#which is. you know. compelling!

[kazumasdiary]

hypothesis: asobaro is about falling in love (and it being a bad idea for all parties involved); asoryuu is about being in love (and it being a bad idea for all parties involved).

[stil-lindigo]

reverb in an empty hall.

prints (all proceeds go towards aid for Gaza)

[a-most-beloved-fool]

fic wherein some of the TOS crew is being questioned by an entity who seems to think that the best way to take (and keep) control of the enterprise is to ensure Kirk's cooperation by figuring out which girl he's in love with and using her as collateral. The entity has got a truth compulsion thing on Kirk and keeps asking him things, forcing Kirk to answer, but... well.

ENTITY: You're in love with a woman. Who is she?

KIRK: I'm not.

ENTITY: Sure you are. You're James T. Kirk. You're always in love with a woman. Fine, if you won't answer that, then who's the most beautiful woman on the Enterprise?

KIRK: There are many beautiful women in my crew. I don't know if I could pick a most beautiful, though. I don't think about that when we're working. I'm their captain; it would be inappropriate.

ENTITY: Give me a real answer! It's a simple question! Who's the most beautiful person on-

KIRK, INTERRUPTING: Spock.

ENTITY: ... what?

KIRK, BLUSHING: Uhm. isaidspock.

[flowersandfashion]

sorry let me rant about downton abbey 10 years later

Thomas's conversion therapy plot pisses me off so much. firstly, it's incredibly out of character. he never wanted to change to conform to society, he wanted the world to change to accomodate him. the man who said "it's not against the law to hope is it" and "I'm not foul, Mr Carson, I'm not like you, but I'm not foul" would NEVER

secondly, from a storytelling perspective, the only 'problem' is that he used infected needles. did we forget that Thomas was a sergeant in the RAMC? he knows how to sterilise needles and how to recognise and treat infection. this also shifts the blame to Thomas himself for getting sick and implies that the conversion therapy itself is harmless (Dr Clarkson says it's just saline solution)

thirdly, it's not historically accurate. I'm not an expert but conversion therapy was not at all common in the 1920s, even Sigmund Freud was against it. hormone therapy and chemical castration were barely developing let alone available to the public (I can't imagine what else the 'treatment' was supposed to be). the only practices that I can find evidence of were psychoanalysis and electric shock therapy

Thomas also mentions that he did electric shock treatment - if you really want to make a point about homophobia in the 1920s (and make Thomas suffer as much as possible), show that instead. watching him be literally tortured for his sexuality would have been far more impactful than him just... looking sweaty for a few episodes

[missingn000]

hey all! i wrote a what-if character study & action fic for if king fought sanji instead of zoro during the raid on onigashima. i'd really love if you gave it a read! thanks so much!

link

playlist

happy reading!

[katabay]

original thief series basso & garrett :)

ngl, it's about quality over quantity for me. an npc can have a total of three minutes of screen time, but if they have a cool name, they can live rent free in my head and I'll spend several hours trying to decipher drawable features from a blurry screenshot of pixels

there is a vague hint of a story here, and that's because every time I try to play thi4f, I get incredibly frustrated with how Not Fun the game play is. like, is the story good? well. but it has a PLAGUE. that should've given it instant 'I'll replay this once a year' status in my heart, but the game play sucks so bad that I've never finished it. I can't believe Not Fun gameplay beat out my obsession with narrative plagues.

anyway, the idea is basically if the original era had a game with a plague centric narrative and some other stuff I liked out of thi4f thrown into a narrative blender, with a heavy dash of horror thrown in because some parts of the thief games were scarier to me than entire dedicated horror genre games.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[vaguely-concerned]

lucanis truly has a near terminal case of burned out golden child syndrome. caterina fucked both of these kids over so incredibly bad with the dynamic she enforced there, with illario being labled the perpetual fuckup kid where lucanis 'could do no (would never be allowed to do) wrong'. the way he admits in the first coffee date scene that the only thing that happened when he showed he could carry the weight of expectation was that more weight was added makes me so sad. you can hear it in caterina's voice in his intro mission that she's incredibly proud of him, but this is clearly a leandra and hawke situation where that pride never translates into relief or resolution or unconditional warmth or understanding or anything that really helps.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

caps from comic Im doing

[doloneia]

just read this article where the author argues that when ajax is crying out in his tent he is crying out solely for teucer (not eurysaces, as tecmessa suggests to the chorus) and it is everything to me now.

the idea that - in this moment of incredible emotional vulnerability - when ajax cries out, ἰὼ παῖ παῖ, he is not looking for his son but his brother? that his specific call for teucer - Τεῦκρον καλῶ. που Τεῦκρος; - is an elaborated cry for help?

fantastic. show-stopping. incredible. it's all i'm going to be thinking about now and forever.

[alacants]

i really love fics where there is clearly a fully-realized world underpinning the story but it isn't overexplained—the author relies on you to intuit the necessary background from the information presented in the foreground. i'm therefore about to overexplain the figure skating au to within an inch of its natural life. 

this is tagged role reversal and that was the basic premise—au where jannik is the one from a country with a recent record of success and carlos is from the middle of the fucking wilderness. tennistically skateistically speaking.

fs fans will know that the italian skating federation is right on the border of powerhouse status—it's not quiiiite big 3-4 (russia, canada, us, arguably japan/france) but it's real close. their greatest success hasn't necessarily been in the men's discipline but should a generational talent come along all the elements would be in place to immediately launch him into the stratosphere from the comfort of almost-home. jannik's nearly-lifelong training base—the icelab in bergamo— is only about 100 miles from sexten as the crow flies, just a bit farther than the distance between murcia and villena. the sacrifice is his mother driving him 3 hours there and back on saturdays, then later on boarding in bergamo during the week and going home on the weekends. a small metaphorical price to pay to train at an isu center of excellence from literal childhood.

(so why did it take jannik so long to break through? jump consistency—he lost his jumps after a massive growth spurt and, as the headcase references indicate, even after he got them back he stayed spooked for a long time. the real bergamo legacy is his pure and flawless skating skills, good enough that even the heavily foreshadowed simone-fixing-carlos montage won't be enough to catch up. and he'll still have those skills after his body can't hold up to the jumps any more, just as carlos will still have unmatched performance quality. in a way their late-career competitions are going to be much more interesting than their peak.)

meanwhile, spain. if you don't know much about figure skating i cannot emphasize the extent to which, on the figure skating map, spain is nothing and nowhere. …or was, until out of the blue they produced world champion and olympic bronze medalist javier fernandez. javi falls neatly in between the juanki and carlos generations, so i've split him in two and made juanki the freak pioneer, the one didn't quite beat the structural disadvantage, and carlos the freak protege, the one who will.

juanki… oh juanki. comment referring to him as the local narrative punching bag couldn't be more correct. imagine if irl juanki was exactly the same except born in a country where no one played tennis. this is what it's like to be figure skater juan carlos ferrero, a special talent in an esoteric sport with no resources whatsoever.

the only way juanki would have been able to achieve what he did in the late 90s/early 2000s is to have begun training abroad no later than his mid-teens. you can draw the obvious corollary wrt his family history. something he would have deeply conflicted feelings about, even today, manifesting in a total commitment to his life's mission: a real purpose-built training rink in his part of spain. a mission that is much, MUCH more quixotic than a tennis academy. the most he can dream of is to provide a good environment to learn the fundamentals, help young skaters start competing, bring in guest experts and host training camps and maybe, just maybe, someday, this will help a kid with promise make a real go of figure skating. and then he gets carlos.

right person, right place, right time. carlos is able to launch himself as a competitive junior skater while training in his home country, propelled by juanki's resistance to the idea that the only path to success must be for a child to leave their home and family + learned experience that it's possible to come from a humble skating background and still medal at the top. this is very good for carlos at first. this is less good for carlos later.

namely i think that when carlos first begins to advance there's an element of… idealism? pride? naivete? in how juanki understands his own career, that serves as a early blind spot. like, yes, world bronze, european champion… under the 6.0 system, courtesy of a certain amount of patronization. the judges are happy to reward this obvious talent who may not have the technical chops but has a real feel for the ice, a special quality to his performance… to a point. but that bronze was his ceiling. he was never going to be in the running for gold next. (which doesn't matter, since in 2004 he got the first of several injuries and by 2006 it was all over.) 

20 years later, this is not that different from the judging that lifted carlos to the euro gold. here is an obvious talent performing the skate of a lifetime and landing quads. when the faves flop—casper ruud that was your title for the taking!—you bet he's going to get rewarded. but you only get that shock and awe bump once. (also those quads were sooooo underrotated. his jump technique is Not Good.) afterwards, he's going to suffer from an expectation gap. seventh at the olympics is a much more realistic assessment of the tier he'll find himself in…. unless he makes a big change.

for non-fs fans… it's hard to explain all the factors that influence a supposedly objective score, but suffice to say there are many, many intangibles including but not limited to politicking and packaging. politicking = networking and advocacy on your behalf by your federation and/or coach. a federation like spain has zero power, so it would all come down to the coach. packaging = your combination of music/costume/choreo style, your image on the ice. does it look good and do you sell it well. a coach who hasn't been engaged at the elite senior level for 18 years is going to struggle because what worked in 2003 isn't necessarily going to work in 2022. and part of coaching is understanding what judges want and giving it to them. 

(you know juanki's still resisting the music-with-lyrics rule change so hard. he might understand it but he does NOT like it.)

juanki's a fast learner but he's all on his own out here—trying to coach carlos and teach regular lessons and keep the rink operational. he's doing everything he possibly can to revive all his old skating connections from 2003 and leverage them on carlos' behalf but that's only a drop in the bucket. he could drop all his other obligations and devote himself solely to leveling up as an elite senior coach for carlos, but it still might not be enough, fast enough. and it would kill the rink.

deep down he knows that he should have pushed carlos to make the switch immediately after that breakthrough season. he just resisted it for a long time. he doesn't want carlos to leave! he cares about him so much! how could he not, this magic gift from the fates, the consolation and the reward and the meaning to everything he's worked for over the last 17 years of his life! like. jesus. i am actually making myself feel bad thinking about this but it has to happen and juanki knows it has to happen. carlos fought him for MONTHS before accepting it, and it should go without saying that the major reason he did finally accept it was—in every sense of this word—the carrot. lmao.

(what finally pushed juanki over the line? well, it hurt to see carlos' scores that post-euro season, when he knew what they really could be. he loves carlos. he wants more than anything for carlos to be the skater he has the potential to be. and also oh idk maybe there's a new relationship in his life that's helping him face up to some of these emotional challenges. examines nails.)

juanki's still going to be listed as part of carlos' coaching team, carlos is still going to spend the off-season training in valencia, the odds are good that juanki's going to be the one putting the cry in kiss&cry when milan rolls around. i think the carlos experience does inspire him to commit to high-level coaching and he becomes a fantastic and highly-regarded junior coach, with young skaters from across europe choosing to train with him. the rink in valencia gets a major upgrade and it might not ever be an isu center of excellence but it's a beloved community institution and a source of local pride. HAPPY ENDING!!!!

…got sidetracked there. anyway, the point of this story is: what if jannik was the one who desperately wanted to connect with someone on his level, only he didn't know it. until it happened. 

[crabsnpersimmons]

Miss, it's time to go to bed. Are you on your phone again? Sleeping late will ruin your lovely skin. This is the final warning. If you don't fall asleep now, We are going to dance. - "잘자요 아가씨" by ASMRZ

found this song and i was possessed to draw @starriegalaxy's butler Eclipse dancing to it

(also i apologize in advance for my horrendous hiragana, hangul, and cursive)

Textless, effectless version under the cut!

[idkwhatimdoingbutslay]

I think the major disconnect is actually just people who believe caitvi are in love and people who don’t.

Without the context of their being in love with each other, not much of what they do makes any sense. I believe Caitlyn and Vi are in love based on their whole arc from s1 and I think s2 seriously banks in that fact. People who don’t understand why Vi would love Cait and vice versa wouldn’t get any of that and I guess technically there’s nothing wrong with that.

I know many believed it in s1 but didn’t like how s2 was executed and I cant necessarily get angry at people for how they receive something. I just wonder what could have been believed in the first place? Like, what did you want from the narrative specifically?

[shroomerr]

You guys ever read the most beautiful, jaw dropping, feet kicking, leaves you with a feeling of yearning fic that it possesses you? yea that was me anyways here’s vampire Kyle and his annoying assigned bodyguard who’s also a witch

(ALSO IF YOU WANT TO READ SAID FANFIC ITS A KYLE X READER FIC CALLED ITS FALLING FOR THE IDEA BY FEDOSAURUSREX ON AO3 THAT INSPIRED ME TO WHIP THIS WHOLE AU UP)

[aerithisms]

i think my problem with this dw season arc accusing the audience of fanbrain for theorising about ruby is that it both feels deceitful and isn't actually that compelling from a character perspective. the season goes out of its way to build up supernatural mystery around ruby and even invokes susan more heavily than ever before in a way that is deliberately trying to get the audience to make those connections. and then it turns around and says you stupid idiot why would you ever try to connect these dots i have deliberately tried to get you to connect.

building up a mystery only for the character to be ordinary is an impossible girl arc redux only this time accusing the viewer of failing to see the humanity of the companion, whereas the impossible girl arc was turning that accusation on the doctor. 7b didn't really blame the audience for viewing clara as a puzzle and in fact several times spells out the fact that clara is perfectly ordinary before the big reveal to give the audience a chance to catch on. as 7b goes on, instead of laying the mystery on thicker, the audience just gets more and more affirmations that clara is a normal human being (rings of akhaten, journey to the centre of the tardis, hide). i found this approach compelling because it was rooted in character, focusing on the doctor's disconnection from humanity/the gendered dynamic of a man treating a woman as his manic pixie mystery to pull him out of grief. s14's meta approach of accusing the viewer feels both unfair, given it has deliberately led the viewer towards theorising, and personally less compelling to me because it wasn't tied into character in any way.

the thing about rey's parentage in tlj is that the reason rian johnson chose to go for that reveal was that it was the only answer that was interesting. none of the theories - rey is a skywalker, rey is a kenobi, and even the eventually canonical rey is a palpatine - were interesting or satisfying because they brought nothing compelling to the table for the story being told. the only satisfaction to be gained from those answers was a fanbrained "omg rey is important because she's related to that guy from the other movie." on top of that, rey desperately wants her parents to have been important, to give her life and her abandonment some kind of significance. so them being ordinary provided the most compelling trajectory for her character because it was the thing she least wanted to hear. it forced her to do the most introspection and growth, as well as tying into the film's themes about the capacity of ordinary people to be special. it wasn't just a choice made to "gotcha" the viewer, it was rooted in character.

i don't think ruby's mother being ordinary accomplishes the same thing. by invoking susan, s14 is engaging with the most egregious example of the doctor's streak of abandonment, which has potential to be very compelling in relation to ruby (and now also the doctor's) own abandonment issues. theories that ruby might be susan, or be somehow related to susan, or somehow related to the doctor, weren't just fanbrained "omg she's related to that guy i know from the classic series." they were theories genuinely rooted in character and the potential to explore both the doctor and ruby's issues with abandonment. and this is something the show willingly led fans towards by invoking susan so much in the first place. so for the show to turn around and act like they were shallow out of nowhere ideas when they were not shallow and were based on potential character conflicts the show itself deliberately invoked, feels misguided.

as well as that, ruby's mother being ordinary does not require that same growth from ruby as it did for rey because it is exactly what ruby wanted to hear. she never wanted her mother to be important, she just wanted to know who her mother was and have a connection with her. so finding out she was a normal woman who still loves her and wants to be a part of her life is everything she's ever wanted. it doesn't introduce interesting conflict for her the way rey's parents being ordinary did for her, because they were written as different characters with different hangups over their abandonment.

tl;dr i don't necessarily dislike ruby's mother being ordinary as an idea but compared to the things it was inspired by - 7b and star wars - it is not nearly as compelling in terms of how it relates to the characters or themes. and the meta angle, while conceptually interesting, doesn't quite work for me because it feels a little manipulative of the audience.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Hey, I was wondering why you think Roxy was destined to end up with Eridan? I get the shared wizard interest and the quirk foreshadowing I guess, but that still seems like a large stretch. It's kinda like saying that Equius and Dirk are going to end up together because they both like robots and horses. It's just seems like the sort of character remixing that Hussie uses a lot in Homestuck. But what do you think?

Roxy

- fucking LOVES WIZARDS

- is a hipster and literally wears a colorswapped version of eridans scarf

- is pink and bubbly

- uses riflekind

- has a perfectly opposite powerset to eridan (can create anything by stealing its void away vs. can destroy anything with pure belief) and are connected to each other through the matriorb

- has a crush on a troubled, eccentric prince so you know that's her type

- quirk cameo with momlonde

Eridan

- Is a wizard

- Is a hipster and literally wears a colorswapped version of roxy's scarf

- Uses riflekind

- Had a huge crush on Feferi, a bubbly pink girl whom he (wrongly) believed to be so nice she might not even be capable of pitch, so we know that's his type

- The equal and opposite powerset & quirk cameo

At the end of the day I can't tell you what to ship, nor am I interested in making anyone ship anything, but I'm kind of just saying, the things that make Roxy predisposed to liking Eridan are, like, the biggest parts of her character, and Eridan is very easy & would pretty much say yes to anybody, but Roxy is also definitely His Type and Eridan is a simp who thrives under any sort of positive attention & would do anything someone asked if they were giving him positive feedback. or attention at all. case in point kanaya fucking hates him but at least she talks to him and he's constantly praising the shit out of her

Jane and Jake also have their introductions IMMEDIATELY followed by talking about how they've got a thing for "cobalt" hunks and "cerulean babes" respectively, so setting up roxy with eridan also fits into a pattern of the b2 kids being set up to date a dead troll. still rereading this part of the comic, but it really jumped out to me how blatant it was for jake and jane

[mossterunderthebed]