#what does she have? A KNIFE

[essektheylyss]

My thing about Veth potentially venturing into polyamory is that I do think everyone involved would be perfectly fine with it and happy to help her experiment, and I think that no matter how they do it, it would not fix her. This isn't to say that she wouldn't get any benefit out of trying! It's just to say that it's not a solution to her actual problem, because I genuinely don't think the problem is that she's lacking any one thing that would make her life complete.

Fundamentally, I think Veth struggles with the idea that there will come a point at which she has to settle. Not in a bad way, just in the sense that she is one person with one life and she will have to live within those bounds. Because the thing is, I don't really think her issue ends at struggling to "have it all"; to an extent she does! She is a good parent, even if her kid is a little rebellious; her marriage is supportive (and has fun sex); she gets to go off to save the world with Yeza's blessing on occasion, when the world needs saving. She doesn't have all of these things all the time, but... that's not really a flaw, that's just a fact of life.

But she started out her adult life settling to an extent—even if she loved Yeza and loved being Luc's mom, she did the safe thing that was expected of her. The goblin attack and everything that transpired after shoved her out of that life, but in retrospect, to an extent it likely feels that that pushed her to find something more that she wouldn't have had otherwise. Being pushed to her limit under the worst conditions made her better, stronger, braver, and at the end of it she found that she could have both her original life and much of her new life—so why wouldn't she then wonder if further experiences of that ilk could do the same?

Crucially, she has not actually run up against a hard limit yet, and as such she hasn't had reason to believe that there is a point at which she has to stop and recognize that there isn't more for her to find. When she was drinking more heavily during missions, even when it caused the death of herself or others, there were no long-term consequences. And the thing is, I'm not saying that she should face that kind of major consequence, but she seems as though she is scared to accept that maybe she could be happy if she stopped before she does.

I'm also not suggesting that she should stop experimenting or trying new things—the Luxon knows I am not one to talk in that realm—but I do think she is searching for novelty not because that would make her happy, but because she doesn't believe that she has the capacity to know what would make her happy. She was unaware that polyamory was even an option, so think of what else she might not be aware of! She doesn't have perfect knowledge of the world, after all, so how can she trust that she's found what she really wants? So yeah, she could fuck someone else, and it might even be an enjoyable experience that she didn't know was missing! But that only prolongs the question of what else she might be missing.

I think that deep down, she's terrified that if she doesn't keep pushing until that external hard limit, she will end up with regrets later, and simultaneously she is resentful that her friends all seem to have reached a point where they are largely content with what they have, because she wants them to have everything. She wants herself to have everything. And she has not yet allowed herself to come to terms with the fact that only she can determine when the everything of what she already has is enough, and anything else is the cherry on top.

[erinwantstowrite]

wait

i really want more klepto peter

like dick being all

“where did you get that”

and peter being all “uhhh”

i have a joke set up in the christmas oneshot that implies he has been doing that since he was born and it's my favorite joke. like even before his powers he was foreshadowing being able to disappear and have everyone go "wait where's peter 😨" or him having something he is 100000% not supposed to have

[ominousgradient]

I feel like if the twins had a youtube channel it would all be SPENDING 24 HOURS IN A HAUNTED WALMART baby slop content with them pogging in every thumbnail

Meanwhile Snotlouts channel would consist of rant videos where he complains about his life and shits on media he dislikes and overall it'd just be him being a bitter little hater

[backpackingspace]

Hi yes more unhinged penelope pleaseeee.

[knockknockitsnickels]

Thinking about parallels between Ms. Beast and Tower. They're both the result of choosing to fight the princess and losing (no-knife and knife routes respectively), both have similarly boastful personalities and see you as beneath them (prey and a pet).

Something about how one becomes an animal and the other becomes a god, yet both transformations are equally dehumanizing.

[captainrufflebanger]

🎒

From the OC ask’s~

Big ol backpack

Open it and give me your oc seecrets (I totally forgot the question for this one already but I knew I wanted the backpack, :) I have the attention skills of Angie

🎒 (backpack) - What items does your oc usually carry? Do they have a bag or just keep everything in their pockets? Do they carry a lot or a little?

Elise doesn't carry too much with her given she rarely leaves Castle Dimitrescu. For her daily sous-chef duties, she keeps a simple chatelaine with a metal spoon for tasting and a small pocket watch given to her by the (late) castle cook who mentored Elise. She hardly uses the watch to time cooking anymore; it's simply become a fond habit she refuses to abandon.

[torchickentacos]

Skyrim NPCs seemed kind of bland to me at first but the more I play and the more characters I meet, the more I love them all??? this game slaps and I am once more partaking in that thing where I show up 15 years late to something and go 'wow this is great, why is nobody talking about this???' (they did) (15 years ago) (extensively) (I ignored it) (people told me to play it) (I didn't until I felt like it) (here we are)

[skitskatdacat63]

I love how 80% of the time I draw Eclipse, she's curled into a ball, truly the most unfortunate creature ever

(hey guys would you like to see a poor quality edit of her I made years ago, of an idea i still feel very strongly and emotionally about!?!?!??! Send me an ask 😞 every time I see it, I'm obsessed w the idea again and pray to one day make it fully realized lmao)

[tenwhiteandalusians]

and then no one said anything about the fact that if i watched ONE MORE episode tenax pulls a "i'm not angry i'm just disappointed i'm hurt" about scorpus signing with the white faction.

[jollyreginaldrancher]

S3 E6 Spoilers on Natalie and what she did and

the hikers. I'm seeing a lot of people assume they lead to them getting rescued and it's all thanks to Natalie's actions...

We already know they don't get rescued here. They're stuck there 19 months. They wont get out before the second winter...

The hikers are probably not going to lead to them getting saved. And even if they do, yeah there's no guarantee they only found them cause of Natalie's actions. I think we're really snorting that copium to soften what Natalie did here…

but it's okay to admit she's not perfect guys. That she did a bad thing. It's okay to acknowledge when she does something wrong and when she's not being perfect. That's what makes her soooo…. that's what makes her Natalie. We can admit she's flawed, it's okay.

[marinecorvid]

blorbos from my brain

[vaguely-concerned]

always darkly funny to me that rye really went through the whole story sucessfully going '*deep breath* if there's to be any hope for this world we must always hold to mercy. mercy, mercy, mercy, in the faith that new flowers might one day bloom on ancient graves' and then at the very last possible hurdle goes 'actually you know what. mercy rescinded. murder time now'. it's so not the character arc I expected him to have going in but I am absolutely DELIGHTED that that is how it shook out, it's so fraught and complicated and chewy. my secretly vengeful babyboy. local man joins the cyclical nature of violence on the side of violence at the last possible minute, fully aware that he's missing the point but too pissed off and plain done with this shit to care, beware the fury of a patient watcher etc., maybe you should have thought about it a bit harder before you made me quite so much in your own image. (I love the fact that this means he echoes exactly what he did to baron van markham before the start of the game once more. solas this could have been predicted if you'd been paying attention lol the last guy who really pissed him off could fit in an envelope now) and then once the most acute bloodlust fades he has to spend the rest of his life wondering what varric and harding would have thought, because he'll never get to ask them; 'we'll never get to fix it', as taash says. what is it going to be like, having to forgive yourself while not knowing if someone you loved would do the same. sooooo much delicious narrative space to work with here. at least lucanis is there to go 'nah u good. you want pancakes? I was thinking about making pancakes' lol emotional support ride or die or stab bae <3

gravekeeper left once more with nothing but a grave and a 'varric I'm sorry you thought I was a hero but unfortunately. I am just me' in his heart he never gets to hear the answer to :') delicate thematic echoes and overtones of hawke once more. now you're gone and all I have left of you are stories.

(in some strange ways I think it's a more honest appreciation/appraisal of solas' virtues than the redeem ending would be for rye specifically though. the main upside to the redeem ending outside of any emotional attachment you have to solas himself (I know I do! I did go into this game with a decade of wanting to save this motherfucker from himself behind me, let's not get anything twisted) is his stated intent to try to soothe the dreams of the titans and so maybe end the blight once and for all. but the thing is... is anything stopping him from doing that if you fight him or especially when you trick him and he is lucid enough to eat his humble pie with something like grace? with seemingly all of eternity to maybe chill out and really think about it, is he incapable of reaching that conclusion rationally and compassionately on his own?? my angle on it for my own sake (not rye's. rye does not give a fuck at that point either way lol) ended up being something like hey solas I know -- I know!! -- there is goodness in you and I am DONE trying to hold on it for you. I love you but I love you like an adult and that means I can't keep taking responsibility for your actions. either you wisen up in your veil babyjail timeout and start to help ease the pain you caused because it's the right thing to do on your own damn initiative (WHICH AGAIN I THINK YOU'RE FULLY CAPABLE OF! I can see in you the things cole saw in you even if you're happy to throw them all on your bonfire of martyrdom), or get off the fucking board already this is not actually a game, I can't afford to gamble on you like this when the stakes are 'everything and everyone'. and no we don't know how that's going to work out long-term, but neither can you know it will work out when he sets out to do it intentionally. if anything, considering solas' track record with his actual stated plans... it might conceivably cause less trouble in the long run fhaskj.

anyway I think the ending choices are quite interesting that way, and not quite as black and white as they seem at first glance. the redeem ending is of course the most straightforwardly 'breaking the cycle' 'right' option thematically, but I'm glad they acknowledge that it stretches credulity very nearly to the point of utter irresponsibility to gamble on solas changing his mind and not stabbing you in the back this time, for sure. I know he did it again literally five minutes ago, but this time he'll prove himself! as the player we can find out and kind of expect our faith will be finally rewarded b/c story structure and gaming conventions and so on, but rook has no way of knowing that going in, and it starts to veer close to the definition of insanity territory at some point. I love solas, and it's good that you have the option to put his turmoil to rest and help him come to peace with himself (in my other playthrough I will!). but the fate of the world is not and should not be contingent on one man's goodness, is what I think I'm trying to say. if the game is telling you anything it's that the world is way weirder, more diverse and more resilient than that. even through the blight flowers can grow. with or without you, along with you or in spite of you, we will thrive. and I don't think 'you have to make your own choice here and reap the consequences, I can't and I don't have the responsibility to make it for you' is the wrong conclusion to draw, necessarily, it's just a conclusion. I'm so impressed by how solas is written in this game, there truly are so many conflicting things about him that are true at the same time and depending on the perspective you choose to bring to it.)

[venti-death-watch]

yknow based on freminet’s emphasis on being controlled & the director’s weapon vs making his own decisions, and looking at xiao’s everything, if one of the house of hearth kids is going to betray the fatui/join the traveler i’d kinda expect it to be him

[bestworstcase]

you refer to summer as proto-cinder - do you have thoughts then for how actual cinder coming into the picture affected that dynamic? like was summer Salem’s protege first, do you think? did cinder replace her + she got sent away or did she get promoted when cinder arrived? mostly just asking for your speculation since I don’t think we have many canon answers but I love reading your rwby thoughts

loosely my thinking is that: 

1 - salem at the time was not participating in ozpin’s forever war in any meaningful sense. that his hush-hush last minute urgent missions routinely turned out to be inconsequential false alarms because he was jumping at every shadow while salem mostly ignored him. (and: i think she knew he’d hidden the relics in the schools, but didn’t yet know the particulars.)

2 - raven did not go back to banditry when she broke things off with tai, or if she did it was as a cover for her work as a spy; hence her continued working relationship with summer years later.

3 - gretchen rainart was the spring maiden. ozpin picked her out of beacon’s ranks the same way he did pyrrha, then pulled her out of the normal curriculum and sent her to mistral to be trained, in secret, by raven. the public story was that she “tragically lost her life in a training mission,” and hazel knew something didn’t add up.

4 - discomfort with that situation, combined with raven and summer both thinking ahead 10-12 years to when their daughters would be gretchen’s age, is what got the wheels turning on the secret rogue mission to take salem down.

5 - the plan was for summer to go in alone, banking on silver eyes, with raven and gretchen at a safe distance but ready to intervene if summer got into trouble. (think: gretchen blasting magic through a portal positioned to hit salem, raven ducking through and yanking summer out before salem could recover. with kindred link’s sensory aspect and a maiden’s firepower, that’s about the best escape plan summer could have had.)

6 - ozpin does his level best to keep his people as far away from salem as possible. salem knows this. one of ozpin’s guardians tracking her down with heroic declarations at the ready would interest her, and she’d instantly zero in on summer having gone rogue. that’s an opportunity: it indicates a fracture in her faith in ozpin. so salem didn’t try to smush summer like a bug; she started talking.

7 - unlike her daughters, who really have been fighting a war, summer’s experience up to that point had been a lot of secrecy, paranoia, and false alarms. if she said “i’ll stop you” and salem answered “i’m not doing anything to stop”—it would not have taken a lot of convincing to believe that, because it tracks.

8 - once the first hurdle of believing that salem isn’t waging existential war against humanity is cleared, it’s really, really easy to flip the narrative against ozpin. all salem has to do is tell summer about the mandate while stressing that the gods cannot be appeased, that they destroyed the world once before and will do it again if ozpin calls them back. which is true!

9 - salem, for whatever reason, wants the relics. if summer believes her about the mandate, getting her on board with stealing the relics is as easy as “ozpin is planning to bring them together soon; we have to get them away from him” or “i can destroy them” or “we can use them to stop him forever.” if summer doesn’t believe it… well, ozpin must trust her a great deal, to have told her of salem’s existence. surely she knows where and how he’s hidden the relics? go find the lamp. use it to find the truth for yourself; then make your choice.

10 - isn’t it serendipitous, then, that summer has the living breathing key to the vault of knowledge on her side?

check and mate. 

whether summer buys salem’s story or not, the stakes are so high that she can’t afford not to seek confirmation—and with raven and gretchen already involved, it would be so easy to be in and out of that vault with no one the wiser, and they can always seal it away again if it turns out salem lied. one way or another, summer has to open that vault.

what happens next?

i think there are two plausible ways this might have shaken out, depending on how much trust raven had in ozpin and how willing summer was to take salem at her word. 

if raven trusted ozpin and summer believed salem, then things probably got heated fast when summer returned unscathed from meeting salem and started talking about ozpin being the real danger and needing gretchen to open the vault; they might have come to blows then, and with gretchen caught in between.

if summer believed and raven was skeptical, they probably did get the vault open—but they wouldn’t have been able to use the lamp. none of them knew jinn’s name. so what then? do they seal the lamp, or trust salem’s word and bring it to her? how does gretchen feel about those options? how intense is summer about getting at least one relic away from oz?

either way… the only thing we really know about the last spring maiden is that she struggled with the magic; it was too much for her, she was scared, the training never stuck, she wasn’t cut out for it. and she was a student—probably not much older than pyrrha. we’ve seen how poorly a young, not-fully-trained maiden fared against a couple of kids and cinder. summer and raven were among the best of the best. so if things got heated enough to come to blows…

i doubt very much that summer planned or intended to kill gretchen; she’s the proto-cinder in the sense that i think salem saw an opportunity to snag a relic and maybe a valuable double agent and went for it. why look a gift horse in the mouth?—but it was all sort of ad hoc. 

but then you have a girl with power she can’t master because she’s been isolated and she just wants to go home, and the old unspoken tension between the only two adults who care enough to try to make that happen very suddenly erupting when one of them flips her loyalties out of the blue. that is a volatile situation. all the more so if it’s kept simmering until the relic is out of the vault and they’re realizing that they don’t know how to use it and they’re all going to have to choose without knowingwho told the truth.

what happens to summer rose if things get out of control and she lands the fatal blow? does she run? does she move to help before raven lashes out and forces her to run? how far does she get before it hits her that she cannot go back home?—that the choices she made, the blood she spilled tonight have tied her irrevocably to salem whether she likes it or not?

and then there’s raven, left behind to give gretchen the bitter mercy of a quick and painless death. she becomes spring—maybe seals the lamp away again, if it got that far—and then has to consider her options. tell the truth and face whatever consequences there might be for letting this happen, or… ash the body, and feign surprise come morning? leave on the pretense of searching for her missing protege, then drop out of contact and stay as far the fuck away from this mess as possible? let the guilt and the secrets fester unchecked for twelve years, always looking over her shoulder because summer has to know, she must, who gretchen gave the magic to. does salem know? would summer tell her? can raven afford to trust that she won’t?

salem specifically sought out hazel. why? how did she even know about him, if not because summer told her? (<- a decade and change later when salem is actively prosecuting a war, she doesn’t have the slightest idea who neopolitan is—after neo was instrumental in the fall of beacon! salem is not exactly obsessively monitoring what goes on in vale!) and hazel says that gretchen’s death taught him never to trust ozpin.

if “training mission gone wrong” was a cover story for pushing gretchen into hiding after she became the spring maiden, and summer knew that, and summer tried to stop it only for that attempt to go so catastrophically wrong that gretchen died because of her, and the whole time hazel was still desperately trying to get answers… and one of the very few things we know about who summer is as a person is that she Does Not Like To Lie… wouldn’t she feel that hazel deserved to know what really happened? 

and if this is how salem learned that the relics are in vaults only the maidens can open—to say nothing of how the maidens themselves are treated!—then. well, ‘divide’ and ‘sacrifice’ are both seethinglydisdainful about the futility of ozpin’s sacrifices and his cause. it isn’t a stretch to think this might have been what incited salem to actually go to war for the relics. and in that case it seems only natural for her to recruit hazel, too, because salem literally is motivated by gretchen’s death. and she can sidestep the part where summer is the one who killed gretchen by hammering ozpin’s conspiratorial lies.

and then—because summer is wholly unsuitable as a skeleton-key maiden vessel by dint of having moral reservations about murdering people and no particular desire for power—salem needs to find herself a protege. and maybe pick up another agent or two while she’s at it.

cinder is only a few years older than yang. she was probably around ten or eleven when summer met salem and the dominoes began to fall; she didn’t escape the madame until her mid-teens, and we don’t know how much time passed in between then and salem finding her. so quite a lot—half or more—of the interim between summer joining her and the beginning of V1, salem probably spent just looking for a viable candidate. and then training her while laying out the plan to off ozpin, hit the academies, and seize the relics before ozma even knew what hit him. so summer, i think, would have had a fairly lengthy period of time to reconcile herself to beginning the war she thought she was going to end, as a necessary step towards ending the wider conflict and the harm done by ozpin’s one-sided imaginary war. her life is a mess. she probably hates… everything about what her side is doing but if she really was involved directly in gretchen’s death then she’s kind of stuck with salem until/unless the truth comes out, and even aside from that there is the problem of the divine ultimatum to worry about; after more than a decade i would imagine that summer has firmly been convinced that salem isn’t gunning for annihilation, because if it came down to a choice between confessing to murder or helping bring about the end of the world, i do think summer would pick the former.

[impossible-rat-babies]

if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had a da protag after I romance someone be like “hmm not really my sexuality vibe” I would have two nickels. but bc it’s happened years apart it’s kinda wild*

*I don’t know anymore what is eshka’s sexuality

[atherflame-theconcubus]

Old Sona lore.

For anyone curious I’ve had multiple Sona’s throughout my Internet life. I haven’t even mentioned it yet, but my profile picture isn’t even my main Sona anymore.

If anyone is curious, this is my second ever Sona and technically was my last pixel gun 3D avatar. This was one of her earliest designs as well. As of right now, her current name is flame Foxtail. I decided to make an origin story for how she got her first pet, Gabby, the goat. (almost every single pet after Gabby was named after a Minecraft YouTuber, except the spider crab pet, which I named blood vines. And if you’re wondering, yes, I am having regrets now.)