#she exists to fail

[shkika]

the amount her death haunts me is unreasonable

[momentomori24]

I may just be insane about this but does this feel like foreshadowing to anyone else. In this scene we see her trying to replicate the skill of someone else (her mother) and failing to achieve the same results that they would. That feels really specific and it's driving me insane.

Like, we see this come back again in the aftermath of the trial. Diana has repeatedly voiced her admiration for Wolfgang's ability to speak and inspire those around him in the darkest of times, saying she wished she could do the same. We see her pour her heart out and give her own speech to inspire the others-- except the reaction that she receives is cold and miserable, far from the newly kindled warmth and hope Wolfgang was able to create every time.

Diana is a chameleon. Her whole thing is to reflect, to replicate and to adapt. Do you think that this small scene where she tries to make a butterfly out of her hairclips-- a butterfly, an animal associated with transformation and change-- and the end result looking nothing like what she wanted it to be is a metaphor for her future character arc? She has declared that she wants to follow in Wolfgang's footsteps, wants to become something new, but do you think that by the end she ends up being the furthest thing from him? Do you think that by the end she will be left distorted, fundamentally wrong? Do you think that if she could see what she will become in the future, the only emotion that she can muster is horror as she gazes at a stranger that's supposed to be herself? That by the end, she won't be able to recognise herself, because there's no "her" left anymore?

[frostgnawdraws]

failure and futility

for day 2 of campfire fest! prompt: third eye (and i guess could also count for explosion, or a lack thereof lol) @outerwilds-events

[shorthaltsjester]

Imogen Temult, Exaltant Hope of the Red Storm

Heroes and Monsters by Penny & Sparrow // Critical Role Campaign 3

[genericpuff]

I'm not sure if anyone else has made this connection, but I've never seen it mentioned before. I think, similar to Lolita, RS was also inspired by the art of Trevor Brown. His work has a lot of young girls and medical fetish themes (to put it lightly) in a style reminiscent of RS's earlier stuff.

sigh

CW: medical fetish art often depicting children / child-like characters and medical equipment such as needles, gas masks, etc. seriously don't hit the jump if medical equipment or young girls in nurse's outfits or with open wounds makes you squeamish, I will not blame you for turning around now LOL

OP I was about to just... dismiss this. Wave it away as a funny coincidence that is indeed funny, but doesn't have any real evidence to back it up. I had a post typed up in response already declaring this, after which posting I was gonna move on with my day, work on Rekindled, play some XIV.

Because sure, there are a lot of resemblances between Trevor Brown's work and Rachel's old art, but nothing that can't be dismissed in good faith as a simple coincidence of being within the same genre of fetish art (first three are Trevor's, last three are Rachel's).

But then that little voice in the back of my head whispered in my ear, "Puff. You should double check. Just to be sure. Do your due diligence." And I once again found myself on the precipice of the rabbithole that somehow becomes deeper every time I jump. This time though, I knew it couldn't be that bad, I mean, I had enough confidence in knowing that there's no fucking way she listed Trevor Brown as one of her favorite artists-

God fucking dammit. How in the world did I miss this? I mean, I suppose I missed it simply because I'm not familiar with the works of Trevor Brown, but you can bet your ass I became familiar with it in my digging. Yeah, this guy is a supreme creep.

Again, I am not going to accuse Rachel of being a pedophile because that's just not an accusation that should be thrown around without undeniable evidence. What I will say, which has largely remained the same - though even more confidently now than ever before - is that she's clearly someone who took a lot of inspiration and influence from very problematic artists when she was young (I'm talking in her late teens which has me wondering if she started making medical fetish art when she was still a minor-) and then, BEST guess, she started to drop the medical fetish stuff around the time she went to college (which was also the same time she dropped The Doctor Pepper Show, which later got reworked into The Doctor Foxglove Show which was a lot less reminiscent of her medical fetish style from the early 2000's, but still had some of her usual preferences at play) and that's led up to today where she's drawing comics that look like they're for kids but tackle heavy adult subject matter in the worst way possible that straight up perpetuates grooming.

No matter how much experience I have with this already, no matter how much I think I've already seen, I always find more, and this time was no different. In fact - though unrelated to the original topic - thanks to this one fucking ask, I even found the full Mads Mikkelson comic with the completed caption. You know, that one.

And apparently Mads Mikkelson did very much replace her crush on Jeremy Irons.

Who's Jeremy Irons?

Oh yeah.

I just... y'all I can't. This is un-fucking-real. I'm gonna go take a shower, I need to scrub myself off of this 😭

[lovesickeros]

☆ de fontaine

{☆} characters furina {☆} notes cult au, imposter au, drabble, gender neutral reader {☆} warnings angst, suicidal thoughts, hurt / no comfort {☆} word count 1.4k

This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair!

She thought, for one moment, she could put the mask down and breathe – for one moment of daydreaming, she thought she could just be Furina. She thought she would finally get to live the live she should've had in the first place, the life she threw away to play God to an audience who saw her as nothing but a circus animal, dancing to their whims. Furina just wanted to be selfish for one brief and fleeting moment..and it was gone before she could even grasp it in her hand. A comet soaring past far out of her reach.

She can barely keep her hands from violently shaking as she looks down at them – broken and bloody and more a corpse then a person – and she feels so numb she can't even feel the rain pelting against her back. None of this is fair, she wants to scream, why is it always me? But her voice is silent beneath the torrent of rain. She wonders if the ocean would take her if she sank into it's depths – just for a moment, she wonders how it would feel to finally be able to sleep at ease.

Furina is tired.

But Furina is nothing if not useful, isn't she?

So she forces her feet to move, dragging against the stone beneath her heels, and drags their bloodied body into the nearest empty building, letting the rain do the work of washing away the smeared blood following her path. The smell makes her feel sick, the feeling of it sticking to her hands and gloves makes her lightheaded, but she persists. Because Furina is useful, because Furina won't let them die out in the rain, because Furina won't stand by and just let them rot on the streets like some..pest.

Furina wants to go home. She wants to sleep and she isn't she if she wants to wake up, this time. But she keeps going anyway.

Because it's all she's ever done, and the habit sticks.

An Archon she may not be, not anymore, but the expectations of five hundred years still linger like eyes on the inside of her skull. They watch her, pry and prod at her thoughts, mocking laughter and judging eyes following her as she forces herself to dance to the song they weave with glee. Furina never stepped off that stage – she's still there, she thinks, watching the crowd stare at her in disdain as the curtain call looms above her like a guillotine. She still hears Neuvillette deliver her damnation and salvation with a trembling voice, still feels her hair stand on end when electro crackled like the crack of the whip, Clorinde's blade aimed at her like a loaded gun.

She's trapped on that stage and she never left, not really.

She hates it. She thinks she hates them, but it's not their fault. They didn't ask for this, didn't ask for everyone to turn against them, didn't ask for her to save them. Neither did she..yet here they are, she thinks.

She tries to tell herself she's in control this time, though. She can stop performing her part in this horrible, bloody play any time she wants. It makes her feel better, just for a little while, if she convinces herself she's still Furina, painfully human.

And Furina has always been good at lying.

It's the believing that's the hard part.

There isn't time for her to wallow in her own self pity, though. They're still bleeding out onto the dusty, creaky floorboards of some random, broken down house and she's just standing there as the blood stains the wood. She can fix it – she's good at fixing things. She's done nothing but fix things – try to, anyway – for five hundred years. She can fix a little wound, how hard could it be? Her hands are clenched so tight they ache as she kneels down, wincing at the creak of the floorboards beneath her heels– she hesitates just long enough to wonder if she's making a mistake before she peels away just enough of the outer layer of their clothes to see the deep, bloody gash across their chest. She tries not to think about it – it's deep, too deep, and she feels dizzy just looking at it, but she's handled worse, right?

Furina can fix it. That's what she's good at.

She doesn't feel so confident when she tries to wrack her brain for..something. Five hundred years, and a little wound stumps her? No, she had to have learned something, right? She's decidedly not trying to buy time because she's panicking, parsing through hundreds of years of memories like flipping through a book. Furina isn't made for this, not really – she's running on nothing but adrenaline and she's really not sure what she's doing, but she's trying. And just like before, it won't be enough, will it?

She'll fall short again – she'll be too late to fix it before she's alone again.

Furina was an Archon..used to be. What use would she have for that sort of knowledge? Which makes her predicament all the more harrowing and bleak. What was she supposed to do?

Furina had heard it first hand, that vitriol in Neuvillette's voice. She isn't sure she's ever heard him that..angry before. She's not sure he would listen to her if she tried, either. And that scares her more then anything. All of Fontaine was up in arms about this..imposter, yet here she was, staring down at them bleeding out in front of her, and she was trying to save them.

Why? Why is she throwing away her only chance at normalcy for a fraud? Why didn't she just turn them in?

They were dying – that should've been a good thing, shouldn't it? So why didn't it feel like it?

"Why you?" Her voice breaks as she speaks in harsh tones, grabbing the front of their shirt in trembling, bloodied hands. "Why now?" She wants to scream, to demand answers they can't give, to claw back the reprieve she was promised after five hundred years of agony..and all she can do is sob into their chest, pleading for an answer that will not come. "Why me?"

Silence is their answer, and it hangs heavy on her trembling shoulders as she cries.

Of course they don't, she thinks bitterly, no one has ever answered her pleas spoken in hushed sobs. Not her other self and certainly not them.

Furina has always been alone. Furina will always be alone.

Because Furina never left that stage, never left that moment when she looked at herself in the mirror and took up a mantle too heavy for her to bear. She always finds her way back eventually. There's no one on the other side anymore – she stands alone on a stage, waiting for an inevitable end she isn't sure will come.

"Please," She pleads through tears and choked sobs, clinging to them like they are all that keeps her from sinking. "Please don't leave me, too." The words burn on her tongue – how pathetic is she that she craves companionship from the bloodied body of the imposter? Perhaps she's truly lost her mind after all these years..perhaps she's finally gone mad. She must have.

But their presence is like the first feeling of gentle warmth upon her skin as the sun crests the horizon, like the gentle lap of tides along her heels, the sway of branches and leaves as the wind blows through them like an instrument all it's own. They are the soothing sound of rain against the window as she watches the dreary skies in fond longing, the first bloom of spring as color blooms upon the landscape like paint had been spilled across the hills and valleys.

They are like the faint spark she carefully nurtures and stokes, so fragile even the smallest wind could blow it out like a candle. She cradles it within her palms, pleads with whoever will listen – prays that someone finally listens, because if not for her, then for them.

She's failed to protect too much already, let too many people with so much trust in her fall between the cracks of her fingers like grains of sand. She won't let them go – she can't.

If nothing else, if she couldn't be saved when she begged for salvation from that five hundred year long agony, even if she never got that chance..

Furina will make sure they do.

[sofiaruelle]

Its was my bday 2 days ago and thought i might make this.

[lady-quen]

"NO! You cannot roast a hotdog over the Commander's personal portal to hell!"

"For the hundredth time it's NOT a portal to hell, Taimi!"

[googleeyes]

I love it love it love it when the characters in Dracula start reading the same stuff we've been reading it's like Yayy Book Club :) Tell me more about how much you love Mina

[coraniaid]

Not a surprise to anyone who's ever read anything I've written, I suspect, but there's something so fascinating to me about the character of Faith's first Watcher.

Well, I mean, 'character' is already putting it a bit strongly. We don't know practically anything about her, other than the fact she was killed in front of Faith. Faith never (explicitly) brings her up again after her first appearance (although she has to be implicitly referencing her, and perhaps her mother as well, when she tells Gwendolyn Post in Revelations that she has "this problem with authority figures: they end up kind of dead", and we can assume she's also thinking of her when she confronts Buffy in Enemies: "you get the Watcher, you get the mom [...] what do I get?")

There are some things we can infer about her. She was presumably in better standing with the Council than Giles (although Faith was lying about her being away at the Watcher's retreat in England, she must have been invited and told Faith about it or else why would Faith know that was happening and assume Giles would be there?). She was, perhaps, older than Giles (Faith's flirting with Giles on first meeting him is just a warped self-defence mechanism on her part so we can't take it too seriously, but she does profess to be surprised by how young he is). And, of course, from the way Faith reacts to Mrs Post and the Mayor, we can assume Faith bonded to her pretty strongly (no doubt making her failure to save her from Kakistos all the more painful).

But ... that's it. We don't even have a canonical name. Even Kendra's Watcher managed that much, and Kendra was only (barely) in three episodes. Some people -- including me -- sometimes use the name 'Diana Dormer', but that's from the tie-in novel Go Ask Malice which isn't even considered canon by those people who consider some of the tie-in books to be canon.

And yet, as I've said, she kind of fascinates me. What was she like? How long did Faith know her? What was her relationship with Faith like: was it something close to what Buffy and Giles had, or more like Buffy and her first Watcher (also not named canonically, unless you count the film)? Would she have left Faith alone in a motel room all year? Was she anything like the Watcher Gwendolyn Post pretended to be? Did Faith ever complain about her "taking the fun out of [Slaying]", the way Faith later complains about Wesley? Was Faith thinking of her when she went to visit Buffy and her mom for Christmas? Was she the last adult Faith had ever brought a "crappy" present for when visiting her home?

Why are there so few named adult women characters on this supposedly feminist show?

[fortune-maiden]

Thinking about Shao Yuanyuan and her wildcard potential and it hit me today... just how much does she know? Does she live in a time loop similar to Lu Guang or does she hop in and out of the past like Cheng Xiaoshi? Does she know that Cheng Xiaoshi also has a death node?

It suddenly occurred to me to that the Shao Yuanyuan we likely saw during the fire in Ep 4, was either a time leaping SYY from the future or at least one who had information from her future self to know to be in Bridon at this point in time and also a Shao Yuanyuan who might have just realized Cheng Xiaoshi had awakened his own powers.

Given her meeting with Cheng Xiaoshi in Ep 6 where she acts like Cheng Xiaoshi should be aware of how this all works, I suspect that it's because the version of Shao Yuanyuan from Ep 4 arranged this meeting because she encountered Cheng Xiaoshi during the fire and thus knew he would show up in Bridon and go searching for them through Wang Qing. She needed to set up that meeting so she could tell Cheng Xiaoshi face to face not to pursue her anymore (and make things more complicated).

I also think that was her second attempt at doing so - the first being to go back years earlier to tell the Qiao family not to let him go to Bridon. But the future refused to change so she found another opportunity to try again.

And based on Lu Guang's comments it sounds like she would have also failed again in the original timeline. It's not clear how her conversation with CXS went last time (if there was one) but at the very least she might not have had time to make CXS promise not to chase after her anymore, and that would have likely sealed his fate. If anything, a sudden interrupted meeting like that might have even encouraged him further.

And this is all coming from a Shao Yuanyuan from an unknown point in the future...

Anyway this is a lot of words to say where in time is Shao Yuanyuan?

And what the heck does the timeline look like from her perspective?

[sehaniine]

your blind faith and soft heart will doom them all, inquisitor lavellan

[shallowseeker]

For your consideration, because I've been thinking about this...

According to Chuck, Dean doesn't mind feeding Amara "into the meat-grinder with a wink and a smile."

And certainly there are layers to how he feels about doing that... Dean has always walked the line between doing what’s right and what’s necessary, but in this moment, his morality is being pushed to the breaking point.

It’s an existential crisis because it challenges everything he stands for, every instinct to protect and not betray. In this situation, his sense of duty and survival are at odds with his humanity—making him question what he’s willing to sacrifice to win. But ALSO.

Perhaps, deep down, he’s still reeling from the fallout of his and Amara's initial connection.

In Gimme Shelter, Dean is chafing over her decision to meddle:

DEAN: You're damn right. Look at you. Just another cosmic dick rigging the game. You're just like your brother. AMARA: It was a gift, Dean, not a trial. DEAN: I'm not angry, Amara. I'm furious. To know that all my life, I've been nothing but a hamster in a wheel, stuck in a story. And you know whose fault that is? Chuck's. And it ain't just me. We're all trapped. Sam and Cas and Jack and even you. And you want to talk about the people that he's killing right now— AMARA: Stop. ...

AMARA: Can I... trust you? DEAN: I would never hurt you.

Amara and Dean's initial relationship wasn’t just symbiotic; it was predatory.

And with Chuck’s voyeurism looming over the season, it’s all a trigger for Dean. Dean longs to be free—not just from Chuck’s voyeurism, but from Amara’s fascination with him. It’s not just about the manipulation; it’s the lack of consent, the way Chuck and Amara have both used him for their own agendas, to make Dean tap-dance, or to "see what could put out his anger/fire."

///

That said, Amara empathized with Dean

She wanted to return a lost loved one to Dean. She’s not alone. In fact, both Amara and Cas did that—Amara bringing Mary back to life in season 12, and Cas trying his best to bring Sam back to life in season 6.

But how they perceive and engage with Dean could not be more different. Amara: Her actions toward Dean come from a place of curiosity that borders on predation. At first, she seeks to feel what it is to be human through him.

When she revives Mary, it's at its core a way of experimenting with his emotions, not engaging with them. It's a desire to feel what Dean feels for her own sake, not truly honoring him as a person. (It's a bit of a throughline from how Crowley initially sees Demon Dean, "See what I see, feel what I feel.")

It’s tricky because empathy tends to be, at least in part, self-focused. That’s normal. But the difference here is that Amara wants to see what Dean does in response to a cosmic trigger. It’s a grand experiment.

In season 15, she's taking tentative steps toward her own experiences, but when it comes to Dean, there's still a niggling sense of predation or compulsion: "You have a distinctive musk. We will always help each other." Cas: On the other hand... Cas’s fascination comes from a place of genuine empathy and a burgeoning recognition of Dean’s humanity. Cas tries to witness Dean’s emotions as a detached observer but can't help resonating with them.

He finds that Dean helps him stand up for his own values—values he's been forced to bury over and over again. Quickly, Cas's engagement with Dean becomes based on a shared history, a shared fight, and shared values. They don't always agree, or even always help each other. But despite their sometimes very explosive differences of opinion, they usually come to a mutual understanding of one another.

When Cas revives Sam, it comes from a deep sense of guilt and frustration with his own kind. Cas wanted to protect Sam from a fate he felt was tied to his angelic brethren's actions—their failings and their manipulation of the human world.

Cas’s shame about his brothers' actions simmered beneath the surface, eventually boiling over into the white-hot rage of an authoritarian, but unlike Amara, Cas’s initial move was to simply to protect those he loved from the celestial forces he once served.

In short, Cas sees Dean’s pain, his flaws, and his humanity, not as something to be experimented and tinkered with, but as something to cherish and understand. To protect.

Overall, despite some occasional teasing and sniping, Cas witnesses and honors Dean’s humanity, recognizing it as something valuable and worthy of respect, even when, and maybe especially when, it's ugly. //// Anyway, it just seems to me that Dean's panic response in late season 15 regarding Amara could have been inflamed by his and Amara's underlying history.

Amara assumes she and Dean are bound by fate to always help each other—an inevitability, not a choice—and so, choosing to betray her becomes an act of rebellion in itself.

[kaidanalenkosprmanager]

Sophie Oliveira-Shepard Alenko-Oliveira and Kaidan Alenko-Oliveira - ME3 (3/?) "What would I do without you?" "You'll never have to find out." Mass Effect 3: Legendary Edition (2021)

[starryluminary]

Dating sim where Noah’s the playable main character and the goal is to get with one of a wide variety of campers on the island (to his protest)

[paynomind-iamnotreal]

So, FHJY theory/au idea:

In that one promotional video, Emily had been unsure about continuing on as Fig right? Well, looking at the devil's nectar, and how powerful Fig's illusions are becoming, and all the stuff with Cuspin Clark, imagine if Figueroth Faeth turns into Wanda Childa, and Wanda Childa finds that she cannot turn back?