#maybe at the end but in the middle NO

[openphrase123]

Openphrase123 you are healing my soul with your fic THANK YOU!!!!!! I LOVEEEEEE HOW YOU WRITE THE CHARACTERS AND ESPECIALLY HOW YOU WRITE ISABEAU!!!!!!!! I LOVE HIS INTERACTIONS WITH SIFFRIN AND THE REST OF THE PARTY!!!!!!!

Also real to keep Odile’s hp low for her portrait

from the tone and general demeanor of this ask i assume you mean curtain call, and thank you!! it was so fun to write!!!!

yeah. um. odile dies a lot when i play. specifically because of the low hp thing. when i first played and got that portrait i ran into my gf's office like "um. look at this" and she immediately went "is this game on steam too?" AJKLFASDJF. we love that middle aged woman in this house

[straycalamities]

this was supposed to be just a doodle erm

[canisalbus]

I swapped them around in a silly doodle

.

[hinamie]

harus

[fernisfreaky]

Why do I keep thinking that Optimus, Megatron, and Ratchet from Prime were in like a throuple before the war?

BECAUSE IT'S TRUE!!!

[starstruckodysseys]

the spectrum of gambling in d20 is really just “learning how to play craps mid episode” <--> “chef’s tools”

[dreadfuldevotee]

"The Vampire Chronicles characters are exercises in the cycle of trauma and abuse and how they are capable of complex emotions and receiving and giving love and empathy alongside all the horrible shit they do to one another" and "Anne Rice herself was a bigot and had some shitty personal beliefs and just because the genre is Gothic Horror doesn't mean you ignore the way those ideas bleed into the writing. Not all commentary is good commentary" are two sentiments that can and SHOULD co-exist, what the fuck are we doing.

[thegalaxyinapaperbag2]

*throws this half-assed shit at you and runs like it's about to explode*

[quibbs126]

So my brain had another thought recently, and so I figured, how else to convey this idea than through another meme redraw?

I swear, I don’t know why I’m doing it so much now

But anyways, I essentially have this mental image of Starscream, Soundwave and Shockwave all being roommates in the TFOne-verse, whether that was always the case or if that only happened after Megatron took over an essentially kicked Starscream out of his room (and/or Starscream didn’t want to share with him). I just think it’s a funny mental image

But I also have a specific mindset with this dynamic, in that Soundwave and Shockwave are dating/married, while Starscream and Skyfire were a thing in the past, but with Sentinel’s betrayal Starscream hasn’t been able to see him in 50 years. So basically he’s stuck unwillingly third wheeling while not being able to be with his own partner, and he just kind of has to live with this

Anyways, I just thought it was funny and wanted to share it

[sandinthepipes]

The fact that I can wholeheartedly enjoy ofmd and good omens and appreciate the angst because I KNOW there will be a happy ending.

See, I’ve never had that. None of us queer folks have ever had that.

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[dizzybizz]

al lsasints steret 🥺

i lvoe alll saints stereettttrahghghhhh

[seilon]

im glad I haven’t seen anyone calling jayvik old man yaoi on here yet. not just cause its not really accurate but also because that’s disrespectful to silco and vander. like they’re literally right there

[why-the-heck-not]

finished a book in the morning and that was a mistake like what am I supposed to do with the rest of the day? Starting a new book would feel like a blasphemy towards this one but also so would just moving on & doing other things

[cnl0400]

Obviously normally a gacha game will never make drastic changes to their characters, and Simeon has the 'appeal' of being marketed as an angel, but I just don't like how they are trying to make him an angel again? Like he wants to be an angel because of Raphael/Luke now, not because of any real attachement to the CR. Hell, even If he were to made It back to being a archangel, he would just be Michael's errant boy, he would still be demoted, and every problem he had with the CR before being turned in a human would still be there, he would be in square one again I guess.

Like even If I don't like human!Simeon, in the Devilgram Coffee Someday, he talks about how he dreams of opening a cafetería and how he never thought an angel could 'dream of something like that' (this being in the NB timeline, a obvious reference of him opening the Angel's Halo in OGS3) Is he just suposse to abandone his dream like that? To return to the Celestial Realm just for the sake of Raphael & Luke? I do wonder... Is there really a life for Simeon in the Celestial Realm?