#some more debatable than others

[butchladymaria]

HEALING CHURCH CRIMES BINGO!!!

fun fact: you can count enough crimes done by Healing Church & Co. ™️ to fill at least three bingo cards! (this is a joke, don't take this too seriously lol)

[akanemnon]

We didn't even get an answer, and we never will (at least it's not determination)

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[balleater]

something i've already posted about in the past but am thinking about again because of the conversations in this episode is that i still truly do not understand bells hells'(well, particularly ashton's) view on what is going to happen if the information about aeor gets sent out to the people of exandria. obviously, i'm not an average person living in that world and am instead a viewer of the media with fairly extensive knowledge of the lore, so i could definitely just be missing what the impact would actually be! but the insistence that it would be a world shattering revelation that completely turns everyone against the odds just... doesn't make sense to me?

unless ludinus has a way of editing the information he presents and can take away the context, which would basically make the "footage" even more strange, what they're going to be seeing is... the gods saving themselves from people with the active ability to murder them all and having a rather humanizing crisis of what they should do about it? i guess the working with the betrayer gods part could be considered the controversial aspect of it, but overall, considering everything else that was destroyed in the calamity, aeor really was the one instance that was closest to being "justified". i don't think anyone who cares enough about the gods for this to cause any sort of big disruption of faith would have as big of a problem with it as they are assuming, nor do i really think it's something that would cause mass revolts against the gods in people who aren't devout.

[warning-heckboop]

Oh to be able to make the complex lore comic that lives in my head about the concept of fairies, anti-fairies, and pixies once being a civilization of one single species of fae that splintered both metaphorically and literally due to internal conflict

[sysig]

Softly, slowly, I want to love you anyway (Patreon)

[corrie-zodori]

Me: I fucking love arcane Also me: FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS PLAY LEAGUE OF LEGENDS.

[winteriron-trash]

rdj the (whitewashed) electric boogaloo

This is a reminder to everyone who's excited about RDJ's casting as Doctor Doom that this casting is whitewashing. Victor Von Doom is a Romani character and has been a Romani character since his introduction in the 1960s. (Fantastic Four Annual #2 [1964]) Not only that, but his Roma identity and the persecution he and his family faced due to it is integral to his character, it is what forms his identity. (Books of Doom by Ed Brubaker) Even if on the off chance this casting is meant to not be Victor but instead be some variant of Tony or whomever else becoming Doctor Doom, it is damaging to the character to rob him of that important cultural background. Doctor Doom does not exist without that history. Fans have been pushing hard to cast Doom as a Romani actor for years, especially since the MCU has whitewashed other Romani characters. (Wanda, Pietro, etc) This casting is not a celebration moment, it's fucking heartbreaking that the MCU repeatedly ignores the important and nuanced cultural backstories of characters.

I know I can't change anybody's mind on whether or not you want to be excited about RDJ's return to the MCU. But I do think at the very least you should be mad that the MCU is baiting us all and destroying nuanced and interesting characters for the sake of self-referential easter eggs and nostalgia bait. Because that's what it is. Feel how you'd like to feel about RDJ's return, but personally, this is soul-sucking. I had such a deep love for the MCU as a teenager, it was obviously something incredibly formative to me, especially Tony Stark. This isn't recreating what I fell in love with the MCU for. This is turning a well-planned and artistic storyline of adaptations into cheap cash grabs and fan service. Because, I think we're past the point of being able to call the MCU an adaptation of anything. They can use existing characters' names and powers, but to say they're being properly adapted is laughable.

This is not an adaptation of Doctor Doom. This is RDJ the Electric Boogaloo because Marvel's fear of losing the interest of dedicated MCU fans overrides their willingness to tell stories that are genuine to the characters. I don't know what there is to be excited about that. The MCU has lost its authenticity and aside from a few projects, feels heartless. Every movie is a copy of a copy. This announcement isn't something celebratory, it feels like a death knell of a cinematic universe that's so desperate to cling to relevancy it's resorting to nostalgia for a character/actor who hasn't even been dead for a decade. We're not getting anything new, we're just rinsing and repeating the same song and dance.

I get it. I love Tony Stark, his death destroyed me and I to this day, rue the ending he got in Endgame. It misunderstood his arc and it robbed him of a satisfying conclusion. But the solution to that isn't dragging the corpse out of the grave five years later to whitewash an existing character with rich and interesting nuance, just to forcibly tie his existence in the MCU to Tony. Whether he is a variant or not. Why would you want someone else's fave's legacy to be destroyed simply so your fave's legacy can go on? Hell, if we were really all so hellbent on the return of RDJ and/or Tony to the MCU, we have the multiverse for a reason. There were other ways to do it that didn't whitewash and ruin someone else. This just. Isn't something to be happy about.

[motleyfam]

Dick is convinced that food always tastes better after a show.

His dad laughs and tells him it’s just because they’re acrobats and they can’t eat much prior to spending a few hours intricately twisting and flipping their bodies through the air over the dizzying roar of the crowds below. Hunger, he tells his son, has always been the best spice. But Dick thinks there’s more to it than that. There’s something about the buzz — the energy following a performance — that makes even the simplest of dishes special.

With so many different cultures and nationalities represented at Haly’s, Dick is used to eating all sorts of things, learns to tell who’s making dinner each night by the aroma of the various herbs and spices wafting out from the tent. There’s a Russian acrobat and a Taiwanese contortionist and a French wire walker and a clown from Cleveland, and the only common factor seems to be their insistence that the nine-year-old could use some more meat on his bones. He helps his mother stir cornmeal porridge and stuff cabbage leaves with ground meat and rice while his dad, grinning, juggles bell peppers and onions and cans of tomato paste in an arc above their heads.

It’s always late at night by the time they gather around the plastic folding tables with full plates, aching muscles, and weary smiles. Snippets from conversations in three or four different languages wash over Dick, and he doesn’t understand everything, but he doesn’t mind it either. The food and laughter warm him from the inside out, and he eats until his belly is full and his eyelids start to grow heavy. His mother pulls him into her lap and lets him curl up against her chest, and he’s lulled to sleep by the hum of the troupe members’ voices, perfectly safe and content.

The night that Dick’s parents fall to their deaths, there’s beef goulash simmering on the cookhouse stove and just the smell is enough to make him sick.

[atragicallycrispydude]

I think it's fine to dislike Strive for being a high damage, high offence gorilla game with easier combos, that's certainly not for everyone, but I'm actually going to explode if I see another person say "the power level is too high." are you for fucking real. if you're comparing it to, like, street fighter, fine, but if you compare it to XRD and say that I need you to please think critically for one single second

like, okay, fine, XRD doesn't let every character two touch you (except when it does, but it's pretty character and RISC specific) but holy fuck have you ever actually looked at that game and all the bullshit it lets you get up to

every single character in the game gets to enforce some fucked up looping okizeme except for, like... zato when he runs out of eddie gauge? sure, some of them are better than others, like Slayer's 4-way mix off of certain knockdowns, all of which lead into another 4-way mixup. you also have whatever the fuck haehyun has going on (genuinely i still can't block that shit it's fucking insane im glad she isn't very popular because of her difficulty and slowness) or johnny yrc zweihander

like. please. strive has two-touchy kaboom you explode gameplay. XRD has five-touchy you want to uninstall gameplay. stop saying the power level is too high i beg you XRD is not any less fucked up it's not a holy grail of fighting game fundamentals it's "we gave everyone insane bullshit so it balances itself out in the end" have you ever been in a venom 50 meter red glowy ball vortex or a johnny Bacchus sigh setup or gotten knocked down once vs jacko stop it stop it stop IT STOP IT

go play some XRD though. if you can get past YRC... existing, it's pretty fun and I want more people online to play with

[dawnthefluffyduck]

Doodles based on "Yet Another Nightmare" by Catroic on Ao3 (highly recommend reading, its very good)

[mantisgodsdomain]

More notes for Roach conlanging. Roach has grammatical gender, in which only Male, Female, and Object are grammatical genders, whereas Worker uses feminine grammar, Queen and King use a slight variant on feminine grammar, and Drone, and Queen-Alate use masculine grammar. This is because King is derived from Queen, due to their similar positions in a colony, and Queen-Alate is derived from Drone, as both are forms of alate.

Queen is an alteration of feminine grammar that functionally just adds a handful of extra syllables to it, and King is an offsprout of Queen that uses the same grammar with different pronouns. Queen-Alate, despite the name, is derived from Drone, as they are both for referring to different types of alate ant.

Most Roach dialects are intelligible to speakers of Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach, but Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach is not entirely intelligable to speakers of Roach dialects due to a mix of the excessively specialized vocabulary caused by the specific needs of its speakers, the fact that its speakers do not necessarily have Roach mouthparts and thus may not pronounce syllables in a similar way, and due to the fact that Inanimate Object is a full grammatical gender that does not exist in any other dialect of roach and replaces a decent chunk of terminology for things that previously had Other Words For Them.

[christinafaaaye]

no matter how you view dan and phil's relationship, they are together. in every sense of the word, they are together regardless.

[smaeemo]

What do you mean “Fantasy doesn’t count as real literature.” Great, Thanks. Have fun reading another white man complain about fincial issues and how women are “too promiscuous these days.” I’m going to go read a cool werewolf book, and guess what, it’s all a metaphor about racial inequites specifically via schooling as a result of colonialism. AND it has a cool map at the begininng. So suck it.

Also, even if I were rereading twilight, atleast im not pretending to enjoy myself reading catcher in the rye. I read 40 books last year, predominantly classics and basically? Not a single one was as interesting as Edward and Bella. 🤷

[gingermintpepper]

Hi!! I don't know if you remember me, but I'm the person you explained the Castalia thing to a few days ago. I've been following you for a while now, but I just managed to go through your blog well and proper, and I'm here to express both my gratitude for the amount of info and links you've shared (I did NOT know about the hepatoscopy and haruspicy, and I'm about to go down a lengthy rabbit hole) and my horror at once again being given a new hyperfixation (I didn't imagine wanting to read about liver-divination help).

Also, also, are you the author of Exeunt Phoebus Apollo on AO3 because that was the fic that sent me on this greek mythology spree, and it's so good I got obsessed with Apollo, and he's everywhere around me now. Thank you for writing it!

AAAAAA THIS IS SO SWEET?? THANK YOU!! I do remember you and hey man, I'm always happy to help <33

I'm so glad to recruit someone else to my hepatoscopy group because it is a long and storied tradition with many many different types of study and schools of thought dating all the way back to the Sumerians! It's an extremely underrated bit of study when it comes to sketching portraits of divination and prophecy when it comes to adaptations of imaginings of greek myth works - similar to bird augury (which was such a widespread skill that most people had some level of understanding of the basics of what the omens of common birds meant the way people now can look at the clouds over head and know if it'll rain and when approximately that rain'll happen).

It's a great and common misunderstanding that things like prophecy and magic were these fantastic elements that had no tangible features to their practices and while there's nothing wrong with interpreting things as more fantastical for the sake of coolness or aesthetic, I personally think these elements are interesting enough to be worth looking into and portraying!

Also yes, I did write Exeunt 😳I'm very very honoured that you enjoyed my work so much and I'm even more grateful that it could let you see the Apollo in everything 💖 Thank you for reading it!!

[zerodaryls]

it's so funny (read: sad) that if bigoted fuckheads didn't insist i was a woman simply by virtue of my body at birth, i'd probably be chill with she/her pronouns in addition to he/they. if my mom didn't insist i was her daughter, i'd probably let her call me that, and we could still have a relationship.

i'm nonbinary and 'gendered' words are hypothetically meaningless, but because there are so many people who are more interested in telling me who i am rather than lovingly and curiously letting me express my own sense of self, those words carry trauma.

there's no reason a nonbinary person like myself can't be a son and a child and a daughter. there's no reason a nonbinary person like me can't go by he, they, and she.

'she' is not a slur. 'daughter' is not derogatory. 'beautiful' 'pretty' 'gorgeous' 'feminine' are not insults.

to the contrary, they're parts of language that express certain facets of a multi-faceted human existence, like mine.

and i have this sad, mournful feeling that if it weren't for unloving, condescending people, i'd probably be down to be called any of those things alongside my usual masculine/neutral terminology.

but i'd rather die than let anyone tell me what i have to be called.