#plot wise?

[ladyminaofcamelot]

"a life barren of unicorns was existence without purpose." -Hadrian Blackwater

[gale-force-storm]

Thinking about the fact that, to pull Gale from the stone and get him in the game at all, you have to decide to try to touch an extremely dangerous looking swirling mass of unstable magic. Something that is, objectively, a terrible idea

Like, the options it gives you are to either touch the sigil or leave, and if you leave you just... don't get Gale in the party

You have to take the risk. You have to let your curiosity override your common sense. You have to look at this unstable, possibly dangerous malfunctioning magic sigil and go "...Ok, but what if I poke it?"

In short, to get Gale in your party, you have to do exactly what he would in that situation, and indulge in a moment of reckless curiosity. And I just think that's delightful

[ashleys-doodle-corner]

ACT 2 "You're... me?" "That's right, stardust!"

You know I've been drawing Loop as their Siffrin form so much that it's got me thinking. I've read and seen so many fics and artworks of Loop eventually getting back to looking like their old self, but I don't think I've seen any so far of Loop already being a mirror copy of Siffrin. So uh, yoink?

ISAT AU where the game plays out the same way (plot-wise at least) but Loop looks like Siffrin the whole time and while Siffrin is extremely perplexed that there's another him, he's still gotta accept their help because how else are they supposed to escape the loops? Good ol' Loop is here to help, helpful friendly Loop!

Siffrin is going through it still but Differently.

[nonasbirthday]

i still can't believe there are folks who say "well GTN is annoying but you just have to get through it and then the other books aren't like that so you'll be fine."

personally i have been chasing the high of GTN ever since i first closed the book

[cosmicwhoreo]

BEHOLD! I gave Pearl chronic headaches! now she's just like me fr fr-

[maddie-grove]

One of my more inflexible opinions is that the term “romance novel” refers to a very specific type of book (distinct from being a romance or a love story or romantic fiction or romantic or, God forbid, Romantic) and that the couple (or throuple, etc.) ending up together and that being presented as more or less a good thing is an indispensable feature of the genre. Not because romance novel readers “can’t handle” another kind of ending (many might enjoy that sort of thing in another genre). Not because a story can only be romantic if there’s a happy ending, either (I do not feel that way and am not making any value judgements here). It’s because the main focus of a romance novel is “how do they get together” and reading a book where the main focus is “will they get together” is an entirely different experience. Just as reading a mystery novel where the focus is “who committed this crime” is different from reading a book where the focus is “will the crime be solved.”

[mxmade-up]

If you’re reading Dungeon Meshi online, there’s this horizontal page and I did my best to splice it together

[smallidarityfan]

smallidarity highschool au

came up with this au like actually 2 years ago where it's mainly empires 2 smallidarity centric, with Jimmy as a student council member and Joel as an honours student who doesn't like the way Jimmy runs things around the school.

As payback for the regulations Jimmy put up that Joel thought was stupid, Joel does these elaborate 'The Office' style pranks on Jimmy (specifically) while Jimmy retaliates by trying his best to dig up dirt on Joel. This banter goes on for a while— however Joel ends up doing the pranks less as a statement, and instead more just to see how Jimmy would react... with his comical, cartoony villain yells, and... weirdly cute face....? (YAOI YAOI YAOI YAOI)

very very old au drawings below:

from July 2023

😭😭 joel does NOT look like a highschooler here 😭😭😭😭 (i also wanted to draw angst in the first two ig idk a year later it's pretty cringe [i am still cringe]) (also partially inspired by when I read "Go for it, Nakamura!" and the mc reminded me of joel for no actual reason. or maybe i was just thinking about that manga while drawing smallidarity. idk)

from November 2022:

I think these doodles were genuinely the first instance of me converting from being against mcyt shipping to for shipping LMAOO

[soulspark]

[bucksdaffy]

oh, how i LOVE that tim decided to include tommy in the last two episodes, even though they are not really buck-focused. if this doesn't prove to you how serious he actually is about tommy being a long-term LI for buck, i don't know what will.

[mightyfoz]

Unicorn wars but the unicorns swap places with the bears!! not sure if anyone has thought of this idea, but i just thought what if the bears were just as vicious as they were in the movie, but instead they weren't the ones to evolve, but the unicorns did instead.

[reineydraws]

watched dead boy detectives and spent so much of it picturing young mihawk in charles's outfit so i made it happen and threw in an edwin!shanks bc ofc i did :')

if u like teen supernatural shows and ghosts and stuff, or worlds created by neil gaiman, i encourage u to check out the show! it's in the same 'verse as the sandman.

[unlikablefemaleprotagonist]

i keep thinking about the possibility that if there's ever a senior year, emily might choose to come back as a different player than fig. i say might because even if she felt like she wanted to play as someone else before junior year, by the time senior year rolls around (if ever) she might change her mind again, or feel that fig's story has taken a unique enough path at the end of junior year that it's compelling to continue playing with it.

and while i would certainly miss fig, and i think the team dynamics would change a lot if a new sixth character was pal-ing around with the bad kids, i hope that if she goes that route, she takes inspo from murph, and the greatest replacement character in d20 history: cody walsh.

because what was great about cody was that finding someone everyone would like as much as kugrash was a very tall order! so instead he veered the other way (on his moped) by creating this perfectly annoying drip of a loser, that everyone else would have strong feelings about, and more importantly, conflict with.

[sparring-spirals]

Bell’s Hells: *successfully defeat a big robot*

All of us, unaware, fools: *applauding* Incredible! Bravo! How exciting! Nothing can top this!

Episode 50, abruptly and without warning:

(source)

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[strawberrybyers]

i truly would not be mad if nancy breaks up with jonathan and tells steve to move on. and for vickie to tell robin she’s not interested but is willing to be friends. so nancy and robin decide they need to hang out after a long day of heartbreak and throughout their convos of explaining everything that’s been going on, they realize they have feelings for each other. i truly would not be mad at that. in fact, that’s exactly what i want to happen 😌