#or do a giveaway?

[sirenthestone]

I made bracelets!

I messed up my first Spoon bracelet. It's too small. I might sell it.

[fumifooms]

I don’t like minimizing the importance and gravity of Laios and Toshiro’s fight into just being a childish squabble, even if to a degree it is framed that way, because to both of them it has a lot of personal significance and emotional weight and runs very deep to their characters… The fight isn’t nothing it’s a LOT, they made up but it’s not something easy to express and to get over for either of them which makes it all the more meaningful! I’m on both sides but there very much are sides, there’s no "they’re both having a ball, Toshiro and Laios hand in hand yay" side to the fight, that comes after

The fight with Toshiro WAS very scary to Laios, almost existentially so, but it’s moreso the "I thought I’d made a friend!!" bit and my god. My god actually

Like it’s not "just" about oh his friend liking him less than he thought, THAT IS SO MUCH. It’s a bond he thought he had being a lie it’s all the time and moments spent together either being a lie from his perspective or marred now looking back. It’s not only being upset at Toshiro for lying but upset at himself that he’s so easy to fool, it’s being upset that there’s something so wrong with you that you can’t even tell if your "close buddy" even actually likes you or not, it’s like. Holding my head. He can’t trust his own vision of events that happened do you see. There’s always this film of distrust that it could be a lie that should be there when he interacts with people there’s always this sense of cloak and dagger to expect backstabs out of nowhere because you CAN’T see it coming you CAN’T you CAN’T there’s something about you which makes it impossible so you CAN’T-

He’s so scared of not being able to read people. He knows it’s a weak spot he has, he’s always known. All of these bits are centered around social expectations and betrayals, the assumption that he doesn’t belong either in society or with other humans.

And Laios’ level of awareness is actually sort of complex to analyze, but it’s there, there’s how out of him and Falin he was the one sensitive to the ~aura of hatred~ he felt from the townspeople, there’s of course his nightmares whispering to him about the mocking looks, and how yeah actually he realizes that his gold stripper coworker was taking advantage of him. There’s of course the Winged Lion speech about his trauma and how he fundamentally mistrusts/dislikes humans to some deep seated degree, this distrust that he still keeps under control always. There’s how pre-canon he often wanted to suggest eating monsters but never worked up the courage to bring it up with the others. There’s how he gets across as stoic when he isn’t being enthusiastic…… We don’t know how aware and wary he is exactly in the moment but we do know he has some anxiety around social stuff, and looking back he does notice and aughh augh, the sense you have to hide yourself to not get hurt and be on your guard and shit and.

When you don’t know what to look out for and when to look out for it, the general ‘common sense’ of not always trusting people or noticing when someone’s messing with you becomes hypervigilance in social settings

"Man they really know what you hate huh." Being socially unaware literally plagues him, he knows, he knows it so well.

It’s so quick that it’s almost hard to digest how literal and blatant Laios summoning his monster to crush all the people who’ve hurt him is. His literal go-to coping mechanism for comfort in his literal monster-induced emotionally intense nightmares, saving him by taking away the upsetting element (the humans)

"Monsters are his coping fantasy, where they can whisk him away from humanity, all the hurt it’s caused him and its arbitrary rules" with the subtlety of a brick. Monsters are his comfort safe zone "because they kill humans" yes but no it’s because he pits them as the guardians against humans who to him are in the role of the agressors. To him they represent freedom from the shackles of what it means to be part of humanity, a fundamentally social species

[jgvfhl]

Continuing my animal shifter/therian au for the military propaganda games with Nik and Price. Nik is a polar bear and Price is a Eurasian brown bear. No explanation needed. (There is lore under the cut)

Nik is #obsessed with Price's fuzzy ears. Nik also has some questionable eating habits, but it's not his fault! Polar bears just... casually hunt humans down and eat them, okay! Is it technically cannibalism if he doesn't chew on other therians? The only features Nik retains as a human are large white streaks in his hair that started appearing in his teens. He's honestly fairly low-key until he's suddenly like 8ft tall and threatening to eat people.

Price's ears are usually a dead giveaway, but they are the only physical features he retains in human form. His eyes are the dead giveaway in his animal form. Well. That, and most bears don't wear hats.

Soap & Ghost & Gaz || Alejandro & Rudy || Phillip Graves

@worldseer @cod-dump @gomzdrawfr @midnight193 @totally-not-fandom @daftdrac

[blackghostm2oart]

I was on the mood to do less cartoony drawings.

Here’s Cherik (ignore the hands)

And a Merik one (I will not tell the specific actor because I feel… Idk… Like overestimating my skills? Being pretentious?… Idk how to explain it)

If you get who this is, I love you *smooch* <3

[emceescha]

alright. here we go. happy 100 emceeschers 📢📢📢💥💥💥

mutuals and followers. meaning YOU 🫵 yes YOU 🫵 reblog with an f/o + s/i and maybe some ship art or a song and i will make YOU 🫵 a short early 2000s style amv for YOUR ship. if you don't have ship art i will MAKE SOME for you. GO

[ckret2]

My interpretation of sinner bill-

there he is. origami Bill.

[elysiae]

sometimes i hate the whole rule of "don't include details in your writing that your audience doesn't need to know" because sometimes i really want to just write my characters being human. like, stuttering and fumbling a word or sentence so bad they just have to stop and go "wow." and have the other characters laugh with them about it, or have their mind get so wildly sidetracked that they go "--wait, what was i thinking about? what was i doing? oh right", or fiddling with something and dropping it and scrambling to catch it, miss it and pretend it never happened before awkwardly picking it up. or, hell, laughing at a stupid comment in their head, trying to salt their food and the whole fucking lid coming off, pausing and forgetting what the other person was talking about because they saw a cute dog and completely tuned them out, having a serious conversation and being interrupted by a cat, I could go on and on. but no it'll distract the reader, and i get it, i understand, but man sometimes do i just want to write silly little inconveniences or joys into my story that have no real meaning other than sprinkling some more humanity into my darlings, to just show that theyre going through their day to day life too. its not all trauma i promise, sometimes there's a cute kitty in the window and you gotta almost run into a pole over it, or skid on the icy sidewalk you didnt know was glare ice, or be mesmerised by a really messed up blinking store sign, or see a really cool bird and point it out to your friends, you know?

[tosahobi-if]

the wonderful @vampyrrhik gave me the honor of drawing their tshb oc for their giveaway prize! i had a ton of fun working on this, and i’m super excited to do more of these in the future!

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2025: OVERGROWTH by Mira Grant.

Plant-astically delighted to report that I received an ARC via Tor (Nightfire) and Goodreads! I love Seanan McGuire's writing, and my first foray into her work as Mira Grant was INTO THE DROWNING DEEP, which was phenomenal (think all the best parts of Michael Crichton--the Science, the Speculation, the Consequences--but women and queer people are Entire Characters)(we love a good sci-fi horror paced like a thriller in this house).

The premise of OVERGROWTH is basically "the pod people are coming, they've been warning you about it for decades, and no one has been listening." Stasia, our main character and (first person, past tense) narrator, has spent her whole life telling people that she's "the vanguard of an invading species of intelligent alien plants," which is confirmed via a broadcast from space.

And the chapters are time-stamped "X days pre-invasion."

Yeah.

This book was an absolute delight and all around a lot of fun--the tone was the perfect balance of funny and heartfelt and relatable and dread-inducing, and it very much read like a love letter to the genre with lots of cross-pollinated references (Seymour? Little Shop of Horrors? War of the Worlds? Jurassic Park? Hello????).

It was also very much a book about the distinction between being human and being a person, and about alienation and belief and trust and friendship, and about queerness and neurodivergence and belonging. And, y'know, mimetic plant aliens, in myriad shades of green.

I was initially surprised by the choice to tell this story in past tense and first person (because DROWNING DEEP was patently not that, and most of what I've read of McGuire hasn't been either), but it turns out that was The Only Correct Way To Do It: For most of the book, Stasia didn't have the full picture of what was going on, but her partial understanding + our readerly perspective from inside her head carried both the relatability and the horror. It was a really interesting and cool way to do an alien invasion book (from the perspective of the invader's plant)(ahaha, botanical pun). Also, the narrative frame made me pterodactyl Hunter shriek my way through the last two pages, which. OOF. WHAT A RIDE!!! I'll be rotisserie-ing over the late-game twist (page 396/465 in my copy) and the ending for a long time.

I loved that the aliens felt alien and all too much like people; I loved Toni and Hunter; I loved the biology and worldbuilding; I loved the botanical quips ("salad bar" is, in fact, the best possible term of address to an alien invader, no notes); I loved the shady government agencies and unethical experimentation; I loved the "we are the monsters you have made". I stayed up way past my bedtime several times for this, and it was worth every second. Do recommend, check this out in May!!

Half-assed spoilery content warnings under the cut (I'm not good at these because I have a weird concept of what necessitates a warning, so please do NOT consider these complete in any way shape or form):

on-page toddler death (graphic, in prologue, signposted with "look away"); transphobia (toward beloved trans character); spider (alien); bug-adjacent (alien); vampirism/blood drinking; other usual horror/alien invasion type tropes etc. (body horror? do people tag body horror?? i was an animorphs kid i'm sorry i don't know what a normal amount of body horror is but i love it all)

[front-facing-pokemon]

[marblerose-rue]

click for better quality!

if only / snowkit and speckletail