#thoughts and quills

[clare-89]

She girlbossed too close to the sun

[minutestildawn]

Hello, jon

[lleafyleafsterr]

I think the funniest thing about shipping mantis x loki in rivals is their ironic similarities that people wouldn’t have thought to compare before.

loki is the god of mischief/lies. mantis can read his mind or feelings to find the truth.

they’re both green, Mantis has antennas, Loki’s helmet has horns.

Mantis’s abilities in rivals revolves around nature/life, and y’all know about Loki’s connection with “trees”….

and also they both have dumb (usually blonde) brothers, which, also fits my comparison because iirc Loki and thor aren’t siblings in norse mythology and are uncle/nephew instead? which makes them only brothers in the mcu, mantis and peter are only siblings in the mcu, too.

[cirrus-grey]

This is the funniest fucking thing

[koscheyyyart]

RQG Brainrot never leaves you✨

[flocktothelight]

Days of Feast fits <3

[archivalhaven]

i’m sipping on that TMAlcohol tonight

[intuitive-revelations]

Jumbled thoughts and theories on belief and metaphysical engines, the Nexus, and fate of the Web of Time...

"Do all those gods seriously exist (not just as alien fakes) in the DW universe? How did the Doctor supposedly meet them?"

Keep in mind, belief making something real is hardly a new theme for DW. The most obvious example for this would be belief in the Doctor being able to empower him in The Last of the Time Lords.

We also know that every story has a place in reality, with the Land of Fiction, not to mention the Doctor's own statement in The Gallifrey Chronicles:

"My dear, one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip."

But I hear you. Suppose, for example, we want a more concrete example of this applied to religion:

Look no further than the series I've long batted for: Class.

In "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did", Quill, Ballon and Dorothea literally travel into several afterlife realms using something called "the reliquary", or a "metaphysical engine".

DOROTHEA: This, as best we can tell, is a 'metaphysical engine'. QUILL: Metaphysics? Metaphysics aren't real. It's just thought. DOROTHEA: Everything in the universe is conserved. Everything. Even belief. Get millions of creatures believing something strongly enough for long enough and even space responds.

Quill even gets to meet (and fight) the goddess of her own people:

"Ok, so there is a device that can take you into a theoretical space where beliefs are real, you haven't answered how the Doctor is going about meeting these gods."

Is now a good time to mention that the metaphysical engine is bigger on the inside?

"Yeah, but so are a lot of things, even the Barber's ship..."

Except, there really is more here. Because the TARDIS itself is a metaphysical engine. Canonically. Explicitly.

In the First Doctor Short Trip "Every Day", the TARDIS actually ends up seemingly landing in a man's head, as he struggles to come to terms with his wife having an affair, which manifests as a time loop. Once it's broken, they suddenly find themselves far gone from the loop:

"What happened?" asked Ian, looking around in shock. One minute they had been in the house, the next they were on their way. "I don't know for sure," said the Doctor. "But my TARDIS, you see, is a metaphysical engine. It can travel through all the dimensions related to space and time. It's possible that, on this occasion, we entered the dimension of one man's mind. One man's imagination."

Other stories have similarly seen the TARDIS breach into metaphysical space, even at one point physically landing in the Doctor's own mind in the VNAs.

Some of the Doctor's other meetings with legendary, mythical, or fictional characters (even on-screen: the Devil, Robin Hood, Santa Claus etc.) start to also make a bit more sense, don't they?

This all perhaps also shouldn't feel that incongruous, considering we had the Doctor literally end-up in Bethlehem in time for the birth of Christ just this Christmas (even if that one wasn't itself by the TARDIS).

This, perhaps, also sheds light on how the Barber's plan really was going to work.

I mentioned in my live reaction that the "World Wide Web / Nexus" strongly resembled the idea of the Web of Time (with "signals" even being transmitted through it in a way resembling the Matrix). Well the Web of Time, in expanded universe lore, is partially constructed through something called the "Observer Effect", in which temporal probabilities become fixed in history, named after the real-life effect in quantum physics. Through this, history becomes fixed by those that perceive it - designed to enforce Time Lord dominance over history.

For an in-show example, think of the laws of fixed points established by The Angels Take Manhattan: if you read your own future, you fix it into being. This is one reason why the Time Lords ostensibly forbid Time Lords from interacting with one's own past or future, despite the many times we've seen this violated.

I'd make an argument that the Nexus, if it's not literally connected to the Web of Time in some way, effectively serves a similar purpose. Just as observers can shape history, the Nexus allows believers to shape reality, via the effect Dorothea mentioned previously. By controlling it, the gods secure their own existence, just as controlling the Web of Time secures that of the Time Lords. If it is destroyed, those stories are lost, just as history as we know it is transformed by the degradation of the Web of Time.

This may sound like a lot of fanwank, but I have a suspicion that this kind of thinking with regards to the Web of Time is good to keep in mind over the next few episodes.

I theorised after Episode 1 that the TARDIS trying to "pull" itself back to Earth via the Web of Time is what resulted in those various landmarks somehow ending up pulled into the middle of space between MissBelindaChandra-1 and the Earth. That these represented sort-of "node points" in the Earth's history as represented in the Web, and by continuing to pull when it couldn't arrive, the TARDIS had actually pulled them towards it, rather than the other way round.

One episode on, and we get the "vindicators", devices designed to do exactly what I just said!

DOCTOR: We land anywhere, and the vindicator casts out a signal, like a fishing line - whoosh! - to May 24th, 2025, and we use it to pull the TARDIS in like a hook. So we must land.

ANOTHER episode later, and it's revealed that Mrs. Flood (hey remember she said she literally wanted to seize God's kingdom?) actually wants the Doctor to be using the vindicators? We also discover, even more concerningly, that Earth's future history, despite its significance to the universe, has been completely erased.

Next week in Episode 4, we get a relatively grounded episode, that ends with someone "rejecting the Doctor's reality", who is then seemingly recruited by Flood.

Finally, this week, we get this: a story of someone determined to control / tear down a Web stretched over time and space.

Put all this together with the ongoing decline in Rassilon's established laws of rationality, which started after the devastation of Gallifrey in Series 12 and the creation of the Flux, but accelerated after the Doctor fell to the point of using superstition outside the bounds of the Time Lord noosphere in Wild Blue Yonder, and what we know about the final two episodes, including episode titles (which I won't repeat here for spoilers), and it quickly starts to seem like Mrs. Flood might be planning to tear apart the Web of Time.

This may admittedly seem like a bit too much for casual viewers, but the vindicator element at least I'm feeling pretty confident with. If this WILL actually connect to the Web of Time, we'll see, but today's episode didn't exactly dissuade me...

[clumsypuppy]

did it seriously take me this long to realize the back of shadows head is shaped like dooms eye

[friskafriskito]

Six fanarts! My second time :D

Sister Carpenter, from The Silt Verses (podcast)

Lyfrassir Edda, from The Bifrost Incident (album, by The Mechanisms)

Jonathan Sims, from The Magnus Archives (podcast)

Jiji, from Kiki's Delivery Service (animated movie)

The Phantom of the Opera, from The Phantom of the Opera (book version)

Jack Skellington, from The Nightmare Before Christmas (animated movie)

Requested by (in order):

@arianwells , @archivists-plus-one , @thekyuusanna @stephanie568 @princeofbadassery , @pixelferrets

I hope these turned out alright, because a lot of these characters have no official visual design. It was so much fun to come up with them though, I might do these again!

[sunlaire]

i'll eventually make a whole post showing my HMS Terror Build but i really wanted to show yall this room...third lieutenant John Irving's cabin,, Theres a little minecraft bible on his little bookshelf

[squuote]

being stumped on a story involving your own characters is so mind numbing. I’m watching them sit in their enclosure doing jack shit. please move around or something

[crowskullls]

the idea here was fein losing a lockout game and then being dramatic over it, but really anything is possible.

[thenerdrant]

Today I re-listened to the first episode of TMAGP and the part surrounding the reddit thread about the magnus archives caught my eye (pun intended)

I dont think the archivst creature is John. I think the reddit user RedCanary was turned into the archivist that we see later in the season

[breadspacee]

Welcome to skins for marvel rivals that would make me empty my wallet

(With mostly starlord and Adam because I main them… oops)

First and foremost: cowboy skin set please please netease look at what you could do

It’d be so cool… and since we already have the rocket skin and the mrs.barnes skin I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they released these

Next, skins inspired in the designs of the gotg game, especially Mantis because her design is just gorgeous and I feel like it’s pretty different to her usual design with the pink skin and all

Now, this is completely self-indulgent but it would be so cool to have any of these designs of Adam as a skin for him, either his design for Adam rebirth or the 2008 gotg one

Bonus points if they give him makeup in the 2008 one

Last but not least, annihilation starlord… or grounded starlord would also be cool

Any of these would be super cool

Honestly this is just my way of coping until they release new skins for my mains please forgive me 😔

[wanderer-sketches]

Blood, soul, liquid gold