#so that's Something

[ridaine]

A little Freyluviel doodle between comms... for morale.

(Aluviel belongs to @cerylune)

[sheeezu]

I have chosen favorites from the people who interact with my posts regularly, so much so I get excited when I get a notification from them.

[pushing500]

"Mechi, we just finished fighting a second War Queen. What could possess you to summon something even more powerful??"

The mechanoids have allied with an emu. It's the end of the colony, I'm sorry. Pack it up, lads, we're going home.

Somehow it's always Alistair who ends up dealing with the nociosphere. He must just linger near it whenever we need to send it out somewhere so he gets roped into it.

Oh, yes? What is this fight missing, Randy?

... Yeah, alright. It does look pretty cool with the red haze.

Unfortunately, our colony does happen to have a sanguophage hanging around at the moment. I wonder how Jut is coping?

Ah, well. Those refugees won't mind if Jut bloodfeeds on them a little bit. It's the least they can do after invading our space and then complaining nonstop about everything. Don't worry, Chomper—the pigskin refugee that Jut targeted—is fine, just (understandably) grumpier than he was before.

Now Jut can snuggle up in bed and get some well-earned deathrest! I'm sure we won't need him for anything anytime soon.

Well, a combination of mortar fire and the nociosphere seems to have been enough to take the Apocriton down (yay!), but the nociosphere now only has a few stray emus between it and our colony...

Just in time! Those emus held it off for the last few precious seconds. Good job, emus!

Well, I'm glad we got the nociosphere out of the way. Now we have an empty holding platform! Tune in next time to find out what will occupy it...

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[getvalentined]

Vincent Valentine of the Elite Four from Pokémon Holy/Meteor, releasing never on the N!ntendo Switch.

I put way too much effort into this for a dorky one-off, but here we are! I have a whole backstory for this AU but I will not bore you all with the details.

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

Foul Legacy peeking over your shoulder and watching you work for hours, never once faltering. he knows how you toil- he's seen it firsthand, most days of the week- and he knows that there's really no changing it. so when you're home, he keeps you company, curling up beside your desk in a pile of soft blankets and cushions you arranged specifically for him. sometimes Legacy naps, snoozing and snoring peacefully. other times he reads one of your books, claws delicately turning each page with care and precision. his preferred position, though, is to have his head on your lap, leaning against your legs as your hand runs through his thick, soft hair. your Abyssal monster purrs and rumbles in satisfaction, pressing his head into your hands and tilting and turning so you can scritch just the right spots, his wings fluttering in bliss. it grounds you, too. helps loosen the tense muscles in your head and shoulders, fingers buried in his copper locks, the ones you take so much care in washing and brushing just to hear him happily trill.

when Legacy thinks you've been working too hard for far too long, he sits up and nudges your back with his head, urging you out of the chair. if you don't comply, he simply shrugs and scoops you into his arms, marching away and settling you on the couch. breaks are important too- even the mightiest Harbinger, the most powerful Archon- they all take breaks from time to time, seeking a moment of respite from their duties. it's the same for you, Legacy chittering as he brings you water and some fruit, curling up around your body and bumping against your hands. he doesn't let you go until you eat, nodding approvingly and nuzzling against you with quiet chirps, and if you're in any sort of pain, well! work will just have to wait, because he's snuggling down against you and using all of his weight to make sure you can't get up.

you deserve a good night's sleep- besides, he missed you all the other days when you were out, and Legacy wants cuddles.

[karalovesallthegirls]

Okay so I semi-spontaneously wrote a soulmate au in the past twenty four hours with the intention of it being a short tumblr ficlet. I did then tragically write 2.5k of what could probably be a 4-5 chapter fic. Part of me wants to just post it on tumblr and then if I ever add to it put it on ao3, as I have TOO MANY wips on ao3, but also 2.5k feels like a lot for tumblr.

idk any thoughts? I'll probably post it here

[victusinveritas]

[amethystina]

Hope you’ve been doing well <3 Or if not, that things improve and you feel better!! Just want you to know that an anonymous raccoon on the internet is thinking of you :)

Thank you so much, anonymous raccoon — I'm very flattered to hear that someone is thinking of me 💜

Unfortunately, things aren't the best right now. But they could also be worse, I guess? My former stepdad is out of the hospital! So the sepsis didn't kill him, thank god! But now my aunt is in the hospital with blood clots in her lungs so, uh, that relief was kind of short-lived.

I'm also back to working full-time (because of stupid bureaucracy) despite not actually having recovered from my burnout, so that's also a bit of a struggle. But they have sent me to a therapist now, so there's that? Not on a permanent basis but as a "we don't really know what else to do but try this I guess?" and I was immediately reminded of how difficult a patient I am to every therapist I've run into — this one being no exception.

They're always telling me that I seem so well-adjusted and calm and insightful and have all the tools to handle my mental health and so they don't know what they can do to help me. But, like, my guy — if I can barely function despite all these things, there's obviously something wrong. And it's your job to figure that out, not mine.

So we'll see how that goes, I guess? He's not a bad therapist by any means, I'm just a trickier patient than most because I know the tricks and strategies and use them in all the right ways, but I'm Still Not Okay. And that just throws them for a loop. They quickly run out of ideas when working with me.

And, because of all this stress, all I want to do is read. I've been reading so many fanfics these past couple of months. But, unfortunately, not written anything myself. For literal months. It's not writer's block so much as an instinctive reluctance towards anything that isn't reading (so drawing has fallen to the wayside as well). But I'm trying to find ways around that since I do miss writing. And I have so many projects to finish.

So yeah. Life isn't great right now with so much happening and my thoughts and feelings being all over the place, but I'm trying to straighten things out, slowly but surely. But it's probably going to take a while before I'm back to anything even remotely resembling normalcy. Still — I'm trying.

Thank you so much for reminding me that there are people out there who care about me. I wouldn't say that I've forgotten, but a reminder is always nice. So thank you, truly.

Please take care 💜

[whetstonefires]

that Modern Adaptations Profession Post is over 90k notes now thanks to roach and derin, so i clicked into its contagion map to torture put my computer through its paces; it only loads 200 reblogs at a time and it's fantastic watching things evolve.

@unpretty is this major node off on the left from pretty early on, 9 reblogs deep; initially regionally dominant, but standing out less as time goeson. but I just clicked on a major evolving node 58 reblogs deep with 13000 reblogs loaded, thinking it might be @prokopetz with the steel chair Quincy Morris headcanons and no, it was unpretty coming back for seconds. (via @brawltogethernow.)

@nudityandnerdery is a visible early contributor with the bus stop realtor ad visual, but someone called @ohcorny became a major redistribution hub without a whisper.

Turns out a lot of people see a post with a lot of funny additions and silently go back to the op's blog to reblog the original version; the gravity well/cell wall/thicket around the root post kept growing steadily.

At 14k reblogs my computer refused to go on. Map froze. Still no prokopetz.

i really wish the reblog graph zoomed all the way out so i could screenshot this nonsense properly.

[feeshies]

I did as much research as I could before getting a cat, I lived with baby locks on my cabinets for months so I could get used to it, I spent 45 minutes with an employee at the shelter bombarding her with questions, and I still worry every day that I'm fucking up.

Anyway, watching old episodes of My Cat from Hell has been comforting in that aspect

[eveningrainstorm]

Listen. Swansea is great; he's a well-written character and I like him a lot. But it's weird to me how much fan content I see about him that seems to make him out to be a lot nicer than he's actually shown to be in the game, and nowhere is this more obvious than in how people depict his relationship with Anya.

I've seen other people address the whole "If Anya had told Swansea what happened he'd have killed Jimmy" thing (she did. he didn't.) but there's a larger issue where people act like Swansea cared a lot more about Anya and was a lot closer with her than is actually the case in canon. And sure, the game leaves a lot of room for differing interpretations of things and imaginings of what could have happened offscreen, but I've seen so many people act like this idea of Swansea and Anya being close is something actually depicted in canon which. It very much is not.

Like okay. Let's talk about this. What does the game itself actually show us about Anya and Swansea's relationship?

Well, we don't see much of their dynamic before the crash aside from them just being coworkers with some level of familiarity with each other. They do stand together at the birthday party, and Anya playfully tells Curly that “Swansea really likes that cake. Don’t tell anyone,” to which Swansea only "hmph"s in response. From this we can gather that the two of them are friendly enough that Anya feels comfortable teasing him. Even so, she certainly isn't an exception to his characteristic harshness and brutal honesty — take an interaction later in the same scene, where a distressed Anya says she has no savings and asks if Pony Express can really fire them like this and Swansea, not cruelly but certainly bluntly, tells her that Pony Express going under has been a long time coming.

Of more importance, perhaps, is the game's first "2 months after the crash" segment, where we are first introduced to both of them — and where the game makes it quite apparent just how little Swansea respects Anya. The very first scene, in fact, features Swansea interrupting Anya and mocking her when she tries to explain why opening the cargo hold is a good idea. Later, when talking to Jimmy, Swansea calls Anya "our so-called nurse" and says that "it's in one ear and out the other" when talking about how she nearly got injured on the broken vent. And if you get the code scanner before talking to her Swansea will tell you to get her before opening the cargo hold but specifically with the justification that "even she couldn't make the situation worse with her presence." None of this is really uncharacteristic of Swansea, given he talks about Daisuke in much the same way, but it's not something that can just be swept under the rug — and yet, seemingly, everyone does. I hardly ever see anyone even mention Swansea insulting her here.

Of course, none of these scenes are where the idea that Swansea and Anya are particularly close comes from. No, that idea comes from a single scene: "3 months after", when Jimmy finds the two of them talking in the cockpit at night. We only see the end of this conversation, where Anya, apparently crying, is saying “No. I understand completely. If that’s how it has to be—”

The game never reveals exactly what the two of them were talking about; the two main theories I've seen are that Swansea was telling her that he was saving the cryopod for Daisuke or that she had told Swansea that Jimmy assaulted her and Swansea was saying she'd just have to put up with being around him for the time being. Personally, I think the latter is much more likely, but either way, the end result is the same: regardless of how much Swansea cares about Anya, her well-being is not his first priority.

We never see any follow-up on this conversation; if Anya and Swansea meet up behind Jimmy's back at any other point, we don't see it or hear it referenced. "4 months after" offers no interaction between the two of them at all, with Swansea busy dancing drunkenly while Anya, on the other side of the lounge, tells Jimmy about the extra medicine cabinet. "5 months after", Anya commits suicide in Medical while Swansea sits drunk and oblivious in front of Utility. The only reference to Anya and Swansea's conversation — and the closest we get to a confirmation of what it was about — comes after Daisuke's death, when Jimmy uses "telling Anya who knows what" as a sign of shady behavior from Swansea, and Swansea agrees that he did talk to Anya, "but it was her telling me all sorts of things instead, wasn't it?", the implication being that she told Swansea about Jimmy raping her.

This line is interesting. Swansea is referencing what Jimmy did to Anya here, and implicitly condemning him for it, and yet... well, Anya's already dead. Swansea isn't doing anything for her, really; he doesn't seem particularly emotional or angry about it, either. All it really is, when it comes down to it, is a spiteful jab at Jimmy — just Swansea, still angry over Daisuke's death, trying to get under Jimmy's skin.

We never see Swansea react to Anya's death. This isn't surprising; we aren't shown what happened when Daisuke got the door to Medical open, and afterwards Swansea is understandably preoccupied with Daisuke's fatal injuries. The first thing Swansea says about Anya after her death is the line about her telling him things. And, well... here's the problem.

That line? Is also the last thing Swansea says about Anya.

He never mentions her again. That one line, the one that doesn't even mention her death, the one that seems more about getting at Jimmy than mourning her — that's the last we hear of her from Swansea. And maybe he does care, maybe her death is just as much a catalyst for him trying to kill Jimmy as Daisuke's is. But he never says anything about her. He doesn't mention her in his death scene. Sure, that last portion of the game is largely filtered through Jimmy's mind, his disregard for Anya keeping her out of focus, but Swansea's death — a moment of sharp, simple clarity in which Swansea says all the things Jimmy doesn't want to hear — doesn't have that excuse. Swansea doesn't say a thing about her, because in the end, he's not focused on her either.

So that's what we have. They don't seem to be that close, before or after the crash, though they theoretically could be. Anya telling him specifically about what Jimmy did could be considered a notable show of trust, but then again she could have just wanted to tell someone and considered him her best option, and in any case if she was hoping for him to do anything about it, he didn't. And despite a large portion of the fandom believing it to be the case, there isn't actually anything indicating that he told Anya about the cryo pod — if anything, his assertion that it was Anya who told him things rather than the other way around is evidence against it. Technically, anything's possible — Swansea could have comforted Anya when she told him about Jimmy, he could have offered her the cryo pod, he could have grieved her just as much as Daisuke — but looking at what the game itself presents, the picture it paints is far different from the one typically seen in the fandom.

We don't know what's going on in Swansea's head. We don't know what happens in the time between the moments the game shows us. But what the game does show us is this: Swansea repeatedly is disrespectful and rude to or about Anya; Swansea doesn't do anything after she tells him what Jimmy did to her; Swansea doesn't have any real reaction to Anya's death. Does he care about her? Probably. I'd like to believe so. But she's not the one he decides to kill Jimmy over, she's not the one he has regrets for in his dying moments, she's not the one he's saving the cryo pod for.

Maybe Swansea cares about Anya, but she's not his first priority. And isn't that sort of the point? This is what the game has been showing us the whole time: Anya is no one's first priority, except her own.

[coldshrugs]

vierapril day 4: danger

[pushing500]

Kwahu made friends with an anima yak, who is now named Suzette. She'll give us lovely blue anima wool which we can sell or make lovely blue clothes from!

I'm calling this gift from Arwell "Chekhov's Bionic Leg" for no reason in particular.

Anyway, time to go fight a mech cluster!

Well, we defeated the mechs but forgot to get out of dodge before the turrets exploded! I'm sure there is only minimal damage, though, right?

Oh damn. That looks painful... At least we have a bionic leg to replace it, right, Kwahu?

... Kwahu?

oh hell

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[mctreeleth]

"I'm always so nauseous while I have my period" <- girl who has eaten nothing but steak and dark chocolate for the past 4 days

[fourraccoonsinacoat]

The horrors persist. But so does my hyperfixation.