#special status

[gallus-rising]

i'm beginning to think the Swansea is devs' favorite character and i love it so much. they made him an official dance playlist on Spotify, there's an achievement for letting yourself be axe murdered 10 times in a row called "The Good Ending", his keys in your inventory could've totally been just a normal picture of some keys but they put in the extra effort to give him a silly swan charm, he gets multiple epic speeches, there's an entire character dedicated to hyping him up, they posted a video of him twerking Jimmy to death. mark my words they're going to turn him into a marketable plushie any day now

[emmavakarian-theirin]

soooooo i accidentally got lucanis killed trying to trigger new dialogue but i guess you could say i got a bunch of new dialogue anyway :')

[the epilogue slide]

[dearestdo3]

regulus who at first hates sev for being a poor, weird halfblood but for some reason keeps getting special treatment from his cousin and her fiancé

and years later he does the same thing

[azirafuck]

people will tenderly kiss crowley as he's in the middle of the snake-to-human transition looking like an expired cucumber but draw the line at. beard.

I'm also people

[renjunnipeikko]

thinking about how blade stood there staring up at the imbibitor lunae statue who knows how long after the quintet “meetup” and even asked trailblazer if dan heng was happy. that statue is of yubie. my brother in christ… methinks this whole thing wasn’t ever really about dan feng’s sin…

[rmbunnie]

Something kinda tasteless about the way that alongside the concerns of "Batman needs someone to rein in his aggression/edginess" (mostly a meta concern,) "Robin is a symbol of undying hope right alongside Batman, Superman, and the police system," and "now that the thought's crossed my mind I think being Robin would be pretty sweet actually," one of Tim's points for why he should be Robin at the end of A Lonely Place of Dying is "we need to show the criminals of Gotham that they can't just kill Robin and expect to get away with it!" Because. They can. That's exactly what happened.

Using that line of reasoning, Tim makes the claim that the idea of Jaybin's life as disposable and inconsequential is heinous and bad, his killing something impermissible, but instead of disproving said idea they allow it to become true and devote their energy to making sure it doesn't become widely known as such. By covering his death up, they actually are permitting his murder to go unaddressed and deeming it acceptable, even taking away the opportunity for it to be consequential to anyone outside of Bruce's inner circle by not spreading the news. As much as we say "oh Bruce was a great dad because losing Jason crushed him" and "he almost considered trying to kill the Joker one time," he in all tangible areas did not do anything about Jason's death. Setting aside the question of killing the Joker or not, it's still shown in Batman Year 3 that Bruce's reaction to Jason's death in the time til Tim showed up was to hide away everything Jason owned and carry on with business as usual, a little angrier. Bruce didn't make any changes or actually evaluate anything in a significant way after the warehouse and Jason's death didn't warrant any tangible consequence, that's evident from reading the comic. I know some may disagree, and I acknowledge the room for interpretation, but in order to discuss Tim's reason we have to concede that it is explicitly written into this specific comic as something Bruce and Tim both recognize as fact, because it serves as the foundation that this reason is built on: there is good reason for the criminals to believe there would no punishment for killing Robin based on the actions Bruce did or didn't take in response. The concern about the public realizing there are no consequences for killing Robin wouldn't be reasonable if it wasn't true, if there actually were.

While they recognize that Jason's death came to pass largely without consequence, the fact itself is less of an issue to both Bruce and Tim than letting criminals actually find out that it doesn't have consequence. They know it's unjust, the notion that Jason can be killed without repercussion (and in making an effort to minimize his murder confirm it to be true,) but their concern isn't for what actually happened to Jason or the lack of proper response. At least on the vigilante side of things, the problem is public perception and continuing to uphold an image of Batman as just and diligent while permitting him to ignore injustice against those close to him. There's no efforts taken to actually disprove the idea that killing Robin would lack impact, what Tim proposes is just making it harder to prove right.

I think the best way to word what comes across tasteless for me here (aside from the side commentary on the unstoppable might of the institution of police and how it's an exemplar of heroism) is that beyond Tim's victim-blaming of Jason during his stint as Robin, (discussed in more depth by people who can word it better than me,) in the base text of a Lonely Place of Dying, it is foundational to the initial premise of Tim as Robin that part of his motive for being Robin hinges on accepting what happened to Jason as something that cannot be allowed in their pursuit of justice or go unaddressed for reasons completely unrelated to the actual harm, and then intentionally erasing the event and the way in which it was allowed and did go unaddressed. No matter how much it's claimed in later comics that Bruce was faultless and Jason doomed himself, Tim's Robin came to be at least in part (in-universe) as a cover-up for the lack of action taken about Jason's death, and by extension as an effort to overwrite his time as Robin and an individual entirely. And thought it wasn't the way his character viewed it, Tim wasn't passively complicit in it or going along with a poor grieving man, the intentional and deliberate erasure of Jason as a murder victim and the injustice of his posthumous treatment was part of his opening pitch.

[quinn-of-aebradore]

Something that really makes me feel insane about Ashton is the way a solid chunk of their arguments have always been that they’re Just A Guy. They’re nobody. They’re nothing. The gods never paid any attention to me, I don’t matter. I’m not special. And sure, with the information that was available early in the campaign, that was a reasonable conclusion for them to have drawn.

But now? When they know the powers that live inside them, powers that never have been combined before and likely never will be again? When several people have all independently pointed out how unprecedented their existence is? That basis for their argument loses all credibility. How many people on Exandria are walking around day to day with a fragment of a titan and a piece of the Luxon inside them? One. Ashton is a singularly unique being. “I’m nobody, I don’t matter,” bitch you’re the main character in a YA novel, calm down.

[rapha-reads]

No but I gotta talk about Medusa for a minute actually.

It's been. A very long time since I read the PJO books so I don't exactly remember how Uncle Rick presents Medusa in the book. But the way the show introduces her myth? Fascinating. For me as a Greek mythology enthusiast, that is.

The show makes Medusa a victim of Athena. Of course, the show is mainly for kids, so they can't exactly say that, hey, kids, Medusa was Athena's priestess and she was raped by Poseidon, YEP, or protagonist's father, IN Athena's temple, nah, that's neither kid-friendly nor does it endears us to Poseidon. Not that Poseidon is very dear to us viewers/readers at this point, our narrator/protagonist can't stand his own dad.

But still what fascinates me is that even though they twisted the myth to ft the narrative they still managed to evoke Athena's curse as being actually a gift, and Medusa not feeling wretched over her condition but blessed.

Which is not a modern reading of the myth, actually. Saying that Athena couldn't punish Poseidon for his transgression and could only punish Medusa, but did so in a way that would give Medusa weapons to defend herself against whoever and whatever would try to harm her again, is a narrative that exists since Antiquity.

My point is that the re-framing of Medusa's myth, departing from the traditional, non-kid-friendly version while still incorporating both classic and modern elements, is a good frame of reference for the series (book and show)' entire approach to mythology. And I guess I'm saying that mostly for the non-book readers who are discovering this world, many of whom might be Greek mythology fans and might have gone "wait, why is Hades AGAIN presented as the bad guy when he's the chillest, most normal, most stable god in this entire pantheon", because that's a conversation the book fandom has been having (over and over again) for more than a decade.

Anyway, yeah. As a long time book fan and a show appreciative, here's my advice to anyone who knows WAY too much about Greek myths and still want to enjoy the ride without going every five minutes "wait, that's not correct": reframe. Contemporary rewritings, modern audiences and Fantasy genre.

[afurtivecake]

I like that TSC, though written in the POVs of characters who experience physical attraction, still reads like an ace romance. It still relies on small tender gestures and moments to convey emotions like deepening feelings of trust. What it doesn't do is place characters together in big plot moments and just waving away the reason for the characters' sudden closeness as *it's sexual attraction*. Allo romance novels will tell you how they got together, but an ace romance is basically an entire thesis on WHY they got together. And I'd say TSC reads far more like the latter.

[no-face-no-shame]

- A post about how certain trans hcs may make more sense for a character than other trans hcs

"Hm I don't fully agree with the example given but generally the post is good"

- Opens the reblogs

- Half of the reblogs are trans women talking about how much they hate trans men, or rather "transandrobros", and how those disgusting freaks (trans men) try to make everything about themselves

- Starts blocking and looks into the camera like in The Office

[agentc0rn]

Lonely earth-bound monarch figures whose existences and legacies extend past the bounds of time and space.

[shitty-malevolent-aus]

Malevolent au but it’s just an endless loop of the Benevolent Christmas special where every time Arthur and John slowly realize what’s going on and somehow break out and break the cannon

shitty AU status denied. this sounds interesting

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

America's Response Monument, subtitled De Oppresso Liber, is a life-and-a-half scale bronze statue in Liberty Park overlooking the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.

Unofficially known as the "Horse Soldier Statue" it is the first publicly accessible monument dedicated to the United States Army Special Forces. It was also the first monument near Ground Zero to recognize heroes of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

[osamucide]

do we talk enough about how atsushi and the weretiger and his character overall are a great metaphor for healing from trauma, specifically through community? i mean we meet him as this scared young adult who believes himself to be incapable and worthless. he doesn't even realize the manifestation of vengeance inside him or the fact that it's already lashed out and hurt people - in fact, he thinks he's running from this exact thing that lashes out, without realizing it is in fact himself. memory loss is a common trauma response, and when he does learn he's the weretiger, he's frightened by it and its capacity for harm. it's dazai and the agency who give him the opportunity to use his willpower for selflessness and help him to understand that he's not bad, he's just hurt. throughout the story we're watching him move from uncertain, insecure, overly-polite and meek to strong, assured, determined, and unabashed in his protectiveness over others (see kyoka). we see him go from paralyzed by his flashbacks to determined to dispel those misconceptions about himself. when higuchi corners him and the tanizakis in the alley early in season one, he still doesn't know how to summon the tiger, but it comes out after akutagawa's words (and also, debatably, watching naomi 'die' - just the stressful situation overall, perhaps) trigger a flashback - a really sound metaphor as manifestation for his trauma (stressful/triggering event = fight response). and while his is certainly not the most common or relatable circumstance to understand and heal from trauma under, the weretiger is so powerful metaphorically because ultimately, he uses his harnesses this destructive, disruptive, terrifying power for good. sometimes healing your trauma feels like inching close to this big, scary animal until it trusts you enough to touch and when you finally do, you realize the big, scary animal was also once just a hurt cub who needed a figure to tell it hey, you're not any of those things you think about yourself. (the imagery in the manga/anime/official art of atsushi sitting with the tiger, cradling it, petting it, etc. is so powerful to me for this reason)

it's another reason why akutagawa is such a good thematic parallel for him. akutagawa was not given this grace as a hurt child, by dazai specifically, and thus grew up into a hurt adult - and this also speaks to how complex of a character dazai is. these characters just play so well with one another and demonstrate such complex reactions to trauma, how it is cyclical, how that cycle can be broken, etc. and i just think it's really beautiful and refreshing for a mainstream anime to deal with themes like this

[lizzybeeee]

Blessed in that I have only one hyperfixation...cursed because that fixation is Dragon Age.