#read it how you want to

[1mnobodywhoareyou]

Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

The band had just finished playing Edge of Great to close out their concert. They’d decided to keep Luke’s impromptu duet moment for live performances and had also now played it enough times that it’s not quite as charged for them as it once was. Julie and Luke are still staring at one another when the band is met with an unexpected response.

“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” the crowd starts chanting.

Reggie hugs his bass, settling back with a self-satisfied smirk as if he can’t wait to see this go down. Alex looks with amusement and a smidge of concern between the audience and the couple and back again. Julie and Luke haven’t formally announced their relationship but they haven’t been working all that hard to hide or deny it either.

Julie raises an eyebrow at Luke and he grins at her with a mischievous glint in his eyes and startles everybody by suddenly standing. He makes his way over to the corner of the drum riser just behind Julie and Reggie barely has time to move his bass out of the way before Luke dips him deeply and plants what appears to be a very sloppy, overzealous kiss on him. The audience gasps in seeming unison and is otherwise silent. Alex can’t help the guffaw that leaves his throat, harshly breaking the silence that had settled over the room and Julie breaks down giggling as Luke returns Reggie upright before bounding off the stage with a wave. Reggie stands stunned for a moment and Julie grabs him to pull him offstage with her.

Where Luke has been met with a very “trying to be stern while also choking down laughter” manager of theirs, Flynn.

“Do you have any idea how much work it’s going to be to clean this up, Luke?” they asked him while he grins.

“Yeah, but it was funny.”

“Hilarious,” she deadpans with a roll of their eyes and a slight upturn to their lips. 

The crowd had apparently recovered and were now calling for their expected encore. Flynn rolls her eyes, still not understanding why this is a thing that continues to happen at concerts but Luke is nothing if not a musician of his time and he insists on maintaining the tradition. He all but shoves Julie back onto the stage, reeling her back quickly to peck her on the lips before sending her out again as if nothing out of the ordinary had even happened.

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[trans-androgyne]

Genuinely, what happened to “feminism is for everyone”?

That’s the feminism I grew up with: encouraging people to recognize that fighting sexism and restrictive gender roles helps folks of every gender. We’d push back on the idea that feminists hate men, pointing to inclusive feminist literature and how many men are feminists.

Now, there are so many people insisting that the solution to patriarchy is to openly hate and ostracize men no matter what. Why? What is the benefit? It’s certainly not effective in fighting oppressive structures to exclude half the population from your cause on the basis of immutable traits. It may feel cathartic to say horrible things about men and try to punish them for your frustrations with patriarchy. But the only actual effect I see is the increasing right-wing radicalization of young men, who are being told that the left hates them for the way they were born and presented with an abundance of proof that it’s true.

Why are we going back to treating men and women as different species? It doesn’t fix things to say “well women are the good gender and men are the bad one” this time. If you sincerely want to dismantle sexism, you’re going to have to unpack and let go of all sex and gender essentialism—even that which considers women inherently pure and men inherently immoral.

[egophiliac]

tsum events really are just the best, huh

[ink-the-artist]

Rabbits

Some bonus art, I initially started making this in a totally different art style but changed my mind about halfway through lmao, here are the parts I finished

[artkaninchenbau]

People keep on asking for more Baby Robin and Papadile so here is more Baby Robin and Papadile. Now never ask anything from me ever again

[hinamie]

"I'll show you every day that choosing to live was worth it"

some of my favourite scenes from @hijinks-n-lowjinks' fic things i would miss from the other side . this fic tore my heart out fr but like in a good way and i wanted to pay it homage the only way i know how <3

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[1mnobodywhoareyou]

Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Alternate

Because I had two versions in my brain and they both needed let out...

Julie and the Phantoms are at a meet and greet, engaging with fans. They arrange themselves for another group photo, as previously planned, with Julie sandwiched between Reggie and Luke, the latter’s arm around her waist, and Alex behind them. They’re engaged in quiet conversation while they wait, and from the fan’s perspective, Julie and Luke must look particularly intimate because suddenly a cheer starts making its way through the crowd. 

“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”

Julie pulls her attention back to the people in front of them and rolls her eyes as Luke’s hand tightens on her waist. She feels Reggie pull away slightly from her other side, as if to give the two of them room in encouragement and Alex has already lifted his hands in resignation and removed himself from the whole situation. A lot happens in a very, very short moment of time and she finds herself taking a page out of Luke’s book, pulling Reggie into the space between them as she extracts herself from his grasp. Both boys (and everyone else) are stunned for a moment but Luke recovers almost imperceptibly quickly and shrugs before wrapping his hand around the back of Reggie’s neck and pulling him in for a kiss. 

Alex and Julie gape at them while a collective gasp rises from the crowd.

When they pull apart, Reggie adjusts his hair as he reorients himself in his spot a Julie’s width away from Luke and Luke directs a wink her way. She shakes her head in amusement and a grin before taking her own place between them. 

Luke nods toward Alex, summoning him back too.

“Flynn’s gonna be pissed,” Alex tells him as he returns to his position behind them though he can’t keep the amusement out of his voice.

“Worth it,” Luke grins at him

The band recovers as if nothing had even happened. It takes the fans a bit longer but the stunned silence turns into excited clamouring and the event is back underway before too long.

[ot3]

i do get why people are going so hard in on reminding each other that depicting something bad in fiction isn't the same as endorsing that thing. but also i feel like that's a talking point that cedes a lot of ground i'm not willing to cede re: the right to engage with works that do endorse a bunch of bigoted or harmful shit. interacting with a work of fiction that wholeheartedly espouses a worldview you do not agree with isn't a trojan horse that injects hitler particles into your bloodstream or something. like sometimes you read a book and your main takeaway is 'wow this author thinks women are cattle' or something along those lines and nothing about the process of having read that book has in any way damaged your moral integrity. it's fine! it's fine. you can learn a lot about yourself by reading shit that's hostile to your worldview.

[fonulyn]

since I've seen it talked about in several places recently:

if you are going to do a whump- or kink- or ANY-tober or other similar challenges please please please don't post them as one fic with 31 chapters unless it actually is one coherent fic. if they're 31 completely separate fics or ficlets then please just make a collection for them or just post them as separate fics. it doesn't matter if they're only 100 words or if you think they're too small or insignificant to post alone, they're not.

and why this?

because if you post all 31 of them in one fic the tagging is absolutely useless. if I look for things to read on ao3 I'm gonna look at the tags, and if the tags include something that's a dealbreaker for me, i won't even click on the fic. I might not even SEE the fic because I've filtered out the nope-tag! so I'm gonna lose out on reading 30 perfectly nice fics because of one fic that my nope-tag applied to.

ao3 is about archiving. it's about clear tagging and being informative. there is nothing informative about it if the tags in the fic apply to random chapters while others have nothing to do with it. it makes so much more sense to have each work as an individual fic with its own individual tags and warnings, so readers can make informed choices.

of course, you do you. I can't police what other people decide to do. but personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to weed through 31 chapters to find the ones I actually want to read. so I don't. I automatically scroll past all works posted like that. and I know some others do, too.

there is absolutely no shame in posting short things on ao3. there is no minimum word count. no one is going to look at you funny if you post a small ficlet on its own, I promise. it's just going to make some readers very happy when they can actually find the things they want to read.

so, please. at least consider the upsides of posting each work as their own fic.

signed, one very frustrated fandom grandma.

[noornight]

Long distance besties. This definitely happened after the third movie (source: trust me bro)

Based on this

[housederiva]

Dragon Age put important plot information in your games challenge

[cringefail-clown]

post-canon/epilogues au, in which kankri, through paradox space shenanigans, gets revived and comes into his ultimate self, gathering knowledge from all of his past and future iterations - including the signless. now hes on a one-man mission to stop ult dirks plan to start another session of sburb in the bud

[choccy-milky]

sometimes you gotta lure your overly-studious ravenclaw gf into spending time with you 🥰 📚 ( from 'Every Teardrop is a Waterfall' by Kat_12739 on ao3, GO READ IT!!! the first story is about seb falling sick and still pushing himself/not admitting he's sick until he ends up in the hospital, the second story is about the birth of seb and clora's daughter and seb's reaction to clora almost dying in childbirth, and the third is about dealing with a fussy newborn lewis😭🥹THEY'RE SO GOOD AND SWEET AND SOMEWHAT SAD (not to mention beautifully written) so go check it out!!💖💖 )

[saragrosie]

Some really stupid season 3-4ish mag sketches plus obligatory crumpling Jon up into a ball (And also s1 Jon is there writing his gay little statements whatever).

I say s3-4 cuz Helen ya know here's another Helen under the cut my beloved they could never make me hate you. You are the not a who but the moment the icon the legend:

I'm sharing some more dumbass things I've drawn in another post cuz there are early season 5 references (I'm on MAG 169) so check that out if you're caught up to there if not begone no spoilers for you ok byeeeee