#popped the longer version under a cut

[hotwaterandmilk]

My extremely brief review of Sailor Moon Raisonné Art Works 1991~2023 book is as follows: fantastic as something akin to an exhibition catalogue, disappointing as an art book.

Longer version:

Takeuchi is a great artist, Sailor Moon has some extremely memorable illustrations, there hasn't been a new art book in decades... this should have been a slam dunk in terms of meeting fan expectations. Unfortunately I think the portrayal of this as a preserved "art collection" is a bit disingenous given the format of the book, the number of art revisions, and its overall quality are pretty standard for exhibition catalogues rather than actual art books.

In saying this I absolutely love art work catalogues, particularly when they provide context on how the illustrations were originally used. "Raisonné" shines in this regard, it gives revision notes and context to the original uses of all images from Nakayoshi colour pages through to furoku. Loooooove this:

It even features a comprehensive account of furoku and zen'in for the manga, which is another thing I appreciate in these types of publications.

The main problem, as countless people have pointed out, is that the actual art work in this book is extremely tiny. Many of the rarer images fans were excited to see in decent resoluton (like the colour art from Codename wa Sailor V) are a few cms across here, piled up crammed from a couple to a dozen a page.

The character designs presented exquisitely in full in the "Materials Collection" art book are condensed to a handful of pages rendering Takeuchi's chracter notes unreadable and the gorgeous sketches lacklustre at best. Why are they included at all when some designs are barely visible here? The paper quality too is fine for a catalogue but there's just no comparison to the paper and print quality found in the original Sailor Moon art books.

I think it also has some very standard art collection flaws on top of this, including baffling choices when it comes to putting artworks partially across two pages (will never not hate this in any art book, it's particularly egregious here where the cover illustrations from THE BOOK ITSELF are about the third of a page in size and placed across a page spread).

There's already been plenty of dissatisfaction expressed about this book and I'm not here to give it an additional kick around because I do feel it has value as an art work catalogue. I just think there was a definite divide in what Kodansha produced vs. fan expectations and if you purchase the book knowing this then at least you'll be aware of what you're getting.

[selvenus]

I already made a polish Miku in a Lublin region dress, but I also had a mikufied version of the same dress sketched out literally months ago so I had to draw her again!

A silly bonus under cut

In national ethnographic museum in Warsaw there's a HUGE Miku statue!! I love it so much a huge W, I hope I can see her in person someday BUT I have some personal beef with it because of the costumes they give her, It's not that serious but this idea popped up in my head and I just had to draw it

EDIT:

I've been told by a few people in the tags that the Miku statue is no longer on display, which sucks but it be like that sometimes...

[nawoken]

   Yes, because I got bullied by both of the games I played so... I'm here to rambling some stuff that has been stuck inside my head since forever.

How about... Reader with cute aggression, especially for those small, fluffy creatures, like... cats! (Ơ w Ơ).

You can't help squeezing, kissing, and biting (lightly) those cuties. Yes, you have Grim, but he won't let you pet him since you're too much, his words.

And TWST boys that by some accident, maybe from alchemy class or their clumsiness. They, unfortunately, have turned into those mischievous creatures.

   You don't know that. You just walking around, minding your own business or headmage supposed to be business. Then, you saw it, a cat with the fluffiest fur and cutest eyes you've ever seen run by. And you know, you've fallen in love :)))

   TWST boys, now in cat body don't know that they're in danger, roaming around freely with the hope that someone they know will realize and help them.

   Oh, is that our calm and kind prefect? Surely, they can help our poor boy, right? No! They're deadly WRONG!!!

   The next thing our boy knows after approaching prefect is that he's trapped in your embrace, being kissed, squeezed, and petted while you compliment him on how smooth and healthy his fur looks.

   Damn it, prefect! He is not an actual cat, can’t you see it?! The answer is… No, you can’t. You’re busy admiring his cuteness.

   He is struggling, embarrassed by your doing. Some of them might feel ashamed since it feels like he is taking advantage of you… or the other way around, some just aren’t used to being pampered. But, the worst thing is… prefect, please don’t rub your face on his stomach! Mmraooo!!! :’)))))

   After a while, you finally stop, he sighs out of relief, … but why do you look at him like that? D..do you finally realize that he is not a cat?

   You stared at the poor creature in your hand, thinking. And, this made him concerned, what are you planning to do?

   Before he can do anything, you chomp on his face, more specifically, his muzzle … Yes, you do it without your teeth. But... YOU BITE HIM!!! ON HIS FACE!!! C...CAN THIS COUNT AS A KISS?!

He is panicked and stunned while you're in heaven. This might be the sweetest cat you've ever seen, he doesn't even bite or scratch you when you do all this to him.

Suddenly, pink smoke emitted from the cat, and with a "pop" sound, it turned into a human. Not to mention, you know him. Is it a good or bad thing? You don't know, the only thing you know is... you're DOOM!

You should know that this is a magical world, so you can't just hug any stray cat on the street, it can be anyone, not to say this is your crush. But you got tricked! By those sparkling eyes! And those fluffy ears! And now you can die from embarrassment.

Now, you're the one who panics while he just stands there, not knowing what to do or to say. The cure for this potion, it's a true love kiss. (Another version of the "The Princess and the Frog" potion but instead of a kiss from the princess, it's a true love kiss, why not? :))))

You two end up looking at each other for a whole minute before he decides to speak up but are cut off by you. "Please, just forget everything, this is so messed up of me, I promise I will try to make it up to you somehow, but please just erase that shameful thing I have done from your mind!" (QAQ)

Then you ran off, left him there with bewildered expression.

~~~~♡♡♡~~~

That's longer than I expected :'D

But, yeah, this has been stuck inside my head for too long, finally it can appear under the sunlight...

You know, I want to make a request for that idea. I've followed so many good TWST writers. But, well I'm shy and don't really sure how to, so I just keep it in.

The idea for this post is... I have a cat, she's been suffering from my cute aggression. Ehe, poor her, but she never bites me when I'm chomping on her muzzle. So sweet of her.

But yeah, I can't stop laughing when I think about TWST boy turning into a cat and being chomped on. That must be terrifying for him, but they still tried their best to not scratch you, their dear prefect. Except: Riddle, it's just his reflection, and he feels regret right after. And maybe Leona? Or, he just shows his claw to threaten you but doesn't actually do it.

Nom nom :3

MY ANGEL!!!

[missbutterworthless]

[i’m not a violent dog. i don’t know why i bite.]

The lead singer of BOTB’s Season 4 projected underdogs, Arlo Beck of Penny Arcade, declined further comment in regards to the threatening of a member of the media when questioned about former band mate and fellow competitor, Seven Lawless of Soft Violence.

Further Info Under the Cut!

TW for mentions of addiction 🫶

Introducing Arlo Beck, lead singer of Penny Arcade, a pop punk band of humble origins known most for their musically delivered political commentary and their revenge anthems (it is of particular note that such anthems were not common in the Lawless Era, with the band leaning far more heavily into charged love songs. Which could mean nothing.)

Fun Facts!

Beck is an Aquarius!

According to an insider source, beyond singing, Beck is quite capable with the ocarina.

Beck is known to juggle at any and every opportunity, regardless of who may or may not be watching. (He is apparently rather talented as well.)

Beck is known for accessorizing with heart motifs, noted by a previous local publication to be a nod to fellow bandmate Rowan Hart.

Beck often carries a bottle of quick dry black polish for ‘manicure emergencies’. He is known to have addressed such emergencies while on stage after chipping a nail during a performance.

Beck is often cited as the source for Penny Arcade’s ‘gimmick’ of collecting loose change in collection bins during a dedicated song at every performance. The change is then matched and donated to queer and at risk youth. Beck remains firm that every member of Penny Arcade, past and present, is equally responsible.

Picture Easter Eggs and more Fun Facts!

Arlo is wearing a WWOD? bracelet in the pic! The band got together to make bracelets with Orion’s most recent catchphrase while waiting for filming to start. Arlo made his particularly fruity. He also made a keychain version for Orion.

The time on Arlo’s phone is a nod to MCx7. Seven is, well, 7. And Arlo is 1 & 2 because his initials are the first and second letters of the alphabet. Hence, 7:12.

Arlo’s initial tattoo utilizes the S in SD as an infinity symbol. He acknowledges it is cringy. And poetically tragic.

Not shown is his tongue piercing, which Orion chewed him out for getting because his tongue was swollen and his speech slurred for nearly two weeks!

As stated above, he likes to wear motifs of his band members! Because he is a doofus! Most common because it’s his daily accessories is a heart motif for Rowan, but he also has jellyfish pendants and vampire bite chokers for Iris and different color bee pins for Devyn depending on their hair color! Jazzy is represented in the case he carries his juggling equipment in, which he takes literally everywhere after she bought him one for his birthday years ago. He is currently racking his brain for what to do for August!

43 of the 57 missed calls on his phone were from Orion. He knows because Orion’s ringtone is I Don’t Dance from High School Musical 2.

He is heavily addicted to nicotine (to Orion’s chagrin) and became a functioning (for now) alcoholic after The Fight™️. Prior, he imbibed during social functions but never alone and never when he had plans. Up until the audition, he never partook in other substances but caved into peer pressure. Despite his snark and notorius RBF, he is a chronic people pleaser.

The eyebrow slit is a scar from slicing his eyebrow open in Lucy’s diner after crashing head first into the dish station and shattering a plate. With his face. The scar is almost entirely faded but he can no longer grow hair there. He’s actually really insecure about it and has considered getting the spot microbladed.

That’s all for now folks! I mostly wanted to share my art :) I adore @infamous-if and have been playing with Arlo as my MC since Day 1! He finally fully clicked in my head and after days of attempting to find a face claim or craft him in the sims I decided to crack open Ye Olde iPad and do it myself!

Please feel free to share any fun facts about your own Infamous OCs! Regretfully my friends stay firmly opposed to interactive fiction so I am starved for fellow Infamous fans

[rebelfell]

have some more bestfriend!eddie flangst, you animals.

a sequel to this, which is a prequel to this.

Johnny wasn’t so bad. 

He was handsome enough and his cropped haircut suited his face. It showed off his high cheekbones and the angular lines of his strong jaw. He did crew, so he had nice broad shoulders with arms that were lightly muscled from lots of hours logged on the rowing machine. And he had a disarming sort of smile, his mostly straight teeth framed by strangely plump pink lips.

It was an odd thing to think, but he actually kind of looked a little bit like Eddie.

A distorted, alternate universe, almost cursed version of him, that is. Because, come on—Eddie Munson with blue eyes? Some things were too ludicrous to even consider. And picturing those warm and inviting deep brown irises replaced by Johnny’s cool, ocean blue orbs…

The thought alone almost made you shudder.

Aside from his looks, Johnny was also absurdly charming. He laid lines on you like it was his job and yet never came off smarmy or disingenuous. Confidence just oozed off him like molten lava, as if he had never experienced even a second of self-doubt one time in his whole life. Clearly, he kneels aware of everything he had going for him.

So no, Johnny wasn’t all bad.

But he wasn’t all good, either.

Your first few dates had all been at bars where you just happened to link up with some brothers from his fraternity. He then spent the majority of the evening carrying on with them, lazily draping his arm across your shoulders and whispering a sardonic running commentary in your ear.

He never outright ignored you, but it seemed there was always something to draw away his wandering eyes—a game playing on the TV, one of his friends sinking a shot in pool or hitting a bullseye in darts, a pretty girl in a low-cut top passing briefly through his peripheral vision.

It was never anything that felt worth exerting the effort of getting annoyed over, though. He’d been very upfront with you about what he was looking for and not being the “boyfriend” type. The word around campus was he was nursing a serious case of heartbreak and still carried a fairly massive torch for his ex, Crystal.

Which was quite honestly fine by you.

Like most of the people you dated, he was ultimately just a distraction. Someone nice and cute, inoffensive and disposable. Someone to keep you warm on particularly lonely nights.

And Johnny kept you extremely warm. Literally.

He always ran weirdly hot, which was nice in some respects. Like tonight, when he parked his car under the cover of some trees on the side of some deserted lane he found far too quickly for it to be coincidental. The moment he cut off the engine, the chilly evening air had begun to leak into the cabin and had you sitting closer to him in the backseat and clinging onto him a little tighter than you normally might have.

Kissing him was like making out with a furnace, but he was a very good kisser—no doubt having had plenty of practice. And the longer it went on, the harder it got not to think about the pair of lips his reminded you of so much. With your eyes squeezed shut and the two of you lit only by the scant traces of moonlight illuminating the edges of your entwined limbs, it became a little too easy to imagine a different set of hands running up your sides, sliding up your sweater.

But when your hand drifted up, fingers expecting to wind into long and wiry waves, and you found yourself gripping futilely at short blonde hairs behind his ears, the illusion shattered.

Your shoulders shook in a shiver as your chest was exposed, the simple lace bralette not nearly as insulating as your thick knit top. Lips popping off yours, Johnny pulled back to get a look at what he’d unveiled and you felt a little tremor of worry sneak down your spine.

“Huh,” he said with an amused chuckle.

Not exactly the reaction you’re going for when you take your shirt off for a guy. 

“Something wrong?” you asked pointedly. His head jerked up, like he had forgotten there was a person attached to the body he’d been pawing at for the last hour and a half.

“Hmm? Oh, no, I just noticed something s’all,” he answered, surging in for another kiss. 

You planted your hand in the center of his irritatingly toned chest and pushed him back. 

“Noticed what?”

“S’nothing, baby,” he told you with an easy smile. “One of ‘em’s just way bigger. Look—”

And before you could say anything, before you could fully register what he was doing, he had put one of his hands on each of your breasts and he pushed them up to demonstrate. And it was hard, nigh impossible, to deny how your right one filled out his hand significantly more than the left.

With a huff, you yanked the bottom of your sweater down, forcing his hands to drop as well.

“What? What did I say?” he asked, blinking at you far too dumbly for someone as smart as him.

“Just take me home, please. I have a lot of work I need to get done.”

His mouth opened, no doubt to protest, but you had already pushed open the car door to climb out and get back in the front seat. You’d then spent the rest of the ride home quietly seething while he attempted to assure you he “didn’t mean it that way” and that “it’s not a bad thing.” 

But even with his over-abundance of body heat, there was no chance of him thawing you out.

You honestly didn’t believe he said it maliciously, you just figured he could have been a little more diplomatic? It wasn’t like you didn’t realize there was a balance issue—they were your boobs for chrissake, did he think you never noticed?

It was just no one else had ever felt the need to point it out so thoroughly.

Still, you nodded mutely when he pulled up to your apartment and asked if he could call you the next day. And you hated yourself more for it with every stair you climbed to your floor.

The flashing light on your answering machine drew your eye as you skulked through the door and tossed your purse on the kitchen counter. The jangle of your keys sounded especially loud in your empty apartment and you heaved a sigh as you pressed ‘play’ on the way to the fridge for a beer. You’d just touched the rim of the bottle to your lip when you heard Eddie’s voice.

“Hey, I might need an emergency extraction ASAP—Steve and Robin dragged me to karaoke and they’re about to do dueling STYX covers. You’re my only hope! Come! Pleeeease!”

He sounded just a little bit tipsy rambling off the address of some bar he was probably outside of calling you desperately from a pay phone. If you closed your eyes, you could see his sweet and lopsided smile as he laughed into the receiver, his warm breath fogging up the glass siding, fingerless-gloved hands tracing shapes in the condensation while he talked.

A spiral. A lightning bolt.

The first letter of your name.

The machine beeped and his voice filled your apartment again, sounding much less jovial and much more sober, this time most likely calling from the comfort of the recliner in his trailer.

“Hey, sorry, I forgot you were out with what’s-his-name. Uhh…I just got home. Call me when you get in? If you want, y’know, assuming you’re not…busy. Or, um. N-never mind. Night.”

His message had barely finished playing before you snatched your keys back up and headed out the door. You couldn’t say for sure what spurred your spontaneous trip, but you didn’t stop long enough to wonder. Maybe you were just lonely. Maybe you were just sad.

Maybe you just needed to be around someone you knew wanted to be around you.

You let yourself inside his darkened trailer with the key he’d given you, sneaking silently down the hall towards his bedroom door that was outlined in gold from his bedside lamp on the other side. Had it not been for the rumble of his stereo, you might have thought he was asleep.

“JESUS CHR—”

The yelp he let out when you opened his door made you giggle. He scrambled to sit up, not so subtly flinging away the magazine that had been spread open in front of him. His top half was bare, tattooed chest heaving as he clutched at it and panted trying to catch his breath.

“You scared the shit out of me,” he accused, the fondness in his voice leaking through despite his attempt to sound angry. A smile twitched up the corner of your mouth as your brow arched.

“Sure you don’t mean the jizz?” you asked.

“I’m not—”

Eddie’s chest puffed up angrily until you fixed him with a Look that made it deflate. He glanced at the Heavy Metal on the floor and gave you a cheeky smile and a guilty shrug instead.

“That’s what you get for breaking an entering, sweetheart.” 

“Well, you think you can get friendly with yourself a little later? I kinda had a bad night.”

The wounded tone in your voice caught Eddie’s ear. He nodded and gave you one of those “you don’t have to ask” sort of smiles you had kind of been hoping for. You nodded back succinctly and went to open the drawer in his dresser that had begun to accumulate your clothes.

“Do…do you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asked, his dry throat aching as he tried to swallow.

With your back turned, you couldn’t see the way his eyes l bulged when you tugged down your jeans to replace them with sweats, and you definitely couldn’t see the way he plopped a pillow on his lap as you stripped off your sweater and put on a t-shirt in its place.

“Nah,” you told him, resolute and flat. “It’s stupid, anyway.”

Eddie didn’t need to hear about some blonde douchebag feeling you up. He didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t like he cared about your dates one way or another. And it’s not like what happened was that bad, you reminded yourself again as he switched off the light.

You curled up on the side of the bed closest to the window—your side—and folded your arms under the deflated sack of feathers posing as a pillow to support your head. As you lay there, waiting for unconsciousness to overtake you, you heard the low murmur of Eddie’s voice that was drowsy with sleep and rough from the joint he’d smoked whose scent still lingered in the air.

Only the first bit, a slurred “g’night sweetheart” reached your ears. The rest was unintelligible. Something about shoving you?

“Did you say something?” you whispered to him.

“No,” he answered after a long pause. “No, noth…nothing important.”

if you had told me the guy who commented on our boobies in the first part was gonna end up being Johnny Storm…

ty for reading. love you, mean it! 🪭

[yamayuandadu]

The most important deity you've never heard of: the 3000 years long history of Nanaya

Being a major deity is not necessarily a guarantee of being remembered. Nanaya survived for longer than any other Mesopotamian deity, spread further away from her original home than any of her peers, and even briefly competed with both Buddha and Jesus for relevance. At the same time, even in scholarship she is often treated as unworthy of study. She has no popculture presence save for an atrocious, ill-informed SCP story which can’t get the most basic details right. Her claims to fame include starring in fairly explicit love poetry and appearing where nobody would expect her. Therefore, she is the ideal topic to discuss on this blog. This is actually the longest article I published here, the culmination of over two years of research. By now, the overwhelming majority of Nanaya-related articles on wikipedia are my work, and what you can find under the cut is essentially a synthesis of what I have learned while getting there. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed working on it. Under the cut, you will learn everything there is to know about Nanaya: her origin, character, connections with other Mesopotamian deities, her role in literature, her cult centers… Since her history does not end with cuneiform, naturally the later text corpora - Aramaic, Bactrian, Sogdian and even Chinese - are discussed too. The article concludes with a short explanation why I see the study of Nanaya as crucial.

Dubious origins and scribal wordplays: from na-na to Nanaya Long ago Samuel Noah Kramer said that “history begins in Sumer”. While the core sentiment was not wrong in many regards, in this case it might actually begin in Akkad, specifically in Gasur, close to modern Kirkuk. The oldest possible attestation of Nanaya are personal names from this city with the element na-na, dated roughly to the reign of Naram-Sin of Akkad, so to around 2250 BCE. It’s not marked in the way names of deities in personal names would usually be, but this would not be an isolated case.

The evidence is ultimately mixed. On one hand, reduplicated names like Nana are not unusual in early Akkadian sources, and -ya can plausibly be explained as a hypocoristic suffix. On the other hand, there is not much evidence for Nanaya being worshiped specifically in the far northeast of Mesopotamia in other periods. Yet another issue is that there is seemingly no root nan- in Akkadian, at least in any attested words.

The main competing proposal is that Nanaya originally arose as a hypostasis of Inanna but eventually split off through metaphorical mitosis, like a few other goddesses did, for example Annunitum. This is not entirely implausible either, but ultimately direct evidence is lacking, and when Nanaya pops up for the first time in history she is clearly a distinct goddess.

There are a few other proposals regarding Nanaya’s origin, but they are considerably weaker. Elamite has the promising term nan, “day” or “morning”, but Nanaya is entirely absent from the Old Elamite sources you’d expect to find her in if Mesopotamians imported her from the east. Therefore, very few authors adhere to this view. The hypothesis that she was an Aramaic goddess in origin does not really work chronologically, since Aramaic is not attested in the third millennium BCE at all. The less said about attempts to connect her to anything ���Proto-Indo-European”, the better.

Like many other names of deities, Nanaya’s was already a subject of etymological speculation in antiquity. A late annotated version of the Weidner god list, tablet BM 62741, preserves a scribe’s speculative attempt at deriving it from the basic meaning of the sign NA, “to call”, furnished with a feminine suffix, A. Needless to say, like other such examples of scribal speculation, some of which are closer to playful word play than linguistics, it is unlikely to reflect the actual origin of the name.

Early history: Shulgi-simti, Nanaya’s earliest recorded #1 fan

A typical Ur III administrative tablet listing offerings to various deities (wikimedia commons)

The first absolutely certain attestations of Nanaya, now firmly under her full name, have been identified in texts from the famous archive from Puzrish-Dagan, modern Drehem, dated to around 2100 BCE. Much can be written about this site, but here it will suffice to say that it was a center of the royal administration of the Third Dynasty of Ur ("Ur III") responsible for the distribution of sacrificial animals. Nanaya appears there in a rather unique context - she was one of the deities whose cults were patronized by queen Shulgi-simti, one of the wives of Shulgi, the successor of the dynasty’s founder Ur-Namma. We do not know much about Shulgi-simti as a person - she did not write any official inscriptions announcing her preferred foreign policy or letters to relatives or poetry or anything else that typically can be used to gain a glimpse into the personal lives of Mesopotamian royalty. We’re not really sure where she came from, though Eshnunna is often suggested as her hometown. We actually do not even know what her original name was, as it is assumed she only came to be known as Shulgi-simti after becoming a member of the royal family. Tonia Sharlach suggested that the absence of information about her personal life might indicate that she was a commoner, and that her marriage to Shulgi was not politically motivated The one sphere of Shulgi-simti’s life which we are incredibly familiar with are her religious ventures. She evidently had an eye for minor, foreign or otherwise unusual goddesses, such as Belet-Terraban or Nanaya. She apparently ran what Sharlach in her “biography” of her has characterized as a foundation. It was tasked with sponsoring various religious celebrations. Since Shulgi-simti seemingly had no estate to speak of, most of the relevant documents indicate she procured offerings from a variety of unexpected sources, including courtiers and other members of the royal family. The scale of her operations was tiny: while the more official religious organizations dealt with hundreds or thousands of sacrificial animals, up to fifty or even seventy thousand sheep and goats in the case of royal administration, the highest recorded number at her disposal seems to be eight oxen and fifty nine sheep. A further peculiarity of the “foundation” is that apparently there was a huge turnover rate among the officials tasked with maintaining it. It seems nobody really lasted there for much more than four years. There are two possible explanations: either Shulgi-simti was unusually difficult to work with, or the position was not considered particularly prestigious and was, at the absolute best, viewed as a stepping stone. While the Shulgi-simti texts are the earliest evidence for worship of Nanaya in the Ur III court, they are actually not isolated. When all the evidence from the reigns of Shulgi and his successors is summarized, it turns out that she quickly attained a prominent role, as she is among the twelve deities who received the most offerings. However, her worship was seemingly limited to Uruk (in her own sanctuary), Nippur (in the temple of Enlil, Ekur) and Ur. Granted, these were coincidentally three of the most important cities in the entire empire, so that’s a pretty solid early section of a divine resume. She chiefly appears in two types of ceremonies: these tied to the royal court, or these mostly performed by or for women. Notably, a festival involving lamentations (girrānum) was held in her honor in Uruk. To understand Nanaya’s presence in the two aforementioned contexts, and by extension her persistence in Mesopotamian religion in later periods, we need to first look into her character.

The character of Nanaya: eroticism, kingship, and disputed astral ventures

Corona Borealis (wikimedia commons)

Nanaya’s character is reasonably well defined in primary sources, but surprisingly she was almost entirely ignored in scholarship quite recently. The first study of her which holds up to scrutiny is probably Joan Goodnick Westenholz’s article Nanaya, Lady of Mystery from 1997. The core issue is the alleged interchangeability of goddesses. From the early days of Assyriology basically up to the 1980s, Nanaya was held to be basically fully interchangeable with Inanna. This obviously put her in a tough spot. Still, over the course of the past three decades the overwhelming majority of studies came to recognize Nanaya as a distinct goddess worthy of study in her own right. You will still stumble upon the occasional “Nanaya is basically Inanna”, but now this is a minority position. Tragically it’s not extinct yet, most recently I’ve seen it in a monograph published earlier this year. With these methodological and ideological issues out of the way, let’s actually look into Nanaya’s character, as promised by the title of this section. Her original role was that of a goddess of love. It is already attested for her at the dawn of her history, in the Ur III period. Her primary quality was described with a term rendered as ḫili in Sumerian and kuzbu in Akkadian. It can be variously translated as “charm”, “luxuriance”, “voluptuousness”, “sensuality” or “sexual attractiveness”. This characteristic was highlighted by her epithet bēlet kuzbi (“lady of kuzbu”) and by the name of her cella in the Eanna, Eḫilianna. The connection was so strong that this term appears basically in every single royal inscription praising her. She was also called bēlet râmi, “lady of love”. Nanaya’s role as a love goddess is often paired with describing her as a “joyful” or “charming” deity. It needs to be stressed that Nanaya was by no metric the goddess of some abstract, cosmic love or anything like that. Love incantations and prayers related to love are quite common, and give us a solid glimpse into this matter. Nanaya’s range of activity in them is defined pretty directly: she deals with relationships (and by extension also with matters like one-sided crushes or arguments between spouses), romance and with strictly sexual matters. For an example of a hymn highlighting her qualifications when it comes to the last category, see here. The text is explicit, obviously. We can go deeper, though. There is also an incantation whose incipit at first glance leaves little to imagination:

However, the translator, Giole Zisa, notes there is some debate over whether it’s actually about having sex with Nanaya or merely about invoking her (and other deities) while having sex with someone else. A distinct third possibility is that she’s not even properly invoked but that “oh, Nanaya” is simply an exclamation of excitement meant to fit the atmosphere, like a specialized version of the mainstay of modern erotica dialogue, “oh god”.

While this romantic and sexual aspect of Nanaya’s character is obviously impossible to overlook, this is not all there was to her. She was also associated with kingship, as already documented in the Ur III period. She was invoked during coronations and mourning of deceased kings. In the Old Babylonian period she was linked to investiture by rulers of newly independent Uruk. A topic which has stirred some controversy in scholarship is Nanaya’s supposed astral role. Modern authors who try to present Nanaya as a Venus deity fall back on rather faulty reasoning, namely asserting that if Nanaya was associated with Inanna and Inanna personified Venus, clearly Nanaya did too. Of course, being associated with Inanna does not guarantee the same traits. Shaushka was associated with her so closely her name was written with the logogram representing her counterpart quite often, and lacked astral aspects altogether. No primary sources which discuss Nanaya as a distinct, actively worshiped deity actually link her with Venus. If you stretch it you will find some tidbits like an entry in a dictionary prepared by the 10th century bishop Hasan bar Bahlul, who inexplicably asserted Nanaya was the Arabic name of the planet Venus. As you will see soon, there isn’t even a possibility that this reflected a relic of interpretatio graeca. The early Mandaean sources, many of which were written when at least remnants of ancient Mesopotamian religion were still extant, also do not link Nanaya with Venus. Despite at best ambivalent attitude towards Mesopotamian deities, they show remarkable attention to detail when it comes to listing their cult centers, and on top of that Mesopotamian astronomy had a considerable impact on Mandaeism, so there is no reason not to prioritize them, as far as I am concerned. As far as the ancient Mesopotamian sources themselves go, the only astral object with a direct connection to Nanaya was Corona Borealis (BAL.TÉŠ.A, “Dignity”), as attested in the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN. Note that this is a work which assigns astral counterparts to virtually any deity possible, though, and there is no indication this was a major part of Nanaya’s character. Save for this single instance, she is entirely absent from astronomical texts. A further astral possibility is that Nanaya was associated with the moon. The earliest evidence is highly ambiguous: in the Ur III period festivals held in her honor might have been tied to phases of the moon, while in the Old Babylonian period a sanctuary dedicated to her located in Larsa was known under the ceremonial name Eitida, “house of the month”. A poem in which looking at her is compared to looking at the moon is also known. That’s not all, though. Starting with the Old Babylonian period, she could also be compared with the sun. Possibly such comparisons were meant to present her as an astral deity, without necessarily identifying her with a specific astral body. Michael P. Streck and Nathan Wasserman suggest that it might be optimal to simply refer to her as a “luminous” deity in this context. However, as you will see later it nonetheless does seem she eventually came to be firmly associated both with the sun and the moon. Last but not least, Nanaya occasionally displayed warlike traits. It’s hardly major in her case, and if you tried hard enough you could turn any deity into a war deity depending on your political goals, though. I’d also place the incantation which casts her as one of the deities responsible for keeping the demon Lamashtu at bay here.

Nanaya in art

The oldest known depiction of Nanaya (wikimedia commons)

While Nanaya’s roles are pretty well defined, there surprisingly isn’t much to say about her iconography in Mesopotamian art.The oldest certain surviving depiction of her is rather indistinct: she’s wearing a tall headdress and a flounced robe. It dates to the late Kassite period (so roughly to 1200 BCE), and shows her alongside king Meli-Shipak (or maybe Meli-Shihu, reading remains uncertain) and his daughter Hunnubat-Nanaya. Nanaya is apparently invoked to guarantee that the prebend granted to the princess will be under divine protection. This is not really some unique prerogative of hers, perhaps she was just the most appropriate choice because Hunnubat-Nanaya’s name obviously reflects devotion to her. The relief discussed above is actually the only depiction of Nanaya identified with certainty from before the Hellenistic period, surprisingly. We know that statues representing her existed, and it is hard to imagine that a popular, commonly worshiped deity was not depicted on objects like terracotta decorations and cylinder seals, but even if some of these were discovered, there’s no way to identify them with certainty. This is not unusual though, and ultimately there aren’t many Mesopotamian deities who can be identified in art without any ambiguity. 

Nanaya in literature

As I highlighted in the section dealing with Nanaya’s character, she is reasonably well attested in love poetry. However, this is not the only genre in which she played a role. A true testament to Nanaya’s prominence is a bilingual (Sumero-Akkadian) hymn composed in her honor in the first millennium BCE. It is written in the first person, and presents various other goddesses as her alternate identities. It is hardly unique, and similar compositions dedicated to Ishtar (Inanna), Gula, Ninurta and Marduk are also known. Each strophe describes a different deity and location, but ends with Nanaya reasserting her actual identity with the words “still I am Nanaya”. Among the claimed identities included are both major goddesses in their own right (Inanna plus closely associated Annunitum and Ishara, Gula, Bau, Ninlil), goddesses relevant due to their spousal roles first and foremost (Damkina, Shala, Mammitum etc) and some truly unexpected, picks, the notoriously elusive personified rainbow Manzat being the prime example. Most of them had very little in common with Nanaya, so this might be less an attempt at syncretism, and more an elevation of her position through comparisons to those of other goddesses. An additional possible literary curiosity is a poorly preserved myth which Wilfred G. Lambert referred to as “The murder of Anshar”. He argues that Nanaya is one of the two deities responsible for the eponymous act. I don't quite follow the logic, though: the goddess is actually named Ninamakalamma (“Lady mother of the land”), and her sole connection with Nanaya is that they occur in sequence in the unique god list from Sultantepe. Lambert saw this as a possible indication they are identical. There are no other attestations of this name, but ama kalamma does occur as an epithet of various goddesses, most notably Ninshubur. Given her juxtaposition with Nanaya in the Weidner god list - more on that later - wouldn’t it make more sense to assume it’s her? Due to obscurity of the text as far as I am aware nobody has questioned Lambert’s tentative proposal yet, though.

There isn’t much to say about the plot: Anshar, literally “whole heaven”, the father of Anu, presumably gets overthrown and might be subsequently killed. Something that needs to be stressed here to avoid misinterpretation: primordial deities such as Anshar were borderline irrelevant, and weren't really worshiped. They exist to fade away in myths and to be speculated about in elaborate lexical texts. There was no deposed cult of Anshar. Same goes for all the Tiamats and Enmesharras and so on.

Inanna and beyond: Nanaya and friends in Mesopotamian sources

Inanna on a cylinder seal from the second half of the third millennium BCE (wikimedia commons)

Of course, Nanaya’s single most important connection was that to Inanna, no matter if we are to accept the view that she was effectively a hypostasis gone rogue or not. The relationship between them could be represented in many different ways. Quite commonly she was understood as a courtier or protegee of Inanna. A hymn from the reign of Ishbi-Erra calls her the “ornament of Eanna” (Inanna’s main temple in Uruk) and states she was appointed by Inanna to her position. References to Inanna as Nanaya’s mother are also known, though they are rare, and might be metaphorical. To my best knowledge nothing changed since Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz’s monograph, in which she notes she only found three examples of texts preserving this tradition. I would personally abstain from trying to read too deep into it, given this scarcity. Other traditions regarding Nanaya’s parentage are better attested. In multiple cases, she “borrows” Inanna’s conventional genealogy, and as a result is addressed as a daughter of Sin (Nanna), the moon god. However, she was never addressed as Inanna’s sister: it seems that in cases where Sin and Nanaya are connected, she effectively “usurps” Inanna’s own status as his daughter (and as the sister of Shamash, while at it). Alternatively, she could be viewed as a daughter of Anu. Finally, there is a peculiar tradition which was the default in laments: in this case, Nanaya was described as a daughter of Urash. The name in this context does not refer to the wife of Anu, though. The deity meant is instead a small time farmer god from Dilbat. To my best knowledge no sources place Nanaya in the proximity of other members of Urash’s family, though some do specify she was his firstborn daughter. To my best knowledge Urash had at least two other children, Lagamal (“no mercy”, an underworld deity whose gender is a matter of debate) and Ipte-bitam (“he opened the house”, as you can probably guess a divine doorkeeper). Nanaya’s mother by extension would presumably be Urash’s wife Ninegal, the tutelary goddess of royal palaces. There is actually a ritual text listing these three together. In the Weidner god list Nanaya appears after Ninshubur. Sadly, I found no evidence for a direct association between these two. For what it’s worth, they did share a highly specific role, that of a deity responsible for ordering around lamma. This term referred to a class of minor deities who can be understood as analogous to “guardian angels” in contemporary Christianity, except places and even deities had their own lamma too, not just people. Lamma can also be understood at once as a class of distinct minor deities, as the given name of individual members of it, and as a title of major deities. In an inscription of Gudea the main members of the official pantheon are addressed as “lamma of all nations”, by far one of my favorite collective terms of deities in Mesopotamian literature. A second important aspect of the Weidner god list is placing Nanaya right in front of Bizilla. The two also appear side by side in some offering lists and in the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN, where they are curiously listed as members of the court of Enlil. It seems that like Nanaya, she was a goddess of love, which is presumably reflected by her name. It has been variously translated as “pleasing”, “loving” or as a derivative of the verb “to strip”. An argument can be made that Bizilla was to Nanaya what Nanaya was to Inanna. However, she also had a few roles of her own. Most notably, she was regarded as the sukkal of Ninlil. She may or may not also have had some sort of connection to Nungal, the goddess of prisons, though it remains a matter of debate if it’s really her or yet another, accidentally similarly named, goddess.

An indistinct Hurro-Hittite depiction of Ishara from the Yazilikaya sanctuary (wikimedia commons)

In love incantations, Nanaya belonged to an informal group which also included Inanna, Ishara, Kanisurra and Gazbaba. I do not think Inanna’s presence needs to be explained. Ishara had an independent connection with Inanna and was a multi-purpose deity to put it very lightly; in the realm of love she was particularly strongly connected with weddings and wedding nights. Kanisurra and Gazbaba warrant a bit more discussion, because they are arguably Nanaya’s supporting cast first and foremost. Gazbaba is, at the core, seemingly simply the personification of kuzbu. Her name had pretty inconsistent orthography, and variants such as Kazba or Gazbaya can be found in primary sources too. The last of them pretty clearly reflects an attempt at making her name resemble Nanaya’s. Not much can be said about her individual character beyond the fact she was doubtlessly related to love and/or sex. She is described as the “grinning one” in an incantation which might be a sexual allusion too, seeing as such expressions are a mainstay of Akkadian erotic poetry. Kanisurra would probably win the award for the fakest sounding Mesopotamian goddess, if such a competition existed. Her name most likely originated as a designation of the gate of the underworld, ganzer. Her default epithet was “lady of the witches” (bēlet kaššāpāti). And on top of that, like Nanaya and Gazbaba she was associated with sex. She certainly sounds more like a contemporary edgy oc of the Enoby Dimentia Raven Way variety than a bronze age goddess - and yet, she is completely genuine. It is commonly argued Kanisurra and Gazbaba were regarded as Nanaya’s daughters, but there is actually no direct evidence for this. In the only text where their relation to Nanaya is clearly defined they are described as her hairdressers, rather than children. While in some cases the love goddesses appear in love incantations in company of each other almost as if they were some sort of disastrous polycule, occasionally Nanaya is accompanied in them by an anonymous spouse. Together they occur in parallel with Inanna and Dumuzi and Ishara and Almanu, apparently a (accidental?) deification of a term referring to someone without family obligations. There is only one Old Babylonian source which actually assigns a specific identity to Nanaya’s spouse, a hymn dedicated to king Abi-eshuh of Babylon. An otherwise largely unknown god Muati (I patched up his wiki article just for the sake of this blog post) plays this role here. The text presents a curious case of reversal of gender roles: Muati is asked to intercede with Nanaya on behalf of petitioners. Usually this was the role of the wife - the best known case is Aya, the wife of Shamash, who is implored to do just that by Ninsun in the standard edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s also attested for goddesses such as Laz, Shala, Ninegal or Ninmug… and in the case of Inanna, for Ninshubur.

A Neo-Assyrian statue of Nabu on display in the Iraq Museum (wikimedia commons)

Marten Stol seems to treat Muati and Nabu as virtually the same deity, and on this basis states that Nanaya was already associated with the latter in the Old Babylonian period, but this seems to be a minority position. Other authors pretty consistently assume that Muati was a distinct deity at some point “absorbed” by Nabu. The oldest example of pairing Nanaya with Nabu I am aware of is an inscription dated to the reign of Marduk-apla-iddina I, so roughly to the first half of the twelfth century BCE. The rise of this tradition in the first millennium BCE was less theological and more political. With Babylon once again emerging as a preeminent power, local theologies were supposed to be subordinated to the one followed in the dominant city. Which, at the time, was focused on Nabu, Marduk and Zarpanit. Worth noting that Nabu also had a spouse before, Tashmetum (“reconciliation”). In the long run she was more or less ousted by Nanaya from some locations, though she retained popularity in the north, in Assyria. She is not exactly the most thrilling deity to discuss. I will confess I do not find the developments tied to Nanaya and Nabu to be particularly interesting to cover, but in the long run they might have resulted in Nanaya acquiring probably the single most interesting “supporting cast member” she did not share with Inanna, so we’ll come back to this later. Save for Bizilla, Nanaya generally was not provided with “equivalents” in god lists. I am only aware of one exception, and it’s a very recent discovery. Last year the first ever Akkadian-Amorite bilingual lists were published. This is obviously a breakthrough discovery, as before Amorite was largely known just from personal names despite being a vernacular language over much of the region in the bronze age, but only one line is ultimately of note here. In a section of one of the lists dealing with deities, Nanaya’s Amorite counterpart is said to be Pidray. This goddess is otherwise almost exclusively known from Ugarit. This of course fits very well with the new evidence: recent research generally stresses that Ugarit was quintessentially an Amorite city (the ruling house even claimed descent from mythical Ditanu, who is best known from the grandiose fictional genealogies of Shamshi-Adad I and the First Dynasty of Babylon). Sadly, we do not know how the inhabitants of Ugarit viewed Nanaya. A trilingual version of the Weidner list, with the original version furnished with columns listing Ugaritic and Hurrian counterparts of each deity, was in circulation, but the available copies are too heavily damaged to restore it fully. And to make things worse, much of it seems to boil down to scribal wordplay and there is no guarantee all of the correspondences are motivated theologically. For instance, the minor Mesopotamian goddess Imzuanna is presented as the counterpart of Ugaritic weather god Baal because her name contains a sign used as a shortened logographic writing of the latter. An even funnier case is the awkward attempt at making it clear the Ugaritic sun deity Shapash, who was female, is not a lesbian… by making Aya male. Just astonishing, really.

The worship of Nanaya

A speculative reconstruction of Ur III Uruk with the Eanna temple visible in the center (Artefacts — Scientific Illustration & Archaeological Reconstruction; reproduced here for educational purposes only, as permitted)

Rather fittingly, as a deity associated with Inanna, Nanaya was worshiped chiefly in Uruk. She is also reasonably well attested in the inscriptions of the short-lived local dynasty which regained independence near the end of the period of domination of Larsa over Lower Mesopotamia. A priest named after her, a certain Iddin-Nanaya, for a time served as the administrator of her temple, the Enmeurur, “house which gathers all the me,” me being a difficult to translate term, something like “divine powers”. The acquisition of new me is a common topic in Mesopotamian literature, and in compositions focused on Inanna in particular, so it should not be surprising to anyone that her peculiar double seemingly had similar interests. In addition to Uruk, as well as Nippur and Ur, after the Ur III period Nanaya spread to multiple other cities, including Isin, Mari, Babylon and Kish. However, she is probably by far the best attested in Larsa, where she rose to the rank of one of the main deities, next to Utu, Inanna, Ishkur and Nergal. She had her own temple, the Eshahulla, “house of a happy heart”. In local tradition Inanna got to keep her role as an “universal” major goddess and her military prerogatives, but Nanaya overtook the role of a goddess of love almost fully. Inanna’s astral aspect was also locally downplayed, since Venus was instead represented in the local pantheon by closely associated, but firmly distinct, Ninsianna. This deity warrants some more discussion in the future just due to having a solid claim to being one of the first genderfluid literary figures in history, but due to space constraints this cannot be covered in detail here. A later inscription from the same city differentiates between Nanaya and Inanna by giving them different epithets: Nanaya is the “queen of Uruk and Eanna” (effectively usurping Nanaya’s role) while Inanna is the “queen of Nippur” (that’s actually a well documented hypostasis of her, not to be confused with the unrelated “lady of Nippur”). Uruk was temporarily abandoned in the late Old Babylonian period, but that did not end Nanaya’s career. Like Inanna, she came to be temporarily relocated to Kish. It has been suggested that a reference to her residence in “Kiššina” in a Hurro-Hittite literary text, the Tale of Appu, reflects her temporary stay there. The next centuries of Nanaya are difficult to reconstruct due to scarce evidence, but it is clear she continued to be worshiped in Uruk. By the Neo-Babylonian period she was recognized as a member of an informal pentad of the main deities of the city, next to Inanna, Urkayitu, Usur-amassu and Beltu-sa-Resh. Two of them warrant no further discussion: Urkayitu was most likely a personification of the city, and Beltu-sa-Resh despite her position is still a mystery to researchers. Usur-amassu, on the contrary, is herself a fascinating topic. First attestations of this deity, who was seemingly associated with law and justice (a pretty standard concern), come back to the Old Babylonian period. At this point, Usur-amassu was clearly male, which is reflected by the name. He appears in the god list An = Anum as a son of the weather deity couple par excellence, Adad (Ishkur) and Shala. However, by the early first millennium BCE Usur-amassu instead came to be regarded as female - without losing the connection to her parents. She did however gain a connection to Inanna, Nanaya and Kanisurra, which she lacked earlier. How come remains unknown. Most curiously her name was not modified to reflect her new gender, though she could be provided with a determinative indicating it. This recalls the case of Lagamal in the kingdom of Mari some 800 years earlier.

The end of the beginning: Nanaya under Achaemenids and Seleucids

Trilingual (Persian, Elamite and Akkadian) inscription of the first Achamenid ruler of Mesopotamia, Cyrus (wikimedia commons)

After the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire Mesopotamia ended up under Achaemenid control, which in turn was replaced by the Seleucids. Nanaya flourished through both of these periods. In particular, she attained considerable popularity among Arameans. While they almost definitely first encountered her in Uruk, she quickly came to be venerated by them in many distant locations, like Palmyra, Hatra and Dura Europos in Syria. She even appears in a single Achaemenid Aramaic papyrus discovered in Elephantine in Egypt. It indicates that she was worshiped there by a community which originated in Rash, an area east to the Tigris. As a curiosity it’s worth mentioning the same source is one of the only attestations of Pidray from outside Ugarit. I do not think this has anything to do with the recently discovered connection between her and Nanaya… but you may never know. Under the Seleucids, Nanaya went through a particularly puzzling process of partial syncretism. Through interpretatio graeca she was identified with… Artemis. How did this work? The key to understanding this is the fact Seleucids actually had a somewhat limited interest in local deities. All that was necessary was to find relatively major members of the local pantheon who could roughly correspond to the tutelary deities of their dynasty: Zeus, Apollo and Artemis. Zeus found an obvious counterpart in Marduk (even though Marduk was hardly a weather god). Since Nabu was Marduk’s son, he got to be Apollo. And since Nanaya was the most major goddess connected to Nabu, she got to be Artemis. It really doesn’t go deeper than that. For what it’s worth, despite the clear difference in character this newfound association did impact Nanaya in at least one way: she started to be depicted with attributes borrowed from Artemis, namely a bow and a crescent. Or perhaps these attributes were already associated with her, but came to the forefront because of the new role. The Artemis-like image of Nanaya as an archer is attested on coins, especially in Susa, yet another city where she attained considerable popularity.

Leaving Mesopotamia: Nanaya and the death of cuneiform

A Parthian statue of Nanaya with a crescent diadem (Louvre; reproduced here for educational purposes only. Identification follows Andrea Sinclair's proposal)

The Seleucid dynasty was eventually replaced by the Parthians. This period is often considered a symbolic end of ancient Mesopotamian religion in the strict sense. Traditional religious institutions were already slowly collapsing in Achaemenid and Seleucid times as the new dynasties had limited interest in royal patronage. Additionally, cuneiform fell out of use, and by the end of the first half of the first millennium CE the art of reading and writing it was entirely lost. This process did not happen equally quickly everywhere, obviously, and some deities fared better than others in the transitional period before the rise of Christianity and Islam as the dominant religions across the region. Nanaya was definitely one of them, at least for a time. In Parthian art Nanaya might have developed a distinct iconography: it has been argued she was portrayed as a nude figure wearing only some jewelry (including what appears to be a navel piercing and a diadem with a crescent. The best known example is probably this standing figure, one of my all time favorite works of Mesopotamian art:

Parthian Nanaya (wikimedia commons; identification courtesy of the Louvre website and J. G. Westenholz)

For years Wikipedia had this statue mislabeled as “Astarte” which makes little sense considering it comes from a necropolis near Babylon. There was also a viral horny tweet which labeled it as “Asherah” a few months ago (I won’t link it but I will point out in addition to getting the name wrong op also severely underestimated the size). This is obviously even worse nonsense both on spatial and temporal grounds. Even if the biblical Asherah was ever an actual deity like Ugaritic Athirat and Mesopotamian Ashratum, it is highly dubious she would still be worshiped by the time this statue was made. It’s not even certain she ever was a deity, though. Cognate of a theonym is not automatically a theonym itself, and the Ugaritic texts and the Bible, even if they share some topoi, are separated by centuries and a considerable distance. This is not an Asherah post though, so if this is a topic which interests you I recommend downloading Steve A. Wiggins’ excellent monograph A Reassessment of Asherah: With Further Considerations of the Goddess.

The last evidence for the worship of Nanaya in Mesopotamia is a Mandaean spell from Nippur, dated to the fifth or sixth century CE. However, at this point Nanaya must have been a very faint memory around these parts, since the figure designated by this name is evidently male in this formula. That was not the end of her career, though. The system of beliefs she originated and thrived in was on its way out, but there were new frontiers to explore. A small disgression is in order here: be INCREDIBLY wary of claims about the survival of Mesopotamian tradition in Mesopotamia itself past the early middle ages. Most if not all of these come from the writing of Simo Parpola, who is a 19th century style hyperdiffusionist driven by personal religious beliefs based on gnostic christianity, which he believes was based on Neo-Assyrian state religion, which he misinterprets as monotheism, or rather proto-christianity specifically (I wish I was making this up). I personally do not think a person like that should be tolerated in serious academia, but for some incomprehensible reason that isn’t the case. 

New frontiers: Nanaya in Bactria

The key to Nanaya’s extraordinarily long survival wasn’t the dedication to her in Mesopotamia, surprisingly. It was instead her introduction to Bactria, a historical area in Central Asia roughly corresponding to parts of modern Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The early history of this area is still poorly known, though it is known that it was one of the “cradles of civilization” not unlike Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley or Mesoamerica. The so-called “Oxus civilization” or “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” flourished around 2500-1950 BCE (so roughly contemporarily with the Akkadian and Ur III empires in Mesopotamia). It left behind no written records, but their art and architecture are highly distinctive and reflect great social complexity. I sadly can’t spent much time discussing them here though, as they are completely irrelevant to the history of Nanaya (there is a theory that she was already introduced to the east when BMAC was extant but it is incredibly implausible), so I will limit myself to showing you my favorite related work of art, the “Bactrian princess”:

Photo courtesy of Louvre Abu Dhabi, reproduced here for educational purposes only.

By late antiquity, which is the period we are concerned with here, BMAC was long gone, and most of the inhabitants of Bactria spoke Bactrian, an extinct Iranian language. How exactly they were related to their BMAC forerunners is uncertain. Their religious beliefs can be compared to Zoroastrianism, or rather with its less formalized forerunners followed by most speakers of Iranian languages before the rise of Zoroaster. However, there were many local peculiarities. For example, the main deity was the personified river Oxus, not Ahura Mazda. Whether this was a relic of BMAC religion is impossible to tell.We do not know exactly when the eastward transfer of Nanaya to Bactria happened. The first clear evidence for her presence in central Asia comes from the late first century BCE, from the coins of local rulers, Sapadbizes and Agesiles. It is possible that her depictions on coinage of Mesopotamian and Persian rulers facilitated her spread. Of course, it’s also important to remember that the Aramaic script and language spread far to the east in the Achaemenid period already, and that many of the now extinct Central Asian scripts were derived from it (Bactrian was written with the Greek script, though). Doubtlessly many now lost Aramaic texts were transferred to the east. There’s an emerging view that for unclear reasons, under the Achaemenids Mesopotamian culture as a whole had unparalleled impact on Bactria. The key piece of evidence are Bactrian temples, which often resemble Mesopotamian ones. Therefore, perhaps we should be wondering not why Nanaya spread from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, but rather why there were no other deities who did, for the most part. That is sadly a question I cannot answer. Something about Nanaya simply made her uniquely appealing to many groups at once. While much about the early history of Nanaya in Central Asia is a mystery, it is evident that with time she ceased to be viewed as a foreign deity. For the inhabitants of Bactria she wasn’t any less “authentically Iranian” than the personified Oxus or their versions of the conventional yazatas like Sraosha. Frequently arguments are made that Nanaya’s widespread adoption and popularity could only be the result of identification between her and another deity.Anahita in particular is commonly held to be a candidate. However, as stressed by recent studies there’s actually no evidence for this. What is true is that Anahita is notably missing from the eastern Iranian sources, despite being prominent in the west from the reign of the Achaemenid emperor Artaxerxes II onward. However, it is clear that not all yazatas were equally popular in each area - pantheons will inevitably be localized in each culture. Furthermore, Anahita’s character has very little in common with Nanaya save for gender. Whether we are discussing her early not quite Zoroastrian form the Achaemenid public was familiar with or the contemporary yazata still relevant in modern Zoroastrianism, the connection to water is the most important feature of her. Nanaya didn’t have such a role in any culture. Recently some authors suggested a much more obvious explanation for Anahita’s absence from the eastern Iranian pantheon(s). As I said, eastern Iranian communities venerated the river Oxus as a deity (or as a yazata, if you will). He was the water god par excellence, and in Bactria also the king of the gods. It is therefore quite possible that Anahita, despite royal backing from the west, simply couldn’t compete with him. Their roles overlapped more than the roles of Anahita and Nanaya. I am repeating myself but the notion of interchangeability of goddesses really needs to be distrusted almost automatically, no matter how entrenched it wouldn’t be. While we’re at it, the notion of alleged interchangeability between Anahita and Ishtar is also highly dubious, but that’s a topic for another time.

Nana (Nanaya) on a coin of Kanishka (wikimedia commons)

Nanaya experienced a period of almost unparalleled prosperity with the rise of the Kushan dynasty in Bactria. The Kushans were one of the groups which following Chinese sources are referred to as Yuezhi. They probably did not speak any Iranian language originally, and their origin is a matter of debate. However, they came to rule over a kingdom which consisted largely of areas inhabited by speakers of various Iranian languages, chiefly Bactrian. Their pantheon, documented in royal inscriptions and on coinage, was an eerie combination of mainstays of Iranian beliefs like Sraosha and Mithra and some unique figures, like Oesho, who was seemingly the reflection of Hindu Shiva. Obviously, Nanaya was there too, typically under the shortened name Nana. The most famous Kushan ruler, emperor Kanishka, in his inscription from Rabatak states that kingship was bestowed upon him by “Nana and all the gods”. However, we do not know if the rank assigned to her indicates she was the head of the dynastic pantheon, the local pantheon in the surrounding area, or if she was just the favorite deity of Kanishka. Same goes for the rank of numerous other deities mentioned in the rest of the inscription. Her apparent popularity during Kanishka’s reign and beyond indicates her role should not be downplayed, though. The coins of Kanishka and other Bactrian art indicate that a new image of Nanaya developed in Central Asia. The Artemis-like portrayals typical for Hellenistic times continue to appear, but she also started to be depicted on the back of a lion. There is only one possible example of such an image from the west, a fragmentary relief from Susa, and it’s roughly contemporary with the depictions from Bactria. While it is not impossible Nanaya originally adopted the lion association from one of her Mesopotamian peers, it is not certain how exactly this specific type of depictions originally developed, and there is a case to be made that it owed more to the Hellenistic diffusion of iconography of deities such as Cybele and Dionysus, who were often depicted riding on the back of large felines. The lunar symbols are well attested in the Kushan art of Nanaya too. Most commonly, she’s depicted wearing a diadem with a crescent. However, in a single case the symbol is placed behind her back. This is an iconographic type which was mostly associated with Selene at first, but in the east it was adopted for Mah, the Iranian personification of the moon. I’d hazard a guess that’s where Nanaya borrowed it from - more on that later. The worship of Nanaya survived the fall of the Kushan dynasty, and might have continued in Bactria as late as in the eighth century. However, the evidence is relatively scarce, especially compared with yet another area where she was introduced in the meanwhile.

Nanaya in Sogdia: new home and new friends

A Sogdian depiction of Nanaya from Bunjikat (wikimedia commons)

Presumably from Bactria, Nanaya was eventually introduced to Sogdia, its northern neighbor. I think it’s safe to say this area effectively became her new home for the rest of her history. Like Bactrians, the Sogdians also spoke an eastern Iranian language, Sogdian. It has a direct modern descendant, Yaghnobi, spoken by a small minority in Tajikistan. The religions Sogdians adhered to is often described as a form of Zoroastrianism, especially in older sources, but it would appear that Ahura Mazda was not exactly the most popular deity. Their pantheon was seemingly actually headed by Nanaya. Or, at the very least, the version of it typical for Samarkand and Panijkant, since there’s a solid case to be made for local variety in the individual city-states which made up Sogdia. It seems that much like Mesopotamians and Greeks centuries before them, Sogdians associated specific deities with specific cities, and not every settlement necessarily venerated each deity equally (or at all). Nanaya's remarkable popularity is reflected by the fact the name Nanaivandak, "servant of Nanaya", is one of the most common Sogdian names in general. It is agreed that among the Sogdians Panjikant was regarded as Nanaya’s cult center. She was referred to as “lady” of this city. At one point, her temple located there was responsible for minting the local currency. By the eighth century, coins minted there were adorned with dedications to her - something unparalleled in Sogdian culture, as the rest of coinage was firmly secular. This might have been an attempt at reasserting Sogdian religious identity in the wake of the arrival of Islam in Central Asia. Sogdians adopted the Kushan iconography of Nanaya, though only the lion-mounted version. The connection between her and this animal was incredibly strong in Sogdian art, with no other deity being portrayed on a similar mount. There were also innovations - Nanaya came to be frequently portrayed with four arms. This reflects the spread of Buddhism through central Asia, which brought new artistic conventions from India. While the crescent symbol can still be found on her headwear, she was also portrayed holding representations of the moon and the sun in two of her hands. Sometimes the solar disc and lunar orb are decorated with faces, which has been argued to be evidence that Nanaya effectively took over the domains of Mah and Mithra, who would be the expected divine identities of these two astral bodies. She might have been understood as controlling the passage of night and day. It has also been pointed out that this new iconographic type is the natural end point of the evolution of her astral role. Curiously, while no such a function is attested for Nanaya in Bactria, in Sogdia she could be sometimes regarded as a warlike deity. This is presumably reflected in a painting showing her and an unidentified charioteer fighting demons.

The "Sogdian Deities" painting from Dunhuang, a possible depiction of Nanaya and her presumed spouse Tish (wikimedia commons)

Probably the most fascinating development regarding Nanaya in Sogdia was the development of an apparent connection between her and Tish. This deity was the Sogdian counterpart of one of the best known Zoroastrian yazatas, Tishtrya, the personification of Sirius. As described in the Tištar Yašt, the latter is a rainmaking figure and a warlike protector who keeps various nefarious forces, such as Apaosha, Duzyariya and the malign “worm stars” (comets), at bay. Presumably his Sogdian counterpart had a similar role. While this is not absolutely certain, it is generally agreed that Nanaya and Tish were regarded as a couple in central Asia (there’s a minority position she was instead linked with Oesho, though). Most likely the fact that in Achaemenid Persia Tishtrya was linked with Nabu (and by extension with scribal arts) has something to do with this. There is a twist to this, though. While both Nabu and the Avestan Tishtrya are consistently male, in Bactria and Sogdia the corresponding deity’s gender actually shows a degree of ambiguity. On a unique coin of Kanishka, Tish is already portrayed as a feminine figure distinctly similar to Greek Artemis - an iconographic type which normally would be recycled for Nanaya. There’s also a possibility that a feminine, or at least crossdressing, version of Tish is portrayed alongside Nanaya on a painting from Dunhuang conventionally referred to as “Sogdian Daēnās” or “Sogdian Deities”, but this remains uncertain. If this identification is correct, it indicates outright interchange of attributes between them and Nanaya was possible.

The final frontier: Nanaya and the Sogdian diaspora in China Sogdians also brought Nanaya with them to China, where many of them settled in the Six Dynasties and Tang periods. An obviously Sinicized version of her, accompanied by two attendants of unknown identity, is portrayed on a Sogdian funerary couch presently displayed in the Miho Museum.

Nanaya (top) on a relief from the Miho funerary couch (Miho Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

For the most part the evidence is limited to theophoric names, though. Due to unfamiliarity with Sogdian religious traditions and phonetic differences between the languages there was no consistent Chinese transcription of Nanaya’s name. I have no clue if Chinese contemporaries of the Sogdians were always aware of these elements in personal names referred to a deity. There is a fringe theory that Nanaya was referred to as Nantaihou (那那女主, “queen Nana”) in Chinese. However, the evidence is apparently not compelling, and as I understand the theory depends in no small part on the assertion that a hitherto unattested alternate reading of one of the signs was in use on the western frontiers of China in the early first millennium CE. The alleged Nantaihou is therefore most likely a misreading of a reference to a deceased unnamed empress dowager venerated through conventional ancestor worship, as opposed to Nanaya. Among members of the Sogdian diaspora, in terms of popularity Nanaya was going head to head with Jesus and Buddha. The presence of the latter two reflected the adoption of, respectively, Manichaeism and Buddhism. Manicheans seemingly were not fond of Nanaya, though, and fragments of a polemic against her cult have been identified. It seems ceremonies focused on lamentations were the main issue for the Manichaeans. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any worthwhile study of possible Mesopotamian influence on that - the only one I found is old and confuses Nanaya with Inanna. We do not have much of an idea how Buddhists viewed Nanaya, though it is worth noting a number of other Sogdian deities were incorporated into the local form of Mahayana (unexpectedly, one of them was Zurvan). It has also been argued that a Buddhist figure, Vreshman (Vaisravana) was incorporated into Nanaya’s entourage. Nanaya might additionally be depicted in a painting showing Buddha’s triumph over Mara from Dunhuang. Presumably her inclusion would reflect the well attested motif of local deities converting to Buddhism. It was a part of the Buddhist repertoire from the early days of this religion and can be found in virtually every area where this religion ever spread. Nanaya is once again in elevated company here, since other figures near her have been tentatively interpreted as Shiva, Vishnu, Kartikeya and… Zoroaster.

Buddha conquering Mara (maravijaya) on a painting from Dunhuang (wikimedia commons)

zoom in on a possible depiction of Nanaya next to a demon suspiciously similar to Tove Jansson’s Fillyjonk

To my best knowledge, the last absolutely certain attestation of Nanaya as an actively worshiped deity also comes from the western frontier of China. A painting from Dandan Oilik belonging to the artistic tradition of the kingdom of Khotan shows three deities from the Sogdian pantheon: the enigmatic Āδβāγ (“highest god”; interpreted as either Indra, Ahura Mazda or a combination of them both) on the left, Weshparkar (a later version of Kushan Oesho) on the right and Nanaya in the center. It dates to the ninth or tenth century.

Nanaya (center) on the Dandan Oilik painting (wikimedia commons)

We will probably never know what Nanaya’s last days were like, though it is hard to imagine she retained much relevance with the gradual disappearance of Sogdian culture both in Sogdia and in China in the wake of, respectively, the rise of Islam in Central Asia and the An Lushan rebellion respectively. Her history ultimately most likely ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Conclusions and reflections Obviously, not everything about Nanaya could be covered in this article - there is enough material to warrant not one, but two wiki articles (and I don't even think they are extensive enough yet). I hope I did nonetheless manage to convey what matters: she was the single most enduring Mesopotamian deity who continued to be actually worshiped. She somehow outlived Enlil, Marduk, Nergal and even Inanna, and spread further than any of them ever did. It does not seem like her persistence was caused by some uniquely transcendent quality, and more to a mix of factors we will never really fully understand and pure luck. She is a far cry from the imaginary everlasting universal goddesses such longevity was attributed to by many highly questionable authors in the past, from Frazer to Gimbutas. Quite the opposite, once you look into the texts focused on her she comes across as sort of pathetic. After all, most of them are effectively ancient purple prose. And yet, this is precisely why I think Nanaya matters. To see how an author approaches her is basically a litmus test of trustworthiness - I wish I was kidding but this “Nanaya method” works every time. To even be able to study her history, let alone understand it properly, one has to cast away most of the dreadful trends which often hindered scholarship of ancient deities, and goddesses in particular, in the past. The interchangeability of goddesses; the Victorian mores and resulting notion that eroticism must be tied to fertility; the weird paradigms about languages neatly corresponding to religions; and many others. And if nothing else, this warrants keeping the memory of her 3000 years long history alive through scholarship (and, perhaps, some media appearances). Bibliography

Julia M. Asher-Greve & Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources (2013)

Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period (2003)

idem, Nabû and Apollo: The Two Faces of Seleucid Religious Policy in: Orient und Okzident in Hellenistischer Zeit (2014)

Matteo Compareti, Nana and Tish in Sogdiana (2017)

idem, The So-Called "Pelliot Chinois 4518.24". Illustrated Document from Dunhuang and Sino-Sogdian Iconographical Contacts (2021)

Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz, Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja (2008)

Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature (2005)

Andrew R. George & Manfred Krebernik, Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals! (2022)

Valerie Hansen, Kageyama Etsuko & Yutaka Yoshida, The Impact of the Silk Road Trade on a Local Community: The Turfan Oasis, 500-800 in: Les sogdiens en Chine (2005)

Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (2013)

Enrico Marcato, An Aramaic Incantation Bowl and the Fall of Hatra (2020)

Christa Müller-Kessler & Karlheinz Kessler, Spätbabylonische Gottheiten in spätantiken mandäischen Texten (1999)

Lilla Russel-Smith, Uygur Patronage in Dunhuang. Regional Art Centres on the Northern Silk Road in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (2005)

idem, The 'Sogdian Deities' Twenty Years on: A Reconsideration of a Small Painting from Dunhuang in: Buddhism in Central Asia II. Practices and Rituals, Visual and Material Transfer (2022)

Tonia M. Sharlach, An Ox of One's Own. Royal Wives and Religion at the Court of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2017)

Michael Shenkar, Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World (2014)

idem, The Religion and the Pantheon of the Sogdians (5th-8th Centuries CE) in Light of their Sociopolitical Structures (2017)

idem, The So-Called "Fravašis" and the "Heaven and Hell" Paintings, and the Cult of Nana in Panjikent (2022)

Marten Stol, Nanaja in: Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 9 (1998)

Michael P. Streck & Nathan Wasserman, More Light on Nanāya (2013)

Aaron Tugendhaft, Gods on Clay: Ancient Near Eastern Scholarly Practices and the History of Religions in: Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices. A Global Comparative Approach (2016)

Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Nanaya, Lady of Mystery in: Sumerian Gods and Their Representations (1997)

idem, Trading the Symbols of the Goddess Nanaya in: Religions and Trade. Religious Formation, Transformation and Cross-Cultural Exchange between East and West (2014)

Xinjiang Rong, The Colophon of the Manuscript of the Golden Light Sutra Excavated in Turfan and the Transmission of Zoroastrianism to Gaochang in: The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges between East and West (2022)

Gioele Zisa, The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia. ›Nīš Libbi‹ Therapies (2021)

[felassan]

Dragon Age™: The Veilguard - Patch 1.0.0 Release Notes

(patch notes under cut due to potential spoilers)

"Hey everyone, We can't believe it's been a whole week since Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched. Whether you've already been playing or are jumping in for the first time, we have our first patch releasing today with a few quality of life improvements and bug fixes. We'll also be supporting the game with additional patches in the future to help make your playing experience even better.  See our full Patch Notes below.  N7 Day Content:  - Rook can find a new N7 day appearance in the Lighthouse. This is a cosmetic only armor."

Bug Fixes: - Fixed an issue where DLSS options could end up “grayed-out” on a 40-series Nvidia GPU. (PC Only) - Eliminated the cause of a small number of crashes. (PC Only) - Updated XeSS version to 1.3.1. (PC Only) - Fixed an issue where some customizations were not applied to the Inquisitor correctly in one of the ending scenes. - Fixed a bug that caused Companion Skill Points to reset. - Adjusted Companion Approval notifications so they remain on-screen longer as scenes end. - Harding now has arrows in her quiver and is ready for battle. - Global banter should no longer start too early. - Harding and Taash banter no longer repeats indefinately. - Fixed potential issues that could occur if a player fast traveled during a quest. - Changing your party members on the way to certain quests no longer breaks the camera for in-world missions. - Updated a number of assets to improve visual performance over long distances. - Fixed several distance “pop-ins” on level art assets. - Added collision to several assets that were missing it. - Fixed a minor texture issue with codex art. - Added haptics to a number of interactions and events. - Fixed lip sync in some ambient scenes. - Adjusted audio balance on several assets. - Changing equipment no longer disables helmet voice processing. - Fixed several objective markers that were spawning improperly. - Cleaned up certain interactions between Skills that caused them to not behave as described. - Apparitions generated by Iron Veil will now attack Razikale. - Entropic Spheres now behave properly on vertical surfaces. - Fixed a bug where Taunt would sometimes be cleared early, which caused enemies to ignore it. - Fixed a rare issue where Rogues would not hold their bow while aiming down sights. - Made the detailed-stats screen more readable. - Balance changes made to certain fights to match design intent. - Balance adjustments made to several player skills. - Fixed leashing exploits on major encounters. - The Rage Demon’s Ring of Fire should now be appropriately dodgeable in all situations. - Slowed down the speedy raven in Hossberg. - Adjusted creepy corpse movement while they moved on/off-camera. - The Dalish elf in the Unwanted Guests quest is now an actual elf. - Fixed a rare blocking issue in the Sea of Blood quest. - Halla should no longer float during the In Entropy’s Grasp quest. - Fixed a blocking issue in the Pinnacle of Its Kind quest. - Adjusted timing on epilogue text cards. - NPC necks no longer grow unexpectedly. - Corrected instances where NPCs would not properly look at each other or at Rook. - Long hair should now properly mesh with certain armor. - Fixed several issues with makeup in character creation. - Venatori crystal VFX should now disappear properly. - Added scroll wheel support to the sell screen. - Opening the journal while on the map no longer causes it to continue scrolling. - The Faction Achievements will now be gained properly upon reaching max Faction Strength instead of the Faction Cap."

[source]

DA:TV's first bug fixes are out today on all platforms. future patches to come.

[bigshotautos]

What do you think Jevil's personality was like before his corruption by the Shadow Crystal? What do you think brought him and Spamton together, and what do you think ultimately caused their breakup? I apologize if you've already discussed this!!

HI i'm going to ramble a lot under the cut. have fun !

i have a really old post here about pre-corruption jevil, basically i still stand by everything said here except i'd like to add that he was probably also really kind of obnoxious. but in terms of timeline, he comes in contact with the "mysterious stranger" and has his revelation of the world he exists in, but doesn't fully go off the deep end until he snaps at card castle and has to be imprisoned, and while he's imprisoned his worldview twists round and round until it's an ironclad knot of repressed emotions instead of the freeing madness he wishes it was.

as for his relationship with spamton i've kind of been sliiiightly dodgy on it because i'd want to make a long comic of the big shot days consisting of their meeting, peak relationship, then downfall, i'm just concerned about chapter 3 destroying my take on the way the deltarune dark worlds work and the way "mike" / gaster tie into the plot. but the very condensed version is that jevil was already an established actor in the pre-canon secret bosses' interests, and big shot spamton was considered something of a liability to be kept in line, so jevil was sent to essentially keep him in line without spamton actually realizing that was his purpose for being there and without jevil really being given instruction on what to do besides pop in for days on end. spamton thought he was getting a free lackey over the phone but he actually got a barely hinged murderclown who he could not get rid of and actively wanted him As Scared as Possible.

eventually through spending time together they start to realize that they have a lot more in common than they could ever have initially thought, but they both have way too many Issues to see past themselves and truly see each other. the feelings were real, but neither trusted the other fully. when the things put in motion by the shadow crystal bearers break to the surface, their relationship doesn't survive it and they retreat back into themselves, worse than when they first started out, and this is when Jevil gets imprisoned and not much longer after Spamton has his dramatic fall from fame and fortune.

i'm just hesitant to make something big out of it when we're still missing a lot of variables, like the actual goal of gaster with the superbosses / the nature of the shadow crystals / seam's deal in general / several missing characters. i'd want to do this pairing a lot of justice LOL. it's probably the most impact a pairing has ever had on me and it still occupies a lot of my thoughts.

here's a little pre-corruption jevil doodle!

[icarusredwings]

Bad Kitty secret part three!!!???

Tw: Drowning, unconscious medically needed touching, graphic descriptions of distress, pain, and medical conditions/ open wounds. Some scenes may be uncomfortable. Viewer discretion is advised.

For @shittyvampire and @whiskeyandcigarsmoke

Fixing him up took a bit longer than he thought it would, seeing as each type of wound had different needs to subside. Overall, it was a pretty easy process, Just tedious.

He put him in a hot bath, letting him soak as he did his best to pop what he could while he was unconscious, cleaning them with sterilizing gel after cutting small holes into the abscess’ in order for them to drain.

“Ew” He muttered, immediately shaking his head and biting his tongue. He shouldn't say those things. What if he had heard that? Logan knew it was one of his biggest no-nos. Besides, It's not like it was his fault. This just.. happened.. sometimes.

Maybe he panicked when he wasn't there and it caused his skin to get worse? He heard that sometimes when you get stressed out you could break out in hives. Maybe this was Wade's version of that.

As for the blisters and boils, he helped the best and quickest he could, sometimes holding him under the water if he started to smell a little too conscious. The longer he held him, the more limp he would be, easier for him to work with.

At times though, Logan would quickly recoil, jerking him back up out of the water, his instincts telling him to save him.

“Damn it- come on. Get it together.” He grumbles, biting himself as he pushes him back under. Feeling the weak struggles made him tear up, singular tears falling as he looked away. He wasn't cut out for this anymore.

The thought alone made him realize that.. holy shit.. he was now the worst at what he was made for. He couldn't even bare to stab him in the head anymore, so what use would he be as a weapon to them? To anyone?

He was the shittiest weapon there was. And this made him smile. He couldn't wait to tell him. To tell Wade that…

His smile subsides as he realizes his hopes were not as real as he wished them to be… He killed him. Twice by now. He couldn't be so excited to tell him how excited he was that he was no longer a person whose hands bring nothing but pain when said hand right this second was drowning him, watching the bubbles come out of the water with little reaction. A stare of pity and that was all.

The consciousness in his chest felt heavier than Wade's limp wet limbs. With sorrow weighing down the lids of his, Logan's deadpanned straight forward stare looked as bout as mindless as a fox with rabies, trying its damndest to find help. Walking forward with no distinction of where it was actually headed. The glossiness over his eyes showing just how much he dreaded having a soul.

Placing him down on a towel in their bed, Logan takes a deep breath. He washes his hands, pats the still oozing crevasses dry, wiping them clean before dousing him in rubbing alcohol. Just hearing the sizzling And seeing the bubbling makes him feel terrible. The thought of catching him on fire, letting his body regenerate came to mind. He wiped this memory away just as he did the excess lipids, beginning to look at the various creams they had, smearing Neosporin, Lotions, Cocoa butter balms, and petroleum jelly all over him, different stuff in various places.

Carefully, he begins to unravel the gauze that he found in the kit, looking at the cotton padding and plaster dressing. Logan didn't have much knowledge of how he was supposed to wrap each individual wound (especially with the short amount of time he had left) but he made sure to make them tight enough to where they wouldn't fall off if he moved or walked around.

Hell.. by the time he was finished with him, he looked like a full body burn patient. Which.. honestly wasn't too far off. He had even done all that he could for his half deteriorated cheek.. he knew that hurt. Especially since The skin there was completely gone, exposing rotting muscle and thin layers of fat in between cancerous polyps.

Part of Logan felt bad for scrunching and turning up his nose, overwhelmed by the sickly sweet stench of death, Vaseline, rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, and many more scents that made him feel as if he were playing doctor.

Oh That's it!! When he woke up that's what he'd say. He'd tell him that they were playing Dr. Kitty and hopefully- Just maybe, he'd understand. Now.. the real trouble would be trying to change his bandages tomorrow. One could only pray that he was more cooperative.

Logan had dressed him in a long sleeve loose hoodie and comfortable sweats. He (falsely) had it in his head that this would deter him from picking at his scabs.

Looking down at his work, he felt a sense of pride and relief wash over him, though it didn't last long. ‘Shit- did I let that blister on his leg drain all the way?’ He thought, letting out another disappointed sigh as he propped a pillow under his neck, one under his really bad leg too to reduce the swelling.

Alright. So he wasn't the BEST wolverine… But he'd settle for ‘okay'. If he was the Okay-est Wolverine… He'd be okay with that.

But for now? All he had to do was Wait. He should wake up any moment and he definitely didn't want him to be afraid.

A total of 8 minutes pass before he hears that small gasp of air that makes his shoulders soften and his heart rate regulates every time.

Wade blinks, trying to sit up but is being held tightly by a certain worrisome Wolverine. A bit tight too. He was surrounded by his stuffies, his arms felt… Warm.. but a nice kind of warm. Leaning his head back against him, He turns his head, trying to nuzzle him only to realize that his face was wrapped too, hat And hood pulled up.

“...Hi..”

Logan almost jumps, as if nervous. He could feel him swallowing, hearing the gears in his head turning, thinking of what to say.

“Hi kiddo I uhm… we were playing doctor a-and erm.. you had a lot of booboos.” He says, his voice overly gentle.

Raising a non-existent brow, Wade blinked, turning back to look at him. “Logan… Why do I look like a mummy? I mean I'm cool if you're into that but jeez warn a gal first, wontcha?” He mutters playfully.

It was as if a massive wave of relief fell over him, shoulders dropping in relaxation as he groaned. “Oh thank fuck.. No! Never I just.. you.. you must have freaked out and given yourself a break out or.. something? I don't know but..”

Wade could tell he didn't want to talk about whatever it was. He assumed he was just being fussy earlier. He didn't remember much but he felt his body itch. “Sorry… Sooo what are we watchin’ Wolvie?” He asked, Itching his arm only for Logan to gently take it, giving him a squeeze. A small “Don't” leaving his lips. “Some doctor girl show… I thought.. it would be easier to explain if..”

Leaning further into Wade's neck, he was acting as if something was wrong. “... do you feel okay? OR-other then the itching?” Itchy was good. It meant he was healing. Ripping open his scabs? Not so much.

“I feel better than before.. I had this weird nightmare though that you were trying to strangle me to death. Ha! But that's normal right?” He smiles, dreaming often of his loved ones killing him. Either that or unicorns and tacos while committing murder. That was always a fun dream. “Oh! or the one where I can fly.” He responds to his own thoughts. As per usual.

Logan now looked like a guilty dog who's gotten in the trash. “...That wasn't a dream, Wade..” He whispers, sitting up as he pulls himself away from him, as if he didn't deserve his cuddles. He Had a plan to take this secret to the grave but the guilt was eating him up inside, gnawing on his heart and crunching up his bones. It felt like it was snapping pencils in his stomach and then jabbing them through his lungs.

Looking at him with A neutral face, Wade's mind was working to click it all together, staring at him with such wide, curious eyes. At times they flickered, biting his tongue as he listened to what the Jury in his head had to say. Multiple assuming and yelling various conspiracies. Though he decided to go with one that they could all agree on.

“...I'm sorry for being so difficult..” he mumbles, looking at his lap and then away, remembering almost all of it now. “I don't mean to be..”

Logan goes to grab his hand again only for him to instinctively pull it away, close to his chest, Afraid he might possibly try to strangle him again. He knew why he did it. He would have done way worse, but still, emotionally he was spooked. Just a bit.

While he breathed and searched his body language for ill intentions, Logan's hand never left the spot it was in the air, offering him to take it when he was ready.

"Are.. are you mad at me?" He finally spoke after Wade took the hand, pulling him back into him. He wanted to be held, coddled, loved. And this is exactly what Logan gave him, Wrapping his arms around him and letting Wade snuggle into his cheek.

"...no..” He decided, listening to his feelings, slowly learning to embrace them instead of hiding them away. That's what caused this whole break out to begin with.

“I still feel a little... scared.. but I know why you had to do it.. and... It was pretty hot that you did all that just to help me.. even if I literally stabbed you.."

“I strangled you, tried to poison you, suffocated you, drugged you, drowned you, and you're apologizing for stabbing me once?”

“...and for throwing a lot of stuff at your head..” He gives his forehead a kiss, trying to rub his face, knowing how much he loved that, his fingers through the coarse hairs on his jaw.

“You have incredible aim for a kid..” He grumbles.

“You did what you had to do to help me. I'm so proud of you..” He starts; wanting to take care of his Wolvie for his hard work.

“stop…”

“No really. You shouldn't have had to do all those things but you did, just to keep me out of pain. I don't think anyone else would have the balls to suffocate a kid, Peanut.”

He groans, upset that he said this but it was true, shifting to hide in Wade's chest as now it was his turn to be taken care of, praised And told how much he appreciates and loves him.

After getting some snacks, Logan forcing him to take pain medication, Puppins hopping up on the bed, and Althea throwing a fit as to why the floor in the living room was so slippery, followed by Logan cleaning it up, Wade was happy.

Very happy actually, finally getting to eat the sub that Logan brought home, petting Puppins, and snuggling his big sensitive wolvie, who was clinging to him as if Lady Death herself would come take him away. But don't worry, Peanut. He was banned from ever being with her anyway. She never could see him longer than a couple of minutes.

“And that's a good thing for you isn't it, kitten?”

“What?”

“Oh- nevermind....… Hey Logan..?”

He could feel the man swallow as he glanced up to him. “.. yeah?”

“You're the best kitty I could have asked for…. And her name is Doc McStuffins you uncultured swine.”

The man scoffs, smiling ridiculously large, hiding his face in his collarbone. “I hate you.” He teases, Slapping Wade's hand for itching his bandages.

“Hey! Ow!”

“Stop scratching.”

“Oh, that's it. You're bad again.”

“Aw man..”

[violetscanfly]

I doodled a bunch of a little mermaid au stuff last night with no intention to post it but now I'm posting it anyway and making it your problem

This is not even all of it, gonna post the rest later

Gonna ramble about this under the cut cause even tho it started as I wanna draw wwx as merfolk it somehow developed somewhat of a plot??

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

So the beginning is pretty self explanatory but some background stuff would be the Jiang and Wen are merfolk but the Wen were discovered by humans and hunted down to just the remnants that wwx protects in canon, and the Jiang (and presumably other underwater clans I haven't thought about) also shun the Wen remnants and blame them for being discovered. Wwx disagreed with the others about the Wen being responsible of their own demise and left the Jiang to live with them. They aren't in danger anymore though, otherwise wwx wouldn't just fuck off to the surface even if he would come back.

The Lan, Jin and Nie clans are human and the characters hold similar social statuses as in canon. (Also I was just drawing with no idea about the world and just wanting to forward the story and the clothes definitely reflect that being western but the hairstyles being from canon and the Lans still having their ribbons and such.)

Wwx meets and saves lwj similar to the mousehouse version, but him turning human doesn't involve a third party or a time limit because his goal isn't to be human full time. He does a ritual that turns him human but it requires a sacrifice in exchange and he gives his voice. He can turn back at will but if he does he'll have to do the ritual all over again to change into a human again. His voice also returns when he's in his original form.

Wwx has seen lwj before saving him and has a little crush and after saving him he finds lwj's ribbon floating around in the ocean and not knowing the importance of it takes it as a lil memento of him. (Hence lwj in the sketches not having it.)

Also the merfolk are a lot more fishy than the average fairytale mermaids, with having gills, webbed hands etc, and due to gills wwx can't stay above the surface for long unless he's neck deep in water, same with speaking, he can speak above the surface for a bit until he runs out of air.

So after lwj finds human!wwx on the beach thinking he's been washed up from a shipwreck he brings wwx home and they find ways to communicate, he teaches wwx to write and they both learn sign language together and go on cute dates and have a good time and fall in love. Lxc is happy for his little brother but also worried because their uncle had been planning on an engagement for lwj and mm and is not happy about wwx suddenly popping up.

That's about it around these drawings, there'll be more to come later. This turned out way longer than I thought but if you read the whole thing I hope you had fun.

[paperclipninja]

Seeing everyone's reactions to the Good Omens news, I think I'm feeling some version of them all concurrently. And I know throwing my 2c into the basket is neither here nor there, but I've popped some rambling thoughts under the cut.

First off I want to be really clear: obviously the people truly impacted are the victims of NG's behaviour and that is first and foremost. This is not intended to erase or diminish that, I am distinguishing broader impact from impact on the show here intentionally, even though they are inherently entwined, but want to acknowledge that right off the bat.

This whirlwind of finding out about the allegations, to hearing that the show was paused, to assuming it was cancelled, to wanting it not to be cancelled but not wanting NG to be a part of it, to not being sure how that would happen, to being hopeful, to hearing it is back on sans creep but a movie, to hearing it's a series, to getting confirmation it's a 90 minute movie, to finding out that not even a month ago we were, in fact, getting nothing. It's been a lot.

And I managed to convince myself that if it's cancelled, well then the fandom will live on forever - creating, imagining and determined to continue this story and give these characters the varied and many endings and stories they deserve. Believe me, nothing binds a fandom like an unfinished story.

And then I heard that a movie, then a third series, was going ahead and took that to mean NG was no longer involved and thought ok, it's going to look a bit different probably but that's ok. We will still get a 6 episode resolution on screen, an ending that is canon and ties up all the things and we can enjoy that and all it brings and then, probably have lots of mixed feelings about how it's all tied up, then eventually, probably, start to move on.

And now we have actual confirmation that it's a 90 minute movie, NG properly removed other than some script contribution and it's somehow more than I expected and not enough, and a relief and heart-breaking all at once.

And I have been reflecting and thinking about it all morning and realised that for me, this is a funny, bittersweet kind of middle ground that sort of allows two things to happen: we get a resolution on screen, we get to see these characters we love so dearly together once more and for their story to play out to some kind of conclusion. But we will also have to create and imagine and determine what happens with all that we won't get to see now.

Am I sad that there will be many aspects of the story we will probably never get (thinking of more flashbacks in particular)? Absolutely. But the other thing that often happens when a show ends is that after a while, without the need to speculate or theorise or imagine what could have been, fandoms plateau (that's not to say people don't continue to create and love the characters and show, especially something like Good Omens, but generally, in my experience, the level of engagement will peter off over time without new content, especially if everything is wrapped up nicely with a bow). The compulsion to create endings and resolutions is often diminished once an ending and resolution has been established.

So I realised that we find ourselves in a rather unique position. We will get a resolution of sorts, but all those bits we will never get to see will become the source of speculation and stories and art and theories and what could have been, and it will become ours to imagine and create time and time again. I think that the collective experience of all of this, along with the need to fill in the gaps, might actually keep the many talented creators in this fandom inspired and the rest of us engaged and bound together in a way we may not have been otherwise.

This is obviously just my take and where I currently sit on all this - there is no right or wrong way to feel, engage or move forward from here. The beauty of fandom, especially one as big as ours, is that everyone can find their pocket, connect with those who bring comfort and validation, and proceed in a way that works for you.

I adore this fandom, the people I have met and the unbelievable content and fandom works that come out of it. It is truly unlike anything I've ever been a part of online and if nothing else, I am grateful for that. This was an indulgent little ramble, perhaps it might bring some solace or make you want to throw things at me, and that's ok. We're in it together.

[makshu]

Kamaitachi songs that I think fit JSHK characters

Hello there! I thought about making this post because many of this artist's songs remind me of JSHK

–> Well, but who is Kamaitachi you ask me? Kamaitachi is a Brazilian singer and composer who writes songs on a variety of themes, the most common being romantic and horror themes. His musical style is varied, with indie, rock, blues, pop, jazz and others in his composition.

–> In addition, Kamaitachi created his own universe in his songs, having connected songs telling a story such as 'Bob', 'O Sono de Emily' and 'Sr. Sono'. The name Kamaitachi is inspired by Japanese folklore, where "Kama" means cuts and "Itachi" means weasel, representing the sweet and sour crowd.

Well, now that you know him, let's get to the songs and characters! :)

Hanako-kun with 'O Fantasma'

'O Fantasma' translates to 'The Ghost', this song reminds me of Hanako not only because of the name, but also because of the ghostly and melancholic melody. The song demonstrates an internal struggle and a search for redemption. In the song, the lyrical self wants to remove a part of himself, which would be the "ghost", a part that haunts him. The part that reminds me most of Hanako is this one:

I was never an angel

I didn't even have wings to fly away

From what afflicts me

But I was once a demon

And I had to die

To learn how to live as a human being

The theme in general fits very well with Hanako, besides at the end of the song the lyrical self apologizes to someone dear to him for everything that happened. Promising to change and to no longer let the "rays of the past" haunt his life and everyone else's. Remembering Hanako with Yashiro or even with Tsukasa.

Tsukasa Yugi with 'O Sono de Emily'

'O Sono de Emily' translates to 'The Sleep of Emily'. The song features themes of friendship, fear and a plan beyond the tangible, featuring the lyrical self as a little boy named Bob who tries to reach out and befriend a girl named Emily. It's also shown that they are "shadows" and that Bob wants to keep Emily with him. This song reminds me a lot of Tsukasa's relationship with the entity, both in the old and new timelines. Unfortunately, I can't really develop the similarities since we don't know much about how exactly the entity works. However, we do know that Tsukasa makes friends with the entity. The song has a more intense and somewhat sinister melody, as if it were on another plane, and Bob's lines are kinda unsettling.

The song fits very well with Tsukasa's aura, as it presents a very powerful childlike entity that conveys fear of the unknown, just like Tsukasa in all its versions.

Nene Yashiro with 'Alice' (tw: drugs)

'Alice' alludes to the character Alice from "Alice in Wonderland" bringing a dark meaning that has been used several times, that Alice was under the influence of illicit substances and hallucinating everything she saw. Supernatural things are not things that people normally see, you shouldn't see things that don't exist, but Yashiro does. It wouldn't be so absurd, if we put it into reality, to imagine that Yashiro would be under the effect of something. The song brings up the theme of drug addiction and its terrible consequences, and yet, Nene, who truly sees supernaturals, has also had consequences (mostly psychological). And let's be honest, to an outsider, Yashiro really does seem to be hallucinating.

Tsukasa Yugi with 'O Treco'

'O Treco' translates to 'The Thing'. the song presents a dark and enigmatic narrative, where the lyrical self describes the unexpected and disturbing visit of a mysterious man.

I had to put him back on the list since this song really suits him as a mysterious antagonist (and there are many edits of him with this song).

Tsukasa is an enigmatic and unpredictable figure, always appearing out of nowhere and giving many jumpscares to the characters. However, most of the time he actually has an "invitation" when he appears, which is a deep wish made by a supernatural. I think the song suits him very well, especially in this new reality, where he's a bizarre and disturbing child entity, presenting the unknown and danger in the face of those who face him.

Hanako-kun and Aoi Akane with 'Às Cegas no Monte'

'Às Cegas no Monte' translates to 'Blind On the Hill' and the song brings a reflection on the journey of life and the relentless search for happiness. This song reminds me of them in the "To The Far Shore" arc due to the literal meaning of the song since we follow a "train" throughout the song. Throughout the lyrics, it's possible to observe many similarities, such as a train that runs without stopping, something that reminds us of dawn and the desire to still want to be happy even if "it's not the time to be happy."

In its meaning, the song presents the search for happiness, which is something that both Hanako and Aoi seek, even if it's almost impossible to achieve, and it's also about the journey of life, or in this case, the journey that has ended. The song has a calm melody, but it manages to bring a weight to certain phrases and this vibe reminds me of the two of them at the beginning of this arc, a heavy atmosphere but they still try to avoid it by talking about what their lives were like.

Hanako-kun and Nene Yashiro with 'Carnaval'

'Carnaval' which translates to 'Carnival' is about longing and desire, intertwined with the hope of reunion. The song features a lyrical self who misses the other person and who always asks if his partner is okay, indicating that perhaps they haven't seen each other for a while. And in the chorus, the song uses a metaphor, saying that the kiss of this person reminds him of Carnival (a typical Brazilian party) because of all the excitement and effervescence that this party brings.

This all brings out the essence of Hananene, this concern for each other, the occasional separations and the desire. And also all the little moments apart where count the minutes until they meet again. The song features an upbeat instrumental that creates a good vibe and brings a feeling of happiness, especially when you think about your loved one. A really good match with these two.

Hanako-kun and Nene Yashiro with "O Sol e a Lua"

'O Sol e a Lua' translates to 'The Sun and the Moon' the song addresses, in a poetic and figurative way, the relationship between the celestial bodies Sun and Moon, presenting the feeling of revealing oneself and mutual protection. Demonstrating love and how both are important to maintain life. In addition to the music having references to other spatial aspects.

I know that the sun and moon are concepts mainly attributed to the twins in JSHK, but considering romantic dynamics, Hanako and Yashiro fit perfectly into "sun and moon". Hanako is the moon being the most mysterious and serious side of the relationship and Yashiro is the sun being the most cheerful and lively part of the relationship.

I put them back on the list because this song is very hananene coded and I don't know how to explain it other than just saying "it suits them".

—

Well that's it for now, I hope you enjoyed this list and if you give the songs a chance I'll be happy too! Kamaitachi is a very plural and unique artist, and I really appreciate his work.

Thanks for reading ^^

[ratsoh-writes]

Maybe do an updated version of the introvert vs. extrovert list ask in masterlist 2, but with all the skeles?

Alright. *breaks fingers* let’s do this!!

Introverts: honey basil red rust lord mutt coffee butler gold Pluto Helios peaches ram pitch moose quill harpy papaya sails Alden barin saga snipe slim pop tempo green lens cricket tinker partner rowdy

Extroverts: papyrus Star willow lilac edge noir mal cash charm sugar sparks lush sir Flambe pesto Jupiter orion barley crow roost mango fisher Jasper Finn hook captain silex Ollivander arwin Hilda bruiser butch boss rhythm vibrato gears zen thistle yarrow

Ambiverts: sans oak wine salt pepper weasel atlas Artemis rancher cider maple Pearl ace G compass taffy pudding stitches shield

Longer answers: under the cut cause it’s a long fkn list

Sans: he truly is fine with or without company. Simply put sans is just too lazy to care. While he does value his privacy, that’s more in the lines of what his thoughts are. Sans doesn’t give out his true intentions easily. And he can keep being a secretive little jokester in the privacy of his own home, or surrounded by friends. It doesn’t make a difference to him.

Papyrus (and willow): papyrus loves people! He thrives on being surrounded by other happy faces. When he’s alone too long, his more anxious thoughts start turning creep in, so having friends or just any people around is always preferable.

Star (and lilac): he’s an extrovert cause it’s a lot easier to have fun with others than by yourself. Daily tasks just don’t hit as hard without commentary from other people to fill the silence. Star hates silence lol

Honey (and basil): he’s an introvert cause people are scary. It takes a while for him to get comfortable. Therefore it’s just easier to have his me time by himself.

Red (and rust): introvert. He doesn’t like people. And he’s territorial and likes his space. There’s really nothing deep to it

Edge (and noir): extrovert. The best work is done with a proper team and edge prefers his allies around him. He’s learned over the years that just life is simply more.. enjoyable with others, even if they sometimes hold him back he feels

Oak: while he and sans are both ambiverts, it’s for entirely different reasons. Oak simply can’t be introverted. It’s not safe for him to be along long times with his memory. And his perception of time is trash, so he gets nervous if he’s alone too long. But at the same time he would really rather not be always surrounded you know?

Mal: extrovert obviously. Come on, this gossip queen can be nothing else! After all you need many friends in order to get good tea~

Cash: he loves his besties, and causing chaos is always better in groups. You need people to take the blame with you after all lol. Cash prefers having company, mostly of very close friends, but he’ll take others too. He’s pretty extroverted

Lord: he’s a total introvert. He’s only happy to be around a small handful of special people all day, and even then he still needs breaks from them periodically lol

Mutt: he was an extrovert before his LV sickness, but his inability to connect has made him loose his taste for always wanting companionship, so he’s more introvert these days. Unless it’s the right person that is…

Wine: he quite likes lazy days alone, but he equally loves outings with groups. Wine just lets the day take him wherever it may go with no real preference. So ambivert

Coffee: total introvert. He doesn’t like people, and when he is actually in the mood to socialize, it’s for a very limited time frame lol.

Pluto: he’s such a little introvert. He has to get himself psyched up for a day beforehand first when he knows he’ll be in a group larger than four for a few hours. Pluto is perfectly happy spending his days researching alone instead

Jupiter: sports are better with teammates so 100% extrovert.

Orion: his lazy devil may care personality is deceiving. Orion thrives in company, he craves interaction. He’s the guy who will look at a complete stranger and go up to them to get their life story. Total extrovert

Atlas is an ambivert because while he can enjoy company, he doesn’t necessarily need it. He just needs adventure and gossip. It doesn’t have to come from a face to face source, but it doesn’t have to be alone to be enjoyable either

Helios: while he has a great stage face, that’s all it is, a fake face. Helios never liked the spotlight, it’s just another thing he endures so he can stay in the fight. He’d much rather be chilling alone in his Snuggie than dealing with people all the time

Artemis: she’d have been extroverted if she hadn’t been shut away in a hospital room for most of her life. Artemis is used to being alone, but she also loves interaction

Charm: he hates being alone with his thoughts. The brain is cold and hard, other peoples beds are soft and warm~ extrovert

Sugar: he just loves everybody! Of course he wants to hang out!! Total extrovert. If anyone argues otherwise they don’t know sugar at all

Sparks: I could repeat sugars answer and you have sparks pretty much. He loves everyone! Extrovert!

Salt: he’s ambivert as he likes people, but he likes his own space too. He needs a healthy balance of both to feel fulfilled

Lush: he’s a tragic extrovert. Lush craves companionship and company, but finds it very hard to make said friends that fufills that. So he pretends it doesn’t matter when it very much does. Please be friends with him!

Pepper: he’s incredibly picky about the company he keeps, and honestly doesn’t care if that means a few days alone or not. Pepper can entertain himself. But he does throughly love hanging out whenever with the ones he deems worthy. Ambivert

Sir: he’s a nosy bugger and likes being around every one so he can know what’s going on at all times. Sir is a great extrovert!

Weasel: he doesn’t really care if he’s causing chaos with friends, or just chilling alone. There are many ways weasel keeps himself entertained. He’s pretty independent. Ambivert

Butler: he tolerates large groups if he likes the people in them, but it doesn’t stop him from craving that sweet sweet alone time. He’s a social introvert.

Gold: while he does love being with friends, his social battery is way smaller than he acts it is actually. You can tell golds getting tired the more he flirts. He’s secretly hoping he can get this interaction over with so he can go back and work on his outfits

Flambe: all eyes on him ladies and gentleman~ extrovert lol. He loves attention too much not to be

Pesto: like Flambe, pesto craves attention and validation. And he wants it from lots of friends. He’s not in a place where he can feel that again, but he’s getting there. Extrovert

Peaches: he’s perfectly happy with just his trees, and family. But even with a large family, he knows he’ll get all his me time during his work in the orchid. He’s a sweet introvert

Rancher: he’s top goal driven to be introvert or extrovert. He doesn’t care if he’s alone or together with people, as long as he’s achieving the thing he wants to do right now!

Cider: he prizes peace, but peace can come in a group just as much as when it’s just him. Cider is used to a cramped large family, so being surrounded doesn’t bother him. But he’s also perfectly fine alone for a while. He’s definitely ambivert

Barley: he’s so extroverted he literally feels itchy if he’s been alone too long lol. Barley jokes that he’s allergic to solitude

Ram: things are just easier to understand when it’s just him. Ram does prize his alone time and peace. So introverted.

Pitch is easily the most introverted skeleton on this list. He’d be just fine socially if the only three people left in the world were him, Ram and maybe a nice gal/guy for ram lol.

Moose: he’s pretty introverted. While he does like outings, he wants to plan ahead for them. Or else he feels very drained afterwards. It is what it is

Maple: as long as a chainsaw is involved, maple doesn’t care if he’s alone or with 100 people. People that know chainsaw safety that is lol. He’s ambivert

Quill: he’s so introverted it hurts. Groups larger than 3 drain him so fast. He even needs breaks from best friends occasionally

Crow: he’s totally extroverted! Crow thinks people make everything so much more interesting! Yes he would like to hear about your day! Give him all those details!!

Roost: he’s a ladies man~ and a lads man~ and a platonic but flirty chill dude/dudettes guy! Roost just likes fun banter and prefers it over none at all. He’s pretty extroverted

Harpy: she truly doesn’t care if she does everything by herself, or if she has competent partners around her. In her main social life she’s seen as ambivert, but personally she feels as if she leans more towards introverted. While she puts up a good farce, she does just feel.. better alone. More calm.

Mango: she feels more secure surrounded by people she likes, preferably humans but she has monster friends too who’ve earned her trust! Mango is definitely extroverted!

Papaya: he’s more on the introverted side of the spectrum. Papaya is friendly and kind, but he simply just needs a dose of peace and quiet every day to function.

Fisher: his favorite activity in life is playfully tormenting others, and since that requires other people to work, extrovert it is~

Jasper: intellectually he knows he’s a walking dumpster fire if left to his own devices so Jasper constantly seeks out company from buddies. And he does like it lol. So he’s very extroverted

Finn: he quite literally took a job in the royal guard, then as a scout master cause it involves working with other people! Finn loves people and loves helping them! He’s extroverted for sure!

Sails: his ideal day is just him, his dog and a nice day out on his boat in the ocean. Nobody needing anything from him. Sails knows he’s an introvert and is cool with this about himself

Hook: he gets lonely easily, and seeks out lots of companionship and drama cause of it. Hooks always been extroverted because of this. It’s why he’s so happy on the ship with all his crew mates

Captain has honestly never had a life where he was alone. In his old au he shared a ship with many others, and now he captains a navy vessel with a crew on his own. He’d feel quite off if he ever did find himself alone. Captain is definitely extroverted

Pearl quite likes her relaxing me time, but she has no issues pleasing the masses as well as a princess. The spotlight on her is heavy but not exhausting. She’s a good ambivert.

Silex: this man is so extroverted lol. He wants to meet every one and see it all!!! It’s hard to imagine him as anything else

Alden: he’s happiest when it’s just him in his art studio. No distractions. Alden is for sure introverted even though he comes across as one of the more friendly skeletons

Ollivander: the reason his bank is so successful is because in part of how personable Ollie is! Ollivander is an extroverted fellow, and that friendly helpful face he puts on at work is very much genuine. Unless you aren’t paying your debts that is~

Hilda: she’s so obviously extroverted lol. And sucks for her since she was raised in a family of quiet polite high class introverts lol. Hilda felt pretty repressed growing up, leading to the over the top personality she has these days

Saga: she’s very much introverted. Saga is happy to just be left to her books for the rest of her life. But she will tolerate polite companions for a bit each day

Barin: he’s introverted, always has been. But his duties require him to manage a lot of people. So Barin powers through like he does with everything else in life. He really really values what little alone time he does have though

Arwin: he’s the extroverted life of the party! Arwin is a fan of having many fans and wears his posse like a badge of honor lol

Snipe: he hates people. And he probably hates you too. So don’t bother him. Introverted

Bruiser: he loves meeting his favorite people. And things are simply just too boring without them! So bruiser is very extroverted. He’s a needy friend lol

Butch: in order to kick *ss and take names, there needs to be *ss to kick and names to take, so for the sake of all his crazy shenanigans, butch must be extroverted lol

Boss: he craves companionship despite his best efforts to pretend he doesn’t. Boss feels quite lonely when he finds himself with nothing to do. Hence why he bosses his brothers around so much. He’s extroverted

Ace: causing chaos with (or against) others is fun~ causing chaos alone is also fun~ ace is a true ambivert

Slim: he’d rather hurl than have to be around people all the time. And his best friendships are more than often done through a screen. Slim is introverted all the way

Pop: he’s a very friendly and random introvert! He comes across as a quirky socialite though when- oh where did he go? Did he ditch every one again?

Rhythm: dancing is simply more fun with a partner so rhythm must be extroverted! Besides you need a mob to make a flash mob lol

Tempo: he’s very much introverted. After all he need solitude in order to make the compositions he loves! And he’s happiest when he’s creating

Vibrato: it’s a good thing he’s extroverted with how much he’s on stage! He loves his fans so much! And the paparazzi, and his bodyguards who keep him from the paparazzi lol

Lens: even without his paranoia, lens has always been more on the introverted side. There’s certain people he trusts enough to be fine around whenever, but anyone else is very tiring for him emotionally. It takes lens a long time to open up

Cricket: he’s introverted as well, a bit of a surprising fact for anyone who often sees him with cash and mal. Cricket likes his alone time at the junkyard. Only best friends can drag him away from it lol

G: he’s ambivert for sure. G does quite like being surrounded by people, but there’s something equally alluring with exploring life on his own too. He’s a go with the flow guy. Whatever fits better with that days plans works fine

Green: while socializing is enjoyable, green needs time to recoup and heal from it. He thinks very hard when he’s with people and even if he likes them and what they do together, he’s simply just tired afterwards. So introverted

Gears: he’s extroverted, but just barely. Gears can be alone for ages when he’s caught in creating a new trinket, but when he’s away from that (and lucid after he gets out of the inventors haze lol) he craves companionship! He wants to chat! To hang out! To be doted on lol

Compass: he’s a true ambivert. He’s happy playing and exploring on his own, but if someone wants to join he’s perfectly chill with adding them. No fuss. It’s not that deep for him

Zen: he’s an extroverted boy! Zen is just so curious about people. He wants to hear their stories! Plus it pleases the little host inside of him to have lots of others around!

Shield: hes ambiverted. While shield enjoys company, he also enjoys his independence quite a bit. Shield likes toeing the line between popular social guy and cool independent lone wolf. Why confine yourself to one label when you can have both?

Taffy: she doesn’t care for quantity of friends, just the quality. And if that means she’s alone sometime, well that doesn’t bother her. Taffy is a good ambivert

Pudding comes off as extroverted pretty easily, but she’s quite ambiverted really. Most of her social butterfly mask is just that, a mask. She enjoys the play bit doesn’t need it to feel fulfilled

Partner: he’s more introverted. And it reflects in what he does when he’s off the clock. When partner isn’t playing his part as sheriff, he takes a lot of time alone to himself

Rowdy never really got to explore himself socially as a child, so he’s trying very hard right now to come across as social open and adventurous. He’s been realizing over time though that he really just wants to be left to himself for most of the time. Adventure is only fun when it’s scheduled in with plenty of me time breaks in between. He’s an introvert

Stitches: he’s happy nerding out with friends, or nerding out alone! Online forums are a thing too. Stitches doesn’t need lots of companionship to be happy although it is fun. He’s ambivert.

Tinker: anyone who knows this monster can just smell the introvert oozing out of him lol. He crochets all day alone and loves it that way

Thistle: he’s extroverted! In fact he gets jittery if he’s been alone too long. He starts feeling unsafe. Loneliness is scary man

Yarrow: yarrow too is more extroverted for sure. Being raised in a coven all about family inclusion and stuff kinda leaves you no choice lol. He’s cool with it though

[loveshotzz]

Punk!Steve Harrington x fem!goth reader

She’s Automatic

Summary: you’re always hot and cold but Steve can’t seem to get enough.

Warnings: 18 plus (no minors), weed smoking, mentions of drinking, smut, unprotected sex (wrap it up), cream pie. Steve has nipple piercings 😈 the picture in the banner is not representative of readers skin tone, just used for aesthetic purposes. No skin tone is mentioned in this story.

Word count: 1.7k

Authors note: punk!steve has had me in a chokehold for weeks now. This is what you get because of it. Thank you to my wife @myobmaya for her laundry list of ideas. Also just wanted to thank @multiwongi for being nice enough to let me use their punk!steve edit in my banner, they have the best edits of him. Go follow!

Steve wanted you, making it more then obvious every time he’d drag his clearly very over stimulated friend to the bar. Hazel eyes lined with black always greedily taking in your curves. Watching the way you’d stretch and bend down behind the bar in tight leather skirts and cut up shirts leaving little to the imagination. Lug boots coming up to your thighs fishnets always covering the rest.

You entertained Steve’s flirting some nights, noticing the way his eyes would always catch the silver metal of your tongue piercing. It was fun to watch him get flustered when you’d lay it on just as thick. Even with his menacing appearance he was just another fumbling boy. On other nights you’d treated him as if he was nothing but a fly on the wall, going about your job like he wasn’t desperate to catch your attention. Never knowing what version of you he was going to get, the chase kept him hooked.

It had been a particularly long day, already staring down the barrel of an even longer night when Steve strutted up to bar. Lean legs covered in a pair of ripped black jeans, the snug fit leaving little to the imagination of what was underneath. His Leather jacket wrapped around his broad shoulders like butter, covered in patches of bands you’d never admit to him you liked. The white tank top underneath just sheer enough to see the outline of his hidden tattoos, a thick smattering of dark chest hair peaking out from the top. Pierced lips turning up into a smile, he had no idea tonight was finally his night.

“Well, well, well if it isn’t my knight in shining armor.” Kicking it off with a lean over the counter and a flutter of your lashes. Steve’s eyes widen not expecting you to be so warm. The last time he was here you’d ignored any sound of his voice, finally settling for Robin to order the drinks to which you responded to her almost immediately.

“Oh? I’m not a mute today?” Taking a seat on the stool in front of you, his tone is teasing but the smirk on his face tells you that you could ignore him any day of the week, and he’d still come crawling back just for you to look at him like this.

“Aww did I hurt your feelings Steve?” Giving him puppy eyes you jut out your black stained lip. “I didn’t mean it, sometimes I just like to be mean to boys. Nothing personal, promise.” Flashing him a devilish grin, his Adam’s apple bobs under his skin.

“I think I might be able to find it in my heart to forgive you gorgeous.” The blunt ends of his chipped black nails drum against the counter, his pink tongue darting out to play with the hoops sitting on the side of his bottom lip. “A think a shot of whiskey and a beer should really seal the deal.”

You knew the metal head he’d bring in here sometimes sold weed or at least had access to it, always smelling like he’d spent his whole day in a hot box. Your mood had you desperate for something the wasn’t liquor and Steve was probably your best shot.

“I’ve got a proposition for you.” Pushing yourself closer on your tippy toes, Steve’s breath catches in his throat.

“I’m-I’m listening.” Coughing into the back of his hand he tries to cover the nerves in the cracks of his voice.

“I’ve had a super shitty day, and there’s nothing I’d love more than a giant fat blunt.” Popping the T with emphasis you watch his eyes glaze over. “I bet someone like you could help me out with that yeah?”

Nodding eagerly you have to bite back your smile. “Maybe after work? I’ll help you out with these drinks, and can you help me out with my needs?” Looking up from under the hood of your lashes you trace your top lip with the tip of your tongue.

Eyes catching the metal in your mouth in it’s full form, he has to bite back his moan at the thought of what it would feel like against his skin.

Steve’s quick to nod, his love sick smile sealing the deal and with a wink you go and get him those promised drinks.

—

One short trip on the L and a half smoked blunt later is how you end up riding Steve’s porn star sized cock. In nothing but your fishnets with a hole ripped in the crotch courtesy of him, you bounce on it with the kind of vigor that has his toes curling at the end of his bed.

Blunt dangling from your lips your nails rake through his smattering of chest hair, eyes hungrily taking in the ink that covered almost every inch of his naturally sun kissed skin. The metal bars in his nipples catch in the glow of the TV in his room, a stream of late night music videos forgotten. Taking a long drag you roll your hips in a circle purposely clenching yourself around the base of him. Nails digging into the tops of your thighs, a breathy “shit” falls from his lips.

“That feel good or something baby?” Exhaling your hit in a giggle Steve’s cock twitches inside of you at the pet name, the deep forrest green and ocean blue of his eyes over come with the darkness of his pupils. You felt better then every late night fantasy he’d tugged himself to since he met you.

“God, you’re like fucking heaven.” Pussy drunk he starts babbling hips lifting off the bed to meet yours. “So fucking soft.” Thrust “tight” thrust “and wet.”

As if on queue the sounds of your slick squelching against his skin has a guttural groan rip through his throat. One hand pressing down firmly on his chest you push him flat against the mattress. Despite his stuttering hips he still listens taking your silent direction.

Watching you with expectant eyes as you lean forward. Taking the blunt from between your lips your black lipstick stains the end, touching the velvet of his bottom one with it you encourage him to take it. Big obedient eyes look up at you before wrapping his mouth around it, the heat of his tongue flicking against your finger tips as his cheeks hollow out taking a rip. Eyes rolling in the back of his head when his actions are enough to make you moan, the pretty sounds he earns only egging him on.

Dragging your nails across his skin you make sure to catch the small bars keeping his nipples at attention, lightly tugging as you go. Jaw clenching at the sensation, smoke seeps from around the blunt as his eyes screw shut.

Smirking at the mess you’re making of him, you dip your head down to collect one of his piercing in the heat of your mouth. Metal against metal his hips buck up hard enough for you to mewl around him. Grinding down while you nip at him with your teeth, a string of cuss words come spilling out from underneath.

Moving to the next one, you give it it even more attention. Swirling your tongue around the bar, the tip traces up the length of the metal flicking the sensitive nub of his nipple every time you move over it.

“Jesus - fuck.” Throwing his head back against his pillow, he takes the forgotten blunt out of his mouth half hazardly disposing of it in the ashtray next to you.

Too caught up to think about manners his long fingers tangle in your hair, yanking you up. Lips swollen from their assault on his chest he collects them in a searing kiss. Tongue immediately begging for entrance swiping it across the piercing of your lower lip.

Steve catches the your moan in his throat when your tongues battle for dominance in a sloppy mess of teeth and spit, his hands finding purchase on your hips. Fingers digging in hard enough to bruise flesh he pushes himself deep enough to hit the spot that has you trembling on top of him.

“Yeah? Right there?” Breaking from you long enough to be cocky, he doesn’t give you a chance to answer pulling you down even harder bringing him completely to the hilt of you.

“Fuck - Steve!” Shocked by how good he’s making you feel, the dynamic shifts when he feels your walls start to suck him deep enough to know you’re close.

“Say it again baby, tell everyone who’s making you feel this good.” The confidence dripping from his words has you throwing your head back, bottom lip sucked between your teeth.

The pad of his thumb hits your bundle of nerves applying enough pressure to have your legs shaking around his hips, a mumbling incoherent mess on top of him he wishes he could record this.

“Ignoring me for so long, such a bad girl. Could have been worshiping this pussy like it deserves. Such a perfect fucking cunt.” Jaw slack he watches you fall apart under half lidded eyes, completely consumed by the feeling of you.

“Steve - shit - right there, I’m so fucking close.” The whine in your voice is unrecognizable when his thumb starts sliding over your clit in quick figure eights, the sounds of skin slapping together as your slick walls suck him in fill the small confines of his room.

“Cum all over this cock baby, come on. Fall apart I wanna - fuck - feel it.” The encouragement of his words coupled with the snap of his hips is enough to send you flying off the edge, eyes squeezing shut your mouth falls open in a silent scream. Velvet walls sucking him in as your body shakes on top of him.

“That’s it, that’s fucking it.” Grunting you feel him twitch inside you before painting your insides in a way that feels like he’s marking you as his.

Too busy reeling from the aftershock of your orgasm to worry about how he was going to follow you around like a lost puppy after this, you slump down against his chest. The only sounds in the room are your panted breaths and the Ramones leaking from the small speaker of his TV.

Finger tips tracing down the dip of your spine, he gives your ass an appreciative squeeze, noticing the way you’re too spent to talk he can’t help himself never seeing you like this.

“Same time next week?”

Fighting the smile that’s threatening to tug up your cheeks, you mumble your response against his sweat covered chest.

“Don’t push your luck Steve.”

[voxofthevoid]

i know that this may be a bit rude to ask, but i was wondering if you had any rough outlines for the various abo fic concepts that you had? omega gojo and alpha yuji is a really rare treat but i enjoy that a lot...

thank you for reading, and sorry if this is impolite

It's not rude at all, hon 💗

Honestly, I'm always happy to yap about my fics, ideas, outlines, etc., and I'm glad you're interested in the omegaverse ones!

(Also, heads up: a/b/o without the slashes is a slur for Aboriginal Australians. The slash version and "omegaverse" are more acceptable versions.)

A lot of my omegaverse ideas are alpha/alpha. These are the alpha/omega ones:

Omegaverse-canonverse alpha/omega with old man porn. Gojou’s going through the omega version of menopause, starts lactating due to hormone fluctuations, and Yuuji turns out to like that way too much.

Canonverse omegaverse with alpha!Yuuji and omega!Gojou, where Yuuji’s hormones and pheromones go a bit out of control during class, culminating in him eating Gojou out and then fucking him over the desk.

Omegaverse-canonverse alpha/omega where Gojou goes into heat during the basement days, and instead of doing something sane, he deliberately triggers Yuuji’s first rut.

My current outline for #1 is very short, while the others are longer. The short one is below; the other two are under the cut.

CWs: Along with standard goyuu warnings, we have lactation (#1), semi-public sex (#2), and noncon (#3)

1. biology will mix the cocktail of a lifetime

Omega!Gojou reaches the omega version of menopause. Hormonal imbalance makes him start lactating. Yuuji's into it. It's a problem how much Yuuji's into it. Lots of sucking on Gojou's tits through his shirt and t-shirt till he's sore and whining and dripping wet. Throw in sex. Maybe a premature heat. Discussions of Gojou no longer being able to keep up with Yuuji's ruts, and Yuuji going, "You don't need a heat to take me."

2. black lace on sweat

Established alpha/omega goyuu in a canonverse no-Shibuya setting. Gojou taking a class with the first and second years because Kusakabe is on vacation or something. Yuuji getting increasingly flushed and pheromonal throughout the class, to the point everyone else is kind of squirming. Gojou giving him a verbal prod and Yuuji snapping out of it to slap a suppressant patch on himself. Class continues, Gojou running on autopilot while he's more and more fixated on Yuuji—breathing in deeply to try and snag his scent, getting wet to the point he's sure it's soaking into his pants. He'd need a patch too except using Limitless to suppress his scent was one of the first things he learned.

After the class ends, he dismisses them, and Nobara asks Yuuji why he's not coming, and Yuuji just sinks deeper into the seat and says he'll be out in a bit. Nobara just goes "gross", looks at Gojou and says "both of you." Realization dawning on even the second years' faces. Everyone exiting posthaste, maybe Megumi dawdling and Gojou finally letting his scent out in a territorial display. Yuuji groans, distinctly sexual, and Megumi books it.

Gojou asking Yuuji "need it already huh," and Yuuji basically sinking his fingers into the wood and begging in the way of someone who's only doing it to be polite—like he'll take what he wants anyway. Gojou predictably gets wetter at that.

Sex with him calling Yuuji over and Yuuji practically tearing Gojou's pants off to get to his ass. Gojou makes him kneel and kind of rubs himself ass over Yuuji's face and mouth, until Yuuji grabs his hips to hold him in place and eat him out. Goes on till Gojou comes and then after, till his legs are trembling and it feels like it's Yuuji's face holding him up. 

Gojou getting bent over the table and fucked and knotted. Possible breeding kink. Yuuji getting some clarity after the knot pops, apologizing, and Gojou saying he should've known mating a teenage alpha would be trouble.

3. sacrifice your consent for me

Brief sparring scene where Gojou pins Yuuji down for a little too long, stares a little too intently, breathes a little too deeply.

Post-dinner washing up. G crowds Y from behind, very calmly asks Y's an alpha isn't he, and Y says yeah he will be—what in the world is G doing? G burying his nose behind Yuuji's ear and dragging it down to his inactive scent glands—still a sensitive erogenous spot. Sucks on it. Yuuji's having a Time, especially with how he can feel all of Gojou pressed up behind him. Gropey Gojou Galore: hands under Yuuji's shirt, face all over his hair and neck. Yuuji's realization he's scent marking. Stuttered question of what Gojou's designation is, Gojou only saying Yuuji knows the answer. Turns Yuuji around to kiss him—not Yuuji's first kiss but it is his first time someone's trying to crawl into him through his mouth. Gojou dropping to his knees, panting into Yuuji's stomach while working his pants off. Sloppy blowjob. Yuuji's hand trying to push Gojou away becoming a hand keeping him there. It's all fun and nice until Yuuji comes and Gojou just doesn't stop (Gojou's aim: get Yuuji to release enough pheromones to sate his preheat and kickstart the actual heat, which is harder than it'd be with a grown alpha because Yuuji hasn't presented yet). Overstimulation to the point of Yuuji clawing up Gojou's shoulders. After, Gojou jerking off with his nose buried in the scent glands at Yuuji's thigh. Y passing out and waking in Gojou's bed. 

Yuuji will wake up to Gojou cuddling him in a whole nest of blankets and kinda go "it's too hot" where hot is a stand-in for all the ways in which this is fucked up, and Gojou shushes him and does that thing in Ep 2 where he knocks Yuuji out. Next time Yuuji wakes up, Gojou's already going to town on him. Considering making Sukuna also an omega in this for shits and giggles—namely, Sukuna–Gojou parallel with Sukuna saying he wouldn't have been as gentle as Gojou is currently being 

Yuuji practically begging Gojou to give his overworked dick a break and Gojou putting his whole hole on Yuuji's face, and Yuuji's hormones going haywire again at the slick+scent+come combo.

Yuuji can't knot Gojou. Gojou's solution once he's far enough into the heat is to force Yuuji's whole fist into him and also hold Yuuji down there on his dick. Gojou essentially using to get off like that three to four times, and Yuuji flushed and teary and numb by the time he’s allowed to pull away.

Gojou bites Yuuji during his heat because he's insane, and he doesn't register Yuuji's rut setting in until Yuuji bites back. The mating bite is what finally pushes Yuuji over. Too late for Gojou to back out.

[the-mcyt-crackships-brackets]

PSA: These Brackets contain multiple Ch!WilburSoot ships, We DO NOT stand with CC!WilburSoot actions, and send all of our support toward shubble, if you are uncomfortable with these ships, please don't interact and/or block the wilbur soot tag. if those ships are too problematic, they can be replaced. anyway his ass got destroyed

Welcome to the MCYT Crackships Bracket!

Here, we will be seing which crackship is the best, and because that statement is vague, you get to make your opinion!

Each crackships was randomly agenced from Characters You chose! (This also sadly means we can't take more submissions, at least yet (mcyt crackships brackets V.2. Confirmed ???))

This is all meant to be in good fun, so please be respectfull with others and use propaganda the least wisely you can! (propaganda isn't endorsed, it's encouraged!)

We as a community can get inspired by these, make art! fanfics! (and if you do, please tag me) of your favorite Crackship!

Maybe we could even find a name for them, after all, maybe the next "big ship" will be in this, who knows?

WE ARE NOW IN THE SEMIFINALS!

The brackets will not be revealed yet, but when all of the polls will be published! this way, we can still get you surprised!

*Orionsound - Rat SMP version

*LDshadowlady - Empire SMP season 1 version

*Zombiecleo - Pirate SMP version

*Katherine Elizabeth - Empire SMP season 2 version

*Fundy - L'Manberg version

*Fwhip - Empire SMP season 1 version

*Pearlescentmoon - Double life version

*Slimecicle - QSMP version

Our thoughts and observations under the cut!

Round 1:

I clearly thought Ninjaslap would be the biggest sweep, but pixltoile suprisingly fought well, And fish yuri left no shot to Zaypixel and Geminitay

Round 1.1.3 was extremly close, but Shubble x Hypno won by O.8%! (≈4 peoples!)

We already got two piece of "propagandart" (propaganda art) in round 1, and both were for Fish yuri! (by @t4tpolypd and @staringamassivemistakeintheface)

Round 2:

Mogbeans/Swamp boys tried hard but T4T yuri was stronger (My boys 😭 - Admin 1)

Littlesoot got its ass kicked by hotguy/fundy and was crying in a corner when suddendly, out of nowhere, it took itlwblr by storm, broke containment, the poll broke 1k votes, became the most noted of the brackets (yet) and won with a large margin!

FWhilza fought well but Bighills was stronger

Fish Yuri still prevail with the biggest sweep yet (87.3%!!!)

Jojosolos/Jack Manifold vs Tommyinnit/Scott Smajor was the closest yet! (50.1 to 49.9!!!!)

So many art!!!!!!! look at the tag (#propagandart) it's worth it!!!!!

Round 3 and PURGATORY 1 :

Scegg vs Stresstherine was so close it switched side at least 5 times!

i'm genuenely impressed by clownscar comeback they've constantly been close but didn't get ahead during the whole poll and somehow managed to win in the last stretch!

WE MADE MOGBEANS CANON!!!!!!! VIVA LA SOS SMP!!!!

Fish Yuri is unstopable and has killed many great ships now (rip Bighills we loved you so much)

Bdubs Smol Bdubs is tall!

Content SMP fans are sad today, the last two ships they had just sank! (bye bye Evillnox and Skizzlerat)

So much art! and even more as been promised! (you need to check out #propagandart if you haven't already)

Round 4 and PURGATORY 2 :

Fish Wives felt resistence to the first time facing Clownscar, but still they were too powerful

Clownscar you will forever live in our hearts

Wilbur you're a pig, Yuri beat his ass! (and so they did)

Zombiecello/Ivorycleo popped off! >90% sweepage!

3/8 ships still in line are yuri, but none of them are part of the PURGATORY Brackets!

Goodbye Zaypixel, our only Yuri Loss this round :(

You guys seem to love shipping Ethoslab a lot (bunch of ethogirls) as he is in 35% of the remaining ships

even more art, and art trades! (go ceck out #propagandart and #takin' request)

Round 5 and Purgatory 3:

Yuri lost so much, and is now only represented by Fish Wives :(

Half of the ships still in have a wild etho in them (ethogirls rise up!)

The now no-longer-crackship mogbeans is still thriving and bested the fan-favorite fwhilza!

Seapeekarl fought well, but lost to the ethogirls again

this is the first round where they weren't a >40% sweep! but the choice are only getting harder from here!