#more a thing that made me go hmm

[oh-dameron]

I don't sincerely think that Zhao Zhuliu was Jiang Cheng's father and Yu Ziyuan was high-octane projecting all of the "you were in love with a rogue cultivator and had an affair baby!!" onto Jiang Fengmian and Wei Wuxian, but. It does have a certain internal consistency to it.

It doesn't excuse Jiang Fengmian's shitty parenting, even if he low-key suspected it. Either throw your two-timing wife out of the sect and disclaim the kid, or accept that you've raised him since birth and you're his father in all respects that matter. Don't let the suspicion fester into resentment and stop yourself from bonding with your child, it was extremely not his idea.

That would also mean that Wen Zhuliu melted his own son's golden core. Is it crunchier if he knew that and did it anyway? Or if it didn't occur to him until much later when he's ruminating on his past and then sits bolt upright in bed and urgently goes to find out when exactly the Jiang sect heir was born?

[icewindandboringhorror]

I made a few new wax seal stamps out of clay (like the ones I did for my worldbuilding stuff forever ago), this time just of random symbols that I thought might look good done in the style of painting over the raised part of the wax or etc. :0c Some of them aren't carved deep enough to really show up that well, but overall they worked okay for being clay lol

[spacedlexi]

speaking of fucked up overly hated female twdg characters i find it Super Interesting how people will say carver was the best villain in the whole series, but when lilly is literally just a successful carver (iron fist leader of a community turning children into soldiers) suddenly shes a bad/lame villain for some reason 🤔

[mashmouths]

so i started this show and it just gets worse and worseeeee not only did it lift the romance subplot directly from twilight (and not well) but they also are trying to play the forbidden love angle hard in the fantasy racism vein except it's a "cross-species" relationship between the two whitest people i've ever seen in my life and there are three people of color in the whole (first season of the) show who aren't villains and it seems that every other episode (and sometimes ebery episode and sometimes twice an episode!) there is a man physically or magically subjugating a woman and i keep waiting for the big reveal at the end to be stolen from fucking rainbow rowell

[skitskatdacat63]

"average person creates 3 new AUs per year" factoid actually just statistical error. average person makes 0 AUs per year. Alternate Universes Catie, who lives in cave & makes over 2 each month, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[astralprisms]

Was wondering why this particular gith face always feels like it suits baldness best and then I realized it IS in fact Orpheus' face model, Orph just has different unique ears.

Anyway welcome back, dreadwolf.

[kijosakka]

au where through training for the,,, fuckin skate olympics or whatever alejandro did he realizes how shitty his family is and manages to leave the situation (probably getting disowned,, living off of money won through skate competitions or smth idk) and years later reunites with josé on ridonculous race to try and rekindle a real family relationship

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

Anyway prohibitedwish dark medieval mystery drama au. The story is interjected every so often by prismo and scarab arguing over what should happen next

[angeart]

Well now I just wanna know even more about your ocs and their story! xD Even before all the spooky stuff, Raven being placed in the middle of someone else's life and there's pressure to remember people and things he doesn't... And the watch, is that significant, what happens if Raven makes it to new years (hopefully with his sanity intact)? And what is up with this universe's Raven that just 'ah the amnesia hit him again' ?

And what did Rei do to get people that pissed at him? And but is he still trying to look out for Raven even if he acts like he's not?

-🎀

ribbon anon, you have no idea how happy these questions make me.

there's not a lot of pressure on raven to remember things he doesn't, because everyone around knows he gets these amnesia spells. it's still tough on him because he has to navigate this world anyway, and it lets people be dismissive of him. because—there's no reason to make friends with someone who's bound to forget you in a couple of weeks or months anyway, right? (it also gives a green card to be a shit. he won't remember!) (fun morality dilemmas right there.)

he's entirely lost, made to "play family" with people he doesn't know, live in an appartment that's wholly unfamiliar to him yet he's meant to call it his home, and whenever he steps outside, he has to deal with all these strangers looking at him knowingly while they don't know anything about him, actually. and on top of that there's the voices and shadows and mirror reflections...

add in him being worried about evia as she gets close to rei, because he isn't yet sure what kind of person rei is. and then later on kye telling him he needs to stay away from rei. (that they both do; him and evia. especially evia.) that raven should help them bring rei down—

except. kye's words come at a time when raven's already experienced the cracks in rei's masks. they come at a time when raven's beginning to be acutely aware that rei cares and he's hurting.

and now raven has to decide who to trust and side with, caught in the middle of it all.

... so let's talk about rei.

rei is meant to be a troublemaker, this uncaring character who only cares only about himself... and yet this caregiver role is thrust upon him, where he has to also (begrudgingly) make sure raven's okay whenever he forgets things, right? he's tired of this cycle. tired of doing the same things over and over pointlessly.

i had lots of notes on their childhood and young rei leading to how rei got to be like this, and why. but if you want to know about The Incident that so fiercely set nick against rei... well.

rei used to have a girlfriend. and they were young and stupid, and it was a little bit toxic.

ok, very toxic.

see, rei often felt like he's not paid a lot of attention, and he isn't as loved as raven is. that he has to actively take, whereas it always felt to him like raven is just given things. like he always had something to compete and fight for.

and so when he got into this relationship, he really just dug his nails into the idea that he's now wanted and needed. that this was his.

it was possessive, and controlling, and bad.

it ended on a cliffside in a tragic accident.

rei was trying to prove something. like an idiot that he was. she was trying to leave, and he was trying to insist she needed him, cornering her near the edge as they fought.

he tried to grab her, but she fell anyway.

kye and nick were witnesses, and from far away, it looked like rei pushed her.

from kye's recounting of events, it isn't clear if she survived or not. what is searing, though, is the idea that rei never got any kind of backlash from it. he never got punished. he never stopped treating people like shit, making him a ticking time bomb until it happens again. because he hasn't learned his lesson.

nick wants to teach him that lesson, by any means necessary. even if those means are equally as bad as what he thinks rei did. (to be fair, nick is also a little psycho who enjoys people's suffering and power, soo—) (it's kye who's going into this thinking they can do it right.) (it's kye who's begging raven to help them. to go against rei. to let rei feel some consequences; to teach him that people aren't toys or possessions.)

(rei knows these things.)

here's a fun little note i have on rei:

Rei’s choice to be a troublemaker (to fight, physically, with the world around him) was his way of dealing with the things inside of him. But he never wanted that little sphere of destruction to reach anyone else. He never imagined it would ever affect anyone but himself.

[love-has-a-way-ofgrowingbackward]

thinking about hamilton and burr together but not in a kissing way but in a you are so different on surface but are made of the same core way. they have the same sort of wants and hurt but they project it in such different ways.

[linguenuvolose]

I do a lot of translation in my job and I've started enjoying it so much more since I started letting myself be a bit more free in my translations. Communicating the message and the vibe is more important than the phrase structure or wording being exactly the same.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

also it's something (better) like, the exercise of deliberately [art imitates life imitates art] holding up Billions to My IRL Things Perspective and going like whaaat would i want for winston. first answer is you want any character to not have been within the scope of the show in the first place, and to exit it since they are. and you kind of get that in the accidental reward in banishing winston, since like in the end it's just that the show doesn't care about him existing at that point But like it's winston sitting there quietly as everyone leaves & turns out the lights & Then he can leave too; others have peaced out & nobody remembers he exists so Now he can go off & do whatever.

but like in true form i think they definitely accidentally baked in another divine reward for winston in that, like, the way he's kept around as fodder for these fun little [pov: enjoy abusing this guy] asides with him, where it Just So Happens that he's autistic as something they're unaware of but is completely relevant to the expectation we understand him to be inferior(tm), it Just So Happens that he's also ""bad"" at not ""causing"" abuse to be turned on him. he's ""bad"" at staying in line. like well yes Yes that's what i want for him. just like In Real Life it's like yeah Ideally i'd want people to be able to extricate themselves from where they're trapped in power structures & i'd want them to have the perspective about it of understanding they're not Inferior / i.e. they are as much a person as anyone else and they're not corrupting everything good / i.e. it wasn't them Bringing It Upon Themselves and it's not them being Destructive by toppling a jenga tower of a hierarchy that happened to be pressing down on them. and winston is the kind of [the ruinerrrrrr] who is Turned On exactly because he keeps acting like someone who's on the verge of breaking out of the [being in line] someone demands of him as autist, employee, whatever other supposed manifestations of [inferior]

like in the 5 second stretches in which winston's allowed to speak before retaliation, it's because he's like "matter of factly" delivering whatever Information that's useful for another plotline. then he Brings It Upon Himself by making people aware that he's Also existing in his own right as a person rather than what they think serves their own deal / what they want from him at all times, perhaps by expressing his personality (didn't appeal to them! so it was Wrong) or not b/c of anything in particular said or done at present, just b/c people have a constant / accumulating contempt for him so their being in the same room as him & able to see & hear him is already dangerous. the [we're just seeing Any Abusive Dynamic in action] continuing apace.

and it's like, well, right there. he's written as acting like someone who doesn't blame himself for how he's treated, which billions frames as being Rude & Mean, and so too does everyone's abusers lmfao like and that these are his moments that are written to be Bringing It Upon Himself. and it's like hell yeah he doesn't blame himself. hell yeah that his self-esteem can manifest as anger at all. hell yeah that he keeps expressing himself with personality & confidence & doesn't even disguise his having been hurt, & it's this [his ass is Not grey rocking] that billions frames as both him "causing" his abuse & making that abuse "successful" lol, wrow just like real life!! and when like speaking of real life yeah it's not "bad" that people Do engage in strategies to mitigate & survive, including things like blaming themselves or being too "boring" to be anything but a non dialogued background character b/c that's all that goes unpunished, it's bad b/c it's done to them at all, not [ohh they're doing it to themselvesss] and like i'm asking myself like Ideally. what do i want Ideally. and i'd want winston to know that it's being Done To Him & i'd want him to find as much room for his personhood & autonomy as possible. and that's basically how he's written anyways, and billions hates that like You See this is why he deserves it this is why he's doing it to himself. and i'm like my god if that's not Inspiration for like "so what if people don't find you Personally Likable" and not preemptively holding back all personality or anything that'd draw attention as if you exist as a person in your own right & not something that only either gets in the way of or serves their wants of a Real person (someone with more power) like hell yeah you have him out here doing it =']

another fun addendum is like, billions isn't getting into it much b/c it doesn't seem to care much about "what if some people were peers & seem to have a genuine, recipcrocal relationship?" but that it just so happened to be like "oh tuk as the next closest loser who deserves it might be nice to winston" while it's framing winston as the "worse" Loser as being....unconditionally supportive of tuk. while the one downside of billions Also giving bentuk as much as it is is that it also inevitably has that shadow of "but ben is Superior to tuk" and like that it's correct that everyone encourages tuk to Stop Bringing It Upon Himself and start being less of a loser; it's wrong for winston to be like hey let's go have a foursome. like yeah probably don't make a list of the women you work with you'd be dtf but it's not like i'm convinced "ah billions and it's strong anti misogyny stance like" roflmao and billions is Not reflecting on "the downsides of unconditional support?" there when winston was beaten up for criticising taylor earlier like we WILL take his ideas while looting his [beaten unconscious] body there but he WAS wrong to express them as though he's BETTER than taylor!!! mafee's beautiful show of loyalty in kicking his ass even when he might agree with the argument and then benefit when it's adopted by taylor anyways! so it's as usual actually purely based on hierarchy & who gets to be in charge of people. it's correct for ben to be in charge of tuk, unless he has to step aside for that bizarre dead-end subplot about how it's tuk's fault if he's treated badly, b/c it's really his own Failure to have Confidence to know he has good ideas [raising our voice to deliver this message over the sound of breaking desks and chairs and computer monitors over winston because he had the confidence to act like he deserved to talk to someone and because he knows his ideas efforts & results are good & valuable around there] like. and isn't it sooo fucked up to talk about who you're dtf in the episode that has it be neutral if your boss is dtf & lets you know but is nice about it (and you're already Correctly tending to their ego, which you're responsible for!) like hey no possible problem! it's not even so much of a problem for a boss man to have the sex they're entitled to & be rude about their leveraging their power in that acquisition that it Stays a problem into the next season. ew, winston is Known (Inferred) Dtf??? we'll use it to exploit His vulnerability, exacerbate it, & punish him further for good measure in another episode that just revels in abuse & violation with a sexual aspect once again, but like, hey tuk don't do that, winston's such a Bad Influence for being like, shrug, kneejerk intervening with the Good Friendship where the One In Charge leaps in & Tells tuk the Correct thing to do. obviously there's also the tragedy that billions will Never let winston push back against Real Winners like rian or taylor in A Way That Matters (actually gets in their way at all) lol like. one thing that would have really been fun, winston should've literal kneejerk started physically fighting wags in either pertinent scene in 7x03 for real 110%. i wouldn't be like Gasp Violence Is Never The Answer if he just hit someone to hit them b/c fuck you. or broke anything on his way out etc etc. billions would Never let him. which is the other side of the same coin of [why he should get to]

tl;dr how great that winston's being "out of line" means he's basically always noticeably flouting & rebelling against the [He Deserves Abuse] agenda lol. that IS what i want. his being "beyond hope" like ohhh he's sooo stupid he doesn't realize how much he has the bad tastes & wrong interests & annoying personality He Will Always Be This Way like hell yeah!!! billions like oh no winston's personhood will never stay tamped down & locked away such that some godawful person tolerates keeping him in their inventory :( ohhh the ABA will never work :( that's right!!!!!!!!!! although they're not sad about it because it's about relishing the promise there will always be True Inferiors you can enjoy abusing with your righteous power over, but like well you wrote him escaping anyways even while dragging other "better" characters into standing around to serve axe's need for more than 1.8 employees and [crickets, reverberating cough, sneaker scuff] like. another ""wrong"" thing for winston to do, another thing for him to not "deserve," which is itself godawful actually lol like lord what it "rewards" its Good, Deserving characters with, no thanks. meanwhile winston's punishment is that he's autistic and """bad""" at being abused like lmfao good for him, fantastic for him, just what i want

[aromanticasterisms]

my god i am ADORING the fontaine world quests so much they are so good

[voiceshearingyouloud]

I was feeling extremely suicidal today, like the worst I have in maybe four or five years now, and I was deliberating over whether I should go to the hospital like pretty much all day and now that I feel better I realise that the moment I started drafting my suicide note in my head was probably when I should’ve decided that 😭

[duckduckngoose]

Hhhhhhh brainrot hitting so hard. I low-key wanna revive all my Taz grad wipes again from the dead

[stellerssong]

5 and 24 for the fic writer asks?

5. Which WIP is first on your list to complete this year? Will you post a snippet?

it's probably gonna be the very recently renamed "kīpuka," subtitle "danny and despair talk about their feelings," sub-subtitle "this one was technically just supposed to be about the rats," sub-sub-subtitle "can i get a hell yeah from all the pre-contact hawaiian culture specialists and enthusiasts hanging out in the sandman netflix tag on ao3 for some reason":

Anuanu ka ua no ka uka o ʻŌlaʻa. Cold falls the rain in the uplands of ‘Ōla’a. Sharp eyes accustomed to darkness might spy, far off to leeward, a break in the clouds, the faint pale gleam of a low moon and stars. Here, though, in the windward shadow of the mountains, the night brings a chill in its wake, and the air is so heavy with moisture it clings like a second skin. Above the canopy, a fine, steady fall of rain silvers the air; below it is a claustrophobic press of ‘ōhi’a and tree-fern trunks, so dense that no human could hope to pass through without iron and fire and poison to clear a path. Even light struggles to reach the forest floor, caught in the tangle of frond and bough. Something has passed through here, though. Something that needs no path, that leaves no trail. See, here—a gap in the understory. A rare old-growth koa tree, missed or passed over by the kahuna kālai wa’a of far-off times, its trunk and boughs breaking through the ceiling of greenery and reaching towards the clouded sky. A patchy clearing has opened up around the great tree, as though its smaller neighbors have withdrawn to a respectful distance, maka’āinana before their ali’i. At this hour, in this weather, no light pours through the koa’s wide-spreading boughs to dapple the olonā and fern below. There is simply the rain, the cold, a momentary relief from the closeness of the forest, and— A stir in the darkness at the foot of the koa tree.

24. By the end of this year, you want your fandom to think of you as “that author who _______.”

"that author who is real weird about lucienne making out with a creechur, beeft, and/or entity." i'd also accept "the danny/luce person" on the grounds that i do think most of the stuff in that tag on ao3 is my shit anyway. witness me.