#she never thought to mention this

[shiftingserendipity]

so just found out someone spotted my autism at like 7/8 and no one thought to say a fucking thing to me wtf

[starflungwaddledee]

some rather strong first impressions were made.

required reading for the magical "voice" headcanon and another for starstruck's signature in particular. asked by @trainerbob23 !

[caeslxys]

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere but it feels relevant again in light of the most recent episode. Something that’s really fascinating to me about Orym’s grief in comparison to the rest of the hells’ grief is that his is the youngest/most fresh and because of that tends to be the most volatile when it is triggered (aside from FCG, who was two and obviously The Most volatile when triggered.)

As in: prior to the attack on Zephrah, Orym was leading a normal, happy, casual life! with family who loved him and still do! Grief was something that was inflicted upon him via Ludinus’ machinations, whereas with characters like Imogen or Ashton, grief has been the background tapestry of their entire lives. And I think that shows in how the rest of them are largely able to, if not see past completely (Imogen/Laudna/Chetney) then at least temper/direct their vitriol or grief (Ashton/Fearne/Chetney again) to where it is most effective. (There is a glaring reason, for example, that Imogen scolded Orym for the way he reacted to Liliana and not Ashton. Because Ashton’s anger was directed in a way that was ultimately protective of Imogen—most effective—and Orym’s was founded solely in his personal grief.)

He wants Imogen to have her mom and he wants Lilliana to be salvageable for Imogen because he loves Imogen. But his love for the people in his present actively and consistently tend to conflict with the love he has for the people in his past. They are in a constant battle and Orym—he cannot fathom losing either of them.

(Or, to that point, recognize that allowing empathy to take root in him for the enemy isn't losing one of them.)

It is deeply poignant, then, that Orym’s grief is symbolized by both a sword and shield. It is something he wields as a blade when he feels his philosophy being threatened by certain conversational threads (as he believes it is one of the only things he has left of Will and Derrig, and is therefore desperately clinging onto with both bloody hands even if it makes him, occasionally, a hypocrite), but also something he can use in defense of the people he presently loves—if that provocative, blade-grief side of him does not push them—or himself—away first.

(it won’t—he is as loved by the hells as he loves them. he just needs to—as laudna so beautifully said—say and hear it more often.)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

EVERYONE SEEMS TO HAVE MOVED ON SO WELL, ITS LIKE NO ONE EVEN CARES THAT SHES GONE. ISNT ANYONE ELSE FUCKING MAD? OR CONFUSED? I WILL TEAR THIS WHOLE WORLD APART FOR AN ANSWER, SINCE NO ONE ELSE SEEMS TO WANT TO.

[whenfatecollides]

Xena Warrior Princess 2.19 Ulysses

[lizzardson]

when I was a kid I thought bring him home was valjean praying for god to kill marius (home being heaven) because I misheard "the summers die one by one" as "the son must die one by one"

[theriverbeyond]

i WILL defend Kiriona being a total ass to everyone in NtN because Gideon spent her entire life just watching those damned skeletons and wishing that the bones would show her any kind of acknowledgement. and then Gideon went to Canaan House and she made her first friends ever, the first people ever to show her the kind of love and tenderness that she had needed her whole miserable life, and then she died.

and when Gideon came back, practically the first thing she learned is that her mother, who she had spent her whole life dreaming about, hated her. like, suprise!!! you weren't just despised & hated after birth, but also before and during!! her mother thought of her as a parasite and a bomb. just a key to a lock that Gideon had never given a shit about.

and THEN!!! Gideon gets swept off in the River and she comes back as a corpse and the first time she sees her friends again, the first friends she ever had, all they can talk about is using her body -- not even her as a person, just her meat and blood -- for the same end as her mother wanted. just a key for the lock on that same damn door. like, yeah, Cam & Pal & crew thought she was gone and they wouldnt have any way to know that her soul was there. but also, their first words in her earshot were about using her and the first thing they did to her was try and violate her corpse. so basically. Kiriona deserves to have her villian era.

[patzweigz]

i've been kind of glib about this (and perhaps not making things any better by giving the show my attention with redesigns without making it very clear they are borne from criticsm), but speaking more bluntly i don't think vivziepop has earned any kind of congratulations for getting hazbin hotel made until she intentionally and wholly apologizes for, at the very least, her history of anti-blackness as it manifests in her show.

in particular she needs to apologize for everything involving alastor-- it is frankly quite stunning how he both encapsulates the vilification of black people's spiritual practices and long-standing stereotypes of those of african decent (portraying voudou as an evil magic and his noted cannibalism) and yet is simultaneously whitewashed of any clear signifiers that he is black/biracial. as a black louisiana creole myself (as he is as well), he is the most egregious example of the kind of disrespect she feels for black people and their cultures, and as long as he continues to exist in an official capacity in her lineup she has earned nothing but ire in my eyes.

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

Everyone: We need to find Avatar Kuruk's reincarnation! Hey, that one boy! He kinda looks like him! He even has his smile! He must be the Avatar. Kyoshi: *literal shiny variant of Yangchen roaming the streets of Yokoya*

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

10 April 1945 Dick wrote to DeEtta:

In his letter to DeEtta on the 16th September 1945 Dick apparently knew plenty about love, especially about being lovesick:

In his letters he wrote between April and Sept, Dick suddenly started talking a lot about Nix. At one point claiming how untrustworthy Nix is off duty. He also kept gently urging DeEtta to go find and marry someone.

[bookishdaze]

I gotta share something that's gonna sound so ridiculous, and I'm self-aware enough to know that this is me being very gullible, but I just HAVE to spit this out somewhere. Plus, I think it's hilarious.

So I just came back from watching Civil War. I went through like 3 mini heart attacks during that movie by the way.

Anyways, we got a KOTPOTA trailer beforehand, and ya wanna know what my mother said?

"Creo que el changuito se va enamorar de la humana." That's Spanish for "I think the little monkey is gonna fall in love with the human."

And listen. LISTEN. The last time I took a general audience member (my cousin) to watch the first movie in a trilogy from a popular scifi franchise (The Force Awakens) and who had never seen any of the previous movies, I KID YOU NOT they turned to me and told me that they felt something going on between Rey and Kylo. Fast forward 2 years later when the sequel came out AND THEY WERE RIGHT.

For those who don't know, 99% of the theories about Rey at the time were of her being a Skywalker, which would make Rey and Kylo related. Yet my cousin CLOCKED it. My cousin had the gift of PROPHECY.

"Don't be ridiculous. That was ONE time." I don't care. You don't understand. After that experience, I'll believe so many things at this point.

[ganondoodle]

for quite a while in my totk playthrough i thought there would be two possibilites who the new weird looking dragon was, either zelda or sonia

for zelda i had my doubts for some time bc i took them at their word the transformation would destroy ones soul .. which sounds pretty unreverseable, and knew nintendo wouldnt have the gall to essentially end zeldas bloodline .. also it would be kinda boring bc i still had hope shed play and actual role lol (after i knew it was her i was sure youd have to do a special quest with impa to have her return, given that she alluded to that quite clearly ..... im still so miffed that this wasnt a thing and just solves itself but i went over that gods know how many times already)

and sonia .. sonia was my bet for a long time bc i knew even from the very first images that she would absolutely die, not trying to be like HA I KNEW DA PLOT BEFORE I KNEW IT, but like .... to me she had a giant red sign of "I WILL DIE LOL" on her forehead even from the tiny resolution image from a photo taken from a game package that got out before the release BUT i thought it would be like she gets injured and is dying but to preserve her in some way or so she can furfill whatever role she needed to play she takes the stone and does the dragon transformation, shes not fully gone but also gone at the same time .... i thought that would be both tragic and cool and play into her otherwise important role-

bc i thought shed play a role or have any kind of importance aaaand she didnt in the end really, much like zelda tbh, both just kinda standing around as eye candy

[corviiids]

sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

[taylortruther]

Personally I don’t believe for a second that taylor had matty in her mind for years. It minimizes what she had with joe and what even matty had with other people. This whole idea that they were into each other for 10 years, writing about the other seems like a reach and a fantasy. Which is literally what taylor says in ttpd. I’m sure she loved matty, maybe she thought he was the one, but it was lowkey a fantasy. An obsession. She made up a lot of stuff due to her ideas of fate, star crossed lovers and twin flames. And in her head, it made sense. But in paper?. Oh, the reality is there. A lot of us been there. I don’t want to undermine what she had with matty bc that’s up to her but from ttpd.. a lot of the pain was self inflicted because of her own ideas, beliefs and projections. She wanted matty to be the one so she couldn’t think about losing the one she thought it was her endgame. And thats the tragedy of it.

and that's the tragedy of it

[evansbby]

my opinion on the Blake lively situation

[roseworth]

Wait ok I'm not knowledgeable on anything Wilson family. Slade drugs Rose???

yeah <///3 before tt03 they had met like once ever (and it went poorly) so to get rose on his side slade injected her with a super soldier serum

in #0.5 he kidnaps her after buying a hit on her (many such cases) and goes "cmon rose we can be a family lets be a family <3333" and she agrees (because shes angry and slade is the one handing her a weapon to kill the man that killed her mother)

then theyre on the same side for a while! the first time we hear about the serum (and iirc only time its specifically mentioned while shes being drugged) is in #12 (BART 🥺)

we also see some flashbacks in fresh hell of slade giving her the serum too

anyways then she joins the team and everything is alright (lie). this is the first confirmation that she was being drugged, plus also showing that shes staying on the team just bc shes afraid slade will get her again :(

in any story that takes place from 2003-2006 that includes rose & slade (bg #63-64, nightwing #112-115, etc), rose is being drugged :(

basically the writers needed an explanation for why she would choose to work with slade and wanted an excuse for why she would be able to join the titans later on and honestly? rare johns banger. this plotline fucks to me. completely defines rose's relationship with slade and gives her a concrete reason to hate him but also have very complicated feelings about her place in his life ouuughhhh

but in conclusion slade sucks so heres some panels of rose beating him up