#or if you insult my family

[factual-flittermouse]

“The world isn’t kind” and neither am I

"the world isn't kind" ok??? Much more importantly are you?????

[sp0o0kylights]

Grass is green, water is wet, and Jonathan Byers does not like Steve Harrington.

These are known facts in the universe.

Computers were going to take over the world, a “mobile” phone was being invented, and Steve Harrington had lost most of his hearing.

These were unknown facts--rumors even, if you will. Eddie had never seen even a grain of truth to support any of them. 

(Well, maybe the computer thing, but only because Grant and Dustin both had made a couple of convincing arguments.) 

So he doesn’t think about it, when his freshman gang up on him. 

Doesn’t even factor the “can’t hear well” thing in, when he was tasked (demanded, whined, bitched and moaned at) with helping them explain to Steve why going to the release party of the new D&D box set, located at a hobby store only a mere 2 hour drive away, was important.

Eddie’s not even sure how the little shits got him to agree to do it until he’s standing in the parking lot in front of the former King himself. 

“The store’s leading up to the release with a handful of one-shots.” He’s explaining, unsure whether to pull out the bored act or play up his court jester persona, and thus mixing and matching on the fly. 

He does not care if Harrington doesn’t know what a one-shot is. 

“They’re releasing the set at midnight. You have to be there to get it though, you can’t have someone else pick it up for you because they only got a certain amount in.” 

Harrington’s frowning (no surprise) but it’s not until Eddie is well into his spiel about how his van is already full with the elder members of Hellfire, and thus has no room for the freshmen, that he realizes Steve isn’t quite looking at him. 

Is in fact, looking over his shoulder.

Eddie stops. Follows Harrington’s gaze.

Parked across from Steve’s Beemer, is Jonathan Byer’s barely working clunker car. 

A handful of steps in front of it, and thus nearly right behind Eddie, is the man himself.

His hands are still moving, mouth shaping words silent as he goes, his gaze locked not on Eddie or the kids--but on Steve. 

Who turns back around as Harrington’s eyes slide right back to him. 

“And this is taking place next Friday?” He says, in that sort of annoyed but resigned way parents aim at their children. “After school?” 

“I’d like to go during  school, but the freshmen insist you wouldn’t let them ditch out.” Eddie tells him. “They had two separate arguments about it.” 

Loud ones, that had interrupted the game and given Eddie a migraine. 

Once again Steve’s eyes slide away from him, to Jonathan. 

“They’re not skipping school.” He says suddenly, a glare forming and Jonathan makes an annoyed noise. 

“They argued about skipping, they’re not going to.” He says aloud, and finally steps up so that he’s next to Eddie instead of behind him. 

“Munson slow down, I can’t sign as fast as you’re talking.” He adds, in the hang-dog grumble he’s notorious for. 

Eddie stares at him. 

“Can he seriously not hear me?” 

“No.” Steve and Jonathan answer together. 

“I can kind of still hear,” Steve adds, gaze returning to Eddie’s face. “But its more loud music or noises. I can lip read, but you’re also talking too fast for that.” 

Without pausing, he turns back to Jonathan and says; “Why can’t you take them?”

“It’s Friday.” Byers deadpans. 

Eddie’s not an expert on sign language, but his hands somehow looked deadpan too. 

He’s not sure how Jonathan did that. 

“So?” Steve snarks back. 

What follows is an argument that Eddie is not, at all involved in, mostly because he’s too busy handling the fact that Jonathan Byers has learned sign language, for Steve Harrington, apparently, and given the tone the argument is taking they still don’t even like each other.  

Eventually the argument ends, Steve throwing his hands in the air and demanding that Jonathan owes him. 

(Eventually Eddie will corner the ever so quiet Will Byers and ask why the hell his brother learned sign language for someone he clearly fucking hates.

“Oh they don’t hate each other.” Baby Byers would say, in that shy, quiet way of his. “I think they’re actually friends now?” 

“You think?”

“Well--you’ve seen them.” Will shrugs. “I think being mean to each other is kinda their thing.” 

‘What the hell.’ Eddie would think, right up until he stumbled across one of the kids sign language books. 

Byers the Elder, he decides, isn’t the only person who should learn sign language to chew out Harrington properly.

The pay off is immediate. 

Or at least, the pay off of watching Steve’s shocked face the first time Eddie signs something vulgar at him is, anyway.)

[just-null]

there wasn't a slice of life moment with these idiots so i took matters into my own hands... this is my modern au (kimetsu gakuen adjacent?) hence their designs.

[captions i was too lazy to add under the cut]

[kacievvbbbb]

You ever think about how Mihawk definitely does not hear his name alot?

Like there are probably only 2 people in the entire world that consistently refer to him by name. To the rest of the world he’s just an epithet. He might as well have no real name for as little as he hears it.

He’ll hear it at introductions always preface by his epithet, he’ll see it in the bounty posters and notice it in the history books. But barely anyone will ever calm him that. Just a pink headed ghost girl and the red headed half of the most complicated situationship panning 20 years.

You ever think about how Shanks probably has a thousand and one nicknames for Mihawk he cycles through at a whim but maybe Mihawk’s favorite will always be the soft way in which Shanks calls out his given name like that’s all there is too it like there’s a Mihawk that exists all on its own. No matter the situation Shanks calls him Mihawk and he has his full attention

[bonefall]

Stormclan is pretty cool, I’m glad they are a direct result of the clans and not Rouge Group 255674385 that pops up like Minecraft mobs at night

Didn’t ivypool kill beetlewhisker? Will they remember it

The mental image of playing minecraft and Darktail spawns on your roof like a spider, refusing to leave in the daylight and making annoying chittering noises, is magical thank you.

Anyway nah, that was Brokenstar. Ivypool killed Antpelt, not Beetlewhisker. I have doubts they're going to remember that though, and if they do, it'll be one of those "don't worry guys we TOTALLY remember the events in our series!" throwaway lines we've been getting recently. The type that's thought in her head or thrown out in passing, but doesn't significantly contribute to Ivypool's emotional struggle.

I think Ivypool's actually the part of this SE that I'm most apprehensive about, funny enough. StormClan's got me pretty excited, but my hopes kinda started falling when I found out Dovewing was going on the road trip. I do not like the story that the Erins tell between the sisters, and I feel like they keep getting forced together to "reconcile their differences" when it would make a MUCH more effective story for the two of them to not do that.

See, what I like about Ivypool is that she's grudge-holding and spiteful. I LIKE that she tried to leverage her sisterhood with Dovewing in ASC to try and make her manipulate her husband. I find the fact she tried to sabotage SkyClan's chances at the lake back in AVoS to halt Dovewing and Tigerheart's relationship, slighting her apprentice in the process, to be COMPELLING.

I ENJOY reading about Ivypool being nasty. Both a victim of the Dark Forest who was targeted because she felt alienated, and yet, someone who has found a way to use Clan culture's most unfair aspects to her advantage. She'll NEVER see herself as the bully she actually is, because in her eyes, she's permanently the underdog.

so... I just have absolutely no desire to see Dovewing and Ivypool be "close."

Every time it happens on the page, it feels like it's Dovewing desperately wanting her sister to not treat her poorly, or believe in her, or just stop actively sabotaging her life. Then, Ivypool realizes this after a while and displays emotional intelligence that feels unfitting for her character, and apologizes.

It feels forced.

Like it's just happening because the authors know the fans want it, and not actually what these two characters would do. You get me?

I don't want to see them reconnect. I want more bittersweet examples in WC where family members have irreconcilable differences, but now and then, there's that little twinge of love, that old spark that you pray, THIS time, could become a fire... but it doesn't. There's just nothing left to burn.

TL;DR I'm feeling overall meh about Ivypool's Heart but looking forward to seeing what StormClan's all about.

[sysig]

I was inspired from on high (Patreon)

[demeterdefence]

been thinking a lot about how lore olympus really just could not fathom the concept of found family, it absolutely HAD to have a traditional blood-related family for the ending which is just ... so rachel honestly lmao we really should have known.

there were a lot of instances in the series where it almost seemed like rachel went out of her way to paint biological families as inherently dysfunctional, or at least not all they're cracked up to be - aphrodite is disdained by ares' family, zeus and hera are constantly arguing / zeus is constantly unfaithful, rhea and ouranos are an abusive marriage that begets three wildly traumatized sons, etc and so forth. that's not to say all families were bad or flawed (whether that was a choice or rachel spent so little time on them it just didn't come up) but the end result is that there were a lot of broken biological families in the series.

i think rachel wanted to demonstrate that you do not have to stick with an abusive family if they hurt you - that blood is not the defining aspect of family and bonds, that you can make your own and build your own family. i think rachel thought she was writing that, with how hades hates his dad and how persephone distances herself from demeter (who did nothing wrong but anyways.) the problem is, she absolutely does not follow through with it. at the end of the day, rachel is going to prioritize blood bonds and biological children over found family, because to her, that's the only family that counts.

like, hades raised thanatos from childhood and abuses the fuck out of him, completely traumatizes the god of death to the point thanatos is genuinely afraid of hades. thanatos is mocked, derided, scorned, and scoffed at by hades, constantly. thanatos did not have a CHOICE in who raised him, his mother abandoned him into hades' care. and hades does not for a single moment let up on how resentful he is about it. when thanatos finally admits that he only had hades as a parental figure (or ANY kind of family, tbh), hades turns it into how that affects him, how it makes him feel. after, we get two jokes about how hades is thanatos' dad now, and the last scene we ever get of thanatos is that "sometimes hades talks to him." thanatos never shows up in hades' daydreams of a family, he never shows up as a person who is important to hades. for centuries, hades was in charge of raising thanatos, not once does he ever appear in any of hades' dreams or wants regarding family. not biological family, so fuck off.

more to the point, the narrative makes it explicit to us that hades can't have children - it's brought up three times specifically, to drive the point home that hades wants children, he's definitely tried to have children, and it just won't happen. melinoe was seen as a way around that, and i won't lie, compared to rachel's usual hamfisted approaches, it wasn't the worst idea to have. but by the end of the series, it's shown that oh, nope, hades can have children (only with persephone though) and also they look like him, because biological bonds are everything. you know who doesn't count? dionysus, who was kidnapped from his dad and raised as a pet project for persephone. the kid helps her conquer winter or whatever the fuck that plot point was, but because he's not their biological child, hades and persephone ditch him after the final battle and throw him his old mom back to get rid of him.

biological children aren't a bad thing and it's not a bad thing to want or have them, but it's so fucking telling that hades and persephone have multiple people in their lives who should be considered family, and are picked up and discarded summarily once their use is over. dionysus was their proxy kid, and we literally do not see hades interact with him except maybe twice. thanatos gets absolutely trounced and i'll never not be angry about that. i don't even know what's going on with persephone's half brother, but he shows up for a single panel in the finale and then disappears.

wouldn't it have been so powerful if hades, an abuse victim, decided to be the father thanatos deserved? wouldn't it have been more in line with the supposed message of the story if hades and persephone opened their homes to people who once felt like them, abandoned and unwanted? at the very least, couldn't they have shown love to the people in their lives who sacrificed so much and put up with so much from them? what exactly is the measure of a family in lore olympus? we can't control who births us, but we can control the hurt we ourselves give, and the love we share, and that would have been an infinitely better ending for the two most selfish characters to show their growth. another disappointing pin in an already massively disappointing ending.

[lgbtlunaverse]

I know everyone here loves a good "A is injured and/or killed and their partner B absolutely loses it and puts the fear of god into everyone around them" as well as unhealthy devotion to the point of love superceding both self preservation and morality. They're classics for a reason. And I think it's fun that in mdzs basically every single one of the examples for either of these have not been romantic (I think lwj would be up for some wei wuxian-motivated murder if you put him in the right situation but the most he ever did in canon was injure some of his elders, and while intense his grief is mostly silent rather than explosive) but familial. All of the big revenge plans and post death/injury deadly freak-outs have been about family. Wei wuxian (and, honestly, Jiang Cheng) for Jiang Yanli. Wen qing and Wei Wuxian (again) for Wen Ning. Jin Guangyao for his mother. And, of course, the whole fucking plot is set in motion by Nie Huaisang going "I don't give a fuck who it sacrifices in the process i will get revenge for my brother's death" for Nie Mingjue.

It really is "unhealthy codependent family dynamics: the novel." I like it.

[bruhstation]

you deserved better from me than an oversized uniform and a world full of troubles

[sanasanakun]

Jimithon Mouthwashing is such a good representation of untreated, enabled NPD like it makes me want to squeeze the life out of him. I'm endlessly fascinated when watching him interact with his crew, surroundings, and himself because he's so fucking lost in his own sauce. It's insane. If I'm being real, it makes him my favorite character in the game.

It's a little scary to say, but watching Jimmy is like seeing a mirrored version of myself two years ago before I truly committed to treatment for my NPD. He's like a shadow. The opening line "I hope this hurts," which I believe comes from Jimmy right before the crash, is such a poignant statement. It's a simple line, but I can tell you from experience that the desire to hurt others when in a narcissistic rage is overwhelming. It's such a good line to sum up Jimmy's character in that moment. Luckily, in the real world, I had my friends and family there to catch me when I hit my lowest, even though I'd hurt them so many times. Jimmy probably could've used friends to force him into therapy (cough cough Curly cough cough)

[paverics]

a gay guy approached my mum on a night out last night and said he “knows” that she is transsexual because he’s a gay man and he “can tell”

but here’s the thing — my mum had cancer. twice. she lost all of her hair. it’s never grown back. she wears a wig. it’s something she’s incredibly self conscious about. and it made her cry

my mum had 2 surgeries to remove all of her female reproductive organs, and she still suffers from the aftermath of those surgeries. i spent 2 years thinking she was going to die. i saw her in hospital for weeks, unable to walk and barely eating. i see her now struggling with the consequences of those surgeries. her lack of hair is the least important or interesting thing about her. i’m just so thankful she’s still here, regardless of how she looks (which is still beautiful btw, and i wish she saw it)

so i just want to encourage people to keep thoughts to themselves because i cannot stress enough how wildly inappropriate it is to approach a cancer survivor and question their womanhood when that womanhood almost killed them. mind your business

[uncanny-tranny]

It's really frustrating being trans sometimes with cis loved ones because other cis people will go, "oh but it's such a huge adjustment for them! They're grieving for your pre-transition self/they aren't used to the change yet/it's hard on them!"

It's just so frustrating that people forget that trans people's feelings on this matter, too. Cis people aren't the only ones who have adjustments to make. Frankly, as much as I sympathize with cis people in this position, I can't help but be really jaded about it because so often, cis people jump to the defense of other cis people and they will seemingly forget to or refuse to give the same grace to trans people.

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

And that's why she's a Queen

[frippschamber]

She leaned against Alex, who was sitting next to Anne, and wrinkled up her nose. “You really smell,” Lisa said. “I hate to say it, but you don’t exactly smell like roses yourself,” Alex responded with a wry smile. [Soul Riders: Darkness Falling, Helena Dahlgren, pp. 101]

like, yeah lisa, you smell like manipulation and self-centredness

[citrlet]

why is everyone like "oh it's sunny outside! it's such a beautiful day it's so gorgeous and wonderful and the world is great"

and then talk about rainy days like "it's disgusting outside I hate it it's nasty yucky awful everything is horrible id simply die if i went outside"

[bananasfosterparent]

Got to my favorite part of Efenity's playthroughs in my current one 👌🏼😩

Astarion's ascension, the cold and unsexy sex scene (that's suspiciously genuine, intimate, and tender hmm) and the turning of Efenity. <3

The other fun part is finally getting to dress them up as Lord and Lady. Taking Astarion from vagabond-looking rogue to commanding Lord with OTT drip, and taking Efie from leather-clad streetrat to the glam baddie she has strived for her whole life but couldn't afford to be lmao

ALSO random, but this time, I brought Jaheira along instead of Gale, just to see what she'd say (if anything) and it's cute how much confidence she has in my Tav and Astarion to be "good" people 🤣 She really doesn't know them at all. She isn't there during his ascension in Efie's canon, but it was fun just to see what she would say.