#the inherent tragedy...

[0dde11eth]

Jaskier creating a rumor that witchers can't taste honey and in fact, it's mildly poisonous to them. If you serve a witcher honey cakes or put some honey in their tea, they'll be forced to vacate the premises and will run away to heal.

This way people can "protect themselves from witchers, and banish them". And since the witcher can't taste the honey, the human is safe from retaliation! The monster hunter won't know who harmed them!

The rumor helps the witchers too. They can get a rare delicious treat, and a subtle warning that the humans are untrustworthy. If they taste honey, they should leave the town immediately as a Mob may form if they stay too long.

[critterbitter]

Introducing! ELESA, the new kid on the block! She's a tiny bedraggled child from Sinnoh and not all that familiar with Galarian, the spoken language in Unova. (One day she'll be amazing. Right now though, she just wants to go play in the mud. And maybe get a better set of hearing aids.)

When not bitterly lonely, she’s scheming to run back to her old home. Or chasing the local patrat. Or watching nervously from the sidelines as other children play on the swings. Oh elesa. (loosely inspired by @/noxstrages' incredible comics about elesa's origins! Ty for the food.)

Masterpost to my submas comics!

[sail-not-drift]

"I did not then, nor will I now, discuss the career of Dr. Cook in his later days. I am wholly unfamiliar with the facts which led to his imprisonment, and I have no desire to know them or have an opinion regarding them. Even had I known that he had been guilty of baser crimes than those with which he was charged, I would still have felt my duty and my inclination to be the same. Whatever Cook may have done, the Cook who did them was not the Dr. Cook I knew as a young man, the soul of honour and kindness, lion-hearted in courage." - Roald Amundsen, My Life As An Explorer (1927)

Graphic text from Not Easily Conquered by dropdeaddream and WhatAreFears. Photo citations in alt text.

[ceaselesswatchersspecialboy]

I need more people to see the MelJayVik vision. Please. Polyamory won’t save them but it can make them so much worse.

What is romance if not two God-like beings and their loser mortal boyfriend?

[aphelionatseven]

ferrari and her devoted predestined

the original painting is by Alméry Lobel-Riche, but the colors/lighting idea came entirely from the lovely @/cuarto_sol on twt

[lgbtlunaverse]

So I've said multipe times now (here and here) that thinking nmj is just so blinded by privilege he doesn't undertand that acting out of line gets people killed is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of his character that ignores the part where he's, you know, actively dying the whole time and thinks that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean I don't think privilege plays no role at all in how he views the world.

Specifically, his view that death (at least premature or violent death) means something.

Death isn't always a tragedy to NMJ, but it is always meaningful. If you kill an evil dangerous person for your righteous cause, that death had meaning. There was evil in the world and now there is less of it. Similarly, if you die in the pursuit of your righteous cause, that death has meaning, because the sheer dedication you gave to it that you were willing to die for it will further that cause, and your bretheren will be invigorated by your sacrifice to fight even harder.

If a death isn't meaningful, that's an injustice and it is up to the living to give it meaning. That's what cuts so deep about his father's murder. There were no consequences, no changes, no meaning. Wen Ruohan was just going to get away with it! He fights and wins an entire war to make it mean something, to make it so that the unjust murder of Nie Mingjue's father is part of Wen Ruohan's downfall.

But this is a view he can only hold because he's the kind of person who's death will be meaningful. Most ordinary people's deaths are meaningless. Not ontologically, not inherently, but they are made meaningless because no one cares. For death to be meaningful you either have to be so powerful that anything you risk your life for will be impacted in some way. (Like, say, if you sacrifice a long life for immense martial power in a faustian bargain with a blade) Or if people with that kind of power care enough about you to do so for you. For most people, this isn't true. A starving street kid has no power to change the unfair world that put them there, even if they risk their life trying, and no one will do it for them once they die.

Nie Mingjue knows this in abstract, and of course rightfully believes it's wrong. But all that does is make it yet another righteous cause people should be willing to die for. Everyone's deaths should mean something, we'll make it so or die trying!

This is what the conflict between nieyao is about at its core. Because Jin Guangyao, fundamentally, cannot conceive of his own death as meaningful. Nie Mingjue grew up around powerful men who could change the world but refuse to do so because god forbid they risk a single hair on their perfect heads. Meng Yao, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where no one of importance would blink twice if you died. He was surrounded by meaningless death. Indeed his entire early life is defined by that lack of care.

Meng Shi dies and no one cares. Meng Yao gets thrown off a flight off stairs and no one cares. He has to be the one to do the caring, and once he's gone no one else will do it for him.

So he has to live.

Jin Guangyao eventually gets far enough that he actually does aquire the power to change some things... as long as he's alive. If he changes too much, holds on too tightly to his ideals, he'll die and it'll all be for nothing. He can't sacrifice himself for his goals because doing so would immediately render those goals unobtainable. No one will care about what he tried to do. He won't be a heroic sacrifice, he'll just be trash that finally cleaned itself up.

And well... Nie Mingjue dies, and someone makes it mean something. Makes it mean so much that the entire story of mdzs would not exist without it. Jin Guangyao dies and it doesn't mean anything. Most people are glad to be rid of him, and the few that are not don't do anything to change that.

[athi816]

Ivan thinking his love was the most vile, most parasitic, but ended up being the only one to make his loved one happy with a bright future not held down by what he lost.

[inkyrainstorms]

Milestones

@aroace-get-out-of-my-face I sincerely and honestly wish you a very get exploded.

[sha-brytols]

i think that's the reason that one post that's like "there's literally a character in the comics that's exactly like the oghren yall are imagining in your heads" bothered me so much because um. oghren being a dwarf was kind of like the whole foundation of why his particular character arc was so compelling .

[mythalism]

having thoughts about the veil and people's bad faith interpretations about the desire to see it brought down as some sort of misled leftist bloodthirst for violent revolution instead of fulfillment of the fundamental role of trickster gods in mythology and storytelling and how there seems to be, in both fans and the developers, a misunderstanding or perhaps just a disagreement of how solas was supposed to function within the narrative as a force of nature vs. as a person. my adderall just kicked in

[paper-bag-arts]

the T in Trina stands for Tragedy

[windwenn]

feeling so normal about them rn dont even worry

[corsairspade]

I was going to say we need to be weirder about Maglor but then I remembered crablor. That’s on me. We need to also be DIFFERENT weird about Maglor.

Maglor who walks along the coast for thousands of years and does not stop singing. Maglor who after ages of the world have passed, has a voice that is made only for music. When he speaks, there is something too lyrical to the tone. He sighs and the world accompanies him. His raised voice sets the ground shaking, his laments call water like tears from the sky. He has to be careful when he speaks to people, however rare that is, because of it. He weeps and those who can hear him cannot help but weep as well. Maglor with a voice so powerful that he can no longer use it the way he could when the world was young. One more thing lost to the Oath.

[ant--tenna]

We need more mettatenna in Undertale verse, we need a human tv host Tenna somehow whooing the biggest monster TV show host Mettaton when he goes to the surface. Do you see my vision.

[minyard-05]

does anyone wanna hear about my kateaaron orpheus and eurydice thoughts

[butcharyastark]

the first thing you have to reckon with as a dadbastian stan is that the number one obstacle to it is sebastian his own damn self.