#the irony was so delicious

[chaos0pikachu]

lol yuan was really like "yes I AM in love with qian but this ain't about him"

[trappedinafantasy37]

I went to a very old save of mine in which I knocked out Minthara in Act 1 and I talked to her again in the throne room. If you knocked her out, this is how she looks at you when she questions you:

She seems genuinely disturbed over your actions. Can you blame her? You were the one who knocked her out. You brought her harm for reasons that she cannot understand. She can understand someone killing her as that is what she expects of those around her. She will criticize your choice of sparing an enemy and showing mercy to someone you have greater reason to kill. Even though she has doubts about you, she shuts herself down, thinking she should be more grateful rather than doubtful of you.

You can tell her that you saw her as a potential ally, but she will call you a hypocrite as Gut and Ragzlin were not shown the same mercy, nor was any other True Soul.

You can even tell her, "You were simply too stubborn to die" as a means of trying to take any culpability off yourself. To try to turn the situation into a little jokey joke. However,

Minthara does not take it as a compliment and she knows you are full of shit. Even though you took the "good" path, she does not trust you.

Minthara understands mercy and even she believes some people are deserving of it. Sadly, she does not see herself as one of those people and is disturbed as to why you gave her mercy. There is no answer you can give her here that will make her trust you. She knows you went out of your way to spare her and only her, and that frightens her.

Remember, this is not the first time in which Minthara's entire army was killed right from underneath her and she was deliberately left as the sole survivor. Orin slaughtered all of her men in a blink of an eye, and Orin's "mercy" only brought her pain and torture. Later down the road, Minthara criticizes herself for not paying more attention to Orin when she first arrived at Moonrise. And so she is giving you a lot of attention, she is watching you, studying you, because she fears that you are going to hurt her the moment she takes her eye off you. Because you already have. Your "mercy" gave her a concussion, your deception had her found guilty of incompetence, and she was then subjected to even more torture by the Absolute in which she was given permanent brain damage. She is afraid that the only reason that you spared her, is because you want to torture her. Even when you show up in Moonrise and enter into her mind prison, she is expecting you to kill her and begs you do it quickly. She is not expecting mercy from you, only death. She is only in that predicament because of you. Why would she think for a single second that your mercy comes from a place of good intentions?

She knows fully well that she owes her life to you and that her life is entirely at your mercy, one you can revoke at any time. She doesn't trust you, she doesn't trust the rest of the companions, but she cannot leave nor walk away. There is no good way out of this for her and she's afraid of the cycle repeating. She is not going to make the same mistake again. Instead of her oath to you being from a place of affection, her oath to you comes from a place of fear.

[umihoshi]

couldn't find my favorite scene of Lost Small World anywhere, so guess I'll have to do it myself!

"Yataaaa~~....."

[vaguely-concerned]

during the last solas regret memory, when you choose the sad option (he loved her and blamed her) and rook says: "when the other gods struck her down, he destroyed the elven empire to avenge her," they seem to be looking right at lucanis. (who is also the next person to speak and seems to be meeting their gaze during that). there are some times when the staging of a scene makes me feel slightly unfairly rewarded for being a lucanis romancer haha. (or rather unfairly rewarded for having the kind of unhinged brain I do while being a lucanis romancer, maybe.) guess who pretty consistently gets to sit at rook's right hand in most of the scenes where everyone is at the dinner table too :) just little lucanis privileges

[sugarpasteltmnt]

PASTEL WHEN I CATCH YOU PASTEL-

DONT THINK YOU CAN JUST DROP A NEW CHAPTER AND PEACEFULLY GO SLEEP AFTERWARDS AS IF NOTHING HAPPENED

(though sleep is important I hope you slept well :))

where was I-

oh right

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

THE PARALLELS-

ok you put the brothers parts in the same order that Leo stole their masks in. Not only that, you put them in the same spots where they first encountered each other. This- th- ow. it's 4 I'm supposed to be awake in an hour don't do this to me.

Neon Void is now running around in my head again I hope you know. J- that chapter was amazing I don't think there are enough words in the English language to express how amazing this whole fanfic has been.

Now allow me to curl up in a dark corner and just. cry about what I just read.

TEEHEE TYSM

[ohhgingersnaps]

re: generative AI companies throwing an absolute fit over DeepSeek potentially incorporating ChatGPT outputs into its training set

[therighthandofvengeance]

do you enter the dreaming, or does the dreaming enter you?

[keitheaverage]

Vexus in an episode of MLaaTR: One day, XJ9, you will join the Cluster Family!

Me, a Jenny/Vega truther:

[grimark]

rotating in my mind the very real possibility that after missy regenerated into spymaster, one of the very first things to happen to spymaster might have been meeting nardole.

[redheadedfailgirl]

Heaven help us, my hyperfixation on cooking and baking and doing things that go in mouths n make people go mmmmmm is back. Anyone dating me is going to think I have a feederism kink but I swear making tasty food for beautiful women just makes my brain go zoom

[jupiterjunebug]

I think they should do a promo spot of the bucks trying to have a vent sesh at hangman abt how horrible and unfair it is that kenny chose jericho over them and adam just looks them both in the eyes and pops the maximum amount of ibuprofen for his weight class and goes yall know i almost died, right?

[iturbide]

I find the things where Robin IS Grima in some way (literally or reincarnated, etc) to be kind of funny because its like yeah, you succeeded in bringing your god back but you also made them their enemy XD

In all fairness, depending on how you view Grima's relationship with the Grimleal Cult in the game, this is true whether it's a possession scenario or a reincarnation one.

[girlspecimen]

i am so truly obsessed w the breed of new age hipster that just wears normal ass clothes in muted colors and takes random pictures of themselves w their buddies but its like with a sort of shitty camera and it gets posted with a brief esoteric caption. like i truly love how cool they think they are i wish i could live that way its so chuunibyou

[shallowseeker]

re your carmen-silvia-amara post: i was talking to a mutual about carmen the other day and we were discussing where her name comes from. and i suggested the opera carmen and she suggested the model carmen electra. and now you suggested carmen 1983, which is very interesting!! that carmen has this pop culture track of being the hot and fun ideal woman. i don't think it's a coincidence they picked that name for her 👀

It's also a portmanteau of CAR-MEN. Two of the things Dean loves the most. 😏

//

I kid, I kid. I love this, though @fivefeetfangirl. Lots of pop culture swirling around this unobtainable idea of the proper dream-girl, huh?

The model Carmen Electra (and, idk why but that makes me think of Elektra by extension):

//

The opera CARMEN (1875)

//

Carmen 1983 - (A dancers' troupe take on the opera; vibes like Baby & Swayze from Dirty Dancing but with their real lives taking on the ironic beats of the opera)

//

There are so many takes looping back around to the Carmen opera. And another 1984 Carmen based more closely on the opera you mentioned, too, for what it's worth. :-)

///

Interestingly, Sylvia Jones functions as a reverse of the opera Carmen. Connor is her Carmen, who she kills out of jealousy. (And narratively, the Dean-and-Cas unit, like I said in this ask, functions as a committed, non-idealized foil to the Dean-and-Carmen ideal!)

On the flipside, Dean functions as Chuck and Amara's Carmen. Chuck, according to Lilith, was psychosexually obsessed with Dean. And Amara, according to Chuck, "wanted Dean to care about her, but humans let you down every time."

In the end, the things Dean cares about are the things Chuck specifically wants to kill. Friends, family, romantic attachments, comrades, you name it! He only resurrects them if (a) Dean becomes too uninteresting without them or (b) it can lead to further torment.

In season 11, when Chuck wraps himself in Dean's dead-guy robe and overfocuses on Dean's skin-deep performances, we see that, in parallel to Amara, Chuck doesn't really know Dean at all.

(Compare to Mary and Jack, two others who get wrapped in the gray MoL robe, and who understand Dean a little too well. And of course, Dean wraps Cas in a similarly-styled gray blanket in season 11.)

To Chuck, Dean is just a symbol of psychosexual obsession. Dean is as ghostly and unreal to Chuck as the djinn-Carmen was to Dean!

ADDENDUM: Lily Sunder is Ishim's Carmen.

[thedragonagelesbian]

ive stumbled into breaking cyrus' oath a couple of times & wussed out of it bc knowing the full scope of the choice in question, it didn't feel in character (ie not telling arabella that her parents are dead-- after the game told me earlier that she wasn't ready to hear it yet), but now i've done it by using the special barbarian dialogue option when judging madeline (telling her she should've fought back & calling her a coward) and being complicit in he who was' bullshit and........ im kind of compelled by it tbh i think there is a tension between cyrus becoming less trusting & forgiving and his oath of devotion, and i love a narrative beat around penance (even if... the actual mechanical price of atonement really boils down to just some gold)

[squirrelno2]

I did threaten to do some jatp oc posting sooooo

(I'm thinking about a series of small pieces about Willie meeting various HGC ghosts - let me know if you're into this?)

Willie met Genevieve when he decided to experiment with trampolines. He was disappointed to find that he couldn't jump on them, not without a lot more effort than was worthwhile, but when he emerged from underneath the trampoline he saw a woman sitting at the top of the silks hanging on the other end of the circus's rehearsal space like she did it all the time. He paused, hoping he was about to see a show.

Then she turned her head and saw him, and he realised that she was probably dealing with the same issue he'd found with the trampoline.

"Let me guess," Willie called. "You're falling through."

She scowled, slipping into the silks and falling a few feet before she caught herself.

"Go away," she said.

"Have you been dead long?" Willie couldn't help but ask. It was a familiar kind of stubbornness on her face. Lots of new ghosts looked like that when they tried to cling to life.

"I'm not dead!" she snapped, struggling to climb back up.

"Are you like a superhero, then? There's only so many options."

She appeared on the floor, face bright pink with fury. With an angry swipe of her wrist across her eyes, she turned towards Willie.

"You shouldn't be here."

"Maybe. But who's gonna stop me?" He raised his arms gleefully. He wasn't about to touch the whole "I'm not dead" thing, but maybe he could ease her into understanding that death wasn't the end of the world.

"What if you mess with something here? People can get hurt on this equipment!"

Willie looked up at the silks, then at the ghost in front of him.

"I'm always careful," he said. "No bouncing or climbing when lifers are here. I know that."

"Lifers," she repeated. She looked steadier now, though her eyes were still bright and watery. "What are you, the circus ghost?"

Willie resisted the urge to say that was probably her.

"Just visiting," he said. "But I know a place where the silks won't let you down."

The woman rubbed the back of her neck.

"Really," she said flatly.

"Yeah, this guy Caleb has a fancy nightclub - old style, where they put on shows and do jazz dance. I never used to know anything about shows before him, but it's pretty cool."

She looked him up and down, frowning.

"You're just a kid," she said. Willie stood a little taller. "How long have you been -"

She didn't finish the sentence.

"Dead? Yeah, it's been a couple decades. You're really new to this, huh?"

She reached up, pulling her hair out of its ponytail and retying it.

"I guess telling you I'm not dead was a giveaway," she said when she'd finished.

"Hey, we all have moments like that," Willie said. "But it's easier to get used to it all when you're not alone. Wanna come check it out?"

She turned, looking behind her at the silks she couldn't use. She rubbed her neck again.

"I guess it couldn't hurt."

Willie grinned and spun, flinging his arms wide.

"Just wait," he said. "Caleb knows everything there is to know about the afterlife. You'll be back up there in no time."

She laughed softly.

"What's your name?" she asked. "Are you... Alone?"

"I'm Willie," he said. He knew the look on her face pretty well, and decided to head her off at the pass. "And it's not like it would be a good thing if a ghost like me had any family around, you know? That's the thing about all this, you kinda have to make a new one. And not look at us teenagers like we're kids."

"Right," she said. "Decades."

Willie nodded, glad she understood. He wanted to make sure all the ghosts at the club felt like family, but that didn't mean he was looking for some kind of parent.

"I'm Genevieve," she said. "Thanks for this."

"Hey," Willie said. "We gotta stick together."

Genevieve smiled.

"I guess death is like performing that way," she said. "Just... Tell me the need for unions isn't so pressing."

"Don't worry," Willie laughed. "You'll be fine."