#such fantastic and horrifying things it has

[causeimcrayzeebee]

MAJOR TETRO PINK SPOILERS (for the whole thing basically)!!

wow. this was such a heartbreaking ending. i can’t help but be overwhelmed and emotional about everything that happened today,,,, i have so much to talk about but i just really can’t cover it all so I’m just gonna talk about my main takeaways from today!

i was so convinced it was gonna be tamba and was in hysterics cause i didn’t want it to be her… i am actually shocked hasegawa was the culprit— well, for the most part, save for during the camera discussion where i was yelling at my phone that hasegawa knew they were there (and somehow i was still not convinced he was the killer till the actual reveal), but in all honestly, this was a perfect end for his character. 

it really highlighted the decay of hasegawa ken. pre killing game, hasegawa lived a somewhat simple but comfortable life, with a loving family and a successful career. but of course, it seems he was without friends, coming home from school every day to continue studying in his room. then he entered the killing game, surrounded with 15 of his peers, and only 1 of them really became his friend. kamimura kazutoshi. hasegawa became attached to him, connected with him; he felt a love he hadn’t before. and then kamimura was taken away. the remaining students he was surrounded by were who he believed to be terrible people. now, hasegawa was truly alone. 

in hindsight it’s obvious it had to be him…. he couldn’t escape being suspicious for every damn trial n still survive lmaoo,,, of course he would come up with a convoluted, difficult plan that would’ve gone through just fine if it weren’t for monomoko intercepting.

speaking of monomoko, i was thinking about how tetro is so interesting in the aspect that it has supernatural elements like monomoko. she’s not a real bunny and is some kind of dimensional extraterrestrial being (im not caught up with staffside yet bear with me), but somehow, she’s far from the the scariest and most horrifying part about tetro. the things that are the most realistic and plausible to happen are the most fucked up, horrifying parts. in the words of hasegawa ken, real horror is knowing. knowing that it’s possible, knowing the evils of real people.

endings are difficult. even the best stories can have mediocre or horrible endings. but i have to shout out pink because while this technically isn’t the fully ending, it was such a fantastic end to a long journey. red had me tearing up. i did not expect a whole ass animation at all but it was so very moving. the colors and the shots were just amazing! but mostly what hit was the writing. the prose for that took my breath away, the little red riding hood theme was perfect. hearing sasaki one more time, narrating what could only be something from her journal, was a perfect way to wrap up sasaki’s life, and tetro pink as a whole. 

maybe hasegawa is right— maybe the pink cast are all terrible people. but maybe they’re also just human. maybe that’s the human response to their circumstances. and maybe humans just make human mistakes when pushed to the edge. 

looking at the remaining people was a knife to the chest, realizing it was only 5. and those exit interviews. oh my GOD the exit interviews. they’re both so similar yet so different to who the were before. wada…. oh my goodness wada…. “I’d have killed myself so sasaki could go to sleep” was so raw and filled with pain, i don’t think I’ll stop thinking about that answer. ojima and yanagi were both pissed at the people who took away what little childhood they had left, at the loved ones they took. i also found seki commenting on ojima not losing anyone particularly close interesting, because i think many of us acknowledge the absolute devastation of people like hasegawa losing kamimura or wada losing Isono and Tsuno, but we often forget how this would be for everyone else. ojima was close with everyone; everyone was closer than the average group of people because they were put into hell together. even if a student wasn’t super close to someone who died, that was someone they knew who was murdered. EVERYONE lost the deceased 11 people. tamba and hiroaki are both so much more shaken up, more quiet and more defeated. they went into the game as people who took every opportunity to get the upper hand and be better, but now they’ve been beaten to a shell of who they once were.

so with this, our surviving cast is going home. but did they really even survive? yeah, we have survivors technically, but really we’ve witnessed the brutal killing of 16 students; 16 people; 16 KIDS. and there will be more.

thank you von, the vas, and the editors for working so hard on such a beautiful project. im beyond excited (and terrified) for blue!

[honourablejester]

More Starfinder Cool Creatures

I recently acquired Alien Archives 3 & 4, so I had a browse through to see what other weird and wonderful space fantasy creatures the Starfinder universe might have to offer.

I’m going to divide these into three broad categories, because there’s a couple of themes to my preferences. Heh. First, we have space undead. Because I just deeply enjoy space undead. Then we’ve got a loose cluster of what I’m going to call space hazards/space ecologies, creatures that inhabit the void of space and make life interesting for spacers. And finally we just have a grab-bag of more random planetary and weird beasties.

Space Undead

I deeply, deeply enjoy Starfinder’s sheer range of space undead. Because the elemental terrors of the void leading to uniquely fucked up deaths and resulting unquiet souls is deeply satisfying to my space horror loving soul.

Endling. Endlings are basically the ghosts of extinct species trying to wreak vengeance on whatever they believe brought about their end, ghostly vengeance on a species level. There’s a planet in the Veskarium that was aggressively mined out, obliterating the native ecology, and the capital city is now menaced by what are essentially spectral ghost pigs. Which is amazing.

Itmi Vruh. Okay. So we know I deeply enjoy space undead. And we know I deeply enjoy the scary end of FTL and hyperspace travel. The Itmi Vruh are the perfect fusion of those two space horrors. When a ship tries to perform a jump into the Drift and something goes wrong, rather than throwing the whole ship out or crashing, sometimes the ship makes it through, but the souls of several people onboard don’t, and are sucked out to blunder around the Drift, leaving their bodies inexplicably dead behind them. Itmi Vruh want those bodies back, and if they happen upon other ships in the Drift, they will attempt to possess people on them. So there’s two fantastic spacer horror tales to be afraid of: that the Drift will suck out your soul if you jump wrong, and that the fucking resultant space ghosts from hyperspace will possess you even if you make it safely in. Absolutely fantastic. Love it.

Vorthuul. Vorthuul are undead left behind by people who got sucked into a black hole, and they’re formed of two elements: a super dense obsidian skeleton overlaid by a screaming spectral form. Kasathan mystics think that these are in fact two separate quantum spirits formed when the forces of the event horizon fucking bent time and space so that two versions of the same person got overlaid together, one being horrifically stretched and screaming in agony, the other being crushed by gravity into infinite density. So you get two torturous deaths for the price of one! Any ship, station or observation post that passes too close to a black hole, even if it avoids being sucked in, might get invaded by one or more of these tormented things, like hideous avatars of the inimical force waiting to devour us all. They are so cool. Horrifying, obviously. But so cool.

Space Ecology/Hazards

There is something about imagining creatures that live in the void that is just … extremely happy-making to me. These are all creatures that kind of create an ecology in the emptiness of space. And/or creatures that create hazards in space, things that make the already-terrifying void and vacuum even more dangerous in interesting ways. These aren’t planetary sorts of dangers, they’re things you encounter in starships. Or inside stars. Or on space stations. And I love them.

Dawn Beetle. They’re giant iridescent solar dung beetles who dig around for debris inside the middle layers of stars to make giant heat-resistant junk balls that eventually are drawn back down to the core of the star to be used as a hatchery for future dawn beetles. If there is no debris (eg asteroids, shipwrecks, etc) inside the star, they sometimes try to ride solar flares out into the universe beyond, usually winding up stranded. They’re just delightfully weird, beautiful, funky little guys. They also hang around the Burning Archipelago of bubble cities in the surface of the Pact Worlds’ sun, which is one of my favourite locations in the setting.

Giant Space Tardigrade. It is a tardigrade. The size of a starship. It’s a titanic lumbering space bear-bug that is trying very hard to eat your starship, because there’s not a lot of food in the void of space and it’s very hungry. They’re extraordinarily tough, and they have personalities, varying from vengeful to playful, if usually still rather destructive even when trying to be friendly. They’re a fantastic combination of adorable and deeply aggravating, and just a fantastic thing to exist.

Kaion. I love the Diaspora as a location so much. The asteroid belt is home to so many of my favourite things in this setting. Here, they’re starship eating metallic space molluscs with bioelectricity and biomagnetism and weapons that function as basically railgun harpoons where they use their magnetic fields to launch hardened bodyparts at prey and draw them back via the same biomagnetism. I love when space ecology gets weird.

Lurker in Light. Evil space fey that are invisible in light and hunt in places like high tech cities and space stations and starships that are basically perpetually lit up. They’re sadistic little fuckers who like to hunt and hurt people, and to find them to make them stop often involves having to power down whole damned sections of the city/station/ship to force them into the open. Which. On a ship or a station. You have to turn off power in the void of space because an evil space fairy is hiding in the glare of the lights to hurt you. That is an excellent horror story right there. As they get older they become radioactive, which is just excessive, honestly. These are evil little things, and they’re excellent.

Shipkiller Bulb. They’re giant space plants that inhabit the ice rings of gas giants harvesting asteroids and ice for minerals and water while absorbing sunlight from the nearest star. Which is all fine, and another fantastic example of weird space ecology, but they’re called also shipkiller bulbs for a reason. And that reason is that they violently hate Drift travel, and if already starving when annoyed, they will violently attempt to tear an offending starship near them to pieces with tendrils and gravity attacks. If they successfully kill the ship, they’ll feed off the hull the same way they’d feed off an asteroid. They’re easy enough to take down with shipboard weaponry if you know they’re there in time, but if you didn’t see them before they absolutely lost their shit on top of you, you might be in for a bad time. I just. I deeply enjoy all these space hazards?

Voraija. Space whales! Different space whales to the previously-mentioned telepathic Omas. Voraija communicate via microwave radiation ‘songs’ that reverberate through starship hulls, can live up to a millennium, and follow long, meandering migratory paths looking for gas giants to birth their young inside. They can wreak absolute havoc on planetary communications systems and have been driven off as a result, and have also been hunted for use in biotech, resulting in some of the older individuals and pods holding powerful grudges. They’re just. I mean. They’re space whales. What more could a girl want?

Random Beasties

And then a final collection of just everything else that caught my eye.

Irokiroi. They’re just beautiful. Predatory sky-serpents with multiple gorgeous wing-fins from the toxic gas-moon of Osoro near Liavara, they’re absolutely deadly and absolutely gorgeous. They’ve recently been attacking a lot of settlements on the moon, possibly related to increasing ‘safari’ trips into the gas clouds stirring them up. Which is an excellent lesson on ecological non-interference, but they’re also so beautiful, so I can kinda understand. I would probably do something ill-advised and likely fatal to be able to see one too.

Kothama. These are less creatures and more people, so arguably shouldn’t be on this list, but they’re seriously enchanting, so I made an exception. They’re 18ft tall multi-legged shaggy ice bear-trolls that are completely peaceful and obsessed with star-gazing, and I love them dearly. They live on two icy outer worlds in the Vesk system that share a moon. Twice a year the orbits of the two planets pass close enough to hand off the moon, and the Kothama go on sacred pilgrimages via magical gates to the moon and the other planet when this occurs. They’re just … so mystical and cool?

Polyphonic Gel. It’s an ooze. It’s a sparkly, smoked-glass looking tiny ooze made up of millions of semi-fluid fibres that eat sound and sing. They can also use said sonic emissions to do horrific damage to people and things, but that’s incidental. They’re so pretty. They can get really big if fed a consistent diet of sound, like the thrum of industrial fans for example, but then get cravings for specific sounds and can thoroughly rampage through a place in search of them. Devotees of the goddess of music Shelyn believe that they’re sacred and can be a little overzealous in trying to help them out at times. Which I fully understand!

Rendalairn. They (or possibly it, singular) are massive (30ft diameter) metallic superweapons that rove around killing planets. They just hurtle around, land on a world, and tear it the hell up until they’ve wiped out everything intelligent down there. There are two known worlds where this has happened. On one of them, the rendalairn sent a polite telepathic message to everything in orbit to stay away from the ‘demolition site’ and then started telepathically playing music from the culture it was destroying as it razed the planet. On the other, there was no music, but it did still broadcast the warning. No one knows who built them, or sent them, or how they choose worlds to target, so it’s all a little terrifying, but it’s another fantastic bit of spacer lore to throw into your setting.

Sapient Purple Orb. Exactly what it sounds like. They’re sentient, friendly little psychic purple orbs that bob around trying to make first contact with new friends. They’re telepathic but also show visions on their surfaces to people. If they like their new friends, they get very protective of them. They also tend to appear in waves, and in noticeably smaller numbers each time, so there’s something mysterious going on there. They’re just a fascinating little phenomenon, and also adorable.

Vasporan. I blame the art for this one, because they’re just adorable. They’re 11ft fucking tall, granted, but they’re adorable blue giant squid-shrews that can rapidly molt or partially molt their shells into either disposable shields or gas pocket balloons for flight. They’re ambush predators, and dangerous, and, again, 11ft tall, but they’re really, really, really cute.

Warpstitcher. These things remind me so strongly of both the Weavers and the Slake Moths from Perdido Street Station. In different ways, obviously, but still. Serious Bas-Lag vibes with this one. They’re interdimensional spider-like aberrations that target powerful magic-or-tech users and stitch their victims onto their bodies to feed on their minds (which normally is irreparably damaging even for the few who survive, but can, very rarely, open the surviving mind up to revelation and euphoria). They hunt the people they do because they believe that magic and tech (especially the Drift) is doing irreparable damage to the fabric of the multiverse. They believe that before the Gap they were responsible for stitching the multiverse into a single whole, but something that happened in the Gap ripped them away from their true abilities and calling, and now they need to punish those they believe might have been responsible. They’re … The Bas-Lag vibes are very strong, yes?

I love the Starfinder setting so much. Science fantasy and space horror are such fantastic genres for me. I enjoy them deeply.

[caeslxys]

Something I think is extremely interesting thematically when it comes to connecting what Downfall and the ideas it tackled to the overarching narrative of campaign three is that the things Downfall made a point to showcase of Aeor—Cassida, Hallis, the visual of an aeormaton proposing to her partner, the specific and intentional decision to shed light on a far from insignificant amount of the population being civilians or refugees—is that it plays in perfect parallel across from what is happening (and, really, has been happening) to the ruidusborn on Exandria in present.

Bear with me for a moment. Aeor is ultimately a city that was collectively punished for the decisions of its leadership. We could (and, judging by the amount of discourse around this particular topic already, probably will) argue about what the Gods’ motivation for all of this was—whether it be that they could not, in the end, bear to kill their siblings or that they were terrified at the prospect of mortality—for me it is a very healthy dose of both—but for this I am much more interested in the latter. They were scared. That, really, is the driving force behind both this arc and their role in c3 as a whole.

Why I point this out is: It is far more interesting to me, especially as we go back to Bells Hells this week, to dissect the Gods and their decisions not purely on sympathetic motivation alone but as beings in the highest seat of power in the highest social class in Exandria.

So, having established that the Gods (in relation to mortals) are more a higher social class than anything we could compare to our real life understanding of divinity and that Aeor was eviscerated largely because of their fear—what is the difference between those innocents in Aeor caught in the trappings of their autocratic government leadership and a divine war on the ground, and those of the ruidusborn being manipulated both by Ludinus and by the very thing that inspired such visceral fear in the Gods to start with. I would argue very little.

I think of Cassida, doing what she genuinely thought was right and good and would save people, her son, and the object of her worship—and how that did not matter enough to any of them to spare her because of the fear they held at the very concept of mortality. I think of Liliana and Imogen, one of which we know begged for the gods to help her or send her a sign for years on years, and how every single one of their largest struggles could have been avoided had the gods loved them, their supposed children, as much as they feared what they could be. I think of how the thing that did save Imogen, in the end, was a woman who herself existed in direct defiance of the gods will. I think of that young boy, sixteen years old, that Laudna exalted on Ruidus.

I think it’s completely fair to judge Aeor’s overall society as deeply corrupt—it was!—but its leadership and police force are not a reflection of every one of its citizens. Similarly, it is fair to judge the Ruby Vanguard as corrupt—it is!—but its multiple heads of leadership and even the god-eater further are not a reflection of every one of its members.

Notably, and what I think the Hells will latch onto, this did not matter to the Gods. It did not matter that Cassida was trying to help. She was still too much of a risk. Will it matter, what Imogen does? Will it matter, if that young boy is in the blast radius when they decide to take no further chances?

I’ve seen a lot of people say that the Hells will side with the gods and I don’t think I agree. Especially as Imogen has been scolded and villainized over and over for daring to try and save her mother—who herself has been seen by some as an irredeemable evil in spite of her drive being the exact same—her family—but when it’s the Gods it’s justified? When it’s the Gods, it’s sympathetic? Too sympathetic to criticize further than “they’re family”?

I obviously do not think the Gods should die or be eaten or what have you, and I certainly don’t agree with Ludinus (though I find him much more compelling than just a variation of hubris wizard), but when talking about the Gods in Aeor and in present it isn’t really at all about their motivation or their family. It can’t be. Too many people, including our active protagonists, lives have been effected for it to be as cut and dry as “they’re family”. These are your children. They are your family, too.

[kijosakka]

au where through training for the,,, fuckin skate olympics or whatever alejandro did he realizes how shitty his family is and manages to leave the situation (probably getting disowned,, living off of money won through skate competitions or smth idk) and years later reunites with josé on ridonculous race to try and rekindle a real family relationship

[lordcoolington]

i think it’d be funny as hell if there were a couple well-known but super weird animals from our world that didn’t exist in Tíralour. like. what if platypi didn’t exist in Tíralour. or giraffes. now imagine taking anyone from tíralour and bringing them to an earth zoo. would that be fucked up or what

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[evilminji]

"DO BETTER!" Says Now Televised Fanboy

He, Dash Baxter is a Phan-Stan!! It's kinda his thing. See, he's a fancy ass talk show host now. Married Paulie, moved out of Amity, actually DID something with his life. His parents? Did not approve. Long n short of it? He got kicked out.

Paulie's parents were PISSED.

Retaliated by giving him all the help he needed getting EVERY scholarship he qualified for. He went to a really nice college. Missed his girlfriend like mad. But she was off in Metropolis, terrifying weaker men. Conquering the fashion scene.

And SOMEHOW? Thanks to that long talk he had with Phantom (*incoherent fanboy gibbering noises* SO COOL!) he's worked to be... more of a LEADER, you know? Less of an asshole. Cause he's popular. People copy him. He can't be an asshole.

So, somehow, when he's punching out some try-hard that thinks he's hot shit for bullying a Nerd? He and the nerd get talking, right? Cause the guy got his glasses completely fucked up. And it's what Phantom would do.

But GET THIS? Guy's never HEARD of Phantom! Is super curious, cause he runs a small time Hero's show on the web. And, Dude? Is it your LUCKY DAY! Cause you just met THE number 1 fan of Phantom, hands down!! He makes his VERY spirited case, about why Phantom is THE best Hero to ever have lived. And this guy?

Entranced.

In AWE.

Just straight up BEGS him to join his show. Cause apparently? He was BORN for it. Which? Yeah. He HAS been giving speechs to the team for YEARS now. And Talking at fan meet ups. Leading fan meet ups. Hosting parties... actually, now that he thinks about it? He DOES do a lot of public speaking? Huh.

But still, he's about to say "no", when?

Dude mentions? He'll get to talk about Phantom.

SOLD!

It. Blows. Up. Absolutely EVERYONE is in love with his pretty face, hot bod, and STRONG opinions. But they ALSO have no idea who Phantom is! Paulie! This is CRIMINAL! Horrifying! What is going ON!?

Some bullshit information black out, apparently. At least according to her... friendly Nemesis? The Goth Dweeb. Who's engaged, apparently? So good for her. Unsurprisingly, it's too the OTHER Dweebs, but still. Bout time she started planning to drag them to a court house. She's the only one with any spine in that group! If she waited for THEM to propose?

Not even as Ghosts, man.

They'd get distracted by shiny nerd shit and whimp out.

Still... a world where NO ONE knows how Awesome, Phantom is? Not on HIS watch!

So he works it in. To every segment. It becomes "his thing". Oh? Super man saved a kitten from a tree? Cute. Well PHANTOM saved a bus full of Ghost Puppies from a shady, rouge, Goverment agency. Do BETTER, Superman!

The Flash, who is a cheap knock-off and stole his name, took down an Ice Villian? Adorable! PHANTOM stopped a Rouge WINTER SPIRIT with the help of YETI WARRIORS then assisted in giving FREE medical care for anyone who needed it! Here's a picture of him making GHOST ICE SNOWMEN for small children! Do BETTER, Knock-off!

What's THAT you say? Wonder Woman fought a GOD in down town paris?

Excellent work Wonder Woman. Flawless as always. But YOU, god-boy, are a disappointment! All that power! And WHAT do you use it for? Are you even supposed to BE here?? PHANTOM uses his power to HELP people! Is awesome and knows TONS of better gods! You're just salty you didn't make the cut!

DO BETTER!

And obviously? No one believes him. There's no record of this "Phantom" guy. The pictures look fantastical and vaguely glitchy/glowy. Not quite right. They GOTTA be photo shopped. Manipulated somehow. But? As a shtick? A fake "perfect Superhero" is kinda funny and unique.

And it's one hell of Fake Hero!

A Dead Champion? Who fights gods and monsters? Rouge agencies? Sassy and tragic? With a mysterious past? Pretty cool! There's even an Offical Comic from some guy that went to the same high-school as Baxter!

Of course, as Baxter get more and more popular? The "meme" hero, Phantom, get more well known? People get more interested in where Dash grew up. You know, just a bored Google. Maybe see if the hero was based off a local legend or something. But... huh...

The Town website?

Weirdly? Sanitized.

Like... like aggressively sanitized. All smooth edges and no details. Very "move along, citizen". Ha ha... it's part of the joke right? They get it! They'll just look up local restaurants or som-....

Wait...

Hey, guuuuys?

Are you finding ANYTHING?

And! Nothing. And I do mean NOTHING! Triggers the "oh? Secrets???" Instincts of a Hacker, like finding a hard blank wall of "KEEP OUT". Especially when it's somewhere it rightfully shouldn't BE.

All it would take? Is ONE person, of decent skills and an account on Certain Forums, getting bored enough to Google the Dude On The TV(TM)? For the GIW's lil walls to come crashing down. Because yeah, you can stop ONE hacker. Even two. Probably five or six.

But how about thousands?

Hundreds of thousands?

From every time zone. Competing. Just to see what you HAVE and don't want them to see. Maybe they do something with it, maybe they don't. But fuck it, you're being RUDE and now they're CURIOUS. And THEN? Oh. Oh holy shit.

Not a meme.

Very real.

Not a joke.

The walls come crumbling down, down, down. Ripped apart by hundreds of hands. Emails sent to every sort of agency. The JLU line inundated with emergency tips. Not a joke. Not A Joke. Holy Shit, IT WASN'T A JOKE!

Phantom is REAL!

And there, on TV, stands the Man. The signal FINALLY breaching containment. Fighting off the invading God of the week. Built like statue, hair like an aurora borealis of white fire held almost delicately in place by a CROWN of ice, a suit made of void and starlight. Inhuman. Beyond human.

Here to help.

A laugh that crackles like ice and the snap of winter, rolls through the air like coming storms, rich and somehow warm. A smile that bares teeth, yet turns so KIND when he looks upon humanity, as though we are precious and worth fighting for. A living star.

A... a once living star.

And in the center of it all? Wearing his BESPOKE, custome made, Number 1 Phan full body outfit? That's right. Dash Baxter. Ha! You fuckers doubted him! Behold his blorbo and WEEP, ya fuckin casuals! The BESTEST of boys! The FINEST of Heros! Superman? Could NEVER.

And now? The weather!

@babbling-babull @nerdpoe @the-witchhunter @ailithnight @hypewinter @hdgnj @mutable-manifestation

[nettedtangible]

An idea I love is when the Foxes become a more well-respected team in the league, Wymack starts talking to them about being “role models” and that they have all these young fans now who look up to them. And Neil is just horrified.

Then the Exy league organises this like, pre-game warm up meet and greet thing where they do some drills and games with the kids of the local teams in the area.

Everyone expects to have to keep Andrew away from the kids but he’s actually fantastic with them. He’s blunt and honest but he does try very hard and they absolutely love him.

Neil spends the entire time running away from the children and hiding behind Wymack (he tried hiding behind Andrew but Andrew was actually getting along with the little demons)

Kevin hates it but the kids LOVE him, they think it’s hilarious how grumpy and angry he gets and they keep falling over themselves laughing anytime he yells. They keep asking him to “do the grumpy voice” he starts yelling in French and they think it’s just about the funniest thing that’s ever happened.

Dan and Renee are keeping the whole thing on track, actually running through the drills and teaching the kids with endless patience. Dan has a little mini me girl who’s like 10 and the captain of her team and just wants to be Dan so bad so Dan gives her a whistle and she’s just shadowing her all day, blowing her whistle whenever Dan tries to get someone’s attention.

Aaron and Allison hang back and only very reluctantly interact with the children.

Matt is the equivalent of a climbing gym. He has about 4 children hanging off various limbs at any given time and a little 6 year old has taken up permanent residence on his shoulders.

Nicky loooves it and teaches the kids all of bad words and gets them to play pranks on Kevin- which results in Kevin yelling at him and he and the kids falling over laughing.

One child seems to be really isolated and quiet. Neil sits with this kid so Wymack will stop yelling at him to get involved. They don’t talk at all but Neil gives the kid some gum and the kid manages a little smile.

Part 2

[asidian]

I've seen a lot of talk about how hell affected Edwin's pain tolerance, but not very much breaking down how it seems to have affected the way he manages emotion. So to that end, here we go:

Edwin Payne vs emotions (and how his no good very bad helltime messed with him something awful)

Dead Boy Detectives does a very good job early on of establishing the fact that Edwin is not particularly good with people. He's stilted, he's repressed, and though he can be incredibly kind to the people he cares about, he can also be quite abrasive, particularly to those he doesn't know well.

Time and time again, we see Charles step in to be the face man. Charles is the one to greet the clients, to take note of their names, to set them at ease. Charles is the one to support Crystal emotionally, and his interactions with Edwin seem to imply that he's done the same for Edwin, over the years. Charles has to remind Edwin to mind his bedside manner, and he explains to Crystal that Edwin forgets how to talk to people sometimes, because of how long he spent in hell.

In short, these boys compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses in a lot of ways, and Charles is very much the one doing the emotional heavy lifting in this partnership.

And there's a reason for that, laid out in the text and subtext all throughout the show, and the narrative handles it brilliantly.

Edwin's actor does a fantastic job in expressing the character's reactions – or rather, lack of them. Because in the most shocking scenes throughout the show, Edwin often doesn't seem as horrified as the others in the face of events that ought to be horrific. In the Devlin house, he seems as though the murders scarcely affect him. When the jumper at the top of the lighthouse throws herself down, he's downright composed in comparison to everyone else.

And Edwin repeatedly shows or expresses that emotion makes him uncomfortable. When Crystal and Charles are fighting in episode five, he requests that they set their feelings aside until the case is finished. At the end of the episode, he says that the day has been entirely too full of emotions for his taste.

So, what is it specifically about emotion that bothers him so much?

In hell, emotion meant an awful, bloody death.

Panicking over potential incoming horrors? Nope, sorry, too loud. Dead again. Having a sobbing breakdown in a corner? Nope, sorry, too loud. Injured and trying to keep it down so it doesn't get worse? Nope, sorry, that's too loud, too.

Again and again, we see Edwin trying to tamp down on his emotions, but also, tellingly, trying to keep his emotions subdued and quiet.

When Charles finds him in hell, he's crying without making a single sound. When Esther starts to torture him in episode eight, he doesn't scream at first. He's trained himself out of making noise when something hurts or frightens him.

Of course he wants to set emotions aside until the case is done. He's spent seventy years learning what happens if you don't. You take care of business first. If, and only if, there's an after? That's when you let yourself feel.

Early on, when Edwin and Charles need to find the correct book but Edwin is unable to access their office due to the Cat King's bracelet, Edwin is upset. He's frustrated and out of sorts, blocked from making progress on the thing he knows he needs to be doing – hurting himself trying to get his arm through the mirror until Charles stops him. It's Charles who has to step in and help him calm down. It's Charles who has to remind him to breathe through what is very likely a panicked throwback to those times when if he could not solve his way out of a problem, it would very literally get him killed. In this scene, we get a brief glimpse of how Edwin looks when he starts to lose his grip on his rigid control.

And that's before we even get to these things:

Because as awful as the doll spider was, it wasn't the only thing skulking around the Doll House. Charles stumbles across misery wraiths when he goes to rescue Edwin from hell – and we know from the Devlin house episode that Edwin is extremely aware of what they do and how they operate. They were in his space, looking for despair to feed off during a time when he had it in spades.

Taken all together? It's an absolutely heartbreaking picture.

This boy seemed a little socially awkward before his death, from what we see of his time before hell. But afterward? He's had seventy long years of having to teach himself to regulate his own emotions, under pain of excruciating torture if he didn't do it well enough.

With an object lesson like that, over and over again, for literal decades, it's no wonder that Edwin has such a hard time navigating emotions and everything surrounding them.

[valtsv]

can you pitch tsv to me fandom propaganda style… like sell it to me. hook me in. what is it about

the silt verses is a folk horror/political satire/weird fiction podcast set in an alternate ambiguously modern-day reality that asks the question "what if gods (and their saints, and angels, and miracles) were real? what if they formed the core infrastructure of the society you lived in? what if they were sustained by human belief and sacrifice? what if this was just the accepted Way Things Are?" and then introduces you to a cast of characters for whom this is their normal daily routine, and shakes them up through a series of intersecting arcs and plotlines. it deals with a lot of compelling themes - including identity and personhood, how institutions of power are formed and maintained and the potential for abuses of that power even by the most well-intentioned who wield it, action vs. rhetoric and the power of words; whose story is worth telling and whose is erased or adulterated by those privileged enough to write the version that becomes the widely accepted canon, and how struggles for control of something as conceptual as narrative can become very real and legitimate fights for the right to have one's autonomy and personhood recognised, human connection and why it's both so valuable and so destructive, etc. - but the central question it unceasingly begs is "why do we continue to live like this? why do we accept that this is all there is? what will it take for us to care about what's happening all around us, every day, right before our very eyes? what will you do when you realise you've spent your whole life drowning, and every option for relief comes at a cost? how long can you keep telling yourself that you're not really drowning before the water closes in over your head and swallows you like all those before you?"

tsv takes a magnifying glass to the horrifying exploitation and cruelty that so much of our own society runs on, and literalises it, leading to what is often rather heavy-handed satire bordering on the parodic - but it does so with such grace and unflinching, grounded honesty, without preaching to its audience but without letting them off the hook, either. it recognises that we are all both complicit in and victims of our own collective slow grind towards annihilation, and it asks us "isn't this absurd? isn't this horrifying? is this really all there is? is there nothing we can do in the face of this seemingly insurmountable, inescapable self-defeating routine-turned-ritual? why should we, or shouldn't we, care? why should we, or shouldn't we, try to make a difference?" and it's brave enough to admit that it doesn't have all the answers. but it still tries. because the silt verses is, fundamentally, a story about hope - real hope; the difficult, unglorious, unrelentingly in need of maintenance kind that is, nevertheless, still worth every effort to inspire it. the silt verses is a story about why we get up in the morning and try again, even though it might never be enough.

it's also a very character-driven story, and the character writing is truly second to none. every character is a person, in all their infinite messy, human complexity. every character has the capacity for abject cruelty and incredible kindness; to be a significant influence on their reality and to be utterly meaningless in the wider context of things; every character has the potential to be both the hand that pulls someone to their feet in their hour of need, and the boot that grinds them further into the dirt, and every character is both of these things, at some point or another, to someone. every character is both the martyr and the one holding the knife. no character is a saint - not even the actual, literal saints. and while this isn't necessarily something that should be used as a selling point, the way this podcast handles the diversity of identity is fantastic, and never used tokenistically, or as a character's sole defining trait (though not all aspects of identity get equal consideration; the creator has acknowledged that he didn't tackle race as a topic much beyond examining the developmental factors of broad strokes "us vs. them" nationalistic identities, and the arbitrary nature of patriotic loyalty to one's nation when it runs on the same oppressive systems as that which is painted the aggressor, and some fans have pointed out that while diversity of gender and one's lived experiences according to one's gender identity gets plenty of focus, some things are left to implication and inference in a way that doesn't necessarily strengthen the story's themes).

anyway. not sure this is the "fandom propaganda style" pitch you asked for, but listen to the silt verses. it's a brilliant work of fiction and to my mind deserves to be considered a landmark piece of art (even if that does mean that some of my more fandombrained takes would likely come to be seen as unflattering misconstrusions of the source material that betray my personal deficiencies. well whatever it was fun i had fun.)

[moonlightcycle571]

Lmao I just had a fantastic vision.

The JL fighting a multiversal threat, and the for keeps disappearing into different universes/worlds. While everyone is coming up with ways to travel to apprehend the foe, Captain Marvel has an idea.

Batman: so far, our current multiversal technology is subpar and unable to go at the rate the villain is going.

Flash: while I can travel through universes, it’s going to take a while to l’acte which one they’re on, and even then, they can leave before I even do anything.

Superman: we need a reliable tracker and transport system. Both being crucial elements we don’t have

Captain Marvel: I have an idea.

Cue to the JL all on a random sidewalk, with the clear instructions to ‘wait until they arrive’ and to ‘not move or interfere in any way shape of form’.

Random Truck: *appears out of nowhere, hitting a random pigeon*

JL: huh

Marvel: well that’s going to be an interesting story. Anyways, there you are! Guys, meet Truck-kun!

JL: excuse me???

Truck-kun:

Marvel: Their a bit shy ☺️

JL: …

Truck-kun: *blushes*

JL: how is that even possible??!??!?

They proceed to go in and go through some weird interdimensional car chase, passing by random worlds, spawning through random streets (for some reason, most of them are in Japan), and more importantly, hitting A LOT of people. Old, young, middle aged, animals, even a vending machine at some point. It’s just a slaughter.

The JL is horrified, and Cap is just sitting in his seat, all chill.

Green Lantern: DID WE JUST HIT SOMEONE

Marvel: yup

Superman: AND YOURE DOING NOTHING TO STOP IT

Marvel: nope

Batman: Captain that kills people

Marvel: it’s not killing, more like transporting them into a different universe that is more suited for them. Had we not hit them, they would have died either ways within the hour. Now they get a second chance of life.

JL: *existential crisis*

Even after the villain is apprehended, they found out they only managed to get this far is because they had a magic car*

Hawkwoman: *stares at the car* how does one come across thee vehicles

Marvel: well I met Truck-kun cause he’s besties with my magic Train. Train-chan told me that Truck-kuns little brother Car-kun got abducted, which is why Truck-kun was so willing to help.

JL:…

Flash: I’m going to go lie down.

Batman: *mentally adding magic vehicle community to his conspiracy board*

Bonus:

Green Arrow: *retelling what happened* -and then some random Truck pulls up

Conner Hawke: lmao you met Truck-kun

Green Arrow:

Conner:

Black Canary: … how do you know that name?

Conner: w h a t

Bonus 2:

Naturally Conner tells Damian, who tells Jon, who tells Kon, who tells the Titans and basically the whole thing spreads.

Red Robin: YOU MET TRUCK KUN! THE GREAT ONE HIMSELF

Spoiler: THE ALL MIGHTY WHEELS OF STEEL

Cyborg: WHY WASNT I INVITED! CAP YOU LBOW HOW MUCH I LIKE MY ISEKAI

Blue Beetle: JUST CAUSE YOU GASLIGHT DOES NOT MEAN YOURE A GIRL BOSS

Superboy: SHARING IS CARING

Arsenal, lying on the road: TAKE ME

Bonus 3:

Static Shock: next you’ll be telling us you know Archie’s magic bus

Marvel: well I’m not sure I know who this ‘Archie’ is, but Train-chan does have a cousin called Bus-san.

Titans: *explode*

[butterfly-ribbon]

still in disbelief about how mizu5 genuinely captures the subtleties of transmisogyny so accurately like nothing else i've seen before especially with the nuances with which mizuki's story is told … all it takes is a single sentence, a few words … i love that the classmates saying that shit don't even … realize how cruel they are, bc that's how it /is/ and bc "oh no, we said something weird to a Normal Girl, that makes us look bad" - transmisogyny is just a punchline to a joke for them, that's how detached they are from their own cruelty and it's really not any different from the 'average' misogyny and how that tends to be a joke amongst boys. what ena ended up being exposed to is really just the classmates' 'boy's locker room talk' leaking out, so to speak? ena's probably heard jokes from people about how unfeminine her behavior is in the past and she quickly spits out "that's not funny" bc ena and mizuki are both "pretty girls" who like fashion and dolling themselves up, and hearing them talk about how mizuki's cute in this way … i'm sure it reminds her of her own experiences with being an 'influencer' - people like her when she shuts up and makes herself cute and appealing and ena must've absolutely received her fair share of comments and messages from weirdos for posting selfies of herself online, but i think what drives this home to me as such a fantastic narrative is the way that they call mizuki "attractive as long as she's not making any trouble and being a pain" bc it really speaks to how trans girls are objectified and only deemed 'acceptable' as long as they make themselves into limpless dolls who are acceptable targets for any form of abuse and misogyny instead of trying to claim their own subjectivity as women, so there's so much crossover in how mizuki's experiences work alongside ena's? but also mizuki faces so much more constant and direct criticism, all her actions and choices so closely under scrutiny.

mizuki loves and appreciates the attention of girls and when she first met ena she saw herself in the art that ena made - ena draws a girl in pain and mizuki goes "she's me". in the scene where mizuki gets outed, ena is speechless not bc she thinks mizuki is "gross" or bc she's mad mizuki "tricked" her? she's just horrified that she just got degendered /by association/ and then had to listen to these boys speak about the girl she's in love with in this /aggressively/ violent way, especially since mizuki has a meltdown, knowing, apologizing for hurting, even as ena would absolutely say "no, i'm sorry, im sorry, please don't hate vourself" bc mizuki feels like she's the one at fault for feeling like ena would assume the worst of her, but mizuki also feels like she doesn't have the right to be angry at people … this is the first time we get to see mizuki's rage and it's so palpable … i love so much that she hates the idea of niigo's kindness being born out of her 'abnormality' as a trans girl … she hates everything about this. she hates the idea of coming out, she hates the idea of having a question attached to her girlhood..

mizuki logically knows that niigo are going to accept her bc they've also gone through so much turmoil themselves and understand what it's like to be on the fringes of society, but she still can't shake off all those intrusive thoughts about how they might only accept her out of pity or consideration bc they feel too bad for her rather than a genuine understanding and the idea that things might change between them bc of that is too terrifying to embrace… such patronizing 'kindness' burns too much for mizuki to accept, so she'd rather run away and shut herself out completely… for mizuki it's like being stuck on a bridge where the only two ways out are ones where nothing changes and this hurts in its own way bc she can't tell how much of it would be genuine and how much would be an act and the other way is them /trying too hard/ to be considerate and this can easily become alienating bc mizuki truly just wants to be "one of the girls" in the most natural sense? she doesn't want to be made to feel like she's being accommodated, but there's also all the guilt that she's been internalizing for being "deceptive" and not saying the truth sooner that further complicates things and makes her feel like she's undeserving of any kindness that she may be offered… even though she genuinely was going to tell ena the truth herself, it doesn't matter anymore bc someone else told her before she even got the chance to do so herself and that's something she actually wished would happen in the past, so is there anyone to blame but herself? mizuki's entire thing is that until now she's been "writing" a fictionalized cis girl version of herself when she's with niigo and obscuring her own transness bc she doesn't want to be treated as an Other or have an asterisk attached to her girlhood bc she just wants to be treated as one of them instead of having to explain herself or prove anything but she has her facade violently stripped away from her in the most traumatic way imaginable and now she's entrapped within dysphoria induced suicidal ideation...

[witherby]

(same anon) mouse!!! sorgy!!

Okay! Strange influx of mutilation-based hypotheticals I've been receiving lately, but okay!

This is not canon to the main Flittermouse series!

What would your family + Kon do if you lost an eye?

⚠️ vague description of injury, loss of an eyeball ⚠️

Masterlist is Here!

Bruce:

Get you a doctor and try to keep you as chill as possible. This man has trained himself not to panic in terrible situations and he is going to stay so very calm and cool and collected, so that you feel like he's got this under control.

"Hi, honey. I can see we've got a bit of a problem on our hands. Don't freak out — I'm gonna figure this out for you, alright? Keep that eye — the socket — keep the eyelids closed. Yes, great. Press this towel gently to your face and hold it there. I'm taking you to the hospital. Are you — okay, and the shock has set in. It's alright. I'm right here. It's okay."

Hal:

Try not to pass out. There's just a socket where your eyeball should be. That's insane. He's calling Bruce for help and not looking at you. He's actually quite frightened that you ended up this way and the guilt at his initial, improper reaction is gonna tear him apart later.

"Oh my god?? What happened!! No don't tell me, we have to get you help first. Holy shit. How did you lose a whole — gag — eye? NO don't tell me!! It's okay, Mousey, it's fine! Deep breaths, don't pass out. You look like you're gonna pass out. Me?? I'm not gonna pass — hrk — I'm good I'm good. How is the whole thing gone like that!? NO DON'T TELL ME. BRUCE ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE —"

Alfred:

Following a similar procedure as Bruce. Keeping himself calm so that you'll try to be calm, while he's getting you help.

"I've actually seen something similar to this happen before. I'm former British Intelligence, there is very little that's new to me, my darling Flittermouse. Come, let me administer a pain killer and then escort you to my car. I'm sure that smarts quite a bit. Watch your step — forgive the poor choice of words. I have you, dear. Let's get you to the emergency room and get that taken care of. All you have to do is stay awake."

Dick:

Almost passed out, not gonna lie. There's a hole in your head that isn't supposed to be there. It's fucking horrifying. Only his years and years of training help him keep his cool enough to get you to the emergency room, but after that he's breaking down and crying.

Jason:

Takes you to the ER but he's asking you as many questions as possible before you succumb to shock.

"What happened? Who did this? What do you remember? Are you hurt anywhere else?"

After you're in the doctors' hands, he's chasing leads so he can kill the bastard that cost you an eye.

Tim:

He's freaked. Worse than Hal even. I think he deserves a big character flaw so he'd actually be incredibly squeamish. Can't do the gorey shit at all. Like, can't breathe, can't look at you, can't-do-anything-except-have-a-panic-attack kind of freaked. His panic feeds into your panic until you're both uselessly crying into a phone calling 9-1-1. It works, and help comes, but boy he does not have control of the situation.

Damian:

At this point, you're old enough that Damian is in the middle of his doctorate program and residency, if not already done with it. He's doing a fantastic job treating the wound and making sure you don't get hurt worse or it gets infected, before he can't do anything more without surgery and takes you to the hospital.

Medical jargon flies out of his mouth when he talks to coworkers and seamlessly guides you through the corridors to the correct area, communicating what you need and having them prep a surgical team.

In-between it all, he's not giving you meaningless platitudes but he is telling you that everything is going to be fine. You'll likely have some bad depth perception for a long time, but this isn't the end of anything. You can go to culinary school. You can apply for a business license. You can keep dating the alien half-breed idiot. You'll just do all of that with one less eyeball. And the person who did it will die, but you don't need to bother yourself with that. It's fine.

+ Conner:

You'll be flown to the hospital in 0.2 seconds. He's not asking questions, he's not making any phone calls, he's just taking action. He gets you help, he tells you he'll be right back, and then he goes and alerts your family as to what happened.

Now that the most important bits are done, he's using his powers to get a lil freaky. He knows what you smell like, so he's tracing back your blood to try and find your missing eyeball so he can kill whoever took it. No questions asked. Sorry, you don't get to hurt his mate and also survive the next 24 hours. It's just not happening. Don't blubber, don't bargain, don't try to explain yourself. Just die.

After his errands are done, he isn't leaving your side again.

[sunderwight]

Thinking about a bingqiu Dreamling AU where Shen Yuan and Shang Qinghua are both bored deities, just sort of taking a brief sojourn through the mortal world to shoot the shit and see some interesting monster or other that Shen Yuan has heard about, when they come across a tea house and decide to take a break and do some people-watching instead.

Shen Yuan is well into something of a shut-in phase, which Shang Qinghua doesn't like, mostly because when Shen Yuan is in those phases he doesn't do particularly well either. Shen Yuan's a social butterfly, for however little he cares to actually acknowledge it about himself, and his critique of Shang Qinghua's literary masterpieces gets so much harsher when he's not getting enough enrichment.

So when they overhear one of the kitchen boys solemnly insisting that he is going to do everything in his power to never die, and Shen Yuan laments that the boy would probably regret such a wish if it came true, Shang Qinghua decides to bestow a rare bit of godly power onto this mortal and grant his wish.

He doesn't make him a god, of course, that wouldn't even be in his ability. At least, not without using up more time and effort than he's prepared to expend on this one random kid. But immortality on its own is not that difficult. The boy will still finish growing up, and will still be able to be harmed, to know hunger and pain and illness. It just won't ever kill him.

Shen Yuan sighs that it's a cruel thing to do to a mortal, especially one with such low odds of ever cultivating other skills to mitigate the potential torment of it all. But Shang Qinghua just shrugs and they place bets, that this boy will ask for the immortality to be revoked in a hundred years, or two hundred, or so on, or else he won't. Shen Qingqiu approaches the kitchen boy and flusters and bewilders him by telling him to meet him back here again in a hundred years time.

A hundred years later, the tea house is larger. The boy has grown to be a striking young man, who looks at Shen Yuan with wariness and something else, something almost like awe, as he asks what manner of creature he's made this bargain with. Shen Yuan assures him that he has no nefarious intentions, and instead asks Luo Binghe how the past century of his life has gone.

Horribly, at least at first. Binghe's mother had already died by the time they met, but afterwards he managed to earn enough money to travel to a nearby sect. Working in the tea house's kitchen was just a minor stopover along the way. Shen Yuan was wrong, it seems, about his odds of becoming a cultivator -- Luo Binghe earned entry as a disciple.

Yet, he had no success. The master who took him on was unaccountably cruel and mercurial, and Luo Binghe's attempts to cultivate failed. Looking back he sees now that there were many times when he should have died but didn't, but when it was all happening he just thought himself lucky. At least until an enemy sect attacked a cultivation conference, and he suffered mortal wounds that absolutely should have killed him (or anyone) but still didn't die. (No demon race or abyss in this AU, but there are still demonic and fantastical creatures.)

His cruel master, upon witnessing this, accused him of heretical practices and tried to kill him as well by flinging him off the edge of a gorge. The fall was terrible. Binghe lay at the bottom in a horrifying state, injured beyond reason and yet, still, he didn't die. Eventually his body recovered enough for him to drag himself out, and once he did the only thing on his mind was getting revenge. For the next several decades he managed to ingratiate himself to all manner of potential allies, forging alliances, accumulating blackmail, and convincing people that he had to be some powerful cultivator through his supernatural resilience, lack of visible aging, and a lot of bluffing. He got revenge on his old teacher, drove his first sect into ruin, and rose to prominence as a feared and respected leader of the cultivation world.

Shen Yuan listens with clear interest, asking plenty of questions and seemingly quite taken up with the story. At the conclusion, Luo Binghe admits that his actual cultivation is still mostly a matter of smoke and mirrors, and wonders if -- now that the hundred years have passed -- Shen Yuan means to strip his immortality from him.

Shen Yuan asks if Luo Binghe wants that. When Luo Binghe says no, he accepts the answer, and tells him to meet him back here again in another hundred years. Luo Binghe calls after him, but before he can ask anything more, Shen Yuan has disappeared again.

A hundred years later, Binghe arrives back at the tea house with an entourage befitting of an emperor. The tea house has also expanded. Luo Binghe orders a lavish feast from them, which everyone hastens to provide. He's spent the past several decades consolidating his power, forging alliances with key political players via several marriages, producing heirs, and crushing his enemies. As he brags about the state of his massive harem to Shen Yuan, the deity's eyes begin to glaze over. He doesn't seem impressed. He also doesn't seem to care much for the food, and eventually his attention is stolen away by a conversation at another table. The diners are discussing the exploits of a promising new poet and novelist. Try as he might, Luo Binghe fails to regain Shen Yuan's attention before the evening is done. Shen Yuan doesn't think it's a big deal -- after all, if Binghe is still riding on top of the world, he's probably not going to want his immortality gift revoked just yet!

Another hundred years go by. The tea house has returned to a more modest situation, the next time Shen Yuan sets foot in it. He waits an unusually long while for his guest to arrive, and when he does, he's almost stopped at the door by the tea house's servers. It's only when Shen Yuan bids them let him through that Luo Binghe is able to come to the table, almost collapsing against it and desperately falling onto the arrangement of snacks with obvious hunger.

Shen Yuan wonders if this, now, will be when the boy (no longer a boy) asks for the immortality to be revoked. Surprisingly, he finds himself resistant to the idea, even though it's also clear that the game has run too long. Maybe hundred year check-ins were too short? He doesn't like the implications of what's gone on, even if he's not really surprised about it either.

Between desperate mouthfuls of food, Luo Binghe explains that without mastering inedia, going hungry but never dying is a deeply unpleasant experience. Shen Yuan orders more food. Once Binghe has finally eaten his fill, he begins, haltingly, to explain his situation. His clothes are ragged, he is painfully thin, and his gaze is haunted.

Apparently, several of his wives conspired to assassinate him, despite his reputation as unkillable. Realizing that most poisons and such didn't kill him, but that he could still be incapacitated, they hatched a scheme to dose his food with a powerful sleeping agent, and then walled him up in a famous ancestral tomb. They went to great length to ensure that it was impossible to escape from. It took Binghe decades to do it anyway, digging away at the floors, and when he got out he found that his power base had collapsed. In-fighting and the incursion of his enemies had led to the deaths of all of his children, and what wives had survived had either fled or remarried. Not that he particularly wanted them back at that point, since the ones actually most loyal to him had also been killed early on after his own "death". His face marked him, to the eyes of his enemy, as a surviving descendant of himself. He was hunted down, chased across the continent and back again, until he managed to fall into enough obscurity that his pursuers abandoned the chase. Except that he has nothing, and any time he tries to regain something, he runs the risk of being hounded again. Those who might see some potential in him still remember the collapse of his recent "dynasty" and slam doors in his face, or else try and turn him over to those now in power in pursuit of a reward. Those who don't know that much see only a dirty beggar, and usually run him off on that basis instead.

Shen Yuan, almost hesitant, asks if Luo Binghe would like to have his immortality revoked.

Luo Binghe declines. How will he be able to take revenge on those who wronged him if he is dead? He has a hit list a mile long by now.

Which is definitely not the most noble of reasons to persist, but Shen Yuan finds himself reluctant to ask twice. Instead he orders more food, and then even reserves one of the traveler's rooms above the tea house for several days. By then the sky is turning grey, and Luo Binghe is losing his apparent battle with exhaustion. Shen Yuan presses the key into his hand, thinking it's probably not enough, but there are limits to how much gods are supposed to interfere and Shang Qinghua already stretched them to the breaking point with this entire scenario.

He leaves, not seeing the hand that reaches after him just before he is out of the door and gone.

Another hundred years pass. This time, Shen Yuan arrives to find Luo Binghe already waiting for him. He isn't surprised to see that Binghe's situation has visibly improved -- maybe he was keeping closer tabs on him, just a little bit, for this past while. If only to be sure he wouldn't have to warn the tea house workers to expect an unorthodox visitor again! But no, Binghe has been doing well enough for himself. No more harems or thrones, though. He dresses more like a well-off merchant now, deliberately posing as his own mortal descendant rather than as a great immortal cultivator. The food at the table looks far more delicious than usual too (Binghe commandeered the tea house's kitchen himself this time). As they chat, Shen Yuan is regaled with the exploits of Luo Binghe's travels and adventures, how even though he initially set out to claim revenge on those who overthrew him, by the time he was in a position to actually do so they had already died of the usual causes (time, illness, their own schemes backfiring, etc). Subsequently, only their children and grandchildren were left with the scraps of power they had obtained, and when one of those children employed Luo Binghe as a bodyguard, his initial plan to assassinate them eventually fell by the wayside. After all, the wrongdoings weren't actually theirs. From that point, Binghe was able to restore himself to a more comfortable life, joining his new employer on their travels until he had set aside enough earnings to take his leave before his youthful good-looks earned him suspicion. He then began investing in travel and trade, specifically cargo ships, because never spending too long in the same place or around the same people helped disguise his immortality. He had found that, at least for now, this served him better than playing the part of a cultivator. It also gave him time to try and actually repair his ruined cultivation base somewhat, and fighting pirates proved very diverting.

Binghe is midway through recounting his adventures with a gigantic sea monster, while Shen Yuan hangs on every word, when they're interrupted by the arrival of a brash young mistress, clearly wealthy and trained in cultivation. The young lady declares that there is a rumor that a fallen god and a demon meet in this tea house once a century, that they wield strange powers, etc etc, and she intends to interrogate them both with the assistance of her hired muscle and her own spiritual weapon, and discover the truth of the matter. Then she whips out, well, a whip!

Before Shen Yuan can deal with the matter, Luo Binghe is already on his feet, disarming the goons and breaking a few arms in the process. Shen Yuan is so distracted that he almost misses the whip aimed right for him, but before Binghe can catch the barbed weapon with his bare hand (wtf, Binghe, no) Shen Yuan deflects it with a wave of his fan, and then efficiently knocks the troublesome young lady unconscious. The hired muscle flees, Shen Yuan arranges for their assailant to be placed in a room upstairs until she regains consciousness, and he and Binghe resume their meal and conversation in relative peace.

Even though it's clear that Luo Binghe has not yet reached the end of his tolerance for life, Shen Yuan nevertheless finds himself strangely reluctant to part ways at the end of the night. Still, he does, because that's what is expected of him, gently denying Luo Binghe's suggestions that they find some other establishment to continue their conversation at. He also has to investigate these "rumors" that the young lady mentioned. It's probably nothing (Shang Qinghua has a loose tongue when he's drunk, and a lot of imaginative storytellers have frequented this tea house over the years) but he doesn't like being caught unawares like that. Heavenly politics are... complicated, it's best not to court unwanted attention in any capacity.

Another hundred years go by. This time, when they meet at the tea house, Luo Binghe asks Shen Yuan why he keeps it up. Why did he pick Binghe? What is he really after? When Shen Yuan fails to give any kind of clear answer, Luo Binghe shoots his shot and makes a (very obvious) move on him.

Shen Yuan, flustered, gets up and flees. Ignoring Luo Binghe's calls after him. It just doesn't make any sense! Why would Binghe do that?! He's a man who once had a harem of wives in the triple digits! Clearly he's not gay, so what was that all about? Was he just messing with him?! How dare he! Etc, etc.

Another century passes. Luo Binghe waits at the tea house, which has fallen onto hard times again. With the construction of some new roadways, travelers no longer pass through as often. Binghe listens, worried, to the proprietor's laments that this old place will probably not be around in another hundred years. He listens because he has no one else to speak to, because Shen Yuan has not shown up. Not that morning, not during the day, not come evening, and not now that it is closing time. Binghe nevertheless charms and bribes the proprietor to let him stay even after the place has shuttered.

It seems damning, of course. He pressed too hard and now his mysterious benefactor wants nothing more to do with him. Except, no, he refuses to accept that. He's still immortal. And he has gleaned enough of Shen Yuan's character by now that he thinks that even if he was rejected, he would be let down more clearly and gently than this. The more he thinks about it, the less willing Luo Binghe is to believe that he has been deliberately stood up (also, since the tenor of his confession was different from Hob Gadling's, he never delivered an ultimatum about what it might imply when they met up again).

Over the centuries, Luo Binghe has built up a few contacts with similarly strange and supernatural stories. Cultivators, sure, but also others, fortune tellers and people of strange ancestry, questionable abilities, those who have interacted with powerful beings of mysterious provenance. He makes his way to a certain gambling den, frequented often by such people, and while he flashes around enough money to draw curiosity, he collects information. Shen Yuan wasn't the only person who started paying more attention to the kinds of rumors surrounding the two of them after their confrontation with the young cultivator a couple centuries ago. And in fact, Luo Binghe has been spending many, many years trying to find out more about his mystery man. Though, too many potential deities and immortals fit his description for him to have ever conclusively figured much out.

This is how Binghe gets wind of a rumor that an eccentric occultist has somehow captured a god in his basement...

[cryingdew]

summary; the reader is stressed after a particularly infuriating hunt, and dean— their lover, is more than happy to be there for them when things go wrong and they need to relax.

pairing; dean winchester x gn!reader 　genre; fluff

wordcount; 2749 ( this is horrifying, it wasn't meant to go past 1500.. )

notes / warnings; none

you stumbled into the motel room, dried vampire blood coating your cheek and a scowl on your face. dean follows behind you, and the only reason you can tell is from how loud his boots are with each step he takes.

the hunt tonight had been anything but clean. after crawling out of a vampire nest barely in one piece, it didn’t even need to be said that you were beyond stressed. your eyebrows were furrowed, and your entire body is like a coiled spring, ready to pop. and when you run your hand across the dried blood, it comes off in flakes that crumble when your fingers touch them. a groan escapes your lips, and you turn your head around to look at dean behind you, and he looks just as bad. covered in the same dried blood, and his jacket has a couple of rips in the fabric. overall, he looks like a mess. just like you did.

“well, don’t we look jus’ fantastic.” dean speaks, and you can hear the sarcastic undertone— it’s hard to miss.

you laugh a little bit, and you can appreciate the sarcasm from him; it lightens the mood just a little bit. his snide remarks always did, even after the shitiest hunts. “yeah, i guess we do, dean.” his name rolls so nicely off your tongue and you give him a lopsided grin. he matches your smile, and you slowly trudge further into the motel room, flicking on the light switch and the room is bathed in a yellow-toned light.

you hear the door close behind you, and you know dean closed it behind the two of you. the motel room is a mess to say the least— papers flung everywhere and tools scattered on the floor, tables and even the bed. you remember the state you left the motel room in, you just didn’t think it would be so messy, but you shrug and just walk past the piles of papers and books. your boots are heavy when they clunk around on the floor, and dean’s steps are even heavier. but when you’re both in the confines of the room, everything outside seems to go silent in the most comforting way, and it’s just you and dean. like it has been for months.

each time a hunt goes wrong like this, both of you are just exhausted. neither of you want to do anything but take a hot shower and relax, and it seems like he knows what he wants when his arms come to wrap around your waist and he presses a kiss to your neck. a small shudder wracks your body before you tug dean’s hands off of your waist, and you turn around with an exasperated sigh and a frown on your face.

“not the time, dean. we’re both covered in dried vamp blood, and we’re filthy. later.” you stare at him, his face a little beaten up, and a smear of dried blood coats his cheek. he still has that stupid cocky grin and the smile even reaches his green eyes that you had grown so used to seeing every morning when you woke up to ‘heat of the moment’ blaring in your ears or just a normal, yet very annoying beeping. “fine, fine.. later.” he mumbles with a tone that you could only call whiny.

finally you smile softly, giving him a gentle look as you bring a hand up to touch his jaw, feeling the unshaven stubble underneath the pad of your thumb. “you gonna shave soon, baby?” you murmur the words, your eyes trailing all over his face— over his jaw, cheek, nose, eyes and those lips of his. slowly, you lean forward just enough to give dean a small peck on his lips. and all you can do is smile when he gives you that dorky grin of his.

“might, if y’give me a reason to, sweetheart.” he smiles at you when you pull away from his face, letting your hand fall back to your side, mirroring the other half of your body.

you snort with a stifled laugh and raise an eyebrow. “is that so? what kind of reason or incentive do you even need, dean?” you pose him the question, already knowing what he’s talking about. it’s kind of hard not to know with how insanely high his sex drive is. “plus, i never said i wanted you to shave it. makes you look like a real hunter, y’know.”

you turn on the heel of your boots, smiling to dean over your shoulder, and you swear you can see the cogs and gears turning in his head, almost like he didn’t know how to respond to you admitting that you didn’t mind the facial hair he had. a small laugh bubbles out of your throat as you watch him try and come up with something to say. goddamn it, he’s so fucking adorable.

as you begin to walk to the bathroom, you pull a towel that you had hung over the door to the motel’s small bathroom and throw it over your shoulder, more than eager to get cleaned up and out of your filthy clothing. you kick the door open with the toe of your boot and your spare hand flicks the light on, and you blink a couple of times, the bathroom lights blinding you slightly since they’re the only actually bright lights in the entire motel room. Tossing the towel onto the counter of the sink, you run a hand through your hair, groaning.

beginning to strip, taking off the pearl snap shirt, running your fingers in-between the seams, and hearing the snaps pop open, and the shirt begins to feel loose around your torso and shoulders. you see yourself out of the corner of your eye in the mirror, seeing the anti-possession tattoo sitting right above your heart, and that frown from earlier comes back. yes, you’re glad you have it, but at the same time, you wish you didn’t need it. but for now, you shrug the black shirt off your shoulders and down your arms, and the fabric drops to the floor in a heap at your boots. man you look like shit. soon your belt comes off, pulling it through the belt loops and letting it be the next thing to fall to the tile of the bathroom floor.

once whatever you were wearing has been stripped off of you, and all you see in the mirror is just an expanse of skin, covered in scars and red and purple bruises that are just beginning to bloom all across your torso. you knew the hunt had been messy and rough, but you weren’t expecting to be so banged up at the end of it, and with a sigh, you tear your gaze away from the mirror and you start the shower, giving the water enough time to heat up so when you step in you don’t get temperature shock.

warm steam begins to flood the space of the bathroom, the mirror growing foggy, and water starts to bead on your skin, running down each sharp and toned curve of your body. as you move, slowly stepping into the shower and the warm water runs down each plane of your skin, through your hair, and down. you hear the bathroom door open, and you know that it’s dean— who else would it be? and your thoughts are only confirmed by the sound of a belt being unbuckled and clothing dropping to the floor loudly.

while you’re scrubbing the blood, dirt and grime from your skin, running your hands all over your face, neck and shoulders, cleaning everything you can off of yourself— dean slips in the shower behind you, and you can tell from just how his hands go to immediately run through your hair, pulling it out of your face and slicking it back on top of your head. “you gonna let me help you, baby?” dean murmurs next to your ear, his other hand going to rest on your stomach while the other stays where it was and continues to card fingers through your hair, his nails soothingly scratching your scalp. goddamn it, he knows how to get you to agree to anything.

“yeah, sure, you can help i guess..” you sigh the words out, giving dean the all-clear to help you wash up, and you already know that you'll end up washing him off unless he says otherwise. and slowly you begin to feel his hands pull off and away from your body. and when they come back and begin to run all across your skin, they’re soapy and rough, trailing over your body with a practised motion, mapping out each part of you again and again every time you two shower together.

by the end of it, you’re both clean of any remnants of the hunt. his hair is sticking to his forehead, and he’s smiling at you like he’s seeing you for the first time again. standing in front of each other, and all you can do is stare at him, into those beautiful eyes of his. you’re almost jealous of how attractive he is, but it all sifts away when you remember that he’s all yours, and you couldn’t be happier. “you know, dean.. i love you.” your words grow quieter and quieter when you finally kiss him. it’s nothing like the kisses you two share at the bar after a good hunt, those ones are so visceral, all tongues and teeth. but this one is soft, meticulous and sweet, like you have all the time in the world. and hell, you just might.

dean’s hands go up and cup your cheeks, his eyes fluttering shut, and he kisses you back. these moments aren’t common enough, both of you know it, but when you get a chance and you’re like this— standing in the shower together with the water still beating down on your back, your eyes closed and your lips against his, you’re reminded of how nice the sweet, small and gentle things in your relationship. but when you both pull away, you stare at him with a look of admiration and love. “i love you too, baby. now let’s get out’a the water, yeah?”

slowly, you nod, stepping back and away from dean, pushing the shower knob in, you feel the water slowly stop. stepping out of the shower and over the edge of it, you turn your head over your shoulder and smile at dean, catching his eyes, and he smiles back at you softly. even through the foggy glass of the shower wall, you can see his smile lines, and goddamn it, he’s so sweet it might give you cavaties.

you grab the towel you had thrown onto the counter, and you run it over your face, wiping the water off yourself slowly and surely while you begin to dry your entire body off. dean’s right next to you, he pulled a towel from the cabinet, and he’s doing the same as you— drying off his entire body, from his shoulders to his hips, and then his legs. and each movement is slow and exhausted, but still eager at the prospect of being able to go to bed clean and dry.

once all is well and done, and dry, dean is the first to leave the bathroom, going to search for something to put on to sleep in, but you’re still stuck staring at yourself in the mirror, like you’ve never seen your own face before. slowly, you trace one of your hands over a scar on your lip, remembering how you got it— from some stupid fuckin’ ghoul that you failed to properly kill on one of your first hunts as a little kid. it’s not your favourite memory, and it reminds you that you were always doomed to become a hunter, but maybe it’s not so bad with dean as your hunting partner and your lover.

you finally pull yourself away from the mirror and out of the bathroom, and when you walk into the main area of the motel room where dean was carelessly getting dressed, you just stare at his back for a momentck for a moment— seeing the red lines on his skin from your nails yesterday night that just refused to fade, and you laugh softly to yourself as you remember how the night went, but rather than say anything to dean, you just whistle a cat-call and grin at him when he turns around and all he sees is your entire body naked with a cocky smile on your lips.

but all you do is step closer and closer, reaching past him to let him continue getting dressed, and you grab a shirt from his duffle and a pair of shorts from your own bag. you tug the shirt on over your head and hair, which is still wet, and the shirt fits comfortably on your shoulders and loose around the neck— and only then do you realise it’s dean’s mangled led zeppelin shirt, and you smile to yourself.

soon enough, you’re both dressed and just staring at each other under the awful lighting of the room, but damn if he doesn’t look good. “did y’really have to go ‘n take my nice shirt, baby?” dean huffs, crossing his arms and just staring at you, his eyes raking up and down your body. “are you complaining, dean? and ‘nice’ is an overstatement, this shirt looks like it lost a fight to a werewolf.” you respond, equally snarky but without his drawl, and he looks appalled at you for even saying that, but he just grumbles, huffs and walks over to the bed, setting some of the books down onto the floor and he gives you a look, one you don’t yet know.

“c’mon, i’m tired ‘n i know you are too.” and dean’s right, both of you are exhausted after today, and the warm shower only made you more eager to sleep. so you walk over to him, watching him get up onto the bed, and you follow suit.

slowly, the two of you crawl into the bed, shuffling under the covers and past the books and hearing them drop and clatter to the floor with loud thuds when they hit the wooden panelling. while dean makes himself comfortable with his back pressed against the headboard, you’re tucked next to his side, and his arm slung around your shoulder, and the back of your head near his collarbone. this had to have been the best way to relax.

while dean clicks through the tv channels with one irritated grumble after another, he continues to flick through one after another, and random clips of shows and movies fill the room before dean clicks to another one. “wait, dean—” you go and point at the screen right before he flicks through it. he had gone past an actually okay movie, which is rare when you’re looking around tv channels for anything good to watch. and he skipped past the 1978 halloween movie, which is practically criminal to you, because out of all the old and messy slasher movies from the late ‘70s, this had to be one of the better ones.

“go back a channel,” you spoke quietly— you didn’t need to be loud, not when it’s just you and dean hidden away in a motel room. “man, you’re feelin’ demandin’, huh?” he responds to you in kind and with that signature ‘dean winchester’ snark that had you enamoured the moment you met him, but he does go back a channel for you, and when he sees one of the scenes from halloween, his groan makes you smile. “this movie is awful, hun.” he muttered and you elbow him in the ribs for his comment. “shut up, dean.”

dean chuckles at you while you try and hit him, he just pulls you closer and sets the remote down with a smile on his lips. “as you wish, your majesty.” dean sighs dramatically and he pulls the covers a little higher up on the two of you while you settle in closer, finally being at some state of calm after the messy night. you turn your eyes to the movie to watch the cheesy horror flick until the next one on the channel plays— or until you fall asleep on top of your boyfriend. either works in the end.

@ cryingdew

[toaarcan]

I'm not wading into CR God Discourse this week, shit seems especially angry this time around and I've made my thoughts on that pretty clear already (no, the needle hasn't moved any). But man... I do not vibe with Predathos as an individual at all.

Like, the fights themselves were fantastic. Possessed Imogen was great, Imogen's escape leading to it turning into a more monstrous form was great, its evolution into an N64 "Head and Hands" monster for Phase 2 was great, and the fight in E120 was immaculate, I had so much fun watching it.

But man does Predathos itself, as an entity, disappoint.

Like, we have this eldritch monster from beyond all living memory, that's been imprisoned for thousands of years. It's been trying to find a way out ever since then. But all it does once it does get out is roar and attack things. Its characterisation can be summed up with "Hungy."

The campaign's earlier episodes present it as a terrible, horrifying thing, that the gods and primordials united to imprison. Its presence created the Ruidians, not by artifice but because being in its presence heavily mutated everything on the moon. They used to be regular Exandrian mortals and now they're not! And when Ludinus first made contact with it, it destroyed and permanently blighted an entire city. But apparently now it's no danger at all to anyone else. The Primordials were just doing the gods a favour by imprisoning it, I guess.

And the way it's been presented in these last two episodes is just inconsistent between story and gameplay. "It doesn't see mortals, it only sees the gods" but it has no issues having a full two-phase boss battle with a group of mortals, where it makes strategic and deliberate moves against them. "The Ruiner flees at the mere sight of it within Imogen, and the gods and all their celestial creations are helpless against it" but Braius can smite it and the Matron's boons can turn the tide and the Arch Heart's bottled Meteor Swarm is used to kill it.

Gameplay!Predathos can see mortals well enough to fight them, and has no trouble eating them. Lore!Predathos can't see them at all, and only wants to eat the gods. Gameplay!Predathos can be blasted with divine power and divine weapons and divine magic and it will be beaten. Lore!Predathos is totally immune to divine anything.

Predathos doesn't feel like a coherent character design for a game, it feels like a plot device designed to result in the exact end-stage scenario of E120. The gods can't fight it, so they and their followers have to do whatever BH says, because the alternative is them dying anyway. It has no desire to eat mortals so that there's no negative consequences to releasing it, just ignore Molaesmyr and how dramatically it's mutated the Ruidians (reshaping pre-existing life is only bad if the gods do it I guess). But none of this factors into the actual fight with it, where it has no problems seeing and eating mortals, and it can't no-sell divine power. And the fight was fun as hell, but Predathos' mechanics as an RPG Final Boss Monster do not reflect Predathos' in-lore role as the consequence-free invincible deicide machine.