#some perminantly

[redeemed-wren]

Thought too long about Hermoine daughter of Meneleus and Helen and got sad

[filledwithstarz]

regulus "long, deep groans" black

james "loud, shakey moaning" potter

remus "quiet shivering and grunting" lupin

sirius "all of the above" black

evan "no noise" rosier

barty "whimpering mess" crouch jr.

peter "doesnt get the chance to find out" pettigrew

check out the tags for mountains of more info

[my-wildflowergirl]

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[pureastrologywisdom]

𝔗𝔥𝔢 9𝔱𝔥 ℌ𝔬𝔲𝔰𝔢 𝔦𝔫 𝔄𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔩𝔬𝔤𝔶

If you have 9th house placements you may feel a pull towards ‘higher knowledge/learning’. Whilst for some this may be studying through university this is often also through travelling and exploration. Often life opens up and you feel more alligned when or after travelling. Travelling aids in your self discovery and you may ever find you want to live in a foreign country perminantly.

I have found that you can be really interested in other cultures from your own and love to understand others peoples way of life. For this reason you are some of the most open people you will meet.

another interesting pattern I have seen with people with 9th house placements is your interest in foreign language or languages that differ to their native language. This goes hand in hand with travel also and interest with other cultures. This is especially prevalent if you have mercury or the sun in the 9th.

Planets here also indicate an attraction towards foreign people or people who grew up in a different culture/country. Especially if Venus is placed here.

Thank you for reading,

Pureastrowisdom x

[brittle-doughie]

Hey Brittle! Sorry for looking like i'm impatient and Tumbler ate my ask so I'll repeat it here. How about a scenario of y/n cookie spliting into three versions of themselves because of an accident (they were visiting alchemist cookie but a potion fell on them) one being the emotional side, the second one being the logical side (despite this one being the logical side they have an ego) and the third one being what's left of a living being that lacks emotion and logical thinking, the instinct and struggle to survive (this one isn't always going through the struggle of trying to live btw but they do lack some ability to rationally think, they will act now and ask later. This also leads to unfiltered thoughts that are sometimes said outloud, this ranges from very random to very concerning.) The other cookies (specifically the ancients, legendaries, the beasts, and dragons[wow that's quite the group of cookies]) found out about this and go to Alchemist's location to see if they're alright, unfortunately for them the emotional and logical sides hate eachothers existence and will consantly argue with eachother which quickly escilates into a physical fight between them with the third half desperately trying to stop both but because of them acting now and ask later thing, it leads to them picking the worst way possible, especially when into more time of their existence the other two get to the point of trying to kill eachother accidental or not,leading the other two to get horribly damaged in the long run with the emotional side getting perminantly blinded and further into their existence the logical side's vocal chords get ripped out and now they have a voice modulator, leading to the third becoming quite suicidal(an attempt was made in the progress which failed cuz of the other to interfere.) And when they finally become y/n again they held one fourth of each of their injuries, slight rope burn marks on the neck, slight blindness on both eyes, and throat (do cookies even have throats and necks?) has slight injury causing their voice to become a little horse, all of these injuries are caused by the three sides that they split into and are permanent, the worst part about this being y/n misses the comforting black void without to worry about other cookies wanting to be or stalking them ect. Which leads y/n back to alchemist cookie's lab, steals the potion, goes back home, and drinks some of it, causing the other three sides to go back to hating eachother and back into existence and y/n now peacefully in the black void as the their three sides are now back to square one, which after becoming y/n again will worsen their injuries and their condition. Can we have their reactions to this situation? (Sorry for how long this is and take this as a reference to an au crossover i'm making lol) Sincerely- CCCC Anon

Literal wall of text, pls put spaces between paragraphs next time going insane aaaaaa-

Since there are three sides to Y/N Cookie, there will be a split amongst the group of cookies on who they’d likely take the side on. Emotional, Logical, and Instinctual are all still Y/N in their own ways.

But the overall situation would be Y/N wanting to escape their situation of having the cookies crowd and stalk them and want to just hide away for as long as they can.

Cookies that are attuned to your Emotional side like White Lily and Pure Vanilla Cookie would feel horrible that this is all happening because you’re wanting to escape the stalking, the constant attention, it was a horrible thing to hear that this side of you had been blinded. This side of you lived up to your part, unable to control your emotions as the two watch you break down..

Your Instinctal side…that’s something in the Dragons’ side of things. Longan would want you to do what came natural in your general nature as a cookie. Pitaya would want you to just go with what the first thought in your head was to do. For them, it was to fight! Even when you’re all put together as one, they’ll still tell you to just follow your first instinct as a cookie. Crumbling yourself wouldn’t be their answer though…

Some of the others may align with your Logical side. Ice Queen would advise that you should let feelings cloud important judgement on things. Shadow Milk Cookie is more blunt, he was the former Virtue of Knowledge after all. Why should others’ feelings or instincts change the facts, use your head and come to your own decision, and make sure no cookie change your choice. Yes, even if it did result in your voice faltering.

[raindrop2401]

What if the reason the vision of the future instantly kills you is because there is no future beyond this point. Everything loops back just a few moments after this fight. The last thing the party sees is some incomprehensible merging of the past and future, and seeing such a thing causes them to die from simply being exposed to something so reality-bending. It also explains why Sif can tank it in act 5. Even though they don't realize it, they're about to break the loop soon. They can see the future properly, and living with their actions perminantly is less painful than looping again.

Or maybe there's an explanation in an obscure piece of text that I missed idk

[twisted-x-hearts]

So looking it up and apparenlty the old Birthday Cards' will rerun next year all under the same banner.

Oh.

No more birthday encores anymore :(

[enderslibrary]

So occasionally i take a step back and realised how some of my old ideas have just come to life and asserted themselves in my life and brain more perminantly then they were meant to

Like yeah hey there minecraft skin from many years ago that has become my online persona, good to see you, why are you still here

How are you random thought number 23 from last year that keeps having new lore ideas by just living in my brain

Why does dumb idea number 1687 from 7 weeks ago trying to be a book in the library, i don't have the new bookshelf for that yet

Don't get me wrong i love the random stories and online persona but like why is my brain like this, is this just a writer thing?

[janeborowski]

I am..feeling too many horny thoughts tonight. So many idk if I can list them all honestly but uhhh guess I can try to.

I want someone to tie me up perminantly till my body keeps me from moving, being fed and fucked and used whenever they want. Body becoming all blobby and squishy.

Maybe never being allowed to leave ever again from wherever I am, everything decided by you on what happens to me. Cleaning, bathing, walking, clothes, how much I eat and drink, what I eat and drink, getting relief.

Maybe this all happens when we meet up sometime, seems super innocent enough. Just some food and a few drinks somewhere. You're getting me really fucked up, I ask for no more drinks but they just keep coming. Then you take me back to your place. Then it's all over.

People will start asking about me, people will start wondering where I went. Guess I'll just be your dark secret. Your little...pet. Your little project..toy..object. Whatever gets you off.

You'd get my body really fucked up, basically torture on how little I'm treated well. Never cleaned, never allowed relief, constantly filled to the brim, brainwashing me, making me forget about any life I had before this. This is just what it's always been.

Maybe..you'll push my body to the limit...maybe you'll let me go. Maybe you'll take me put and force me to be shown off in public. Just to torture my legs and body cause by that point, I'll be barely mobile.

But you don't want anyone else to have me do you? You want me all to yourself. You've always wanted a prized pet to yourself huh? And you'll do what you please won't you?

No need to hide your intentions from me. No need to keep them a secret. Embrace them. Why don't you just talk to me about them already. I've been waiting for you to talk to me. Just embrace your fucked up urges. And indulge~

[rubbership]

so i was able to fully put my thoughts down yesterday on why i don't exactly gel with deltarune and spamton specifically and I wanted to share it here too even if i feel like some of my friends wont agree or won't super love what i have to say, but i think theres something important here we should be looking at.

the way people speak about spamton scare the fuck out of me because it feels exactly like how people talk ahout doc scratch yet somehow LESS self aware. the themes of the game are specifically what children do to cope with trauma and the consequences that come with it, Kris is shown to be a young transgender teenager with no autonomy of their body that uses the internet to escape from their unhappy situation in a vulnerable way. This is then paired with Spamton, an older man who is the embodiment of pop up adds who repeatedly sexualizes Kris and their friends, before pulling Kris aside privately to give a shpiel about how Kris will never relate to anybody but him and how they share the same darkness and trauma and are both puppeteered by higher forces that leaves Kris perminantly changed. This is a character who speaks about penis enlargment pills, and calls Noelle Kris' "sidechick" and "hoochie mama." The Darkners have been essentially all but outwardly confirmed to be based off of experienced and types of people Kris had known in their real life, and Spamton would be no different. This paired with the fact that Spamton is meant to be a heavy allegory to internet pop up adds and the hypersexuality of the web, and that Deltarune is actively envoking imagery and themes of child abuse and repression, the implications feel obvious to me. While I don't think Spamton HIMSELF is a groomer or evil or Kris' abuser, i do think hes meant to be analogus to Kris' internal feelings about lack of autonomy especially bodily autonomy. I actually hope deltarune doesn't go in this direction or confirm it, I feel like the way its being handled right now feels tactless and strange.

This is made even worse by the utter obsession and fascination the fandom has on Spamton, the way people interpreted Spamton calling Noelle "hochi mama" as him calling her his Literal Mother speaks to a form of media literacy i find genuinely fucking repulsive. Do you see the parallels i can make between the way Spamton is talked about between how Doc Scratch is talked about, with people seeing him as a "father figure" to Rose and ignoring the fact that his hypersexual language is meant to thematically code him as a child groomer. I bring up so many homestuck parallels when I talk about Deltarune but you have to understand that Toby Fox and Hussie are literally creating art from the same or similar internet space they grew up on, about the same types of people and the same types of experiences most millenials/older gen z experienced. this is why Deltarune shares so many narrative beats and thematic similarities to homestuck. They're both stories about being transgender youth raised on the internet due to your poor circumstances.

And the refusal to ever ever ever engage with these themes is exactly the same thing the homestuck fandom did, its exactly why people didn't realize things like Bro sexually abusing Dave because they liked to read the shit about Bro having cameras in the bathroom as comedic and unserious rather than important to the themes or character development of the Striders. I see Deltarune makes the same mistake as homestuck where Toby Fox has developed an attitude of welllllll~ i wont say it outloud explicitely the viewer should interpret it however they want~ but i'll nod to it~ i'll even imply it heavily~ but i'll never say it outloud, for it would break the metaphor! this was a problem with undertale too, but the difference is undertale was an extremely small and empty game. Undertale essentially functions as a darkride game, youre on a set of tracks and you watch the choices that happen due to those tracks. Sans severely underdeveloped character doesn't matter because in the nature of undertale you arent supposed to see that. Only catch glimpses of what Frisk is seeing. but that doesn't change the fact that Sans is, overall, a poorly written character. this is applicable to most of Toby Foxs characters, but Sans is the most obvious example in my mind. Toby Foxs work tends to scream BABYS FIRST GRIMDARK to me, but unlike with homestuck, instead of driving head first into qanon psychobabble edgelord shit, it just lightly teases ideas before running away like a giddy child.

MAYBE chara tried to kill themself! maybe. MAYBE kris is nonbinary! maybe. MAYBE susie is homeless or an orphan!!! maybe!!!!! MAYBE chara was from an abusive home maybe frisk tried to kill themself maybe asgore is eviler than we thought maybe toriels an alcoholic maybe papyrus is flirting with a child maybe mettaton is an evil capitalist maybe chara is evil maybe spamtons a predator maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. and again, this worked in undertale! frisk was a young child and we only got to see through their eyes with the context they were given. but Kris isn't like that, Deltarunes story doesn't function like that, and thats the problem.

I dont think Toby Fox is bad or evil for any of this, but i do think its bad writing when you have all these deals with nintendo and have sweatshops making plushies of spamton that people are buying for their young children. and I think we never actually NEEDED an ambiguously nonbinary character, like. We didn't fucking need that with the original undertale! You know he could've just come out and said it right? that they use they/them pronouns? He can STILL do that. Right now. He can still say "hey Kris is nonbinary" on twitter. But he doesn't. Despite being one of the most popular games right now and literally having contracts with nintendo. And now the most popular character in the game is a character who interacts sexually with the teenage main characters and represents using capital to attempt to buy themselves out of their trauma great. Good! Im sure this means great things to come!!!

I just think maybe we should actually try to engage with whats being put infront of us maybe? Maybe? i feel like its the fucking homestuck incest shit like ohhh well maybe if we don't look at it itll go away and its like idfk how to tell you that this is what the stories literally about.

[thelemoncoffee]

IMMA BOUT TO FUCK Y'ALL UP WITH THE SWEETEST SHIT

So catch this, something my ma always told me is that your lover should never just be your lover, they should also be your best friend too. a strong friendship with your lover makes a strong bond, and being someone's love doesn't mean you aren't friends anymore.

imagine Shuichi's uncle told him this growing up. imagine one day post relationship start, Shuichi calls Kokichi his best friend, and when Kokichi asks about it he recites this advice to him.

imagine Kokichi's never thought about it that way, never really saw romance and friendship going hand in hand like that before. but now that Shuichi's brought that concept to light it, changes everything. it just hits Kokichi that Shuichi doesn't just love him- he sees him as that one fun freak he can be a dumbass with, the friend he can wail his woes at, the guy who is going in his pocket.

and he's so very soft about it too. up until now he never felt a connection like that with anyone he's dated. he always took love as this super special thing that you have to act a specific way to achieve, something he struggles to do. but then Shuichi comes in and shatters that made up wall by calling hm his best friend, and suddenly love feels different- less restricting- more fun.

That one interaction perminantly changed the way Kokichi went about being Shuichi's boyfriend. he started to relax around him in ways he was afraid to do and open up a bit more. it wasn't a quick change, but being called best friend definatly triggered a part of his brain that usually only DICE and his siblings could trigger, and it allowed for him to take some barriers down that he was holding up to "not fuck up this relationship"

idk, i just think Kokichi's the kind of person who struggles to find proper connection with his lovers because he puts love up to this impossible standard he was socially conditioned to believe, and i think Shuichi breaking that veiw would rewire his brain and make him feel a bit more free in the relationship

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

was thinkin bouuuuuttt making my own needle minders and have now been on an hour-long deep dive rabbit hole of neodymium magnets. as one does

[sionnisaweirdperson]

I challenge you

To talk about your AU

GIGGLES!!!!!

okah so the concept came to me in a dream,, jk it came to me in a science class lmao

So I was just sitting there, teacher was talking about how gemstones can have liquid and solid states sometimes, and I went: "huh... isn't there something in the wiki about determination having a liquid form..??" And I looked and YEAH.

"Injecting" implies that it was a liquid of some kind, so I went "lol what if souls were crystal determination" and then i thought a little harder and made a comparison to something like carbon. Carbon can take many forms, most of the time solid. But it has been proven that in the earth's core, carbon can take a liquid form. So I thought a little harder. What if, with enough pressure and heat a soul could be crystallized further, like the process of carbon turning into diamonds.

So what if these gems which are pure determination could be used by a monster like some sort of power up to increase the amount of power they have??? What if they had other properties???? And then it all started branching out from there.

So from my thoughts, I've created a few conclusions:

When a monster with a high enough already LV (like for instance, Flowey) tries to combine a number of souls together, the heat and pressure generated causes them to fuse together into one full gemstone.

Said gem can only be used by one person. Once that person, weither it be a monster or human, uses the gem for anything they are bound together perminantly. The gem creates a link between the soul and itself, and if that bond is shattered so will the user's soul.

The gem can change the user's body perminantly and harshly. This will be important later. (foreshadowing)

The gem changes the user's LV, as if they had absorbed all seven human souls. But without the unfortunate effects of your body melting from having too much determination. Though if I bet you use it too much, that could definitely start happening :33 like an overheating laptop.

The concept for the actual AU after I had figured that all out was "oh golly gee I wonder what the hell would happen if sans somehow got ahold of that thing???" Because of course we gotta have our boney boy being the main point in this situation. And what if the energy from this caused a explosion that destabilized the underground and what if sans was stuck down there alone trying to figure out how to do something, anything with this gem that is now a perminant fixture in his existence????

So: Pacifist route, everything's going fine and jolly until the final fight against Flowey. He manages to kill/fatality injure all the monsters and kill Frisk. He tries to combine the energy of the souls together, fucks it up, ends up creating the gem. Everything explodes, and the gem gravitates towards sans as he's the one with the most HP left. He somehow manages to get a hold of the gem, manages to stumble his way back to the edges of Snowdin, passes out in the snow. But because he has the gem, it activates. It puts sans into a THREE YEAR CRYOSTASIS under the snow while it slowly heals him and modifies his body. Because that's just what it does. And the rest I have yet to theorize about. BUT WHAT I DO HAVE IS DESIGN IDEASSS nevermind I dontt have any photos of them atm. SOON. TRUST.

Anyways this has been brewing in my brain for months and i am shaking in my boots now that I'm actually talking about it,,,,,,, commentary, suggestions, and addendums are all welcome in rbs/my askbox :33

BTW SOMEKNE TOLD ME TO NAME THIS SANS CRYO BECAUSE OF THE CRYOSTASIS THING AND SO THAGS WHAT HIS LIKE FUNNY LITTLE MULTIVERSE NAME IS. NO IDEA WHAT THE AU IS GONNA BE CALLED YET SEND ME SUGGESTIONS.

[leafgun29]

ok that's it i am going feral. in sonic prime when shadow is falling into the void and sonic just stares at him for a sec. it's. I'm going insane ok bc bro was probably having fucking flashbacks to the ending of sa2 (where shadow falls from space and is presumed dead for quite some time) and like. bros genuinely terrified. he thinks shadow is gonna leave him for a second time and maybe perminantly this time. and just AUGH

[tucaneggs]

Updated my old Xephos headcanons after catching up on the new Jaffa Factory series! Feels good to be back (and the teasing of lore?? Christmas came early!)

Main changes from my old headcanons are greying hair + scars. Scar map: 1. Fell on head one too many times, perminantly scarred. 2. Eyebrow, sustained from another player at some point. 3. Assorted scars and marks across face. Usually from creepers. 4. minor cuts from his ears getting caught on branches, nicked by arrows, ect. 5. arrow wound and sword slash on neck. 6. Not pictured: Many scars across torso.

[attackfish]

the “shifting quagmire of rising and falling states” au (Aang died in the iceberg, but at his canon age.) to zoom in a bit, did katara ever learn water bending and if so who taught her? Alternatively, how did Iroh and zuko’s travels go?

Continued from: [Link].

I don't think Katara remaining perminantly without waterbending training is a tenable situation. She is going to go north at some point. And this becomes even more urgent when she finds out, as we know from the comics, that there are other waterbending children, much younger than she is, in the south, who will also need to learn waterbending. And I think that her journey north will coincide with her reaching adulthood.

Unfortunately, she doesn't know about the swampbenders, so her goal will in fact be the Northern Water Tribe. And once she gets there, especially because there are other young waterbenders in her tribe, and she's going to feel that profound need that she's going to have to teach them, she is going to feel that she has to be all kinds of waterbender to all kinds of people. Just learning healing isn't going to cut it. And the Northern Water Tribe and Master Pakku still aren't any more willing to teach her any other kind of bending than healing. So she goes to a former student of Pakku's and weasles training out of him. They're caught, Pakku wants her kicked out, she fights him, he sees her necklace, he agrees to train her. She becomes the first of the new waterbenders at the South Pole.

Before I talk about Zuko, let's talk about Azula, because Azula is dealing with the reality that no matter what she does, at some point, her father is going to stop seeing her as his favorite child, and start seeing her as a threat. This is true because at some point, hes going to notice that she's separate person from him, with her own opinions, and he is not going to be able to cope with that. But it's all the more so because he, after all, is a man who came to this throne by killing his own father.

And by considering her a threat, and treating her as such, he, of course, makes himself a very real threat to her. This is going to be incredibly painful for her and hard and nasty, and it will shatter her illusions and make her feel scared and alone and miserable, and eventually she will figure out that she needs to deal with him as a threat, and I'm putting my money on Azula, because she is a lot smarter than her father.

So Azula takes the throne the same way her father did, through murdering her own father. But Ozai is not an old man on the verge of death, so Azula has to be that much more careful. She slips a small amount of slow acting poison into something he drinks every day, something he keeps in his room: his tea. Because Ozai might have mocked his brother for decades over his fussy tea drinking ways, but he drinks almost as much tea, and is almost as fussy about it. And Azula slips in the poison right before leaving for a year long tour of duty handling insurgents in the Earth Kingdom.

It takes almost three weeks for Ozai to even begin to feel the effects, and another month to become seriously ill. Azula is called home as she knows she would have been, and as she relied on, because after a certain point, he was going to get too sick to make himself tea. But once she's home, she can keep making it for him.

Azula carefully researched the poison she used, to find one that would mimic the symptoms of a natural intestinal issue, and the physicians are none the wiser, nor is her father. As he grows weaker and weaker, as he lays dying, they reconcile. Hes scared, and he wants his golden child there again, who adores him and believes in him. And it's all very sweet and heartfelt, and Azula feeds him his last dose of poison before he slips away.

Almost as soon as he's dead, she sends for her brother. But who is the Zuko Azula sends for?

Already at sixteen, Zuko is perceptive enough and brave enough to tell Zhao that his father is a fool if he thinks rest of the world will follow him willingly. He's drowning in a whole lot of fear, pain, anger, and self deception, but it's not like he's incapable of perceiving the harm the Fire Nation is doing, and how the rest of the world feels about it. Without the Avatar, and going back to the Fire Nation, and the series of events that happened in canon, it takes him longer to realize what a shit his dad is, and how his dad doesn't love him, or want him home, or think he can find the Avatar, and how about he, Zuko, didn't deserve the way his dad treated him, and how the best thing he can do for the world is work against his father and the Fire Nation's imperialism, but he gets there. He is in fact there for about a decade before his father dies.

His exile is boring. That's the thing, whatever internal changes he has come to, he spends most of his time sailing around, on a perpetual journey, designed to keep him away from his father and the court. Once he comes to the realization that he was never really supposed to find the Avatar, he's left adrift with little purpose. It's almost a blessing that his ancient ship is pretty much always falling to pieces around him, especially after the first five years, and he and his crew are chronically underfunded, so he is forced to find ways to make up the shortfall. At first, this mostly means running errands for various naval officials, but especially after the fall of Ba Sing Se, it means smuggling.

Zuko and his crew actually ran his sister's blockade around some of the cities she is besieging, because they were harboring insurgents, to bring food and supplies, and she was none the wiser.

So when she calls him home, she expects him to be biddable, scared, angry, but desperate for acceptance, love, and family connection. And yeah, when he first comes home, he is pretty biddable. He and Mai, uh, renew their acquantance, (Mai was waiting for Zuko, but not altogether willingly. Once Azula decided that her brother was going to be doing the whole. Making heirs thing instead of her, she quickly decided on Mai as his future wife. When Mai attempted to date a guy when she was nineteen and recently returned from Omashu, Azula shut that down fast, and made it clear to Mai that it would not happen again) and Azula basically ignores him and their uncle while she starts ruling the country.

And here is the part where Azula's pragmatism versus her father's self-aggrandizing stubbornness come to the forefront, because Azula, as mentioned in the previous post, is capable of realizing that she can't hold onto all of the Earth Kingdom. As much time as she has spent in the field, trying to deal with insurgency, she's very well aware of this, but she also has no intention of losing all of the Earth Kingdom colonies, just the ones she has to, just the ones that are much more expensive to keep than they could ever get out of them.

But just because she is being pragmatic, and doing what is the most self-interested thing the Fire Nation can do, that doesn't mean that there aren't people who are going to lose here, or who are afraid they are going to lose here, and the most dangerous time for any autocratic regime is when it's trying to reform. All it takes is one colonial governor afraid that he is about to lose his position, or people who used to live in the new colonies, coming home to the Fire Nation, unhappy about it, for someone to plot and assassination, and Azula might be very good in combat, but there's not a lot she can do about a bomb thrown at her palinquin.

And just like that, a few years into his sister's reign, Zuko, newly married and with the kid his sister wanted to be her heir on the way, takes the throne in the wake of his sister's grisly assassination. Azula is remembered as a martyr for the deconnization that her brother would forge ahead with, much further and faster than she ever would have. Certainly not a fate she ever would have chosen for herself.