#this can only end bad

[sarathrwizard]

Requests :)

Go to my ask box and write down the most reckless or dumb idea you can think of that Leo would do with the wheelchair.

And I will make a doodle for it!

Ya know, something like this!

Oh this could be fun! :)

Have fun! Lord bless you!

[gotstabbedbyapen]

It's always "Hades isn't bad or cruel, his deeds are just metaphors of the inevitable death" or "Hades kidnapping Persephone represent the premature death".

But when the argument "Zeus has numerous affairs and many children because he represent the fertile rain" is brought up, all nuance is suddenly out of the window and Zeus is just a womanizer who can't keep it in his pants.

[coddda]

I wish we could have met in some other way.

Lawlight Week Day 2: Soulmates

If you saw me repost and re-edit this several times uh No you didn't </3

Still frames/Individual gifs:

If you know what every frame is from you get a free cookie. by the way

[anxiousapplepie]

After 4 painful Acts and at least a dozen traumatizing experiences that will haunt them forever, Traveler!Bonnie gives the friendship quests a try! And discovers new and terrifying interesting information about the Researcher.

[orbch]

“why are you drawing season 1 tua fanart?” because season 4 was so bad it made me want to die. next.

[corpsentry]

a glass sun 1/2

[pidgydraws]

IMO

i make a lot of very fluffy, sentimental, art~ but i need everyone to know just how much i fucking hate these two (adoringly. with all my heart.)

[aaronsinferno]

Rambling here but….

This has truly hit me harder than I expected it to. I feel completely blindsided by all of this. It’s as if the rug was just pulled out from under me. As a gay man, this was a hard punch to the gut and not just for me but for everyone who found representation in these characters. I hate this especially for Lou, though. After Oliver’s recent comments, it’s clear now more than ever that Lou was the one person who truly cared and was the most invested in the relationship and its potential. He believed in the story and wanted more for it. To think about how he endured so much vile, hateful, and disgusting attacks online for months on end and stayed silent through it all without a single cast member standing up to defend him sickens me. All for him and his character to be discarded like this…without any care at all. it’s upsetting. It’s unfair. And I’m sure Lou himself doesn’t take any of it personally, but still. it’s just all so….

I’ve never experienced anything like this in a fandom before.

I feel spat on.

[shouyuus]

OH MY FUCKKK. college roomate!vi is fucking killing meeee. the last one made me literally squeal when i read about vi's vape 😩😩 i am a silly little smoker myself and i was wondering if you'd write something about vi introducing reader to smoking? like one night they're sitting and talking on the couch, maybe watching a movie or something and vi whips out her lost mary (i KNOW thats what she'd smoke) and reader asks kinda out of nowhere to have a hit, and vi laughs a little and then teaches her how to use it (it is an art form), and their faces keep getting closer and closer and they're basically kissing because they're hitting from the same vape, right? RAAAHHHHHH 😩

college roommate!vi cinematic universe not me having to google the brand but yES ur rite she woULD

+18, no sex but vape usage, mdni

"l-like that?"

"yeah, just like that -- breathe in -- hold it -- breathe out --"

you let out a soft groan, the "cherry peach lemonade" flavored smoke slipping from the corners of your lips in streams, vi's eyes flickering down and back up again, her own lips parted, her pupils dark.

"it's -- it's a good flavor," you say, blinking as you hand the vape back to vi, who grins and takes a long hit, leaning back slow, one hand on the vape, the other slung lazily across the sofa back, letting the smoke unfurl from her mouth. you watch, mesmerized as she rounds out her lips and blows out little smoke rings just to make you laugh.

"yeah, it's nice," vi says, her voice soft as she glances back at you, at the way your eyes have gone just a bit hazy. she leans forward, tugging your chin towards her with a thumb and forefinger, a mischievous grin sweeping across her face.

"open your mouth for me, pretty girl."

you do, letting your mouth fall slack as vi takes another long hit and blows the smoke into your mouth. like this, you can feel the cool of the smoke, the warmth of her breath, the strange duality sending tingles shooting down your back, a coil tightening in your gut as you breath in.

your lashes flutter as the high slips through your body, the weightlessness gathering in your loosening muscles.

"i-i've seen people do that before --" you say, grasping for something to fill the strange, ethereal silence, "at parties," you clarify, hoping for... you're not entirely sure what.

vi chuckles, "yeah? it's called shotgunning. it's... a bit gentler than just taking a hit straight from the vape so --"

she pulls you towards her again, this time, you lean in and your lips are so close you can feel the heat of her skin against yours.

you open your mouth without her prompting, and you don't miss the way her pupils dilate at the motion. and just for a second, you can taste your own heartbeat -- the sweet cherry peach lemonade tang of it at the back of your throat -- before vi's blowing another steady stream of smoke into you and you're breathing it in, tasting her -- wondering if her lips would be just as sweet without all the flavored smoke --

"there... think that's enough for you for tonight?" vi asks, pulling back with a grin.

you lick your lips, glancing at the tv screen.

"we've missed like... half the movie."

vi laughs, grabbing for the remote, "yeah well. we were busy. luckily, there's a rewind button."

you keep quiet as she rewinds through the parts of the movie the both of you missed, your mind a berry-tinted haze of half-formed thoughts. you inch closer to her, pressing your thigh to hers, letting your head drop onto her shoulder.

"thanks, vi," you say, your eyes cast towards the tv but not really seeing it at all.

she stills beneath your touch.

"what for, princess?"

you nuzzle your head deeper into her neck, "nothing just... glad you're here."

after a beat, vi curls an arm around your shoulder and gives you a squeeze.

"i'll always be here, princess. whenever you need me. and even if you don't. got it?"

you giggle, closing your eyes and letting the bright neons of the movie play out behind your eyelids like the passing of so many days and nights.

"i'll always need you, vi... even if you think i don't." and your voice is so, slow, honest. so honest that vi feels her chest squeeze. she settles for brushing her lips along the seam of your hair.

"then i guess we're stuck with each other for the long haul, aren't we princess?"

you let out a sleepy little laugh, nodding.

"yeah. guess we are."

[starscream-is-my-wife]

This is part 1 of a continuation for my other post where LL Megatron gets trapped in the G1 universe, I was thinking about how someone would go insane in this cartoon world and thought "what if Megatron had someone else to accompany him" so, I gave Starscream an existential crisis

Edit: pt 2 here

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about not only the specific people lucanis pulls in to represent the 'locks' in his psyche, but the storytelling that happens in the structure/order of them. the underlying ideas are presented something like:

the lucanis who went into the ossuary never came back out again; he died down there (the boy caterina raised is gone forever) -> you're putting yourself in danger doing this (by being close to me), you should leave because I can't bear it if you get hurt because of me -> it doesn't matter even if we do try this, it won't work anyway (again because of me) ('you know what he's like, you can open the door but he won't walk through it' :'( oofie doofie) -> what if the real secret is that there was never anything but the monster in here from the beginning. you should leave, there was never anything here worth saving in the first place. (implicitly: what if I deserved what happened, all along.)

it runs pretty cleanly from outward-oriented attachment anxiety ('caterina won't even want me back like this, she won't recognize me (the same way I no longer recognize myself)) and gradually deeper inwards until we reach self-image and self worth. or you know, the harrowing basic lack of it lol.

"careful -- they'll know we're not right," spite says in one of their first scenes... but clearly, some very deep part of lucanis has feared or suspected for much longer than that that there's something inherently not right at the core of him, way before any demon entered the picture. and the voice he gives those lines to is the person who should know him better than anyone in the world, who he has loved more than anyone in the world -- and who deliberately chose to hurt him so horrifically anyway. 'It's better if I'm just a monster and deserved what happened than it is to allow for the idea that the brother I love doesn't really exist and maybe never did'. it's better if he's fundamentally flawed in some way that needed fixing to help him survive, and that's why caterina chose to hurt him again and again -- out of love. (this one I think he might have a very sad wakeup call on one day if he ever ends up with the responsibility and care of a child of his own in some way and realizes just how alien the idea of ever intentionally hurting them for any reason is to him. oh buddy. also interesting that he keeps caterina as the outermost lock -- there IS a distance he keeps there that he hasn't with illario. he doesn't resent her 'anymore' he says, but he also keeps her carefully further away from his deepest self.)

as far as I could tell the only note in the mind prison that's fully hidden and needs to be uncovered is the sad painful helpless stupid little truth that even after all this, even knowing what happened... he still loves his brother. is there anything illario could ever do that would make lucanis completely stop loving him, do you think? sometimes the trouble with unconditional love is that it is, well. unconditional, even when some terms and conditions probably would have been in order haha.

that's the pattern you see there again and again; he would rather destroy and abandon and imprison himself at every turn than let go of love, even when it's just scraps, even when there's only ever enough of it to hurt him. it's only when rook shows up and as it were takes his hand and walks along with him that he can entertain the idea of changing the story of what walking out the door might mean in the end.

[z-1-wolfe]

And who will you be in your death?

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[loves2spwge]

they just want to be one...

commissions @jolyonvane did for me where i asked if he could please please please make stan look as desperate and exhausted as he usually does but is being kept together by all his love for his sbf kyle

[heymacy]

IAN GALLAGHER + his journey with bipolar disorder

╰┈➤ “At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of." - Carrie Fisher

[bixels]

The more I think about it, the more I question Arcane S2's politics and themes, which were so foundational to S1. Like, a tiny example [SPOILERS AHEAD]:

Singed wins. He gets exactly what he wants in the end. All his "efforts" are rewarded. What does that say about people who share his ideology of eugenics? He is the source of nearly every horrible thing and conflict that happened (Shimmer, the factory deaths, Jinx, Vander as Warwick, the corruption of Viktor), and he gets a happier ending than any other character. Not even a 'he got what he wanted but he has become completely unrecognizable/monstrous to his daughter' tag at the end. You can say they're setting him up and need to open his daughter to future shows, but the way you end a character's story says something about what you think about that character. What does it say when the eugenicist war criminal gets the happy ending he doesn't deserve?