#of course I’m human

[fluffernuterfiller]

my personal favorite version of the “humans are special because…” is the idea that humans don’t just pack bond with other species we make other species pack bond with us

the idea that a human will pack bond with something/one and after a period of time that thing/person will begin to care about the human too, even if the species doesn’t typically form pack bonds or are exclusively solitary or only brought the human aboard for its usefulness (only thought of us as a tool to be used and discarded if no longer of use)

the idea that by caring for someone/thing we can make them go against their own nature and care for us too

I like the idea that once the alien’s figure out that it’s a thing™️ they try to study it and the results are frustratingly inconclusive, it’s not some sort of telepathic manipulation, it’s not pheromones, it’s not psychological conditioning, it’s not a method of training. it just is

Humans are Weirdos (ft.  animals)

I know a popular ‘humans are weird to aliens’ topic is how easily humans can bond to animals. But then think the opposite.

We humans are so weird because we are practically bonding magnets to animals.

We have our social hierarchies, so it makes sense that we can fit in with certain groups like dogs and even gorillas if we can understand them enough. We get ourselves acquainted with dogs who have been domesticated and these dogs will leap into our laps and constantly bother us for pets and treats and licking us as a way to show affection. People who can get certain animals to open up to us are super cool. Aliens are in awe of how our understanding of them can get us into a pack so readily that humans who are super close to normally protective dog mothers are allowed to hold their precious babies.

We can even manage to bond with animals like cats, known to be mostly solitary. We care for these cats and when they’re comfortable they will break their isolation and seek us out for affection.

Imagine an alien seeing a dog or cat go to an upset human and try to nuzzle them or snuggle into their lap to let themselves be held for our emotional comfort. These animals which, though currently domesticated, were descended from predators streamlined towards a goal of becoming efficient hunters. Willingly coming to our emotional aid and comforting us because they’ve bonded with us so closely.

Aliens see dogs act as protectors and bark away intruders on the human territory, but instantly turn happy when they know it’s their owner and friend. They see cats utilizing inborn maternal instincts to hunt down and leave ‘gifts’ of dead things in an effort to feed and teach their humans to take care of them since we’re such worthless hunters in their eyes. They’ll even know if something is wrong with humans medically before we do, or know about disturbances in the home like fires or gas leaks, and will uncharacteristically jump us to get us out of danger.

And when humans are in danger by others, and an animal senses it before we do, these animals will immediately jump on the defensive and snarl and warn against any potential enemies  and try to alert us.

You’ve got dogs who will literally jump on intruders and bite them when they’re trying to attack their human owners. Throwing themselves and and intimidating animals many times larger than themselves for our sake. Even cats, the ones people might think aren’t very interested in their humans, will throw themselves into the fray and claw the hell out of something that’s a danger to a precious human of theirs.

And, for an added bonus, imagine if we can get this to apply to bigger, deadlier animals with similar capacity for pack bonding.

After months and months of talking, mimicking, feeding, and caring for a giant predator the rest of the crew refuses to near, it’s sort of relaxed to the human. A sense of loyalty that 'yes, this creature cares for me’. Then, one day, pirates invade the vessel and somehow the animal gets loose. Cue the crew panicking when it comes ambling out of its’ holding bay at the time when a pirate is about to bring a knife or something down on the human. Two seconds later this pirate is running and screaming for its life when it sees it. The creature takes a running start, LEAPS over the human (which was closest to it and already injured) and takes off after it. When that pirate is either captured or dead, the creature returns to the human, nuzzling them and making sounds to see if they’re okay.

The human is smiling and mimicking the sounds back, or just talking to it to say what a 'good boy’ it is.

The aliens of the crew are in shock.  The rest of the humans just smile knowingly.

[raplinenthusiasts]

Outro: TEAR

© namuspromised

[yetdevout]

“you’re ruining me… and i’m letting you. god, i’d let you do anything to me,” is a crazy fucking thing to say as a possible fear demon by the way.

[scary-lasagna]

HABIT

“I just wanted flowers.”

It really pained you, that you asked for the simplest thing and didn’t receive it.

After months of asking, and buying your own flowers, you decided to not let this battle slide away from you anymore.

HABIT was always good to you, with constant praise, and date nights, and promises to get you things.

And yet, you always have to drag him out of his work just to remind him that you exist that day.

And deep down, it hurts. Because flowers are so simple, and at the right time of year you can find them in the side of the road.

They’re not expensive, not that money is of any proper value to him.

Your hope was fading, and you’ve realized you have pushed too far, because u like the other times you didn’t want to take, “I’m working on it, my sweet. I have plans for you. Big ones ” for an answer, when he has said that over a year ago.

You cried yourself to sleep that night, knowing he won’t come to bed until the late hours of the morning after hovering over his work for the whole day.

He won’t notice the dried tear stains on your pillow because he was too busy admiring how soft your skin looked in the moonlight.

A hopeless romantic, they call them. Maybe even a little narcissistic.

Too obliviously in love to value what you asked for, and has already decided what you really want.

HABIT didn’t think that you wanted silly old dying flowers. Nooo, you wanted a full garden. A bountiful garden that will last through the cold winters and stormy summers.

But you didn’t want a garden.

You only wished to dust off your vase, even just for a week out of the year.

Just flowers. Just for one week.

[thewiglesswonder]

Have been struggling through finals, but I’ve scrounged out a bit of time for art! Here’s a human Shockwave based on the Tuareg people of North Africa.

[leclerrari]

[netmors]

Very serious and focused Grand Admiral...

Sudden night time sketches. I wanted to preserve the process of working on the admiral's "flying head". Contrasting lighting is always so mesmerizing. Especially when want to create pathos.

And I still can’t decide… Red eyeliners for the eyes or more “alien” eyes???

I really liked the idea of Chiss eyes from @kobadit ✨

[firethekitty]

very unpopular trigun fandom opinion but. i really Don’t like when people write/draw wolfwood as being genuinely religious. like wearing rosary and praying every night and saying grace before eating and shit. HE SHOOTS PEOPLE AND KILLS THEM and smokes and drinks and curses and wears his collar as wide open as possible and is a Literal Hitman who was kidnapped by a religious cult as a child. do you guys sincerely believe he’s a good christian boy or something

[tf2heritageposts]

look i’m about to take a nap but i want everyone to know that no matter what happens it is all going to turn out okay. if you’re overwhelmed about it all and feel like the world is closing in on you, put the social media down for a few minutes and go pet your animal and talk to your friends. it’s all shock and awe and you’re meant to feel like it’s all encompassing and can’t be stopped, but it can be stopped.

however you still need time to let yourself breathe before you can do any work to help make things less worse. i love you

[bog-bitch]

Boot and sock containing the foot of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared near the summit of Mount Everest in June of 1924.

Photographs by Jimmy Chin

[nattikay]

after the post from yesterday, thinking more about the folks who claim that the RDA are “actually the good guys” and the more I think about it the more baffled I am that this is an actual take people have.

First, I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the RDA in A1 is trying to “save humanity” (most of the what arguments I see are regarding A1 so Bridgehead City and Ardmore’s “new home for humanity” thing in A2 are irrelevant and a topic for another day). As I already detailed in the previous post, A1 makes it pretty dang explicitly clear that the RDA is mining unobtainium for the money and the money only. Unobtainium is a convenience for humans, it’s desirable, but it’s not a necessity. They can use it to make some dang fancy technology, but they can survive without it.

But ok, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that the RDA’s main goal is to protect humanity and that unobtainium is crucial to humanity’s survival. Does that justify their actions? The bombing of Hometree, the bulldozing of the Tree of Voices, the assault on the Well of Souls?

Starting with Hometree, it may be true that the unobtainium deposit underneath it was the richest in the local area, but that doesn’t mean it was the only possible deposit available anywhere. They’d just have to move their operation somewhere else. “They [the Na'vi] can move!”, Selfridge shouts? You can move too, buddy. Violently forcing the Omatikaya out of their home to take the resources you need (even if you really do need them, not just want them!) is not justified when you can just get said resources somewhere else. Sure, it would be a hassle to pack up and move the operation, but violence is not a proportional response to inconvenience.

But ok, let’s add another stipulation, let’s say that the deposit under Hometree was THE only one available absolutely anywhere. Combined with the idea that humanity needs unobtainium to survive (which again is not actually true, but for the sake of the argument), this is the closest you can come to possibly justifying the attack. Even with all these stipulations, though…bombing a village and killing innocent people in the process is still…not good. You can certainly argue that it’s a necessary evil in these specific circumstances—a desperate “either they die or we die, we can’t both live, so of course we’re gonna fight for ourselves to be the survivors” kind of thing—but still an evil nonetheless.

But even if you can kinda-sorta justify Hometree IF you pretend that 1.) humanity needs unobtainium for their survival and 2.) the unobtainium deposit under Hometree is the only one available on the whole moon, what about their other attacks?

What about bulldozing the Tree of Voices? That place didn’t have a special unobtainium deposit. What could bulldozing that area possibly do to “save humanity”? What would the point of that be?

Well, they tell you in the movie. Grace comments on the situation, “they bulldozed a sacred place on purpose to trigger a response”. Jake concurs, “when people are sitting on s*** that you want, you make them your enemy, and then you’re justified in taking it.”

The RDA bulldozed the Tree of Voices specifically to anger the Na'vi, to provoke them into retaliation so that the RDA has a better excuse to attack Hometree. I’m sorry but you cannot justify that with “but they’re just trying to save humanity guys!!1!”

And the attack on the Well of Souls? Even worse. Bombing the Well of Souls was not meant to “help humanity”, it was meant explicitly to harm the Na'vi. Quaritch says during his briefing, “we will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep that they will never come within a thousand klicks of this place ever again”. I cannot fathom how anyone can hear a brief like that and not recognize it as straight-up literal terrorism.

…and then, of course, you remember that canonically the RDA is not doing any of this to “save humanity”, they’re doing it for MONEY. They’re doing it to protect their bottom line. Any shred of justification they might have been able to scrape as “defenders of humanity” evaporates there.

And that’s only the stuff they do in A1! They have a plethora of other sins under their belt, such as the massacre of the Sarentu clan in AFoP. I don’t even wanna know how the RDA defenders attempt to justify that.

so um. Yeah. Believe it or not the very clear and very obvious bad guys are in fact the bad guys. Again it absolutely baffles me that this has to be stated but apparently it does.

[elendsessor]

every once in awhile i think about an idea @hautecl-re told me about (who is a very awesome person who you should follow asap) which is trans rella. and it makes so much sense on several levels.

(spoilers below!)

think about it: regardless of if she has womb envy or some other kind of dysphoria, it’s really clear she was wracked with guilt over the prince assassination attempt, so transitioning as a means to feel more comfortable with herself and distance herself from louis is plausible.

we don’t really see much of young rella outside of the one exposition cutscene and i don’t think we see the front side of her so for all we know she could’ve appeared more masculine which further gave forden reason to use her as a double to frame the evil twink.

also due to how the sex spectrum works, there can be a massive imbalance between testosterone and estrogen exposure during fetus growth (which is part of where the gay gene theory comes from), which is what often creates physical differences, be it on a build or genital front. the ishkia we see tend to have more typically feminine traits or are otherwise not as masculine, so there could be a case of pre-existing excessive estrogen that becomes more intense within male ishkia.

good chance i’m overthinking the last part, since a majority of character designs tend to be not really all that muscular. a couple roussainte, mainly bardon, are as broad as anyone gets outside of monsters. could also be because of euchronia initially being tokyo or at least shinjuku so stereotypical traits carried over. regardless, the genetic implications could 100% aid in transitioning, so even if they don’t have something like top surgery, transitioning is still possible.

tldr; trans rella is not only realistically a possibility but is also a goated idea and i believe in trans rella supremacy

[somedudewithantlers]

what if Ford got gender envy from Bill. Is this anything

[starry-eyer]

magic in asoiaf is genetic. and that is intresting. and the fact that grrm doesn’t shy away from the implications of this makes me love asoiaf even more.

because it’s very understandable that these people who could ride dragons would see themselves as more gods than men. it’s understandable that the practice of sibling-sibling incest would become common in order to keep this ability in the family/to not lose said ability. it’s also understandable that these people would see their race as superior because they are able to do these things that others could not.

it also makes complete sense that this human civilization collapsed in a horrific magical event due to their own hubris because they saw themselves as gods when they were always only men.

and that is peak world building.

some more peak world building is that the noble houses of westeros also clearly gained power and held onto their power through the use of their magical abilities inherited from their ancestors.

a godlike existence like Garth the Green being the ancestor of all the oldest and most noble of the reach houses makes perfect sense for this world!and it also makes sense that the lords without this ancestry are discriminated against in this region that still holds onto the values their society cultivated in the past in order to maintain their magical superiority, even though most of these noble and old houses no longer exhibit these abilities.

and it also makes sense that these people no longer have access to these abilities as they no longer practice the religion that was centered around these powers; plus their blood is simply diluted at this point as these houses have married into a different ethnic group so often that the magical gene just doesn’t surface anymore.

but the fact that it still matters if you can trace your ancestry back to Garth the Green? peak! peak! peak!

george does such an excellent job showcasing the stagnation of westerosi society here because why should it matter if you’re connected to this magic guy if magic is no longer commonplace? however, it also makes total sense that the ruling class of the reach still harps on and on about this as it’s how they maintain the status quo and differentiate themselves from those they consider lesser now that they no longer have access to magic themselves.

and this is also why it’s very important that the Starks still retain the blood of the first men. because the first men interbred with the children of the forest and other elder races, which is what gave these humans these powers. it’s also worth noting that before the direwolves connected with the Stark children, none of our current Starks were able to awaken their abilities by themselves, which shows that even now they are very far removed from their ancestor who’s genetic makeup gave this bloodline these abilities. and it makes sense that the Starks experienced this slow magical decline because magic itself was declining in the world after the doom of valyria.

another reason for this decline is because Andal culture started heavily influencing the North and slowly changed the way magic was perceived. so now in the present, a warg/skinchanger/greenseer has become something to fear being because that’d make you different and therefore puts your life at risk, which means that there’s now practically no safe environment to cultivate these abilities and no secure way to pass down any knowledge you do have about said abilities.

i can’t help but be reminded about how Jon Snow has rejected his nature and how that has led to the stagnation of his abilities, and then i think about Arya and Bran and how their new environments have led to an astonishing growth in their abilities, which shows that it’s not just genetics that matter, environment is also just as, if not more, important.

i bring all of this up because magic being genetic in asoiaf is not as problematic as people try to make it out as. in real life, sometimes people just have genetic gifts. some people can become olympians, and some people are disabled. some people are born 10 times smarter than the average human, and some people believe that covering their faces in lemon juice would turn them invisible. that is reality. and in this universe, some people have access to magic and some don’t, and it’s all based on genetics. it’s unfair! and that makes it realistic.

not everyone gets to ride dragons and not everyone gets to travel back in time, and that grounds asoiaf, which is what grrm was going for.

and how these societies have organized themselves in response to these genetic abilities and the dangers they pose makes absolute sense. on one hand we have the valyrian freehold, which was a magic hotspot and the people who lived there used magic to propel their society to new heights, and on the other hand we have the seven kingdoms that demonize anyone too different, and all magic practitioners are different from normal humans.

and the fact that george decided to go this route with asoiaf is so juicy to me cause:

we have characters like Varamyr and Euron who use their abilities to commit great evils and we know that their powers have influenced the way they see and interact with others. on the other hand we have characters like Dany who use their abilities to fight against evil violent institutions. and through characters like her we learn how vulnerable fledgling magic practitioners/characters with these abilities are to these older and more dangerous institutions and individuals who are perfectly aware about the knowledge gap between them and these younger characters and know exactly how to exploit them.

so, while it’s understandable that the fandom is uncomfy with the practices and values that grrm has written about, this isn’t bad world building by any means. it’s logical and well thought out. and i truly enjoy that grrm doesn’t shy away from writing about the more worrying aspects and implications of magic being a matter of genetics. i also like how the seven kingdoms and the valyrian freehold are kinda extremes on the matter of magic and how this is/was detrimental to both of these societies and at the individual level. a horrific magical firey doom is not any better nor any worse than a slow drawn out icey decline.

imo, what is important to remember is that in the world of asoiaf, people with magic are the ones who are discriminated against (bc most POV characters are in Westeros and magic is a no no there). so they are the ones who are in danger if they out themselves as magic users. now, it is true that some societies are more tolerant (Qarth is a great example of this and Valyria before the doom was likely the most tolerant to have ever existed in this world), but as of now most societies simply aren’t. remember jojens warning? he didn’t pull that out of his ass. bran would’ve been in a lot of danger if he came out and told the wrong people about his dreams/abilities. also, jon’s assassination may have been partly motivated by the mutineers fear of wargs. this is the life-threatening danger magic practitioners are in for simply existing in an intolerant society.

tbh the reason i typed all this up is because it’s very annoying when people try to ignore the reality, which is that the dragonbond depends on genetics. now, i’m sure there are other ways to ride a dragon, as dragons are magical animals so of course there may be a one in a million chance of a dragon allowing some rando to ride it, but this doesn’t change the fact that there is such a thing as a genetic ability that gives these certain humans the ability to form a connection with a dragon.

(another example that i can’t help but remember is that melisandre was able to get ghosts approval by using some of her tricks. of course there could be other reasons for ghost to have done this, but the most likely reason is that ghost simply fell for melisandre’s trick and this influenced how jon saw mel. but this doesn’t change the fact that melisandre will never have the kind of bond jon and ghost have because melisandre is not a warg. this is also another example of how vulnerable fledgling magic practitioners are to older ones.)

so, sorry not sorry that george decided to create a realistic representation of what a society would look like if only certain bloodlines were able to ride dragons <\3.

[lynxfrost13]

I need to make more human AUs of my replikas so far I’ve got:

Holt as a nurse in a hospital and Wanze having a serious injury and being her patient with the two of them eventually falling in love after Wanze recovers (they get to have more fun together here thanks to no Eusan Nation), only for Holt to later on get cancer and not be able to recover from it :(

Kosmos and Dorredt as astronauts on a space station going from reluctant coworkers to best friends with Kosmos being more data/science oriented and Dorredt taking care of maintenance and repairs

I also have one with Feuerkröte as a military dropout but I don’t have a whole lot else apart from she has fire tattoos on her arms because she thought they were badass (they are but she kinda sucks about it)

[skyblueartt]

You ever just sit back and realize. Damn. I’m really writing freddy fazbear fanficiton