#it's kinda all over the place lol

[numbuh424]

The unstoppable, mighty hurricane and the immovable, cold, hard truth.

[mosovi-vian]

And I will stay alive for my future self, so they can one day learn to be kind to who I was as a child. And I will teach them to honor who we used to be, so they can remember the comfort of what once was our untempered flesh and gentle soul. Me and myself are each a fresh wound and a rough scab, bearing respectively the gift of green faith and honed will.

This has been in my draft for a while because I was determined to post this only after I knew what I should write underneath it. I’ve read a lot on the concept of healing the wounded inner child since even before my c-ptsd diagnosis. However, I’ve sought as much comfort in my little self as they had in me. Looking back, I was an impressively emotionally-intuitive kid. I remember well how I used to think, the things I would write to my future self; they were wiser and gentler than I could ever hope to be as an adult. Needless to say, the little poem above is inspired by the aforementioned experience. Sure, big me is armed with a more developed pre-frontal cortex and access to invaluable resources (coping mechanisms, therapy, on and offline communities) , but I struggle to rediscover/reinvent my identity. Little me was the biggest vestige of my lost personhood. So yeah, this might be just a huge self-indulgent projection with my favorite character, but thinking that post-S3 Hunter would also be in my shoes is not completely baseless. 16yrs old Hunter is the fresh wound (a lot of things happened before his teen years, but I’m going to interpret the events of Hollow Mind - which happened when Hunter was 16 - as the ultimate boiling point in his trauma timeline, hence the ‘fresh wound') and 20yrs old Hunter is the rough scab. Each version of Hunter could be dealing with a different set of trauma-induced symptoms. I think his loyalty to Belos kept him going as a child. Being doubtless was important to Hunter back then; it held his sense of self together. And maybe when he survived and was rewarded the time and space to grow into his own person and live for himself, there was this lasting emptiness. I feel this sort of emptiness even today. My only reference of what ‘wholeness’ felt like was when I was obedient to my family. I equated self-abandonment as the righteous norm. The symptoms I deal with today are definitely different from when I was Hunter’s age pre-time-skip. Now that Hunter is in a safe space and an adult post-time skip, he might also need to seek that strength from his younger self. Reminding himself of how far he’s come and the parts of him that he'd like to keep from his past. The parts that he knows in his bones are purely his - not instilled by Belos, not inherited from Caleb.

[sysig]

Rainbows (Patreon)

[skitskatdacat63]

"Memories of This Life" - Il Capitano(x)

[front-facing-pokemon]

[flovoid]

When an apple falls off a tree

[alicornze7]

eepy time

finally giving kinger the love he deserved on this blog

[m333myselfandiii]

Genuinely tweaking tf out because last chapter dropped and I'm so soul-wrenched pulled apart at the seams and unraveling that I don't even have the energy to cry lmaoo. Tbh i never expected to get this attached to a character/s (all of them, really- Shingen, Somi, Shintaro) and it sounds kind of stupid when I write it down here but still.

My heart breaks for all of them; Shingen, who had to live his life burdened by his clan duties. Shintaro, who had to live his life never being the first choice, of always being tethered to the rules. Somi, who, I think (I hope) loved her child, but just a little too late, and for Gun, poor, sweet Gun, who had to see them all die before his eyes.

They weren't good- they were a terrible family by all means (talking about the adults here obv), but somehow I can't bring myself to hate them for it. It's hard to express what I'm really feeling lol but I just hope. I just hope they're all finally at peace, now. Somehow, somewhere.

I hope Shingen and Shintaro get to be the kids that their childhood never allowed them to be, I hope Somi gets to smile more freely, and I hope that Gun can be happy and unburdened by his past. I hope.

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[emberglowfox]

faceless day (post-canon)

[goldensunset]

dude if kh ends ill. probably cry lmaoo. but also. fandoms continue after their thing is finished dont they?? like. 10 years after its done ppl will still talk abt it?? i hope so at least

given that the kh fandom has survived several massive droughts over the years at this point i think it's unkillable. some of my mutuals on here are from like the ice age of kingdom hearts and still alive and blogging the exact way they always did. it won't be a huge fandom but even now with the series still being alive the fandom isn't as big as it once was in its heyday. but those of us here are incredibly loyal. and the nature of any long-running thing is that people carry it with them over the course of many years and it'll become impossible to drop it once it does end. but! it truthfully all depends on How it ends if you ask me. if it's a trainwreck a lot of people might abandon it out of resentment. if it's good or even mediocre as an ending it'll have its fans throughout eternity

[averycutesalamander]

hello miss sal i hope u are doin splendidly. i am here to say ive had juno on repeat for the past week and have had. well let’s just say. Thoughts. i need to know what u think about breeding kink boothill like.. on one hand i feel like he would be sent into a total frenzy if you were so into it in the moment you let slip you wanted him to knock you up. the fact you’d want him to give you everything, to have his kids, to lock you down, even despite his current predicament. but on the other hand i also feel there’s a little twinge of sadness in his head given he can’t physically give you that. probably heavier on the former i think he would absolutely be into that and give you SO much lip for it. in that sexy as fuck drawl man so uhh yea roll credits ROLL CREDITS

BREEDING KINK GOES CRAZY WITH HIM HjafhaJWFHAJFHJ ok hi i am normal. i did something adjacent to this at the end of DDBB (shameless plug if you haven't read it) but i think it'll end up featuring in a lot of my fics because i am Obsessed with the idea LOL

but yeah i imagine him to be really into it too, not just as a kink but also because he would love to have kids with you, if you were down for that. he gets so into it that im not even confident that the sadness would register for him in the moment. the dirty talk with him is insane. if you were super into it he would absolutely make you beg for him to get you pregnant. goes completely apeshit at the thought of filling you with his come. would love to stuff you full and then keep a plug or something in you to "make sure it'll take." christ he makes me crazy

in regards to actually having children (adopted or otherwise)... i honestly think he'd be torn between wanting to wait until all of this IPC business is done and over with before committing to kids, OR wanting to make sure he has one with you now, just in case, yknow?... like, if something wildly out of his control happens and he dies, would it be better or worse if he left behind a child that you'd have to raise on your own? the idea of you having to raise your kid without him is agonizing to him, but the idea of leaving you with nothing but memories is almost worse. there's also the aspect that if you have a kid now, he'd have to be far more absent than he'd like to be until his revenge is secured - especially during your pregnancy, when he would want to stay basically glued to your side so he could take care of you. with all of that in mind, i think he might lean slightly toward wanting to wait, but you could very easily convince him to go for it now.

i imagine, in whatever wack-ass future HSR is set in, he can get some crazy operation done that samples dna from whatever remains of his human body (which in my headcanon is pretty much just his brain and spine and maybe some nerves to connect to the artificial nervous system) so he can essentially make himself fertile again? via sci-fi magic? and uhhhh not to completely show my hand or anything but. imo the ideal situation would be like.. he is technically fertile, but the success rate would be so low that.. well. the two of you have to really try to make it happen. (im in a weird limbo where i do absolutely have a breeding kink but i ALSO have a mortal fear of pregnancy. but it isn't quite as hot without the risk of getting pregnant yknow. so if the chances are low it hits that perfect sweet spot for ME, but obviously feel free to imagine that however you like)

on a vaguely related note. uhh... warnings for cnc under the cut lol

so i have a loose plan for a second cnc fic (the first is dizzy heat, cloyingly sweet) where the two of you roleplay like you're an IPC office worker or something that he's kidnapped and he's trying to get a code for a computer out of you. naturally this involves some.. uh.. unique interrogation methods, including edging you until you break and give him the code.

a snippet for you (in text form bc im on pc):

He leans back onto his heels, looking you up and down, quick and noncommittal – almost unimpressed. Then, he makes a grand show of throwing up his brows in consideration. He scans you a second time, though this one is far more leisurely – almost starved; the plushness of your lips, the curve of your neck into your collarbone, the tempting swell of your breasts, the way your shirt clings to your waist, the way your pants cradle your thighs. “Well, ya might be IPC scum,” he drawls, raking his gaze up your body to meet your eyes, “but you're still quite a looker.”  The astonished look you give him isn’t quite entirely a farce; he has to wonder if he’s genuinely flustered you by just staring at you a little too hungrily. His lips twitch into a grin, his eyes narrowing lethally. “How about this?” he begins, his tone deceptively light. “Let's play a lil' game, huh?” Slowly, agonizingly, he leans forward into your space, his smile widening steadily as you flatten yourself against the wall. He presses further, dipping one knee down to rest just barely against your cunt, his teeth glinting as they hover just out of reach of your lips; he doesn’t miss the tiny breath you take as he reaches forward, hooking one finger beneath your shirt and leisurely dragging it upwards, exposing a sliver of your skin to the chill of the ship’s air.   “Let’s see how hard I can push ya before you break.”  Oh, he could die happy at the look on your face, all wide-eyed and awed, shamefully aroused and horrifically desperate. Your lips shake as you whimper, “W-Wait, please…” With a glint of red in his eyes, he snaps one hand around your throat, his gut clenching at the way you stiffen beneath him. “I don't wanna hear a word outta your mouth unless it's about that code,” he rumbles, his voice dark and husky. He squeezes around your throat once for emphasis, and he damn near growls at the tiny noise that escapes you. “Got it? Good.” 

anyway im thinking of ending that fic with him claiming that he's "still fertile" (whether or not that's true will be up to the reader's interpretation) and basically saying he's going to keep the reader as his "little breeder" and essentially baby-trapping her with the extra spice of kidnapping. the reader is like "wait no, you cant!! im ovulating!!" (also up to the reader's interpretation) and he just smiles and purrs, "even better, doll" and jesus christ i need to be euthanized bc im blushing just thinking about it LOLLLL

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Our Lady Of Mysterious Ailments & The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle

books 2 & 3 in the Edinburgh Nights series

paranormal mystery set in a climate-ravaged future Scotland, plagued by ghosts and magic

follows a 15yo Black girl who’s finally gotten an in to learn scientific magic properly - but it turns out to be an unpaid internship, so she has to take more jobs delivering ghost messages and investigating mysteries to take care of her gran and little sister

in book 2 she’s investigating a strange illness centred on a magic school for boys

and in book 3 she’s attending a global magician conference held in a creepy castle - when someone’s murdered, and they’re locked in until she figures out the culprit

Zimbabwean magic, friendship, disabled characters, no romance (so far)

[sysig]

Take care of him (Patreon)

[ruskatuskapuskasapuska]

Oop here are the requests (was too tired to post last night and today I've just been really eepy... And still am :"D I'll just dump all of these in one post)

One ghostface-ismo (it was hard to choose a good line for this, so many iconic options :"D) and one Ikuina-just-being-Ikuina, coming up!

And heck, I'll dump the requests from insta as well, moots there were being more unhinged than usual (must be the Halloween-spirit)

((some) translations etc. in the pics' alt text)

[gwyns]

e/riels are singlehandedly the most misogynistic group within this fandom and god does it make my blood boil