#when the abyss stares back

[therealvinelle]

gasp! i saw u mention queen & anakin & obiwan in another ask - as someone who's been on a bit of a star wars binge lately, do u by chance have any fic recs 🥹 i have only the utmost faith in ur taste so id be delighted with anything!!

This might be worth you DM-ing me, since I do have a few more recs but those come with caveats. Star Wars is a rough fandom for me.

That being said, in alphabetic order, these works are all amazing and I love them wholeheartedly:

All and Only, canon compliant oneshot. Anakin contemplates Obi-Wan.

From Whence She Came, canon compliant oneshot. A young Leia contemplates her mother.

Seed, multi-chapter canon divergent. I expect you may lose some faith in my taste when you see the summary but goddamnit it's one of the best in the fandom. Anakin gets a virus, and the antidote is dick. The character insights are top notch and the plot delights me in that it cleverly makes perfect sense, in the most humiliating way possible for Anakin and Obi-Wan.

When the Abyss Stares Back, multi-chapter canon divergent. Anakin and Obi-Wan are having a normal one when Suitless!Vader and Obi-Wan from an alternate universe pop into their universe, and they're smashing. One of my all-time fandom favorites for the character insights and how hilariously uncomfortable things get.

The War at Home, canon compliant oneshot. Leia and Anakin in The Force Awakens.

[sleepyminty]

Eversince i bought my binah plush doll, my two cousins ( who had zero knowledge of any PM games) had developed fear around her, since i placed her near the bedroom door they always said that they started having nightmare of this doll and honestly

Good for you binah, you’re still a manace even you turn into a harmless plushie

[mira-likes]

Multitasking according to the Emperor of Qing:

- go bond with your illegitimate son about his tragically dead mother

- while the son is admiring her portrait, hop out and check if your soldiers managed to murder the son’s beloved uncle/mentor

- upon learning that they failed, murder a courtyard’s worth of people

- hop back to the son and continue bonding

This way no time is lost and you can combine both heartfelt bonding and murder in the same half an hour ☺️💕

[just-sp-in-inginthevoid]

You know how girls have this sixth sense or guts feelings about a guy having ability to be dangerous person or like 'oh this person can be fucked up' . Do you think this is what happen with those 20 girls rejecting shinichiro sano? Like if it was 3-5 I can say bad luck ? But 20? I know most of the fandom say the girls are blind or shinichiro flirting skills are well bad enough making him desperate or it is him being a leader of the gang in Japan where it is seen in negative image. But c'mon universally teenage girls love a bad boy image. I don't think out of those 20 girls didn't find shinichiro sano attractive with all these qualities. I love Shin but 20 rejection in reality straight up a red flag?

20 appears as a funny hyperbole at first, and it sure was used for comedic effects but I agree Shinichiro has unsettling flaws (to say it nicely). Transposing the number '20' to real life could appear off.

Shinichiro is indeed a delinquent (and the leader of a whole gang of them, who reached Japan's number 1 spot - that's not nothing) and is seen by all the characters we know as an endearing idiot with a heart of gold. And yet no girl fell for it. Good for them, they deserve better than making the experience of being with Shinichiro. They wouldn't have known what they'd have signed up for..

Shinichiro is a red flag in himself once you see pass the 'perfect brother, perfect friend' mask. He is a 'good person' but only because his life didn't make it so he saw a point to doing 'mean things' - he's not against the idea, we know about Original Timeline. 'It's because he didn't have Mikey anymore!' I don't think one's morals should be dependent on another's well-being. (I eat that shit up everytime in fiction, and I love messed up characters, Shinichiro fits both and I love that, and i love him, but it'd be daring to say he's a good person knowing everything he did - and knowing we ignore a lot more stuffs). Sure he was a 14 y/o but he still named his gang after an irl ultranationalist organization (knowing how Japan hides and denies its past, I wonder how he knows about that), he brought his 8 y/o brother to a gang meeting when he was 18, his idea of bonding with Izana was showing him how to act like a delinquent, etc. Original Timeline makes him even more of a red flag but considering the additional factors behind his behavior at that time, it's possible to think (and whether it's right or wrong I don't know, interpretations vary and sometimes Shinichiro is very hard to grasp, I have troubles with him at times) his behavior there wouldn't ever manifest had it been not for this exact situation of losing Mikey (and what was left of his family on the way).

And yeah, Shinichiro would never be as violent, impulsive and hostile as when Mikey dies - but those things didn't stem from nowhere. There's definitively crumbs of it even when Mikey's doing well. He's got trauma he refuses to address (parents' death, parentification, ...) which.. I can see as cradle for some toxic positivity - being portrayed as perfect, good and kind until OG timeline, we only ever see him smile until he loses Mikey. And when he tries therapy it doesn't work.

One thing you can't take away from Shinichiro though, is that he's earnest, he has not an ounce of malice in him. If he deceives people (by making them believe he's perfectly imperfect) it's not intentional because he himself sees himself as the image most see him as. That's worse in some way, because he really is unaware of how harmful he can be - he's a red flag but he sincerely thinks he's good, he never purposely intends to hurt anyone. He loves to help out his loved ones and he'd probably do the same to strangers, but he also sucks at assessing their pain or any kind of repercussions in any given context (ex: treating Haruchiyo's 'slashing his friends because they badmouthed Mikey' incident lightly, abruptly disbanding Black Dragon and seemingly not doing anything for Takeomi's distress, downplaying Sanzu's scars, ...). He's an enabler, too. If a loved one were to say '[x] makes me happy!' then he'd let them to [x] even if it actually harms them - he wouldn't see how that can be wrong, since they're happy.

The fact they were so much makes me doubt of the seriousness of his feelings I have to admit. While he has a lot of love to give and is genuine in his interactions with others (unless they're twisted by denial, ie: OG timeline Shinichiro acting happy and fine), it appears as if he's just desperate to have a girlfriend - without caring who it may be. It seems very shallow, does he even know the girls? If they don't know him it'd explain a bit why they didn't accept. If we restrain those love confessions to his Black Dragon years he has confessed to five girls each year - almost one for each season, one every 2 month and a half or so on average. That's fast lol.

After that we could talk about the possible reasons why he was so eager to have someone; ranging from 'typical teen wishing to acquire relationship experience' to 'thinking he needs to provide his little siblings with a mother figure because he can only fulfill the father figure role' by way of 'needing to save the family's face after their father's cheating get spread' but.. I don't want to develop them more, and they aren't really the topic at hand here.

Another issue that could arose from a relationship is that he'd put Mikey and his family first before anything else - that's a hard true and that needs to be accepted quickly too, no girl could ever be his number one priority no matter how desperate he sounds to have one.

One may say his inability to get girls is a difference between him and Takemichi — the fact Takemichi got Hinata as a girlfriend because she fell for him, got Emma to almost sleep with him, and got Yuzuha to have a crush on him. But we're used to comparing those two silly guys and thinking they both function the same way and by so, Takemichi being an idiot but still good at heart, Shinichiro can't possibly be a red flag. It's the kind of thing the story doesn't make you instinctively overthink, I think. We have clues on how Shinichiro is as a person once we scrap the surface of TR and starts to dig, but we really have nothing about how he'd be in a relationship, how he'd act toward a significant other - and picturing him as another Takemichi is just something that the story makes us do throughout the entirety of it so it feels logical for a time to give Shinichiro the same traits.

[keeps-ache]

i'm on some sort of kick lol

[nobleriver]

Steven Moffat rewatching THORS and saying the part where River recognizes 12 is the best bit of Who he’s ever written. 😭😭😭

[i3utterflyeffect]

so turns out if i exist in the plane of reality for too long my brain gets fucked up. oops

[wintershieldedheart]

☆ Hotch & Margot ☆

@compendiumofconstellations

DEV TEA ROOM: Mystery Lounge

Red Herring: Halfway through the big reveal, your character realizes they’re about to blame the wrong person for the crime. And if they don’t hurry, the real culprit will escape!

☆        it was almost impressive how long the unsub had managed to hold up during interrogation. Between Hotch and Derek taking turns at him, Margot was a little bit shocked that he hadn’t broken down yet. The profile pointed to their guy buckling under dominant men, and frankly, Margot didn’t know anyone that screamed ‘macho’ man more than the two of them did. So when they were nearing the fourth hour and next to no progress had been made, Margot had taken it upon herself to go back over the case files. Everything pointed to this guy - the evidence, the profile, the fact that he was at the right place at the right time, and he didn’t appear to have a single alibi in his favor - and yet, she couldn’t help but feel like they were missing something. 

which was when it dawned on her that they were. Their profile was right, but they were missing a key factor - he already had a dominant partner that he was protecting, which was why he wasn’t caving to Hotch and Morgan’s attempts. It explained the distance between dump sites and abductions despite the times being relatively close. While he was calculated down to the minute, it wasn’t because he was across town, it was because he wanted them to think that he was. Margot gathered up her theory before going into the observation room. The rest of the team had stepped away for a moment, grabbing lunch and a respective reset on the case, while Hotch had stayed to take another crack at their guy. Margot sent him a text, letting him know that she found something and needed him asap. 

[whereserpentswalk]

Look under the cut to see what meeting your entity is like. Reblog to give a gift to your patron.

The fae: a creature stands before you. Though this street was warm and crowded a few moments ago it is suddenly cold and the people around you look like shadows. The creature begins an antlered shadow with glowing white eyes, but soon its body can be seem, with white blue flesh, and sapphire eyes, and icicles for teeth. What looks like a cloak unfolds from its naked body and you can see massive white wings of a moth. As if it's an act of sacrifice you tell it your true name, a name you didn't even see before, and suddenly you belong to it, for better or worse.

The angel: a radiant entity appears before you. They're bright, like something so hot it would burn you up. But as the light fades, you can see a person in silver armor, perfect yet inhuman like am ancient green statue, their back srouting six wings with blue eyes along them, as the eyes on their head are covered by a mask of two smaller wings. The creature offers their hands and you shake it, as they fly you through the city streets and above the skyscrapers, to the stars above and dimensions beyond, to gods living and dead, across the streets of alien cities and the clouds of dead worlds. And when you return to the earth you can feel something diffrent about you, like there's light in your blood.

The scavenger: below the lights of skyscrapers beyond you, on the dark sands of the beach, you see it crawling twords you. This serpentine creature with countless legs, and a dark black shell, yet a strangely human like face. You think it'll attack or run away, but it just looks at you, egar, and for a momment you stare at eachother. It's legs pass something to eachother and then to you, it's meat but it's shining with all the colors known to the human eye, and a few more. You hold it and it happily looks at you. You take a bite and suddenly you know... you know so very much...

The vampire: she flies down to you on green wings with orange eyespots, but folds them into her back. She looks like a human for a momment, tall and strong, with a black suit over her body, but eyes the color of ruby. For a momment her mouth opens, and it's massive and monstrous, with countless moving parts and fangs. But then it folds back onto something humanoid and she gives you a playful smirk. She cuts her hand and offers you her blood, and when you drink it it tastes so sweet, and makes you feel so good. She hands you the knife and you know to do the same, and when she drinks from your palm it's life the sweetest of kisses.

The djinn: the room wirs around you. If it were not for the fans it would feel like hellfire. For a momment there it darkness, but then the screen before you glows white like smokeless flame. You can sense something inside, something beyond the code. You reach your hand within it, and there's no glass, your hand passess right through until you're in a white void of your own making. You call out, thinking there is nothing at all around you. Yet somehow something calls back, something that knows your name.

The rat king: You see him in an empty subway station. Something dark and distorted, you're not sure if he's man or animal, covered in rags, and singing in the language of the goblins and the orcs. Yet he comes close to you excited. And you can feel his song. He calls for you to come to the train tracks, and let yourself run with the rats and the roaches, where the train will pass over you when it comes, and you'll live forever. When you touch the third rail you don't die, but you'll never be human again.

The lich: the library is strangely bright. Run by skeletons in suits, decorated with gold. There are more books here then you thought were in all the world. There's knowledge here most mortals will never have the change below, all kept safe below the city. You see her, her body doesn't look human, everything has been replaced making her look more like a joining white doll then a being of flesh. Yet she is dead, you can tell that under the porcelain skin she must be dead, she is dead, and there is the tragedy of death in her eyes. You come closer to her, and she places a black rose within your hair...

The demon: You stand in his office and he stands before you, a humanoid being covered in black scales, with red eyes covering his skin. Yet none are on his head, that remains featureless save for two massive horns. Wings on his back nearly surround you. Countless souls line the walls of his office, looking at you, waiting. After you sign your name you give him yours, you can feel it come away for you forever and your eyes grey and your skin pales. But he puts the jar in a special place for you, you're spacial, he can tell there's something about you that he likes.

The mushroom lord: you walk through the darkness of the forest, the furthest from civilization you have ever been. You come upon a part where the trees all seem dead, that even the cryptids won't go near. Mushrooms fill the ground, and white vein like lines are all over the trees. You feel the need to lay down, and you let the moss and the mushrooms and the worms surround you, and let yourself sink into the soil,, and it feels good. It feels so good...

The witch: You can see them in the Cafe next to you, skinny and small, with a sweatshirt over most of their body, and dark glasses over their eyes. They seem powerful though, and though their body looks young they seem ancient, they seem beyond humanity. You talk to them and they tell you things, and secrets, lost gods, things you never knew you didn't know, both beautiful and disturbing. When it's time for them to go they pet your head, and give you their number. You don't know if you should text them, but you have to, you have to see them again, there's something about them that makes you need to know.

The living clothing: you step into it at first, it looked like a puddle yet shining like silver or chrome. But soon it surrounds you, first just your torso, but soon your head, your entire body. But it doesn't feel scary, it feels like you're being held, held by something beyond your understanding. It whispers to you, and you don't know if you should feel like your being eaten alive, or like you're being protected. You can't help but keep walking.

The abyss: the void is before you, blackness beyond blackness, like the color beyond the field of your vision, stands before your eyes. You stare at it, it's nothing yet you're entranced. It stares back...

[lanternlightss]

today i have thought sm about my beloved oc’s mel and cerelia and i am feeling so completely normal about them (this is a lie i am so unwell)

[tvintedspvrkmoving]

tag drop part two .

[tvintedspvrkarc]

tag drop : admin

[ariaste]

listen ok so i made some good jokes yesterday about Lestat having an onlyfans but i am back today with a new essay and this one is entitled

Why The Invention Of Social Media Is Going to Permanently Save Loustat's Fucking Marriage

come on this journey with me.

ok so on one hand we have Louis, who does not like to leave the house except when he absolutely fucking has to and even then he resents it. my man wants to be at home with a book 100% of the time and he's so fucking valid for that. When he leaves the house, bad things happen to him. He has learned this and honestly i can't fault his evidence. it sucks out there. it truly incredibly sucks out there.

the problem is that sometimes he is married to lestat, who starts clawing at the walls if people aren't paying attention to him for 12 consecutive seconds, and being Out Of The House is the best place for him to go foraging for People To Pay Attention To Him. my man once had a rock star career the way that some people get addicted to meth brewed in a trashcan in someone's garage. Louis, through no fault of his own, is simply not capable of filling this psychological need no matter how hard he tries, except he should not even HAVE to try like that, because no one can do it, because Lestat is fucked up and like wasn't hugged enough as a child or something

this imbalance in their relationship is the core source of all their marital problems since day 1: THIS man's idea of a good time is chilling on the sofa in silence and maybe staring contemplatively at the wall for a while, and THIS man starts self-destructing at a truly astonishing rate if no one is making eye contact with him. If you make Louis go outside and socialize with people, he's miserable and sulking and whining about "are we done can we go home". If you make Lestat sit in silence in a chair for five minutes he starts crying and claiming that No One Has Ever Loved Him, Ever, Ever, And No One Understands Him, And He Hates Everyone In This House and He Is Being Actively Neglected And Cruelly Mistreated Right Now And No One Even Bothers To Feel Sorry For Him, This Is BASICALLY Domestic Violence Against Him Personally, If Only Anyone Knew About The Quiet Hidden Tragedies Of An Unhappy Marriage, and then he breaks some furniture and a window and isn't seen again for six weeks and comes back like "you will not believe what just happened, i [checks notes] met Merlin and also a dragon who gave me three wishes, brb i'm going to write another book about it :))))"

all you fucking have to do to fix their problems is to hand Lestat a cellphone and say the words "do you know about social media? you can say whatever shit you want and there's always someone awake in some time zone to talk to you." Suddenly Lestat is now very interested in sitting quietly on the couch, Lounging Alluringly and posting thirst traps on instagram and finally getting emotional fulfillment from all the likes and comments of "omg???? omg this is the hottest man alive". he does not have to leave the house anymore to get his attention meth. His yawning abyss of neediness is being fulfilled by having parasocial relationships with millions of strangers online who all think he's sexy and don't have to experience how fucking awful he is up close. he can flirt pointlessly with 200 people at once which is FINALLY ENOUGH FLIRTATIONS FOR HIM TO SATISFACTORILY JUGGLE

Meanwhile Louis is 3 feet away, vaguely reflecting to himself that HE is feeling all emotionally fulfilled because they're spending this great Quality Time together in perfect silence while he reads his book and Lestat plays on his cellular telephone and only OCCASIONALLY giggles to himself or says "louis which of these photos do you think is sexier, the one with four buttons undone or the one with five buttons undone" Louis is feeling like his Opinion is being Valued, Louis feels like he is being Consulted on Matters that are Important To Lestat. He has opinions about the photographs. It is not that much trouble to be interrupted from staring philosophically at the wall to spend five seconds looking at a photograph and then saying "that one". Finally he is experiencing Cozy Domesticity. he is so horny about it. lestat is surprised and bewildered about the sudden sharp increase in the amount of sex he is now getting but before he can make any vaguely mean comments about it (bc he's confused and vaguely defensive and worried that it's going to stop out of nowhere and he doesn't know any other interpersonal skills for expressing a thought) his phone pings about how he's just broken 5 million followers on instagram and he totally forgets to even mention the sex thing, which means that he continues getting the sex instead of inciting an argument about the sex and going through his 800th divorce from Louis

all their friends are extremely confused when a whole month, and then six months, and then a year goes by without another Loud Divorce happening and no one crashing through their front door like "I HAVE TO SLEEP IN YOUR GUEST COFFIN FOR THE NEXT MONTH, HE IS INTOLERABLE". They are worried. they are concerned. what is going on over there. are they both dead. no, they can't both be dead, Lestat just posted another tiktok of him sucking on his own fingers, which he would not be doing if Louis were dead. there is an ecosystem collapse happening in the groupchat and it's because the main Drama Vectors have been neutralized

[threecardtrick]

"that's why it's called a leap of faith, thomas." - from john locke

"and i've hit the ground enough times to know better." he pities him. he envies him. faith could be a great comfort... how it would soothe the mind in ways that no other thing could. but in equal measure, the crash was merciless. like no other than GOD can be.

[sarii-draws]

And Remember: when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.

[wintershieldedheart]

☆ Riona & Margot ☆

@asoulofstars

DEV TEA ROOM: Mystery Lounge

Everybody Did It: Three identical confessions, all saying they were the only person there at the time of the crime. They can’t all be the truth. Two of them are lying. Can you crack one of them and get the truth, or will they escape justice together?

Verse: criminal minds

...

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆  

☆         standing in the room that separated the three interrogation rooms, Margot’s eyebrows knitted together tiredly. ‘ you’ve got to be fucking kidding me, ‘ she murmured. It wasn’t professional, but at this point, it was just her and Riona in the room at the moment, which allowed her to drop some of her defenses. The fact that all three suspects gave the exact same confession, verbatim down to the last word, was suspicious enough, but what was worse was the fact that it absolutely was not plausible. There was no possible way that each one of them was the only person there at the time of the crime when all three of them were claiming to have been there. Without evidence to place any of them at the scene, it was impossible to narrow down who was there and who wasn’t. 

clearly, there was more to this than they currently knew. Either they were protecting each other, or someone else, but the question she wanted answered was why. Understanding why would more than likely crack the who, because it would explain the behavior. Pushing her hair back, Margot texted Garcia, asking her to send all the information she had about their victim, asking her to dig deeper into the dark web than before. 

‘ we’re missing something Ri, ‘ she murmured, ‘ they’re protecting someone, or each other. if it’s not self preservation then they’ve got a good reason for potentially going down for murder to keep someone else out of trouble. this is too rehearsed though. three identical confessions, word for word? bullshit. ‘ Huffing out a breath, Margot grabbed her ipad as it dinged, ‘ Garcia sent over some new files, ‘ she admitted. ‘ I wanna know more about our victim. ‘