#week one hands or dark

[aeris-blue]

Just out of reach

Always too far

I’m going to try my best to do Grillstertember this year we will see what happens ^^

[buttercupshands]

can you even call it a warm up if I'm going to bed without drawing anything big

and a sketch I made while sitting in the park today

[hauntingofthelamb]

isolated merriment 🕸 2024

[latelylately]

i know the perfect way to waste our time

[ungodlysaltyinfrastructure]

What up gang 😎

Nothing heartbreaking here. Nuh uh. No sir-ey! Just a nice happy family 👍

(Yall getting a double whammy of an alt version of the first one)

Ok, time for incoherent ramblings.

Since AR 14 I've been thinking alot about Alux's parents. More in the sense of, what the fuck is going on with Alux's mom

The circumstances of Alux's mother's death are extremely suspicious.

She was

Murdered

It was IN FRONT OF ALUX

It seemed like it was an ambush of some kind.

There seems to be no clear reason

Why she died is ambiguous. Was it a planned attack? Or did Alux and his mother get tangled in the crossfire of a battle that didn't originally involve them?

If it was planned, why only go for Alux's mom????? Did they kill his mom, and then not realize he was just standing there??????

Or maybe during the attack Alux hid? And the following shots of his dead mom we see from his perspective is the aftermath of everything, and it had died down?

If this attack was purely meant for his mom, why?

If the QUEEN OF COZEN had DIED, what would the other kingdoms say?

What the hell did Hamatria say??????

Could the queen's death be, if not THE, then one of the inciting incidents that lead to the rising tensions between Hamatria and Cozen?

Mind you, all of this shit would have been like, 15 years ago. Maybe 20 if Alux is a bit older. So like. Wtf was going in back then.

Now, there is one thing. And it's that, how do magic users come to be? Is it genetic? Or can it be manually learned? With Alux, it may be genetic. (Mother fucker took one sip of pink and then BUSTed green crystals all over the place, he did NOT learn that manually) And if so, it would be from his mom. (Elric fucking died by a stab wound and Alux seems to have super healing abilities. Either Elric is not a magic user, or he is not the father.)

Either way, it seemed like Alux's mom had the Magic Gene™️

in a kingdom that's racist to Magic users.

…

Maybe Elric didn't hate magic users as much as Alux would put it.

Maybe he was just weary of Alux discovering his magic abilities in a kingdom that would probably lynch you if you were a magic user.

Maybe Elric didn't really like Petro, not because he was gay- *cough* sorry, a magic user, but that he was teaching his son about magic when his son has magical powers.

Not gonna lie, if I had lost my wife for being a magic user, and now my son was most likely one, and he was set to become king of a kingdom that *has the reputation of not liking magic users* when I died, I would be scared shitless for him.

That actually brings me to a question, did Elric start this whole “Magic user bad” thing in Cozen, or was it already within its culture and he just had to abide by it so he wouldn't get overthrown? Eh. Either way,

Whether or not it was a consequence of Elrics actions, Alux would definitely not have been prepared for being king, (That's kind why he's going on this self discovery adventure) so like…

Maybe… At least we have a motive for Elric's action of keeping Alux sheltered and inside the Castel? Granted, if Elric started the whole Magic racism thing then it's his own fault his son is not ready, but 🤷

That actually brings me to this.

Did Elric ever feel guilt for not being there for his family when they were in danger? Did he ever feel empathy for Alux or regret in his decision to keep him inside? Did he feel shame for not taking better care of his son? Did he sometimes feel like he did everything wrong but can't go back?

Did he ever feel alone after his wife died?

I'm actually kind of sad that Elric died so early on. A Lot could have been done with him. But maybe we'll see that in flashbacks. But that does leave room for speculation that could *in canon* be left up to the viewer to interpret so :DDDDDDDDDDDD I'm gonna rewrite Elric!1!!1!! Or maybe, add onto his character that wouldn't be shown within the series. Yippee🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

[silvertiefling]

&&. SHIPPING TAGS...

PLATONIC.

Iago. ( @accultant ) // &&. SAILS. Chaos. Cats. Crime.

ROMANTIC.

canon characters.

Astarion. ( @estarion ) // &&. SAILS. WELL DAMN! WE ALL GOT PROBLEMS!

Astarion. ( @starcunin ) // &&. SAILS. No holding back.

Harleep. ( @dvilsdesire ) // &&. SAILS. Two cats. One yarn.

Raphael. ( @fiendishfinesse ) // &&. SAILS. Deals & Diatribes.

Shadowheart. ( @sharransepulchre ) // &&. SAILS. Until my darkness goes.

dark urges.

Balasar. ( @bloodsoakedurge ) // &&. SAILS. We're odds & ends.

Ithaca. ( @faebhaal ) // &&. SAILS. Cannibal Girlfriends.

Puck. ( @bloodtwin ) // &&. SAILS. The Mutts.

Serkan. ( @murderreign ) // &&. SAILS. Hearts without Hands.

tav. / oc. / oc companion.

Azariel ( @asangel ) // &&. Holiness & Monsters.

Cassian. ( @crimesought ) // &&. SAILS. Weremutts.

Connor. ( @relentlessgrief ) // &&. SAILS. Two creatures in a pod.

Lithos ( @fellbless ) // &&. SAILS. See my heart is black.

Tempest. ( @lovepvnch ) // &&. SAILS. My love will laugh with me.

Vhaal. (@demonwebs ) // &&. Wolf Spiders.

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[goosefries]

ava shorts s2 out on saturday this is NOT A DRILL!!!!!!!!!

(i predicted this. too many ava references in the past few shorts. so ready to see chosen again. i love him)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

THAT WOUND. THAT VILE WOUND. it throbs in time with your speeding heart, and the ache it carries through your veins is oppressive, its hot, it tangles around your jaw and through your spine and behind your eyes. there are needles, sprouting from the lacerations like the most heinous ivy, and it strangles your lungs, rips tears from your eyes, lures bile to your throat. it hurts. oh god it hurts. you cant think, you cant breathe, you cant swallow, you cant see. you cant see. you cant see. you cannot see but you know when your eyes are closed, because there are colors stained upon the backs of your eyelids. they form images of loved ones, of viscera, of bile and blood and blackened mud. its jarring, they make anxiety spike outwards, frantic ferro fluid, frightened from faces too scared, too pained, too dead, too piercing with eyes staring straight at you, straight at you. actually, you cant tell when your eyes are open.

SAUCE FREE VERSION UNDER THE CUT.

[twnj]

'Shikamaru leaned slightly forward now, his cheekbone against his knuckles as he stared ahead, waiting to catch her eye. Of course, he found it instantly and held it with ease, as if she’d fabricated the last few minutes of avoidance, fabricated the night before. The moment she locked eyes with him, his right hand extended across the board and lingered in the air between them. Eager to present normalcy and show that nothing phased her, Temari reached out and took his hand. It was warm and clammy, and she felt its ghost glide across her cheeks into her hair.

He shook with feeling, and (much to Temari’s detriment) she now knew precisely which.

[...]Fear had no place in her game unless she was the one to instil it.

Except now, as Shikamaru held her gaze, her hand, her attention, she felt it. To her core, somewhere deep and feral, she felt it.

But he didn’t. He held her eye too easily to be scared, too easily to be the man she’d left cowering in her bed the night before. This was an entirely different person grasping her hand and staring her down. This wasn’t her Shikamaru, as she’d come to know him. This was GM Shikamaru Nara, the last World Championship challenger, a cold and calculating killer.

Grandmaster ao3 by @notquitejiraiya

[starlight---starbrights]

Undertale yellow flowey embroidery

This took about 40 hours, give or take a few

[crowleyscleaninglady]

Y’all I have company coming this weekend so I’ll really only have time to read one (1) of my books. Which one should I start

[pickled-flowers]

Back on my edgy shit i guess

[itspileofgoodthings]

when @awake-my-oceans said that I got stuck because of understandable very deep hurt but then I got unstuck and it was just like “look at her go”

[inkynightmaresau]

what does norman think of the toons?

and what do the toons think of it (aka dad #2)?

and what do the toons think of it (aka dad #2?)

》FIRST《

》PREVIOUS《

》NEXT《

[dragonbleps]

idk if its jsut because i've bought a lot more fruit lately, but the AMOUNT of fruit i've had to toss from being moldy or going rotten incredibly quickly (despite being [i thought] VERY thorough with inspecting them before buying!!!) has been ridiculous tbh