#the natural progression of all things

[lonely-space-ace]

ok but imagine being Yaz and you fall in love with the Doctor but it doesn’t work out bc the Doctor cant stay anywhere for too long and also won’t talk about her feelings to save her life

and then the next regeneration of that person settles down to live with another family for years, in the same city as you, less than a day after you said goodbye forever

and then the NEXT regeneration after that talks about his feelings CONSTANTLY. Gives all the info on Gallifrey and their parents and the time lords and all of it DAY ONE.

I would go insane

[poppytuft]

the bear s3 spoilers

below the cut! thinking about claire and stuff we saw this season re: carmy/syd/the restaurant/donna, just finished the season so itll be a mess and also im comin in way too hot on this so my bad

sometimes...... sometimes i believe you guys are all watching different tv. im not sure how this season didnt feel like a direct through line from s2?? and im not sure WHY everyone is SO MAD about claire LITERALLY "haunting" this season. girl. come on. we need to have a sit down talk about how the berzatto generational trauma is the real meat of this show (this will make sense, just trust me). thats the MAIN EMOTIONAL POINT. syd's relationship with her dad, marcus and his mom, richie and evie, even tina and louie are all examples of parental relationships that are tender, sweet, supportive, etc. these are INTENTIONAL!! by creating these relationships we see PLAINLY how fucked donna is and how much she fucked up all of these kids. thats why "ice chips" was such a FANTASTIC episode. there was SO MUCH unpacked, so much revealed, so much worked through with sugar and her but at the end of the day she's still learning how to unlearn all of this horrific narcissistic bullshit. SHES STILL UNLEARNING THOUGH. thats where fucking DONNA of all people sits right now——somehow, she's learning how to heal. EVERYONE IS LEARNING. that's also what is so important about that episode.

now lets look at carmy. in "ice chips" we are LITERALLY told about how each berzatto is born: mikey fighting against the idea of being alive at all, nat into a quiet, soothing room, and CARMY is fucking born into EVERYONE SCREAMING and ARGUING and FIGHTING. we are BLATANTLY told that all carmy has ever known is HELL and all he's ever known how to communicate is through exploding. this is so violently against what we also know about his personality from childhood in "fishes" (anxious growing up, arts-oriented, had a hard time making friends). now, he works a violently stressful job, processing the trauma from both his mother (and chef fields [joel mchale], realistically) through the high-stress environment.

NOW. ENTER CLAIRE.

HOW is she not fascinating to you all. we don't see her whole story (because the bear, duh) but we are given just enough pieces here to put together that her story runs parallel to carmy's. how are you not getting this. walk with me.

claire. glasses, nerdy, quiet, sweet, girl next door. family friend! cute, but considered mid for a long time by everyone at school, but suddenly the berzatto men all badger carm, "oh she got a glow up, oh shes looking for you, she wants to see you," etc etc etc. what happened in between?

she finds herself. she finds the stressful thing she LOVES, which is the hospital. her job is objectively more stressful than carmy's (illustrated by that scene earlier in the season but i forgot the episode, where claire talks about the girl who got her shit wrecked by the glass table), and while we don't have an exact understanding of what her home life was like, we understand that her and carmy both have a level of internal anxiety that thrives on the stress of their careers. HOWEVER, claire does it because she loves it. carmy just doesn't know how to stop.

this is what makes claire feel like "peace" to carmy——because her high-stress job is a choice, an active choice she is making because it fulfills her. it's not to prove her dead brother wrong, or to honor his own legacy, or to prove that dickbag boss wrong, or to leave a mark on the world, or to make her own life worthwhile, or to prove that she doesn't need anyone else. she genuinely enjoys helping people even when the days are stressful, or scary. he's obsessed with this. he wants to know how she does this. every day she leaves that stress at home——and he wants to learn how to do that too.

claire is VITAL to this season and to understanding carmy's stress——and how far back he is in his healing process. it should only become more and more apparent, as we see characters like tina (the beef/the bear became vital to her success/development as a chef AND person, both for the people AND her love of food), marcus (not hiding his grief, but using it to help rationalize how much his mother loved him and wanted to be surrounded by people that love him), and richie (finding a purpose through service/expo and understanding he can start over again) push through their own traumas and struggles to become better people. if donna can be not only present at sugar's bedside during labor, but WELCOMED at this point in the show, it makes carmy's inability to heal all the more present. claire is an important part of this puzzle: she helps us see a window into a world where carmy is balanced emotionally, but unbalanced professionally, because he has no idea how to make the two coexist.

however, the idea that he can be balanced emotionally at all is so fucking enticing——with the help of someone who experiences stress in the same way as him (and who is familiar with his familial trauma), he has the opportunity to grow up and move on from his family trauma and wounds perpetuated by the industry he works in.

on the flip side of this....... his inability to process any of this is starting to impact syd. and frankly, that's some bullshit. his lack of communication, inability to community build/trust ANYONE, and his violent stubbornness is pushing her into the same space that he was in under chef fields, in a much slower, more subtle manner, and for slightly different reasons. her panic attack at the end of the season could read in two directions to me: her stress over the responsibility of changing so many people's lives has boiled over once she remembered that the beef once was truly great (hey five star review on the fridge!), OR, she realizes how much she isn't in it for the food. fuck a Michelin star: she wants to cook with her family. chef terry says at the end of "forever", in the garage with carmy, that she's so grateful she got to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, where she wanted, with the people she wanted to do it with. sydney is so close to having those things at the bear——but carmy's dysfunction is keeping it just out of arms reach. the two of them are now on opposite sides of the approach from last season: syd dying for a star, and carmy dying to cook for the woman he loved. now, carmy is hungy for recognition again, desperate to prove something, and sydney is remembering (thanks to the conversation with other chefs during the ever funeral service) why she loved cooking in the first place. so this leaves us to wonder: should she stick it out? for the people? or make something of herself? is she carmy, or is she terry? i guess we will just have to see.

all this to say: every character is connected. the bear is a show about family, found and blood, and the choices we make for, with, and because of the people we love, for better or for worse. food is only the center of it, because it's the center of all of our lives. you can't hate claire without understanding where she sits in the web of the berzatto family. and really, you can't hate her if you understand what her presence means for carmy, for syd, and the restaurant as a whole.

[koetjingwarrd]

You're my baby, say it to me...

[icewindandboringhorror]

sneepy cozy time....

[six-of-cringe]

"haha wylan walks in on jesper kissing the wrong guy" yes funny but moving on, have you ever wondered why Wylan was up there in the first place. Because the last he'd seen of Jesper was him being yelled at by Colm to explain what was going on or Colm would "tan your hide so bad you won't be able to sit down for two weeks". Everyone else finds Jesper getting full government-named very funny, but to Wylan this threat would not seem empty - that is just what happens when sons make mistakes. Consider that he wanted to check on Jesper, to see if he was alright, because though it's not really addressed directly, the story gives us several moments of Wylan not trusting Colm and trying to "protect" Jesper from him. Wylan had been isolated to the point where he only knew one father-son relationship, or even one relationship at all, which was between him and Van Eck. Why would he trust Colm? Maybe he just wandered into the room for a silly plot convenience, but I think he was there to assess the damage and be there for Jesper in case the thing that happens between fathers and their sons happened to him.

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[codacheetah]

Homunculus

[theskymother]

i love stealing other people's den ideas and putting them in my own den

[saltydoesstuff]

Every Universe

"I love you." She uttered, barely above a whisper. "I love you in every universe." "Do we end up together in every universe?" He asked. "No," She replied, and the painful memories of those life times flashed behind her beautiful eyes as she reflected to the 'back then's. Yet, she smiled, "But I love you anyway, how could I not? My soul yearns for you, even before it had come to know you. It remembers, I remember." "Does it hurt?" She was silent for a moment, "A lifetime without you hurts more then a lifetime when we are not together." "I love you." He blurts out unthinkingly, desperate. He reaches out for her hand, taking it and holds it in both hands in a grounding grip. She looked down at their hands and smiled, relishing in the bitter sweetness. "I know." She confesses quietly. She held his hand tightly, trying to ignore the buzzing within her body- threatening to tear her apart atom by atom. "But you aren't mine. Not this time."

[kareenvorbarra]

upset about arnheid vinlandsaga again today so i reread some of her scenes and i'm still marveling at how well her storyline was executed. i have literally no complaints about how the author handles her situation; even her death doesn't feel like she was done wrong by the narrative (though i would be more invested if she was still alive). she has real interiority and complex motivations and she's written with such delicasy and sympathy that you can tell that the author understands her. basically every other character in this arc can be judged by how they treat arnheid - thorfinn and einar's ride-or-die solidarity for a fellow slave who has treated them both with kindness, snake clearly seeing her as a person despite his respect for the status quo and anger over the deaths of his men, the petty cruelty of ketil's wife (which could never escalate to the level of what ketil is capable of), ketil treating her relatively well as long as she dedicates herself entirely to his pleasure and then beating her to death in a rage when she tries to escape with another man

lots of characters judge her harshly for her actions (to ketil's wife she's ungrateful, to snake's men she's spoiled and selfish, to ketil she's a traitor) but the protagonists never do. thorfinn respects her resilience and pragmatism in the face of suffering, understands on some level the violence she's endured. einar values her friendship, he asks her what she wants and does everything he can to help her with whatever she chooses to do. they refuse to leave her behind in a war zone when she might be dying. they steal her from a man who will surely hurt her again if she lives. she's an ordinary woman, suffering a very brutal but mundane kind of violence, and for a little while she's the most important character in this story.

[puhpandas]

getting into ben 10 is so sad bc I binge the entire OS and am like wow cant wait for more and then every other series doesnt have the things I liked about OS and even casual fans online say that 10yo Ben's character in OS is more compelling than all the others but theres barely any of him after OS

[roguemonsterfucker]

Didn't expect to learn about the forced sterilization of black women while playing theHunter but here we are

[umemiyan]

people will be like “omg body positivity <3 you’re beautiful you would be loved you just the way you are <3” and then criticize individuals who shave their vaginas

[tracle0]

✨Good day and happy STS!✨

so I read through an ask about your colors story (such a cool concept btw 👏) and I was curious about the White mage: Elan!

if it’s not too much trouble, could you tell me more about them? Anything, really, take this as a chance to ramble!

have a lovely day ✨

Happy STS :)!!! Ah, thank you!!!! I like,,,,, colours,,,,

Oh jesus christ Elan Soot. Yes I can tell you about Elan Soot. They are one of the biggest freaks I have ever created. Buckle in.

They're the only survivor of a very very very painful and delicate procedure, and although the procedure technically failed (they were meant to come out able to control all colours), they're still hailed as a success of some kind. Scientific miracle, if you will.

A very very very lonely and tormented scientific miracle.

See, as a white mage, they're. Very keyed into the other pigments and colours around them, all the time. It's not something they can easily ignore.

To manage this, when they're allowed to, they bleach colours out with their, uh. Very corrupted magic.

See, when a normal mage pulls colour from an object, it leaves the object white, sure, but simply... stripped of pigments white. When Elan does it, the pigments remain, but warped, changed, and hijacked. I can't say if it's stable or not. These changed pigments resist re-dying, so once they've got changed an item... it won't change back.

However, notably, they're not always allowed to do this. Quite often, they're denied this by the person who made them this way - Bernadette Blackling.

This control and command is all psychological - she's not a mage, she can't do anything to really stop them... but she has twisted their perspective of themselves and the world and those they loved to benefit her entirely. They're a trembling, furious mess, and she has them wrapped around her finger, ready to move at her command.

(This is not a problem for her in the plot at all, not even once).

Elan is a gardener! To relax, they like to be around plants, to nourish and grow them. These days, that means existing in a petrified, albino garden, maintained and adjusted entirely by them.

When they get upset, they have a habit of destroying this garden and sobbing in the remains. That image always hurts my heart a little.

Anyway! Thank you for the ask and hope you have a wonderful day too :) Here is a picture of them, for the road.

[raylangivins]

every single queen bee mean girl in a teen movie and teen drama is a lesbian to me by the way.

[teenagefeeling]

hmmm i don't have any desire to be pregnant ever myself, but it feels extremely rude to refer to it as "terrifying body horror" even if ur being facetious like. pregnant people are not scary monsters omg