#which is - oof

[hippydippydruid]

Imagine being a child, and your whole family dies, and it’s just you and your dad. And he starts locking himself in his office, claiming he has work to do, so you sit and you wait and you grieve. And then one day your mother is there like nothing ever happened, making breakfast and cleaning the house and homeschooling you just like she used to. And your dad is acting like this is completely normal. And this works for a while, but then this twisted version of your mom stops just cooking breakfast and cleaning the house and begins trying to have hobbies. And suddenly your mother is gone again and there is a new mom in the kitchen the next morning. And you realize that you will never get the closure of fully losing your mother, but you will also never get the satisfaction of having her back. And soon your mother, who used to adore you, is pampering these two new children that behave so well and aren’t sad and angry like the poor little .5. And you watch as every new version of your dead mother begins to view you with more and more disdain as you look into the lifeless eyes of a woman who used to sing you songs before bed every night, and you know there is no one who will ever believe you. Imagine being Timmy Trout.

[egophiliac]

hiii im sure you’ve answered this before but in regards to your twst x Pokémon, how do you choose which Pokémon go give to the cast?? really curious since your choices are unique :O

unique in a good way, I hope? 😅 (jk jk I haven't come across too many pokemon AUs, so I was going in without preconceptions, I guess!) I was sorta aiming somewhere between doing, like, a full AU with internal consistency and everything, and just picking entirely based on theme/character, so maybe that's why! basically I just set some arbitrary rules (no legendaries/no repeats/evo stages based on year) and then went on ~vibes~. a couple were also suggestions (thank you guys!) and last-minute decisions, so it was a bit of a delightful mess of ideas!

my one regret is that I should have given Riddle a Togedemaru after all. ...you know what, he can have one now, why not

[crazymecjc]

✨daniil dankovsky’s fun steppe vacation✨

[keirientez]

Pokemon trainer AU, Reborn is the champion meanwhile Tsuna is his apprentice. Tsuna’s design belongs to my friend @Cloud_Knee (Twt or X)

[svsss-brainrot-blog]

Whump Qijiu idea #2:

SQQ gets hit with some pollen/curse/ect that requires him to share honest feelings about whoever he’s around and/or have said feelings amplified.

The first few rounds go about as well as you’d expect.

LQG- he hates that he’s stronger, hates that he calls SQQ a spoiled lord when the only person between them that actually applies to is LQG himself. Hates that he was berated for trying to help, hates that LQG acts first and asks questions never.

MQF- he hates being touched. He hates being seen. It makes him uncomfortable and vulnerable and he’s never going to stop trying to avoid it. It’s nothing strictly personal- he just can’t have MQF Knowing Things about him more than he already does.

QQQ- of course he understands her distaste for him. He is, unfortunately, A Man™️ and respects that she would angle her impressionable disciples against the opportunities to be toyed with. Still hurts that she thinks he would be someone who would hurt them tho.

And then, once he’s finally been corralled somewhere, someone calls for the Sect Leader, because of course they would- SQQ is currently a major sect liability. Zhangmen shixiong, what are they to do if it cannot be fixed?!

They expect anger, but cranked up 1000%, because of course that’s what Shen Qingqiu would feel for Yue Qingyuan, right? They see it all the time.

So when he immediately starts devolving into hysterics, everyone starts panicking. Hard.

And Shen Qingqiu turns away, trying to loophole out of it by not actually “seeing” Yue Qingyuan as the others try for failing damage control, but he continues to have a moment that eventually culminates in him lashing out with broken sobs.

“How COULD you?! You PROMISED! You KNEW what they would do to me and you left me anyway! How could you, how could you, how could you!!?”

And that’s the fun day the peak lords had to realize: the feeling Shen Qingqiu feels most in regards to Yue Qingyuan isn’t anger.

It’s pain.

[bleue-flora]

Ok, I recently wrote an essay [here] talking about the definition and duties of civil engineering as well as the ethics because of the brain rot @swordfright gave me with calling Dream Sam’s ultimate engineering project. So, because I actually am a civil engineer I took it upon myself to design the title and summary of quantities sheets just like I do at work for roads but with Dream as the project instead. And in honor of angst day sponsored by @sixteenth-day-event, I figured I’d share it because I feel like it kinda works for the prison of the mind prompt.

“Sam’s “ultimate engineering project” he deemed too damaged like a bumpy road or crumbling building that wasn’t worthy of patching and filling in the cracks or reinforcing, that’s too eroded to be fixed and preserved. So, Sam strived to tear him down to the bedrock so he could remake, remold, and reengineer Dream according to his design for the common safety, public health and well-fair.”

{These are very similar to the actual sheets I make day to day, which I shall not share for the sake of doxing my location, but yea pretty much everything has a significance. Some of it doesn’t necessarily make sense but that was because I was more so taking inventory of what we see in lore (so you know I counted ;) lol)}

[hanzajesthanza]

i read a take about the witcher online that i disagree with

[leveragehunters]

Title: There's Something Out There (I Can Hear it Calling) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Word count: 12,080 Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson Characters: Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Alexander Pierce, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, James "Bucky" Barnes Additional Tags: Canon Divergence - Movie: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Magical Realism, Canon-Typical Violence, POV Outsider, POV Multiple, Eye Trauma, Explosions, HYDRA Character Death Summary:

What if Steve died fighting the Winter Soldier.

What if he came back.

(A Winter Soldier/The Wraith (1986) AU)

Read it on AO3

[nightmare-creatures-art]

[etirabys]

Apologies if this is personal and you don't want to answer (or you don't want to answer for any other reason!); if that is the case no worries. But anyway by virtue of the fact that I am (sort of) a linguist I often get curious about people's language situation. You speak English obviously but spent your childhood in Korea, and often went to the English language book store while there? What is like, your personal linguistic history? Like, what language(s) did you grow up speaking, which ones did you learn later and when, etc? How fluent do you consider yourself in both English and Korean? If you don't mind my asking.

Haha, this is a dream scenario for me (someone asking about a situation I find fascinating about myself because I've never met anyone else with that background, but is probably boring to most people). Here's a longer story than you probably want:

My parents emigrated to the US before I was born, stayed for a decade, and moved back to Korea right after I was born. They're conversational in English, and my sister (12 years my elder) is fluent. Speaking English is valuable in Korea, so they raised me to be bilingual. They taught me the alphabet, bought me English language children's books, and sent me to an English language school run by Christian missionaries for preschool, kindergarten, and part of first grade.

My sister left the country when I was three to go to a boarding school in the US, but she came back every year for holidays, spoke exclusively in English to me, and refused to let the conversation move on if I mispronounced a word.

When I was six, my parents moved further away from the missionaries' school and switched me to a neighborhood public elementary school. At this point I was mildly more fluent in English than in Korean. Reading (English books) was a self-sustaining reaction I spent every free hour on. There were fewer interesting Korean books for children. Korea had industrialized ~30 years prior, and the hangeul writing system had only been in full use ~50 years at that point. As far as I knew, there was no CS Lewis of Korea, no Tolkien, no Diana Wynne Jones. In Korean bookstores, many of the prominent books on display were translated – The Little Prince was popular for children, and there was a children's fiction fad around another French author (who afaik never made a splash in the States) whose name I forget.

So I'm reading like 10 hours a day, at the dinner table, on the escalator when my mom takes me while she's shopping, sometimes under the desk at school flipping the pages with my toes, because the teachers don't care. (This is a huge W as far as I'm concerned for Korea – public school teaching is a somewhat competitive and standardized government job, it attracts people who lack great passion for either teaching or controlling children.) Meanwhile my peers don't like me much because my vibes are rancid: I have a compulsive laugh tic I haven't gotten under control, and I don't seem to understand their preferences very well or actively seek to understand them. Fair enough. I have one friend at any given time and she's usually on the fence about me.

When I'm old enough to take the train on my own, some weekends my mom gives me 5000 won for the train ticket + lunch, and I go into Seoul to visit one bookstore that has a 10-shelf English section. I pick a book, spend the day finishing it, and go home. Instead of my English language skills lapsing and being overtaken by the language I'm immersed in, I'm going deeper into English. Which increased the disconnect between me and my peers. I remember overhearing a conversation about an anime (The Black Cat) and eagerly asking if they'd also read the Edgar Allen Poe short story. I wanted to much to talk about shared interests, but it didn't occur to me to "invite myself into their interests" by picking up the manga they talked about.

...this all made my childhood weird in ways that have shaped me hugely but are difficult to describe. I was isolated and not, happy and not, stimulated and not, developing unevenly...

At eleven I discover fanfiction.net, probably one of the most impactful events of my life. I'm running out of physical books, I've read everything five or ten times, but then the computer! has made a deal with me! It contains INFINITE LITERATURE, although sometimes people seemed to misspell things on purpose and I didn't know why. (I had, approximately, never encountered misspellings in written material before.) In return the internet would take MY SOUL FOREVER although I didn't realize this at the time. I post a 100K Harry Potter epic over the next year where Harry is trained by a special assassin cult that lives under a mountain.

My parents have no idea what is on the internet. They're on a new temporal continent with no clue there's a parasite that can turn your daughter into a fujoshi. They do know that they have a worrying child. But! Her grades are really good, especially when she's testing in English. Good enough that although they originally intended not to send me to the US (my sister got depressed and burned out, and they attributed it to sending her to a different country for school), it made much more sense for me to go. I was on track to get a full ride at an Ivy, a carrot they were Not Immune to, and I obviously despised Korea and wanted to leave.

When I arrived in the States, I was terrified of speaking English to real native speakers. My language experience was "reading/writing: 95% English, speaking/listening: 90% Korean". I could perfectly pronounce any English sentence when I tried, but I'd occasionally and bizarrely mix up R and L, or the vowel sounds "ih" and "eeh" if I weren't paying attention. This went away after a year but I felt extra shy and didn't talk much. I'd guess 80% of my social cachet in freshman year came from writing funny Facebook posts.

I remember my time in Korea without feeling bothered by any single aspect, but overall I still have a big sense of "wow I didn't like that", have avoided non-Americanized Korean people since getting here (ten years ago), and now speak Korean haltingly. I'll try to teach it to my children so that they have the option of that cultural connection, but I don't think I can do a good job. It's feels 90% true thinking/speaking Korean is just a normal skill, a thing I do sometimes on the phone – and 10% true that the happier and more whole I become in the US, the more unsettling it feels to speak Korean at all.

[itwoodbeprefect]

the great thing about falling really deep into a new media niche is developing opinions on many new things. the terrible thing about falling really deep into a new media niche is developing opinions on many new things

[roseseatea]

[teatitty]

A funny thing I've noticed is that people tend to make Iruka's back scar diagonal but if you go back and re-read/rewatch that scene... it's vertical. A straight up and down line, you can even see the slice it made in his vest

And honestly? A vertical wound is worse imo, because a diagonal wound means there's a chance it only hit one bone, but a vertical like this? That's easily 2 or 3 at least, not to mention the actual chakra points in the spine too. Fuma Shuriken are even noted as being so deadly you aren't allowed to use them in the academy. The same academy that teaches kids how to fight with kunai and regular shuriken and probs some other weapons too. The same academy that lets the kids spar even if one of them has like a fireball jutsu but their opponent doesn't yet a Fuma Shuriken is where they go "this is too dangerous we forbid its use"

And Iruka not only takes this thing VERTICALLY TO THE SPINE he then proceeds to rip it out one-handed, throw it back, and keep fighting while the wound is bleeding. In the manga his wounds are even worse because he also still has regular kunai stuck in his legs arms and body like a pinchushion

Ended up ranting a bit there my bad the point of this post is that I make a little chuckle whenever I see art of him shirtless and this wound is diagonal instead of vertical I have no idea why everyone does that or where it stems from but it amuses me nonetheless

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

When discussing or analyzing Dazai, one thing I hope you will keep in mind when reading anything I write about him is that from my perspective, he is always, always both.

What do I mean by this? Well, I find there tends to be a general split among people who hold the opinion that "he's a manipulator and will always be manipulative" and "he's doing his best to be good and helpful and live up to Oda's last wishes for him", of which, neither is completely right - because he is both. But even among the people who hold to this dual-nature interpretation, I find that his individual actions and motivations still tend to be thought of in a dichotomous manner - is it manipulative, or genuine?

Again, I think it's always both.

Dazai has a very pragmatic view on a lot of things - he is always looking for the usefulness of things and people so that the situation turns out in his favour. He's incredibly adept at this, and his prediction and placement and careful reveals are all manipulation tactics to get his allies and enemies doing exactly what he needs them to. I don't think anyone can contest this since we see it over and over in the series.

But that's not all there is to it. He's not solely manipulative and he does, to some extent, sympathize with others - I think there are several instances of this in the series, but I want to stress that this has been apparent since Chapter 1!

For context, Dazai is recalling what Atsushi said to him a few minutes earlier, but it's very interesting that it should be this specific part of the conversation. He could've flashed back to the part where Atsushi said he had nowhere to go; no money, no food - he is about to trick him into joining, after all, and this is the key piece he uses to basically force Atsushi into the Agency. But instead it's Atsushi's self-deprecation that catches his attention, and it really does, because even during the conversation, he turns to look at him after he says this with an odd expression.

You could say that this makes Atsushi easier to manipulate, if that's your angle, but that can't be solely it, because in the later conversation with Hirotsu, we know Dazai was planning to bring Atsushi into the Agency and set him up as one half of the new Double Black the moment he met him. The panel shown there is the riverbank, set much earlier in the day than this scene. He was already planning to pair him with Akutagawa since he figured out he was the tiger, so what's with this reaction?

Well. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best.

He manipulated Atsushi into joining with the intention of utilizing him in his future plans. He also helped him and gave him a place to belong, and importantly, he likes this kid! It's both.

I think much of it might be that his brain just kinda works way too fast - he's such a natural at crafting these elaborate plots and seeing how things connect and gathering useful people like resources that it's practically automatic - though this is not a great means when you're trying to be a kinder person. There's an omake, I believe, that has him saying "I like using my head for justice", i.e. using these underhanded means to act for the better. Not great, but those are the kind of gifts he has. He's way more suited to exploitation, but is choosing to use these tactics to save people now, which is quite reminiscent of what he tells Kyouka. Kyouka's talents lie in killing people - when what you're good at isn't who you want to be, what do you do? Well, I expect you use what you have, even if it's not ideal.

Now, about the current situation with Sigma - I think he definitely likes him, and is intrigued by him and his situation. We did get a little thought bubble where the guy amusedly compares him to Atsushi, and you can't tell me he doesn't care about Atsushi (listen to the onsen drama cd, or read 55 Minutes if you somehow don't believe me). But also, it's undeniable that Sigma is in a very vulnerable position of being homeless and having had no one be genuinely kind to him before. His trust is very easy to earn, and with the latest chapter, Dazai has now saved his life multiple times. There is, as always, a practical purpose he needs him for. And I have to be somewhat amused because Dazai is quite literally telling Sigma everything he ever wanted and needed to hear. It's a brilliant means of quickly endearing himself to Sigma - but I don't think that's all it is.

Look. The most honest moments we get in this series from Dazai are, interestingly for an expert manipulator, when people are at their most vulnerable. In spite of every pointlessly cruel act he inflicted on Akutagawa, his first meeting with him was open and transparent; much like the orphanage director, it seems he thought this treatment would make him strong and adaptable (he's wrong but that's not the point of this). He cuts Kyouka off in irritation and says "don't give me that" when she implies that she would fail the entrance exam. He tells Atsushi it's normal to cry after losing a father figure and to feel however you feel, even if that person caused you nothing but incredible pain and cannot be forgiven. He refuses to entertain Sigma's assumptions that Dazai sees himself as a superior being to him.

Selective honesty can also be utilized to great effect; Mori does this, and undoubtedly it serves this purpose for Dazai too. But I want to stress that I do sincerely believe this is all still honesty from him. Manipulation, or genuine?

Both. It's both.

[mishoru]

Don't you think I look pretty curled up on this bathroom floor?

[magenta-somethings]

wait, is that

gotham knights timkon??