#it's kinda all over the place lol

[wndybyrd]

NEVER TASK 002 :     n i g h t m a r e  !

wendy only dreams of neverland. whenever she can finally force herself into a deep enough slumber, the island plagues her with memories ( at least, she thinks they’re memories ) of everything she foolishly ran away from. memories of elated joy, memories of epic adventure, memories of an incomparable life she’ll never be able to recreate in the mundane of london. the dreams are so real — like she’s experiencing them all over again in that moment, projecting herself back into those precious moments — that, each morning as her eyes reopen to the breaking down, she’s left even further exhausted.

when she isn’t dreaming, wendy is tormented by nightmares. there is no in-between, no medium, no escape. she’s haunted by happy memories she can only relive in restless sleep, or chased by nightmares of twisted messages impossible for her to interpret. the girl’s tired, hollow eyes are evidence enough of how strongly she fights sleep until it finally consumes her. she yearns for rest, even if it’s eternal. 

wendy was drowning. her lungs were so full of the murky water they felt like rocks in her chest, weighing her down as she sunk further into the depths. it had grown so dark, she no longer knew which way was up or which direction to swim towards. this time, however, no one was dragging her under. no hands clawed at her legs or pulled her further down down down. like a stone that had been skipped upon the shimmering surface, she merely sunk. the girl screamed with the last bit of air in her waterlogged lungs, a soundless scream, muted by a choir of bubbles that fell from quivering lips.

but they weren’t bubbles, were they ? they were stars, & she was falling down down down through the clouds, closing in on the ground at rapid speed. now, her scream was ringing through the air, echoing across the island like a bird’s twittering song. this was her song. her wendy-bird song; it was the one she’d sung when the lost boys had shot her out of the sky, when the merfolk had tried to claim her soul, when peter had . . .

wendy was in peter’s arms, suddenly, her pounding heart racing against his. he would never let her fall or drown or die because then there would be no more ‘peter & wendy’. even when his toes touched the ground, he did not let her go. he would never let her run or hide or home because then there would be no more story, & peter loved stories as much as he loved himself. even if, in this story, he had no face for he was but a shadow of that oh-so familiar silhouette. the shape of a villain parading under the mask of a hero, a mask she had adoringly helped him craft. a mask he wore so well it was like second-skin.

then, ripping through the night, she heard her name crowed out. the girl’s head spun & glassy eyes widened as john & michael came into view. she was standing now, somehow, & dashed towards them as the tattered ends of her nightgown tangled at her ankles, teasing to trip her. wendy’s hands were outstretched, believing that, if she could just reach them, enveloping them inside her, the armor of her love would shield the boys from — —          two figures stepped out from behind each brother: shadows mirroring the same wicked smile. in a swift motion, they gave john & michael smiles of their own . . . carved across their necks, their essence leaking out into the earth as they crumpled to the floor. wendy leapt for her brothers, but the ground opened up & swallowed their bodies whole before her fingers could even scrape their skin. instead, she fell against the grass with a resounding ‘thud’, though, the ache in her bones could not compete with the searing pain that stabbed at her heart. 

she wept. she wept & her tears melted into land like their blood had. she wept & shook & cried out. his arms wrapped around her, but they weren’t warm or comforting like she remembered them to be. his arms were the steel bars of a cage. “ stay. ” he whispered, & she knew it wasn’t a request or a wish. the word was a promise. a command. an absolute. yet, despite everything, she knew she would . . . because if she left she would never come back. if she left, there would be no more ‘peter & wendy’, there would be no more stories, there would only be the end. 

[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)

[front-facing-pokemon]

[alicornze7]

eepy time

finally giving kinger the love he deserved on this blog

[hella1975]

im so sick of reading ooc dabihawks fics make them try and kill each other fr i have a GUN

[emberglowfox]

faceless day (post-canon)

[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.

[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

[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)

[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

[sysig]

Take care of him (Patreon)

[faunandfloraas]

"Seungmin would be SO hot if he got muscle like, can you imagine?" You would be hotter if you shut your mouth but we can't always get what we want so <3

[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