#they made some very good points

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

[hailsatanacab]

"Well, this is a bad idea," Tim says, hands on his hips as he surveys the mess they’ve made in the cave.

"Nah," Danny replies, twirling his screwdriver in the air in what is probably meant to be an impressive trick to inspire confidence, except he fumbles it and it clangs to the floor loudly, "we good. If a younger version of myself hasn't come forward in time to stop me, how bad can it be?"

"Shouldn't it be the other way round?"

"What?"

"Normally, it's an older version of yourself going backwards in time to stop you, right?"

"Not in my experience."

Danny's grin is impossibly feral and a shiver runs up Tim's spine.

"This is definitely a bad idea."

[tofixtheshadows]

Hot take: Laios wouldn't actually mind an arranged marriage. Obviously "reluctant royal being pressured into marriage" is very fun for shipping purposes. But I have harlequin blood, so bear with me. Join me on this journey of character theorizing/shipping nonsense that makes it abundantly clear I have a Scrivener document I'm neglecting.

Laios was promised to someone from a young age. He and Falin both were; it's probably how their parents ended up together. They both broke it off by leaving their village, but it didn't seem to be a factor in Laios's own decision. And when Marcille, presumably, asks about his hypothetical love life (bicorn chapter), he not only brings it up readily, but actually seems kind of flattered? lmao

I love when smug Laios comes out. Underrated factor of Laios's personality for me is how much he enjoys being seen as cool. I think you'd expect Laios to be embarrassed or uneasy over this line of questioning, and the fact that he isn't is fun to me.

So when Yaad and his other old advisors bring up his need for a wife, Laios is ready to go along with it. Not necessarily thrilled by the prospect, but he was raised to think of marriage as a business arrangement you do because it's beneficial for your household/bloodline (as was often the case historically). He's already made the big step to claim a throne, and the idea of becoming village chief after his father seemed to have been vaguely in the back of his head all his life. Besides, if he has to do it anyway, I think he'd take comfort that there was a formalized process for an otherwise socially messy undertaking.

This dovetails neatly with my personal headcanon that Laios is gay but unaware of it. He comes from kind of a repressed culture- or at least I can imagine he does based on context clues- and has spent most of his life being ostracized in one way or another, feeling like he's on the outside of humanity. So he doesn't realize that his lack of attraction to women is unusual- he assumes that nobody really enjoys romance that much. It's not like his own parents married for love. It's just something people play up for stories, right?

It's all tangled up with his fraught desire for human connection and platonic companionship anyway. Meanwhile he's blithely unaware that the things he says about Toshiro are not normal bro things. Oh you'd totally marry Toshiro, Laios? Tell me more.

I see this in Marcille too. Firstly due to her unstable development, which has only recently allowed her to reach maturity (I headcanon her as somewhere between 20-22) and secondly due to her being a half-elf (infertile+a too-long lifespan), I think she has the expectation that she's simply not destined for love. The half-elf character she relates to in her favorite books says as much. So she, too, confuses a genuine lack of heterosexual attraction with the belief that this is just because of her half-elf status distancing her from it. Plus, she spent over a decade as a student/researcher in a nice little sheltered academic bubble, at an all-girls academy populated by adolescents. She's the most sheltered of all the characters: she's only spent the past year in the "real world", and she still focuses all her romantic attention on living vicariously through her favorite characters or her friends (except for Falin, conveniently!).

And Marcille would absolutely want to live vicariously through Laios and his future wife. She would not want him to go through a dispassionate formalized process: she wants her bestie to have a fairytale romance! What is the point of being a heroic king in a mythic castle if you can't even get a love story for the ages out of it?

This would result in a lot of Laios meeting with eligible bachelorettes at Marcille's urging, looking to Kabru for help the entire time and being grilled by Marcille afterwards about what he liked best about each girl. "She had nice, um, teeth?" They're both so close to getting it.

Kabru, meanwhile, is agitating for Yaad and the other advisors not lock the country into a hereditary monarchy, they have the chance to do something radical here, to break away from the systems that the elves and dwarves uphold. At the very least, let Laios marry for love, or formally adopt an heir and name them his successor if he wants, he's already sacrificed enough for the sake of Melini. Don't make him jump through these circus hoops for the chance of some trade agreements, we can get those without a royal marriage. And even if Laios was willing to go along with it, he does look at Kabru like he's his hero for sticking up for him.

The vague unhappiness Kabru feels at the idea of Laios being married off is easy for him to ignore. Kabru didn't actually get better at honoring or even recognizing his own wants just because he's moved past the dungeon. And Laios hasn't gotten the hint about his crush on Toshiro and is still 50/50 on saying casually shocking things, so when he remarks that he doesn't need a wife anyway when he has Kabru, he has no idea why that gets him the looks it does. After all, where he's from, men marry women to run their households, but Laios has castle staff for that, and Kabru is handling the rest?

That comment alone ticks one month off their collective gay awakening countdown.

Anyway. How many repressed gays in their twenties does it take to run a country?

Answer: Yaad can tell you.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Lackadaisy Enrichment

[neunhofferart]

fave scene u boarded this season?

Okay, MAJOR SPOILERS for Jurassic World Chaos Theory Season 2 incoming haha. It's hard to pick just one, so here's a bunch:

Favorite scenes that made it to screen:

The sucho vs. hippo fight (Though sadly I didn't request this one for my demo real because most of the boards are not very pretty/had to be cleaned up by someone else due to time. These panels below are some of the few that look nice enough to show LOL. Originally in the script, there were TWO hippos we called Orson and Welles, but it was just too much going on in that little set, so the whole thing had to be reworked from scratch halfway through the boarding period. My director Mike Mullen and our revisionist Emma Gilles contributed a LOT to this sequence and made my hastily redone roughs actually legible for everyone, and added/refined more after I had to move on in the schedule)

Ben freaking out while everyone piles more and more problems on Yaz

Kenji fixing his dislocated arm while Darius gagged

Santos sending Red to kill Captain Lang (I have permission to share this one in full, but I need to format it because it's in pdf form).

Favorite scenes that were cut or significantly trimmed down:

Extended scene of Brooklynn feeding Gordon that introduced more of an idea of her having lingering PTSD around dinosaurs, while also highlighting more of the connection between her and Gordon sharing a limb difference. It was a more contemplative scene, but the episode hit 30 or 35 minutes in the initial cut and it could only be 22, so a LOT was cut in the Brooklynn episode (I also have permission to share all of this one, but again need to format it first)

Extended Kenji/Brooklynn break up scene- The first half is still there, which leads into what Rianna originally boarded in 104. A stupid detail I'm proud of- when Kenji leads Brooklynn up the mountain by hand, it's the last time anyone ever holds that hand (in that way). HOWEVER- there was originally a bit more past what Rianna did in 104 that showed how their dynamic/what they both wanted out of their relationship wasn't really in sync. Brooklynn tries to defend her actions to Kenji, but Kenji feels that her work has grown important to her than he is, and Brooklynn actually winds up being the person to say 'Fine, then let's break up!' Which I doubt she mentioned to Darius haha. Anyway, this was again cut because the episode was too dang long.

[claitea]

idk quick doodles of a time where volo ends up finally giving up his plans and rei gets his friend back. i just really wanted to draw that hug haha

[rinbylin]

圣人有情而无累

dihua + 情 | 莲花楼 mysterious lotus casebook

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is that small moment in “Air Turtle” where immediately after the Daves lose yet another game, Leo says how sorry he is and how he’s doing his best as the mascot. This moment is so short but it’s honestly jam-packed with a whole heap of characterization.

His need to apologize for things clearly not his fault - especially when it feels like he messes up the job he was given despite doing the best he can (the phrase “it’s not about you” takes a new meaning when this is one of the lessons to be learned from that - that he is not always solely responsible for things going wrong), his need to save face and make a connection with an older adult man in his life (something he consistently does throughout the series - he’s got a few daddy issues, always collecting potential father figures, it’s no wonder he jumps at the bit to keep rapport), and the way he sounds and looks and the words he chooses really pushes how he is just a kid (“Mr. the Dunk, I’m so sorry”).

Like I know it’s a one off moment that doesn’t truly mean much, but when put against the rest of the series it works really well with the rest of Leo’s established character and helps in solidifying later concepts as well.

[inamindfarfaraway]

I love how Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse said “Anyone can be Spider-Man”. I love how it inspired everyone to imagine their own Spider-People, saving the day in their own universes, with all kinds of cool, interesting personalities and aesthetics and mutations and life stories and relationships. We all put pieces of our soul into these homemade heroes. We had fun. We found community. And then Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse said, “Wow, great job! You’ve really taken our message to heart. Well, get ready for even more of everything you liked from the first movie and a new message to complement the first. Anyone can be Spider-Man… and anyone can be pulled into a cult.”

So now we all have to contemplate whether our lovingly crafted heroes would ever be on Team Mandatory Trauma Because Martyr Complex or not and why.

[nats-uvi]

Angst time :D👍

You can read my rambling about her in the tags

[ofswordsandpens]

I'm sincerely very happy for anyone who is enjoying the show but every time I see takes that the show has improved the book characterizations or that the book characters are underdeveloped in comparison to the show...

[juustozzi]

a dumping ground for some random quick doodles

[themissingnumbers]

[missing numbers is a project that is very dear to me which i take VERY seriously. anyways apparently caramelldansen came out on november 2nd]

[talesfromthebandgeekmafia]

Man why did my latest obsession have to be a 40 year old fantasy book series

[abyssal-ilk]

posting that sketch yesterday made me remember just how much i love my taashath so i did another doodle <3