#whatever this was a good series

[metamatronic]

oh thank goodness the d1 polycule is in tact. FALSE ALARM GANG

[hinamie]

long way home

[rendevok]

The gingerbread anything agency!

A secret santa gift for my good friend max 🥰🫶

[kdinjenzen]

With the new Ranma 1/2 series finally out on Netflix it's a great time to mention that despite the fact that Ranma 1/2 cracked a lotta eggs for 90's kids the character (and series as a whole) is not really a queer/trans/nonbinary story.

I loved Ranma 1/2 as a kid, it definitely was a part of crackin' my egg, but seeing people getting into it now calling Ranma (the character) "genderfluid" or "under the trans umbrella" is kinda wild considering like... what the actual character does, is, says, etc and also what the show actually does, is, and says.

[ajwalkerartblog]

them!!! they!!!!!

[blossoms-phan]

thinking about what it means to be chained together, work, life and social, to quite literally be beside each other in life and… still make the confirmation that phil is indeed the funniest person he knows sound like the most earnest and sincere thing in the entire world? to spend so many of your days and years together now, with evidence of all those smiles and laughter written all over your face. something about the simplicity of these questions, timeless ones but untainted by social media or meme speak, leaning fully into the girly sleepover night energy but also just… answering so honestly, in a way that’s funny and charming and completely them but walls down. thinking about them trying to make dil and tabitha best friends and being disappointed when that reduced their romance level. thinking about “i think 14-year-old dan and phil would have been friends”, about more than just romantic, about i didn’t have a best friend for the first 18 years of my life, real best friends. their friendship is so important real lovers are friends first etc etc

[dandylovesturtles]

@leisi-lilacdreams post about both of the Donnie's getting their twin sense tingling in the latest CAS arc (by @somerandomdudelmao) inspired some dialogue in my brain and so here.

---

"You let him go!?"

Donnie doesn't bother turning around; he can hear Mini-him pacing back and forth around the lab, and he doesn't have to look to know how this is shaking out.

"What was I supposed to do, tie him to a chair?"

"Yes!?" says Mini-him like he's stupid, which warrants a scoff.

"You know as well as I do that when Leo decides something, you can't talk him out of it."

"Yes, which is why tying him to a chair is the appropriate response!"

"No one's invented a rope strong enough yet, not even me."

"I can. I will. Watch me."

Donnie does not watch. Mini-him is still pacing back and forth, from the sounds of it, so there's nothing to see. It takes him over a minute to finally stop.

"...You feel it too, don't you?"

"Of course I do," Donnie says. He doesn't need any clarification. "We're the same person, I'm just older, smarter, and sexier."

Mini-him huffs, not rising to the bait, which means there are more feelings in the air than Donnie cares for. But he gets it. He wasn't lying about feeling it, after all.

"...We almost lost him," says Mini-him at length, and finally Donnie turns away from his work to look at the kid. He's got his arms crossed tight, looking away, seeing something else. "We did lose him, for a few minutes. But I could still feel it." He sighs, looking down. "If Mikey hadn't been able to open that portal..."

"Then you would have found a way to tear it open yourself," says Donnie, and Mini-him's eyes jerk up from the floor. Donnie just shrugs like he's saying something obvious. "Leos get into trouble, and Donnies save them. Right?"

Finally, a small smile from Mini-him. "He's more trouble than he's worth, though."

Donnie grins, then grabs a wrench and holds it out for the kid to take. "Now are you going to keep angsting or are you going to help?"

"I'm not angsting," he says unconvincingly, but he does come forward and grab the wrench. "What are we working on?"

"Before I tell you, you have to sign an NDA."

"Oh, well, if this is official work, you'll have to pay my contracting fee."

Donnie barks a laugh, even though they both know that neither of them are joking.

[dustykneed]

good luck, babes! 💙💛

maybe i should write a fic. hmm

(edit: if you wanted to know my personal interpretation... watch the can in bones' hand. and the colors mean things loll. i think i'll make an explanation tomorrow just for fun)

[explorersaremadeofhope]

im doing a very quick (aka skimming-a-lot) GO reread and i'd forgotten how much i love discorporated aziraphale. he is 3000% done. he has no fucks left to give. this part of the book is just him and crowley, independently of each other, having hit rock bottom and come through despair and out on the other side into "fuck it we ball" and it's wonderful. they're so in sync and so unhinged.

favourite discorporated az moments:

telling mr shadwell he's the southern pansy

gets so annoyed with the televangelist he tells him that heaven only has a 50% chance of winning and the rest is propaganda, after denying it for the whole book

"you lot [humanity] are all going to be civilian casualties either way"

telling mrs ormerod that he knows he's in england because nobody else could have asked such a fucking stupid question

world's least sincere "wasn't that touching."

'the exorcist' reference *

extremely eager to murder adam young

i cannot emphasise enough how down with child murder he is **

tells madame tracy they need to be doing 70mph and then makes her fucking vespa warp through space at 200mph

"i'm the nice one. you can't expect me to—oh, blast it. you try to do the decent thing, and where does it get you?" aziraphale snapped his fingers.

* im willing to bet money that was crowley's idea and ended with him feeling vaguely queasy while aziraphale sat next to him going "what absolute nonsense, this isn't how it works at all"

** until he actually meets him. but still.

[raayllum]

I get that in general a lot of kids shows do utilize the protagonists ('good guys') in ways where they're supposed to be role models, particularly because some do have a "lesson of the week" where the character does bad things, then clearly learns and explains what they should've done instead by the end of the episode.

That has just... never been how TDP has operated, and I don't get how and why people think we're supposed to take what anyone does in the show as being unilaterally good or evil. Particularly in arc 2; any moral simplicity that was hanging on by a thread in arc 1 has been taken out back and shot numerous times by now.

TDP very rarely calls anything Evil or Good, and when it does, it's always filtered through the characters' biases, and rarely does more then 2-3 characters ever have the same opinion on something for the same reasons. Soren and Rayla, who have inverted character arcs, are some of the only characters to ever use the term villain / good guys or bad guys, and are two of the most staunchly black-and-white thinking characters, heavily to their detriment, I might add, in terms of coping with the increasing complexity of their lives. They have cognitive biases. They're not always right, and are frequently wrong. This is true for everyone in the show.

The show refuses to condemn murder, indirectly and directly condemns the expulsion of humans from Xadia routinely (Evrkynd being a city for everyone, Ezran arguing with Karim, who is the most wrong about the most things), and shows a variety of viewpoints on all things.

The show understands that the choices people make—whether the same character trait is a flaw or a strength—as well as 'moral' choices are all circumstantial.

Are you wrong to burn people alive? Mostly yes (2x07, 6x08) but also no (3x09). Are you wrong to kill people? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes whether it's 'wrong' or 'right' doesn't even factor in. Are you wrong to use dark magic, or use the dangerous Staff of Ziard, or coin someone and condemn them to a 'fate worse than death'? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Is lying or hiding the truth to protect someone wrong? Sometimes yes (1x06, 2x03, 3x03, 5x01, 7x04, 7x06) sometimes no (1x02, 2x03, 6x06, 5x08, 7x08).

Are you doing the right thing?

Do you have no choice? Is that true, or is that just what you think, or how you rationalize it yourself?

When is it right or cowardly to leave (Viren, Lissa, Rayla, Callum, Ezran, the Cosmic Council, the offer made to Karim's troops)? When should you stay? When do you decide to share resources (2x05) to your potential detriment or withhold them in the name of protecting yourself and your own people (Xadia and magic)? At what point(s) do you prioritize your own pain and grief, or someone else's (i.e. the Keeper vs Callum vs Ezran)? At what point is someone too dangerous or 'too far gone' to keep alive (Runaan about Harrow, Ezran about Aaravos)? At what point do you decide someone cannot change? When do you refuse to change (Karim, Terry) who you are no matter what happens, and when do you decide that you must (Ezran, Soren)? When is it wrong to use illusions to trick someone (3x09 and 7x06) and when is it more reasonable (2x03)? When should you be willing to sacrifice others (Rayla with her family, Runaan and Rayla with Callum, Soren with Viren) and when should you refuse? When should you sacrifice yourself, and when it is wrong to? Did you betray them, or did they betray you, or both (usually both)? When should you betray or stay loyal to your family? What is the right thing to do?

The show, tbh, doesn't know, at least 90% of the time. It's not interested in knowing. It's interested in exploring. That's the whole point. At most, it says you should work towards harm reduction, but what constitutes harm, and what peace looks like, is also something that greatly differs for all the characters.

Rayla is willing to sacrifice the love of her life, Ezran is willing to create weapons of mass destruction and wield one, and Callum used a torture spell on someone when he absolutely did not have to. The idea that any of the protagonists are meant to be paragons of unblemished virtue who are always 100% right, or that any of the antagonists do not canonically have a good point of contention with anything that's happened and are always 100% wrong, is reductive to everything the show is and explores, because it is Quite Literally not what the show does, ever tbh.

They literally spelled it out this past season as a core theme; I don't think they needed to have a character directly point it out every time a main character did something that was Kinda Fucked Up or Complicated But Understandable to know that the show knows it was Canonically Fucked Up or Complicated But Understandable.

There is not a single character or action in TDP that is always right, and there is not a singular character or action in TDP that is always wrong. Hell, even narrowing it down to "this is 'right' or 'wrong'" feels counterintuitive because it's so subjective within the narrative.

Every choice the characters make is often well reasoned, aligns with their values and world views, and fits into how they work through problems. Every choice has benefits and consequences, for them or for others. That doesn't mean it's Right for everyone involved. That doesn't mean it's Wrong for everyone involved. That's what makes the show interesting. Everything has nuance. Everything has Complexity. I'm not interested in a simplified version of TDP. I'm interested in the show as is.

I hope you are, too.

[benevolenterrancy]

Swords pining for each other's cultivator is my new favorite type of pining. Love your NieYao content! <3

I don't suppose we could get Baxia or Hensheng throwing a tantrum while Jin Guangyao / Nie Mingjue are away, leaving their owners to deal with the embarrassing aftermath?

Also, do you have any recs you'd recommend with these two?

this is the exact moment Nie Huaisang realised he was going to have to start meddling in his big brother's love life (con't: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Hensheng, on the other hand, doesn't throw tantrums but WILL sulk...

[deoidesign]

when your main characters start dating after years of writing so they finally get to be like this

[todayisafridaynight]

[arson-09]

Tamlin is actually such an underrated character in acotar. Because of feyres very biased narrative she forces readers to ignore the complexity of his character and man. its sad

Tamlin is a character who is genuinely GOOD at his core. He changed so much of the spring court for good, eliminating slavery within the spring lands and mortals having more protection. Hes a morally good character that made a few mistakes and is boiled down to just those mistakes. Locking feyre in the house and the magical/emotional blow up, which are both pretty decent fuck ups (i dont think siding with hybern fully counts as he was a double agent all along and tamlin was decently justified in thinking feyre was being kept against her will. lets be fr here) and even after he’s extremely fucked over by the nightcourt, his lands and court burned to shit, he still saves rhysand. Saves rhysand and tells feyre to be happy, even when he has every reason to NOT do that!

Hes a character that clearly holds himself to a higher standard. throughout acotar he puts lucien and feyres safety above his own, even sending feyre away when she was the only one who could save him. Even though what he did to her wasnt great its not completely irredeemable, rhysand did much worse things to feyre and other people but hes living his best life while Tamlin seems to find himself unworthy of being a person (acosf wheres hes been in beast form for roughly over two years) hes a perfectionist who now doesnt even think he deserves anyone because he accidentally hurt the people he loves most.

Sjm accidentally created a beautifully rich and morally righteous character who is so extremely fucked by the narrative. Which doesnt even work half the time as sjm cant seemingly commit to making him a full villain (seemingly by accident again she gave him quite a reasonable explanation to everything he did ‘wrong’ but still chooses to make him a punching bag)

If Tamlin was genuinely a morally evil character he wouldnt have NEARLY the amount of fans as he does. Hes a character that requires the minimum amount of media literacy and comprehension to understand and i LOVE him.

[bellshazes]

i don't think the life series is "about" anything at all. it's not about survival or winning or player dynamics, or any theme. however i do think that the entire series - third life to present - is unified by a game design philosophy where all mechanics are engineered to disrupt the game as it has been played.

third life was initially pitched as "a[n ...] experiment" and its opening question was fundamentally how long can this last, which scar quickly proved was not long at all. it's easy to forget that it was not always a given that seasons would last approximately eight weeks and how the breakpoints of red/yellow violence would fall.

last life attempted to disrupt the established social norms by a) attempting to ban acting based on prior season's events and more importantly b) introducing social deduction mechanics which destabilized all alliances by default. similarly, although the ban on continuity never returned, double life's gimmick at its core is just another disruption of social dynamics. limited life iterates on last life's boogeyman dynamic while applying a different kind of time-limited pressure; secret and wild life are carousels of disruption to social play and "regular" or survival gameplay.

nevertheless players have defined the real rules of the game - the game-as-played which gives the series continuity - through their playing of it. both in spite of and because of the mechanical disruptions, conventions around sportsmanship and acceptable behavior are deeply entrenched. kills that are "illegal" by the written rules matter less than the player perception of them; the desire to invent social punishments for explicit infractions died with etho in the third life firing squad. players judge kill attempts as acceptable/impermissible by their relative status of reds vs. yellows, as the rudeness of ending someone's series early far outweighs the obvious strategic benefit of eliminating reds first. history persists, only as much as a given set of players negotiates it should. everyone should be along for the ride for as long as possible, but it will end.

ultimately life seasons are designed to make it difficult to play as you always have, and the players derive fun and drama from balancing their leaning into the gimmicks or into their habits. unfortunately this tension is deeply compelling and leads to wildly divergent opinions on what is "good" or "authentic" about a season or gimmick or episode because where the "good" tension is depends on the viewer, the point of view, the episode, etc.

[ramen2jpeg]

Its 5 am. I cant sleep. Throws this at you

It was funnier in my head