#whos the iterator? hell if i know

[v4visms]

[miscellaneousrenaissant]

Ep 3 AU in which Evan succeeded on his death save but lost his arm, so K made him a prosthesis while the group was still on Galamanis

[tacagen]

OKAY MY NEWFOUND AGENT BISHOP TMNT AUDIENCE. ANY THOUGHTS ON WHY THERE ARE

two of them?????

[druidshollow]

"what would your character be like without their trauma?" is such a hard question for me because it makes me feel like a massive asshole LMAO

(im attaching a picture of a tundra literally to add context to my ramble in the tags because my posts are structured by a sane person) (you should read the ramble in the tags i talk so much about rivers fsr)

[randomwriteronline]

It was so warm and tender that he thought he might have died.

It was a fleeting thought, bursting from his chest with the rustle of a small bird's wings as it left him only a heart beating fast and gentle, and a splendid unknown with curious eyes looking up as it laid beneath him.

Could he have described it? Oh, he didn't know; he wasn't enough of an artistic soul to do such a thing justice with his words. If he was forced to wrack his brain about it, he would have said it was incomplete: like a sketch left unfinished, the vague shape of an anatomical structure made of sand abandoned at the cruel mercy of the rising tide, some new flavor of sublime.

But he didn't want to think, and all he could describe it as was handsome.

He leaned down upon it, basking in the heat and light and barely completed physicality. His hand brushed the cheek, pressure causing its infinite pieces to crumble before they returned to their rightful place.

So handsome, he muttered as he settled between the ever shifting legs. So handsome.

The marvelous being looked at him with the gleaming eyes of a puzzled child beholding a strange rite for the first time.

"What is this?" it asked.

"Oh, we've got names for it," he replied: "Some crass or mean or downright silly."

He sunk into the body of multitudes like one sinks in a warm, dense liquid, with a pleasant mellow resistance enveloping him wholly; his gorgeous partner gasped without a mouth, and its arms melted briefly as it was taken by surprise. He kissed its forehead kindly, feeling its fluid chest lurch slowly forward for an overwhelmed second before deflating so sweetly.

"If you like it, we can call it making love," he said with a smile.

The body beneath him raised to surround him.

"I do," his wonderful lover replied breathlessly, wrapping him within itself slowly, limbs rising to consume him, swallow him, with such magnificent tenderness, and on its yet to be drawn face bloomed something akin to watercolor blush beneath its shining eyes: "I do like it - I do like it very much."

He moved forward, sliding without opposition deeper within the gentle mound covering him, embracing him slowly.

It felt sweet, and good, and just like he'd imagined it, or almost; the strange non-existence of the body he pierced at such a deliberate pace felt welcoming despite the peculiarity, the fleeting sensation as it barely clasped around him like a spectre's shadow upon a wall - but after all, he could not expect the taking of a formless minor god to feel too similar to that of a creature of flesh and blood.

A blissful sigh grazed his face through a cloud of mild golden embers.

"I like it so, my friend," the wondrous beast whispered, its voice propagating through him in long waves: "I do like it - I truly do like it so, my friend, truly, truly..."

He was slow, so slow, so gentle, as he kept going, going, going, sinking further and further down in that barely held together shape that kept enveloping him with relaxed coils as if trying to turn him into another part of itself - here he was, inching slowly along its stomach, digging in its faux entrails to fill it up completely, kind and warm and loving, moving into its chest where a quiet thrumming spasmed rhythmically through the sand-like form while it curled around him, covering every single inch of him, leaving a sensation so indescribably good across his skin.

He leaned down to kiss where its mouth should have been and felt a pair of lips kiss back.

"I love it - I love it, I do," it breathed through him, overwhelmed by something too delightful to explain: "I do, I do, I do."

In a moment, he was swallowed up completely.

The splendid creature exhaled through his lungs, long and quiet, as they both unwound.

"I do," they both repeated longingly, bodies and minds muddled together imperfectly like too much syrup in too little water, distinct but not for long: "I do. I do."

His hand reached out.

Something akin to another palm caught it.

He held onto his marvelous lover for a long while, feeling it pulse over him slowly.

"How wonderful," it sighed through him, smitten.

He laughed quietly, just as lovestruck.

"How wonderful indeed." he whispered through it.

The dream kept going - longer than it should have, really; the shapeless body enveloping him held him down, close to the unknowable core of the gorgeous chimera in his grasp, until their thoughts began clearing from the humid mist overtaking them again, until their forms began to divide enough to be pulled apart from each other again, until he could see those magnificent eyes clearly again (half-lid and heavy and gleaming with the soft sheen of velvet, taking all the time in the world to return from their bliss), until he could feel the hand gently resting on his nape as something outside himself again, until the invisible mouth that met him halfway to a kiss was one with his own in a manner different from the inexplicable unity that had bound them again.

He felt a quiet sigh curl upon his cheeks, just for a moment, warm and tired. Then his sublime partner closed its wonderful eyes, breathing deeply, fast asleep - and Ackar woke up still groggy, with his body half aching from moving in ways it hadn't enjoyed in a long while now, as Mata Nui slumbered deeper still in his own rest, exhausted from making love.

[softcryz]

"Off the string" aus are really fun to think about and I especially love seeing other people mess around with it with their own ocs (especially cause you get to explore their characterization! Putting them in scenarios they'd usually never be in!)

(BONUS POINTS if you acknowledge how different it'd be/how losing everything would/could fuck said oc up)

But I look over at my guys and I'm like okay . I think only one of them is actually dealing with this decently

[tarraxahum]

You know it's one thing to rewatch an old hyperfixation comfort movie that shaped so damn much of you as a creator (maybe as a person too, who knows)

It's a whole other thing to suddenly come face to face with a realization that it's been 15 fucking years

[avidlylivid]

so many swag epic awesome tmnt iterations (/gen /pos) and then I realise I Have Not Solidified Mine

anyways need to actually make the au premise other than random fun facts about them and their dynamics then come up with a name and then :3 the guys !!!

[unproduciblesmackdown]

superior "ugh this isn't a joke >:(" route

[snailfen]

making pokemon designs based on rain world creatures and thinking about making trainer designs for the iterators when i suddenly think "hey why dont i draw some pkmn characters as like iterators maybe"!! except i dont think i could do that to any character. except maybe colress (he could do like ninebillion times the fucked up experiments) or iono (she would have an entire city to advertise her twitch streams to. I guess) because itd be funny and they could probably withstand the horrors. any other character and it would be too cruel

[reluctantcheesecake]

God I need to get sappy in tags over tbis stupid bear okay

[navree]

gonna be entirely honest i think a LOT of people are missing the point here. the issues surrounding characterization and bad dialogue and lazy plotting and changes that weaken the story and lack of internal cohesion would have existed anyway, because those are issues that came directly from condal and hess, yes. but it IS actually a massive fucking problem that the network decided to slash a FIFTH of the time the writers thought they were gonna have to tell their story, and that they decided to do that mere weeks before shooting, likely when things were starting to be pretty firmly locked down. it IS a huge issue that this created an insane amount of work for the writing team to try and make that sudden limited time work, especially with the deadline of the strike on top of the deadline of shooting. that was ALWAYS going to create a disaster of a season.

imagine if, a month before it was schedule to start filming, hbo had demanded that succcession cut, at minimum, a full episode from their season. imagine if season 4 had that similar mandate, going from ten episodes (which it was, and which it crafted its story around) to eight. it doesn't matter how good the writing is, how on point the characterization is, how fantastic everything is on all other cylinders, demanding those changes in such a short time span is always going to lead to something sloppy and just not good. adding on top of that the fact that the writers were not able to keep on working on the show as they were filming (possibly using the time they were shooting early season episodes to work around the clock to try and make the time crunch make more sense wrt later episodes) due to the strike, which kept up for literally the entirety of shooting, at hbo's behest as well, any change that could have been made was likely incredibly half baked and needed a lot more refinement before it could even hope to work, and would have been that way for any production, even of the shows getting the most applause for their brilliance this year. abbott elementary, interview with the vampire, shogun, they would have suffered the same issues of pacing and lack of climax and both too much buildup and lack of buildup that hotd has been noted as having because of hbo's choices, and these are all shows where we know that the writing team is top notch and the showrunner has known exactly what they're doing and crafted it all expertly.

it's not about your antipathy towards condal and hess as showrunners specifically. i'm not pleased with them either, but in this i could honestly give a shit. it's about the fact that this is an insanely popular property, one whose success creates a lot of money, and the network responsible for it still made decisions that severely and detrimentally impacted its ability to succeed. this season was doomed to fail before a second of footage was shot, and a lot of that blame can and should be laid at hbo for the choices it's made here. there likely wasn't much that would have been able make the writing of the season better, because of the issues already highlighted, but this didn't fucking help. this made it infinitely worse, and created an unsalvageable situation from the getgo that possibly wouldn't have been there if the episode count hadn't been cut, if the writers had known their final count from the getgo, if they'd been given more time to rework the season, if hbo hadn't kept up filming in spite of the strike so that the writers could keep working without screwing over the rest of production.

way too many people are missing the forest for the trees here. yes, condal and hess made bad decisions all the livelong day, and yes that's on them, ring the shame bell at them. but it doesn't matter in the discussion here. the discussion here is on what's now a very clear pattern of hbo and the broader wb/discovery crew making constant choices that denigrate the actual craft of storytelling and are clearly meant to maximize their own profits at the expense of the artists involved in creating those profits, as part of the broader entertainment executive industry's disdain for creatives as a whole that we've been seeing with the strikes and generative ai and now this (and also the trend of david zaslav's incredibly bad business management that is alienating so many people from everything under the wb/discovery umbrella). that's why hbo making these choices is essentially dooming the season to fail from the outset (which is what it was, there's no way anything good could have come from this situation even if the entire writing staff was blessed by the muses themselves, it was dead in the water from the getgo because of this specifically and then only made worse by shitty writing), and something that should be talked about with the gravity it deserves, irrespective of whether or not the dragon show did a plotline you liked or not.

i'm sorry hbo allowed this writing team to plan out a ten episode season until a MONTH before shooting when they cut it down to eight????? and then kept production going when the writer's strike started like two weeks after and kept up for the entirety of the filming schedule??????? i said that filming during the writer's strike was the death knell of this season but oh my god i did not expect to be this fucking right

[ponett]

Any opinion on the Pokemon Gigaleak or nah?

I think seeing some of the WIP assets from when gen 3 was in development is kinda neat, because Game Freak is normally so secretive about that kind of thing. But beyond that I mostly just find this whole situation tiring.

Fans have a tendency to almost treat scrapped material as "more canon" than whatever actually made it into the finished product, in a way. It's treated as this pure, unfiltered insight into the creators' true vision. In reality, most of the time this stuff gets cut for a reason. Sometimes they very quickly realize it was a bad idea that was never gonna work, and they don't go very far with it. Sometimes it's a pitch from just one guy on the team that was never gonna get accepted. Sometimes they're just spitballing. Experimentation and iteration and knowing when to cut things are integral parts of the artistic process.

And hell, a lot of the time creators will just mess around with an idea purely as a creative exercise, or to get an idea out of their system, or to explore a crazy what-if scenario, or even just as a joke, with no intention of ever actually using those ideas. We recently saw this same thing happened with those leaked Rebecca Sugar sketches, where people were like "OMG Rebecca ships this, this is what they REALLY wanted to do with the show, this is canon, this was happening off-screen!!" And it's like, y'all have no idea how much crazy shit your favorite artists draw with their characters just to amuse themselves. The crew on Clarence had a not-so-secret Tumblr where they redrew scenes from Evangelion with Clarence characters. That doesn't mean they wanted to turn Clarence into Eva. They were just screwing around. This happens all the time, and with way more extreme examples than these. Lord knows how many Disney animators have drawn Mickey Mouse with his dick out over the years. That doesn't mean they ever actually wanted to make an official Mickey Mouse porno.

And, of course, there's the response to those myths that were never supposed to see the light of day. Anyone who's even passingly familiar with mythology from just about any part of the world shouldn't be surprised to hear fables about humans and animals having babies or whatever. But now people are responding to those unused stories and going "OMG Game Freak is a bunch of gooners who want humans and Pokemon to have sex!! This is canon!!!" It's so fucking tiring. So much of the modern internet, particularly Twitter, is driven by people who just want an excuse to whip out their favorite shocked/disgusted reaction image and ham up their reaction to something that isn't actually all that shocking. Everyone just wants to get their funny dunks in and feign moral superiority. It's childish. And it's because of reactions like this that this stuff was never supposed to see the light of day in the first place. But fans feel like they're owed every single shred of info from the development of their favorite franchises, so these leaks happen and people run wild with them.

(It also doesn't help that this is all just sourced back to a 4chan thread, so people were posting fake shit between the real leaks and muddying the waters. And also most of it is in Japanese, so people are just sticking documents through Google Translate and going "whooooaaaa this is canon")

[malachitezmeyka]

It’s all “take care of your inner child!! Treat them the way you wanted to be treated years ago and it’ll help you heal!!” until said inner child is throwing a tantrum about having to go eat dinner

[killbenedictcumberbatchagain]

I'm still reeling from the events of last year. From being assaulted, drugged, miscarrying, being nearly assaulted by a zoophile, losing literally Everything I had, being gaslit and having my privacy invaded by many people close to me, having revenge porn made of me, and finding out I'm being stalked and in danger by way of 24/7 surveillance, I have nearly nothing left to go on. I have been essentially abandoned and had my trust destroyed by many people I considered close to me. And in order to escape that hell I had to get diagnosed with a disorder that essentially discredits me from all my grievances and I have had to return to my childhood home where I'm surrounded by the cluttered, pest-infested trash in which my mother inhabits. I cannot endure this much longer. I almost Died last year and no one who I thought to be a friend ever tried to help me. I am so alone and so, So at the brink of something drastic and permanent. I have to find a way out of this place and into a safe, private, healthy environment. My birthday was just 1 week ago (1/27) And I ran into further abuse and objectification. I just want an end to this iteration of life. I want so badly to rest and heal. Please help me, I'm begging. I am so tired of humiliating myself. Please, share this with people. Allies, pay it forward and help a black queer disabled mentally ill and severely traumatized person not just live, but thrive. The help is out there and I know you're able to do something to alleviate this terror. Don't wait for someone else. I don't care what your reasoning is, just please help me

cash.me/$tomi1

venmo: tominova

paypal.me/tominova

[salsa-di-pomodoro]

Sorry for hjiacking your post but you just made something click for me! For months i've been seeing people saying there were ancients on the surface when i was pretty sure there was a pearl stating it had become impossible to live there. One sentence i remember clearly was 'we are across the river and have kicked out the boat.'

Now i realize that there WERE ancients on the surface, but only until pebbles was finalized. The rain from two iterators was likely too much to live in and, as far as i understand, some ancients refused to go onto the iterators (because they hated them, as we see here) and the remaining ones had no choice but to make everything automated (like that farm arrays (?) pearl) and go up to the surface, probably only coming down to do manteinance. The graffiti such as these, with five pebbles in them were likely made in the in between stage, when the higher ups were still deciding if the rains were truly worsening enough to justify letting more people up above the clouds. (Spoiler alert: they were. They were probably getting worse globally but i don't know the lore well enough to say that lol)

This would also mean that:

Compared to other iterator complexes, Moon and Pebbles' shared grounds likely had worse rains than other places for a long time. (You decide if thats until Moon stopped getting water or if the rains got bad enough globally to amount to the same amount they were already putting out. I think it's the second one personally.)

Five Pebbles had A Lot more power over his citizens than the average iterator (again, until the rains got worse globally). If before he was built an ancient could still survive live somewhat comfortably on the surface, after his completion there was no way for anyone to survive below the cloud layer for a prolonged period of time, making it necessary for everyone to stay on top of his structure and never come down. If my previous point is true, this would be very unusual for anyone from another iterator's complex to hear. Ergo, the exterior pearl. (The one where Moon calls the ancients skin parasites.) I realize now the conversation it belonged to was probably not between one of the citizens that decided to stay on Moon and one from Pebbles' city, but between the latter and someone from a different complex, who couldn't have known how bad it had become for them and was still on the side of those upset about the shaded citadel thing. They were at his mercy for everything, and they were probably the first to ever get to that point. (This probably didn't help his then still developing god complex. Lmao)

Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon were the only ones in a situation such as the one with the shaded citadel. No other iterator was built in a place that was That controversial. Which may have been obvious to some but is yet another realization to me. This is kind of off topic from the rest of my points but my melatonin has kicked in and i do not have the energy to remember if this was the point i wanted to make or if there was something else i wanted to say. <3

Please tell me if i got any lore or anything wrong! I love worldbuilding but i often forget about important details here and there. Tell me what you think :)

i was looking through the graffiti in the wiki and saw this one, i wonder what does it mean?

maybe those others are scrapped iterators and the graffiti is saying "you are next pebbles!" or something like it?

i dunno

I think it’s more so protest from the ancients who lived on the surface! One iterator raining on you is bad enough.. but two?

We hate iterators!! We hate Pebbles!! Get rid of him!! Sort of thing. Most graffiti regarding iterators on the surface is negative!

I’m pretty sure Moon mentions how after Pebbles’ construction a lot of ancients who lived on the surface had to flee to the outer expanse? If I’m not mistaken/don’t misunderstand.