#sppoilers

[maxbegone]

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY → (2.10) Holiday Hookah

[ellies-enrichment]

evermore - taylor swift

[wild-magic-oops]

So Durge has rid himself of the Dark Urge™ but beware of the other one - the Procreation Urge™ lmao (idk how to break it to Sarevok but this won't be happening to my Durge)

Every exchange between bhaalspawns is just so unhinged in this game, I love it lmao

[jameslongforjimshortforgabriel]

seventy-seven years..... 77 years he lied. it was lestat. 77 years lestat fucking waited. seventy seven years

[joan-deactivated20230204]

LA DODGERS WIN THE WORLD SERIES BOYS LOVE REIGNS OVER EVERYTHING FOREVER 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

[guest0666]

jus woke up world is hell but bneautiful

[ryderdire]

Okay so this clip spefically is driving me mad

[raven0usravi0lii]

should not have said that

[onionheadd]

hi mutuals. can you tell whats wrong with me this week /hj

[paddysnuffles]

I noticed this too!

I like that it kinda implies that even magic has its limits -- you can control people's actions but not their emotions (kind of like how in Aladdin Genie says that he can't make someone fall in love with someone else); so while Ursula can make Eric say that he wants to get hitched, she can't make him actually want to.

It reminds me of a line from Doctor Who: "[Blood control] is like hypnosis -- you can get someone to walk like a chicken or sing like Elvis, but you can't hypnotize them to death; survival instinct's too strong."

🧜‍♀️ Little Mermaid spoilers

I love how Ursula is able to hypnotize Eric to marry her, but like, only barely? Like, yeah, he tells his mom that they’re engaged and he stands next to Vanessa sometimes?

But like…

Grimsby asks him if he wants to get married and he’s just kinda like 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ariel disappears after he’s been hypnotized and, despite the enchantment, he still worries about her and wants to find her

Vanessa is actively being attacked by animals and he does absolutely nothing, but then Ariel appears and he immediately runs to her.

…So, basically, yeah, he’ll marry her, but that’s where he draws the line 😂 Her magic only goes so far. I honestly love hypnotism as a trope? Deciding where the hypnotized character is and isn’t able to resist is so interesting!

[waywardmongergoopzine]

SPPOILER ALERT

WHAT WAS THAT WHAT WAS THAT YALL WHAT WAS THAT I WASNT EXPECTING THAT I WASNT EXPECTING THAT

I SHOULD VE BELIEVEDTHAT TESSA IS DEAT THEORY

THE DD BEING THE ONES THAT ATE THE HUMAS ON EARTH IS SMTH THAT I NEVER EXPECTED

THE HORROR WAS SO GOOD

I DID NOT ECPECT NORI'S VOICE TO SOUND LIKE THAT, TBH I DON'T REALLY LILE IT BUT ILL GET OVER IT

NORI HAS PROBLEMS I REPEAT NORI HAS PROBLEMs

KHAN AND THE OTHERS GETTING SCREENTIME WAS AMAZING KHAN IS A BADASS

ALSO O DONT THINK THAT THE SOLVER JUST EXPLODED COPPER 9 CUZ WHAT ABOUT THE KEY THAT WAS GIVEN TO N?!?!?!!!??

IM CALLING IT NOW IT IS AN ALUSSION CAUSED BY THE SOLVER AND UZI+NORI LL HAVE TO ESCAPE IT AND N WILL SAVE EVERYONE AND ITS GONNA BE OK

[froggityboingerrr]

Hiiii btw I’m not watching the eps in German ( they were dropped in German, right? ) cause im waiting for them to drop here :]] SO THIS KEANS: PLESSE NO SPPOILERS!! I’ll be blocking the spoiler tags for now , but just in case lol.

I’m waiting for them to drop in English since me and a few friends are gonna watch it together on the weekend!

[loohconrado]

oh so it wasnt just me, cause i was flirting with EVERYONE and he was the only one to show up with a heart pretty early

taash had a more comunicative style, they asked me, and then the heart showed, even if it was kinda early too, but davrin???

you flirt with him like twice and you are already kind of starting somethin ahahha

i accidentally romanced davrin

[laggingbehindreality]

8 and 6 for venom please

8 - A headcanon I have about this character

If I never get around to writing it into a fic, I think that Venom being transmasc is a genuinely plausible character trait. I think as an orphaned kid he decided to pretend to be a boy as a self-defense/job tactic, and he just kept going along with it for such a long time that he suddenly realised hey wait a minute. I like myself like this! And then got magic top surgery at his earliest convenience.

(A less plausible joke-canon I have is Zato's trans-affirming homophobia. Venom i'll support your top surgery and kill anyone who uses incorrect pronouns to refer to you but you can't keep saying things like how you'll fight by my side forever or die for me in battle that's gay)

6- The scene that shows just how awesome they really are

Night of Knives. Disc 3. Translation by Vaporbabe. Sppoilers incominfg

Venom is trying to prevent Millia from running away after she stabbed Zato. He's already half-dead from winning a fight with essentially an already powerful knight who got turned into a gear. He stands up and says that he's still got fight left in him, he can't just let her get away with treason.

Millia takes him up on his challenge and they're evenly matched. As they trade blows, their words change. During the rest of the audio drama, all they've ever had to say to each other are catty remarks and veiled digs at each other. But now, when they're trying to kill each other, they've got nothing but compliments. They both reveal that they see each other as Zato's no.2, not themselves, and Venom holds back to let Millia take the win. Brings me to tears.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

How is Faerie Smut Not Its Own Genre at This Point???

Ok, I've been on a faerie kick again lately, and I have just finished reading ACOTAR with a friend because he had started it and noped out, but agreed to try it again with me because he's the best. Like Fourth Wing, this book is a white girl BookTok darling, which means that the hype around this books peaks at "THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN AAAAAAAAAAAAAA" and "THIS BOOK IS THE WORST THING EVER WRITTEN AAAAAAAAAAAAA."

Y'all...this book is fine. It's aggressively fine. I think it has pacing and plotting issues, and it is absolutely oversold in terms of spice, but I didn't hate it, and there were bits that were fun. I would not kick this book out of bed. (I might kick it out of my classroom if I was teaching, but that's a separate issue.) Let's talk A Court of Thorns and Roses.

Spoiler warning here, because this book and series has been memed to hell and back, and I do not feel like avoiding spoilers is necessary. So SPPOILERS BELOW THE BREAK. Consider yourself warned.

Ok, so first thing's first: I like a good faerie story. I like a good scary faerie. And I am a wee bit of a sucker for a sappy love story once in a while. ACOTAR has all three of those, so objectively this book was fun. It hit some good beats for me, and I was not objectively opposed to faerie smut. Faeries are very flexible, they work in a surprising number of contexts--not to mention that the jump from "my boyfriend is a monster" to "my boyfriend is a high fae lord" is less of a jump and more of a sideways step. So just on paper, ACOTAR wasn't a hard sell for me.

For those of you who have been following my reviews--specifically the Artemis Fowl ones--you'll be happy to hear that Amarantha has been added to the Hall of Unnecessarily Extra Lady Villains with Opal Koboi and Semihrage. I am HERE for Amarantha girlbossing her way to absolute power while wearing the eye and finger bone of the dude she brutally murdered on the way up. I'm also a fan of her TRULY EPIC tantrum once Feyre has murdered two faeries, attempted murdered Tamlin and solved the goddamn riddle at the LAST POSSIBLE SECOND.

(And no, I'm still not over my John Oliver pitching a fit over the solution to the Da Vinci Code being apple levels of fury about THAT...but I digress.)

Amarantha fully leans into toxic girlbossing and just has FUN with it, and I'm never not here for that.

I also appreciated the little tweak of the Aos Si tradition of fairy hills and fairy mounds and fairy barrows into being under the mountain. Like, yes, that mountain is fae as HELL and I'm here for it. That was a nice little addition to the lore, and there's something about having an entire mountain above their heads that made Amarantha's court feel even more oppressive. I'm not sure how it managed not to feel like Khazad Dum, but it didn't, which was excellent.

The other thing I really liked was that the faeries in this series had a very clear sense of danger to them. No candy floss Disney Fairies here, the high fae are DANGEROUS and you can really and truly be fucked if you aren't fully on your game and know all the rules PLUS have a doctorate in rules-lawyering immortal beings. And even then, you could miss something and end up horribly murdered. Between Amarantha, the Night Court in general, the Attor, the Suriel, and the bogge, there was plenty of ambient danger around for our little human protagonist out of her depth.

The problems with this book for me were the aforementioned pacing and plotting problems, and also the romance. Let's take these one by one.

I think it's pretty well known that the last hundred-odd pages of Sarah J Maas books are where the action is, and while that can work for books (it worked beautifully for To Shape a Dragon's Breath), I wasn't buying it for ACOTAR. Feyre's time at the Spring Court draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagged for me, and honestly I would have been happy with about a third of that timeframe. There was also some dragginess in the pacing under the mountain between the trials. A month between trials was just too long, and the time was not well-filled. A week. Just give it a week, you get the same bits between, and I'm not over here going "Why is this taking SO LONG??"

The pacing issues are at least a little exacerbated by the plotting issues. The first like...two-thirds of this book is a weird speedrun of a slow-burn Beauty and the Beast, except that Feyre isn't actually genre-savvy enough to KNOW that's what's happening, and the curse deadline actually passes (with everyone somehow blaming Feyre for this????) before anyone fills Feyre in on the fact that there was a curse in play at all. Then the last third of the book speedruns cursebreaking. Which was actually more interesting than "Feyre just kinda hangs out in a faerie castle for a few months," but very much felt like a completely different book.

Finally, we have the romance issues. And please, as y'all go into this, remember that I have a PhD in English and Film, and I have more life experience than your average 15-year-old who is inhaling this book. I am not the target demographic. Disclaimer out of the way...WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT???? Feyre spends more time with Lucien than Tamlin at the Spring Court, Lucien is the one who checks on her in her cell in under the mountain (yes, I know they explained it in the text, but it was a weak explanation and frankly, Tamlin could have TRIED), and then she spends a weird amount of time with Rhysand under the mountain, even if she doesn't remember most of it. She didn't have TIME to fall in love with Tamlin. I kind of hate to say this, but there was a huge sense of "You love the IDEA of him, sweetie" while I was reading. Not to mention that she kept flip-flopping on Tamlin while she was under the mountain. While he was physically in her line of sight she was all "I love this fae" but the second she's not looking at him, it's like he barely exists. Was this just an object permanence problem??? Like...Feyre, sweetie. I'm happy if you're happy, but you have not spent enough time with this man. You're just horny for the idea of him.

I also want to just...morally object to everyone BLAMING FEYRE for not knowing there was a curse? Like, even Belle knew that there was a curse in play, she was not expected to just...intuit that the Beast and castle were cursed. Like ten people told her about the curse. And I don't care that part of the curse was that nobody could tell Feyre, that did NOT serve the story.

The last weird thing I want to morally object to is everyone shaming Feyre for her illiteracy. Kids not having the opportunity to pursue education is a tragedy, but WE DO NOT SHAME THEM FOR IT. Feyre gets shit from EVERYONE about this, and the second trial hinging on an assumption that she can read just really hammered the "you are bad for not being able to read" home in the weirdest way. Just...What the hell???

All of that said, I want to reiterate that I would not kick this book out of bed. It has its problems, but I was indeed entertained--at least enough to finish the book. And full disclosure, my reading buddy and I are going to start ACOMAF next, so we're apparently hooked. And yes, you will eventually get a review of that one too!

[for-thee]

alright its pale court rant time here. we. go.

also disclaimer this isn't meant to be taken as if it was written by someone incredibly well-versed in music theory i just play the funny instruments and just so happen to adore the way that music can tell a story :)

(this post will be LONG so i'm putting it below the cut and for sppoiler reasons)

alright so this is stemming from a post i made a while back (here) on pale court and how it pretty much tells the story of the rise and fall of hallownest through the piece. lets get started!

the piece opens with a harp playing constant patters and a couple violins followed by a cello. i'm going to say that this represents the pale king and the white lady arriving in hallownest or hallownest itself before the infection . it's peaceful and very royal or regal sounding, basically showing that hallownest was a peaceful place. the "royal" leitmotif is present since the song is somewhat focused on the royal family of hallownest. i'm not completely sure about this but at around 1:05 a part of the hollow knight leitmotif is played.

this peace starts falling apart after this. at this point the infection has started spreading. the hollow knight leitmotif is still present, possibly representing the creation of the vessels? i'm not too sure on that. the tempo picks up, theres a crescendo, and the mood has changed. this feels like it's possibly supposed to represent hallownest finally starting to crumble and slip through the pale king's hands. everything has began spiraling out of control, and there's not much time left. this feels like pk attempting to save hallownest despite knowing there's not much he can do at this point, under the "no cost too great" mindset. he would do anything for this kingdom, even if that means sacrifice, or the dreamers.

the music reaches its most tense point at around 2:03 to 3:11. it is EXTREMELY tense at this point, as well as emotional. this is the infection has reached its very peak. it does calm down a small bit at one point, not sure how to explain this but it is relevant. hallownest is still falling, except it's falling faster than before. much faster. everything is out of the pale king's control now. there is nothing he can do except hope his plan with the dreamers and the hollow knight works. the music starts picking up again, getting louder and louder and louder still, picking up and then--

silence. hallownest is gone. all that's left is the faint echo of a land which once thrived, its citizens long lost. the music starts again, this time quiet, tranquil yet again as hallownest has become a shell of a once flourishing kingdom. the royal leitmotif is played yet again, this time quiet and somewhat sorrowful. the infection has completely taken over the kingdom. as the music comes to a stop, it ends on a minor chord.

YEESH that was a lot thank you for reading if you did! i'm a little nervous to post this as this is my first time doing something like this, please share any thoughts you have on this! also i am not completely sure on how lore accurate this is, if anything is spotted that doesn't make sense please let me know.