#uhhhh I got rambly but

[huginsmemory]

Been thinking about how Bill legitimately had a horrifying reason (the literal progressive disintegration of the nightmare realm that erases whatever it disintegrates from existence completely) to move himself and his crew into a new dimension. Like that's terrifying. And yet he never utilizes this to his favour. He could have been honest about this with Ford, and you KNOW as long as Bill didn't mention plans of overtaking the earth, Ford would've made the portal for him, both out of Ford's own interest and because Ford when faced with these big moral questions will pull through. But this is a card Bill NEVER plays because although he needs to leave the dimension, he cannot lose face. He can't put aside his pride and admit to the humility that he needs to flee from his dimension, that he's not actually all powerful. And so instead he pretends to be a muse and when Ford figures out something else is going on, instead of being open and humble and saying that his dimension is unravelling, Bill focuses on that he's going to over take earth, that he's actually been a monster all along, surprise Ford!

And part of it is definitely because Bill's built himself up on power and violence and to grovel and earnestly ask for help, to admit that he cannot stop the unraveling of his dimension completely invalidates that; showing vulnerability? Can't do that, even under the guise of lying to get his way. And part of it makes you wonder if it's also a form of self-sabotage, because underneath his deep denial Bill is guilty over what he occurred; he sees himself as a monster and so he'll be that monster, and having people recognize that feels good in the same way that pressing a bruise feels good. But it makes you wonder what would've happened if Bill even just was open about his dimension unravelling and had lied about overtaking the earth.

It's also interesting because although Bill has SOME charisma and can manipulate people decently well (as evidenced by his cult, and pandering to people's desires with Ford, Mabel and Blendin), he refuses to be vulnerable, refuses to not be true to his off-putting self, even when if he was just vulnerable of pretended to not be himself, to put aside the (false) pride he has in himself he would've gotten a portal by now. and part of me wonders if it's because it's this false pride that built on insecurity and denial on who he is he cannot drop that mask.

Further thoughts on this!

[neverhangd]

“Untwist yer knickers, Shady One,” Anne replies almost immediately. Gods above—is this what dealing with her is like? Unpleasant and mean without a real reason? …what a stupid fucking question. Of course this what dealing with her is like, right down to the dismissive assumptions. Anne isn’t used to dealing with someone like herself; James and Jack were loud, brash arseholes, and Read was a serious, quiet shadow at her shoulder. She doesn’t miss James, or Jack, or any other shit-dick excuse for a sailor on the Ranger save Read. They were always a good sort. “Didn’t say I would stop ye. Hells, didn’t say I wouldn’t help ye!” She also didn’t say she would, but that’s another matter. “Just lookin t’understand. Ain’t met something I’d risk my everything for like that.”

She thought she had, twice.

Both times she’d been sorely mistaken.

Anne rolls her eyes when she’s accused of jabbering. Leaves crunch underfoot and a breeze stirs the trees, but without the sound of canvas snapping against it, it just doesn’t seem like real wind. These others, except the elf, they all seem so…unbothered by it all. Like they’ve spent their whole lives traversing woods and caves and what all else, likes midges and flies and mosquitoes and goblins are just run of the mill nuisances one must suffer to continue living. She’d known the sea was a world apart from any other, but the unexpected loneliness of that truth keeps driving Anne to do stupid shite she wouldn’t normally.

Like all the talking. She usually enjoys being reticent, closed off, let alone—but maybe Read’s broken something in her, because now being totally alone feels…lonely. She has to choose between horrible hyper-awareness of the leech in her skull, being alone with her thoughts and unoccupied hands, or making an arse of herself to distract from it all. It’s an easy choice to make, despite looking so out of character for her in the face of it.

Besides, she isn’t jabbering. The Blade fella jabbers. A never-ending source of sound, that one! Always on about his exploits or trying to woo one of the women in the party. He reminds her of Jack in that way, and she can’t trust herself to go ply him for talk. Might end up with her blade in his belly out of reflex.

Anne scoffs at the idea of rotting her gut the moment they make port. “Is that yer best? ‘Sailors are drunkards, har-har’? Pull yer head outta yer arse.”

Truthfully, Baldur’s Gate is only her destination because that’s the heading her companions have taken. Anne isn’t from these parts, wasn’t even before she turned pirate; she’d been born and partly raised in a different country of Toril altogether, and hadn’t spent more than a few years in Faerûn before marrying James and running off. She has no home here, no home anywhere as of ten minutes prior to ending up kidnapped by the squids. The question of her fate is an uneasy one. The uncertainty and the terror of it threaten to choke her: frankly, if it weren’t for the whole becoming one after part, letting the little bugger in her brain finish its bidding might just be a mercy for her. No more living in lesser men’s shadows.

“I done more drinking at camp with you lot than I done in all my life, gods’ honest truth.” There was always something to be done on the ship, after all; knots to check, tighten, tie, supplies to be accounted for, training to be had, navigation, mending, polishing, cleaning, and in the few stolen moments she’d allow for it, Anne would bury herself in more shameful pursuits. Read aside, the things she misses most about the Ranger already are the books she’d so unexpectedly left behind. Jack would toss them overboard if he found them, and only him and Read actually know that Anne can read at all. To be a woman at sea is already to be considered cursed, and each thing Anne is after that is another curse compounded upon her: not just a woman, but a learned woman. Not just a learned woman, but in fact the captain’s whore wife. And more! The result of an illicit inter-class affair, red-haired and left-handed, a murderer, a law clerk—all of it too much! All of it that could be hidden away kept just so. She forced herself to use her right hand until that became an easy, unconscious ruse. She’s disguised herself as a boy and, when that was discovered, quit her place as a law clerk. She left her father’s name so it would never be tied to her and feigned ignorance in the face of arithmetic and literature. The first murder was swept under the rug, the rest justified as battle.

And now she’s hiding one more thing. In a world where it isn’t as bad to be a woman, or even a learned woman, it’s considerably worse to be a pirate.

Anne stretches her arms over her head and tries to relieve the pain in her back. These fucking packs are awful. (That’s another thing; no need to carry all of your effects with you at sea.) In all the ways that Shadowheart can sense the sea on Anne, Anne is all but insensible to the Sharran influences on Shadowheart. Like her father before her, she isn’t sure if she does or even can worship a god, though also like him and her mother she knows them all to be real. Her mother instilled a fear of the gods into Anne before her passing that her father only plastered over with his indifference to them. Though unaccustomed to the company of other women, Anne is confident that the things she does sense in Shadowheart are more telling, anyway. Aside from being a fellow utter twat, Shadowheart’s hiding a hurt in plain sight. The strange black mark on her hand she sometimes rubs as if it pains her when she thinks no one is watching. Anne doesn’t need to know its story to recognize that it’s nothing, in the same sense that the scar on Anne’s own back is nothing. She knows better than to pry uninvited into nothing.

“S’pose I’ll figure out my fate when it arrives.” Anything’s better than what she’d had, and even has now. She pretends she doesn’t feel the tadpole shift, but her small flinch at the sensation says otherwise. It’s less subtle than the waver in Shadowheart’s voice, making it harder to ignore. “’Less it gets figured out for me before then.”

@neverhangd sent: “So…let me get this straight. Ye’ve got a magical doohickey in yer possession of foreign origin and unknown purpose, and it just so happens t’be keeping the tentacles at bay…and ye still plan t’hand it o’er when we get t’the fucking Gate? Does that apply even if the wriggler’s still present for ye?” She isn’t judgmental of the religious aspects of the cleric’s plans—that’d make her one hell of a hypocrite, her own sordid past considered—family’s family, whether that family’s a torture cult or a band of thieves—but the lack of self-preservation continues to astonish her. Especially seeing as Shadowheart’s yet to present such an astonishing lack of care for the self, both in battle and in camp.

The plan was intended to be simple. Horrendously dangerous and almost certainly liable to result in her own death, but simple.

Steal Retrieve the prism, keep it safe and out of unsafe hands, and deliver it personally to the control of her sacred enclave. This changed the moment she discovered its true capabilities. The moment she learned it was all that stood between them and their agonizing mutation. Not just a permanent end, but a resurrection into something monstrous and unfathomable. A mindflayer.

She still intends to carry out her mission in its entirety. Failure is not an option she is willing to consider, but she's not immune to doubt. To the grim reality of what obedience means for both her and her fellow companions. To choose between thoroughbred faith, and the atrocious violation of body and mind to live onward as illithid, well, such a decision is beyond what she's prepared to handle.

Still, if there's anything Shadowheart can rely on, it's faking it. And she will fake it until she makes it, or, until it breaks her.

"There is no outcome that ends in me forfeiting my duties. I will deliver the artifact, with or without help, and will face whatever consequences as they come." It's nearly imperceptible, almost invisible, but her voice wavers. She is scared. "… if you intend to stop me, I won't show mercy. Anyone who stands against me will be brought to their knees, through force, if necessary." A well-placed, violent threat might add a bit of credence, and she was eager to prove herself worthy of the responsibility placed upon her shoulders. Not that she needed to prove anything to anyone, of course.

The group treks onward, carving a route through a mountainous forest. Sun speckled polka dots filter through the canopy, still hours away from dusk. The day had been long, and it only promised more to come. Their journey's been anything but peaceful, and more than anything, Shadowheart just wanted to go home.

"We're a long way from the Gate, though. Might want to conserve your strength and focus on the more pressing matters at hand. There's a decent chance we won't even make it that far, especially with you jabbering my ear off." A rather abrupt plea to end the conversation. Shadowheart isn't chatty even in her sunniest of dispositions, and much less so when she feels cornered and probed.

"... and what of your fate? I can only imagine you'll find the nearest leaking tap and drown your gullet in pints of ale." Or rum. Or mead. Or whatever it is that seafarers seek to fill their barrels. That's what Anne is, no? Either a caster of nets, or an explorer of tides, or a castaway sailor seeking glory. Her story is sealed away, hidden behind chapters unopened, perhaps permanently. Shadowheart has pieced together a small bit of Anne's heritage, based on the odd off-hand comment or educated observation of the redhead's wardrobe. She smelled of the sea, as well. Whiffs of salt breezed water and a sun-kissed complexion. All the trademarks of a seasoned mariner.

Baldur's Gate is a port teeming with much of the same breed, and the Sharran would recognize their stench a mile away.

[glassydiatom]

Some doodles b4 bed!!

[suguwaya]

kieran hyperfixation so bad he got me actually enjoying doing art (ft. pomoe pokemon oc i have idk... he's just there with a spiked bat)

[murdleandmarot]

The gang’s all here!! They’re on the case!! And there’s no ghost that they wouldn’t chase!!!!!

@mysticalcats’s Foxglove, @toki-toro’s Chaumet, @emimii’s Clownaire, and my own Bluebelle :)

[bitegore]

i feel like it says something about me, not positive, that i wrote an entire fanfiction about a guy using random pieces of metal for piercing jewelry (among other things, also piercing himself on his lonesome in the bathroom with a process not intended for it) and it ending very badly and then, within a year, decided to take a random link of metal about the right size for an earring and use a fucking pair of pliers to close it on my ear, meaning i will need to use pliers to take it off. which i just haven't done. for a year now

[i-am-a-fan]

it’s a shame we have yet to get these lmk episodes

- singing episode/ musical episode

- an episode where they are just at SWK’s treasure pile and they just keep using magical weapons that none of them know how to use

- Mind swap episode

- dream/nightmare episode

[anris-resurrection]

Stephanie Beatriz is probably the only reason I watch half of the things that I do. So I drew this as I sat sick all day and watched the show haha,

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

(from prev post of Howdy and Barnaby)

"once or twice weed as well"

Excuse me (?)

listen man a dealer's a dealer

[enhanced-operatives-division]

Phoenix with fun trousers...what more to say..

[ssreeder]

HI HELLO!! I JUST FINISHED “Into the Fire” A COUPLE DAYS AGO!!

I would say my thoughts about it but I have too many thoughts but I also don’t wanna fill your asks with 20 million anons so,

after I finished it I decided to re-read from LIAB and bro…

That shit broke me.

The way you perfectly constructed sokka’s arc, like I swear everything was intentional

He literally went from “it took years for him to get comfortable killing” to “he was always so good with people, that’s was before he started killing them” and from “if he felt a way about something he would most definitely share it” to literally hiding everything that happened to him from people he trusts. Wow.

Once again, absolutely amazed by your incredible writing skills, like actually impeccable.

Enough of me being philosophical,

YOU GAVE BATO A BF!!! HE CAN FINALLY GET OVER HIS HIGH SCHOOL CRUSH!!! AND JEE GETS TO BE HAPPY!!! AAAAHHH!! I’m so happy for them (ik they aren’t even an item yet but still, super happy for them)

Hooray for Ara!! She got her closure, and now she can start a new, healthier, happier lifestyle. Congratulations to my favorite violent dog!! May she get what she deserves (ominous)

But the way she just.. told Katara about zukka being together?? Like, no hesitation.

“Whoops, thought you were banging my brother. Sorry lol.”

“No lmao it’s okay. Zuko’s deff banging him though”

“WHAT?!”

“Yeah lol. Toodles!!”

And then she just- LEAVES?? honestly mood though.

i liked how sweet and genuine she sounded when explaining zukka’s love story though, that was so good of her, she didn’t even talk them down or anything. It was actually so nice.

Can’t wait to see what you do for Jet, really really hope my little street rat gets better. on agni we gonna get you some will to live!!

So many exciting things happening I can’t wait!!

-suki closure!!

-TOPH AND SOKKA BONDING!!!

-IROH AND SOKKA’S TEA TALK!!!!!

literally have said this a million times but actually super scared for sokka for the last bit (zhao tea talks usually didn’t go well)

But I also feel like ur gonna make that an iroh pov… (I’m an empath) so I’ll stay tuned!!

Yue and La bless my favorite water tribe man Hakoda! He loves his kids so much I hope nothing bad happens to them (this is gonna be foreshadowing isn’t it?)

But anyways!!

I wanted to finally tell you about music!!

It’s gonna be a lot of mitski cus she’s one of my main artists I listen to but still,

I thought about “once more to see you” by mitski A LOT throughout RIA and a little bit now through ITF, it fits this part of the story perfectly (in my opinion). It’s literally just zukka through sokka’s pov.

Another one is “Christmas Kids” by ROAR, this one is more for LIAB, and a little bit of RIA, (can you tell I make the edits in my head?) But this time the choruses/verses change pov or can just be seen as multiple characters.

“First Love/Late Spring” by mitski fits zukka through zuko’s pov

And “I bet on loosing dogs” by mitski is Ara with zhao/shen

Now this one is very specific:

“Vampire Empire” by Big Thief

The first verse to the first chorus is LIAB-RIA kataang through aang’s thoughts about katara,

the second verse to the second chorus is zukka LIAB-RIA (and now more recently the current ITF situation) told as per sokka’s pov

And the third verse to the final chorus is how Ara feels about zhao. Like their entire history.

Okay that’s it sorry for bombarding you with my random ass disorganized ask 😭 I’ve been yapping too much, I know, I sound like Reho. Sorry if I said anything disrespectful!!

Anyway!! Can’t wait for the next update!! STAY SUPER DUPER AMAZING SSREEDER!!!

HI ANON WHO I ADORE & LOVE SO MUCH I AM SO SORRY FOR TAKING 10000 YEARS TO ANSWER THIS. (In my defense it’s a perfect 10/10 ask and I couldnt let it go right away<3)

I AM SO SO SO SO SO SOOOOOO happy you enjoyed sokkas arc because damn, I really dismantled him throughout the series and the way you highlighted some of the details about sokka pre prison and how he did a drastic 180 is *CHEFS KISS* yeahhhhhh it was a long process but I’m glad you noticed the intentional dedication I had to ruining our boy sokka <3 (i know I know he’s not ruined but he’s not in a great spot mentally but he’s getting better but hell regress and progress and regress and yeah sokkas just not the same I mean but we will love him and he’s still our SOKKA)

JEE DID GET HIMSELF A BOY FRAND… He is smitten with our boy Bato it’s cute.

Ara is hilarious that’s all I gotta say about her haha.

JET!!!!! I love him!!! He’s not the besttttt influence on Suki but FUCK IT JET IS AWESOME (don’t expect any life changing shit from him but I’m excited that he’ll stay a part of the story) sorry Jet haters he’s staying in LIAB till death does us part of the story ends haha.

oh shit you sent this ask before the last chapter was dropped so now you know ITS AN IROH AND ZUKO TEA TALK (& let me tell you HAAAAA… they’re wonderful in a room together haha)

I was trying to listen to all your songs before I answered your ask but I couldn’t get through all of them, but I will!! I love that you are so passionate about music and the scenes and characters I feel the same way and that’s why I always try to give you songs I’m vibing with lol.

THANK YOU AGAIN ANON AND PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DONT BE SHY COME BACK ANY TIME I LOVE YOUR ASK!!!!

[dead-dove-orchid]

Explaining my Invincible Selfships..

Crashr references. Closeups under the cut!

[mypeggableromance]

.

[arrowpunk]

Sometimes I think about how I used to know this like fairly popular artist who made a decent living off commissions who like, very purposefully put in her terms of service that she wouldn't draw ships. Which is fair, artists can do what they want- but I was friends with her at the time and so I knew the entire reason she had that in her terms of service was because she didn't want to draw any queer ships.

And the thing that gets me about it is that the majority of her fan base was/is queer. And so fairly frequently people would commission her to draw like 2 different bust portraits of the different halves of their gay ship- which! Good for them! But she like knew it was for ~gay shipping~ reasons and she wouldn't turn it down but she would come into the group chat and complain about how uncomfortable it made her. And how she hated how when she sold charms the most popular were always the popular fandom gay ship. Like she made/makes her entire living off of queer people. And like. Hates us. Behind the scenes where her fan base cannot see.

She would sometimes show the group chat asks she got asking if she was homophobic because it isn't actually that difficult to figure out if you pay attention. Because in spite of it all she did draw a lot of het ship art. And she would fret and worry that people would Find Out that she's. Really homophobic. And then she'd lose her entire source of income. (She would of course just delete the asks and never answer them)

And she always had such a victim complex about it too. Like The Queers were conspiring to get around her terms of service to make her, a Good Christian Woman draw their dirty little gay ships.

Like not a single thought spared for how she was profiting off of a marginalized group of people by publicly making sure she seemed totally fine with queer stuff. (In her charm sets she did always include the popular fandom gay ships, in spite of how much she complained about how she hated that people bought the charms for gay reasons) While behind closed doors she would mock and deride queer people and participate in discussions about how awful it is that queer stuff is so Normalized these days, and whatever happened to the sanctity of marriage and all that conservative evangelical bullshit.

And like I haven't interacted with her in many years, for uh. Obvious reasons. And it doesn't happen often but Every Now And Then some of her art will show up on my dash. Usually reblogged by someone openly and proudly queer, and I will just be sitting there like. Damn. You have no idea how much she hates everything about you. This sucks.

[outeremissary]

Tbh I'm a little let down that after last November when I returned to a dash so fucking insufferably ridden with ad hominem attack discourse set up to dodge fandom blacklists that it ruined my desire to talk about games with people, now the notorious DA has really just not shown up the same way. I thought this was supposed to be the most toxic fandom out there and I barely even see opinions. I was ready this time. What happened to all the "every industry evil was uniquely invented by the latest somewhat disappointing popular game." How did everyone preorder it after all the essays last year about the industry rot of preorders. What happened. Did everyone burn out making Tumblr suck so bad last year

[gree-gon]

mako doodle dump

TW (blood, injury))

damn thats a lotta ketchup