is taking they still don’t even like each other.  

Eventually the argument ends, Steve throwing his hands in the air and demanding that Jonathan owes him. 

(Eventually Eddie will corner the ever so quiet Will Byers and ask why the hell his brother learned sign language for someone he clearly fucking hates.

“Oh they don’t hate each other.” Baby Byers would say, in that shy, quiet way of his. “I think they’re actually friends now?” 

“You think?”

“Well--you’ve seen them.” Will shrugs. “I think being mean to each other is kinda their thing.” 

‘What the hell.’ Eddie would think, right up until he stumbled across one of the kids sign language books. 

Byers the Elder, he decides, isn’t the only person who should learn sign language to chew out Harrington properly.

The pay off is immediate. 

Or at least, the pay off of watching Steve’s shocked face the first time Eddie signs something vulgar at him is, anyway.)

[fonthoura]

Hc where Garak knows Julian is a liar, but he can't, for the life of him, know what he's lying about.

Like, he has this feeling, given to him by years of training and an observant eyes, that Julian is very purposefully unauthentic, and it seems that no one else notices.

He sees how Julian talks a lot and overshares, but never really says anything, to the point where his friends would have a hard time answering any question about him, like, for fucks sake, it took reading his file to get to know his date of birth because no one knew.

Jadzia thinks he has a brother, Miles is convinced he has a sister, and Garak is fairly sure he is an only child, the problem is, Julian doesn't talk about it. He talks too much and hardly says anything.

Garak also notices how he is always tense, as if holding back, like when he lets himself be punched when he clearly sees it coming, when he let's things break even though Garak is sure he could've caught them mid air, how he seems to calculate the perfect amount of clumsy in a day (once he even bumped into Garak and pretended to be distracted) and no one notices.

But Garak does, Garak knows he is lying about something, he feels it, specially when he looses on games and arguments, like he could not think of something else but Garak sees it in his eyes that he is hiding something.

And Garak constantly gets worried, despite his best knowledge, about him.

He knows how lonely it is, to keep yourself hidden from the world, to not let anyone know you, to hold the weight of a thousand secrets on his body, and constantly he sees this weight taking it's toll on the doctor.

Julian keeps people at arms length, he gets close on condition, he larps with Miles, discuss literature with Garak and converses with Jadzia, but keeps them all compartmentalized, always distant, even his crush on Jadzia being shallow, no real depth to it.

Julian seems skin deep and Garak knows how it feels and aches for him.

So he constantly tries to scratch the surface, aways tries to get Julian out of his lie made shell like Julian does to him, and he doesn't succeed, but he keeps trying.

Specially after he finds out that Julian had been gone for a month and not even him noticed it, he knows it's because no one would, because Julian keeps so much of himself hidden that you can't distinguish him from a fake.

And then, doctor Zimmermann shows up...

[somnoir]

Bats and Phantoms - Part 3

Part 3 | Masterpost

Cassandra and Jasmine

Jazz has always been concerned for her siblings. Why wouldn't she? Dan was a former world ender, Danny was ghost king (or was it crown prince?), and Ellie was almost always everywhere. In all honesty, if was overwhelming.

But she'd be damned to not love them no matter what.

Visiting Gotham to see if Danny was okay was... Well, she just had to. Somehow, her brother's have caught the eye of vigilantes and that was obviously bad.

Her phone buzzed and once again she's plagued by Dan's messages.

Younger-Older-Bigger: Should I stalk Nightwing???

Older-definitely: No. Please don't.

Older-definitely: We already have to worry about Danny getting stalked by a crime lord

Younger-Older-Bigger: Yeah but I'm not a crime lord

Older-definitely: NO

Older-definitely: STOP

Older-definitely: DAN

Younger-Older-Bigger: ᕙ⁠(⁠ ⁠ ⁠•⁠ ⁠‿⁠ ⁠•⁠ ⁠ ⁠)⁠ᕗ

Why? Why did they have to be like this? Weapon training was somehow the automatic bonding activity for the Fenton/Masters siblings. Dan and Danny liked to fight with sword a little too much and Ellie was all to happy to throw daggers at people. Jazz preferred her lazers and blasters (though her aim was wonky at first, it got better... She promised.)

So here she was, in Gotham... Making sure her brother wasn't being seduced by a crime lord. But of course, she was a Fenton born and bred and raised. Gotham apparently had literal alarms that alerted the entire city of a massive attack. Her phone even got an alert from... WE warning. Wayne Enterprises?

Okay... Apparently Scarecrow was running amok and plaguing the streets with his fear toxin. Oh, Danny was going to go feral.

(A couple blocks away, Danny Fenton was high on the fear and giggling to himself. Yes.)

And also Gothamites carried gasmasks around. What a wonderful day to leave hers behind.

She's already cough, closing her eyes as she desperately tried to stay sane. Her liminal and almost half a state should have made the effects different from her but apparently she wasn't ghost enough to feel euphoric.

Stumbling into the closest building she could find, she's desperately gasping when a gasmask was pressed against her face. Jazz can barely register the dark haired girl with asian features who was hurriedly hauling her to her feet and away from the door.

It takes a minute before she's registering the girl, blinking when she saw her making gestures. Again, it takes her another minute to realize it's sign language.

Thank God she had paranoid siblings who took those classes in case they couldn't speak. But with her brain filled with feat toxin, she's clumsy in signing back but there's some mild surprise in the girl's eyes. But Jazz is conscious enough to notice the tense way the girl stood, how her stance was prepared for a fight. Maybe that was normal Gothamites behavior...

At least, she was communicating with someone. Someone who's really pretty too. God, was the fear toxin making her dopy? That can't be, right?

Cass had seen a pretty redheaded girl fall to her knees, and yet she had more resistance to fear toxin than local Gothamites. It was almost interesting really, but she's not going to dwell on it when this girl was choking for air.

Words don't easily process for her but her body moves without much thought, signing to her if she was okay. The girl, clearly disoriented, looks confused before realization bleeds into her strangely bright eyes—then she's clumsily signing back.

She says her name is Jasmine, like the flower, the princess—call her Jazz, she insists.

And she replies that she's Cassandra—like the character from Rapunzel, like the girl from Greek muths—just call her Cass tho.

When Jazz is in her arms, Cass can feel some muscles through her clothes. This girl wasn't as frail as she look. No. This was a trained fighter, someone who knew how to defend themselves without a problem. Cass should be wary, but at the same time she was worried.

She knows she should be going out there and helping but Oracle had immediately told her to help the civilians in the area. Batman, Robin, Red Robin, and Spoiler were handling the situation but the civilians had to be protected at all costs. She might not be able to help as orphan in that moment but she could as Cass Wayne.

The commotion gets worse once Scarecrow's henchmen start raiding the place with every weapon they could get their hands on. She fights to the best of her abilities, watching, predicting, but what she didn't predict was a loud blast tearing through the place and shattering the window.

Cass can see a blast of green spark through the air before directly hitting the Jonathan Crane. The man is blasted into a wall, groaning before he's knocked out.

Her eyes dart to where the blast came from.

Jazz, the strange girl she has just met, was holding a strange gun.

(In the distance, Danny was still very much high and was not aware that one of his maniacal invention had actually worked in his sister's favor.)

Part 4 | Masterpost

[forkaround]

Thai BL is making me google stuff and I don't like it here

[billymarvel]

Imagining Billy, a boy who has been stuck in time due to a weird time leak that was never quite patched up right in Fawcett, exploring the rest of the world as a hero and just getting so many odd looks at what he says. He says such dated things that make someone go 'What? No, that was outlawed in XXXX....' or 'That law was introduced before I was born?' and he is just scratching the back of his head like Huh..... The outside world is wild... No wonder no one leaves our lil shithole

[bixels]

Taking the current topic as an excuse to ask you to tell me all the reasons you love Rarijack. Your art for the ship is so sweet and intimate I'd love to hear any in depth thoughts you have.

Breathes in.

I think what makes their dynamic really strong is that they have opposing personalities but aligned values. It's deeper than just "opposites attract." Rarity's fancy, prissy, and femme while Applejack's modest, rough, and "masculine." But both value hard work (to the point of being workaholics), their families (both have guardianship over their little sisters), running successful businesses, and eventually each other. Their relationship can be boiled down to, "Despite our differences/disagreements, I still like you because we value the same things."

We see their relationship develop so much. In the first season, they can't stop bickering about surface-level differences. By season four, they still bicker, but will mend their relationship because they can't help but do nice things for each other. In Trade Ya, they start off arguing over personality differences (Applejack likes old junk and Rarity likes useless crap). Then they pivot and start arguing that they value their relationship more than the other. In the end, they mend things by sacrificing their needs and buying each other a gift. Even if they don't understand it, they know it'd make the other happy. And that's all that really matters. It's a genuinely sweet moment that shows how arguing can be healthy and necessary for relationships to strengthen.

We even see them dropping their hang-ups about each others' personalities. In Made in Manehattan, when Rarity runs off in dramatics about someone's fashion, AJ doesn't roll her eyes or scoff, she smiles. Oftentimes, their conflicts are very common domestic conflicts romantic couples face. Applejack's Day Off is about a woman's inability to balance work and life and find time to properly spend with her partner, causing her partner to feel neglected.

By season seven, they're actively participating in each others' interests. Any problems or conflicts that arise are dealt with, and they come out the other end stronger and closer. In Honest Apple, AJ pretty much spells out why their relationship works so well: even though she doesn't understand fashion, she can recognize and appreciate how much work it takes and wants to respect that. When she realizes her mistake in the episode, AJ goes above and beyond to fix things and apologize to Rarity. They care about each other so much.

The two go out of their way, sacrificing their personal desires and beliefs and doing things they normally wouldn't, to make the other happy. That's just love.

There's Simple Ways, where AJ gets stuck in an unwanted love triangle between Rarity and her hipster crush. And her frustration and anger can be so easily interpreted as AJ finding herself in a terrible position; the girl she loves wants another man, and that man wants her.

I dunno. I've always had a preference for opposites attract ships, but Rarijack's stuck with me like a brain worm because they have the perfect chemistry. The way they show they care, or do things for each other, I've always read it as the truest representation of romance in the show.

[shwarmii]

i just heard one of my favorite youtubers say this meme out loud in a video and the pronounciation FLOORED ME so now i gotta know:

poll is just "which way do you say it"; tags is "which way is right", assuming your answer to "which way is right" is different to "which way do you say it". or i guess tags are also for uhhhhhh if your answer is complicated and if you wanna explain, if you have a diff way of pronouncing (pls tell meeeee), or whatever else you want, im not your parents, idk

[otome-dissection]

compilation of Hey What The Fuck Did They Mean By This

[ladydisofdurin]

“Keikaku means plan”-ass writing motherfucker lmao just say funeral

Ur mad at for me for using the correct word for the traditional funeral rite in a culture I was specifically talking about?  ✨ eat shit ✨

[theswirlersisterscircus]

Because of this post reminding me about the Bad Kidz Parent Polycule, I present to you the Bad Kidz Family Cluster.

[ID: A family tree of all the Bad Kidz and their parents using the updated official art. In the top right corner, Gorgug has a solid green line connecting him and Roz and Gorbag. A dotted green line connects him and Digby and Wilma. Roz, Gorbag, Digby, and Wilma are connected by a solid black line with a question mark below it.

Below that, The Applebees are connected to Kristen, Bucky, Bricker, and Cork by solid green lines. Kristen and Tracker are connected by a solid pink line with a red X crossed through it.

Tracker is connected to "Unknown Parents" by a solid green line. "Unknown Parents" is connected to Jawbone by a solid blue line, and Tracker and Jawbone are connected by a dotted green line with a question mark above it. Adaine is connected to Jawbone by a dotted green line, and Aelwyn is connected to Adaine by a solid blue line.

Jawbone and Sandra Lynn are connected by a pink line. Sandra Lynn and Gorthalax are connected by a pink line with a red X crossed through it, and Fig is connected to them by a solid green line. Gorthalax and Sklonda are connected by a pink line with a question mark below it. Sklonda and Pok are connected by a purple line that is bisected by the skull and crossbones emoji. Riz is connected to them by a solid green line.

Sandra Lynn and Gilear are connected by a purple line with a red X crossed through it. Gilear and Fig are connected by a dotted green line, and he and Hallariel are connected by a pink line. Hallariel and Bill are connected by a purple line that's bisected by a skull and crossbones emoji. Fabian is connected to them by a solid green line, and Fabian and Fig are connected by a dotted blue line. End ID]

Green means parents/children, Blue means siblings, Pink means dating, and Purple means marriage. Dotted lines mean non-biological. The black line means I have no idea what the Thistlesprings and Roz and Gorbag have going on.

I wasn't sure if Gorthalax and Sklonda are actually dating so I put a question mark, and I wasn't sure if Jawbone actually adopted Tracker or was just letting her live with him. Regardless, here's the full family tree. I hope it gets worse <3 thanks for your time.

[erinwantstowrite]

thinking about how superman and batman literally fused. like canonically. because of their willpower...

[chotachica]

Favorite part of The Dead Boy Detectives for sure is Edwin pulling literally every single age appropriate male character he interacted with. The absolute cunt ever

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

I love Fiona the Hippo, so I really liked your post highlighting her, but now I'm sad that Moo Deng is having a bad time. I did think it was funny she tried to bite that one handler's crotch, and I was worried that she's going to grow up to be an aggressive hippo that might hurt someone because they're just kinda . . . letting her bite people and how that'll end very badly for her, but it hadn't occurred to me that she was being mistreated. :(

It’s hard to say whether she’s being “mistreated” necessarily. I don’t like to throw around words like abuse when it comes to animal welfare because people use it way too lightly.

But there’s definitely a degree of stress she’s experiencing due to that handling. It’s so easy to find cute animal videos endearing and amusing when we don’t know what to look for.

I tend to try to assess things over multiple contexts and videos and form an opinion from there. The blatant smacking, grabbing, picking up and chasing were probably the best examples- but I only found most of those because TikTok kept shoving guest videos from the zoo onto my fyp.

The biting was another flag. Yes, hippos use their mouths to interact with their world but regardless of context it’s just a huge no no when it comes to handling any animal - especially a large herbivore that grows up with a bite force of approx 1800lbs!

Also I was looking for more videos of their adult Pygmy hippos and came across a video of one of the keepers using a water gun on one of them

Dude really? You’re going to post that on your official zoo TikTok and not have a think about the optics for your conservation message?

Yikes.

Also the adult Pygmy hippo very much avoids the keeper and either tolerates it or runs away from the water.

Interesting to see the open mouth while being followed/chased with the water gun while he tries to avoid it. A redirected threat display? A stress yawn? He just looks very much like he’s tolerating it.

It does make me wonder if this is another hippo raised with the same rough handling as Moo Deng and they’ve just learned nothing they do matters and to tolerate whatever comes their way. It’s pretty much learned helplessness and I don’t like that at all.

Compare this with Fritz the common hippo (Fiona’s brother) interacting with the hose - it stays in one place for him to interact with, is offered and then moved away so he can continue to seek it out if he wants more. He actively seeks the hose and can move himself around to where it feels best.

This is how you offer consent and autonomy to your zoo animals. Not chase them around their enclosure with a water gun jfc

[veyronvenus]

he looks like something you'd see perched on a branch in the rainforest