#where are the great explorers?

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

Ok, so when the Space Wolves show up on Macragge they're described as being dirty and smelly, and I am irrationally ticked off by this. This is Space Viking slander, how dare you. Vikings used to seduce good Christian women away from their homes with their heathenish hygiene and style. I'm dead serious, we've got records complaining about it. Norse archaeological sites dig up combs and tweezers by the boatloads. Space Wolves should be so clean and well-groomed that whole-ass planets swoon into compliance. I will die on this hill.

[hairychestloversblog]

When he’s down to the suit pants and ready for you to explore all he has to offer ☺️☺️💜💜

[ryllen]

After the great battle, he kept finding himself sneaking out to the great hall during sleepless night to find serenity & make peace with everything that happened

[felassan]

ouugh i just cant wait to return to thedas

[morganbritton132]

I think one of the most interesting ways to write Steve’s parents (or his mom, at least) is as a deeply flawed person with good intentions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a fic where they’re just bad people. Sometimes that’s all you need for a good story and this is not a criticism of anybody’s interpretation.

My personal preference in writing his parents is as people who are trying to be good parents.

Like, im currently messing around with this AU concept where Steve has a really complicated family dynamic. In it, he has bad parents. His mother made a choice to follow her husband because she thinks it’s the only way to preserve her marriage and thus preserve a good life for her son. It’s not malicious neglect but it is neglect. She’s trying to do the right thing but she’s making the wrong decisions. In the end, she’s still hurting her child.

A couple years ago I wrote this fic about Steve spiraling into a severe depression and his parents are trying to help him. They just don’t listen. They don’t understand what he’s dealing with and they make the wrong choices when trying to help him. Everybody that tries to help him makes the wrong choices, but with the best of intentions. Steve says repeatedly throughout the fic that it’s not his parents fault they don’t know how to be parents.

It’s really fun to write and it’s really cathartic if your relationship with your parents isn’t easy.

[ohmytiredheart]

Honestly I feel for Sam but serves him right.

Even if we ignore the potential intermingling of the web or any other other spooky strings that are likely being pulled, there's a lot to unpack here.

I wouldn't say Sam "deserved" it, but Alice tried warning him for months. This is what he gets for sticking his nose in places it didn't belong.

Did I say the same thing about Jon in TMA? Yes and no. Obviously there isn't a story without someone doing something dumb, but I think Jon's situation and Sam's situation are a little different. Jon was an idiot, yes, but he (and everyone else around him) were forced to go in completely blind. He had no idea what he was doing and didn't have any warnings or help at all except from his creepy boss with ulterior motives.

Sam also went in blind, but he was warned several times by several people including the eldritch computer to stop and turn around. He could have avoided this if he just returned Alice's calls or looked at her messages.

But nooooo he had to poke around with his little crushy crush and get himself thrown into a portal to what we can only assume is the TMA universe. Serves him right.

[demdems]

genshin trying to explain why every playable natlan character is gonna be paper white but enemy npcs who get easy aggro'd need to be dark skinned

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Don’t Let The Forest In

YA horror

an anxious Australian boy whose only friends are his twin sister & best friend/roommate returns to boarding school in the US - but his sister is ignoring him, and his friend is acting strange, with rumors of having something to do with his parents’ murder

he follows him into the nearby forest one night - and finds him fighting eldritch monsters from the dark fairytales & art they create together, desperate to stop them from hurting anyone else

ace MC, m/m

[redrobin-detective]

Which Danny Phantom episode had the Coolest idea but the Worst execution

[bestdressedchuuya]

Ok I wanna talk abt crow country cuz I just finished it tonight and I really loved it, major spoilers under the read more 👇

So as soon as we saw the first "guests" and how humanoid they were, I knew they used to be human, and I kinda figured that they were originally park guests who got blobbed up due to the crazy shit happening right underneath the park. And like... I did feel kinda bad at first shooting up monsters who used to be human but it's like eh, typical horror trope (I mean that's basically what zombies are) so I got used to it. BUT THEN you find out that they're humans from the future who are desperately trying to communicate a message to you despite the fact that their bodies and minds are completely falling apart and I dunno abt anybody else but that made me feel WAYYY worse about blasting their heads off. LIKE...they are using the last semblance of their human thoughts to desperately write out the year they came from in blood all over the place and it's so tragically falling on completely deaf ears!! BIG OOF. MY GUY EDWARD CROW FUCKED UP BIG TIME.

[akimojo]

Lowkey hate the possibility of ff9 getting a remake after ff7 😭 og 7-10 are incredible the way they are (and super charming at that), I just don't see the point??

If any ff should receive a remake next it's 100% ff6, despite being a great game I feel like that's the only ff that was actually limited by its technology and goddammit there were themes that just weren't dug into deeply enough!!!

[randomfoggytiger]

Scully's Survival Broke The Field Where I Died's Cycle

I noticed something while scrubbing through Mulder's hypnosis: in each past life (the concentration camps and the Civil War battle), Scully is always killed first; then Mulder; then Melissa Reidel.

I think that not only were the souls reborn correctly in this life, but they also ended in the correct order-- that Scully circumvented her destined end in order to save Mulder from his tragic, heroic pitfalls. And, more importantly, that she was alive at the crucial moment of Mulder's life: the moment his exhausted soul was almost doomed to repeat another failed cycle at the hands of Melissa Rydell's destined self-sabotage.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SCULLY'S UNPRECEDENTED SURVIVAL

Mulder has a history of being the first one to get into trouble: it's not two cases in before Mulder sneaks onto an airfield base and gets mindwiped. We know Mulder takes impossible risks even when Scully isn't there to back him up; so, it's more likely he would die on the field than live long enough to be canned from the FBI.

Although Mulder wasn't going to be killed in Deep Throat (just returned more scrambled on release) Scully wouldn't have been able to save him from fate or himself if she'd died later in Squeeze, Ghost in the Machine, Eve, Gender Bender, Lazarus, Young at Heart, Shapes, Darkness Falls, and Tooms. Or, more particularly, in One Breath.

If Scully had died in the forests of Darkness Falls, then Mulder would have been died underground in Tooms. If Scully had died in One Breath-- as she was meant to, it seems-- then Mulder might have died in Firewalker and Aubrey but most certainly in End Game; and when Irresistible didn't kill her, cancer tried to throughout Season 4, which almost caused Mulder's death in Demons, regardless. If Scully died in Kitsunegari, Mulder would've died in Kill Switch and Bad Blood. If Scully died in The Red and the Black, Mulder would've died in Folie a Deux. If Scully had died in Fight the Future, Mulder would have died then or perished soon after in Triangle. If Scully had died in Tithonus, Mulder would have burnt alive at the One Son hanger. If Scully had died in Field Trip, then her presence wouldn't have brought Mulder out of his psychosis (and death) then or in Amor Fati. And lastly, if Scully had died in Orison, Mulder would have died in First Person Shooter and Brand X, etc.

The infamous ending to Pusher exemplifies this dynamic to a 'T': Mulder rushes in without caring for his own safety; but the kill shot was turned on Scully, not Modell or himself. And if Scully hadn't saved them both, Modell might have taken a bullet to the chest or he might have manipulated Mulder's mind further for his own ends.

But it all ties back most pivotally to One Breath, where she chose to stay instead of pass on. By fighting to live another day, Scully began a pattern that lead to her and Mulder's salvation.

MELISSA RYDELL GOES FIRST

Not only is this the first life cycle that Scully survived, but it's also the first cycle that places Scully, Mulder, and Melissa on an even romantic playing field. Mulder subtly acknowledges this by asking where he and Scully still fit with, he assumes, a soulmate wedged between them: "Dana, if, um, early in the four years we'd been working together... if we'd been friends together, in other life times, always, would it changed some of the ways we looked at one another?" Scully doesn't believe in fate, living her life by the dictates of her conscience; and Mulder's question doesn't shake those beliefs, either.

And not only does Scully survive with the ability to rival Melissa's hold on Mulder, but she and Mulder are also this cycle's first unprecedented survivors: Melissa (Mulder's tragic mirror) dies first and dies alone. Mulder still broke rank in his attempts to save her; but by heeding protocol as long as he did, Mulder was too late to be killed before Rydell or to join her in death.

Why did he play by the rules that long? Because the impact of Scully's partnership-- years of insisting he follow the guidelines created for his protection-- kept his destructive tendency at bay long enough to save him from certain death. Her active presence by his side reinforced this decision when it mattered most: the moment that changed the course of their fate.

CONCLUSION

It's like Scully said: "Even if I knew for certain, I wouldn't change a day." She doesn't believe in fate; and The Field Where I Died's implications would therefore suggest Scully beats back destiny through sheer force of will, besting the monsters that hunt her as easy prey and saving Mulder from the demons driving him harder and faster into irrational action.

And she won. Cancer was already growing in her brain; but Scully outlasted the cycle that trapped her, Mulder, and Rydell's souls: that she die first (or that she die at all.)

Souls may mate eternal; but her choice broke old chains and saved their fate.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

[miyku]

[kacievvbbbb]

Maybe it's just me and I just don't understand the arc. Or maybe this arc will get some grand conclusion I'm really starting to doubt. But like I'm sick and tired of Tashigi being used as Zoro's misogyny proxy. Like the "a woman swordsman could never beat a man" belief and trauma made sense for both Kuina and Tashigi and was a very valid fear way back in the East Blue when they were still fighting relatively normal people and had no scope of how big the world is

but at this point where there are literally 20 feet tall dudes and people can blow up a whole city with just Haki the only reason Tashigi is still weak is because she is being written that way. Which is really hard to understand because it seems now more than ever One Piece has been getting more and more strong female characters so I don't know why every time Tashigi is on screen with Zoro we have to rehash this. It's even worse cause all she does in the scene is prove Zoro right by getting in a fight that she can't handle and needing saving. It's such a confusing message and honestly doesn't really apply or come up anywhere but with Tashigi and Zoro (outside of that one time where Zoro yells at enel for blasting Robin because she's a woman which was weird because Robin's been in a lot of fights before but seemed there just so enel could point out just how ruthless it is.)

Hell with the exception of the G5 all being in love with her. She is treated like a regular character and not just "the woman"

It honestly feels like both Tashigi and Smoker got lost in the narrative and Oda just doesn't know where to put their arcs. It feels like she was being written to help Zoro overcome whatever mental block Kuina's death instilled in him about facing female opponents with his sword. But she is just sooooo far behind him it renders the point moot and strengthens his convictions (it's weird that he will literally crush a woman's face rather than use his sword and is the only reason I won't say he doesn't fight women he does he just seems to have a mental block about cutting them down especially if they fight with anything blade like) but also we've only ever seen him face female character he knows can't challenge him it would have been interesting to see what he'd do in a fight against someone like big mom, tsuru or smoothie doubt that will happen though. But here's to hoping for Tashigi to have an actual arc.

[yellowocaballero]

hi! i've been reading some of your older fics and was wondering if there's any merit in watching buffy for the first time in the year 2024

This may not be obvious, but this is actually an extremely complicated and highly subjective question. I'll try to go on for too long.

As background: my mother loved Buffy and its spin-off Angel growing up. It was our Bible (besides the actual Bible). Not kidding, she was on the forums and fan groups and wrote fanfiction for it and everything (These days, she's really into kdramas and Asian dramas, and calls me about how the Thai seem like big fans of gay people). So I'm quite biased.

BTVS is both a product of its times and ahead of its times. It was a show about feminism and the struggle of living in this world as a woman, when very few shows were doing that. It was the first show to have a long-lasting lesbian couple, and the first show to depict a kiss between them. For better or for worse, it was one of the codifiers of broody vampire boyfriend. It was pretty unafraid to be experimental in a lot of what it did. It had incredibly complex and nuanced character work and growth that I still aspire to. Spike's arc is still matched in quality only by Avatar's Zuko. Angel's long term arc, from Buffy to his spin-off series, still makes him one of the most complex characters on TV. It had the most complex depiction of depression on TV at the time and I still think it's one of the best. I think the show had very high highs.

It also had very low lows. Some of the feminism is problematic in retrospect. The sapphic couple has a rather famous element that was severely problematic. There are, overall, some deeply atrocious arcs that I can appreciate objectively but not in practice. Xander: a whole-ass character aged awfully. On a meta level, the workplace conditions were bad (thanks, Whedon.) There are no people of color. The spoiler's sake I won't go into detail on this, but in general the good stuff was so influential and the bad stuff was just awful.

I think these days people tend to brush off the entire thing because it's Whedon. That is more than fair. But I'd also say that Whedon & Buffy is extremely similar to Brian Michael Bendis & Ultimate Spider-Man. Bendis was fantastic at writing sassy, bouncy, permanently stressed-out teens - issue was, he wrote entirely different serious adult characters the way he wrote these sassy teens. Same with Whedon: the annoyingly constant quips are perfect for Buffy, because that's who the characters are. They're awful in Marvel, because Steve Rogers is not Xander. Kinda similarly, Buffy was genuinely feminist for 90s TV - issue is, Whedon has not grown or developed his views, and now his works feel so sexist (oh my fucking god why did you treat Natasha like that). After a certain point it's egotistical: you're writing like that because you're Joss Whedon and it's how you write, not because it's what's best for the characters and story. But it was really important to me to get the character voices right, and it's freaking difficult to endlessly write dialogue that distinct, full of voice, witty, and clever.

I think BTVS & Angel TV's greatest influence on my writing is how intensely character-driven both of those shows were, and how intricate the characters were. What every character did was something they would do, if that made sense. Even the stuff I hated to watch, that made me uncomfortable, was the culmination of so much (usually). I think I also picked up the constant wit and humor lol. On a personal level, the conversations I would have with my mother where she broke down the character motivations and composition of the story was my first exposure to looking at storytelling from an analytical perspective and a framework of critical analysis, which was an approach I carried into the rest of the media I consumed and that was the primary reason I was able to become a decent writer. Thanks, Mom. Have fun with your kdramas.

TL:DR: There is merit, especially if you care about good character work. There are things about it that may make you want to drop it, which is extremely valid. Season 1 is rough but interesting, Season 2 and 5 are the best, Season 3 is pretty good, Season 4 and 7 skippable, and Season 6 is........epic highs, epic lows......

[courtney-deserved-better]

telling myself i can't start another tdwt rewrite but dear god do i want to write one focusing on alejandro and courtney in this weird situationship thats a lot more nuanced than just alejandro manipulating courtney and her falling for it. like theyre best friends they dont trust each other theyre the same person they dont know anything about the other one theres a mutual attraction theyre pining for other people theyre codependent they dont care about each other theyre platonic soulmates like i just want to do a deep dive into how messy that relationship couldve been building off of their friendship that exists in my head except the line between romantic and platonic is so fucking blurred they have no idea what they are to the other person