#it...got away from me lol

[kelpio]

Fordtober Day 14: Weirdmageddon

Prompts

[reineydraws]

i regularly think about mishanks immediately post luffy becoming pirate king and this is one of the fluffier ideas haha

also kind of the spiritual successor to my very first mishanks post :'))

[scaryarcade]

nobody in the fucking world is obligated to go to therapy. "not going to therapy" is never a moral failure. the only thing you're obligated to do is to treat other people with respect. the idea that therapy is the only path to being a person who's safe to be around is so fucking warped and rotten i can't believe how deeply ingrained it is in our society that even well-meaning people parrot it without thinking

[mugwot]

someone

[all-made-of-stardust]

i firmly choose to believe that the reason there weren't any cats in that house when Bells Hells bamfed in was because both Essek and Caleb are responsible cat parents and they both realized that their usual hierarchy of in-home catsitters (Beau & Yasha -> Jester & Fjord -> Veth, Yeza & Luc -> Caduceus) was depleted because they were all gonna busy with the liveshow shenanigans.

You know who wasn't busy? Kingsley.

You know who was next in that hierarchy? Definitely not Kingsley! (It was probably Dairon, but Dairon was busy running around the Cobalt Soul frantically)

So I love to imagine that the world is going to hell and there's at LEAST four cats in their house that need proper care and nobody is available to do it, so in a last ditch effort (because Mittens needs a special wet food diet and Krumel needs some medication and the others are simply too social to be left alone for too long) Essek phones up Kingsley and asks him.

Only for then, four days later, Essek stops into the house briefly to grab supplies and pauses halfway up the hall when he realizes that the cats are nowhere to be seen.

"Kingsley?" he Sends, trusting of his friend but not entirely sure of his character. "Where are the cats?"

"Oh, I had to go deal with a new trade deal by Port Damali!" Kingsley replies cheerfully. "Don't worry, the cats are with me!"

Essek pauses. Inhales deeply. This was the man he helped save, this was the man he mourned before a literal miracle of the gods brought him back.

"Kingsley," he Sends again, already bitter about the extra spell slot usage. "Are you at sea? Are you on a boat?"

"Yup!" comes the unadulterated happy reply. "The Captain's cabin is nice and roomy, and Krumel loves chasing down mice! Surprisingly helpful on a boat, cats! I might keep 'em!"

Essek physically restrains himself from wasting another spell slot on the tiefling. Instead, he touches the stone held in his palm.

"Caleb," he sighs. "I believe our cats were catnapped by Kingsley."

All he hears on the other end is a fit of laughter.

[buried-l0cket]

On the job 🏃‍♀️

[acrobattack]

Like, YEAH, girlfriend!

[rileyclaw]

thinking about them . ..

[marshmallowgoop]

no thoughts just Heiji Hattori (HD)

[flamingtoads]

Inspired by @blossom--of--snow's fanfic Right to the Heart of Me an AU based off the movie The Bodyguard for @cassiopeiasara!!

[crowlixcx]

The Scrapbook Series

[drenched-in-sunlight]

Theory: If Messmer is Marika’s sword (spear), Godwyn is her shield.

Yes I made another doomed Mother & Son presentation slide: eldest sons edition 🙏😔

EDIT 1: adding a bit to this, the theme music of Godwyn's Death Knight is a rearrangement of Erdtree Knight OST (aka Tree Sentinels theme)

(Messmer’s timeline) (discussion of Radagon’s shady behavior)

[dhmis-autism]

DHMIS doodle pages that I managed to cut and paste together and color! I personally like them a lot haha.

2nd doodle page is sorta inspired by @mariaisshiki ‘s piggyback trio drawings.

 B/c it reminded me of the time I tried to carry my baby cousin on my back and I am SO short that even though I got her body off the ground,both her feet were still firmly on the floor. That memory was so horrific I had to project it onto the smallest one.

[sysig]

How much of me is me? (Patreon)

[sacredfire44]

Kinda wanna read/write a post-canon Bingqiu fic set years later, where during some routine, silly wife plot, Binghe somehow finds out that the soul attached to his husband’s body is not, in fact, the original soul.

Like any person, his first assumption isn’t that his husband had replaced the original SQQ. It’s that an imposter has replaced his husband.

A skilled imposter. One who knows all of his husband’s little quirks, who slipped under even Binghe’s watchful eye.

Binghe takes care to not indicate that he’s noticed. His blood parasites confirm this is still his husband’s body, and he refuses to scare them into running before he can get the imposter out.

Binghe spends weeks researching and practicing, until he’s finally certain he can tear the imposter’s soul apart without hurting his husband. Praying, desperately, that it’s a powerful possession instead of a replacement. Praying his husband is still alive in there.

Finally, he slips into the imposter’s dreamscape, clinging to threads and forcing his way as close to the soul as possible, for the surface-level dreams show him in SQQ’s body. Inside, he finds a small man, with big eyes and stick-thin arms, features far too similar to his Shizun. A cheap, pathetic mockery of Shen Qingqiu, he makes sure to tell them.

They are weak outside of Shen qingqiu’s powerful body. It is all too easy to restrain them, to rage and revile them for their crimes, to question what they’ve done, to tear them apart, limb from limb-

“How long?,”He’d snarled, furious, claws digging into the pathetic parasite’s left arm, yanking it just far enough for the strain to burn.

“Years,”The imposter says, eyes wide and wet. Crying.

Years. Years with his husband that this imposter has taken, has stolen from them. Nights spent entangled, lazy mornings spent curled into each other’s embrace, soft evenings spent watching the sunset.

Binghe yanks the arm the rest of the way out, relishing in the way the parasite screams. It will know pain for what it’s taken from him, for what it’s taken from his Shizun.

XXXX

At first, Shen Qingqiu, formerly Shen Yuan, didn’t know what was happening. He’d thought of himself as Shen Qingqiu for years now, so waking up in his original body had been confusing and disorienting.

When Binghe appeared as well, he knew immediately it was a nightmare. It couldn’t be anything but that. Binghe, his Binghe as he was now, would never look at him like this, like he was the dirt on the bottom of his shoe, the scum of the earth.

It was rare to have nightmares nowadays. Binghe was always watching his dreams too closely to let something like that slip by. But the last few weeks, he’d been absorbed in his newest little pet project, exhausted and stressed by whatever it was he refused to talk about. Shen Qingqiu didn’t blame him for having one night of sleep without constant vigilance.

“So the imposter shows himself,”Dream-Binghe said, and ah, what an odd thing to dream up! Shen Qingqiu was just as good as the original goods, and he knew it! There was no way at all he had such insecurities, and certainly not any strong enough to appear as dreams! If he’d had such dreams before, that was simply a coincidence, a trick of the mind repeating the scenario it’d already created to avoid making a new one.

But Binghe doesn’t rant and rave at him for lying, doesn’t call out his betrayal. Instead, his eyes hard and cold, his claws tight where they dig into his wrists, he questions him.

Why?

I don’t know, Shen Qingqiu has to answer. I woke up in this body.

Where is he?

I don’t know, he answers again.

How long?

Here, Shen Qingqiu bites down a cry of pain as his left arm his yanked painfully out, a loud pop as it tugs out of his socket. The pain is real, he realizes deliriously. It’s real the way the Punishment Protocol had been. The thought makes ice pool in his chest.

What had he done to deserve a punishment from the System?

The hand tightens, the bones in his wrist creaking ominously at the strength of the hold.

The look in Binghe’s eyes hurts far more, though. Shen Qingqiu doesn’t even notice the tears in his eyes until they’re spilling over, until his voice comes out as a broken warble.

“Years,”He whispers at last, aware he’s hammering the final nail into his coffin.

It’s only as his arm is yanked away, as muscle and sinew tears with a sickening squelch, that it occurs to him. The punishment protocol had worked by sharing his dreamscape with the original Bingge. It hadn’t summoned nightmares out of no where.

This wasn’t Bingge. He’d known it on sight. Had recognized it in the curlier hair, the taller build.

This wasn’t Bingge. This was his husband.

And this wasn’t a dream.

XXX

Binghe watches as the pathetic worm scrambles away from him, gasping and hiccuping through his tears. His remaining arm shakes against the jagged edge of his stump, trying to stem the flow of blood. It won’t do a damn thing. This is a dream world, and that form is just a representation of his soul.

“I’m sorry,”It begs, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Binghe forgive me- “

“Do not call me that,” He hisses. This parasite had squirmed its way in, had settled in and gotten comfortable in its place as his husband, but that spot would only ever belong to his Shizun, his rightful Shizun. Everything else… everything else had been a lie!

“No!,”The imposter gasped. Had Binghe spoken out loud? “No, it wasn’t! I really- I really tried to be honest, I- I-“

It gulped, face pale and wan, tears spilling over its cheeks. Its voice dropped to a whimper.

“I loved you. I thought you loved me too.”

Luo Binghe let out a harsh laugh. So that was the plan? Replace his husband and try and make him grow attached? Try to squirm into his heart, when it was already spoken for?

“I could never love a pathetic fake!,”He snarled. “I’ve been planning your death from the moment I learned!”

The imposter sucked in a sharp breath. They stopped scrambling away, simply sitting before him, shaking and curled into themselves.

It didn’t try to run again as he stepped forward. Not even as he grabbed its leg and tore it from its body. It screamed, and thrashed, but made no effort to pull itself away again.

Instead, the insolent wretch began muttering under his breath, a plea and a prayer in one. Begging for forgiveness, for the dream to end, for Binghe to wake him up. Pathetic. Had the imposter really fallen in love with him over the course of its tenure?

He dug his claws into the stump at its shoulder to stop it. The muttering broke into muffled cries, biting their lip as they struggled to hold them back. A habit he recognized from his husband. Disgusting, he thought, holding to the illusion for pity until the very last second.

“You’re just a cowardly weakling, leeching off of Shen Qingqiu. You fell in love with me? Then know this in your heart.”

Binghe dug his fingers in harder, harder, until his claws scrapped against the shattered bone of the socket and dug in. The parasite’s eyes nearly rolled back into its head as it jerked. Binghe lifted it off the ground by the bone, then held still until the worm caught its breath.

“I could never love the man before me. I would never have even looked at you twice had I known.”

Binghe expands his awareness to the dream world around him. From a greater distance, the soul of the imposter is more like a small flickering flame, a little glow between his hands, than a man.

It takes almost no effort at all, to close his fist around it and smother the flame.

XXX

Binghe wakes up in the morning, ecstatic to finally be done with this journey and desperate for love from his husband who he’s apparently not seen in years.

Shen Qingqiu doesn’t wake up with him.

Shen Qingqiu doesn’t wake up at all.

XXX

Anyway now that I’ve officially written a short version of it I want y’all to know that Shang Qinghua would be the one to tell him, after rushing over when he gets an alert that the account of User 002 was deactivated.

Binghe gets to metaphorically self-destruct, realizing everything he said and did was to his own husband and not an assumed imposter. The world shapes itself to Binghe’s wishes, and he still has access to the holy mausoleum, so he manages to bring back Shen Qingqiu. I debated having him bring back Shen Jiu instead but I love the protagonist of any book I read, and that includes Shen Yuan, so instead he brings back his husband whose heartbroken and runs off, with a new level of instinctive terror to go along with it. Binghe really does try to give him room, but that does neither of them good because Binghe drowns in his guilt and the confirmation of his husband’s fear, and Shen Yuan drowns in his heartbreak and confirmation of his husband’s rejection.

The happy ending comes after a slowburn of binghe groveling and breaking himself down(a la Lost and Found in Limitless Clarity) with a side of both being left with new insecurities to add to the existing ones post-canon.

(And if Binghe now dreams of the delicate flicker of a soul between his hands, now jolts awake to the reminder of how small it was, how easy to smother, well-

-it’s the least he deserves, isn’t it?)

[genericpuff]

i find it funny that one of rachel’s drawings of herself in the afterword that just went up is just fully persephone. is that something she does a lot?

Alright so I've been making it a general rule for myself to like, not harp on Rachel in any way outside of LO as much because frankly the horse is dead now and there's not much left to say outside of what can be analyzed in hindsight. I think despite everything I have to say about her and her work, she still deserves to get away from this nonsense and I don't wanna spend eternity hovering over her shoulder.

But the afterword was posted within the LO series and is clearly meant for readers of LO in the functioning of being an afterword so let's just call it fair game LOL

I will say, on the whole, it does feel very honest and sentimental and I can respect Rachel for taking the time to write out and illustrate her afterword in a way that was personal to both her and her fans. I can understand why she went at it from the angle that she did and I'm not gonna fault her for that.

But there's also something that feels deeply... disingenuous about her approach right from the starting gun. I will say, before I continue, that I'm well aware I am biased towards Rachel as a creator, and I fully acknowledge that I could very well be reading too much into things. This is just my opinion, take it with mountains of salt.

I can get looking back on your own childhood, your past self, whatever, and going "see! it all got better!" because sure! For a lot of creators like Rachel, it must be wild to look back on where they came from and there's a lot of sentimentality on expressing that through an afterword like this where she reflects on where she came from. Though she STILL didn't acknowledge her other comics outside of LO, I can understand if she wants to leave those skeletons in the closet.

But I feel like her drawing herself as a child who's being given an Eisner by her adult self and all that just feels like some gross attempt to disarm any criticism of her because "don't make fun of me, I'm just a sad lonely baby girl!"

She's not a child. Child Rachel didn't grossly misappropriate Greek myth into their own self-indulged vanity project. Child Rachel didn't claim herself a folklorist of a culture's works only to bastardize them completely. Child Rachel didn't create a hostile environment within her fanbase by bullying anyone who she perceived as a threat, sneaking into critical spaces to try and cause trouble, and writing her own clapbacks into her comic. Child Rachel didn't claim to be challenging misogyny and purity culture only to reinforce misogyny and purity culture through her own self-insert baby-virgin-gets-rescued-by-rich-tycoon power fantasy that regularly glorified abuse towards women and the lower class.

30-almost-40-year-old Rachel did though.

At best it comes across as really cringe sentimentality from a Greek-weeb (heh, greeboo) and goes to show how much Rachel inserted herself into Greek myth without ever absorbing its messages or cultural contexts, it was all about her and her feelings as a sad New Zealand girl with dyslexia who thought Persephone's story was about another sad girl being rescued from her "horrible childhood".

At worst it's an active attempt to play on people's heartstrings by drawing herself as a child who people will naturally not want to criticize. I don't want to assume she's doing it intentionally, I really don't want to leave her afterword on a bad foot, as I can definitely understand as both a creator and a person who struggled with learning disabilities in their own childhood how and why she wants to pay homage to her past and where she came from... but let's just say, as someone who's also gotten way too "lost in the sauce" concerning personal self-reflective projects, I think there's a lot to say about how this confirms that Rachel made LO entirely for herself, about herself, without any actual intention to respect the original myths, because she never truly separated them from herself when she was a child. And, in my humble opinion as someone who has Been There with the self-insert OC's and self-reflective angsty plotlines, I can fully attest to the fact that that's not fucking healthy. Even with personal projects, you NEED to learn to get your head out of the sauce, you NEED to learn to objectively separate yourself from the narrative so the story doesn't fall apart under your own hubris and ego, you NEED to learn to draw a line if you want to have any sort of identity as a human being outside of what you make for people. And that's with just normal original stories, this was a story based on Greek myth which doesn't belong to her.

And this goes for a lot of the things she's said and done in the past, so much of her own "sources" even are tethered to things that she read / watched in her childhood and only vaguely remembers, as if she never mentally left her childhood at all, which just... if the point was to highlight her past and the traumas she went through and how they contributed to her present, an Eisner isn't going to validate those experiences. And drawing attention to her past through the lens of her childhood self absolutely 100% does not absolve her of the negative effect her work has had on the modern Greek myth zeitgeist nor the things she's said and done as a 38 year old woman who should absolutely know better.

The community she entered and took from will forever remain changed by her influence and taking, in many ways not for the better. She has the privilege of walking away and never having to think about it again, with all the awards and accolades that were bought for her, the bravado that she built around being a "folklorist" with zero credentials, and the platform she was given over many other creators struggling to even be heard.

That "place" she claims to have now was built entirely on inserting herself into another culture's works and doing nothing but taking, taking, taking, while offering nothing in return but vanity and lip service. That "place" was paid for and brought to you by Webtoons.