#nobody expected this i'm sure

[braemjeorn]

Hwang Daewong x Seo Heejin | Untouchable

The Auditors (2024)

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I've seen the last '"g-d made you perfect" that I can handle, and it's led me to a realization about how I think of g-d.

I don't think we were made perfect. We were made human. And, if I'm honest, the only perfection in my mind is g-d, and that sense of perfection is what differentiates humans from g-d. If humans were as perfectly-made as g-d, I for one wouldn't see the point in following, believing, trusting, caring for, or loving g-d.

I guess for me, I see the ways in which humans alter the Way We Were Created that I really don't think it's right to speculate as to if there's a limit to altering our abilities or bodies. For instance, as a trans person, I've definitely been inundated with this idea that because g-d made my body "perfect" that I shouldn't alter it ever, but isn't that a dangerous precedent? Is it really so, that our bodies are magically made perfect, as g-d that to even tamper with the idea of change would be the same as cursing g-d? I really don't think that's compelling.

I love thinking about just how much g-d is placed into people, but I don't think it warrants restricting the ability to learn, create, grow, or change. Thank g-d that He created the ability to change!

[misc-obeyme]

I had a realization. The white marks on Mammon’s demon form are practically a one to one with his jewelry from his angel form. Are they scars and not tattoos???? I also noticed that with Beel a bit too…

Just something to chew on in your brain

HUH.

I never noticed that...

I always kinda imagined those markings as being like... not tattoos but naturally occurring? Like they're part of the demon form, you know? So they're just part of their body already. In which case it could be that their demon form markings naturally mirrored their angelic form's jewelry or design. Like that part of their body changed when their soul changed, a remnant of who they used to be.

Though if they were scars, that would imply that the jewelry actually physically damaged them when they fell, which is also a compelling idea. I mean, can you imagine during your fall from heaven that the angelic jewelry you were wearing started to burn you as you transformed into a demon? And then you carry the scars of that forever on your body??? DEVASTATING.

All the brothers have demon form markings of some kind, though. So it seems to me like they're more likely to be naturally occurring. Unless for some reason Mammon and Beel in particular had some reason for their demonic markings to manifest as scars and so they were the only ones who were burned by their jewelry as they fell. Which would also be a compelling story lol.

Anyway, this is indeed interesting...

[codemiracle]

What are all of their body types? Who is most to least muscular?

Yotsuya: Unexpected right? but my boy is JACKED. He literally lifts weights every time he's stressed and as an office worker, you know my boy is literally lifting every single day. 2. Seth: He's god, he didn't do shit. Seth doesn't even know what a "gym" is. Also, his muscles came with his body, so give all the credit to whoever he took the body from. 3. Dr. Kurosaki: He doesn't go that often to the gym anymore, but he used to train a lot when he was in college. Also, his metabolism is at its peak. 4. Tatsuya: He's not muscular per se, but his figure is pretty well-kept, especially bc he needs it for his job. Tbh from all the boys he has the worst diet so who knows how he's keeping his body in shape. 5. Yuuta has a weak body and he's not that fit at all, he looks a lot sickly too. But, funny enough, he's one of the strongest of them, my boy is fueled by pure rage.

[howtodisappearcompletelyand]

20/10 stars little guy

[thedreadvampy]

sometimes I forget that my experience has been. um. not 'your experiences are not universal' vibes but more like 'your experiences are EXTREMELY atypical'

[ssaalexblake]

it’s also baffling to me that tumblr, home of the ‘why are white men Still being cast as the doctor’ for So many years now (For you know, like over a decade.) is somehow not appalled that they hired a white dude to be the next Doctor because look okay it’s okay if it’s This white man. 

I mean, I do not consent to acknowledge that they’ve shoved him in there under any circumstance, but my Only need for the casting of the next person was that it was Not a white man, otherwise i didn’t care who it was, so when they “announced” Gatwa I was satisfied (i am hesitant to say they announced it bc it was more like a tiny footnote than an announcement, oh the disrespect) and it took a whole seven days (it was literally seven days. Yes i counted. it was easy since it was only seven days) it was ‘actually sorry no it’s this white dude we’ve already had before did we forget to mention that???’ and it’s steadily gotten worse and worse. 

That This site of all places is not up in arms about both the situation and how it specifically played out is depressing, but also massively and darkly hilarious.  

Especially since i Also remember nobody on this site thought casting Whittaker was good enough but literally going backward to a previous white man is?? This is not even a metaphor about diversity getting worse, they literally looked backwards. 

But, yeah,  tenn/ant with the ‘what the future looks like’ headline is uh... Good???? Not super worrying and ominous? 

I feel like i’ve been dumped in some weird parallel universe by reactions to all of this on here like??? the whole way this was done was appalling, the situation is appalling, but i guess the bbc/disney should get a rousing round of applause for accurately judging that nobody would care about their poor actions if the specific white guy they cast was popular enough that next to nobody would care. 

( and to the ‘it’s an anniversary ep’ thing, they legit could have just set a couple of eps in the past. i don’t mean they travel to the past. i mean just say ‘hey this ep is set during s4!’ and nobody would care. this show does weirder stuff than this every second episode. and it would still be bad, but how they did it is so much Worse.)

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[shower-racoon]

imagine if the Terraria bosses were on tumblr. what would they even post

[jichanxo]

sooooo... *twirls her hair* how many asks should i send until kuwagami art. jk as well. the real question will be: does it happen often that someone else’s art inspires you? in fandom spaces specifically

well you see it’s like a loyalty card program, every 10 asks or so you get a complimentary kuwagami

just kidding you can just breathe in my direction and I’ll be tempted to draw them. kuwagami blast! (you've caught me on a... just okay art day lol)

(people still like kabedons, right?)

anyway for my actual answer: in terms of direct inspiration, it doesn't really happen much? the last two times i did art directly based on someone else's work is probably this one from this fic, and also that time i drew art of someone else's judgment au. oh! and there's that moriohpsycho art based on this comic! (filthyguts' work is so very. hgngngghh. very good.) nothing else really comes to mind, and when i think of the other things i've been into recently there hasn't been as much opportunity for that to happen...

flex and herds = strong fixation but lmao. almost nobody else made stuff about them. nobody is surprised umineko = surprisingly i don't read much umineko fanfiction? and in terms of illustration, i certainly picked up imagery and indirect inspiration but nothing concrete enough for me to give an example... now that i think about it, i did once draw andromalius from redaction/sunny, but that was years ago, and also mostly because i was acquainted with the writer. ...i don't have that artwork on hand right now death note = didn't really get involved with the fandom + i enjoyed my own ideas well enough! ...i can't recall if i drew long-hair-L art before or after seeing other artists do it. and as for everything else the same kind of reasoning applies. didn't really get involved with the fandom or wasn't really compelled to make art in response to stuff i saw, or i just don't remember anymore.

buuuuuuut if we're opening this up to just... pulling ideas from other people? then yeah, all the time, though that kind of goes without saying when you have a creative hobby. ...it's probably going to be hard to come up with examples of this since it's more ambiguous.

there's uhhhhhh... kuwana listens to nickelback which was a @/four-white-trees invention, wasn't it? (EDIT: and @/overdevelopedglasses!) (not tagging in this post so he doesn't feel obligated to read my big ass ask responses 💀) as of writing this, it's not posted but i did end up making kuwagami art based on a nickelback song so. yknow. there's that LMAO

for sawashiro and arakawa, i do sometimes go reference @/todayisafridaynight 's art to help me with my own. ("how did he draw this part of the suit? oh, like that huh? hmm" <- this kind of thing)

and um. i'm not trying to pander to you (at least not this time), but genuinely it's one of the few examples that come to mind at this moment. but when i was writing my first kuwagami fic, i could feel the influence of the ever-changing on my brain... was turning over some of your ideas there...

you remember this? (you even pointed it out in your comment on my fic, and i should've said something then, but whatever i'm saying it now)

that was absolutely because of this

(obligatory poke at anybody else reading this post that you can read passthroughtime's fic here.)

so, um. yeah. not really sure what else to add to that. pretty self evident i think. (i'm always talking about the ever-changing but i don't think i can overstate the impression it left on me at the time)

anyhow there aren't really any other examples off the top of my head! these are all recent examples so they're not so difficult to recall, but there are probably others i've forgotten...

[ageless-aislynn]

Nowwwwww, I facetiously mentioned at the bottom of this post about the Halo: Reach achievement:

To do that, you have to go under or close to par time on pretty much each level ON LEGENDARY.

I have beaten Reach on Legendary but it probably took me closer to 30 hours than 3 because I did my slow, methodical strategies to get through. I did the par time achievement by running past everything I could on Easy. Can I combine the two successfully?

I decided to give the first level "Winter Contingency" a try (after watching some Youtube vids on getting this achievement, of course 😉). Par time is 15 minutes.

That was my third try, the first was 16 and some minutes, the second got it to 15 and some and then that one got under the par by 32 seconds! I should note that this is considered one of the easiest levels to do on Legendary and the guide I watched by the ever-awesome Halo Completionist did it under 12 minutes and you're going to need every spare second you can scrap together to give you a buffer for some of the long, difficult levels. But still!

It's silly, I know, but I feel so proud of me! I'm an old lady (well, middle-aged, if I'm being generous 😜) playing Halo with shaky hands but I made under par time on Legendary! 🥳🥳🥳

PS - Tried it again and got 13:55!

[hey-scully-itsme]

anyone got tips for finding and joining book clubs? mostly i think i need to see if there are postings at my nearest library and/or local coffee shops.

i'm a little worried - and this is largely anxiety speaking, i just need to try some clubs and i'll calm down – i'll have trouble finding a book club i can fit in with, partly because i avoid trendy reading culture both online and off, and partly because in college i was in what basically amounted to intensive book club meetings six hours a week, so i have a pretty direct discussion style that i often struggle to temper.

[kyofsonder]

Life, aiming a loaded crossbow at me: I'm sorry. You were involved in the decisions that led to this, but you can't know whether they're worth it until everything is done. This is the first step. Endure it as best you can.

Me, shot with the crossbow bolt: [looks down and sees a label tied to the bolt that reads "metaphor for stressful situation"] Ow. Thanks for the warning, I guess? At least it's the only thing I'm getting shot with for a good while.

Life, reloading several bolts into the crossbow at once: Have you ever heard of speed shooting?

Me: I want it to be known that I resent this.

Life: Noted. [shoots me multiple times in quick succession]

Me, on the floor and stuck full of crossbow bolts all over my body: Recovering from this is gonna suck.

[nixotinix]

Ok guys. A lot of y'all follow me on here for my Jackson and Holt content. Which I love!! But now I gotta know, and everybody is actually legally required to participate in this poll. I know we shouldn't pit two people who are technically the same person against each other, but I have to know everyone's personal decision:

Do feel free to defend and explain your pick in replies or reblogs. Get your votes in, people, so we can once and for all decide which one comes out on top.

[mishkakagehishka]

Different anon, lolthia uses @/edenstarrie now and was online at 4pm yesterday. Some account claiming to be a mutual of theirs from another platform (@/burneraccount6000) made a bunch of posts claiming that Lolthia said that they had a medical condition that could kill them if they got too stressed and that being isolated and alone is causing them tobstress and become extremely depressed. Them being dead is just an assumption since they haven't been online. Ngl, I think everyone is being too hard on the. From what I've been seeing since they moved to edenstarrie they've just been posting regular Eden content and just want to get noticed. I think they deserve a second chance despite everything but maybe I'm just too forgiving?

Tbh i think everyone should make their own decisions re: who deserves a second chance and who doesn't, i will admit i feel bad for them often, but the problem is that they self-sabotage way too much by spreading negativity in the main tags which naturally turns people off. I've no idea what their twt presence is like, i didn't even know they had one, but if they were really just normal there, i hope they did make a friend or two.

But, you know, it's mostly all this anon harassment that somehow always ends up tying back to them that makes me not wanna give them another chance. As i said, since i blocked them, i haven't seen any gatekeeper drama either. And now that i don't block one of their blogs - look what happens. Again, not saying anything. But at least it's an omen that friendship between me and them is not meant to be.

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

this is the funniest line ever in fodlanverse