#its just very intriguing

[meatgrinder-0]

the treatment of canon fords experience in the portal vs reverse portal au stans experience in there is very fascinating to me. makes me narrow my eyes a little

[grayeet]

I love the pale garden and how it's like a parallel to dark forests. I love how the two divert expectations.

Dark forests, despite their name, are saturated and full of life. Even compared to regular forests, there's a lot more biodiversity than many of the "basic" biomes. There's three whole different trees found there, giant mushrooms, and plenty of flowers. They're one of the biomes capable of spawning a lush cave underneath it. It has its dangers just like any other overworld biome, obviously, but it's nothing overly more than anywhere else. Traversing it can be tricky sometimes and illagers may take residence in the biome's woodland mansions, but it's ultimately a very colorful and lively environment.

Opposing it is the new pale garden. Usually white and light colors are seen as pristine and good, but the pale garden takes it the opposite direction and goes right into uncanny valley territory. It has none of the color of dark forests, none of the biodiversity, none of the liveliness. It has trees and moss that look familiar, but something is off. It has a signature mob, but even the creaking is just a puppet of the trees, not really sentient, not really even plotting against anything. There's "life", but, once again, it's wrong.

I think the pale garden is a wonderful addition to Minecraft's world building as it is, but the deliberate parallel to dark forests? Delicious.

[benevolenterrancy]

Swords pining for each other's cultivator is my new favorite type of pining. Love your NieYao content! <3

I don't suppose we could get Baxia or Hensheng throwing a tantrum while Jin Guangyao / Nie Mingjue are away, leaving their owners to deal with the embarrassing aftermath?

Also, do you have any recs you'd recommend with these two?

this is the exact moment Nie Huaisang realised he was going to have to start meddling in his big brother's love life (con't: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Hensheng, on the other hand, doesn't throw tantrums but WILL sulk...

[lotus-pear]

rewatched madoka magica again today bc i fucking hate myself and to absolutely no one’s surprise i went through all five stages of grief in a single evening

[anetherealpoetess]

thinking about haladriel. thinking about heroines and villains and the insistence that love in stories is only love if it is virtuous and selfless, and therefore the villain can never love the heroine because of all the reasons he is a villain in the first place.

hate to break it to you, but love that is plagued, hounded, and haunted is still love. love that is obsessive, cruel, and selfish is still love. at some point, you have to face the fact that stories are not crafted to reinforce a neat, overarching set of morals. once you accept that fact, you'll find love exists in deeply interesting places--like in the flaws and complexities that make a character compelling.

how boring if only heroes are allowed to love.

[mags-writes]

me, 14 and reading the end of mockingjay:

me, 24 and reading the end of the ballad of songbirds and snakes:

[citrusinicake]

ppl who dont understand loving a character while also hating them fascinate me, clearly youve never stanned a complete and absolute dickhead before

[kaurwreck]

have yall ever noticed in osamu dazai's entrance exam that ranpo cuts to the heart of dazai within moments of meeting him, weighs him against the feather in his gaze, decides it neither too heavy nor light, and then says, simply, unfeignedly, deliberately, "Oh, that's nice. Anyway, welcome to the Agency."

and dazai, despite smoothing himself shapeless under ranpo's scrutiny, is rattled, slipping aside his noh mask to self-soothe by asking kunikida about ranpo's skill. because the radio static crackling along his spine can't be the sensation that he's been caught, or ranpo would have renounced or redressed or recoiled from the snake in his home— so it must be no longer human, buzzing and frustrating such and such skill ranpo set on him, and this placidity is a facade to save face. ranpo couldn't have seen what dazai didn't deign to show him, however much the thought briefly excites dazai.

except then kunikida explains that ranpo's skill is to deduce the truth of a case just by looking at it, and dazai is momentarily stunned, the static roaring in his drums as muscle memory swallows piqued yearning and spits bitter incredulity. even if there were a skill that could crack him apart to out the pluck meat that might reassure him he's made of flesh beneath the chitin, there is no exception to his nullification.

even as the blackened grief encroaches like ennui around dazai's edges, ranpo is calling them, promising them the answer they asked for, and no more than that much. he asks dazai for his glasses (the glasses precious to him, typically on his person, but in that moment, somewhere else), and dazai is coaxed by his curiosity and ranpo's beckon.

and because dazai is still a pitiable creature prone to wanting, he leans towards the taunting lure and takes it between his fingers while holding his breath to brace against the certain-to-be-crushing disappointment.

and instead, substantiation brokering little argument. ranpo can deduce the truth by looking at it. and as dazai's own discernment reverse engineers ranpo's conclusion, he finds no fault in it.

dazai's rhapsody enlivens him in the car with Kunikida, the well of him overflowing with the salvific implications that moments prior he was pinned, writhing in place, by someone sincerely seeing him, who was satiated by enough substance to then look away, who wasn't the least surprised to see wriggling, living flesh in the shape of him.

dazai's so beside himself that when kunikida remarks that he's never seen dazai marvel over someone else's skills like that before, dazai scarcely lies to him when he says lots of things take him by surprise, like when he tried to pick up a clam with his chopsticks, and it was still alive, startling him.

kunikida, who also notices more than he's given any credit for, dismisses dazai's third perspective, depersonalized, dehumanized, and disassociated clam metaphor, and says: "You seemed taken aback that someone had the ability to see and know all."

to which dazai responds with the same seamless and subtly mean spirited deflection he tends towards whenever he's suddenly feeling vulnerable.

but yes, he is taken aback. it's worldview shattering, not unlike when chuuya incited him, or oda shrugged at him, or when kunikida would, later, see a lock without any key (a climax without any hope) and create one himself.

ranpo saw him, saw who he'd been, and said, with prejudice: "Anyway, welcome to the Agency."

because I didn't until a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't stopped thinking about it.

[perilegs]

i'm trying to watch a trans guy critique some video game trans rep bc i'm interested in hearing more trans ppl talk about it. but he's very. i'm paraphrasing here but "why would anyone ever in a million years want their rpg character to have top surgery scars. isnt that a constant reminder to you and everyone around you about how you were born" and "you don't work on transitioning. you just need hormone treatment and possibly some--"

[grapecaseschoices]

vivienne is --

giving me a lot of conflicting emotions. particularly as a black woman.

[cloudbends]

The psychological torture of loving media that is both relatively obscure and the small audience it does have doesn't get it whatsoever. I need normal people to get into shoushimin or ill be alone in the appreciation corner for eternity

[uncanny-tranny]

There's something so insane to me about being able to create and recreate vintage or even ancient music, clothes, fabrics, building architecture, anything, really.

I watched this video about a lady who knit a WWII-era vest, and it was really unique, because the cable work would eat up yarn, when there were shortages of fibers. This pattern would have likely been used by people to send overseas to soldiers, and now it's being created in a time where this war has been over for generations. What were the people making this pattern thinking of? What about the people making the vest? Could they fathom a world where world wars didn't happen back to back? Could they imagine what peace felt like, or did it fade like a distant memory, a faint friend? All we have now are the remnants of their efforts, a "simple" vest that would warm the bodies of countless people the knitter would never have imagined were here on earth with them.

We're reaching across time to learn about other people - we're reaching our hands out just to grasp anything tangible. And when we've take hold of something, all we can do is say I love you I love you I love you

[ccbatman]

actually so evil how much of hal's internal world gets obliterated with the rewriting of his relationships with jessica and martin.

[ungodlysaltyinfrastructure]

Tripping and falling

ep 18

Siiiiogghhhhhhhh. I just woke up to this, and the only thing I gotta say, is Alux is so autistic about that firebird.

I was right in saying that he loves fantasy creatures >:]

But everything else is just character and world building. Nice and cozy, like the tavern. But story progression wise, it doesn't give us *a lot*. It does give us some things, like adding character to deer and rocky (because they've been pretty neglected since introduction), and there is that one snippet of the Wisp and petro at the beginning. But like, the title of the episode seems off. Like the presentation first hand, and then the actual content don't line up, so I can only assume that the title and thumbnail are meant to foreshadow something bigger in ep 19 or 20.

My best prediction is that 19 is going to be Petro centric. And 20 is going to be the season finale with the honeybee festival, and some goes horribly wrong because of some sort of butterfly affect by Petro, kicking off season 2 with Alux having to now find out what's going on in cozen. (And of course the gang going along with him.)

[cent-scratchnsniff]

progressing through the myth of sisyphus again

[the-last-dillpickle]

waiting for the day someone has julian bashir refer to a cigarette as a "fag" in their omb fic