#maybe believe is the wrong word

[the-physicality]

i watched 5/14/22 W over seattle today and.....

a w is a w, but not a lot of ~good~ basketball happening here

a real nailbiter [but i looked at the box score in advance, for my mental health]

this was of course before sue announced and interestingly enough the announcers [ryan and rebecca] said when they both go, there won't be tour. little did they know

more concerning is that they asked dt about her plans and she gave a hard no re stepping away [which if you recall is very different from the answers we've been getting.. and some may say an answer in and of itself]

[nevarroes]

[dirtytransmasc]

imagine if Aeron and Davos survived the burning of the mill and had to witness the merciless carnage of the Blackwoods against the Bracken's after Daemon orders Willem to turn the Bracken's to Daemon's side.

imagine them finding each other in the chaos. Davos cannot stand for it, because he loves Aeron, and these are Aeron's people, and they are but women and children, even if they're still Bracken's. they could be his aunt's or little cousins or even nieces or nephews. hurting his family feels wrong.

Aeron is angry, his people are being pillaged and tortured, women and children are going missing and being slaughtered in their homes, in their beds. his lovers kin is doing this, they're savaging his people for holding strong.

and then they find one another. Aeron is blazing with fury, even as the flames lick at and singe his still healing wounds. Davos, usually the one itching for a fight, for the spill of blood, looks pale at the scene around them.

Aeron throws a punch, not giving the Blackwood a chance to attack him and move onto the next victim, not able to see anything past the others red clothing and Blackwood sigil, but Davos catches it, hiking the other's hand gently.

"Babe killers, all of you, you- why are you doing this?" comes Aeron's agonized cry, unable to free his hand, choosing to swing with his non-dominant hand, aiming for Davos's chest. Davos lets him, before taking that one too. "you stoop so low to attack women in their beds, spill their and their children's blood on their very own sheets, steal our food, all because we had honor?"

he's teary eyed even as his face flushes with anger, his ears tinge bright red, his beautiful hair hanging in his face, in his eyes. his lips look like they're red from crying and biting. it's still torn, like the high of his cheek. he favors one leg over the other. he's still wounded from battle.

Davos can see that he is beautiful, even in a moment like this, and his kin are tarnishing that beauty.

"I'm sorry," is all he can say. he squeezes Aeron's hands in his own. "I'm sorry, I-" what does he say? what could he say? does he betray his house and apologize for their actions? would he even be believed? would that hurt Aeron's heart more?

he doesn't say anything else, not yet, just drops Aeron's hands so he can take his face, holding just tight enough that Aeron can't pull away. he doesn't kiss him, just looks in his eyes, lets their pain and fury wash over him.

"this is wrong!" Aeron cursed

"I know."

"can't you see it's wrong?"

"I do"

"why won't you stop them? why won't you make it stop?"

"I can't."

"can't? or won't?" his eyes were dark now.

"can't. if I stop them, try to stop them, they will put a blade in my heart, it will have been for nothing."

"then you're a coward." it felt like a punch. it was true. even if he could stop this, he wouldn't. he was afraid. he could not stand between his kin and the Bracken's.

"I am... but if it were the other way around, would you?"

Aeron sighed, the fight leaving him. he leaned into Davos, their foreheads coming together.

"no."

Davos was not angry at the answer - they were just boys and this was war. they were boys and their people had been fighting for longer than they could comprehend. they were just boys and they were afraid- instead, he just kissed him softly, praying no one would see them, or if they did, then they would just strike them down here where they stood, that they would let them die together, tangled into one.

"they had honor. they would not be forced to pledge for another simply because they were afraid of death. their honor was meant with depravity." Aeron whispers through tears now.

Davos nodded. they did have honor. more honor than his own kin had.

"I'm sorry."

Aeron didn't speak again, just held onto him, wrapping his arms around his back, taking hold of his cloak, balling it up in shaking fists. Davos moved to copy him, threading one hand into his soft hair, gently smoothing it with his thumb, and the other wrapping around his waist.

they stayed there. through the screams and the cries and the smell of smoke and the calls of animals being herded from their fields. they were together, two boys hiding in the forest as their houses slaughtered each other.

[bmpmp3]

sorry to be a bit of a hater but i do wish youtubers weren't so scared of making their videos just like, "reviews", whys everything gotta be a "video essay" all the time. every day my recommendations are filled with 40 minute videos titled "_____: An Underrated Masterpiece" where the first like five minutes are reading the wikipedia definition of "masterpiece" in a somber voice with dramatic themed text on screen. please just tell me how good or bad you think something is and use the rest of the runtime to explain why. you dont need to put on all these airs

[toxiccaves]

not as huge on this site but i need ppl to remember to not feed the trolls. If its that outlandish, leave it. Block and report. If you reply ANYTHING, at least try to be respectfully educational. Because these people are genuinly uneducated on the matter, and have been fed so much propaganda that they're somehow this self righteous without caring about their own rights at the same time.

Remain above them. Don't stoop to their level. If an attempt to educate turns into sealioning, leave. No more ratio wars for internet points. We either try to make a difference one person at a time, or not raise hateful voices or give them the engagement they're craving.

[randomtextxx]

dont mind [haha] me. just testing something out

silly

[mxtxfanatic]

Ngl, I’m actually pretty uncomfortable reading my old posts defending the goodness of the common people and their right to defend themselves—as persecuted groups or as individuals—from hierarchical tyranny, given how easily in this current irl moment a not-insignificant amount of people have fallen into supporting an active genocide, because I cannot separate this from how much pushback I got (and still sometimes get) for being consistent in my politics

[quillkiller]

Hi, I love your blog, and please I would love to see you talk more about Walburga, I always found her a very interesting character, but there's almost nothing about her

hi!! thank you!! 💞

i love walburga so much, i think she’s so interesting. i think people forget that she was a woman in the 70s, and a girl in the 60s. to be clear, i don’t think she’s a redeemable character, especially not as an adult, but i do still think she’s a victim. <- two things can be true and everything isn’t as simple as black and white.

she’s painted as the main villain of the noble and most ancient house of black, but people forget she’s a woman. in the seventies!!! realistically, walburga held no power what so ever, was married off to orion against her will, and under orions control. she gave orion sons and an heir and did her duties as a wife. she’s a victim turned abuser. <- she simply didn’t break the cycle of abuse, tale old as time, etc. she’s been powerless her entire life, so she takes it out on her children.

me and kara talked about walburga a bit when we started talking about the bellareg marriage, and like, in the grand scheme of things, walburga isn’t really anything. she’s such a small pawn in such a large game, a game ruled by powerful pureblood men. she was born a daughter, something to be dealt with and bartered with, and ends up at the hands of a husband like her father. <- i wrote a bit about this in my bellareg oneshot. me and kara said that we think bellatrix grew up idolizing walburga, because despite being small in the grand scheme of things, she can appear so scary and violent. but as bellatrix gets older she loses more and more respect for walburga. she realises that she really is just a submissive and obedient wife, on a tight leash held by her husband. walburga doesn’t have ambitions that stray outiside being a wife and producing an heir. like, at the end of the day, walburga really is just a wife and a mother.

walburga’s abuse is allowerd because orion is the one to allow it. he’s the puppet master, the only one with an actual say-so in his family and with his sons. i’ve said it before when i’ve talked about how walburga is treated like the Main Villain, but a silent man (of the house) will always scare me more than a wife ’acting out’. orion is a man, and it’s bonkers to me that people don’t recognize that he’s the main villain and main abuser in the black household. he’s literally a massively powerful pureblood man in the seventies and people want to act like he’s somehow scared of walburga ??? (<- a take ive seen multiple times lmao). like genuinely, WHAT is walburga going to do to him. she’s powerless in her own marriage. even a disowned sirius is more powerful than she’ll ever be. even regulus, the spare, is more powerful than she’ll ever be. because they’re men.

to sirius, she’s a monster. he’s simply not able to humanize her (to me), and nor should he have to. she quite genuinely is his abuser and his own devil, and i don’t think he necessarily recognizes that the main villain of his upbringing is his father. <- not that he doesn’t hate his father too and thinks of him as his abuser. but to me, walburga is his actual devil. his monster under the bed, more frequent im his nightmares than his father. and like, yeah. that’s so understandable, and i don’t think that’s like the wrong opinion of him to have lmao. it’s never up to the abused to forgive and/or understand his abuser. like i said at the very top, walburga is irredeemable. when she becomes an adult the abuse becomes a choice, and she didn’t break the cycle. <- i wrote a bit about this, and how shocked sirius is to see walburga as a person with feelings, in my grief microfic.

reg, however, is able to humanize his mother. me and kara talked briefly about the spare & wife parallells and how that’s why he’s able to see her as a person. laurie @/itsjaywalkers reblogged a post a million years ago that said something like ’i wish they would invent a mother who wants to be saved’ <- and that’s how regulus sees his mother, i think. regulus knows what it’s like to be powerless, to be a shadow, to be less. but his mother doesn’t want to be saved, and so regulus doesn’t want to be saved. i’ve always thought that sirius is more like orion and regulus is more like walburga. <- and that’s also why walburga loves sirius more, and why she can’t stand regulus. it’s also part of a lot of conflict between the black brothers, the fact that sirius can’t humanize walburga and regulus can’t help but humanize her.

anyway! yeah, walburga is irredeemable & and abuser but at the same time she’s also a victim. people can be, and often are, both. it doesn’t mean she should be forgiven. i’ve talked lots here on quillkiller dot tumblr dot com how much it infuriates me when abusers are painted as evil heartless monsters that simply can’t help it because its ’in their nature’ or because they were ’born evil’ <- that’s simply just not how people and/or abuse works. abusers are people who chose to do that to you, who have feelings and lives and relationships and a past. it’s never as simple as black or white ! there’s nuance everywhere, babey

[deargravity]

one of the many things that bothers me about goku luck is the fact that they have kenta (a minor) in a penitentiary full of adult convicts. where was the juvenile welfare officer and why are they not doing their job. hope they’re fired

[transmascutena]

thinking about how akio sees his younger self in utena and wondering if there's any fondness there. doesn't change the horror of what he does to her obviously but i do wonder

[medicinemane]

I don't know... horrible things happen all around the world and it's not a competition

Atrocities are committed against multiple groups in multiple parts of the world at the exact same moment, and none of them erase each other. They all matter, all the people in this world who are being brutalized matter. There shouldn't be any line you draw where one group doesn't actually matter as much as another

You're welcome to prioritize your energy towards helping one group or another, but what's not ok is invalidating or dismissing people who are actively being harmed

Same goes for trying to figure out which social group has things worst (and lets be honest, always using a US lens)

Like... maybe the important thing is to prop each other up and help everyone get on their own feet rather than trying to... pick fights about if physical disabilities or mental illness are less respected (I'm trying to pick a more absurd example but sadly I've seen exactly that argument happen before). Maybe it doesn't really matter and what matters is helping who we can when we can

I'm tired of it, I'm just fucking tired of it. Support people, champion them when the world is just brutalizing them, but you don't need to throw a single other person under the bus to do that

Which seems to be an absolutely impossible lesson for people to learn

[arbitrarygreay]

More evidence that Alder would have done gangbusters focusing on espionage: Petra notes in 2x4 that "Intelligence does often have a hard time keeping track of the General's comings and goings." Literally the person in charge of keeping track of information and shit says that Alder and her Biddies were giving them the slip all of the time over the decades. It's like the inverse of the Marshal being able to hunt anyone down, Alder is able to slip the leash when she wants. Which kind of goes against the popular fanon of Alder being stuck in meetings and in the unavoidable public eye all of the time, and finding it a burden. It turns out, Alder not only made a habit of getting around surveillance, but the other side of that coin is that what publicity/propaganda/speeching/posters/etc. she did do was of her own desire. If she didn't want to be a public face, she could choose to avoid it all. (To where when Nicte forced her into the Warding Circle and Petra appeared to make announcements with Silver instead, it was notable by everyone, a duty that Alder relinquished reluctantly.)

[quixotin]

it is absolutely wild to me that the untimely passing of a pedophile and abuser causes more discourse in tumblr than an actual fucking genocide.

[satellitedarling]

haha god listening to music and having scenarios in your head is so fun, yes the scenarios are about a hypothetical good relationship with my parents why do you ask

[freakwiththeknifecollection]

It's kinda laughable to me when people bring up Meg telling Jo that Dean only saw her as a little sister as like, definitive proof that's how he felt. Like demons never lie just to fuck with people

[sp1resong]

pleasepleaseplease talk about your ocs i am so curious

OKAY SO

i have... four? ish? main oc stories/universe atm, not counting random fandom ocs i make on the side that aren't linked to any big overarching story

those four are Dr. Paradise's Theory of the Self, Tales of Godborn (<- title i am planning to change but do not yet have anything to change to), The Poison Beneath, and Onelight's Dawn. the latter two are warrior cats, and the former two are generic cat furries (...and both started as wc. Me when i got the warrior cats autism instead of the good at math or science autism)

im just going to go off about dptots because.Good lord. i am so infodumping. my hands would shrivel up and fall off if i wrote any more of this i hope you understand

DPTotS is a story about identity, personhood, and necromancy, i guess. at its bare basics.

um. The titular Dr. Willow "Will" Paradise (she/her) is a reclusive scientist and self-proclaimed alchemist. In her younger days, she found some manner of fame as "Miracle Worker Will", a so-called genius who claimed to be seeking immortality itself.

she very suddenly fell out of the public eye in what can only be described as "the identity crisis of a century" following which she threw herself into the sea to test a theory of hers. and promptly drowned to death. (she got better)

now with a bond to the Abyss (yeah the ocean is a whole entire eldritch horror in this universe), along with several new and unknown neuroses and complexes, Will shuts herself away in her lighthouse (for the most part! she still occasionally attends social events--but it's odd, her demeanor has changed entirely almost overnight...)

eventually she drops her titular Theory of the Self, which proclaims that identity is invariably a facade, and that true selfhood is guided by motivation; by which parts of your mind drive your choices.

she splits the Self [or; the abstract entity who is capable of making choices] into three distinct guiding factors:

the Heart [representing emotion]

the Mind [representing logic]

the Will [representing desire]

(...before you ask, i promise i am not lying when i say i wrote that part long before i even knew who chonny jash was)

though it is not a part of her in-universe theory, on a more meta level there is a fourth factor, the Mask, which represents the charade of a cohesive identity, or the urge to adhere to social norms and etiquette even when every other part of you is screaming against it.

anyways! wow there are. Actually three more main characters. good lord. i am the fucking infodumper

um! the other main characters are Doe (it/its), Alice Grey (she/her), and Dorian Winters (he/him).

Doe is... the sole inhabitant of the corpse of John Doe. John died of a stab wound in a back alley and Will stumbled upon his corpse some time later. She wasn't about to look a gift corpse in the mouth, bringing his body back and attempting to recreate the conditions of her own resurrection in the controlled environment of her lab. If this worked--why, she would have earned her title of Miracle Worker! she would have found the key to eternity, to conquer death itself--

and work it did, or so it seemed, at first.

truth is, Doe does not remember being John. perhaps it lost its memory as some consequence of the trauma of dying and being resurrected, or perhaps John's mind could not be saved at all, and another was constructed in its stead.

whether a broken John or a new soul entirely, it doesn't matter, really! because we have Doe now. Doe, identity issues connoisseur (in other news i fuckign hate spelling connoisseur why does french have so many god damn fucking letters in it. Spellcheck save me), who lives life as a failed copy, a dead man's shadow, a mere shard of what it should be. does it imagine the disappointment in will's gaze when it lingers on its eyes (bright blue; her same color. john's were amber)? is the face in the mirror truly its own? when it looks down, are those its hands by right?

it knows the answer, of course. or... 'know' is not the right word. it does not know anything. it feels. that is all it can do.

alice, meanwhile, is a Completely Normal Cat with an Ordinary Life--which is to say, her issues at the beginning of the story are fairly mundane in comparison to whatever the fuck is going on with the other two (this fact will change).

her in-laws dragged her to some fancy party, once. she did not have a good time at all, and just kind of stood uncomfortably in the corner the whole time until she was approached by an Odd Stranger dot dot dot... just kidding it's will fucking paradise. Will decides to spare alice from the woes of Standing There Awkwardly and strikes up a conversation. alice is nervous at first, but will is like. scarily good at figuring people out (and figuring out how to get other people to trust her as a result), and alice quickly becomes comfortable around her.

they become fast friends! alice learns more about will, while will hears of alice's assorted wiles and woes.

she wants a lot of things, but she's too nervous to get them. she doesn't like her family, she doesn't like the city, she doesn't like the life she is living, she feels like everything goes by too fast and she will never be able to do all she wants to with her time on this earth.

will is sympathetic, of course. she hears her out and offers a shoulder to cry on, and offers carefully-picked bits and pieces of her own history and struggles that alice might be able to relate to. until...

um. long story short will pushes alice off a cliff into the ocean, thereby granting her will's brand of quasi-immortality (she does not age, and she is very difficult to kill; so long as abyss doesn't decide to pull the plug, so to speak. which it can do at any time).

now, alice, who literally fucking died and had her soul pledged to an eldritch horror without her consent at the hands of someone she thought was her friend, is rightfully fucking pissed about this. and one thing about alice is that once she's gotten over her initial fear of rocking the boat she is stubborn.

alice swears revenge. she misses will, she hates will, she never wantts to see will again, she wants will to apologize, she doesn't know what to feel or think. this all hardens into one thought: will has to die. she has to. she has to.

um.Admittedly this part of the story is Way less planned out due to being fairly close to the ending, but whateverr

oh yeah also doe has a character arc where it learns to accept that it isn't John, and that it doesn't have to be John, and just being Doe is enough. also it befriends John's widowed husband. long story.

anyways! some shtuff happens (i'm not... sure what yet), the three of them are brought to the seafloor by abyss in a dream. btw theyre all associated with some small element of abyss's imagery because fuck you that's why (alice has tridents, will has ink, and doe has.I haven't decided yet).

now, in this dream-state these bits of imagery become more real--will's palms are ink-stained, doe... ...i'll figure it out, and, most importantly, alice gets an actual trident because.First of all haha chonny jash hyperfixation and second of all. she deserves a large stabbing weapon okay

alice proceeds to threaten will's life! and yet will... doesn't react at all. alice holds her trident to her throat and will looks back, unmoved, looking, if anything, slightly bored as she stares at her death. and alice all but begs will for a reaction, anything to bring some catharsis into this bloodshed, anything to make this all worth it. by the end of it, she's sobbing on the floor and will is looking down at her.

and will apologizes, and alice doesn't forgive her. and she cant bring herself to do it anymore. and nothing will ever be the same again

and then some more stuff happens idk i dont even know how the story ends it just exists as a Cluster of Scenes That I Want To Animate featuring the Guys (gender neutral)

...oh yeah. and dorian. i forgot about dorian. fuckin uhh. dorian is will's college friend and a former singer slash musician, who had the misfortune of becoming rather famous for his music. and now he's a public figure no matter what he does and he fucking hates it. but he'd never go up front and say he fucking hates it, of course. he is passive aggressive forever and ever and

will crashes on his couch sometimes, as the most Normal of her friend group, and by Most Normal i mean literally just the only one not involved with the horrors (very low bar)

anyways.

the story also functions as something of a... parable, i suppose, about will's titular theory! will represents the mind, doe represents the heart, alice represents the will (...yeah, the character named will isn't the will. lmao. look, this was a later addition. and, to be fair, if she were writing the story, im fairly certain she would do this on purpose), and dorian represents the mask.

...and the abyss represents The ocean is really really fucked up /silly

nah, abyss's position in the metaphor is Up To Interpretation tm. as i see it, theyre a vague representation of mental illness, but eh. the author is dead here.

tl;dr: if there were three guys at the bottom of the ocean and two of them tried to kill each other would that be fucked up or what