thinking about the way ghost doesn't hesitate to start killing shadows when graves betrays them but soap only takes one hostage
you can almost hear the voice in his head telling him it doesn't have to be this way; they can still talk it out
"i'm calling shepherd"
his first instinct when confronted with betrayal is to play it by the books: to go up the chain. that goes against everything we've seen him do. he bucks authority at every chance except for the one time he's confronted with the barrels of his allies' guns
he wants a peaceful resolution; for the first time we've ever seen, he doesn't want violence to be the answer. there has to be another fix, a solution that doesn't end with him killing the same men he's been working with; his friends
nothing's happened yet
it doesn't have to go this way
but ghost has been betrayed before. he knows the way this ends; either with him six feet under or his enemy
he doesn't hesitate
it's only when they knock alejandro out that soap shoots; when they spill the first blood and cross a line they can never come back from
only when ghost orders him to run and he has to cover his retreat
and somewhere along the line, between civilians’ screams and taunting voices, between his shaking breath and ghost steady in his ear, that naivety is stripped away; his trust turned to teeth that he uses to sink into throats of men he'd have given his life for
"be careful who you trust, sergeant; people you know can hurt you the most"
he's learned the price of trust
just like ghost did
but unlike ghost, he has someone to guide him through the aftermath
"good advice, It"
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If I have you blocked, please do not message me on other accounts. If you know I have you blocked on one place, please do not try to reach out to me if you find out i didn't block you on another place.
It is very frustrating knowing that some people, not everyone, will see that I have them blocked and will go through different accounts to send me anons or dms. I know that when it gets to that point, it is a bit pointless to try and publicly ask someone like that to just leave me alone, but you know! I still wanna like. Ask you. To leave me alone if I have made it clear multiple times that I don't want to interact with you. I don't really care if you believe its unfair that I have you blocked. Unfortunately, in the world of online spaces, if I decide that I don't want to talk to you because i felt so uncomfortable that I decided to block you, thats me expressing a boundry. That's me saying 'please leave me alone'.
I'm some weirdo online who writes mid smut of traumatized guys. I should not be so important to you that you want to try and contact me through alt accounts or get upset when I continue to block you. I am uncomfortable. You reaching out knowing this, does not make that uncomfortable go away. It makes me more defensive, less willing to talk, and more prone to snapping and popping off if it does happen. I know it hurts when someone blocks you, but you need to understand that pushing for yourself to be unblocked through friends or anons, only makes the situation worse. There are so many other people to befriend who are so much nicer than I'll ever be, please leave me alone.
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This is the comfort for the yunli part because someone in the comments requested this!!
ADDITIONAL
Yunli (comfort)
After the man was punished, Yunli felt slightly bad for yanqing.
Yanqing most likely ignored her the whole day, Not even talking to her while training March, Yunli hates to admit but she's a bit worried, Is he truely alright?
She tried to talk to him 10 times and failed all ten.
Well the last she tried and then Yanqing broke down crying, Unable to explain.
They didn't talk for a whole week before Yanqing apologised for pushing her away and invited her for a small meal in the Aurum alley.
They ate silently, But Yunli could also feel that yanqing was still traumatized, even after the man was punished.
Yunli managed to get him talk, He didn't go into much detail and just told that it hurts.
Poor boy, he doesn't have many friends his age, Nor anyone to talk freely with without being anxious or scared.
Yunli wasn't great at comforting, The only way she comforts is by giving him her piece of Berrypheasant skewers. Yanqing stared at her, But started eating.
For the first time, They feel like friends.
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The Many Illustrators of
A Tale of Two Cities
7: A. A. Dixon
"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"
This is a very long post.
This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.
Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.
You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.
But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is:
Are you familiar with all of them?
Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.
And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.
Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!
...
...but if you start counting...
...you'll notice that this seems...
...like a lot more than twelve!
Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.
For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.
In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:
#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'"
#6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'"
#7: "He said, 'Farewell!'"
#12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'"
#9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.
To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?
It gets even more interesting.
As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!
That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!
And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!
At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!
(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)
All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.
Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures!
Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!
So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.
And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!
If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.
As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!
And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!)
We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.
Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!
Except...
It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter!
Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:
This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!
EXCEPT...
For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples.
(My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)
More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O.
Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.
Dare I say..."Oh."
Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers!
After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).
As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:
why? why would you put us through this?
& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:
This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫
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Good evening to our lovely contestants and our viewers at home! Before we get into tonight's recap, I have some unfortunate news to share with you all. Many of you will remember our lovely contestant Aphelios. Unfortunately, it seems that he's been snatched out from under our noses and whisked away, no doubt to some horrible prison of the empire's enemies. But don't fear! Already the emperor's forces are scouring the galaxy, searching for him. And with our intergalactic broadcast, there's no doubt that he'll be found soon. Remember, if you see our lovely contestant, please report the sighting to your latest Empire Embassy so that we can find him as soon as possible! Rest assured, we will bring him back to us, safe and sound, so he can continue his incredible run in 𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐋 𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐑��𝐑 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐋𝐎𝐑!
And ... erm ... Lee Sin has also been disqualified. Let's take a look at our lovely contestants, shall we? Today had a tricky question, but all of our contestants showed a willingness to at least try to please the emperor, and that's what matters, right? The ship has been secured,, so our esteemed guests are welcome to resume their usual lives after that little ... scare earlier today. To our viewers at home, don't fear! We're all, uh, perfectly safe, I'm sure!
Anyways! Our scores from previous rounds have all been tallied up, so let's head right to the scoreboards, shall we?
AHRI +8 (78), EZREAL +9 (67), EVELYNN +9 (77), MORGANA +10 (44) APHELIOS +/ (63), YASUO +10 (61), IRELIA +7 (66), ZED +10 (75), TALON +5 (47), LEE SIN +/ (56)
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