#through the tides

[sobri-k-eyt]

Silly Lore doodle I'm working on through the storm. I don't have a canon design for my siren goddess yet, so the shadowy figure will have to do. All I have is her glowing golden eyes, the same eyes that mirror in all her daughters

Someone please let me yap about this. You can't stop me and I'm shaking

Also taking fanart requests because I love to draw!

[sillysonglyrics]

"With her toy, she starts to play A simple song To ease the pain of her youth A verse she choked through Glistening rain touched her chin As she confessed To the sin that had stained A velvet dress she saved"

-Rule #7 - Angel's Tango by Fish in a Birdcage by Through the Tides

[cipher-the-sidhe]

Moon also requires his mandatory hugs, but he’s a little more insistent and needy about it. Luckily, you have a good rebreather, because he’s probably gonna keep you wrapped up for awhile…

[otterlyart]

Brained and Brawn for @xombigirl

[beaulesbian]

One Piece ep. 257 || "That was really something. They don't call themselves pirates for nothing."

manga ch. 367

It was cute Luffy really did the peace sign in the manga as well!

+Bonus "That was fun."

"No human could pull that off"

[goddammit-sam]

This post but with Fish in a Birdcage

feeling cute, might mass follow some Crane Wives accounts

[eastbluecrewed]

the brainworms got me unfortunately

in my head they're like vaguely rivals and lovers where asura is trying really hard to be serious and not let nika get to him and nika is devoting every fiber of focused energy he contains to getting to asura. they're married

[catoinette]

them!! ⛓️🌧️

[front-facing-pokemon]

[flowery-laser-blasts]

Drakken: You're a loser, baby... Shego: ...A loser, but just maybe if we, Both: eat shit together, things will end up differently. Shego: It's time to lose your self-loathin', excuse yourself, let hope in. Baby. Play your card, be who you are: Both: A loser, just like... me.

My friends and I watched the first four episodes of Hazbin Hotel and honestly this song is too catchy (+ I really really love this visual in the number). I'm weak for Keith David's singing voice.

[sobri-k-eyt]

class wip~ fish in a birdcage

doing some more practice with copics during a class. Honestly, drawing helps me focus more, and this is half vent art, half practice. Trying to hone my skills for comms, and always improve!

Trying to have this idea of claustrophobia, of this cage that's darker and pressing in and this bright characters being slowly consumed, both by the cage and her curse

[intothegenshinworld]

Some small headcanons for Xiao x Reader with the prompt: "Watching GaMing’s performance with a character of your choice" || WC: 350+

Shoutout to Orion/@chaoffee for being the best teammate I could've gotten <3 You're the GOAT www

As a vigilant Yaksha, XIAO hunts demons and the remnants of karmatic debt for the majority of the time.

You had always known that your friendship would be built on the few moments when he'd take a rest—going to Wangshuu inn to relax—the place where you met him and often found him when you needed him.

And as the time of the year came around, the festive spirit of Lantern Rite slowly began to reach Wangshu Inn as well. The owner of the place had hung up all kinds of decorations and the people would travel from here to the harbor where they'd celebrate the festival with their loved ones.

You knew that, despite his somewhat distant personality, Xiao adored this festival in his own way as well.

A few years back, he mentioned watching the lanterns being released, and ever since, you'd been trying to find the courage to ask the Adeptus to join you. (If not for yourself, then for him. That soft smile that broke free on his face when he talked about the lanterns, it's that happiness you wish him to experience again)

When you asked him on the roof of Wangshu Inn if he'd like to join you for a visit to Liyue Harbor, it took you some convincing to get him to agree.

And when he finally did, you decided to plan out your visit - wanting to make sure he'd get the best experience on his short break.

You were familiar with Gaming. You'd seen him perform a few times in the past, and thus decided to drag Xiao to one of his performances before the lanterns—or kites—would fill the sky.

From a distance—not wanting to be surrounded by people—Xiao stood by your side as he watched Gaming dance, jumping from side to side, skillfully and captivating the entire audience—including the Adeptus.

During the performance, you saw how focused Xiao seemed. His shoulders relaxed, if only for a short while, and his mind drifted away from his burdens.

For the first time in a while, he seemed to be happy and content

[boinday]

I am so normal about the way they interact what do you mean

[rcmclachlan]

Trademark: Top-tier Bucktommy writer + generally Cool + getting Buck pregnant

Thank you + thank you + thank you!

[bestworstcase]

your point about team rwby being the maidens’ liberators made me think - do you think blake is going to have a special connection to the summer maiden? I noticed that she’s the only one who hasn’t been close to a maiden yet

i think gillian asturias is the summer maiden (and this post is hysterical in hindsight. at the time i wrote it, the full-length v9 epilogue hadn’t been released yet so we’d only seen qrow’s section and about half of winter’s – hence my pausing to lay out the argument for salem going to vale next and making a pretense of hedging my bets on the crown being narratively central in v10. lol)

now! with regard to blake and the summer maiden, the common thinking here seems to mostly run along the lines of “…and that’s why summer maiden ilia,” or the more general speculation that the summer maiden will be a faunus character.

to this i say:

it’s a fallacy to conflate “blake will probably have a strong narrative connection to the summer maiden” with “the summer maiden necessarily is or will be blake’s old friend,” and the argument for ilia being due for maidenhood is quite thin otherwise, and

blake can and does have important narrative connections to characters who aren’t faunus, and it’s a weird to presume that in order for the summer maiden to have a meaningful tie to blake, she must be a faunus herself.

to expand on that first point, let’s consider the personal relationships between each of the maidens so far and ruby / weiss / yang:

pyrrha -> ruby’s friend

cinder -> ruby’s personal enemy

raven -> yang’s estranged mother

penny -> ruby’s friend

winter -> weiss’s beloved sister

the takeaway here – other than that if you’re ruby’s friend and someone offers you to become a maiden you should refuse – is half the relations between maidens and members of team rwby are antagonistic. (raven seems likely to at least try making amends with yang in v10, but as it stands in the narrative right now things between them are very fraught.)

it is just as likely that blake’s narrative connection to the summer maiden might develop through a personal conflict between them, rather than friendship. yes?

and, if i’m right about gill being the summer maiden, well—stop me if you’ve heard this one: a girl with a driving, passionate ambition to uplift her people from the ashes of centuries of conquest and subjugation is radicalized by a boy she loves who pulls them both deeper and deeper into violent, spiteful extremism that ultimately harms the very people they claim to fight for, until he finally crosses a line she can’t accept and she says no i will not.

that’s blake and adam but it’s also gillian and her brother. the difference between them is that blake’s red line was adam glibly revealing that the train heist was actually intended to be a massacre whereas gillian’s was jax stating his intention to commit suicide rather than retreat and live to fight another day; she helped yatsu subdue him specifically to save jax’s life, not because she had a crisis of conscience about their movement.

(there is a certain—really irritating—contingent of CFVY novel readers who project their own dislike of jax onto gill and insist that she turned against him because he demanded she ‘sacrifice her life’ to save him, which 1. he didn’t, he asked her to give him all her aura and then bodily shielded her because he’s physically bigger than she is so this was at worst a “if we’re going down together, i’ll make them go through me first,” 2. if gill only wanted to save her own neck all she had to do was rip her aura out of him and bounce, and 3. she explicitly says that the reason she did what she did is because he’s her brother, she loves him, and she couldn’t let him die.)

the point being, gill is still a radical; her soft betrayal of jax revealed her priorities in that she loves her brother more than The Cause, but in no way did it represent a break from her belief in the cause. if the epilogue is any indication, she’s just as committed to overthrowing shade academy as before. (and i think there’s a real chance that her actions will have improved her relationship with jax to some degree, because he believed she didn’t care about him at all! he thought she only stuck with him because his semblance compelled her to do so! and then gillian exploded his mind by revealing that his semblance straight up doesn’t work on her and she just loves him. which, if the twins are on the same page now, cuts down on the internal tension and likely makes them more dangerous adversaries to the coalition.)

but her history, the way she became like this, is eerily similar to blake’s radicalization in the white fang, and i think blake would certainly be able to piece that together. she’s also by far the member of team rwby i would say is most likely to recognize and relate to the genuine pain at the heart of the crown’s movement—vacuo has suffered.

vacuo wasn’t even a state until the end of the great war. it was a mistrali territory. its people were enslaved and worked to death in a systematic and horrifyingly effective project to extract every last speck of valuable resources from the region, and then even statehood was a slap in the face because they were left to fend for themselves in a barren wasteland whose ecosystem had been completely and utterly destroyed.

the crown is a mirror held up to the white fang; blake is insightful and empathetic enough to realize these similarities and see herself and her past mistakes reflected in gillian, but this time she’s an outsider to the movement—she can’t effect change from within or reclaim the true, important work from the vengeful extremists. so she’s limited in what she can do, practically, even as it’s going to be painfully clear to her that the crown is falling into the same trap adam did.

and at the same time, the new white fang will in all likelihood either be in vacuo or show up to join the coalition in v10, so blake’s part in her own movement, her place in her community, can be directly juxtaposed with her opposition to/empathy for the crown.

v9 sets up for this with blake’s advocacy for the afterans—v7-8 do as well to a lesser extent, because blake is still dealing with the personal fallout of v4-6 and thus is quieter about mantle than say, nora is, but like. blake draws a comparison between her experiences in the white fang and with adam and the moral compromises ironwood starts making after the election. it just seems… pretty clear to me that the narrative has been setting up blake to play a pivotal role in relation to the crown since at least v4 if not earlier, depending on how granular the vacuo outline was during v1-3.

so this is a narrative connection i very much expect blake to have with gillian regardless, but… if gill is the maiden…

well, she’s certainly not trapped inside ozpin’s vault/key maiden paradigm! so in that case what does it look like for a member of team rwby to fulfill this narrative role of liberation? probably something like de-radicalizing her and her brother by convincing them there is a better way forward than their divisive, violent, paranoid ideology. and blake is unquestionably the member of team rwby best equipped to get the ball rolling there.

further, blake’s semblance is a really strong counter to gill’s – that’s true of ruby and weiss as well, because gillian has to touch a person in order to steal aura and so agile, fast opponents are going to be tougher for her in general. but blake has two more things going for her beyond the basic mobility advantage, vis-a-vis making it personal:

the illusionary aspect of blake’s semblance will allow her to create decoys, which is a very powerful tactical advantage against an opponent who really wants to grab her, and

blake’s girlfriend is a hand-to-hand fighter, and an incredibly brave one with an intense protective instinct at that.

clears throat. we all remember yang getting possessed in rwby x jl part 2, yes? and blake clocking it instantly? well.

if blake and gillian are meant to be not just foils but personal adversaries in the vein of ruby and cinder—yang’s gonna get got. agile though she is, as a hand-to-hand combatant yang is unavoidably much more vulnerable to the twins’ contact-based semblances than the rest of her team, her personality will make it very hard for her to play it safe and stay back if it comes to an open fight, and there is nothing the narrative could do to lock in that personal enmity that would be punchier than yang being compromised.

even if gill as a personal adversary to blake isn’t in the cards i expect yang to get got anyway because, let’s be honest: do we really expect crwby to set themselves up with a golden opportunity to do a climactic love-overcomes-mind-control scene with the bees in v10 and then not take it? with how nuts the entire creative team goes for these two? after the climactic battle in ice queendom hingeing on yang being able to free blake from a nightmare with the mere lesser power of unrealized lesbianism? do we reeeally believe they would pass that up? lol.

[crowreys-wormstache]

If I had a nickel for every time @quiddie told a story via the medium of TTRPG that involved a PC witnessing the "monstrous" side of their love interest (also a PC) and being absolutely smitten I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but I'm glad it happened twice and I'm hoping it'll happen again