#surprising no one

[blue-mood-blue]

I’ve grown to appreciate the aus where Shen Yuan enters the story as “Shen Yuan” - same name, probably similar face, generally able to interact with PIDW as himself and change the story through his added presence. I like the sense of “if only you’d been here, things might have been better the first time around” of it all.

And I was thinking, it’s a funny coincidence in that scenario that someone named Shen Yuan gets put into… another Shen Yuan. What are the chances? What a weird twist of fate that Airplane would pick out the name that his most dedicated critic could slip into seamlessly.

What about a version where it’s not coincidence at all?

Airplane goes to school with a kid named Shen Yuan. He’s prickly and hard to approach and a little intense, but Airplane is persistent. In fairness, Airplane is relentless - and maybe it’s a good thing that they end up being friends, because they’re a little too much for anyone else to handle. They balance each other out. They’re the “weird kids” in class and they’re okay with that, because even when they don’t have any words for it, they know they’re not like their classmates, not really. That’s okay; they don’t want to be.

Recesses and breaks are consumed with the elaborate stories that Airplane wants to tell, and all the holes Shen Yuan pokes into them. It’s not mean-spirited, though, even though Shen Yuan isn’t the kind to temper his words. It’s passionate. He cares about those stories the way Airplane cares about them, and it can’t be mistaken for anything else when they lean together conspiratorially across the lunchroom table. They’ve both got notebooks filled with details and characters and monsters. Shen Yuan’s practically got a whole bestiary sketched out in wobbly childhood attempts at art, entries fervently scrawled beside them. Airplane prattles out plots nonstop, always with the promise of shining eyes and being asked “what happens next?”

They come up with a whole world together. Airplane’s going to write about it someday. Shen Yuan is going to read every word.

Shen Yuan misses school. Shen Yuan starts missing school a lot.

Airplane goes to the hospital room instead. He doesn’t think to worry, because Shen Yuan is okay - that’s what he says. He looks okay, and he’s a kid, and it doesn’t feel real that anything bad should happen to a kid. He doesn’t think to worry. He doesn’t think to say goodbye.

It’s one of the older Shen brothers who catches him on the way up to the room one day, in the hallway just outside - snaps at him to go the fuck home, and when Airplane hesitates, pushes him into the elevator and tells him not to come back. “Tells” is a generous way to describe the way the words come out - a growl, a hiss, the sound an animal would make when a hand got too close to a wound.

(It’s not fair to name a villain after him, even if the name never really comes up in the story. He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d lost a brother minutes before, and he was getting his brother’s friend out of the way so he didn’t have to… see. It isn’t fair, but then, none of it is fair.)

Death feels very real after that.

The notebooks get shoved into a closet, and it’s not until Airplane’s moving out and one falls on him from a high shelf that he thinks about it again. He’s written things, lots of things, but nothing as ambitious as this - nothing as important. It could be good, he considers. He’d promised. Shen Yuan wanted to read it.

The problem was that no one else does, not for a long time, not until Airplane has whittled himself and his art into a corner and into such an unfamiliar shape that he has to wonder how it’s still his own face he sees in the mirror. He has to eat. He has to pay rent. Shen Yuan would yell at him, but Shen Yuan isn’t there to yell at him, and who cares. Who cares if it could have been better? The people who actually are here love it, and it’s paying his bills, and sometimes stories don’t go the way they’re supposed to and the world is fucking unfair. It doesn’t matter.

(It does. But he shoves that thought away along with styrofoam cups and soda bottles to the bottom of a garbage bag.)

Authors are not gods and their power is limited, but Airplane exercises just a sliver of what he’s been granted and gifts an inconsequential sort of immortality. He thinks about making him a rogue cultivator, maybe the kind that goes around documenting beasts and compiling his findings. He thinks about making him someone too powerful for death to touch, or too important to threaten, but when Airplane looks at the world he crafted and everything that’s become of it, it feels like the kindest thing he can do for Shen Yuan is a childhood where he’s loved, and a death that’s peaceful. What does it say about that world, that he’d kill off his best friend too early again instead of making him live there?

(The best writing he ever does is the only, shining moment of humanity that his scum villain ever displays: a lament about death that comes too early, about a brother gone too soon. The commenters praise him. The commenters flatter over how real the emotions feel. The commenters don’t get any response from Airplane on that chapter.)

Death is incredibly real when it comes for him too early, too, still hovering over his keyboard with the story technically finished and incredibly incomplete. Airplane could tell himself that’s because the written version can never be the version in the writer’s head, always shifting and with every possibility still on the table, but he knows better than that. The System knows better than that, with its condescending message about “improving” his writing and “closing plot holes” and “achieving his original vision”...

…and he’s a child again. He’s a child in his own story, he’s Shang Qinghua now without the benefit yet of a peak or cultivation or anything, and maybe he’s a little bitter, and a little scared, and…

And Shen Yuan - with longer hair, with robes, with a couple of older kids watching him from across the street, but undeniably the prickly little boy who used to sit down imperiously across from him and tell him everything that was wrong with the chuck of writing that had been handed to him last period, but with that smile that said he was only invested because he knew it could be better and they were going to make it better - marches up to him with a fire in his eyes and a frown that warns of a coming tirade.

“You told it wrong,” is the first thing he says.

Shang Qinghua wants to ask how him how he’s here, how this is possible, or maybe laugh because, yeah - yeah, Shen Yuan has no goddamn idea how wrong he got absolutely everything.

(Shang Qinghua wants to say “I missed you�� and “why did you leave so soon” but he’s here now. He’s right here.)

“I know,” he says instead. “I’m sorry. It all kind of… spiraled out of control.”

Shen Yuan frowns, but then it dissipates the way it always does, and his eyes shine with ideas the way they always used to. “That’s okay,” he relents, grabbing for his hand. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it what it was supposed to be.”

[strawlessandbraless]

I found out some new information recently that is relevant to the famous ‘horseplay’ scene in Merlin

BBC Merlin: A Family Show

[ex0rin]

Adult Language with Hughie | The Boys S04 Promo

[tealvenetianmask]

Enjoy some Blitz angst courtesy of me listening to The Mountain Goats a lot this week. I think these lyrics capture really powerfully the way it feels to want to reach out but have no idea where to start, especially when dealing with trauma and self-hatred.

When I try to open up to you, I get completely lost Houses swallowed by the earth, windows thick with frost And I reach deep down within, but the pathways twist and turn And there's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn

And I am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam And no emotion that's worth having could call my heart its home My heart's an autoclave (x)

(For anyone who can't access the video, the song is called "Autoclave," by the Mountain Goats)

[hiddentrails7]

Me: Oh hey, the FFVII obsession is returning! Maybe I'll finish 100%ing the og and Rebirth or write more or draw more or—

Cuts to me being chokeslammed by Vinveld (They make me sad)

[diazsdimples]

Putting forward my CV of Wants Kids Will Be Good Dad

I AM SO DAD SHAPED SOMEONE GIVE ME A BABY

[pagingdoctorbedlam]

Friend me in Arknights for FREE CZERNYS FOR LIFE.

[bonesblubs]

I can tell ur fond of a lot of characters but mu qing is your ‘just a little guy’

Yeah 😔

This may sound weird, but I actually relate to Mu Qing in a number of ways that i think would make some people in my life confused but makes sense to me- I have a hard time expressing my affection irl, especially physically. Often when I’m speaking genuinely to a friend it can sound flat or even sarcastic. I don’t know how to properly take a compliment and I freeze up when I’m touched without warning. People even close to me might call me reserved or cold in this area. I find it a lot easier to write out my feelings than to say them out loud. So asks like the ones that have been sent here have been a really nice outlet for being able to be open more with these things, and drawing Mu Qing has become a little bit of a therapeutic “if he can do it, you can too” kind of thing. I’m not nearly as vindictive or as aggressive as he is, but I think at its core the way we show our love is similar, and because of that it almost feels like my job to make him happy and figure out how to make those he loves happy in return.

[mail-me-a-snail]

the bass part to medic’s theme is so fun to play… i haven’t played bass in a minute but fiddling around and playing medic’s theme has been such a good time

YOU CAN PLAY BASS?!?!! THATS SO SICK‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ur epic as fuck

[draconicshinx]

I always knew fandom reception to astarion was going to be fucking wild but I was not ready for the way people act about ascended astarion

Like do whatever you want, I don't care, but I'm not sure how you missed the fact that killing 7000 people is the evil option

[lavenderjewels]

kenjaku fascinates me

[tanuki1029]

How does it take you thirty fucking years with a dead name like Owen fuck you even a cis fucking guy would hate that name but you keep it?????? Isabelle you IDIOT

[ameliadallon]

been getting big into incest lately

[incorrectgundamwingquotes]

Duo: We’re about to do the taser challenge, you want in?

Trowa: What is the taser challenge?

Heero: We taser each other then drink.

Trowa: ...How do you win?

Duo: What are you, a lawyer? You want in or not?

[this-fine-day]

Helluva Boss has the audacity to keep this deranged killer out of the Halloween merchandise??

💀🔥Whatever, I love Halloween, so I'll just make my own.

Though the other new Merch is definitely solid.