#the truth is in everyone and everything

[iomadachd]

What does your heart look like?

a tangled ball of red strings

Who are you without the company of others? You aren’t sure, but you know that you aren’t fond of whoever it is. You are an actor, a pretty face and a pleasant song. Many idolize you, or love you, but you can never be sure of how sincere it is. Your heart is buried under the letters they leave you, sealed with a kiss. It can’t be untangled from the red strings they’ve attached to you. You deserve to find something, someone, true and faithful to hold your heart in place. You don’t have to be everything to everyone.

tagged by: @demonstigma

tagging: People born in June, August, October, December, February, and April

[corpsentry]

pick your battles

[transmascutena]

the fact that he spends all his time grooming kids into believing they're mature enough to consent and then turns around to condescend to them about how young and stupid they are and how they actually don't understand anything makes my fucking blood boil. i need to kill him

[p4nishers]

with eddie confirming he only married shannon bc of chris and his disastrous relationship with ana i think it's pretty safe to say that he's gay. he is SO gay and i was right.

[n3ongold3n]

I wanted to draw sth completely different but my brain was like ''...what if... alkonost käärijä? It's perfect.''

[tornado1992]

Saw someone exploring the “Miles means gift from god” take. Magnificent.

Apparently something about the Chaos Emeralds creating Tails for Sonic, a “gift from god” in all its sense, I really want to see how this concept develops.

Now, kind of a previous concept here on my side, some think about the Chaos Emerals giving Sonic his little brother… have you heard about the Law of equivalent exchange?

Maybe the Emeralds didn’t create Tails, they didn’t give him to Sonic, but they did give Sonic unmeasurable power, a god’s gift, a way to change the world, and Sonic did change the world, he saved it.

That kind of power doesn’t come for free. He used that power. He has protected and saved countless lives over and over with that power. He saved the world with that power. The chaos emeralds gave him a literal divine gift, it’s only fair they take something as valuable from him isn’t it?

The Chaos Emeralds giving him Tails… What about the chaos emeralds taking him away?

[laulink]

Something that I don't often see in the "was Edelgard's war necessary" discourse is the interdependence between the Church and the nobility. The question is always framed such as "are Edelgard's reforms worth starting a war over" or "is the net result of the war positive or negative" or "did she need to invade the Kingdom and Alliance to do her thing or was she just a cold-hearted, power-hungry tyrant" and the arguments given for or against either side of the conflict very rarely includes this simple fact :

No reform is possible in Fodlan because the Church and nobility feed off of each other.

It doesn't matter whether or not the specific reforms Edelgard wants to implement deserve thousands of people to die for them (if such a thing is even objectively quantifiable) ; it doesn't matter what the "net result" of the war is (if you can even make an objective measure on that) ; it doesn't matter whether or not having the Kingdom and Alliance under her authority was necessary to make the reforms she wanted ; absolutely no reform, whatsoever, in any territory, could have been achieved and lasted with the Church still standing. Why ?

Because the Church and the nobility enforce each other's "divine right to rule" and neither wants to lose their power.

Rhea wants to keep Fodlan in stasis until she brings Sothis back. She's done that for a thousand years and will keep doing it for as long as she needs to. How did she do it ? By making the powerful (the Crest-bearing descendants of the Ten Elites) dependant on her. She made their strength (their Crest) dependant on properly following and supporting her Church, instilling in Fodlan's societies the belief that a family won't produce Crest-bearing heirs any longer if they oppose the Goddess. The Crests are therefore both a mark of the Goddess' favour, granting nobles their "divine right to rule", and a pair of shackles binding them to the Church. If the Church falls and the commoners don't believe in the Goddess any longer, they also won't believe in the nobles' divine right to rule anymore and will rebel against the caste system. Therefore, the nobles need to enforce belief in the Goddess by showing how devoted they are, as Ferdinand and Lorenz explain is their noble duty to guide the commoners on the path of the faithful, and by giving the Church money to keep its influence and prestige ; otherwise, the nobility itself will be at risk.

But the reverse is, therefore, also true : if the nobility were to fall or stop supporting the Church (the one Rhea leads, mind you), it would lose power, influence and the money necessary to maintain its presence throughout the continent. The Church needs to make sure that the nobility system either stays the same or at least still relies on the belief in the Goddess. Any reform that abolishes the nobility, title inheritance or Crest supremacy is bound to be an absolute nightmare for the Church. Sounds familiar ?

Three Hopes touches onto this by showing us Rhea's attempts at killing the Bishop of the newly restored Southern Church. She doesn't try to get him killed because Edelgard was the one to choose him, she tries to kill him because this Southern Church represents a threat for the Central Church she leads, and she doesn't accept that.

How is the Southern Church a threat ? Two possible, non-exclusive ways :

The Southern Church's teachings are in opposition to the Central Church's teachings : we don't know exactly what those teachings are, but if the Southern Church's teachings imply that the Central Church's ones are fake, it would put their legitimacy into question. Which brings us to the second point :

The Southern Church is trying to become more prominent than the Central one : the Southern Church was dismantled about 200 years before the start of the game for being "dissident" and is now being revived with Edelgard's support. It doesn't even matter what it teaches the people : it fills a gap in the Imperial citizens' lives. By doing so, and by being morally, publicly and financially supported by the new Emperor, it earns the support of the faithful of the Empire and takes it away from the Central Church, in part at least.

So, because Rhea doesn't accept power being taken away from her, she attacks and tries to kill the "rebellion" in the egg, the same way she did with the "dissidents" of the Western Church in Houses, where she sent her students to execute and capture the priests, then executed the survivors without a trial. Sending an assassin against a bishop is clearly not something she would hesitate to do.

But, in this example, the Church was the one "under attack". You might wonder how Rhea would have reacted if Edelgard hadn't restored the Southern Church or started the war and had simply reformed the Empire without bothering anyone else, right ? Well, the answer is : basically the same thing.

What we know of Edelgard's reforms is that they are meant to end the caste system, let anyone reach a position of power, oust the people who are not competent enough to handle them and deny the very idea that birth determines someone's right to rule over a region or a whole nation. Those are all ideas that the Central Church has spent the last millenia denying and fighting against so the nobles would stay dependant on them ; if Edelgard's reforms were to be implemented, and moreso if they were to be successful, therefore proving that Crests and the ability to rule are not related, the Central Church's teachings would be proved wrong and the people of Fodlan, Kingdom and Alliance included, would rebel and stop supporting the Church and nobility. Rhea would lose her power and Fodlan would evolve, one way or another, outside of her control. She would do anything to avoid that, including sending her knights to support the rebellious nobles (like the ones we see in Hopes) who are bound to fight against Edelgard's tyranny to preserve peace and order in Fodlan, even if it means fighting against the Imperial army until they can march on Enbarr and behead the mad tyrant... which is roughly what happens in SS where the Black Eagles form a rebellion and ally with the Church's forces to fight against Edelgard and ultimately defeat her in order to keep the status quo. Yes, they fought this war because they thought Edelgard was in the wrong and needed to be stopped, but the result is the exact same.

(if you want to get into real world parallels, the Catholic Church was in much the same position of power as the Central Church for a good millenia (the xenophobia and the way it wormed itself into being central in every government by saying the King ruled out of God's will and had to be a good Christian if they wanted to keep their throne is especially similar), but then Martin Luther called it out on its corruption and started the Protestant Church (Southern Church, in Fodlan's case), leading to a long religious and physical conflict where the Catholic Church tried to eradicate the dissidents, with fire among other things)

So, what do we deduce from all this ? Three things :

The Church and nobility feed off of each other to maintain their own power ; if one were to disappear or stop working the way it did in the past, the other would collapse.

Rhea is more than ready to do what it takes to preserve her power and influence over Fodlan because it allows her to keep it in stasis and she believes that is what she should do until her mother comes back from the dead.

Edelgard's reforms would put a dent in Rhea's power, war or no war, which would result in Rhea trying to get her killed so she could put a good, obedient noble on the throne in order to restore the Central Church's power and maintain the nobility's standing in the Empire/Fodlan.

So, in conclusion : no significant change to the system can be made and kept in place for more than a few years, a decade at most, without national level of armed conflict at the very least because the Church and nobility will ally and fight tooth and nail to preserve their power. Taking apart the nobility cannot be done without destroying the Central Church at the same time, for one will always try to save/bring back the other to justify its own power. If Edelgard hadn't started the war, Rhea would have ; if Edelgard hadn't invaded and conquered the Kingdom and Alliance, their nobility would have attacked her in order to avoid her reforms giving ideas to their own population, or the population would have rebelled and started a bloody civil war in order to win their freedom, which would have likely caused more casualties, especially civil ones and children, than a fight between two actual armies.

There would have been war anyway. There would have been thousands of deaths anyway. Edelgard did what she did in order to gain the advantage by attacking first, improve her odds and shape the conflict in a way that would cause the least civilian casualties. We can still debate whether or not she was right or wrong, whether or not there was a better way to achieve her goals and save more lives, but the fact remains that while she did start the war, if she had not, someone else would have in order to stop her reforms. There was no peaceful way to change the whole system. As always, when you want to take power away from a group of people, you have to fight for it, and they will fight back.

[artifeast]

mustache maintenance

(i do in fact recommend clicking on the images to see them properly)

[h3ytheredemons]

my kingdom for Lestat to appear to Daniel next episode and do the Barbosa line of "You best start believing in Telenovelas, Mr. Molloy— you're in one!"

[thetwilightroadtonightfall]

history 101 💛

This was originally just supposed to be me having fun exploring what Ephemer would be like as a teacher but it got a bit out of hand in a good way (but I think I spent way too long on this lol)

Notes:

I wholeheartedly believe that teaching is Eph’s true passion. While writing Overmorrow, I came to realize that his role as a teacher/master is necessary in ensuring that light and the will of the keyblade lives on, but it’s also something he would just genuinely enjoy doing on a personal level. Aside from being able to infodump to his heart’s content (that’s a big deal! 😄), he can also help, inspire, and lead as a teacher! I think if he does actually establish the Keyblade order/academy in canon, it would be his pride and joy

Eph’s actual classroom may not have looked like kh3/dr’s, but I like to believe it was probably similarly designed. (He learned a lot about teaching from Hestia 🥰)

Lyra first appeared here :) the rest of the students are new, I made them up on the spot

my ass could not have handled making Overmorrow as a webcomic

[romanananan]

i needed to tell everybody everything for so long

@palacholic @brblifuk

[dragonseeds]

there’s a horrible sickness in me that makes me want to stop and replay da:i whenever i start a different game. how am i supposed to resist the story of my own unwilling apotheosis? especially as lavellan, who doesn’t believe in the maker and who has every right to hate and mistrust the chantry but chooses to use what power they have to try save people, to fix what’s broken, no matter how afraid they are or how careful they have to be. walking side by side with the great trickster god/adversary of your people without knowing, befriending him, changing his mind about this world but ultimately not his choice. he understands what’s happening to you because it happened to him once and he gives you his castle, built over the place where he sundered the world, and paints your story there in frescos that will last long after you’re gone and after the story has been retold and reshaped so many times that the truth of who you are and what you did is lost—just as he did his own story, which was lost and perverted by war and propaganda, and he shows all of this to you knowing you’ll understand because you’ve lived through something similar, grown into something larger than yourself and your true name, and it doesn’t change anything but. he wanted you to see him just for a moment, even if he can’t tell you everything (or almost anything) and you can’t save him—because he owes it to you as a someone who is a friend, almost an equal, and because there’s no one else left who knows: a direct result of what he did to your people and which he now seeks to undo at the cost of this world.

[theinfinitedivides]

there is nothing more beautiful than seeing the full montage of Jun Mo going absolutely batsh*t insane crazy unhinged when he steps foot in that hallway and sees what's going on. just completely gloriously feral out of it kill count going up by the dozens bathed in blood like a kind of baptism or wine of pseudo-Eucharist this is My body and My blood eat (drink) this in remembrance of Me etc etc bc as from his own mouth he says that there is someone he needs to protect. forget acting like the rent was due he acted like it was mortgage backdated student loans credit card bill car payments hospital fees alimony child support you name it he had his bank details ready holy f*ck

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

I'm frightened of you knowing who I am but, could you possibly give me your frank frankly theories pretty please idc if you only have like 2.1 I want them regardless of how many you have.

mayhaps?

ah man i wish i had some to give! i think all of my Frank theories (at present) are tied into other theory posts! he simply doesn't have a lot to chew on yet

[jimmyspades]

The Blacklist is the funniest possible show the insane conspiracy theory-ridden alt-right could’ve latched onto but it’s also not very funny is it. Yet still fascinating how a particular group can obsess over something without understanding it at all

[the-casbah-way]

i never ever cry in front of anyone ever but there was this boy i was OBSESSED with in primary school when i was like seven years old because he was the fastest boy in the class and he had cool spiky hair and i always thought it was a crush until i came out and realised it was gender envy of some form and today my friend out of the blue told me that i look like him and we looked at his instagram together and i actually do. i look almost exactly like him. and i cried like an absolute wanker because i’ve been so miserable my whole life being perceived entirely the wrong way and i went home today and looked at myself and realised i look like the boy i always wanted to be when i was a kid. and whenever i feel bad about myself i get to remind myself that i look like him so i shouldn’t feel bad because back then i couldn’t have ever dreamed of getting to look like this. and t will only make it better and even though the idea of starting it is still so scary to me i keep having moments like this that make me realise how good it’s going to be even if some of it will suck. i always focus on all of the ways my transition has gone and will go wrong and i forget that it’s going to go right in a lot of ways too