#my friend got carlos

[papaya-smoothie]

they did me dirty at this cafe. this looks nothing like oscar.

[yu-huuuu]

"Your body, my choice"

"Your microdick, my knife🥰🔪"

[sainz100]

2024 Hungarian GP | x (edited)

[wheredidalltheusersgo]

Character design my beloved

All of these characters were made using brief descriptions from my friends @gweathney-propaganda @xxalphaclownxx @chris-mclean-has-me-by-the-neck @r4bidcherry and @fire-feather-flies !

[guardian-angle22]

↳ requested by anon

[cakeleighh]

[MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LIES OF P- KIND OF. ITS AN AU SO ITS MORE SPOILING THE PLOT AND CHARACTERS IN SAID PLOT]

Lies of P x Hunger Games ! au, District 3 Reaping, now with more Romeo!

Romeo proceeded to spend the rest of the train ride genuinely thinking he had gone insane.

This is a continuation of another post I did -with the district 12 reaping. To be completely honest, it's Romeo who makes this au interesting, it always is. I mean P is interesting, but Romeo is where most the plot is.

ANYWAY! Something important to know in this au is that Krat is not the capitol, but rather a part of district 3 that managed to push itself to an economic boom through it's own automation (puppets). The capitol didn't want Krat to have the power it gained, but it couldn't do anything about it, because the developers of the technology (namely Geppetto) refused to show how to make the puppets to anyone outside of Krat, while also establishing a monopoly of puppets. There was a massive desire of automation in the capitol, which led to more investment into Krat. There were attempts by the capitol to recreate it, but none succeeded, so they had no choice but to buy from Geppetto and/or Venigni.

This lead to Krat being seen as a "extended part of the capitol" as the people managed to raise their standard of living due to the reinvestments of the booming economy. The capitol knew they couldn't stop the city from growing, so they decided to block it off from the rest of district 3 and try to regain control socially. They moved in some people from the capitol -trying to establish an upper class, while also trying to get the people of the capitol to see Krat kinda like a vacation area. By cutting it off, they managed to make sure District 3 could not overthrow the capitol through Krat, even if many in Krat still despised the capitol.

However, the agreement was that all of Krat's population would be excluded from the Hunger Games, so there wasn't much fuss from the people.

But then the puppet frenzy happened. And Krat swiftly fell, with very few actually making it out, Romeo being one of them. All puppets became hostile, even ones in the capitol (although few). The capitol saw a scape-goat and they took it. Geppetto was vilified, blamed as the cause of all this destruction -but he disappeared before the capitol could get him. They assumed he had been killed.

Venigni was an unique case. Yes, he did make many puppets, however he focused much more on quality of life advancements, rather than complete automation. When the frenzy occurred, he was on the front lines trying to stop the disaster, as futile as it was. But he was also incredibly rich -even to capitol standards- so when the people of Krat could finally leave, Venigni managed to buy his way into the capitol, where he was warmly welcomed by many fans of his.

That year of the puppet frenzy, the Hunger Games were cancelled. They couldn't go ahead with the puppets at the capitol causing a (admittedly small) crisis. The next year they did go ahead like normal, but many of the survivors of Krat were still unaccounted for and lost, so were not legally obligated to attend.

It was two years after the puppet frenzy when Romeo could attend the reaping, and made his decision to partake in Carlo's stead. Little did he know of a certain mischievous puppet who wasn't doing as he was told.

(District 12 Reaping, with P!)

[leclerced]

i am So Close to making this my icon right now someone fucking stop me

[tankgotstuckinthecircusgate]

i know that when carlo suddenly decided that he needs to marry guy made a whole list in his head n like had a deadlines n shit. like it was some kind of a task he needed to do

[beaudeanw]

Deacon asking Dean to punch him before escaping // Betty asking Carlos to punch her before escaping

Supernatural // The Winchesters parallels (2x19/1x11)

[v7n5]

Theorizing Howard and Lalo’s respective relationships with their cars in my head rn. Lalo’s heavy interest in customizing and test-driving his ride gives me the impression that there’s a sense of attachment to it, and he’d rather keep adding tweaks here and there and make a hobby out of it instead of wasting resources on different ones every few months. Watching people like Eladio owning more vehicles than they could efficiently make use of and truly appreciate it as an art form because they change cars like changing clothes has probably set an incentive for him to be more mindful of his consumption and stick to what he feels is the most special. The grand gesture of gifting his boss a brand new car was a glimpse into his insightfulness of what impresses the higher-ups, not something that he himself is also into particularly.

On the other hand, Howard gives off the energy of someone who's generally more concerned with status symbols. Expensive suits, Gucci loafers, snagging up reservations at every 5 starred restaurant that he knows, old money aesthetics and quiet luxury items with still recognizable high-end brands on them— they're all elements of the wealth signalling theme a man of his social status and privileges would actively keep up as the result of subtle peer pressure and such. I wouldn't be surprised if the Jaguar was one among the many he scheduled to lease for a short period before moving onto the next one. Touring automobile showrooms and looking into various trendy models when he has nothing better to do acts as a distraction from the sad reality of his life lol.

[lestappenwdc]

https://twitter.com/_allthatglitz/status/1729180066909983162

:)

Ohh yes!! Thank you for this person. I've been saying this since Sunday. I cant believe people attacked ME bc of their own lack of reading skills. But lack of reading skills on tumblr is a problem as old as the site itself.

Also let me point out one more thing that is clearly in these transcripts (that the video that that one user on here provided failed to include): On Lap 48 (10 laps before the end) Carlos tells Ricky that his tires are gone. At this point he is on the second hard tire. The HARD TIRES were GONE 10 laps before the end. What makes you think for even a second that the mediums would have made it to the end. It's ridiculous. It's hilarious. Man ate his tires for dinner this race. 1 stop would NEVER have worked. Best case scenario he gets overtaken by everyone behind except the lapped cars. And ends up .... you guessed it... p18. And we have confirmation for this.

[swampthing07]

Today I met a three legged cat named Carlos! He is my friend now :]

[mpsideadump]

my friend playing LoP for the first time

He's got A LOT of interesting thoughts and I just have to talk about it lmao

Spoilers below

So my friend is playing LoP blind for the first time and he's loving it as a Soulsborne player. The funny thing is that he has never seen another Pinocchio adaptation, so Lies of P is technically his first exposure to the story (aside from Disney Pinocchio in Kingdom Hearts *he's never seen the movie*).

Obviously because of this lack of knowledge of the story, he's missing a lot of references and that is fine and all. The real kicker here though is that my dude is 100% convinced that ROMEO is Gepetto's son.

What's even more fucking hilarious is that he understands that P is Carlo, Carlo is the boy in the portraut, Carlo and Romeo are friends and used to go to the Monad Charity House. He's literally seen the sand memories and he is still 100% convinced that Romeo is Geppetto's son.

I can't y'all🤣🤣🤣🤣

My dude is literally just gonna piece everything together right before the Nameless Puppet fight at this point😭

[kingdomoftyto]

"Carlos, if you could just pause your experiment for a second--if you could only hear me out, hear my hypothesis! I think once you understand the science of the situation, you--" Carlos opened the door. He was crying. She had never seen him cry. He was overwhelmed and unsure of how to express his emotions, since he usually only did so in carefully worded sentences, not with water from his body. "The science of the situation?" he snarled. "That Otherworld. I was trapped there, Nilanjana. I couldn't see Cecil for ten lonely years. I was kept away from the people I love, in that desolate place where you never get hungry and you never have to drink water and so you never live. It is a place that devours. It is a place that is empty. That is the science of the situation, and I study it so I can fix it. Only I can do that. Only these experiments can do that. I'm sorry, Nilanjana; I'm not going to stop so you can tell me what science is."

🫠

[rindomness]

what do you like about Carlos? (jackdaw) ( grdhgfyg my questions are basic because I do not know much about wtnv but don’t mind being spoilt)

FAIR WARNING: this is, like, really long? it is five pages long and that's on 11pt Arial in google docs, where I had to copy and paste it so I could fix paragraph spacing so it would post. Also, I like, legit cried while writing this? So there is that also. like thank you for the blorbo talking enabling but also i do not know if you fully grasp what youve unleashed. idk if i fully know what youve unleashed

Because what don't I like about Carlos? He is my chief blorbo. He is the Guy I think the most about. I'm a little bit beyond just blorbo thoughts about him.

Okay let's break this down a little bit 'cause there's, to put it simply, a lot. Like, fifteen thousand words and counting of fic a lot? Also, I'm gonna be getting into, like, super recent stuff and also It Devours! here so just heads up on that

So. Carlos. Carlos shakes up the entire status quo, helps put the world back together, and becomes a critical element of Night Vale. That's on a narrative level. I'm gonna start with that because that's easier for me to talk about and also won't get me called out quite as quickly!

Carlos is a driving force in the narrative, in the world. Carlos shows up in town at the very start of the podcast, says he is here to study the most scientifically fascinating place in the U.S., and proceeds to uproot every single bit of Night Vale's centuries-long status quo. Carlos shows up and turns the entire universe on its head, at least in Night Vale. If I'm going to talk about how powerful, exactly, Carlos's impact is, I need to talk about Cecil. Of course I have to talk about Cecil.

Cecil announces, on live radio, that he fell in love with Carlos immediately. Cecil instantly attaches his attention to Carlos. I talked about this a little bit more in the Night Vale essay (over here) but Cecil is vital for the continued functioning of Night Vale. In mundane terms, Cecil on the radio serves as a giver of instructions and updates and ways to stay safe in this unbelievably dangerous town. In a less mundane sense, he's the Voice of Night Vale, which is an actual title, and sort of... represents his place as the center of Night Vale's community (which contains that more mundane element) and also as the center of this weird little pocket universe Night Vale is stuck in for the first five years at least. Because Huntokar loves Night Vale and Huntokar loves Cecil and Huntokar is a god and a god's love can be a dangerous thing.

But Cecil falls in love with Carlos. Carlos, who is a scientist, who deals in observation and acknowledgement and recording information and learning from it all. Things which Night Vale, a town with a very tenuous grip on its own reality, is innately allergic to. Night Vale is built upon the necessity of ignorance and denial for survival and continued existence. It depends on Cecil, the Voice of Night Vale, not changing, not growing, not looking, not for real. And he falls in love with a scientist, and he changes.

Narratively, it's absolutely insane how much power Carlos holds. Given the rules of the universe, Carlos is incredibly powerful. In Night Vale, perception is reality and acknowledgement becomes a threat to the powers that be. If it were anyone except Carlos, there is absolutely no way that any of the enforcement entities in town would let him get away with even a little bit of what he's able to. But Cecil loves him. I fully ascribe to the idea that Carlos's miraculous rescue and survival in One Year Later is because of Cecil, and Cecil refusing to accept that Carlos was dead. Cecil is powerful. And he's been protecting Carlos, in ways he might not even realize. Which means that Carlos is free to acknowledge Night Vale's weirdness, and because perception is reality in Night Vale, it changes for him.

I'll get back to this more later, but you see this a lot with the University of What It Is. If anything, that's what the UOWII arc is about. It's been a thesis since at least Who's A Good Boy? and Cecil wandering through the ruins of Night Vale, announcing that he must bear witness, even though he is sure his mic is not broadcasting to anyone. Perception is reality and acknowledgement is what is keeping Night Vale together post-Matryoshka and what kept it from toppling into the abyss to begin with. Carlos becomes unbelievably powerful in this way, in this understanding of the power of observation and recording. (I promise we will get back to the UOWII but I want to spend actual time on that and I have other stuff I wanna talk about first.)

Carlos does not seem to realize this, though, not for a while. I personally don't think that it really clicks for Carlos entirely what perception is reality means in the case of Night Vale until somewhere around Toast. I do not think it really clicks for Carlos how important he has become here, how much of an impact he has had, until reality itself starts to fall apart. The key of Carlos, and Carlos's impact, and what makes this Night Vale the True Night Vale as opposed to any of the other Night Vales we learn about, is the presence of Carlos. Every Night Vale has a Cecil, because the existence of Night Vale hinges on the existence of Cecil. There is only one Carlos, though.

Carlos only exists in this one reality. Carlos only exists in this one version of Night Vale. And we see how much that has changed things! We see it in The Missing Sky, when we hear the miniature city's Cecil and how sad he is. This Cecil is despondent, and cannot see any reason to keep going. He is deep, deep in a terrible dissociative depression, reporting on a pointless war and a missing sky and a god he believes has abandoned them. We see it in Cal, with the version of Cecil who never met Carlos, either, and Cal himself. The simple, stated question of "do you have a girlfriend yet?" sets all the scene we need for Cal. This Cecil does not have a Carlos, and he does not even have the safety in the knowledge that Night Vale is a safe place for him to announce, loudly, to the whole world, that he loves another man. And it's... depressing.

The podcast is from Cecil's point of view, so we get most of this information from listening to Cecil talk. We don't really see Carlos's perspective often, if ever, if not filtered through the way he interacts with Cecil. For that, I take us now to It Devours! because oh boy. It is very clear that Carlos loves Cecil very very deeply. If only from what we get in voicemails and phone calls. I haven't listened to it, but my understanding is that he's very clear about his love for Cecil in Condos, too. And we get it from his actions in Taking Off/Review and the way he picks up everything he's been doing for a year in the desert otherworld to go back to Night Vale and to Cecil because he loves Cecil and wants that to be his home.

Except, it wasn't a year. It was ten. And this information is revealed right alongside Carlos cares about the people he loves more than anything and the book-long element of Carlos trying, despite the wishes of City Council, to investigate the desert otherworld. I have written so much about the desert otherworld, and I will write more, because holy shit. Holy shit. I'm not going to tell you what it is because it made me almost scream for real in the very early hours of the morning when I heard it, but the information that is revealed in the very end of It Devours! is heartbreaking. Carlos cares about the people he loves more than anything, and it brings him right to the brink of destruction, because of how much he cares about Cecil and this new family he has found through Cecil. And throughout It Devours! you get such a clear idea of just how much Carlos loves Cecil, how much knowing Cecil has changed Carlos right back.

And, like, the autistic coding. It is blatant. It is obvious. It is much harder to overlook it than to notice it. It is intentional. We're getting to the part here where I might be calling myself out a little bit but like. The way that it weaves into how he expresses his love for Cecil and for Night Vale. It's the way that it is channeled through his science, and how his science helps him make sense of the world. I love him, and I love how he is written in such a way that his science has become the lens through which he navigates the world and this step-by-step justification of his existence. The way that this plays into the ongoing belongingness element of his arc throughout the podcast. 

He starts as an outsider, and he stays an outsider, and just as he's starting to think he might not be an outsider, well. The desert otherworld happens. And I've definitely worked through a lot of these thoughts already but that's what it comes down to! I cannot help but read his belongingness arc as innately tied into how he is written as autistic because that's just what it's like to grow up autistic! You don't belong anywhere, or at least that's what you're told. If you're a lucky one, that message isn't stated explicitly, but it's there. Of course he's cautious with his assertion he belongs in Night Vale! It would be a wonder if he wasn't!

So he does not know how important he is until he is forced to see it and then as soon as he is forced to see it it becomes his whole world. And every time I think about how there is only one Carlos across every single Night Vale in existence (or tentative non-existence), I have to think about how he believed he should not return to Night Vale because the door had shut for him, and how this led to spending a full ten years in a lonely and empty desert otherworld while Cecil fell apart back in Night Vale. I think about Cecil's sobbed I am still holding the trophy in One Year Later, and I think about Carlos grounds me in Delta and I think about how, in The Promise of Time, his joy at the end was for himself and Carlos, and I think about his panicked I have to call Carlos as soon as the warrant goes out in The Heist Pt. 3. And because of that... Night Vale attaches its reality to Carlos, too.

Night Vale cannot exist as it is now without both of them. There is only one version of Carlos across every single version of Night Vale. Carlos makes Night Vale what it becomes, because he witnesses. He witnesses and he records it all and he investigates and he understands. Besides Cecil, I do not think there is a single person in town other than Carlos who truly understands Night Vale. He understands it through scientific observation and archival and experimentation. Carlos pokes the boundaries to see how they'll react to him but he never crosses them, never breaks them. He does not feel the need to explain why Night Vale is the way it is now, because it simply is. He is observing the laws of this town (both legal and physical) and he respects them and nods as he passes.

Which brings us back to the University of What It Is. I said we'd come back to this, didn't I? I don't know how much I can say that doesn't lead to speculative conclusions here, because the UOWII arc isn't finished at the time of writing, but there are some things that have been laid out clearly. Janet Lubelle does not stop for anything or anyone. Janet Lubelle is what the UOWII considers to be the height of a successful scientist. Carlos used to also be considered a successful scientist, and then he came to Night Vale, and he lost whatever quality it was that the UOWII considered a qualifier of success.

Janet Lubelle does not respect the rules of Night Vale. It's very, very easy to see Dr. Lubelle as a foil for Carlos, especially since they came from the same institution. Only, Dr. Lubelle tramples over those boundaries, those unspoken (and, arguably, spoken) rules that make Night Vale what it is. She is here for an explanation for everything and she will not stop until all the mystery, all the wonder, is gone. And she calls it science. 

And if you go back far enough, Carlos talked like this too! He was looking for an explanation to Night Vale's temporal weirdness, an explanation for its weird seismic activity, an explanation for the house that does not exist. But he adapted, and he learned, and he observed, and he took his time and did not simply enforce his way of things onto the world without its permission.

Carlos feels like a love letter to science and the scientific way of observing the world and falling further in love with it through that scientific inquiry. I'm going to get a little, uh, sappy and personal here, so fair warning, but I likely have that reading because that's been how I've lived my whole life. I was talking to someone even just today about how, when I was little, my dad would take us out onto the back patio and we would set things on fire and see what we could burn to make the fire different colors. 

I've grown up with parents who deeply, truly love science. My mom has a physics degree. My dad has a math one. He still texts my family group chat every day to inform us it is pi time at 3:14. Every day. So maybe it's that, and maybe it's growing up with an understanding of the world that is rooted in scientific inquiry and questions and exploration, but Carlos feels like a love letter to science to me.

Carlos comes in and he turns the entire world on its head as he does it and he finds, at the end of the day, that he loves Night Vale. He loves Night Vale because it's so weird. It's the most scientifically fascinating place in the U.S. and this becomes his way of saying I love you. I want to understand you. Science, through Carlos, is its own sort of faith in the world and the way it is all put together, how everything connects. And Night Vale loves him back for it. He'll poke and prod at the edges but he will never cross them if he knows crossing will do harm, even if he does not fully understand why, because following an ever-growing series of whys is what science is about. Not having one single explanation at the end of the day. 

Carlos's exploration of Night Vale changes it, because it must change, everything must change eventually in order to continue to exist, and Carlos does what he can to help it not fall apart completely as it does. Carlos becomes more Night Vale as time progresses, and Night Vale lets more of Carlos in, until he is so enshrined in it that it is just his life. Night Vale lets him rest, and here, in this weird, weird town that is so incredibly hard to find, he finally finds a place he belongs. I don't know what isn't to love about that.

[milflewis]

oh fuck me i think my results might be out