#this is a hard world we are living in

[tizzymcwizzy]

THANK YOU BUGGACHAT!!! EVERYONE SAY THANK YOU BUGGACHAT!!!!!!

[chimaeraonwards]

no ai generated content will ever compare to the absolutely cartoonishly evil plot to cut down trees to prevent workers from striking to get livable wage.

[chalkrub]

svanhildr my beloved returns

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Kingdom of Corona

[skrmbrks]

i wish for peace in our lifetime, i wish for love to seep into every crack of this planet, i wish for it to penetrate every heart and soul. i wish for brutality to face its end, i wish for evil to turn to light. i wish for us to create such a place where cruelty cannot resurface. i wish for communities without borders, i wish for human and nature to be reunited by love and protect each other.

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[the-punforgiven]

Hey, I'm really sorry to have to ask y'all, but my family and I are being evicted from our home and we can't really afford to live anywhere else.

We've been saving up for a while and we've found a place we can almost afford, but we're still short about $4,400. So like, if you have anything you can do to help I'd greatly appreciate it, but like, I get that times are tough all around so I totally understand if you don't

Here's a link to my paypal, but like, please only donate if you've got the cash to spare, I don't want anyone to go hungry on my account

[moeblob]

Happy Birthday to Ferdinand von Aegir!

I actually made 33 emotes, affectionately known as Aegirglyphics to some, for my own personal use on discord. However, I figure why not share some of them! They're free to use for discord servers/icons/pfps or whatever. However, my only request is Do NOT use them as subscriber emotes on Twitch. You can make them free follower emotes but you are not to make them locked behind a paywall.

[nyc-pizza-rat]

okay thinking about her

the tree bark at his back scratches him as he shifts. there are bruises on his skin that sting. he feels the slide of blood at his temple, unsettling and unfamiliar, even after all these years. castiel looks down at his hands, a little calloused, now, and wrinkling, and tries to center himself. there is dirt on his palms, under his fingernails. a small cut on his index finger that is loud and sharp. he curls his fists and tries to reach within himself. the well of his grace has been running low for a while, now, and castiel hasn't been sure of...well, anything.

it's harder to find his dimming grace within, here in purgatory. harder still to coax it to the surface. sweat beads at his brow but castiel keeps his fingers clenched, mumbles to himself in enochian — words to songs of praise and comfort and strength that mean so little now, and yet come to him easy.

there is a thin stream of silver light, and castiel heaves a breath, sinks further into the hollow of the tree. he unclenches his fist, and there are red half-moons carved into his palm. the cut is gone, but there is a scar, still, and castiel cannot stop looking at it. it looks like a thin tear in fabric, like the cracks in between the worlds that let them through. it looks like the beginning of the end.

he rubs his thumb over the scar, feels the slight raise of his skin. his thoughts begin to spin, and all he can focus on is the heat building at the back of his neck, the rushing of blood in his ears. suddenly, then, a ripple within. a breeze by his ear that pull at his core. that compels him to quiet, to listen.

someone, somewhere, is invoking him in prayer.

his grace surges now, easy as it hasn't been in a while, and while it doesn't heal him still, castiel feels more angel than he has in a long time.

Cas, I hope you can hear me... that wherever you are, it's not too late.

castiel sighs, something inside him relaxing. he hadn't even noticed the way his muscles had been pulled taut. hadn't noticed the tendrils of fear creeping into his heart. dean's alive. dean's alive.

I should've stopped you.

castiel swallows. digs his fingers into his thighs. his grace spins out, trying to find the source of the prayer. It's harder than it is on earth, and harder than it should be for an angel of his caliber, but castiel keeps trying.

You're my best friend, but I just let you go. 'Cause it was easier than admitting I was wrong.

castiel wishes dean would stop saying these things. he bites his cheek, listening, following dean's voice. he's always following dean's voice, even when he doesn't want to.

I – Ohh. I don't know why I get so angry. I just know – I know that it's – i-it's just always been there. And when things go bad, it just – it comes out. And I can't -- I can't stop it. No matter how –

dean breaks, and castiel pauses, stares at the blinking doorway that will lead them back onto earth. back into a battle that they are bound to lose. he thinks about jack, lost forever. about chuck, who cannot be beaten. about the pointlessness of what they are doing, the desperation with which he has been clinging to hope.

— how bad I want to, I just can't stop it.

he wishes he could see dean. there is something solid pressing against the back of his throat, like he has swallowed a rock, like it is blocking the air. his eyes sting. he wishes dean would just — just talk to him.

And — And I — I forgive you. Of course I forgive you.

castiel shakes his head. his wings are more bone than anything else, skeletons he lugs around because he cannot bear to sever them from his trueform. now they twitch, twined with his grace as they are. castiel lets them curl inwards, pretends he can feel them whole, their warmth, the comfort of it.

I'm sorry it took me so long – I'm sorry it took me till now to say it. Cas, I'm – I'm so sorry.

castiel forgives him, despite everything. thinks he'd forgiven him long before this, before dean ever thought to ask. he wonders if dean knows that castiel doesn't know how to loathe him, even if he wanted to.

longing surges out to him, the pull of the prayer strengthened by cords of need, of want.

dean thinks he's dead, and he's desperate for him to not be. castiel knows what dean can be like, when he loses those he considers kin, when he's even faced with the prospect of losing them.

Man, I hope you can hear me. I hope you can hear me.

longing can feel a lot like love.

angels were never meant to decipher the nuances of human emotion, and despite all the time he's spent on earth, even castiel is not all that good at it. so when prayer is made with longing, it can feel a lot like love.

and maybe it is. castiel doesn't know.

it's almost unsettling, the way warmth bleeds into his trueform, as dean finishes praying, as he makes his way closer. castiel tries to reign in his weak grace, pulsing away under his skin. tries to not let himself get carried away.

he looks up at the grey sky, the sunless world he is trapped in. he thinks about the empty. he thinks about his son.

maybe it isn't. human love is so complicated, after all.

somewhere to his right, footsteps. castiel breathes, wills his lungs to loosen, his heart to slow. he pulls the leviathan blossom out of his coat pocket. all that fighting and the fidgeting has smushed it a little. he rubs a thumb over one of its strange petals, and puts it back in his coat.

dean is getting closer. castiel can hear him breathing now. can hear the way his heart races.

he gathers himself and pushes out of the hollow of the tree. straightens a little.

"dean," he calls. he sounds tired, even to his own ears. human. god. "you made it."

[naamahdarling]

.

[jerreeeeeee]

i don’t know if i’m ever gonna write the fic but i’ve been thinking abt like. the eternal stockade. the implications. lup, a lich who was trapped in a dark featureless cell for a decade completely isolated with nothing to keep her sanity but her own mind. she has to put people in the eternal stockade. how many liches does she see herself in. how many liches started out just like her. how many liches are truly too far gone. and the only liches we ever see other than her and barry are edward and lydia. they’re certainly evil, but mad? they seem pretty sane. they’re not, like, tattered echoes of souls, they’re definitely still people. even as much of a grudge as lup surely has against them, wouldn’t they remind her incredibly strongly of herself? do they deserve to be trapped just like she was? for eternity? isn’t eternity what turned john to existential despair in the first place?

[cator99]

out of curiosity, would you consider yourself butch?

used to be a blonde underweight twink and now I'm a based jock still got the chanel bag and the sick albeit matured mind of a suckpig to prove it so I'm gonna let you decide whether you wanna call me that word just cuz I got a pussy and short hair. I promise you that there have been enough advancements made in the art of lesbian sexual dynamics in the past 50 years to broaden the vocabulary used to describe the plethora of types of masculine females.

[bearotonin-international]

Hope your life is bearable and you're doing well, team! 🐻❤️

hi friend. thanks for your well wishes 💙 the team is alive and surviving so that’s something

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

As much as I joke, I should note that I don't actually see Bill as a sweet little innocent baby who couldn't do no harm.

It's hard to explain but: Do I still feel bad that I now know he didn't intend to destroy his dimension and carries that grief, and that truly he's a desperate person trying to find him and his friends a home to stay in so they don't disintegrate when the edge of the world approaches them? Yeah. Does that mean id be totally fine if he had taken over earth and turned it into the nightmare realm? HELL NO! Get that dorito bastard away from my dirt!!!

Do I feel bad that he's suffering in theraprism? Kinda, yeah. Do I find it hilarious that he's suffering in theraprism. Absolutely. Is that a question? That's fucking awesome. These coexist simultaneously in my mind.

[carlyraejepsans]

ppl already terribly misinterpret sans do you want him to have the morally grey female character treatment too

i don't give a crap can you imagine the glados level cat 5 lesbian event the "dead where you stand" scene alone would cause? the trope subversion of the worn-down, nihilistic bar sleaze male character archetype that he represents? soriel yuri? does anyone fucking care about soriel yuri???

[m0thlegs]

maybe the real Viktor arcane season 2 character arc were the friends we made along the way