#much to discuss yes....

[johaerys-writes]

ik this is so random buttt if all of your patrochilles AUs were in the same room what do you think would happen; like would they beef orrr ???

Omgggg I love this ask 😭🙏 this was so fun to think about, so let's see. If all my patrochilles AUs were in the same room...

Achilles:

Disasters & BBB!Achilles would absolutely be FLOORED by Twin Flames, Nameless and Fates!Patroclus 😳 those pecs, those arms, that back..... like "Whoa... C-can you bench-press me pls... pretty pls 😳🥵"

Disasters!Achilles would THROW DOWN with BBB!Achilles for treating Patroclus and also Dei the way he has 🤬 teach him some respect!!!!

BBB!Achilles would totally make out with every version of himself for shits and giggles

Disasters!Achilles would be incredibly intrigued by Fates!Achilles (a super strong, super fast demigod version of himself?? Sign him up👀) and would also chat with Twin Flames!Achilles about dresses and passing as a girl LOL

Any version of Achilles would climb Fates!Patroclus like a tree honestly LMAO that alpha is just too powerful 😩👌 and Fates!Achilles would get super territorial and bite them all

Patroclus

Disasters!Patroclus would absolutely throw down with both BBB and Twin Flames!Patroclus for not following Achilles wherever he is!!!!! Like what do you MEAN you're too depressed to love him right, get your shit together bro!!

Disasters and Twin Flames!Pat would have big beef with BBB but also Fates!Patroclus for treating Achilles with anything less than complete devotion, respect and adoration. Twin Flames Pat especially might challenge all of them to a duel at dawn lmao

I think BBB!Patroclus would cry upon meeting Disasters!Patroclus and realising how things could have worked out between him and Achilles, and how they didn't need to completely trash their relationship for years 🥲 maybe that would be the wake up call he needs

Despite all that, every version of Patroclus in a room full of Achilleses would think he's in heaven or something LOL

[ddddd-pixels]

For International Asexuality Day, I'm hitting you all with the Ace Beam. ☺️

(This took a lot more effort than I thought it would, lol...)

Edit: 800 notes?! In less than five hours?! Thank you all so much!!

Edit 2: 2000... The most I got on any post before was just over a hundred, lol. You are all so nice!

[sunonwaxyleaves]

I feel like we, as a community, do not talk enough about the fact that Louis held onto Lestat’s card that he gave him when they first met FOR OVER 100 YEARS!!!!!!!!

[droltatzuentes]

no notes. just louis and madeleine.

[errorkey]

wait i feel like i Need to say something re: the kantbison bondage scene in ep3 part 4

i've been seeing a Lot of people be like "yeah no that scene was really off-putting idk ://"... i think that was the point?

neither of them are actually in the moment. kant is very clearly not enjoying himself At All, and bison is inebriated (and drugged???) past the point of real comprehension.

but that's the thing – that scene isn't about the two of them having sex. it's about them trying to desperately get their hands on what they really want.

the show's established that kant isn't into this stuff in the least (as seen post-fadel's confrontation at the tattoo parlor), but he's willing to suffer through it, to grit his teeth and bear through the quite literal pain. he's willing to do anything, as long as he'll finally be able to get the evidence he needs to be free of these things forever.

on the other hand, we've seen bison state over and over how much he's wanted to do all of this, how he's never been able to find someone to actually hold power over. and now bison – younger brother, "never allowed to make a real decision of his own for even a day in his life" bison – is finally, finally able to take control over someone's life; something that's meaningful, something that matters.

that's exactly why i'd argue that the entire scene isn't meant to be "hot" or "appealing," but rather unsettling and weird (especially with the constant cuts to fadel digging(?) mysteriously in a field, but that's a whole other thing).

TLDR; kantbison's first time may have been passion and lust incarnate, but this one is so far removed from that. because, this time, neither of them actually care about the sex more than about what it means – a means to an end for kant, and a first glimpse at unadulterated power for bison.

[enden-k]

i know some fuckers reupload my art without a care in the world, im fighting w this for years now and it was a major reason why i deleted my previous art blog and stopped posting art for a long time. i dont hunt the internet to catch everyone tho, even if it pisses me off greatly.

BUT if anyone ever sees my oc art reuploaded, let me know so i can deal with this. one of my biggest fears is people stealing my ocs/worlds or claiming them, i saw that happen to someone once and its scary as hell. i wont tolerate that w my ocs. literally fuck you.

and regarding the AI ask just now; please dont use my OCs for things such as roleplay or anything.

also i rb sm abt it and thoughts its obvious - especially as an artist - what my stance on AI is and what a deep hatred i have for it. do NOT use my things for ANY of that shit.

and, in general while were on the topic of AI bc i see this SO OFTEN: you cant be anti AI and then turn around and use AI writing programs, its all scraped and based on stolen shit. please protect writers as much as artists and VAs.

[beannoss]

Something I think about a lot and wonder if maybe gets overlooked in Twilight’s story and as vitally indicative of his character is actually in the very first chapter:

Anya isn’t needed for Strix. Twilight decides to adopt her anyway.

[Spoiler warning: Mostly this post deals with early chapters already in the anime but there is reference to chapter 62, which has not yet been animated and will be in season 3]

Twilight decides it — “I’m going to rework the mission so it doesn’t involve a child because that’s too dangerous” and he’s 100% right! Donovan Desmond is canonically a far right warmonger with fascistic authoritarian aims. His government made liberal use of the SSS — a group to mirror the Stasi — who continue to operate in morally dubious ways (much more likely they’re actively morally reprehensible, though we’ve mostly only had rumours of that so far). From what we can tell, Desmond is at best an absent father and likely actually worse than that: if that's how he treats his own children, imagine how he might treat others. And the timeline seems to indicate that the experimentation performed on Anya was done under Desmond's government — even if Twilight isn't aware of experimentation on children, he is aware of both human and animal experimentation under Desmond's government. Taking all that and also the complexity of Strix's aims, undoubtedly there were other things that could be done, more straightforward if not necessarily easier.

So. Why? Why entertain the change at all? And then, having entertained it, why go back when the reasoning is indisputable?

On the Doylist level, I think Endo wanted to ensure that Anya had some agency within the set up — Endo also does this with Yor. It would be much harder to be on Twilight’s side fully, or to trust him on an ethical level/take him as any sort of moral authority, if he were just straightforwardly using these two people. To have them be active and consenting participants (arguably to actually be affirming the arrangement: Twilight sets it up, but Anya and Yor actually make it happen) even if the audience only knows the depth of their knowledge/motivations/etc currently, shifts the power dynamic in important ways.

But it also the set up tells us important things about Twilight. He is largely impatient, cold, detached in chapter one. His overarching feelings towards Anya are, I think, real annoyance, real confusion, and real impatience. He just doesn’t understand this damn kid and it turns out she’s a person which is frankly unacceptable — he’d needed and anticipated an automaton, ideally of himself in miniature form. (Though I think one could ponder whether Twilight was, in many ways, an automaton himself at this point, but that's maybe for another meta 🙃)

He’s not entirely unmoved of course — we're given to understand he’s affected when Franky tells him how many times Anya’s been adopted and returned, and isn't amused by Franky's joke about names. Franky's comment — "Just don't get attached" — reinforces this. The prospect of “the future” perturbs Twilight when he’s reading the parenting books. His initial reaction to Anya’s kidnap is horror. All these are true too.

Then there’s also this, from earlier in the chapter:

It’s exposition, yeah, and it’s also exposing. "Hopes" and "joys" are very specific words to describe those events. It could simply have been "A marriage? An ordinary life?" but describing them as such — hope for marriage; joy in ordinary life — expose something of what Twilight feels about those two experiences and, on the flipside, they expose what he deems he's lacking. No hopes of intimacy; no joy in (an ordinary) life. There's an argument as well, of course, that he's being ironic but I don't think that actually invalidates the above analysis. Drawing attention to 'hope' and 'joy' at all are revealing, regardless of Twilight's tone in thinking of them. I think it's also interesting this panel, taken in conjunction with a pair of panels in chapter 62, Twilight's backstory. The above is almost a pulled out version of this below panel of Twilight's recollection of his childhood, and of course the returning image of not just a rubbish bin but a rubbish bin on fire when it comes to disposing of his identity:

Back to Strix. Both his final interaction with Karen and the whole everything of the framing of Strix is making Twilight think (and feel, ahem) things that he hasn't for some time. Twilight decides, I’m reworking this. It can’t proceed this way. Not because Anya is a pain in his ass, not because she’s not as (apparently) intellectually advanced as he’d originally thought, not even because he thinks he can find another child who would better be exactly what mission parameters called for. No:

And what changes his mind is Anya asking to come home.

One of the important parts of this to me is this:

He seeks consent.

This moment is a keystone, I think, to understanding Twilight. It’s also more telling than he maybe realises. Twilight is decisive — we all laugh because he spirals at the drop of a hat when his daughter or wife look even mildly upset but outside those (also very telling) scenarios, he makes decisions and he pursues them. Often he makes decisions quickly. He’s a dab hand at it; it’s a large part of why he’s as good a spy as he is.

He’d decided to change Strix.

Anya asks him, in essence, not to.

So, he doesn't.

But it's wild that he entertains keeping her request at all — why? Why even entertain it? It’s dangerous; it’s impractical; there are too many moving parts outside his direct control; Anya isn’t the sort of child he’d wanted for the mission if he’d spent any time thinking about what a child might actually be like; Strix is in many ways an extremely long shot anyway, Desmond could just stop attending for reasons unknown and unrelated; etc.

So, yeah, why? Maybe because of this —

In conjunction, I often think of this moment in the cruise arc:

Twilight first naming the feeling as lonesome, and secondly tacitly conceding that he perceives Yor as a companion and that that relationship is important to him, something to be missed. What makes this for me though is that Anya calls this out "Papa's you're so sappy" and Twilight's reaction is that of someone caught-out. He doesn’t say “nuh-uh!” but he may as well have. Essentially, something landed a bit close to home, hm? Maybe some of that hope for marriage? A soupçon of joy of an ordinary life?

Twilight’s loneliness underpins many of his decisions with his family — probably without him being fully conscious of it. I think he is at least somewhat conscious of it, but also if he looks too closely... Well, best not to. I could fill this post, I think, with images that demonstrate his loneliness throughout the series; that sorrowful/pensive close-up of his eye(s) is one of the abiding motifs for Twilight throughout. I'd probably start with this one from Twilight's backstory arc:

Anya's request plays directly off his loneliness. Still though, he doesn’t immediately capitulate — he emphasises Anya’s choice. Is she sure? The last day has been scary for a child (and for him, but he's ignoring that part) and Twilight, in his increasing recognition that Anya is a person, is probably aware in the back of his mind that he hasn’t exactly been warm or welcoming or at all patient with her. Things that people respond to — he's otherwise excellent at manipulating people, so of course he understands this. So. Given she'd just had this scary experience, given he hasn't exactly been great with her: Is she sure? She wants to come home — with him?

I think the moment may get a little lost because Anya says something riffing off his own earlier thoughts and self-revelation (featuring that shadowed, lonely eye motif again!)

Were this a post about Anya, I’d talk about how it’s an important character moment for her as well by way both of demonstrating her agency/choice and also that she isn’t nearly as dumb as Twilight thinks (and the audience, maybe, also thinks).

But in my view, she didn’t actually need to say anything about it making her cry. I think she could simply have said yes in that moment and Twilight would have agreed.

Twilight’s an unreliable narrator; he’s disconnected from his heart and that shrouds his own motivations from himself — something he actually also concedes in this chapter!

And it shrouds from us just how much he actually understands himself. He’s also a master of deflection. Easy to assume or say that bringing Anya home is just to align with Strix. Nothing more to see here; nothing else going on. But also that ripping off of the mask in the panel above — and the literal 'riiip' sound effects — also indicate to us that this is an unveiling to himself.

In my view, Twilight agreeing to Anya's request, deciding to go back to original mission parameters, actually shifts his motivations, subtly. Now he’s committed not only to the original mission goals, but also to Anya. He needs Anya to succeed at Strix, not only for Strix's sake, but also because otherwise the mission will end and she’ll have to go back to the orphanage, and he’s just agreed with her not to do that (not right away, in any case). I don’t think at this point he’s thinking it’s forever — his thoughts throughout the manga indicate he still expects the Forgers to be temporary. I don't think the shift in motivation is necessarily even conscious, but given the set up, I think something inside Twilight recognises that agreeing to bring Anya home is a compact, jointly engaged. Mostly all this has become subsumed into Strix: he makes decisions. He pursues them. He deflects, even from himself. Of course it's just for the mission; this saved him the trouble of reworking it, of figuring out something else. Nothing more to see; no need to think any more on it. And to be fair to him, Strix is very high stakes, resting pretty solely on his shoulders, so of course that is, objectively, motivation enough. Why even consider beyond that?

But I personally think that to the extent he's aware of it at all, there is something else going on, that he wants to have Anya for as long as it takes him to work something else out for her. If that's the case, then of course, we have Occam’s razor: the simplest solution may be the best one.

Maybe Twilight should just keep Anya himself, eh?

[Image description: gif from Spy x Family season 1, episode 1. Twilight and Anya have just found out Anya passed her entrance exam and are overjoyed. Celebratory, Twilight picks Anya up and swoops her into the air as they smile at one another. End image description]

[monofazz]

Swindle, that's a weird dog you have

[starscelly]

aren’t you tired of being nice?? don’t you wanna go crazy???

or, jason robertson set to “all-american bitch”

[critter-wizard]

ep 43 had me tearing up in a fucking shopping centre ‼️‼️

b+w alt version that I truly couldn't decide if I liked it more . Also I included a lot of thoughts in the tags but they're somewhat incoherent<3

[somegrumpynerd]

Actually it turns out I had more thoughts about that post that I forgot about lol

Would Nightmare actually give up his boys? Yes and no

If it was just a black and white situation of they're miserable, they don't wanna be here, they have somewhere better to be, then yes. He would leave them out to wherever they needed to be despite his own feelings and very quickly realise afterwards just how much he'd gotten used to the noise and company. I think he would get a little clingy with Dream about it, which I'm sure Dream would find very weird after everything but not unwelcome, he did miss his brother after all.

(If he couldn't attach himself to Dream's side for whatever reason, I think he might just sit in his castle and go insane. Or maybe he'd just spend all day at Ccino's trying really hard to project that he just likes the atmosphere and isn't lonely as hell)

But the thing is, most of them don't have somewhere better to be. Horror has his au, and Nightmare would keep up the supply of food even if Horror said he wanted to quit at this point, so he would understandably let him return home. Killer, Dust and Cross effectively don't have aus anymore though, and they tend to get into self-destructive habits when they're left to their own devices. (Obviously bringing Color and Epic into the mix to make sure Killer and Cross are taken care of eases matters, but Dust doesn't really have any friends outside their group he could go stay with - that Nightmare knows about at least).

The flipside of this is that his boys may not necessarily want to be given up. I think if Nightmare got really in his head about this he could easily end up convinced this is the right thing to do without ever asking them if it's what they want, with potentially terrible results. He's established such a pattern of always returning to find Killer when they get seperated, that if he never showed up Killer might just keep sitting there and waiting for him greyfriar's bobby style, refusing to leave because he's certain his boss is coming back.

[strawberrystepmom]

nothing gets someone unfollowed quicker than age gap discourse like stop pretending that women are these delicate little creatures who cannot possibly make our own decisions even well into our 20s and 30s regarding partners bc they're *gasp* older than us! give me a break yall are fucking these 23 year olds who do nothing but vape so much they have to use online pharmacies to get generic viagra to even fuck you yet we're being cooked for liking Men. grown Men with careers and priorities and responsibility. crazy.

[futuretrain]

kinda to go along with my thoughts re: jason and the popular perception of his inescapable criminality when lacking bruce to guide him. i have a huge issue with how often the fandom at large/comics readers do their best to read the biological families of kids that bruce takes in as somehow bad, neglectful, or abusive, so as to be able to easily cut them out of the narrative (after all, if they're bad for the child in their care, then of course they don't deserve said child) and clear way for bruce to fold them into his family. as if the (much less privileged and less rich/poorer) family cannot in any way be (allowed to be) a good and loving environment for their child and only a (lbr very white-coded for decades) billionaire can deliver that

[instantpansies]

life is hard for us oz fans who are only meh about wicked. have half a meme.

[helloimamistake]

Nah cause i just saw someone saying that they can't see the appeal of hyuluka because its "uke and a lesbian.."

Bro just admit you only see mlw relationships as

"Oohhhh big strong man x petite girly pinkie goofy ahhh"

Like every kind of relationships can be non-stereotypical even the mlw/wlm one..

Its literally not illegal for a guy to be shorter and a bit feminine than the girl.. In my opinion that is a really interesting and unique dynamic

If you really can't see that type of dynamic to be likely happened, than you just see mlw as literally black and white and that is sad af

There's literally more than

"Big strong sigma independent man x housewife petitie goofy ahh girl"

ITS LITERALLY MORE THAN THAT, AND IM FUCKING TIRED OF PEOPLE CAN'T SEE THE OPPOSITE WITHOUT SAYING

"But that looks weird they should not be attracted to the opposite gender since the man is feminine and the girl is masculine" blah blah blah

Bro stfu

Besides luka deserve to be pegged by a strong women so stfu

[etirabys]

thinking about getting sexiled on short notice in my freshman dorm (worst case: coming back from a shower to find door locked & hair tie around the doorknob) and how ludicrous that seems to me now. "a fundamentally unserious way for people to coordinate around sexual activity"