#so he wanted revenge for that instead

[mayasaura]

so basically, I think Alecto is going to vore John, and John is going to be happy about it

See, the ending I see for John and Alecto is. They're not going to both die. No one is going to kill Alecto just so they can kill John. Talk about reenacting the cycle of violence. Nah, I think they're gonna do the Paul thing. The lyctor thing. Complete the eightfold word. but instead of a merging of two equal souls, John will be subsumed by and become a part of something greater than himself. absorbed completely into the world he loved and fought for and changed and killed and resurrected. I'm not sure he'd even fight it. On some level, I think he's wanted it for ten thousand years, just as badly as Gideon wanted it from Harrow

[wishesofeternity]

The thing about HotD is that it while it absolutely minimizes the agency and ambition of both Rhaenyra and Alicent, this is specifically used to glorify Rhaenyra and frame her as righteous while condemning Alicent and framing her lacking. That's the key difference in both their textual portrayals that has directly led to 90% of the fandom hailing Rhaenyra as the second coming of Christ while spewing the most hateful vitriol at Alicent just for existing. But y'all are not prepared for that conversation.

[tokyo-daaaamn-ji-gang]

He is so cute here with his little hat and the way he's holding that plushie!!!

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

literally no one was doing it like natsuno yuuki. he was genre savvy but he was also fucking gay so he still died. after his death he started dressing like the google search results for gay vampire. his only friends were his homoerotic bestie, an adult medical professional speed running his descent into madness, and two random kids he dug up his stalker’s grave with. he became a vampire and was immediately better at it than all of the other vampires but he thought they were bitches so he didn’t even tell them he turned. his last words was that he was never going to make it out of that town alive but if anyone could have it was him and that’s what makes him so tragic. he died trying to save someone who was never ever going to save him back. he wasn’t afraid to die because he was already dead. he burned the entire town to the ground mourning his own death and he didn’t do it to save a single goddamn person, he did it because they murdered him and he was going to fucking hurt them back for it. I’m obsessed with him

[little-pondhead]

man i'm on a roll tonight

DP x DC idea:

Bruce Wayne has somehow managed to become the unofficial guardian of at least two more kids. Maybe three. He's not sure yet. Various members of the Batfamily have made new friends recently and have been having them hang out at Wayne manor for extensive periods of time. Now only if he could actually meet the rascals face-to-face, maybe he could adopt them for real.

or

Danny, Elle, and Jazz have all made friends with different Wayne kids at different times from different places. Damian met Elle at school, Danny met Tim while working at a coffee shop, and Jazz met Cass outside the local theater. All three visit the manor separately, and no one communicates that they've befriended people from the same family. Eventually, however, their hangout sessions accidentally overlap and the Waynes have to deal with the excitement of three Fentons under a single roof.

Let's just say there's a reason the three of them live separately.

[ayrennaranaaldmeri]

lmao condal will be like 'noo why do people like d*emon he's not a good guy!!!' but he won't have the balls to make d*emon explicitly be the evil that he is in the book re: b&c lmao.

[pinacoladamatata]

I'm still so mad about the Wyll rewrite actually

[forcedhesitation]

why should it just be steve who has all the torturous purgatory realm fun?

[dollypopup]

y'all can all cancel me (again) for this, but if there's even a SHRED of 'who should I pick?' from Penelope in season 3, I am tuning out SO fast because like. . .sorry not sorry, there IS no choice. Debling is some crusty OC suitor she barely even knows and Colin is a man who she has been so supposedly in love with to the point where she'd ruin her entire family's reputation to have a potential love story with him. Penelope and Colin have background, years of knowing each other, intimacy that few people in the Ton can boast of having (letters, conversations about purpose, fights and arguments and makeups) and her and Debling have. . .a dance or two at a ball because he's a rebound for Penelope's broken heart. he means nothing. he has no nuance, he has no weight to the story, he is such an afterthought to me. either I wanna see Penelope going 'you know what? I don't even LIKE this dude. he's. . .fine, but I don't care about him even a shred as much as I care about Colin' or the INSTANT Colin's like 'you know what? we should get married' if it's not an immediate 'say less, you're already my husband, try returning me without the receipt, Debling whomst?' then I don't want it!

like. . .it's just so frustrating to see all the 'I hope Debling sweeps her off her feet and she rejects Colin's proposal and she makes him work for it and and and-' nonsense from the fandom and it's always tagged and no matter how many times I block it, it just keeps popping up. I go into the Polin tag for POLIN. I don't give a SHIT about a male love interest other than Colin. Not one. Not a shred. Not an iota.

and also. . .Debling has the 'benefit' of not having depth, or character traits, or HISTORY, so peeps can project onto him however they want, but I'm calling it now, there is NOTHING he could do or be that would make me like him more than Colin. Colin will always hit different, and I will always love him more. and if Pen's not on that same page? lol bye

you want me to believe Penelope and Colin are soulmates and it's romance for her to hem and haw about how difficult a decision it is for her to marry a stranger who knows barely anything about her. . .

when Marina was out here dropping banger lines like 'You were the only man with which I could see myself being happy' and 'I do not care about any of these men, where is Colin?'? like hello??? and she wasn't even fully in love with him!!!! but we'll demonize her until the cows come home in our fandom and make her the villain in Polin's love story for DARING to get in between Polin, yet Debling, a white man, is a darling dear perfect prince for getting in between Polin? existing in our fandom solely so Penelope can be like 'lol, Colin ain't shit, let me entertain any and everyone else'?

if that's the direction it goes then, ten toes down and on my mama, she doesn't deserve Colin and she can move because I'm on my way to court him my damn self

and that's that on that

[jokerfic]

@shepards-dead-fish DELIGHTED to talk about this, tyvm

first and foremost, the big dawg himself, Nolanverse Joker

His whole deal can honestly be summed up with:

effectively flipping a code of morality on its head necessitates an intimate understanding of that code of morality first. Ledger's Joker sure does spend an awful lot of his limited screentime preaching nihilism to people, that nothing matters, that saving a busload of puppies and pushing a granny into traffic are both completely morally neutral acts, as is everything else under the sun, because there's nobody up there keeping score.

to me it reads like a crusade. to me, it reads like a smokescreen for rage and disgust. either the Joker isn't human, is instead a figment, a personification of chaos, or he is human, and something happened, something shoved him over the edge, and his actions are a means of punishing a cruel world that he bitterly resents and hates in its totality. you have to understand the concept of cruelty to react to it and lash out like that, though. you have to understand that it's a bad thing-- that bad exists at all. a true nihilist, when confronted with the weight of the world, shrugs-- because what are you going to do? what's the point in trying to change anything when any change is equal to the status quo?-- and moves on with their day. The sheer amount of time and effort the Joker expends on terrorizing Gotham speaks to a belief that Gotham deserves punishment, and punishment as a concept doesn't exist if there's no right or wrong.

confronted with this idea, he would claim that it's just his favorite hobby, his favorite thing to do, and since there's no moral weight attached to the shit he pulls then why not indulge in it? it's important to understand that this is total horse shit. it may well be his favorite hobby, but I think it's his favorite hobby because doing this shit makes him feel superior to everyone, and again, if he was a true believer in what he's peddling, he'd know that there's no true superiority when everything is on totally equal, neutral footing. he's a liar. he's an excellent bad guy because he knows bad exists and is intimately familiar with it. he lives as an inversion of good, tacitly acknowledging that good exists and that he's painfully aware of it.

next up: Jerome Valeska!

Jerome is honestly kind of a doll compared to the others. He's on the simpler side of Jokers when it comes to his motivations and morality, because he sort of of wears his heart on his sleeve (and he never shuts up, so you don't really have to wonder what he's truly thinking). Jerome is doing what he does because he sees it as punishing a world that failed him, and he's open about it. He kicks off his criminal career by murdering his abusive mother, he's unrepentant about it, and from that point on, everything he does is with an attitude of "why should I care if anyone lives or dies if nobody ever did the same for me?"

There's no doubt that, like Ledger's Joker, Jerome really does get a kick out of violence (his family members who've known him since he was a kid repeatedly call him out for being a difficult, bad kid who frequently acted out and scared them-- and it's not as if regular abuse can have that effect on a child, right? he was definitely just "born bad," as his brother Jeremiah puts it. /s). I would argue that he gets a lot more actual joy and fulfillment out of murder and mayhem than any other Joker. He really just likes to kill, terrorize, and destroy! It makes him feel powerful and engaged with the world. It's his main social outlet (he's an extrovert).

He knows it's wrong-- he never tries to argue otherwise, or get out of it by acting like right and wrong don't even exist-- but in Jerome's morality, he's justified in doing it, because the way he was treated was wronger. All he's doing, in his mind, is seeking revenge, and revenge is one of Jerome's biggest motivators. I would argue that the pursuit of it is something he thinks is always morally correct in any case. There's a sense of fairness there, and by extension unfairness. He understands that it's an unfair world, and he thinks it's every person's right to fight for what they believe they're owed, even if that means stepping on other people to get it. "Every man for himself" is Jerome's morality, and given his background, how could it not be? If nobody ever reaches a hand out to you, you never learn to reach out a hand to others.

(By the time he meets people who do reach out their hands to him-- Lee Thompkins, Bruce Wayne-- his point of view is firmly cemented, and instead of opening up to the possibility that the pursuit of goodness might be worthwhile, he laughs at them for being freaks of nature, acting against their own self-interest.)

And finally, Arthur:

Arthur, who of the three is easily the most sympathetic and more of an anti-hero than an outright villain.

Arthur, like Jerome, is also lashing out against a world that has repeatedly hurt him, but in contrast to the other Jokers, whose destruction spreads out over the whole city, he's very deliberate about who he attacks. He goes after people he specifically feels mistreated by. He goes after bullies and thugs and the elites who he blames for the state of Gotham, as well as for his own low personal state. His victims are specifically targeted-- he's not out to just hurt anyone he can get his hands on. He doesn't seem to find any pleasure in the idea of hurting people just to hurt them. He wants to punish bad people (and, at worst, he's neutral about innocents, though I'd say he leans more towards sympathizing with them than not caring about them at all).

That's what I mean when I say his moral code is unusually explicit for a Joker-- it is! Far from being the city's personal tormentor, he's basically hailed as a vigilante and a sort of champion at the end! That's very odd for a Joker. Far from denying they even exist, he very clearly knows the difference between right and wrong, and moreover, he cares about trying to do the right thing (which is why he never even seemed to entertain the idea of killing Gary, even though Gary had just witnessed Arthur committing a serious crime-- Gary hadn't done anything wrong, Gary didn't deserve to be killed). Unlike TDK Joker and Jerome, he doesn't seem to have a natural inclination towards and sense of pleasure in violence-- it seems painful for him, like a last resort, something that takes him over and that he surrenders to rather than something that's always been a temptation in the back of his mind.

But I don't think he thinks of himself as a bad guy. I think he thinks of himself as desperate, maybe broken. I think he cares about being good, I think he's tried to be good-- I think he feels like he's tried everything. But in Arthur's mind, violence is now the only way, the only thing that will make the bad guys sit up and take note. I think that he thinks that the exercise of violence against bad guys is no longer an evil, and I think the distinction matters to him because, again-- he wants to be good. In his view, it's the world that's stopping him from being good, nothing inherent to his own nature.

so yeah. all three of them have a personal sense of morality that informs their lives and decisions, and that they use to justify the things they do. it's super interesting to see where they differ and where they overlap.

[septembersghost]

it's just that "i was half-convinced i'd waken, satisfied enough to dream you" is such a delicate declaration, yet so ardent. if perhaps you aren't real, if you are something my own mind has concocted, that's enough. (come back to me, even as a shadow, even as a dream.) the mere gossamer thread of fantasy would be enough to fill my heart, would be real enough if you don't exist in this waking world, i'll bring you into it, i'll find you in a dream. "happily, i was mistaken," and have never been so glad to be wrong. you do exist, some miracle of fate led me to that window, and as long as you are real, there is hope to hold onto. that love could be realized too. anthony is the only person in the story who still believes in anything, and it's love. my heart has followed a winding path, and that you exist is enough to persist. in the cracks of light, i dreamed of you. it was real enough to get me through. 'til i'm with you, then i'm with you there.

[graveyarrdshift]

the older i get, the more i hate my family

[thatgirlonstage]

Thinks about arms outstretched and has to lie facedown on the ground for nine hours again

[hopeworth]

kishimoto might have been a mostly bad writer but he kinda went off with Breaking The Cycle as an overarching theme of the whole series

[alchemiclee]

been looking in tags for a few days now to see if anyone else found the whole high cloud quintet and related story to be a bit.....poorly written, nonsensical, contradictory, full of plot holes and loose ends, etc. apparently i'm not the only one. (and i'm not even talking about shipping stuff, because any time I saw someone mad about bad writing, someone always replies to be homophobic and laugh about failed ships. weirdos.) it could have been so good but was thrown into the garbage for the most part (IF you noticed all the plot holes and contradiction. if not, then it's a fine enough story tbh. I expect most people to see it on surface level and not read all the little hidden lore bits and try to piece it together like my autistic brain did. which is ok! enjoy it if you liked it and ignore me 😆)

[dykeofmisfortune]

thinking thoughts about claus mother 3