#no they're so fascinating

[vultures-and-scavengers]

so, annette and blackwall are like. doomed as a ship. but thats why i like it for this AU. she has an absolute need for trust, which he can't provide, and the worst parts of his life have all been influenced by orlesian nobility, which she is, but he can't say that because that was his life as thom rainier. (and i feel like that should have come up with a trevelyan warrior/rogue, that they're part of the nobility that he loathes so much. not even cullen seems to loath the nobles as much as blackwall does.)

and by WEWH, i think those cracks in their relationship are widening, even as annette pretends everything is fine because she needs to have someone in her corner, or at least someone she can convince herself is in her corner-- because she feels so alone and overwhelmed as inquisitor. and blackwall, who has put her on this pedestal, is also starting to see more of the moments where she compromises with the nobility, where she opts to scheme and play the Game instead of more head-on solutions. and that pedestal is getting a little tarnished.

the line about the wings of valor i think really puts annette on the back foot. "It was a long time ago. Back then we didn’t stop to boast about past victories when there was an assassin on the loose," he says, in a pretty hostile tone, and i think its something she can't quite turn a blind eye to, like she has all the rest. she just wanted to know something about the man she cares about, and if they announced it to the court, surely she can ask questions about it.

but no, she can't. and annette spent over a decade in orlais playing the Game before Inquisition. she knows when she's being deflected or lied to. and she's starting to wonder how much she'll just allow blackwall to lie to her as she just stays quiet and lets him.

[tawnysoup]

the fritter (frin critter)

[madamemiz]

saw a post recently about the sun and moon fandom and how non-selfship content is rare, and how that's frustrating, and it struck me, like... how rare that is. genuinely in all my 20ish years in online spaces, i've never seen a fandom that not only welcomed selfship but actively encourages it, when usually the rule of thumb is that it's tolerated at best and despised at worst

so why is this fandom so selfship centric?

the answer is a combination of factors, of course, but I think it was mostly just a perfect storm of the right character with the right traits at the right time. many people between about 23 and 33 were and still are experiencing intense childhood nostalgia that's being perpetuated by online culture and various media, often through a distorted or slightly unsettled lense. the daycare attendant is fun! they're childish, but decidedly not children. they're not human, unattainable in reality, but plausible enough in the age of ai that they make you ponder. they make you long to nap and play and color and do all the whimsical things you wish you could take a week off from your dull job and do! but there's something... off about them. an element of danger that's intriguing. they're dangerous, but what if they aren't to you specifically? or, if they are, what if they overcame that, just for you? what if you were worth it?

people our age are lonely, and if not, often working through issues they didn't have time to contemplate in their teens and early 20s because they were still living throigh the issues. younger people too, of course, but it's especially rampant in the aforementioned age group. past college and college friends, too caught up in work to make new ones. if the dca really clicked with you as a character, it's kind of fun to imagine what it would be like to hang out with them. what if they were your friend? what if they were more?

which leads to my last point--cringe is dead and we stomped on its corpse

maybe it started with a few people drawing a y/n with the dca, and wow the art is cute! who's the cute jester character? ... is that a self-insert? huh. and then more people join in. is that allowed? yes! and the crowd cheers for it too! the right people drawing the right character dynamics at the right moment, drawing others like a moths to a strange robotic flame

ultimately, the fandom attracts so much selfship because that's the bedrock, the foundation the rest of the fandom built its home on. almost all of the common tropes and characterization have roots in selfship fic and art. the dca's popularity very much kicked off from that, and seeing other people using them as an outlet for their loneliness, friendship, romantic or sexual desires, or even just for creative character and plot setups that are only tangentially related to canon actively encouraged others to join in, in a way that could only happen while riding the funerary coattails of cringe culture

it's very much a lightning in a bottle fandom, the likes of which i doubt we'll see again for a while

[marlenacantswim]

shassie as a dynamic works so well imo because shawn is dialectically a genius and an idiot while lassie is dialectically badass and pathetic. thus, in the most ideal scenario, they're a scarily effective power duo of whip-smart deduction and ruthless tactical intimidation, but when you flip them to the other sides of their spectrums they become Two Losers Making Asses Of Themselves, both of whom constantly try to hoist themselves back to the other end by using the other as a counterweight.

[starry-bi-sky]

do yall ever think about bruce/batman!clone danny standing in front of his bathroom mirror after finding out he was a clone and silently tracing his face. The slope of his jaw and point of his chin. The high angle of his cheekbones and the shape of his eyes, the curve of his brow bones and the shape of his nose. The volume of his hair and the way it curls and gets fluffy when it gets too long.

His hair is black the same way a crow's wing is black. His dad's hair is black the same way a black bear's fur is black. His dad's eyes are blue like the ocean is blue. Danny's eyes are blue the same way a glacier is blue.

His dad has a square jaw and straight flat hair, and he tans and gets a face full of freckles when he's out in the sun for too long. Danny burns like a lobster and his face remains untouched. Danny has a sharp jaw and tall cheekbones, and Sam says when he's not smiling there's almost something regal about him. You would never call Jack Fenton "regal" when he's not smiling.

Sam says when he's not smiling he looks scary the same way a stone statue is. Jack Fenton when he's not smiling looks scary the same way that german shepherd staring at you across the street is.

Do you ever think he grew up wondering if he was adopted. Because of course, he has black hair and blue eyes like his dad. But having the same color doesn't make you someone's child.

Or, worse, things he's heard from the other kids and the other parents and even some of his teachers growing up; that he was the product of an affair. And that his dad was just too stupid to notice. And Danny would defend his parents until the day he died, because Jack Fenton wasn't an idiot and Maddie Fenton wasn't a cheater.

But doubt comes in with fickle tongue. his parents swear up and down that he is their child when he asks about either. That Danny just had his grandparents' features, but he was their son and they loved him.

But Danny doesn't look like either of his parents. His mom's eyes are blue like an aquamarine and Jazz's too. And they burn like lobsters in the sun too, but Jazz gets freckles on her face and so does Maddie. And as Danny grows up he doesn't bulk up or get stocky like his dad did, and when he hits puberty he doesn't shoot up like a tree like Jack Fenton did.

He stays small, and they say he's a late bloomer (and he is), or that he just has his mom's height. But he's fast and has good stamina, and some days it feels like he's built entirely different from his family. That the things they went through growing up just didn't apply to him. Jack and Maddie Fenton both had acne and breakouts when they hit puberty, and Jazz inherits it and he's seen the amount of skincare products she keeps on her side of the bathroom.

And then he hits puberty and breaks out maybe once or twice, but his skin stays clear for the most part and the problems and changes his dad went through just don't happen to him.

And the truth is worse than all of the lies.

How horrifying.

[cringefailvox]

charlie's low empathy/high sympathy desperation to help people without ever really understanding WHY they feel the way they do + vaggie's complex about needing to be useful to the people she loves or else she's worthless = charlie completely mistaking vaggie's self-sacrifical behavior for an expression of love and not the trauma response that it is, because all she's grasping are the literal words out of vaggie's mouth and not the alarming nuances of terrified self-hatred lurking underneath

[platoapproved]

armand + preparing to tell louis about his past

[koshercosplay]

Neil gaiman is a Zionist :(

this is so funny because if you google "neil gaiman zionist" nearly all of the links are to unsourced tumblr posts or responses to a single tweet from 2015 that just acknowledges Israel's existence

I see gaiman has once again committed the heinous crime of Being Jewish When Israel Is In The News

[autumnoakes]

okay but this update brings me back to melinoë's "with me or against me" view that she seems to have. people like eris, scylla, or prometheus who stand in her way are labelled as "enemy" and she can't really see things from their pov (eris especially is fascinating to see interact with melinoë because mel just cannot figure out or understand her motives). those who support her are labelled as friends. and it's pretty clear to see why she thinks this way when you look at what hecate and odysseus have to say. both of them pretty clearly hate chronos, and both of them had a large hand in raising melinoë. hecate especially was the one who trained melinoë from a really young age to kill chronos specifically, and she's the one mel looks up to the most (she sees hecate as a mother figure despite hecate wanting anything but).

what i find MOST fascinating is how melinoë just... doesn't really know how to handle nuance when it comes to friends vs. enemies. take arachne for example. there is a part in hades 2 when arachne just gets really bitter that melinoë is not only being helped by the olympians, but is helping them in turn. melinoë has absolutely NOTHING to say to arachne during that time (unless they added more dialogue in with the update). she doesn't know what to do when her friends are at odds with each other because of past conflicts, or how to address them. it goes against her black-and-white thought process and how she handles her morals.

[natashasbanner]

And another thing, these trials are all fun and games to Rio (obviously because there aren't any real stakes for her) right up until Agatha's about to get her feelings hurt. How very "still in love with my ex-wife" of her.

[haze-of-hyperfixations]

Eurylochus during Thunder Bringer:

[yashley]

Sometimes I do stuff to you guys while you're sleeping.

[biblically-accurate-dca]

various redraws of tsams thumbnails

[melverie]

Sometimes I'm doing well, and then other times Lucifer's level 30 intimacy phone call in Nightbringer suddenly comes back to mind, and I am once again reminded how Lucifer is so utterly desperate to connect with Satan in any way. It doesn't even have to be meaningful; just having his brother despise him a tiny bit less than before would already be more than enough

And when they finally do make the tiniest, most insignficant amount of progress imaginable, Lucifer is so overjoyed about it that he ends up celebrating with a horn of Demonus......or two, maybe three... Might as well finish the bottle. Let's open another one! And another, and another, and another! We've got to celebrate tonight, after all! Hm? No, he isn't drunk MC, what a stupid question to even ask. Here, he'll drink some more just to prove it! Then after that--!

And all that because he and Satan managed to hold a conversation for a minute longer than usual

[isthatacalzone]

me: *seeing people yell about how they did Glintshore & Percy's death in the show*

also me: ..................anyway

[enkays-den]

went out into the fields and harvested a bountiful crop of vintage imp and skizz

Sources: 1 and 2

Bonus goobers: