#those are interchangable

[blackboxtheater]

i voted! i was going to vote them anyway but i wanna prompt!

prompt is…

pokémon (my other hyperfixation lol)

Ahhhhhh!! Yes!! We are keeping our lead!

To make sure we keep the lead, go vote for Mumpearl in the Mumbo Jumbo ship bracket!!

But onto the really exciting stuff!

Okay so I have to preface this by saying I know nothing about pokémon.

And not in a funny "yeah, I've forgotten most of it cause I haven't played since I was a kid hahaha" way. In a "didn't know you had to fight them against each other to gain experience" way.

I know nothing about Pokémon.

I know 'Gotta Catch 'Em All!', Team Rocket has a cat man creature in it, you throw the ball at the little monster to capture it, Pikachu does something with lightning, and Snorlax…..exists? Charizard…..is a thing……I think? 

So I need to preface this by saying that I am so so SO sorry from the bottom of my heart that you found the last person on earth who doesn’t know about Pokémon to give this prompt too. I am so sorry I am going to butcher the mechanics of your favorite game. You can and should roast me for it.

With all that in mind, it's probably best to think about this as a story loosely based on the concepts of Pokémon as opposed to actually how Pokémon works. But I tried. And I Googled a lot.

*-* *-* *-*

When people ask Trainer Moon and Nurse Jumbo at international research conferences about how they started the Boatem Forest Pokémon Wildlife Hospital and Research Facility, they each tell a slightly different story.

Nurse Jumbo gushes about how Trainer Moon's skill in battle is a critical foundation for his study of rare evolutions and pokémon abilities. Trainer Moon talks bout Nurse Jumbo's selfless work treating pokémon in rural communities and how the research facility is founded on the basic premise that new discoveries can only happen if the resources to study wild pokémon are actually located near wild pokémon.

Even the stories of exactly how they fell in love vary slightly, but most researchers only make the mistake of asking that question once. Because once Trainer Moon or Nurse Jumbo get started on that tangent, you had to consider the rest of your night lost to being held captive by their endless stories showering praise onto their partner. The details may vary slightly, but their adoration and devotion to one another is irrefutable.

The actual story was a little messier and a lot less inspirational.

Because the truth was that Pearl had no memory of first meeting Mumbo.

She remembered the burn in her legs as she ran up the rocky mountain road towards the faint lights in the distance.

She remembered the blood of her oldest and most loyal Midnight Lycanroc Tilly seeping into her hoodie.

She remembered praying to any god who would listen that the lights were a town and offering anything the god wanted in return for there to be a Pokemon Center in this town that could save Tilly.

She remembered crying even harder than she had been before when she finally saw the universal sign of a Pokemon center calling out to her through the darkness along the deserted town road.

She remembered sobs of blind panic and utter relief and bottomless grief at the thought of losing Tilly all crashing over her as she burst through the doors.

The next thing she remembered was waking up alone in a stiff plastic waiting room chair.

The only sounds were the quiet clicks of a keyboard and the snores of a Sylveon curled at the ground between her feet. Which explained how she slept at all considering the ache in her back.

"Oh! You're awake," a voice said to her left.

She turned to see a dark hair man towering behind the counter, far too tall to comfortable sit at the small computer terminal in front of him. The only thing she could focus on as he kept talking was the twitching of his incredibly pronounced mustache.

"Did you sleep well? That was a stupid question. Sorry. The chairs are terrible. I know that. Everyone says that. We, well really it's just me so I guess I, I keep meaning to get new ones. Did Potato help at least? Sorry, I mean is there anything I can do for you?"

"Potato?" Pearl blinked, but the rustle at her feet answered her question before the man behind the counter could.

"Are you Potato?" Pearl looked down into the big blue eyes of the Sylveon staring eagerly back at her. The happy chirps she got in response were quickly accompanied by its ribbon twisting around her arm and tugging her hand down towards its head in a shameless demand for head scritches.

"I wish I could say that means you're special, but Potato loves everyone," the man said, stepping out from behind the counter and walking across the lobby waiting room towards Pearl. "Don't you buddy? That's why you're a good boy. Who's a good boy?"

Pearl wasn't sure if the happy chirps from Potato are from the scratches she was giving him behind the ears or from being called a good boy. But it was enough to make her smile for just a moment before the worry about Tilly sunk back into her gut.

"Are the nurses around this morning? I'd like to get a status update on my Pokemon," Pearl asked, looking up at the man.

"Oh she's stable. Still asleep in the back. It was a long night but Tilly pulled through. She was in rough shape. You both were. That's why I had Potato come out to help you get some rest too. And looks like it worked, huh buddy?"

The man, who apparently knew Tilly's name, looked down to the Sylveon as it released Pearl's hand and trotted over to curl around his legs.

"I'm sorry," Pearl said, shaking her head in confusion. "Who are you again?"

"I'm Mumbo, I was here last night when you brought in Tilly? I mean I'm always here cause I'm the only one here so…" he trailed off with a nervous laugh.

"You're the nurse?"

Pearl blamed her stupid question on the exhaustion, but the laugh she got in response had a lightness to it that made it sound like she wasn't the first person who had asked the same thing. Living on the move like Pearl did and living this far into the wildness meant she had seen a lot of different nurses in a lot of different Pokémon Centers. She couldn't say she ever remembered meeting a young man. She'd met male nurses before, but most were old enough to be her grandfather. This one barely looked older than her. And that might just be because of the mustache.

"Yeah, I know I'm not exactly what people expect. But I'm the only nurse around for at least a couple of towns, so you're stuck with me."

The nervous laugh was back, and Pearl wasn't sure if she felt worse about making the stupid assumption that he couldn't be the one taking care of her pokémon or the fact that this came up enough that he had a response ready to go.

"Do you want to see Tilly?" Mumbo asked, motioning back towards the rooms behind the counter.

Pearl could only nod, tears threatening to prickle into her eyes even though she knew that Tilly had to be okay.

Mumbo opened the door into a recovery room in the back to reveal a worse for wear, but very alive, Tilly. Pearl chose to focus on the slow rise and fall of her chest as she slept curled in on herself rather than the countless wires and IV's hooked up to her. But Pearl didn't notice the Umbreon nestled inside the crook of Tilly's legs until she was already climbing down onto the floor to try to wrap herself around her favorite pokémon.

"Mooner, come here," Mumbo called, making the Umbreon perk up from where it had snuggled into Tilly. "It's time for the nice lady here to hang out with your new friend."

"Sorry," Mumbo continued, directing his attention back towards Pearl. "Mooner like to pretend she's like her bother Potato and can help her friends feel better. Tilly seemed to calm down and sleep better with another pokémon around thought which, I mean, I guess I get now."

He gestured to how Pearl had curled herself completely around Tilly.

"She normally sleeps next to me," Pearl offered as explanation for Tilly's behavior. Or maybe her own.

And since Mumbo didn't kick her out, that was how Pearl stayed for the rest of the day, curled up next to Tilly, chatting with Mumbo as he monitored Tilly's vitals and diligently administered additional healing every 2 hours like clockwork.

It was probably a good thing that he seemed to ramble a lot, because Pearl wasn't in much of mood to talk. But she was in the mood to listen to Tilly's breathing and Mumbo's soothing voice as he explained how a guy like him ended up running a Pokémon Center in the tiny town along the side of Magic Mountain. 

Or more correctly, ended up back in Magic Mountain.

He explained, between replacing Tilly's IV bags and mixing more healing elixirs, that he had grown up here, just up the mountainside. He'd been fascinated by pokémon growing up just like so many other kids, but he'd never been good at battling with them. His friends Grian and Scar were always better at the actually fighting, he was more interested in learning about their abilities, behaviors, evolutions, statistics, or really anything he could learn.

"That’s why I have so many of these guys hanging around," he joked, picking up a snoring Mooner from the counter so he could grab the stack of papers under it.

"They can turn out so many different ways, and you mostly just need to love them for them to evolve. Which is perfect for someone as terrible in fights as me."

That was probably also why he got so experienced in taking care of injured pokémon, he said. Not a lot of nurses in rural places like this, and between his friend's eagerness to fight and his perchance to lose against anything he fought, he got pretty good at taking care of their little flock of pokémon growing up. 

He explained to Pearl that when he, Grian, and Scar were finally old enough to go to university in the big city, his friends were sure they were going to become the best pokémon trainers in the world. Meanwhile he was sure he would become a world renowned pokémon scientist.

"I thought I was going to study in this big lab. Use all this fancy equipment and powerful computers. But turns out to have that, you have to live really far away from the mountains. And you have to care about optimizing pokémon for fighting, which, between you and me, I don’t really think is the most interesting thing about them."

Pearl viscerally understood that sentiment.

She had had been told that she was a talented trainer in the cities and towns she drifted through in her early years. She had won lots of battles and defeated opponents in new and creative ways. There had been whispers gathering around her about the bright future she had, and how she could become one of the greatest trainers of her age given a little more time and practice.

Until she swung at her ally for the way his Alolan Ninetales went after Tilly in the middle of battle. Then it didn't matter how talented she was because giving a trainer a black eye made most people question if she had the mental stability needed to be successful.

The whole thing had just made Pearl question why she was making her pokémon fight battles they didn’t need to in the first place.

So she had apologized to Scott Major for breaking his nose, packed up her things from the MCC gym, and left for the mountains.

That had been nearly 5 years ago and now she had a collection of extremely rare pokémon she caught in the depths of the Boatem forest. But more importantly, her pokémon never fought unless they absolutely had to.

Which they did.

Often as one might expect in the wilderness.

But she would rather them fight a wild pokémon to help her survive than ask them to fight against another trainer just to settle some petty dispute in a big city.

"At least you're good at fighting. I spent all my years as a kid obsessed with pokémon and no way to ever evolve them because I could never win a fight," Mumbo laughed, a self-deprecating tinge settling inside the sound as Pearl explained how she even ended up in the far flung town of Magic Mountain in the first place.

"But I'm glad you're here to treat them," she offered, running her fingers through Tilly's fur. Tilly was finally awake enough to gaze up at Pearl from where her head sat in Pearl's lap, but was still too weak to do much else.

"Learning to take care of all different types of pokémon is an interesting challenge. One I was happy to find once I realized I would have been miserable as a scientist locked away in some pristine lab in a big city. I mean, what do they even study there? There's no pokémon in cities except the ones people bring in. How is that- Sorry. I mean yes. I like being a nurse. I like helping these guys get better. And it's needed. Ever since nurse Tin died a few years ago, I'm the only nurse on the mountain."

"That must be hard," Pearl said, realizing that if Tilly had needed round the clock care since Pearl brought her in last night that meant Mumbo must have never slept.

"Thank you," Pearl added, looking up from where Tilly was drifting back to sleep. "She wouldn’t be here without you, so thank you."

It took Tilly a few more days to recover, which meant more time for Pearl to hang around the clinic chatting with Mumbo. He taught her some quick battlefield healing tricks in case she was farther out the next time her pokémon took this much lethal damage and she wasn't lucky enough to find a pokémon center in time. And once Tilly was strong enough to walk, she introduced him to her vast collection of pokémon during their walks around the small meadow behind the clinic. He had seemingly endless questions about their abilities, behavior, stats, and history, and Pearl felt guilty the more she had to admit she didn't know the answer to most of his questions. She had suspected she had a lot of rare pokémon before, but it was wild to have her suspicions confirmed by the countless blank data fields in even Mumbo's medical grade pokédex.

So when Mumbo refused to take any payment for his work on Tilly, she promised she would come back and repay him with some answers to all his questions. He laughed and told her to not worry about it, but there was an excited flash in his eyes that she couldn't stop thinking about even as she packed up and headed down the mountain with a newly healed Tilly by her side.

That look in his eyes was all she could think about six months later when she watched her Ursaring evolve into a Bloodmoon Ursaluna right before her eyes. She could see that look so clearly as she scribbled down everything she could think of that could possibly be relevant before packing up her camp and starting the trek back to Magic Mountain that very night.

When she walked back through his Pokémon Center doors, she thought he was excited to see her because he remembered her promise to bring him back some of the answers he had been looking for since he was a kid.

Many years, dozens of adventures, countless pokémon, and a first nationally recognized scientific paper later, Mumbo confessed he had forgotten that Pearl even promised to come back when he saw her come through the doors that day. He had just been thrilled to see the pretty, brilliant trainer walk back into his life again.

The fact that she was offering a path to an unimaginably fantastic future of studying pokémon together was just a lovely bonus.

[non-stick-pansexual]

If your trans activism ignores, excludes, infantilizes, or actively targets trans men and transmasculine folks, you need to re-evaluate your activism and your stance as a trans ally.

You do NOT get to ignore and exclude trans men just “because they are men”, that’s antithetical to trans activism and actively harms the community as a whole. As a trans community, and as a greater queer community, we need to do better.

[blueskittlesart]

I noticed you into persona again and drew botw link in zelda what would their link and zelda perssona and outfit be like if they were in persona?

this was. an interesting exercise in character design if nothing else. not entirely vibing with the golden goddesses which is why i didnt color them fully & also i exclusively referenced p5 personas (& orpheus p3 purely because i remember that design). not entirely sure they're reading as game-accurate because i honestly don't pay much attention to the actual persona designs so i was really just focusing on silhouette and vibe lmfao. anyway if you're an artist and you ever feel like torturing yourself try designing a character or 5 based off the persona franchise

[mothcpu]

＠△～＊＆☆＄％

[meowicule]

old man yaoi political compass

[ohitslen]

Intrusive thoughts

[kirby-the-gorb]

[artigas]

I’m really happy that Black Sails is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, but (predictably) some of the takes I’m seeing online are so busted. It’s wild to me that anyone would complain about the fact that Anne Bonny kisses Jack after she’s developed this life-changing relationship with Max. It’s absolutely wild to see anyone roll their eyes or feel uncomfortable about the fact that Flint has sex with Miranda when he returns to her in season one or that Max is most likely a lesbian but actively has sex with men for pay and knows how to make that pleasurable. It’s crazy to me that some of the very audiences who claim to want queer representation feel so discomforted when they actually see the mess and seeming inconsistencies of queerness that they asked for.

The reality is that there are lesbians who have had (and will have!) meaningful, mutually-gratifying, and deeply sexual relationships with men. There are gay men who’ve enjoyed having sex with women, who are gay as the day is long and nevertheless feel sexually attracted to a woman or two and are nevertheless gay men, full stop. There are gay cis men who are happily married to trans women. There are femme dom tops and butch bottoms and there are mascs afab people who like femme boys. There are non-binary people and trans men who actively identify as lesbians. There are ace and aro people who enjoy thinking about and engaging with sex — sometimes in fiction and sometimes in real life. Queerness, in fiction and in reality, defies neat categorization. That is the beauty, power, and (perceived) unorthodoxy of queerness.

Now, I’ll say this — do I think the straight men behind Black Sails were actively thinking deeply and insightfully about the paradoxes and fuckery of queer identity when they wrote Black Sails? No! By their own admission, Steinberg and Levine have owned up to the fact that some of the writing of the show was really hinged on their own blind spots as people who are not (to my knowledge) members of the queer community. If I want to be generous, I think that the beautiful mess of Black Sails is that, in not feeling like experts enough to designate specific identity labels to any of their characters, the writers stumbled their way into more authentic representation of lived queer experience, which is to say that the notion that James Flint was actively thinking of himself as a gay man was anachronistic. As many lesbian archivists and theories have noted, the notion of a queer identity — as in, queerness is who you are, not what you do — was patently unthinkable for most cultures in the past. In other words, the idea that Anne Bonny operates in the eighteenth century as a lesbian and thus would not willingly engage in relationships with men is not only untrue of the series, but untrue of most recorded lesbian experiences in the real world. The notion that a lesbian would operate her entire life without engaging sexually or romantically with men, for instance, is a very new privilege that some of us are very lucky to enjoy, but it is not true for the vast majority of human history — hell, it’s not even true of our present world.

This is all to say that think that there’s something really funny about how we want queer characters to fit into neatly organized boxes. This isn’t a new problem, either. When the show was still airing, the BS fandom would get itself into tizzies about wether or not Flint is gay or bisexual, wether or not Anne Bonny is a lesbian, wether or not Silver is queer when his only canonical relationship is with Madi, etc etc. We’ve been having these discourses for years and I don’t know. I get that much of it is fueled by how badly some people want to see themselves represented in media, but . . . well. The siloing of queer characters and queer narratives into neat little boxes has never felt very authentic to me and nine times out of ten, it’s also just so damn boring.

[banefort]

S2 dropping Nettles and inserting Rhaena into her storyline is actually insane. Nettles being one of (if not) the most important characters of the dance, showcasing the intersection between race, class and material privilege, undermining targaryen racial supremacy by claiming a dragon.. all that out the window ! this show is unreal man

[tapestryundone]

quiet is right handed and always holds the blade in his right hand as a result. he is tied to the narrative that the narrator constructed through the blade and no matter what happens in any runthrough the knife will always end up in his hand at least once no matter what he does or what he truly wants

the princess is always chained by her right hand. no matter what, she is always bound to the cabin and the narrative that the narrator constructs. tsm is represented through countless arms and yet the princes is always placed in a basement with her right hand shackled

both quiet and the princess are trapped in the construct, parallel to one another. the knife is to the long quiet as the chain is to the shifting mound

in the prisoner chapter, if quiet becomes chained then he must lose the knife. there is no purpose to overlapping ones shackles, he just trades one for another

anytime that the princes recieves the knife, she becomes free of her chain. there is no purpose to overlapping ones shackles, she just trades one for another

the knife and shackles are equivalent, and both must be shed in some way for the shifting mound and the long quiet, or the princess and quiet/hero

at the heart of the shifting mound, the princess will always be free. the shifting mound is free to choose anything she wants. shes waiting for you to choose. the apotheosis establishes that she could destroy the construct if she so chose, but if the long quiet doesnt break free with her, destroying the construct will destroy him, too. she is free of her shackle but she has a choice between leaving with the long quiet or killing him- mirroring that the long quiet has a choice between leaving with the shifting mound or killing her. only that the shifting mound made her choice, and that is that no matter what happens, she will not destroy the long quiet

at the heart of the shifting mound, quiet has the choice to take the knife and give into the narrators script- to abide by it or return to its beginning and reread the story all over again- or to abandon his own shackles and free himself from the story the narrator wove

effectively, the chain and the blade must be abadoned in some way for the two to be free. with or without reaching the heart of the shifting mound, neither can be free until the remnants of the construct are abandoned, until their unique tether to the construct is left behind

and if the two are a palindrome, then the letter in the center is the cabin- a structure that exists for both of them and is a construction of the narrator that they both influence differently but in equal amounts. they both have been built around it and feom it, very literally, and the chain and blade are both offshoots of it that the narrator uses to control them

[mollysunder]

There should be a separate ship name for stuff related to main timeline Ekko and alt timeline Powder. Something like TinkerTime or On The Clock. Timebomb doesn't describe those two, in the alt timeline Powder's described as a tinkerer and she does support work.

[smtown-tourist]

You know, I gotta say, the fact that GOT7 has yet to do a 7 Deadly Sins inspired comeback feels like a crime

[nickfromguesswhohateclub]

[theflagscene]

Kant & Style: You’re going to jail.

Fadel & Bison: We’re going to jail.

Me: No, babies, you’re going to prison and a Thai prison at that. Good fucking luck! 🫡

[carouselcometh]

The Glass Coffin Mocktail! In honor of my most beloved and favorite Saw trap 5ever :)

[wiredalienvampire]

together at the sunset

Btw, incase yr wondering how long I took on this piece

Thats thirteen hours and 58 minutes in total btw!