#there's definitely more i could say

[when-we-drive-away-in-secret]

aside from Lesbian Reasons™︎ (understandable.), what is it about esme that makes you adore her so?

Ooooooh boy I am SO glad you asked

Okay, so first off I just think she's fun. Like, obviously a terrible person, but a fascinating character—the show kind of did her dirty in some regards, but if we go off the books, she's definitely one of the most competent adults, and yet no one actually seems to acknowledge it?

Like, especially in terms of the fandom, people CONSTANTLY underestimate her as a character, but I'm so intrigued by her. We're introduced to her as just another terrible guardian; selfish, arrogant, frivolous. Not a terrible person, but not a good one, either. She cares more about trends and appearances than the lives of children, but there doesn't seem to be any real malice in it. And then the children tell her everything; they've discovered a good portion of her and Olaf's plan, and if it were Olaf confronted with this information, he would have become immediately violent and panicked. He probably would have lashed out, grabbing a child (most likely Sunny) and threatening them to get them to fall in line. Not Esmé, though. She stays perfectly calm, perfectly in-character. She guides the children outside, reassures them, and switches at the last minute, pushing them into a pre-prepared trap. The children—very intelligent, notorious for seeing through disguises—had no idea until they were falling however many feet to their presumed deaths.

Then, even more fascinating, she fools them again. Sure, you can argue the kids didn't interact all that much with officer Luciana, but when Olaf "disguises" himself, it takes them all of two seconds to clock him. Even Fernald is better at disguises than the supposed actor! But Esmé talks to them, has a whole scene in the court, and they have no idea. If I remember rightly, even when Olaf shows up, it's not until the end of the book that they actually clock her. And yet everyone pretends she's the incompetent member of VFD!

Then of course there's the rivalry with Beatrice. We know Esmé tried to save Olaf's parents, and yet Esmé's the villain and Beatrice is the hero (another gorgeous demonstration of the grey-morality typical throughout the entire series). But do we get any explanation? Kit specifically had to get past Esmé to give Beatrice the darts—why? It implies that Esmé was not only aware of what was going on, but actively trying to stop it—did she tell Olaf? Did he not believe her? Did she try anyway, knowing what the deaths of his parents would do to him? (I have my own personal answers to all of these questions, and a long-ago thought up fic plot to explore them, but that's another story). And why was there a tunnel connecting the Baudelaire mansion to the penthouse? In the books, it isn't even a network of tunnels; it's all but stated it was a direct route! Why? Why was Esmé so intent on getting that penthouse? Why didn't she use the tunnel? Or did she? When? And what for?

There are just so many curious elements to her character that I LOVE to think about, and mentally expand upon—but also the lesbian reasons, of course

[chloesimaginationthings]

The story of Ballora in FNAF..

[theoldkyokodied]

The Allegiance of the Ascended Vampire and the New God of Magic

[vaguely-concerned]

the strength it must have taken for illario to not immediately go full 'lmao since when have you even had a kiss hello lucanis' sibling violence mode during the café talk. inspirational. rook and lucanis really were doing all that right in front of his salad huh

[egophiliac]

I DID IT I GOT MY PINK HAYATE now I am never doing that again!

(at least until they give me, like, a frilly unicorn Kamui or something)

[secondbeatsongs]

going through some old logs, and I need you to understand just how truly unhinged early 2010s RP omegle was.

genuinely you could stay on there for hours with just one person, hashing out complex traumatic backstories, drawn-out love confessions, detailed action scenes...collaboratively describing graphic violence, past abuse, comfort, hurt/comfort, hurt/no comfort, any number of sex acts...and then one of you would be like, "oh haha it's 2AM! I have to sleep :(" and the other person would say, "omg saaaame. :( gnight!!!" and then you'd exit the chat and never speak to each other again, and this was. fine.

you could just spend an entire evening shoving your wretched, bleeding soul into a chat log with someone you'd never meet or learn the name of, achieve some form of emotional catharsis, and then go about your day or night like this was an average way to spend your time.

I'm really normal about this, actually

[mollysunder]

I know Heimerdinger's Christian Linke's favorite character, and I sort of tolerated it in s1, but now it feels like things are a little too indulgent. Heimerdinger gets to team up with Ekko to launder his reputation through Ekko and the Firelights. Heimerdinger gets the first narrative game and second character teaser in the promotional cycl. Heimerdinger gets to SING A SONG that's included on the s2 Arcane soundtrack (Spin the Wheel).

Maybe I'd be less annoyed if the show at least did more to acknowledge Heimerdinger's failings as a leader, but his character description can't even do that. This is how the official Arcane website describes Heimerdinger:

"Heimerdinger warned the Piltover Council about the dangers of using magic without tangible solutions for safeguarding its use. Learning from his mistakes with Jayce, Heimerdinger inspires Ekko to keep looking for a solution and works with him to solve the problem, instead of just offering advice."

That's not Heimerdinger's main problem! The problem is the fact he's the person most singularly responsible for the state of Zaun and Piltover. It feels like the show and the cast are just dancing around the fact that Heimerdinger technically has the highest body count in the show (Day of Ash, pollution, extreme poverty, etc). The one time someone puts him to task (Jayce), the show makes it seem like Jayce is wrong or overstepped, and yeah he did do it for Viktor's sake, but Jayce was right! Heimerdinger's bad at his job, he shouldn't be in a leadership position if he's a bad leader.

[huginsmemory]

Like I get why human-Bill post canon redemption fics for Billford are common because it's fun to put Bill in that situation where he doesn't know whats going on and its a way to 'break' Bill into not being a huge asshole through learning empathy BUT I feel like also a big part of that is also people being COWARDS and not leaning into the monsterfuckery of Ford falling in love and getting it on freaky style with a triangle LIKE HE ALREADY DID.

[fiddlededeejester]

so poolverine, right? i feel like their relationship really shows the duality of man. violence? yeah. softness? also yeah. animalistic tendencies? yep. domestic life? absolutely. yk what i mean?

[zecoritheweirdone]

hey do you guys wanna see a comic for a msa au me and my friend ascel came up with? trick question yes you do. anyway- hehehehehhhoo body swap au <3.

okay quick context for this rq- this is an au where it diverges after freaking out- instead of possessing the truck, lewis ends up chasing the gang for a while, maybe a week or two? arthur and vivi don't know why this random ghost they met ages ago keeps going after them, but one things for sure- he really, really wants arthur's head on a spike.

cut to the present- arthur got separated from vivi and mystery, and lewis ends up chasing him into the woods!

[forgettable-au]

What was Wingdings and Sans’ school life like? especially early on when Wingdings couldn't talk without some sort of translation. Did they ever get bullied?

Not too important for the story, i'd assume, but you just gotta love the little things-

Yeah... this is probably not gonna matter to the story a lot...

BUT I ALSO LIKE THE LITTLE THINGS SO I'LL ANSWER!!

I'm gonna add a keep reading here because I'll probably yap a lot

Okay, so you would assume they would have been bullied... But they weren't!! not really?

Probably in a more realistic world they would have been, but usually, monsters are pretty nice!! (with some exceptions)

SO! I'm gonna talk about how I think it would have gone

Monsters were nice to Dings, friendly! But there was always the inconvenience of not being understood. And Sans was there to help him but I don't think Wingdings liked that, he wanted to do so himself or not at all And as I've said before, at some point, Wingdings gave up on making friendships work, he isolated himself and focused and what really mattered!!

Sans did have friends! But his first priority was his brother, if he had to skip friend time to be with Wingdings he would do that

So he never really made close friends, just friends

Going back to Wingdings, there were probably some mean monsters that did bother him about the dingbat font at some point, but that wasn't a usual thing! Usually, monsters were nice! And though there was definitely a barrier, they didn't care all that much? BUT WINGDINGS DID CARE, HE KNEW HE WAS DIFFERENT TO EVERYONE ELSE AND WHAT THAT COULD MEAN, so why even bother?

When I was thinking about this I remembered that one scene from Meet the Robinsons:

AND JFKFJKDCJDSK

Small Dings was kinda like that

He was usually outcasted, but no one really disliked him?? They just didn't know him at all because he didn't even try talking to anyone

So no one approached or talked to him, if anything they found him intimidating

Sans was there with him the whole time! So it's not like he had no one at all, but uh,,,, yeah

[edwinisms]

it’s actually so wild to me that this fairly quirky YA type show gave both of its main characters deaths that can, in one way or another, solidly be considered hate crimes. they were both flat out murdered as a result of being A) gay and effeminate or B) brown (south asian, specifically) and you could argue whether or not those kids thought of it that way in the moment or whatever but the bottom line is that they would not have been in the situations that killed them if they weren’t of their respective minorities. like legitimately that is a ballsy choice for this kind of netflix show, let alone for the two Main Characters, and i respect it big time

[chloesimaginationthings]

sometimes it looks like game mike has eyelashes personally i love that top tier even if i'm making things up. man i love men i wish they were real

Michael maybe dead but his mascara game is on point

[fabuloustrash05]

For those of you calling 2012 Mikey innocent and constantly babying him and saying he must be protected, you are literally doing the exact thing that he hates.

2012 Mikey has stated in the show that he hates being treated like a child and doesn’t like it when people look/treat him as such. Yes, his brothers are still gonna be protective of him but that’s brotherly instincts. He is the youngest after all.

But we have to remember that in the end…

Mikey is NOT innocent. He has committed manslaughter. He literally ate PizzaFace alive, who is a mutant that used to be a living human being.

Mikey does NOT need to be protected. He can handle himself. He managed to figure out and survive in Dimension X all on his own for what seemed like weeks/months. He also took on villains like Tiger Claw, Rahzar and Newtralizer by himself!

Mikey is NOT a baby. Mikey is a skilled ninja. Splinter has stated that Mikey has the highest intuition compared to his brothers. He was also willing to sacrifice and die for his friends and family in an attempt to to stop Newtrailzer, staying behind as Dregg’s ship exploded.

[bigskydreaming]

Imagine looking at a character whose entire premise is that in every stage of his life, he's made every version of himself into someone that inspires people to such a degree that EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF HIM has people wanting to literally follow in his footsteps in some way or another.....

And coming to the conclusion that like.....the most important things about him are the sum of all his trappings. His entirely homemade developed from scratch could not exist if not for what he already was and brought with him BEFORE crafting this newest version of himself trappings, with his greatest trait throughout all of it being his adaptability; his ability and willingness to roll with the punches and not try to simply weather any opposition or changes to his life but instead reshape himself as needed to better fit INTO whatever new shape his life and the world around him takes. All while managing to carry the most innate, fundamental and necessary aspects of himself from one version to the next. Thus every single version of himself is different but simultaneously every single version of himself is also undeniably the same person.

The strength of this character, to me, will always be that he can be so many versions of himself, he can become so many things, all without ever actually losing or discarding any of the aspects of himself he considers most essential, the things he's not willing to lose or give up just to keep going. Finding that road not taken by most, usually because most never even think to look for it as an option. But one that he's always able to find because the one trick he's mastered in his tumultuous life is threading that needle of not just digging in his heels in an unproductive way but rather being selective about when and where he makes a stand and decides "this is not a thing I'm willing to compromise about" but here are places and ways I can and will change and evolve and adapt in order to make it possible for me to hold onto these parts and keep them as they are.

And that's why its always so mind-boggling to me that so many writers can't seem to think of anything else to do with Dick Grayson other than invent some new reason for him to just....not be that person, or to like just take the character whose most basic fundamental trait he's NOT about to compromise on is willingly giving up his spot in the driver's seat of his own life.....and make him just a passenger in his own life and stories.

Dick Grayson at age nine....at age nineteen...at age twenty nine....the one core thread running through all versions of him is the only way he's standing back and letting you call the shots for him or putting him on the sidelines in some way is over his dead body.

HOW he goes about that, what that looks like, who he becomes and what aspects of himself he plays up at some times and what traits he lets fall by the wayside at other times when they offer less in service to his primary goal here....that changes constantly. He changes constantly.

But those changes are almost always (or at least they used to be/should be IN MY OPINION) made with the intention of keeping certain things about him or his life as consistent as possible.

That's the duality of Dick Grayson that I'm here for. The inherent contradiction of him that COULD allow for endless conflict and breaking new narrative ground in all sorts of ways if mined properly:

His eternal willingness to compromise....but only ever in pursuit of doubling down on the ways he's not willing to compromise.

Forever walking that tightrope in ways that only a kid born and raised in a circus could ever hope to.

[cherrirui-official]

Awe yeah Hitman JD art (+ semi-unrelated doodle bc I wanted to put something over the cut)

!! Blood warning for the art under the cut !!

@lemony-and-zesty HI I stumbled upon your Hitman John Dory au while looking at trolls fanart and I'm SO NORMAL abt him!!!! I just had to draw him I hope that's okay