#obv this is just for my interpretation

[fadewalking]

I said i wasn't going to say this hc out loud in case it ever got run over by future canon, but now that that's gone, I suppose there's no real harm in declaring it:

Felassan came from a spirit of Loyalty.

Why Loyalty?

To me, it seems like the main trait he embodies throughout his entire existence.

Loyalty to The People.

Loyalty to Solas.

Loyalty to a fault, at some points.

Felassan says you must always keep asking yourself if you are doing the right things for the right reasons, and then if you're not, you must be brave enough to change course (or something along those lines). And that to me is loyalty to the Self. Something Solas, on the other hand, fails at.

Felassan struggles with these several cords of loyalty in TME, and in the end, makes a decision that, while ungraciously labeled as the ultimate betrayal, I think is proof positive of his ultimate loyalty. He really does make the decision that is most loyal to all his connections. Briala, The People, himself, and even Solas in a roundabout way. But the fact that we can still acknowledge this as a betrayal gives even more impact to the idea that he manifested from Loyalty, doesn't it?

After all this time, after everything he's been through, after his undying loyalty throughout countless lifetimes, he finally draws the hardest line he's ever made, and he meets it bravely. It shows the evolutionary arc from a spirit restricted to its nature to a fully robust person capable of flexibility, adaptation, and nuance (Felassan is more spiritually and emotionally evolved than Solas, who finds it much more difficult to break out of his spirity binary thought patterns).

Looking at it this way also lends a bit more sense to Solas' decision to kill him (we still hate you for it, Solas), because if Solas sees this as a betrayal (Solas was the one to betray him, but ok), then he may see it as a thematic corruption of Felassan's nature as Loyalty. Oh you've been corrupted, Loyalty, thus sadly you must die. I say thematic, because Solas does know that Felassan isn't a spirit anymore and is capable of nuance, but it's the metaphor, and Solas is the type of bitch to kill for the symbolism of it all.

So anyway, change my mind, Felassan is Loyalty.

[ministarfruit]

day 18: once upon a time ♡

(femslashfeb prompt list)

[thatswhatsushesaid]

psa that the day there are no jgy stans left on tumblr dot com is the day i am dead

but rest assured i'll go to my grave exactly as i lived: obnoxiously proclaiming to everyone within earshot how great lianfang-zun is. narratively, metaphorically, spiritually. sexually, too, like why limit myself. i like to keep my options open

[abalidoth]

to me "girl" feels like a lego brick (not a lot on its own, but a fun component to make something cool) but "woman" feels like a funko pop (just like. an immutable premade object that you can't do anything with other than put it on a shelf)

does that make sense

[feroluce]

Had the cutest realization last night- so there's a saying we have in English meaning to get something done by any means necessary. It specifically includes dishonest methods, such as violence or lying. So when you're willing to resort to that kind of thing to achieve your goals, you say you're going to do something

"by hook or by crook"

[rebellum]

The whole transandrophobia discussion thing is weird bc it feels like it's a bunch of poc and jewish trans people being like "here are my experiences of how specifically being MASCULINE had affected me, and the discrimination and violence I experienced based on that. And here is how that relates to me being a racial/ethnic minority"

And then a few loud white trans people going "ohhh you wanna be oppressed so bad you *slur*. This is why there aren't any poc in your movement it's because REAL poc understand intersectionality"

[rollercoasterwords]

ok personal top 5 least favorite responses 2 lambpost:

1. terfs going ‘woman moment’ -> your politics are rooted in a fundamental reinvestment in the very sex binaries that undergird patriarchal power & your analysis of this post is shallow & mean-spirited. immediate block

2. ‘get therapy LOL’ -> health itself is a social construct as is mental health & therapy is not a neutral institution. your assumption that anything deemed strange/abnormal/uncomfortable must be the result of an emotional state in need of ‘fixing’ indicates a lack of critical self-reflection as to how and within what institutional confines your own ideas about what is ‘normal’ & ‘healthy’ have developed

3. ‘wait is this deep & meaningful or is it weird & horny i can’t tell’ -> your inability to reconcile the fact that the erotic can be meaningful & the grotesque sexual paired with your assumption that art must have a single, fundamental True meaning is tiresome

4. ‘oh yeah well i’m NOT the priest’s favorite sacrificial lamb because i bite & kick & fight back’ etc etc -> ok. why r u on the priest’s favorite sacrificial lamb post then

5. ‘clearly the Actual Meaning of this post is X & anyone interacting w it in a different way is a freak/brain damaged/incapable of critical thought/etc’ -> do u enjoy the pedestal u have built for urself. does it make u feel special.

personal top 5 favorite responses 2 lambpost:

1. this comic by @honeyedheartss -> beautiful & i am always thinking abt it <3

2. these tags by @unclemagnemite -> genuinely a fresh & fun interpretation i had not considered which added something new 2 my own experience of a post i wrote. also very funny

3. people making webweave posts w supernatural & succession characters -> this is what social media is meant for. also ur so right that character is definitely the priest’s favorite sacrificial lamb…

4. this fanart by @penaltyboxboxbox -> idk who that man is or why he’s the favorite sacrificial lamb but i think it’s so cool how his guts r out

5. this comment on tiktok -> let’s all hold hands & become alpha wolfs. together <3

[rox-of-iu]

hulloo, i am here once again with cultivate....but not the usual one (~_~;)

so funny thing! i had most of these already done from before, but felt a bit silly so i didnt post them. but then (spoiler) we got Tao Ying in his fresh new look and like.. i had to draw him and post the rest of the gang along with him hksfh. so here, the sillays

🍑Tao Ying

🐉Qing Mushu

🦆 The Empress

🐗The General

aaand more sillies of the goobers

aaaaand thats it hdjhdsjfhds so sorry for the long post lmao

characters yoinked from @neonghostcat cultivate

[only-the-shippers-can-bully-nrmt]

(Original Japanese on the left with translations under the break, Fan Translation in the middle, and Official Translation on the right.)

Saw some things flying around that have (unintentionally or otherwise) been giving people the wrong idea, so here are the comparisons to show that, yes, Miles was referring to Phoenix near the end of the second Miles Edgeworth Investigations game. Miles does bring up Gregory too, but Gregory being "that man" during the famous "shines brilliantly" scene was actually a change in the official English release that does not line up with the original Japanese version (even MTLs will get across the Wright meaning).

Also, "shining brilliantly in one's eyes" can be both how a son might look up to his father but also how a ruffly prosecutor might strongly/romantically see his courtroom partner; the line is simply intense enough to not easily carry the label of an "average" relationship. We don't need to elaborate when we tell family members/friends/significant others "I love you" (even if it's at the same time) for similar reasons, and I don't see anyone arguing that this means that Miles must see Phoenix like a father because he grouped them together in some form.

TL;DR: The official translation mucked up some context and stuff happened because of it. Keep shipping and feel free to use this as a reference post because the shippers did not misinterpret anything. We can have a conversation about how the change affected the moment, but the original context is still important and Phoenix was part of it.

Besides the translations, there are other points under the break as well, including a bonus of one of the nice and harmless additions the official translation changed/added with the "saved me from myself" line:

Translations (provided by a friend of mine who knows Japanese; edited at times to sound more natural in English or help get across the intended meaning)

........以前、 ある男が言っていました。

……..In the past, a certain man once said:

被告人の唯一の味方になって あげられるのが弁護士だと。

the only one willing to be the defendant's ally is their lawyer.

依頼人を信じることで、《真実》に近づいていく････

By believing in the defendant, the truth draws closer....

その男の姿は、私の目にも まぶしく映りました。

The image of that man was so bright in my eyes, it was engraved into my mind.

There's a bit more added here for clarification's sake and people like me who have a habit of taking metaphors too literally; essentially, the first part that's in the game is saying that the sight of "that man" was so blinding that it stuck in Miles's mind/memory eternally, so the translation in the fan version is correct in a direct translation and what it means is closer to the official.

(fun fact that if you go for an MTL, a translator may translate what in English was "image"/"sight" as "appearance" or "figure" which is technically accurate but obviously not the intent when translated, just as "so bright"/"shining brilliantly" may become "dazzling"; doesn't mean I won't mention it for people to imagine/have fun with though :3c "That man's figure was so dazzling in my eyes." my god)

法廷で戦う父と、同じように････

In the same way my father fighting in court does….

(without the clarification it's more like "In the same way my father fought in court...." but as above, message is clearer this way)

しかし、それはあくまで その男や父の生き方です。

However, that's just the way that man and my father lived their lives.

This is the big one since it makes a clear and blatantly obvious separation between "that man" and Gregory himself.

Here's another translation in a reblog of the post I linked, which follows even closer to the fan translation and is more straightforward.

My asks are open for any further translation clarifications people may want to make (don't want to bog down reblogs when edits can simply be made) but this was a long-winded way of saying that the fan translation was super on point with accuracy and the only thing of note is the "burning into memory" that the official one has to help get the point across (though I think more was definitely lost the way it was done).

Other Points

1 - Staying on the official translation, its use of "that man" is rather... bizarre, even if one hasn't seen the original. Such a use is typically for:

someone the game wants the audience for figure out on their own (so the character knows it but the player needs to go talk to the person themself once they figure it out)

someone who the character speaking isn't really familiar with (like, "oh yeah, that guy, I kind of remember now")

someone the game tries to keep secret a little longer for the sake of mystery (example being the fan translation where Ray refers to Gregory without a name drop for the build up that Ray worked for him)

Miles using the phrase and then saying "my father" in the very next sentence made me do a double take because I was totally caught off guard by how it was done.

The shot of Miles sepia toned in the courtroom (the fourth shot) doesn't even make sense anymore if he's only talking about Gregory since obviously he's never seen Gregory from across the courtroom while Miles has been behind the prosecutor's bench (nor do they do a camera slide as if Miles is only imagining himself across the courtroom from him; it flashes to white instead). It only makes sense if he's taking about Phoenix.

2 - Looking at it from a fan's perspective, it makes 150% sense why "that man" would immediately be associated with Phoenix in the context of the moment. Not only did the last case of the first game have that exact thing too ("In a situation like this… what would that man do…? What would he who can turn any desperate situation around do…?"), thus making it a near-perfect continuation of that, but "a defendant's only ally being their attorney" was a huge part of the original trilogy.

In fact, the official translation actually actively makes it weirder to leave Phoenix out of that bit because of the change "a friend to the friendless" it did, which catapulted me back so violently to Turnabout Sisters - the first serious case in the entire series - that it could've put me in a coma.

This is even disregarding how important the whole "trusting clients" and "finding the truth" stuff was in cases, especially 2-4.

It's like, "ah yes, Mr. Fender, that was yours and my father's life, not mine and also no one else's; honestly, not a single other important person in my life who I could have mentioned comes to mind" lol)

3 - From my own personal perspective, I'm not stirring up a fuss over shipping, it's not about that (though shippers getting thrown under the bus absolutely sucks). I'm far more baffled that it takes the already-not-around Phoenix and chucks his mention away for later.

4 - Anyone lamenting the loss of "shining brilliantly" for something else without the context has every right to be confused and should not be criticized for it. Shipper or otherwise, most wouldn't imagine for a second that the end of Miles's arc/self-reflection would have a significant change that takes 50% of the original meaning out.

This taken into account with my comment about the visual aid of Miles behind the prosecutor's bench in sepia during that very line furthers this. Obviously people will (still) think it's about Phoenix.

5 - I only linked to one of the comments/posts I saw in case I was accused of making things up. I don't actually recommend approaching/confronting anyone because I don't think it's worth the time/effort, so this is more for anyone who felt gaslit/like they'd gotten it wrong or wanted the actual evidence. I did check the blog of the person who I linked and they made a long answer to a person who was complaining about the people complaining about said post, but hadn't made an edit to their original post telling people that there were misinterpretations being made.

That's not actually me being aggressive in any way (it's their business and their blog), but pointing out that it's not something important to people like that. I'll also grant that some might simply not know enough about the fan translation/original meaning to get it, so don't stress about it is all I'll say. :)

6 - Here's the "saved me from myself" line as promised, congrats on listening to me babble and making it all the way down here~

[13eyond13]

love it when a character that's hard to read intuitively for you has like a dedicated fandom interpreter who can just glance at their blank face in a panel and then give you a 3k word essay on their innermost thoughts & desires & fears and neatly tie it back into the themes & whatnot as if it's the most obvious thing in the world

[cloud-based-and-rainpilled]

Michael Sheen playing Aziraphale as cockhungry as possible VS the Good Omens fandom and Neil Gaiman and the Lord himself screaming for Aziraphale to be asexual

[compacflt]

Rumors from Pearl Harbor.

When Admiral Kazansky first comes to Pearl, he brings with him about half of his previous staff, all exceptionally-hardworking people hand-picked over years—advisors, flag aides, secretaries, ranks all over the board. But his new hires, upon getting acquainted with the old guard, are shocked to discover that his previous staff still hardly knows him at all.

“He keeps to himself, mostly,” Lieutenant Commander Hartford explains over a pint. “I made the mistake of asking him once what he did for fun. You know, like, hobbies and stuff. He blinked at me for a second, and then said, ‘I read.’ That’s it! I read! My advice to you newcomers would be, don’t ask him questions about his personal life, because it tends to be pretty boring.”

“It sounds to me like he’s a walking, talking Wikipedia page,” says Captain Calvert, who worked for the previous two Pacific Fleet Commanders and thinks she knows how to deal with them by now. “We owe it to ourselves to figure him out. It’ll make our lives easier, anyway. So, let’s put our heads together: what do we know about him?”

What they know are his habits, which they’ll come to learn intimately over the next few years, and which are admittedly pretty boring. Admiral Kazansky is one of the first to show up to work in the morning and one of the last to leave in the evening. He often answers e-mails past 2300 hours, but never later than midnight. Jokes never catch him off-guard; he rarely smiles, and when he does, it has an ulterior motive. When he’s not working, he’s scheming and making plans to go back home to San Diego, and his requests for leave are always granted, because he works like a pack mule from home anyway. He signs off every e-mail with “Sincerely,”…

“Is he sincere, though?” asks Chief Warrant Officer Kent halfway through Admiral Kazansky’s first year. (Admiral Kazansky is surely unaware that his staff now spends the second Friday of every month chit-chatting about him over drinks in downtown Honolulu.) “I can’t ever tell. And he lives in Hawaii. San Diego’s nice, I know, but what’s so different about the beaches there that he can’t get here?”

“I genuinely don’t think he’s human,” confesses Commander Stoddard. “People warned me about that when I came here, and I laughed it off, but… he keeps his desk biologically sterile. Not one fingerprint, but I’ve never seen anyone wipe it down. I’ve looked through his drawers. Don’t judge me, I got curious. Everything squared away, like he’s goddamn Einstein or something. Have any of you ever seen him in his civvies?” No one has. “God damn it, where does he shop for groceries? No one’s seen him at a grocery store? Does he even own a pair of jeans? Does he wear his uniform to bed, too?”

“He probably goes grocery shopping on the whole other side of the island to avoid all the enlisted kids,” laughs Captain Calvert. “Come to think of it…you know how he always eats lunch in the office? It’s always a salad. And always the same kind of salad. This guy survives on one cup of coffee and one spinach salad a day. Maybe he really isn’t human.”

They build out their wealth of knowledge and come to learn that Admiral Kazansky is defined by his extremes, by what he always does and what he never does. Admiral Kazansky gets his uniforms dry-cleaned every week, though he never spills anything on them. No one has ever seen Admiral Kazansky stumble over his words while giving a speech, or trip over a sidewalk curb, or push a “pull” door. He is always polite and never friendly. Sometimes he is cold, and sometimes he is cruel in his patience with you when you’ve fucked up, like a cat toying with a hemorrhaging mouse. But he never raises his voice. He is always immaculately put-together, well-groomed, constructed every day like a product on an assembly line. Nothing is ever out of place. Allegedly his umbrella once turned inside-out during a rainstorm; he disdainfully shook it once, as a hunter might pump a loaded shotgun, and it flipped itself right-side-in again. The laws of physics do not seem to apply to him. Nor do the natural embarrassments that come with being human. Admiral Kazansky is never flustered, never harried, and never falls apart.

“I found this old picture of him shaking hands with another pilot on the Internet,” says Chief Warrant Officer Kent in Admiral Kazansky’s second year. “Smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Never seen him smile like that in all my years working with him. And he had frosted tips, too. Like Guy Fieri on a diet and steroids. It was the eighties, sure, but it’s like he knew how to have fun, once upon a time. Wonder what happened to him.”

“I feel lonely for him sometimes,” says Commander Stoddard. “Strict guy like that, no family, no friends, no wife, nothing to live for but the Navy? He’s like a workhorse with blinders on. Nowhere to go but forward. That’s a lonely existence.”

“Not if you’re a robot,” says Lieutenant Commander Hartford. “I swear, sometimes he breathes and it makes me jump, ‘cause I forgot he was alive!” —What else doesn’t Admiral Kazansky do?

That’s when they realize that none of them, not the old guard nor the new, has ever, not once, ever seen or heard Admiral Kazansky sneeze.

And they all finally give up the game and quit arguing and agree that, no, he really isn’t human after all. He must be some cyborg from the future sent to whip the Pacific Fleet into shape, and you can’t ask for too much humanity from someone who’s doing a pretty damn good job of it.

The rumors start soon after that. Jokes that could get them all tossed out of the Navy, but probably won’t. Jokes that accidentally spread like wildfire.

Yes, Admiral Kazansky could be a cyborg, but he also could be a Mormon fundamentalist, or a Scientologist, or a really weird Catholic. Maybe he goes home to San Diego so often because in his spare time he’s really a mule ferrying cocaine across the Mexi-Cali border. That’s what he does for fun. He eats spinach salads because he’s a reincarnation of Popeye the Sailor Man, and he needs all the super-strength he can get to deal with the Navy’s modern-day bullshit.

“I don’t know if that story makes sense,” laughs Captain Calvert on the phone with her husband in Washington, “but it makes more sense than the real Admiral Kazansky does!”

So the rumors get spread around.

“I don’t know if you know this,” Maverick comments, watching Ice make their bed from the relative comfort of the bedroom doorway, “or if I should tell you this, because you might crack down on it, which would be a shame, ‘cause it’s funny. But every time you send a mass e-mail to the Pacific Fleet commissioned officer corps, you become the main topic of conversation between all of us officers for a solid day and a half.”

“Oh?” says Ice with a smile, struggling to fit the last corner of the fitted sheet to the mattress. He sighs, tugs on the strings of his old ratty-ass hooded sweatshirt, and looks at Maverick balefully through his glasses. “Help me out over here, would you? —What are people saying? All good things, I hope.”

“Not really,” Maverick says, stuffing a pillow into a pillowcase as he stares out the window into the San Diego sunshine. “Some pretty crazy shit, actually. Hard as hell for me to keep a straight face. I heard this one—you know, people are saying you eat nothing but salads?”

“Oh,” laughs Ice, hospital-cornering the free sheet. “Yeah, that one’s kind of true. I bring salads in to the office sometimes.”

“You hate salads.”

“I know, it’s torture! Move over.” He bumps Maverick out of the way to tuck in the last corner. “But, I figure, if a man torments himself with spinach-and-arugula salads three times a week, you ought to respect his commitment. It’s all an act. You get to a certain Defense Department paygrade, it all starts being storytelling and stagecraft.”

“Or trickery and deception, depending on how you look at it.”

“Sure. But you could say that about everything. —Besides, I’d rather the Navy discuss my salads than discuss… well, this.” He gestures to Maverick, then down to the bed. They start tugging the comforter over it together. “How much slack you got over there?”

“‘Bout a foot.”

Ice pulls his side down a couple more inches to match, then flips the top up. “Is that it? That’s all people are saying about me?”

Maverick grins and bends down to pick up a pillow. “They’re also saying that you’re the reincarnation of Popeye the Sailor Man. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam, and all that. Think fast.”

Ice doesn’t think fast, and the pillow hits him square in the face, and he laughs again as he catches it in his arms. “Shit, that’s good,” he says; “I was just about to call Slider, think I’ll tell him that one. That’ll make him laugh. Popeye Iceman.” He tosses the pillow onto the made-up bed and pulls out his cell phone, but—then he frowns, grimaces, mutters “Ah, no,” and turns away to sneeze.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

hey do u guys wanna try a draw-this-in-your-style thing where we all finish the same sketch

[nero-neptune]

thinking about scars...

[the--highlanders]

whenever I think about zoe being aspec it's always like. obviously to an aspec viewer there's a lot about her that's relatable, especially in the wheel in space, where she relates to other people so differently and experiences relationships in a way which she knows is non-normative, but which she can't 'fix' and doesn't altogether hate - she just hates the way she's perceived. and over the course of her travels she doesn't change herself, just becomes more comfortable with relating to others as she is, and that lets her open up more. I'm preaching to the choir here ik ik you get it.

but from an in-universe perspective the way she relates to people is explicitly down to her training, rather than (exclusively) anything about zoe herself:

which obviously doesn't negate the way she comes across to the audience! but it /does/ make things interesting in-universe, because presumably the emotions she's been encouraged to neglect include anything approaching sexual/romantic attraction. she's probably been trained out of questioning that side of herself along with everything else.

so if you want to explore aspec zoe I just feel like that potentially leaves you with a scenario where she starts travelling with the tardis, starts working through all the parts of her humanity she's been missing out on, starts trying to figure out what attraction means for her, and there's just. nothing. which would throw her for a loop, right!! she's trying to reclaim all the parts of her that have been neglected, and she's still left with a gaping hole where other people have /something/. is this something she'll never fully develop, like gemma told her, or is this just an innate part of her? so she ends up coming around to the desperation to feel something and the difficulty of identifying an absence of feeling, and ultimately to having to learn to embrace it not because of her upbringing but in spite of it.

[poyameows]

I keep making posts about episode 24 but I am physically incapable of stopping.

I just keep thinking of the parallels between the demon baby feeding on Patricia and the actual toll of pregnancy and how it mirrors the idea of giving up your body for the sake of your child. Like during pregnancy your baby could be classed as a parasite.

Quote from - https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-archive/press-releases/pr9938.html#:~:text=The%20human%20foetus%20and%20placenta,particular%20diverting%20blood%20and%20nutrients.

The human foetus and placenta have a different genotype from the mother. The foetus has been described before as acting in a parasitic way: it avoids rejection by the mother and exerts considerable influence over her metabolism for its own benefit, in particular diverting blood and nutrients.

I just think its really interesting as someone who is personally terrified by the idea of pregnancy that the way in which the baby was acting is akin to a baby in the womb (obviously to a much more severe extent lol)