#read 2022

[lotus-pages]

2022 reads ⋆ the cruel prince by holly black ♡

“most of all, i hate you because i think of you. often. it's disgusting and i can't stop.”

for my honest reaction and rating, check out my goodreads.

[booksandwords]

'Twas the Night Before Pride by Joanna McClintick. Illustrated by Juana Medina

Age Recommendation: Pre-School/Kinder Topic/ Theme: Pride, LGBTQ+ Rights Setting: Generic American City, New York City

Rating: 5/5

I would honestly give this 5🌟 for originality alone, who would have thought of combining Christmas and Pride? 🎄🎼 +🏳️‍🌈= 💖

I love this it's just cute and fun and a great way to introduce pride to young children, especially those with queer parents. It includes Stonewall and the importance of Pride (both the parade and the concept/emotion). Everything is wonderfully in line The Night Before Christmas, a rhyme and meter children and adults will be familiar with making it easy to read out loud (as intended). Medina's illustrations are so nice. They are playful and always give the reader something to point out, look for. While this is a book about pride, I do about the choice not to go overboard on the Pride flags. There are a lot of Pride flags, yes, but not obnoxiously so or at least I don't think so. I really like the outfits that Medina has chosen for her characters they are lovely, and great choices, particularly for the adorable protagonist. The end pages are beautifully coloured. Unsurprisingly rainbow, it's a soft rainbow not watercolour but something akin to it. This background is covered by outlines of people. A diverse arrangement of people, all them implied to be queer or allies.

Basically, this is just super cute and I recommend it to readers who like queer books. No one says you have to be queer or a child to enjoy this. In some ways reading picture story as an adult is even more fun. It's just all colour and cute.

[myloveonherknees]

@/mothercain. twitter, 14 mar 2022.

[lime-bucket]

LESBIANS COME GET YOUR JUICE!!!

[kulai]

DAY 10, 11, 14 - 16, 17, 18 - 20, and 21 all-in-one post!

sorry im just getting really lazy posting it separately lol, check out the image description if you wanna know the specific prompt! xoxo

check out my twitter where i'm more active!

[moonlit-tulip]

It's often noted, in discussions of the Death Note anime, that it's much weaker than the manga in its rendition of post-timeskip events partly for pacing reasons: the pre-timeskip parts of the anime adapt ~6.5 manga-volumes in 25 episodes, while the post-timeskip parts adapt ~5.5 in 12 episodes, so a lot more important detail-work is lost and the whole thing ends up feeling kind of perfunctory.

Much less often noted as far as I've seen, but nonetheless also true, is that the Death Note anime removes some important characterization-nuance from Light, starting right near the beginning, whose presence elevates the manga to be substantially better than the anime even before the time-skip.

In particular: the Death Note manga is, at its core, a tragedy in classic "character who has everything falls into ruin due to a fatal personal flaw" style. Light is a brilliant student who, in the future ahead of him, has the potential to do practically whatever he wants. He's driven to ruin by the fatal flaw of unwillingness to admit, either to others or to himself, when he's made a mistake. This flaw is an essential piece of his characterization, in the manga. And the anime pretty much entirely skips over it.

As portrayed in the manga, Light's decision to become Kira—which ultimately leads to his downfall—is made in the following way. First, he finds the Death Note, and is led by morbid curiosity to write a name in it, killing someone. Then, still not really believing it, he kills a second person too. At which point it hits him that he's killed two people. And at that point, after a viscerally-horrified breakdown about what he's done, the inability to admit mistakes kicks in, and he proceeds to rewrite his own value-system such that it yields the result that killing those people was actually okay, and in fact morally good. Because the alternative would be for him to acknowledge himself as having made a terrible mistake, and that, more than anything else, is something he's unwilling to do if he can see any other option at all. And then, having convinced himself that those two murders were good, he proceeds to reason that, if they were good, then doing more like them is good; and thus he becomes Kira, leading eventually, far down the line, to his ruin. The anime, by contrast, substantially deemphasizes this flaw of his, portraying him as much more calmly put-together through that series of events and thus making him come across as having been tempted in becoming-Kira-ward directions all along.

Similarly, in the anime, when Light leaks a bunch of information to L about his identity by using non-public information acquired via police channels, he declares that actually this was deliberate as a means of baiting L out so he can kill him, and the anime presents this declaration pretty uncritically. The manga, by contrast, presents it as an extension of that same character-flaw: Light is unwilling to admit to having actually just straightforwardly messed up, and therefore makes up a new plan to view himself to have been following-all-along, thus leading him to take more risks in his game against L going forward and thus, once again, helping him along the path to ruin.

Et cetera.

Compared with the manga, then, the anime's version of Light's characterization ends up less interesting. And, moreover, it introduces a plot hole, when the Yotsuba arc comes around! It makes it much less clear why an amnesiac Light would be so straightforwardly aligned against Kira. In the manga, this is pretty clear: a Light who never killed anyone wouldn't have rewritten his values to consider killing people to be good, and therefore would look at Kira as straightforwardly evil. And, in fact, his amnesiac self has trouble taking the possibility of his having been Kira previously, even as the evidence starts building up, because becoming Kira would be a mistake according to his value-system of the moment, and this leaves him having a very hard time contemplating the possibility of its having in fact happened! Whereas the anime, by deemphasizing Light's big flaw, makes his amnesiac-self's differences from the way he is for most of the story up to that point come across as much more out-of-nowhere, much less narratively well-founded.

So, overall, the people who talk about the Death Note manga as superior to the anime specifically post-timeskip strike me as somewhat understating things. The manga is superior to the anime pre-timeskip, too, via that extra layer of characterization and a resulting improvement both in character-interestingness and in plot-coherence. And thus I consider the manga to be very much the definitive version of Death Note from start to finish, despite the anime's relatively-higher popularity.

[mimimar]

finally completed my comic based on the song ivy by taylor swift!✿ please zoom in to read the text and see the details~

✿.✿.✿

you can get the digital zine pdf here! it includes extras like character profiles, costume design, more art of willow and ivy, zine-exclusive sketches and an illustrated guide to the symbolism of all the flowers in this comic.

you can also get prints of individual pages here!

✿.✿.✿

[waterisnotreal0]

danish dazed

pairing: oscar piastri x fem!reader

c/w: none. oscar overthinking/yearning despite this being their first meeting.

summary: oscar meets you at a quiet boba café, stumbling through the interaction, flustered by your quiet confidence. he swears he’s only coming back for the danishes—but even he doesn’t believe it.

a/n: a little drabble cuz i don’t think im gonna be very active this summer. i’ll add a moodboard/cover photos for this later. i don’t really like this bc it was really rushed lol.

word count: 1.2k

oscar, is a clean-polite-calm-organized time of person. you, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. messy handwriting, dirt on your baggy jeans, scuffed converse, always with a bleeding nose and chipped nail polish.

you had just turned 15, and he was 15 and a half when you both had first met, in a boba café out of all places. hattie had begged oscar to take her to it (she had exclaimed that her friends gave her a sip of the drink they got it, and it was “to die for. like literally it was so good.”) and he just got so annoyed at her nagging that he finally caved in & took her. 

the café was quiet, and empty. probably cause it was a Thursday night, and everyone is always busy on summer Thursday nights. you were sweeping up the floor, despite it looking clean. and when you heard them enter, you looked up, smiling at hattie.

“wait a sec guys, i’ll be right with you.” you had announced to them, sound cutting through the silence. your voice hoarse as if you had a screaming match last night.

he looks at you, with grey sweatpants and a black top that fits your build a little too perfectly.

he frowns to himself, why is he thinking about that? he’s better than that.

you quickly put the broom away, and went to the back to wash your hands (the manager had made it clear that customers loved when you wash your hands before taking their order) and sang the alphabet hurriedly while scrubbing your hands.

5 minutes later, you’re at the cash register. looking down at hattie, who you assumed was going to take the order.

“what would you like to order?” you smile at her, and even though it wasn’t directed at him, oscar swears his heart just stopped.

and as hattie loudly reads offers her order, probably the same drink her friend had told her about, he can’t help but notice things about you.

like the way your fingers are tapping into the counter (although he can’t tell if it’s out of anxiousness or annoyance or or hyperactivity or or or something else.)

he also notices the way your nails are painted with all sorts of colors — neon pink, dark green, baby blue, vibrant yellow — and he wonders if they have meanings or if there was just a buy one get one free discount at the store.

he slowly traces up from your fingers to your face, but not very subtly he figures because your eyes meet him when he finally reaches them. you’re smiling, like you know something he doesn’t. or maybe there’s something on his face. 

“would you like something?” you ask him, in the same loud hoarse voice — and even if it isn’t the most elegant, it makes oscar’s heart melt a little. — tilting your head a bit. 

he’s caught off guard. he was so busy noticing you that he didn’t even notice you were talking to him,  and now he’s left mouth-open, scratching his neck. standing there, awkwardly.

it seems that hattie notices, so she steps in for him.

“he would like a danish tart.” she says, in between giggles. as if she knows what he’s thinking. or maybe, oscar thinks, that he’s not as subtle as he hoped.

“alright.”  and you chuckle. a low chuckle, — like it’s just so funny but you don’t wanna be caught laughing. — and he smiles at the fact that he’s the one that caused it. 

but just as suddenly as it came, it quickly disappeared. turned into dust. like how a magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat, except it’s the opposite.

you’re reading the total cost of the order, but it’s all a haze to him because he can’t stop thinking about laughter. how it slipped from your mouth like honey, like a secret that he wants to keep locked up in a heart necklace. how easy it was to make you smile, how he would love to only hear that sound for the rest of his life. 

he feels hattie nudge him, looking up at him smiling, like a ‘kick me’ sticky note is glued to his back.

he’s pulled out of his gaze, and quickly gives you two 30 dollar bills. that is double the actual price. and you don’t fail to point it out.  

“uhh — the actual price is A$31. you just handed me two of ‘em.” you look up at him, smiling in disbelief. 

at the sight of your smile, oscar can’t help but stutter a bit, “oh — yes, yes. my apologies.” and he feels heat creep up his neck as he grabs the extra note.

you look down back to hattie, “your order will take 16 minutes, go ahead and take a seat while you wait.” shaking your head smiling, as you turn towards the kitchen to make the drink.

it’s 13 minutes later when you call their order, and oscar can’t help but tell himself that maybe you rushed to finish the order just for them. maybe she sees him as more than an awkward customer.

you hand the drink to hattie, exclaiming “here’s the drink for the missus.” smiling softly at her, hand wrapped around the plastic see through cup.

and then you turn to oscar, that stupid grin that he’s already come to love on your face again.

“and a danish for the mute” you remark, passing the pastry that’s wrapped with a soft tissue.

and for a brief moment, your hand brushes against his. his heart stutters, his breath hitches and his finger twitches a bit. but then it’s gone. slipping through his fingers, both literally speaking and figuratively.

he gazes up towards you, but he doesn’t notice anything different in your expression. your eyes are looking towards his sister instead, looking curiously. and he starts to wonder if he imagined the whole ordeal, or maybe you just don’t care to notice something as trivial as fingers sliding past each other. he hopes to god or whatever that is up there that you just didn’t notice out of the same of it and not that you don’t care.

hattie leads the way out of the store, grabbing him by his sleeve as he lazily (and totally not because he doesn’t wanna not see you. totally because he doesn’t want to get to know you more, what school you go to. totally 100% definitely not.)

and when he looks up briefly, he trips up just a bit because he finds that you're smiling at him, waving goodbye to him, to him.

when hattie and him are walking home, the sun casts a ray of orange and pink light across the sky as it sets. and he’s slowly biting at the danish, thinking about you when hattie stops sipping her drink and declares, “you like her.” no hint of uncertainty in her voice.

“i do not. i was nice to her, and she was kind to me.” he faux defends, although it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself more than hattie.

for the rest of the walk home, hattie teases him relentlessly about it.

but he’s not paying attention to her, or the words she’s saying.

he’s instead thinking about how this summer he’s definitely going to go to the café to buy more danishes and totally not to just see you.

[finniestoncrane]

OH BOY! How about Office Eddie nsfw headcanons? I love that dweeb at the office with a dark streak and honestly just want anything about him 💚

Dano!Riddler x Fem!Reader Headcanons oooooooooh yeah!! i've started writing a little outline for something like this but longer!! this is a good excuse to test some things out and see what works >:3c 🐀💚 request info • prompt list • send me a request • kofi • masterlist minors DNI!! 🔞 cw: voyeurism, pervert eddie, peeping tom, spying, non-consensual stuff, masturbation, unintentional cum swallowing

listen, employment in a nice office isn't all that common in gotham, and you're lucky you're not behind a bar serving sleazy wannabe rogues or hustling for what little money you can get, so you're willing to put up with your shy and quiet and kinda dweeby co-worker

but that's only because you have no idea about all the weird stuff he's up to...

eddie is smitten immediately by you, but he doesn't speak to you at all for the first two weeks you're sharing an office with him

it makes you a little uncomfortable, but he slowly warms up and offers you a hello and a goodbye

when he starts talking to you a bit more, it's about quite dark and deep subjects

it's almost like he's trying to guage your response to decide if you're a good person

or one of the people he goes on about, the undeserving masses

he's nice enough though, and you find that he's very helpful and willing to guide you with the tasks

and you quickly notice that he's far smarter than you, and is willing to hold himself accountable for your training

this seemingly kind gesture isn't selfless, however, it's actually his way of getting closer to you

and to have you depending on him for your job

it's not something you notice at first, if at all, but edward always offers to look your work over before passing it on to the bosses

he's changing it without you knowing though, making sure there are little mistakes that have you reprimanded

eddie delivers that bad news of course, and offers to show you how to fix your errors

you're so grateful that you hug him, or compliment him, and so he can hardly stop doing it

besides, the stupider you feel, the more you'll have to rely on him, and the more you'll view him as smart and wonderful

and in order to keep you thinking that, he'll criticise you sometimes

nothing too mean, not too obvious

but enough that he can see your pupils widening and your skin flushing when he does compliment you

"don't worry, i won't tell the bosses"

gosh, you owe him so much... maybe he'll cash in the favours someday

eddie has the keys to the office and he unlocks it every morning, since he's always there a lot earlier than you

you never question why, but it's so he can set things up

you wouldn't believe how many cameras are hidden in the little space you share

under the desk, in the toilet, in the stationary cupboard

and the work laptop he offered to set up for you?

the webcam is hacked, so he can watch you at home

because at a certain point, he can't stand not to be around you or to know what you're up to when you clock out for the day

and that includes when you leave the room to go to the toilet

he had to drill a hole in the wall of the cupboard between the office and the bathroom, just so he can keep an eye on you

and he finds his behaviour escalating, like an experiment to see how far he can go

it starts with him touching himself under his desk, rubbing his hands over his erection and trying to keep quiet

rubbing against you in the elevator, placing his hands on your shoulders as he stands behind you, staring down your blouse

asking you to reach up high or down low to watch the way your clothes move to expose you

messing with the ac, watching you sweat when it's too hot, watching your nipples harden when it's too cold

then he starts messing with the cables under his desk a lot, something with the wiring you don't understand

but it's an excuse to stare at your legs, trying to get a peek up your skirt

and then before you know it, your sweet coworker is masturbating into your coffee creamer

waiting to see if you can taste the difference, to see if you recognise him on your tongue

[pumpk-n]

“what do you want?” to see what your insides look like ~

[corneredcopia]

stobotnik continues to hold the title for ‘I read this in a fic and now it’s actually canon’

[stew4]

COOL AS FUCK PANEL

(Comic by Nyoomian)

(It’s amazing go read it)

[kulai]

DAY 24: First Date

check this out on twt ! based on ch16 of "between the shadow and the soul" on ao3. ANOTHERR heavy recommendation!

[sekanithezombie]

College years Eddie!! Based off that one page from Year One

[elsartzz]

why didn’t you come back home?

[visenyaism]

Can I get the name of the poem about eating chilled tofu with the ghost dog that you mentioned bc that phrase has been lodged in my brain ever since I read it.

So there there are two (miss you would love to take a walk with you and miss you would love to grab that chilled tofu we love) and I conflated them. They do things to me neurochemically. and spiritually.