#lo and behold there’s a whole ship

[devi1sange1]

POV my bf and I watching The Acolyte:

Star wars obsessed bf: watching the acolyte, concerned about the Star Wars lore and the implications the show will have on the existing canon

Me, a casual watcher along for the ride, the exact second Qimir healed Osha and gave her his cloak: SHIP!! SHIP!! ENEMIES TO LOVERS!! IS THIS HAPPENING??

Bf: What are you talking about?

Me: Just wait, they are going to be a thing I know it.

This article comes out:

[souenkun]

I am today years old when I learned that some ao3 tags, whether it only gained 3 separate uses or has a ton of people using them, can't be filtered because the volunteers haven't wrangled them yet (made them filterable, or "canonize" the tags, according ao3's support and feedback page)... I'm kinda mind-blown by the whole process and how they still need humans to gather every tags before squeezing them into a single term, ngl :o

[cotton-candy-vodka]

I know these three are specifically from musicals… but may i also add Annie Edison from Community?

Just watched Nerdy Prudes Must Die and tell me why these 3 are the same person-

[olderthannetfic]

Oh, dammit, it finally happened to me. I entered a new fandom and it's filled to the brim with antis. It's for a game that heavily features dark themes and suicide, but you're not allowed to depict those or you ~romanticize~ suicide and self harm.

A ship week posted its prompts, and among the list were entries like making out and self harm. The characters involved are both 16, and lo and behold, a whole bunch of people got angry. Couldn't fathom why these prompts would ever be included in a ship week and started throwing around pedo accusations. "The fact that the organizers blocked naysayers instead of accepting criticism says enough" shows that they don't want to help anyone or have a discussion, they want people to do what they say and obey, no questions asked.

I've never been in a fandom like this. How do I keep myself safe here without going insane? I started by blocking anyone who expresses annoying sentiments, but I plan on writing some dark themes and NSFW stuff. The worst part is that it won't even be SA/underage dark themes or kinky NSFW stuff, just standard coming-of-age and mental health stuff that can be expected between young adults with depression. I already know that people will throw a fit over these aged-up 20 y/o's being depicted as sexual beings anyway.

--

Laugh in their faces when they try shit.

Bullies like smelling blood in the water. They don't like being told they're stupid children whose opinions don't count, whether that's by you actually saying that or you just blocking them as worthless in the first place.

[toa-archive]

Not long after the release of Wizards, an art panel was hosted named The Art of Wizards which we're still lucky to have a vod of given copyright strikes nuking things from orbit. It contained a whole bunch of artwork we'd never seen at the time and even at the time of typing still have yet to do so. One of which is the below artwork which many mis-attributed to Alfonso Blaas at the time though personally felt more like Fruiz's artstyle.

Lo and behold with Francisco Ruiz Velasco's recent concept art uploads:

Source is linkedin and you may be asked to log in first

On Sean Murray's artstation account is some "Wizard castles" floating about which seems to track as coming from around the same period. It's very likely they stuck with the Arcane Order ship (Which we do have concept art of! The "eye windows" are a reused asset from Merlin's Workshop!!) for budget reasons. There may be one for Skrael as well though at the moment there's been no sign of anything.

Source

Of course fanfiction and fanart writers are not beholden to silly things like budgets. If you want to go wild with each member of the Order having their own floating fortress to cause problems with, well nothing is really stopping you!

[elerrinacrownedwithstars]

The idea that only Ulmo or Nienna care about Middle-earth and do anything to help Eruhini is a strange misconception because Tolkien pretty clearly shows that at least Manwë is watching very closely what's going on and sometimes even interferes? It's just that the Valar mostly seem to work through the elements they represent, which if you think about it is pretty neat.

Like there are various instances where the wind acts up suddenly, causing storms or rising in just the right moment (as in ROTK, clearing the air for the Rohirrim and speeding Aragorn's journey as he sails for Minas Tirith)

And even more obviously, the Eagles. Tolkien specifically says that the Eagles are Manwë's advocates in Middle-earth, providing miraculous aid when all else fails. Without the Eagles, Beren and Lúthien's quest would have failed and Huor would not have got to Gondolin (which then would have prevented Eärendil's success or even meant he was never born). They give crucial aid to Gandalf more than once. The Eagles also help Fingon to save Maedhros, because Manwë "would not wholly abandon the Noldor". Tolkien recognises that the Eagles are "deus ex machina", and in this case, the meaning is quite literal.

Then there are the Istari, envoys of the Valar: while there is proof of only Gandalf's success, even just the efforts of one of the Wizards was enough to bring down Sauron.

As for Ulmo, you could argue that he is responsible for the whole Eärendil and Elwing arc - and that it was a job between him and Manwë. It's Manwë's Eagles that bring Huor to Gondolin, and Ulmo later sends Huor's son Tuor into the hidden city. Tuor and Eärendil both get sea-longing in their hearts. During the flight of the survivors of Gondolin, Eagles are again present and bring up the body of Glorfindel, making you wonder whether they would have interfered more in the Balrog fight if Glorfindel had not stepped up to protect the refugees - and Eärendil, the fated saviour of Middle-earth. Also, Ulmo rescues Elwing when she casts herself into the sea, turning her into a bird so that she can fly to find Eärendil. Water and air and birds keep showing up in the stories of Eärendil and Elwing and if that's not proof of Manwë and Ulmo's plotting, I don't know what is. I mean, it's even said in the first pages of the Silmarillion that they are fast friends and closely allied from the beginning! Eärendil becoming a star also in a weird way even combines the elements of Ulmo, Manwë, and Varda: bearing the Silmaril, Eärendil sails an immortal ship in the sea of heaven and stars, forever as a sign of hope to the Children of Ilúvatar.

What about the other Valar? If we keep in mind that they chiefly work through the elements they represent, their abilities to interfere are limited (and this is a self-imposed limitation clearly). Yavanna's creation of the Ents proves to be a pretty great one in The Two Towers, although you can argue to what degree she is influencing the events. More obviously In Shelob's lair, Sam calls for Varda, and the light of the phial of Galadriel comes alive in his hand and smites the great spider, helping Sam to defeat the monster. Also, during Sam and Frodo's desperate march through the hellscape that is Mordor, Sam yearns for a little bit of light and water to hearten him - and lo and behold, he gets these exact things as if Varda and Ulmo personally delivered.

In other words, the Valar are a lot more active in Middle-earth than they get credit for, and they work in subtle and indirect ways because only then can they make sure they don't accidentally kill a lot of the Children.

[thetommoway-oioii]

Rant Time™ !!!

so i recently became invested in the 9-1-1 universe. not gonna lie I started with lone star because tk and carlos kept popping up all over my feeds everywhere with their wedding pics and of-fucking-course I immediately looked up the show because I'm not gonna pass up any canon queer rep?? hello!! anyway this ain't about tarlos. after I was done with lone star I started interacting with stuff from that fandom and came to find that one of the characters from the main show recently came out as bi and boy oh boy was I excited as fuck. two days later I'm starting my 9-1-1 binge. I knew absolutely nothing about the characters, storyline or the show except what I saw in the crossover episode and I was so pleasantly surprised that there's already canon queer rep present from the beginning of the show!!! (shout out to henren and michaeldavid absolute legends)

anyway I keep getting sidetracked, what I'm here to rant about is how fucking dumb some of the new watchers like me are?!! I had no idea how this t*mmy person was because all I knew was a gif of him kissing buck. you can imagine my surprise when I first saw him in the flashbacks and found out what an absolute dickwad he used to be?!?! and I could not believe that buck was gonna kiss this dude in the future. there was no fucking way. either there was gonna be a huge redemption character arc or something or he'll have a fuckin twin or something cause no chance they're setting future buck up with this asshole.

anyway lo and behold s2 comes around and in comes eddie diaz with this big brown eyes and slutty tank top and of course I knew who eddie was. come on now be for real. I might have not been a part of the fandom before but there's no way you can exist on tumblr and not know who eddie and buck were. and like any other shipping-prone fan, I thought people were setting buddie up based on subtle sterek-esque subtext but imagine my surprise when slowly throughout the show they became deancas-esque obvious. the connection they developed, the trust, the bond. how they found home and family and sense of belonging and safety in each other. how eddie and chris and buck himself baby trapped himself. I was so sure that buddie would eventually become canon in s7 because there's no other way right. maybe the the whole BT thing was some weird profound realization moment for buck or something.

back to the point. what I'm mad about is how the new watchers are completely Ignoring clear signs of buddie and on top of that shaming or right out calling the buddie shippers crazy all the while blindly supporting a character that is clearly a Major Fucking Dickwad from the beginning. making excuses like he was figuring himself out in the past or he's canonly queer while eddie clearly isn't. as if T*mmy figuring himself out excuses him being a shit person or the literal fact that just because eddie has not come out yet he's not queer. buck was straight UNTIL he came out as bi. anyway that's mostly all I wanted to say. yes I started the show because of a BT kiss gif but once I actually watched the show, it was easy to figure out what was right in front of me.

I urge new watchers like me to take the time and really understand and watch the show and not just look at it from face value or consume information through social media osmosis.

[tales-from-thornvale]

i am so deep in this rabbithole (send help)

(there's a poll at the end i am just losing so many marbles atm)

hello couriers! i am currently transcribing the tales from thornvale episodes (that is a whole separate post, i can be So Normal about courier's call) and in The Seals And Inks Of The Courier Service, grandpa swiftwell himself tells us that the Seal of Favour is something "only given out to those who have helped the Courier Service in their time of need". He then goes on to say he has seen passengers "come aboard an Audron and make their way to Thornvale at the behest of those that carry a seal of favour",,

i.e. if you do the Courier Service one hell of a solid you can ask for favours like passage on ships.

NOW. You may be familiar with Big Sister Skyjacks and our beloved Uhuru crew, famous for taking aboard orphans, teaching them trades and then dropping them off at other ports. We see this happen in episode 38 in Burza Nyth, when Spit takes Bootstrap to go "talk about friends" in port to find him another trade. Cut to the Captain's choosing ceremony at the start of Courier's Call season one, and lo and behold, Bootstrap has made his way to Thornvale.

How, you may ask? Well, from our Grey Audron Tales we know that the Information Desk in Burza Nyth is one of the Grey Audron's "respected and proven clients", which hints that Burza Nyth is probably on the Grey's route. Bringing me all the way back round to my original point. Because Spit took Bootstrap to find somewhere else to go. And passage can be given to Thornvale upon the presentation of a seal of favour. Thornvale, a town which is famously impossible to find on your own and who's location is presumably a closed guarded secret.

So. Does Spit have a Seal of Favour with the Swiftwell Courier Service. Please send thoughts I am rotating this concept at the speed of sound.

If he does: WHY. HOW. WHY.

I present to you: The Poll

[dravenscroft]

So my wife and I have been playing an entirely home-brewed survival ttrpg for The Terror, which I highly recommend. We made up a lot of the rules ourselves, very meticulously, and take turns as the GM, as we have a rough 'plot' outline and have written a ton of 'situation' cards - where we pull a 'situation', have to react and roll accordingly, and then we have to factor anything that happens as a result into the overall narrative we've got going on. (Situations so far include things like a small galley fire, the ship's dog going missing, roll for how much of your tinned food is spoiled, someone falls from the yardarm etc)

The classes are based on rank (officer, seaman, marine, etc) and have different skills, strengths, and weaknesses respectively. It's fantastic.

You can kind of just invent your own guys for it, but we're doing it with the actual characters because it's 1) fun and 2) easier than making up new guys. I'm an author, I make up new guys for a living, I need a BREAK.

We each have three characters and before we pull a 'situation' card, we have to roll to see which of our characters we're playing. I play Hickey, Tozer, and Goodsir. (It's funny because obviously Hickey has the OPTION to Do A Mutiny, but he's done the maths and it looks bleak if he does, so he possibly won't in this game)

ANYWAY all of this to tell you about the funniest possible 'situation' I rolled as Hickey - 'You overhear someone saying it's possible to grow greenery on the warm galley pipes, which might fend off scurvy. What do you do?'

Now this is a real thing Parry successfully did in eighteen-twenty, curing a crewmate of scurvy with mustard and cress grown on the galley pipes. So not nonsense at all.

Naturally I thought, well, Hickey would probably give this a go because 1) it's something to do other than the work he's supposed to be doing and 2) in the unlikely even it's successful, you KNOW he wants that approval from Crozier and 3) he doesn't want scurvy himself.

So what followed was something of a skit with him going from crew member to crew member trying to obtain The Goods to do this guerrilla gardening. Asking people for scraps of wool clothing they couldn't mend to use as some kind of substrate, with everyone being kind of like 'oh god, take it, but whatever you're doing I don't want to know'. Then he had to steal some mustard seeds, and locate a spot unlikely to be noticed to place the whole thing.

It was funny, and I didn't expect it to work, but lo and behold I rolled and had moderate success, and a few days later we had MUSTARD sprouting.

At which point Hickey had to tell SOMEONE about it. It ended up so funny because everyone is like 'wow well done you may have just saved all our lives!' and Hickey was NOT expecting that, this man lives to be a menace and was just trying his luck, so having people genuinely praise him and credit him with having possibly saved lives is just kind of,

Basically I highly recommend doing something similar.

Let me know if you want to know more updates as the game progresses.

Also I low-key want someone to write a fic about Hickey's guerrilla galley garden lmao.

[roxannepolice]

Getting stuff out of my system so maybe I can sleep. So obviously I loved The Giggle and loved the Toymaker, but as a Thoschei shipper I can't express how important it is to me how impersonal the Toymaker was about the whole thing and while my dreams of old men making out have not been realied, the ghost of the Master hanging over the episode really emphasised that. Like, welcome home cheater jokes are great and I was getting lowkey irritated by how both the fans and the writers were making ALL of the Master's actions about the Doctor.

But I was also worried that with a campy game loving villain that would also have a love hate obsession with and resentment for the Doctor, RTD would basically say behold the Master only +++ this obviously had nothing to do with CC giving the Doctor a literal speech about being better than the Master introducing a Dia de los Muertos villain that has soooo much history with the Doctor but is also soooo very powerful and then reiterating that the Master hates themself and only wants to be the Doctor but can't because of essentialism posing as existentialism. nothing whatsoever.

But no. Again, I am a bit tired of the Master being presented mainly as not-Doctor and I do think that if Ten didn't timelock the Tardis, they wouldn't have chosen their pet planet specifically, but compare Saxon's No. This is my turn. Revenge. Best. Served. Hot. to the Toymaker's cold Best of three. Compare the Master drawing pleasure from playing Satan the accuser about humans-turned-toclafane to the Doctor specifically because it's their pet species to the Toymaker being himself attracted to humans because of their nature sth sth Johan Huizinga sth sth homo ludens and play as the foundation of culture sth sth 2001: SO with bone and ball sth sth murder as kickstarter of culture and play as kickstarter of culture. Look at Ten's addendum of If that's what you want to the offer he makes the Master in s3, emphasising that he wants to understand what is it that the latter is after, and at Fourteen's certainty that the Toymaker really is only after games.

Don't get me wrong, I'm far from throwing monogamy at either the Doctor or the Master and they probably both made out with the Toymaker, both individually and menage a trois. But if after literal weeks of holding my breath for an actual cameo I leave the episode fully sated after a gold tooth and laughing sounds and people from outside my Davy Jones' Locker stuck ghost ship notice it too, then I'd say RTD did some really good job hanging the Master's ghost over the story. And that was not just to fan serve. It also made a point about the differences between those relationships.

[treeato]

"I would have waited an eternity for you"

Cooked up that new sylveth piece for the 5 year anniversary!!! I’ve spent too long not acknowledging my interests in these kinds of things I’ve decided I got to be more honest with my self I LOVE FIRE EMBLEM more rambles about myself below.

I’m an awakening kid I remember it right as day on my lunch table in highschool one of my friends was given awakening and fates for Christmas and they realized it wasn't the type of game for them i asked if I could try it out because i had never really played something like that. LO and behold they gave me the games just like that! I remember being ENAMOURED WITH both of them! Sure I was late to the party since they had released a long time ago (3 years ago for fates when i was in highschool in 2018) but I was so smitten with them the characters story art all of it was just a whole different type of game that I never knew i would like.

But aside from the occasional reblog here or there I was very quiet about my love for fire emblem. I didn't want to seem weird to my friends during that time and so I was silently obsessed and kept it to my self reading fanfic shipping characters and the like. I can remember the trailer for three houses there was much discourse over the pokemon scarlet reveal and when I saw the trailer for fire emblem I was estatic on my own I had purchased Shadows of valentia for 3ds and was amazed at how everything was voiced.

All the characters looked so cool! But Blue lions had stole my heart. I remember when the game released I purchased the download right away and spent almost the whole night playing! SO much so my then boyfriend now husband at the time came over to check on me I was that obsessed. it got me through covid and again i kept to myself about this love and i didn't really join fandoms/groups about it because i was just so put off about being myself.

With the 5 year anniversary seeing the amount of love people still have for this game makes me so happy my chest hurts. I wish I could have been more open sooner about my interests. I've seen so much from fire emblem that has reasonated with me fan art original art everything the writers the art its incredible. I can't put it into words really thank you everyone. Thank you fire emblem the community and the fandom.

[astronicht]

oh, I'm a bit late to this because I'm backreading your Fellowship liveblog, but there's been a lot of scholarship done on Tolkien's use of astronomy! Kristine Larsen has a whole lot of journal articles on it though a lot of them are related more to the Silmarillion

No such thing as late, here! And thank you so much for this fun info i am reading the first article of Larsen's I came across ("The Sun, the Son, and the Silmarillion") and I'm laughing a little bit because I once had an old professor despair at the lack of academic work on early medieval cosmology. BUT LO AND BEHOLD, in Tolkien scholarship, people are out there doing it! Right now!

It's not the same thing, ofc, and Tolkien isn't actually trying to recreate early medieval cosmologies, so much as recrafting and reworking them and putting in something of his own. Still! While i am definitely more wobbly on Norse stuff, I have never seen, taking an example from this paper, anyone suggest that a viking cosmology might have something to do with the shape of a ship! (Which I am learning today that Tolkien used, not for Vikings ofc but for Middle Earth). Again, maybe this is a known thing I don't know about, but I have read lots of musings about the importance of the shape of a ship (turns up a lot in Norse grave archeology) and many more musings on how hard it is to picture a Norse cosmos, and I feel like I should have considered these two things together! At least once! Neat stuff.

(I personally like the suggestion (made by an unnamed Icelandic scholar noted in Neil Price's The Children of Ash and Elm) that the world-tree (a central-pillar motif) is tied to the image of the Milky Way stretched across the sky. If you've ever sat out on a floating dock under a nearly unpolluted night sky in northern Ontario (a very similar environment and latitude to Scandinavia), this starts to make sense, whether it's actually historically substantiated).

Anyway, thank you a bunch for this!

[lancerfay]

Holy carp the way I played Citizen Sleeper ended so impactfully

I basically chose every single route where I stayed behind, letting someone I was getting close to leave because there were more people I could and wanted to help on the station. I felt sad when I abandoned Lem and Mina on the ship dock, I most was torn over letting Bliss and Ankhita leave without me, but every time I was thinking I could still do more here, there was still someone that I could help. I also figured at least I'd have a place at the bar with Tala.

Then I got to the very end of the DLC stuff, where the station is evacuating and lo and behold everyone's insisting I should leave, that the only ones staying behind are either occupied with their own lives (like Feng, Sabine, and Rabiah) or were leaving themselves, like Tala.

I get pretty into the roleplaying sometimes in games like this where I get to make my own choices and dang did I have a Moment when I realized that my character was only living for other people and now that they're all going to be gone she would have chosen almost *anything* different.

I cried ngl.

In the 11th hour I chose to leave, I had insisted to Peake that I would stay the whole time, and betrayed them as I left, didn't even have someone with me, just gone and alone again. Had I known I absolutely would have gone sooner.

Roleplaying situation aside...

I feel a lot of what I felt about the people and situations in The Eye to be really well mapped to a lot of larger cities people move to for work, which is absolutely in line with the game's tagline because places like here in Seattle are 100% like this. Most people feel like it's just where they are for now "until their luck turns around", "until I pay off my debt", "Until I get a new job somewhere else". The people from here can't stay because what it is has been slowly crawling towards inhospitable, and it's future is constantly directed by the whims of outside forces that only want to exploit it.

I see parallels, too, in people I've met and characters in game, if you strip away the scifi trappings. I've met someone stuck with a kid they didn't have a say in raising but love nonetheless who wants nothing more than to leave to a new promised start because this one failed. Desperate that this time it'll work out. I've spent a brief time with a professional who's on the run from themselves, looking for an escape but finding themselves falling back into bad patterns, needing to give up everything of themselves to feel cleansed by it. I've definitely met folks that have some semblance of roots laid, and want to just gently fade away into the pocket they've secured, giving to others if they can, but ultimately alone.

Makes me personally reconsider my reasons for moving up here and into this city of transience and if I'll find what I'm looking for, and I think that's so cool that this game evoked that thought in me.

[cursedvida]

What were your impressions before watching Kingdom and its promotional media? I was kind of feeling odd that Freya Allan was being promoted as the only leading human character alongside apes that I had two thoughts:

1. She was pretty enough to gather male audiences and would be like a side-along character like Nova from 1968.

2. (Initially, and hoping it didn't happen), there would be some plot twist, and she would subtly be paired with the ape character.

Mind you, I only saw the teaser trailer and promotional posters in the theaters, and while I was more interested in watching the new lore on ape kingdom... I wasn't initially interested in seeing humans and thought that their presence would overshadow the apes in the movie. Again, I wasn't particularly excited for a possible human x ape ship to get out of this movie (let alone an actual pairing).

But Tumblr is a strange place that can challenge your preconceptions and I got little spoiled with the plot that fuelled my curiosity. So I went to see what the whole thing was about, and lo and behold, I ended up as a shipper and feeling so excited for the next movie to come out and see the drama it will unfold that I want the critics to be so enraged for the controversy it's going to be 😈 hahaha!

Well, the truth is that I was curious to know what her role was going to be within the story. I expected her to be a more flat character; I don't usually have high hopes for female characters in big franchises because they often get sidelined. Seeing the minimal role they had in the previous trilogy, my hopes were minimal. When it was revealed that she could speak, I found her much more interesting because that was definitely going to add depth to the story, but I didn't have a truly preconceived idea. I never bought into the crazy theories about her maybe being an astronaut or something like that, but I imagined there would be much more to her storyline than I had initially thought.

When some promotional videos started appearing that I chose to watch to spoil myself because I can't help it, I did start shipping. I don't know, I've always been a bit basic in that kind of thing, although I didn't ship even a quarter of what I do now, hahahaha.

[eunchancorner]

Revenged and Rescued (Part 1??)

I uh

I did a thing

-

Henry's eyes snapped open, blinding lights filling his vision before slowly clearing. He seemed to be in a medical facility of some kind.

Again? Was that a fail? I died, right? It had to be a fail. I must be back on the ship.

His thoughts raced with the idea, until he began to hear voices just outside his room. Familiar voices, but not the one he should've heard.

“Charlie, there's no good reason for this! He betrayed us, clean and simple. He chose to side with the Toppats and he paid the price.”

General Galeforce, if he remembered correctly.

“General, with all due respect, I don't care! I think he could deserve another chance. After all, who else but Henry could've done, well… all that! He practically did our job for us! The only other person who wasn't straight up dead was the Toppat's prisoner, and that just so happens to be your favorite lieutenant's boyfriend!”

Was that… Charles? Henry was so confused. He should be restarting. And why was he talking about the Toppats like they were already…?

“Listen, son, none of us know what happened at the airship. Yes, it's a miracle Mr. Panpa survived but don't think that was all because of Henry. You don't need to talk to him-”

“Yes, I do! Don't you understand?! I want to go try to be friends with him again. So just let me do that, at least…”

“Fine… but I'm not doing this because I think it's a good idea. I'm doing this because I know it means a lot to you. Just don't cry to me if he doesn't want to talk to you.”

“I won't…”

Finally, Charles entered into the medical tent, his gaze falling on Henry, who sat up slowly, grunting in pain as his back struggled to hold his own weight up.

“Careful, their chief got a really solid hit on you. You're lucky we got most of the damage patched up,” he warned, walking closer to the cot.

“How am I… where am… what…?” Henry managed, finding actually speaking a more laborious task than he’d thought. “I-I thought I…”

“That you died? Yeah, you did for a while there. We were able to bring you back, though. Frankly, you’re lucky I wasn’t the only one who wanted to give you a second chance. Those Bukowski twins are lifesavers…” the pilot chuckled softly, waving at one as he peeked inside the tent at the mention.

“Don’t worry, Konrad, he’ll be fine,” he assured the twin, who nodded and popped back out. Charles looked back down at Henry, explaining, “He’s probably going to tell Calvin you’re awake. You should meet them when you’re better, they’re pretty cool. In fact, there’s a lot of people I want you to meet! But first, we have to finish fixing all the damage to these augmentations of yours.”

Henry nodded, leaning back in the cot, relaxing as he let the weight off his cybernetics. It still felt crackly, glitchy and painful. He tried to move his left arm, feeling as it struggled against every move he tried to make, and finally gave up, sighing as he relaxed it again.

“Yeah, like I said, damaged. Not just from that bullet wound in your back, but probably from the crash too. There was, kind of… a concerning amount of metal scraps on the trail you left? I mean, at least they led me to you, so that’s kinda lucky, right?”

“I guess… so… how did you even…” Henry started, struggling to word his question.

“You wanna know what we were doing in the jungle, don’t you?” Charles guessed, earning a nod from Henry. “It’s kinda interesting. We’d gotten intel that the Toppats were setting up to launch an orbital base there and we went to check it out, but lo and behold, the whole rocket and their airship was completely destroyed. There were Toppat bodies everywhere, including their leader being stapled to a piece of the airship. And, well… that’s where I picked up your trail. It started with your impact spot, then your footprints and some metal scraps from your cybernetic parts. Eventually, I tracked you down, grabbed you and hauled you back to my helicopter. Heh, Rupert wasn’t exactly happy about having to share any space with you, but he sucked it up since the airship crash kinda saved his boyfriend.”

Henry just barely listened, remembering some of the places Charles mentioned. The moments before his death were still kinda blurry, but he knew he’d taken some kind of path after the crash.

“I’m glad I was able to find you, Henry… I’ve been wanting to try to reconcile with you, y’know? I know you betrayed us, but I just… couldn’t stop thinking about you. You’re that kind of person that once you know them, you just kinda can’t forget. I’d hoped I’d get a chance to see you again, though I guess this is a kinda complicated situation. At least you’re not a Toppat anymore, I guess?”

“Mhm…” Henry mumbled, his eyes drifting around the tent, focusing on anything but Charles.

“Mister Calvin?” one of the doctors suddenly addressed the pilot, who nodded at him.

“I, uh, gotta go. They’re gonna have to put you under to repair the augmentations, otherwise you’re gonna be in a world of pain. I’ll see you when you wake up, ok?” he explained, seeming a bit worried.

“Seeya…” Henry mumbled as Charles left the medical tent, staring at the ceiling as the staff surrounded him. However, he still had one more question left lingering in his mind.

What’s supposed to happen now…?

[vbs-kaitos-big-naturals]

opinions under cut that i dont think many people will like so if you get upset easily just to be safe i would skip out on this one ,:D

1: every time i see the word proship or antiship or any variation of those a part of me dies a little. do you understand what a slippery slope that is. what do you define as something thats "immoral" to ship? adult x child? i get why thats icky!! i dont like seeing it either!! sibling x sibling? no one should be in a relationship like that!! its exploitative!!

the main issue is that people seem to equate shipping with thinking those characters would be good for one another. it isnt wrong to think pairings are interesting, its wrong to endorse them in real life. feeling grossed out does not mean being violated, and as long as a piece of art/a fic is tagged correctly, those sorts of explorations of fiction deserve to exist.

in general, we should stop trivializing the real life harm done by things such as pedophilia and abuse and incest and all those by comparing them to simple human creativity. i promise its alright and feeling ucky will pass. if you get upset by seeing it im so sorry but it is up to you to filter things. please free yourself from twitter hell.

2: people treat fandom and fiction in general way too seriously. it isnt that deep people are just making things because its interesting and fun 99% of the time it wont reflect their beliefs.

dont even hit me with "fiction affects real life!! what will happen when the kids see it and it gets normalized???" it is not anyones responsibility to parent others children. at all.

can i tell you something? i was a kid who read smut at 9 years old. and lo and behold i am not someone who endorses rape and / or molestation. there are probably hundreds of others just like me who feel very uncomfortable whenever people act as if exposure breeds corruption.

did you know that seeing people say that made me paranoid about me actually being a bad person? did you know i became obsessed with being "good" to balance it out?

you arent helping anyone. this type of fiction can be incredibly cathartic for survivors, it can spread awareness of the issues, and even if it didnt, that shouldnt matter. net zero harm shouldnt be considered "evil".

its okay. its okay, you dont need to be scared of getting attacked anymore. i will defend you with my life. the bug porn you wrote at 15 years old doesnt mean you want to fuck bugs and it doesnt mean youre evil. youre free. its okay i promise. theres a whole big wide world outside of the little pseudofascist bubble you were exposed to. youll be fine.