#just be internally consistent

[nobodymitskigabriel]

so i have used dean's male siren as proof towards his bisexuality and the reason i disregard that he was supposed to be a replacement for sam, a brother, was because i assumed the writers were trying to play off why dean had a male siren in the first place without saying it was attraction thing because every other interaction felt romantic?? and then out of the blue he says it was to be a brother when it didn't seem the way the whole time. also when he puts sam under his spell as well, he never says he'll be what dean is to him, just that whoever wins gets to "have him" so i just always took that episode as bi dean and bi sam evidence 😂 also i don't ship w* at all so i never looked at any of that ep in that light

Hey if u see it that way then sure thats your right. Im just really not convinced that the writers wrote a romance between dean and the male siren then tried to walk it back by calling the siren his brother. The entire point of the siren is to show the audience the current turmoil in sam and dean's relationship as brothers. Dean cant trust sam. Sam feels like dean cant take the bull by the horns. Those are the seeds of resentment that the siren latches onto to coerce one to kill the other so they can "be with" nick. I personally dont see this as necessarily incestuous (though i see how it could be interpreted that way). Thats why I get so baffled when i see posts like "remember how they gave dean a male siren!! Now what could that possibly mean? 🤔🤔" from people who explicitly do not like wincest i just take pause bc thats...that is literally an incestuous interpretation of the text unless you ignore the blatant message of the episode.

[toki-toro]

Okay springtrap

[mmikmmik]

I think one of the least subtle parts of Mouthwashing is when Anya dies and Jimmy is immediately faced with a medical emergency [caused by Jimmy] and loses his shit and does the thing Anya specifically said would not be effective (because they're out of real medical supplies [caused by Jimmy]) and only causes Daisuke more pain. (And also Swansea's idea for euthanasia is "hit him the face with an axe", which... okay I don't know if I could have come up with something better in his shoes, but...) And then Jimmy tries to take care of Curly and it's horrible. To be fair, Jimmy has clearly lost the capacity to think clearly about what kind of care Curly would need (/comical understatement), but imo part of what That One Minigame was communicating is that Jimmy genuinely has no idea what's going on with Curly's body or injuries [caused by Jimmy] and can't even imagine logical possibilities.

The game leaves a lot about Anya implied or ambiguous, but it really wanted to establish this: Anya does an important, difficult, unpleasant job and when Jimmy and Swansea complain about her work, they don't know what they're talking about.

[startedwellthatsentence]

Not to defend Max because his reaction to Avery’s announcement was (as Tristan and Avery both pointed out) bad, but

A few hours earlier, Max had caught Avery acting super worried about something, and then she had asked him about how difficult med school was and if he had loved it. Their most recent one-on-one discussion had been about if it’s possible to go back to med school.

And so when Avery said that she was trying to make a decision, he latched onto the most recent conversation they had had, which was about her ability to go back to med school.

Was it the right move? No. Does it make sense? Yes.

[leashybebes]

🏳️‍🌈 (but i can’t wait to read everything else too haha)

💛💛

"No! I mean. I'm not - I haven't been - out for long." Tommy finishes his drink, takes a deep breath and says, "I'm in my thirties and I've only slept with four guys. That's - it's tragic, right?"

"What? No! Of course not," Evan says, thinking four? Jesus! He's touched more dicks than that, and he basically only sleeps with women. "It's fine. You should like, go at your own pace or whatever."

"It's not like I don't want to."

"Yeah? I mean - I feel like literally ten seconds on Grindr would solve this issue."

"I don't know."

"You don't know what? Dude, your workouts must be insane. Look at you!" He pokes Tommy's bicep, rock hard even though he's nowhere near flexing. "Actually, what are your workouts? Do you, like, own a gym?"

make me write

[waystarresourceco]

Kieran Culkin on Roman's playboy image and the way the actors/writers understanding of backstory fits together. (x)

[halfbaked00q]

just had the haunting realization that one day they're gonna reboot James Bond which ofc means a new actor, and one day I will probably be one of those "old fashioned" ppl clinging to a previous actor as "My Bond" while some hot new young thing is prancing about on the stage.............

[whetstonefires]

#4 please !

Now see this could be tricky, because generally if I don't get some key elements written down very quickly the idea flows away again and the 'yet' disappears, even if I remember generally what it was about, but I have one this time! I am still just enough plagued by this vision that it's not out of the question I'll go for the capture, but so far nada.

Idea was basically a Jiang family character study by way of modern au. (So tw canonical abuse.) I started from the reflection, in a modern au very high chance the Jiangs are divorced, because being a divorcee wouldn't necessarily ruin Yu Ziyuan in the modern world, as long as she was allowed to control the narrative enough that she didn’t look at fault, so it might be on the table.

Especially because modern views on child abuse are such that while she'd hold back more than she already does in terms of physical chastisement, Jiang Fengmian would also be under less societal pressure to not interfere in her disciplinary system too much, and both these factors mean he’s more likely to put his foot down.

So, concept: Jiang Fengmian, when his son is eight and his daughter thirteen, forces the issue of taking in his best friends' abused orphan child whom he’s just managed to track down in a nightmarish group home, probably leveraging the fact that wherever their money comes from it's mostly his, something he usually doesn't do, but she has always known he could, and been fucked up about it (reasonable) and hated him a little (less so) and hates him so much more now (understandable but still fucked up).

They were obviously still both pressured into this marriage by their families, because I literally cannot imagine them choosing one another of their own free will, and if they did that would be an au in an even more dramatic way than being modern, and no longer work as a character or relationship study as far as I'm concerned. I mean or it’s a cql-based au, but that’s not the version of this toxic marriage I find compelling.

Situation subsequently deteriorates to the point that when the boys are around twelve some outside party observes and is repulsed or otherwise upset by Yu Ziyuan's treatment of Wei Wuxian specifically--she's emotionally abusive to everyone in the family, canonically, and it harms Jiang Cheng significantly more than Wei Wuxian, which I think is also pretty explicit on the page, but she's more openly antagonistic about going after wwx because he's basically a proxy for her husband, whom she doesn't consider to be someone she's capable of harming.

And ofc in a modern family scenario, being abusive to your foster kid is more plainly personal misconduct than being unfair in how you discipline one of your husband's many students, even if it is his favorite. Which means she's very unlikely to chase him around with a whip, but whatever she does do will sting that much more emotionally.

Anyway the outside judgement provokes a more explicit confrontation than the last four years of maneuver and attempting to balance all the competing needs according to two very different standards. And the upshot is that by the time wwx is 13, the Jiangs are divorced. To avoid making a humiliating spectacle of themselves they present a weirdly united front in court and have a very smooth uncontested proceding, although the closed meetings with their respective lawyers involved a lot of vitriol.

Yu Ziyuan, despite having a smallish trust fund and probably a job of some kind, though one that's more prestigious than profitable like uh. Olympic fencing coach. Idk what they make but it's probably not enormous. She and Cangse Sanren probably competed in the same events back in the day.

Anyway she gets a solid chunk of alimony, the house, and primary custody of both her children, although Jiang Yanli is almost 18 at this point so mostly she just gets Jiang Cheng. Everyone thinks Jiang Cheng wants it that way, including sort of Jiang Cheng; he has this idea that if he has his mom to himself they'll finally have a good relationship, even though he's also terrified of being left all alone with her. He's complicated. Families are complicated.

Also she would never have forgiven him if he hadn't concurred that he wanted to stay with his mother because she was the only one On His Side.

Jiang Yanli ofc does not move out right away when she comes of age, in part because her brother needs her, but she probably does go to college, so she's only around part-time.

Jiang Fengmian, meanwhile, keeps most of his financial assets and Wei Wuxian, and gets his kids on the weekends.

So that's all setup for how you have this situation where Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are entering high school--probably the same school, together, but no longer sharing the commute except maybe Monday mornings--and Wei Wuxian's primary residence is Jiang Cheng's dad's apartment.

It’s really chill. They get a cleaning service in once a week and eat a lot of delivery food, but they do cook at least once a week. The canonical thing where they largely agree about what’s funny and what’s right-or-wrong, and so forth, on the one hand really pops when there’s mostly no external conflict disrupting it, but also probably gains more complexity now that it’s not a thread of positivity fighting for its life against a background of drama. They get to know each other better than they ever had a chance to in canon.

Some of that isn't all that positive, because now they have the space to discover the places where they do actually have the capacity for friction, but both of them are very good at dispersing tension (I do tend to suspect jfm's dad was abusive he sure acts like it), and on the whole it's a good thing.

Jiang Cheng is going to have such a mental health crisis, and Jiang Fengmian is going to handle it so badly. Because of course when his son starts replicating his ex-wife's toxic attitudes and behaviors more now that she has primary custody, he’s going to feel guilty and like it’s His Fault, but he’s going to feel like it’s his fault that Jiang Cheng is growing up to be a shitty abusive person.

And even if he’d never say that the subtext would come through, in the assumptions he made when framing communications and so forth, as in canon, so the thing where Jiang Cheng’s father loves Wei Wuxian more than him, or at any rate likes him better and thinks he’s a better person and prefers his company, would wind up feeding into a self-reinforcing loop.

(Jin Zixuan's nasty public remark about Jiang Fengmian treating Wei Wuxian better than his own children hits Jiang Cheng significantly harder in this scenario, where he's being Tormented by the feeling that all his peers know his dad walked out on him for another son. Wei Wuxian's punch is therefore even more clearly primarily for Jiang Cheng's sake, although Jiang Cheng is probably more inclined to see it as being for his dad's. Jin Zixuan is about halfway between the Jiang kids' ages here, so he's a senior saying this shit to a sophomore.)

So that cycle builds to the point where Jiang Cheng would eventually have one of those rare moments where he resorts to actual violence, because his poisoned feelings are choking him so bad his rationality deserts him.

He’s not going to be nearly as close to actually murdering Wei Wuxian as he was in canon the night the Jiang Sect was massacred, because it’s a less extreme situation, but he still goes for the neck. So Jiang Fengmian is in his home office one Saturday about a year and a half into this new normal, and realizes the boys are fighting. He hears through the wall the accusation you stole my dad. He says to himself, well that’s terrible but interjecting myself into this situation would definitely make it worse.

Then he hears sounds of violence, and then an ominous abrupt silence, and updates that analysis.

And when he opens the door to the boys’ room, Wei Wuxian is being strangled. He’s not really resisting, which is because he’s made the call that that’s way more likely to get Jiang Cheng to snap out of it, and thinks it might make Jiang Cheng feel better to get it out of his system (because he does sort of feel like what Jiang Cheng is going through is all his fault, or at any rate is much worse as a result of decisions made for his sake) and is severely underestimating the dangers of choking, but looks to a third party like he’s already passed out and Jiang Cheng is still at it. Which is to say, it looks like a serious murder attempt on the brink of success.

So that sure made that situation worse!

So yeah that's my idea that I probably won't write but it sure has its teeth in me.

[dkettchen]

reading abt devil fruit types on the wiki and apparently we're considering the gum-gum fruit's typing the equivalent of "technically a tomato is a fruit but in practice it's still a vegetable" now huh

[greyedian]

MAN I'm seriously so sad about season 2. Bc I wish act 2 had the same emotional impact on me as it appears to have on so many others. But rn I'm just somewhere between unable to care and actively annoyed by some of those writing decisions. Seriously the more I think about it the less I like it.

[serpentface]

Do you conlang? I was wondering if you had naming languages (or possibly even more developed ones) for pulling the words you use. I tried to search your blog but didn't find anything, wouldn't be surprised if the feature is just busted tho. Your worldbuilding is wonderful and I particularly enjoy the anthropological and linguistic elements.

Ok the thing is I had kind of decided I was not going to do any conlanging because I don't feel like I'm equipped to do a good job of it, like was fully like "I'm just going to do JUST enough that it doesn't fail an immediate sniff test and is more thoughtful than just keysmashing and putting in vowels". And then have kinda been conlanging anyway (though not to a very deep and serious extent. I maybe have like....an above average comprehension of how language construction works via willingness to research, but that's not saying much, also I can never remember the meanings of most linguistic terms like 'frictives' or etc off the top of my head. I'm just kinda raw dogging it with a vague conceptualization of what these things mean)

I do at least have a naming language for Wardi (and more basic rules for other established languages) but the rudimentary forms of it were devised with methods much shakier and less linguistically viable than even the most basic naming language schemes, and I only went back over it LONG after I had already made a bunch of words so there's some inconsistencies with consonant presence and usage. (This can at least be justified because it IS a language that would have a lot of loanwords and would be heavily influenced by other language groups- Burri being by far the most significant, Highland-Finnic and Yuroma-Lowlands also being large contributors)

The 'method' I used was:

-Skip basic construction elements and fully move into devising necessary name words, with at least a Vibe of what consonants are going to be common and how pronunciation works -Identify some roots out of the established words and their meanings. Establish an ongoing glossary of known roots/words. -Construct new words based in root words, or as obvious extensions/variants of established words. -Get really involved in how the literal meanings of some words might not translate properly to english, mostly use this to produce a glossary of in-universe slang. -Realize that I probably should have at least some very basic internal consistency at this point. -Google search tutorials on writing a naming language. -Reverse engineer a naming language out of established words, and ascribe all remaining inconsistencies to being loanwords or just the mysteries of life or whatever.

I do at least have some strongly established pronunciation rules and a sense of broad regional dialect/accents.

-'ai' words are almost always pronounced with a long 'aye' sound.

-There is no 'Z' or 'X' sound, a Wardi speaker pronouncing 'zebra' would go for 'tsee-brah', and would attempt 'xylophone' as 'ssye-lohp-hon'

-'V' sounds are nearly absent and occur only in loanwords, and tend to be pronounced with a 'W' sound. 'Virsum' is a Highland word (pronounced 'veer-soom') denoting ancestry, a Wardi speaker would go 'weer-sum'.

-'Ch' spellings almost always imply a soft 'chuh' sound when appearing after an E, I, or O (pelatoche= pel-ah-toh-chey), but a hard 'kh' sound after an A or U (odomache= oh-doh-mah-khe). When at the start of a word, it's usually a soft 'ch' unless followed by an 'i' sound (chin (dog) is pronounced with a hard K 'khiin', cholem (salt) is pronounced with a soft Ch 'cho-lehm')

-Western Wardin has strong Burri cultural and linguistic influence, and a distinct accent- one of the most pronounced differences is use of the ñ sound in 'nn' words. The western city of Ephennos is pronounced 'ey-fey-nyos' by most residents, the southeastern city of Erubinnos is pronounced 'eh-roo-been-nos' by most residents. Palo's surname 'Apolynnon' is pronounced 'A-puh-lee-nyon' in the Burri and western Wardi dialects (which is the 'proper' pronunciation, given that it's a Kos name), but will generally be spoken as 'Ah-poh-leen-non' in the south and east.

-R's are rolled in Highland-Finnic words. Rolling R's is common in far northern rural Wardi dialects but no others. Most urban Wardi speakers consider rolling R's sort of a hick thing, and often think it sounds stupid or at least uneducated. (Brakul's name should be pronounced with a brief rolled 'r', short 'ah' and long 'uul', but is generally being pronounced by his south-southeastern compatriots with a long unrolled 'Brah' sound).

Anyway not really a sturdy construction that will hold up to the scrutiny of someone well equipped for linguistics but not pure bullshit either.

[pomeraniandancer]

How the fuck does this even happen...

There are a number of languages you can search for works in on AO3, including Eald Eanglisc of all things, but the one language on there that really throws me for a loop is...American Sign Language.

Like, is there even a video option on AO3 for this to be possible?

I once picked a really big fanfic collection to search for ASL fics in and the only one that categorized as ASL was *written* in English. No videofile too be seen.

The most you can do in ASL in writing is write English words with ASL syntax. But that's still not ASL. ASL does not have a written alphabet or syllabary.

Genuinely bewildered about how this came about. Can people just post something and write in an "other" language and AO3 just adds that language to the list of languages they have fics written in?

I can't think of any other way that this might've happened, and as much as I adore AO3, this is pretty problematic.

[wammypilled]

Mello and Misa on a one mofu open sleigh, the bimbo sleigh if you will

[puppppppppy]

how. do u sona....

[alistair-blackwood]

yeah so it turns out when you take an unapologetic eugenicist and give him a sympathetic backstory where he's been uwu traumatized you get a lot of people unironically defending a eugenicist. yeah it's because he's hot. yeah they're saying he has girlhood rage

[romanceyourdemons]

i’m sorry i’m still thinking about that erha extra that’s like yeah if chu wanning and mo ran were born in the republican era they’d participate in the revolution and live happily ever after :) literally who are you talking about right now. chu “questions authority” wanning and mo “authority questions him” ran would make it through one struggle session, maybe two, before one of them was like hey stop it i can vouch for this person, at which point everyone would be like hey aren’t you from a brothel/monastery and also aren’t you a queer and an intellectual (derogatory) these are very very suspect things. and then the other one would kill everyone there on instinct and they’d have to take new identities and charter a boat to hong kong. i know this is what would happen because that’s point for point how it went down in Xianxia World. in fact i can’t think of any two characters more poorly-suited to see 1966