#these are so incredibly special to me

[serenadeofsunshine]

NUCLEAR BOMb IM ALL CHOKED UP

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Must be a Sugondese joke.

[apricatt-art]

them!!!

[mimimar]

i've been completely charmed by witch hat atelier♡

(art prints)

[tunastime]

The Little Things

happy birthday @shepscapades!! you've known about this fic for a little bit, but we talked about how long DBHC Etho's hair had gotten and I really couldn't help myself LOL. I hope you have a great birthday <333

Behind his shoulder, Etho twists a particularly long strand of hair around his finger as they unpack, fidgeting in a way that almost seems anxious. He drags his hand back after a moment, flattening his hair against his neck, combing through absently as he sorts through their collected items and puts them in proper order. Bdubs watches him fidget for a long moment. The thoughts in his head bounce around like loose marbles. Or, Bdubs braids Etho's hair. Etho lets him.

(1506 words)

“Etho.”

Bdubs is staring at the back of Etho’s neck as they walk a short single file through the dark oak trees. Etho holds a steady grip on the hilt of the sword at his hip, head shifting back and forth as they walk together, like they were tethered by an invisible string. He can see the faint glow of his LED in the dappled, midday light. Etho makes a small, confirming sound, but doesn’t look behind him.

“Your hair’s gotten long.”

“Mhh,” Etho hums again—some approximation of pushing out air. He reaches back, combing through the near neck-length hair. “I’m letting it get long. Thought it might be a nice change.”

“‘S it bothering you?” Bdubs asks. Etho shakes his head, glancing back to look at him.

“Keeps getting in my eyes, but otherwise I was just too lazy to cut it.”

Bdubs snorts. 

“Typical.”

Etho shoots him a look, but his mouth is curved into a smile—one where he’s trying to stifle it, so his teeth aren’t showing, but he really wants to grin. All visible too since his mask is tucked under his chin. The motion pulls at the off-white scar down his face. 

“So mean,” he scoffs. “After everything I do for you, Bdubs!”

“Yeah, right,” Bdubs says, thumping his shoulder with the back of his hand. “And you’re bein’ dramatic.”

Etho sticks his tongue out at him, but doesn’t argue any further. Bdubs almost socks him again for that, but Etho giggles enough to get him to start laughing, and by the time he’s even considered it again, their base has come into view. Well—what some would call a stack of deepslate that looked like fort walls. Kind of. It was something at least, even if it wasn’t all that pretty. He can see the peek of Tango’s head over the wall, just a smudge of gold against the backdrop. He must be moving their chests around to keep building, because there’s no way their walls were as short as Tango. 

They both pick their way toward the base just as Tango’s head disappears. By the time their cajoling and banter is within earshot, Tango’s standing outside the front of their base, eyebrows raised.

“You two sure make a lot of noise,” he complains, folding his arms. “I swear I could hear you from across the river.”

Bdubs snorts.

“Blame Etho for that one,” he grumbles, pushing past the two of them. He hears Tango snort as he starts giggling, and Etho makes a particularly pathetic sound in retaliation.

“Bdubs started it,” he complains, dragging himself after Bdubs and into the base proper. Tango twists around to follow them both, trailing after as Bdubs lingers near the doorway. 

“Did you two at least bring back somethin’ to eat?”

“You bet your buns we did,” Bdubs snorts. He drops to sit beside his bag, fiddling until the clasps come undone. There, he reaches in, and hands Tango a chunk of entirely unprocessed redstone. When Tango twists it this way and that, it catches the light in a surprisingly interesting way. He watches Tango’s face scrunch for a moment, LED spinning a light blue ring as he thinks over the stone in his hands. Luckily he hasn’t noticed that there are a few prominent sets of teeth marks in the bottom half. 

Can’t blame a guy for getting hungry. 

Tango nods, seemingly satisfied.

Behind his shoulder, Etho twists a particularly long strand of hair around his finger as they unpack, fidgeting in a way that almost seems anxious. He drags his hand back after a moment, flattening his hair against his neck, combing through absently as he sorts through their collected items and puts them in proper order.

Bdubs watches him fidget for a long moment. The thoughts in his head bounce around like loose marbles.

Tango moves around them both and back to the place where he was moving cots and chests around. He backs himself against a particularly large double chest and shoves it sideways across the grass. Etho continues to quietly stack items into a chest. With his bag now empty, Bdubs picks himself up, and scoops up his bag. At the front door, he slings his newly sharpened axe over his shoulder.

Might as well get some wood while the day was still light.

At the fire, sleep tugging at the edge of his consciousness, Bdubs casts a tired glance over to Etho. He’s shrugged free from his coat, now draped over his knees as he sits at Bdubs’ left, leaning almost into his space. From this angle, Bdubs can see how Etho’s hair lies flat over the back of his neck, curls over the side of his face in frizzy strands. He reaches up almost absently to comb his fingers through it. Etho makes a small, startled noise. He raises his shoulders, but he’s not able to resist the tiny, pleased expression that slides onto his face as Bdubs keeps his hand on the back of his skull. He may not like the teasing, but the idea of Bdubs petting through his hair certainly seems to make him happy.

Which is why Bdubs sighs through his nose and draws his hand away.

“Etho,” Bdubs says, exasperation slipping into his tone unbidden. “C’mere and let me help you.”

“It’s fine,” Etho tries, more in discomfort than annoyance.

“Etho—” Bdubs argues. He pats the ground in front of him, legs splayed. Etho looks him up and down for a long moment, LED spinning, calculating. 

“What’re you gonna do?” he asks.

“‘M not gonna cut it,” Bdubs sighs. “Just trust me, alright?”

Etho makes a noise halfway between a groan and a hum. He finally sinks to the ground beside Bdubs’ knee. Twisting around to put him between his legs, Bdubs shuffles forward on the grass. Between Etho and the fire in front of him, the air around them is warm, filled with the slight mechanical hum from Etho in front of him, the snap of the fire. Bdubs leans forward for a moment, resting his forehead against the nape of Etho’s neck. Etho laughs, one hand coming back to squeeze his knee.

“What,” he teases. “Was this your ulterior motive?”

“No,” Bdubs startles, peeling himself away. “No it wasn’t. This was just a nice moment.”

Etho giggles, squeezing his knee again. He draws his hand down Bdubs’ shin and to his ankle, where he keeps it there.

Carefully, Bdubs combs his fingers through Etho’s hair. It’s not any different than usual, besides the length. He keeps relatively good care of it, the ends are fine, it’s short enough not to reliably knot. Sifting his fingers through takes little effort on Bdubs’ part as he easily separates three sections out, twisting the hair between his fingers as he braids. Etho slumps forward a bit, shoulders rounding out, the base of his spine and lower ribs pressed into Bdubs’ space.

“I learned how to do this a long time ago,” Bdubs says absently as he works. He watches Etho’s LED spin again, and takes that as a sign that he’s still paying attention. “Had’ta use ropes since I didn’t know anyone with hair long enough to actually practice on. It’s easy to do a simple one when you’ve got the hang’ve it, though.”

“Are you expecting me to not ask you for help when I need it?” Etho says, amusement slipping into his tone. Bdubs pokes the back of his neck.

“I’m just sayin’,” he grumbles. “You don’t have’ta learn, I’m just tellin’ a story. Jeez, Etho.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Etho placates, still giggling. “Maybe I’ll learn as long as you teach me.”

Bdubs huffs out a laugh.

“Maybe,” he parrots. He curls his hair into the last section of the small, tight braid, hoping that force alone will keep it together just for a bit. As he lets go, Etho’s hand comes back to feel out the braid, smoothing the rest of his hair back behind his ears. With most of it tucked back, only the tufts of hair in the front spill into his eyes. When he turns back to Bdubs, a soft smile tugs at his face. Bdubs reaches on instinct to push his hair back, dragging his hand down his cheek as he pulls away. He pretends not to notice that Etho’s ears have gone slightly blue as he turns away from him.

“You like it?” Bdubs asks, voice coming uncharacteristically soft. Etho nods silently. “Good.”

Bdubs leans forward into Etho’s space, then, tucking himself against the strong curve of his back. He can feel, ever so slightly, the hum of his thirium pump, the heat that he gives off from all the moving equipment inside his chest. There, he lets out a soft sigh. Etho squeezes his ankle.

“You let me know if you need me to do it again, alright?” Bdubs asks. Etho lets out a long breath of air.

“I will,” he says, voice crackling ever so.

Good, Bdubs thinks. He likes the sound of that.

[phobic-human]

Sakir Khader, Palestine, 2021-2023

Sakir Khader is a Palestinian photojournalist and documentary film maker. His work focuses on war and everyday sorrow in conflict zones. In 2024 Sakir Khader became the first Palestinian photographer to join Magnum Photos.

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[kidovna]

happy birthday to my favourite stranger things character since 2016!!

(companion post to)

[christakisbang]

kim daengdaeng my little puppy ㅋㅋ thank you for always teasing me and thank you for taking care of me ㅋㅋ gukbap ㅋ

[intrepidtrickster]

Moominvalley and Snufmin

S4 Spoilers Under Cut

I’m so disappointed in how they handled Snufkin and Moomintroll this season. I had my worries, but I also had a lot of hope. They did deliberately put in those interactions. The team also kept reacting to mentions of Snufmin with winks and nudges in interviews and videos they put out. It makes me wonder what the point was. I genuinely feel like this was queerbaiting. And I don’t want to use that term because it doesn’t feel like one to use lightly. Even more so since I had such a great love for Moominvalley’s other seasons. Especially 1 and 2. It was genuinely really beautiful and soft and had such lovely queer undertones and moments. But I think it’s more than fair to say that the team knew about the reactions and how many people were introduced to it via Snufkin x Moomin. And they seemingly used that. They gave us build up but didn’t follow through. When it came down to it, they shrugged it off and didn’t address it at all. It felt so removed from Season 4. And I think that that, in essence, is queerbaiting. Because if you keep nodding to something throughout a series, using it to keep your audience waiting for the ‘inevitable’ conclusion to it that’ll certainly play out by the time the story ends only to snatch it away once you’ve secured your viewers and money, that is what that is. And I honestly expected better from the studio. If they weren’t going to commit, then they shouldn’t have kept bringing hopes up and making it seem like the direction it would go in.

(forgive the essay in the tags- I was thinking so many things)

[heyitsspaceace]

crowley is for the gifted students who were told they were smart and special, only later to be cast aside and punished for “straying” from their expectations.

crowley is for the ones who were treated horribly so they became harsher on the outside to protect themselves.

crowley is for the people who worked so hard to change, only for others to say they miss the old version of them.

crowley is for the children who’s parents payed no mind to their creations and hung their crayon drawings on the fridge themselves, only for them to be taken down.

[gearchronocle]

this OPENING man. THIS OPENING. GOES SO INCREDIBLY HARD. FOR NO REASON. it should be illegal to have a song this good in a funny haha silly little comedy anime. I'm going crazy why is it so good. kaidou why r u going so hard on the vocals for NO!! REASON !!!

the fact that it's kaidou singing keeps me up at night. you go lil chuuni boy. eat that up like a full course meal and leave no crumbs not even the plate

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The indescribable tension between an overworked and underpaid smut writer, and his biggest fan hater.

(for @frummpets)

[olasketches]

the thing about me is that… I love seeing yuuji going through so many unimaginable horrors. I love seeing him all bloody and scarred trying to crawl his way out of them cause enduring, gritting his teeth and bearing them is what he does best. every single time he’s on the verge of giving up and succumbing to grief and despair, he just doesn’t. he’s too stubborn, too determined and too burdened with an overwhelming guilt that keeps telling him to keep going and make things right because in the end yuuji doesn't want to regret the way he lived. he wants to survive for long enough to not have regrets. it's that innate ability of his to just endure and fucking survive that makes me love him and appreciate him so damn much.

[sinlizards]

did you know you can just make your favorite little guys hang out and be friends and no one can stop you

[atlas-dr0wned]

when i was a kid i used to think i really understood beatlemania and why everyone was so crazy about them, but it turns out i’m just autistic