#read in narrator voice

[smaeemo]

“Yeah no biggie” I say cool calm and collected.

I was in fact not cool calm or collected and it was in fact a biggie.

[bubblybloob]

I find it very funny that supposedly every time our voices bicker and argue, the princess is just left there, totally unaware.

She seemingly acknowledges this too! After a while of back and forth in our mind, she’ll pipe up because she’s noticed we’ve gotten lost in our thoughts. She must think we have trouble with zoning out. She’s not necessarily wrong, I guess.

[notmoreflippingelves]

Actually going insane over the implications of Jason asking Dick to be the Robin to his Batman in Battle for the Cowl.

Like I initially took it at the purely surface-level of Jason wanting a partner in the general sense. Which made sense, it's a huge responsibility and a lonely one so an assistant/sidekick/partner seems a no-brainer if you can get one.

But then I really thought about it, because Jason is not asking Dick to be his partner in the general sense; he's not even asking Dick to be his Nightwing. He's asking Dick to be his Robin.

And they both know exactly what Jason means: "Be the light to my darkness. Be the smile to my scowl. Be the hope to my fear. "

He's saying "Be 'Robin'; be the embodiment of Love and Justice and Goodness. Be the exceptional person that you have always been. Be the slightly-less exceptional person that I was when I wore your colors. Be the person that I was in the process of becoming and might have been (or might still be), if only Joker hadn't clipped my wings."

He's saying "I am prepared to become vengeance, become the Night. And I will go further than Bruce ever dared to, because it is what is needed. I will be the necessary evil. But you don't have to be. If Batman is Gotham's curse, Robin has always been its blessing. I will be the brutal punishment to our world, and I am asking you to be its incandescent gift."

He's saying, "Be for me, what we were for Him. Be my anchor, my comfort, my hope. Remind me what it's all for, why it's all worth it. And remind yourself as well."

He's saying "Be 'Robin' again--for both of our sakes."

[banaynay-art]

Finished the disco game so i had to draw some of my favourite Kim moments. This was supposed to be a half hour sketch and then 3.5 hours passed and it was 2 am oh well.

Wip and ID under the cut.

[ID: A horizontal page full of sketches and finished drawings of gay icons Harry du Bois and Kim Kitsuragi. Two drawings are just black and white sketches of Harry and Kim's faces. The rest is brightly coloured. The art style is clean, cute and comic-like.

On the first drawing Kim is taking off Harry's red sun glasses. He says: "No" with 3 "N"s because that what he talks like, the madman. Harry looks confused. He probably liked the shades.

The next drawing is Kim calling out: "A gym teacher? I knew it!!" He looks a bit manic, like the mistery of Harry's fitness weighed heavily on him.

The next drawing is of the two sitting on swings. Harry is wearing the mesh top with the ugly tie and the Frittte raincoat. Also he's wearing high boots. Kim is in his usual outift. While Harry is sitting with his legs spread and his hands gripping the ties of the swing, Kim is resting his right foot on his left knee, gripping his ankle with both hands. He is just too cool to sit like a straight person. He is whisteling while Harry looks at him in amazement. There's a tear in his right eye and he has two plusses above his head, indicating that the whisling is healing him.

The next drawing is Kim hiding his laugh and mocking Harry by quoting him: "‘He smells good!‘" Harry looks at him in confusion, his hands raised, palms up, to show he doesn‘t get it. "Yeah?", he asks. He's wearing a dirty wife beater, a read bow tie and a police coat, by the way. It's a grand combo.

There's another drawing next to this one that can be read as part of the previous one. It is just Kim laughing. That's it. Two plusses are appearing above my head as i'm writing this.

The last drawing is Kim standing with his hands in his jacket pockets. He looks angry. Weirdly he also looks a bit like a teenager from an 80ies anime in this. But that's not important. He says: "I went undercover as a pinball pro." A speach bubble from outside the page asks: "A what?"

There is another page which is the work in progress. It's exactly the same but only the line art. /End ID]

[aturnoftheearth]

“passive aggressively reblogging gifs of certain scenes to prove my stance in discourse” is a beloved pastime for spnblr

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

I just pictured this for the light arts au

Wally: go here.

Frank: into the dark?

Wally: go into the dark.

LMFAO PERFECTION, THAT MEME WAS MADE FOR THIS AU-

[ariadne-mouse]

Lark: aw goddamnit I have people I care about now

Lark: aw shit I have to be cruel to them to save them

Lark: fuck off, kid

Me:

[anirritant]

like man the parallels between stan and bill are so so so so so fascinating to me ough...... the most obvious thing is that they speak so similarly, often using the same terms and i can't help but wonder how intentional it all was on the part of the writers. biggest one being "eenie meenie miney you" to me, it's so specific.

it could simply be bill picking up stan's mannerisms through ford's memories to further appeal to ford (is that canon somewhere? i don't actually know but i see it mentioned a lot) but some of these are things bill still says and does even when ford is absent. for a being that's lived for trillions of years would terms he picked up only a couple decades ago cement themselves in his behaviour so much?

(also, has anyone ever brought up dreamscaperers' deleted scenes where bill summons a paddleball in the mindscape? stan does the same thing in his own mindscape in the finale. again, that's so specific i can't help but wonder how intentional it was or if it was just a coincidence. i know deleted scenes might not be the best to point to as evidence but i think i've only ever seen someone allude to in one fic and nowhere else?)

i havent read tbob and haven't really kept up much with the new info from it but i have seen the poem about stan and gosh like. it really does seem like it's being consistently hinted at over and over that there's something there with specifically bill and stan. the axolotl's poem was already eyebrow raising with how much of it could be applied to stan and now there's even more..

[naamahdarling]

Question about audiobooks and accessibility!

I have hearing and audio processing issues.

Audiobooks are great and I use them primarily. They keep my hands free to do something else which means I can pay attention.

My issue is that I sometimes cannot process or understand the audio for stretches between a few seconds to a minute or more. I either have to back up a time or four, or close everything out and try again later.

I would like to be able to have some sort of free to use transcript of the book for accessibility reasons, but that's literally what a paper book or ebook is, and it upsets me to think about not giving the authors the sales. (I eventually buy all three versions for certain authors or things I enjoy or consider important to support.) I would fling myself into a pit before buying and returning a book, and I don't do piracy.

What other options, if any, exist for me here? Or do I just muddle through and lovingly pay for what I can?

Assume I have checked and the books aren't available from my beloved library.

[blueeyeddarkknight]

Val & Mare winnigham (Val's first girlfriend 🥰)

From high school sweethearts to life-long friends

Source : Larryaltmayer on ig

Can u spot da babies? 😃

Source :Brad Koepenick

Val and Mare with acting club at Chatsworth high school in 1976 :

Source : Ed Tobin on Facebook

Source : Val documentary

Source :Brad Koepenick

Val & mare worked together on "one too many"

[missilewithamaninit]

wait no no no. Jean is pronounced Jean? as in John with the French j sound?? Not Jean as in apple bottom jeans??? oh my god please tell me I'm not the only idiot who's been reading it this way the vibes are so different please

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

fast-paced fantasy novella about an undead assassin - with no memory of her life or why she signed up to be resurrected after death

when she’s given a new contract - that she is bound to carry out - she finds an unexpected mark who she doesn’t want to kill

facing connections to a past she’s not supposed to remember, they have to find a way around the contract in one night, facing other assassins, necromancers, gods, and wealthy patriarchs

[uwudonoodle]

I'm writing one character who is highly educated and very well read, so has a large vocabulary. I'm writing another character who, while isn't stupid, is less so. I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle and struggle to write both of them.

[stephofromcabin12]

Sometimes I wake up and I’m like

“I should just say fuck it and make a second channel where I narrate The Trials of Apollo bc fuck it I want a good audiobook of it and no one has lived up to my expectations”

[jjs-brainrot]

So I've finally read How Do We Relationship? by Tamifull

(spoilers for up to chapter 121 ahead)

What exactly is a relationship? Is it some natural part of the human experience where you pick a life partner? is it a social contract between individuals to ensure exclusive romantic and sexual feelings between each other? Is sex a requirement for a relationship? Is romance even?

I don't know to be honest. What I do know is this: How Do We Relationship? by Tamifull hit me like a truck and then backed up over the corpse.

It might be one of the most nuanced, unflinching and uncompromising works about understanding relationships I've read. I think, in general, a lot of romance fiction feels overly wishful. While I can certainly appreciate a good gushy and feel good romance, it kinda gets tiresome seeing the same "will they, won't they (they will eventually)" and "love at first sight (it works out even though they literally have no chemistry)" stories regurgitated over and over again.

So much of it just feels too fake for me. Like I'm not watching two characters come to understand and fall for each other, I'm watching two halves of a couple who only exist to be a couple. Chemistry? Completely optional! Hardships? Temporary and will only make them love each other more afterwards. Break ups? Reserved exclusively as a failure state or for purely abusive relationships…

What sets How Do We Relationship? apart from its peers is its commitment to understanding its characters as people rather than archetypes. People who each have their own wants, fears, feelings towards sex and romance and most importantly: their own personal definition of what a relationship should be. People who when confronted with each other think they understand how everything should go, only to find out that the other person has a completely different understanding that doesn't fully jive with theirs.

The only yuri series I can think of that does something similar is Yuri is My Job! by Miman. Yuri is My Job! focuses heavily on the idea of fake relationships in Class S stories with it frequently asking "what actually makes something a relationship?"

A lot of Yuri is My Job! is primarily a critique on Class S stories first (possibly also a direct refutation of Maria Watches Over Us… I still need to watch MariMite so I can't say for certain) with a lot of its characters being subversions of classic Class S archetypes. So a lot of its dissections of relationships are done in the context of Class S stories.

That being said, seeing a series directly refuting the idea of a relationship being static and instead coming to the conclusion that the only ones that can decide what a relationship is are the people involved? That stuck with me. How Do We Relationship? is far a more focused dissection of what it means to be in a relationship, or at least, what means for its particularly cast of characters.

Take, for instances, our two main characters: Miwa and Saeko

Miwa and Saeko start out as friends, but after coming out to each other and finding out they're both lesbians, they decide on a whim to date. At first glance, they seem like the perfect couple! After all, they bounce off of each other's personalities really well, enjoy each other's company (both out and about and in the bedroom) and in general seem to care for each other quite deeply. They were made for each other, right? Well, no.

They're both individuals with vastly different personalities, experiences and feelings from each other. Over time they begin to see things in their relationship that bother them. Mostly little things here and there. Nothing they want to start a fight over or strain their relationship over at first but… Small wounds still fester. It eventually finally comes to a head a little bit after Miwa visits her old crush in a high school reunion. It's very clear to both Saeko and Miwa that she hasn't actually gotten over her past feelings for her high school crush. What's more clear to Saeko is that Miwa doesn't feel the same level of love for her and she does for Miwa. Eventually they just… break up and go back to being friends.

In most romance stories, a break up is regularly seen as either the ultimate failure state for a relationship, a temporary set back for a relationship to overcome or purely as an escape valve from an abusive or just kind of shit relationship. The reality is that there many different reasons for a relationship to end.

Could Miwa and Saeko have worked it out? With the path they were heading down, no. Neither of them were willing to fully open up about their problems as both feared hurting the other. Which just ended up with them hurting each other even more. If they had continued the course, their break up might have been far more painful and resulted in them not being able to be friends any more.

And they do get to go back to being friends even after being exes!

I think back to my aunt who divorced her husband several decades ago. They ended their relationship but decided to remain close in part for their daughter's benefit. Over the years they've remained close friends and have gone back to living with each other as well. There's no hard rule that becoming exes means you have to fully cut each other off if that's not what you both want. Certainly there might still be mixed feelings between you both (Miwa and Saeko's relationship as friends certainly takes some huge bumps after they break up), but you shouldn't follow along with what society expects from you both in a relationship versus what you both want from YOUR relationship.

And that right there is Tamifull's thesis statement with How Do We Relationship?: don't determine how your life and relationships should be based on what society expects them to be.

Tamifull doesn't hold back anything when it comes to depicting how society treats relationships in general but also how it treats gay people in specific. While the physical danger of homophobia is always a constant that makes many queer people not want to be open with their queerness, being constantly other-ed in most social situations (whether intentionally or not) can frequently be reason enough to want to stay in the closet. Insensitive questions (that are more often born from ignorance rather than malice), being always seen as an outlier, frequently having to lie about who you like and a million other microaggressions that just build up as extra hardship in a queer relationships. Relationships are already not easy to keep together, but adding additional outside stressors can strain them even harder. Enter Shiho.

Shiho was Miwa's aforementioned high school crush whom she reconnected with during a high school reunion. After Miwa and Saeko's break up, Miwa started keeping up contact with her more and more and eventually has the opportunity to meet with her again. Miwa goes to meet with Shiho in order to confess her past feelings for her. Miwa is fully expecting to get turned down but when she meets Shiho, Shiho seems far more receptive and warm towards Miwa than she was expecting. Whatever mental protections Miwa had against the idea of actually having her feelings reciprocated crumbled as it seems like Shiho might have feelings for her as well? Could she actually get together with her old crush?

Unfortunately, while Shiho does have feelings for Miwa, she doesn't feel strong enough to deal with all the baggage that comes with being in a lesbian relationship with Miwa. She very clearly put a lot of thought into the subject, and while she does care for Miwa, she just can't put herself in a relationship with Miwa. Shiho isn't in the wrong about her own feelings and she doesn't invalidate Miwa's. But it still ends up breaking Miwa far more than if Shiho had out right rejected her.

External factors can have a major effect on relationships but internal factors have arguably far more impact on relationships. Namely: sex and romance. Or more specifically: how everyone has different levels of interest in sex and romance.

Figuring out that I was ace and aro took way longer than it probably should have. "I have no interest in having sex with someone but I still get off to porn so clearly I can't be ace!" was legitimately a thought that stopped me from fully embracing being ace for several years. Eventually I figured out that sex-repulsion isn't a requirement of being ace and that the ace spectrum covers a pretty wide variety of experiences under it and that my own is just as valid as the others.

Over the years I've had to engrave a pretty simple idea into my soul: there is no universal experience when it comes to sex and love. Regardless of whether you're allo, ace or aro, you'll have very different feelings towards sexual and romantic interest than everyone else. Let's take, for example, Rika.

Rika is one of the supporting straight characters of the cast. She's also arguably the most sexually active member of the main cast with easily the highest body count of them all. And yet she does not want a relationship past friends-with-benefits. I'm not sure if she's necessarily aro or just not currently interested in a romantic relationship, but the point is that the main thing she wants from her relationships is sex. And that is completely fine! It sucks that when she explains this to dudes she just fucked who want to start dating her that she only wanted a sexual relationship with them and they respond by thinking she must have some family issues that make her so sexually active (she doesn't) or they respond derogatorily that she's just a slut. That's just part of who she is, there is nothing wrong with her. If she was a guy, it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow.

And then on the flip side, you have Tamaki.

Some time after Miwa recovered from her heartbreak over Shiho (and after being sex friends with Saeko again for a bit), Miwa starts dating a year younger kouhai by the name of Tamaki. Tamaki is asexual/alloromantic, she very much has romantic feelings for Miwa and even enjoys kissing and looking at Miwa's body, but she has a very low sex drive. Miwa, on the other hand, has a pretty high sex drive. Tamaki and Miwa together might be one of the best depictions of an allosexual and asexual relationship I've ever seen.

I've know a number of aspecs who've gone through a similar situation as Miwa and Tamaki. Some are certainly able to come to an understanding with their allo partners about each other sexuality, personal boundaries and fulfilling each other's needs in a way that's healthy for both parties. But a lot end up in similar situations as Miwa and Tamaki.

Where in one or both partners feel like they're hurting each other. Some aces feel guilt over not being able to provide for their partner's sexual needs, even if their allo partner assures that them feeling comfortable is far more important to them. Some allos might feel like they're raping their ace partners when they have sex, even if their ace partner expressly gives consent because they want satisfy their partner's needs, even if they themselves don't get anything out of the experience. If you get both together, you end up with a feedback loop of self hatred where the ace person sees their own lack sexual interest as actively harming the person they love and the allo person sees themselves as a monster for wanting to have sex with the person they love.

It's a toxic situation to be in, but it's also one that's hard to leave as both parties feel they themselves are in the wrong and their solutions to correct their error (the allo refraining from asking for sex and the ace more freely offering up sex) just lead to the situation escalating to the point of serious damage to one or both parties.

And unfortunately, that seems to have happened to Miwa. As of writing this, we're at chapter 121 so we're still early on the current arc, but it's looking like Miwa breaking up with Tamaki has done a number on her sex drive. I'm no expert on fluctuations in sexual interest due to trauma, so I won't dive too deeply into this (especially since we're still so early in the new arc). However, associating your sex drive as something that's actively harming your partner to the point that you leave them even though you still love them? Yeah, that's going to cause some damage.

I could ramble on and on about other aspects and topics that How Do We Relationship? does so well (Yuria/Saeko insecurities and dependencies, Saeko/Miwa's brief stint as friends-with-benefits, etc), but I've already said far, far more then I was originally already planning to say. So I think I might have save them for some future posts if I remember them.

So to finally end this now very long essay, I return to my original question: "what exactly is a relationship?"

I don't know, I ain't a cop. Whatever you and your partner(s) say it is, is what it is. But watch out though!

[redwinterroses]

Boatem, on any given day, was probably gonna be two things:

Obviously, the first was “chaotic.” That surprises no one, yeah? Raise your hand if you’re surprised that Boatem was chaotic. 

See? No hands. It's a thing that is known. You got your end crystals and tree wars and mountains going up over night and ravagers raining from the heavens… Boatem was the home-sweet-home of chaos. And it lived there very comfortably.

But the second trait that Boatem had, on every day that end in Y, wasn’t quite as obvious. 

It was "secretive."

Hah. Yeah, I see your quirked eyebrow of skepticism. Look buddy, I had a bird’s eye view of the whole thing and I can tell you this for sure: the only reason none of those morons got caught out in their big secrets was that they were all too busy being cartoonishly self-conscious to notice literally everyone else doing the same thing.

That thing being, specifically: pretending to be human.

Yeah. You heard me. Human. Pretending. As in: none of that lot are human in any way, shape, and only occasionally in form.

Take Mumbo for example. Dear old Mumbo Jumbo, my personal nemesis—and also the member of Boatem I got to see up close and personal the most.

Lucky me.

He somehow managed to hide it right under everyone else’s nose, which I can only chalk up to years of trusting friendship mixed with a hilarious lack of awareness. His shapeshifting abilities have never been more unstable than they were in Boatem—maybe it was the chaos bleeding through, or the way that world was a bit unstable even from the very beginning… Either way, he turned into a living potato right in front of all of them and they barely blinked. 

A potato.

Night after night I had to listen to him pacing around in his storage room, muttering to himself about how dangerous it was to be a shapeshifter living with a bunch of humans. How he was putting a lot at risk and what fibs he was going to tell to play it off as some sort of joke or prank. I started keeping a scratch tally of how many times he said “Oh dear. Oh dear."

I ran out of space about two weeks in.

But it’s not like any of his neighbors were going to notice anyway. “Living with a bunch of humans,” my big wishbone. 

Human. Hah. Right, like “human” Pearl—the alien who ducked her feathery antennae in her hair any time someone came around, who floated around her base like gravity was frickin' optional? Pearl, who nearly got caught with her antennae out every time someone ran past and jumped like a skittish rabbit enough to raise anyone’s suspicions… Except her clueless Boatem pals.

Or “human” Scar, who never even hides his vexy teeth when he grins, but somehow everyone acts like they don’t notice. Maybe he uses some sort of glamor on them—not like I’d know. Magic is ticklish territory for my type. All I know is that for someone who loudly proclaims to be human—a thing no human has ever actually had to do—he didn’t go to much effort to act like one. 

And then there’s that Impulse guy. I’m not sure what he is, but the one time he got close enough to peck he nearly roasted my tail feathers. Plus it seemed like all you had to do was say his name and he’d just… show up.

Downright creepy if you ask me. Not like no one ever does. Don't bother talkin' to the guy who has a view of everything for 18 chunks--no, just blame him for your dumb redstone door breaking.

Anyway. The one Mumbo seemed most desperate to hide his “secret” from was… that other one. I don’t even like to say his name, to be perfectly honest with you but I know you know who I’m talking about. The wing-appropriator. The merry prankster. The one who watches you with eyes so dark you never know where he’s looking. 

And people say I have beady black eyes.

I don’t even know why Mumbo bothered trying to hide it from Gr… from him. Or why he was trying to hide what he was from the rest of them. Or how they never noticed the extra pairs of wings that would sometimes flutter about, or how he always saw when people were trying to prank him—even if it looked like he was asleep. 

But I’ll admit it was hilarious watching them dance around each other like a couple of hens avoiding a creeper—except both of them were hens and they each thought the other was a creeper. 

Somehow—somehow—none of them ever noticed the others. Who needs camouflage when you've got friends this oblivious? Anyway, come on—we all know none of them would actually care if they revealed their precious secrets.

I kinda hope they never do, though. Five best friends, none of whom are human, all convinced that they're the only alien-vex-demon-shapeshifter-thing-nonhuman in the bunch?

That's a joke even this bird-brain can appreciate.