#lemme be monke

[hollypies]

Ty for all the slug requests!!!! Hope you allllll enjoyyyyyy

Also click for non blurry quality tumblr. Did not like these LMAO

[royaltea000]

Got so mad seeing a forced marriage plot for the 20th time that I got up to draw a design specifically to put a veil on him

[xxplastic-cubexx]

Snap: I don't like Erik with a full on viking beard

Me: What about Erik with a Xehanort goatee?

So thats worse actually hope this helps !!!!!!!!!!!

[dvnieldraws]

emi emi emi EMIRYN! [original, oc]

[azurescaled-archived]

Out of context with my pathfinder session yesterday:

[stardustandash]

Waffling over ideas for the next chapter of Get By With a Little Help. Currently a three way tie between Zee, Skoova, or Caij

[ceylar-does-art]

Moxie brings me great joy and I was having a rough day, but drawing her (and vibing with my friends) helped me feel better <3

Draw your blorbos in self indulgence.

Also queue ran out a while ago and I’m uploading as I finish drawings.

[hexingart]

Speaking of being normal about Pathfinder, I never got to play my Monk/Hunter multiclass girl Skoda.

[velvetreds]

HONEYMOON PHASE — A. MIYA

cws; swearing, gn?reader but it gives fem to me even tho theres not descriptions of reader or gendered pet names, married life, tooth rotting fluff, yeah.

wc; 605

"'s it too late," atsumu's voice is muffled and his words slurred as he speaks, face buried in your shoulder.

"mm?" you respond sleepily, not really listening to him. strong tan arms are wrapped around your middle, and you absentmindedly curl your fingers into his untoned bleached hair. he purrs at the feeling, pulling you closer to him so he can press his mouth to your neck, grinning lazily. you make a slight noise of protest as you feel his teeth against your neck, and then he bites you, really bites you, to make you shut up.

"mmh, leave the jackals, y'know? fuck 'em, i could become a hermit or a monk or somethin'."

a drowsy, surprised giggle bubbles out of you, and his smile widens in response. he likes making you laugh.

"tsumu," you say, and he realises with glee that you still have your rough, lower-than-usual, sexy morning voice. "tsumu, monks can't get married, i think. and they have to be bald."

he groans, but you're not sure which one it's in response to. switching tactics, you half-heartedly try to push him off you.

"lemme stay here," he whines. "i love you, i wanna—"

"tsumu, no," you chide him, and he quiets down like a kicked puppy. raising his head, he pulls your left hand to his lips and presses a kiss to the spot just above your wedding ring before he gets up with a sleepy yawn.

"five years into our marriage and you still don't let me sleep in," he says with a pout.

you ignore him, pausing mid-movement to admire his sculpted figure and the way his body moves as he transfers his wedding ring from his finger to the chain around his neck. when he notices you looking, a bright, boyish grin lights up his face. "can't risk losing it," he tells you, still smiling. you can't help but mirror his expression with your own giddy, lovestruck smile.

you're fixing up breakfast in the kitchen when he comes in, although he's still not dressed to leave yet. you turn to him, smiling when he nuzzles his face into yours. "baby, can i drive you t'work?"

you shake your head, hands coming up to cup his face. "you're already running late, love."

he rolls his eyes in response, angling his head to kiss your palm. "baby, best friend, love of my fuckin' life. is it such a crime to want to spend more time with you?"

"we have all the time in the world, tsumu," you say. "eat quick and go."

"not leaving the house without you," he says sulkily. "they can practice without their favourite setter for a bit."

"favourite? that's debatable," you tease, sitting down next to him with your own breakfast. atsumu kisses your knuckles again with a sly grin, ignoring your dig at him. "but i'm your favourite setter."

"you're my favourite everything," you say, and then you laugh as the red spreads across his cheeks and his nose and the tips of his ears. your breakfasts remain untouched as he leans in to kiss all over your face in a bid to distract you.

"are you flirting with me, y/n l/n?" he asks.

"maybe," you reply, still laughing.

he shuts you up with a kiss. "what if we skip work today?"

"and do what, exactly?"

"laze around, y'know. i just want to stay with you, spend some time together."

"hmm." you pretend to think, but your mind is already made up. "i dunno..."

he kisses your palm, and then your wrist. "please?"

you've never been able to resist those stupid puppy eyes, anyways.

I HATE THIS ITS SO HAPPY. kmsing. drop a like, rb and or comment if u liked this 🤔🤔 husband atsumu u could fix me

[junipernight]

I redesigned Yangchen's outfit!

... I actually designed a lot of outfits for her, because I am Extremely Normal about these books, and also I like costume design and learning about historical clothing.

Short disclaimer: These fantasy clothes aren't culturally or historically accurate, just historically and culturally influenced. I don't have any expertise in East or Central Asian culture or clothing, I've just been clicking around on the internet a lot the last two weeks learning things because that's my idea of fun lol. If you wanted to talk to people who actually know things you should check out @atlaculture or like @ziseviolet, both of whom's blogs I referenced while drawing.

I only designed two alternates for the outer robes. The first is based loosely off the robes Buddhist monks wear (loosely, because drawing draped fabric is hard ^^') especially the Tibetan zhen robe. This garment is just a long wide rectangle of cloth which can be draped across the body in lots of ways (versatility ftw!).

The other garment I drew is a Chuba, a traditional garment from Tibet and the Himalayas. It's a robe, but it highkey reminds me of kilts and hoodies, in that it a) can be worn over one or both shoulders or just as a skirt and b) it makes a giant pocket over the stomach. The long sleeves can be folded up or tied back btw.

I spent the most time on the middle layer, because I was thinking it has to be something she could comfortably fight in while also being suitable for diplomatic meetings, meditating, espionage, and possibly sleeping.

And like. You can fight and hike and whatnot in loose skirts, but it's annoying how twisted up they can get while sleeping. ALSO, YC does a lot of flying and leaping, so my girl needs pants. My faves are definitely the Xiaolin monk pants and the yellow wrap pants Aang wears. I tried dhoti (Indian wrap pants) because that kind of looks like what the giant statue of Yangchen meditating might be wearing, but I think it looks odd paired with a highwaisted shirt instead of a long tunic. Maybe I'll do some more drawings with her in a tunic and dhoti or a monk's dhonka and shemdap later, idk.

As any good historical fashion nerd knows, foundational garments are everything (◡‿◡✿).

But also, there's a scene where Yangchen and Kavik pretend to be lovers, and are "discovered" by a maid sleeping in the same room, with Yangchen in a state of partial undress (gasp!)

I am living for this fake drama; I need to know how scandalized the maid was lmao.

When the maid walks in, Yangchen immediately wraps herself in a bedsheet before ushering the maid back out the door. Maybe all she did was take off her outer robe... but why would she need to wrap herself in a sheet if she was wearing a long-sleeved high-necked gown? I got the sense from both the book and cursory research about buddhist monks that walking around without your outer robes was socially acceptable, at least in casual settings. I think it more likely she was in her underclothes, which historically (in the west anyway) would also double as sleeping clothes.

"The Aang" is censored because this is Tumblr-dot-com. Its mostly a joke, but also, I know other countries are less uptight about bººbies, so like, maybe it's a valid option ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The ~Water Tribe~ look is based off Sokka's swimwear and not Katara's, mostly because chest binding seems antithetical to airbending.

All the other undergarment designs are based on hanfu neiyi, because that's what I could find reference photos and romanized names for.

I'm tired of typing now. Lemme know if you have questions about something, or want me to post a larger version of a specific outfit. I am open to feedback and tentatively open to requests.

[childrenofcain-if]

Let's say that for some reason MC and the RO broke up. Years passed the ROs suddenly heard of MCs upcoming wedding. How would they react to that?

i’m not gonna lie, i lowkey have something about this written somewhere in my drafts but since it’s unfinished rn, lemme give you the short version:

C LACROIX: if you hear that there was a pale green aston martin with a L4CR01X nameplate which drove away from the scene of your future spouse’s murder, no you didn’t.

V NÆSHOLM: this is fine 😃 they’re signing up to be a nun/monk the very next day.

W OSTENDORF: what in the love, rosie?

D DIACONU: they’ll get their bandmates to be onboard as well as they crash the wedding and loudly object before breaking into a well-rehearsed speech declaring their love for the MC.

M WHITLOCK-SINGH: trying very hard not to act like their heart hasn’t been ripped out of their chest as they attend the wedding from the sidelines and allow themself to see MC’s face for the last time in person.

[euniveve]

"His hair looks like (jambul = weirdly styled bangs) special nusantara's equator"

YOU PEOPLE HAHAHAHHA PLS I JUST CAN'T..... INDO JOKES ARE A WHOLE OTHER LEVEL OF FUNNY SJDMDKDMM

[yourplayersaidwhat]

Guard NPC: Sorry, your friend is in jail, you'll have to pay a fee to get him out

Monk (OOC): Wait, didn't you say they arrested [Huntress] outside the city?

GM: Yes?

Monk (OOC): But it was at night. Aren't the doors closed at night?

GM: Hold on lemme check.

GM: Yeah they were closed

Huntress *realisation*: Oh this is gonna be GOOD

Monk: I go meet the chief of the guards and tell him his men arrested people outside of their jurisdiction.

GM *snickering*: Roll at least a ten

Monk: 18

GM: The chief is absolutely embarrassed and profusely apologises while he lets the Huntress go

[sam-keeper]

Susan Twist: Word Lord?

Many* people** are wondering about the theory held by certain Doctor Who fans*** online that the actress Susan Twist in the new season of the long running franchise is playing what's known as a "Word Lord".

Now, granted, many more are wondering whether she might, in fact, be Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter. That, my friends, is exactly the kind of question a Word Lord would want you to be asking.

Lemme break this theory down for you.

Throughout this whole new season of Doctor Who, the protagonists have been haunted by the recurrence, in different roles, of a stage and character actor who happens to have the delightful name Susan Twist. Like, not in the show, in real life. According to Russel T Davies, she was the only actor they could get due to an "actor shortage", which seems like a pretty terrible and even implausible dilemma, but luckily Davies has made lemonade out of this very real production constraint! Twist popped up in every episode this season, in some form or other. That's versatile writing! No wonder they brought Rusty back as showrunner.

But perhaps there's more to the story than just the unfortunate realities of filming in a country ruled by a failed regime...

The Doctor and his companion Ruby started noticing Twist's recurring roles over the past few episodes, though the plot of each episode intervened before they could put anything definitive together. It's one of a number of nods to the metatextual content of the show--literal winks to the audience, another character (Mrs Flood) directly addressing the viewers, a whole musical number about how there's "always a twist at the end"--that suggested maybe some authorial tomfoolery was afoot, that maybe something a little tricky or tongue in cheek was happening.

But what could the explanation be? Could Susan Twist really be playing THE Susan, a relative of the Doctor's that hasn't been seen in the franchise since the 60s? That seems a little silly, surely! Or could she be playing another character, like... the Rani? or the Monk? Both of them got namedropped alongside Susan at one point. Or maybe she's the portended head of Maestro and the Toymaker's extracosmic family. I guess there's a theory this is Sutekh, the evil alien god from Pyramids of Mars? Sure, seems fun.

But no. Fuck all that noise. I know what's really going on here and it just coincidentally involves a character that I'm feral about, and that no one else has even heard of, a guy called, somewhat fittingly, Nobody No-one.

No-one shows up in just one and a quarter stories by Steven Hall for Big Finish's series of audio dramas, first as a minor opponent (in 45) and then as a much more motivated and fearsome one (in A Death in the Family). In the latter story, he manages to--no points if you worked this out from the title--kill the Seventh Doctor. How did a character with such a low profile manage such a feat? Well, Nobody No-one has powers comparable to a Time Lord: he is a Word Lord.

Word Lords are one of the most delightfully bonkers concepts to come out of the early exciting and experimental period in Big Finish's line of audio dramas. Hailing from another universe, they're the equivalent of Time Lords for a reality where narrative rather than chronology drives all existence. It's like if the Anchoring of the Thread established not linear time but, I guess, TV Tropes instead. Nobody No-one regenerates like the Doctor, and has his own equivalent to the TARDIS: the CORDIS, or Conveyance Of Repeating Dialogue In Space-time, which is a memetic construct transporting the Word Lord through repeated phrases, jokes, coincidental number recurrences, and so on. The CORDIS is heralded by the number 45 popping up, and you'd better believe I sat up and noticed how many times that number recurred in the code pattern in Dot and Bubble! In Death in the Family there's a whole military organization the Doctor's mucking around with--No, not UNIT. No, not Torchwood. A different thing, one run by a human supremacist vampire hold on we're getting off topic--and Nobody casually reveals at one point that his CORDIS was bouncing around inside their "For King And Country" mantra for years.

Nobody No-one's real fun as a villain comes from his special Bullshit Powers. He's a Word Lord, so he's basically a memetic being, right? He IS language in some sense. Like, apparently his CORDIS crashed into the alphabet after his first encounter with the Doctor, annihilating the 27th letter of the alphabet and causing the English Great Vowel Shift. This story does a ton with the concept of "what if a guy was words".

But what makes him so dangerous is a quirk of his own identity. To grasp what a Word Lord can do, you have to think linguistically, dialogically. Imagine someone haplessly says: "but, nobody could have gotten into that locked room to kill the ambassador!" What would that allow a Word Lord to do? And imagine further:

"No-one tells the sun whether or not to shine." "Nobody could survive that!" "Nobody could just kill the Doctor!"

One slip of the tongue, that's all it takes for Nobody No-one to gleefully command godlike power.

That's Nobody, though. I don't think Susan Twist is just Nobody. I mean, No-one could seriously ask you to believe that this character who appeared in an (unfairly, given its quality) obscure audio adventure, written by an author who only ever wrote those two stories for Doctor Who, with a bunch of wild over the top and no doubt difficult to write around powers, is going to suddenly come back as a major character in the third tv revival of this 60 year old franchise. Like, Nobody would expect Davies to start referencing, I don't know, the Shalka Doctor either, surely. And I wouldn't ask you to make that kind of totally absurd leap, not even if I happened to be writing some sort of tongue in cheek article.

No, what I'm--I mean, what the fans are suggesting is that this concept of a Time Lord but for stories, who comes from a Borgesian narrative dimension, appearing in one and one quarter obscure audio dramas by an author who never wrote anything else for Doctor Who... what the theory proposes is that there's a SECOND one of those guys.

Just think about it, think about it like a Word Lord. What has the fandom asked itself about this season? Surely, one of the foremost questions is simply: what about Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter? She's been name dropped a few times, the Doctor doesn't say she's definitively dead... could there be some reveal here that Susan is alive? There's got to be, right? That's what they're leading up to!

There's just got to be a Susan Twist.

That, my friends, is exactly how she snuck into this reality.

Now, maybe the "Susan Triad" slated to appear next episode isn't this Word Lord proper but a kind of, I don't know, fictionsuit or vessel or entry point. I'm also not sure what a "Susan Twist" would even want, what the grand scheme would be. Unlike Nobody No-one, there's not a lot of word games you can play with "Susan Twist" beyond the obvious. But, maybe that's part of the point. Nobody No-one was a megalomaniac, a guy who really did just want to watch the world burn. The Doctor's companion Hex accuses him of being "proper mad", and he responds, "Mad? I'm FUUURIOUS!" followed by an explosion from the grenade he had tossed into the duck pond. Nobody is a brash, arrogant, chaotic, and... probably not that bright guy, who has the advantage of his CORDIS's many tricks and his incredibly versatile name. Perhaps this new Word Lord wants something other than chaos and destruction. Maybe she simply wants what we've already seen her achieve in the show: universal ubiquity. There's always a Twist at the end.

Actually, this would weirdly parallel another beat from Death in the Family. In order to trap Nobody, the Doctor weaponizes his own narrative against the Word Lord, tapping into the universal internet and googling himself in order to build a whole proxy universe based on his own life. From another perspective, he basically uses the entire narrative of Doctor Who--all the episodes, all the Big Finish audios, all the Doctor Who Monthly comics, all the Virgin New Adventures--as an ideatic missile. This is such a cool concept I'd feel guilty about giving it away, only it happens about a fifth of the way through Death in the Family. Seriously, this audio GOES places. Anyway, the suggestion is that the Doctor is so entangled with the history of the universe, so threaded throughout all these other narratives, that his history effectively is a world unto itself that a being of narrative like Nobody might get completely lost in.

That's a kind of narrative ubiquity if there ever was one. If I was a Word Lord I'd be sorely tempted by that. Nobody is: he appears a perverse counterpart to the Doctor (and personally I think David Tennant would do a GREAT job playing him if he ever appeared in the show). I can't help but notice, incidentally, that we just got an episode where the shapeshifting Chuldur quickly became obsessed with cosplaying as the Doctor, and Wild Blue Yonder also introduced a couple of not-things trying to copy him. Could this Word Lord be seeking to build a narrative as strong and inescapable as the Doctor's?

It would be an interesting way of incorporating some of these meta elements without slipping too far into a kind of self-referential morass. It feels like Davies has been dancing right up on that line this entire season in a way that's exhilarating, but that also has been a bit nerve wracking for me. The more metatextual storytelling has exited the realm of weird independent art and entered the mainstream, the more cloying it's started to feel. Like, when you engage the audience, entreat them directly to care about the characters or write tearful paeans to the necessity of the Hero as a Symbol, the more it can start to feel like a bit of a desperate exercise in brand management. Clap if you DO believe in fairies, and all that. Doctor Who certainly has some history of guilt here--sorry, Steven Moffat, but sometimes it does get to be a bit much. And it does risk standing the purpose of literature on its head, where ironically through characters lauding the virtues of storytelling within society, the virtue of having participated in a transaction consuming art becomes the foundation of fandom, and the actual literary content is assumed, but treated as an afterthought.

Davies has thus far instead treated the meta content in two ways: as a unique physics to be solved, and as a way of exploring a particular bit of social commentary (sometimes more than one at once). Goblins use a "language of luck" and a physics of rope and knots, the Toymaker brings the world into a State of Play, and Maestro introduces a State of Musicals. To challenge these beings, the Doctor must understand their particular ontology and exploit it. As soon as the Bogeyman in Space Babies faces real peril, all the children who were afraid of it rally to its defense, which doubles as both a commentary on the "Teatime Terror for Tots" charge thrown at children's media like Doctor Who--children LIKE scary stories and creepy, gross monsters!--and reinforces Davies's acidic anger at social and political abandonment of people who are inconvenient to the bottom line. Rogue plays gleefully with fanfiction tropes, and its positioning of the Chuldur as "cosplayers" would riiight up to the edge of being a little too navel gazing about toxic fans... if not for the fact that the Doctor and Ruby are also explicitly cosplaying as Bridgerton characters, and the episode is still giving fans exactly what they want in the form of a whirlwind gay Doctor/Rogue romance. This season is concerned with these sorts of metatextual games, without being subsumed by them and becoming entirely about self-referential brand building.

A Death in the Family is also, notably, only partly about Nobody No-one and his machinations and the counter-machinations required to stop him, set into motion by the Seventh Doctor and carried out beyond his death by companions Ace and Hex. Like I said, a lot of the seismic action of the story is over within the first 25 minutes. The Word Lord is really just used as a jumping off point to talk about a bunch of other stuff: truth, lies, choices made for ourselves or made for us by others... we see multiple information-worlds built in the story, some of them more subtle than others. At one point Ace tearfully proclaims that traveling on the TARDIS with the Doctor "is the only life I've ever wanted!" The Seventh Doctor retorts, with some audible guilt and distress, "No, it's the only life you've ever HAD!" In a very real sense, the Doctor has created the notional worlds that Ace and Hex inhabit, defining the contours of Ace's life since she was a teenager, and deliberately staying silent about Hex's traumatic family history, deciding for both of them "what's best". Nobody No-one in that sense is a pretext, in the best tradition of Doctor Who, to dig into questions about power.

The metafictional is risky, but it's a narrative tool like any other, and it fits with a long history of Doctor Who as a franchise reflecting on itself and its place in culture, with everything from the Mind Robber's suggestion that the Doctor himself might be an escapee from fiction, to Vengeance on Varos and Trial of a Time Lord's dramatization of Doctor Who's conservative culture war critics, to the Last Great Time War as metaphor for the show's cancellation. In a sense, behaving as though cosplay or fandom or whatever don't exist and couldn't possibly be the idiom through which characters--even weird alien characters--interpret their reality and act upon it might equally alienate the show from being about any wider culture beyond itself, endlessly, the same dalek and cybermen and Master stories recycling forever. My hope is just that as Davies barrels into the finale at full speed, it's this sense of a meaning for Doctor Who beyond its own lore driving him. The anger we've seen from him about social issues, the commitment to changing the show where it needs to grow, and the willingness to take big swings at continuity all give me some reason to feel confident.

Confident, of course, that he has seen the wisdom and logic of building his arc around Susan Twist being a Word Lord. What? That's what this article is about, remember? That didn't stop being a thing. Anyway, I'm excited for friday, when all of us pulling for this theory will be proven indisputably right, and you will all, in deference, subscribe to my Patreon.

* alleged ** hypothetical *** me, specifically

[milksinyourarea]

What DND class jjk characters would be

(excluding the sorcerer class, obviously)

Yuji: Open Hand Monk. Stellar hand-to-hand combat abilities without the need for weapons. Excellent durability and resistance to poison.

Megumi: Arcane Trickster Rogue. Shadow technique makes him naturally stealthy, good for sneak attacks and escapes. Intelligent, strategic.

Nobara: Battlesmith Artificer. Given that her technique utilizes a magically imbued hammer and nails, I feel like there's potential to create that isn't being utilized in the story, and I see that in her.

Gojo: Oath of Glory Paladin. I really hummed and harred over this, I think the nature of the glory oath is fitting for the expectations Gojo puts on himself as a sorcerer, and the view everyone has of him, if that makes sense. I also like to think that when a six eyes limitless user is born, they will grow into an aasimar.

Shoko: Life Domain Cleric. If you're unfamiliar with DND classes, clerics are typically designated the healer role. Life domain clerics specifically have the highest healing output of the clerical studies, with the possibility of healing double what a regular healing spell could.

Geto: Necromancer Wizard. Because of the nature of his technique I thought necromancer worked the best due to their ability to summon and create undead allies.

Yuta: Warlock. This one speaks for itself. Pact of the blade, not sure what Rika counts as in terms of being his patron but I'm leaning towards Fiend.

Inumaki: Bard. I mean come on, his name literally translates to "cutting words," which is a bard class action. He's fast, flexible, and a prankster. Also it would be funny.

Panda: Druid. Not because he's a panda but because he can change forms between his panda mode, his gorilla mode, and his dino mode. I still kinda feel like this answer is a copout, but I can't think of anything more suitable right now :,)

Maki: Barbarian. Proficient in all forms of melee weaponry, a heavy hitter, and super durable. Excellent combatant, she would also work as a regular fighter class but I thought barbarian suited her better due to their high constitution scores.

That's about all I can come up with for now, lemme know what y'all think, and who you would assign to what class. This is all in good fun, so don't take it seriously.

[running-with-the-feels]

Kung Lao Headcanons

thanks to @charlotte-family-apologist for helping to inspire these

uses his teleportation to play pranks on people and has gotten Liu Kang to scream as a result of startling him. Tried to scare Kitana with it once and got stabbed before she realized it was him.

Made his had himself after getting the idea from a dream. Everyone in the Wu Shi thought he was insane for it and kept trying to stop him but he wouldn't listen. They even piled on extra training so that he wouldn't have enough free time but he just stopped sleeping so he could get it done. Liu Kang was the only person who supported him in doing this.

As a result, Kung Lao is actually a very skilled blacksmith and weapon maker, and made Liu Kang his nunchucks as a birthday gift.

Despite having a large extended family, Kung Lao was raised in the monastery with little contact with the outside world, knowing few of his relatives and seeing them only a few times in his life

This is because Raiden believed that he had been given a sign by the elder gods when Kung Lao was born that the young boy would be a skilled warrior and instrumental in winning the next tournament so he asked his parents to turn him over to the Wu Shi shortly after he stopped nursing.

His mother and father were very reluctant to agree, but had faith in Raiden's judgement so they let him go. They were not allowed to visit often for fear that it would distract the boy but every time they did they would spoil him and make sure he knew how much he was loved and how proud of him they were.

They later died in the Netherrealm war, and Kung Jin is one of Lao's few living relatives left.

Kung Lao threw himself into his training, despite other characters viewing him as lazy or a slacker, he put everything he had into it. Whenever he would skip lessons it was bc they were things he had already taught himself on his own time and sitting through the lecture was exceedingly boring, so he'd sneak away to practice his own techniques in private, usually the ones the monks refused to teach him.

Sometimes he would also sneak off to practice his blacksmithing, a talent none of the other monks wanted to encourage as they believed it to be a distraction. Often Liu Kang would join him, using his pyromancer to help light the forge (it also became their go to make out spot as no one bothered them there)

Despite this, nothing he did ever satisfied Raiden as the god held him to the standard of the great Kung Lao, expecting him to be better. Due to the stakes of the next tournament being the last one, Raiden had Kung Lao trained more harshly than anyone else and held him to higher standards, fixating on the smallest mistakes in an effort to make Kung Lao the perfect warrior.

As a result, no matter how rapidly Kung Lao excelled, nothing he did was ever good enough for Raiden

by contrast, Raiden was always impressed by Liu Kang as the boy overcame all the odds against him to become Kung Lao's equal in skill, so Raiden switched his attention to the pyromancer before long, leaving Kung Lao behind.

Kung Lao can't bring himself to resent Liu Kang for it, as he too thinks that Liu Kang is perfection incarnate, but it does still sting.

Raiden's indifference and clear preference for Liu Kang led to Kung Lao thinking he had shamed his family legacy, the thing he had been raised to uphold and sacrificed his childhood for, which is why he sneaks into the tournament anyways bc he's desperate to make the shame go away.

That's all I've got rn, but lemme know if anyone would be interested in more