#we are small but we are strong

[stepmarchen]

every day i thank the gods for giving us a normal asm fanbase here on tumblr

[formulaborb]

thank you f1blr for being so welcoming to me as a new f1 fan!! I hope we have a great 2024 and I hope to get to know some of yall better <3

[austajunk]

I feel you sm and I’m so sorry you feel this way about the blog :( (yes I only saw that post now)

I also love talking about komanami, and I love berating you talk about them too!! I’m not sure if it would make you feel better, but how about you tell us about your headcanons/scenarios you have for them? Or anything (yes I don’t know how to explain this better) jflflrlvpf

I hope you will feel better soon :(

It’s alright. Personally, I’m kinda going through a change of medication right now, so if I’ve been off or depressing, that’s just a thing lately. XD

And yes! Yes yes yes! We should talk more about KomaNami cos I miss it and KomaHinaNami talk a lot. XD But it just means I need to put in the leg work to make some new content myself.

As for current KomaNami things to talk about, I’m currently thinking about more Remnant of Despair stuff for them. That includes my Remnant Chiaki stuff I was originally making, but I’m not sure where to honestly pick it back up with them. It’s just dozens of ideas of Servant being all “Wow so epic and disgustingly vile” every time Despair Chiaki uses her games to murder someone horribly. It’s like the opposite of the rest of the wholesome KomaNami stuff I think about.

That and that Mastermind KomaNami AU that one anon mentioned a bit back had my head in the clouds and daydreaming. XD

Also bonus headcanon: Nagito is all about trying to get Chiaki to eat to improve her health, but it really saddens her a lot that when she tries to do the same, Nagito just brushes her off. She gets the pouty face, grabs his cheeks (unpleasant for him), and tells him he can’t game with her as a partner anymore if he doesn’t eat and care for himself more!

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[judasgot-it]

I’m with you, girl. My sister is always bullying me because I’m obsessed with tecchou but I don’t know how to explain it. I know he’s just a drawing but I can’t help, HES TOO HOOOOOOT. I love his silly, quiet, introvert and cute personality, maybe is because of my obsession with dark hair men too. And his presence, he has a dominant aura that makes be at his feet🙇🏻‍♀️ (Fck, sorry for my bad English)

HES A GOOD CHARACTER!! sorry but out of everyone Tecchou is a top contender....imagine liking Mori (sorry mori stans, your man just uhhhhhhh)

But he's perfect sorry not sorry!! Not apologizing !!

He's not just handsome he's pretty !! His design is so good

Your sister is FAKE cause Tecchou is gorgeous smh and she needs to see how beautiful he is. He's like if a man and a woman had a baby smh

Anyone never settle for anyone less unless they're like Tecchou that's my life motto.

[rosurie]

sometimes after a long day of being molested by the whole town all you need is to soak in the bath with your bestie (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)♡

with @wreckowafer 's yunie <3

[voiider]

I need codependent Danny/Jason as a little treat (for me) and I love the idea of them having some sort of instant connection the moment they meet (bc ghost stuff idk)

Danny who's been dropped in Gotham with no way home (alt universe??) and he's been here for 36 hours and having a Very bad time senses a liminal being and immediately latches onto them heedless of the fact that his new best friend is shooting at some seedy guys in an alley and goes off about how stressed he is and how he can't make it back to the ghost zone and what a bad day he's been having (and it's important to note Danny is a littol ghost boy literally hanging off of Jason's neck as he floats aimlessly) and Jason is like "who are you??" And Danny is like "oh sorry I'm Danny lol" and then just continues lamenting his woes

And honestly ? This might as well happen. Nothing about this Danny guy(is he human?) gives Jason a bad vibe and tbh he's never felt more calm and level headed before so he just keeps up his usual Red Hood patrol and doesn't even think about it when he heads back to a safehouse and feeds Danny dinner (breakfast) before crashing for half the day

The only thing I actually need is Jason meeting up with the bats for some sort of Intel meeting and they're like "uhhh who's that" and Jason is like "that's Danny." And does not elaborate (very ".... What do you have there?" "A smoothie" vibes)

And it takes them a while to realize that these two have known each other for less than 12 hours and are literally attached at the hip

[blorbologist]

Y'know, I think I figured out why the Hells still feel like a new low-level party to me, even though they're level 13 and almost 100 episodes in.

I don't quite think it's the lack of conversations, or the fact half the party's plot hooks are big ties to past campaigns - though that definitely plays a part.

... Bell's Hells still primarily rely on quest givers.

Most of their goals are given to them and do not feel organic to the party, and constantly remind us that the Hells are pretty much never the most powerful people in the room. Which is usually something you see with a low-level party.

NPCs offering jobs is not a bad thing; it's a very common plot hook. Matt has been extremely skilled with using NPC quest givers in those two campaigns. Not only do they provide an obvious plot thread, but they can put the party in the path of others (say, the Nein running into the Iron Shepherds while doing a job for the Gentleman and everything that came of that). And the Hells had a solid start with it too - Eshteross was an excellent quest giver!

The problem is that Bell's Hells have never really not had a quest giver.

Maybe it's a byproduct of the more plot-heavy structure of this campaign? But while prior parties have felt like they decided on their course of action and what they prioritized, Bell's Hells feels less like level 13 (13! Level 13!) experienced adventurers and more like an MMO group clicking on the exclamation point over an NPC's head. Where does the plot demand we go next? Who do we report back to?

They're level 13.

At level 13, Vox Machina had just defeated a necromantic city-state to clear their name and Percy's conscience. And, you know, the Conclave just destroyed Emon. No one was explicitly telling the group to gather Vestiges and save the world (though Matt guided them there), and they were usually among the most powerful people in the room. They chose which Vestiges to prioritize, which dragons to tackle when, even if the over-all plot was pretty clear.

At level 13, the Mighty Nein were celebrating Traveler Con (another PC goal, I'll note) after brokering peace between two nations, accidentally becoming pirates and heroes of the Dynasty. The Nein regularly chose what to do based on personal goals, not grand ones. Though definitely smaller fish than Vox Machina at this level, they were very independent and gaining solid political clout.

While we're at it: level 13 is one level lower than the Ring of Brass, who had a huge amount of sway over Avalir. They ended the world, and also saved it, while in the grand scheme of things being only a smidge more powerful than Bell's Hells are now.

Can you really see the Hells wielding that amount of influence, when they're constantly being told what to do next?

The god-eater might be unleashed, so Bell's Hells have no time to do anything but what is asked of them. No time for therapy unless stolen from Feywild time, no travel on foot and late-night watches. They haven't even had time to grieve FCG. Percy was grieved in the middle of the Conclave arc. Molly was grieved when half the party was still in irons.

Matt is in the very unfortunate spot of not being able to give the Hells the same agency as the other two parties. Not only because of the world-ending plot introduced so early on; they are surrounded by characters they know (and the cast knows) are stronger and wiser than them - the familiarity of the past PCs and NPCs is to their disadvantage.

Why would the party reasonably ignore Keyleth's task that will help save the world and go off on a romp? Why would the cast when they know well Keyleth has to be sensible and with the best intentions in mind? The stakes are just too high.

It means that the Hells still feel like they're running errands instead of pursuing their own destiny. Their accomplishments are diminished as just being parts of a to-do list, and any stakes feel padded by several level 20 PCs/NPCs standing 5 steps away ready to catch them.

This isn't Bell's Hell's fault, nor is it Matt's. It could be amended, I think, if the Hells are really left to their own devices for a long period of time without support and shortcuts (like during the party split)... which would be really tricky to pull off at this point in the campaign.

They're level 13. They're big fish, but they're stuck in a pond full of friendly sharks, so they don't feel big at all.

[fangirlforeversthings]

Would these characters help you k*ill a spider?

Part 1

The witcher 3

[mammomlette]

People don’t talk about MC needing to wear a magical ring to not accidentally yk cause NATURAL DISASTERS with their powers??? Not only accidentally but without realising???

Diavolo or smthn is asking too much of MC or being a bit too annoying and their other hand slowly drifts towards the ring and they hold onto it while maintaining dead eye contact. Like continue to piss me off hoe I’ll blink and blow a hole in your castle idk

Obv they never do it (or do they?) but the threat is there and it’s a risk dia (or whoever but I’m using dia) can’t take

[xlmibby]

i might have said it a million times before but i think every time lumine is not in liyue, xiao starts to think she's haunting him. but not in a i'm going to show up in your nightmares and be that annoying little voice in the back of your head kind of way - it's less threatening even though he's dizzy, feeling as if his heart is going to rip its way out of his chest.

because when lumine is not by his side, she's still everything. she's everywhere, intangible. knitted into his heart, wrapped in his soul. and while it's so unnatural to be without her, it is so, so easy to feel her presence in the air he breathes and see a small pieces of her in every single thing around him.

xiao slowly starts to wonder if he's not going crazy because how it is even possible that everything reminds him of lumine?

sunny city street is lined with tender memories of the time when she held his hand for the first time - just because she thought he might be a little bit stressed. it wasn't a complete truth but he didn't push her away when her fingers slipped between his and she squeezed his palm in her own, smaller one. anything golden and shiny reminds him of her, too. like the stars, the sun, the crystalflies that glow once the light hits them. xiao finds himself being mesmerized by it but he knows all too well that if lumine was here with him, his eyes would focus solely on her.

subconsciously, he thinks about her when he hears someone laughing (he likes the way she smiles), eats a plate of almond tofu (she always made it for him (also... sometimes, he wonders if she wouldn't taste sweeter than the dessert. he thinks the idea will be the death of him)) and walks by the sea shore (she loves the sound of waves).

when xiao closes his eyes deep in the night, he sees lumine. no matter if he's dreaming or it's all just in his head, she's there. if he tried to run away, it'd be pointless. she still would be there, no matter what nation she'd be staying in at that time. she's always there; like she's a part of his life–of him, like their souls cannot be separated from each other... and neither can them.

so when she's away, he yearns and falls in love with her a bit more each night. it's inevitable for him. she's his inevitable.

[itz-pandora]

There's only one person I truly hate with all my being

[firelise]

Oh if the two gay British twinks who played Bianca and Lucentio in the original 17th century productions of taming of the shrew could see these Thai boys now…

[prolibytherium]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[iloveacronix]

Not the banner

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, MY BANNER IS SO SWAGFUL🔥🔥

[rhaenall]

jeremy strong just fucking gets it. calling succession a love story ouchie