#walked away for a bit

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Being someone who read Under The Red Hood and came out with the firm belief that, for Jason, it's not about killing Joker, it's about Jason wanting proof Batman would choose him over the Joker (bc shelia chose the joker). Makes seeing any other media where it's all about just wanting the Joker dead is a teeny bit frustrating. to be honest

Jason could've killed the Joker himself, really, really easily. Jason kidnaps the Joker before the confrontation. I can't open my comic for a reference right now, but it felt like he had the Joker for quite a bit before the confrontation. He had him. He beat him up with a crowbar. He had every single opportunity to kill the Joker himself, but he didn't because that wasn't his goal. Make no mistake, he did plan for the Joker to be dead by the end of it, but do you see what im trying to say here

Edit: If I knew this post was gonna get 1000+ notes I would've tried to word it better or something, this was a rant I made on the way to the grocery store 😭

It's not about making Batman kill either. When Batman says he won't kill, Jason adjusts and goes, 'Let ME kill the Joker or kill me to stop me' instead. The test is all about Batman choosing him. The whole final confrontation is Jason's first death again. The parent, The Joker, and the explosives. It even ends with Jason unable to move as a bomb goes off right next to him again because the parent didn't choose Jason. And instead tried finding an option that'd benefit them and (consequencely) letting the Joker walk, again, lol, lmao <-in agony

[theosirianischosen]

A few different things it could be (though do note I don't agree with every item I list here):

The Tears of Gold cliffhanger at the end of season 2 is never brought up again. Like, the closest we get in season 3 is right before Victor becomes a sinner when he tries to plan with Robert on how to become immortal and re-create the elixir. Other than that one-off, it doesn't really connect, and it is never brought up again.

Nina not returning in season 3. I know that couldn't be helped and was not the fault of Nickelodeon; Nathalia just wanted to leave to focus on her schooling. I detest how they wrote her out of the show, but again, not the fault of Nickelodeon.

The switch from proper Nickelodeon to TeenNick. I'm not 100% sure it was done solely for mature themes. But for a lot of people, Nickelodeon and TeenNick were not in the same cable package. If they wanted to watch the show live, some people would have to upgrade their cable package. Plus, it also changed the way the show was formatted. Instead of one hour every week, it was 4 half-hour time slots. That may seem like a good thing on paper, but it also meant that the finale became finale week. I truly believe that had it stayed on Nickelodeon, the last four episodes would have been combined into a 2-hour finale episode. There's no way to know for sure, but I'd like to think this was the case, especially when the previous finales were action-packed with at least one plot twist (Season 1: Sibuna didn't bring the Ankh pieces to the school, Rufus gave Patricia the note, the tipping of the scales isn't symbolic and requires a sacrifice, and Joy isn't the chosen one; Nina is. Season 2: Rufus wants to become a god with the Mask, Senkhara wants the same thing, the mask at the end of the tunnels isn't real, and the reveal that Eddie is the Osirian.). But for a lot of people, the finale could simply be boiled down to a race to put the key in the keyhole. However, all of the finale week better fits the twists and turns of a finale episode.

House of Anubis deviated too far from Het Huis Anubis. I don't know how many of those complaining about Nickelodeon treating HOA poorly are people who originally saw HHA. But even us hardcore fans tend to think that HHA>HOA. Combined with the fact that the show was commissioned out of Nickelodeon US (even though it was produced in the UK), and it becomes clear that even the "British" elements have become Americanized. Alfie jokes about Santa in Season 3, not Father Christmas. The Touchstone of Ra features a high school graduation, which is something that doesn't happen in the UK equivalent to high school education. Also, in TOR, Trudy says "The middle school has bedbugs", but I'm pretty sure "middle school" is another American school term. (Does anyone in the UK want to confirm for me or correct me on that?) But even in season 1, which is the closest to HHA, the deviations from the source material can leave some things to be desired. In HHA, Nienke moves into Anubis House while her Gran moves into an old folks home. It's there, while Nienke is visiting her Gran, that she first bumps into Sarah. But in HOA, with Nina being from America, the writers needed to find another way for Nina to first run into Sarah. So, they come up with the brilliant idea of... having Sarah willingly leave the old folks home and walk up to Anubis House, but refuse to go inside because "He's always waiting". Or the fact that they combined Rufus and Zeno into one character (presumably for time, as the first season of HHA had nearly twice as many episodes, and Nickelodeon only commissioned 60 episodes for the first season), and changed up many storylines because of it. Rufus was looking for Joy in the original, while Zeno was looking for the cup. So, the writers moved the chosen one storyline to season 1, and have the plot twist that Nina was the chosen one, not Joy. In HHA, the plot twist is actually that Nienke (Nina) was NOT the chosen one; it was Noa. I've heard many people who grew up on HHA were fond of the plot twist being the character that would be obvious to make the chosen one is actually not the chosen one. This was undone in HOA. I think the writers tried to remedy this by making everyone think Fabian was going to be the Osirian, but then it turned out to be Eddie. Except, once you dive into the character further, it's a bit more obvious than the Noa reveal. Nina is American. So is Eddie. Nina's female. Eddie is male. Nina is sweet and kind. Eddie has a bad-boy persona. Nina can be reluctant to take action, preferring to think things through before doing them. Eddie is quick to take action with no regard for the consequences of doing so. Seeing as the Chosen One/Osirian dynamic is supposed to be like yin and yang, Nina and Eddie are polar opposite Americans. So, all this to say, while the writers are to "blame" for a lot of these changes, some of it could also be due to American executives meddling in the show's storyline.

Nickelodeon canceled the show, despite there being at least some demand in the fanbase for a season 4 in 2013/2014. I'd still wish they'd do a reunion movie for Paramount+ (and I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing for that), but that's unlikely to happen. Nowadays, most people who think of live-action Nickelodeon nostalgia think of the Dan Schnieder creations, and with Quiet on Set airing recently, people are "out to cancel" Nickelodeon. Now, I know the accusations in the documentary (which I have yet to see) are serious, but because many slept on the show when it first aired, I could see this becoming a causality in terms of people not looking fond on this era of Nickelodeon. Another reason why it could have been slept on is because of it's serialized nature. Generally speaking, once you know what Drake & Josh, iCarly, or Victorious are about, you can just watch any episode from that show in any order without getting lost. You can't do that with HOA. For those that don't know and/or remember, when HOA first aired season 1 in 2011, the first 9 episodes were billed as a "premiere movie" in two parts. The first part is the pilot, comprising of the first full episode and editing the next four to fit in a regular 1-hour time slot with commercials. The second part was the next 4 episodes in an hour time slot. (Remember, the first two seasons of HOA comprise of two 11-minute episodes in a half-hour time slot with commercials.) On streaming, the first part is episode 1, and the second part is billed as episodes 2 and 3 (at least here in the States). And because of how the movie ended, my younger self was under the impression that this was like iCarly and more episodic in nature. It wasn't until the cliffhanger at the end of the very next episode that I realized it was serialized. Its serialized nature also made reruns harder. You had to run a whole season regularly as a batch for it to work, but iCarly could have a season 2 episode followed by a season 5 episode and then two season 1 episodes in one two-hour marathon, and it wouldn't be confusing.

All of this to say, Nickelodeon could have handled some parts better. It didn't handle the show perfectly, but Nickelodeon didn't fully fumble it either. That's just my very rambly thoughts on the matter.

I am once again asking for everyone to actually get real here and realize that for a show whose formula was entirely different than anything else on the network at the time (barring the literal other versions of the same show), HOA had it pretty damn good. Most shows just got flat out canceled with no resolution.

[stil-lindigo]

the machine.

a comic about being a 'creator' online.

creative notes:

[crimsonclad]

I keep seeing Takes about how recent media like Glass Onion and The Menu aren’t taking “eat the rich” seriously enough to launch real change or revolution and like?? yeah??? popular crowd-pleasing entertainment where horrible rich people Suffer A Comeuppance for the pleasure of an audience is one of the oldest tropes in all of human history???? It is a crowd pleaser! It is the bread (ha) and butter of the Western canon! It is in Chaucer it is in Dante it is in Shakespeare it is the stuff of Dickens and 95% of Agatha Christie and almost every teen movie ever made??????? “look at these horrible rich idiots and hypocrites…and now enjoy their DESTRUCTION” transcends time and space and historical moments! It is so strange to be surprised that Hollywood returns to this well without any intention of seeking anything more transgressive than an audience having a hearty chuckle lmao

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

Fuck anyone who makes jokes about a crash that literally sent a driver to hospital.

Max's crash at Silverstone is the third most severe crash we've had in F1 in the past five years (most severe being Grosjean's in Bahrain 2020, followed by Zhou's in Silverstone 2022).

Additionally, the fact he was sent to the hospital at all is significant as Silverstone has its own medical facility on the grounds. It says everything that even as a precautionary measure, Max (+ Alex & Zhou the following year) was sent to the nearest hospital instead.

Do not for a single second take a driver walking away from a severe crash for granted. Sometimes, the miracles don't happen. Sometimes, a driver doesn't walk away unscathed. You do not want to be watching when the worst-case scenario becomes a real possibility, or worse; a reality.

If the like from Lando's dad is real... I have nothing else to say, from the bottom of my heart; FUCK YOU!

[molinaesque]

"Go away. You're too late." "Oh, it's a hell of a place. It says something about the late Marcus that he found imprisoning your sister to be a greater mercy than killing her." "Killing isn't mercy." Silco chuckles. " A spark of rebellion still burns inside that husk, I see. No... killing is a cycle. One that started long before Vander and me. And it will continue long after the two of you." "I'm done running in circles." "We build our own prisons. Bars forged of oaths, codes, commitments. Walls of self-doubt and accepted limitation. We inhabit these cells, these identities, and call them "us." I thought I could break free by eliminating those I deemed my jailors. But... Jinx... I think the cycle only ends when you find the will to walk away."

[beastlyidiocy]

[kimdokjas]

If you're not here, then how are you always with me? If I'm not here, then how am I not there with you? — One of Us, Paruyr Sevak (tr. metamorphesque)

happy belated birthday, tay ♡ @misakarose [insp.]

[blue-mood-blue]

I can pinpoint the moment that destroyed my life today:

It’s been a handful of weeks since Murderbot came within inches of having a new, organic governor module implanted in its head via infection - do you think, maybe, that’s also been hiding behind the redacted? Not the way everything else is, just as a deep-seated reminder of what it can’t afford to lose?

What a way to be told “I love you” - to be told “I will not lose you, I will not let go, I will do the hard part of holding on even if you don’t want me to”

[somegrumpynerd]

Blue always seems to have the answers

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 204

Danny is on a bit of a roadtrip. An accidental roadtrip and might be getting chased by some sort of assassins or whatever they were. Look, it’s not his fault, he was injured and out of it! How was he supposed to know that the Pits or whatever the people were yelling about were important. Or sapient. 

Actually, he should like… “How do you even know how to drive if you’re like, thousands of years old??” That was not what he was going to ask his current roadtrip buddy, but maybe he had a concussion. 

Ectoplasm-green eyes turned towards him from the road, framed by a mixture of black and white hair that shifted like his own. “You most likely don’t want to know the answer to that, actually.” Okay, but what if he did, huh? 

“Okay, but where are we going, because I don’t think this is my dimension…”  

They shrugged, their clothing shifting with the motion. Ha, ninja clothing for a sapient pool of ecto, or whatever it had been. “I am, not exactly familiar to things that were not known to those thrown into my blood, so we’re, I believe the saying is going in blind?”

“Oh. Okay. Y’know you’re kind of nice for an ecto-death pit thing.”

“... I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that, child.”  

“Okay. I’m going to go to sleep because my head hurts.” 

[fatedroses]

And some days, I just wish you wouldn't look at me at all.

[gingermintpepper]

There are many things people expect from one called 'God of Blood'. Always, the first thought is the blood of war, the blood of violence, the blood of the weak shed for the goals of the strong. Ares doesn't think of the blood of battle at all. When he thinks of blood, he envisions the many tied knots of blood bonds and bonds forged in the blood of battle. Blood sons and blood daughters, blood brothers and battle sisters, blood oaths and blood vengeance - he watches over them all and keeps close each one of these bonds.

One cannot begrudge his displeasure then when he realises he cannot tell Leto's offspring apart just by looking at them.

It was easier when it was just Artemis. Dark hair curled about her shoulders, a fierce mien whenever Father summons her to the mountain, a scattering of bones and blood shed whenever she was disturbed; the eldest child of Leto was a wild thing, sharp toothed with sharper claws always at the ready. There's whispers of her being a twin, of her other half being made to crawl on their belly as penance for their sin of god-slaying but Ares pays it little mind. What twins look alike among their number? Even dog litters are born distinct with all their unique markings inlaid in their fur. Artemis' twin too would be much more than their sister's mirror image.

Pouring over his list now, he wishes anything about Phoebus Apollo was that simple.

Mirror image did not begin to describe it. The twins were the same height, the same build, had the same colour and texture hair, ate the same raw food and drank the same amount of nectar. There was no difference in how they dressed, no difference in the company they kept, no variance in the weapons they used. There are some days Ares still cannot believe Phoebus will grow into a man and not some nymph with the way his ears have that slender point. He watches them now, sitting together beneath a shady palm and stringing their bows in an uncanny unison and curses because he still cannot tell them apart. What use is his skill in knowing blood when they both have the same damn blood running through their veins? What bond is there to sense when they are tied so tightly together, Ares can scarcely tell brother from sister?

He sighs. Unadorned and completely alone, the only way to know who is who is to speak to them. He'll have to find more ways to tell them apart from a distance. Surely they cannot stay this similar all the rest of their immortal lives.

[vaguely-concerned]

do you ever think about how, when we get lucanis' ossuary mind note on what he was thinking during the fireplace scene at the end of his recruitment mission... what's implied to be his instinctive internal reaction as he's saying "you'd have to kill me" out loud sure isn't 'and I don't want to die'. it's '(and spite would die)'. do you think spite's gremlin-y candle-hungering give-me-FIRE! >:D presence has maybe saved that guy's life even more times and in more ways than are immediately obvious at a glance. do you ever. cry.

it's also very. him that the thing that would stay his hand on killing himself partially might be that he just isn't willing to visit the same cruelty or harm on spite as zara, even when accepting his passenger spirit as collateral damage would at least offer a chance to put an end to his own pain, which at that point he seems unable to see any other way of truly escaping or find real relief from than to die. there's so much resentment and fear and other understandable fraught emotions in spite and lucanis' relationship early on, but it's just as clear that deep down lucanis conceptualizes spite as fundamentally innocent in what's happened here -- perhaps, indeed, more innocent than he manages to conceptualize himself until someone else can help him get in there and start to untangle it with him. he's protective of spite in some subtle ways right from the start, taking pains to point out several times on the jog through the ossuary that the spirits here were just as much victims in what was done to them as anyone else. when spite acts out during the fireplace scene... how much of lucanis brushing it off the way he does is about the '*actively bleeding from the eyes* don't worry about me' avoidant side of it all, and how much is him trying to shelter spite from the eyes of people he does not know well enough yet to predict how they’ll react in response — towards himself or spite. (additional idea to really bring on the heartache: do you think he has maybe intervened in pretty much the same way between illario and caterina over the years and that’s how he does it so smoothly and automatically; it’s basically psychological muscle memory. Haha. ow.) 

Between that and the pretty consistent language he uses that frames spite as child-like, even when he means that in frustration/enfant terrible flavoured terms lol, you get the sense that regardless of how much Lucanis is aware of this on the surface, there is a deep instinctive protectiveness in him for spite. I think that even comes across in the scene where lucanis tells you he’ll continue to pursue a way to separate him and spite on the minrathous route. So I was kind of picking up on/working with that already subconsciously, but when I found that note it hit me like a sledgehammer that clearly in some part at least, the reason lucanis is still here is that he knows now that spite would die with him and doesn’t find that price acceptable. Spite thinks that lucanis mentally locking himself in his (torture :() room and refusing to speak to him is an act of rejection or trickery, but to my eyes taken with everything else we know about how lucanis’ brain tends to work… as much as it’s an expression of avoidance and fear and overwhelm and trying to get away from the voice pushing him towards action when the mere prospect of action fills you with despair to even contemplate (“There’s nowhere to go”), I think it’s also a mark of lucanis’ affection and protectiveness of spite. The guards along the way make it very clear that more so than to keep the outside world from coming in, this place is for protecting people from what might break out. 

And that’s why I think this is also such a good case study to look at lucanis' internal freeze logic and why it has been so adaptive for him up until now when faced with completely impossible emotional situations to which there are no good answers or causes of actions available, even though it's inherently and unavoidably one of those 'what's worse, the medicine or the disease' solutions a brain cooks up. lucanis by the point of inner demons is facing this conundrum: 1) I can't live like this, it hurts too much. I've been in pain so long I’ve got screams where my blood should be and it just keeps getting louder, and nothing really touches or helps that. 2) I can't die to escape this, because that would also kill spite (and also I've got a job to do I guess *working 9-5 slowed with reverb and with underwater sound distortion effects is playing in the background*). those are of course not actually his only options, but in the state he's in they are the only options he can conceive of. (that's not infrequently how it works, when the suffering is that intense and unrelenting. Nothing gives you tunnel sight quite like ‘I just need this to stop’ agony that has gone on long enough to add sheer soul exhaustion to the mix)

so what happens in the end? his freeze brain -- honed, I'm sure, through many long years of attachment trauma and abuse and loss for exactly this kind of 'uh-oh. Incoming FUBAR situation alert let’s go' -- kicks into action and makes him do nothing except what's externally required of him, so he can stay just functional and momentarily distracted by a plethora of avoidance behaviours enough to get through his daily life, if like not particularly happily so... and otherwise, as it were, locking himself in his room deep inside where nothing can touch him, where nothing gets in and nothing gets out, no harm allowed to either escape from within nor allowed to pierce through and get inside. numbness isn't actually a cure for that kind of suffering, but it's the closest thing you're likely to get with any immediacy and if you’re desperate enough by god you take those. It’s how he survived his upbringing, and it’s how he survived the ossuary — as he tells Davrin straight out, the trick to just shut down every part of his soul he can to get through intolerable pain, loss or helplessness. I don’t think that mechanism came to him in the ossuary the first time, I think that blueprint was deeply embedded in his neurons and went ‘ah. My time again. Not to worry I’m a bit of an expert at this I’ll get us through this yet (though you may not thank me for it by the end of it all)’. 

In that state he's unable to himself reach out and meaningfully ask for help (and also like... why would his inner world have any framework for that as even being on the table? this has never been an option before in his life, not in any safe or consistent way; he's fucked up the way he is because the same things/people that should have been and partially, comparatively, were the sources of help and relief and safety growing up are also the sources of pain and abuse, that eternal irreconcilable ambivalence, the double edged sword of unpredictable insecure attachment), but it also keeps him from doing anything uh drastic the other way too, on acting impulsively in ways that can’t be taken back. (that seems to be more illario’s role/dubious privilege in the family lol.) at many points in his life and especially growing up, freezing and going numb around the pain is as close to having control of anything as there was any hope of. 'harm will be inflicted on me unpredictably, but fuck you I don't have to truly feel it as long as I shut all this other stuff down as well, that's what I can control' nervous system logic. (it'll get you every time.) for what it’s worth I’m not so sure his nervous system judged that one incorrectly, I think that is the kind of rebellion you would have to cling to while being raised by someone like caterina, because look at illario if you want to know how much she respects and rewards anything more overt or active. (I mean, if you don’t succeed, at least. swing at Grandma Dellamorte you’d better not miss or you’ll meet that cane swinging at you the other way and she will not miss)

I say all this because I think it's as easy to demonize the freeze response as it is to demonize anger, to conceptualize it only as an obstructive force that, as bellara puts it, is one of the purest forms of a heart not seeming to want to let you be happy, or a mindless byproduct of trauma. But in my experience, the brain doesn’t generally come up with ‘stupid’ defense mechanisms. Even in the most maladaptive of coping mechanisms, there is at the core of it some part of you that once meant to save your life, no matter what trouble it is wreaking for you today. when you look at the setup of Lucanis’ soul, as it were, you can see the dual and in some ways genuinely noble and even tender qualities this response has in him, however misguided: it does imprison, but it also protects, and it means to protect; for all the pain along the way it has sheltered all the parts of his soul that are most precious and breakable, the most vulnerable parts that want to live and so so importantly love completely and freely. Lucanis thinks he’s protecting not even primarily himself but everyone he loves by staying where he is. (“It would be better for me to stay here than to risk losing you”) A child’s logic, to be sure, but logic of a kind and clearly one that caterina has encouraged in him because that’s a conception of love it’s been very useful for her for him to have. Freeze looks like utter hopelessness on the surface, but in some ways I think it’s the utmost triumph of hope — a spare and unrelenting winter that exists because it thinks one day spring might still come, and the things too precious and fragile to thrive in your life as it is now might bloom then. 

He is an adult now, and Caterina no longer controls his entire world, physically and emotionally. There’s finally room for other things, other people, himself, in his life, without everything having to defer to the gravitational force of what Caterina wants from him at the end of the day. And while I think her jumpscaring him with the First Talon position is partly her attempt to wrangle him back into the status quo of control she once had, I’m not sure it’s going to work quite the way she might hope — at least in the Treviso saved route, there are just too many fresh spring shoots in his life at that point that could grow into something new, it’s too late to trample all the saplings growing up through the cracks in time (and indeed some of them might also fight back). (The outlook on the Minrathous saved route is um. Perhaps less convincingly immediately hopeful to me and the prospect of actually getting around to healing further down the road, but I refuse to give up on him that’s my little guy and he’s above all incredibly smart and stubborn and not a quitter and all the rest of this still remains true beneath it all, just like. Give him a moment here.) His hopes and dreams have diversified while she had her back turned lmao he suddenly keeps them with so many more people than just her and Iillario now. She doesn’t hold the monopoly of meaning and connection in his life the way she used to. And whether out of love (you know. Hope is every man’s prerogative I suppose) at seeing him really happy for perhaps the first time or sheer pragmatism, I think she’s going to have to accept that and adapt her ways of doing things with him accordingly, or else have him drift even further away from her.

Spite is the urgent impatient voice that starts to break through to go ‘that moment is now it HAS to be now. We need to shake off the shackles and illusions and face what’s actually here so we can learn to properly live now, or this winter will starve us to death as surely as anything Zara could do to us’. And he is right! As crucial as this soul-starvation landscape has been in survival, it has clearly reached the end of its sustainability, you can’t survive permanently on frost alone. I just also want to recognize the credit Lucanis (and his fucked up but valiant nervous system <3 pour one out for a real one) also deserves for stubbornly holding on in any way he had to until Spite’s true escape project is even an option for either of them. Especially since Lucanis seems to harbour a lot of self-loathing and frustration over his own propensity for freeze — “You know him. You can open the door, but he won’t walk through it”  (still one of the saddest most painful things I’ve ever heard. In case you were wondering. He knows. He knows what he’s like, and he despairs of it, he thinks it means it’s his own fault he still feels like this. Augh.) The real point at the end of the day is not that spite saved lucanis or vice versa, but that as traumatic as it was to get there and against all cultural expectations, it is ultimately their enmeshed condition, their togetherness, that saved them both. (which, again, when you consider the cultural narrative of possession and spirits most andrastian nations are working with…what a radical conclusion to come away with haha. Not unprecedented at all, if you look at Wynne and her spirit, but on a deeper and more psychological plane than ever and even more impactful for it, to me.)

[royalarchivist]

Tubbo: Hola!

Spreen: [Completely unprompted] I can't be homophobic, my btch is gay.

Tubbo: PFTTT—?!

Spreen: [Laughs as he jumps off the ledge]

Tubbo: [Continues laughing in confused delight]

[pettson]

i could make a comment on how tess being overlooked in the tlou fandom is because of the misogynistic views on older women we have in this society where any woman over 35 is not considered sexy anymore and therefore loses her worth, but do i want to