#or start and argument I promise

[venomspecs]

Tiktok users describing Odysseus as the hot guy who gets all the goddesses because he's a sigma again 🫠

[diino8081]

swap au or something

ekko -> viktor

viktor -> jinx

jinx -> ekko

i read this fic and got inspired. it doesn't follow the canon to it but it inspired me (do check it out though it's really cool)

if you got any au questions then throw em at me (i've only watched arcane once tho so i might not have answers)

(more in the tags)

[bugwolfsstuff]

*Makes an anti-Luke Castellan post (or any kind of post that does not see Hermes as the devil incarnate)*

Ar nawr am i gonna get screenshotted and complained about again

[autumn-applepie]

University ever pushes you so low you have to go buy a couple of beers? /srs/neg

I'm gonna vent in the tags for a moment humor me for once /gen

[revui]

(greetings to followers and mutuals alike. if you've seen recent tags, you know what's about to happen)

FL theory time: I think Miranda's missing twin is actually Sunset. Hear me out.

Hint 1 - The Timeline

We know Miranda and her twin were taken to the Foreverlands about/at least two years ago.

So assuming that Miranda and Skyler DID both end up in the Foreverlands, that means they got dumped in two different spots about two years ago. And that matches the evidence we have for when "Sunset" first rose to prominence.

And speaking of...

Hint 2 - "The Teeth Thing"

Rewinding to Tuesday, one of many things that went on included Sunset and Evander publicly turning on and killing Ranger. Now obviously the part people focus on is that, according to Miranda, Ranger looked a lot like how she remembered Skyler, even though once she found his body the differences were pretty obvious.

I think the spotlight on Ranger and how much he looks like Skyler is an intentional distraction from Sunset's involvement. The moment Ranger starts pulling Sunset's mask off during the fight, SHE RIPS HIS THROAT OUT WITH HER TEETH. Sunset escalates immediately in response to the threat of her face being exposed, and why? It could be that she knows there's someone out there who would hate to find out she's a murderer.

This is a microcosm of a greater point about how desperate Sunset seems to hide everything about who they are. They never speak, they hide their face religiously, the only time they even show skin (so far) is when they take their gloves off after Tessera goads them into a fistfight. And why?

Hint 3 - Colum

During School of Masters, there's that moment in the middle of Thistle's storm on Wildwood where something happens, something related to Sunset, and obviously Azar can't see it, but Colum does. Whatever it is matters more to him than pretty much anything else so far, and out of nowhere he starts expressing the desire to find Sunset himself.

Remember, Miranda has only told two people about her twin: Kassandra and Colum. There are only three people in the world who know Skyler's name and face, and only one of them is present for this moment. I contend that what happened was the mask coming off. How much do you wanna bet that Colum saw her face and realized she was Skyler?

That would also explain lines like this when he's talking about Sunset in the next book:

What "answers" does he want? His motives are much clearer if you assume that Sunset and Skyler are one in the same. And considering how Colum usually behaves, it's not a stretch to say he wouldn't tell Miranda right away.

Hint 4 - Gender

Miranda sort of implies that Skyler is genderfluid, and thus references to Skyler use he, she, and they pretty much at random. This next detail might just be a joke considering Sunset hides so much of themself that they have no observable "gendered" traits, but the way everyone constantly changes up how they refer to him could mean something.

It's not a lot to go on, but it would explain a lot. Sunset has been a very opaque character even after seven books with at least one appearance in each. She's obviously important, but she's not had a single line or revealed anything about her origin or motive aside from what vague knowledge the characters around him have gathered. We know that he's extremely loyal to Thistle and obeys the Rose without question, but it pretty much begins and ends there, without even a reason for why. The majority of people who actually know him personally often refuse to speak about him or will openly acknowledge their own ignorance.

(obligatory go fuck yourself freyja)

When even the people apparently closest to Sunset barely know anything about her, it's not out of the question that it's Skyler, taking great pains to obscure who she is. There are a couple complications, but I think it's pretty sound in general. If anyone else has something to add I'd love to hear it!

[szaryherbatnik]

Tough day rambles

In a world with a different setting id be a prophet or a person with cool visions, id be a person worthy of protection and trust and friendship. Here im just paranoid and i worry about the wrong things. Somewhere else when i dance on my way to a shop everyone thinks im full of joy and whimsy and they dont think im drunk or childish. Somewhere else i can be around people for more than 5 hours before i shut down for the rest of the day. Somewhere else i dont remind everyone im stupid and dumb and i dont describe everything i do and feel as "slight" and "little" and "a bit", im able to love romantically and dream of tenderness and give it and recieve it. Idk i just hate myself a lot.

[windandwater]

do not fucking get me started on this place's inability to apply "separate the art from the artist" appropriately

[zevrans-remade]

.

[shearah]

u kno what really sucks

when self proclaimed toxic friend (friend A) catches wind of a conversation you had with another person (friend B). in which B says A is "kinda toxic".

A then comes to you upset about it. and asks why you didn't defend them.

there's no kind way to say "bc they right"

[enfinizatics]

it’s the way i’ve wanted to read all the young dudes ever since the author started publishing it on ao3 but i’ve never made myself do it bc of being a survivor of the marauders fans bullying back in 2017-2018 tumblr bc i posted stuff about snape LMAOO truly an extraordinary time on harry potter tumblr, the marauders fans were so vicious back then i actually avoided every single marauders content like the plague until like last year because the bullying made me feel physically nauseous whenever stumbling upon the content please-

[pollyanna-nana]

The confusion on how the ancients became the chao is honestly strange to me. Maybe I’ve just taken too many biology courses but it seems pretty logical to me, especially considering that there’s all sorts of woo woo magic in the sonic series that contributes to it.

I mean, you have to consider that the planet they arrived on is likely very different from their own. Even if they didn’t change that much when they first landed, it makes sense that over however many thousands of generations things would change just because of different environmental factors. As for the loss of intelligence, well… intelligence isn’t sacred to evolution, you know? If it stopped being necessary for their survival then well, it may have just disappeared over time.

This is of course not counting the influence of the emeralds, which is likely… very important lol. We know that the chaos energy can cause some pretty gnarly mutations so that likely sped things along. So a combination of different environmental factors from their home planet/chaos energy radiation meant that we eventually got the chao. As for Chaos, we know that he was mutated due to prolonged exposure to the master emerald, so I like the interpretation that the master emerald turned back the clock evolutionarily on purpose to make an intelligent guardian. That’s just my hc though, we’ll have to see if they ever expand on that.

[ziracona]

I know I say this every time I read my own work, but Speak for the Dead really is the best chapter in ILM.

“Well, you know for the first time in a long time this actually feels like fall?”

Jane Romero was smiling at him, sitting propped up against a tree in what had sort of become her usual ‘therapy’ corner in the past almost two weeks. And she was right, it did feel like fall. The air wasn’t as sharply cold as normal, and honestly ‘sharply’ cold was a nice break in and of itself when it happened—usually the weather here was somehow just cold—cold with no adjectives attached. But today it was nicer. It was the kind of waiting fall cold that came when it wasn’t biting outside yet, and it was almost pleasant. A promise of a change in the seasons. Tapp wondered why.

The trees hadn’t started to change color with it, or fall in piles, and as far as he’d gathered there weren’t seasons in here. Everything looked the same. Tall, thick woods, undergrowth and moss and rocks and fallen logs, a slight breeze on and off. Dark sky overhead, full moon, at this point long since throwing off everyone’s idea of what day and night were supposed to mean. All the usual. Except, somehow, the kind of cold in the weather. Who knew, maybe nothing had changed. Maybe they had just started to feel better.

LIKE. Those opening lines mean nothing but environmental flavor when you read them. But they’re a lead in for the thesis of the entire chapter.

“Well, you know for the first time in a long time this actually feels like fall?” - A promise of a change in the seasons. - Who knew, maybe nothing had changed. Maybe they had just started to feel better.

Like that’s it. Speak for the Dead is about a lot of things, but at its heart it’s about healing. It’s about forgiveness and healing, that exists between the living and the dead. It’s about how you can only speak for them, by speaking for them. Not how you want to punish yourself or live for them, but by how you know they would forgive you, or would ask you to live. Very little other than exchanges of information happen, but so much happens at the same time. All of it significant. It’s hope. It’s about how Tapp (and Meg) have spent every day here fighting in their own way to cope with the agony and failure of their lives, and the loss of people they couldn’t save, and have only dug their wounds deeper. About love. About nothing stoping the lambs from screaming except accepting that they want to let you go.

[badedramay]

so. since you’re revisiting, a diyar-e-dil question. i started rewatching a lot of old dramas i used to love recently and while i can acknowledge many of these are products of their time and emblematic of certain societal ideals i also feel like the harm of those ideals is sometimes so hard to ignore. like in rewatching diyar-e-dil i’ll go to the youtube comments and so many people have nothing but disdain for ruhi when all i can feel rewatching as an adult is immense sympathy for her. i know the point of the drama as a whole is to overcome differences and prejudice and to mend old wounds, and there is of course a valid concern in how ruhi imposes her own anger and hatred onto faarah to the point of suffocation. but i don’t know how people don’t sympathize with ruhi for the reasons she’s angry in the first place. if i were a mother and my husband told me to get my daughter married to her cousin out of a need to mend old wounds i would be infuriated. i would feel terrified for my daughter and for her ability to make her own choices. and it feels like the degree to which ruhi and faarah are stripped of agency for the sake of perpetuating the whole narrative is almost absurd, like they have to go along with everything and wait for it all to fall into place bc that’s the only way the message of familial unity will get across (and i know faarah doesn’t give in literally speaking, she’s obv quite defiant, but i’m referring more to the wait-and-see narrative approach that our dramas are so often fond of to make a girl come around to a guy she’s forcefully married to). of course wali ends up being the better love interest in the end even though he utterly manhandles her in the beginning bc she “belongs” to him. of course ruhi was just wrong and judgmental of the family the whole time and not reacting to a fear of feudalist tradition and supremacy. of course faarah’s mamoozaad cousin was conveniently evil and psychotic the whole time. it all feels way too convenient. and i know there has to be some suspension of disbelief to successfully engage with these stories but i don’t know how capable i am of it anymore when it seems so many harmful stereotypes and mindsets are perpetuated through our dramas and continue to be, and they overwhelmingly treat people who are apprehensive of the harms of certain traditions like judgmental aliens who simply have to meet the right family to come around. it feels like a very naive approach to addressing those apprehensions and the societal concerns at the root of them

in any case, i know you love diyar-e-dil a lot, so if any of this upsets you feel free to delete the ask entirely. but (to finally ask my question lol) i was wondering, did any of these little details ever catch your eye or bother you too with respect to what we allow dramas to subtly perpetuate on a societal level? i feel like people’s engagement with these topics and to this level of depth is quite low on pak drama twt, but i’ve enjoyed your deeper analysis so i figured i’d take a chance and ask for your insight. hope none of this comes off as judgmental of you or your tastes bc i definitely don’t intend it to be! for all of my qualms with the drama now i am still fond of it in certain aspects, just not so much in others anymore

*rubs hand in glee*

first off, thank you for sending in this long and insightful ask. just to be clear i am not the least bit upset or offended by it cuz whatever you said IS a valid point. tbh, the reason why i want to revisit Diyar e Dil is because I want to watch it and see how I *now* feel about it. nostalgia paints a pretty picture and while I am sure no amount of years will lessen my love for this drama, my reason for revisiting is to see what more I can add to the commentary that I have already made (and i have made a LOT of it) about the drama and its narrative themes. have my tastes changed? how forgiving or not am I now about the things show in the drama vs when I first watched it in 2015 or when I rewatched it in 2018? i know i have changed..but how much has Diyar e Dil changed in the years? these are important questions and I believe asking them is only fair and legitimate. bhayee jo baat hai..how long can we continue to recommend dramas as "best that the industry has to offer" but with a disclaimer "yeah ignore some of the obvious flaws of it though". Diyar e Dil for so long has been my no-brainer drama to recommend to people looking for quality scripts..it's only fair if I put it to test.

therefore fair warning: i am answering this based on my previous knowledge of the show which might be lacking cuz time works in a funny way to the memory xD

warning 2: it's long.

Ruhi was, in its truest essence, a grey character. up until the point when Behroze takes Ruhi to meet Aga Jaan after he makes the choice of choosing his love over his family, Ruhi had all my support. she wasn't a bad person; despite her fears she encouraged her husband to reconnect with his family. even until Behroze makes his decision of getting Faraa married to Wali, I could sympathize with Ruhi. where she fully loses me is how Ruhi treats Faraa after all that. the years long emotional abuse she subjects Faraa to..that's where she crosses a line of no coming back. the thing with Ruhi is that makes it easy for the YT audience to make her the subject of their disdain is how hypocritical Ruhi was when it came to her family vs Behroze's. Ruhi went above and beyond to keep her family close and in love with her. I get why she did it, the fear of abandonment had her clinging on to them for dear life. Where Behroze also lost her is how she simply refused to extend that courtesy towards Behroze's family. She had such a trigger happy response ready whenever Behroze mentioned his father that it baffled Behroze. Had he not been a good husband to Ruhi? Had he not been a good son-in-law for her family? Had he not loved and supported her and her family in whatever capacity he could? Behroze's obligation was only towards Ruhi but he accepted that Ruhi's family came around in their toughest times so he accepted them as his own. But that doesn't erase that his family DOES exist. That for years his brother had been trying to build the bridge between him and their father. That it was Behroze's own zidd that made him lose time in which he could've made more peaceful amends. Behroze was troubled, he was emotionally and mentally disturbed; the first person he expected to give him support no questions asked was the first person to abandon him. And Ruhi CONTINUED to abandon Behroze for years by not caring for Faraa; by not even trying to muster up the manners to have a kind conversation with her father-in-law. Ruhi and Behroze were both abandoned by their family. In both cases the families did eventually come around. if Ruhi was willing to forgive her own family for it, why not for Behroze's? Specially when Behroze reconnected with his family by getting the worst possible news he could. Ruhi's flaw that pushes her in the darker of the grey category is her victim complex. And the narrative does call her out on it. That in the list of people who made mistakes, Ruhi is not excluded from it. A lot of Ruhi's anger and fears are justified but SO MUCH of her actions aren't.

so many harmful stereotypes and mindsets are perpetuated through our dramas and continue to be, and they overwhelmingly treat people who are apprehensive of the harms of certain traditions like judgmental aliens who simply have to meet the right family to come around. it feels like a very naive approach to addressing those apprehensions and the societal concerns at the root of them

Fair point but it doesn't really apply in the case of this show, does it? Ruhi spent her life with a man who belonged to the same society and family whose supposed evil traditions she wanted to "protect" her daughter from? if Behroze turned out to be a decent man, by sheer law of probability his family could also be decent. No. this show only chooses the veil of being apprehensive towards the norm of a certain society to show how a person uses certain stereotypes and prejudices to conveniently stay in their own bubble where they feel safe. as far as themes go, Diyar e Dil was never meant to address these socio-cultural concerns. sure, they were an important plot device but the plot itself was not fully reliant on them. if anything, DeD ended up showing a positive side of the often criticized segment of the society by reiterating that a person's inner goodness or evilness is not defined by which socio-cultural background they belong to.it never made any sweeping statements about how ALL families in ALL over the world are ALL like this. no. it showed a story of this ONE family only with all the mistakes it made and how it worked to rectify them and left it to the audience to learn something from it if they liked it enough.

One of the big takeaways from the show is to judge people by their individual merits, to ponder over their actions not in isolation but within the context of their situation, because that's how one truly knows a person and until you don't know a person..how can you love or hate them? (that's what Faraa confesses no? that how could she hate Wali when she didn't even know him? she always only knew the version of him that was fed to her by people who ALSO didn't know him)

I am someone who was always fond of the story of Diyar e Dil. It's one of my favorite comfort reads by Farhat Ishtiaq. When it was announced that DeD was going to be adapted to screen, i was scared. not always does a book to screen adaptation does the story justice. however, DeD onscreen didn't disappoint. not only the script for TV added more layers and dimensions to the characters and situations, the STORY at its core remained intact. DeD was written always to give the lesson of how ego rots relationships. that while ego can give a temporary satisfaction it's the bonds that tie us which are our salvation. and to make bonds is to abandon the ego. Aga Jaan, Behroze, Ruhi, to an extent Faraa..it was their ego that made them stand on the precipice of disaster. Behroze lost his chance. AJ learned his lessons but not until he faced immense tragedy did he fully embrace it. Ruhi had to fall from the cliff into the mouth of tragedy to learn the lesson but she got rescued midway. And Faraa was lucky enough to learn it while she had the time and she stepped away from danger. I see DeD as a story like this. Hence, the flaws that it has become not wholly ignorable but they lose their ability to overpower the heart this story has. and the story has its heart in the right place.

maybe I am the odd one out here but I judge a drama (desi dramas more specifically) based on what it intends to be and how it presents those intentions. everything else is secondary. convince me on the intention and convince me that the methods chosen to present that intention are in tandem with each other and be very CLEAR about them - you'd have my attention. this works across all genres for me. I lose my interest when i see discrepancies in the intention and the presentation. which is why I have dropped shows after being hyped about them to the skies (Tere Bin/Pyari Mona) and which is why I have gotten back on board on shows that previously lost me (Yunhi). Diyar e Dil had the intention and presentation decided right from the beginning and it very clearly stayed on the path. did it have to rely on some plot conveniences? of course it did, it had no other choice (like for the longest time I was a staunch Moiz supporter and only until he fully showed his ugliness did i start to hate him...his villanness which seems obvious now in hindsight broke my heart {despite also knowing Moiz was a bad guy in the novel as well like wow ajeeb dimag chalta tha tab mera dkjaehakjsdhawea} but it was necessary for the plot so contrived it might be..i accepted it) would i like to change things about it? sure! which drama is so wholly satisfying that it leaves the audience with no ground to transform it? it's just that there's something so fulfilling about this story and how it's told that I keep coming back to it again and again even if its to say the same praises and air the same grievances again and again.

[conspiracydawg]

it annoys me so much that the entire internet isn't a searchable database organized with nested taggable tags and clearly defined metadata. why can't I go to the universal search bar and type in like "clothing scythia artifact date:600BCE-200BCE type:image type:photo source:original" and get the earliest known source of every photo on the internet of extant clothing from scythia from 600-200. or "fantasy dragon(black feathered_wings(white)) -sci_fi type:image type:art medium:digital medium:2d" and get every digital drawing/painting of a black dragon with white feathered wings that isn't sci-fi. we went so fucking wrong with SEO

[trainsinanime]

I've seen a number of people worried and concerned about this language on Ao3s current "agree to these terms of service" page. The short version is:

Don't worry. This isn't anything bad. Checking that box just means you forgive them for being US American.

Long version: This text makes perfect sense if you're familiar with the issues around GDPR and in particular the uncertainty about Privacy Shield and SCCs after Schrems II. But I suspect most people aren't, so let's get into it, with the caveat that this is a Eurocentric (and in particular EU centric) view of this.

The basic outline is that Europeans in the EU have a right to privacy under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU directive (let's simplify things and call it an EU law) that regulates how various entities, including companies and the government, may acquire, store and process data about you.

The list of what counts as data about you is enormous. It includes things like your name and birthday, but also your email address, your computers IP address, user names, whatever. If an advertiser could want it, it's on the list.

The general rule is that they can't, unless you give explicit permission, or it's for one of a number of enumerated reasons (not all of which are as clear as would be desirable, but that's another topic). You have a right to request a copy of the data, you have a right to force them to delete their data and so on. It's not quite on the level of constitutional rights, but it is a pretty big deal.

In contrast, the US, home of most of the world's internet companies, has no such right at a federal level. If someone has your data, it is fundamentally theirs. American police, FBI, CIA and so on also have far more rights to request your data than the ones in Europe.

So how can an American website provide services to persons in the EU? Well… Honestly, there's an argument to be made that they can't.

US websites can promise in their terms and conditions that they will keep your data as safe as a European site would. In fact, they have to, unless they start specifically excluding Europeans. The EU even provides Standard Contract Clauses (SCCs) that they can use for this.

However, e.g. Facebook's T&Cs can't bind the US government. Facebook can't promise that it'll keep your data as secure as it is in the EU even if they wanted to (which they absolutely don't), because the US government can get to it easily, and EU citizens can't even sue the US government over it.

Despite the importance that US companies have in Europe, this is not a theoretical concern at all. There have been two successive international agreements between the US and the EU about this, and both were struck down by the EU court as being in violation of EU law, in the Schrems I and Schrems II decisions (named after Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist who sued in both cases).

A third international agreement is currently being prepared, and in the meantime the previous agreement (known as "Privacy Shield") remains tentatively in place. The problem is that the US government does not want to offer EU citizens equivalent protection as they have under EU law; they don't even want to offer US citizens these protections. They just love spying on foreigners too much. The previous agreements tried to hide that under flowery language, but couldn't actually solve it. It's unclear and in my opinion unlikely that they'll manage to get a version that survives judicial review this time. Max Schrems is waiting.

So what is a site like Ao3 to do? They're arguably not part of the problem, Max Schrems keeps suing Meta, not the OTW, but they are subject to the rules because they process stuff like your email address.

Their solution is this checkbox. You agree that they can process your data even though they're in the US, and they can't guarantee you that the US government won't spy on you in ways that would be illegal for the government of e.g. Belgium. Is that legal under EU law? …probably as legal as fan fiction in general, I suppose, which is to say let's hope nobody sues to try and find out.

But what's important is that nothing changed, just the language. Ao3 has always stored your user name and email address on servers in the US, subject to whatever the FBI, CIA, NSA and FRA may want to do it. They're just making it more clear now.

[candle-wax-and-polariods]

I saw someone say Taylor dosent have a brand anymore because she wants mentioned in something but she does, her brand is her extremely autobiographical song writing (sometimes excruciatingly autobiographical), blending genres to make her music instead of staying in boxes (see: parts of red, evermore, and ttpd) , and her big live shows that help her not only gain fan connection/and engagement but also helps her stay talked about by the general public because at the end of the day her shows are still very much spectial so weather or not you like her brand is up to you but she still has a brand