#love is ludicrous

[brethilach]

"ohh thorin trusts Bilbo above his own family and kin because he just loves him sooo much because I think romantic love is superior to any other form of love" or maybe it was he was experiencing a severe episode of paranoid psychosis and he implicitly trusted Bilbo because he was the only person in the Company who didn't have any preexisting, longstanding loyalities to him (as a King or brother-in-arms or Family or otherwise) and followed him purely out his own desire to and he saw Bilbo stay by his side even after his contract had ended even though he knew how much he wanted to go home (and had every reason to at that point). maybe it was because he knew Bilbo would had nothing to gain by betraying him (re: no birthright to the crown, no desire for riches or property, etc). Maybe he believed he could confide into Bilbo because he felt like he wasn't responsible for his safety in the same way he felt responsible for his nephews or his kin (as their King), and he no longer need to mantain any sort of formalities or barriers with him (because Thorin is not. his. King).

sorry I just refuse to believe Thorin doesn't love his nephews as much as he loves Bilbo (someone who he'd only known for 6~ months at that point) and I think there's a lot of better ways to explain his behavior here

[angelsdean]

dean and cas love and trust each other unconditionally. they give and they forgive easily. there is never a debt to settle. never a score to keep. i'd rather have you, cursed or not. i prefer trusting, less dumb less ass. i'll go with you (again and again and again). i forgive you, i need you. of course i forgive you. of course i wanted you to stay. i've got you. i love you. etc etc. they are best friends first and foremost. they can talk to each other and be real. they know when the other is lying about being "fine" and they call each other out on it. and then they listen. they get angry sometimes, and miscommunicate often, but they are always approaching everything with the desire to understand, to work together. they worry. they make bad choices sometimes out of a desire to protect the other. keep each other out of a situation and out of the loop. take on the burden for the other. all these flaws and wrong choices are still rooted in love and care. they care SO much. that love and care is at the center of everything they do.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Imagine being Orion in A Deadly Education.

People are mostly not that interesting to you. They don't like you so much as they like what you can do. Maybe at some point you tried to really connect with someone, and it didn't go that well, so you didn't keep trying. Fighting mals though? You're good at that. It makes sense to you, unlike most of the things people do. It's rewarding -- intrinsically rewarding -- and people seem to be happy that you're doing it? Because they don't like doing it but it benefits them. So, basically no downside.

And you go off to school and it's full of mals, and people think you're great because you fight the mals, and you ignore them as best you can when you're not fighting mals for them. (You're polite, your mother always wanted you to be polite and you don't want people to be mad at you. But you don't do anything beyond being polite.) And people seem to think you're doing a good thing. So. It's ok. It's good enough. The world makes sense, more or less. This is what you're for.

And one day you see a soul eater go under another student's door, and you destroy it like you always do. Except this person is mad at you. Which makes no sense. No one's ever been mad at you before, not for fighting mals. So apparently you did something wrong even though you only did what you always do which has always been right before. But you guess you should probably make it up to her? So when she says she needs to go to the shop at dinner you offer to go with her, why not?

Except somehow she's mad at you again. So you have to make it up to her even more now, you guess?

(You don't like it when people are mad at you, but you know what to do when people are mad at you. You Make It Up To Them, usually by doing whatever they tell you to or fighting a mal or both, and then they stop being mad at you. You prefer to understand why they are mad at you, but most of the time it makes no sense, and you know what to do when it makes no sense to you why someone is mad at you.)

So you guard her door while she fixes it. Which takes her a weirdly long time. You've just taken down several mimics, you're bursting with mana, you'd give her some if she asked. Mana has never been a scarce resource for you; on some level it hasn't really occurred to you that it could be a scarce resource for anyone else. People aren't that interesting to you, you don't think about them much, except when someone tells you to, like your mother making you do flash cards of other kids' names. But she doesn't ask, and she doesn't cheat either, she does things the long and hard way, which makes a third thing all coming from the same person that doesn't mesh with your pre-existing worldview. She's fascinating.

And then she pulls on your mana like it's nothing and she's even more fascinating. How did she do that? Is she a malificer? (Is that why she keeps being so mean to you, when nobody is ever mean to you?) What's going on?

And you've never voluntarily fought alongside anyone else before, but she's good to fight with. She's annoying, but she does also point out things you missed or didn't know.

And she stands up for you, in a way that nobody has ever stood up for you before. She's not nice. She's the opposite of nice. But it's starting to dawn on you that being nice is not the same as something else that seems like it should go with being nice. And if El is not nice to you but is that other thing, maybe some other people who are nice to you are...not that other thing to you?

It's a lot to think about.

Anyways. You like her. You're not very interested in people. But you are interested in El.

And then you have the best day of your life, when you've gotten to take on more mals and scarier mals than you've ever taken on before, and you did it and you were good at it, and you kind of didn't want to leave but you were supposed to leave because that was how the Mission worked, and then you were about to die because you missed the bell and the cleansing fires had started and there was nowhere to go, but at least you were going to die next to El.

But she didn't think she was going to die, and she cast a wall of mortal flame (who does that?) and it worked as a firebreak and you didn't die and no one had ever saved you before. That wasn't how the world worked. Who was this person who kept breaking the rules of how the world worked like they didn't even apply to her?

(And then you look around and she isn't there and you kissed her earlier when you thought you were both going to die, and she, uh, didn't react well and oh no, what if you've ruined everything what if you like her but she doesn't like you like that what if she won't want to be around you any more? What if the one interesting person in the entire world doesn't think you are interesting?) (it'd be ok, right? It was ok before.) (it wouldn't be ok. So maybe it wasn't ok before either.)

[dilf-phoenix-rights]

If y’all can forgive Edgeworth for knowingly participating in a rigged trial because he couldn’t accept ruining his perfect record, than you should be able to forgive Phoenix for presenting forged evidence when he was facing the possibility of execution and the man actually responsible for the murder he was accused of walks free and could go after his daughter if he decided taking vengeance out on Phoenix wasn’t enough.

[gingerteaonthetardis]

[kyurochurro]

GUESS who got sick and GUESS who’s angrily taking care of him till he gets better

[is-the-milk-fresh]

"But the ship is pseudo-incestuous!!" THE GIRL CANONICALLY FUCKED HER ACTUAL COUSIN???

Like incest bad. Don't do incest. Don't be Lucy. But I feel like maybe thats not the grounds on which to be arguing here? Never mind that they are literally NOT related (no matter your personal headcanons). Ms. 'Incest is a normal part of growing up' probably isn't going to be morally hung up on that. Even if she (in the case of actual incest, not headcanon father figure pseudo-incest) absolutely should be.

I don't even ship it myself. But Lucy Maclean is a capital F Freak. You gotta accept that.

[kacievvbbbb]

Here is me proposing that maybe not the song but the vibes of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” music video is very Mishanks.

Just the general vibes of being super embarrassed not about the fact that your partner is a criminal but because they are so pathetic about it.

Mihawk reading the morning News Paper and seeing that the red haired pirates have ransacked an armoires navy ship and the front page is an obviously posed picture of Shanks giving what he thinks is a pretty boy smile and finger guns. And Mihawk just sighs morning cup of coffee ruined can’t believe he’s attached his name to this ingrate.

[vanilladrpepper]

i do think that the french was meant as a little gag but also i do want to have a discussion about ways that i, personally, extrapolate meaning from it besides it being silly and charming! like objectively. theres no real explanation for why hes sobbing in french and it never gets brought up again but it is fun to think about potential reasons

for instance, he has been alive for 150 years, and has spent a lot of that time trying to patch up conflicts where he can and assist humans when he can - so perhaps he learned a bit of other languages in order to communicate with other people more often (though this does raise the question of who speaks french on no mans land. which i cannot answer) or perhaps (since the specific word is maman) it was something he grasped while on seeds with rem and knives which raises further questions on why this was being taught. potentially a reason i could see is due to the fact that children are able to learn languages better than adults - and perhaps rem was like hm. does their accelerated growth affect language learning capabilities? which admittedly does sound like a fascinating concept that would be harmless to the twins while providing more information on independents and their growth that could help rem figure out how to raise them properly and what steps to take

maybe he learned it bc he thought it was neat! or Fancy! i mean if i had 150 years to live id also probably learn a bunch of languages so i cant blame him really

admittedly i know a lot of this is completely just meandering around a one off gag but listen. Listen. language learning is neat and fascinating and does in effect communicate something about a person - whether thats where theyre from, who theyre around, what languages they feel are important or neat to learn and what they were exposed to as a child - and with vash (while obviously where hes from isnt france) it is interesting to try providing a reason for his knowledge!

[fuunsaiki]

what she says: i'm fine

what she means: the division clearly knew that the song now and then was important to rachel, and presumably they knew why and therefore just how much it meant to her, so instead of ignoring it they co-opted it into their mind control so that if it popped up in elly's life then she might know it meant something to her but she was supposed to just think 'oh, it's my song from my music box', however even vogler's best efforts - both as the head of psy ops and in her capacity as mother figure - couldn't completely erase the full depth of feeling that rachel has for aidan so no matter how much ruth encouraged elly to try dating, deep down she *knew* she wasn't single, and her song reminded her heart of that every time she heard it, even though her head had completely forgotten who aidan was

[softgothbabe]

Day off!! Much-needed after an honestly fucked up week lol

[trentskis]

[azfellandco]

Aziraphale’s very black and white thinking in the Edinburgh flashback feels off because it seems like 1827 is pretty late in the game for him to be sticking to the party line quite this hard. It feels like a conversation that ought to have happened a few thousand years back eather than a few hundred. But this stops concerning me as much when taking into account that the framing for this flashback is a diary entry. Who is Aziraphale trying to convince with this characterization? Himself, or a potential not-himself reader?

[rodlaveraryna]

ok time for me to rant for a sec: i'm sorry if this offends anyone but i can't stand the jannik as aaron burr (hamilton musical mind you, not the real person) comparisons. don't get me wrong, wait for it has some great lyrics that fit with jannik nicely but as a whole the core of burr's character is like the antithesis of jannik. the reason jannik went from in and out up and coming top 10 player to world #1 grand slam champion is because of incremental improvements in his game that might not have looked like much match by match but are clear as day in retrospect. on the other hand, burr's inaction is a key negative trait of his and he only realizes that after he's fallen behind from his peers. and while you could perceive this "catching up later" as being jannik coded, jannik has been active since the beginning trying to catch up with and surpass his peers after a practically nonexistent junior career. burr is defined by being passive while jannik is anything but.

[syn0vial]

kinda surreal to see people on tumblr like, "the people on that submersible should have known the risks and were just too rich and stupid to think they could die" and then reading the account by the 19-year-old's aunt saying he was "terrified" to get in the sub and only did so to please his dad on father's day weekend...

makes me think about how we comfort ourselves through horror movies by latching onto some little mistake a character makes and going, "oh, that's so stupid! i would never do that!" and thus insulating ourselves from the horror that terrible things can happen to us, too.

and, i know, i know, the true thing protecting all of us from this exact fate is that none of us have $250,000 in recreational savings to burn on submersible trips down to the titanic anyway, but. there are plenty of other situations where we might overlook our own instincts that say to get the hell out of dodge just to please a friend or loved one, or because it's their "special day" and we don't want to rain on their parade, and where we might indeed end up paying for it with life or limb. i can think of several such incidents from my own life that could've ended with me just as dead, and that's just off the top of my head!

so yeah. it's a sad thing to hear about and i wonder how much of our collective scorn for the dead is in fact a self-soothing behavior to ward off our own fears of mortality...