#probably one of the best i've read

[libraryleopard]

Collection of adult fantasy, horror, paranormal, and science fiction short stories and novellas

Draws on mythology and folklore (especially Filipino folklore)

Several stories with central LGBTQ+ characters

Rich & atmospheric

Favorites: “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” "Good Girls," "How to Swallow the Moon," and "A Canticle for Lost Girls"

[veerbles]

"He doesn't say goodbye. He just lets go."

goodbye at dawn.

[thelassoway]

Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso Seasons 1-3 » T-shirts

[rainsofcamelot]

THIS SHOW !!!! THEM !!!!

[pigeonclaw]

some leaders I've somehow never drawn before

[lunapegasus]

Nearly a year ago today I made this blog and posted my art online for the first time. So here's a redraw of it to celebrate :) Also sketch under the cut because it actually looks very different than the lineart but I really like it (+ the lineart for comparison)

[diedbydeth]

rant about proshipping because it's 1 am and i can't sleep and i can't find a good fucking fanfiction website and i'm just so fucking sick of everything.

just to preface this i'm not an "anti". just anti-leaning. i'm shipcourse unaligned because i find this type of discourse really pointless and anger inducing. like why the fuck do i have to tell grown ass adults (i'm literally not joking there are people in their fucking forties believing this shit) that shipping a child and their dad is not ok. like what.

ok preface done. now the rant.

i find all of proshitters' takes on stuff really weird. like what do you mean fiction doesn't affect reality? if fiction doesn't affect really, then how the fuck did the january 6 riots happen? i can assure you that the reason they were there was not because there was actual election fraud. if fiction doesn't affect reality, then queer and racial representation in fiction doesn't matter. like people realize that, right? or am i just out of my mind? clearly you can understand how pedophilia and incest in fiction can affect people if you can understand how representation of minorities in fiction can affect people. there can't possibly be people that dense, right? even aside from children and minors reading that shit, pedophiles reading it can make them consider not getting help for their paraphilia and just jacking off to the porn you oh-so-graciously have given them. like does that not make you uncomfortable beyond words?

or their other argument saying that people shouldn't care what others ship? like am i overreacting to be incredibly uncomfortable around people who actively ship minors and adults? why do people even do that in the first place? don't give me that coping mechanism crap, there are *much* more better and efficient coping mechanisms than writing about pedophilia, like writing about the feelings you felt or talking about it with someone. i went through something very similar, but i didn't have to write pedophilic shit and post it on ao3, so why would you have to?

like you are harming people with this crap. you are giving predators something to hide behind. you are giving people who draw problematic things, not even related to weird ships (like people who draw racist and other bigoted things), something to hide behind. you are giving creeps a platform and ultimately helping them in getting their behavior normalized. do you not see the problem with this?

do i, a teenager, need to tell an adult, a person in their mid-forties, that condoning pedophilia and incest, even fictional, is problematic?

rant over. feel free to send death threats or try to tell me to support creeps in the replies or even my askbox. or don't. your choice.

[good--merits-accumulated]

going through some old left-for-dead projects and just found this one where I was like. INTENT on dissecting jeff's brain on the operating table (i.e. google docs) but only from todd's weird skewed pov

[professor voice] it's about brothers as eternal combatants and it's about being so convinced of your own goodness you excuse your shitty actions. it's also about comparing yourself to a dog because you feel less fully formed than your brother. lol.

[parlerenfleurs]

I think what needs to happen for female characters and f/f ships is the female characters need to be more emotionally constipated. They MUST have some hard edge in there of resistance to produce the vitamin of Compelling.

It's fun if they're more unhinged, sure, but it's not just unhinged characters that are interesting and loveable. Kind characters, weird quiet characters, dignified characters, cold characters, gruff ones, it's good to have variety.

But what makes a character compelling a lot of the time? When they take a weird stance on something. A place of stubborn. An integrity of attitude. A mask they're wearing, an emotion they're sublimating. They're holding something back, they have a measure of composure, they are, in a word, emotionally constipated. Not necessarily too much! Just enough so that they have some depth! That the hidden part of two characters can collide and spark some damn chemistry!

It's the same rule as for eroticism, it is created by the juxtaposition of the hidden and the revealed.

Why do we love villains and toxic ships? They're not bland. They have that rule of erotic thing going on, emotionally. Now it's possible to not be bland at all without villainery or toxicity, but for some reason when it comes to female characters, it trips back into blandness a lot of the time. Gruffness or coldness becomes plain harshness. Vulnerability becomes boring weakness. Put two such women together and the bland collides into the bland and only brave souls with very active imaginations manage to salvage some Compelling from this. I'm afraid it's often entirely absent from the source material, though.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

“Sweetheart, if you knew the things I could do with you, you’d have run away a long time ago,” said the young man standing below the arch of the city gate.  If you looked at him full-on he seemed normal enough, but catch him in your peripheries and he seemed Wrong somehow.  Like he had too many sides to him, or like his limbs were just out of proportion, or like he moved with a grace that wasn’t quite human.  He reached out to run a finger along a stray lock of hair escaped from the pigtails of the young woman he was talking to.     

She groaned loudly.  “Don’t. We’ve known each other far too long for this bullshit.” 

The man grinned.  It was an unexpected grin, usually men like this are expected to smirk, or leer, or smile slyly, or even quirk an eyebrow if it came to it.  But the grin was real, open and glad, briefly washing away the aura of inhumanity and leaving merely a boy who very much liked talking to this girl. 

“But it’s funny.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“But it’s really funny.”

Let’s back up a bit.  Everyone knows that history repeats itself and certain outcomes always arise.  Violence is condoned through complacency.  Tyranny lasts for a while then tends to burn itself out.  Empires always end up toppled in the end.  These are our stories, at least, which crop up again and again.  The principle is true in other lands as well, they just happen to view different things as histories. 

Fulfaran was particularly high in story density as cities went.  It seemed you couldn’t turn a corner without running into a run-away princess, or a charming scoundrel, or a crone (crones were particularly bad – it was a 50/50 chance as to whether they’d try to destroy your life or give you genuinely good advice).  The markets were teeming with exotic goods, the castle at the top of the hill flew its banners brightly in the breeze, and there were established parts of town you went to only if you wanted to a. meet an orphan, b. meet a thief or c. fall down a hole.  Rather a good place for Reynard and Connie, who tended to be plagued by stories. 

Constance was a baker’s daughter who had been taken as a teenager to live in a tower by a witch in exchange for her impoverished family receiving enough gold to live on.  She never fully understood that witch’s motivations but that’s just how it went.  She had immediately proceeded with a number of escape attempts, most of which failed until Reynard had ridden below her window and she had bargained with him until he snuck a rope inside with her food deliveries.  He had claimed to be a prince, but wasn’t.  Connie knew he wasn’t quite human either, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it and she didn’t want to pry. 

She had wanted to go home, but she knew the witch would try to exact vengeance.  So, she said her goodbyes for a second time and started out in the opposite direction, which happened to be where Rey was headed as well (or so he claimed, in truth he had no direction or purpose.  But he liked Connie, she was sensible and she made him laugh). 

Unfortunately, it seemed the two of them were not fated to have an easy path.  For one, events kept transpiring which forced Rey into situations where he was expected to betray Connie.  Said events seemed rather upset every time he simply told her everything and they worked out a solution together.  Connie, on the other hand, was continuously being offered chances to fight royalty and claim a kingdom.  It wasn’t that she wouldn’t like a kingdom, she commented once as the two of them wandered through the woods, but she didn’t think she had the training to run one.  She was, after all, a baker’s daughter.  She could make excellent bread but she didn’t care for administration. 

They also stubbornly refused to fall in love with each other, which seemed to make the stories very distressed indeed.  This was not helped by how within a few hours of meeting they had become firm friends – Connie rather thought they had been expected to be unlikely allies who hated each other at first.  But it wasn’t in either of their natures to hate very hard and she liked Rey – he was clever and cutting, but never cruel.

Eventually the events all became too much, which is why they had come to where they were, the main gate of Fulfaran.  The storied city.  Surely someone here must know how they could get out of this. 

Connie felt herself smiling back despite herself.  “Fine, it’s a little funny but I honestly don’t know how you can say stuff like that in public without wanting to curl up into a ball and die,” she said starting to walk again, under the gate into the crowds.  Rey fell into step beside her. 

“I have no shame,” he shrugged, “besides, I don’t know any of these people. No one’s paying attention and even if they were, they’d think it’s normal.  I’m pretty sure I saw at least three pairs of ‘people who definitely hate each other’ coming in after us."

Connie was going to reply, but she was cut off by a harsh voice that had snuck into their path. 

“Child! I see greatness in you—”

“Oh not today, thank you!” said Rey, doffing his cap to the aged woman in the dark cloak swaying before them.  Connie summoned up her best customer service smile, the one with just enough of a hint of rage in it that it tended to shut people up without them knowing why, and slipped past the figure. 

“Wait!” the crone cried, “there is a prophecy—”

“Probably not me,” said Connie cheerily over her shoulder.  “Try that girl with midnight-blue eyes over there, that’ll do the trick.”  She rolled her eyes at Rey who grimaced. 

“When we get to the inn we’re taking the most boring room imaginable,” he said emphatically.  “Nothing on the top floor, nothing with secret passages, just four walls and a bed.”  The two of them had long since given up on multiple rooms, or even multiple beds.  No matter how hard they searched every inn was always just a little too full. 

“We better do it quick, I want to sleep before dinner.  Who did you say this place was recommended by again?”

“Basically everyone I know who’s been here,” said Rey, scanning the buildings as they passed.  “They say it’s lovely, really quaint and unique. We should be there right around this corner—”

He halted.  Connie almost hit his shoulder but she hardly noticed, too focused on the inn they had found.  It was small and smoky, almost crumbling beneath the weight of the sky.  Hooded figures passed in and out, glimmers of gemstones sometimes flashing out from beneath their clothing.  The sign was covered in enough grime that it couldn’t be read and there was a large board on the front with dozens of papers stuck to it advertising quests, monster-hunts, missing people, missing dogs, various balls, festivals, and competitions, and the best shops to find weapons in the area.  Connie’s heart sank and Rey’s expression told her he was feeling the same thing. 

“I saw a TreacleTavern down the road,” he said under his breath.  TreacleTaverns were in every city and they were all huge and identical.  Connie nodded vigorously.

“Let’s go, let’s go.”  She all but shoved him back down the way they had come. 

As they left she shot one last look over her shoulder.  A young man was staring at them.  He had chestnut brown hair and an intense expression, as though he had seen them before.  He seemed oddly familiar to Connie, though she didn’t know how she might have met him. 

It was probably something very important that she would have lingered on had the circumstances been different.  Unfortunately for the stories, however, she was still extremely invested, come hell or high water, in getting her pre-supper nap.   

[rmbunnie]

Red Hood Characterization

This is really long so I'm putting a cut here, I've been thinking about Jason Todd's character motivations and the question of whether or not his actions are based in a Moral Code (I don't think so, not to say he's without any morality) and I talk about that in more depth here.

I saw someone say on here that Titans: Beast World: Gotham City was some of the best Jason Todd internal writing they'd seen in a while, and I've been a Red Hood fan for 8 years or so now? pretty much since I read comics for the first time, so I went and checked out and I thought it was good! The way the person I saw talking about it as if it was rare and unusual made me wonder though, because as well-written as i thought his stances on crime were, there wasn't really anything in it that went against the way I conceptualize Jason?

This kinda plays into a larger question I've been thinking about for a while with Jason though, which is that, do people think that the killing is part of a fundamental worldview that motivates him a la batman, and that worldview is the reason he does the things he does?? Because 8 years ago i was a middle schooler engaging with fiction on the level that a middle schooler does, so I simply did not put much thought into it beyond "poor guy :(" but ever since I actually started trying to understand consistent characterization, I don't really see Jason as someone who's motivated by a moral code in his actions the way batman or superman is!

tbh my personal read is that he's a very socially-motivated guy, his actions from resurrection to his Joker-Batman ultimatum in utrh always seemed to me like every choice made leading up to his identity reveal was either a. to give him the leverage and skill necessary to pull off his identity reveal successfully, or b. to twist the knife that little bit more when he does let Bruce find out who he is. Like iirc there's a Judd Winick tweet like "yeah tldr he chose Red Hood as his identity because it's the lowest blow he could think of." And I think that's awesome, I think character motivations rooted so deeply in character's relationships and emotions are really fun to read! I also think it's where the stagnation/flatness of his character comes from in certain comics, because if his main motivation is one event in one relationship that passes, and he is not particularly attached to anything in his life or the world by the time that comes to pass, it's a little harder to come up with a direction to go with the character after that, because there isn't much of a direction that aligns with something the character would reasonably want? But I do think solving this by saying "all of the morally-off emotionally driven cruelty he did on his way to spite Batman was actually reflective of his own version of Batman's stance that's exactly the same except he thinks it's GOOD to kill people" isn't ideal. To be fully honest, it seems to me like he never particularly cared one way or the other about killing people to "clean Gotham of crime," he just did everything he could to get the power necessary to pull off his personal plans, and took out any particularly heinous people he encountered along the way (like in Lost Days.) Not to say I think the fact he killed people keeps him up at night anymore than everything else in his life events, I just never really thought he was out there wholeheartedly kneecapping some dude selling weed or random guy robbing a tv store for justice.

Looping wayyy back to my question, Is this (^) contradictory to the way he's written/the overall average perception of the character? Because like I enjoyed his writing in Beast World i have zero significant issue with anything there, I just didn't believe it would be a hot take, like yeah, that is Jason. It's been a while since I've read utrh and lost days, but I don't think my takeaway directly contradicts either of those too bad iirc. Idk all this to say I think Jason killing and being alright with killing is an obvious and objective fact, but i guess i've always seen it as more of a practical tactic than a moral belief, and I think taking the actions made during the lowest points of a character's life where he is obsessively focused on this ONEEEE thing and trying to apply it as a Motivating Stance to everything he's done after that, doesn't really follow logically for me.

[writeouswriter]

Reading a fic that's so well written I wish I could close my eyes and just let the descriptions and atmosphere wash over me, but the dilemma with closing my eyes is, well, I then would not be able to continue reading this fic, now would I.

[sskk-manifesto]

Proof that bsd would be a lot better if they just let it pass the Bechdel test more often

[theirloveisgross]

.

[sluttyten]

personal rant

[syncast-err0r]

during the whole post s2 montage or whatever, it's revealed that gabriel and beelzebub actually live in a cottage in North Downs, being their resident cryptids and functioning in worse ways than crowley and aziraphale could ever manage, and that's just them not trying

their entire house has rooms that are either completely empty or fully thrashed. these two idiots didn't even bother with trying to seem human. the house just spawned out of nowhere and they don't even bother with humans' memories they literally do not give a fuck. there's no bathroom, no bedroom. however there is a dungeon. neither of them ever sleep so they're just walking around at night for funsies. they're awful. their neighbors at least are grateful because flies refuse to enter anywhere else aside from the bureaucracy house (house is a strong word) just bc beelzebub is nearby. fuck it. they have several floors which can only be accessed from the inside, meaning it looks like it only has one floor from the outside. they have a garden and for some reason it's full of the worst smelling plants to attract flies but also they don't smell at all because gabriel was like nah n beelzebub was like fair enough

do u guys see my vision. do u